5/15/23
Newsletter #337
The Crack of Dawn
This is a postscript to the story of me trading a bag of weed for a realistic-looking Colt .45 BB gun in high school. Four years later Sam Raimi made a 45-minute, Super-8 film called The Happy Valley Kid that we all worked on. The lead character is a cowboy in his fantasies, and he needed a gun. I offered my Colt .45, which is exactly the gun he needed. When Sam saw how real it looked, he was so pleased that he not only borrowed it, but he also put a sequence in the film of the Kid taking it out of his duffle bag, unwrapping it from a red bandana, staring down at it, then looking up with a psychotic expression (I scored this scene with Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and it worked great). In any case, Sam never returned the gun and I’ve never seen it again.
Although there’s an endless stream of The Beatles trivia out there, here’s a tiny bit of minutia that I’ve only heard once, many years ago, and have never repeated. When Paul brought in the song Let it Be and played it for the band and the producer, George Martin, for the first time, John pitched a fit. He said that there was no way The Beatles were going to have a blatant Christian reference like, “When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me/Speaking words of wisdom/Let it be.” Paul looked at John and said, “My mother’s name was Mary,” which John knew, but had forgotten. And the line stayed in the song.
I knew this story, too, but I just watched Peter Asher tell it, so now I know the details. Early in The Beatles’ career — 1964 to be exact — Paul had moved out of his family’s house, and was staying at the home of his girlfriend, Jane Asher. Jane’s little brother, Peter, who was 19, stood in the doorway of the guest room and watched Paul write a couple of songs. One of those songs was A World Without Love, which goes like this: Please lock me away/And don't allow the day/ Here inside where I hide/ With my loneliness/ I don't care what they say I won't stay/ In a world without love.
As they did with all of their songs, Paul played the song for the band and George Martin. Apparently, John hated the song so much that he threw his body over the piano and declared, “The Beatles will never record that song! Over my dead body!” Dejected, Paul returned to the Asher’s house where he told Peter what John had just done. Peter, who is a hell of a character, being envious, ambitious, opportunistic, and in exactly the right place at the right time, asked, “Can I record it?” Paul said, “Sure,” and gave him the song. Peter immediately contacted his buddy, Gordon Waller, who also played guitar and sang, and they hastily formed Peter & Gordon, then went directly to George Martin. George Martin produced the song and in 1964 it went to #1 in both the U.S. and UK. And I’m with John, it’s a really stupid song, but it is catchy.
Peter Asher went on to produce a lot of records, but particularly all of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt's best albums. If that was all he did, I don’t care what they say, I would live in a world without love. But wait, there’s more . . .
The documentary, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019), is a good, and reasonably thorough account of Linda Ronstadt’s spectacular life and career, with a profoundly unhappy ending. Spoiler alert: she developed Parkinson’s Disease and can’t sing anymore. At the end of the movie everybody tries to get her to just sing along, but she doesn’t want to and won’t.
It’s sad, but here’s how I see it. She’s 12 years older than me. In 1966 when I was 8 years old, and attending 2nd grade here in Michigan, Linda Ronstadt was 19 and the lead singer of the Stone Poneys and had her first smash hit, Different Drum (written by Mike Nesmith), and it was huge. They played the shit out of that song. Linda Ronstadt went solo soon thereafter – meeting Peter Asher along the way – and then put out one hit after another after another for over a decade. Linda Ronstadt songs are all over my life, as I said, beginning in elementary school, then all the way to adulthood. Ronstadt has released 24 studio albums and has charted 38 US Billboard Hot 100 singles. Twenty-one of those singles reached the top 40, ten reached the top 10, and one reached number one ("You're No Good"). It’s a bitch that she can’t sing anymore, but that’s a helluva career.
However, the Peter Asher-produced record that has had the biggest, most long-lasting effect on me is Sweet Baby James by James Taylor. I sing as I walk around my neighborhood every day, and that whole album is on my playlist. Flashing back most of my life, to Mr. Dubois’ art class in 9th grade, we played nothing but that album the entire year. Somebody, anybody, could have brought in another album, but we were all perfectly satisfied to listen to nothing but Sweet Baby James over and over again as we drew or painted or sculpted.
I’ll raise my shade, but I think it’s too early for the blue gels. And it is. Maybe 30 minutes early.
No, no, I just stalled a little bit – I lit the roach – and there are the blue gels. A new day has begun.
I’ll take it, whatever it is.