Palace Intrigue and a Tower of Song

America still feeling Harry. A "rapey" Pepe Le Pew accused. Plus music from Tom Petty, Ella Fitzgerald, Simon & Garfunkel and Aretha--and Lou Reed inducts Leonard Cohen.

On this day in 1958, Big Records released “Our Song” by a high school duo from Queens called Tom & Jerry. Real names: Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel. It was a followup to their earlier “Hey, Schoolgirl” single, which had reached #49 on the charts thanks to $200 in payola paid to money-grubbing deejay Alan Freed. The new one, however, did not chart. Give it a listen below, you are bound to smile. Exactly six years later—on this same date—the pair went into a studio for Columbia and recorded a little ditty titled “Sounds of Silence.” As I recalled last month, it was purely acoustic and went nowhere but became a hit a year later when, amid folk-rock mania, Bob Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson added electric instruments to the track…Anyway, enjoy! Then maybe Comment—and subscribe, it’s still free.

News & Politics

As we noted yesterday, Joe Biden had to send his dog Major back to Delaware for a spell after an “aggressive” episode. Jimmy Fallon: “Apparently Major was jumping, barking and charging at people. You’d think after the last four years the White House staff would be used to that.” Seth Meyers: “Under the last administration that kind of behavior would have made you press secretary.”

Piers Morgan, reviled critic of Meghan Markle, has suddenly left ITV’s big morning show in Britain. Stephen Colbert: “Piers Morgan is such a baby, someone at Buckingham Palace just asked what color he’s gonna be.”

Major NY Times profile of Chuck Schumer today reveals: “He once cried so hard at the movie Free Willy that his daughters left the theater out of embarrassment.” Also: “His staff has imposed some rules for him when appearing in public: ‘No singing. No dancing. No hats.’”

Nixon “plumbers” finally getting their day, as HBO set to start filming in my neck of the woods (Hudson Valley) for a five-part series, starring Woody Harrelson (as E. Howard Hunt) and Justin Theroux (as G. Gordon Liddy). It’s based on Egil “Bud” Krogh’s book and public records, and titled The White House Plumbers— from producers of Veep and Succession (so my old buddy Frank Rich?). A call for extras as gone out locally here.

Politico this morning: “The House is set to pass the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package today and Americans are eager for it to happen, according to our latest Morning Consult poll. Three-quarters of respondents said they support that package, with strong backing across the political spectrum: ninety percent of Democrats, more than seven in 10 independents and nearly six in 10 Republicans.” Plus: 60% of Dems back statehood for D.C. but just 22% of Repubs (and we can guess why).

Jimmy Carter has put out a statement, citing his work as an election watchdog overseas, in which he said he’s “disheartened, saddened, and angry” by the GOP’s attempts to limit voting access in Georgia. Andy Borowitz imagines it coming to this:

Republicans in the Georgia Senate passed a new bill that would allow some voting in certain situations. Senator Harland Dorrinson, who sponsored the bill, said that the legislation stopped short of other Republican proposals that would have banned voting altogether, but was still “a good step forward….Under this bill, voting in Georgia will be legal but rare,” he said. “This legislation will stop the runaway growth in voting.”

Dorrinson said that the bill would prevent a repeat of what happened during the January runoffs, when “voting was allowed to spiral out of control….People were voting as if it were their right,” he said.

Reuters: “If anything, the biggest backers of Trump’s false election-fraud narrative—such as Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—have been rewarded with a flood of grassroots donations, more than offsetting the loss of corporate money. And contributions from both small donors and rich individuals looking to fight the Democratic agenda have poured into the party’s fundraising apparatus.”

The Onion: “CDC Launches Ad Campaign Featuring Racist Mascot In Effort To Get More Conservatives Vaccinated.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter on Tuesday: “One year ago tonight, in front of millions of loyal viewers, Fox's Sean Hannity accused the media of ‘scaring the living hell out of people’ about the coronavirus and said ‘I see it, again, as like, let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.’”

You will see more progressive Dems challenging moderate incumbents in 2020, as the party machinery in Congress has now abandoned its former rules banning work with contractors who aided such challengers. AOC was a big advocate of dropping that rule.

Wash Post: “Amazon fights aggressively to defeat union drive in Alabama, fearing a coming wave.”

The interest shows how seeds of unionization efforts at one U.S. warehouse could blossom into organizing drives at its other facilities and force Amazon to adopt workplace rules it finds restrictive. Among other problems, unions could dent the company’s flexibility, limiting its ability to rapidly hire and cut workers to meet shopping demands that spike and recede throughout the year, said former company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about internal policy.

And it explains why Amazon is fighting aggressively to defeat the union drive in Alabama, as well as quieter ongoing workers’ efforts at facilities from Iowa to the United Kingdom. That’s a strategy it has followed throughout its 27-year existence, including using hard-nosed tactics to stop the Alabama drive from a well-worn playbook.

Wendell Pierce, who co-starred with Meghan Markle on Suits, has slammed everyone involved with the Oprah interview for taking attention away from the pandemic tragedy. Pierce said he found it "quite insensitive and offensive that we are all complicit in this sort of palace…gossip in the midst of so much death." Re-run of the Oprah interview show coming Friday night.

Patrick Freyne’s take on the interview in the Irish Times is getting a lot of love on this side of the pond. It opens: “Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev write in The Atlantic: "The internet has taken us back to the 1890s: Once again, we have a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful people whose obligations are to themselves, and perhaps to their shareholders, but not to the greater good. But Americans didn’t accept this reality in the 1890s, and we don’t need to accept it now.…"

Music

Quite a day in history, even beyond the twin Simon & Garfunkel episodes cited at the top.

1954: The Threepenny Opera opened in Greenwich Village, a revival of the German production from 1928. Of course, Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin had hits with "Mack The Knife," but here’s Queen Ella’s version from 1960.

1963: When "Little" Stevie Wonder, age 12, performed "Fingertips" at the Regal Theatre in Chicago the performance was recorded. Released as a single in May, it became, purportedly, the first live recording to hit #1.

1967: Aretha Franklin issued her first album on Atlantic Records, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. Though the album is most famous for “Respect,” the title track is absolutely riveting in its own right, here the following year:

2003: Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines sparked wild controversy in the run-up to the Bush invasion of Iraq when she told a London audience: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." Wide protests and boycotts in the USA ensued.

2008: Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame by Lou Reed. In his acceptance speech, Cohen paraphrased a famous 1974 quote about Springsteen by record producer Jon Landau: "I have seen the future of rock & roll—and it is not Leonard Cohen." Then he recited “Tower of Song.” All here:

Film

Wash Post headline: “How Pepe Le Pew Became the Latest Characters in the Culture Wars.” Let’s recall, in reference to the Looney Tunes skunk, “a classic bit from Dave Chappelle’s 2000 standup special, Killin’ Them Softly, in which the comedian says that Pepe, whom he laughed at as a kid, later through an adult lens makes him realize: What kind of … rapist is this guy?”

Over the weekend, Pepe’s name resurfaced when Deadline reported that the lecherously predatory skunk won’t appear in the sequel “Space Jam: A New Legacy” due out in July, after a scene involving Pepe — shot by the film’s first director, Terence Nance — was cut. Director Malcolm D. Lee took over the movie nearly two years ago.

Deadline reported that Pepe Le Pew will “likely be a thing of the past across all media,” and the Hollywood Reporter also noted that “there are no current plans for the controversial cartoon skunk to return.”

Song Pick of the Day

Of course, Tom Petty was very open from the start about his debt to The Byrds, and especially the singing and Rickenbacker of McGuinn. But for their song “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star” he borrowed for the live show (below) something else from them: a trumpet solo. The Byrds had taken the daring step in 1967, when rock groups rarely added horns, in importing the little-known jazz man Hugh Masekela, from South Africa no less, for the significant trumpet solos for their track. His “Grazing in the Grass” instrumental would be a hit the following year.

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.