"The quickest route to ridicule, it seems, is for aging rockers to proceed as if nothing has changed."

"The truth is, years have passed, and to deny this is a form of visual dishonesty."

Yeah, but what counts as denial? The writer knocks Roger Daltrey for performing with his shirt unbuttoned and then dares to classify Iggy Pop as somehow in denial for going entirely shirtless. It seems to me Iggy Pop is letting you see exactly what he is. He's the opposite of dishonest.

Pia.

Seeya.

Let's put the blame where it belongs: on Gwen Stefani. If it weren't for that jumpsuit, we'd have been relieved of Stefano.

And, Iggy... no. That did not work. I love you, but I don't think America understands.

Iggy Pop says law is for "for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead."

"In America, in school... I learnt creative writing, I learnt advanced algebra and geometry, but I didn’t learn there was such a thing as intellectual property. I didn’t learn how to read a contract. And I didn’t care about those things. Those things were for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead. They still are, but now I do my living-dead s***work every day. And I can feel the hair follicles reacting.”

"I believe in God and Senator Dodd."

I read the opening lines of Calvin Trillin's op-ed -- written in June 2006, but featured on the NYT website this morning as an op-ed "classic":

MY excitement at the news that Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, is considering a bid for president in 2008 is easy to explain: his name has enormous rhyming potential. We all have our own issues.

And it took me back to the 60s, when Dodd's dad was a Senator and Phil Ochs used the line I've put in my title in "Draft Dodger Rag," which you can listen to here or buy the album "I Ain't Marching Anymore." Lyrics here:

Oh, I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and a-keepin' old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve I knew "better dead than red"
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said....

The original "chicken hawk" song (I think).

But the subject is poetry and names. Trillin has made his career in part out of writing light verse with a high proportion of famous names:

Someone in my position tends to see Ross Perot and John McCain as two peas in a pod — blessedly iambic candidates with nearly unlimited rhyming possibilities. During my 16 years in the deadline poetry game, though, we've had nobody with a name like Ross Perot or John McCain in the White House. I've had to deal with presidents whose names are an affront to rhyme and meter. Given the rhyming difficulties of Bill Clinton's name, in fact, I believe future historians will think of him as the "orange" of American presidents.

I think of him as the banana of Presidents, but it's all a matter of how you look at things.

Just the other day, in this comments thread to that post about whether lawprofs should call students by their first names, we got to talking about the poetic limitations of some names. I said: "[T]here are no pop songs about 'Ann.' Actually, there are few pop songs with one-syllable names."

With this, Pogo proved me wrong and exposed my inadequate knowledge of the 1960s, to which I'll plead guilty, eschewing the defense that if you can remember, you weren't there.

I looked into your cool cool eyes
I felt so fine, I felt so fine
I floated in your swimming pools
I felt so weak, I felt so blue

If you want to rhyme, rhyme. If you don't, don't. ← inferred Stooge theory of poetry.

Back to Trillin, who despite his name, didn't sing his lyrics (as far as I know). Trillin's had trouble with the current administration:

At times George W. Bush has seemed interested in making my life easier. He must have known before the appointments were made, for instance, that Condoleezza Rice's name fits exactly into the meter of "The March of the Siamese Children" from "The King and I" ("Condoleezza Rice, who is cold as ice, is precise with her advice") and that Alberto Gonzales rhymes with "loyal über alles."

And he fretted over the names coming up in 2008:

In my more pessimistic contemplations of the 2008 campaign, I see myself telling some political operative that I've made my peace with the possibility that the Democrats, desperate for some charisma, could turn to Barack Obama — a man whose rhymes I long ago used up in trying to deal with Osama bin Laden.

"But Obama's not the only Illinois contender," the operative says. "There's also the governor."

"The governor?"

"The governor," he repeats. "Rod Blagojevich."

Okay, then. Let's see the poems. Roll out your "-itch" words, you bitch.

IN THE COMMENTS: JohnJEnright composes this:

He desired the joy
of being rich.

He devised a ploy,
but it hit a hitch.

Weep, Illinois,
for Blagojevich.

AND: More commenters are itching for frontpaging. First, bearbee:

Blagojevich
Chicago jock itch
Who tried to get rich
By auditioning off a niche
And ended in an FBI hitch
Now when will he turn and snitch

And Palladian (presumably sung to the tune of "The Munchkin Song"):

Blagojevich, you bitch,
Will scratch you where you itch
and name you to the Senate seat that Barry O did ditch.

