In 1997, the Cornell Chronicle announced: “The world’s smallest guitar — carved out of crystalline silicon and no larger than a single cell — has been made at Cornell University to demonstrate a new technology that could have a variety of uses in fiber optics, displays, sensors and electronics.”
Invented by Dustin W. Carr, the so-called “nanoguitar” measured 10 micrometers long–roughly the size of your average red blood cell. And it had six strings, each “about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms.”
According to The Guardian, the vintage 1997 nanoguitar was actually never played. That honor went to a 2003 edition of the nanoguitar, whose strings were plucked by miniature lasers operated with an atomic force microscope, creating “a 40 megahertz signal that is 130,000 times higher than the sound of a full-scale guitar.” The human ear couldn’t hear something at that frequency, and that’s a problem not even a good amp–a Vox AC30, Fender Deluxe Reverb, etc.–could fix.
Thus concludes today’s adventure in nanotechnology.
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We’ve devoted space here before to legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s musical legacy, from his formidable record collection to his many hours of “Peel Sessions,” the recordings he made in BBC studios of artists like David Bowie, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees and so, so many more–usually when they were on the cusp of superstardom or enduring cult status. It was Peel’s particular talent for discovering and promoting such artists that set him apart from his peers. Rather than riding the cultural wave of the moment, he listened at the margins, cultivating and curating what he heard. Whether punk, glam, new wave, hardcore, ska, techno, or industrial, it seems John Peel got there first, and the rest of the industry followed after him.
Peel did not approach his role in a critical vein—sitting in judgment of the music around him. He approached it as an enthusiastic and obsessive fan, which explains much of his appeal to the listeners who loved his broadcasts. He honored those listeners each year by compiling a list of their favorites in what he called “The John Peel Festive 50.” This end-of-the-year event “became a Christmas institution, writes the BBC, “more loved than fairy lights and Christmas crackers.”
Listeners of Peel’s show voted for their three favorite tracks in November. The following month, the highest-ranked “Festive 50” were all played on the air. He described the process as a truly democratic, crowdsourced endeavor, as we would say today.
It’s really just me marking every single vote down in a ledger. There is obviously the temptation to slip something in that I like, especially if it’s just outside the 50, and something crap has gone above it. But I have a very workman-like brain so it just wouldn’t be on to fix it.
Peel “wasn’t always happy with what the listeners voted for,” often feeling “there were too many ‘white boys with guitars’ making an appearance.” The predictability of several of the lists irked him, and seemed to work against the spirit of his mission to tirelessly promote adventurous, experimental music. Peel may have been popular, but in matters of taste, he was no populist. For the most part, however, he remained faithful to the fans’ picks, and noted that he never would have been able to choose the top three songs of the year himself: “I couldn’t get any fewer than a list of 250.”
The tradition, with a few hiccups, continued from its inception in 1976 till Peel’s death in 2004, and the massive Spotify playlist above aggregates the hundreds of those picks—932 songs, to be exact, over 70 hours of music. From Dylan, Clapton, and the Stones to Neko Case—and along the way, no shortage of tracks from the punk and post-punk artists most closely associated with Peel’s show. While the listener’s picks do fall heavily into the “white boys with guitars” category, there’s plenty more besides, including early tracks from Eric B. & Rakim, P.J. Harvey, Stereolab, 10,000 Maniacs, Cocteau Twins, and many more. You can explore the tracks in Peel’s “Festive 50” lists here. They’re sorted by decade: 1970s — 1980s — 1990s — 2000s.
Before the advent of digital studio technology, a degree of imprecision naturally resulted from the recording process. It may now be too easy to erase and correct perceived errors. As Brian Eno has pointed out, “the temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out.” Perhaps that’s why so many of the famous songs containing mistakes in pop culture lore come from a pre-digital age. In any case, such lore abounds. Some of it speculative, some anecdotal, some apocryphal, and much of it clearly evident in close listens and confirmed by the musicians, engineers, and producers themselves.
