Jukebox In My Head

I still remember when Neil Young, in direct response to students killed by the National Guard at Kent University during the Vietnam War, wrote a song, “Ohio,” that was pressed as a single within a couple months of its creation.

Considered speedy in 1970, that time period from conception to release would be considered downright slothful these days. Witness ”Hey Paris, a new song by Dion addressed to Ms. Hilton.

For those of you who don’t remember, Dion was an early teen star, sometimes with the Belmonts, beginning in the late 1950s with “A Teenager in Love,” “The Wanderer” and “Ruby Baby” and later with the landmark hit “Abraham, Martin and John.”

Now a well-preserved 67, Dion once wrote a song called “Runaround Sue,” about a girl who, once she captures your very soul, turns your heart upside down and “goes out with other guys." And having been around the block once or twice when it comes to fame and the handling of such, he is in a good position to offer a bit of elderly advice for Paris Hilton: “Steady, girl!”

“You got a friend till the very end
I’ll stand by you
I’ll pray for you
I’m looking out for you”

“Hey Paris” is the essence of internet D.I.Y. culture. You can see the sheet of paper with the lyrics in front of him and watch him turn on the rhythm machine. He knows this might give him a little exposure, but he’s smart enough to know that it’s not worth making a record or any more of a fuss about.

Which makes it perfect youtube fodder. As a longtime fan, I wondered what else I could find out about Dion with youtube. Typing Dion into youtube’s search engine, the first pages of entries were devoted to Celine Dion – imagine that? -- so I changed to Dion Dimucci, his real name.

That coughed up a digital goldmine. First up was a rocking three-minute snippet from a 2006 live set in Red Bank, New Jersey, of “Drip Drop,” one of my favorite, if less known, Dion and the Belmonts tunes.

There were representative videos from every stage of his career. An American Bandstand performance of “A Teenager in Love” shows the consummate onstage ease and cool style that characterized his teen-star years and carries over into the Hilton performance. That's a fifty-year span.

By 1964, Dion tired of teen fare and began recording blues standards, and the hits went away. He apparently developed and quit a drug habit before returning with “Abraham, Martin and John,” which resounded with the anti-war sentiment making its way across the country. I couldn’t find a Smothers Brothers Show clip of “Abraham, Martin and John” that made a big impression on me in 1968 -- it was the first time I remembered seeing someone perform a hit with an acoustic guitar. But this clip from a 1988 Arsenio Hall Show includes Dion’s brief, funny history of 1950’s and 1960’s music and a great solo acoustic performance of the song.

Dion, who last year released Bronx in Blue, a fine album of blues standards, has been extremely consistent in regards to the origins of his music. He grew up before rock, with blues and country music, which he saw as two sides of the same coin. It is as easy to hear those connections in “Ruby Baby” as it is in “Hey Paris.” He tells how he learned blues from a janitor named Little Willie and from listening to Hank Williams records, punctuating his points with a guitar, in this 1988 clip from Little Art’s Poker Party .

My favorite clip is from a 1988 Grammy performance in which Dion casually fronts “A Teenager in Love” with a vocal chorus that includes Buster Poindexter, Ruben Blades, Lou Reed and a clutch of doo wop groups.” It is the essence of Dion-ness, the gracefully aging star equally bemused and flattered by the attention as he belts out his teenage song almost thirty years down the road. Pay attention, Ms. Hilton, this guy knows whereof he speaks.

p.s. Dion also inadvertently participated in perhaps the greatest moment in the busking career of the Soldiers of Love, in the early nineteen nineties on the Boulder Mall. One of our all-time music heroes, the late and great Doug Sahm, walked past us and threw in a dollar. Gil and I started up “Teenager in Love,” a Mall staple, and when we got to the chorus, we sing, “why must I be a baby boomer in love?” At which Doug turned around, rocked back on his heels and grinned at us before walking on. Perfect moment!

Posted by Leland Rucker at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Two federal wildlife agents were killed last Friday in a plane crash in Wayne County, Utah. The cause of the accident is pending, but the agents were engaged in killing coyotes from the air under a federal program.

That federal program, innocuously called Wildlife Services, in 2005 killed more than 27,000 animals from the air, and lesser numbers of bobcats, domestic cats, red foxes and wolves. All told, Wildlife Services kills several hundred thousand animals every year, in the guise of protecting ranchers and farmers from livestock losses.

That comes at a frightening cost. Since 1989, nine people have died and 34 more injured in helicopter or plane crashes while carrying out this grisly policy. “Aerial gunning is, as Wendy Keefover-Ring of Sinapu, says, “deadly business.” (Read Sinapu’s account of the accident here.

And it is deadly business that we are paying for with our taxes. Millions of dollars are spent every year indiscriminately killing animals and people in a sorry spiral of death.

Contrast that with the story of Stacey Scott, a rancher for more than 30 years in Natrona County, Wyoming, one of the aerial-gunning hotbeds. He has coyotes and fox, bobcats and mountain lions on his property, and many of his neighbors experience losses to coyotes. But he doesn’t shoot coyotes, and he doesn’t have a problem with them, either.

Here is the reason he gave the Star-Tribune in Casper (full story here):

The rancher said there is a direct correlation, a “cause and effect,” between pressures put on coyotes by ranchers, and how coyotes respond. Scott said most of his neighboring ranchers try “to shoot every coyote they see.” If a coyote population is regularly and systematically shot, trapped, gassed or blown up by ranchers and government trappers, the survivors respond with large litters of six to eight pups, he said.


This is the dirty secret about coyotes. The more of them we kill, the more they reproduce. As if to spit in the face of Wildlife Services, there are today more coyotes in the United States than there were when the Wildlife Services program began. And they enjoy a much wider range than ever, since they are more adaptive than humans.

Wildlife Services is a waste of our tax dollars based on a fraudulent premise. The only “service” it provides, for its own employees as much as animals, is death.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of us who have lived in Boulder awhile are used to fusses. You have to be. People here are passionate about everything from dog poop to historic preservation and prairie dogs, and we don’t mind expressing our opinions, silly as they may be.

That passion can put us in the national spotlight, too. The latest silliness is an ongoing tumult over a panel discussion on sex and drugs that reached the sensitive ears of some Boulder High School students during the Conference on World Affairs, a relatively harmless annual confab distinguished by full-of-themselves liberal panelists making pithy comments on subjects they often know nothing about and probably shouldn’t be speaking on in the first place. It’s as close as you can get to an actual Lefty Lovefest, a place for those who write into the local newspaper wanting to keep Amy Goodman but can Bob Greenlee as a Camera columnist. Everybody in town knows it.

Anyway, after a student and her parents complained to the school board about a CWA “sex and drugs” panel held at Boulder High School, the board looked into the matter, noted that district policy was violated when some teachers mandated student attendance at the panel and made the appropriate change: The one student who complained will never have to miss a class again to hear people talk about sex and drugs.

You'd think that would be the end of it. But it took a couple of days for Fox News’ morality bloodhound and self-anointed Savior of Children, Bill O’Reilly, to charge in last week with a couple of televised rants, complete with recordings of some choice audio selections from the discussion. Give the man credit where it’s due: Never once does O’Reilly let facts get in the way of his mighty self-righteousness. As O’Reilly’s chief parodist might say: Truthiness Rules.

Once O’Reilly went in for the tackle, the right-wing piled on with enthusiastic vigor. I have two personal favorites, both from the Friday Camera. Focus of the Family, never an organization to pass up a chance to pour lye on a liberal open wound, jumped in, blabbering about possible “crimes” (specifically contributing to the delinquency of a minor) committed by the panel members (who said stupid things but were hardly outside their constitutional rights. If that suit wins, I’m going to start litigation against every television show and ad that includes “sex” and “drugs” in its programming. Gotta protect the kids.)

But my real favorite was the top story of the day, about a bobble-headed state congressional delegation. Here is the lede in Saturday’s Daily Camera: “Ten Republican state senators called on the Boulder Valley school board to fire the district's superintendent and Boulder High's principal because of a ‘reckless and utterly irresponsible panel discussion’ the school hosted during the annual Conference on World Affairs.”

Of course, the fact that the district superintendent, George Garcia, is retiring this summer apparently didn’t reach any of the ten senators, whose knees are probably still jerking today from the fallout. When asked, Broomfield Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield “said the district's upcoming superintendent transition wasn't known to the lawmakers when they called for the dismissal.”

Really? Coming from someone in an elected position of trust, might that kind of oversight be considered “reckless and utterly irresponsible,” too.

It’s like that line from an old Bruce Cockburn song: “Everybody loves to see justice done -- on somebody else!”

The entire flap also reminds me that it wasn’t that long ago – just two and a half years, in fact -- that the national media last cast its cameras and petty morality on Boulder High School. The ingredients are a bit different, but it is the same old tired story. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It's fall of 2004, President Bush has just been re-elected, a somber mood has fallen over Boulder, and high school students are planning their spring recital. Click this link at the Boulder Lout (thanks, Dick) for the story of how Boulder High School students were investigated by the FBI for practicing an old Bob Dylan song that might or might not have contained lyrics that threatened the president.

Really! It’s like we never learn.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)