#(I know that the 'story' of sgt. peppers as a whole album is kind of negligable but I'm so brickpilled I can't let it go)

[asurrogateblog]

I still feel like we aren't paying enough attention to the fact that "in the flesh?" is just evil sgt. peppers

[joen-lenawley]

Ok so—

My personal favorites songs are Strawberry Fields Forever, Rain, and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, while my favorite album is Revolver (with not a single bad track in my opinion!)

For the Ideal Beatles Experience, it’s best to listen to their discography in order to see how they progressed as musicians, but I get that some of their older songs might be not *as* enjoyable to some, so feel free to just get the highlights of each album first.

While their earlier albums don’t really have much of an intended order (besides the hit song usually being first and the A-side/B-side thing), their later stuff tends to have a more planned tracklist (like Hawaii: Part II, although probably not to that extent) if that makes sense. Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road are particularly good examples of this.

Beatles recs based on Tally Hall preferences:

MMMM is very similar in vibe to Abbey Road.

Rubber Soul sort of sounds like a more light-hearted Good & Evil. Maybe it’s the folk influences reminding me of Good & Evil’s almost medieval vibe on some songs.

Magical Mystery Tour is Hawaii: Part II-ish, and I’m pretty sure Joe recommended that album.

There’s a whole host of Tally/Beatles sound-alikes. Misery Fell/Eleanor Rigby is probably my favorite pair, and they’re actually somewhat close in vibe!

If you like Rob’s solo work, I’d definitely recommend checking out Paul’s!

Joe takes heavy inspiration from psychedelic-era John Lennon songs (such as I Am the Walrus, Strawberry Fields Forever, and Tomorrow Never Knows, to name a few), particularly in his lyrics.

I got my therapist to listen to Tally Hall, and she described them as “Sgt. Pepper’s-esque”, so there’s that.

I’ve seen multiple Tally Hall fans say that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is their favorite Beatles song.

Also, basic trivia:

The four members are John Winston Ono Lennon, Sir James Paul McCartney, George Harold Harrison (I didn’t know his middle name until just now when I searched it up. HAROLD???), and Sir Richard “Ringo Starr” Starkey. They’re almost always listed in this order (John, Paul, George, Ringo, since I know this is cluttered and messy and ramble)

Don’t worry, they’re kind of hard to tell apart at first. You’ll get the hang of it eventually. (Assuming you aren’t faceblind.) Same goes for their voices.

Their albums in order are: Please Please Me (1963), With the Beatles (1963), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Beatles For Sale (1964), Help! (1965) Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (1968) (colloquially known as The White album), Yellow Submarine (1969) (the b-side is entirely orchestral instrumental songs from the Yellow Submarine movie, and there are only 4 new songs on the a-side), Abbey Road (1969), and Let it Be (1970) (released after they broke up).

This is using the British releases, since some of the releases in America were…weird. Usually, when talking about albums, people will use the British versions for everything except Magical Mystery Tour.

Their music and style are usually divided into eras: Teddy Boy (when they were playing in clubs before they made it big), Mop-Tops (beginning at their first album, named after their iconic bowl cuts, early recording career and the Beatlemania years), Psychedelic (beginning around Revolver, drugs! sitars! backwards vocals! weird faluns effects! nonsense lyrics!), and what I’ve heard some call Long-haired weirdos (beginning around either The White Album or Abbey Road). There’s also a time in between mop-tops and the psychedelic where they were starting to get more advanced and experimental, but they weren’t doing shockingly large amounts of LSD.

They used to have a bassist named Stuart Sutcliffe, but he decided to stay in Hamburg, Germany (where the Beatles often played at a club) until he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

Their original drummer was Pete Best. There are a variety of stories of why he was kicked out, from the record label not liking his drumming to the rest of the band wanting to kick him out but asking their manager, Brian Epstein, to do it instead.

Speaking of Brian Epstein, he was gay! And Jewish! /pos. Sadly, he died of an accidental overdose in 1967, which is part of the reason the band started falling apart.

Their producer was Sir George Martin, who wrote orchestral parts to accompany some of their songs.

All 4 Beatles were born in Liverpool, England, a port city that had significant involvement in WWII.

John Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, to Julia and and Alfred Lennon. As he was born, bombs were being dropped on the city.

John’s first instrument was the banjo. He was raised by his aunt Mimi since Julia couldn’t take care of him. He started a skiffle band called The Quarrymen, which later evolved into The Beatles. Sadly, his mother died when he was 17.

He was known as “the smart Beatle” and played rhythm guitar. He formed one half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership.

Paul McCartney was born on June 18, 1942, to Mary and James McCartney. His mother was a nurse.

Paul’s first instrument was the trumpet, since his father was a trumpet player, but he later switched to guitar. He joined The Quarrymen after meeting John. Sadly, his mother also died when he was a teen.

He was known as “the cute Beatle” and played bass, although he played drums on some tracks when Ringo wasn’t present. He was the other half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership.

George Harrison was the youngest Beatle, born on February 25, 1943, to Louise and Harold Harrison (although his birthday is listed February 24 sometimes because of some weird daylight saving time stuff).

George had the happiest childhood of the four. Like most teenagers in the 1950s, he was obsessed with rock-n’roll and also joined John’s band. At first, John was skeptical of someone so young joining the band, but he quickly proved himself with his skills on guitar.

He was known as “the quiet Beatle” (partially because he disliked the press), and played lead guitar. Frank Sinatra called his song Something (on Abbey Road) “the greatest love song of the last fifty years.”

Ringo Starr (his real name is Richard Starkey) was born on July 7, 1940, to confectioners Richard and Elsie Starkey.

Ringo spent much of his childhood in the hospital (where he learned to drum). He couldn’t keep up with school because of this.

He was known as “the funny Beatle” and played drums. He didn’t do much songwriting during his time with the band.

The Beatles’ name was inspired by Buddy Holly’s backup group, The Crickets. It was also inspired by one of John’s dreams.

Some people credit “Yesterday” as the most covered song of all time, but this isn’t true. However, it is The Beatles’ most covered song.

Notes about solo work:

Listen to Temporary Secretary (Paul’s) and your face will probably look like Paul’s on the album cover! (It is pretty catchy and fun once you get used to it, though.)

John has said that “imagine no religion” from Imagine isn’t supposed to be anti-religion, but anti-fighting over religion.

I haven’t listened to much of their solo music, but George’s stuff has been my favorite out of what I’ve heard.

Giant list of recs I sent my friends:

She Loves You (hit, catchy)

I Want to Hold Your Hand (hit, catchy)

Revolution (hit, catchy)

Paperback Writer (hit, catchy)

Rain (underrated, beautiful)

The Ballad of John and Yoko (hit, catchy)

Do You Want to Know a Secret (underrated, catchy)

I Saw Her Standing There (hit, catchy, iffy lyrics though)

Twist and Shout (hit, catchy)

All My Loving (hit, catchy)

A Hard Day’s Night (hit, catchy)

If I Fell (underrated, beautiful)

I Should Have Known Better (underrated, catchy)

I’ll Follow the Sun (beautiful)

Help! (hit, catchy)

Ticket to Ride (hit)

I’ve Just Seen a Face (underrated)

Yesterday (hit, beautiful)

Dizzy Miss Lizzy (underrated, catchy)

Drive My Car (hit, catchy)

Norwegian Wood (hit, beautiful)

Think For Yourself (underrated, catchy)

Nowhere Man (beautiful)

In My Life (hit, beautiful)

Run For Your Life (underrated, catchy, iffy lyrics though)

Literally everything on Revolver god dang best Beatles album

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (hit, catchy)

She’s Leaving Home (underrated, beautiful)

Within You Without You (beautiful)

When I’m Sixty-Four (hit, catchy)

A Day in the Life (hit, beautiful)

The entirety of Magical Mystery Tour - Flying (might as well listen to it if you’re listening to the full album though. Also, All You Need is Love is kind of overrated tbh.)

Back in the U.S.S.R. (hit, catchy)

Helter Skelter (hit, catchy)

Julia (beautiful)

Savoy Truffle (underrated, catchy)

While My Guitar Gently Weeps (hit, beautiful)

Hey Bulldog (underrated, catchy)

It’s All Too Much (underrated)

All Together Now (underrated, catchy)

Literally everything on Abbey Road god dang second-best Beatles album

Across the Universe (beautiful)

Maggie Mae (underrated, catchy)

Dig a Pony (underrated)

The Long and Winding Road (beautiful)

“Why isn’t Let it Be on here?” Hot take: Let it Be (the song, not the album) is kind of overrated. Like it’s a good song, but I think people give it too much credit, lol.

Speaking of Let it Be (the album, this time): @devilish-parrot posted something along the lines of “What is Let it Be…Naked? Did the Beatles just sit down 10 years ago and re-record all of their songs naked?” Sadly, John was shot to death in 1980 and George succumbed to cancer in 2001, so that wouldn’t be possible. It’s just a more stripped-down mix of Let it Be.

Anyways, happy listening! :D

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SIR JAMES PAUL MCCARTNEY (JUNE 18, 1942)

[zilabee]

Jann Haworth was the artist who made the Sgt Pepper cover.

She will always happily say that it was 50/50 between her and her husband at the time, Peter Blake, but imo her name should go first in that collaboration. And instead she is so often not mentioned.

This is not one of those things where it was his work and she just helped a little. It was a joint project. Some people's account of it says that Robert Fraser originally brought the project to both of them from the very start. She was a known and brilliant artist who knew Robert well, and had already exhibited at his gallery, so it seems likely to me. But even if it was originally brought to Peter Blake, she was certainly involved from the design stages, right through to completion.

She freely gives Peter credit for the idea of it, the idea of the crowd of heroes behind the beatles, but she suggested they do it in her style not his - ie as standing silhouettes, rather than paper collage - which meant she had the experience and the skills to actually create the thing. She came up with the floral arrangements so it wouldn't be ruined with graphics. She did the majority of the work.

She's super well adjusted about the whole thing, she tends to set people right about it when they claim she's copying his work, rather than continuing her own in her more recent pieces. You can read interviews with her here, here, or here.

One of my litmus tests for beatles books is whether they mention her at all. They don't mostly, because they'd rather die than actually question anything. But if you think it wasn't known until more recently then know that George Martin in 'Summer of Love' in 1995 credits her fully as a co-creator. It was never a secret.

"Along with the Pepper tableaux cloth figures, Jann Haworth came up with a number of other original ideas for the venture. [...] She said that it would be very nice not to have real lettering on the Sgt Pepper cover but to do something like that kind of civic flower-bed lettering. [...] Jann spent a long time building a background, a scene against which the Beatles would be photographed, hanging the first row of photos on the studio wall, then fixing the other blow-ups on poles and spacing them in tiers at intervals of a foot or so, to give the picture the illusion of depth. Haworth also did all the hand tinting of the original black and white photographs." Summer of Love, George Martin

(Most of the sites where I found pictures of the Sgt Pepper making, DO NOT NAME HER at all, much less credit her in photos, but here she is, creating the album cover with her bare hands, while Peter Blake stands around.)

I know none of this is probably news to anyone much around here. I just needed to rant about it, having seen this quote from peter blake. It's just hilarious to me that he's complaining about the lack of money, after he's benefited from all the fame and credit for it over the years, and meanwhile she's left out of the story entirely... it's just so incredibly male of him. Any time he doesn't immediately set his interviewer straight about how that album cover was made is a disgrace. (Also his whining that he's only remembered for Sgt Pepper is a lot like when John would whine that people played Yesterday to him... if you're going to try and take ALL the credit for something, you can't complain when people tell you their favourite bit was the bit your partner was responsible for.)

[daggerzine]

Ray Farrell on music and his time at SST, Blast First, Geffen and many more.

Ray Farrell has had a lifetime surrounded by music. First as a fan as a young kid and then eventually working for a series of record labels. He’s obviously a fan first and foremost as you can tell by reading below. It also seemed like he was there at the beginning of some major music scenes happening.

I had met Ray very briefly at one of the A.C. Elks hardcore shows that Ralph Jones put on in Atlantic City in the Summer of 1985 though Ray doesn’t remember it (honestly, a bunch of us were standing in a circle and chatting so I’m not even sure if any proper introductions were done).

Anyway, knowing some of the record labels that Ray had worked for I wanted to hear the whole story. I contacted him and shot him some questions and he was more than happy to elaborate and let us know where he’s been and where he’s going.  Take it away, Ray!

 Where did you grow up?

RF-Jersey City and Parsippany, New Jersey in the 60/70’s. I have two younger brothers.

What did you listen to first…classic rock or stuff earlier than that?

RF-Rock wasn’t classic yet. My earliest memories of music are my parents’ modest collection of 45’s and grandparents’ 78’s. My mom had a handful of singles on Chess and Satellite (pre-Stax)  that she said fell off a truck. We rented our house from a family connected to the mob. The records probably came from them. My mom and her sisters often sang Tin Pan Alley era songs at family gatherings. Harmony was encouraged!

Some records I heard as a toddler stayed with me forever. Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor?” is a skiffle classic. Chuck Berry’s “Guitar Boogie” and “Last Night” by the Mar- Keys are still favorites.  I remember being spooked by the overblown production of the “Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams” e.p. on Sun Records. In the mid 60’s, my mom had top 40 radio on in the house unless my dad was home. When I was in kindergarten, a high school neighbor in our building babysat me for a couple hours after school a few days a week.  Her girlfriends came over regularly. They listened to a lot of doo-wop, which I still love today. The babysitter and her friends taught me how to slow dance, even though I wasn’t nearly a full grown boy. J

My best friend in 7th grade was a Beatles fanatic and we immersed ourselves in decoding clues to the “Paul McCartney Is Dead” gimmick. That was a brilliant scam and a fun short term hobby.  It was a deep dive into The Beatles music as a junior music detective.  By the time I started buying records, The Beatles were on their way out.

I happily lived for many months on only three albums-

CCR’s “Bayou Country”, Iron Butterfly’s “In A Gadda Da Vida” and the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper.” I joined the Columbia Record Club. I got the first twelve albums for one buck. That was a popular scam.  Those first twelve records shaped my taste because they were the only records I had. I didn’t know what to order but I chose very well in retrospect. After that, I bought a lot of records. I didn’t smoke, but many of my friends did. A carton of cigs cost the same as an lp- 5 bucks.

I learned in 7th grade that if I knew the songs that girls liked, we would have something to talk about. Girls loved Tommy James and The Shondells and The Rascals. I still do! I had a wider range in music taste than most of my high school friends. Everyone in my extended circle loved the Stones, Neil Young and the Allman Brothers. In a tighter circle we were into David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sparks, Todd Rundgren etc. I loved Mountain, Led Zep, Hendrix, Budgie, The Kinks, Alice Cooper, Sabbath. At first, The Stooges seemed too deep and serious for me. A little scary because I thought if teenagers felt like this all over the world, I’m doomed.  I bought the album with “Loose” and played that song for weeks before listening to the rest of it. The girl next door had Iggy’ s “Raw Power” album the week it was released. When glam rock was happening in England, there was a weekly NYC radio show that played the Melody Maker Top 30 singles. I was fascinated by T.Rex, Slade, Hawkwind.  I don’t recall if prog rock was a tag yet, I knew that I didn’t like songs that rambled on for more than 7 minutes. There were exceptions of course- some King Crimson, Yes, Mahavishnu. I was impressionable. Radio station WBAI hosted “Free Music Store” concerts with local acts. One show was a keyboard  group  called Mother Mallard that had banks of synthesizers on stage. They were similar to the music of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, who you would only hear on that same radio station. I talked myself into buying their records, but it took years to comprehend them. I was too young to be listening to such serious stuff. I played soccer and ran track for a couple years. During meets at other schools, I made friends. At parties I heard Issac Hayes, Bohannon and James Brown records. Brown was all over top 40 radio. Rhythm guitar was my jam! Soul and funk records were best for that. I spent many nights listening to AM radio. The signal travels farther at night, so I’d listen to stations far away. It didn’t matter what kind of music it was. Some of my relatives had short wave radios. I was more interested in radio production than short wave content. The production quality has not changed much since then.  It often sounds like broadcasts trapped in the ether for the last 30 years.

 While I was in high school, it was common for local colleges to host rock and jazz concerts for low prices, sometimes free. The schools had to spend the money sitting in the student union coffers.   There was a live music club in my town called Joint In The Woods. The venue began as a banquet hall that doubled as a meeting hall for Boy Scout Jamborees and the like.  When it became the Joint, it was a disco. The first night of live music was a show with Iggy & The Stooges. The regular disco patrons were pissed!  The guys were mostly goombah’s in Quiana print shirts and bell bottoms. Three or four guys smacked Iggy around after his set.  Sure enough, he played Max’s Kansas City the next night as if nothing happened. Because of this club, touring bands were suddenly playing in my town. Badfinger, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, Muddy Waters. The NY Dolls were scheduled but didn’t show up. Springsteen was often an opening act. The N.J. legal drinking age had just lowered to 18. It was a great time. I was still in school, so I wasn’t staying out on weeknights.

I was determined to learn NYC music history by hitting all the Greenwich Village clubs and talking to the owners and bartenders. It didn’t matter what kind of music they specialized in- I was into the vibe. There were occasional scary nights parking near CB’s or jazz spots in that neighborhood. Folk music was on FM radio at the time. A high school friend booked a local coffee house called Tea & Cheese. Mostly locals and ambitious tri-state artists. Martin Mull, Aztec Two Step, Garland Jeffries. Some of Lou Reed’s touring band, The Tots, played there.  I went to all kinds of record stores, mainly those that sold rock imports and cutouts. I was fascinated by the street level buzz of a record. In ’74, I heard dub reggae for the first time. The only stores to get that music were in Queens because there was a strong West Indian community there. It may have been the “Harder They Come” soundtrack that got me started. There was a “pay to play” radio station in Newark - WHBI. DJ’s had to buy their airtime. Arnold “Trinidad” Henry had a weekly show playing new calypso and reggae. He was more into calypso than reggae.  A lot of calypso was political and comical. Arnold was fascinating! There was often a personal crisis he’d talk about on the air. My favorite incident was when he said that his life had been threatened during the program, so he locked himself in the studio.. Someone called the cops. They convinced him to unlock the door. He just wanted more airtime.  Arnold played the first reggae dub track I’d heard- full dub albums were a new concept at the time. Most dub was found on the flipsides of reggae 45’s. One of the shows sponsors was Chin Randy’s Records in Queens. I trekked out there by train to buy my first dub records. That was a trip! Randy Chin’s family went on to start VP Records.

 What was the first alternative/independent music you got into? How did it happen (friends? older siblings?)

RF-The term “punk” as a music style hadn’t been coined yet.  I vaguely recall equating “punk” with the great “Nuggets” compilation or something Greg Shaw might have writ in Bomp Magzine. I didn’t identify labels as independent. I knew that if the label design was simple and the address was listed, it was probably a small company.  There were plenty of record stores carrying obscure stuff.   I bought import records from a few NYC stores. I took the bus in until I was old enough to drive.  One store Pantasia, was up in The Bronx. I went there one Christmas eve day to get the import of the second Sadistic Mika Band album. The clerk talked me into buying the harder to find first album as well. He said it sounded like Shel Talmy produced it. I knew who that was and it was a revelation to talk to somebody in a record store at that level. That is what a record store should be! I read Phonograph Record magazine, Bomp and Trouser Press regularly.  Patti Smith and Television self released their debut singles- those are the first “indie” records I bought, followed by the first two Pere Ubu singles.  I remember hearing the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” from the Bezerkley Chartbusters comp on WFMU and thinking that there must be more music like that. It was refreshing.

Seeing Patti Smith and Television perform at CBGB’s changed my life. I connected the dots. I had BÖC albums on which Patti had co-writes.  She had a poem insert in Todd Rundgren’s “A Wizard, A True Star” album. She read a Morrison poem on a Ray Manzarek lp. She wrote for rock music mags with distinctive style. I read a brief story about her in the Voice and went to see her do her annual Rock N’ Rimbaud show. Shortly after that she and Television played CBGB’s for six weekends in early ’75. Both bands were really great. Patti didn’t have a drummer yet. Richard Hell was a big inspiration to me.  He looked cool. He played bass like he just picked it up the month before. That was a new concept.  Television changed bass players in the middle of the residency. Television was the first band I saw with short hair and they dressed like teenage delinquents circa 1962. The CBGB’s jukebox had a good number of 60’s garage records. In my head I conceived Television  to be inspired by that music.  Made sense to me- Lenny Kaye, who assembled the “Nuggets” comp,  is in the PSG. When I went back to see Television headline, The Ramones opened. Seeing The Ramones again, Talking Heads opened. It seemed like the streak of seeing great new bands would not end. They were distinctly NYC sounds. They could not have merged anywhere else.  I remember avoiding the band Suicide because I didn’t think the music could be good J. Bands like Tuff Darts, Mumps and The Marbles opened shows but I wasn’t thrilled by them. A CBGB’s band that doesn’t get mentioned much is Mink DeVille. They wore matching outfits like they were playing a low budget Miami dive in 1962J.  The club still had the small corner stage. The p.a. was ok and the bands had small amps. The music wasn’t loud in a “rock” way. You could sit at a table right in front of the band. Although we consider the club a birthplace of punk, the club showcased local bands that had been around for a while. I think the club upgraded the p.a. once before building the big stage. I realized at that point that when a band was great or at least interesting live, the records were basic documents of the band’s sound.

What was your first job in the music scene/industry?

RF- Before realizing I wanted to be in the business, I hounded import mail order guys on the phone about non-lp b-sides and albums that weren’t released stateside.  I was fascinated by the process.  Why were some records not in stores even though they had local airplay? My dad did not listen to much music, but he had an army buddy that made a living in Al Hirt’s band. He came to our house once. He gave my dad a copy of John Fahey’s “After The Ball” album, which he played on.  I liked his stories about the session man side of the business.  Fahey treated him well.  I was generally shy, but when it came to music I would approach anyone I thought I could learn from.  I heard horror stories about the music biz in NYC but learned later that those were a mob related labels. At the time, I thought the entire NYC music biz might be that way. I planned to move to California anyway.   In high school, I go-fer’d at local Jersey radio stations and talked my way into meeting a few top FM radio dj’s. I thought I wanted to be a professional dj, but my dad wisely talked me out of that. The itinerant radio jock life would not be for me. It was a racket.

In ’76, I took a long low budget cross country trip with my high school sweetheart.  Along the way, I stayed in Memphis for three weeks with a cousin who was stationed at the Millington naval base.  Got a job at a hip movie theatre that served liquor.  I found Alex Chilton in the phone book and spent an afternoon talking with him. I wasn’t yet legal drinking age in Tennessee. It amused him that a fan showed up in his town who was not old enough to drink.  En route to Cali, Tulsa, OK was on my route to find Shelter Records and studio , but it  shut down and the label moved to L.A. At the time, Dwight Twilley’s “I’m On Fire” was a radio hit. I didn’t think there were still bands like that. Twilley was from Tulsa, but had moved to L.A. by that time.

When I arrived in L.A. I visited small label record company offices. A few offered me jobs or references. I spent two weeks crashing at the Malibu house of a distant family friend. I didn’t want to live in L.A. but I was encouraged by the opportunities. I got a job at the famous record store- Rather Ripped in Berkeley, CA.

 Patti Smith told me about Rather Ripped before I left Jersey. In ’75, she and her band went to California for shows in L.A. and Berkeley. The northern Cali shows were set up by the store. She did a poetry reading there. This is well before “Horses” was released.  I bought a couple records from the store’s Dedicated Fool mail order service. They had a monthly catalog on newsprint. Thousands of records in tiny font.  Every record was described with a few words. This is 1976 and punk rock was just getting started. I worked as a prep cook in a charcuterie associated with Alice Waters’ famous restaurant Chez Panisse. The proprietor knew the record store owners. I wasn’t actively looking to work there, but I talked about music all day every day. They fast tracked me for an interview. Because of a scheduling mistake, Tom Petty interviewed me for the job. His first album just came out and “American Girl” was close to being a hit single. The band came to the store before a local show. Tom overheard the owner apologizing for not being able to do the interview, so he offered to conduct it.  It was great. I knew all about his label, Shelter Records.  I deliberately avoided talking about The Ramones and Patti Smith because punk was new and against the grain.  At the end of the interview Tom told the owners that if he lived in Berkeley, he’d buy all his records from me.  The store owner still had to interview me formally the next day, but I knew that I nailed it.

 It was owned by two dynamic gents that were connected to Berkeley society and Bay Area journalists. They weren’t typical record store guys. They celebrated the 70’s in the moment. They held court with well known music scribes, musicians, dj’s. They were good friends of The Residents. Perhaps my strangest story is meeting The Residents with the Rather Ripped owners at a S.F. Irish bar that specialized in Irish Coffee’s. I had only recently heard of the group, so I was not cognizant of their marketing myth.   At the bar, we were with our girlfriends and wives. One of the Residents tried to convince me and my gf to go back their place for a hot tub session.  I laughed out loud and said “geez, what a bunch of hippies”! We didn’t go. In retrospect, I should have gone on the condition that they wore eyeball heads in the tub. At that time, The Residents rarely performed live, but they did in 1975 for the store’s birthday party. The early Bezerkley Records (Jonathan Richman, Greg Kihn) was distributed to stores through Rather Ripped. Their office was a few blocks away. At the store, each employee had unique music taste and expertise. Pop music was changing rapidly with a new energy. Some of us were tapped into it.  We all had to know the key new releases in every genre because we were tastemakers. Major labels would beg us to do window displays for new releases. But if they could not find a store employee that liked that artist, it was no go. So, no Pablo Cruise window display.  We weren’t against major labels, but we put a lot of energy into selling the ton of music that we loved. Our focus was on imports, indies, promos and cut outs where we could get a good price mark up.  We had a rare record search service with customers all over the world. We’d find rare records through trade-ins and by combing record stores all over the state.

There were a few import distributors, but they weren’t hip to many small run U.S. independent releases. That was understandable because bands didn’t often press enough records for a distributor to get excited about. In other words, why spend half your day hunting down records that were only pressed in small quantities. Just as they start selling, you’re out of stock. There gonna sell a hell of a lot more Scorpions’ picture discs!   As always, some distributors financed exclusive re-pressings of records that had momentum. The only way to get records like Roky Erikson’s “Two Headed Dog” single or The Flamin’ Groovies’ “You Tore Me Down” 45 was directly through mail order.  I wrote to label addresses listed in Trouser Press and fanzines to buy direct in order to sell them in the store with no competition. Major label sales reps didn’t prioritize us  because we didn’t shift bulk units of the hits. However, we were so plugged in to the lesser known artists that we were a good place for record companies to try and start a buzz. We could swell 50-100 of a record that all the other stores sold a handful of. Bands showed up at the store while touring.  Springsteen bought Dylan bootlegs from us by mail order. Patti Smith’s manager Jane Friedman used the store as a home base when Patti and John Cale came through the area.

Berkeley is in the East Bay of the S.F. bay area. A few months after starting at Rather Ripped, I realized that the city had a rich music scene well before punk /new wave started. There was Fantasy Records, a well known jazz r&b label but best known for CCR;  Arhoolie, Solid Smoke, Metalanguage;  the contemp classical labels- Lovely Music and 1750 Arch; folk and blues labels like Takoma and Olivia. Of course, bands like Chrome and others started labels to release their own music. Ralph Records was started by The Residents, and they began signing bands.  Rather Ripped was also a center for improv, electronic and meditation records.

In ’77 or ’78   I joined the nascent Maximum Rock N Roll radio team. This was well before the magazine. In the early days there were weeks when we didn’t have enough new punk records to fill the two hour weekly show. Tim Yohannon was all about energetic, real rock n roll, so he filled in the program with records by Gene Vincent, The Sonics etc. BTW, Tim applied green masking tape to the three closed sides of every record he had. He gave me a Mekons double single  he decided he didn’t like. It was in a  gatefold sleeve that he sealed shut with his green tape!  Sometimes he re-designed the cover art…never for the better. He made his own pic sleeves for 45’s that didn’t have them. Bands would stare at their own records in bewilderment. Tim was archiving the records of the entire punk and hardcore movement worldwide.

Eventually, Tim brought in Ruth Schwartz, and Jeff Bale as co-hosts- both great people.  Jello Biafra was a frequent guest. Tim assembled the “Not So Quiet On The Western Front” lp and later organized syndication for the radio show. I remember hearing the first Disorder ep and thinking -this is the future! J  It was exciting. But soon, most hardcore records sounded alike to me. It was like- “Do you want more fries with your fries?” I went to plenty of live shows without knowing a lot about the bands playing them. I was happy when the fashion trended away from jackboots to sneakers…getting a boot kick to the head in a stage dive could be brutal.  I didn’t see a lot of skinhead violence at shows, but I know it was changing the scene.

San Francisco and Berkeley were important music centers, activist meccas as well as creative artistic and intellectual hubs.  Yohannon had history as an activist. He identified with public protests for causes & social issues.  For many teenagers, punk rock was a rite of passage. I think it changed a lot of kids’ lives for the better.  The overriding message was to be civically aware of what is going on around you and what affects your life.

 Tell me about your time at Arhoolie Records. Where was it located?

Rather Ripped’s owners had a falling out and the remaining owner just wanted to sell records and antiques with his wife. He moved it to a nearby city. Just before the store closed, he told me of an open position at Back Room Distribution, a division of Arhoolie. It was in El Cerrito, a small town north of Berkeley. Chris Strachwitz, the owner of Arhoolie is a legendary record man. He recorded many of his early blues albums with a tape recorder in his car.  He owned the legendary Down Home Music store in the same building.  Separated by partition behind the store was Back Room.  It was an indie label distributor for blues, folk roots music. Rounder Records was still a new label at the time. I gotta admit, when Rounder issued The Shaggs “Philosophy Of The World’ I was in seventh heaven. I worked primarily for the distributor, grooming to be a sales rep but I spent a lot of time in the store.  At first, I didn’t yet relate to blues and country music. But there were a lot of touring artists in those styles making a living. It was a strong network of clubs, fans, radio shows and press that fueled it. The store had an incredible selection of obscure 50’s/60’s rockabilly and garage band comps. The Cramps were my favorite band at the time.  The rockabilly comps  mostly on a the Dutch White Label, were treasure troves of insane songs.  My heart was in new music- whatever you wanna call it, punk, new wave, art music. That’s the business I wanted to be in.  I used my time to learn more about distribution operations. The people that worked at Arhoolie and in its community were fun music heads. There were a lot of good musicians among them.  It was a great time to live in Berkeley.

What was next, Rough Trade and CD Presents? Was that in San Francisco? I went to that Rough Trade store a few times and it was an amazing store.

I knew folks from Rough Trade UK because I bought imports from them to sell @ Rather Ripped. When they wanted to open in the U.S. they contacted me, but at the time the wage was low and there wasn’t enough space to work. I was interested in working in the distribution division, not the store. They speiled something about it being a socialist business.  I stayed at Arhoolie for a little while longer.  In the meantime, I was offered my own weekly late night radio show on Pacifica’s  KPFA in Berkeley- same station as Maximum Rock N’Roll. I took over a show called “Night Sky”, an ambient music program. My interim program title was “No More Mr. Night Sky” until I settled on “Assassinatin’ Rhythm”. The station’s music director was a contemporary classical composer closely associated with avant -garde and 20th century music. A major segment of my show was for industrial, post-punk and undefinable music. I hosted a few live on- air performances with Z’ev, Slovenly and Angst among others. Negativland’s “Over The Edge” program started on KPFA around this time. KPFA was 100,000 watts of power with affiliate stations covering the Central Valley down to Fresno and Bakersfield.

 When the time was right, I moved to Rough Trade’s U.S. distribution company in Berkeley. The record store was in San Francisco. We distributed a lot of British records sent by Rough Trade UK, often in small quantities.  Rough Trade US was set up to press and distribute select RT and Factory records by Joy Division, ACR, The Fall, Stiff Little Fingers, Crass. It was cheaper and more effective to press in the U.S and Canada. I also distributed some U.S. labels but there was one Brit on the staff that hated most American music.  On top of that, it could be a dangerous place to work. One of the staff was importing reggae records and weed from Jamaica to our warehouse. The local connection was shot on his porch shortly after he picked up a shipment! I was lucky to spend a few days travelling with Mark E.Smith of The Fall. He loved obscure rockabilly and garage band records. I was able to return to Memphis for a while to prep the first Panther Burns album for release. Tony Wilson of Factory put up most of the money to keep RTUS going. He was a brilliant character, but I learned from talking with him how not to conduct business. I often got sample records from bands that wanted distribution. Pell Mell’s “Rhyming Guitars” e.p.  was the start of my long association with the band. I enjoyed selling records to stores all over the country. I learned about local scenes, records, fanzines, clubs and college radio stations everywhere. Making these sources connect for touring bands and record sales was exciting. Because Rough Trade is British, we had the benefit of connections with club dj’s. We pressed and promoted New Order’s “Blue Monday” single on a shoestring budget.  For a long time, it was the best kept secret from the mainstream.  I left Rough Trade for Subterranean Records ( Flipper etc) for a spell while working in a record store. The guy that put up the money for the record store ran guns to Cuba through Mexico. Thankfully, not through the actual store.  I booked Cali shows for Panther Burns, The Wipers, Sonic Youth, Whitehouse.

Who owned the CD Presents label? I remember that Avengers compilation.

It was owned by a lawyer, David Ferguson. He had a recording studio as well.  I didn’t understand why he wanted to run a label. He did not have an ear for music. But we did release a Tales Of Terror lp!  He almost released a DOA album that I thought the band would kill him over. Many years later I got into a fist fight with one of David’s employees in a limo ride shared with Ferguson and Lydia Lunch. We fought through the window separating the driver from the passengers. I would love to recreate that for a film. Good times!

My main role there was to set up the first Billy Bragg record in the U.S. Billy’s manager was the legendary Peter Jenner and both were great to work with. They were using CD Presents as a stepping stone to a major label. In the meantime, I knew a few people at SST. Joe Carducci is an old friend. He was pitching me to move to L.A. and work there,  but I resisted for a while. I had just met the woman that I knew would be the love of my life. I didn’t want to move to SoCal. Joe gave me an ultimatum. He sent three advance cassettes that convinced me to go- Meat Puppets’ “Up On The Sun”, Minutemen’s “Double Nickels” and Huskers’ “New Day Rising” That’s an excellent recruiting strategy. I later married the love of my life.

