Back in 2012, we featured a 1975 Talking Heads concert at CBGB, referencing Generation X author Douglas Coupland’s telling definition of who, exactly, constitutes that cohort: “If you liked the Talking Heads back in the day, then you’re probably X.” Simultaneously ironic and sincere, artistic and commercial, ramshackle and polished, cerebral and impulsive: the sensibilities of David Byrne’s influential new-wave band and the zeitgeist profile of Generation X share too many qualities to list. 1975, for a Gen Xer, would certainly count as “back in the day,” though perhaps a bit too far back in the day for many of them to have gained entrance to such a vibrantly scuzzy venue as CBGB. Just five years later, though, many more of them would have come of just enough age to engage with the Heads, who by that point had blown up in popularity, playing huge venues all over the world.
You may have seen the band playing Rome in 1980 when we posted that show in 2012, and today we give you another of their European gigs from that same breakout year, in Dortmund. That location, about 250 miles from Coupland’s Canadian Air Force base birthplace in Germany, in a Germany still divided, brings to mind not just the importance of themes of the late Cold War to the novelist’s work, but to Generation X itself, the last kids to grow up under the credible threat of sudden nuclear annihilation. Such an uneasy psychological and ideological environment would have an effect on the formation of anyone’s creative mind, as it must also have on that of Generation X’s predecessors, the Baby Boomers — a group in which the 1952-born Byrne falls right in the middle. The Cold War may have ended, but the Talking Heads’ music, as you’ll experience in this Dortmund concert, transcends both temporal and geographical context.
Recently attacked by Cossacks in Sochi and by black-clad men with green antiseptic in Moldova, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have, since their December release from a two-year prison sentence, remained the very public faces of the punk band/agit-prop collective known as Pussy Riot. The two also continue to raise the band’s profile in the States. Last month alone, they appeared on The Colbert Report and onstage with Madonna at a star-studded Amnesty International event.
Not only prominent activists for prison reform, Nadia and Masha—as they’re called in the HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—have become celebrities. (So much so that other mostly anonymous members of the group have disowned them, citing among other things issues with “personality cult.”) The HBO doc begins with profiles of the women, as does a new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, by Russian journalist Masha Gessen.
In an interview Friday for KQED in San Francisco (above), Gessen—a lesbian mother who recently moved to the United States for fear of persecution—describes how Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot’s primary target, has regained his popularity with the Russian people after his aggressions at the Ukraine border and Crimea’s Sunday vote for secession. She cites, for example, alarming poll numbers of only 6% of Russians who oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the time of Pussy Riot’s infamous performance at a Moscow cathedral in February of 2012, which led to Tolokinnikova and Alyokhina’s imprisonment, the anti-Putin protest movement made the autocratic ruler very nervous.
Gessen sketches the history of the movement in her interview (and details it in the book). At first the protests involved the situationist antics of performance art collective Voina—“War”—(see Tolokonnikova, above at far right, with other Voina members in 2008). The feminist punk band has only emerged in the past three years, when Voina’s art-school pranks became Pussy Riot’s provocations days after Putin announced his intent to return to the presidency.
One month before the cathedral performance that sent Nadia and Masha to prison, the band appeared in their trademark fluorescent dresses and balaclavas in Red Square (top). Only three months prior, on October 1, 2011, they released their first song, “Ubey seksista” (“Kill the Sexist”) and—as members of Voina—announced the arrival of Pussy Riot, a radical opposition to the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and crony capitalism they allege characterize Putin’s rule.
In November of 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first public performance (above), scaling atop scaffolding and Moscow trolley and subway cars while scattering feathers and dancing to their song “Osvobodi Bruschatku” (“Release the Cobblestones”). The song recommends that Russians throw cobblestones in street protests because–as Salon quotes from the group’s blog—“ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the approaching elections.
The collective next released the video for “Kropotkin Vodka” (above), featuring a montage of public appearances in fashionable locations around Moscow. The locations were chosen, the band writes, specifically as “forbidden sites in Moscow.” More from their (Google-translated) blog below:
The concerts were held in public places [for] wealthy putinists: boutiques in the capital, at fashion shows, luxury cars and roofs close to Kremlin bars […] Performances included arson and a series of musical occupations [of] glamorous areas of the capital.
The song takes its title and inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian aristocrat-turned-anarcho-communist intellectual.
In their open letter publicly releasing their two most prominent members from the group, six members of Pussy Riot write that the “ideals of the group” Nadia and Masha have allegedly abandoned were precisely “the cause for their unjust punishment.” The two have become, they say, “institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights.” And yet in mid-December, 2011, the band performed their song “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on the rooftop of a detention center holding opposition leaders and activists. This was at the height of the anti-Putin movement when upwards of 100,000 people took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a Thief” and demanding free elections.
While most of us only heard of Pussy Riot after their arrest and trial for the cathedral stunt, their “breakthrough performance,” writes Salon, occurred one month earlier at the Red Square appearance at the top of the post. This was when the band decided to “take revolt to the Kremlin,” and coincided with promises from Putin to reform elections. “The revolution should be done by women,” said one member at the time. “For now, they don’t beat us or jail us as much.” The situation would turn rather quickly only weeks later, and it was with Pussy Riot, says Gessen, that the wave of arrests and beatings of protesters began. The band’s current schism comes just as the anti-Putin movement seems to be fracturing and losing resolve, and the future of democratic opposition in Putin’s increasingly belligerent Russia seems entirely uncertain.
A film that began its life as a script called Who Killed Bambi?, written by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (trailer below) became a farcical caper starring the Sex Pistols minus their lead singer. Johnny Rotten had quit the band at this point and appears only in archival footage. Mostly The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a vehicle for Malcolm McLaren to sell himself as the guru of punk and the driving force behind the band. Directed by Julien Temple (who also made the far superior Sex Pistols doc, The Filth and the Fury), Swindle is also notable for almost launching a Sid Vicious solo career, and it might have worked, were it not for his epically destructive flame-out in 1978.
The film saw release two years later, and produced a soundtrack album, which I remember finding in a used record bin—pre-Google—and thinking I’d discovered some long lost Sex Pistols album. One listen disabused me of the notion. Some of album is a snapshot of the band’s shambolic final days, but most of it is devoted to “jokey material” from the movie and most of that is pretty terrible. The sole exception is Sid’s version of Paul Anka’s “My Way” (top), a sneering piss take on the song Sinatra made famous. After some obnoxious faux-crooning, Sid tears through song with punk aplomb. Allmusic aptly describes the performance as “inarguably remarkable” yet showing that Sid was “incapable of comprehending the irony of his situation.”
The moment of the performance itself is bathed in sad irony. I’ve always thought it showed that—had he just a little more instinct for self-preservation—we might have someday seen Sid Vicious recording an album’s worth of bratty takes on the American Songbook, but probably at McLaren’s behest. What more he might have had in him is anyone’s guess; in life he seemed unable to rise above the role McLaren assigned him in the film “Gimmick.” But he made it look good. Those familiar with Alex Cox’s definitive portrait Sid and Nancy will of course remember Gary Oldman’s recreation of Sid’s “My Way” (above). Convincing stuff, but no substitute for the real thing.
Singing a piece of music for the first time while reading the notes from a sheet is hard, and requires complete control of one’s vocals. Today, the most popular ways of teaching this skill to musicians are based on the solfège method, where notes on a scale are matched to particular syllables: your standard do, re, mi, fa, so la, si. Students practice singing different combinations of these syllables, using varying rhythms and intervals, and eventually cement their knowledge of that particular scale. The method is, surprisingly, almost a millenium old, with the first European use of this mnemonic technique dating back to the middle ages.
In the 11th century, a monk known as Guido of Arezzo, began to use the “Guidonian hand” as way to teach medieval music singers his hexachord, or six-note scales. Arezzo, who had also devised the modern musical notation system, had noticed that singers struggled to remember the various Gregorian chants that the monastic orders performed in the monasteries.
To help their memorization, Guido decided to take the first syllable in each line of the well known hymn Ut Queant Laxis, and created a hexachord, or six note scale, that singers familiar with the hymn already knew: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. The hand, shown above, was a map of the musical notes in this hexachord system, with each note associated with a particular joint. In all, the Guidonian hand ranges almost three octaves. Although it had fallen out of use for the past few centuries, the Guidonian hand seems to be making a comeback. Here’s a video of the method in action, forwarded our way by Anton Hecht, an Open Culture reader:
I love the concept, but can’t help feel that using the Guidonian hand during a performance makes you look a little like a first grader struggling with basic arithmetic.
For more information on the Guidonian hand, check out this writeup of a 2011 Stanford symposium, and watch another demonstration video, here.
David Bowie and Cher: the combination sounds so incongruous, but then you think about it and realize the two could hardly have more in common. Two singers of the same generation, close indeed in age but both (whether through their sensibilities or through various cosmetic technologies) perpetually youthful; both performers of not exactly rock and not exactly pop, but some oscillating form between that they’ve made wholly their own; both masters of the distinctively flamboyant and theatrical; both given to sometimes radical changes of image throughout the course of their careers; and both immediately identifiable by just one name. The only vast difference comes in their performance schedules: Bowie, despite releasing an acclaimed album The Next Day last year, seems to have quit playing live shows in the mid-2000s, while Cher’s continuing tours grow only more lavish.
Long before this current stage of Bowie and Cher’s lives as musical icons, the two came together on an episode of the latter’s short-lived solo (i.e., without ex-husband Sonny Bono, with whom she’d hosted The Sonny & Cher Show) television variety show, simply titled Cher. On the broadcast of November 23, 1975, Bowie and Cher sang “Young Americans,” at the top, “Can You Hear Me,” just above, and bits of other songs besides.
Watch these clips not just for the performances, and not just for the outfits — costumes, really, especially when you consider Cher’s even then-famous variety of artificial hairstyles — but for the video effects, which by modern standards look like something out of a late-night public-access cable program. An especially trippy set of visuals accompanies Bowie’s solo moment on the episode below, singing about the one quality that perhaps unites he and Cher more than any other: “Fame.” And lots of it.
Stephen Sondeim’s “Send in the Clowns,” like the much mangled “Memory”from the much maligned musical CATS,has weathered any number of ill-advised interpretations.
It’s misinterpretations like these that set composers spinning in their graves, but Sondheim is still very much in the game. His approach to musical theater continues to be exacting, no doubt nerve wracking, though the Guildhall School of Music and Drama student he’s fine-tuning in the video above bears up bravely.
She’s a couple of decades too young to play Desiree, whose unsuccessful attempt to woo an old lover away from his teenage bride occasions the song, but no matter. Her adjustments show the dividends a close reading of the text can pay.
See what you can do with Sondheim’s advice next time you’re singing in the shower, the only place private enough for me to believe I’m doing credit to his oeuvre. Those of us who can’t sing can take heart knowing that the original Desiree, Glynis Johns, couldn’t either, at least by the master’s usual standards. The song’s uncharacteristically short phrasing allowed her to shine as an actress, and deflected from any vocal shortcomings.
Those who are more director than diva may prefer to evaluate the performances below. In my opinion, at least one of them merits a firm rap on the knuckles from Maestro Sondheim for excessive wallowing. (Hint for those whose time is short: we’ve saved the best for last.)
Judi Dench, Desiree in the 1995 Royal National Theatre revival, performing at the BBC Proms 2010, in honor of Sondheim’s 80th birthday.
Glenn Close, another Night Music vet at Carnegie Hall.
Carol Burnett stuck close to the spirit of the original in a non-comic sketch for her 1970’s variety show, costarring the late Harvey Korman.
Bernadette Peters, the 2010 Broadway revival’s Desiree, at Southern Methodist University. Her accompanist seems pretty happy with this performance.
Dame Judi again, showing us how it’s done, in costume on the edge of a giant red bed, with Laurence Guittard as Frederik. Have a hankie ready at the 3:10 mark.
The number of Beatles bootlegs—in every possible medium and state of quality—must approach infinity. A person could spend a lifetime acquiring, cataloguing, scrutinizing, and discussing the relative merits of various outtakes, live recordings, demos, and studio goof-offs from the band and its individual members. It should go without saying that a great many of these artifacts have more historical than musical interest, given their fragmentary and unserious nature—and the simple barriers posed by bad recording. But while I imagine some angry antiquarian or zealous devotee interjecting here to tell me that absolutely everything the fab four touched turned directly to gold, I remain unsold on this article of faith.
So where are we average fans to place A Toot and a Snore in ’74, the bootleg album (above) recorded at Burbank Studios and featuring musical contributions from Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis, and Bobby Keys? Well, its historical value is beyond question, since it represents the only known record of John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing together after the Beatles’ breakup. Though their mutual dislike at this time was well-established and they hadn’t seen each other in three years, the tapes document a very laid-back session with the two legends—John on lead vocal and guitar, Paul singing harmonies and playing Ringo’s drumkit—letting go of the past and having some fun again. Lennon first mentioned the recording while discussing the possibility of reunion in the 1975 interview below (he’s surprisingly warm to the idea). At 1:45, he says, “I jammed with Paul. We did a lot of stuff in LA. There was 50 other people playing, but they were all just watching me and Paul.”
How does McCartney remember the session? “Hazy,” he said in a 1997 interview, “for a number of reasons.” The drugs were surely one of them. The title refers to Lennon offering Stevie Wonder coke in the opening track: “do you want a snort Steve? A toot? It’s going round….” The impromptu gathering convened on March 28 during the recording of Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats, which Lennon was producing. This was during Lennon’s so-called “lost weekend,” the year and a half during which he separated from Yoko, lived with their assistant May Pang, and did some serious drinking and drugs (as well as recording three albums).
Pang, who was present and plays tambourine, recalls it as a night of “joyous music” in her 1983 book Loving John, but you probably had to be there to fully appreciate it. As Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds notes, “it’s basically just a drunk, coked-up jam session.” But, he adds, “a drunk, coked-up jam session of great historical significance.” And for that reason alone, it’s worth a listen. Or, if you like, you can read a transcript of the ramble and banter over at Bootleg Zone. Consisting of lots of studio crosstalk, noodling improv, and a few attempted covers, the session was released by Germany’s Mistral Music in 1992, credited simply to “John and Paul.”
There’s something oddly soothing about listening to music on vinyl. Regardless of what digital music lovers say, and irrespective of the fact that the same sound may be produced digitally, die-hard vinyl fans will tell you that nothing compares to the warm scratchiness of a needle on a record. I don’t have a horse in the race, but having grown up with a record player in my bedroom, I can’t help but slip into a brief reverie whenever I hear an old Satchmo record spinning on a turntable.
In an elegant twist on the digital/analog battle, German-born Bartholomäus Traubeck has created Years, a “record player that plays slices of wood,” using a process that translates the data from the tree’s year rings into music. This process is, however, completely digital. Instead of using a needle to pick up the sound from the record’s grooves, Traubeck used a tiny camera to capture the image of the wood, and digitally transformed this data into piano tones. More than merely a clever contraption, however, Years is also an intriguing interaction between the physical and the temporal. As Traubeck notes,
“On regular vinyl, there is this groove that represents however long the track is. There’s a physical representation of the length of the audio track that’s imprinted on the record. The year rings are very similar because it takes a very long time to actually grow this structure because it depends on which record you put on of those I made. It’s usually 30 to 60 or 70 years in that amount of space. It was really interesting for me to have this visual representation of time and then translate it back into a song which it wouldn’t originally be.”
A little convoluted? Don’t worry. Play the video above, and enjoy the eerie melody.
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