Bob Dylan and the Band "Highway 61 Revisited"

Bob Dylan with the Band at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969. The video has a nice homemade kinda feel, and Dylan and the boys look like their having a gay ol' hootenanny.

It was on this day in 1966 that Dylan released one of my favorite albums by him, "Highway 61 Revisited."

Is That Bing Crosby? Nope. It's Dylan.

Wrap your brains around this, kiddies: Bob Dylan is going release his first ever Christmas album. What?!? Yes!! It's true.

Now, before you go making snide little comments, like "Hey, that doesn't sound like Bing Crosby" or "Please, God, don't let him ruin 'Silent Night' for me" or "Is that a weasel being strangled...oh, it's just Dylan singing 'Winter Wonderland'," bear something in mind. The CD, "Christmas in the Heart," to be released October 13, will have all it's artist's royalties going to benefit the charity Feeding America and international charities that provide meals for those in need, and the royalties will be donated to those charities not just at the holidays, but forever. In perpetuity, as they say. (I've looked, but I can't find Perpetuity on a map anywhere.)

I really can't imagine what a Dylan Christmas album is going to sound like, but what he's doing with his earnings is truly special.

Uncle Junior, the Great American

The bald guy in the Great America commercials looks like Uncle Junior from "The Sopranos." What's with that?

Pearl Jam

Could you really make jam from pearls? It might be a bit gritty. And how much sugar would you need to make it palatable? What kind of fat content are we talking about here? And what about the cholesterol level in pearl jam?

Health Care: A Riot of My Own

These people who go to these town hall meetings (hoo boy, were those things a bad idea) and heckle the politicians and generally disturb the peace of normal discourse with rants about Death Panels (oh Sarah, you scamp, look what you've wrought), these people suck. I don't know exactly what their issue is with health care, and I suspect that they don't either. Me thinks they just hate President Obama. And that's ok, that's their right as American to hate and to voice their opinion, no matter how annoying they make themselves.

What I do find much more intriguing than these loudmouths is how upset the liberal media and their Democratic opinion givers got about these emotive outpourings. They criticize the protests by calling them "orchestrated" and "organized." What? An organized protests?!? OMG! The left never did that. Those yippies and hippies in Grant Park in 1968 all just ended up their by coincidence. And moveon.org would certainly never organize anything.

What really frightens the Left is that the kooks on the Right (and calling these people "kooks" is being polite) have figured out how to Take It to the Streets. Now it won't be only sandal-wearing, pony-tailed placard carriers standing on street corners yelling half-truths and outright lies about this, that and the other thing; they'll be joined by protesters who just slipped out of their Brooks Brothers suits and into a neatly pressed t-shirt and chinos, ready to ready to carry signs and yell at politicians.

Cheap Trick "Sick Man of Europe"

They're Frank's Cookies, We Just Eat Them

On occasion I like to bake chocolate chip cookies. Well, to be more honest, I don't necessarily enjoy baking all that much but I do enjoy the end product and the accompanying accolades. (I must admit, they are good cookies.) As with many other things in life, a good soundtrack heightens the pleasure of the cookie making experience. Over the years I've baked whilst listening to a variety of music by a variety of artists. Judas Priest is a little too harsh, John Coltrane a little too free form, Neil Young a little too mellow, except, perhaps for parts of Rust Never Sleeps, but, again, that might be a little harsh for the cookie groove. Frank Sinatra seems to work best, particularly A Swingin' Affair, with such hits as "Night and Day" and "Stars Fell on Alabama." Never a bad batch of cookies is baked with Frank singing in the living room.

Just Thinking

I think Death Panel would be a good name for a heavy metal band.

Happy Anniversary, Woodstock! And Yes, Baby Boomers, It's Too Late to Die Before You Get Old

It was forty years ago this weekend that the Woodstock Music and Art Festival was held in Bethel, NY. Why wasn't it called the Bethel Music and Art Festival? I don't know. I guess Woodstock just sounded a lot cooler. And what about that bird that couldn't fly straight in the Peanuts cartoon strip? Would he (or was it a she?) have been as cool had he been known as Bethel? I think not. And which came first, the bird in Peanuts or the music festival? Whatever. I'm getting off track. And the track I want to be on is the one thing that I believe deep in my heart of hearts: I would have made an awful hippie.



For one thing, I don't like to be dirty. I don't like dirt on me, especially in it's semi-liquid mud form. Also, I don't like to wear sandals. They were okay for Jesus, but not for me. And I don't think you can chant away the rain. The climactic conditions of Earth simply don't give a rat's ass about the anti-rain vibes you're putting out, man. As for the nudity, I don't much like being naked in public, nor do I wish to see most of my fellow humans naked in public.

I'm wound a little too tight to be a hippie. And I'm a bit of a rebel. When told to not take the brown acid because it's bad, I would have taken it anyway. And what would have been the result of my rebellious behavior? A bad trip, that's what. Although, I gotta be honest, a weekend spent with a hundred thousand people, all rolling around in various states of undress in the mud combined with an extreme lack of bathroom facilities and no showers, that sounds like one giant bad trip to me. Bring on the brown acid.

It's best for someone like me, and all other God fearing Americans, to simply watch the Woodstock movie and dig the groovy music from a safe distance of 40 years. And the movie is well worth watching, if for no other reason than you get to observe a culture, temporary as it was, that at this point in time seems quaint, if not a little naive. Heck, it seemed that way when I first saw the film at the Parkway Theater in Chicago somewhere around 1979. Only ten years after (hey, they were great in the movie!) the event, it looked like it could have happened a hundred years earlier. That's how much things had changed in America and in culture. The tie-dyed dreamers just looked out of touch in the brave new age of punk and New Wave. In a mere decade, we had strayed pretty far from the garden.

But the music, the music was great. If you can sit through Joan Baez singing "Joe Hill" near the beginning of the film (and if you can reach the fast forward on your remote, you won't have to) you are rewarded with stellar performances from many bands that are now considered the bastions of "classic rock": Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Joe Cocker, Santana and Ten Years After ("I'm goin' home...by helicopter"). Even Sha Na Na was good. Why a retro-1950s band was at the penultimate celebration of hippiedom, I don't know but they seemed to have had a good time.



So there you have it. I could never be a hippie, but I do dig their groovy, groovy tunes, man.



Having just watched this clip of the Who doing "My Generation" I have two thoughts (other than Pete Townshend looks really young and stoned here).

1. Does a guy in a white jumpsuit beating his guitar until it makes primal noises, whereupon it is thrown into the audience, represent the peace and love that Woodstock is supposed to be all about?

2. I really like the home grown feeling of the event itself. It seems light years away from the professional, antiseptic shows you get quite often now. The whole thing looks like some kids got together and said, "Hey! Let's put on a show!" built a stage and invited a hundred thousand of their closest friends to watch. It's actually very cool. Still wouldn't have wanted to be there though.

Les Paul 1915-2009

Les Paul did not invent rock and roll. He did, however, pretty much invent the solid body electric guitar and multi-track recording and was the first to incorporate a variety of what became common place studio recording techniques. Someone else may have invented those things if Les Paul hadn't, but someone else didn't. It was Les Paul. Now imagine rock and roll without a solid body electric guitar. What would guys like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards have played?

Why I Dig Sarah Palin

I like Sarah Palin.

I want her to be president. Desperately.

You know why?

Because this chick is nuts. Sometimes good nuts, sometimes bad nuts, but always, nuts.

Let's be honest: Those four years of her presidency (and, really, I don't think there would be a second term; she'd get bored and want to do something else, like trying to personally invade Canada with her own group of Rough Riders on snowmobiles so the US can seize the Yukon Territory because she heard they heard great moose hunts there, you betcha) would be the most fun ever.

No other president would be able to match Sarah Palin on the wacky meter.

President Palin would be flying around on that Marine helicopter, hunting God's creatures with one of those mounted machine guns you see on those military choppers in war movies. (If there isn't one of those on Marine One now, she'd have one installed.) Meanwhile, the hubby would be having "snow machine" races down the Potomac in the dead of winter, provided it freezes over. Or maybe even if it doesn't. A lot more adventurous if there's some liquidity involved.

And the kids. These would not be the cutesy Obama children (I like them way better than I like their father). The Palin children would be raucous. The White House would get tore up, you just know it. That would be so cool. And don't get me started on the soap opera the Palin's and their extended family and friends are going to be. It will be like four years of an insane reality show in the White House.