On the side I booked shows for bands I loved. Gerard Cosloy asked me to book Sonic Youth first northern Cali shows. I also booked shows for The Wipers and noise band Whitehouse

Was SST Records next? How long did you last there and what was that like?

I was there for three years. “How long did you last there?” sounds like I was biding my time :)   I’m often asked about my time with SST.

Carducci hired me to do PR. That meant publicity, college radio, regional press. Video was a valuable promo tool. MTV’s “120 Minutes” program was a great way to promote our records.

In 1987 we put out more records than Warner Brothers. By that time, I hired people to help.

I’ve done a number of interviews about SST. If you have specific questions, shoot. I recall that my social life was almost entirely with my co-workers and bands on the label. I was nearly oblivious to music from other labels. I was a big fan of Dischord and Homestead. Metallica, COC, Voivod and the Birthday Party/Nick Cave were my non-SST staples.

I think around this time I had met you briefly in NJ at one of the Elks Lodge shows that my old friend Ralph Jones put on. Were you living in NJ at that point or just visiting?

You’ve mentioned that before and I don’t recall the specific show. I moved out of NJ permanently in ’76. I came back for annual summer visits to NYC, north Jersey and Philly. Some high school friends went to Upsala College, then the home of WFMU. On my first visit back in ’76  I met Irwin Chusid and R. Stevie Moore. Some high school friends were connected to Feelies before they took that name.

Was Blast First! next? I met Pat Naylor once and hung out with her at a show and she was really sweet.

Yeah around the time I left SST, the folks in Sonic Youth called saying that they had left as well. They wanted me to be involved with Blast First! in the U.S. I knew Paul Smith because he released their albums in the UK. Blast First UK released a number of Touch N Go and SST records. The label was a division of Mute which had a  U.S. deal with Enigma. My job was almost entirely “Daydream Nation” promotion. It was so much fun to be able to go deep  with one album. We issued Ciccone Youth shortly afterward, which augmented the overall Sonic Youth story.  The only other active touring band was Band Of Susans and on a limited level, Lunachicks and Big Stick.  It was only one year of work before Enigma cut Mute/Blast First loose. I went on Sonic Youth’s Soviet Union tour and I had a few memorable meetings with Sun Ra. David Bowie called a few times asking about recording studios that Dino Jr and Sonic Youth used.  Bowie had a brilliant idea to record Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” with Glenn Branca’s large guitar group. We tried following up on it but Bowie was immersed in Tin Machine and other projects.

Was it on to Geffen then?

Yes, Sonic Youth had good meetings with the label. I had recently met Mark Kates who was championing the signing.  He suggested that I come in to meet the entire company. He brought my name up with David who said, “we need someone like that here”.

I had fleeting thoughts that working for a major was “selling out”...punching corporate clock. I wanted to apply what I knew on a larger scale.  

What was that like, working for a proper major label? Was David Geffen still involved?

On my second day there, David called me into his office. He is down to earth, street smart. Like many of the best in the biz, he didn’t have an attitude.  He had met with the Meat Puppets. He sensed that Dinosaur Jr. was important. I reminded him that I was not hired for a&r.

He said- “I don’t assign job titles. If you find something else you’d like to do here, you can pursue it ‘after 5pm’ ”. I found reissue projects like the Pere Ubu box and Raincoats catalog. I recorded a new Raincoats album.  I signed Southern Culture On The Skids, Garrison Starr, Skiploader. I assembled and recorded Rob Zombie’s Halloween Hootenanny comp. With Sonic Youth, I pondered making records with John Fahey and Townes Van Zandt. After ten years, it was time to move on.

Tell us what you do now, didn’t you get involved with digital music at some point?

Geffen Records was folded into Interscope in 1999 and I was bored with the limitations of the business as it was.  Digital music was gaining ground solely through illegal file trading on Napster. I knew there would be a major shift in the business moving to digital. I worked for the download site. eMusic.com, signing distribution agreements with labels. This was years before iTunes and YouTube. Major labels would not work with us because mp3 files are open source files that could be traded freely without control.  They saw eMusic as a facilitator of illegal file trading. Like marijuana use leading to hard drugs!  In the big picture, I knew that digital downloads weren’t “sexy”.  But at some point, digital music would develop into something easier to track and use. We skipped the major labels. The bigger independent labels understood that digital music would be the future.  It was a great place to be. I knew a lot of music, but I had no idea there were so many labels in every country. One label owner told me that I had the best  job in the world. I knew that to explain this new unproven music format it could be an uphill climb. So I took the time to research label websites for song samples. That way I could find common ground with label owners. There’s surf music in Brazil? There’s a young female cellist duo in Prague that make energetic music? There’s archaic royalty rules connected to opera arrangements? Bring it on!  It certainly changed how I listen to music.

It was a time when business rules and legal rights had to change in order to deal with digital income disbursement. For example, digital downloads could be sold by the song while royalty payments were based on album sales. eMusic was at the forefront of those changes. When iTunes launched, digital music was “legitimized”. Borne out of eMusic was RoyaltyShare which provides a royalty accounting platform for labels. It is now a division of The Orchard and I divide my time between The Orchard and RoyaltyShare.

Who are some current bands you are into?

A loaded question! I listen to a lot of new music. I spend a lot of time listening to records and cd’s in my collection. Of current artists,  I really like Steve Gunn’s music. I listen to the projects involving members of Sonic Youth.  Bill Nace, Kim’s partner in Body/Head is a guitar genius. Body/Head’s music is a cathartic experience for me.  London is lucky to have Thurston Moore living and working there. I think the music they make separately is far more exciting that what Sonic Youth would’ve made if still together.

Lately I’m digging Melenas from Spain, Hayvenlar Alemi from Turkey. Quin Kirchner is a Chicago based  drummer that put out a great jazz record in 2018 called “The Other Side Of Time”. I think he plays on Ryley Walker ‘s records.

Because I’ve spent so much time with the music of Sonic Youth, Branca and Rhys Chatham, I crave the occasional dive into instrumental symphonic guitar army and tonal stuff. Current favorites in that vein are Bosse De Nage, Pelican, Sunn O)))

Given the chance I’ll see any performance by Mary Halvorson, Ches Smith, Marc Ribot or Mary Lattimore.

It took me years to get it, but I’m now a big fan of Keiji Haino’ music.  Dean McPhee is a British guitarist I really like. I just bought a couple of Willie Lane lp’s on Feeding Tube.

I research music history and the development of the industry. There are historical and social components of every type of music by culture, country, time period. I love stories about riots at premieres of new avant garde works. I read a book about famous classical composers in the 18th Century playing home concerts (salons) where people are talking the entire time…but they are paid handsomely for the performance.   Streaming music sites and YouTube are vast repositories of music and cultural documentation.

Do you still make it out to many shows?

I go to two/three shows a month when I’m home and more when traveling especially NY/London. I start work early in the morning so I’m not out late often.  I understand why people see less live music as they get older. I’m done with music festivals. The Big Ears Festival is the only Stateside event that might inspire me to stand for eight hours.

I always hear music by new artists that I really like. I don’t always go to see the live show. Sometimes I hear a new band that sounds like a band  I liked 20 years ago.  I wouldn’t deliberately see a band that uses another band’s sound as a template.

 What are your top 10 desert island discs?

I cannot do 10. It’s 20 or nothing. If you say sorry Ray, it will be nothing. FineJ If I’m on an island, I’ll listen to the ocean waves and sounds of nature. If I’m relegated to a desert, I’ll listen to the blood coarsing through my veins.

Miles Davis- Kind Of Blue

Television- Marquee Moon

Peter Brotzmann- Machine Gun

Sex Pistols -Never Mind The Bollocks

Rolling Stones- Let It Bleed

Soundtrack – The Harder They Come

Billy Harper – Black Saint

Kleenex/Liliput- First Songs

Patti Smith Group -Easter

Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers- Houserockin’

Led Zeppelin- Houses Of The Holy

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation

Elvis Presley- Sun Sessions

The Cramps- Songs The Lord Taught Us

Pell Mell -Flow

Procol Harum- A Salty Dog

Sibelius- Complete Symphonies

Lou Reed -Coney Island Baby

Meat Puppets- Up On The Sun

The Kinks- Kinks Kronikles

 “Hmm....Flow or Star City?”

 Any final words? Closing comments? Anything you wanted to mention that I didn’t ask.

I’ve been involved off and on with the artist Raymond Pettibon for a music project called Supersession. He has made records under this moniker before. This project began in 1990 and stalled for many years. We revived it a couple years ago. I play bass. Raymond wrote many pages of words and lyrics that he passed to the band, encouraging us to write music behind them. It’s different from Raymond’s other records because it is not improvised. Rick Sepulveda, our guitarist is a great songwriter and he wrote music for Raymond’s words. Rick sings a bunch of the songs because Raymond loves his voice. We did a  NYC performance in November that was really fun. So now of course, I’m thinking we should play monthly in L.A. We are nearly finished with the album that we recorded at Casa Hanzo, the San Pedro studio Mike Watt owns with Pete Mazich. Raymond is a brilliant man; fun and inspiring to work with. When I practice with Rick, he’ll often break into a cover song deep in the recess of memory. Like John Cale’s “Hanky Panky Nohow” ,Kevin Ayers’ “Oh Wot A Dream” or the Doors “Wishful Sinful”. We may cover a Harry Toledo song. It’s a blast.  I hope to have the album finished in July.

 Tav, Bobby, Pell Mell and Ray 

[blapisblogs]

I feel like I need to apologize to you all for exposing you all to that video, even if indirectly. That very well may be- no, you know what? It is the worst thing I’ve ever liveblogged on here, bar none. Even worse than Rio 2 (and you know that’s no easy feat if you saw my reaction to that movie’s shitty ending). I don’t enjoy covering something that I know is gonna make me mad, I really don’t, but holy shit this was too much for me to avoid not talking about.

Full disclosure: before I found out about this video and the massive backlash it got, I was what you might call a casual Pink Floyd fan. (I liked the songs of theirs I’ve heard on the radio and one of their less-popular albums that my dad has.) I’d heard of the film version of The Wall a few times but hadn’t actively thought about it or sought it out. I didn’t know about almost anything regarding any of the stories behind the songs. After the backlash though? I looked a bit more into their work, which is fascinating. I listened to the whole original album for The Wall, and now it’s one of my favorite concept albums. My girlfriend @animatedc9000 and I watched the movie together not too long ago, and since then it’s grown on me quite a bit, more than any other movie based on a concept album I’ve seen (which may not be saying much since that list only includes Tommy, which is a mixed bag, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which sucks). When I started sharing the things I was finding out about the album with her, she told me that all of it was “blow[ing her] mind”. I’ve found something new that I like, and it’s because of all the people who cared to speak up against the work of somebody who didn’t care enough about it to really do the subject matter justice.

Listen, I’m not saying that if you have a different view or opinion on something from me and/or most others that you’re wrong. Don’t like The Wall, either the film or the album? That’s fine. Don’t care for Pink Floyd in general? That’s okay. Can’t enjoy The Wall because of all the drama behind it regarding Roger Waters? Fair enough. However, if you’re gonna review something like this, then context is important (especially for something like The Wall, both the album and film), and not only does this “review” provide none of that, it feels like Doug Walker doesn’t know the context either and that he didn’t do any research into any of it past his initial viewing. I know I’m not the best when it comes to bringing up all the details about the things I liveblog, but that’s because I’m not really reviewing them so much as reacting to them half the time, and even then I at least try my best to let people know what’s going on. I’m just one person on the internet who does this stuff mostly on the fly, for fun, and for free, unlike Doug Walker who’s got thousands of subscribers, (supposedly) analyzes media for a living, plans most of his material out in advance, and has the resources to make an elaborate production like this.

That being said, what Doug Walker did in this video isn’t just state his unpopular opinion in an ill-conceived way; he continually made fun of an abuse victim, saying that what they went through wasn’t that bad and he should just get over it, and made no attempts to even try and understand how it affected them even long after it all happened. That is the biggest factor in what makes this so unforgivable to me, and all of the other terrible elements that come with it just further cement it as the worst video he’s ever done. Of course, this isn’t that new for him or his company, given that their first public message addressing the Change the Channel situation was “We sincerely regret you feel that way”, so what makes this different from that? (Well, aside from the mistreatment of the former employees being arguably unproven whereas you can’t even deny the fact that he’s mocking an abuse victim here.) I’m sorry to say that the answer seems to come down to more of who he’s talking about this time than anything.

Look, certain classic rock fans can be easy to irritate, to put it mildly. I include myself in that because I still have a tendency to clench my jaw and groan whenever some guy (yes, including Doug Walker, and yes, it’s always cishet white guys I see doing this) refers to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as “The CSI Miami theme”. It’s not a big secret that rock fans are like this either, in a way you could say it’s a stereotype. Nobody really seems to talk about Doug Walker’s content all that much these days (outside of people doing “cringe compilations” of it I guess), not after that Not So Awesome document discussed the horrible things he and his company have done to their former employees. If he wanted to get people’s attention again, he was gonna have to do something big and in a way where people would have to talk about him, and what better way to do that than with a series of statements regarding something some people have a strong attachment to (and whose album happened to be turning forty soon) where he can feature bigger name guest stars and includes something he can try to sell off to his most dedicated fans?

What I’m saying is that Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall comes off as an attempt to troll for attention so he can try and become relevant again, even if it's for all the wrong reasons.

That’s probably the wrong conclusion to come to for this (or maybe not; this is a guy who seems to delight in pissing off Pokémon fans for no good reason), but at this point who even cares what the reasoning behind it was. What matters is that this happened, and the things he’s said here aren’t just lazy, they’re cruel and insulting to say to an abuse victim, and no amount of guest stars or special effects can cover that up or save it. If you can handle darker, fairly depressing subject matter, I do recommend listening to The Wall, perhaps even checking out the movie if you can handle what’s in the album (though not before looking into the kind of triggering content it has; like I said earlier, it gets dark at points). If it doesn’t seem like your thing, I completely understand, but regardless of how you feel about it, please do not watch this “review” or seek out the album they made of their songs from it, not even to try and laugh at how bad it is or see for yourself if it really is that bad. Please trust me: it is that bad and it is not worth your time.

Doug Walker, I doubt you’ll ever read this, but if somehow you do, then I have just one thing to say to you: STOP.

[theloniousbach]

A LISTENER'S JOURNAL #21: GOIN' (BACK) TO KANSAS CITY

My best, longest standing jazz friend who is also from Kansas City called my attention to Nathan W. Pearson's Goin' to Kansas City (University of Illinois Press, 1987).  The good old Eden Webster Library had the volume as support for our strong jazz program.  It was checked out a couple of times within a couple of years of publication according to the card in the book and has possibly gone out through electronic check out like mine since or used in the stacks.  Still, a moment's pause on the fate of scholarly books.

It's a shame because the oral history with all of the players captured a dying generation, a passing moment.  They conducted them in the mid-1970s when we were discovering the music generally even if KC swing was hardly our starting place.  Jay McShann was around town as "the last of the Blue Devils;" talk was afoot for a Jazz Hall of Fame to go with revitalizing the 18th and Vine District; and we saw the Count Basie Band at KU (I was close to Freddie Green watching him impassively chording on a possibly unamplified, barely mic'ed arch top, eyebrows only slightly raised as horns crescendoed behind him.  The Count himself showed that beaming smile and turned the band with deceptively simple mostly right handed lines.  The magic was there, but the horns were mostly second or third generation.  Maybe Jimmy Forrest played tenor.).

But, particularly with this return to this music, it is so clear how much of the KC aesthetic informs my sense of jazz: blues, riffs, driving rhythm.Basie was the starting point.  I recall, admittedly hazily, that my dad vouchsafed that he preferred Basis to Ellington.  We had a two record album put out as a fundraiser for the Congress of Racial Equality (that too is a story to unpack because my parents' politics had an influence, even they might say too much influence, on my life) with a whole side of the Basie band that I played often.  I do know that I got the Verve "Essential Count Basis"  album before I got "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," putting those Neal Hefti 1950s charts, Joe Williams blues, and that core repertoire ("April in Paris," "Jumping' at the Woodside," and a proper "One O'Clock Jump" in my brain.  A previous off label album had a long jammed version of "OO'CJ" that only backed into the theme at the end--and that was unacceptable though now I'm curious about how they did it.).

But, man, Basie could swing hard with a brassy swagger.  Those bluesy riffs set up solos, accessible, smart, and succinct.  Basie himself was a presence and there was something about his presence.  I recall vaguely seeing them (and possibly, separately, Ellington) as a kid as a local grocery store had a tiered trailer they could put in a parking lot with the band on it.  That is the probable source of my father's preferences.

So KC jazz through Basie was formative.  The prompt from the book is to get into the bascally 1930s roots of what I heard (and what caught Dad's ear as a teenager).There are just snippets of Walter Page and the Blue Devils and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy.  But there is some with Basie playing a much bigger two handed piano.  The recordings are earlier, reflecting less developed technology and likely less than ideal studio or remote conditions.  The music is less developed too, so it sounds corny.  Yes, the 4/4 rhythm is insistent, but we sneak things into it now; same with the harmonies in the horn section.  But the blues is there loud and clear with riffs sounding even more focused  because recordings could only be three minutes long.

The real rediscovery is the early Mary Lou Williams.  I knew her some as a revered figure, including as a mentor to Monk and others.  My mother's piano bench has a jazz instruction book by her that I wish I had now.  But in these early recordings  she is strong and varied and defining.  There are even about five trio sides that really showcase her talent.  I can hear the future there, even as I use her to epitomize the KC sound.

But, the KC sound is both distinctive in the moment, but has some of the future in it.  Of course, that is precisely my lens--that jazz is at its heart blues, driving rhythm, and riffs.  But it spurs the transition.I was acutely aware that Charlie Parker was from Kansas City, hitting New York with Jay McShann but cutting his teeth around town at the clubs and union hall.  There was a jazz opera about him that we saw at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art when I was a kid and an antipathy to opera that I haven't shaken.

I am a child of bebop, but I am not steeped in the nuances of Parker's career, certainly the way I am with Monk's.  I saw Dizzy Gillespie a couple of times in the 1970s (maybe even with electric piano and electric bass--not for fusion purposes just that's what people played) but he too is an ebullient presence and huge ears (as important as bebop is, he also promoted Afro-Cuban).  I did of course dig back through Miles to his apprenticeship with Parker, but it's "Birth of the Cool" and the "Cookie'/Relaxin'/Steami'/Workin'" sessions with Coltrane where it starts for me.

It's a revelation to hear Parker this time with KC swing as the context.  It slows down the caricature of harmonic pyrotechnics around the changes and I heard better what he was doing with the changes to create countless beautiful melodies.  I heard a singing Bird--and that's a treat.  I've read of his voracious musical curiosity, exploring the more modern European Art Music Tradition (Stravinsky, Impressionsts) to find melodic ideas.

The other revelation is the connection, including KC, with Lester Young.  I know him (and the other great tenors of the 1930a--Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins--who influenced and transitioned to bebop) too little.  Yes, the Billie Holiday dates but Mingus's "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" tribute is far more familiar in many iterations than what Mingus celebrates.  But Young is another captivating melodist.  There's a delicacy and vulnerability to his playing that I didn't quite expect.  He is a Kansas Citian through and through, but his tone commands a different kind of attention as we lean into it.

Pearson's book also captures the role of the Pendergast machine's corruption that shielded the city from the worst of the Great Depression and allowed the margins where this outlaw music could prosper.

My home town!

[sherlockmonkeesstartrek]

I’ve got to admit, I like writing these. It’s fun to share personal experiences, and talk about a fandom, kind of relive my obsession with it, for a while. So buckle in because today I’m ranting about my obsession with the Beatles.

It all began, much like my discovery of the Monkees, in the back of my Dad’s car when he used to play my sister and I 60s music. In seeing that we shared his love of golden oldies, he liked buying compilation albums, best of and greatest hits to see which bands we liked best- which usually coincided with his favourites- then he’d by band-specific best ofs and greatest hits. As with the Monkees, there’s a few Beatles songs that really remind me of this time. Actually, I say a few, but probably the entirety of ‘1’ takes me back to that time. More specifically, the first 8 or so tracks. I distinctly remember listening to ‘Love Me Do’ ‘With Love From Me To You’ and ‘She Loves you,’ the former of which I’ve always had this strange connection to. When I asked what instrument played the iconic riff and my dad taught me about the harmonica, I remember having a clear picture in my head someone recording this song. I’d never seen the Beatles, I don’t think I knew their name at the time. Instead of envisioning 4 gorgeous boys in black and white, I had this image of a man, standing in a dark room with a spotlight on him, holding a harmonica up to his lips and playing that riff. I don’t know why I can still remember this, but it has always stuck with me. It’s strange the imagination of a young brain, how we rationalize things and understand them, and how things can stick with you for so many years.

My next memory of the Beatles is actually connected to the Monkees. While I was totally obsessed with my boys overseas, I was often having to defend them from those who thought they were just a rip off of the Beatles. I would pride myself on having whole albums of the Monkees downloaded on my phone and only one single Beatles song on my playlist- Love Me Do. I was always rooting for the underdog, and since the Monkees had so much stigma behind them, and yet their music was fun and easily enjoyed, I was adamant that they were better than the Beatles. Now, my opinions haven’t changed all that much. I still prefer the Monkees over the Beatles, but I can’t say that one is better than the other.

My actual obsession with the Beatles began when I went to the cinema. It’s funny, because I really don’t recall what I was there to see. I think I was with my Mum and sister, and being them, they had to nip to the toilet before we went to our screen. While I waited for them, a screen by the loos was, as cinemas often do, advertising upcoming movies, one of which was 8 Days A Week. Now, I don’t know whether it was the music that drew me in first, or the fact that it was a movie about a 1960s band that had me wanting to see it. Either way, I told my mum, and later my dad, that we should check it out. It wasn’t until it came out on DVD, however, that I first watched it.

And instantly, all the songs I knew so well brought back memories I didn’t realize I had. I’d forgotten that I knew the lyrics to many of them, and found myself singing along. Soon enough, I had downloaded several of their tracks onto my phone, songs like ‘Twist and Shout’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘I Feel Fine.’ It was in the video for ‘Twist and Shout,’ that I first really noticed the handsome Rickenbacker player bopping up and down along to the track and seemingly squinting. It was then that I had fallen for John Lennon.

However, my sister, as with the Monkees, had also noticed him, and she had the unnerving habit of ‘dibbing’ anyone she found attractive. Basically, we could claim people we liked, singers, actors, characters, all by calling ‘dibs’ and in my sister’s case, once she’d called dibs, I wasn’t allowed to fangirl over them. Still to this day, she has dibs on Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. But it wasn’t always like that. The first Beatle she dibsed was John Lennon. I fought hard to win him back, because there was no way I could watch a single video of him, or listen to his voice, or simply just think about him without fangirling excessively. Though I was sad to give George Harrison over to her, I thought it was a fair swap.

Now, the summer after I watched 8 days a week, my mum had dug out the family’s old 70s record player which now firmly lives in my bedroom. I owned one record of my own- one of Davy Jones’ solo albums- and basically took ownership of all those that my mum found along with the record player in the garage. It was from that moment on that I began collecting records. My first Beatles one was Help. I remember being in a HMV, holding Help in one hand and A Hard Day’s Night in the other. I only had enough money for one. I think it was my sister who ended up insisting on Help, though I had originally gone there to buy the other. In any case, I played it as soon as I got home. I did eventually get A Hard Day’s Night too, and then Sgt Peppers, and it’s these three albums that remind me of the warm summer I spent dancing to them, and the many trips up to Baker Street to peruse the Beatles Shop there.

Of course, I then had to go to Abbey Road. I’ve been there so many times now to take pictures that I have a photo album on my phone titled ‘The Crossing.’ And after that, my dad and his girlfriend surprised me, offering to take me to Liverpool. Least to say, I accepted. I got to go on the Magical Mystery Tour and see the Yellow Submarine. I got to indulge in the Beatles for a whole weekend, walk where they walked, see where they would’ve played and lived and the environment they grew up in. I have to say, the most exciting part of it all was the Cavern Club. I really got a sense of what it must’ve been like in the 60s.

It was also around this time that I started writing the ‘Mate’ series. I know it seems strange to mention a fanfiction here, but these stories weren’t just another couple of fanfictions to me. Always I’ve been an avid writer, but I’ve never written anything quite as substantial as ‘Though not In Heat I’m Hot For You.’ And with every addition to the series, I upped the word count without even realizing it! It still is such an important step for me as a writer, and it’s all thanks to the Beatles.

What is also all thanks to the Beatles and that fanfiction was my meeting  @savoy-brown-shoe​  We got talking on archive of our own over one of the fics in that series and we’ve been tumblr pen pals ever since. I’m so glad that through an interest of mine, and a project that I spent a lot of time on, I gained a friend <3

So the Beatles continue, just as the Monkees do, to be a big part of my life. Music is to me a stronger connection to memories and moments in my life than things like tastes and smells. It’s funny to think how these bands are nostalgic to me, even though I wasn’t born when they were making music, or alive when they were popular. My Dad always says it’s crazy to think that his daughters listen to the same music as he did when he was a teenager, and it really is. 

[harrisonstories]

First off, the 2018 Mix, Take 5 Instrumental Backing Track, and Esher Demo of Back in the U.S.S.R. are now on Spotify.

Secondly, Rolling Stone just published an article noting the “15 most revelatory moments” by Rob Sheffield, who was lucky enough to be able to listen to the Super Deluxe Edition of The White Album. You can read the full article here. 

[...]  The outtakes defies the conventional wisdom that this is where the band split into four solo artists. “Do you think the perception of the Beatles history has been tainted by their own commentary in the early Seventies?” [Giles] Martin asks. “That’s what I get. I think post-Beatles, when the champagne cork has flown out of the bottle, and they’ve gone their separate ways, they reacted against it. ‘Oh, to be honest we didn’t work well as a group,’ and that sort of thing. Yet they never slowed down creatively. I quite like the idea of them throwing cups of tea at each other in the studio. I’m mildly disappointed not to find it. But what they’re doing is making a record.”

The Deluxe and Super Deluxe Editions finally unveil the Esher demos, which hardcore Beatle freaks have been clamoring to hear for years. In May 1968, just back from India, the group gathered at George’s bungalow in Esher (pronounced “Ee-sher”) to tape unplugged versions of the new songs they’d already stockpiled for the new album. Over the next days, working together or solo, they busked 27 songs. The tapes sat in a suitcase in George’s house for years. Seven tracks came out on Anthology 3; others have never been released in any Beatle version, including John’s “Child of Nature” and George’s “Sour Milk Sea.” The Esher tapes alone make this collection essential, with a fresh homemade intimacy that’s unique. Martin says, “They’re rough takes, but spiritually, the performances stand on their own.”

Here are 15 of the most revelatory moments:

1. “Revolution 1” The legendary Take 18, a nearly 11-minute jam from the first day of the White Album sessions. The other Beatles were surprised to see someone new at John’s side: Yoko Ono, who became a constant presence in the studio. It begins as the version you know from the record: John’s flubbed guitar intro, engineer Geoff Emerick’s “take two,” John’s “okaaay.” But where the original fades out, this one is just getting started. The groove builds as John keeps chanting “all right, all right,” from a low moan to a high scream. Yoko joins the band to add distorted synth feedback, while Paul clangs on piano. She recites prose poetry, fragments of which that ended up in “Revolution 9”: “It’s like being naked…if you become naked.”

The story of this jam has been told many times, usually presented as a grim scene where Yoko barges in, sowing the seeds of discord—the beginning of the end. So it’s a surprise to hear how much fun they’re all having. It ends in a fit of laughter—she nervously asks, “That’s too much?” John tells her it sounds great and Paul agrees: “Yeah, it’s wild!”

2. “Sexy Sadie” As the band warms up, George playfully sings a hook from Sgt. Pepper: “It’s getting better all the tiiiime!” John snorts. “Is it, right?” Take 3 is an acerbic version of “Sexy Sadie,” with Paul doodling on the organ. Yet despite the nasty wit, the band sounds totally in sync. When George asks, “How fast, John?,” he responds, “However you feel it.”

3. “Long, Long, Long” George’s hushed hymn has always been underrated—partly because it’s mastered way too quiet. In the fantastic Take 44, “Long, Long, Long” comes alive as a duet between George and Ringo, with the drums crashing in dialogue with the whispery vocals. Giles Martin explains, “I suppose, as is documented here, George was Ringo’s best friend, as he says. That song is kind of the two of them.” George starts freestyling at the end: “Gathering, gesturing, glimmering, glittering, happening, hovering, humoring, hammering, laquering, lecturing, laboring, lumbering, mirroring…” It closes with the spooky death-rattle chord, originally the sound of a wine bottle vibrating on Paul’s amp. “It still gives you the fear when it comes.”

4. “Good Night” Of all the alternate takes, “Good Night” is the one that will leave most listeners baffled why this wasn’t the version that made the album. Instead of lush strings, it has John’s finger-picking guitar and the whole group harmonizing on the “good night, sleep tight” chorus. It’s rare to hear all four singing together at this stage, and it’s breathtaking in its warmth. “I do prefer this version to the record,” Martin admits. (He won’t be the last to say this.)

John plays the same guitar pattern as “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” That’s one of the distinctive sonic features of the White Album—the Beatles had their acoustic chops in peak condition, since there had been nothing else to do for kicks in Rishikesh. In India, their fellow pilgrim Donovan taught them the finger-picking style of London folkies like Davey Graham. “Donovan taught him this guitar part. John was like ‘great!,’ and then in classic Beatle style, went and wrote three songs using the same guitar part.”

The other “Good Night” takes are closer to the original’s cornball lullaby spirit. In one, Ringo croons over George Martin’s spare piano; in another, he does a spoken-word introduction. “Come on now, put all those toys away—it’s time to jump into bed. Go off into dreamland. Yes, Daddy will sing a song for you.” By the end, he quips, “Ringo’s gone a bit crazy.”

5. “Helter Skelter” This Paul song inspired endless studio jams, lurching into proto-headbang noise—they started it the day after the Yellow Submarine premiere, so maybe they just craved the opposite extreme. This take is 13 minutes of primal thud—remarkably close to Black Sabbath, around the time Sabbath were still in Birmingham inventing their sound.

6. “Blackbird” Paul plays around with the song—“Dark black, dark black, dark black night”—trying to nail the vibe. It isn’t there yet. He tells George Martin, “See, if we’re ever to reach it, I’ll be able to tell you when I’ve just done it. It just needs forgetting about it. It’s a decision which voice to use.” He thinks his way through the song, his then-girlfriend Francie audible in the background. “It’s all in his timing,” Martin says. “There’s two separate things, a great guitarist and a great singer—he’s managed to disconnect and put them back together. He’s trying to work out where they meet.”

7. “Dear Prudence” Of all the Esher demos, “Dear Prudence” might be the one that best shows off their rowdy humor. John ends his childlike reverie by cracking up his bandmates, narrating the tale of Prudence Farrow that inspired the song. “A meditation course in Rishikesh, India,” he declares. “She was to go completely berserk under the care of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Everybody around was very worried about the girl, because she was going insaaaane. So we sang to her.”

8. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” There’s an early acoustic demo, but Take 27, recorded over a month later, rocks harder than the album version—John on organ, Paul on piano, lead guitar from special guest Eric Clapton. (George invited his friend to come play, partly because he knew the others would behave themselves around Clapton.) The groove only falls part when George tries to hit a Smokey Robinson-style high note and totally flubs it. “It’s okay,” George says. “I tried to do a Smokey, and I just aren’t Smokey.”

9. “Hey Jude” Recorded in the midst of the sessions, but planned for a one-off single, Paul’s ballad is still in raw shape, but even in this first take, it’s already designed as a 7-minute epic, with Paul singing the na-na-na outro himself. Another gem on this box: an early attempt at “Let It Be,” with Paul’s original lyric showing his explicit link to American R&B: “When I find myself in times of trouble / Brother Malcolm comes to me.”

10. “Child of Nature” Another treasure from Esher. “Child of Nature” is a gentle ballad John wrote about the retreat to India: “On the road to Rishikesh / I was dreaming more or less.” He scrapped it for the album, but dug it back out a few years later, wrote new words, and turned it into one of his most famous solo tunes: “Jealous Guy.”

11. “JULIA” One of John’s most intimate confessions—the only Beatle track where he’s performing all by himself. You can hear his nerves as he sits with his guitar and asks George Martin, in a jokey Scouse accent, “Is it better standing up, do you think? It’s very hard to sing this, you know.” The producer reassures him. “It’s a very hard song, John.” “‘Julia’ was one of my dad’s favorites,” Giles says. “When I began playing guitar in my teens, he told me to learn that one.”

12. “Can You Take Me Back?” The snippet on Side Four that serves as an eerie transition into the abstract sound-collage chaos of “Revolution 9.” Paul toys with it for a couple of minutes, trying to flesh it out into a bit of country blues—“I ain’t happy here, my honey, are you happy here?”

13. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” Paul spent a week driving the band through this ditty, until John finally stormed out of the studio. He returned a few hours later, stoned out of his mind, then banged on the piano in a rage, coming up with the jingle-jangle intro that gets the riff going. This early version is pleasant but overly smooth—it shows why the song really did need that nasty edge. A perfect example of the Beatle collaborative spirit: John might loathe the song, Paul might resent John’s sabotage, but both care too deeply about the music not to get it right.

14. “Sour Milk Sea” A great George highlight from the Esher tapes—“Sour Milk Sea” didn’t make the cut for the album, but he gave it to Liverpool pal Jackie Lomax who scored a one-shot hit with it. (It definitely deserved to rank ahead of “Piggies,” which remains the weakest track on any version of this album.) “Not Guilty” and “Circles” are other George demos that fell into limbo—“Not Guilty” sounds ready to go at Esher, yet in the studio, it was doomed to over a hundred fruitless takes.

15. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” A tricky experiment they learned together in the studio, with John toying with the structure and his mock doo-wop falsetto. “Is anybody finding it easier?” he asks. “It seems a little easier—it’s just no fun, but it’s easier.” George pipes in. “Easier and fun.” John replies, “Oh, all right, if you insist.” It’s a moment that sums up all the surprising discoveries on this White Album edition: a moment where the Beatles find themselves at the edge of the unknown, with no one to count on except each other. But that’s when they inspire each other to charge ahead and greet the brand new day.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Joshua Stamper

Photo by Christopher McDonald

After 25 years composing and arranging, Joshua Stamper’s versatility remains as notable as ever. The artist moves fluidly from classical to indie-rock to chamber music and more. While collaborating with acts like mewithoutYou and Robyn Hitchcock or scoring films, he manages to release his own work, too. Reviewing Stamper’s most recent release, Justin Cober-Lake described PRIMEMOVER as a “soundtrack for a particular kind of year in the church life, one with puzzles and rest, beauty and complication.” His work, as with PRIMEMOVER or his new Elements project, tends to be multidisciplinary, with Stamper incorporating an array of influences from outside music. With his breadth of input and output, it's no surprise that Stamper would offer us a list that includes music, visual art, philosophy, and poetry.

Thierry De Mey — “Unknowness, for percussion and sampling: Love Function is to Fabricate Unknowness”

My brother gave me Thierry De Mey’s Kinok for my birthday about twenty years ago. He bought it on the strength of the album cover alone. It’s a record I have returned to dozens of times. “Unknowness” is utterly arresting — a deep and loose sway juxtaposed with startling percussive gestures as unpredictable as ricocheting gunshots. It is all swing, mystery, magic, and space. I feel when listening that I am reduced to sub-atomic scale, where mountains of granite become a gossamer mesh that I move through as a stroll in the park, looking at trees that are freeze-frame explosions.

John Cage — “Water Walk”

4'33" is a popular punching bag for Cage critics. The piece is derided as an adolescent practical joke from an impertinent child of a composer who gets his kicks deliberately wasting audiences’ time. “It's not music” is the common refrain, but the complaint behind the complaint is that it is alienating; that the only way in which the piece facilitates communal experience is that everyone feels on the outside of an inside joke.

When I was younger, I shared this impatience with Cage. Then I came across “Water Walk,” a piece premiered in January 1960 on the popular TV game show I’ve Got A Secret. My view of John Cage and his music were both upended, instantly and utterly. Instead of a preening and pretentious provocateur I encountered a playful and guileless individual filled with wonder; one who took unfettered joy in people, invention, and the sheer fact of sound.

In the space of one viewing, 4'33" shifted from an insolent and self-satisfied prank to a concentrated celebration of community and sound — a wide-eyed invitation to pause, together, all of us here sharing this space, LISTEN, all of us here sharing this space, together, pause. My self-righteousness shattered. All becomes music. I haven't heard anything the same way since.

I’ve since spent a great deal of time with his writing, lectures, poems, prints and music, and wonder how I could have ever thought ill of the man's intentions. It may seem obvious, but Cage taught me that an artist’s own life is the clearest interpretative lens through which to understand their work.

Prince and the Revolution — “I Wonder U” (from Parade)

Sgt. Pepper-esque sound design, kaleidoscopic orchestral arrangements, the hushed voices of Prince, Wendy and Lisa riding on a composite groove of such integrity and force that it sounds like it's forged from steel...

I first encountered Prince’s Parade the summer between my high-school graduation and my first year of college. “I Wonder U” is less than two minutes long, but I was stopped in my tracks. The song feels like the liminal space between dreaming and waking, at once welcoming and dangerous, where multiple musics converge like Charles Ives’ double marching bands destined for head-on collision. Discreet melodies and rhythms and keys bleed in and out of each other, but also exist as vital layers in a larger whole. It's a hypnotizing 3-D sonic Venn diagram.

My decision to major in composition was set.

Jasper Johns — “Regrets”, 2013, oil on canvas

Jasper Johns said, “I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final statement has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.”

“a helpless statement” – I find myself breathing deeper and slower with Johns’ words, grateful for the reminder that before anything else, art making must be grounded in vulnerability and weakness. The hope and the challenge in Johns’ words is its call to distillation, to get to the heart of the heart of the heart of a matter, where there is simply nothing else that can be said. The process of distillation even involves the shedding of all those things we sometimes mistake for the work itself: craft, expertise, training, credential. There’s a threshold that must be crossed, a moment of lift-off where will and deliberation are left behind and the work takes flight on what is inevitable, as involuntary as a cry or a laugh.

Palestrina — “Missa Brevis”

“Painting is time, music is space.” So said one of my brother’s undergrad art professors. Of course, you’d expect the opposite, as space is the context in which painting exists while time is the fundamental warp and woof of music. But my most profound experiences with music are always characterized by new spaces being revealed or created. By “space,” I don't mean some state of cerebral or emotional revelry. I mean real, actual space — with dimensions. A space that’s shocking in its physicality. This happens to me constantly.

My first experience of Palestrina’s “Missa Brevis” was in a choir rehearsal in my junior year of high-school. It was a catalytic event. A braid of interweaving melodies and counter-melodies emerged, enveloping me and everyone else singing, and the room seemed to expand. I wanted more. The vocational pull to become a musician was like being swept out to sea.

Every time I return to this piece, I experience this expansion. The patient dip and rising of every “Kyrie,” “eleison” and “in excelsis” creates its own cosmology, its own dimensions and gravity. Our relationship to time is also a relationship to space; their woven-ness is inextricable. The space-time continuum isn't just a physics thing.

Ann Hamilton — The Event of A Thread

Years ago, I had the opportunity to experience The Event of A Thread by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. A massive silk that moves like water or vapor, a field of swings, a record stylus, wooden crates of live pigeons, paper scrolls spilling onto the floor, a ceiling peppered with pulleys, bags of words and sacks of sound... It's difficult to describe the piece, in either its scope or particulars, but I became a child.

In Ann Hamilton's discussion of the piece, she says, “It happened because a space was made for it to happen.” The inverse implication of this statement is that if space isn't made, things won’t happen. In my experience, solitude, reflection, exploration and craft are so easily bullied by the crush of life and of calendars, but Hamilton’s observation presses an urgent case for the care and protection of these kinds of spaces to think and puzzle and make. How much wonder, play, rest, and beauty could exist only for want of a place to exist?

So, with that, “it happened because a space was made for it to happen” – my working manifesto.

Mary Oliver — Upstream (Section One: “Of Power and Time”)

“It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone, or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.”

The untroubled waters of a day whose promises have yet to unfold are not untroubled for very long. But the most persistent interruptions are those that come, as Oliver describes, “not from another, but from the self itself.” The resonance for me is deep.

In a 2015 On Being interview, Mary Oliver tells a story about when she learned she had received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (she didn't even know that her latest, American Primitive, had been submitted for the award): she was at the town dump looking to buy shingles to shingle a roof with. A painter friend of hers came by, joking, “Ha, what are you doing? Looking for your old manuscripts?”. Oliver just laughed and continued looking. When recounting the story to Krista Tippett, she chuckled and said, “...my job in the morning was to go find some shingles.”

To simply be dedicated to the work of the day, to be unmoved and uninterrupted by either rejection or by accolade represents a degree of settledness that I find very beautiful and very challenging.

She was known for writing while she was walking...

Ludwig Wittgenstein / Wendell Berry — “How to Be a Poet”

To continue on the subject of the working life, last night I came across a beautifully concise quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein that speaks to a consistent tension I experience: the urgency to cultivate the solitary and silent spaces required for thinking and working, and a loud and frenetic pull in the opposite direction to “produce” (to what end? - I constantly find myself asking). He simply says: “I can only think clearly in the dark."

This sentiment is echoed in Wendell Berry's proverb-like poem “How to Be a Poet” (wit and wisdom go together well):

“...Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgement.” [...]

“Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.”[...]

“...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.”

Both Wittgenstein and Berry cut against the grain of popular priorities of content-creation, audience-building, beating the algorithms and cutting through the noise (again, to what end?). Instead, they throw open a window to the generous gifts and glories of a life lived in obscurity.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy’s work re-convinced me that art has power. That it is able, for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, to create or reveal a different way of inhabiting the world, of inhabiting one's own humanity. My introduction to Goldsworthy was a documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer called Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time. I watched tall stone cairns being built on the beach, slowly and carefully, only to be disassembled by the gentle but unremitting incoming tide. I was transfixed by bright yellow leaves stitched together and set loose along a creak, moving like a lazy water snake, wending around rocks and logs and gradually twisting and breaking apart. Balls of bright red dust thrown into the air to form dissipating crimson clouds; delicate stick-curtains collapsing at the breath of a breeze; one-ton snowballs on a London summer day, melting to water and then to air.

As Westerners we tend towards a conception of beauty that is extremely specific, a precise and particular point in time: the crest of a wave, a flower that's just bloomed, a new car rolling off the truck at the dealership, a man or a woman at twenty-five... But Goldsworthy's work does something different. It includes these moments but also folds them into something larger. One begins to see the whole story of a thing, from its initial conception all the way to its inevitable fading or destruction, and all of it is beautiful. This changes everything.

I recognize in myself a preference for the promise of a thing more than the reality of a thing, but as I interact with Goldsworthy’s work my understanding of beauty is slowly and gently disassembled, like one of his beach cairns. It is replaced with a widened aperture, a more charitable and hospitable read of the people and the world around, and I'm welcomed into a more generous way of being.

Ornette Coleman — “What Reason Could I Give” (from Science Fiction)

Jane Austin’s Mr. Knightley says to Emma Woodhouse, “If I loved you less, I could talk about it more...”

All I can say about this piece: I’m fully convinced that this is what angels sound like.

[mclennunf]

Hey idk if you're still doing prompts so please forgive me if you aren't! But I was hoping maybe you could do a fic about George and Ringo slowly realising that John and Paul are together? Like they keep seeing these little moments and then they either see something or both kind of are like...... wait wut. Idk? Sorry if this is a weird prompt!! (Also I love your writing, it's amazing, thank you for blessing this fandom)

It took a long time. 

It took a shockingly long time. 

It was right in front of them the entire time. Years and years George Harrison and Ringo Starr watched the phenomenon that was the famous John Lennon and Paul McCartney from the middle of the four headed monster, but from the side lines of the real relationship between the two. They had watched the long nights of rehearsing, watching the sweat drip off their foreheads, hearing their laughter bounce off the walls and echo throughout the walls of the Cavern. George and Ringo had also watched the long nights of fighting, watched the two men tear each other apart because they were the only ones who knew how to tear the other’s world apart. George watched Paul come to school with bags under his eyes after spending the entire night writing songs with John. Ringo watched the two walk to Paul’s home in Cavendish together after a day of recording nearly every single day in 1967. 

Paul and John were relatively shocked they had kept it a secret from the two people they were closest two other than each other for nearly 10 years. George had questioned their relationship for the first time in 1961. It was October, which happens to be the month Mr. John Lennon was brought into this world. So, for his birthday he was given 100 pounds by a rich Auntie. John decided to take off to Spain with Paul, but they only made it as far as Paris. The most romantic place on Earth. That was when George had questioned their relationship for the first time. Why take your mate, when he could’ve taken his girlfriend at the time? George thought it was rubbish. Perhaps they wanted to get away from the band.. But his initial assumption was right all along, wasn’t it?Ringo had questioned their relationship when the Beatles were recording A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. The band had gathered in the studio to listen to John play a song he wanted on the album. Ringo and George had shown up a bit late, but Paul and John were already there, huddled together on the piano bench tinkering away at the keys. “Right, let’s hear it then.” George instructed as he sat on a stool. As John began to play the song that would henceforth be called “If I Fell”, Ringo saw the exchanging looks between Paul and John. Ringo heard the lyrics to the song. He often wondered to this day if George had the same experience of accusations running wild in his mind about their two dearest friends and band mates as he did. He did.

George and Ringo discussed their thoughts about the true nature of Paul and John’s relationship for the first time in 1965 whilst on tour in America. Paul and John had gone to their shared hotel room early that night to write songs. To which George and Ringo always believed, but they now know that writing songs wasn’t always the case. Ringo and George had been drinking that night. George could never keep up to the drummer’s pace of drinking no matter how hard he tried. This particular night was a drunken one. Ringo was still relatively sober, feeling a buzz, but nowhere near as intoxicated as Harrison was. “I reckon Paul ‘n John are more than song writing partners.” George had suddenly blurted out in the middle of a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with the two men. 

Ringo was shocked to hear the words out loud at first. He’d only ever silently contemplated the possibility of Paul and John to himself. To hear his best mate say the words out loud was a shocking relief. “So it’s not just me then!” Ringo and George burst out laughing. They didn’t further discuss it. Mostly because it hadn’t been long after that George had passed out drunk, but also because they didn’t think it was their place to discuss it. The next morning when they ran into a giggly Paul and John in the hotel lobby, Ringo and George suddenly remembered the brief conversation they had about the two and nodded at each other, silently agreeing that it would stay between them. 

They hadn’t discussed it again until the day Paul and John hadn’t shown up to the studio in 1967. They were in the middle of recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and George and Ringo had never been more shocked in their lives when the two didn’t show. This album was Paul’s baby, and anything that Paul loved, John loved too. George had suggested he and Ringo walk over to Cavendish to see what was going on, and Ringo agreed. They didn’t bother calling John before they left because John had basically been living at Paul’s house since late 1966, they assumed he was there. George and Ringo were nearly arriving at Cavendish when a very familiar, very fluffy face was barreling toward them. “Martha?!” Ringo crouched down and greeted her. “What on Earth are you doing out here on the street without Paul?!” He asked her, secretly wishing she could respond. The two men pet her gently for a few moments before carrying on to Cavendish, Martha close at Ringo’s side. George always teased that the only reason Martha liked Ringo better than him was because she was bigger than Ringo, and he needed her protecting. 

“The bloody door is wide open!” George pointed as the they walked up to the house. Ringo put a finger to his lips, gesturing for George to shut his big mouth. They walked into the house quietly and slowly, waiting for a crazed fan to pop out of a closet. When Paul’s bedroom door finally opened, John walked out with his hair astray, no glasses on his face, wearing nothing but an over-sized t-shirt. He froze as he made eye contact with George and Ringo. “Babe? What’s the matter, then?” They heard Paul’s tired voice call from behind John. When he appeared, touching John’s waist, he immediately jumped back and widened his eyes. That was one of the first times that the all famous band of musicians, The Beatles, stayed absolutely silent for more than a minute while being in the same room. Finally, John broke the tension. “Well, cat’s out of the bag then, innit?” He rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. Paul hid his face in his hand before gesturing for Ringo and George to sit down at the table while he made tea, after making John put pants on of course. The Lennon-McCartney duo then proceeded to tell their story. The real story. The way they felt when they met. John had described it as two souls that had been searching for each other. George noticed Paul blush at that. Paul told them about their first kiss in Paris. Paul also explained that the door was open because John was way too eager to get his hands on him and he left the bloody door open when they returned from the Supermarket.  Ringo and George stayed silent the whole time until finally Paul couldn’t stand their silence any longer. “Please, for the love of all that is holy, say something.” Paul’s voice was low but shaky. 

“It’s funny, we talked about this two years ago, didn’t we Ritchie?” George shifted the mood of the room with voice dripping with humour. “That we were, I believe you owe me money, son!” Ringo joked back. “Hey, you bet against them, not me!” Paul and John were extremely relieved that their two best friends had decided to handle their secret with such delicacy, the one thing that held the Beatles together other than love, humour. “We love ya’s no matter what, and it’ll stay with us to our graves if that’s what you want.” Ringo told them as he covered one of their hands with his own. 

It took a long time for George and Ringo to find out the truth about the real relationship between Lennon and McCartney.

It took a shockingly long time. But they were happy for them nonetheless.

[prehistoricsounds]

This week's arrivals!

New releases from Arctic Monkeys "Live At The Albert Hall", Black Mekon "The Lumpiness Of Demand", Peep Tempel's Blake Scott has released his debut solo LP "Niscitam", You Am I's Davey Lane "Don't Bank Your Heart On It", Hatebreed "Weight Of The False Self", Hugo Race & The True Spirit "Star Birth Star Death", Metal Supergroup Killer Be Killed "Reluctant Hero", We've imported a couple of versions of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard "Live In San Francisco" the Eco-vinyl version and the deluxe edition. The studio album K.G. is still a couple of weeks away I'm told. Macabre "Carnival Of Killers", Two NOFX releases "The Decline Live At Red Rocks" and a split LP with Frank Turner "West Coast Vs. Wessex". Motorhead's Phil Campbell and The Bastard Sons "We're The Bastards" and Yungblud "Weird!"

Reissues and Legacy releases from Jimi Hendrix "Live In Maui", Bag Raiders, Cosmic Psychos, Buckcherry, Gary Moore and a whole bunch of Fat Wreck Chords releases. Plus loads of restocks

A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders [LP] (sold) AC/DC - PWR UP [LP] Against Me! - As The Eternal Cowboy [LP] Alice In Chains - Facelift [2LP] Anti Flag - The Terror State [LP] Arctic Monkeys - Live At The Royal Albert Hall (Clear) [2LP] Bad Cop/Bad Cop - Warriors [LP] Bag Raiders - Bag Raiders (10th Anniversary) [LP] Bee Gees - Best Of The Bee Gees [LP] Billie Eilish - When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go [LP] Black Mekon - The Lumpiness Of Demand [LP] Blake Scott - Niscitam [LP] Bob Marley - Babylon By Bus [2LP] Bruce Springsteen - Born In The USA [LP] Bruce Springsteen - Letter To You [2LP] Buckcherry - Buckcherry (Clear W/Red & Yel Swirl) [LP] Cosmic Psychos - Blokes You Can Trust (Pink) [LP] Cosmic Psychos - Blokes You Can Trust (White) [LP] Cosmic Psychos - Blokes You Can Trust [CD] Cosmic Psychos - Loudmouth Soup [LP] Cosmic Psychos - Self Totalled [CD] D12 - D12 World [2LP] Davey Lane - Don't Bank Your Heart On It [LP] Dicklord - It's Soooo Boring [LP] Elton John - Diamonds [2LP] Emma Swift - Blonde On The Tracks [LP] Gary Moore - Bad For You Baby [2LP] Gary Moore - Close As You Get [2LP] Gary Moore - Old New Ballad Blues [2LP] Hatebreed - Weight Of The False Self [LP] Helmet - Meantime (Red/Blue) [LP] Hugo Race & The True Spirit - Star Birth Star Death [LP] INXS - Dekadance [LP] Jimi Hendrix Experience - Live In Maui [3LP+BLU] John Coltrane - Sun Ship [LP] Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid M.A.A.D. City [2LP] Killer Be Killed - Reluctant Hero [2LP] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana (Yellow) [LP] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Live In San Francisco '16 (Deluxe:Fog/Sunburst) [2LP] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Live In San Francisco '16 (Random) [2LP] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity (Yel/Red/Blk) [LP] Leftover Crack - Constructs Of The State [LP] Lime Cordiale - Permanent Vacation [LP] Lime Cordiale - Relapse Box Set: New Recordings Only [2LP Box] Lime Cordiale – 14 Steps To A Better You [LP] Macabre - Carnival Of Killers [LP] Machine Gun Kelly - Bloom [LP] (sold) Macy Gray - Ruby [LP] Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Purple) [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Are A Drag [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Are We Not Men? We Are Diva! [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Blow In The Wind [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Have A Ball [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Rake It In: The Greatest Hits [LP] Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Ruin Johnny's Barmitvah [LP] Misfits - Legacy Of Brutality [LP] Mulatu Astatke & Black Jesus - To Know Without Knowing [LP] N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton [LP] No Doubt - Rock Steady [2LP] No Use For A Name - All The Best Songs [2LP] NOFX - Ribbed: Live In A Dive [LP] NOFX - The Decline [LP] NOFX - The Decline Live At Red Rocks [LP] NOFX / Frank Turner - West Coast Vs. Wessex [LP] Oasis - (What's The Story) Morning Glory [2LP] (sold) Oasis - Definitely Maybe (25th Anniversary) [2LP] (sold) Olafur Arnalds - Some Kind Of Peace [LP] (sold) Pearl Jam - Riot Act [2LP] Pearl Jam - Ten [LP] Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons - We're The Bastards [2LP] Pink Floyd - Animals [LP] Pink Floyd - Delicate Sound Of Thunder (Remix) [3LP] PJ Harvey - Rid Of Me [LP] PJ Harvey – 4 Track Demos [LP] Propagandhi - Potemkin City Limits [LP] Propagandhi - Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes [LP] Queen - Greatest Hits [2LP] Rammstein - Herzeleid [2LP] (sold) Ravi Shankar - The Rough Guide To Ravi Shankar [LP] (sold) Rob Zombie - Sinister Urge (Pic Disc) [LP] Rush - Permanent Waves [LP] San Cisco - Between You And Me [LP] Shepparton Airplane - Sharks [LP] sleepmakeswaves - Not An Exit [EP] (sold) sleepmakeswaves - Out Of Hours [EP] (sold) Stella Donnelly - Beware Of The Dogs [LP] Sticky Fingers - Land Of Pleasure / Caress Your Soul [2LP] The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (2017 New Stereo Remix) [LP] The Budos Band - Long In The Tooth [LP] The Hu - The Gereg (Cream) [LP] (sold) The Mothers Of Invention (Zappa) - Freak Out! [2LP] The Offspring - Ixnay On The Hombre [LP] The Real McKenzies - Two Devils Will Talk [LP] The Rolling Stones - Voodoo Lounge Uncut (Red) [3LP] The Vandals - Live Fast Diarrhea [LP] The Verve - Northern Soul [2LP] TISM - For Those About To Rock [7"] Trouble - Manic Frustration [LP] (sold) Tyler, The Creator - Igor [LP] Various - Blue Note Re:Imagined [2LP] (sold) Various - Mild In The Streets: Fat Music Unplugged [LP] Yungblud - Weird! [LP] Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Tea For The Tillerman 2 [LP] (sold)

[robrob1127]

The Monkees Micky Dolenz Returns to the Sellersville Theater By Rob Nagy Micky Dolenz is no stranger to celebrity. The former childhood star rose to international acclaim in the late 60s as a member of pop sensations the Monkees. Featuring Micky Dolenz (vocals/drums/ keyboards), Michael Nesmith (guitar/ vocals), Davey Jones ( vocals/ percussion, and Peter Tork (bass/ vocals/ keyboards), the Monkees recorded and released some of the decades most popular hits, a list that includes “Last Train to Clarksville”, “Daydream Believer”, “I’m A Believer”, and “Pleasant Valley Sunday”. Starring in their self-titled TV show, the Monkees were guests in millions of American living rooms every week. Attaining instant superstar status that, at the time, could go head to head with any rock group, they were a breath of fresh air during one of the most challenging times this country. America needed an escape from the escalating Vietnam War, the assassination of political and religious leaders, and racial tensions, and the Monkees were happy to oblige.

“I feel so blessed to have been cast into that television show and everything that has come along with it,” reflects Micky Dolenz, from his home in West Hills, CA. “To be part of that cast and having all of those incredible writers not just the screenwriters for the TV show, but the songwriters. How can you go wrong with Boyce and Hart, Carole King, David Gates, Paul Williams, and Harry Nilsson. So when I go out and sing those songs it’s always a pleasure because those people didn’t write too many bad tunes.”  “They were produced, sung and performed well, that has to be at the top of the list,” adds Dolenz. “The television show can’t be disregarded. It had a hell of a pedigree of people that we're writing, producing, directing, it all came together at the right time like the perfect storm. One of the producers said when asked that question, “You know we just caught lightning in a bottle.” You can’t break it down in a scientific sense. The whole becomes greater than all of its parts, and that’s what happened with the Monkees, something just clicked.”

The Monkees TV show enjoyed high ratings during its first two seasons in 1966, and 1967. The show won two Emmy awards for the first season for “Outstanding Comedy Series” and “Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy”. The Monkees went on their first U.S. concert tour latter part of 1966 to the spring of 1967 followed by more U.S. and U.K. tour dates that summer. The late guitar god Jimi Hendrix opened for them on seven of their U.S. concert dates. The Monkees also went on to star in their feature film, Head, in 1968. All good things often come to an end, and the Monkees craze was no exception. Their TV show ultimately went into syndication and Dolenz, Nesmith, Jones, and Tork moved on to pursue their individual musical and business interests.   

Dolenz returned to his roots of stage acting and directing.  A three-month commitment in London, England in the late 70s to star in the musical The Point!  turned into a twelve-year residency working as a producer-director for the BBC and London Weekend Television. 

“After the Monkees, I decided not to attempt to continue with a solo songwriting career,” recalls Dolenz. “I lived a very peaceful rock and roll country mansion life in England. I had children and a family. I became known as Michael Dolenz the producer-director rather than ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz. I did nothing but direct, produce and write television shows and movies. I wasn’t fighting my history. I wasn’t one of those people changing their path to reinvent themselves. I understand how that can be very frustrating, they call it typecasting, and it also happens in music. You have a hit record or an album and they want you to do the same thing again.” 

MTV rebroadcast episode of The Monkees in 1986, reigniting their career, for a time, to a new generation of fans. Dolenz returned to the states and teamed up with Tork to record the single “That Was Then, This Is Now”.  Fueled by this single became their first Top 20 since 1968, Dolenz, Tork, and Jones embarked on a highly successful U.S. summer concert tour.

Dolenz multiple talents have found him performing sporadic concert tours with his old bandmates, stage acting, directing, producing, authoring books, appearing as a guest on radio and talk shows, and cameo appearances in a variety of popular TV shows. In 1993, Micky's autobiography I'm A Believer: My Life Of Monkees, Music and Madness (Hyperion/Disney) was published. Most recently, Dolenz performed the song “Perfectly Beautiful Day” on the tribute disc entitled Thank You, Mister Rogers.

In the fall of 2019, Dolenz joined by Todd Rundgren, Christopher Cross and Joey Molland (Badfinger), on “It Was Fifty Years Ago Today” concert tour commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ White Album. "It was fantastic,” says Dolenz. “There were some heavy hitters on that tour, and I think I held my own. It was nice not having to carry the whole show because usually, I do. I grew up with those songs. The White Album to me was just such a monster, frankly, all of the Beatles songs were, I was a huge Beatles fan.”  

“I was at a few of their original recording sessions” Recalls Dolenz. “I was in England meeting the Beatles for the first time, it was a press op kind of thing, and I was having dinner with Paul and he just said, ‘We’re Recording tomorrow do you want to come by? And they happened to be doing the tracking for “Good Morning Good Morning”. I was also at a Sgt. Pepper session.” “I’m going to be doing quite a few Beatles songs,” says Dolenz. “I’ve decided now that I’ve done the White Album tour to throw in some more, ‘cause now I have a little bit of a story to go along with it. I also do “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry because it was my audition piece for the Monkeys. That was the song that got me the gig. Of course, I’ll be doing all the Monkees hits, I always do. So if you like the Monkees and the Beatles you will not be disappointed.”

Following the passing of Peter Tork in 2019, Davey Jones had passed away in 2012, Dolenz and Nesmith contemplated going on tour as a duo.

“Davey’s passing was a big shock, there was no warning for that one,” recalls Dolenz. “Peter had let everyone know he was having serious health challenges, so that was not as big of a shock. Even though we knew that was coming I had my doubts and my concerns, so did Mike. We had gone on the road with Peter and David, all different configurations. We talked about it and thought, ‘What do we do?’  Fortunately, I sang the great majority of the songs, so we had that. Mike wrote some wonderful songs during the Monkee period and also wrote some wonderful songs for other artists. So we went out and tested it. We started doing those songs and celebrating the two of us and the Monkees. We got a very good response and got very good reviews, which is the important thing. I guess the buyers were happy because they bought it again in April of this year, and again in the fall.”  

"The vast majority of the audience are original fans,” adds Dolenz. “There are always two or three generations in the audience ‘cause of seeing the TV show and listening to our music. I’m very careful to do the songs as they were recorded so people can sing along and revisit their childhood.”  

Rhino Records recorded five of last years Dolenz and Nesmith live shows. To coincide with their impending concert tour, “An Evening With The Monkees”, Rhino Records is releasing The Monkees – The Mike & Micky Show Live on April 3, 2020.

Micky Dolenz, wit special guest the Mark Evans Band, performs at the Sellersville Theater located at 24 West Temple Avenue, Sellersville, PA, February 22, 2020, at 3:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M. Tickets can be purchased by calling (215) 257-5808 or online at www.st94.com

To stay up to date with Micky Dolenz visit www.mickydolenz.com To stay up to date with the Mark Evans Band visit www.markevansband.com

[jacobpaulnielsen]

The Black Parade

Prompt: Write a 1,000-word album review of a record you’ve never heard in a genre you’re not familiar with.

I’ve always really, really hated emo music. The huge guitars and undeniable hooks are the same things that made me love a lot of bands, so I’m not entirely sure why I have such a distaste for it. The genre is famous for songs about depression, self-loathing, and heartbreak. None of these topics are out of place on a Neil Young, Smashing Pumpkins, or Radiohead record; all people that have been important to me at one time or another. And yet, something about this genre has always rubbed me the wrong way. I can't really put my finger on it. So for this assignment, I decided to challenge myself and do a deep dive into The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.

Initially, my reaction to the album was less than stellar. I tore the album apart. I actually wrote, "On The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance tried their best to strike the right balance of music just edgy enough to appeal to suburban teens but not rebellious enough to actually provoke forward movement." Bold words coming from someone that's never sold a record, let alone written a song.

I wanted to do some research on the band before I really started writing the review in earnest, and it seemed like Life on the Murder Scene, the 2006 documentary on the band was a great place to start. I’m glad that I did. The film really changed my perception of the band and the album. I came to find out that MCR has the same narrative as the bands that were subjects of VH1's Behind the Music series. Like their predecessors, the band was plagued with the pressures of fame and drug addiction. It’s a Classic Rock story. It’s Rocket Man and Almost Famous and all of those other legends that follow the same classic rock mythos that inspired us to want to take over the world when we were kids.

So on this review, I challenged myself to find out how The Black Parade fits into the mythical schema of what's been dubbed "classic rock," because - like it or not - it does.

With 2006’s The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance created a Classic Rock masterpiece. Considering that Classic Rock as a genre mostly stopped progressing in the early to mid-80s, this might be a strange concept. However, the elements that make Classic Rock so pervasive in American music are all found on this record, too. It’s not a stretch to say that My Chemical Romance is the natural evolution of established and accepted Classic Rock artists like Kiss or Alice Cooper. MCR fans would probably shudder at the idea of their favorite band being lumped into the same category as bands that their parents listened to, but the similarities are striking: mythical lyrics, dramatic stage shows, power ballads, and - most importantly - mystery. Their image of a goth band gone punk evokes the same feelings that captivated teenagers when Kiss released Destroyer in 1976. And the image worked - their major-label debut was certified platinum just a year after its release. In his book Twilight of the Gods, Steven Hyden defines classic rock as “a particular era of music signified by bands who may or may not be shitty”. This definition is important if we’re going to consider The Black Parade for Classic Rock canon. There is a definitive line that can be drawn between Classic Rock as a genre and a classic rock album. The Velvet Underground & Nico is a classic rock album, whereas Bad Company is a Classic Rock album. Furthermore, there are recurring themes within the Classic Rock genre that appear throughout all of the essential Classic Rock albums. Let’s take a look at three of those essential elements of Classic Rock and see how The Black Parade measures up.

Grandiose Lyrics About Heartbreak, Love, Death, and Youth

“Carry on my wayward son There'll be peace when you are done Lay your weary head to rest Don't you cry no more”

Kansas. The band responsible for hits such as “Point of Know Return,” and “Dust in the Wind,” are one of several bands that came to embody Classic Rock. Given this definition and the ambiguous use of their music in Will Farrell movies, Kansas could very well be the defining Classic Rock band. Despite how “shitty” (as Hyden so lovingly puts it) Kansas is, we love them to this day. According to Louder Than Sound, Carry on Wayward Son was the number one song on classic rock radio in 1997. Since then it’s logged more than two million downloads.

But why?

These aren’t politically conscious lyrics. There’s no hidden meaning here. There’s no call for peace or change. These are just lyrics that, quite simply, feel good to sing out loud at a concert with fellow fans. The words just create this feeling of belonging. The same is true for the (almost) title track of The Black Parade. This is a song that was made to be played in front of a crowd.

One of the great things about Classic Rock is that the lyrics really seem to be made for the fans. They’re the right words sang in the right cadence. That’s it. These are words that just sing well. As a result, it’s really the fans that interpret the lyrics and ultimately take ownership of them. So when you take these lyrics from “Welcome to the Black Parade,” it’s obvious that Gerard Way didn’t actually have this conversation with his dad at a parade. Real people don’t talk like that. But damn those lyrics do make you feel some kind of way, don’t they?

Call to Arms

The Call to Arms is a song that asks the fans to get together and stand for something. It’s a song that says “let’s go take over the world.” A true Call to Arms, as it relates to the Classic Rock genre isn’t a zeitgeist, but the opaque lyrics do have a sense of urgency about them. More than any other song, these are the ones that give the fans a sense of identity and community. It’s a war cry. It’s a song that you would put on your workout playlist or you’d hear at a hockey game. It’s Immigrant Song, Seven Nation Army, and We Will Rock You. In the case of MCR, it’s Teenagers.

Teenagers, it’s probably the best example of a straightforward Classic Rock song on the album. Guitarist Ray Toro begins the song with a typical E minor blues riff before the whole band locks in with Bob Bryar’s classic beat and the song erupts. On the Live in Mexico DVD, their touring keyboardist even accompanies them with a very Stones-y piano part. And is that a cowbell Bob is playing during the breakdown? It’s a testament to the band’s bravery that they wrote a song like this in the first place. It’s a testament to their talent that it actually worked; it’s a staple in their set fourteen years later.

The Concept Album

It started in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper and it still continues to this day. It’s not surprising, given Gerard Way’s love of comic books and horror films, that he was drawn to the idea of a concept album. Originally titled The Rise and Fall of My Chemical Romance, this record opened up a whole world of possibilities for MCR. Given how the concept album lends itself to a particularly theatrical nature (see The Wall), it suddenly made sense for My Chemical Romance to integrate theatrics into the live performances supporting the album. Donned in black marching band uniforms and makeup for the tour, the live performances of songs from this album were like a marriage between David Bowie and Alice Cooper.

