Tony Joe White -- "Polk Salad Annie" (1969)

Down in Louisiana

Where the alligators grow so mean

There lived a girl

That I swear to the world

Made the alligators look tame

I have a strict policy of staying away from any woman who makes alligators look tame.  

Maybe if I found myself in New Orleans on business and I could avoid giving this woman my real name, I might consider one teeny little "date" with such a femme fatale.  Especially if I had been drinking at this fine French Quarter establishment:

But it's probably a better idea to steer clear – especially if the woman's momma was working on a chain gang as the result of a rumpus involving a straight razor, which was the case with "Polk Salad Annie's" momma.

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Polk salad – American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) – is a large herbaceous perennial that is native to the eastern half of the United States.  ("Poke salad" seems to be the more common spelling, but I'm following White here.)

Parts of the plant are quite toxic, but the leaves are apparently safe to eat if you pick them before they mature.  (One source I found says leaves that are under seven inches in length are OK, but I think I'll take a pass on pokeweed altogether – there are plenty of varieties of lettuce, spinach, etc., at my local grocery store to satisfy my needs.)

Pokeweed (a/k/a/"Polk salad")

If you live out in the woods and have no money and decide to pick you a mess of polk salad and carry it home in a towsack, my understanding is that you need to rinse the leaves in cold water, cook them in boiling water, rinse them again, boil them again, and rinse them again.

Of course, you can just buy them in a can:

Polk salad is similar to collard, turnip, or mustard greens, and is at its best when cooked in bacon grease and served with bacon.  But you could say the same thing about almost any green vegetable (e.g., Brussels sprouts).

Click here for an article that tells you everything you need to know about cooking polk salad.

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Tony Joe White was born and reared (not raised – as my high-school English teacher taught us, you raise animals but you rear children) in a small town in northeast Louisiana, near the Mississippi River.  

"Polk Salad Annie," White's only hit single, was recorded in 1968 in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and released late that year.

Initially, the record went nowhere.  White was living in Corpus Christi, Texas, at the time, and the people who heard him play live bought enough copies to make it a local hit.  Eventually, it charted nationally in July – months after its initial release – and stayed in the top 10 throughout August of that year.  (We started school in August in those days, so "Polk Salad Annie" qualifies for inclusion in my ongoing series of one-hit wonders from my senior year of high school.)

White's other singles didn't do nearly as well, although his "Soul Francisco" single was something of a hit in France and Belgium.  ("Rainy Night in Georgia" – which he had written in 1962 – became a big hit for Brook Benton in 1970.)

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Tony Joe appeared in the 1974 movie Catch My Soul.  That movie – think of it as "Othello" meets "Hair" – was directed by Patrick McGoohan, the star of two of my favorite television series of all time, Secret Agent and The Prisoner.  

The movie starred Richie Havens (of Woodstock fame) in the Othello role, Lance LeGault as Iago (you might remember him from The A-Team), Season Hubley as Desdemona, Susan Tyrrell as Emilia, and White (who wrote and performed several songs on the movie's soundtrack) as Cassio.  Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and Billy Joe Royal also appeared.

Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner

Catch My Soul was – in director McGoohan's words – "a disaster."  (He never directed a movie again.) 

Here's an excerpt from Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times:

The music, a lot of it written by Tony Joe White, who plays Cassio ("a wino from Baton Rouge, Louisiana") is not at all bad, especially when it's being sung by Mr. White or Richie Havens, who is as creditable an Othello as it's possible to be under the nervy circumstances.  It's the hybrid plot and dialogue that keep one in what is genteelly called stitches. . . .

Says Desdemona in plighting her troth: "Whither thou goest, I will go. Whither thou lodgeth, I will lodge."  . . . You wouldn't be at all surprised if she added: "In whatever car thou renteth, I will be beside thee, on the fronteth seat."

When Desdemona, asks Cassio why Othello no longer favors him, the sodden Cassio pulls himself together just long enough to say: "Ah don' know.  A mess a things.  Ah ain't much of a talker."

"I like not that," says Iago, as Desdemona goes off to whisper into Cassio's ear. Says the distracted Othello: "Wha's dat?" . . .

Susan Tyrrell, who was so good in Fat City, turns up as Emilia, a woman who talks like Mae West and who dresses as if she had access to the wardrobe of the Madwoman of Chaillot.

Forget the movie and get the soundtrack album.

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"Polk Salad Annie" has been covered by a number of artists – unfortunately, Tina Turner was not one of them.  

Elvis Presley regularly performed "Polk Salad Annie" in concert.  Click here to view a video of one such performance, featuring Jerry Scheff's fuzzy bass solo.  (Scheff, whose first achieved success as the bass player on the Association's "Along Comes Mary," was a member of Presley's "Taking Care of Business" band from 1969 until 1977, and also played bass on L.A. Woman, the final Doors album.)

Click here if you'd like to watch a video of Tony Joe singing "Polk Salad Annie" with Johnny Hallyday, also known as "the French Elvis Presley."  (Why Tony Joe and Johnny were sharing the stage in Memphis in 1984 is a very good question.)

And click here if you'd like to hear Dan Aykroyd and Jim (not John) Belushi's version of "Polk Salad Annie."  It's OK, although Aykroyd's faux-Louisiana accent is a bit much.

Click here to listen to the original "Polk Salad Annie."

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

PJ Harvey -- "Down by the Water" (1995)

Little fish, big fish

Swimming in the water

Come back here, man 

Gimme my daughter

I've been doing 2 or 3 lines for almost three years now, and I have written about almost 400 different songs.  But there are still many, many worthwhile recording artists whose music hasn't yet been featured on my wildly popular (but disappointingly unlucrative) blog.

I can now check PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey off my list.

PJ Harvey was born in 1969 in Bridport, a British town of about 13,000 souls that sits on the English Channel.  Bridport is located at the western end of Chesil Beach, a long shingle beach -- which means it consists of pebbles rather than sand.

Chesil Beach (UK)

Chesil Beach was the setting for Ian McEwen's short 2007 novel, On Chesil Beach, which is about the honeymoon of a young British couple in 1962.  It is a compelling novel, but not a happy one.  (It's one of those heartbreaking books that is made even more heartbreaking by the fact that things could have so easily turned out happily.)  

"Down by the Water" is from PJ's first of six solo albums to date, To Bring You My Love, which was released in 1995.  (She had previously recorded two albums as the frontwoman of the PJ Harvey Trio.)  The song got a lot of airplay on college radio stations, and the music video appeared on MTV quite a few times.

"Down by the Water" was nominated for the Grammy for "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance," but lost out to Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know," her sweet little musical bouquet of flowers for Dave Coulier.  No disrespect to PJ, but "You Oughta Know" deserved the top prize.  Click here to read what 2 or 3 lines had to say about "You Oughta Know."  

A lot of people have posted online explanations of the meaning of this PJ Harvey song, most of which are completely loony.  (All of you people, listen to me -- you need to get a life.  Or maybe you need new meds.)

In 2005, PJ was asked by Spin magazine what was the most ridiculous thing that anyone had ever written about her.  Here's her answer:

People assume my songs are autobiographical, but I'm not a dark person like the characters in my songs.  Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they'll listen to "Down by the Water" and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her.

The music video features Harvey in a red dress wearing a very big wig and lots of bright-red lipstick.  (She described the look as "Joan Crawford on acid.")  As you'll see, she spent a lot of time in the swimming pool during the shooting of that video, although she did have a body double for some of the shots.

Here's the "Down by the Water" video:

Click here to order the song from Amazon:

Jay-Z -- "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" (1998)

From standin' on the corners boppin'

To drivin' some of the hottest cars 

New York has ever seen

For droppin' some of the hottest verses 

Rap has ever heard

It has been quite some time since our last "Hip Hop 101" class, hasn't it?  Well, better late than never.

Today's lecture features one of Jay-Z's biggest hits, "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)," from his third album (its title was Vol.2 . . . Hard Knock Life), which was released in 1998.  

The album, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, made Jay-Z a superstar -- driving "some of the hottest cars New York has ever seen" as a result of his coming up with "some of the hottest verses rap has ever heard."  But as the lyrics quoted above indicate, Jay-Z hadn't forgotten what it was like to be a teenager standing on a Bed-Stuy street corner, working on his rhymes while peddling crack. 

