DISQUS

A-and you'll never convince me that rock's coolest song isn't "You Can't Catch Me" -- how much hipper can you be than to own a flying car?

I did read Chuck's autobio, years ago, and I thought it barely disguised a very peculiar man. Great songwriter, sure, the most influential guitarist who ever picked up a Gibson ES-355, but a mighty odd duck (walker).

Thanks, Tom!

Hey is last year’s still up?

It's linked to in the text of this post -- the "Christmas Time Is Here" link.

It occurs to one that Paulie's haircut during the Seventies could possibly have been referred to as "the Mullet of Kintyre."

Just a thought.

I listened to Sgt. Pepper for the first time in a while on a long night ride a couple of months back and was amazed at how open and sparsely instrumented it is.

The genius of Geoff Emerick. My own reintroduction after a long separation was only last week, on the anniversary if its release, and what struck me was the buttery creaminess of Paul's bass. I've still got the bass line from "Getting Better" reverberating around in my head.

In this respect, what Sgt. Pepper’s brought to the table was the feeling this music had evolved to another kind of studio and another kind of headspace, an atmosphere.

"Revolver" fascinates me precisely because it's so clear that a quantum leap is just about to take place. You can hear them assembling the pieces -- Here's ADT, here's varispeed, here's Paul putting the bass on last, here's the Leslie speaker.... The element of play is very satisfying.

Frank, have you ever heard the mono mixes of Rubber Soul? Worth seeking out if you can find them. (I have a copy if you'd like it -- neddiejingo at aol dot com)

Thank you, Kevin. High compliment indeed. I'm touched.

And listen, the fact that we’re all still analyzing the Beatles is testament to their work and talent.

This is gonna sound pretentious as all hell, but here goes anyway: The Beatles' story has the arc and scope of classical tragedy. The heroes are undone by a combination of Epstein's (the Father's) death and elements of hubris that were present in them at the beginning of the story -- the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership that essentially dissolved very early on. Even the personalities assigned to the four (the handsome one, the quiet one, etc.) are literary archetypes. Note how carefully the artificially created Monkees assumed essentially the same four personalities.

I haven't read it, but I'm told that one of Nick Hornby's novels riffs on this idea. (Wish I could remember which one.)

But I thoroughly enjoyed the profile in this week’s New Yorker on Macca by John Colapinto.

Oog, that full-face photo of Sir Paul! The most uncomplimentary lighting possible! What a horror!

I don't know about the internal workings at The New Yorker, but they seem to have hired a photog who brings out the absolute worst in his subjects. I remember a full-face photo of Dan Rather last year that should have been the casus belli is an antidefamation suit -- the most uncomplimentary photo imaginable...

But, I do like the line My ever present past.

Reminds me of my problem with getting into new music. I need my music to have some history. A solid foundation. A little gravity.

GlueBirl, you have absolutely hit the nub of the biscuit on the head of the apostrophe.

Paul's problem post-Lennon's-assassination is that he's not, you know, dead. He's actually had to live into middle age. He didn't get to give us "Working Class Hero" and then be providentially assassinated. Those of us who've accompanied him there deeply appreciate the implicit message in something like "Vintage Clothes," where the idea is, "I've seen this before, honestly it bores me, what else can you show me?"

Since our society seems to work according to ever-narrowing cycles of nostalgia, where what's hip and what's square appear to be aimed in tighter and tighter centrifugal circles at each others' fundamental apertures, we who've seen these cycles before become less and less impressed with their allure.

Drop out from the madness! Be your own fashion consultant! Wear and hear and watch what you like, and not what some power-mad sociopath thinks you should wear! There is no more revolutionary act.

You owe it to yourself.

I rather thought that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was our generation's "Midnight to Six Man" by the Pretty Things; our "Sergeant Pepper" was the Talking Heads' "Remain In Light."

But I'm also the guy who thinks that our generation's "Village Green Preservation Society" was "English Settlement," our "Surrealistic Pillow" was "Marquee Moon," and our "Are You Experienced?" was the first 1:03 of "Wurlitzer Jukebox" by Young Marble Giants, believe it or not. Our "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" was the version of "Good Vibrations" that appeared in an ad for Dr. Pepper in 1978, our Dr. Pepper was Jolt Cola, and our LSD was this used kleenex I just chucked at my podmate, who's glaring at me and preparing revenge.

