This is a slow day in rock music, save for one particular birthday and one death.
It’s not Tony Jackson of the Searchers …
… or Tom Boggs, drummer for the Box Tops …
No comments on Presty the DJ for July 16
-
-
Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:
Imagine having tickets to this concert at the Anaheim Civic Center today in 1967:
Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.
-
This being Bastille Day, it seems appropriate to bring you some French rock music. (Despite my 2.5 years of middle school and four years of high school French, I understand none of the words.)
Outside of France, today in 1967, the Who opened the U.S. tour of … Herman’s Hermits.
Today in 1986, Paul McCartney released his “Press” album:
Other than Woody Guthrie, who was not a member of the rock or pop music worlds, the only birthday of today is Jos Zoomer, drummer for Vandenberg:
Today in 1984, Philippe Wynne, former member of the Spinners, died of a heart attack while performing in Oakland:
-
Gary Smith reviews a book:
“I don’t think You’re man enough to take on a car like this.” Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) has just walked into Pete’s Dependable Used Cars somewhere in Idaho. He eyes up a Cameo White ’73 Trans Am with a red “shaker.” “It’s a repo. Three thousand and change,” says Pete. Seconds later, the Trans Am is flying through the western countryside, stolen. Movies made the Trans Am an American legend.
Tom Glatch tells the inside story of the Trans Am’s impact on the culture (and sales) through it’s starring role in several motion pictures and TV shows. Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot drove a Cameo white ’73; John Wayne’s Brewster Green ’73 in McQ; and David Carradine’s red ’73 in Cannonball. 1977 introduced Burt Reynolds drove a black TA “Bullet” in Smokey and the Bandit, along with Hooper. “Ain’t nobody can fly a car like Hooper.” Steve McQueen drove a ’80 TA in Hunter. Steve died four months after the film was released. In the early ’80s David Hasselhoff starred in the TV series Knight Rider that featured KITT, the talking Trans Am. Tom reveals many inside details about the making of the films, how the cars were procured, and what became of them.
The book quotes many designers and engineers who had something to do with the Trans Am. Norm Inouye drew the famous flaming bird graphic based on a sketch by Pontiac Studio Chief Bill Porter. After a flaming initial rejection by Bill Michell, it finally became an option beginning in 1973. Porter recently commented, “I think it may have saved the car. In the mid-seventies, everything was going against the Firebird, and I’ll put he case forward that the Trans Am bird saved it.”
Mitchell’s Pegasus
Enzo Ferrari gave Bill Mitchell a 347 horsepower V-12 from a Ferrari Daytona 365 GT/B4 for his customized Firebird, Pegasus. The motor was a tight fit, and the author states that the firewall was moved back nine inches to accommodate the longer engine. However, you can clearly see that there were no modifications made to the interior or the wheelbase of the Pegasus. The V-12 was shoehorned in by taking up the space occupied by the stock fan and fan shroud.
1989 Turbo Trans Am
As an added bonus the author devotes several pages to the development of the 1989 Turbo Trans Am, the fastest four-seat American car of the 1980s. Pontiac built two Trans Ams in 1986 with the Buick Turbo 3.8-liter engine. But for the engine package to fit, the passenger-side fame rail was modified to make room for the exhaust downpipe. Production was not feasible, because the car would have to be re-certified at great expense to meet government crash standards. Using the standard Trans Am transmissions was also a certification issue.
The PAS team was brought in to see if production would be possible by other means. Bill Owen of Buick, the primary engineer behind the Turbo V-6 engine, came up with the idea of using the cylinder heads from the front-wheel-drive 3300 V-6 to narrow the width of the engine and make room for the transmission bracket so that the entire Grand National engine/transmission package would fit, along with the different heads. With this, the first production-ready Turbo Trans Am was born. Lloyd Reuss, executive vice president for GM’s passenger car group at the time, drove the gray-on-gray prototype and decided he wanted it to be the 30th Anniversary Trans Am.
Pretty interesting stuff. There are a lot of similar insights in the book.
By the way, in the gallery there is a shot of five ’77 TAs and a GMC motorhome that was part of the Trans Am Territory promotion. It is included in Michael Lamm’s great book, The Fabulous Firebird. One day at GM Design they picked out several TAs in the parking lot for the shot. The yellow TA was my car.
The Trans Am was named for a racing series of the same name, which included such pony cars as the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger and AMC Javelin, each of which was limited to a 5-liter V-8 engine.
We owned very mild versions of two of these. Our first new second car was a brown 1973 Javelin with the 304 V-8 and automatic. It was the first car I, uh, legally drove. It had bucket seats and console, which was cool. It did not have power brakes, which one could get used to; it also didn’t have a parking brake indicator light, which led to a few interesting moments when one tried to drive without releasing the parking brake. It was fun to sit in the front seats of that car, but not so much in the back.
Note: Not our actual car. Twelve years later, my mother got a red 1985 Camaro, because her oldest son kept using the 1975 Caprice, about which I have previously written. The Camaro had the 2.8 liter V-6 and automatic. It was an unusually reliable car for a GM product of the day; the only problem I recall with it was that the shifter knob kept coming apart until a recall. The problem that fit in the category of Feature, Not Bug was that that Camaro was so low that I had to put my hand on the ground first to get out.
Note: Not actual car, I think. Between Javelin and Camaro ownership, the motorheads at my middle school (none of whom of course could legally drive) there was an ongoing argument about the Trans Am and the Corvette. The late ’70s C3 had the L-48 350 V-8 engine standard, with the L-82 350 V-8, with 40 more horsepower, optional. The standard Trans Am had a 400 V-8 with the same horsepower as the L-48, with the “T/A 6.6” V-8 adding 20 more horsepower.
Both cars are an example of 1970s taste, such as it was:
You could logically guess that I pined for the Corvette. I was a subscriber to Motor Trend magazine (motto: Every Car’s Great!), and when it reviewed the ’77 I pored over every word, including the red bubble on top of the antenna for the AM/FM/CB radio. (Don’t ask me how I remember that, good buddy.)
The reason the Trans Am became so popular in the late ’70s wasn’t just “Smokey and the Bandit” (starring ’70s icon Burt Reynolds), but because there were few other choices for a hot car. (“Hot” as in high performance, such as it was in the day, not “hot” for stolen.) Besides the Corvette (which was more expensive and lacked any back seat, as opposed to pony cars’ Back Seat in Name Only) … well, AMC killed the Javelin, and Chrysler killed the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger. Chevy killed the Camaro Z-28 in 1975, only to bring it back in late 1977 after noticing Trans Am sales. Ford’s Mustang II was based on the Pinto, and without a V-8 until 1975, one year before Ford introduced the Cobra II package powered by a 140-horsepower V-8.
The ultimate Trans Am is the Special Edition T/A, available in black with gold bird thing on the hood or gold with black thing on the hood. According to this site, the correct combination — the T/A 6.6, 4-speed manual and T-tops — was chosen by 2,699 buyers.
-
The writer’s name is Orkin. Haris Orkin.
I was a skinny, bookish, bespectacled, and insecure 12-year-old living in the suburbs of Chicago when I first realized what I wanted to be when I grew up: Alexander Mundy in It Takes a Thief, James West in The Wild, Wild West, and James Bond. Those men had no fear. They were confident in any situation and were comfortable in their own skin. Not me. I lived a life of perpetual embarrassment. Of course, now I know that’s how most 12-year-olds feel. At the time, all I knew was I wanted to be someone else.
The first Bond movie I saw was In Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond was engaged to be married to Teresa (Tracy) Draco, played by Diana Rigg. I was a huge “Avengers”‘ fan back then. (I’m talking about the English “Avengers,” not the Marvel “Avengers,” though I was an avid comic book reader as well.)
Who wouldn’t want to be engaged to Diana Rigg in 1969? She was beautiful and smart and effortlessly cool. Bond was heartbroken when (spoiler alert) Diana Rigg died. At least he avoided getting married. It was clear even to my 12-year-old self that no one wanted a married Bond—a Bond who had to change nappies and help with the dishes. They killed off his fiancé so Bond could continue to be a lady killer. This is probably just as well. Bond would have made a terrible husband and a worse father. The first time his kid spilled a Cherry Slurpee on the supple leather of his Aston Martin, Bond would have launched his tiny ass into the stratosphere with his ejector seat.
There’s no denying that being Bond has its perks. You visit all kinds of exotic places and drive unbelievable cars. You have a license to kill and because you do, you can take what you want and do what you want and no one stands in your way. Men fear you and women fall all over you. Best of all, you get to make a difference. You get to save the world.
There’s also a pretty significant downside. After all, no one really cares that much about Bond, and Bond doesn’t really care all that much about anyone else. That makes for a pretty lonely life. That’s not the worst of it. Bond isn’t willing to open himself up to love. He’s kind of an emotional coward. He isn’t willing to care deeply about someone. He’s too afraid of getting his heart broken, too afraid of experiencing loss.
Fathers face that kind of fear every day. We worry about our kids. We worry about them physically and psychologically. We worry about their futures. To me, the idea of losing a child is far more frightening than having a supervillain like Auric Goldfinger barbecue my scrotum with an industrial laser.
In the original Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson played a gunfighter who comes to a Mexican village with six other gunmen to protect the town. He’s admired by three little Mexican boys who follow him everywhere. They worship him for his bravery and aspire to be just like him. They think their fathers are cowards in comparison. Bronson paddles their asses and gives them a speech that has always stayed with me:
Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally, it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery.
Am I sorry I didn’t become an international super spy? Would I have enjoyed jetting around the world, dispatching super villains and romancing women with names like Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead? Probably. Then again, when I was in junior high, I was painfully shy around girls. I was awkward, tongue-tied, and insecure. Not exactly James Bond material. By the time I hit college, I started capitalizing on the strengths I did have. Like my honesty, my empathy, and my self-deprecating humor. Besides, if I had become James Bond, I wouldn’t have had time to coach my son’s soccer team or teach him how to ride a bike. I wouldn’t have had time to take him hiking or watch “Looney Tunes” or play video games with him. I would have missed everything.
My son saw me for who I was: a combination of contradictory traits. I was klutzy and confident, bold and bashful, and I made fun of my own awkwardness. Humor was my secret weapon. He watched and learned, and had none of my bashfulness when it came to the opposite sex. He had a lot of friends who happened to be girls. He saw them as equals. He had no expectations, so he didn’t make things weird. He was honest about his feelings and didn’t play any macho games. He was a good person and girls could see that. And he was funny. That’s probably why he had a girlfriend from the time he was 12.
Maybe you don’t need a license to kill to be a hero, after all. Maybe there’s more than one way to save the world. Maybe it’s more important to be a good parent. Maybe it’s more important to raise a child with confidence and kindness.
-
-
Yale Law School Prof. Akhil Reed Amar:
The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice is President Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move. Last week the president promised to select “someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.” In picking Judge Kavanaugh, he has done just that.
In 2016, I strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president as well as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. But today, with the exception of the current justices and Judge Garland, it is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh. He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.
Judge Kavanaugh, who is 53, has already helped decide hundreds of cases concerning a broad range of difficult issues. Good appellate judges faithfully follow the Supreme Court; great ones influence and help steer it. Several of Judge Kavanaugh’s most important ideas and arguments — such as his powerful defense of presidential authority to oversee federal bureaucrats and his skepticism about newfangled attacks on the property rights of criminal defendants — have found their way into Supreme Court opinions.
Except for Judge Garland, no one has sent more of his law clerks to clerk for the justices of the Supreme Court than Judge Kavanaugh has. And his clerks have clerked for justices across the ideological spectrum.
Most judges are not scholars or even serious readers of scholarship. Judge Kavanaugh, by contrast, has taught courses at leading law schools and published notable law review articles. More important, he is an avid consumer of legal scholarship. He reads and learns. And he reads scholars from across the political spectrum. (Disclosure: I was one of Judge Kavanaugh’s professors when he was a student at Yale Law School.)
This studiousness is especially important for a jurist like Judge Kavanaugh, who prioritizes the Constitution’s original meaning. A judge who seeks merely to follow precedent can simply read previous judicial opinions. But an “originalist” judge — who also cares about what the Constitution meant when its words were ratified in 1788 or when amendments were enacted — cannot do all the historical and conceptual legwork on his or her own.
Judge Kavanaugh seems to appreciate this fact, whereas Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow originalist, did not read enough history and was especially weak on the history of the Reconstruction amendments and the 20th-century amendments.
A great judge also admits and learns from past mistakes. Here, too, Judge Kavanaugh has already shown flashes of greatness, admirably confessing that some of the views he held 20 years ago as a young lawyer — including his crabbed understandings of the presidency when he was working for the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr — were erroneous.
Although Democrats are still fuming about Judge Garland’s failed nomination, the hard truth is that they control neither the presidency nor the Senate; they have limited options. Still, they could try to sour the hearings by attacking Judge Kavanaugh and looking to complicate the proceedings whenever possible.
This would be a mistake. Judge Kavanaugh is, again, a superb nominee. So I propose that the Democrats offer the following compromise: Each Senate Democrat will pledge either to vote yes for Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation — or, if voting no, to first publicly name at least two clearly better candidates whom a Republican president might realistically have nominated instead (not an easy task). In exchange for this act of good will, Democrats will insist that Judge Kavanaugh answer all fair questions at his confirmation hearing.
Fair questions would include inquiries not just about Judge Kavanaugh’s past writings and activities but also about how he believes various past notable judicial cases (such as Roe v. Wade) should have been decided — and even about what his current legal views are on any issue, general or specific.
Everyone would have to understand that in honestly answering, Judge Kavanaugh would not be making a pledge — a pledge would be a violation of judicial independence. In the future, he would of course be free to change his mind if confronted with new arguments or new facts, or even if he merely comes to see a matter differently with the weight of judgment on his shoulders. But honest discussions of one’s current legal views are entirely proper, and without them confirmation hearings are largely pointless.
The compromise I’m proposing would depart from recent confirmation practice. But the current confirmation process is badly broken, alternating between rubber stamps and witch hunts. My proposal would enable each constitutional actor to once again play its proper constitutional role: The Senate could become a venue for serious constitutional conversation, and the nominee could demonstrate his or her consummate legal skill. And equally important: Judge Kavanaugh could be confirmed with the ninetysomething Senate votes he deserves, rather than the fiftysomething votes he is likely to get.
-
Republicans should consider themselves lucky that they are not facing the same sort of existential crisis that is currently dividing the Democratic (or is it Democratic Socialist?) Party, but the Grand Ole Party is nonetheless facing anew its grand old quandary: What exactly is conservatism?
In the Age of Trump, is it the President’s own flag-waving, trade-warring populism? Is it the more rigorously academic yet far less politically pragmatic theorizing of the last remnants of the #NeverTrump movement? Or is it somewhere in between—somewhere that now embraces Trump fully but was the last state to vote against him in the Republican Primary; somewhere that has cut taxes, reformed welfare, stood up to unhinged bullying when it drained its own version of the swamp, and came out stronger than it ever has been?
What is conservatism? In a word, it’s Wisconsin.
The birthplace of the Republican Party has a century and a half later also been the birthplace of this new form of conservatism that is (and should be) less focused on style than it is on substance and less fixated on how it defines itself in theory than on how it succeeds in practice.
In that sense, Wisconsin has been what conservatism has always promised. Or, more accurately, Wisconsin has proven that only conservatism can fix the failed promises of liberalism. That, at its very essence, is the difference between the two ideologies: Liberalism promises, but conservatism delivers.
After seven years of conservative governance under Governor Scott Walker and a Republican State Legislature, Wisconsin has hit a record low unemployment rate of 2.8% that is significantly lower than the national rate of 3.8%. Its labor force participation rate of 68.9% is the highest it has ever been and ranks fifth highest in the nation.
After seven years of liberal governor Jim Doyle and a Democratic State Legislature, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate stood at a record high of 9.2%. Jobs, especially manufacturing jobs, were fleeing the state in droves. The state’s unemployment insurance trust fund was more than $1 billion in debt.
Today, initial unemployment insurance claims are at their lowest level in 30 years, while continuing unemployment claims are the lowest they’ve been since 1973. Wisconsin ranks second in the nation in the number of manufacturing jobs it’s added this year. Since Governor Walker took office, the state’s addition of more than 45,600 manufacturing jobs ranks in the top 10 nationally.
And that’s even before 13,000 more manufacturing jobs are created now that Foxconn has broken ground on the single largest economic development project in the state’s history and one of the biggest foreign investments ever seen in the United States. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce estimates that when Foxconn’s factory is fully operational in 2020, it will boost the state’s gross domestic product by a staggering $51.5 billion over the 15 years that the state is paying tax incentives to the company. That amounts to $3.4 billion each year and represents an $18 return on every dollar invested.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, conservative management of Wisconsin’s finances turned a $2.7 billion structural deficit into a $579 million surplus in the state’s main account. If ever there were a clearer illustration of the fundamental difference between conservatism and liberalism, it would be this: Governor Doyle almost constantly raided Wisconsin’s transportation fund, eventually transferring more than $1.3 billion to the main fund to plug various budget gaps caused by his and his party’s utter negligence. Governor Walker never had to transfer a dime (and even helped pass a Constitutional amendment banning the practice).
Over the past seven years there has been no budget gimmickry; no outright thievery—only prudential leadership and a conservative philosophy that has proven to be more than the sum of its various reforms. More so than Right to Work legislation, more so than property tax cuts, a partial repeal of Prevailing Wage laws, welfare reform, child tax credits, university tuition freezes, more so even than Act 10’s collective bargaining reform, Wisconsin has recovered from its Lost Doyle Decade of a general embrace of conservatism that allows it to foster a relationship with its private sector based on partnership and not subjugation.
This, more than anything, is what unites Trump and #NeverTrump conservatism and differentiates both from the creeping socialism of the Democratic Party. While liberals cheer a fresh-faced new superstar like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, they are making to the American people an implied promise—that this socialist will finally be the one who gets it right; the one who is finally able to make their philosophy work.
Conservatism, meanwhile, makes no promises. It doesn’t have to. All it has to do is point to Wisconsin and let the results speak for themselves.
Not perfectly, of course. Republicans have failed to enact into the state Constitution permanent controls on government spending and taxes, largely because Republicans believe, just like politicians of any or no party, in getting themselves reelected. The Legislature has failed to increase road spending by cutting other government spending. In fact, government spending hasn’t been cut at all (including school spending, in contrast to Tony Evers’ lie). Wisconsin still has the socialist minimum-markup law. Wisconsin still has too much government any way you measure it — government spending, number of government units, number of government employees, etc. One cannot really call Wisconsin Republicans small-government conservatives.
However, none of the things that have been accomplished this decade would have taken place had Tom Barrett, Mary Burke, any of the Democrats running for governor now or any Democrat been elected governor instead of Walker, and had Democrats been running state government instead of Republicans.
Government is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. Democrats believe in the other way around. That is why for the foreseeable future I will never vote for a Democrat.
-
It turns out that my forced retirement from public broadcasting punditry (because the show on which I was punditing concluded) lasted a month and a half.
I will be appearing on National Public Radio’s “1A” show today discussing “Wisconsin’s Legacy” and the book The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kauffman.
The show calls itself “a show about a changing America. Host Joshua Johnson convenes a daily conversation about the most important issues of our time. 1A brings context and insight to stories unfolding across the country and the world. With a name inspired by the First Amendment, the show celebrates free speech and the power of the spoken word.”
I’m all for that. (Which is why I appear on every show, friendly audience or not, I’m invited to, other than the fact that I am a media ho.) In fact, I think every newspaper should change the name of its opinion page from “Opinion” or “Perspectives” or something generic like that to “The First Amendment.” (Of course, then they would actually have to respect the First Amendment, which is not currently the case for such newspapers as the New York Times.)
What is the book about? Glad you asked!
During the 20th century, Wisconsin was the embodiment of what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called a “laboratory of democracy” — an experiment in social and economic innovation, and a prospective blueprint for other states.
A bastion of progressive values, Wisconsin created the first workers’ compensation program, a progressive state income tax, stricter child labor laws, and the first unemployment insurance program. Much of FDR’s New Deal was even authored by Wisconsin natives.
But in recent years, the state has undergone a major political shift. Republicans secured the [state] government in 2010, and in the 2016 presidential election, the state went Republican for the first time in three decades.
How did Wisconsin go from electing Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016? Dan Kaufman, author of “The Fall of Wisconsin,” assesses the state’s changing tides:
Wisconsin has gone from being a widely admired “laboratory of democracy” to a testing ground for national conservatives bent on remaking American politics. Its century-old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually every area: labor rights, environmental protection, voting rights, government transparency.
As Gov. Scott Walker campaigns for a third term, new polls indicate that public opinion of various economic and environmental conditions is low.
We’ll discuss how the changing political landscape has impacted life in Wisconsin — and vice versa — and what’s next for the once-progressive state.
The show originates from WAMU radio in Washington, D.C., which means I will be on a radio station in a place I’ve never been to, though as readers know that didn’t stop me from appearing on the BBC World Service earlier this year. Actually, since this is on NPR nationwide I will be on the air in a lot of places I’ve never been to. (I therefore should be nervous, I suppose.)
The show is on WAMU (88.5 FM for Washington-area listeners) from 10 a.m. to noon and 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern time. It’s on WPR from 1 to 3 p.m. Central time. Our discussion will be on WAMU live at 11 Eastern, 10 Central, and on WPR at 2 p.m. Central time, which means I guess I’ll be able to hear myself after I’m done talking.
As you might imagine — spoiler alert! — I will be taking an opposing view, or views, from the author and the third guest, a fellow Wisconsin Public Radio Week in Review alumnus who apparently suggested me for this. (I might start, perhaps, with questioning the term “once-progressive state,” which infers that most Wisconsinites bought everything the Progressives did.)
-
Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Today in 1979 was one of the most bizarre moments in baseball history and/or radio station history:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 