Petty Remark: "It's Good to be King"

Sundance film fest announces prizes, impeachment rolls ahead, and a special probe answers the eternal question: Did Nixon smuggle pot for Satchmo?

As impeachment fever rises today in Washington, most GOPers still won’t back down, but Trump, in free fall, more than ever realizes “It’s Good to Be King.” Also below: Did Richard Nixon really help Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong sneak his pot stash past customs at a Moscow airport? Plus a haunting Dinah Washington/Max Richter mash-up. And a fresh look at The Day the Music Died (except it didn’t). As always: share, comment, subscribe—it’s still free.

A good re-naming by Colbert: “Mar-A-Gulago.”

Yes, the Golden Globes nominations are out, here is complete list, if you care, and I have to say that of the ten films up for best picture—none made my year-end Top Ten though a couple were close. Good to see some love for Shira Haas and Unorthodox, and the always great Carey Mulligan and Vanessa Kirby. As usual when I see reporters listing “snubs,” I say, ha, they deserved…to be snubbed. One highlight though: Was it just a year ago that Natalie Portman pointedly announced the “five nominees for best male director”? This year three out of the five are women.

Surprise reported by Politico late last night: “Rep. Adam Schiff wants to be named California’s next attorney general — and he has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blessing, according to four Democratic sources familiar with the matter. Schiff, a former prosecutor who currently serves as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has lobbied California Gov. Gavin Newson to appoint him to the role, those individuals said.”

Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis has died suddenly, based on his wife's post on his Facebook page. Photo below by Nacio Jan Brown captures Rennie with Fred Hampton (subject of upcoming movie) and the late Tom Hayden. I never met him but was just a few feet away on a couple of occasions at Chicago ‘68 protests. Update: NY Times now with first full obit, which covers final decades, including his promotion of the young Guru and the mammoth Astrodome event in 1973, which we covered at Crawdaddy. And yes, he was widely mocked at that time. Old friends say he stuck to his ‘60s beliefs and was great guy to the end.

Charles P. Pierce boils down the House’s impeachment case against Trump as posted yesterday:

"His mob." Those two words are the heart of the case brought against the former president. There are literally hundreds of videos supporting the proposition that, in every way that mattered, this was indeed the former president's mob. The mob included his personal lawyer and his eldest son, who joined him in inciting them, and it doesn't matter how many times the former president said the word, "peaceful" out loud, he knew what he was doing as clearly as he knew what he was doing back in 2015, when he would tell his crowds to "beat the crap" out of protestors.

Jimmy Kimmel last night on Trump’s brief for his impeachment trial: “On the very first page of their first legal filing, they wrote, ‘to the honorable members of the Unites States Senate.’ They misspelled ‘United States.’ And we’re off!”

Michelangelo Signorile: “How many of you ever thought we'd be reciting, ‘First they came for Liz Cheney and I did nothing, then….” NY Times today charts her “perilous” position.

Classic: Lin Wood, one of Trump’s most deranged attorneys claiming vote fraud in November, now under investigation for…wait for it…voting illegally, according to Atlanta TV. To the north, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is considering prosecuting Steve Bannon in state court following his pardon by Trump.

TV/Film

Sundance annnounced its festival awards late last night and the doc we featured yesterday, Summer of Soul by Questlove, took home the top prize in that category. CODA, about a girl’s struggle to support her deaf family, directed by Sian Heder, won the feature honors. The Lucy Walker doc on California wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade, also made a big impression. Its producer, Holly Becker, also helmed a film I was deeply involved with awhile back, Original Child Bomb.

The “GameStop” crisis is already heading to Hollywood, courtesy of the Winklevoss twins and the writer whose book inspired The Social Network.

Finally watching the HBO series from Marty Scorcese re: Fran Lebowitz. We published one of the first national pieces on Fran at Crawdaddy way back in the mid-1970s, which I will have to dig out. In the new series I appreciate her love of books (to read and as actual objects), understand why she hates sports, and sort of agree with her that musicians and cooks exist on a higher plane because they actually bring the most pleasure to people. Wild story about her being chased down 7th Avenue by mountainous Charles Mingus, who she met—and I met—for the same reason in the early 1970s: writing for the little rock magazine in the East Village called Changes, edited by his wife, Susan Graham. Then there’s her quip about allowing boxing, where men beat up men, but cockfighting is illegal—even though we love, love, love to eat chickens….

Did Satchmo Trick Dick?

A few days back I mentioned that I was reading the galleys for a book coming in May,  The Magic Years,  by Jonathan Taplin,  best known as tour manager for Dylan and The Band and producer of The Last Waltz and Mean Streets.   I've come upon a wonderful story told to him by Miles Davis covering two of the most important Americans in my life:  Louis Armstrong (as the single most influential musical creator of the past century) and Richard M. Nixon (a dark presence for my entire time on earth and co-subject of one of my books, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady).   It goes something like this:

Louis was waiting in a VIP lounge at Orly Airport in Paris for his flight to Moscow in 1959 when in walks Vice President  Nixon.  An amateur piano player, Nixon was a major Satchmo fan and he greeted the jazzman accordingly.   Then they shared first-class on the same Pan Am flight, as Nixon was off to meet Khrushchev.   As they were landing, Louis got a bright idea.  An enthusiastic pot smoker, he was carrying his usual large stash in one of his two suitcases,  and who knew how tough the Communist customs agents might act.  Nixon had said if there was anything he could do for Louis in Moscow, just let him know. So now Satch asked him if he might like the honor of carrying his (pot-burdened) valise until they got to their rides.  Fan boy Dick, ever naive, was happy to comply, and Armstrong thanked him profusely before they parted….

It seemed to this perpetual cynic a little too good to be true, or at least embellished a bit?  Was this another case of "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend?"  When I looked further, it seemed pretty solid--or at least it had been repeated for decades in print with few flags raised, and usually with Miles as the source.  And why would Miles lie?

Then I found an appraisal a few years back by one of the most respected  Armstrong experts (and Facebook friend) Ricky Riccardi.  He's written two important books on Louis and is director of research collections at the Armstrong House and Museum in Queens.   He had long questioned the Miles story but never wrote a detailed debunking until former Nixon aide Roger Stone--our Zelig!--had repeated it in a popular Daily Caller piece and then a book. Stone had made the story even richer.  Nixon had "muled" three full pounds of Satchmo dope and when told afterward what he had done, asked innocently:  "Louis smokes marijuana?"  Stone also had changed the year to 1958 and the venue to Idlewild Airport in New York, so now the dreaded customs agents were Americans—and they had been tipped off to the incoming contraband!

Riccardi pointed  out, among other things, that Armstrong never left the  country in 1958, and for that matter, did not visit  Moscow in 1959, and there's no other non-anecdotal evidence to bolster either telling.  He added,  "Let's stop and think about this for a minute. Louis Armstrong had been smoking marijuana on almost a daily basis since the 1920s. He'd flown around the world numerous times since the early 1930s. But during this one trip, he's dumb enough to carry three pounds of marijuana through customs? And now he's sweating profusely? And Vice President Nixon just happens to be there at the same time? Really?"

And so on.  You can read much more here.   Yesterday I asked Riccardi if he had learned anything since then to change his view of the Nixon yarn.   Here's how he replied:

Yeah, that blog I wrote pretty much still stands.  As I mentioned, I consulted the Nixon library and we couldn't even find Louis and Nixon in the same place except for a day or two in Japan in 1953. The thing I stand by is Louis was a very seasoned smoker and knew how to travel without getting caught. His drummer Barrett Deems told a mutual friend of mine that his secret was stashing it in a pillowcase. So the whole thing of Louis getting nervous at the airport and suddenly sees a way out of it through the Vice President.....nah, doesn't hold up (though I wish it did because it IS a great story!)"

Louis, below, in under three minutes demonstrating why he was both the most influential American musician and vocalist of 20th century.

Yes, today is the day the music did not quite die in 1959 (though Buddy Holly did), and here’s Facebook friend Rob Stoner—most famous from Dylan’s Rolling Thunder— on recording the Don McLean epic:

“American Pie” recording session, 1971 at the Record Plant, NYC:

The gig featured Paul Griffin (piano), Roy Markowitz (drums), David Spinozza (guitar) and Rob Stoner (bass, harmony vocal). Listen to Buddy's "I'm Gonna Love You Too" and you will hear the melody which McLean "borrowed" for this song. The players on this date have been associated with several characters depicted in the song's lyric: Griffin and I both worked with the Jester [Dylan], I worked with Roger McGuinn, Roy Markowitz was in Janis Joplin's band, I did a modeling job with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans who recorded “The Bible Tells Me So.” Jack Douglas, the assistant engineer on the session, became the producer of many albums by the leader of the quartet which “practiced in the park.”

One day I will dig out one of the favorite Crawdaddy pieces I edited: a Tom Miller scoop, based on hidden “documents,” showing that Buddy, Bopper and Valens were murdered by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI so that American kids would forget rock ‘n roll. Many readers and media took it seriously, for awhile.

The NY Times out today with favorite string quartets picked by a number of noted musicians and writers. Naturally, my droogies, Ludwig Van (subject of book that I co-wrote and film I co-produced) garners more choices than others. You can listen to some extracts.

Song Pick of the Day

I came upon one of my favorite modern “classical” pieces by accident a couple of years back while watching the excellent documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor. Much of the soundtrack utilized haunting portions of a unique mashup of the fine tune (“This Bitter Earth”) by legendary songstress Dinah Washington and a short piece (“On the Nature of Daylight”) by Max Richter, renowned creator of much modern music for all sorts of purposes, including movies and notably the HBO series The Leftovers and My Brilliant Friend. I didn’t know that the Richter composition had been used earlier in Martin Scorcese’s Shelter Island and then Arrival. Here is the mash-up in full.

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.