“When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They’re the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created.” — Gerald Early talking to Ken Burns.
In this clip unearthed by the Smithsonian earlier this year, we find two great American traditions intertwined — baseball and jazz. As John Edward Hasse explains in his online essay, jazz and baseball grew up together. According to some, the first documented use of the word “jazz” came from a 1913 newspaper article where a reporter, writing about the San Francisco Seals minor league team, said “The poor old Seals have lost their ‘jazz’ and don’t know where to find it.” “It’s a fact … that the ‘jazz,’ the pepper, the old life, has been either lost or stolen, and that the San Francisco club of today is made up of jazzless Seals.” Or, if you listen to this public radio report, another use of the word can be traced back to 1912. That’s when a washed-up pitcher named Ben Henderson claimed that he had invented a new pitch — the “jazz ball.”
During the Swing Era, jazz musicians often took a keen interest in baseball. Writes Ryan Whirty in Offbeat, Louis Armstrong’s “passion for America’s pastime was so intense that, in the early ’30s, he owned his own team, the Secret Nine, in his hometown of New Orleans, even decking the players out in the finest, whitest uniforms ever seen on the sandlots of the Big Easy.” (See them in the photo above.) And then other band leaders like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington formed baseball teams with members of their groups.
Above, you can watch Ellington playing ball in some home videos, both hitting and pitching. When the Duke was a kid, he imagined himself becoming a professional baseball player one day. But the youngster eventually got hit in the head with a bat during a game, and that’s where his baseball career ended. He later noted, “The mark is still there, but I soon got over it. With that, however, my mother decided I should take piano lessons.”
Note: The Duke Ellington Center writes on Youtube that “The appearance of Ben Webster at the end of the clip times the video to around 1940–41.”
Before she died earlier this year, Maya Angelou was working on Caged Bird Songs, a musical collaboration that features Angelou reciting her poems and producers Shawn Rivera and RoccStarr blending them with modern day hip-hop. After her passing, Angelou’s estate continued nudging the project along. Eventually the 13-song album was released in November, and now comes a music video. The video (above) centers around “Harlem Hopscotch,” a poem Angelou wrote in 1969. The text of the poem is available over at the Poetry Foundation. You can hear more tracks from the album below, or purchase the complete album here:
They’ve even become friends, ones close enough that Lynch just calls Moby “Mo,” and Moby once gave Lynch a slide guitar as a present. They’ve got such a rapport, in fact, that Moby can ask Lynch, leadingly and admittedly so, if Lynch considers that slide guitar the best present he ever received. He asks it, in fact, right up there onstage at the IMS, along with such other questions, pre-written on a sheet, as “Have you ever grown maggots?,” “Is Inland Empire my favorite movie of the last ten years?,” “What would your favorite birthday meal be, keeping in mind this is a conference about electronic music?,” “Do we fear death?,” and “Would you like to grow quinoa in your backyard?”
Though both Moby and Lynch love their quinoa, they make even more of a connection over their city of residence, Los Angeles. The former points out that three of the latter’s pictures — Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire — star not any particular human actor, but Los Angeles itself. “Anything goes,” Lynch explains about the city that inspires him (sometimes, no doubt, during the meditation sessions he also discusses here) with its light and its jasmine-scented air. “You’re free to think and do things” — two pursuits that both of these guys have engaged in, unceasingly and fruitfully, over their entire careers.
Next time you see the still-youthful and musically prolific Paul McCartney, take a good hard look and ask yourself, “is it reallyhim?” Can you be sure? Because maybe, just maybe, the conspiracy theorists are right—maybe Paul did die in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a double who looks, sounds, acts, and writes almost exactly like him. Almost. It’s possible. Entirely implausible, wholly improbable, but within the realm of physical possibility.
In fact, the rumor of Paul’s death and replacement by some kind of pod person imposter cropped up not once, but twice during the sixties. First, in January, 1967, immediately after an accident involving McCartney’s Mini Cooper that month. The car, driven by Moroccan student Mohammad Hadjij, crashed on the M1 after leaving McCartney’s house en route to Keith Richard’s Sussex Mansion. Hadjij was hospitalized, but not killed, and Paul, riding in Mick Jagger’s car, arrived at the destination safely.
The following month, the Beatles Book Monthly magazine quashed rumors that Paul had been driving the Mini and had died, writing, “there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles’ Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper Safely locked up in the garage.” “The magazine,” writes the Beatles Bible, “downplayed the incident, and claimed the car was in McCartney’s possession.”
