There’s no city in America that defined labor quite like beautiful, hardscrabble Pittsburgh. Our workers produced the big, hard, heavy, clanging things that made the world go 'round: iron, steel, aluminum, glass, massive rotors, giant generators. Nobody worked as hard as Pittsburghers. And nobody wrote and sang about the working class lives and loves of Pittsburghers quite like the fabulous…
Ask me where I would love to have lived in the 1960s, and I'll say LONDON in a Big Ben minute. The fashions, the music, the clubs! Imagine the chance to sit in on the drug trials of Mick and Keith! Or being able to crawl through Paul McCartney's bathroom window, as fans once did. Blimey, the bobbies didn't even carry guns (and still don't, except for special circumstances). Alas, the swinging times came to an end in the 1970s, as inflation, unemployment, high taxes and strikes eventually made for a very unmerry old England. But when times get rocky, rockers liven things up. And nowhere was this more evident than in London, where artists helped quell the chaos with new sounds and provocative fashion. Here, then, is Part Two of my take on London's 2012 Olympic games: The 1970s' British Style Icon Competition.
When it comes to music, I've waved the U.K. Rock Team flag my entire life. Okay, I realize those skinny boys stole a lot of riffs and rhythms from their American R&B heroes of the '50s. But there was something about their electric British sound and haughty, mod style that turned me into a Union Jack junkie from my earliest Beatle-loving days. So, in honor of London hosting the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, here is Part One of my series on British rock medal winners: The 1960s Style Icon Competition.
"What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day." That's just one of the many funny lines made famous by trailblazing comedian Phyllis Diller, who would have turned 98 today. Did this keen observation of corporate life qualify the flamboyant Phyllis to perform for managers in training? It's debatable. But every year on her birthday I recall the time in 1969 when Westinghouse Electric Corporation sent a group of newly promoted supervisors, including my father, to watch her nightclub act.
Bass players are the Rodney Dangerfields of the rock world, it seems. I tell ya, they just don't get no respect. And no wonder! On the day after God created rock stars (sometime around 4 am on a gin-soaked Saturday night in Memphis), he created groupies. And he commanded them: "Thou shalt honor thy singer and thy lead guitarist and have no false rock Gods before thee."