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Andy Sullivan: Against the Grain

One day last week, I was listening to The Blend on SiriusXM when Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” comes on.  The song lyrics included a lot of classic events that shaped history.  The cutoff was the year the song was released, 1989.  The song was released as a single September 18, 1989 and later released as part of Joel’s Storm Front album on October 17, 1989.  A list song, its fast-paced lyrics include brief references to 118 significant political, cultural, scientific and sports events between 1949, the year of Joel’s birth, and 1989, in a mainly chronological order.

First, Harry Truman.  Truman won the 1948 United States presidential election following a partial term after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Next is Doris Day, who debuts in film in Romance on the High Seas featuring the popular song “It’s Magic”.  We move to 1948 next.  Red China is established by the Communist Party of China, who wins the Chinese Civil War.  Next mention right after Red China is Johnny Ray.  The rock & roll progenitor signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records. 

Next mention is South Pacific.  1949 was the year South Pacific opened on Broadway.  Walter Winchell was an influential radio and newspaper journalist.  Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.  Joe DiMaggio signed a record-breaking $100,000 contract with the New York Yankees that year.

We move to 1950: U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy gains national attention and begins his anti-Communism crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.  Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.  Studebaker, a popular automobile company, begins its financial downfall.  Television becomes widespread throughout Europe and North America.  North Korea invades South Korea, beginning the Korean War. Marilyn Monroe appears in five films, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. 

Moving to 1951: married couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of espionage.  The United States developed the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb, as a nuclear weapon.  Sugar Ray Robinson, champion boxer, defeats Jake LaMotta in the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”.  That moniker would be used again for a WWE event four decades later with Stone Cold Steve Austin vs Vince McMahon in a cage, but I digress.  Panmunjom, a border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War. Marlon Brando is nominated for Best Actor Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire.  The King and I, musical by Roges and Hammerstein, opens on Broadway.  Controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, is published.

1952: Dwight D, Eisenhower is the landslide winner of the 1952 U.S. presidential election.  Vaccine for polio is successfully developed by Jonas Salk.  Rocky Marciano defeats Jersey Joe Walcott for the world heavyweight championship in boxing.  Liberace first broadcasts The Liberace Show.  The final line referencing 1952, “Santayana goodbye”, references the passing of philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana.

1953: Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin dies.  Georgy Malenkov succeeds Stalin for six months.  Gamal Abdel Nasser acts as the true power behind the new Egyptian nation as Muhammad Naguib’s minister of the interior.  Popular Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev dies.  Winthrop Rockefeller had a highly publicized divorce in 1953, but Nelson Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller III also made headlines that year.  Billy Joel himself has stated that Nelson Rockefeller was who he meant in the song, for his fame as governor of New York State. Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, receives the National League’s MVP award for the second time.  Communist Bloc was the last mention of the year.  The East German uprising of 1953 is crushed by Volkspolizei and the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.

1954: Roy Cohn resigns as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and enters private practice.  Juan Peron is at the height of his power as the President of Argentina before a coup the following year.  Arturo Toscanini is at the height of his fame as a conductor, performing regularly with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on U.S. national radio.  Dacron is an early artificial fiber made from the same plastic as polyester.  The fall of French/Vietnamese camp Dien Bien Phu to Viet Minh forces leads to the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states.  “Rock Around The Clock” is referenced.  It’s of course a hit of that year from Bill Haley and his Comets.

1955: Albert Einstein passed at 76.  James Dean achieves success with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause but dies in a car accident at age 24.  “Brooklyn’s got a winning team” is reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who won their only World Series that year before moving to Los Angeles.  Davy Crockett, a Disney television miniseries about the legendary frontiersman, was a huge hit and inspired a short-lived “coonskin cap” phase.  That’s racoon for those not in the know.

Peter Pan was referenced in the song.  He was subject of an NBC musical that year broadcast live and in color.  Elvis Presley signed with RCA Records on November 21 of that year, beginning his pop career.  Final reference of that year: Disneyland opens as Walt Disney’s first theme park.

1956: Brigitte Bardot stars in And God Created Woman.  Budapest is mentioned.  It was the site of the Hungarian Revolution.  Alabama is the site of the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the pivotal events in the civil rights movement.  Nikita Khrushchev makes his famous Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality”.  By the way, that’s where the song “Cult of Personality” came from.  The beginning of that song has a bit of the speech in it.  The song ends with “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  Not a Joel reference but I found it interesting.  Princess Grace Kelly appears in her final film, High Society, and marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco.  The line “trouble in the Suez” alludes to the Suez crisis deepening as Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal.

1957: Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of a standoff between Governor Orval Faubus attending a previously whites-only school.  Boris Pasternak was the Russian author who published his first novel, Doctor Zhivago, that year. Jack Kerouac publishes his novel On The Road, a defining work of the Beat Generation. Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union, marking the start of the space race.  Zhou Entlai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, survives an assassination attempt.  The Bridge on the River Kwai is released and received seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. 

1958: Lebanon is engulfed in a political and religious crisis that eventually involves U.S. intervention.  Charles de Gaulle is elected first president of the French Fifth Republic following the Algerian Crisis.  California baseball begins as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California.  Starkweather homicide is mentioned.  Charles Starkweather killed 11 people, mostly in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Children of Thalidomide: Many pregnant women taking the drug Thalidomide had children born with congenital birth defects.

1959: Buddy Holly dies in a plane crash with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.  Joel prefaces the lyric with a Holly signature vocal hiccup “uh-hu, uh-huh”.  Ben Hurr, starring Charlton Heston, wins 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Space monkey: a rhesus macaque and a squirrel monkey become the first two animals to be launched by NASA into space and survive.  Mafia leaders are convicted in the Apalachin meeting trial, confirming it as a nationwide conspiracy.  Next week, I’ll finish the timeline with 1960-1989. 

Check out my podcast Blendertainment at the links below!

https://open.spotify.com/show/61yTPt9wXdz37DZTbPUs16?si=dejf1SatQLe0i8G2...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blendertainment/id1541097172

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