Sing Along With O.J. Simpson's Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band...

It was twenty years ago today

Police chased the Bronco driving O.J.

He’s been going in and out of jail

Couldn’t sell his Heisman Trophy for bail

So may I introduce to you

The back you cheered for all those years

O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band

We’re O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band

The Juice used to be an All-Pro

We’re O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band

He did his running in a Bronco

O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in, O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in

O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band

It’s horrible to be here

It’s like being a Buffalo Bill

Such a huge TV audience

He’d like to take you home with him

He’d love to stab you at home

I don’t really want to stop the chase

But Marcia’s gotta prosecute the case

And O.J.’s fingers in the glove are too long

So the jury got the verdict wrong

So let me introduce to you

The one and only Orenthal James

And O.J. Simpson’s Stabbed in the Hearts Club Band

Knife...Scissors...SHEARS!

What would you do 'bout the lives led to ruin?

Would you stand up and render Guilty?

Lend me your ears and I’ll show you how wrong

You would be not to set me free

Oh, I get by with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, I won’t fry with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, gonna lie with a little help from the Dream Team

What do I do when my love’s cold awhile?

(Does it bother you that you killed her?)

How do I feel by the end of the trial?

(Where’d you like the price of your soul billed, sir?)

No, I get by with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, I won’t fry with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, gonna lie with a little help from the Dream Team

(Do you need anybody?)

I need somebody to kill

(Could it be anybody?)

My ex-wife and the waiter from Ill.

Would you believe that the glove is too tight?

Yes, I’m certain that it does not fit

Would you convict if the jury were white?

I can’t tell you but you must acquit

Oh, I get by with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, I won’t fry with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, gonna lie with a little help from the Dream Team

(Do you need anybody?)

I need somebody to kill

(Could it be anybody?)

My ex-wife and the waiter from Ill.

Oh, I get by with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, I won’t fry with a little help from the Dream Team

Mm, gonna lie with a little help from the Dream Team

Yes, I get by with a little help from the Dream Team

With a little help from the Dre-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-heem Team!

(Thanks to Drinkmore Pat for Photoshop guidance; GIF of chase copyright CNN.) 

It's Not a Nerd, It's Too Inane...It's Soviet Superman!

Pat e-mailed the rest of the Drinkmore crew this panel today. It’s from Superman: Red Son, a three-issue comic book produced in 2003 and premised on Kal-El having landed in Ukraine rather than the United States and grown up a Soviet “citizen,” fighting a never-ending battle for Josef Stalin and the Red Army rather than Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Although I’ve never read Red Son, aside from the canon of the story, in which the Soviet Union apparently becomes the predominant superpower and the United States produces super-villains to destroy both it and Superman, it is readily evident just from this panel why the USSR ultimately failed in its goal of world domination: the Russkies were dopes.

Firstly, Soviet Russia officially adopted the metric system in 1918, almost immediately upon its inception. Now, I’m not saying that Tsar Nicholas II might have saved his and the Royal Family’s tsasses by going metric—after all, the Russian Revolution was more socio-politically than metrically motivated—but I am saying that the Tsar could have substantially improved life under his apathetic reign by standardizing the nation’s AAA maps both internally and to the rest of Europe, vastly simplifying vacation travel for serfs. Even so, why the hell was Soviet Superman calculating in “capitalist” miles instead of “communist” kilometers? Soviet Superman wouldn’t have made it past Russian elementary school—yet he’s the USSR’s ultimate weapon?   

Much more importantly than simple units of measure, look how utterly vague and scatterbrained is the hammer-and-sickle–chested Superman: In a nation that measured more than 6,000 miles east to west and nearly 3,000 miles north to south—an area of 14 million square miles—he’s “pinpointing” a destination more than 3,000 miles away from a known locale.

Three thousand miles west of Vladivostok, a coastal city in the Russian Far East, is just east of the Ural Mountains. However, the Urals stretch north-south for approximately 2,500 miles. Even considering Superman’s incredible flying speed, that’s still precious minutes wasted in a millions-of-square-miles wild-goose chase across the Soviet Union’s spine. How many people will die and homes will burn while the Man of Stoli searches for this chemical fire by needlessly zooming up and down mountainous wilderness of the Urals like Clint Eastwood looking for his refueling point in Firefox?

Considering that Stalin and Soviet Superman are surely in Moscow—4,000 miles west of Vladivostok and thus obviously much closer to the chemical fire than that cross-continental port city—citing Vladivostok as a reference point makes absolutely nyet sense. Why not use Yekaterinburg, a major city on the eastern slope of the Urals and approximately those 3,000 miles west of Vladivostok, as the reference point? It’s still almost 900 miles from Moscow, thus preserving the image of Superman heroically coming to the rescue from a great distance yet eliminating the asinine inexactitude that betrays his stupidity. After all, one does not summon emergency services by saying that an ambulance is needed fifty miles west of a town located fifty miles to the east…

That neither Comrade Kent nor Stalin—who also foolishly fails to demand a more-specific location—could not fathom such obvious logic displays the kind of flawed reasoning that led to the USSR’s demise. Would American Superman know to go specifically to San Francisco if he were needed “3,000 miles west of New York”? Of course not—but, possessing the American penchant for individual thought and the free exchange of ideas, you can bet he would look into it, he would at least ask for directions. Little wonder the USSR never landed a man on the moon, conquered capitalism, or beat the Broad Street Bullies in 1976—those Soviets were such slaves to their own narrow-minded system, their overbearing Mother Russia, that they were utterly incapable of thinking even slightly out of the Bloc.

Not that the United States owns an unblemished heritage of geniuses at the helm—the US government hydrogen-bombed its own country more than a thousand times since the end of World War II—but at least our superheroes’ kryptonite isn’t common sense, and our pizza deliverymen get their precious cargo to hungry mouths without empty-headedly basing their route on the customer’s distance from the Cumberland Gap.

(Superman: Red Son panel copyright DC Comics; map of Russia copyright npr.org.)

Abraham, Father of Nations...Abe Vigoda, Father of Patience

Abe Vigoda continues to astonish with his longevity—especially those who thought he died long ago. (The extremely veteran actor has been reported as deceased on at least three occasions over the last thirty years.) Born Abraham Vigoda in February 1921 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he remains the highest-ranking Jew in the history of the Italian Mafia, enjoying the status of caporegime in the Corleone crime family until his forced “retirement.”

Now 93 years old—and having looked ancient for many decades; he was a mere 51 in The Godfather yet appeared easily to be in his mid-sixties—I’m wondering if Vigoda can hold on to become the oldest Abraham in history. Vigoda passed Abraham Lincoln only two months into the run of his spinoff series, Fish, in 1977, and moved into the No. 2 spot in 1986, when he eclipsed Abraham Zapruder, who had proved not up to the challenge by dying, years before, at age 65. Since then, only the biblical Abraham has stood in Vigoda’s way.*

* We can endlessly debate where Abraham Simpson belongs on this list, but the fact is that his birth year has never been revealed. And with the timeline of his life continually in flux, a determination of his true age would be specious at best. Grampa Simpson is a World War II veteran, yet he also claimed to have fought in the First World War, as well as participated in the 1936 Olympic Games. His service in World War II is undoubtedly true—at least, he was certainly old enough to have served—but given Grampa Simpson’s penchant for meandering tall tales and his suspect memory, much of his background cannot be taken as gospel, even though we know he was of an advanced age when he fathered Homer in the mid-1950s. Yes, through flashbacks and glimpses of Simpsons future, we see Grampa and other Springfield residents at different ages, but because of strictly maintained canon, they never actually age—their age at the time of the series’ “birth” is the age that they have remained throughout the canonical run of the series. Therefore, Grampa, an 80-something when The Simpsons premiered in 1989, remains an 80-something today regardless of the fact that nearly a quarter-century has elapsed. So, even though Abraham Simpson once was likely much older than Abe Vigoda, Vigoda has long since reclaimed second place.

Of course, according to Genesis, Abraham lived to the ripe, old age of 175. Now whether you take the Bible at its literal word or dismiss the ages of its many incredulously long-lived characters as gross exaggerations, 175 remains the sole “official” age of record—and a target still so far away that the nonagenarian Vigoda is little more than halfway there.

Still, I believe Abe Vigoda can do it. The key to Vigoda’s long life thus far has been his languid, almost reptilian, movement. Whether shuffling gingerly through the Corleone compound or planted in fatigued misery behind his 12th Precinct desk, Vigoda’s patient, unhurried manner emulates the slow heart rate and conserved body motion of such long-living animals as the elephant, the whale, and the tortoise. Let’s face it: Vigoda even shares the same facial expressions as a tortoise…

Certainly, none of us will be around to see it, but I wouldn’t be shocked in the least if, early in the year 2096, a shriveled-yet-still-filled-with-vim Abe Vigoda quietly becomes the longest-living Abraham in human history.

After all, a 90-something who can take this hit isn’t going any time soon…

Besides, breaking the age record is the smart move...and Tessio was always smartuh.

(Image from Barney Miller copyright ABC; image from The Godfather copyright Paramount Pictures; animated GIF of Snickers ad copyright Mars, Incorporated.)

A Coupe Fit for a Pope—The Cordoba Could've Been a Holy Roller

What if the 1975 Chrysler Cordoba had seats made not from soft Corinthian leather, but from soft Corinthian letters—as in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians? Imagine driving in the plush comfort of parchmented scripture as you get to your destination in style and a state of grace...

I’m surprised Paul VI—the first pope to make formal appearances in a motor vehicle—failed to deem this his “Popemobile.” The 1975 Cordoba certainly was roomy enough to accommodate not only His Holiness, but a trio of his favorite cardinals as well. And with a three-speed, automatic, V8 engine, the Most Holy Father would rest assured that he’d get to his destination with all expedience. Paul VI could even have issued a papal bull re-designating his vehicle as a Chrystler Cordoba...perhaps also decreeing that something from First Corinthians become the brand motto...

Ricardo Montalbán: “The new 1975 Chrystler Cordoba—All things to all men (1 Corinthians 9:22).”

Turning Siamese Would Have Been Quite the Coup d'Etat for All in the Family

Amid the current political upheaval in Thailand, capped by the military coup d’etat of May 22, this is the optimal time to examine why Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, would have made an even better Archie Bunker than Carroll O’Connor. Sure, O’Connor earned four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for his timeless and beloved portrayal of Archie Bunker, who, in turn, helped make All in the Family one of the most culturally significant programs in television history. America laughed for a decade at Archie’s convoluted logic, malapropos and mannerisms, his equal-opportunity bigotry, and his big-hearted narrow-mindedness—all of which mirrored a nation struggling with its own hypocrisy and neuroses by finding the right way to reflect all that was wrong with America.

Still, Chang and Eng Bunker, twin brothers conjoined at the chest by a large segment of cartilage, seem even better suited to the role. Born to Chinese parents in Siam (present-day Thailand), in 1811, the brothers found worldwide celebrity exhibiting themselves on tour as the “Siamese twins” (even rating a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records a century later as the source of the term). The Bunker twins later immigrated to antebellum North Carolina, becoming successful plantation owners—and slave owners, oddly enough, in view of the similarly low status of “Orientals” in that age—as well as naturalized U.S. citizens. Proving more desirable than many “single” men, they fathered twenty-one children between them—literally between them, considering the logistics involved—and died in 1874.

For a show called All in the Family, what could have been more familial than conjoined twins sharing the lead role? Especially with the ability to call Edith a dingbat and Mike a meathead in stereo? Perhaps even opting for the comedic drama of one brother a hard-line, war-hawk conservative and the other a bleeding-heart, pinko-commie liberal, verbally battling each other between orders to Stifle yourself! and moans of Aw, geez, huh? (Their inevitable problems with American enunciation hardly would have been worse than Archie’s butchering of the English language.) I don’t know if the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences would have awarded each brother his own Emmy, presented the two of them with a single prize, or, most likely, bestowed the twins with two individual statuettes soldered together, but Chang and Eng surely would have carted off during the series’ run an armful of them—carried with each lending one arm, of course.

During that narrow, 100-year window between Chang and Eng’s death and the mastering of special effects that now might allow twin Thai actors as talented and charismatic as Carroll O’Connor to appear conjoined—or, in lieu of expensive technical wizardry, at least have them share an XXXXXXXXXXXXL shirt—we certainly were fortunate that O’Connor gave the world Archie. But in a medium in which twins have long been prized both as a source of comedy and conflict, Change and Eng Bunker—the first of their kind, on the first show of its kind—would have yielded twice the laughs.

Boy, the way Yul Brynner played

Years on Broadway Mongkut stayed

Thais like us, double we weighed

Those were the days

And you knew Siamese twins

Didn't quite move like Errol Flynn

Messrs., we could use a man
Like Naresuan the Great again

Didn't need no coup d'etat

Everybody smiled through Buddha

Gee, Bangkok was Shangri-La

Those...were...the...dayssssss!

(Chang puts stogie to mouth with available hand as Eng leans head on Chang’s shoulder)

(Image of Archie Bunker copyright CBS.)

Deep Purple's Deepest Puzzle Solved...Thanks to Judith Owen

Okay, this is a seriously overdue discovery, but you, too, may have been unaware of this: Welsh-born singer-songwriter Judith Owen has righted one of the great wrongs in the history of popular music. Not widely known in pop or rock circles, the velvet-voiced pianist—and wife of humor mainstay Harry Shearer—devotes much of her musical career to jazz and Celtic material that you wouldn’t normally hear in the mainstream…and certainly not on rock stations, despite Owen covering songs by The Kinks, James Taylor, The Police, Mungo Jerry, Shearer’s own Spinal Tap, and Deep Purple.

In 2005, Owen’s Lost and Found album led off with a cover of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Despite being pretty well versed in contemporary music, I never heard her version—which also served as bumper music for the Coast to Coast AM radio show—until this morning. Owen’s wistful and, yes, smoky rendition of the 1972 hard-rock classic—complete with alluring uh-uh-uhh’s in place of Ritchie Blackmore’s immortal riff—adds an extra word to Ian Gillan’s original lyric.

A word that corrects perhaps the most brazen grammatical neglect since December 7th, 1941—a date that will live in infamy (neglect that, in turn, stood as the most egregious transgression in human communication until the 1976 debut of the sitcom What’s Happening!!—with its two vexing exclamation points yet no trace of a question mark).

Even as a six-year-old I was perplexed by “Smoke on the Water”’s Some stupid with a flare gun. Sure, I had yet to embark on the great endeavor of kindergarten, but even though basic grammar, syntax, and parts of speech lay in my future, I recognized—as surely did most adults—something horribly amiss with that line. “What’s a stupid?” I asked myself every time I heard the instantly anthemic tune crackling out of Dad’s car radio. I didn’t yet know what a noun was—but I instinctively knew stupid wasn’t one. In a perversely psychotic twist of poetic license, Ian Gillan, one of the very greatest vocalists in rock music, had forced the square peg into the round hole by singing an adjective as a noun. Somehow, the FCC had done nothing—both it and the BBC couldn’t censor or ban songs containing a drug reference or anything deemed even mildly “subversive” quickly enough in those days, yet they sat on their collective hands as “Smoke on the Water” raced up the charts and addled a generation of preschool minds with grammatical nonsense.

   

Confused and losing alarming amounts of sleep as “Smoke on the Water” saturated the airwaves—and, consequently, my cerebrum—I eventually made excuses for Ian Gillan…

“It was done for meter—following stupid with a noun would have made the couplet too long,” I sometimes placated myself.

Other times—questioning my own rationalism—I fell back to no one in particular on the all-healing mantra, “It’s rock ‘n’ roll, man!”

Yet why didn’t Gillan use a noun in place of stupid? Okay, he might have been lured by the alliteration of some stupid—even at the risk of creating one of the all-time asinine lines—but Gillan still could have achieved this lyrical device by opting for an “s-noun.” Some sod with a flare gun would have worked smashingly. Or if the young bloke from Hounslow had managed in his youth to pick up any Yiddish from the approximately 0.25% of Jewish citizens living in that London suburb (based on 2011 U.K. Census data), even some schmuck with a flare gun.

It might be too cynical to believe that Gillan planned this lyrical faux pas to garner attention—after all, the band self-admittedly operated in a constant whirlwind of sex, booze, and drugs that likely left minds too fogged to know that A is for apple, let alone articulate simple sentence structure. Then again, Deep Purple hadn’t made an impact where the money was—the American singles chart—in nearly four years, when it was essentially an entirely different musical entity. And even though “Smoke on the Water” wasn’t officially released as a single for nearly a year, this signature-tune-in-the-making, with its haunting imagery and relentless crunch, was chiefly responsible for propelling Machine Head into the Top 10 in the United States and breaking Deep Purple as a major force in rock. As far as I was concerned, the song seemed just as provocative because of what was wrong about it as what was right about it. (Not even the hopelessly straight-laced Pat Boone bothered to correct the line in his infamous 1997 lounge-metal cover, probably with the aim of augmenting his pathetically disingenuous attempt at the bad-boy image—so maybe I’m not being too cynical after all.)

Perhaps Ian Gillan’s carelessness even served as the subconscious impetus for me to become an editor all those years later, sowing in my young mind a need to make sense of a bewildering rock ‘n’ roll landscape—a need that I carried into adulthood and from which I have made my living ever since.*

* Not long before “Smoke on the Water”’s release, I had already become well acquainted with another radio hit, America’s “A Horse With No Name,” whose lyrical minefield of a chorus quickly became legend; however, that song lacked the monolithic majesty of Jon Lord’s distorted Hammond C3 organ to produce the same editorial consternation in my young logic center.

Forty-three years later, along comes Judith Owen, like an angel of grammar out of the Welsh mist, not only to cover this most iconic of rock songs, but to fix it, by adding the noun it so dearly lacked lo these many years.

Some stupid fool with a flare gun/Burned the place to the ground  

Hallelujah, Judith. After more than four decades, we finally know who was responsible for starting the fire that destroyed Montreux Casino: A fool. A stupid fool. This information likely came too late to amend the fire-insurance claim filed by Groupe Lucien Barrière execs sifting through the cinders of their gutted casino, but it does mercifully provide grammatical closure for Deep Purple fans such as me, disillusioned casualties of the 1970s, and those who value the English language.

Now if Judith Owen only would cover Jimi Hendrix so that castles made of sand can melt and slip into the sea—properly... 

(Image of Ian Gillan copyright Rolling Stone.)

Happy Days and The Godfather Aren't Apollonias and Oranges

Although Happy Days' original theme song was Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” the producers eventually commissioned for Season 3 a new theme—yielding the Pratt & McClain “Sunday, Monday, Happy Days” theme that we all know.

Keeping that in mind, let’s take a step back and consider for a moment that Happy Days premiered in the wake of The Godfather—and while the eagerly awaited Godfather II was being filmed.

Now, I’m not saying that Happy Days was a shameless prime-time knock-off of The Godfather, but I am saying that undeniable similarities exist between the Cunninghams and the Corleones: Howard (“Mr. C”) heads his family with the protectiveness, if not brute vigilance, of Don Vito. Marion, like Mama Corleone, is the loyal wife, mother, and cook.

And although The Fonz—lending ethnic provenance as “Arthur Fonzarelli”—Potsie, and Ralph Malph are not blood members of the Cunningham family, for all intents and purposes within the parameters of the show, they, along with Richie, serve as the four brothers. The hotheaded, impulsive, womanizing Fonzie is a dead ringer for Sonny; dim-witted Potsie aptly reflects Fredo; brainy Ralph Malph wouldn’t be far removed from Tom Hagen had the all-business consigliere possessed a sense of humor (or at least a pair of springy-eyeball glasses); and the shrewd, All-American Richie, of course, fills the role of war-hero Michael.

Joanie rounds out the family similarly to Connie Corleone, even marrying The Fonz’s cousin, Chachi—as Connie wed Carlo, who, similar to Chachi, was introduced to his future bride through Fonzie’s cinematic “progenitor,” Sonny.

Furthermore, could Arnold and Al be more brazen clones of Tessio and Clemenza? Savvy restaurateur Arnold, like Tessio, clearly is the smarter of the two, whereas Al displays Clemenza’s girth and love of food.

Extending beyond the family, Richie Cunningham’s history with women closely mimics that of Michael Corleone: Although a violent end is not implied, Richie’s first girlfriend, Gloria, passes quickly through his life, appearing in five early episodes before departing—somewhat akin to Michael’s brief, star-crossed marriage to Apollonia Vitelli. Later, Richie weds Lori Beth, who, in her prim-and-proper WASPiness, echoes Michael’s second wife, Kay Adams and, like Kay, knows nothing of Richie’s former life with Gloria.

And perhaps the producers threw in for good measure that—even though they’re not analogous characters—Potsie, like Johnny Fontane, made his bones with a microphone.

Finally, eldest son Chuck Cunningham isn’t exactly a replica of the traitorous Paulie Gatto, but it’s no stretch to believe that the mysteriously vanished Chuck ended up slumped over a steering wheel somewhere in the marshes of Milwaukee. (After all, orange—the color of Richie’s hair—is the Italian symbol of death, and Chuck went missing not long after being in the presence of his younger brother’s hair...)

Hell, the trisyllabic Cunningham even sounds something like an Anglicized version of Corleone…

With this less-than-coincidental—and very lucrative—family model in place, Executive Producer Garry Marshall should have further capitalized on the Godfather films’ popularity through the show’s new theme song, especially because The Godfather II was largely set, like Happy Days, in the nostalgia-filled 1950s. This could best have been accomplished by having Truett Platt or Jerry McClain—whichever is performing the lead vocal in “Happy Days”—sing the lyric as how Michael’s new Sicilian bride, Apollonia, recited the days of the week in The Godfather. Or better yet—hire Simonetta Stefanelli, herself, to sing the theme in her adorably fractured English...

Mon-day, Tues-day, Happy Days
Thurs-day, Wednes-day, Happy Days
Fri-day, Sun-day, Sa-tur-day, Happy Days
The car explodes
That’s the way it goes
Fabrizio meant it for you!

(Images of The Godfather copyright Paramount Pictures; images of Happy Days copyright ABC.)