Tag Archives: Today in History

Synchronicity Two

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The Rolling Stones at Altamont

Dateline October 24 – In a weird act of Flying Spaghetti Monster manifested Synchronicity, today is the birthday of both Bill Wyman (1936) and Meredith Hunter (1951). Although separated by 23 years, they will always be linked by a singular event in history: The Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969.

Bill Wyman

Bill Wyman was the second bass player for The Rolling Stones after the original bass player, Dick Taylor, decided to return to school. There are conflicting stories of how Wyman heard of the opening. One says early Stones drummer Tony Chapman told him; another report says he answered an advertisement. Both could be true. Either way, by December of 1962 Wyman was a Rolling Stone and stayed with the band until he quit the Stones in 1993.

Meredith Hunter

Meredith Hunter was an 18-year old from Berkley, California who went to Altamont Speedway (along with an estimated 300,000 other people) for a free concert which advertised appearances by The Rolling Stones, Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and The Grateful Dead. In the end the Dead declined to play because of the violence.

The concert was a gift from The Rolling Stones to ‘Merka and had been hastily organized after many people criticized the band for the high price of tickets for their ‘Merkin tour. Originally the concert had been planned for San Jose State, then changed to Golden Gate Park, but they couldn’t get a permit. The next proposed venue was Sears Point Racetrack, which was owned by Filmways, Inc., the same company know for such tee vee hits as The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres. However, Filmways wanted $300,000 up front and the distribution rights to the resulting movie. This left slighly less than 2 days to find a new venue and the Altamont Speedway was hastily chosen.

One of the major complications of the venue change was the height of the stage. It was only a meter high. That would have suited the Sears Point Raceway, which would have placed it at the top of a hill. The location for the Altamont stage was at the bottom of a hill. To keep people from rushing the stage The Hells Angels, hired to provide security for a reported $500 in beer, surrounded the stage.

By now everyone knows what happened. The Hells Angels were out of control, as was the crowd. There were many fights, long before The Rolling Stones hit the stage. However, the one that everybody remembers is when Meredith Hunter, hopped up on methamphetamines, was stabbed to death by Hells Angel Alan Passaro. The horrifying act was caught on film directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The resulting movie was called Gimme Shelter and chronicled the entire ’69 tour, but culminated in the disater at Altamont, often called the deathnell of the Hippie movement.

Passaro was charged, tried and acquitted of murder after he claimed self-defense. The jury agreed after being shown some of the footage above. He later served time on unrelated charges and was found drowned in the Anderson Reservoir a year after he was released from jail.

Happy Birthday Bill Wyman and Meredith Hunter.

Me and Pierre Trudeau ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

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DATELINE October 18, 1919 – Pierre Elliot Trudeau is born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. While he was born into wealth, when he became Prime Minister in 1968 there were no Canadians who didn’t think he also spoke for the “little guy.”

I shook Pierre Trudeau‘s hand once. It was 1967. I was a 15 year-old ‘Merkin and at summer camp, which was in Michigan. Every year, in an effort to shoehorn culture into us, we would be sent to Stratford, Ontario to take in a Shakespeare play. We were waiting in front of the playhouse and the doors were still closed, long past the time they should have opened. Several of us were milling around on the steps, hoping to be the first to get inside.

Suddenly a black limousine pulled up, a man jumped out of the back, and the crowd went wild. Suddenly all the Canadians erupted in applause and cheering. As the doors to the playhouse opened, and we were held back from entering, PET bounded up the few stairs shaking hands all the way as the crowd magically parted for him. I was right at the door. Pierre Trudeau turned to his left, where I standing, and reached out to shake my hand. I reached back. For 2 seconds we were connected. Then he ran into the theater. The audience was held back another few minutes so he could get settled, but the crowd waiting was ELECTRIFIED. I had never seen anything like it before. I turned to the closest Canadian and asked, “Who was that?”

“That’s Pierre Trudeau. He’s our Justice Minister,” words that meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Skip ahead a few years. By 1971 I was living in Canada and Pierre Trudeau was MY Prime Minister.

Trudeau was a transformational politician. He was a Rock Star. He was loved and hated, but remained Prime Minister until his defeat in 1979. However, just a year later the Joe Clark government fell on a Motion of Non-Confidence and the Liberals won the subsequent election, with PET serving as Prime Minister until 1984 when he decided to retire.

