Kent State, 40 Years Later

May 4, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, News media, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of one of the Nixon era’s most tragic events, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard gunfire at the campus of Kent State University during an antiwar demonstration. The shootings were followed by a nationwide student strike, and thousands of students descending on Washington to protest. (It was at that time that President Nixon made his famous early-morning visit to the Lincoln Memorial, which I’ll write about in a few days.)

The deaths of the students were preceded by the burning of a building used by Kent State’s ROTC chapter. One member of the chapter was William Schroeder, one of the students who died. Another was David Rust, who at the time was planning a military career and took a job maintaining the chapter’s rifles. The events of May 4 changed his mind and made him decide to go into journalism. He’s been a cameraman with CNN for nearly thirty years, and at the channel’s website he writes about the events of that day:

As I watched the four days unfold, I was struck by the images I saw in person and the stories on the national news.

I heard news reports of “thousands” of student protesters, but I had only seen a few hundred in the protests before May 4. Many were like me, just watching what was going on.

It amazed me that the events unfolding at this small university could affect people’s opinion of their country and their government.

I was also impressed by the dramatic photos that captured the events, including one shot by John Filo, a Kent photojournalism student.

It showed a 14-year-old girl kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the dead students. The photo earned a Pulitzer Prize for Filo. It also had a huge impact on the American public.

The power of the media coverage of the Kent State protests opened a whole new world for me.

For the first time I began to think about journalism. Six week later, when school reopened, I began to take my education more seriously. My grades dramatically improved, and I started focusing on a profession. I returned home to California and started taking writing and photography classes at Pasadena City College. The more I learned, the more obsessed I became with the news business.

With the help of friends working for televisions stations in Los Angeles, I learned to operate a television news camera.

Two years later, I heard about Ted Turner’s new experiment in 24-hour news, and I started working for CNN’s bureau in Los Angeles.

It all started with an unexpected lesson learned from a tragedy 40 years ago.

And at Time.com there’s an article about “Ohio,” Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s song, recorded later in May 1970.

Smells Like San Clemente Spirit

April 13, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Popular Culture, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A few weeks after the 37th President boarded Air Force One for his last trip as President, David Bowie stood in a studio in Philadelphia and asked the country’s young Americans, “do you remember your President Nixon?”

Not long after that, Neil Young, recording “Campaigner,” reminded the world that “even Richard Nixon’s got soul.”

But it turns out that at the same time, another rock’n'roller was starting his career with songs referring to RN – a musician who, though he is not yet in the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame with Bowie and Young, is sure to join them sometime after 2013, when his eligibility starts 25 years after his recording (as opposed to performing) career began.

During his final live shows with Nirvana, in the fall and winter of 1993-1994, Kurt Cobain sometimes brought out an Epiphone Texan guitar for the acoustic portion of the show, which he had found in a store in Los Angeles. It sported a “Nixon Now” bumper sticker from 1972, and is now renowned among students of the Nirvana oeuvre as the best-sounding acoustic Cobain ever used. (At the end of 1994, eight or so months after the deaths of Cobain and Nixon, a blowup photo of Kurt playing this guitar was displayed in the Nixon Library exhibit “Rockin’ The White House.”)

But it turns out that this was not the first time that President Nixon entered Cobain’s musical world. From RTTNews.com comes this article:

Early recordings from a young Kurt Cobain were recently discovered at a garage sale in Aberdeen, Washington.

Producers Jack Endino and Butch Vig [the producers of Nirvana's first two albums] both verified that the tapes are self-recordings of Cobain, who is believed to have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. According to reports, it sounds as though he is playing an acoustic guitar and ukulele, sometime around 1974 or 1975, based on the content of songs about Richard Nixon. [Note: Cobain was born on Feb. 20, 1967, so he may have been as young as 7 when he recorded this material.]

Several cassettes labelled “KDC” – believed to stand for Kurt Donald Cobain – in black magic marker were found at the sale. The tapes are estimated to be worth millions.

April 1969 — All That Jazz

January 31, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Music, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In April 1969, RN celebrated the 70th birthday of Duke Ellington and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House

Len Garment, accomplished jazz musician and RN’s White House Counsel, writes in this weekend’s New York Times:

IN April 1969, three months after his inauguration, President Richard Nixon hosted a party at the White House to celebrate Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday and award the Duke the Medal of Honor. Great American jazz figures were there. Musicians played Ellington songs arranged by Gerry Mulligan. Joe Williams and Mary Mayo sang. Ellington danced with Rose Mary Woods. After dinner, the president had a nightcap with the pianist Earl Hines.

