Having grown up in Georgia surrounded by blues, gospel, and country music—and having studied the classical composers when he was learning piano—Ray Charles was bound to become a polymath of musical genres. He is often credited with creating soul music, but a less remembered but equally important part of his career was recording one of the first major crossover records, 1962’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The record execs at ABC-Paramount understandably thought it would be career suicide, but Charles, who had a contract that gave him creative control (and ownership of his master tapes), insisted. It went on to be both a commercial and critical success, creating racial and genre bridges during the Civil Rights Movement.
So the above video of Willie Nelson performing a duet with Charles was not the oddity that it may first seem. The two recorded “Seven Spanish Angels” for the former’s Half Nelson album of duets, and the single would go on to be the most successful of Charles’ country releases, reaching the top of the country charts in 1985.
The song has become a favorite country cover, and judging by the YouTube comments is a favorite at funerals, seeing that it’s a tale of an outlaw couple pledging their love and going out shootin’. (That is, it’s good for honoring devoted couples, not for criminal parents. But we’re not here to judge.)
The 1984 TV special from which this excerpt came was filmed at the Austin Opry House, and featured Charles on five more songs with Nelson, including “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
And although he didn’t write “Georgia on My Mind” (Hoagy Carmichael did), Charles’ name is synonymous with the well-loved soul number. That being said, Willie Nelson’s cover of the song reached higher in the charts in 1978, a kind of thank you to Charles for his country work.
After this 1984 video, the two would duet nine years later for Willie Nelson’s 60th birthday celebration where they once again sang “Seven Spanish Angels,” a testament to their long friendship.
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.
A popular thought experiment asks us to imagine an advanced alien species arriving on Earth, not in an H.G. Wells-style invasion, but as advanced, bemused, and benevolent observers. “Wouldn’t they be appalled,” we wonder, “shocked, confused at how backward we are?” It’s a purely rhetorical device—the secular equivalent of taking a “god’s eye view” of human folly. Few people seriously entertain the possibility in polite company. Unless they work at NASA or the SETI program.
In 1977, upon the launching of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, a committee working under Carl Sagan produced the so-called “Golden Records,” actual phonographic LPs made of copper containing “a collection of sounds and images,” writes Joss Fong at Vox, “that will probably outlast all human artifacts on Earth.” While they weren’t preparing for a visitation on Earth, they did—relying not on wishful thinking but on the controversial Drake Equation—fully expect that other technological civilizations might well exist in the cosmos, and assumed a likelihood we might encounter one, at least via remote.
Sagan tasked himself with compiling what he called a “bottle” in “the cosmic ocean,” and something of a time capsule of humanity. Over a year’s time, Sagan and his team collected 116 images and diagrams, natural sounds, spoken greetings in 55 languages, printed messages, and musical selections from around the world–things that would communicate to aliens what our human civilization is essentially all about. The images were encoded onto the records in black and white (you can see them all in the Vox video above in color). The audio, which you can play in its entirety below, was etched into the surface of the record. On the cover were etched a series of pictographic instructions for how to play and decode its contents. (Scroll over the interactive image at the top to see each symbol explained.)
Fong outlines those contents, writing, “any aliens who come across the Golden Record are in for a treat.” That is, if they are able to make sense of it and don’t find us horribly backward. Among the audio selections are greetings from then-UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, whale songs, Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No. 2 in F, Senegalese percussion, Aborigine songs, Peruvian panpipes and drums, Navajo chant, Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night” (playing in the Vox video), more Bach, Beethoven, and “Johnny B. Goode.” Challenged over including “adolescent” rock and roll, Sagan replied, “there are a lot of adolescents on the planet.” The Beatles reportedly wanted to contribute “Here Comes the Sun,” but their record company wouldn’t allow it, presumably fearing copyright infringement from aliens.
Also contained in the spacefaring archive is a message from then-president Jimmy Carter, who writes optimistically, “We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.” The messages on Voyagers 1 and 2, Carter forecasts, are “likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed.” The team chose not to include images of war and human cruelty.
We only have a few years left to find out whether either Voyager will encounter other beings. “Incredibly,” writes Fong, the probes “are still communicating with Earth—they aren’t expected to lose power until the 2020s.” It seems even more incredible, forty years later, when we consider their primitive technology: “an 8‑track memory system and onboard computers that are thousands of times weaker than the phone in your pocket.”
