Hark back thirty years ago this week: 65,000 people gathered in the soft summer twilight to listen to pretty music. Will we ever see that again?
Yes, it’s The Bee Gees in Concert in Berlin, early June 1991. We’re told the lyrics of the song “One” had special meaning for the crowd: the Wall had fallen and Germany was reunited: “You and I should be one…Ah, we are one…We are one….We are one.”
Not just a performance. It’s a nice moment in time…and nice moments are rare: https://youtu.be/VZoN4E47ymQ
The drummer is Gerry Polci who joined the band in the early 70s. He was married to Valli’s daughter for a time.
How many drummers sing (well)? Here’s a good list:
I only got Mickey Dolenz and Phil Collins. I plumb forgot Levon Helm of the Band, who sang many of their most well-known songs, “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Cripple Creek” and “The Weight.”
Then there’s Karen Carpenter — I never think of her as a drummer.
As a singing drummer, Andy Sturmer from the band Jellyfish had a pretty interesting live setup. It was sort of a standing kit so he could be out front. Here’s a live clip from David Letterman in 1990:
As in so many such videos, the band is lip syncing. Hearing the exact version that was recorded takes away a little from the experience of watching.
Is Jeffrey Toobin returning to CNN a good thing or a bad thing?
On the one hand, it demonstrates perhaps the greatest practical problem facing America. We have developed a self-perpetuating ruling class of halfwits and degenerates who believe rules and standards only apply to others.
On the other hand, that class is well on its way to not even pretending otherwise. Lots of people will admire The Emperor’s New Clothes. Most of ’em, however, will draw a line at actually having the Emperor’s junk rubbed in their face.
Mike
Neo, I don’t know if you have seen this but it seemed like something in your wheelhouse.
It is a bit confusing, with all the personnel, but there is some interesting history here.
When the song was recorded in the studio in May 1967, I think maybe all of these guys were 17 or 18 and grew up east of Los Angeles. The lead singer on the studio version, a friend of the band, was 16, Greg Munford. He was never a member (but incidentally, I saw somewhere that he played drums). The drummer on the studio recording was Randy Seol, who was 17, and had just joined the band himself and was hired to help with vocals.
It is Seol in the above video, but since it is the studio recording, not live, it is Munford’s singing.
In an interview I will link below, Seol says he always tried to sing it like Munford because that was what people expected. It was a huge hit.
I believe this is Seol singing lead (and playing drums) in another TV appearance, but on a different song.
The person who posted it on YouTube says he believes it was live and from the Jonathan Winters show. The lead voice sounds different from Incense and Peppermints. Seol would also have been the voice on the studio recording, though, so unlike Incense and Peppermints, that studio recording would have sounded like him.
On Incense and Peppermints, they recorded a version with Seol and another with Munford, who just happened to stop by that day. The producer chose the version with Munford.
Below is the same recording but with clips from two movies they were in, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Psych-Out. The band was also on the first episode of Laugh In.
And here is that interview with Seol where talks a lot about Incense and Peppermints, how it was made, including how the band didn’t get any royalties: https://youtu.be/RjgPXFBlA2U
Note, I see many good recent comments on these videos, informative, such as by people who knew them in high school. And more specific ones that relate to my understanding above which I had basically come to by then.
I always liked the song on the radio. Seeing it on YouTube eventually, 30 years later or whatever, it stuck with me that the lead singer was the drummer.
Creepy Joe and The Jill in Europe and The Ho staying away from the border, but don’t fret; the Pentagon and alphabet agencies have targeted the real threat: “whiteness.”
Slowly, slowly Om… Keep your blood lust down. We’re all likely to be bathing in the stuff sooner or later… but let’s not rush it now.
Pro Tip: Sort out the Home Front first. You’ve got more Fifth Columnists there than you have Bulldozers to make pits. Work cut out.
Pro Pro Tip: Best re-learn how to smelt steel at scale, build large ships quickly, and manufacture 4nm process semiconductors. Especially that last bit. Might want to chomp off the relevant TSMC Fab bits of Taiwan and tow them to Alaska maybe? Or maybe the Red State keyboard warriors have a Plan. 689 ^^#2222 Hash Key 2397843EF12A .. there… does that QAnon Gibberish make you feel OK now? 🙂
Pro tip to Can Do!
Think about your next hidey hole. Hong Kong ain’t a long term thing for a free roader.
You are a self parody talking about blood lust.
