Both Elton John and Bernie Taupin claim not to know what their 1970 song "Take Me to the Pilot", even means. Taupin compared his writing style in “Pilot” to poets like “Baudelaire and Rimbaud…(who) just threw things together and went ‘Wow! That sounds good’.”
According to Wikipedia, the albums discography of Elton John consists of 30 studio albums, 4 live albums, 7 soundtrack albums, 16 compilation albums and 3 extended plays, as well as 2 other albums. John has sold more than 350 million albums worldwide.
Some of the musicians that have collaborated and/or performed with him include Leon Russell, Dusty Springfield, Rick Wakeman, Jean-Luc Ponty, Toni Tennille, John Lennon, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Pete Townshend, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, Tammy Wynette, Gladys Knight, Bonnie Raitt, Leonard Cohen, and George Michael.
Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien. Before embarking on her solo career, she formed a pop-folk vocal trio, The Springfields, with her brother Tom Springfield (born Dionysius P. A. O’Brien) and Tim Feild. In the early 1960s they were one of the UK’s top selling acts.
Dusty Rhodes is a secondary character aboard the starship Lewis and Clark in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1956 book Time for the Stars. Rhodes is a brilliant but immature and rather irritating young man with a talent for drawing extremely accurate pictures that he can “see” telepathically sent to him by his twin back on Earth.
Dusty Baker is a US Marine, and he was born on a June 15th.
And hey, so am I!
While Tom Paxton never thought he’d write another song about the Vietnam War after it was over (and if you’ve never heard his Talking Vietnam Pot Luck Blues, do give it a listen), after he read Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, he felt compelled to put the story into song into song. Later he met Kovic, he told him he loved it.
Calvin Coolidge is the only President of the United States to have been born on the Fourth of July. He is buried in the same town in which he was born, Plymouth Notch, Vt.
Although most Presidents have been sworn into office by the Chief Justice, the sudden death of the predecessor can force an exception. The lowest-ranking official to swear in a President was the small-town justice of the peace and notary public who performed the duty for Coolidge in the middle of the night. That was his own father, whom he was visiting in Plymouth Notch when informed by telegram of President Warren Harding’s death on a West Coast tour, one that included seeing an Alaskan glacier that is now named for him.
Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Pat Boone, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Bobby Darin, Sandy Denny, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Dion DiMucci, Plácido Domingo, Donovan (Donovan Philips Leitch), Bob Dylan, José Feliciano, Arlo Davy Guthrie, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, The Seekers, Simon & Garfunkel, Tiny Tim, Bobby Vinton, The Weavers, and Glenn Yarbrough all have covered Tom Paxton’s songs.
And many of them have gone on west coast tours, too.
You left out Bob Dylan (Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song) and the Fireball’s amazing hit rendition of “Bottle of Wine.”
In play: Bob Dylan had typed up a poem that Tom Paxton read and asked “What’s the music sound like?” Dylan replied “It’s not a song. It’s a poem. No way you could set it to music.”
Paxton told him to do so, and the result was 'It’s A Hard Rain Gonna Fall."
One of Bob Dylan’s inspirations for the lyrics of 'It’s A Hard Rain Gonna Fall" was the 16th century Scots ballad “Lord Randall”, particularly the opening lines and their repeated variations: “Where have you been, Lord Randall, my son/ And where have you been my handsome young man?” Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had studied literature at Columbia, points this out in his 1980 Shakespeare lectures at Naropa Institute.
For the District of Columbia, “Columbia” is a historical name used by both Europeans and Americans to describe the Americas, the New World, and often, more specifically, the United States of America. The name had been in use since the 1730s, for the colonies, and originated from the name of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus.
ETA:
Oops, yes I did!
Vanguard 1, a grapefruit-sized satellite launched by the United States in 1958, has been orbiting Earth for over 60 years. It is the oldest man-made object to do so, and is expected to remain in orbit for 240 years.
The investment management company The Vanguard Group is named after HMS Vanguard, a 74-gun Royal Navy ship of the line which Admiral Lord Nelson once commanded. John C. Bogle, the founder of the company, chose the name after a dealer in antique prints left him a book about Great Britain’s naval achievements, and a likeness of the ship now appears on the company’s logo.
The .460 Weatherby Magnum rifle cartridge was developed in 1957 by Roy Weatherby as an African dangerous game rifle cartridge for the hunting of heavy, thick skinned dangerous game. It was the world’s most powerful commercially available sporting cartridge for 29 years until the advent of the .700 Nitro Express. The .700 Nitro Express was itself eclipsed in only five years by the 1993 introduction by A-Square of the .577 Tyrannosaur. The .577 T-Rex develops approximately 10,180 foot-pounds force with a velocity of 2,460 ft/s.
Roy Weatherby founded an American rifle, shotgun and cartridge manufacturing company in 1945.
Weatherby, currently headquartered in Paso Robles CA, makes the Vanguard rifle, www.weatherby.com/products/rifles/vanguard.html.
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
Hilaire Belloc, "The Hippopotamus", The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)Robert Heinlein’s book Space Cadet (1948), set at an academy for young astronauts, contains one of the first science fiction references to what we would today recognize as a cellphone.
The flip, or clamshell, style of cell phone was not (entirely) based on the Star Trek TOS communicator. A reference to a flip phone style communicator is referenced in chapter 3 of “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” a science fiction novella by Philip Francis Nowlan which first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. The device is described in the following quoted passage:
“Alan took a compact packet about six inches square from a holster attached to her belt and handed it to Wilma. So far as I could see, it had no special receiver for the ear. Wilma merely threw back a lid, as though she was opening a book, and began to talk. The voice that came back from the machine was as audible as her own.”
What became the Constitution-class starship USS Enterprise was, in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek screenplay, referred to as the USS Yorktown. Roddenberry also considered naming his heroic captain either April or Winter before deciding on Kirk.
The frigate USS Constitution, the world’s oldest commissioned warship still afloat, defeated five British warships: HMS Guerriere, Java, Pictou, Cyane, and Levant, in the War of 1812. Her 1995 reconstruction was facilitated by Hurricane Hugo, which fortuitously blew down enough old-growth live oak trees in Georgia to provide sufficient historically-correct timbers.