I post a weekly diary of the historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I featured this past week in "Cheers & Jeers". For example .....
If you watched the Open golf championship from England ..... well, one of the leading contenders gave the Boston Globe/ESPN sports reporter Bob Ryan a suggestion ..
FATHER-SON? - American film star Tommy Lee Jones ...
........... and the Danish golfer Thomas Bjorn.
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
ART NOTES - works from the Group of Seven - no, not another congressional panel but, instead, a group of noted Canadian landscape painters - are at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan through September 11th.
FILM NOTES - the Guardian newspaper's Italy correspondent John Hooper suggests his "10 of the best films set in Rome" list.
ARCHEOLOGY NOTES - recent excavations just 22 miles west of the capital city of the South American nation of Uruguay - to investigate the bones of animals dating back 29,000 years - may cast doubt on the theory that the populating of the Americas came via the Bering Strait some 12,000 years ago.
MONDAY's CHILD is Chester the Cat - a Dublin, Ireland kitteh reunited with his family after he got into the engine of a car and (when the car slowed down) he managed to get out safely.
YESTERDAY there was a free outdoor concert in New York City entitled She's Got the Power - a veritable "Girl Group Extravaganza" featuring Ronnie Spector, Lesley Gore plus The Crystals, Chantels and other pioneering girl-groups of the 1960's-70's.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - best-selling author J.K. Rowling and Garth Algar from the "Wayne's World" TV/film series (as portrayed by Dana Carvey).
NAUTICAL NOTES - a ship used in the Baltic Sea (between the 12th and the 14th centuries) has been discovered in the waters off eastern Sweden- and thus may be the "World's Oldest Wreck".
RECENTLY in Cheers & Jeers yours truly posted a quick mini-bio of the late European parliamentarian Otto von Habsburg (who died earlier this month at the age of 98) to set-up a cute one-liner he once uttered. This garnered a favorable response from annetteboardman who suggested a more complete biography of someone destined for the Austro-Hungarian throne (which was abolished when he was only six years old) but who managed to play a key role in European integration after WW-II. Good idea, and that was the subject of my Top Comments diary this past Thursday.
ART NOTES - The inaugural exhibition in the museum’s new space devoted to exhibiting jewelry is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts through November 1st.
GET WELL to Canada's opposition leader Jack Layton - who is stepping down temporarily to focus on his battle against cancer.
MUSIC NOTES - the Israeli Chamber Orchestra (led by conductor Roberto Paternostro) will break with tradition to play a work by the composer Richard Wagner - who was glorified by the Nazis - at this week's annual Bayreuth Wagner festival in Germany, a long-time goal of pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim.
TUESDAY's CHILD is a 12-week-old Colorado kitteh that police now believe was abducted before being tossed from a car window and abandoned - but who has now been reunited with its family.
DEBAUCHERY CENTRAL - in today's episode of "Lost in Translation" - border guards in Croatia questioned four female Slovakian tourists, intending to ask if they had drugs ........ but were heard as demanding oral sex.
YESTERDAY there was a Northern New England seacoast meet-up of Cheers & Jeers .... with a nice lunch in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (followed-up by some ice cream) with about 12-14 attendees. Bill & Michael are doing well, and we saw some of the Usual Suspects as well as some newer faces. Debbie in ME said that she looking to acquire a new playmate for Loki the Cat tomorrow (and has a #1 draft pick at her local shelter in mind).
Bill's famous 'kiddie pool' (non-inflated) was brought, in case anyone hadn't had a chance to autograph it before ... although it would have taken an 18-wheeler to bring his infamous 'Snark Tank' along. Add to that fine weather all day (albeit just a tad hot if you were in the direct sun, as there were few clouds in the sky).
As the 'Wayne's World' guys would say .... "Goooood call!"
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? - Austrian Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger - who posited his famous Schrödinger's Cat theory of quantum physics ....
............. and film star James Woods.
SPORTING NOTES - for the first time in the 65-year history of the Little League Baseball World Series: a team from Africa will participate, as a squad from Kampala, Uganda won the Middle East/Africa regional tournament with a 6-4 victory over a team from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
ART NOTES - an exhibition of (primarily) 18th and 19th-century British watercolors as well as drawings are at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California through October 23rd.
ARCHEOLOGY NOTES - researchers are to begin searching for the remains of the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes in a downtown Madrid convent.
DEBAUCHERY CENTRAL - the Attorney General’s Office of the western Mexican state of Jalisco has fired four women from its sex-crimes unit who organized a co-worker's bachelorette party ...... including the hiring of male strippers.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Cous Cous the Cat - a Mobile, Alabama kitteh who was the subject of an experiment by an advertising agency in that city. The agency developed a consistent, well-crafted campaign of three Facebook ads, and in the other corner ... purred a ridiculously irreverent Facebook cat ad.
Their conclusion? "In the five weeks that we’ve been collecting data, Cous Cous has destroyed the competition by a factor of 78%".
MUSIC NOTES - making official what listeners had surmised all the while: the 93 year-old pianist Marian McPartland will remain as artistic director of her long-running Piano Jazz radio program on NPR but will neither generate (nor host) new programs. She will concentrate instead on live performances while her mobility — though not her piano skills — has been compromised by osteoporosis.
ART NOTES - works by the noted Georgia artist and educator Lamar Dodd are at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens through August 28th.
POLITICAL NOTES - the Green Party candidate for the 2012 presidential election in France has called for its traditional July 14 military parades to be scrapped and replaced with something all citizens can enjoy and be involved with.
SPORTING NOTES - more than 600 athletes fled East Germany during its existence; branded as "traitor athletes" and often pursued by the Stasi (its secret police). A new exhibit opening in Berlin tells their stories.
THURSDAY's CHILD is Smokey the Cat - who rules-the-roost at the Hyde Brothers Booksellers in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
BOOK NOTES - when you're age 75 and plan to leave your home to move to an apartment: what do you do with your 2,500 book library? Well, if you're the best-selling Australian author Thomas Keneally - of 'Schindler's List' fame - you offer it to a school: and so the Tom Keneally Centre will open next month.
THEATRE NOTES - at a trial in the Romanian capital of Bucharest: the heirs to the late, disgraced leader Nicolae Ceausescu lost their bid to prevent the staging of a theatre play entitled "The Last Hours of Ceausescu".
OLDER-YOUNGER SISTERS? - US film star Jane Alexander and Spanish film star Carmen Maura ("Volver" from director Pedro Almodovar).
POLITICAL NOTES - President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea is incensed over corruption, saying "The entire nation is rotten" - with examples of this attributed to civil servants, business magnates ... and now, even match-fixing in its professional soccer leagues (where 46 players have been arrested).
FRIDAY's CHILD is Gobi the Cat - who competed in the Cat showmanship 4H event at the recent Great Northern Fair in Havre, Montana.
......and finally, for a song of the week ...............… he may be the best soul singer you never heard of: yet no less than Elvis Costello has described Howard Tate as "the missing link between Jackie Wilson and Al Green". After years away from the music business, he’s made a comeback this past decade – yet it was the recent death of his longtime producer Jerry Ragovoy that brought Tate's name back into the spotlight, for the work that the two men did together. It’s a spotlight that ought to remain focused, as Howard Tate’s life story – as well as his music – is worth hearing.
The Macon, Georgia native came of age in Philadelphia, and began singing in a doo-wop group along with Garnet Mimms the future soul singer. In his early twenties, he became a featured singer for the noted R&B organist Bill Doggett - who had a major instrumental hit with "Honky Tonk" a few years earlier (in 1956). In the mid-1960’s, Garnet Mimms told the Philadelphia-born producer Jerry Ragovoy about Tate – and the two combined over the next four years to record ten singles and an album at Verve Records.
Howard Tate had a soulful voice that recalled Sam Cooke yet which had a blues tradition to go along with it. Jerry Ragovoy was an excellent songwriter for Tate (and also wrote or co-wrote the classic songs Time Is on My Side as well as Piece of My Heart for others) but as a producer: he let his singer’s own style shine through. And the use of top-caliber session men (such as Eric Gale and Chuck Rainey) completed the circle of excellence.
Howard Tate had hits from 1966-1969 that – frequently – were larger hits for others, such as "Ain’t Nobody Home" (for B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt) and "Look at Granny Run Run" (for Ry Cooder and Grand Funk). Yet those songs (along with "Baby I Love You") made the Top Twenty in both the R&B and pop charts. His 1967 album Get It While You Can is considered a major historical work, and its title track was another successful Ragovoy tune that became a minor hit for Tate – but later became a major hit for Janis Joplin, who modeled her version after Tate’s.
Tate then left Verve for Lloyd Price’s Turntable Records, where an album entitled Howard Tate’s Reaction and produced by Johnny Nash did not sell well (and was thought not up to his standards). He left for Atlantic Records where he re-joined Jerry Ragovoy and released a self-titled album that also featured innovative covers of Girl from the North Country by Bob Dylan and "Jemima Surrender" by The Band which gained yet more glowing reviews ... yet little airplay or sales.
By the mid-1970’s, Tate had grown weary of endless tours, mistreatment from record company contracts and promoters and left the music business - swearing that he 'wouldn’t give a glass of water to anyone in the industry, even if they were dying from thirst'. He sold securities in the southern NJ/Philadelphia region but saw his 13 year-old daughter die in a house fire, his 19-year marriage end in divorce and eventually become a substance abuser. For awhile, he became a homeless person in Camden, N.J. and spent time in a homeless shelter.
He eventually spent time counseling drug users and – like his father – became a minister in 1994, founding a church with outreach missions, drug counseling and a homeless shelter. In 2001, a Jersey City disk jockey located and encouraged him, and Howard Tate performed in New Orleans – his first concert in over twenty-five years.
In 2003, this led to a meet-up with Jerry Ragovoy, who took a chance by inviting Tate to a recording session in his native Georgia (see center photo below). The resulting album Rediscovered featured a new recording of "Get It While You Can" as well as covers of songs by Elvis Costello and Prince. The result was a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues album, as well as providing dedicated funding for his ministry’s homeless shelter in Mt. Holly, New Jersey.
Since then, Howard Tate has continued to perform: and a 2006 album A Portrait of Howard included some of his own writings as well as covers that ranged from Randy Newman to Lou Reed to the avant-garde jazz pianist Carla Bley. That same year, a live album recorded in Denmark was released.
His most recent studio album is 2008’s Blue Day – and this Nashville recording is the one he’s wanted to make for three decades as it goes back to his roots. Eerily .... it has a song entitled Miss Beehive - an empathetic song about the troubles of ..... Amy Winehouse. And last year saw the (limited) release of a vinyl-only live album.
Howard Tate will turn age 72 next month and is one of the comparatively few remaining active performers from the golden age of soul music. The producer Al Kooper summed up Tate's partnership with his late producer when they reunited earlier this decade: "One of the sweetest voices in soul music, combined with one of the most savvy soul producers—Howard Tate & Jerry Ragavoy—and God has seen fit to reincarnate them! Is this a beautiful country or what?!?"
Of all of his work: it is the song that Jerry Ragovoy wrote along with Mort Shuman entitled Stop that is my favorite of his. It was covered early-on by Hugh Masakela, then by the Joe Walsh-led James Gang - and then appeared on an enhanced re-release of the 1970 Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsies album (that did not appear on the original release).
And below you can listen to Howard Tate sing it.
Stop - baby, can't you see that I can't take it no more
Stop - if you keep it up I'm gonna go through the floor
Stop - hold it up a minute 'cause I've gotta catch my breath
Stop - everytime you squeeze you scare my heart half to death
Thought I was the captain of my ship
But your love has made me lose my grip
Everything is hazy
One more kiss and you'll drive me crazy