Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in London. The band kicked off the show by performing all eight tracks from the album, before then playing another 23 songs, mostly hits from their large catalog of music. Originally live streamed on YouTube, you can now watch the entire show online. Just click play above.
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This past Friday, the bassist of The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost immediately the tributes poured in, most recognizing that Lesh wasn’t your ordinary bassist. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. [His] playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.”
My first encounter with the Grateful Dead came when I was 16 years old. I vividly remember the guy who played bongos on my friend’s head when we arrived at the show. I also remember the spinners tripping on acid, dancing down the halls and short-circuiting my little mind. But the concert itself remains only a hazy memory. And certainly the artistry of Lesh, Garcia, Weir, and the drummers was lost on me. Only years later, did it all start to click. That’s when I dialed into the Barton Hall concert at Cornell (May 8, 1977) and encountered Lesh’s bass lines at the start of “Scarlet Begonias.” Once you hear them, they’re hard to shake. The video above zooms into that performance, exploring the development of Lesh’s bass playing throughout the spring of ’77. The next video down lets you hear the complete Barton Hall performance of “Scarlet Begonias” in all of its glory.
When others try to capture what made Phil, Phil, they’ll feature another beloved show–Veneta, OR (6/27/72). Below, you can hear isolated tracks of Phil’s bass work on “Bertha” and “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.” (Click the links in the prior sentence to hear Lesh and the band performing the songs together–so you can hear how the bass ties in.) Trained in free jazz and avant-garde classical music, Lesh infused rock with the influences of Coltrane, Mingus, and Stravinsky–not to mention others. And, with that, the bass was never the same.
Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in aNew YorkTimes Magazine profile of the novelist: “busy, upbeat, dramatic — like five normal songs fighting for supremacy inside an empty paint can.” Murakami tells Anderson that he “chose the Sinfonietta because that is not a popular music at all. But after I published this book, the music became popular in this country… Mr. Seiji Ozawa thanked me. His record has sold well.”
In addition to being a world-famous conductor, the late Ozawa was also, as it happens, a personal friend of Murakami’s; the two even published a book, Absolutely on Music, that transcribes a series of their conversations about the former’s vocation and the latter’s avocation, a distinction with an unclear boundary in Murakami’s case.
“I have lots of friends who love music, but Haruki takes it way beyond the bounds of sanity,” writes Ozawa, and indeed, Murakami has always made music a part of his work, both in his process of creating it and in its very content. His books offer numerous references to Western pop (especially of the nineteen-sixties), jazz, and also classical recordings — fifteen of which you can hear in the video from NTS radio above.
We’ve previously featured NTS, the London-based online radio station known for its deep dives on themes from spiritual jazz to Hunter S. Thompson, for its “Haruki Murakami Day” broadcast of music from his novels. Opening with Le mal du pays from Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, the NTS Guide to Classical Music from Murakami Novels continues on to “Vogel als Prophet” from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, and thereafter includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 In A Major, Mendelssohn’s Cleveland Quartet, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, and much else besides. You may not be able to recall where you’ve seen all of these pieces mentioned in Murakami’s work right away, but you’ll surely recognize the Sinfonietta the moment it comes along.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The scene is Farm Aid, 1985, attended by a crowd of 80,000 people. The song is “How Blue Can You Get.” And the key moment comes at the 3:10 mark, when the blues legend B.B. King breaks a guitar string, then manages to replace it before the song finishes minutes later. All the while, he keeps the song going, never missing a beat and singing the blues. Enjoy.
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Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown are remembered as larger-than-life performers with an almost mythical-seeming presence and distinctiveness. But it wasn’t so very long ago that both of them were active — and even active onstage together. In the video above, the King of the High Cs and the Godfather of Soul get together on “It’s a Man’s World” in 2002. It happened at the penultimate Pavarotti & Friends concert, one of a series of yearly benefit shows that ran between 1992 and 2003, and also featured the likes of Andrea Bocelli, Grace Jones, Sting, and Lou Reed.
“It’s a remarkable performance on so many levels,” writes Tom Teicholz at Forbes.com. “James Brown is in top form, his voice strong and pure. He commands the stage, and he dominates — he is in every sense an equal to Pavarotti, who sings in Italian with great subtlety, finesse, and emotion. The video is filled with moments of grace — such as when Brown, with a magisterial wave of his arm cedes the stage to Pavarotti to sing his solo, or when Brown says ‘my Bible says Noah made the Ark’ as if it was truly HIS Bible.”
What’s more, this is hardly the James Brown only slightly exaggerated by Eddie Murphy in those Saturday Night Live hot tub sketches a couple of decades earlier. “Brown’s performance is not about his staged theatrics, not about his dancing, not even really about Brown’s trademark grunts and growls,” Teicholz writes. “This is about singing and getting the song across,” a mission certainly not hindered by the kind of of orchestral backing they have. “It’s a Man’s World” might seem like the kind of song you “couldn’t sing today,” at least if you take its title at face value. But in any case, how many singers today would want to be subject to comparison with this particular rendition if they did so?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
George Harrison loved the ukulele, and really, what’s not to love? For its dainty size, the uke can make a powerfully cheerful sound, and it’s an instrument both beginners and expert players can learn and easily carry around. As Harrison’s old friend Joe Brown remarked, “You can pick up a ukulele and anybody can learn to play a couple of tunes in a day or even a few hours. And if you want to get good at it, there’s no end to what you can do.” Brown, once a star in his own right, met Harrison and the Beatles in 1962 and remembers being impressed with the fellow uke-lover Harrison’s range of musical tastes: “He loved music, not just rock and roll…. He’d go crackers, he’d phone me up and say ‘I’ve got this great record!’ and it would be Hoagy Carmichael and all this Hawaiian stuff he used to like. George was not a musical snob.”
“Crackers” may be the perfect word for Harrison’s uke-philia; he used it himself in the adorable note above from 1999. “Everyone I know who is into the ukulele is ‘crackers,’” writes George, “you can’t play it and not laugh!” Harrison remained upbeat, even during his first cancer scare in 1997, the knife attack at his home in 1999, and the cancer relapse that eventually took his life in 2001. The ukulele seemed a sweetly genuine expression of his hopeful attitude. And after Harrison’s death, it seemed to his friends the perfect way to memorialize him. Joe Brown closed the Harrison tribute concert at Royal Albert Hall with a uke version of “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” and Paul McCartney remembered his friend in 2009 by strumming “Something” on a ukulele at New York’s Citi Field.
In his remarks, McCartney fondly reminisced: “Whenever you went round George’s house, after dinner the ukuleles would come out and you’d inevitably find yourself singing all these old numbers.” Just above, see Harrison and an old-time acoustic jazz ensemble (including Jools Holland on piano) play one of those “old numbers”—“Between The Devil and Deep Blue Sea”—in 1988. The song eventually wound up on his last album, the posthumously released Brainwashed. Just below, see Harrison, McCartney, and Ringo Starr sing a casually harmonious rendition of the 1927 tune “Ain’t She Sweet” while lounging picnic-style in a park.
In Hawaii, where Harrison owned a 150-acre retreat, and where he was known as Keoki, it’s said he bought ukuleles in batches and gave them away. The story may be legend, but it certainly sounds in character. He was a generous soul to the end. Just below, see Harrison strumming and whistling away in a home video made shortly before his death. You can hear the hoarseness in his voice from his throat cancer, but you won’t hear much sadness there, I think.
In 1958, Merle Haggard saw Johnny Cash play in San Quentin, and went on to sing honest country songs for country outlaws. In 1982, future Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello saw Joe Strummer play with The Clash in Chicago and went on to play angry righteous rock for angry punks. Both Cash and Strummer, who died less than a year apart, were musical prophets in their way, inspiring others to pick up their message and carry it to the common fan. The same, of course, could be said of Bob Marley. And though those three would likely have different definitions of the word “redemption,” they shared a belief in music as a force for good.
Just above, hear Cash and Strummer sing Marley’s “Redemption Song,” with Morello on guitar. Recorded during the sessions for Cash’s last album, the Rick Rubin-produced American IV: The Man Comes Around, the duet happened more or less by chance.
Says Rubin, “Joe was coming every day, because he loved Johnny Cash, and he just happened to be in L.A. on vacation. And he actually extended his trip a week longer just to come every day and be around Johnny.” Rubin also recorded a solo take of Strummer singing “Redemption Song” (below), which appeared on Strummer’s final album, the posthumously released Streetcore.
“Originally, the song was supposed to be a duet, and we recorded it as a duet,” Rubin continues, “But, just in case, both Johnny and Joe sang the whole song several times” on their own. The duet version appears on the third disc, titled Redemption Songs, of the released Cash box set Unearthed, which features outtakes and alternates from the Rubin-produced American Recordings series of Cash cover songs. Seems fitting somehow that one of the last songs both Strummer and Cash would record would be this one, and that they would sing it together. As one site succinctly put it, the recording represents “the first true punk rock star and the last. Together forever.”
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The most streamed Beatles song isn’t “She Loves You,” “Hey Jude,” or “All You Need Is Love.” It isn’t even “Yesterday.” If you were about to guess “Something,” you’re on the right track, at least as far as the source album and songwriter. In fact, it’s George Harrison’s other signature song “Here Comes the Sun,” which has racked up 1,433,830,334 Spotify streams as of this writing, nearly a million more than “In My Life” right below it. The You Can’t Unhear This video above breaks down what makes “Here Comes the Sun” stand out even amid the formidable Beatles catalog, from its conception through its recording process.
Though it comes off as a simple song — whose inviting quality may well have something to do with its outsized popularity — “Here Comes the Sun” turns out to be the result of a technically complex and unconventional process fairly characteristic of the late Beatles. Starting with a melody crafted while playing an acoustic guitar in Eric Clapton’s garden (having recused himself from yet another business meeting), Harrison enriched it with such techniques as running his guitar through a revolving Leslie speaker meant for an organ and having his hulking Moog synthesizer transported to Abbey Road so he could add a layer of electronic sublimity.
At this point in the life of the Beatles, everyone involved could surely feel that the band’s end was near. Regardless, none of the Fab Four was quite working in isolation, and indeed, the “Here Comes the Sun” sessions — which, of course, ended up on Abbey Road, the final album they recorded — represent some of their last work as a unit. It’s not surprising that such a context would produce, say, John Lennon’s grimly descending “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which ends side one; what startles no matter how many times you hear it is the gentle optimism with which Harrison’s side two opens immediately thereafter, especially if you’re not turning an LP over in between.
Even in isolation, “Here Comes the Sun” has made such a cultural impact that Carl Sagan lobbied for its inclusion on the Voyager “Golden Records,” which were launched into outer space with the intent to give other forms of intelligent life a glimpse of human civilization. The Beatles also liked the idea, but they didn’t own the necessary rights; those belonged to the label EMI, who in the recollection of Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan demanded a prohibitive fee for the song’s use. Had it been included, perhaps it could’ve ended up the first intergalactic hit song — one enjoyed in the orbit of another sun entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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