Pierre Trudeau will always be known as the Prime Minister who patriated the Constitution from Great Britain in 1982.

This documentary was made during the period when Pierre Trudeau was still Justice Minister and shaking my hand. It was made by celebrated Canadian journalist Norman DePoe for the CBC program News Magazine.

Pierre Trudeau died in 2000 and the entire nation mourned.

Musical Appreciation ► Bob Weir

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DATELINE October 16, 1947 – Robert Hall Weir is born in San Fransisco, California and grew up in nearby Atherton, on the other side of the bay, with his adopted parents. He picked up the guitar at the age of 13. Three years later, on a New Year’s Eve, he followed the sound of banjo playing to meet Jerry Garcia for the first time. After jamming all night they decided to form a band. At first they called themselves “Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions,” which became “The Warlocks,” and finally “The Grateful Dead.”

There is no ‘Merkin band with the same storied romance between its fans and the group. Long before most people even knew about Bootleg recordings, The Grateful Dead would allow fans with tape machines to plug directly into the sound board. Dead Heads would follow the band around the country, and across the world, to take in as many shows as they could. An entire culture grew up outside Grateful Dead concerts, not to mention inside the shows.

While with The Dead, and after the death of Garcia in 1995, Weir also performed with such bands as Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog and his latest band Further, which is named after the bus used by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, where the Grateful Dead got their start, and the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of Tom Wolfe’s early books.

However, it will always be about the music.

ENJOY!!!

Happy Birthday Lenny Bruce

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Dateline October 13, 1925 – Leonard Alfred Schneider is born in Mineola, New York. By the time Lenny Bruce died in 1966 he had changed the face of comedy forever. However, more importantly, he changed the face of The First Amendment and Free Speech forever.

“I rode with him in a taxi once,only for a mile and a half. Seemed like it took a couple of months”

– Bob Dylan about Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce had many run-ins with the authorities over obscenity in his night club act. According to the WikiWackyWoo:

 On October 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that “to is a preposition, come is a verb”, that the sexual context of come is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, he “probably can’t come”. Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity.

Bruce was arrested again in 1961, in Philadelphia, for drug possession the same year, and again in Los Angeles, California, two years later. The Los Angeles arrest took place in then-unincorporated West Hollywood, and the arresting officer was a young deputy named Sherman Block, who would later become County Sheriff. The specification this time was that the comedian had used the word schmuck, an insulting Yiddish term that is an obscene term for penis.[citation needed]

In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again pertaining to his use of various obscenities.

A three-judge panel presided over his widely publicized six-month trial, prosecuted by Asst. Manhattan D.A. Richard Kuh, with Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon both found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. The conviction was announced despite positive testimony and petitions of support from – among other artists, writers and educators – Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin, and Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced, on December 21, 1964, to four months in a workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon later saw his conviction overturned; Bruce, who died before the decision, never had his conviction stricken. Bruce later received a full posthumous gubernatorial pardon.

“Lenny Bruce died from an overdose of police”
– Phil Spector

 Much of what Lenny Bruce said is as true today as it was when it came out of his mouth:

Take away the right to say “fuck” and you take away the right to say “fuck the government.”

The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.

If something about the human body disgusts you complain to the manufacturer.

The kind of sickness I wish Time had written about, is that school teachers in Oklahoma get a top annual salary of $4000, while Sammy Davis, Jr. gets $10,000 a week in Vegas.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. 

 A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That’s what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord… there should be a statute of limitations for that crime.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

If you’re from New York and you’re Catholic, you’re still Jewish. If you’re from Butte Montana and you’re Jewish, you’re still goyisch. The Air Force is Jewish, the Marine Corps dangerous goyisch. Rye Bread is Jewish, instant potatoes, scary goyisch. Eddie Cantor is goyisch, George Jessel is goyisch-Coleman Hawkins is Jewish.

“Bruce stands up against all limitations on the flesh and spirit, and someday they are going to crush him for it.”
– The New York Post

Some of what Lenny Bruce said is just outright funny:

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.

