Jake the Poacher from Withnail and Iwould have called this “prancing like a tit.”
It has only just come to my attention that this weekend marked the 65th birthday of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger (DOB 7/26/43), prompting all sorts of hi-larious headlines about how the Mickster is now eligible for a pension. So a tip of the hat to Sir Michael Philip Jagger, who certainly seems to be enjoying his life, although he hasn’t made a good album for either 27 or 32 years, depending on whom you ask (I personally give the benefit of the doubt to 1981’s Tattoo You).
I wanted to post something by way of tribute, and I don’t know how I could do better than the following Mick tribute by Gilda Radner. A bit of setup: A couple of times on Saturday Night Live Gilda did a character called Candy Slice, a dirty punk rocker loosely but clearly based on Patti Smith. She revived the character for her post-SNL Broadway show, which was subsequently released as a movie called Gilda Live, from which this clip is taken. The song she’s doing, “Gimme Mick,” is a fairly simplistic punkish number, but energetically played and with great lyrics. In case you want to sing along, the chorus goes like this:
Gimme Mick, gimme Mick Baby’s hair, bulging eyes Lips so thick Are you woman, are you man? I’m your biggest funked-up fan So rock me and roll me till I’m sick
Keep an eye out for Paul Shaffer (as Candy’s drummer/enabler) and guitarist G.E. Smith, Gilda’s pre–Gene Wilder husband (better known as the grinning skull who led the SNL band from 1985 to 1995).
Update 5/15: The clip from Gilda Live has been wiped from the internet by the forces of the Long Plastic Hallway. I fail to see how that helps anybody, but whatever. Here’s the SNL version, which is an inferior performance but will have to do:
The filename of the picture at the left, for reasons I won’t go into here, is “william-shatner-kidney-stone.”
As fate would have it, one day recently the postman brought CDs by two guys named Bill: The Transformed Man by William (Bill to his friends) Shatner and The Best of Bill Withers (Bill to everybody, as far as I know).
Shatner, who is never far from my consciousness to begin with, has been especially on my mind lately because my lady friend and I have become dangerously obsessed with the TV show Boston Legal. At one time I would have had a hard time publicly admitting this fact, because BL is after all a prime-time lawyer show, and what self-respecting pseudo-intellectual watches those? But honestly, this show couldn’t be more different from the CSIs and Law and Orders of the world: where they are ponderous and self-important, it is playful and self-aware; where they are stuffy and straight-laced, it is sexy and insouciant; where they revel in procedural details, it makes no pretense of realism whatsoever. Boston Legal may not be the best show in the history of television, but it is among the most entertaining. (more…)
And so many of them go unused. For instance, I think that someone should start a band that does electro-pop covers of old blues songs, and furthermore I think that this band should be called “Robot Johnson.”
So last week it seemed the Great Silence had come to an end. Everything was up and running, I had some good momentum going, it was like a train on greased rails, and then…silence again.
It’s still unclear exactly what happened this time, but reports out of Mediajunkie HQ are implicating an Ethernet cable detached by a clumsy cleaning woman. And I think we all know how that makes me feel….
A weird little moment on the way to work today: I was flipping around the radio and alighted for a moment on KFRC, which plays soothingly predictable rock and soul hits. Apparently today is “Aloha Friday,” and the chirpy DJ announced that he had a caller on the line: Tony Danza, who was listening online from LA and wanted to play the ukelele on the air. We were then treated to a brief — apparently improvised — ukelele tune from someone who may or may not have been Tony Danza, during which he transposed the station’s call letters to “KRFC.” The only thing that would have been stranger is if he’d played “Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza.”
