So I found out earlier this week that the University Archives here at Mizzou house a complete run of a fifteen-minute campus radio show that ran in the late 60s and early 70s called "University Close-Up". I looked through the show list the other day, requested several episodes, and spent a couple hours earlier today listening to them. Many of those segments are, naturally, campus figures talking about campus issues like new developments in the School of Agriculture and the revolutionary use of motion pictures in a "Family Life" class.

Most of the shows I listened to were interviews with or speeches from some prominent figure who visited the university. Here are some highlights -

Singer Andy Williams in 1968 talking about how much things had changed in popular music recently: "For a band singer, like me - that's what I call it, a band singer - it used to be you went into a studio with an arranger, and he picked out the songs, maybe twelve songs. You recorded maybe four songs in a session, and the sessions were three hours long. You can't do that these days; The Beatles changed everything. They spend four months in the recording studio, and they do all kinds of sonic tricks, and we can't keep up. And all of the young singers now are writing their own music. I used to call myself a pop singer, but I'm not that anymore. . . . I did just meet with the Beatles. I was in London - not for a meeting, but for something else, but while I was there, I met with them. I'm doing some specials this year, and I met with the Beatles about maybe doing one of them together."

That didn't happen, obviously, but it blows my mind that it might have.

New York Times humor writer Russell Baker in 1968: "Washington is the biggest factory town in America, and like in any factory town, every time you get a new boss, you get a new way of doing things. Every time there's a new president, you change your whole way of life in Washington. When Kennedy was elected, everyone started hanging French Impressionist paintings in their houses. 'Kennedy loves French Impressionism,' they all said, so they hung up French Impressionist paintings. And daiquiris. Everyone started to drink daiquiris. That gave me heartburn. I was drinking scotch & soda - we all got to drink scotch & soda under Eisenhower - and someone said to me, 'What are you doing? Kennedy likes daiquiris. We all have to drink daiquiris now.' So for me, the Kennedy administration was three years of heartburn. And you had to learn how to fall into a swimming pool with your tuxedo on and come up smiling. Head colds. Well after that we got Johnson, so everyone took down the French Impressionist paintings and replaced them with buffalo heads. I burned my buffalo head right before I left. It had begun to get fleas."

Also Baker: "Every day I go into a big giant box, get into a little metal box, go up seven floors and sit in a box all day. When the day is over, I get into a box on wheels, drive miles out in the country, go into a box, where I take off my tie, put my feet up and watch a box. Why do I this? Why am I living in boxes, waiting for the final box?"

That Girl star Marlo Thomas in 1970 talks a lot about helping out with underpriveleged youth and a star's responsibility to do what she can to help society. It's about what you'd expect from Marlo Thomas, but I really like the bit where she says "I'm crazy about the teenagers. They aren't creeps or law-breaking people. They just need something to do, and if you ask them to help with the smaller children, they will. Like everyone else, they need something to do."

Talk show host David Susskind in 1970 talking about the Vice President of the United States and his tendency to blame television for society's ills: "Television is blamed because it's so visible. When Agnew wants someone to lash, it's a good visible target. So are movies with the new permissiveness with nudity and obscenity."

[At this point, the interviewer brings up a quote from another news personality saying, essentially, that Agnew is evil and will destroy television.]

"I don't agree. You need Agnew. He's welcome. American mediocrity has a face to it. It's all in one face now. Spiro Agnew is all that's lousy and wrong in American life. Before, it was a theoretical proposition."

2001 author Arthur C. Clarke in 1970 predicting what life will actually be like in the year 2001: "Satellite communication will be everywhere, and everyone will connect through satellite hookups. Cities as we know them will no longer exist, because they won't be necessary."

I was hoping he was going to say more on that subject, but he really didn't. He mostly just talked about how 2001 doesn't have any messages, because he doesn't believe fiction should have any, saying "If you have a message, send it Western Union. Fiction should tell a story."

Anyway, I hope you got as much of a kick out of that stuff as I did. I transcribed one interview in full, but I'm saving it for tomorrow because it deserves a full post.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I moved to Missouri for grad school a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't get back in the habit of posting. Well now I am getting back in habit. To mark my return, here's a link -

A website with the number one song for each date in history. Apparently the number one song on the day I was born was "Like a Virgin".

No, I don't have any jokes about that, thank you very much.

Every time I see a TV ad for or read anything about Pineapple Express, I hope anew that James Franco and Seth Rogen are going to sing this in it:


That would probably be amazing.

Today, while packing for my upcoming move, I found a bunch of notebooks from college. In between taking notes, I would often turn to the back on a notebook and start writing random things. Often, this took the form of a list. I had apparently forgotten just how geeky these lists were. Today, I found all 43 recurring or regular characters on Buffy, all 13 Beatles albums, all 16 Martin Scorsese movies I had seen at the time, and (then) all 38 members of the Justice Society of America. Each of those lists, and dozens of similar ones, were ranked in order of my personal preference.

So that was what I did for fun in college. Currently, I'm making a note reminding myself to not do the same thing in graduate school.

I was listening to "I Can't Get Next To You" by The Temptations today, I noticed something that I'd never really thought about before. There's a line in the second verse where Melvin Franklin says "I can live forever, if I so desire."


Is it just me, or is that staggeringly brilliant? His metaphorical superpower, in this case, isn't that he's immortal. It's that he could be immortal if he decided he felt like it. He's so powerful that living forever is something he may or may not decide to do.

That's a short story just begging to be written. Good work, song writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong.

Okay, I realize it was only supposed to be five, but I just thought of this one, and I couldn’t leave it out.

1979 - “Honest Lullaby” by Joan Baez, from the album Honest Lullaby

 “Living in a fantasy, in love with Jimmy Dean. If you will be my king, Jimmy, Jimmy, I will be your queen.”

Each verse of Joan’s painful, beautiful, lyrically dense memoir of growing from teenager to mother tells of a separate phase in her life. Here, in the second verse, she’s blossomed into a teenager who isn’t awkward around boys the way she was in verse one. Now she has the opposite problem, as she’s “spending all [her] energy, in keeping [her] virginity.” The only way she knows to deal with it is to pretend she’s dating, instead, an idealized movie star. It's just one indelible image in a song full of them, but the use of the late actor's name makes it that much clearer.

This version, from the Muppet Show, contains only verses two and four. You really should hunt down the album track. It’s terrific.

 

 

It’s a tricky thing to score with a good pop culture reference in a song. It’s easy to toss off an allusion, but considerably harder to make it mean something. A jumble of references that mean nothing will only lead to this: 

So today, I’m going to present five pop-culture references that add to the songs they’re in. I’m not talking about songs dedicated to TV shows or movies, although that’s certainly a possible topic for a future list. None of these songs is about the item or person being alluded to. In all five cases, allusions help make a specific point about the song’s larger theme.

 1974: “Young Americans” by David Bowie, from the album Young Americans.

“Black’s got respect, and white’s got his Soul Train” 

In his epic, vicious indictment of American life circa Watergate, Bowie invokes everything from the lack of emotionally moving music to the handiness of having a razor “in case of depression.” But one undercurrent that runs throughout the song is the state of race relations at the time, which reaches its peak in the bridge, when he implies that in the end, all it really achieved was a TV show.

1980: “Play It All Night Long” by Warren Zevon, from the album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School

“Sweet Home Alabama, play that dead band’s song . . .”

Unlike David Bowie, the late Warren Zevon wasn’t railing against all of America – just the South. In “Play It All Night Long,” he paints a bleak picture of a staggeringly dysfunctional, disgustingly stereotypical and, in his view, apparently just plain typical Southern family. He mocks them for their backwards ways, bringing up incest, incontinent grandparents, and failed ranching endeavors. It’s all wrapped around the chorus, which claims just three years after Ronnie Van Zandt's death that perhaps this is the type of person who listened to Lynard Skynard. Necessary? Probably not. But it certainly stings.

1985: “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, from the album Tim

“Elvis in the ground – no way he’ll appear tonight.” 

The Replacements carry out an indictment of their own, as they “trash that Baby Boom” for four minutes. In reaction to the protest songs and movements of the 60s, they proudly announce that their generation can’t be summed up like the previous one. They don’t have a cause. They don’t unite around an issue. There’s “no war to name [them]”, and the song gives the sense that even if there was, they wouldn’t care anyway. Getting involved is a thing of past, and Baby Boomers were silly to ever try. Nowhere is this sentiment clearer than in the line I quoted, where with a sneer they dismiss the false hopes of a generation who won’t let their time pass gracefully.

2004: “Damn Good Times” by TMBG, from the album The Spine

“She acts like David Lee Roth when he turned twenty-one.” 

This song is much more upbeat than the previous three (or, indeed, the next one), but it uses its allusion to equally profound effect. The song focuses on a girl who is described at various times as a “natural dancer” and “a jumping bean”. Nothing puts across her crazy style of dancing better than when it nods to the man who a hit song of the same title. Honestly, can you even imagine what he must have been like on that occasion?

2005: “Stevie Nix” by The Hold Steady, from the album Separation Sunday

“And when we hit the Twin Cities, I didn’t know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore, and I knew Profane Existence.” 

Like most Hold Steady songs, “Stevie Nix” is part of the larger tapestry of the album which contains it. In this case, the album is about two girls who transition from Catholic upbringings to drug-fueled lives in Minneapolis. Craig Finn often weaves in pop culture references, as he does a number of times in this very song. None of them work quite as well as this one, where the reality of the drug-addled world we hear about (and indeed, could read about in Profane Existence ‘zine) is contrasted with expectations engendered by watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
 

You know what? That ended up a lot darker than I thought it would be when I started.