DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

This is a difficult artistic puzzle to sort out: a) Why is this, Doris Day’s signature song, the only cover that Sly ever recorded?; and, b), Is its delivery of “cheerful fatalism” a positive or a negative? The motto, cribbed by song writers Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the Hitchcock film THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, from another film THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, has a rich history of memento mori application going back centuries, and yet, here it appears in a fresh, compelling funk version for the modern era. It’s a brain teaser.

For me it’s all positive, albeit bittersweet. The young woman, voiced by Sly’s sister Rose, asks her mother and lover to allay her apprehensions about the future, and Sly, taking the lead on the response, bursts into an ecstatic response: “Whatever will be, will be…” which turns the angsty inquiry on its head. BE HERE NOW, is the imperative. The future will take care of itself. 

AT THE HOTEL BOHEMIA WE BELIEVE YOU CAN'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING UNLESS YOU KNOW WHERE YOU HAVE  BEEN.
2025 COMIN' ROUND THE MOUNTAIN.
CAN YOU DIG IT?
 
Drummer Buddy Rich died after surgery in 1987. As he was being prepped for surgery, a nurse asked him, “Is there anything you can’t take?” Rich replied, “Yeah, country music.”

Lucky Luciano was a mob leader who helped the U.S. work with the Sicilian Mafia during World War II in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. His last words were, “Tell Georgie I want to get in the movies one way or another.”

Donald O'Connor was a singer, dancer, and actor known for his role in Singin' in the Rain. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 1954. O’Connor died at age 78 with his family gathered around him. He joked, “I’d like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get.” He still hasn’t gotten one.

Groucho’s brother Leonard, who was better known as Chico Marx, gave instructions to his wife as his last words: “Remember, Honey, don’t forget what I told you. Put in my coffin a deck of cards, a mashie niblick, and a pretty blonde.” A “mashie niblick” is a type of golf club.

As he was dying, Alfred Hitchcock said, “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.”

Blues guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, said, “Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now, I ain’t never gonna wake up.” And he was right.

Bo Diddley died giving a thumbs-up as he listened to the song “Walk Around Heaven.” His last word was “Wow.”

"It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you"-
Shane McGowen

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AND YOURS FROM YOUR SPLENDID BOHEMIANS!

This cut, from Julie London’s album of the same name, became a camp classic. It’s undeniably bawdy, with the torch songstress purring like a mod Mae West, with tongue solidly in cheek. The original, generated by neutered, pre-fab bobble heads, The Ohio Express, is a prepubescent rocker, lacking any lubriciousness whatsoever, but, emanating from Julie’s throat it’s an open invitation to bed, or a post-coital pillow declaration.

Julie is Her Name, her first album, was released in 1955, and YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY was her last, arriving in 1969, when she was 43 years old. Being an aging sex star is hard, but doing it in the 1960s during the youth movement must have been agonizing. Following this, she retired from recording altogether to concentrate on her acting career, which served her well. In ’72, her ex-husband, Jack Webb, cast her in the tv show Emergency! alongside her current spouse Bobby Troup,- (the composer of Route 66) - and that show lasted 6 years.

In 2000, throat cancer claimed the life of the sultry voiced siren, after a lifetime of dedicated smoking. She was 74, leaving behind a discography full of yearning and heartache. I discovered her decades after her Hey Day, on a collection of Lounge numbers, and was smitten.  

1) EVIL WEINER- ALL AROUND THE WORLD
2) AIMEE MANN AND MICHAEL PENN- CHRISTMASTIME
3) CHRISTY MOORE- FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK
4) FRANK SINATRA- CHRISTMAS SEALS PUBLIC SERVICE SPOT & I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
5) GEORGE JONES- LONELY CHRISTMAS CALL
6) MELVIS - I WANT TO GET LAID ON CHRISTMAS DAY -  (1958)
7) MABEL SCOTT- BOOGIE WOOGIE SANTA  ( 1955)
8) PORKY PIG- BLUE CHRISTMAS
9)THE RAMONES-  I DON'T WANT TO FIGHT TONIGHT-
10) STAN FREBERG- I'M GETTING NUTTIN' FOR CHRISTMAS (1955)
11) STEVE MARTIN AND PAUL SIMON- SILVER BELLS- - (SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE REHEARSAL- 1976)

Dedicated to Chemayne Halverson (1/6/1967-12/23/2020)

This is a haunting song by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which expresses the indefinable mysteries of romantic love. An interesting word I learned which describes this feeling is “limerence,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily…” This revelatory gnosis occurred  to me quite early, when I played the character of Emile de Becque, the aging plantation owner, in the Camp Sno Hill production of South Pacific, at the age of eleven or twelve. It goes without saying I was no Ezio Pinza, but I brought the heat

Signor Pinza (1892-1957) was an Italian opera singer who made the unlikely late-life transition into musical comedy matinee idol status after retiring, when he delivered this unforgettable ode to romance. 

Many have had, as I have, this experience of love at first sight. It happened to me when I ran up a theater aisle, threw open the door to the hall, and ran directly into the woman who later became my wife. I still remember her soft warm breath, begging pardon in a Southern inflected voice. 

Perhaps the romantic fantasies that have been pedaled to us in countless songs, movies, plays, films, and books have created unrealistic expectations. But, I still believe in that life actualizing dream, and Ezio Pinza is one of the reasons why. 

 A BEATSVILLE CHRISTMAS- PART ONE

1) Christmas In Jail-  The Youngsters- 1956
2) Yulesville-  Edd "Kookie" Burns -      1959
3) Pancho Claus-  Jose Gonzales-Gonzales- 1964
4) Surfing Santa-  The Ramblers-  1964

Maybe late-night TV shouldn’t be called “late-night TV” anymore, with so many viewers consuming it in clips the morning after, on their phones. Yet the genre’s hallmarks — the avuncular host, the sidekick, the band, the monologue, the desk, the guests — linger. Most were stamped on America’s consciousness by Johnny Carson.

A new biography about an old reliable, Bill Zehme’s “Carson the Magnificent” harks back to an era when doom and scroll were biblical nouns and Carson’s “Tonight Show” was a clear punctuation mark to every 24-hour chunk of the workweek — less an exclamation point, maybe, than a drawn-out ellipsis. “They want to lie back and be amused and laugh and have a nice, pleasant and slightly … I hate the word risqué … let’s say adult end to the day,” is how a producer in 1971 described the millions tuning in from home, to Esquire.

Carson went off the air in 1992, after three decades on “Tonight,” and left this Earth in 2005. Zehme, a journalist known for his chummy celebrity profiles, struck a book deal almost immediately but struggled to get purchase on his subject— “the ultimate Interior Man,” he despaired to a source, “large and lively only when on camera” — and then was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He died himself last year at 64, and a former “legman” and friend, Mike Thomas, has finished the project, giving it a doubly valedictory feel.
There were plenty of earlier books to consult, like “King of the Night,” by Laurence Leamer (who wrote about Joanne Carson in “Capote’s Women”), “And Now … Here’s Johnny,” by a young Nora Ephron, and the memoirs of Carson’s eternal second banana, Ed McMahon. His lawyer’s tell-all, published in 2013, is tellingly unmentioned. Zehme and Thomas have taken, if not the high road, the yellow brick one, with Carson’s Midwestern background left in dusty black and white while the nitty-gritty of show business is buffed to a high Emerald City sheen.

Give the authors points for changing up the standard chronological format. We don’t get to Carson’s birth date of Oct. 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, until the 107th page; his rebirth on Oct. 1, 1962, in NBC’s Studio 6B, midwifed by Groucho Marx, being the main event.
On air, Carson would take on various goofy guises, including the turbaned Carnac the Magnificent. The book’s title, and its light glide over his womanizing and sometimes violent alcoholism, suggest that in real life, too, he was a master of disguise and escape. After an unpleasant first date with Jody, he gives her a cactus in a bedpan with a note reading: “Sit on this. It will remind you.” After they married, she would sometimes wake with bruises. “Did he hurt you, Mom?” Joanna’s son asks after blowups. Zehme attributes such behavior to a booze-poisoned “doppelgänger”; he credits Carson with destigmatizing divorce without considering how swiftly, today, his whole operation would be canceled.

Visiting a proto-couples counselor, Carson “would taste shrinkage for the first time,” but he was far more comfortable overseeing Carson’s Couch. He might have been his own best analyst. “My job is to give them that feeling,” he told the “Tonight Show” regular Tony Randall of his drowsing masses, “that there will be a tomorrow.” How very yesterday.

You remember that anachronistic Sea Chanty internet meme a couple of years ago? All over the world people were recording themselves singing “The Wellerman”, proving the endurance of the Anglo folk tradition. You can thank Bert Lloyd (1908-1982) in the UK, for being the folklorist and song collector who documented and compiled many of these ancient songs, and for keeping the folk flame alive in the age of modern recording. 

He started collecting songs when he worked as a sheep herder in Australia, and his index expanded while working on whaling ships. In 1938 the BBC hired him to do a radio documentary about sea life, and thus began his career as a journalist, creating the singular vocation of “professional folklorist”.  

Sovay (or, Sophie), the much covered tale about a lady highwayman who tests the fidelity of her lover, appears on Bert’s Topic Records collection “First Person: some of his favorite folk songs”, and that’s where I discovered it.  I have an affinity for this niche of song collecting, developed years ago, while researching the archive of Sing Out magazine in the Smithsonian library. It’s been a gift that keeps on giving. 

Okay. No one wants to spoil the party.
But according to the American Psychological Association, 89% of US adults reported feeling stressed during the 2023 holiday season.

It's a good news, bad news situation much like this podcast which is truly a conflicted search for the highway to heaven, if such a utopia indeed exists.
At least we make an effort to engage about the comforted and the awkward which is more than I can say for many who only pretend to do so.

The holiday season can cause stress for many reasons, including:
Being exposed to constant, over exposed or insipid Christmas songs everywhere from your radio to  each elevator and mall assault across the USA. The Phil Spector Christmas Album is all I require. And I must admit that I have enormous affection for "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"-
Family gatherings leading to the desire to drink like Ray Milland in Lost Weekend-
Lack of time-
The demands of hosting gatherings-
The pressures of gift-giving-
Navigating complex family dynamics-

But here's the good news:

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”
—John F. Kennedy
“Friendship… is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”
- Muhammad Ali

And more ultimate wisdom arrives in the truths of what I consider the greatest gratitude song ever written, THE REBEL JESUS as composed by Jackson Browne

"But pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
There's a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus"-

In closing I leave you with the following:
"I haven't been saved but it could happen yet."-
Robert Earl Keen

Amen Brothers and Sisters.

And The Beat Goes On-

Thank You Listening Gang.
-Rich Buckland

I miss Amoeba Records in Hollywood. When I was working a few blocks north of there, I’d visit a few times a week during my lunch break. They had a warehouse full of oddities of all mediums and genres, books, films and memorabilia. It was on one of these mid day excursions that I came across an album entitled: “The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Africa”. This was earmarked and marketed for people just like me. The music contained therein varied quite a bit from my idea of psych, but I love discovering new stuff so I couldn’t pass it by.

“Guitar Boy” was one of the tracks on this collection, by Nigerian national hero - the musician, writer, sculptor, and musical instrument inventor Sir Victor Uwaifo (1941-2021), who achieved the very first gold record there with “Jeromi” in 1965. The genre is called High Life, developed in Ghana, a former British Colony on the west coast of Africa. It’s style is immediately recognizable as Afro-Cuban, with it’s fusion of Afro beats with western melodies played by guitars plucked in staccato arpeggios. 

Guitar Boy was banned for awhile because of it’s connection to a failed coup in April ’67, which was led by a Lt. Samuel Arthur (later executed), who marched prematurely into Broadcasting House Accra, announced the coup, and ordered the record to be played. Wow! You can’t make this shit up.