You can hear Don Helms' trademark steel guitar on Patsy Cline's Walking After Midnight, Stonewall Jackson’s Waterloo, the Louvin Brothers’ Cash on the Barrelhead, Lefty Frizzell’s Long Black Veil and Loretta Lynn’s Blue Kentucky Girl, pretty much a Theme Time Radio Hour roll call.
And of course, as one of the Driftin' Cowboys, Helms was featured on over 100 Hank Williams recordings, including 10 of the 11 Hank Williams #1 hits. Helms played with Williams on his last recording session in late 19 and 52, a session that eventually produced Kaw-Liga, Take These Chains From My Heart, and Your Cheatin’ Heart.
Helms was the last of the Driftin' Cowboys, and was working up until his death. In fact, according to his obituary in the New York Times, at the time of his death Helms was working with Vince Gill onan album of uncompleted Hank Williams songs. Emphasis mine, as I suspect that this is theso-called "Briefcase Songs" album that we discussed back in Episode 48 - That Fateful Day: The Lost Songs of Hank Williams. and adds Vince Gill to the roster of artists thought to be on that album, including Norah Jones, Jack White, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan.
The full NY Times obituary on Helms can be found here and is well worth the read. Our title is taken from the phrase Helms used in concert to introduce a medley of Hank Williams' tunes... "Now, close your eyes and think of Hank."
I keep on meaning to do a Dreamtime on Pandora, the "internet radio station," that is much, much more than an internet radio station, but if I'm going to do a show featuring Pandora, it looks like I better move fast.
Why is a company that has a listening audience of 1 million a day, attracts an average 40,000 new listeners a day, and has one of the most popular iPhone applications available in the iTunes store on the brink of shutting its doors?
Thank SoundExchange, brought to you by those wonderful people at the RIAA, who are nominally charged with collecting royalties on behalf of the artists for all work broadcast over the internet or satellite radio. I say "nominally," as many artists say they've never seen a dime from the millions that SoundExchange has reportedly collected, and many artists don't want SoundExchange doing anything on their behalf. But SoundExchange trucks on nonetheless.
Consider this: Unlike what you might have thought, traditional over-the-airwaves radio stations pay not a dime for the music they play, although SoundExchange is trying to change that too.
Satellite radio such as the newly renamed Sirius XM Radio pays around a royalty rate of 1.6 cents per hour per listener - at that rate, XM pays around $38,000 in royalties for each TTRH aired. That's an estimate, based on published reports that TTRH has a listening audience of around 2 million. The actual royalty figure is probably lower, as I doubt whether anyone is still collecting royalties on some of the music TTRH plays. In any case, the same music played on Pandora for an hour will cost the company almost double the satellite radio rate - an estimated 2.9 cents per hour per listener. Pandora estimates that rate will cost them over $17 million a year, or about 70 percent of their annual revenues. Which is way too much to pay out for the start-up to survive.
Although not coming right out and saying it, Pandora CEO Tim Westergren is hinting that the time may be at at hand where Pandora literally pulls the plug, and shuts down. And that would be a shame. While Pandora isn't perfect by any means, I've been a fan since its launch and recently fell in love with it again thanks to its new mini-application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Pandora, for those of you who don't know it, allows listeners to create their own "radio stations" which you can listen to through your computer, or now through an iPhone, and if you have a docking station for your iPhone, through your stereo or media center. One of Pandora's quirks - again due to music licensing restrictions - is that you can't build a specific playlist or request a particular piece of music. You give Pandora an artist like Bob Dylan, or a song like Mississippi, and it goes out and creates a playlist based on music similar to your selections. Eventually you'll probably even get Dylan's version of Mississippi, but Pandora's strength - as well as its weakness - is through offering songs and artists that have something in common with your requests. It's a great way of discovering music you've never heard before.
As I said, Pandora is not perfect, and can be quite quirky in its music offerings. I've always had this suspicion that the algorithm occasionally tosses in something that you'll almost certainly hate, just to ensure that you're paying attention.. However, if Pandora coughs up a particular piece of music that you really dislike, you have the option - within limits - to get it off your playlists.
Over the last couple of years, I've been building various Theme Time playlists in Pandora, using the artists and music from shows stretching all the way from Weather to Cold as my templates. An example of the results can be heard by clicking on the image above.
Some of the music on my TTRH stations is pretty good, if not quite as good as what Our Host might pick. And some of the music is exceedingly strange, such as my Mother station, as one might expect from a playlist that includes stuff from LL Cool J, the Rolling Stones, Merle Haggard, and Ruth Brown. The Drinking one is pretty weird too.
As Michael Arrington notes in his TechCrunch article, what entities such as the RIAA, SoundExchange, and the record labels don't seem to get is, "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist" Period. The end.
Pandora and other internet radio entities, satellite radio, traditional radio all should be considered valuable marketing and advertising tools, not another revenue stream to try to shore up the music industry's failing business model. In fact, I think a strong case could be made that the various record labels should be paying Pandora, et al for promoting their music. And yes, I know what I'm talking about is payola, but you know what, that's not necessarily a bad thing. What's wrong with a, "this hour of music was presented by Sony, Arista..." NPR-like announcement at the beginning of each hour of Pandora? Good music will still rise to the top. Crappy music will sink. Play enough crap and you'll be out of business, no matter how much payola you're taking.