Save yourself a trip. Your time's better spent with Bulgakov. I'm not gonna claim it's the world's most brilliant television program (that was Deadwood). It's actually rather pedestrian, the episode plots largely unsurprising, and the dialog mundane.

But the "mystery" gimmick is pretty compelling. And the Enlightenment parallels have been fun to trace -- a recent minor character was named Edmund Burke, and I sprang into attention. When the NYRB article popped with that little Francis Bacon tidbit, I was immediately hooked -- it was so clearly a source for the show.

So are they songs?

Certainly not by the dictionary definition of the word. "Compositions," I think, is the better term. Spontaneous, communal compositions. As Andy says in the interview, the best metaphor is recorded musical conversation -- but an abstract one, using noises produced by instruments rather than words -- or of three people making a sculpture together.

Remember his considered rejection of architecture as a metaphor to describe the process of making these -- things, whatever they are. (That was why I'd planned to ask the faux-naive question, by the way -- I knew he'd reject the metaphor.) Songs have structure, balance, and symmetry, and the ornateness or simplicity of the decoration determines the emotional effect of the piece -- anything from Rococo to Bauhaus.

The compositions on Monstrance have none of these characteristics; they meander from one timbre to another spontaneously, at the common whim of the composers. This can be a recipe for self-indulgent poot at the hands of less sympathetic performers, and it's a real marvel that they've managed to pull something off that's extremely listenable and accessible.

Andy replies to Tom's question in an email to me:

Nah! we of course couldn't play these live. Where would we start? We could only play unheard ones live, but only one sixth of the gig would be any good.

Are these “permanent” songs now? Could the band play them again, take them on tour, cut different versions?

No more than you'd want to have exactly the same conversation you had three weeks ago, I think. It's an interesting philosophical question, isn't it: When does an improvisation stop being one?

Could you or I do a cover?

I suppose you could play the same notes as you hear on the record. Another interesting question for the philosophers...

i>This seems very considered.

I get the impression that the three approached the job very determined not to fall into conventional patterns like blues changes. These truly are some of the finest musicians and songwriters around, and they're good enough to know how to avoid a pitfall like that, even playing completely spontaneous music.

Did you listen to any of the samples? It's really interesting stuff. Partridge has always had a rep as being a "musician's musician," and "Monstrance" has at its core a fascinating lecture on how music is created, where it comes from in the human soul.

Type your comment here.I came to The Sopranos late, so I don’t have creds as a serious fan. I entered the world in season 6, after that long hiatus following season 5, and read through the earlier history. I wasn’t dazzled the way I was swept off my feet by Deadwood,

Almost exactly the same as me. Our house didn't acquire HBO until three years ago, and I was content to let the Sopranos-as-cultural-phenomenon wend its merry way without me.

I've just now been making my way through the first season of Deadwood on DVD for the second time, and I'm still discovering subtleties, mirrorings, nuances of plot, and those delicious felicities of language that so distinguish that show. The Sopranos is very, very good; Deadwood is (or, sniff, sniff, was) great.

Viscount: Listen very carefully to the sixth note of the solo. I hear an upward slide of a whole note -- from a C to a D on the A string. Can't do that with a piano.

Wow. This is ultra-weird.

I'm going to say something rather heretical here, so don't jump down my throat...

I don't believe George Harrison played the solo on "A Hard Day's Night" on a Rickenbacker 360-12.

My first piece of evidence, entirely circumstantial, I admit, is this. The version recorded live at the BBC, which you can find on "The Beatles at the BBC," has one of the funniest edits I've ever heard: when the Fabs get to the solo, the BBC simply edits in the solo from the record. No attempt to hide it or anything -- I guess they thought it wouldn't be remarked by the unsophisticated audience listening over the radio.

So why wouldn't they use the solo as George played it? Maybe because he clammed it so badly --repeatedly, because it wasn't a true live broadcast and George could have taken as many mulligans as he needed -- that it was unusable.

I will say this: That solo is a beeyotch to play -- and I'm a pretty fair guitar player. The first phrase is very easy, but those triplets in the second phrase are very hard to play crisply.

Ian MacDonald says that it was recorded at half-speed an octave lower -- but this is clearly impossible because the guitar solo is being played on its lowest strings; you can't play an octave lower.

Wikipedia theorizes that it wasn't a guitar at all, but George Martin playing a harpsichord. I don't buy this one either, because there's a very clear slide up two frets on the sixth note of the solo -- impossible with any keyboard.

But Wikipedia does get one thing right, and this is the most damning detail: the notes in the solo are two octaves apart, not one, as the 12-string guitar is tuned.

This hints that the thing was played at half-speed -- by two guitars, or by one guitar and a harpsichord, or by a solo harpsichord. But not a Rick 12-string.

Come on over to my place later this evening -- I'm going to post the solo, and the edit from the BBC session. Let's get to the bottom of this.

I believe I forgot to mention -- corkin' great post, Tom!

Also, a great post in Cork. Works both ways.

I found another Joyce quote from the same source, which I held in reserve for my own porpoises....

"Dubliners, strictly speaking, are my fellow-countrymen, but I don't care to speak of our "dear, dirty Dublin" as they do. Dubliners are the most hopeless, useless and inconsistent race of charlatans I have ever come across, on the island or the continent. This is why the English parliament is full of the greatest windbags in the world. The Dubliner passes his time gabbing and making the rounds in bars or taverns or cathouses, without ever getting 'fed up' with the double doses of whiskey and Home Rule, and at night, when he can hold no more and is swollen up with poison like a toad, he staggers from the side-door and, guided by an instinctive desire for stability along the straight line of the houses, he goes slithering his backside against all walls and corners. He goes 'arsing along' as we say in English. There's the Dubliner for you.

"And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -- the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature...."

-- from James Joyce's course material, used while teaching English to Berlitz students in Trieste, in 1906. From Richard Ellman's James Joyce, p. 217

Number one, Everything I Own by Ken Boothe. It’s the Bread song done as reggae, and it’s a great example of the kind of emotional range that often gets neglected in the popular view of reggae.... What always struck me as treacle in the original version seems authentic here.

!!!

I heard this as a bumper on some NPR show or another recently, and I was immediately struck by exactly the qualities you describe. It's a really lovely reworking of the song, turning, as you rightly say, treacle into something quite warm and wonderful.

Nice one!

Forgot to say...

After I heard "Horses" for the first time, I didn't listen to much Jethro Tull anymore. The kid who gave me the record really hated it -- he'd been given it by a well-meaning sister, but the kid was unalterably steeped in prog (poor thing), and let's just say, what they had there was a failure to communicate.

How about really bad covers? I'll nominate Yes's awful, awful, awful Pomp-Rock-ification of Simon & Garfunkel's "America"....

Took me a while when i was 14 or so to realize, hey man, that’s a girl singing about a girl:

Oh, ab-so-LEWD-ly!

Tom, we must be about exactly the same age -- but it didn't take me more than about 0.0006 seconds to realize this was a girl singing about a girl, and this stirred an odd combination of lust and fear in the 15-year-old moi. Patti just didn't give a rip what you thought of her little sexually transgressive thoughts, and (not having yet read Genet or Burroughs) this was probably my first contact with utterly unapologetic same-sex lust. Wow.

I absolutely loved -- and still do -- the way the band explodes on the line "And I've got this crazy feeling that I'm gonna/Uh-uh, make her mine" -- without question my introduction to the power of punk ("Horses" was a full two years before "Never Mind the Bollocks," if you can believe it...). The racing heart, the surging adrenaline, the impulse to destroy something useless...

Good to see Jason being his usual contrarian self. I agree completely about Hendrix's take on "All Along the Watchtower." It's a psychedelic tour de force, chock full of jaw-dropping production, a real grab-bag of chewy Electric Kool-Aid candyfloss -- but it completely misunderstands the actual song itself. Dylan's original, which is the centerpiece of perhaps the most anti-psychedelic record ever made, is icy-cold, sere, and deeply, deeply frightening.

(I think the most fascinating thing I've ever heard anybody say about "All Along the Watchtower" -- and dammit, I can't bring up the critic's name right now -- is that it can be viewed as a circle. Finish the lyric "Two riders were approaching/The wind began to howl" and then go right back to the top: "There must be some way out of here...!" -- if there is a Hell, it must involve something like the realization that No, There Is No Way Out of Here....

I'm surprised no one's yet brought up the Beatles' coruscating cover of Otis Redding's "Day Tripper." Man, they really rip through that one!

...And I'm wondering precisely what is involved in "poodling." If a pub is at the end of one's poodle, it certainly must be a pleasant enough activity.

I'm not going to weigh in on the question of who qualifies as a "visionary" and who doesn't; comparing scientific discoveries to musical works is a minefield of subjectivity that's best left alone. But a couple of assertions can't go unanswered:

Led Zeppelin was king of Classic Rock. The Beatles were pop.

What does this even mean? These are completely ahistorical and artificial categories, thought up by radio and journalist gooberheads to classify something that's almost by definition unclassifiable. If you want to use "diversity" (another highly subjective word) as a criterion for excellence, both of these bands explored an enormous range of genres; can you really defend the notion that "Helter Skelter" is "pop" and "D'yer Mak'er" isn't?

Further on the question of "diversity": The Beatles bent genres in construction of their unique style well before they became famous. Listen to the Decca audition tapes from 1962; you'll hear "Sheik of Araby," "Bésame Mucho," "Like Dreamers Do," and "Hello, Little Girl" in quick succession. With a little sympathy and openmindedness, you can quite easily trace how elements of these diverse genres found their way into the Beatles' later output. The point being, it's arguable that the Fabs' experimentation with a wide range of styles was their single most important contribution to rock -- that the simplistic harmonic patterns of early rock could be expanded to include conventions borrowed from jazz (the sixth chord that suffuses "She Loves You," the walking bass in "All My Loving"), musical theater ("Michelle," "Girl") bluegrass ("I've Just Seen a Face"), classical ("Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby"), West Coast country ("I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"), and the list goes on and on and on. In this area, the Beatles were absolutely unarguably innovators, and everyone else followers.

Not a one of the Beatles could match a Jimmy Page or Pete Townshend’s musicality.

I'm at a bit of a disadvantage, here, because I don't know the extent of your musical literacy. Your assertion implies a rather reductionist definition of the word "musicality." I don't think Pete Townshend himself would allow your assertion to stand. (Pete? Wanna weigh in?)

The Beatles' initial appeal to the musical intelligentsia (as opposed to their appeal to teenaged girls) was based on the effortless harmonic sophistication that informed their arrangements. (I'm talking "With the Beatles," here, not "Revolver," by which time their genius was quite clear to everyone.)

The Beatles were above all else a quartet. Particularly in their pre-marijuana period, their song-arrangement skills were put to use to make four instruments sound like one single unit. That is to say, they sublimated their individual musical egos to the task of producing something greater than the sum of its parts. I'd point in particular to George Harrison's lead guitar work, which in many cases wasn't what we now think of as "lead guitar" at all (i.e., the production of bombastic single-note weedle-weedle extravanganzas at a given point in a song -- many thanks are due in part to your Mr. Page for this innovation), but instead served the arrangement as an important but not dominant element. In many cases ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You," "When I Get Home" come to mind) it's quite impossible to tell the lead and rhythm guitars apart, so complex is their interplay.

I would call this subservience of the ego to the greater whole, musicality.

(Fascinatingly, at the instant I was typing this last paragraph, I received Dan's gibbering broadside "Diversion on Censorship, Stupidity, Dishonesty, et al.....", and having now wiped the flecks of saliva from my glasses and face, and noting Dan's assurance that he won't be darkening our doors any longer, I can drop the veneer of politeness that I had carefully constructed around this Comment and say what I was actually thinking:

(Dan, you're clearly not a musician, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, and perhaps most tellingly of all, you clearly have a very bad habit of defining words to your own purpose. In the case of this post, you misunderstand the word "musicality"; in the case of that bucket of bile you just dumped into my Inbox, you clearly need to carefully look up the word "censorship."

Jesus Christ: Jim Morrison!?!?!?! You blither, Dan. Please check this tendency. It's highly unbecoming.)

Admission time: Sitting on this couch is really starting to hurt -- not the subject matter, which I could ridicule all night -- but I've only had this hip for a week, and my physical capabilities are pretty limited.... Nighty, all...!

How does "hotel California" even qualify as country music????

A-and JOHNNY GIMBLE!

Glad I stayed up!