A taste of honey
My dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny links me to this, last night.
Lookit them crackers play. And i bet not one of them was on coke or dope at the time, just good old brown liquor. Right out of the era of “Mad Men”. And these were the first time around for these songs, outside the black community. They were already being reprised when it was Herb Alpert doing them in the 60’s and 70’s.
How can I be so old, when I feel so immature?
12 comments Og | Uncategorized
Man, do I know that feeling. Was thinking about the last 30 years and how quickly they have passed.
Scary shit.
I surrendered to it. Herb Alpert is on my Ipod.
Wow.
Wasn’t this the theme song for “Honey”, the blonde, female PI in the 60s just before Hawaii 50?
YeOldFurt
Would that be Honey West with Ann Francis? and I don’t believe that was the theme.
I don’t know that I’d bet so firmly against the dope or coke. Neither of those are new to “our” era.
Re: 60s/70s
I have to concentrate on the fact that the 80s weren’t just a few years ago (how did that 29-year-old at work get to be so much younger than I am? And why doesn’t he remember Jimmy Carter?)
Q
Actually, that came from a musician friend of mine. The drugs didn’t come in vogue with cracker jazz musicians till later, she says; these guys were probably hard drinkers.
I knew a member of the WH band from a tad later (early ’70s). I can assure you, the band DID smoke, but were NEVER high on stage. Woody would have fired them.
M
ONBTW, you may also remember that “A Taste of Honey” was also covered by the Beatles.
M
Oh, hell, I’m trying to think of a band that didn’t cover it! Streisand, the Rascals, Chet baker!!
I think the point Jenny was making to me was that that sort of thing was very much frowned upon at that time, so she assumed they were just plain old drunks.
“In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.” That sort of attitude.
Grass was fairly common among musicians at that time, but as you said, they didn’t go stoned on stage.
Coke and “bennies” were also not uncommon among the jazz musicians, but not too many were dependent on them; their talents and abilities would have degraded under too much dependence.
Oh no, I personally know people from the Herman Band — one of them in that video — and they were not too picky, there’s drunks and dopers and Methodists in that ensemble.
Woody turned a blind eye to a lot of stuff — but he would fire your ass if you were high on stage. (The attitude of most bandleaders, in fact.)
He didn’t hire blacks in his band until the 1970s because the band toured extensively for a whole lot of years and he was afraid of reprisals in the south — or worse, cancelled bookings. He was not personally a bigot, trombonist Phil Wilson says, and I believe Phil. It’s hard to keep a band in business — there’s few big bands today and that’s one reason why, they’re too expensive to operate profitably — and Woody was focused on keeping them keeping on.
Here’s that same Herd jumping off on a Charles Mingus tune — Woody did appreciate black artists, as this is damn near note for note off the Mingus recording.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oox_tfU9ti4
By the time I saw the band for the first time live — in the 1970s — they not only had an integrated band but wore dashikis, which made me giggle the first time I saw it and even more today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFPhsXu8EWo
Jenny