April, Come She Will

It's (finally) "infrastructure week." And today's musical planks come from Paul Simon, Norah Jones, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Jimi Hendrix, plus a preview of Paul McCartney series.

To kick it off, here’s the timely “April Come She Will” with Paul Simon solo, 1965, in London before his stagnant partnership with guy named Garfunkel hit big. Don’t forget to comment, share, subscribe (it’s free).

News & Politics

The Onion: “Conservative Christian Deeply Offended at Rap Video’s Implication That Satan Is A Homosexual.”

Politico this morning: “The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech was completely effective in preventing infection among teens 12-15 in a late-stage trial, the companies said Wednesday. The study of nearly 2,300 teens showed the vaccine to be even more effective for that age group than for adults.”

Biden will unveil his giant $2+ trillion infrastructure plan today and it’s already under attack from the left and right. Labor is happy, climate activists not so much. Too much to go into here, but AOC, for example, says “needs to be much bigger.” Repubs say won’t cooperate at all if Biden sticks to plan to raise corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. But a brand new Morning Consult poll shows Americans overwhelmingly favor infrastructure investments paid for with tax hikes.

Howard Dean on Biden shedding bi-partisan instincts: “He’s nice and low key and basically saying, if you don’t want to cooperate then we’ll run you over. But he’s doing it in a nice language….He’s smiling while he steamrolls.”

Early takeaways from the upcoming Hunter Biden memoir, via NY Times. “In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.” Also: He attempted to quit crack with the help of ketamine infusions, psychoactive compounds and 5-MeO-DMT therapy, “which employs the gland secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.”

Wash Post: “Republicans seek to make vaccine passports the next battle in the pandemic culture wars.”

Water-Gaetz Scandal: When Axios reported yesterday that lunatic Rep. Matt Gaetz was considering quitting Congress for a job at Newsmax, Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted to the rightwing cable channel: “Matt Gaetz would be great for your network. You should do everything you can to hire him away from Congress. Thank you.” Then it emerged that Gaetz now reportedly being probed for relationship with girl, 17. Later he makes bizarre claims and goes on Tucker Carlson’s show and implicates himself. Josh Marshall mocks: “Any lawyer will tell you that in a situation like this the wisest decision is to start doing a lot of impromptu press interviews.”

Eli Grober of The New Yorker rewrites some classic opening lines from literature for the pandemic, here with Dickens, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Melville, Woolf:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But, mostly, it was the worst of times. In fact, not once had it felt like the best of times.”

“Happy families are all alike. They all have a back yard and a fire pit, and they’ve all been vaccinated.”

“In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since: ‘The host of the Zoom gets a copy of the chat.’ ”

“Call me Ishmael327. I am a Twitter bot, trolling your election.”

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, online. From a small business, and certainly not from Amazon.”

Wall St. Journal: “Democrats Look at Lowering Medicare Eligibility Age in Healthcare Package.” That would be from 65 to 60.

Eat prey, love: Okay, we love raptors here, so if you do, don’t miss this LitHub piece.

Watergate felon (and then talk radio presence) G. Gordon Liddy has died at age 90.

Lengthy but good summary of various issues involving Covid surge and vaccines and outlook for all of us by fellow Substacker, Zeynep Tufekci.

Music

I’ve already highlighted Richard Thompson’s soon to be published memoir Beeswing a couple of times but now Rolling Stone has the first excerpt. Coincidentally I am presently reading a Sandy Denny bio with a brief intro by her former guitarist. The excerpt in Rolling Stone focuses on the fatal Fairport van crash in 1969, which besides taking two lives (including RT’s gal friend), provoked a change in direction for the band, as they delved deeper into the trad-rock they would become famous for.

So the band would carry on. [Fiddler] Dave Swarbrick would join us, we hoped, and we would hold auditions for Martin’s replacement. By throwing ourselves into a new project, we would distract ourselves from grief and numb the pain of our loss. In 1969, no one thought of counseling or therapy. With British fortitude you soldiered on. We were too fragile; to think beyond fumbling forward while leaning on each other for support would have destroyed us.

Here’s a stunning song Sandy Denny wrote for Richard after the accident (she had been traveling in another vehicle, with future husband Trevor Lucas), and then below that RT himself, as usual very witty in introducing and then playing….Britney’s “Oops, I Did It Again.”

On this day in 1949: RCA Victor introduced the 45 rpm record. In 1958: Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” single was released and eventually made it to #8 on the charts. The original lyrics referred to Johnny as a “colored boy” who could play, but Chuck changed it to “country boy” to ease radio play. And in 1967: Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage for the first time, at The Astoria in London, on tour with The Walker Brothers, little-known Cat Stevens and, yes, Engelbert Humperdink.

So naturally we have Jimi, below, playing…”Johnny B. Goode.”

Film/TV

Not sure when this is going to surface but there’s a Paul McCartney-Rick Rubin doc coming….Here is the trailer.

Does the world need this? A Game of Thrones spectacular is now heading for Broadway.

Enjoyed little Aretha, in episode 3 of the new NatGeo series, sneaking into a Sam Cooke concert just as he was shifting from gospel to pop. Then, they fast forward to 1968, when she decides to speak out more politically, and sings, with MLK Jr. nearby, “Change Is Gonna Come.” Sam does not appear on the screen himself.

Song Pick of the Day

One of the sexiest songs of recent decades, Norah Jones, “Got to See You Again,” and what a groove.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.