On Tuesday, April 15th, the husband and I did worked a gig at a chiropractor's office (hi, Dr. Josh!), hanging a tv and some signs. The music playing inside the office was classic rock. I heard "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel.
Since I wrote about literary references in 3 songs in the previous post, I wondered if there was any crossover with "We Didn't Start the Fire."
This Tumblr post (not by me) links every reference in the Billy Joel song to the corresponding Wikipedia page. I won't replicate that work. Let's see what we've got here in the lyrics:
"We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel and Mick Jones (Michael Leslie Jones, guitarist for Spooky Tooth and Foreigner)
[Verse 1]
Harry Truman, Doris Day
Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific [1]
Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon
Studebaker [2], Television
North Korea, South Korea
Marilyn Monroe [3]
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb
Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando [4], The King And I [5],
And The Catcher In The Rye [6]
Eisenhower, Vaccine
England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace
Santayana goodbye
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
2. That Time I Tried Out for Jeopardy! We visited a former Studebaker showroom in Chicago. It hasn't come up on this blog yet, I don't think, but at least three generations of my family worked for the Studebaker automobile company in South Bend. One of my great-grandmothers was a seamstress there.
3. Monroe is, of course, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That's our first crossover with the previous post.
4. March 27 almanac entry: March 27th, 1973: Liza Minnelli wins a Best Actress Academy Award for her role in Cabaret. She beats out Diana Ross, nominated for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings The Blues.
At this same Academy Awards ceremony, Marlon Brando wins an Oscar for his role in The Godfather. He turns down the award, having boycotted the ceremony to bring awareness to Native American rights and representation in film. In his place, actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, a self-reported member of the Apache and Yaqui nations, declines the award on Brando’s behalf. According to legend, John Wayne has to be physically restrained from attacking Littlefeather as she is speaking. She is escorted off the stage by the award presenter, Roger Moore.
[After Littlefeather’s death in 2022, journalists investigating her claim of indigenous North American ancestry uncovered that Littlefeather was most likely of European and Mexican descent, with no ties to the Yaqui or Apache peoples. Of course, people who are indigenous to Mexico are native North Americans, but this does not excuse Littlefeather from making a claim to ancestry that she had no legitimate status to claim.] (end of almanac entry)
Brando is also on the Sgt. Pepper's cover with Marilyn Monroe.
5. February 22 almanac entry: February 22, 1930: Soprano Marni Nixon (in full, Margaret Nixon McEathron) is born in California. Her voice can be heard singing on behalf of the non-singing leading ladies in musical films including West Side Story, The King and I, and My Fair Lady. (end of almanac entry)
My Fair Lady is based on the stage play Pymalion by George Bernard Shaw, who is on the Sgt. Pepper's cover.
May 23 almanac entry: Saturday, May 23, 2009: Weekend trip to Milwaukee! We chose Milwaukee because it’s one of the settings of my novel Midsummer Night and we needed intimate details. We drove there in about four hours, taking a stop for a bathroom break in the northern suburbs of Chicago.
We arrived in Milwaukee around 7 p.m. and checked into the Hyatt Regency hotel downtown, right across Kilbourn Avenue from the stadium where the Bucks play. We rode the glass elevator to the 18th floor. As we settled in, I called author and Milwaukee native Barbara Vey, one of my Facebook friends. We made plans to meet up. Then Tit and I ate dinner at a Thai restaurant, The King and I.
6. Banned Books Week: Is The Catcher in the Rye Morally Destructive?
February 22 almanac entry (again): February 22, 1995, South Bend: Having finished its course of studying Dante’s Inferno, Miss Fox’s Novel class began studying J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
July 16 almanac entry: July 16, 1951: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published.
[Verse 2]
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov
Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella
Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron
Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, "Rock Around the Clock" [1]
Einstein, James Dean [2]
Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan
Elvis Presley [3], Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place
Trouble in the Suez [4]
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
2. You might think that James Dean should be on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's, but he isn't.
April 1, 2012 blog post: Go Mutants, Cat Women, and the Ikette
August 12, 2012 blog post: Being Midwestern Rules!
