Category Archives: Today in history

Anniversary, Beatles, Music et al, Today in history

Beatles Shakespeare

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Beatles Shakespeare

April 28, 1963
Excerpt of Paul and John speaking parts of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the Around the Beatles TV special.

The many roads musicians travel are not necessarily the weed, whites,  and wine-filled ones that fans imagine. The key to breaking through is exposure. Performances night after night can fine tune a group’s show and songs, but small venues provide small audiences.

True in the 60s as it is today, electronic media can reach far more ears and eyes than those nightly gigs. Given the chance, a group will jump, however reluctantly, onto whatever opportunity presents itself.

So it was for the Beatles.

Being able to perform songs was the obvious and key part. John, Paul, George, and Ringo did not realize that dressing up and performing Shakespeare was also part of deal.

Beatles Shakespeare

Around the Beatles

The morning of  April 28, 1963 the soon-to-be-Fab Four showed up at Rediffusion’s Wembley Studios, London.  They rehearsed and did a radio interview before the show’s taping.

The “story” was supposed to be set in the Globe Theatre in the round, thus the show’s name.

Jack Good was the director. He would later give us the TV show Shindig!.

From the Beatles Bible site: The Beatles took part in two segments in the show: a musical set and a spoof of Act V Scene I of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison also mimed a trumpet fanfare at the start of the show, before Ringo Starr appeared with a flag to set off a cannon ball. The group also introduced PJ Proby’s performance.

For the Shakespeare spoof, Lennon took the female role of Thisbe, McCartney played Pyramus, Harrison was Moonshine and Starr played Lion. Incidentally, McCartney later owned a cat he named Thisbe.

Beatles Shakespeare
Ringo setting off the cannon at the show’s start

The Beatles lip-synced Twist And Shout, Roll Over Beethoven, I Wanna Be Your Man, Long Tall Sally, Can’t Buy Me Love, and did a medley that included: Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me To You, She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. They closed with their cover of the The Isley Brothers’ Shout, the only time their performance  of the song was recorded.

The show aired on May 6, 1964.

Beatles Shakespeare

PJ Proby

Ironically, the person who got the biggest immediate media bump was American singer PJ Proby who performed “Walking the Dog” and “Cumberland Gap.”  

Draft, Today in history, Vietnam

Paul Robert Cohen

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Paul Robert Cohen

Are words on a jacket conduct or speech?
And if speech, is it protected?

Bill of Rights

We know our Constitution contains the Bill of Rights and the very first of those first 10 Amendments reads:


Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


Freedom of speech does not mean that we can say anything at anytime. We cannot yell “Fire” in an assembly. Nor can we protest on the steps of the US Supreme Court.


Paul Robert Cohen was 19 and worked in a department store. On  April 26, 1968, Cohen was in the corridor of the Los Angeles Courthouse waiting to testify on behalf of an acquaintance.


He had he met a woman the night before and she had stenciled the words “Fuck the Draft. Stop the War” on his jacket.


Police arrested him

Paul Robert Cohen

Convicted

A court convicted him of violating Section 415 of the California Penal Code, which prohibited “maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] offensive conduct” and sentenced him to 30 days in jail. (California Legislative article) 

Cohen appealed, but the California Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. That Court held that “offensive conduct” means “behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace.”

Cohen appealed to the California Supreme Court, but that Court denied the appeal.

Fortunately for Cohen, on June 22, 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal. (1970 NYT article)

Almost a year later, on June 7, 1971 in a 5 – 4 decision, the US Supreme Court agreed that California’s statute had violated Cohen’s freedom of expression.  (Oyez article)

Paul Robert Cohen

Court

In an opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the Court reasoned that the expletive, while provocative, was not directed toward anyone; besides, there was no evidence that people in substantial numbers would be provoked into some kind of physical action by the words on his jacket. Harlan recognized that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” In doing so, the Court protected two elements of speech: the emotive (the expression of emotion) and the cognitive (the expression of ideas). (see Oyez article) 


In his dissenting opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun suggested that Cohen’s wearing of the jacket in the courthouse was not speech but conduct (an “absurd and immature antic“) and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.

Though he asked, Cohen never got back his jacket.

Paul Robert Cohen
Music et al, Today in history

Declan O’Rourke Children of 16

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Declan O’Rourke Children of 16

Easter morning, Dublin

April 24, 1916
“Proclamation Of The Irish Republic” by Michael MacLiammoir.
Declan O’Rourke Children of 16

Uprising

Once the Irish uprising began on 24 April 1916, Easter morning, no one on Dublin’s streets was safe. The British imposed a curfew and the rebels themselves wanted no looting, but for the poor, and there was an abundance of them, their lives of scrounging for Dublin’s leftovers had to continue.

These poor were among the many killed during the failed uprising. No burial services were held. No graves marked. In fact most were interred in a mass grave in Glasnevin cemetery.

From the Irish Times: Broadcaster Joe Duffy…spent his spare time in the last year trawling records and has documented the deaths of 40 people under 17 among the 374 civilians who were killed during the Easter Rising.

Declan O’Rourke Children of 16

Declan O’Rourke

The Irish singer Declan O’Rourke composed a song in memory of those young: Children of 16.

Nostalgically remembering the 1960s and the protest music that came out of those turbulent years, many aging Boomers complain that today’s singers lack that sensibility.

Those Boomers are wrong. They need to look around and listen. I have put the lyrics to O’Rourke’s song before the video. Both are amazing.

Stephen Mogerley made the film at the GPO on O’Connell St in Dublin.

O’Rourke stands at the spot where Padraig Pearse read out the proclamation of the Irish Republic on Easter Monday, 1916.

Declan O’Rourke Children of 16

Children of 16

In Dublin town one Easter morn a hundred years ago
The Rebels led a rising from the city’s GPO
Brave heroes and their enemies fell, civilians in between
And among the dead and fallen were the Children of ’16

Those children of the tenement slums who daily with their pals
A brazen wild brigade sprang up between the two canals
With their handcarts over cobblestone they rattled, skid, and tore
Barefooted as they scavenged through the crossfire and the gore

A war zone of the capital the bombs and shelling made
And snipers’ bullets pierced and whipped the sulphured April haze
There was fighting from the union to the mill above the green
And it made a great excitement for the Children of ’16

Six days have bid the Rebels pay a grave and bloody toll
But through their blood and martyrdom Republic soon was born
High aloft its streets and buildings now their names can e’er be seen
But still missing from the pages are the Children of ’16.

Nor Pearse, nor Clarke, McDonagh nor the Connolly we know
Would rest were they remembered on a pedestal alone
And are they not the Fathers of our nation proud and free
And our sisters and our brothers then the Children of ’16.

Thank you Declan O’Rourke for keeping alive the memory of  actually important historic events.

Declan O'Rourke Children of 16
The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic

Declan O’Rourke Children of 16