CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead. And if we get favorable election results: even more so.
ART NOTES— a collection of vinyl panels (with the effect of stained glass) in an extended exhibition entitled Foragers will be at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina to September, 2022.
SADNESS that a KGB Museum in Manhattan did not survive the pandemic — and so its contents are going on auction.
YOUR WEEKEND READ#1 is this essay by Olivia Nuzzi about a GOP operative in Washington with a schizophrenic attitude to the current situation.
YUK for TODAY — someone noted her time as a poll worker during a prior Massachusetts primary election when a woman (flustered at not knowing what party ballot to ask for) finally said — as the line behind her grew long — “I want to vote for the short fat guy who collects the money at church, but I don’t know which ballot he is on.” Luckily, the pollworker knew which ballot to give, leading the woman next in-line to say, “Only in America can you go to the polls and say you want to vote for the short fat guy at church and receive the correct ballot!”
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Tom Cat— who jumped out of a 2-story building in East Harlem after it was set ablaze by a man who violated a restraining order — and after being caught, he appears to be recovering well from smoke inhalation.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES has broken-out the $1.1 billion indebtedness of the Trumpster into a few short categories, without lots of jargon.
QUOTE for TODAY— in a report on how world-renowned Italian business has aging superstars (many CEO’s over age 70), a tendency to stay inert as well as the feeling on the part of the young that corporate life is limited to the well-connected: a 1958 historical novel is cited, with a nephew telling his prince uncle, “If we want things to stay as-they-are … things will have to change”.
HAPPY TRAILS to the retiring cartoonist Tom Toles (at the age of sixty-nine).
YOUR WEEKEND READ#2 is this short report about RFK’s twenty-six year-old grandson Max Kennedy Jr.— who joined Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 volunteer task force — and broke a non-disclosure agreement to report to Congress about the whole episode of ineptitude and dishonesty, involving such health ‘experts’ as Jeanine Pirro (with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer having a more detailed report).
CHEERS to the voters of Chile — who voted over 78% in a nationwide referendum to scrap the constitution imposed four decades ago under the fascist military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Ruby the Cat— an English kitteh (who went missing two-and-a-half years ago) has now been reunited with its family after being found about 60 miles away.
YOUR WEEKEND READ#3 is this NYT essay by Ron Suskind — who wrote the excellent book The Price of Loyalty, about Paul O’Neill’s disillusionment within the W administration — on What Will Trump Do After Election Day ... with the NYT granting anonymity not only to current Administration officials, but also past.
BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz (w/one common question).
A NOTE on TODAY’S POLL— I fully expect to have a Trumpster-centric poll next weekend, for all those pressing for one (plus some other GOP stumblebums).
SEPARATED at BIRTH— from the diary by grim determined indolent about three right-wingers in Wichita, Kansas who collaborated on a dirty-trick scheme:
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… two weeks ago, in profiling the short-lived band Electric Flag, I received feedback on one aspect: that several of the musicians mentioned performed on a landmark 1968 album, Super Session— billed as Bloomfield, Kooper and Stills (who were the featured musicians). They were all on hiatus (or in-between) major bands and this was at a time when rock music was continuing a trend away from 3-minute songs. The back-story (as the three did not record together) is worth noting. The late Mike Bloomfield (who died at age thirty-seven) is someone I profiled, and the seventy-five year-old Stephen Stills needs no introduction: hence, the focus on Al Kooper.
In much the same way that Mike Bloomfield had founded Electric Flag — a rock band with a horn section — so had keyboardist Al Kooper founded Blood, Sweat & Tears, recording on its first album (Child is Father to the Man). Then, the band had several members leave (including trumpeter Randy Brecker joining Horace Silver’s band) — when Al Kooper was subsequently fired by the others remaining (leading to the Spinning Wheel version of the band, with David Clayton Thomas).
A free agent, he then rented two days of studio time, and called on Mike Bloomfield — whom he had recorded with on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album, and also performed with at Dylan’s landmark 1965 Newport Folk Festival show (where Dylan “went electric”).
Al Kooper went on to being a prolific session musician, producer (including Lynyrd Skynyrd’s first three albums) and was also a music instructor for many years at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. He published his memoirs in 1977 (with an updated version released in 2008) and is still active at age seventy-six.
As noted in my Electric Flag profile, Mike Bloomfield had left the Electric Flag due to his drug problem, and thus a 2-day session should have been doable. He brought with him to the session two of his old Electric Flag bandmates (keyboardist Barry Goldberg and bassist Harvey Brooks). The idea was to record some more blues/R&B oriented music.
And this they did: with the song Stop (a minor hit for R&B singer Howard Tate, and later recorded live by the James Gang and Jimi Hendrix) as well as the Curtis Mayfield song Man’s Temptation, and some other Kooper/Bloomfield originals. All went well that first day.
The next day? Mike Bloomfield did not show up — which Kooper suspected was due to drug problems — and, worried about the studio time he was on-the-hook for financially (whether used or not), Al Kooper got on the phone.
“I called every guitar player that I knew in California,” Kooper told JamBands. “I called Jerry Garcia and I called Randy California and Stephen Stills. I think Steve was the only one that responded.”
Stills was himself in a state of flux; Buffalo Springfield had disbanded, but Crosby, Stills & Nash had not yet come together. He went to the second night’s session, which focused on vocal songs (with the exception of the Brooks-penned “Harvey’s Tune,” an instrumental).
Among the songs they recorded was one by the bluesman Willie Cobbs (still alive at age eighty-eight), You Don’t Love Me— which the Allman Brothers made famous on their Fillmore East live album three years later — as well as the Donovan classic Season of the Witch (very timely, this weekend).
While this album was never followed-up, it is considered a celebrated recording — despite Kooper’s worry about finances, the $13,000 spent resulted in a gold album. The All Music Guide writer Lindsay Planer concluded, “This is one of those albums that seems to get better with age and that gets the full reissue treatment every time a new audio format comes out — this is a super session indeed”.
One song from each side follows.
An extended (nine minute) instrumental from the Mike Bloomfield (first) side is His Holy Modal Majesty— reminiscent of the song East-West from Mike Bloomfield’s first major group (the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) — intended partly as a tribute to the saxophonist John Coltrane (who had died the previous year) and features Al Kooper on an early synthesizer prototype, the ondioline.
And from the Stephen Stills side: their rendition of It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry— on which Al Kooper backed-up Bob Dylan for his original recording on Highway 61 Revisited album (along with bassist Harvey Brooks).