Tom Waits for...Everyone?

Plus: More "Q" tips, the battle over a Christopher Hitchens bio, music from Tom, Carole King and Aretha, and an "inventive" new film.

If you were dozing last night, you may have missed the news that Rep. Liz Cheney (who supports impeachment) retained her position as a GOP leader only because the vote from her peers was by secret ballot. Earlier they had cheered for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) because they had to take a public stand. The Senate impeachment vote coming up will be…public…so you can probably kiss that one goodbye. See preview in Stiers cartoon below. Then on to the usual news, views and tunes. And maybe subscribe, it’s free!

Politics/Media

Trevor Noah last night on Newsmax backing down in humiliating fashion under legal threats from Dominion: “Remember, Newsmax is like Fox News after it stopped taking its meds. But at least for a minute, Dominion managed to sue them into behaving like actual journalists.”

White Dopes Are Punked? Tom Edsall today with a useful, if exhausting, compendium of research, with links, on why and how QAnon -type conspiracy thinking has now become entrenched in and out of the Republican party.

Jeff Sharlet warns: “The real winner in everything Marjorie Taylor Greene does is that guy nobody’s talking about now. What was his name? Oh yeah—Josh Hawley. Watch out. Whether she knows it or not Greene’s running interference for the really dangerous ones.” Colbert show last night opened with a song “tribute” to Greene’s wacko lies.

But new Quinnipiac poll: Pelosi favorable rating: 47% McConnell favorable rating: 21%.

From Lucian Truscott IV (cartoon from The New Yorker below):

As of yesterday, 1779 residents of South Dakota have died from COVID.  That is one out of every 500 citizens, the highest death rate per capita in the country.  One in eight have contracted the disease, also a national high.  By any measure, the great state of South Dakota doesn’t have much to be proud of, but you wouldn’t know that listening to the state’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem.  Commenting on the state’s pandemic record today, Noem bragged, “We did have losses, we did have tragedies, but we did get through it better than any other state.”

That cop in Columbus (OH) who shot and killed an unarmed black man back in December—within moments of approaching him—was finally arrested and charged with murder late yesterday. Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha Killer, is missing and authorities in WI are looking for him. He got sprung on $1 million bail thanks to a sketchy online fundraising campaign attracting the support of those who view him as a hero.

What a week for country music star Morgan Wallen. One day we learn that his latest record had gone #1. A few hours later: TMZ posted a video showing Wallen using a racial slur after a night out. This is the same creep who was supposed to appear on SNL awhile back but got dumped after a video surfaced showing him partying in a bar without a mask. (SNL later welcomed him back.) Now, post-slur, reports the NY Times, “Spotify, Apple and some of the largest radio conglomerates in the country have removed Wallen from playlists and airwaves, while the singer’s record label and management company, Big Loud, announced that it would ‘suspend’ his contract indefinitely.” Oh, the name of his latest album: Dangerous.

Richard Marx comments: “Whether it’s Mel Gibson or Morgan Wallen, spare us the bullshit ‘I was drunk’ excuse. Booze doesn’t make you a racist piece of shit. It just occasionally reveals that you always were one.”

Progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan has long been one Joe Biden's most outspoken critics, from the Left. But in a new article he announces that he has been pleasantly surprised so far: "We cannot afford to lose sight of the big picture. Now is a moment for the left to be emboldened, not embittered…. Forget 100 days: Biden's first 10 days look more like the fulfillment of a progressive wish list than a great centrist betrayal. Neither Bill Clinton nor Obama began their presidencies with such energy or ambition."

Books

I knew the late Christopher Hitchens a little—he even raved in print about my Upton Sinclair campaign book. And I am still friends with his longtime agent, Steve Wasserman. So I have been following reports of how Wasserman and Hitch’s widow, Carol Blue, have been discouraging people from cooperating with an upcoming biographer. Now there’s a full story today. Their note to warn people off included this:

We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton.

It’s not such an unusual request in some cases, but this one set off a debate, with the common view from that side expressed by David Nasaw, a well-known biographer, who opposes “engaging in a sort of pre-emptive censorship, intended to frighten away not just this one writer but any others who might not, for one reason or another, pass muster with them….It’s really counterproductive in a dozen ways. These are smart people, and they had to have known that all this was going to do was heighten interest in the biography and in the writer — and encourage people to talk. I don’t quite get it.”

Wassserman replies: “Just because Mr. Phillips has a contract to write his book in no way entitles him to the cooperation of others.” Stay tuned.

Music

This month we marked the 50th anniversary of an album that set all sorts of sales records in its time, while also winning the Grammy for album of the year and is still ranked by Rolling Stone (last as looked) as the 25th greatest of all-time. Of course, we speak of Tapestry by Carole King, which also bolstered the brief era of “singer-songwriter” dominance (see: Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Jackson Browne etc.) and, following on Joni Mitchell’s success, new avenues for women (Carly Simon, to name just one). So that’s pretty monumental. Full story here.

Of course, for some of us, Carole hardly came out of nowhere. In fact, just weeks before Tapestry arrived, I had reviewed, favorably, her first true “solo” album, the rather obscure, Writer, for a couple of rock magazines. But long before that, I knew her as the writer, going back to her late-teens, of one hit after another, with her husband Gerry Goffin. Come on now, sing along: “A Natural Woman,” “Up on the Roof,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Chains,” “The Loco-motion,” “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “One Fine Day,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and on and on. As a Byrds fan, I caught up to her in a somewhat different mode with their fine covers of “Goin’ Back” and “I Wasn’t Born to Follow”—the latter later featured in the immortal Easy Rider. Oddly, she also co-wrote (and this shocks people when they learn it) for Phil Spector the once-banned single for the Crystals, “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).” I will spare you the lyrics, but you can imagine.

Anyway, she broke up with Goffin, maritally and professionally, and since she never had a stellar singing voice and her record label was the tiny Ode (run by Lou Adler) one had to wonder what kind of impact she might make as a recording act, even though she had moved to songwriter heaven, Laurel Canyon. Well, we sure found out, and fairly quickly. Turns out the earth moved and it was not “too late, baby” for Carole. She went on to make many other albums, some good, some not so, all doomed to never match the freshness and quality of Tapestry, while remaining a strong concert draw. Then there was the hit Broadway musical. And who can forget at her Kennedy Center honors when she really lost it up in her luxury box as Aretha performed “A Natural Woman,” which Carole had revived for Tapestry back in the day.

Film

Care to watch an 18-minute film short now being promoted as possible Oscar pick? I met the director, and daughter of the subject, Lyn Goldfarb back in the early 1990s. I had just written my award-winning book on Upton Sinclair’s leftwing and highly influential race for governor of California in 1934, The Campaign of the Century. She had produced the Oscar-nominated With Babies and Banners and was now involved with a multi-part series for PBS on The Great Depression. Inspired by my book, they wanted to devote much of one film to that campaign, with Lyn to direct. Of course, I agreed to come on board as consultant. I met with Lyn (who lives in Los Angeles) and others with the series and passed along the bulk of my visual archives and interview contacts.

The episode, titled “We Have a Plan,” turned out great and you can watch a few minutes of it here (it doesn’t seem to be on DVD or streaming any longer). Lyn and I proposed a couple of other film projects after that but none quite clicked. I went on to write more books and she directed other films, including Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race.

Now she has taken a more personal approach, with her new movie short, Eddy’s World. It has already been featured in several festivals, and The New Yorker has been featuring it on its site for most of the past two months. It’s very much in the running for an Oscar nod. Eddy is her father, a famed inventor of toys—including the classic Yakity Yak chattering teeth—and is still at it today at the age of ninety-eight. From The New Yorker:

Goldfarb went on to invent more than eight hundred toys, including the popular games Battling Tops, KerPlunk, and Shark Attack! The documentary demonstrates the lingering joy that Goldfarb takes in the small, precise work of inventing—work which, in the course of his long life, came to include his family members…. “The toy industry is a noble industry,” he says. “Say you sold a million games for that year—that meant a million families were playing that game with their kids.”

Song Pick of the Day

Back in mid-1970s, I got loaded a couple of nights in NYC with Tom Waits, in his boozing heyday, and lived to tell the tales, which I will do here some day soon. He also sent me a poem which we ran at Crawdaddy, and I still have the original. For now, here’s his classic but newly-relevant mind-twister (with animation) at a time when we all have to worry about what the Qs and Proud Boys and various other nut cases might be “building in there.”

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.