“Chevrolet,” a new track on Neil Young’s 42nd studio album World Record, takes you on a long, rambling road trip, covering a lot of different terrain over 15 minutes, with some verses lasting more than two minutes. Above, you can watch Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Nils Lofgren, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina) play the song for the very first time. It’s also the same cut that appears on the album. It’s a pretty remarkable display of musicianship, and a great new Neil Young track.
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(Yes, you are allowed to pick more than one favorite.)
Things were decidedly different when drummer Honey Lantree, the only female member of the 60s British Invasion group the Honeycombs, took up the sticks.
Drums were not her original instrument. Her boyfriend, employer, and eventual bandmate Martin Murray was giving her a guitar lesson when she asked if she could take a whirl at his kit.
Murray recalled his surprise when she started whaling away like a vet:
She was just a born, natural drummer; she hadn’t played before and just went for it. I was aghast, staring at her, and said, “All right, you’re our new drummer.”
Lantree’s gender helped the Honeycombs secure press.
She snagged a celebrity endorsement for Carlton drums and turned 21 with a cake festooned with marzipan bees, and, more importantly, a #1 single, “Have I the Right.”
Of course, her gender also ensured that most of the coverage would focus on her appearance, with scant, if any mention of her musical talent.
Lantree was not the only member of the Honeycombs to find this galling.
As lead singer Denis D’Ell told the Record Mirror in 1965:
How can it be a gimmick just because we have a girl, Honey, on drums? Honey plays with us purely and simply because she is the right drummer for the job. If she wasn’t any good, she wouldn’t hold down the job.
On tour, we don’t have any troubles by having a girl with us. We just operate as a group. Perhaps it is that the novelty has worn off — we hope that fans soon will forget all about this so-called gimmick.
The following year, he quit, along with lead guitarist Alan Ward and Peter Pye, who had replaced Murray on rhythm guitar. Lantree and her brother, Honeycombs’ bassist John, soldiered on with new personnel until the 1967 death of producer Joe Meek.
Still, for a brief period, the Honeycombs’ recordings, tours, television appearances, and yes, press coverage made Lantree the most famous female drummer in the world.
Admittedly, the field was not particularly crowded. Just challenging in ways that outstripped the disproportionate focus on figures, boyfriends, and beauty tips.
Male fans dragged Lantree offstage during a concert in Cornwall, leading her to remark, “You expect this sort of thing but it’s still terrifying.”
Around the same time, another British band, the all-female Liverbirds, were invited to cross the pond for a coveted gig in Las Vegas…provided they’d play it topless. “Can you imagine me on the drums playing topless,” Sylvia Saunders, who shortly thereafter was forced to choose between the drums and a high risk pregnancy, gasped.
Although she is said to have inspired a number of young female musicians, including Karen Carpenter, Lantree, who died in 2018 at the age of 75, rarely shows up on curated lists of notable female drummers.
In a strange way, that spells progress — there are many more female drummers today than there were in the mid 60s, and mercifully more opportunities for them to be taken seriously as musicians.
The B‑52s’ debut single “Rock Lobster” brought the party and a playful sense of the absurd
to New Wave.
The New York Times nailed the band’s appeal as “70s punks molded not from the syringes and leather of New York City, but from the campy detritus you might have found in the thrift stores and garage sales of their home of Athens, Ga.: bright clothes, toy pianos, old issues of Vogue, tall wigs and discarded vinyl:”
They channeled spy soundtracks, exotica, surf music, long-abandoned dance crazes and garage rock …The B‑52s were a sui generis clash of sounds that help bring punk to the suburban kids more likely to watch Saturday Night Live than visit CBGB:Fred Schneider’s sing-shout poetry, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s alien girl-group harmonies, Ricky Wilson’s tricky guitar riffs and Keith Strickland’s art-funky drums. Even demographically they were nothing like the new world of new wave being built by Talking Heads and Devo: 40 percent female, 60 percent Southern, 80 percent queer, 100 percent fun.
Their quirky sense of humor found favor with a wider audience thanks to 1989’s Cosmic Thing, with its irresistible “Love Shack.”
“It’s a fictitious place, but the whole idea is that everyone’s welcome to the party,” Kate Pierson told The Guardian.
“Roam,” Cosmic Thing’s other chart topper offers a similarly bouncy groove, well suited to road trips and other adventures. “We were on the bus,” Pierson explains:
We partied with each other – we had some epic bus parties, and the bus driver created a dance called the Bore Hog. We would do our concert then get on the bus and keep rolling. It was a wild ride though. We were tired of being this underground band – this was a confirmation of something.
Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s isolated “Roam” harmonies, above, strike us as aural confirmation of something else.
Not just Classic Pop’s apt description of the pair’s tight harmonies as a combination of “Appalachian folk music” and “teenage Motown fantasies of hairbrushes for microphones…”
With the instruments removed (and Schneider temporarily benched), “Roam” evinces a haunting quality that supports Cindy Wilson’s assertion that “it’s a beautiful song about death:”
It’s about when your spirit leaves your body and you can just roam.
Wilson, whose brother and bandmate, Ricky, died from AIDS in 1985 at the age of 32, recalled the recording process:
When we started jamming, it felt like Ricky was in the room with us. I was having a really hard time with the grieving and sorrow, but creating this music was such a wonderful thing. Ricky’s spirit was there and it was amazing. We did that music for ourselves, and it really helped me.
Imagine the afterlife as a great after party, where auto-tune hasn’t been invented yet, and the harmonies are truly angelic.
When you think “Jungleland,” you think of Clarence Clemons and his iconic sax solo, which stretches on over two glorious minutes. It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing that solo. But, after Clarence’s death in 2011, the honors went, fittingly, to his nephew Jake, who joined the E Street Band and performed “Jungleland” live in Sweden, on July 28, 2012. It was an emotional performance for all.
Speaking below, Jake Clemons remembers it as “an extremely emotional moment. It felt like the most extreme emotion that I had ever experienced…” He continues: “Up to that show, all of the shows before then, I felt like I was filling in for Clarence… That moment for me was a moment of like, he’s not coming back. Physically he would not be walking on that stage again.”
Later, he told Rolling Stone, the “moment was so significant that we couldn’t soundcheck it. That moment was the first time that the band heard me play that song.” But, from there, it “became a huge part of the healing process.” You can watch the poignant performance above, with the sax solo starting around the 5:10 mark.
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Those who have only casually appreciated Brian Eno’s music may not think of him as a singer. Given that his best-known solo recording Music for Airports not only has no lyrics but contains few recognizable instruments, that perception makes a certain amount of sense. Still, it’s incorrect: in fact, Eno has a great enthusiasm for singing, and indeed he has credited the practice with developing “a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor” — though that last is surely on display in the remark itself.
Though Eno may still be most widely considered a pioneer or popularizer of ambient music, a listen through his discography will reveal how well his singing skills have served him for nearly half a century now. Released just last month, his new album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE marks a return to lyrical songs, a form he hasn’t practiced on an album since 2005’s Another Day on Earth.
As the now-74-year-old Eno says in its press materials, “My voice has changed, it’s lowered, it’s become a different personality I can sing from. I don’t want to sing like a teenager.” And “as for writing songs again — it’s more landscapes, but this time with humans in them.” He’s been describing his music and art this way for quite some time: here on Open Culture, we’ve even featured a 1989 documentary about it called Imaginary Landscapes.
Judging by some of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’s lyrics, not to mention its title, the landscapes he perceives seem to have become fragile; none of them, perhaps, are now especially long for existence. That impression may well be underscored by the three song videos collected in this playlist, “Garden of Stars,”“We Let It In,” and “There Were Bells.” Each has its own style: the first is kaleidoscopic, the second is verbal, and the third is a full-fledged live shoot featuring Eno and his brother-collaborator Roger performing amid the ruins of the Acropolis of Athens. Given Eno’s penchant for concepts novel, expansive, and contradictory, one might call the sensibility of this latest album a kind of optimistic Ozymandianism.
Below you can also watch a playlist of animated tracks (or “visualizers”) for ten songs on the new album.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The first compact discs and players came out in October of 1982. That means the format is now 40 years old, which in turn means that most avid music-listeners have never known a world without it. In fact, all of today’s teenagers — that most musically avid demographic — were born after the CD’s commercial peak in 2002, and to them, no physical medium could be more passé. Vinyl records have been enjoying a long twenty-first-century resurgence as a premium product, and even cassette tapes exude a retro appeal. But how many understand just what a technological marvel the CD was when it made its debut, with (what we remember as) its promise of “perfect sound forever”?
“You could argue that the CD, with its vast data capacity, relatively robust nature, and with the further developments it spurred along, changed how the world did virtually all media.” So says Alec Watson, host of the Youtube channel Technology Connections, previously featured here on Open Culture for his five-part series on RCA’s SelectaVision video disc system.
