I always liked this song a lot, though it’s more of a groove than song. With hair.

We had a couple of families gather together for movie night. TONIGHT. There was a lot of discussion about what we should watch, but we watched Rosemary’s Baby.

Rosemary’s Baby is a perfectly structured movie, exquisitely executed by a stellar cast blending their overactive acting skills with an overactive narrative, herded by one of cinema’s great directors, Roman Polanski.

But not overactive in terms of too many plot points. The movie is overactive reinforcing the main line of the narrative, and actually proceeds with ancient decorum. Which is brilliant, because the story is… hmmm. That would spoil it all.

My point is that Polanski doesn’t seem to care that the secret is revealed in the first third, because he knows dramatically we’re still going to want to tie all the pieces together in the “very satisfying” end. At least for Beelzebub.

But Rosemary’s Baby has had a much broader impact on the culture. I could rehash it all, but it is better fobbed off to this story at Dangerous Minds.

And the beautiful and dangerous part of this part of the story is that Mia Farrow and her sister (Prudence) visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and meet up with the Beatles, who wrote the song whose title Charles Manson’s associates scrawled on the wall (Helter Skelter) during their murderous spree, during which they killed Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, in the same house (probably) that the Beatles did acid with Terry Melcher, who was for a bit Charles Manson’s producer, years before.

That is your lattice of coincidence, or a spiral of corruption. But the song of tonight is Lennon’s beautiful and challenging song directed to Prudence Farrow.

[Edited 5/24 to fix the error claiming John Lennon wrote the song “Helter Skelter” (Paul McCartney did) and implying that it was an inspiration for the Manson clan’s murders.]

I learned about this story earlier today, while reading about the band called Spirit’s copyright claim to the song Stairway to Heaven. Jake Holmes had a more compelling case in 2010 (it was the same song), went to court, and settled the case in 2012.

The backstory. Holmes wrote and recorded the song, which was released on his album The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes in 1967. A few months later Holmes opened for the Yardbirds at a club in Greenwich Village, and Jimmy Page added the song to their set later that year. Two years later Led Zeppelin recorded their famous version of the song, which appeared on their first album, Led Zeppelin. It was not credited to Holmes.

It certainly should have been.

When I write my words about these songs I’m trying to figure it out.

Fugazi was a punk band that showed up after punk. They embraced the real political values of punk and made music that many loved. With an activist spirit that pissed off some.

I love Fugazi’s motives, they were activist and political, and I admire their music. I am so glad that there is today a big active population today that shares their values.

Let’s get to the fucking song:

I had a very brief career as a civilian rock critic for New York magazine.

A couple or few times I was sent a bunch of CDs. I was to write 75 words about each from my personal un-music-critical perspective. They created a grid of my comments along with five other civilian critics (identified as Greenwich Village preschool teacher, or Upper West Side socialist, you get the idea) writing about those discs.

One of the disks was one of Beyonce’s which I think we must have all hated so much they didn’t include it. Another was the album this cut is from, by a band I hadn’t heard of called Of Montreal.

In my review I said that this song was great, but the album sucked. That the guy seemed too obsessed by Norse mythology and his own personal mythology, and it was all terrible, misogynist, pretentious, awful, except for this rather long fantastic song which I still really like even though especially because it is pretentious.

Some time after my “review” ran, New York profiled Of Montreal’s lead guy, Kevin Barnes (accompanied by a photo of Barnes with the notorious Solange Knowles). Turns out he’s a single, not a band, with hired players, and he has a backstory that either means our past is meaningless or that we are prisoners of our destiny. He was also married, with kids, in Georgia, though he’d moved to Norway for a time, if I’m getting this right. An original story, kind of surprising.

I like this overly long song a lot.

Better than Green Day.

And then, if you care, there is this, which is kind of amazing, at least for a few minutes. Singer songwriter version.