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Tuesday, April 29th, 2025
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| 8:00a | Tom Jones Performs “Long Time Gone” with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young–and Blows the Band & Audience Away (1969)
Welsh crooner Tom Jones made an unlikely comeback in the late 80s, covering Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise. Then in the mid-90s, he showed up on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to sing the mid-60s hit “It’s Not Unusual” for superfan Carlton Banks. This was a time of 60s comebacks all around, but Jones’ resurgence was a little odd (though perfectly in character for Carlton Banks). Tom Jones had been a big star in the mid to late 60s, with his own TV show and a string of international hits. But Tom Jones was never exactly cool in the way that, say, Neil Young was cool in 1969, the year he and Jimi Hendrix stole a truck to get to Woodstock. “Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as somewhat ‘square’ by the rockstar standards of CSNY,” writes Dangerous Minds,” but when the foursome agreed to appear in September of that year, just weeks after the massive festival in upstate New York, it turned into a memorable television event, with Jones taking lead vocals on “Long Time Gone” and blowing the audience and the band away. “The man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said,” even Young, whose “face goes from one of disdain/’What am I doing here?’ to ‘This fucking rocks’ about halfway through.” Even stranger than this combination is the fact that Young agreed to do it at all. He had become notoriously averse to doing television, even turning down The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and citing his hatred of TV as a reason for leaving Buffalo Springfield two years earlier. Though he may have been caught up in the moment, he later regretted it, as his longtime manager Eliot Roberts told biographer Jimmy McDonough: “Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit.’ Crosby had this weed of doom… Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.” “It was highly rated,” says Roberts, “sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing.” Young probably shouldn’t have worried. Weed of doom or no, it didn’t seem to hurt his credibility as much as his bewildering (though critically re-appraised) 1982 New Wave record, Trans. Jones has done just fine, reinventing himself in the 80s and 90s in good-humored self-parodies, then becoming a bona fide pop star once more. He has yet to appear again with Neil Young. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020. Related Content: Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlikely Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969) Tom Jones Covers Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”–and Burns Down the House (1999) Tom Jones & Chuck Berry Perform Together, Singing “Roll Over Beethoven” & “Memphis” (1974) The Time Neil Young Met Charles Manson, Liked His Music, and Tried to Score Him a Record Deal Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness |
| 9:00a | The Simple, Ingenious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engineered a Remarkably Effective Weapon
As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have had a plan until pila punched through their shields. A kind of javelin with a wooden shaft and a sharp iron shank, the pilum came in both long and short lengths. Short pila had the advantage of distance, but long pila had the advantage of power, as well as the convenient feature — whether deliberately or accidentally implemented at first — that their shanks would more readily bend after impact, making them impractical to remove from the shields they’d penetrated. With his shield thus made unwieldy by one or more pila, an advancing combatant would thus be forced to discard it entirely — assuming he was still in the condition to do so. As you can see vividly demonstrated in the Smithsonian Channel video above, a pilum landing in the center of a shield could easily skewer anyone standing behind it. History has it that Roman soldiers were also trained to throw their pila where enemy shields overlapped, pinning them together and thus rendering twice as much of their defense useless. After a victory, pila could be gathered from the battlefield for refurbishment, an example of quasi-industrial production undergirded by Roman military might. Like all weaponry — indeed, like all technology — the pilum had its heyday. Polybius’ Histories credits it as an important factor in the Roman victory at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC. But by the third century AD, it was phased out, having become an obsolete anti-infantry weapon in the face of the evolving equipment and tactics of Germanic tribes and Persian cavalry. Nevertheless, similar javelin-like tools of war evolved into other forms, outlasting the Roman Empire itself and even persisting into the early age of gunpowder. Now, when very few of us face the threat of impalement by pila or their successors, we can appreciate the skill it takes to throw them — as Philip Roth described, in his final novel, with an eloquence very different from Tyson’s — in the realm of sport. Related Content: Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Roman Sandal with Nails Used for Tread Ancient Greek Armor Gets Tested in an 11-Hour Battle Simulation Inspired by the Iliad A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire? Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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