Another Week: Number 184

RAPPER LISTENS TO THE BEATLES FOR THE FIRST TIME!!

On Monday morning, wandering YouTube at breakfast, I watched “RAPPER LISTENS TO THE BEATLES FOR THE FIRST TIME!!,” starring Mel. Crozby.

I wasn’t planning to watch the whole thing. It’s just a head-and-shoulders shot of an easygoing guy, completely unfamiliar with The Beatles, reacting to their Abbey Road album 56 years later, track by track — and yet somehow it’s so compelling.

I have heard this album many hundreds of times since childhood. There’s the jarring comedy of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the guttural screaming on “Oh, Darling!” and the refreshing beauty of “Here Comes the Sun,” which Crozby finds “heartwarming” and “orange-and-yellowish.”

Meanwhile, I have been reading Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, and there on page 212 is an image of Pangu, “shown covered in leaves to indicate that Cosmic Man (or First Man) simply existed, like a plant, grown in nature.” Now, on my TV, the branches of an indoor tree overhang Crozby, who knows that one of The Beatles is named John Lennon.

Speaking of symbols — when I was about 12 years old, my dad took me to J-J’s Records and Tapes in downtown Kenosha to buy some 8-tracks. I came home with Led Zeppelin IV. My father put on my headphones, laid down on my bed, and listened to the entire album, ultimately raising his eyebrows in a “not bad” expression as it finished.

I thought about those 45 minutes of my childhood while next watching Mel. Crozby experience the same album for the first time.

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)

On Tuesday, a story about David Bowie sent me down another rabbit hole. He spoke about what drew him into music:

When I was nine and first saw Little Richard in a film that played around town—I think it was probably Girl Can’t Help It —seeing those four saxophonists onstage, it was like, ‘I want to be in that band!’ And for a couple of years that was my ambition, to be in a band playing saxophone behind Little Richard.”

I had heard the title — but knew nothing else about bout The Girl Can’t Help It, a 1956 musical comedy starring Jayne Mansfield and featuring a trainload of cameo performances by artists including Little Richard, Abbey Lincoln, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, and The Platters.

Well, the whole thing is available on YouTube, so there went my next hour and 38 minutes.

Edmond O’Brien — kind of a cross between Nicolas Cage and Rodney Dangerfield — plays slot machine mobster Marty “Fats” Murdock. While in prison, Fats wrote a novelty song, and now he wants Tom Miller, a press agent with a drinking problem, to make it a hit record featuring his gorgeous girlfriend (Mansfield). Miller, a broken man after his failed relationship with singer Julie London, is played by Tom Ewell – famous from the previous year’s comedy The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe.

It’s all a fast-moving sequence of wacky nonsense, filmed in vibrant, mid-century DeLuxe Color. Mansfield is an iconic, Marilyn Monroe knock-off, and the musical acts are too-short bursts of fireworks — except for Julie London, whose stern, ghostly memory is slightly unsettling.

American Experience: Seabiscuit (2003)

My mom loves horses and the Depression-era, so on Wednesday we watched the one-hour American Experience: Seabiscuit from her cloud DVR.

Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion. He was small, knobby-kneed, and he slept a lot. But Charles S. Howard bought the horse in 1936 and had Tom Smith train him — and Smith paired Seabiscuit with jockey Red Pollard, starting a flabbergasting chain of events that wove though great promise and crushing defeat before achieving the ultimate victory at long last in 1940.

This rags-to-riches story is as much about Pollard as it is about the horse.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

My mom’s parent’s retired in Westchester, Illinois, where they lived across the street from Gene Pingatore and his mother Annette. Pingatore was the head basketball coach at St. Joseph High School, and famously coached NBA superstar Isiah Thomas, whom my grandparents met at backyard cookouts.

So I thought my mom might enjoy seeing Hoop Dreams, the 1994 documentary about a pair of young basketball hopefuls from Chicago’s inner city who commute out to St. Joe’s on their career paths. One of the two finishes instead at John Marshall High School back in the city.

Mom said she hadn’t seen the film before – but later she told me when a shot of Annette was coming up so, as is often the case, this was not her first viewing.

The movie is a 2-hour, 51-minute closeup of the two young athletes, their families, their coaches, and the unfolding of their high school careers. It’s a gritty, grainy slice of reality in urban neighborhoods and .

Mom loved watching St. Joes play Nazareth Academy, her alma mater.