Crabby Appleton – "Go Back" (1970)

And you know it's not right

When you kiss me tonight

You pretend his lips are mine

Crabby Appleton was a short-lived Los Angeles band that released two well-reviewed LPs and opened for some high-profile groups – including the Guess Who, Three Dog Night, and the Doors – before disbanding.

I recently rediscovered the group's biggest single, "Go Back," on a 5-CD compilation set called Forever Changing: The Golden Age of Elektra 1963-1973. (Thank you, Montgomery County Public Library!)

Although its stable of recording artists included the Doors, Elektra Records was not really a rock or pop label – it leaned more towards folk, with artists like the Byrds, Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, and Richard Farina.  Elektra also signed the amazing, one-of-a-kind Arthur Lee and Love, who supposedly persuaded the label's co-founder, Jac Holtzman, to give the Doors a chance.

But Elektra was not known for perfect little three-minute AM radio singles like "Go Back."

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Crabby Appleton is an odd name for a band.  Anyone out there know where it comes from?

Crabby Appleton's publicity photo

My more mature readers may remember that Crabby Appleton – his slogan was "Rotten to the core!" – was the arch-villain on the "Tom Terrific" cartoon that was featured on the legendary "Captain Kangaroo" TV show, which aired five mornings a week on the CBS television network in the 1950's and 1960's.

Tom Terrific was a boy superhero who wore a funnel-shaped "thinking cap," which enabled him to turn himself into a tornado, a train, or whatever was necessary.

Click here to see the "Tom Terrific" intro.

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We had two television stations in my home town (Joplin, Missouri) back in the day.  One was a CBS affiliate – CBS was the dominant network back then, with the Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton variety shows, plus "Gunsmoke" and "Beverly Hillbillies" and many others – while the other local station carried a mix of NBC and ABC programming.

Much to my chagrin, the second station chose to stick with the fuddy-duddy ABC western "Wagon Train " in 1964, when NBC introduced the coolest TV show ever, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."  I was beside myself.

The stars of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

Click here to see the "long open" to a season-one "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." episode.

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Both my parents worked when I was a kid, so I spent most of my summer days with my grandmother, who lived only a couple of blocks away.  She was very young and very energetic for a grandmother, and really functioned more like a second mother for me.  (When I was born, she was less than a year older than I was when my youngest child was born.)  My mother was only child, and I was an only child until I was almost 7, so I had my grandmother all to myself.

I have vivid memories of my grandmother's cooking.  She did all the standards – hamburgers, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, etc.

A favorite Saturday lunch to accompany the major-league baseball "Game of the Week" (broadcast by legendary former players Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese) was macaroni and cheese topped with pan-fried sliced bologna.

Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese

When "The Wonderful World of Disney" aired on Sunday evenings, I would watch it while eating my standard Sunday night dinner – scrambled eggs, toast with grape jelly, and a chocolate milk shake.

But the most remarkable dish she prepared was known as "syrup 'n' bread," a favorite breakfast that I speculate was something that was created out of necessity during the Depression.  To make it, you cut up two slices of white sandwich bread into nine bite-sized squares each, placed small pats of margarine on each square, and poured white Karo syrup over it.  (Sort of a poor man's French toast, I guess.)

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There weren't a lot of kids living on my grandmother's block and certainly no summer camps or other planned activities for me, so I spent most of the day in front of the television.  (As I got older, I spent more time reading.  I'd often go to the public library and check out six books – which was the maximum number allowed -- then return them the next day and get six more.)

After starting my days off with "Captain Kangaroo," I watched several game shows – "Jeopardy" (hosted by the smooth and very insincere Art Fleming) was my favorite.  (Yes, I kept score.)

Click here to watch a brief segment from a vintage "Jeopardy" episode.

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At noon, I would have lunch and watch a curious local program called "Melody Matinee," which was obviously aimed at rural housewives and senior citizens.

It featured a country/gospel band (including a guitar player named Earl who was missing the third and fourth fingers on his strumming hand) and a genial host who acknowledged viewers' birthdays and anniversaries and passed along song requests.  (The TV station's website claims that "Melody Matinee" was the longest running local music program in the U.S.)

"Melody Matinee" stars Virgil and Earl

Click here to learn more about "Melody Matinee."

After that, my grandmother watched "As the World Turns" and a couple of other soap operas.  Later in the afternoon, there were old Roy Rogers and Gene Autry reruns, "Three Stooges" reruns, and reruns of "Wrestling with Russ Davis" from the Chicago Amphitheatre – click here to watch a match featuring Gorgeous George, the greatest of all the old-time wrestlers.

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Back to Crabby Appleton, the villain in the "Tom Terrific" cartoons and the namesake of the band that recorded today's featured song.

I actually thought Crabby Appleton was the villain on "Underdog" – one of the very best cartoon series of my childhood – but Underdog's arch-enemy was actually Simon Bar Sinister.

Here's Crabby Appleton:

And here's Simon Bar Sinister:

I think my confusion is understandable.  One black-and-white mad-scientist cartoon arch-villain looks pretty much like the next one.

By the way, Simon Bar Sinister's name is an example of macaronic language, which mean text that mixes words from more than one language – here, the name is sort of a bilingual pun on a heraldic mark known as a "bend sinister" in English, which indicates there's an illegitimate birth in the family line.  "Barre" – pronounced "bar" – is the French equivalent of "bend."  Hence, Simon Bar Sinister is another way of saying "Simon the Bastard," which he was.  

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The "Underdog" theme song was a classic:

When criminals in this world appear

And break the laws that they should fear

And frighten all who see or hear

The cry goes out both far and near for Underdog!

Underdog!  Underdog!  Underdog!

Speed if lightning, roar of thunder, 

Fighting all who rob and plunder

Underdog!  Underdog!

Click here to listen to that theme song.

Underdog was modeled loosely on Superman.  He was a mild-mannered shoeshine boy who transformed himself into a super-powered hero by taking an energy pill and going into a phone booth to change into a Superman-like costume.  Underdog, who always spoke in rhyming couplets – e.g., 'There's no need to fear/Underdog is here!" -- was voiced by Wally Cox, whose television persona was that of a 97-pound weakling, but who was actually strong and athletic.  (He and Marlon Brando were close friends – rumor has it that they were lovers – and their ashes were scattered together in Death Valley after Brando's death.)

Wally Cox and Marlon Brando

Cox is probably best remembered today for his frequent appearances on the old "Hollywood Squares" quiz show.  You can click here to watch an episode of that show that features Cox.  (Cox is asked a question about eight minutes into the show.)

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Click here to hear a cover of the "Underdog" theme song recorded by the Butthole Surfers, of all people.

The Butthole Surfers are a very strange and disturbing band founded by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary (originally Paul Leary Walthall), who met when they were students at Trinity University in San Antonio in the 1970's.  

Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes

My sister also went to Trinity – she was a couple of years younger than Haynes, but knew him because they both played basketball.  (He was the men's team captain and also an accounting major – she is still Trinity's career basketball scoring leader and became the first female non-tennis player to be inducted into the Trinity athletic hall of fame several years ago.)

The band's CDs include Locust Abortion Technician, Independent Worm Saloon, and Hairway to Steven.  (Think about it.)  

Click here to watch the music video for one of my favorite Butthole Surfers songs, 'Who Was in My Room Last Night?"

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And click here to watch an excerpt from an episode of comedian John Byner's "Something Else" TV show that features Crabby Appleton lip-synching to "Go Back" on Catalina Island in 1970.  (By the way, that video was posted by the band's lead singer, Michael Fennelly, who wrote "Go Back.")

To buy "Go Back" from Amazon, click here:

Five Man Electrical Band – "Signs" (1971)

The sign said

You got to have a membership card
To get inside (GRUNT!)

[NOTE: I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines on November 1, 2009.  That means we'll be celebrating my wildly popular little blog's tenth birthday in just a few days.

This resurrected 2 or 3 lines post – which originally appeared on July 23, 2010 – features a great song that I will always associate with Nina's Green Parrot, a Kansas bar where many of my high-school friends and I misspent our youth sucking down cheap 3.2% beer.  Those were the days, my friend . . .] 

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Les Emmerson of the Five Man Electrical Band doesn't literally say or sing the word "Grunt!" in today's featured song – he just grunts.  And that grunt is the highlight of this song.  It's hard to explain why, but that grunt packs a tremendous emotional wallop.

We'll get back to this song a little later, but first let's set the stage – which means traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind – a journey into a wondrous land whose inhabitants float in a sea of cheap 3.2% beer.

Our destination: Nina's "Green Parrot" bar, in Galena, Kansas.  The time: a hot Friday evening in July 1971.

Galena (with sphalerite)

Galena – named after the most commercially important lead ore mineral, which was discovered in abundance in the area in 1877 – is and always has been (as far as I know from personal experience) a depressed and depressing old mining town.

Within a few months of the discovery of lead ore, Galena was home to 10,000 souls, and its population eventually peaked at 30,000.  The 2000 census reported that Galena had only 3287 residents, and I have to think that every single one of them would move away if they had their druthers.

Of course, I haven't been to Galena in years – I'm basing my opinions on what the town was like in the early 1970's.  Maybe things have changed for the better.  But maybe they haven't.

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I don't think I ever took today's featured song too seriously, but I'm guessing a lot of people did.  I sort of bought into all that counterculture stuff when I was in college, but I wasn't totally committed like a lot of people were in those days.

"Signs" hit #3 on the Billboard chart in 1971, and was very successfully covered by Tesla in 1990.  If you don't remember the gist of it, here's a very learned exegesis courtesy of Wikipedia:

The song was released during an era of social and political change, and its lyrics carry themes of tolerance and inclusion.

In the first verses of the song, the main protagonist (a hippie) expresses his frustration over a series of signs he encounters. One of the signs discourages "long-haired, freaky people" from applying for a job, while another expresses the "trespassers will be shot on sight" threat; yet another proclaims that membership cards are required to get into a club. 

While he is able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist in the first two instances — first, by tucking his hair up in a cap; the second, by telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior — the protagonist, since he isn't wearing a button-down shirt or tie, is turned away at the door by the club usher.

In the final verse, the hippie shares his experiences of going to a church, where he is finally accepted for who he is. After pointing out a sign reading "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray," he is asked to contribute to the offering; however, when he realizes he has no money, he takes out a slip of paper, writing on it "Thank you, Lord for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine." 

Did the author pull this from a paper he did for a college English class ("English 323: Popular Song Lyrics from the Psychedelic Era")?  I've never read such constipated prose.  "Able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist"?  "Telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior"?  You gotta be kidding me.

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I remember this song being on the jukebox at Nina's.  Nina's wasn't the only bar in Galena, but it was the one favored overwhelmingly by Joplin teenagers.  The summer of 1971 was the summer after my freshman year in college, when – and I am not exaggerating, as several other members of the Parkwood High School class of 1970 can testify – I spent six nights a week at Nina's.  (On the seventh day, Nina rested – and I dried out.)

I worked from 7 AM to 3:30 PM that summer unloading railroad cars at a grocery warehouse for four bucks an hour.

Did I ever tell you the story about having to unload an Clorox car that had been humped – that's a technical railroad term – a little too brusquely, which resulted in a few dozen cases of gallon jugs of bleach being crushed, leaving undiluted chlorine bleach an inch or two deep in the bottom of the car?  Where was OSHA when I needed them?  My lungs have never been the same.

A vintage Clorox ad

And what about the time the Ralston-Purina car got banged around somewhere on the Frisco railroad tracks between St. Louis and Joplin, and after unloading Quaker Oats and Cap'n Crunch and a bunch of other stuff, I came to a few damaged cases of dog and cat food that had been festering inside the cars for several days in the August sun, and were literally crawling with maggots?

When my shift at the warehouse was over, I came home and took a bath, gobbled down a home-cooked dinner (with nary a words of thanks), and headed out after a "conversation" with my mother.

This "conversation" generally went something like this:

Her:  "Where are you going?"

Me:  "Out."

Her:  "When will you be back?"

Me:  "Not too late."

Then it was off to Galena – via old Route 66, part of the nightly convoy of Missouri teenagers heading to Kansas for 3.2% beer, which could be legally purchased by 18-year-olds.

Going in the other direction was an equally heavy stream of Kansas 21-year-olds beating it to Missouri to visit our many classy cocktail lounges – liquor-by-the-drink (not to mention many other accoutrements of civilization) being illegal in Kansas.  

It's amazing there weren't more automobile-related deaths and dismemberments at the end of the evenings as both groups returned home (usually much the worse for wear) but it was only about a 10-mile trip, and I don't recall any serious accidents during those summers.  However, I do remember a few close calls passing buses and 18-wheelers on the two-lane highway.  But my 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme has a 350-cubic inch V8, so passing didn't take long when you really stomped on the gas.

(NOTICE:  Please drink responsibly.  Always have a designated driver.  Do as I say, not as I did.)

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We usually hit Nina's shortly after 7 PM and stayed until closing time, which was midnight.  Usually, I drank two quart bottles of beer each night – occasionally three.  (Sometimes, I would order a 24-ounce "tall boy" to go and down it on the drive home – a decision I would really regret when my mother rousted me out of bed at 6 AM the next morning to go to work.)

