He looks like Bob Dylan. He sings like our birthday boy Bob Dylan. And yet he’s covering perhaps the cheesiest 80s sitcom theme song ever made — which makes it all the more hilarious…
Peter Sellers Performs The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night” in Shakespearean Voice
Back in 1964, Peter Sellers (aka Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther films) made a cameo appearance on “The Music of Lennon and McCartney,” a television program produced at the height of Beatlemania. The schtick? To read the lyrics of A Hard Day’s Night in a way that comically recalls Laurence Olivier’s 1955 performance of the opening soliloquy from Richard III. It starts famously “Now is the winter of our discontent …” (See full text here.)
On a very related note, don’t miss:
Peter Sellers Reads The Beatles’ “She Loves You” in Four Voices
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For Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday, Footage From His Earliest NYC Days
Rock star, folk singer, poet, and national treasure Bob Dylan turns 70 today, and just in case you haven’t made plans to mark the occasion, we’ve got a few options for you: If you’d like some company, you can check out this Google map of all the septuagenarian celebrations worldwide to see if there will be one in your hometown. Or you can re-read Joe Queenan’s brilliantly incorrect assessment of the rebel at 50 in Spy Magazine. And if you’re feeling solitary and reflective, there’s always Chronicles Vol. 1 and DylanRadio by candlelight.
We chose to go with the lovely “Guess I’m Doing Fine” from the singer’s earliest days in New York City (now available on “The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964,” the latest installment of The Bootleg Series. Watch the trailer here). The 20-year old’s voice sounds a bit thin and plaintive, and the lament perhaps undercut by the many miles of road he hasn’t yet travelled, especially when he moans:
No, I ain’t got my childhood
Or friends I once did know.
But I still got my voice left,
I can take it anywhere I go.
But don’t be too hard on young Bobby Zimmerman… He was a whole lot older then, and he’s younger than that now.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
3 Dreams of Black: A Mind-blowing Interactive Music Video
So this is definitely not your grandma’s MTV. The clip we’ve posted above explains the making of “3 Degrees of Black,” an interactive video made for your browser, which was the product of a collaboration between the multi-hyphenated artist/filmmaker Chris Milk and a group of 20-something geniuses at Planet Google. But before you delve into the (admittedly fascinating) backstory, be sure to experience the video for yourself and move your mouse around a bit.
“Three Dreams of Black” is a song from the new album “Rome,” itself a collaboration between American producer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniel Luppi, featuring Jack White and Norah Jones. The song is a perfect choice for a trippy, multi-faceted project like this, which combines video, 2D and 3D graphics, and the user herself. And yes, we know the whole “experiment” is basically just an advertisement for Google Chrome, but after spending some time in their dreamscape, we’re cool with that.
via Metafilter
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
The National Jukebox: Play 10,000 Songs Released Between 1901 and 1925
The National Jukebox, the new digital musical player of the Library of Congress, features more than 10,000 songs released by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925 (with the promise of more to come). You can build your own playlist from the many genres of music available, which include some extremely rare recordings from different genres including 0pera, blues, yodeling, jazz, and much, much more.
We also love the disclaimer on the website’s front page: WARNING: Historical recordings may contain offensive language. It’s quite easy to see why the warning is necessary, especially after some time spent listening to the comedy section.
If you want to see a Victor Talking Machine in action, you can watch one getting demoed here.
via @kirstinbutler
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
A Paul Simon Feelin’-Very-Groovy Moment
Playing in Toronto last week, Paul Simon did something, well, awesome. A fan asks him to play “Duncan,” his 1972 classic, and lets him know that she learned to play guitar to that song. So Simon agrees. And, even better, he invites her on stage to take over guitar and vocals. Nervous, almost hyperventilating, she hesitantly gets going, as does the crowd. From there, a big feelin’ groovy moment unfolds, and it just gets better as it goes along. Kudos to NPR’s All Songs Considered for making this great find …
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Bob Dylan Answers China Charges
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary anthems. In short, she declared, Dylan went to China and sold out his 60s soul:
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a‑Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Now, in a note to fans, Dylan took the rare step of responding to these (and other) accusations in a short letter published yesterday. He writes:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
I’m guessing this response will only partly satisfy Dowd. Perhaps Dylan didn’t change his set to please the apparatchiks. But did he miss an opportunity to make the right statement? Just maybe. But no matter, we’re putting this behind us and getting ready for Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24. We still love him, warts and all…
Keith Richards Interviewed at The New York Public Library
For a certain kind of person (that means you, Dan C.), a straight hour of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards expounding on the rock n’ roll life is about as close to heaven as one can get without magically transforming into Richards’ favorite guitar. Here is the 66-year old legend being interviewed at the New York Public Library, following the publication of his critically-acclaimed memoir Life, which no less severe a judge than Michiko Kakutani called “electrifying.”
In the interview (see the remaining parts here, here and here) Richards comes off as witty, articulate, and especially eloquent when speaking about his passion for American blues, but one of the most charming early moments comes thanks to his interlocutor, Anthony DeCurtis. DeCurtis is something of a rock star in his own field, but he fights a losing battle with his natural fandom for the first 15 minutes of the conversation, then finally starts to implode at about the 22:2o mark. His mini-meltdown is immediately followed by Richards’ hilarious riff on the Stones’ early Beatles-envy, and it all just gets better from there, culminating in the expected wild applause at the end of the hour.
A footnote: Richards’ collaborator on Life is the respected British journalist named James Fox. Fox spent five years working with the guitarist, or rather, chasing him from continent to continent, recording hundreds of hours of their conversations, and then shaping those hours into a book that is not merely coherent or interesting but genuinely literary. He deserves a round of applause as well.
Related Content:
Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards
John Lennon and The Rolling Stones Sing Buddy Holly
Patti Smith at the New York Public Library
via NYPL
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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