In 1969, rumors of Paul’s death and a conspiracy to cover it up began circulating again, this time with an impressive apparatus that included publications in college and local newspapers, discussions on several radio shows, a university research team, and enough esoteric clues to keep highly suspicious, stoned, and/or paranoid, minds guessing for decades afterward. The formless gossip first officially took shape in print in the article “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?” in Iowa’s Drake University student newspaper, the Times-Delphic. Cataloguing “an amazing series of photos and lyrics on the group’s albums” that pointed to “a distinct possibility that McCartney may indeed be insane, freaked out, even dead,” the piece dives headfirst into the kind of bizarre analysis of disparate symbols and tenuous coincidences worthy of the most dogged of today’s conspiracy-mongers.
Invoked are ephemera like “a mysterious hand” raised over Paul’s head on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—“an ancient death symbol of either the Greeks or the American Indians”—and Paul’s bass, lying “on the grave at the group’s feet.” The lyric “blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life” comes up, and more photographic evidence from the album’s back cover and centerfold photo. Evidence is produced from Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album. Of the latter, you’ve surely heard, or heard of, the voice seeming to intone, “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Cherish the dead,” when “Revolution No. 9” is played backwards. Only a college dorm room could have nurtured such a discovery.
The article reads like a parody—similar to the subversive, half-serious satirical weirdness common to the mid-sixties hippie scene. But whether or not its author, Tim Harper, meant to pull off a hoax, the Paul is dead meme went viral when it hit the airwaves the following month. First, a caller to Detroit radio station WKNR transmitted the theory to DJ Russ Gibb. Their hour-long conversation lead to a review of Abbey Road in The Michigan Daily titled “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light.” With tongue in cheek, writer Fred LaBour called the death and replacement of Paul “the greatest hoax of our time and the subsequent founding of a new religion based upon Paul as Messiah.” In the mode of paranoid conspiracy theory so common to the time—a genre mastered by Thomas Pynchon as a literary art—LaBour invented even more clues, inadvertently feeding a public hungry for this kind of thing. “Although clearly intended as a joke,” writes the Beatles Bible, “it had an impact far wider than the writer and his editor expected.”
Part of the aftermath came in two more radio shows that October of 1969. First, in two parts at the top, New York City DJ Roby Yonge makes the case for McCartney’s death on radio station WABC-AM. Recycling many of the “clues” from the previous sources, he also contends that a research team of 30 students at Indiana University has been put on the case. Yonge plainly states that some of the clues only emerge “if you really get really, really high… on some, you know, like, mind-bending drug,” but this proviso doesn’t seem to undermine his confidence in the shaky web of connections.
Was Yonge’s broadcast just an attention grabbing act? Maybe. The next Paul is Dead radio show, just above, is most certainly an Orson Welles-like publicity stunt. Broadcast on Halloween night, 1969, on Buffalo, NY’s WKBW, the show employs several of the station’s DJs, who construct a detailed and dramatic narrative of Paul’s death. The broadcast indulges the same album-cover and lyric divination of the earlier Paul is Dead media, but by this time, it’s grown pretty hoary. But for a small contingent of die-hards, the rumor was mostly put to rest just a few days later when Life magazine published a cover photograph of Paul—who had been out of the public eye after the Beatles’ breakup—with his wife Linda and their kids. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, McCartney famously remarked in the interview inside, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and added, “If I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.”
In later interviews, the Beatles denied having anything to do with the hoax. Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 that the idea of them intentionally planting obscure clues in their albums “was bullshit, the whole thing was made up.” The hoax did make for some interesting publicity—even featuring in the storyline of a Batman comics issue—but the band mostly found it baffling and annoying. Certain fans, however, refused to let it die, and there are those who still swear that Paul’s imposter, allegedly named Billy Shears and sometimes called “Faul,” still walks the earth. Paul is Dead websites proliferate on the internet—some more, some less convincing; all of them outlandish, and all offering a fascinating descent into the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. If that’s your kind of trip, you can easily get lost—as did pop culture briefly in 1969—in endless “Paul is Dead” speculation.
Everybody spreads holiday cheer in their own way. On Christmas Day 1976, the eccentric jazz composer and bandleader did it by appearing on Blue Genesis, a show on the University of Pennsylvania’s radio station WXPN, reading his poetry with music. “The choice of poems and their sequencing offers what Sun Ra thought was most important in his writing,” writes John Szwed in Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. “Here are key words like ‘cosmos,’ ‘truth,’ ‘bad,’ ‘myth,’ and ‘the impossible’; attention to phonetic equivalence; the universality of the music and its metaphysical status; allusions to black fraternal orders and secret societies; biblical passages and their interpretation; and even a few autobiographical glimpses.”
Part 1
Part 2
Though read on Christmas, these poems have no particular religious slant — nothing, that is, but Sun Ra’s usual mixture of the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, numerology, Freemasonry, ancient Egyptian mysticism, Gnosticism, and black nationalism.
Fans of Sun Ra would expect no less. But those more recently acquainted with the jazzman born Herman Poole Blount may find this an unusual half-hour of listening, for the holidays or otherwise. “A pioneer of ‘Afrofuturism,’ Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band,” wrote Open Culture’s own Josh Jones earlier this year. “While attending Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, he had an out-of-body experience during which he was transported into outer space.”
In that post on Sun Ra’s 1971 UC Berkeley Course “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” you can learn more about the numerous nonstandard experiences and philosophies that went into the production of his words and his music, which converge in this special broadcast you can hear at the top of the post or on Ubuweb. It’ll make you regret that Sun Ra and his free-jazz “Arkestra” never produced a full-length Christmas album — though maybe, on whichever distant planet his immortal spirit reached after the end of his Earth-life two decades ago, he’s recording it as we speak.
We like to bring this chestnut back from time to time. Watch it, and you’ll know why.
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died of a heart attack, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable. An older, crusty Crosby had no real familiarity with the younger, androgynous Bowie, and Bowie wasn’t crazy about singing The Little Drummer Boy.
So, shortly before the show’s taping, a team of writers had to frantically retool the song, blending the traditional Christmas song with a newly-written tune called Peace on Earth. (You can watch the writers tell the story, years later, below.) After one hour of rehearsal, the two singers recorded The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth and made a little classic. The Washington Post has the backstory on the strange Bing-Bowie meeting. Also find a Will Ferrell parody of the meeting here. We hope you enjoy revisiting this clip with us. Happy holidays to you all.
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How does a movie become a “classic”? Explanations, never less than utterly subjective, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would submit that classic-film status, as traditionally understood, requires that all elements of the production work in at least near-perfect harmony: the cinematography, the casting, the editing, the design, the setting, the score. Outside first-year film studies seminars and deliberately contrarian culture columns, the label of classic, once attained, goes practically undisputed. Even those who actively dislike Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would surely agree that its every last audiovisual nuance serves its distinctive, bold vision — especially that opening use of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
But Kubrick didn’t always intend to use that piece, nor the other orchestral works we’ve come to closely associate with mankind’s ventures into realms beyond Earth and struggles with intelligence of its own invention. According to Jason Kottke, Kubrick had commissioned an original score from A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf composer Alex North.
At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s opening with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 minutes of his score on Spotify. As to the question of why Kubrick stuck instead with the temporary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatchaturian he’d used in editing, Kottke quotes from Michel Ciment’s interview with the filmmaker:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? [ … ] Although [North] and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film.
North didn’t find out about Kubrick’s choice until 2001’s New York City premiere. Not an enviable situation, certainly, but not the worst thing that ever happened to a collaborator who failed to rise to the director’s expectations.
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Today as we say goodbye to British singer Joe Cocker, who died at 70 after a struggle with lung cancer, we’ll remember him most for that 1969 Woodstock performance of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends.” It was without a doubt a career-defining moment. He never stopped performing the song in his inimitably gruff style, his raspy voice partly a product of too many cigarettes and some pretty hard living over the decades. Known also for his air guitar proficiency, Cocker successfully covered other famous bands like Traffic and The Box Tops, and made many songs—like Billy Preston’s “You Are So Beautiful to Me”—uniquely his.
But yes, it’s that 1969 debut album, also titled With a Little Help from My Friends, with its mix of originals and big-name covers from The Beatles and Bob Dylan, that first brought us the Joe Cocker we fondly pay tribute to this holiday week. I overheard someone describe Cocker as the only person who could do The Beatles better than they could, which is going a bit too far. But he may be the only artist whose covers of the band are as well-known and well-loved as their originals. Paul McCartney, who will lead memorials this week with Ringo Starr, said of Cocker’s “A Little Help,” “it was just mind-blowing, [he] totally turned the song into a soul anthem and I was forever grateful to him for doing that.” Indeed. At the top of the post, see Cocker and band above play “With a Little Help” in Cologne, Germany in 2013, and just above, watch again that gripping Woodstock performance.
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