A quick note: Thanks to NPR’s First Listen site, you can now stream for free (but only for a limited time) The Best Of Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years Of The Grateful Dead. This new double record, featuring 16 tracks recorded during the Dead’s farewell shows in Chicago this summer, will be officially released on November 20th. But you can get a sneak peek right here, right now by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
Tracks includes “Box Of Rain,” “Shakedown Street,” “Truckin’,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Fire On The Mountain,” “Not Fade Away,” “Touch of Grey” and other fan favorites.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.
In the late 50s, a fearful, racist backlash against rock and roll, coupled with money-grubbing corporate payola, pushed out the blues and R&B that drove rock’s sound. In its place came easy listening orchestration more palatable to conservative white audiences. As sexy electric guitars gave way to string and horn sections, the comparatively aggressive sound of rock and roll seemed so much a passing fad that Decca’s senior A&R man rejected the Beatles’ demo in 1962, telling Brian Epstein, “guitar groups are on their way out.”
But it wasn’t only the blues, R&B, and doo wop revivalism of British Invasion bands that saved the American art form. It was also the often unintentional influence of audio engineers who—with their incessant tinkering and a number of happy accidents—created new sounds that defined the countercultural rock and roll of the 60s and 70s. Ironically, the two technical developments that most characterized those decades’ rock guitar sounds—the wah-wah and fuzz pedals—were originally marketed as ways to imitate strings, horns, and other non-rock and roll instruments.
As you’ll learn in the documentary above, Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World, the wah-wah pedal, with its “waka-waka” sound so familiar from “Shaft” and 70s porn soundtracks, officially came into being in 1967, when the Thomas Organ company released the first incarnation of the effect. But before it acquired the brand name “Cry Baby” (still the name of the wah-wah pedal manufactured by Jim Dunlop), it went by the name “Clyde McCoy,” a backward-looking bit of branding that attempted to market the effect through nostalgia for pre-rock and roll music. Clyde McCoy was a jazz trumpet player known for his “wah-wah” muting technique on songs like “Sugar Blues” in the 20s, and the pedal was thought to mimic McCoy’s jazz-age effects. (McCoy himself had nothing to do with the marketing.)
Nonetheless the development of the wah-wah pedal came right out of the most current sixties’ technology made for the most current of acts, the Beatles. Increasingly drowned out by screaming crowds in larger and larger venues, the band required louder and louder amplifiers, and British amp company Vox obliged, creating the 100-watt “Super Beatle” amp in 1964 for their first U.S. tour. As Priceonomics details, when Thomas Organ scored a contract to manufacture the amps stateside, a young engineer named Brad Plunkett was given the task of learning how to make them for less. While experimenting with the smooth dial of a rotary potentiometer in place of an expensive switch, he discovered the wah-wah effect, then had the bright idea to combine the dial—which swept a resonant peak across the upper mid-range frequency—with the foot pedal of an organ.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—a fascinating history at that, one that leads from Elvis Presley studio guitarist Del Casher, to Frank Zappa, Clapton and Hendrix, and to dozens of 70s funk guitarists and beyond.
Art Thompson, editor of Guitar Player Magazine, notes in the star-studded Cry Baby documentary that prior to the invention of the wah-wah pedal, guitarists had a limited range of effects—tape delay, tremolo, spring reverb, and fuzz. Only one of these effects, however, was then available in pedal form, and that pedal, Gibson’s Maestro Fuzz-Tone, would also revolutionize the sound of sixties rock. But as you can hear in the short 1962 demonstration record above for the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, the fuzz effect was also marketed as a way of simulating other instruments: “Organ-like tones, mellow woodwinds, and whispering reeds,” says the announcer, “booming brass, and bell-clear horns.”
In fact, Keith Richards, in the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—the song credited with introducing the Maestro’s sound to rock and roll in 1965—originally recorded his fuzzed-out guitar part as a placeholder for a horn section. “But we didn’t have any horns,” he wrote in his autobiography, Life; “the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s attention.”
The assertion isn’t strictly true. While “Satisfaction” brought fuzz to the forefront, the effect first appeared, by accident, in 1961, with “a faulty connection in a mixing board,” writes William Weir in a history of fuzz for The Atlantic. Fuzz, “a term of art… came to define the sound of rock guitar,” but it first appeared in “the bass solo of country singer Marty Robbins on ‘Don’t Worry,’” an “otherwise sweet and mostly acoustic tune.” At the time, engineers argued over whether to leave the mistaken distortion in the mix. Luckily, they opted to keep it, and listeners loved it. When Nancy Sinatra asked engineer Glen Snoddy to replicate the sound, he recreated it in the form of the Maestro.
Guitarists had experimented deliberately with similar distortion effects since the very beginnings of rock and roll, cutting through their amp’s speakers—like Link Wray in his menacing classic instrumental “Rumble”—or pushing small, tube-powered amplifiers past their limits. But none of these experiments, nor the pedals that later emulated them, sound like the fuzz pedal, which achieves its buzzing effect by severely clipping the guitar’s signal. Later iterations from other manufacturers—the Tone Bender, Big Muff, and Fuzz Face—have acquired their own cache, in large part because of Jimi Hendrix’s heavy use of various fuzz pedals throughout his career. “Like the shop talk of wine enthusiasts,” writes Weir, “discussions among distortion cognoscenti on nuances of tone can baffle outsiders.”
Indeed. Those early experiments with effects pedals now fetch upwards of several thousand dollars on the vintage market. And a recent boom in boutique pedals has sent prices for handcrafted replicas of those original models—along with several innovative new designs—into the hundreds of dollars for a single pedal. (One handmade overdrive, the Klon Centaur, has become the most imitated of modern pedals; originals can go for up to two thousand dollars.) The specialization of effects pedal technology, and the hefty pricing for vintage and contemporary effects alike, can be daunting for beginning guitarists who want to sound like their favorite players. But what early players and engineers figured out still holds true—musical innovation is all about creating original sounds by experimenting with whatever you have at hand.
It’s unfortunate, I think, that legions of Beatles fans turned on Yoko Ono with such ferocious animosity after the breakup of the band. Most fans still absolutely despise Yoko. (See the legion of often crudely misogynist comments under every Youtube video in which she appears.) Sure, her voice and music is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but without her artistic and conceptual influence on John Lennon post-Beatles, it’s unlikely his amazing solo albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band(1970) and Imagine(1971) would sound the way they do. Yoko, in fact, more or less gave Lennon the seeds of “Imagine,” the song, in her quirky 1964 self-published book, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings, though she never took the credit for it.
Like it or not, if we love solo Lennon, we have no choice but to take the more traditionally great songwriting with the messy, experimental, and sometimes unlistenable. They cannot be completely untangled, to the dismay of a great many people. As Damian Fanelli at Guitar World comments on Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s impromptu performance/jam with Eric Clapton in Toronto in 1969, “Yoko screams—very loudly—during the entire otherwise-decent performance.” This is not an exaggerated or especially biased characterization. “Someday,” Fanelli then goes on, “I’ll vent about how terrible and depressing this is.” Fine, but whether we think of her singing as challenging performance art or “depressing” caterwauling, we’re stuck with it. But do the dynamics of John and Yoko onstage change when we add another polarizing weirdo—Frank Zappa—to the mix? See for yourself in the videos here, from an onstage jam session the two did with Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East in 1971.
See Zappa, Lennon, et al. do Walter Ward’s “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go),” which Fanelli declares “the highlight of the jam, for sure.” Zappa announces to the band the key and “not standard blues changes,” then Lennon introduces the tune as “a song I used to sing while I was in the Cavern in Liverpool. I haven’t done it since.” Zappa rips out a fantastic solo and the band—though seemingly in the dark at first—lays down a righteous groove. And Yoko? Well, it’s true, as Fanelli notes, “all she did was scream her head off.” In this straight-ahead blues number, I have to say, it’s pretty obnoxious. But her vocal tics play much better in more freeform, oddball, Zappa-lead jams like “Jamrag” and “King Kong,” and the shouty, repetitive “Scumbag,” which sounds almost like a Can outtake.
Zappa and band, as always, are in top form. Lennon at times looks out of place and uncertain in their improvisatory environment, but he gamely keeps up. Yoko… Yoko does her usual lot of screaming, howling, yodeling, etc. But before you gin up to tear her to pieces in yet another nasty online comment, bear in mind, for what it’s worth, no Yoko, no “Imagine.”
As Fanelli notes, “the performance was released as part of Lennon and Ono’s poorly received (and not very good at all) 1972 studio/live album, Sometime in New York City.” See Allmusic’s review for a much more thorough, fair-minded assessment of that recording, which “found the Lennons in an explicitly political phase.”
Kye Smith, a drummer based in Newcastle, Australia, recently hauled his drum kit to a nearby rooftop (an homage to The Beatles’ 1969 rooftop gig?) and started banging out a pretty wonderful tribute to Ringo Starr, playing drum parts from 71 Beatles songs in 5 quick minutes. Smith moves chronologically, playing the songs in the order they were released (not recorded). We start in 1962, move through 1969, and even momentarily visit 1995. On his Facebook page, Smith had this to say:
Way before I found out about punk rock or even knew what a snare drum was I spent my childhood playing vinyl records at my grandparents place spinning artists such as Slim Dusty, ELVIS PRESLEY and The Beatles.
Thanks to everyone at The Great Northern for letting me make some noise up there and to Eluminate for helping me shoot it and lug heaps of gear up 7 storeys of stairs!
Below the jump, you can find the list of songs that appear in the video, complete with corresponding time stamps. And keep in mind that Smith, as he mentions on Youtube, is “available for studio and live work and will be opening up some slots for drum lessons shortly.” Contact him here.
PS: If you can name one of the drum parts that was originally played by Paul McCartney, you get bonus points.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.
Has the endless distraction of modern life destroyed our ability to sit with the symphonies of Beethoven and Bach? Do we no longer have the attention span to read novels? These are the kinds of questions scholar Alan Jacobs asks in books like The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and they’re questions he admits—on his blog Text Patterns—may obtain different answers depending on the age of whom you ask. In a post from this past August, Jacobs wrote of his need to counteract social media with “the more peaceable and orderly music of Bach and Mozart and Handel,” and pondered the emotional resilience of younger people exposed pretty much daily to videos of real-life violence online. “It occurs to me,” he concludes, “maybe Twitter—maybe social media more generally—really is a young person’s thing after all. Intrinsically, not just accidentally.”
I admit, Jacobs’ post resonated with me because of the difficulty I sometimes have as I get older in disconnecting from the constant stream of horror and triviality on social media—and of getting lost in a good book or a moving piece of music after witnessing spectacle after spectacle online. Perhaps it is a function of age, as Jacobs surmises, and the young are better equipped to bounce right back. Or perhaps our daily exposure to endless conflict has all of our nervous systems frayed raw, leaving us unable to appreciate the “countervailing forces” of music and literature that demands sustained attention. The Spotify Classical Playlist blog seems to suggest as much in quoting Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s claim, “people whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.” Substitute “Twitter tsunami” and “24-hour cable news” for “music in trains, airports, lifts” and the point may apply to our current cultural condition.
So you may think of the Spotify Classical Playlists of all of Beethoven and all of Bach featured here as exercises in increasing your mental stamina, or as therapeutic “coping mechanisms” as Jacobs writes, to keep “emotional balance.” You may think of them as ways to connect fully with composers who lived in a world very different from ours, one that moved much more slowly and demanded much less of our overtaxed senses.
Or you can choose not to apply any kind of framework, and simply revel in the fact that thanks to the internet—be it overall a scourge or a boon to human life—you can now enjoy all of the works of Beethoven and Bach, each in chronological order; 250 hours of enthralling classical music, for free. So enjoy. And learn more about how these playlists were compiled at the the Spotify Classical blog. And if you need Spotify software, get it here.
However you feel about Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen reforming recently under the band’s name with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on vocals, the band has stated on several occasions that they never intended to replace Freddie Mercury. “[Lambert] interprets the songs the way he interprets them which is wonderful,” May has remarked, “We wanted him to be himself.” Fair enough. But even if Queen had wanted to replace Mercury after his death from AIDS complications in 1991, the task would have proved impossible. No one sounds like Freddie Mercury, no one commands a stage like he did, and no one writes like him either, with his unique mix of raunchy, funny, quirky, candid, and deeply heartfelt lyricism.
“Mother Love,” the last song Mercury recorded—at the band’s Montreux studio—contains some of the most painful of Mercury’s lyrics, an expression of his desire “for peace before I die.” In what we can’t help but hear in hindsight as a direct reference to his illness, Mercury sings, “My body’s aching, but I can’t sleep… I’m coming home to my sweet / Mother love.” The inherent pathos of “Mother Love,” pervades the posthumously-released 1995 album Made in Heaven, but the song that most seemed to define Freddie Mercury immediately after his death is also a rumination on mortality. Shot through with nostalgia, remorse, and expressions of the brevity of life, “These Are the Days of Our Lives”—from Innuendo, the last album the band released during Mercury’s lifetime—laments, “you can’t turn back the clock, you can turn back the tide.” Longing for childhood lost, Mercury sings, “the rest of my life’s been just a show.” Maybe so, but what a show it was, even in the band’s final video, above, shot in black-and-white to hide Mercury’s frail condition.
At the top of the post, you can see behind-the-scenes footage of Mercury from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” video shoot, discovered, writes The Independent, “during a five-year trawl through the Queen archives by Rhys Thomas, the comedy actor,” who co-produced the BBC Two documentary, Queen: Days of Our Lives. “The footage of Freddie in his final video,” says Thomas, “is shocking. He is so frail, he needs two hands to hold a champagne glass. But he knows he is being filmed and wants to show people what he was going through.” Brian May remembers Mercury spending “hours and hours in make-up sorting himself out so it’d be OK. He actually says a kind of goodbye in the video.”
A consummate performer to the end, Mercury was determined to work until he couldn’t, recording new material until days before his death. In the full-color film from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” shoot, we see him studying and critiquing footage of himself, fully engaged in the creation of what he likely knew would be his final performance. He had certainly come a long way from the shy schoolboy he was before Queen brought him international celebrity and acclaim. In the poignant video above, we see what is likely the first footage of the young man then known as Freddie Bulsara. The film shows Mercury in 1964—the year his family migrated to England from Zanzibar—with school mates at Isleworth Polytechnic (new West Thames College). It would be another six years before Mercury would meet May and Taylor and form the band that defined the rest of the days of his life.
At the lower range of hearing, it’s said humans can hear sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But while we may not hear those lowest frequencies, we feel them in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).
In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”
Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, “saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register,” and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team “played people high and low pitched notes at the same time.” Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists “found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon.”
The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: “Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms.” In other words, “there is a psychological basis,” says Trainor, “for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.” University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a “plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.” He also adds, writes Nature:
For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”
Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms.
Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that “the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody.” As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, “you control the harmony,” as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated.
Imagine if you will that it is the year 4515, and future people slowly begin excavating the musical remains of millennia past. Now add the following wrinkle to this scenario, courtesy of classics scholar Armand D’Angour: “all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi’s operas were the words and not the music.” Would it be possible to recover the rhythms and melodies from these scraps? Wouldn’t this music be forever lost to history?
Not necessarily, D’Angour tells us; we could “reconstruct the music, rediscover the instruments that played them, and hear the words once again in their proper setting.” Given the inexact, speculative nature of much ancient history, I imagine the reconstructed Beatles might end up sounding nothing like themselves, but then again, now that scholars have begun to recover the music of ancient Greek tragedy from a few fragments of text, surely those future historians could remake “Love Me Do”
Reconstructing Don Giovani might be a little trickier, and that’s often the scale academics like D’Angour are working with, since not only the love-poems of Sappho, but also “the epics of Homer” and “the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides—were all, originally, music. Dating from around 750 to 400 BC, they were composed to be sung in whole or part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments.” This much we all likely know to some extent.
D’Angour goes on to describe in detail how scholars like himself use “patterns of long and short syllables” in the surviving verse to determine musical rhythm, and new revelations about ancient Greek vocal notation and tuning to reconstruct ancient melody.
The earliest surviving musical document “preserves a few bars of sung music” from fifth-century tragedian Euripides’ play Orestes. A “notoriously avant-garde composer,” Euripides—scholars presume—“violated the long-held norms of Greek folk-singing by neglecting word-pitch.” You can see the papyrus fragment above, written around 200 BC in Egypt and called “Katolophyromai” after the first word in the “stasimon,” or choral song. Above the words, notice the vocal and instrumental notation scholars have used to reconstruct the music. The lines describe Orestes’ guilt after murdering his mother:
I cry, I cry, your mother’s blood that drives you mad, great happiness in mortals never lasting, but like a sail of swift ship, which a god shook up and plunged it with terrible troubles into the greedy and deadly waves of the sea.
This translation comes from “Greek Reconstructionist Paganism” site Baring the Aegis, who also describe the song’s rhythm, Dochmius, and mode, Lydian, with a helpful explanation for non-specialists of what these terms mean. They also feature the live performance of the stasimon at the top of the post, just one interpretation by Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou of neofolk band Daemonia Nymphe. Below it, hear another interpretation by Petros Tabouris and Nikos Konstantinopoulos. And just below and at the bottom of the post are two more versions of the ancient song.
Given Euripides’ experimentalism, we can’t expect that this reconstructed song would be representative of most ancient Greek music. “However, we can recognize that Euripides adopted another principle,” setting words to falling and rising cadences according to their emotional import. As D’Angour puts it, “this was ancient Greek soundtrack music,” and it was apparently so well-received that historian Plutarch tells a story about “thousands of Athenian soldiers held prisoner” in Syracuse: “those few who were able to sing Euripides’ latest songs were able to earn some food and drink.”
As for “the greatest of ancient poet-singers,” Homer, it seems according to reconstructions by the late Professor Martin West of Oxford that Homeric tunes were “fairly monotonous,” explaining perhaps why “the tradition of Homeric recitation without melody emerged from what was originally a sung composition.”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
