Marilyn

We've reached the point where Marilyn Monroe doesn't exist anymore. Instead, the girl born Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1, 1926, has morphed into whatever the beholder wishes her to be. Needless to say, this arises to a great extent from the way she looked. Keep in mind that she died at the age of 36, which means that throughout her entire career she was pretty much always young (to varying degrees) and always sexy (ditto). She was referred to as a sex symbol during her lifetime, but worked hard to become a good actress. The pressure to be Marilyn Monroe was rough on her, as it would be on anyone. We don't have to look far nowadays to see people who can't handle the pressures of fame and publicity, but she was one of the first to suffer those pressures in a very public fashion (her stardom began as the studios were losing control of their publicity machines, not to mention the fact that her marriages to the world's greatest baseball player and the world's greatest playwright were noteworthy in and of themselves). Apparently she died as a result of those pressures.

One wonders what she would have been like if she had not died. Would she have matured into a great actress? Would she have faded away as her sexy image was passed along to younger actresses?

I'm betting that young people today don't know much about MM's work. They certainly know her name and her fame, but have they seen any of her pictures? Some Like it Hot is still one of the funniest movies ever made. It should be on everyone's must-see list. Bus Stop is corny fifties drama, but it's good corny fifties drama and MM is perfect in it. Watch The Misfits if you want to judge where her acting was headed. And if you want to see her shine at her best, check out How to Marry a Millionaire or one of her other signature roles, Lorelei Lee, in this one, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:



Whatever you do, do watch the movies. The Marilyn Monroe that the movies created was the one on the screen. See that one, and let it go at that.
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Tommy Emmanuel

Or, the best guitarist you've probably never heard of. He was born on May 31, 1955.




Emmanuel is Australian, but in one video I watched (and let me tell you, it was absolute torture to pick the videos for this post—life can be awfully nice sometimes) he claimed to now live in the US. I've only seen him live once, because he doesn't come around often, but in concert he is dynamite.



It wasn't until I was doing the research for this post that I discovered he has a brother, who also plays guitar! Talk about your sibling rivalries!



Not much video out there on Tommy playing with his hero. They have recorded together, though.



My favorite of his pieces tend to be the lightest. What a touch!



Happy birthday, Tommy. And please come back to the neighborhood. I need another concert.

The King of the Surf Guitar

Dick Dale was born on this date in 1937. Audrey Hepburn was also born on this date, in 1929, but she could never do this:



Dale is a great story. He really was a surfer (unlike, say, the Beach Boys, who seemed more to want to be surfers and wish they were with the girls of the beach, when in fact they were mostly spending their time fantasizing in their room) and he invented a music that would sound like what surfing was when he was doing it. Once he captured that sound, which as a left-hander he did upside now, rather than restringing the guitar, he also needed to project it, so he got some folks to invent an amp that could blast from somewhere in California roughly as far away as Cleveland. He claims to be the first person to set an amp at ten (or, actually, TEN!).

You know that line from Hendrix, "You'll never hear surf music again"? Dale got hit by rectal cancer in the 60s, and Jimi was sending a tribute to one of his own idols. Fortunately, Dale bounced back.

If you want, you can play Misirlou as part of Guitar Hero 2. And if you're wondering about the source of the guitar version of Saint-Saens on Disneyland's Space Mountain, now you know.

Happy birthday to a surfing and guitar-playing legend.
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The Godfather of Soul

AKA, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business. AKA James Joseph Brown, born on this date in 1933.

He performs like a house a fire. His band is nonstop, and he's even more nonstop. He is always in motion. How can anyone go on for so long? Finally, his DJ comes to help him off the stage. But no, he can't stop. He has to go on! It's one of the best bits in show biz, ever:




And here he is, just straight, just doing his job.



Brown toured with seriously big bands, and seemed to do one-nighters every night of the year. He was a notorious task master, from his band's playing to the shine on their shoes. He was a political activist committed to many causes, and his activism worked its way into his songs, most noticeably with 1968's "Say it Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud."

“The song is obsolete now... But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people... People called "Black and Proud" militant and angry – maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride... The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.” [From Brown's autobiography, quoted on Wikipedia]

Brown in his lifetime received just about every honor there was to get.

Ain't it funky now? (And yeah, that's Bootsy's older brother on guitar.)


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Link Wray

I saw Link Wray back in the 70s at a club called the Bottom Line in New York City. My ears are still ringing.

Wray was born 5/2/29, and was one of the inventors of rock guitar playing. In 1958 he recorded "Rumble," which is pretty much the first thing that comes up when his name is mentioned. He kept playing it for the rest of his career.



Link Wray was probably the coolest person in the room, no matter what room he was in. He's credited with inventing heavy metal and punk, but personally, my greatest regard is for his rockabilly work (Retro-rockabilly, actually).