As for diplomacy, watch out for a woman who likes to shoot things. Palin is tough. She runs and hunts and skins dead animals and God knows what else she does. If the Russians give us any trouble, she would simply arm wrestle Putin. And win. And then she'd tell him the way things are gonna be from now on, at which Putin would ask her to marry him, because that's the way he is. She would consider it for a second, then tell him to get lost.

But seriously, I do like Sarah Palin. You know why? Really why? Because I believe her to be genuine. If she says it, you can bet she believes what she is saying. When she talks about the America of small towns with small town values, she is being genuine. Unfortunately, she's also being genuine when she talks about Obama's health care "death panels," but that's part of the thoroughly unpolitical politics of Sarah Palin. When people are genuine, and say what they actually believe, you will sometimes hear some weird and wacky things. We'll just have to learn how to deal with it.

So, apart from the insanity that Sarah Palin will bring to the presidency, she will usher in a new era of The Genuine Person. And it will be refreshing.

John Hughes 1950-2009

John Hughes died yesterday. He was 59, which is a ridiculously young age to leave this earth, and he dropped dead from a heart attack while walking around Manhattan.

Listening to the news and talk shows today, one thing strikes me about Hughes.

John Hughes was underrated. Underrated by film critics and film-goers alike, underrated by me.

I lost track of whatever Hughes has been doing for the last decade or so. Let's face it, he was the scriptwriter for a lot of mediocre (and that's being generous) movies that quite often had numbers in their titles, like "Home Alone 4" and "Beethoven's 5th."

The flipside of that is that he also wrote and/or directed two of my favorite comedies of all time, "Mr. Mom," with the great Michael Keaton, and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," with Steve Martin and the late and beloved John Candy. Hughes was also responsible for movies about teen-agers that I saw and enjoyed when I was a teen-ager, like "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles." Or maybe it was "Pretty in Pink." Some of those Molly Ringwald movies were interchangeable.

Speaking of Molly Ringwald, a lot of actors got their starts or had their first big successes in John Hughes' films, like Macaulay Culkin and pretty much everyone in the Brat Pack.

Hughes never made any great dramas or action films, he apparently never aspired to make a "Citizen Kane" or a "Raging Bull," and maybe that's why he didn't necessarily receive more critical acclaim. John Hughes made comedies. They were light weight but well made and the comedy never had a mean spirit to it. His movies had a gentle, humane quality about them, and that's a quality sorely missing in a lot of today's entertainment.

He's a Bird, He's a Dog, He's a Bird-Dog

There was good news and bad news for the American journalists, both attractive young women, who were freed from a North Korean prison.

The good news is they were free to return home.

The bad news is they had to take a long plane ride with Bill Clinton.

Can you imagine what he was saying to them? "You girls are smart, but you sure are pretty, too. You know, Hillary spends a lot of time away from home. You ladies should come over one of these days." It's right about then the two reporters, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, started looking around for parachutes.

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I know what you people, at least you liberal, left-leaning Clinton lovers are thinking: Cheap jokes at the expense of a man who helped rescue two innocent Americans from a repressive dictator.

Yeah, so what?

Listen, I like Bill Clinton. Always have. He's a hard man not to like. Clinton, not George W Bush, is the kind of guy I'd like to sit and have a beer with. He's the kind of everyman W could never be. Clinton is the son George H W Bush wished he'd had. I didn't think Bill was a great president, yet I voted for him twice. I wish he were still president sometimes. I certainly did during the Bush years. Whether it was his doing or not, Clinton presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. But, as his Arkansas state trooper guards used to say when Clinton was governor, "He's a hard dog to keep on the porch."

That's the gist of it. Clinton was, and possibly still is, a bird-dog. For whatever good he did as president, he will best be remembered for some icky Oval Office moments involving a cigar, a blue dress, and an intern.

So the cheap jokes will always be there, to his dying day. And then, hopefully, we'll just say nice things about him and let him rest in peace.

Where Have You Gone, Eddie Murphy?

What happened to this Eddie Murphy? You know, the funny one. The Eddie Murphy who looked like a comedy god, like Elvis in his prime, strutting, preening, wearing a leather suit. Not the Eddie Murphy who makes movies wearing fat suits or talking to computer animated squirrels.

The clip comes to us by way of an Esquire magazine article about entertainers, specifically comedians, even more specifically black comedians, and the handling of the first black president.