John's Gibberish, John's Smile

I know I probably shouldn’t use peanut oil.  It’s bad for one’s cholesterol, right?  But no other oil I know gets that hot.  And when you want to cook veggie burgers or veggie meat balls or falafel and you drop a wad of bean mush into, say, virgin olive oil it doesn’t cook fast enough and they tend to disintegrate and get sloppy.  Plop them into raging hot peanut oil and the outside sears quickly, preserving the shape.  (I just looked on line and there doesn’t seem to be much difference between peanut oil and, say canola oil in terms of “smoke point.”  Always helps to actually look.)  Well, the veggie burgers and the beef burgers weren’t bad last night, so was the cauliflower dish I made, but buying hothouse corn in winter was a waste.

Had the ferocious tenor of Johnny Griffin on most of the day.  I believe I’d caught the “Little Giant” back at the Blue Note in the Village in the summer of 1989.  I seem to remember he took some time to explain what it was like when his wife complained to him and he imitated the sound, rather convincingly with his horn that day.  Standing towards the back of the hall, there were two Japanese guys talking loudly beside me until another patron assertively shshshshs’d them and shortly thereafter, they left.

After burgers though I turned Johnny off and my younger one got into sharing tunes:  you play a song, then I play a song, etc.  For her, BTS certainly.  At this point I can recognize most of the seven dudes by name.  Me?  I wanted to play her Sly and then Carlos and then Jimi at Woodstock.  “there were a million people!”  "It's right near grandma's."  Must have been about two and a half hours later the older one returned, popped her head in the door and asked: “Have you two been doing this ever since dinner?”  We nodded, guiltily, and she pulled up a chair to join us.  

Toward the end, I put on the live version of “Don’t Let Me Down”, from atop Abbey Road studios.  “This was your favorite song when you were little” I told the older one.  Those were the days, per the title, that I could still hold her in my arms.  There must be two versions of the song from that day, as this one is clean.  I’d wanted the one where John messes up the lyrics and covers it ad-libbing some gibberish with a smile that makes Paul, George and Ringo smile as well.  

Infected with original sin, Beatlemania, I continued on, after we’d finished as a family searching for and finding that version, John’s gibberish.  John’s smile.  I wanted to find a particular interview with John, where he berates a reporter: “. . . down on their knees in somebody’s office.  Probably yours.”  I found it, and then watched one and then another interview, looking for his zingers, listening for his turns of phrase.  There is one from the Los Angeles Press Conference in 1966 where John is so tired of having to be polite about the “bigger than Jesus” comment and he twists about on his stool, so contemptuous and disinterested in the whole process.  What a chore it must have been, when he wasn’t making music. 

Friday, 02/01/19