September 16, 2012 blog post: From Here to Eternity Backstory + My Killers Video
October 6, 2012 blog post: 10 Things You Might Not Know About Montgomery Clift
April 8, 2024 blog post: Three More Vignettes (short fiction)
February 8 almanac entry: February 8, 1931: James Dean is born in Marion, Indiana.
May 2 almanac entry: May 2, 1991: Paula Abdul’s single “Rush, Rush” is released. Its music video is an homage to the classic James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause with Abdul in the Natalie Wood role and Keanu Reeves in the Dean role.
October 10 almanac entry: October 10, 1956: The film adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel Giant premieres, one year and 11 days after its star, James Dean, was killed in a traffic accident.
December 9 almanac entry: December 9, 1994: I spent the day on a college visit to St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. I sat in on an Introduction to Literature class, which discussed a short story about the Day of the Dead. I went on a guided tour, then had a one-on-one interview designed to see if I would be a good fit for St. Mary’s College.
After my interview, Mom and I had lunch in the dining hall. We went to the college’s bookstore. She asked me if I wanted a Maya Angelou book, and when I said yes, she bought it for me. I then met my hostess for the evening, a student named Susan who’d gone to Marian High School in Mishawaka. She showed me her room and then I went to her Intro to Spanish class with her. She had to study for a History exam after that, so I sat in her room with her, reading my new Maya Angelou book. I found that I recognized some of the poems because they’d been in the movie Poetic Justice*.
She took me to dinner at the dining hall with five of her friends and another visiting high school student. As “Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones played in the background, the college students had a discussion of the Chipmunks cartoon and whether Dave was hot. In another dorm room, I helped Susan with a community project, making “Santa-grams” for St. Mary’s students to sent to one another. Susan ushered me out of there as soon as some of the women started mixing drinks.
We went to her friends’ room and watched Newsies with these musical-obsessed young women. I went to sleep in a comfy makeshift bed on Susan’s floor with all of her pictures of James Dean looking down upon me.
*Footnote to the footnote: This '90s movie starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson features a brief, early appearance by Clifton Collins, Jr.
3. I have the hardest time getting myself to be interested in anything to do with Elvis Presley. His music and movies are simply not to my taste. But he's pretty much culturally ubiquitous in the U.S., so he does merit a few almanac mentions.
September 23 almanac entry: September 23, 1994, South Bend: Mr. Gerencher got sent to a convention in Indianapolis, so our substitute in Media showed us a movie about Elvis Presley.
September 26 almanac entry: September 26, 1992: Marilyn, Therese, and I went to the Centreville, Michigan, County Fair. Despite the rain, Therese and I rode the rides, played carnival games, and won a lot of cheap, plastic toys. We ate fried mushrooms, caramel apples, and German almonds. We also bought tickets to the Ricky Van Shelton concert.
The warmup act was a sounds effects artist who made noises such as a doorknob falling down a flight of stairs. I’d have preferred another musician. Now, most of Ricky Van Shelton’s songs I didn’t recognize; Marilyn is the country music fan. But he did the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” a Patsy Cline song called “She’s Got You” (he changed the “she” to a “he”), and an Elvis Presley song called “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.” I recognized those.
October 12 almanac entry: October 12, 1994, South Bend: In Media, Mr. Gerencher told us the tragedy of how early rock ‘n roll almost fizzled out in the 1950s: Buddy Holly was dead, Little Richard entered one of his religious phases, Chuck Berry went to jail, Jerry Lee Lewis had a nervous breakdown, and Elvis Presley joined the army. He also told us an anecdote about meeting the Everly Brothers while working as a bellhop.
December 15 almanac entry: December 15, 1994, South Bend: Mrs. Haas’s senior Brit Lit class watched part of the Wuthering Heights film starring Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff. After school I watched a tribute to Elvis Presley that featured Bono and Melissa Etheridge. Etheridge performed “Burnin’ Love.”
December 31 almanac entry: December 31, 1992, South Bend: “You were a pretty good year, 1992. I laughed and cried, I looked and listened, I lived and breathed. I bled, I read, I wrote and sneezed and told jokes and drank water. I came in 14 and went out 15. Elvis Presley is still dead, and I don’t really miss him. But in old 1992 talk is cheap. Thus I leave you with one word: Goodbye.”
4. A different trouble in the Suez happened again in 2021.
[Verse 3]
Little Rock, Pasternak
Mickey Mantle, Kerouac [1]
Sputnik, Zhou En-lai
Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle
California baseball
Starkweather Homicide
Children of Thalidomide
Buddy Holly [2], Ben-Hur [3]
Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro
Edsel is a no-go
U-2, Syngman Rhee
Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho [4]
Belgians in the Congo
 |
| Belgians in the Congo not only committed shocking historical atrocities but continue to cause problems into the 21st century. |
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Verse 3 Footnotes:
1. September 2012 blog post: My Favorite Quotes
October 2012 blog post: Caturday
January 2013 blog post: Must-Have New Books of 2013
March 2013 blog post: Vintage/Black and White
2023 blog post: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Octobers
2025 blog post: Welcome to the Monkeyhouse
January 14 almanac entry: January 14, 1995, South Bend: Uncle Paul installed a modem on our computer. I went to the library and checked out Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.
On the same day, Ernest Hemingway’s sister Madelaine “Sunny” Hemingway Miller died at the age of 90. [Ernest Hemingway's coming up in Verse 4.]
February 8 almanac entry, again: February 8, 1926: Beat Generation writer Neal Cassady is born in Salt Lake City. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac referred to him as “Dean Moriarty.”
February 24 almanac entry: Friday, February 24, 1995, South Bend: In study hall, I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This wasn’t an assignment; this was for fun.
March 12 almanac entry: March 12, 1922: Jack Kerouac is born.
“Jack Kerouac so closely entwined his dream world with his writing that it is almost impossible to separate the two. His Books of Dreams, published in 1961, contains nearly 250 dream reports, ranging from very brief accounts to lengthy descriptions ‘scribbled after I woke from my sleep...sometimes written before I was even wide awake.’ Aware that many of his dream events were similar to events in his novels, he actually provided a key in his preface, indicating which characters in his dreams had appeared, with different names, in such books as On the Road and The Dharma Bums.” - Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle
July 17 almanac entry: July 17, 1947: Jack Kerouac embarks on his first cross-country road trip.
August 13 almanac entry: August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr, 19 years old at the time, will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr.
August 15 almanac entry: August 15, 1968: According to a (fake) plaque hung in Lowell, Massachusetts (as a marketing gimmick), “...authors Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and William S. Burroughs (1919-1997) came to blows over a disagreement regarding the Oxford comma. The event is memorialized in Kerouac’s ‘Dr. Sax’ and in the incident report filed by the Lowell Police Department. According to eyewitnesses, Burroughs corrected the spelling and grammar of the police report before passing out. The report is now in the permanent collection of the Mogan Center.”
According to Atlas Obscura, “The plaque, one of a few faux historical markers at Mill No. 5, is a marketing creation of Constantine Valhouli and Jim Lichoulas III, to help promote their commercial venture, a conversion of old industrial space into a hive of new businesses, galleries, studios, and tech labs. The developers really intended it as a lark—little did they anticipate how quickly two dead writers could create an online viral ruse.”
August 23 almanac entry: August 23, 1949: Jack Kerouac writes in his diary, “It’s about time for me to start working on On the Road in earnest. For the first time in ages, I want to start a new life.”
September 5 almanac entry: September 5, 1957: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is published.
October 2 almanac entry: October 2, 1958: The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac is published.
October 7 almanac entry: October 7, 1955: Allen Ginsberg gives the first public reading of his poem “Howl” at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The emcee of the poetry reading event was Kenneth Rexroth. Other poets who read their work that day included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia. Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady were all in the audience.
October 20 almanac entry: October 20, 1923: Poet Philip Whalen is born in Portland, Oregon. In The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac called him “Warren Coughlin.”
2. 2013 blog post: Imbolc, Buddy Holly, and Human Sacrifice
2016 blog post: J.K. Rowling, Writing as Robert Galbraith, Doesn't Fear the Reaper
2025 blog post: Bummer February
January 23 almanac entry: January 23, 1986: The first members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are inducted. They are all men. They include Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard.
January 31 almanac entry: January 31, 1959: 17-year-old Robert Zimmerman, the future Bob Dylan, sees Buddy Holly perform at the Duluth Armory. This will be one of Holly’s last performances before his plane crash death in the early morning hours of February 3rd.
February 3, 1959 almanac entry: February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971.
September 7 almanac entry: September 7, 1936: Rock and/or roll pioneer Buddy Holly is born in Lubbock, Texas, as Charles Hardin Holley.
3. 2014 blog post (brief mention): Currently Reading: Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott
April 10 almanac post: April 10, 1827: Ben-Hur author Lewis (Lew) Wallace is born in Brookville, Indiana. His father, David, was the governor of Indiana from 1837-1840, during which time the family lived in Indianapolis. Today if you want to visit General Lew Wallace Study & Museum, you’ll find it in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
As a Union general, Wallace defended Washington, D.C. from Confederate attack. When Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was published in 1880, Lew Wallace was the governor of New Mexico Territory, not yet a state, appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Among his dubious accomplishments as territorial governor was, allegedly, offering outlaw Billy the Kid a full pardon if The Kid agreed to testify against the murderers of a Lincoln County lawyer. When his governorship ended in 1881, Lewis was appointed U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, a diplomatic post. He retired to Crawfordsville in 1885 and is buried there.
July 1st almanac entry: July 1, 1902: German-Jewish-American film director William Wyler is born in Mülhausen, Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire. (It’s part of France now.) He directed Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, Charleton Heston in the remake of Ben-Hur, Audrey Hepburn in The Children’s Hour (from the play by mayonnaise non-inventor Lillian Hellman [Simpsons reference]) and Roman Holiday, and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. He won the Oscar for directing three times and was one of the most frequently nominated directors in Oscar history.
4. 2019 blog post: 'A Stir of Echoes' by Richard Matheson - Mid-Century Spooky Story
2023 blog post: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Septembers
April 10 almanac entry, again: April 10, 1959: R&B singer, songwriter, and producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds is born in Indianapolis, Indiana. On the same day, Robert Bloch’s Psycho is published, and NBC airs Benny Goodman’s Swing Into Spring tv special featuring Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton, and Peggy Lee.
October 10 almanac entry: October 31, 2019, Indianapolis: Tit and I were at Hilbert Circle Theatre listening to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra perform the Psycho film score live while the film played. We had popcorn and beer, and then later, decafs. This may have been the most fun I’ve ever had at the symphony.
[Verse 4]
Hemingway [1], Eichmann
Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan [2], Berlin
Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia
British Beatlemania [3]
Ole Miss, John Glenn
Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X
British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away
What else do I have to say?
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
August 23, 2013 blog post: Pinky, Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?
November 3, 2012 blog post: A Few Snaps From My Trip to Los Angeles
December 9, 2012 blog post: Caturday
April 2013 blog post: Book Club Friday: Hemingway's Girl
August 2013 blog post: Elmore Leonard Appreciation Post
2015 blog post: A Letter to My Cat
January 14 almanac entry: January 14, 1896: Novelist John Dos Passos is born in Chicago. Ernest Hemingway broke Dos Passos's arm in 1930.
“A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin.” - John Dos Passos
February 7 almanac entry: The Key West Diaries
March 3 almanac entry: March 3, 1911: Harlean Harlow Carpenter is born in Kansas City, Missouri. She’ll be known to the world as Jean Harlow. She’ll star in such movies as Hell’s Angels (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) and be name-checked in Madonna’s song “Vogue” (1990).
“Maybe it is like those dreams you have when someone you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely. He’d slept with them all that way when he was asleep in bed. He could remember Garbo still, and Harlow. Yes, Harlow many times. Maybe it was like those dreams.” - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
March 4 almanac entry: March 4, 1952: Ernest Hemingway finishes writing The Old Man and the Sea.
May 8 almanac entry: Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum
July 8 almanac entry: July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway is wounded while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I.
July 21 almanac entry: July 21, 1899: Ernest Hemingway is born.
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” - Ernest Hemingway in Esquire magazine, December 1934
July 21, 1959: A U.S. District Court in NYC rules that D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not pornographic.
On the same day, Ernest Hemingway’s 60th birthday, Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway threw him a birthday party in Málaga, Spain. Guests included Lauren Bacall and bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez. The menu included sweet-and-sour turkey and a cake with 90 candles, 60 for Ernest and 30 for Antonio’s wife Carmen. The celebration’s fireworks display sets fire to a palm tree, so the local fire department has to come out. Legend has it that after the blaze was quelled, the firefighters joined the party.
September 1st almanac entry: September 1, 1952: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is published.
October 15 almanac entry: October 15, 1937: Ernest Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not, is published.
October 21 almanac entry: October 21, 1940: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.
November 1st almanac entry: November 1, 1930: Ernest Hemingway crashes his car while returning home from a hunting trip he took with John Dos Passos, breaking his arm.
November 10 almanac entry: November 10, 1957: CBS airs The World of Nick Adams, based on the short stories by Ernest Hemingway, adapted into a play by A.E. Hotchner, featuring incidental music written by Aaron Copland, directed by Robert Mulligan, and starring Steven Hill as Nick Adams.
2. Bob Dylan is on the Sgt. Pepper's cover.
June 25, 2011 blog post: 5 Jewish Dudes I'd Most Like to See Lewd
December 25, 2011 blog post: The Hanukkah Hotness, Night 6: Winona Ryder
November 30, 2023 blog post: My Spotify Wrapped 2023
December 31, 2023 blog post: My Top Tumblr Posts of 2023
September 3, 2024 blog post: My Spotify Top 99 of 2023, Annotated
February 1, 2025 blog post: Bummer February
January 17 almanac entry: January 17, 1975: Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks is released. Some of its memorable tracks include "Shelter From the Storm" and "Tangled Up in Blue."
February 5 almanac entry: February 5, 1972: Neil Young releases the single “Heart of Gold,” with backing vocals by James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. It will be the Canadian artist’s only single to reach #1 on the charts in the U.S. Bob Dylan will say of the song, "Shit, that's me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me."
March 8 almanac entry: March 8, 1996, St. Mary’s: My Jazz and Pop course opened up the discussion of folk music by focusing on Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan.
March 29 almanac entry: March 29, 2017: Bob Dylan agrees to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature he’s been awarded six months before.
April 9 almanac entry: April 9, 1969: Bob Dylan releases his Nashville Skyline album, featuring Johnny Cash on “Girl From the North Country.” On the same day, Bruce McBroom photographs the Beatles in their second-to-last photo shoot as a group.
April 11 almanac entry: April 11th, 1961: Bob Dylan plays his first gig at Greenwich Village’s Gerde's Folk City, opening for John Lee Hooker. He plays “Blowin’ In the Wind.”
April 24 almanac entry (it's not in the published version yet, but it will be there once I update this entry): April 24, 1961: Bob Dylan plays on his first record, Harry Belafonte’s “Midnight Special,” as the harmonica player. He’s paid $50 for the recording session.
April 27 almanac entry: April 27, 2012: Bob Dylan receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
May 12 almanac entry: May 12, 1950: Gabriel Byrne is born in Dublin. He’s the first of his parents’ six children, three boys and three girls. All the girls sleep in one bed and all the boys in a second bed. Byrne won’t have a bed to himself until age 11, when he goes away to seminary school in England. His father is a cooper, making barrels at the Guinness factory.
“I’ve never fallen out of love with books like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. When I read them both for the fourth time, I absorbed them whole and unquestioningly. Jane Eyre was the first book I ever read. It was read to me by my mother and we went to see the movie of it, Orson Welles’ Jane Eyre. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time. I can still see the image of that black horse on the heath, rearing up in the half-darkness, from that angle, with Jane looking up in the mad eyes of Orson Welles. It gave me nightmares for years and years afterwards.” - Gabriel Byrne
Do you know who else, besides the Byrne parents, has three daughters and three sons? Bob Dylan. When he married Sara Lowndes, she had Maria, whom Bob adopted. Bob and Sara had Jesse, Anna, Sam, and then Jakob together. After they divorced, he married Gospel singer Carolyn Dennis; Bob and Carolyn have Desiree. Maria, Anna, Jesse, Sam, and Jakob’s younger half-sister Desiree is a lovely Black Jewish queer woman whose wife’s name is Kayla.
