There are many ways to cel­e­brate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a lis­ten­ing par­ty alone. You can have a lis­ten­ing par­ty with friends. You can learn the title track in a cou­ple of days and play it onstage while the band you admire sits in the audi­ence. That last one might be overkill. Unless you’re Jimi Hen­drix. Hen­drix was so excit­ed after the UK release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band in 1967 that he opened a set at London’s Sav­ille The­atre with his own, Hen­drix-ified ren­di­tion of the album’s McCart­ney-penned title song. In the audi­ence: Paul McCart­ney and George Har­ri­son.

It’s a loose, good-natured trib­ute that, as you might imag­ine, made quite an impres­sion on the Bea­t­les in atten­dance. “It’s still obvi­ous­ly a shin­ing mem­o­ry for me,” McCart­ney recalled many years lat­er, “because I admired him so much any­way, he was so accom­plished.”

To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actu­al­ly do it by the Sun­day night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because nor­mal­ly it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might won­der whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pret­ty major com­pli­ment in any­one’s book. I put that down as one of the great hon­ours of my career.

McCart­ney fre­quent­ly rem­i­nisces about that night. See him do so in the clip above from an August, 2010 con­cert. Mac­ca gush­es over Hendrix’s solo, then tells the audi­ence how Jimi—having thrown his gui­tar out of tune dur­ing the solo with his wham­my bar dive-bombing—asked Eric Clap­ton to come onstage and retune for him.

Clap­ton, who McCart­ney says was actu­al­ly in the audi­ence, demurred. It’s a sto­ry he con­tin­ues to tell—in fact.

One lin­ger­ing ques­tion is whether or not Hen­drix knew there were Bea­t­les present that night. NME and the BBC both say he did not. In a recre­ation of the moment, above, from the 2013 fic­tion­al­ized biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, Hen­drix (played by André Ben­jamin) knows. Not only that, but he decides to open with “Sgt. Pepper’s” right before the gig, with no rehearsal, over the stren­u­ous objec­tions of Noel Red­ding, who thinks the Bea­t­les might be insult­ed. It’s high­ly doubt­ful things went down that way at all. (The scene takes oth­er licenses—note the Fly­ing V instead of the white Stra­to­cast­er Hen­drix actu­al­ly played). But it makes for some inter­est­ing back­stage dra­ma in the film.

In any case, I’d guess that Hendrix—“the coolest guy in the world,” as Ben­jamin called him—would have pulled off the cov­er with panache, whether he knew McCart­ney was watch­ing or not. There may be lit­tle left to say about Hen­drix’s bril­liant gui­tar the­atrics, com­plete­ly inno­v­a­tive play­ing style, onstage swag­ger, and pow­er­ful song­writ­ing. But his “Sgt. Pepper’s” cov­er is an exam­ple of one of his less-dis­cussed, but high­ly admirable qual­i­ties: his gen­uine­ly awe­some rock and roll col­le­gial­i­ty.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Opens for The Mon­kees on a 1967 Tour; Then After 8 Shows, Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Jimi Hen­drix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Gui­tar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Bud­dy Guy & B.B. King

Jimi Hen­drix Wreaks Hav­oc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1970: Lis­ten to the Com­plete Audio

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

When Clare Tor­ry went into the stu­dio to record her now-leg­endary vocals for Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” the cen­ter­piece of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, nei­ther the singer nor the band was par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with each oth­er. David Gilmour remem­bered the moment in an inter­view on the album’s 30th anniver­sary:

Clare Tor­ry did­n’t real­ly look the part. She was Alan Par­sons’ idea. We want­ed to put a girl on there, scream­ing orgas­mi­cal­ly. Alan had worked with her pre­vi­ous­ly, so we gave her a try. And she was fan­tas­tic. We had to encour­age her a lit­tle bit. We gave her some dynam­ic hints: “Maybe you’d like to do this piece qui­et­ly, and this piece loud­er.” She did maybe half a dozen takes, and then after­wards we com­piled the final per­for­mance out of all the bits. It was­n’t done in one sin­gle take.

Asked the fol­low-up ques­tion “what did she look like?,” Gilmour replied, “like a nice Eng­lish house­wife.”

Tor­ry, for her part, was hard­ly starstruck. “If it had been the Kinks,” she lat­er said, “I’d have been over the moon.” She also remem­bers the ses­sion very dif­fer­ent­ly. “They had no idea what they want­ed,” she says. Told only “we don’t want any words,” she decid­ed to “pre­tend to be an instru­ment.” She remem­bers “hav­ing a lit­tle go” and knock­ing out the ses­sion in a cou­ple takes.

This Rashomon sce­nario involves not only faulty mem­o­ry but also the legal ques­tion as to who com­posed the song’s melody and vocal concept—a ques­tion even­tu­al­ly decid­ed, in 2004, in Torry’s favor, enti­tling her to roy­al­ties.

She clear­ly wasn’t about to become a tour­ing mem­ber of the band, even after the album’s mas­sive suc­cess and two sub­se­quent tours. Still, while Tor­ry may not have suit­ed Gilmour’s phys­i­cal pref­er­ences for female singers, and while she may not have thought much of Pink Floyd, she has appeared live with their dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions over the years, includ­ing a show at the Rain­bow The­atre in Lon­don just months after the album’s release (fur­ther up). Lat­er, in 1987, Tor­ry appeared again, this time with Roger Waters at Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um on his K.A.O.S. on the Road Tour.

