Marvin Lee Aday, aka Meatloaf, died late last week, reportedly after falling ill with Covid. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Guard paid tribute to the musician and his 1993 hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” on Sunday. It’s a nice touch.
One of my favorite quotes about creativity comes from 20th-century electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius: “You don’t get better, you grow.” The aspiration to get “better” implies a category of “best” – a height artists frequently despair of ever reaching. Pastorius rejected a state of perfection, which would mean stopping, going no further, freezing in place. “One can always learn more. One can always understand more. The question is to provide yourself with confidence.” That wisdom comes not from Jaco Pastorius but from 20th century French music teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger, who might not have approved of the libertine jazz phenom’s life, given her aristocratic conservatism, but heartily endorsed his wisdom about continuous creative growth.
Although deeply rooted in a classical tradition which strove for perfection, Boulanger taught, influenced, and championed some of the century’s most avant-garde composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, who broke violently with the past, as well as jazz greats like Quincy Jones, who took her lessons in an entirely different modern pop direction.
Indeed, Boulanger presided over “one of the most expansive periods in music history, particularly for America,” says the narrator of the Inside the Score documentary above, “How Nadia Boulanger Raised a Generation of Composers.” Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Strauss, and even minimalists like Philip Glass… all studied with Boulanger at some point in their career.
Boulanger also took on many female students, like composer Lousie Talma, but she preferred to work with men. (The famously stern teacher once complimented a female student by calling her “Monsieur”). She had little regard for Romantic ideas about “genius,” and certainly not all of her students were as talented as the list of famous names associated with her, but for those with aspirations in the classical world, a visit to Boulanger’s Paris apartment constituted a rite of passage. “Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson led the way in the ’20s,” notes Red Bull Music Academy, “transforming Boulanger’s clear, tart tonal exactness into a new version of hardy Americana.” She became such a stalwart presence in the world of 20th century composition that composer Ned Rorem once joked, “Myth credits every American town with two things: a 10-cent store and a Boulanger student.”
At age 90, in 1977, Boulanger was well known as the most famous music teacher in the world when director Bruno Monsaingeon caught up with her for the nearly hour-long interview above. See the aged but still incredibly sharp (no pun intended) legend still teaching, and struggling to put into words exactly how it is that music keeps us growing past mathematical limitations. “Can one actually define that?” she asks mid-sentence while instructing a student. “I am using words such as tenderness or tension. It’s all wrong. It is what the music itself is.…”
Learn much more about Boulanger’s extraordinary life and work as a music teacher and composer in the documentary Madamoiselle: A Portrait of Nadia Boulanger, further up, and in our previous post at the link below.
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Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Rock critic Lester Bangs described bubblegum pop as “the basic sound of rock ’n’ roll – minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie.” The short-lived genre had its roots in the Please Please Me era of the Beatles’ minus the sex and the sarcasm. But from the Beatles we can trace a pretty solid path to the Archies. Not that we deserved this band as an inevitability, but the cartoon concoction is one of a thousand variants from that infectious strain of post-war pop.
The Archie’s lasting legacy is one single: the bonafide earworm, “Sugar Sugar.” Written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, it was a real number one single (it knocked the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” off the throne in 1969) sung by a completely fake band, namely the cast of Archie Comics, the five or six perpetual teenagers that have been around since 1941.
How we got there, we must go back to the Beatles. Once the Fab Four had started to quickly outgrow their innocent image, King Features turned the four into a Saturday Morning cartoon show in 1965 so their Richard Lester-inspired antics could continue apace. This then led producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider to ask themselves: why use the Beatles when America could manufacture its own? The Monkees were born in 1966: three Americans and one Brit sorta-moptops who starred in a sitcom based around their own hilarious, failed attempts to be as good as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Music Supervisor Don Kirshner came from a career at the Brill Building, launching the careers of Neil Diamond, Carole King, and Tony Orlando, and on the Monkees, he was in charge of seeking out songwriters for the group, along with studio musicians, calling in the band to sing only when necessary. This led to “Last Train to Clarksville” (Boyce and Hart), “Daydream Believer” (John Stewart) and “I’m a Believer” (Diamond), all solid hits. But that dismissiveness of the actors’ own talents led to tensions in the band, especially Michael Nesmith, who had his own country-leaning interests. Upon hearing “Sugar, Sugar” as a possible Monkees song, Nesmith absolutely refused. “It’s a piece of junk,” he told Kirshner. “I’m not doing it.”
Kirshner returned home knowing that the song could be a hit. His son Ricky was reading Archie comic books, and the idea formed-—why not turn the comic into a band, and have them perform the single. (The rights for the Archie characters at that time were very affordable.)
