Gimme Shelter--It's Just a Shot Away

Storm still threatening so Biden urges wider vaccination. Plus: Music from the Stones, Amy Winehouse, Velvet Underground and Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.

I missed this until today but I take it the whole world, including Hollywood, is talking about this 87-second, single take (a la Scorcese) film masterpiece shot via a drone as promotion for a bowling alley in Minneapolis. Listen for bits of dialogue, including a Lebowski reference. Enjoy, then Comment or subscribe—it’s still free! No gutter balls here!

News & Politics

Stephen Colbert on the anniversary of Covid being declared a pandemic: “I think we all remember where we were when we heard the news, because we’re all still there.” And: “Of course, it’s also the one-year anniversary of the first time I Lysol-ed a banana. But not the last.”

Was good to see Biden using part of his first national address to call out the rise in anti-Asian racism amid the COVID-19 pandemic, calling such attacks "un-American."

Well, that was quick: Geraldo now says he won’t run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio after all. Poor dreams dead in O-hio.

The latest claim by a woman against Gov. Andrew Cuomo—actual groping—has been referred to Albany police and “may rise to the level of a crime.” Meanwhile, the state assembly is officially looking into an impeachment avenue. Today’s front-page of the NY Post: “CUO MUST GO.” Reaction by the great illustrator Steve Brodner:

NFT…WTF? If you need to catch up with what the hell NFTs are, here’s a good primer at the NY Times in reporting on the record-setting auction for a digital artwork—by one Beeple—for $69.3 million. “The sale, at Christie’s, for the purely digital work was the strongest indication yet that NFTs, or ‘nonfungible tokens,’ have taken the art market by storm, making the leap from specialist websites to premier auction houses.” Blockchain chain—chain of fools?

The Alabama House has voted to overturn a decades-old ban on yoga in K-12 schools—but the bill says the moves and exercises taught to students must have exclusively English names.

Could be a self-portrait, below, if I had done it, but actually by Roz Chast. Perhaps you can relate.

Twitter is aiming to make its live audio feature available to all its users by April. Meanwhile, YouTube has taken down more than 30,000 videos that made misleading or false claims about COVID-19 vaccines over the last six months.

Wash Post: “The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men, a Washington Post analysis has found.” Clay Bennett image:

Tucker, out: Senior military officials are condemning the Fox News host for saying this week that Biden is making a “mockery” of the armed forces through efforts to recruit and keep women in the service. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs during her service, drew wide acclaim for saying it succinctly on Twitter: “F*ck Tucker Carlson.” Then she added, “While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women. Happy belated International Women’s Day to everyone but Tucker, who even I can dance better than.”

Major Atlantic profile of Big John Fetterman, now running for the U.S. Senate in PA suggests he “wears shorts in February” but “is tired of being reduced to the appealing oddball from Braddock.” And: “He’s been simultaneously tagged as a radical left-winger by state Republicans and a worrisome sellout by some progressives.”

Music

Should have stayed mum: Winston Marshall, banjo player for Mumford & Sons, says he’s “taking time away from the band” to examine his “blindspots” after praising right-winger Andy Ngo for his book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. “Congratulations @MrAndyNgo. Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,” Marshall tweeted Saturday.

On this day in 1967, the Velvet Underground (and Nico) released their first album, with its Andy Warhol banana cover, and it would prove enormously influential for, among others, drag queens, garage rock bands, and druggies. This was the album that inspired the famous quote from Brian Eno: It sold poorly but "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" It was recorded in a crap NYC studio and cost maybe $10,000 to make, partly funded by Warhol, and was soon rejected by Columbia, Atlantic and Elektra. It ended up at Verve Records largely because Tom Wilson—yes, former producer for electric Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel—had just moved there from Columbia. The original, costly, cover had a zipper on the banana. When unzipped it naturally revealed a peeled banana. Nico soon departed and Lou Reed fired Warhol as manager. Wilson produced their 2nd album as well.

Here is the (for me) best song, “I’m Waiting for the Man,” about trying to score $26 in smack up in Harlem, along with vintage footage from the Warhol “Factory” and elsewhere. Or if you prefer, a later fine version by Reed’s pal, David Bowie.

The following year on this date, The Rolling Stones started recording their stand alone single “Jumpin' Jack Flash” with new producer Jimmy Miller in London. Mick Jagger has said that the lyrics concern the need to break out of the psychedelic acid haze of their brief Their Satanic Majesties Request period. It’s oft-quoted “crossfire hurricane” line was inspired, Keith has said, by him being born in 1943 during the German air assaults on Britain. As for the title, Keith claimed that he and Jagger wrote the lyrics while staying at Richards' country house. Supposedly they were awakened one morning by the sound of gardener Jack Dyer trudging past a window in his work boots. When Mick asked what the noise was, Richards responded, "Oh, that's jumpin' Jack." Keith: “I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase ‘Jumping Jack.’ Mick said, Flash,’ and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it.”

Here is a Stones “alternative” performance of the song from 1968 that may surprise you in its raw delivery. While it’s said to be from the Ed Sullivan show, that’s unlikely. Or it was a one-off in Ed’s history.

And on this date in 2007, Amy Winehouse made her USA debut on the Letterman show, doing her autobiographical “Rehab.” It would be her only top ten hit in this country and would win three Grammys. She would be dead a little more than four years later.

Film/TV

HBO Max starts airing today a rather surprising three-part series on the great bestselling Chilean writer Isabel Allende. Of course there is much on her twenty-four books (including The House of Spirits) but it also covers her daughter’s death at 29, her exile in Venezuela, and her role as a feminist icon.

Allende’s writing is political and her life is too, with "Isabel" portraying her activism as part accident and part heroism, avoiding the temptation to lionize her. The most obvious example occurs after the assassination of Allende’s uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende, in a coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet as Chile’s brutal dictator. Isabel goes to check on one of her colleagues from the magazine and sees the violence inflicted on him by the new regime. Worried for his life, she helps him get out of the country. And she keeps helping people escape, while knowing that doing so endangers her family, until her children are kidnapped in a warning from the state….

In the end, the miniseries makes Isabel Allende feel both exceptional and relatable, her story tragic and triumphant. Like her writing, "Isabel" is personal and political, mixing the two to tell the story of a whole human being who faces a harsh world bravely but imperfectly. The result is inspirational, a reminder of the challenges Latinas continue to face and also a pathway to transcending them.

For a good time check out this wild trailer for the 1963 C-movie Hootenanny Hoot, on the folk craze of that era. No name actors and singers (the Brothers Four were past their prime), until out of nowhere ….Johnny Cash shows up! Watch, it’s a real ….hoot.

So, I take it there’s a new South Park “vaccination special.” Your move.

Books

A few weeks back, I posted three separate highlights from the upcoming Jonathan Taplin memoir mainly covering his years in music helping to manage tours for Dylan and The Band, as well as work on The Last Waltz. Now there’s a promo video focusing on the famous Band debut in San Fran when Robbie was ill (or suffering from stage fright) and had to be hypnotized to get on stage….

Song Pick of the Day

One of our finest songwriters, Gillian Welch, with partner and guitar virtuoso Dave Rawlings, rock out with “Caleb Meyer”—as the would-be rapist gets his just rewards (a broken bottle slicing his neck).

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 and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.