Ringo Sings

Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band put on an excellent show this past Saturday in Detroit. It opened with Ringo doing a cover of Carl Perkins' rockabilly classic Matchbox. He had done the song as a Beatle and I've always loved it. It really got the crowd going, which I guess was the point, eh?

Ringo did several of his standards from both his Beatle and solo days, all of which you would expect. Octopus's Garden, Boys (the crowd, including yours truly, got well into the bop-shu-wop, bop-bop-shu-whop) Act Naturally, A Little Help From My Friends (in part directed as a thank you towards his All Starrs), and, of course, Yellow Submarine, which had great audience participation. He also sang What Goes On from the Beatles. It's the only Beatles song credited to Lennon-McCartney-Starkey, he pointed out to the crowd, and a pretty good B-side to the Nowhere Man single.

From his solo days came It Don't Come Easy, Back Off Boogaloo, I'm the Greatest (written by John Lennon, who thought Ringo would bring the right attitude to a self effacing tune) and Photograph. A lot of people sang along with these standards; it added great enjoyment to the concert air.

Ringo clearly picked things to please the crowd. And you know what? He did. 

All right, I haven't been to many concerts at all. But this was absolutely the best.

Marty's being an Infant

As if I don't waste enough of my life on nonsense, let me share with you the nonsense I've wasted time on in the last day.

You know how people frequently use the word 'baby' as a term of endearment? Your wife or husband or long lost lover is your baby, right? Well, isn't that kind of demeaning when you think about it?

I was listening to Linda Ronstadt cooing her old song Oooh, Baby, Baby and I thought, how would that sound if we replaced baby with another term for a tiny human child? What if we substituted infant for it?

Oooo, oo, ohh, Infant, Infant. Oooo, ooo, ooh, Infant, Infant. Funny, eh? How about this: Oh where oh where can my infant be? You know, from Pearl Jam's Last Kiss. And you can do it with almost any song which employs baby as a familiar. Carl Perkins' rockabilly standard Everybody's Tryin' to be My Baby becomes Everybody's Tryin' to be my Infant. Peter Frampton's famous hit is now Infant I Love Your Way. The Beach Boys are singing Don't Worry Infant. And have you heard the Beatles sing Infant You're a Rich Man? For you suburban rapper wannbees we have Vanilla Ice performing Ice Ice Infant.

I could go on. But I so hope I've given you the ear worm now. So tell me what you come up with. 

New thoughts on old records

I saw on Facebook the other day a thread on a friend's page which asked, what was your first record? I began to offer a response there then thought, why waste such profundities on a mere internet post? I'll blog about it.

If you care to define ownership as simple possession of a record I'll lay claim to a lesser know Carl Perkins number, Dixie Fried. It was I'm sure originally owned by me Pops. I still sing it often when on the road, perhaps because it binds me to those childhood days. It was an old 78 on the Sun label, the label which launched many rock and country careers. Elvis, Perkins himself, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash all started out at Sun Records. The flip side was I'm Sorry I'm not Sorry, not a bad little ditty itself. That one had great piano riffs.

The first single I actually bought myself was either Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels' Too Many Fish in the Sea/Three Little Fishes medley, or the Beatles' Nowhere Man. Why either? I don't really know anymore. Likely as not I was enamored of 'Detroit' being on any such thing as a record, and to Nowhere Man I have to imagine that I had some idea that the Beatles were somehow important and that I should listen to them. I never bought anything else of Mitch Ryder's (although I still like that particular recording a lot) but I became quite enamored of the Beatles. They are definitely my favorite group ever.

The first whole album I bought was Paul McCartney's Band on the Run. Talk about an album that starts and finishes strong: Band on the Run, the full version, opens it, and in closing we have Nineteen Hundred Eighty Five, my personal favorite non-hit track on any album which I've heard all the way through. It builds fantastically and ends marvelously abruptly in the style of A Day in the Life. The fact that the actual 1985 was twelve years away when I bought the record ( 1985 is 33 years in my rear view now!) may have influenced my taste. Still, I'll argue it's a great closing track.

Other than the Perkins' one, which truly regret not having, I still have them all somewhere. Band on the Run is on a shelf behind me, while Mitch and the Nowhere Man are in a box in a third floor closet, having not seen the light of day since 1981. None of them were bad first picks in my mind.