This one’s a little tongue-in-cheek, since of the two versions from 2000, the same person’s singing.
In the (what I consider) classic film OBrother, WhereArtThou? George Clooney leads an inept trio of runaways from a chain gang, which at one point pretends to be recording artists called the Soggy Bottom Boys.
Now, despite being the nephew of Rosemary Clooney (WhiteChristmas), George didn’t sing on the soundtrack, so when his character leads “Man of Constant Sorrow,” that’s Dan Tyminsky you’re hearing, and that’s Tyminsky with Alison Krause in the second video. The soundtrack was by far a bigger success story than the movie itself, leading to a renaissance for Americana music that also led to a brief revival of interest of folk music later that was another reason rock lost favor with critics and/or fans.
Eventually “Man of Constant Sorrow” gained enough traction to carry cover versions from the likes of Home Free. Despite being more than a century old today, it wasn’t until Tyminsky covered it in 2000 that it reemerged into the popular consciousness.
But as with many things, we can circle the conversation back to Bob Dylan:
Here’s the Stanley Brothers before him:
Here’s Joan Baez singing “Girl of Constant Sorrow”:
I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before, but it still fascinates me and has actually gotten bigger since then…
This time I’ll go a little deeper. Let’s rewind to Russell Crowe in the ‘80s, when you had to be Australian to know he existed. At this point he really was making his name as a pop act. The song most relevant to later eras would be “I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando.” Eventually he did in fact become an acting icon.
But he never left his interest in music behind. He ended up making friends with Alan Doyle of the Newfoundland folk band Great Big Sea, and they made music together and Doyle showed up in a number of Crowe’s movies. (Their biggest musical collaboration would be “Testify,” a song so good I still swear it can’t possibly originate with them or is a testament to just how good Crowe really is.) Doyle’s biggest role was as Alan-a-Dale in RobinHood. When you cast an authentic musician in the role who regularly performs folk music and composes original material, the likelihood of something great resulting increases. He cobbled together a tune that’s half in the background of one scene, forgot about it, and a few years later was made aware that folk acts had claimed it and made it their own, finishing it out however they felt like, and the music scene began crediting it as another folk traditional from some point long in the past, original composer “unknown.”
So he finished it out himself and released it on an album. In recent years, after acts like Mumford & Sons made it briefly seem folk music would explode again in all the ways fans still lament Bob Dylan abandoning in Newport, there’s once again been a resurgence. Nathan Evans went viral with “Wellerman,” a traditional sea shanty, and on the album he subsequently got to make he included a cover of Doyle’s “Bully Boys.” Colm McGuinness has a video where he accompanies himself brilliantly, and that’s become a favorite of mine…
It’s strange how these things turn out. When I started this series I didn’t immediately think to include “Bully Boys,” since I’d covered it before (heh), but it would be woefully incomplete without it. Anyone can look up traditional songs that trace back centuries. This is one that played out over very recent history in the most unlikely ways. It will probably never top any charts, but has woven its way deeply across the English speaking landscape (and for all I know, elsewhere). This is the kind of thing that fascinates me.
This one's a departure from what I've been talking about, since all three versions of "The Weary Kind" included above were done at the same time, for the same reason, a film called Crazy Heart.
It's just interesting, to me, that even that's possible, that we so seldom think of how radically different a song can sound if a different person is singing, not merely in a rearrangement but in the vocals themselves. Jeff Bridges sounds completely different than Colin Farrell, Bridges playing the cagey veteran who gifts Farrell the song, which in the real world was composed by Ryan Bingham, who later became a little better known for a supporting role in Yellowstone, where he sometimes sings, too (his introduction merrily jokes about how depressing his music sounds).
And I've loved the song, regardless of who sings it, since I first saw the film. I was reminded recently of how canned music written for movies has become in recent years, but "The Weary Kind" is a considerable exception. Much of what Bridges sings to represent a legendary career is a little on the nose (written sometimes to comment on the state in which we find him rather than to reflect on a heyday). "Weary Kind" is a song that eclipses this fictional output and sounds like it could easily have landed on the radio in real life. Maybe it did? I don't know.
The convoluted saga of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is another you can read about elsewhere, but it’s worth talking about in a more general sense. Like a lot of listeners, it was a clear highlight of late Nineties radio for me, one of those contradictions you can’t help but laugh about when people say rock was a wasteland by that point (always greatly exaggerated). I didn’t know anything about the legal battles that tanked the Verve in its wake. It seems the band borrowed some notes from an orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song in order to achieve its signature sound.
