What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love & Understanding?

Congress flees Capitol Hill but we are here with David Crosby, Elvis Costello and Larkin Poe, Van Morrison, and a Jason Isbell tribute to Danko and Manuel.

Well, this could be our theme song here at this Music & Politics newsletter. Of course it’s the Nick Lowe-penned classic, below, in a recent version with a strong Elvis C vocal and backed by the wonderful Larkin Poe sisters and band. As always—please share and comment and maybe subscribe (it’s still free).

News/Politics

Texas governor declares Covid contained even with 7000 new cases there every day. James Corden: “Businesses are now completely open and even the mask mandate has been lifted, to which most Texans replied, ’What mask mandate?’” Headline at The Onion: “Texas Governor Announces State’s Morgues Now Allowed to Operate at 100% Capacity.” Stephen Colbert: “Glad some states are reopening in time for everyone to no doubt make very good choices on St. Patrick’s Day.”

At one point last night 33 of top 50 bestselling books on Amazon were from Dr. Seuss, including #1-6.

The decision to recess Congress today for the rest of the week due to threatened militia attacks on the Hill drew criticism. For example, Rick Perlstein: “The people making this decision to suspend Congress are skirting breaking their oath of office. Mobs do not get to dictate when the United States Congress conducts its business.” Lucian Truscott IV: “And what do they do? They fold.  They go into recess for four days and leave all those troops and cops out there along the fence guarding a seat of government that’s empty and not doing the business of governing.  In effect, they let the stupid fucking Three Percenters win.  They wanted to shut down the government like they did on January 6 for eight hours, only this time they’re shutting down the government for two days.”

Samantha Bee last night exposed setbacks for women during pandemic even as media keep asking, “Can women have it all?”

Before the recess, House Democrats pushed through a sweeping expansion of federal voting rights late Wednesday over unified Republican opposition, “opening a new front in a raging national debate about elections aimed at countering G.O.P. attempts to clamp down on ballot access,” the NY Times reports.

The bill, adopted 220 to 210 mostly along party lines, would constitute the most significant enhancement of federal voting protections since the 1960s if it became law.” But the measure “appears to be doomed for now in the Senate, where Republican opposition would make it all but impossible to draw the 60 votes needed to advance. Democratic leaders have vowed to put it up for a vote anyway, and progressives were already plotting to use Republican obstruction of the bill to build their case for jettisoning the legislative filibuster in the months ahead.

Corruption Watch The Daily Beast: “SCOOP: Rep. Jim Jordan failed to report nearly $3 million in campaign raising and spending over the last two years. The FEC wants to know why. It could be tied to a new backdoor payment scheme for GOP digital fundraising.” NY Times: “Former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao misused her office – including to support her family's shipping business — an internal watchdog report found. The Trump Justice Department chose not to pursue the a criminal investigation.” David Corn at Mother Jones covers here.

Politico decided to find out via a Morning Consult poll if Jim Jordan was right—the GOP has now become the “beer and blue jeans” party (with an influx of working-class folks) while the Dems are now the “wine and cheese” party. The fun findings: Repubs favor beer over wine by 27%-24%, while with Dems it’s 29%-22% for wine. No survey question on blue jeans vs. chinos though.

David Frum on Trump getting vaccination in January in secret: “When a president takes a vaccine in public to demonstrate its safety—that's leadership. When he takes it in private to protect himself [politically]—that's cowardice and selfishness.”

Politico: Bipartisan senators introduce bill to strip Biden of war powers. “Senators from across the ideological spectrum signed onto the Kaine-Young bill as co-sponsors on Wednesday, including Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). [Tim] Kaine and [Todd] Young have introduced similar efforts before, but Biden’s airstrikes in Syria breathed new life into their push.”

Well, give her credit for admitting it: Molly-Jong Fast at Daily Beast admits, “My Cuomo ‘Crush’ Turned Out to Be Stockholm Syndrome.”

Music

Terrific new interview with bad boy David Crosby by Joe Hagan at Los Angeles Times for 50th anniversary of his first much-derided solo album, If I Could Only Remember My….What? which was described by Lester Bangs as “a perfect aural aid to digestion when you’re having guests over for dinner.” Croz dishes on two old pals no longer talking to him (Neil and Graham), defends his many menage a trois, gets a little cruel about ex-girlfriend Joni, hails George Harrison and criticizes Phoebe Bridgers—and others—who smash their guitars, and so on. Here’s the 80-second vocal exercise from that solo album that he loves. Well, at least it’s better than “Mind Games,” but then again, what isn’t? Worth seeing, however, was the recent doc about him directed by Cameron Crowe.

This video below goes back to the fabled Monterey Pop Festival, though it’s not in the film. Here Croz with the Byrds does a song they had recorded, the classic “Hey Joe.” What’s amusing is that in his intro he mentions a guy (Tim Rose) and group (Love) who also did early versions and then casually mentions that it’s now also been recorded by a new guy who the crowd will soon meet—one Jimi Hendrix. What’s amazing is that there is zero reaction from the crowd at the mention of Jimi’s name. That would change forever—after Jimi came out later that night.

On this day in 1966, John Lennon is quoted in the London Evening Standard, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now." Few pay it much mind at first, but then all hell breaks loose when it is cited in the U.S. press four months later. Organized protests (“Come and burn or smash your Beatles records” ) and boycotts emerge. Good glimpse below and John’s attempt to mitigate:

Film

Danny Boyle is directing a limited series for FX on the punk band Sex Pistols, and Rolling Stone has the first photos and some casting news. “Imagine breaking into the world of The Crown and Downton Abbey with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent,” Boyle previously said in a statement. Hopefully the guy who traveled with, and wrote about them most—my old Crawdaddy mate “Mighty Chuck” Young—gets his due.

Happy to see that the fine and scary music doc on Bert Berns and Bang Records (first home of Van Morrison before much trouble arrived) is back at streaming sites this month, narrated by Stevie Van Zandt, and here is the trailer. And below: a very boyish Van and Them live, 1965, with “Mystic Eyes” and a little number called “Gloria.”

The other day we helpfully gave you The New Yorker updating 1980s movies for a more PC today. Now they propose new “horror film tropes” much-needed to replace the many tired ones. Two samples below.

The Young Republican: This Jacob Wohl look-alike, who wears pin-striped suits to school and has a portrait of Ben Sasse pinned up in his locker, offers a timely, insufferable element to any horror film. This character will be best known for grating observations about how the serial killer “is a classic Marxist, obsessed with taking something that he has no right to,” and that the real monster isn’t the giant, tentacled monster ravaging the town square but America’s obsession with P.C. culture.

The White Guy with Dreadlocks: An easy, painless kill in the first act.

Others include: “The Zombie Who Calms Its Victims by Suggesting That Death Is Sweeter Than Medical Debt,” “The Murderous Haunted House That’s Sitting on Some Killer Real Estate,” and “The Gas-Station Attendant Who, in Addition to Warning the Teens That It’s Not Safe to Drive Into the Hills Late at Night, Asks Some Tricky Questions About Gender and Sexual Identity.”

Media

Buzzfeed: “NYT columnist David Brooks draws a second salary for leading an Aspen Institute project funded by Facebook, Jeff Bezos' dad, & others. He didn't disclose this to readers. The Times refused to say if the paper was aware of Brooks' second salary.

Wired on fake news from right-wingers dominating on social media:

New research released today … appears to be the first to show empirically that the relationship between accuracy and engagement varies dramatically based on where the source aligns on the partisan spectrum. According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels of engagement per follower compared to any other category of news source…. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t.

Books

Actress Emily Mortimer with a piece at the NY Times asking why and how Nabokov’s Lolita managed to actually get published in its day and is still not reviled today—after her re-reading found that the girl in question is 12 at the start and not, say, 16. Of course the answer mainly is: it’s a true work of literary genius, one of the greatest ever, no matter how offensive Humbert and his actions are. Mortimer has an interesting angle as the daughter of an attorney who defended artists charged in obscenity cases—including the Sex Pistols and Hubert Selby (for his Last Exit to Brooklyn).

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

On this sad day in 1986, Richard Manuel of The Band, one of the greatest vocalists in the rock era, died by hanging after a gig in Florida. He was 42 and long in thrall to drink and drugs. Here’s a tremendous tribute to him (and fellow bandmate Rick Danko, also gone way too soon) by my man Jason Isbell in a stunning live performance that did not make the Austin City Limits broadcast. Like Jason, I can sometimes “hear poor Richard singing from the grave.”

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.