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Shirt Them-A-Tear Up, Trousers Are Gone

September 8, 2012 10 Comments

The Israelites was the first reggae song I can recall hearing. It came out the same year as the Beatles’ White Album. All sorts of things used to come out of the radio back then. Wonderful things. Odd things. Music got to be big business later on, so the whole process got roped and branded and leveled out quite a bit.

Desmond Dekker and Leslie Kong wrote The Israelites, and there’s Desmond singing it in the video.  Desmond’s clothes have obviously been placed in  his wardrobe by his enemies. Leslie Kong sounds like a pretty tough name for a guy, but he’s been dead since I was in eighth grade, so I guess he wasn’t built for the long haul. Anyway, it’s a marvelous piece of backwards backbeat.

It was the Jamaican version of Louie Louie, in that no one could agree on what the hell the lyrics were. Here’s as good a guess as any:

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I’m working for.
Poor me, Israelite,
I look a-down and out, sir.

I remember how profoundly exotic that song sounded coming out of the radio the first time I heard it. It was backwards and sideways and their accents didn’t register as any I’d heard. It was a message from outer space, only warmer.

More Beatles Bolognese

June 14, 2012 6 Comments

(Galeazzo Frudua on YouTube)

My sons are up to around twenty-five songs that they can play together now. After dinner each night, my wife and I go for a walk around the neighborhood while they practice together in an unused bedroom. The plaster is falling off the walls rather nicely in there.

The nine-year-old is entirely immune to praise. If you tell him,”You played that really great,” he might say,”Yes, we did,” in his best Chance the Gardener monotone, but he’s more likely to start rambling about something he’s building on Minecraft, which is apparently what he’s thinking of the entire time he’s playing the drums. My older son teaches him the songs. They have become self-contained now.  I used to give the little one a lesson at lunch every day, but it became superfluous.

They use Spotify  and YouTube to find out what they need to know. Our children do not attend the public schools. I was amused –if that’s the right word — to read that the local schools hand out laptops to all the children, but are reconsidering allowing the children to fully use them for school. They’re thinking of blocking certain sites because the kids waste too much time there. Only a few websites, one being YouTube, were mentioned as needing to be blocked.

After all, what could an intelligent and curious youngster find on YouTube that’s worth knowing?

Love, Love Me Don’t

June 5, 2012 6 Comments

I dearly love seeing people making things.

It’s jarring to see the juxtapositions of fine and heavy work. Half-way through, the thing already looks like a delicate instrument, and then all of a sudden guys with hammers and nails and drills and files start whaling on the thing like it owes them money when it gets to their work station.

Hofner is a German company, of course. Their info page ominously notes Beijing along with Bavaria now, so one wonders what everyone in the video is doing for work now. Their violin bass is simply known as The Beatle Bass where I’m from. Paul McCartney played one and that’s that. You can dry your tears with a kleenex after xeroxing something you read on your iPhone after googling it  if you don’t like it. Get a coke out of the frigidaire; you’ll feel better.

I’ve played rather a lot of electric basses in my day. I’ve owned a few, too –a no-name mess hand-me-down from my brother I took apart to try to refinish and couldn’t reassemble; a four-hundred-pound Peavey that my lower back still talks about; a G&L P-bass (there’s that generic thing again) I still own; a Pedulla fretless that sounded amazing, even with me playing it, that gave me an aneurysm trying to sing and play at the same time and that I eventually sold to buy food; and a graphite-plastic Steinberger that I rigged to spin in a circle like a propeller. I liked the Steinberger best — it was good in a fight, and since it didn’t have any wooden parts, you only had to tune it every January 12th.

So besides all the stuff I’ve owned, I’ve played Fenders galore, and Rickenbackers, and Ibanezes, and all sorts of other electric doghouses. And without question, a Hofner Beatle Bass is the worst musical instrument of any kind I’ve ever encountered. Paul McCartney said he only bought one because he couldn’t afford a Fender, and the thing looked about the same upside-down. I don’t know what everyone else’s excuse is.

I Can Work The Beatles Into Anything

June 3, 2012 5 Comments

So, Richard Dawson kicked the bucket. He’s one of those fellows nobody much has anything bad to say about. (Parse that sentence, college boy)

I suppose everyone will remark about his turn as the host of a vapid game show, but he’ll always be Corporal Newkirk to me.

His biography says he ran away from home when he was 14 and joined the Merchant Marines, and later boxed for money when the rozzers weren’t looking. Then he became an actor by acting like himself. In short, he was exactly, precisely the opposite of every male child in the English-speaking world today. Let’s face it. Chicks dig that sort of thing.

Well, chicks did dig Colin Emm the truckdriver’s son, and he dug them right back. I think he kissed them all, sequentially towards the end, but in a big pile on the floor with Bob Crane at first. One of them was Diana Dors, who was often billed as the British Marilyn Monroe. I think that meant she filled out a bustier nicely but had crooked teeth. She married Dickie Dawson in 1959, and during an eight-year marriage, they had two sons. Both Dickie and Diana sound about as wild as one another. She was the youngest person to ever register a Rolls Royce in England, using all her ingenue bucks. And he was the guy that got busy with the only girl that Swindon ever felt the need to memorialize with a statue. She makes Jessica Rabbit look like Olive Oyl.

Oh yes; the Beatles. Well, if you were somebody in 60s England, I mean really somebody, you were on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s. Hell, only Marilyn Monroe’s face is pasted in there, but Diana’s in the front row in all her glory.

Way to go, Dickie. Only Lawrence of Arabia, if that’s who the Easter Island head in front of George is supposed to be, managed to get better billing than your wife.
 
Like the man said: No matter what — keep smiling. Some of that must have rubbed off on John Lennon; he smiled here and there during this video, even though you could tell he was thinking of murdering Paul McCartney the whole time for making him sing Hello Goodbye:

Tag: Beatles

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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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