Some of what Lenny Bruce said is just poignant:

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

This is one of Lenny Bruce’s most famous routines:

“But like all the truly important people in the world, he’s dead but he”ll live on.”
– Ralph J. Gleason

I first learned to love Lenny Bruce when Frank Zappa released The Berkeley Concert on his Straight label. It’s still worth a listen:

Lenny Bruce had a life worth exploring. If you are unfamiliar with his life and troubles with the law, this is a good place to start.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be ► Vice Presidents We Have Known

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It seems only fitting this morning, after last night’s Vice Presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congresschild Lyin’ Ryan, to remind people that on this day in 1973 President Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to replace Spiro Agnew as VP. Agnew was forced to resign ahead of pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to charges that he accepted bribes as governor of Maryland and tax evasion before becoming Nixon’s one-breath-away-from-the-presidency pick as Veep.

After Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford, who had been a Congressman, was elevated to the office of the presidency, despite having not been elected to either office.

“Some people say” that Ford’s massive gaffe during the Presidential Debate against Jimmy Carter doomed his reelection. There are others that say it was his own clumsiness, or perception thereof, that doomed his reelection. Then there’s a whole passel of people who blame Chevy Chase’s portrayals of Ford on Saturday Night Live as the reason Ford wasn’t reelected. I’ve never listened to those “nattering nabobs of negativity” because I’ve always believed Ford lost reelection because he pardoned Richard Nixon.

This turn of events made Gerald R. Ford the only appointed President of the United States, until George W. Bush in 2000.

You Made Me So Very Happy ► My Days With David Clayton-Thomas

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David Clayton-Thomas by Carl Lender

Dateline September 13, 1941 – A baby is born in war time England, Thames, Surrey, UK, and named David Henry Thomsett. He would later grow up to become David Clayton-Thomas. His father was a Canadian who met his piano-playing mother ‘over there’ when she went to entertain troops in a hospital in London. According to Larry LeBlanc at DCT’s official website:

After the war, the family settled in Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto. From the beginning David and his father had a troubled relationship. By the time David was fourteen he left home, sleeping in parked cars and abandoned buildings, stealing food and clothing to survive. A tough, angry street kid with a hair-trigger temper, it wasn’t long before he ran afoul of the law and was arrested several times for vagrancy, petty theft and street brawls. He spent his teen years bouncing in and out of various jails and reformatories.

David inheirited a love for music from his mother and when a battered old guitar came into his possession, left behind by an outgoing inmate, he began to teach himself to play. Before long he was singing and playing at jailhouse concerts and for the first time in his life, he found acceptance. Now he had a dream and his life had direction… he put the reformatory years behind him and he never looked back.

While Clayton-Thomas is best known as the booming voice of Blood, Sweat and Tears, (to make a long, interesting story very short) he put in his apprenticeship with a series of bands before he made it big. He had his own band, The Shays, at 21 and in 1966 he joined a new band The Bossmen, which had a hit before breaking up. Earlier he had traveled to New York and gathered some other Toronto musicians to form his back-up group The Phoenix. They played in New York City at The Scene before getting tossed out of the country for not having the proper work papers. He kicked around Toronto for a few more years, immersing himself in the Blues and Jazz scenes and sitting in with John Lee Hooker in Yorkville, Toronto’s Hippie mecca. He followed Hooker to New York and when Hooker left for Europe, Clayton Thomas stayed on where he came to the attention of Blood, Sweat and Tears following the release of their first LP. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Back, with liner notes by DCT.
Ishan People’s 2nd LP

Surprisingly, left out of the official biography of David Clayton-Thomas, and even left off his WikiWackyWoo page, is how I came to know David. Back in the day (1976-1977) I managed a group called Ishan People, Canada’s first Roots Reggae band. David Clayton-Thomas produced both our LPs on GRT Records. David was an early proponent of Reggae, well before Bob Marley was a household word. By then Clayton-Thomas was already a singer of some renown with his work with Blood, Sweat and Tears. However, he took a small pittance as a producer to work with music and musicians he loved. Here’s a sample of David Clayton-Thoamas’ work with Ishan People.

I don’t know why this has been left off all the biographies, because this is something that David Clayton-Thomas.should take great pride in. I note he has an autobiography called, appropriately enough, Blood, Sweat and Tears, which I’ve never read. I wonder if he mentions it there. At any rate, you made me so very happy, David. Thanks for everything.

