The country song "I Can't Stop Loving You" was Ray Charles' biggest pop hit, hitting the top of the charts this day in 1962. It came from his album Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, a genre-bending career move that he was warned against, but was one of his biggest artistic and popular successes.
Some of the backup singing is pretty saccharine to modern ears, but Ray's voice and piano playing really gets over the love he had for country music. Our ASotD has one genius covering another: a version of Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart."
This day in 1973 Levi Strauss and some other guy received a patent for blue jeans, or dungarees as I insist on calling them. The first song that popped into mind was this one, "Bell Bottom Blues," which first appeared on the Derek & the Dominoes Layla album. This live version is a pretty good one from 1989 featuring my two favorite guitar players, who need to do a proper studio album together, preferably with Knopfler picking all the material.
We celebrated Townes van Zandt's birthday yesterday, and because I don't really have any other ideas for today, I thought we'd start a mini-string of others doing his songs.
You have to begin such a list with Lyle Lovett, who covered three of van Zandt's songs on Step Inside This House, his 1998 tribute to Texas songwriters. "Lungs" is my favorite from this album, making a sad, desperate song from van Zandt into an insistently desperate one with a bit of hope, propelled by some nice guitar and grounded by Lovett's impeccable, reserved vocal.
Last week we paid tribute to Nicky Hopkins, who was most famous for his work with the Rolling Stones. Today, or ASotD pays tribute to an even more integral part of that band, Brian Jones, who was born this day in 1942.
He was a founding member of the band and brought many world and roots music instruments into the mix, giving the Stones a more diverse sound to underpin the growing songwriting talent of Jagger/Richards. All this, of course, before the drug-fueled demise that ended in his own swimming pool in 1969.
Today's track is "No Expectations," from Beggar's Banquet, which features Jones on slide guitar.
It's my friend Mary Beth's birthday, so I let her pick the artist for today's ASotD. She picked Howlin' Wolf, who she liked when she heard his music when we went to see the 2008 film Cadillac Records. (The actual record label was Chess Records, in Chicago, and I'm not sure why they changed it for the movie.)
"Forty-Four" is the track I picked. It's not one of his bigger hits, but I've loved it ever since I heard Eric Clapton do a killer version of it live several years ago. (Van Morrison also sometimes quotes the first line of this one in his extended live versions of "See Me Through," which we'll feature Saturday.)
What this song does have is the essence of Howlin' Wolf, just that wild, hard voice over a tom-tom drum shuffle and a simple, halting guitar/piano combo. And there's the fact that he carries gun big enough to make his shoulder sore.
I really hated the first half of this book, but Doctorow tied together what seemed like disparate strands in such a fashion as to make the book not a horrible one. His attempt to make the book flow like a storyteller's tale by eschewing quotation marks for dialogue is quite annoying.
To a degree, he does capture the mood of the New York area during the early part of last century by employing real, famous people as characters, but his main achievement here is the character of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a black musician who does not bow to a very real injustice.
Not really recommended, but, as I said, not horrible. Three stars out of five.
I went to see Iron Man at the good theater last night (Sunday) to catch their last showing at 10:20 p.m. I often go to that theater at that time because the chances of having to share a space with cell-phone-using, can't-shut-up riff-raff are minimized. And because I always go to movies alone.
But since it was opening weekend, there were still quite a few people there. Lots of low-level chatter, not enough for me to go off on someone but really annoying when you think that these people paid $10.25 to not watch something.
The movie was OK. Judging it against Batman Begins (A+) and Spiderman (A-), it's a solid B.
Robert Downey Jr. is great, tossing off some great lines under his breath like, I think, no one else can manage now that Peter O'Toole is 97, or however old he is.
Terence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow are fine, but needed more lines/more interesting parts. As proof of this, I offer the fact that the warmest relationships Stark develops are with a robot arm and his computer's operating system.
The villain is lame, and the climactic action sequence is not that great. Most of the cool shots of the Iron Man in action are in the trailers.
Not much to comment on about the Oscars Sunday night. Without
question, Cate Blanchett should have won the supporting actress award
for playing Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.
And No Country for Old Men,
rightly, won for best picture, director(s), adapted screenplay and
supporting actor and should have won for its cinematography, which was
by far the best I've seen in as long as I can remember. (There Will Be Blood, which won, looked great too, to be fair.)
The one thing that made me glad I watched was the duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from Once. They performed "Falling Slowly," which was nominated for best song, and soon thereafter won.
Both
were so happy, and Hansard's acceptace speech was the definition of
gratitude. Irglova got cut off by the music leading to a commercial,
but Jon Stewart, in a truly classy move, brought her back out after the
break and gave her all the time she wanted.
No Country and Once were my two favorite films of 2007, one dark and bleak, the other hopeful and real.
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