Today is 9/9/9, and the Beatles Remasters are finally available to the music listening public. What's the big deal? Are they any different from the albums we already have? Are these remasters better than those mixed by Dr. Ebbetts or Purple Chick, superior versions that have been passed around by collectors for years?
Jem Aswad writes on MTV online:"The recordings have been meticulously reprocessed with technology I couldn't hope to explain (involving '24 bit 192 kHz resolution via a Prism A-D converter'), but the remastering team has been just as meticulous in retaining the original mixes and feel of the recordings. Thus, the closest analogy here is a restored painting: The songs are the same — they even retain mixes that, in the strange logic of the early days of stereo, can have all the vocals and the bass in one speaker and all the other instruments and no vocals in the other — but it's as if a cloak has been lifted from them, bringing forth sounds and details that were obscured on earlier releases. You can hear breaths being taken before verses are sung, previously muffled instruments (usually percussion or keyboard parts), mumbled asides in the backing vocals, enthusiastic shouts in the background (usually from Paul McCartney), and even subtleties like the group seeming to fight off laughter as they sing the final 'Mee-ee-ooooo' of 'Help!'"
"Songs that once seemed to make up the numbers step into the spotlight in bold new colours, or, rather, the old colours revealed anew," says the London Times. "On Revolver, the dissonant tug of Paul McCartney’s piano on George Harrison’s I Want To Tell You sounds discombobulatingly urgent, while on the 1964 A Hard Day’s Night album Any Time At All swings zestfully between the canine eagerness of John Lennon’s vocal and a guitar part from Harrison that fleetingly foretells the jingle-jangle mourning of the forthcoming folk-rock boom."
"No less startlingly," says the Times, "songs long since dulled by ubiquity suddenly burst into life again. Yesterday in particular is a revelation. Free of the reverb that blights the 1987 CD version, McCartney’s voice radiates a damp, autumnal proximity that foregrounds the brittle bitterness of loss. No less affecting is Penny Lane, a song in which McCartney pauses the videotape of memory on a moment to which he knows he can never return, now revealed in more tantalising detail than ever."
Here's the complete story from the Times Online, including some wonderful A/B samples comparing the remasters with the original 1980s CD mixes. Times Online.
MOJO has posted their Beatles coverage online here.
With a brand new musical game, Beatles: Rock Band, and their entire catalog remastered, the Beatles strike again. All you need is love, and all it takes is money--and a good stereo--to experience these old recordings cleaned up like never before.
It's a brand new Beatles blitz with the release of the Beatles: Rock Band (a musical game) and the upcoming remixes (I'm already in line for seconds) but as time passes and the historical context recedes are we losing an important part of the story? Sure, the music is the thing, and I'm sick of maudlin boomer nostalgia, but the Fabs were more than just purveyors of brilliant pop. They shook the culture up.
The Beatles catalog, digitally remastered for the first time since the original CD releases, arrives in stores Sept. 9.
"Audiophiles have long lamented the thin, shrill results of the music's 1987 transfer to CD, flaws magnified by advances in digital technology that enriched the recordings of peers with repeated remastering rounds," says USA Today.
The LA Times says, "In general, the music sounds like an aural scrim has been lifted. Everything has become cleaner, fuller, the dynamic range -- the difference between the loudest and softest sounds -- has been expanded, vocals sound more immediate."
Ellie Greenwich, who wrote some of the greatest singles of the 1960s, died this week. Ellie wrote the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and “Baby, I Love You,” the Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack,” the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” Tina & Ike Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” and the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” and “Da Doo Ron Ron," says Rolling Stone.
And that wasn't all.
According to Rolling Stone, "Greenwich’s other major hits include Manfred Mann’s “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and Tommy James’ and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky.” Greenwich and Barry also helped nurture the career of a fledgling singer-songwriter named Neil Diamond, and Greenwich and Barry produced and contributed background vocals to Diamond hits like “Kentucky Woman,” “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “Red, Red Wine” and “I’m a Believer.”
Ellie Greenwich (middle) sings with Jean Thomas and Micki Harris, 1965
Listen to some of Ellie's songs below, in the "Cool Chick" post.
Here are a couple good tunes from the vaults. First up is a nice jam with some old pals, Yo La Tengo, and "Stockholm Syndrome." This is a great song. I know it's wrong but I swear it won't take long.
"Born in the Seventies" by the Fruit Bats is an hilarious backwards glance at a decade you might remember. Vaguely. Great seventies pedal steel and appropriately opaque lyrics. The sands of time stuck in your shoe...that make you cross, they make you blue. Whatever happened to you? You were born in the seventies.
"You've Lost That Loving Feeling," by the Righteous Brothers.
Great vocals are all about feeling. Sure, you can get Mariah Carey to hit six octaves or hire the Three Tenors to sing the Manhattan phonebook and it would all be technically perfect--and about as dull as dishwater. Good vocals are about feeling, and the spaces in between, and the surprising harmony that somehow lifts it all off the ground. The sand in the Vaseline is what makes it interesting. The great pop song makes you tap your feet, or stop and listen, or crank up the radio as you drive the great American highway.
"I Get Around" by the Beach Boys
The Beach Boys were an harmonic convergence of California sun, surf, girls, and souped-up hot rods. Their soaring vocals were instantly recognizable as the sound of summer. At the creative helm was Brian Wilson, who directed this juggernaut into teenage symphonies, but you can't beat these early transistor radio tunes. This sounds like summer.
"Cloud Nine" by the Temptations
Out of Motor City, The Temptations were one of the most successful soul acts, a tough little outfit with vocal harmonies that reached a gritty perfection. The Temps were cool. The sound of these soul survivors was tough and real back in the day, and folks may snicker at their outfits and dance steps because all style gets old eventually, but their vocals remain timeless. On top of that, they didn't just sing silly love songs. They could "tell it like it is."
"Get Back" and "Don't Let Me Down" by the Beatles
The Beatles...of course. With two of the greatest rock vocalists ever, Lennon and McCartney, not to mention unrivaled songwriting teams, The Beatles could do it all. They wrote their songs, and could play just about anything, but their vocals were a huge part of their success. Here they are, late in the game, after the screams of Beatlemania had died down playing on the Apple rooftop in London.
"Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson & Bob Dylan
As if to prove my point, here are too technically imperfect voices--Willie's is thin and high and lonesome, and Dylan's is gravelly--that come together in a wonderful duet on an old Townes Van Zandt song. They make it their own, and you believe them. Sure, Mariah could sing this tune and toss in all that glissando but it would be like eating a cake made entirely of frosting. This is a plate of ribs, crispy and burnt on the ends, slathered with picante sauce that leaves you gasping for beer. This performance fits a story of outlaws and bandits beautifully.
Fans of the Beatles are descending upon Abbey Road to mark the forty year anniversary of this photograph. The iconic photo was taken in August of 1969, and became one of the most famous album covers in history and graced their last recorded work, "Abbey Road," which gave us such enduring classics as "Something," "Come Together," "Here Comes the Sun," "Oh! Darling," and that brilliant medley at the end of side two. (For those who don't know: unlike a compact disc, a long playing record had two sides)
Who the hell is this guy? Why didn't anyone tell me about Benji Hughes? I keep up with contemporary sounds as best I can, trade musical tips with fellow obsessives, read the music rags, but I totally missed this oddball character from North Carolina who looks like the offspring of some unholy union between a long lost beer hippie and Sasquatch. Benji is one scary looking dude, but just when you think he'll ride his Harley through your flowerbed to kill the family dog, he turns into a heartsick troubadour who brings a tear to your eye. Benji writes the hell out of a song. He maps the human heart and not like some dopey singer-songwriter--this guy has soul.
I first heard about Benji this week in the Believer Magazine Music Issue, something that comes out ever year about this time, and a great article by Joe Hagen. Esquire, StarNews Online, and Encore, "Your Alternative Voice in Wilmington, NC," have also been sources for this piece, if you're curious about that sort of thing. Track down more info if you can. Some day he may be a common household name, but I just hope he gets one billionth the attention your brand name pop stars enjoy every day. One of the best Benji Hughes' songs I've heard came out in 2003, in which Hughes sings about his old man in the joint.
"Dad"
It’s been a long time since you dropped me a line I just had a birthday and Mom’s doing fine The last time I heard you were still doing time I heard about the sentence, never got the details of the crime
“Benji captures heartache much in the same way Hank Williams did back in his day," said Fred Champion, local musician and the owner of CD Alley, in Wilmington, NC (where tickets were on sale for Benji's shows at the East Coast Opera House, July 24 and 25). "He expresses in a song his thoughts and feelings on just what it means to be human: to love, to have heartache, to pine for someone, and about regular everyday life things like annoying neighbors or the experience of going to see a favorite band with some friends.”
Chuck Klosterman wrote a great article about Benji in Esquire back in March. "A Love Extreme is twenty-five songs of pure, enthusiastic songwriting from a man who clearly does not care what I think about his work. It's an ambitious, solipsistic project...But he's amazingly good at fitting every musical idea into whatever worldview is best suited to hold it. There's something effortless about his ability. It often seems as if Hughes can listen to any rival artist, immediately deduce what element defines the work, and then synthesize the vibe without seeming derivative. It's almost like A Love Extreme is a project: At various fleeting moments, he sings a little like Julian Casablancas, Joe Pernice, Leonard Cohen, Jarvis Cocker, Rivers Cuomo, Chet Baker, Mark Oliver Everett, and Mark Sandman."
Listen to his song about a road trip to see the Flaming Lips, called, appropriately enough, "I Went with Some Friends to See The Flaming Lips":
It was raining just a little but we didn’t mind We had some drinks in the bar at the Haywood Park Sent Mark and Jason on a beer run, ’cause it was getting dark Then we checked into our rooms and started eating mushrooms Jessica and Elle dropped by... The music changes, shifts, and whoa, the drugs kick in.
Standing in a line we realized Mark had taken too much... taken way too much MDMA...
He elucidates his world in stunning detail, and the music beautifully reinforces the mood. He'd probably yell obscenities if he heard this, but he's really a short story writer. His stories wouldn't be out of place in a collection of great contemporary writers working in the short form, George Saunders, say, or Deborah Eisenberg--writers who chronicle this strange modern world in all its glorious and strange detail.
"You Stood Me Up" is about a fight Benji had with a date. He brings in some soulful sounds and telling details to paint a picture of a small town misunderstanding that is bleak and absolutely real: You had a date with me On April 17th I showed up at the Dairy Queen where we were 'sposed to meet I got there at 4:53 We were 'sposed to meet at 5 I had a Butterfinger Blizzard and some fries
According to Hagen in the Believer, Benji grew up in a crazy family with a strict Jehovah's Witness mother and a "hard-fisted drunk man" for a father, but he finally squeezed out of there. He played gigs in Charlotte and became something of a legend among local teenagers. This hillbilly beardo would show up and blow everyone away with his songs, then he'd smile and pop a beer. Hughes recorded some, too, and was roundly ignored by everyone. He co-wrote one of the songs from "The Dewey Cox Story" called "Let's Duet," a Johnny Cash/June Carter parody that has more double entendres than anything I can remember.
Benji Hughes came out with another record, "A Love Extreme," a glancing reference to the Coltrane spiritual classic. NYTimes music critic Jon Pareles loved it, and a few more folks, but it didn't really take off. Too bad. Not enough people read George Saunders, either. Still, it's a great album and worth your time, especially if you're just hanging around the Dairy Queen doing nothing.
Benji Hughes is not for everyone, and he doesn't want to be. If you're looking for standard pop confection look elsewhere. His voice can be mournful at times, kind of in the Beck ballpark, but he can dazzle you if you love true stories and real music.
"The Mummy"
The committee, they asked me to be the one to pick the band to play the prom I said I wanted Frankenstein They said that Frankenstein was not a band Could you get Dracula? Whatever you do, don't get the mummy
Don't get the mummy, when the mummy gets drunk he unravels...
Superstition is alive and well. People believe in UFOs and Bigfoot, Santa Claus and Satan, heaven and hell, and global conspiracies of Jewish bankers. They swear they saw Christ on a pizza, or the skunk ape on a camping trip. Skeptic Magazine founder Michael Shermer takes us through some strange things people believe - from alien encounters to hidden messages revealed while playing "Stairway to Heaven" backwards. He explains the evolutionary and cognitive basis for these lapses in reason. Shermer is the author of "Why People Believe Weird Things."
Led Zeppelin: Satanic messengers from Hell or classic rock band?
This is the second installment of Bob on Bob--the man in his own words. The first post included clips of early Dylan, these later clips are also pretty amazing. (Link to the earlier post here)
People who think Bob Dylan's best work is behind him haven't been paying attention. This artist keeps evolving. Right now he's on a winning streak that should continue with the forthcoming album, Together Through Life, due April 23rd. If the new record is anything like the single, Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (link below),we can expect a smoldering bluesy joint reminiscent of the classic Chess records of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.
Dylan performs "Love Sick" at the Grammys when an unexpected idiot jumps onstage to bask in the glow. The man barely fazes Dylan, who has seen it all. This segment was edited strongly for official release. This is the full, unedited version, complete with the "Soy Bomb."
The Interview
Dylan recently spoke with rock critic Bob Flanagan and provided a glimpse into the creative process, the music industry, and his favorite songwriters. Here are a couple excerpts. (Links to the full interview below)
Bill Flanagan: A lot of the acts from your generation seem to be trading on nostalgia. They play the same songs the same way for the last 30 years. Why haven't you ever done that?
Bob Dylan: I couldn't if I tried. Those guys you are talking about all had conspicuous hits. They started out anti-establishment and now they are in charge of the world. Celebratory songs. Music for the grand dinner party. Mainstream stuff that played into the culture on a pervasive level. My stuff is different from those guys. It's more desperate. Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly ... exactly the way people remember them. My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway, I'm no mainstream artist.
BF: Then what kind of artist are you?
BD: I'm not sure, Byronesque maybe. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now. Some of my songs have crossed over but they were all done by other singers.
"Cold Irons Bound" on the set of Masked and Anonymous with his loyal band from The Neverending Tour.(full lyrics here)
BF: Who are some of your favorite songwriters?
BD: Buffett I guess. Lightfoot. Warren Zevon. Randy. John Prine. Guy Clark. Those kinds of writers.
BF: What songs do you like of Buffett's?
BD: "Death of an Unpopular Poet." There's another one called "He Went to Paris."
BF: You and Lightfoot go way back.
BD: Oh yeah. Gordo's been around as long as me.
BF: What are your favorite songs of his?
BD: "Shadows," "Sundown," "If You Could Read My Mind." I can't think of any I don't like.
BF: Did you know Zevon?
BD: Not very well.
BF: What did you like about him?
BD: "Lawyers, Guns and Money." "Boom Boom Mancini." Down hard stuff. "Join me in L.A." sort of straddles the line between heartfelt and primeval. His musical patterns are all over the place, probably because he's classically trained. There might be three separate songs within a Zevon song, but they're all effortlessly connected. Zevon was a musician's musician, a tortured one. "Desperado Under the Eaves." It's all in there.
BF: Randy Newman?
BD: Yeah, Randy. What can you say? I like his early songs, "Sail Away," "Burn Down the Cornfield," "Louisiana," where he kept it simple. Bordello songs. I think of him as the Crown Prince, the heir apparent to Jelly Roll Morton. His style is deceiving. He's so laid back that you kind of forget he's saying important things. Randy's sort of tied to a different era like I am.
BF: How about John Prine?
BD: Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about "Sam Stone" the soldier junky daddy and "Donald and Lydia," where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be "Lake Marie." I don't remember what album that's on.
(from Flanagan interview, Part 5)
"One Too Many Mornings," live from the Rolling Thunder Tour, 1976. The last day of the tour, playing in the rain, Dylan sings his heart out."I gaze back to the street, the sidewalk and the sign..."
The rest of the Dylan interview by Bill Flanagan can be read in its entirety here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part4 Part 5 Now, the final installment, Part 6
"Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" from the forthcoming Dylan album:
What a long strange trip, indeed. The New York Times published an article a couple days ago settling things forever and silencing all debate by announcing, once and for all, that the greatest Grateful Dead concert--according to Ben Ratlif, anyway, and others he claims to have spoken with--took place on May 8th, 1978. End of story. The journal of record has spoken. The story barely made a beep, and the world of news quickly returned to its tales of war and collapsing economies, mothers killing children, fathers killing mothers, pirates kidnapping sea captains, and seemingly normal people killing huge numbers of random strangers or loved ones before turning their guns upon themselves. Stories about the ungrateful dead, you might say.
