In 1999, Volk­swa­gen aired a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Deal­er­ships were soon inun­dat­ed with calls, as pop­u­lar cul­ture his­to­ry remem­bers it, but not from peo­ple inquir­ing about the car. Rather, they were des­per­ate to know the name of the song sound­track­ing the ad’s footage of a top-down night dri­ve to a house par­ty. For all they knew, it was a new sin­gle from an up-and-com­ing young man with an acoustic gui­tar and sen­si­tiv­i­ty exquis­ite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure Eng­lish singer-song­writer Nick Drake’s belat­ed ascent to star­dom.

“Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replace­ment for The Church’s eight­ies hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a record­ing career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If lis­ten­ers of the late nineties curi­ous enough to pick it up — or, as had just become pos­si­ble, down­load it from file-shar­ing net­works — could hard­ly have been dis­ap­point­ed, they still would­n’t have been pre­pared for its sec­ond track, “Riv­er Man.”

Described by Ian Mac­Don­ald as “one of the sky-high clas­sics of post-war Eng­lish pop­u­lar music,” the song com­bines Drake’s haunt­ing­ly evoca­tive lyri­cism and uncon­ven­tion­al gui­tar tun­ing with a rich lay­er of orches­trat­ed strings that stops just short of cloy­ing, all in jazzy 5/4 time.

As music YouTu­ber Charles Cor­nell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt rec­og­nize that time sig­na­ture from Dave Brubeck­’s “Take Five,” which makes that high­ly unusu­al rhythm feel nat­ur­al. So does “Riv­er Man,” though the more close­ly you lis­ten to it, the more musi­cal­ly dar­ing it sounds, even if you don’t have the the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage to explain it as Cor­nell does. There is, for exam­ple, no cho­rus, which could­n’t have helped its chances of radio air­play at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflec­tive mood. “The coun­ter­cul­ture was car­ni­va­lesque, its opti­mism com­pul­so­ry,” Mac­Don­ald writes. “Drake saw deep­er.” It’s hard­ly implau­si­ble, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Bud­dhis­tic alle­go­ry of an indi­vid­ual faced with a choice between the con­crete, cycli­cal real­i­ty of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.

Drake com­posed “Riv­er Man” dur­ing his brief time at Cam­bridge, and the books writ­ten about him quote acquain­tances from that peri­od describ­ing it as a remark­able step for­ward in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. Dur­ing the Five Leaves Left ses­sions, he sang and played gui­tar live with the orches­tra, whose arrange­ments (by the band­leader Har­ry Robin­son, then known on British TV for his nov­el­ty band Lord Rock­ing­ham’s XI) filled space Drake had delib­er­ate­ly left in the com­po­si­tion. The strings, in oth­er words, weren’t an incon­gru­ous attempt at sweet­en­ing, as Phil Spec­tor would per­form on the Bea­t­les’ “The Long and Wind­ing Road” the fol­low­ing year, but an inte­gral part of the song. Drake’s solo per­for­mance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broad­cast host­ed by none oth­er than John Peel) sounds cap­ti­vat­ing, but incom­plete. On the Five Leaves Left ver­sion, every ele­ment works togeth­er to make “Riv­er Man” endur­ing — and, in every sense, tran­scen­dent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rab­bit”: The 1960s Clas­sic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Car­roll, Miles Davis’ Sketch­es of Spain, and Hyp­o­crit­i­cal Par­ents

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

How a Fake Car­toon Band Made “Sug­ar Sug­ar” the Biggest Sell­ing Hit Sin­gle of 1969

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Even among the most acclaimed albums ever record­ed, not a sin­gle one is per­fect. That goes more so for the releas­es of what I call the “hero­ic age of the album,” which enjoyed its zenith around the late sev­en­ties. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, 1979 was the year that Pink Floyd put out The Wall, a rock opera whose sprawl across two discs deals with themes rang­ing from the bomb­ings of the Sec­ond World War to drug depen­den­cy to fas­cist impuls­es to the iso­la­tion of super­star­dom. This ambi­tion was repaid: The Wall soon became the best-sell­ing dou­ble album of all time, despite hav­ing been received with at least a mea­sure of ambiva­lence over the grand­ness, or per­haps grandios­i­ty, of the scale of its pro­duc­tion and the tone of its nar­ra­tive.

Yet those few pre­pared to call The Wall an artis­tic fail­ure must nev­er­the­less acknowl­edge how much impres­sive work it real­ly does con­tain. Of its pop­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed achieve­ments, per­haps the most mem­o­rable is David Gilmour’s gui­tar solo, or rather the gui­tar solos, on “Com­fort­ably Numb,” a song about being med­ical­ly revived from a sub­stance-induced stu­por moments before giv­ing a con­cert.

They cer­tain­ly stuck in my own head in sev­enth grade, when my music teacher assigned our class term paper ana­lyz­ing the album, and kept pop­ping back into it over the sub­se­quent decades. “His play­ing is so lyri­cal,” says YouTu­ber David Hart­ley in his new video about the mak­ing of “Com­fort­ably Numb.” “The way he plays each note is in a way that you can almost sing it, and the way he uses phras­es is so sim­ple, and so beau­ti­ful.”

These solos were record­ed in a con­text of less-than-smooth sail­ing for the Floyd: as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, “Com­fort­ably Numb” was the prod­uct of anoth­er argu­ment punc­tu­at­ing the long-fray­ing part­ner­ship between Gilmour and lead singer Roger Waters, for whom The Wall was a way of ren­der­ing his own life expe­ri­ences and per­cep­tions in musi­cal form. But as some­times hap­pens, con­flict — in this case, between two com­pet­ing and stark­ly dif­fer­ent con­cepts of the song, whose evo­lu­tion Hart­ley explains with demo record­ings and inter­view clips — pro­duced a greater result than any one artist’s vision. It all arrives at what Hart­ley calls “pos­si­bly the great­est gui­tar solo of all time,” which clos­es out side three, and indeed the most fruit­ful era of Gilmour and Waters’ col­lab­o­ra­tion. Even those who can’t take The Wall too seri­ous­ly have to admit that life isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly easy for a rock star, much less for two of them in the same stu­dio.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

The His­to­ry of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo: A Sev­en-Part Series

Pink Floyd Songs Played Splen­did­ly on a Harp Gui­tar: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here” & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Com­fort­ably Numb” Live (2006)

The Evo­lu­tion of the Rock Gui­tar Solo: 28 Solos, Span­ning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s almost 35 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” debuted on MTV’s 120 Min­utes and, for bet­ter or worse, inau­gu­rat­ed the grunge era. The video (below) arrived as a shock and a thrill to a gen­er­a­tion too young to remem­ber punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy cor­po­rate dance music and hair met­al that char­ac­ter­ized the late-80s. For every­one out­side the small Seat­tle scene that nur­tured them and the tape-trad­ing kids in the know, the band seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a total angst-rid­den pack­age, and the MTV video, by first-time direc­tor Samuel Bay­er, seemed brac­ing­ly anar­chic and raw at the time.

But a look at the first live per­for­mance of “Teen Spir­it” (above) makes it seem pret­ty tame by com­par­i­son. The video’s a lit­tle grainy and low-res, which suits the song just fine. Live, “Teen Spir­it’s” dis­turb­ing under­tones are more pro­nounced, its qui­et-loud dynam­ics more force­ful, and the ener­gy of the crowd is real, not the thrash­ing around of a bunch of teenage extras. Not a cheer­leader in sight, but I think this would have grabbed me more than the pep ral­ly-riot-themed MTV video did when it debuted a few months lat­er. Despite their anti-cor­po­rate stance, Nir­vana was a casu­al­ty of their own suc­cess, eat­en up by the machin­ery they despised. Their best moments are still the unscript­ed and unpre­dictable. For con­trast, zip back to 1991 and watch the MTV video below.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nirvana’s Home Videos: Watch Nir­vana Rehearse in Krist Novoselic’s Mother’s House (1988)

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (1991)

Nir­vana Before They Were Nir­vana: Watch Their 1988 Per­for­mance Record­ed in a Radio Shack

Nir­vana Refus­es to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ After the Crowd Hurls Sex­ist Insults at the Open­ing Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

Nir­vana Refus­es to Mime Along to “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” on Top of the Pops (1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Robert John­son died at just 27 years old, some say as a con­se­quence of sell­ing his soul to the dev­il at a cross­roads. But before his time came, he man­aged to record 29 songs, a scant body of work that nev­er­the­less secured his artis­tic immor­tal­i­ty as one of the most influ­en­tial blues musi­cians of all time. It’s unfor­tu­nate that his record­ings, all of them made between 1936 and 1937 in less-than-ide­al stu­dio con­di­tions even for the time, leave some­thing to be desired in the audio qual­i­ty depart­ment. But now, some 90 years lat­er, sound restor­er Nick Del­low has been upload­ing rel­a­tive­ly crisp dig­i­tized “test press­ings” of John­son’s songs to YouTube: last month, for exam­ple, we fea­tured one of “Cross Road Blues” here on Open Cul­ture.

In the video above, you’ll find a sim­i­lar­ly high­er-qual­i­ty ver­sion of “Come On in My Kitchen,” a song acknowl­edged as an ear­ly demon­stra­tion of the young John­son’s oth­er­world­ly musi­cal pow­er. You may notice that the title labels this par­tic­u­lar record­ing as “take one.” John­son also record­ed a much dif­fer­ent sec­ond take, which his label Vocalion Records released in 1937, pos­si­bly because it sound­ed less mourn­ful and thus — accord­ing to record-indus­try log­ic — more viable as a hit.

Though take one now seems to be regard­ed as the “true” ren­di­tion of the song by his seri­ous enthu­si­asts, the pub­lic did­n’t get to hear it until 1961, when it was includ­ed on the com­pi­la­tion King of the Delta Blues Singers that did more than any oth­er release to win John­son his posthu­mous fan base.

It is, admit­ted­ly, not easy to imag­ine the first take of “Come On in My Kitchen” sweep­ing the dance halls, even with this sound qual­i­ty much improved from the ver­sion on King of the Delta Blues Singers. But the rea­sons John­son’s music has endured so long have less to do with his abil­i­ty to get a crowd mov­ing than with his com­bi­na­tion of under­stat­ed vir­tu­os­i­ty and preter­nat­ur­al-sound­ing abil­i­ty to reach into gen­uine­ly haunt­ing emo­tion­al realms. Like many canon­i­cal singer-song­writ­ers who died young, he seems always to be and remain some­how old­er than us, his lis­ten­ers, even as we reach (and indeed pass) mid­dle age. Occa­sion­al­ly, the release of nev­er-before-heard record­ings or press­ings reveals the true edge of imma­tu­ri­ty in such fig­ures; with John­son, it only deep­ens his leg­end.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A New­ly Dis­cov­ered Record­ing Lets You Hear Delta Blues Leg­end Robert John­son in Stun­ning Clar­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It can be frus­trat­ing for Led Zep­pelin fans to hear the band reduced to pla­gia­rism law­suits or the quin­tes­sence of sex­u­al­ly-aggres­sive rock-star enti­tle­ment (though much of that is deserved). For one thing, Zeppelin’s occult song­writ­ing ten­den­cies, cour­tesy of both Page and Plant, play just as promi­nent a role as their blues-rock come-ons (as sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of fan­ta­sy met­al bands can attest). For anoth­er, their stu­dio pro­duc­tions and live shows are renowned for pio­neer­ing mash-ups of mod­ern rock, folk, and clas­si­cal instru­men­ta­tion, cour­tesy of both Page and Jones. And final­ly, the band’s record­ing tech­niques were—for the time—demonstrations of tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry.

Thus it should come as no sur­prise that tech­ni­cal wiz­ard Jim­my Page would play the Theremin, though he does play on it the kind of scream­ing, feed­back-laden bends he unleashed from his Les Paul. Intro­duced to the world by Sovi­et inven­tor Leon Theremin in 1919, the ear­ly elec­tron­ic instru­ment emits high-pitched singing when a play­er’s hands come with­in range of its invis­i­ble elec­tri­cal fields. “It hasn’t got six strings,” Page says in his demon­stra­tion at the top of the post, from the 2009 film It Might Get Loud, “but it’s a lot of fun.”

Page used a Son­ic Wave Theremin in his Zep­pelin days in a very gui­tar-like way—running it through a Mae­stro Echoplex and Orange amps and cab­i­nets. (Watch him revive the tech­nique in a 1995 French TV broad­cast above.) For sev­er­al months in 1971, writes fan­site Achilles Last Stand, Page “used a dou­ble-stacked Theremin” for twice the son­ic assault.

Though he seems to have gone back to just the one Theremin in the solo above, the effect is no less elec­tri­fy­ing, if you’ll excuse the pun, as he sends echoes of ray-gun noise cas­cad­ing around the the­ater. Well over five min­utes into the hyp­not­ic affair, Page takes to his Les Paul, cre­at­ing more ragged pat­terns with vio­lin bow and Echoplex. Even if you aren’t in a dazed and con­fused state, you’ll feel like you are if you give your­self over to this piece of per­for­mance art. Hero­ics? Yes, and indeed the bowed gui­tar act has its phal­lic over­tones. But it begins and ends with long stretch­es of the kind of dron­ing exper­i­men­tal noise one would expect to find onstage at an ear­ly Kraftwerk show.

Those in the know will know that Page put the theremin to use on one of the band’s most tech­ni­cal­ly exper­i­men­tal record­ings (though it also hap­pens to be an appro­pri­at­ed blues stom­per), “Whole Lot­ta Love” from 1969’s Led Zep­pelin II. “I always envi­sioned the mid­dle to be quite avant-garde,” Page told Gui­tar World, “The Theremin gen­er­ates most of the high­er pitch­es and my Les Paul makes the low­er sounds.” Watch him rip out a theremin-and-gui­tar solo above in the live per­for­mance from 1973. Tak­en with the psy­che­del­ic video effects, the per­for­mance reach­es mys­ti­cal planes of rhyth­mic abstrac­tion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Learn How to Play the Theremin: A Free Short Video Course

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

There’s a max­im that says, “It’s not the gui­tar, it’s the play­er.” And the video above bears it out.