It's a different sort of Dreamtime this time around. I recently had the opportunity to interview one of my favorite vocalists and interpreter of Bob Dylan songs, Maria Muldaur, and our Episode 57 focuses on Maria's latest release, Yes, We Can!which showcases the work of a variety of songwriters, including Marvin Gaye, Allen Toussaint, Earl King, Garth Brooks, and Bob Dylan himself.
A couple of show notes before we get started. As one of the Moscow Rules states, "Technology will always let you down." I had an equipment melt-down about 10 minutes before I was scheduled to call Maria, and ended up jury-rigging a last-minute Rube Goldberg recording system in order to capture the interview. I was left with the option of either capturing Maria's voice clearly, or my own, and of course decided for the former. You can tell how badly the recording sounded on my end towards the close of the interview. So, in any case, Maria wasn't indulging in a monologue, but was responding to my questions, which I edited out, but which I think you can figure out from the context of her answers.
Maria also notes in the interview that there should be a free download of a song that had to be left off Yes, We Can! on the Telarc site. As of the the time of this podcast's release, which should be around August 12, 2008, the song had not yet been posted on telarc.com. I'll put a post and a link on the Dreamtime blog when the song becomes available.
So, without further ado, here's Maria Muldaur, and a few clips from her latest release, Yes, We Can!
You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.
Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.
I'm getting of the age where hearing the phrase "a musical legend/icon/giant/etc. has passed away" as a network news teaser fills me with dread, wondering who it is this time.
The clip is from the great film, Wattstax, which I heartily commend to your attention. Besides Hayes and the very young Jesse Jackson, there are appearances by the Staple Singers, an equally young Richard Pryor, Rufus Thomas doing an incredible Funky Chicken, Albert King, The Bar-Kays and many more Stax artists. As a musical document you may find the many incomplete sets in Wattstax frustrating. On the other hand, it's probably the best video document of what Watts was like in the early `70s.
I know. I was there, teaching on 101st Street. I didn't make it to Woodstock. But I made it to Wattstax, and spent one of the best days in my life, 36 years ago come this August 20th, one of the few white faces in a sea of black faces, not scared, not even nervous, just boogeyin' to the music along with 10,000 other people.
"While Bob Dylan is off searching for new Dreams, Themes and Schemes – your suggestions are welcome at bobdylan@xmradio.com – XM is playing back some of our favorites from the first two seasons of Dylan's XM Exclusive show in alphabetical order.
It's Theme Time A to Y. Why 'Y'? No 'Z' theme in the catalogue. Yet."
If one is looking for, ahem, tell-tale signs on when TTRH Season 3 will begin, the list of shows may hold a clue. We're currently at "P" - for "President's Day" and "Party" which will play this Wednesday, August 6th. Shows continue to " W" and Y" - "Walking" and "Youth and Age" (one presumes this last is the "Young and Old" show from Season 2) to be broadcast on September 3rd.
So what happens on Wednesday, September 10th, hmmmmm?
As the purchase of XM Satellite Radio by larger rival Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. closed yesterday, questions remained over whether the combined company can handle its $3.4 billion in debt, including $1.1 billion due next year.
Also murky was how quickly the companies can mesh their technologies without angering consumers....
...In the past, the companies have mentioned offering a "best of both" service for $17 a month, compared to the current price for one of the services at $13 a month.
Sirius and XM haven't disclosed which programming the best-of service will include. And there's no guarantee Howard Stern will be available to XM customers or that Sirius customers will see Major League Baseball games, for instance....
The government has approved the long-delayed merger of the nation's only satellite radio companies, combining Sirius and XM into a single entity with 18 million subscribers.
The decision last night came almost a year and a half after the companies first proposed joining. Based on yesterday's closing share prices, the deal is valued at $3.3 billion, not including debt.
...The companies must cap prices for three years after joining and allow consumers to choose the channels they want and pay less for packages of channels. Radios that allow a la carte channel selections will eventually be available for car dashboards -- the largest area of growth. The companies said they would introduce radios that receive both XM and Sirius channels...
WASHINGTON - A majority of commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission have reached a deal to approve Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s long-pending purchase of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc.
The final hold-out, Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, agreed to vote to approve the deal after winning several concessions from the companies involving enforcement issues.
"I think it's fair to say an agreement in principle has been reached," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in an interview Thursday morning. "We're still trying to work out the language."
A deal was reached with the companies late Wednesday night to pave the way for Ms. Tate's vote on the merger, Mr. Martin said. Four of the commissioners had already voted on the deal, but they had split 2-2 on whether to approve it.
The two satellite radio companies agreed to enter into a consent decree to resolve complaints they violated FCC rules. Those violations include using excessive power levels on some radio units sold to consumers and erecting several unauthorized towers to boost their satellite signals.
The companies have agreed to pay almost $20 million to settle the complaints, with XM paying about $17.5 million and Sirius paying about $2.2 million.
Ms. Tate is expected to vote on the deal as soon as Thursday. The FCC isn't expected to formally release its decision for a few days, as staff attorneys draft the final paperwork for review by the five commissioners...