True Classic Rock artists are not merely people. They are Greek Gods. I’m finishing this post on the heels on Neil Peart’s death, of which Taylor Hawkins wrote “Neil Peart had the hands of God. End of Story.” Peart isn’t the first Classic Rocker to be compared to God, nor will he be the last. The genre is absolutely drenched in mystique, folklore, and larger than life stories of how the Gods came to be and the creations they made. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Paul McCartney died and the Beatles told us about it. Led Zeppelin recorded their legendary fourth album in a haunted mansion. Not unlike their heroes, My Chemical Romance has draped all that they do in as much mystique as the 21st century can allow. Not unlike The Spiders from Mars, My Chemical Romance often performed under the name The Black Parade. And not unlike Kiss, the band performed in costume. The cryptic announcements surrounding MCR’s reunion shows and the impending new album has caused hysteria among their fans. It can’t be more clear that their vast and devoted fanbase considers them absolute superheroes - and that’s really the whole of what truly makes a band a Classic Rock band. If classic rock was what you were looking for in 2006, you could find it alive and well with My Chemical Romance.

[beatlebob64]

Q&A with Paul McCartney about the Sgt. Pepper album that took place at Abbey Road’s Studio Two – the very room where the album was recorded! PaulMcCartey.com [PMc]: Do you remember coming up with the cover and band concepts? We understand that the original concept came from you doing a doodle on a plane based around an Edwardian military band? Paul McCartney [PM]: Yeah! Well, what really happened was I was coming back from a trip abroad with our roadie, Mal Evans, just the two of us together on the plane. And we were eating and he mumbled to me, asked me to pass the salt and pepper. And I misheard him. He said [mumbles] “saltandpepper”. I go, “Sergeant Pepper?” I thought he said, “Sergeant Pepper”. I went, “Oh! Wait a minute, that’s a great idea!” So we had a laugh about it, then I started thinking about Sergeant Pepper as a character. I thought it would be a very interesting idea for us to assume alter egos for this album we were about to make.

So that’s what we did. And yeah, I started doing drawings of how the band might look. I sort of got this military look thing going and one of my ideas was that they were being presented by the Lord Mayor of some Northern town in a park. And in the old days they used to have floral clocks, they called them. It was like a clock that was made out of flowers. So I did drawings of the floral clock and then, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”, AKA The Beatles, getting an award. So they’ve got a big cup and they’re getting some sort of award from the town.

So that’s where the idea came from and then I just talked to all the guys and said, “What do you think of this idea?” They liked it and I said, “It will mean, when I approach the mic, it’s not Paul McCartney. I don’t have to think this is a Paul McCartney song”. So it was freeing. It was quite liberating.

So, you know, we didn’t keep that idea up all the time, but that was the basic idea that we would make something that was very free. Something that this other band might make, instead of doing something that we thought The Beatles ought to make. It originally came from that mishearing of salt and pepper!

PMc: Were you doing the drawings on the same flight? PM: I don’t remember if I did the drawings on the flight, or whether that’s just got morphed into the same story. But definitely on the flight coming back.  That was the start of it when I misheard that. So that’s the essence of the whole idea.

PMc: Had you already started to write the songs for that album? PM: No, but when I got back I started thinking, “Okay, what would their theme tune be?” So I wrote what became the opening song where they would introduce themselves and then they would introduce another character: Billy Shears, which was Ringo.

It was just to give us all alter egos, to give us all invented characters. So that now we were making this album like a piece of theatre. We were now going in to the studio as other people. And we came down to Soho, in the West End, and had our uniforms made by Berman’s the theatrical costumiere.

PMc: Was there any reason for the different coloured outfits? PM: No, we just chose a material. Said, “I’ll have that, he’ll have that”. There was no concept, no. It was just whoever wanted what colour.

PMc: We understand there were two drum skins created for the cover. Was there any specific reason for that, or was it just to make sure you had different options? PM: No, I think the drum skins - as I recall - were organised by Peter Blake, who had someone he knew who did painting for fairgrounds. So you see the rides in the fairgrounds - like the Waltzer, or you know, the House Of Fun and all that - it’s always lettered and painted a certain way, which is quite an ancient tradition, apparently. There’s a specific look to it all and there are people who specialise in those, so I think Peter had those done by those people, and I suppose he just had a spare one made as well. I think we probably would have just said, “That one”.

PMc: We realised in the office that there are some grammar mistakes on the drum skin: a semicolon after ‘Sgt’, and there isn’t an apostrophe in ‘Peppers’. Is that just an accident? PM: Yeah, that’s an accident! The guy doing it was, as I say, a fairground guy, so all this sort of stuff [Paul points to the logo on the album cover] - the filigree and all these decorative things - are the kind of things you would see on the side of a Waltzer, when you go to the fairground. It’s covered in this kind of stuff.

So I think he will have just been told “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, and instead of putting a dot after the ‘gt’ of ‘Sgt.’ - which I think you might naturally do - I think it just looks better as a composition to be down there. And there’s no particular reason for it being a semi colon. It could have just as easily been two dots, or something. And then no apostrophe? There’s no reason for it. He was asked to do that and he came up with that beautiful design.

PMc: Do you remember who’s idea it was to have the cut outs that came with the album? The moustache, medals, stripes and band stand up? PM: I think those were Peter’s ideas. I certainly gave him the basic idea of the Sgt. Pepper band. There was the floral clock that got changed into the little flower arrangements on the cover. And then the idea was that each of these characters in the “play” would have their own background. So I asked all the guys to come up with a list of people who their character might be fans of. So everyone did that like as a bit of homework, kind of thing.

PMc: Was there anybody who kind of didn’t make the final collage on the cover? PM: Oh, yeah! I mean, some, because it was just a fun thing. You know, I think someone brought Hitler. And that was vetoed immediately: “No!” And then Jesus was in there. You know, he was an understandable hero. But there were certain ones that might have offended people.

I mean, Hitler, I think was just a joke. No way he was gonna get on there. Jesus was not so much a joke. He could have been in there but we didn’t want to offend Christians.

PMc: Do you remember any specific names you suggested? PM: [Looking at the album cover] I think these were mine: Aldous Huxley, because I had been reading a book by him. H.G. Wells, Fred Astaire. And then there was Dylan Thomas.

There’s a footballer there, I think that’s Dixie Dean. I mean this is all documented exactly who they are. Laurel and Hardy, we liked them. William Morris, Marilyn Monroe, Terry Southern. This is what the floral clock became at the bottom of the cover. And then people thought this was marijuana, which they weren’t. They were just plants! But, of course, in those days everyone read everything into everything we did.

But that was it. We all had a list of favourites. George put in an Indian guru, that’s Yogananda. And Babaji is in there. So we just each put people in that we admired through history, so that was the idea. It was really just so if a fan magazine had said to the characters in this fictitious band, “Who are your favourites?” They’d go, “Oh, these people”. We’d go, “Okay this character, is that kind of guy. George: he’s more into mystical people, you know. Paul: okay, he’s more into literary ones, or whatever”. So it would give us each an identity. It was really just for background.

There were certain ones we all liked, like Oscar Wilde. Max Miller was a British comedian. And then there’s Stuart [Sutcliffe], who had been our old bass player, who died. Aubrey Beardsley, the artist. The Bowery Boys, they were a TV series when we were growing up, and there was one of them who wouldn’t do it. One of them wanted money for it.

We just wrote to everyone and said, “Do you mind?” Well, at first we didn’t. But the head of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood came to my house and complained! He said, “This is going to be a nightmare. There are going to be legal battles!” I said, “No, no, no. People are gonna love it! They’re all on The Beatles cover, you know! It’ll be a laugh, they’ll understand”. He said, “No, you’ve got to write to them all”.

So we did. We got a letter out: “We are planning to do this using your image. Do you mind? Is it okay? Please give us the okay”. And all of them did, except for one of the Bowery Boys who wanted to cut a deal. And we thought, “You know what, we’ve got enough people on here!”

PMc: Did that delay the album release? PM: No. No the cover wasn’t shot. We had the idea… Or it may have been, it may have been actually. Yeah, I think it was shot, but we just had to ask them all.

PMc: Would you pick different people for the cover today, compared to 1967? PM: I’m not sure. You know probably, yeah. But just because it wouldn’t be the same time.

PMc: We’ve read that the Sgt. Pepper moustache came about because you had been in a bike accident. Is that true? PM: Yeah! I had a moped and was with a friend of mine up in Liverpool. It was Tara Browne, who was one of the Guinness family. He and I were going to visit my cousin Betty on these mopeds that we had, little motorised bicycles. And there was a very full moon and I said, “Wow, look at that moon!” Then I suddenly realised I’d lost my balance and I looked back and I smacked the pavement and bust my lip! And we went to my cousin’s house with my hand over my lips saying, “Hey Bett! Don’t be worried”. And she’s thinking, “Oh, isn’t he funny”. And then, “…Ahh!”

So, Betty said, “Oh, I’m gonna get this guy”. This doctor, he’s the local doctor and he came over. But, tell you the truth, he’d had a few. So he said, “I’m gonna have to stitch you!” And I said, “Oh!” Because, you know, it was Christmas time or New Years time, and he definitely was over the limit!

So he got his needle, and he could barely thread it, he couldn’t thread it even. So I think Betty sort of said, “Here, let me do that”. So she threaded his needle up for him and I went, “Ahh… Here goes nothing!”

So he put it in – no anesthetic. Bang! “Oww!” You know, and then he put it through and made a stitch up, put it through the other side, “Oww! God!” I was just sort of standing there. It was not wonderful, but I thought, “Well, he’s got to do it”. He pulls it right through, and the thread comes out. “Oh, we’ve got to do that again, then.” “Jeez.” Was I happy? No!

But yeah, so after that I started growing this moustache to hide quite a big, sizeable bump. There’s a bump still there. But it was quite a good gash, and I broke a tooth!

Yeah but anyway, so he had to do it. He finished it off. It wasn’t a brilliant job. So then, as I was recovering, I let this grow as a moustache. I wasn’t really in the public eye for a while, so then the first thing people knew was that I’d grown that moustache. And the other guys liked it and so we all grew them. It was just like a fun thing. So that’s that!

PMc: At the end of the album - following ‘A Day In The Life’ - you have that very high-pitched tone. And then you have the inner groove loop on the record. Where did those ideas come from?

PM: Okay, so the loop thing was that at that time people were partying a lot and getting stoned a lot. And one of the things is you would be in a party with everyone, you’d be playing an album on vinyl and so the record would end. But everybody would be so sort of stoned that the record would just go [mimics the noise of the record player getting stuck in the inner groove]. You’ve all been there! And people would go, “Ahhh… Yeah…” And no one would turn it off!

So we went, you know what, we should have something there. We should put in a little loop so when that happens, there will be something there! So that was the basis of that idea. So we just recorded something, we just all got around the mic, and we just said stupid stuff. It’s just a loop cut out of some stuff we said.

I think John said something like, “Cranberry sauce, cranberry sauce”. And that was just a little bit of fun for us, because we were always trying to be different from other people who made records. So this would be a very “Beatle-y” thing to do. So we did it, and it was just for that moment where [mimics record player playing the inner groove]. It would say something instead of just, “Cuh-chug, cuh-chug”.

The crazy thing was, as I said, everyone read into everything we ever did in those days. So somebody arrived at my house and the rumour was that if you played it backwards, it said something. If you play it in that groove backwards and then we thought well none of us have ever tried. So I said, “No, it’s nonsense. That’s not true, at all!” And they said, “It is! It is! It is!” And they insisted. So I said well come and show me. So he took it, and somehow, we just went against the player’s motor, turned it backwards, the loop. And sorry folks, excuse my expletives, but it was supposed to say, “We’ll fuck you like supermen”. I went, “This is just ridiculous!” But sure enough, “We’ll fuck you like supermen, we’ll fuck you like supermen”. It sounded like that!

PMc: So that was just by complete chance? PM: It was, yeah! It was pretty random, but those things happen with the readings, you know. Because people would look into it so much, and that was that.

PMc: And no one had done that kind of inner groove loop before, is that right? PM: Yeah, nobody had done it on a loop like that. It’s a silly idea. No one was as silly as we were!

But the other thing, that was fascinating: the high-pitched noise [whistles]. We would have great conversations with George Martin in the studio, because he was very swotty, George was. Very mathematics, and he knew the science behind a lot of what we were doing, whereas we didn’t. We just enjoyed it and loved it. But he was talking about frequencies. He said, “There are so many frequencies”. For instance, he said, “Your ears are all younger than mine”. He said, “Let’s do a little test’. So he took a little oscillator that we had and went [whistles from a low to high pitch]. And he got it up to [whistles very high]. And he said, “Can you hear that?” We go, “Yeah…” He goes [whistles higher]. He said, “I can’t hear that, can you?” We go, “Yeah!”

Then he took it higher so even we couldn’t hear it and said, “It’s still there”. The noise, the frequency was still there. He said, “Dogs can hear that. Dogs have a different framework, a different range of hearing”. We went, “Fantastic! We’ve gotta put that on the record!” So when suddenly when everyone’s listening to it, no one can hear it and the dog would perk up. You know, prick his ears up: “What’s that?”

So that arrived from those great conversations. And the other end of that conversation was he said, “Lots of people know this, this frequency thing. And one of the things Hitler had was these sort of PR people, who did movies for him. You know, Leni Riefenstahl. And there was a PR machine behind everything he did”. He said, “And one of the things, and it’s suppose to be true, was that at these rallies, hundreds and thousands of people would arrive, and you see film of it. And he wouldn’t arrive, he wouldn’t be there. And what they would do is they would put a subsonic noise [makes low-pitched hum] through the speakers. But no one could hear it, but it was sort of was rather discomforting. So you can’t hear it, but it kind of puts you off a bit.” It’s like a super sub-bass at a big club. It’s like, it can actually sort of get to you, it can bother you a bit, so he said, “They used to play this, this is the story, and then just before Hitler showed up they would turn it off”.

PMc: So they would get a sense of relief? PM: Yeah! Like, “I feel so much better, now he’s here!” You know, and nobody knew that there’s a subsonic noise.

PMc: And George Martin told you that story? PM: Yeah, George Martin. This was all one conversation: “The Highs And The Lows” by George Martin. But you know, we took it all in. We loved him. We loved these little chats and we used it all in our music.

You know, if someone put a tape machine on backwards by mistake once, the tape op, and we were like, “Oh! What’s that?” Whereas I always say any other band would have just gone, “You’ve got it on backwards, stupid! Put it on right!” But we were always, “Ahh, how can we use that?”

George was such a good producer and got it. And he would say, “Well, we could do it. And if we did this, and if we did that…” And so that really made it interesting, because there were all sorts of physical things like that that he would educate us with. Like half speed things. If things were very fast, the guitar solo in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ [sings the song]. It was very hard to play normal speed. So George would say, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do…” So we took it down to half speed on these studio machines. You have to take it down an octave, that’s what was intriguing. So half speed, the octave would go down. You would play it on a bass guitar or a guitar [sings song again, lower and at half speed], and it’s easy to play! And then you just put it back up [sings at full speed]. So if you listen to that solo that’s at double speed. So we had a lot of fun with that, you know, it’s gonna go down an octave, we’re gonna play it slow.

PMc: I’ve always wondered if you guys slowed down ‘When I’m Sixty Four’ because your voice sounds slightly higher? PM: Sometimes I would just speed things up a bit. Often, when you make a song you record it and then you think, “It’s not quite fast enough!” So rather than do it again, you just lifted the tape. These days you can lift the tape and not lift the pitch, with Logic and a few other machines. But back then you would actually lift the pitch a bit.

PMc: So another question we quite often see is, in hindsight, do you wish ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ had been included on the album? And if so, where would you have placed them? PM: No, I was happy. So we won’t even get into placing them! I was happy that it was the precursor to ‘Sgt. Pepper’. And the thing was, you know, we always liked to release things fresh. We had just made those tracks, so the thought of waiting until we had completed the whole album would not have appealed to us. You know, we liked that as soon as it’s made, at the nearest point to the actual making of the song and the record, we would like to put it out. So I was glad how we did it and it was like a fanfare, that single. Another thing we liked about it was it was simple value for money. You really got two A-sides. But it kind of heralded what was to come.

PMc: Kind of like a road sign showing what was on the way? PM: Yeah!

PMc: Another question we see is: Did you have any kind of idea at the time just how big this album would become? PM: No, not really. The only thing we knew was that the music press, I’m not sure who it was – it would probably have been The New Music Express or The Melody Maker, the two music papers that were very big at the time – one of them, somebody from one of those music papers said, “Oh, The Beatles have dried up. They’ve finished. We haven’t heard anything from them, you know, they’ve run out of ideas”. So we were quietly tinkering away at Abbey Road knowing we hadn’t run out of ideas and knowing it was gonna be really great to be able to say, “No, we didn’t run out. Check this out!” And give them ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and go – “Take that back!”

In fact, when it did get released, the music critic from The New York Times said it was terrible. And Linda said she met him in the street and said, “You’re crazy, man. It’s a great album! What are you talking about?” And there must have been a lot of people that said it to him that week, because he took it back a week later. He said, “You know what, it’s grown on me. I like it’.

PMc: And looking back now, what always blows our minds, is that you were only 24 when that album was recorded. That’s quite incredible! PM: Yeah, I mean there’s quite a few people who feel they’re very grown up when they’re 24. And we did! We’d been doing the group since, well, since we were kinda 19 and 20. So four years at that kind of pace was a long time. And we all smoked Rothman cigarettes. And we had Carnaby Street stuff, so we thought we were pretty hot. So 24 didn’t seem young to us, because we had just been 20!

I mean, I always tell the story of when were 17, me and George - and George would have been 16 - and we used to go round to see John at his Art College, which was next door to our school. We were where LIPA now is, The Liverpool Institute. Next door was the Arts School which is now part of LIPA as well. But that’s where John was, so we’d go round just to hang out and see him during lunchtime and there was a guy who was in John’s year, who was like older than the class. You know that phenomenon and he was 24 and we felt so sorry for him! No, we really did, like a genuine sorrow. [Whispers] “He’s 24? God, it must be awful!” You know, now looking back he was like a child. But, you know, so by the time we were 24, we felt like we had done quite a lot. We had done enough to sort of think we were pretty grown up!

A coda from PaulMcCartney.com: After we stopped recording our Q&A, Paul carried on telling us some very cool stories, such as how one day in the studio the ‘A’ string on John Lennon’s guitar began to resonate when he leant his guitar against an amplifier. The band jumped up when they heard the noise, saying, “What’s that?!” After George Martin explained how certain frequencies will make objects vibrate, it was agreed they would record this new sound for the start of ‘I Feel Fine’.

Paul told us how he really loved that about The Beatles: when those “happy accidents” happened, the band would want to use it in a song somehow. He likened it to how a painter might see a small, unintended brushstroke on a canvas and decide to leave it in, rather than painting it out.

Another story Paul told us was about how one of the engineers threaded the tape machine the wrong way in the studio during a session. When they pressed “Play” the song played backwards and again, up they jumped asking George Martin if they could use that somehow. Paul told us George’s response was always to rub his chin, look thoughtful then reply, “Well, I suppose we could…” And the rest, as they say, is history!

[ruminativerabbi]

Jubilees

Jewish life is cycles inside of cycles: the daily cycle of prayer, the weekly cycle of Sabbath observance, the monthly sanctification of the New Moon, the annual cycle of festivals, the seven-year sabbatical cycle related to debt release and land use, the twenty-eight year cycle relating to the recitation of Birkat Ha-ḥamah, the Blessing of the Sun…and the granddaddy of them all, the fifty-year jubilee cycle that brings all lands in Eretz Yisrael back to their original owners and completes the manumission of indentured servants. But that’s it—no cycles are longer than that final one, a half-century being most of most people’s lives, I suppose, and the notion of having calendrical cycles longer than the average human life span just didn’t really make that much sense…and particularly in ancient times, when life expectancy was that much less than it is nowadays.

So fifty was a big number of years in ancient times. And, today, I’d like to write to you about three different fifty-year anniversaries that either just passed or are about to come up, each of which affected the fifty-year-younger me in ways that I am certain I didn’t understand at the time and perhaps even couldn’t have.

It was fifty years ago exactly that Chaim Potok’s novel, The Chosen, was published in the spring of 1967 and became an instant bestseller, remaining on the Times’ bestsellers’ list for thirty-nine weeks. I read it that summer at camp and was completely taken with it. But although I was myself only one year younger than the book’s protagonists, Reuven Malter and Daniel Saunders, I could not possibly have been less like either of them—perhaps more overtly not like Danny Saunders, the son of a hasidic rebbe who in Williamsburg who is not only being raised in a hasidic community but who is also being raised by a father who refuses to engage in ordinary conversation with him and who only speaks to him at all about serious religious or spiritual matters…but also not at all like Reuven Malter, a boy being raised in a more “normal” Brooklyn Jewish home, but a strictly observant one nevertheless, under the aegis of a gentle father who is also a world-renowned Talmud scholar. I was neither of these boys! But, bringing to bear that peculiar Jewish ability to remember the future, I somehow understood, even at fourteen, that I was already on the path forward that would eventually become my life’s journey…and that successfully traveling its trajectory was going to require that, for all I wasn’t ever going to be either of them, I was somehow also going to have also to be them both.

The following winter, I read Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, the book which more or less guided me through my adolescence. It was a very popular book back then—I’m guessing not a few of my readers also read it in the course of their high school years—and it too featured two protagonists who were wholly unlike each other. Narcissus is the scholar who finds his greatest joy in intellectual achievement, while Goldmund wanders the world and samples its pleasures freely and with almost Dionysian abandon. But although the book is about how different and how similar the two of them actually are—in the end, each ends up wishing he were more like the other—and how each of us, to find balance and joy in the world, needs somehow also to “be” them both, I already had in place the antipodes that would delimit my life’s journey, and they were Reuven and Danny, not Narcissus and Goldmund. For better or worse, that is how I got to be me…if not precisely then certainly in broad terms. But the struggle depicted in the book between religiosity and scholarship, between losing yourself and finding yourself in Jewishness, between finding solace and guidance in other people’s books and writing your own story over and over in your own (the boys trade places with Reuven, the scholar’s son, becoming a rabbi, and Danny, the rebbe’s son, becoming a psychologist)—even at fourteen, I understood that this was to be my own slightly impossible path forward in life.

I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even tell myself, not really. But in retrospect I can see that I knew it clearly, and I think one of the first real intimations of my future life that I had came to me as I read The Chosen. I eventually read all of Potok, just as I eventually read all of Hesse. I liked all of both authors’ books too, although some more and others less. But nothing ever equaled either book in either author’s oeuvre in terms of the effect it had on the adolescent or post-adolescent me.

The second thing that happened a full fifty years ago that altered the course of my life forward was the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which the Beatles released on my fourteenth birthday. (You see, it really was all about me!)

Young people today, unused to the way things were in ancient times when music wasn’t free and certainly didn’t come to you by floating magically through the air into your “device,” will find it difficult to imagine the impact that single album had on an entire generation. It was the Beatles’ eighth studio album, not their first. And it wasn’t that there weren’t other bands out there recording innovative, interesting material. But there was something in Sgt. Pepper that changed everything, even despite its relative brevity. (The whole album, all together, isn’t forty minutes long.) But I knew every lyric to every song, as did more or less everyone I knew anywhere near my age. We used and re-used phrases from the album endlessly in our casual speech. We could identify every single one of the fifty-seven living people and nine wax figures on the cover. The music itself took on something of the sacred, each track being intoned endlessly by ourselves in ninth grade as though the album were a collection of hymns reverently to be chanted as part of daily worship. I still had a month left of junior high school when the album came out, but that was a mere detail…and I was so ready for whatever was going to come next precisely because Sgt. Pepper served as a kind of a gateway into an unknown future, and not just for me alone either but also for more or less an entire generation. To this day, I know every word of every song. At least until James Taylor released his Sweet Baby James album in 1970, I thought of “Within You, Without You” (the only non-Lennon/McCartney song on the album) as my personal anthem. I could identify any song from its opening second or two. If The Chosen was where I was going, Sgt. Pepper was where I was. And it opened up to me the possibility of traveling there under my own steam, propelled forward by the sheer power of my own will to be as I wished and to become who I wished.

And, of course, we are coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War, the single most transformational event in post-Shoah Jewish history. I will have a lot more to say in its regard when we get to Yom Yerushalayim on Wednesday, May 24, the actual anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem from Jordanian control and the re-unification of the city, but today I’d like to speak of the anniversary in far more personal terms.

My first visit to Israel was in 1966, the year of my bar-mitzvah. But that trip, transformational in every meaningful way possible, was only the prelude to what was to come. (For more about that trip and the effect it had on the adolescent me, click here and here.)

I loved Israel in 1966, but it was more than a bit of a third-world country in those days. The public telephones didn’t work too well. You could only phone overseas from a post office. Major roads were unpaved. The restrooms in the bus stations were by American standards unspeakable. Yet there was an intoxicating feel of newness and adventure everywhere, and the pioneering spirit our teachers spoke about endlessly in Hebrew School was fully tangible at every turn.  I was not only impressed, but, in the deepest sense of the word, I was overwhelmed. Nothing felt the same to me after that trip—certainly nothing back home in Forest Hills, but also nothing at all elsewhere in the world either—but, in the end, it was the Six Day War itself that sealed the deal and made me feel that Israel was not only a noble undertaking destined to have a profound impact on Jewish history, but that the future of the Jewish people was going to be indelibly and inextricably tied to the future history of the State in a way that was already making it impossible to think of one without simultaneously thinking also of the other and which would eventually shape my own sense of the meaning of Jewish history in our time.

And that was the story of my fourteenth year. Out there, the world was focused on the summer of love as it was unfolding in San Francisco, New York, and London. (I actually attended—or at least put in a nervous appearance—at the Be-In in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow that spring, which I remember as being remarkably like its depiction in Miloš Forman’s movie version of Hair. But that will have to be another story for another time.) But for me, it was the year of three things backed up by three other things—the Six Day War backed up by my experiences a year earlier in Israel, The Chosen backed up by Narcissus and Goldmund, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band backed up by every album I owned that came before it and which created the hole where the rain got in, and got my mind to wondering where it could go oh, where it could go. Oh! And where I went too, as it turned out. 

[solenelanza]

Guess what? We are not men! I mean, we won’t have no doubt if you ever have the chance to meet us but while browsing the urban setting of the Oasis second album, I was not sure anymore. Told you it was not Blur!

Êtes-vous au courant : nous sommes de femmes ! Vous ne vous poseriez pas la question si vous aviez déjà eu l’occasion de nous rencontrer mais dans le décor urbain du second album d’Oasis, le doute est permis. Je vous avais prévenus que ce n’était pas Blur ! 

Sometimes my mates just hate me. Well they are too cute and over polite but I know that look in the deep dark eyes between boredom and annoyance, especially on a very early Sunday morning. Let me explain. You might have an idea about how close I want to match this with reality and historical facts #journalism Well after the hard long photo shooting nights for Blur, we had to be back in the area for Oasis. Yes I know how touchy it is to fuel the fire of the Britpop match.

Parfois, mes amis me détestent. Ils sont trop charmants et polis mais tout le monde connaît ce regard noir plein d’ennui et d’énervement surtout le week-end. Ok, explication. Vous voyez, depuis un petit moment, que j’aime faire chanter la réalité et les faits historiques #déformationprofessionnelle Et bien, après la longue nuit expérimentale de Blur, nous avons affronté de nouveaux les pavés de Soho pour Oasis. Oui, je sais, c’est mal de jeter de l’huile sur le feu du combo Britpop. 

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Une semaine avant les #britawards Londres Mag revient sur ces lieux de la musique #madeinengland. Retour sur le célèbre groupe britannique @oasis et sa pochette d’album Morning Glory toujours présente à Soho ! #Soho #britawards #oasis #music

A post shared by Londresmag (@londresmag) on Feb 12, 2019 at 11:07am PST

I told them 5am. They didn’t have time to laugh because they were exhausted to try their Gallagher outfit. If we wanted to feel their reality, we should be on stage in the dawn of the off day. It was a « no » answer. So by 8am, on a Sunday morning, we drove our way to Soho. You can’t imagine how beautiful Carnaby street is it without any soul walking by! But our destination was Berwick street in the middle of the recreation of the new face of the charming area.

Je leur avais dit 5h du matin. Elles n’ont pas eu le temps de dire ouf qu’elles étaient déjà épuisées à l’idée de suivre les pas des frères Gallagher. Si nous voulions être près des faits, il fallait être sur le pont  dès l’aube… un jour férié. La réponse a été un non sans appel. Finalement, à 8h du matin, un dimanche, nous revoilà à Soho. Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer la beauté de Carnarby sans aucune âme (ni touriste) qui vive. Mais notre destination était Berwick street, épicentre du remodelage du quartier charmant et pittoresque. 

Everyone knows this Oasis sounding like the meeting of two dead souls in an unusual over sunny London day. This blurry picture, not far from our Blur playground, freezes the ghosts of the 90s. And it might be a sign but it is the part of the best seller British albums with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Greatest Hits by Queen. Well it was just made by musicians early in the morning. We are not musicians, but you should have an idea that we have a musical teeth.Well recreating this picture was not that easy. First, the empty street had to be … empty. And how can you ask to the crowd to stop living in the center of the city? Secondly, rhythm is the key to blow our faces and feel this evanescence of casual life. Then, details are not cherry on the cake but the ultimate way to pay tribute to the music and the creators.

Tout le monde connaît la pochette d’Oasis, cette rencontre de deux fantômes par un dimanche ensoleillé et terriblement contrasté. Cette photo toute floue, si proche de notre terrain de jeu Blurien, a cristallisé à jamais les spectres des années 90. Etait-ce un signe mais cet opus fait partie des meilleures ventes des albums britanniques avec Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band et The Greatest Hits de Queen. Alors que l’image avait juste été faite par des musiciens, au petit matin et nous ne sommes que des mélomanes. Et recréer cette imaginaire n’était pas simple comme bonjour. D’abord la place devait être… vide. Et avez-vous déjà demandé à la foule londonienne d’arrêter de vivre dans le centre ville ? Ensuite le rythme est la clé de la photo, avec un  flou des visages comme un appel à l’evanescence du quotidien. Ensuite, les détails ne sont pas secondaires mais la meilleure façon de rendre hommage à la musique et à ses créateurs. 

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If you have the chance to touch the opus, it should be surprising opening the sleeve. Calm, stress-free and agreements-free can be the qualifications of these studio photos. Found of this kind of space outside, in Central London is quite of impossible. But as we are French, we are unstoppable. And, thanks to the opening of new trendy gastropubs, the Blue Posts lost a bit of the popular atmosphere, that would have be loved by the Gallagher Brothers from Manchester, but adds a lovely style, a touch of elegance and a shade of Blue that was perfect for our profile picture background. Thanks Ollie Dabbous, you had such a wonderful taste.

Si vous avez déjà eu l’album entre les mains, vous savez qu’en ouvrant l’opus, la surprise est encore là. Car le calme, le stress oublié mais aussi les relations cordiales étaient les maîtres mots des photos de studios. Trouver un tel espace, en extérieur dans le Londres si bruyant était presque impossible. Impossible pas Français. Et, les gastro pubs si élégants du quartiers nous ont bien aidées.Le Blue Posts n’est plus cette adresse tradi qu’auraient adorée les frères Gallagher de Manchester mais est devenue ce bar élégant, adorable avec ces 50 nuances de Bleu sur lesquelles nous avons sauté. Merci encore au chef Ollie Dabbous d’avoir un aussi bon goût … esthétique ! 

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Picking the Yellow screen was the last challenge and browsing this Soho, where time seems to forget to last, we had the chance to encounter this yellow door. Perfect for my new short cut hair, Kelly’s new manicure and my Uke. But it sounded to me as well that it would be the best spot for a picture on social media or an Instagram post. You have no idea how London is the new Instagram scene, I mean like picturesque streets of Paris and bridge view points of New York are. Were Oasis the first bloggers? Who knows?

Trouver le fameux fond jaune était le dernier pari, et dans le vieux Soho, le temps semble s’être arrêté , et c’est là où nous avons eu le coup de foudre avec LA porte jaune. Parfait décor pour ma coupe de cheveux, la manucure (pas vraiment French mais totalement franche) et mon ukulélé. Parfait décor de photo shoot d’artiste ou d’instagrammeurs. Vous n’avez pas idée comment Londres sied bien à l’application photo, enfin autant que les ruelles de Paris ou les vues imprenables sur Brooklyn Bridge. Alors Oasis était-il le premier des bloggers? Vous avez une heure ! 

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Then it was the last step of this crazy British morning with the back cover. The man leaving became a woman, queen Kelly. With a large top, boyfriend style, male pants. Watching this very feminine lady drove me a bit disgruntled. Nor she was unpretty or disgraceful but it wasn’t a thing to be dressed like a man to feel closer to a rockstar. Arguing for feminism in the musical scene, we took the last pic where Soho started to be destructed. Transforming something beautiful in something modern and new.

Please come after the whole city will lose her whole identity.

Pour le dernier plan, il fallait retourner le quartier et l’album. L’homme de dos sur le départ est devenu une femme, et pas n’importe laquelle : Kelly. Avec mon haut bien trop grand pour elle, sa silhouette masculine, son style. « boyfriend », la voir partir au loin me contraria un peu. Elle perdait en charme ou en style, mais était-ce alors si obligatoire de voler les frusques d’un homme pour se sentir rock star ? Retour aux questions féministes sur la scène musicale dans le lieu où Soho commence à être détruit. Transformer quelque chose de jolie en un décor moderne et nouveau.

Venez-donc nous rendre visite avant que la ville entière ne finisse sa mutation ! 

Texts: Solène L. Model+Editing: Kelly Pictures by ©Alice Menguy 

Pour d’autres histoires musicales à Londres, suivez-moi ou contactez-moi 😉

  What’s the story of our Morning Glory ?  Guess what? We are not men! I mean, we won’t have no doubt if you ever have the chance to meet us but while browsing the urban setting of the…