Insight: The Stranger, Bookends and the Ring of Fire

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Every single day, in some way, shape or form, music touches my life. And I’m a better person for it.

Last weekend, my wife Nancy and I spent time visiting several thrift shops and antique stores and we each found something to bring home. She is into sewing and with the time speeding by until a new grandchild is born in March, she’s been busy accumulating fabric to turn into clothing and other items for the baby. As for me, I always find a record album or two during these excursions to add to my growing collection.

On this trip, I brought home Billy Joel’s 1977 recording “The Stranger” priced at only $5, and Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 “Bookends,” also for $5. I also bought a “Peter Paul and Mary” album for $3. Considering those to be genuine bargains, you can only imagine my surprise when I noticed a pristine copy of 1963’s “The Best of Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire” for $12. I brought four all-time classic recordings home for just $25.

That Billy Joel album remains one of my favorites, and I am lucky to say that I saw him and his band perform it live during his “Just the Way You Are” tour at the Frankfurt Zoo in Germany in 1978. I was stationed in Frankfurt in the U.S. Air Force at the time and a friend called and asked if I wanted him to purchase tickets for the concert. I was able to scrape up the $20 and the next evening, my wife and I joined our friend and his wife to walk two blocks to the zoo for the show.

The Frankfurt Zoo Auditorium featured a small stage facing 300 folding chairs with 150 on each side divided by an aisle. We sat near the aisle in the third row, and I was completely mesmerized by how great the acoustics were there. At one point, Billy Joel stepped off the stage and ran up and down the aisle while singing and I certainly felt that he gave a great performance that night.

If you’ve watched the movie “Almost Famous,” you’ve probably seen the cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” album. It’s a black and white image of the two singers and in the film, actress Zooey Deschanel brings the album home and her mother, portrayed by actress Frances McDormand, disapproves. Deschanel says that the music of Simon and Garfunkel is poetry, but McDormand says “Yes, it's poetry. It is the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex.”

The “Bookends” album contains an interesting mix of catchy tunes including “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” “At the Zoo,” “Mrs. Robinson” (from the 1967 film “The Graduate”), and “America.” Deschanel plays “America” from “Bookends” to explain to her mother why she’s leaving home to become a flight attendant. At one time in the 1970s, I owned the Simon and Garfunkel album “Bookends” on 8-Track tape for my car, but that’s another story for another time.

Growing up in the 1960s, I loved listening to Peter Paul and Mary but have never previously owned one of their albums. This was their first album on the Warner Brothers label in 1962 and includes classic folk songs such as “500 Miles,” “Where Have All The Flowers Gone,” “If I Had A Hammer,” and “Lemon Tree.” I was on my way to the front of the store to pay for the other records I had found when I noticed the “Peter Paul and Mary” album. Its cost of $3 was less than a gallon of gas and it promises to be a much-beloved part of my collection, especially since it was the first folk music album to ever reach the top position in America on the Billboard Popular Music chart.

The weekend after the New Year’s holiday, Nancy and I went to the theater to see the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.” Scenes in that movie depict the friendship between Dylan and Johnny Cash and although I’m not much of a country music afficionado, I am aware that Johnny Cash is truly a legend, and through the years I have come to appreciate his music.

Finding “The Best of Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire” album was indeed a stroke of luck. The distinctive purple album cover, and the LP inside it are in near-mint condition, and it’s a tangible piece of history now residing in my music room. Released in July 1963, sales for “The Best of Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire” grew over the rest of that year and it was the first #1 album when Billboard debuted their “Country Album Chart” on Jan. 11, 1964. Some new copies of the soon-to-be 62-year-old album are selling for $35 currently on Amazon.

With each passing day, I’m so grateful to have rebuilt my home stereo system last summer. I even have co-workers contribute albums to my collection. Over Christmas, Melissa Carter of The Windham Eagle was in Goodwill and found two old Neil Diamond albums which she purchased and gave to me.

For me, music rekindles past memories, it helps me travel to places I wouldn’t normally visit, and awakens my sense of creativity. <

Andy Young: Changing of the guard at the National Statuary

By Andy Young

The National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C. contains 101 full-body sculptures of important individuals, including two from each state. The 101st is of Rosa Parks, who represents either no particular state or every state, depending on the eye of the beholder.

The National Statuary Hall is in Washington, D.C.
COURTESY PHOTO

The gallery houses a wide variety of statues depicting famous Americans. A likeness of Virginia’s George Washington is there, as are representations of Ohio’s Thomas Edison, Alabama’s Helen Keller, and Dwight Eisenhower of Kansas. Not everyone represented is well-known, though. How many Americans are familiar with Iowa’s Norman Borlaug, Father Damien of Hawaii, Esther Hobart Morris of Wyoming, or Po’pay of New Mexico?

Perhaps surprisingly, inclusion in America’s de facto Hall of Fame isn’t necessarily permanent. Individual states can choose to remove one or both of their representatives and replace them with others, which is why the gallery is about to add a statue of its first professional musician, thanks to Arkansas’s legislature having passed a bill five years ago allowing the state to displace its two previous honorees.

Designating Johnny Cash, who’ll be depicted holding a guitar and a Bible, to take the place of James P. Clarke, a professed racist who served as the state’s governor for two years in the late 1880s, seems like a no-brainer. So does the other half of the 2019 legislation, which designated Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, a civil rights champion and key figure in the contentious but ultimately successful desegregation of Little Rock’s schools in 1957, as the replacement for Uriah M. Rose, who pledged allegiance to the Confederacy and renounced his U.S. citizenship in order to retain his county judgeship during the Civil War.

It’s not just Arkansas that’s changing direction. Thirteen other honorees have been replaced since the start of the 21st century, and Julius Sterling Morton of Nebraska, Philo T. Farnsworth of Utah, and Marcus Whitman of Washington are all scheduled to be supplanted (by Willa Cather, Martha Hughes Cannon, and Billy Frank, Jr., respectively) in the not-too-distant future.

Other recent additions to the Hall include North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham, a replacement for avowed white supremacist Charles Brantley Aycock, who served as the state’s governor from 1901 to 1905, and Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who, in Omaha’s U.S. District court in 1879, successfully argued that Native Americans had civil rights. He occupies a spot formerly held by Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president who spent his twilight years arguing against the teaching of evolution.

Replacements will likely continue coming to the National Statuary. Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, is inexplicably still one of the two Mississippians displayed in the gallery. The other is a fellow slave owner James Z. George, a politician and Confederate military officer.

Two schools of thought exist regarding the replacing of various figures from the National Statuary. On one hand, extracting strident racists, misogynists, ethnic cleansers and other autocratic bullies from the gallery of esteemed Americans seems like a step in the right direction. However, opponents of removing statues of historical figures that spent their lives enslaving and/or oppressing fellow Americans based on race, creed, or gender argue history is still history, and posthumously condemning those who engaged in conduct considered odious today but that was common amongst their contemporaries is counterproductive. Whitewashing history doesn’t change it, they maintain.

Thankfully money has nothing to do with who’s in and who’s out at the National Statuary. But like it or not, next month James P. Clarke’s likeness is going to be removed in favor of a cold, hard Cash. <

Andy Young: No one names their son August

By Andy Young

When it comes to months, August is literally and figuratively not cool.

Aside from being longer than February, April, June, September, and November, the eighth twelfth of the calendar doesn’t have a lot going for it. The eastern United States is consistently hot and uncomfortably humid during August, and while the clamminess factor isn’t as bad in America’s west, that’s chiefly because much of that area is on fire at this time of year.

And as for Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, well, when the temperature is hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk by 8 a.m., it really doesn’t matter what the humidity is.

August isn’t any more attractive in the southern hemisphere either. Winter lingers for a full 31 days this month from the mountains of Chile to Argentina’s southern tip, Tierra Del Fuego. It’s not just South America where August winters drag on; waterfalls freeze over in the African nation of Lesotho, inland alpine areas of New Zealand can see temperatures nosedive to 10 degrees below zero Celsius, and Antarctica is so cold that polar bears won’t even travel there, despite all the delicious waddling birds in the area. August is equally unappealing in both hemispheres. It’s a hot mess in the summer and a cold mess in the winter. It’s also a month without an identity.

Think about it: January commences with New Year’s Day celebrations. February has Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day is synonymous with March.

April showers bring May flowers and Memorial Day, June means school’s out for summer, and July 4 is all about cookouts and fireworks.

September: Labor Day weekend. October: Halloween. November: Thanksgiving. December: Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa, with New Year’s Eve for dessert.

What’s August got? Ceaseless humidity, millions of acres of forest fires, and cold so intense that even ravenous polar bears won’t make the effort to swim a few thousand miles to a veritable penguin buffet.

Another thing concerning August that needs to be discussed, if delicately: its name. Let me preface this by admitting that as a male Caucasian of above-average height born in the United States of America who speaks fluent English with no discernible accent, I should not be allowed to complain about anything. That’s why the following observation should not be considered a grievance, but rather as mere food for thought.

How come there are three female months, but only one that’s got a male name?

The second quarter of the calendar year consists of three lovely months with three lovely names. In addition to Daisy Duck’s three nieces there are, according to various internet sources, legions of accomplished women named April, May, or June.

There is one reasonably well-known male June, but he comes with an asterisk. The only reason the man who once quarterbacked the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and coached the University of Hawaii’s football team was christened June Sheldon Jones III was that his father was June Sheldon Jones, Jr.

Now compare the amount of splendid and accomplished Aprils, Mays, and Junes there are with the number of prominent Augusts. Well, let’s see. There’s August Anheuser Busch, the son of the founder of the Anheuser-Busch brewing company. And there’s August A. Busch, Jr., and August A. Busch III, and August A. Busch IV, and … well, that’s about it for distinguished Augusts.

I imagine those Busch boys got teased incessantly over their first name. Guys like February Johnson, July Rodriguez and November Williams never had to put up with that.

With apologies to Johnny Cash, being a boy named Sue is a day at the beach compared to being a month named August. <