Showing posts with label Telegraph. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Telegraph. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

This afternoon's listening


It's not a bad way to spend 40-something minutes of a cool November day, listening to the Stones as the sun sinks behind the Nebraska plains well before suppertime.

This is the time of year when you're really starting to miss the daylight we had just the other day, it seems like. And you're wanting it back.

But as Mick Jagger says, "You can't always get what you want."

True, true. . . .

"But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need."


Like a late fall fix of 1969's "Let It Bleed," one of a stretch of albums the Rolling Stones made back when the Rolling Stones made albums that mattered. Mick from London -- another Mick from London, Mick Brown who writes for The Telegraph -- says that hasn't been the case for a very, very long time. And he adds that the bad boys grampaws of rock 'n' roll should just hang it up after a half century.
On Sunday night, while the Rolling Stones were performing for 20,000 people at the O2 in London – the first of five concerts they will be playing in London and New York to mark their 50th anniversary – one of their early heroes was also making an appearance a few miles across town, in the somewhat shabbier surroundings of the Kentish Town Forum.

Bobby Womack is the veteran soul singer who wrote, and with his group The Valentinos recorded, the original version of It’s All Over Now, which gave the Stones their first number one hit in Britain in 1964. Womack once recalled his chagrin at his mentor Sam Cooke giving the Stones his song, and depriving him of having the hit himself. “I was still screaming and hollering right up until I got my first royalty cheque. Man, the amount of money rolling in shut me right up.”

Womack, 68, who styles himself as “the Soul Survivor”, has survived drug problems, near-penury and cancer. He was performing songs from a new album, The Bravest Man In The Universe (modesty was never his strong suit), produced by another, younger admirer, Damon Albarn.

The Rolling Stones, who started out as a rhythm and blues covers band, borrowing heavily from black artists such as Womack (a debt which, to their credit, they have always warmly acknowledged), are now among the wealthiest entertainers in the world, a thriving corporation, steered by a CEO – Mick Jagger – who has demonstrated a mixture of shrewdness and business acumen that makes him the peer of any more strait-laced captain of industry.

The Stones are reportedly being paid more than £15 million for their five shows. Ticket prices for the London performances range from £95 to £375, with a “VIP hospitality” ticket priced at £950, and no concessions for the pensioners who are the group’s most devoted audience, many of whom will doubtless have travelled to the O2 on their Freedom Passes. 
We can put aside Jagger’s blithe explanations that when it comes to ticket prices the group are merely hapless victims of market forces, or Ronnie Wood’s shrugging dismissal that “we’ve got to make something”. The Stones long ago set the benchmark for shameless cynicism when it comes to exploiting “the brand”. Among the luxury items on offer when the box-set of Exile On Main Street was released two years ago was a limited-edition box of three lithographs, “signed individually by Mick, Keith or Charlie”, priced at £1,999.99. Note, that’s “or”, not “and”. 
By one account, the biggest crush of the night at the O2 was not at the front of the stage but at the merchandising stand, where eager customers were spending £200 on a poster of a gorilla’s face – the artwork on the cover of the the band’s newly released greatest hits, Grrr!. Of course, one should not begrudge a handful of pensioners a few bob in their declining years, but as Johnny Rotten once said, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
(snip)

It is an odd paradox that while the Stones have not made an album worth listening to since Tattoo You in 1981, they are bigger business now than they ever were – the prime example of Sixties and Seventies rock music as heritage industry. The Stones performing their greatest hits, Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds, Van Morrison performing Astral Weeks – these are rock music’s equivalent of the blockbuster Jackson Pollock or David Hockney retrospective.

Some manage this trick better than others. It is a tired and familiar trope to point out the irony of old rockers, who can barely make it to the stage unaided, singing the anthems of their rebellious youth: The Who, for example, singing My Generation at the Olympics closing ceremony (or to be more precise, half the Who, the rhythm half having sadly fulfilled the song’s prophecy). Paul McCartney has become a national institution, wheeled out at state occasions to sing the creaking Hey Jude – the post-war generation’s We’ll Meet Again – with ever-diminishing effect. Surely it’s time to give it a rest?
YEAH, I can agree with that. The Stones lost me with "Some Girls," on which they tried to be disco-relevant in 1978. The lowlight was the title track -- Google the lyrics and cringe.

Anyway, Brown was just setting the stage for his coup de grace . . . which I also can go along with.
Watching the splendid documentary Crossfire Hurricane, shown on the BBC over two consecutive weekends, reminded you of just how glamorous, how dangerous, how romantic the Stones were in their prime; a different species altogether from the cadavers who emerged, as if from creaking coffins, on to the O2 stage. Jagger is, as they say, marvellous for his age but nobody would describe him as “a soul survivor” – unless one counts surviving the inconvenience of tax exile, two expensive divorces and, by his own account, “dozens” of paternity suits.

It was always said of Jagger that his ambitions were to mingle with the aristocracy. He achieved that and more; in a sense, the Stones became the aristocracy themselves, in the process exhibiting some of the more disagreeable characteristics of their caste, with all the air of entitlement and the barely concealed disdain for the paying punter.

Another song comes to mind. “Let’s drink to the hard-working people/Let’s drink to the lowly of birth/Raise your glass to the good and the evil/Let’s drink to the salt of the earth.”

The song is Salt of the Earth by … the Rolling Stones. It was not a song they found time to play at the O2. They did, however, perform It’s All Over Now. Surely now, it’s really time it was.
AT LEAST we still have the albums from when the Stones still mattered.

Albums from a time before the talented cads became whatever it is they are today, which I suspect bears an unfortunate resemblance to the dirty old men of Bide-a-Wee Manor, regaling nurses half their age with stories of how they used to be somebody as they try to cop a feel.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Off the traks in Rail Town USA



You'd think that in a city that bills itself as "Rail Town USA," the daily newspaper would know that it's "Amtrak," not "Amtrack."

You'd think. You'd also be wrong.

Thus goes the sad decline of what used to be a damned good little newspaper in North Platte, Neb. I know. Once upon a time, I was a reporter there.

And I daresay everyone who mattered at the Telegraph then knew how to spell "Amtrak" just as well as "Union Pacific," the railroad that's the reason North Platte can call itself Rail Town USA. (The newspaper, however, calls it "Railtown USA" in a Sunday news story. Whatever.)

Actually, it was construction of the UP that gave North Platte its reason to be at all. And with the world's largest rail-classification yard in town -- yep, Union Pacific -- it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask that Telegraph web editors know something about railroads.


For instance, how to spell "Amtrak."


AMTRACK?

Amtrack???

This is what happens to a good newspaper when it inevitably falls under the dark spell of mediocre people beholden to an out-of-town corporate owner. When "community journalism" is just another job for just another editor and just another publisher, and the bottom line is just another entry on a balance sheet in Omaha.

They don't make editors like Keith Blackledge anymore -- or hold newspaper staffs to standards as high as his, either.

THEN AGAIN, why should Rale Towne USA be any different from anywhere else today.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I hope I die before I get old. Oops.


See, I knew it was better to not try, rather than to try, succeed, then not try anymore, then think "OH MY GOD, I'M A HAS-BEEN!", then panic and do any damn thing, then fail miserably and have people write stuff like this about you.
A Thousand Words: Eddie Murphy's most pitiful effort yet

Eddie Murphy's latest film 'A Thousand Words' is the crown jewel in an unspeakably dreadful career.

“If I don’t die in a plane crash or something, this country has a rare opportunity to watch a great talent grow,” Eddie Murphy once said, little realising that there was one further option that was possibly the least appealing of the lot.

That third possibility – a career that turned out to be both inexplicably long and unspeakably dreadful – is, lo and behold, exactly what came to pass. Things have come to a peak of sorts with his latest effort, the high concept comedy A Thousand Words, which has been finished since 2008 but has spent the last four years sitting in a box at Paramount, possibly marked ‘open on pain of death’ and shaped a bit like the Ark of the Covenant.

On its release in the US last weekend, the critical response was more negative than for any other Murphy movie: the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes found that of 39 reviews, all 39 were variations on calls for the negative to be shipped to Geneva and taken down to its constituent elements inside the Large Hadron Collider.
YES, it is better to try and fail than never to try at all. I guess. But you can be damned sure there's something worse than never trying at all.

That would be the career of Eddie Murray.
Uh, I mean Murphy.


IS IT too late for the guy to just go back to Saturday Night Live? Probably.

Well, that's enough trying for this post. I think I'll just get me another beer.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

The irreplaceable editor


There's something I need to say.

You know how people -- mostly in corporations and crap -- say no one is irreplaceable? That's bulls***. The folks in North Platte, Neb., learned how irreplaceable Keith Blackledge was when he retired as editor of the North Platte Telegraph.

They learned how irreplaceable he was when he was no longer at the little daily newspaper, and no longer was taking punk kids right out of college and turning them into grown-up reporters and editors who, frankly, learned more in North Platte than they had in several years of journalism school. North Platte also learned how irreplaceable Keith was when -- suddenly -- the little newspaper that could . . . couldn't. Well, at least not nearly so much as it had under the steady -- and sometimes bemused -- leadership of Keith Blackledge.

People learned how irreplaceable one newspaper editor was when he no longer sat in that corner office at the Telegraph. When he no longer could will, it seemed, a little city to do what needed to be done, establish what needed to be established and build what needed to be built.

They also learned how irreplaceable Keith was when he grew too frail to serve on the approximately 98 trillion committees and boards he had served on for decades and decades.


AND NOW we all are learning how irreplaceable Keith Blackledge is as a presence in our lives -- as a living example of how to love the place where God has put you, do a job to the best of your ability and then teach your charges how to do that, too. We're learning that because time waits for no man -- not even Keith -- and it finally has taken that presence away from us.

We can't replace it. We can't replace the best damned boss we ever had -- those of us who were blessed enough to pass through the Telegraph newsroom on our way to somewhere, alas, not as good.

Almost three decades ago, a know-it-all, smartass kid from way south of the Mason-Dixon Line trekked out to the Sandhills of Nebraska to give Keith Blackledge a spring and a summer of hard work, some more-or-less decent news stories and, no doubt, a serious case -- or 20 -- of acid indigestion, with the odd migraine thrown in as lagniappe.

In return, Keith gave me a graduate-level, hands-on education in community journalism, a well-deserved ass-chewing or two, several friends for life . . . and my dear wife of 27 years -- the wire editor I stole from him on my way out the door.

I got the better end of the deal. Keith, meantime, was left holding an IOU I couldn't repay, not even if I had six lifetimes to try.

At the wedding shower, he also gave me the best advice I've ever gotten. Keith advised me that I should take care of all the monumental things in Mrs. Favog's and my marriage -- you know, world peace, geopolitics, erasing the national debt and divining the meaning of life -- while letting my new bride handle everything else. You know, like what I'll wear, where I'll go, where we'd live, what we'd eat, when I should just shut the hell up . . . stuff like that.

So far, it's worked out pretty damned well.

Except that I just broke Keith's rule about cussing in the newsroom.

I only can hope that the best damned newspaperman ever will forgive me this one last transgression. After all, I was -- and am -- replaceable.