Ten Things You May Not Know About Mama Cass

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1. She was born Ellen Naomi Cohen on September 19, 1941. Per bandmate Denny Doherty, she may have chosen the new first name Cass after actress Peggy Cass. She later assumed the surname Elliot in memory of a deceased friend. In 1965 she became Mama Cass after joining The Mamas & the Papas. In 1971 she became Baroness von Wiedenman, when she married Baron Donald von Wiedenman. The marriage lasted just six months.

2. Prior to marrying the baron, Cass married James Hendricks, a bandmate of her pre-Mamas and the Papas groups The Big Three and The Mugwumps, to help him avoid being drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. The marriage wasn’t consummated and later was annulled.

3. Cass dropped out of high school her senior year. She moved to New York City to pursue an acting career. She toured with a production of The Music Man. In 1962 she went for the part of Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, but lost out to Barbra Streisand.

4. She reportedly had an IQ of 165.

5. The Mamas and Papas’ John Phillips was reluctant to let Cass join the group, because of her size and because she couldn’t hit the high notes. While walking past a construction site, a metal pipe fell and conked Cass on the head, knocking her to the ground. She spent three days in the hospital with a concussion. After being released, she joined the group at one of their rehearsals and amazingly, was able to hit the high notes. Phillips then made her a member of the group.

6. Per writer Julia Phillips, Mama Cass owed the IRS $10,000, which she paid via a truckload of pennies. The government cited her for contempt.

7. She was attributed with the following quote: “I would say the world’s in terrible shape, but I’m afraid the world would say, ‘Look who’s talking.’”

8. In 1967 Cass posed nude for Cheetah magazine.

9. On July 29, 1974, following two sold-out concerts at The London Palladium, Cass retired to her hotel room. That night she died in her sleep of heart failure.

10. She died in room no. 12 at 9 Curzon Place in London. Four years later, The Who’s drummer Keith Moon died in the same room.

Tunes du Jour remembers Mama Cass Elliott on her birthday with this twenty-track playlist.


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It’s Ricky Bell’s Birthday And I Need To Dance!

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Parents often say the following expressions to their children as life lessons: “If you have nothing nice to say don’t say anything at all.” “You can get more with honey than you can with vinegar.” “Never trust a big butt and a smile.”

Your parents got the last one from the Bell Biv DeVoe song “Poison.” Hell, they may have gotten the first two from Bell Biv DeVoe songs – I don’t know the group’s catalogue that well.

I’ve heeded that advice, which is why I’m still single. As the great Pee Wee Herman famously said in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, “Everyone I know has a big but. C’mon, Simone, let’s talk about your big but.”

Friday is dance day at Tunes du Jour. You don’t need a partner to dance, unless you are doing the tango. As many parents have said, “It takes two to tango.” That expression predates Bell Biv DeVoe, who didn’t do tango music. Then again, maybe they did. I don’t know the group’s catalogue that well.

Today, Ricky Bell of Bell Biv DeVoe and New Edition turns 48. Our dance playlist kicks off with BBD’s “Poison.” Trust!


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Throwback Thursday – 1987

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This week’s Throwback Thursday playlist is comprised of hits from 1987, a pretty nondescript year for pop music. The new wave music that dented the US charts earlier in the decade faded in popularity, while rap and alternative had yet to cross over in a major way. What we had was some good mainstream rock and pop. Here are twenty of that year’s biggest:


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tapes

A Ben Folds Mix Tape

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When all words fail, she speaks / Her mix tape’s a masterpiece
– Ben Folds, “Kate”

tapes
The precursor to this blog was mix tapes. In high school I made mix tapes every day to get us through the 45 minute bus ride to school. For friends I made mix tapes of songs I thought they should know. After I graduated college and started a job, I made mix tapes to get through the work day. As I didn’t have my own office for several years, I aimed to make compilations that would have broad appeal, so my coworkers could enjoy them as well. It’s hard to please everyone. Try as I might, I could not get Karla to enjoy the tunes I included. She thought Whitesnake were the greatest group in creation, so how could I expect her to like music that was good?

In his book Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield writes that there is always a reason to make a mix tape. He provides the following categories:
The Party Tape
I Want You
We’re Doing It? Awesome!
You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to be Friends
You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cray and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It
The Road Trip
No Hard Feelings, Babe
I Hate This Fucking Job
The Radio Tape
The Walking Tape
And the drug tape, the commute tape, the dishes tape, the shower tape, the collection of good songs from bad albums you never want to play again, the greatest hots of your significant other’s record pile, the night before you break up.

I love mix tapes. I love to categorize music. Not by genre. I miss the old days of top 40 radio when Led Zeppelin and the Carpenters were played on the same station. I love to find connections between songs that nobody else would have thought to put together.

There’s an art to making a good mix tape. I have my rules – open with an uptempo song, don’t clump all the best known songs together, mix in lesser-known tracks with the more famous ones.

This blog is my mix tape outlet for the 2000s. Here I usually focus the playlists on single artists (meaning playlists of one artist, not unmarried artists, though maybe I’ll make a mix tape of the latter). The art of a single-artist mix tape differs from that of a various artists collection. For that matter, the methodology varies from artist to artist.

When I created a Buddy Holly playlist last week, it wasn’t difficult to decide what songs to include. The man had a short career, so it was pretty obvious which twenty songs would comprise the compilation. The Michael Jackson playlist I created just over a week before than was more challenging. The man had so many hits and other great tracks that were not hits. In that case, I figured whoever would be listening knows Thriller inside and out, so I focused on his other releases. I chose songs that were hits but since forgotten, songs that were not hits but have held up great over time, and mixed them with the best-known songs from his teenage and pre-teen years. I approach each artist differently.

Part of the challenge of creating a good mix is I don’t know exactly who my audience is for the blog. For example, being today is Ben Folds’ birthday, I made a Ben Folds mix. Who is going to listen to it? Is it the Ben Folds fan? Is it the person who knows Folds from his only crossover hit, “Brick?” Is it the person who has never heard of Folds, but gives the playlist I listen because they trust my recommendation?

I don’t know, so I created a playlist in which my favorite Folds album tracks hang out with many of the fun cover versions he has released digitally between albums. I usually don’t include so many covers in a playlist of a singer/songwriter. In Folds’ case, he approaches covers in different ways. Some are faithful to the original, as when he performs Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.” Some are radically different than the original versions, a la his covers of the Flaming Lips’ “She Don’t Use Jelly” or Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” Though covers, the ones in the latter category reveal his artistry as much as his originals do.

In honor of Ben Folds’ 49th birthday, here is a Ben Folds mix tape.


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It’s Moby’s Birthday And I Need To Dance!

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On September 11 I was living in New York City, two miles from where the Twin Towers stood. I remember voting that morning, as it was Primary Election Day. I remember walking to work. I remember my boss coming in to my office to tell me the towers are falling and I should go home. I remember how crowded yet quiet the sidewalks were. I remember spending the rest of the day sitting on my bed crying. I remember thinking about dinner. I don’t know how to cook. I usually ordered in or went out. I regained some composure around 8 PM. I opened my apartment door to find the hallway full of smoke. A neighbor down the hall saw me and yelled “The building’s on fire. The fire department is here.” I went back inside. The only food I kept in my apartment was a can of soup for emergency colds. That night for dinner I had a can of soup.

I remember a lot more details about that day and the days that followed. I still cry when I think about them.

On September 12 I had dinner with my friend Jesse. As the police would not allow anyone below 14th Street who didn’t live in that area, as Jesse did, he came to my place on 16th Street. We figured we’d see if any restaurants in Chelsea were open.

Not only were almost all restaurants along Eighth Avenue open, they were packed. Music was playing. People were laughing. That may sound strange to people not there, but amidst all the horrendousness, amidst the postings of missing people that started to cover all available wall space, amidst the stench that worked its way uptown and permeated our neighborhood, people were celebrating life and friendship.

I’ll never forget what my city was like on September 11. I’ll never forget that night of September 12 either. Life is fleeting. Take advantage of being alive. Celebrate.

