In celebration of Prue’s birthday, here is an item from The New Yorker during her first few months in the Big Apple. The author took a rather bemused tone regarding the proceedings. I heard from Prue today and she’s okay, avoiding Covid in Spain.
One of the tracks featured in the HBO Watchmen series is Desmond Dekker’s hit “Isrealites,” produced by Leslie Kong.
Debuting on May 17, 1969, the single cracked the Billboard Top 10 at #9. I heard it on WRKO-AM radio in Boston. I love YouTube videos like this one, with a budget record player. It sounds fantastic, and proves the magic is in the grooves, not the gear.
The reference in the song to the groundbreaking 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde presages the premise of Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come.
One thing I didn’t need was another streaming video service, but I got talked into giving HBOmax a try. Over the past three days I’ve watched the nine episodes of HBO’s Watchmen sequel.
The series pushes hard on culture war issues. The presentation owes a lot to the stylistic influence of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Some hardcore Watchmen fans have complained the series doesn’t remain true to Alan Moore’s original vision, but it carried me through from one episode to the next. HBO has made the soundtrack available on YouTube, and it’s worth scrolling through the playlist for tracks that may be of interest.
My DJ roots are showing once again. Years before “Radar Love,” Golden Earring, from Holland, had the British Beat sound nailed in 1965.
Here’s the big hit that got a lot of play in the college cafeteria jukebox. With a somewhat changed lineup, the band certainly got their sound — and their look — right for the 70’s.
TCM has its restored print of King of Jazz back in rotation. Paul Whiteman was as much the King of Jazz as Murray “the K” Kaufman was the Fifth Beatle. Both titles were self-proclaimed and completely untrue.
Nonetheless, Whiteman’s significance can’t be overlooked, and King of Jazz, from 1930, includes his two most significant contributions. He commissioned George Gershwin to write “Rhapsody in Blue,” and he hired Bing Crosby.
The movie is a fascinating time capsule from the early era of sound on film. It opens with a Walter Lantz cartoon with a brief appearance by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the character that was stolen from Walt Disney, forcing him to create Mickey Mouse.
https://youtu.be/HDReQ6T-54k
Do records sound “better?” Here is a comparison that is completely invalid in every technical sense, but is nevertheless worth hearing.
First, the official copy on YouTube.
Now from vinyl, that may have been, for all I know, mastered from a digital source.
On my Logitech Z-3 computer speakers I’m hearing the same difference I’ve always heard between CD and LP.
