Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.
I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.
It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.
The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.
What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:
Maybe you prefer the later versions:
By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.
People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.
I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.
So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.
Well, I’m informed that they did call George Jones the Rolls-Royce of Country Music, but I’m not sure it fits. A Rolls is posh. A Rolls isn’t for driving, it’s for being driven in. And a Rolls is British, and that’s way out of bounds for George. I understand the sentiment. Pretty much every country singer wanted to sing like George Jones. Calling him a Cadillac might seem like faint praise.
More to the point, George was a serious wildman. He stands stock-still, his lantern jaw moving in Clutch Cargo fashion, his hair laid out with a spirit level, so you might be forgiven for thinking that man in the Nudie suit must be a taciturn sort of fellow. But he was anything but. He was an ex-Marine, a famed hellraiser, a skirt chaser, and occasionally had to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the hospital to dry out. He, ahem, liked to drink a bit. A bit of a still at a time.
No, his voice was clear and powerful, butter and a headbutt at the same time, so he’s no Rolls-Royce. We can do better than that, nickname-wise. Once, his wife tried to keep him from going out and getting drunk, and she hid all the car keys, and went to bed. When she woke up, George was missing. She drove eight miles on the highway to the next town, to the closest place he could conceivably get drunk at, and found George sitting at the bar. Their riding mower was parked out front.
The John Deere of Country Music. There, I fixed it.
El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:
Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:
No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.
The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.
But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years
Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.
When I’m driving in my car And a man talks on the radio He’s telling me more and more About some useless information Supposed to fire my imagination
It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.
I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.
The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.
Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.
And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.
Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.
They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago. You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.
In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
Easy Rider (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Chinatown (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.
Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.
Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.
Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:
Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video. In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.
“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.
No, I’m not talking about Bernard Purdie, shown here playing the drums with Vulfpeck, although it would be alright with him if I was. Bernard played on the original Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan minor masterpiece. I like how Bernard is wearing a Bernard Purdie tee-shirt. I think I’ll wear a Sippican Cottage t-shirt when I pick up my Nobel prize for literature. Or maybe a sweatshirt. I hear it gets cold in Stockholm. On further reflection, maybe they can just mail me the money and the bronze coaster with the dynamiter on it, and save me the trip.
Speaking of trips, in the title, I’m not referring to Bernard, or Becker or Fagen, or even Owlsley, the LSD king that Kid Charlemagne is written about. All that chemistry was in aid of the largest deliberate experiment in subverting the culture ever attempted: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Ken Kesey has had a larger influence on the United States than anyone going back to maybe Alexander Hamilton. And while it ultimately led by a very circuitous route to the wonderful agglomeration of Bernard Purdie and Vulfpeck playing Kid Charlemagne, it would be hard to come to any conclusion but one: That influence was all bad.
The Merry Pranksters, as they styled themselves, wouldn’t mind being called bad influences by the L7s, because they were rebelling against the squares. Many people thought the Pranksters were doing a good thing by telling people that drugs would expand their minds, and that these expanded minds would lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like whirled peas, face painting, and luxuriant armpit hair on women.
Well, it didn’t.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face They’ve joined the human race Some things will never change
These are the Day-Glo freaks Becker and Fagen were talking about, and Kid Charlemagne was supplying with LSD:
Kesey is largely responsible for the two major problems currently haunting America. First, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That made him a pile of money, and earned him plenty of notoriety. It was the lever that started the big rock of “reform” rolling downhill for US mental hospitals. Of course Chesterton’s Fence wasn’t consulted, and the benighted denizens were simply turned out of doors instead of firing all the prototypical passive aggressive girlbosses like nurse Ratched and starting over. So mentally ill people get to live under bridges and yell at cars, courtesy of Ken Kesey.
Then Kesey started the sixties counterculture, nearly singlehanded, if Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is to be believed. Now that Wolfe is dead, I figured it was safe to read something written by him. My wife found a dogeared paperback copy of it for me in a used bookstore. If I’m still reading the frontispiece correctly, this paperback edition was printed in 1989, but was already the 31st edition of the thing. I’m always amazed at how well bad writing used to pay.
I’m exaggerating some. The book’s not bad, exactly. But the breathless praise for TEKAAT book seems a bit much to me. The author was trying way too hard, and ends up sounding like a stoned, short-bus James Joyce. But that was the spirit of the times. To a normal person, a species which of course has currently been hunted to extinction, hearing the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the bad rock music, you realize that it only sounds like something if you’re stoned.
But that was the other Kesey shoe that dropped. Giving people LSD, including giving it to them unawares, is just one act in his passion play. The whole idea that it is completely normal for everyone to be stoned on one thing or another, or everything all at once for that matter, was adumbrated by Kesey and his coterie of Day-Glo freaks. I found it interesting that in the book, Wolfe describes what the merry band used when LSD was hard to get. They’d smoke a lot of weed and take a lot of speed, and reported that it gave them almost the same sort of trip. I immediately thought of today’s kids, gobbling ritalin and other ADHD drugs, which are a kind of speed, and smoking now-legal marijuana. Everything old is new again, I guess.
Downstream of all that, Kesey’s idea that any productive behavior is strictly for the squares now reigns triumphant. Riding around, stoned out of your gourd, and annoying the locals while filming it, just like the Merry Pranksters, is the number one career choice for young people these days, at least according to various polls:
86% of young Americans say they’d try being an influencer; 12% already identify as one, according to a Morning Consult poll (ages 13–38)
57% of Gen Z teens (13–26) believe they can easily make a career as an influencer, with the same share saying they’d leave their current job to pursue it
40% of teenagers (13–18) are actively considering becoming social media influencers, per a Citizens Financial/Junior Achievement survey
16% of teens explicitly want to become a “social media influencer/content creator,” ranking just behind entrepreneurship in a Junior Achievement/EY study
It doesn’t matter that there are no more squares to outrage. Grandma’s got an ass-antler tattoo and grandpa is swinging at The Villages hot tub with his current girlfriend. Whatever. Today’s young girls make endless videos of themselves stuffing comped food in their faces at various vacation spots, or take off their tube tops on OnlyFans to make a few bucks. The guys record their video games and publish them on Twitch or suchlike, and mention that they might also acquiesce to being a pro athlete, but pretty much no one wants a real job. Kesey did that.
So Wolfe’s book accidentally shows what happens the day after tomorrow when you take Timothy Leary’s advice to: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Plenty of those Merry people ended up in mental, and other sorts of hospitals. An assortment ended up dead. Jail was pretty common. Eventually the hippie chicks learned that Merry Pranksters thought Hell’s Angels were just as merry, and invited them over for what sounds to me like a gang rape that Tom Wolfe should have called that. And the whole lovely worldview soldiered on through the decades until it reached its apotheosis in Fentanyldelphia, Pennsylvania:
It’s useful to recall that the original idea for giving Americans LSD was part of a CIA mind-control experiment called MKUltra. I guess you could call it a failed experiment, but then again, you’d have to know what they were really trying to accomplish to know if it was a failure, and almost every record of it was burned by the CIA. But a list of the known and likely participants in the “experiments,” some unwitting, sure is interesting. Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, James Whitey Bulger, Ted Kaczynski, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson. Nice bunch of people there. Very tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Jim Jones had his own Kool-Aid test down in Guyana, too, and while no one can positively say the CIA was in on it, it sure sounds fishy, and one is reminded that denying they’re in on it is right on their business cards.
So what did it all add up to, really? Driving around in a garishly decorated bus, dressing in clown motley, taking drugs, and annoying regular people while filming it? Let’s go back to Steely Dan for the answer.
While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light.
Tag: 1960s
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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