“Old Man Willow” by Elephant’s Memory was featured on the soundtrack of the Academy Award-winning movie Midnight Cowboy, which was the subject of the last 2 or 3 lines.
After re-watching that movie recently, I realized that I had the entire Elephant’s Memory album that included “Old Man Willow” on my computer – and that I used to listen to that album on my iPod years ago.
I had a silver one and a green one
I still don’t understand why Apple stopped selling iPods. (I LOVED my iPod Shuffle – it was perfect for bike rides.). As late as 2008, the iPod was Apple’s best-selling product. It was responsible for 42% of Apple’s revenue in the first quarter of that year – more than Apple realized from computer sales.
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No one remembers Elephant’s Memory today, but their eponymous debut album – which was released in 1969 – is GREAT!
Here’s what rock music critic Richie Unterberger had to say about that album:
An elephant’s memory is legendarily large, and so was the size and scope of the New York band that went by the same name. Unlike some other horn-rock ensembles of the late-‘60s that took advantage of the freedom to expand rock’s size and sound, however, Elephant’s Memory weren’t merely a rock band with jazz overtones.
There was plenty of pile-driving rock’n’roll, and a good deal of jazz of both the free and big band varieties. But there was also soul, spaced-out psychedelia, and pop – not just over the course of the entire album, but sometimes within the space of a single song – and what can only be described as downright strange lyrics about hot dog men, yogurt, love as a jungle gym, and “Old Man Willow.” [NOTE: I don’t think “The Yogurt Song’ was really about yogurt.]
Some of it was written by [Tony Visconti,] who’d go on to produce David Bowie, some of it would end up on the soundtrack to the classic movie Midnight Cowboy, and the whole shebang was produced by [Wes Farrell,] who’d go on to produce the Partridge Family.
If Elephant’s Memory were a strange band, they were certainly no stranger than their surroundings, with second-degree-separations between the careers of not only Bowie, Midnight Cowboy star Dustin Hoffman, and the Partridge Family, but also the Beatles and Carly Simon. [NOTE: Simon was the group’s original lead vocalist, but left before their debut album was recorded.]
Even by the standards of the late 1960’s, which saw some of the strangest and most genre-bending rock albums ever, Elephant’s Memory is a strange animal. . . .
Even the relatively straightforward R&B-soaked tunes were apt to take weird left turns, like the guttural nonsense chanting and siren-like scatting that interrupt “Don’t Put Me on Trial No More”; the “Baby, you’re an animal/And I guess I’m just a cannibal” refrain of “Jungle Gym at the Zoo”; the low moans on “Takin’ a Walk” that sounded like the mating of a vacuum cleaner with an actual elephant; and the hippie marching-band anthem ethos of “Band of Love.”
And there was “Hot Dog Man,” where actual street conversations between the band and hot dog vendors were interlaced with hot funk licks and cheerleading-like chants from the band mimicking the hot dog men's sales pitch.
The music on Elephant’s Memory is weird, but it’s also very listenable. If my iPod hadn’t given up the ghost a decade or so ago, I’d strap it on and listen to it right now.
[NOTE: It is much easier to quote a lot of sh*t someone else wrote than it is to write sh*t yourself.]
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Click here to listen to “Jungle Gym at the Zoo,” which is featured on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
Fun fact about the 1969 movie, Midnight Cowboy: it’s the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. (Coincidentally, Oliver! – which was released the previous year – is the only G-rated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.)
Actually, Midnight Cowboy wasn’t really an X-rated movie. The head of the studio that produced it assumed it would be rated X, so he didn’t bother submitting it to the Motion Picture Association of America for an official rating – he simply put an X rating on it himself. Two years later, the MPAA gave the movie an R rating without even being asked.
The old X rating (which was renamed NC-17 in 1990) eventually became exclusively associated with porn movies. But before that happened, several well-respected directors made X-rated movies, including Nicholas Roeg (Performance), Stanley Kubrick (Clockwork Orange), and Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris).
Sam Peckinpah’s greatest movie, The Wild Bunch, was originally rated R when it was released in 1969. Warner Bros. decided to do a 25th anniversary re-release in 1994, and resubmitted the movie to the MPAA – which rated it NC-17 for some reason. After a year of bitching and moaning by the studio, the MPAA agreed to give the movie an R rating – clearing the way for the 26th anniversary re-release of The Wild Bunch.