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Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Philo T. Farnsworth

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Dateline September 7, 1927 – On this day Philo Taylor Farnsworth demonstrated his radical new invention: electronic television. Prior to this all televisions (which were still in the experimental stage) used a clunky mechanical system with a rotating disk. Farnsworth’s radical design used image dissection, an electronic scanning of a series of lines. He was only twenty-one.

More amazingly, he came up with the idea when he was just a 14-year old farm boy. The brainstorm came to him while plowing a field; the plow moves across a field, then back the other way for the next row. He drew his idea on a chalkboard for his science teacher John Tolman, who was so impressed with it that he made a contemporaneous sketch of it. This proved fortuitous years later when he was sued by RCA over patent infringment. The teacher’s sketch made in 1922 won the case for Farnsworth.

Indeed it was Another Magical Tee Vee Moment. Here’s just one more:

Electronic television is no longer with us, having gone the way of the horse and buggy. A whole generation has now grown up viewing tee vee on a cathode ray tube that necessarily made the living room tee vee deep in dimension. Now tee vees can be hung on a wall like a painting.

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Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be ► The Beatles’ Last Concert

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Dateline – August 29, 1966 – Candlestick Park, San Francisco – After an estimated 1,400 live shows and 9 years as a Band on the Run, John, Paul, George and Ringo, collectively known as The Beatles, perform their last concert for paying customers.

The Beatles arriving in San Francisco for the last concert

It had been a Long and Winding Road. From Hamburg to Liverpool. Then all around England, at first. Then the entire world. It seemed Beatlemania would never end. It got crazier and uglier and more dangerous as time went on. By the time The Beatles reached Candlestick Park in 1966, they knew it would be their last show. Even Paul was ready to throw in the towel and he was the Beatle who always wanted to tour and record.

“On our last tour people kept bringing blind, crippled and deformed children into our dressing room and this boy’s mother would say, ‘Go on, kiss him, maybe you’ll bring back his sight.’ We’re not cruel. We’ve seen enough tragedy in Merseyside, but when a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch him and maybe he’ll walk again,’ we want to run, cry, empty our pockets. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.”

~~~~~John Lennon

“There was a big talk at Candlestick Park that this had got to end. At
that San Francisco gig it seemed that this could possibly be the last
time, but I never felt 100% certain till we got back to London.

John wanted to give up more than the others. He said that he’d had enough.”

~~~~~Ringo Starr

“Thank you very much everybody. Everybody, wonderful. Frisco, butchered.
We’d like to say that, erm, it’s been wonderful being here, in this
wonderful sea air. Sorry about the weather. And we’d like to ask you to
join in and, er, clap, sing, talk, do anything. Anyway, the song is…
good night.”

~~~~~Paul McCartney, introducing the last song at Candlestick Park

“That’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

~~~~~George Harrison, on the plane after the show
The Beatles taking the stage at Candlestick Park

According to Mitch McGeary’s Beatles website:

  • The Beatles took 65% of the gross, the city of San Francisco took 15% of paid admissions and 50 free tickets. This, along with lukewarm ticket sales and other unexpected expenses resulted in a financial loss for Tempo Productions;
  • The oversize tickets were to [sic] large to fit the counting machines at Candlestick and had to be counted by hand;
  • The performance was taped by Tony Barrow at Paul McCartney’s request and is available in bootleg format. The last song was truncated because the recorder ran out of tape;
  • Just before leaving the stage, John teasingly strummed the opening guitar notes of “In My Life”;
  • Wes Wilson designed the concert poster for the show. Wes later on to become one of the most influential artists of the psychedelic movement and designed many important posters for Bill Graham.

Although Candlestick Park had 42,500 seats, unbelievably the ticket sales were sluggish and just over half were sold. Only 25,000 people were on hand to witness the final official concert by the greatest Rock and Roll band to ever come down the pike.

Knowing it could be their last show The Beatles took some commemorative pictures:

“Before one of the last numbers, we actually set up this camera, I think it had a fisheye, a wide-angle lens. We set it up on the amplifier and Ringo came off the drums, and we stood with our backs to the audience and posed for a photograph, because we knew that was the last show.”

~~~~~George Harrison

The 33 minute show had a slightly altered setlist from the other shows on the tour:

  1. Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry cover)
  2. She’s a Woman
  3. If I Needed Someone
  4. Day Tripper
  5. Baby’s in Black
  6. I Feel Fine
  7. Yesterday
  8. I Wanna Be Your Man
  9. Nowhere Man
  10. Paperback Writer
  11. Long Tall Sally (Little Richard cover) (with ‘In My Life’ snippet at the end)

One other thing The Beatles did to commemorate the occasion was to ask press officer Tony Barrow to record the show: According to The Beatles Bible:

“At San Francisco airport, as our plane prepared to take off, Paul’s head came over the top of my seat from the row behind: ‘Did you get anything on tape?’ I passed the cassette recorder back to him: ‘I got the lot, except that the tape ran out in the middle of Long Tall Sally.’ He asked if I had left the machine running between numbers to get all the announcements and the boys’ ad lib remarks. I said: ‘It’s all there from the guitar feedback before the first number.’ Paul was clearly chuffed to have such a unique souvenir of what would prove to be an historic evening – the farewell stage show from the Fab Four.

Back in London I kept the concert cassette under lock and key in a drawer of my office desk, making a single copy for my personal collection and passing the original to Paul for him to keep. Years later my Candlestick Park recording re-appeared in public as a bootleg album. If you hear a bootleg version of the final concert that finishes during Long Tall Sally it must have come either from Paul’s copy or mine, but we never did identify the music thief!”

~~~~~Tony Barrow; “John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me”

Beatles fans (and completists like myself) are lucky there was a music thief. That’s why 46 years later we can still listen to the last concert The Beatles ever performed for a ticketed audience. Sadly the tape ran out part way through the last song. However, we still have this record of The Beatles at the height of their live performances.

From this moment through to Abbey Road, The Beatles were a recording band, save for their one brief appearance on the roof of Apple for the Let It Be film (which has still not been released on DVD. Get on that, Sir Paul.)

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Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be ► Ronald Reagan Cracks A Joke

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President Ronald Reagan and his Vice President
Dateline August 11, 1984 – Ronald Reagan, famed for his highly-tuned sense of humour, made a funny while doing audio levels for a radio broadcast. Get ready to LOL.

Oh! Stop!! My!!! Sides!!!!

It should never be forgotten that Reagan presided during the Iran-Contra scandal, when he PERSONALLY approved a plan to sell arms to Iran, which just a few years earlier had held 52 ‘Merkins hostage for 444 days, and may have been the deciding factor in President Jimmy Carter losing re-election. Reagan famously said he would never negotiate with terrorists. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Schultz were against the deal. Yet, in the end, there can be no other reading: Reagan traded arms for hostages.

However, it didn’t stop there. Less than half of the $30 million Iran paid for the 1,500+ missles ever made it back to ‘Merka. The rest was diverted to the Contras, Nicaragua rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government, or the Junta of National Reconstruction. This fund diversion was only discovered during Attorney General Ed Meese’s investigation of the arms-for-hostage deal. It turned out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, of the National Security Council, had passed the missing money on to the Contras. Because this had been done under the aegis of National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter, North assumed Reagan also knew. This has never been proven but it caused some comedians (most notably me) to ask, “What did the President forget and when did he forget it?” According to PBS:

Speculation about the involvement of Reagan, Vice President George Bush and the administration at large ran rampant. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigated the affair for the next eight years. Fourteen people were charged with either operational or “cover-up” crimes. In the end, North’s conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush issued six pardons, including one to McFarlane, who had already been convicted, and one to Weinberger before he stood trial.

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Meanwhile, enjoy these photographs of Reagan throughout his long life.

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I’ll Take Game Shows Hosts For 200

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Who began his career on a televised sock hop in Canada in 1963?

Need another clue?

It was called Music Hop.

Another clue? Are you brain dead? Okay. he hosted the following exciting CBC competition show:

What about if we give him a mustache?

Happy 72nd Birthday, Alex Trebek. You’re a Canadian institution, on tee vee since 1963, longer than most.



And, a prank played on Alex Trebek: