Jim Croce, Creative Genius and Master Storyteller

 

Jim Croce wrote and recorded a lot of great music in a very short time. One of those was “Operator”, a story song about a guy who misses his ex-girlfriend something terrible, even though he tells himself he doesn’t. Oh, and just to twist the knife a little bit more, she left him for his “best old ex-friend Ray”.

He tries to call her from a pay phone and has an unexpected emotional moment with the telephone operator, telling her the whole story. But then he suddenly changes his mind and says “forget about this call” and “you can keep the dime”, which sounds like he finally seems to accept that it’s over and he needs to move on. 

Recently I’ve watched two different videos featuring three different musicians detailing how great this song is, both from a creative viewpoint and from a fan’s.

First, Rick Beato and Mary Spender.

Next is Fil who also runs a great channel for analyzing popular songs.

All three of these professional musicians are just blown away by the storytelling and overall quality of this song, and by the sweet guitar playing of both Jim and his musical partner Maury Muehlheisen. 

Songwriters spend entire careers trying to write a story song this good, and guitar players dream of creating such beautiful, tuneful, memorable music. 

Jim and Maury created about 20 such songs with their two fingerstyle guitar technique, weaving in and around each other, playing a simple but beautiful melody, along with fills, rhythm and constant chord changes. 

Simple but not easy; if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and these two guys wouldn’t have carved out a wonderful musical legacy in a few short years.

As with most of Jim’s songs he wrote it about a real life scene he witnessed while in the Army, lined up at the pay phone to call home, and hearing another guy have this experience right before his very eyes. 

Jim Croce, “Operator”

Both of these creative geniuses were killed in a tragic plane crash on September 20, 1973, when I was 14 years old. I was a huge fan, and was crushed by the news, and have missed both of them and their beautiful transcendent music ever since. 

And in an amazing coincidence, my first son was born on that same date 15 years later. His name is James. It’s just a coincidence, I think. 

Tangled Up in Bob

 

Not really a Bob Dylan fan but his 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks” is very very good, his best according to a lot of people, such as me for example.

And the best song on his best album is “Tangled Up in Blue”.

Tangled Up in Blue

The music, the band, the arrangement, etc. are all quite good and draw you in as a listener.

But the lyrics … the lyrics are at or near the pinnacle of the art form. 

You could use this song to teach a class on how to create imagery that sticks in our heads, how to evoke emotion and longing and regret for past loves and mistakes made, how to tell a story with a long arc including past, present, and future, how to put words together in very interesting ways (including references to Rimbaud and “Italian poets from the 15th century”) without becoming a tedious bore, and much more.

Truth be told, I’m not much of a “lyrics guy” and have long regretted his influence on artists who clearly tried to emulate him but did not have his talent for lyrics — a dangerous combo — mainly because it resulted in pretentious, precious, often unlistenable music, but that’s a topic for another day. 

So you can believe me when I tell you that this tune is the bee’s knees. At the top. 

Lyrically we can group it with many other classic songs from all musical genres, as the best of the best — it’s just not possible to write a better song. Many just as good, none better.

This breakdown video from the excellent “Polyphonic” channel explains it in more detail (and probably better than I ever could).

Tangled Up in Blue:  Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece  

530 Years Ago Today, in 1492

 

Columbus Discovers America

And it was just the first of four voyages he would take, discovering not just the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic  and Haiti), but the Gulf of Mexico, and South and Central America too.

He was a busy guy, when he wasn’t subjugating entire races of people I guess.

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and “Indian” captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.

He had a bit of trouble getting the first voyage financed, rejected by King John II of Portugal and then King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (twice) before they finally agreed after Spain defeated the Moors (or “Moops”) in January 1492 at Granada.

Just 14 years later in 1506 he passed away, and Spain — which had hoped to find a route to the “Far East” — instead discovered the New World and all the riches and peoples they could plunder.

Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. He also unleashed centuries of brutal colonization, the transatlantic slave trade and the deaths of millions of Native Americans from murder and disease.

