The Beatles gave us enough. You couldn’t ask for more. But if you want to get a little greedy, you could ask for a few more songs from George. Though crowded out by the prolific Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, Harrison squeezed in some Beatles songs that rival their best. Shall I refresh your memories? “Taxman.” “I Want to Tell You.” “It’s All Too Much.” “Something.” “Here Comes the Sun.” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” You owe them all to George.
Written in 1968 for The White Album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is ranked #136 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list, “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Clapton played the solo on the original recording–the same solo Prince shredded at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony. And it’s perhaps partly thanks to that Prince performance, witnessed so widely when the musician passed earlier this year, that we now have this: a new video paying tribute to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” featuring scenes from LOVE, Cirque du Soleil’s mesmerizing Beatles production that’s been running in Las Vegas since 2006. If you like the beautiful LOVEsoundtrack, you’ll enjoy the remixed version of Harrison’s song and all of the dreamy Cirque du Soleil visuals that accompany it above.
When I’m feeling depressed or uninspired, I can always count on one of my favorite visionary musicians to remind me just how much wild weirdness and unexpected beauty the world contains. That person is Kate Bush, and for all of her many brilliant songs—too many to name—the touchstone for true fans will always be her first single, “Wuthering Heights,” written when she was only 16, recorded two years later, and turned into two astonishing videos. The first, UK version does Kate’s ethereal strangeness justice, without a doubt, placing her on a dark stage, in flowing white gown, fog machine at her feet, showcasing her idiosyncratic dance moves with several double-exposure versions of herself. All very Kate, but we’d seen this kind of thing before, if only at the meetings of our high school drama club.
It really wasn’t until the second, U.S. video’s release that audiences fully grasped the uniqueness of her genius. In this version, above, the young prodigy—who trained, by the way, with David Bowie’s mime and dance teacher Lindsay Kemp—appears in a flowing, Bohemian red gown, matching tights, and black belt, haunting a “wiley, windy” moor like Catherine Earnshaw, the doomed heroine of Emily Brontë’s novel.
Everything about this: the flowers in her hair, the editing tricks that have her fading in and out of the shot like a ghost, and most especially the fully uninhibited dance moves—not confined this time to the boundaries of a stage (which could never contain her anyway)…. It’s perfect, the very acme of melodramatic theatricality, and simply could not be improved upon in any possible way.
And so when fans seek to pay tribute to Kate Bush, they invariably call back to this video. In 2013, Kate Bush parody troupe Shambush! organized a group dance in Brighton, with 300 eager fans in red dresses and wigs, each one doing their best Kate Bush impression in a synchronized comedy homage. This year, on July 16th, a flashmob gathered in Berlin’s Tempelhof Field for “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever,” breaking the Shambush! record for most Kate Bush-attired dancing fans in one place. See them at the top of the post. Other flashmobs assembled around the world as well, in London, Wellington, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and elsewhere, reports German site Tonspion. Melbourne, it seems put on a particularly “strong showing of Bush-mania” (watch it above), according to Electronic Beats, who also suggest that next year the organizers “switch it up and find a good forest for a ‘The Sensual World’ flashmob.” That is indeed a stunning video, and it’s very hard to choose a favorite among Bush’s many visual masterpieces, but I’d like to see them try the wartime choreography of “Army Dreamers” next.
William S. Burroughs may have died almost twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean his fans have gone entirely without new material since. This year, for instance, has seen the release of the Naked Lunchauthor’s new spoken word album Let Me Hang You, which you can listen to free on Spotify. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) Its content, in fact, comes straight from that form- and taboo-breaking 1959 novel, which Burroughs committed to tape — along with a trio of accomplished experimental musicians — not long before his passing, and which thus got lost along the way to commercial release.
“But more than 20 years later,” writes the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli, “those surreal recordings — which featured music from the guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, along with the pianist Wayne Horvitz and the violist Eyvind Kang — are getting a second life as an album with an assist from the independent musician King Khan, best known for his raucous live shows as an eccentric punk and soul frontman.” Fans of Burroughs’ roughest-edged material can rest assured that, in these sessions, the writer focused on speaking the “unspeakable” parts of Naked Lunch: “think sex, drugs, and defecation,” Coscarelli says.
Hard as it may seem to believe that a novel written well over half a century ago, let alone one written by an author born more than a century ago, could retain its power to shock, this newly published musical interpretation of Burrough’s substance-inspired, random-access, “obscenity”-laden text freshens its transgressive impact. “One particularly jagged track on the record is ‘Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole,’ ” writes Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow. “As Burroughs stiltedly reads his own bizarre prose in which the titular Snide recites every lurid, gritty detail he notices while watching a junky ‘female hustler,’ Khan and his fellow musicians play a brittle, upbeat groove and funky, bluesy guitar solos.” Finally, someone has taken this work of the most offbeat of all the Beats and set it to a beat.
You don’t have to, like, stretch your brain or anything to rattle off a list of Keith Richards’ influences. If you’ve ever heard a Rolling Stones song, you’ve heard him pull out his Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry riffs, and he’s never been shy about supporting and naming his idols. He’s played with Waters, Berry, and many more blues and early rock and roll greats, and after borrowing heavily from them, the Stones gave back by promoting and touring with the artists who provided the raw material for their sound.
Then there’s the 2002 compilation The Devil’s Music, culled from Richards’ personal favorite collection of blues, soul, and R&B classics, and featuring big names like Robert Johnson, Little Richard, Bob Marley, Albert King, and Lead Belly, and more obscure artists like Amos Milburn, and Jackie Brenston. You may also recall last year’s Under the Influence, a Netflix documentary by 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville, in which Richards namechecks dozens of influential musicians—from his mum’s love of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, to his and Jagger’s youthful adoration of Waters and Berry, to his rock star hangouts with Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf.
Point is, Keith Richards loves to talk about the music he loves. A big part of the Stones’ appeal—at least in their 60s/early 70s prime—was that they were such eager fans of the musicians they emulated. Yes, Jagger’s phony country drawls and blues howls could be a little embarrassing, his chicken dance a little less than soulful. But the earnestness with which the young Englishmen pursued their Americana ideals is infectious, and Richards has spread his love of U.S. roots music through every medium, including his 2010 memoir Life, a wickedly ironic title—given Richards’ No. 1 position on the “rock stars most-likely-to-die list,” writes Michiko Kakutani, “and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.”
It’s also a very poignant title, given Richards’ single-minded pursuit of a life governed by music he’s loved as passionately, or more so, as the women in his life. Richards, Kakutani writes, dedicated himself “like a monk to mastering the blues.” Of this calling, he writes, “you were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.” In the course of the book, Richards mentions over 200 artists, songs, and recordings that directly inspired him early or later in life, and one enterprising reader has compiled them all, in order of appearance, in the Spotify playlist above.
You’ll find here no surprises, but if you’re a Stones fan, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t put this one on and listen to it straight through without skipping a single track. When it comes to blues, soul, reggae, country, and rock and roll, Keith Richards has impeccable taste. Scattered amidst the Aaron Neville, Etta James, Gram Parsons, Elvis, Wilson Pickett, etc. are plenty of classic Stones recordings that feel right at home next to their influences and peers.
With the exception of reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff and Sly & Robbie, most of the tracks are from U.S. or U.S.-inspired artists (Tom Jones, Cliff Richard). Again, no surprises. Not everyone Richards appropriated has appreciated the homage (Chuck Berry long held a grudge), but were it not for his fandom and apprenticeship, it’s possible a great many blues records would have gone unsold, and some artists may have faded into obscurity. Thanks to playlists like these, they can live on in a digital age that doesn’t always do so well at acknowledging or remembering its history.
Jeff Buckley released just one studio album, Grace, before the emerging star died unexpectedly in May, 1997, drowning while swimming in the waters flowing from the Mississippi River. He was only 30 years old.
Given his painfully short discography, fans will delight in the newly-dropped album, You and I, which features, among other things, previously-unreleased Buckley covers of songs originally recorded by Bob Dylan (“Just Like a Woman”); Sly & the Family Stone (“Everyday People”); Led Zeppelin (“Night Flight”) and more. The album is now streaming on Spotify.
Starved for some more Buckley music? Then you’ll also want to check out this new interactive website which lets you browse/stream every album in Buckley’s varied vinyl record collection. Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Van Morrison, the Stones, Dylan, Bowie, Coltrane and The Clash–they’re all part of the collection. The video above shows you how to take full advantage of the new site. Enjoy.
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She was a little bit country. He was a little bit rock and roll.
Turns out Marie was also more than a little bit Dada.
From 1985 to 1986, Marie served as actor Jack Palance’s cohost on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a TV series exploring strange occurrences, bizarre historical facts, and other such crowd-pleasing oddities… one of which was apparently the aforementioned European avant-garde art movement, founded a hundred years ago this week.
If you don’t know as much about Dada as you’d like, Ms. Osmond’s brief primer is a surprisingly sturdy introduction.
No cutesy bootsy, easy references to melting clocks here.
The highlight is her performance of Dada poet and manifesto author Hugo Ball’s nonsensical 1916 sound poem “Karawane.”
Lose the yellow bathrobe and she could be a captive warrior princess onGame of Thrones, fiercely petitioning the Mother of Dragons on behalf of her people. (Invent some subtitles for extra Dada-inflected fun!)
A sharp eyed young art student named Ethan Bates did catch one error in Marie’s lesson. The ’13’ costume she pulls from a handy dressing room niche was not worn by Hugo Ball, but rather Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg, one of the founders of the De Stijl movement.
Still you’ve got to hand it to Marie, who was slated to perform just a single line of the poem. When it came time to tape, she abandoned the cue cards, blowing producers’ and crew’s minds by delivering the poem in its unhinged entirety from memory.
Now that’s rock and roll.
Below you’ll find footage of Ball himself performing the work in 1916.
Fifty years on, you can read all you want about the Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds (and here’s twobooks that are great), but to really appreciate the intricate nature of the arrangements, you have to turn to the multi-tracks themselves.
Working with session players that could pick up the ideas tumbling from his head (and hurriedly transcribe them), Brian Wilson created a sonic tapestry at L.A.‘s Gold Star Studios that still sounds fresh and, as the years go by, otherworldly. Influenced by Phil Spector’s work, along with the textures of the songs of Burt Bacharach and Martin Denny, Wilson created something as unique as his own DNA. Pet Sounds continues to reveal secrets and treasures the more you listen to it–as this series of YouTube mini-docs from user Behind the Sounds reveals.
These videos use the raw session recordings that were released in 1997, and annotates them, pointing out moments of Wilson’s artistry as we hear these classic tracks assembled. (Wilson, it’s said, kept his swearing to a minimum in order to be taken seriously by the musicians.)
An experienced arranger would probably never have come up with the recipe for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” for example: two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion. And certainly not for a pop song. But there it is.
Yet, as amazing as Pet Sounds is, the album was also a cry for help as mental illness began to really take hold of Wilson. The album would be the high point before a slow decline. It’s as if one man couldn’t hold all this art in his head. It was too much. Aware of the endless possibilities of the studio as instrument, and owning a perfectionist nature, Wilson came undone. These docs are an excellent insight into a beautiful, troubled mind, but one that recovered after a long spell. Wilson continues to record and tour, including full performances of Pet Sounds. Click here to find tour dates for Brian Wilson’s “Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary World Tour.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.
If your understanding of early punk derives mainly from documentaries, you’re sorely missing out. As I wrote in a post yesterday on international treasure John Peel—the BBC DJ who exposed more than a couple generations to carefully-curated punk rock—finding such music before the internet could be a daunting, and exciting, adventure. Without a doubt the best way die-hard fans and curious onlookers could get a feel for the music, manners, and personalities of any number of local scenes was through magazine culture, which disseminated trends pre-Tumblr with a special kind of intensity and aesthetic personalization. Punk publications documented firsthand the doings of not only musicians, but visual artists, activists, promoters, managers, and, of course, the fans, offering points of view unavailable anywhere else.
The breadth and range of local punk rock fanzines, from the UK, the States, and elsewhere, can seem staggering, and the quality curve is a steep one—from barely legible, mimeographed broadsheets to large-format newsprint affairs with professional layout and typesetting, like legendary titles Touch & Go and Search & Destroy. The latter publication emerged from the rich, but often overlooked San Francisco scene and featured frequent contributions from Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra, who appears on the cover of another San Francisco ‘zine, Damage (top), “as fine an example of the [punk ‘zine] form as any you care to name,” writes Dangerous Minds. Thanks to Austin-based archivist Ryan Richardson, you can download 13 complete issues of Damage, from 1979 to 1981, in one large PDF.
Through his project Circulation Zero, Richardson has made other punk magazine collections available as well, in “an attempt to answer some questions…. Are collections better off inside institutional libraries or in the hands of collectors? Should ancient in-fighting prevent bringing the punk print hey-day to a new generation?” Obviously on that account, he’s come to terms with “eggshell walking over copyright issues” and decided to deliver not only Damage but two more seminal titles from the West Coast punk scene’s golden age: Slash and No Mag. Each download is fairly large, including as they do “single searchable PDFs” of print runs over several years. In the case of Slash, we get a whopping 29 issues, from 1977 to 1980, and Richardson gives us 14 issues of No Mag, from 1978 to 1985. Because “some publications stuck around for a long time,” he writes, “I’ve picked a reasonable stopping point based mostly on when my fascination precipitously declines heading into the mid-80s.”
Even so, these collections are magnificent representations of the most fertile years of the movement, and they capture some of the most necessary publications for fans and scholars seeking to understand punk culture. “The importance of Slash,” Dangerous Minds writes, “to the L.A. punk scene, and really to the worldwide punk scene in general, cannot be overstated.” The edgier, “filthier” No Mag’s “transgressive art and photography, along with the interviews of now-legendary bands, make this run a crucial historical resource.”
Founded in 1978 by Bruce Kalberg and Michael Gira—before he moved to New York and started punishing noise-rock band Swans—No Mag’s catalog included the usual roundup of L.A. punk heroes: X, Fear, the Germs, Suicidal Tendencies, along with several forgotten local stalwarts as well. This particular rag—as an L.A. Weekly piece detailed—“frequently bordered on the pornographic… forcing [Kalberg] to manufacture it in San Francisco, where printers are apparently more tolerant.” It may go without saying, but we say it all the same: many of these pages make for unsafe work viewing.
Circulation Zero generously makes these invaluable collections available to all, ostensibly free of charge, but with the understanding that readers will “decide what your experience was worth and then donate” to charities of Richardson’s choice, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. You’ll find download links for all three titles on this page, and donation links here. However much, or little, you’re able to give (on your honor!), it’s worth the time and cost. Whether you’re an old-school punk, a new fan learning the history, or an academic cultural historian or theorist, you’ll glean an inestimable amount of knowledge and pleasure from these archives.
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