A 1976 Christmas - From Neiman Marcus

(click on image to enlarge)

Last year, the 1972 NM Christmas catalog was featured here to a somewhat lukewarm reception. This year, the 1986 Apple catalog I posted was seen by half of the United States and all of Australia. I don't get it but I never do. Maybe it was the Belinda Carlise video? Anyway, I blew the dust off my corporate American Express card (they'll never know) and secured this 1976 cheese extravaganza off eBay.

Christmas of '76, I was waiting for the Special Forces 'Q' course to start at Ft Bragg. I didn't know Neiman Marcus from Shinola and the same could be said about Special Forces and what it took to make the grade. Of the 88 in my class -- three got their green beenies and they were all noncoms. My class was the last to allow lower ranking enlisted (E-1 to E-4) after which you had to be an E-5 or above due to the brutal wash out rate.

It's not what you dream -- It's what you fail at that gives character. And this catalog is full of character. That's why I love it so. However, I'm not adverse to an equally cheesy music video of the era saving my ass. Here's to the 85 who failed at USAIMA and to Phil. I remember this playing in the barracks like it was...a very long time ago.

The Hangover Cure

M Magazine 12/1987

Trust me on this one -- Forget everything else. Goes well with grilled lamb and a Cote du Rhone. Key: Emmentaler Swiss. Tom Cat bread. The Del Fuegos, 'I Still Want You.' Destroy a gas station, 'It's a Mad, Mad Mad, Mad World.'

A heart is not enough...

Dance Like The Go-Go's

Many thanks to Oyster Guy for mentioning this video in yesterday's comment section. Most people don't look at comments and that's a shame. If the post is the cake, then surely the comment section is the baking soda. I try and publish all comments. Even those accusing me of being gay. Which is impossible. At my age, every time I bend over the blood rushes to my head and I get so dizzy I almost fall over.

Head Over Heels For The 1986 Collection

Am I the only one who thinks the '80s are making a comeback? No. Svpply thinks so too, but I may be the only one who thinks Belinda Carlisle looked better chubby. Can't stop myself.

Chicago with Tom

This year Mr. Waits was inaugurated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he told the black-tie music-business crowd, “They say I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing.” New York Times




Tom's private party. Would you be okay with that? Try the album out here.

Joe Williams: He Just Sang

G. Bruce Boyer contributes his third Jazz review to The Trad. Count Basie and Joe Williams could be hard to handle at 8:30 on a Monday morning. But, today's Friday, and that all important, "Time, Place and Occasion" ain't just for getting dressed. Cue the cocktail shaker.

For me, Joe Williams always was, is, and will be the perfect male jazz singer. I say this with the greatest respect to Armstrong, Sinatra, Nat Cole, Johnny Hartman, Torme, Bennett, and anyone else you can think of from that fifty-year classic period of jazz singers, 1925 – 1975.

From the moment I first heard his recording of “Smack Dab in the Middle” in the early '50s ( I believe it was his only recording to ever make the charts), it was clear to me that he had everything a jazz singer ever needed. Actually, there wasn't any kind of popular music Joe Williams couldn't sing supremely well. He could have sung Handel's “Hallelujah Chorus” all by himself if he'd wanted to.

Sinatra could break your heart with slow, soft songs of lost love or swing with as much force as a whole trumpet section, but he couldn't really sing the blues. Nat King Cole could swing lightly and give you a refined version of blues, but his true métier was the ballad. Mel Torme could slide across lyrics as though they were butter, and he could scat with the best of them. Johnny Hartman may well have had the best natural voice and clearest interpretation. But Joe Williams had it all. You struggle for comparisons in vain.

The man Basie called “#1 Son” grew up in Chicago and played the clubs with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Andy Kirk, and Hot Lips Page before joining the Basie crew. Basie had hired him to replace the great blues/swing singer Jimmy Rushing, that rotund and affable veteran of the famous Territory bands out of Kansas City in the 30s and 40s. Rushing had a voice that could pierce steel and seemed an impossible act to follow.

When he retired from the Basie Band in 1950, it took four years to find a replacement. By then Basie had constructed the swingingest big band there ever was, and every orchestrated punchy, bluesy note had that perfect “in the pocket” feel. It was a newer, harder driving, more sophisticated band, and, arguably one that no one could have stood up to other than Joe Williams.

