What else can I say about The Monkees? Except for Mike Nesmith, they weren’t musicians. I think the show confused me, putting me in a musical ambivalence by the time I was 11. They were cute and funny, but I think I wanted more from my music. Or maybe I’m just thinking I was more sophisticated than I was, cause I was really kind of a bonehead more times than not.
In any case, the Monkees were a fabricated group, and in 2002, after the death of John Entwistle, bassist for the Who, at the age of 57, and George Harrison less than a year prior at 58, I said these very words to a colleague of mine regarding the ironies of life: “We have two Beatles, two Who, one Mama and one Papa, but we still have all our Monkees.”
That fact altered five years later with the passing of Denny Doherty, leaving us with but one Mama, probably the least significant, but definitely the best-looking of the Mamas and the Papas. The entire statement was then nullified five years after that when we lost Davy Jones of The Monkees at 66, the same age as Papa Denny.
Even though I enjoyed the first Monkees album, I thought they had worn out their welcome and this one would be uninspiring. However, you throw in a little Midler, and you’ve again got an energetic and fun workout. As a matter of fact, this is actually a pretty good album. I guess we have to thank Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and Neil Diamond for songs like “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone” and “I’m a Believer.” Except there’s a real lame-ass song in the middle of side two. But I take back my derisive comment of more than ten years ago, and my past feeling of ambivalence. It doesn’t matter, these guys were fun. As much as I enjoyed the record though, it’s not a contender for Ram alternative.
I did love The Monkees. I watched their show every week. I even acted out fantasy games with my friends playing their particular crush. But, believe it or not, I just didn’t have a favorite Monkee. None of them really did it for me, and as we all know by now, I crush easy, especially when I was a kid. Davy – sorry, too short; Peter, too pale; Mike, the most talented and serious, but too, I don’t know, too talented and serious and he wore a stupid hat; and Mickey, who I sometimes claimed as my favorite, too goofy.
I don’t know if it was The Monkees or inertia, but I just didn’t feel like exercising tonight. I got some chores done, so I wasn’t a total slug today. But when it came time to consider the project, I employed avoidance, going so far as to eat a third of a loaf of 40 calorie per slice bread slathered sparingly with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter – light. But I did get my butt in gear, and even added three Bette Midler songs from side one of her album, and had a pretty darned good workout. And as for The Monkees, this was an enjoyable record. I have to admit, I had my doubts about it, but was pleasantly surprised. Who knew that their theme song had so many verses.
Another Long Island boy, Eddie Money made a good showing on Saturday Night Live back when this, his first record came out, singing both songs from the album that would become hits – “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Baby Hold On.” His, like Ricki Lee Jones’ performance on the show made a big impression on me, and, unlike with Ricki Lee Jones, I rushed out to buy this album. I’m still liking the two hits a lot and the rest of the album is okay.
I was going to write about the GEICO commercial that ran in 2013 and my reaction to his appearance, but when I googled Eddie Money commercial, the words popped up right away and at the top of the list of references were the words I had typed in to search, plus the word that summed up my reaction to his appearance. So many posts with the same thought that was already in my head, and it’s not kind, so I thought I would just end here. I don’t want my site to be one of the ones that comes up in that kind of search, which is why I’m not using the descriptive word. I just have to wonder what would Ronnie say.
Since we already did Mitch Miller for Christmas, we move on to Willy DeVille and his group. I don’t know, I just liked it. I thought it was cool. A few of the people I have been or will be writing about have passed away, and Willy is one of them. He died in 2009 at the age of 58 (just a kid, as I see it) from pancreatic cancer. He had been a New York staple at the clubs in the 1970’s, but I didn’t catch on until the early ‘80s with this album. It’s R&B with a Salsa/Cajun flair and some Bruce-like undertones. I really like “Maybe Tomorrow” and his version of “You Better Move On.” Plus, Willy DeVille had great cheekbones.
I was happy for Willy for his Academy Award nomination for Best Song in 1987, and his appearance on the Oscar’s singing his theme song from The Princess Bride, “Storybook Love.”
This album reminds me of the year just prior to taking up with the ex, hanging out at Cagney’s and a previous boyfriend. But we won’t get into that. At least not right now.
You know, I had two Bette Midler albums, this self-titled one and The Divine Miss M. The latter got leant to someone and never returned. Just desserts, I guess. And I remember who that was, and it wasn’t my brother. Anyway, why Bette Midler amongst my rock ‘n roll records, plus the one’s I inherited from the family collection? I like her. I like Bette Midler. I like her energy, her enjoyment in what she does, I like her talent. I’ve never seen her in concert, though I wouldn’t mind, and I don’t flock to her movies, but I like Beaches and The First Wives Club, and how fabulous was she in The Rose. I like Mayim Bialik, TV’s Blossom, who played the young Bette Midler in Beaches and is now wowing us as Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, my favorite show.
This album that salutes all eras of music, is appropriately, for workout purposes, peppy on side one, and a bit more laid back on side two. Bette Midler is a bawdy, ballsy broad, and does it well. This is just a lot of fun and has earned a spot on the Ram alternative list, behind Delaney and Bonnie and Layla, but up there with Benny Goodman. As a matter of fact, as I had to put away Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” it is after Christmas after all, I think Ms. Midler will stay out for a while as I can use her and side one for extra aerobics when needed.
Really fun album. Really good workout. I’m now missing the other record.
This is an earlier album. The cover shows a smiling Lee Michaels wearing a chain mail vest, and when you open it up, it reveals that he is standing in a pond naked, but for the chain mail vest, covering his genital area with pond debris. I thought it was hysterical at the time. Now I just don’t get it.
And I don’t remember a thing about this album, but it does help me understand where his one top ten hit, “Do You Know What I Mean” came from, later in his career in 1971. I had moved on by that time, but though I thought the song was not his best, I was happy for him. This album that came several years earlier was more poppish than the other two, but a weird pop. Reminds me a bit of the Grass Roots, a weird Grass Roots, with that trademark Lee Michaels falsetto.
My friend, who has been mentioned here before as my cohort in the cutting up of the 45s caper, and I, both still in junior high at the time, wanted to go see Lee Michaels in concert. He was playing in New York City at the Fillmore East. My friend’s mother was a businesswoman with an office in the fashion district. She was an executive with a bar in her office. I remind you, this was the late ‘60s. Most women were housewives like my mother had been until she became one of the few divorcees around. She was the only one I knew of till this time. The professional women were teachers or nurses. My friend’s mother was divorced and a fashion executive, and my mother stayed home. Mrs. R., we’ll call my friend’s mother, was apparently agreeable when approached with the notion of going to the concert and even wrote out the check for us to mail in with our ticket order. We were to come into the City and meet her at her office. She would take us to dinner, and drop us off at the Fillmore and pick us up at 11:00 to take the last train before midnight home. And she did. My mother was fine with it because she didn’t have to do anything, not even worry.
A boyfriend of about a dozen years ago, who is not the “ex” nor the one that looked like Bruce Springsteen, knowing that I had been to the Fillmore as a kid, bought me this book Live at the Fillmore East – A Photographic Memoir by Amalie R. Rothschild. The marquis in the cover photo reads “Bill Graham’s Fillmore East” then lists the current concerts and upcoming artists. The top line, serendipitously enough, lists the artists in this very concert – Moody, Michaels, Argent. It made me keep that boyfriend around a little longer.
But other than the three acts, the psychedelic Joshua Light Show, the playbill with the tarot card of the The Lovers on the front, and despite the anticipation and excitement, both then and now, coupled with my ability to recall minutia of yore, I don’t remember a thing about the concert, except for that darned drum solo by the Argent drummer, which, by the way, I thought was fantastic – then. Go figure. Oh, and that Mrs. R. came to get us at 11 as promised, halfway through the Moody Blues.
And so, we move on from this pivotal moment in my life to something completely different.
Yesterday was a snow day! Unfortunately it was also a sick day.
Barrel was the next album and follows the self-titled record, which was not Lee Michael’s first, in chronological order as well.
The workout tonight was adequate. I only kinda, sorta remember anything about this album, but I’m diggin’ it. There’s not much distinction from one song to another, but despite the organ making it sound a bit churchy here and there, it’s a decent listening album.
I had been invited for an early dinner on the 1st by my friend whose family I had spent most holidays with since high school and for many years after. She was having a New Year gathering that consisted of some members of her and her husband’s families. Her brother-in-law was talking about his new novel, which really does sound kind of interesting, of which he said he had been working on for an embarrassing amount of time. I had to know what other’s thought an embarrassing amount of time was, so I asked how long. Ten years, he said. I confessed, and perhaps it was the wine, that my play had begun 20 years ago when the title popped into my head, but I think it’s more like 25. I swear it’s almost there but for the tweaking.
In any case, this is how this story relates, in case you think I’ve gone off on another tangent. Also at dinner was one of my friend’s brothers. The one with the really large record collection. If we go all the way back to the beginning of this particular blog project, perhaps you will recall that I discovered that the very first record exercised to – Alice Cooper’s Love it to Death, was not so honestly procured, and that was not a very good way to start. It was his album. I ‘fessed up, which I think I would have done with or without the wine. He didn’t seem to remember having the album, or care about its loss, but his wife told me he still has his record collection, which last time I saw it more than 30 years ago, could eat mine whole and still have room for dessert. I salivated at the thought.
