Quote of the Day (Ronnie Spector, on Dating John Lennon)

“I was 18, and I didn’t know John [Lennon] was married. John and George [Harrison] came and picked us [Ronnie and her sister] up at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. They said to my mom, ‘Mrs. Bennett, would you like to go out with us to dinner?’ I thought she would say, ‘Oh, you kids go out and have fun.’ But she said, ‘Let me get my purse!’ George and John almost passed out. After dinner, my mom took the hint and got in a cab. The rest of us went to the Crazy Elephant club and John said, ‘Ronnie, sing a bit of “Be My Baby” in my ear.’”—Ronnie Spector, pop legend and lead singer of the ‘60s group The Ronettes, interviewed by David Browne, in “The Last Word: Ronnie Spector on Her Childhood Hero, Getting Sober, Life With Phil Spector, and Dating John Lennon,” Rolling Stone, June 2, 2016

Quote of the Day (John Fogerty, on What Buddy Holly Meant to Him and Others)

“I just want to tell you what Buddy Holly meant to me. I was twelve years old, and I was working at a beach resort, and that voice and guitar came up over the PA. I went out and bought ‘That'll Be the Day,’ started learning the words. A few months later, I bought the album, and that album set a course in musical history…. There was a group pictured on the cover… and it was the first time you saw a group in rock ‘n roll. I thought, ‘I'm gonna have a group.’ Over in Liverpool, the same thing was going on with four other guys. They named their group the Beatles because Buddy Holly's group was called the Crickets. In 1963, these four guys chose to end their great song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with the little syncopation Buddy Holly used in the chorus after the solo. Well, about twenty years later, a kid was writing a song about how it feels to be back [Fogerty’s ‘Centerfield’], and he ended his song with the same riff--came from the same place.”— John Fogerty, speech inducting Buddy Holly in the first class of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Jan. 23, 1986

Considering that his life was cut tragically short in a plane crash at age 23, it’s hard to believe that Charles Hardin Holley was born 80 years ago today in Lubbock, Texas. But it’s even harder to believe that Buddy Holly, as singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer, created a musical legend and legacy in a recording career that lasted only about 18 months—songs covered, on vinyl or in concert, not just by The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also by the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy!”, “It’s So Easy,” “Heartbeat,” “Everyday,” and “Rave On.”

Listen and marvel at a catalog that will “Not Fade Away.”

The Scandalous Woman Who Descended Into Respectability

“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

As a witness at the 1963 trial of osteopath Stephen Ward on charges of “living off immoral earnings,” Mandy Rice-Davies, a nightclub dancer and model, had just been told that the 3rd Viscount Astor, William (known as Bill), had denied sleeping with her. All at once, it seems, centuries of privilege had finally been checkmated with her saucy response.

Ms. Rice-Davies was not the principal figure in the Profumo sex scandal that rocked British politics, society and culture to their foundations, but she was the one who made the definitive remark about the case. The age of deference had collapsed in America with the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency; now, in the U.K., 135 years later, it had been given the insolent, funny jolt it deserved with her crack.

Ms. Rice-Davies, who died last week at age 70 after a short battle with cancer, might have been the most fascinating figure associated with what Sunday Herald reporter Barry Didcock called "the yardstick against which all other political scandals are measured." She did not experience a vertiginous fall from power like John Profumo, the government minister who had shared a mistress with a Soviet naval attache (i.e., KGB intelligence officer); she did not die in disgrace and legal jeopardy, as did Stephen Ward, who used his connection to attractive young women to cement his ties with high government officials and celebrities; and, by living abroad, away from incessant media attention, she did not flounder in confusion, dismay, penury and alienation after her life came under scrutiny, as did her more vulnerable fellow cabaret dancer, Christine Keeler, Profumo’s mistress.

Instead, she is reported to have said, cheekily, in later years, “My life has been one long descent into respectability.”

The former teenaged goodtime girl achieved, after three husbands and countless headlines, something like the life she wanted. Successively, after the first feeding frenzy of the scandal abated, she became a cabaret singer; founder of a string of nightclubs and restaurants; and an actress and writer. Her last spouse, observed columnist Mark Steyn, was a businessman friend of Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis. Thus, in the 1980s, was this woman who helped upend one Conservative government in the curious position of entertaining the Prime Minister of another. People who met her reported surprise that this high-school dropout and onetime department store clerk could speak knowledgeably about subjects as diverse as Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, and the artist Lucian Freud.

In one sense, she was a tabloid forebear of Monica Lewinsky—first the plaything of a powerful man, then the scapegoat for that man’s hypocrisy and lies. Unlike “that woman” (Bill Clinton’s phrase) who inadvertently instigated the 1998 impeachment drama, however, Ms. Rice-Davies remained proudly defiant, noting, “In those days, there were good girls and there were bad girls. Good girls didn’t have any sex at all, and bad girls had a bit.” 

For a long while, I’ve been interested in how the scandal erupted and its disastrous fallout for the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as seen in this prior post of mine. But the death of Rice-Davies led me to review and re-think the case, which continues to fascinate me.

For instance, Ms. Rice-Davies had not heard from Ms. Keeler in three decades before her death. It might have been because the latter was already psychologically damaged goods even before the scandal, having been molested by several older men (including her stepfather) and aborted a baby. Perhaps, as a result, she resented Ms. Rice-Davies’ ability to distance herself, psychically and even physically (living in Spain, Germany, Israel, Florida and the Caribbean at various times), from her notoriety.

Second, though Rice-Davies was involved with Astor, she never met Profumo himself.

Third, though I saw the 1989 cinema account of the affair, Scandal, starring Bridget Fonda as Ms. Rice-Davies and Joanne Whalley as Ms. Keeler, the last quarter-century softened in my memory some of the details of the affair. I was taken aback all over again, then, when I read that the imbroglio grew out of a chance 1961 meeting at Cliveden, the country estate of Lord Astor, between Keeler, Profumo and Astor.

What brought me up short in re-reading all this was that location, a cushy estate that played host to every British sovereign since George I. Nearly a quarter-century before Profumo and Astor laid eyes on Keeler, Cliveden had been the epicenter of a group of aristocrats who wanted to appease Adolf Hitler, a cadre that gave rise to the derisive nickname “Cliveden Set.” You would think that someone like Lord Astor would have thought twice about allowing his landed estate to become an object of national scorn all over again.

But once Profumo—as lucky in marriage (his spouse was actress Valerie Hobson) as in politics—absorbed the charms of Ms. Keeler, emerging topless from Lord Astor’s pool, it was too late. He and Lord Astor promptly chased the young woman around the pool; Profumo embarked on a three-month affair that Keeler would expose in a newspaper interview in early 1963; and Astor took up with Rice-Davies. Profumo would be forced to resign his office and Astor would die several years later, largely, it was agreed, due to the stress created by his appearance in the tabloids.

Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott cites the Profumo imbroglio as an example of the superiority of British over American political sex scandals. While both are “often rooted in a dolor of middle-aged malaise,” he observed eight years ago after the Mark Foley (remember him?) scandal, those on the other side of the Atlantic are “also animated by spite, spicy details, vanity, revenge, bitter comedy, and bawdy excess—the complete Jacobean pantry.”

The Profumo scandal was more than the biggest sensation to hit Fleet Street in the 1960s. Its repercussions extended beyond the political into the cultural sphere, and beyond its own moment into our time.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Macmillan government’s disastrous fall from the electorate’s favor registered with an Irish-American U.S. President with anglophile tendencies and considerable affection for the Prime Minister. As I discussed in this post, John F. Kennedy had his own version of the Profumo scandal in the form of Ellen Rometsch, wife of an West German soldier—and, the FBI informed him, a likely spy for East Germany. JFK and brother Robert, immediately recognizing the peril of impeachment, had her deported immediately afterward—then let it be known to Congressional leaders that they needed to be careful about disclosure of their own peccadilloes, lest they be tempted to make political hay out of anything further that might come out about this woman.

