Jam Session On The Big Rock Candy Mountain

On the set of East of Eden, Burl Ives and James Dean demonstrate their skills on the bagpipe and recorder, a daring combination. Actually, Ives isn’t playing the bagpipes because he’s too busy smoking a pipe and looking at Dean like maybe he ought to teach him to button his shirt all the way up but what’s the point because Dean is going to go and get himself killed in a car crash the same year the movie is released (1955)so who cares about his shirt anyway?

By the way, Dean’s nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role was the first official posthumous acting nomination in Academy Awards history. Ives actually lived another 40 years after the movie was released, eventually dying from oral cancer caused from…smoking pipes, you guessed it.