Give Mr. Banks' Boy a Break!

I just can't figure out what these songwriters have against this kid!

"Beggars' Parade"
Working My Way Back to You (1966)
The Four Seasons,

Hungry for bread, plant a seed
Satisfy your evil greed
No, you'd rather collect that unemployment check
Why should you work, like the rest,
When it's easier to protest?
Oh, you're all the same,
Bowery bum, banker's son
Beat the drum, here they come
Banker's son, bowery bum


"Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters"
Honky Chateau (1972)
Elton John

While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night
For unless they see the sky
But they can't and that is why
They know not if it's dark outside or light

I easily can imagine Benedict XVI sitting in his Vatican apartment...

...humming, "Where to now, St. Peter?"

Calling Dr. Freud...

I'm assuming that, if I can learn about myself by examining my dreams, then the songs I sing regularly in the shower could be self-revelatory too.



Here are the three songs, any one of which, far more often than not in the morning, I'm singing in the shower:

"Mean to Me" (Frank Sinatra, Columbia Records, 1947)

"Oh, Darling" (The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969)

and

"Shoulder Holster" (Elton John, Blue Moves, 1976)

A sonic Rorschach test, to be sure (to mix my metaphorical psychoanalytsts).

 

 

 

My Top 5 Shipwreck Songs!

5. "Isle of France"

Nic Jones, 1977

 

 

4.  "Billy Bones and the White Bird"

Elton John, 1975

 

 

3.  "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

Gordon Lightfoot, 1975

 

2.  "Odessa (City on the Black Sea)"

Bee Gees, 1969

 

 

 

1. "The Theme from Gilligan's Island"

The Wellingtons, 1964

 

 



"The Secret Garden" at NCTC

Saw my younger daughter performing in NCTC's very nice production of The Secret Garden last night.

Two songs that I think should be added to the show:

Elton John's "Empty Garden" for Mary:

Who lived here?
[S]he must've been a gardener who cared a lot
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop,
but now it all looks strange...

And I've been knocking
But no one answers
I've been knocking most of the day
And I've been calling
Hey, Hey, [Colin], can't you come out and play?

and John Lennon's "Mother" for Colin:

Mother, you had me, but I never had you...

Mother, you knew me, but I never knew you...

(with lots and lots of anguished screaming).

I'll offer my alternative reading of the play in another post soon. Stay tuned!

Why I'll Never Be a True Guitar Hero

As I was treadmilling last night, the Carpenters' song "Goodbye to Love," with its fairly cool guitar solo, came on my MP3Player, and I wondered if that song was available on any o' those interactive gaming systems. I'm thinking not.

(Forget pretending to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo on LSD, let's play Karen on drums or Richard on keyboards! Insert anorexia joke here.)

The song also brought to mind that, when our family bought a brand new 1975 Chevrolet Malibu Classic with its 8-track tape player (no more am radio for us!), my father complained about the racket emanating from it on The Carpenters Greatest Hits tape. That, and "Better off Dead" from Elton John's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, simply drove him nuts!

We were truly a headbangin' family, in case you you couldn't tell.

Notes from the Tony Awards

In the "surprise" opening number, which considering it was merely a medley of things presently on the Great White Way and so hardly was surprising at all, Stockard Channing sang "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" from the revival of Pal Joey, and, while it was far from a great performance, at least she was performing a song worth hearing – especially when paired with (and compared to) “I’m Alive” sung by some guy from Next to Normal. Why is it that most songs from contemporary musicals are so repetitive? I believe the only thing he sang was -- wait for it -- yes, “I’m alive.” There’s more wit and lyricism in any one line of almost any Rodgers and Hart song than anything recent I heard last night…and we won’t even mention the music.


Liza Minnelli looked and sounded terrible (to be polite). As my wife explained to our girls, “Like her mother, she’s had a very hard life which has included drug abuse, etc…” To which I added, “But her mother was smart enough to die before she turned into this.”


9 to 5: The Musical.
Shrek the Musical.
Rock of Ages (was that really “Don’t Stop Believing” I was hearing?)
And these are the ones the American Theatre Wing chose to put on stage to highlight itself. Broadway’s not dead; it’s simply gone senile…


From the vaults: Elton John writing an Aida is akin to Neil Simon offering his own Macbeth. Not saying they can’t do it, but, man, they really shouldn’t.

Give me a good venereal disease any day of the week

Today at noon, as part of the Central Authors television series I help organize (official title: producer; actual role: booking agent), I attended an insightful and enjoyable talk by Heather Prescott, a colleague in the CCSU History Department, on her new book Student Bodies: the Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine. As she traced the history of student health services, developing in response to increasing diversity on U.S. college campuses, the subject of sexually transmitted diseases, not surprisingly, arose.

Then it dawned on me: what exactly was wrong with the term "venereal disease" (or even "social disease," for that matter) that demanded the uninspired, and pedestrian, name of "sexually transmitted disease." Have we, as a culture, become so dim, so poorly read, so imaginatively bankrupt, that any term not patently obvious needs replacement?

"Venereal," after all, is an adjective that derives from the Latin name of the Roman goddess of love and sex -- Venus, Veneris (stem vener-) -- and, as such, specifies that any things so described are sexually related.

When I raised this question after the talk, a young man in the CCSU bookstore (who hadn't even attended the talk) came by, apologized for interrupting, and suggested that perhaps it was because the Latin derivation was gendered -- that it somehow blamed such diseases on women.

Not a bad theory, but hardly convincing. Remember, the Roman philosopher Lucretius in his epic Epicurean poem on atomism, De Rerum Natura, invoked Venus as neither god nor woman but as the driving creative (read: sexual) force in the natural world.

Venereal = sexually transmitted - history/lore/tradition

We continue to fall ever further from the rich poetic/mythic roots of our language, and we're the poorer for it.

Also remember the name for syphilis came from a character, Syphilus, in a 16th-century neo-Latin poem by physician/poet Girolamo Fracstoro.

Before the poem, the French called it the "Italian Disease, the Italians the "French Disease, etc...."

Now THAT'S how you name a disease.

We can't leave this topic without quoting the chorus of "Social Disease," the Elton John / Bernie Taupin composition from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road :

I get bombed for breakfast every morning
I get bombed for dinner time and tea
I dress in rags, smell a lot, and have a real good time
I'm a genuine example of a social disease

But I won't count on that either....