...The companies are expected to bring new a la carte radios on the market in the next three months that would provide consumers more choices in which stations they receive from the two services. ...
It's Summertime, the living is easy, and our July Twenty-Ought-Eight show is all about solar rays and happiness, direct from the sun and fun capital of the world, Merrimack, NH.
Summer Days, Summer Nights
Leading us off, a 19 and 67 song in praise of Trans-Love Airways, strobe lights, blue jeans, Harley-Davidsons and warm summer nights in San Francisco. Direct from the Summer of Love, Eric Burdon and the Hippie incarnation of The Animals with San Franciscan Nights.
[San Franciscan Nights - Eric Burdon and The Animals]
As anyone who has spent any time in San Francisco can tell you, "warm" would only be used to describe a San Franciscan night by someone who's never lived there. But hey, it's still a pretty song, and one that could only have been written in the summer of 1967, when all of us wanted to wear flowers in our hair.
This was the second incarnation of the Animals, much more psychedelic than the earlier blues-oriented Animals of the `early 60s, whose big hit was House of the Rising Sun. The New Animals would also have a string of hits during the late `60s, each one getting successively weirder, until culminating with 19 and 68's Sky Pilot, a seven-minute song that included gunfire, bagpipes and dive bombers, and which had to be split over two sides of a 45. Nevertheless, Sky Pilot (Parts 1 and 2) made it to #14 on the charts.
[Jingle]
Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner
There's a movie I watch every summer, on a warm night, all the lights off, just the glow of the tube lighting the room. Now - don't laugh at me - that movie is Dirty Dancing, which is one of my favorite summer movies of all time.
Some movies just get the time and place right on, and Dirty Dancing hits the summer of 19 and 63 and the Borscht Belt world of summer resorts perfectly. Maybe that's no surprise, as screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, herself called "Baby" as a girl, used the memories of her own childhood to write Dirty Dancing.
You know the plot: Young Jewish girl goes to summer resort, falls for dancer on wrong side of tracks. Hotel workers spend nights gyrating hips. Obnoxious college kid moonlighting as waiter knocks up hired help. Doctor Father confused about who's sleeping with who. Sister sings Wiki-Wacky-Woo. Old Jewish couple revealed as master thieves. Everybody dances at the end.
And nobody puts Baby in a corner.
One of the things that make Dirty Dancing so great is the soundtrack, much of which was based on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's personal record collection. That soundtrack includes our next song, Mickey & Sylvia's Love is Strange, a hit from thirty years before the movie was made.
[Love is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia]
Love is Strange was written by Bo Diddley, but was credited to Ethel Smith, who was Bo Diddley's wife at the time, because he was in the middle of a legal battle with his record label over who owned what. "Who owned what?" might be the best phrase to describe Love is Strange and its history, as its distinctive riff was lifted for numerous songs - including the roller skate rink hot hit of 19 and 62, Rinky Dink and 1963's Killer Joe by The Rocky Fellers.
You can make up your own mind how closely either song resembles Love is Strange by checking out the Dreamtime podcast blog (that's right here), where I've posted YouTube videos featuring both songs. For the record, Dave "Baby" Cortez was sued over Rinky Dink's close resemblance to Love is Strange - and lost - while The Rocky Fellers weren't. On the other hand, Mickey & Sylvia might have thought a band named The Rocky Fellers was already punishment enough.
Surf's Up!
Hey! What's that I hear? I think it's time to hit the beach!
[Ho Daddy! - Bob Denver]
I have many guilty pleasures - indeed, Jailbait claims that my life is one big guilty pleasure - and one of those guilty pleasures is my love of surf movies from the `60s. One of the best from that genre that did not have Annette Funicello in it, but did have James Darren, Bob Denver, Tina Louise, Nancy Sinatra and Paul Lynde was 1964's For Those Who Think Young.
A "hodad" or "hodaddy" is surfer slang meaning someone who adopts the surfer look, even to the extent of having a surfboard that he never uses, because he's on the beach to pick up girls, themselves referred to by the surfing crowd as "Betties."
While one story has it that the term "Betty" came from The Flintstones character Betty Rubble (an obvious sexual hysteric who Barney isn't satisfying in bed, according to that great surfing mystery, The Dawn Patrol), "Betty" was being used by surfers to refer to an attractive girl long before the cartoon was a glimmer in Hanna-Barbera's eye. "Betty" is probably derived from Bettie Page, fabulous pin-up and bondage star of the `50s, whose life story is worth a Dreamtime by itself.
Jerry Fielding, who is credited with writing the music for For Those Who Think Young, must have consulted with some real surfers to come up with the authentic lyrics. Besides "hodaddy," you'll hear Denver refer to "hot doggers," "gremmies," (inexperienced surfers), "pearl diving," "the nose," and "going over the falls.
The Man Who Walked on Water
Believe it or not jazz babies, the godfather of California surfing was novelist Jack London, who, while trying to learn to surf in Hawaii saw what London later described as a "brown-skinned god" shoot past him on a surfboard.
That brown-skinned god was one George Freeth, son of an Irish sailor and a Polynesian mother, who would later become the All-Father of California surfing.
The legend goes that Freeth borrowed a surfboard from an uncle, and finding the 16-foot board too unwieldy to carry, chopped it in two. The truncated board was not only easier to carry, Freeth found he was able to surf a helluva lot more easily too, and soon earned a reputation as someone who could do about anything in or on the water.
The impressed London talked up Freeth to anyone who would listen, and Freeth was eventually recruited by Henry Huntington - he of the famous beach - to come to California. Huntington was trying to promote his new pier at Redondo Beach, and crowds started to gather when Freeth - billed as "The Man Who Can Walk on Water" - began swooping through the pier's pilings on his surfboard.
Freeth's exploits were legendary - wrestling sea lions into submission, saving seventy-eight people from drowning, rescuing a capsized Japanese fishing skiff and surfing it to the shore, saving its crew of seven. That last exploit prompted Congress to award Freeth with the Medal of Honor.
Freeth also invented the crawl stroke and the the torpedo-shape life float that lifeguards still use to this day. Freeth started the world's first water polo team and founded the San Diego lifeguard corps. His proteges won both gold and silver medals in the 1912 Olympics. Freeth himself probably would have won a slew of medals, but he lost his amateur status because he took Henry Huntington's money.
Freeth died in 1919, age 35, a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic that was raging through the world. Today, if you take a stroll on the Redondo Beach boardwalk, you'll find a bust George Freeth, one of the few memories left of the Man Who Walked on Water.
The Case of the Missing Navel
I have this theory that all men of a certain age had the hots for Annette Funicello, as I certainly did, and as I did for another Disney girl, Hayley Mills.
The last of the original Mouseketeers to be cast, Annette also turned out to be the most popular. Even though Annette herself knew she had an unremarkable singing voice, by age 16 she was in the studio, recording 15 albums for Disney, which resulted in a string of pop hits during the `50s and `60s.
In 1963, Annette took to the beach, starring with Frankie Avalon in what was essentially the same movie repeated five times over the next two years, culminating with 19 and 65's Beach Blanket Bingo.
Here's Annette with the theme from the first of those infamous beach movies, Beach Party, from 19 and 63.
[Beach Party - Annette Funicell0]
One of the more enduring - and kind of endearing - urban legends surrounding Annette and the beach movies is that Walt Disney himself gave Annette the go-ahead to do them, but with the caveat never, ever to "show her navel." And thus that is why you never see Annette in a bikini in any of the beach movies, even though nearly every other girl on the beach is fruggin' around in the skimpiest two-pieces allowable by 1960 standards.
However close study - and believe me, I've studied those movies closely - reveals that Annette also reveals in 19 and 64's aptly named Bikini Beach, where her belly button is shown repeatedly to God and everyone else in all its glory.
Annette wrote a charming autobiography several years ago titled, A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, which I heartily recommend if no other reason that it's one of the few autobiographies I've read where there are no stories of exploitation, abuse, or backstabbing.
If not fully a charmed life, as she now suffers from multiple sclerosis, Annette seems to have had a pretty good one, and one that she's appreciated even through illness. To us, she'll always be our favorite Disney Girl, and we offer her our best wishes from Dreamtime.
Fugue for Tinhorns
Hey, I see that Jailbait has the lobster tails and steaks on the grill, so I think it's time for the turf portion of our show. Here's a song that I can almost guarantee you'll know, but I bet you can't tell me the title.
And nope, it's neither Paul Revere or Can Do.
[Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls]
That was Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls, and like I said, you probably know the song, if not the name.
If you've been to Vegas, or even a carnival, you've probably seen a chuck-a-luck cage. It kind of resembles an hour-glass-shaped birdcage. It contains three dice, the dealer tumbles the cage, and you bet on the dice roll.
The first version of chuck-a-luck was played with a tin horn, and since chuck-a-luck players were considered small-time by their more sophisticated brethren, they acquired the name tin horn gamblers, which eventually became shortened to tinhorn, meaning any cheap gambler.
While there's no evidence that the horses named in Fugue for Tinhorns were real, Equipoise, whose name is mentioned by "Rusty Charley" as being the great-grandfather of "Epitaph", was a famous thoroughbred from 1928 to 1938. "Known as the "Chocolate Soldier," Equipoise won 29 of 51 races in six years of racing and was named Horse of the Year twice.
Here's one more song dedicated to the Sport of Kings to add to our turf portion of our show, Willie Egan and Big Boy Groves doing You Can't Beat the Horses from 19 and 56.
[You Can't Beat the Horses - Willie Egan with Big Boy Groves]
In 19 and 62 Willie Egan lost all his equipment in a nightclub fire, and broke and worn out from the music business, retired and went to work as a hospital orderly. Twenty years later a fan tracked him down after hearing his solo singles on an LP that a British label had put out. Everybody - including the label - had thought Willie Egan was dead, but when he found out that he was a hit in Europe, he went to London, revived his career, and cut a new record in 1984.
Willie Egan, a man who couldn't beat the horses, but did all right anyway.