1966: at the old place on Ashbury, just before the party spilled into the streets
Of course, all musical lists are suspect; the value of music is felt in the heart of every listener and should not be left to New York Times, the trainspotting music geeks, or even the Nicks--Hornby and Harcourt. And don't leave it to the Deadheads. They're a funny bunch, whichever vintage, and they've been trading thousands of recordings for decades and are simply too close to the thing to see it clearly. (Like the old joke: what do Deadheads say when the dope runs out? "This music sucks!" Well, it doesn't suck, not all of it, but you get my point) It would be like asking an Eskimo (Inuit, sorry) about snowflakes. No, you don't want to commit your life to the damn thing. You, with your short attention span, want an overview.
Anyway, here are some unusual Grateful Dead clips. The opening segment comes from Playboy After Dark, and listening to the skeezy pajama king Hugh Hefner "rap" with Jerry Garcia brings to mind the writer from the Times dissecting Dead shows for relative merit. You don't need to ingest psychedelic drugs to catch a glimpse of Hef as a lizard of the lounge variety, but I'm sure the bandmembers popped their pills anyway and the entire affair has a surreal quality that Thorazine and orange juice might not bring you down from. In fact, you might not be able to shake this hallucination until you escape the Playboy rabbit hole entirely and get a breath of fresh air.
Further on down the line, truckin' in the 1970s
My point (and yes, I had one...) is that you can't really say which concert is best because it's a matter of taste, but even beyond that the band itself changed so much over the years it would be like comparing apples to orange sunshine. The Playboy mansion clip is from 1969--and by that time the Dead had already evolved from being the house band at the Acid Tests hosted by Kesey and the Pranksters. The band that played the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman's Hall in 1966 had already grown less experimental, more polished and professional. By 1972, they were an altogether different group, and the recordings from that tour were released on "Europe 72" remain favorites. Some would argue this was the "best" Dead period. By 1978, they'd mutated again--the show rocked harder, etc, and if you liked that sort of thing you might like that. To all the kids who staggered after them in the 1980s and 1990s the experience was altogether different. The band played the old favorites for adoring kids who weren't even alive when they put out their first album. (a far cry from my first Dead concert in '70 or so. When someone yelled out "St. Stephen!" Garcia barked back, "That was three X*&$* years ago, man!")
The last clip is from April 17th, 1972, at the Tivoli Theatre in Copenhagen. Their hi-jinx are in high gear as you can see from the clown masks. 1972 was a good year. What do you think?
Grateful Dead Update: According the the Washington Post (April 14th, 2009): "The surviving (and formerly feuding) members of the Grateful Dead had a secret impromptu meeting Monday evening with the man they credit with reuniting them: President Obama."
"The president welcomed all the members of The Dead, who are performing tonight at the Verizon Center in Washington, to the Oval Office just before dinner last night. They didn't talk music as much as they did history - history about the Oval Office, and the president's desk."
To read the rest of the story in the Washington Post, click here.
Still Dead: Phil Lesh and Bob Weir lead the latest incarnation of the Dead shown performing here in NYC, March 30th, 2009
Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) combined the sacred and the profane as a musician, songwriter, composer, bandleader, guitar-player, weirdo, and outspoken critic of mindless censorship in a free society.
Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore on December 21, 1940 to Francis Zappa (born in Partinico, Sicily) who was of Greek-Arab descent, and Rose Marie Colimore who was three-quarters Italian and one-quarter French. His father was a chemist and mathematician in the defense industry, and the Zappas moved around the country as the old man worked in various arsenals and chemical warfare facilities, finally skipping around California--Monterey, Claremont, El Cajon, and San Diego--where Frank joined his first band, The Ramblers, at Mission Bay High School.
The Zappa Family
By 1956, the family had moved to Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base. Zappa continued devouring music. He soaked up avant-garde composers Stravinsky and Varese, old fashioned R and B, early rock and roll, and pachuco Do Wop bands. He met Don Vliet at Antelope Valley High School and they became friends--Vliet of course later recorded under the name Captain Beefheart, though he wasn't actually a captain and his heart was almost certainly human. Around then, Zappa played drums for The Blackouts, a racially mixed band that played blues and R and B. Zappa graduated from AVHS, and would later thank two of his high school music teachers on "Freak Out!" (1966) the first album recorded with the group that made him famous, The Mothers of Invention.
thanks for letting me sign your yearbook, Frank
Zappa at 22 on the Steve Allen Show: experimental music on a bicycle
To quote the Wicky, "His own heterogeneous ethnic background, and the diverse social and cultural mix in and around greater Los Angeles, were crucial in the formation of Zappa as a practitioner of underground music and of his later distrustful and openly critical attitude towards "mainstream" social, political and musical movements."
Today, we celebrate Frank Zappa--and Easter--with this 1988 performance of his beautiful composition, "Watermelon in Easter Hay."
The closest we'll ever get to a Beatles reunion happened last Saturday night, when Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr rocked the house at David Lynch's "Change Begins Within" concert at Radio City Music Hall. These clips from a fan's video camera capture some of the magic. Sorry we missed that show!
On top of this "Beatles reunion," there is good news about the original recordings. Apple Corps and EMI announced they will be reissuing the Beatles' albums with improved sound. Fans have always complained that the original 1987 CD releases could be vastly improved. While waiting for an official re-release, pirate producers such as "Dr. Ebbetts" and "Purple Chick" released remarkable jobs of their own. We only hope the remasters are as good as these outlaw versions circulating among collectors.
The New York Times reports:
"After watching the Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, devote the last few years to developing a site-specific show in Las Vegas, a video game and a line of pricey memorabilia, Beatles fans are finally getting something they’ve been demanding for at least the last decade: sonically upgraded reissues of the group’s original British albums, in stereo and mono. Apple Corps and EMI announced on Tuesday that the much-postponed remasters would be released on individual stereo CDs and in two boxed sets — one stereo, the other mono — on Sept. 9, the same day the Beatles edition of Rock Band, the music video game, is scheduled for release."
From Rolling Stone:
"On September 9, 2009, after a nearly 22-year wait, digitally remastered versions of all of the Beatles studio albums will be released, a press release has confirmed. Each album will feature the track listings and artwork as it was originally released in the U.K. and come with expanded booklets including original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited time, each of the Fab Four’s 12 proper albums will be “embedded” with a brief documentary about its making. The re-releases will include the Beatles’ 12 studio albums and Magical Mystery Tour as well as Past Masters Vol. I and II, which will be packaged as one collection. All 14 discs will be available with DVDs of the documentaries in a stereo box set, and a set titled The Beatles in Mono featuring 10 discs will also be released."
And now...Part 2 of Paul and Ringo's show last Saturday night...
Radiohead made this video without cameras or lights. Instead, they used 3D technologies to collect information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. I don't know what that means, either, but the result is a unique, compelling video. Welcome to the future.
When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn't faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to change -- and quick.
The Café Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The place was a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables -- opened at noon, closed at four in the morning. Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?
New York City, midwinter, 1961. Whatever I was doing was working out okay and I intended to stay with it, felt like I was closing in on something. I was playing on the regular bill at the Village Gaslight, the premier club on the carnivalesque MacDougal Street. When I began working there, the Gaslight was owned by John Mitchell, a renegade and raconteur, a Brooklynite. I only saw him a few times. He was ornery and combatant, had an exotic looking girlfriend who Jack Kerouac had based a novel on. Mitchell was already legendary. The Village was heavily Italian, and Mitchell hadn’t taken even one step back from the local mafiosos. It was a known fact that he didn’t make payoffs out of principle. The fire marshals, the police and the health inspectors were routinely invading the place. Mitchell, though, had lawyers and he took his battles to city hall and somehow the place stayed open. Mitchell carried a pistol and a knife.
Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded "Rock Around the Clock" -- then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.
Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.
"You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds. You're gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper -- not that you'll need much in the way of clothes when you're in the ring -- don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard."
"He's not a boxer, Jack, he's a songwriter and we'll be publishing his songs."
"Oh, yeah, well I hope to hear 'em some of these days. Good luck to you, kid."
Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up -- salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.
My perspective on all that was about to change. The air would soon shoot up in intensity and become more potent. My little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral, at least in songwriting terms. Suze had been working behind the scenes in a musical production at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street. It was a presentation of songs written by Bertolt Brecht, the antifascist Marxist German poet-playwright whose works were banned in Germany, and Kurt Weill, whose melodies were like a combination of both opera and jazz. Previously they had had a big hit with a ballad called “Mack the Knife” that Bobby Darin had made popular. You couldn’t call this a play, it was more like a stream of songs by actors who sang. I went there to wait for Suze and was aroused straight away by the raw intensity of the songs . . . “Morning Anthem,” “Wedding Song,” “The World Is Mean,” “Polly’s Song,” “Tango Ballad,” “Ballad of the Easy Life.” Songs with tough language. They were erratic, unrhythmical and herky-jerky-weird visions. The singers were thieves, scavengers or scallywags and they all roared and snarled. The entire world was narrowly confined between four streets. On the small stage, objects were barely discernible-lampposts, tables, stoops, windows, corners of buildings, moon shining through roofed-in courtyards-grim surroundings, creepy sensations. Every song seemed to come from some obscure tradition, seemed to have a pistol in its hip pocket, a club or a brickbat and they came at you in crutches, braces and wheelchairs. They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.
This is a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin. And then there’s always that ghost chorus about the black ship that steps in, fences it all off and locks it up tighter than a drum.
(excerpts from Chronicles,Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan) to be continued...
ONE MORE THING:
The new Dylan album, Together Through Life, will be released April 28th.Beyond Here Lies Nothin' is the first single, a bluesy track with an old Chess Records feel. In case you missed the free download at bobdylan.com (it was up for one day only. That's right, 24 hours) here is a sneak preview:
"Rip it Up!" by Little Richard: "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake." - Plato
Hell with easy listening, in the sleepy days of yore something strange and dangerous and downright insane crawled out of the dark swampy south, a devil brew of blues, country, and rhythm and blues, a crawling King snake moving through the night on radiowaves nationwide. Call it rock and roll. Where did it come from?
"Hell Hound on my Trail" by Robert Johnson:
They say Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, shook his hand and an eerie light came across the sky. Nobody knows what transpired, but afterward he could play like nobody's business. Slide guitar. This wasn't church music, but something that made your skin crawl. Robert would have played forever but whiskey can be poisoned. They sang Danny Boy at his funeral and the Lord's Prayer, and the preacher talked about Christ betrayed. They say he loved a women named Dee or Miss Delilah who did wondrous works with his fate, fed him coconut bread and spice buns in bed, but a panderer named Red wasn't crazy about the arrangement and brought the curtain down with a fixed drink.
Murder and whiskey. Rock and roll came to town in a black Caddie with no plates. Birds fell silent when it passed. They carried the casket to the cemetery and were surprised when it turned up empty. Get a mojo hand. Light a candle. Turn the radio up.
"Come On" by Chuck Berry:
What was the first rock 'n' roll record? A leading contender is "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (in fact, Ike Turner and his band The Kings of Rhythm), recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in 1951. That was four years before Bill Haley recorded "Rock Around the Clock." Listen to Rocket 88:
Grand and vulgar, powerful and absurdly simple, before pills pills and cream pies and Hollywood and untold power slogged him down, this Tupelo truckdriver named Elvis became the King of Rock and Roll--or at least a King, along with Chuck and Richard and Buddy and Jerry Lee and those early rockers who slammed pianos and guitars and tore a hole in the fabric of the universe.
"Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley:
Okay, this is part one and three of rock and roll renegades. I know, I know, but part two has sound problems and until it's fixed I suggest you get non-linear and enjoy these two spots. Now let's get real gone.
Part 4 of the documentary is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here.
Cat Power--Chan Marshall. Cette chanson est extraite de son dernier album Jukebox. Seul morceau original de l'album, "Song to Bobby", raconte l'histoire vraie de sa rencontre avec son idole de toujours, oserais-je dire l'homme de sa vie, Bob Dylan : "Giving you my heart was my plan".
And after Chan Marshall's "Song to Bobby," here's a rare clip of the man himself playing with some old friends. Back in 1966, an unwitting Playboy reporter asked Dylan what made him choose the rock and roll life.
Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
"On the Good Ship Lollipop" by Shirley Temple, in the movie "Bright Eyes" from 1934. The song became Temple's signature tune, and entered the realm of pop culture. Strangely enough, the song has appeared on such television shows as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gilmore Girls, The Brady Bunch, and not one but two episodes of The Simpsons. (In Season 4, a parody of King Kong stars Homer as the big ape. He is captured and brought to the United States, whereupon he escapes into a theater where Shirley Temple is performing the song. King Kong Homer listens for a few verses, and then eats her.)
So...What's the deal with lollipops? For us, it's a conscious change from the dry and droll. We've been pretty serious lately. Coming right off a blog post about suicide and depression, we thought we should lighten up with some candy, and while we lean toward Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, or the venerable Snickers, the world wants lollipops! I never much cared for them myself. Hard, old-fashioned, filling-pulling, foul tasting, these little suckers do nothing for me. I guess I'm wrong.
So, hey? What's the deal with lollipops?
Let's look at the history. The word itself--or rather "lolly pop"--dates back to 1784, but initially referred to soft rather than hard candy. The term may have derived from the term "lolly" (tongue) and "pop" (slap). The first references to the lollipop in its modern context date to the 1920s.
Check out these Lincoln head lollipops. Don't read anything into them. To paraphrase another bearded old man, the father of psychoanalysis, "Sometimes a lollipop is just a lollipop."Not this time. According to the National Confectionary Association (yes, there is such a thing) candy on a stick was probably created by cavemen who maintained beehives and collected honey with a stick. Not wanting to waste the sweet residue, they, most likely, licked the utensil and thus the first unintentional lollipop, or, candy on a stick, was born.
Archeologists report that ancient Arabs, Chinese and Egyptians produced fruit and nut confections which were "candied" in honey which served as a preservative. Due to the nature of the sticky substance, recent discoveries have hinted that sticks were inserted into these treats to make them easier to eat.
So lollipops were created, and soon after the songs came rolling in. We've narrowed it down to just three for the sake of brevity. We had to cut plenty, and we apologize to fans of The Chordettes and three 6 mafia. Here are a couple more of our favorites.
"My Boy Lollipop" was the first major hit for Island Records back in 1964, and probably the first Jamaican song you ever heard. It was actually written in the fifties, but it took Millicent Small from Clarendon, Jamaica, known in the United States as "Millie Small", to make it a smash around the world. This is the first international ska hit. Listen to the rhythm. Reggae can't be far off.
Dwayne Michael Carter is best known as "Lil Wayne." Maybe you've heard of him. His 2008 album, Tha Carter III, was nominated for eight Grammy awards. "Lolipop" topped the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first Top 10 single for Lil Wayne as a solo artist, as well as his first #1 on the chart. The language is a little rough, but we figured you could handle it. As for the video, well, you can get plenty of ideas for livening up your tired old wardrobe just by watching Lil Wayne. I'm just sayin.'
"Songs that once seemed to make up the numbers step into the spotlight in bold new colours, or, rather, the old colours revealed anew," says the London Times. "On Revolver, the dissonant tug of Paul McCartney’s piano on George Harrison’s I Want To Tell You sounds discombobulatingly urgent, while on the 1964 A Hard Day’s Night album Any Time At All swings zestfully between the canine eagerness of John Lennon’s vocal and a guitar part from Harrison that fleetingly foretells the jingle-jangle mourning of the forthcoming folk-rock boom."
"No less startlingly," says the Times, "songs long since dulled by ubiquity suddenly burst into life again. Yesterday in particular is a revelation. Free of the reverb that blights the 1987 CD version, McCartney’s voice radiates a damp, autumnal proximity that foregrounds the brittle bitterness of loss. No less affecting is Penny Lane, a song in which McCartney pauses the videotape of memory on a moment to which he knows he can never return, now revealed in more tantalising detail than ever."
MOJO has posted their Beatles coverage online here.