Anyway, it’s a great song, still one of my favorite ever. More recently British indie hip hop star Ren offered his version, which carries the same string arrangement but all-new lyrics (no one does it quite like him), once more emphasizing just how far the Verve reached, very much like how the Animals completely reinvented the sound of “House of the Rising Sun,” making the song its own, though “Bitter Sweet Symphony” literally is its own song. I just don’t get how petty people can be.
Listening to “Only Wanna Be with You,” in hindsight, it’s half tribute to Bob Dylan. It’s not something I picked up on, back in the day. Hootie haters, today, they only hear “I only wanna be with yoooou,” the refrain, but the song is better known, in some circles, for the legal problems the band got into for borrowing wholesale from Dylan’s “Idiot Wind.” At one point it’s just Darius Rucker singing from it. It’s something, again, you don’t notice if you’re not paying attention, but inescapable once you do.
I’ve gotta figure some of the backlash Hootie faced was the rock scene not figuring this out, that Hootie was completely immersed in the music it loved. For years they toured as a bar band, so they played what they loved, interspersed with their own stuff. Not nearly enough is made of how much the band adored R.E.M., how Rucker tried singing like Michael Stipe on many tracks in Hootie’s early releases. Rucker isn’t Stipe, though, so to hear him bury his full-throated grandeur in Stipe murmur can be disorienting.
But aside from “Only Wanna Be with You,” Hootie never really pursued Dylan. There isn’t an outright cover in any of the band’s recorded material. Just imagine! A huge part of Dylan’s legacy is other artists eagerly covering his music, and a significant portion of the history of rock music is a result of that. By the time Hootie came around, Dylan was beginning a reemergence, but aside from “Make You Feel My Love,” which Billy Joel happily covered, the scene had begun to move on. At any rate, Hootie’s audacious sampling of “Idiot Wind” was a new way to spotlight Dylan, but it didn’t really catch on, except to say some five years later when Old Crow Medicine Show resurrected “Wagon Wheel,” which Rucker eventually made his own, bringing the whole thing full circle.
“House of the Rising Sun” is another song you can read about on Wikipedia, its incredible origins. Like a lot of people I first heard it as a song recorded by the Animals, and I thought it was a song by the Animals for the longest time, until very recently, when I learned not only Bob Dylan had recorded it on his debut album a mere three years earlier than the Animals version, but Woody Guthrie before Dylan…and apparently it was a well-traveled folk song for…probably…centuries before that. Like true folk songs it becomes impossible to learn the actual origins, only the places here and there where it surfaces, like little signposts.
So in effect it’s one of the purest folk songs we currently enjoy. The Animals version is iconic in its own right, a defining moment in the band’s relatively short history, in the history of the era it came from (the Sixties), rock music itself, and apparently folk (most people tend to associate Dylan as straddling the line, but history flattens everything). It’s one of my favorite songs, anyway, caused me to track down an Animals hits compilation for my collection a decade ago once I realized how important the song was to me.
And as someone who likes collecting songs to try and learn to sing, it’s always nice to think of this as a part of a long tradition. Because that’s what music is really all about.
Darius Rucker, 2012Bob Dylan sketch, 1973 Old Crow Medicine Show, 2003
The story of “Wagon Wheel” is pretty well detailed (have a look at Wikipedia), but I want to write about it as an authentic version of how a song enters the popular consciousness, not just as a pop song that does well on the charts but permeates in folk fashion, so that it feels like it was always there, and always will be.
Dylan gets the initial credit, but even he’s riffing on earlier material. Bob Dylan is recognized by discerning music fans as one of the defining artists of the past hundred years, with his own belief that he was just trying to live up to earlier acts like Woody Guthrie, whom more recent generations know only through Dylan’s admiration (pop music can be fickle). Dylan’s voice, heavily criticized in recent years in its current state, has actually been a source of contention throughout his career, which is okay since his songwriting has always been his calling card and he’s been covered heavily through the years, so it’s not surprising that even an abandoned sketch ends up with a meaningful legacy.
Old Crow Medicine Show picked the sketch back up some thirty years later, completing it in its current state, around the same time Darius Rucker was trying to start up a solo career. When he first tackled the idea of being a country act, nobody took him seriously (possibly because he seemed to be lampooning the idea himself in commercials), but then started recording anyway. By his own admission he stumbled on “Wagon Wheel” almost by accident, initially unsure the material fit him.
It ended up becoming a career-defining song, the kind country bars play so much people get sick of hearing it.
To get to that point is improbable. Rucker first made his name as lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish, the band credited with ruining rock music in the ‘90s, the antithesis of the grunge sound that was supposed to be the next evolution of the format but ended up dying with Kurt Cobain instead. Hootie for about a year was inescapable, and then was turned into a punchline and an afterthought. Rucker’s reinvention as a country star was a solid second act, but “Wagon Wheel” returned him to levels of success he’d previously enjoyed with Hootie, and, arguably, beyond.
If Rucker is remembered in a hundred years it’ll be for “Wagon Wheel.” It’s very likely the song will outlive him. That’s the way these things go. It’s also done it with Dylan, with the blues artists who toyed with it previously, even with Old Crow Medicine Show.
Far too often today we tend to grow precious with our current interests, believing that if they no longer exist in the exact form we know them they’re instantly and forever ruined. But history adapts everything it remembers. That’s the whole point. If it endures it’s changed at some point, with the times, waiting for some new source of inspiration. The lineage of “Wagon Wheel” is a vivid example of that.
CBS’s version of the BBC’s Ghosts has been one of my favorite shows in recent years, with the third season recently debuting.
The thing I love about the show so much is its rich cast of characters, which draws on American eras the way its predecessor did with British, which among others has a caveman in its collection, whereas we’ve got Thor, a Viking.
And gosh I love that crazy bastard.
Thor is still hilariously bloodthirsty even after a thousand years haunting the grounds of Woodstone Manor would eventually inhabit. But he’s so congenial about it!
It probably wouldn’t be fun to experience an actual Viking raid, but Thor depicts a version of the character of these Vikings that make them seem almost…normal. None of the other ghosts, much less Sam (the woman who can see them, although her husband Jay can’t, but has gotten surprisingly cool with the whole affair), really bat an eye at it, because, again, he’s as companionable as anyone.
Anyway, it’s my favorite new show in years, even if it’s technically a version of another show. It’s easy to separate the two when the casts are so different. I’ve seen some of the BBC version, and it’s enjoyable, too. But gosh I love the American version.
In 2015, Disturbed released its sixth album, Immortalized. If you look at the summary of critical reception over at Wikipedia, you'd think there wasn't much to talk about. Based on the flood of praise for the band's cover of "The Sound of Silence" I discovered years after the fact, I would certainly question such conclusions.
Once the video for the cover was released later that year, things began to change, and it was even nominated for a Grammy in 2017 as Best Rock Performance (losing to David Bowie's sentimental favorite, "Blackstar," with other nominees including Twenty One Pilots' "Heathens," featured as one of the few original songs in Suicide Squad).
These days I discover music most easily on YouTube, which is how it went with this song, which has since remained, in the years that've followed, one of my most frequent views on the site. It's a powerful vocal performance (suggestions always include testimonies to such), a heavy and yet elegant reinterpretation of the classic Simon & Garfunkel harmonies, plus a spare but equally effective accompaniment. I get that Disturbed is not known for this kind of music, so the band's fans, and anyone else following their activities, probably never expected it in a million years (although maybe they did? I have no idea), but if a classic song gets a new version that's this good? You don't quibble with its provenience. And it should be hailed widely both for its own time and as part of the continuum of the rock genre. Which is of course impossible in the current "rock is dead" era that must be continuously affirmed by never, ever admitting anything good can possibly still happen.
In a perfect world radio (which still exists) would have this in regular rotation. Not just stations catering to Disturbed's regular fanbase, but to the broader set, where it really belongs.
On February 4th Tracy Chapman reminded the world that she exists, taking the Grammys stage with Luke Combs in support of his recent cover of her 1988 song “Fast Car.”
It caused something of a sensation.
With the exception of another hit somewhat belatedly in 1995 (“Give Me One Reason”), it seemed all too easy for the pop world to leave Chapman behind. Until the Grammys viral moment I didn’t even know the name of the song was “Fast Car.”
It was just a song I knew, and knew that I loved. It’s kind of symptomatic of the modern pop song. The station I check in with these days advertises itself as playing the best of the “80s, 90s, and today,” literally lumping three decades into that last signifier. I mean, the only reason the ‘90s are listed at all is because four decades would probably be too much. I mean, we’re here in 2024. Time to knuckle up and name the ‘00s, the ‘10s (even if a century ago we didn’t until the “Roaring ‘20s,” even if that’s a poor excuse at best). Call them the Oughts, the Tens, or Twenty-Tens if you must. I mean, what the heck are we gonna call these decades when they are the relevant nostalgia period?
The ‘90s are a whole decade that still define pop music, but for all the wrong reasons. “Boy bands” are now Korean, but they still contain no actual instruments. Rock music was so ruthlessly dismissed it effectively killed it as a mainstream phenomenon (and even today, the acts that do manage to make it are mocked or ignored when discussing what happened to the genre).
The ‘80s were hair bands and Michael Jackson, the splintering of rock into pop and various kinds of heavier sounds that increasingly had no place in the mainstream. And you had Chapman, who in the ‘60s would’ve been accepted as the prodigy she was. What a pure voice, such perfectly spare composition, the stuff they built that decade around.
And she vanished without a trace for twenty years, and took back the stage with effortless grace.
I guess that’s its own commentary. Wait long enough and I guess things will be rectified. If you’re lucky you might even be able to enjoy it personally.
A collection of videos (and some songs I couldn’t find videos for) of perfect Darius Rucker vocals, not to be confused with a greatest hits or singles or in other words comprehensive listing…
“Let Her Cry,” Hootie & the Blowfish, CrackedRearView (1994) One of the iconic hits from Hootie’s debut album, a ballad of heartbreak.
“Earth Stopped Cold at Dawn,” Hootie & the Blowfish, FairweatherJohnson (1996)
Hootie’s first song that should’ve been a single but wasn’t, although I still heard it years later at a department store.
“Tootie,” Hootie & the Blowfish, FairweatherJohnson (1996)
One of Hootie’s true buried treasures (no video found of Darius singing but plenty of covers, which is testament enough.
“Michelle Post,” Hootie & the Blowfish, MusicalChairs (1998)
Hootie’s third album saw the band bust loose from expectations. This one’s pretty stripped clean, almost just Darius with backing vocals and banjo.
“Desert Mountain Showdown,” Hootie & the Blowfish, MusicalChairs (1998)
Another delight, a hoedown that became a staple of Hootie’s concerts.
“Fine Line,” Hootie & the Blowfish, ScatteredSmotheredandCovered (2000)
A Radney Foster cover circa the first album but finally released officially years later.
“I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” Hootie & the Blowfish, ScatteredSmotheredandCovered (2000)
Another great cover. Hootie started as a cover band and it always shows, as they’re excellent at interpreting material.
“Can’t Find the Time,” Hootie & the Blowfish, MeMyself&Irene soundtrack (2000)
Another cover, this time leaning deep into soul territory.
“Exodus,” solo, BacktoThen (2002)
The best song from Darius’s first solo album, although he sings it better without musical accompaniment.
“When She’s Gone,” Hootie & the Blowfish, HootieandtheBlowfish (2003)
“Little Darlin’,” Hootie & the Blowfish, HootieandtheBlowfish (2003)
Hootie’s fourth album builds and expands on MusicalChairs in its best moments. “Little Darlin’” is another buried treasure. They both are.
“State Your Peace,” Hootie & the Blowfish, LookingforLucky (2005)
I didn’t choose a lot of rockers for this list, but here’s a good one.
“A Smile,” Hootie & the Blowfish, LookingforLucky (2005)
By the fifth album Hootie had lost all mainstream momentum. A real pity, as songs like this in an earlier era would’ve been iconic.
“Alright,” solo, LearntoLive (2008)
“This,” solo, CharlestonSC1966 (2010)
Two songs that illustrate how perfectly Darius slipped into country music.
“True Believers,” solo, TrueBelievers (2013)
Other than the other highlight from this album, this would be one of my personal favorites for true calling cards of his country efforts.
“Wagon Wheel,” solo, TrueBelievers (2013)
The song that made Darius as a country artist blow all the way up, and probably his musical legacy.
“Not Tonight,” Hootie & the Blowfish, ImperfectCircle (2019)
“Lonely on a Saturday Night,” Hootie & the Blowfish, ImperfectCircle (2019)
If Hootie’s comeback had landed, these songs would be recognized as classics.
You’ve probably heard the Beatles released a new sing. Argylle kind of builds itself around it, even.
It’s pretty great.
"Now and Then" John Lennon December 2023 tribute performance. It was kind of immediately embraced by at least a visible part of the fanbase.
"Free as a Bird"
That was the first “new song,” from Anthology 1.
"Real Love"
That was the second “new song,” from Anthology 3.
“Now and Then” was one of two songs kicked around for Anthology 3, but the original recording quality just wasn’t there, and George just didn’t feel it was worth pursuing.
Part of the problem that will exist as they were finished some thirty years ago is that “Free” and “Real Love” were rough even themselves in how they found John, and the remaining Beatles didn’t play around too much with what they did.
“Now and Then,” as finally completed, is noticeably different. I’ve been obsessed with it since first hearing it. It’s obviously not a traditional Beatles song, but it sounds like a perfect coda, even tribute to John, and the end of the band, something that never happened back in the day, when the Beatles existed one day and didn’t the next, and everyone just went off to solo projects.
Paul & Ringo put in the work. Everything about the song sounds like what the band, at its height, was doing, even the bits pulled from other songs (which Beatles songs absolutely did, even if one magazine article I read seems to have somehow forgotten).
I’ve been catching up with the Beatles for two decades, and anytime someone suggests Beatles music somehow isn’t relevant today (as the major criticism of Yesterday somehow was, despite the recent phenomenon of One Direction, and probably BTS was already a thing back in 2019, and even more ironic if it wasn’t, and of course Coldplay, the latest band to scare people who don’t want any competition to the Beatles legacy), it just baffles me. It’s endlessly rewarding.
And we just got something new. Only the Beatles. As ever.
"Come and I Will Sing You (The Twelve Apostles)" has been an obsession of mine since I first heard it on the Great Big Album The Hard and the Easy, released all the way back in 2005 (if I can possibly believe it...!), one of the rare songs sung by Bob Hallett (sort of the band's own Ringo Starr in that regard).
...The problem is that Bob Hallett sings it...Bob's great! Don't get me wrong. But he doesn't exactly sing...clearly. That's of course him singing in the first of the two videos (the second being an adorable version I found last month in my further attempts to get my family to love the song as much as I do), so you can hear what I mean.
But that's also part of the charm! I love listening to Bob sing it. Actually learning what he's singing becomes difficult, however, so that's why it's taken the better part of twenty years to do so...
Obviously I didn't dedicate a great amount of time in the past two decades to do so, but the interest was always there. The song itself is based on traditional material (as with much of Great Big Sea's catalog), and the variations are known by different titles, but the gist of it is that it's a version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas," which itself has enough weirdness just trying to interpret what all the figures mean, which is also the fun of "Come and I Will Sing You," once you find out what Bob's singing.
To wit (and this is my version, don't you know):
Come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you one-o. What will the one be? One the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you two-o. What will the two be? Two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you three-o. What will the three be? Three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you four-o. What will the four be? Four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you five-o. What will the five be? Five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you six-o. What will the six be? Six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you seven-o. What will the seven be? Seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you eight-o. What will the eight be? Eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you nine-o. What will the nine be? Nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you ten-o. What will the ten be? Ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you eleven-o. What will the eleven be? Eleven that went straight to heaven, ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
So come and I will sing you! What will you sing me? I will sing you twelve-o. What will the twelve be? Twelve the twelve apostles, eleven that went straight to heaven, ten the ten commandments, nine bright-eye shiners, eight Gabriel singers, seven stars under the sky, six the six pallbearers, five ferrymen under the bush, four gospel preachers, three of them were drivers, two of them were lily-white babes, clothed all in green-o, one the one that's all alone and ever more shall be.
Hey!
Finally I decided I just needed to sing it, so I learned it, and some of it was tongue-tying until I learned it well enough, and that's how I spent the weeks of Christmas and so I've satisfied both my curiosity and interest in the song. At last!
And here's some explanations:
"One the one..." This one's pretty self-explanatory. This is God.
"Two lily-white babes" These are Jesus and Mary, born without original sin.
"Three of them were drivers" The Three Kings.
"Four gospel preachers" Well, Matthew Mark Luke & John.
"Five ferrymen" One of the difficult ones to parse. Possibly the five wounds of Christ on the cross.
"Six pallbearers" Also subject to wide interpretation, possibly the six jars of water Jesus turned into wine, or the six days of creation.
"Seven stars" Probably the seven sacraments.
"Eight Gabriel singers" Archangels.
"Nine bright-eye shiners" The orders of angels in general.
"Ten commandments" Self-explanatory.
"Eleven that went straight to heaven" The apostles excluding Judas.
Gasparilla is a festival that’s kind of a big deal in Tampa, and has been for more than a century, celebrating a fictional pirate named Jose Gaspar. It’s a fine excuse to have a little fun, a parade (two!) filled with floats of folk called krewes who toss bead necklaces at the gathered crowds, and celebrate local lore (real and imagined).
When I moved to Tampa back in the fall of 2017, I had no idea this thing existed, but by January 2018 (Gasparilla happens twice every January), I was fully onboard. No, I haven’t yet dressed as a pirate (or anything else), but, y’know, maybe!
I grew up in Lisbon Falls, Maine, which for the part forty-odd years has celebrated Moxie Day (which I’ve talked about a few times in this blog), and when I was living in Colorado Springs there was Pikes Peak or Bust, another commemorative event (this one based on real events). Moxie Day is a community event steeped in the community, which Gasparilla is not, at least not in the same way. Moxie Day has things like bake sales and recipe contests. Gasparilla is food trucks.
Anyway, so the first Gasparilla parade is always the children’s version. The second, a week later, is the adults one, where there is much drinking (it also has the “invasion” reenacted). I used to try and attend both, but that may be firmly in the past tense, or at least has turned in that direction.
My favorite part is actually all the skeleton pirates that pop up to help celebrate. There’s also the Rough Riders (Tampa was a staging ground for the Spanish American War), the Conquistadors, and the cows from Chick-Fil-A (the sponsor of the children’s parade; I took pictures of them previously but not this year).
Well, here we are again, this time talking about some other TV shows I've watched recently, just before those other ones from last week...
Let's start with Sandman. I didn't get into the comics until about a decade ago. I know, I know, that's like twenty years later than all the cool kids, but whenever it happened I finally got there. The efforts to adapt Sandman to movie and/or TV were byzantine, but it finally happened, on Netflix, and that of course meant someone who has never had Netflix was possibly never going to see it...Until Netflix decided to release the first season on physical media. Which of course I snapped up.
For a comic book steeped in the goth culture of its time, there were probably going to be a few changes to keep it from feeling dated. So that happened. Along with about half the cast, Death is now black, and not the other most goth character in the story, but it really doesn't matter. Same character, just as awesome, and half the best episode of the season, along with Hob Gadling (a tweet referring to which went as viral as I'm likely to). Listening to Morpheus after all this time, just having a voice for the character, that's the biggest adjustment to make. Absolutely totally worth the wait. Will they really be able to adapt the whole comic? Time to tell!
Titans finished out its run, and I caught up of course on home media (the way I've watched the whole series), with its fourth season (one whole episode of which finally gave Beast Boy a proper spotlight, which owed more than a little to Grant Morrison's Animal Man), and the whole run has a very symmetrical feel to it, along with the sliding time scale of the X-Men movies as close to a true comic book experience as live action adaptations have gotten. Any regular reader of comics will know superhero team lineups come and go, and usually have a beginning and end of some kind. The show began with the Titans getting back together (some of its best early material across the first two seasons are flashbacks to the past, a whole prior lineup we get to see with some of them coming back for me, including Wonder Girl), and ends with the group going back its separate ways.
The whole series has gotten so little attention (mostly in the beginning, when observers called it "needlessly violent"), and as such will be a welcome bit of rediscovery in the years ahead. Definitely one of the hidden gems of the streaming era.
Speaking of which! All these shows I've talked about in the past few weeks have come from one streaming service or another. This last one this week is no exception. Frasier is a reboot/continuation of the classic Frasier sitcom, which itself was of course a spinoff of Cheers. Early reviews criticized the new version as lacking the depth of comic talent, specifically the actors playing Frasier's son and Nigel's son, but I find their unique characters in the general franchise to be refreshing, helping establish yet another identity for the third look at Frasier's world we've gotten to see. It's also one of those shows I'm baffled has to be relegated to streaming (Paramount+), although the broadcast chances are maybe dicey with sticking strictly to Kesley Grammer as central star (whereas Night Court had a new face to the premise, and what's now known as The Connors had a whole cast it brought back).
Anyway, this old fan loved the results, which also helped keep me visiting my Paramount+ account in the absence (a fairly rare occurrence) of new Star Trek material (not that the service doesn't have other material, too). There was a time (certainly when my working status had much different parameters, much less working hours) when I watched a flood of television programming, at least one show every night. We're not really in a golden age of network television (although I think Ghosts is a classic too many people sleep on), so I'm not missing too much, and most of what streaming offers I can reasonably catch up with as I want. I've also been watching Yellowstone (but curiously, not the streaming spinoffs). Cable (premium or otherwise) rarely has much to interest me, and much of what critics love these days is indistinguishable from what they love in film.
So I guess I can say I'm keeping up about as well as always.
Hmm. Let’s maybe get back a little more into blogging (last year is the first one I missed on this particular one since I started it back in 2002!). If I manage to keep this up, this’ll be a brief look at the highlights of what I’ve watched recently, hopefully on a weekly basis.
So this past week I finally saw the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. I’m really behind. I know this. This is a show that until a few weeks ago only existed on Disney+. Except for Paramount+ (and its predecessor CBS All Access) I haven’t really participated in the streaming future. I have spent most of my life without cable TV, too. I view it like that.
So I finally got to watch it because someone decided to release those seasons in physical media. I got them on Blu-ray, which is itself a format I didn’t participate in until the pandemic started. But I’ve been catching up on that, too. I now have dozens of movies and TV shows on these slightly smaller, smoother, more visually detailed discs. The first one I got was, and also the impetus for, GodfatherCoda: TheDeathofMichaelCorleone, the directorial reimagining of the third film in the series, an attempt to finally make it respectable.
Not really the subject of this discussion. Anyway.
I didn’t really have an urge to watch any of the Star Wars TV shows. I’m a fan of the movies. Pretty much all of them. Modern Star Wars fans and I diverge on a lot of points. They like the cartoons, RogueOne…I don’t. I knew all about the Baby Yoda phenomenon. Kind of hard to avoid. I figured that was probably good enough.
Then this opportunity arose. So I dove in. The absolute best I can say is that it’s really interesting to watch familiar Star Wars elements sort of remixed. I mean, this is clearly (unlike, say, RogueOne) Star Wars. By the second season they’re clearly leaning more heavily into the connective material.
Let’s move on.
I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. All of them. (Prodigy now being on Netflix, this will change for the foreseeable future.) I’ve followed and enjoyed each new show to varying degrees (Prodigy least, so kind of fortuitous).
This being said, last year the best new episode in decades (since the end of Enterprise) happened, and in the series most capable of achieving the necessary episodic format to reach it. Which is to say, StrangeNew Worlds.
The episode is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (which you might have been able to guess from the title of this post). It features a character who’s been a regular in the series from the start, a descendant of Khan, being forced in the most literal way possible, to confront her ancestry.
The whole episode is magical. La’an herself had already been a favorite of mine (as much as it pains her to think of them I love to hear her say “Gorn,” and she was by far the best element of the fantasy episode in the first season, when I truly noticed her for the first time). How she plays off Kirk, and how the episode leans into Kirk himself, interprets him (kind of how Grogu cleverly depicts Yoda’s quip to Luke all those years ago, about he could possibly be so big eating the way he did), which for a character who has existed for some sixty years and this is the third incarnation of him, that’s a special kind of breakthrough.
But yeah, it also dives deeply into Star Trek lore, by giving us a glimpse into Khan’s origins, and La’an’s continuing efforts to reconcile her lineage. The whole experience is, as I may have mentioned, perfect, for all the reasons I’ve touched on and many more besides. It’s the most richly articulated episodes in franchise history, and yeah, one of the best. I have a whole blog dedicated to the franchise, and I have painstakingly detailed the new classics as I’ve talked about all those episodes, classics in Star Trek having become harder to identify the older it’s gotten.
This one goes leagues beyond most of them. And it baffles me that nobody seems to recognize this. So I try to talk about it here and there. I just happened to watch it again, which is why I’m writing about it here now.
I’ve been a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek most of my life, so it’s always nice to know there’s still new stuff worth talking about all these many years later, past the formative material. That’s not a sentiment that gets expressed enough, not these days. I’ve tried most of my blogging experience to counteract that, so it’s fitting to reiterate the point when trying to get back into the swing of it.
