Sandra Bernhard – "Manic Superstar" (1991)

I know what I want

But I just don't know

How to get it

[NOTE: I’m shocked by how old most of this month’s “Golden Decade” posts are – including this one (which was originally published on the first day of September 2015).  Whoever said “Tempus fugit” was certainly right.]

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Sandra Bernhard's "Manic Superstar" is a mashup of "Everything's Alright" (from Jesus Christ Superstar) and the great Jimi Hendrix song, "Manic Depression."

The late Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix was left-handed.  I am also left-handed.  Other than that, we have about as much in common as the two very dissimilar halves of "Manic Superstar."

For example, Hendrix was black, while I am white.

Hendrix was a fabulous guitarist, while I am a fabulous pianist.

Another difference between us is that JIMI HENDRIX IS DEAD.  I am not dead.

And there's this: Jimi Hendrix knew what he wanted but didn't know how to get it, while I don't really know what I want.

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The Board of Selectmen of Orleans, Massachusetts, knew what they wanted when it came to the hundreds of cormorants that were roosting on the power lines that spanned Cedar Pond – they wanted to get rid of them.

Roosting cormorants at Cedar Pond

And the selectmen thought they knew how to get what they wanted.  But it turns out that they couldn't have been wronger.

Why were the town officials trying to get rid of the cormorants?  Because they were pooping in the 15-acre pond.  That resulted in an increase in the pond's nitrogen and phosphorous content, which resulted in the pond becoming covered with algae.  (Yuck!)

The town wanted the local electric utility to put the power lines underground.  The estimated cost of doing that is $1.1 million, which would be passed on to the utility's customers.  (It's so easy to spend other people's money, isn't it?)

In the meantime, the geniuses on the Board of Selectman decided to pay the U.S. Department of Agriculture $6500 to scare the cormorants away by shooting fireworks at them.

A double-crested cormorant

I feel a little sheepish admitting that even though I've lived in Our Nation's Capital for my entire adult life, I didn't know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is who you call when you need someone to go after pooping birds with pyrotechnics.

The USDA went after the fish-eating cormorants with "screamers" which they fired from kayaks.  ($6500 to shoot fancy bottle rockets at birds from kayaks?  I guarantee you that it wouldn't have taken more than ten minutes to find a dozen teenaged boys who would have been thrilled to do the job for free.)

Click here to see a short video featuring screamers.

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Unfortunately, things quickly went awry the first night the fireworks were used.

The Cape Cod Times reported that a local resident who was driving nearby when the USDA began blasting the birds posted on Facebook that his truck was hit by the fireworks:

“[S]everal sky rockets struck the side of my truck, including the glass of the passenger's window,” the person wrote.  “If I'd had the windows down like I normally do the rockets would've gotten inside and I'm pretty sure I'd have totalled my truck.”

It's hard to believe that something went wrong with this well-thought-out plan, isn't it?  After all, according to the Times, "[t]hree USDA officials were on the scene, including one who was specifically there to make sure nothing went wrong."

The following evening, the USDA resumed the bombardment of the poor cormorants, which did appear to put a serious dent in the number of birds roosting on the power lines.

USDA headquarters in Washington, DC

But the effect of the screamers was short-lived.  According to a woman described by the Times as an "Orleans resident and bird-counter," there were some 150 birds back on the wire a week after the fireworks assault. 

USDA launched its kayaks and lit off another salvo of screamers the next night, which reduced the population of Cedar Pond cormorants significantly.  Unfortunately, observers said that the number of birds roosting on a power line over nearby Little Depot Pond had increased by a like amount.  (As my late grandmother used to say, "Six of one, a half-dozen of the other.")  

The Cape Cod Rail Trail goes right by Little Depot Pond.  When I rode my bike past the pond, there were a fair number of cormorants sitting on the power lines over that pond:  

Roosting cormorants at Little Depot Pond

One local resident complained to the Times that the fireworks were terrifying her pet dog.  "He just trembles and tries to hide," she told a reporter.  

