Bearish Music, Bad MAGA, and Hot Cartoons

WIth tunes by Paul Simon, Lou Reed-John Cale, Neil Young, Van the Man.

Friends and fans, asking for a bit of help here. While I appreciate the continuing strong interest from all of you (free) subscribers, it’s harder and harder to reach new readers, thanks to politically-inspired suppression of feeds at Twitter and Facebook—the new reality for many. But you might help attract more readers here if you’d take the trouble to “share” below, or post a link on your other outlets, or recommend to a friend in email. Thanks again for your support!

Weak and awful move of the week so far has to be Lisa Murkowski casting the decisive vote in the Senate to move the Big Bootyfull Bill along and then slamming it afterwards as still needing a lot of reform. Fortunately an embarrassing video with her “explaining” that which will live on.

More headlines to deplore:

Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit

Trump Withholds Nearly $7 Billion for Schools, With Little Explanation

This season of “The Bear” on Hulu, like the previous one, has become something more to endure than enjoy, but still offering one or two good musical selections in most episodes. In the middle ones we’ve had everything from Jason Isbell to the Ronettes and Otis Redding and “Slim Slo Slider.”

There was a lengthy excerpt from a Paul Simon song that opened one episode and it sounded oh-so-familiar from the mid-70s but the chorus seemed to veer off. I was not crazy: It was an unreleased demo of an early version of his much-revered song “Something So Right” that originated with different lyrics and was then titled “Let Me Live In Your City,” and here it is:

Also used at length at the opening of another middle episode a song I always loved from the Lou Reed-John Cale “Songs for Drella” album about Andy Warhol, “Slip Away (A Warning).”

And just to show that two of my fellow geezers, who topped my favorite list around 1970, were still going (strong?) yesterday in Europe. First, Neil Young, with a stirring “Like a Hurricane” (Willie Nelson’s kid on keyboard here):

….and Van Morrison (he’s lost a lot of weight, hope Covid didn’t get to him) still praising “Gloria,” before stalking off after three minutes:

From Tunes to Toons

Companion e-book for my film “The Atomic Bowl” just published, more here. Film starts streaming via PBS on July 12.