In Toron­to, 7,000 singers par­tic­i­pat­ed in Choir Choir Choir’s trib­ute to Ozzy Osbourne, all tak­ing part in a giant sing-along of “Para­noid.”  The first sin­gle on Black Sab­bath’s sec­ond album (1970), “Para­noid” reached #4 in the UK mar­ket and put Sab­bath on the map. The song also became an ear­ly heavy met­al clas­sic. Watch Sab­bath per­form the song live in 1970 here; or watch them per­form it for the very last time on July 5, 2025 here. Then enjoy the Choir Choir Choir trib­ute above.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Free Doc­u­men­tary on the Heavy Met­al Pio­neer (RIP)

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Kids Orches­tra Plays Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Zeppelin’s “Kash­mir”

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

In 1942, John Cage com­posed a short piece of music adapt­ed from the text of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Titled “The Won­der­ful Wid­ow of Eigh­teen Springs,” the piece was orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned and per­formed by ama­teur sopra­no and socialite Jus­tine Fair­bank, and while we don’t have a record­ing of her per­for­mance, we do have Cage’s sheet music (see first page above, or view the entire book here). It is—as one might expect—an unusu­al piece. It sounds like song, yet isn’t. As the Library of Con­gress descrip­tion of the piece has it:

This essen­tial­ly rhyth­mic speech set against a pat­terned per­cus­sive accom­pa­ni­ment can­not be con­sid­ered a song in the usu­al sense. Cage, how­ev­er, is such an inno­va­tor that one often los­es sight of the fact that if one does not expect con­ven­tion­al sounds, his music is often very well con­struct­ed. Here, for exam­ple, the com­pos­er weaves a hyp­not­i­cal­ly com­pelling pat­tern of rhyth­mic ten­sion and relax­ation, akin to cer­tain non-West­ern music, which is very appro­pri­ate for Joyce’s moody prose.

Cage’s own instruc­tions “for the singer” state: “sing with­out vibra­to, as in folk-singing. Make any trans­po­si­tion nec­es­sary in order to employ a low and com­fort­able range.”

This flex­i­ble arrange­ment allows any­one to pick up the piece, and so we have, direct­ly below, an unlike­ly inter­preter of Cage’s exper­i­men­tal art, the late Ramones singer Joey Ramone. Ramone’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the piece is enthralling sim­ply as a piece of record­ed music.  But it’s also a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, rep­re­sent­ing a con­flu­ence of the fore­most fig­ures in ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music, and late cen­tu­ry punk rock.

The record­ing comes from a whole album of Cage inter­pre­ta­tions by New York punk and new- and no-wave art-rock­ers, includ­ing David Byrne, Arto Lind­say, John Zorn, Deb­bie Har­ry, and Lou Reed. The album, enti­tled Caged/Uncaged—A Rock/Experimental Homage to John Cage, was record­ed in Italy in 1993 and pro­duced by John Cale. You can lis­ten to tracks at Ubuweb.

It’s more than just a trib­ute record; it’s a seri­ous engage­ment with the music of a com­pos­er whose work—like the flu­id prose-poet­ry of Finnegans Wake—seems infi­nite­ly mal­leable and adapt­able to the present. Forty years after com­pos­ing the song Joey Ramone per­forms, Cage said, “we live, in a very deep sense, in the time of Finnegans Wake.” Per­haps we still live in the time of Joyce, and also of John Cage.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Hear a Read­ing of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Set to Music: Fea­tures 100+ Musi­cians and Read­ers from Across the World

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Man­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Between 1985 and 1988, a teenag­er by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attend­ing punk and post-punk shows around the Wash­ing­ton, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video cam­era he’d bring to the show and let roll, doc­u­ment­ing entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glo­ry. Just a kid try­ing to doc­u­ment a great night out. Habibion might not have known at the time what an impor­tant time cap­sule he was cre­at­ing, but these 60 or so tapes have now been dig­i­tized and uploaded to YouTube, thanks to Roswell Films and the DC Pub­lic Library’s Punk Archive.

“Please keep in mind that I was a teenag­er when I shot these shows,” Habibion writes, “and had zero pro­fi­cien­cy with the equip­ment. And, as you might imag­ine, nobody was doing any­thing with the lights or the sound to make things any bet­ter. What you get here is what was record­ed on my Beta­max and prob­a­bly best appre­ci­at­ed with a bit of gen­eros­i­ty as a view­er.”

High­lights include the above full con­cert by Fugazi on Decem­ber 28, 1987, a year before their first e.p. and play­ing songs that would turn up on their 1990’s clas­sic debut Repeater; Descen­dents in 1987 at the height of their career; The Lemon­heads when they were a punk band and not a pow­er pop group; the insane and hilar­i­ous GWAR from 1988, the year of their debut; and anoth­er home­town punk band, Dain Bra­m­age, which fea­tured Dave Grohl on drums, long before he played with Nir­vana and the Foo Fight­ers (see below).

Habibion went on to his own musi­cal career: first as the front­man for post-hard­core band Edsel, and cur­rent­ly as part of the band SAVAK.

Habibion’s tape archive makes one won­der: who else is out there sit­ting on a trove of his­toric record­ings? And where is that person’s equiv­a­lent of the DC Library? Who would help fund such a project? And who would see the worth of such record­ings? Not only are Habibion’s tapes about the bands them­selves, but they tell a sep­a­rate his­to­ry of music venues come and gone, of a time and place that will nev­er come again. Watch the shows here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

A Short His­to­ry of How Punk Became Punk: From Late 50s Rock­a­bil­ly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pis­tols

DC’s Leg­endary Punk Label Dischord Records Makes Its Entire Music Cat­a­log Free to Stream Online

Hen­ry Rollins Tells Young Peo­ple to Avoid Resent­ment and to Pur­sue Suc­cess with a “Monas­tic Obses­sion”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Joan Baez was already her­ald­ed as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zim­mer­man aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the bur­geon­ing folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his tele­vi­sion set long before he met her. He was smit­ten. He would write much lat­er in Chron­i­cles, Vol. 1, that she had “A voice that drove out bad spir­its… she sang in a voice straight to God… Noth­ing she did didn’t work.”

And for a cou­ple of years they became col­lab­o­ra­tors, part­ners, lovers, and folk roy­al­ty. It was Baez who intro­duced a then-unknown Dylan to the crowds at the 1963 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. But soon, for­tunes changed: Dylan became an unstop­pable cul­tur­al force and Baez would be on the receiv­ing end of sev­er­al betray­als, artis­tic and oth­er­wise.

An excerpt from an Earl Scrug­gs doc­u­men­tary, the cute video above, shot by David Hoff­man and post­ed on his YouTube chan­nel, shows Baez imi­tat­ing Dylan after she sings a verse of “It Ain’t Me Babe”. (She does this while hold­ing her baby and try­ing to get it to drink from a pitch­er, too.) A 16-year-old Ricky Skaggs—not look­ing any­thing like a teenager—accompanies her on gui­tar.

For one thing she does a crackin’ good Dylan impres­sion. The oth­er is watch­ing the emo­tion behind that impression—there’s a lot of his­to­ry there, a bit of sad­ness, a bit of nos­tal­gia, noth­ing bit­ter or mean, but evi­dence of a shared life togeth­er that once exist­ed.

By this time in 1972, Dylan’s voice had matured. The croon­er on Nashville Sky­line was a dif­fer­ent per­son from the man on Blonde on Blonde, all those rough cor­ners sand­ed off and the reg­is­ter deep­ened. Yet when any­one imi­tates Dylan, they head on back to those mid-‘60s albums, the “bray­ing beat­nik” as writer Rob Jones calls him. (Jones posits that Dylan has had eight par­tic­u­lar voic­es dur­ing his career.)

Remem­ber, as Slate’s Carl Wil­son points out, when Dylan first start­ed out, he was com­mend­ed for his voice, and was con­sid­ered  “one of the most com­pelling white blues singers ever record­ed,” by Robert Shel­ton, who wrote the copy on the back cov­er of Dylan’s 1962 debut album. He came from a tra­di­tion of both Woody Guthrie and Howl­in’ Wolf, and sev­er­al oth­er idio­syn­crat­ic singers who didn’t sound like Frank Sina­tra. (Although Dylan’s last few projects have been cov­ers from the Great Amer­i­can Song­book.)

Dylan him­self, in a 2015 award accep­tance speech, turned his ire towards crit­ics of his voice:

Crit­ics have been giv­ing me a hard time since Day One. Crit­ics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t crit­ics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Crit­ics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. [Why] don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get spe­cial treat­ment? Crit­ics say I can’t car­ry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Real­ly? I’ve nev­er heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free? … Slur my words, got no dic­tion. Have you peo­ple ever lis­tened to Charley Pat­ton or Robert John­son, Mud­dy Waters? … “Why me, Lord?” I would say that to myself.

Fast for­ward to the present and Dylan’s voice shows the wear of years of per­form­ing and years of indul­gence. It’s grav­el­ly and phleg­mat­ic, smoky and whiskey-soaked, but Wil­son points out: “Even the rasp and burr of his late voice, sev­er­al keen lis­ten­ers have noticed, is very much like a more gen­uine copy of the old-blues­man tim­bre he pre­ten­tious­ly affect­ed as a young man. It’s almost like this is what he’s been aim­ing toward.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­pare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Com­plete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Con­cert

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

17-Year-Old Joan Baez Per­forms at Famous “Club 47” in Cam­bridge, MA (1958)

Bob Dylan’s Famous Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.