It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts and began the processes that led to the desegregation of public schools in the South and a historic reform of the government’s policy toward American Indians. He announced the “Nixon doctrine,” providing aid — but not military forces — to our anticommunist Asian allies. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

“Nixon In China” On Bowie’s iPod

January 23, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under China, Music, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Over in the UK, the Guardian has a short article by David Bowie in which the onetime Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke describes some of the contents of his iPod. His selections, as is usually the case with him, are eclectic, ranging from current rock bands to African pop to the avant-garde disco of the late Arthur Russell. He includes one operatic selection, from John Adams’s 1987 opera Nixon In China, which in March will receive its Canadian premiere courtesy of the Vancouver Opera.

Reminiscing About RN and EP

January 14, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House | Leave a Comment 

“Picture Of Nixon And Elvis Worth A Thousand Words,” reads the headline in this morning’s Los Angeles Times, and, sure enough, the article by Faye Fiore, the paper’s Washington reporter, that appears below it spends about a thousand words (or more) describing the circumstances that brought about the now-familiar image of the thirty-seventh President and the one and only King meeting in the Oval Office.

(Interestingly, the photo from that day most often seen, with Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley both looking at the camera, is passed over in favor of an image of the President facing the camera and Elvis looking at him.)

The article is based on the eyewitness accounts of the event given by former White House advisor Egil “Bud” Krogh and Jerry Schilling, Elvis’s close friend, when they appeared at the National Archives last week. Most of what they tell has appeared in many books about Elvis and/or Nixon, notably Krogh’s own volume The Day Nixon Met Elvis (which includes a foreword by RN penned just before his death), and Schilling’s book Me And A Guy Named Elvis.

But at the archives, some interesting sidelights were mentioned. Krogh remarked on the little-known fact that toward the end of his Presidency, when Nixon was being treated for phlebitis, Presley phoned to wish him a quick recovery. (And in 1975, when Elvis himself was hospitalized, the President phoned him from San Clemente.)

Krogh also pointed out one remarkable aspect of the 1970 meeting at the White House; despite Presley spenting several hours in the White House after the meeting, getting a tour and meeting several dozen thrilled White House staffers (and their wives), not one word leaked out about the King’s visit for more than a year, until columnist Jack Anderson, looking at an advance copy of John Finlator’s book The Drugged Nation, found a passage about it. (Finlator, the former deputy director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, had helped arrange for Elvis to be presented with a BNDD special assistant’s badge.) It’s hard to imagine a megacelebrity’s visit to the Oval Office could be kept that much under wraps today.

Three Nixon-Related Events In Washington This Week

January 5, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, International Affairs, Music, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House | 1 Comment 

Saturday marks the 97th birthday of President Nixon, and the day before that is the momentous 75th anniversary of the day that Elvis Aron Presley (and, briefly, his twin brother Jesse Garon) entered this world. At the end of the year, four days before Christmas, will come the 40th anniversary of the celebrated meeting of the two in the Oval Office.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7 pm, at the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, Nixon Presidential Library director Timothy Naftali will host “We Were There When Nixon Met Elvis.” Egil “Bud” Krogh, who arranged the President’s meeting with the King in his capacity as White House liason with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (Elvis sought the meeting for the purpose of discussing what role he could play in the war on drugs) and Jerry Schilling, who was a member of Elvis’s inner circle (aka the Memphis Mafia) from the mid-1950s until Presley’s death, will talk about their eyewitness memories of that event, which produced a photograph reported to be, even now, the most frequently requested image in the history of the Archives.

Almost simultaneously, at 6:30 pm at the Busboys & Poets cafe at 2021 14th Street NW in Washington, Len Colodny (co-author of the bestselling Watergate expose Silent Coup) and Tom Shachtman will discuss their new history of American foreign policy in the Nixon, Reagan, and (both) Bush eras, The Forty Years War. But interested readers do not necessarily have to flip a coin; the next day, also at 6:30, Colodny and Shachtman will talk about their book in an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council at UCDC Washington Center at 1608 Rhode Island Avenue NW; this event is also being taped by C-SPAN for broadcast on Book TV. All three events are free and open to the public, although the World Affairs Council site advises obtaining reservations beforehand at this link.

The Day The King Met The President

December 21, 2009 by Dwight Chapin | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Richard Nixon, White House | 1 Comment 

RN pictured with Elvis and Bud Krogh.

Working with HR (Bob) Haldeman and Bud Krogh, I was part of the team that made Elvis Presley’s visit to the White House on December 21, 1970 happen. The letter Elvis left at the front gate was delivered to my office very early in the morning. My secretary Nell Yates immediately brought it to my attention. I contacted Bud Krogh who was the staff person on Drug Policy and began the process of “staffing out” the letter. The memos and actual details of the visit are a part of Bud’s book, The Day Elvis Met Nixon.

The Nixon/Elvis meeting turned out to be one of the most historic visits by any personality to the White House. As many know the picture of the President and the King meeting in the Oval Office is the single most requested image ever from the Nationa Archives!

Recently, Bud Krogh and I did an extensive radio interview with the UK’s Radio One. The program will air on the 75^th birthday of Elvis in January and will document the story of the historic visit.

One of the most interesting points about the visit is the confidentiality that surrounded the it. Elvis did not want the meeting publicized because he thought he could be more effective in helping to stop drug use if he did not look like a White House agent. Elvis kept it confidential and so did the White House. No word leaked out for two years. As I recall, it was ultimately journalist Jack Anderson who printed the story and no one knows who was the ultimate leaker.

Imagine this, Elvis entered the White House through the Executive Office Building, went to lunch in the White House mess, was introduced to several secretaries in the West Wing and no one ever mentioned it to the press. That would never happen in today’s White House.

12.21.1970

December 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The story told by White House official Bud Krogh, the famous letter (written on American Airlines stationery) read by Priscilla Presley:

Sonny West: Still Taking Care Of Business

October 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Music, Nixon Foundation, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Elvis’s loyal friend and bodyguard, Sonny West, spoke at the Nixon Foundation earlier this week and signed copies of his new book Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business a memoir about his life with “one of the most revered figures of all time.”

Foundation Vice President Sandy Quinn conducted an interview with West, where they talked about  — among other things — the day that “the King” made a surprise trip to the White House to meet President Nixon:

Sonny Rises In The West

October 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Music, Nixon Library, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

At 7 PM tonight in Yorba Linda, the Nixon Library will welcome Elvis Presley’s friend and bodyguard Sonny West, who will talk about —and sign copies of— his book Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business.

White House photographer Ollie Atkins captured a candid moment with RN, Sonny West, Jerry Schilling, and The King in the Oval Office on 21 December 1970.

Vic Mizzy    1916-2009

October 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment 

Vic Mizzy died last week; he was 93.  As one obituarist put it, his theme songs for the TV shows Green Acres and The Addams Family “made an incalculabe contribution to 1960s popular culture.”

The Brooklyn-born composer was a child prodigy.  As a 16-year old freshman at NYU, he traded in his well-tempered klavier for a Tin Pan Alley upright, and proceeded to produce some terrific hit songs and some iconic themes and underscores for some of the biggest hits during TV’s gilded age.  (His familiarity with the harpsichord came in handy when he used it at the opening of his Addams Family theme.)   His comprehensive website supplies a biography, discography, and filmography.  The Los Angeles Times ran a comprehensive and interesting obituary.

Everyone who was around at the time will remember The Addams Family opening:

In a 2004 interview, Mr. Mizzy described the theme’s genesis:

Here’s the opening credits of Green Acres:

Mr. Mizzy wrote some of his biggest pop hits while he was serving in the Navy in World War Two.  One of them, which he wrote with lyricist Manny Curtis, is one of my favorite big band pop songs —  ”My Dreams Are Getting Better All The Time.”     There were various covers but the hit belonged to the Les Brown Orchestra, whose version spent three months on the Billboard charts in the spring of 1945 —– including the Number One spot.  The vocalist is Doris Day.

Louis Prima and Keely Smith performed an idiosyncratic cover that’s worth a listen.

Mr. Mizzy was noted for his wit, and describing a recent (and as yet unreleased) CD on his own label —The Vicster Records— on which he sings twelve of his new songs, he slipped into the third person to note that: “His songs have a great advantage over today’s music for three reasons: 1) The words rhyme. 2) He uses more than three chords to harmonize his melodies, and 3) He has natural distortion, which puts him in the same class as many hit vocalists of today.”

Unplugged Prime Minister

October 5, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Canada, Music, Politics, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment 

Last night in Ottawa, the Prime Minister of Canada — the Right Honorable Stephen Joseph Harper, PC, MP, MA— surprised (actually surprised is a mild word for it) the audience at a National Arts Center gala when he walked on stage with Yo Yo Ma and proceeded to play the piano and sing the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

“…he isn’t Joe Cocker but he hits less bum notes than Ringo Starr”:  Canadian Prime Minister and Cellist Yo Yo Ma acknowledging the ovation after their performance last night in Ottawa.

The gig represented a considerable risk for the Conservative PM, who created a major controversy last year by dissing galas as plutocratic wastes of time, and whose personality is widely considered only to palely reflect the warmth and charm of wood.   As explained by John Ivison in the National Post in brutally comprehensible language, if Mr. Harper had flopped, he could have replaced William Shatner’s cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as the universal go-to example of an already bad idea gone terribly wrong.

The consensus in Ottawa last night at the National Arts Centre, including among some Liberal MPs, was that Mr. Harper’s surprise appearance at the annual NAC gala was a political masterstroke….

