His was a hungry man’s hard-hearted view of life, more like Merle Haggard’s conservatism than like his later friend Edmund Burke’s. The self-classified reformers, Johnson insisted, are in pursuit of only their own narrow interests, not those of the common people. He loved to tell the story of challenging Mrs. Macaulay, “a great republican,” to prove her sincerity about social equality by asking her footman to dine at her table. (“She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.”) Life is hard, and there is little that government can do to make it easier. No one was less paternalistic, or puritanical, about the poor and their pleasures than Johnson: give them all the gin and fairgrounds they want, they have little enough else, God knows. (“Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.”)

“Samuel Johnson arrived in London in March of 1737, at the age of twenty-seven. He was escaping from a failed effort to run a country school, along with his prize pupil, a twenty-year-old would-be actor named David Garrick. Although Garrick made his way to the stage, and to stardom, in short order, Johnson had no luck in his dream, of becoming a London writer and wit, for a very long time. He had the misfortune to have arrived in London in a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying. The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money from publishers, was not yet in place. The only way to make a living was to publish, for starvation wages, in the few magazines that had come into existence. Johnson worked as a miscellaneous journalist, carrying his clips around and begging for assignments.”

Dexter, I can’t believe you never heard of Betty Page.

I stand corrected on the McCoys’ roots. A Cincinnati DJ had said they were from Ohio when Hang On Sloopy was big while I was in high school. So it made sense that when I got to Ohio State, I learned it was the (un)official OSU song. Although Wiki says it’s the official rock song of the state of Ohio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McCoys

That’s some six degrees of separation on the red Les Paul!

Knew their father, who Rick always spoke highly of during his heyday, I recall reading a Rolling Stone interview in the 70′s. His father’s view of the rock n’ roll world was a little less.

I believe the the McCoy’s bass player, or perhaps, he was the drummer, was running a pizza shop in Winchester, IN.

Jayne Mansfield… you might still be able to find a copy of a really interesting travel book, “Unauthorized America.” Among other historic locations, i.e. Charles Manson’s boyhood home and so forth, they show the stretch of highway where Jayne Mansfield died in a car wreck, down on the Mississippi coast somewhere.

Obligatory Beatles connections: George Harrison was once photographed with Jayne Mansfield. The red Les Paul he played on “Let It Be” once belonged to Rick Derringer, who traded it to a music store in NYC, where Eric Clapton bought it and later gave it to George.

I am a positive fount of worthless information tonight.