The grooviest girl in the world


© Henry Diltz/CORBIS

I’m in the middle of reading a Vanity Fair article from a few years ago about Michelle Phillips, whose look and style set the pace in 60’s youth fashion in America, the way Pattie Boyd did in England, before Twiggy came along.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/12/phillips200712

I knew Michelle lived some wild times, but … whoo! She wasn’t much into drugs, which is why she’s alive today, but she sure pursued the free love part of the 60’s. Anyway, while reading the article I had one of those coincidences that everybody experiences once in a while. I was on this passage…

Michelle sat up and summoned a recent visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (her years in Mexico had given her an affection for Catholic churches) and came up with: “Stopped into a church I passed along the way / Well, I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray.” John, who’d loathed parochial school, “hated the line,” Michelle says, but kept it in for lack of anything better. Lucky he did; the line gave the song its arc of desperation to epiphany. Thus was born one of the first clarion calls of a changing culture, “California Dreamin’.”

…when this started playing as a random track on the Slacker music service.

I demand 50’s TV, on demand

On the Roku player I enjoy watching old TV shows, particularly from the late 1950’s. But Netflix is again yanking a favorite from Watch Instantly, forcing me to rush through as many episodes as I can in a few days. First, it was “Alfred Hitchcock Presents“, and now the latest victim is my beloved “Leave It To Beaver“.

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My favorite TV show way back in the first grade was “Have Gun, Will Travel”, which was one of the last network series that also ran on radio. I even had a “Have Gun, Will Travel” lunchbox. (We don’t talk about that unfortunate incident with the chicken noodle soup in the thermos.)

Fortunately, the adventures of the gunslinger-for-hire, Paladin, don’t have an expiration date on Netflix yet. Watching the series now, I can see why I liked it so much. Being a half-hour show, the stories aren’t slow and dragged out, the way they were on other westerns, especially “Gunsmoke”. It shouldn’t take too long to recognize the very young actress in this clip from 1958.

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Beatles in colour

When Denro and I were at the Boston Super Megafest concert, we were given our choice of two photo prints, and these were my picks. The microphone in this one is from channel 7 in New York, and it looks like it was taken in ’65. I’ll see if I can get a fix on the exact date.

And this is a somewhat curious pic of Paul, maybe also from ’65, with his left eye looking like mine did after surgery.