Celebrity Jukebox #24: Shelley Winters

Shelley Winters won two Oscars and was nominated twice more. She appeared in Pete's Dragon, Lolita, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Night of the Hunter, opposite inaugural Celebrity Jukeboxer, Robert Mitchum. But for me, she'll always be most famous as Belle in The Poseidon Adventure, saving Gene Hackman's life then dying of a heart attack. Tragedy. Shelley did her own stunts in that movie, though she never lost the weight she put on for the role. Double tragedy.

The Poseidon Adventure gets name-checked in both My Name Is Prince by TAFKAP, as he would soon decide to call himself... and Release Yo' Delf by Method Man. But it gets a full retelling from Killdozer...

On the television, a ship was sinking

It seemed so real, but it was just a movie

Made by Irwin Allen, boy, what a relief

And on the ship was Ernest Borgnine

Brave in the face of certain death

He played a cop on a pleasure cruise

Along with his wife, an ex-prostitute

Of course, Shelley Winters

She was on the ship

She was good, too, but she died

As did Gene Hackman, a preacher

Who gave his life so that others could live

He died shouting "How many more lives?"

Killdozer - Man Vs. Nature

(My bad. I missed that one from my Ernest Borgnine entry.)

Turns out Shelley also went to a watery grave in Night of the Hunter, as explained here by John Cale, Bob Neuwirth and guest vocalist Jenni Muldaur...

I wanna be buried in the bottom of the ocean, 

Like Shelley Winters in "The Night of the Hunter". 

My hair a'billowing, being kissed by the fishes, sushi

For Shabu. If fishes were wishes I'd have you. I'd have you...

John Cale - Ocean Club

And we've already covered this tune in the Mitchum entry...

Shelley Winters has a vision of

Righteousness from up above

She trades her children for the love

Of a preacher with a soul decay

Flop - Night of the Hunter

But today's winner... and OK, some might dispute this... comes from Merle Haggard. Seriously, I'm not buying this as an accident or a coincidence. Merle knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this tune. Clearly he was a fan...

2022 Contenders: Stick Season

Whenever I profess to liking the music of a youngster under the age of 30, I worry they might become popular, like Ed Sheeran popular, sell out, and then I'll have to delete all trace of my ever having been interested in them from the interweb.

25 year old Noah Kahan is from Vermont and makes "folk-infused pop" which already sounds a bit dodgy, and then I read his bio, which was either written by a pretentious Millennial arse from his record company or else it was written in Swedish and then translated into English via Google translate for a laugh...

"As Noah Kahan changes, he casts those experiences onto songs like light through a film projector. At the core of the music’s upbeat energy and unfiltered lyrics, you’ll hear who he was before and who he became—almost in real-time..."

I'll spare you the rest. I'm just hoping Noah didn't pen that himself.

So far, so not very inspiring. 

But.

Damn it if Stick Season, his latest track, isn't the best thing I've heard this week. I've no idea what it's about, but I'm digging the vibe, man.

Now I am stuck between my anger

And the blame that I can't face

And memories are something

Even smoking weed does not replace

And I am terrified of weather 'cause I see you when it rains

Doc told me to travel, but there's COVID on the planes

And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks and I

Saw your mom she forgot that I existed and

It's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim

I'll drink alcohol 'til my friends come home for Christmas

And I'll dream each night of some version of you

That I might not have, but I did not lose

Now you're tyre tracks and one pair of shoes

And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do, ooh, ooh

Celebrity Jukebox #23: Patrick Duffy

"It was all a dream."

When I'm teaching creative writing to GCSE students, I generally advise against the "It was all a dream" ending. You'd be amazed how many students use it. I generally explain to them that after reading a whole story and investing in the characters, the reader will feel cheated if everything that happened turns out to be nothing more than the product of a bad night's sleep. And if they still insist on using it, I tell them about Bobby Ewing in Dallas.

When I say the name Patrick Duffy, please don't be confused with the singers Patrick Duff or even Stephen Tin Tin Duffy. Although that's not to say Patrick hasn't had his own pop career... of sorts.

I feel I need to apologise to anybody who clicked the play button on that. I'm truly, truly sorry. But it did get to Number 5 in the charts in 1983. (In the Netherlands.)

My first encounter with Patrick Duffy was in 1977 when he and his webbed fingers popped up on my tea time TV screen as the short-lived Man From Atlantis. And look, here's a song about that!

Logan Whitehurst - The Man From Atlantis

And another one that might hit a nerve or two for anyone who misses the 70s...

Patrick Duffy ruled Atlantis, Charlie's girls upheld the law

We all prayed we grow up Farrah, we became Kate Jacksons all

Deirdre Flint - I Miss The 70s

Soon after, the webbed fingers went away, and Duffy turned into Bobby Ewing, nice guy brother to the dastardly J.R. (Larry Hagman...who I'm sure will get his turn on the jukebox one day). Eight nail-biting seasons went by in the blink of an eye, and then Duffy chose to pursue other career opportunities and Bobby was killed off... except when both Duffy's career and the show's rating fell off a cliff as a result, the producers realised they had to bring him back. And the only solution they could come up with was for it to turn out that the whole of the Duffy-less Season 9 was actually Pam's bad dream. Victoria Principal must have eaten a shitload of cheese that night.

Patrick and Bobby both show up in the song Why? by Grits...

Now don't get indignant, catch yourself before you act ignorant

That's a sure sign of dead minds, benign and malignant

From here to Dallas, extended with vocal stewing

My walk never switches from Patrick Duffy to Bobby Ewing

But I have to admit, I'm surprised Bobby's resurrection doesn't get referenced in any song I could find, despite extensive research. It was such a colossal shark jump moment in popular culture, one that's been parodied in everything from The Simpsons and Family Guy to The Big Breakfast... I was disappointed not to find at least one lyrical reference. Quite a few pop songs do mention Dallas though, including The Day Before You Came by Abba (Agnetha was apparently a big fan)...

I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV

There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see

...and The Message by Grandmaster Flash...

My brother's doin' bad, stole my mother's TV

Says she watches too much, it's just not healthy

All My Children in the daytime, Dallas at night

Can't even see the game or the Sugar Ray fight

...however, I like to believe the one that gets closest to commenting on Bobby's comeback, and how Dallas was never the same again, is this one from Pulp. Any excuse to play it again...

It's like a later "Tom & Jerry"

When the two of them could talk

Like the Stones since the Eighties

Like the last days of Southfork

(That's the album version. But if you've not seen the video, which doesn't actually feature Jarvis singing at all, but a lot of bad cover versions, you should watch it too. I never get tired of it.)

Neverending Top Ten #5.2: Chester Zoo

You have to accept that when you visit a zoo, you will spend a lot of time staring into what appear to be empty enclosures, in the hope of catching a glimpse of a creature that's really quite fed up of being stared at. At least the elephants didn't want to hide, especially when they realised it was shower time.

The penguins were pretty happy to come see us too, and put on quite a show.

The rhinos, on the other hand, seemed less happy to be there. And the tigers kept well away. As for the gibbon...

Zoos create conflicting emotions. While it's amazing to see these incredible creatures we probably wouldn't ever get to see in real life, I also feel bad that they're here, thousands of miles away from where they're supposed to be, living a life that's not the one nature intended for them. On the other hand, many of these critters (especially the rhinos and the tigers) are on the verge of extinction, and their numbers are only increasing due to protected captivity. 

There's nothing new to say here. You probably share these same mixed emotions. I guess I want Sam to understand it's an honour and a privilege to share the planet with such amazing animals, and we shouldn't ever take them for granted.

Celebrity Jukebox #22: Eva Marie Saint

Some days, I don't want to have to work too hard.

So I go with the obvious ones.

At 98 years of age, Eva Marie Saint is currently (following the death of previous Celebrity Jukebox star, Oliva de Havilland) the oldest living Oscar-winning actress. She started relatively late, making her film debut at the age of 30, scooping up the Best Supporting Actress award in the process, holding her own against Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront. She then went on to star opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock's classic North By Northwest. In later years she appeared in How The West Was Won and even played Cybill Shepherd's mum in Moonlighting. 

But for music fans of a certain vintage, there is one part Eva (or Eve, as she's known to her friends) will forever be associated with. And that's her in starring role in this popular ditty...

Devilment - Hitchcock Blonde

Only joking.

I meant this one, of course...

She looks like Eve Marie Saint in On The Waterfront

She reads Simone de Beauvoir, in her American circumstance

Her heart, heart's like crazy paving

Upside down and back to front

She says, "Ooh, it's so hard to love

When love was your great disappointment."

Take it away, our favourite "Scottish" singer from Buxton...