"A more obviously historic site in Duluth is the Armory" where "Dylan caught Buddy Holly's tour two days before Holly's fatal plane crash."

"Dylan was at the front of the crowd and spoke later of making eye contact with Holly, a moment fans in Duluth think of as a kind of mystical passing of the baton from one rock 'n' roll generation to the next."

From an article about traveling through Bob Dylan's Minnesota.

This post gets my "religion substitutes" tag. That's a pretty creepy example. Why is that worth saying? Poor Buddy Holly died at the age of 22. He was only 5 years older than Dylan. There was no one generation to the next! Buddy Holly only exemplifies the 1950s for us because he didn't make it out alive. But he would have fit in just fine with the 1960s. The Rolling Stones had a hit with "Not Fade Away" in 1964. The Beatles covered "Words of Love":

The Beatles' version was recorded on October 18, 1964. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were fans of Holly, harmonized on their version, holding to the vocal and instrumental sound of Holly's original as well as they could. When they had played this song in their early days at the Cavern Club in 1961 and 1962, Lennon and George Harrison were the vocalists. Ringo Starr played a packing case on this song as well as drums, to achieve a similar sound to Holly's "Everyday."

When that recording was made, Holly would have just turned 28. The Beatles — at the height of their popularity — were doing their best to sound like the man who had died 5 years earlier. Even if you are a soft touch for spiritualistic claptrap, the "baton" was Buddy's to keep, and it's nothing but sad that we didn't get to hear what he would have done in the 1960s.

"Formulas are inevitable for 50-year old bands, not that there are many of them to prove the point."

"The trick, which the Stones figured out long ago, is making them imperfect."

Let's not just talk about The Rolling Stones here. Let's examine that abstract principle.

Dibbing Sun Gold Tomato Seeds.

Here's the Rolling Stones song I bring up as Meade dibs.

"I leave it in your capable hands to do whatever you want..."

"... and please write back saying how much money you want."

Question for normal readers: The idealized working relationship?

Question for first year law students: Is that a contract?

ADDED: Compare the story about Steve Jobs dealing with the master of the corporate logo, Paul Rand:

The [Next] computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.” 

Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The company would pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get one design. “There was a clarity in our relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business problems. He had a tough exterior, and had perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear inside.” It was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.

"Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson (Kindle Location 3941).

"The Steve Jobs' iPod Autopsy: Apple Innovator Stuck in the '60s."

Says Spin:

"His iPod selections were those of a kid from the '70s with his heart in the '60s"...

In fact, loaded on his iPod were a total of 21 Dylan albums, including all six volumes of the singer's bootleg series, but no studio recordings more recent than 1989's Oh Mercy, Isaacson writes. The artists appearing next most frequently on Jobs' iPod were the Beatles, with songs from seven of their albums, followed by the Rolling Stones, with six albums. Others making the cut: Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don McLean, Donovan, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, John Mellencamp, and Simon and Garfunkel, plus the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs' "Wooly Bully."

What if your iPod contents were splattered across the headlines? Would you be embarrassed?

"History of Lyrics That Aren't Lyrics."

Hey, you missed "Papa Oom Mow Mow" and the doo doo songs... Police... and Stones...

Anybody remember when Yale Law Journal devoted a page to reprinting the sheet music of "De Do Do De Da Da" to make a point about the indeterminacy of law or some such trendy critical theory concept?

"Google Introduces New Computer-Like Object, Where Everything Happens On the Web."

Oh? Great.

Benefit? It's a neat idea.

Drawback? Do you feel lucky?

Well, I'm not feeling lucky with Google this week. I'd like to like the cloud, though. You know, one reason that I've stayed on Blogger is that I want my archive to be around after I'm dead. I trust Google to continue on indefinitely, and because Blogger doesn't demand payments, I wasn't worried about my blog going away when I'm not here anymore to pay my bills.

So like, Google had become an idea of the afterlife. And now, they're all about the cloud. It's becoming so God-ish. Google as God. It's a mystical experience we are having here in the world, getting absorbed into The Whole.

The link goes to Ace of Spades, whose next post is "Google Pulls Althouse's Blog And Isn't Telling Her Why?" Why?! Well, clearly, I have sinned, and Google has said unto me — I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

And I enjoyed the comments over there, even the ones that brought up the old show about "nutting." At some point, the commenters get into my political orientation:

I know that Althouse gets lots of link love from Instapundit, but I've never been all that impressed with her. She'll talk a good game about not being a liberal, but if you read her blog long enough you can tell that she's still emotionally wedded to the Democrats.

So no matter what complaints she has about the Democratic candidate, I doubt she'll ever be able to bring herself to vote for a <shudder> conservative. Plus she tends to be rather thin-skinned and quick to anger.

Meh.

Heh.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some advise me to switch to Catholicism and Don't Tread 2012 points to...

"The Stones carry no Woodstockesque, antibusiness baggage."