Jay-Z and his Rolls Royce Phantom

Most of you don't know much about rap music, but I'm betting that you know the song that Jay-Z samples on this track: "It's a Hard Knock Life," from the very popular Broadway musical, Annie.  

A scene from Annie

Annie was based on the "Little Orphan Annie" comic strip, which I couldn't stand when I was a kid.  It opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for nearly six years.  A 35th anniversary revival is scheduled to open on Broadway this fall.

"It's a Hard Knock Life" is performed by a number of young orphan girls leading a very barebones existence:

Instead of treated, we get tricked
Instead of kisses, we get kicked

It's a hard knock life! 

Even Christmas -- the best day of the year for most children -- is a bitter disappointment for the orphans:

Santa Claus we never see 

Santa Claus, what's that -- who's he? 

No one cares for you a smidge 

When you're in an orphanage
It's a hard knock life!

Annie was made into a movie (starring Albert Finney, Carol Burnett, and Bernadette Peters) in 1982:

Last year, Will Smith announced that he wanted to produce a new movie version of the play that would star his daughter, Willow.  (Click here to read a 2 or 3 lines post featuring Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair.")  Smith wants Jay-Z to help write a new musical score.  I don't think the movie's been green-lighted yet -- we'll wait and see what happens.

The official music video for "Hard Knock Life" features a number of young children singing the lines from the Annie song.  While they might not be orphans in a literal sense, the video depicts their lives as far from easy.

"Hard Knock Life" was a big hit in the United States, and was Jay-Z's first single to achieve success outside the U.S.  It made the top 10 in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and all the Scandanavian countries.  (It reached only #21 on the French charts.  Why do the French always have to be so damn difficult?)

If Jay-Z can make a big hit out of a song sung by a bunch of little girls in a Broadway musical, he obviously has the talent to make a credible rap track out of just about anything.

Here's the parody of "Hard Knock Life" from Austin Powers in Goldmember, the third of the Austin Powers movies:

Here's the official music video for "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem):

Click here if you'd like to buy the song from Amazon:

Sniff 'n' the Tears -- "Driver's Seat" (1978)

So pick up your feet

Got to move to the trick of the beat
There is no elite
Just take your place in the driver's seat

Paul Roberts, who wrote "Driver's Seat," was a hyperrealist painter before he formed Sniff 'n' the Tears in 1977.  Roberts has divided his time between music and painting since then.

Here's his 1989 painting, "Angel Redeemer":

And here's his 2004 painting, "Making Waves":

Click here to see more paintings by Roberts.

According to Roberts, the lyrics for "Driver's Seat" were inspired "by the bewilderment felt in the aftermath of a breakup and the need to be positive."

(Say what?)  

"Driver's Seat" is an irresistible pop song, and I'm crazy about it.  It's a great song to sing along to, but I don't think the lyrics mean much of anything.  So I'm not going to quote them or analyze them or do the usual 2 or 3 lines stuff.  I'd rather just listen to it.

"Driver's Seat" is one of those radio hits that comes and goes and is largely forgotten until someone decides to use it in a TV commercial or a movie soundtrack.  For me, "Driver's Seat" rose from the dead of one-hit wonders from 1978 when it was used on the soundtrack of Boogie Nights, the 1997 Paul Thomas Anderson-directed movie about the rise and fall of the Southern California adult-film industry.

Here's the trailer for the movie:

The movie's main character, Dirk Diggler (played by Mark Wahlberg), was based on notorious porn actor John Holmes.  (Holmes, who had sex with an estimated 3000 women, died from complications caused by AIDS in 1988, when he was 44.)

Hoffman, Wahlberg, and Reilly in Boogie Nights

Despite its rather sordid subject matter, Boogie Nights was a very appealing movie -- most of the critics loved it.  The movie revived the career of Burt Reynolds (who was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar) and made stars of Wahlberg and Julianne Moore.  The cast also includes William Macy, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Heather Graham. 

I watched Boogie Nights on DVD several years after it was released, and then watched it again with the director's commentary going.  I think that's the only time I've ever listened to the entire director's commentary on a movie DVD -- Thomas never stops talking, but he's a very knowledgeable guy, and his enthusiasm about movie, the actors, and film-making in general is infectious.

Here's the scene from Boogie Nights that features "Driver's Seat":

Here's Sniff 'n' the Tears performing "Driver's Seat":

Here's a 2005 cover of "Driver's Seat" by the Belgian dance/trance music duo, DHT (which stands for "dance house trance"):

Click here to buy the original "Driver's Seat" from Amazon:

Magnetic Fields -- "Washington, D.C." (1999)

Washington, D.C.

It's the greatest place to be!

It's not the cherries everywhere in bloom

It's not the way they put folks on the moon

It's not the spectacles and pageantry,

The thousand things you've got to see

(If Washington's not the greatest place to be because of all those things, then why is it the greatest place to be?  Don't worry -- we'll answer that question eventually.)

I moved to Washington, DC, after I graduated from law school in 1977, and I've never really left.

I worked in San Francisco in the early 1980s, but that was only a temporary assignment -- a "TDY," as the government calls it.  And I had a job in Philadelphia in the early 1990s, but commuted back to my home in suburban Washington on weekends.

Every day, I take the subway downtown to my office -- which is situated almost halfway between the White House and the Capitol -- and every evening, I take it back to my home in the 'burbs.  I'm rarely in DC on the weekend.  (There were all those years of my kids' basketball and baseball and soccer games, with chores and errands and movies and bike rides squeezed in.)

Tonight was an exception to the usual rule -- and perhaps a preview of the empty-nest years to come, which will begin in just over a year when my youngest child heads off to college.

I left my office at 7 pm and walked exactly 1.7 miles (or so says Mapquest) to the apartment on Capitol Hill that my older son and his girlfriend rented when they got their graduate degrees a couple of months ago.  (He got a law degree, she got an MBA.)  

It was a hot and steamy July evening, and I was shvitzed in the pits at the end of my journey.  Here's the route I took:

Here's my office building.  It's a former department store (the downtown flagship of the local Hecht's chain, which is now part of Macy's) that was converted to office space a decade or so ago:

Here's what the building looked like in 1925:

Marshall Park -- named in honor of former Chief Justice John Marshall -- is just a couple of blocks from my office.  Here's a statue of the old Chief Justice himself (who  was a fervent opponent of the individual mandate) that stands in that park:

And here's a neighboring sculpture of two chess players:

Marshall Park is surrounded by both federal and D.C. courthouses.  South of the courthouses are the Canadian Embassy and the National Gallery of Art.  The U.S. Capitol is a few blocks further east:

There's a very interesting group of sculptures just west of the Capitol.  The centerpiece of that group is an impressive equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant, who was a hard drinker and a harder fighter:

On each side of the Grant statue's pedestal, there are reliefs depicting Union infantrymen:

North of the Grant statue is a group of cavalrymen:

South of Grant is a group of artillerymen:

I walked along the southern border of the Capitol grounds, passing a statue of President Garfield:

After passing the Library of Congress and a couple of House of Representatives office buildings, I came to St. Peter's Catholic Church, which stands directly across the street from the apartment where my son and his girlfriend live:

(I understand that St. Peter's usually has plenty of seats available for Sunday services.  That seems to be true of all the churches that are located close to the Capitol.)

Here's their circa 1850 building -- they have the top floor:

This door ornament -- a jackass holding an American flag -- was apparently left behind by the previous tenant of the ground floor apartment, a Democratic ex-congressman who lost his seat in 2010:

We strolled a couple of blocks to a local Tex-Mex restaurant, Tortilla Coast, and had dinner:

Tortilla Coast is next door to Bullfeathers, an aptly-named Capitol Hill watering hole:

Washington doesn't inspire nearly as many songs as New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco, but it has inspired a few, including this song by Magnetic Fields -- an indie pop group whose music is just as precious and twee as it can be.

(By the way, the Magnetic Fields are named after the 1920 novel, Les Champs magnétiques, by André Breton, the founder of literary Surrealism.  Well . . . isn't that special?)

"Washington, D.C." can be found on the 69 Love Songs album, which the Magnetic Fields released in 1999.  That album does consist of exactly 69 love songs.  (That may sound like you're getting a lot for your money, but many of the songs are quite short -- several are less than one minute long.)

The group's frontman, Stephen Merritt, has said that "69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love.  It's an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love."  (Doh!)

The singer of "Washington, D.C." loves the city, but it's not the history, or the grand public buildings and monuments, or the Smithsonian museums, or the cherry trees that attracts her to our nation's capital.  "It's my baby's kiss that keeps me coming back," she sings.  

On the whole, that's a much healthier reason to love a city than the fact that it's the most powerful city in the world and has a whole bunch of tourist attractions -- don't you think?

Here's "Washington, D.C.":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Deep Purple -- "Hush" (1968)

She's got loving like quicksand

Only took one touch of her hand

To blow my mind, and I'm in so deep

That I can't eat and I can't sleep

(At first, I was just going to quote the first two lines above.  But I just can't ignore such a nice example of enjambment, so I included the next line as well.)

Jon Lord of Deep Purple died earlier this week at age 71.  The immediate cause of his death was a pulmonary embolism, but he also was suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Jon Lord in 2008

I don't enjoy writing obituary posts, but I have no choice here.  Lord was simply too talented and too unique a performer -- I have to acknowledge his passing, and I'm doing so by featuring "Hush."

Deep Purple's version of the "Hush" is one of the great classic rock singles of all time, and it's Jon Lord's organ playing that makes it so special.  Like many great jazz, blues, and rock organists of the pre-synthesizer era, Lord's instrument of choice was the Hammond B-3 organ.  (Actually, Lord usually played a Hammond C-3, which is mechanically identical to the B-3, but comes equipped with "modesty panels" that hide the performer's lower body from the audience -- very useful for lady church organists.)  

As this interview explains, Lord's signature Hammond sound results from the way he used amplification.  (This is a little "inside baseball" for many of you, no doubt, but anyone who ever tried to play a B-3/C-3 -- which includes me -- will find this very interesting.)

Keith Moon was an absolutely unique rock drummer because he could turn the drums into a lead instrument -- as he did on "I Can See for Miles."  Lord's organ style was very distinctive because he was able to turn the Hammond into a rhythm instrument, which gave the guitarist much more freedom.

"Hush" was written by Joe South, who had a big hit with another of his own compositions, "Games People Play."  It was originally released as a single in 1967 by Billy Joe Royal (of "Down in the Boondocks" fame), but failed to crack the top 40.  

Deep Purple's version of "Hush" -- it's first single -- made it to #4 on the U.S. charts despite the fact that was released on an obscure and short-lived label, Tetragrammaton Records.  (The name supposedly refers to the unspeakable Hebrew name of God.)

I cannot overstate how good a record "Hush" is.  It has not lost a thing in the 44 years since it was released, and it is simply inconceivable to me that any group of musicians in the world could do "Hush" better than this.  

Listen especially at the climax of Lord's organ solo (which almost sounds to me like two organists are playing at once, but which is all him):  Lord somehow ratchets up the intensity of his playing one more notch, then there's a drum roll that has the impact of someone kicking you in the behind, and then the  singer comes back in with "Naaah-nah-nah-naaah" and we are heading into the homestretch:

I also have to share with you a video of Deep Purple playing "Hush" on the Playboy After Dark television show.  It is a 100% live performance, and it's pretty bad -- Lord's organ is mixed way too low, and you can barely hear him.  Even worse is Hugh Hefner's painfully clumsy attempt to engage in small talk with Lord before the group performs.  (Watching this really makes you appreciate Johnny Carson.  Hefner was a major tool.)



(I don't think we got this show in Joplin, Missouri.  The only time I saw it was in Miami, when I represented the Parkwood High School Key Club chapter as a delegate to the organization's international convention in 1969.  We were lucky that night: the show featured Hef's main squeeze of the moment, Barbi Benton -- still the most appealing woman ever to grace the pages of Playboy.)

Barbi Benton

One final note.  Check out the lines quoted at the top of this post.  Can you name another song that mentions "quicksand"?

Of course, I'm referring to Spinal Tap's tribute to BBW, "Big Bottom":

The bigger the cushion

The sweeter the pushin'

That's what I said

The looser the waistband

The deeper the quicksand

Or so I have read

(Yes, 2 or 3 lines should feature "Big Bottom" some day -- and it will, I promise you.)

Click here to order "Hush" from Amazon: