We thought you all might enjoy a morning wake up song. Or to put it another way: Get to work!

Holy cow! I had just put that bit of the post up, then went to look for an interesting bit of extra info about Men at Work—and found this:

Men at Work star Greg Ham fears he'll be forced to "sell his house" to pay out royalties for their 1980s hit Down Under after the band lost a copyright battle over the song.

A judge in Australia has ruled that the flute solo in the track samples parts of Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, a song written by an music teacher for the Girl Guides in 1934.

The song's composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, will have to pay bosses at Larrikin music publishers five per cent of the song's proceeds dating back to 2002, as well as royalties from future earnings. [...]

No one detected it – I didn't detect it and I played the f***ing thing. I was looking for something that sounded Australiana – that's what came out – it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

I must be a bit psychic today.

Here's the Kookaburra song, done with the Aussie dance that Aussie kids do to the song. Let us know what you think: Can you hear how the flute part in "Land Down Under" might have borrowed from it?

Some musical information on the lawsuit can be found here.

Mr. Ringo Starr turns 70 today – yikes! – and he's got a message for everyone about what he'd like for the occasion:

"Ringo Starr turns 70 on Wednesday, and he doesn't want any presents.

Instead, the famous Beatles drummer is making it clear, via his website, that the ideal gift to him would be for everyone to throw up a 'peace' sign with their fingers and say aloud, 'Peace and Love' right at 12 p.m. on his birthday."

We, uh, missed it. So let us here at the BRI say just a few hours late: Peace and Love! Woo hoo!

And a tidbit about one of Ringo's most famous songs, from page 13 of Uncle John's UNSINKABLE Bathroom Reader:

“'Octopus’s Garden': On a boat trip in Sardinia in 1968, Ringo Starr turned down the octopus he was served for lunch. That sparked a conversation about octopuses. According to the Beatles’ drummer, 'The captain told me how they go ‘round the sea bed and pick up stones and shiny objects to buildgardens. I thought, How fabulous!”

Happy Birthday, Ringo.

Happy 4th of July, everybody!

Take it away, Mr. Guthrie:

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York Island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway

I saw above me that endless skyway

I saw below me that golden valley

This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

While all around me a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

This land was made for you and me

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling

A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,

This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York Island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

Take it away, Mr. Springsteen:

Sandy the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight
Forcin' a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm Jul
Down in town the circuit's full with switchblade lovers so fast, so shiny, so sharp
As the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark
And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore
Chasin' all them silly New York virgins by the score

Sandy the aurora is risin' behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh love me tonight for I may never see you again
Hey Sandy girl
Now now baby

Now the greasers, ahh they tramp the streets or get busted for sleeping on the beach all night
Them boys in their high heels, ah Sandy their skins are so white
And me I just got tired of hangin' in them dusty arcades, bangin' them pleasure machines
Chasin' the factory girls underneath the boardwalk where they all promise to unsnap their jeans
And you know that tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag
I got on her last night and my shirt got caught
And they kept me spinnin' baby, they didn't think I'd ever get off

Oh Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
This pier lights our carnival life on the water
Runnin', laughin' 'neath the boardwalk with the boss's daughter
I remember Sandy girl
Now now now now now baby

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw boppin' down on the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with Loverboy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life is through baby
You ought to quit this scene too

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us
This pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh love me tonight and I promise I'll love you forever
Oh me and Sandy girl
Now now now now now baby
Yeah promise Sandy girl
Shala la la la baby

It is the Summer Solstice, the day with the most hours of sunlight in the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), and the very first day of summer. Bring on the sun, the heat, the bbqs, the parades, the camping trips, the ants, the snakes, the scraped knees and the burnt skin – and don't forget the swimming!

To get us all in the mood, here's the great Loudon Wainwright III, with "The Swimming Song."

Here's the lyrics, if you feel like swimming along:

This summer I went swimming,
This summer I might have drowned
But I held my breath and I kicked my feet
And I moved my arms around, I moved my arms around.

This summer I swam in the ocean,
And I swam in a swimming pool,
Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes,
I'm a self-destructive fool, a self-destructive fool.

This summer I swam in a public place
And a reservoir, to boot,
At the latter I was informal,
At the former I wore my suit, I wore my swimming suit.

This summer I did the backstroke
And you know that's not all
I did the breast stroke and the butterfly
And the old Australian crawl, the old Australian crawl.

This summer I did swan dives
And jackknifes for you all
And once when you weren't looking
I did a cannonball, I did a cannonball.

Happy summer, everyone. Enjoy.

We're working on an article for Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader (due out in November 2010) called "Show Stoppers." It's about concerts or theater shows or whatever that had to be stopped mid-performance for one humorous or interesting reason or another. Here's an excerpt—and it just happens to be our favorite. (We'll tell you why at the end of the piece in the "Special Note" section.)

Performers: The Who
Background: On the night of May 16, 1969, almost to the date that their iconic fourth album, the rock-opera Tommy, was released, The Who was playing the Fillmore East in Manhattan. Only a handful of songs into their set, a somewhat disheveled-looking, heavy-set guy climbed up on stage—and grabbed the microphone out of singer Roger Daltry’s hand, right in the middle of a song. Daltry stood there stunned for a few seconds; bassist John Entwhistle and one of the band’s roadies grabbed the guy; guitarist Pete Townsend walked up to him…and kicked him right in the bollocks, as the Brits say. Then they unceremoniously threw him off the stage. The band then went back to the song they were playing. (Keith Moon had never stopped.)
STOP! Less than a minute later the band stopped playing, and Pete Townsend said, “I smell smoke.” Someone walked out from backstage, whispered in his ear, and the band walked off the stage. The five-story apartment building and supermarket next door were on fire—and the show was over. Bonus: Unbeknownst to the band, the guy who jumped on stage was a plainclothes cop. He was trying to tell everyone about the fire. The NYPD wanted to charge Townsend with assault; he eventually paid a fine instead.

Special Note: We didn’t have to look on the internet, or read a rock-and-roll history book, or Rolling Stone magazine, or anything like that at all to research this item. Why? Because Uncle John was there. And—amazingly—he remembers it! (He told us we had to promise to say he was very, very young at the time.)

(pic)

Today is the anniversary of the 1967 release of the very first song by the great British psychedlic-rock (and so much more) band, Pink Floyd. The song was "Arnold Layne," written and sung by Syd Barret. It's about a guy who steals women's clothes from washing lines and wears them. He is unfortunately caught doing this, and "doors bang, chaingang." Poor Arnold. Wikipedia has quite a bit of information on the song here.

They apparently don't allow embedding, but you can go see the video the band made for the song the same year. It is comically awful, to be honest. And there's even another one. And here's Pink Floyd's official Syd Barrett Web site. (Automatic music once you enter the site.)

Image of the band (in 1967) from the Syd Barrett Scrap Book. (Click the pic to enlarge.) Left to right: Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, and Roger Waters.

Today is the Man in Black's birthday. He died in 2003, but if he were still alive, Cash would be 78 today.

Cash's signature song was "Folsom Prison Blues." But Cash didn't get the idea for the song while doing time. He got it while watching a documentary in 1951 about the legendarily tough northern California penitentiary called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. It struck him that most people live in a prison of one kind or another, and that they would relate to a song about prison (even a real one) as much as they would to a song about the frequent country song subject matter of drinking, trains, or broken hearts.

By the way, Cash never did any hard time. He was arrested for minor infractions a few times, but never anything approaching "shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die."

"Folsom Prison Blues" was initially released in 1956 as a B-side to Cash's single "So Doggone Lonesome." But a live version, recorded at San Quentin prison, became the #1 country hit of 1968.

Here's an extra wad of Cash: just yesterday, an iTunes user downloaded the 10 billionth song sold on the service. The song: "Guess Things Happen That Way," by Johnny Cash. Guess things happen that way.