Every Friday Tunes du Jour celebrates life with a dance playlist. We kick off this week’s party with Moby, who turns 50 years old today.


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me before prom

Throwback Thursday – 1981

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me before promThe blogger in 1981, before heading to the senior prom

For this week’s Throwback Thursday playlist, we revisit 1981. The 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year went to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. The Best New Artist was Shena Easton. Record of the Year and Song of the Year went to “Bette Davis Eyes,” performed by Kim Carnes. Both Carnes and Easton were nominated for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, along with Olivia Newton-John for “Physical” and Juice Newton for “Angel of the Morning,” but those ladies lost to Lena Horne for “WTF?”. Rick Springfield won Best Rock Performance, Male (naturally) for “Jessie’s Girl.” “Just the Two of Us,” the Grover Washington, Jr./Bill Withers hit, took home the trophy for Best Rhythm & Blues Song.

Here are some of 1981’s biggest hits:

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Ringo + Buddy

Buddy Holly And “That’ll Be The Day”

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Ringo + Buddy
In 1956 Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison and Sonny Curtis went to the movies to check out the John Wayne feature The Searchers. In the film Wayne, when given predictions by other characters, would reply with the catchphrase “That’ll be the day.”

Holly suggested to Allison they write a song together. Allison mimicked the Duke when he responded with “That’ll be the day.”

The two did write a song. They called it “That’ll Be the Day.” At age 20, Holly had his first hit record when that song went to #1 in 1957.

The following year a teenage British combo who called themselves The Quarreymen recorded “That’ll Be the Day” as a demo disc. The group, whose members included John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, later changed the name of their band. Inspired by the name of Holly’s group, The Crickets, to whom the single “That’ll Be the Day” was credited, The Quarreymen chose another insect, a beetle, altering the spelling to the more musical Beatles.

Buddy Holly racked up seven top forty hits before his death in a plane crash at age 22. Despite a very brief recording career, his influence was massive.

Today is the 79th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s birth. Here are nineteen gems from his catalogue, plus one song named after him.


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A Hint Of Mint – Volume 19: Religious Freedom

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Today a woman is sitting in a jail cell in Kentucky because her religious freedoms were trampled upon. She says her religion calls for her to get paid to do a job without actually having to do the job. Her employer, the state, disagrees. She says her religion forces her to break the law and that breaking the law shouldn’t be illegal. Again, the state disagrees. She is sitting in a jail cell, maintaining that laws should not be enforced and people should get paid by their employer regardless as to whether or not they do their job, for her belief system tells her this is so. This is called religious freedom.

Religion inspired this week’s playlist of songs performed by artists who can legally wed in the United States of America, of which Kentucky is one. Each song and each state has a hint of mint.

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Winston & queen

Scaramouch! Scaramouch! It’s Freddie Mercury’s Birthday!

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In October of 1975, the band Queen played for their manager, John Reid, a song they recently finished recording that they wanted to release as their next single. Reid told them the track would not get any airplay. He played it for another artist he managed, Elton John, who reportedly said “Are you mad? You’ll never get that on the radio!”

Queen stayed firm, not relenting when their record company begged them to at least edit the song down from its nearly six-minute duration.

To promote the song, the band was invited to play on England’s hugely popular Top of the Pops television program. They were unable to appear due to tour commitments, so they did something that wasn’t very common in 1975 – they filmed a videoclip. Top of the Pops aired the clip. As the song rose up the charts, the video was shown repeatedly. Soon other artists in the UK made videos for their records, which is why when MTV launched in the United States in 1981, many of the clips they aired were of UK acts.

Winston & queen
The single, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” went to #1 in England in December of that year, where it stayed for nine weeks. It got knocked from the top spot by a song whose title consisted of a phrase used in “Bohemian Rhapsody” – ABBA’s “Mamma Mia.” “Bohemian Rhapsody” hit #1 again there in December of 1991, a few weeks after the death of the band’s lead singer and the song’s composer, Freddie Mercury.

In the United States, the song didn’t go to #1, but it did hit the top ten in 1976 and 1992.

Today is the birthday of the late, great Freddie Mercury. Here are twenty of Queen’s finest.


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