That’s not my understanding: I believe Jonny didn’t come in with his big guitar chords until the chorus, but during rehearsals, when it didn’t matter, he would use a quick, hard strum to check during the lead-in to the chorus to make sure his guitar was ready for the big climax. The other guys liked it and it stayed in.
Arthur Conan Doyle infamously hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he attempted to kill him off, which didn’t go over well with his many fans.
With good reason.
sigh
What I was pointing out is the alarming trend, witnessed multiple times per day on this board, of people being almost willfully ignorant of anything that happened before they were approximately 6 years old, whether it’s history or high culture or pop culture. I love Star Wars. I was a young teen when it came out. I knew at the time that Alec Guiness was a famous actor. As a kid and teen and young adult, I was fully aware of music, tv, and movies that were made long before I was born, and that wasn’t anything that unusual among my family or the other people I knew, and we were just working-class suburbanites.
So yes, I feel justified in calling someone who only knows Alec Guiness as Obi-Wan culturally illiterate.
As well they should.
Even if this adds more fuel to the fire, I agree. It wasn’t like Guiness was almost entirely a stage actor who only got into movies with the **Star Wars **films. Prior to them, he’d been making movies for over 30 years and had won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Bridge on the River Kwai (not exactly an obscure flick).
Anyway, I think stories about Guiness’ dislike of the Star Wars movies have gotten a bit exaggerated over time. He did the first movie as a lark for which he’d be well-paid and get to work with a promising young director, George Lucas (who was just coming off his success with American Graffiti). *Nobody *(including Lucas) thought the movie would become a gigantic blockbuster that would lead to five other films and spark a quasi-religion. I think what Guiness disliked was spending the last 25 years of his life dealing with obsessed Star Wars uber-geek fanboys who thought he was some sort of mystic and knew nothing about the rest of his career.
Flock of Seagulls still performs once in a while, and the lead singer hates having to sing “I Ran So Far Away” over and over. Tough shit, I say…you should have written another hit to beat it out.
Which made something Harpo Marx did much more effective than he anticipated. Harpo Speaks! - Harpo Marx - Google Books
Please see ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ and ‘The Horse’s Mouth’ - Alec Guinness had every right to be annoyed when people only thought of him as ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’.
‘Culturally illiterate’ is a loaded term, but those are films you simply should have heard of, if not seen. Several times.
I’ll bet their fans make them wear those 80s hairdos also.
Warren Zevon had a funny appearance on The Larry Sanders Show where he complained that the only song anyone ever wanted to hear him perform was “Werewolves of London”. I know it’s a fictional show, but I suspect there was more than a kernel of truth to it…
Along the same lines, I went to an Iron & Wine show and he got slightly irritated that people kept requesting “Such Great Heights” (which is from the Garden State soundtrack).
I don’t really blame him; he’s probably had to play it a million times and he didn’t even write it.
Now that “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” is in the Twilight soundtrack, I bet he gets sick of hearing teenage girls scream that out at shows too. Although at least he did write that one himself.
I feel justified in calling that characterization elitist and snobbish at best. Furthermore, I feel justified in saying that it is possible to know fuck-all about any roles Guiness might have played in the movies and still be quite culturally literate. Some folks just don’t like movies. That does not preclude them from being very much in tune with their culture.
I saw (then met and drank with) Zevon at a bar in Scottsdale in 94 or 95. About halfway through the set some putz yelled, “Werewolves!”
Zevon said (quoted as closely as I can recall it): Ya know the great thing about being around long enough to turn into an oldies act? I can take grim satisfaction from the fact that 10, 15 years from some asshole in some bar is going to yell, “Hey, Alanis! Do that song about the blowjob!”
Gods, I miss that man.
Joel is also famous for his hatred of Piano Man. He did a show here in Phoenix a few years ago and the local bubble-headed bleach blonde entertainment reporter asked him something like, “It must be a thrill for you to have audiences singing along with you on Piano Man after all these years.”
Joel said (again, as closely as I recall), “Not really. I don’t care for the song. The melody is simplistic and repetitive and it’s not really musically interesting at all. I’d love to never have to sing it again, but my fans have given me the gift of this incredible longevity in a career not known for it, and I owe it to them to give them the show they want to see, rather than the one I want to play.”
I thought he showed some real self-awareness and class there.
Your standards of cultural literacy are ridiculous and contradictory.
My favorite movie came out 40 years before I was born.
My favorite book came out 20 years before I was born.
The drummer of my favorite band growing up died a year before I was born, and they never played or recorded together again.
By all this, one would think I’d be culturally literate in Claire Beauchamp’s erudite eyes.
But wait.
I was negative 4 when Star Wars came out, and knew fuck all about Alec Guiness until I was at least 12 and watched the “special edition” VHS tapes which talked a little bit about him being a renowned British actor. I still think of him primarily as Obi Wan Kenobi.
Guess I’m riffraff after all.
(And by the way, do you not find it funny, in all your tomsnobbery, that your definition of culture seems to be merely “modern pop culture”?)
A lot of bands and artists who are “album artists” and not single artists, were often required by their labels to put out a commerical single.
The Motels “Only The Lonely” was a good example. They were told if they wanted to keep their contract they better record a hit single, even though the band wasn’t a singles type act.
Andy Kim of “Rock Me Gently” fame said while he didn’t dislike the single it set him on the wrong path. People kept expecting him to make more songs like that and that song was a fluke.
I like what Pat Benetar had to say in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine. She said that she often gets tired to playing her old music but then she remembers that her fans haven’t heard the songs as much as she has. And to each fan, each of her songs probably holds a special meaning, to them alone. And then she’s quite happy to perform her songs again.
I like that attitude
We’ve been over this over and over and over again. Calling someone out over not knowing more about your favorite actor/singer/author/goat felcher does not make you literate and the other person illiterate. Instead, it makes you seem like a bully.
Thousands of movies have been released since 1977 and thousands more were released before it. If someone only knows of an actor because they starred in the most popular movie of all-time has very little to do with what they might know.
Joe Walsh just before playing “Rocky Mountain Way” -
“Well, if I knew I’d have to play this song the rest of my life I probably would have wrote something else. But it’s too late. You’re stuck with this one.”
And I could swear this is a deja vu thread.
OK?
Lucas cast Guinness almost as a cameo; certainly to add *tone *to the proceedings. Guinness had had one of the mos distinguished careers in movies–nevermind stage–of anyone, ever, well before Lucas came along. If he had died in 1976, he’d still have one of the greatest resumes in film history.
So yeah, anyone who thinks of* Star Wars* as the peak–as little more than a blip gone horribly awry–of Guinness’s career is blindlingly culturally illiterate.
Wanna put Star Wars in perspective? Check out the Ealing comedies Guinness did, or The Bridge on the River Kwai, or Great Expectations. Just one of those, let alone all of them and more, will demonstrate to you how much Guinness was slumming–yes, I said slumming–to do the Lucas stuff.