Another year, another attempt by me to throw together random audio clips while trying to pass it off as a Christmas message.

Click below to listen.

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Though I’m far from the biggest Jimmy Fallon fan on the block, I gotta really hand it to him with this one. Not only does he perfectly approximate Jim Morrison’s voice, as well as the inconceivably corny backdrop from The Doors’ 1967 Ed Sullivan appearance, he exposes the total idiocy that apparently passed for lyrics back in the late 1960′s.

Kudos to the band as well. I’m sure they’re professional musicians (if it actually is them playing; it’s a little hard to tell), so it must have been extremely difficult for them to play THAT poorly. The drummer does an absolutely perfect impression of a typical John Densmore drum seizure at about 1:56.

My only (very minor) complaint is that, as with so many things parodic, “Weird Al” Yankovic was there first with the brilliant “Craigslist.” As far as the impression goes, I have to give Fallon the nod.

Mayor Bloomberg may have finally figured out a way of methodically dismantling the Occupy Wall Street protest.

I was walking along Wall Street this morning. For the past few weeks, the walking area has been partitioned in a way that allows roughly single-file foot traffic in either direction. Today, however, there was an added bit of police work. Work IDs were required in order to gain entrance to Wall Street between Broadway and Pearl.

Mark my words: the protest backlash will begin sometime next week due to the sheer inconvenience of having to take an ID out of a wallet. Here’s the reason: Generally speaking, Americans value convenience more than anything else. They will sacrifice any shard of liberty or privacy for the thrill of owning the iPhone or BlackBerry, let alone protection from terrorists.

Forcing pedestrians to show ID is a genius move on Bloomberg’s part, as much as I hate to admit it. Not only does it prevent an onslaught on new protestors, it makes it so irritating for the people traveling back and forth daily that it will turn those who were once for the protestors against them.

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Hello, this is your Eye In The Sky here. Better known this week as “The Prisoner Of South End Avenue.”

As you know, this weekend is filled with memorials concerning the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Since I live a block away from Ground Zero, it’s kinda hard to escape them. Today, from my window, I could see (and hear) the annual NYPD 9/11 Memorial procession. I figured this year I’d try to get at least a little footage of it. I wound up getting very little (all of it shot from my window), due to an uncharged battery and bad timing.

Musically, it’s all drums and bagpipes. It kinda has that Charles Ives feel in that every band is playing simultaneously, and after a while it just becomes one big cacophonous racket (I like the sound, personally). The whole ceremony had a certain magnificence to it. There were even a few Mounted Police lurking about. God knows what they were doing here, but it’s nice to see them anyway.  Overall, the whole thing was pretty surreal but beautiful.

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Here’s a little tribute to America’s Favorite Redhead, Lucille Ball. This is an SNL sketch written by Michael O’Donoghue that originally aired on March 19th, 1977.

Enjoy.

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It is with incredible sadness that I report the death of Gil Scott-Heron.

Repeatedly called by many the “Godfather of Rap,” despite his disliking that monicker, he was a self-proclaimed “Bluesologist” and poet more than anything else.

My first memory of Gil Scott-Heron was hearing, in heavy rotation, what would become the closest thing he ever had to a hit, 1975′s “Johannesburg.” I instantly fell in love with the song, even though I had absolutely no idea what any of the words meant (I was five at the time). I vaguely remember my parents being horrified at me singing the song verbatim (mostly phonetically, but accurately) at the top of my lungs when they had guests over to the house. They took away my radio for a couple of years after that.

I finally got to see him live at Joe’s Pub in 1998, and it was truly like seeing light on stage, he was absolutely brilliant in every way. When I saw him backstage, however, he was having more than a little trouble standing up, a sign of rougher days to come for him. 

It is one of life’s little ironies that the man who declared Winter In America died on the weekend that is the unofficial start of Summer. A bad omen if there was one.

Despite making his name with pieces like “Whitey’s On The Moon,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Johannesburg,” Gil Scott-Heron did not strike me as an angry man (nor are the aforementioned songs merely “angry”). He work ranged from the empathetic (“Pieces Of a Man,” “Billy Green Is Dead”) to humorously prophetic (“B-Movie”).

The video clip above is taken from his film, Black Wax. It is an abbreviated version of the “B-Movie” section of the film. “B-Movie” was a song he wrote in 1981 after Ronald Reagan (or “Raygun,” as he’s referred to here) was elected by a so-called “mandate.” The song is particularly relevant in today’s Tea Party “Let’s Take Our Nation Back” political climate. Tea Partiers seem to wallow in the same nostalgia as those who voted for Raygun. In fact, quite a bit of their nostalgia is for Raygun himself.

Below are three songs that are absolutely brilliant and essential (as is the majority of his catalog, for that matter). It pains me to only pick three, but I have to have some limits here.

The first is 1974′s “Winter In America,” the second is 1970′s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” and the third is from his last album, 2010′s I’m New Here. It’s a poem titled “On Coming From A Broken Home.”

Hope you enjoy all three.

Gil Scott-Heron - "Winter In America"

Gil Scott-Heron - "Home Is Where The Hatred Is"

Gil Scott-Heron - "On Coming From a Broken Home, Pts. 1 & 2"

Here’s another animation I did mostly for fun. It’s another Kinetic Typography thing with a little 3D thrown in for good measure. The song is called “Amber,” and it was one of the tracks from 1980′s The Residents Commercial Album. I’m dedicating this one to an old friend of mine, Neal Bantens, because this is one of his favorite songs of all time (at least it used to be).

Enjoy.

Well, here it is at last! This is the last Great Shakes jingle I have at present (I’m hoping to get more. A lot more). This Great Shakes ad features The Yardbirds and was recorded in 1966. The personnel is unknown, but most likely this was recorded while Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were both guitarists in the group. Jeff Beck left soon after to form the Jeff Beck Group, leaving Page as the sole guitarist and the group as a four-piece. [Yeah, you all know what became of that Page guy. Blah, blah]

The Yardbirds based this ad on their most recent (and my personal favorite) hit, “Over Under Sideways Down.” Enjoy!

"The Yardbirds - "Great Shakes"

This is a promo I did just for fun. Maureen Johnson’s new book will be released April 26th, so pre-order your copy today, folks!.

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With the death of Don Kirshner comes the end of an era. Kirshner was the granddaddy of the musical kingmakers (Col. Tom Parker notwithstanding).  Known as “the man with the golden ears,” he was responsible for starting the careers of Bobby Darin, The Monkees and The Archies.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he created Aldon Music with partner Al Nevin.  Aldon contracted several of the most important songwriters of the so-called Brill Building, including Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield, Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus, Mort Shumer, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and Barry Mann.

He achieved his greatest fame as host of the syndicated Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in September, 1973.

And that’s where this clip comes in.  Paul Shaffer had been doing a dead-on impression of Kirshner on Saturday Night Live for years when the above clip aired on January 28, 1978.  Here, Shaffer as Kirshner introduces the “Mr. Mike & Tina Turner Revue,” featuring Michael O’Donoghue as the “evil Mr. Mike,” Gilda Radner, Jane Curtain and Laraine Newman as the Mikettes, and Garrett Morris doing an insanely brilliant Tina Turner.

Incidentally, this is the last of “Mr. Mike’s Least-Loved Bedtime Tales,” as O’Donoghue would leave the show at end of the third season.

From Swimming to Cambodia:

The Cambodians knew how to have fun.  They knew how to have a good time being born; how to have a good time growing up; a good time going through puberty; a good time falling in love and staying in love; a good time getting married and having children; a good time raising children; a good time growing old and dying.  They even knew how to have a good time on New Year’s Eve.  I couldn’t believe it.

Just in time for the holidays, I slapped this aural bit of collage nonsense together and dubbed it a “holiday-themed classic.” And not a moment too soon.

I’m telling you, once you’ve heard my nonsensical, profanity-laden masterpiece of a quickly-thrown-together sound-thing, you’ll never hear Christmas quite the same way again.

Click below to listen.

The Baked Ziti Stocking Stuffer
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