The surprise to those Canadians who see Mr. Harper as the arch-political tactician was that it was Mrs Harper who pushed an idea, which caused much chewing of fingernails among political advisors. Everyone could see the potential upside of neutering the impression that the Prime Ministers is a cultural cro-magnon. But they could also see the massive downside if his version of “With a Little Help From My Friends” supplanted William Shatner’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as the worst Beatles cover of all time and became a Youtube classic. That opposition is said to have melted once they heard the Prime Minister sing and tinkle the ivories – he isn’t Joe Cocker but he hits less bum notes than Ringo Starr. Mrs. Harper said she knew she had her man when he said “maybe” to the idea.

Alicia de Larrocha    1923 – 2009

September 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music | Leave a Comment 

Alicia de Larrocha died last night in her native Barcelona. She was 89.

The 4′9″ dynamo was a child prodigy who started lessons at three and made her debut with an orchestra at eleven. Her repertoire, which extended from Mozart to Khachaturian, broadened and deepened over the years until she retired in 2003.

Her recordings of Spanish music were particularly admired and beloved. She  comfortably ranged from the sublime austerity of Antonio Soler’s baroque sonatas, and the sunny sensuality of Granados’ Danzas Espanolas (with whom her mother had studied piano), to the over-the-top bravura of Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance.”

In the early ’90s she participated in the Concerto project with host Dudley Moore and London Symphony Orchestra conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.  The accompanying video dissecting their preparation of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto offered an insight into both the rehearsal process and the strong but charming personality of the performer.

The second, concluding, part is here.

A Career That Just Keeps Rollin’ Along

September 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon family | Leave a Comment 

Three months ago I wrote a post about a Philadelphia newspaper’s profile of Jennie Eisenhower, President Nixon’s granddaughter whose stage career has taken her to theaters around the country. Starting on Wednesday, and continuing until November 1, she can be seen in the Media Theatre, near Philadelphia, in a production of that venerable cornerstone of the American musical, Show Boat. In it she plays Julie, the role created on Broadway (and continued in the famed 1935 film) by Helen Morgan, and also enacted in the 1951 film remake by Ava Gardner, and so will be singing those two classic Jerome Kern tunes “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and “Bill,” with words by P.G. Wodehouse. This article from the Delaware County Daily Times discusses the upcoming show and in it Jennie discusses the various roles she’s undertaken. One thing for sure: there aren’t many thespians out there who have played both the Artful Dodger (in Oliver!) and Hedda Gabler. But Jennie has.

Arthur Ferrante, 1921-2009

September 22, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam, Music | Leave a Comment 

In August of last year I noted the death of Lou Teicher, who, with Art Ferrante, formed the “grand twins of the twin grands,” a duo trained at Juilliard whose instrumental renditions (often of movie themes) were a mainstay of American easy-listening stations throughout the Sixties and Seventies and earned them invitations to perform for Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. Last Saturday, Ferrante passed away as well, at his home in the Florida Keys. Here are Ferrante and Teicher circa 1970, complete with their trademark bushy sideburns and mustaches, inimitable dinner jackets, and black-rimmed glasses, at their back-to-back pianos, performing the “Theme from Exodus.”

Mary Travers, 1936-2009

September 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music | 2 Comments 

Word came today of the death of Mary Travers, who, as one-third of the trio that included Noel “Paul” Stookey and Peter Yarrow, was one of the most recognizable and popular voices of the music of the 1960s, with hits like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “If I Had A Hammer,” John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” and, of course, “Puff The Magic Dragon.” Although Peter, Paul and Mary disbanded in 1971 after a decade together, they periodically reunited to record and tour from the late 1970s until earlier this year, when Ms. Travers’s battle with leukemia made it impossible for her to perform. This is a minute-long Youtube clip of PP&M performing part of “I Dig Rock And Roll Music,” from Jonathan Winters’s variety series in 1968

SuBo’s Stones

September 16, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Music, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment 

This week’s Soundtrack of Our Lives deconstructed the Number One hit forty years ago this week — the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

On tonight’s finale of American Idol, Susan Boyle —the 48-year old Scottish spinster who is Paul Potts’ successor as the latest Simon Crowell cynically-supplied unprepossessing feelgood superstar— will premiere her new single, which is a rather affectless, but not entirely unworthy, cover of the Stones’ superb 1971 song “Wild Horses.”

“Wild Horses” was a track on the Sticky Fingers album.  Rolling Stone selects it as #334 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time:

Richards wrote this acoustic ballad about leaving his wife Anita and young son Marlon as the Stones prepared for their first American tour in three years. Stones sidekick Ian Stewart refused to play the minor chords required, so Memphis musical maverick Jim Dickinson filled in on upright piano at the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, recording session for Sticky Fingers.

Here’s the original; and here’s the Boyle cover:

Among my candidates for the Greatest Stones Cover of All Time is Franco Battiato’s 2000 rendition of the 1967 classic “Ruby Tuesday.”   “RT,” which was on the Between the Buttons LP, outranks “Horses” at Number 303 on the RS 500:

At a session for Between the Buttons in November 1966, Richards drew this lyrical sketch of Linda Keith, his first serious girlfriend, and turned it into an uncharacteristically wistful ballad. Brian Jones played the recorder on the track, giving the song a madrigal feel. The countermelody was played by Bill Wyman, who fingered the strings on a cello while Richards bowed them.

Battiato is a fascinating Italian anomaly, whose long and checkered career has included several productive collaborations — including one with another favorite, Alice.  I find this sleekly accented eclectic account of the song completely compelling and even intermittently convincing.

Here’s the original; and here’s the Battiato cover:

Memories Of 1969

August 29, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

The fortieth anniversary of “three days of peace, love and music” on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, continues to be celebrated, most recently in movie theaters this weekend when Taking Woodstock, the new film by Cold Mountain and Incredible Hulk director Ang Lee, opened to somewhat mixed reviews and brought in a disappointing $1.2 million.  The film stars Demetri Martin, a comedian best known for his short-lived series on Comedy Central, and features, in the role of Yasgur, the eminent funnyman Eugene Levy in a rare dramatic role.

Still, the one moment during the past month’s boomlet in counterculture nostalgia that has stuck in my mind came on August 15, during a show billed as “Heroes Of Woodstock” at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, close by the original festival site.  The performers included several acts from the hippie era that did not actually perform at Woodstock, such as Big Brother And The Holding Company (a band Janis Joplin had left well before she appeared at the festival). But several musicians who were there took the Center’s stage, including Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, Richie Havens, and Country Joe McDonald.  Before reprising his “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” so familiar after countless rebroadcasts of the Woodstock documentary, McDonald, who served in the Navy from 1959 to 1962 and has been involved in veteran’s activities in Northern California, paused to read the names of the natives of Sullivan County, New York, where Woodstock took place, who died in Vietnam and have fallen so far in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And speaking of Vietnam reminds me of an event that occurred ten days ago in Columbus, Georgia, but, in the clutter of news in recent days (the health-care debate, President Obama’s trip to Martha’s Vineyard, the release of the two American journalists by North Korea, Ted Kennedy’s death) received comparatively little attention.  A member of that city’s Kiwanis Club invited a veteran of the Vietnam War to appear before the organization, deliver some remarks about his experience, and take a few questions. Usually, this would hardly attract notice outside the local level, for countless veterans have spoken before chapters of fraternal organizations across America through the years.  But when the veteran’s name is William Calley Jr., and he is appearing to speak about the massacre which he supervised in the hamlet of My Lai in what was then South Vietnam in March 1968, that’s another matter entirely.

It was September 5, 1969, that Lt. Calley was charged with the deaths of 104 Vietnamese civilians in the massacre; later estimates gave the death toll as high as 500, but the U.S. Army ultimately concluded that 347 died. Two months later, Seymour Hersh broke the story of the bloodbath, a scoop which made his name as an investigative reporter.  For the next eighteen months, as two dozen other officers and enlisted men were charged but either acquitted or went untried, Calley became the focus of intense debate at dinner tables across the nation.  For many of the young, and a large number who supported the war as well as opposing it, he was unquestionably a war criminal.  But in the rural United States and especially the South, there were those who argued that it should be kept in mind that Calley believed he was acting in accordance with the orders of his superior officers to subdue a base of Viet Cong operations. (An example of such views is Terry Nelson and C Company’s record “The Battle Hymn Of Lieutenant Calley,” which figures prominently in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

Calley was convicted by a military court on March 29, 1971 – the only participant in the My Lai atrocities to be found guilty. Two days later, after Jimmy Carter and George Wallace had spoken on Calley’s behalf, and following a flood of letters and telegrams to the White House, President Nixon ordered the lieutenant’s release pending his appeal.  When the appeal was upheld, Calley served three and a half years under what amounted to house arrest in Fort Benning, Georgia.  Upon his release, he married the daughter of a prominent jeweler in Columbus, obtained a gemologist’s certificate, and went into the business of selling diamonds and other stones, from which he retired a few years ago. Through the decades, he avoided discussing My Lai.

But this month, Calley – now a portly, bald, bearded figure with little resemblance to the youth who was so much a part of the news nearly four decades ago – chose to finally break his silence. He told his audience at the Kiwanis Club: “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

During the q-and-a period afterward, he reiterated what he had stated after he was charged – that he acted as he had because he thought the orders he had received from Capt. Ernest Medina, which specified that My Lai’s habitations were to be destroyed and its livestock killed, implicitly included the killing of any persons found there. (Medina was also charged, but, after being defended by the famed attorney F. Lee Bailey, was found not guilty.)  One wonders if the Kiwanis appearance was an isolated one or if Calley has anything more to say about the event to which his name is forever linked.

