Rant #2,518: Keep On Running

The other day, we lost another musician who helped to define the 1960’s generation of rockers with his music.
 
Spencer Davis, the leader of his eponymous band which blended rock, pop and blues and probably most importantly, brought the world Steve Winwood, passed away at age 81 from pneumonia.
 
The Spencer Davis Group rode into our consciousness once the door for British bands was broken wide open by the Beatles, but their sound was so different than that produced by the Fab Four.
 
It was bluesy, it was smoked with a lot of fire, and a lot of that had to do with Winwood, the teenage phenomenon whose voice sounded way older than it actually was.
 
That voice propelled Spencer Davis and his cohorts to several hits in America, including “Keep On Running,” “I’m a Man,” and their biggest stateside hit, “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which hit No. 7 in  the fall of 1966.
 
And they were even more popular in England, where they had numerous hits with Winwood out front.

 
And once Winwood became too huge to be contained in this band, and he left the act, the hits stopped, and “Time Seller”—the sleeve that I posted here from my personal collection—only reached No. 100 on the charts in 1967, and that was pretty much it for the band as a chart entity in the U.S,
 
One would think that a band that is eponymously named for its founder that had a young wunderkind becoming the biggest star of the band would make the bandleader jealous of the kid’s stardom, but nothing could be further from the truth with Davis.

 
Everything that I have read about him and his feelings toward Winwood are just the opposite, that he knew who the real star of the band was, and it wasn’t the person the band was named after.
 
And I know this personally, because one of my first celebrity interviews way back when was with Davis.
 
I think that interview took place in 1988, when I was writing for the fledgling Long Island-based music publication called “The Island Ear.”
 
I was assigned to cover the opening of a performance venue called “The Saint,” which was simply the updated and newly polished off Fillmore East, which had closed several years before.
 
The venue was under new owners, who had renamed the place, and one of the first shows they had there was an oldies show with a few veteran acts including the Chambers Brothers and Spencer Davis.
 
I know I was probably pretty nervous when I got there, but once I met Davis, I wasn’t nervous anymore. He was so kind and all he wanted to do was talk, so a half hour interview turned into two hours of memories from him, and in particular about Winwood.
 
When I had heard that Davis has passed, I immediately looked for the interview, but I can’t find it. That is a real shame, because once I was backstage and Davis talked to me, I really got a great interview from him.
 
I remember my editor told me it was too long, that I had to cut it down, and I did, but what a wonderful interview it was.
 
All I said to Davis was, “Take me back 20 years ago to when you first started the Spencer Davis Group,” and he spoke almost non-stop for two hours while I could hear the Chambers Brothers practicing in the background.
 
Anyway, he told me all about the British blues scene at the time, how his band fit into that scene, and what an enormous talent Winwood was.
 
He told me something to the effect of “Look, we knew we had caught lightning in a bottle with Winwood, but he had become so big, there was no way we were going to hold him back. When the proper time came, we simply had to let him go,”  and even though that was pretty much the end of the Spencer Davis Group as a big act, Davis had absolutely no regrets about Winwood’s departure.
 
But back to Davis … he was just so nice to me, made me feel comfortable—I must have looked like a wreck—and after two hours of talking to him, my head was far from dizzy, in fact, I think it was on straighter than it had been earlier in the day.
 
And that is what I read about him as the news came through about his passing.
 
No one had a bad word to say about him, and I mean nobody.
 
In later years, he had become something of a musician that other musicians looked up to for advice and for direction, and having been there and done it all, he knew his place in the musical world, and he went with it.
 
Years later, at the old Westbury Music Fair, I saw him with a new Spencer Davis Band, and they were quite good. They had a lead singer who kind of sounded like Winwood, and they went through the requisite hits with Davis in the background, probably the most anonymous band leader of a band that had his name in the history of rock music … I mean, compare that with, let’s say, Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five, who was out front and center with everything his band did, and you will understand what I mean.
 
So, with Davis’ death, another musical icon from my youth has left us, but this one just was so personal for me based on the two hours I spent with him more than 30 years ago.
 
It is a memory I will never forget, and when I hear “Gimme Some Lovin’” or any of the other songs they did, I still think about that interview as if it happened yesterday.
 
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #2,517: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

I see on my Yahoo homepage that Ivanka Trump, the adviser to the president, who happens to be her father, Donald Trump, told the world that she is learning to play the guitar during the pandemic.
 
