GA Russell

Here's a good article about some of the characters CFL fans have enjoyed reading about over the past twenty years. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/200...107386-sun.html

The Beatles' Second Album (US Capitol)

Saskatchewan Roughriders 46....Toronto Argonauts 35 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/foot...article1215357/ http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Gam...0102221-cp.html The Ticats-Lions game last night was so good that my appetite for sports is sated until next week. I listened to some of the first and most of the second of this game, but my internet connection went out, and I just decided that I had other things to do. Sask scored 28 points in the last five minutes of the first half. Darian Durant has started six games for the Riders, and they have won all of them.

Hamilton Tiger-Cats 31....British Columbia Lions 28 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/foot...article1214976/ After the Bombers-Stamps game, I took a 100 minute break, and then tuned into this. Imagine my surprise when the announcer said that there were six minutes left in the third quarter and the Ticats were leading 21-14! Great game, with a particularly exciting finish, as the Lions really got their act together at the end. DeAndra Cobb had a great game. He ran for 100 yards and scored a TD.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers 42....Calgary Stampeders 30 http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Gam...0096251-cp.html Calgary: What the heck is wrong with the Stamps? In both games they have allowed their opponents to get big leads in the first quarter. Both opponents have scored 40 points. I wonder if the defense is demoralized by the cutting of JuJuan Armour late in camp. Winnipeg: I was very skeptical when Mike Kelly announced before camp opened that Stefan LeFors would be his starting quarterback. He had been in the league only two years, and had played very little in Edmonton behind Ricky Ray. But I have to say that he has looked pretty good both games so far.

It looks like Jim has put me on his ignore list!

Here is the beginning of his LA Times obituary. There is a link there to his album covers. I didn't know that the photo shoot of Pearl was the night Janis Joplin died. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/...0,1170616.story Tom Wilkes dies at 69; Grammy Award-winning art director and album cover designer Wilkes designed album covers for the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Janis Joplin and other legendary musicians. By Dennis McLellan July 11, 2009 Tom Wilkes, a Grammy Award-winning art director and album cover designer whose work included albums for the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Neil Young and other music legends, has died. He was 69. Wilkes, who was diagnosed with a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1999, died of a heart attack June 28 at his home in Pioneertown, Calif., said his daughter, Katherine Wilkes Fotch. Wilkes was partner in a Long Beach advertising firm when he became art director for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival for which he created all of the graphics and print materials, including the festival's psychedelic poster that was printed on foil stock. "In fact, he won an award from Reynolds aluminum for the most creative use of aluminum foil," Fotch said. "He was always very proud of that." Music producer Lou Adler, who produced the landmark music festival with singer John Phillips, said Wilkes "caught the spirit of the time" with his festival graphics. "Most of the art work in that particular culture was coming out of San Francisco, and what Tom did was he took a San Francisco look, or niche, and made it international," Adler said. "You can see a lot of the posters from that period and say, 'Oh, that's the '60s.' With Tom, it isn't dated. There's a very special look to it." The Monterey pop festival "catapulted" Wilkes' career into the music industry, his daughter said, beginning as art director at A&M Records. During his heyday, Wilkes designed or provided the art direction or graphic design for scores of album covers, including designing the covers for the Rolling Stones' "Beggars Banquet," Neil Young's "Harvest," Eric Clapton's "Eric Clapton," Joe Cocker's "Mad Dogs & Englishmen" and George Harrison's "Concert for Bangladesh" and "All things Must Pass." As he did with many of the albums, Wilkes also shot the cover photo of Joplin for her 1971 "Pearl" album, which shows the flamboyant singer lounging on a settee. "Their photo session was the night she overdosed," Fotch said. In 1973, Wilkes won a Grammy Award for best recording package for the Who's rock opera "Tommy," as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir. David Fricke, a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine and an admirer of Wilkes' work, said that "the magic and the sort of importance of album design was to be able to catch the eye, to try and get a sense of what the music and the personalities were inside and also make you want to buy it." Wilkes, Fricke said, "was able to capture a certain essence of what was on the record and the person who made it. "You look at something like Neil Young's 'Harvest,' the texture of the cover and that very simple, almost antique lettering, and you get a feel of what Neil was trying to do in that record, the honesty and the grit and the deep Americana of what that record represents now." And the cover for "Mad Dogs & Englishmen," Fricke said, "with that pose of [a muscle-flexing] Cocker almost like a circus strongman captures the carnival atmosphere of what those shows were like." Adler, for whom Wilkes designed the "Tommy" album as well as a number of Cheech and Chong albums for his Ode Records label, described him as "very creative" and "very volatile." "He was very, very independent and sometimes difficult to deal with because of his strong convictions on what he was doing," he said. But the end product, Adler said, "would be very unique and special, as evident by his artwork when you look at it." Born in Long Beach on July 30, 1939, Wilkes graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1957. He attended Long Beach City College and graduated from what was then known as Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena). After two years as art director at A&M Records, Wilkes was a partner in Camouflage Productions, a partner in Wilkes & Braun Inc. and art director of ABC Records. Then, in 1978, he launched Tom Wilkes Productions and also became president of Project Interspeak, a nonprofit environmental and human rights organization...

Unable to find anyone who would trade for him, the Bombers released Derick Armstrong. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/fo...n-50347487.html ***** As if their chances against the Lions weren't slim enough, the Ticats' top three tailbacks are all injured, so they will be starting their fourth string running back DeAndra Cobb. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/cfl-...article1213396/

Happy Birthday Guy!

Montreal Alouettes 50....Edmonton Eskimos 16 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/foot...article1213226/ The Als dominated from start to finish, but the Esks were able to keep it close on the scoreboard until the last minute of the first half. The Als scored 31 points in the fourth quarter.

NIS, the only downside I know of is that my ISP rations the service, so that I can only download so much per month. That includes streaming audio. So with my level of service I am unable to listen to lala as much as I would like.

David Naylor Week 2 preview http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/week-2/article1211579/ Montreal-Edmonton preview http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Edm...075171-sun.html

Doug Ramsey's Rifftides blog today has a YouTube clip of a 1960 Dusseldorf performance of Hackensack by Stan Getz and John Coltrane together! http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/

Happy Birthday Erik!

Happy Birthday Captain Wrong!

I'm with Peter King.

The Eskimos have put Jesse Lumsden on the nine game injured list. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/eski...article1210064/ ***** The Roughriders have hired Marcus Crandell to be their quarterbacks coach. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/cran...article1209603/ ***** Mike Kelly has announced that Derick Armstrong will never again play for him and the Bombers. The team has offered him to the league as trade bait, and there have been no takers. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/arms...article1210037/

Lala got in 128 jazz releases this week. About 100 of them are from Denon, which is to say Savoy and Muse. This includes the boxes of The Complete Savoy... of Charlie Parker (and Dial too), Lester Young, and Stan Getz.

7/4, don't you think she was cute? Judging by looks alone, I would guess that she was pretty popular with the boys.

Just last week I was emailed some jokes about the economy. "The economy is so bad that..." One of them was, The highest paying job is jury duty! A couple of others were: I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail. The bank returned my check marked "Insufficient Funds", and I had to call to ask them or me.

I read yesterday that the girl was an Iranian immigrant and a member of the Bahai faith. The Bahai's believe in interracial marriage, so maybe she was brought up to date black men. No big deal to her. The medical examiner is now saying that the fact that she bought the gun two days before makes it very likely that it will be ruled a murder-suicide. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/evid...article1209350/

It is my recollection, could be wrong, that Paul Revere and the Raiders were the first rock act on Columbia Records. Mitch Miller was Columbia's a&r man, and he disliked rock 'n' roll, so all of the company's rock acts were signed to the Epic label. Shortly after that came The Byrds. That's how I recall it.

Happy Birthday 2009 Randy!

Those of us who were born at the right time watched Where the Action Is upon our return from school each weekday in the mid-60s. This was a Dick Clark show which featured a repertory cast of singers with (as I recall) one guest act per day, all lip-synching their songs. One of the regulars was Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the show catapulted them to popularity. Clark did what he could to make household names of each of the members. Their lead guitarist was Drake. His most famous solo, such as it was, was on their hit Just Like Me, which had the same feel as Louie, Louie. Here's his LA Times obituary. http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...0,2699826.story Drake Levin, guitarist, dies at 62 Email Picture Drake Levin, far right, died Saturday at his home in San Francisco after a long battle with cancer. Levin was lead guitarist in the '60s for Paul Revere & the Raiders but left to form his own bands and establish himself as a top blues player in the Bay Area. By Randy Lewis July 7, 2009 Drake Levin, lead guitarist for Paul Revere & the Raiders during the quintet's hit-making prime in the mid-1960s, died Saturday at his home in San Francisco after a long battle with cancer, according to his longtime friend and former Raiders bandmate Phil Volk. He was 62. Levin's four-year stint with the Raiders, known for its campy Revolutionary War uniforms, thigh-high black riding boots and tri-corner hats, coincided with a string of top 10 hits including "Kicks," "Hungry" and "Good Thing." For a time he was one of the most recognizable American rock guitarists through the group's weekly appearances on the Dick Clark-produced music series "Where the Action Is." The band's 1965 hit "Just Like Me," prominently featuring Levin's double-tracked lead guitar, is on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll." "I've lost my dear friend, my Raider buddy, and the music world has lost a guitar icon," Volk said in a note posted on his website. Drake Maxwell Levinshefski was born Aug. 17, 1946, in Chicago, and after his family moved to Boise, Idaho, he began to gain recognition as a musician with bassist Volk in the Surfers. Nebraska-born Revere also had moved to Boise, where he formed the first incarnation of the Raiders in the late 1950s. That edition of the group charted a top 40 single with "Like, Long Hair" in 1961, making it Boise's best-known rock band. Revere invited the Surfers to open a Raiders show outside Boise in 1963, with Raiders drummer Mike "Smitty" Smith sitting in. This put the group on Revere's radar screen, and when his guitarist left, he offered the job to Levin. Volk soon followed him into the Raiders. The group relocated to Portland, Ore., looking to build on its regional following. Revere and the Raiders recorded Richard Berry's "Louie Louie" a week before it was put on tape by another Portland band, the Kingsmen, whose version became the national hit and established it as one of the quintessential songs of what came to be known as "garage rock." Levin's guitar work came to the fore in "Just Like Me," a gloriously sloppy number with a chord progression and overall sound similar to "Louie Louie" that reached No. 11 in early 1966. Levin, Volk and Smith left the Raiders in 1967, leaving behind Revere and lead singer Mark Lindsay, and formed the Brotherhood. By the time the Raiders landed their only No. 1 hit, "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)" in 1971, Levin was long gone. Levin's prominence as a guitarist helped him land subsequent work playing with organist Lee Michaels, singer-songwriter Emitt Rhodes and others. After settling in the Bay Area, he became one of the region's top blues players and formed groups of his own, including Billy Dunn and Bluesway. He last played with his Raiders cohorts at a 1997 reunion in Portland that featured all the mid-'60s band members except Revere, who has continued touring with his own lineup. Levin is survived by his wife of 37 years, Sandra; sons David and Darby; his mother, Charle; his brother Jeff and his sister Lori. A memorial service is planned for July 18, but details have not been settled. When finalized, arrangements will be posted on Volk's website, philfangvolk.com.

Just wrote the check.