DOIN' THAT CRAZY HAND JIVE

Being a big fan of this song (and of bilateral symmetry) I have loved this dance ever since I first learned it (which took about 10 seconds). The hand jive is one of those dances that it's really pretty close to impossible to mess up. And you can add onto it just about anything you can think of. I've seen more complicated versions of it, particularly one rather raunchy version that made the rounds of the frat parties when I was in university, which may have been a lot closer to the original rhythm and blues original than we realized at the time. If memory serves, it was called the "Dirty Thirty from Chi-town." That's really all I can tell you today. Maybe it had 30 hand jive gestures, I never counted. Maybe it originated in Chicago, I never thought to ask.

Whatever it was in the early days, for me, the hand jive was always the classic version seen here in the first video embed which I found on YouTube. As you can see from the apparent age of the girls in this vid, the hand jive that I did in the late 50s through the 60s is still being done by contemporary youth. Like they say, rock and roll is here to stay! Warning, the video is four minutes long, but after the first 10 seconds, you've seen all of the moves; the girls don't go on to free-style it, so if you're pressed for time...



In looking for a vid of the acutal song, I found this terrific vintage footage of Johnny Otis performing his huge hit, complete with some very hip dancers (reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in "Funny Face"). As you can see, their hand jive really isn't all that much about the hands. But I like it! Good old Wikipedia has more to say on the subject:

The Hand jive is a dance particularly associated with rock and roll and rhythm and blues music of the 1950s. It involves a complicated pattern of hand moves and claps at various parts of the body, following and/or imitating the percussion instruments. It resembles a highly elaborate version of Pat-a-cake. Hand moves include thigh slapping, cross-wrist slapping, fist pounding, chest slapping and pounding, hand clapping, elbow touching and hitch hike moves.The hand jive was particularly popularized by Johnny Otis's 1958 hit "Willie and the Hand Jive". Eric Clapton did a version of the song in 1974 that reached the Top 40.[1] It is also featured prominently in the Broadway musical Grease through the song "Born to Hand Jive"; in the movie adaptation of the musical, the song is performed by Sha Na Na.



Finally, I saw this on the news lately, and thought it was the perfect way to wrap up our hand jive coverage. This one is worth watching all the way through (3 mins exactly!) because there are virtually no repeats. It's about the best hand jive you could find that's done sitting down and not to music! And after you see this, I promise you you're going to look at Wolf Blitzer in a whole new light.



Videos top to bottom by YT members icecreamlover531, twobarbreak, wgn

SOTP IN THE NAME OF LOVE

There’s a picture making the rounds online, maybe you’ve seen it. A road crew in Stockton, CA installed a brand spanking new red STOP sign, and then, to go with it, they painted the same word in big white letters on the road. Only they spelled it wrong. It was quickly corrected of course, but not before someone took a picture so we can all have a good laugh at their expense. Some of us wonder about the ethics of laughing, because some of us (and by that I mean me) have what’s known as dyscalculia, which is a little like dyslexia, only with numbers and spatial directions (putting together IKEA stuff is hellish torture). I’ve also been known to swap out a few words or letters here and there, too, so I sometimes tell people I’m dyslexic. Technically speaking, the two disorders are close cousins, and not actually interchangeable, but dyscalculia is neither easy nor fun to pronounce (dis-cal-KYOOL-e-yah is pretty close to it), and everybody’s heard of dyslexia, so I kind of fudge things. Does that entitle me to laugh at the Stockton road crew, or should I feel guilty? Well, too late, anyway. To make up for it, let me share about one of my personal musical miscues.

Chicago, “25 or 6 to 4” (really great video, BTW!) Part of the trouble I had with this song is that I only heard it on the radio, but I never owned a copy. Back in 1970 I was a struggling student with no discretionary income, so even though I liked it, it was not a time in life when I was adding to my record collection. Thus, when I heard the lyrics, I was mystified, because I thought he was singing “25 or 624.” What the heck does that mean? Was he trying to reconstruct the combination to a lock? Or was it some kind of weird, sinister code? Or, like John Lennon (see previous post) was he just messing with my head? Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was confused by these lyrics (oh sure, suddenly it’s cool to be dyslexic!!) It caused quite a stir, and spawned lots of interpretations. Here’s a short quote from Wikipedia:

Chicago fans have long argued about the meaning of the song. When it was released, there was speculation that the lyrics were drug-related; but the same thing was said about many songs in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the rumor has been largely dismissed. Lamm himself says that the title is "just a reference to the time of day," and that "the song is about writing a song. It's not mystical." The time of day in reference is 3:35 AM (or 3:34 AM), which would then be 25 (or 26) minutes to 4 AM. Lamm was not above perpetuating the mythology of the song, though. In one interview, he referred to the song title as "a cricket score."

Well, I don’t know how cricket is scored, but it’s obvious that Robert Lamm didn’t have a digital clock, or the whole song would have been very different. I also discovered that in 2005, a fellow named Jonathan Coulton wrote and recorded a song called, “When I’m 25 or 64” which kind of splices the Chicago song with The Beatles “When I’m 64.” Talk about confusing the situation, stuff like that should be allowed! I’m kidding...and in fact I have learned to compensate for my numerical short-comings. But I can still give cellist Yo-Yo Ma the old switcheroo if I’m not careful.