Bobby Bland - St James Infirmary

This is a pretty good version, too.

James Ray- St James Infirmary

There are a lot of versions of this song out there, but this is my favorite.

James Ray is great in general. He's best known, if you could call it that, for having his song "I've Got My Mind Set on You" covered by George Harrison. This is a great album, the entire thing. If you see it out there, buy it.

Danny Barker - My Indian Red

There are really only two hip cities in the U.S. That would be New York and New Orleans.

Yup, I said it. NYC and NO have their own crazy energy. New York has a history of wild innovation in whatever arts appeal to you; New Orleans was the multicultural center of the universe and the birthplace of Jazz and the Blues. They're unique, and alone at the top.

San Francisco might have a claim to fame. It had the cosmopolitan thing early on, okay, but it's a tiny place with limited appeal and very few artistic credentials. Chicago is okay if you like steak, and they have the blues thing, but unless you are a big fan of gangster history or the wind, Chicago is nowhere. Kansas City was a wild-ass music scene that we're all thankful for, although almost no one knows that that is true in any meaningful way. So . . . no. I'm going with New York and New Orleans.

And the rest of y'all honorable mentions out there? Atlanta? Wannabe city of all time? Maybe next time! Keep trying, you know it's worth the effort. Show us something! Go for it! God knows we could all use something to bring us up.

Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker, ''Think Twice'' (X-rated version)

Who knew, back in the day, that such things even existed? Not me, that's for sure. Probably not a lot of white people.

There was a whole world out there that white people didn't have a clue about. It's not too hard to understand, really. White people lived in the Disney world, where everything was officially okay, all the time. Black folk, on the other hand, lived in the real world, the black world, where things routinely went to shit in a big fucking hurry.

So there was a lot of this kind of thing out there, not for general consumption. I hope that it's better by now for our black brothers and sisters, at least a little bit. One can only hope.

The Trans Boy Who Won The Texas Girls' Wrestling Championship Is In An Impossible Position

That’s the title of an article on Slate dot com on Tuesday, February 28, 2017. I’d say that the title puts it mildly. It puts lots of people in an impossible position.

The trans boy, I’m pretty sure he was in an impossible position already. (“Trans boy,” isn’t that a boy at birth who is transitioning to female? I’m just checking the math.) Most people suffer from a certain amount of confusion as teenagers, but I can’t even imagine what these kids go through.

His parents, or her parents, I’m trying to be sensitive, they might just have been in an impossible position already, even without this championship. I hope that they are being very supportive of their child through the entire process, that’s the only thing to do, but I’d be surprised if they weren’t thinking, just a little bit, “does he have to bring the entire world’s attention to this thing?”

The state officials who ran this competition, they were caught between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t let him compete, they are roundly condemned for being insensitive to the needs of diversity. If they do allow it, they are roundly condemned for violating at least the rights of the other girls to participate in a girls competition, and at most of violating the very laws of God almighty, and probably everything in between, too. Better them than me. I prefer not to be condemned at all.

I’m sure that there was a sanctioning body for this event, and maybe a state agency that runs these kinds of affairs. I wonder if they have a policy these days regarding transsexuals, but one way or the other they were probably in an impossible position as well.

The impossible position raised by the article’s title has become general. We all share it. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I always assume that my own feelings about something cannot, statistically speaking, be unique. I, and maybe most people, are of the opinion that our brothers and sisters, and all of them, should be allowed to live their lives in the manner that they find most appropriate. That’s an easy thing to support. People should be able to love whom they choose, even marry whom they choose. They should be able to smoke cigarettes, if they choose, without being condemned later on if they come down with lung cancer and become a drag on the medical system (it was legal; they did it; deal with it). Same with drinking, or an over-time over-dose of KFC. I wouldn’t mind seeing the legalization of any drug that didn’t make people violent, and that enabled people to go on working and being productive, but maybe that’s just me. I would extend this logic rather further, but I don’t want to offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. It’s your body; it’s your life: go in peace. But . . .

I can’t help having the feeling, though, that actually changing your physicality through extensive surgery may not be a good idea, neither do I feel like it’s obviously a good idea for society to encourage it. It does me no harm if other people take that route, but I can't help wondering if it might do some of them some harm in the meantime. There’s something different about it, don’t you think? At least where minors are concerned.  Are we really to allow minors to make a choice like this, the surgery part?