The thing about Williams – something that's almost unheard of today – is that he just opened his mouth and sang. There wasn't any body language, no pyrotechnic movement, no arm-slapping gyrations. He just stood there behind the mike and sang. And the room filled with the wonder and awe and rapture of it.

I remember the night I saw him with Basie at a small club in the autumn of 1960, just a year before he left Basie to go it on his own. The room was long but very narrow, at least 100 feet long, but only around 30 feet wide, with a bar running down one long side, tables scattered about, a dance floor the size of a cuff link, and the small bandstand which accommodated the dozen or so musicians tightly jammed together.

The place was packed four deep at the bar and the small tables were jammed with 4 to 6 people each. Basie did one 50-minute set, starting off with his theme, “One O’clock Jump” and several other standard numbers.

Williams strode purposefully onto the small stage in a beautifully cut navy blue mohair suit, straightened the mike and surged into a rocking, pulsating version of Memphis Slim’s “Every Day I Have the Blues”, segued into “Who She Do” and “Goin' to Chicago”, then slowed down for a few ballads, and finished up with a slow-but-powerful “April in Paris”.

After two ten-minute encores – the crowd wouldn't let them go – of “Roll 'em Pete” and “All Right, O.K., You Win” , I couldn't believe the walls were still standing, they seemed to be throbbing with the beat. It's funny, I can't remember the young lady I was with.

Williams could sing Ella Fitzgerald to a draw in a scatting contest, do Rogers and Hart as poignantly as Sinatra, and shout the blues with all the vibrancy and soul of Big Joe Turner or Rushing himself. His was an unmatchable, cross-pollinated art of down-home Delta blues, Kansas City swing, Broadway ballad, joyous early Rhythm 'n Blues, and unforgettable versions of both gospel and protest music.

In his life (1918 – 1999), he seems to have sung with every great jazz musician of the 20th Century. It would also seem that, when Duke Ellington wrote “Doesn't matter if it's sweet or hot/ Just give the music everything you've got”, Joe Williams had it to give, took it to heart, and gave. The range of his abilities has never been approached.

Select Discography

Joe Williams Live (Fantasy)

Joe Williams: Nothin' But the Blues (Delos)

Joe Williams: A Man Ain't Supposed to Cry (Label M)

Joe Williams: Having the Blues Under European Sky (Denon)

The Overwhelming Joe Williams (RCA)

Havin' a Good Time: Joe Williams and Ben Webster (Hyena Records)

Joe Williams: A Swing' Night at Birdland (Roulette)

The Greatest: Count Basie Plays, Joe Williams Sings (Verve)

Joe Williams Every Day: The Best of the Verve Years (Verve)

Joe Williams: At Newport/ Jump for Joy (Collectibles Jazz Classics)

Halloween Costume Idea # 1

I first head this in college. I wanted to be Frank on Halloween. Short sleeve shirt & tie. Gas can in one hand and a Mickey's Big Mouth in the other. Never got around to it. Maybe you will. Here's how I'd introduce myself.

Hi, name's Frank
(shake hands),
Just settled down in the Valley.
Yeah, I like to say I hung my wild years
on a nail I drove through my wife's forehead.

What do I do? Anything I want.
No, seriously...I sell used office furniture out
there on San Fernando Road. Yep.
Assumed a $30,000 loan at 15 1/4% and
put a down payment on a little two bedroom place.

The wife? Spent piece of used jet trash...
Makes a good Bloody Mary. Keeps her mouth shut most
of the time. We have a little Chiuaua named Carlos.
Has some sort'a skin disease and is totally blind.
I drive a Nissan. Yeah, I'd say we're pretty happy.

Was coming home from work one night when
I stopped off at the liquor store and picked up a couple
Mickey's Big Mouths. Drank 'em in the car on the way to the
Shell Station. Got a gallon of gas in a can and drove home.

Doused everything in the house and
torched it.
Parked across the street and watched it burn...
All Halloween orange and chimney red.

Then I put on a top 40 station,
got on the Hollywood Freeway
and headed north.
Yeah, I'll have another one.
Thanks.

(to myself)
Never could stand that dog.

