You can't get fooled again

Despite my wide-ranging reading habits, one subject I'd never read anything about until very recently is the history of 20th-century popular music. I'm currently reading my second book on the topic, hot on the heels of my first -- not because of some sudden interest in pop history, but because each of the two books was independently brought to my attention by the sync fairies.

The first book was The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (2006) by Steven Lee Beeber. The sync-path leading me to that book began with the syncs documented in "Blue Green Crystal Ball" (September 24). This caused me to start thinking and writing about a hypothetical ball of that description, which I often abbreviated in my notes as BGCB. Then, in "Tom Petty death sync" (October 3), wanting to emphasize that an urge to listen to Tom Petty had appeared out of the blue, I wrote that what I had been listening to before said urge was "mostly New Wave kind of stuff" -- meaning, primarily, Blondie and Metric. Due to a moment of self-doubt as to whether I was using that genre label correctly, I read a little bit about new wave music on Wikipedia and discovered that it had started at a club called CBGB. I noted the similarity of that name to my abbreviation for Blue Green Crystal Ball and posted on it in "CBGB and the BGCB" (October 4). Later I independently noticed what Steven Lee Beeber apparently noticed back in 2006: that CBGB sounds like heebie-jeebies, which sounds as if it might have originated as an anti-Jewish slur. As documented in "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's" (October 6), I discovered Beeber's book by searching for heebie-jeebies jewish. The fact that that search turned up a book about CBGB -- the club whose name led me to run the search, but which was not included in my search prompt -- was a striking enough sync that I read the book.

While I was still reading Beeber's book, I checked Whitley Strieber's channel on YouTube and found an interview with Gary Lachman, who was briefly a member of Blondie. Near the beginning of the interview, Strieber proposed that they "start with the seventies and CBGB's and that world" and mentioned that he himself lived near CBGB at that time and used to patronize the club regularly with his wife. I posted about this in "Gary Lachman: Jewish punk?" (October 23) I've since determined that, no, he isn't Jewish. As I listened to the rest of the interview, the book The Morning of the Magicians came up, which prompted the random thought that I should search for afternoon of the magicians. As documented in "Afternoon of the Magicians," that search somewhat mysteriously yielded a picture of the cover of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (2014) by David McGowan. Even more mysteriously, I discovered that I already had an electronic copy of that book, with no memory of when or how I learned of its existence and downloaded it.

McGowan's book is primarily a history of another 20th-century popular music scene -- Laurel Canyon in the hippie years, home to the Doors, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, the list goes on and on. I was in a sense led to it by the other pop-history book I was reading -- Gary Lachman and CBGB are what made me pay attention to that interview -- but I actually found it via a search prompt completely unrelated to music: afternoon of the magicians.

Last night, about two-thirds of the way through Weird Scenes, I decided to glance at the table of contents to see what the remaining chapters were about. Given that the book is all about folk rock and hippie music, I was surprised to discover that the last chapter in the book is titled "Won't Get Fooled Again: Punk and New Wave Arrive." Given that one of the synchronistic threads leading me to this book began with my listening to "New Wave kind of stuff" and then abruptly switching to a very different genre, that last chapter seems significant.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" is a song by the Who. Why a non-punk song by an English band serves as the title of a chapter about punk rock coming to Los Angeles, I guess I won't know until I read the chapter. I'm not very familiar with the Who, though, so my first association was with George W. Bush's famous mangling of a common saying:

There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.

Last night, shortly after discovering that chapter, I somehow ended up listening to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series and finished the first two episodes. This morning I started Episode 3 and found that it includes -- just 12 seconds into the video -- footage of Bush delivering the very lines I have quoted above.