In September, 1972, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Canada staged the “Summit Series,” an eight-game series of hockey games between an all-star team of Canadian players from the NHL, and the Soviet National Team.
The first four games of the series were played in Canadian cities (Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver), then the final four games were played in Moscow. At the time, it was widely believed in the West that Canada’s professional players were the best in the world, and that the Soviet squad was unlikely to be able to compete. However, the Soviets surprised, winning the first game, and three of the eight overall.
In the presidential election of 1972, George McGovern lost the election and did not win his home state (South Dakota). This would not be repeated* until 2000 when Al Gore Jr. lost to George W. Bush losing in his home state of Tennessee in the process.
The last major European outbreak of smallpox was in Yugoslavia in 1972. Marshal Tito’s government took draconian measures to bring the outbreak under control, including martial law and mass vaccinations. The nurse who had treated the original victim of smallpox was kept in quarantine under armed guard. In Kosovo, public events, meetings and weddings were forbidden. Despite this, there were still 175 cases and 35 deaths.
Toward the end of the 19th century, smallpox outbreaks in the United States led to vaccine campaigns and related anti-vaccine activity. The Anti Vaccination Society of America was founded in 1879, following a visit to America by leading British anti-vaccinationist William Tebb. Two other leagues, the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League (1882) and the Anti-vaccination League of New York City (1885) followed. The American anti-vaccinationists waged court battles to repeal vaccination laws in several states including California, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
The British used smallpox as a biological warfare agent at the Siege of Fort Pitt during the French and Indian Wars (1754–1763) against France and its Native American allies. The actual use of smallpox had official sanction. British officers, including the top British commanding generals, ordered, sanctioned, paid for and conducted the use of smallpox against the Native Americans.
In play: The disease name "chickenpox has nothing to do with chicken. The name was meant to distinguish this “weak” form of the pox from smallpox (chicken being used, as in chickenhearted, to mean weak or timid). The “pox” of chickenpox is no major matter unless infected (through scratching) or occurring in an immunodeficient person.”
The smallpox vaccine was the first successful vaccine to be developed. It was created by Edward Jenner in 1796, after he observed that milkmaids who previously had caught cowpox did not catch smallpox.
When Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra first sang the song ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, he added a nonsensical word at the end of the title line. Lynne sang, “Don’t bring me down, groose.” But everybody thought the word was ‘Bruce’, so, as Lynne recalls: “We started going on tour and every time we played [it] everyone used to sing ‘Bruce,’ so I said ‘Ah, f*ck it, I’ll sing Bruce as well’!”
The 1980s supergroup The Traveling Wilburys came about when George Harrison was asked by his record label to supply a new song as a B-side to his single, “This Is Love.” Over dinner one night in April, 1988, Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne (who had produced Harrison’s and Orbison’s most recent albums) discussed recording the requested song. Harrison arranged to record the song in Bob Dylan’s garage studio, and brought Tom Petty into the recording when he went to Petty’s house in Malibu to retrieve a guitar which he’d left there.
The five musicians enjoyed playing together, and as the record company felt that the resulting song (“Handle With Care”) was too good to waste on a B-side, they decided to form a band and record a full album together.
George Harrison’s son Dhani Harrison toured this summer with Jeff Lynne’s ELO, and opened for the band. He was also usually later welcomed onstage to sing the lead vocals for the Traveling Wilburys’s song “Handle with Care.”
In the album credits for Traveling Wilburys Vol. I, the “Wilburys” joke was extended further, with the band members listed under various pseudonyms and pretending to be half-brothers – sons of a fictional Charles Truscott Wilbury, Sr. During promotion for the album, Orbison played along with the mock history, saying: “Some people say Daddy was a cad and a bounder, but I remember him as a Baptist minister.”
Before the start of the recording sessions for the first album by the Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison reportedly told Bob Dylan: “We know that you’re Bob Dylan and everything, but we’re going to just treat you and talk to you like we would anybody else.” To which Dylan replied: “Well, great. Believe it or not, I’m in awe of you guys, and it’s the same for me.”
Bob Dylan did not actually compose “All Along the Watchtower”, according to the reboot series “Battlestar Galactica”, but somehow drew it from racial memory of 150,000 years ago.
Singer/songwriter Don McLean had three songs hit the top 20 on the U.S. charts. Two were songs of his own composition, “American Pie” (#1 on the chart) and “Vincent” (#12), both from his 1971 album American Pie. After achieving limited chart success through the rest of the 1970s, McLean recorded a cover of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying,” which reached #5 in 1981.
Bob Dylan was probably not put in a cast after crashing his Triumph motorcycle in 1966. No ambulance was called to the scene and he was not hospitalized. Dylan said he was hurt but was in seclusion just to take a break from his rat race schedule.
A copy of the sheet music of Don McLean’s “Vincent”, together with a set of Van Gogh’s paint brushes, is buried in a time capsule beneath the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
Bob Dylan wrote a little known song known as “Spuriously Seventeen Windows,” or “The Painting by Van Gogh,” or “Definitely Van Gogh” and “Positively Van Gogh.” Under the latter title, it finally came out on the 18-CD version of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966.
