YouGovAmerica, a market research firm, recently asked thousands of adults this question:
How confident are you that you could safely land a passenger airplane in an emergency situation, relying only on the assistance of air traffic control?
46% of the males surveyed but only 20% of the females said they were either “very confident” or “somewhat confident” of their ability to bring a plane down safely in an emergency.
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The only surprising thing about this finding is that the male number isn’t a lot higher than 46%.
You can chalk that up to the modesty that is so characteristic of the male sex, because males clearly have a big edge when it comes to God-given airplane-handling aptitude.
46% of men disagree
If you don’t believe me, let’s consider the facts.
The Wright brothers were male – right?
Charles Lindbergh was male, too – as was famed test pilot Chuck Yeager.
Not to mention astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and every one of the 12 astronauts who have walked on the moon.
“Sky” King, Han Solo, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell – the list of great male pilots goes on and on!
Of course, not all famous pilots were men – there’s Amelia Earhart, for example.
I don’t know about you, but if I was to be seated next to Amelia Earhart on a plane and the pilot of that plane suddenly became incapacitated, I’d start saying my prayers.
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In closing, let me quote a recent Washington Post article:
Last May, a Florida man was returning home from a fishing trip in the Bahamas when the pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 fell ill. With the guidance of an air traffic controller and flight instructor, Darren Harrison safely touched down at Palm Beach International Airport.
Darren Harrison was a male. (Just sayin’.)
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Three Dog Night was a very underrated group – possibly because they didn’t write their own songs. (Neither did Frank Sinatra or Dusty Springfield, of course.)
Instead, Three Dog Night covered songs by accomplished songwriters like Hoyt Axton, Dave Mason, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, Robbie Robertson, and Neil Young – to name just a few.
“Circle for a Landing” was written by Don Preston, a session guitarist who toured and recorded with Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, and others. He and Russell co-wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” – a truly great song.
Click here to listen to Three Dog Night’s recording of “Circle for a Landing,” which was released in 1969 on the group’s second (and best) album, Suitable for Framing.
[NOTE: Three Dog Night's cover of "One" was one of the first recordings to be featured in a 2 or 3 lines post. Here’s a lightly edited version of my original 2010 post about "One," one of this year's inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.]
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"One" was Three Dog Night's first big hit. I vividly remember hearing it on the radio while sitting in a Central Missouri State University dorm room during Missouri Boys' State in the summer of 1969.
I'm not writing about it because it's a perfect little 3-minute AM-radio song ("PL3MAMRS") – although it is – but because I hope I can chase down an old rumor I've wondered about for years.
I heard that the committee that planned the 1969 junior-senior prom at Parkwood was having trouble deciding which of two bands to hire to play at the dance. The band that was eventually chosen was a local favorite, the Pink Peach Mob (one of whose members, Steve Gaines, later joined Lynyrd Skynyrd and was killed in the 1977 crash of that band's airplane).
The story goes that the other band was Three Dog Night, an up-and-coming California group that would have cost a lot more money to book than the local guys. Later, of course, Three Dog Night hit it very big, and everyone who went to the dance missed out on being able to bore their friends, co-workers, children, and grandchildren with the story of how a hugely successful band – they had eleven top-10 hits (including three number ones) – had played at their high school prom.
Maybe Three Dog Night was a candidate to play at the 1968 prom, not the 1969 one as I've always heard – looking at the band's recording history, 1968 would work a lot better.
Surely some of my Joplin readers know whether this is a true story or just an urban legend. Please -- post a comment and help me clear this up once and for all.
By the way, I see that Three Dog Night played at the Downstream Casino this past July 4 – so they did make it to Joplin, just 42 or so years late.
* * * * *
"One" was written by Harry Nilsson, a very good but very odd singer-songwriter. If you don't believe me, click here and give a listen to his song, "You're Breakin' My Heart":
You're breakin' my heart
You're tearin' it apart
So f*ck you!
Nilsson's biggest hits were "Everybody's Talkin' " (the theme song to the movie "Midnight Cowboy"), "Me and My Arrow," and "Without You," which was a #1 hit in 1971. But my two favorite Nilsson songs – both from the 1972 Nilsson Schmilsson album – were "Jump Into the Fire" (which was featured during the scene in "Goodfellas" when Ray Liotta is driving all over town with a bunch of guns in his trunk while a helicopter appears to be following him) and "Coconut" (which was featured in the closing credits of "Reservoir Dogs"):
You put de lime in the coconut, you drink 'em both together
Put de lime in the coconut, then you'll feel better
Click here to watch a truly bizarre video of "Coconut" from a 1971 BBC television special.
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Nilsson released "One" as a single a year before Three Dog Night did. Click here to listen to his version of the song, which went nowhere – it's a lovely recording, but no chance it was going to get played on the radio in 1968.
Click here to listen to the Three Dog Night version of "One."
Click on the link below if you'd like to buy the recording from Amazon:
Three Dog Night’s Suitable for Framing was one of the albums I listened to over and over when I was a senior in high school.
I didn’t brag about it, of course. I viewed Three Dog Night as a lightweight band, and would never compare them to Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or the Doors. I’m actually surprised that I bought one of their albums.
Three Dog Night put out a lot of good singles – their first hit, “One,” is one of the best singles of its era – but they put out some pretty hokey stuff as well.
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Three Dog Night made a living off other people’s songs. They wrote a few of the songs they recorded, but mostly did covers.
You’ve got to give them credit – they chose songs written by some of the very best songwriters of the sixties and seventies. I’m talking Harry Nilsson (“One”), Laura Nyro (“Eli’s Coming”), Randy Newman (“Mama Told Me Not to Come”), Robbie Robertson (“Chest Fever’), Dave Mason (“Feelin’ Alright”), Neil Young (“The Loner”), Tim Hardin (“Don’t Make Promises”), Hoyt Axton (“Never Been to Spain”), and many others.
I didn’t know until recently that today’s featured song, “Lady Samantha,” was an Elton John-Bernie Taupin song. In fact, “Lady Samantha” was Sir Elton’s first American single. (It didn’t chart.)
Three Dog Night’s cover is quite similar to John’s version, with one important difference. For some reason, John repeated the first chorus in what seems like a blatant attempt to stretch a too-short, two-verse song to an acceptable length.
You can repeat the final chorus. Hell, you can repeat it five or six times if it’s really good. But you shouldn’t repeat the chorus the first time you sing it.
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I can’t think of a band other than Three Dog Night that had three lead vocalists. (Plenty of groups have three singers, but there’s usually only one lead vocalist. The others may occasionally get to sing lead, but are first and foremost backup singers.)
I took my older kids to see Three Dog Night perform live at the annual “Hometown Holidays” celebration in Rockville, Maryland. I’m thinking it was the early nineties – maybe ’92 or ’93 – but I can’t be sure. I’m pretty sure they didn’t perform “Lady Samantha,” which was never released as a single.
Here’s Three Dog Night’s version of “Lady Samantha”:
[Note: This post originally appeared almost exactly five years ago, just before my 40th high school reunion. After some minor editing, I'm reposting it today –which is the day before my 45th reunion kicks off. (Tempus certainly does fugit, boys and girls.)]
A 45th high-school reunion in Joplin, Missouri, is hardly a "celebrity ball." And I doubt that any of the girls I'll see there will be wearing satin and lace. (Sorry, ladies -- you may be 62 or 63 years old, but it's hard not to think of you as "girls.")
But no matter. It will still be an occasion to celebrate.
What exactly will we be celebrating? Some of us can celebrate success in a career or a business. (I'm not just talking about money. I'm talking about the satisfaction you get from doing something well, and the recognition and respect you receive from your customers or your employer or your peers.)
Others can celebrate their children, or grandchildren, and the pride and joy they bring – and is there anything in life more celebrate-able?
At the very least, we can all celebrate just being here. Some of us have already survived close calls, and know from very personal experience that life isn't something to be taken for granted. The fact that so many of our classmates – not to mention parents and other loved ones – are no longer around to join the celebration should make that very clear to the rest of us.
What I'm especially celebrating this weekend is growing up in Joplin, where I spent almost every day of the first 18 years of life. It was what I experienced here that made me the person I am today – for better and for worse.
Certainly my parents were the most important influence in my life. (I'm sometimes told – not necessarily in a complimentary tone of voice – that I am getting more like my father every year. That is absolutely true, and it doesn't bother me a bit. He and my mother have accomplished a lot after starting out with very little, and my sister and I owe them more than we can ever repay.)
I moved to the Washington, DC, area after I finished law school over 38 years ago, so I've lived here a lot longer than I lived in Joplin (even accounting for for brief detours to San Francisco and Philadelphia).
The last few years have really brought that home. I can't overstate what an impact all the old photos that have been posted to the reunion's Facebook page have had on me.
I've seen familiar faces that have been lost to me for many years – I've allowed "out of sight" to become "out of mind" far too easily – but it turns out those faces were not really forgotten. Seeing them has triggered all kinds of wonderful and surprisingly intense memories. And the memories that have resurfaced have all been happy ones.
The Dugout Lounge at Mickey Mantle's Holiday Inn in Joplin
The reunion will be a great opportunity to see many of the friends with whom I have kept in touch over the years. Just as important, it will be a chance to really connect with other classmates for the first time. I've already struck up some friendships with people I didn't really know in high school, or that I barely knew, and I hope those friendships will continue in some form after the reunion is over.
It wouldn't be honest of me if I were to deny that this whole experience has also been somewhat bittersweet.
One thing the reunion is forcing me (and, I suspect, many others) to do is to to look back and take stock of where I've been and where I am – and where I'm going as well. It's impossible for me to look at all those pictures from 40 and even 50 years ago without regrets – regrets for all the mistakes I've made, regrets for all the things I wish I had done but didn't . . . but mostly regrets from (to quote from a book I recently read) "the realization there [are] a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree."
I can't resist sharing some quotes from my favorite poet and my favorite novelist from my high-school days, both of whom had a lot to say on this subject.
From William Wordsworth's "Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)":
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction . . .
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind . . .
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
(I need that "philosophic mind" right now -- I hope I don't have to wait much longer for it to arrive.)
And from The Great Gatsby (by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was laid to rest only a few miles from where I've lived for the past 25 years, and whose tombstone bears these words):
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's tombstone in Rockville, Maryland
That's not altogether a bad thing, in my opinion. Life in Joplin when we were young was actually wonderfully multilayered and rich. It was a time of intense curiosity and intense feelings. To paraphrase the song I quoted earlier, you can take it or leave it -- high school is us, high school is who we are.
Well, that's it from me – my last post before the reunion. I've been talking a lot, and now I'm going to concentrate on listening for a change. I look forward to seeing – and listening to – all of you in Joplin (or elsewhere, if you can't make it to the hootenanny).
Get ready to celebrate. And even if you can't be there in person, you can celebrate our shared history in spirit – and get started on our shared future. I hope this song – the final cut from Three Dog Night's second (and best) album, Suitable for Framing – will help put you in the right mood:
I know this blog is called 2 or 3 lines, but I thought it was better to quote the entire final verse and chorus. Quoting just two or three lines out of context might have been confusing -- but when you read the entire verse and chorus, it all makes perfect sense . . . right?
I first heard this song over 40 years ago -- the Three Dog Night version, not the original version by The Band -- and I had no idea that these were the words.
The Band
This may be TMI, but if you've never heard the term "mooncalf," it originally referred to a miscarried fetus of a cow. (Superstitious folk believed that the moon could cause miscarriages.) Later, the term came to be used to describe malformed or grotesque creatures -- it appears in Shakespeare's The Tempest, an H. G. Wells novel, the Harry Potter books, and The Bank Dick (a 1940 W. C. Fields movie).
"Chest Fever" is from The Band's first studio album, Music from Big Pink, which got its title from the pink-siding-ed house in upstate New York where The Band and Bob Dylan hung out in the mid-sixties. (The Band had been Dylan's backup band on his 1966 tour, and he wrote or co-wrote several songs on the album).
The Band had a unique style. You might say they were the quintessential American roots rock band, except for the fact that four of the five members were natives of Ontario. (Levon Helm -- who died of cancer just last year -- grew up in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, an unincorporated community near Helena.)
Music from Big Pink wasn't a big seller at first, although Al Kooper's rave review of it in Rolling Stone helped. Eric Clapton liked its laid-back, rootsy style so much that he quit Cream so he could take a different musical direction. (Clapton's work on the Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominoes albums demonstrates how influential The Band was on him.) George Harrison loved it, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said it was the second-most influential rock and roll record ever (behind only Sgt. Pepper's).
"Chest Fever" is credited to Robbie Robertson. He freely admits that the lyrics don't make any sense. That's a fact, Jack! (Levon Helm says that the lyrics were originally improvised by him and Richard Manuel.)
Garth Hudson at the Lowery organ
The song begins with a very Bach-like organ solo played by Garth Hudson. Unlike most rock organists, Hudson played a Lowery organ -- not a Hammond B-3.
I'm not a huge fan of roots rock, but you can't argue with songs like "Chest Fever," "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," "Rag Mama Rag," and "Don't Do It." The first 500 songs featured in 2 or 3 lines didn't include anything by The Band, but now I've made up for that oversight.
Here's "Chest Fever":
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:
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