The disgruntled pet owner was skeptical of the whole fireworks idea.  "The birds aren't really stupid.  They're just going to move to another pond," she said.  "It just seems crackers to me."

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Sandra Bernhard (circa 1990)

Sandra Bernhard is kind of crackers herself.  She was brilliantly weird in the brilliantly weird Martin Scorsese movie, King of Comedy (which starred Robert DeNiro and Jerry Lewis), and I'll never forget her fabulous 1990 movie, Without You I'm Nothing (based on her one-woman off-Broadway show). 

Click here to buy Without You I'm Nothing from Amazon.

DeNiro and Bernhard in "King of Comedy"

Bernhard proved once and for all that a female comedian could be as dirty and funny as any male comedian.  One-trick-pony female comedians like Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler, and Amy Schumer may match Sandra Bernhard when it comes to talking dirty, but Bernhard was a much more interesting and multifaceted performer than her wannabes.

Click here to listen to "Manic Superstar," which was released on Bernhard's 1991 album, Excuses for Bad Behavior (Part One).  

Cranberries – "Zombie" (1994)

With their tanks and their bombs

And their bombs and their guns

Massachusetts ranks second among all states when it comes to cranberry production, and many of those cranberries are grown on Cape Cod.

Floating cranberries

Captain Henry Hall became the first man to successfully cultivate cranberries on Cape Cod some 200 years ago.  I’ve been visiting the Cape for over 40 years, but I didn’t know until today that the house where I stay is literally only a stone’s throw from Hall’s original cranberry bog.  (The land that house was built on was once owned by Hall.)

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Until this year, I had never been on the Cape after Labor Day – which meant that I had never been around for the cranberry harvest before.

The Cape Cod Rail Trail passes by a number of cranberry bogs, and I interrupted a couple of my daily bike rides to check out the harvest.

A cranberry “eggbeater”

I learned that most of the cranberries that go into cranberry sauce or cranberry juice are gathered through a process known as “wet harvesting.”

When the berries are ripe, the farmer floods the bog.  He then drives a machine called an “eggbeater” through the bog, agitating the water so that the berries break free from the vines and float on top of the water.  (Cranberries float because have an internal air pocket.)

Lassoed cranberries

The berries are then essentially lassoed and sucked up through big-ass hoses into trucks, which transport them to processing plants:

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The Cranberries, who formed in Limerick, Ireland in 1989, broke up after the death of their lead singer and chief songwriter, Dolores Mary Eileen O’Riordan, in 2018.  (O’Riordan drowned in the bathtub of a London hotel room after drinking herself unconscious.)

O’Riordan’s voice was utterly unique –  when you hear one of her tracks, you know for sure that it’s her singing.

Dolores O'Riordan

O’Riordan wrote “Zombie” – the band’s best-known song – in memory of two young boys who were killed when two bombs hidden by the Irish Republican Army exploded in Warrington, England on March 20, 1993. 

Click here to watch the official music video for “Zombie,” which has been viewed over one billion times on YouTube.

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

Incredible String Band – "Waiting for You" (1971)

Yes, the hydrangeas do look divine
This time of the year

If you took chemistry in high school, you probably remember that if a solution turns litmus paper red, it’s acidic.  If a solution turns litmus paper blue, it’s alkaline (or basic). 

The opposite is true of hydrangeas.  Most hydrangeas produce pink flowers in alkaline soil and blue flowers in acidic soil.

The acidity or alkalinity of the soil isn’t directly responsible for whether a hydrangea’s blossoms are blue or pink.  What matters is the concentration of aluminum in the soil.  But aluminum is more easily absorbed by a hydrangea when the soil is acidic, which is why pH affects the color of hydrangea flowers.

So if your hydrangeas are pink and you want them to be blue, amend the soil with enough acidifier to lower its pH and increase the uptake of aluminum.

If you want pink hydrangeas, raise the pH by adding lime to the soil around the hydrangea.

