Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Same thing, different particulars

Baton Rouge (La.) State-Times, Sept. 18, 1969

I like to look through old newspapers, which to me is a much cheaper way of revisiting my long-lost youth than combing my remaining hair over the bald spot, buying a flashy convertible and having an affair with a nearsighted woman much younger than myself.

Which brings us to the nearsighted, much-younger woman part.

I remember what a media sensation it was when arch pop-culture weirdo Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki . . . on The Tonight Show.


MISS VICKI, otherwise known as Victoria Budinger (or "the pretty New Jersey teenager"), was 17. Tiny Tim, otherwise known as Herbert Khaury, was 37, but everybody thought he was a decade older. In 1969, "Me Too" was more like "Me Can!"

As I said, it was a media sensation.

At this juncture, your woke-ass, under-50 self might be thinking "WHAT THE FUCK?!"

Exactly.

You see, we westerners -- particularly we Americans -- always have been all about the weird shit. 1969's "Isn't that cute? Kinda weird, but cute" has become 2019's "Lock him up and cut his nuts off! Then sue!"

On the other hand, we fail to bat an eyelid at believing there are something like 73 genders today, that "men" can have babies and that we all must state our preferred pronouns. (Mine is "My Lord and Master / My Lord and Master." If you don't think that's an actual pronoun, you are a hater, and you're making me feel threatened.)

AMID ALL the suckage of middle age and aging, the one benefit is having developed (at least one hopes) a finely tuned bullshit detector and an appreciation for the waves of bat-shit crazy that periodically roll through -- and roil -- what's left of our society. So, if you're just floating through postmodern America right now, and you think everything looks pretty normal to you, boy is your old self gonna be embarrassed by your young self in about 50 years.

Assuming, of course, we survive the absurdity that is President Donald Trump. That right there is a big-ass assumption, so we'll see.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

3 Chords & the Truth: The Big Show has landed


"One of these days, Alice! Pow! Straight to the moon!"

One of these days came 50 years ago today. Pow! We went straight to the moon.

Oddly enough, it wasn't Ralph Kramden's fist that got us there. No, it was three brave astronauts who climbed atop a gigantic Saturn V rocket four days before, blasted off into the heavens and took the whole damned planet with them for a lunar joyride.

July 20, 1969. It was a Sunday. I was 8 years old -- almost 8 and a half. Halves are very important when you're 8.

That day -- POW! -- straight to the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins got there with Apollo 11. I suspect they kinda knew that I (and a few billion others) had hitched a ride on their rocket ship.

This episode of the Big Show has the moon on its mind, a way to remember the greatest thing mankind has done and give thanks to the three men who did it . . . and all the thousands of men and women who got them there.

In fact, this week's 3 Chords & the Truth doesn't have a single song that isn't a moon song. And they're all good. Fittingly good for an Apollo 11 anniversary program.

Mementos of a grade-school space nut
PUTTING THIS particular edition together put me, in a very real way, back in time. Back in our living room at 10645 Darryl Dr. in Baton Rouge. Back in front of the black-and-white, 21-inch Magnavox television tuned in to CBS and Walter Cronkite. Back to when I was an elementary-school spaceaholic, the one with all the Gemini-mission stickers all over the dresser mirror in my bedroom.

The 1960s were fraught times, like our own today. But a big difference was hope. We had hope. We knew we were better than our struggles and our national squabbles and missteps, and we had hope that, someday, we would overcome.

Someday.

We have yet to overcome and, indeed, we're backsliding. Today, we have a lot more Trump than we have hope.

BUT LOOKING BACK at Apollo 11 and those first glorious steps on a strange world, we know what the better angels of our human nature look like. And when we look up into a moonlit sky, we know that for those better angels, the sky is the limit.

And in an age seemingly bereft of heroes, we only have to look back within the lifetime of your broken-down old radio guy here to see a whole big bunch of them -- heroes who touched the moon, if not the stars.

For that, we give musical thanks.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Wednesday, March 20, 2019

How did they sleep?

We should have seen the end coming a half century ago.
It was as plain as a patchwork plague, courtesy of your haberdasher from hell. Which in this case was the 1969 Sears Wish Book.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Holy Hash Pipe, Batman!
One thing never changes, however -- copy editors are always required but never in adequate supply. I'm reasonably certain that the headline above the Red Menace display at left should have read "Family Nightmare."

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Oh, the weather outside is frightful!

It's April 15, the wind chill is something like 10 degrees, it's snowing and just west of here, there was a hellacious blizzard.

In other words . . . oh, what the hell.

