The following account also appears in Howard Sounes’s Fab (2010). Can’t help but be curious about this Mormon girl who got under Beatle Paul’s skin.
P. 38: “As the spring of 1971 turned to summer, the strangeness that came with Paul’s extraordinary fame began to creep back into the McCartneys’ lives…Determined devotees would make the long pilgrimmage to Argyll, since it was no secret now that the McCartneys spent much of their time near Campbeltown….
“More worryingly, a young girl, a Mormon from Utah, had taken to camping on the edge of some woods just beyond the boundary of High Park, so that she could get close to Paul without trespassing on his land. The McCartneys often saw her, partially hidden by the trees, watching them through binoculars. One day in the summer of 1971, Paul apparently snapped and, according to the girl, came out of the house, drove toward her in his Land Rover, and angrily emerged, shouting and swearing.
“The girl claimed that she couldn’t remember much of what happened next, except that in the aftermath, her nose was bleeding. The implication, obviously, was that McCartney had assaulted her, which Paul denied. ‘I have been asking her politely – pleading with her – to leave me and my family alone,’ he stated. ‘She refuses to recognize that I am married with a family.’ “
There’s a whole category of hit singles that charted because of their involvement in TV ads, like the Johnny Mann Singers’ “Cinnamint Shuffle,” from 1966. “Cinnamint” was a flavor of Clark’s chewing gum (along with “Teaberry”) and commercials for both of these featured consumers popping a stick of it into their mouths and dancing a two-second shuffle before carrying on with their business.
The ad campaign’s song was a familiar one: “Mexican Shuffle,” written by Sol Lake, which was a keynote track on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s South of the Border LP, a Billboard Top Ten hit in 1964 (the “Mexican Shuffle” single hit #88). The Johnny Mann Singers’ 1966 version of the song, sporting the new title of “Cinnamint Shuffle (Mexican Shuffle),” managed to squeak into Billboard‘s “bubbling under” chart, peaking at #126. (Johnny Mann was the musical director for the Joey Bishop Show, incidentally.)
Armchair carbon dating: I’m not thinking the ad in the YouTube clip above is from 1961, as listed at the beginning. That would be a full three years before Herb Alpert’s version. Also, the car at :13 is looking like a ’66 Buick Riviera and the art at :32 looks a tad countercultural.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Johnny Mann Singers – “Cinnamint Shuffle (Mexican Shuffle)” (1966)
In 1970 this Israeli duo (Hedva Amrani and David Rosenthal) entered their single “Ani Cholem Al Naomi” (“I Dream of Naomi”) in Tokyo’s Yamaha Song Festival and won first prize. They entered with a Japanese version, though, which subsequently sold close to a million copies. If you let this sticky song run through your mind long enough, it might morph into the Association’s “Along Comes Mary” or the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.”
I collected these cans in the summer of ’79 and was able to make the stacked up panorama shown in this picture. My decision to toss them out at the end of that summer was perhaps a formative anti-hoarding lesson for someone with an unmistakable collector’s impulse. Each can offers up a single image suggesting a quintessential recreational activity for each state (photos – except for Minnesota – courtesy of usasoda.com):
Alabama (biking in historic Mobile) Alaska (scaling the Alaska range) Arizona (backpacking in the Grand Canyon) Arkansas (picknicking in Hot Springs) California (surfing the California coast) Colorado (skiing in the Rockies) Connecticut (hiking the Appalachian Trail) Delaware (touring) Florida (boating in the Everglades) Georgia (fishing Lake Lanier) Hawaii (snorkeling) Idaho (rafting the Salmon River) Illinois (cycling in New Salem State Park) Indiana (playing basketball) Iowa (ballooning) Kansas (camping along the Santa Fe Trail) Kentucky (horse racing) Louisiana (boating in Lake Pontchartrain) Maine (canoeing in the Allagash River) Maryland (sailing in Chesapeake Bay) Massachusetts (running the Boston Marathon) Michigan (fishing in Lake Michigan) Minnesota (dogsledding in the Superior National Forest) Mississippi (sailing along the Gulf Coast) Missouri (canoeing in the Ozark streams) Montana (backbacking in Glacier National Park) Nebraska (saddlebronc riding) Nevada (wind sailing in Death Valley) New Hampshire (climbing White Mountain) New Jersey (canoeing in the Pine Barrens) New Mexico (rounding up cattle) New York (sight-seeing in Central Park) North Carolina (golfing the Tar Heel Fairways) North Dakota (cross country skiing) Ohio (backpacking along the Buckeye Trail) Oklahoma (horse riding near the Glass Mountains) Oregon (climbing Mount Hood) Pennsylvania (touring Independence Square) Rhode Island (sailing in Newport) South Carolina (playing tennis at Hilton Head) South Dakota (hiking Mount Rushmore) Tennessee (hiking the Great Smokies) Texas (fishing the Toledo Bend Reservoir) Utah (camping in national parks) Vermont (iceboating in Lake Champlain) Virginia (camping in the Shenandoah Valley) Washington (kayaking in the Skagit River) West Virginia (climbing the Seneca Rocks) Wisconsin (fishing in Lake Winnebago) Wyoming (hiking the Grand Tetons)
Anyone interested in constructing an alternate list?
An entry in Nicholas Rombes’ A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (2009), in which the phrase “There is nothing inherently wonderful about starkness” serves as a stand-alone entry in the T section:
P. 289: ” ‘There is nothing inherently wonderful about starkness’: A sentence from a scathing 1976 article about Patti Smith by Ira Robbins, the editor of Trouser Press. Describing Horses – which had been released in December 1975 – as a ‘fairly good album, capturing a small part of the feeling one got seeing her at Max’s a year ago,’ Robbins wonders why she has become a darling of the ‘straight press.’ His critique rests on two objections. First, her music has been transformed from a sort of self-deprecating ‘imitation’ of rock and roll into an actual, serious effort to be rock and roll… Second, her newfound success with Horses is a betrayal of her roots and of the New York underground scene…
“In some ways, Robbins’s article predicts the countless attacks on punk and indie bands that would, in the coming decades, be accused of selling out, either because they signed to major labels or because they began adjusting their sound to accommodate the broader tastes of wider audiences.
“But more than this, Robbins’s assault has the tone of a spurned lover or, worse yet, a forgotten one. Patti, why have you forgotten me? I love you. Please come back. It’s a feeling we’ve all had at one point or another about a favorite band, and about the betrayal we feel when that private experience goes public and everybody gets a chance to listen. In this respect, Robbins’s essay is not a hatchet job but a confession of love.”
Years ago I’d read Joe Jackson’s Cure for Gravity and mentioned it here. Certain words of his that I didn’t write about then have stuck in my head:
“…It still amazes me how much scorn some people can muster for musicians – or the wrong kind of musicians. The biggest fights are not necessarily between, say, jazzers and folkies, or rockers and baroquers. The greater the distance between two genres or subcultures, the more likely they are to be irrelevant, even invisible, to each other. It’s ironic, but this is the way that grudges and rivalries seem to work. Poor people don’t envy the rich nearly as much as they envy the poor person who gets a break… The history of rock ‘n’ roll teems with such wars of attrition…
“Of course music per se is not always the issue, and it’s impossible to completely separate any kind of art – or any kind of product – from the preoccupations of its time. I like to say that I have no agenda. I say it because I don’t run with any particular gang, and because agendas are often no more than defensive postures we take up against other people’s agendas. But I do have an agenda of sorts, or a guiding conviction, and I may as well be honest about it. Music is either an art form or it isn’t, and I say that it is: the greatest of the arts, and one of the closest approaches we mortals have to the divine. And try as I might, I can’t seem to reduce it to the level of the matching handbag that goes with this year’s jacket. Nor can I inflate it to the level of tribal warfare.”
I played Texocentric songs on last Sunday’s edition of Folkways for Texas Independence Day and I noticed that on the Cartwright Brothers’ 1929 “Texas Ranger” they pronounce “Rio Grande” as “RYE-oh Grand.” I’d first noticed the Texas river pronounced that way on Stan Freberg’s 1955 “Yellow Rose of Texas,” which parodies Mitch Miller’s singalong hit version of the song and which also uses that pronunciation. (So does a version by Johnny Desmond released hot on Miller’s heels in the summer of ’55 – another big hit.) I figured Freberg’s usage was an oversight that was especially regrettable since he mimics a Texan and I’ve only ever heard it as “REE-oh Grand” here in the Lone Star State.
The Cartwright Brothers threw me, though, because they were from the town of Munday in the Texas panhandle and their record came out so much earlier than the other ones. Additional poking around has informed me that the town of Rio Grande in Ohio happens to be pronounced “RYE-oh” and that the majority of the employees of the Denver Rio Grande Western Railroad, which ran in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, also pronounced it that way. Maybe the railroad connection is the most relevant one here, with Munday close enough to the Intermountain area to adopt that quirk. (Gene Autry’s 1933 version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” has him singing “REE-oh Grand.” He’s originally from Tioga, pronounced “Tie-OH-ga” in Northeast Texas.) Keeping my ears open…
