#Concorde history

[nocternalrandomness]

Concorde's last landing - Bristol. UK - Nov 26 2003

[unbfacts]

There were once supersonic passenger planes that could reach speeds of up to 1,354 mph. In comparison, today’s commercial airliners typically cruise at around 560 mph.

[511am]

[livesunique]

Hôtel du Garde-Meuble, Place de la Concorde, Paris, France

The Hôtel de la Marine was originally the home of the royal Garde-Meuble, the office managing the furnishing of all royal properties.

It was designed by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel and built between 1757 and 1774 on the newly created square first called Place Louis XV.

[lionofchaeronea]

Windy Day, Place de la Concorde, Jean Béraud, 1890

[blueiscoool]

Musket Balls Recovered From Site of First-Day Revolutionary War Battle

Almost 250 years ago, British soldiers marched in search of military supplies stockpiled by colonial rebels in Massachusetts and tension turned to bloodshed with battles at the towns of Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War.

The fighting in Concord on April 19, 1775, was immortalized by legendary essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as “The Shot Heard Round the World.”

National Park Service archaeologists recently found five musket balls fired that day by colonial militia members, according to a news release from the federal agency.

“It’s incredible that we can stand here and hold what amounts to just a few seconds of history that changed the world almost 250 years ago,” Jarrad Fuoss, a ranger at Minute Man National Historical Park and a historic weapons specialist, said in the release. “These musket balls can be considered collectively as ‘The Shot Heard Round the World,’ and it is incredible that they have survived this long.”

The projectiles were found near the site of the North Bridge where British soldiers faced off against the militia members in the famed three-minute battle in Concord, the park service said.

“Further analysis of the musket balls indicates that each one was fired from the opposite side of the river and not dropped during the process of reloading,” park service officials said.

The recently discovered five musket balls will be on display at the park Saturday.

The fighting that led to the birth of the United States began that 1775 day with a short skirmish in Lexington, Massachusetts, in which eight militia members were killed and 10 were wounded.

The British continued to move to Concord to search a home for military supplies, leaving a contingent of about 100 soldiers at the North Bridge. As militia members approached, shots were fired by the British troops.

Historians say 18 men were killed or wounded in the battle at the bridge. The fighting that day at Lexington, Concord and other sites took the lives of more than 120 people.

By Steve Almasy.

[max-e-doodle]

Concorde. Up close and personal.

[captain-flanders]

Concorde

[deadpresidents]

I am absolutely not joking when I tell you that one of the main reasons I started this blog way back in 2008 (yes...SIXTEEN YEARS AGO) was because I thought: "Maybe I should post some of these random articles I've written about Franklin Pierce in case there are other people like me."

Quite frankly, I didn't think that there were, but I'm happy that I was wrong. And shocked to find out over those sixteen years (!!!) that there were actually tens of thousands of people interested in reading my random stuff about Franklin Pierce. I just happened to branch out and talk about other Presidents too.

But since we're talking about him tonight, in case anybody wants to go back, I might as well share links to some of those pieces about Franklin Pierce:

•Pierce Bicentennial Essay Originally written for the New Hampshire Historical Society's website celebrating Pierce's 200th birthday in 2004 •"When tears and toil and conflict will be unknown" When former President Pierce wrote a moving letter to President Abraham Lincoln following the death of Lincoln's son, Willie -- a tragedy that Pierce also experienced as President. •"After the White House what is there to do but drink?" •"Franklin Pierce and the Consequences of Ambition" •"In Concord: The Friendship of Pierce and Hawthorne" A piece about the lifelong friendship between Franklin Pierce and author Nathaniel Hawthorne -- and friendship that endured controversy and lasted until Hawthorne's death while on holiday with former President Pierce. •My 2011 review of Peter A. Wallner's two-volume biography of President Pierce -- Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire's Favorite Son (2004) and Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union (2007) -- which is the definitive modern biography about Franklin Pierce's life and times.

[canuckus]

On today's date in 1969, Concorde flew for the first time. I took this photo at Heathrow in 1978. Sadly, I never got to fly on Concorde.

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

I sincerely hope that the ghost of Sydney Carton is having a good time watching the park skateboarding event that's happening at the Paris Olympics today and tomorrow, considering (according to my research) this set of stands is literally exactly where the guillotine stood in the Place de la Concorde at the time of the story.

obviously Sydney Carton wasn't real, ghosts or not (😔), but, in light of the real Terror and strife that this place once embodied, I personally think that seeing the square transformed today into a place of shared joy and celebration is very, very moving!

[nordleuchten]

The First Days of September

We left Portsmouth for Boston, as already stated, at midnight and arrived there at two o’ clock; we set out again at four, through Lexington, Lancaster, Worcester, Tolland, and Hartford. In each of these places, Lafayette received from all the citizens evidences of regard, which vividly affected him, but to which he had scarce time to respond, so rapid was our journey. We slept the first night at the charming country house of Mr. Wilder, near Boston, whose kind hospitality will never be effaced from our memory.

Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or Journal of Travels in the United States, Translated from the French, Volume 1, New-York, 1829, p. 81.

Celebrations in Lexington

Celebrations in Concord

Celebrations in Bolton

In other news, the French Ambassy to America is really, really committed to this Bicentennial. I never thought I would recommend subscribing to their YouTube channel … but there might some very good videos/shorts coming in the future.

[lionofchaeronea]

Parisienne on a Rainy Day, Place de la Concorde, Jean Béraud, 1890s

[dronescapesvideos]

British Airways Concorde Supersonic Jet Is Moved Backed To Intrepid Air, Sea And Space Museum After Restoration (2024) ➤➤ VIDEO: https://youtu.be/FGVEKstDeJw

[vintage-london-images]

This is the 17th July 2001. I'm not sure whether this would be classed as vintage, but do you know what, its 22 years ago, when I was a hot young history student. Well that's enough about me. Anyway, this is Concorde G-BOAF off on a post modification test flight out of London Heathrow, following work that was put in place following the tragic accident of an Air France Concorde the year before. Taking to the air at around 1420 in the dry, she returned to RAF Brize Norton at 1800hrs in typical British July weather.

Back in service, British Airways Concorde flights only had another two years or so before finally being withdrawn on the 24th October 2003. The final Concorde flight ever was from Heathrow to Filton Bristol on the 26th November 2003.

Lots could be written about the whys and why-fors, and do's and don'ts of Concorde's final withdrawal, so I'm not going to write it here. Enjoy the flight.

Please check out other posts with hashtag #video on @vintage-london-images

[sinceileftyoublog]

Cracker Interview: Telling the Band's Story

Photo by Jason Thrasher

BY JORDAN MAINZER

"Sometimes, nowadays, you don't have control over what you're promoting and marketing."

Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven front-man David Lowery, speaking to me over the phone from his hometown Athens, GA, was referring to songs going viral on TikTok when you least expect or even desire it, something that's happened to artists from Duster to Faye Webster. But control is exactly what Cracker have been seeking for the past two decades. In 2006, a day after their previous label Virgin Records issued a Cracker greatest hits record without the band's permission, Cracker released their own, Greatest Hits Redux, via British independent label Cooking Vinyl. More importantly, the songs on Redux were rerecorded, meaning Cracker owned the masters, and the band priced them on iTunes for less than the versions on Virgin's collection, resulting in greater sales for the Redux versions. Plus, if you were a Cracker diehard or completist, wouldn't you have wanted to nab the technically "different" versions of these classic songs?

In November, Lowery and company called back to their previous middle finger to the music industry, releasing Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective, also via Cooking Vinyl. The compilation contains the Redux versions of the band's most popular tunes as well as their past collaborative rerecords with Boulder bluegrass jammers Leftover Salmon, live recordings from Madrid and the German TV show Rockpalast, deep cuts, and previously unreleased material. Lowery, also a Senior Lecturer in Music Business at the University of Georgia, is as privy to anyone to the general listening habits of Gen-Z, knowing that music listeners increasingly favor playlists over albums. Consider Alternative History Cracker's official band playlist.

In fact, some of the versions on Alternative History have become canon in the ears of fans. If you've caught Cracker performing "I See the Light" live, the spritely ending here (originally on Redux) should sound more familiar than the comparatively slower outro from their self-titled debut. The jaunty barroom pianos of the Leftover Salmon collaborative version of "Sweet Potato" breathes new life into the Kerosene Hat standout. Leftover Salmon also help Cracker get to the point on "Eurotrash Girl", the arrangement carried by Noam Pikelny's banjo rather than dripping psychedelic guitars.

Of course, Cracker hopes that Alternative History becomes anything but alternate--if not definitive, that it stands on its own. It provides Lowery the opportunity to tweak his vocal performance and banjo playing on "Almond Grove", and for the band to remix, ever so slightly, even recordings released a mere few years ago. The compilation ends with "Ain't Gonna Suck Itself", the band's infamous dismissal of Virgin Records that appeared on 2003's Countrysides. It was the only non-cover song on that album, and ironically, wasn't rerecorded when it appeared on Redux. Here, we see the now indie rock band dangling a carrot over the heads of major label executives, cheekily asserting the control they continuously fight to keep.

Cracker's currently on tour in support of Alternative History, and on Sunday, they stop at Old Town School of Folk Music for two shows: an afternoon unplugged set and an evening full band show. Below, read my conversation with Lowery, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Why did you decide to release this alternative history?

David Lowery: Students who would take classes from me would dig through my catalog and discover Cracker through these algorithmic playlists that the streaming services generate, which are sort of weird. Obviously, the hits are at the top of those playlists, but [sometimes,] something [gets traction from] someone else's playlist, like "Greatest Hits of the 90's" or "Songs From The Television Show Californication." Playlists are sequenced badly, because they're by popularity, and I was kind of tripping on the fact that if somebody wants to get into a band, there's a better way to do it. [Plus,] our Greatest Hits Redux was only our first 10 years of the band, so we needed a new one. We needed a new retrospective.

I started talking to Cooking Vinyl about it, because a lot of our catalog is licensed by them. What we were gonna do was license key tracks from the Universal Music Group and Concord catalogs, but That started to seem expensive. One of the good things for Cracker is that through the years, we've rerecorded a number of our hits and key tracks for licensing. One of the reasons you do that is if somebody wants to come for a commercial, film, video game, or streaming license, you can offer them this other track at a slightly reduced price and keep all the money. That was very helpful for us. There were a lot of rerecords of our hits, and they're very well done. Movie directors are super picky. They want a particular recording of a song, so the rerecords have to sound just like it. There were also various collaborations we did over the years, like with Leftover Salmon and Drive-By Truckers, and because of the constraints of licensing, we started looking at this like, "What if we did a retrospective, but did all re-records, outtakes, B-sides, and live recordings, and tell the Cracker story that way?" I just thought it was more interesting, and in a lot of ways, a more accurate telling of the band's story.

SILY: Some of the versions on here are the ones your fans prefer. Also, it seems like once you release a song and play it live over the years, it takes a new shape and often becomes the definitive version. Do you agree with your fans in that regard?

DL: Certain songs, the beauty of the recording you get in a studio can't be matched. But "One Fine Day", which over the years has evolved into a Crazy Horse-esque, 8-minute-long song, that's just a better version of the song. We had a really good recording of that from the German television show Rockpalast. "Gimme One More Chance" from that same show is a good one. There's a stripped down, slower, more quiet version of "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey" from when we were on tour in Spain a few years ago. That's a different interpretation of the song, but it's cool. It works really well. In some cases, these other versions we did of the song, the live versions, maybe, were better than the original recordings, because [at the time of recording,] the songs were new and we hadn't played them that much. There's also just weird stuff, like the fact we found a demo of "Merry Christmas Emily", which I did as a rock rave-up, a roots rock version from forever ago. The original demo of the songs was completely different, and I had forgotten about it. [The version on Alternative History is] not the demo of the song, we just recorded it as we would have if we had changed the song to more of a rock song. It's almost like a different song with the same words. These things are important for people to hear, almost like an alternate reality.

SILY: There are a couple songs on Alternative History that aren't even rerecords, you've just reintroduced them because they were from a record you didn't think enough people paid attention to, like Greenland and the song "I Need Better Friends". I was also happy you included alternate versions of songs from Berkeley to Bakersfield, which is my favorite Cracker record. How does your relationship with your songs change over time? Do you still identify with the person you were when you wrote them?

DL: Most of the time. There's a certain level of professionalism you have to have. I've played "Low" 5,000 times, but I have to play it like it's our new song. I get myself in that mindset. It's a challenge with older songs we've played so many times. But we have such a large catalog, we can always mix it up. We'll play our 5 hits, but every other song in the set is different than the last time we played that city.

SILY: Do you ever think you'll do a live tour of alternate versions?

DL: We used to do a Cracker duo tour, and that evolved into a trio when we borrowed a pedal steel player. That's what we did for a while. There was talk of us releasing an album of it, but we never really got around to it.

SILY: You could get Leftover Salmon to join you. I love your collaborative version of "Eurotrash Girl" with them--it's concise and compacted.

DL: There was a 20th anniversary of that [album, Oh Cracker, Where Art Thou?, in 2023], and we talked about trying to do some shows together, but we couldn't fit it into our schedules. Those songs are important to our career and catalog. A lot of our fans know about them, but a lot of the general public doesn't. I love that version of "Eurotrash Girl". It was done in a single take. We were talking about how to do it, and [Leftover Salmon's] banjo player at the time suggested we do it as a waltz. We were noodling around and got it going, and that's the take, from conception to printed recording in 30 minutes.

SILY: Are the Madrid songs on here the same you shared on Bandcamp in 2023?

DL: Yeah. We did that as a limited edition CD, only 600 copies. A couple of them are slightly remixed, because in between the time we released the Madrid shows and the release of this record, the stuff we call "AI," which is really just very intelligent signal processing, has gotten so advanced, we were able to rebalance those recordings a little bit, where, [for instance,] the vocals were too quiet. The [songs are] slightly different. Someone with a fine ear will notice the instruments are balanced better, because you can literally take a two-track live recording and remix it down, and it has no artifacts. It's bizarre.

SILY: It's been over 10 years since Cracker's released a new record. Is there anything next for you?

DL: My 3 solo records [that came out since COVID] all come out as a box set with even more songs on it in May. It started before COVID, but that project was supercharged by COVID. It's super cool, because it's kind of somewhere between Camper and Cracker. Some of it is stripped down, and some of it has a string section. I've been doing solo shows--not a ton of them, because I've been waiting for all of this to come out as a box set--and it's started to become a pretty popular show for me. I sold out 2 shows in Atlanta. That's kind of where my focus has been. I imagine we'll make another Cracker record. I'd hoped Camper would make a record for our 40th anniversary, but I don't think we'll have time to make that happen, so instead I think me and Chris Molla, one of the founders in the band in the early years, are thinking of making a recording of our band that preceded Camper van Beethoven but shares a lot of the same songs. I got a lot of stuff going on; I'm not sure if it's a Camper record or a Cracker record just yet.

SILY: Right before COVID, I saw the Cracker-Camper Van Beethoven tour at Lincoln Hall in Chicago. For some reason, my wife and I had watched Bio-Dome earlier that day, and there's a Camper song in that movie that you played later that night (“Good Guys and Bad Guys”). I had totally forgotten about that. It was such a weird cosmic connection, experiencing a movie and song I hadn't in years on the same day.

DL: There's a certain kind of B movie that gets played over and over again that generates a lot of performance royalties for us, and that's one of them. Another one is Year One. We had two songs in Sharknado, another weird sleeper that just keeps getting viewed and viewed. It's interesting when songs go into those films; there's a certain B movie that has that weird long life.

SILY: Is there anything lately you've been listening to, watching, or reading that's caught your attention?

DL: The Penguin, which is not a superhero movie, but a mafia movie from the Batman universe, is super well done. If you're ever into science fiction, The Three-Body Problem is a mind-blowing trilogy, and so is The Expanse series. I've gotten back into sci-fi because one of my sons is really into sci-fi and space shanties. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of John K. Samson's solo records. He's put out a number of solo records that are outstanding writing. In some ways, there's something about him that I think people hear Camper in, in a way, but that's not really why I listen to him. I just think it's outstanding writing and storytelling.