A recent Reddit thread compiled 500 comments worth of discussion on the subject. One prominent example is Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 “Mack the Knife,” in which she forgets the lyrics to the chorus and improvises. “Talk about failing gracefully,” writes user Bleue22. The album, they note, went on to win a Grammy.
But this example, you may object, comes from a live album—no second takes allowed. And Fitzgerald sets up the error by saying beforehand, “we hope we remember all the words.” (I’d guess she’s using the royal “we,” to which she’s fully entitled.) Nonetheless, her “Mack the Knife” may have no equal.
Still, we don’t lack for studio examples of mistakes in great recordings. If you’re a metal fan, Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All likely holds a special place of honor in your collection. As Kirk Hammett revealed in a 2002 interview with Guitar World after his induction into the magazine’s hall of fame, his solo on the track was only a second or third take, with little rehearsal. “There were no frills, no contemplation, no overintellectualizing,” he says. The result? Amazing, right? But, Hammett continues, “On a couple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch; for 18 years, every time I’ve heard that guitar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me!”
Every guitarist has suffered through this experience while listening back to their records. Few make Guitar World’s hall of fame. The point is that greatness and perfection are not always the best of friends. Another example of the kind of thing that might only haunt a musician: In Steely Dan’s “Aja” from the 1977 Grammy-winning album of the same name, drummer Steve Gadd plays “one of the best drum solos ever recorded,” writes Michael Duncan as Sonic Scoop. Drummers for decades have sought to replicate the moment, especially an idiosyncratic click at 4:57. Turns out, it was “actually a slip of his stick; albeit a well-timed one.” The solo, Duncan notes, was done in one take.
Other examples may have had life-changing consequences for the musician in question. It’s rumored that David Gilmour’s faintly recorded coughing on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” bothered him so much that he quit smoking. In some cases, the mistake can turn into a hook or a musical statement, such as Cindy Wilson’s shout of “Tiiiiiiin Roof! Rusted” in the B‑52’s “Love Shack,” apparently a mistake on Wilson’s part. The phenomenon, granted, tends to manifest in genres that accommodate all varieties of looseness—rock, blues, jazz, etc.—and the great bulk of examples in the Reddit mistake thread come from such recordings. I couldn’t say whether it’s possible to compile such a list in music with far stricter arrangements or reliance on electronic instrumentation.
I also couldn’t say whether mistakes in, say classical or electronic music, would produce such desirable results. What often emerges in these discussions is the degree to which mistakes, unplanned improvisations, or happy accidents can become essential features of a song. Take The Breeder’s “Cannonball,” which intentionally incorporates a mistake bassist Josephine Wiggs repeatedly made in rehearsals, sliding to the wrong note in the solo bass intro, then correcting when the guitars came in. “We all just thought it was hilarious and thought it sounded really great,” she remembered. “It was clear to us at that moment that that was the right thing to do, to keep the wrong note in there.” Does it matter that some recorded mistakes are intentional and others are not? That question may be fodder for another 500-comment-long discussion. Or we could heed the wisdom of Brian Eno or Miles Davis and just go with it either way.
If Senator Al Franken won’t run for President in 2020, perhaps he’d temper fans’ disappointment with a repeat of his early 80’s turn as Mick Jagger, above.
The performance took place at Stockton State, a public university conveniently located in New Jersey–what the late Tom Davis, Franken’s long time Saturday Night Live writing partner and Keith Richards to his Jagger called “the Blair Witch scrub forests twenty-five miles north of Atlantic City.”
Franken’s performance is an immersive triumph, especially for those who remember his best known SNL character, the lispingly upbeat Stuart Smalley.
His Jagger is the opposite of Stuart–butch, preening, athletic … a less than sober student fan in the Stockton State crowd might have drunkenly wondered if he or she had accidentally bought tickets to the Tattoo You tour. Those lips are pretty convincing.
The costuming is dead on too, and Franken did not take the route Chris Farley would later take, lampooning the male strippers of Chippendales. He may not be Jagger-rangy, but he’s certainly fit in an outfit that leaves no room to hide.
As we started “Under My Thumb,” Franken came running out as Mick Jagger, wearing yellow football pants and Capezios and was so good, it was scary. Unfortunately, Franken and Davis at Stockton State never sold very well… maybe it would be re-released if one of us became president, or shot a president.
Knowing that Davis, who died five years ago, would likely never have predicted the outcome of the recent election, and that Senator Franken, outspoken as he is, is in no position to joke about the second option, we suggest truffling up a used copy, if you’d like to see more.
And for comparison’s sake, here are the originals performing to an arena-sized crowd in Arizona in 1981:
Apart from whatever political nightmare du jour we’re living in, it can be easy to dislike Washington, DC. I say this as someone who grew up outside the city, called it home for many years, and generally found its public face of monuments, tourists, politicos, and waves of lobbyists and bureaucrats pretty alienating. The “real” DC was elsewhere, in the city’s historic Black neighborhoods, many now heavily gentrified, which hosted legendary jazz clubs and gave birth to the genius of go-go. And even in the privileged, middle class neighborhoods and DMV suburbs. Among the skate punks and disaffected military brats who created the DC punk scene, a seething, furiously productive punk economy centered around Dischord Records. The small label has been as hugely influential in the past few decades as Seattle’s Sub Pop or Long Beach’s SST.
Formed in 1980 by Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye and his bandmate Jeff Nelson, Dischord is 6 years older than Sub Pop and in several ways it inspired a template for the West Coast. Dave Grohl came from the DC Punk scene, as did Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Rollins and MacKaye were childhood friends and DC natives, and MacKaye went on to form Fugazi, virtually a DC institution for well over a decade.
MacKaye’s brother Alec was a member of Dischord band Faith—one of Kurt Cobain’s admitted influences—and of Ignition with Gray Matter’s Dante Ferrando, who went on, with investments from Dave Grohl, to found the club Black Cat, a central hub of punk and indie rock in DC for 27 years. The more you dig into the musical families of Dischord, the more you see how embedded they are not only in their home city, but in the weft of modern American rock.
The common features of its lineup—political urgency, earnestness, melodic experimentation, unpretentiousness—stand out. Dischord bands could be math‑y and technical, straight edge, vegan, Buddhist, Hare Krishna, fiercely feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war.… These may not sound like the makings of a great party scene, but they made for a committed cadre of hard working musicians and a wide circle of dedicated fans around the country who have kept the label thriving in its way.
What distinguishes Dischord from its more famous peers is the fact that it only releases bands from the DC area. Why? “Because this is the city where we live, work, and have the most understanding,” they write on their site. Still, given the label’s heightened profile in recent years, it’s surprising that so much of its music remains unknown outside of a specific audience. Fugazi is the best-known band on the roster, and for all their major critical importance, they have kept a fairly low profile. But this is the spirit of the label, whose founders wanted to make music, not make stars. Bands like Shudder to Think and Jawbox may have eventually moved to bigger labels, but they did their best work with Dischord.
Dag Nasty, Embrace, Government Issue, Make-Up, Q and Not U, Rites of Spring, Soulside, Void, Untouchables, Slant 6, the Nation of Ulysses.… these are bands, if you don’t know them, you should hear, and already have, in some way, through their enormous influence on so many others: not only Nirvana, but also a contingent of derivative emo bands some of us might prefer to forget. Still the label’s history should not be taken as the gospel canon of DC punk. One of the most influential of DC punk bands, Bad Brains, came out of the jazz scene, invented a blistering mashup of punk and reggae, and get credit for creating hardcore and inspiring Rollins, MacKaye, and their friends. But Bad Brains was “Banned in DC” in 1979, shut out of the clubs. They moved to New York and eventually signed with SST.
