A tale of two Anthonys

I never heard of Casey Anthony until last week when she was being discussed on Bob Frantz's morning radio show on WTAM, here in Cleveland, Ohio. Why, he asked his listeners, was there such an interest in her saga while Anthony Sowell's trial, now in progress, is being ignored by the national media?

For those as clueless as I was until a few days ago, Casey Anthony is a 25-year-old Florida woman acquitted this week on charges that she murdered her daughter who was inhibiting her freewheeling, party-hearty lifestyle. She's probably guilty, but there was, as they say, "reasonable doubt," at least in the minds of the jurors.

The other Anthony, Mr. Sowell, is the alleged serial killer whose home on Cleveland's east side was the scene of numerous grotesque slayings. One of his victims - luckier than most in that she managed to get away after a visit to smoke some crack with her host - reports that she saw a dead body, its head cut off, lying on the floor of his bedroom. During the initial search of the house, a head was discovered in a coffee can in the basement and there were bodies buried in the backyard. That initial search was a long time in coming. The police apparently ignored reports through the years about the foul stench emanating from the house, as well as turned a blind eye to eyewitness accounts of the carnage that took place there. Finally, just as 2009 was about to gasp its last, the police paid a visit and discovered that Mr. Sowell was a sort of real life Dr. Hannibal Lector, lacking the good doctor's charm, perhaps, but sharing his appetite for blood, death, and sadism.

The Sowell story was big news for awhile, locally and nationwide, earning the top spot on Time's list of the top 10 crime stories for 2009. Now that his trial is in progress, it remains a local story, but the networks, both broadcast and cable, are apparently not taking much notice, whereas Casey Anthony's trial was a cause celebre, and its aftermath warranted a special hour long edition of Nightline. As of this writing, the ABC news program has spent two consecutive nights on the story, and there was also a prime-time special for those who either don’t stay up late, or can’t wait until 11:35 for their Casey Anthony fix.

Many of the callers to Frantz's radio show blame racism for the media's relative lack of interest in the Sowell trial. Casey Anthony and the daughter she allegedly murdered are white. She is also young and attractive, enough so that she was offered the lead in a porn film after her acquittal. Sowell and his victims are black, and the women he allegedly murdered were from the wrong side of the tracks - crackheads, hookers, and the like. There's a tendency to think they got what they deserved, shameful as it is to think such a thing. Caylee Anthony, the daughter who died under highly suspicious circumstances, was an innocent victim.

I think location, not racism, is to blame for the lack of interest in the Sowell case. The Casey Anthony trial took place in sunny Florida. Sowell is in gloomy Cleveland, the economically depressed rust belt city, and no one wants to hear about Cleveland any more than they’d want to visit it. Whoever decided to ban the national media from providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Sowell trial certainly wasn’t thinking about what’s best for the city. Think of the boost that the local economy would have gotten if Court TV and the like descended on the town? Ah, but coverage of a murder trial, especially one as tasteless as this one, might be bad for Cleveland's image. That might make sense if Cleveland had an image worth protecting, but is that true of the city once called and perhaps still known as "The Mistake on the Lake"?

I’m surprised there’s any interest in either story. Haven’t we seen it all before? Didn’t the O.J. trial satisfy everyone’s lust for tales of jealous rage and sensational murder? Didn’t the Amy Fisher and Monica Lewinsky business feed their appetite for a salacious sex scandal? The media always has a freak show in progress to keep the populace distracted from more important matters, such as those wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya that are adding to America’s crushing debt, but serve no other discernable purpose. The two Anthonys are just the latest “stars” of this long running show. The names change and so do the faces, but once the Anthonys leave the stage, other freaks will emerge to take their place.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Bob Dylan is 70!

“Don’t trust anyone over 30" was one of the few memorable phrases from the 1960s that did not originate in a song by Bob Dylan, but many others did:

“To live outside the law you must be honest”

“You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”

"He not busy bein' born is busy dyin'"

Hard to believe, but Dylan turned 30 way back in 1971, and now it’s forty years later. On Tuesday, he turns 70, older than Bing Crosby was in any year of the 1960s, and the same age Frank Sinatra reached approximately one month after Columbia Records released Dylan’s career-spanning boxed set, Biograph, in 1985. Unlike Crosby, whose career began in the ‘30s, or Sinatra, who was the world's most popular singer in the '40s, Dylan’s age was important when he first arrived on the national scene in 1963, the year his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released. He was, indeed, the voice of a generation, and that generation was defined by its age. There was never any talk about “youth culture” in Crosby’s heyday, and if there was a generation gap during Sinatra's prime it went unacknowledged at a time when children were seen and not heard. In the mid-1950s, the rise of Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll gave young people a voice, but it wasn’t until Dylan that they had anything significant to say.

Old age has reduced Dylan’s always rough, raspy voice to an often indecipherable gargle, but it hasn't diminished his appeal among the faithful. He performs more than 100 concerts a year, and when he releases a new album, as he does infrequently these days, it shoots straight to number one on the charts, something his records rarely did even in his 60's heyday. No matter how much he loathed the title, Dylan was the spokesman for a generation in ways that no musical performer has been before or since. He was there at the 1963 March on Washington, singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” on the historic occasion that Martin Luther King, Jr delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He chronicled the changing times and gave a voice to the voiceless in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and challenged the power structure in “Masters of War.” What he never did, to my knowledge, anyway, was specifically address the Vietnam War in any of his songs, nor did he ever have much to say in interviews about the conflict. And yet, when he recently performed in Vietnam for the first time, the mainstream media, clueless as ever, suggested he did little else. He certainly didn’t advocate extremism, but the Weathermen, a group of radical left-wingers, took their name from the “weatherman” reference in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Of course, anyone who has followed his career and continues to do so knows that Dylan shuns labels, and he is impossible to pin down. The only thing for sure is that he’s an artist, a great one, and whether he likes it or not, he’s an icon and a legend, as well as a survivor in a field in which self-destruction has often been the rule. Death, particularly when it’s self-induced, is so much a part of the rock culture that it once seemed unlikely that any of the music’s icons would live to see middle-age, let alone cash a Social Security check.

Comparing rock ‘n’ roll to a religion, author Nick Tosches observed that popular idolatry shares with Christianity the requirement that the idol sacrifice his life for his followers. “When one man idolizes another, the hate and envy in his heart are as great as the love and respect of his outward homage. The idol, whom the idolater would, but never can, be, is both the object of his adoration and the cause of his effacement and insignificance. So overwhelmed is the being of the idolater by that of the idol that only the latter’s supreme sacrifice, martyrdom, can justify and sanctify the relationship.”

Dylan’s crucifix almost came in June 1966 with the motorcycle accident that led to rumors that he was dead or reduced to a vegetable. Instead, it was an excuse to shake-off the expectations of his audience, and momentarily free himself from contractual obligations. Some of those idolaters were disappointed by his survival. “I wish Bob Dylan had died,” some asshole in The Village Voice wrote in 1978.

Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison all followed rock ‘n’ roll’s scripture by dying young, then being resurrected in death as cult figures. Through no fault of his own, John Lennon also became a rock ‘n’ roll martyr. Though he came close to fading away and may have even burned out in the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s, Dylan would not be nailed to a cross. Maybe, to paraphrase one of his early songs, he has God on his side.

“I don’t care what people expect of me,” he told People in 1975. “Doesn’t concern me. I’m doin’ God’s work. That’s all I know.”

It’s quite possible that many people under 30 haven’t a clue as to who Bob Dylan is, and if they do, they'd shrug their shoulders and think of him only as that old guy who was on the Grammy Awards this year and sounded like a frog. But as Newsweek reported in 1997, in a cover story to coincide with the release of Time Out of Mind, "Some 30 years ago, Dylan's work mattered more intensely to more people than anyone's does today." And to those of us who continue to listen, it still does.

*

In honor of his 70th birthday, Rolling Stone, the magazine that was once a voice of the counterculture that Dylan did so much to create, has recruited various "experts" and artists to compile a list of “The 70 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs.”

Of course, 1965's “Like a Rolling Stone” tops the list. As much as I love it, it’s not my absolute favorite, but what other song could be designated his greatest? The 1965 recording put him in Billboard’s Top 10 singles chart for the first of four times, and was revolutionary in many respects, including its 6:13 length at a time when a “pop” song rarely exceeded three minutes. Its mood was distinctive, too: a vindictive song filled with put-downs delivered in a snarling nasal voice. “The verbal pugilism on display here cracks open songwriting for a generation and leaves the listener on the canvas,” Bono of U2 writes of the song in his typically pompous style. The rest of the top 10:

(2) “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
(3) “Tangled Up in Blue”
(4) “Just Like a Woman”
(5) “All Along the Watchtower”
(6) “I Shall Be Released”
(7) “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
(8) “Mr. Tambourine Man”
(9) “Visions of Johanna”
(10) “Every Grain of Sand”

Few Dylan fans would be shocked by the selections, but fewer still could resist challenging them. If I were putting the list together, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” would be in the top 10, not at # 25, three slots above “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” his most famous and enduring “protest” song (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” its gentler cousin, comes in at # 20).

In his message to fans about his recent concerts in China, Dylan noted that the Chinese press “did tout me as a sixties icon,” posting his photo beside those of Joan Baez, Che Guevara, and others from the era, and it is his ‘60's output that dominates the list with 45 of the songs written and recorded in that decade, a figure that includes such Basement Tapes titles as “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” that only saw official release in the following decades. The ‘70s come in second with 19 songs, including 7 of the 10 selections from 1975's Blood on the Tracks, as well as “Up to Me,” an out-take from those sessions. Another four are from 1976's Desire, with that disc’s total reaching five through the inclusion of “Abandoned Love” which did not see release until 1985's multi-disc anthology, Biograph. There are three more from 1974's Planet Waves. Rounding out the decade, there’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” from 1971's Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” from 1973's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” from 1979's Slow Train Coming.

The ‘80s are represented by a mere three songs (“Every Grain of Sand,” “Jokerman,” and “Blind Willie McTell”). The ‘90s were a decade in which Dylan was barely on the media’s radar. The Never Ending Tour, as fans came to call his yearly series of concerts that began in 1988, was in progress, but not only was he reduced to playing small halls that rarely sold out, he released only two albums of new original material, the second of which, 1997's Time Out of Mind, would win a bunch of Grammys, sell more than a million copies, and see him reborn as the grand old man of rock ‘n’ roll. Number 50 on Rolling Stone’s list is that album’s somber “Not Dark Yet.” There are two songs from the 2000s - the Oscar winning “Things Have Changed” from the Wonder Boys soundtrack, and “Mississippi” from 2001's Love and Theft.

The most conspicuous omission is probably “I Want You,” a highlight of 1966's Blonde on Blonde, an album whose lesser “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” did make the list. “Tough Mama” from Planet Waves and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” a single that failed to crack the top 40, were also considered worthy, but not “Sweetheart Like You,” “Foot of Pride,” “Brownsville Girl,” or “Shooting Star,” far superior songs from the ‘80s when Dylan was in a commercial slump and overshadowed by Bruce Springsteen, one of the many artists slapped with the “New Dylan” label in the ‘70s.

Rolling Stone also provides a 10 song list of “The Greatest Dylan Covers of All Time,” and, once again, I have to disagree with some of their choices. Jimi Hendrix’s blistering hit version of “All Along the Watchtower” is rightfully included, along with the Byrds’ # 1 cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and George Harrison’s version of “If Not for You,” but some of the others (“Highway 61 Revisited” by P.J. Harvey? “Up to Me” by Roger McGuinn?) seem to have been chosen simply as a way to avoid putting Cher on the list. The diva’s version of “All I Really Want to Do” deserves a spot regardless, and so does Elvis Presley’s 1966 rendition of “Tomorrow is Such a Long Time,” a cover that Dylan himself once said was his favorite.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Linda Ronstadt, Back in the Day

I can't say that I've ever been a big fan of Linda Ronstadt, but the woman sure had (and probably still has) a powerful voice. Contrary to popular belief, a voice alone doesn't translate into knowing how to sing. Praising a singer because of his/her voice is like saying a writer has a nice pen. It's how the singer uses that voice that makes the difference. The average contestant on American Idol doesn't have a clue. They whine and warble without taste or discipline, stretching out syllables because they believe this technique enhances the drama in a performance. It does no such thing.

Ronstadt knew how to use her voice and achieved dramatic results honestly, by finding the emotion in the lyrics and acting them out under the direction of the melody. Her greatest performances, to my ears, anyway, can be found on her 1976 album, Hasten Down the Wind, the follow-up to 1975's Heart Like a Wheel which brought her a top 10 hit with "You're No Good," and made her a star after a decade or so of performing. Although Hasten Down the Wind was a major hit, its first two singles failed to reach the top 40. I remember hearing "Someone to Lay Down Beside Me" many times during the bone-chilling Cleveland winter of 1977, and yet it only climbled to number 42 on Billboard's national chart. "Lose Again" did even worse, gasping its last at number 76. Both songs were written by Karla Bonoff, and are classic torch ballads that gave Ronstadt great opportunities to show her stuff. A live performance of the latter from a 1976 concert in London is available on You Tube. It's well worth hearing and also a pleasure to watch. Ronstadt was quite the babe back in the day (to use a phrase that really should be retired, and soon).

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Born with the gift of a golden voice

Unlike Bob Dylan, his only rival as the greatest songwriter/poet to emerge in the 1960s, Leonard Cohen is an affable sort, prefacing his songs with remarks to the audience whom he calls "friends." While glum Bob acts like he's making a sacrifice by appearing before his fans, Cohen thanks them for "keeping my songs alive" and says, "We're honored to play for you tonight." He jokes with them in his witty, self-deprecating way. In Leonard Cohen Live in London, taped at the O2 Arena on July 17, 2008, he recalls that he was 60 when he last played London, "just a kid with a crazy dream."

And the crowd loves him, cheering enthusiastically, and roaring their approval when, in his raspy baritone, he sings those lines from 1988's "Tower of Song":

"I was born like this, I have no choice,
I was born with the gift of a golden voice."

Cohen's voice IS golden, and the songs are magnificent. He performs 24 of them in this concert, all but one from his selective pen. Most of his signature works are here - "Suzanne," "Everybody Knows," "Take This Waltz," "Hallelujah," "Sisters of Mercy" (but not, alas, my favorite, "Joan of Arc") - songs whose melancholy tone nonetheless have a calm, soothing effect, the perfect antidote to a world that, as Cohen observes, "is plunged in darkness and chaos." Hallelujah, indeed!

Cohen is also kind to his collaborators, introducing his band and backup singers several times, and highlighting their exceptional work even during the songs ("Dino Soldo on the saxophone," he points out midway through "Bird on the Wire," and "Javier Mas on the archilaud" before Cohen has even sung a note of "Who By Fire").

I'll always rank Cohen's October 1988 appearance on PBS's Austin City Limits above any other live performances since it was then that I was formally introduced to this incomparable artist (and when will that glorious hour be released on DVD?), but Leonard Cohen Live in London is outstanding. This is a moment in time to be cherished, now and in the future, when, to paraphrase the man himself, we ache in the places where we used to play. If possible, his voice and music will resonate even stronger then, and heal the most battered heart and soul. I love you, Leonard.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Qaddafi and the Big Bad Federal Reserve

When did the Federal Reserve submit to an audit? Senator Ron Paul sponsored a bill calling for the Fed to open its books, but I remember hearing it was defeated. I must have been misinformed.

