Steve Allen: This Could Be The Start Of Something Big

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A Facebook friend posted the "See the USA" Dinah Shore Chevrolet commercial today, and made me think of this amazing video from 1958.

If you're not familiar with him, Steve Allen invented late-night television, and was a major influence on generations of comedians. He also wrote this song, adapted here as a promotion for his network. You should Google him sometime. 

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R.I.P. George Martin, The Fifth Beatle - UPDATED

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A Day in the Life’

From The New York Times:

The song that closes “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and is, for many listeners, the most astonishing track on an astonishing album, actually began as a pair of unrelated songs: The melancholy outer verses were Lennon’s, the brighter central section was Mr. McCartney’s. What transformed these fragments into a cohesive whole is a touch of avant-garde string scoring by Mr. Martin. By the time the Beatles set to work on the track, on Jan. 19, 1967, they and Mr. Martin had mapped out its structure. Two of Lennon’s verses would open the song, followed by Mr. McCartney’s verse, which would lead back to final thoughts from Lennon. Between the two composers’ sections, though, the band would vamp for 24 bars, and there would be another long vamp after the closing verse. How these would be filled — well, Mr. Martin would figure that out later.

For several weeks, the group tweaked the main parts of the song, polishing the vocals, drums and bass, adding extra percussion parts, and trying to imagine what should occupy those long vamped sections. Mr. McCartney thought an orchestral section would be good, but left the question of what that should entail to his producer. Mr. Martin’s solution was to take a page out of the playbooks of classical composers like John Cage and Krzysztof Penderecki, who at the time were creating works in which chance played a role. Mr. Martin hired 40 symphonic musicians for a session on Feb. 10, and when they turned up, they found on their stands a 24-bar score that had the lowest notes on their instruments in the first bar, and an E major chord in the last. Between them, the musicians were instructed to slide slowly from their lowest to highest notes, taking care not to move at the same pace as the musicians around them.

The sound was magnificently chaotic, and it became more so once Mr. Martin combined the four takes he recorded (some with Mr. McCartney on the podium, some conducted by Mr. Martin himself). It was a brilliant solution: as Lennon’s voice faded into the echoic distance, the orchestra began its buildup, ending sharply on the chord that begins Mr. McCartney’s section.

Fooled Around And Fell In Love

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I first saw Elvin Bishop with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, where he dueled with Mike Bloomfield on guitar.

Those duels were legendary. That band was legendary. And Elvin took some of that magic with him when he left the band in the early Seventies. As in this song, his best. 

And Mickey Thomas has the perfect voice to sing it.