I could talk about Galena for hours.  I remember an amazing number of details, like the beer prices at Nina's.  My friends and I usually went for quarts of beer – not regular bottles.  (We were frugal types – children of children of the Great Depression.)  The premium brands – Budweiser, Schiltz, Coors -–were 35 cents a quart, while the bargain brands – Pabst, Hamm's, Stag, Busch – went for 25 cents, as I recall.

You could get the premium quarts for a quarter each at "Uncle" Buck's Recreation Parlor across the street, plus watch farmers in bib overalls play dominos and play pool on non-coin-operated pool tables, with the balls hand-racked by a gnarly little dude wearing a carpenter's apron full of change.  It was right out of a Dickens novel – if Dickens had written any novels about rednecks and beer-soaked teenagers, that is.

We spent so much time at Nina's that we ended up hanging out with the bartenders after hours – a couple of cousins named Ron and Marilyn, who gave us extra beer-company lights and window signs that Nina didn't need.

I fondly remember one very chic Hamm's lamp, which was by far the most notable piece of decor in my college apartment:

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What did we actually do for those five hours a night, six nights a week?  Drinking two quarts of beer didn't take all that much time, and Nina's didn't serve food.  (Well, they had chips and Beer Nuts and pickled hard-boiled eggs and SlimJims -- but not much else.)

We didn't dance to the jukebox – I don't think that was allowed.  (Nina, the mean, squinty, uncommunicative old woman who owned the joint, had a lot of rules, and you either followed them or got kicked out.)  There was a coin-operated pool table, but I rarely played it – I wasn't good enough, and it was always in use.  I don't think we played cards while we at Nina's – spades and hearts were obsessions of ours in those years – although we might have.  And there were no TVs to watch.

So I assume we mostly talked.  Talked with the girls who came to Nina's – or talked about the girls who came to Nina's (or the girls who didn't come to Nina's).

Sometimes one of the smart, quiet girls from your English class would show up and it would suddenly dawn on you that she was really quite attractive, and you wondered why you never asked her out back in high school because she was not only cute, but also nice and not stuck-up and no doubt would have made a much more satisfactory girlfriend than most of the girls you did pursue.

A Schlitz "tall boy" can

Some nights – especially Fridays and Saturdays – we ventured further west, to Baxter Springs or even to Pittsburg, a college town with more varied entertainment opportunities.  But most nights, it was Nina's.

I don't know Nina's last name.  But I can see her right now, almost 40 years later, wearing a white waitress's uniform, sitting behind a hostess podium just inside the front door, checking IDs under a small desk lamp with her beady little eyes.  (It did not matter one whit if you came to Nina's every Monday through Saturday for 3 months, as I did, because she would still look at you as if she had never seen you before and simply hold out her hand for your driver's license.)  I know she died years ago, and I heard they auctioned off the bar's furnishings.

Then someone took the place over and ran it another 25 years or so until 2006, when a mine-shaft collapse resulted in the 114-year-old building's being condemned and later razed.   Here's what the old gal looked like in her final days:

Click here to read more about Nina's.

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I had a hard time deciding which song from Nina's jukebox I should honor.  Some of the songs I remember vividly from Nina's were "Long Cool Woman In a Black Dress" (the Hollies sans Graham Nash), "Sweet Hitchhiker" (Creedence Clearwater Revival's last big hit before they broke up), "One Fine Morning" (Lighthouse, a Canadian band like the Five Man Electrical Band), and "Liar" (Three Dog Night's darkest single). 

The Five Man Electrical Band

Then there was "Brandy" (by Looking Glass), a favorite of a girl I hung out and drank with the following summer.  ("Dated" would not really be the correct term.)  

At night when the bars close down

Brandy walks through a silent town

And loves a man who's not around

She still can hear him say

She hears him say "Brandy, you're a fine girl –

What a good wife you would be.

But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"

That song seems to have been a major favorite among girls of that era, but it made no sense to me.  Why in the world would a girl like a song about a sailor who told the woman who loved him that the sea was more important to him than she was, and then sailed awayhor a couple of years.

Maybe those girls agreed with this line from Anne Taintor:  "She liked imaginary men best of all."

Here are some more good Anne Taintor lines:

  – "Had she punished him enough?  How could she be sure?"

  – "One just had to admire his deluded self-confidence!"

  – "Looking for trouble?  Look no further!"

And my all-time favorite:

  

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Hmmm . . . now where was I?  Oh, yes . . . now I remember.

Click here to listen to "Signs."  (If you're from Joplin, close your eyes and pretend you're hearing it on Nina's jukebox back in 1971.)

Here's a link to use if you want to buy "Signs" from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968)

Use all your well-learned politesse

Or I'll lay your soul to waste

[NOTE: I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines on November 1, 2009.  That means we'll be celebrating my wildly popular little blog's tenth birthday in just a few days.

This month, I'm resurrecting some of the most significant 2 or 3 lines posts from its first year – which was probably its best year.  Here is one of the very first 2 or 3 lines posts to ever appear.  Fans of Jean-Luc Godard and James Joyce won't like it, but the rest of you will think it's a doozie.]

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When we were in junior high in the mid-1960s, I and many of my friends devoted a lot of attention to top-40 music. 

The Beatles were universally recognized as the numero uno group, but we disagreed over who was the best of the rest. 

My pick – the Rolling Stones – turned out to be a pretty good one. My best friend wasn't so lucky. He hitched his wagon to  . . . Herman's Hermits?  (Later he switched his allegiance to Simon and Garfunkel, which was a little better, I guess.)

By the time we were in high school, we focused less on singles and more on albums. Rubber Soul and Revolver produced some hit singles, but were viewed more as a whole than a collection of individual parts – as was the first Led Zeppelin album and many others. The Rolling Stones had some good albums prior to Beggars Banquet, but that was their first truly great LP.

The original "Beggar's Banquet" album cover

Track one, side one of that album – which issued in a rather plain white jacket with a simple cursive-script title after the original filthy-toilet cover was deemed unsuitable for the American market – was the immortal "Sympathy for the Devil," a song whose lyrics outdid almost anything else that had come along before it in terms of intellectual sophistication. 

It was an apologia pro vita sua of sorts sung by the devil himself ("Just call me Lucifer"), with references to Pontius Pilate, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi blitzkreig, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and various other bits of nasty business for which the Prince of Darkness is often given the credit. The song was over six minutes long, and doesn't sound a bit dated 40-plus years after it's original release.

I remember reading a review of the album in Newsweek, which mentioned the song's use of "politesse," a French word that can be translated simply as "politeness," but is better understood as meaning formal or genteel politeness. 

Remembering to say "please" and "thank you" when you ask someone to pass the taters and gravy doesn't mean you have politesse. We're talking the kind of politeness that is practiced by guys who wear morning coats and striped trousers when they drop by the ambassador's digs for tea or a spot of sherry. 

The point of the article was that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were much more than shaggy-haired teen idols cranking out boy-loves-girl lyrics employing a 6th-grade vocabulary. They were sophisticates and intellectuals.

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We were all concerned in those days with proving to our elders that the bands we listened to (the Doors, the Kinks, the Who, et al.) deserved to be taken seriously. I remember how one friend of mine insisted that parents listen to a song on his brand-new Steppenwolf album that he hadn't listened to yet but understood made a strong anti-drug statement. Imagine his surprise (and that of his parents) when John Kay got to the chorus of that song:

God damn the pusher

God damn, I say, the pusher

I said God damn, GOD DAMN the pusher man!

After I bought Beggar's Banquet and listened to it a few thousand times, I found the sheet music for the album at the local music store. I didn't play the guitar, but I was a pretty good pianist back then, so I attempted to play "Sympathy for the Devil," and "Parachute Woman," and "Stray Cat Blues," and all the rest on the piano, reading the sheet music more or less literally. That didn't work out quite as well as I hoped.

A few years later, when I was in college, I was hanging around with a pretty bad crowd – a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and poseurs. One of my friends was a foreign-film aficionado (is my overuse of French words starting to get annoying, or is it more my affectation of italicizing them that is getting on your nerves?), and he announced to us one day that there was going to be a midnight showing of the 1968 Jean-Luc Godard film titled Sympathy for the Devil at a local theater: 

Godard, one of the founding members of the French New Wave filmmaking movement, was also a Marxist – which gave him beaucoup street cred to early-1970's vintage American college students. Our friend was absolutely breathless with excitement (that's a little joke for you Godard fans out there) when he shared these glad tidings, and we all started counting the days until the big night.

Godard's Sympathy for the Devil combines footage of the Rolling Stones' recording various takes of that song – which started as something quite different than the song that ended up on their album – with tedious and obscure political dreck (e.g., shots of members of the Black Panthers reading from various half-baked revolutionary texts). 

