Marc Maron’s WTF podcast now clocks in at 585 episodes. Certainly one I remember — and so does Maron too — is Episode 400, which featured the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop. Above, an animated Marc Maron recalls the many musicians he’s interviewed in his Los Angeles garage. And especially the summer day when Pop paid a visit, tore off his shirt, and gave his own nipple a little twist. Good times in LA.
Bob Dylan’s newly-released album, Shadows in the Night, features Dylan covering pop standards made famous by Frank Sinatra during the 1940s and 1950s. And what better way to promote the album than to release a music video that pays homage to a great style of film from the same era — film noir. The track showcased in the noir video, “The Night We Called It A Day,” was recorded by Sinatra not once, not twice, but three times — in 1942, 1947 and 1957. Between the second and third recordings, Sinatra starred in a noir film of his own. Now in the public domain, Suddenly (1954) can be viewed online. It also appears in our collection of 60 Free Noir Films.
(Note: The clip above is the first of six parts. Hear the remaining parts here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
John Lennon’s last days were filled with professional and domestic routines characteristic of both a typical wealthy New Yorker and a legendary rock star and activist: making breakfast and watching Sesame Street with his son Sean, going on epic shopping sprees, spending late nights in the studio, staging demonstrations, arguing with his retinue of servants and hangers-on. After five years in semi-retirement, or “siegelike retreat,” spent raising Sean, John Lennon seemed ready to emerge from seclusion and renew his career. On his final day, December 8, 1980, he was feeling hopeful about his creative future. He had just learned that his album with Yoko, Double Fantasy, had gone gold, and he and Yoko were engaged in promotion, and were looking forward to their next musical endeavor.
That morning, Annie Leibovitz and her assistant came to the Lennon’s apartment building, The Dakota, to shoot those now iconic photographs for Rolling Stone of the Lennons in bed. Meanwhile, a devoted fan named Paul Goresh, and Lennon’s murderer Mark David Chapman, started to hang around outside the building. Less than two hours later, a crew from San Francisco’s RKO radio arrived at The Dakota to interview John and Yoko. Interviewer Dave Sholin remembers meeting Lennon, who was getting dressed after the nude photo shoot: “the door opens and John jumps in with his arms extended, like ‘here I am folks!’ We were meeting John Lennon and we were all maybe a little nervous but that just put us right at ease in probably less than a minute.” “He was a regular guy, very, very sharp and extremely quick witted,” Sholin continued. “And he connected with all of us. He had been out of the public eye for five years and he was open to speaking about anything. He did not hold back.”
You can hear that interview, in six parts, above, and read a transcript here at Beatles Archive. John and Yoko talk in great detail about Double Fantasy, about parenting, about meeting, falling in love, and working together. Lennon also talks about his social vision and the need for “holistic” solutions to “stop this paranoia of 90-year old men playing macho games with the world and possibly the galaxy.” Notably, he offers his assessment of the cultural shifts from the sixties through the seventies.
The bit about the sixties we were all full of hope and then everybody got depressed and the seventies were terrible – that attitude that everybody has; that the sixties was therefore negated for being naïve and dumb. And the seventies is really where it’s at, which means, you know, putting makeup on and dancing in the disco – which was fine for the seventies – but I don’t negate the sixties. I don’t negate the seventies. The … the seeds that were planted in the sixties – and possibly they were planted generations before – but the seed… whatever happened in the sixties the… the flowering of that is in the feminist, feminization of society. The meditation, the positive learning that people are doing in all walks of life. That is a direct result of the opening up of the sixties. Now, maybe in the sixties we were naïve and like children everybody went back to their room and said, ‘Well, we didn’t get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate and, and, and it wasn’t just pretty and beautiful all the time’ and that’s what everybody did, ‘we didn’t get everything we wanted’ just like babies and everybody went back to their rooms and sulked. And we’re just gonna play rock and roll and not do anything else . We’re gonna stay in our rooms and the world is a nasty, horrible place ’cause it didn’t give us everything we cried for’, right? Cryin’ for it wasn’t enough. The thing the sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility, and the seventies everybody gone ‘Nya, nya, nya, nya’. And possibly in the eighties everybody’ll say, ‘Well, ok, let’s project the positive side of life again’, you know? The world’s been goin’ on a long time, right? It’s probably gonna go on a long time… ”
After the interview, Sholin boarded a plane back to San Francisco, and John and Yoko went back to work, meeting with producer Jack Douglas. When they returned home that night, they found Mark David Chapman still waiting outside The Dakota with his .38. At 11:15 that night, Lennon was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital. Sholin tells the story in a lengthy intro to the interview above. You can also listen to a streamlined version of the interview without the intro below.
