Artists of the 50s

Who were the greatest artists of the 1950s? Artists whose careers blossomed in the 50s, either reached their zenith or (in the case of artists with long careers) their first flowering? Peter Jones and I put this list together off the tops of our heads -- certainly we've forgotten people.


Allen Ginsberg
Bill Evans
Chuck Berry
Edward Albee
Elvis Presley
Fats Domino
Hank Williams
J. D. Salinger
Jackson Pollock
James Baldwin
Jerry Lee Lewis
John Updike
John Coltrane
Johnny Cash
Miles Davis
Robert Lowell
Sonny Rollins
Walt Kelly
Willem deKooning
Willie Dixon


All men, which probably says something negative about the way our minds work, but it also says something about the 50s. So who did we miss?

Transitions at The Gallery at Opus 40

Battle of the Decades

Jerry Lee takes the last one with 12 (maybe 13), but it wasn't unanimous, and it wasn't the whippersnappers who dampened the Killer's great ball of fire.
Elvis gets 2, or maybe 1, depending on who Caitlin's "ditto" was for, the vote just above hers, or the majority.
One for Patty Smyth, one for Frankie Laine, both of them deserving.



40s on 4*
Duke Ellington
The Gal From Joe's http://www.lala.com/#search/the%20gal%20from%20joe%27s%20duke%20ellington


50s on 5*
Playmates
Beep Beep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-h27xvUGbo


60s on 6
Steam
Na Na Hey Hey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsaTElBljOE


70s on 7*
Orleans
Love Takes Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WESBLOPiuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdSa5GMWCmY&feature=related

80s on 8* Wham!
I'm Your Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwm-okcskVA


90s on 9*
Jane's Addiction
Jane Says
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh-5FI21s6M



Not hard to figure out what gets the gate first here. What is hard to figure is why "Beep Beep" would inspire this arty film-student video.

And for me, second out the door isn't hard either, but there are a few George Michael fans here who might disagree with me. I can't see how.

Jane's Addiction did some interesting stuff, and this is representative of it, quirky and ranty but arresting. Although I have to say I think Sergio is better off -- and don't worry, Sergio, there's nothing much good on TV anyway. And I definitely wouldn't have dinner with Jane.

For cultural relevance, you'd have to go with Steam, who became a ballpark staple first for White Sox fans and then for the world. As I understand it, this was cut as a demo with a scratch vocal -- they were planning on coming back and adding real lyrics to it later. But someone recognized its terminal catchiness, and a group was hastily thrown together to tour behind the song.

For musical value, you'd have to go with Ellington, Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges. Here's another neat version of the song by Nina SImone -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwBqW26FBgo

But I'm going with nepotism. Orleans and "Love Takes Time."

Recently on NY Writing Examiner

Recently in NY Writing Careers Examiner:

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http://www.examiner.com/x-2862-NY-Writing-Careers-Examiner

Who not to submit to

Who not to submit to.

Besides authority, that is.

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Battle of the Decades

The battle of the icons. John goes up over Fats by 9-5. Only slightly less iconic, the Tempts get 2 votes, and only slightly less iconic than that, one for the Dave Matthews Band. Some strong temptation to vote for Duran Duran, but they didn't quite break through. Oh, well, Hungry Like the Wolf or James Bond will hit BOTD at some point, and they'll come roaring back.

This time around:

40s on 4*
Cab Calloway
Blues in the Night


50s on 5*
Elvis Presley
Can't Help Falling in Love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7VG4I_b2Fk

60s on 6*
Blood, Sweat & Tears
You Made Me So Very Happy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y168CNQyO7g

70s on 7*
The Eagles
Peaceful, Easy Feeling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrc8XOlJsm0

80s on 8*
Naked Eyes
Promises, Promises
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJP2PH8WKaI

90s on 9*
House of Pain
Jump Around
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwQbPgouUYo


I hate David Clayton-Thomas's voice, and his style, and his songs. One down.

Naked Eyes -- hey, if I were going to vote for an Eagles-sounding group, I'd vote for the Eagles.

House of Pain -- ah, Irish hip-hop. A Big Ten football fight song, for the Wisconsin Badgers, and I still have my Big Ten roots. Lively and angry, always good qualities in a song. And the guys are ugly, which is a nice change of pace from Naked Eyes. I do think that Naked Eyes and House of Pain are both good group names.

Elvis and the Eagles. These are a couple of listenable songs. "Peaceful Easy Feeling" is neither lively nor angry -- in fact, it's peaceful and easy, "Can't Help Falling" is really peaceful and really easy, but it's one of Elvis's better ballads. Written by Hugo and Luigi, perhaps the most soulless bandleaders in America, but it turned out they could write a pretty nice ballad. Also, to my surprise, it turns out they produced the Stylistics, and the Isley Brothers' "Shout." Maybe they weren't quite so soulless. I really like the Eagles, although many have accused them of soullessness too. But if someone asked me to put on Eagles record, this isn't the one I'd choose.

Harold Arlen. Johnny Mercer. Cab Calloway is great even with mediocre material -- how can he not be great with great material? Even without the Nicholas Brothers. "Blues in the Night" gets my vote.

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This week, from another area of American literature, Fats Domino.

Charting Opus 40's Place in the Universe

I'm not sure exactly what VizWiki is, or who makes up these charts, or what their purpose is, but I found it fascinating.

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In Episode XXII of Situations, our story takes a dark turn. Wisdom comes at a steep price, and we say a farewell.



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Random New Paltz Memory: an Old Tramp Named Bob

It’s probably late afternoon, and I’m in the Homestead. George Montgomery is tending bar. In walks a gentleman, tall, shabbily dressed but with excellent posture, unshaven but with an exquisitely shaped mustache. He looks like an oversized Lord Buckley. He sits down on a barstool and says, in a sonorous voice, “Does anyone here have a beer for an old tramp named Bob?”

George does not for a moment question his mandate, but places a beer in front of the old tramp.

Old Bob starts to open up to me and George and Larry the Fluff – I don’t recall all that much of it, but I remember that he was a logger from the Adirondacks – how he had happened through New Paltz, I don’t remember. I drift off at some point, but later in the evening I wander back past the Homestead just as Old Bob is walking out the front door. He gets halfway down the path, suddenly turns stiff as a board, pitches forward flat on his face – directly between Henry Cavanagh and Michael Weissberg, as it happens.

I go over to see if he’s OK, and so does a scruffy young kid. He’s not OK. Between the kid, me, Weissberg and Cavanagh, none of us are really qualified to deal with this situation – too bad someone like Ron Fields isn’t there, but we’re all he has. The kid and I try to help him to his feet, and more or less succeed, but he’s still out of it. What are we going to do next? “Let’s take him back in the Homestead and prop him up in a booth,” the kid suggests.

“We can’t do that…” but I don’t have a better suggestion.

Old Bob stirs into consciousness. “You’d better get me to the police station, boys. I’m an epileptic.”

The obvious answer – but none of us are really police station-oriented enough to think of it. So the kid and, supporting him with his arms around our shoulders, half-walk, half-carry him to the police station. The kid is terrified – he’s a junkie, he informs me later, and he’s terrified that they’ll see the tracks in his arm. But he hangs in there. We get him to the police station, and they’re no better prepared to deal with the situation than we are. Louie Olson is there, I forget who else. So we stay, the kid and I. We lay him down on the floor, and hold him gently so he doesn’t hurt himself when he starts thrashing. He has a can of beer in his pocket, which we remove for the same reason.

And he has plenty of time to thrash. An ambulance is dispatched from Kingston Hospital, but it takes about an hour and a half to get there. I find out later that the first ambulance driver dispatched had a heart attack on the way down, so they had to dispatch a second one to take care of him before dealing with Old Bob.

But finally he’s on the way to the hospital, and the kid and I leave. Louie Olson gives me the warm can of beer, sort of like the state trooper giving Johnny his motorcycle trophy at the end of The Wild One. I drift back down to the Homestead.

It’s after hours, and they’re not serving any more, but they let me in. Fluff is there, and I tell him the story. “And here’s Old Bob’s last beer. I guess I’ll take it home for a souvenir – and someday I’ll bring it back into town and give it to some other old tramp for whom it will have no symbolic meaning.”

There’s a girl there – I don’t remember who, now, but someone who was around town a lot for a short time, and she asks, “Can I have it?”

I think for a moment. It occurs to me that this is exactly what I had planned to do with the beer, just not quite so quickly.

So I give her Old Bob’s last beer, and call it a night.

Memories of the 60s

Originally posted to a group on Yahoo remembering New Paltz in the 60s -- the protest movements of 1967, when protest was not yet fashionable.

About 5 years earlier, living briefly in NYC, I had known a young man named Vinnie, very troubled, from a conservative Irish Catholic family, no longer sure of very much in his life but still tied closely to that background.

A couple of years later, I ran into a mutual friend. He'd recently seen Vinnie, who had apparently found a substitute for his CYO: "I've found this swell group -- they have dances, and meetings, and the kids are really great -- did you ever hear of a group called 'Progressive Labor'?"

Fast forward again to 1967, and I'm faculty chaperone to a group of New Paltz students going down to the city for a march against the war, culminating in a rally at UN Plaza. The rally was interrupted by a downpour, so we left, and took shelter from the storm under the eave of a building -- a bank, misappropriately enough. Suddenly someone comes dashing across the street and squeezes in beside me under the same eave.

It's Vinnie.

"Hey, how have you been?" "Oh, I've been great -- I've been traveling a lot -- Holland, Germany..."

"That's great, Vinnie."

"You know, there's a real revival of the Nazis over there."

"Is that so?" And it's here that I notice, under Vinnie's raincoat, a brown shirt.

"Yes -- I'm one of them!"

A momentary speechless pause from me.

"Were you at that peace rally just now?"

"Yes, we were, Vinnie."

"I notice you had a lot of Jews at that rally."

Rain coming down even harder.

"Gee, great to see you, Vinnie. Well, it looks like the rain's letting up. We've gotta be going. Come on, everyone!"

What I'm Listening To

What I'm listening to. George Mraz, John Hicks, Idris Muhammad, Eric Alexander, on Lala . Not guys at the top of the jazz hit parade, perhaps, but this is great stuff. Reminds me of the days of the Tin Palace in NYC.

Battle of the Decades

Billie Holiday 9 to 5 over the Zombies last time around, with one vote for Nirvana. Three good ones. And some good ones coming up here, too.

These go out to my BOTD posse by email, but feel free to vote here too.





40s on 4*
Harry James
The Man With the Horn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm1qTTmnDnM


50s on 5*
Fats Domino
Blue Monday


60s on 6*
The Temptations
Cloud Nine


70s on 7*
John Lennon
Instant Karma


80s on 8*
Duran Duran
Union Of The Snake



90s on 9*
Dave Matthews Band
Ants Marching ('95)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t7xE8yovw4



Duran Duran -- they're not bad. They did a James Bond song that some people bizarrely pick as the best Bond song (nothing touches "Goldfinger"). They bear about the same relation to the really significant bands of the 80s that Harry James bears to Benny Goodman, and neither Harry nor Simon are at their zenith here, so let's wrap them up together. Simon is handsomer, but Harry was married to Betty Grable.


The rest are all virtually uneliminatable, so I'll take them in chronological order. I think I'd put "Blue Monday" just a shade below Fats' A+ work, which still makes it better than most anything by most anyone else.
The Temptations were the subjects of probably the best TV movie music biopic ever, and if that sounds like a bar not raised awfully high, I don't mean to damn it with faint praise. It was a terrific flick. And the Temps were always good, and the combination of social commentary and Motown choreography (on red, green and orange platforms) is well-nigh irresistible.
I hadn't heard this Dave Matthews before, and wondered briefly if Dave had done a Sesame Street bit and recorded "The Ants Go Marching Two by Two." But this is great stuff, and not just for dual sentimental reasons -- first, that the DMB shot a video at Opus 40, and second, that the drummer is wearing a Rangers jersey on the night when the Rangers fought gamely but went down to the Washington Caps in game 7 of the opening Stanley Cup series. This is a very tight band, some tight songwriting, and I like the little auctioneer bit he does.

But...John Lennon. His power is undiminished. And the symbolism of Yoko knitting blindfolded...wow...what symbolism! It symbolizes...well, like I said, John's power is undiminished. John for me.

New Paltz in the 60s

A Yahoo group has started for reminiscences of those days, and Henry Cavanagh has posted one of his columns for the SUNY New Paltz Oracle, remembering ties and jackets on campus in the early sixties. That reminded me of this story:

It would have been 1965, I guess, the year I arrived. The Jazztet -- Benny Golson, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller -- were playing on campus in the Old Main auditorium. I went to see them with my friends Dave Roach and Walter Donnaruma, himself a great jazz musician, returned from playing piano in a cantina in Mexico to come back to school. We arrived, presented our tickets, and were turned away by the sorority sisters who were running the concert. You can't go in. What do you mean, we can't go in? We have our tickets -- we paid for them.

You can't go in. You don't pass the dress code test. You're not wearing ties.

We protested. Cajoled. Jazz was our religion then. Threatened. Cajoled some more. Finally they let us in, but only allowed us to sit in the back row.

Wow...I'd forgotten all about this. A couple of days later, I was approached by the Inquiring Photographer for the Oracle, asking me about the incident. I don't remember what I said -- it's probably in the Oracle's files somewhere. I do remember that I was set up. When the issue came out, my response was there, along with the responses of five or six sorority girls who had all been shown mine, and had at me, dripping with sarcasm.

Easter Sunrise Service at Opus 40

Battle of the Decades

Mariah a strong finish, picking up two votes at the end to finish with three, not quite enough to catch the dead-heated Maria, Kenny and Gopher. Sam with two votes, and my one lonely pick of Enrique,

This time around:

40s on 4
Teddy Wilson v/Billie Holiday
My Man
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/2009/04/little-billie-holiday.html

50s on 5
Bobby Rydell
Sway


60s on 6
The Zombies
She's Not There


70s on 7
Spinners
Could It Be I'm Falling


80s on 8
Cutting Crew
I've Been In Love Before


90s on 9
Nirvana
All Apologies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTRXzkRis-s



Easy to knock the first one out this time. Bobby Rydell, reminding us that the decade that brought us rock and roll also brought us some of the sappiest performers ever. I had actually never heard Bobby Rydell do this song before -- only Dean Martin, and it was bearable when Dino did it, but not by much.

Nirvana, Cutting Crew and the Spinners are all real professionals, even though Nirvana were supposed to be the anti-professionals, and they all made really tight records. Nirvana was the best of the three, but the Spinners had the coolest outfits.

Speaking of cutting crews, could it be possible for anyone to cut the crew of Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson? The Zombies give them a good fight. They didn't have as many great songs as the Beatles, the Stones, or the Kinks, but the ones they had were marvels -- tight writing, tight harmonies, songs taken in surprising directions that had the inevitability of greatness. And Peter Jones points out that in spite of Teddy, this is not Billie's best take of "My Man." But it's still Billie for me.

A little Billie Holiday

...and Teddy Wilson.

Listen here.