For a big Rolling Stones fan like myself, the documentary footage of Mick, Keith and the boys in the recording studio was somewhat interesting, at least through the first few takes of the song – eventually even the charm of that began to wear a little thin. But the rest of the movie was appallingly boring.

Click here to watch the trailer for the movie, which makes Sympathy for the Devil  seem like it might be almost interesting. But don't be fooled – it's not.

I saw my friend a few days later and asked him what he thought of the movie. He said that it was perhaps the greatest film he had ever seen. 

I instantly realized that he and I saw the world very differently indeed.

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That midnight showing of "Sympathy for the Devil" was the end of my life as a pseudo-intellectual and the beginning of my life as an anti-intellectual. [NOTE: If that sentence doesn't prove that I'm so full of sh*t that my eyes are brown, I don't know what does.] 

The culmination of my anti-intellectual phase came a year or two later, in a college class of mine titled "Contemporary Culture."

There were no lectures in that class. Instead, we attended various cultural events, and wrote papers on our experiences. We went to a Van Cliburn piano concert, saw Truffaut's The 400 Blows, visited the home of art patrons John and Dominique de Menil (which was later converted to an art museum), and spent an evening in the Rothko Chapel, which featured 14 large and essentially identical and very dark monochromatic paintings. (Anyone who has seen these paintings won't be surprised to learn that the artist who created them, Mark Rothko had a long struggle with from depression. He committed suicide in 1970.) 

I thought I was going to lose my mind at the Rothko Chapel that night. Having to sit and stare at these almost-black canvases for three hours was the worst kind of sensory deprivation. You can get an idea of what the paintings look like from this photo:

The Rothko Chapel

For our final project in this class, a friend of mine and I told the story of a made-up modern composer, complete with brief excerpts from his nonexistent compositions performed by me on a piano – those excerpts consisting of totally random banging on the keys. 

The fictional biography of our fictional composer started out in a reasonably plausible fashion but got more and more absurd as it went along. We had him die by falling out of a malfunctioning Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Transylvania. (I was a great fan of Bela Bartok, a very real modern composer who was a native of Romania.) 

Naturally, the class swallowed our ridiculous story hook, line, and sinker – including the professor. (He later claimed to have been suspicious that we had made the whole thing up, but didn't say anything because he was afraid of offending us – by which he meant he was as clueless as the other students, or didn't have the confidence in his critical abilities to call us out as phonies).

Our point – that (like the Emperor in the Hans Christian Andersen story) contemporary art, music, writing, etc., had no clothes, and the artists and critics and academics who tried to persuade us otherwise were just as naked – was far from original, and I doubt that our presentation was especially clever or creative. We were shooting fish in a barrel – our target (pseudo-intellectualism among college students in the early 1970's) was so fat and slow-moving that we really couldn't have missed.

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To be honest, I'm not totally cured of pseudo-intellectualism. 

I still occasionally read a modern novel that the New Yorker say is to die for, or watch an avant garde film that the avant garde critics all love. But most of the time I manage to resist wasting my time on such nonsense. 

Before my road-to-Damascus experience at that midnight showing of Godard's film, I thought that I was going to have to read Finnegan's Wake someday if I wanted to think of myself as an educated man. Now I've know that life is too short to waste time trying to decipher Joyce. (I feel the same way about Virginia Woolf, but a friend of mine whose opinions I have the utmost respect for has told me otherwise, so I may have to give her another chance. But only one.)

Life is too short

Of course, being an anti-intellectual is just as much a pose as being a pseudo-intellectual. I'm a very smart guy, and I'm highly educated (albeit with a number of large gaps in my education) and a voracious reader. But I'm also a small-town kid who didn't go to Europe until I was 50, doesn't speak a foreign language, and carefully avoids pronouncing a large number of the proper nouns in the classic novels I've read because I've never heard those names pronounced properly and am afraid of sounding foolish in front of the more sophisticated types who know how to say them correctly.

So it's hard for me to know which way to go. I can be the sophisticated Ivy Leaguer who remembers his humble roots, or I can be the unapologetic redneck who knows good writing and good art when he sees it – and good music when he hears it. (As this blog proves.) Or I can alternate between the two depending on the environment – always in doubt as to which is the real me. [NOTE: This post is getting more brown-eyed by the moment. I'm tempted to edit it severely, but I don't believe in rewriting history.]

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Click here to listen to "Sympathy for the Devil."

Click here to watch the infamous performance of that song at Altamont in 1969. 

Use the link below to order "Sympathy for the Devil" from Amazon: