Six Degrees Round Three

Paula made her connections today starting with the color black in her word game that is loosely based on Carnelli and I will start off with the color red.  This is used in the Grateful Dead song ‘Casey Jones’, where Jerry sings, “Trouble ahead, the lady in red”, which is possibly a reference to John Dillinger being betrayed by a lady wearing a red dress.

I used to live on Hawthorne Court, so I have always been partial to Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote the romantic historical fiction The Scarlet Letter, and this ties in, since scarlet is a brilliant red color, with a slightly orange tinge to it.  I never read the book, but I saw the movie.  In the movie, Demi Moore has a child and refuses to name the father, so the Puritan community forces her to wear the letter A, for adulteress, as this was considered to be a badge of shame.

On the Cream Goodbye album there was a song named ‘Badge’ which was written by Eric Clapton and George Harrison and Harrison also played rhythm guitar on this, since Cream had only one guitarist, that being Clapton.  The funny thing about this song is that Clapton saw Harrison’s notes for this song, and he was looking at them upside down and he misread “Bridge” as being “Badge”, but they ended up keeping that name for the title of the song, which became a joke between them.  The song was supposedly written about Patty Boyd Harrison who ended up divorcing George and marrying Eric.

Celebrities are so weird, and as Boyd’s marriage to Harrison began to fail, she had an affair with Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood.  She separated from Harrison in 1974 and they divorced because Harrison was also unfaithful, which culminated in an affair that he had with Ringo Starr’s wife Maureen.  A story about rock and roll infidelity would not be complete with out mentioning Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull who was involved in the Mars Bar incident.  Love triangles are one thing, but Anita was in a Rolling Stones rectangle, being involved with Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.  In the Stones song ‘Gimme Shelter’, Anita was the storm that the Stones were seeking shelter from.

In ‘Gimme Shelter’, the Stones reflected on a world that appeared to be going to hell, as Keith saw this storm from his window which made him feel like it could make him fade away.  This makes me think about the Buddy Holly and the Crickets song ‘Not Fade Away’, which was also recorded by the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.  This is a love song and the lyrics say, “You know my love will not fade away”.  This was one of the first pop songs to feature the “Bo Diddley” sound, which is a series of beats (da, da, da, da-da da) which was popularized by Diddley.

If you do something that is worthless, or you don’t do anything at all, it could be said that you did diddly-squat.  During the 1930’s, this phrase was coined due to an observation of someone that was squatting while they were doodling in the sand.  The word doodle became confused with the word diddle, maybe because to dawdle meant to fool around, and this led to the expression diddly-squat, which is exactly what I accomplished here today in this post.

I connected ‘Casey Jones’ to Nathaniel Hawthorne and then to the Cream song ‘Badge’.  Then I used Patty Boyd Harrison to jump to Anita Pallenberg and I got ‘Gimme Shelter’.  I went on rambling about the Buddy Holly song ‘Not Fade Away’, which brought me to Bo Diddley and I ended with diddly-squat.

Written for Paula Light’s 6 Degrees round 3 prompt.