The Biggest Story in a Crazy Year

Jacksonville: No, this is not a look back at 2009. Well, maybe it is. But it’s not a best-of-the year list.

Besides, in a year of national and global horrors, of the usual great highs and scandalous lows, of Obama and Tiger; of Taylor Swift and Adam Lambert; of Lady Gaga and that craziness with Kanye West, when it came to entertainment news, everybody and everything took a back seat to Michael Jackson.

I was visiting a morning show here in town – Fernando & Greg, on KMVQ (“Movin”) one day in December, and we were doing the stories-of-the-year thing when I brought up Michael’s death at age 50. Fernando said he wasn’t surprised by the media frenzy. “What I was most surprised by,” said Greg, “was how quickly people turned back the other way. Ninety percent of people in America made fun of him for ten years. They ridiculed him and called him a child molester. His name became a joke. All that was instantly switched. All that was gone. He was a legend; that’s all you heard.”

Well, not all. People were saddened by his death and, through the media, reminded of what a singular talent he was. As I wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “He’ll never escape the darker clouds that hovered over him for almost the last half of his life. But he’s also forever linked to some of the best music and most dazzling dancing we’ve ever experienced.”

San Francisco Notes: I got into an end-of-the-year decluttering spree in my home office, including reading a pile of magazine articles I’d never gotten to. One of them was On Self: From the Notebooks and Diaries of Susan Sontag, 1958-67. By coincidence, I was reading these journal excerpts, published in the N.Y. Times’ Sunday Magazine in fall of 2006, exactly five years after the intellectual/writer’s death, on December 28, 2004, just before her 72nd birthday.

After pages of fiercely intellectual and personal discourses and confessions, along with simple, observational notes, perhaps for future writings, there was this entry, dated April 6, 1967:

SF groups

• The Grateful Dead
• Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
• The Great Society
• Jefferson Airplane
• The Only Alternative + his Other Possibilities
• The Myddle Class +
• The Mothers of Invention (LA?)
• The Byrds (LA)
• Country Joe + the Fish
• The Quicksilver Messenger Service
• Big Brother + the Holding Company
• The Turtles
• The Miracles
• The Sparrows + the Charlatans

OK. Everybody spotted the Miracles, out of Motown, and most music fans know to place the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Turtles in L.A., along with the Byrds and the Mothers. Otherwise, she had a pretty good list, circa spring of ’67, although I don’t recall any band called the Myddle Class (pretty OK name, though). But she had the first psychedelic band, the Charlatans, and even included the Only Alternative, etc., which was fronted by the late Mimi Farina, folksinger, member of the influential improv comedy troupe the Committee, and sister of Joan Baez.

In Ralph J. Gleason’s 1968 book about the Airplane and the San Francisco scene, he listed a whopping 300 band names in an appendix, including the all-women Ace of Cups, the heavy metal Blue Cheer, and others missing from Sontag’s list, like the Steve Miller Band, Santana and It’s a Beautiful Day. But, nope, there’s no Myddle Class.

Susan Sontag, a self-professed fan of pop music, didn’t comment on the “SF groups,” but did note: “In Calif., a stranger is a (potential) friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise. One uses up a lot of energy in NY by that hypothesis.”

Meantime, out here, our energy was leading towards a little something that would be called the Summer of Love.