Pink Floyd is sure­ly the most quotable of psych-rock and pro­gres­sive bands. Every­one, no mat­ter their musi­cal tastes, knows lines like “we don’t need no edu­ca­tion, we don’t need no thought con­trol,” “I have become com­fort­ably numb,” and “we’re just two lost souls swim­ming in a fish bowl, year after year.”

The band’s first album with Syd Bar­rett was full of word­play and whim­sy. Lat­er song­writ­ing cut right to the heart of things, with razor-sharp obser­va­tions, heart­break­ing state­ments, sneer­ing jibes, and stri­dent pro­nounce­ments. In their finest iter­a­tions, they were a band with some­thing to say.

These qual­i­ties make it all the more strik­ing that one of their most mov­ing com­po­si­tions is a song with­out any words, unless we count the vocal sam­ples at the begin­ning from writer Mal­colm Mug­geridge. Smack in the mid­dle of Dark Side of the Moon, “The Great Gig in the Sky” show­cas­es a soul­ful impro­vi­sa­tion by guest vocal­ist Clare Tor­ry (who final­ly, right­ful­ly, received a writ­ing cred­it in 2004). Her voice pro­vides all the dra­mat­ic ten­sion the song needs, com­mu­ni­cat­ing more, in pure­ly emo­tion­al terms, than any lyric the band might have writ­ten.

Does the effect come through when her per­for­mance is replayed on a Theremin? You be the judge. The song made famous by its word­less inten­si­ty meets an instru­ment played with­out any touch—it’s a poet­ic kind of mashup, and a well-exe­cut­ed cov­er. Theremin play­er Char­lie Drap­er doesn’t only play Torry’s vocal, but also David Gilmour’s ped­al steel gui­tar parts, which are prob­a­bly bet­ter suit­ed to the instru­ment. As an added bonus, he plays over one of the ear­li­er instru­men­tal demos of the song with sam­ples from Apol­lo 17 astro­nauts, adding a few more words that serve only as more atmos­phere behind the melody.

The Theremin is often pegged as a nov­el­ty instru­ment, defin­ing the sound of B‑movie sci-fi, but it has a long and dis­tin­guished his­to­ry. First called the Ether­phone by Russ­ian inven­tor Leon Theremin, it became the pas­sion­ate instru­ment of choice for clas­si­cal play­er Clara Rock­more in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. A sort of mini-Theremin revival has brought it back into promi­nence as a seri­ous inter­preter of clas­si­cal and mod­ern music. On his YouTube chan­nel, Drap­er demon­strates his appre­ci­a­tion for the Theremin’s range, play­ing Mozart, Grieg, Gersh­win, and the theme from the film First Man. Just above, Hank Green tells us all about the physics of the Theremin, in a SciShow crash course that could answer many of the ques­tions you might have had while watch­ing Drap­er play Pink Floyd on one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Down­right Great

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

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

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

There are a hand­ful of pop­u­lar songs that have become cliche and short­hand for film­mak­ers wish­ing to take us back to the trau­ma of the Viet­nam War: Jimi Hendrix’s cov­er of Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er” or Edwin Starr’s “War,” to name two. Yet at the same time, while clas­sic rock lives for­ev­er, mem­o­ries or lessons of Viet­nam have not. Buf­fa­lo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” orig­i­nal­ly was a com­ment on the Sun­set Strip Cur­few (anti-war) riots, but now its mean­ing is open end­ed enough to suit any poten­tial­ly vio­lent protest.

In Polyphonic’s two-part series, clev­er­ly titled “How the Viet­nam War Shaped Clas­sic Rock” for the first half and “How Clas­sic Rock Shaped the Viet­nam War” for the sec­ond, Noah Lefevre per­forms a need­ed reeval­u­a­tion on dozens of rock and soul songs, plac­ing them back in their his­tor­i­cal con­text and show­ing how the pow­er and mes­sage of music evolved as the war descend­ed into chaos and defeat.

