{Glenn's Picks #3] 8 outrageously great old musical film clips

[Glenn Allen Howard]




Hi Folks,

Welcome to GP #3- a brand spankin’ new stash of “old” film clips  
scientifically designed to straighten your slacks and iron your undies!

I've been working the past several weeks cruisin' youtube for buried  
treasures and have rounded up another nice little pot of gold for all  
you YouthTubers and Grouch Potatoes to dig.  Don’t try this at  
home – I can do it faster & more efficiently since I’ve been  
collecting music on film almost as long as I been pilin’ up the  
vinyl. I already know what exists, and only a small fraction is up  
there in cyberspace.

You wouldn't believe how much youseless, tubeless trash I've waded  
through, but buried deep in the swill are some real gems: clips from  
old movies, TV, newsreels, and documentaries containing incredible  
music of all styles and eras.

The concept of this little missive is that I'll post one email every  
week or two (or three), containing links to 5-10 brilliant old  
musical clips.  Anyone can join the list and start getting these  
posts, and anyone can leave the list by unsubscribing. No one can see  
your email address and it won’t be sold into slavery or shared with  
anyone outside of the AMHF and yours truly.

I’ve scribbled some semblance of program notes for your education  
and Edison-ification, which start right after the links.
If you got any kind of “kind” speakers, now’s the time to plug  
‘em in and turn ‘em up!


1.  Yardbirds  “Train Kept A-Rollin”    1967

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zeza1xeWKM

2.  Carl Perkins   “Glad All Over” 1956

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWSkGw6lIqk

3.  Bukka White  “Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues”       1966

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMpHHSLSlc

4.  Fats Waller & Bill “Bojangles” Robinson  “Livin’ in a  
Great Big Way”     1935

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-MGuYHS8rY

5.  Baby Rose Marie  “My Bluebird’s Singin’ the Blues”    1934

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmok0Ugk3Fs

6.  Les Paul & Mary Ford with Alastair Cooke  “How High the  
Moon”   1953

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YA_RINQySU

7.  Duke Ellington & His Cotton Club Orch.    “Old Man Blues”   1930

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofImnBpf7aE

8.  Cannonball Adderley  “The Work Song”  1962

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBxAC4ywaJ4




OK, that's the gold; here come the notes.  You should be at least  
this tall to go on this ride or get least guidance from somebody  
else’s parents.  If you are easily offended by any kind of off – 
beatnik humor and satire, you can bail on the notes.  Now fasten your  
seat belts and ready or not, off we go into the wild blue...

******************************************************

Yardbirds  “Train Kept A-Rollin”    1967

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zeza1xeWKM

Here’s one especially for the little kiddies under 70 who have yet  
to crawl out from under the “rock music only” wigset to dig the  
solid soil from which it all sprang.  This little Limey cover of the  
Johnny Burnette Trio’s cover of the R & B hep-cat hero Tiny  
Bradshaw’s smoke-stackin’, skin-singein’ 78 has 2 out of 3 of  
the best six-string slingers that this artificially in-seminal band  
ever came up with.

Jeff Beck totally rips away the film frames from the new kid on the  
block, Jimmy Page.  Unlike the Who’s tedious repetition of their  
endlessly predictable finale, the damage done here springs from the  
storyline and the more realistic reaction to the cause and effect of  
a bum amp.  The neck that gets tossed to the turf towards the happy  
ending nowadays would make enough gold on eBay to keep the Townsend  
Plan in disposable guitars for a whole tour.  Once upon a Woodstock,  
the old deaf boy was caught on film actually tossing his guitar  
“virgo intacto” to some lucky cat in the crowd.  Now that showed  
some class.

Now I hate to come off as a native Californian chauvinist pig (which  
I am), but I wouldn’t take nothin’ for my journey now and I  
believe “The West is the best, get here and we’ll do the rest.”

Dig the mod–au–go–go threads on these swingin’ London  
derrierres, flaunting their conspicuous-consumerism that was the   
philosophical flipside of the West Coast bohemian scene as laid down  
for real and for thrift-store cheap at the very same time and space  
coordinates in the lovely little neighborhood called the Haight.

The culture that we all think of as “the world-famous sixties”  
emanated from Berkeley, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Santa Cruz and  
if you were somewhere else, you got something else that was, to those  
of us who were here for the chaos, not as cool.

These expensive rags from Carnivoreby Street cost these Brit-cats  
each a day job that the Best Coast professional hippies couldn’t  
afford to bother with–especially seein’ as to how they used to be  
able to completely coast on less than 2000 clams a year. And like,  
why the hell should they do a full time forty per for 50 out of 52  
when high quality antique clothes and costumes could be had for a tad  
in the thrifts, or for nada at the Diggers’ Free Store?

The more brutish British youth “couture” didn’t dig that the  
time (especially that time) was worth way more than the money needed  
to score the synthetic fibers that the fascist fashionistas were  
pushing and peddling to the naïve natives of the mother country. I  
may be overly “Mary Quant contrary,” but the English “hippies”  
tended to be good little clueless consumers eagerly serving a  
sentence of forty a week just so they could be seen on the scene at a  
dance in a chrome-coloured coat and a pair of red and yellow striped  
plastic pants.  St. Zappa sang in ‘67 “who cares if you’re so  
poor you can’t afford to buy a pair of mod–au–go–go stretch  
elastic pants.”  I think he had a point there and he was from L.A.

Note that until the axe gets split and has an out–of–guitar body  
experience, the teens move and groove at about the same speed as the  
current crop of Seattle hipsters who dance the freeze to generally  
groove-less indie-pop which is goin’ at like a screamin’ zero  
point zero miles per. Can you get any whiter than these frozen  
freaks?  Only if Ms. Medusa is making eyes atcha.

That said, I still have a soft spot in my skull for this raucous  
little rock band and caught them live a couple of times, including an  
afternoon at the Fillmore. I was all of 18 or 19 and hadn’t scored  
the rare original versions yet- so I thought the tune was theirs.  
I’m still 18 or 19 when I’m groovin’ to this one. I can still  
play their version on the guitar.  Have a nice rave-up.



2.  Carl Perkins   “Glad All Over” 1956

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWSkGw6lIqk

All the Yardbirds but Bird himself came up boppin’ to Carl Perkins– 
a real cool cat. He got a flat car and a hitch in the hospital  
tryin’ to make his way to the Sullivan show, which gave Elvis an  
early edge and kept him off of his blue suedes and in the backseat  
for a solid year–which is not where he ever belonged.

Ain’t no doubt about it, it musta been love when the rock hit my  
little head and heart in the third or fourth grade. I passively  
signed myself up for a 2 year course in rock ‘n’ roll, from the  
forkin’ top forty of all places, before some Dick clocked in with 30  
pieces of Payola and switched it over to all the Frankies, Bobbys and  
other teen idles that bored me stiff and put a damper on lookin’ to  
the tube for any kind of solid sounds.

Rockabilly was unceremoniously removed from the radio by the evil  
grownups by ’59 so we kids wouldn’t grow up to become Juvenile  
Delinquents.  Nice try, Mr. “Father Knows Zip” (as in the TV  
show), but the seeds had already been sown which would sprout in just  
a few and with far more flying colors than their out-cold martini- 
mindsets could have ever conjured.

In total desperation, I went as far as getting into classical music  
for a couple of choruses in and around the Stanford scene, where  
“good music” was a code word for Mozart and that crowd- no matter  
poorly it was executed. With the exception of a couple of gigs I  
caught when Stravinsky was bribed and showed up to shake his stick, I  
witnessed more executions (called recitals) than any Texas governor,  
bar W or his egg–suckin’ successor.

They were very adamant that NO Gershwin need apply, ‘cause it was  
too accessible to the lower 7 or 8 classes, which included the  
unmentionable Blacks (excuse me, Negroes) and Jews so critical to the  
core content of America’s real classical music genres. Like all the  
great styles, it comes from the underclass, not from the  
upperclassmen and fratheads, and definitely not from the poison ivy- 
covered ivory towers where they were pushin’ the likes of Walter  
Piston till I got finally got totally pissed off.

I’m lookin’ for a classical clip as cool as this one from the  
Carlster that’s worth throwin’ your way, but the pickin’s are  
mighty slim.  Fortunately, there is no need to look at much recorded  
after 1964.

Luckily, before long a hip kid named Pete Clark crossed the tracks,  
my path and my eardrums, and steered me on to the Wolfman and the  
black stations that were hidin’ in the colored section of the mostly  
whites-only radio dial and I began to drinkin’ heavily from the  
“colored fountain” by ‘62.

To keep a long story from getting very much longer, this marked the  
beginning of my collecting and my education. I didn’t learn shinola  
from school about music though I kept tryin’. You have to learn it  
from records and clips like these, since the books are only good  
after you’ve pre-dug the sounds they are writin’ about.   Maybe  
someday they’ll teach the good stuff startin’ in grade school, but  
I wouldn’t be waitin’ under water for that day without a large  
economy size tank or two of 02 to help see you through.



3.  Bukka White  “Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues”       1966

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMpHHSLSlc

After waxing “Streamline Special” and a small gaggle of slippery  
slide masterpieces in the dawn before the “second” in a series of  
Great Wars, this black man named White was unearthed early in the  
sixties search for the old masters of the country blues.  Naturally,  
St. Christopher Strachwitz was one of the first (with John Fahey) to  
pony up the pennies to post this primitive into and onto the grooves  
of a Classic Arhoolie LP--which can still be had directly from this  
Silesian–American daddy-o.

Nobody in the nation pulled more rhythm out of a National guitar than  
Booker T. Washington White on this sweet little shorty from sixties.   
Catch The Man’s hands as he whomps them wires on down.

There wouldn’t be no rock ‘n’ roll without this kind a shit  
goin’ down first.



4.  Fats Waller & Bill “Bojangles” Robinson  “Livin’ in a  
Great Big Way”     1935

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-MGuYHS8rY

The original “Fat Man” of the ivories was really hittin’ his  
stride and his jive in ’35, for his first foray into filmsville with  
none other than the “Mayor of Harlem,” Bill “Bojangles”  
Robinson, who was already well known to the Northern “lights” from  
stealin’ scenes from the tiniest upstager, little Shirley Temple.

The Southern “lights” were clueless since studio censors sliced  
their sweet stompin’ right out of her features for fear that any  
kind of white girl would be tarnished by any kind of proximity to a  
black cat with only two talented legs–let alone to go shinin’ a  
light on the frames where they were holding hands.  Generally tagged  
as Top Tap Cat of all time, Bill tapped out the beats from his big  
black hand to her little white one, so she could pick up on the  
rhythm for her footsies to follow.

Maybe the Dixiecraps were onto somethin’ after all, since Shirley  
later scribbled down that she loved that old man, like the most!

By the by, the evicted chick-let is Jeni LeGon from way outside of  
the outskirts of Gonesville, USA, a suburb just south of Nowhere  
Fast. If you Giggle the internet you can find a few lines to the  
effect that after this, her first feature, she danced a few more feet  
of film before dumping the whole song and dance routine for some  
dramatic roles--including the classic creeper “I Walked with a  
Zombie.”  Having danced with Tapman & Waller on her first go  
‘round, she laid down a hard riff to beat out for top billing in the  
Wicki-Wacki Pedia should they ever get hip enough to slip her a page.



5.  Baby Rose Marie  “My Bluebird’s Singin’ the Blues”         
1934

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmok0Ugk3Fs

Little Shirley T. may have sparkled plenty, but this hip little  
kitten got all the way down, and dug deeply into the likes of Bessie  
Smith and Cab Calloway. Comin’ up the in the depths of what now  
appears to be the first in a series of Great Depressions, she  
conquered the airwaves while Little Miss Temple became the ruling Fox  
for Samuel Goldwyn and the 20th Century Studio Cats flicker factory  
in Hollywoodland, CA.  Outside of the small crowd that caught BRM’s  
act during last days of Vaudeville, until she made the scene on the  
silver screen, huge swaths of the general public thought she was  
really a full-sized female ‘cause her cords rang too lowdown and  
loose for such a sweet little papoose.

After the usual child star crash and burn, she flipped a Phoenix and  
finagled her way onto the idiot box in the glory days of Camelot as  
the wise-cracking, bleach blondie, hubby-hunting Sally Rogers on the  
almost hip, but straight, “Dick Van Dyke Show.”  Even then, she  
still swung out with one of the biggest basso-profundos in the whole  
wide mother-mundo



6.  Les Paul & Mary Ford with Alastair Cooke  “How High the Moon”  
1953

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YA_RINQySU

Here’s another fabulous film find from my faithful high-tech  
sidekick and saddle-sortie pal on this quazy quest, John Gilmore.   
Most of you major musicheads are sick of picking up on the now  
tedious tale of Sir Paul and the Ur days of multi-tracking, but here  
they are in fifty-fuckin’ three, demonstrating “The New Sound of  
Les Paul & Mary Ford,” in front of your own eyeballs and earlobes  
just as it was going down in real time with one of the cooler 50s TV  
host-us Cookies that ever descended a staircase not even in the nude.

Alastair’s son John played bluegrass with Harvard’s Charles River  
Valley Boys, most famously on the 1966 novelty LP, “Beatle  
Country” which turned the Fab Four’s grass blue long after they  
were already grazin’ on the green.  Little John followed that act  
with an attempt to road manage her most unmanageable highness, Janis  
Joplin. Shows what kind of trouble a Harvard sheepskin and a  
bluegrass addiction can get you into–since he became a roads scholar.

How many of you spotted the cute little guitar with the Bigsby tail  
that’s worth a few thousand double-dozen super-smackers today, even  
if it hadn’t been his? Three years later, (check the GP#3’s second  
clip), Carl Perkins is drivin’ the exact same model.

I rate this (on a scale of 1-10) an e-z  11 and a half swinging solid  
bodies, buddy.

By the wayside, Les wasn’t the first to release an overdubbed  
effort.  The engineers at the RCA studios were neglecting their  
locomotives and goofin’ around with this frantic fomula in the lab  
one day when the first very first jazz virtuoso, New Orleans Creole  
kitty, Sidney Bechet, fell in on these studio studs.  Tape recording  
was absolutely unknownsville outside of Naziland, so the Sidster  
whipped it onto serial wax discs for 5 in a row, on my Grand-mammy’s  
53rd birth of the cool day, April 18, 1941, no less.



7.  Duke Ellington & His Cotton Club Orch.    “Old Man Blues” 1930

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofImnBpf7aE

This is one of the “hipper clippers” I’ve been able to nip from  
the net, and is from the Golden Era of Harlem’s ‘jungle music”  
period, when it was cool for jazz to be hot–PERIOD!  Dig!  For those  
of you that are keepin’ score, that’s Art Wentzel, Freddy Jenkins  
and Cootie Williams blowing their brains out through their trumpets,  
Tricky Sam Nanton & Juan Tizol are teasin’ the two trombones, Johnny  
Hodges, Harry Carney and Barney Bigard are wreckin’ the reed  
section, and the rhythm boys are the Duke on the pianola,  Freddy Guy  
is the guy on the guitar, Wellman Braud is badddd on the doghouse  
bass and Sonny Greer grins & grooves behind a paleozoic drum kit.

I’m hip that the critics spill an awful lot of ink over his 1939-42  
combo, but most of the original “jungle” cast are right up front  
here–blowin’ their gold right before your very eyesockets.  This  
little congregation was “hotter” and much more “over-the-top”  
than the later Orchestra, in fact, this band burned to beat the  
banned.  They hadn’t yet become darlings of the critics, since there  
weren’t any in 1930, nor had they been influenced by their  
“white” writing, since unlike most of the leading honkers, the  
first generation of writers were pretty much all semi-hip honkies, at  
best.

Check the 20’s hipsters! How cool it was to be young, white and  
diggin’ the Duke back in the days of Hawaiian ukes and bootleg puke,  
when the flappers were flippin’ and flaskin’ and profits were  
pilin’ up in bales in the back room of the famous Cotton Club.  It  
was the cats pajamas, the bee’s knees and 23-skiddoo all put together!

Like the old song sorta says, “Hail, hail, the gangs(ters) are all  
here! What the hell do we care, what the hell do we care.”

Maybe we should have cared, ‘cause while the government prohibition- 
promoters were stackin’ the kickbacks, and bankin’ the bribes, the  
bad guys were electin’ their own and takin’ over the whole show.  
Their grand-gangster kids have been in the re-run business since well  
before Nixon hipped us all that he wasn’t a “crook.”

What a crooked crock of crap–especially now that the whole  
country’s piggy bank is runnin’ on empty, with Endsville  
creepin’ up on the horizon’s radar screen–scene. I’m  
thinkin’ Lincoln would say, “It’s time to tax that Ex-lax and  
free the salves and the slaves.”



8.  Cannonball Adderley  “The Work Song”  1962

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBxAC4ywaJ4

The original host of the “Tonight Show,” Steve Allen, was actually  
hip.  He had the juice to get a for real contemporary jazz show on  
the Network, but in the brand new 1962 America, “the land of the  
fleeced,” the hipsters were far too few and the sheep were stuck in  
the square sewer of commercial TV-land weren’t ready for much beyond  
Dixieland and Swing.

Cannonball’s Sextet nails one of his brother Nat’s big royalty- 
rakers, makin’ him a nose full of nickels with nary a nod to showbiz  
or TV BS.  They play completely straight ahead with not a single  
square visible through the Viewmaster or workin’ anywhere on the set  
to bring the whole program down. In my own little dream house in  
Sleepsville, they would have worked in a couple of choruses with  
Oscar Brown singing, but this band is enough to wash and wax my  
peepers for keepers.

Joe Zawinul plays a mean piano solo minus the plug– years before he  
had to walk to school for miles (and Miles) and electric light-years  
before he had to report for duty with the Weather-men.

Stick around for the credits and take in a tour of some of the  
swinginest front porches of the era’s jazz clubs.  It’s sweet to  
eyeball the places where so many classics were waxed (and more often,  
not waxed) and to check out all the 1962 jazz cats and kittens.

If you aren’t already holding, bop on down to the local Disc Den and  
scarf up a copy of Oscar’s “Sin & Soul.”  This is not an  
elective, it is a required text at the AMHF and GlennsPicks.  After  
you’ve sounded those sides, slip on out of the recovery room post- 
haste and start marchin’ through (but not in front of) the rest of  
O.B. Jr.’s canon. Better beware though, ‘cause it will lay a big  
sound on your nervous system before it takes you back to “cool.”

I still have a few sealed original pressings of one of Oscar’s  
personal favorite vinyl LP’s “Joy.”  He asked me to pick up  
every copy I could score for him, which amounted to several small  
stacks over the centuries, but he checked out before I could whip  
this last little stash on him.  They’re a dime each ($10), plus $4  
for the Stamp Tax and the mailer, while they last.  I just used up  
all my Aztechnology chops and Giggled the net to troll for “Joy”  
CD’s” and found there was Nathan Shakin’ in the digital do- 
mainline so it’s vinyl or nothin’.  Is there still anyone out  
there who hasn’t got the word that vinyl (let alone sealed vinyl)  
stomps digital into the dirt? CDs are for convenience, not for  
fidelity.  If its worth hearing, it’s worth hearing right. So send  
your box tops in by midnight tomorrow and I’ll whip a copy onya.

At the AMHF, we take care of the original analog records.  They are  
the hard copies and the analog masters of our planet’s culture.

Meanwhile, here’s a Howard’s ‘hip tip” to guarantee that you  
get at least the bare minimum of a maximum wig flip from all the film  
clips: This stuff is ALL good, but maybe your taste–buds and taste– 
buddys have hangups about all those “other” kinds of music that  
are not the relatively few styles you’ve been using up all your  
minutes on.  Take at least 3 turns on each link before you give it up  
and if you still don’t dig it, you can crawl back in your hole  
knowin’ that at least you tried to get it.  Expanding your musical  
horizons has never been, and will never get any easier than it will  
be here at GlennsPicks.

Catch you later, when I swing back with some more hot links.   
They’ll be as cool as a one-sided Sousa 78 - smooth on the flipside  
and one big groove up front.

Are there any groups I haven’t offended yet?  ––Mort Sahl

Later for that, cats & kittens,

Glenn Howard

=======================================
Glenn Allen Howard
Founder, Curator
American Musical Heritage Foundation

(831) 335-4356
PO Box 66224
Santa Cruz County CA 95067

(360) 691-2105
PO Box 163
Arlington, WA 98223

glennallenhoward at yahoo.com




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