BUDDY, THE BEATLES & BOB
Today's hot news and politics, cartoons and quips, and music from Linda Ronstadt, Buddy Holly, The Quarrymen (a.k.a. The Beatles), the Sex Pistols--and Bob Dylan's little-known "electric" debut.
Enjoy, but don’t forget to share, comment, tweet, RT, post, subscribe (it’s free) before it’s too late…
News & Politics
Stephen Colbert on Jeff Bezos buying MGM: “Guess what? All the outtakes from The Apprentice are owned by MGM.” He labeled this the “holy mother of DVD extras.”
Jimmy Kimmel: “Can you imagine Donald Trump on trial? Putting that little orange hand on a Bible, suddenly the Bible bursts into flames. He escapes in the chaos like a Batman villain.” Seth Meyers: “If Obama were under investigation, we would be talking about that, too. But the only news Obama makes these days is showbiz-related. In fact, if you hear about ‘Obama investigations’ it’s probably a new show on HBO Max.”
The Onion, after the San Jose massacre, again carried the enduring headline for which it has become famous: “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
Happy Filibuster Day! First GOP blockage of major Dem move expected today re: Jan. 6 commission. Sen. Dick Durbin: “We have a mob overtake the Capitol, and we can’t get the Republicans to join us in making historic record of that event? That is sad.”
Politico with a big “scoop”: Nationwide shortage in porta-a-potties looms for this summer, caused partly by a “shortage in plastics to make portable toilets, thanks in part to international petroleum market instability and the winter Texas freeze.” And now, dang it, the public will expect a higher level of maintenance and cleanliness post-Covid. Still, folks “have varying opinions on portable toilets, but most often people see them as a necessary evil.”
The great Steve Brodner on the proudest of boys, Ted Cruz:
You voted fine, Oklahoma: The state’s Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter (R) announced his resignation on Wednesday, saying that “certain personal matters that are becoming public will become a distraction for this office.” The resignation comes after his extramarital affair with a state employee was revealed.
Pig Out: A Michigan town council refused to count a resident’s Juliana pig as a therapy animal, citing concerns that cows and chickens could be next.
No vax, no brains. Newsweek:
A Tennessee woman is facing multiple felony charges after police said she endangered the lives of COVID-19 vaccination workers by driving her car into a vaccination site. The Blount County Sheriff's Office said Virginia Christine Lewis Brown, 36, sped her SUV through a closed-cone course and into a tent where at least 15 people were working at a vaccine site in the parking lot of Foothills Mall in Maryville, Tenn. Witnesses said they overheard Brown shout "no vaccine!" as she came within "inches and feet" of running over workers.
Gates Keeper: A NY Times investigation has found that Bill Gates showed a reluctance to act on numerous workplace misconduct complaints against the manager of his fortune, Michael Larson. At least six people, including four employees at Gates’s money-management firm, Cascade Investment, complained to Gates about Larson.
Dead kids remembered: During fighting this month between Israel and Hamas, at least 66 children under the age of 18 were killed in Gaza and two in Israel. These are the children who died, in a very welcome and moving NY Times photo spread.
Black eye still shows: Senior managers at the Associated Press admitted fault in a gathering with employees on Wednesday in the firing last week of Emily Wilder, who was being targeted by right-wing commentators over her political activism in college. However, they continued to fully defend the firing and appeared only concerned about bad publicity and the effects on staff morale.
Yet a NY Times reporter got away with this: Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet on Wednesday that said the coronavirus “lab leak” theory—now being seriously studied as real—has "racist roots." Mandavilli was widely criticized for the assertion—especially within her own newsroom. Meanwhile, Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured.
Juan Gone: After all these years of taking a beat as lone liberal, Juan Williams has abruptly left Fox’s pathetic The Five. A new designated victim will be chosen.
Exxon shareholders bucked management by installing at least two new members—some call them “activists”—on the oil giant's board in a push to make Exxon more aggressive on addressing climate change.
Headline of the Day, from Wall St. Journal: “Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime.”
Music
On this day in 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets released 'That'll Be The Day” which cemented his/their status and reached #3 on US charts. The song was inspired by Buddy and friends attending the classic John Wayne film The Searchers which featured Wayne’s catchphrase, "That'll be the day." It would also become (allegedly) the first song to be recorded by The Quarrymen, a little group that subsequently became known as The Beatles (whose name was inspired by The Crickets). Here’s is their fine, hard-rocking version, John on lead vocals, even trying out Buddy’s hiccup style.
Of course, Linda Ronstadt would do her own strong version 15 years later.
And because I love you, enjoy a bit of Buddy himself—as a hologram—performing it himself.
On this date in 1963: The album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released by Columbia in the USA. To this day, relatively few know that Bob “went electric” around then, not in 1965. That’s because he had recorded an electric number, “Mixed Up Confusion,” which Columbia released as a single earlier—but dropped from the album! Here it is (another take is similar but the piano is upfront).
Just found this from a great Tom Junod piece from 2014 in Esquire, re: Dylan.
"We played with McCartney at Bonnaroo, and the thing about McCartney is that he wants to be loved so much," Jeff Tweedy says. "He has so much energy, he gives and gives and gives, he plays three hours, and he plays every song you want to hear. Dylan has zero fucks to give about that. And it's truly inspiring. The joke on our tour was that his T-shirt should say PISSING PEOPLE OFF SINCE 1962. If you dropped people out of a vacuum from another planet and planted them in a field somewhere so that they could study us, and there's a guy half-decipherably singing jump-blues songs almost in the dark, and there's people watching him—well, it wouldn't make any sense…."
Song Pick
Also on this date in 1977, The Sex Pistols’ single “God Save The Queen” was released in the UK and soon banned by TV and radio and in some record shops. Still, it would peak at No.2 on the UK charts and sdpark a riotous US tour at peak of punk. I suppose some of you have heard of it but never heard it or watched them in their Johnny Rotten/Sid Vicious “glory,” so here ya go.
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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. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. 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.