It's a Cruel, Cruel Summer
Cruel Summer was originally cut by the British girl group, Bananarama in 1983, and then re-recorded by the Swedish group Ace of Base in the late `90s. Me, I like the hip-hop version Blestenation, using samples from Bananarama's original, did for Blue Crush, another one of my all-time summer movie faves... and that's what I'm going to play for you now to close out the show.
This is Fred Bals, your summertime theme deejay left all alone and putting in a hot day at the studio while Mr. D. takes his leisure at the beach.
Here's hoping your summer is cool rather than cruel, the back of your neck doesn't dirty and gritty, and those summertime blues stay far away.
[Cruel Summer - Blestenation]
***
With Theme Time Radio Hour on hiatus, Dreamtime is on a once-a-month podcast schedule for the duration. We'll be back in August with a new show. Thanks as always for listening, and remember to enter our Dreamtime Constant Listener Contest, underway right now. Send us an email with your guess on the date that Theme Time Radio Hour returns with Season 3, and get the opportunity to win a copy of Million Dollar Bash, as well as a CD of Poetry Readings direct from the Dreamtime studio with those nifty stewART covers.
***
You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.
Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.
Many in the Dreamtime audience get their info from the blog through its feed rather than visiting, so, even though I've updated the "Dylan Tix" post from yesterday with the info, here it is again for my feed reading audience.
We received a flurry of email , almost all around the same time. Kevin from Maryland, who noted that he "lived in the Pittsburgh area for 11 years and would be happy to make the trip back..." was the first in our mailbox and our winner of the two tickets to the NAMU Music Festival on August 8 and 9.. Congratulations, Kevin! And thanks again to Christina at the Advance Guard for offering Dreamtime the tickets.
Although not a surprise, it was kind of neat to read how far people were willing to travel to catch Mr. D. Hundreds of miles, in some instances. As Jackie Gleason once said of Miami Beach, Bob Dylan fans really are "the greatest audience in the world."
The folks over at the New American Music Union, obviously cognizant of the quality of Dreamtime listener/readers, have kindly provided us with two tickets to the NAMU Music Festival being held in Pittsburgh, PA on August 8 and 9, 2008.
Bob Dylan and the Cowboy Band will be taking the main stage on Saturday, August 9th, headlining a show that includes The Raconteurs and Gnarls Barkley. More info on the concert can be found by clicking on the link above.
Dreamtime has two tickets - a $100 value - for the Festival that we're giving away !!FREE! FREE! FREE!! on a first-come, first-served basis to the first listener/reader who emails us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com. One ticket covers both days of the Festival, so you can bring a friend along. This giveaway only covers the tickets. You're responsible for your own travel and lodging, of course.
So, if you're in the Pittsburgh area - or decide you want to be - and want to catch Mr. D.'s show on Saturday, August 9th, here's your chance. Drop us a line at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com - and be sure to include your name and address so the NAMU people can send you your tickets. Good luck! And, btw, Dreamtime will be expecting a full concert report from you.
All three songs, as different as they are, were written by one Chip Taylor, born James Wesley Voight, in Yonkers, New York.
If Chip's birth name or the photo to your left brings a question to mind, the answer is "yes," he also happens to be Jon Voight's brother, adding "uncle to Angelina Jolie" to his list of credits.
The New Yorker had a piece on Taylor the week of the 7th, noting the recent release of Taylor's latest CD, New Songs Of Freedom. As the article relates, Smith has had one helluva life in 64-odd years. He first tried his luck as a pro golfer, but moved into music - and the famous Brill Building - after a wrist injury. Golf, incidentally, is where Taylor picked up the "Chip" nickname, as in "chipping a shot."
Chet Atkins heard one of Taylor's country songs, and not quite believing anyone who could write country like that was really from New York, asked to hear more... and liked what he heard, launching Taylor into a successful career as a country music writer, penning hits for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings among others.
But Taylor liked R&B just as much as country, and by the mid-60s had also written The Troggs/Jimi Hendrix classic Wild Thing, possibly one of the most suggestive songs ever composed. In contrast, Taylor also wrote the near-hymn-like (at least when compared to Wild Thing) Angel of the Morning, a #7 hit for Merrilee Rush and The Turnabouts in 1968, and an even bigger hit in 1981 for Juice Newton, hitting #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart (for four weeks) and #4 on the Hot 100, as well as #22 on the Country chart.
Apparently not satisfied with being an awesome cross-over song writer, Chip Taylor also has had an extraordinarily successful career as a pro gambler - I'm not making this up - specializing in handicapping the ponies and playing blackjack well enough to get him banned from most Atlantic City casinos. Taylor's gaming career was so successful that he quit the music business in 1981, only taking it up again 12 years ago.
And he still plays the ponies.
Here's a link to Chip Taylor's personal label label, Train Wreck Records. As Chip notes on the site:
When Chip got back into the performing business in the mid-1990s he reflected back on his prior experience with the music business. He had not been pleased with how the big labels had handled his unique music that didn't exactly fit within one of the established genres. Given the new climate in the industry that allows small labels a better chance to compete, Chip decided to start his own company.
Train Wreck also has (or had, it looks like there's been no new episodes since 2006) a podcast, Church of the Train Wreck, which you can subscribe to through an iTunes search or from here.
