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Last week, I was driving home from work and saw a billboard for an area casino’s summer concerts. The top right was emblazoned with “Grand Funk Railroad” with a picture of five guys beneath it. Wait a minute. Grand Funk was one of the original American and a highly popular power trio. Meanwhile, next Thursday Creedence Clearwater Revisited is performing at the local fairgrounds. In both cases, the only original members of those bands are the rhythm sections — the bass player and drummer.
Granted, Grand Funk’s rhythm section is two thirds of the original band (which also added a keyboardist along the way). And I’ve always loved bassist’s Mel Schacher’s work, which Homer Simpson once fittingly described as “bong-rattling.” But anyone familiar with teh band and its music knows that guitarist Mark Farner was the band’s vital force. He wrote most of the songs (many of which were surprisingly political), sang lead and is a helluva guitar player. Grand Funk without Farner simply is not Grand Funk. Fortunately, a friend and I saw them several years ago when Farner was temporarily reunited with the band.
Likewise, although Creedence Clearwater Revisited’s name distinguishes it from the original Creedence Clearwater Revival, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford were even less of a driving force in the original Creedence Clearwater Revival. Perhaps even more so than Farner, John Fogerty was Creedence Clearwater. Not only was he lead singer and guitarist, his songwriting ranked him among the most respected of the era.
And there certainly isn’t any love lost within the bands themselves. Fogerty lost a legal effort to stop his former bandmates from using the name Creedence Clearwater Revisited. He even refused to perform with them when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. They supposedly were barred from the stage and Fogerty played with a band that included Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson. More recently, Schacher and drummer Don Brewer got an injunction against Farner preventing him from using the names “Grand Funk” or “Grand Funk Railroad” unless it indicates he was a former member of the band. As two-thirds of the legal entity, they get to use the band’s name.
I won’t contest any musician’s efforts to make a living. But why are we Baby Boomers so fascinated with our past that we are willing to go hear ersatz versions of that music?
Is it for pity or pain that I cry?
Grand Funk Railroad, “Winter and My Soul,” Grand Funk
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Growing up Muslim in America (“… while the heightened sense of a threat from Islamic terrorism that existed post-[9/11] may have gone, it has given way to a persistent, low-level paranoia that pervades the everyday lives of the million-plus Muslim Arab Americans living here and throughout the country.”) (via)
Blog Headline of the Week
This Week’s Big Brother Moment
Irony of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.
Joss Whedon
It’s official. Sort of. Earlier this week I got an email from Goodreads this week announcing: “You’re in the top 1% of reviewers on Goodreads!” (Their emphasis, not mine.) But digging around a bit makes me feel I’m still pretty much with my friends in the 99 percent.
First, the email also tells me that Goodreads has more than 20 million members. At one percent, I’m in the top 200,000. But then not every member writes book reviews. Still, though, the email says the site has more than 25 million reviews. Let’s see. I’ve posted 241 reviews, meaning I’ve written .00000964 percent (9.6 millionths in English) of the reviews. Compare that to the top 10 reviewers of all time in the U.S. alone. You have to have written more than 3,000 reviews to crack the top 10 and more than 1,300 to make it into the top 100.
The person with the most all time reviews in the U.S. supposedly has reviewed more than 7,500 books. She’s outpaced only by a Canadian gentleman who’s written nearly 10,000 reviews — all of them this year. That’s just shy of 50 reviews a day. I doubt I’ve read 10,000 books in my life. He is 73 so maybe there’s an outside shot I can catch up.
The statistics are less surprsing and that I am in the one percent is more surprising when you consider a review only need be 50 characters (that’s right, characters, not words). I think that’s why one American supposedly wrote more than 2,100 reviews already this year, another has written 576 this month while, as of the date I write this, a third has written 210 reviews this week.
So at least as far as Goodreads is concerned, the one percent isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
All my life, I’ve always wanted to be somebody. But I see now I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
An ambitious soul on Reddit compiled the information from 11 “Top 100” book lists into a combined master list. The results are interesting. Only three books made 10 of the list and only 26 made it on more than half the lists.
Here’s the books and the number of lists they’ve made. I’ve italicized those I’ve read.
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (10/11)
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (10/11)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (10/11)
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (9/11)
- Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut (9/11)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (9/11)
- The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner (9/11)
- 1984 by George Orwell (8/11)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (8/11)
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (8/11)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (8/11)
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (7/11)
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (6/11)
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (6/11)
- Brave New World by Alduos Huxley (6/11)
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (6/11)
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (6/11)
- My Antonia by Willa Cather (6/11)
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac (6/11)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (6/11)
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers (6/11)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (6/11)
- The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (6/11)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (6/11)
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (6/11)
- Ulysses by James Joyce (6/11 Lists)
Frankly, I’m surprised I’ve read a third of them. And I have another four sitting on a bookshelf or ereader.
The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough,
Louise Erdich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Liberty—Myth or Fantasy? (“Our country no longer hungers for the myth of liberty; it is starving from its absence. In place of this myth, various groups have established their own set of beliefs and moral goals, all of which are designed to encompass a few but hold out the many.”)
- Onliness (“Literature is the group home of only children…”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
The things you don’t need to live — books, are, cinema, wine and so on — are the things you need to live.
Matt Haig, The Humans
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