As we’ve previously noted, Jimi Hendrix spent several years as a journeyman guitarist, playing the early rock ‘n’ roll circuit with stars like Wilson Pickett and Little Richard, before he finally came into his own. One point in his career, writes the Daily Beast, found him “on the bad side of a horrible recording contract” with “notoriously shady label owner and producer” Ed Chalpin of RSVP Records. This was during his tenure with a group called Curtis Knight & The Squires, many of whose recordings ended up “locked in litigation for years, a period that stretched to decades.”
Now that these tracks have been acquired by the Hendrix-family run company Experience Hendrix, they can finally be heard for the first time. Soon to be released as part of the compilation You Can’t Use My Name: Curtis Knight & The Squires (Featuring Jimi Hendrix), the instrumental above, “Station Break”—unlike so many other supposedly “new” Hendrix releases—has never appeared before in any other version. It’s not a Hendrix composition, but it’s his guitar, restrained in some fairly standard R&B licks.
“What makes [the recordings] so special” on the new compilation album, says Hendrix’s sister Janie, “is that they provide an honest look at a great artist during a pivotal time when he was on the cusp of his breakthrough.” Though Hendrix may seem to have descended from outer space, he actually honed his skills in groups like the Squires, before Animals bassist Chas Chandler discovered him and brought him to the UK. These early R&B releases “represent a significant segment in the timeline of Jimi’s musical existence.” They may not be as mind-blowing as, say, the psychedelic riffs in “Third Stone From the Sun,” but they show us an incredibly talented guitarist at work, straining to break free of a pop template and venture into musical realms uncharted.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’sTractatus Logico-Philosophicus (available in our collection of 130 Free Philosophy eBooks has surely set a fair few of its readers on the path to philosophy. But how much music has it inspired? Improbable as it may sound, the German-Austrian philosopher of mathematics, language, and mind’s ultra-terse 1922 masterpiece has brought about at least two pieces. We’ve previously featured Finnish composer M.A. Numminen adapting the Tractatus into an avant-garde comic opera. Today, we have Tibor Szemző’s Tractatus.
You can download the whole piece as a single MP3 on Ubuweb, or hear it above. According to UBU’s page about it, the work, first composed for Szemző and Péter Forgács’ video Wittgenstein Tractatus, “took six months of hard work in the studio to produce, yet it is only 30 minutes and 30 seconds long.”
And not only has Szemző set to music Wittgenstein’s statement after statement on the relationship of language to reality, he’s done so in seven different languages, combining readings recorded in English, Spanish, and Hungarian in Budapest, Japanese in Tokyo, Czech in Prague, the original German in Vienna, and Slovak in Bratislava.
Though I can only really follow three of those (assuming I really grasp Wittgenstein in the first place), Szemző’s Tractatus makes me appreciate how well Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — with its simple yet complex lines like “Everything we see could also be otherwise” and “The light that work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light” — functions not just as a set of lyrics, but as an exercise in foreign-language comprehension. And didn’t Wittgenstein want to get us thinking about language in the first place?
In 2001 or 2002, guitarist and singer David Gilmour of Pink Floyd recorded a musical interpretation of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” at his home studio aboard the historic, 90-foot houseboat the Astoria. This video of Gilmour singing the sonnet was released as an extra on the 2002 DVD David Gilmour in Concert, but the song itself is connected with When Love Speaks, a 2002 benefit album for London’s Royal Academy for the Dramatic Arts.
The project was organized by the composer and conductor Michael Kamen, who died a little more than a year after the album was released. When Love Speaks features a mixture of dramatic and musical performances of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and other works, with artists ranging from John Gielgud to Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Kamen wrote much of the music for the project, including the arrangement for Sonnet 18, which is sung on the album by Bryan Ferry. A special benefit concert to celebrate the release of the album was held on February 10, 2002 at the Old Vic Theatre in London, but Ferry did not attend. Gilmour appeared and sang the sonnet in his place. It was apparently around that time that Gilmour recorded his own vocal track for Kamen’s song.
“Sonnet 18” is perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. It was written in about 1595, and most scholars now agree the poem is addressed to a man. The sonnet is composed in iambic pentameter, with three rhymed quatrains followed by a concluding couplet:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This post was originally published on Open Culture on April 5, 2013. We’re bringing it back today for Gilmour’s 69th birthday.
I’ve lived all of my life in various cities on the East Coast, north and south. Various cultural and geographic features of the mid-Atlantic have shaped me in ways I’m probably only partially aware of. But this past summer I spent more time on the West Coast—L.A. to be precise—than I ever have before, and I found it completely refreshing. Of course, mass commerce being what it is, no matter where you go in the U.S., you run smack into a Target, usually flanked by strips of other tediously familiar chains. But instead of the towering pines of my current locale, I gazed up at languid palm fronds, and instead of the typical East Coast swelter, I relished the arid heat and the faint ocean tang in the air. A change in climate changes one’s perceptions of the world, and that’s not even to mention my—admittedly superficial—tourist’s appreciation of myriad architectural, culinary, and other SoCal eccentricities.
On returning and settling back into the grind, I still felt the pull westward, toward L.A.’s weirdness. This is unsurprising—it’s a city, and a state, that have always symbolized escapism, as well as disappointment, whether that of the Joads, Norma Desmond, or countless real anonymous hopefuls. The story of moving west in pursuit of some American Dream is as old as Lewis and Clark and as new as Devo, one of whose founding members, native Californian Mark Mothersbaugh, narrates above his journey to Hollywood with his bandmates after college at Kent State (at the top of the post). He begins with some formative childhood experiences—getting his first pair of glasses in 2nd grade (Mothersbaugh is legally blind), seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. He then tells, in brief, the story of Devo vs. the record company, or how a quirky art-rock band co-opted Madison Avenue strategies to “tell the good news of de-evolution,” only to themselves become a commodity after scoring a hit with “Whip It.”
The video is part of a series called “California Inspires Me,” a collaboration between Google Play and California Sunday magazine. Beneath Mothersbaugh’s animated story, see one from filmmaker and artist Mike Mills, who talks about skateboarding and punk rock in his L.A. youth. In the video above, singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen shares her “really deep appreciation for the history of San Francisco in music.” And below, Jack Black relates his experiences growing up in the “deep, deep South” of Southern California, specifically Hermosa Beach, with its surf culture, and “free-wheeling hippie love.” If there’s one thing that ties all four videos together—besides the music by Shannon Ferguson—it’s the mellow personalities of the four Californian artists. Watching the series from my currently blustery winter climate gave me the East Coast jitters, firing up that urge again to hit the dusty trail and revisit, or maybe relocate to the Sunshine State.
I’ll admit it. I have a thing for listening to rock biographies and autobiographies on Audible, particularly memoirs narrated by the author him or herself. Look in my personal Audible library and you’ll find Patti Smith reading Just Kids. Keith Richards reading sections of his bestseller Life. And Pete Townshend narrating his 18-hour tome Who Am I. That’s just naming a few.
Right now, I’m getting started with Girl in a Band, the new memoir released by Kim Gordon, the co-founder of the influential indie rock band, Sonic Youth. And it looks like you can do the same with me. Rough Trade has made available online five audio clips, starting with Gordon reading from Chapter 1. Together, they amount to almost an hour of free audio. Find them all below.
Meanwhile, if you want to download the entire memoir for free, you can go here, and then click on the “Try Audible Free” button in the upper right corner. Just realize that you’re signing up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial program, which lets you download two free audiobooks and try out the service for 30 days. If you so choose, you can cancel before a fee kicks in. Please make sure you read all of the fine print before you sign up.
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