When our favorite musicians leave us, whether they die young or live to ripe old age, we’re guaranteed to keep discovering new material from them. Sometimes this happens through the questionable remixing of their unfinished work, and the results can be disappointing, if not downright disrespectful. More often, we’re treated to hours of rough demos, home and concert recordings, and alternate takes. And while these may not always live up to the polished studio versions, they nonetheless open intriguing windows into the creative process of artists we love and admire.
In the case of Kurt Cobain, we’ve heard for a couple of years about unreleased demos for a solo album the Nirvana frontman supposedly had in the works before his suicide in 1994. What might it have sounded like?
Well, it might have sounded something like Cobain’s wife’s band, Hole—or at least like their song “Old Age,” released that same year with the single “Violet.” Cobain wrote the song and recorded his own acoustic demo, which you can hear at the top. Dissatisfied, he gave it away to Courtney Love. Just above, hear another acoustic home demo, “Do Re Mi,” that Hole co-founder Eric Erlandson told Fuse offers a hint of what might have been.
Until, if ever, the actual recordings of Cobain’s planned solo album come out, we can only speculate. But whether or not the notoriously introverted singer would approve, we do have many more acoustic demos and home recordings of songs we know and songs we probably don’t. Many of these appear on the Nirvana box set With the Lights Out, which, in addition to containing “Old Age” and “Do Re Mi,” has acoustic versions of In Utero’s “Rape Me,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” and “All Apologies” (above).
What you won’t hear on the box set is the song above, “Creation,” a home demo Cobain made in the late eighties, using a 4‑track recorder to mix his vocals with a bassline and drumming on suitcases. This track appears on an unofficial 4 CD bootleg set called Nirvana: The Chosen Rejects alongside a good many demo tracks from Cobain’s first band, the obnoxiously-named Fecal Matter, which he formed with future Melvins drummer Dale Crover in Aberdeen, Washington.
“Creation” presages the droning, rhythmic melodicism that became the hallmark of Cobain’s Nirvana songwriting. But as for that sadly aborted solo album, it seems the singer may have been moving into some very eclectic territory indeed. Cobain, says Erlandson, “was headed in a direction that was really cool. It would have been his White Album.” Alas.
Now Exhibit C: It’s a no-bs press release that announced the arrival of the band, and what it’s all about. Written by Tommy Ramone (the drummer who died last summer, but only after outliving all of the other original band members), the one-pager describes The Ramones succinctly:“The Ramones are an original Rock and Roll group of 1975, and their songs are brief, to the point and every one a potential hit single.” And with a little bit of humor. “The Ramones all originate from Forest Hills and kids who grew up there either became musicians, degenerates or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each. Their sound is not unlike a fast drill on a rear molar.”
You can click the press release above to read it in a larger format. Or read the transcript below.
The Ramones are not an oldies group, they are not a glitter group, they don’t play boogie music and they don’t play the blues. The Ramones are an original Rock and Roll group of 1975, and their songs are brief, to the point and every one a potential hit single.
The quartette consists of Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone, Johnny, the guitarist, plays with such force that his sound has been compared to a hundred howitzers going off. Joey, the lead singer, is an arch villain whose lanky frame stands threatening center stage. Dee Dee is Bass guitar and the acknowledged handsome one of the group, and Tommy is the drummer whose pulsating playing launches the throbbing sound of the band.
The Ramones all originate from Forest Hills and kids who grew up there either became musicians, degenerates or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each. Their sound is not unlike a fast drill on a rear molar.
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If Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist, the makers of Epic Rap Battles of History refuse to say, I will: neither of them.
Instead, it is action director Michael Bay (as embodied by a bewigged Shukoff), who emerges victorious, dropping into the proceedings via helicopter, to spit that moviemaking is all about the “motherfuc&in’ money”! Artistically, he may not have much currency, but there’s no arguing that the Transformers franchise has indeed endowed him with the “socks made of silk money.”
It’s vulgar, and NSFW sans headphones, but as legions of adolescent boys will passionately attest, it has its moments. Watching the behind the scenes, below, reminded me of all the planning that went into this episode, from special effects make up to research and green screen. If the end result is not quite to your taste, at least you can rest assured that it’s by design.
If you heard Sun Ra’s Christmas-day radio broadcast of poetry and music we featured on, well, Christmas day, perhaps it inspired you to create something — music, poetry, radio — yourself. More than twenty years after his death, the flamboyant jazz visionary continues to inspire all kinds of creative acts on the part of his listeners. Surely he played no small part in motivating the production of Big Music, Little Musicians, an album by the fourth‑, fifth‑, and sixth-graders of music teacher Randy Porter’s classes at Chabot, Montclair, and Thornhill elementary schools in Oakland, California. The album offers not just 43 (!) compositions by these elementary schoolers, but, 42 tracks in, their interpretation of Sun Ra’s “Planet Earth” (in its original form the opening cut from 1966’s Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth):
You can hear the entirety of this out-of-print 1994 release (incidentally, the year after Sun Ra took his leave of planet Earth) at Ubuweb. “With as little as a couple months of experience under their belts,” say the notes there, the ten‑, eleven‑, and twelve-year-old students “are encouraged to improvise and compose and this disc documents it.” And admittedly, “while some may cringe at some of the technical problems young, inexperienced players are bound to have, the creativity exhibited is undeniable. It is also refreshing to hear such unabashed, egoless joy as we have here. Many a seasoned player could stand to give this a listen.” It puts me in the mind of not just the grade-schoolers who sang David Bowie’s Space Oddity but the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an amateur orchestra at the Portsmouth School of Art that compensated for each member’s shaky grasp of their instrument (including, at one point, none other than Brian Eno’s on the clarinet) with its sheer size and the famousness of its selections.
Ghost Train
Tom-Foolery
Help I’m Drowning In A Sea Of Harmony
Just above, you can hear a few original cuts of intriguingly named big music from these little musicians: “Ghost Train,” “Tom Foolery,” and “Help! I’m Drowning in a Sea of Harmony.” Seeing as these kids would be the same age as me today, it would certainly interest me to hear how they’ve turned out; such an early and strong dose of Sun Ra certainly couldn’t make one’s life less interesting.
“When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They’re the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created.” — Gerald Early talking to Ken Burns.
In this clip unearthed by the Smithsonian earlier this year, we find two great American traditions intertwined — baseball and jazz. As John Edward Hasse explains in his online essay, jazz and baseball grew up together. According to some, the first documented use of the word “jazz” came from a 1913 newspaper article where a reporter, writing about the San Francisco Seals minor league team, said “The poor old Seals have lost their ‘jazz’ and don’t know where to find it.” “It’s a fact … that the ‘jazz,’ the pepper, the old life, has been either lost or stolen, and that the San Francisco club of today is made up of jazzless Seals.” Or, if you listen to this public radio report, another use of the word can be traced back to 1912. That’s when a washed-up pitcher named Ben Henderson claimed that he had invented a new pitch — the “jazz ball.”
During the Swing Era, jazz musicians often took a keen interest in baseball. Writes Ryan Whirty in Offbeat, Louis Armstrong’s “passion for America’s pastime was so intense that, in the early ’30s, he owned his own team, the Secret Nine, in his hometown of New Orleans, even decking the players out in the finest, whitest uniforms ever seen on the sandlots of the Big Easy.” (See them in the photo above.) And then other band leaders like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington formed baseball teams with members of their groups.
Above, you can watch Ellington playing ball in some home videos, both hitting and pitching. When the Duke was a kid, he imagined himself becoming a professional baseball player one day. But the youngster eventually got hit in the head with a bat during a game, and that’s where his baseball career ended. He later noted, “The mark is still there, but I soon got over it. With that, however, my mother decided I should take piano lessons.”
Note: The Duke Ellington Center writes on Youtube that “The appearance of Ben Webster at the end of the clip times the video to around 1940–41.”
Before she died earlier this year, Maya Angelou was working on Caged Bird Songs, a musical collaboration that features Angelou reciting her poems and producers Shawn Rivera and RoccStarr blending them with modern day hip-hop. After her passing, Angelou’s estate continued nudging the project along. Eventually the 13-song album was released in November, and now comes a music video. The video (above) centers around “Harlem Hopscotch,” a poem Angelou wrote in 1969. The text of the poem is available over at the Poetry Foundation. You can hear more tracks from the album below, or purchase the complete album here:
They’ve even become friends, ones close enough that Lynch just calls Moby “Mo,” and Moby once gave Lynch a slide guitar as a present. They’ve got such a rapport, in fact, that Moby can ask Lynch, leadingly and admittedly so, if Lynch considers that slide guitar the best present he ever received. He asks it, in fact, right up there onstage at the IMS, along with such other questions, pre-written on a sheet, as “Have you ever grown maggots?,” “Is Inland Empire my favorite movie of the last ten years?,” “What would your favorite birthday meal be, keeping in mind this is a conference about electronic music?,” “Do we fear death?,” and “Would you like to grow quinoa in your backyard?”
Though both Moby and Lynch love their quinoa, they make even more of a connection over their city of residence, Los Angeles. The former points out that three of the latter’s pictures — Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire — star not any particular human actor, but Los Angeles itself. “Anything goes,” Lynch explains about the city that inspires him (sometimes, no doubt, during the meditation sessions he also discusses here) with its light and its jasmine-scented air. “You’re free to think and do things” — two pursuits that both of these guys have engaged in, unceasingly and fruitfully, over their entire careers.
Next time you see the still-youthful and musically prolific Paul McCartney, take a good hard look and ask yourself, “is it reallyhim?” Can you be sure? Because maybe, just maybe, the conspiracy theorists are right—maybe Paul did die in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a double who looks, sounds, acts, and writes almost exactly like him. Almost. It’s possible. Entirely implausible, wholly improbable, but within the realm of physical possibility.
In fact, the rumor of Paul’s death and replacement by some kind of pod person imposter cropped up not once, but twice during the sixties. First, in January, 1967, immediately after an accident involving McCartney’s Mini Cooper that month. The car, driven by Moroccan student Mohammad Hadjij, crashed on the M1 after leaving McCartney’s house en route to Keith Richard’s Sussex Mansion. Hadjij was hospitalized, but not killed, and Paul, riding in Mick Jagger’s car, arrived at the destination safely.
The following month, the Beatles Book Monthly magazine quashed rumors that Paul had been driving the Mini and had died, writing, “there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles’ Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper Safely locked up in the garage.” “The magazine,” writes the Beatles Bible, “downplayed the incident, and claimed the car was in McCartney’s possession.”
In 1969, rumors of Paul’s death and a conspiracy to cover it up began circulating again, this time with an impressive apparatus that included publications in college and local newspapers, discussions on several radio shows, a university research team, and enough esoteric clues to keep highly suspicious, stoned, and/or paranoid, minds guessing for decades afterward. The formless gossip first officially took shape in print in the article “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?” in Iowa’s Drake University student newspaper, the Times-Delphic. Cataloguing “an amazing series of photos and lyrics on the group’s albums” that pointed to “a distinct possibility that McCartney may indeed be insane, freaked out, even dead,” the piece dives headfirst into the kind of bizarre analysis of disparate symbols and tenuous coincidences worthy of the most dogged of today’s conspiracy-mongers.
Invoked are ephemera like “a mysterious hand” raised over Paul’s head on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—“an ancient death symbol of either the Greeks or the American Indians”—and Paul’s bass, lying “on the grave at the group’s feet.” The lyric “blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life” comes up, and more photographic evidence from the album’s back cover and centerfold photo. Evidence is produced from Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album. Of the latter, you’ve surely heard, or heard of, the voice seeming to intone, “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Cherish the dead,” when “Revolution No. 9” is played backwards. Only a college dorm room could have nurtured such a discovery.
The article reads like a parody—similar to the subversive, half-serious satirical weirdness common to the mid-sixties hippie scene. But whether or not its author, Tim Harper, meant to pull off a hoax, the Paul is dead meme went viral when it hit the airwaves the following month. First, a caller to Detroit radio station WKNR transmitted the theory to DJ Russ Gibb. Their hour-long conversation lead to a review of Abbey Road in The Michigan Daily titled “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light.” With tongue in cheek, writer Fred LaBour called the death and replacement of Paul “the greatest hoax of our time and the subsequent founding of a new religion based upon Paul as Messiah.” In the mode of paranoid conspiracy theory so common to the time—a genre mastered by Thomas Pynchon as a literary art—LaBour invented even more clues, inadvertently feeding a public hungry for this kind of thing. “Although clearly intended as a joke,” writes the Beatles Bible, “it had an impact far wider than the writer and his editor expected.”
Part of the aftermath came in two more radio shows that October of 1969. First, in two parts at the top, New York City DJ Roby Yonge makes the case for McCartney’s death on radio station WABC-AM. Recycling many of the “clues” from the previous sources, he also contends that a research team of 30 students at Indiana University has been put on the case. Yonge plainly states that some of the clues only emerge “if you really get really, really high… on some, you know, like, mind-bending drug,” but this proviso doesn’t seem to undermine his confidence in the shaky web of connections.
Was Yonge’s broadcast just an attention grabbing act? Maybe. The next Paul is Dead radio show, just above, is most certainly an Orson Welles-like publicity stunt. Broadcast on Halloween night, 1969, on Buffalo, NY’s WKBW, the show employs several of the station’s DJs, who construct a detailed and dramatic narrative of Paul’s death. The broadcast indulges the same album-cover and lyric divination of the earlier Paul is Dead media, but by this time, it’s grown pretty hoary. But for a small contingent of die-hards, the rumor was mostly put to rest just a few days later when Life magazine published a cover photograph of Paul—who had been out of the public eye after the Beatles’ breakup—with his wife Linda and their kids. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, McCartney famously remarked in the interview inside, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and added, “If I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.”
In later interviews, the Beatles denied having anything to do with the hoax. Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 that the idea of them intentionally planting obscure clues in their albums “was bullshit, the whole thing was made up.” The hoax did make for some interesting publicity—even featuring in the storyline of a Batman comics issue—but the band mostly found it baffling and annoying. Certain fans, however, refused to let it die, and there are those who still swear that Paul’s imposter, allegedly named Billy Shears and sometimes called “Faul,” still walks the earth. Paul is Dead websites proliferate on the internet—some more, some less convincing; all of them outlandish, and all offering a fascinating descent into the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. If that’s your kind of trip, you can easily get lost—as did pop culture briefly in 1969—in endless “Paul is Dead” speculation.
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