It's All Right, Have a Good Time

Who killed the Tanden nomination? Plus: Jon Batiste goes from "Soul" to "Pops," Elvis visits "Heartbreak Hotel" and Sandy Denny captures Richard Thompson.

A great, bouncy way to start your Wednesday below with a little number from the Golden Globe-winning Soul, with Jon Batiste and Celeste doing the fun Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions hit, “It’s All Right.” And down the page today you will find Jon talking about his fellow Louisianan (and musical man of the century), Louis “Pops” Armstrong. Don’t forget to share or comment—or even subscribe (it’s free).

News/Politics

Politico this morning claims the Biden decision to pull the Neera Tanden nomination did not come because Bernie was going to vote against her but because they needed Murkowski to cancel a Manchin “no”—and either she finally signaled she would not vote “yes” or the White House’s negotiations to swap her something sweet for Alaska became too public. Murkowski claims she was still pondering when Tanden was taken off the table.

Least shocking news of the week: “Fox News says former WH Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has joined the outlet as a contributor.” The Daily Beast called it the “addition of a known and frequent liar to the Fox News roster.”

News break: Turns out that the 200-pound gold-colored “sculpture” of Trump that was the hit of CPAC was not manufactured in Mexico (embarrasing enough) but in…China.

Fun tweet yesterday from Dolly Parton, who helped fund early Moderna research: “Dolly got a dose of her own medicine.” She also posted a little video of her singing “Vaccine, Vaccine” to the tune of “Jolene.” Let’s hope this encourages her many fans to do the same.

We are at a key turning point in the “vaccine story” as another one has been approved and Biden says shots will be ready for all by June 1. That means the “vaccine story” is now the hesitancy by many to take part, and here the media (including Fox) can play a large role. Brian Stelter of CNN wrote last night:

I reached out to Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University and a CNN medical analyst, to get his thoughts on all of this. "The media is going to have to focus on vaccine hesitancy in communities of color and also hesitancy in the GOP," Reiner told me over email. "I think the media should start talking about how being vaccinated changes someone’s outlook and daily life (my wife and I are in a restaurant this weekend for the 1st time in a year). The CDC will soon have guidance about this. Talking about what one can do after being vaccinated (going out to eat, seeing family, going to the gym, traveling) will incentivize more people to get vaccinated. We should be hearing stories from vaccinated people in communities of color. Why did they chose to get vaccinated? How did it change their lives?"

1920s editorial cartoon:

The talk on Fox News yesterday was not FBI Director Christopher Wray at a hearing announcing there was no evidence that fake Trump supporters were involved in siege at Capitol on January 6th, that domestic terrorism threat is now “metastasizing,” and that white supremacists are the biggest worry. Instead the focus was on six Dr. Seuss books taken off the market due to “offensive images.”

The latenight hosts, of course, had a lot of fun with this. Jimmy Kimmel imagined some updated Seuss titles: How the Grinch Appropriated Native American Culture. Hop on Pop—With His Consent. Horton Hears a “They.” There’s a Wocket in My Ethically Sourced Sustainable Pocket. No Eggs or Ham (for vegans) and Yertle the Gender-Fluid Turtle. Trevor Noah: “We’re going to cancel Dr. Seuss books just because they’re racist? Uh, then what are the racist kids going to read, huh?”

By the end of the “cancel” day, however, Variety was reporting: “More than a dozen books penned by Dr. Seuss hopped onto Amazon’s best-sellers ranking.” His And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, now pulled, was my childhood favorite, Chinaman and all…

CNN: “The Department of Defense inspector general has issued a scathing review of Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) during his time serving as the top White House physician, concluding that he made ‘sexual and denigrating’ comments about a female subordinate, violated the policy for drinking alcohol while on a presidential trip and took prescription-strength sleeping medication that prompted concerns from his colleagues about his ability to provide proper care.”

I noted this briefly not long ago but now here’s a long profile on the hero of Hotel Rwanda (played by Don Cheadle) now accused of being a “terrorist.”

The great Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic warns today: A new wave of state-level voter-suppression bills constitutes the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot.

NBC, meanwhile, on the critical Arizona voting rights case that went before SCOTUS yesterday: “Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two Republican appointees and potentially pivotal votes in the case, appeared to be wrestling with the arguments as they asked tough questions of lawyers on both sides. A significant moment during virtual argumentscame when Arizona GOP lawyer Michael Carvin connected the validity of the Republican-backed laws to the party’s interest in winning elections. When asked by Barrett what the state Republican Party’s interest in the case was, he replied: ‘Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.’”

Important new piece at The New Yorker: Is fracking causing illnesses in Pennsylvania kids?

On February 13, 2019, WPXI, a local TV station, aired the first story on Ewing’s sarcoma cases among young people in Washington County. Soon after, David Templeton and Don Hopey, reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, documented at least twenty-seven cases of Ewing’s diagnosed between 2008 and 2018 across Washington, Greene, Westmoreland, and Fayette Counties. Templeton and Hopey raised the possibility that the cancers could be caused by radioactive fracking waste in the water. The parents, who’d known about one another only through word of mouth, were shocked by the scale of the problem. Valent told me that, when she read the article, she thought, “Holy crap, there are all these other kids!”

I love Jacob Lawrence and now another one of his missing paintings has turned up in NYC—in the dining room of a nurse. Great story. "After she had connected the dots, she called the Met, but her messages went unreturned."

Music

On this day in 1956, Elvis Presley made his first appearance on the Billboard charts when "Heartbreak Hotel" debuted at #68. Executives at RCA, his new label (after leaving Sun), had once called the release a mistake. Now the song would rise to #1 on the pop chart for eight weeks plus 17 weeks at the top of the country chart. "Heartbreak Hotel" would later be ranked #45 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Few today can name the co-writers: Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton. Her son was the actor and singer Hoyt Axton who wrote several popular songs himsef including “Joy to the World,” “No No Song,” and for Steppenwolf, “The Pusher.”

So what was the story behind “Heartbreak Hotel”? Accounts differ wildly but according to the writers it was inspired by a newspaper article about the suicide of a lonely man who jumped from a hotel window. Axton offered it to a popular duo first but they turned it down calling it “too morbid.” Months later, Elvis agreed to make it his first RCA single if he could be given one-third of the writing credit and royalties. He recorded it after adding all-stars Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer. RCA’s studio was more professional than Sun’s loose approach and engineers found that Elvis refused to stand still but jumped around, meaning the recorded sound was flipping around—so they had to mic the general area instead. They did retain Sun’s vocal “echo,” however.

How important was its impact? George Harrison, Robert Plant and Keith Richards, among many others, have said it changed their lives. John Lennon: “I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We'd never heard American voices singing like that. They always sang like Sinatra or enunciated very well. Suddenly, there's this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on.” And, yes, this was the song Bill Clinton played on his sax in his famous TV appearance on Arsenio Hall’s show. But you can still marvel (above) at one of E’s first TV appearances. Uncut magazine called it the second most important cultural event of the rock and roll era (presumably The Beatles on Ed Sullivan was #1 or Dylan going electric?).

Bunny Livingston, the last surviving Wailer (with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh gone), has died at the age of 73. He became better known as Bunny Wailer starting in the 1970s.

Terrific dozen minutes below from Jon Batiste, interviewed by Walter Isaacson, about the most important musical creator of the century (sorry Elvis), their fellow Louisiana native, Louis Armstrong. Yesterday marked the anniversary of Pops beginning his last musical engagement, at the Waldorf (an episode portrayed in a fine recent off-Broadway play). Jon even plays a bit of Louis though he does not get into his influence as a vocalist on top of everything else. Here Jon does Louis’s early classic “St. James Infirmary.” Below, Pops (the father of us all) in 1929 himself, practically inventing modern playing and singing, with “Dallas Blues.”

Books

Excerpt from new book about tragic story I know well—on major league baseball’s first player to come out as gay, Glenn Burke, and what happened afterward.

Special hot promo today—$1.99 for e-book—for my current The Beginning or the End, on how Truman and the military sabotaged the first movie, from MGM, on the atomic bomb and Hiroshima. Deal is at Amazon and other leading outlets as well.

Song Pick of the Day

Last Friday, I posted Richard Thompson’s cover of the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind.” It proved to be the most popular link/music/video on the site that day, so cheers—a lot of fellow RT fans here! So with that confidence, let’s turn to his former Fairport colleague, the great Sandy Denny. I didn’t know until recently that this staggering song below was a portrait of troubled young Richard. Ex-partner Linda Thompson told me that it captures Richard “like a Polaroid.” BTW, the “hard times” in the lyrics included the crash that killed a Fairport member and Richard’s girlfriend. Note: I posted earlier Sandy’s equally great “John the Gun.” Don’t miss that, either. Also posted her Led Zep tune. But okay, enough.

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.