Bruce Springsteen played in Auckland, New Zealand this past weekend and gave a big nod to Lorde, the country’s 17-year-old star. Above you can watch him perform a Springsteenian version of her mega hit, Royals. Then, in a little bit of a contrast, we have the Boss paying tribute to another great local act, AC/DC and their rock anthem “Highway to Hell.” That was at a show in Perth, Australia. And, if you want a little more contrast, don’t miss the Brisbane performance of the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive. No joke. Stay tuned for some Men at Work.…
Whether you hate-watched, love-watched, or ignored last night’s Academy Awards, you may be tired today of Oscar talk. Take a break, unplug yourself from Facebook and Twitter, and travel with me back in TV time. It’s June 7th, 1969, and The Johnny CashShow makes its debut on ABC, recorded—where else?—at the Grand Ole Opry (“I wouldn’t do it anywhere but here”). Featuring Cash ensemble regulars June Carter, the Carter family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and the Tennessee Three, the musical variety show has a definite showbiz feel. Even the opening credits give this impression, with a decidedly kitschy big band rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues.” This seems a far cry from the defiant Johnny Cash who gave the world the finger in a photo taken that same year during his San Quentin gig (where inmate Merle Haggard sat in attendance).
But showbiz Johnny Cash is still every inch the man in black, with his rough edges and refined musical tastes (in fact, Cash debuted the song “Man in Black” on a later episode). As daughter Rosanne showed us, Cash was a musicologist of essential Americana. His choice of musical guests for his debut program—Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw—makes plain Cash’s love for folk songcraft. The appearance on the Cash show was Kershaw’s big break (two months later his “Louisiana Man” became the first song broadcast from the moon by the Apollo 12 astronauts). Mitchell, who plays “Both Sides Now” from her celebrated second album Clouds, was already a rising star. And Dylan was, well, Dylan. Even if all you know of Johnny Cash comes from the 2005 film Walk the Line, you’ll know he was a huge Dylan admirer. In the year The Johnny Cash Show debuted, the pair recorded over a dozen songs together, one of which, “Girl from the North Country,” appeared on Dylan’s country album Nashville Skyline. They play the song together, and Dylan plays that album’s “I Threw it All Away,” one of my all-time favorites.
Initially billed as “a lively new way to enjoy the summer!” The Johnny Cash Show had a somewhat rocky two-year run, occasionally running afoul of nervous network executives when, for example, Cash refused to censor the word “stoned” from Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and brought on Pete Seeger, despite the furor his anti-war views caused elsewhere. Ever the iconoclast, Cash was also ever the consummate entertainer. After watching the first episode of his show, you might agree that Cash and friends could have carried the hour even without his famous guests. Cash opens with a spirited “Ring of Fire” and also plays “Folsom Prison Blues,” “The Wall,” and “Greystone Chapel.” And above, watch Johnny and June sing a sweet duet of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
On 2/28 I’ll be doing a show at Madame ZuZu’s Teahouse [in Chicago]; start time noon, and due to nature of performance it’ll last 8–9 hours… As with all our events there is no charge. Performance will be centered around an ambient/musical interpretation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha; built by modular synthesis, on the fly. Readings of the text to go hand in hand with whatever is created; + the first @Hexistential poster, and event t‑shirts too. Hope to see you there.
One fan quickly responded: “Film this, please. This sounds like a truly special event, one that I’d be humbled to take in, even if a recording is the only way to do so.” Luckily, his wish was granted.
Above and below, you can watch Corgan’s long ambient interpretation. And, in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections, you can find a copy of Herman Hesse’s existential novel from 1922. As you watch the video, you’ll encounter what SPIN describes as “a reading of the book itself, combined with modular synth blips, bloops, and textures.” Settle in and enjoy.
It’s hard for me to believe that we now live in a post‑R.E.M. world. Also a post-Sonic Youth world, post-Pixies world (as far as I’m concerned), etc. The bands of my errant youth are no more; sometimes it feels like all I can do is toss out the occasional, half-hearted “get off my lawn” or mumble bemusedly, “what’s a Lorde?” when contemplating the current state of music.
Yet all is not lost for “aging hipsters”—in the parlance of the blog Rock Turtleneck!. Though our pop culture may seem to slip into an irrelevant ice age, we can at least warm ourselves at the flickering screen, where Youtube caches troves of footage of our bygone heroes—like the video above of R.E.M. playing “Radio Free Europe” for their first appearance on TV in 1983.
Now, this was before the time of my fandom, which dates from the later 80s. Still, it’s always a joy to see one of my all time favorites roaring in their lionhearted youth.
The band appeared on Letterman, promoting their debut, Murmur. The venue is no surprise, given Dave’s consistent championing of instant-classic American artists. But after this appearance, they would not return to his show for another 12 years, this time to play “Crush With Eyeliner” in the midst of their 1995 Monster tour (above). I loved R.E.M. no less then, but they were pros by that time, not the scrappy, jangly Southern alt-rockers boldly challenging the orthodoxy of bloated stadium rock.
I think Rock Turtleneck! does not overstate its case in claiming that the band’s national television debut “was the college rock equivalent of The Beatles playing the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.” Well, maybe just a little, but it’s still a pivotal moment in the history of alt-rock. Murmur appears as number 1 on this list of the “best albums of 1983”—calculated from “overall rankings in over 13,000 greatest album charts”—followed by other new wave and alternative classics like the Violent Femmes’s eponymous debut, The Police’s Synchronicity, U2’s War, Tom Wait’s Swordfishtrombones, and New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies. Simpler times, simpler times….
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The country music classic “I’ve Been Everywhere” was first recorded by Lucky Starr in Australia in 1962, then later adapted by Hank Snow, various other artists, and eventually the great Johnny Cash. The lyrics begin:
I was toting my pack along the dusty Winnemucca road
When along came a semi with a high an’ canvas-covered load
“If you’re goin’ to Winnemucca, Mack, with me you can ride.”
And so I climbed into the cab and then I settled down inside
He asked me if I’d seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said, “Listen, I’ve traveled every road in this here land!”
I’ve been everywhere, man
I’ve been everywhere, man
Crossed the desert’s bare, man
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I’ve had my share, man
I’ve been everywhere
I’ve been to:
Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota
Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota
Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma
Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma
Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo
Tocopilla, Barranquilla, and Padilla, I’m a killer
I’ve been to:
Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana
Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana
Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa
Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa
Tennessee, Tennessee, Chicopee, Spirit Lake
Grand Lake, Devil’s Lake, Crater Lake, for Pete’s sake
And that’s not all of the locations the narrator travels to. If you chart and connect all of the destinations mentioned in the song — as Iain Mullan has done in this handy, dynamic map — you’ll find that the singer covers some 112,515 miles (or 181,075 kilometers). Even better, you can watch the travels take place in real-time on a Google map. Just click play, and you will be on your way.
For more travels on a Google map, don’t miss our recent post:
It sounds like a cliché, but if I learned anything in grad school, it’s that I know very little. I apply the same insight to music. While I’ve played guitar—six string and bass—with some consistency for over twenty years, I’d be the first to say that my room for improvement is infinitely large, and I’m always keen to sit at the feet of a master and beg, borrow, or steal whatever I can. So when I discovered that Paul McCartney had an instructional video on Youtube I leapt at the chance to see what I could pick up.
Rightly renowned for his mastery of every rock instrument, McCartney plays nearly all the parts on most of his solo albums (and on many Beatles tracks as well). He does so on “Ever Present Past” from 2007’s Memory Almost Full, and he released tutorial videos for each part of the song as part of the promo for the album. In the video above, Sir Paul teaches the bass part, casual in jeans and t‑shirt and wielding his classic Hofner violin bass (“me little baby”). The overarching lesson? Keep it simple.
As McCartney says, the bass part is “really simple,” and gloriously so. While McCartney has written some very complex music, his playing style is on the whole very straightforward and melodic. On “Ever Present Past,” he plays mostly root notes on the bass, eschewing flourishes and “fiddly bits,” though he encourages you to add them if you wish. First, he shows us the notes on bass alone, and an inset in the video shows their position on the fretboard. Then, a full track comes in, and he plays along (hear the studio version in the official video above).
The tutorial was produced by “Now Play It,” a “new and exciting way to learn and play your favorite songs” by artists like KT Tunstall, Blondie, Coldplay, Radiohead, and many more, often with the original musicians as teachers. You’ll have to pay for most of the content on the site, though there are some nifty free previews. Unfortunately, it appears that the full “Ever Present Past” lesson—with McCartney teaching his drum and rhythm and lead guitar parts—is no longer available on the “Now Play It” site (you can see a teaser trailer here). But you can watch a snippet of the acoustic guitar lesson above. And if you’re eager to see more of McCartney’s range of instrumental skill, check out the clip below from a 1997 episode of Oprah in which he plays the song “Young Boy” from that year’s Flaming Pie, whileprojected on screens behind him are three more McCartneys on bass, drums, and lead guitar.
Let’s test our agriculture math skills with a little dairy industry story problem:
If an 8‑ounce glass of whole milk provides 149 calories, 8 grams of protein, 276 milligrams of calcium, 8 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat and 24 milligrams of cholesterol, and a cup of two-percent milk has 120 calories, 5 grams of fat, 3 grams of saturated fat and 20 milligrams of cholesterol, what kind of music will result in an overall milk production increase of 3%?
Huh. Based on the concert tees of the boys I grew up around in Indiana, I would have guessed Rush or Guns N’ Roses. (Maybe there was some Barry Manilow going on behind closed barn doors?)
Actually, research shows that bovine musical preference, like that of aerobics instructors, hinges less on any specific artist than on beats per minute.
…I hope they didn’t spend too much on this study. Upon reflection, isn’t it just common sense that noise-sensitive herd animals attached to machines via their udders would choose a mellow groove over death metal or psychobilly?
(Poor Bananarama. It must’ve stung when the University of Leicester’s team told the world that 1,000 Holstein Friesian cattle liked listening to nothing at all better than their 1986 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, “Venus.”)
Should the above tune ever grow old (doubtful) there’s always Shakespeare. According to NPR, a theatrical reading of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” proved popular, milk-wise, with an audience of UK cows. And Modern Farmerhas honored Lou Reed by including one of his compositions (no, not “Metal Machine Music, Part 1”) in their recent Playlist To Milk By:
Last fall, our readers loved watching Iron Horse, a bluegrass band from Alabama, performing a most unusual version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The band’s take on Metallica’s anthem was originally recorded on the 2003 album, Fade to Bluegrass: Tribute to Metallica, where Iron Horse — with Tony Robertson on mandolin, Vance Henry on guitar, Ricky Rogers on bass, and Anthony Richardson on banjo — played Metallica hits in bluegrass fashion — “or at least as bluegrass as it’s possible for Metallica songs to be.”
This January, the quartet released a new video, this time covering “Rocket Man.” Sung by Elton John in ’72, written by Bernie Taupin, and inspired by a Ray Bradbury story, Rocket Man has been covered/performed by Coldplay, Kate Bush, My Morning Jacket and many others. But, if you have a scorecard, you’ll almost certainly give Iron Horse top marks for creativity and originality. Hope you enjoy.
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