Leonard Bernstein’s 1972 Counter-Inaugural

August 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Leonard Bernstein, Music, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

I recently posted a piece about Alex Ross’ three New Yorker articles based on the material released as a result of his Freedom of Information Act requests regarding the government’s interest in Leonard Bernstein.  The bulk loyalty investigations were earlier —beginning with Truman in ‘49 and continuing through LBJ in ‘68— but the polymath composer-conductor-writer-lecturer-activist also made some brief and belated appearances on the Nixon tapes in the fall of 1971.

In that post I unaccountably failed to include one of my favorite passages from H. R. Haldeman’s Diaries — for 9 September 1971 — in which they discussed the previous night’s premiere of Mass.  It provides one of the Diaries‘ few glimpses of RN’s mordant sense of humor:

I was fascinated this morning to get a report on the Kennedy Center opening of the Mass last night.  I described the program, and Bernstein’s performance, and after asking a few questions and making a few comments, he paused a minute, this was over the phone, and then said, “I just want to ask you one favor.  If I’m assassinated, I want you to have them play “Dante’s Inferno” and have Lawrence Welk produce it,” which was really pretty funny.

RN: “I just want to ask you one favor.  If I’m assassinated, I want you to have them play ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and have Lawrence Welk produce it.”  Despite his frustration over the several brouhahas surrounding the Kennedy Center’s various openings, the President retained his sense of humor.  Liszt’s A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Commedia was first performed in 1857; it’s two movements reflect the the first two parts of its inspiration: Inferno and Purgatorio.  This YouTube video of the “Inferno” is not attributed, but it’s a safe assumption that the orchestra isn’t Lawrence Welk’s.

The program for the NSO’s opening concert at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall on 9 September, attended by RN, was completely Lisztless.  It began with Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture, and included Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G (K.216) with Isaac Stern as soloist, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and William Schuman’s A Free Song: Secular Cantata No. 2, a stirring choral work, composed in 1942, on two poems by Walt Whitman.

What RN heard on 9 September 1971: the opening piece on the NSO’s opening program at the opening of the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall was Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture. It was written in 1822 for the opening of a new theater in Vienna.  In this spirited performance, the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by  Zoltán Kocsis

RN had earlier told Haldeman that he would have preferred Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or something by Lizst.  The reviews of the opening concert —mine among them— commented on the oddly eclectic program.  In a conversation a few days later with movie star Ginger Rogers, RN had a smart —and undoubtedly correct— explanation:

They picked numbers that were more for the acoustics —this is the symphony opening — rather than for the music.  But it’s famous for this.  I must say it doeesn’t send me. I’m not completely square on that sort of thing.  I like a bit of jazz from time to time.  But when I hear a symphony, I want it to be a great symphony.  I mean I don’t see why they can’t play Beethoven, or, you know, Tchaikovsky, or Lizst or so on or so on. But these days the modern conductors, they have to go off on some Bernstein thing…

Antal Dorati, conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, chose a Lizstless program that showcased the new Kennedy Center Concert Hall’s acoustics, but failed to “send”  the POTUS in the audience.

A few days after the  ”Mass Appeal” post appeared, I received an interesting (and much appreciated)  email from a reader —David Taylor— who has given me permission to quote it here:

Although my day job is now lawyering for the CFTC, in those days I was a graduate student in conducting at the University of Maryland and assistant conductor of the University of Maryland Chorus.  Your post brought to my mind an experience I had involving President Nixon, Leonard Bernstein, and the Nixon inauguration in 1973, that I thought you might find of interest.

In 1973 and throughout most of the 1970s, the University of Maryland Chorus performed several times each year with the National Symphony under its great music director Antal Dorati.  In January of that year, the Chorus sang four performances with the NSO of Beethoven’s great Missa Solemnis (an amazing musical experience I will never forget).  Given the times, those performances intersected with both President Nixon, the Vietnam War, and Leonard Bernstein.

As luck would have it, our Beethoven performances were slated for the week of the inauguration.  It had been a tradition for decades that during the week of each Presidential inauguration the NSO played (outside its normal subscription season) what was labeled the Inaugural Concert, as part of the festivities of inauguration week.  The performance was usually attended by the President-elect, and after the building of the Kennedy Center it always took place there.  Normally, this would have had nothing to do with the Beethoven concerts.  However, it turned out that President Nixon had been a life-long fan of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and for what was going to be his final inauguration he expressed a wish to have the Philadelphia play the Inaugural Concert, which they did.  The NSO leadership was very gracious about this change, and responded by dedicating the week’s regular NSO subscription concerts to the inauguration of the President.

