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Open thread 12/23/21 — 34 Comments

  1. Always Buddy — and a drum solo fest! Or so it always did during my youth.

    Dr John Campbell looks at Australia, where Omicron had been manifest for four weeks.

    He elaborates on “The Australian Protocol” t9 dealing with it, noting how independent medical authorities there are about evaluating the novel variant and how to counter it. Basically, about living with the Covid 19 virus.
    https://youtu.be/LVl5OkHcvf4

    Taken altogether, this amounts to a substantive critique of the hysterical alarm in the UK over Omicron, as well it’s gentler but neither kinder nor more realistic rejoinder across the pond in Washington.

    Things will get better soon after a short blizzard in some locales because limited hospital resources may get stressed out, mostly in state medicine providing nations.

    But look at travel stocks like Carnival or Norwegian — up 20% and 15% this week, respectively, because the market thinks Omicron fears are exaggerated and excessive. The longer trend is friendly to warmer humans having more interactive fun, not less.

  2. Never understood the attraction of early rock and roll. Though the popular music of the early and mid fifties was so generally gawdawful according to the “song mining” I have troubled myself to do, that even the rock of the era may have seemed preferable.

    The exception to the bad would be some R&B influenced ” rock”, some jazz, and some country. I’ll omit classical since it was not written then.

    And that era seems to have been one of the periods in which those ” novelty songs” so beloved by many others here were prolific. Which is enough to sink it in my opinion.

    Still, others might argue that for every (and not being too precise as to timing) doggie in the window, every oh my papa and every she wears shot shorts, there is a Walk Don’t Run ( original) a Love Letters in the Sand, Sun period Elvis cut, or an occasional novelty song like Atkins’ performances of China Town my China Town or Mr. Sandman.

    However, having merely flown over that territory as a remote observer, and seen the relics of it in houses and garages, I’m willing to admit that maybe, ” You had to be there” at least at an age to be conscious of it, to really get it.

  3. When I lived in Lubbock Texas as a child, on either on the date of Holly’s birth or his death, we got a half day off of school. We also went over his life in music class. I remember it as one of the few times I enjoyed music class because it wasn’t just a bunch of annoying show tunes.

    One wonders how American music would be different if Holly had not died in a plane crash.

  4. It’s amazing to think about how he wrote so many classic songs at such a young age, dying at only 22.

    Despite Omicron supposedly now making up aound 73% of new cases in the US (based on CDC inference anyway) and the number of daily new cases skyrocketing, so far there has been exactly 1 confirmed US death from it. And there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 dozen confirmed Omicron deaths worldwide I think. So far it certainly seems like Omicron is indeed both very contagious and of extremely low virulence. In short, Omicron is the best thing that could have happened as it will likely finally bring an end to the deadlier variaties of Sars-Cov-2.

  5. Though the popular music of the early and mid fifties was so generally gawdawful according to the “song mining” I have troubled myself to do, that even the rock of the era may have seemed preferable.

    A great deal of schlock in the vocal music released the first ten years after the war. Johnny Ray was the biggest thing around ca. 1952. Not sure why.

    Some of the commanding heights were handsome: Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, Dinah Shore, Jo Stafford, Teresa Brewer (now and again). Eydie Gorme was working at the time but not yet touring or recording, I believe.

  6. I remember it as one of the few times I enjoyed music class because it wasn’t just a bunch of annoying show tunes.

    One of my pet peeves concerns diversionary music classes in the elementary and junior high years; just a waste of time and a waste of everyone’s patience. IMO, music classes should consist of tutorials and small group instruction in learning particular instruments. Slots would be rationed and distributed by lottery. Put the rest of the kids in the art studio and segregate the latter by sex.

