I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
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.
ART NOTES— an exhibition entitled Poetry in Paint: The Artists of Old Tampa Bay will be at the Tampa, Florida Museum of Art through January 23rd.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this (quite) lengthy New Yorker analysis by Margaret Talbot with the apt title, Justice Alito's Crusade Against a Secular America Isn't Over.
HAIL and FAREWELL to the film star Marsha Hunt — who starred in Pride and Prejudice (before being blacklisted) and in Johnny Got His Gun (after that era) — who has died at the age of one hundred and four. She had been the last surviving person in this 1943 photo of the stars of MGM— which included Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball, Katherine Hepburn, Gene Kelly and musicians Tommy Dorsey and Harry James.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Misty the Cat— an English kitteh who has been such a help to a girl (for eight years from age fourteen) suffering a painful condition affecting the cartilage of the rib cage … that she was named Most Caring Cat at Britain’s National Cat Awards last month.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is this essay in Pro Publicaon how the response by the incoming GOP administration in Montana to Covid led a hospital to-the-brink.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #3 is this essay in The Guardian by their eminent columnist Jonathan Freedland on the extra handicap that the new British prime minister Liz Truss faces: her predecessor (like 45) unwilling to go away; and claims that he is “leaving office because of rule-changing by others, rather than rule-breaking by him”.
FRIDAY's CHILD……. seems unimpressed with the new prime minister ...
BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz.
THE OTHER NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a look at The Week that Was in Britain— political as well as monarchical … w/even more Larry the Cat.
GRANDFATHER-GRANDSON?— Dan “Hoss Cartwright” Blocker (of Bonanza fame) and journeyman major league baseball player Daniel Vogelbach.
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… seven years ago this past summer, the Grateful Dead held their final reunion concerts (although there are still concerts of band members under different names). It might do well to look at a founding member who did not have a chance to participate — and that is because he is part of the Forever 27 club: rock stars who died at the age of 27.
It's fair to say that Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan - amongst all of the Dead's band members - would be the answer to the "Which of these band members is not like the others?" question. Nonetheless, he was my favorite band member ... and his passing changed the band in a way that resulted in my never becoming a full-blown Deadhead. Forty-two years on ... it's time for a fresh look at this singer and (sometime) keyboard player who would have turned age seventy-seven this week.
Ron McKernan was born in San Bruno, California in September, 1946. Unlike the rest of his future band mates, he grew-up (a) in an African-American neighborhood, and (b) his father was an R&B disk jockey ... so he had a quite different cultural and musical upbringing than the others. (Jerry Garcia's father, an immigrant from Spain, was a Dixieland clarinet player by contrast). Expelled from high school: he set-out to play in San Francisco's bars and coffeehouses in the early 1960's.
And it was while working at the music store of Dana Morgan in Palo Alto that he met Jerry Garcia. When Jerry was performing at a local coffeehouse, he invited McKernan to join him onstage, and his vocals and blues harp made him part of a loose collective. They eventually morphed into Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions which later morphed into The Warlocks, the forerunner of the Grateful Dead.
In 1965, McKernan convinced the others to go electric, perfectly consistent with his blues/R&B orientation. The rest of the founding members of the Grateful Dead joined at various stages during this process (and I will not focus on them for this essay). McKernan was given the name Pigpen by Jerry Garcia partly due to his hygiene, but also due to his resemblance to the Peanuts character.
Most of the songs he performed with the band were R&B/blues covers and did little writing himself. His material was a notable part of the band's repertoire from 1966-1970, singing such tunes as the traditional "Katie Mae", Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle", Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning", Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" and what was his tour-de-force: Turn On Your Love Light that Bobby 'Blue' Bland made famous (written by his bandleader Joe Scott).
McKernan often carried on a dialogue with the audience during some of these extended performances and looking back: it was a pity he never completed the solo album he began recording later in the 1960's. He also sang onstage often with Janis Joplin .... yet this also never translated into a recording (and she, too, is part of the Forever 27 club).
As the band began to change as the 60's neared its end: McKernan increasingly became the odd-man-out. The reasons include (a) Garcia and the others began writing more psychedelic-oriented music, rather than Pigpen's R&B, (b) the band began more extended instrumental improvisation, less needing vocals, (c) he did not share their love of drugs, much preferring his alcohol, (d) visually he resembled more of a biker, rather than the hippie image of his bandmates, (e) his talents in his secondary role (as a keyboard player) were inadequate for the increasing sophistication of the band's material, and (f) his health began to decline as the decade was ending, due to his ever-increasing level of drinking. Accordingly, in late 1968: the band hired as keyboard player a frequent studio session player for them, Tom Constanten— who freed-up McKernan to focus on singing.
Side note - with the deaths of McKernan and subsequent keyboard players Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland and Vince Welnick - Tom Constanten (who left the band in January, 1970 (due to musical disagreements) is thus the only keyboard-playing Grateful Dead official bandmember (not on a salary basis) who is still alive, though he declined to participate in the 2015 Grateful Dead reunion concerts.
Meanwhile, doctors advised McKernan not to continue touring after he was diagnosed with congenital biliary cirrhosis, and his increased drinking only exacerbated the problem: leading to an August, 1971 hospitalization. At this time, Keith Godchaux was hired to replace the long-departed Constanten. Jerry Garcia was upset over McKernan's often missing rehearsals and being unable to keep-up with the new material, yet the band (to their everlasting credit) never closed the door on him. And he soldiered on, ignoring doctor's orders to join the Grateful Dead's extensive Europe 72 tour.
But after a brief stateside tour, he performed for the last time at a June, 1972 performance at the Hollywood Bowl. He became something of a recluse, not wanting people to see him as his health began a more rapid decline.
Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan died on March 8, 1973 from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage .... and had to be discovered by his landlady. I attended my only Grateful Dead show eight days later, and while he had not been touring with the band: he was the main subject of conversation that night.
With his passing, the band began to complete the crossover they had been making in stages since 1970: less rock, R&B and blues ... and more bluegrass plus experimental music. That, not coincidentally, was the time I became less attached to them, though I never fully lost interest in them. Indeed, at McKernan's funeral: Jerry Garcia summed-up his influence by saying, "After Pigpen's death, we all knew this was the end of the original Grateful Dead".
One song that he did write the music for was Mr. Charlie - a blues tune (with lyrics by Robert Hunter) recorded on the Europe 72 tour live album in London in May, 1972 .... one of the last performances he gave. And below you can hear it.
I take a little powder, take a little salt Put it in my shotgun, I go walking I can hear the drums, voodoo all night long Mister Charlie tells me I can't do nothing wrongWell you take my silver dollar, take those silver dimes Fix it up together in some alligator wine
Now Mister Charlie told me, won't you like to know? Give you little warning before I let you go
Juba-juba, wolly-bully, looking high, looking low Gonna scare you up and shoot ya Mister Charlie told me so