Of course, the anti-war movement, further fueled by the developing Watergate affair, wanted to protest the Nixon inauguration.  One musical consequence of this, as you may remember, was the hasty arranging of a sort of “Anti-Inaugural Concert” consisting of a performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at the National Cathedral by a large chorus (I believe it was either the Cathedral Choral Society, the Choral Arts Society of Washington, or parts of both) and a pick-up orchestra, conducted by none other than that famous musical leftist, Leonard Bernstein.  I was not present, since we were singing Beethoven at Kennedy Center, but was told by people who did attend that the Bernstein performance drew a huge attendance, including 2000+ inside the Cathedral and thousands more listening on loudspeakers outside.

There were also nearly consequences for our Beethoven performances.  A signficant number of the approximately 140 members of the University of Maryland Chorus shared the sentiments of the anti-war, anti-Nixon protesters and were upset that the NSO had dedicated the Beethoven concerts to the President’s inauguration.  Quite a few of them initially refused to go onstage to sing something dedicated to President Nixon.  Paul Traver, the conductor of the U. of Md. Chorus (and my major teacher) and I had to do a considerable amount of fast talking to convince them that they owed it to the Chorus, to Maestro Dorati, and to Beethoven to sing as scheduled.  In the end that view prevailed, and the Missa Solemnis—one of humanity’s greatest choral treasures, and a work that dwarfs Bernstein’s Mass into utter insignificance—went forward magnificently and without incident.  But it was a close-run thing.

I remember Bernstein’s anti-Inaugural —the “Concert for Peace”— very well.  It was performed on 19 January —the night before RN’s second inaugural— and it was,  to put it mildly, given saturation cover by the local media.  It drew an overflow crowd to the National Cathedral  — which it would have done even if it hadn’t been free.  In addition to Haydn’s Mass in Time of War, the program included Bernstein’s  song  ”Take Care of This House” — based on a letter from Abigail Adams— and concluded with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

The 1973 Inaugural Committee was chaired by J. Williard Marriott.  Several concerts were planned — including an Inaugural Concert (with, as Mr. Taylor mentions, RN’s favorite Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy, and Van Cliburn as soloist), and an American music concert led by Sammy Davis, Jr.  There was also, for the first time, a youth concert, produced by Mike Curb and starring pop singer Tommy Roe,  for the many young campaign workers who came to Washington to celebrate.  As vice chairman Mark Evans said, “President Nixon is pretty dedicated to these youngsters who confounded the experts.”  Along with Evans’ statement, The New York Times reported an announcement from “leaders of the militant Students for a Democratic Society” that a demonstration march on the Capitol would be staged to coincide with the President’s inauguration.

Ormandy’s Inaugural Concert program, chosen by RN, included the 1812 Overture Greig’s  Piano Concerto in A Minor with Van Cliburn as soloist.  In RN’s diary, dictated the next night (Inaugural night), he noted:

When Mike Curb stepped up at the end of the performance and said that the President had done more to bring peace in the world than anybody else, I thought we would get a few boos.  Interestingly enough, he got a pretty good cheer for it, which alloyed one of the fears I had as we went to the inaugurals, having read earlier that eleven of Eugene Ormandy’s orchestra members requested the right not to come, and he had put his foot down and told them to come.  When Steve Bull informed him that I would not be coming down to the platform because it simply couldn’t be worked out from a logic standpoint, Ormandy said that he would have liked to have me come to the stage and stand there beside him “just to show those left-wing sons of bitches.”  What a man he is.

“What a man he is”:  Eugene Ormandy, of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In January 1970, RN went to Philadelphia to present him with the Medal of Freedorm.  RN said:  ”Usually the awards are made in the White House. I found, however, when I suggested that Mr. Orrnandy might come to the White House for the award, he said: ‘Only if I can bring the 105 people in my orchestra–all 105.’  Now, we would have been delighted to have the 105 in the orchestra there but we could not have had any guests. And so since the orchestra could not come to Washington, I thought that the President ought to come to Philadelphia and come to the orchestra.”   Later in 1973 he became the first western conductor in many years —and  the first American conductor ever— to bring his orchestra to the People’s Republic of China.

After the Concert, at 1:04 AM, RN called his aide Charles Colson to indulge in a post mortem of their respective evenings (Colson had attended the American Music concert featuring Bob Hope and Roger Williams):

President Nixon: Hello.
Charles Colson: Yes, sir, Mr. President.
President Nixon: Well how’d you like the evening?
Colson: Well I enjoyed it. We had–
President Nixon: Which one did you go to?
Colson: We were at the American music concert and–
President Nixon: You didn’t do the symphony?
Colson: I did not do the symphony. No, sir. …..
President Nixon: That was really–the American was great but the symphony just–they had some magnificent things there that just, you know, patriotic and the rest. The 1812 Tchaikovsky Overture and other things that I’d asked [Philadelphia Symphony Music Director Eugene] Ormandy to do and a [Edvard] Grieg [concerto] that [pianist] Van Cliburn did. Being somewhat a student of music, I played Grieg when I was a sophomore in high school.
Colson: Did you really?
President Nixon: Yeah, well, I was quite advanced in music at an earlier age. But anyway it was fantastic…..
President Nixon: ….. And God, Ormandy was fantastic. ,,,,, And so much better than ‘69 and ‘52 and ‘56, when we just went over to Constitution Hall and heard the Washington Symphony go through a rather routine–I mean, they aren’t that bad and with Dorati they’re better than ordinary, but who the hell is equal to Ormandy? Do you know anybody?
Colson: No. No one.
President Nixon: Nobody could’ve played, well, you weren’t there.
Colson: No.
President Nixon: Cliburn did the Grieg routine, and some of Grieg is bad, but this is the best. And he played for a half hour and, by God, you’d never know that the symphony was there. They were so good, the way he fitted in, the sound of Ormandy. Goddamn, it was great.
Colson: I didn’t realize –
President Nixon: And everybody got–he got a standing ovation. They finished with the 1812 Overture, you know,
Colson: I love that.
President Nixon: –with the Los Angeles chorus of 200 and the Valley Forge military band and it brought the audience to its feet. It was fantastic.

Mr. Taylor tied things up with the ending of his email:

It has nothing to do with this story, but it always felt to me like a sort of post-script to it that in 1977, as a member of the Choir of Men and Boys of Washington Cathedral, I got to sing performances by the NSO and the Cathedral Choir at Kennedy Center of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms—a much better piece of music than his Mass, in my view—conducted by the composer.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the second of his three Chichester Psalms.  The choral piece —for boy treble and small orchestra— was commissioned in 1965 and premiered that year in New York and in Chichester Cathedral.  The Hebrew text for the plaintive second movement juxtaposes the gentle Psalm of David — “The Lord is my shepherd”— with the more anguished “Why do the nations rage?”.   In 1977 the Choir of Men and Boys of Washington National Cathedral, of which David Taylor was a member, performed the Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center, conducted by the composer.  This recording, also conducted by Bernstein, features the New York Philharmonic with the Camerata Singers and John Bogart.

Ellie Greenwich    1940-2009

August 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Ellie Greenwich, who was a melodic force behind some of the greatest music —not to mention some of the biggest hits— of the 1960s, died last night in New York.  She was 68.  Her catalog of several hundred songs runs from A (“And Then He Kissed Me”) to only one short of Z (“You Time’s Gonna Come”).  She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1991; there is a comprehensive biography on the Hall’s website.

One of her best known songs was 1963’s “Be My Baby,” co-written with her then-husband Jeff Barry and Phil Spector (who also produced it) for the Ronettes. Brian Wilson called “Be My Baby,” which is Number 114 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, “the greatest pop record ever made.”

Working with various collaborators, including Barry and Spector, Ms. Greenwich made a distinctive mark on, and made a major contribution to,  pop history.  As The New York Times‘ obituary notes:

In 1964 alone, according to “Always Magic in the Air,” a 2005 book by Ken Emerson about the pop music of the time, 17 singles by Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry landed on the pop charts, including “Chapel of Love,” a No. 1 hit for the Dixie Cups, and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” which became a No. 1 hit for the British band Manfred Mann.

Among their other compositions, many of which have been covered by myriad artists, Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry also wrote “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You” and “River Deep, Mountain High” (all with Mr. Spector). They were also singers, recording their own songs (and others) as a duo called the Raindrops.

Perhaps their most famous song was “Leader of the Pack,” which Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry wrote with George Morton, a producer who was known as Shadow Morton. Telling a soap-operaish tale of a girl who was in love with a biker but forbidden by her parents to see him, it ends with the biker’s death as, after their breakup, he speeds away from her and crashes. Woven into the melodramatic music are sound effects, spoken words and a plaintive cry of anguish — “I met him at the candy store” — the overall result being what Mr. Barry called “a movie for the ear.”

It was a No. 1 hit for the Shangri-Las in 1964, and became emblematic enough to be lampooned almost immediately by a band calling itself “The Detergents,” who recorded a song called “Leader of the Laundromat.”

You can listen to an audio sampler of Ellie Greenwich’s rich catalog at the end of Rolling Stone’s obituary.

“The Leader of the Pack,” written with Jeff Barry and producer George “Shadow” Morton, was a Number One hit in 1964  for the Shangri-Las.  It became so iconic that it inspired several parodies.

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