Last week, Nick Cave announced “It’s 10.30 Wednesday evening, and if the world wasn’t in lockdown, I’d be onstage in Toulouse, France singing my heart out with The Bad Seeds. But I’m not. I’m doing the next best thing—sitting at home watching Bad Seed TeeVee. Pure non-stop joy!” And you can too. Above, watch a new 24/7 YouTube livestream that will feature, writes NME, “rare and unseen footage from the band’s archives,” including “promo videos, interviews, live footage, outtakes and other exclusive unseen footage from the band’s archives.” Enjoy.
If there were ever a time to rush a pandemic-themed project to market, this is it. The move can seem well-intentioned, generous, or cynical, depending on the artist and the audience. The Rolling Stones proofed themselves against the latter criticism ages ago by building cynicism into their brand. They know what their audience wants, and they consistently deliver, decade after decade, playing the hits. When vague social commentary slips into a Stones tune, it vibrates at the same frequency as their trademark sleaze.
But why would we expect relevance from a band that hasn’t released any new music in eight years? “On their most recent tour,” writes Alexis Petridies at The Guardian, “which began in 2017 and would still be on course were it not for the coronavirus pandemic—the most up-the-minute addition to their setlist was 25 years old.” Who indeed “would have thought that the Rolling Stones would be early to market with a Covid-19-themed song?” They certainly don’t need the money.
In fact, the band wrote and began recording the song in February 2019. “It wasn’t written for now,” Mick Jagger told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview. “But it was written about being in a place which was full of life, and then now (is) all bereft of life, so to speak. And when I went back to what I’d written originally lyrically, it was all full of… well, I didn’t use them in the lyrics, it was all full of plague terms and things like that.” Jagger and Richards decided they had to release the song, part of a collection of new material the band was working on. Or as Richards put it in a statement:
So, let’s cut a long story short. We cut this track well over a year ago in L.A. for part of a new album, an ongoing thing, and then s— hit the fan. Mick and I decided this one really needed to go to work right now and so here you have it.
Richards sounds almost apologetic about the rushed version you hear above, which they finished remotely after the lockdowns began, but in his interview with Lowe, he says he’s pleased. “We sort of did it from outer space. But I actually liked the way it turned out.” The track has a tight, bluesy, stripped-down dub groove. Shots of Sir Mick reading lyrics from his iPad, in what is presumably his home studio, add a Zoom meeting-like vibe to the video. “We’ve worked on it in isolation,” Jagger says.
He also admits he rewrote the lyrics, “but didn’t have to rewrite very much, to be honest. It’s very much how I originally did it. I was just jamming. I was just playing a guitar and just wrote it like that. I don’t know what frame of mind I must’ve been in. I mean, it was semi-humorous, then it got less humorous….” I think we’ve all said something like that, many times, over the last few years. The Stones were in the right place and right time to play out the end of the 1960s, when things got decidedly less humorous. But who would have guessed they’d show up over fifty years later to soundtrack our current 21st century tragedy?
Pink Floyd is helping you get through the coronavirus by streaming free concert films on YouTube. First came Pulse, a 22-song set from the 1994 Division Bell tour. Now comes Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a 1972 concert film featuring the band performing within the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Pompeii. It’s a classic. Watch it above. And learn more about the film in our prior post here.
Note: The film is only streaming free on YouTube for 24 hours. So watch it while you can. Once the film goes dark, you can watch outtakes here.
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World War I symbolism gets lost on Americans. Our historical memories are short and selective, and the War has “largely vanished from view,” as historian Geoffrey Wawro writes at Time magazine. But in Europe, of course, where some armies suffered ten times the casualties as U.S. troops, and where millions of civilian died and towns were bombed into oblivion, the memory of the Great War is very much alive.
In Ypres, Belgium, the War has been memorialized every day since 1928 (with the exception of four years of German occupation during WWII) by the Last Post Association, a devoted company of buglers who play the military song at the Menin Gate memorial every evening to commemorate the British dead at the Battle of Ypres. As of this writing, they’ve held their 31,748th ceremony.
In Britain itself, and around the world, the tune has a long history as a symbol, like the poppy, of Remembrance Day. Just like Taps in the U.S., the Last Post is “a bugle call,” writes the Last Post Association, “played in the British Army (and in the armies of many other lands) to mark the end of the day’s labours and the onset of the night’s rest…. It has come to represent a final farewell to the fallen at the end of their earthly labours and at the onset of their eternal rest.”
Robert Graves summed up the song’s association with death in his 1918 poem, “The Last Post”:
The bugler sent a call of high romance— “Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square. On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer, “God, if it’s this for me next time in France… O spare the phantom bugle as I lie Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns, Dead in a row with the other broken ones Lying so stiff and still under the sky, Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die.”
I imagine Mark Knopfler, a lover of poetry, might be familiar with Graves’ verse. In his own rendition of the Last Post, above, Knopfler commemorates 17,000 Northumberland Fusiliers killed in the War, who came from his home region and suffered more casualties than any other regiment. Recorded on Remembrance Day, November 8, 2018, the 100th anniversary of the War’s end, Knopfler’s version is both restrained and fiercely overdriven, recalling Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” in some of its flashier moments of vibrato. Rather than one of his usual iconic guitars, he plays a custom instrument that howls like a keening bugle.
The recording was part of a project in which musicians around the world played the ceremonial call on a variety of instruments. For comparison with Knopfler’s creative interpretation, see a straightforward rendition played above by a member of the Australian Royal Military College Band. The bugle call reminds us of the war dead we may have forgotten, and the millions killed by starvation and influenza after the armistice. And perhaps it also reminds us of the importance of collective mourning for the dead in our own extraordinary historical moment.
If you’re feeling a little stressed today—maybe a lot stressed today, maybe severely-rationing-your-social-media stressed—it might do you some good to get comfortably numb. And unless the laws of your locality prevent it, you can reach a safe state of bliss at home with historic live concert films from Pink Floyd. “Following the lead of Radiohead and Metallica and launching a YouTube concert series,” notes Consequence of Sound, “the band will release unseen, rare, or archived material from their vault and stream it for free” over the next few weeks.
It may or may not be necessary to qualify that Pink Floyd these days consists of only two people, David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, keyboardist Richard Wright having passed away in 2008 and bassist/rock opera impresario Roger Waters having stormed off to make his own records in 1985, never to return. Perhaps only coincidentally, the first film the band has released is 1994’s Pulse, a 22-song set from the Division Bell tour, the second studio album made without Waters. But it’s got quite a lot to recommend it despite his absence.
“Filmed at London’s now-defunct Earls Court during the band’s record-breaking 14-night residency,” this show is notable particularly for “the inclusion of the first-ever film recording of Pink Floyd playing The Dark Side of the Moon in full.” The 1972 album’s sardonic ruminations on the banality of modern life in an economy that cannot stop its constant grind might strike us as particularly grim while we’re facing such huge collective losses of life and livelihood. But as always, the band knows how to make its medicine go down with some sweet eye and ear candy.
Mixed in 5.1 surround sound and digitally re-mastered by James Guthrie, Pulse also includes some of original screen films used for the 1970s concert performances of The Dark Side of the Moon (which were never filmed) as well as the visual components for the piece which were remade for the 1994 tour.
On their Facebook page, the band promises more “interesting and diverting images, music and video to help us all get through this”—as best as we can, in any case. And if you run out of Pink Floyd to help you get through a tough time of day, head over to see another band bringing blues-based psych-rock, American style, to the shut-in masses this spring. The Grateful Dead have their own weekly streaming series of full concert films. Of the first concert posted, they write, “Its excellence is indisputable and is something that we think pretty much everyone will enjoy in the absence of actually being able to see live concerts.”
Take an hour or two to relax with some classic live shows from classic bands of yore, and maybe make a list of all the current bands you want to go out and support as soon as you get out of quarantine. Something tells me after all this livestreaming, there’ll be waves of renewed appreciation for live music. Goodness knows, musicians everywhere will need it.
Visit the Pink Floyd Youtube channel for more lives streams in the future.
Ladies and gentleman, the greatest rock n roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. Live, in quarantine, at home, performing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Any theories on what’s the story with Charlie’s drum kit? And why they have red in their homes? Enjoy.
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I needed a lift today. This did the trick. Neil Finn–you know him from Crowded House and Split Enz–plays a beautiful acoustic version of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Enjoy.
Born into poverty in New Orleans in 1901, and growing up during some of the most brutal years of segregation in the South, Louis Armstrong first lived with his grandmother, next in a “Colored Waif’s Home” after dropping out of school at age 11, then with his mother and sister in a home so small they had to sleep in the same bed. After already living through the first World War, he would go on to witness the Spanish Flu epidemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s and the Vietnam conflict.
That’s a lot for one lifetime, though for much of it, Armstrong was a star and living legend who beat the odds and rose above his origins with will and talent. Even so, he suffered some severe ups and downs during the hard times, touring so much to cover his debts in the lean 1930s, for example, that he injured his lips and fingers, and finally moving to Europe when the mob came after him.
Armstrong’s descriptions of his experience of the 1918 influenza pandemic—as he remembers it in his 1954 memoir Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans—are almost jaunty, as you can partly see in the typescript page above from the Louis Armstrong House. But he remembered it from the perspective of a 17-year-old musician in robust health—who seemed to have some kind of resistance to the flu.
He devotes no more than two paragraphs to the flu, which hit the city hard in October of that year. According to the Influenza Encyclopedia, an online project documenting the flu in the U.S. between 1918–1919, New Orleans city authorities “acted immediately,” once they discovered the outbreak, arrived by cargo ship the month before.
On October 9th, the New Orleans Superintendent of Health, “with Mayor Martine Behrman’s consent and the blessing of state authorities… ordered closed all schools (public, private, and parochial, as well as commercial colleges), churches, theaters, movie houses, and other places of amusement, and [prohibited] public gatherings such as sporting events and public funerals and weddings.”
For a struggling young musician making a living playing clubs and riverboats, the closure of “other places of amusement” took a serious toll. The loss of livelihood is what seems to have hurt Armstrong the most when he returned to the city from touring, still unsure if the Great War would end.
When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaiser’s monkey business was getting worse, and, what is more, a serious flu epidemic had hit New Orleans. Everybody was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-minded. I never missed a week without a physic, and that kept all kinds of sickness out of me.
Whatever “physic” helped Armstrong’s avoid infection, it wasn’t for lack of exposure. In lieu of playing the trumpet he began caring for the sick, since all of the hospitals, even those that would take black patients, were completely overcrowded.
Just when the government was about to let crowds of people congregate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With everybody suffering from the flu, I had to work and play the doctor to everyone in my family as well as all my friends in the neighborhood. If I do say so, I did a good job curing them.
We might imagine some of those “odd jobs” were what we now call “essential”—i.e. low paid and high risk under the circumstances. He persevered and finally got a gig playing a “honky-tonk” that avoided a shut-down because it was “third rate,” and he “could play a lot of blues for cheap prostitutes and hustlers.” Few things could get Satchmo down, it seemed, not even a flu pandemic, but he was one of the lucky ones—luckily for the future of jazz. Only, we don’t have to imagine how hard this must have been for him. We just have to take a look around.
Learn more about the 1918 influenza epidemic in the U.S. at the Influenza Encyclopedia and read the rest of Armstrong’s account of his formative years at the Internet Archive.
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