Today, 8 January, would have been Elvis Presley’s 80th birthday. In remembrance of his fascinating life we’re sharing a slideshow from the beautiful images in Elvis Presley: A Southern Life by Joel Williamson. How did this Southern boy make it from Nashville and Vegas, to Grafenwoehr and the White House?

Featured image credit: Headline and 1956 photo from article on Elvis and Mae Axton, who wrote “Heartbreak Hotel,” just after the record sold 1 million copies, 1956. Published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Courtesy of the Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library & Information Center.

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By Kirk Curnutt

Ask folks who came of age in the 1980s what they remember about the movie Eddie and the Cruisers and one of the following responses is likely:

1. It spawned the great rock-radio staple “On the Dark Side” and briefly made MTV stars of the improbably named John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.
2. It was such a shameless Bruce Springsteen rip-off that Boss fans considered it as sacrilegious as devout Christians do Jesus Christ Superstar.
3. It had a whiplash-inducing twist ending that Roger Ebert called “so frustrating, so dumb, so unsatisfactory that it gives a bad reputation to the whole movie.”
4. It was a box-office flop that thirty years ago this month shocked Hollywood by becoming a surprise HBO hit.
5. It was a movie you rented repeatedly during the decade’s video boom because it fit perfectly VHS’s promise of cheap home entertainment: undemanding, toe-tapping, and eminently re-watchable, it was an ideal 99-cent diversion that helped you forget VCRs cost $500 and were as boxy as Samsonite suitcases.

What you’re less likely to hear, unfortunately: it was based on one of the best, most criminally underappreciated rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

In a preface to Overlook Press’s 2008 reissue (the book’s first widely available trade paperback), no less than Sherman Alexie admits he never knew Eddie was originally a novel by P. F. Kluge until deep into his own career, long after “obsessing” over the movie as a high-schooler. It’s indicative of how the film overshadows its source material that Kluge’s Eddie doesn’t even make this supposedly comprehensive list of rock novels published since the 1950s.

The novel’s relative obscurity is a shame, for as Alexie notes, it has literary “ambitions and secrets and qualities” that far surpass the movie’s “mainstream” pleasures. Director Martin Davidson, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Arlene, made several changes to Kluge’s tale of a Jersey rock star who may or may not be haunting former bandmates twenty years after his supposed death. The most significant is seemingly the most cosmetic. Whereas Kluge conceived hero Eddie Wilson as a Dion-esque doo-wop rocker, Davidson turned him into an awkward splice of Springsteen and Jim Morrison. In so doing, the filmmaker altered the literary inspiration that in Kluge gives the musician a model for imagining rock ‘n’ roll as an art form instead of mere entertainment. The change is decisive to how differently each version of Eddie depicts the purpose of popular music.

Une saison en enfer, Arthur Rimbaud, Bruxelles, Alliance typographique, 1873. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the movie, college dropout Frank “Wordman” Ridgeway, the story’s Nick Carraway, introduces Eddie to the 19th-century French symboliste Arthur Rimbaud. Literature spurs the hunky frontman to make “serious” music instead of cranking out bar-band favorites for Jersey beachgoers: “I want songs that echo,” Eddie insists. “The [music] we’re doing now is like bed sheets. Spread ’em, soil ’em, ship ’em out to laundry. Our songs — I like to fold ourselves up in them forever.” Soon enough, Eddie pens a concept album called A Season in Hell, after Rimbaud’s most famous work. His slimy record-company owner refuses to release it, however, because the music sounds “like a bunch of jerkoffs making weird sounds.” The rejection sends Eddie squealing away in his ’57 Chevy, which hurtles off the Raritan Bridge, either an accident or a suicide. The Cruisers are forgotten for two decades later until an Entertainment Tonight-type reporter begins hyping Hell as an ominous foreshadowing of the late sixties, “a new age, an age of confusion, an age of passion, of commitment!” Suddenly, someone claiming to be the dead rock star is stalking the surviving Cruisers, intent on finally releasing the missing opus so the public can recognize Eddie’s brilliance.

Serious scholarly papers have drawn parallels between Eddie and Rimbaud, but the script’s invocation of the poet never really rises above literary window dressing. Davidson mainly uses Rimbaud to allude to Morrison, who idolized the literary libertine and who, according to a farcical urban legend, faked his 1971 death to escape the rock biz (much as Rimbaud abandoned literature before he was twenty). The movie asks us to believe that the Beatlemania-era Eddie predicted the Dionysian extremes of the Doors’ “The End” or (God help us) “Horse Latitudes,” but the song that’s supposed to illustrate his visionary genius, “Fire,” hardly qualifies as “weird sounds”. It’s merely an arthritic gloss on Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain” with none of the Boss’s blistering vitality.

Walt Whitman. Photo by George C. Cox, restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

For Kluge’s Eddie, by contrast, the spirit father isn’t Rimbaud but Walt Whitman, and Eddie’s magnum opus is Leaves of Grass. Having seen Leaves appropriated to do everything from woo interns to expose unlikely meth kingpins, I’ll be the first to say that the Good Gray Poet’s popularity as the Go-To Lit Reference sometimes leaves me craving a Longfellow revival. Yet his role in Kluge isn’t gratuitous. Whitman inspires Eddie to reimagine rock ‘n’ roll as the vox populi, a medium not for becoming famous but for creating the true song of democracy. To produce his rock version of Leaves, Eddie recruits black and white greats from Elvis to Sam Cooke to Buddy Holly (the novel is set in 1957-58, a half-decade earlier than the film). Their mission is to snip the American barbed wire of segregation through a series of secret jam sessions designed to “to bring off the impossible, some fantastic union of black and white music.” What breakthroughs Eddie achieved before his supposed death is as compelling a page-turner as the mystery of who’s harassing the surviving Cruisers. (Spoiler alert: Eddie does not predict “Ebony and Ivory”).

In ditching Whitman for Rimbaud, Davidson’s film became a story not about the Gordian knot of race in American music but about rock-star greatness and fame. That point is bashed home like a gong by the movie’s trick ending, which reveals Eddie is indeed alive but indifferent to the hullaballoo the media creates when his masterwork is finally released. Despite the adaptation’s defects, Kluge speaks appreciatively of it, and rightly so: as a cult favorite, the movie kept the novel’s name alive during the decades the book was out of print. Besides, when the other movie based on your writing is Dog Day Afternoon, you can afford to be generous.

Nevertheless, the lack of attention Book Eddie receives feels like a missed opportunity for rock novels in general. The genre is a diverse, unruly one. Some of its entries are romans à clef that do little more than pencil fictional names into legends rock fans already know by heart (Paul Quarrington’s Brian Wilson-retelling Whale Music). Many others are coming-of-age novels in which that form’s traditional theme of lost innocence plays out like a Behind the Music episode, all downward-spiral cocaine and coitus. Still others are less about music-making than about the grotesquery of fame and fan worship (Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street). What rock novels aren’t nearly as often about is race — or, at least, the alchemies of ethnic interchange explored in such great nonfiction music histories as Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986). A handful of exceptions do come to mind, Alexie’s own Reservation Blues (1995) most notably. Yet for the most part storylines about ahead-of-their-time geniuses predominate, and frankly, the plot of making personal art instead of appeasing a hits-happy public is as tired as the playlist at my local oldies station.

The idea of rock ‘n’ roll as both the promise and impasse of a racially egalitarian barbaric yawp, on the other hand… That’s a song in fiction we still don’t hear nearly enough.

Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery, Alabama, campus, where Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in 1918. His publications include A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004), the novels Breathing Out the Ghost (2008) and Dixie Noir (2009), and Brian Wilson (2012). He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

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By Liz Wollman

Colony Records, which will close on Saturday, September 15th after 64 years of business, is no mere record store. A cavernous, crowded, and never particularly tidy place, Colony has kept one foot firmly in its Tin Pan Alley past, and the other in its media-saturated present. The largest and easily most famous provider of sheet music in New York City, Colony also houses cassettes, CDs, DVDs, karaoke recordings, an absolutely enormous collection of records, and all kinds of memorabilia: pop music action figures and Beatles mousepads; signed, fading photographs of A-, B-, and C-list celebrities from every decade that the store has been open; novelty key chains and promotional buttons from countless Broadway musicals; old concert programs, playbills, and t-shirts; Ramones coffee mugs and “Glee” lunchboxes; and locked shrines in dank corners, filled with dusty Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley collectibles. The staff, depending on whom you talk to, is comprised either of snobbish, standoffish jerks or brilliant, walking encyclopedias who can help you locate a piece of sheet music within seconds of your humming a few notes from the song in question, no matter how obscure. I suppose that genius and churlishness, just like Tin Pan Alley and rock and roll, are hardly mutually exclusive; the owners’ understanding of this is, in the end, likely why Colony managed to last as long as it did.

Photo by William Ruben Helms. Used with permission.

Colony Sporting Goods became Colony Records when its owners, Harold S. (“Nappy”) Grossbardt and Sidney Turk, took it over in 1948. Their sons, Michael Grossbardt and Richard Turk, are the current and will be the last owners. Initially located at 52nd Street and Broadway, Colony moved in 1970 to the Brill Building, at Broadway and 49th Street, where it has remained. On a typical day, visitors to the store include tourists from all over the world, members of the theater industry, professional and amateur musicians, and record and memorabilia collectors. Countless celebrities have patronized Colony in its six decades: Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Elton John, Neil Diamond, and Jimi Hendrix. The bizarrely image-conscious Michael Jackson used to make furtive visits via a back entrance, specifically to buy up enormous amounts of his own memorabilia. According to lore, both Bernadette Peters and Dusty Springfield decided to become entertainers after merely walking by the store and hearing music emanating from it. When James Brown visited, he apparently exclaimed, “This smells like a music store!”

He’s right; it does. And before paying my last visit to Colony this past week, I’d completely forgotten what a music store smells like. Also, what one looks like and feels like.

I am no stranger to Colony. I’ve bought plenty of sheet music from them in the 25 years that I’ve called myself a New Yorker. In that stretch of time, I have been, at various times and sometimes simultaneously, a reasonably good vocalist, a truly terrible pianist, a middling guitar player, and a music scholar who writes frequently about the post-1960 stage musical. I’m not an atypical patron, I think. In the weeks since news of Colony’s closing broke, I’ve heard plenty of people mention that they used to go there regularly when they dabbled in trumpet or in cello, or taught guitar or voice lessons, or before they decided to quit pursuing a career in the theater, or before Amazon started carrying everything they needed.

Yet despite how much it has served us New Yorkers — not to mention the millions of tourists who stroll, sometimes maddeningly slowly, through Times Square at some point during their visit here — I wasn’t terribly surprised by the news that Colony had fallen prey to declining sales, the Internet, and (the final straw) a landlord who plans to quintuple the rent of the store. None of this is shocking, especially when it comes to commercial real estate in Manhattan, which at this point heavily favors conglomerates. Really, the big news to me, at least initially, was not that Colony was closing. It is that Colony has managed to stay open for so very long.

Think about it: Colony opened in 1948. During the 1950s, rock and roll arrived, purportedly to destroy Tin Pan Alley in one fell swoop. During the 1960s, again purportedly, young people en masse abruptly turned their backs on the musical tastes of their elders. During these decades, Colony only grew in size — —so large, in fact, that its owners had to relocate. Its move, in 1970, coincided with one of the darkest periods in New York City’s history. Mired in financial crisis, and inching dangerously close to bankruptcy, New York was hardly a happy place in the 1970s. Times Square, Colony Records’ new home, had become internationally notorious — a sleazy, crime-ridden example of everything that had gone wrong with the urban jungle.

And yet Colony survived it all. It outlasted Beatlemania, psychedelia, disco, punk, hair metal, and hip-hop, MTV, VH1 and the first two decades of the Internet. It outlasted Napster and the dot-com boom. It outlasted Tower Records, HMV, Patelson’s, and Footlight Records. Arguably, it even outlasted, for a while at least, the neighborhood around it; Times Square was given a Disneyfied “facelift” in the early 1990s, which has resulted in a more tourist-friendly and seemingly safer, if also increasingly generic and corporate urban environment. Since it first opened in the postwar era, Colony has grown with and adapted to the times in ways that none of its past competitors managed. My initial reaction, then, was merely to praise Colony — not to mourn it for a second — because in the end, sixty years is a pretty impressive run for a family-owned business in the middle of Times Square.

But then I went to visit, and my logic gave way to a surprisingly emotional wave of nostalgia.

James Brown was right: it’s the smell of the place that gets you first — a mix of old, comfortably dusty things; of vinyl and paper and cool, musty formica. The sounds, too: a mix of Beatles songs blasted through the speaker, competing with several languages being spoken by as many tourists. “Look, honey, a Lady Gaga backpack!” a woman with a thick Long Island accent shouted down the aisle at her absolutely mortified pre-teen son. A man in a suit and sunglasses paced back and forth through the brass section while he talked shop on his phone. “We need to give them more bang for the buck this year,” he said. “Maybe we could get another few animals up on the stage this time around?” As “Strawberry Fields” came on over the speakers, I wandered through the aisle of picked-over cassette tapes, passed a group of Italian women looking at Beatles memorabilia, and found a huge basket of promotional pins from past Broadway musicals. I grabbed three, almost at random, from shows that all flopped at least a decade ago: Nick and Nora, Mayor, James Clavell’s Shogun: The Musical. The producers of those shows would have killed for even a fraction of the run that Colony has had.

Photo by William Ruben Helms. Used with permission.

I was about to leave, but then I started rifling through music books for the sake of rifling through music books. New ones, used ones, ones for woodwinds, piano, violin, voice, and guitar. They are, I am sure, all available online should I ever decide to become a terrible violinist or a horrible oboeist. But wandering through so much sheet music, being able to reach out and touch it, page through it, admire the quality of the paper is — much like spending an hour or two in a store flipping through records, or cassettes, or CDs — something I’d completely forgotten the pleasure of. I’ve spent a great deal of my life killing time in stores like these. I miss them, even as I understand that times change and modes of commerce with them. The automats are gone, too, from Times Square. So are the dime museums, the grindhouses, the arcades and the penny restaurants, and yes, the notorious if occasionally hilarious XXX theaters (a favorite marquis post from the early 1980s: “Hot As Hell! A Potent Groin Grabber!!”). I am sure that whatever chain store opens up in the place of Colony — be it a Gap, an Urban Outfitters, or a particularly snazzy Applebees — will, someday, also eventually close up shop.

I ended up purchasing the three pins, along with two used books of classic rock and pop songs “for very easy guitar,” which is about my speed these days. Warren, the longtime Colony employee who rang me up, gave me one of the pins for free, and then called my attention to the song that had come on over the speakers. “Man, this is the Beatles before they even sounded like the Beatles, you know?”

“Sure,” I replied, snapping out of my fog of nostalgia to focus on his. “Because it wasn’t their song, right? It was one of the songs they covered. It was originally by — by –”

“It’s ‘Matchbox,’” he said. “Carl Perkins. 1955? No. 1956.”

I chuckled. “Thanks.” I said, taking my bag and preparing to leave Colony for the last time, and realizing that my eyes were welling up. “For everything. I’ll miss you.”

He didn’t look surprised at all. “I know,” he said, gently. “We’ll miss you, too.”

Elizabeth L. Wollman is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College in New York City, and author of Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City and The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. She also contributes to the Show Showdown blog.

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I didn't get into writing for the crying. It just happened.I didn't get into writing for the crying. It just happened. The first time was near the half-way point of my book, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. I was writing about the International Pop Underground Convention, a once-only gathering [...]

Firsts, by nature, are fleeting. By the time a human being arrives at age 33, as I have, a good many have gone under the bridge. Long ago, I swam in my first ocean, summited my first mountain, set foot in my first foreign land.Long ago, I swam in my first ocean, summited my first [...]

Izzy’s Popstar Plan

 Marestaing, Alex (2011) Izzy’s Popstar Plan. Thomas Nelson Publishing. ISBN 9781400316540. Author recommended age: tweens. Litland.com recommends age 13+, with parents discerning if appropriate for younger readers.

 Publisher’s description:  Izzy Baxter has big plans-popstar plans. Ever since she was six, she’s dreamed of becoming the world’s next singing sensation. Now sixteen, her singing career is on the rise, and she’s been selected to compete on the hit TV show International Popstar Challenge. As Izzy performs in far off locations such as Tokyo and Paris, it seems as if her plans are coming off without a hitch. But God has plans of His own, and Izzy will soon discover that living for Him is “way cooler” than megastar fame.

 Our thoughts:

 Living in the world but not of it…that is what many of us try to do. It means to take part in the world, enjoy the good, and stay away from that which is bad for our well being.  If your family enjoys those American-idol type reality shows, then here’s a book for you.

 With dialogue uniquely formatted as a blog, we follow Izzy’s adventure into stardom, complete with its struggles. Healthy choices, redefining the meaning of friendship, setting boundaries, and learning from mistakes all come into the picture. The blog entries are short but poignant in a quick-to-read format. This makes it of interest to all tweens and teens, advanced and reluctant readers alike. Although focused on a female character, boys in the crowd might enjoy it…nothing too mushy or girlie—after all, she is a rock star!

 The real world of the American teen/tween today is full of cable TV shows creating (or cloning?) one pop star after another Lizzie McGuire style, from which come the cd’s, concerts, clothes and books. The scripts have formulas:  cute girl faces typical teen problems and, with help of friends, makes decisions independently. In the process, parents and other authority figures typically exist as props to be manipulated, bumbling fools believing any lie. Even boys the same age as the main character often play a secondary role. In these shows and books, friends and family exist to serve the girl.  Many parents are tired of this entertainment forming the attitude of their kids.

 In walks Izzy the pop star, just as cool but better. She misses her mom, loves and respects her dad and brother, family and friends are everything. On the road to stardom, she learns that respect and integrity are non-negotiable. This author is “in tune” with today’s teen and Izzy’s Popstar Plan meets kids where they are at…in their real world. She deals with real teen issues such as lying to her father to sneak out of her hotel and go on a date, her first kiss, the onslaught of materialism badgering teens today, the world’s definition of beauty vs. true beauty, etc. Don’t let the blog format fool you; the life lessons are poignant and run deep. She is faced time and time again with the challenge of being self-serving or selfless, often with adults putting pressure on her to make the wrong choice. It is not Disney babies, and I disagree with Amazon’s listing this for sale to 9-year olds. Because this 16-year old character deals with issues rather than childhood problems, Litland.com recommends this book for age 13+. Families should use discretion with younger readers.

We attended an author event at the Rathbun Library in East Haddam, CT. It opened with wine and hors d’oeuvres on the lawn.
The author spoke in the Reading Garden behind the library. He was the author of a number of mystery novels and nonfiction books about forensic science, focusing on the most lurid murders of our century, including O.J. Simpson, Sam Sheppard, JonBenet Ramsey, et al.
During the Q&A, someone asked the author whether researching such heinous crimes had given him a morbid outlook on human nature. “Some people will disagree with me,” the speaker said. “But I think rock and roll has a lot to do with what’s wrong with this country today.”
Huh?
I must confess a certain ambivalence regarding the effect of art on human behavior. It’s like I’m back in Problems of Democracy class when we had to debate first one side, then the other side of a controversy.
On the one hand, I am totally convinced of the power of art and literature to change people. On the other, people who blame art for human wickedness never fail to annoy me. The notion that a book—or a movie—or a video game—or a piece of music can derange one’s moral compass seems silly to me.
Humans were behaving badly long before rock and roll came along. People—women especially—were paying the price for unprotected sex long before the jazz age. Teens don’t learn profanity from books, as a rule—they learn it the old fashioned way—at home or on the street.
Art is rooted in experience, emotions and opinions that already exist. It can be a means to communicate between like-minded folk. It is expressive. It can crystallize and clarify. It is a medium—but it is the artist and the audience who provide content and context—the fertile ground in which ideas can grow.
Yes, art moves people. Yes, the creators of art may have an agenda. The Declaration of Independence articulated an argument for freedom on behalf of a group of educated white men, many of whom were slave-holders. The men were flawed, but their art was brilliant—so brilliant that it should have been used to argue for freeing the slaves. The flaw was in the men who created the art—not in the art itself.
In fact, art is more likely to drive moral behavior than immoral acts. What makes us human is our ability to empathize. Great art creates connections between us—it allows us to see the world through the eyes of another, and so understand.
Abraham Lincoln famously called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little woman who caused this great war.” He didn’t really believe this—that taking out Harriet before her book was written would have averted the clash of interests, economies, and culture that caused the Civil War. But her views were representative of an ethical shift that made slavery no longer acceptable in a nation that claimed to be free.
Mark Twain continued this work in his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. Everything Huckleberry knows about slaves and slavery is contradicted by the reality of Jim. And the reader’s assumptions are confronted as well.
As Pablo Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

How to Start a Band, Book Gigs, and Get Rolling to Rock Stardom by Jessica HarperWorkman Publishing 2009I'm really torn over this book. On the one hand, this book is a perfect tonic for all those girls (like the author) who were told or felt that the world of Rock & Roll and all it has to offer is a secret club populated by boys who insist that "Stairway to Heaven" is be-all, end-all in rock.

Digital painting I did of David Bowie. This took about two hours in Photoshop. This surprised even me how quickly it went.

Visit my website.
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Howdy y'all,

It's been quite a long time since I posted anything. That's mainly because for a long time it seemed like editor bogged down every time I tried to save anything. Thought I'd give it a shot again. Here's a digital painting I did recently of Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes. This is all Photoshop. About 5 hours from start to finish.

Mark

http://www.markdraws.com
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For the past 11 years, Duluth Minnesota has hosted the Homegrown Festival. Originally started as a birthday party for a local dj / band member / all-around good guy, it has grown into a weeklong, areawide festival of music, arts, plays, poetry and more. A sort of SXSW for our North Central region. New this year was a Video Festival: participants drew a local band and song out of a hat and had 48 hours to make a video. Here's a link to mine for the Black-Eyed Snakes:

Black Eyed Snakes - Rise Up! from Brian Barber on Vimeo.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the original post below he looks at the Beatles 45th anniversary of being on the Ed Sullivan Show.

For the Beatles, the month of February holds particular significance. Forty-five years ago on 9 February 1964, the Beatles made their official American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show and we have not been the same since. Adolescent America had anticipated the event, abandoning their normal anti-social isolation, positioning the family in front of the television, and ensuring that the CBS eye logo appeared on the screen. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sat at the top of most American charts and the buzz of expectation now deafened anyone who would listen. When Ed Sullivan started his introduction and the audience screams erupted, we experienced one of those singular events in western history as a significant portion of North America temporarily stopped breathing.

But the Beatles had set down the path to the Ed Sullivan Show two years previously in what must be one of the most remarkable weeks in music history. On Monday 5 February 1962, the Beatles’ drummer Pete Best fell ill and the band recruited an old friend from a rival band. Ringo Starr appeared that night with John, Paul, and George in Southport, a city just north of Liverpool. Decca Records had just informed the Beatles that they would not be signing a recording contract. Perhaps Starr’s dry humor helped spark optimism that would get them through the month, just as his personality would help anchor them as America exploded around them in a February two years later.

The next day, Tuesday 6 February, the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein argued with Dick Rowe at Decca’s headquarters in an attempt to change his mind about rejecting the Beatles. Rowe, the head of artists and repertoire, notoriously and condescendingly informed Epstein that guitar groups were passé and that he and Decca’s sales manager, Sidney Arthur Beecher-Stevens recommended Epstein return to record retailing in Liverpool.

Liverpudlians do not fold so easily. On Wednesday (two years to the day when the Beatles would arrive in New York), Epstein met with Tony Meehan, the former drummer of the most famous guitar group in Britain, the Shadows and who had been at Decca the day the Beatles had auditioned, to talk about an independent production. Meehan would produce and have his own hits in 1962. Still, little about the meeting seemed to satisfy Epstein and yet another great moment of potential slipped into history, but the planets were still moving. By Thursday, they began coming into alignment.

On 8 February, Epstein walked into the Oxford Street HMV store to visit with the record store manager and to use the services of the house engineer who could transfer at least some of the Beatles failed audition from tape to disk. The engineer, Jim Foy, liked the Lennon-McCartney tunes and put Epstein in touch with another occupant of the building, Sid Colman, the head of EMI’s publishers, Ardmore and Beechwood. Colman in turn contacted George Martin of Parlophone Records and helped arrange a meeting the following Tuesday between the band manager and the artists and repertoire manager.

The end of the week found Colman and Martin meeting, no doubt discussing the polite and endlessly effusive businessman and his oddly named beat group. They could not know that in two years from that day, the Beatles would smash through American television screens and into the lives of millions. By the weekend, Epstein was writing to Decca informing them that the Beatles had arranged for a different company to record them. He exaggerated of course, but perhaps he could feel the momentum building, if not the sting of Rowe’s comments fading.

A short while back I began doing all my "inking" in Adobe Illustrator, and I have to say I've been really pleased with the results. Here's my rendition of Dylan.

See more at my website.

Mark

My Chemical Romance front-man Gerard Way.

Visit my website.

Rock!

www.echesketch.com

PaperTigers most recent (and last-of-the-year) issue celebrates National Adoption Month, ‘Children’s Books & Good Causes‘ and more. I encourage you to check out the new interviews, articles, reviews, gallery features, etc. And to expand on the issue’s focus, here are two more quality adoption-related books worth sharing at home or in the classroom: Joanna Catherine Scott’s The Lucky Gourd Shop, and Uma Krishnaswami’s Bringing Asha Home.

For more adoption-related posts, check here, here and here.

I found out from Rose Kent, author of Kimchee and Calamari that November is National Adoption Month. I'm posting about this today, in the middle of the month, because I found out there is a National Adoption Day on November 17th to celebrate thousands of foster care adoptions that are being finalized around the country. Isn't it cool when people can open up their hearts and homes to older children? I also have several friends who have adopted children from Asia and have found such joy and hope. Along with sometimes painful questions and stares. I'd like to show my support for their decisions to adopt and bring a child into their home to love, cherish and raise as their very own.

For those naysayers who say a true family cannot exist unless the family members share the same DNA, though that too can sometimes cause some controversy, well, these families I know would certainly prove anyone wrong. I'm of the opinion that no matter how different an adopted child may seem to be initially from their adoptive family or vice versa...once all the family members have adjusted and fallen in love with each other, the external differences melt away. Those who know these families can only see family resemblances and a REAL FAMILY.

Rose wanted to share a few things about National Adoption Month, and since she said this best, I'm quoting her from an e-mail: "I'm on a mission to get lots of people thinking about this in the kidlit world. There are plenty of reasons to acknowledge adoption. Of course an adopted mom and an author with a book featuring an adopted protagonist would say that, right? But the reasons go beyond my kids & my story.

It turns out, we live in a big ol' adoption nation. Studies show that one hundred million people have someone adopted in their family -- that's a third of us in the US. Yet, I can vouch to this, many Americans are clueless on what adoption is & isn't. At a recent school visit I talked about adoption and a little girl raised her hand and said, "Adoption is when movie stars fly planes faraway and get babies from dirty orphanages." (I kid you not.) Many adoptive families I know tell me they are stopped out in public and asked questions like, "How much did your son
cost?" Or if they have more than one child (who doesn't look like them), "Are they REALLY brother and sister?"

Rose has written a Personal View for papertigers.org, and she was kind enough to share it with me. I think you'll like what she has written: Three Cheers for Adoption Books and Why We All Should Read 'Em.

There are so many websites and organizations about adoption. Rose mentioned these two organizations in her article. You might want to start from these sites in your research to find reputable adoption organizations.
Institute for Adoption Information, Inc.--an organization that strives to promote understanding about adoption.
Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption--the founder of Wendy's created this organization to help find loving homes for foster children.

Some Amazon.com Lists on Books on Adoption (Please note, I have not read any of these books, these lists are compiled by different readers.)
Books that will change the way you think about adoption, Amazon.com list
Top 10 Books for International Adoption, Amazon.com list
Books I will read to my adopted child, Amazon.com list
Fiction about Children in Foster Care Placements, Amazon.com list
Foster Care Children's Books, Amazon.com list

Some New Books for Children:
The Red Thread by Grace Lin
Every Year on Your Birthday by Rose A. Lewis
We Belong Together: A Book about Families and Adoption by Todd Parr

And in case you want to read about some first hand experiences on adoption, here is the November 2007 Adoption Blog Carnival and a more intensive Blog Carnival from September 2007 hosted by Suzanne over at Adventures of Daily Living.