Well, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t really Columbus who “unleashed” all that, it was Spain, followed by the British, French, and Dutch. 

Colonization, slavery, murder and disease was just how the whole world worked. For thousands of years. This was nothing new.

Slavery and the slave trade was practiced by every nation with the power to do so, since the beginning of time. Until the British outlawed slavery in 1807 (and the slave trade in 1833) it was the worldwide historical norm. All of history has been thus, for everyone everywhere — except for the rich and powerful of course, and they got rich and powerful by subjugating and enslaving and murdering people, and taking land and property, and every other form of unpleasantness one can imagine. 

What exactly are we supposed to do about it? Impose modern expectations of civilization, of human rights that didn’t exist yet, upon an earlier time? It was what it was, and it’s best to view it by the norms of the time. 

Life for everyone everywhere was nasty, brutish, and short.

If it wasn’t Columbus who discovered America somebody else would have, and that man would get blamed as Columbus is now, and either way the exact same colonization and enslavement and murder would have followed just as night follows day, for the reasons given above. 

The revisionist tries to willfully misrepresent history and demonize everyone who ever did great things for daring to live in their own times according to the accepted norms of the time, instead of in today’s times according to today’s norms. It’s tiresome, ahistorical, and tremendously disrespectful towards leaders of the past, and makes us all dumber and myopic. 

Link:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/columbus-reaches-the-new-world

The Great B. B. King

 

B. B. King

The blues legend wrote, recorded, and performed so many classic songs for so long that it’s difficult to choose just one or two (or four or five) for inclusion here …

But onward we must go.

“How Blue Can You Get” (live version, 1970)

He solos for a full two minutes and 45 seconds as the intro — and an incredible solo it is — before just ripping the vocals to shreds too. 

You’re evil when I’m with you baby
And you are jealous when we’re apart
I said you’re evil, you’re so evil when I’m with you baby
And you are jealous when we’re apart
How blue can you get baby
The answer’s right here in my heart

Both his guitar playing and his singing convey tremendous and unmistakable emotional power and range to the listener, which is one major reason why he is one of a kind. 

“You Upset Me Baby” (studio version, single originally from 1954)

A straight-ahead “uptown” blues number. 

Like listening to AM radio late at night in 1954 on some Southern station, since this was before Elvis (and others) popularized “race” music (yes that’s what it was called by Billboard and the radio industry). 

Later in the 1960s the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, and countless other bands, plus individual guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, having immersed themselves in Blues and R&B during their youth, would go on to popularize it for a mass audience and pay homage to it by actually naming their influences and fully crediting the origin of their style of playing. 

B. B. King was very high on all their lists.

None of that happened with the Elvis wave. They just kinda pretended they invented it. Which is unfortunate.

The influence on guys like Clapton from this next tune are obvious.

“Please Love Me” (studio version, single from 1953)

This one is new to me, his version of Leon Russell’s classic “Hummingbird” live from Japan in 1971 — he makes the song his own and the guitar tone here is fabulous.

“Hummingbird” (live version, 1971)

I could go on and on and on — the man recorded an incredible amount of great music, toured year-round for decades, and lived long enough to record albums with accomplished guitarists who claimed him as their hero like Keith Richards and Eric Clapton and John Mayer. 

He was in a class by himself. 

Body Language is Often More Important Than the Words Coming Out of Our Mouths

And ladies and gentlemen, who better to illustrate it than one of the people I’ve learned to not trust at all, Bill Gates!

This “Charisma on Command” channel is pretty interesting and talks a lot about charisma, body language, persuasion, etc. 

In the video the host has to give a big disclaimer towards the end about how we shouldn’t “otherize” people who are socially awkward because it’s not fair to people are are just socially awkward and not evil sociopaths.

And that’s true. Tons of well-meaning, normal people can be socially awkward, especially when nervous like on TV or in other public settings they’re not used to. 

