Doobie Brothers. Look how they danced around on stage back then. How could such good music become so embarrassing? Fortunately most of us only heard them on FM and 8-Track and never saw their awesome stage performance.
Speaking of performances, this one goes out to Jay Leno, one of the funniest modern comedians who never had to use vulgarity to score a laugh. He’s right up there with Johnny Carson, Jonathan Winters and Bill Cosby. I never met Leno, but some friends did. Each said essentially the same thing: “Jay’s an honest nice guy, and he’s funny as hell.” That’s how I want to be remembered when I’m gone. Leno’s still alive.
Sorry, but I can’t bring myself to post any of the more recent poor quality sucky sounding live versions of “Sweet Melissa.” God bless you, Jay, and thanks for all the entertainment.
The Portuguese Man O’ War is amazing, as it’s not a single animal, but a colony of several bizarre organisms, all dependent on the others for survival. One provides transportation, one lures and traps food, one processes it, one cooks, and the other one does laundry and runs the blog.
The harmless gasbag idiot-animal floats while dangling his nasty stinging-tentacled buddies as deep as 160 feet below the surface. How they find each other and decide to hang together is a mystery to me, unless it has something to do with cheap beer, tasers and fraternity parties.
I saw one washed up on a beach when I was a kid without knowing what it was – thought it was an inflatable toy dolphin with seaweed attached. Yeah, I poked it with a stick, and yeah, I found out what the insides of a Portuguese Man O’ War smelled like, as did everyone else within a quarter mile downwind.
When the floating-gasbag idiot-animal washes up on shore and dies, it takes the other idiot-animals with him, and they can’t do anything about it because their free ride is over. Such is the life of a sycophant.
The missus informed me that there were words to that great theme, and she’s right. The closing credits for the early episodes included “The Cartwrights” singing the theme (after apparently stumbling out of a saloon/cat house joint venture in Carson City) and mounting up to pick fights with and wreak havoc on the local populace before they rode back to their fortified enclave known as The Ponderosa:
[Little Joe] I’ve got a flair for women everywhere, Bonanza!
[Hoss] BONANZA! ¡AI-AI-AI!
[All] I’m gonna call on any gal at all, she’s gonna welcome me.
[Ben] I’m not afraid of any pretty maid, Bonanza! BONANZA! When I give a kiss to any pretty miss, She’ll learn a lot from me!
[All] One for four, four for one This we guarantee!
We got a right to pick a little fight – Bonanza! BONANZA! If anyone fights any one of us, He’s gotta fight with me!
BTW, the best comment on that Utoobage link was posted by someone named 75yellowraven:
“144-441 what does that mean?”
The lyrics and acting were so laughably absurd that the clip was canned. Years later Lorne Greene sang the song with much different lyrics: Lorne Greene singing The Theme To Bonanza.
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But that’s not the weird part. The Bonanza Theme was orchestrated by David Rose, same guy who composed “The Stripper,” a number of TV theme songs, and this horrible piece of 1960s grocery aisle music:
Bet you couldn’t last the whole two-point-five minutes of that, so here’s almost a whole hour of The Beat Farmers circa 1984, featuring the late Country Dick Montana on drums, vocals, beer and belligerence.
Hope that grabs on, holds and squeezes you for this edition of The Saturday Matinee. Have a great weekend, even if you have to mow the snow.
P.S. If you ever wanted to sing along to The Chips‘ “Rubber Biscuit” we’ve got the Complete & Accurate day down sum wanna jigga-wah lyrics here.
While looking for something else I found this, and it kept my attention long enough to post it for your upcoming New Year’s Eve celebrations. If you can figure it out, enjoy it.
I was actually looking for these guys. The Allotria Jazz Band plays early American jazz and Dixieland. You may not have heard them or of them – they’re from Munich and they’re great.
Once the camera SsTFD this is pretty good stuff. “Stairway To Heaven by the Oompah Brass. Now for something completely different.
Loud, piercing and sharp… a whistle is hard to ignore. But whistling languages are in danger of dying out. But residents of Kusköy on the Black Sea coast still communicate by whistling.An ee sounds higher than an ah. Consonants are distinguished by changes in pitch over different intervals of time. Eskimos communicate with whistles; so do indigenous people in the Amazon, and in Europe shepherds keep boredom at bay and communicate by whistling to each other. But the world’s 70 whistling languages are slowly becoming extinct. Kusköy in Turkey is defending the tradition.
I’m not sure if Harpo was self-taught, but I know that some items in his Wikipedia entry are contradicted by Groucho’s Autobiography. The story I recall (that means “I seem to remember but I’m too lazy to research it”): there was a dispute with a theater owner where the brothers were perfoming. Harpo was pissed, said he hoped the place burned down. It did, and Harpo vowed never to speak on stage again. I don’t know if it’s true, but I recall (again, that means “I seem to remember but I’m too lazy to research it”) that’s what Groucho claimed.
Awesome Retro Cover of Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” and it beats the hell out of the original. Post Modern Jukebox is amazing, and that song is dedicated to Calo who’s having some tough times. Get well, Suki.
Kinda hot here the past few days, and with some unusual humidity for Bunkville, I had to turn off the a/c occasionally on a 2-hour commute just to let it de-ice. While we’re waiting for Dear President to start pushing the Affordable Air Conditioning Act, let’s spin some tunes that are too hot to handle and too cold to hold on The Saturday Matinee.
The Lovin’ Spoonful in September 1966. A few years after that song came out I discovered that John Sebastian wasn’t black, yet he had soul.
The Temptations were great, and this is one of their greatest: “I Wish It Would Rain.” According to Wiki, it was originally released as a B side to a Melvin Franklin song on Motown Records in 1967 and made it to No. 4 on Billboard’s Top 100 the following year. [The songwriter, Roger Penzabene, was distraught after finding that his wife had been cheating on him and offed himself a week after the song’s release.]
Let’s cool off with this classic. It’s got subtitles, too.
Yep, real cool, except for the pirouettes. Have a great 3-day weekend, folks.
Tacky Raccoons 