I'm only halfway home; I've got to journey on to where I'll find, I'll find the thing that I have lost. Written by Buddy Miller and performed by Helm on his Grammy-winning 2007 album, "Dirt Farmer." He's singing with Teresa Williams and his daughter and co-producer, Amy Helm.
When the album came out and Terry Gross interviewed him for "Fresh Air," he reflected on his recovery from cancer in his vocal cords, which had kept him from singing and sometimes even talking for years:
I've always appreciated my family and friends, you know, and those ties that bind us together. But it's like my music, this much later and after you've almost got everything taken away from you, once you get that back, boy, it's a joyful life that we've all been given.
And, you know, you can really - you know, when you see a young nephew or a young person in your family that's blood related, and you see them for the first time and they're not old enough to know that they're all related, but you can look into their face and you they look into your eyes and you both know it. You know, we take it for granted. You know, we enjoy that kind of thing without even a big thank you most of the time.
I'm pretty sure that preaches. My music buddy Boom Baker and I are offering a big thank you that we had the blessing of making the trip to Levon's Woodstock barn in 2009.
This critique of Chris Brown's return to the Grammy awards last night gives the impression that the entertainment industry, which is generally pretty proud of its superior enlightenment, may be soft on violence against women:
I want to say this to anyone who is listening: This is not okay with me. A man hitting a woman in anger is unacceptable and is not easily forgotten or forgiven. A man who hits a woman in anger deserves to be reported to the authorities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of who might be inconvenienced in the process. A man who hits a woman in anger may eventually be permitted to go on with his own life, but he is not permitted back in my life, even if it’s been three whole years.
Is this how the Egyptian revolution started? Noticing a spike in sales at Amazon of his book Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein tracked it to this philly.com item about last night's surprise Grammy phenom:
Lady Antebellum are the Nixonland not-so-silent majority candidate, this year's stealth Taylor Swift, the voice of Middle America with a pretty, de-twanged sound that's all about harkening back to a "simpler" time.
Why that would cause anyone to buy a $14 tome about 1960s-70s politics is beyond me, but I don't have time to worry about it, because I just remembered I need to download some Lady Antebellum.
For his first-ever appearance on the Grammys, an apt and humble choice by Mick Jagger: The late Solomon Burke's 1964 hit "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love."
In a tribute to Janis Joplin at the 2005 Grammys, Joss Stone and, in one of the most exciting entrances and performances in televised rock and roll history, Melissa Etheridge
My "New Nixon" colleague Frank Gannon posts a wonderful feature each Sunday: A look back at the popular music of 1968, the year Richard Nixon was elected President. This week's installment is all about the heart-strung songwriting of Jimmy Webb ("By The Time I Get To Phoenix" and "Wichita Lineman" for Glenn Campbell, "Up, Up And Away" for the Fifth Dimension, and so on). And then:
Frank's background on that immortal cut:
[Webb] wrote a song called “MacArthur Park” as a component of a three-part cantata for the popular softcore sunshine rock group The Association. They rejected it, but broody bad boy Irish actor Richard Harris —the Colin Farrell of back in the day— included it on his album "A Tramp Shining."
'MacArthur Park' broke all the rules — it was more than twice as long as the maximum allowed for radio play, its lyrics were nonsensical, and its singer, not to put too fine a point on it, had a limited range. Webb finally gave up after many futile attempts to correct Harris’ mistaken rendering of the song’s title as MacArthur’s Park.
Nonsensical or no -- well, okay, nonsensical -- that's how I rock and rolled in the late 1960s.
It hadn't always been that way. The music of the epoch won me forever when I heard "I Saw Her Standing There" (which Sir Paul is singing right now on the Grammys) in a Rexall drug store in Grosse Pointe in 1964. Born in Detroit, I had the Four Tops (also Grammy-featured) and Supremes in my blood.
In the summer of 1967, we headed for Phoenix, where my mother was starting a new job at the Arizona Republic. The aforementioned Association's "Windy" was in heavy AM rotation as we made our soggy way across the country in mom's white '67 Karmann Ghia and godfather Louis's grey '65 Mustang. By the time we got to Phoenix, the organ intro to the Doors' "Light My Fire" was snaking through the air. "The Beatles" (that's the white album to you and me, kids) was a Christmas gift in 1968. Back east at prep school in 1969-73, somebody introduced me to the blues and Led Zeppelin.
But in 1967, when I was 13, something was going on, and you know just what it was, Mr. Jones, that had turned my musical sensibilities to mush. The vaguely ironic sentimentality of songwriters such as Jimmy Webb and Neil Diamond (there he is at Staples, too) felt grown up, as did the mysterious insinuations in songs like "Lady Willpower" (Gary Puckett and the Union Gap) and "Angel of the Morning" (Marrilee Rush).
The Singer store at the mall on Central Ave. had a wall rack of .45s costing maybe 50 cents. I had about 30, which I labeled, alphabetized, and played on a record player my mother got me at Sear's. "MacArthur Park" was my favorite song for a while. When we returned to Detroit on vacation the following summer, I took my collection along. Our former upstairs neighbor, Peter Johnson, was a church organist who said pop music was an unqualified abomination. I thought I could win him over with "MacArthur Park," however, because it had strings, time signature changes, unfathomable literary pretensions, and some famous British (sic) guy. Peter sat on the floor and listened with me, roaring with with joyful derision when Harris sang:
After all the loves of my life I'll be thinking of you And wondering why
Peter, of course, is an Episcopalian (besides being a literary critic). The Nixon angle? A friend and biographer of the late President, Jonathan Aitken, is now married to the former Elizabeth Harris, ex-wife of old Dumbledore himself.