Other parts of the scene scorned the clean-living moralism of Dischord, and the label’s sober founders later found themselves “alienated by the violent, suburban, teenage machismo they now saw at their shows,” writes Jillian Mapes at Flavorwire. Dischord became known for championing causes on the left, a legacy that is inseparable from its legend. Not everyone loved their politics, as you might imagine in a city with as many conservative activists and political aspirants as DC. “Great political punk bands—like Priests—still exist in DC,” writes Mapes—and Dischord continues to release great records—“but the ‘80s scene retains its place in history as the pinnacle of political American hardcore music.” And Dischord remains a sometimes unacknowledged legislator of American punk rock in the ‘80s and ’90s. Stream their whole catalog at Bandcamp. You can also download tracks for a fee.
When Leonard Cohen released You Want it Darker in late 2016, some suspected that it would be his last album. When the 82-year-old singer-songwriter died nineteen days later, it felt like a reprise of David Bowie’s passage from this mortal coil at the beginning of that year in which we lost so many important musicians: just two days after the release of his album Blackstar, Bowie shocked the world by dying of an illness he’d chosen not to make public. Both Cohen and Bowie’s fans immediately doubled down their scrutiny of what turned out to be their final works, finding in both of them artistic interpretations of the confrontation with death.
The title track of You Want It Darker, says the narrator of the Polyphonic video essay above, “is not just any song, but the culmination of many meditations on Cohen’s own mortality. The result is a hauntingly accusatory song towards his own god.”
This analysis focuses on lines, delivered by Cohen’s gravelier-than-ever singing voice, like “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game / If you are the healer, that means I’m broken and lame” and “If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame / You want it darker, we kill the flame.” Cohen also uses phrases taken from a Jewish mourner’s prayer as a way of “facing up to his god and submitting.”
The non-religious Bowie took a different tack. “Just take a look at Bowie’s costume,” says the essay’s narrator. “He’s bandaged, frail, and maniacal in the ‘Blackstar’ video. While the bandage serves to represent wounds, it can also be taken as a blindfold,” historically “worn by those condemned to execution.” Using Christian imagery, Bowie frames his song “in the post-paradise world of mortal life,” in a sense referencing what Cohen once described as “our blood myth,” the crucifixion. And so Bowie’s song “is using our cultural vocabulary to explore our relationship with death.” And yet, “in the midst of this dark song, Bowie offers optimism” in the form of the titular Blackstar, a “newly inspired being” that emerges from death.
“While mankind can’t cheat death, we can still find immortality in the way people remember us, the legacy that they carry on.” And despite recognizing their basic humanity, many of us carriers of the legacy still struggle to process the deaths of high-profile, sui generis performing artists. Maybe it has to do with their status as icons, and icons, strictly speaking, can’t die — but nor can they live. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the men, may have finished their days, and what days they were, but Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the cultural phenomena, will surely outlast us all.
You can listen to Cohen and Bowie’s final albums above. If you need Spotify’s free software, get it here.
The Summer of Love was not just a season of great music and the zenith of the flower child, but the culmination of a movement that started back on a chillier Bay Area day, on January 14, 1967. That was the month of the Human Be-In, and what must have looked like a full on invasion of the counterculture into Golden Gate Park. The backdrop of this outpouring of good vibrations was anything but loving: Vietnam, inner city riots, Civil Rights, and a huge generation gap. The crowd size was estimated at 100,000, and everybody there suddenly realized they weren’t alone. They were a force.
Joel Selvin, interviewed by Michael Krasny for this KQED segment on the Summer of Love (listen here), says that the real Summer of Love for San Franciscans at least, happened in 1966, when it was a local secret. One year later, the hippie movement had become mainstream. And that’s when every band on both sides of the Atlantic had turned on to the zeitgeist, and the gates of psychedelic music opened up.
Today, we have a playlist of 89 songs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that historic summer. (Download Spotify’s free software here, if you need it.) If you are coming to this as a music fan, but not somebody who lived through that era, you might think you know all the songs from that period, having had them hammered into your brain over the years from the ubiquitous hits of classic rock radio, and nostalgic movies.
There are of course the stone cold classics from 1967, with not one but two Beatles releases, including the iconic Sgt. Pepper album; the best two songs from Jefferson Airplane; Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”; the Who’s best psychedelic song “I Can See for Miles”; Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” and “Hey Joe”; the Rolling Stones’ move into chamber pop with “Ruby Tuesday” and their own trippy “She’s a Rainbow” and “We Love You”—the last time they ever felt lovey dovey about anything; and the first releases by the Doors.
Soul and R’n’B was also at the height of its mid-60s power, with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, and Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” infecting the charts.
“We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave,” is how Hunter S. Thompson famously put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and this playlist might just convince you of that considering how music seemed to fracture so soon after—even the Beatles would be delivering that strange and sometimes frightening trip of a White Album a year later. Vietnam would continue to drag on, and the decade’s metaphorical end at Altamont was looming on the horizon, not that many could see it. (By the way, Joel Selvin just wrote a very good book on that dark, decade-ending concert.)
Enjoy the playlist and argue over what’s missing in the comments. (No “Waterloo Sunset”? “I Second That Emotion”? “Gloria”? Hmmph!)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Note: The first poem and others contain some offensive language.
In the context of the radical socio-political change of 1975, Patti Smith announced herself to the world with Horses, “the first real full-length hint of the artistic ferment taking place in the mid-‘70s at the juncture of Bowery and Bleecker,” writes Mac Randall. Though born in an insular downtown milieu, Smith’s view was vast, conducting the poetry of the past—of Rimbaud, the Beats, and rock and roll—into an uncertain future, through the nascent medium of punk rock. The album is “closely associated with the beginning of something,” and yet is “so concerned with endings”: the loss of Jimi Hendrix (at whose studio Smith recorded), and of “other departed counterculture heroes like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones.”
In a way, Smith’s voice defines the pivotal moment in which it arrived: anticipating an anxious age of austerity and women’s liberation; mourning the loss of 60s idealism and the promise of racial equity. She was a female artist fully unconstrained by patriarchal expectations, with complete authority over her vision. “My people were trying to forge a new bridge between the people we had lost and learned from and the future,” she recently remarked.
In her “fabulously grand” way, she told The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2013, “I felt in the center, not quite the old generation, not quite the new generation. I felt like the human bridge.” Smith was no naïf when she made Horses, but a confident artist who, at 29, had worked in theater with her lately-departed friend Sam Shepard, become her famous lover Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite subject, joined the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and published two collections of verse.
She thought of herself as a poet who “got sidetracked” by music. “When I was young,” Smith says, “all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.” But poetry was always central to her work; Horses, she says, “evolved organically” from her first poetry reading, four years earlier, at St. Mark’s Church, alongside Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other luminaries. Above, you can hear her discuss that attention-grabbing first reading, and at the top of the post, listen to Smith at Columbia University in 1975, reading the poems that developed that year into the songs on Horses, including her 1971 “Oath,” which begins with a variation on Horses’ opening sneer, “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Be warned the first poem she reads contains offensive language, as do many others. No one should be shocked by this. But some who only know Smith as a singer may be surprised by her masterful literary voice and wicked sense of humor. She has always been an elegist, mourning her cultural heroes, most of whom died young, as well as a tragic string of personal losses. “When I started working with the material that became Horses,” she remembers, “a lot of our great voices had died.” But her intent went beyond elegy, beyond a maudlin appropriation of fading 60s heroes. Smith had a “mission,” she says, of “forming a cultural voice through rock’n’roll that incorporated sex and art and poetry and performance and revolution.” It sounds grandiose, but it’s a mission she’s largely fulfilled. At the center of her project is poetry as performance, as a means of entertaining, shocking, and seducing an audience. The reading at the top is an especially faithful record of her fearless onstage persona.
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