Month: March 2021

Covers: Shiny Happy People

R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” was on their album Out of Time which was released 30 years ago yesterday on March 12, 1991. It was also issued as a single. Sesame Street made a version called “Happy Furry Monsters” with the band’s participation.

Racist Ron Johnson

He’s a Russian stooge, a liar and a racist.

Covers: The World Is Going Wrong

“World Gone Wrong” was originally written and recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks. Bob Dylan used it as the title song for his 1993 album (as World Gone Wrong) but there’s no YouTube video for it. B.B. King, who was from Mississippi did an electric blues cover in 2008 which is very different from the original version.

Covers: La Bamba

“La Bamba” was a top 40 hit for Ritchie Valens and a #1 hit for Los Lobos in 1987. Their version was featured in the film La Bamba about Valens. The earliest known recording is from 1939.

Los Lobos is my favorite current band. I have seen them seven times and they always put on a great show. I don’t think they want to be identified strictly with “La Bamba” and sometimes they don’t play it. I don’t think they have ever tried just to be popular. They followed up “La Bamba” with an album of folk songs in Spanish which certainly didn’t build on the success of La Bamba. In 1993, I saw them at Hammerjack’s in Baltimore. It was a beautiful old industrial building with exposed brick interior walls that mostly had heavy metal bands. Los Lobos opened with five songs in Spanish which took guts on their part.

from the film

Baltimore’s industrial decline

The Sparrows Point Bethlehem Shipyard (discussed in the article linked to in the tweet below) was probably the biggest private employer when I moved to Baltimore in 1976. If you had told me then that it would totally vanish, I would have been shocked. I interviewed many people filing for retirement benefits who worked there. I was making $8,925 a year just out of college and these guys were making about $20,000. That was excellent money for people who frequently didn’t even have a high school education but you could look at them and see they had worked hard. Those kind of good paying manufacturing jobs are mostly gone now which exacerbates income inequality.

Everyone now takes having a birth certificate for granted but many people born before around 1930 didn’t have one. For many people, we had to get Census records. In the 1970s, you had to write the Census Bureau in Pittsburg, Kansas and it took six weeks to get a response. Many of the retirees had been born on rural areas in the south. Their ability to remember exactly where the farm or other home was located was impressive.

I remember one man who said he was born in 1914. We got the 1920 census record. It should have showed he was six. It showed he was 11. Then we had to get the 1910 census record. He was there and he was one which consistent with the 1920 census. Somewhere along the way he had lost five years. I had no doubt that he was 70, not 65, and he was still doing manual labor at Sparrows Point. When I explained this to him, his first concern was if it affected his pension since they had a mandatory retirement age. I didn’t know but didn’t think so since he genuinely didn’t know his real age. A lot of businesses would let the government establish the age of an individual and then adopt our determination.

Muscle and Blood is a fine book about industrial work in the 1970s which I read back then. As I recall, author Rachel Scott had worked for the Baltimore Sun and discussed Sparrows Point in her book.

This is an excellent article. I look forward to reading his book. MacGillis lives here in Baltimore.

Even more Baltimore salt boxes

Baltimore Salt Box – The Broken Plate Co. (ibreakplates.com)

Republicans want to repeal the estate tax for rich people

I don’t want to hear any crap from Republicans about the debt when they propose crap like this. Does their white nationalist base think this will help them?