I Fired Dat Staff So I Could Hire Distaff

So — I have this great FDR/Eric Cantor post cooking, and another on some highly wonkish political science offering insight into the next election on the basis of analysis of 2008′s dinner dance, and much more good stuff besides, but…

….I’m sitting here contemplating (that’s a nice word) bourbon (descending steadily on the $/dram scale as I work through the evening) in response to the third-of-four-quadrants close encounter with my oral surgeon today.  Gingivitis! Dont’ try this at home kids!

(Wincing yet?  Good.  Misery loves company.)

So no actually useful blogging from this quarter.  Sorry.

Besides, there’s nothing on but crazy folk that some kind person should take back inside to the nice padded room.  Feed them their gruel with blunted spoons and no one will get hurt.  No Mitt — you can’t whack Rick with your Social Security Bear.

But, hey.  All this gives me an excuse to extend  the discussion from the other night, when I tagged Freddie Mercury as one of the top candidates for the title best male rock and roll vocalist ever.

Someone subsequently said, in essence, what about the women?

Well, what about them?

Linda Ronstadt appeared in the thread as the leading candidate, and while I concur that she’s a fabulous artist, I can’t bring myself to see her quite as a rock avatar.  If you extend to jazz there are some fabulous candidates, from Billie Holiday to Cassandra Wilson and so many more…or perhaps really Billie Holiday and you can probably stop there.  You want to go to blues and you get some more…for example I defy you to say Koko Taylor isn’t on your list.  And then there’s Aretha.

You want diva-tude? Well in the last thread we had Annie Lennox mentioned, and to keep the Freddie vibe going just one more minute, you can always listen to this remarkable duet…and you can’t tell me she doesn’t have the stage presence and the voice. (And that dress!)  The great country voices….and, and, and — you get it.  No one answer, lots of great music whilst we argue.

But talkin’ rock and roll, plain and simple?  I don’t know; I haven’t got a slam dunk candidate.  Janis Joplin would have been the obvious one in my youth, were it not for Grace Slick before she wandered off into I don’t know what (and actually, listening again, Janis, still wins)…and so  on.

So why not start a thread on this, and for an actual living, music making wonder who’s injecting herself into the debate, how about that Grace Potter?  I saw some comment on one youtube or another that called her the daughter Janis never knew she had, and that’s not far off.

Here she is with Joe Satriani and others, purely owning Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.”

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So have at it:  open (musical) thread with which to wash all those Republicans out of your hair.

Image:  Jan Steen, The Dentist,  1651

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