Tag Archives: Paul McCartney

Here Comes the Sun, There Goes the Sun

Sun-Maid Logo 1915 / Public Domain

In 1912 a group of raisin growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley got together and decided to form a collective but had no name or business plan. They soon became the California Associated Raisin Company, but a gentleman named E.A. Berg coined one of the most iconic brand names in American history: Sun-Maid. In 1915, Sun-Maid’s director saw a young woman named Lorraine Collett in a bright red bonnet drying her hair, and she agreed to pose for a painting that would become the company’s logo. That logo was featured on a little red box that my mom would put into my Roy Rogers tin lunchbox as my snack every day I went to school. That’s my first memory about the sun: It helped grow something sweet and satisfying.

Beyond raisins, I don’t recall ever spending much time thinking about the sun. You learn about it in science class and study the mythology, and it’s in the news whenever there’s an eclipse. It can burn you and make you sweat, it’s so gigantic that if it were hollow you could fit 960,000 planets the size of Earth inside, and it rises in the east, sets in the west. Stories, myths, legends, facts and fiction: A gazillion books, films, paintings, and songs have either made the sun their subject, or at minimum placed the three-letter word into the title. We love it, we fear it, and many worship it. We’ve been taught to travel far to take vacations in sunny places, and when we have outdoor plans we pray for a sunny day. And for those who can’t get enough of it, there’s a small town in Norway where the sun doesn’t set from April to August.

I have a strong recollection of getting sunburned when I was about five or six, when my family had rented a house for a week down the Jersey shore in a town called Ocean Gate. Back then most folks weren’t so conscious of the danger that the sun could cause, apart from warnings from the endless Coppertone suntan lotion billboards on the side of the highways that featured a dog pulling down a little girl’s shorts. At the end of my first day in the sand and surf, we came back at the house, washed off with a hose and saw that my skin was the color of a tomato. My mom told me I was going to be in a lot of pain and she sent dad to the local drugstore for a bottle of something called Solarcaine, which they slathered on me from top to bottom. It helped a little, but it hurt so bad that they rented a beach umbrella for me to sit under for a few days and I had to keep a shirt on and wear my Phillies baseball hat.

Speaking to both my ignorance and stubbornness, one might have thought I learned a life lesson. I didn’t. For the next 60 years I rarely would put on sun protection and pretty much hated wearing hats. I got sunburned many, many times until I figured out my own little method of soaking up just a little bit of sun during the first few days of summer or while on a vacation, “laying down a base,” as I called it, and eventually developing that healthy-looking dark tan. Worked like a charm most of the time and, besides, it was the sun: the source of life on Earth, providing humanity with food, shelter, warmth, and don’t forget those damn sweet raisins.

Last month I caught a bad cold that developed into bronchitis and went to see my doc. After she checked me out and wrote a prescription, I casually pointed to this spot on my arm that I had recently noticed and asked her what it was. “It’s a trip to the dermatologist,” she replied, and the next day I stood naked in front of a stranger who found a couple of suspicious looking spots. Let’s skip the gory details, but five days later I was diagnosed with not just one type of malignant skin cancer, but two. If I had any doubt to the seriousness of it, when I got the call it began with “I don’t want to alarm you, but tomorrow morning you’ll be seeing an oncologist.”

Cutting – I probably shouldn’t use that word – to the chase, in the past three weeks I’ve had two surgeries leaving me with a new fear of the sun, two long scars, and we’re still not finished. If you want the good news, it was caught before it spread and it looks like I’ll be sticking around for a while longer. The bad news is that I have to buy a hat and start wearing it. And put on sunscreen. And wear long-sleeved shirts with fabric that offers ultraviolet protection. And keep out of the sun from 10 to 4. Great.

I do not share this for empathy, but I’m up against a deadline and at the moment this is about the only thing on my mind. Songs about the sun seem to take a new meaning today, so there you have it. And listen, I ain’t one to be preachy, but it wouldn’t hurt you to get an annual skin check-up. Let me close this out not with a song about the sun, but one by Eva Cassidy who passed away at the age of 33 after her skin cancer spread. She had discovered the same sort of thing I have when she was in her late 20s, took care of it, and then blew off the follow-ups. In her death she has gained in popularity, especially for her version of “Over The Rainbow,” but this is the song that keeps playing over and over in my head.

After my picture fades and darkness has
Turned to gray
Watching through windows
You’re wondering if I’m okay
Secrets stolen from deep inside
The drum beats out of time

If you’re lost you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting
Time after time

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Monterey Pop Festival: The Fifty Year Anniversary

Paul Kantner/Jefferson Airplane by Elaine Mayes

It happened in June of 1967, before the Woodstock music festival and Altamont concert. The Beatles were still a band that had four singles in the top ten. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was released and it landed on the charts behind the Monkees,  Doors, Stones, Aretha Franklin and Velvet Underground with Nico. Johnny Cash had yet to record at Folsom Prison and Gram Parsons was neither a Byrd nor a Burrito Brother. Townes Van Zandt was still playing at a club in Houston, Steve Earle was only 12, Jay Farrar turned seven months old, and Jeff Tweedy was yet to be born. There was no radio format called Americana, and it would be 28 years until Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden would publish the first issue of No Depression.

On the first day of the Monterey International Pop Music Festival I had just finished up tenth grade, and was living 3,000 miles away in Philadelphia. Throughout the spring and summer I was hanging out at the Guitar Workshop, downtown near Rittenhouse Square, where I’d dust off the Martins and run errands. It was around the corner from The 2nd Fret, a coffeehouse where you’d see old blues men, young folkies and local bands. On July 23, my friend Carol Drucker asked if I wanted to go with her to see the Mamas and the Papas at Convention Hall. On the bill were the Blues Magoos, Moby Grape, and a guy named Scott McKenzie. That night was the first time we heard news about this festival they had in California.

The three days and nights of the Monterey Pop Festival were put together in just seven weeks as a nonprofit event. It has been written that the idea first came out of a discussion at Cass Elliot’s house with Paul McCartney, John and Michelle Phillips, and producer Lou Adler. Alan Pariser and promoter Ben Shapiro approached John and Lou about staging it in Monterey and a number of people jumped onboard, including Peter Pilaflan, Chip Monck, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Tom Wilkes, and David Wheeler.

It’s that Canned Heat performance from Saturday afternoon that was on my mind this week and prompted me to troll YouTube. I was researching ’60s “white boy” blues bands and remembered seeing it years ago. What I had forgotten about was how much of the festival was caught on film by D.A. Pennbacker. Although it was released the following year as a 79-minute film, in 2002 a three-disc high definition DVD set with a super clean 5.1 mix was brought out and is still available from The Criterion Collection.

The performances that are most known from the original release included The Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and The Holding Company with Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, and Jefferson Airplane. The full collection also has the “outtakes,” with the Blues Project, the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, the Electric Flag, Al Kooper, Laura Nyro, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Simon & Garfunkel, and more.

Here’s Pennbacker on how the film was shot:

The music performances would be recorded on eight track recorders, which had only recently been invented and were quite rare. The real complication was getting the film we shot to sync with the sound. The cameras we were going to use weighed heavily on my mind as we had made them ourselves. There were no commercial cameras we could handhold that would run the film in real time and sync to the sound. And the syncing was not always perfect.

We knew that there was going to be much more music than we could fit into a ninety minute film, so Bobby Neuwirth tended a red light at the edge of the stage which would be on for the songs we had chosen so all the cameras would know what to shoot. But when Jimi Hendrix or Otis Redding or The Who got going, the red light never went off.

That’s Booker T. and The M.G.’s with the Mar-Keys’ horn section backing Otis Redding, who six months later would die in a plane crash. He was the closing act on Saturday night and up until then he had performed mainly for black audiences. According to Booker T. Jones, “I think we did one of our best shows, Otis and the M.G.’s. That we were included in that was also something of a phenomenon. That we were there? With those people? They were accepting us and that was one of the things that really moved Otis. He was happy to be included and it brought him a new audience. It was greatly expanded in Monterey.”

The festival was indeed a nonprofit event, with every artist playing for free, with the exception of Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000. Country Joe and The Fish earned $5,000 from the film but all other funds went to The Foundation, which describes itself as “a nonprofit charitable and educational foundation empowering music-related personal development, creativity, and mental and physical health. In the spirit of the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on behalf of the artists who took part, the Foundation awards grants to qualified organizations and individuals with identifiable needs in those areas.”

Brian Wilson, who was on the board of directors for the festival, and the Beach Boys were scheduled to headline one night but cancelled. The Kinks, Donovan, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards couldn’t secure visas into the country. Brian Jones attended and introduced Hendrix. Invited but declining to appear were the Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Dionne Warwick, and several Motown artists. Moby Grape’s film and audio remain unreleased as their manager Matthew Katz demanded $1,000,000 for the rights. (Of course, this being 2017, the audio has been found and posted on You Tube…hail hail rock n’ roll.)

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression dot com.