But he’s also made a six-part miniseries on the considerably more successful compact disc, whose development “solved the central problem of digital sound: needing a for-the-time-absurdly massive amount of raw data.” Back then, computer hard drives had a capacity of about ten megabytes, whereas a single disc could hold up to 700 megabytes.
Figuring out how to encode that much information onto a thin 120-millimeter disc required serious resources and engineering prowess (available thanks to the involvement of two electronics giants, Sony and Philips), but it constituted only one of the technological elements needed for the CD to become a viable format. Watson covers them all in this miniseries, beginning with the invention of digital sound itself (including the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem on which it depends). He also explains such physical processes as how a CD player’s laser reads the “pits” and “lands” on a disc’s surface, producing a stream of numbers subsequently converted back into an audio signal for our listening pleasure.
The CD has also changed our relationship to that pleasure. “If CDs marked a new era, it is perhaps as much in the way they suggest specific ways of interacting with recorded music as in questions of fidelity,” writes The Quietus’ Daryl Worthington. “The fact CDs can be programmed, and tracks easily skipped, is perhaps their most significant feature when it comes to their legacy. They loosened up the album as a fixed document.” Paradoxically, “they’re also the format par excellence for the album as a comprehensive, self-contained unit to be played from start to finish.” Even if you can’t remember when last you put one on, fourteen million of them were sold last year, as against five million vinyl LPs and 200,000 cassettes. At 40, the CD may no longer feel like a miraculous technology, but we can hardly count it out just yet.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When Joni Mitchell heard the great cabaret artist Mabel Mercer in concert, she was so struck by the older woman’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” the enduring ballad Mitchell wrote at the tender age of 23, that she went backstage to show her appreciation:
… but I didn’t tell her that I was the author. So, I said, y’know, I’ve heard various recordings of that song, but you bring something to it, y’know, that other people haven’t been able to do. You know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it.
Well, she took offense. I insulted her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was concerned. So I got out of there in a hell of a hurry!
But I think I finally became an old lady myself and could sing the song right.
This is just one of many candid treats to be found in Mitchell’s interview with Elton John, for his Apple Music 1 show Rocket Hour.
For the most part, Mitchell’s reminiscences coalesce around various iconic tracks from her nearly sixty years in the music industry.
“Carey,” off Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, sparks memories of an exploding stove during a hippie-era sojourn in Matala on Crete’s south coast, with an Odyssey reference thrown in for good measure.
“Amelia” was hatched, as were most of the tunes on 1976’s Hejira, while Mitchell was on a solo road trip in a secondhand Mercedes, an experience that caused her to dwell on the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic solo. (She scribbled down lyrics that had come to her at the wheel whenever she pulled over for lunch.)
Regarding “Sex Kills” from 1994’s Turbulent Indigo, John quotes a Rolling Stone article in which Mitchell discussed the “ugliness” she was detecting in popular music:
I think it’s on the increase. Especially towards women. I’ve never been a feminist, but we haven’t had pop songs up until recently that were so aggressively dangerous to women.
“What did you mean by that?” John asks. “ People saying rap music with ‘my hos’ and stuff like that?”
She may not seem overly fussed about it now, but don’t get her started on what young women wear to the Grammys!
John also invited Mitchell to discuss three songs that have influenced her.
Her picks:
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s “Charleston Alley” (a musical epiphany as a high schooler at a college party)
Edith Piaf’s “Les Trois Cloches” (a musical epiphany as an 8‑year-old at a birthdayparty)
And Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (dancing ‘round the jukebox at Saskatoon swimming pool)
Circling back to “Both Sides Now,” Mitchell prefers the orchestral arrangement she recorded as an alto in 2002 to the original’s girlish soprano, with its possibly unearned perspective. (“It’s not a song for an ingenue…”)
When I performed it, the orchestra gathered around me and I’ve played with classical musicians before and they were always reading the Wall Street Journal behind their sheet music and they always treat you like it’s a condescension to be playing with you, but everybody, the men — Englishmen! — were weeping!
There’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions that crosses our desk a lot at this time of year. It’s the one in which he declares Armistice Day, which coincidentally falls on his birthday, sacred:
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
Here, here!
Hopefully Shakespeare won’t take umbrage if we skip over his doomed teenaged lovers to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s 11/11 Centennial with songs inspired by his work.
The driving force behind the KTE Tim Langsford, a drummer who mentors Autistic students at the University of Plymouth, was looking for ways to help his “foggy mind remember the key concepts, characters, and memorable lines that occur in each” of Vonnegut’s 14 books.
The solution? Community and accountability to an ongoing assignment. Langsford launched the Plymouth Vonnegut Collective in 2019 with a typewritten manifesto, inviting interested parties to read (or re-read) the novels in publication order, then gather for monthly discussions.
His loftier goal was for book club members to work collaboratively on a 14-track concept album informed by their reading.
They stuck to it, with efforts spanning a variety of genres.
The psychedelic God Bless You, Mister Rosewatermixes quotes from the book with edited clips of the collective’s discussion of the novel.
The project pushed Langsford out from behind the drum kit, as well as his comfort zone:
It has taken an awful lot to be comfortable with the songs on which I sing. However, I have tried to invoke KV’s sense of creation as if no one is watching. It doesn’t matter so do it for yourself…. Although do I contradict that by sharing these things to the internet rather than trashing them unseen or unheard?!
Ah, but isn’t one of the most beautiful uses of the Internet as a tool for finding out what we have in common with our fellow humans?
Congratulations to our fellow Vonnegut fans in Plymouth, who will be celebrating their achievement and the legendary author’s 100th birthday with an event featuring poetry, art, music and film inspired by the birthday boy’s novels.
Folk rocker Al Stewart is another who “was drawn by the Sirens of Titan.” The lyrics make perfect sense if the novel is fresh in your mind:
The band gave the author a writing credit. He repaid the compliment with a fan letter:
I was at my daughter’s house last night, and the radio was on. By God if the DJ didn’t play our song, and say it was number ten in New York, and say how good you guys are in general. You can imagine the pleasure that gave me. Luck has played an enormous part in my life. Those who know pop music keep telling me how lucky I am to be tied in with you. And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn’t I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that’s really worth a damn. I envy you guys.
If that isn’t nice, we don’t know what is.
Vonnegut’s best known work, the time-traveling, perennially banned anti-war novel,Slaughterhouse-Five, presents an irresistible songwriting challenge, judging from the number of tunes that have sprouted from its fertile soil.
She titled her recent EP of five Vonnegut-inspired songs, Everything is Sateen, a nod to the Sateen Dura-Luxe house paint Vonnegut’s abstract expressionist, Rabo Karabekian, favors in Bluebeard.
We’re fairly confident that Hwang’s No Answer, offered above as a thank you to crowdfunders of a recent tour, will be the bounciest adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five you’ll hear all day.
Keep listening.
Sweet Soubrette, aka Ellia Bisker, another Bushwick Book Club fixture and one half of the goth-folk duo Charming Disaster, leaned into the horrors of Dresden for her Slaughterhouse-Five contribution, namechecking rubble, barbed wire, and the “mustard gas and roses” breath born of a night’s heavy drinking.
Songwriting musicologist Gail Sparlin’s My Blue Heaven: The Love Song of Montana Wildhack — seen here in a library performance — is as girlish and sweet as Valerie Perrine’s take on the character in George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Back in 1988, Hawkwind’s The War I Survived suffused Slaughterhouse-Five with some very New Wave synths…
The chorus of Sam Ford’s wistful So It Goes taps into the novel’s time traveling aspect, and touches on the challenges many soldiers experience when attempting to reintegrate into their pre-combat lives :
That ain’t the way home
Who says I wanna go home? I’m always home I’m always home.
Having invoked Vonnegut’s evergreen phrase, there’s no getting away without mentioning Nick Lowe’s 1976 power pop hit, though it may make for a tenuous connection.
Hi ho!
Still, tenuous connections can count as connections, especially when you tally up all the references to Cat’s Cradle’s secret government weapon, Ice Nine, in lyrics and band names.
Then there are the submerged references. We may not pick up on them, but we’re willing to believe they’re there.
Pearl Jam’s front man Eddie Vedder wrote that “books like Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Player Piano…they’ve had as much influence on me as any record I’ve ever owned.”
A memorable Breakfast of Champions illustration is said to have lit a flame with New Order, propelling Vonnegut out onto the dance floor.
And Ringo Starr edged his way to favorite Beatle status when he tipped his hat to Breakfast of Champions, dedicating his 1973 solo album to “Kilgore Trout and all the beavers.”
There are dozens more we could mention — you’ll find some of them in the playlist below — but without further ado, let’s welcome to the stage Special K and His Crew!
Yes, that’s Phish drummer (and major Vonnegut fan) Jon Fishman on vacuum.
But who’s that mystery front man, spitting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?
Happy 100th, Kurt Vonnegut! We’re glad you were born.
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