The Viet­nam War dragged on so long that music and cul­ture were both vast­ly dif­fer­ent by the time Saigon fell and the Amer­i­cans pulled out. Poly­phon­ic begins with the first line of protest, the Amer­i­can folk singers in Green­wich Vil­lage, in par­tic­u­lar Phil Ochs and his appren­tice Bob Dylan. Folk was the tra­di­tion­al way that protest reached the Amer­i­can public–it need­ed a singer and a gui­tar and noth­ing more–but Dylan would pro­vide the bridge that rock music need­ed, as he strad­dled both camps for a while (and Ochs did not).

How­ev­er, as Lefevre astute­ly points out, the troops them­selves weren’t lis­ten­ing to folk. They were like any­body else their age at that time and lis­ten­ing to rock and r’n’b. Their top of their pops, cir­ca 1965, was The Ani­mals’ “We’ve Got­ta Get Out of This Place” (orig­i­nal­ly about small town alien­ation, but per­fect for being stuck thou­sands of miles from home) and Nan­cy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walk­ing.”

Things changed as the war esca­lat­ed in 1966 and the first sol­diers returned home, many of whom would join in the protest move­ment.

And while on one hand psy­che­del­ic drugs pow­ered the Sum­mer of Love, advance­ments in tech pow­ered the images of the war that now got beamed into all our tele­vi­sion sets. The war was dirt­i­er, messier, and more hor­rif­ic than most peo­ple imag­ined, and music respond­ed in two ways. One was to bounce out­side that real­i­ty and pro­claim peace the answer, as John Lennon and Yoko Ono did, squar­ing off against the gov­ern­ment and rad­i­cal­ized youth alike. The oth­er was to cre­ate a music sound that tried to match the mad­ness. Jimi Hen­drix man­aged it sev­er­al times, includ­ing “Machine Gun” and his infa­mous ren­di­tion of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” But King Crimson’s “21st Cen­tu­ry Schizoid Man” and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” were even dark­er. And then there was Mar­vin Gaye’s mas­ter­piece What’s Going On, which is nei­ther peacenik nor hor­ror­show. Instead it’s a sigh of melan­choly and sad­ness, tak­ing in man’s cycle of vio­lence towards itself and to the earth.

Poly­phon­ic real­ly stepped it up in these two mini docs, gain­ing access to high qual­i­ty archival footage. There’s plen­ty more to learn and hear in them, so click play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

How Fleet­wood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Explor­ing the “Son­ic Paint­ings” on the Clas­sic Album, Rumours

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

How do you explain Steely Dan to some­one who’s nev­er heard of them? Two pre­ten­tious, per­fec­tion­is­tic, and very tal­ent­ed white guys who love Bebop and R&B meet in pass­ing at Bard Col­lege in 1967. They start a series of bands, one of them fea­tur­ing Chevy Chase on drums. They rub every­one the wrong way and write songs too com­pli­cat­ed for pop and TV but too good to go away, so they become a cel­e­brat­ed stu­dio unit, named after a fic­tion­al steam-pow­ered dil­do in a William S. Bur­roughs’ Naked Lunch.

They obsess over stu­dio pro­duc­tion, putting togeth­er a revolv­ing cast of high-end ses­sion musi­cians and push­ing them through take after take. They care­ful­ly edit songs togeth­er from hours and hours of tape. And some­how, they end up cre­at­ing some of the funki­est music of the 70s—the smoothest of smooth jazz, the yacht-iest of yacht rock… then, a gen­er­a­tion lat­er, they become per­haps the most sam­pled band of all time, their grooves a sine qua non of hip hop’s evo­lu­tion….

Hard­ly sounds plau­si­ble. But there it is: Don­ald Fagen and Wal­ter Becker—two super-fans of the gen­res they cre­ative­ly appropriated—made some incred­i­ble, snarling, cyn­i­cal, vicious­ly groovy easy lis­ten­ing music, and it has more than held up over the decades since they released their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill in 1972. Despite decades of crit­i­cal praise and hit after hit, they also remain a pro­found­ly mis­un­der­stood band.

That is, if we can even call them a band. The Poly­phon­ic video above con­vinc­ing­ly argues oth­er­wise. Beck­er and Fagen main­tained total con­trol at all times over the project, and most­ly resist­ed tour­ing to focus on build­ing albums out of thou­sands of per­fect takes. They were curat­ing “an aes­thet­ic… one that relied on intense per­fec­tion­ism” and satir­i­cal, oblique lyri­cism. Some­thing of a con­cep­tu­al art project that nev­er once broke char­ac­ter.

The ele­ments were there from the beginning—in “Do it Again,” for exam­ple, from their first album—and they grew more sophis­ti­cat­ed and cal­cu­lat­ed through­out the decade. The band’s obses­sion with qual­i­ty cul­mi­nat­ed in their mas­ter­piece Aja and their swan song (before re-unit­ing 20 years lat­er), the slick and bit­ter Gau­cho. Their hyper-crit­i­cal detach­ment can be off-putting to peo­ple who pre­fer to see musi­cians tele­graph pas­sion­ate authen­tic­i­ty, but for Steely Dan fans, the aloof­ness is part of the appeal.

Major gui­tar-rock hit “Reel­in’ in the Years,” a song Fagen called “dumb, but effec­tive,” sat­i­rizes 60s nos­tal­gia long before that became a major cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. The song mocks the very peo­ple who most respond to it, like Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” tips the sacred cows of many of its biggest fans. Even Steely Dan’s detrac­tors can’t help but admire their abil­i­ty to choose the per­fect play­ers for every song and to coax, or brow­beat, out of them the best pos­si­ble per­for­mances.

Their per­fec­tion­ism and stu­dio pol­ish, qual­i­ties you’ll learn much more about in the video, masked a dark, sub­ver­sive core. “For Fagen and Beck­er,” writes Chris Mor­ris at Vari­ety, “the beau­ti­ful­ly tooled music they made with their stu­dio cohorts served as the ulti­mate alien­ation effect. The true import of their work, which addressed for­bid­den impuls­es that moved to the edge of crime and fre­quent­ly beyond, was always garbed in satiny ele­gance; its sar­don­ic and hor­rif­ic essence was mar­ket­ed as the purest ear can­dy.”

Or, maybe, put dif­fer­ent­ly, if you get the dark humor of Patrick Bate­man earnest­ly extolling the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News, Whit­ney Hous­ton, and Phil Collins before a cap­tive audi­ence of his mur­der vic­tims in Mary Harron’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, there’s a good chance you get Steely Dan. As Jay Black, lead singer of Jay and the Amer­i­cans, once said, Beck­er and Fagen were “the Man­son and Stark­weath­er of rock ‘n’ roll,” refer­ring, of course, to Charles Man­son and spree killer Charles Stark­weath­er. With that in mind, you might nev­er hear “Rik­ki Don’t Lose that Num­ber” the same way again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Went Through Sev­en Gui­tarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Per­fect Gui­tar Solo on “Peg”

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A pho­to­graph of two old friends—Joni Mitchell and David Hockney—holding hands at Hockney’s L.A. solo exhi­bi­tion took over the inter­net for a moment, for sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons Guy Tre­bay laid out in The New York Times. These include the fact that “Ms. Mitchell has sel­dom been seen in pub­lic since she says she was giv­en a diag­no­sis of Morgel­lons dis­ease, and suf­fered a brain aneurysm in 2015,” and “despite the pres­ence of the cane she uses since hav­ing learned again to walk, Ms. Mitchell appears radi­ant and robust.”

Tre­bay does not include anoth­er rea­son that comes to mind: the two elder­ly artists, in their sweaters and adorable match­ing snap-brim hats, look like reg­u­lar old folks on the way to a week­ly chess match in the park. It’s a human­iz­ing por­trait of two giants of the art and music world, two peo­ple who, despite their wealth and fame, seem immi­nent­ly down-to-earth and approach­able; a warm and cheer­ful image, says Irish poet Sean Hewitt, who first shared it on Twit­ter, of “two suc­cess­ful peo­ple enjoy­ing their old age.”

