This week, producer Giles Martin held a listening session at New York City's Republic Studios, where he unveiled his remixed version (prepared with engineer Sam Okell) of the Beatles' legendary "Revolver" album. As the key feature of an upcoming boxed set, slated for release on October 28, the remixed "Revolver" is a revelation made explicitly possible by recent advances in sonic technology.
In some ways Revolver is my favorite Beatles album because they were discovering new ways of composing and working in the studio. Here is Taxman from the new mix:
What is astonishing, apart from the clarity of the new mix (I think I'm hearing a cowbell I never heard before) is the incredible freshness of the music even fifty-six years later.
Way back when I was a teenager in high school eagerly awaiting the next Beatles album I never imagined that Ringo, for one, would be still going strong over fifty years later. But he is and unlike Keith Richards, he doesn't even look his age:
The BBC has a tribute article. I've been a fan of Ringo for a long time. He's a great and original drummer,. he's still touring and he's been married to Barbara Bach for thirty-nine years.
"Rain" is one of the best examples of Ringo's drumming:
That's mostly true, of course. The Beatles never managed to become the long-lasting commercial enterprise that the Stones did. In fact, the Stones probably learned how to handle their business by noting all the mistakes the Beatles made.
The Beatles stopped touring early in their rise to stardom, reportedly because the screaming and carrying on from fans got out of hand. The boys from Liverpool hit the big time with their 1963 release of “Please Please Me,” but they broke up in 1970, with McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison all going their separate ways. Lennon was murdered in 1981 at age 40, while Harrison passed away from cancer in 2001 at age 58.
The Stones, meanwhile, have been one of the largest touring bands every decade since the 1970s. All the members — Jagger, Richards, 76, Charlie Watts, 78, and Ron Wood, 72 — are out on the road every couple of years with a new show, which feature elaborate sets and amazing light shows.
All true. The Stones and the Beatles were/are fundamentally different kinds of musical acts. The Beatles were singer/composers who could also play their instruments. The Stones, once they settled into their groove, have always been a solid rhythm and blues band with a rough originality. The Beatles wrote hundreds of songs, each one unique, even the bad ones, like "Obladi-Oblada," are uniquely bad. The Stones have essentially delivered the same product, in different packaging, hundreds of times. It is a bit like the difference between Bach and Vivaldi. What the Stones do is great, but they do it over and over. This is undoubtedly why they are so long-lasting and so successful. The Beatles, on the other hand, couldn't stand to repeat themselves and their creative ferment drove them apart in less than a decade.
Now the Stones have a new number one single, the first in a long, long time, and it is again, a solid, blues-based tune a lot like their other stuff:
A while ago they did a tribute album devoted to some old blues standards like "Ride Em Down," an old Eddie Taylor tune from the 50s and, with a funky video starring Kristen Stewart driving a classic Mustang, it was really well done:
Here's the original:
But again, still in the same basic blues groove. And why not, that's what they do and that's what people like.
But the Beatles were always a different story. With everything they did, they tried to break new ground. And succeeded. Some samples:
Completely different harmonic scheme and vocal treatment.
Again, completely different harmonic structure, this time alternating between major and minor.
I choose all these from a fairly early period in the Beatles just to show what variety they were capable of even early on. Later, of course, they did a lot of radically innovative things. They even did a couple of solid blues-based tunes...
I have long been a big fan of Ringo's drumming. Somewhere on an old post I think I said something like "Ringo reinvents drumming for every song." I just ran across a video clip where Sina takes the time to demonstrate just how original he was:
I promise there will be a substantial post tomorrow, but in the meantime, here is one that just missed the Friday Miscellanea because I didn't see it in time: All 213 Beatles Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. I only like these kinds of things if they aren't afraid to level some devastating criticism, or quips at least. Here are some excerpts that I enjoyed:
206. “Free As a Bird,” single (1995): This single enraged me, in 1995, when it was released to gin up interest in the first Anthology album. It was a Lennon song from long after he’d left the Beatles; he sounded so vulnerable, and the studio work that had gone into making this distant-sounding, crummily recorded demo sound presentable felt like too big a burden for the martyred star to bear.
204. “She’s Leaving Home,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): A bathetic lugubrious mess, the nadir of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The call-and-response chorus is labored; the whole thing reeks of having come from a squaresville OffBroadway musical about kids these days. The instrumentation is unusual; there are no actual Beatles playing on the track, but no one cares because the song is so bad.
That was particularly enjoyable because the Wall Street Journal, who can be tone-deaf, just published a laudatory essay on the song by Alan Alda.
194. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): The whimsy will continue until morale improves. Definitely in the top five of Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote. It took a long time for the band to get this right in the studio. No one liked it; but it was reportedly Lennon who finally sat down and banged the piano part out appropriately. This is a song that isn’t about anything in the first place; the last two verses are the same except for having Desmond and Molly’s names switched out, but McCartney’s vocal gets more and more excited. Newsflash: No one cares about Desmond and Molly Jones.
I would have put that one a LOT lower.
189. “I’ll Be Back,” A Hard Day’s Night (1964): The least of the lesser songs on the second non-soundtrack side of the A Hard Day’s Night album, and an anticlimactic album closer.
I totally disagree with that one. The major/minor alteration and the vocal harmonies make this one of my favourite early Beatles' songs.
