George Martin: Genius behind the geniuses

Back at Abbey Road, Martin gave The Beatles the chance to respond to his dressing down. "I've laid into you for quite a long time," he said. "You haven't responded. Is there anything you don't like?" 

"Well, for a start," replied George Harrison, "I don't like your tie." 

The quip broke the ice and The Beatles relaxed into comedy mode. 

"For the next 15 to 20 minutes they were pure entertainment," recalled Norman Smith. "I had tears running down my face." 

Despite his misgivings, Martin eventually decided The Beatles had "the potential to make a hit record" and gave them a recording deal on 6 June (backdated by two days so as to secure copyright to the recording session). 

He later admitted it was their "tremendous charisma" rather than their music that won him over. "When you are with them, you are all the better for being with them and when they leave you feel a loss," he told Sue Lawley. 

"I fell in love with them. It's as simple as that."

3 Chords & the Truth: Schwing states

I messed up.

I watched the latest Republican presidential debate.

Donald Trump made sure everyone knew there was "no problem" with the size of his hands . . . or his penis. This happened.

The candidates also yelled at each other a lot.

NEEDLESS to say, I can't quite get the vision of this out of my brain. Yet I still had to do another episode of 3 Chords & the Truth, and I'm told it's bad to get too political on the radio . . . or the Internet facsimile thereof.

So I did my best.

But . . . GOD ALMIGHTY, A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ALLUDED TO THE SIZE OF HIS TALLYWHACKER ON NATIONAL TV! 

Among other things.

I guess what I'm saying is this edition of the Big Show may have gotten a little interesting. I spin the stacks of groovy wax; you decide.

Whatever.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Dropping the needle on another show

Music, the way it used to was and, more and more, still be.

I have records, and I'm not afraid to play them. Now, that's the answer to the $64,000 Question.

I imagine you'd be surprised to know exactly how much of the music on 3 Chords & the Truth comes to you in the the old-school manner, off of old LPs, 45s and even 78s. Welllllllll. . . .

I'd have to say most, actually.

BESIDES, old Zenith "Cobra-Matic" record changers are just so cool. As are old LP jackets. 

I think that about covers it until later, when we'll drop another episode of the Big Show onto the platter and see how it plays.

That is all.

Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it. . . .

If what I just read in the paper instead were a book, you'd have to call it "Profiles in Cowardice."

And our first profile in gutlessness, not to mention political amorality, is Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska. I wish I were shocked.

From today's Omaha World-Herald:

Sen. Deb Fischer on Wednesday rejected fellow Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse’s call for a third-party conservative candidate in the event that Donald Trump captures the GOP nomination.

“I don’t know how any Republican or conservative can support that,” Fischer told The World-Herald. “We’ve seen this story before. We saw it in ’92 with the election of Bill Clinton because of a third party. And I certainly don’t want to see it in 2016 and have the election of another Clinton because of a third party.” 

(snip)

Regardless of the nominee, Fischer said a third-party bid represents a “really poor strategy” that would only ensure a victory for Hillary Clinton. As president, Clinton probably would have an immediate opportunity to make one appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court and most likely more down the road.

“I will support the Republican nominee,” Fischer said. “This election is a big one. There is way too much at stake to hand it to Hillary Clinton — and the strategy of a third party, I believe, would do just that.”

Fischer wasn’t the only Republican taking a hard pass on Sasse’s third-party proposal.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told The World-Herald that she’s sticking by her plan to support the GOP nominee, whoever that is.

I DON'T AGREE with Ben Sasse on many things, but he has demonstrated here that at least he's a man of principle . . . and character. On the other hand, Deb, what you're telling Republicans is "Vote for the fascist; it's important."

Let me put it this way: If you're a Republican who thinks it's important to vote for an amoral, fascist vulgarian who draws his political energy from the darkest recesses of the American soul, you are no better than Catholic bishops and laymen who sacrificed the innocence of children as they turned a blind eye to the predators in their midst and covered up unspeakable sins "for the good of the Church." Or party, as the case may be.

They were, and are, pond scum. And you, madam, are a moral cipher. You are engaging in mindless political tribalism. You seek to get out in front of the mob in the hope it won't then come for you.

But mobs aren't easily satisfied. The mob -- or the strongman -- will come for you soon enough. And you won't even have the small consolation of a holy death.

POLITICIANS like you, Deb Fischer, are demonstrating to us why the Republican Party -- the party of Lincoln that's been disgracing the Great Emancipator for a long time now -- deserves that favorite punishment of GOP partisans everywhere . . . the death penalty.

I just regret like hell that it's Donald Trump who gets to be the executioner.

America's fascist moment

So, here we are on Feb. 29, 2016.

The presumably putative Republican presidential nominee, de-facto fascist Donald Trump, refuses to outright repudiate the support of noted white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, feigning an ignorance of Duke that he certainly does not possess. And, in light of this, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, had a question:

"I mean, is he really so stupid that he thinks Southerners aren't offended by the Ku Klux Klan? Is he really so ignorant of Southern voters that he thinks this is the way to their heart -- to go neutral, to play Switzerland when you're talking about the Klan!?"

I THINK Scarborough overestimates the virtue of Southern voters and underestimates the moral rot that has hollowed out the United States. If what Scarborough says is true, Trump would go down in flames tomorrow, "Super Tuesday," where most of the primary states are in the South.

He won't.

The candidate who also favorably retweeted a quote by Benito Mussolini will sweep through the South and all but lock up the Republican nomination. Listen, a Louisiana cousin of mine once actually said on Facebook, during a dust-up over banishing Confederate symbolism from the public square, "Sadly, the South lost the war." The Civil War.

And polling in the wake of Trump's overwhelming victory in the South Carolina GOP primary reveals that Southerners like my Confederate-loving kinfolk are far from isolated basket cases in the region's sociopolitical economy:

Mr. Trump’s support among those who say they support a temporary ban on Muslim entry into the United States — a notion Mr. Trump first advanced in early December — is significant. He won more than twice as many supporters of the ban in South Carolina as any other candidate. Voters often echo the things candidates say on the campaign trail, so that level may not be revelatory.

Possibly more surprising are the attitudes of Mr. Trump’s supporters on things that he has not talked very much about on the campaign trail. He has said nothing about a ban on gays in the United States, the outcome of the Civil War or white supremacy. Yet on all of these topics, Mr. Trump’s supporters appear to stand out from the rest of Republican primary voters.

Data from Public Policy Polling show that a third of Mr. Trump’s backers in South Carolina support barring gays and lesbians from entering the country. This is nearly twice the support for this idea (17 percent) among Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s voters and nearly five times the support of John Kasich’s and Ben Carson’s supporters (7 percent).

Similarly, YouGov data reveal that a third of Mr. Trump’s (and Mr. Cruz’s) backers believe that Japanese internment during World War II was a good idea, while roughly 10 percent of Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Kasich’s supporters do. Mr. Trump’s coalition is also more likely to disagree with the desegregation of the military (which was ordered in 1948 by Harry Truman) than other candidates’ supporters are.

The P.P.P. poll asked voters if they thought whites were a superior race. Most Republican primary voters in South Carolina — 78 percent — disagreed with this idea (10 percent agreed and 11 percent weren’t sure). But among Mr. Trump’s supporters, only 69 percent disagreed. Mr. Carson’s voters were the most opposed to the notion (99 percent), followed by Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz’s supporters at 92 and 89 percent. Mr. Rubio’s backers were close to the average level of disagreement (76 percent).

According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.

Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.

SO, WE AGAIN come to the question at hand: How have we come to this moment in American history? How have we arrived at the point where the party of Abraham Lincoln is about to nominate a fascist vulgarian as its candidate for president of the United States?

The correct answer probably is the most obvious one. Moral rot, elite decadence and economic hardship had turned an electoral majority of Germans into willing Nazis by 1933, and the same factors in 2016 likewise have unleashed the American Id.

It is our very own, all-American fascist moment, summoned forth like a demon within -- not by an exorcist delivering it to the wrath of a holy God but, instead, by a megalomaniac desiring to channel the darkness for his own malevolent ends.

3 Chords & the Truth: Shtick happens. Or not.

I looked and looked and looked for a gimmick, a theme, a shtick for this week's episode of the Big Show.

I got nothin'.

So this week's 3 Chords & the Truth will be completely shtick-free. No gimmicks. No overarching theme. No cutesy-pie crapola. Just me and you . . . and the music.

One hopes that will be enough. It ought to, you know? Because aren't we all getting tired of people's shticks?

That is all.

Just listen to the unvarnished program, if you please. It's here. Or down there. Or over there.

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

I spy a numbers station

Rikki don't lose that number
You don't wanna call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself
Rikki don't lose that number
It's the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better
When you get home

-- Steely Dan

Natasha callink Boris . . . Natasha callink Boris. . . . 

Important message for Boris!

Uno, dos, siete, cuatro, cuatro, seis, ocho, tres, nueve. . . . 

If you hear a strange station on shortwave that's just counting -- usually in Spanish -- it's a spy . . . somewhere . . . sending coded messages to other spies . . . somewhere.

I USED to pick up these stations all the time when I was a kid. They seemed incredibly mysterious back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That's because they were. And are.

Still, it's somehow reassuring to know the cloak-and-dagger folks stiil do that voodoo that they do old school, though Natasha here has incorporated a dial up-style modem into her sleuthy transmissions to Boris Badenov . . . wherever he might be.

In this case -- now that advanced computing is available to the average listener -- I was fortunate enough to decode this particular message in just a couple of hours. Here is the transcript:

Attention: Agent Badenov. STOP.

Inform Comrade Putin that Operation Combover is more successful than we had hoped. STOP. Now calculate odds of Donald Trump securing Republican nomination at 74 percent. STOP. The American voter is much more stupid than previous intelligence indicated. STOP.

With luck in November, American hegemony will be finished. STOP. With very good fortune, we could turn this into a second American civil war. STOP.

Awaiting further instructions. STOP.

Signed, Natasha.

END.

Hitchin' a spin

This evening, after watching the network news and its tales of death, mayhem and Trump -- and then reports about all the non-campaign goings-on -- I found myself with a stark choice.

Happy, poppy tunes from 1971 or slitting my wrists.

I trust I made the wise choice. Thank you, Vanity Fare, wherever you are.

Trump protests he's just as Christian as the next POS

"For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President, No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man's religion or faith."

-- Donald Trump

Says the man who cites "two Corinthians," when trying to bamboozle Evangelical voters.

If the vicar of Christ, who Catholics believe to hold "the keys to the Kingdom," given to him in Matthew 19 minutes after 16 o'clock, doesn't have the right to proclaim Donald Trump not a Christian in any sense we're given to understand the term, then who the hell does?

Donald Trump, obviously:

How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

FRANKLY, I don't really care whether the Donald is a Christian. Like the pope, I have my serious doubts on the question.

What I do care about is that he's a loose-cannon neofascist who plays to and feeds off the darkest human instincts among the angriest and most alienated (generally for good reason) Americans.

What I also care about is that, in the world of Trump, those of us who believe what the Catholic Church proclaims are somehow, no doubt, un-American. And if that were the case, it's a label I'd wear with pride.

Donald, whether you're a Christian or not, you can go straight to hell.

Sounds just right. Not perfect, right

OK, there are better record changers out there than this 1956-vintage Zenith.

To be overly truthful, it's really a rebranded Voice of Music 1200-series unit with a "Cobra" tone arm stuck on it. There are even better changers of this vintage out there, if you're willing to pay up.

But to me, this sounds absolutely right. Just enough rumble, a wee bit of hum . . . it sounds like youth. My youth. It sounds like a console stereo in the living room, with the grown-ups playing their music on it.

You can almost smell the hot vacuum tubes burning off a thin coating of dust . . . even when your amp in 2016 is quite solid state. If you're over 50, you KNOW that smell, and you know it well enough to smell it in your mind's nose.

No, sometimes with the right album, you don't want sound that's perfect. You want sound that's right.