Running After My Hat

Midweek Music Break/What’s in a Song: “Makin’ Whoopee”

February 27, 2013 by John 5 Comments

[Sheet music from the original Broadway show. Note implication that
“whoopee” just refers to a cowgirl’s yell: yeah, right.]

Over the weekend, a couple of TV experiences converged to drive this song into my head:

On Sunday, we watched the great Otto Preminger-directed film of 1959, Anatomy of a Murder. Jimmy Stewart plays a defense attorney for a confessed killer, an Army lieutenant played by Ben Gazzara. The killer was driven to it impulsively — so goes his defense — when he learned that his wife had been beaten and raped by the murder victim.

At one point, the lieutenant’s wife (Lee Remick) takes the stand in his defense. Although the prosecution has argued strenuously (albeit ineffectively) to keep the rape out of the testimony, they can’t help trying to turn it to their advantage. Lead prosecutor George C. Scott, practically leering, compliments the wife on her cute little dog (who’s just made a courtroom appearance), and then attempts to paint her as a tart who dresses and acts in a way almost guaranteed to lure men from the straight-and-narrow path of chivalry and honor. He calls attention to her beautiful hair, her tight clothes, her drinking, her playing pinball, her occasional disregard for even common everyday decencies like wearing underwear—

Jimmy Stewart leaps to his feet to object. Your Honor, he demands rhetorically, is the assistant Attorney General from Lansing pitching woo, or is he going to cross-examine?

The Missus and I snickered: pitching woo. Like, huh? woo???

But in fact the synaptic groundwork had already been laid in my head. Earlier, I’d watched an episode of the late SyFy show, Eureka. In this episode, the beautiful-but-tough-as-nails deputy sheriff, named Jo Lupo, suddenly starts behaving out of character. In particular, she reveals a sudden (and heretofore unrevealed) interest in the nerdy assistant-to-geniuses named Fargo. During a karaoke session in the local cafe, as Fargo plays the piano, Jo — in a slinky gown — goes into a rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee”… crawling around on the piano, and concluding with a kiss.

That scene in Eureka, red dress and all, was so close to another — Michelle Pfeiffer on the piano, Jeff Bridges at the keyboard, in The Fabulous Baker Boys — that it had to be intentional.

So I already had the song in my head. And then (as one does) I started to poke around on the Internets…

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The Possibilities of Treeness

February 22, 2013 by John 6 Comments

[Image: Tree on the Hill (2012), by Patrick Winfield. 24×23.5 inches, film and Polaroids on panel]

From whiskey river:

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman, and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of [the feat]… You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.

Like so.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and:

Tree

All day I waited to be blown;
then someone cut me down.

I have, instead of thoughts,
uses; uses instead of feelings.

One day I’ll feel the wind again.
A moment later I’ll be gone.

(Dan Chiasson [source])

…and:

We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we’re looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

(Charles de Lint [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Hannalee, “Valhalla” and “Never Been to Memphis”

February 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Seattle’s Hannalee comprises the almost impossibly photogenic threesome of husband-and-wife Michael Harley* and Anna-Lisa Notter, and childhood friend Fidelia Rowe. When you look at any of their group photos — even without having heard their music, or knowing anything more about them — you might think: Wow. I thought I’d heard of most of the San Francisco groups from the ’60s… how’d I miss them?

If you take a gander at some of their other photos, like this one, you may find the San Francisco folk-rockers comparison almost too apt for coincidence.

Looks (as we all know) can be deceiving. But in Hannalee’s case, you might not be far off the mark. Oh, they don’t specialize at all in psychedelia or any such genres; but the sense of the late ’60s is there, all right — the sense of distant possibilities, brought suddenly within reach via music.

It’s folk music, sort of, and that’s how they seem to identify themselves. (Their Bandcamp profile says: “Blending the sounds of traditional folk music with elements of dark, neverland whimsy, Hannalee creates a unique music strange and familiar at once.”) But their three-part harmonies can also verge on something older, even choral. And of course, if they’re singing in an old church (Seattle’s Fremont Abbey) with strings behind them… The song is “Valhalla,” from the first of four seasons-of-the-year EPs (the autumn title, Cucurbita — the pumpkin genus — just released a few months ago):

[Lyrics]

And here’s how they sound in the studio, also on the Cucurbita EP; the song is “Never Been to Memphis.”

[Below, click Play button to begin Never Been to Memphis. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:28 long.]

[audio:neverbeentomemphis_hannalee.mp3|titles=’Never Been to Memphis’|artists=Hannalee]

[Lyrics]

The series’ winter release, Brassica, just came out last week.

By the way, I don’t know how they chose the name Hannalee. But The Kingston Trio (among others) recorded a song called “Hanna Lee.” (It was written by a Stan Jones — perhaps the one who penned “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky.”) The words to that song, at least as performed by the Kingstons, go like this:

Your dusty eyes were soft and glowin’ when first I met you, Hanna Lee.
There was no way for me a-knowin’ the sorrow your sweet caress would
bring to me.

Chorus:
High, high, high is the gallows. (Yeah, and it’s long) long as the rope that
waits for me.
High as the gallows. They’ll hang me for your sins, my Hanna Lee.

You shot and killed your cruel husband because you found you loved but me,
And then you lied before the jury and they blamed for your sins, my Hanna Lee.

Chorus:

Down at the jail on hangin’ mornin’, I heard you tell them you had lied.
Your dusty eyes were soft and glowin’ and I saw you hang your head and cry.

I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that this song and Hannalee’s ethereal look and sound might be connected, but who knows? Musical history, especially of the folk variety, traces some mysterious pathways.

[Hat tip to Simon of Beat Surrender for the intro to Hannalee.]

_______________

* Is Michael Harley’s last name really Harley? It’s very confusing: Web sites seem split about 50-50 in identifying him as Michael Notter or Michael Harley. At Bandcamp and their own site, he goes by the latter. I tossed a (loaded) coin.

Consider the Things We Miss (Then Consider Our Missing Them)

February 15, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: Where Are You, by user “code1name” at the sxc.hu site]

From whiskey river:

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge — none of that tells us very much.

(Paul Auster)

…and:

My Love
(excerpt)

It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon —
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.

(Don Paterson [source])

…and:

The Storm

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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What Lies Beneath

February 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[Image: lunar surface, color-enhanced, per results of the NASA GRAIL mission.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Your soul and your what?” he said.

“My soul and my meat,” I said.

“They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”

“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”

“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people — get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

(Kurt Vonnegut [source])

…and:

Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around

Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.

That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.

Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.

Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.

(Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) [source])

…and:

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Honeycutters, “Boneyard”

February 6, 2013 by John 1 Comment

As you probably know, or can tell, I listen to music quite a bit. But I don’t listen to it consistently throughout the day or week, and I don’t listen to it, well, with intention. Not for the most part, anyhow. But as the calendar pages turn over towards mid-February every year, that changes: for each of the last seven or eight Valentine’s Days, I have given a different custom “mix CD” of music to The Missus.

Now, her tastes run to music she already knows (although, as I have pointed out, at some point she didn’t know any of it). So I try not to get too adventurous with my selections for a given mix (the theme of which changes every year).

Nevertheless, around now annually I often find myself wandering around little back alleys of music and musicians I didn’t know about.

Thus, today’s Music Break selection, from The Honeycutters.

Oh, no, uh-uh: it’s not suitable for a Valentine’s Day mix. Certainly not such a mix for The Missus, anyhow. The only personal connection I could establish, in fact, is completely coincidental; I didn’t know, until I’d already heard and decided to use the song, that The Honeycutters are based in Asheville, NC.

The Missus and I love Asheville and the surrounding area, out of all proportion to the amount of time we’ve actually spent there. (That may total up to maybe a week all told, in the twenty years we’ve been together.) Part of the attraction might be called extrinsic, stemming from our history rather than from anything about the place itself. (It was the first locale we visited together which neither of us had experienced alone. And, not to put too fine a point on it, we, uh, well, we didn’t get out of the hotel very much on that first trip.) But oh, my, the place itself… The architecture, the history, the layout of the various neighborhoods, the culture, the pace, the climate, the trees and mountains: it all spelled home to us, instantly.

Still, no: The Honeycutters’ “Boneyard” won’t appear on The Missus’s playlist this year.

But I will say this about the song: its sound and its lyrics kick the bejeezus out of most songs purporting to be about love. real love, love with a tides-in/tides-out history. From the opening notes (in which singer-songwriter Amanda Platt seems at first to channel Carly Simon at the start of “Anticipation”), through the complex but sweet non-stop picking of lead guitarist Peter James, and into the fragile, all-too-brief mandolin of Tal Taylor, this music would not let me go. Toss in a nuanced storyline whose narrator has both imagined what might have been and realized what she’s already got, and, well, it’s no wonder the song turned my head.

(Platt is one of those songwriters who (a) doesn’t feel obliged to rhyme her lines or make them follow a predictable meter, and (b) has a voice that can carry it off. Both of these ingredients, together with her… well, with her sensibility make her songs very easy to listen to.)

“Boneyard” closed the group’s 2009 debut album, Irene. A successful Kickstarter campaign a few years ago enable them to record and release their second, When Bitter Met Sweet, in 2012.

[Below, click Play button to begin Boneyard. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:46 long.]

[audio:boneyard_honeycutters.mp3|titles=’Boneyard’|artists=The Honeycutters]

[Lyrics]

By the way, the rest of Irene doesn’t sound much like “Boneyard.” Recognizably the same band performs it all, true, and they sound equally great on all the tracks. But most of that album tends to the honky-tonk end of the spectrum — I bet The Honeycutters do a great live show, especially in a small venue. In what I’ve heard of When Bitter Met Sweet, however, the music (as in “Boneyard”) seems to favor late-night sessions at a kitchen table, with no more than a few people sitting around.

