Jim Morrison, (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971)

I remember when Danny Sugarman’s book came out. I was in high school, less than a decade after Morrison died in France. I’d basically missed The Doors hey day, lacking an older sibling to show me what to listen to. Maybe I knew Light My Fire, I can’t remember.

But the book triggered a Doors renaissance of a sort, at least at my school in The Valley, at least among the school paper / honor’s English crowd. In retrospect, it was an eclectic time. I listened to The Clash, Bruce Springsteen, The Doors, Neil Young – I lacked the commitment to really be a punk or a head banger, I mostly listened to what Jim Ladd listened to, plus whatever punk/new wave my friend John Z turned me on to.

I do remember that my little brother, in junior high at the time, liked The Doors and The Boomtown Rats, before Bob Geldof tried to save the world.

Morrison died 27 years ago today. Now, my kid’s know who he is, can tell its The Doors when we listen to KLOS in the car — though maybe they think he looks like Val Kilmer.

I, wonder, actually if Morrison ever thought people would be digging on The Doors 27 years after his death.

I know the youtube linked cuts off a little at the end, but I liked the intro, so I used it.

C’mon, baby, take a chance with us …

Oh NO!

Porter Wagoner ailing, hospitalized

2 hours, 51 minutes ago

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Porter Wagoner has been hospitalized with an undisclosed ailment and is in serious condition, his publicist says. Darlene Bieber said the 80-year-old Grand Ole Opry star, known for his trademark rhinestone stage outfits, “is asking for prayers from his friends and fans.”

She had no other information, Bieber said Thursday. WSMV-TV reported that Wagoner was admitted to the hospital earlier this week for observation. He was hospitalized for two weeks in July 2006 after suffering a stomach aneurism. In May, he celebrated his 50th year on the Grand Ole Opry, the long-running live country music show. He helped launch Dolly Parton’s career by hiring her as his duet partner in 1967.

Wagoner’s career took an upturn this year when he signed with ANTI-records, an eclectic Los Angeles label best known for alt-rock acts such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Neko Case. He released the album “Wagonmaster,” earning Wagoner some of the best reviews of his career.

Wagoner was the opening act for the White Stripes at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan this summer.

___

I’m so confused.

David Bowie is still cool.

NEW ORLEANS - David Bowie has donated $10,000 to a legal defense fund for six black teens charged in an alleged attack on a white classmate in the tiny central Louisiana town of Jena.

The British rocker’s donation to the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund was announced by the NAACP as thousands of protesters were expected to march through Jena on Thursday in defense of Mychal Bell and five other teens. The group has become known as the Jena Six.

“There is clearly a separate and unequal judicial process going on in the town of Jena,” Bowie said Tuesday in an e-mail statement. “A donation to the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund is my small gesture indicating my belief that a wrongful charge and sentence should be prevented.”

I have no idea what to think … but I like Todd Haynes, and Cate Blanchett in Dylan-drag is pretty funky no matter how you cut it.

Everything around here is lethal.

So, let me see the light:

Torrance firm sees the nonlethal ‘light’
Torrance firm’s police flashlight disorients and provides a nonlethal way to incapacitate subjects.

A newly invented law enforcement tool to combat crime can do more than make suspects throw their arms up in surrender.

It can make them throw up - literally.

Touted as a nonlethal device to subdue suspects or control crowds, the LED Incapacitator looks like a normal flashlight, but packs so much power it can disorient a bad guy and cause temporary blindness.

Before long, it might be hanging from police officers’ belts throughout the land.

“The whole purpose is to be able to create a nonlethal way to hold off perpetrators,” said John Farina, chief executive officer at Intelligent Optical Systems Inc., a Torrance research and development business that invented the device. “It’s a lot less lethal than a .38-caliber revolver.”

The device - using light emitting-diode technology - produces such a dazzling display of blue, green and red lights that those who find themselves in front of its strobe can’t see, may develop a headache or even become physically ill.

Imagine a strobe light in a disco - Department of Homeland Security-style.

“It’s at its base a very, very bright light that flashes at a frequency that, if you keep looking at it, will be extremely uncomfortable for you,” said Bob Lieberman, IOS’s president and chief technology officer.

“If you looked at it a very long time, it can become extremely disorienting. In some cases, it can cause vertigo and possibly nausea,” Lieberman said.

I’ve heard the same thing said about Martini Revolution.

Oh, Lee Hazlewood! Rest in peace!

Nancy and Lee: Summer Wine, 1967

Lee Hazlewood, who died on Saturday aged 78, was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century pop; most famous as Svengali to Nancy Sinatra, for whom he wrote These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, he was also an important influence on Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” recording techniques, and his songs have been covered by stars from Elvis Presley and Dusty Springfield to Nick Cave and Courtney Love.

Nancy Sinatra had been signed up to her father’s label, Reprise Records, in the early 1960s, but by 1965 had not had a hit and was on the verge of being dropped.

Jimmy Bowen, a neighbour of Hazlewood’s who worked for Reprise and was dating Nancy, asked the 36-year-old record producer to do for Nancy what nepotism had failed to achieve. Hazlewood was reluctant, but after Sinatra himself lured him to the family home for a drink and thanked him for agreeing to help, he felt it would be unwise to demur.

Hazlewood set about reinventing Nancy as a “tough little broad”, dyeing her brown hair blonde, swapping her ballgowns for Carnaby Street fashions and persuading her to wear boot-polish black eye make-up and frosted lipstick. He also persuaded her to lower her vocal pitch.

In 1966 she had a huge hit in America and Britain with These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, its title inspired by a line in Robert Aldrich’s 1963 western 4 for Texas starring her father and Dean Martin.

Hazlewood told her to sing it “like a 14-year-old girl who screws truck drivers” (”14″ was later sanitised to “16″ and “screws” to “dates”), and it sold five million copies to an audience blissfully unaware that, as Hazlewood put it, “anyone in my part of Texas knows that messin’ [as in "You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin"] means f*****’.”

Initially, Nancy Sinatra sang alone. But when Reprise suggested she move on to duets, she insisted that only Hazlewood would do. They went on to record several hits together, fusions of country, pop and psychedelia, including the darkly ambiguous Some Velvet Morning, and Sugar Town.

The songs’ scurrilous lyrics, with their thinly-veiled references to drugs and sex (”Some velvet morning when I’m straight/ I’m going to open up your gate”) were part of the attraction.

So too was the implication that theirs was more than a singing partnership, though Hazlewood maintained that they were just good friends and, in any case, Nancy, as a nice Catholic girl, never understood what she was singing about, having sensibly decided not to ask.

Read the rest here.

… a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead! RIP, Tommy Makem.

DOVER, New Hampshire (AP) — Irish singer, songwriter and storyteller Tommy Makem, who teamed with the Clancy Brothers to become stars during the folk music boom, has died of cancer. He was 74.

Makem died Wednesday in Dover, where he lived for many years, his son Conor said Thursday. He had battled lung cancer.

The Irish-born Makem, who came to America in the 1950s to seek work as an actor, grew to international fame while performing with the band The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. The brothers, also from Ireland, were Tom, Liam and Paddy Clancy.

Armed with his banjo, tinwhistle, poetry, stagecraft and his baritone voice, Makem helped spread stories and songs of Irish culture around the world.

He brought audiences to tears with “Four Green Fields,” about a woman whose sons died trying to prevent strangers from taking her fields. Other songs included “Gentle Annie” and “Red Is the Rose.”

“He just had the knack of making an audience laugh or cry. … holding them in his hands,” Liam Clancy told RTE Radio in Dublin, Ireland.

The New York Times wrote in 1967 called them “an eight-legged, ambulatory chamber of commerce for the green isle they love so well. … At one point, Irish teenagers were paying as much homage to them as to the Beatles.”

After touring for about nine years as The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, he struck out on his own, but he remained friends with the brothers. Tom Clancy died in 1990 and Paddy in 1998.

Back in the 1950s, Makem and his friends, saw their first few albums — “The Rising of the Moon” and a collection of drinking songs — as a fluke.

In a 1994 Associated Press interview, Makem recalled he was astonished when a Chicago club offered him more money to sing for a week than he was getting for acting with a repertory company.

“I was the opening act for Josh White. I felt sort of silly, coming out and singing unaccompanied, and then Josh coming out and almost making the guitar talk,” he said.

As their fame spread, they appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other major TV shows, and headlined concerts at Carnegie Hall and London’s Royal Albert Hall.

A young Bob Dylan was one of the folk singers who got to know Makem and the Clancys during the early 1960s.

“Topical songs weren’t protest songs,” Dylan wrote in his memoir “Chronicles Volume One.” “What I was hearing pretty regularly, though, were rebellion songs, and those really moved me. The Clancy Brothers — Tom, Paddy and Liam — and their buddy Tommy Makem sang them all the time.”

In 1992, Makem and the Clancys were among the stars performing in a gala tribute to Dylan at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman and Dylan himself also took part.

President Mary McAleese of Ireland led the tributes to Makem after his death. “Always the consummate musician, he was also a superb ambassador for the country, and one of whom we will always be proud,” McAleese said.

Even while battling cancer, he was maintaining a performance schedule, and he visited Belfast last month to receive an honorary degree and returned to his native Armagh.

“He had very much wanted to get over there,” said his son Conor. “I think he knew it might have been his last time over.”

What your humble girl reporter did last nite.

article and pix courtesy Elise Thompson/LAist.