The Million Dollar Quartet

February 2, 2014 • 11:23 am

In one of my rare forays into the real world, I went to a musical last night: “The Million Dollar Quartet,” which has been playing in Chicago for several years. You may know the backstory, which is detailed in Wikipedia:

“Million Dollar Quartet” is a recording of an impromptu jam session involving Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash made on Tuesday December 4, 1956 in the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. An article about the session was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title “Million Dollar Quartet”. The recording was first released in Europe in 1981 as The Million Dollar Quartet with seventeen tracks. A few years later more tracks were discovered and released as The Complete Million Dollar Session. In 1990 the recordings were released in the US titled, Elvis Presley – The Million Dollar Quartet.

The jam session seems to have happened by pure chance. Perkins, who by this time had already met success with “Blue Suede Shoes”, had come into the studios that day,[1] accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S. Holland, their aim being to cut some new material, including a revamped version of an old blues song, “Matchbox”. Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, who wished to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play piano on the Perkins session. Sometime in the early afternoon, the still 21 year old Elvis Presley, a former Sun artist but now at RCA, dropped in to pay a casual visit accompanied by a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans.[2]

After chatting with Philips in the control room, Presley listened to the playback of Perkins’ session, which he pronounced to be good. Then he went out into the studio and some time later the jam session began. At some point during the session, Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had recently enjoyed a few hits on the country charts, popped in. (Cash wrote in his autobiography Cash that he had been first to arrive at the Sun Studio that day, wanting to listen in on the Perkins recording session.) Jack Clement was engineering that day and remembers saying to himself “I think I’d be remiss not to record this” and so he did. After running through a number of songs, Elvis and girlfriend Evans slipped out as Jerry Lee pounded away on the piano. Cash claims in Cash that “no one wanted to follow Jerry Lee, not even Elvis.”

During the session Phillips called a local newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, and Bob Johnson, the newspaper’s entertainment editor, came over to the studios accompanied by a UPI representative named Leo Soroca and a photographer. The following day, an article, written by Johnson about the session, was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title “Million Dollar Quartet”. The article contained the now-famous photograph of Presley seated at the piano surrounded by Lewis, Perkins and Cash (the uncropped version of the photo also includes Evans, shown seated atop the piano).

The players, photographed on that day: (L to R), Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash

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I knew about this amazing jam sesssion, but had no idea that it had been recorded. And, indeed, the entire recording is available at YouTube (on the bottom). The play involves four musicians playing the principals (the guys playing Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins were particularly good), and interacting with each other and Sam Phillips, giving a bit of history of Sun Records. The music was great (unlike the real jam session, the Johnny Cash actor actually sings some songs in the musical).  There are 47 tracks on the album from the real jam session (the Wikipedia article lists them all), with a surprisingly large amount of gospel music. Gospel was, of course, a huge influence on Elvis and the early rockers, and Elvis recorded gospel songs throughout his career.

A lot of songs in the musical weren’t actually played on that day in 1956, and here’s one of them: my favorite in the show. There simply was nobody who could match the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis (1935 and still with us). Here he is doing one of my favorite rockabilly songs, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On“; this was recorded in 1957, when Lewis was a stripling of 22! (It’s also one of only four rock songs I know of that mention the word “chicken”.) Who knows how such talent came out of Ferriday, Louisiana, but blame the laws of physics. Lewis was a bit of a shooting star, never able to hold onto to the quality of songs like this one, or “Great Balls of Fire,” but he’s the only one left of the original four.

The song wasn’t written by Lewis, but he gave it the driving impetus that made it a #1 hit. It’s a deliberate tour de force, performed here on Steve Allen’s show:

Another favorite. You might be unaware that “Blue Suede Shoes” was not only not written by Elvis, but was a hit before his version: the writer and original singer was Carl Perkins (1932-1998), whose recording made it to #1 on the country charts. Here he is performing it in 1956 on the Perry Como show:

Finally, here’s the original recording of the “million dollar quartet”, at a bit over one hour:

h/t: GM

Tiny, but immensely important: plankton

February 2, 2014 • 10:47 am

by Matthew Cobb

Richard Kirby is a Research Fellow at Plymouth University in the UK, and he specialises in the study of plankton. As part of his long-term research programme, he’s just released ‘Ocean Drifters’, an excellent 16 min video, narrated by David Attenborough. The video explains the variety and importance of plankton, focusing not only their cool life-cyles (many of the zooplankton are larval stages of sponges, jellyfish, molluscs and arthropods) but above all on their role in the carbon cycle.

Plankton help make the sea smell of the sea, they contribute to the existence of clouds (oh yes) and above all, the phytoplankton capture carbon and release oxygen. I cannot emphasise too much how important this video is. It takes 16 minutes of your life, but it will show you the immense importance and staggering beauty of this vital part of our ecosystem. Watch on full screen and, if you can, HD.

h/t @JenniferFrazer who has a great page about this over at SciAm blogs.

For more info, including links to a book and details of the research behind the video, see Richard’s university website.

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An Open Letter to Bill Nye

February 2, 2014 • 9:23 am

Not from me, but from the Secular Coalition of Australia. It’s hilarious. After the letter there’s an explanation of why it was written. Gotta love those Aussies!

(More on the Nye/Ham debate later.)

An open letter to Bill Nye, the Science Guy

Sunday 2nd Feb 2014

Dear Bill,

We’re sorry. We’re really sorry.

We know how you American rationalists think of us Aussies. You think we’re all so busy clinging on to the bottom of the world with our fingertips that we don’t have time to waste concerning ourselves with silly creationist ideas – that we’re a haven of straightforward logical thinking, secular education, free healthcare and good-looking half-clothed beach bunnies.

But we’re really sorry, Bill – Ken Ham is our fault, and it’s time we took responsibility for him. We, the people of Australia, have allowed our zealots to escape to your fair shores. It’s not just Ham, either. Fine specimens like Gary Bates, who left for the forgiving climes of Georgia, still manages to send his tentacled pods back over the Pacific and feed our kids rubbish about how the earth is only 6000 years old – a particular head-scratcher for our Indigenous population, whose families have been here since 50,000 BCE. I mean, talk about breathtakingly rude.

We’ve been slack, Bill. Our practically secular society let us get complacent; we didn’t notice years ago, when the scripture classes that had slid in sideways last century were commandeered by proselytising evangelicals who set about “making disciples” of our children. We let slide our government handing over of wads of tax dollars to create a raft of fundamentalist religious schools who teach kids the kind of hogwash that you will have to endure from Ken Ham in your debate.  In fact, Bill, just this week, when Professor Marion Maddox nailed a copy of her exemplary new book Taking God To School to our doors, it was a stark reminder of just how much we’d let our secular-ish, sunburnt paradise go.  And now, any attempt to reverse the process has been met with squealing about “our Christian heritage” from people who often don’t understand either Christianity OR heritage.

To our shame, decades of preoccupation with things like Olympic medal tallies and football players has made Australia into the “Typhoid Mary” of Creationism: we were rubbishing America for its anti-evolutionists and didn’t even notice that we were the ones exporting young-earth evangelism to your great nation, where unfortunately there is no tariff on craziness. We are so, so sorry.

So on Tuesday, when you’re roasting the Ham and his patently ridiculous ideas on the rotisserie of logic, tell him you’ve got a message from Australia. Tell him from us that we used his state-issued Akubra hat to cover a hole in the national chookhouse shed, that he is no longer entitled to use his formal Australian name (Kenno) and that he is now forbidden any Tim Tams – ever again. Also, that whenever his name comes up at Christmas, while we sit around drinking white wine in the sun, there will be a formal awkward silence of twenty to forty seconds, until someone brightly offers everyone pudding. And if you could manage to kick him in the shins and tell him and his ilk to leave our kids alone, Bill – we’d owe you one.

Best Regards,

Secular Coalition of Australia (SECOA)
on behalf of the sensible people of Australia.

P.S. We take no responsibility for Ray Comfort. He’s a Kiwi.

h/t: Gregory

My interview on Age of Discovery

February 2, 2014 • 7:19 am

Adrian Smith, a postdoctoral fellow in entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, came to my lab last week to interview me for his website, Age of Discovery Podcast.  His aim is to collect a series of interviews with ecologists and evolutionary biologists, and he’s already collected Eric Pianka, Joan Strassmann, Bert Hölldobler, May Berenbaum, and entomologist/photographer Alex Wild, whose photos often appear here.

You can listen to my interview here, and there are links to download the mp3 and get it (presumably free!) through iTunes.  It’s 53 minutes long.

As usual, I can’t bear to listen to these things, but, as I recall, Adrian had some great questions: he’d clearly done his homework. And I do remember getting a bit purple-y passionate about biology at the end.

Volcanic eruption in Ecuador

February 2, 2014 • 6:43 am

Reader Lou Jost, a biologist who works and lives in Ecuador, sent me a note with some pictures of a huge volcanic eruption that’s occurred near his home. The eruption of Tungurahua is reported at Wired, but Lou sent pictures he took himself, a brief report, and the link to a YouTube video (below). Lou’s comments are indented:

A terrifying sunset yesterday due to a huge earth-shaking eruption of my volcano, Tungurahua. It filled the sky above me. I never saw an eruption this big before. From here in my yard, at 2100m on the volcano itself, it was hard to grasp the size of the ash cloud; it went up 47000 ft! Sulfur dioxide gas made parts of the cloud turn yellow-orange, coupled with pinks from the sunset and gray-black from the dense ash. It looked like a Hollywood movie. I kept expecting Charlton Heston to walk down from the mountain in front of me. I’m so glad I got back from Wisconsin yesterday, just in time to see this. The attached night picture is taken from inside my house near my desk, through a skylight I designed so that I could see the volcano above me.

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A shaky video made by a kid in a city maybe 50km from the volcano, with cute narration:

I don’t speak Spanish, so perhaps a reader can produce a brief translation.

When you see stuff like this, you realize that although humans can do a lot of bad things to this planet, the planet can also do things over which we have no control.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 2, 2014 • 5:00 am

There is a contest at Listy (Kocia sprawa, or “feline cause”) for which Hili has written an announcement promising a copy of Andrzej’s book to the reader who sends in the best entry explaining why people and their cats should read the website. But the narcissistic little minx can’t resist entering her own contest!

This text is on the piece of paper in the picture:

“Tell us if we are as good as we imagine. If you think that we are, like us and pass the information to your friends.”

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A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m trying to win your book with my dedication in it.

_____

In Polish:

Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Próbuję wygrać twoją książkę z moją dedykacją.

Save a life in 3 minutes

February 1, 2014 • 1:21 pm

A reader who is taking Paul Bloom’s free online course “Moralities of everyday life” (it started Jan. 20), sent me this short video that Bloom uses in the course.  It’s based on Peter Singer’s argument on why we’re obligated to help strangers, and I find it very convincing.

The link at the end to The Life You Can Save site, which recommends some good charities. I also recommend using Charity Navigator, an American site that rates charities based on their effectiveness, financial transparency, and the proportion of donations actually used to help people. I was pleased to see that Doctors Without Borders, the Official Website Charity™, gets the highest rating (4 stars), and gives nearly 87% of its income for its medical program.

I’ve also used Charity Watch (formerly the the American Institute of Philanthropy), which has a convenient page giving the top-ranking charities by area (international relief & development, environmental protection, child protection, literacy, women’s rights, and so on). They give Doctors Without Borders an “A” rating, just a tad lower than the highest, A+.

h/t: Miss May

Readers’ wildlife photos: Heron does its business (and lagniappe)

February 1, 2014 • 12:08 pm

Most of us have, at some time, been hit by bird poop released in mid-air.  Well, we can be thankful that excreta didn’t come from a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias): as these photos by Stephen Barnard show, that bird really lets go when it’s flying.  If you ignore the scatalogical aspects, these photos really are quite beautiful.  Stephen’s remarks:

This is why Great Blue Herons are sometimes called shitepokes. Right after I took these photos I saw a trout with a fresh heron wound.

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When I wrote the photographer that I thought the photos were “lovely,” he responded with this note and sent another nice photo:

Lovely isn’t the word I’d use, but remarkable in a way. Some comments I’ve gotten on Facebook are “skywriting in Arabic (right to left)” and “pooparazzi shot”. If you pick just one photo I suggest the second one. It got more “likes” on Facebook Birders than anything else I’ve posted. By the way, the Facebook Birders and the Wildlife Photography Facebook groups have some great photos, and lots of them. You might check them out. The combination of digital photography and the internet have made possible a golden age of photo sharing.

Here’s a nice photo of a Song Sparrow [Melospiza melodia] the same morning.

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