MY FW: Runway Music

It is a well known fact, mostly among my oldest and dearest friends,  that I'm a klutz. My mother has warned me that I burned through nine lives many years ago. Sgt. Murphy told me I could fuck up an anvil with a rotten banana. I also have the attention span of a wire fox terrier on a triple espresso. And I love to dance. Usually by myself. Listening to a you tube video on a iPhone while dancing and walking down stairs is probably not a good idea... for anybody -- much less a klutz with a short attention span who is over 50 years old.

I'll spare you the details -- Anyway, while the drugs are outstanding, I'm unable to sit for more than 20 minutes but am looking forward to working with my physical therapist Eileen -- who told me I could always remember her name thanks to that song in the '80s. Posts for the next couple weeks will be short bursts with a patina of prescribed pain medication.

Here's a burst of what I was listening to when I took the spill. It's impossible to find a CD from the Doris Days, a little Swedish trio from the '90s, but when I listen to Jumbo Jet on You Tube, I know it would make for incredible runway music. Bouncy & catchy as all get out and amazingly obscure... I'm betting only two people in Williamsburg ever heard of 'em. But you can...so unbuckle your double monks, make yourself a Rye Manhattan and just try not to dance by yourself on the stairs.

Glamour Girl

Bel-Canto

Bel-Canto


Use of a light tone in the higher registers

Agile technique capable of dispatching ornate embellishments

Ability to execute fast & accurate divisions

A pleasing, well-focused timbre

A clean attack

Graceful phrasing rooted in a complete mastery of control

Do You Remember the Days...

Ersatz Kodachrome





... before NYC became a ghost town?

Until Next Year

Not as good as it was -- Better than it will be

Shagging in the Past

Student

You've said that you regarded respectability as one of the

prime enemies of individualism.  Do you regard love as 

an enemy of individualism?

Faulkner

No, no --  What's love got to do with respectability?

I posted this video in April of 2020 with Al Green's lyrics.  Seems appropriate to repost today.

I remember heading down to Myrtle Beach for a long weekend with two cars of Army buddies when I was stationed at Ft Bragg.  I was 20 and wound up dancing with a frosted blonde in her forties. She had long pink nails and held a Schlitz 'Tall Boy' in one hand and an Eve cigarette in the other. She taught me how to shag.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.  William Faulkner

Getz/Gilberto: Sounds of Summer, Spring 1964

Happy 50th.

Those Other Fathers

Tell me were you ever ever frightened
in the afternoons of life
Sitting in your home with closing eyelids
being someones else's wife
One who doesn't care 'bout you at all
only came when his hormones called
He'll never love you the way I do

You used to write me soft revealing letters
I always read them when they came
We stood beside the world in many matters
no one but ourselves where there to blame
And now in a meek but sudden mood swing
not even a thank you for everything
He'll never eat you the way I did

I think the world will always need the cryer
Lonely people seldom mend
Some remain strangers to themselves
still they cross the earth for a friend
If you think you cannot love me till the end of time
with a life not far from mine
No one knows you the way I do

Doris Days, The Cryer

Ska Sunday

Sundays are my SkaDays. Missing Words by The Selectors. Under the radar but a sone cold classic. It went well with a Bloody Mary, side bacon sandwich and packet of Silk Cuts -- Purple or yellow depending on the size of hangover.

"How We Used to Live"

"Whenever you go down the roads in Britain, you travel not in three dimensions but in four.  The fourth dimension is the past.  And as we move to and fro in this fourth dimension,  we see not only landscape, but the economic, political and social forces at work behind the landscape…shaping it…forever changing it, but leaving, here and there, the record and the mark.

The interesting thing about the use of images is that they're often drawn up of something in the past.  Some experience which stimulates a strong emotional response.  There's life everywhere and the tracks we make are shared and crossed by the paths of others…who know this world better than we do." 

From,  "How We Used To Live." A documentary by the band Saint Etienne and film maker Paul Kelly.  It premiered last October in London but haven't seen it available in the UK, much less the US.  It's a beautiful trailer that speaks to those who came before us and how they are still with us... in that fourth dimension.

Bizarre Love Triangle

On the Shore

The Delays are that Summer kind of band full of wind -- A Summer Wind -- Loaded with hope and bubble gum. Back when you were crisp... and feeling like you belonged. In your starched white shirt. Sitting on the beach. Eating tomato sandwiches on white bread with mayo.  But for now, just shut the fuck up and listen.