Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis: What doesn't Malcolm Gladwell 'Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis' understand about DRUGS, KATHY WESTMORELAND, AND THAT ELVIS HATES THIS FUCKING SONG?
"The one song The King couldn’t sing"
Elvis
Presley returned from his years in the army to record one of his
biggest hits, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”.
But he could never quite get
the lyrics right.
Why?
Revisionist History puts the King of Rock and
Roll on the couch.
This is the ridiculous Elvis Podcast episode by Malcolm Gladwell of Revisionist History.
Gladwell'sSEASON-ENDING, cash-in, podcast episode BRANDISHes
hipster, jack whiteand,for all i know, jack black, as Sherpas, up the
mystical road of Elvis' Freudian slips,he callsparapraxis - but the're just gossamer.
Elvis might have
been making slips in his slobbering decline when I saw him, ca. 1977, but during the slurred recitation of all of those countless, drugged-period renditions of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, theyWEREN'T FREUDIAN!
BUT, it was Malc's first time to hear it.
So are we supposed to offer him a pass for the Occam's razor fail of
WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT DRUGS, KATHY WESTMORELAND WAILING IN THE BACKGROUND, AND THE FACT THAT ELVIS HATES THIS FUCKING TRIPE?
i posted a section of a scathing blogpost Tyler wrote called,
E L V I S A R O N P R E S L E Y 5 3 4 9 1 1 9 6 5 7 9 5 1 3 5 7I A 5 3
4 9 1 1 9 6 5 7 9 5 1 3 5 7 5+3+4+9+1 + 1+9+6+5 + 7+9+5+1+3+5+7 = 80
8+0=8 Elvis Birth Certificate Elvis Numerology based on his Birth
Certicifcate ¸Latest News Latest Elvis News Elvis News in Pictures A
Lyrics Index FREE Newsletter ¸All Things Elvis Greatest Singers Elvis
Top Ten American Idol Elvis Elvis Army Days Elvis Art Elvis Autographs
Elvis Autopsy Elvis Banned Elvis Biography Elvis Birthday Elvis
Birthplace Tupelo Elvis Cadillac Elvis Cars Car Elvis Shot Elvis Coffin
Elvis Coffin Picture Elvis Coin Elvis Collectibles Elvis Cook Elvis Co
Stars Elvis Crazy Boss Elvis Cause of Death Elvis Death Elvis Death
Certificate Elvis Death Hoax Elvis Dentist Last Visit Elvis Duets Elvis
Easter Elvis Eulogy Elvis Exhumed Elvis FBI File Elvis First Home Elvis
First Job Elvis Funeral Elvis Funeral Service Elvis Gladys Presley Elvis
Grammy Awards Elvis Grand Kids Elvis Guitars Elvis Guns Elvis
Hairstyles ElvisHasLeftTheBuilding Elvis Jaycee Award Elvis Jewelry
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Elvis Las Vegas Elvis Limousines Elvis Love Letters Elvis Medical Report
Elvis Memorabilia Elvis Motorbikes Elvis Movies Elvis Music Elvis The
Name Elvis Elvis Newsletter Elvis in Paris Elvis Pets Elvis On eBay
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School Days Elvis Sightings Elvis st Signature Elvis Stories Elvis
Sunglasses Elvis Unusual Cars Elvis Watches Jewelry Elvis Wedding Photos
What is Elvis Worth Elvis Women Elvis Rated Poems ¸Elvis A to A Big
Hunk Of Love Al Jolson A Little Conversation All Shook Up Always On My
Mind Amazing Grace American Trilogy America The Beautiful Anita Wood Ann
Margret Are You Lonesome Elvis Astrology Baby Lets Play House Barbara
Eden Barbara Leigh Beatles and Elvis Big Boss Man Bill Clinton Bill
Randle Blue Christmas L V I S A R O N P E Y
Here's a true story from an engineer who was there:
On the condition of anonymity, here's what happened, as best as I
remember it... keep in mind, this was the late sixties and I was there
so accuracy is optional. I was a staff engineer at one of the bigger
commercial/industrial studios in NYC and had contact with lots of record
company folk, producers, musicians, writers, other engineers...some
famous, some wannabes.
Apparently the Byrds were recording somewhere,
and one of my studio rat friends told me about a song he was working on
with them about this red neck DJ on the Grand Ole Opry radio station in
Nashville. It was just one of those quick little stories that fly
through a recording session. Some years later, I was free-lancing at a
company that produced syndicated radio programming for various formats.
This day for me it was "The Ralph Emery Show", playing C/W music. Ralph
would fly in from Nashville, do a four hour session of voice intros and
outros, and then some underpaid assembler/mixer (in this case me) would
playback his voice track and roll the tunes. I cued up this track by the
Byrds and rolled it after his intro. I cued up his out and waited til
the end of the song, just after they say, "This one's for you, Ralph". I
rolled his voice track and howled with laughter...I missed my next
several cues. I laughed and stomped and caused such a commotion in the
little production studio that people came in and wanted to know, "What's
the happs". I asked if Ralph, who was long gone back to Nashville until
next week, if good ol' Ralph Emery knew the Byrds song about this red
neck all night DJ, was about him? Within hours, I heard that Ralph was
suing the Byrds. I don't know the outcome of that but it's great song
though! "He's a Drug Store Truck driving man, he's head of the Ku Klux
Klan, when summer rolls around, you'll be lucky if he's not in town. He
don't like the young folks I know. He told me one night on his radio
show. He's the only DJ you can hear after three!" Probably never got
played on Ralph's show again.
Opry Almanac starring Roger Miller & Charlie Louvin
The full hour on WSM-TV 6am March 8, 1966
with host Ralph Emery ... also appearing Jerry Allison of "The Crickets"
House Band:
Jimmie Colvard: Guitar
Thumbs Carlisle: Guitar
Beggie Cruiser(Adair): Piano
Bobby Dyson: Fender Bass
Buddy Rogers: Drums
He is “the man” according to the likes of country music’s hard-knocks and outlaws.
He’s “the man” in the pejorative sense, not the complimentary sense, as witnessed in “you da man. No, you da man” exchanges.
In 1968, Gram Parsons (International Submarine Band, The Byrds) lambasted Emery as everything antithetical to the true spirit of country music.
After an unpleasant, on-air tiff with Ralph Emery, The Byrds wrote "Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man," in which they accuse Emery of everything from racism to your classic case of white, southern douchebaggery.
You’d never guess it from the casual, friendly nature of this episode, but there was a storm brewing in the world of country music.
In 1966, the tension was gathering, but it had yet to break.
The 1960’s was so much about “change” it would’ve made Barack Obama nauseous.
Maybe Vietnam was to blame for a lot of it. Or was it the music?
After a while, it sort of turns into a chicken/egg impasse. In the news bulletin toward the end of this episode, Vietnam’s inevitable, looming presence creeps into an otherwise cheerful affair.
The announcement of the war’s most devastating air attack on North Vietnam is a chilly reminder of world events that sits uneasily in the good ole boy, just hangin’ around feel of the show.
Whatever the case may be, Ralph Emery was determined to keep rock and roll out of country music.
When asked what exactly typified the “Nashville sound,” Chet Atkins reportedly jangled his pocket change and said:
“It’s the sound of money.”
As head of RCA’s country division in the 1950’s, he took the twang out of country music, and replaced it with croon.
Roger Miller and Tex Ritter enjoyed long periods of wild popularity and chart-topping sales.
The Nashville sound sold like crazy. It continued to hold steady throughout the 1960’s as the nation’s conservative listeners disdained the new ethics of rock and roll and sought to hold onto the purified pop of yesteryear.
Despite the commercial sensibility, the elitist attitude of the Nashville sound, and Ralph Emery himself, I have to admit that I enjoyed watching this television episode.
The improvisational feel and cigarette-smoking is worlds away from the Regis and Kelly kind of morning show I’ve grown to expect and avoid.
And for all the change-jangling and sound of money – the music really isn’t half bad either.
It reminds me of happy, sun-shiny days, minus an overwhelming load of idiocy.
I can dig it.
Okay, maybe Gram Parsons had a point about Emery’s elitism. (what? - ed.)
And maybe the Nashville sound had to die to give way to a new breed of outlaw characters (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson etc.) who better typified a new American ethos. But there is something to be gleaned from country’s pop days – something wholesome and good.
Another composition recorded during the October 1968 sessions was the
McGuinn and Gram Parsons penned "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man".[4][16]
The song had been written by the pair in London in May 1968 before
Parsons' departure from the band and was inspired by the hostility shown
towards The Byrds by legendary NashvilleDJRalph Emery when they appeared on his WSM radio program.[4][8] The song's barbed lyric contains a volley of Redneck stereotypes, set to a classic country 3/4 time signature and begins with the couplet "He's a drug store truck drivin' man/He's the head of the Ku Klux Klan."
[26][27]It should be noted, however, that Emery was not, in fact, a Klansman.[4]
The song was subsequently performed by Joan Baez at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and dedicated to the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan.[8] Baez's performance of the song also appeared on the Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More album.[28] An acetate version of Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, dated October 16, 1968 and containing a seven-track programme for the album is known to exist.[29]
At this point the album consisted of the songs "Old Blue", "King
Apathy III", "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man" and "This Wheel's on Fire"
on side one, with "Your Gentle Way of Loving Me", "Nashville West" and
"Bad Night at the Whiskey" on side two.[29]
The album's title, along with the back cover photo sequence, which featured the band changing from astronaut flight suits into cowboy garb, illustrated the schizophrenic nature of the album's material.[10] The psychedelic rock of "Bad Night at the Whiskey" and "This Wheel's on Fire" sat alongside the Bakersfield-style country rock of "Nashville West" and "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man".[4] Despite containing only ten tracks, Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde is The Byrds' longest single album, clocking in at approximately thirty-five minutes in length. Only the double album(Untitled) is longer.
It is what it is. This verbal shrugging-off was examined here recently as an example of the use of repetition not for emphasis but for evasion. I called it a tautophrase, a coinage bottomed on tautology, from the Greek for "redundant."
Readers are readers. Members of the Squad Squad stopped referring back to "free gifts" long enough to challenge my facts about the current plethora of pleonasm, their mock outrage often expressed with facts are facts!
Tautophrases need not be evasive, argued these readers (who shudder at refer back); on the contrary, such repetition can be imperiously dismissive. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told European diplomats that he wanted no part of fiddling with the wording of a resolution about a human rights commission: "If you want to fix the text, fix the text."
The technique of superfluity can also reflect kindness and generosity: Let bygones be bygones is an adage — not, of course, an "old" adage — that led to a liberating "Let Poland be Poland." (Prof. James Bloom of Muhlenberg College informs me that that nationalistic tautophrase is antedated by Langston Hughes's 1938 poem, "Let America Be America Again.")
Or it can show determination. The most famous tautophrase in movies is closely associated with John Wayne: "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."(Or is it gotta be? And who was the screenwriter? I am nonplused, Latin for "no more," and would appreciate getting plused by a film freak.)
A tautophrase is a phrase or sentence that repeats an idea in the same words. The name was coined by William Safire in The New York Times.
Examples include:
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." wikiJohn_Wayne" title="John Wayne"John Wayne
"A la guerre comme à la guerre" — A French phrase literally meaning "at war as at war", and figuratively roughly equivalent to the English phrase "All's fair in love and war"
Qué será, será or che será, será — grammatically incorrect English loan from the Italian, meaning "Whatever will be, will be."
The state of being — is, am, will be and such — is as central to a tautophrase as a repeated word. Thus, "assertions of fixity," as Jacques Barzun calls them — such as "handsome is as handsome does" and "I can only feel as I feel" — do not qualify, nor does Stanislaw Lee's philosophical "Think before you think." What's what makes the cut, as do Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose" and her derogation of Oakland, Calif., as "There is no there there." So does Sigmund Freud's reported "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
The most famous "am" tautophrase is not, as I had it, Popeye's "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam!" Before that, Shakespeare had his Iago say " I am not what I am."
In 1611, seven years after he wrote "Othello," the King James Version of the Bible was published. It contained this English translation of Exodus 3:14, quoting God's answer to Moses' request for source attribution at the burning bush: "I am that I am." Subsequent translations of that puzzling phrase include "I am who I am," "I am what I am" and "I shall be as I shall be."
The sentence is reprised in the New Testament in an epistle (that's a letter) of the apostle Paul, First Corinthians 15:10: "But by the grace of God I am what I am."
I announced proudly the finding of an early use of it is what it is dating to 1949. Comes now an "Aha!" from Jeffrey Apparius of e-mail-land with this epistle: "It appears that it (it is, what it is) had also been used (with a comma) in the New York Times 'Topics of the Day' column of Sept. 20, 1851." Here it is: "Whether it is just what it should have been in all its detail The Courier will not say; 'but it is, what it is, and cannot, without destroying it, be made otherwise.' " Note that quote within a quote; it means that the saying originated before that. We will find it when we find it.
Fraught — With or Without?
"I have always thought the word fraught, 'weighted,' had to be used with a with, as in 'fraught with sorrow,' " writes Marianne Makman of New Rochelle, N.Y. "Lately it appears classy to use it alone, and I hate that!" She describes her state as "at the moment fraught with irritation."
Similarly, Henry Hecht of Demarest, N.J. (I like correspondents who say where they're from), notes a subhead in The Times Magazine describing an issue as "divisive and fraught" and asks "Can fraught be left on its own, or does the magazine make up its own usage?"
Fraught and the noun freight have the same heavy Dutch root, but fraught, the adjective, is now enjoying vogue use.
Shakespeare used it in "King Lear" without the with, as Goneril urges her crazed father to "make use of that good wisdom, Whereof I know you are fraught; and put away these dispositions, that of late transform you.. . ."
The use of with changes the meaning of fraught. Standing alone, fraught means "marked by emotional distress or tension." When the preposition with is added, what's distressing the subject can be made specific.
"If you want to say that a marriage was full of tension," explains Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the newsletter Copy Editor, "you can say that someone had 'a fraught marriage' or that 'the marriage was fraught,' and leave off 'with tension' because the word fraught alone implies tension or emotional distress. If, however, you want to specify what something was fraught with — beyond what you can assume from fraught alone — you can say a situation was fraught with danger or potential pitfalls or violence, uncertainty, risk. If you used fraught alone, it wouldn't necessarily carry the connotations of peril or risk — just tension."
Same type of distinction with the adjective charged: you can say "the atmosphere was charged," suggesting a sense of excitement in the air, or, if you want to get specific, "charged with anticipation, electricity, eroticism, impending doom" or whatever else thrills.
Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsman, gave a nice dig to the overuse of the adjective by stretching it to a noun:
