Rock Me on the Water

If you need to soothe your fevered brow: some music from Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, Pink Floyd, Sandy Denny and Willie Nelson, and a new book on California in the '70s.

Given the tragedies in Atlanta and Boulder, it seems apt to open by re-posting Sandy Denny’s staggering “John the Gun.” Put away your guns of steel / Death comes too soon for all. From Boulder to Birmingham and elsewhere. Feel free to leave a Comment. Go here to read updated quotes from reviews and responses to my Atomic Cover-up film, still streaming this week. And don’t forget to subscribe, it’s still free!

News & Politics

Trevor Noah: “Uber has started offering Covid tests. Yeah, if you get in the car and you are still able to smell weed—you just tested negative, my friend. Congrats!”

The Onion: “Jeopardy! Guest Host Dr. Oz Under Fire for Claims He Could Have Cured Alex Trebek With These 3 Tips.”

Stephen Colbert on Sen. John Kennedy claiming we don’t have a gun control problem but “an idiot control” problem: “Oh, we definitely have an idiot control problem. It’s people who don’t recognize that this country has long had a gun problem…John Kennedy.”

Almost gun heaven, West Virginia: Sen. Joe Manchin says he opposes House bills passed earlier this month expanding background checks—claims commercial transactions should be background checked but “if I know the person, no.” Politico newsletter this morning: “An assault weapons ban is out. Biden might be pushing for this, but no one is talking about it on the Hill right now — at least not seriously. Even background checks are a long shot. What’s more likely: executive action.”

NY Times finally obtained videos of the fatal Jan. 6 attack on Officer Sicknick.

Lubbock or leave it: While attention was rightly focused on ten massacred in Boulder on Monday, a little to the east this seemingly Q-related incident was transpiring in the Lubbock environs of Texas:

An Arizona man has been arrested after he cut off and held at gunpoint a caravan of National Guardsmen transporting COVID-19 vaccines to Matador, Texas around 7 a.m. this morning, according to Idalou Police.

Larry Harris, of Willcox, Arizona, is accused of following three National Guardsmen vans from Love’s Travel Station on East Regis Street in Lubbock to about two miles east of Idalou. Police say Harris attempted multiple times to run the vans off of the roadway. He then turned his vehicle into oncoming traffic on Hwy. 62/82 and stopped the vans. He then pointed a gun at an unarmed National Guardsman, identified himself as a detective, and demanded to search the vehicles and ordered the rest of the unarmed guardsmen out of their vehicles at gunpoint.

Harris told police he thought the people in the vans had kidnapped a woman and child. All 11 of the guardsmen were in uniform.

YouTube says it will not remove a controversial live-streamed video of the mass shooting in Boulder despite criticism of the streamer’s tactics and commentary.

Headline of the Day from The Atlantic: "America Is Now in the Hands of the Vaccine-Hesitant" But here’s Willie Nelson singing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” below, for a new Covid vaccination PSA.

North Korea just conducted its first missiles tests under Biden. So here we go again.

L.A. Times: "Experts on extremism are warning about a troubling shift in the right-wing QAnon movement toward a new vein of conspiracy that blends anti-Chinese and anti-Jewish tropes with fears of vaccines and a global plot to take over the world."

Politico on stinging the police: “In private email exchanges and on public social media platforms, Democratic elected officials, operatives and aides continue to battle over whether the issue that has come to be known as simply ‘defund’ is so radioactive that it nearly cost the party its majority — or whether it had any impact at all on the outcome.”

Wash Post: By April 22, when President Biden convenes world leaders for an Earth Day summit, he is expected to unveil a new, aggressive plan to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2030…. At the same time, Biden officials are keenly aware that promising too much, too quickly could mean relying upon questionable assumptions — specifically, what Congress is willing to fund and what policies future administrations pursue.”

Very interesting story here, which I can’t hope to summarize, but it involves a Yale faculty member named Bandy Lee. I have followed her since she put together a collection of essays that became a bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, with an intro by my frequent collaborator, Robert Jay Lifton. The “problem” was: She and some of the others clearly claimed that clearly unstable Trump was mentally unfit. This was an “issue” because, as psychiatrists, they are, supposedly, bound by the so-called “Goldwater Rule” which suggests they are not supposed to discuss a person’s mental capabilities without personal contact. Now she’s been fired by Yale for such, and is suing the school. So follow the link, please.

Music

Pink Floyd has announced plans to finally release live album of their fabled 1990 Knebworth show (minus Waters but, ha ha, with plenty of rain). Here from that gig is one of my favorite songs by any group, “Comfortably Numb,” though could have been re-named for this, “Dangerously Wet.”

On this day in 1958, Elvis reported to the draft board in Memphis. In 1973, during a Lou Reed show in Buffalo, a fan jumped on stage and bit Lou on the ass. The man was thrown out of the theatre. Reed completed the show. Perhaps he changed one tune to “I’m Beginning to See the Bite.”

And in 1977, Fleetwood Mac released “Dreams” which, you might be surprised to learn, was their only #1 single despite massive popularity in that period. You may prefer this stripped-down Stevie demo.

Books

Speaking of ‘70s California bands….I noted last month that longtime political reporter and cable news talker Ron Brownstein was coming out with a book taking the title of an early Jackson Browne song, Rock Me on the Water, with the subtitle: “1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics.” Now it’s here, and reviewed today by The NY Times, with the reviewer calling it “engrossing.” Excerpt:

He points out that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, just as 36-year-old Jerry Brown, promising a fresh vision, was elected California’s governor. (Brown went on to date Linda Ronstadt.) But this book is more interested in how politics and Hollywood ricocheted off each other. One chapter considers Jane Fonda and her left-wing political awakening during her marriage to the activist Tom Hayden. The earthquake they wanted to set off in Washington never came, while in the cultural realm, as Brownstein chronicles, America convulsed with change. More permissive attitudes about sex and drugs, a perception that the American dream was not only unattainable but rotten at the core — this new sensibility charged up the films, music and television that Los Angeles exported to the rest of the country, and the world.

Song Pick of the Day

So in light of the above, here’s Jackson singing a song that made his career, “Rock Me on the Water,” in 1976. Is he still trying to get down to the sea somehow?

Greg Mitchell’s film, Atomic Cover-up, will have its American premiere at the Cinequest Film festival March 20-30. Go here to read more, watch trailer, buy tix. He 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.