Enjoy this bit of yuletide the way it sounded in the 1960s -- Christmas Day programming on KFAB-FM in Omaha, circa 1969. Alas, this aircheck of "Cloud Nine Stereo" -- 99.9 on every FM dial -- was recorded on a dual-track mono tape recorder back in the day.

In transferring the recording to the digital realm, I did what I could to get the most out of the audio.
I'm a wizard that way.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Louisianian for 'looks like rain'


Troffaloff.

If you're at least 50ish, lived in Baton Rouge in the 1960s and early '70s and ever watched Tex Carpenter deliver the weather on Channel 9, you either know what that means or you think ol' Tex had an on-air stroke every so often, and then it rained.

Or as my pediatrician once said to my dad when the subject turned away from my fear of needles and toward the weather (and those who forecast it on TV), "What the hell is a 'troffaloff'?"

The answer, taken from my 1969 edition of the Tex to English/English to Tex dictionary (via the Essa Weather Wire Service), is a "trough aloft," otherwise known as a low-pressure area, which oftentimes means "rain."

And that's your TV Weatherfact of the day, discovered in a box uncovered after years unbothered.

Monday, September 24, 2012

This is Tom Jones, indeed


A friend of mine is always linking to great music videos on Facebook. "Are you adequately prepared to rock?" he always asks.

I don't think anyone was adequately prepared for the awesomeness he posted tonight -- this 1969 pairing of Tom Jones and Janis Joplin on "Raise Your Hand." The memorable moment came in December of the second season of This Is Tom Jones, the singer's variety TV series that ran three seasons from 1969-1971.

Verily, I say unto thee, that the Lord hath smiled upon the soulitudinous, boogielicious union of the blackest white woman in Port Arthur, Texas, and the blackest white man in South Wales, and then He hath commandeth the angel choirs to hush up because all y'all just got to hear this.

Can I get a witness, y'all? Raise your hand!

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Tranquility base here. Neil Armstrong has landed.




I was blessed to gave grown up during an age of American giants, though we didn't always realize it at the time.

As Joni Mitchell sang, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?" Now in this land of small minds, smaller men and great discontent, we may be getting some idea of what we had.

Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, is dead. He was 82.

Above is what I -- and hundreds of millions -- saw that July day in 1969, a time of trouble, yes, but also a time when giants walked the earth. And when astronaut giants flew to the moon --
and back.

One of the last of those giants now is gone, God bless his soul, leaving this postmodern world to its pygmy overlords.



UPON HIS LEAVING, it's almost as if Neil Armstrong: Giant has left us his final commentary about the kind of hands now holding our collective fate as Americans. Look at this screenshot of the NBCNews.com front page.

Says it all, doesn't it?

Goodbye, Mr. Armstrong. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your dignity.

Thank you for our dreams.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Look, folks! They're not actually singing!


There really was a more innocent time in TV history. Hosts would tell you when the acts were faking it.

Well, OK. Maybe only Arthur Godfrey would tell you when the acts were faking it, er . . . lip synching . . . which is one of the dadgum hardest things to pull off in show bidness, dadgummit!

Certainly more difficult than getting the performers' names right -- when the Carpenters appeared on this 1969 episode of the syndicated Your All-American College Show, Arthur managed to turn Richard into "Ed."

No, Ed was the name of the slab of carved stone placed next to Godfrey. Back in the day, slabs of carved rock were known to have long-running variety shows on network television. We are hopeful this age's brightest archaeologists -- soon, one hopes -- will be able to explain this ancient practice.

ANYWAY, it was just as well that Godfrey proudly touted that "what they're gonna do is give you the number right off the album, and what these kids are gonna do is lip-sync it." Viewers would have figured it out from a few clicks and pops in the audio . . . because they were playing "Ticket to Ride" right off the album. Not a tape.

Thus was the world of syndicated TV shows in the 1960s.


AND FOR your trivia enjoyment, here from 1968 is The Carpenters' first TV appearance -- as The Dick Carpenter Trio, also on Your All-American College Show.

The Interwebs . . . you can find
anything in there.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Friday, October 22, 2010

Your Daily '80s: 1986 looks back on 1969


In the fall of 1986, a new prime-time news program hit the
ABC airwaves -- Our World.

It was a news magazine devoted to the news of days past, with Linda Ellerbee and Ray Gandolf as hosts. I minored in history, so I was a sucker for this show.

Sadly, not so many others were.

Anyway, direct from the fall of '86,
Our World looks at the summer of '69.







Monday, August 10, 2009

Tempus fugit, man


I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock n roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

-- Joni Mitchell







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