The Skeleton Equation Poster

for tonight’s event….

Happy 18th birthday to son Lance. His band The Skeleton Equation performs their special brand of existential polka punk there tonight.  

The poster artist Ted Michelowski invented these innovative drawing socials to, in this case, unite art with and music.

James Taylor has many of those and with this one grabs onto every man’s boyhood sense of place. We all had those places our mothers would have fainted if they knew about. Our fathers would have understood. For us in South Philly it was hunting rats at the Pipelines or swimming in the greasy abandoned industrial canal called the Highlines, walking the tracks down past the Jungles or diving into the Delaware off the Coal Pier. For James Taylor it was a spot that “no one knew why they called like they do.”

A later incarnation of Lynyrd Skynrd puts forth their 1973 hit with all the simplicity and power of the song’s advice, to be a “Simple Man.” There’s no telling how many men this song could have diverted from some more complex path.

The sentiments of Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Someday Never Comes” are so universal that they easily cross borders, or oceans. So since there’s no Credence You Tube of the song at the moment, the most sincere cover of this great song is about a 65 percent effective try by a coupla dudes at something called Fogerty Fest in Finland last year. Swamp Duo’s version may not be the best and they may have used their shoe money to buy Credence CDs, but this only proves the strength of the song.

So we bought Hot Rocks yesterday. I had Hot Rocks when first issued back in ‘71 and had forgotten that “Rainbow” is not on it. That album pioneered the classic rock best-of genre, even while the classic rock era was ongoing. Smart (Mick, always in control, and a grad of the London School of Economics) the Stones knew all along  that they would issue a second greatest hits record and saved some of the old stuff for it.

We filled it in for Escella by buying “Rainbow” as a single song, and now she has the whole lot on her iPod, right there cohabitating with Mika. 

So, while playing through Hot Rocks this morning  Mrs. Shears pointed out the irony of one particular Stones lyric. 

“Mother’s Little Helper” played, opening with: “What a drag it is getting old.”

“How freakin’ old were they when they wrote that?” Mrs. Shears asks. (That’s about as profane as Mrs. Shears will get.) 

Well they were in their early 20s, a lot younger than they are in this recent picture:

By now the Stones as the leading geezers of the Geezer Rock scene is an old joke, on multiple levels. Charlie Watts looks the oldest, but he’s a cancer survivor so good-on-ya Charlie. Mick Jagger has aged fairly well, but it’s only because he looked old when he was 22. He’s eased into his grotesque attractive-like-a-car-wreck face over the years. Ron Wood, the luckiest third-rate rocker in the world, will always look like an (even) uglier Rod Stewart. And Keith Richards is, self-admittedly, lucky to be alive, and not because of a bout with cancer; and he has those little chicken arms, scrawny to rival those of the Dalai Lama. We’re sure his hands have not atrophied with the years, however. Great guitarist.

Oh, and by the way: Free Tibet! 

Products in this post:
“Shes a Rainbow”
Hot Rocks
Mika – Life in Cartoon Motion
Keith Richards: The Biography The Biography

Here’s a decent little editing effort over that record (by mrchef, of The Rock & Roll Chef) with Hubble telescope images and some shots of Hoagy.

Perfect. Well, the song is. I think anyway.

And here’s The King himself. with a TV performance of the song. Hard to beat.

They don’t sing ‘em or write ‘em like that anymore.

Here’s Hoagy playing it instrumentally. Without moving either. Wow.

And finally, to make up for the lack of motion in the previous, a Carmichael song can even make the unpolished pipes of the torchy and nicely motile Lauren Bacall sound good in the great film, To Have and Have Not, the project where Bogie fell for her hard. You can see it in this scene. I don’t think he’s acting too hard there. And of course you know that’s Hoagy on piano.