Cartoons Friday!

Plus Billie Eilish's bold message to billiionaires, a new song from Lucinda Williams, and the key tune in the Springsteen bio-pic not by Bruce.

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE.

So if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, see links at very bottom of today’s newsletter, thanks.

First, Stephen last night:

Next, we like this:

Accepting the Music Innovator Award at the Wall Street Journal Magazine Innovator Awards in NYC on Wednesday, Billie Eilish urged the audience, which included Mark Zuckerberg, to help those in need, given the current state of the world and the United States. Zuck did not applaud, they say.

Nice piece at The Guardian with the great Mavis Staples taking questions from readers.

And now this: During a key late scene in the new Springsteen bio-pic, a song appears, not by Bruce, that caused my wife and I to nudge each other in the theater, as it is one of our all-time favorites—and one no one else there probably recognized in the slightest.

It comes as a climax to the main story of Bruce and Jon Landau sticking to their guns and making Columbia release “Nebraska” still acoustic. Bruce is now moving to California so Jon brings a tape over to play Bruce one last song to mark the end of this process. It’s Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, around 1956, before Sam launched his pop career, his gospel body of work among greatest ever created by anyone in the century. It’s still playing as aerial shot tracks Bruce driving away in his car.

But how did this esoteric (for a mass audience) song wind up in the movie? From Far Out magazine:

During one scene, when Strong plays Springsteen a song to try and tap into his more emotional side, he opts for Sam Cooke’s heartfelt ‘The Last Mile of the Way’. This was a suggestion from Springsteen himself, as when deciding what track Landau would have played in that moment, Strong reached out to the people who knew best.

“I said to Bruce, ‘What I’m looking for is: What song would you play if you wanted to save your friend’s life?’ He said, ‘Let me think’, recalled Strong. Half an hour passed, then an hour, before Strong finally received the rather humble response, “You’ve stumped the band.”

Eventually, after hours of deliberation, Springsteen settled on ‘The Last Mile of the Way’, a song that seems to inspire truth, hope and heart to all of those who listen.

And here is Sam and the Stirrers, “The Last Mile”:

Another great, Lucinda Williams, has a new album coming in January, and yesterday she released the first cut from it, the rocking and highly topical “The World’s Gone Wrong”:

From Tunes to Toons

Photo Finish

My new daily feature, from my camera to you, today: Cristo’s “Gates,” after the storm, Central Park, NYC.

Books by Greg Mitchell include: Best-seller “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Film JFK Tried to Kill.” Award-winners “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” and “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” A New York Times Notable Book, “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas.”

Companion books to his recent PBS films: Memorial Day Massacre, Atomic Cover-up, The Atomic Bowl.

Also, two acclaimed books with the late Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America” and “Who Owns Death? Against Capital Punishment.” On the media and Iraq, “So Wrong for So Long,” with a preface by Bruce Springsteen. And in a different vein, “Vonnegut and Me,” “Journeys With Beethoven” and “Joy in Mudville: A Little League Memoir.”