Mung-Bodied: A Reverie

February 5, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: schematic of a “Rube Goldberg” solution to the challenge of waking up a laptop, by a fifth-grade physical science project team. For details, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

When I was a kid, one of the things which could — without fail! — get all of us laughing was for somebody to go all suddenly and unintentionally tongue-tied. Mung-tongued, we called it. In a little one of his stand-up bits, Steve Martin asked the audience rhetorically something like this: Are you ever talking along and all of a sudden your tongue gets away from you and ywannguhmelizzorwhat? (I laughed at that, too.)

But you know what? The tongue finds lots of company among the other muscles.

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Cold. So Cold.

February 1, 2013 by John 13 Comments

[Image: “ice-creeksicles,” by Jeremy Hiebert. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Winter Afternoon by the Lake

Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January. No birds. No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped. Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today. But the thin
Moon says no. The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often. It’s cold, but it’s quiet.” We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap. A voice says: “It’s old. You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, ‘Stay as long as you like.'”

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness. “Not yet.”

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Stan Freberg’s Musical “Parodies”

January 30, 2013 by John 8 Comments

Wikipedia’s got an interesting article on the musical parody genre: “borrowing” the lyrics or music of existing songs, and recasting them with different music or lyrics, respectively. Usually (as the ‘pedia points out) this is done with humorous intention — think Weird Al Yankovic — and that’s what this post is about. Apparently though, the intention isn’t always to induce laughter, especially when it comes to lifting music from old folk songs and like sources:

Bob Dylan took the tune of the old slave song “No more auction block for me” as the basis for “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

(Talk about a whiplash response when I read that little tidbit. I mean, I know Dylan has great respect for old music. Still…)

Anyhow, parody may be unique among the various forms of satire in that we can’t always tell what’s being made fun of. Is it the melody? the lyrics? a particular performer, or even a specific performance? The humor seems to rely strictly on the upending of expectations: we have to know the song to get the joke, and we have to know it well enough to recognize what’s been changed. (I guess from a certain perspective, even the work of this group — contemporary songs performed in old-fashioned styles — could be considered parody.)

Stan Freberg — the comedian, writer, all-around wizard of words and pop culture who flourished on radio and television in the 1950s-60s — seemed to specialize in a particular form of not-quite-parody: poking fun at the process by which recordings are made in the first place. It was almost as though he’d at some point heard Song X, Y, or Z, and thought: Wow. I bet THAT made for some interesting sessions in the studio…! The classic Stan Freberg musical piece featured a nearly note-for-note reproduction of some popular song… and a performer openly at explosive loggerheads with his accompanists or studio technicians. These little three(ish)-minute gems of artistic melodrama tended to conclude with hurt feelings, slammed doors, or worse.

Here’s an example. Around the time of Freberg’s heyday, Harry Belafonte contributed his “Day-O” (a/k/a “The Banana Boat Song”) to the library of pop-music earworms:

Freberg accepts the song’s virtues at face value; as I said, the guy really could perform. But he imagines the singer and his backup musicians having to deal with a producer or accompanist who perhaps woke up that day on the wrong side of the bed (if so, maybe with a soaring hangover):

[Below, click Play button to begin Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:30 long.]

[audio:bananaboat_dayo_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’|artists=Stan Freberg]

Freberg loved what instruments could bring to a piece. (One of his parodies took on “Dueling Banjos”: “Dueling Tubas.”) He could also imagine, though, that instrumentalists and vocalists didn’t always see eye-to-eye on how best to interpret a song. A classic example is his take on “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; by the time this fictional recording session ended, vocalist and assertive drummer were practically at each other’s throats:

[Below, click Play button to begin The Yellow Rose of Texas. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:26 long.]

[audio:yellowroseoftexas_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Yellow Rose of Texas’|artists=Stan Freberg]

Finally: in late 1955, The Platters recorded one of their biggest hits, “The Great Pretender”:

Freberg apparently listened to this and wondered not about the obvious performers — the lead vocalist and ooo-ooo-oooh background singers — but about one member of the accompanying band. Like, jeez — the poor piano player: he had to play the same note, over and over and over and over… But what might the session have been like for real, given the “cool” of popular pianists at the time?

[Below, click Play button to begin The Great Pretender. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:22 long.]

[audio:thegreatpretender_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Great Pretender’|artists=Stan Freberg]

That little twist at the end — the sudden re-introduction of a troublemaker from another parody — is one of my very favorite Stan Freberg moments.

By the way, although I’ve used the past tense above, Stan Freberg at age 86 still crops up from time to time, lending his voice (and no doubt writing) talents to videos, kids’ shows, and documentaries.

Mindflow

January 25, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Mountains and Rivers Without End: For information about this image,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is the relationship of thinking to reality? As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to “know” another, and to what extent would this be possible?

(David Bohm [source])

…and (excerpt):

There is smoke and grease, there is
the wrist’s exhaustion, there is laughter,
there is the letter seized in the clock
and the apple’s tang, the river
sliding along its banks, darker
now than the sky descending
a last time to scatter its diamonds
into these black waters that contain
the day that passed, the night to come.

(Philip Levine [source])

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