Julius Caesar’s Riff

We’ve all seen the play, (at least the movie version with Brando and James Mason), but, come on! What was the real deal on Julius Caesar; and why didn’t people dig his playing ?

New evidence shows he had a Trio with Pompey and Crassus around 60 B.C.C. (Before Cab Calloway). Now we all know Caesar as a soldier, but he was also a mean player of the lituus, a bronze conical pipe ending in an animal horn. Pompey played an early kind of Roman organ, the stallone, and Crassus was reputedly a funky psantrin (harp) player. They did a successful series of gigs in Gaul and Britain, and really slaughtered the Germans.

He went to Egypt for a much needed holiday, and made it with the infamous Cleopatra, a chick-singer of whom the joke was told: What’s the difference between a chariot and Cleopatra ? ... Not many musicians have been in a chariot!

Crassus quit the band at a festival in Spain, and later Caesar had trouble with Pompey who never could control his organ. They were playing for a musical-comedy at the Rubicon theatre, and Pompey was playing a lot of wrong chords making it impossible for the singers. The audience started booing and Caesar yelled, “The cast is dying!”. (This was later misquoted as ‘The die is cast’, but what the hell does THAT mean?) Caesar finally blew Pompey off the stage at their last show in Pharsalus.

From then on, life seemed sweet for Julie’s solo career. He had won his beautiful wife Caldonia in a battle with King Louis on the Jordan River.  After a sell-out tour of Asia Minor, he uttered the oft quoted, “I came, I blew, I conquered”.

Unfortunately, a couple of critics, Brutus and Cassius, were jealous of his success and panned his later Roman gigs. On 15 March 44, Caesar read a particularly cutting review and said, “This is the unkindest cut of all! And you, Brutus ? What have YOU ever played ? Those who can’t DO, teach ! And those who can’t teach, criticise !”

Being a journalist, Brutus got twelve other guys to sneak up behind Caesar in the Senate and stab him to death.  They then gave him a lot of bad reviews.

Mark Antony later gave a speech at Ceasar’s funeral where he countered the bad press. “The clams that cats play sometimes end up on their first CD.  The hip shit they play on gigs never gets recorded!”

Antony himself took a particularly bad gig in Egypt and his rep never recovered.