It may take some time for the hydrangeas to react to the change in soil pH, so be patient.

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My recent visit to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket came at the height of hydrangea-flowering season.  There were hydrangeas everywhere – and I do mean everywhere – and the vast majority of them were blue.  

I’m guessing that blue hydrangeas are preferred because there are a lot more plants that produce pink flowers than blue flowers.

It’s possible to manipulate soil pH to produce hydrangeas that have both blue flowers and pink flowers and in-between colors, too:  

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Here’s are photos of some of the beautiful hydrangeas I saw on my bike rides around the Cape and islands last month:

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The Incredible String Band, which was called a “psychedelic folk band” by one reviewer, was one of the more esoteric musical groups of the sixties.

Their music is pretty indescribable.  It’s often sort of Celtic-sounding – until they add Middle Eastern and Indian instruments (like ours and sitars) to the mix.

To say that the Incredible String Band’s music is an acquired taste is something of an understatement.  There’s a chance I’ll attempt to acquire a taste for it, but there’s also a chance – probably a much better one – that I’ll just forget about them.

The Incredible String Band at Woodstock

By the way, the Incredible String Band performed at Woodstock.  They don’t appear in the Woodstock movie, and none of their music was included on either the original three-LP Woodstock album.  

But there are two Incredible String Band songs on the six-CD Woodstock box set released by Rhino Records in 2009.  (That box set features several other of the more obscure acts that appeared at Woodstock – including Sweetwater, Bert Sommer, and Quill.  But it does not include anything by the Keef Hartley Band, which is the only band that performed at Woodstock but was left off all of the Woodstock compilations.)

“Waiting for You” was released on the Incredible String Band’s 1971 album, Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending.  It’s a very odd song, but if you’re looking for a song that mentions hydrangeas, you don’t have a lot of choices – and all the other hydrangea songs were even worse.

Here’s “Waiting for You”:

Doors – "The End" (1967)

This is the end, my only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Of everything that stands, the end

I must have heard "The End" before 1979.  After all, it was released in 1967 on the Doors' eponymous debut album.

But I didn't really hear "The End" until 1979, when I went to the Uptown Theatre in Washington, DC, to see Francis Ford Coppola's 153-minute hot mess, Apocalypse Now – which took Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and moved it to Vietnam.

That movie opened with a shot of a dense green forest, accompanied by the subdued guitar introduction to "The End."  Slow-motion helicopters seemed to circle behind my head (thanks to the Uptown's state-of-the-art sound system) then flitted across the screen.

Suddenly, as Jim Morrison intones the first line of the song, "This is the end," the screen lit up with napalm.  You were only one minute into the movie, but you knew it was time to buckle your seat belts, boys and girls – it was going to be a bumpy night at the movies.

This is the end . . . of a series of posts about my trip to Cape Cod over the Memorial Day weekend.  Each post in that series features a song I heard on the SiriusXM radio that came with the rental car I drove during my visit to the Cape:

This is the end . . . of the Cape Cod Rail Trail:

I was afraid that last year was the end of the Pleasant Lake General Store in Harwich, which was a convenient place to stop for a drink and a snack when I was riding my bike on the rail trail.  But the store reopened this spring under new ownership:

Outside that store is a bench with a number of brass plaques that commemorated the end of a number of longtime customers of the store:

One of those folks is memorialized as "our storyteller":

(It pleases me to think that a few of my loyal readers might give me the same appellation after I have shuffled off this mortal coil.)

This is the end of the dinners I had on Cape Cod – an order of fried clams and onion rings from the good old Kream 'n' Kone in West Dennis.  

Here's a still from the episode of "The Americans" I watched that night.  Margo Martindale is playing Pac-Man and Keri Russell is playing Galaga – two popular arcade games I played frequently in 1981 (which is when this episode of the show took place):

And this is the end of my visit, as I prepare to join my yellow Lab Lily in the minivan for the drive back to Washington:

Here is "The End":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Crazy Elephant – "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'" (1969)

To the girls in 'Frisco

To the girls in New York

To the girls in Texarkana

You gotta understand

Baby, I'm your man!

I once lived in San Francisco, and I've spent a fair amount of time in New York City, and I wouldn't hesitate to tell any woman from either place, BABY, I'M YOUR MAN!

I've never been to Texarkana.  But if you're a girl from that fine city, you can best believe that BABY, I'M YOUR MAN, TOO!

I've always loved "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'," and I was thrilled when it popped up on my rental car's satellite radio while I was driving on Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago:

It's a glass-half-full song. . . maybe even a glass-three-quarters-full song. . . and an incurable optimist like me will always pick a song like "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'" over a glass-half-empty song like this one:

I heard Crazy Elephant's one and only hit single – which topped out at #12 in both the U.S. and the UK in 1969 – while I was on my way to the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth's trails for a walk with my dog, Lily:

The society is headquartered in this building, which once housed Benjamin Gorham's cobbler shop:

The Kelley Chapel (originally built in 1873) and an old blacksmith's barn stand at the beginning of the main trail.  Both buildings were moved here from elsewhere to preserve them:

The trail circles Miller Pond, which is good-sized:

Part of the trail comes close to the old Cape Cod Railroad's tracks, which once ran from Boston to Provincetown.  The Boston-to-Hyannis portion of the line is still used by commuter and excursion trains.  Further east, the tracks were torn up and the right-of-way converted to a paved hiker-biker trail.  But this stretch of the old tracks just sit there:

I almost walked by a large patch of lilies of the valley, but I noticed the wonderful fragrance emitted by those lovely flowers just in time:

There were plenty of buttercups on the trail, too:

In the late sixties, producers Jerry Kasenatz and Jerry Katz formed Super K Productions and released records by "bubble-gum" groups like the Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Music Explosion, the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Chorus, and Crazy Elephant.  (Less successful Kasenetz-Katz group included Flying Giraffe, Lt. Garcia's Magic Music Box, J.C.W. Ratfinks, and the Rock & Roll Dubble Bubble Trading Card Company of Philadelphia 1941.)  

Like some of the other Kasenetz-Katz groups, Crazy Elephants wasn't a real band, but rather a brand name used to release records by an ever-changing group of studio musicians.  (The lead singer on another Crazy Elephant single was Kevin Godley, who later achieved fame as a member of 10cc.)

Here's "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

INXS – "Devil Inside" (1987)

Here comes the woman

With that look in her eye

(Which look is that?  In my experience, most women have about ten different looks.  One or two are good.  The rest mean trouble.)

I wrote recently about the explosion in the number of microbreweries in the United States.  Sometimes it seems like there's a microbrewery on every street corner.

Except on Cape Cod, that is.

You would think a popular vacation spot like Cape Cod would be awash in microbreweries.  But until recently, there was only one -- Cape Cod Beer in Hyannis.

This Memorial Day weekend, a second microbrewery opened on Cape Cod.  Devil's Purse Brewing -- which is located just off the Cape Cod Rail Trail in South Dennis -- takes its name from the casings that contain the fertilized eggs of skates (oviparous rays) and certain types of sharks.

A devil's purse

I made plans to visit Devil's Purse along with one of my daughters and her husband the first day it opened.  When we arrived, we learned that we could purchase small samples of their beers.  We could also purchase "growlers" (half-gallon jugs of beer) and "crowlers" (32-ounce cans that are filled and sealed on the spot) to take home.

But we weren't allowed to buy a pint to drink on the premises . . . which is really the point of visiting a microbrewery.

When I asked what the deal was, I got two different answers.  One person told me that Massachusetts law didn't allow Devil's Purse to serve pints to their customers for consumption on the premises.

A growler and a crowler

Another person told me it had to do with their sewer/septic tank hookup -- that they would need to upgrade their sewer/septic system before they could have bathrooms for customers.

