Hey, Diddle Diddle!

When I started this blog a little over a week ago, I used a poem from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as an introduction and to explain the name I chose for the blog. The poem was an example of Tolkien's reworking of a familiar adage to suit his purpose. I think it is also quite a nice piece of verse.

Just a little before he unveils "All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter" to introduce the character of Strider, Tolkien worked a similar kind of magic, even more grandly, on an old nursery rhyme. The rhyme is "Hey, Diddle Diddle," and it goes as follows:

Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.


On the surface, this seems to be a nonsense rhyme. Whether there is anything more significant to its origins is a matter of some speculation. It's certainly difficult to see it as the culmination of any sensible narration, but this is, in fact, the challenge that Tolkien undertook. To create a humorous song for Frodo to perform while the hobbits were guests at the inn The Sign of the Prancing Pony in Bree, he imagined a story in which the verse with which we are familiar is but a small part. Within the vast historical and philological context that Tolkien created for his stories, he is, in essence, suggesting that the nursery rhyme we know is the only surviving part of a longer text that dates back to the Third Age of Middle-earth.

He called the resulting song "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late." Unfortunately, the tune to which Frodo sang the story that night in Bree, is, like most of the lyric was, prior to Tolkien, lost in antiquity. However, I believe that there are some who have set the verses to new music. Anyway, even without music, it's an interesting read, and much more satisfying, narratively speaking, than the short nursery rhyme.

You can read the whole poem here. Let me know how you like it.

A Daydream Believer and So Much More

About three weeks ago, the music world lost a giant. Unfortunately, to the extent his passing was noted in the mainstream press at all, he was cited for what I would consider one of his lesser achievements - writing the song "Daydream Believer" in 1967 for The Monkees.

Not that there's really anything wrong with "Daydream Believer." I'm sure that a large part of my problem with it is due to the fact that it was introduced by "The Pre-fab Four," as some referred to The Monkees way back when. For those too young to remember, The Monkees was some record executive's idea of a way to stem the British invasion and get an American rock and roll act back on top of the charts. It was all engineered from the very start. A record label was lined up, a concept for a television show was in the works, they started to work on finding songs that would work ...

Oh, and that's right, they also had to find a few guys to make up the group. So ads went into Daily Variety, and casting calls were held. (Is this any way to form a rock 'n' roll band? A boy-band maybe, but rock 'n' roll?) Hundreds of aspiring actors/musicians turned out. Stephen Stills (who was still an unknown in 1966) clearly had the musical chops, but the producers felt he looked too old for the part. Stills referred a former roommate, Peter Thorkelson, who made the group under the name Peter Tork. The group also included two other Americans, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith, and one Brit, Davy Jones. Micky Dolenz had been acting in television since the 1950s, when he had starred for three seasons in a show called "Circus Boy." Mike Nesmith was already a fairly successful musician and songwriter. He wrote the breakout hit "Different Drum" for Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys. (Mike's mom invented Liquid Paper, a typewriter correction fluid. A single mom, she no longer had to work as a secretary after that.) Davy Jones was a musical stage actor. He had already attracted a lot of attention in the role of the Artful Dodger in the original London and Broadway casts of "Oliver!" Along with the rest of the "Oliver!" cast, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show the same night that the Beatles made their U.S. debut. (By the way, a few years later in an "Oliver!" revival on the West End in London, another future rocker made waves in the role of the Artful Dodger. His name was Phil Collins.)

But, as they say, I digress. Back to our Daydream Believer.

John Stewart was born (09/05/1939) and raised in Southern California. He showed musical ability from an early age, learned to play the guitar and banjo,and wrote his first song at the age of ten. As an adolescent, during the 1950s, he was a great fan of both traditional folk music (e.g., the Weavers and Pete Seeger) and the emerging music of rock 'n' roll (e.g., Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley). While still in high school, he formed his first band, Johnny Stewart and the Furies.

A little later, John teamed up with Gil Robbins (father of actor Tim Robbins) and John Montgomery as the Cumberland Three. As a trio, they were similar to and greatly influenced by the Kingston Trio, which had formed in 1957, and had become one of the most popular recording acts in the U.S. (At one point, the Kingston Trio had four albums in the Billboard Top Ten; not even the Beatles did that!) The Cumberland Three recorded a two-album set called "Songs from the Civil War." One record featured songs from the Union side, and the other songs of the Confederacy.

In 1961, Dave Guard, the founder of the Kingston Trio, wanted to pursue a less commercial sound, so he left to form the Whiskey Hill Singers. John Stewart was recruited to succeed Guard in the Kingston Trio, and under his leadership, they recorded twelve more albums between 1962 and 1967. However, as the 1960s progressed, it became increasingly difficult for the Trio to hold onto the fame and popularity they had once possessed. In some ways, they had sown the seeds of their own failure.

Without the popularity the Kingston Trio had brought to folk music between 1957 and 1962, it may have been difficult for newer artists like Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and the like to have gotten record contracts and reached national audiences. Also, college students in the early 1960s were far more political than just a few years earlier. They wanted more from their folk artists than catchy world beats, tight harmonies and comic patter. Dylan, Baez and many of the other new folk acts delivered with relevant songs about social justice, civil rights, American imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean, and eventually, the anti-Vietnam War movement.

At the same time, new sounds were emerging that were claiming a larger and larger share of the pop music market. There was beach music personified by the Beach Boys, whose signature striped shirt look was copied almost directly from the Kingston Trio. There was also the emerging R&B sound coming from Detroit that was, for the first time, gaining broad mass appeal that went beyond black audiences. The final straw was the beginning of the British invasion with the Beatles' American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. Folk music would never again claim as big a piece of the American music scene, and the success that it did enjoy would be shared by the topical artists, especially those attacking the continued U.S. presence in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and early 1970s.

I think that is part of the reason that John Stewart was not more successful in his solo career following the disbanding of the Kingston Trio (in it original form) in 1967. It's not that John wasn't topical. He toured extensively in support of Bobby Kennedy's presidential bid in 1968, before the campaign came to a tragic end following the California primary. But he wasn't a protest singer. Instead, I think Stewart wrote music and sang from the heart about everyday people holding their heads up and getting on with life. Though he lived his entire life in California, he traveled extensively and wrote about America. I've counted at least 35 of the 50 states that are mentioned in his song lyrics, not to mention many American towns and cities.

I'm attaching a YouTube player to this post (assuming I can figure out how to). The clips I will index there include a couple of tributes I found to John Stewart, as well as a number of performance clips. Some are recent, some from the 1970s, and a couple even date back to TV appearnaces he made with the Kingston Trio during the 1960s. I encourage you to give them all a try to get a picture of this great American musician.

Even though John had left the Kingston Trio back in 1967, they all remained good friends. There were occasional reunion appearances, and over the past few years, John Stewart and Nick Reynolds have held annual Trio Fantasy Camps in Scottsdale, Arizona. You can get information about the 2008 camp, which will be dedicated to the music of John Stewart, here.

If you are interested in the music of John Stewart, one great compilation is "The Phoenix Concerts - Live," recorded in the mid-1970s. In my opinion, it's one of the best live concert albums ever. To order more recent albums, you can visit John's website, chillywinds.com.

Introducing ... Baby Amanda and some of the rest of the family

In a little over a month, we will be celebrating a big occasion in our family. It'll be the first birthday for Amanda, our first granddaughter.

Our son, Tim, or T.J., as we like to call him, married Amy in April 2006. They gave birth to Amanda on March 19 of last year, the same day that my father turned 80. That was a nice plus, because it was only a month earlier that we lost my mom to lung cancer.

Anyway, Tim and Amy started a family blog a while back, so if you would like to see pictures of them, baby Amanda (talk about all that is gold!) and their two new puppies, Molly and Boo Radley, you can visit them here.

This probably won't be a long entry tonight. I took my second Lortab of the day a few minutes ago, and if it's anything like the first one, I'll be out cold in a short while.

After two days of gritting my teeth and trying to get over my misadventure on the front steps (see my last entry for details), I broke down and called the doctor today. The pain seemed to get sharper yesterday, and I also noticed that as the general lower backache eased off a bit, the pain became more localized around the area of my right kidney. It was probably just paranoia, but I also felt like I was peeing a lot more often than usual yesterday.

The good news is that my kidney is fine, thank you. My fall just resulted in a nice deep contusion in the muscles on the lower, right side of my back. To help ease the pain and let me get an uninterrupted night of sleep, the doctor was kind enough to prescribe a muscle relaxant, plus the aforementioned Lortabs. I don't want to use the latter for any longer than necessary - hopefully just the next day or two. Lortab is essentially an extra-strength Tylenol bolstered with an opiate to help kill the pain. Obviously, this is not the type of medicine you want to fool around with or use without good reason.

My appointment with the doctor was scheduled for 11:00 a.m., but it was well past noon by the time they called my name, and nearly 1:00 p.m. before I got out of there. That's one of the problems with seeing the most popular doctor in the clinic. It seems like his schedule is always overfilled. I like him though. In this day and age of assembly line medicine, with the accountants running the HMOs and cracking down on any M.D. who averages more than 11 minutes with a patient, my doctor takes his time, makes sure any questions you have are answered, and really seems to try to get to know his patients. Kicking it old school, so to speak.

Between the time of the appointment, waiting to get my prescription filled while I grabbed a little lunch, and then breaking in that first dose of Lortab, I didn't get into work today at all. It gave me a chance to finish a book I picked up at the library on the way home from work last night.

A co-worker (Kirsten J.) and I had been chatting about favorite books at work. My all-time favorite novel (and I make an exception here, because I don't usually like to single out the very favorite anything) is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I mentioned that one of the things about the book that I like is the unique first person perspective, in this case that of Scout Finch between the ages of approximately 6 and 8. This led to talk about other books that have unusual first person points of view. One such book is Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, told from the point of view of the large native American that McMurphy befriends in the asylum.

An author who almost seemed to specialize in such first person perspective novels was Jerzy Kosinski. His first novel, The Painted Bird, was the tale of a young boy in the surreal landscape of German-occupied Poland during WWII. At times, Kosinski suggested that the novel was, at least in part, autobiographical. It is true that Kosinski was a young boy in Poland during the war. He was born Josek Lewinkopf in Lodz in 1933. However, the truth of the matter is that his Jewish parents obtained a forged baptismal certificate for him in the name Jerzy Kosinski and placed him safely with a Roman Catholic family for protection during the war. It does not appear that he personally was subject to the acts of cruelty and abuse portrayed in the novel.

Another of Kosinski's first person perspective novels was Steps, with a blind protagonist. The title refers to the fact that he has memorized the exact number of steps between each of the places he visits in his daily routine.

Probably the best known of Kosinski's books is Being There. A great part of its fame is due to the fact that it was made into a quite successful movie in 1979. Peter Sellers starred in the movie as Chance the gardener (or Chauncey Gardiner) and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. Melvyn Douglas did win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying Ben Rand, a successful, but aging businessman who becomes Chance's mentor. Kosinski himself won several awards, including a Writer's Guild Award for best screenplay for the adaptation from his novel.

I originally read Being There when it was first released in 1970 or 1971. The first thing that struck me when I picked it up in the library last night was how short the book is. I didn't remember this, but it is almost more of a novella than a full novel. The paperback edition I borrowed is less that 120 pages long, and the story consists of a mere seven chapters, that last of which is an enigmatic three-page epilogue.

For those who have not read it, I don't want to spoil the story here. Let me just say that it is an extremely entertaining story told from a very unique first person perspective. It is a satire of American values and, especially, of Americans' tendency to seize on pop icons. In this respect, the book is probably more relevant today than when it was published nearly 40 years ago.

As I said, the book ends on an enigmatic note. The reader is left to ponder the question, how far could a man like Chance go? As I finished reading the book this afternoon, my first thought was that for the last seven years, he's been occupying the Oval Office.

Enjoy.

Good News, Bad News

I think I'll start with the bad news ...

It's been a harsh winter here in Utah. This is my ninth winter since relocating from Northern Virginia to Utah for my job. Without question, we have seen more snow at my house than in any of the previous eight winters, and we still have six to eight weeks of potential winter weather to go.

Snow in Utah is not dealt out very evenhandedly. Sitting here in the Salt Lake Valley, we are surrounded by mountains, especially the Wasatch Mountains just to our east. The Wasatch Mountains are where Park City and all those hot ski slopes (Deer Valley, Alta, Snowbird, etc.) are. Obviously, they get considerably more snow in the mountains than we will ever see in the valley. Which is all to the good, since we need the mountain snow to fuel the winter tourism economy (Sundance only brings people to Utah for a week or two, after all.) and to fill the mountain reservoirs when temperatures eventually rise in June or July. (Hah!)

Even in the valley, though, the same storm will deliver remarkably different results, depending on where one lives. We only got a couple of inches in Sandy this past Sunday night/Monday morning, while in South Jordan, just a handful of miles to our west, they got nearly a foot. A couple of weeks ago, on Martin Luther King's birthday, while only four to eight inches fell almost everywhere else, even in the mountains, Sandy was hit with 15-18 inches of the cold, white stuff.

The storm had started in the early morning hours, and as I left for work, only a couple of inches had fallen at our house. My wife is a teacher, so she had the day off. As the inches kept mounting, she went outside periodically and fired up the snowblower, pretty effectively keeping our driveway clear. (Did I marry well, or what? Add to that the fact that I never have to apologize for watching football, since she is, if anything, a bigger sports fan than I am. She even watches baseball on television. During the regular season. A test for even the most avid sports fanatic, if you ask me.)

When I got home, I had to clear our sidewalks, which is a formidable task, since we have a corner lot, plus dig out around our mail box, so the mailman, rested though he might be after the MLK holiday, wouldn't have to work too hard to leave us our bills and advertising flyers.

It's been two weeks since that storm. For the first week or so, it was calmer, and temperatures even rose a bit, and some of that heavy snow melted, though the huge piles along the sides of the roads and driveways remained impressive. But then we began a cycle of storms that delivered a few inches of new snow every 48 hours or so. We ran out of Ice Melt last week, and it's been so bad that all of the stores in the area have been sold out of that, of rock salt, and even, as they told me when I went into K-Mart yesterday, of snow shovels.

Despite the lack of chemical assistance, as of late yesterday afternoon, I had managed to achieve a state of bare concrete on all of our sidewalks and two lanes of driveway. I went to bed with a great sense of accomplishment. Better still, despite the effort expended breaking up and removing ice pack at the end of our driveway and elsewhere, I woke up this morning surprisingly free of aches and pains.

At least until I went out to get the morning paper. If only I had heeded the warning I was given. When I opened the front door, I noticed that there were icicles hanging from the edges of the gutters running across the front of the house. If it hadn't been so early, I'd like to think that my brain would have made the following connection - icicles means water had been dripping, then refroze as the temperatures dropped during the night. Water dripping plus freezing temperatures means a layer of ice on the front steps.

This didn't run through my mind until after my feet flew out from under me and I found myself airborne, on the way to a hard landing on my lower back on the sidewalk out front. Given that there were steps behind me, I'm just grateful that I didn't crack my head open in the process. After scrambling back into the house, shouting obscenities all the way to get my wife's attention, I was finally able to determine that, apart from a very sore and stiff lower back, I had escaped my fall uninjured.

So it's been a day of acetaminophen every couple of hours and gritting my teeth every time I had to get up from my desk to visit the men's room or go anywhere else. Fortunately, my SUV has heated seats, which actually helped ease the pain in my back as I drove.

As for the good news, though I had planned to wait until I had been posting for at least a week, I ended up sharing the fact that I had starting blogging again with Kirsten J. from my office. We were chatting about it via an internal IM system we use at work. I was explaining about the source for the blog's name, and the talk turned to literature. Before I knew it, we had discussed, not only Tolkien, but some of my favorite authors, including Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) , Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There) and Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities), as well as a couple of K.J.'s favorites, one of whom, Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), was a teacher of Ken Kesey's.

It was just the sort of exchange, in microcosm, at least, that I hope this blog will lead to. I came away from it with a couple of ideas for new books to read, and I hope that K.J. did, as well.

Now I just have to figure out how to play the blogging game, so that others whose interests intersect my own can find my blog and are motivated to post comments remarking on some of my observations, as well as sharing their own.

The Sad Tale of Jim “The Flash” Gordon

One of my favorite parts of “Layla” is the long piano coda, with Eric Clapton and Duane Allman trading blues guitar riffs as Jim Gordon plays those elegiac power chords on the grand piano. The piano part was originally to be a separate song that Jim Gordon was writing, but when Clapton heard him playing it in the Criteria Studio in Miami, where as Derek and the Dominos, they were in the midst of the sessions that produced the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, he talked Gordon into adding it to the end of “Layla.” As a result, Gordon is given joint credit with Clapton for having written “Layla.”

Derek and the Dominos was a transitory group Clapton formed after the breakup of Blind Faith. Clapton had developed a friendship with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, and he invited their group, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, to tour as the opening act for Blind Faith in 1969. During the tour, Clapton often appeared onstage with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, and discovered he enjoyed playing with them more than he did with Blind Faith. Around the same time, Delaney and Bonnie were constantly bickering (their marriage would end a couple of years later), and the rest of their band, which included keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon, were getting tired of it.

After the Blind Faith tour ended, Radle and Gordon left Delaney & Bonnie & Friends to tour with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. Meanwhile, Whitlock joined Clapton in England, where they began working on new songs together. They reunited with Radle and Gordon (and another Delaney & Bonnie & Friends alum, Dave Mason) to work on George Harrison’s huge album All Things Must Pass during the summer of 1970. During that time, they officially debuted together at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Originally, they had planned to perform as Eric Clapton and Friends, but became convinced they needed another name. When announced to the crowd at the Lyceum Theatre as Derek and the Dominos, they went onstage to polite applause, until the crowd figured it out and went wild.

That was the only time Dave Mason played with Derek and the Dominos, but in August 1970, Clapton, Whitlock, Radle and Gordon assembled in Miami to begin work on their studio album. The first few days of the session were uninspired, and their producer, Tom Dowd, who was simultaneously producing the album Idlewild South for the Allman Brothers Band, took Clapton to see the Brothers play an outdoor concert in Miami. The next day, Duane Allman showed up at Criteria Studios where he and Clapton jammed for hours. Afterwards, Allman was invited to become the fifth and final member of Derek and the Dominos.

When they finished the studio sessions in October 1970, Derek and the Dominos prepared to go on tour, but without Duane Allman, who returned to the Allman Brothers Band.

Jim Gordon had been something of a straight arrow in the music business. He had gotten an early start, playing with the Everly Brothers in 1963, when he was only 17. However, after years of touring, including the tour with Derek and the Dominos in 1970-71, which was reputedly noted for an excess of drugs, Gordon was a cocaine and heroin user. In his case, this was a catastrophe, as he was an as yet undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He continued to be one of the most sought out sessions drummers in the rock world for several more years. (Click here to see a partial list of the artists he played with, either in the studio, or on tour, or both.)

By the late 1970s, however, Gordon complained of hearing voices, including that of his mother, who he apparently believed to be a demon. His musical career crumbled, due to his mental instability. Then, in 1983, he murdered his own mother, thinking it would stop the voices in his head. Because California law had been changed to limit the use of the insanity defense, Gordon was tried and convicted of 2^nd degree murder, and has been held in California prisons or mental facilities ever since. Though he has served more than the minimum number of years of his sentence, it seems unlikely that he will ever be released. Reportedly, he did not even apply when he was last eligible for parole.

Some who have stayed in touch with Jim Gordon report that he is fairly content. He is said to be a model prisoner. He has described himself as “institutionalized,” which reminds me of Morgan Freeman’s narration in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” After years in prison, he says, a man becomes institutionalized, and loses his ability to cope with all the challenges of the world at large. What with his history of severe mental illness, in addition to more than 20 years in custody, I imagine the world today would be a pretty scary proposition for Jim. While it’s sad, it probably is best that he remain institutionalized, for his own well being, as much as anything else.

In addition to Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs and All Things Must Pass, Jim Gordon contributed his considerable skills on drums and percussion to a remarkable number of truly classic tracks and albums.

You can't judge a book by its cover

It's one of those old adages that everyone knows. Basically, it means that you shouldn't let yourself be governed by first impressions. Instinct is a valuable tool, but it only goes so far. For good or ill, people can surprise you. Some can be charming as hell on the surface, but turn out to be ultimate slimeballs. Likewise, people who seem very removed and difficult to get to know, can turn out to be your greatest friends.

YCJABBIC cuts both ways then. It's the all purpose maxim about first impressions. There are a host of others that are more pointed. Calling someone "a wolf in sheep's clothing" is a warning that, not only are they not what they may seem, but they probably have bad intentions. Similarly, "let the buyer beware," or "caveat emptor" in the original Latin cautions you to look carefully before you spend, lest you suffer buyer's regret.

Another of those old sayings that is closely related to caveat emptor is "all that glitters is not gold." Do not be fooled by a shiny exterior. Don't let yourself be taken in by fancy accessories. In particular, never succumb to flowery marketing talk, slick advertising and ridiculous claims. And don't be so vain as to think you aren't susceptible. Year in and year out, millions of people spend billions of dollars on impossible investment schemes, diet pills, astrologers and other charlatans, all because they are taken in by slick promises.

"All that is gold does not glitter" is a different kind of warning. In a world where we are often in too much of a hurry to worry about our destination, it cautions us that if we do not take our time, we may overlook that which is of true value because it does not initially grab us with its glitter. In some ways, this is a greater error than being fooled into making an unwise purchase or decision. We all make mistakes, and we all have shelves full of books we have never read (at least not past the first few pages) and CDs we never listen to anymore.

But passing something or someone up because they do not grab us right from the start often means that we will never get to know them. Missed opportunities are more likely to lead to regrets than bad purchases. "We may never pass this way again," as Seals and Crofts sang back in the 1970s.

"All that is gold does not glitter" is not really an old adage like those cited above. It is a twist on "all that glitters is not gold" created by author J. R. R. Tolkien. I'm sure many fans of The Lord of the Rings recognized it right off the bat. It's the first line in a poem Tolkien wrote as a way of introducing the character of Aragorn. If my memory serves me right, it first appears in The Followship of the Ring, in a letter from Gandalf to Frodo Baggins. He knows that Frodo and his companions will encounter Aragorn, in his guise as Strider, a ranger of the north, on their way to Rivendell. He wants Frodo to know that he can trust Strider, even though he may appear rough-hewn and dangerous.

Here is the entire text of the poem:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

The last lines of the poem, of course, presage that Strider is, in fact, Aragorn, Son of Arathorn and Heir of Isildur, who would take up the broken sword Narsil, reforged by the elves, and play a vital role in the downfall of Sauron. Thereafter, he would be crowned King of Arnor and Gondor, restoring a throne that had been vacant for ages. His coronation marks the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth, and with the withdrawal of the Elves to Valinor, marks the beginning of the Age of Men.

I selected All The Is Gold as the name for my new blog, because I want to use it to explore and share my thoughts on books, movies, music, people and whatnot that I have found to have real value. In a lot of cases, this is no secret, and I know that a great many others share my opinion. But, on at least a few occasions, I hope to introduce you, Gentle Reader, to something you might have otherwise missed. I welcome your feedback and look forward to learning from your insights, as I hope you will, once in a while at least, from mine.