Beatles on Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, Joe Garagiola

There was a post recently and someone asked about the Beatles Lennon/McCartney appearance on The Tonight Show while Joe Garagiola was the guest host. I have never seen the bit and would guess that it doesn’t exist or it would have turned up somehow, somewhere. I seem to recall that much of the early Carson 1960’s era shows were not saved. That stuff always amazed me but I guess it was considered too expensive. You can buy every show Jack Benny ever did from 1938 to 1960 on ebay for about 10 dollars. Go figure.

But this had come up and I wrote the original post from memory and the memory was reading a book by Craig Tennis called “Johnny Tonight”, published in 1980. I was at my parent’s house last night and I found the book in a desk and opened it right to the Beatles page. Weird. So since I was photographing old family photo albums to digitize the shots, I took shots of the story from Tennis’ book. His words:

 

 

The Baseball Booth From Hell

Liverpool has an away goal vs Toulouse. Rafa ran a lot of different guys out there. No Torres/Kuyt. Instead, Crouch/Voronin were up front WITH Ryan Babel. Three forwards? Hmm…well Voronin netted one and Gerrard missed on a set piece by inches. Later, Gerrard was kicked up pretty bad and came off later at 60 mins or so. You have to wonder: is he ok? We would like to get 3 points at Anfield courtesy of Chelsea on Sunday and wouldn’t you know it? My boy is being Christened while that game is on. VCR.

Louis Armstrong: Great. Posada? Lucky.

This is an interesting thread from Bugs and Cranks that I happen to agree with: Jorge Posada’s batting average on balls in play (or BABIP) in the last three years has been .312, .294., and .302. This year? .406. This stat says that basically, he’s lucky right now.

Is he exhibiting better plate discipline? No, his walk to strikeout ratio, 0.63, is in line with his career average, 0.66. Is he hitting more flyballs? No, his groundball to flyball ratio, 1.21, is a tick off his career average (1.20). So what IS he doing differently? Nothing. Balls are falling in freakishly more often this year than in the past.

Prediction: Posada’s average comes down with a vengeance. Now we’re deep into the year so it would be hard to offset all the early going, so he’ll have himself a great year for a 36 year old catcher with a career .275 average. And, of course, he hit .675 with 3 HR’s and a clutch of 2B’s to destroy my fantasy team this week, so he’s got that going for him.

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I didn’t do a real good job on the Louis Armstrong Hot Five post because I was hot and tired. Luis Castillo left the game at Wrigley Field in Chicago yesterday with “heat exhaustion”? Pulease, Looey, come on up in my attic and see how you like the heat. In fact, yesterday, with the fuse pulled so I could rewire things, the attic fan was out of action and it was inhuman up there.

I’ve been listening to the Hot Five recordings for many years. They are amazing. They are genius. A group of artists, absolutely peaking. It’s brilliancy on top of brilliancy and if you know the history at all, you know that like most genius stuff, at the time it came out, NO ONE else was doing anything of the sort and after it came out EVERYONE else was trying to catch up–and most couldn’t touch it.  Armstrong was 24 when the Hot Five sessions began.

In The Arts or Sports (also an art), there are a few eye-popping, legendary performances that live on and on. Ruth’s called shot in the 1932 World Series. Williams’ .406 season. The first 4 minute mile. And so on. Most of these things are now word-of-mouth, hearsay, so it’s hard to put yourself right there and understand maybe WHY those things are so special.

But with the Hot Five recordings, you can listen to them all, end to end, over and over. You can hear a guy who is so beyond his peers that it’s a joke. In this case, the hardest thing to imagine is the context of all the other music that came out around the same time. It’s hard to find any of that because it’s long ago just hopelessly dated and virtually unlistenable to modern tastes. You would have to hunt for it. It’s gone. But Louis work is still very much available and very listenable even today. And that is probably the truest test of a real subjective thing, which is, music, and which music is “good” or “great”.

People throw around that term too loosely for it to have any meaning anymore. A lot of words got written since Shakespeare’s time but very few of them are still being read. I would think that very little of the music that the Baby Boomers grew up listening to will be found in 80 years time anywhere other than the Library of Congress archives. Perhaps the Beatles will, but not all of their stuff by any means. The Rolling Stones? The Who? Led Zeppelin? Probably all their stuff will be 100% forgotten and dead by that time. You get my point. But in another 80 years time, in 2087, there will STILL be folks listening to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and it will still be as amazing as it was in 1926.

Cash Plays LaMaze

Mrs. Pinetar and I finished the LaMaze classes last night.  Near the end, the teacher spoke of when the baby’s head is crowning and stuff is stretching and she said that, “Midwives, might call this ‘the ring of fire’ but that’s not a medical term…”

And that was it.  For the rest of the night, all I could hear were the Spanish trumpets: pah-pah, pah, pah-pah-pah–paaah …..puh-puh, puh, puh-puh-puh–puuuuh…

And then Johnny Cash of course: “I fell in to a burning ring of fire….I went down,down,down….and the flames went higher.
And it burns,burns,burns…the ring of fire….the ring of fire.”

All night.

No exceptions.

And on the way home.

I don’t believe any song ever written can get into your head and STAY there, like the Ring of Fire.  And now you’re all hearing it.  Hearing the trumpets.  And  humming it.  Good luck.  –fog

Tommy John Surgery to be known as “Pavano” Surgery

It looks like it will be at least a year until Carl Pavano is once again, throwing from flat ground. He has opted for what used to be known as “Tommy John surgery”, but will now be known as “Pavano surgery”.

It doesn’t look like he’ll ever pitch again for the Yanks so now you can do the math on his deal. It comes to $16,000 per PITCH for New York! hahaha. Cashman has this one on his resume to go with the gym teacher they just fired because everyone’s hammies were popping like Jiffy Pop over there. Looks like a playoff exit for the Ansky will surely mean a Cashman exit and will probably sweep Torre out with it.

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I think the next time Texas plays the Yanks, they should just come out dressed in skirts. Why hide it anymore?

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I played only the second softball game in 15 years today and I am sore. I fell on my butt catching a ball in Right Field that sailed over my head and I almost got Pavano’d on it but fortunately, I could stay in the game.

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I drafted Chris Carpenter 2nd on my fantasy roster and he is now Pavano’d at least 3 months with arthroscopic surgery. I can’t stand this. Clubs go deep into October and their starters rack up the innings. If I’m paying you 20, 30, 40 million dollars to pitch for me, I want it in the contract language that as SOON as the season is over, you go right into the MRI tube and if you need chips cleaned out, we do it Nov 1 and have you back by the following May, fresh and Pavano-free. In WHAT other business would it be ok to play million dollar guessing games? And you would think that the pitcher would welcome it as well as he gets paid off these numbers and he can’t garner stats when he’s Pavano’d. Is it ME?

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Acropolis Now - Liverpool in the Euro Cup Final on Wed May 23 in Athens. There’s some pretty good trash talk between Gerrard and Gattuso. Final looks like it will be heavily centered on Kaka vs Maschareno but don’t count out Gerrard. He has a way of figuring in big games. I have the day off and will be in midtown Manhattan for the hoopla.

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A reader sent in the new CD “Love”, which is Beatles tunes remixed by George Martin and his kid. It took them 3 years and when you listen, you hear why. They have mixed different songs together and before you poo-poo that, take a listen. It is really well done. And if you know the music inside and out, it is fun to try and decide if the vocal is the primary take or an alternate. In one case, where the vocal appears to be triple tracked, they’ve left it bare and only doubled and you can hear how they worked in that case. It’s a glimpse into their studio “tricks” and a fresh listen as well. No Beatle fan will be (1) annoyed or (2) disappointed. Thanks Chris.

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SF Giants phenom, Lincecum on the Sunday Night game and no Bonds, but hey, we have Joe Morgan and who knows what entertaining insights he will have? How he does really depends on how bad the plate ump hazes him. Perhaps, his ballyhoo is so great, that the ump will give the corners and the sub-knees. If so, 10 K’s or more. –fog

European Cup Since the Beginning

With Liverpool having a rematch in the European Cup on May 23rd, let’s have a look at the past winners of this competition:

Click here to see the list of winners: 

Real Madrid have won 8 including the first 5 (1956-1960)

AC Milan have won 6

Liverpool have won 5

Ajax Amsterdam 4 & Bayern Munich 4

Only one French team has ever won: Olympique Marsailles and I believe they had it stripped for match fixing but I could be wrong.

After Liverpool in England: Man United 2, Nottingham Forrest 2 and Aston Villa 1 

One Scottish team has won: Celtic in 1967.

The year after Celtic won, Manchester United won the first ever for an English side and it was coached by Sir Matt Busby (who was later knighted for the deed).  In the Beatles song “Dig It” on Let it Be, Lennon throws in a reference to Matt Busby which, I have to believe is recorded in May or June of 1968 when Matt Busby would have been the talk of England for winning this.  I always thought that it’s a shame a Scouser like Lennon couldn’t have mentioned Bill Shankly but that was yet to come in 1968 mostly.

 

And McCartney thought Lennon was difficult

There is a report that Paul McCartney is close to a divorce settlement with Heather Mills that would pay her $2,000 per hour for EVERY hour of their four year marriage. –fog

4*365*24*2000=$70,080,000

The Beatles - 8th grade business education

Mrs. Pinetar was surprised to hear me say that The Beatles were instrumental in Badfinger’s launch. Now I may have the story a little fuzzy, but my understanding is that when The Beatles realized that their avant guard, pet project of Apple records was hemmoraging cash, they needed to prime the pump for the talented, but as-yet, relatively unknown band, Badfinger, in order to get some positive cash-flow going for Apple.

I love it, people always want to ascribe almost magical intelligence and powers to their pop-music icons like The Beatles. It’s inconceivable to them that their heroes are just guys who are good tunesmiths and take a nice picture and not much else. I was reminded of this when John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted a NY based talk show in the early 1970’s. Was it Mike Douglas? Dinah Shore? Anyway, I recently saw a rerun of that and it was just painfully obvious that Lennon, while very opinionate and unafraid to share those opinions, was woefully uneducated on most topics and was really just parroting the hippie talking points of the day. A tough watch for someone who loves the Lennon music as I do. But it taught me, don’t just ascribe omniscience to these pop stars. They are good at one thing and usually don’t have time for anything else, even if they wanted to. The Beatles was a 12-year, 24 hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week job. When was a John Lennon going to have time to go to University? It’s pretty well documented that if he had any free time at all, he was taking acid, not reading “The Economist”.

So you see evidence of this in The Beatles Apple records debacle. The business plan was basically: “We’re so big, that no one will tell us we are wrong, and we’re planning on giving away money basically”. So that’s what happened. The hippie ideal was a smokeshow and people just descended on the Apple office and grabbed up whatever they could carry away, both figuratively and literally! Such naivete.

So you see, while The Beatles were all-time great tunesmiths, they were no businessmen. And while that idea was dawning on them (of course it was McCartney who first stepped into the breach) , they realized that they needed to counteract the cash outflow and they had to speed up the earnings activities of their pet band, Badfinger. Now Badfinger were quite good in their own right, but as we’ve noted before on the Pinetar Rag, the music business isn’t a meritocracy. You could be uber-talented and wait your whole life for the discovery that never comes. So Paul knew what to do. He wrote the song, “Come and Get It” and gave it to Badfinger and said, “record this”.

Badfinger’s leader immediately started thinking out loud with Paul as to what he could do with the song to which Paul said, “Mate, do it THIS WAY. Don’t change it!”. So they got the message and recorded it true to the master’s instructions and had a nice hit with it.

After hearing the story, Mrs. Pinetar says, “yes, they DO sound like The Beatles” and notes that “Day after Day” is quite Beatle-esque. It is true, they do sound like The Beatles (not a bad thing) , but they might not have the title for the most openly Beatle-esque band of all time. If you’ve ever listened to ELO, you might have thought “Beatles” on many of their tracks. I think Lennon evely openly joked with Jeff Lynne that he was “their biggest fan”. And Lynne must have been in heaven years later when he got to produce the two songs for Beatles Anthology (Free as a Bird and Real Love). Sometimes, you get to go to Disneyland. –fog