Bridging the Generation Gap

1967! The year that my favorite musical genre — Psychedelia — came into its own. Youth culture was taking over! The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix joined the Beatles and the Stones on the Pop charts. But there was still plenty of music for adult contemporary audiences.

On ABC-TV that year was a remarkable special. The show was a tribute to the songs of Rodgers and Hart, when Hart had been dead for almost 25 years. It featured a one-of-a-kind lineup of performers:

  • Bobby Darin
  • Petula Clark
  • The Mamas and the Papas
  • The Supremes
  • Count Basie
  • The Doodletown Pipers

Petula, The Mamas and the Papas, and The Supremes had hits in ’67 that kids liked, but they were also acceptable to a middle-aged audience. The Doodletown Pipers were a group of TV singers in the 60’s.

Petula’s duets with Darin are very nice. Bobby was obviously very happy to be singing with Count Basie.

Note: Embedding isn’t allowed for the first video, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube. Don’t know why the same requirement wasn’t made for the second.

Part 1

Part 2

Alexa, We Need to Not Talk

Having watched “The Man Trap” on Star Trek, Thursday, September 8, 1966 at 8:30, I’m a first generation fan. Despite that, I don’t care to converse with computers, so there are no smart speakers in the house. My FireTV remotes have a mic for Alexa, and using the button for it means you don’t have to start commands by saying “Alexa…” I test the feature occasionally, with the results being useful about 75% of the time.

Amazon has a new feature, called Sidewalk, integrating with their Internet of Things (IOT) things. Creating a WiFi mesh between residences sounds cool, but just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

Keeping Score

Trump has added blogging to his list of failed ventures. But I’ll be fair to the ex-prez in exile and note that Google has a worse track record.

  • From the Desk of Donald J. Trump: May 4, 2021 – June 1, 2021
  • Prattling before the Pratfall: September 5, 2006 – Present

Coming up on 15 years for doggie rattus dot commonus. Now that’s staying power!

Good, Aged Charlie Brown

The Charles M. Schulz Museum has obtained a few more originals from a proposed strip by Sparky that didn’t take off. They were even drawn on paper with pre-printed Peanuts panels. Click to enlarge to full size, and you can see that the original India ink is much darker than the printer’s ink.

Little-seen original art for a proposed 50s comic strip Hagemyer, as drawn by Charles M. Schulz/copyright SFIPT

The museum has assembled the originals, and some other material, for an interesting new exhibit. More information is available from The Washington Post.

The strips were supposedly drawn by Schulz, but I’m wondering if Jim Sasseville, his assistant for the comic book stories, had a hand in producing the samples. It seems likely to me that if “Hagemeyer” had been launched, Sasseville would have worked on it, just as he did for the “It’s Only a Game” strip.

When Tower Lost Power

Another free music documentary on YouTube. I haven’t watched it yet, but the subject is good enough for me to recommend it.

Tower’s flagship store in Boston was at the Mass Ave. end of Newbury Street, the namesake of Newbury Comics, a longtime music retailer that’s still in business. The Tower Records store in Burlington, MA was a relatively convenient stop on the way home, where I used to live, but most of my purchases were made at Newbury Comics, at the other end of the same shopping center.

Before all of that, THE place to buy records in Boston was actually in Cambridge. The Harvard Coop, in Harvard Square, as in Harvard University. My first visit there was almost 50 years ago, spending some of the fifty bucks I earned one night, helping to close down the annual town fair.

…

I’ve watched the documentary, and definitely recommend it. The amazing thing about the rise of Tower Records is that most of the core team members were — let’s be honest — uneducated drunks, who were following the grand vision of a smart man who was as drunk and uneducated as they were. Their success is proof of the power in doing what you love for a living.

Tower’s over-expansion on borrowed money was technically what led to the chain’s bankruptcy. But even if they hadn’t taken on debt, that would only have softened the crash landing. Tower’s demise was inevitable, and the end was predicted not long after its beginning.

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form). — “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.