Lee Morgan's Last Night at Slug's

Today at Narratively, I break out of my baseball niche to dig into historical crime of a different sort. Lee Morgan has always been one of my favorite postwar jazz musicians, but until I started reading up on him I had no idea about the heartbreaking story of his life and death.

On an icy night in 1967, one of the world's greatest trumpeters didn't own a trumpet. His horn was in the pawnshop, along with his winter coat, sold to pay for heroin. Three years after releasing one of the most successful jazz albums of the 1960s, Lee Morgan was in the depths of a drug habit that had consumed him for nearly a decade. Even if he'd had a trumpet, he was so out of practice that he could barely play. That was the night he met the woman who would save his life.

A transplant from North Carolina, the woman who would become Helen Morgan was known in jazz circles as "the little hip square." She didn't touch heroin, but her apartment was a refuge for struggling musicians, including many addicts. After the clubs had closed, "Helen's Place" was somewhere to get warm and get fed. On that particular cold night, she says in "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan," Morgan came by, "raggedy and pitiful…and for some kind of reason, my heart just went out to him.

"I said, 'Child, it's zero degrees out there and all you have is a jacket. Where is your coat?'"

"In hock," he said. She got the coat back for him, along with his trumpet, and like a lost puppy, he followed her home. From then on, she said, "he hung on to me," and in turn she "took over total control" of Lee Morgan, helping the onetime prodigy grow into the musician he was meant to be. Helen would get him well, she would get him working, and five years later, she would end his life.

"She was a sucker for people who were suckers," says Larry Reni Thomas, author of "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan." "He was a sucker for heroin."

It starts ugly and gets uglier. You'll like it. 

I'm Not Wild About The New Bowie, & I Hope I'm Wrong

Today, people are having opinions. Lots and lots of opinions about David Bowie, a man whose media attention has, in the last few years, been at an historic low. Good or bad, The Next Day​ merits having some opinions—and just that is a triumph, I think. Like everyone else, I listened to the album this afternoon on iTunes, and I don't like it very much.

The new David Bowie is currently available to stream for free on iTunes, and the question on everyone’s mind is, “How sad should this make us?” The Next Day is the onetime superstar’s first album since 2003′s indifferently-received Reality, and it hasn’t been hotly anticipated so much as warily watched out for. If this were Springsteen or the Stones, no one would worry too much. We know they’re doing fine. But Bowie made his bones as an artist, and just because he hasn’t made any good art in decades doesn’t mean that his ambition is gone. This is a man whom we don’t want to fail.

The question is what constitutes failure for Bowie. Should we treat this as a serious attempt, and trash it? Or do we let him coast on his name, and give him another pass? It depends on whether or not you still take Bowie seriously as an artist—or whether you think he takes himself seriously. It's a big question, and one that I am way, way, way under qualified to answer. ​One thought I had though—for every article you see about this album (including my two), take a look at the accompanying photos. If every picture you see is from the '70s, well, that says more about this album's importance than I can.

I'm going to give the album a few more listens this week, and hope it grows on me. Heathen ​and Reality​ both did, although I haven't really listened to them much since high school. You'll feel much less conflicted about The Next Day if you like the album straight off, as Gothamist​ does. I hope everyone feels the same way they do. I hope I am completely wrong.

Today in, "Oh No They Didn't," The USPS Takes On Dolly

All right, so the post office isn't really going to war with the woman who wrote "Jolene," "9 to 5" and "I Will Always Love You."​ They'd have to be goddamned fools. But they are screwing with her charity, and I don't like that one bit, so I wrote a doodad about it:

As if the United States Postal Service didn’t have enough trouble, a little-noticed news item ran this week that suggests they are about to make a powerful new enemy: East Tennessee’s favorite daughter, Miss Dolly Parton. In 1996, Parton founded the Imagination Library, which sent a free book every month to children in Sevier County, the forever-impoverished mountain community where she was born in 1946. (Huh. Never thought of Dolly as a baby boomer.) In 2000, she took the program nationwide, partnering with local libraries and community groups to spread the love of reading across the United States. It’s an uncontroversial charity, because everyone likes reading.

Everyone, that is, besides the Post Office. The local newspaper from Maryville, Tennessee, reported this week that the Post Office has begun throwing out Imagination Library books that were returned due to a bad address. Although the local Kiwanis Club was once allowed to pick these books up free of charge, Uncle Sam has changed his mind. Post Office flunky David Walton said:

They are wanting to go pick those books up without paying that return fee. We can’t afford that. They are wanting to … bypass that fee that most other mailers pay. For some time, they have been getting away with that. It’s costing us money.

For the Post Office, I predict this will prove a fatal mistake.

Read on, if you'd like to know more about why I love love love Dolly Parton.​ Is this a Tennessee thing, or do people nationwide find her incredibly inspiring? I don't know the answer, but I do know that if I have a few too many beers tonight, this is the song I'm putting on the jukebox:

The Porter Wagoner Show

This Post Has A Synth-Heavy Soundtrack

The lady had the day off from work, so she and I spent the morning watching the original Highlander, a wonderfully mediocre film that made us ask two questions:

1. What is up with Christopher Lambert's accent?

2. Why don't movies have badass original songs any more?

There was a time called the '80s when original songs were requisite, regardless of genre. Ghostbusters has not one, not two, but three original songs. (And please don't forget Run DMC's contribution to the sequel.) Kenny Loggins, as my pal Nate from PopDust points out, had chart-topping singles for Top Gun, Caddyshack, and Footloose. And then, of course, there's the song to which we all had the time of our lives.

I'm sure there are business reasons for the decline in ridiculous movie tie-in songs. A strong soundtrack isn't the moneymaker it once was, and record labels no longer have godlike control over their artists. Once the golden age of music videos fizzled out, and grunge became dominant, it stopped being possible for a mainstream film to feature mainstream music. And it's possible that once the cocaine haze of the 1980's wore off, someone realized that rapping about fictional characters isn't very cool.

There's no way that a single Number One hit was so excellent, it forever crippled the idea of movie-tie in music. Not when the practice continued for years after the film's release. Not when the idea of single events forever changing the course of mankind's destiny has been discredited by every freshman year history student. There's no way that a single video was so indulgent, so ridiculous, so—but wait. We forgot about Prince.

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I knew that, as part of Prince's Warner Brothers captivity, he was forced to record the Batman soundtrack. I knew about the scene in the art museum. But I did not know about Batdance. It's a seven minute-long argument against the 1980's, a spectacle of dismal dancing, a neon orgy that doesn't just prefigure Batman & Robin —it nearly outdoes it. If the formula for the chart-topping original song was set by Ray Parker, Jr., Prince took it so far that it would never work again. He broke it forever. This, kiddies, is why we can't have nice things. 

UPDATE

My friend Fallon, when she's not blogging about the horrors of the weather for Scars, has an excellent knowledge of the dark world of original music. She suggests the titular song from Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, by Dokken, and the unbelievably amazing "One of the Living," from Beyond Thunderdome.

Tina and Max, together at last. What a beautiful world.