But wait! Hold on!
There's just a little hitch!
A Senate seat is valuable! He's trying to get rich.

So here's the pitch!
Pay up you fucking bitch!
And just forget Pat Fitz and Lisa Madigan, that witch!

Blago-jevich!
Payola is his niche!
A suitcase full of unmarked bills, nobody's gonna snitch!

But who will stop
this monumental kitsch?
Corruption that would cause even Jack Abramoff to twitch!

Fitch? No, Fitz!
in a prosecutor blitz
will smash the Illinois machine to tiny little bits!

Justice Breyer strikes out.

He was on the NPR show "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me":

On why he even agreed to answer questions outside his area of expertise in the humbling, and often embarrassing, "Not My Job" segment: "Well, it was my sister-in-law who wanted me to do it, and I wanted peace in the family."...

In the end, the NPR regulars confessed they were relieved that Breyer didn't know Bowie once tried to exorcise Satan from his swimming pool, Iggy Pop spent a year eating nothing but German sausages or Osbourne once asked for directions to the bar immediately after checking in to rehab.

Aw. But would you have done better? Me, I would have got the Osbourne.

"I'm in the middle without any plans..."

"I'm a boy and I'm a man..." I've chosen "Eighteen" by Alice Cooper as today's Unplayable 45 I Won't Throw Out:



Wow! Is that in bad condition! It even has paint on it.

What got me thinking about this one is that Bob Dylan ended this week's "Theme Time Radio Hour" with an Alice Cooper song. The theme today was school and the song was "School's Out" -- get it? -- because it was the end of the show. Lyrics: "School's out for summer/School's out forever/School's been blown to pieces." That doesn't resonate well these days, does it?

"Fantasy used to be a lot more effective than reality," said Alice Cooper...

Now "you cannot shock an audience anymore. Audiences are shocked - and I'm shocked - by CNN. When you're seeing a real guy getting his real head cut off by real terrorists on television, and then you see Alice Cooper get his head cut off in a guillotine that's an obvious trick, well, it's not very shocking."...

Thirty-four years and the Columbine shooting later, Cooper stills fends off accusations that his music, and the music of other artists such as Marilyn Manson (who counts Cooper as a big influence), is somehow responsible for the actions of disturbed teenagers.

"I think any time that you're a personality that goes against the grain, you're an easy target," Cooper said. "If I wrote a song that said, 'Go out and buy yourselves some guns and go to your school and go kill everybody that you don't like and it'll be OK,' well, yeah, I think I'm responsible if somebody does that. But if I say, 'School's out,' I don't think that 99.9999 percent of the people will go, 'Yeah, school's out; I hated school, too; (I'm going to kill someone).' "

But, as Cooper acknowledged, "you're always going to have that 1 millionth of a percent that goes, 'Yeah, I know what I'll do ...' That person's going to do something horrible no matter what they hear."

Though he might have strong opinions, you won't hear Cooper giving his political views in his lyrics. For Cooper, rock 'n' roll and politics were never meant to be bedfellows.

"You won't find any political songs, excepted for 'Elected,' which is a satire, on my records. You're never going to find me promoting this candidate over that candidate because I'm sitting there going, 'Why should people who like my music ... vote for the guy I'm voting for?' " Cooper said. "Asking me who to vote for is like asking the guy who makes your pizza who to vote for."

I don't know. He sounds pretty sensible. Maybe we should consult him about who to vote for. Back in 2004, we got a glimpse of his political opinion:

Alice Cooper, a shock rocker back in the old days and now a fan of President Bush, says rock stars who've jumped on the John Kerry bandwagon -- Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen among them -- are treasonous morons.

"To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics," the 56-year-old [said]....

"If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal." (We think he meant watching C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," or maybe he meant perusing the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, but either way you get the idea.)

"Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn't already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that's a good reason right there to vote for Bush."

Back to "Eighteen." Why is there only one "t" in the word "eighteen"? Why have I never noticed that before? Anyway, I kind of doubt that I bought this 45. I think it's probably my brother's. He's three years younger than I am, and he liked a lot of things that I and my friends looked down on -- notably Grand Funk Railroad (they were an American band) and Emerson Lake & Palmer (yikes, that is one retro website). Looking for some links about Alice Cooper the first thing I hit in Google is my own old post. At some point in a blogger's life, searching for something in Google is like wracking your own brain for memories, except that it's easier, and you can cut and paste:

[I]t's pretty random that I even went to see Alice Cooper at all. It was a long, long time ago, by the way. It was back when "I'm Eighteen" was a hit (1971). I'm not even sure if "School's Out" was out yet (1972). It was the summer of either 1971 or 1972, in an obscure part of southern New Jersey, and my younger brother wanted to go to the concert. Even though I thought it was embarrassing to go to an Alice Cooper concert--people my age (20 at the time) considered him a joke--I loved the single "I'm Eighteen," so I went. There was an elaborate stage show, which I can't remember anything about. I do remember, I think, that at one point he stripped off a layer of his costume and had on a skin-tight gold lamé body suit, and that was the sort of thing that just wasn't done at the time by anybody my friends would respect. In fact, I remember Iggy Stooge performing on campus (at the University of Michigan) in 1969 or 1970 and everyone shaking their heads and expressing pity for this late-stage has-been who was taking off his shirt, writhing on the ground, and suddenly stooping to the pathetic ploy of renaming himself Iggy Pop. How astounded we would have been if we could have known that 35 years later these two would still be around and would be respected and that Iggy would still look good with his shirt off.

...One of the reasons we thought Alice Cooper was a joke was because he was seen as a Frank Zappa side project, a Zappa prank. The album I listened to every day back then was "The Mothers Live at the Fillmore East," which includes some comical references to Alice Cooper:

Well, it gets me so hot
I could scream
ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!
ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!

You can read all the lyrics here. [Not for the faint-hearted.] I still love that album! People who love the song "Happy Together" but don't know "Live at the Fillmore East" are missing a key perspective.

Sorry about calling the song "I'm Eighteen." It's just "Eighteen," you can clearly see from the record label. Anyway, I'm embarrassed that I was embarrassed to go see Alice Cooper back then.

Convergences.

When John was in town we watched the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes" one evening, and then the next day we listened to that Rufus Wainwright song "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk." Later, I was in the café and didn't like the music they were piping in, so I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.

I'd been too busy this week to do my Wednesday morning drive to listen to "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan," but I went to check the website to see when the replays of the new show were, and I saw the theme this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding. Now When it's time for one of the replays, so I'm going to get in my car and go for a drive. If I kill myself in an accident, be sure to say she died doing something she loved, and link to this post. Have a cup of coffee and talk about convergences, including whatever it was my car converged with.

UPDATE, after hearing the show: More convergences. On the death theme, Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes," the part where Iggy Pop tells Tom Waits he ordered coffee for him and then worries if that's okay.

"Come on, prompt... Do your business. Humor us."

This is the sort of cultural package about which I have no choice. I am forced to buy it.

The first of these [episodes of "The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave,"], a roundtable discussion whose participants include an 18-year-old Paul Weller and a baby-faced Joan Jett, does not bode well - Mr.Snyder is noticeably dismissive of the emerging new-wave scene and condescending to his young guests. Yet for reasons known only to Old Tom himself, he continues to invite the punks back to "Tomorrow," to provide them with a venue to perform music he clearly doesn't grasp, and to interview such emerging artists as Elvis Costello and Patti Smith no differently than if they were James A. Michener or Frank Capra. In his questioning, Mr. Snyder can come across as out-of-touch ("Is that a part of this punk thing, people hitting each other?"), overly intellectual ("How do you make certain that you don't become a member of what you now call the establishment?"), or superficial (to Iggy Pop: "Why are you bleeding?"), but he is never fawning or self-conscious, and his curiosity is sincere....

On his June 25, 1980, broadcast, Mr. Snyder spends half his program attempting to converse with the former Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, who was then fronting the band Public Image Limited under his given name, John Lydon. Four years earlier, Mr. Lydon had helped to bring down the British television presenter Bill Grundy with an especially raucous interview, and he seems to be spoiling for a rematch with Snyder: "Come on, prompt," the characteristically crabby singer goads his American host. "Do your business. Humor us."

But Mr. Snyder is either too professional to be flustered, or too naïve to know he's being insulted, because he keeps jabbing back at Mr. Lydon with simple, honest questions-"Is it a band? Is it a public relations firm?" "Let me try this: What do you like?" - before landing this unexpected uppercut on the ex-Pistol's chin: "It's unfortunate that we are all out of step except for you."

There's a clip of the Snyder/Lydon interview at the link. Quite hilarious. There is something about Snyder's face. I love the reaction shot of him at the end of the clip.

Paglia on Zappa.

Camille Paglia reviews a new book about Frank Zappa in the NYT Book Review. True to Paglia form, she emphasizes Zappa's Italian background. The book, by Barry Miles, is just called "Zappa," but Paglia titles her review "Freak Out!" after Zappa's first album. I can't hear that title without guilt, because a friend of my brother's loaned me the album, an expensive double album, 35 years ago, and I've never given it back. For the last 30 years or so, I haven't remembered the person's name or had any idea how to reach her. So it's really just a permanent burden of guilt. But here's some Paglia on Zappa (and Miles, whom she doesn't seem to like very much):

Miles, who knew Zappa, often seems ambivalent about him. There is a gap between the ''juvenile and prurient'' Zappa he describes and the one we see in the book's sensational photographs, which show a man of burning magnetism and piercing intellect. Miles calls Zappa a ''cold nihilist'' who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ''cynicism and misanthropy,'' he detects Catholic guilt and ''deep-seated problems with women.'' Zappa was ''stuck in a 50's time warp'' -- yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.



Whatever the meaning of the S-and-M and fetish imagery in his songs (a theme that makes Miles squirm), the picture painted here of Zappa's family life is troubling. When not touring (which he loved to do -- Miles calls him a ''road rat''), Zappa spent 10 to 18 hours a day holed up in his cavernous basement studio in his Tudor mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He was a born tinkerer and a groundbreaker in early digital production.



Addicted to black coffee and cigarettes (he was fiercely antidrugs), he slept during the day and saw little of his family. His second wife, Gail, said, ''Frank did not do love.'' When she was 13, Moon Unit slipped a note under the studio door to ''introduce'' herself and her ideas. The result was the hit song ''Valley Girl,'' a phenomenon when it was released in 1982. Because he thought formal education a waste of time, Zappa took his children out of school at 15 and refused to pay for college.

Painful. But "black coffee and cigarettes" -- that reminds me, I'm in the middle of watching "Coffee and Cigarettes," and liking it very much. I'm up to the scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and I'd only meant to stop for a minute to go see if the Tom Waits fan in the house wanted to watch that scene, and I got sidetracked by my laptop and that Paglia review!

Ideas for the official Wisconsin state rock song: Part II.

On the subject of picking an official rock song for the state of Wisconsin, Hazy Dave (BSEE 78) writes:

I nominate "Rockin' Behind The Iron Curtain" by the Red Ball Jets, a Milwaukee group from the late 70's. An old Huey Piano Smith tune, IIRC, available only on a 7 inch EP they self-released back in the day, so I guess it's a bit obscure. Still, I thought it might strike a resonant chord up there in the People's Republic of Madison...



Group members included guitarist Mark Schneider from the late lamented Dirty Jack's Record Rack, drummer Rob McCuen, (nowadays an Iggy pop disciple - a much kinder word than wannabe - still haunting Milwaukee's club scene), and a singer called Molly Putz (a gym class putdown cut from the same cloth as "Violent Femme")...



I suppose anything of some national recognition by the Bodeans or Violent Femmes would be a better choice, but nothing I can think of has much to do with the state or hometown pride or anything like that. "Gimme the Car" is a bit profane for official recognition, and "Children Of The Revolution" is a cover of a T.Rex song... I'm not entirely sure if the Fendermen were from Wisconsin or across the border in the Twin Cities, but "Muleskinner Blues" was at least a national hit, a good natured novelty rocker in the early 60's or late 50's. I can't quite think of a good rockin' enough near-hit by the Robbs or the Legends, and the Spooner tune I'd choose, "Shut Up", isn't on any of their (out-of-print) albums anyway. "Johnny Stood Up" was another great Spooner song in the same boat...



Maybe the Spanic Boys' "Keep On Walkin'"? I'm not being too helpful here, but I recognize that an officially sanctioned State Rock Song would have to be much more mainstream and/or stupid than I'd prefer in order to be approved in the first place. "It's just the Good Life passing you by..." - Madison's Fire Town.



Hey, it's the "WHEREAS, Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down" bit that really makes it anyway. If it came to a vote, I expect the Budweiser song ("When you say Wisconsin, you've said it all") would handily trounce all comers anyway. This is clearly an unacceptable solution from St. Louis (pun intended), so I recommend we table the motion.

Answers to two recent blogpolls.

On Saturday, I asked readers to guess which one of three performers--Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, or Alice Cooper--I had seen in concert, and then Sunday, I asked readers to spot the lie in a particular post about the construction of Madison's Overture Center. I've been checking the results all along and find it interesting how stable the numbers are, which gives me some inkling of why actual scientifically done polling based on relatively small numbers is reliable. And not only has the pattern of answers in both polls stayed about the same all along, but the answers have been correct! I saw Alice Cooper (and only Alice Cooper) in concert and I completely lied when I asserted a belief that the dome is "beautiful." So, now, why did people do so well getting those answers? Do readers know me so well and am I that knowable on the question of what concert I would happen to have seen and what I would lie about, or were both questions surrounded by clues and cues that helped people guess correctly?



The easier question, by far, is spot the lie. With five potential answers, purely random guessing would lead to more errors, but having more answers dilutes the strength of the random-guesser vote. And two answers are quite unlikely to be lies ("gleaming" and "elegant," which came in at the bottom of the vote, with 8.5% and 11% respectively). Also near the bottom was the fussy-about-facades answer, with 11.4% of the vote. Of course, a place like Madison would tend to have historical preservationist types who would get involved in a big project like this. The second place answer, that I find random junk "picturesque" still only got 28.9% of the vote. People were attracted to this answer above the other wrong answers, I assume, for the obvious reason that junk is not in fact "picturesque." Regular readers might remember earlier pictures of junk on this blog and know to avoid this answer. The correct answer--that the dome is "beautiful"--got 40.2% of the vote. I'm thinking people got this because they were looking at the picture and did not themselves think the dome was beautiful. Certainly, it does not approach the beauty of the other dome in the picture, the one on the state capitol building. By the way, I regret writing "I knew I was lying" in the post setting up the poll, because it implies that one can tell a lie without knowing it is untrue, and I am critical of people who do that in political debates. And I was even alluding to the political slogan "Bush lied!" in the title of the poll ("Althouse lied!").



But, now, why did you guess that I would have seen Alice Cooper (51.2%) of the vote and not Pink Floyd (34%) or Bruce Springsteen (14.8%)? My theory is that you thought about my present day motivation to ask the question. Since Alice Cooper was the most interesting choice, I probably felt like doing that particular poll because Alice Cooper was the answer. It's too boring to have gone to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and that's why that answer came in last. Thus, correct answering doesn't really have anything to do with an understanding of my musical taste. In fact, it's pretty random that I even went to see Alice Cooper at all. It was a long, long time ago, by the way. It was back when "I'm Eighteen" was a hit (1971). I'm not even sure if "School's Out" was out yet (1972). It was the summer of either 1971 or 1972, in an obscure part of southern New Jersey, and my younger brother wanted to go to the concert. Even though I thought it was embarrassing to go to an Alice Cooper concert--people my age (20 at the time) considered him a joke--I loved the single "I'm Eighteen," so I went. There was an elaborate stage show, which I can't remember anything about. I do remember, I think, that at one point he stripped off a layer of his costume and had on a skin-tight gold lamé body suit, and that was the sort of thing that just wasn't done at the time by anybody my friends would respect. In fact, I remember Iggy Stooge performing on campus (at the University of Michigan) in 1969 or 1970 and everyone shaking their heads and expressing pity for this late-stage has-been who was taking off his shirt, writhing on the ground, and suddenly stooping to the pathetic ploy of renaming himself Iggy Pop. How astounded we would have been if we could have known that 35 years later these two would still be around and would be respected and that Iggy would still look good with his shirt off.



UPDATE: One of the reasons we thought Alice Cooper was a joke was because he was seen as a Frank Zappa side project, a Zappa prank. The album I listened to every day back then was "The Mothers Live at the Fillmore East," which includes some comical references to Alice Cooper:

Well, it gets me so hot

I could scream

ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!

ALICE COOPER, ALICE COOPER! WAAAAH!

You can read all the lyrics here. [Not for the faint-hearted.] I still love that album! People who love the song "Happy Together" but don't know "Live at the Fillmore East" are missing a key perspective.