Beach Boys – "Let Him Run Wild" (1965)

And now that you don’t need him

Well, he can have his freedom

In the course of writing this blog, I’ve discovered dozens of great records that weren’t new, but were new to me.

Then there are the rediscoveries – great records that were on my radar at one time, but that I had somehow forgotten about until I stumbled across them many years later.

“Let Him Run Wild” is a rediscovery rather than a discovery.  (Not that it really matters.)

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Back in November, we celebrated the 13th anniversary of this wildly popular little blog by presenting an interview of 2 or 3 lines conducted by none other than 2 or 3 lines.

In that interview, I said that the records that would be featured on the blog in the upcoming year would be chosen from my 474-item list of worthy records that I’ve heard on various Sirius/XM channels (especially the “Underground Garage” channel) while driving in my car in the last year or so. 

The best “Underground Garage” DJ ever!

If I did choose records exclusively from that list – other than the ones I’ll pick for induction into the various 2 or 3 lines halls of fame – that means I could winnow it down by 100 or so records a year.

But it looks like that ain’t gonna happen.

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My best laid schemes for 2 or 3 lines often gang aft agley, but my plan to feature only records that are on the list of 474 has ganged even aft agley-er than is usual. 

The first few posts of the 13th year of 2 or 3 lines went according to plan.  I featured records like Andy Pratt’s “Avenging Annie,” Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” and Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” – all discovered (or rediscovered) while listening to Sirius/XM.  

But then the 2 or 3 lines train jumped the track (as it is wont to do).

While the Ad Libs’ “The Boy from New York City” was selected from my Sirius/XM list, the following post featured the Beach Boys’ “The Girl from New York City” – a record which was not on the list.

That Beach Boys song spurred my recollection of the group’s cover of “Long Tall Texan” – another record that wasn’t on the list.

The good news is that “The Girl from New York City” also led me to today’s featured song – both were released on the same 1965 album, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!).  

I bought that album when I was 13 and played it almost to death.  But I hadn’t heard “Let Him Run Wild” for years – or decades – until I recently rediscovered it.

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Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) had its ups and downs, but the ups definitely outnumbered the downs.

The album includes a cover of the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me,” a funny (not really) Brian Wilson song about his nightmare of a father (“I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man”), a throwaway instrumental track (“Summer Means New Love”), and an odd little one-minute-long a cappella song fragment called “And Your Dream Comes True” that closes out side two of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!).

The album also includes “The Girl from New York City,” “Amusement Parks U.S.A.,” “Salt Lake City,” and “You’re So Good to Me,” which are pleasant but forgettable album-fillers.  (Any of them would have made a serviceable “B” side.)

While “Help Me, Rhonda” deserved to be the huge hit that it was, it doesn’t really advance the ball in terms of Brian Wilson’s musical development.  It looks backward to traditional Beach Boys hit singles like “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “I Get Around” rather than breaking new musical ground.

However, the remaining tracks on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) most definitely do break new ground.

At first glance, “Girl Don’t Tell Me” is a just another song about a short-lived summer romance between a couple of teenagers.  But it has a much more bitter tone than most summer-romance songs – and most contemporary Brian Wilson songs.  Oddly, Wilson wrote it while he was honeymooning with his first wife, Marilyn Rovell, who was not quite 17 years old when they were married.

Brian and Marilyn Wilson

“California Girls” has one foot in the Beach Boys’ past and one foot in their future.  But while the babes-on-the-beach-in-bikinis lyrics didn’t break the traditional Beach Boys mold, the music certainly did.

 

But the most forward-looking song on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was the B-side of the “California Girls” single, “Let Him Run Wild.”

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“Let Him Run Wild” is a stunning record.  It was good enough to be on Pet Sounds, which is the ne plus ultra of pop music albums.  It’s not quite in the same league as “God Only Knows” and “Caroline, No” but I think it holds its own against anything else on that album.

The song’s verses are built on a minor-seventh chord progression – which is just dissonant enough to temper the sweetness of the vocals.

Things change dramatically as the verse transitions to the chorus – the minor-seventh chords become major chords, and the vocals suddenly become loud and aggressive.

I get chills every time I hear that first chorus blow the song wide open.  I know what’s coming as the verse comes to an end – after all, I’ve heard the record many, many times – but that chorus still grabs me by the throat. 

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“California Girls” is Brian Wilson’s favorite Beach Boys record.  He once said that the song’s intro is the greatest piece of music he ever wrote.

Wilson named “Let Him Run Wild” (which was the “California Girls” B-side) as his least favorite Beach Boys record.  He didn’t like his high-pitched vocals – “I sounded like a little girl,” he complained (sounding somewhat like a little girl).

But Brian’s brother Carl Wilson appreciated just how remarkable Brian’s writing on “Let Him Run Wild” was:

It was around [Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)] that it became very evident to me that Brian was evolving very rapidly on many different levels.  His music was gaining a great depth . . . somehow, there were a lot of levels going on at the same time.  If one song offered a big clue that he was taking pop music to a new level, it was “Let Him Run Wild.”  I remember first hearing the track; in the verse, there are so many different parts and themes and lines.  The chord progression was very advanced, very different than the three or four chord structure that had been so much a part of pop music songwriting until then.

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Dennis Wilson wasn’t speaking about “Let Him Run Wild” in particular when he wrote the following words, but they apply to that song as much as they do to any song Brian Wilson created:

We would be in the studio, and he’d play us a song, and we’d start singing and crying.  It was so great.  It was so beautiful.  It was like, “How could this be happening?” We’d say, “How’d you write that?” There wasn’t one person in the group who could come close to Brian’s talent.

Dennis actually underestimates Brian’s talent.  In fact, there wasn’t one person in the world who could come close to Brian’s talent.

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Click here to listen to “Let Him Run Wild.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Beach Boys – "Long Tall Texan" (1964)

I’m a long tall Texan

I wear a ten-gallon hat

People look at me and say,

“Hoo-rah, hoo-rah, is that your hat?”

The first Beach Boys album I ever owned was Beach Boys Concert, which was a live recording of a December 21, 1963 concert in Sacramento:

It included a number of their hit singles – like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “I Get Around.”  

It also included several covers of novelty records – like Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,” and the faux-country-and-western song, “Long Tall Texan,” which was originally released in 1959 by the Four Flickers.

Click here to listen to the Four Flickers’ recording of “Long Tall Texan.”

    

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“Long Tall Texan” was written by the late Henry Strzelecki, the bass player for the Four Flickers.

Strzelecki eventually became one of the group of Nashville session musicians known as “The Nashville A-Team,” which included such legendary figures as Floyd Cramer (piano), Chet Atkins (guitar), Johnny Gimble  (fiddle), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Boots Randolph (saxophone), and Charlie McCoy (harmonica).  

Henry Strzelecki with Jimmy Dean

The Birmingham, Alabama native played bass on recordings by over two dozen members of the Country Hall of Fame – including Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson.  He was the bass player on Roy Orbison’s iconic “Pretty Woman,” and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album.

Strzelecki was struck by a car while out for a walk in Nashville, and died on December 30, 2014.  He was 75 years old.

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“Long Tall Texan” is just the sort of goofy song that appealed to me when I was 12 years old.  I remember singing along to the Beach Boys’ cover in a very exaggerated – and no doubt very annoying – manner.  (My parents put up with a lot from me.)

I haven’t heard the record in 50 years, but I’m willing to bet that if you called me right now, I would remember every word.  (Go ahead.  Try me!)

Click here to listen to the Beach Boys’ recording of the Henry Strzelecki song, “Long Tall Texan.”

Click on the link below to buy the recording from Amazon:

Beach Boys – "The Girl from New York City" (1965)

L.A. boys all heard the noise

About that girl from New York City

The previous 2 or 3 lines featured the Ad Libs’ 1965 hit, “The Boy from New York City.”  (If you missed it, scroll down to the bottom of this post and you’ll find it.)

A few months later, the Beach Boys released an answer song to “The Boy from New York City” that was titled – somewhat unimaginatively – “The Girl from New York City.”

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Answer songs usually attempt to capitalize on the popularity of a big hit record.  

If the original song is sung by a male singer, the answer song is likely to be sung by a female singer.  For example, after Jim Reeves had a #1 hit with “He’ll Have to Go” in 1959, Jeanne Black released an answer song called “He’ll Have to Stay.”  

The singer in the Reeves song is in a bar, calling a woman who is entertaining another man in her home.  The implication of the song is that the singer is in love with the woman, and tired of sharing her with other men – if she’s not ready to commit herself exclusively to the singer and tell the other man he’ll have to go, he’s going to walk away from her:

Though love is blind, make up your mind

I’ve got to know

Should I hang up, or will you tell him

He’ll have to go?

But it’s a different story in the answer song.  As the singer in the Jeanne Black record tells it, the man calling her from a bar – she hears the jukebox playing in the background – has stood her up and is out with another woman.  She once loved him, but he’s broken her heart, and she’s ready to move on with another man who’s love is more steadfast:

My love was blind, I’m not your kind

That’s all I’ll say

So you can hang up, I’m in his arms

He’ll have to stay

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Some answer songs were political rather than personal in nature.  

Barry McGuire had a hit with the angry, pessimistic “Eve of Destruction” in 1965:

Don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?

And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today?

If the button is pushed, there’s no running away

There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave

And you tell me

Over and over and over again, my friend

Ah, you don’t believe

We’re on the eve of destruction

The Spokesmen responded with an optimistic answer song titled “Dawn of Correction” that spun the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as a good thing:

There are buttons to push in two mighty nations

But who’s crazy enough to risk annihilation?

The buttons are there to ensure negotiation

So don’t be afraid, boy, it’s our only salvation

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True answer songs are sort of mirror images of the originals that inspired them.  The title of “The Girl from New York City” was clearly inspired by “The Boy from New York City,” but a true answer song would be sung by the boy in the first song and would be about the girl who originally sang about him.

But the Beach Boys’ song is essentially unrelated to the song the Ad Libs recorded.  The original paints a very specific and detailed picture of a particular boy that the female singer is enamored of – but the “answer” is a fairly generic Beach Boys song about a hot babe who moves to L.A. from the Big Apple and catches the attention of all the surfer dudes who see her hanging around the beach.

Click here to listen to “The Girl from New York City.”

And click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Ad Libs – "The Boy from New York City" (1964)

You ought to come and see

His dueling scar

And brand new car

Ad libitum – usually shortened to ad lib – is a Latin phrase that’s often translated as “as you wish.” 

In drama or film, it refers to something that an actor says on the spur of the moment – something that’s not in the printed script.

In music, when “ad lib” is written on the sheet music, the performer has permission to vary the notes or the tempo. 

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The Ad Libs were a vocal group from Bayonne, New Jersey, whose recording of “The Boy from New York City” made it all the way to #8 on the Billboard “Hot 100” not quite 57 years ago:

But if there’s a single instance of ad libbing on that record – which was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (who wrote dozens of hit singles, including “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and Stand By Me”) – I missed it.  Every note sounds like it was executed exactly as written.

That’s not surprising given that “The Boy from New York City” was recorded in three separate sessions – the rhythm section went first, then the singers, and finally the horns were recorded.  In anyone had ad libbed along the way, the final recording would have been a bit of a show.

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John T. Taylor and George Davis wrote “The Boy from New York City.”  After an exhaustive research effort, I was unable to ascertain which one of them wrote the lyrics to the song.  (By “exhaustive research effort,” I mean that I spent about five minutes randomly poking around online, then decided I was too exhausted to continue.)

The first and third verses of the song are pretty conventional stuff – the singer describes the boy she is enamored of as “really fine,” “so sweet,” and someone who “can dance and make romance.”

But the second verse reveals that the girl is mostly a fan of the boy’s dough-re-mi:

He’s really down

And he’s no clown

He has the finest penthouse I’ve ever seen in town

And he’s cute

In his mohair suit

And he keeps his pockets full of spending loot

You ought to come and see

His dueling scar

And brand new car

Believe you me, a boy who’s not only cute and a good dancer but also has the finest penthouse in town, a brand new car, and “keeps his pockets full of spending loot” is going to have no trouble at all attracting hot chicks.

Which brings me to the one thing about “The Boy from New York City” that seems a bit odd – and that’s his dueling scar.

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It turns out most of the men who actually had dueling scars were upper-class German and Austrian university students who got their scars while engaging in fencing bouts with their classmates – not in potentially deadly duels of honor with opponents who had insulted them:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dueling scars were considered proof of physical courage – men who bore them had higher social status.  Most dueling scars were not terribly disfiguring – particularly those that were self-inflicted, or the result of a trip to a doctor who would slice one’s cheek up to order and then sew it up.

I had always assumed that “The Boy from New York City” was a prosperous young African-American male, but he may be a wealthy, middle-aged Prussian who got his dueling scar while fencing with a fellow Studentenverbindung (German for “fraternity”) member at Heidelberg University a hundred or so years ago. 

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Click here to listen to the Ad Libs’ recording of “The Boy from New York City.”

Click on the link below to buy that recording from Amazon:

Ludacris – "How Low" (2009)

How low can you go?

How low can you go?

I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the man who was seen hitting his head over and over with a hammer:

When a passerby asked him why he was doing it, he said, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

I’m that man – except I haven’t stopped hitting myself yet.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about playing trivia by myself at a neighborhood pizza joint.  (It was the Thursday before Christmas and the number of new covid cases in our area was climbing, so the brewery where I and some neighbors usually play on Thursdays decided to cancel trivia that night.)

It’s almost impossible to win at trivia playing solo unless your opponents are dunces, or drunk, or both.  Finishing in the middle of the pack is about the best you can hope for.

That night I got off to a horrible start, missing five of the first seven questions.  I could barely look the host in the eye when I took my answers up – I was so embarrassed.  I would have sneaked out the side door and gone home with my tail between my legs if there had been a side door.

I eventually righted the ship, and answered the next 13 questions correctly.  That enabled me to finish with a respectable score, although well behind the first-place team – which had five or six players.

“That was a b-i-g mistake,” I said to myself as I was walking out of the restaurant.  “A mistake I certainly won’t be making again!”

Famous last words . . .

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Two weeks later, all of my Thursday night teammates opted out of playing at our regular venue, so I went back to the pizza place for another one-man effort.

It isn’t far away from my house, and the pizza there is quite good – plus they discount the prices of the local craft beers significantly during trivia.  (I do love me a bargain!)

But the real reason I went back is that relatively few teams show up for trivia there – in fact, I was one of only four teams competing that night – which meant I had a better chance of finishing at or near the top of the standings.

I should know better than to think I can win even under such relatively favorable circumstances . . . but it seems that I still haven’t learned my lesson.

When an acquaintance of his whose first marriage had been miserable decided to marry for a second time, the English writer Samuel Johnson said the friend’s decision represented “the triumph of hope over experience.”  That epigram applies equally to me for playing trivia solo for a second time.

The philosopher George Santayana’s famous line – “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – was also applicable to me.  

Except my second experience playing as a one-man team wasn’t a repeat of my first experience – it was even worse.

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I did pretty well in the first two rounds that night.  Naturally, my score wasn’t as high as it usually is when I’m playing with my bartender pals – but it wasn’t bad.

The wheels started to come off the bus during the picture round, which asked players to look at still photos from ten 2021 movies, and name those movies.  (I haven’t been in a movie theatre in two years – and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, or Fast and Furious 9, or Cruella.)  

It helped my score that I was able to successfully name eight of the ten largest countries in the world by population.  (I doubt that any of my opponents did better.)

The first question of the third round was a real softball for me: “Name the longest-serving Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”  It came with a bonus question – “Name his successor, who was the second-longest-serving Chief Justice ever” – that I knocked out of the park as well.  

At that point, I was in second place, and within shouting distance of the six-member first-place team.

I did miss the next question, but I had bet the minimum amount on it – which prevented any real damage to my score – and then followed up with another high-wager winner and bonus combination.

As for what happened after that, the less said the better.

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I missed the next six questions in a row.  (Horribile dictu!)

Several of those questions were relatively easy.  For example, do you know what color always comes first in rainbows?  I didn’t.  (It’s red.)

I couldn’t name even two of the last three American males to win grand-slam tennis tournaments.  (I correctly identified Andre Agassi, but missed the other two.  I might be forgiven for not thinking of Andy Roddick, who won one and only one grand-slam title.  But how I overlooked Pete Sampras – who won a record fourteen grand-slam events, and was the #1-ranked player in the world for almost six years – is beyond me.)

A sudarshana chakra

The next question concerned something called a sudarshana chakra, which is a discus-like weapon with 108 serrated edges.  It’s associated with one of the major gods of a particular religion, and we were asked to identify what that religion was.  I figured it had to be Hinduism or Buddhism, given its name and the fact that the religion in question seemed to have more than one god (which eliminated Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  I mentally flipped a coin and guessed Buddhism, but the correct answer was Hinduism.

Quel désastre!  I had scored 31 of a possible 36 points in the first round, 30 out of 36 in the second round, and 25 out of 36 in the third round – but I only tallied seven of the possible 36 points in the fourth and final round.  

That’s bad enough.  But things were about the get worse.

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The last question is the only one where your wager is subtracted from your score if you don’t know the correct answer.  (If you miss any other question, you simply get zero points added to your total.)

After the fourth round, I was in 4th and last place – ten points out of 3rd and so far out of 1st there was no point in even thinking about it.

You can bet up to 12 points on the final question, and there was no reason for me not to go for broke – when you’re 4th out of four teams, you really can’t go any lower. 

The category for the final question was “Fictional characters,” which gave me reason to be optimistic – I was an English major, after all, and I’ve always read a lot.

Here’s the final question:

When this character is first introduced in a 20th-century novel, she is only sixteen years old.  However, by the time the novel is finished, she has been married three times, had three children, lost one of those children to a horse-riding accident, and runs a successful sawmill.  Who was that character?

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The six-player team that finished first that night knew the answer.  They wagered 12 points and ended up with the very highest score of the 102 teams who played at a Pourhouse Trivia venue that night.

I obviously never had a chance of beating them single-handedly.  But I certainly had a chance to finish in 2nd or 3rd place.

However, by whiffing on the final question, I finished with a final score that was actually lower than my score after the third round.  In other words, I would have done better if I had gone home after the third round, and just punted on the last seven questions.

It doesn’t get any worse than that.  

Surely the shameful memory of my performance that night will cure me of any desire to ever play trivia by myself again.

On the other hand, it doesn’t get any worse than that – so I have no place to go but up!  Right?

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In case you’re wondering, the two longest-serving Chief Justices of the Supreme Court?  John Marshall and Roger Taney, of course.

The ten largest countries in the world by population?  China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Mexico.

Finally, the answer to the final question is none other than Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind fame.  I’ve read the book and seen the movie – it was a l-o-n-g time ago, to be sure – and all I remember for sure about her is that after the South’s defeat in the Civil War resulted in her financial ruin, she made a fancy dress out of her family mansion’s curtains in hopes of impressing the man she wanted to marry:  

None of that stuff about husbands and children and a sawmill stuck with me, and my final score suffered accordingly.

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Ludacris’s “How Low” was a big hit for the Atlanta rapper (who is a distant cousin of the late comedian Richard Pryor) in 2009-2010.

The track samples Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” – that’s where the “How low can you go?” line quoted above comes from.

Click here to watch the official music video for “How Low.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Smiths – "Bigmouth Strikes Again" (1986)

Now I know how Joan of Arc felt

As the flames rose to her Roman nose

And her Walkman started to melt 

The subject of the last 2 or 3 lines was the Washington Post’s fine-dining restaurant reviewer, Tom Sietsema.

One of my problems with Sietsema is that he’s forgotten who he works for.  He’s become so ga-ga over the chefs at the luxe restaurants where he eats his meals that his reviews read more like a publicist’s puff pieces than honest evaluations designed to help his readers find dining experiences that are  commensurate with the prices they are asked to pay.

Since I rarely patronize the modish spots that Sietsema writes about, I am more interested in what the WaPo’s second full-time restaurant critic, Tim Carman, has to say in his columns – which focus on less expensive eateries.

Until recently, those columns were titled “The $20 Diner” because Carman only wrote about restaurants where the entrees cost less than $20.

For those of you who don’t live in Washington, or New York City, or San Francisco, or other cities where the cost of living is out of sight, you might view a $20 entree as a little pricey – especially when you consider that appetizers, salads, desserts, drinks, and the tip aren’t included.

But to Tim Carman, “The $20 Diner” title was an insult to the restaurants specializing in Egyptian, Nepalese, Yemeni, Ethio­pian, Indian, Thai, Jamaican, Korean, Persian, Philippine, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, Peruvian, Cuban, Italian, Japanese and various American regional cuisines that he had reviewed in the previous year. 

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You might have noticed that there was one cuisine that didn’t appear on Carman’s list: French.  Here’s his explanation:

Is it because French restaurants, even their informal bistro cousins, tend to have a higher price point than the $20 ceiling that I placed on entrees?  Or is it because I, as a writer and critic, do not view French cuisine as affordable, no matter how casual the establishment? 

Whatever the reason, French cooking has cachet in the public imagination, and that translates into how much folks are willing to pay for it, which is, I suspect, more than many are willing to shell out for Mexican or Chinese food.

By writing about immigrant cuisines under a cheap-eats rubric, I have perpetuated the narrative that they should always be thought of as budget-priced.  I’m reminded of a conversation I had with David Chang when he was preparing to open Momofuku CCDC in 2015.  Chang was firing on all cylinders that day: He was unspooling long, profanity-laced sentences about diners who won’t pay $17 or $18 for a bowl of ramen, no matter how costly the ingredients he used for his noodle soup. 

“It is not cheap at all” to prepare the ramen, he told me.  “Here’s one thing: If we opened an Italian restaurant, and I said that it’s something in brodo with brisket, I could charge you [expletive] $27 and no one would ever [expletive] blink. That pisses me off, that I’m stuck by some type of ethnic price ceiling.”  [NOTE: brodo is an Italian beef broth that can be used in soups.] 

Carman then quotes an academic to support his argument.  (You know you’re in trouble when you start to read a column that usually tells you where to find good, cheap barbecue, or pho, or kebabs, or Tex-Mex food, and you get quotes on the sociological niceties of immigrant food from some professor type.) 

Krishnendu Ray, a New York University associate professor of food studies, has written a lot about our perceptions of a cuisine based on the immigrant group’s place in American society. The lower the immigrants are on the social ladder, Ray argues, the less we value their cooking. This explains the roller-coaster ride that Italian food has endured in America, Ray writes in The Ethnic Restaurateur, noting that the perceived value of the country’s cooking took a nose-dive in the late 1800s when poor immigrants from southern Italy flocked to the United States.

But, Ray adds, this also explains “the difficulty of Chinese, Mexican and soul food to break away, in dominant American eyes, from the contamination effect of low-class association. Poor, mobile people are rarely accorded the cultural capital.”

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“The $20 Diner” focused on inexpensive and unappreciated restaurants or carryouts in the DMV’s less glamorous neighborhoods.  A lot of those joints served “ethnic” food (e.g., Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Greek, or whatever) but others served food that’s considered “American” (e.g., barbecue, sandwiches and subs, fried chicken, pizza – which is no longer thought of as Italian) – which seems to undercut Carman’s argument that his column’s “The $20 Diner” sobriquet was somehow insulting to immigrants.

Carman says that “[b]y writing about immigrant cuisines under a cheap-eats rubric, I have perpetuated the narrative that they should always be thought of as budget-priced.”

Isn’t it a little absurd to say that by reviewing restaurants that serve burgers and barbecued ribs and other less-expensive examples of “American” cuisine, Carman perpetuated a narrative that belittled the worth of American cuisine by implying that it should always be thought of as budget-priced?   

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Frankly, I think Carman is so full of you-know-what that his eyes are brown.  A column that focuses on bargain Indian or Chinese or Mexican restaurants doesn’t “perpetuate the narrative” that higher-priced restaurants whose dishes are derived from those cuisines don’t deserve to charges those prices.

The primary determinant of whether Americans are willing to pay a lot or a little for a meal isn’t whether the food being offered is “immigrant” food.  After all, there are plenty of Indian and Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the Washington, DC, area, that are just as pricey as the typical French or high-end Italian joints.

All those restaurants – regardless of what national cuisine their menu reflects – offer attentive service and a tony atmosphere as well as sophisticated dishes with costly ingredients (like lobster, or duck, or expensive cuts of beef).

You don’t get all that at a neighborhood strip-mall carryout, and that’s why the tab is lower – not because Americans turn their noses down at “ethnic” cuisines.

The Chinese-American chef quoted by Carman is wrong when he says there’s an “ethnic price ceiling.”  Certain types of American food – like burgers and barbecue – are subject to a price ceiling as well.   

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Carman obviously has great respect and affection for the hard-working folks – some of whom are immigrants, some of whom aren’t – who are responsible for the food he writes about.  He wants to give them their due, which is praiseworthy.

But he’s overthinking things – he needs to go back to basics and write first and foremost with the needs of his readers in mind.  

Hopefully, the pieces that used to be titled “The $20 Diner” will continue to shine a light on places that serve tasty but inexpensive food.  The many food fanatics with seemingly unlimited budgets who are out there have Tom Sietsema to guide them to places like Pearls and Pineapple, the Capitol Hill restaurant that charges $350 for a 12-course tasting menu but provides you with a perfect opportunity to wow your friends on Instagram.  The rest of us found Carman’s recommendations in “The $20 Diner” much more useful.

I’m sure that the restaurant owners who get a good review from Carman couldn’t care less whether that review is titled “The $20 Diner” or something else.  They are probably just thrilled to have some more $$$ coming through the door – not to mention the satisfaction that comes from having a successful business serving good food at a fair price to appreciative customers.

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Today’s featured song has nothing to do with the subject matter of today’s post . . . and I’m OK with that!

(To tell the truth, I’m OK with pretty much everything I do.  If you’re not, may I respectfully suggest that you MYOFB.)

The lyrics to “Bigmouth Strikes Again” were written by Morrissey, the Smiths’ frontman.  The image of Joan of Arc’s Walkman melting as she is being burned at the stake is as startling as it gets.  

Click here to listen to “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” which was released in 1986 on the Smiths’ third studio album, The Queen Is Dead.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: