light fantastic

Color and Mood

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left a good job in the city

     Reading a little bit about Frank Sinatra recently, I learned that he put out an album in 1960 titled, "Nice 'n' Easy."

     Almost immediately started wondering if that album name was the source of a take-off by the Ike and Tina Turner Revue -- 

where Tina would introduce their version of "Proud Mary" by saying,

Ya know -- 
every now and then,
I think you might like to hear something from us --

nice --

and easy.

But there's just one thing --
we nevah, evah -- do nothing,

Nice.

And easy.

We always do it -- nice --

and rough.

Now we're gonna take the beginning of this song --

and do it --

easy.

But then we're going to do the finish --

rough.

That's the way we do --

Proud Mary.

(And we're rollin' ... rollin' yeah -- rollin' on the river...)

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talk into your phone, and enunciate

     There's a new movie coming out called A Hidden Life.  It's about an Austrian farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II.

     The film's director, Terrence Malick, "creates spaces rather than produces scenes," according to one observer.


     Talking about spaces rather than the thing on the spaces put me in mind of Keith Richards discussing music and the space between the notes.

[excerpt from Richards' autobiography Life] -- What can you do with those three chords?  Tell it to John Lee Hooker; 

most of his songs are on one chord.  Howlin' Wolf stuff, one chord, and Bo Diddley.  

It was listening to them that made me realize that silence was the canvas.  Filling it all in and speeding about all over the place was certainly not my game and it wasn't what I enjoyed listening to.  

With five strings you can be sparse; that's your frame, that's what you work on.  "Start me Up," "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," "Honky Tonk Women," all leave those gaps between the chords.  That's what I think "Heartbreak Hotel" did to me.

It was the first time I'd heard something so stark.  I wasn't thinking like that in those days, but that's what hit me.  It was the incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues.  To a kid of my age back then, it was startling.  With the five-string it was just like turning a page; there's another story.  And I'm still exploring.

-------------------- There's something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it.  

We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute.  

The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. 

It echoes something in the human body.  

So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us.  The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one.  

Listen to "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley.  One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it.  It's just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm.  Rhythm really only has to be suggested.  Doesn't have to be pronounced.

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you will start out standing

She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back

She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back

She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black




You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees


She never stumbles
She's got no place to fall
She never stumbles
She's got no place to fall
She's nobody's child
The Law can't touch her at all


She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She's a hypnotist collector
You are a walking antique


Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum


---------------------------------

"She Belongs To Me"
Bob Dylan
album:  Bringing It All Back Home

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saving the barefoot contessa

     "Two and a half hours later, she walked in the door.  Somebody went down and got her."

George C. Scott


     When I heard that Ava Gardner story on a You Tube video, the question came to mind:  How did Frank Sinatra "take care of" the problem?  

Did he call -- wise guys?  La Cosa Nostra? ... Clearly, if Mafia guys went to rescue Miss Gardner, they did not behave like such types do in The Sopranos, because George C. Scott did not die that year (1964); he died in 1999.

___________________________________

Gardner; Sinatra

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chilly and cold

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he had the world on a string

     We used to hear about Frank Sinatra, besides being a good singer and actor, and stage performer in Las Vegas, that he had occasionally roughed up photojournalists, and was connected to the Mafia.

     I remember hearing these sensationalistic tidbits when I was high-school and college-age, & it was information I was not seeking by any means, it just filtered into my consciousness somehow, as gossip is wont to do.

     This stuff would get in my head and I would have no response, or any idea what to do with it.  ("Ummh -- what?  I -- I don't -- know --...")

-------------------------- Recently watching videos on You Tube ("graduate school") I was learning about Ava Gardner.  She was an actress of uncommon physical beauty, who worked in movies starting in the 1940s, Hollywood's golden age.

     She was married three times, the third husband was Mr. Sinatra ("Chairman of the Board"; "Ol' Blue Eyes"...).  By all accounts, they had a lot of drama between them, fought a lot, and went their separate ways after two years of marriage, for the good of all concerned.

     Each of them always said after that, however, that the other was "the love of their life" and they remained on friendly, supportive terms and communicated periodically.

     In the video I watched, it said Ms. Gardner acted in a 1964 movie called The Bible, which starred George C. Scott.  She and Mr. Scott were seeing each other romantically, but when he got drunk he would hit her -- at one point she was afraid she was going to be killed by him. -- Her assistant, Mearene Jordan, speaks on camera:  she says that Ava "would keep going back to him; she said she loved him and felt sorry for him."

     Ms. Jordan says, George C. Scott had "talked Ava into going down to Connecticut" -- Ava had been gone for over a day, and she (the assistant) was frantic.  "So I called Frank," she says.  And he said, 'Reenie, don't worry, I will take care of it.'

     "And two and a half hours later, Ava walked in the door."  You can hear the relief and gratitude in the assistant's voice, all those years later, as she tells that part of the story.

     "Two and a half hours later, she walked in the door. 

Somebody went down and got her."


___________________________________

That's the end of that episode in the Ava Gardner story, but it wasn't the end for me.  After going to do some things, and letting You Tube play on as I worked, the question haunted me:  "Whom did Frank Sinatra -- call ?"

?

?


???...

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