Music Sunday: The 1968 Edition

Clearly, I have not been keeping up this week. Apologies for that. Part of it has to do with the fact that this week was Practice Interview Day at CVP. That means that from Sunday night through Wednesday evening I was sending reminder e-mails to those involved, both interviewees and interviewers, answering e-mails back, making schedules, and generally feeling like tearing my hair out (or bashing my head against a brick wall, whichever is least painful). Actually, this month's interview day went fairly smoothly. Only one of the newbies didn't show up, and his cancellation was due to his having gotten a real interview, which is much more important, because real interviews sometimes end up in real jobs, which is the whole point of the exercise at CVP.

Another part of it has to do with getting ready for an SCA event next weekend. For me, right now, that's mostly in the thinking phase at the moment. Still, it takes time to think. And still another part of my not keeping up here is that I'm actually making good progress on my writing project. I'm still behind, but making up ground.

So, that leaves us with Music Sunday. Which was missing in action last week.

During the week, I've been spending a lot of time in the Sixties thanks to the work I'm doing. Actually, I've been bouncing back and forth a lot between the Sixties and the Eighties. Talk about historical whiplash. Anyway, part of the research involves the music of the time I'm looking at. Lots of good memories in the Sixties music. Not so much in the Eighties music, although things started to improve as the end of the decade approached. Still, Sixties music is what I grew up with, and is still my favorite. Which is why I decided to share some music from the late Sixties today, beginning with a song I'm sure I've shared here before. That's okay. It's one of my favorite songs, ever, and I want to hear it.



That, of course, was Otis Redding and "Dock of the Bay". Which was released in 1968, after Redding died. It was recorded just a few days before he died, in fact, in 1967.

Another song from 1968 is Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", here in a live performance at Montreux:



The Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash", here in a live performance in Texas in 1972, was also released in 1968:



I have to confess that I don't really get the appeal of Mick Jagger, much like I don't get the whole Elvis Presley thing. Jagger just isn't interesting to me. I like the Stones' music well enough, but I've always found Keith Richards to be a much more interesting and compelling character than Jagger, for all of Richards' infamous misbehavior.

If I include the Stones, I have to also include The Beatles, who released "Hey Jude" in 1968. This is the official promotional video for the song, which was first shown in the United States on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on October 6, 1968. This means I know what I was doing on that evening, because I remember seeing this on that show:



Also from 1968, here are The Grass Roots and "Midnight Confessions". My 12-year-old, seventh-grade self loved this song:

What I read this year...

I read some books in 2012.

Not as many as I had planned to, but more than I read in 2011 (2 more, actually). I passed the 10,000 page threshold, which was my page goal for the year. I read both fiction and non-fiction, which is always my hope and my goal. Despite the fact that I ended up reading a few stinkers, I also found some really good books during the year.

To protect the guilty, and because good and bad is, to an extent a subjective judgement regarding fiction, I won't belabor the subject of which novels I read and did not like. Well, with one exception.

In May, I pickied up a book at the library called Natural Selection. It had an interesting premise: the evolution of a new species that leaves the sea, adapts to life on land, and then wreaks havoc. However, Dave Freedman, who wrote the novel, clearly has no real grasp on how evolution works, does not seem to be able to write a sympathetic character to save his life, and completely contradicts something he wrote earlier in the novel near the end in a way that destroys any credibility as a storyteller he had built in the earlier telling of the story. Not that he had built up much credibility at all.

Maybe I should be easier on Freedman. As I recall, it was his first novel. But Natural Selection was just such a bad book that I can't manage to work up much sympathy for him. Somehow, he managed to keep me turning the pages, but looking back I can't imagine how, except that I had a perverse curiosity to see if it could get any worse. And it did. I remember finishing the book and wondering how he managed to sell it to a publisher.

On the non-fiction side, I have to say that the least satisfying book I read this year was Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate, which I read in April. I've read a lot of books about Charles Manson, the cult he built up, and the horrible things they did. This book was by far the least helpful in understanding that whole situation. I think part of the trouble was that it was co-written by Sharon Tate's niece and a family friend based on writings left behind by one of Sharon's late sisters. As a picture of a family that disintegrated in the wake of the murder of a member of the family it probably has some merit, but the problem is that the family seems never to have found any peace and just passes down its desire for revenge to each succeeding generation. I can see how that could happen in such a situtation, especially when the crime that took their loved one's life attracted so much media attention, but the book really provides no insight. It left me feeling like I hadn't learned anything, but instead just made me feel like I had peeked in on family dynamics that would have been better left private.

On the other hand, I also read my favorite non-fiction in April. That was Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox. Life is an amazing book. I won't go on about it here, except to say that if you have any interest at all in music, in The Rolling Stones, in the culture of the sixties and beyond...read this book. Even if you don't have any interest in any of those things, read the book anyway.

While you're at it, read Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German. I'm not really sure how two books about The Stones turned out to be some of my favorite reading all year. I've never really been that big a Stones fan. But both of these books are really good.

I read a lot of good fiction this year, but by far my favorites are two books in a series that combines fantasy, historical fiction, and a genre I don't read very much, romance. Those are A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night, both by Deborah Harkness. I picked up the first volume while browsing the shelves at my local library. It sounded interesting...at least, the vampires didn't sparkle...and so I checked it out and read it. I might not have done if I had realized that it was the first volume in the series and that the second volume hadn't even been published yet, especially when I finished it desperate to know what happened next. Fortunately, publication of the second volume was just a few months away. In that book, the action moves from Oxford in the present day to London during the reign of Elizabeth I. Like I said, it's a fantasy. Now I'm just waiting for the third volume to be published.

Well, if I reviewed everything on the list, this post would be way too long, so I'm just going to leave my full reading list for the year here with you. Each book is marked either F (fiction) or NF (non-fiction), and the ones I liked the best or felt were of special worth are marked with a double asterisk. Please note, though, that, especially with the fiction, these evaluations are very subjective and based on a lot of criteria, so your mileage may vary. For example, I liked Barbara Hambly's Ishmael very, very much. However, it is a genre novel based on two very old television series, Star Trek and Here Come The Brides, that I was a fan of when I was very young. A lot of the reason I liked the book was because Hambly managed to take two series that were very, very different and capture the spirit of both of them with an accuracy that I would not have believed possible. She also created a story that would have fit into an episode of either series. So, while it is a well-written book, I loved it for very personal reasons that you might not share.

January
**(1) Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969, by William J. Mann (422 pages) NF
(2) Gun Games, by Faye Kellerman (375 pages) F
(3) Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell (498 pages) F
(4) Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (309 pages) NF
February
(5) Hotel Translyvania, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (252 pages) F
**(6) Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly (255 pages) F
March
(7) Hangman, by Faye Kellerman (422 pages) F
(8) Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello (675 pages) F
(9) Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman (338 pages) F
April
**(10) A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness (579 pages) F
(11) Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate (381 pages)
**(12) Role Models, by John Waters (304 pages) NF
**(13) Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (564 pages) NF
May
(14) Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman (414 pages) F
(15) Dead Time, by Stephen White (400 pages) F
(16) Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins (377 pages) F
June
**(17) The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns, by Catherine Whitney (250 pages) NF
(18) The Blackbird Papers, by Ian Smith (326 pages) F
(19) Virgin, by F. Paul Wilson (309 pages) F
July
(20) The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, by DC Pierson (226 pages) F
**(21) Corn Flakes With John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock’N’Roll Life, by Robert Hilburn (280 pages) NF
September
**(22) Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harkness (584 pages) F
(23) World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction, 3d edition, by Brian M. Fagan (299 pages) NF
**(24) How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge (210 pages) NF
(25) Summer of the Dragon, by Elizabeth Peters (277 pages) F
(26) LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour, by Stephen Davis (217 pages) NF
October
(27) Bones Are Forever, by Kathy Reichs (288 pages) F
(28) A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (307 pages) F
**(29) Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German (354 pages) NF
(30) The Bone Bed, by Patricial Cornwell (463 pages) F
November
**(31) The Prism and the Rainbow: A Christian Explains Why Evolution Is Not a Threat, by Joel W. Martin (170 pages) NF
December
(32) The Overlook, by Michael Connelly (262 pages) F
**(33) Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross (401 pages) NF

Cumulative page total: 11,788 pages.

Music Sunday: Another View of the Rolling Stones Edition, plus a book review

I've never been that big a fan of the Rolling Stones. It isn't that I don't like their music; some of their songs are classic. I think it's mostly because I've always had the impression that Mick Jagger can be sort of an ass. On the other hand, I've always been sort of intrigued by Keith Richards, who seems to be a walking, talking set of contradictions. He has this reputation as being "bad, mad, and dangerous to know" (I don't know who said that first, but I've heard it over and over gain), but he is, by all accounts, extremely well read and fairly articulate for someone who has ingested the amount of liquor and drugs he reputedly has.

Well, last week, I read another book about the Stones, sort of, Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) (2009, Villard Books; 354 pages), by Bill German. Like the book I read about Led Zeppelin's 1975 US tour, and reviewed here recently, Under Their Thumb is really more about the writer than the band. Unlike the author of the Zeppelin book, Bill German acknowledges in the title that the book is really about him and his adventures as writer/editor/publisher of the fan newsletter "Beggars Banquet", which he put out more or less on his own beginning in 1978, on his sixteenth birthday, and continuing until 1996. During that time, German became friends with the band, especially with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, even ghostwriting an art book with Wood along the way.

It's a good book, with interesting insights into the life of the band and the lives of its members during a time that doesn't get that much attention. German was there during the years when it seemed that there might not be any more Rolling Stones, as the band struggled through personality clashes and disagreements and then came back bigger, but indebted to big corporations in ways that changed the band and its relationships with the music and the fans in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It is also the story of how a teenage boy, through hard work, persistence, and luck, got to hang out with his favorite rock band and make a living writing about them. Not that it was much of a living. Even though his newsletter was the Stones' official newsletter for a period of about a year and a half, he never made much money from it. It's expensive, following a bad around the world amid ever-higher ticket prices (again, thanks to its association with corporations), after all.

By the time German began to hang with The Stones, a lot of their more controversial work and behavior was behind them. They had not, individually at least, gotten any less interesting, even if they didn't quite live up to the "bad boy" image that had cultivated since their earliest days as a band, not least through the songs they recorded early on in their career.

For instance, I found this oddity, from a television performance in 1965, of "Play With Fire", that presents all kinds of mixed messages, illustrating fairly well why The Stones were the band that your parents didn't want you listening to:



Things didn't get any better when they recorded "Let's Spend The Night Together" in 1967, and then got positively dire when they released "Sympathy For The Devil" in 1968. Unlike the Beatles, the Stones were not out to play nice.

Here is a performance of "Let's Spend The Night Together" from Top of the Pops the year it was released:



Of course, Mick Jagger was not above altering the lyrics of the song to "let's spend some time together" for The Ed Sullivan Show in the US. He wanted the exposure, after all, and at that time, the Sullivan show was the ultimate in exposure. Jagger showed, however, by some pretty dramatic eye-rolls during the performance, that he thought the whole idea of having to change the lyrics was really pretty damn stupid:



"Sympathy for the Devil", of course, started rumors that The Stones were Devil-worshipers, despite the fact that it is one of their best songs, here in a much later live performance:



The Stones' reputation was not enhanced after their free concert at Altamont Speedway in California in 1969, which essentially ended the Sixties when a concert-goer was stabbed to death by Hell's Angels. Well, the bikers were serving as security (not necessarily the wisest choice for that role), and the victim, Meredith Hunter, had been waving a gun around near the stage (a stupid thing to do even before the days of terrorist threats), but The Stones took a lot of the blame for the incident, especially after rumors spread that the band had been singing "Sympathy for the Devil" at the time of the stabbing, something that a viewing of the concert footage proves to be untrue.

The picture Bill German paints of the later Rolling Stones in Under Their Thumb is much less threatening. Sure, Jagger is "a nice bunch of guys", as German is told by Richards and Wood at one point in the book, referring to Jagger's variable personas and an inability for even those closest to him to predict which one of those guys they were going to get on any particular day, or even from one hour to the next. And there is a lot of drug use and drinking, although German insists that he never did drugs with The Stones - never did drugs period. German further claims that Richards defended him in that when others accused German of maybe being a narc when he refused to snort a line. All in all, the members of the Stones as portrayed by German are much nicer, and much more human, that their reputation would have us believe.