Next, we discuss my first trip to the Fillmore East.
Happy New Year!
How appropriate that we start the New Year with Lee Michaels, who represents for me a passage, not from year to year, but from AM to FM. And yet I approach the album, the first of my Lee Michaels purchases, with trepidation. Will the music it provides live up to my memories? I don’t recall many of his songs, and we have three record to go through, but I remember his music having a big impact on me. It was just like that moment in the Lou Reed song “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” that I am sharing with you to better elucidate what I mean:
“Jenny said, when she was just five years old, You know there’s nothin’ happening at all, Every time she put on the radio, There was nothin’ goin’ down at all, Not at all
One fine mornin’, she puts on a New York station, And she couldn’t believe what she heard at all, She started dancin’ to that fine-fine music, Ooohhh, her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll”
Well, I wasn’t five at the time, I was more like 12 or 13 and I was home alone. My mother had a kitchen radio on the ledge of the opening between the playroom and the kitchen. It was AM/FM. I knew from my brother what station to go to, WNEW-FM, 102.7. And I swear, the moment I went from AM to FM was life changing. There was so much more going on. And then one night I heard “Heighty Hi” by Lee Michaels. You could hear the DJ in the background dancing around to it, as I was. Lee Michaels was like nothing I ever heard before. It was just him on piano or organ, and his drummer Bartholomew Smith-Frost, then known as Frosty and currently going by Barry Smith.
So, I exercise to the record, starting with the second side as it begins with Michaels’ version of “Stormy Monday” and ends with “Heighty Hi,” and am glad I decided to do it that way. Those songs still hold up, but the first side was not as enthralling as I had hoped. I remember once getting into the drum solo, “Frosty’s” but no more. Maybe I have developed an intolerance to drum solos (remember I was not thrilled with Ginger Baker’s solo on the Blind Faith album), but I have recently seen the movie of Woodstock and still enjoy the solo performed by Santana’s then 19-year-old drummer.
I have more to say about Lee Michaels, and about radio as well, which I will leave till next time, or the time after that.
I loved this album! I was 21 in my first apartment and I used to crank this up. Actually, I was a much more considerate neighbor than that, but it was cranked up in my mind’s ear. All the songs were written by Jim Steinman and sung by the rotund Meat Loaf, who I recognized from Rocky Horror Picture Show fame. I tired of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” pretty quickly, but still love the title song and others on the album like “All Revved Up With No Place to Go.”
But “Paradise” was the song that got the album noticed as it has this sex/baseball thing going and contains a bit of a narrative by then Yankee baseball announcer and former Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto. I had no clue who he was at that time. My friend told me that Meat Loaf presented Phil Rizzuto with an award or something on the infield of Yankee Stadium. As Meat Loaf was known for his girth, I asked if there were dents on the field. He answered – Why yes, there’s a dent between 2nd and 3rd base. I thought he was being facetious and ignored him until I soon became an avid Yankee fan. I watched every game over the next few years, and if it wasn’t televised, I listened to it on the radio. If the game was on the west coast, I stayed up as late as they did. And that dent on the field, then shortstop Bucky Dent was pretty darned cute, but my heart belonged to Reggie Jackson.
And speaking of being rotund, I have been bemoaning the fact that I’m not losing any more weight nor belly. I had noticed the tautness to the sides of my torso that occurred during the first month of the project, but my stomach still protrudes almost as much as it did when I started. However, I just noticed, moments ago, that the sides of my protruding stomach are slightly indented and less of a solid round mass. If I continue to tighten the sides of my torso and the sides of my stomach, but retain the outward bulge of my belly, it could prove to be an interesting look.
No matter what people say about Linda McCartney’s voice or her presence in the band Wings, this is a beautiful love story of two people who wanted to be together and create a family and music together. After Paul and Linda McCartney married, Paul adopted her daughter from her first marriage and they produced three more children and numerous records with their group Wings. I only have Venus and Mars, which I purchased for the song “Rock Show.” The line “save for my dear old friend and confidant, Mademoiselle Kitty,” inspired me to use the word “save” in that context in some of my own writing. I enjoyed hearing the album again and had another good workout.
Since I have exhausted all I have to say about Paul McCartney, maybe I should tell you about my Christmas Eve phone call from my stepmother. It was already Christmas morning for her at that time, and I had 20 minutes to go.
Update-In case anyone thought me too flip regarding what I originally wrote about my stepmother here, as I now realize I was, I have removed it. I am very fond of my stepmother, and we have become good friends. Not that I think she will ever read my blog, but what I wrote wasn’t very fair to her. I apologize.
The Walrus Was Paul 