Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday wonderings
I wonder why Simon Cowell keeps beating the Melinda Doolittle horse - good singer though she may be, she looked and acted too old and was simply too boring and already-a-pro backup singer. Why doesn't he get it? He's one of the geniuses behind this, after all.
I wonder why John Edwards doesn't get it that he can't run around saying he's the champion of the poor and downtrodden while getting zillion-dollar haircuts and gajillion-dollar paybacks from hedge funds and living in mansions. Are the limousine crowd simply utterly out of touch?
I wonder why Jimmy Carter lit into Bush in the first place - which is impolite, unseemly and incredibly unwise given his own performance in office. And I also wonder why he semi-hemi-demi retracted his lacing into Bush. Of course, I forget that his brain rarely makes much sense.
I wonder what it is that some people see in Quentin Tarantino. He's a strange looking, somewhat whiny, violence-loving emperor who isn't wearing enough clothes.
I wonder what possessed the drafters of the current immigration bill to propose that back taxes be waived. Unless they're planning a general tax amnesty for all of us current citizens, that would be a bizarre and nasty little piece of work. Unless we're all missing something. Where are the conspiracy theorists when you need them?
I was wondering what happened to Vicki Carr because I was thinking about one of her songs the other day when watching American Idol. Turns out she's alive and well and performing all over the place. I still remember one amazing performance of hers on Johnny Carson.
I wonder why John Edwards doesn't get it that he can't run around saying he's the champion of the poor and downtrodden while getting zillion-dollar haircuts and gajillion-dollar paybacks from hedge funds and living in mansions. Are the limousine crowd simply utterly out of touch?
I wonder why Jimmy Carter lit into Bush in the first place - which is impolite, unseemly and incredibly unwise given his own performance in office. And I also wonder why he semi-hemi-demi retracted his lacing into Bush. Of course, I forget that his brain rarely makes much sense.
I wonder what it is that some people see in Quentin Tarantino. He's a strange looking, somewhat whiny, violence-loving emperor who isn't wearing enough clothes.
I wonder what possessed the drafters of the current immigration bill to propose that back taxes be waived. Unless they're planning a general tax amnesty for all of us current citizens, that would be a bizarre and nasty little piece of work. Unless we're all missing something. Where are the conspiracy theorists when you need them?
I was wondering what happened to Vicki Carr because I was thinking about one of her songs the other day when watching American Idol. Turns out she's alive and well and performing all over the place. I still remember one amazing performance of hers on Johnny Carson.
Labels: headlines, reflections
Permalink | 
| posted by jau at 9:22 AM
jau — at 11:29 AM, May 23, 2007:
— at 10:16 PM, May 23, 2007:
| posted by jau at 9:22 AM
3 more:
jau — at 11:29 AM, May 23, 2007:
Amazing story!! (I wonder if Spector held a gun to her head?) She's had a long career anyway, though.
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— at 10:16 PM, May 23, 2007:
I felt this might be a good time to exhume the recording (Liberty 55493) and give it another listen.
Vikki is very good, but the pseudo-march time imposed on the song does it a disservice: it makes her sound, well, regimented, and that's way inconsistent with "If they don't like him that way, they won't like me after today."
Vikki is very good, but the pseudo-march time imposed on the song does it a disservice: it makes her sound, well, regimented, and that's way inconsistent with "If they don't like him that way, they won't like me after today."
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In 1962, she was the new ingenue at Liberty Records, and producer Snuff Garrett was getting ready to record her first single for the label: a new Gene Pitney song. Liberty was in Los Angeles, but Carr was in New York, so Garrett dispatched under-assistant Phil Spector to take care of business.
Spector heard the song, decided he could do a better job with it, flew back to LA and cut a backing track with his usual ten or twenty dozen session pros. The track was intended for the Crystals, who unfortunately were back in New York and didn't want to travel this far. So Spector hired the LA-based Blossoms, fronted by Darlene Love, for triple scale in lieu of actual royalties, and put out the record under the Crystals' name anyway. (Gene Pitney, incidentally, disputed some of this story: he said that the competing versions were recorded the same day, and anyway Pitney had written the song for Spector in return for Phil's work on Pitney's "Every Breath I Take" single the previous year.)
Whatever the circumstances, the bogus Crystals got to #1 with "He's a Rebel," released one week before Vikki Carr's Garrett-produced version, which never got above #115 - though it was a big hit in Australia for some reason.
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