But evil sociopaths can be socially awkward too, and there’s something weird about both Gates and Zuckerberg that goes far beyond social awkwardness, based on their inventions and public statements. In fact a lot of Technology and Silicon Valley types are weird people. And they advocate for weird, anti-social, anti-family, anti-freedom ideas.

It’s more than okay to otherize them, because their inventions otherize and isolate us, and actively divide us, and monetize all of that, all day, every day.

On This Day in 1941

Ted Williams finishes the season hitting .406 

Nobody else has done it since, so it has now been 81 years since anyone has accomplished the feat. That’s an average human lifespan, more or less. 

Pearl Harbor was still in the future, FDR was president, Benny Goodman and swing music in general ruled the hit record charts, and Joe Louis was heavyweight boxing champion.

In all of sports there are very, very few single season records that survive that long. It tells you a lot.

Only 3 hitters have approached the .400 mark since, most notably Tony Gwynn with .394 in 1994, George Brett with .390 in 1980, Rod Carew with .388 in 1977.

These days nobody is remotely a threat to hit .400 because launch angle and exit velocity have taken over the game and nearly ruined it.

Ted Williams somehow managed to hit for both power and average despite using a slight upper cut in his swing — not because it caused the ball to “launch” off the bat at some desired angle to maximize home runs (and strikeouts), but because that better matched the slightly downward path of the pitch, maximizing your chance of hitting the ball hard and on a line. He wrote a famous book about his philosophy of hitting, “The Science of Hitting”.

He was clearly one of the best hitters of all time — if not for serving in two major wars and missing 5 years of his baseball prime, he definitely would have threatened Babe Ruth’s all time HR record of 714.

So it’s been 81 years since Williams did it, and prior to that there were 5 players who hit .400 a total of 10 times from 1900-1925 — Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby both did it three times, George Sisler twice, and Napoleon Lajoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson once. Here’s the full list of all-time season batting average records.

The first in the modern era was Lajoie in 1901 and the last was Hornsby in 1925. In between, Cobb (1911, 1912, 1922), Shoeless Joe (1911), Sisler (1920, 1922), and Hornsby (1922, 1924). Two .400 hitters in 1911 and three in 1922! 

I point all this out to highlight the clumping of these data points — eleven times total, once in 1901, once in 1941, nine times in the years 1911-25. That’s the whole history of .400 hitting in a nutshell.

Of this group of .400 hitters, Hornsby, Cobb, and Williams all had, as one might expect, long runs of extreme dominance.

Hornsby’s run from 1920-1925 was one of the most amazing batting displays in history — he hit .400 three times and led the NL, all six years, in all of these categories: BA, OBP, SLG, OPS, plus five times in TB and four times in Hits, 2B, and RBI. His stat line over those years is incredible: BA .397 and 1.133 OPS with season averages of 118 Runs, 115 RBI, 216 Hits, and 363 TB. Over a twelve year run from 1920-1931 he averaged .378 with 185 hits and 105 RBI and led the NL in:

• OPS ten times
• OBP nine times
• SLG eight times
• BA seven times
• TB six times
• Runs five times
• Hits, 2B and RBI four times
• BB three times

Williams had a similar six-year run from 1941-1949 (excluding the war years 43-45) where he hit .359 with a .505 OBP and 1.161 OPS and averaged 35 HR, 130 RBI, 150 BB, and 339 TB, and led the AL, all six years, in all of these categories: BB, OBP,  SLG, OPS, plus four times in BA, HR, Runs and TB and three times in RBI. He is the all-time career leader in OBP at .482 — almost a .500 OBP for an entire career! Over a 13 year run 1939-1958 (excluding war years and injury-shortened years) he led the AL in: 

• OBP twelve times
• OPS ten times
• SLG nine times
• BB eight times
• BA, Runs and TB six times

Cobb’s dominant run was thirteen years from 1907-1919 where he averaged .377 and 197 hits per season, and led the AL in : 

• BA twelve times 
• OPS nine times 
• Hits and SLG eight times
• OBP seven times 
• SB and TB six times 

All three players were absolute machines on offense, obviously.