Paul Desmond/"Autumn Leaves"/The Root of the Chord, Beatles raw Star Club tapes, Famous Monsters, Gildersleeve, Grateful Dead, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, Monoliths/Puppets, "Mouse" alterations

Monday 7/27/26

I'm staring to plan a jazz essay about the standard "Autumn Leaves." I'll see if I can have it run somewhere, if not this year then maybe next, as it's getting on, but I think this would go well with my book, The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry. Paul Desmond's version from Toronto in 1975, as heard on Mosaic's fine box set, got me thinking about this over the weekend, but I've been running up against quite a few versions of "Autumn Leaves" in the past couple weeks in my listening undertakings, as if something is in my personal autumn-loving air.

Downloaded another set of Star Club recordings. I have this music in quite a few iterations, as one would expect. They have different purposes for me. This latest--from the Misterclaudel label--presents the raw tapes. No attempt at cleaning them up. Straight from the reels.

You really need to listen to the Beatles' albums up through Sgt. Pepper in mono. Lennon thought the stereo mixes lessened their sonic punch, going so far as to call them "embarrassing."

I've had the sound of Mr. Peavy singing "There Is a Tavern in the Town" from The Great Gildersleeve in my head for the past two days. Increasingly I favor the view that The Great Gildersleeve is some of the best art ever produced in this country. You have to give it your time and become ensconced, but once you do, there's nothing like it. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say it's the White Album or Ulysses (as in, the James Joyce novel) of radio programs.

The Strokes have a new album. I may check it out. They had the first two great albums and that was it. Not a pun. You see that. A kind of magic number of two. But all you really need from them are Is This It, Room on Fire, and bootlegs of the early shows. They should have released that Alexandra Palace show from 2003.

Spent some time studying various Grateful Dead items over the weekend for the "Dark Star" book. The 12/11/72 Winterland "Dark Star," the 3/28/73 Springfield, MA "Dark Star," and the 8/6/71 Hollywood Palladium "Turn on Your Love Light" primarily, though I moved through some other things as well like the 1968 Mystery Reels. Garcia sings the verse differently on that Springfield "Dark Star."

I updated the News and Op-ed sections of the site this morning. Just about everything else remains woefully incomplete. I'm trying here. Obviously I need to do a lot better.

Began thinking, too, about a piece on the Everly Brothers' 1958 album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, which is masterful. A true stand-out album in American popular music history. The beauty of the thing. Many people think there were no canonical albums as albums until Bob Dylan and the Beatles got going with theirs, but the truth is there were many before that. Some of those first wave rock and rollers could hold their own as artists with most anyone who came afterwards in the 1960s.

I rewatched 1957's The Monolith Monsters, which I'll write about for the horror film book. Good film. Watching 1958's Attack of the Puppet People for the book as well, which I'll incorporate into a section about drive-in horror films. John Agar stars, and any 1950s Agar horror film is worth your time. It'll be fun. His films are part of the backbone of movie horror in that decade.

A weekend letter:

Friday night and working on a bunch of things, but wanted to step aside for a second and send you something I've been meaning to, which I thought you might dig. It's the first 200 episodes of Famous Monsters of Filmland, running from 1958 to 1983. You can download them in two handy folders. The last issue has a news note about Revenge of the Jedi coming out soon, adding that it will then be followed by episode three, a prequel entry in the nine-part Skywalker series. There's a lot of good stuff here. I'm not saying it's Andre Bazin-level film theory, but historically it's neat and there are valuable nuggets throughout. Lots of horror film lover's spirit, too, of course, and awesome images.

I had said some time back in this record that I'd finally completed "Mouse." This turned out not to be accurate. I ended up going back in, and I've been working on it off and on for a number of additional weeks. I didn't detail that here because I was waiting until I was as certain as can be that I wouldn't be making further alterations. I've talked about this story a lot in these pages, but I think it's with good reason, considering what it is.

I've worked longer on this story than I have anything else in my life. I had a day where I was looking at what I thought was the final version, and I thought, "You know...let's just try something here..." and I took what I had and copied it and pasted it into a new document. I'll do that, sometimes. No pressure. If something happens, cool, if not, not.

But what happened right away was some really great things. Also, the title went back to what it was in the first place, which is "What the Mouse Knew." It has to be the title. The story demands it. The mouse, you see, has this piece of pertinent information regarding the cat, which the cat doesn't have. That's what the mouse knew. Or so we think, at first. But what the mouse really knows...it's the most important thing in the world.

I go to bed thinking about this story. Not about how to change it or anything. I think about what it is. I think about how it somehow exists in this world. I replay the final sentence, in my head. I don't believe that a human could do anything better. And all in 1600 words.

On each of the last three mornings, I've read it through aloud. That's what I was doing yesterday before the Monument fiasco with the three harpies. I'm about things like this, such people are about things like that. The changes I've made here over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are small in terms of the amount of text that has been changed, but impactful. I could read this story an endless amount of times. That's how it was designed to be.