The seemingly indestructible private bank that dominates the American economy is a law unto itself, exactly what the Rockefellers, Morgans, and other financial parasites behind its creation envisioned when they met at Jekyll Island almost a century ago. Its existence is a violation of the Constitution which gives the power to issue currency to the U.S. Treasury. But the banksters are more powerful than our elected leaders, many of whom wouldn't have been elected had they not sold their souls to the money interests, and the Federal Reserve has acted autonomously all these years. The Fed manipulates the economy, and leads us into recession, depression, and war, while our leaders look the other way and remain silent. Those who have dared to challenge usually end up dead, including Mark Pittman, a Bloomsberg news reporter who sued the Fed into opening its books, and John F. Kennedy, who tried to defang the bank by issuing United States Notes through the Treasury in June 1963. As Craig Roberts, author of A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza, wrote, Kennedy's action "would end the control of the international investment bankers over the U.S. government - and the American people." Five months later, Kennedy was assassinated.

When campaigning for the republican presidential nomination against Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush coined the phrase "voodoo economics" when criticizing the Gipper's plan for the economy. In truth, "voodoo economics" is the brand of economics practiced by the Federal Reserve. As William Still writes in On the Horns of the Beast, “The Fed system requires that our nation be in debt, and continue expanding that debt as the economy expands . . . If we were to extinguish our debt we would extinguish our money. The average person would have no green folding stuff in his wallet and a zero balance in his checking account. This is not an exaggeration.”

In the age of New Media, the citizenry is more educated than in the past when corporate-owned newspapers, magazines, and TV networks controlled information. Books exposing the Federal Reserve and the larger conspiracy of which it is a part were available under the counter, published independently and available in specialty bookstores. Now, thanks to the internet, the truth is available through a few computer keystrokes. There is such a glut of information that even corporate puppets like Glenn Beck occasionally take on the Federal Reserve, but usually stop short of proposing that it be eliminated entirely and let the U.S. Treasury issue currency, as our Founding Fathers intended all along. Despite the internet's power, the mainstream media continues to wield tremendous influence, and they apparently never bothered to inform the public that the private central bank responsible for so much destruction was recently audited. As long as we don't know it occurred, we won't want to know the results. If we don't know the results, it's as if the audit didn't take place. Fortunately, Rolling Stone, once the voice of the counterculture but now a major and too-mainstream-for-its-own-good periodical, (and, therefore, not above suspicion) still sponsors honest reportage from time to time. In an issue due to hit newsstands in two weeks, the magazine is staying true to its motto - "All the news that fits" - by publishing a story about the results of that audit. A preview currently available on the web is shocking enough.

"Why is the Fed Bailing Out Qaddafi?" asks the headline of the report by Matt Taibbi posted April 1. "Barack Obama recently issued an executive order imposing a wave of sanctions against Libya, not only freezing Libyan assets, but barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks," Taibbi reports. "So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that just a week or so after Obama's executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue to operate without sanction."

What would Obama say about that? Until a member of our "free press" (raucous laughter) asks him about it, he doesn't have to say anything.

Read more directly at Rolling Stone.

For a more in-depth look at what's really wrong with the world, read The Illuminati Zone by William Fevers, available through Lulu and Amazon.com.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Bad Boy Bios

Life, the autobiography of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, reached bookstores almost simultaneously with Decision Points, the memoirs of George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States. Richards, two years older than Bush, has written a memoir almost 100 pages longer (564 pages, excluding the “About the Author” page) that gives readers an almost exhaustive account of his days since birth, but dwells on the nights in whose dark shadows most of his waking hours were spent. “Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it,” he scrawled in cursive on the front jacket flap, right above his indecipherable signature. In his introduction, Bush says “I decided not to write an exhaustive account of my life or presidency. Instead I have told the story of my time in the White House by focusing on the most important part of the job: making decisions.”

Those of us who have read any of the unauthorized biographies of Bush 43 might be tempted to wonder if his story, had he decided to write that “exhaustive account” that Richards favors, might bear more than a striking resemblance to the life of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.

“I have a habitual personality,” he tells us as a way to explain his nine year cigarette habit, broken only by switching to snuff which he quit by turning to chewing tobacco before finally settling for cigars. Bush’s biggest habit, however, was drink. “Can you remember the last day you didn’t have a drink?” Bush recalls wife Laura asking him. On Mondays it was a “few beers with the guys,” on Tuesdays it was Benedictine and brandy after dinner, on Wednesday “I’d have a couple of bourbon and Sevens after I put Barbara and Jenna to bed,” while Thursday and Friday were once more devoted to drinking beer. On Saturday night, there was more beer, as well as martinis and more B&Bs (Benedictine and brandy).

Bush makes a brief mention of the incident in which he drunkenly drove over a neighbor’s trash can which led to an angry confrontation with his father, but Oliver Stone made more of the encounter in his film, W, than Bush does. On Labor Day 1976, Australian tennis star John Newcombe “introduced me to the Aussie tradition of drinking beer with no hands. You put your teeth on the edge of the mug and tilt your head back, and the beer goes down your throat. We had a great old time, until the drive home.” Police saw Bush driving “about ten miles an hour” with “two wheels on the shoulder.” Bush pleaded guilty to DUI and paid a $150 fine.

Bush doesn’t dwell on his moral failings because, as a former president, he represents law and order, even if he has been lax in adhering to either in his private or public life. Richards is a rock and roll star, and, it could be argued, an artist. In detailing his misadventures with drugs and alcohol (mainly drugs), there’s no need for “spin.” He’s not running for office. As Bob Dylan said, “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Richards also had a run in with police following a mishap with a motor vehicle. In 1969, in a period when the Stones were working on their Let It Bleed album, “I turned over the Mercedes with Anita (Pallenberg) in it when she was seven months pregnant with Marlon (their son).” After a visit to the hospital, Richards was questioned by police. “They suspected drugs,” he writes. “Of course, there were drugs involved.” Drugs are in his system throughout many pages of Life, and not just alcohol (Jack Daniels being his drink of choice, as it was for Frank Sinatra), but heavy duty substances like heroin and cocaine.

Bush beat his demons through prayer, or so he says. “Faith showed me a way out. I knew I could count on the grace of God to help me change . . . Prayer was the nourishment that sustained me.” Apparently, prayer was not an option for Richards. Growing up in Dartford, England, “the church, organized religion, was something to be avoided. Nobody minded what Christ said, nobody said there wasn’t a God or anything like that, but stay away from organizations.” Though continuing to indulge in other drugs, Richards got off heroin shortly after making headlines in Toronto where he was charged with drug trafficking for entering Canada with an ounce of heroin in his possession. He got clean with the help of a doctor who treated him with electrodes “attached to your ear (which) released endorphins, which, theoretically, cancelled the pain.” Even if prayer didn’t enter into it, the Lord was present through the doctor’s family, who, according to Marlon Richards, were “right-wing Christian American” with a “white-picket fence and skateboards, and I started going to an American school where you had to say prayers every day. That was really shocking.”

Shortly after 9/11, which was to the Bush presidency what the albums Beggar’s Banquet through Goat’s Head Soup were to the Stones (“backbone stuff,” says Richards), Bush passed out in his study after he supposedly choked on a pretzel. Sadly, Bush the author didn’t choose to elaborate on that incident in his book. It might have been a nice companion piece to Richards’ account of how he fell off a ladder in his library, puncturing a lung. Some people doubted Bush’s pretzel story, convinced something more ominous led to his blackout, and Richards also had to deal with a skeptical public. “Nobody believes that I was looking for a book on anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci,” he writes. Then there was the infamous fall from a palm tree while trying to pick a coconut. Well, that’s what the media reported. Richards corrects that in his bio. “Forget any palm tree. This was some gnarled low tree that was basically a horizontal branch.” It was a more serious accident than believed at the time, and it required brain surgery. He now has a steel plate in his head.

They move in different circles, or so you’d think, but George W. Bush and Keith Richards know some of the same people. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the first foreign leader Bush invited to Camp David. “The more time we spent together, the more I respected Tony,” Bush writes. After his fall from that tree, Richards received a letter from Blair that opened with “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes. . . “ Bill Clinton, Bush’s immediate predecessor in the White House, also sent a get well note, and don’t forget he took to the stage of the Beacon Theater in New York to praise the Rolling Stones during a performance captured on film by Martin Scorsese. Bush and Clinton are now warm buddies, always quick to praise each other.

Bush and Richards are bad boys, one reformed (or so Bush wants us to think), and the other as unrepentant as he is unapologetic. “I can rest on my laurels,” Richards writes just before concluding his autobiography. “I’ve stirred up enough crap in my time and I’ll have to live with it and see how somebody else deals with it.” Bush stirred up enough crap in his time, too, from phony wars to banker bailouts, and the United States will be dealing with it for decades to come. At least Richards has given us some great music.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Who was Harry Nilsson?

Harry Nilsson wrote the song, “One,” as in “the loneliest number you could ever do,” which became a top 10 hit for Three Dog Night in 1969. He also wrote “Cuddly Toy” for the Monkees, and “Best Friend,” the theme to TV’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. So it’s a bit ironic that his own first hit single, “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and his biggest hit, 1971's “Without You,” were covers written by others. Nilsson, who preferred to be billed by his last name only, had an erratic career. These days, if he’s known at all, it’s as the guy who partied too hard with John Lennon during the latter’s infamous “lost weekend” of 1973-74. He’s also the guy who owned the London flat in which both Mama Cass Elliot and Who drummer Keith Moon breathed their last, respectively, in 1974 and 1978.

There was a time, however, when Nilsson was big. His 1971 album, Nilsson Schmilsson, produced by Richard Perry, sold a million copies and was nominated for Grammys as Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Engineered Recording, etc, and won Nilsson a second Grammy for Male Pop Vocal (the first was for “Everybody’s Talkin’”). Rather than follow that blockbuster with something equally commercial, he chose to litter 1972's Son of Schmilsson with profane lyrics that guaranteed it would receive minimal exposure on the radio. He followed that with an album of standards, then Pussy Cats produced by John Lennon, wherein he sang so forcefully that he damaged his voice. Robert Altman recruited him to write the songs for Popeye, released in 1980, the same year that Lennon’s murder inspired him to campaign for tougher gun control laws. The next time the world heard from Harry Nilsson was in 1994. On January 15 that year, he died of a heart attack at age 52.


Nilsson is the subject of a documentary film, Who Is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him, by John Scheinfeld, who previously made The U.S. VS John Lennon. With his blonde hair and sad eyes, Nilsson looked like a choir boy when he first emerged on the scene in late 1967. Terry Gilliam may have said it best: “He was a fallen angel.” Nilsson started on the path to self-destruction almost as soon as he became successful. The song “1941,” named after the year of his birth, may have offered a clue to his troubles:

“Well, in 1941, a happy father had a son,
and by 1944, the father walked right out the door.”

After moving from New York to L.A., he got a job in a bank’s computer center. He wrote songs on the side that were impressive enough to attract music published Perry Birken, Jr., who signed him up at $25.00 a week. His first album, Pandemonium Shadow Show, was released by a reluctant RCA (which already had poet Rod McKuen on the label and didn’t want another singer-songwriter) in 1967. It didn’t sell, but Derek Taylor of the Beatles’ empire heard it and passed it on to the “Fabs” who raved about it during a 1968 press conference in New York to promote their new Apple Corps. John Lennon said “Nilsson is my favorite group.” His next album, Aerial Ballet, wasn’t a big seller either, but his name was on the tip of the tongues of people who could make things happen. Film director Otto Preminger asked him to write the score for his deranged, LSD-drenched 1968 misfire, Skidoo, and he was one of several songwriters (Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were some of the others) asked to write songs for the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City” was rejected (as was Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”) when director John Schlesinger decided to stick with the Nilsson recording from Aerial Ballet that he had been using as a temporary track. “Everybody’s Talkin’,” written by Fred Neil, became the song heard over the credits of the Oscar winning X rated film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, and Nilsson’s first big hit.

A career in the fickle world of pop music requires a certain consistency and Nilsson’s career was perversely inconsistent. He was a songwriter, but after scoring a hit with someone else’s song, he followed that with an album devoted to Randy Newman compositions. Despite sterling reviews and a citation from Stereo Review proclaiming it the album of the year, it tanked, and Nilsson’s career didn’t get back on track until he hooked up with hit maker Richard Perry who had successfully produced Carly Simon and Barbra Streisand, for 1971's Nilsson Schmilsson, a lavish recording put together with scraps of songs that Nilsson completed only once the sessions were underway at London’s Trident Studios.

He obviously had some pretty good scraps. The infectiously loony “Coconut” became a top 10 hit, and the psychedelic “Jump Into the Fire” would be given a second life when memorably used on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, Goodfellas. Once again, however, Nilsson the songwriter was overshadowed by Nilsson the singer who sang the hell out of the Badfinger ballad, “Without You,” a dramatic torch song that became a huge number one smash. He and Perry found themselves awash in Grammy nominations and gold records.

“Harry was the most insecure person I’ve ever known, He just didn’t have any self-esteem,” a former wife said in explaining Nilsson’s refusal to perform in concert. Whereas the big “Rock Tour” was a common practice for every artist (except the former Beatles) at the time, Nilsson never hit the road to promote his albums. It didn’t seem to hurt him, but another associate describes him as having a “death wish.” He seriously damaged his career by following Nilsson Schmilsson with Son of Schmilsson, once more under Perry’s guidance, but this time the whimsy of “Coconut” and “The Moonbeam Song” was replaced with the hostility of “I’d Rather Be Dead” and the notorious “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” with its message to a former lover: “F___ you.”

A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, was something else again. An album of standards like “As Time Goes By” and “For Me and My Gal” with Sinatra favorite Gordon Jenkins conducting, it was a beautiful production, but hardly what the world was expecting or wanted in 1973, a year when Led Zeppelin and David Bowie were all the rage, and Elton John released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Derek Taylor, his mentor from the Beatles empire, produced the disc when Perry refused, warning Nilsson that it wasn’t the right time in his career for such an adventure. The album sales proved Perry right, and it’s little wonder that RCA was preparing to drop Nilsson from its roster of artists. He was spared that fate when John Lennon intervened on his behalf, visiting the record company with Nilsson and hinting that he, and maybe Ringo, might, just might, sign with RCA when their contracts with Capital expired in 1976, but only if they were willing to keep an artist as important as Nilsson on the label.

Nilsson’s life and career rolled downhill rather speedily after that. RCA kept him for a time, but Nilsson was proving successful only at getting his now bearded mug in the papers by joining Lennon (and some say, egging him on) in heckling the Smothers Brothers during the comedy duo’s comeback engagement at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour. According to Lennon’s lover at the time, May Pang, it was Nilsson who instigated trouble but always escaped to let others take the blame. “Harry was a wonderful perpetrator, an agent provocateur,” remembers percussionist Ray Cooper. Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the club, and though it was the former Beatle who got most of the ink in the tabloids, Nilsson’s reputation took a hit from which it might have recovered if he had been producing some other kind of hits, but his well had gone dry.

“In the End, Only Creditors Talked to Nilsson,” was the headline of a Los Angeles Times article about the singer’s troubled final years published in the year of his death. A business manager had made off with his savings, leaving him bankrupt. Years of drinking, drugging, and chain smoking had caught up with him, and he was now suffering from diabetes. Other than some chest pains, he was apparently unaware of the massive heart attack he had in 1993. A second heart attack on January 15, 1994 ended his life at the relatively youthful age of 52. Appearing on an HBO Comic Relief telethon that night, Dustin Hoffman, star of Midnight Cowboy and the original narrator of the animated film, The Point, which Nilsson had created for ABC’s Movie of the Week in 1971, broke the news to the audience and praised him as a “great artist.”

Who Is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him may not rescue Nilsson from the obscurity to which he had been consigned long before his death, but it succeeds in rehabilitating his reputation for those who do remember him, but only vaguely, as the guy who sang that song in Midnight Cowboy and gave free rein to his emotions when belting out “Without You.” He was so much more than the guy in whose bed Mama Cass and Keith Moon died, and tore up the town with John Lennon, which, he told Rolling Stone, “still haunts me. People think I’m an asshole and a mean guy.” As the film proves, he could be an asshole at times (though there’s little to suggest he was mean), but he was also a great artist deserving of more kudos than he has received.

See the trailer HERE.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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