May 17 almanac entry: May 17, 1964: Bob Dylan gives his first public concert in the U.K. at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
May 24 almanac entry*: May 24, 1941: Bob Dylan is born (as Robert Zimmerman) in Hibbing, Minnesota, USA. His Traveling Wilburys names are Lucky and Boo.
June 9 almanac entry: June 9, 1964: Bob Dylan and producer Tom Wilson record 14 songs: The entire Another Side of Bob Dylan album, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and two others.
July 20 almanac entry: July 20, 1965: Columbia Records releases Bob Dylan’s single “Like a Rolling Stone.”
July 25 almanac entry: July 25, 1965: Bob Dylan shows up at the Newport Folk Festival, sets up electronic equipment, and plays a rock-based set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band as his backing band. The audience, expecting an acoustic folk music set, boos and jeers so loudly they can barely hear “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”
August 9 almanac entry: August 9, 1962: Bob Zimmerman legally changes his name to Bob Dylan.
August 26 almanac entry: August 26, 1970: Joan Baez, Miles Davis, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and a variety of other performers perform at the Isle of Wight Festival.
August 30 almanac entry: August 30, 1965: Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited is released by Columbia Records.
September 7 almanac entry again: September 7, 1965: Bob Dylan releases the stand-alone single “Positively 4th Street.”
September 22 almanac entry: September 22, 1985: The first of the Farm Aid concerts organized by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young is performed in Champaign, Illinois. Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, B.B. King, and Loretta Lynn are among the performers. More than $9 million is raised for the benefit of American family farmers who are in danger of losing their land and homes to mortgage debt.
September 27 almanac entry: September 27, 1997: Bob Dylan performs “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” at the World Eucharist Congress for an audience of 300,000 people that includes Pope John Paul II.
October 13 almanac entry: October 13, 2016: Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
October 16 almanac entry: October 16, 1992: At The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, Madison Square Garden, Bob Dylan and a variety of other musical artists performed in recognition of Dylan’s 30 years in the music industry. A live double album was recorded from that performance. It features Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Lou Reed, Kris Kristofferson, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman, and Richie Havens, among others.
October 21st almanac entry again: October 21, 1970: Bob Dylan’s album New Morning is released. It features the title track and a song called “Father of Night,” which had originally been intended to be used for an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster produced by poet Archibald MacLeish. The collaboration was cancelled due to creative differences.
October 24 almanac entry: October 24, 1975: Bob Dylan records his song “Hurricane.”
October 26 almanac entry: October 26, 1963: Bob Dylan plays a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.
November 6 almanac entry: November 6, 1967: Bob Dylan records “All Along the Watchtower.”
November 22 almanac entry: Bob Dylan 1996 (the time I attended a Bob Dylan concert)
December 7 almanac entry: December 7, 1997: Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston, Jessye Norman, and ballet dancer Edward Villella all receive Kennedy Center Honors for their contributions to the performing arts at a ceremony at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C. President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton preside.
December 27 almanac entry: December 27, 1967: Both Leonard Cohen’s debut album and Bob Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding are released.
3. Hemingway and Dylan were a lot. Let's save Beatlemania for another day.
*Footnote to the footnote: May 24th is also the birthday of Pedro Gonzales Gonzalez. The grandfather. Of Clifton Collins, Jr.
 |
| Aww, I wish I could. But you see, there was this John Milton podcast episode, and then Catherine Keener was in the Joker movie. |
[Verse 5]
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh
Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock
Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine
Terror on the airline
Ayatollahs in Iran
Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride
Heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets
AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores
China's under martial law
Rock and Roller cola wars
I can't take it anymore
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on
And on, and on
[Outro]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
What song is Erin obsessed with right now?
I've been very into the Swedish band Ghost, fronted by one Tobias Forge in various Satanic incarnations. I recently discovered this Shakespears Sister [that is the correct spelling of the band name, without the "e" and without an apostrophe] cover featuring actor Patrick Wilson (husband of Polish-American actor/novelist Dagmara Dominczyk) from the horror movie Insidious: The Red Door (which Wilson also directed).
The original:
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| Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the book cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the publisher or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless. Fair use. |
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