As you can see, Wray is still the coolest person in the room, but that bass player is giving him a little competition. "My gal is red hot, you're gal ain't doodly squat," has to be one of the great lines of modern music. Rumor has it that Cole Porter had considered it for inclusion in "Miss Otis Regrets," but ultimately decided against it.

One last taste of Wray's guitar, sound only this time.



Link Wray died in 2005. Why isn't he in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame???!!!
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Willie Nelson

Born April 30, 1933, Nelson has been a musician pretty much all his life. And all kinds of a musician. A Grand Ole Opry musician, an original country outlaw, a pop balladeer, jazz—you name it. He's sung for the IRS and Farm Aid, wrote Patsy Cline's "Crazy," fought for marijuana legalization and the environment and been honored by just about everybody who has honors to give out. All we can add to that is a short video biography:









Happy birthday, Willie.
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Ma Rainey

The Mother of the Blues? She claimed to have invented the term. She also claimed to have invented Bessie Smith, although Smith may already have known exactly what the blues were and how to sing them when the women met probably some time right after WWI.

The early blues recordings sound a little less than appealing to modern ears. These folks were essentially performing into big eardrums like on the old phonographs, rather than microphones, so the music is there, but not the impact. Imagine this music live and in person, with bigger than life performers. Ma Rainey was big in her day, and her fame was real enough to warrant a US Postage stamp in 1994. Short of setting down to do some serious research, it's hard to get too much real information on her for our purposes. Did she record with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, for instance? You can track that down for yourself. The informative data on YouTube (Slowtubbi has a lot of music on his YouTube page worth checking out) makes various claims about her lifestyle that make her even larger than the larger than life she already was. And of course there's the August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which portrays the recording scene of the day, and brings yet another version of Rainey to life. It's all a musicologist's job, but if you want to know the blues, you've got to know what was going on early in the 20th Century, not just with the lone guitarists that seemed to spring up in the South, but the bands who were turning that music into what would soon be jazz (and later, rock).

Ma Rainey was born on April 26, 1886(ish). Here's just one number. "Booze and Blues." That about sums it up.

The First Lady of Song

5003 people liked this video when I grabbed it. 27 disliked it. If we can get the names of the dislikers and send them to Mars, we will improve the Earth enormously and find suitable astronauts for the long haul at the same time, without having to worry too much about having them return. Win-win, if you ask me.



Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917. To suggest that her voice was the greatest jazz instrument ever will cause most fans to not even bat an eye. In the clip above, she's shaking it up. How about going a little mellow?



At Grinwout's HQ, there are about a million Ella albums. But we have no compunctions about which to recommend: her Ella and Louis collaboration albums are required for all desert islands. Alone, go for the Cole Porter. If you need a big band, then it's her album with Duke Ellington. Then again there's the Joe Pass albums toward the end of her career. And of course—

Hell, we can't pick. There was never a bad one. We're going to need a bigger desert island.

Thank you, Ella, for all of it.
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Hollywood's first great on-screen interracial couple

Shirley Temple, born April 23, 1928, is still alive and, one hopes, still kicking. Maybe not as she once did, but we'd understand that. She was one of the top box-office draws of the 30s, and was often paired with dancing partner Bill Robinson. This is one of their best:



They really were one of the movies' first interracial pairings, in a time when any but the most subservient of black faces were absent from the mainstream. One could say that a mature and polished performer like Robinson being matched up to a little kid is somehow off, but this was Shirley Temple we're talking about, and she was the big time. And the real deal. Not to mention that almost any excuse to capture the amazing Robinson on film is a good one, but the thing is, Temple was pretty amazing herself. She really could perform like a trouper, as her scenes with Robinson demonstrate: she's in there with him all the way. There were good reasons for her popularity.

As with most child stars, the fact that she aged gently slowly moved her out of motion pictures, but she never lost her charm and personality. She hosted a television anthology show in the 50s, and most famously proved that there was life after show business by being appointed US Ambassador first to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia.

Happy Birthday, Shirley Temple, one of the last of the great movie legends.

George Takei

Is George Takei the most interesting veteran of Star Trek? Today's birthday boy (4/20/37) was interned with his family during WWII, he was student body president of his LA junior high school, he was one of the first Japanese actors to build a career in post-war Hollywood, and eventually served as a Lieutenant on the Starship Enterprise on The Original Series. As true connoisseurs know, he was promoted to Captain after TOS ended:



Of course, his greatest fame was from TOS, where he worked with the only other contender for the most interesting Star Trek veteran, a relationship he describes here in his predictably gentlemanly fashion:




As a measure of cool, he's done voice work on everything from Archer to Scooby-Doo to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Having served both masters, so to speak, he is the voice of reason in the ongoing war between Carrie Fisher and William Shatner on which Star X is best. And he's also a noted advocate of gay rights.

Did we mention he's also one of the funniest people in the universe:



Happy birthday, George Takei.

Tim Curry

April 19 being Mr. Curry's birthday, could we be amiss posting this?



Or this?



He's also had a rock career (without makeup):



The possessor of one of most mellifluous speaking voices around, he's done seemingly endless animated voices, originated the title role in Amadeus and the part of King Arthur in Spamalot on Broadway, and even done video games. The man does not seem to take a lot of days off.

Happy birthday, Tim Curry.

Daffy Duck

Daffy Duck made his first appearance on April 17. 1937. He predated Bugs Bunny, but comes across now as the alter-rabbit in many ways. Bugs, of course, was Warner Bros' big animated star, as emblematic to that studio as a certain mouse was to Disney. Bugs shone because he was the wise guy everyman that we rooted for because he always outwitted the world that was out to get him. Daffy, on the other hand, was wise guy who always seemed to outwit himself. When it comes to favorites, you can choose for yourself. Rabbit season? Or duck season?

There are those who claim that this is the best Daffy short. I won't argue with them:

Tiny Tim

One has to admit that Herbert Khaury, AKA Tiny Tim, is best referred to as an acquired taste. He seemed to come out of nowhere in the Sixties, and he seemed to be quite genuine. The song below was his biggest hit, but his most popular moment was when he was married, live, on the Tonight Show. It was the real thing; Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon stood off to the side, just like any wedding guests. (Sadly, the marriage did not last.)



TT was born on this date in 1932, and died (almost literally while playing the ukulele onstage) in 1996.

There's more TT on YouTube. Most of it is about the same. As we said, he was, at best, an acquired taste. But one has to point out that as offbeat as he was, he had a love of old music at a time when old music was almost going out of business. He had the courage of his convictions, in other words. He just happened to have unique convictions.

Bill Irwin

Bill Irwin was born on April 11, 1950. He's done drama and comedy and musicals, but at heart, he's a modern-day clown, a physical comedian of extraordinary ability. This tiny clip of him walking down stairs is emblematic:



This cute little segment has a history:



Watch that same scene from Irwin's Broadway show, Largely New York:



And, in an example of perfect casting, Irwin is Sesame Street's Mr. Noodle (when he's not playing a serial killer on CSI):



Clown, comic, serial killer... Happy Birthday, Bill Irwin.

Hedy Lamarr

Much has been made recently of actress Hedy Lamarr as an inventor, with the convenient and predictable backstory of "beauty and brains."

Feh.

Why is it that one's appearance, over which one has little control, could somehow preclude one's having intelligence? Do men really want dumb but good-looking women, or more to the point, do they believe that all good-looking women must of necessity be dumb?

Hedy Lamarr didn't make a lot of great movies, and is far from an icon today, as Rhagen Russell writes in her preceptive article, In Which Hedy Lamarr Refuses To Stand Still And Look Stupid. To some extent it may be that she looked so good she didn't look real, and the filmmakers couldn't figure out what to do with her. She might, also, not have been that great an actress. But one thing is absolutely certain—she was beautiful. Russell has her own ideas on the subject:

In a culture that compels women to view themselves as they imagine others view them, and to act always in anticipation of or response to that assessment, the camera is a perfect catalyst for self-objectification. The vast public eye becomes a special Panopticon for women already given to excessive body discipline and commodification of self. Selecting to consciously utilize one’s feminine sexual assets (and thereby present oneself as an object to others) in a bid for empowerment is a far trickier game than most anticipate. To put it simply, we more often than not fall for our own tricks — we become the objects we imitate, and buy into the gender roles we contrive to exploit. This was Lamarr’s story, on a grander scale than most.... She was ever-aware of her aesthetic allure, and deftly wielded it to get ahead in her career and manage her love life. The same maneuvering may well have engendered the inescapable emptiness of her film roles and real-life romances, and deeply distorted her personal standards of success.

An article of interest both to movie fans and students of sexual politics.

Roger Corman

So many birthdays today. Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, Gregory Peck. Obviously something about April 5 brings out one's inner thespian. But I'd prefer to talk about a man who spent his entire career bringing out other people's inner thespians. And their inner directors, and producers, and editors. If anyone could be deemed a one-man film school on the hoof, it's Roger Corman. He nurtured Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Dante—the list goes on. He acted, directed, produced. This interview from around 1999 gives a good sense of his contributions overall.

But nothing captures a filmmaker like the films he's made. Like this one, made in, as Corman says, "two days and a night." Needless to say, Corman also discovered a few actors:



Pain magazine?

Happy Birthday, Roger. Thanks for all that exploitation!

Honi Coles

As Arlene Croce said about Fred Astaire, he could tap, but he wasn't one of the all-time great tap dancers. That distinction goes to a handful of others; prominent among these is Charles "Honi" Coles, born on April 2, 1911.

We are blessed, first, with film of much of the art of the 20th Century, and second, easy access to all that film in the 21st. I don't have to say anything about the amazing elegant Mr. Coles, or the speedy music of his feet. You can see it for yourself. This clip is about 8 minutes long, and you're not going to be able to tear yourself away, so set aside those few minutes to savor: