Europeans do weird things with American folk music. Sometimes they do horrible things, like the 1994 techno rendition of traditional country song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” by a Swedish act who called themselves “Rednex” and who dressed up like cartoonish hillbillies in a parody only slightly less offensive than their music. In the video above, we have three continents colliding for another Scandinavian appropriation of Appalachian tropes, by way of a cover of “Thunderstruck” by Aussies AC/DC. The Finnish bluegrass band Steve ‘N’ Seagulls has achieved viral notoriety with their most recent release, which features banjo, mandolin, upright bass, accordion, a drummer who plays the spoons, and an anvil. Oh, and of course a wardrobe of overalls and suspenders without shirts. And the accordion player arrives on the scene on a riding mower.
Offensive? I don’t know—where Rednex was clearly minstrelsy, this has the feel of a fond tribute to a culture whose musical traditions Steve ‘N’ Seagulls clearly adores, though their wearing of Native headdress (below) would not sit well with certain music festival organizers.
As for their take on AC/DC; I almost prefer it to the original, though one Metafilter user pointed out that being able to hear the lyrics with such clarity does confirm one’s suspicion that they’re completely inane. And lest you think Steve ‘N’ Seagulls is some one-cover-hit wonder, check out their covers of Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” above and Dio’s “Holy Diver” below.
My first reaction upon learning about Bob Dylan’s brief conversion to Evangelical Christianity may have been something like “What in the hell?” It wasn’t a religious Dylan that surprised me; it was Dylan embracing a faith that can often seem doggedly literal and, well, just a little inflexible. What with his love of ambiguity, of occult symbolism and symbolist poetry, and his resolute contempt for convention, Dylan has always struck me as more of an ancient Gnostic than a modern Bible thumper. While Dylan’s immersion in the Christian world may have been brief, it was deep, and it was confusing—enough so that Andy Greene in Rolling Stone comments that his proselytizing from the stage “took audience provocation to the next level.”
In his gospel shows of 1979/80, Dylan presented “a night of music devoted exclusively to selections from his new gospel records, often pausing for long, rambling sermons about Christ’s imminent return and the wickedness of man.” Hear one of those sermons at the top, a seven-minute theological disquisition, before Dylan and band launch into a powerful performance of “Solid Rock.” Just above, in another sermon from 1979, Dylan holds forth on the “spirit of the Antichrist” before an unsympathetic crowd in Tempe, Arizona. That same year, he gave an interview to Bruce Heiman of KMGX Radio in Tucson on the subject of his conversion (below).
In a certain way, a Dylan obsessed with divine judgment and the book of Revelation jibes with his pursuit of the arcane and the mystical, with his consistently apocalyptic vision, prophetic mumblings, and tendency to moralize. But the preaching is just…. well, kinda weird. I mean, not even Dylan’s friend, the deeply devout Johnny Cash, used his musical platform to harangue audiences about the Bible. Was it a stunt or a genuine, if perhaps overzealous, expression of deeply held beliefs? That question could be asked of almost every move Dylan has ever made. This brief period of very public religiosity may seem anomalous, but Dylan’s interest in religion is not. Google his name and any faith term, and you’ll see suggestions for “Dylan and Islam,” “Dylan and Buddhism,” “Dylan and Catholicism,” and, of course, “Dylan and Judaism,” the religion of his birth. Some contend that Dylan still keeps faith with Jesus, and that it doesn’t mutually exclude his Jewishness.
And yet, how Dylan’s Christian preaching could line up with his later commitment to Chabad—an Orthodox Hasidic movement that isn’t exactly warm to the idea of the Christian messiah, to put it mildly—is beyond my ken. But logical consistency does not rank highly on any list of virtues I’m familiar with. Dylan seemed to be reconnecting with Judaism when he explicitly expressed solidarity with Israel in 1983 in his Zionist anthem “Neighborhood Bully” from Infidels, in other respects, a wholly secular record.
Three years later, Dylan appeared on the Chabad telethon (above), accompanying his son-in-law Peter Himmelman on harmonica in a rendition of “Hava Nagila,” along with, of all people, Harry Dean Stanton (whose chilling turn as polygamous Mormon sect leader in HBO’s Big Love you may well recall). By this time, at least according to Jewish Journal, “Chabad rabbis had helped Dylan return to Judaism after the musician embraced Christianity for a time.” The mid-90s saw Dylan worshipping with Brooklyn Lubavitchers, and in 2007, he was sighted in Atlanta at Yom Kippur services at the Chabad-Lubavitch of Georgia, saying the “blessings in Hebrew without stumbling, like a pro.”
So is Bob Dylan a firebreathing Christian or an Orthodox Jew? Or, somehow… both? Only Dylan knows, and frankly, only Dylan needs to. His beliefs are his business, but his public expressions of faith have given his fans much to puzzle over, reading the lyrical tea leaves for evidence of a solid rock center amidst the shifting sands of Dylanology. Let ‘em sift. Some people obsess over Dylan’s religious commitments, others over his “secret” wife and daughter, his corporate sellouts, or his sometimes inscrutable personal politics. It’s all part of the business of fame. What I find fascinating about the many layers of Bob Dylan is not how much they tell me about the man, who has the right to change his mind, or not, as often as he likes, but how much they reveal about his strange lyrical themes. After all, Dylan’s seemingly contradictory allegiances and ambivalent identities as an artist may in in fact make him all the more the archetypal American songwriter he’s always said to be.
Most everyone who comments on the phenomenon of the supergroup will feel the need to point out that such bands rarely transcend the sum of their parts, and this is mostly true. But it does seem that for a certain period of time in the late sixties, many of the best bands were supergroups, or had at least two or more “super” members. Take the Yardbirds, for example, which contained, though not all at once, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton. Or Cream, with Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. Or Blind Faith—with Clapton, Baker, and Steve Winwood…. Maybe it’s fair to say that every band Clapton played in was “super,” including, for a brief time, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band.
It started with the one-off performance above in Toronto, which led to an undated eight-page letter Lennon wrote Clapton, either in 1969, according to Booktryst, or 1971, according to Michael Schumacher’s Clapton bio Crossroads. The letter we have–well over a thousand words–is a draft. Lennon’s revised copy has not surfaced, and, writes Booktryst, “the content of the final version is unknown.” In this copy (first page at top), Lennon praises Clapton’s work and details his and Yoko’s plans for a “revolutionary” project quite unlike Lennon’s former band. As he puts it, “we began to feel more and more like going on the road, but not the way I used to with the Beatles—night after night of torture. We mean to enjoy ourselves, take it easy, and maybe even see some of the places we go to!”
Lennon explicitly states that he does not want the band to be a supergroup, even as he recruits super members like Clapton and Phil Spector: “We have many ‘revolutionary’ ideas for presenting shows that completely involve the audience—not just as ‘Superstars’ up there—blessing the people.” While Lennon and Ono don’t expect their recruits to “ratify everything we believe politically,” they do state their intention for “’revolutionizing’ the world thru music.” “We’d love to ‘do’ Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, etc.,” writes Lennon. Later in the missive, he explains his detailed plan for the Plastic Ono Band tour he had in mind—involving a cruise ship, film crew, and the band’s “families, children whatever”:
How about a kind of ‘Easy Rider’ at sea. I mean we get EMI or some film co., to finance a big ship with 30 people aboard (including crew)—we take 8 track recording equipment with us (mine probably) movie equipment—and we rehearse on the way over—record if we want, play anywhere we fancy—say we film from L.A. to Tahiti […] The whole trip could take 3–4‑5–6 months, depending how we all felt.
It sounds like an outlandish proposal, but if you’re John Lennon, I imagine nothing of this sort seems beyond reach—though how he expected to get to Eastern Europe from the Pacific Rim on his ship isn’t quite clear. The problem for Clapton, biographer Michael Schumacher speculates, would have had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with his addiction: “after all his problems with securing drugs in the biggest city in the United States, Clapton couldn’t begin to entertain the notion of spending lengthy periods at sea and trying to obtain heroin in foreign countries.” In any case, “in the end, Lennon’s proposal, like so many of his improbable but compelling ideas, fell through.” This may have had some relation to the fact that Lennon had a heroin problem of his own at the time.
The clip of Clapton performing with the band comes from Sweet Toronto, a 1971 film made by D.A. Pennebaker of the band’s performance at the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival (see the full film above). That event had a wholly improbable lineup of ‘50s stars like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley alongside bands like Alice Cooper, Chicago, and The Doors. As the title opening of the film states, “John could at last introduce Yoko to the heroes of his childhood.” Pennebaker gives us snippets of the performance from each of Lennon’s heroes—opening with Diddley, then Lewis, Berry, and Little Richard—before the Plastic Ono Band with Clapton appear at 16:43. (This performance also produced their first album.) The Beatles Bible has a full rundown of the festival and the band’s somewhat shambolic, bluesy—and with Yoko, screechy—show.
Read the full transcript and see more scans of Lennon’s draft letter to Clapton over at Booktryst, who also explain the cryptic references to “Eric and,” “you both,” and “you and yours”—part of the “soap opera” affair involving Clapton, George Harrison’s (and later Clapton’s) wife Pattie Boyd, and her 17-year-old sister Paula.
Last week, America’s reigning bard of silly parody songs, “Weird Al” Yankovic scored his first number one album, Mandatory Fun. His vastly improved take on Robin Thicke’s catchy, if deeply creepy, earworm Blurred Lines alone might just be worth the price of the album. This weekend saw the release of the James Brown biopic Get On Up, starring Chadwick Boseman, Octavia Spencer and Dan Aykroyd. So we thought you all might be interested in watching Weird Al’s interview of the Godfather of Soul in 1986. You can watch it above.
Ok, so that interview didn’t actually happen. It was cobbled together to make it look like Weird Al was peppering the music legend with bizarre and inane questions. Example: “What was it like the very first time you sat in a bucket full of warm oatmeal?” or “What can you do with a duck that you can’t do with an elephant?”
Back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s when MTV played videos and not endless reality TV shows about the drunk and the vapid, Weird Al regularly hosted Al-TV, a parody of the music channel. Boasting the tagline “putting the ‘vid’ in video and the ‘odd’ in audio,” Al-TV featured skits, fake news reports and, of course, Weird Al’s trademark music video spoofs. It also featured dada-esque “interviews,” like the one with Brown. Below we have some more to check out, like this one where Weird Al ridicules that most dull and pompous of pop stars, Sting.
Weird Al’s interview with pop genius Prince is really odd, and not just because of Weird Al’s dopey questions — “What do you do when someone on the street gives you a piece of cheese?” Perhaps it’s that knowing smirk on Prince’s face. Or maybe it’s because the interview happens while surrounded by his well-coiffed entourage.
And finally, Weird Al doesn’t have to do much with Avril Lavigne. One suspects that the original interview would be pretty funny even without the jokes. At one point, Yankovic asks, “Can you ramble incoherently for a while about something that nobody cares about?”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new picture of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
Have you heard of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men? If not, you can’t say you know all of David Bowie’s groups. Fifty years ago, in his very first television interview, Bowie appeared in the capacity of its spokesman, as well as that of “President of the International League for the Preservation of Animal Filament.” “I think we’re all fairly tolerant,” says the 17-year-old then known as David (or even Davey) Jones, “but for the last two years we’ve had comments like ‘Darling!’ and ‘Can I carry your handbag?’ thrown at us, and I think it just has to stop now.” Cliff Michelmore, host of the BBC program Tonight where this all went down in November 1964, asks if such behavior surprises him, because, “after all, you’ve got really rather long hair, haven’t you?” “We have, yes,” replies the proto-Bowie Bowie. “I think we all like long hair, and we don’t see why other people should persecute us because of this.”
The “we” to which he refers comprises all the equally mop-topped young dudes flanking him. Together, they would later appear on another BBC program, Gadzooks! It’s All Happening, as the group — this time musical — the Manish Boys, performing their big number, a cover of Bobby Bland’s “I Pity the Fool.” But according to the David Bowie FAQ, producer Barry Langford had, for that appearance, previously “insisted that David cut his 17” long hair,” resulting in the brief formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men and, consequently, “numerous newspaper reports… of course it was all a scam for some free publicity.” Whatever his style — and he’s had a few — Bowie has clearly always known how to work the ever-reengineered publicity machine. Sometimes he’s done it by going with the flow, but only partially, as we see here, where he and the Manish Boys sport roughly nine-inch hair rather than cuts to the harsh early-1960s standard. Bowie, never one of rock’s dedicated longhairs, can’t have found this too terribly oppressive in reality, although when he returned to the BBC 35 years later for a chat with the more strident Jeremy Paxman, he did so with a look that might have done the old Society proud.
Farmers like Derek Klingenberg know that you can enchant cows with music. Above, watch him start playing Lorde’s “Royals” on the trombone and the cows come a runnin’.
On a recent road trip through the Deep South, I made a pilgrimage to several sacred shrines of American music, including obligatory stops in Memphis at the garish Graceland and unassuming Sun Studios. But the highlight of the tour had to be that city’s Stax Museum of American Soul Music (“nothing against the Louvre, but you can’t dance to Da Vinci”). Housed in a re-creation of the original Stax Records, the museum mainly consists of aisles of glass cases, in which sit instruments, costumes, and other memorabilia from artists like Booker T. and the MGs, Sam & Dave, The Staples Singers, and Isaac Hayes. One particular relic caught my attention for its radiating aura of authenticity—a battered first pressing of James Brown’s 1956 “Please, Please, Please,” the song that built the house of Brown and his backing singer/dancers the Famous Flames—a song, wrote Philip Gourevitch, that “doesn’t tell a story so much as express a condition.”
“Please, Please, Please” was not a Stax release, but the museum rightly claims it as a seminal “precursor to soul.” Brown bequeathed to sixties soul much more than his over-the-top impassioned delivery—he brought to increasingly kinetic R&B music a theatricality and showmanship that dozens of artists would strive to emulate. But no group could work a stage like Brown and his band, with their machine-like precision breakdowns and elaborate dance routines. And while it seems like Chadwick Boseman does an admirable impression of the Godfather of Soul in the upcoming Brown biopic Get on Up, there’s no substitute for the real thing, nor will there ever be another. By 1964, Brown and the Flames had worked for almost a decade to hone their act, especially the centerpiece rendition of “Please, Please, Please.” And in the ’64 performance above at the T.A.M.I.—or Teenage Awards Music International—at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, you can see Brown and crew for the first time do the so-called “cape act” (around 7:50) during that signature number. David Remnick describes it in his New Yorker piece on this performance:
…in the midst of his own self-induced hysteria, his fit of longing and desire, he drops to his knees, seemingly unable to go on any longer, at the point of collapse, or worse. His backup singers, the Flames, move near, tenderly, as if to revive him, and an offstage aide, Danny Ray, comes on, draping a cape over the great man’s shoulders. Over and over again, Brown recovers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death collapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute abandonment to passion.
It’s an act Brown distilled from both charismatic Baptist church services and professional wrestling, and it’s a hell of a performance, one he pulled out, with all his other shimmying, strutting, moonwalking stops, in order to best the night’s lineup of big names like the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Rolling Stones, who had the misfortune of having to follow Brown’s act. Keith Richards later called it the biggest mistake of their career. You can see why. Though the Stones put on a decent show (below), next to Brown and the Flames, writes Remnick, they looked bland and compromising—“Unitarians making nice.”
When I was a child, my father, enchanted by the notion that I might someday provide live piano accompaniment to his evening cocktails, signed me up for lessons with a mild-mannered widow who—if memory serves—charged 50¢ an hour.
Had I only been forced to practice more regularly, I’d have no trouble remembering the exact price of these lessons. My memory would be a supremely robust thing of beauty. Ditto my math skills, my cognitive function, my ability to multitask.
Instead, my dad eventually conceded that I was not cut out to be a musician (or a ballerina, or a tennis whiz…) and Mrs. Arnold was out a pupil.
Would that I stuck with it beyond my halting versions of “The Entertainer” and “Für Elise.” According to the TED-Ed video above, playing an instrument is one of the very best things you can do for your brain. Talent doesn’t matter in this context, just ongoing practice.
Neuroscientists using fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) technology to monitor the brain activity of subjects listening to music saw engagement in many areas, but when the subjects traded in headphones for actual instruments, this activity morphed into a grand fireworks display.
(The animated explanation of the interplay between various musically engaged areas of the brain suggests the New York City subway map, a metaphor I find more apt.)
This massive full brain workout is available to anyone willing to put in the time with an instrument. Reading the score, figuring out timing and fingering, and pouring one’s soul into creative interpretation results in an interoffice cerebral communication that strengthens the corpus calossum and executive function.
Though to bring up the specter of another stereotype, stay away from the hard stuff, guys…don’t fry those beautiful minds.
If you’d like to know more about the scientific implications of music lessons, WBUR’s series “Brain Matters” has a good overview here. And good luck breaking the good news to your children.
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