The Voyagers were not the first probes sent to interstellar space. Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973, each containing a Sagan-designed aluminum plaque with a few simple messages and depictions of a nude man and woman, an addition that scandalized some puritanical critics. NASA has since lost touch with both Pioneers, but you may recall that in 2006, the agency launched the New Horizons probe, which passed by Pluto in 2015 and should reach interstellar space in another thirty years.
Perhaps due to the lack of the departed Sagan’s involvement, the latest “bottle” contains no introductions. But there is time to upload some, and one of the Golden Record team members, Jon Lomberg, wants to do just that, sending a crowdsourced “message to the stars.” Lomberg’s New Horizon’s Message Initiative is a “global project that brings the people of the world together to speak as one.” The limitations of analog technology have made the Golden Record selections seem quite narrow from our data-saturated point of view. The new message might contain almost anything we can imagine. Visit the project’s site to sign the petition, donate, and consider, just what would you want an alien civilization to hear, see, and understand about the best of humanity circa 2017?
One of my favorite music-themed comedy sketches of recent years features a support group of Radiohead fans flummoxed and disappointed by the band’s post-Ok Computer output. The scenario trades on the perplexity that met Radiohead’s abrupt change of musical direction with the revolutionary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radiohead fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood disorders, at least a heightened propensity for generalized depression.
Now, purely subjectively, I’d place “How to Disappear Completely” in the top spot, followed closely by Amnesia’s “Pyramid Song.” But my own associations with these songs are personal and perhaps somewhat arbitrary. I might make a case for them based on lyrical interpretations, musical arrangement, and instrumentation. But the argument would still largely depend on matters of taste and acculturation.
Thompson, on the other hand, believes in “quantifying sentiment.” To that end, he created a “gloom index,” which he used to measure each song in the band’s catalog. Rather than listening to them all, one after another, he relied on data from two online services, first pulling “detailed audio statistics” from Spotify’s Web API. One metric in particular, called “valence,” measures a song’s “positivity.” These scores provide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musical perspective.” (It’s not entirely clear what the criteria are for these scores).
Next, Thompson used the Genius Lyrics API to examine “lyrical density,” specifically the concentration of “sad words” in any given song. To combine these two measures, he leaned on an analysis by a fellow data scientist and blogger, Myles Harrison. You can see his resulting formula for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you understand the programing language R, you can see examples of his analysis at his blog, RCharlie. (Read a less data-laden summary of Thompson’s study at the analytics blog Revolutions.) Thompson also plotted sadness by album, in the interactive graph further up.
So, which song rated highest on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic version up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine runners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spotify playlists above). “Pyramid Song” appears at number 5, but “How to Disappear Completely” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a purely subjective standpoint, this makes me suspicious of the whole operation. But you tell us, readers, what do you think of Thompson’s experiment in “quantifying sentiment” in music?
Here’s the top 10:
1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Picture Soundtrack
4. Let Down
5. Pyramid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dollars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier …
10. Videotape
The influence of modern jazz on classic rock extends far beyond too-cool poses and too many drugs. In the 1960s, writes Jeff Fitzgerald at All About Jazz, “a few players were venturing beyond the sacred three-chord trinity and developing some serious chops.” John Coltrane’s “extended improvisations on his unlikely top-forty hit version of ‘My Favorite Things’” gets credit for inspiring “not only long-form rock hits like The Doors’ seven-minute ‘Light My Fire’ and CCR’s eleven-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ but later jam bands from the Grateful Dead to Phish.” But of course, the “breakthrough moment for Rock-Jazz relations” arrived when Miles Davis “developed a Jazz/Rock hybrid called Fusion.”
Davis’ Bitches Brew had much crossover appeal, especially to one of those aforementioned jam bands, the Dead, who—a month after the album’s release—invited Davis and his electric band to open for them at the Fillmore West. (Read about, and listen to, that unique eventhere.)
The pairing made sense not only because Davis’ long-form grooves hit many of the same psychedelic musical receptors as the Dead’s extended free-form sessions, but also because Jerry Garcia was something of a jazz-head. Especially when it came to free jazz pioneer and inventor of “Harmolodics,” Ornette Coleman.
“The guitarist had been a long time devotee” of Coleman, writes Ben Djarum at Ultimate Classic Rock, and contributed his distinctive playing to three tracks on Coleman’s 1988 album Virgin Beauty (hear them together on “Desert Players” above). Garcia’s devotion marks him as a true rock connoisseur of avant-garde jazz. (Perhaps the only other Coleman fans in the rock world as indebted to his influence are the also-legendarily-drug-fueled indie experimentalists Royal Trux.) It turns out the appreciation was mutual. “Coleman himself was aware of musical similarities between the Dead and his own group, Prime Time,” which also had two drummers.
“Each emphasizes both melody and look-Ma-no-limits improvisation,” wrote David Fricke in a 1989 Rolling Stone article about “jazz’s eternal iconoclast finding a new audience” through his association with Garcia and company. Upon witnessing the Dead play Madison Square Garden in 1987, and awed by the fans’ ultimate dedication, Coleman found himself thinking, “’Well, we could be friends here.’ Because if these people here could be into this, they could dig what we’re doing.” It would take six more years, but Coleman finally played with the Dead in 1993 at their annual Mardi Gras celebration at the Oakland Coliseum. Where the Davis/Dead match-up 26 years earlier had been a diptych, showcasing the strengths of each artist by contrast with the other, the Coleman/Dead pairing was a true collaboration.
Not only did Coleman’s Prime Time open the show, but the saxophonist joined the Dead onstage during their second set—in the midst of an open jam called “Space” (see in playlist below). His horn became a prominently integrated feature of what one fan remembered as “singularly the most intense thing I ever witnessed.” Such exaggeration from Deadheads seems routine, and sadly we have no video, nor could it ever replicate the experience. But some pretty spectacular live recordings of the entire Dead set may bear out the extremely high praise. “The Other One,” at the top of the post, first stretches out into very Coleman-like territory, and the band keeps up beautifully. After the verse kicks in halfway through, the song soon erupts into “walls of sound, screams, meltdowns, explosions….”
“The Other One,” was “a wise choice,” writes Oliver Trager in his The American Book of the Dead, “as its rhythm-based power allowed Coleman to continue his broad brush strokes.” After a “languorous” rendition of “Stella Blue,” the penultimate tune, “Turn on Your Love Light,” above, “provided Coleman with the perfect show-ending raveup to let loose in the fashion of an oldtime, down-home Texas horn honker.” In an interview later that same year, Garcia called Coleman “a wonderful model for a guy who’s done what we did, in the sense of creating his own reality of what music is and how you survive within it. He’s a high-integrity kind of person and just a wonderful man.” As for the night itself, Garcia remarked:
It was such a hoot to hear him play totally Ornette and totally Grateful Dead without compromising either one of them. Pretty incredible. Good musicians don’t do that kind of characterizing music. like this is this kind of music and that is that kind of thing.
Coleman should be remembered as one of the most refined examples of such a musician for his championing what he called “Harmolodic Democracy.” You can hear the full Grateful Dead set from that February, 1993 Mardi Gras concert at Archive.org. The night went so well, notes Trager, that “the musicians repeated the formula with similar results in December 1993 running through a nearly identical song list at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles.” One can only imagine the audience was equally mesmerized.
“Records can be a bad trip. The audience can play your mistakes over and over. In a television special they see you once and you work hard to make sure they’re seeing you at your best.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone blessed with Mama Cass’ golden pipes being embarrassed by a recorded performance. A live gig, yes, though, celebrities of her era were subjected to far fewer witnesses.
The Internet was an undreamable little dream in 1969, when the sole episode of The Mama Cass Television Show aired. The former singer of the Mamas and the Papas died five years later, presumably unaware that future generations would have knowledge of, let alone access to, her failed pilot.
She may have described her variety show as “low key” to the Fremont, California Argus, but the guest list was padded with high wattage friends, including comedian Buddy Hackett, and singers Mary Travers and John Sebastian. Joni Mitchell, above, delivered an above-reproach performance of “Both Sides Now.”
Later, Mitchell and Travers joined their hostess for the heartfelt rendition of “I Shall Be Released” below, a performance that is only slightly marred by Elliot’s insane costume and an unnecessarily syrupy backing arrangement of strings and reeds.
Those who can’t live without seeing the complete show can purchase DVDs online.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is appearing onstage in New York City through June 26 in Paul David Young’s political satire, Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Composer and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, above, feels music profoundly. For her, there is no question that listening should be a whole body experience:
Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb ‘sentire’ means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form ‘sentirsi’ means to feel.
It’s a philosophy born of necessity—her hearing began to deteriorate when she was 8, and by the age of 12, she was profoundly deaf. Music lessons at that time included touching the wall of the practice room to feel the vibrations as her teacher played.
While she acknowledges that her disability is a publicity hook, it’s not her preferred lede, a conundrum she explores in her “Hearing Essay.” Rather than be celebrated as a deaf musician, she’d like to be known as the musician who is teaching the world to listen.
In her TED Talk, How To Truly Listen, she differentiates between the ability to translate notations on a musical score and the subtler, more soulful skill of interpretation. This involves connecting to the instrument with every part of her physical being. Others may listen with ears alone. Dame Evelyn encourages everyone to listen with fingers, arms, stomach, heart, cheekbones… a phenomenon many teenagers experience organically, no matter what their earbuds are plugging.
And while the vibrations may be subtler, her philosophy could cause us to listen more attentively to both our loved ones and our adversaries, by staying attuned to visual and emotional pitches, as well as slight variations in volume and tone.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Back in the summer of 1975, the Talking Heads were still an unknown band, laboring away in obscurity. Amidst a stifling heat wave, they practiced in every day in a New York City loft. And so it went until they got an early break–a chance to perform live at CBGB, as the opening act for The Ramones. “Hilly [Kristal, owner of CBGB, asked Johnny [Ramone] if we could open for them, and Johnny said, ‘Sure, they’re gonna suck, so no problem,’ ” Chris Frantz (Talking Heads drummer), recalled in an interview with The New York Post. “There were very few people in the audience, maybe 10 altogether,” he adds. “Five came to see us and five came to see the Ramones.” The lucky ones.
By 1977, the bands had released their debut albums and embarked on a European tour together. Equally innovative but stylistically different, their histories would remain forever intertwined–something that’s perhaps best captured by the clip above. If we have our facts right, in January 1977, the Talking Heads opened a show at the Jabberwocky Club at Syracuse University with a cover of The Ramones’ 1976 single “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” You can listen to the complete 20 minute set below. Also, in the Relateds further down, find footage of both bands playing at CBGB in 1974 and 1975.
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The punk movement gave birth to hundreds of bands in a small amount of time, like a petri dish that just explodes under the right conditions. Forty years later, we are still living in the aftermath of that explosion and sorting things out. Lists need to be made. And if you consider garage rock to be proto-punk, the list can be very long.
Four years ago, L.A. Weekly created a list of the Top 20 punk albums of all time, but purists might despair to see Green Day on there or just anything after the ‘90s.
But they also turned to their columnist, Black Flag vocalist, intense spoken word performer, and radio deejay Henry Rollins, and asked him to create his own list. See them below, and hear them above (via this playlist).
In his brief intro, Rollins mulls over the eternal genre question–where does punk stop and post-punk begin?
Could Wire, also be considered Post Punk? Where do you put bands like PIL, Joy Division, Television, Patti Smith, Suicide, and Killing Joke? What about Gang of Four, 999 and the Banshees? For me, as a lean definition, I go by the classic UK 1977 graduating class, Pistols, Clash, etc., and go from there.
The list, he says, is in no particular order, but it’s not a surprise to see the first Clash album at the top, followed by the debut albums of the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Damned, X, Wire, The Buzzcocks, The Saints, The Germs, X‑Ray Spex, The Adverts, and Stiff Little Fingers. Very few on that list went on to top their debut, or even–such as the Pistols and The Germs–record a follow-up.
Rollins talked about this in an essay (also for the L.A. Weekly) on why he loves another band on his list, the U.K. Subs.
How some of those bands were able to follow up with another album is a fascinating bit of musical history, as well as a study of talent, vision and integrity. It is where the rubber truly meets the road. After the explosive excitement of the initial batch of songs has settled, the band often is left with a success-derived self-awareness that hangs like a cloud over the practice room. The awfulness of expectation enters the equation, and the results are not always good.
Rollins is a fan of the first four U.K. Subs LPs–“they are like desert island LPs. Records you can’t do without,” he once said.
Other interesting choices on Rollins’ list: the shameless Ramones-copyists The Lurkers, The Minutemen’s first album (instead of the undisputed classic Double Nickels on the Dime), the lesser-known Eater, the Ruts, and the Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour, which is punk in aesthetic, but certainly not in production.
For a man who usually has something to say, it would have been cool to have some commentary from Rollins on his choices. On the other hand, maybe he’d just tell us to shut up. The music speaks for itself.
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.
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