This week, we mourn the passing of a soul legend, whose output in the early 60s alone, would've been enough to launch him into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
I'd go a step further and say "I Thank You" is enough to put him in the Hall. Hell, if Bon Jovi memorabilia is good enough to collect dust, (and with any luck get eaten by species of Tineola bisselliella), I.H. deserves his own damn wing, can you dig it?
The Hayes-penned hit, "I Thank You", as performed by Sam & Dave and later given a Jeffrey Dahmer-like treatment by ZZ Top (as well as those dollar-store Jersey Rockers), starts off with a sick drum pattern, eighth notes accented on every third beat, before this pulpit requisition:
"I want everybody to get up off your seat And get your arms together, and your hands together And give me some of that o-o-old soul clapping," followed by a leering octave bass run punctuated by glorious horns.
[see below]
Hold On! I'm a Comin', rather than referring to anything sexually suggestive, was co-written by Hayes when writing partner Dave Porter was taking an inordinate length of time in the bathroom. Thankfully, for the history of soul music, Porter didn't call out "Man, I think I ate something funny" instead. In my estimation, the opening horns in this tune are rivaled only by Knock on Wood or In the Midnight Hour, by Wilson Pickett as some of the greatest horn riffs of all time. Here they are back to back.
We've all heard Soul Man, so here's another 'Soul' classic, Soul Sister, Brown Sugar, another S&D hit from this period, with a propulsive bass line similar to 'I Thank You' with start & stop horns and luscious high harmonies.
Finally, here's the wah-guitar funk-tastic 'Shaft', which life (or God, take your pick) gave to Hayes, taking him from us far too young.
“Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.” George Carlin (1937-2008)
We were saddened to hear the news of the passing of George Carlin, a comedian who is to comedy what authors like JP Donleavy, Hunter S. Thompson etc., are to books. His humor was not the, “You ever notice how after you do a wash, there’s always that one sock missing? Where did it go? Let’s explore that theme for the next five insufferable minutes!” kind, or some similar bland inoffensive pap that is likely to get the teller a sitcom, but unlikely to challenge the person hearing the joke any more than the morning garden program on only-seniors-and-lunatics-are-up-at-this-godforsaken-hour weekend community radio.
Carlin was different. He challenged people with his comedy. He went to jail to challenge people with his comedy (the pictures above aren't film stills). Writing this blog today took a long time because we were continuously sidetracked by hilarious Carlin bits on everything from growing up Irish Catholic, to people who ought to be killed (Part One, Part Two), to a breakdown of the Ten Commandments that even Christopher Hitchens might have envied, and many other bits.
George Carlin is gone now but he has left a wealth of material behind him that will be howled at and, more importantly, thought about for years to come. Of course, we’re the kind of guys who do our best to lighten up any party, even a wake, so on that note we’ll leave you with some George Carlin quotes on drinking, partying, and the best analysis of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs that we've yet come across:
“And this should go without saying. That's why I'm going to say it: Drinking and driving don't mix. Do your drinking early in the morning and get it out of the way. Then go driving while the visibility is still good. “Napalm and Silly Putty”
The radio ad said "Hi, I'm Jeff Healey from the Jeff Healey Band. Don't drink and drive. I don't." Well, I hope you don't drive sober either, Mr. Healey. You're blind, for God's sake! "Ten Things That Piss Me Off"
[Relevant entries from] People I can do without. This is my list: A gynecologist who wants my wife to have three or four drinks before the examination…Girls who get drunk and throw up at breakfast… A cross-eyed nun with a bullwhip and a bottle of gin! “What Am I Doing in New Jersey?”
The seven dwarfs were each on different little trips. Happy was into grass and grass alone... Happy, that's all he did. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy. Too much speed. Sneezy was a full blown coke freak. Doc was a connection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for Dopey. He's always got his arm out and his leg up. And then, the one we always forget, because he was, Bashful. Bashful didn't use drugs. He was paranoid on his own. Didn't need any help on that ladder. "Nursery Rhymes", Toledo Window Box
Unsourced
“Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink, I think female alcoholics should be told not to fuck”
I think tobacco and alcohol warnings are too general. They should be more to the point: "People who smoke will eventually cough up small brown pieces of lung." And "Warning! Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was."
"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day."
"You never meet a wino with perfect pitch."
I'll bet there aren't too many people hooked on crack who can play the bagpipes.
"Let's stop underage drinking before it starts." Please explain this to me. It sounds tricky."
"When a masochist brings someone home from the bar, does he say, "Excuse me a moment, I'm going to slip into something uncomfortable"?
"When he got loaded, the human cannonball knew there were not many men of his caliber."
"I'd hate to be an alcoholic with Alzheimer's. Imagine needing a drink and forgetting where you put it. "
And on that note…
What is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Three out of four people now, believe in angels. What're you, fuckin' stupid? Has everybody lost their fuckin' minds in this country? Angels, shit. You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive collective psychotic chemical flashback of all the drugs - all the drugs - smoked, swallowed, snorted, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. Thirty years of adulterated street drugs'll get you some fuckin' angels, my friend.
"Angels", You Are All Diseased
I've begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, reflections at the park... the occasional skin cancer, but hey. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. But I don't pray to the sun - it wouldn't be polite to presume on our friendship. You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci.
"There Is No God", You Are All Diseased (1999)
This conversation is bound to turn up. Two guys in a street meet each other and one of them says, "hey, did you hear? Phil Davis died". "Phil Davis? I just saw him yesterday." "Yeah, didn't help. He died anyway. Apparently, the simple act of you seeing him did not slow down his cancer. In fact, it may have made it more aggressive. You know, you could be the cause for Phil's Death, how, do you live with yourself?"
Woman, 110, credits her longevity to whiskey...For a taste of her whiskey, we'll give you some advice.
The life of London's Minnie Smith's has spanned the Spanish American War to the recent Vegas debut of the world's largest TV and New Hampshire primaries. In order to experience such a rich lifetime's worth of accumulated experience you'd have to either switch to a Soylent green exclusive diet, sleep upside down or develop a time machine.
Naturally, anyone traveling back in time will have to sign a release form guaranteeing they won't pervert the natural course of history and disrupt the future development of a time machine by say, telling Kennedy to duck or thwarting the Titanic ice-berg collision. The latter, for example, would excise the calamitous event from history books, add a few hundred souls who otherwise wouldn't have been conceived (if this vessel's a rockin', don't bother knockin') and remove any and all future references to the Titanic from the obits of very old people.
Minnie Smith, it should be said, is not dead yet, but 110 years young--her namesake on the tombstone pictured above an unfortunate coincidence and oversight we blame on a guest editor---we wish her many happy returns on her recent B-Day. According to the Independent, she was 14 when the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage and her life spanned six monarchs, 21 prime ministers, nearly every Stanley Cup, the invention of the flashlight and annexation of the island of Hawaii (it should be noted at this point, that the relevance of each particular cultural touchstone varies according to region--though who doesn't like Hawaii?)
Smith, according to reports, credits her Grim Reaper-defying existence to regular drops of whiskey and boiled onions (not together).
The authors of The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death first noted the healing properties of whiskey while on a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee and credit going an entire year without a head cold to a 'walk slow, and breathe deep' injunction while ambling through the oak barrel storehouse where the hard stuff ages, so you don't have to, apparently.
[Editor's note: The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery is available in the United States on Amazon.com, today, January 9th, the birthday of Joan Baez, Jimmy Page, and Richard Nixon]
Eyes Well Damned: George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008)
Pardon a break from regularly-scheduled SharkBook.Com chicanery
One of the reasons that Chris and I decided that writing a book together might not be such a bad idea and why the experience was, well, a hell of a lot of fun (and why the next one will also be a tandem effort), is that while we each had our own reading interests, the list of our favourite books was quite similar: “The Ginger Man”, by JP Donleavy, (top on my list) , “Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole, and the works of Charles Bukowski, and Mordecai Richler.
These writers never tried to come across as precious with what they wrote, and the stories they told were never hampered by artifice – among their works you won't find a single humorless 800-page family-saga bummer of a book. They wrote against and in the face of political correctness, puritanism, and pretence and their books found a home with audiences who welcomed this blast of frank talk on their bookshelves. Indeed, they were writing for readers who've heard dirty jokes before and are ready to laugh at the next -- so long as it's a good one.
George MacDonald Fraser, who died this week, at age 82, was among the best of them and his creation of Victorian-era soldier, Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE (1822-1915), will go down as one of the most entertaining anti-heroes of all – a more well-traveled, though equally caddish Sebastian Dangerfield of Donleavy's Ginger Man, whose exploits were captured in 12 hugely entertaining novels that scored what to my knowledge has to be the only hat-trick in the history of the written word of top-notch historical accuracy, hilarity, and first-rate prose.
Fraser himself led a fascinating life – everywhere from Burma to Saskatchewan (and I think he might have went from summer to winter in both of those places, which makes it all the more impressive) – and was, like his character, a case study in how to make the bloody best of it by living life on your own terms, and damning the parking pylons -- i.e. Sir George speaking on his writing and offering advice to newcomers: "It may be tripe but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act."
A good obituary can be found here with more of that, but I thought it best to point to a bit of his writing for a true sense of Flashman, and the brilliant satirist who created him.
Harry Flashman is a Victorian-age colonel, undercover in native garb just prior to the Indian Mutiny. Here Fraser, as Flashy, helps show how the proselytizing efforts of British commanders undoubtedly played a part in the downfall of the Raj (From “Flashman in the Great Game"):
“I doubt if any commander in the old days would have done what Carmichael-Smith did in the way of preaching-parades either. I hadn’t believed it in the barrack gossip, but sure enough, the next Sunday this coffin-faced Anglican fakir, the Rev. Reynolds had a muster on the maidan, and we had to listen to him expounding the Parable of the Prodigal Son, if you please. He did it through a brazen-lunged rissaldar (major in the Indian army) who interpreted for him, and you never heard the like. Reynolds lined it out in English, from the Bible, and the rissaldar stood there with his staff under his arm, at attention, with his whiskers bristling, bawling his own translation:
“There was a zamindar (farmer), with two sons. He was a mad zamindar, for while he yet lived he gave to the younger his portion of the inheritance. Doubtless he raised it from a moneylender. And the younger spent it all whoring in the bazaar, and drinking sherab (strong drink). And when his money was gone he returned home, and his father ran to meet him, for he was pleased – God alone knows why. And in his foolishness, the father slew his only cow – he was evidently not a Hindoo – and they feasted on it. And the older son, who had been dutiful and stayed at home, was jealous, I cannot tell for what reason, unless the cow was to have been part of his inheritance. But his father, who did not like him, rebuked the older son. This story was told by Jesus the Jew, and if you believe it you will not go to Paradise, but instead will sit on the right-hand side of the English Lord God Sahib who lives in Calcutta. And there you will play musical instruments, by order of the Sirkar. Parade – dismiss!”
George Macdonald Fraser is gone but Harry Paget Flashman lives on and, to borrow one of the best literary catchphrases I've heard, he shall continue to damn the eyes of the impudent!
Robert Goulet: The "T" is silent and, sadly, so is he...
We here at TheSharkBook.com momentarily paused with our drinks in mid-air on Tuesday, took in the news that Robert Goulet had passed away, finished what was remaining in a single gulp and, once the next round was served, raised our glasses and said “To Goulet!” (We then retired to our respective homes and shot up our television sets).
Our ties to Monsieur Goulet are shaky: one of us has a French Canadian background and the other is a fellow graduate of the University of Toronto who also studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music (and ruined more than one soprano’s sense of pitch with less than inspired noodling on the oboe – eschewing the electric guitar, following a less than reputable source’s suggestion that woodwind guys get all the chicks). Yet we thought it fitting that we mark Goulet’s passing on to that great hotel, resort and casino in the sky (the “Foxy Boxing” in Heaven is rumored to be superb) by doing what we do and paying tribute to an incident involving Goulet and alcohol, which as William James once noted has the “power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour”.
Despite the average American citizen hearing the national anthem constantly throughout years of schooling and at every public event they attend apart from charity car washes, some of that country’s most famous citizens have managed to botch the lyrics or otherwise sully the ditty in front of thousands on numerous occasions. Roseanne’s turn at a San Diego Padres game is the first to come to mind, but there have been others including an embarrassing outing for Michael Bolton (check that out here and note the intensity of the booing when he forgets the lyrics and how it seems to go beyond mere patriotic zeal and enter into “We just don’t like Michael Bolton” territory), and even Bobby Vinton (click here for his botched version of the anthem – capped off by a Polish joke from the commentator). Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler thought he’d come up with a brilliant flourish when singing the anthem at the Indianapolis 500 by closing with “and the land of the INDIANAPOLIS 500!” The war veterans in the audience led the chorus of boos and Tyler later apologized. And for some inexplicable reason, someone figured it would be a good idea to ask gold-medal Olympian Carl Lewis to sing the anthem before an NBA game (it was not).
Surprisingly, none of these incidents involved alcohol consumption, as far as we know. However, our favorite tale in this regard, and the one in which Mr. Goulet took the central role, did.
Goulet was hired to sing the anthem prior to the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight on May 25, 1965 in Lewiston, Maine. Though born in the US, Goulet was raised mostly in Canada and had not performed the anthem publicly prior to that booking (whether or not he serenaded passengers on buses making the border run between Niagara Falls and Buffalo is not mentioned in wire reports). Still he was a big fight fan and the gig meant a pair of free tickets, so he accepted.
Goulet had dinner with the governor of Maine prior to the big fight, leaving occasionally to go out on the porch and “practice” – i.e. drink wine.
Later in the evening, all of the under-card’s talent had slugged it out and it was Mr. Goulet’s turn to fire the crowd up with a bit of nationalistic fervor to mix in with the bloodlust. He botched the opening line, singing “Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early night” (some wondered about Goulet’s powers of prophesy as it was indeed an “early night”, with the controversial main event not lasting a full round). Journalists at the time also insisted that he made a second mistake later on in the song, singing “gave proof through the fight”, though Goulet himself only owned up to the first gaffe. An eyewitness account referenced in this story, which suggests that Goulet was off-key and out of synch with the organ accompaniment, but that he “managed to slur his way through it”, suggests that the great Goulet’s powers of recall are not to be trusted on this point.
Goulet would go on to provide the silky baritone soundtrack to more than one Las Vegas evening, however this story never left him and whenever he was at ringside during a big match at Caesar’s Palace, some wag would be sure to pipe up with: “How’s about a few bars of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ Goulet!”
To his credit though, Goulet braved this early drunken shaming and made it up to Americans by delivering dozens of note-perfect renditions of the anthem at all sorts of sporting events, as well as singing the Canadian anthem at Wrestlemania VI, a historic moment that was soon overshadowed by Rowdy Roddy Piper painting half of his body black in an attempt at racial solidarity.
This week, we mourn the passing of a soul legend, whose output in the early 60s alone, would've been enough to launch him into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
