Always hard to hear one of your heroes slagged off by another one of your heroes but at least in the case of Howard Zinn there is a kernel of reason to your gripes.
Sure, A People's History encourages skepticism for official sources and the US gov and so can result in overly sweeping dismissals of complicated figures like Lincoln. The irony here being the explicit purpose of Zinn's history was to break up the hagiographic one-dimensional gloriana of conventional American histories. To my mind, A People's History is one of the greatest legacies and outgrowths of the '60s civil rights movement and a part of the peaceful revolution everyone left of the plutocracy wages to this day. Including, I should think, you.
But you're even worse on Bernie Sanders, where the only reason for your disdain seems to be a deep-seated grudge rooted in your loyalty to the Clintons. At any rate, as best I understand your differences-- moral, political-- with Marsh I've always thought I was more firmly in your camp. But here, assuming Marsh's views of Zinn and Sanders more favorable, I really don't know, I do know I think you're way wrong.
I still think “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” are the best Wings songs the Beatles ever recorded. Almost as good as “Jet.” The rest of the album I can do without.
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that has since come to be known as Brit Pop. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music. For most people all this is a big thing in their lives in their teens and twenties; from then on interest wanes. Those for whom this phase ran its course at anytime in the 60’s to 90’s tend to think of themselves as having been around for the best of it. If the thee billion plus hits on Spotify’s most streamed songs is the measure, you could argue that it is now bigger than ever. But nobody seriously believes that any of them will go down in history as great ones. So what will? What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
Jerry Lee Lewis was the Robert Mitchum of rock 'n roll. Works both ways, as Mitchum had talent he never got to properly use in the medium he worked. Perhaps, the closest Jerry Lee came to fulfilling his talents was being cast in the late 60's musical Catch My Soul, where he portrayed Iago onstage in that recasting of Othello. Jack Good of Shindig produced the show and Bob Dylan on his Theme Time Radio series, played a couple of the songs Jerry Lee sang for the show which combined Shakespeare with rhythm and blues. Great stuff!
“The” Antichrist would’ve been too limiting, tying the announcement too tightly to a merely (!) eschatological context. “An” is vertiginously disorienting, nihilism announcing the terror of pure possibility.
I think that Natty Dread is the best album Bob Marley put out without Bunny and Peter and not necessarily because it was the first. I’ve never seen your take on Natty Dread though. Do you mind if I ask, or should I hold it over until the next AskGreil?
Sept. 1963, beginning of 9th grade, my parents uprooted the family to a place not far from where we grew up but where the social stratification was oppressive, unlike anything I had experienced. I spent a lot of time after school listening to the radio, and fall 1963 (after Little Stevie Wonder's "Fingerprints Pt. 2" sustained me for the summer), I particularly remember the amiable "Sugar Shack" as the best thing on the radio/Intercom my mom had installed in the new house. But "Sugar Shack" was burning out, and so I kept the radio/Intercom low. The first time I heard "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," it was low background, but I felt a consciousness shift. The next time I heard it, I ran to that damn radio and turned the volume full blast. As close as a depressed 14 year old could come to a born-again experience. It was like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" the next day in school: Everybody looked the same, but were different.
You capture it better than I did. Though I thought then and think now that ‘Sugar Shack’ was the worst record ever made. When I found out years later that it was the Fireballs Decca hired to dress up Buddy Holly’s last solo apartment tapes that confirmed my wish that they’d never been born.
Thanks so much, Greil. Yeah, they were basically a West Texas instrumental act that recorded out of Norman Petty studios in Clovis, N.M. When I processed "Sugar Shack" back then, I figured, "likely one-hit wonder." Access to some Fireballs albums did not change my mind.
"And then the huge worldwide hits "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," which were unbearable." - Thank you, I thought there was something wrong with me for hating both of these. For that matter, hating most of "Abbey Road."
Always hard to hear one of your heroes slagged off by another one of your heroes but at least in the case of Howard Zinn there is a kernel of reason to your gripes.
Sure, A People's History encourages skepticism for official sources and the US gov and so can result in overly sweeping dismissals of complicated figures like Lincoln. The irony here being the explicit purpose of Zinn's history was to break up the hagiographic one-dimensional gloriana of conventional American histories. To my mind, A People's History is one of the greatest legacies and outgrowths of the '60s civil rights movement and a part of the peaceful revolution everyone left of the plutocracy wages to this day. Including, I should think, you.
But you're even worse on Bernie Sanders, where the only reason for your disdain seems to be a deep-seated grudge rooted in your loyalty to the Clintons. At any rate, as best I understand your differences-- moral, political-- with Marsh I've always thought I was more firmly in your camp. But here, assuming Marsh's views of Zinn and Sanders more favorable, I really don't know, I do know I think you're way wrong.
Have a nice day.
I still think “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” are the best Wings songs the Beatles ever recorded. Almost as good as “Jet.” The rest of the album I can do without.
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that has since come to be known as Brit Pop. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music. For most people all this is a big thing in their lives in their teens and twenties; from then on interest wanes. Those for whom this phase ran its course at anytime in the 60’s to 90’s tend to think of themselves as having been around for the best of it. If the thee billion plus hits on Spotify’s most streamed songs is the measure, you could argue that it is now bigger than ever. But nobody seriously believes that any of them will go down in history as great ones. So what will? What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
Jerry Lee Lewis was the Robert Mitchum of rock 'n roll. Works both ways, as Mitchum had talent he never got to properly use in the medium he worked. Perhaps, the closest Jerry Lee came to fulfilling his talents was being cast in the late 60's musical Catch My Soul, where he portrayed Iago onstage in that recasting of Othello. Jack Good of Shindig produced the show and Bob Dylan on his Theme Time Radio series, played a couple of the songs Jerry Lee sang for the show which combined Shakespeare with rhythm and blues. Great stuff!
“The” Antichrist would’ve been too limiting, tying the announcement too tightly to a merely (!) eschatological context. “An” is vertiginously disorienting, nihilism announcing the terror of pure possibility.
I think that Natty Dread is the best album Bob Marley put out without Bunny and Peter and not necessarily because it was the first. I’ve never seen your take on Natty Dread though. Do you mind if I ask, or should I hold it over until the next AskGreil?
Sept. 1963, beginning of 9th grade, my parents uprooted the family to a place not far from where we grew up but where the social stratification was oppressive, unlike anything I had experienced. I spent a lot of time after school listening to the radio, and fall 1963 (after Little Stevie Wonder's "Fingerprints Pt. 2" sustained me for the summer), I particularly remember the amiable "Sugar Shack" as the best thing on the radio/Intercom my mom had installed in the new house. But "Sugar Shack" was burning out, and so I kept the radio/Intercom low. The first time I heard "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," it was low background, but I felt a consciousness shift. The next time I heard it, I ran to that damn radio and turned the volume full blast. As close as a depressed 14 year old could come to a born-again experience. It was like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" the next day in school: Everybody looked the same, but were different.
You capture it better than I did. Though I thought then and think now that ‘Sugar Shack’ was the worst record ever made. When I found out years later that it was the Fireballs Decca hired to dress up Buddy Holly’s last solo apartment tapes that confirmed my wish that they’d never been born.
Thanks so much, Greil. Yeah, they were basically a West Texas instrumental act that recorded out of Norman Petty studios in Clovis, N.M. When I processed "Sugar Shack" back then, I figured, "likely one-hit wonder." Access to some Fireballs albums did not change my mind.
"And then the huge worldwide hits "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," which were unbearable." - Thank you, I thought there was something wrong with me for hating both of these. For that matter, hating most of "Abbey Road."