Can't Quit You, Baby
Biden's speech seemed to go down well with sane listeners. On a lighter note, enjoy news of an Eric Andersen doc plus music from Springsteen, Willie Nelson & Norah Jones, and the great Otis Rush.
After one good flurry of “shares” a couple of weeks ago after I begged, cajoled, warned and threatened, that’s back to only a handful a day. Your support much needed….Enough said. Meanwhile, I’ll mention again the new daily feature at the very bottom of the page, My Photo of the Day. If you haven’t subscribed—it’s still FREE.
News & Politics
Jimmy Fallon: “The Capitol took center stage tonight, and I got to be honest, it was nice to see someone behind the podium who wasn’t wearing deer antlers and a pelt.”
The Onion swears they heard Sen. Tommy Tuberville whisper, “Wait, Is That The President?” halfway through Biden’s address. Was that before or after Ted Cruz nodded off and Lauren Boebert donned that foil blanket?
Key reality from Ron Brownstein: “Historians are legitimately comparing the scale of Biden's ambitions to FDR & LBJ. cBut FDR in '33 had a 23 seat Senate majority; LBJ in '65 a 36 seat majority. Biden is trying to do this w/ a 50-50 Senate & slim House edge. He's crossing a high wire w/ very little margin.”
After listening to Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who could use a good teacher, actually came out against public schools: “Federally funded school from age 3 to 20 doesn’t sound like education, it sounds like indoctrination. All at your expense. By force in the form of taxes.”
Headline of the Day, from the Daily Beast: “They Went to D.C. on January 6. Now They’re Running for Office.” Meanwhile, a jury convicted a New York man of threatening to kill Democrats in the days after the Capitol riot.
Rick not rolled: Three days later Rick Santorum still has a job at CNN after saying there was “nothing” in America before white colonizers came -- and that Native Americans haven’t added much to American culture anyway. And Spotify is standing by Joe Rogan after his plea to young people to skip the vaccine. He might as well have said, “Use Axe but don’t Vax.”
Pillow Talk: It’s too ridiculous to go into, but Mike Lindell did appear with Jimmy Kimmel last night, who also introduced a fake Lindell (even more fake than the original).
Long-awaited report: Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a landmark report accusing Israel of apartheid crimes against humanity in its conduct towards Palestinians—and calls on the international community to pursue investigations (for prosecutions) of Israeli officials in order to end abuses. The report indirectly endorses some aims of the BDS movement, by arguing at minimum for companies to cease activities that contribute to apartheid in Israel and for states to issue sanctions, travel bans, and asset freezes against Israeli individuals and officials complicit in it.
Fun Read: When the Cellos Play, the Cows Come Home.
Three men were finally indicted yesterday on federal hate crime and attempted kidnapping charges in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, the Black man shot to death while jogging in Georgia last February. They were already facing state murder charges. Meanwhile, a judge in North Carolina denied a request to immediately release video footage from body cameras worn by sheriff’s deputies in the recent shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. The judge said that Brown’s family could view the footage.
And back to the George Floyd murder: Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports: “Feds plan to indict Chauvin, other three ex-officers on civil rights charges. Justice Department officials discussed arresting Chauvin in the courthouse if he were found not guilty, according to sources.”
From Steve Brodner at his Substack.
That’s all for menthol: The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to bar menthol cigarettes nationwide in a plan to be released today. The menthol ban would be one of FDA’s most aggressive tobacco reform efforts since the agency first began regulating the industry in 2009. Unlike many of the administration’s plans, a ban on menthol cigarettes or flavored cigars does not require congressional approval.
Kendrick Carmouche has a chance to become the first Black jockey in 119 years to win the Kentucky Derby.
Music
Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch will write the music and lyrics for an upcoming musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Welch will compose the music alongside Thomas Bartlett.
Born on this date in 1933: Willie Nelson, who below pays tribute to another icon, Waylon Jennings, with Norah Jones.
Then, on this date in 1934 the great bluesman Otis Rush was born. Here he performs an astounding version of his hit, “I Can’t Quit You, Baby.”
Anita Lane, the singer-songwriter who co-wrote some of the Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ most memorable songs, has died at age 61.
Film
I was fan of singer-songwriter Eric Andersen as far back as (ouch) 1965 and his first folk album featuring three songs oft-covered by others since: “Thirty Boots,” “Close the Door Lightly When You Go,” and “VIolets of Dawn.” He got a bit lost in the rest of the folk rocking and psychedelic ‘60s but briefly found stardom with his well-received Blue River album in the early 1970s, which we loved at Crawdaddy. He faded again—his followup album to that was lost accidentally or on purpose by Columbia—but has always maintained respect and a decent audience, despite moving abroad, as he has expanded his scope and literary ambitions. Good friends with everyone from Patti Smith to Joni Mitchell.
Now he’s the subject of a new doc, The Song Poet, that has gained good festival notices and now arriving for streaming—see trailer below. Also the subject of a Rolling Stone Q & A this week. And film may be available for free viewing via PBS site now.
A Kane Mutiny: CNN reports, "The online reviews database Rotten Tomatoes has unearthed a negative 80-year-old write-up of Citizen Kane, stripping the cinematic classic of its perfect score among critics and demoting it below movies including Paddington 2 and The Terminator… It apparently underwhelmed one critic for the Chicago Tribune, whose lukewarm review has come back to tarnish the movie's legacy eight decades after it was written."
Books
Good Vanity Fair piece on how The New York Times handled its own connection to the Blake Bailey scandal, as the story of a woman allegedly raped by him in the home of one of the paper’s top writers after a dinner.
Song Pick of the Day
On this day in 1976: After a gig in Memphis, Bruce Springsteen took a cab to Graceland and scaled the wall of Elvis’s home (this was with Presley still among the living). A guard apprehended him. Below, on the epic occasion of his concert in East Berlin in 1988 before the fall of the Wall —which I covered in my book The Tunnels—Bruce covers Elvis’s ballad, “I Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
My Photo of the Day
My take on the Bodega, Ca. church made famous by Ansel Adams decades ago (and then got a cameo in Hitchcock’s The Birds).
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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.Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.