  7. Nonapod– you might be interested in this post about Omicronmania in the Acela corridor: “Twitter blue checks across the Northeast are utterly divorced from the reality of pandemic life in the rest of the country. . . . Thanks to the hysterics of our media elite, a certain segment of the American people have lost their minds over Covid and essentially become some version of the mask-sealed-with-surgical-tape, “Shitton of Xanax” lady [photo at the link]. . . . the South African doctor who first reported the omicron variant wrote earlier this month that she was ‘astonished by the extraordinary worldwide reaction’ to the new strain of Covid, which she says is ‘out of all proportion to the risks posed by this variant.'”

    https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/22/the-corporate-media-freakout-over-the-omicron-variant-isnt-normal-its-psychotic/

  8. Dammit, they truncated BEST PART.

    Pritty Pritty Pritty Pritty Peggy Sue….

    Barbarians!

  9. a Love Letters in the Sand

    An amazing out-of-genre composition by one of the best fiddlers in the South, the part-Cherokee Arthur Smith. That guy had ears.

  10. OK, I am 75 and this is my music. Early Elvis and all the rest. My Sirius Radio on the car has the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s stations. Of course we lived in Memphis in the mid 50’s. I remember the Day the Music Died.

  11. Yep, 76 years old here and that was my music too. Small town teen dances after the Friday night football games, that was fantastic music at the time and the girls were ever so beautiful. Of course it was also nice that Buddy Holly had about the same amount of West Texas twang to his speech that was about the same as ours.

  12. Give me Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. After them, rock’n’roll became too civilized.

  13. Thanks for the Buddy Holly video, neo. The video is live but lip-synched, apparently. Neither electric guitar has a cord.

    DNW wrote “The exception to the bad would be some R&B influenced ” rock”….”.
    It was before my time, but I have read that Buddy Holly was considered R&B-type music in those days. In the fictionalized Buddy Holly Story movie, at a recording session a producer tells him “Don’t play that nigger music” and Holly punches him in the face.

  14. SHIREHOME on December 23, 2021 at 12:08 pm said:

    OK, I am 75 and this is my music. Early Elvis and all the rest. My Sirius Radio on the car has the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s stations. Of course we lived in Memphis in the mid 50’s. I remember the Day the Music Died.

    OldTexan on December 23, 2021 at 1:01 pm said:

    Yep, 76 years old here and that was my music too. Small town teen dances after the Friday night football games, that was fantastic music at the time and the girls were ever so beautiful. Of course it was also nice that Buddy Holly had about the same amount of West Texas twang to his speech that was about the same as ours.

    Can you folks actually remember traveling in cars with split windshields, and straight sixes?

    There is something about the postwar era of cars that is especially interesting from a developmental perspective. Yes, the Ford V-8 was earlier, yes the great Chrysler Airflow gambit was a beautiful marketing failure that influenced all that followed, yes there were neat power assist transmissions earlier; but in terms of really cool innovations in power plants, transmissions, and suspensions (all of which fascinate car guys) the 50’s and sixties seem to have it.

  15. I remember one “Buddy Holly” song that I liked as a kid: “I fought the Law”

    All the 7 and 8 year old boys in the neighborhood used to laughingly shout out a phrase or two of the lyrics as if it were especially naughty fun.

    Kind of like exclaiming “Damnably good!” for a laugh because we had heard the phrase uttered in some old barely watchable British movie featuring Dickensian fat guys in high collars talking about port wine and sherry.

    As for the song, it turned out it was sung by a guy named Bobby, not Buddy.

  16. Many years ago, I was infatuated with a stripper who made this her signature song.

    Too little information?

  17. When I was 15 I learned to drive my mom’s car, a 55 Chevrolet sedan with no power steering, no a/c and a straight six engine that drank oil, that was in 1961 and then a month before I took my driver’s license test my dad bought her a new, used car. All of a sudden I was driving her Impala with a 348 V-8 engine, power steering, a/c, it was a four door hard top and fast as the devil in the quarter mile. My best friend had a 1948 Hudson that was a tank with a straight eight cylinder engine and that was a lot of fun to ride around in back in the good old days. Lots of hours driving up and down main street listening to the radio playing the current top songs, some were great and some were terrible like ‘Teen Angel’ one of the worst ever.

  18. Joan Didion dead at age 87. I like her photo in the link.

    I’ve been meaning to read Blue Nights. I admired her work.

  19. This music was omnipresent, like the bug. Sorry.
    I didn’t have to go out of my way to hear it–car radios, whatever, later versions in the dorm rooms–and I didn’t.
    I do get a kick out of for rockers in dinner jackets and brilliantined hair. Bet their shoes gleam.
    So they look like the quiet jazz quartet in the corner of the lobby of a top-end hotel and play what passed for outlaw music. Maybe meant the contrast to add to the impact.
    Occasional memories triggered but no particular love for the music itself.

  20. I just read a Twitter thread of people professing their love for the 2016 reboot of “Ghostbusters.”

    I no longer have any hope for us as a species.

    Mike

  21. My coming of age was the early 1970s so I missed out on Holly and his contemporaries. The Beatles were everywhere and FM was just getting started. My generation was the glam rock and hard rock era. Maclean’s song was about the past while we celebrated the present.

    Not that I don’t appreciate the origins of rocknroll.

  22. Happy Festivus Day!

    The Festivus aluminum pole is out: may the airing of grievances begin.
    Festivus for the rest of us!

  23. OldTexan, I’m a bit younger than you, but my first car was the family’s hand-me-down 54 Ford. V6, 3 speed on the column. By the time I got the car the front ball joints were going so it had a big steering wheel shimmy at speeds over 55. I kept asking my Dad to fix it, but he said too expensive. I later realized he deferred in order to keep me under 55 mph. The passenger floor board rusted out and was replaced by some plywood. Also the passenger door would not always latch, and one day driving the guys home from school, the door swung open as I was making a left turn from a stop light…. looked over and my friend was running along side holding on to the door with the guys in the back laughing hysterically. Can’t beat those old cars for fun and experience.

  24. Ah, those older cars. At the end of the 60’s I commuted to high school in my cousin’s Corvair. A cool car in spite of the controversial rear suspension.

    A friend’s parents were fans of old Cadillacs with big fins. If I recall correctly, one of them had a tail light lens on that fin that flipped open to expose the gasoline filler neck. The same friend had an old Plymouth with big mechanical pushbuttons on the dash that shifted the transmission.

    Another friend went rally racing with his father in a Fiat 850 Spider. That’s probably where I got my love of very small cars.

    I got my parent’s cast-off German made Ford Capri with a pushrod V-6. Lot’s of fun.

  25. I’m 73 and didn’t begin to appreciate rock until the mid 60s.

    Check out Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways” recorded in
    October 1958, four months before the singer’s death and in mono with astonishing fidelity.

    “Can you folks actually remember traveling in cars with split windshields, and straight sixes?” DNW

    Yes. But what I miss most is the small side windows you could crank out. They allowed you to roll the front windows down on a mild day or night and not have the wind buffeting you as it enters the vehicle. Now the wind roils about and interferes with having a pleasant conversation while driving. Marketing for aethetics instead of practicality.

  26. The death of the front vent window may have something to do with a rectangular pane of glass in a rigid metal track and a separate vent window. These required a heavier more complex and costly door assembly. It is possible that some clever design engineer came up with a mechanism for a single pane glass window mechanism that was lighter and less expensive. You know they call that an engineering and design and marketing decision. For some reason there is no demand for “sneeze through wind vent” windows on cars.

  27. Seventy-seven years young here. As a youngster our family car was a ’37 Dodge, acquire before the war. split windshield, and rear window. No radio. A trip to Monterey one spring, in the rain, demonstrated why the vacuum operated wipers went out of vogue; every hill the old Dodge climbed stopped the wipers. We never had an actual new car, always used.

    I learned to drive in the 1950 Dodge… fluid-drive and all. A true tank. Was on my way to school with an older neighbor who drove when we heard of Buddy Holly’s death. I loved that music, as well as a lot of the “folk” genre of the time… Disco drove me into the country genre.

    As said above: Buddy Holley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry…. now you are talking music. It took Haggard and Jennings to cut into the old rock…

    You younguns missed some good times….

  28. Oh my goodness I remember those vacuum drive windshield wipers as well as that nice in front of the windshield vent on those old cars which had a had to move lever under the center of the dash.

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