John's Children – "Desdemona" (1967)

Desdemona, just because

You're the daughter of a man

In Shakespeare’s Othello, the man that Desdemona is the daughter of is Brabantio, a Venetian senator.

The Grand Canal in Venice

In the opening scene of the play, Brabantio is awakened and told that Desdemona has eloped with the much older Othello, an African prince and general in the Venetian Army:

'Zounds, sir, you're robbed; 

For shame, put on your gown;

Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is topping your white ewe. 

The enraged Brabantio tracks down the newlyweds and accuses Othello of using witchcraft to seduce the innocent Desdemona.  But Desdemona swears that she married Othello because she truly loved him.

"Othello and Desdemona in Venice"
by Théodore Chassériau (1850)

In the final scene of the play, we learn that Brabantio has died of grief over the loss of his daughter.

*     *     *     *     * 

John’s Children was an English band known for its outrageous live performances and lack of musical talent.  (The group’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell – who also managed the Yardbirds – said John’s Children was “positively the worst group I’ve ever seen.”)

In 1967, the band toured Germany with the Who, who fired them mid-tour.  Pete Townshend said John’s Children was “too loud and violent,” which is a case of the pot calling the kettle black if I ever heard one.

“Desdemona,” the group’s most famous single, was written by Marc Bolan.  Bolan was a member of John’s Children for just a few months before leaving to form Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Here’s “Desdemona”:

Click below to order the song from Amazon:

blink-182 – "What's My Age Again?" (1999)

That’s about the time

That she broke up with me

* * * * *

Tom DeLonge and Scott Raynor, two of the original three members of blink-182, met when they were students at a suburban San Diego high school.  (The group’s third founding member, Mark Hoppus, was the older brother of one of their classmates.)

“What’s My Age Again?” is about a 23-year-old who doesn’t want to grow up.  (The song was originally titled “Peter Pan Complex.”)  His immature behavior costs him his girlfriend, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.  

Tom DeLonge

I don’t know if Tom DeLonge’s ancestors are French or Italian.  (“De” names can be either.)  But I’m guessing he’s eaten more than a few pizzas in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood, which is where all the photos above were taken.

Here’s “What’s My Age Again”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Gwen Stefani -- "Hollaback Girl" (2004)

This sh*t is bananas

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

I hope you enjoyed a fun-filled Cinco de Mayo.  (Not feeling too hungover still, are you?)

2 or 3 lines spent this wonderful holiday with its close friend Snooki, star of the Jersey Shore reality TV show.  As this photo shows, we celebrated with Mexican Bulldogs -- which you make by sticking a Corona bottle into a big-ass frozen margarita.

Snooki celebrates Cinco de Mayo
with a Mexican Bulldog

Anyway, let's pick up where we left off -- which was midway through my recent pleasure-business-pleasure trip to San Francisco, San Diego, and Granbury, Texas.

I go to San Diego every year with several other attorneys from my law firm because we exhibit at a trade show held annually at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel:

(The tree in the foreground of that photo is the naked coral tree, or Erythrina coralloides.)

I always seem to get a room with a view of the gynormous Dole Food Company facility at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal, which is just south of the hotel.

Dole trailers at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal

San Diego is one of the 30 busiest ports in the U.S., but it handles less than 2% of the container traffic that each of the two busiest American ports (Los Angeles and Long Beach) handle.  

Dole imports roughly 500,000 tons of bananas and pineapples from Central and South America through San Diego each year.  It's the Port of San Diego's biggest customer.

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

Dole's fleet of ships takes fruit to Europe, the Far East, and four ports in the U.S. -- Wilmington (DE), Port Everglades (FL), Gulfport (MS), and San Diego (which is the entry point for fresh produce going to stores west of the Rockies).  

Dole imports about 185 million bananas through San Diego every month.  It recently signed a 25-year lease with the Port of San Diego for almost a million square feet at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal.

The Dole Ecuador

Every time I've been in San Diego, there's been a Dole ship tied up just south of my hotel.  Each of those ships holds about 500 40-foot containers full of fruit.  

Dole's banana ships are about 550 feet long, but they look like rowboats compared to a US Navy aircraft carrier.

The USS Ronald Reagan

While I was in San Diego last month, three of the Navy's ten aircraft carriers -- the USS Nimitz (CVN 68), the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), and the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) -- were in port.  The speculation was that this was the result of the Navy's need to save some money due to the sequestration thing.  (The home port for the Vinson and Reagan is San Diego.  The home port for the Nimitz is Everett, Washington.)

Here's a shot of the three carriers (with a ferry boat in the foreground) taken from across San Diego Bay:

Each of these ships carries a crew of 5680 sailors and 90 aircraft (mostly F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets).  These three carriers alone pack a punch that is superior to that of any other country's navy.  (The navies of the UK, France, Russia, and China each operate only a single aircraft carrier, none of which can compare to any of the US Navy's carriers.)

F/A-18 E/F "Super Hornet"

There was one other very impressive ship in port when I was in San Diego: the 199-foot, $80 million  yacht Méduse, which is owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.  The Méduse sleeps 12 passengers (plus 15 crew members), and is equipped with a recording studio and a helicopter.  

Here are a couple of views of the Méduse:

That's a big-ass yacht, but Allen actually owns two that are even bigger -- the 302-foot Tatoose ($162 million) and the 414-foot Octopus ($200 million), which was the largest private yacht in the world when it was built in 2003.  The Octopus is equipped with two helicopters, seven tenders (the largest is a 63-footer), a swimming pool, and two submarines.

Allen left Microsoft years ago, but reportedly still owns 138 million Microsoft shares (which have a market value of about $4.4 billion).  He owns the Seattle Seahawks football team, the Portland Trailblazers basketball team, most of Ticketmaster, a $250 million art collection, and a bunch of guitars that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix.

Allen reportedly bought the Fender Stratocaster that Hendrix played at Woodstock for $2 million:

Allen is a major philanthropist.  He's given away an estimated $1 billion to various nonprofit organizations, and is one of 105 billionaires around the world who has signed "The Giving Pledge," promising to give at least half of his fortune to charity.  But there's plenty more where that came from.

"Hollaback Girl" was released on Gwen Stefani's very successful first solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby.

The term "hollaback girl" (or "holler back girl") was originally used to describe a cheerleader who repeats -- hollers back -- the words of the cheer that the squad leader shouts out.

More generally, a hollaback girl is a girl that waits around for guys to call her up and then agrees to do pretty much whatever they want her to do -- a doormat (or booty call), in other words.

Gwen  makes it clear in this song that she isn't a hollaback girl in either sense of the expression.

Gwen Stefani about to
strangle Courtney Love

"Hollaback Girl" was written in response to some disparaging comments Courteney Love made comparing Stefani to a high-school cheerleader.  (Love said she wasn't the cheerleader type -- you can say that again.)  As far as Stefani is concerned, Love's sh*t is "bananas."

Here's the "Hollaback Girl" video.  It's a hoot:

"Hollaback Girl" is one of the songs that is prominently featured in the Super Mash Bros mashup, "Young Gelt Cash Gelt Billionaires":

Girl Talk also uses "Hollaback Girl" in the "Hand Clap" mashup:



Click here to buy "Hollaback Girl" from Amazon:

Stone Temple Pilots -- "Lady Picture Show" (1996)

Lady picture girl

I think them boys don't like your show

(Good grammar isn't everything.)

Poor San Diego.  It's the second-largest city in California, but trails far behind Los Angeles (the largest) and San Francisco (number four after not only San Diego but also San Jose) in fame and its impact on American culture and the popular imagination.

I could list musicians associated with Los Angeles and San Francisco until the cows come home.  (Los Angeles has the Beach Boys and Doors and many more.  And San Francisco has the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and so many others.)  But what bands of real stature are associated in the public's mind with San Diego?

The Stone Temple Pilots

Well, there's one-hit-wonder Iron Butterfly -- they started out in San Diego although they quickly relocated to Los Angeles.

There's Stone Temple Pilots -- who also got their start in San Diego but quickly relocated to Los Angeles.

And then there's . . . hmmmmm.

The Stone Temple Pilots came together when Scott Weiland met New Jersey-born bass player Robert DeLeo at a Black Flag concert in Long Beach, California, in 1986.  

The two men, who both lived in San Diego's Point Loma community, figured out that they were dating the same woman.  But rather than fight for her hand (or her hey-nonny-nonny), they decided to form a band and ended up living together in the woman’s San Diego apartment after she moved to Texas.

Downtown San Diego from Point Loma

The band (which also included DeLeo’s guitarist brother Dean and drummer Eric Kretz) originally called themselves Mighty Joe Young, which was the title of a 1949 movie about an African gorilla who becomes a California night-club entertainer.

The movie was remade (badly) in 1998:

After a couple of years of playing clubs in San Diego and Los Angeles, the band signed a record contract.  But while they were recording their first album, a record company lawyer told them that an elderly blues singer who already called himself Mighty Joe Young.  

The group decided to record under the name Stone Temple Pilots.  That name didn't mean anything -- it seems to have been inspired by the old STP motor oil logo.  (One theory is that the group chose the name because they could get STP stickers for free at gas stations and use them as promotional giveaways.)

The band's first album, Core, was released in 1992 and went multiplatinum, thanks in part to the popularity of singles like "Wicked Garden" and "Plush."  

Today, there's an STP tribute band in San Diego that goes by the name Core.  Think about that, boys and girls -- a Stone Temple Pilots tribute band.

STP tribute band Core

STP was hardly the Beatles, or Led Zeppelin.  In a 1994 Rolling Stone poll, STP was voted "Worst New Band" by critics.  But it was also voted "Best New Band" by readers.  That same year, STP’s song “Plush” won the “Best Hard Rock Performance” Grammy.  

All five of the band’s studio albums have earned either gold or platinum certification, so maybe forming a tribute band wasn't such a crazy idea after all.   

After my recent San Francisco vacation with my family, I headed on to San Diego on business.  I visit San Diego each spring to attend a trade show with several other lawyers from my firm.

One of the highlights of this year's show was the keynote speaker, famous basketball coach Bob Knight: 

Knight is known for speaking his mind.  Actually, he's known for speaking his mind while choking players and throwing chairs on to the court during games.

The most memorable part of Knight's speech came when he advised his audience not to be too quick to say "yes" when asked for something by a child or employee.  "It's a lot easier to go from saying 'no' to saying 'yes' than it is to go from 'yes' to 'no'," he opined.  "Some of you ladies know what I'm talking about."

It's remarkable how creative modern trade-show promoters are when it comes to selling sponsorships and advertising -- no stone is left unturned when it comes to making money.  Here's a picture of the inner doors of one of the elevators at the hotel where the trade show was being held.  As you see, even that space had been sold to one of the exhibitors:

The trade show is at a big hotel that's located on right on San Diego Bay.  There's a nice paved hiker-biker path that runs north past the San Diego convention center, a couple of other huge hotels, and Seaport Village, a restaurant/shopping area that attracts a lot of tourists.  

Here's a sign that was posted all around the outdoor eating area in Seaport Village:

Why are the Seaport Village pigeons being singled out for carrying and transmitting diseases?  Couldn't you say the same about most of the people there? 

You can see one of the two towers of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in the background of this photo of a bottlebrush shrub (genus callistemon).  The Hyatt's two big-ass towers are 33 and 40 stories tall, and have a total of 1625 guest rooms.

The trail also runs past a marina with a lot of very pricey boats, the Maritime Museum of San Diego (whose collection includes the official California tall ship, a couple of 19th-century ships, and a couple of submarines), and the USS Midway, a World War II-vintage aircraft carrier that opened as a museum in 2004. 

One evening when I was out for my daily constitutional, I saw this rather unusual sight:

If you just can't live without a Colt .45 barbecue grill, click here.  It's available on Etsy for a mere $7950 (plus $750 shipping and handling).

Another iconic feature of the San Diego Bay waterfront is "Unconditional Surrender," a 25-foot-tall statue that's often referred to as the "Kissing Statue."  

Most people think the sculpture is based on the famous Alfred Eisenstadt photograph, "V-J Day in Times Square":

But it is actually based on a photograph of the same scene taken at about the same time by a Navy photojournalist, Lt. Victor Jorgensen:

"Lady Picture Show" was the second single released from the Stone Temple Pilots' 1996 album, Tiny Music . . . Songs From The Vatican Giftshop.  It sounds quite different from most of STP's songs, which tend to sound more like Alice in Chains and Nirvana and Soundgarden and the other Seattle grunge bands whose music was so popular in the early nineties.  "Lady Picture Show" is almost Beatle-ish.

Here's the album cover:

And here's the official music video for "Lady Picture Show," which is a hoot -- it's as incoherent as the song's lyrics, but that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun:

Click below to order "Lady Picture Show" from Amazon: