Once the Boston Red Sox – sorry, World Series Champion Red Sox – took Game 6, flooded the clubhouse with bubbly, painted the town Red for the rest of Wednesday night, and rode the duck boats into MLB history, it was all over but the touting.
The Wall Street Journal’s Friday Arena section has a regular feature called Anatomy of a Song, which deconstructs the creation of memorable musical performances.
When the red light went on at Hollywood’s Capitol Studios in 1967, singer Linda Ronstadt was scared. There to record “Different Drum”—her first lead-vocal single as a member of the Stone Poneys—Ms. Ronstadt was expecting to sing an acoustic ballad version of the song accompanied by her two bandmates.
Instead, a new faster arrangement had been written, a rhythm section and string players were brought in to replace the other two Stone Poneys, and Ms. Ronstadt had just seconds to figure out how she was going to phrase the lyrics and make the song work.
The song had been written by future-Monkee Michael Nesmith and made it to #13 on the Billboard charts. For the Journal feature “Ms. Ronstadt, 67, author of ‘Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir,’ published in September; Mr. Nesmith, 70; harpsichordist Don Randi, 76, and Stone Poney Bobby Kimmel, 73, talked about the song’s evolution” to reporter Marc Myers.
But before we get to that, the recording itself.
Representative samples from the interviews:
Michael Nesmith: Whenever I wrote, I liked creating little ‘movies of the mind.’ I was thinking about two lovers—one of whom decides they love different things. In later years, comedian Whitney Brown referred to “Different Drum” as the first “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup song.
Linda Ronstadt: I thought we were going to record an acoustic ballad version of “Different Drum” with Bobby and Kenny. But when I walked into the studio, there were other musicians there I didn’t know. Bobby [Kimmel] and Kenny [Edwards] played on two of the songs, but on “Different Drum,” Nik asked them to sit out.
Bobby Kimmel: Kenny and I didn’t mind. It was always going to be a solo vocal feature for Linda anyway, and Nik wanted more going on instrumentally behind her. Kenny and I stood in the engineer’s booth and watched and listened.
Ms. Ronstadt: We didn’t rehearse. I was just thrown into it. I was completely confused. I didn’t have the lyrics in front of me—I sang them from memory. Since I can’t read music, I didn’t have a lead sheet either. I knew I could remember the words, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase them with the new arrangement and faster tempo.
Don Randi: She had this innocence and humility that won me over. If she had been frightened, you’d never have known it. Linda was so down-to-earth and natural—she even recorded that song barefoot.
Ms. Ronstadt: I’ll be honest—I was never happy with how I sounded. It took me 10 years to learn how to sing before I had skill and craft. Today I will break my finger trying to get that record off when it’s on.
Perhaps because of that, the Journal piece includes this later version.
(For our money, the original version is way better. But maybe that’s just our 18-year-old hormones talking.)
Regardless, read the whole piece. It’s a corker.
P.S. Two years later Ronstadt delivered the emotional flip side to “Different Drum” in the it’s-not-me-it’s-you “Long Long Time” (from Silk Purse).
And while we’re doing the whole balance of power thing, here are two more.
“Long Way Round” (from Hand Sown . . . Home Grown).
“Some of Shelly’s Blues” (from Stone Poneys Vol. III).
The current issue of The New Republic features an entirely sympathetic profile of Michelle (né Michael) Kosilek, who was convicted of killing then-his wife Cheryl in May of 1990. For the past 20 years, Kosilek has been incarcerated at the medium-security men’s correctional institution MCI Norfolk. For the past seven, Kosilek has been waging a legal battle for state-funded sexual-reassignment surgery (SRS).
While the state of Massachusetts has fought and foot-dragged every step of the way, the courts have generally sided with Kosilek.
So has The New Republic. Third graf:
To suffer from gender dysphoria (G.D.), as Michelle Kosilek does, is to exist in a real state for which our only frame of reference may be science fiction. You inhabit a body that other people may regard as perfectly normal, even attractive. But it is not yours. That fact has always been utterly and unmistakably clear to you, just as the fact that she has put on someone else’s coat by accident is clear to a third-grader. This body has hair where it shouldn’t, or doesn’t where it should. Its hands and feet are not the right sizes, its hips and buttocks and neck are not the right shapes. Its odors are nauseating. To describe the anguish a G.D. patient suffers, psychiatrists will allude to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: For Michelle Kosilek, the gulf between human being and insect is precisely as wide as that between woman and man.
When reporter Nathaniel Penn, a correspondent fro GQ, visits Kosilek in prison, he waxes even more empathetic.
In photographs, she has the proud but deluded air of someone who doesn’t realize she’s not quite pulling this off, but in person her features are smaller and finer. She is persuasively a woman, even a pleasant-looking one. “Bless you!” she exclaimed when I told her so. She clasped my hand. Then she scrutinized me and said: “Is that what this visit was all about? You wanted to see?”
And then there’s this conclusion to the piece:
[I]n ways both glaringly obvious and hidden, Michelle Kosilek is not the same person she was on the day she killed her wife. It’s an essential human project to seek not only to endure as the years pass but also to try to change for the better, however you define that. If Kosilek is putting on a show of remorse, it may be because the murder she committed is as distant in her memory as the things you did two decades ago are in yours. It’s a terrible truth about people who cause pain to others: They move on. The question is, should we?
In the case of Michelle Kosilek, the better question might be can we? The letters to the editor in the next issue might give us a hint.
When the great Lou Reed died at a very old 71, he made the front page of every New York daily except the Wall Street Journal.
Monday’s Page One New York Times obit by Ben Ratliff:
LOU REED, 1942-2013
Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ’n’ Roll
Lou Reed, the singer, songwriter and guitarist whose work with the Velvet Underground in the 1960s had a major influence on generations of rock musicians, and who remained a powerful if polarizing force for the rest of his life, died on Sunday at his home in Amagansett, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 71.
The cause was liver disease, said Dr. Charles Miller of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where Mr. Reed had liver transplant surgery this year and was being treated again until a few days ago.
Mr. Reed brought dark themes and a mercurial, sometimes aggressive disposition to rock music. “I’ve always believed that there’s an amazing number of things you can do through a rock ‘n’ roll song,” he once told the journalist Kristine McKenna, “and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat. The things I’ve written about wouldn’t be considered a big deal if they appeared in a book or movie.”
Or an ad? Reed played a starring role in this 1984 Honda scooter TV spot.
(There’s a great story behind that campaign, which the hardworking staff will recount some other time.)
Yesterday, a different Lou Reed ad ran in the Times on page A17.
Syracuse University. Who knew?
Apparently the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Fusilli, who wrote this appreciation yesterday.
From Underground to Mainstream
Lou Reed, who died Sunday at the age of 71, was an essential figure of American popular music since the arrival of the Velvet Underground in 1964. Reed created a new form of songwriting, one that merged rock’s power and energy with the gritty realism found in the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, his mentor at Syracuse University, and novelists as varied as William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr. , and writers from the Beat Generation and of hard-boiled pulp fiction.
(Hubert Selby, Jr. Flashback: We still get chills from reading Last Exit to Brooklyn four decades ago.)
Pull-quote:
Reed’s influence is so fundamental, it’s impossible to imagine contemporary rock without him.
What good is native advertising if it doesn’t talk like a native?
To help advertisers, media companies are building teams, often called studios, that create sponsored content for advertisers. Here’s a look at four publishers, and how their sponsored-content teams shape up.
Already, the 2013 Boston Red Sox have shown that anything is possible, if you assemble a group of dedicated individuals, provide them a fair wage, and ask them never to shave again. On Saturday, Boston defeated Detroit in the American League Championship Series, four games to two, setting up a World Series appointment with the St. Louis Cardinals, NLCS conquerers of Los Angeles on Friday. Baseball observers will recognize this as a rematch of the 2004 World Series, in which the Red Sox swept the Cardinals for Boston’s first championship since the Cretaceous Period. This reprise, which begins Wednesday night at Fenway Park, does not offer the same history-squashing stakes. It is hard to feel empathy for the frustrated 10-year-olds in this country who have never seen Boston meet St. Louis in a World Series.
Photo caption: “Red Sox manager Joe Cronin and Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer at the 1946 World Series. St. Louis won that series in seven games.”
Paul Pierce is living and working in New York City, and this is weird. It’s been weird from the get-go, since it happened, since that startling early summer trade that brought Pierce and his Boston teammates Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry from the Celtics to Brooklyn. There’s no need to pretend that it’s not weird now. It’s going to be weird for a while. It’s possible that Paul Pierce in New York City will never stop being weird, because there’s something surreal and unimaginable about the whole thing, no matter how sensible and civilized it looks, no matter how much basketball, like any other professional sport, is a cold business. Totally get that. Totally sounds reasonable. Still: weird.
Read these two pieces and you’ll understand why Jason Gay is the best Boston sportswriter not writing in Boston.
Well last night the hardwriting staff was listening to Paris jazz station TSF (because our stereo system is totally shot) when who should come on but Nat Cole singing Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.
Representative sample:
Our favorite lyrics:
We stop for a while, she gives me a smile
And snuggles her head on my chest
We start in to pet and that’s when I get
Her powder all over my vest
After I kinda straighten my tie
She has to borrow my comb
Once kiss then we continue again
Walkin’ my baby back home
Nobody did that song better.
P.S. Turns out the hardlistening staff already wrote about this vocal here. Don’t mean to be repetitive, but Nat Cole will do that to you.
SPORTS BLINK – SHAUGHNESSY JINX? Boston Globe A1, “Red Sox are the whole show: Boston thumps bumbling Cardinals, 8-1, in World Series opener,” by Dan Shaughnessy: “When do the St. Louis Cardinals get here for the … World Series? … [T]he Red Sox demolished the Cardinals … in Game 1 of the 109th Fall Classic at Fenway. … This looked like the 2004 World Series all over again. The Cardinals never had a lead when they were swept by the Sox in ’04 and they picked up where they left off, committing three errors, one wild pitch, and allowing four unearned runs in one of the sloppiest performances in World Series history.”
Campaign Outsider 