Tor­ry would then join the David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd in 1990 for “Great Gig in the Sky” at Kneb­worth. I do not think she resem­bles an Eng­lish house­wife in the con­cert film at the top—or at least no more than the rest of the band look like mid­dle-aged Eng­lish hus­bands. But she still pulls off the soar­ing vocal, more or less, sev­en­teen years after she first stepped into the stu­dio, hav­ing lit­tle idea who Pink Floyd was or what would become of that fate­ful ses­sion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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

How Con­flict Helped Cre­ate Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” and Its Leg­endary Gui­tar Solos

Hear Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” Played on the Theremin

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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

Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Dig­ging deep into the crates will yield many an over­looked sur­prise, many a sub­tle sleep­er, cut-up clas­sic, and elec­tron­ic exper­i­ment. But if all you’ve got is Changes­bowie—the 1990 com­pi­la­tion that became, for some gen­er­a­tions, a defin­i­tive state­ment of his career—you’ve still got a col­lec­tion of songs the likes of which have nev­er been heard before or since in mod­ern pop.

Com­pletists may grouch, but even res­i­dent Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ash­es to Ash­es,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Mod­ern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casu­al fans, we con­nect with Bowie’s music through mile­stones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploit­ed. In 2008, Mike Schiller at Pop­Mat­ters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie com­pi­la­tion albums had been released, a few of which “don’t real­ly seem to court any greater pur­pose what­so­ev­er.”

Giv­en this sur­feit of Bowie com­pi­la­tions on the mar­ket, Schiller’s ini­tial groan­ing reac­tion to news of yet anoth­er (“Oh, good Lord. Anoth­er David Bowie col­lec­tion?”) seems appo­site. Except this col­lec­tion, iSE­LECT: BOWIE, released in 2008 to read­ers of the U.K.’s Mail on Sun­day, then lat­er in an offi­cial CD and dig­i­tal edi­tion, “is actu­al­ly some­thing spe­cial.” Bowie “picked the track­list him­self. Even more than that, the track­list actu­al­ly looks like some­thing he’d have picked him­self, rather than hav­ing a man­ag­er or pub­li­cist pick it for him.”

iSE­LECT: BOWIE
1. “Life On Mars?” (from the album Hunky Dory)
2. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” (from the album Dia­mond Dogs)
3. “The Bewlay Broth­ers” (from the album Hunky Dory)
4. “Lady Grin­ning Soul” (from the album Aladdin Sane)
5. “Win” (from the album Young Amer­i­cans)
6. “Some Are” (cur­rent­ly exclu­sive to this com­pi­la­tion)
7. “Teenage Wildlife” (from the album Scary Mon­sters)
8. “Rep­e­ti­tion” (from the album Lodger)
9. “Fan­tas­tic Voy­age” (from the album Lodger)
10. “Lov­ing The Alien” (from the album Tonight)
11. “Time Will Crawl (MM Remix)” (new remix by David Bowie)
12. “Hang On To Your­self [live]” (from the album Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72)

See the full track­list above and hear a playlist of his picks at the top. If we put all our lists of favorites togeth­er, we might see a very high per­cent­age of “Life on Mars?” picks. We’re in excel­lent com­pa­ny; it’s Bowie’s num­ber one favorite song of his. But how many of his oth­er picks might we choose? The eight-and-a-half minute “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” from Dia­mond Dogs? “Win” from Young Amer­i­cans or “The Bewlay Broth­ers” from Hunky Dory?

Aside from “Life on Mars?” and the far less­er-col­lect­ed “Lov­ing the Alien” and “Time Will Crawl,” none of his twelve selec­tions were released as sin­gles. There are no songs from two of the most acclaimed Bowie albums, Low and ’Heroes’, unless we count “Some Are” a bonus track includ­ed on the Low 1991 rere­lease. There are two tracks from Lodger, the third and least acces­si­ble of his vaunt­ed Berlin tril­o­gy, and only one selec­tion from Zig­gy Star­dust, and it ain’t “Zig­gy Star­dust.”

If any­one else hand­ed you this list of favorite Bowie tracks, you’d be skep­ti­cal. Who puts “Hang On To Your­self” (Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72) above any of the stu­dio tracks on that clas­sic 1972 break­out album? David Bowie, that’s who. And who knows, if you’d asked him the day before or after, he might have picked twelve dif­fer­ent songs. There’s no telling how seri­ous­ly he took the exer­cise, but in the news­pa­per release, he did “casu­al­ly [pen] his inspi­ra­tions for the songs and the record­ing process­es behind them,” notes Allmusic’s Jason Lyman­grover.

On his choice of “Teenage Wildlife,” for exam­ple, Bowie com­ment­ed: “So it’s late morn­ing and I’m think­ing, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ron­nie Spec­tor. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enam­oured of this song and would give you two ‘Mod­ern Love’s for it any­time…” Bowie got to expe­ri­ence his own music in a way no one else could. iSE­LECT: BOWIE gets behind the great­est hits col­lec­tions for a glimpse at the way he heard and remem­bered his cat­a­logue.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s 100 Must Read Books

The Art Col­lec­tion of David Bowie: An Intro­duc­tion

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

David Bowie Sings Impres­sions of Bruce Spring­steen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Stu­dio Out­takes (1985)

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

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.