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.

No Laughing Matter

November 15, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, Culture, Entertainment, Media, Popular Culture, TV | Leave a Comment 

“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

The philosophy of Chuckles  the Clown.

Comedy writer David Lloyd died last week at his home in Beverly Hills; he was 75.  A fitting epitaph was provided by Cheers co-creator Les Charles (for whom Lloyd wrote many episodes):  ”I do think he was the preeminent writer of television comedy.  If you consider how long his career was and how much he wrote for such really popular shows, he’s got to have been responsible for a record number of laughs in this world.”

Many of those laughs were concentrated in the seventh episode of the sixth season of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles Bites the Dust.”  In this script, the rarely seen Chuckles —host of a kid’s show at WJM, the Minneapolis TV station at which the series was set— meets a sudden and tragic end.

As Grand Marshal of the annual circus parade, he dresses as one of his many beloved characters Peter Peanut.  Station manager Lou Grant (Ed Asner) informs the shocked newsroom that, in this goober incarnation, Chuckles was shelled by a rogue elephant.

Here, from the show’s script, is that memorable moment:

               Lou enters, genuinely stricken.

                                     LOU
                              (Mutters)
                         Oh my! Oh, dear...!

                                     MARY
                         Mr. Grant...?

                                     LOU
                              (Really shaken)
                         Something terrible has happened.

                                     MURRAY
                              (Sober)
                         What is it, Lou?

                                     LOU
                         Someone we all know is dead.

                                     MARY
                         What! Mr. Grant--who?

                                     LOU
                              (Getting control)
                         No... I won't tell you about it now...
                         I don't want to upset you...

                                     MARY
                              (Frantic)
                         Mr. Grant!!...

                                     LOU
                         Where's Ted? I gotta tell Ted...

                                     MURRAY
                         He's on the air, Lou. What happened?
                         Who died? Tell us!

                                     LOU
                              (Still dazed)
                         Chuckles. Chuckles the Clown is dead.
                         It was a freak accident. He went to
                         the parade dressed as Peter Peanut...
                         and a rogue elephant tried to shell
                         him.

               They are both stunned.

For many years “Chuckles Bites the Dust” stood at the top of TV Guide’s list of the Top 100 Episodes of All Time.  (It has now been edged down to Number Three by Seinfeld’s 1992 “The Contest” and The Sopranos’ 1999 “College” episodes.)

Here’s TV Guide’s citation:

3. THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
“Chuckles Bites the Dust” 10/25/1975
Take one unlucky peanut-clad clown, a rogue elephant, an irreverent newsroom, an Emmy-winning script and a virtuoso performance by one of TV’s greatest comedians, and you get one of the biggest laugh-out-loud sitcom episodes ever. When kiddie-show host Chuckles the Clown has his tragic culinary misadventure, it’s catnip to the WJM-TV crew—except for a disapproving Mary Richards. The comic payoff comes with Mary’s unsuccessful attempts to stifle her snickers during a eulogy celebrating Chuckles’ alter egos Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo and Auntie Yoo-Hoo. The pièce de genius: When the minister gives Mary permission to laugh, she begins to bawl. Amazingly, not everyone was on board, recalls star Mary Tyler Moore. The series’ usual director opted out of the episode “because he thought it was not in good taste,” says Moore. CBS also had misgivings about the show’s tone, she says, “but we knew it was something special. It’s not just about laughing at the funeral, but also the tensions and talking about it in the newsroom. It really is a uniquely funny episode.”

Here are links to the first, and second parts of “Chuckles Bites the Dust.”  And here is the final segment (which is even funnier if you watch the set up).   The audio is slightly out of sync but the laughs still arrive on time.

       Organ music stops and Reverend Burke steps to the lectern.

                                     BURKE
                         My friends... "Any man's death
                         diminishes me, because I am involved
                         in mankind. Therefore, ask not for
                         whom the bell tolls--it tolls for
                         thee."

                                     TED
                              (Sotto: scandalized)
                         Hey, Lou, he stole your poem!

                                     BURKE
                         Chuckles the Clown gave pleasure to
                         millions. The characters he created
                         will be remembered by children and
                         adults alike: Peter Peanut, Mr. Fee-
                         Fi-Fo, Billy Banana, and my particular
                         favorite, Aunt Yoo-Hoo.

               Mary stifles a laugh.

                                     BURKE
                         And not just for the laughter they
                         provided--there was always some deeper
                         meaning to whatever Chuckles did.
                         Remember Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo's little catch
                         phrase, remember how when his arch
                         rival Senor Caboom would hit him
                         with the giant cucumber and knock
                         him down? Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo would always
                         pick himself up, dust himself off
                         and say, "I hurt my foo-foo."

               Mary again stifles a laugh. The others in the row glare at
               her.

                                     BURKE
                         Life's a lot like that. From time to
                         time we all fall down and hurt our
                         foo-foo's.