In this clip, musi­cian Clay Shel­burn and his pal Zac Stokes vis­it a Wal­mart at 3 a.m. and pick up a Dis­ney Cars 2 toy gui­tar. Next, they pro­ceed to play Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” and unleash the full poten­tial of that $25 gui­tar. The Bar­bi­es all go crazy.

When it comes to the blues, any old gui­tar will do. That we know. But if you care to watch Shel­burn play the same song on a gui­tar that runs north of $1,000, check out the video below.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Plays the Acoustic Gui­tar in Rare Footage, Let­ting Us See His Gui­tar Vir­tu­os­i­ty in Its Purest Form

Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s Ver­sion of “Lit­tle Wing” Played on Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment, the Gayageum

John Coltrane released “more sig­nif­i­cant works” than his 1960 “My Favorite Things,” says Robin Wash­ing­ton in a PRX doc­u­men­tary on the clas­sic rework­ing of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broad­way hit. “A Love Supreme” is often cit­ed as the zenith of the saxophonist’s career. “But if you tried to explain that song to an aver­age lis­ten­er, you would lose them. [“My Favorite Things”] is a defin­i­tive work that every­one knows, and any­one can lis­ten to, and the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of its evo­lu­tion is some­thing every­one can share and enjoy.” The song is acces­si­ble, a com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful hit, and it is also an exper­i­men­tal mas­ter­piece.

Indeed, “My Favorite Things” may be the per­fect intro­duc­tion to Coltrane’s exper­i­men­tal­ism. After the dizzy­ing chord changes of 1959’s “Giant Steps,” this 14-minute, two-chord excur­sion pat­terned on the ragas of Ravi Shankar announced Coltrane’s move into the modal forms he refined until his death in 1967, as well as his embrace of the sopra­no sax­o­phone and his new quar­tet. It became “Coltrane’s most request­ed tune,” says Ed Wheel­er in The World Accord­ing to John Coltrane, “and a bridge to a broad pub­lic audi­ence.”

Coltrane’s take is also mes­mer­iz­ing, trance-induc­ing, “often com­pared to a whirling dervish,” notes the Poly­phon­ic video above, a ref­er­ence to the Sufi med­i­ta­tion tech­nique of spin­ning in a cir­cle. It’s an unlike­ly song choice for the exer­cise, which makes it all the more fas­ci­nat­ing. The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final Broad­way col­lab­o­ra­tion, was an “instant clas­sic,” and every­one who’d seen it walked away hum­ming the tune to “My Favorite Things.” By 1960, it had become a stan­dard, with sev­er­al cov­er ver­sions released by Leslie Uggams, The Pete King Chorale, the Hi-Lo’s, and the Nor­man Luboff Choir.

Hun­dreds more cov­ers would fol­low. None of them sound­ed like Coltrane’s. The modal form—in which musi­cians impro­vise in dif­fer­ent kinds of scales over sim­pli­fied chord structures—created the “open free­dom” in music explored on Miles Davis’ path­break­ing Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane played tenor sax. (It was Davis who bought Coltrane his first sopra­no sax that year.) Coltrane’s use of modal form in adap­ta­tions of pop­u­lar stan­dards like “My Favorite Things” and George Gershwin’s “Sum­mer­time” from Por­gy and Bess was an explic­it strat­e­gy to court a wider pub­lic, using the famil­iar to ori­ent his lis­ten­ers to the new.

The video essay brings in the exper­tise of musi­cian, com­pos­er, and YouTu­ber Adam Neely, who explains what makes Rogers and Hammerstein’s clas­sic unique among show tunes, and why it appealed to Coltrane as the cen­ter­piece of the 1961 album of the same name. The song’s unusu­al form and struc­ture allow the same melody to be played over both major and minor chords. Coltrane’s mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the song reduces it to the two ton­ics, E major and E minor, over which he and the band solo, intro­duc­ing a shift­ing tonal­i­ty and mood to the melody with each chord change.

Neely goes into greater depth, but it’s over­all an acces­si­ble expla­na­tion of Coltrane’s very acces­si­ble, yet ver­tig­i­nous­ly deep, “My Favorite Things.” Maybe only one ques­tion remains. Coltrane’s ren­di­tion came out four years before Julie Andrews’ icon­ic per­for­mance in the film adap­ta­tion of The Sound of Music, evok­ing the obvi­ous ques­tion,” says Wash­ing­ton: “Did he influ­ence her?”

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jazz Decon­struct­ed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Ground­break­ing and Rad­i­cal?

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Dis­cov­er the Church of St. John Coltrane, Found­ed on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme

Behold John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.