The number one single today in 1966 (which means that it predated the movie by two years):
The Beatles had an interesting day today in 1969. Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman …
… while George Harrison and wife Patti Boyd were arrested on charges of possessing 120 marijuana joints.
It was about relationships last year, and it’s about relationships this year.
Aaron Rodgers wasn’t in a great place with the Packers coming out of the 2020 season, and an upset loss to the 49ers in the NFC title game, so much so that the Green Bay brass spent weeks unable to get ahold of its quarterback. There was the bungling of the communication on the Jordan Love pick. There was awkwardness of a draft-day news drop of a trade demand a year later. There was president Mark Murphy calling Rodgers a “complicated fella.”
And even Rodgers’s reentry to the organization, at the outset of training camp, was wonky, with his airing-of-grievances press conference and insistence that Randall Cobb be acquired as part of his return to Green Bay.
The funny thing is, seven months later, the earmarks of that dispute foretold everything.
Rodgers spent this past weekend officiating his buddy David Bakhtiari’s wedding. Cobb was there and Matt LaFleur was, too—and that served as the perfect precursor to a decision for Rodgers that, in some ways, came down to those ties that bind the quarterback to the only organization he’s ever played for.
Let’s start with the relationships that were never in a bad place, those between Rodgers and his teammates, and between Rodgers and the current Green Bay staff. Rodgers has always loved the guys he played with, evidenced by how close he is with longtime Packers such as Bakhtiari and Cobb, and fellow wedding attendees A.J. Hawk and Clay Matthews III. All the same, his relationship with LaFleur has been pretty steady all the way through.
In fact, that last relationship with his coach wound up being the key to keeping all of this together, with the coach having maintained his bond with the quarterback even through all the tumult of last year. Which is why, in a quiet moment, on the second day of training camp, LaFleur remained optimistic that Rodgers wouldn’t necessarily be eyeing the door when the clock showed zeros on the 2021 season.
And this is important, too—above all else, you could hear how badly LaFleur wanted to keep coaching him.
“I mean, the guy’s, in my eyes, the greatest to do ever do it. So yeah, why wouldn’t you want to?” LaFleur told me that night at Lambeau Field. “I think he’s still got a lot left in the tank. I see it every day. He has so much fun out there, too, just competing. The ball’s still jumping out of his hand so damn effortlessly. So yeah, if he were to have retired, I would’ve put it in the same category as how I felt growing up in Michigan.
“I didn’t really grow up a huge professional football fan, but yeah, it was fun watching the Detroit Lions and Barry Sanders. And when [Sanders] walked away? That was heartbreaking. I know, from my perspective, it just wouldn’t be good for the game of football. And I do believe—I know—that there’s a lot of history here, and a lot that he loves about this place. And hopefully we can continue to work and come together, and fix whatever issues there might be.”
Which brings you back to the issues that were there. Though Rodgers held no ill will against Love, having been through a rocky start to his career alongside Brett Favre, he didn’t like the handling of Love’s selection—he was not told the Utah State prospect would be the pick until the Packers were on the clock—and didn’t like that Murphy and GM Brian Gutekunst hadn’t involved him more in big-picture decision-making. So that’s why when the Packers’ front office tried to change that, and did so last winter, Rodgers more or less ghosted them.
Since then, Gutekunst and Murphy have worked hard to repair their respective relationships with Rodgers and, as you might imagine, that went a very long way. So, too, did the fact that Rodgers, I was told over the weekend, felt like his relationships in the locker room (again, which have always been strong) were as good as they’ve ever been this year.
Now, I’m not naive to the business part of this. The Packers and Rodgers have discussed a four-year extension that’ll likely be finalized now as a part of this, and money’s not a nonfactor in any of these sorts of things, no matter what people try to tell you. I also believe that the Packers’ willingness to take on a Buccaneers–style build, in which they restructure contract after contract, mortgaging deals in order to keep a core in place, was important, too. Rodgers wanted the Packers to work on his timeline, and now they are.
But in the end, none of that matters if the relationships that Rodgers wanted to have with the people he works with, all of them, weren’t where they needed to be.
With one tweet from Pat McAfee on Tuesday morning, we got affirmation.
They are.
Aaron Rodgers’s pursuit of a favorable environment in Green Bay was one he took to its theatrical edge, not unlike Leonardo DiCaprio’s desire for an Oscar win that led him to be pummeled by a black bear in The Revenant.
He freed himself from the buttoned-up quarterback norm. He said everything—literally, everything—that came across his mind during a consequential and maddening time in U.S. history. He posted cryptic Instagram photos (before denying their cryptic nature). He called out the Packers’ organization in press conferences with their sponsor logos sitting idly in the background. He became both the disease and the cure, which forced his team to decide between a full-scale surgical removal or ultimate, unbridled acceptance. In vacillating between hero of all jaded employees and suspect Reddit Thanksgiving uncle, Rodgers was essentially forcing the Packers to make a plaster mold of his personalities, desires, preferences and talents for him to comfortably fall back into.
And he did. Even before news of his record-breaking contract leaked Tuesday—the one that will rightfully place him above Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Dak Prescott, the one that will almost surely get Jordan Love traded—Rodgers began to see the changes he desired enacted out of that reticent acceptance. The organization brought back his favorite position coach with no assurance that Rodgers would even sign. Behind the scenes at the combine, Packers execs were prepared to pay him whatever he wanted but also seemed wholly prepared for the entire thing to blow up on a whim if Rodgers decided to walk away. That is a special kind of Stockholm syndrome.
Throughout this process, Rodgers accomplished a few bucket list items. He did what Brett Favre couldn’t do, establishing his value to the point where it was the understudy, not the entrenched MVP, who would have to go. He assured that his thoughts would matter, whether they were actually taken into account inside the Packers’ front office or if they’d simply be espoused on Pat McAfee’s show as a means to second-guess the employer who wouldn’t listen to him.
But mostly, he provided a modern blueprint for the next handful of quarterbacks angling for an extension. Not just ensuring that they would likely continue the trend of market-topping deals after a few years when players at the position started taking strange, below-market contracts, but that they would have to be accepted, wholly and completely. That they would have to be listened to. That they would be undermined no longer at the hands of some process that didn’t exclusively have their best interests in mind.
We don’t know whether Justin Herbert, Matthew Stafford or Joe Burrow has any burning desires to control their respective front offices, sign contracts that could afford them enough money to purchase and rule over a small Caribbean island chain or wade into media as active players religiously defending their own personal narrative. But now they can. They will be able to do so without so much as a sneeze from their employer because they, like Rodgers, have crossed a talent threshold that a franchise will stand on its head to accommodate.
Think about the incredible reality of what Rodgers accomplished. In an era of scheme-forward head coaches, the Packers have Matt LaFleur, who won 13 games in each of his first three seasons. They have a first-round pick at the quarterback position whom LaFleur could tutor. Theoretically, they were armed with absolutely everything they needed to walk away from Rodgers during the most fitful moments of this passive-aggressive power struggle.
What did they do instead?
This is real, concrete power. This is absolute power in a day in age when some seedy owners are so desperate for answers at the position that they’re willing to try to disgustingly force-settle very serious lawsuits in order to attain stability under center. Credit goes to Rodgers for feeling that out. For realizing that no one was going to tell him “no.” And for showing another generation of players just how valuable they are and how desperate those who employ them can get.
While some might say this isn’t behavior to be celebrated, think about how manipulative, controlling and coordinated ownership has become in NFL circles. Think about how many times players have been squeezed, locked out, shut up and buried just to maintain the current illusion of power.
Rodgers is an extreme example, but when you look around the NFL, his importance to the Packers is not unlike Herbert’s to the Chargers, Mahomes’s to the Chiefs, Allen’s to the Bills, Burrow’s to the Bengals or Stafford’s to the Rams. Everything would fall apart if they walked away, and the organizations must be willing to accommodate so much more, bending and contorting so much more than these players thought possible.
It’s time for them to start asking for the moon and the stars. For Saturn and a few of its rings, and demand that Pluto be reinstated its planethood just because they feel like it. Then, they can thank Rodgers for the ability to get what they wanted, when they wanted it and just because they wanted it.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1968, this song went gold after its singer died in a plane crash in Lake Monona in Madison:
Today in 1956, RCA records purchased a half-page ad in that week’s Billboard magazine claiming that Elvis Presley was …
Ordinarily, if you have to tell someone something like that, the ad probably doesn’t measure up to the standards of accuracy. This one time, the hype was accurate.
Today in 1960, Britain’s Record Retailer printed the country’s first Extended Play and LP chart. Number one on the EP chart:
Today in 1963, the Beatles appeared in a concert at the East Ham Granada in London … as third billing after Tommy Roe and Chris Montez.
Today in 1964, Capitol Records released the Four Preps’ “Letter to the Beatles.”
The song started at number 85. And then Capitol withdrew the song to avoid a lawsuit because the song included a bit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released. Other than the run-on nature of the lyrics, the song was one of the first to have an accompanying “promo film,” now known as a “music video”:
Today in 1971, Radio Hanoi played the Star Spangled Banner, presumably not as a compliment:
Today in 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing marijuana at his farm in Campbelltown, Scotland.
McCartney’s excuse was that he didn’t know the seeds he claimed to have been given would actually grow.
John Kass passes on Pat Hickey:
I taught English Literature and Composition at Catholic schools from 1975 until I retired in 2017, including Honors and Advanced Placement. Since that time my hours were filled as a substitute teacher in Northwest Indiana, and I now work as a Jobs Coach for Special Education students in a large public high school. I take troops of students to workplace locations (Al’s Grocery, WINN Machines, LaPorte County Animal Shelter and show young men and women how to wash dishes for an elementary school) and teach them how to comport themselves in a workplace.
My charges are mostly Autistic and Downs Syndrome youngsters, and they are sensational workers. Their General Education contemporaries go to college and vocational preparatory classes. I think Gen Ed kids get the short end of stick. The Special Education kids go right into the workplace and their talents and work ethic gives them a leg up on their classmates. The students are not paid for their labors, as the time (usually 90 minutes a couple of days a week) gets credited as part of their graduation certificate. From the Workplace Program, seventeen-, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old workers very often get recruited directly into jobs. Three of my students are now salaried employees, after school.
These young people are not dependents; they are workers.
They will not go on to Valparaiso, DePauw, Purdue or Notre Dame, nor will their parents be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in college debt. They will not read The Canterbury Tales, Aeneid, The Virginian, Ethan Frome, Henry V, Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre or Invisible Man; but neither will their General Education counterparts. That is a huge problem.
The current secondary school English canon is dumbed down. It seems to me that everything of value went to hell when we politely considered the opinion of dim bulbs who interrogate with “Well, who’s to say?” People who know something, Karen.
The Who’s to Sayers have screwed up religion, politics, and sports. Keep reading, gentle folks, because at the end of my jeremiad I post a list of essential works of literature.
What were once essential readings have disappeared from high school curricula universal. As a substitute teacher I was shocked to learn that texts once deemed essential to one’s intellectual, ethical, and civic growth are no longer taught, offered, or considered. Young people have no connection to the great conversation anymore. Thousands of years of shared thoughts have been cast aside in favor of graphic novels, critical race theory, or books related to movies.
Vanity Fair, Tom Jones, The Mysterious Stranger and Moby Dick have been erased in favor of books selected by Oprah, or room temperature I.Q.’s like former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who placed his political imprimatur on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
That tome was considered a ‘nice story’ but not remotely on a par with Jude the Obscure, much less George Eliot’s Middlemarch. After the City That Used to Work gushed over the canonization of Truman Capote’s BFF, Ms. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird climbed to top of the academic pyramid. It’s a nice story, but it is no David Copperfield. It was considered young adult fiction. Now it is mentioned in hushed tones.
Whenever I run into classmates from the 1960s, we tend to talk about the sad world the young are forced to wade through: a swamp of tepid experiences without any sense of common struggles and shared joys. This is a mean and humorless age that celebrates the balkanization of races, religions, and classes. Literature mirrors the music of the times. Chief Keef is the Old Blue Eyes and Amanda Gorman the Robert Frost. In the 1960s our common culture shared the magic of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Dusty Springfield along with Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as Shostakovich and Schubert–all through television and radio. The Sound Must Seem the Echo of Sense. That was a quote from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which these days gets a nod only in an Advanced Placement English class. It is a musical essay that once set the canons of taste.
Books and tunes make little sense these days and essential key codes to leading a vital life are not available to students today. Let me explain.
Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener is a warning about the dire consequence of copying the words of others. Most people, other than the 46th President of the United States, know that imitation is flattery, but plagiarism is soul-sucking theft. The character Bartleby refuses to write or do anything other than die. He sheds his mortal husk and finally communicates with his employer, who laments, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”
That apostrophe (in poetry, an address to a dead or absent person) sums up our copy-cat culture that churns out formulaic novels, stories and ‘spoken word’ screeds that pass for poetry.
The classics were artifacts of truth. Practice, or genuine imitation, was the only passage to genius. Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope and John Dryden imitated, not duplicated, Horace, Virgil, and Juvenal. Real poets like Seamus Heaney imitated the greats and wrote the greatest translation of Beowulf, which celebrates courage and commitment. Amanda Gorman is celebrated for eschewing meter and rhyme scheme in favor of odd pauses. Seamus Heaney? Not in our high schools.
The virtues teach us to be morally excellent by taking the golden mean. Courage, for example, stands squarely between two vices (deficiency/excess: cowardice/rashness) and should never seem ambiguous or ironic. Shakespeare taught Aristotle to his audiences better than the Stagirite might have done himself. Richard III is a monster and Richard II is a vacillating whiner, but Henry V is what kingship is all about. Julius Caesar offers a simple seminar on political rhetoric: Brutus – the Attic, or closed fist and Antony the African, or open palm. The Attic school of rhetoric was from Greece and was determined by logic and cold reason, while the African school came from Egypt and appealed to the heart. Attic says, “Do what I say!” African says, “Hey guys, give me a hand!”
The Attic style works for autocrats like our shut-down elected officials. Mandates are neither suggestions nor invitations to debate. They are an exercise of power.
The African rhetorical style worked nicely with people who were shown respect and allowed to exercise their civic duties as free men and women.
Brutus speaks to logic and Antony to emotion. Know your audience. The Roman plebs are angry that their champion Julius Caesar had been butchered by the woke senators who wanted to maintain the oligarchs’ power of the Senate over the common folks of Rome. Antony, a masker and reveler, understood the common man. Brutus, an honorable man, was convinced that his class should always lord it over the unwashed mob. Brutus’s closed fist: Romans, countrymen: Be patient till the last. Hear me for my cause and be silent that you may hear. Believe me for mine honor and have respect to mine honor that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom and awake your senses that you may the better judge.
Yeah, right.
Antony offers an open palm: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So, let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Well, the folks rioted and the noble Romans had to beat it out of town, and fast! Between Antony’s rash emotionalism and Brutus’s cold Attic arrogance lies Octavian, the true heir to Caesar. A common Shakespearian device in tragedy and history is to have the last speech go to the person meant to rule–the last word: According to his virtue let us use him, With all respect and rites of burial. Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie Most like a soldier, ordered honorably. So, call the field to rest, and let’s away to part the glories of this happy day.
The great ruler is fair to all. The golden mean requires it.
Do you think that our elected officials have any sense of fairness? Our young people should be introduced to eternal values and virtues. Instead, they mask up as advocates and slogan-slinging cranks.
These are empirical observations based on what I witnessed. Who’s to say? In this case, me.
I could not be an English teacher in 2022. The Woke culture would cancel me immediately. But I was able to impart eternal truths and basic virtues via literature for four decades. Helping Special Education youngsters learn to bag groceries at Al’s in LaPorte is far more important than trying to convince young minds that Amanda Gorman is a poet. Not gonna happen.
These are a few essential readings that young people once had presented to them. N.B., I find Joseph Conrad, a Polish sailor who could write in three languages and produce the most beautiful English prose about honor, duty, dignity, and compassion to be the most important. Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison wrote the two greatest American novels: Moby Dick by the former and Invisible Man by the later. If I had one book to save from extinction to prove that humanity is the work of God, it would be John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which seems destined to be known as a weak joke in Animal House. The greatest comic novel is A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous indictment of cant, ignorance and pretense.
Ladies and gents, my promised list:
The N*****of the Narcissus –Joseph Conrad–also titled “The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle”
The Secret Sharer – Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
The Man Who Would be King – Rudyard Kipling
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre – Emily Bronte
Paradise Lost – John Milton
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Henry V – William Shakespeare
Sonnets – John Donne
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville
Red Badge of Courage – Stephan Crane
The Virginian – Owen Wister
The Big Blonde – Dorothy Parker
Poems of Emily Dickinson
Man Without a Country – Edward Everett Hale
Aeneid – Virgil
The Odyssey – Homer
The Greek Passion – Nikos Kazantzakis
The Informer – Liam O’Flaherty
Short Stories of Brett Harte
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
U.S.A. Trilogy – John Dos Passos
The Day of the Locusts – Nathaniel West
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Caine Mutiny – Herman Wouk
The Continental Op – Dashiell Hammett
The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler
The Sign of Four – Arthur Conan Doyle
Napoleon of Notting Hill – G.K. Chesterton
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present Britain’s number one single today in 1970:
The number one single over here today in 1970 was by an act that had already broken up:
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley made his TV debut, on “Louisiana Hayride” on KWKH-TV in Shreveport, La.
The number one album today in 1966 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Going Places”:
The number one single today in 1966:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 