I’m glad that I am not on the committee that has to make these decisions. That would be an impossible position for me. It would be much easier if it were just my child coming to me with the decision. Then I could just smile and be supportive.

This type of thing tends to ride a wave through the public imagination before the wave breaks on the shore of so-what. We’ve seen it all before. Long ago there was a fellow who underwent the whole medical process to transition to womanhood. That was Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s. People thought that it was strange, and then they got over it.  

And now we periodically hear about tranies competing in women’s tennis or something. Then it all settles down and people forget about it, because really, in the scheme of things, it’s no big deal. To us it’s no big deal, anyway. To them, the sufferers, it’s a very big deal. I say “sufferers,” please forgive me if that seems insensitive. But really, isn’t it safe to say that no one would choose to go through something like that if it seemed like less than an absolute imperative? Like a situation that one had to escape from on an emergency basis? Like you were escaping a condition that caused you profound suffering?

So I’m all for this kid finding peace with this world of deep shit that we must all come to terms with. His struggle may be different from ours, but no one gets out of these blues alive. Really though, does he really need to take all of that extra upper-body strength to a women’s wrestling tournament? That’s a good question, isn't it? 

Alan Price Set - Simon Smith & his amazing dancing bear 1967

Okay, let's put Alan Price on the "underrated/underappreciated" list.

He was a major contributor to the success of the Animals, and his solo LPs were consistently great. This cut, I believe, is on "This Price is Right."

I think that it took a certain courage to put together a band like the Alan Price Set in 1967, an almost foolhardy courage. Very good music, though, and there were a few of us who appreciated it at the time. A few.

Cool Wi-Fi TV Movie Alert: Queen of Blood (1966)

This is a very cool movie with a great back-story. It’s up on the YouTube, and it looks very good. There are some wavy distortions running through it from time to time, but it’s a sci-fi movie, so it all looks very normal. The color is good. 

It’s a B-movie, for sure, but it does have John Saxon and Dennis Hopper to recommend it. Not to mention Basil Rathbone. The three of them really showed up for work here too, no fooling around, no sleep-walking.

Of all the God-Damned things, it’s based on a Soviet film called “Mechte Navstrechu.” Scenes from Mechte Navstrechu and also scenes from another soviet movie called “Nebo Zoryot” were used in Queen of Blood. They look great, too, and they really add to the movie. Those are the great scenes of planetary surfaces and spherical spacecraft, the real sci-fi touches.

Forrest Ackerman is also in the film. Forrest was in a few films, but he was mostly famous for being a sci-fi gadfly. He was a literary agent to sci-fi writers, he did some sci-fi writing, and he put out the rather good magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland for many years. He appears in quite a few scenes in the movie, but he has no lines. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe he never got his SAG card. (Screen Actors Guild.) 

The soundtrack is occasionally Theremin based, but that might only be for scenes lifted from the Soviet films.

Somehow, aliens come into radio contact with people from the earth, notably the great scientist played by Basil Rathbone. Rocket ships go to Mars to retrieve an alien ship. They come across a survivor, the very Queen of Blood from the title. She blood-loves Hopper and another guy to death, and almost gets John Saxon, too, but the female astronaut, who happens to be Saxon’s girlfriend, puts the kibosh on that and scratches the Queen across the neck and back.  Big plot point, that.

There are some interesting points that suggest that by 1966 people were coming to grips with the newness of space and etc. After they realize that the Queen just wants to feed on their blood, the chief scientist on the spaceship says, sure, she’s a monster, but we know nothing of her moral constructs or mores. That kind of thinking was new. 

Lots of the old attitudes remain, though. After being scratched, the Queen dies. John Saxon examines her and says, wow, she bled to death! She was a hemophiliac! Maybe she was royalty!

Oh, you know, the Queen is dead but she left eggs all over the place. Basil Rathbone and the rest of the scientists are strangely blasé about the eggs, bringing them straight to Earth for examination. No suggestion of a sequel, though. They just leave it all hanging.

John Saxon was always pretty good in these movies, and this is no exception. Basil Rathbone brings his A-game here, and it really does elevate the movie a bit. Dennis Hopper is very engaging in a role that would have been called on Star Trek, “crewman number seven.” The entire cast is fine, and the movie is very entertaining from beginning to end. “Directed and Written” by Curtis Harrington, and it was a good job both ways.