               Mary again stifles a laugh. Other people turn to look at
               her.

                                     BURKE
                         If only we could all deal with it as
                         simple and bravely and honestly as
                         Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo. And what did Chuckles
                         ask in return? Not much--in his own
                         words--"A little song, a little dance,
                         a little seltzer down your pants."

               Mary has great difficulty in stifling herself here. Many
               people turn to look at her.

                                     BURKE
                              (Looking right at
                              Mary)
                         Excuse me, young lady... yes you...
                         would you stand up please?

               Mary, with no alternative, stands up.

                                     BURKE
                         You feel like laughing, don't you?
                         Don't try to stop yourself. Go ahead,
                         laugh out loud. Don't you see? Nothing
                         could have made Chuckles happier. He
                         lived to make people laugh. He found
                         tears offensive, deeply offensive.
                         He hated to see people cry. Go ahead,
                         my dear--laugh.

               As Mary bursts into tears, we:

                                                                   FADE OUT

                                      END OF ACT TWO

Bruce Weber in The New York Times and Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times offered excellent obituaries. One of David Lloyd’s sons, Christopher, is co-creator of Modern Family —- the superb sitcom which, along with FlashForward, will save the 2009 season from the trash heap of TV history.

The New Nixon Podcast Is Up And Running

October 31, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Advertising, Foundation News, Interviews, Media, New Media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Center, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Podcast, Popular Culture, Richard Nixon, Social Networking, Technology, The National Interest, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

During a recent visit to the Nixon Library, I had a discussion with several people about the potential for a podcast, something designed to highlight the events at the library, as well as the larger work of the Nixon Foundation.

We determined to use the recent visit of Sonny West and his talk about the day Elvis came to see President Nixon in the Oval Office for the premier production of the podcast.

This podcast is being registered with I-Tunes and will be available through them by the end of today. This, of course, makes the podcast portable. It can be downloaded to I-Pods and other such devices. In the meantime, here is a link to the first episode of what we hope will be a regular feature.

A couple of provisos: First, the theme music is from “VICTORY AT SEA” at the recommendation of Sandy Quinn. He told me how much Mr. Nixon enjoyed it – so it was an obvious choice. Second, some of the audio during Sonny’s remarks is a little difficult to hear and I suspect he pulled a Fran Tarkenton and scrambled out of the pocket, straying from the microphone, at times. These technical difficulties will be addressed and corrected for future events and podcasts.

But even with a few “glitches” – this podcast will be, I think, a welcome edition to the wonderful media expressions of the Nixon Foundation.

It is my privilege to host and produce this and I look forward to working on new editions about once a month – so, stay tuned! My special thanks to Philip Bassham, on my staff in Fairfax, for his vital help with this project.

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.

Download on iTunes

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.

The Way We Were

September 20, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Art, Lifestyle, Media, Popular Culture, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Bernie Fuchs, who showed middle class America the way it wanted to live during the 1950s and then changed the ways Americans looked at sports, died on Thursday at the age of 76.  He was one of the most —if not the most— influential illustrators of the last second half of the 20th Century.

An excellent obituary by Adam Bernstein in today’s Washington Post limns his life and describes his influence:

Mr. Fuchs was adept at balancing art and commerce. He met the needs of mass-circulation magazines accustomed to Norman Rockwell-style realism, but he injected a fresh vitality and impressionism that became hugely popular and transformed the illustration field. He even experimented with bold designs based on the abstract expressionism movement popularized by painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom From Want” —from his Four Freedoms series painted for the Saturday Evening Post based on FDR’s 1941 Message to Congress— is still the idealized iconic version of that American holiday.  (In the same way that his “Freedom of Speech” was, at least until its recent brush with reality, the ideal of what town hall meetings would look like.)

Fuchs’ illustration for a story in the December 1962 issue of  McCall’s magazine paid homage to Rockwell’s vision while updating it and adding some homely touches of reality.

This late-50s ad —one of his many illustrations for Coca-Cola— is full of rich details of the carefree and glamorous middle class lifestyle few attained and most coveted.  Today it looks charmingly innocent; back in the day it was the epitome of hip:

The WaPo obit deconstructed the creative elements of a Fuchs illustration for a McCall’s short story:

One vivid example, commissioned by McCall’s magazine in the late 1950s, was a portrait of two young couples relaxing in a small room after dinner. One man is lying on the ground, his head nestled on a woman’s lap and smoking a cigarette as she strokes his hair.

While the image has the control and realism of Rockwell, it also has several more dynamic features taken from avant-garde techniques: the vigorous brush strokes; the tilted horizon that heightens a sense of drama; a lampshade in the foreground that appears slightly distorted; and, most strikingly, the placement of the couples in the distance instead of being the center of the picture.

By the age of 30, Fuchs had been named Artist of the Year by the Artist’s Guild of New York — the first of many honors that included being one of the youngest inductees into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, whose company included Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and John James Audubon.

Men With Hats: A Fuchs illustration for a late ’50s Seagram’s ad.

Don Draper Please Call Home: a Fuchs Seagram’s ad that could be a story board for Mad Men.

In an interesting obit on his blog Illustration Art, David Apatoff describes the next phase of Fuchs’ career:

So Fuchs was feeling pretty cocky by the time Sports Illustrated called him in the early 1960s to ask him to illustrate an article. Fuchs met with the legendary art director of Sports Illustrated, Richard Gangel. A tough minded visionary, Gangel gave Fuchs an assignment, but as Fuchs was leaving, added– “Oh– and I don’t want that shit you do for McCalls.”

Fuchs could have walked off in a huff. It would have been easy for him to continue working for other clients in the successful style he had already developed. Instead, he rose to Gangel’s challenge and became even bolder and more innovative.

The result was the introduction of an impressionist immediacy that quickly became the gold standard for sports illustration.

Bernie Fuchs painted Sandy Koufax for the cover of SI’s 1964 Baseball Issue.

A Fuchs illustration of a golf match in the rain.

Bernstein quotes illustrator-educator Murray Tinkelman about Fuchs’ long run as the beau ideal of illustration art:

He became the most emulated and imitated illustrator in the field through the 1980s . . . when the vogue turned to more decorative, whimsical, punkier illustrations that were influenced by underground cartoons like those of Robert Crumb.

Fuchs continued to draw and paint into this century.  A retrospective including his later work can be seen here.

Bernie Fuchs’ drawings were used as the cover art for Frank Sinatra’s 1967 LP The World We Knew.

The Madding Crowd — Now And Then

September 16, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Popular Culture, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

There must be something in the water over at the Daily Beast where posts sympathetic to RN (albeit unintended and/or inadvertent) have now appeared twice in three days.

First it was Chris Matthews’ admiring exposition of the role Edward Kennedy and a panoply of Kennedy partisans played in bringing down a President who had just been re-elected with the second biggest landslide in American history.

Today it’s Lee Siegel, one of the Beast’s most dependably provocative provocateurs, who provides the latest answer to the question “Is Obama the New Nixon?”.

Mr. Siegel urges a general untwisting of panties over the recent Tea Party rally on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Despite the deepest fear (and fondest hope) of cable TV, the current wave of protest doesn’t represent a political apocalypse about to plunge the country into civil war.

But, he says, it does represent something very different and very important: the rise of a new counterculture.  He writes:

The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.

And while the new counterculture’s racist images of Obama are sickening, they are similar in their emotional violence to the images of the old counterculture’s Representative Villain, Richard Nixon—caricatures which ran the gamut from violent to pornographic. Just as Nixon exemplified middle-class, middle-aged white, repressive stasis, so Obama exemplifies—for his haters—ceaseless, wearying, uprooting change.

Each man presented the perfect vexation to enraged opponents—Nixon a hurdle to change, Obama a wide-open door to an uncertain future.

And he ends with an appeal for some patience and some perspective:

In other words, everyone, calm down. What we are seeing is the good, old American Berserk in action. It’s just that, ever since the 1960s, we are not accustomed to seeing it come from the other side.

The central role the counterculture played in American history during the 1960s and ‘70s, and its impact on the Nixon presidency, has been pretty much overlooked and undervalued.  But, in fact, the 1960s represented the apotheosis of the axiom: Let me write a country’s songs and I don’t care who writes its laws.

RN arrived in the White House just when the elements of a perfect storm had fallen into place: a debased elite that had lost confidence in itself and its values; a youth cohort that was economically empowered, intellectually flattered, hedonistically assaulted, and that felt personally threatened by the war and the draft; a mass media that had achieved almost total national saturation and exercised a virtual monopoly on public opinion; and a hard core of organized radicals —ranging from loopy anarchists to regimented terrorists— that knew how to intimidate the elite, exploit the media, and inspire and/or amuse the kids.

Today’s protesters are really very different from those of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

What the protesters of the ‘60s and ‘70s reflected and represented was a top-to-bottom crisis of the entire American —indeed, of Western— culture.  What we’ve been dealing with so far in the summer of ’09  is still only a politically-triggered media-driven populist phenomenon.

The ranks of today’s protesters, while growing apace, is still specifically segmented.  It is comprised of a lot of average citizens who are fed up with the extravagance and corruption of government and the arrogance of its representatives; of a smaller, and overlapping, group that is motivated by conservative media; and of a miniscule fringe of LaRouche wingnuts that the media consciously neglects to identify and unconscionably presents as representative.

But —whether he’s right or wrong about an emerging counterculture— it’s promising that Mr. Siegel is thinking and writing along these lines.  There can be no balanced assessment of RN’s presidency without an understanding of what he was up against.

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: