"I booked a flight with United for tonight -- they said that the red-eye was full, but there's still seats on the black-eye"...
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Yesterday, contemplating Neil Sedaka's "Bad Blood" (with Elton John singing back-up and harmony), I thought, 'What makes this song so affecting, so great?' ... and then I read someplace, someone said the song "has the Bo Diddley beat."
"Now I get it!" - or, as Charlie Brown would say,
"THAT'S IT!!!!!!!"
The Bo Diddley stutter-stepping, forthing-and-backing, walking-forty-seven-miles-of-barbed-wire...maraca-wielding da-da-da-da-DAH-da ...
was unfamiliar in my listening inventory when "Bad Blood" was out -- I hadn't ever heard of Bo Diddley yet. But I knew I really liked that song with the
"how you let a woman like that
treat you like -- small change!"
As they sing that, the power and punch, the rock and the roll of the line seems to increase, for the listener, with each syllable....
When Bo Diddley died in 2008, the N.Y. Times published an article by Ben Ratliff, "Bo Diddley: The Beat That Will Go On."
Ratliff writes that Bo Diddley "has to be understood through his beat....Popular musicians of many kinds have heard bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp as swing or primitivism, as the graceful three-beat, two-beat sequence of Afro-Cuban clave or as garage-rock tom-tom stomp. All kinds of rock 'n' roll and rhythm-and-blues musicians have used it, and will continue to...."
Then he lists some --
Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"
Elvis Presley "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame"
The Who, "Magic Bus"
Bruce Springsteen, "She's the One," "Ain't Got You"
U2, "Desire"
The Strangeloves (and later Bow Wow Wow) "I Want Candy"
The Smiths, "How Soon Is Now?"
The Stooges, "1969"
George Michael, "Faith"
The Electric Prunes, "Get Me to the World on Time"
Neil Sedaka, "Bad Blood"
[etc. -- he lists more songs -- the article can be read online.]
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Yesterday as I thought about "Bad Blood" being top of charts in 1975, I started thinking, What was going on in 1975? What were we doing?
Well, First Lady Betty Ford was -- dancing. We cannot see who she's dancing with, but I thought it was a nice picture.
(foreground, Left - New York Governor Hugh Carey; Right - New York City Mayor Abraham Beame)
The people in the above l975 photograph are probably addressing New York City's fiscal crisis....
---------------------------- Thinking about Airline Safety (i.e., keeping the traveling public safe from airlines) -- I thought about the 1970s and remembered that back then, airline management did not send security officers to attack and manhandle passengers -- at that time, the "thing" to worry about was "hijacking."
People used to hijack planes to Cuba. Kind of often. It would be in the news -- "another plane got hijacked to Cuba" -- and a person would just think, "Well there they go again, hijackin' another plane to Cuba" ...
One would not think things could get any stranger, until you time-travel to the year 2017 where the airline $$emperor-ceo presides over physical attacks upon their paying customers: "thanks for spending your money with us, now take that!"
The last headline I (could stand to) read before I started ignoring that story was, that the airline security officers at O'Hare Airport want to be issued guns so they can carry them on the job.
(Wonderful. Then they could just pistol-whip randomly selected passengers....)
"Oh, yes -- regarding the idea of giving you some -- like -- guns... Uhm, yes, uh -- that would be no. And -- thank you so much!" (Nervous fake P-R smile)...
-30-
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