Well, there are a large number of videos of “Long Tall Sally” available at YouTube. One of the most interesting – despite the annoying slow-motion segment in the middle – is this one of the Beatles performing live on television, either in the UK or perhaps in Australia or New Zealand (going only by the hostess’ accent, which I can’t place). The performance dates from 1963 or 1964, I would guess; it could be narrowed down more if one were so inclined by the fact that Ringo appears to have a mustache. (If this is from the Australian tour during the summer of 1964, then it’s from June 14 or later: Ringo was hospitalized with tonsillitis when the other three Beatles left Britain at the beginning of the tour. Jimmy Nicol filled in on drums until Ringo could rejoin the band in Melbourne.)
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Here’s some footage of Gene Vincent – generally forgotten these days but a pretty big name in the late 1950s – performing “Long Tall Sally” in Belgium on October 10, 1963. The performance last about two minutes; the remainder of the clip is comments in French from, I assume, some of those who saw Vincent’s performance. I’m sure the comments are fascinating, but my schoolboy facility in French long ago dwindled away, so I have no idea what those young folk are saying.
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Here’s Elvis Presley’s version of the song, packaged with photos of Presley. The recording dates from September 2, 1956.
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After learning of its existence as I wrote Tuesday’s post, I’m trying to find either audio or video of Roger Whittaker’s performance of “Long Tall Sally.” I’ve seen references to it online that imply that it’s, well, unique. According to All-Music Guide, it’s included on a DVD of a concert performance. I’ll keep looking.
Note from 2022: I evidently posted about the death of musician Larry Knechtel on this day, but that post is for some reason missing from my Word archives. The files do contain an addendum to the post from later that day:
I posted about Larry Knechtel this morning. And early this afternoon, I got a note from Patti Dahlstrom:
Dearest Family and Friends,
I have just received the sad news today from Art Munson and Artie Wayne that a dear friend of mine, Larry Knechtel, has passed on. Larry was a legend in pop music, still more than that he was one of the most down-to-earth people and true hearts I have ever known. I was blessed to have Larry play piano on my 3rd album. He came into my life when I was deeply heart-broken, as I had lost a great love and my piano player. He stepped in with compassion and patience and we quickly became good friends. He played piano, bass, harmonica and sang background vocals, as well as producing and arranging my 4th album on which we had a song we wrote together, Changing Minds, which will be included on my CD release here in the UK.
The last time we exchanged emails was on his birthday August 4th. Leo rules the heart and he had a big one that gave and gave until it finally gave out. The obits say he played a concert the week before. It is only fitting that Larry should play until the end. The earth is a sadder venue without him. He was a great friend whom I treasured.
I’m attaching a song I wrote with Artie Wayne when Jim Croce died. Larry is playing piano on it. It is appropriate that I send it out in his memory now. Thank you for everything, Larry.
Patti
“Sending My Good Thoughts” by Patti Dahlstrom from Your Place Or Mine [1975]
Patti gave me her permission to post as well a song on which Larry Knechtel contributed an amazing harmonica solo:
“Lookin’ For Love” by Patti Dahlstrom from Livin’ It Thru [1976]
First stop at YouTube this morning finds us revisiting the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness that took place at London’s Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992. Joining Queen for a superb version of “All the Young Dudes” were Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople; David Bowie, who wrote the song; guitarist Mick Ronson; and Joe Elliott and Phil Collen of Def Leppard.
The Bette Midler/Bob Dylan version of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain” was one of the more popular mp3s ever posted here. I couldn’t find a video of it – I’d hoped for some television performances – but I did find a decent live performance of the song by Neko Case in Seattle, Washington, on August 30, 2008.
Here’s Talking Heads with a kickass version of “Take Me to the River.” The original poster at YouTube noted this was a “clip from the movie.” I’d assume that “the movie” was Stop Making Sense, except that the soundtrack for the film lists a running time for “Take Me to the River” at about six minutes and this clip last for more than eight minutes. All-Music Guide lists only one Talking Heads version of “Take Me to the River” that runs eight or more minutes, and that’s on an album entitled The Complete Gig, about which I can find little information. Answers, anyone?
[Note from 2022: The Complete Gig was a live album released unofficially on CD in Italy in 1991. This clip is likely from the concert that was recorded for that album. Note added May 17, 2022.]
Tomorrow, I may dig into some music by one of my favorite bands from the 1990s, or I might go back to the box of unsorted 45s. We’ll see.
Given yesterday’s post of a Yogi Yorgesson single, I thought I’d see what I could find from Yogi at YouTube. Here’s a snippet from an episode of The Jack Benny Program from what appears to be the 1950s. Harry Stewart’s Yogi – acting here as Edgar Bergen’s servant –gives the audience a few lines of “Yingle Bells.”
Here’s a Yorgesson recording from 1950, “I’m Glad I’m A Nincompoop,” “Nincompoops Have All The Fun,” backed with some photos of Stewart and a few other visuals, as well as a few shots of the 78 rpm record as it plays.
Another find at YouTube: A record by the Miller Sisters that wasn’t included in the discography I looked at yesterday: “Your Love,” released as GMC 10003. The discography I found in Mitch Rosalsky’s Encyclopedia of Rhythm & Blues and Doo-Wop Vocal Groups listed a 1965 release, GMC 10006, “I’m Telling It Like It Is/Until You Come Home, I’ll Walk Alone,” but not this record. Sounds like the same group, though, and “W. Miller” – the sisters’ father was William Miller, who wrote some of their songs – is listed as one of the writers. I’m thinking it’s the same group, probably from 1965 as well.
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And here’s another Miller Sisters’ tune, “Tell Him,” which is listed in Rosalsky’s discography as the B-Side of Riverside 4535, from 1962.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll dig into the Billboard chart for the week ending August 22, 1970, and see what might be found there.
Looking for video related to Monday’s post about the Benton County Fair, I found a sweet performance of “Too Long At The Fair” by Bonnie Raitt on the BBC show The Old Grey Whistle Test. The original poster at YouTube said the performance comes from 1976.
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Reader Laserman said the other day that his list of best cover performances would include José Feliciano’s rendition of “Light My Fire.” Wandering a little further into the video valley, I found a 1968 television performance of that Doors’ song by Feliciano.
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The Sonny & Cher album I wrote about yesterday was the home of “I Got You Babe,” the first hit for the duo. Here’s a video of the two of them lip-synching the song – which spent three weeks at No. 1 in the U.S. in 1965 – on Britain’s Top of the Pops.
Tomorrow I’m going to write a little bit about Beatles ’65 and the risks of certainty, as well as talk a little about the mysterious Lori Jacobs. And there might be a few other things in there, too.
Here’s a video of the Staple Singers performing “Respect Yourself” at the 1972 Wattstax music festival, which took place in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The festival, notes Wikipedia, was “organized by Memphis’ Stax Records to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots. Wattstax was seen by some as ‘the Afro-American answer to Woodstock.’ To enable as many members of the black community in L.A. to attend as possible, tickets were sold for only $1.00 each. The Reverend Jesse Jackson gave the invocation, which included his ‘I Am – Somebody’ poem, which was recited in a call and response with the assembled stadium crowd.”
I think – but don’t know for sure – that the video is pulled from the film Wattstax, a documentary by Mel Stuart that focused on the festival and, as Wikipedia notes, “the African American community of Watts in Los Angeles.” Wikipedia adds, “In the film, interspersed between songs are interviews with Richard Pryor, Ted Lange and others who discuss the black experience in America.” (Richard Pryor’s fame still shines; for those who don’t remember, Ted Lange’s fame came from playing Isaac Washington, the bartender, on the television series The Love Boat.)
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Yesterday, I posted “Bags and Things,” the title track to Dennis Lambert’s 1972 album. This morning, I found a video of Lambert performing “It Only Takes A Minute” in March 2008 at Hollywood’s Viper Room. It turns out – and I might have been one of the few out of the loop on this one – that Lambert co-wrote (with Brian Potter) “It Only Takes A Minute,” which was a No. 10 hit for Tavares (No. 1 on the R&B chart) in 1975.
Here’s a look at Honey Cone dancing and lip-synching their hit (No. 15) “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part I” on a 1972 episode of the The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
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One of the songs I posted yesterday, “All These Things We Dream” by the Living Daylights, has been downloaded less than any of the other five. Noticing that last evening, I pulled the group’s self-titled CD from the stack and dropped it in the player. I still like almost all of it, and as the CD seems to be out and print and I am persistent, I’ll be offering the entire CD tomorrow, hoping to persuade at least a few of you to give a listen to an unknown group who put out a very, very good album in 1996. See you then!
So what does YouTube have for us with at least a tenuous connection to the things we’ve done here recently?
Well, here’s Mississippi Fred McDowell with a typically good performance of “Goin’ Down to the River” on what appears to be a back porch-like set in some television studio somewhere. I’d guess late 1950s to early 1960s on this one, mostly because of the black and white visuals. The song, “Goin’ Down to the River,” was a McDowell original, and it shows up on some albums recorded in the 1960s. The person who posted this at YouTube didn’t leave a lot of information about this clip, and it would be nice to know some more. On the other hand, the music speaks for itself. [A little digging on reposting reveals that the performance likely was on a German television show in 1965. Note added May 12, 2022.]
In the listings for “All Along The Watchtower,” I found this performance by Jimi Hendrix at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. According to Wikipedia, Hendrix performed during the early hours of August 31, 1970, less than three weeks before his death.
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Here’s a clip showing Jack Casaday and Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna performing “Mann’s Fate,” a Kaukonen original that was on Hot Tuna’s first, self-titled album in 1970. The performance came from a PBS show called Folk Guitar that was produced in San Francisco and hosted by a woman named Laura Davis, from what I’ve been able to find out. Based on Casaday’s clothing, I’d place this one in the very early 1970s. [ The performance is from 1969. Note added May 12, 2022.]
And that will do it for today. Still in the plans is a six-pack from a single label, which I think I’ll do tomorrow, and Motown – suggested earlier – sounds like a good choice. We’ll see what sits in the files.
Rummaging as usual today, I found a fascinating clip from a British television show examining the greatest one-hit wonders. Here’s that show’s take on Richard Harris and “MacArthur Park.”
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This is interesting: Here are the Three Degrees live in London in 1975, with their rendition of “MacArthur Park.” The dancing is, well, cheesy, but the vocal performance and the musical backing are pretty good.
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Here’s a video put together or taken from another source – long after the fact, I assume – to go with Jay and the Americans’ version of “Always Something There To Remind Me.” I don’t recognize the video. Does anyone out there? It’s a little ambiguous and disturbing for some reason. Or it could just be too early in the morning.
And to close, here’s a performance from one of Jools Hollands’ New Years’ fetes, with Ron Wood, Slash and Holland taking on Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie.” They get an assist from a strolling streaker, whom Slash doesn’t even notice.
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Tomorrow, I think we’ll do something we haven’t done in a while: Select a record label and pull a random selection of singles. At least we’ll start there.
I’m a newsman, a reporter. I always have been and always will be. I haven’t made my living in that trade for more than ten years now, but still, I am one. I didn’t have much of an audience for the hand-printed newspapers I put together when I was twelve or so, but even then I was a newsman (or newskid, if you will). As someone whose life is tied to the news – and that will always be the case, even if I never work another minute in the industry – there are those who have influenced me on my path.
Chief among those is DQ, my first real-world editor at the Monticello Times. DQ taught me almost everything I know about newspapering in a small town. Explicitly, through his instruction, and implicitly, through his behavior and demeanor, he showed me how to be what I eventually realized I’d always wanted to be: a reporter.
The fact that I wanted – and had always wanted – to be a reporter surprised me. Writing – one of the essential portions of reporting – had always been a chore: Until I got a typewriter and mastered it, my thoughts moved far too fast for my horrid handwriting to keep pace. And even with more and more modern tools, there still are days when writing is hard work. Add to that the tasks of first, going out and talking to strangers to learn what they know and think and second, finding a way to tell all of that to an audience, and reporting is a craft that can be complex and scary. And I’ve wondered from time to time where that impulse arose: Who or what in my youth made me – despite my dread of writing and my uneasiness as having to face strangers throughout the process – want to be a reporter?
I think I got my answer last evening, and that answer – as delayed as its realization might have been – was ultimately as unsurprising as the sunrise. My inspiration was Walter Cronkite, the grand man of television news who died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. From World War II through the Iranian hostage crisis of the later 1970s and early 1980s, Cronkite was first and foremost a reporter, even during the nineteen years when he was the anchor for the CBS Evening News.
That was evident last evening in many of the clips that CNN showed as it covered Cronkite’s death. Among the many on-air moments of his life that were shown last evening, we saw him discussing Vietnam with President John F. Kennedy in the backyard at (one assumes) the Kennedy retreat at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and talking about the D-Day invasion with retired general and one-time President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy, France. We saw him at his anchor desk explaining the intricacies of the Watergate affair in late 1973, delving into a story that did not, at that time in its development, lend itself well to the visual medium that is television news. And we saw perhaps the two most famous moments of Cronkite’s long career: his exultation and relief in July 1969 when the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle found a safe landing spot on the moon and his controlled shock and grief in November 1963 as he told his viewers of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.
As I watched those clips – all of which I’d seen before and some of which I’d seen at the moment of broadcast – I realized that from the time I began to watch television news (and that was at a very young age, perhaps when I was ten), I always by choice watched CBS and Cronkite. (Cronkite was followed on CBS, of course, by Dan Rather, who was himself succeeded by Katie Couric. I don’t think much of Couric, but I still watch CBS; brand loyalty dies hard.) I realized as well that it was Cronkite who – without my ever coming close to realizing this before – gave me a model of what a newsman should be: As he reported and presented the news, he was calm, well-spoken (which means he also wrote well), courteous but persistent, interested in just about everything, and a good story-teller.
Cronkite’s passing is truly the end of an era, as has been said many times by many people on CNN and elsewhere in the brief hours since his death. I’ll let others deal with the historical implications and with the contrast of the news environment of, say, 1969 to that of 2009. My reaction is far more personal, and it’s far more intense than I would have expected.
I don’t know that I ever had heroes, even when I was a kid. I don’t think I ever thought of anyone as someone who could do no wrong, which is to me the definition of a hero. Over the years, however, from the time I was very young through my college years (and probably beyond), I did have role models, folks whose best attributes and actions seemed to me worthy of emulation: A couple of them were teachers, for the way they guided me and encouraged me; I’ve written once about Roger Lydeen and I may write about others in the future. Musically, as I’ve also said before, there were Al Hirt, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. As a sports fan, I looked up to Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings. And, as I noted above, I realized last evening – with some surprise and some tears – that Walter Cronkite was on that list as well.
I would imagine that Walter Cronkite shows up on a lot of folks’ similar lists, especially among those of us who consider ourselves newsmen and -women.
And here’s a song whose content has no relation to my topic but whose title fits. “I Got The News” by Steely Dan from Aja, is today’s Saturday Single:
Echoes In The Wind Archives 