Does­n’t every­one espe­cial­ly want that for Joni Mitchell? Of all the beloved sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an stars on the public’s radar these days, Mitchell gar­ners more well-wish­es than anyone—rallying gen­er­a­tions of stars and musi­cians for a 75th birth­day trib­ute con­cert last Novem­ber. The show appeared in the­aters (see a trail­er below) and has been released as a superb album of live cov­ers called Joni 75. So much of the love for Mitchell—her undis­put­ed bril­liance as a song­writer, gui­tarist, and per­former notwithstanding—has to do with the amount of per­son­al pain she over­came to make it as an artist.

Born Rober­ta Joan Ander­son in Alber­ta, Cana­da, her ear­ly strug­gles gave her musi­cal voice so much poignan­cy and authen­tic­i­ty. As she her­self has said, “I wouldn’t have pur­sued music but for trou­ble.” A bout with polio at age nine, a push against her par­ents’ expec­ta­tions to claim her iden­ti­ty as a visu­al artist and musi­cian… then, at age 20, Mitchell’s boyfriend left her, “three months preg­nant in an attic room with no mon­ey and win­ter com­ing on,” she lat­er wrote. She gave up the baby for adop­tion, and the deci­sion haunt­ed her for years. In 1982’s “Chi­nese Café,” she sang “Your kids are com­ing up straight / My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.”

The fol­low­ing year, 1966, she mar­ried Amer­i­can folk singer Chuck Mitchell, took the name we know her by, and left Cana­da for the first time to make musi­cal his­to­ry. But first, she appeared on a Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Let’s Sing Out, host­ed by folk singer Oscar Brand and record­ed on col­lege cam­pus­es across the coun­try between 1963 and 1967. The first ’65 episode at the top cap­tures Mitchell—then Joan Anderson—singing her unre­leased “Born to Take the High­way” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­i­to­ba, a pre­scient song that “imag­ined cars and women dif­fer­ent­ly” than the typ­i­cal road songs of “pow­er­ful mus­cle cars” and “jacked-up mas­culin­i­ty and sex­u­al con­quest,” writes the blog Women in Rock.

“I was born to take the high­way / I was born to chase a dream,” she sings, cer­tain­ties that rever­ber­ate through her music and her life. Brand intro­duces Mitchell as an exam­ple of the move­ment in folk music toward the “self-writ­ten song.” She appears with him lat­er on that same broad­cast to sing “Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew” (a young Dave Van Ronk also appeared on the show). In sub­se­quent broad­casts in the com­pi­la­tion, we see “Joan Ander­son” more con­fi­dent­ly inhab­it the per­sona that would pro­pel her to fame first in Cana­da, then the States, then the world. She per­forms solo and with the Chap­ins, then, final­ly as Joni Mitchell, in two 1966 broad­casts. Find a track­list of each clas­sic per­for­mance below, and, if you haven’t already, take some time out to cel­e­brate Mitchel­l’s 75th by revis­it­ing the begin­nings of her career over fifty years ago.

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Dave Van Ronk

00:00 — Open­ing

01:22 — Born to Take the High­way

04:25 — Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Patrick Sky

07:52 — Open­ing

09:05 — Favorite Col­or

12:00 — Me and My Uncle

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and Jim­my Drift­wood

15:08 — Open­ing

17:20 — Just Like Me

20:15 — Urge for Going

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and the Allen-Ward Trio

24:08 — Open­ing

25:05 — Night in the City

27:55 — Blue on Blue

30:30 — Let’s Get Togeth­er (Allen-Ward Trio)

33:37 — Prithee, Pret­ty Maid­en

Relat­ed Con­tent:

For Joni Mitchell’s 70th Birth­day, Watch Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Joni Mitchell Sings an Aching­ly Pret­ty Ver­sion of “Both Sides Now” on the Mama Cass TV Show (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness