Category: Music

‘Watch This!’

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The headline is a two-word text message I sent to my youngest daughter after watching producer Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great” video about the 1970 Chicago hit, “Make Me Smile,” which is an absolute must-see. I’ve talked before about my love of Chicago:

It happened the other day (thank you, YouTube algorithm) that I started watching old videos of the jazz-rock band Chicago. Did you know that Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath was Jimi Hendrix’s favorite guitarist? To listen to Kath play on “25 or 6 to 4” is to be amazed, and it’s a pity that Kath (who died tragically in 1978) is so seldom mentioned among the rock-and-roll greats. Kath could also sing like Ray Charles, a distinctive bluesy baritone . . .

Rick Beato is not just a music producer, but an accomplished musician who earned a master’s degree in jazz from the New England Conservatory of Music. What he provides on his YouTube channel is a far better educational experience than most kids get in school nowadays. One of the things Beato does occasionally is to review the Top 10 list on Spotify, the general point of his reviews being that most contemporary pop is puerile four-chord garbage produced by computer simulation of actual music. (See 357 Magnum’s “Rick Beato Listened to These Songs, So You Don’t Have To.”) Of course, it’s a steady fact of history that every generation believes that the younger generation’s music is crap (e.g., Richard Weaver denouncing the “barbaric impulses” of jazz), but things have gotten very bad indeed now. My teenage daughter is, God help us, a Harry Styles fan and, to be honest, some of his stuff is OK, but he is nearly the apex of sophistication in the vast wasteland of contemporary pop.

Baby Boomers like me grew up with Top 40 radio without realizing at the time we were living through the Golden Age of Classic Rock, to say nothing of all the other excellent music that was being produced. Some of the pop stuff that we sneered at back in the day — when cool kids were into Zeppelin and Floyd, and disdained those catchy singles on radio — was, in retrospect, very good music. For example, I wasn’t really “into” Steely Dan as a teenager, but they were excellent and “Do It Again” (a Top 10 hit in 1973) is a marvelously sophisticated piece of work. Because we were absolutely inundated in quality music in our youth, Boomers are not likely to enjoy the simplistic dumbed-down stuff that is popular with our children and grandchildren. But I digress . . .

Terry Kath was the heart and soul — especially the soul — of Chicago. As a guitarist, he was incomparable — so good that Jimi Hendrix, after seeing Chicago play a club date in L.A., said Kath was better than him. And his vocals were just so incredibly soulful. How could a Midwestern white guy in his early 20s sing like an aged blues legend? Very rarely do you encounter a lead guitarist who is also a talented lead singer, and Kath had that magic combination. “Make Me Smile” was the first time Chicago had a single make the Top 10, and there’s an important story behind that.

Like most rock bands of the late 1960s and 70s, Chicago was album-oriented — serious music listeners weren’t interested in 45-rpm records, but in the aftermath of what the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967, were more focused on producing long-form music on 33-rpm albums.

As part of their deal with Columbia Records, Chicago secured an agreement that their first album would be a double album — something usually reserved for proven hitmakers, but Columbia’s president Clive Davis really believed in the band, so 1969’s Chicago Transit Authority was a double album with 12 mostly long tracks, including their 7-plus-minute cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man.”

 

How strange it is that a band who could jam like that should have gained a reputation, just a few years later, as an “easy listening” pop group. And yet, by the time I was in my mid-teens, that’s how I thought of Chicago. But this was because of their subsequent success with hit singles that smashed through the Top 40 charts, completely against the wishes of the group itself! The earliest attempts to turn Chicago’s songs into singles flopped, but after the release of their second album in 1970, Clive Davis personally intervened to insist that “Make Me Smile,” which was more than four minutes long on the album, be edited down to under three minutes as a single. It has even been claimed that Davis himself was in the booth for the final edit, although this has been disputed and may be apocryphal. At any rate, the horn introduction to “Make Me Smile” was shortened, and Kath’s guitar solo was deleted from the middle of the song so that the single version was 2:58. It is this version that Beato analyzed in his “What Makes This Song Great” video:

You really must watch that video, as Beato isolates individual tracks to call attention to parts of the song you might never have noticed before. One thing that particularly impressed me was just how great drummer Danny Seraphine was (and is, as he’s still playing at age 73). Some of those parts are just incredible, and the whole group’s performance is a tour de force, made more enjoyable by Beato breaking down the chord progressions — A-flat+4, C-minor and so forth. Did we even know we were listening to Phrygian mode back in the day? No, but after Beato pointed it out, I felt ashamed that I didn’t appreciate it before.

Anyway, after watching that video, I sent it to my daughter in hopes that she will appreciate it, but she’d probably rather listen to Harry Styles, I suppose. Alas, these kids today . . .




 

Everything You Love Is Cancelled Now

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You can still purchase Elvis Costelo’s 1979 album Armed Forces, but who knows how much longer this will be possible? How long before we’re required to forget that it ever existed?

Elvis Costello has said that he will no longer perform one of his biggest hits, “Oliver’s Army,” and has urged radio stations to also stop playing the song because of its use of the N-word.
The song, which is taken from Costello’s 1979 album “Armed Forces” and is one of the rockstar’s best-known hits, was written about The Troubles in Northern Ireland — a long and deadly conflict between mostly Protestant unionists determined for Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom and Catholic republicans desperate to break away and create a united Ireland.
The anti-Black racial slur is used during the song to describe a British soldier. The line in question reads: “Only takes one itchy trigger, one more widow, one less white n——.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Costello said he plans to go on tour this summer, but will no longer be performing “Oliver’s Army” as part of his setlist.
“If I wrote that song today, maybe I’d think twice about it,” he told The Telegraph in a recent interview.
“That’s what my grandfather was called in the British army — it’s historically a fact — but people hear that word go off like a bell and accuse me of something that I didn’t intend.”
Costello continued to say that he censored “Oliver’s Army” during his last tour, but he no longer believes that censorship is the correct method.

If you are familiar with British culture of the time, you understand how the word was used to denote someone of lowly status — a lackey, a stooge, expendable. John Lennon famously used it that way in another song we’re supposed to forget ever existed and nobody — absolutely nobody — could plausibly claim Lennon was racist. Nor have I ever encountered evidence that Elvis Costello (whose real name is Declan Patrick McManus) harbored any prejudice against anyone. If such evidence existed, surely it would be widely publicized, and yet this lyric, whose meaning was always clear to any educated person, must now send “Oliver’s Army” down the Memory Hole, airbrushed from existence like Trotsky during the Stalinist era. Has anyone in the Permanently Indignant class even bothered to ask what the song is about?

Hong Kong is up for grabs.
London is full of Arabs.
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by the Chinese line,
With the boys from the Mersey
And the Thames and the Tyne.
But there’s no danger,
It’s a professional career.
Though it could be arranged,
With just a word in Mr. Churchill’s ear.
If you’re out of luck or out of work,
We could send you to Johannesburg.

What an astonishingly brilliant commentary on imperialism and its consequences. Costello was expressing the view of the British soldier — a cynical working-class chap, generally — posted in Belfast, risking his life to keep the Irish down while, at the same time, “London is full of Arabs” (even more true now than then) and Britain’s Pacific outpost of Hong Kong was “up for grabs.” The soldier mocks the absurdity of his helpless situation in Northern Ireland, comparing it to the prospect of World War Three breaking out in the Middle East (“overrun by the Chinese line”) or being deployed to South Africa to prop up the apartheid regime. This was written during the dark era of the late 1970s, before the economic revival that followed under Thatcher’s administration, and there were a lot of young men “out of luck or out of work” in England, including not a few like Costello, who was a Catholic of Irish ancestry.

The religious background of the conflict in Ireland is signified by the “Oliver” in the title which “refers to English Parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell, who personally led the English forces which subjugated Ireland in 1649.” So the entire song, really, is about the cruel absurdity of this centuries-long warfare, with Catholic boys in England required to do service in “Oliver’s Army” fighting the Irish Catholics!

It doesn’t matter what your opinion was (or is) about British policy in Northern Ireland, the song is pure genius, in quite the same way the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “Fortunate Son” is pure genius, no matter your opinion about U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Some would argue that “Oliver’s Army” is the best song Costello ever wrote, rivaling even his poignant breakthrough hit “Alison.” But now he can’t even play it anymore, because of stupid Political Correctness.

Well, you can still buy it. Just don’t tell anyone, or else you could become another dot on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map.”

The eyes of Texas are upon you,
’Til Gabriel blows his horn.

IYKWIMAITYD.




 

The Savage Young

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Dave Reaboi is a hater.

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t have a “Beatlephobia” category on their Hate Map, but if they did, Dave would be a dot on it.

Like a lot of Beatle haters — and I could also name Ace of Spades in this category — Dave Reaboi is a Gen Xer, and one suspects that there is some sort of intergenerational Boomer envy involved in his irrational hatred of the Four Lovable Mop Tops from Liverpool. Coming of age in the blighted MTV era, when Michael Jackson and Madonna were The Big Thing, it’s difficult for Gen Xers to relate to the cheerful Good Old Days of 45 rpm singles, AM Top 40 radio and Ed Sullivan. Like all prejudices, Beatlephobia is rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding that expresses itself in slurs like “overrated” and “hippies.” The new documentary Get Back, focused as it is on the way the Beatles ended — drugs and Yoko and “peace” — is unlikely to bridge this generational gap. If you want to love the Beatles, you must start at the beginning.

Because I was just 4 years old when the Beatles arrived in America, I missed the initial wave of Beatlemania, although my older cousins Deborah and Trish were caught up in it. It wasn’t until I was a teenager myself that I got into the Beatles, listening to their first Greatest Hits double album (the red one) which I’d gotten from my brother Kirby after he went to college and the Army. Listening to those early tracks — “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” etc. — was an excellent introduction, and I also began rooting around in the trivia of the band’s origins. There was a copy of the 1968 Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies in our high school library, and I also listened to the crude early recordings that the Beatles made with Tony Sheridan in Germany in 1961, later released as The Savage Young Beatles.

In my mind, this is who the Beatles really were — rock-and-rollers in leather jackets and greased-back ducktail haircuts, playing Chuck Berry tunes for drunken crowds in Hamburg dive bars, popping amphetamines to make it through their eight-hour nightly sets. As Malcolm Gladwell observed in Outliers, it was in Hamburg that the Beatles did their “10,000 hours,” returning to Liverpool with a tighter sound that set them apart from the dozens of other rock groups in England. On their way to fame, they lost John’s buddy Stu Sutcliffe to a brain hemorrhage and replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr (who had played the Hamburg clubs with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes). They got cleaned up by manager Brian Epstein, a gay Jewish record store proprietor with a background in theater and, after having been turned down by several record labels (“groups of guitars are on the way out,” as one label executive remarked), caught the ear of EMI’s George Martin.

While the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney would eventually emerge as the greatest hitmakers of the decade, six of the 14 tracks on the Beatles’ first album were cover tunes, the most memorable of them being “Twist and Shout,” originally an R&B hit for the Isley Brothers. I don’t care how much Dave Reaboi or another Beatlephobe hates them, it is impossible to deny that this is one of the greatest rock-and-roll recordings of all time. Every serious Beatles fan knows the story of how this classic was recorded at the end of a 12-hour session at EMI’s Abbey Road studio. It was past 10 p.m. on Feb. 11, 1963, and John Lennon had been struggling with a chest cold. Because “Twist and Shout” required an all-out screaming vocal performance, they decided to record it last, knowing that John couldn’t get through it more than once. So what went onto the tape was a straight-up live recording, done in one take with no overdubbing, and it is absolutely perfect. If you want to know what had throngs of teenage British girls screaming their heads off in 1963, this track is the essence of it — wild and raw, that Savage Young Beatles sound cooked up during those long nights playing for crowds of gangsters and prostitutes in Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn district.

 

What you have to realize, if you want to understand how revolutionary the Beatles were at the time, was the difference between their sound and what was on the radio before they scored their big breakthrough. Go back and dig up some of the Top 10 hits of 1962-63 and see if you can find anything — anything — with a sound comparable to what the Beatles made. For example, contrast the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout” to the Isley Brothers’ original, and the difference is unmistakable.

Is it possible to make someone like Dave Reaboi understand this? Probably not. Love and hate are fundamentally irrational, and Dave’s anti-Beatles prejudice is unlikely to be overcome by any evidence or argument I could produce. My love of the Beatles is, of course, equally irrational, involving fond memories like the time I was bopping around my $1.80-an-hour job at Six Flags over Georgia when I was 16. Working the front line at the Plantation House restaurant, I was singing “From Me to You” when I heard a vocal harmony and found the buck-toothed girl at the cash register singing along. Ah, sweet memories!

Talk about doomed teen romance — Kathy’s favorite Beatle was George, while mine was John — and I could narrate the sequel, which involved Kathy’s younger sister (similarly buck-toothed, though more buxom) but why bother? Dave Reaboi could never relate. It’s so sad . . .

Dave doesn’t want to hear these stories from a gray-bearded old grandpa, but trust me: The Savage Young Stacy McCain was a wild man.




 

8 Killed as Houston Hip Hop Show Becomes ‘Mass Casualty Incident’

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If you’ve never heard of Travis Scott, he’s a rapper who is also Kylie Jenner’s baby daddy. A native of Houston, his 2018 album Astroworld, which went triple platinum, was named for a Houston amusement park that closed in 2005. The title now has deadly significance:

At least eight people died and scores more were injured when chaos, including a crowd crush, broke out during opening night of rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Texas Friday, authorities said.
A mass of concertgoers at Houston’s NRG Park “began to compress” to the front of the stage at around 9:15 p.m., causing mayhem and some people to get hurt, Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña told reporters early Saturday.
“People started to fall out, become unconscious and it created additional panic,” Peña said during a press conference.
At around 9:38 p.m. Peña said a “mass casualty incident” was triggered as the number of victims grew and emergency responders became overwhelmed.
At least 23 people were rushed to a hospital, including a 10-year-old, authorities said. Of those hospitalized, 11 were in cardiac arrest. Some 300 people were treated at a field hospital on the scene.

Some 100,000 tickets were sold to the event.




 

R.I.P., Charlie Watts

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The great rock-and-roll legends of our Baby Boomer youth are now marching like a parade toward the grave, and I ignore most of these routine obituaries, but I’ll make an exception for Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, arguably the most dapper man in rock-and-roll.

Watts was not originally a rocker, but instead was a youthful jazz enthusiast who was recruited in 1962 as the drummer for Alex Korner’s Blues Incorporated, a London group that over the years gave rise to many future stars of Britain’s blues-rock scene. From a working-class background, Watts was actually more bourgeois than Mick Jagger who, as the son of a school teacher, was more of the middle-class rebel. It took about six months for Jagger to persuade Watts to join the Rolling Stones in 1963, because this move required Watts to give up the steady paycheck he’d been earning as Korner’s drummer. While the Stones courted controversy as the “bad boy” alternative to the nice, polite Beatles, Watts was not into the decadent lifestyle that the Stones’ reputation would seem to require. He got married in 1964 and stayed married to the same woman for more than 50 years, and never had a substance abuse problem, except a few years in the mid-1980s when he started drinking more heavily, a phase he later attributed to a “mid-life crisis.”

It was during that mid-80s phase that Watts did something that contradicted his famously low-key personality. Mick and Keith Richards had been partying all night on tour, and Mick called Watts’ hotel room at 5 a.m. to shout, “Where’s my drummer?” About a half-hour later, Watts showed up at Mick’s room, dressed in a Saville Row suit, punched the singer in the face and told him, “Never call me your drummer again.” Keith had to intervene to soothe Watts’ injured pride.

Here is video — from a documentary directed by Martin Scorcese, of all people — showing the Stones playing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in 2006, where the camera focuses on Charlie Watts the entire time:

 

Something to notice is that, while most rock drummers nowadays play “match grip” (both sticks held overhand), Watts played “traditional grip,” with the left stick held underhand. That can probably be attributed to Watts’ background as a jazz player, although Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, who played match grip, was also influenced by jazz. The vast difference between Watts and Bonham is worth contemplation. Like the Stones, Zeppelin were very blues-influenced, but were much more into a psychedelic style, with extended instrumental solos, and Bonham’s drumming style was idiosyncratic. You noticed Bonham’s beats — listen to the final two minutes of “Stairway to Heaven,” for example, and hear those thundering syncopated tom-tom riffs — in a way that was seldom the case with Charlie Watts. Reliable and yet unobtrusive, the steady beat of the Greatest Rock and Roll Band — quite a career, one that lasted nearly 60 years. Not bad for a truck driver’s son from Wembley. R.I.P.




 

My Chicago Earworm Problem

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For the past several weeks, for some reason, I’ve become obsessed with old Chicago songs. Not their later easy-listening pop, but their early stuff from 1969-1972, when they were still avant-garde. And I couldn’t figure out why this happened until I realized that “25 or 6 to 4” had been remastered as a U.S. Army recruiting advertisement:

Fifty years after its original release, Chicago’s signature song, “25 or 6 to 4,” has been reimagined as a hip-hop anthem about finding your inner warrior with fiery new vocals by indie rapper realnamejames. An abbreviated version of the remix first appeared in November 2019 as a part of the launch of the U.S. Army’s “What’s Your Warrior?” marketing campaign, which was developed to showcase the breadth and depth of opportunities for today’s youth to achieve their goals in America’s largest military branch. The track sparked conversation and excitement online, and a full-length version of The “25 or 6 to 4 (GoArmy Remix)” is now available for download . . .

 

Wow, I feel old. I haven’t felt this old since Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” was the soundtrack of a Cadillac ad. Back in the day, those early Chicago albums were real stoner music. Every hippie was certain that “25 or 6 to 4” was a reference to acid (LSD-25), but in fact the title and lyrics are about keyboardist Robert Lamm’s struggle to finish writing a song in the wee hours of the morning. He looked up at the clock and it was either 3:35 or 3:34 in the morning — 25 or 26 until 4 a.m.

As I say, Chicago was considered quite avant-garde in their early career. Their first three albums were all double albums, and their fourth album was a quadruple live album. They did a lot of long-form instrumental tracks, and one of my favorite Chicago songs, “Beginnings,” was nearly eight minutes long on their first album. It was not until Columbia Records president Clive Davis personally insisted on editing it down to under three minutes that “Beginnings” became a hit single. Similarly, the album version of “25 or 6 to 4” was nearly five minutes (4:50), which Davis chopped down to 2:52. Of course, the guys in the band resented the hell out of this commercial butchery of their art, but it made them rich. Selling singles (45 rpm) to teenagers required getting airplay on Top 40 radio, and back in the day, there was no way you were gonna get a five-minute song on the radio, let alone eight minutes. So these brutal chop jobs were a necessary part of the business. Chicago could indulge their artistic impulses all they wanted on their albums, but in order to sell those albums, they needed radio airplay, which meant hit singles and — chop! chop! chop! — there went half the song.

Nobody understands this stuff nowadays, in the digital age, where everything is Adobe Audition and kids just download music from Spotify, but once upon a time, a recording was an actual performance, recorded analog on tape, which had to be physically cut and spliced to make edits. And there were actual radio stations run by human beings (or soulless monsters, depending on your point view) called “program directors,” so that turning a record into a hit was a transactional sort of enterprise. Even after Congress outlawed “payola,” there was still a lot of shady stuff involved in promoting records to radio. Of course, in the long run, the music was either good or it wasn’t. Most of the mediocre crap that got played on the radio has been forgotten, but the real classics are timeless.

So I’ve been walking around with this song stuck in my head:

 

What the heck is that final chord? “25 or 6 to 4” is in the key of A-minor, but that final chord is definitely not A-minor. So I actually researched it and discovered that Lamm ended the song this way:

Dm 6/9 …. F9 … B6(add D) … G/A# … B/A

That’s just insane. In case you don’t know, B/A is an inverted B7 chord, with the 7th (A) played as the bass note. It is completely incongruous with an A-minor scale, which is why that final chord leaves the listener with such a weird feeling. Instinctively, you want the song to resolve to the tonic (I) chord, but instead you have this weird progression of complex chords culminating in something that’s just . . . wrong.

You could spend a lot of time pondering the significance of stuff like that, but that would require a supply of psychedelic drugs, consumed in a basement room with blacklight posters, which was how hippies used to listen to music (according to sources, the professional journalist said).

And so now a hiphop remix of “25 or 6 to 4” is being used for Army recruiting ads. Dude, I never expected to be so old . . .




 

A Musical Interlude

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So I’ve spent the past day researching, which involves viewing a lot of old YouTube videos. When I’m watching YouTube videos for my own amusement (rather than research), my preferences are fireworks, “storm chasing” and rare old Beatles sessions. Somehow, the algorithm for “suggested” videos popped up this interesting performance:

 

This fascinates me, because (a) how does someone so young discover an old Buddy Holly song? and (b) the arrangement is so simple. Besides her ukulele, the only instrumentation is a Takamine guitar and a Suzuki Omnichord, a 1980s-era electronic autoharp. New models sell for about $270, but the instrument is scarcely more sophisticated than many children’s toys you could buy for around $100 nowadays. The audio mix was done with Garageband software, and the video was recorded on her iPhone, edited with VideoLeap software. Even the microphone — a Shure 545S Series 2 Unidyne III — is rather cheap, less than $100 on Amazon.

My friend John Hoge worked as a recording engineer in Nashville back in the day, and can tell you what it would have cost to book studio time in the era of analog tape recording. Circa 1981, when I was chasing the rock-and-roll dream, the cheapest 8-track studio in Atlanta charged $25 an hour, at a time when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. In other words, you’d have to work an 8-hour day at minimum wage to earn enough for one hour in the studio, and a full week’s wages wouldn’t pay for an eight-hour session. By the late 1980s, you could buy a 4-track cassette recorder for about $450 — about two-days’ pay[*], at minimum wage — but the audio quality was low (e.g., tape hiss) and it wasn’t until the late 1990s, by which time I’d outgrown my rock-and-roll dream, that home digital recording equipment became something affordable to the masses.

[* — see note below about this egregiously wrong estimate.]

Young people, in addition to their lack of knowledge of classic Buddy Holly tunes, generally have no idea how cheap technology has revolutionized so many things that we now take for granted.

Back in 1957, Buddy Holly had to travel to Clovis, New Mexico, to record in Norman Petty‘s studio, where “Everyday” was recorded as the B-side of “Peggy Sue.” You couldn’t just program a synthesizer (or use an Omnichord) for your backup track, either. You had to have an actual band to accompany you, or else pay studio musicians at union scale. Because the equipment needed for recording — what Marx would call “the means of production” — was so expensive, getting access to studio time usually required the support of a manager or a record company. Young musicians would generally spend years playing bar gigs and such before they could hope to get a shot at a recording contract. By the time the Beatles signed with EMI in 1962, they had been together five years, played every dance hall in northern England and done four stints as a house band in bars in Hamburg, Germany.

What the advent of cheap high-quality recording technology has done is to topple the barriers between musical talent and the audience. You don’t need a manager or an agent, you don’t need a record company, a studio, a producer, a contract — no lawyers, no paperwork, nothing — to be able to record a song, produce a video and upload it to YouTube where, potentially, you could become an instant superstar.

Allison Young has about 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, and her most popular video has gotten nearly 400,000 views:

 

Wow — “Till There Was You,” a song which was a hit for Anita Bryant in 1959, the year I was born! Think of all the old songs that might be remade for YouTube by young performers. If I could persuade Allison Young to sign a contract, I’d help her find those songs (because I know them all), but such is the nature of technology that Ms. Young probably doesn’t think my knowledge as a would-be A&R man could be helpful to her. This is something else about technology. Because everybody can look up anything on Wikipedia, young people have little respect for the possession of actual knowledge. So I reckon my career as a latter-day Colonel Parker will never happen. Sigh.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! One of the commenters points out a math error:

“$450 / $5.15 (min wage in 1997) is 87 hours of labor ( 2 weeks of pay).”

Thanks. I actually can do basic math, I just didn’t bother to do it, and so my estimate was disastrously wrong.




 

An Experiment That Failed

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Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by . . .

Will the people who sold us all that Sixties “peace and love” business ever admit that the road we’re traveling does not lead to Utopia? Is there nothing that can cause them to look back and say to themselves, “Y’know, everything was actually better when Eisenhower was president”?

In 1988, when Ronald Reagan was still president and MTV still played music videos, rock guitarist Melissa Etheridge was recording a video for her song, “Bring Me Some Water,” when she met Julie Cypher, who was working on the production crew. At the time, Etheridge was not yet “out” as a lesbian, and Cypher was married to actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who had recently soared to stardom in the 1987 Richie Valens biopic La Bamba. Nevertheless, a romantic affair commenced. Cypher divorced her husband and became Etheridge’s girlfriend. The celebrity couple officially “came out” together in 1993. Cypher gave birth to a daughter, Bailey, in 1997, and in 1998, a son Beckett was born. Both children were conceived via artificial insemination, and there was widespread public speculation as to the sperm donor, with the actor Brad Pitt being one of those rumored to have been the couple’s semen supplier.

To universal surprise, in a Rolling Stone cover story in February 2000, it was revealed that the sperm donor was David Crosby, the singer whose work with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had defined the folk-rock sound of the 1960s and 70s. Why, of all people, would anyone choose this portly middle-aged drug addict as a sperm donor?

Did I mention that David Crosby was so damaged by his decades of substance abuse he had to undergo a liver transplant in 1994? But bad decision-making was more or less baked into the cake of the Etheridge-Cypher relationship. Mere months after being featured on the cover of the Rolling Stone as a sort of ideal of postmodern family life, the couple split. Cypher decided she wasn’t actually a lesbian and, four years after leaving Etheridge, she married a man. Etheridge, meanwhile, hooked up with Tammy Lynn Michaels who, in 2006, gave birth to twins, conceived with an anonymous sperm donor, but Etheridge and Michaels split in 2010, and Etheridge then moved on to marry Linda Wallem.

Well, what about the kids?

Melissa Etheridge has paid tribute to her son Beckett Cypher who has died following a battle with opioid addiction, aged 21.
Cypher, son to US grammy-winning star Etheridge and her former partner Julie Cypher, died on Wednesday.
Etheridge, best known for songs ‘Ain’t It Heavy’ and ‘Come To My Window,’ announced the news on her social media.
The 58 year-old wrote on Twitter: “My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addiction and finally succumbed to it today.
“He will be missed by those who loved him, his family and friends.
“My heart is broken. I am grateful for those who have reached out with condolences and I feel their love and sincere grief.
“We struggle with what else we could have done to save him, and in the end we know he is out of the pain now.”

What sort of “pain” was Beckett Cypher in? Spoiled rich kid pain:

Melissa Etheridge’s son Beckett spent his final two months ‘on a bender’ in the luxury $3,500-a-month Denver apartment where he was found dead last week, DailyMailTV can reveal.
An exclusive DailyMailTV video shot nine weeks ago shows Beckett, who was 21, inside the stylish one-bedroom apartment shortly after he moved in.
Beckett, who is seen at the home with an unidentified friend, appeared to be high as he filmed himself pulling poses in the mirror and showing off his new space.
Another video shows him taking a hit of an unidentified substance from a large bong while a third includes footage of the large collection of modified guns he amassed.
Friends said Beckett often posted videos to social media of himself drinking ‘lean’ — a highly intoxicating mixture of codeine cough syrup and Sprite, which is also known as ‘purple drank’.
In addition to that, he was known for his regular use of the opioids Xanax and Percocet and, according to a friend who knew him from his time in Snow Mass, Colorado, was notorious for knocking on his neighbors’ doors late at night to ask for baking soda which can be used to turn cocaine into smokable crack.
Fishing guide Joe Kayafas, 38, who had been friends with Beckett for three years, told DailyMailTV: ‘I’ve known him since he came [to Snow Mass]. I don’t know if he was in college much at all — he was an animal.
‘He takes after his dad [singer David Crosby who is notorious for his drug use]. I’ve never seen people do that much drugs.
‘He did everything. He once showed me a bag with a thousand Xanax and he was like, you want some?
‘I like to party but I’m not into things like that. He was always on something pretty much.’ . . .
But according to Kayafas, drugs became all-consuming for Beckett and he became notorious in Snow Mass for the prodigious quantities he took — on several occasions taking an eight-ball of cocaine, which is three grams of the drug, every day for five days in a row.
He said: ‘I would just be watching him do lines of coke – one after another, after another, after another.
‘Not like most people when they party – it’s a social thing. But he was like hammer down. That’s all he really did: snowboarding and drugs, play video games and just sit there and zone out.’
Kayafas added: ‘I’ve never known him to do dope [heroin] or shoot anything. He was about pills and smoking stuff, eating, drinking or whatever.
‘I’ve seen him with Percocets which is another opioid. He would make cocktails — do coke and Xanax together. Scary shit. Uppers and downers, speedballing… That’s not good for you.
‘He would do an eight-ball of cocaine for himself every night of the week for five days and he would just keep buying.
‘I know people who sell drugs and they would be like, dude, he hits me up all the time.’ . . .
Beckett . . . lived a nomadic existence in his last two years, pinging between Colorado, Montana and Etheridge’s home in California.
Kayafas said much of his time was spent in hotels drinking lean, often accompanied by ‘call girls and random dudes’ or with Etheridge.
Jobs would come and go and he went through three trucks in three years — one of which was wrecked in a crash in Los Angeles in 2018.
His final two months were spent in Denver where according to Kayafas, he made money by dabbling in bitcoin trading.

A complete waste of life. One hesitates to blame this on Beckett’s dysfunctional family background, when it’s so much easier to blame the genetic legacy of notorious druggie sperm donor David Crosby. At any rate, all that Sixties hippie peace-and-love business has failed again. The Woodstock generation did not teach their children well, so to speak.