164. “Good Night,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Lennon’s attempt to write a lullaby for Ringo to sing as an envoi to “The White Album.” It’s lulling, and nothing wrong with that, but it’s also kinda boring.
I rather disagree with this too. In context, following Revolution #9, it is well beyond surreal.
117. “Don’t Let Me Down,” single (1969): Another of the so-so unadorned Lennon songs from the last days of the Beatles. Too many of his songs consist of the title words repeated over and over in the chorus. The case for it is that it’s a naked profession of his love for Ono and a new statement of vulnerability. The band played it on the famous rooftop concert in Let It Be, but it was left off the album. It turned up as the B sideB side of the “Get Back” single.
Maybe it's just me, but I have always loved this song. I captures a special kind of emotional desolation like no other song.
Well, I stopped there because as we work into the better songs, he doesn't have a lot to say.
Skipping to the top songs, numbers one and two are, as they should be A Day in the Life and Strawberry Fields.
Your milage may vary and if it does, tell me about it in the comments.
A while back the comment section went all red in tooth and claw about politics in the Music Salon. After all the dust had settled I resolved, not for the first time, to try and avoid political topics when possible. Alas, it is not always possible because we live in highly politicized times, times when people like Dr. Adam J. Rodriguez, PsyD, can accuse a friend who tries to persuade him to like the Beatles of "microaggression". The argument is rather interesting, not so much for its validity as for its assumptions:
All cultures contain within them many subcultures, with one cultural dimension often dominant. When one is a member of the dominant culture, that person enjoys particular power and privileges, including the freedom to not have to consider other perspectives. My friend has enjoyed the privilege of not having to consider that there are people in the world that don't have the same relationship to music, food, art, or culture that he does. He has the privilege of not being forced to consider perspectives that are not his own.
Here's what my friend did not consider: He grew up a white middle-class male in the 70s and 80s, to parents who grew up on the Beatles and were immensely influenced by them and other rock and roll bands. I grew up a Puerto Rican lower-class male in the 80s whose parents played guajira, salsa, and Motown/classic R&B/soul growing up. My ears had grown up hearing syncopation, multi-chordal harmonies, diverse percussion, horns, and groove-oriented rhythm sections. The Beatles CDs I listened to were classic rock, non-syncopated, guitar- and drum-dominated, and rhythmically and harmonically simpler. The type of music that he grew up listening to and loving was quite simply different from mine. It was neither better nor worse. Only different. My friend, caught in his ethnocentric blindness, could not grasp that somebody would have a different experience and values from him.
This is very much in tune with the times when individuals have no real agency, but are mere consequences of "cultural" influences. When everything is relative except the "truth" of white privilege. When everything is to be understood in terms of prejudicially-defined collectives.
Just a few striking errors in the second paragraph about the music: white middle-class people in the 70s and 80s (and 60s and 90s for that matter) were very familiar with Motown/classic R&B/soul, if less familiar with salsa (unless they sought it out). The vast majority of songs by the Beatles contain syncopation, multi-chordal harmonies (I think he means "multi-voice"), diverse percussion, horn and sure, groove-oriented rhythm sections. The Beatles are "classic" in the sense of being very good examples of 60s music, but not in the sense of "typical" rock which is implied here. Saying that their music is non-syncopated means either that you haven't listened to it or you don't know what those words mean. Yes, guitar and drum-oriented, but often with the addition of other instruments such as harmonica, flute, horn, electric piano, etc. But anyone who states that the Beatles' music is rhythmically and harmonically simpler than salsa or guajira (which Wikipedia describes as "a musical form which evokes a rural ambience in its texts, instrumentation and style") simply either has not listened to it or lacks listening skills.
This kind of article is so astonishingly wrong, but astonishingly pervasive these days, that I think it is worth making a fuss over. Dr. Rodriguez is like a man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail to be hit. His specialties are "issues of power dynamics and identity." Therefore, for him, everything is about these topics. For me, this is a mistaken approach based on mistaken assumptions, but leaving all that to one side, he accuses his friend, who seems to have gone to great lengths to introduce him to the Beatles, of making a personal attack on him:
My friend did not stop with curiosity to ask what about the Beatles did not appeal to me. Instead, because he could not consider a different perspective, he had to dismiss that other perspective as faulty. As a result, he made a reductive comment about my character.
As is perfectly obvious from the text, Dr. Rodriguez made no real attempt to assess the music of the Beatles:
A friend of mine is a really, really big Beatles fan. Quite some time ago I reflected to him that I was not familiar with their music. Sure, I could name some of their more popular songs, but when challenged, that list was limited to about seven songs. Astonished and determined to rectify my ignorance and indifference, he burned all of his Beatles CDs for me, in chronological order (yes, this is when music was not yet streaming), and insisted that I dedicate time to listen to them.
So I did. While they had never appealed to me, my friend was so impassioned that I thought it was worth a shot. I did not get very far. After the first two albums, I found it simply was not for me.
So, he decided that the Beatles were simply not for him. OK, but he decided this after the first two albums? These were Please Please Me and With the Beatles and while they were certainly strikingly original and intense in the context of the day, I think that anyone would agree that basing an aesthetic evaluation of the Beatles based on them would be like basing an aesthetic evaluation of Beethoven on his Op 2 piano sonatas. Nice yes, but hardly indicative of his Symphony No. 5.
What is blindingly obvious here is that Dr. Rodriguez' methodology is based on, yes, "issues of power dynamics and identity" which prevent him from anything like an objective assessment of any music. Everything is either going to be part of his sub-culture and hence valid just because of that or, not part of his sub-culture and therefore oppressive somehow, especially if part of the dominant culture.
And the horrific truth is that whole generations are being taught to think in this and no other way. I think if you set out to destroy civilization root and branch you could not do it more effectively.
So yes, feel free to hate the Beatles, but try to do so for musical reasons, not just because you have a collectivist ideology.
Fifty years ago, well, not today, but yesterday, the Beatles played the first mega-concert of the rock and roll era. They were booked into Shea Stadium in New York and sold out all 55,000 seats. Back in those days the amplification systems were primitive and couldn't compete with the screaming of all those fans so this concert went largely unheard. The Wall Street Journal has an article on the event.
I think that, many years later, George rather summed things up when he said that "the whole world decided to go mad--and blamed it on us!"
NewMusicBox has an essay up titled "The Dangers of Secondhand Music" that bemoans the ubiquitous presence of background music almost everywhere you go. That is certainly a beef I share! Yesterday I had lunch at a very fine restaurant in a very high-class hotel. The menu was original and creative and the preparation and presentation outstanding. The service was courteous and attentive. Everything was excellent. With one exception: there was a constant thumping, very bad, background music--just a bit too loud to be really in the background making it impossible to ignore. What was so bad about this music was its industrial quality. There were no vocals, it was just instrumental tracks that were vaguely like Electronic Dance Music, but without any trace of creativity. I would much have preferred regurgitated 60s hits! They brought a little comment form to the table, so I made sure to point out how horrible the music was. We will see if anyone takes note.
So that's the beef. Now the quiz. The Guardian has a quiz on the Beatles up on their site. Let's see how we do.
Well, I did pretty good with ten out of a possible thirteen correct. The average score is six. No fair looking anything up! I really had no idea what Stones song John and Paul sang backing vocals on, so I picked "I Wanna Be Your Man" because John and Paul wrote it and then gave it to the Stones to record. And I had no idea what song kept Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane from the number one spot. Anyway, a fairly fun quiz if you like that sort of thing.
I am tempted to do one of my quizes, but the last one so demoralized my readers that I'm afraid to! Maybe a really short one?
What is a "tam-tam"?
How many strings on a mid-16th century lute?
On Sylvius Leopold Weiss' lute?
What is the order of instrumental solos on Archie Bell and the Drells' 1968 hit "Tighten Up"?
What is "automatic double-tracking"?
What does MIDI stand for?
How many cents in a semitone?
Who was Janáček's muse?
What solo instrument did Chopin write for other than the piano?
Who wrote the longest string quartet ever composed?
Oh, darn, I think I came up with another really daunting one! All of these can be answered easily with Google, except maybe the last question, but it is really more fun to do without a search engine. Just like the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle. In pen.
Bonne chance!
And some music to end with, a suite for Baroque lute by Sylvius Leopold Weiss. And no the illustration is not of a Baroque lute (that's a Renaissance lute) so you can't answer the question by counting the pegs:
UPDATE: Anyone want to have a go at the quiz? Or should I just put up the answers?
My basic position on arrangements or "covers" of the Beatles is that they should be at least as interesting as the originals. As this is almost impossible to achieve, it is better not to do it. Just say "no"! But this is a pragmatic, not an a priori position. That is, it is certainly possible for someone to do some great arrangements of Beatles tunes that are not less interesting aesthetically than the originals--it is just unlikely.
Let me take a minute to explain why I think so. Apart from being extraordinary performing musicians, outstanding songwriters and fascinating personalities, the Beatles invented an entirely new way of composing. This took place from Rubber Soul on. Stepping away from their exhausting touring commitments, they spent over a month in the studio writing, arranging and recording the all new songs. Compare this to the mere ten hours they spent in the studio for their first album. What they were doing was composing for the studio. In other words, they were creating unique soundscapes for every song using available resources and inventing new ones as needed. Some examples of the latter include "varispeed" recording where you alter slightly the speed of the tape recorder. When you play it back at normal speed, it alters the quality of sound. They used this technique to make the instrumental tracks sound "fatter" and the vocals sound more forward. They also used double-tracking on the vocals. A solo vocal line was recorded twice. Since it would never come out exactly the same, there was a added presence to the line. As this was very time consuming, one of the technicians invented a way to do this automatically. It is called "automatic double-tracking" of course and now it is available as a software effect. They did a lot of other things too, like recording voice or guitar lines and playing them back backwards. Or using tape loops to create a kind of "musique concrète".
So from Rubber Soul on, a Beatles song is, in its recorded incarnation, a whole aesthetic object. Inevitably, most cover versions take the bare bones of the song and render them in the style of the artist. Here are a couple of examples. the first is a pretty good version of "A Day in the Life" by José Feliciano:
And the original:
Of course, the reason the Feliciano version is pretty good is that he goes all-out to try and reproduce the original, even to the extent of having a full orchestra backing him up!
Here is an arrangement/recomposition of "Penny Lane" for guitar and orchestra by Leo Brouwer:
Not too bad, but I would prefer the original as it is more uniquely what it is, than when it is turned into a guitar concerto:
But, as I was saying, this is not a foregone conclusion and there is a new album that might be rather interesting. I ran across this courtesy of Norman Lebrecht at Sinfini Music. If you are a really good string quartet with a really creative arranger, then the Beatles offer some interesting challenges. Here is a link to the Amazon page where you can listen to brief samples of the songs on the album. There seem to be no clips on YouTube of the Wihan Quartet playing the Beatles, so have a listen to the brief samples and let me know what you think.
...well, yesterday, actually, April 4, 1964, that The Beatles occupied the first five places on Billboard's Hot 100 list of popular songs. They are the only artists to have ever done this. The closest anyone else has come is, according to the article, 50 Cent, with three songs in the top five in 2005. Here are those five songs:
Can't Buy Me Love
Twist and Shout
She Loves You
I Want To Hold Your Hand
Please Please Me
The Beatles were a real anomaly in the history of music. Immensely popular masters of the popular genre like many before and since, but they managed to transcend the genre (or genres, actually) to create their own unique pieces of music that no-one else has come close to equalling. Genre artists, almost without exception, remain genre artists. Masters they may be, but they don't stray far from the boundaries of their style. The musicians I was talking about the other day, Taraf de Haïdouks, are masters of their genre, but, while they did an album of classical music, it was all related to the styles they know and their interpretation consisted in "re-gypsyfying"the music.
Masters of the blues like B. B. King, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan usually stayed close to their roots.
But The Beatles are an anomaly... If you listen to one of those songs listed above, like this one:
you should conclude that it is an outstanding pop song of its day. It is actually even better than that. Unlike nearly all of the other pop songs of fifty years ago, not one Beatles' album has ever gone out of print, not even the first:
But much more remarkable than that is how their musical "language" progressed. There were two ways this happened. First of all, they widened their writing to encompass more and more genres, some of which we don't have names for. There was Latin:
Music Hall:
Indian:
It is ironic to notice that one of the reasons they explored various genres was to be sure not to miss out on the Next Big Thing. Then at some point they must have realized that they were the next big thing.
This brings up the second way in which they were so anomalous: they created and kept developing an entirely new way of approaching song-writing and produced uncategorizable pieces like this:
And this:
So that feat, capturing all of the top five places in the Billboard list, is really the least of their accomplishments...
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of what musical event? As nearly every media outlet is informing us, it is of the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I actually vaguely remember this. It was before my musical consciousness actually awoke. I was living in a very tiny town in northern British Columbia at the time, no more than 800 inhabitants. I remember that when I went to school the next day, I was in grade six, I believe, and the teacher set up a debate in which we were to argue who was better, Elvis or the Beatles. I don't even remember which side I was on!
This was the song that kicked off the show:
There is just so much that is good about that. First of all, the band are really tight in terms of ensemble. The shuffle drums, walking bass and crisp sextuplets on rhythm guitar are integrated just right. Starting with the voice is a nice effect. Do people notice how much care the Beatles took over how songs started? People, and by people, I mean theorists like Walter Everett in his two volume book on the Beatles's music, rave about George's rockabilly guitar solo, but that, to my mind, is the one element that doesn't quite fit.
In retrospect, to listeners in 1964 who were alert (probably not me!), this was an electrifying experience.
For the second of my innovative Retro Record Reviews I am going to do Revolver by The Beatles that is, in the view of George Harrison at least, a kind of sequel to Rubber Soul.
Like Rubber Soul and all subsequent albums, the name "The Beatles" does not appear on the front cover. Well, there is one exception, the cover of the White Album does have "The Beatles" on it, but just lightly embossed and you have to hold it up the light at the right angle to even see it. Unfortunately, all subsequent reissues have highlighted the name in light grey, which defeats the whole purpose of an album with no cover art! Sigh...
The Beatles went from being an obscure small-time band playing in a Hamburg strip club to being, not just the most famous musicians in the world, but the most famous people in the world, in just a couple of years. I'm not sure anything like that has ever happened before or since. But let's get right to the music.
In case anyone had any doubts about the creative power of The Beatles after Rubber Soul, Revolver laid that to rest. The album starts with a clever reference to the beginning of their first album, Please Please Me that had Paul counting in the band. This count is tentative rather than the shout of the previous album:
Lots of interesting things about this song: it is the only time a song by George Harrison was used to kick off an album. And a good song it is. Straight ahead, four on the floor, rock and roll. And the theme? Tax policy. Yes, the only song I know that is about punitive tax rates and it even mentions the then prime minister, Edward Heath. The passion of the song is explained by George having just noticed that they were paying 95% of their income in tax. Yes, that's correct, 95%. "One for you, nineteen for me." Solely as a result of this song, taxes were lowered world-wide. Just kidding! Had you going there, didn't I? The acerbic lines about pennies and dead people were, of course, the contribution of John Lennon:
Now my advice for those who die Declare the pennies on your eyes
Revolver was released on August 5th, 1966 after thirty-seven days of recording, mixing and editing between April and June. Each song took between ten and thirty-three hours of studio time and a lot of the real "composition" took place in the studio. The basic structure of the songs, the lyrics, chords and melody was usually conceived outside the studio but what the Beatles were inventing in the studio was what you might call the "orchestration" of the song: the texture of instruments, quality of timbre and various things that we previously didn't have names for and that are still exotic practices. For example, they would sometimes slightly alter the current to the tape recorder when recording the instrumental tracks to make them sound "fatter" (by recording them slightly too fast and playing back at the normal speed) and then do the opposite for the voices. The result pushes the tone-quality of the voices forward. They would also double-track the voices for yet more intensity. Recordings by the Beatles always sound different from just about everyone else because a big part of the composition is actually the way they recorded the song.
The second song on Revolver, an utter contrast to the first, is very classical sounding as the only accompaniment is a string octet. The song is Paul's "Eleanor Rigby":
The musical ideas are all Paul's, but he relied on the invaluable George Martin to write out the parts for the players. Now each of these first two songs is a brilliantly creative example of pop music, but it is a whole other order of brilliance that they would appear side by side as they are so radically different. This astonishing range of creative thinking appears in the next song as well, "I'm Only Sleeping" by John Lennon:
This song uses the varispeed technique I mentioned above as well as another one invented for this song. The guitar solo was recorded in the usual way, but inserted backwards into the final mix. In other words, you are hearing all the notes backwards. It's a nice eerie effect for a song that evokes dreamlike states.
OK, so three songs, rock and roll, chamber music and electronic wizardry. Surely that is enough stylistic variety even for the Beatles? Not at all, because the next song is another one by Harrison that is the first in which his interest in Indian music really takes over. "Love You To" was inspired by George's lessons on the sitar with Ravi Shankar and also uses a group of Indian musicians resident in London, so the sound is much more authentically Indian than you might expect:
The metric variety in that music was soon to have an influence on the writing of Lennon.
There are even more varieties of music on this astonishing album including the next song, "Here, There and Everywhere" which is one of Paul's beautiful ballads (and one that sends theorists into conniptions--good ones, I hasten to say):
This was composed and added to the album almost at the last minute. I won't keep putting up clips, but "Yellow Submarine", one of the most popular children's songs ever, written for Ringo to sing, is also on the album as is another of Paul's soul-influenced numbers, "Got To Get You Into My Life":
Big, brassy and bold, that one took more time in the studio than any other song as they kept redoing it to get exactly the right sound. They used three trumpets and two tenor saxes, put the mikes right in the bells and severely limited the signal for the most compact sound. I like the way Paul saves the big, belted out line "Got to get you into my life" for just the right place in the song.
And after all that, we haven't mentioned the most remarkable song on the album, and strangely enough, the first to be recorded, the one that ends the album, "Tomorrow Never Knows" with lyrics based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. What makes this song unusual are a number of ideas, both technical and musical. First of all, Ringo, again, invents a new kind of drum pattern, then the whole song is just one chord, C major, John's voice is put through a speaker system called a Leslie that was originally made for electronic organs. The speakers are on a rotating base that, as it whirls, makes the sound airy and fluttery. But most importantly, this is the introduction into pop music of an avant-garde compositional technique called "musique concrète" as it was developed by French composers. In this, five small loops of pre-recorded sounds are played and layered over top of one another. Some are forwards and some back. The result is a song that sounds like and is like no other:
If they had never recorded another note, I think that this album would pretty much make the Beatles immortal. JMHO.
Well, first of all, I'm changing the name of the series to "Retro Record Review" instead of Retro Album Review.
This is part two because in my last post I took over 1400 words and only managed to talk about two songs and the cover of one of the most important albums ever made, Rubber Soul, released in December 1965 by The Beatles. Let me see if I can do two more songs from the album. One song that everyone seems to know is one by Paul that has a French touch to it--even some of the words are French. You might have noticed Lady Gaga also did this in "Bad Romance". Here's the song, "Michelle" from Rubber Soul, the last song on side one:
The thing that has alway stuck in my mind the most about that song is the guitar solo. But this is one of those seemingly innocuous little tunes that Paul just seemed to toss off--like "Yesterday". But they do seem to stick in your head and finally you realize they aren't innocuous, they are great, though unpretentious, songs. Back in 1967 this song won the Grammy for song of the year. Incidentally, this year that same award went to this song:
Now that's not a bad song, certainly better than the other nominees, but I don't think you could call it unpretentious. When did pop music get so over-produced and bloated? Oh, right, the 80s...
But the one song on Rubber Soul that really stands out and was perhaps the most innovative instrumentally is "Norwegian Wood", a song with rather coy lyrics about an affair John (yes, this song is one of John's) supposedly had. The instrumental innovation was the use of the Indian instrument the sitar for the first time in a popular music recording. The song has an interesting echo in a song by Bob Dylan that appears on Blonde on Blonde, "4th Time Around":
The resemblances are pretty strong. I'm not sure if it is important to say which song came first. The truth is that John Lennon and Bob Dylan had a big influence on one another around this time. Ok, now let's listen to "Norwegian Wood".
There's just a tiny bit of bass drum in there, but that's it for percussion. This song shows what a really great rhythm guitarist John was--the whole texture is based on that driving, chunky rhythm guitar. Nice melodic interjections by the sitar. But the thing about this song is its extreme simplicity, both harmonically and melodically. Simple, but, in its way, perfect and no harmonic clichés, in fact some very interesting harmonies.
I don't think I will talk about the other songs on the album so I will just send you to listen to the whole thing. The whole album is only a bit over 35 minutes in length, and all of it is good:
Partly inspired by a suggestion of frequent commentator Rickard, I am going to start a new series called "Retro Album Reviews" based on the notion that it should be just as interesting, if not more so, to write a review of an old album as a new one. In reviewing new albums, there is always the possibility of an agenda in the mass market reviews: is the positive review being paid for in some way?
Rickard was suggesting that I talk about some good pop music, which got me thinking. So I am going to start by reviewing a pop album, but I won't restrict myself to those. There are some great retro classical albums out there too. By "retro" I just mean an album has been around for a while, years or decades.
So to start, I am going to review a pair of albums that are quite historically significant. I call them a pair of albums because according to one of the participants, they are really one big album that came in two parts. The two albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. Rubber Soul was released on Dec. 3, 1965 which makes it just over 49 years old! Good grief, has it been that long! Actually, this album just precedes my musical consciousness which only came along a couple of years later.
This was the sixth studio album by the Beatles and the first one that they actually had uninterrupted time in the studio to work on. It took a couple of weeks to record and a couple more to mix and you can compare that to their first album that was recorded in one day, over ten hours. These sessions were not broken up by other commitments to touring or film so in a sense it was the first big opportunity to see what they could do, creatively, in the studio.
But first, let's look at that cover. Notice anything? The name of the group does not appear. In a very interesting reaction to "Beatlemania", the phenomenon where people just seemed to go nuts around them, the Beatles more and more distanced themselves, well, from themselves. The name The Beatles doesn't appear on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's or Magical Mystery Tour either. In fact, on that last album, neither do their faces as they are all wearing masks. This reached its maximum with The White Album that has no cover art at all, except for "The Beatles", embossed on the paper. On the original release, you could see the name if you held it at an angle to the light. Subsequent reissues have put the name in light grey, which is too bad.
One of the many, many remarkable things about this album is that it is not only a tremendous creative success, it was also a huge popular success: it pushed the Sound of Music soundtrack off the top of the charts! In today's pop world we just assume that the more creative and original the music is, the fewer copies it will sell. I'm not sure this is entirely true as artists like Gotye and Lady Gaga manage to be creative and original and still sell pretty well, but the general trend is clear: if you want to sell a lot of albums, do what everyone else is doing, but shake your booty a bit more.
But the Beatles were and are a major contradiction to this narrative. They were the most creative pop group of their time, enormously more creative than their peers, but they were also the biggest selling pop group and not only of their time, but of all time. Their only close rival is Elvis Presley.
Ok, let's look at the music. The first song, side one (yes, vinyl records have two sides which affected the way the Beatles organized the songs) is McCartney's "Drive My Car". You will notice me referring to songs as being by McCartney or Lennon when they are both credited with all the songs except for those by Harrison. Yes, John and Paul wrote a lot of songs together, especially in the early years, but by this time each song tended very much to be the product of one or the other of them. John would never have written "Michelle" and Paul would never have written "Nowhere Man".
Oh, just a note: I'm talking about the UK release, the original release in the US had somewhat different songs in a different order. This first one doesn't even appear on the US release. Since the re-release of all these albums in the late 1980s, the UK version has prevailed. "Drive My Car" is one of Paul's rocking soul numbers obviously influenced by American soul music. But I want to just point out what is interesting and original here. First of all, Paul is playing a new Rickenbacker bass and the agility and prominence of the bass lines is a big part of the sound. People forget what an incredible bassist Paul is because of all his other talents. Oh, and the bass line is doubled in the guitar an octave above, which you might not notice at first. The vocal parts are rich: the verse is harmonized in bare fifths and occasional tritones while the chorus is in thirds and the occasional tritone. This sounds a bit acerbic to us because we don't hear this kind of vocal harmony much these days. Listen to the percussion: as always, Ringo (and the boys) seem to reinvent drumming with every song. In this one, notice how the sound of cow bell and tambourine dominates. There is something interesting in every bar. Notice the triplet chords in piano that answer the line "Baby, you can drive my car".
Some interesting things about the lyrics. While the Beatles started out with the usual romantic lyrics, with every song they tried to find a new angle on them. In this song, the character speaking most of the time is a woman who is going to be a famous movie star. Lennon's contribution to the song was mostly in improving the lyrics. "Drive my car" was an old blues euphemism for sex. Paul has described this song as Zsa Zsa Gabor talking to her boy toy.
I see that I have already written a whole post and I'm still on the first song of side one!
Let me just pick one other contrasting song (what am I saying, all the songs are contrasting!) before I close. Paul was the one who talked about different characters in his songs while John's songs tended to be more self-exploratory. "Nowhere Man", the fourth song on side one, ironically came out of the frustration of trying to write a song. In an interview John related that "I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good and I finally gave up and lay down. Then "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down."
So, it's a really good song about not being able to write a good song. This might be the first pop song about existential angst; it is certainly the first Beatles song that has nothing to do with romantic love. There are some interesting cross-currents going on. You might expect the song to be dreary, but it's not. The bass is rather jaunty with a lot of syncopation and passing tones. The melody, while buried in the other two vocal lines (Paul above, George below) is pretty directional. Incidentally, you hear some "la, la las" in the background of the chorus. They might have used this same musical device in a love song (and did), but here it is just a texture. From the 48' mark to just after the one minute mark is a doubled guitar solo with George and John playing twin Stratocasters with maxed-out treble. And I do mean maxed out, when the engineer said that the treble pot was at max they said "well, put it through the faders again". Plus, if you pick the strings right at the bridge, you get more treble. The double solo ends with a high E harmonic. In this song Ringo is actually playing a backbeat, but not rigidly and not all the time.
Now go back and listen to "Drive My Car" again. See how the texture and palette is completely different? Starting with this album the Beatles in effect orchestrated each song in the studio. Every resource available was used and when they ran out they invented new ones. Every song took a unique approach.
One measure of just how important the Beatles were is the amount of material that is available. We have the big Anthology and associated CDs of early and alternate versions of a lot of songs. We have books on their equipment and even one that recounts what they did every single day they were together as a group. But today I ran across something particularly interesting: a clip of just the vocal tracks of the side two medley from Abbey Road.
UPDATE: The original link seems to have gone astray so I can't embed, but this link should take you to the clip:
They really had it all, didn't they? Two of the finest songwriters ever in the English language, Paul and John, a very original guitar player (George) and probably the most creative drummer in rock and roll (Ringo). On top of all that, they could really sing.
With thanks to long-time friend and commentor RG for the original suggestion, I would like to talk about two ways you can look at music history: horizontally and vertically. Of course, this comes from the world of wine-tasting where you can have horizontal or vertical tastings. In a horizontal tasting, you assemble a bunch of wines from the same vintage and compare them. For example, you might get together all the premier cru wines from Bordeaux from 1978 (and if you do, please invite me). There would beChâteau Latour, Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Margaux,Château Haut-Brion and Château Mouton Rothschild. What you would be noticing is the variation between the terroir and the wine-making techniques even given the same weather. Château Lafite, for example, is famous for making great wine even in poor years. A vertical tasting, on the other hand, would take a single vineyard, say Clos Vougeot from the Burgundy region, and assemble wines from different years, which would be an interesting index of how that particular wine aged. Clos Vougeot dates from 1336, so that could take a while. What does this have to do with music history? We could look at different forms or genres from both dimensions. For example, the rondo or rondeau form has existed for a very long time so we could look at it vertically through time. In the 13th century it was both a poetic and musical form with a repeated refrain in both the words and music. Here is an example by Adam de la Halle:
In the 15th century we have a different kind of rondeau, but still based on the refrain principle. Here is Craindre vous vueil, a rondeau cinquain form by Guillaume Dufay from around 1430:
The rondeau became purely instrumental in the 17th and 18th centuries and is often spelled "rondo". In this variant, a principal theme alternates with contrasting episodes. The first were often for harpsichord. Here is a famous one by Rameau, Les Tendres Plaintes:
The rondo was a favorite form in the classical period as the final movement in sonatas or concertos. Here is a very well known one, the Rondo alla turca by Mozart:
Another famous rondo is the last movement of the Pathétique sonata by Beethoven:
Of course the genius comes not only in how the principal theme is constructed, but how ingeniously it is led into each time it recurs. The rondo or rondeau is a rare form nowadays, but it has had an interesting history. But what would a horizontal look at music history consist of? I had a theory teacher once that brought a number of pieces to class for us to analyze, all composed in 1951, which turned out to be the year he was born. In a less-capricious manner, we could pick a year, or decade, and look at what different kinds of things were going on at that time. Just for the heck of it, let's pick the year 1964 and see what was going on. It was a time of immense upheaval in the musical world and if we pick three particularly significant pieces of music, we might get a sense of that. For the first, I choose a string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich, composed in 1964. Though a uniquely and powerfully individual work, the inspiration is undoubtedly the quartets of Beethoven. Composers in Soviet Russia were, on pain of banishment or worse, encouraged not to be too avant-garde. Shostakovich seems to have not let this make him any less creative. I devoted a whole post to the String Quartet No. 9 here. Here is a performance, in three parts, by the St. Petersburg Quartet:
For my next example, a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen composed over a number of years, but with a substantial portion complete by 1964. Here is a performance of Momente from 1965:
Everything you hear is part of the performance. That clapping at the beginning is the choir. Here is a description from Wikipedia:
In addition to singing, the choir members clap their hands, snap their fingers, stamp and shuffle their feet, and slap their thighs. They also play small "auxiliary" instruments: choir I has cardboard tubes of various lengths with glued-on covers, played like drums using light mallets; choir II uses twelve pairs of claves—all with different pitches; choir III shakes plastic soap boxes and refrigerator drink canisters filled with buckshot, which sound like maracas with different pitches, according to the number of pellets and the size of the plastic canisters or boxes; choir IV uses twelve pairs of Volkswagen lug-nut spanners (which kept disappearing during rehearsals, because most of the choristers drove Volkswagens). The purpose of these instruments was to create mediating links between the percussion and vocal timbres. Having the choristers play simultaneously with each syllable they sing or speak automatically and easily solves the problem of rhythmic coordination (Stockhausen 2009, 129). However, Stockhausen reported that the WDR choir, which sang for the première, initially objected to these practices (Stockhausen 1964a) and, "because such means of sound and noise production can have a comic effect, . . . one newspaper report talked about a 'cabaret performance' and ridiculed the whole thing" (Stockhausen 1964b, 132).
Momente is written in "moment form" an invention of Stockhausen. It is worth reading the Wikipedia article. The basic idea is that the composition is a mosaic of 'moments' set off from one another and with no overall narrative line.
Now, for my third example, I choose a musical event that completely overshadows both of the preceding ones: Beatlemania. You may be too young to have experienced this, but for a few years the Beatles were popular in a way that has never occurred before or since. If you look at the Wikipedia page for "1964 in Music" in Wikipedia, it seems as if half of the entries are about the Beatles. Sales of Beatles records made up 60% of the singles market. For a while the top five on Billboard's Hot 100 were all by the Beatles. When they visited Australia for the first time, 300,000 fans met them at the airport. In a matter of a mere year and a half the Beatles went from an obscure bar band playing in Hamburg, to the most famous people in the world. The biggest release for the Beatles in 1964 was A Hard Day's Night, the soundtrack to the movie, which was also a success. Here are some songs:
So, there were three different kinds of things going on in music in 1964: the continuation of the classical tradition by people like Shostakovich; the invention of entirely new kinds of musical forms by people like Stockhausen and the triumph of popular music, largely at the hands of the Beatles. Sociologically, the Beatles are obviously far more important than either Shostakovich or Stockhausen. But what about aesthetically? There is no denying that the Beatles were extraordinary song-writers, probably the best since Schubert or Schumann. They were also amazingly innovative in their arrangements and use of the studio environment. But what was crucial to their success was the baby boom generation: a host of young people looking for something new and with disposable cash. For them, the Beatles were by far the most interesting music around. One interesting consequence is that since the 1960s, the whole classical field has been dwarfed, economically, by the pop artists. In the case of the Beatles, it is hard to deny their appeal. But now, with Nicki Minaj, Psy, Lady Gaga and their ilk, it just seems like an aesthetic train wreck.
It is Stockhausen that is most difficult to put into perspective. He and many others of the European avant-garde received a great deal of support from the US State Department and CIA as part of their Cold War cultural battles. But it is hard to say that his music was the "music of the future". Instead, it seems, to me at least, to be the most dated of my examples. Shostakovich's quartet sounds better to audiences today than probably at any time since it was written. And the Beatles' music never seems to age. Every single one of their albums has been in issue constantly since they first came out--including the very first one, Please Please Me. But Stockhausen might not be listened to too avidly fifty years from now.
A lot of Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials like to scorn us Boomers for never getting past the music of our youth. "Why do you keep listening to all that old 'classic rock' crap, anyway," they say. So let me go back and explain how I got back into the Beatles--not just because I listened to them when I was young, though I did, but because I re-encountered them.
Back in 1990 or 1991 I was visiting a classical guitarist friend of mine in Toronto and was alone in the apartment one morning with nothing much to do. I noticed a copy of the White Album on the CD shelf. I quite literally had not listened to it for many, many years. At least a decade, probably more like two. So I put in on and listened to all four sides. Of course, there was nostalgia from hearing those familiar songs once again, but much more powerful than that was I discovered that I was listening closely and hearing much more than I had ever heard before. As time goes on and you acquire more and more experience in music, your listening becomes more focused, more capable. Now I was hearing aspects and relationships I had never noticed before. Let's hear just a couple of those songs. Here are the first (by Paul) and last (by John) songs on side one, which also has George's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that I just put up the other day. First, "Back in the USSR", Paul's demonstration of how to do surf music, but set in Soviet Russia. I love how the airplane flies through your head at the beginning, from the right to the left channel. Since we were just talking about Ringo the other day, let me point out that he is not drumming on this song. There were a lot of intra-group tensions during the taping of this album and Ringo just took the day off. So Paul is playing the skins:
Now John's "Happiness is a Warm Gun", which has, apart from the pun of the title, some of the twistiest music Lennon every wrote. Walter Everett in his two-volume analysis of the Beatles points out that "there are six different meter changes in the first twenty-one bars." At one point Ringo maintains a 4/4 meter for four and a half bars while the rest of the band is doing three bars of 12/8 (the eighths are equal). The song is in discrete sections set off with significant changes of tempo. All this is unified by using a small set of melodic motifs. Let's hear it:
I doubt there are many other groups that could even perform that song, let along write it. Let's listen to one of George's songs that isn't "While My Guitar". The last song on side three is "Long, Long, Long":
It's a melancholy waltz about lost love, but there are lots of songs like that. What makes this unique? Listen to the arrangement, especially the drumming! There are two drum tracks here: one that very quietly just lays out the 3/4 time and that you hardly notice. Then, on top of that, there are big drum fills--solos--that comment on the song and come in between the sung lines. The first comes at the 27 second mark, but they occur throughout the song and every one is different! Another interesting thing is the way the song ends: it just stops, then there are some distorted organ sounds, followed by a conclusive ka-ching from the rhythm guitar and finally, a drum cadence. It is the details they add to songs, how they begin, how they end, that often distinguishes songs by The Beatles.
After I got to the end of the fourth side in that listening session in Toronto that morning I found tears in my eyes. I don't think that was nostalgia; I think it is because this is powerful music. Here is the Wikipedia article on the album and here is a post I put up on it a while back. This could be the most radical album design ever as well. The album doesn't really have a name. Officially it is "The Beatles", but that is just embossed, not printed, on the plain white cover. So, no cover art. Everyone calls it "The White Album".