Nearly a quarter century before Presidential candidate Gary Hart’s mad fling with Donna Rice opened the floodgates to greater scrutiny of U.S. candidates’ sex lives by the press, Britain’s Fleet Street had gotten there first—and then some. In a retrospective on the Profumo scandal published on its 50^th anniversary a year ago in the British publication The Guardian, Richard Davenport-Hines noted that the real offense in the affair lay in how British police intimidated witnesses and suborned perjury in their attempt to get Ward; and that the British press was in no mood to complain about such slippery investigatory methods because they themselves paid for stories.

On the culture front, those with comparatively short memories will recall that the saga of Rice-Davies, Astor, Keeler and Profumo gave birth not only to the 1989 film Scandal directed by Michael Caton-Jones, but also, a couple of years ago, to an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, Stephen Ward, whose run in London’s West End lasted only a few months. But this whole affair also made its presence felt in another subtler, but longer lasting, manner.

In his 2011 biography, Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life, NPR critic Tim Riley underscored just how prepared the scandal left the British public for the Beatles: “The hypocrisy of the ruling class had reached such heights that the Beatles seemed not just a necessary tonic but an all-conquering elixir. With their winning comic charisma and clear disdain for show business as usual, it was almost as if the Beatles led the way out of a public crisis, relegating Profumo to the tawdry clichés of political potboilers, with an unmistakable subtext: ‘What do you expect from a bunch of…stuffed shirts?’"

Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Hard Day's Night,’ In Which George Comments on His ‘Do)

Reporter (played by Marianne Stone): “What would you call that hairstyle you're wearing?”

George Harrison (played by himself): “Arthur.”— A Hard Day's Night (1964), screenplay by Alun Owen, directed by Richard Lester

This is not, truth be told, my first post about the film that added a whole new dimension to Beatlemania (see this one). But, with the 50^th anniversary of the classic film’s premiere in New York City here, the urge was irresistible to allude to it again.

“Mop top” is the most common label for the Fab Four’s hairstyle. As it happened, the first member of the “Beatles” to adopt it was then-bassist Stu Sutcliffe (who died tragically in 1962), who was given the tonsorial look by his girlfriend in Hamburg, Germany, in 1960. Among the group members who eventually became famous, it was George who first requested this style for himself.

What I like about the quote from the film is how it reflects that George, the “quiet one” of the Beatles, also possessed a sly sense of humor. In a way, it also demonstrated his response to the media’s obsession with this non-musical aspect of the group’s vast influence. At a New York press conference in 1964, asked where their haircuts came from, George answered, with typical cheekiness, “our scalps.”

This Day in Rock History (Beatles Release Hot “Revolver”)

August 8, 1966—Simultaneously with the Beatles’ release of their seventh album, Revolver, in the United States, the Fab Four’s single “Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine” appeared. The latter tunes from the LP offered fresh evidence that, even when recording a pop novelty song, the group was prepared to pull out all the stops in the studio—and that, when they became more ambitious, they could stretch the limits of the prototypical rock ‘n’ roll song like nobody except Bob Dylan.

It’s a measure of the Beatles’ greatness that you'll find partisans lining up behind different disks when asked about their favorite LP. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, of course, set standards as a concept album; Abbey Road featured the great Side 2 medley as well as the George Harrison works that marked him as an indelible songwriting force, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”; and The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album), as a double album, featured as much of their work released at one point that anyone could ever want.

I recognize all of these arguments,.and yet I still would claim that Revolver bests them all, surpassed in the Beatles’ entire opus only by its immediate predecessor, Rubber Soul. It exhibits much of the sense of experimentation that marked Sergeant Pepper’s, and, though not achieving the same sense of artistic unity as the 1967 LP, maintains a more consistently high level among its songs. (Even tunes that did not climb the charts as singles were superb examples of their songwriting skills, as I realized several years ago at a Marshall Crenshaw concert, when that talented singer-songwriter paid tribute to the recently deceased Harrison by playing John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping.”)

While Harrison did not reach the songwriting heights he would later scale on Abbey Road, the creative straitjacket in which he had operated until 1966—no more than two songs for each LP—was loosened enough to allow him a third song on Revolver—and gave Lennon and Paul McCartney, already challenging and competing with each other, still another force to reckon with within the band. Moreover, Revolver represented a point when Lennon and McCartney were still functioning, to some extent, as collaborative songwriters. (By the time of Abbey Road and the near-disastrous Let It Be, they were simply bringing their contributions pretty much fully formed separately to the studio.)

Lennon’s influence on the tone of Revolver is the most evident of the four musicians. In particular, “Tomorrow Never Knows” seems felicitously placed as the concluding tune, heralding not only Sergeant Pepper’s but also the entire drug-influenced “psychedelic rock” movement to follow. Two years removed from “Can’t Buy Me Love,” Lennon was taking Beatlemania on a long, strange trip indeed.

Over the years, Lennon has gained something of an upper hand over Paul McCartney for his lyrics. At his best, however, with someone prodding him to produce something other than silly love songs, Paul could be far more than the so-called “cute Beatle,” and “Eleanor Rigby” shows why.

For fans who wanted a slow, meditative, thoughtful love song, McCartney supplied “Here, There and Everywhere.” For those who wanted one of his optimistic anthems, “Got to Get You Into My Life” provided an especially brassy jump-starter.

But “Eleanor Rigby” was something radically different from anything he had written before, and maybe different from anything anyone in the band, Lennon included, would do again. It’s a bifurcated narrative with two figures, Eleanor Rigby and Fr. MacKenzie, united only in their loneliness and sense of futility.

Most astonishingly for a McCartney song, there is no happy ending. But, unlike a frequent Lennon attitude, there was no irony or cynicism, either, only a cry of sympathy: “Ah, look at all the lonely people!”

Just as unusual, “Eleanor Rigby” did not contain a single instrument commonly associated with rock ‘n’ roll: no guitar, no piano, no drums, no bass. While the Beatles join in the vocals, none plays an instrument here. Instead, session musicians were employed for the four violins, two violas, and two cellos.

McCartney, who had been listening to quite a bit of classical music in the months leading up to the album, shared his idea of all-strings instrumentation with producer George Martin. The latter, in turn, found inspiration in the film scores of Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s longtime collaborator. The most notable impressions left by the song, then, are tension and lack of musical resolution—aural counterparts to life.

For his recent Yankee Stadium appearance, McCartney had five decades of songs from which to draw. But the fact that he included “Eleanor Rigby” on the set list for his 2 1/2-hour concert says much about his justifiable pride in the song—a pride reflected in its powerful influence on other, later rock ‘n’ rollers.

For instance, an account of the life of Elvis Costello, Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows, has a short section on the making of The Juliet Letters, the string-oriented album that the musical polyglot made in 1993 with the Brodsky Quarter. Costello was trying to explain several years later why, despite success overseas, the album failed to catch on stateside, recounting his conversation with a clueless record company exec:

“This Juliet Letters would be all right if it just sounded more like ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but Paul McCartney already made that record. Why would we want to make that again? We’re trying to make a record that’s not like ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”

Ah, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”—his idea that texts are inevitably a response to what preceded them--would get quite a workout in this case. A record “not like ‘Eleanor Rigby’”? It wasn’t there on the basis of the evidence. McCartney’s collaborator on “My Brave Face” and “Veronica” might have been better served by frankly acknowledging that he was trying to create something even greater than that single, hard as it was to imagine.