Tiananmen Square should have shown you how dainty the CCP can be when it comes to blood. Who do you suppose is encouraging the domestic (USA) subversion, something about followers of a Little Red Book?
You follow QAnon like your fellow sage Yammer?
Keep shilling for the CCP, does it keep your social credit score acceptable for now?
Boring.
Parthian Shot Practice is far more fulfilling.
*glues a dollar to the sidewalk*
*notches arrow*
…
Can Do! A legend in his own mind.
University death spiral dead ahead?
University of London’s Eric Kauffman’s new study of politicization of the university gets a thorough review from climatologist Patrick Michaels, who was ramrodded out of the environmental sciences department at the University of Virginia for climate heresy after 30 years service. He observes that the young PhDs are more censorious and seriously fascist than their elders.
Therefore, the future is definitely worse than the present for the once great repositories of wisdom. The only strategy that could change this is too down political force.
Because the US cannot do at the federal level what the UK can, our future is seriously bleak.
He concludes: “This is depressing, for it seems that the death spiral of American academia is inevitable. Our problems are structural and intractable. Because the university faculty is empowered to dictate who its members are and what is permitted in the canon of knowledge, it will retain that corrupt absolute power. Self-selection by the faculty ensures an increasingly leftward tilt, not just in the social sciences and humanities; as the infection has now reached STEM. Political intolerance will increase, as will de facto and direct suppression of academic free speech. It encourages heinous self-censorship that silences teachers who might dissent—until they can no longer speak.” https://judithcurry.com/2021/06/09/death-spiral-of-american-academia/
Red State reports details of Dr Li-Meng Yan’s China-CCP engineered the Covid virus story has been confirmed. That the FBI effectively acted to coverup this evidence was exposed by Congressman Matt Gaetz in open testimony by the FBI’s Christopher Wray.
“Pause for a moment and consider this. Our government now has additional evidence that a virus that killed 600,000 Americans, sickened millions more, nearly destroyed our economy, and inflicted untold collateral damage, was a bioweapon created by the Chinese military and deliberately released.
“I say “additional” evidence because the FBI has had some of this evidence for more than a year and the person who brought it forward has only been subjected to a thorough smear campaign for her efforts – which is highly relevant when attempting to understand the newest defector’s actions.
“As reported in my original story about the defector, sources told RedState that the FBI, the State Department, and CIA were intentionally kept in the dark about the fact that the defector was working with the DIA.” And now we only why.
Bari Weiss is given a long interview with Jordan Peterson on YT. Weiss is alarmed that True liberals face pessimistic dilemmas.
Will the Woke Left fascism fade like other moral panics like child sex abuse did in the 1980s? asks Weiss. No, replies Victor Dàvis Hanson.
It was the Vietnam War’s compulsory military service draft that united hippies and the flower power gen and mobilized action and reaction then. This was more like a moral panic, or rather bonafide protest and reform movement.
By stark contrast, the Wokies Revolution may be a bare 20%, but they control every citadel of societal and political-economic leadership in the US.
Today, “They are “the Man.”
“Our 21st century revolutionaries are multibillionaires with flip-flops, tie-dye T-shirts and nose rings, but with the absolute power and desire to censor how half the country communicates — or cancel them entirely.
“They don’t flock to campus free-speech areas; they are the campus administrators who ban free speech.
“They don’t picket outside the Pentagon; they are inside the Pentagon.
“They don’t chant “eat the rich”; they are the rich who eat at Napa Valley’s French Laundry….
“They don’t protest “uptight” values, because they are more intolerant and puritanical than any Victorian.
“They don’t believe in racial quotas based on “proportional representation,” because they are racists who demand underrepresentation of “bad” racial groups and overrepresentation of “good” groups. The color of our skin is their gospel, not the content of our character.
“They are top-down revolutionaries. None of their agendas, from open borders and changing the Constitution to critical race theory and banning clean-burning fossil fuels, are ever favored among a majority of the population.
“Their guiding principle is “never let a crisis go to waste.” Only in times of a pandemic, a national quarantine or volatile racial relations can the new upscale leftist revolutionaries use fear to push through policies that no one in calm times could stomach.
“Our revolutionaries hate dissent. They destroy any who question their media-spun hoaxes.
And thus violence is much more likely the inevitable result. And the only way differences are settled.
Maybe.
Chinks shifty sure. So tell me something new.
But I sense a lot of people trying to start another foreign war because they’re terrified of a looming civil war in a hopelessly fractured polity. War with China won’t be like the last squalid little episodes in the various sandboxes — highly profitable for all the Usual Cronies. It would be Life Changing.
My Humble Suggestion. Get your Civil War sorted.. rebuild America if possible. Then when you’ve done all and if your new political elite still wants a war and if you find that you have an American Public which is Gung-ho (ooh… old time Soong Mei-ling Claire Chennault tingle up my legs fly the hump powerful big joss juju Words Of Power Me Understand China Velly Much, You Savvee, Johnny?) for a war and happy to lose the odd CVN or three then by golly gosh have at it!
Try not to nuke HK. It would really be a bore for me as this would make it unlikely that I’d be able to contribute further to Art+Deco’s expanding sense of mastery of arcane statistics. I know nobody is very fond of LA, San Diego, Seattle, and Bremerton, so I won’t mention those further. I reckon they won’t take out Portland unless they’ve already managed to steal the IP for all those craft beers.
Zaphod, the shill for XI, is worried about his rice bowl in the Hong Kong hidey hole. Funny that he stokes fears of all those who aren’t white and then promotes race war. How clever is Can’t Do! after all?
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Hark back thirty years ago this week: 65,000 people gathered in the soft summer twilight to listen to pretty music. Will we ever see that again?
Yes, it’s The Bee Gees in Concert in Berlin, early June 1991. We’re told the lyrics of the song “One” had special meaning for the crowd: the Wall had fallen and Germany was reunited: “You and I should be one…Ah, we are one…We are one….We are one.”
Not just a performance. It’s a nice moment in time…and nice moments are rare:
https://youtu.be/VZoN4E47ymQ
The drummer is Gerry Polci who joined the band in the early 70s. He was married to Valli’s daughter for a time.
How many drummers sing (well)? Here’s a good list:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/the-10-best-singing-drummers-in-rock-history/
I only got Mickey Dolenz and Phil Collins. I plumb forgot Levon Helm of the Band, who sang many of their most well-known songs, “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Cripple Creek” and “The Weight.”
Then there’s Karen Carpenter — I never think of her as a drummer.
As a singing drummer, Andy Sturmer from the band Jellyfish had a pretty interesting live setup. It was sort of a standing kit so he could be out front. Here’s a live clip from David Letterman in 1990:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpXMIsIKuGs
I would have only gotten Collins and Henley.
Bass player was Don Ciccone, formerly of the Critters, hear singing the lead vocal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h27rFCiL96Y
As in so many such videos, the band is lip syncing. Hearing the exact version that was recorded takes away a little from the experience of watching.
Is Jeffrey Toobin returning to CNN a good thing or a bad thing?
On the one hand, it demonstrates perhaps the greatest practical problem facing America. We have developed a self-perpetuating ruling class of halfwits and degenerates who believe rules and standards only apply to others.
On the other hand, that class is well on its way to not even pretending otherwise. Lots of people will admire The Emperor’s New Clothes. Most of ’em, however, will draw a line at actually having the Emperor’s junk rubbed in their face.
Mike
Neo, I don’t know if you have seen this but it seemed like something in your wheelhouse.
https://www.city-journal.org/tulsa-opera-daniel-bernard-roumain
Singing drummers? My mind kept going towards singing bass players. This is a reach, but how about Ringo Starr? Not that he’d make any 10 best list.
If I recall correctly, Phil Collins reluctantly got drafted into singing after Peter Gabriel left the band.
TommyJay:
Who can forget Ringo’s singing leads on “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Yellow Submarine”?
Plus rockabilly rockers, “Act Naturally” and “Honey Don’t.” Ringo was perfect.
The Beatles had a deep bench.
Yes, a deep bench is right. Ringo might have been the third or fourth best singer in the band, but was good anyway in the appropriate song genre.
Ringo was the Everyman in the group with a voice to match. I can’t think of any other rock musician who filled that role.
That was another ingredient in “What Makes the Beatles Great?”
Speaking of singing drummers, and a stand-up drum kit, don’t forget Dave Clark of the Dave Clark V.
alanc709:
I did not know that. Here’s to Dave Clark!
The DC5 had a perfect British Invasion sound.
A classic by Strawberry Alarm Clock, with the drummer as lead singer:
Incense and Peppermints, 1967
https://youtu.be/4rw1_FNdy-Y
It is a bit confusing, with all the personnel, but there is some interesting history here.
When the song was recorded in the studio in May 1967, I think maybe all of these guys were 17 or 18 and grew up east of Los Angeles. The lead singer on the studio version, a friend of the band, was 16, Greg Munford. He was never a member (but incidentally, I saw somewhere that he played drums). The drummer on the studio recording was Randy Seol, who was 17, and had just joined the band himself and was hired to help with vocals.
It is Seol in the above video, but since it is the studio recording, not live, it is Munford’s singing.
In an interview I will link below, Seol says he always tried to sing it like Munford because that was what people expected. It was a huge hit.
I believe this is Seol singing lead (and playing drums) in another TV appearance, but on a different song.
Tomorrow, 1968
https://youtu.be/9tXVZb33CwM
The person who posted it on YouTube says he believes it was live and from the Jonathan Winters show. The lead voice sounds different from Incense and Peppermints. Seol would also have been the voice on the studio recording, though, so unlike Incense and Peppermints, that studio recording would have sounded like him.
On Incense and Peppermints, they recorded a version with Seol and another with Munford, who just happened to stop by that day. The producer chose the version with Munford.
Below is the same recording but with clips from two movies they were in, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Psych-Out. The band was also on the first episode of Laugh In.
Tomorrow, 1968
https://youtu.be/zhEff-d8Chc
And here is that interview with Seol where talks a lot about Incense and Peppermints, how it was made, including how the band didn’t get any royalties:
https://youtu.be/RjgPXFBlA2U
Their Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Alarm_Clock
Note, I see many good recent comments on these videos, informative, such as by people who knew them in high school. And more specific ones that relate to my understanding above which I had basically come to by then.
I always liked the song on the radio. Seeing it on YouTube eventually, 30 years later or whatever, it stuck with me that the lead singer was the drummer.
Amazon Alexa and Ring Users should watch this.
Rob Brax on the dangers of Amazon Sidewalk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccrUAp4GQvY
This ain’t QAnon. What else is the CCP up to?
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/11/exclusive-defector-provides-evidence-that-the-chinese-military-orchestrated-the-creation-of-covid-19-and-lab-leak-n395384
Vaccine, Virus, Can’t Do?
Creepy Joe and The Jill in Europe and The Ho staying away from the border, but don’t fret; the Pentagon and alphabet agencies have targeted the real threat: “whiteness.”
Slowly, slowly Om… Keep your blood lust down. We’re all likely to be bathing in the stuff sooner or later… but let’s not rush it now.
Pro Tip: Sort out the Home Front first. You’ve got more Fifth Columnists there than you have Bulldozers to make pits. Work cut out.
Pro Pro Tip: Best re-learn how to smelt steel at scale, build large ships quickly, and manufacture 4nm process semiconductors. Especially that last bit. Might want to chomp off the relevant TSMC Fab bits of Taiwan and tow them to Alaska maybe? Or maybe the Red State keyboard warriors have a Plan. 689 ^^#2222 Hash Key 2397843EF12A .. there… does that QAnon Gibberish make you feel OK now? 🙂
Pro tip to Can Do!
Think about your next hidey hole. Hong Kong ain’t a long term thing for a free roader.
You are a self parody talking about blood lust.
Tiananmen Square should have shown you how dainty the CCP can be when it comes to blood. Who do you suppose is encouraging the domestic (USA) subversion, something about followers of a Little Red Book?
You follow QAnon like your fellow sage Yammer?
Keep shilling for the CCP, does it keep your social credit score acceptable for now?
Boring.
Parthian Shot Practice is far more fulfilling.
*glues a dollar to the sidewalk*
*notches arrow*
…
Can Do! A legend in his own mind.
University death spiral dead ahead?
University of London’s Eric Kauffman’s new study of politicization of the university gets a thorough review from climatologist Patrick Michaels, who was ramrodded out of the environmental sciences department at the University of Virginia for climate heresy after 30 years service. He observes that the young PhDs are more censorious and seriously fascist than their elders.
Therefore, the future is definitely worse than the present for the once great repositories of wisdom. The only strategy that could change this is too down political force.
Because the US cannot do at the federal level what the UK can, our future is seriously bleak.
He concludes: “This is depressing, for it seems that the death spiral of American academia is inevitable. Our problems are structural and intractable. Because the university faculty is empowered to dictate who its members are and what is permitted in the canon of knowledge, it will retain that corrupt absolute power. Self-selection by the faculty ensures an increasingly leftward tilt, not just in the social sciences and humanities; as the infection has now reached STEM. Political intolerance will increase, as will de facto and direct suppression of academic free speech. It encourages heinous self-censorship that silences teachers who might dissent—until they can no longer speak.”
https://judithcurry.com/2021/06/09/death-spiral-of-american-academia/
Red State reports details of Dr Li-Meng Yan’s China-CCP engineered the Covid virus story has been confirmed. That the FBI effectively acted to coverup this evidence was exposed by Congressman Matt Gaetz in open testimony by the FBI’s Christopher Wray.
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/11/exclusive-defector-provides-evidence-that-the-chinese-military-orchestrated-the-creation-of-covid-19-and-lab-leak-n395384
“Pause for a moment and consider this. Our government now has additional evidence that a virus that killed 600,000 Americans, sickened millions more, nearly destroyed our economy, and inflicted untold collateral damage, was a bioweapon created by the Chinese military and deliberately released.
“I say “additional” evidence because the FBI has had some of this evidence for more than a year and the person who brought it forward has only been subjected to a thorough smear campaign for her efforts – which is highly relevant when attempting to understand the newest defector’s actions.
“As reported in my original story about the defector, sources told RedState that the FBI, the State Department, and CIA were intentionally kept in the dark about the fact that the defector was working with the DIA.” And now we only why.
Bari Weiss is given a long interview with Jordan Peterson on YT. Weiss is alarmed that True liberals face pessimistic dilemmas.
Will the Woke Left fascism fade like other moral panics like child sex abuse did in the 1980s? asks Weiss. No, replies Victor Dàvis Hanson.
It was the Vietnam War’s compulsory military service draft that united hippies and the flower power gen and mobilized action and reaction then. This was more like a moral panic, or rather bonafide protest and reform movement.
By stark contrast, the Wokies Revolution may be a bare 20%, but they control every citadel of societal and political-economic leadership in the US.
Today, “They are “the Man.”
“Our 21st century revolutionaries are multibillionaires with flip-flops, tie-dye T-shirts and nose rings, but with the absolute power and desire to censor how half the country communicates — or cancel them entirely.
“They don’t flock to campus free-speech areas; they are the campus administrators who ban free speech.
“They don’t picket outside the Pentagon; they are inside the Pentagon.
“They don’t chant “eat the rich”; they are the rich who eat at Napa Valley’s French Laundry….
“They don’t protest “uptight” values, because they are more intolerant and puritanical than any Victorian.
“They don’t believe in racial quotas based on “proportional representation,” because they are racists who demand underrepresentation of “bad” racial groups and overrepresentation of “good” groups. The color of our skin is their gospel, not the content of our character.
“They are top-down revolutionaries. None of their agendas, from open borders and changing the Constitution to critical race theory and banning clean-burning fossil fuels, are ever favored among a majority of the population.
“Their guiding principle is “never let a crisis go to waste.” Only in times of a pandemic, a national quarantine or volatile racial relations can the new upscale leftist revolutionaries use fear to push through policies that no one in calm times could stomach.
“Our revolutionaries hate dissent. They destroy any who question their media-spun hoaxes.
“Truth is their enemy and fear us their weapon.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-isnt-your-fathers-left-wing-revolution
And thus violence is much more likely the inevitable result. And the only way differences are settled.
Maybe.
Chinks shifty sure. So tell me something new.
But I sense a lot of people trying to start another foreign war because they’re terrified of a looming civil war in a hopelessly fractured polity. War with China won’t be like the last squalid little episodes in the various sandboxes — highly profitable for all the Usual Cronies. It would be Life Changing.
My Humble Suggestion. Get your Civil War sorted.. rebuild America if possible. Then when you’ve done all and if your new political elite still wants a war and if you find that you have an American Public which is Gung-ho (ooh… old time Soong Mei-ling Claire Chennault tingle up my legs fly the hump powerful big joss juju Words Of Power Me Understand China Velly Much, You Savvee, Johnny?) for a war and happy to lose the odd CVN or three then by golly gosh have at it!
Try not to nuke HK. It would really be a bore for me as this would make it unlikely that I’d be able to contribute further to Art+Deco’s expanding sense of mastery of arcane statistics. I know nobody is very fond of LA, San Diego, Seattle, and Bremerton, so I won’t mention those further. I reckon they won’t take out Portland unless they’ve already managed to steal the IP for all those craft beers.
Zaphod, the shill for XI, is worried about his rice bowl in the Hong Kong hidey hole. Funny that he stokes fears of all those who aren’t white and then promotes race war. How clever is Can’t Do! after all?