Karl Höfn­er began mak­ing stringed instru­ments in 1887, in the lit­tle town of Schön­bach. His com­pa­ny flour­ished into the 20th cen­tu­ry and real­ly took off one for­tu­itous day in 1961, when Paul McCart­ney ambled into a Stein­way shop in Ham­burg, Ger­many and saw a Hofn­er bass, oth­er­wise known as the “vio­lin bass.”  McCart­ney lat­er recalled:

Fend­ers even then seemed to be around £100. All I could afford real­ly was about £30. Always tee­ter­ing on the edge of not hav­ing much — so I did­n’t real­ly want to spend that much. So… I found this Hofn­er vio­lin bass. And to me it seemed like, because I was left-hand­ed, it looked less daft because it was sym­met­ri­cal. So I got into that. That became my main bass.

As The Bea­t­les Online notes, “The Hofn­er 500/1 bass became McCart­ney’s sig­na­ture instru­ment,” and was even­tu­al­ly rechris­tened “the Hofn­er Bea­t­le Bass.” 50 years lat­er, they’re still mak­ing the icon­ic gui­tar, and you can watch the whole process unfold in just 16 min­utes. It’s not a very styled video, a far cry from oth­er gui­tar-mak­ing videos we’ve fea­tured here before, but it’s worth the watch.

The Art of Mak­ing a Fla­men­co Gui­tar: 299 Hours of Blood, Sweat & Tears Expe­ri­enced in 3 Min­utes

Mak­ing Fend­er Gui­tars, Then (1959) and Now (2012)

Even a mild inter­est in the cul­ture of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can rock will lead you to learn about the Wood­stock Music & Art Fair, those oft-com­mem­o­rat­ed “three days of peace and music” in August 1969. But roll the clock back two years, turn from the east coast to the west, and you’ll find the tem­plate for that icon­ic “Aquar­i­an Expo­si­tion”: the Mon­terey Inter­na­tion­al Pop Music Fes­ti­val. Held from June 16 to June 18, 1967 in Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Mon­terey Coun­ty Fair­grounds, Mon­terey Pop fea­tured a who’s-who of the com­ing momen­t’s musi­cal pan­theon: Jef­fer­son Air­plane, Janis Joplin, Simon and Gar­funkel, Ravi Shankar (play­ing for an entire after­noon), and the Grate­ful Dead. In the intense­ly era-dis­till­ing clip above, watch a cer­tain Jimi Hen­drix fire off his inim­itable ver­sion of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Not bad at all for what Rusty DeS­o­to called “the first real rock fes­ti­val.”

Mon­terey Pop, orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a rock-legit­imiz­ing com­pan­ion to the exist­ing Mon­terey Jazz and Folk Fes­ti­vals, brought many of its host­ed artists a kind of pop­u­lar­i­ty they’d nev­er had before. Otis Red­ding, just six months before his untime­ly death, enjoyed his first pre­dom­i­nant­ly non-black live audi­ence in Mon­terey — and they, by all accounts, enjoyed him. Colum­bia Records gave Joplin and her band, Big Broth­er and the Hold­ing Com­pa­ny, a con­tract on the strength of their Mon­terey show (right above). A great deal of high-qual­i­ty film and audio tape of these per­for­mances sur­vives, thanks in large part to doc­u­men­tar­i­an D.A. Pen­nebak­er, whose film Mon­terey Pop remains the defin­i­tive record of the fes­ti­val. Watch any of the footage, such as the clip below of a ram­bunc­tious out­fit by the name of The Who, and you’ll under­stand just how force­ful­ly Mon­terey Pop launched these artists into the zeit­geist.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jef­fer­son Air­plane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Cap­tures It (1968)

Wood­stock Revis­it­ed in Three Min­utes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Neil Young’s new album, his first with Crazy Horse in nine years, is a raw, heav­i­ly ampli­fied inter­pre­ta­tion of clas­sic Amer­i­can folk songs of the kind many of us learned in ele­men­tary school, like “She’ll Be Com­ing ‘Round the Moun­tain” and “Oh My Dar­ling, Clemen­tine.”

But while the gui­tar chords may be dis­tort­ed, the lyrics are not. As Young told Ter­ry Gross this week on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he wants lis­ten­ers to hear the words as they were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten. So, for exam­ple, he has restored the scathing protest-song ele­ments of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” And in “Clemen­tine” he sings a verse teach­ers did­n’t want inno­cent lit­tle chil­dren to hear: “How I missed her, how I missed her, how I missed my Clemen­tine. So I kissed her lit­tle sis­ter, and for­got my Clemen­tine.”

One of the best tracks on the new album is a rol­lick­ing ver­sion of “She’ll Be Com­ing ‘Round the Moun­tain.” (See the video above.) In the “Fresh Air” inter­view, Young explains the ori­gin of his arrange­ment:

I heard that song back in 1964, and I was real­ly into the groove and the melody and the fact that it was an old song with a new melody and old lyrics. And then, when I did it in 2012, I start­ed relat­ing more to the lyrics and start­ed doing more research on the lyrics. I actu­al­ly got into what the lyrics were real­ly about more than I was in 1964. I chose a few vers­es that empha­sized a cer­tain dark­ness, but they were all the orig­i­nal vers­es.

Young was first exposed to a few of the songs on Amer­i­cana when he heard Tim Rose and The Thorns play in Cana­da in 1964. He was deeply impressed by Rose’s rock­ing arrange­ment of “Oh, Susan­na” (anoth­er song on the new album). “I saw what he did to ‘Oh, Susan­na,’ and thought, wow, I could do that to a lot of these songs,” Young told Gross. “And that’s a real­ly cool thing to do to them, because it gives them a new life. Plus I have drums in my band, and the Thorns did­n’t have drums, so I knew we could real­ly rock these things.”

You can lis­ten to Young’s inter­view with Ter­ry Gross, which includes more songs from the new album, at the NPR Web site. And you can get your copy of Amer­i­cana right here.

Few bands can boast a per­for­mance so image-defin­ing as the one the Talk­ing Heads pulled off in Jonathan Dem­me’s Stop Mak­ing Sense. Giv­en its phys­i­cal metic­u­lous­ness, its seam­less edit­ing, and its refined aes­thet­ic sense — qual­i­ties rarely pri­or­i­tized in rock con­cert films — its place in the zeit­geist seems well earned. But that pic­ture opened in 1984, when the band had already released its most wide­ly respect­ed albums, and when they had only four years to go before effec­tive­ly dis­solv­ing. Live in Rome, which you can now watch uncut on YouTube, cap­tures the Heads in 1980, a less estab­lished moment in their his­to­ry. David Byrne and com­pa­ny express the same kind of off-kil­ter ener­gy on dis­play in Stop Mak­ing Sense — the enthu­si­asm of punks who also hap­pen to be musi­col­o­gy nerds — but here they express it in a sim­pler, more tra­di­tion­al­ly “rock con­cert-ish” set­ting.

Talk­ing Heads enthu­si­asts, note that Live in Rome fea­tures the group’s full “Afro-Funk Orches­tra” line­up. Addi­tion­al­ly, you’ll see on gui­tar a cer­tain Adri­an Belew, who would begin fronting King Crim­son the fol­low­ing year. (As he might, in anoth­er real­i­ty, have front­ed the Heads them­selves; in our real­i­ty, he turned down an offer to take Byrne’s place.) The songs not heard in Stop Mak­ing Sense include “Stay Hun­gry,” “Cities,” “I Zim­bra,” “Drugs,” “Hous­es in Motion,” “Born Under Punch­es,” and “The Great Curve.” No die-hard fan will feel com­plete­ly sat­is­fied with this con­cert, of course, until some­one remas­ters it on Blu-Ray with a com­plete sur­round sound mix. But if you sim­ply need a hit of a pack of art-school rock­ers unlike any oth­ers Amer­i­ca has pro­duced, this Remain in Light-era hour mer­its a per­ma­nent book­mark. H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

David Byrne Inter­views Him­self, Plays Sev­en Char­ac­ters, in Fun­ny Pro­mo for Stop Mak­ing Sense

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

For most chil­dren the word “play­ing” brings to mind things like wif­fle­ball or hide-and-seek. But for a very few tal­ent­ed and ded­i­cat­ed kids it means Mozart, or Mendelssohn. Today we bring you four videos of famous vio­lin­ists play­ing when they were incred­i­bly young.

Itzhak Perl­man, age 13: “When I came to the Unit­ed States, ” Itzhak Perl­man told Pia Lind­strom of The New York Times in 1996, “I appeared on The Ed Sul­li­van Show as a 13-year-old and I played a Mendelssohn Con­cer­to and it sound­ed like a tal­ent­ed 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a fin­ished prod­uct.” In the clip above, Perl­man plays from the third move­ment of Felix Mendelssohn’s Con­cer­to in E minor dur­ing his debut Sul­li­van Show appear­ance in 1958. The young boy was an instant hit with the audi­ence, and Sul­li­van invit­ed him back. Encour­aged by his sud­den celebri­ty, Perl­man’s par­ents decid­ed to move from Israel to New York and enroll him in Jul­liard. But despite his pre­coc­i­ty, Perl­man mod­est­ly asserts that he was no child prodi­gy. “A child prodi­gy is some­body who can step up to the stage of Carnegie Hall and play with an orches­tra one of the stan­dard vio­lin con­cer­tos with aplomb,” Perl­man told Lind­strom. “I could­n’t do that! I can name you five peo­ple who could do that at the age of 10 or 11, and did. Not five, maybe three. But I could­n’t do that.”

Anne-Sophie Mut­ter, age 13:

One vio­lin­ist who cer­tain­ly was able to per­form at a high lev­el at a very ear­ly age was the Ger­man vir­tu­oso Anne-Sophie Mut­ter, shown here per­form­ing the Médi­ta­tion from the Jules Massenet opera Thaïs with Her­bert von Kara­jan and the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic in 1976, when she was 13. Mut­ter began play­ing the vio­lin at the age of five, and by nine she was per­form­ing Mozart’s Sec­ond Vio­lin Con­cer­to in pub­lic. Kara­jan took her under his wing when she was 13, call­ing her “the great­est musi­cal prodi­gy since the young Menuhin.”

Jascha Heifetz, age 11:

Jascha Heifetz was indis­putably one of the great­est vio­lin­ists of the 20th cen­tu­ry. His father, a music teacher, first put a vio­lin into his hands when Heifetz was only two years old. He entered music school in his home­town of Vil­nius, Lithua­nia, at the age of five, and by sev­en he was per­form­ing in pub­lic. At nine he entered the St. Peters­burg Con­ser­va­to­ry, where he stud­ied with Leopold Auer. In this very rare audio record­ing from Novem­ber 4, 1912, an 11-year-old Heifetz per­forms Auer’s tran­scrip­tion of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart’s Gavotte in G from the opera Idome­neo. It was made by Julius Block on a wax-cylin­der Edi­son phono­graph in Grünewald, Ger­many. Heifetz is accom­pa­nied by Walde­mar Lia­chowsky on piano. At the end of the per­for­mance the young boy’s voice can be heard speak­ing in Ger­man. Rough­ly trans­lat­ed, he says, “I, Jascha Heifetz of Peters­burg, played with Herr Block, Grünewald, Gavotte Mozart-Auer on the fourth of Novem­ber, nine­teen hun­dred and ten.” A week ear­li­er, Heifetz made his debut appear­ance with the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic. In a let­ter of intro­duc­tion to the Ger­man man­ag­er Her­man Fer­now, Auer said of Heifetz: “He is only eleven years old, but I assure you that this lit­tle boy is already a great vio­lin­ist. I mar­vel at his genius, and I expect him to become world-famous and make a great career. In all my fifty years of vio­lin teach­ing, I have nev­er known such pre­coc­i­ty.”

Joshua Bell, age 12:

The Amer­i­can vio­lin­ist Joshua Bell began play­ing when he was four years old, and made his debut as a soloist with the Philadel­phia Orches­tra when he was 14. The video above is dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers, in that it does­n’t present a pol­ished per­for­mance. Instead, we watch as the leg­endary vio­lin teacher Ivan Galami­an con­ducts a les­son in 1980, when Bell was 12. Bell spent two sum­mers study­ing at Galami­an’s Mead­ow­mount School of Music in the Adiron­dack Moun­tains of upstate New York. In the video, the elder­ly teacher works with Bell as he plays from Pierre Rode’s Etude No. 1.