Things you were shockingly old when you learned

OK, so that explains how George Harrison was able to come up with a good, catchy song in 1987.

He had a different method for doing the somersaults in the video

The whole story behind that cover is pretty crazy.

https://www.stereogum.com/2143088/the-number-ones-george-harrisons-got-my-mind-set-on-you/columns/the-number-ones/

I only learned that Got My Mind Set On You was a cover sometime this year! The video was a big favorite of mine back in the Nick Rocks years, especially the squirrel playing the pipe like a saxophone. That was a big hit with all the third graders. Never made the Evil Dead connection either, but watching it now, it's very obvious.

Ronnie Wood covered another James Ray song on I've Got My Own Album To Do.

dr. demento played the og "got my mind set on you" on his show when the cover became a hit for george, so i learned this fact back then. i wish i still had the tapes i recorded off the radio. fortunately the demento archives are so thorough, you could basically recreate any episode from that era, although some tunes don't appear to be online.

From the Stereogum piece:

While he was in Benton, Harrison sat in with a local band at a VFW Hall, took in a drive-in double feature, and bought the Rickenbacker that he’d play on Ed Sullivan five months later.

Except he played his usual Gretsch on Ed Sullivan, which doesn't resemble in any way the Rickenbacker 425 he bought in Benton:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S78yWZ1Eqnk/U2zjx_HaIeI/AAAAAAAAMM4/7so-8OinO5k/s1600/eskilstuna.jpg

Prior to visiting his sister in Benton, George and his brother stayed in NYC for a day or so and took in the Empire State Building:

https://external-preview.redd.it/4HYji8sGaUG7VVpzwA_QFHF1Bbkjp1EQrQgtFhzEoBY.jpg

No one in the US knew or cared who he was, and he was the only Beatle to have had that fame-free experience in America.

d'oh

https://external-preview.redd.it/4HYji8sGaUG7VVpzwA_QFHF1Bbkjp1EQrQgtFhzEoBY.jpg?auto=webp&s=2433a3e183cf29eac5c6ef173a210960319d3011

“Handle With Care” only went to #45? I feel like it was everywhere! I even bought the album when it came out!

my brain shorthandedly knows gmmsoy as a travelling wilburys hit, i erased that harrison even had a late 80s album

Xpost it got to #2 on the Album Rock Tracks chart (now Mainstream Rock), so your memory's not wrong, it was getting plenty of airplay. Maybe VH1 was involved also.

I have given way too much thought to the Weird Al parody. "This song is just six words long" is seven words.

"I got my mind set on you" is also seven words long.

Granted, "got my mind set on you" is six words. But they never appear without "I."

Hence Al released his version with "Song's" in the title, even though he very definitely sings "song is."

Also Al's lyric that goes "couldn't think of any lyrics, no I never wrote the lyrics," suggesting that either Al either didn't know it was a cover or pretended not to, because otherwise his parody wouldn't make sense.

Also Harrison wrote lots of lyrics. Which Al no doubt knew. So the whole thing is just off.

No one in the US knew or cared who he was, and he was the only Beatle to have had that fame-free experience in America.

strange that he was wearing his work clothes at the time

Ronnie Wood covered another James Ray song on I've Got My Own Album To Do.

I've Got My Own Mind To Set On You

strange that he was wearing his work clothes at the time

I bet this started some arguments a few months later when they were on Ed Sullivan. “Hey, I’ve seen him! We saw that guy a few months ago!” “SURE you did.” “No, really! He was at the Empire State Building, and I said, ‘Look at how long that guy’s hair is!’” “Yeah, right! And I saw Dean Martin at the supermarket the other day! Ha ha ha!”

in the Weird Al parody, I don't think he's parodying George Harrison so much as portraying a hack musician who threw together a song in five minutes.

He definitely sings "song is", because I think I protested this very thing with my dad and he gave the cheat answer of "well I guess it's 'Song's'.

My big protest is that the other lyrics where he bitches about having wrote no lyrics are actually lyrics and therefore the song has way more than six words, just because they're meta doesn't mean they don't count.

Fuck you Al, your mother is an astronaut.

Also Al's lyric that goes "couldn't think of any lyrics, no I never wrote the lyrics," suggesting that either Al either didn't know it was a cover or pretended not to, because otherwise his parody wouldn't make sense.

lol xpost basically these are all reasons why it’s great.

it was my favorite song on the album as a kid. me and my friends in dad's truck on the way back from Bible School would sing it (and I knew the George Harrison version too cos my dad was a Beatles fellater)

Tracer gets it, the Weird Al song is pure genius

Also Harrison wrote lots of lyrics. Which Al no doubt knew. So the whole thing is just off.

― your marshmallows may vary (Ye Mad Puffin)

i mean not just that, if you listen to Yankovic's earlier "Theme to Rocky XIII", Al is singing about Rocky owning a deli in his retirement. Now, obviously, Rocky III had only just been released at the time, and Yankovic couldn't have _known_ for sure what he would do in his retirement, but a _deli_? Really? The Italian Stallion? Obviously, if you think for a minute about the constraints of the Rocky cinematic universe, it has to be clear that Rocky could only possibly be the owner of an Italian restaurant. I mean, I could see this glaring mistake coming from a lesser pen, but we're talking about the songwriter who wrote _Yoda_, for heavens' sake, a masterwork that gets the famed _Empire Strikes Back_ character better than any other writer has done before or since. How could he flop so catastrophically when it comes to the much simpler character of Rocky Balboa? I am at a loss for an explanation for this.

he also calls Rocky fat and weak and a disgrace!

It's Rocky 13 so it's presumably taking place at LEAST 10 years later which is plenty of time for the champ to get fat and lazy, cf. Raging Bull

but that's rude to call him that!

besides a choice between rye and kaiser IS NO CHOICE

"No one in the US knew or cared who he was, and he was the only Beatle to have had that fame-free experience in America."

You'd think at least one person would have asked him if he was Clem Burke - especially given that it was New York.

Apparently Harrison's trip to the US involved a bit of self-promotion, so it wasn't entirely a holiday:
https://www.beatlesbible.com/1963/09/16/george-harrison-holiday-america/

"While in Benton, George Harrison performed with a local group, The Four Vests, at the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Hall in Eldorado, IL. The guest spot was arranged by (his sister) Louise. The Four Vests played their normal set during the first half of the show, then returned to the stage and introduced Harrison as "the Elvis of England".

Harrison wore a dark suit and white shirt with no tie. They performed songs including 'Roll Over Beethoven', 'Johnny B Goode', 'Matchbox' and 'Your Cheatin' Heart'."

Looking at photos from the period he seems to have worn the Beatles suit even when he was relaxing, so perhaps he only brought a couple of sets of clothes with him to the US. Perhaps he thought had to dress smart because New York was the big city. Or perhaps that's what British people looked like in their default state. I'm turning into the Steve Hoffman forums, oh no!

We drove down that way last year and passed the George Harrison roadside tribute:

https://bentonil.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harrison-Post-Card-Final-Image.jpg

Also down that way (generally speaking) is the second biggest cross in America and the original Burger King, which is unrelated to the chain beyond a historic lawsuit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_(Mattoon,_Illinois)

Drive a bit further down from Benton and you hit Metropolis, IL - "hometown" of Superman - around the border with Kentucky.

Road trip!

I didn't know it was a cover until today when I read this thread and then heard it on the radio later this afternoon for the first time in decades.

I didn’t know it was a cover either.

OK, so that explains how George Harrison was able to come up with a good, catchy song in 1987.

― Tom D: I was in the army (Tom D.), Friday, July 22, 2022 12:18 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Apparently I’m the only one around here that’ll rep for “When We Was Fab”.

That Chris Pine's dad was the sergeant on CHiPs.

That the use of 'nimrod' as a pejorative likely originated in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Learned this last one from one of my kids.

here's daffy saying it to elmer fudd in 1948:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8MRRq36d6w

here's bugs saying it abt yosemite sam in 1951 (the version i mainly remember):

However, an earlier Looney Tunes cartoon, "What Makes Daffy Duck" (1948) DID have Elmer being called nimrod...by DAFFY. So it was actually Daffy who first used the term sarcastically https://t.co/RoRAGLNFho

— Charles Brubaker - TEAM BLOOM (@bakertoons) October 25, 2020

annoyingly wikipedia mentions a 1932 example (pre-bugs or daffy) without properly sourcing it

oops those are the same:

While Bugs did use "nimrod" sarcastically once, he did it to refer to Yosemite Sam, not Elmer. This was in "Rabbit Every Monday" (1951), where Bugs, feeling guilty for tricking Sam, said "I couldn't do that to the little Nimrod" (skip to 6:50) https://t.co/IOPnzEFTB4

— Charles Brubaker - TEAM BLOOM (@bakertoons) October 25, 2020

I was somewhat less old (but still shockingly so) when I realized that El DeBarge was the name of one of the guys in DeBarge and not just a rebranding of DeBarge (as 'The DeBarge').

fuck all those looney toons villains anyway, according to this 1998 cartoon promo they're all chasers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ombeEg0VA

watching the Sky Arts documentary about the Blitz Club in london that spawned the new romantics. hadn't realised the club was a London blitz-themed club full of wwii era posters etc

The original linking (no pun intended) of "dog" with sausage - as in, eventually, "hot dog" - goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century in the US, when the nursery rhyme song "Oh where oh where has my little dog gone?" was twisted to torment German immigrants:

"Oh! Where, oh! Where ish mine little dog gone?
Oh! where, oh! Where can he be?
His ear’s cut short, and his tail cut long:
Oh! Where, oh! where ish he?

Tra, la la….

Und sausage is goot: Baloney, of course,
Oh! where, oh! where can he be?
Dey makes ‘em mit dog, und dey makes ‘em mit horse:
I guess dey makes ‘em mit he."

FWIW, "hot” was code for "dodgy;" "hot" dogs were cheap.

though i have long known that there are correspondences between many hebrew / arabic names (e.g. abraham and ibrahim), i was just made aware of two fairly obvious ones: david / dawud and solomon / sulayman

Sherilyn Fenn is Suzi Quatro's niece according to Quatro in her memoir Unzipped. Don't think I've heard that before picking the book up a few days ago.

Woah.

Seconded.

Chuck Eddy mentions that in Stairway to Hell.

That Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek wasn't called Michelle.

Arabic one I just learned.

aubergine (UK/France) <- alberginera (Catalan) <- al-badinjan (Arabic) -> brinjal (India)

not shocking, but neat.

I really want a terrible fake american derivation for eggplant now, but after egg-plant it’s like fuck, do u c?

What the “circular file” means

I think I only saw why the name eggplant applies a couple of years ago. Since the version that is normally seen in supermarkets etc is the aubergine purple teardrop shaped one and small rounder white ones only turn up in Asian shops. & even then are more likely to be Green striped or black or something.
Like some types actually look egglike.

They all look egglike when they first start to grow I think

https://✧✧✧.shop✧✧✧.com/s/files/1/2406/3467/products/Intore_AfricanEggplant4edsq_1024x1✧✧✧@2✧.j✧✧?v=1650043634
or
https://www.thespruceeats.com/thmb/cPVQfx_aOvzW94t7jgU1BRzKE8c=/450x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-126552553-5c5dd7adc9e77c0001d31c52.jpg

though not sure either is likely to work and this as in the emoji is the way that I was always seeing them
https://gardenplannerwebsites.azureedge.net/plants/aubergine-2x.jpg
though on a shelf or display or whatever not with much connection to a plant it was growing from