Why the Rolling Stones are able to make so much money.

Not everyone, of course, is enchanted by Jagger’s business smarts. There are those who see the Stones’ transformation into a brand as an affront to the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll, a betrayal of the lawless, piratical impulse that once made them great. Such romantics are inclined to question whether a song like “Street Fighting Man”(“Hey! Said my name is called disturbance/I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants”) can still be plausibly sung by an elderly knight who does sponsorship and licensing deals with Microsoft and Sprint.

These "romantics" just need to perceive the romanticism of capitalism. Capitalism could say "my name is called disturbance" — creative destruction and all — don't you think?  By the way, Mick Jagger studied at the London School of Economics.

Speaking of romance, Jagger addresses the subject of marriage:

“I don’t really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be... I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don’t really think much of marriage. I’m not saying it’s not a wonderful thing and people shouldn’t do it, but it’s not for me. And not for quite a few other people too, it would appear... I just think it’s perhaps not quite what it’s cracked up to be. I know it’s an elaborate fantasy.”

Capitalistic?

Photographs by/of Dennis Hopper.

Hopper took some cool photographs in the 1960s — cool not just because he had access to some of the celebrities of that era (Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, Brian Jones, Tuesday Weld, Andy Warhol, etc.).

And Terry Richardson did a nice cigar-smoking sequence of Hopper.

Via Metafilter, which highlights the great photoblog Chasing Light.

Ravenous hunger for Sarah is making even Hoosiers nasty.

Hoosiers!

What's going on? Things move from good to bad so quickly, like Woodstock to Altamont. This could be the most beautiful evening...

Did you get your Adam Lambert haircut?

This is an "American Idol" question, and a cute kid video. Please forgive me. You need know who Adam Lambert is, and you can get up to speed looking at this clip — he's at the end (singing "Satisfaction"). And here's a photo of him.

Why R. Crumb drew an album cover for Janis Joplin, but not for Mick Jagger.

"You don't want to support that guy."

Here he comes now! Your new Senator!

Is Justice Alito harboring a grudge against Joe Biden?

AP seems to think so, in this report on a speech he gave last night at a dinner celebrating the anniversary of the "conservative" American Spectator magazine:

Alito made several joking references to Vice President-elect Joseph Biden... including Biden's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential campaign over plagiarizing parts of a speech from a British politician.

"To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need," Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric.

Then, he added, "Did someone say that before?"

A bit later in his talk... Alito said he was about to quote liberally from a magazine article. "In the spirit of the vice president-elect, I want to honor the copyright laws," Alito said.

AP surmises that he's still pissed about questions Biden asked at Alito's confirmation hearings.

In case you've forgotten, here's how Biden acted back then:

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

But I don't think it's necessary to infer that Alito's still pissed about that and getting back at the garrulous old VP-elect. We all make fun of Biden whenever we feel like it.

"Get your ya-yas out."

Says Barack Obama:



"That's an old 60s expression."

Yeah, it is:

ADDED: You can debate about what ya-yas are. (Everyone who's read the David Sedaris book "Naked" should know Greeks use it to refer to grandma.) But in rock and roll history, there's something that pre-dates the Rolling Stones album. It's Lee Dorsey's song "Ya Ya" ("Oh, well, I'm sitting here la la, waiting for my ya ya"). I think it's just pure serendipity that Lee Dorsey also has this — a song called "Yes We Can," with surprisingly Obama-appropriate lyrics.

IN THE COMMENTS: Kirk Parker asks:

Do we also get to Kick Out The Jams?

If you do, please do it this way — not this way. And it's NSFW to do it this way or this way.

"Bhutto was fearless."

David Ignatius on Benazir Bhutto:

I remember encountering her once when she was a graduate student at Oxford, shaking up the august and occasionally somnolent Oxford Union debating society as its president. She was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, the one with the sassy tongue sticking out, and I recall thinking that Pakistani politics would never be the same once she returned home, and I recall thinking that Pakistani politics would never be the same once she returned home.

Christopher Hitchens:

I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country....

And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety.

"Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Mike Huckabee asks the NYT reporter. The reporter, Zev Chafets, portrays Huckabee as rather sly:

Romney, a Mormon, had promised that he would be addressing the subject of his religion a few days later. I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘‘I think it’s a religion,’’ he said. ‘‘I really don’t know much about it.’’

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

Earlier in the article, Chafets also references the devil — who, I think, appalls most NYT readers not because they fear Hell but because they fear those who concern themselves with the famous old supernatural malefactor. The context is that Huckabee is glowing over the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, author of the ‘‘Left Behind’’ series:

Recently [LaHaye] donated a hockey rink to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, although some members of the faculty there deride ‘‘Left Behind’’ as science fiction. Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, has no such reservations. He considers the ‘‘Left Behind’’ books, in which the world comes to a violent end as Jesus triumphs over Satan, a ‘‘compelling story written for nontheologians.’’

Is Chafets trying to get readers to think that Huckabee is more benighted than a Liberty University professor? What actually is the difference between viewing the books as "science fiction" or as a "story for nontheologians"? Is it that those faculty members "deride" the story while Huckabee finds it "compelling"? But those unnamed faculty members don't stand to benefit from the endorsement of a very popular author, and there's actually nothing inconsistent between ridiculing the scenario in those books and acknowledging that the story works very well to engage some people in thinking about religion.

Satan horns his way into the article again when Chafets sits down to lunch with Huckabee:

Lunch with Mike Huckabee is a study in faith-based dieting. He has lost 110 pounds in recent years, a feat he chronicled in a book, ‘‘Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.’’ This has given Huckabee something to talk about on daytime television. More important, it has lent him evangelical street cred. An important part of the evangelical narrative is overcoming the devil. But Huckabee was seemingly born born-again. Luckily for him, gluttony counts as a sin, Crisco as a Christian chemical dependency. By the time he reached 40, Huckabee had packed more than 300 pounds onto his 5-foot-11 frame. Then he began wrestling, calorie by calorie, with Satan.

Huckabee ordered soup and a sandwich without drama or comment and began talking about rock ’n’ roll.

Damn! Why won't Huck give Chafets the religious nuggets he so craves?

This is his regular warm-up gambit with reporters of a certain age, meant to convey that he is a cool guy for a Baptist preacher. Naturally I fell for it...

... but not hard enough to resist adding Satan! to the text of the article even though Huckabee apparently hadn't even mentioned religion at this point.

... and asked who he would like to play at his inaugural. ‘‘I’ve got to start with the Stones,’’ Huckabee said. The governor regards 1968 as the dawning of ‘‘the age of the birth-control pill, free love, gay sex, the drug culture and reckless disregard for standards.’’ The Rolling Stones album ‘‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’’ provided the soundtrack for that annus terribilis.

Satan again! Is Satan tempting Chafets? And why not tell us about "Sympathy for the Devil"? That came out in 1968. "Satanic Majesties Request" was released in 1967 and contained candyass songs like "She's a Rainbow." Maybe the editor decided it was high time to strike one Satan reference.

But Mike Huckabee wanted me to know that he believes in the separation of church and stage.

"Church and stage"? Oh, so that's not a typo? It's a Huckabee joke that's been processed into near imperceptibility.

You put all that Satan into the article and then you don't let us get the feeling for how he really talks about Satan? And the big quote everyone's going to get from the article is the one I've put in the title to this post, which leaves Huckabee — perhaps a kindly and humorous guy — looking... devilish.

When Huckabee pardoned Keith Richards.

Everybody is a fan:

Former Arkansas governor and now presidential candidate Mike Huckabee sounded almost indignant last week describing how police in his home state charged Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards with reckless driving back in the 1970s. When Huckabee met Richards last year, he righted that perceived wrong by pardoning the rock star. Cynics accused Huckabee of giving the famous special treatment, saying he wouldn't pardon the average citizen. To which Huckabee responded: "No, I wouldn't. . . . But here's the deal: If you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I'd do it for you."

And here's the video of Huckabee basking in his memories of Keith. Put up with the commercial, because the video shows Huckabee glowing with love for the guy and even imitating his English accent. And how often do you get to hear a presidential candidate laughing off the notion of equal justice under the law?

"I have found it personally inspiring in my war on political correctness in academe. "

Says Camille Paglia about Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." But she doesn't think it deserved to be #1 on that list of greatest songs put out by Rolling Stone. That should have been something by the Rolling Stones. The flaw of "Like a Rolling Stone" is "compulsive sneering - an adolescent tic," per Paglia. But, wait, isn't adolescent sneering the point of rock and roll? It's hard to do adolescent sneering well. And once you've done it well, if you try to get past it, John Pareles might pillory you in the New York Times.

100 top albums of the 1980s.

Speaking of Prince, why was "1999" only #16 on Rolling Stones list of 100 top albums of the 1980s? Here's the top 20 (go to the link for the full list):

1.London Calling, The Clash
2.Purple Rain, Prince
3.The Joshua Tree, U2
4.Remain In Light, Talking Heads
5.Graceland, Paul Simon
6.Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
7.Thriller, Michael Jackson
8.Murmur, R.E.M.
9.Shoot Out The Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson
10.Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
11.Get Happy!!, Elvis Costello
12.It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy
13.Diesel And Dust, Midnight Oil
14.So, Peter Gabriel
15.Let It Be, The Replacements
16.1999, Prince
17.Synchronicity, The Police
18.Dirty Mind, Prince
19.New York, Lou Reed
20.Pretenders, The Pretenders

One answer is that they gave him the second slot for "Purple Rain" and even put "Dirty Mind" at #18. ("Sign o' the Times" is #74.) Another answer is that the list was made in 1990.

What looks really out of place on this list today? Maybe my younger readers will agree with me that this list reeks of Baby Boomer.