Johnny Cash needs no introduction. But unless you happened to be watching ABC between June 1969 and March 1971, The Johnny Cash Show might. Cash added one more chapter to his legendarily storied career by hosting 58 episodes of the musical variety show from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, then the home of the Grand Ole Opry. You might expect from such a setup nothing but country music, and Cash and his producers did indeed make a point of introducing the genre’s stars to all of America as well as highlighting its skilled but low-profile performers who wouldn’t otherwise have received national exposure. But many Johnny Cash Show broadcasts reached well beyond Cash’s own presumptive base, making non-country luminaries accessible to country listeners as much as the other way around. Above you’ll find a popular video of Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides, Now” on the program; Bob Dylan and Neil Young also made appearances representing the next generation of singer-songwriters.
But Cash also routinely shared the stage with his elders, most notably Louis Armstrong in a broadcast that featured Armstrong singing “Crystal Chandeliers” and “Ramblin’ Rose” and both of them performing “Blue Yodel #9.” He also joined in when he brought on Pete Seeger, which demonstrates an impressive collaborative range. I didn’t expect to see poet Shel Silverstein turn up on the show, but then I’d forgotten that he wrote “A Boy Named Sue,” one of Cash’s best-known songs, not to mention the lesser-known “25 Minutes to Go,” which each of them recorded individually on their own albums. Alas, despite its surprising cultural reach, The Johnny Cash Show couldn’t survive the caprice of networks eager to capture a younger demographic; it got the axe, alongside the likes of Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hee-Haw in the so-called “rural purge” of the early seventies.
The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem of the United States in 1931, thanks to Herbert Hoover. And, ever since, the anthem has had its detractors. The Kennedy Center acknowledges on its website:
Some Americans complain that it celebrates war and should be reserved for military ceremonies. Others simply grumble that it is too hard to sing with a range that is out of reach for the average vocalist [anyone remember Carl Lewis giving it a try?]. Suggested replacements have included “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and “This Land is Your Land.”
And don’t forget that singers, amateur and professionals alike, often have difficulty remembering the complicated lyrics. Yes, The Star-Spangled Banner has its critics. But the great Isaac Asimov wasn’t one of them. In 1991, Asimov wrote a short piece called “All Four Stanzas” that staked out his position from the very start. It began:
I have a weakness–I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.
The words are difficult and the tune is almost impossible, but frequently when I’m taking a shower I sing it with as much power and emotion as I can. It shakes me up every time.
I was once asked to speak at a luncheon. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing our national anthem–all four stanzas.
This was greeted with loud groans. One man closed the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud and distracting. “Thanks, Herb,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It was at the request of the kitchen staff.”
I explained the background of the anthem and then sang all four stanzas.
Let me tell you, those people had never heard it before–or had never really listened. I got a standing ovation. But it was not me; it was the anthem….
So now let me tell you how it came to be written.
And, with that, he takes you back to The War of 1812, which started 200 years ago. It’s largely a forgotten war. But it did leave us with our most enduring song. Perhaps you’ll find yourself singing it in the shower today too.
Yesterday we featured UC Santa Cruz’s new Grateful Dead Archive Online. There you’ll find a wealth of materials about the band from their inception in 1965 until their disbandment in 1995. But over the past 17 years, the surviving members of the Dead have pursued all sorts of fascinating projects, musical and otherwise. Mickey Hart, the group’s drummer between 1967 and 1971 and again between 1974 to the end, has put out a particularly unusual new album that takes its basic materials from the heavens. As both a musician and musicologist, Hart has established a precedent for such sonic experiments. Crafting his 1989 album Music to Be Born By, he recorded his yet-unborn son’s heartbeat within the womb — the most natural of all percussion, you might say — and recorded tracks on top of it. For his latest record, Mysterium Tremendum, he listened not to the core of a human being but as far in the other direction from humanity as possible, collecting and composing with “cosmic sounds” made in outer space.
To make music like this, you need some unusual collaborators. Hart went to NASA, Penn State, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with scientists like George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather. They helped convert light, radio waves, and other electromatic radiation into sound waves that Hart and his band could put to musical use. After getting a sample of the resulting extraterrestrial grooves in the videosabove, you might consider listening to this recent interview with Hart on KQED’s Forum. Why go to all the trouble of sampling the billons-of-years-old sounds of the infinite universe? Because the Big Bang, Hart thinks, marked the very first beat. “Four words: it’s the rhythm, stupid,” he explains. “That’s what I always say to anyone, and myself as well. It all goes back to that. We are rhythm machines, embedded in a universe of rhythm.” Spoken like a true drummer.
Give the talented Alex Chadwick 12 minutes, and he’ll give you A Brief History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, with each defining moment represented by a famous guitar riff. Our journey starts in 1953, with “Mr. Sandman” by Chet Atkins. Pretty soon, and quite seamlessly, we get to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, Queen and The Ramones, and eventually some more contemporary pairings — Green Day and White Stripes. The video is sponsored by the Chicago Music Exchange, a store specializing in vintage gear, like the $32,995 1958 Fender Strat played in the clip. A full list of riffs appears below the jump.
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“They’re not the best at what they do,” said respected rock promoter Bill Graham of the Grateful Dead. “They’re the only ones that do what they do.” The band developed such an idiosyncratic musical style and personal sensibility that their legion of devoted fans, known as “Deadheads,” tended to follow them everywhere they toured. The Dead withstood more than their fair share of classic-rock turbulence in the thirty years from their formation in 1965, but didn’t dissolve until the 1995 death of founding member and unofficial frontman Jerry Garcia. The bereft Deadheads, still in need of a constant flow of their eclectic, improvisational, psychedelic-traditional, jam-intensive sound of choice, took a few different paths: some began following other, comparable groups; some would go on to rely on acts formed by ex-Dead members, like Bob Weir and Phil Lesh’s Furthur; some made it their life’s mission to collect everything in the band’s incomparably vast collection of demos, live recordings, and sonic miscellany.
Grateful Dead completists now have another source of solace in the Grateful Dead Archive Online from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lest you assume yourself Dead-savvy enough to have already seen and heard everything this archive could possibly contain, behold the newly added item featured on the front page as I type this: Jerry Garcia’s Egyptian tour laminate. According to the press release, the archive’s internet presence features “nearly 25,000 items and over 50,000 scans” from the university’s physical archive, including “works by some of the most famous rock photographers and artists of the era, including Herb Greene, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson and Susana Millman.” Rest assured that it offers plenty of non-obscurantist Dead-related pleasures, including television appearances, radio broadcasts, posters, and fan recordings of concerts. Like any rich subject, the Grateful Dead provides its enthusiasts a lifetime of material to study. UC Santa Cruz, a school often associated in the public imagination with the Dead’s greater San Francisco Bay Area origins as well as their penchant for laid-back good times, has just made it that much easier to plunge into.
The Evolver T‑Shirt, it’s the perfect gift for the science believin’ Beatles fan. It’s obviously a play on The Beatles’ great 1966 album Revolver. And, over at BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder asked readers to rethink the titles of various songs on the album — to imagine them in evolutionary terms. Here are some of the creative suggestions:
Taxman = Macaques, Man
And Your Bird Can Sing = And Your Chimp Can Swing
I’m Only Sleeping = I’m Only Simian
Doctor Robert = Doctor Fossey
I Want to Tell You = I Want to Groom You
Tomorrow Never Knows = Too Many Bonobos
Personally, I think “Tomorrow Never Knows” could stay just as it is. Doesn’t it already capture the Darwinian spirit in its own way?
In this 1977 television ad for Pioneer Electronics, jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins wails into the New York City night air while standing on the Brooklyn Bridge. A voice-over announcer tells viewers of Rollins’ 1959–61 hiatus from the jazz scene, when he took his sound to the streets to rediscover himself musically. It’s mostly a true story. Only trouble is, Rollins actually retired to the Williamsburg Bridge—admittedly not quite as picturesque! Here’s the story as Rollins tells it:
In the 50s and 60s, Lucille and I had a small apartment on Grand Street on the Lower East Side of New York. It was a nice time. I had a lot of friends there and I was welcomed by the neighborhood people. Like most of New York, the Lower East Side has undergone gentrification but back then, it was a much more ethnic place.
I started practicing in the house because I had to practice, but I felt guilty because I’m a sensitive person and I know that people need quiet in their apartments.
I was walking on Delancey Street one day, not far from where I lived on Grand Street and I just happened to look up and see these steps that I decided to check out. And there, of course, was the bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge. It was this nice big expanse going over the East River. There was nobody up there. So I started walking across the bridge and said, “Wow. This is what I have been looking for. This is a private place. I can blow my horn as loud as I want.” Because the boats are coming under, and the subway is coming across, and cars, and I knew it was perfect, just serendipity. Then, I began getting my horn and going up there regularly. I would be up there 15 or 16 hours at a time spring, summer, fall and winter.
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