Whatever the reason is, it sounds to me like it's the damn government's fault.  When something is FUBAR, I always say "Cherchez l'etat!"  And I'm usually right.

The Australian group INXS ("in excess") was hugely popular in the eighties and nineties.  But in 1997, lead singer Michael Hutchence was found dead in his room in the Sydney Ritz-Carlton hotel.  The coroner ruled that Hutchence had committed suicide while depressed and under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

"Devil Inside" was released in 1987 on the band's best-selling studio album, Kick.  The song made it to #2 on the billboard "Hot 100."

By coincidence -- assuming that there is such a thing as coincidence -- "Devil Inside" popped up on channel 33 on the SiriusXM Radio in my rental car while I was driving to the Devil's Purse brewery. 

(Channel 33 on SiriusXM is the "1st Wave" channel, and features classic alternative songs from the eighties.)

Here's "Devil Inside":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: 

Spinners – "Rubberband Man" (1976)

Hand me down my walkin' cane

Hand me down my hat

Hurry now and don't be late

'Cause we ain't got time to chat!

Today, you're invited to join me and Lily (my sweetheart of a yellow Lab) on one of our recent Cape Cod walks.
  

Walkin' canes are optional – I don't need one yet, but you may – but hats are mandatory because we all need to minimize our UV exposure . . . right?

The first part of walk is along Scarsdale Road, a quiet residential street in Dennis Village, Massachusetts.  Lily takes the lead – this will be my view of her for most of the walk:

The most notable building on Scarsdale Road is the Dennis Inn, which was the site of my daughter's wedding reception last September:

The older homes on Scarsdale Road are generally quite modest:

But the newer houses are large and luxurious:

These wild golden asters are in bloom on Scarsdale Road at this time of year:

Scarsdale Road deadends at Whig Strret.  Lily and I will continue on a footpath through an overgrown area that my kids used to call "the jungle."

Hidden in "the jungle" is a cemetery containing the remains of a number of descendants of John Hall, who came to Dennis from Coventry, England, in 1651:

The oldest headstone in the Hall family cemetery marks the grave of Mrs. Bethiah Hall, who died in 1696.

After crossing Nobscussett Creek, the footpath takes you to the extensive grounds of the Cape Cod Center for the Arts in Dennis Village, Massachusetts, which is home to the Cape Playhouse (the oldest professional summer theatre in the United States) and the Cape Cinema (best known for its Rockwell Kent ceiling mural).

The Cape Playhouse, which seats about 365, opened for business in 1927:

Bette Davis worked as an usher at the Cape Playhouse one summer before returning the following summer to act.  Other famous actors who worked at the Cape Playhouse include Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck, Robert Montgomery, and Shirley Booth.

Here's the playbill from a 1981 production of "Educating Rita":

Here's the Cape Playhouse's scene shop:

That building is named after scenic designer Herbert Senn (who created more than 350 sets for the Cape Playhouse, as well as sets for Broadway and Lincoln Center productions) and his collaborator, Helen Pond:

The Cape Cinema opened in 1930:

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an author and artist who is remembered mostly for his book illustrations.  Here's the cover of his illustrated edition of Moby Dick that was published in 1930:

That same year, he designed a 6400-square-foot ceiling mural for the Cape Cinema that depicts the heavens and is populated by figures inspired by the constellations:

The day Lily and I took our walk, the Cape Cinema was showing Far from the Madding Crowd.

If I had been able to extend my visit by a day or two, I could have seen Love and Mercy, a biopic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys:

The Spinners were a Detroit group that had little commercial success until they switched from Motown to Atlantic.  With the help of famed "The Sound of Philadelphia" producer Thom Bell, the group cranked out five straight gold album sin the early 1970s.

"Rubberband Man," a song about an entertainer who hooks a rubber band around his toe and plays it, was co-written by Bell and Linda Creed.  It reached #1 on the Billboard R&B chart and #2 on "Hot 100" chart in 1976.

Here's "Rubberband Man":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: