Your perception of the fool may range from the benign to the malevolent - no names mentioned.
Praise be, you have a wide selection to choose from. You can start at the low end of the chart with your least favorite SMM blogger or move all the way up to your least favorite Tweeter - your choice. Especially in the Internet age -the fool just types away - often without considering th repercussuions. Once done, your foolishness might as well be everywhere.
My choice of the Doobie Brothers. .. Doobie... a what?
I wonder if I would have chosen that as my band's name? Maybe so? Maybe not. Maybe they wanted to make a statement 40+ years ago. Maybe they weren't such a bunch of fools,because they saw the future of the doobie.
Heck .. I don't know ... but doobie people are generally portryed as ... well ... fools who are wasting their lives.
But compared to you and me, Jeff Baxter, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and the rest wouldn't be portayed as wasting their lives away - doobies aside or not.
It is astonishing to believe the video above and the one below are the same singer, separated, as they are, by nearly three decades. And more so that the first one represented the band, the Bee Gees, then already in their first stride, a full decade before they became near ubiquitous for disco falsettos and windblown hair. In this, their first heyday, they were producing intelligent and sensitive ballads, often, as this, with quirky lyrics that actually are worthy of some thought. Perhaps also astonishing is the fact that the 2nd clip (below), is itself already two decades old, the band now well into their post Saturday night Fever zeitgeist, able to call on songs from all their careers. Now I am no fan of their 70s fame and fortune, only with the passage of enough time able and willing to admit I was a fan of theirs, as a boy, in the 60s. Indeed, I remember singing this very song, into a hairbrush, standing on my bed, for the benefit of my cohort of fellow school chums. (Yup, dormitory days in the UK private school system.......) Robin Gibb, for it is he, was always my top Bee Gee. He always seemed to have a little more grit than his brothers Barry and Maurice, escaping them for a brief moment in '69 through '70, with his solo hit, 'Saved by the Bell', another part of my youthful repertoire.
Joke was the 2nd single from the 1968 album 'Idea', and went top ten across most markets. Written by all three brothers, it was primarily a vocal showpiece for Robin, who described it as a "very spiritual song". Big brother Barry was a bit less serious, citing it as an example of how you could write almost anything in those psychedelic days and then someone would be able to find a meaning for it. It was possibly peak period for their early career as, although they continued to produce a stream of fairly successful records thereon, they were ultimately beginning to fade from view until 1975's Jive Talking'. Which was my cue to lose interest.
Over the years the song has popped up in a number of cover versions, often prompted by film soundtracks. Most well known, perhaps, have been the ones by Faith No More and by Low. My favourite, sneaking out on a single b-side, was by The Beautiful South, the quirky and melodic band fronted by Paul Heaton, who lightened up the UK charts in the 90s and noughties.
Barry Gibb remains the only living brother Gibb, Robin having died in 2012, aged 62, 9 years after his twin brother Maurice. It seems only now that the majesty of their first decade seems to be rising to the top of their canon. 'Odessa', from 1969, is now seen as a masterpiece to go alongside the Beatles'
'Sgt Pepper'. If that is the case, 'Idea', with the track here featured, must surely be a 'Revolver'.
I really wanted to write about a prank, but the only two musical pranks that I could think of were “Paul is Dead,” which would require essentially regurgitating the stuff that I linked to in this, and “Rickrolling,” which I really don’t find interesting. I also thought about going to the Monty Python well again, but decided against it. But this is a good song, by an artist that I’ve never written about, so here we go.
Elvin Bishop has had a long career as a blues guitarist, after he decided not to finish his degree in physics at the University of Chicago and join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963. He formed his own band in the 70s, and had a minor hit with the song “Travelin’ Shoes,” from an album on the Allman Brothers’ label, Capricorn Records, that featured contributions from Dickey Betts, Charlie Daniels, and Sly Stone, among others. The follow up to that album was almost finished, but the producer said that they needed one more song. Bishop suggested “Fooled Around And Fell In Love,” but they were all unhappy with the way Bishop’s vocals sounded. In all of the interviews that I’ve read about the song, Bishop is incredibly self-deprecating about his voice, which he considers to be average, at best—although he believes that this has forced him to write better songs.
Bishop suggested that his backup singer, Mickey Thomas, who he acknowledged had an incredible voice, give it a whirl, and rock and roll history was made. “Fooled Around” was a #3 hit on the Billboard charts, and has been a staple on FM radio, and on soundtracks, maybe most notably Guardians of the Galaxy. It is also regularlycovered.
After that, Mickey Thomas left Bishop’s band, tried some solo work, and became the lead singer of Jefferson Starship, recording one pretty good album, and a series of less good albums, ultimately (after litigation) dropping the “Jefferson” and recording something that is regularly on lists of the worst song ever recorded. (My Cover Me piece here links to a couple of such lists). Interestingly, the drummer on “Fooled Around,” Donny Baldwin, later also joined Jefferson Starship, but in 1989, in Scranton, PA, he attacked Thomas, who needed reconstructive surgery. Attacking your lead singer is generally a bad idea, and Baldwin was fired, but as history has shown, the Airplane/Starship revolving door is always turning, and Baldwin rejoined a Mickey Thomas-less version of the band in 2008.
Bishop, on the other hand, returned to the relative obscurity of the blues world, continuing to record and tour both as a leader and sideman. When he performs the song these days, he either does it as an instrumental, or with his background singers stepping forward—and occasionally with Thomas. (who also performed the song with Starship). He’s had a couple of Grammy nominations, in the Best Traditional Blues Album category, losing out to B.B. King and The Rolling Stones (no shame there), and is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And, one can assume, Bishop continues to cash royalty checks for “Fooled Around,” demonstrating that he is nobody’s fool.
And, indeed, those who bought this as a single, in it's first incarnation, in 1978, could indeed be deemed as potential fools if they then thought the tousle-haired soul-lite balladeer would still be at it a full 40 years later. Number 12 in the U.S. Billboard chart that year, with 3 weeks at the top of the (do they still call it that) Adult Contemporary Chart, bagging a grammy the following year. That was his peak stateside, but he has gone on to have a number of careers in different markets, different genres even, as the years have rolled by. Ironically, for what he states is still his only song not performed on the guitar, he was pitched headlong into the Elton John/Billy Joel marketplace, a place he has never quite fitted. When the next 2 or 3 albums flopped, he was dropped.
Not that you could tell from the featured song, his first love was actually the blues, the real delta bottleneck variety, Charlie Patton through Howlin' Wolf. Born in Middlesborough, in England's industrial north east, his first band was alongside later rock screecher David Coverdale. Rea only began to sing when the singer failed to show for a gig. In some debt to his record company, he then had a surprise hit in europe, I Can Hear Your Heart Beat, which displays his gradual transition into a (slightly) rockier style, albeit with a retained pop sensibility. Building on this momentum, he then toured constantly, gaining an especially big fanbase in Germany. His home country took a few years yet to catch his drift, with 1985's Shamrock Diaries, which broke him on the back of the success of the song Stainsby Girls, a paean to the girls, his wife included, of his (Stainsby, north Derbyshire) youth. This is where I first caught sight of him, and remains my favourite of his songs. This album, and the next 2 each sold over a million and, buoyed by a run of further hit singles, finally allowed him to repay his initial advance to the record company of 10 years earlier.
It took his next album, New Light Through Old Windows, to break him back into the U.S. market. Then a relatively unusual step, now much more commonplace, this was the trick of re-reording and reprising his back-catalogue, principally the hits, thus gaining control of his own songbook. The 2nd version of Fool, above, is lifted from that and, whilst broadly similar, shows the more gravelly tones he is now more recognised by, with a little more oomph in the rhythm track. Singles found themselves back in the Adult Contemporary and, yay, finally the Rock Mainstream charts. (Who defines these genres?)
For several years he could do no wrong, albeit still a greater pull in Europe and the U.K., each record getting greater sales and accolade until the early to mid 90s. Whilst The Road to Hell gave him his biggest hit in 1989, an ill-conceived Part 2 a decade later, signed the end of this second wind. This was an unexpected foray into sax'n'electronica . The less said.
In 2001 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, an illness with a dire reputation that is generally well onto the killing of you before its discovery. He was lucky, caught early he had a Whipple's procedure, massive surgery to remove the pancreas and much of the gut, transforming you instantly into being dependent both on insulin and the need to take extra digestive enzymes to manage any sort of normal diet. Promising himself that, should he survive, he would espouse his more commercial persona and return to his blues roots, this is exactly what he has done. Setting up his own label and distribution, and often a sidesman and/or producer, allowing other musicians the limelight, he released a number of largely instrumental albums. building up to his major opus of 2005, Blue Guitars, an 11(!!) cd set featuring 137 tracks. Each disc covered a separate theme, to include Chicago blues, Texas blues, electric Memphis blues, country blues etc etc. (The featured selection is from electric Memphis blues. He also painted the cover.
Since then he has produced further and similarly ambitious pieces and tried to get back on the road, albeit dogged by poor health, suffering a stroke in 2016. At the time of writing his last tour remains unfinished, an onstage collapse in December 2017 possibly calling an end to any such further plans. But with all his luck, good and bad, you'd be a fool if you thought him over.......
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