max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#897: merle haggard - swinging doors (1967, hillbillys in a haunted house)

the reason you know this is from a movie and not good old reality, besides merle’s charmingly poor ability to mouth the words to his own beautiful song, is that he’s introduced not only as “one of my favorite singers” but also “one of my favorite people” by the gentlemen in an ascot. merle haggard, by all accounts, was nobody’s favorite person in his younger days, and nobody wearing an ascot. he escaped from californian juvenile prison, started playing music in bars, was found, sent back, released, got physical during a burglery, was sent back, was released, and discovered by lefty frizzell, all before merle haggard was sent at age 19 to san quentin for three years. “i wasn’t really that bad a guy,” he’s said. “they just couldn’t hold me anywhere else.”

a few weeks away from his 75th birthday, merle haggard, according to his official website, is said to be “recovering from 3 stomach ulcers, the removal of 8 polyps from his colon and diverticulitis in his esophagus. he will be back up and running in 30 days.”

#892: john coltrane, mccoy tuner, jimmy garrison & elvin jones - alabama (1963)

this is the song that john coltrane played in rhythm to martin luther king’s funeral speech for three of the girls who were killed by the bomb in the 16th street baptist church in burmingham in 1963. “history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. the innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force (yeah) that will bring new light to this dark city. (yeah) the holy scripture says ‘a little child shall lead them.’ (oh yeah) the death of these little children may lead our whole southland (yeah) from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood,” he said. “good night, those who symbolize a new day (yeah, yes) and may the flight of angels (that’s right) take thee to thy eternal rest.”

#889: elizabeth cotten - washington blues & a jig (1969)

ms. cotten was jimi hendrix in a turtleneck, but a finer guitarist. and she would say, “i have a little jig i like to play. i don’t know how it came about. i play, then i ask people to name it. some said, ‘name it the birdcall.’ some said, ‘name it the waterfall,’ and somebody told me yesterday—a little something, i don’t know,” instead of lighting her instrument on fire.

#882: the beach boys - wake the world (1968)

ah, winter, the coldest of the seasons! these days of sad sleepiness and snowy starkness! sanguine silence and other soft sibilants! and let’s be frank, because we’re all friends here—it’s mostly horrible. unless you’re in the late-60s beach boys and things are falling apart and you’re in a hotel in germany and you make a music video about your room service and walking around in the snow in a hat and things like that. that’s nice.

#877: duke ellington - tchaikovsky’s nutcracker suite & interview (1960)

wouldn’t you know it, readers? we’re 20 days away from christmas, which means it’s time to start playing the inarguably most essential holiday albums in the entire history of snow, candy canes, multicolored menorah candles and hearty good cheer—ella fitzgerald wishes you a swingin’ christmas, the new possibility: john fahey’s guitar soli christmas album, phil spector’s a christmas gift for you from philles records, and, of course, duke ellington’s the nutcracker suite, which you should get for toot toot tootie toot (dance of the reed-pipes) and replay daily for the next three weeks for sugar rum cherry (dance of the sugar-plum fairy). watch ellington and his band record that last song, one that’s as fat and glowing as kriss kringle on a coke can, at the finale of the totally astonishing video above. and to all a good night.

#873: the rolling stones - it’s all over now (1964, live)

you could tell by the shape of his guitars that poor brian jones wasn’t going to make it. and everyone should’ve known by the way he held the mic stand before doing rubber-legged jumps with a meaninglessly balletic clap at the top that mick jagger would.

#869: elis regina - upa neguinho (1968)

it is almost beyond comprehension that the live introduction here didn’t provoke a brazilian invasion of france, which, while we all know war is unsafe for children and other living things and whatnot, would possibly have been justified in the instance of such egregiously giggly hostesses taking up so much of ms. regina’s ferocious time with empty nonsense. how her lime green dress was not splattered with others’ red by the final note is one of tropicalia’s enduring mysteries.

#865: marvin gaye and tina turner - money / i’ll be doggone (1964, shindig!)

i count 86 exclamation points that shindig! put up on the t.v. screen for this forehead-against-the-wall duet, which is too few by a mathematically sound factor of 101,352,406,774. by itself the horizontal tilt of tina turner’s left hand just before the minute-and-a-half mark is exclamatory, and it’s not even a sentence that needs punctuation.

#862: roy orbison - blue bayou (recorded 1963, live 1973)

any nincompoop could have dressed up this year as steve jobs or hipster cop or occupy wall street or an updside-down herman cain 9-9-9 plan, but i wanted to try out pompadoured roy orbison on the mid-60s blue bayou album cover, before i realized that the real gift to halloween would be going as roy playing blue bayou live a decade later after he was made a widower but before undergoing a triple bypass.

and then it hit me that, of course, dressing as the three bowtied backup guitarists in roy orbison’s mid-70s band would be the greatest gift of all.

so i here am, all blue, wearing three dinner jackets, mouth slightly agape in that rhythm guitarist way, just to the side of the spotlight, picks in hand, singing backup about roy’s bayous, just for you.

#859: beach boys - do it again (1968)

i know that people often squabble over which great music video out of all of history’s great music videos features the longest white dinner jackets paired with the least effortful lip-syncing combined with the deadest eyes, but that’s an even more pointless fight than the famous ahhs argument.

#858: beach boys - friends (1968)

the best oohs in pop music is a toss-up, but anyone who bickers over which song has the finest, cleanest, happiest ahhs is either argumentative or imbecilic. let’s not fight—let’s be friends.

#856: laurindo almeida & the modern jazz quartet - one note samba (1964)

the wonderfully sneering, dead-eyed, condescending, jowly, ahistorical and nearly-charming idiocy of the introduction (“i don’t think any instrument has received quite such maltreatment in recent years or perhaps ever as the guitar, the once noble instrument which has now been appropriated by almost any teenager who can learn three chords”), is outmatched only by the same announcer’s cruel and curious postscript denouncement of guitar picks. but nothing he says matters, because together the modern jazz quartet and the guitarist laurindo almeida sound like the please hold music at the pearly gates. it is very nice.

#855 - the modern jazz quartet - winter tale (1964)

i just had an epiphany, the vibraphone is the thinking man’s electric guitar. milt jackson and lionel hampton should be on posters on college dorm walls, with mallets.

#852: fairport convention - farewell farewell (1969)

if you’re wondering how to get your 5772 off to a bang, it turns out that the guitarist simon nicol once wrote what’s basically the stephen hero of pastoral-psychedelic british folk rock band mini-memoirs: “i can’t remember who decided that we should all live together, although, of course, we’d done that successfully in winchester the previous summer,” is how he describes the year after the band made liege & lief, which the video above proves is the one album you’d take with you if you had to spend the rest of your life alone on the outskirts of a hamlet.

and so: “our road manager and i were saddled with finding somewhere. we looked at the angel in little hadham and i remember phoning round everyone to tell them it was too bleak, too spartan, grubby, damp, inadequate bathrooms and so on. but by then swarb and his family were on the way there from milford haven in a removal van. as things turned out, the angel was ok even though it was pretty basic and freezing cold. it ended up as quite a headcount there. robin and richard were the only singles at first, though another roadie called david harry joined us later. the rest of us were married - dm and his missus, me and mine, swarb with his wife and stepdaughter, and peggy and chris with their baby daughter. one bathroom, one sink, one kettle for all of us! everybody was happy and it worked socially. we were remarkably tolerant of one another: “who’s had my bleedin’ cornflakes?” nobody would do the washing up though – it would mount up until chris pegg put on her marigolds and put us all to shame.”

#849: thelonious monk - ‘round midnight (1963, baden-baden)

it’s the first weeknight of october, but new york has somehow frozen into a winter evening, so i’m going to sleep in a wool hat. i feel just like thelonious monk, except i can’t play the piano like a philosopher-poet.

update, october 10: happy birthday, monk.