She said this during an interview, stating that the pandemic has allowed her and many others to “reconnect with life’s simple pleasures.”
 
However, many have taken this comment to the extreme, likening it to Nero fiddling while Rome is burning—with the recent announcement that eight million people have fallen into poverty due to the pandemic.
 
Trump said she took up guitar because her husband, senior adviser to the president Jared Kushner, was working very late nights, and after she put her children to sleep and finished up her own work, she needed something to do.
 
Of course, people are so, so, so sensitive today to just about anything, and of course, Twitter is the outlet that they use instead of playing guitar to fill up their free time.
 
One Twitter respondent stated, “That’s cool. 24,000 New York City residents died.”
 
Look, anything with a Trump name on it today is going to come under fire from people who simply do not like the president, to the extreme that if you get a pimple on your face, you trip on your kids’ toys on the floor, or you get into a car accident, it is going to be “Trump’s fault.”
 
And quite frankly, people responding on Twitter to anything have too much time on their hands, but the president uses Twitter too, so I guess it is the current place to vent any frustrations that you have.
 
Me, I don’t think I have been on Twitter more than a few times. I had gone on it several years ago, looked at it here and there, but I never got into the Twitter culture, so I haven’t been on it now in a long time.
 
I guess I have other places to vent my frustrations.
 
Heck, I guess that I vent them right here!
 
But anyway, I know where Trump is coming from. Sure, it is for the wrong reason, but the pandemic has given many of us a lot of extra time on our hands, and rather than go onto Twitter, it is an opportunity to go back to basics.
 
Trump also said that she has broken out every board game that she has, and has played all of them, but al lot of people think that with her comments, they are the ones being played.
 
We have lots of problems in the country, and a woman with the responsibilities that she has should be using her time to right those wrongs, not learning to play guitar.
 
I get that, but how many of us work 25 hours a day, even with a job to go to?
 
Everybody needs some free time to do what they want to do, and even someone at this level needs that too, in particular with her husband working 245 hour days (yes, I did mean 25 hours, meaning that they are working all day—plus).
 
Me, being out of work for so long forced me to do other things to fill up my time after my daily, and ultimately fruitless, look for work, like writing a novel. Whether that novel will ever see the light of day and get published is another story, but it filed in so much time over a couple of months of inactivity.
 
I also digitized a lot of my records during this period, and I still try to fit in some digitizing now that I am busier with this remote job that I have.
 
So what’s wrong with doing something for yourself every once in a while?
 
Everybody screaming on Twitter about how insensitive Ms. Trump is, I mean, do you work 25 hours a day, even if you are employed?
 
The one silver lining of the pandemic—and there is only one—is that it has forced us to re-examine our priorities, making our families paramount, putting them where they should have been in the first place.
 
And if we do what we are supposed to be doing during the day, what is wrong with taking some time to do personal things, things that make you happy?
 
Again, I guess anything associated with Trump will get the hairs of some people in total disarray.
 
I would tell these people a message that I think would fit into the Twitter regimen of words and letter that you can post:
 
“Chill out, just chill out!”

Rant #2,516: Hot Fun In the Summertime

Or is it “Hot Fun In the Autumn Time?”
 
I really don’t know right now, but all I can say is that right now, at least for me, it’s time again for Sly and the Family Stone.
 
It all started a few weeks ago.
 
I was listening to Sirius satellite radio’s 1960s music channel—Channel 6, naturally—while driving in my car, and “Hot Fun In the Summertime” came on the radio.
 
Not that this was a new revelation, of course. The song has been coming on the radio of Top 40, FM and satellite radio stations for the past 50 years or so, a staple of whatever type of radio you are listening to.
 
But when it came on this time, it sounded almost different.
 
Maybe it was a different mix, maybe it just sounded better on satellite radio, maybe I was just ready to hear the song at that every moment in time to soothe my senses.
 
But whatever the case, this song came on the radi0, and I remember thinking to myself as I was driving that this song sounded just so good, so perfect on the radio.
 
And, in fact, from the first time I heard it more than 50 years ago—probably on WABC-AM, the nation’s top Top 40 station at the time, the station that you could hear all over the country on certain nights—I just loved the song, and it defined what summer was all about to me, certainly being a city kid back when the song was new.
 
Sly and the Family Stone had burst onto the scene in 1968 or so, a mixed race band that took rock, pop, rhythm and blues, soul and a few other musical genres and mixed all of them into a new stew, which later morphed into what we now call funk.
 
But back when they came on the scene, their music, their look, and their vibe was just so different than what we were used to seeing, but it was all honed out west in San Francisco, where Sylvester Stewart—Sly Stone—had become one of the most prestigious musical entities in the burgeoning rock scene out there, a black man producing rock acts like the Beau Brummels while also honing his craft as a songwriter and overall musical entity with numerous other projects that didn’t initially bare much fruit.
 
But somehow, with the San Francisco rock scene becoming more prevalent, his stature was also rising, and when he formed the Family Stone with several musical relatives and friends, he hit pay dirt, but it wasn’t immediate.
 
There had been interracial acts prior to Sly and the Family Stone—the American Breed comes to mind, but there were others too—but this band was different.
 
There sound, even early on, could not be defined, but Epic Records knew it had something special with the band. While its first album, the suitably titled “A Whole New Thing,” didn’t do much business, the next album set the world on fire due to the title track, and from there, there was no looking back for the band.
 
“Dance to the Music”—both the single and the album—rocked all formats, and became top sellers for the band, the template that they needed for their success during the next five or sis years.
 
The song mixed every possible pop musical genre at the time, coming out with a song that even if you didn’t dance, you had to at least tap your toes to.
 
This was not Motown, this was not rock, this was not pop … it was a mix of everything and anything, virtually like taking the musical kitchen sink and throwing all the dishes together into one heaping pike.
 

It set the tone for the band, which had also gone from conventional outfits to stuff this side of the 5th Dimension, both figuratively and literally, so not only was their music a tonic for the ears, the band was a tonic for your eyes.
 
Over the next few years, they had hit record after hit record—“I Want To Take You Higher,” “Everybody Is a Star,” “Family Affair,” “Life,” “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin,” and their albums were also selling in the millions with each release.
 
They triumphantly played Woodstock, and for a few years, they were perhaps the top American musical act on the charts.
 
Sure, it all unraveled after a while, a mix of too much pomp, too many drugs, a lack of continued creativity, and through the behavior of the band’s leader, Sly Stone.
 
But within that five or six year period of success came “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” a paean of that time of year, a song that hit with me and millions of others as THE song of the summer in the late 1960s.
 
It just came at the right time, and every time I head it, it brings me to a different time in my life, a time when I was still a kid, soon to be a teenager in a few months after it came out in the summer of 1969, and I just took to it hook, line a sinker.
 
I just love the song, and I have often thought why I liked it so much. Was it the song, or was it the connection that my neighborhood had to Sly Stone.
 
This is getting off the topic a bit, but I grew up, as I have told you many times, in a somewhat magical place called Rochdale Village, a 20-building cooperative development that was situated smack dab in the middle of one of the oldest black neighborhoods in the country, Jamaica, Queens.
 
Being that myself and others were white kids growing up in such a development, we saw and heard things that we would have never experienced if we had grown up in a segregated environment, and that also included music, where we were exposed to everything playing around us.
 
By 1969, Soy Stone was a huge celebrity, and his girlfriend at the time—whose name I cannot remember for the life of me—lived in Rochdale Village, as did the girlfriend of another huge star at the time, basketball’s Walt Frazier.
 
Now I cannot remember which one it was, but somehow, word got out that one of them were going to pick up their girlfriend one early afternoon right in the development.
 
Each one drove a Rolls Royce at the time, and once word got out, hundreds of kids like me congregated in one of the sections of the development waiting to get a glimpse of Sly or Walt and their girlfriends.
 
We congregated, the Rolls Royce came, the girlfriend was picked up, and dozens of us chased the Rolls Royce for as far as we could, seeing it drive off in the distance.
 
Again, I don’t remember if it was Sly or Walt, but it was for one of them, it did happen, and I have memories of that day that have lasted more than 50 years.
 
Anyway, back to the song …
 
When I heard “Hot Fun in the Summertime” a few weeks back, it just hit me like it hadn’t hit me before.
 
Subsequently, in between all that I have to do at home and with my remote job and helping my son find a job, I have been digitizing my entire Sly and the Family Stone collection, stuff that I hadn’t listened to in ages.
 
And I can report that the music still sounds so good, so perky, so vital, so alive!
 
I wish I could say the same thing about Sly Stone.
 
Due to drug use and a variety of illnesses, he has not been well now for decades. The last I heard, he was living in his van, nearly broke but not done yet.
 