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Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch weren’t the only notable movies to be released in 1969 – Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Goodbye Columbus, Marlowe, Medium Cool, and Once Upon a Time in the West are among the others.
1969 marked the beginning of the greatest decade in American film history. Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, American Graffiti, Badlands, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, An Unmarried Woman, Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, and Breaking Away were all released between 1969 and 1979.
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Harry Nilsson’s recording of “Everybody’s Talkin’” is the song from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack that everyone knows.
But let’s not forget “Old Man Willow” by Elephant’s Memory, which you hear during the Midnight Cowboy scene when Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) go to a party whose attendees include several of Andy Warhol’s better-known pals.
Several years after Midnight Cowboy was released, Elephant’s Memory became John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s backup band. But I’ll forgive them for that because “Old Man Willow” is a seriously groovy track.
Click here to listen to “Old Man Willow.” (The song is named for a character in The Lord of the Rings.)
This is the third of four consecutive 2 or 3 lines posts about New York Times wedding announcements. (You’ll be sorry if you miss number four, which will be published in a couple of days. Believe you me, it’s a doozy.)
The wedding announcements that are featured in the “Vows” column in the Times are many things. Mostly, they are parodies of themselves.
Let’s begin at the beginning:
Christopher Ahnberg cannot quite put his finger on the moment he started identifying as a feminist. But his appreciation for women who aren’t the shrinking-violet type goes way back, and for the sake of his future happiness, it should probably go way forward, too.
“Growing up, my favorite shows always had strong female leads, like Kate & Allie,” Mr. Ahnberg said. “In my fifth-grade yearbook, I wrote down Murphy Brown as my favorite show. Plus, I grew up with two strong older sisters. So I never saw women as anything but very strong people.”
(You know, I felt much the same way as Mr. Ahnberg when it came to favoring TV shows with strong, independent female characters – for example, Charlie’s Angels.)
The effect Mr. Ahnberg’s sisters and Candice Bergen had on his views of gender roles may help to explain, at least partly, why he fell in love with Cristen Conger, who is part of a duo of “girls-next-door gender experts” who host . . . “Stuff Mom Never Told You,” a weekly podcast that has attracted a loyal audience, mostly of young women.
Wacky feminist podcaster Cristen Conger
The show, known as SMNTY to its viewers, trains a clear-eyed focus on subjects like fashion, differences between the sexes, and women in the workplace and beyond. Titles of recent episodes include “Free the Nipple,” “Period Pride” and “Are Women Bigger Whiners?”
(Can you excuse me for just a moment? I want to subscribe to that podcast before I forget.)
Click here to hear Ahnberg and Conger talk about women who don't shave their armpits
Ms. Conger describes herself as a “liberal feminist” — one who believes that women should be free to pursue the lives they want. The recent dust-up over the somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that damnation awaits women who fail to vote for Hillary Clinton caused Ms. Conger more frustration than anything.
“I thought it was completely understandable within the context of history, if politically foolish,” she said. “What upset me the most was that it only spurred more narrow media coverage of feminists being pitted against feminists.”
(What in the world is this discussion doing in a wedding announcement?)
Mr. Ahnberg, 33, met Ms. Conger, 31, when both were students at the University of Georgia in 2004. But it wasn’t until August 2012, when Ms. Conger was in need of someone to go with her to the wedding of a friend, that they began dating. . . .
[D]espite her status as an emerging feminist voice, Ms. Conger had to concede that mustering up the courage to ask Mr. Ahnberg to be her date was a little unsettling.
“I was nervous because I liked him,” she said. “I tried to play it off as a friend-date, like, ‘I have to go to this wedding; can you come with me?’ But I didn’t tell him I had been counting down the days, that it was really such an event for me.”
Conger shows off her engagement ring on the Great Wall of China
(I know you’ve been waiting for the romantic stuff – here it comes!)
The evening turned out to be less feminist than fairy tale.
“We had a magical night,” said Ms. Conger, who is tall and slim and has a tendency to wave her hands to make a point. “I bought a new dress and had my hair done, and he showed up all dressed up in a suit and sunglasses, and he looked very studly, and the setting was this beautiful home in Marietta with a beautiful garden.”
(Who knew that studliness was the number-one quality that feminists look for in a man?)
Ms. Conger knew early on that Mr. Ahnberg had a sharp, quick sense of humor. But it was only after a few dates, when she and Mr. Ahnberg were drinking Bloody Marys during brunch on an Atlanta restaurant’s rooftop patio, that she began to realize he had more to offer her than punch lines and someone to be her plus one at events like her friend’s wedding.
“We started talking about feminism, and it was the first conversation I had ever had with a guy my age about feminism that was in-depth and engaging,” she recalled. “And he was not at all nervous about the term. I just remember sitting there thinking, ‘This is incredible’.”
(I always figured that trying to get a feminist drunk would not be an effective strategy. Silly me!)
Mr. Ahnberg says that feminism is a factor for him when voting and when he’s choosing which businesses to support. His feminist umbrage may be most on display when someone suggests that women cannot be funny.
“I’m always shocked when anybody says that,” he said, and understandably so, when you consider that his partner does what, despite her protestations to the contrary, looks and sounds vaguely like a very good Russell Brand imitation.
Not-so-funnyman Russell Brand
(I’m not sure what Russell Brand has to do with being funny, but we’ll save that discussion for another time. Do you think that the statement that our blushing bride “does what . . . looks and sounds vaguely like a very good Russell Brand imitation” is really a compliment? Would you consider it a compliment to say that an amateur singer “sounds vaguely like a very good singer,” or praise a young fiction writer by saying that his writing “reads vaguely like that of a very good writer”?)
[Mr. Ahnberg’s older sister] said he and Ms. Conger can break out into an improv comedy routine at a moment’s notice.
“They make a comedy routine out of everything they do,” she said. “They could be slicing peppers to make fajitas and all of a sudden they’re breaking into a fajita song, trading verses.”
(Sounds hilarious. Let’s get back to the romantic stuff.)
During that rooftop brunch with Ms. Conger . . . she was not the only one who felt the stirrings of love that day.
By then, something had occurred to Mr. Ahnberg, who usually carries a warm, wide smile atop an athletic frame. “I realized I had been an idiot the entire time I had known her,” he said, “because we had been on-and-off friends since college, but she was everything I ever looked for in a woman. I wasn’t going to let her slip away.”
(“I realized I had been an idiot the entire time.” You certainly won’t get any argument from me on that point.)
He eventually decided to do what one of Ms. Conger’s feminist icons has famously suggested in song: put a ring on it.
(I wonder if she did that comedy routine in her Russell Brand persona?)
At the Ahnberg-Conger nuptials
Ms. Conger has chosen to keep her own name, but both she and Ms. Ervin agree that it is also possible to find power in a woman who takes her husband’s last name, an issue that has been a hot topic among SMNTY listeners since an episode titled “A Practical Wedding” aired in January.
The wedding expert Meg Keene, who was a guest on the show, insisted that brides should keep their names.
(I don’t understand why Ms. Keene feels so strongly that married women should stick with their fathers’ last names rather than taking their husbands’ last names. Either way, the woman ends up with a man’s last name.)
Mr. and Mrs. Conger
For Ms. Conger, deciding which elements of a traditional wedding to keep and which to toss in the name of feminism involved careful consideration.
“Ultimately, we’ve moved away from the wedding-industrial complex to do what honors us,” she said.
But some rituals proved trickier to excise than others.
Accepting an engagement ring, for example, required some soul-searching. “In its historic sense, the ring signified possession rather than partnership,” she explained. “But I also knew it meant a lot to Chris to make the gesture. And I know that does harken back to old-school gender norms, but I wasn’t going to trivialize something that was important to him.”
(In other words, Ms. Conger agreed to take possession of a pricey 1930s-vintage art-deco engagement ring just so she wouldn’t hurt Mr. Ahnberg’s feelings. That’s so sweet!)
But “Single Ladies” was featured in a previous 2 or 3 lines. (You can click here if you missed it.) And 2 or 3 lines has a strict policy of not featuring the same song twice . . . except when it does.
So instead we’re featuring “Don’t Put Me On Trial No More,” by Elephant’s Memory.
Elephant’s Memory was a funky, bluesy New York City band with a horn section – think Electric Flag or Big Brother and the Holding Company. After contributing a couple of songs to the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack and releasing an eponymous debut album, they became John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s backup band.
Here’s “Don’t Put Me On Trial No More,” which absolutely kicks ass:
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