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Sir Elton and I might have bad timing to see each other

If it wasn’t for the minor annoyance of possibly having knee surgery on Wednesday, well, I probably wouldn’t go anyway to the Elton John concert that’s happening just a few miles down the interstate from me. I mean few, like three or four miles maybe.

There are still tickets left, according to Ford Park, one of the most financially-troubled venues in Texas over the past 15 or so years. And it would be a nice gesture to help out old Elton, well, he is only about to turn 67 in a couple of week. It would be even a better move to help out Jefferson County and its prime real estate entertainment complex. Still, I just can’t see myself paying $99 or $69 tickets. If I had a date — what a riotous thought — I would have to sit in one seat and my date in the other. I would probably take the $99 seat. Which explains why a date for me is such a flight of fancy.

Sir Elton is a musical hero of mine though. I can remember listening to “Rocket Man” on KEEL-AM in Shreveport or WLS in Chicago. The latter station we would hear every now and then in Navy boot camp at Great Lakes, Ill., which is right on Lake Michigan though I never saw it from boot camp. But that jingle they would play “Chi-ca-go weathe-r!” Kind of like “Buy Mennen!” or as George from “Seinfeld” put it “Co-stanza!”  Now, 40 years later that damn radio station jingle is still in my head. No matter that the AM station probably has gone through about 10 format changes since then.”

the moon
I hope my legs won’t break, walking on the Moon. Or Enchanted Rock. Copyright 2004. Eight Feet Deep

 

After high school and in the Navy and on into college did I come to learn both old and new — relatively speaking — works of some of the great rockers like Elton. It was at the house of my friend, the incredible late Betti, red-headed hell-raiser she was, where I first heard what was to me the most improbable Elton tune “Texan Love Song” from his 1973 album Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player.

“So it’s Ki yi yippie yi yi
You long hairs are sure gonna die
Our American home was clean till you came
And kids still respected the president’s name … “

Call it what it was, satire. Betti’s friend Russell sang it and played it well on the guitar.

Sir Elton’s opus as far as I am and many others are concerned is the 1973 double-album — yes vinyl — Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It had a bevy, or flock perhaps, of great songs. Sir Elton was on fire back in the day.

Back especially in the 70s was I very fortunate to have seen quite a few rock concerts. Some were very popular groups at the time: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, ZZ Top, Bob Seger, Fleetwood Mac (the latter three times within a year and a half in North America and New Zealand), and the perennial favorite the Rolling Stones. Other individuals and groups, super or not, I had what I feel was the misfortune to have not seen: Any group with Eric Clapton, the Beatles, Warren Zevon, the Who, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Led Zeppelin among them.

Ford Park hosted another favorite, not so super group, a few weeks ago: Foreigner. They have played across the U.S. staging local competitions for high school choir groups to join the band on stage to help with the chorus of “I Want To Know What Love Is.” A local school choir was chosen, the contest hosted by an area TV station. This was a stroke of genius, at least in theory, especially when performing with those high school vocal groups with a soul-gospel orientation, such as some of those from my area. It’s a lovely song that was great when it was released. I do remember hearing it ad nauseum on Christmas Day 1984 while driving all the way across Texas from the most eastern county to the most western.

I can’t remember what the prices were for Foreigner but I know it was more than I would pay for these days.

Honestly, I don’t know what it would take for me to attend a rock or country, stadium-sytle, concert these days. The second-coming of Elvis, Jimi, Janis, George and John, perhaps? Maybe if I were a young person today I wouldn’t mind paying such prices, but there is a time when such events are like what climbing up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial or walking up Enchanted Rock would be for me today with my torn lateral and medial meniscus. Ah yes, it comes back to that.

Yes it does. I want to get the damned thing fixed and in a hurry. The surgery won’t help me walk up Enchanted Rock today — the picture I took in 2004 always reminds me of the Police song “Walking on the Moon” — but at least, maybe, I won’t hurt so much when I walk down the street and hear yet an old tune come floating out of my memory.

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It’s only rock and roll and 50 years later … damn knee!

Perhaps I have been a bit inattentive lately. I swear I have an excuse. But you know what they say about excuses — Yes, everyone’s an ass****. Well, maybe not.

My right knee has, quite frankly, hurt like a sonofabitch for the last month. It still does but I’m hopefully getting a little closer to the reason why. I went to a non-VA doctor and he says it looks as it I have a torn cartilage. Probably a meniscus tear would be my guess. I am awaiting an appointment for a MRI that may tell me what’s up. In the meantime, the orthopedist told me no standing for more than two hours a day. I might have to get him to add no sitting for more than two hours. It feels okay when the knee is bent. It is standing up that is tricky.

Just putting my two scents in on that Beatles tribute on CBS earlier in the week. Sunday maybe? Whenever.

Someone once told me there are two kinds of people in the world. There are Beatles people and there are Stones people. Well, I’m a Stones people, uh, person. I saw them in concert 30 years ago at the Superdome and figured it amazing they were still getting around very well back then. And now. Damn, Mick must be 100 years old. Keith Richards looks 200 at least. But their music is still … great.

I like the Beatles too. Some of their music I liked more than others. Wasn’t much of a Sgt. Pepper’s fan. Abbey Road is my favorite Beatles album and one of my favorite all-time works. The White Album comes second. George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is one of my favored songs from that album. It was played powerfully during the Beatles 50-year tribute by guitarists/vocalists Gary Clark Jr., Joe Walsh and drummer Dave Grohl. Clark is an Austin bluesman, whom sadly, I had not heard of but perhaps heard. Walsh, from James Gang and later Eagles guitarist and presidential candidate rounded out a great leading trio on the Harrison song with Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, drumming his heart out.

Not so much did I care for the covers by Maroon 5, although I like some of Adam Levine and the band’s songs, mostly “Harder to Breathe.” Katie Perry, Grammy queen, was seemingly panned by most writers I have seen after the tribute concert for her take on “Yesterday.” But then what do writers know anyway?

The two surviving Beatles? They still rock. I wonder though, what they might look like if they looked their age? Ringo? Half-bald and a pot belly? Paul, like he did singing on the Rooftop Concert. Even 80-year-old Yoko Ono was dancing during the tribute and … I wonder what John was thinking, way back when?

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The anatomy of a great country song: From the dirty streets of LA

A few minutes ago I came across an interesting story in The Wall Street Journal. Now that in itself may seem unusual if you are familiar with my writing. Since the Journal became a part of Australian-American right-wing mogul Rupert Murdoch’s empire, I read the paper’s website even less than I did than when it was just a right-wing paper in its own right. But I have to admit the paper has some very talented writers and the story I came across is an example of that stable.

Writer Marc Myers penned an interesting look at the anatomy of a country hit made within a very short time period by singer, C & W legend Merle Haggard. The connection between the WSJ and a Merle Haggard song is the entertainer’s scheduled appearance on the Grammies come Sunday. The tale is of how his 1982 hit “Big City” stemmed from Haggard returning to his tour bus from a recording session only to find his bus driver and childhood friend Dean Holloway stewing over some thought. Haggard learned that Holloway hated the “dirty old city” of Los Angeles where they were. Hag tossed his friend a piece of paper and asked him to take out his discord on that paper. Within less than an hour, said the recording star, the song was written that would become his 28th No. 1 single.

I have long been a Merle Haggard fan since his hits started playing our radios back in the 60s. I never knew what to make out of “Okie From Muskogee,” whether it was a piece of satire by Hag or if that was his sentiment back then. I have heard many other Haggard songs and his views expressed in interviews that made me think, if that had been his views, they had changed somewhat over the years. People do change, after all. I remember singing some of those songs with an impromptu group of my brother John on piano, me and a young man slightly older than I — the son of the town’s cobbler — whose taste ran more toward black gospel. The music sounded okay and it was fairly loud enough to drown me out. The effort seemed to please our audience of nursing home residents. They’d probably have liked anyone to play.

Haggard said in the article that his lifelong friend, who also became his bus driver, passed away a few years ago. But he once told Haggard that he had earned — after Haggard split the song credits with Holloway down the middle — around a half a million dollars. Not bad for an afternoon’s discontent.

 

 

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Neil Young, Pocahontas and Me

First I am reading about the dawning of the pot rush in Colorado. Where else would I find this, I mean, besides on the internet? High Times? Well, I’ve not gone there but I’m talking about Rolling Stone.

I have read RS on and off since my teens. I think I first had a subscription in college and it pretty well continued into the end of the century. The internet is where I have found selected pieces, enough to remind me that it is still probably the best music magazine that was ever published. This despite its turn in the 21st century toward celebrity gossip. Maybe not gossip, but it might as well be gossip.

My two paragraphs are spent not on what I’d intended, so much. It is memories of Neil Young which surface from a story I read this afternoon in Rolling Stone about Young playing Carnegie Hall.

I probably first heard his work when “Heart of Gold” was on all the radio stations, we didn’t get that many stations back then. Well, I’m sure I heard Buffalo Springfield on the radio before that, but it would be a bit later before I knew of his helping to found the great group. Offshoots would include Poco, a favorite, and Loggins and Messina. Then Woodstock and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came along, later the album “Deja Vu,” I think it is the group’s best work. But Neil Young was a separate music entity. Unlike musical acts I “rediscovered” in recent years — the Allman Brothers Band principal among them, I had listened to Young since I was a long-haired country boy. This was back before I joined the Navy and saw, at least, a pretty nice portion of the world.

What is so wonderful about Neil Young is also the most exasperating. That is Young the musical chameleon. Remember “Trans?” The Carnegie concert features Young, without a doubt, on some of his best work. Many of his popular songs — “Mr. Soul” from Buffalo Springfield before I was a Young fan — are coming to life again. As if they ever lacked life. The review notes that Young, at 68, only shows a few minor cracks in his tenor voice, although those cracks on his high-notes have been there for years.

As is probably the case with many popular music acts who have been around for eons, a fair amount of Young’s songs are not always the most popular ones. “For The Turnstiles,” “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” and “Pocahontas” to name a few. I think I mentioned here before the oddity of traveling from Houston to Galveston one day, passing the Astrodome along the way. On the island, a stop at a convenience store revealed the day’s news that Marlon Brando had died. I immediately found the irony from “Pocahontas:” and its Canadian frost:

 “And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We’ll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome
and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me.”

I also thought, for a time, Young was too quick to jump on something topical. “Let’s Roll,” from the terrible saga of 9/11, for example. But topical is what I do, man! So why should I get on Neil Young’s case?

I’m going to leave links to a few vintage Young favorites. If you looking for cheery, well … I hope you enjoy these half as much as I have. Have a great weekend while you are at it.

“Comes A Time”

“Pocahontas”

“Powderfinger”

“Needle and the Damage Done”

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“If not for Christmas … by New Year’s night”

Tony Russell “Charles” Brown grew up Galveston and taught chemistry at Carver High School in nearby Baytown, Texas, after receiving his degree from Prairie View A & M.  This was decades before integration and just as the U.S. went to World War II. Brown worked in a mustard gas plant in Arkansas and a Southern California shipyard before settling in Los Angeles. It was there Brown honed his skills as a pianist in blues bands and eventually recorded his music.

His Christmas blues standard “Please Come Home for Christmas” was a hit in 1960. It was popular enough through the various holidays that followed that it had sold 1 million records eight years later.

Brown was always more or less claimed as a “Southeast Texan.” Of course, he was Southeast Texan having grown up in Galveston but not “down home Southeast Texan” in the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange “Golden Triangle” in which Janis Joplin was a native. He was more a native in the ZZ Top style. The three band members played many time in the Beaumont area, especially before they made it big. With the Frank, Dusty and Billy being mostly a Houston band, they too were co-opted by those of the Beaumont area.

Brown died in 1999 and was buried in California.

It really doesn’t matter who is from where though. During the number of years I lived outside of Southeast Texas, I never really felt at home in the area when I visited for the holidays until I heard James Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.” And as much as I like the Eagles version of the song sung by northeast Texan Don Henley, sometimes there is nothing like the original.

May you all have a Happy Christmas wherever you are or whatever you are.