I also read that his son said that he does sit down at the piano and strokes a couple of notes here and there, but can’t get anything coherent or sustained to come out of his attempts at getting back on the right track.
 
He made bad business deals, spent his money on the proverbial wine, women and song, and every comeback attempt is unsuccessful.
 
In fact, the Family Stone has toured without him for years.
 
It is sad, but Sly Stone’s legacy is his music, and “Hot Fun In the Summertime” is tops with me.
 
If only he could find his own summertime … .

Rant #2,515: Talk Talk

I wake up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and then I go on the computer to compose my daily Rant.
 
After I turn on the computer, I click onto Google Chrome, and the first thing that opens up is my Yahoo home page.
 
I take a glance at the “headlines” and move on, but I know that many people use their Yahoo home page as their main source for news, which based on the “headlines” that you find there, is quite alarming.
 
Today, the lead story when I turned on the computer and went to the home page was “Secret Weapon Gives GOP Hope For Election Day,” related to voter registration tallies showing that the Republicans have narrowed the gap in three key states for the upcoming presidential election.
 
OK, I can buy that as a lead story, but what followed next … I mean, even with the lower expectations of “news” these days, could you imagine your local newspaper, your local TV or radio news, or the nightly network news covering these stories as “news?”
 
Here are some of the headlines, and remember, millions of people use Yahoo news as their only resource for the news of the day:
 
“Trump Reportedly Invited a Waiter Into a Top Secret Intelligence Briefing Room To Order a Milkshake”
 
“Porn Stars Are Terrified of Amy Coney Barrett”
 
“The Queen Reportedly hut Down Prince Harry’s Demand That Meghan Markle Get Her Way On Her Wedding Day”
 
“Naked and Proud: 17 Body-Positive Photos of Ashley Graham We Can’t Stop Looking At”
 
“Kim Kardashian Tells David Letterman She Was Warned ‘Don’t You Dare Step Foot In That White House Or Your Reputation Is Done’”
 
And this group is only five of dozens of “headlines” that I could have listed here.
 
There were others about a pregnant woman “setting the Internet ablaze” with a run; rapper 50 Cent stating “I don’t care that Trump doesn’t like black people,” and some YouTube celebrity yelling at his wife in front of their children.
 
And I could go on and on and on …
 
But no Elizabeth Hurley bikini pictures today, I’m afraid.
 
Well, is this the national news or the National Enquirer?
 
We have spoken about this subject before at this blog, but the Yahoo home page is more comical than newsworthy, but it pains me that so many people get their news from this site, and only from this site.
 
Can you imagine the vaulted New York Times having a news headline about model Ashley Graham and her latest array of pictures?
 
Can you imagine Nora O’Donnell on the CBS Evening News leading off the half hour newscast with a story about a YouTuber yelling at his spouse?
 
I mean, if you read the Times and if you watch the CBS News show, yes, we are almost at that point in news reporting, but we are not quite there yet …
 
But we are closer than you might think we are at getting to that point.
 
With TMZ being a major source of news in this day and age, you just know that we aren’t that far away from the ‘yellow journalism” that we were all taught about in school, where stories are fabricated and not necessarily true, and are created to frame a viewpoint rather than report the news as it happens.
 
We are getting there when the graphics on the nightly news shows Trump and Biden, with Biden’s photo on the left, larger and move inviting than the current president’s photo on the right. It should be the other way around.
 
We are getting there when presidential ads from both candidates run on network news, one particular one running after a news report about new TV ads released from one of the candidates.
 
We are getting there when the news media is so biased and so determined to show how “inclusive” it is that it elevates one race over another in the very way that it handles and prints the race of one group over another.
 
And that is sad, really sad, because these instances are helping to shape thoughts the wrong way, telling us what to think rather than allowing us to think for ourselves.
 
So the next time you see a Yahoo headline that reads something like “Elizabeth Hurley Shows Off Her 50-Something Body Yet Again in a Tiny Swimsuit,” you can laugh all you want … I know that I do.
 
But the laughs should also turn to concern, because this is what we are being fed as “news,” and it simply isn’t.
 
Remember the saying “all the news that’s fit to print?”
 
The more important one is “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and if that is the case, we are all being killed by how news is handled today by supposedly reputable outlets.
 
That might be news to some, but we should all be aware how our minds and thoughts are being manipulated by lazy reporting of things are about as newsworthy as “the sky is falling.”
 
Maybe, just maybe, Chicken Little was right.