I use to set my Grandmother’s and Uncle’s lighter up to maximum and then watch as they set their noses on fire. A real blast except for them. And I wondered why my relatives didn’t want me around much?
I grew up in an age where cigarettes were everywhere. On TV, you’d see popular actors light one up in a scene. The cigarette had nothing to do with the plot, it just made the sponsor happy. We even had candy cigarettes in cute boxes like the adults. But, my hanging around cigarettes all my life, even though I’ve only had one pack in my life, came in handy last Friday.
I was picking up a check from a client and when I arrived, the bushes in front of their house were on fire. Burning bushes on Good Friday. The joke was not lost on me, but I kept it to myself. The fire department had it well under control, so I hung with my client a bit. The Fire Marshall pulled a fresh cigarette butt out of the burnt bushes. Seems he had found the ignition source, but he couldn’t place the brand. I knew in an instant it was a Winston cigarette. Winston was the brand for all my relatives and it has a distinctive orange speckled wrap over the filter. Besides, Winston sponsored NASCAR for like 25 years or whatever, I know this brand. Anyway, I felt like I had contributed to a scene from CSI or something as the clue suddenly clicked with everyone. The suspect smoked Winstons! I was very glad to have been alive in the 60s/70s when it was still cool to smoke.
Nothing more annoying then the freaking organ solo in “Light My Fire” I tried to find the single version, but alas only the album version is out there it seems. I don’t mind Manzarek’s playing normally, but that solo grates on me. A great song, annoying solo.
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Hang on, don’t *all* factory cigs have orange-ish speckled filter covers? Unfortunately I can’t check, as I roll my own toothpick-cigs with teensy mini-filters o_O
I HATE that solo. And I HATE the organ sig riff in Light My Fire. I think it’s one of the ugliest pieces of keyboard work ever inflicted on the public in the history of rock :-’(
In the golden age of cigarettes, I think that was a standard way of identifying that the cigarette had a filter on it (remember the unfiltered ones? Ugh) Today, Marlboro and Winston have similar wrappings, but they are different… I just happen to know the Winston brand very well. Though Marlboro has a HUGE market share… and in the early days, Marlboro was marketed to women! Had cute babies in ads telling their mommies to “light up and not scold me”. Man, the guys in Advertising will do *anything* for a sale. But, when they converted to a “rugged” man’s cigarette… bingo, it they took off.
I’ll take your word for it, then
Only brand of factorymades I ever smoked was B&H, and I went over to rollies many years ago. lovely things – I do enjoy smoking, but with hand-rolls I smoke the equivalent of three factory cigs a day, and they don’t smell nearly as awful!
I look back at old tonight show clips where every guest is smoking.
Yeah, everyone on the Tonight Show would light up. Didn’t Johnny have a lighter on the desk for a long time? Can’t remember… It was THE thing back then, and besides, cigarette companies dumped a TON of money into TV in the early days.
On the “Lost In Space” TV series DVDs, they have some extras of some of the cast doing screen tests and in one of the out-takes, you can hear the producer telling the actor to “light a cigarette” to please the sponsors. The actor didn’t smoke, but lit one up anyway and then set it out of frame. The good ol’ days…
If memory serves, the studio execs wanted there to be a “futuristic cigarette” for the cast of Star Trek to smoke as well, but Roddenberry flat-out refused.
I watched a clip of Jackie Gleason on Carson recently and the FIRST thing he does after coming on stage and sitting down?.. takes out a cig, lights it, big drag and exhale..
Gleason was a master showman in everything he did… right down to taking that first big drag on the cigarette. He sold a ton of coffee and cigs in his day at the end of his variety show coming out on stage with a cup of coffee and cig in hand. He was a smart cookie…
Let’s all sit back and enjoy the fireworks! Cool lighting effects from the flame, by the way
And yeah, the solo is kinda ugly, sounds like a darker version of a Nintendo game soundtrack. But it’s worth getting past, just to hear a bit more of Jim at the end!
Yeah, it’s just this piercing high pitched organ with little or no bass. Not sure if it is how it was recorded back in 1967 or what, but the song lacks any serious depth. Save Jim Morrison’s voice, which is pretty much all the doors had going for them period.
I’m also not a big Doors fan as they did NOT have a bass player in the group. Now, being a bass player, I know we’re annoying chaps, but you *gotta* have some sort of bottom end or it’s just this big empty sound coming at you.
Bass players do it deeper, man…
Heh. In the UK in the 70s there was a popular ‘refillable” disposable lighter called the Clipper that really would produce that length of flame without modification other than simply turning the flame adjuster to max. Combine the popularity of smoking, the prevalent hair length amongst male university students (I looked like a cross between Gandalf and Jimmy Page) and the “waggish humor” of one’s friends and many an otherwise boring night in the pub was brightened up by the occasional hair fire.
In 1975 we had a gas crisis and as a result people with liquid (aka “petrol”) lighters couldn’t get the lighter fluid for love nor money. A friend had a WWI era pipe lighter which you pulled open like a James Bond spy camera and spun the wheel to produce a flame inside a ring of metal with a wick in it. One day, during a game of snooker, I borrowed it to light a hand-rolled cigarette and my face was engulfed in a flare the like of which has not been seen outside of a North Sea oil rig. Once I had extinguished the lavish flames that had taken root in my beard, hair and nostrils my “friend” explained that he was now filling the lighter by visiting an all night gas station and scavenging the drips of gasoline from the pump nozzles. Nice one Jim.
I’m having difficulty believing a cigarette butt could set fire to a green bush without some help, but since I trust you implicitly I’ll take your word for it. Nice one, Byron. Did you burst into “Who Are You?” after you identified the brand?
No, you are correct, the green bush itself was not set on fire by the cigarette butt, but rather the DRIED up mulch on the ground surrounding all the bushes. We suburbanites love to put down wood chips around our shrubberies and house to ensure there’s plenty of kindle to get a good fire going…
We’re such doofs sometimes…
Ah, the flaming beard gag… been a while since I’ve seen one of those. My friend lost his eyebrows using liquid white gas to start a fire in his fireplace one day. Funny as hell as he wasn’t hurt. Fire… friend… ugh, ugh…
Somewhere i have a 45 with the single version of light my fire. We had a record store in the mall that had a vinyl section full of re-released singles from the 50′s-80′s. Almost every payday in high school I would buy a different 45 until the record store was bought by FYE and no longer carried any vinyl or tapes (forcing me to buy a cd player)
I miss my old 45s… they were such fun to buy and play. A CD single isn’t the same. Looks like a regular CD, just a whole lot less on it. A 7″ single was this fun little thing good for tossing like Frisbees at drunken friends at a party. They were practically indestructible and fairly cheap.
I’m sounding like an old fart…
the big downside to 7″ singles is that they happen to sit, content-wise, in the range of diameter on a record where sound quality suffers the worst. because of this, sound quality on a 7″ is always going to be sub-par compared to stuff that would be on the outer edge of a 10″ or 12″ sized record. this also goes for the last few songs on any long player or 10″er. the closer you get to the center, the suckier the sound quality is going to be.
the other bummer about 7″ers is that toward the end of their popularity in the mainstream record-buying public (and they are actually still quite popular, especially with punk rockers), they were made out of the WORST sounding materials…styrene was a popular material to press them out of (disney especially loved to make them out of styrene) because it was super-cheap. unfortunately, styrene doesn’t hold up nearly as well as vinyl and as such the sound quality suffers pretty much immediately… since the majority of people who played 7″ers used close’n'plays or portable phonographs with heavy tracking tonearms (kids), radio stations (heavy tracking) and jukeboxes (also heavy tracking), styrene 7″ records didn’t hold up long and became noisy and nasty sounding really fast…
Byron, I’m curious what you might have thought of Val Kilmer singing The Door’s songs in the Oliver Stone movie he was in years ago. I always thought he did a terrific job at portraying Jim Morrison in the movie. I knew he had sung all the tunes himself as he sung all the songs in “Top Secret” too…
Just curious…
-Chris
The movie itself wasn’t all that bad. Kilmer can carry a tune, but he’s no Morrison. But that said, his singing was good for the film as it would have been weirder for him to lip sync to Morrison’s takes. So, it fit the subject.
Stone as a film-maker is another story…
It tripped me out once when I was watching an old movie, and the people were smoking in the courtroom like it was an everyday event.
Sigh….I miss the days when you could walk around the mall smoking.
Kinda funny how things have taken a complete turn around now and it’s only cool to smoke like in a dark room behind closed doors or else you’re like persecuted. I’ve never been a smoker myself, but man, it’s crazy.
By the way, in new Galactica spinoff series Caprica, *everyone* smokes. Even more than they did on the reimagined Galactica. In fact, I think the showmakers went out of their way to strew the landscape with cigarette smoke! It’s a fantastic show, as it happens – even if Ron Moore did describe it as ‘Dallas with robots’
i’m digging caprica even more than i dug galactica. i just hope syfy gives it the attention it really deserves and doesn’t make it as a half-season like warehouse 13 or any of their other smaller productions. it drives me nuts that shows like w13 and eureka don’t get full seasons but are usually half-season shows because at the end of them, you feel like they could have gone much, much farther with the plots.
i thought that in BSG it was hilarious that the doctor would smoke in the SURGERY room…
With you on that, Your Dee-nificence – though I should point out that IMTAO The West Wing in space, I mean the *real* Galactica (i.e. 21st century series), might just be the best-made telly series Liek Evar. Caprica’s V-world rocks as hard as Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse, and I love love love that Team Caprica is continuing their portrayal of a society that, although moribund in some ways, is enlightened enough to view unfettered sexuality choices as the normal thing they should be in *our* society. Science fiction for grownups!!! (And besides, what’s not to like about being able to tell a friend things like ‘You HAVE to see the latest episode – dude, the first-ever Cylon Centurion’s mum is about to get frakked by a stoned nun!…’)
I’ve been told that the ratings for Caprica aren’t setting any records, so I hope against hope that they get at least a couple of seasons to tell the story/stories in.
As for Doc Cottle smoking in the Galactica’s operating theatre – hellooo, when you’re the last practising surgeon in the human race, you can smoke anywhere you damn well please
Actually, the only recent “science fiction for grown-ups” was the remake of “Solaris”, but there weren’t enough (noisy) explosions, banking, whooshing spaceships or robots so nobody in the USA went to see it.
Erm…there was a telly series of Solaris? News to me…
(If we’re talking about science fiction *films* for grown-ups, there’ve been more than a few awesome ones in the past 20 years – three of them in the past year or so alone…)
“Light My Fire” begs for a 12″ single version. All you’d have to do is loop the organ solo for a bit longer.
*<8OD