A 30-minute WNYC podcast on the "disaster song vogue" of the early 1900s. Includes excerpts from the magnificent box set from 2007, People Take Warning, as well as commentary from the compilation's producer, Christopher King, and from Greil Marcus.
The folks who brought you The Best of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour are back again with Volume 2.
Like the first edition, the 2-CD set includes 52 cuts (track listing below), relying heavily on out-of-copyright (at least in Europe) selections. Again, as with the first edition, no Dylanesque commentary or TTRH material, simply tracks that have been played on the show.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin said yesterday (June 15 - fhb) that he will support a merger between the nation's sole satellite radio operators, XM and Sirius, a decision that could remove the last regulatory hurdle in the lengthy and heavily criticized move to make the companies one.
Martin came to the decision after the companies agreed last week to several commitments intended to prevent the monopoly from raising programming prices and from stifling competition among radio makers, aides to the chairman said in an interview yesterday. Critics have argued that a merger of District-based XM and Sirius of New York would hurt consumers, who would have fewer choices of programming and radio transmitters and who would be charged higher prices because of a lack of rivals.
As early as this week, Martin is expected to issue an order that the commission vote to approve the merger, which at least two of the remaining four commissioners must also agree to, the aides said.
LBJ also rides the IRT to view the youth of America on LSD. And 10 Dreamtime points to readers who know the source of that non sequitur.
Anyway, Dreamtime reader/listener Steve Ramm sends us a link to an entertaining Wall Street Journal article by WSJ drama critic Terry Teachout. An excerpt:
To listen to "Theme Time Radio Hour" is to rediscover the sense of musical adventure that old-fashioned disc jockeys with strongly individual personalities offered in the days before big-money stations pinned their fiscal hopes to the rigid Top 40-style playlists that took the fun out of radio. Now that America's public-radio stations are abandoning musical programming in favor of news and talk, such shows have grown hard to find in many major markets. That's what makes satellite radio promising. Because it has so many different channels, it has room for everything -- including unpredictability.
Mr. Teachout notes as an aside that the FCC has apparently finally approved the Sirius/XM merger/takeover, of course doing it while Dreamtime was on vacay. There will be a separate post on that story upon the moment. Thanks for the tip on the WSJ article, Steve!
Dreamtime Top Cat Bear sez, "Time to close the ol' laptop and enjoy the Summer."
His brother Curly is already outside contemplating whether it's worth the effort to chase down a chipmunk, and Jailbait is fixing the steaks on the grille.
Life is good. The Dreamtime team is taking our bi-annual Summer vacay, so there'll be no updates to the site or news features for a week or so.
See you soon! ~Bear, Curly, Jailbait, and Your Host.
Dreamtime friend Michael Emery, Director/Producer at PBS station KLRU-TV, Austin, TX writes:
Contributors, supporters, and friends, it is done! JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE looks a bit different than what I initially envisioned, but the result yet fetches an appealing look and enlightening message. You can see the results of the past 13 months of effort on KLRU-TV (broadcast channel 9) at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 19th. (There will also be previews of the program at the African American Cultural Center at ACC's Eastview Campus and at the George Washington Carver Museum, both on Juneteenth.)
And if you can't watch the show on TV or attend a public screening, there's always the internet: . You can watch program segments on your computer equipped with a high-speed connection. I owe some of you a JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE DVD; if you can't wait for its arrival, catch the show online.
Thanks to everyone who contributed, and particular thanks to the late Alvin Patterson. My sister played in his Anderson Yellowjacket band, and she was the tall and graceful drum major of the band as a high school senior. My dad played alongside the Patterson brothers in earlier Anderson bands that were led by B.L. Joyce. I cannot overstate how much influence the Patterson clan had in East Austin back in the day.
Before I had any tight ideas on how to proceed, Google and the search term "Juneteenth" led me to . Mr. Fred Bals, I thank you for telling the story and playing the music of Gladys "Fatso" Bentley. Her song, "Juneteenth Jamboree," became the theme song and the title of my program. The joy of the song harmonizes well with the spirit of Juneteenth!
And special thanks to the very patient and resourceful Brian Joseph, whom I filmed and had intended to include in the show. Well, the content sort of went out of my control, and I hope to deliver Brian's story as an Internet extra on the JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE website...coming soon.
There are also the faceless many at KLRU who have been supportive of this project. These folks know how to get a TV show on the air with last year's "Show World" and aluminum foil. Amazing!
My thanks, all, and my hope: I do hope that some money will fall out of the sky, and it will provide sufficient means to create JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE 2009. And 2010. And 2011. And on and on.
When I ask if he finds the art establishment preferable to the one he is more used to, Dylan grins and pulls a face of mock disgust. “The music world's a made-up bunch of hypocritical rubbish. I know from publishing a memoir [2004's Chronicles Volume One] that the book people are a whole lot saner. And the art world? From the small steps I've taken in it, I'd say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don't pretend. And having been in the music world most of my life [he laughs again], I can tell you it's not that way. Let's just say it's less...dignified.”
He's had two proposals for a new series of paintings, both of which he sounds interested in doing. The first is Dylan portraits of celebrities: "inventors, mathematicians, scientists, business people, actors..." The other Dylan's interpretation of "historically romantic figures. Napoleon and Josephine, Dante and Beatrice, Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, Brad and Angelina [here he laughs]..."
As already reported, he's at work on Volume II of Chronicles. On Volume I he notes:
“It took me maybe two years in total. I was touring so much in the beginning, on days off or on a bus, I'd write my thoughts out in longhand or on a typewriter. It was the transcribing of the stuff, the rereading and retelling of it, that was time-consuming and I came to figure that there had to be a better way. I know what that is now. You need a full-time secretary so that you can get the ideas down immediately, then deal with them later.”
He is, unsurprisingly, hopeful about Barack Obama:
“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.
And when Theme Time Radio Hour is mentioned, Dylan smiles.
As Dreamtime Constant Listeners will remember, we devoted a whole show to the Andrews Sisters and their megahit of a calypso song - Rum and Coca-Cola - a song that turned out to be purloined by comic Morey Amsterdam from a Trinidad singer.
The first Andrews Sisters hit, Bei Mir Bist du Schön, wasn't stolen, but has almost as twisty a history as Rum and Coca-Cola. Bei Mir Bist du Schön was originally written in 1932 for a stage show, but the Yiddish musical the song had been crafted for closed without making much of a splash with the general public, and Bei Mir Bist du Schön probably would have disappeared into obscurity except for a perfect act of love and theft.
We'll talk about that in a second, but first let's hear the Andrews Sisters and their 1938 hit, Bei Mir Bist du Schön.
[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - The Andrews Sisters]
So, what happened between 1932, when Bei Mir Bist du Schön first appeared as a Yiddish musical number and then disappeared off the radar, and 1938 when it suddenly returned as an English-language hit for a trio of Lutheran sisters from Minnesota?
Around 1937 the song fell into the hands of an act called "Johnnie and George," two black performers who were stopping the show at the Apollo with their swing version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön...sung to their Harlem audience in the original Yiddish.
The legend goes the two were shown the song's sheet music while doing their act up at the Grossinger's summer resort in the Catskills sometime during the late `30s. They gave the song a shot, and found their Jewish audience got a kick out of hearing two black boys doing Yiddish, so Johnnie and George made it a regular part of their show. Back in town for a gig at the Apollo in 19 and 37, the pair suddenly spring a jump jive version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön on their hipster audience... which goes wild and starts swinging up and down the aisles, setting the whole Apollo to shaking according to contemporary reports.
Watching all this is Sammy Cahn, who's dropped into the Apollo on one of his regular expeditions for musical inspiration and is now laughing in amazement as he sees the joint rocking out to a song whose lyrics the only two Jews in the crowd - he and his partner - can probably understand. Knowing a hit when he hears one, Sammy Cahn tracks down the provenance of Bei Mir Bist du Schön and finds the song's authors, who are more than happy to sell it to him for the going rate of $30 - $15 bucks each.
[Left: The Andrews Sisters with Sholom Secunda, co-author of the original Bei Mir Bist du Schön]
Cahn and his partner try to get Tommy Dorsey to introduce the song at his next live gig, but the bandleader thinks the idea of a Yiddish swing song is crazy, and isn't interested. The pair next turn to Decca Records, label for the Andrews Sisters, a sister act that was trying to break out of vaudeville into the big time of R&R - radio and records - and who needed a B-side for their new single. The three Andrews Sisters are so white bread that they think the song is in Greek, but they learn the Yiddish lyrics phonetically and do the recording.
But now Decca is worried that the song will get the Andrews pegged as an ethnic act and insists that the sisters re-record it with English lyrics. Sammy Cahn and and his partner Saul Chaplin come up with an English version of the song, but now they don't want the Andrews Sisters. The songwriters argue that if they're going to the effort of writing straight lyrics to what they had intended as a throwaway Yiddish novelty number, the song should be recorded by an established singer like Ella Fitsgerald rather than by the unknown Andrews.
But eventually Decca prevails on behalf of the sisters, and the Andrews take on the new version of the old song with the Yiddish title now Germanicized and including a built-in English translation: Bei Mir Bist du Schön (Means That You're Grand). Actually, "Bei Mir Bist du Schön" doesn't mean that you're grand in either German or Yiddish - the Yiddish translates to something like, "By Me, You're Beautiful," but that probably sounded too ethnic, too.
Of all the boys I've known, and I've known some
Until I first met you, I was lonesome
And when you came in sight, dear, my heart grew light
And this old world seemed new to me
... And so I've racked my brain, hoping to explain
All the things that you do to me
Bei mir bist du schon, please let me explain
Bei mir bist du schon means you're grand
The Andrews Sisters record in November and released their single a few days after Christmas, 1937, with the A-side the Gershwin standard, Nice Work If You Can Get It. But nobody is listening to the A-side. By New Years Eve 19 and 37, Bei Mir Bist du Schön was already an established hit on New York radio stations, and by the end of January, 1938 it had sold over 350,000 copies, jumping to the Billboard #1 slot for the next five weeks. Riots would break out at record stores whenever a new shipment of the 78 or its sheet music came in. Not bad for a piece of music where most customers got the title wrong, often asking for that hit song called something like My Mere Bit of Shame or maybe Buy Me a Beer, Mr. Shane.
"It's wowing the country," reported one New Jersey paper. "They're singing it in Camden, Wilkes-Barre, Hamilton, Ohio, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. The cowboys of the West are warbling the melody and so are the hillbillies of the South, the lumberjacks of the Northwest, the fruit packers of California, the salmon canners of Alaska. [Even] the Nazi bierstuben patrons yodel it religiously, under the impression that it's a Goebbels-approved German chanty."
That last was true. Hitler himself was said to be a big fan, thinking it a proper German-American ditty, although how he reacted when he found out the song was originally Yiddish and written - and then rewritten - by a bunch of nice Jewish boys, is unknown. Bei Mir Bist du Schön stayed popular enough in Germany that the Nazi propaganda band, Charlie and His Orchestra, who you may remember from Theme Time's Season 2 More Birds show, did a version in 1942, with lyrics changed to attack that archenemy of Fascism, Bolsheviks.
[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - Charlie and His Orchestra]
Not only did Bei Mir Bist du Schön become a breakout hit for the Andrews Sisters, it started a minor craze for what became known as Yiddish Swing. Within weeks of the song hitting the charts, a New York radio station brought a show on the air called “Yiddish Melodies in Swing” that specialized in putting a swing beat to traditional Jewish folk tunes. The show proved so successful that it packed a 600-seat theater each Sunday, and ran for two decades.
[Excerpts from Yiddish Melodies in Swing]
Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin eventually got their wish, and Ella Fitzgerald covered Bei Mir Bist du Schön, as did many other singers, including Judy Garland, Benny Goodman, Steve Lawrence, and The Barry Sisters, who we just heard performing Oh Mama, I'm So in Love. Even Theme Time favorite, Slim Gaillard did a weird scat version of the song with his partner Slam, something that sounds like it would have fit right into Theme Time's Food episode.
[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart]
The little Yiddish song from 19 and 32 ended up making a lot of money for a lot of people over the years, grossing as much as $3 million dollars by some estimates. It eventually sold over a million copies, giving The Andrews Sisters the first gold record ever awarded to a female vocal group.
Sammy Cahn bought his mother a house with the royalties he earned from his $30 investment. But Shalom Secunda's - the original lyricist who sold his piece of Bei Mir Bist du Schön for $15 - mother wasn't so lucky. She spent the remainder of her days praying in a synagogue for God's forgiveness, convinced that her family must have committed some awful sin for her son to have been stupid enough to give away that song for, well, a song.
And what of Johnnie and George, the two black performers whose Apollo act launched the swing version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön? Disappeared. Forgotten. Unremembered except for Sammy Cahn's story about how he stumbled over a million-dollar song one afternoon in Harlem.
Nobody even knows their last names.
Sources and Additional Reading: The Wikipedia article is relatively stark, but includes links to invaluable source material about Bei Mir Bist du Schön. Among other sources, I drew upon articles from the All About Jewish Theatre site; the "Non-Bloggish Blog"; and most especially The Yiddish Melodies in Swing site (part of the Yiddish Radio Project), which has sections dedicated to both Bei Mir Bist du Schön and the radio program Yiddish Melodies in Swing. Highly recommended reading. Also not to be missed are these two period newspaper articles on Shalom Secunda and his mother.
As is usual with these stories, some of the facts change dependent on who's doing the telling. Sometimes the black duo's names are spelled as Johnny and George. Sometimes it's Johnnie and George. Sometimes Cahn heard them at the Cotton Club. Other times it's the Apollo.
Some stories have it that Johnnie and George came up with the swing version; other stories say it was Cahn and Chaplin. Shalom Secunda claimed that their arrangement was virtually identical to the original. Who knows?
In any case, Johnny and George probably did pick the tune up at Grossinger's sometime in the `30s, possibly from Jenny Grossinger herself, the boss of that famous Borscht Belt resort, and brought it back to Harlem. Sammy Cahn probably did hear it somewhere in Harlemand bought the rights from someone, sometimes it's directly from Shalom Secunda and his partner for $30, sometimes it's from their publishers, who according to Secunda acted as an intermediary and paid the two $30, reselling limited rights to Cahn and Co. for an undisclosed amount while still retaining the publishing rights.
The song went on to gross an estimated $3 million dollars over the next 20-odd years until the copyright expired in 1961 and reverted back to Secunda and his partner Jacobs. They renegotiated a new deal with the publishers and happily finally saw some money from their tune nearly three decades after writing it. And as I said, Johnny and George, or maybe Johnnie and George, disappeared without a trace after popularizing a Yiddish song in Harlem - a reverse case of Love and Theft.
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With Theme Time Radio Hour on hiatus, Dreamtime is on a once-a-month podcast schedule for the duration. We'll be back in July with a new show. Thanks as always for listening, and remember to enter our Dreamtime Constant Listener Contest, underway right now. Send us an email with your guess on the date that Theme Time Radio Hour returns with Season 3, and get the opportunity to win a copy of Million Dollar Bash, as well as a CD of Poetry Readings direct from the Dreamtime studio with those nifty stewART covers.
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You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.
Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.