So take a rejected Monkees song, add a bit of Beatles-style, cheapo animation, and a guaranteed promotion machine (television) and “Sugar, Sugar” turned into a hit. Initially reluctant to play a fake band, pop radio started playing the single two months after its initial release, from May to July, and it would go on to spend 22 weeks in the chart, four of them at Number One. It was Billboard’s Number One song of the year for 1969, a year better known for the crumbling of the Summer of Love. Rape, murder, it was just a shot away. But so was that “candy girl” and that “honey, honey” and why wouldn’t people choose the latter?
The Archies released five albums in total, only the first featuring the comic characters on the cover. But they all continued in the bubble gum vein, written by a small stable of songwriters such as Ritchie Adams, Jeff Barry, Robert Levine, Gene Allen, and others. Rob Dante sang the lead vocals; Toni Wine sang both Betty and Veronica (the latter had the higher register).
Unlike the Monkees, who embraced the pop psychedelia in the culture and put out a grand folly of a movie called Head (with Frank Zappa! and Ringo Starr!), the Archies just kept banging out bubblegum until it turned into sunshine (the name of their third album) and the fad had passed. Fifty years later, “Sugar, Sugar,” remains a good pop song. Wilson Pickett even covered it, injecting some much needed soul into the proceedings.
The idea of a fake, cartoon pop group has never gone away. In fact, Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz project (which has been around for some 20 years now!) showed the benefits that can be had when cartoons take over the image and let the musicians work in the background. Can we give the Archies some of the credit? Chew on that, why don’t ya.
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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.
After several years of writing and performing songs influenced by such sources as authors Edward Gorey and Raymond Chandler, filmmaker Tim Burton, and murder ballads in the American folk tradition, Ellia Bisker and Jeffrey Morris, known collectively as Charming Disaster, began casting around for a single, existing narrative that could sustain an album’s worth of original tunes.
An encounter with Lauren Redniss’s graphic novel Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout spurred them to look more deeply at the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and her pioneering discoveries.
The result is Our Lady of Radium, a nine song exploration of Curie’s life and work.
The crowdfunded album, recorded during the pandemic, is so exhaustively researched that the accompanying illustrated booklet includes a bibliography with titles ranging from David I. Harvie’s technically dense Deadly Sunshine: The History and Fatal Legacy of Radium to Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, described by The New York Observer as “a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie.”
A chapter in the The Poisoner’s Handbook introduced Bisker and Morris to the Radium Girls, young workers whose prolonged exposure to radium-based paint in early 20th-century clock factories had horrific consequences.
In La Porte v. United States Radium Corporation (1935) prosecutors detailed the conditions under which the luminous dials of inexpensive watch faces were produced:
Each girl procured a tray containing twenty-four watch dials and the material to be used to paint the numerals upon them so that they would appear luminous. The material was a powder, of about the consistency of cosmetic powder, and consisted of phosphorescent zinc sulphide mixed with radium sulphate…The powder was poured from the vial into a small porcelain crucible, about the size of a thimble. A quantity of gum arabic, as an adhesive, and a thinner of water were then added, and this was stirred with a small glass rod until a paintlike substance resulted. In the course of a working week each girl painted the dials contained on twenty-two to forty-four such trays, depending upon the speed with which she worked, and used a vial of powder for each tray. When the paint-like substance was produced a girl would employ it in painting the figures on a watch dial. There were fourteen numerals, the figure six being omitted. In the painting each girl used a very fine brush of camel’s hair containing about thirty hairs. In order to obtain the fine lines which the work required, a girl would place the bristles in her mouth, and by the action of her tongue and lips bring the bristles to a fine point. The brush was then dipped into the paint, the figures painted upon the dial until more paint was required or until the paint on the brush dried and hardened, when the brush was dipped into a small crucible of water. This water remained in the crucible without change for a day or perhaps two days. The brush would then be repointed in the mouth and dipped into the paint or even repointed in such manner after being dipped into the paint itself, in a continuous process.
The band found themselves haunted by the Radium Girls’ story:
Partly it’s that it seemed like a really good job — it was clean work, it was less physically taxing and paid better than factory or mill jobs, the working environment was nice — and the workers were all young women. They were excited about this sweet gig, and then it betrayed them, poisoning them and cutting their lives short in a horrible way.
There were all these details we learned that we couldn’t stop thinking about. Like the fact that radium gets taken up by bone, which then starts to disintegrate because radium isn’t as hard as calcium. The Radium Girls’ jaw bones were crumbling away, because they (were instructed) to use their lips to point the brushes when painting watch faces with radium-based paint.
The radium they absorbed was irradiating them from inside, from within their own bones.
Radium decays into radon, and it was eventually discovered that the radium girls were exhaling radon gas. They could expose a photographic plate by breathing on it. Those images—the bones and the breath—stuck with us in particular.
Fellow musician, Omer Gal, of the “theatrical freak folk musical menagerie” Cookie Tongue, heightens the sense of dread in his chilling stop-motion animation for Our Lady of Radium’s first music video, above. There’s no question that a tragic fate awaits the crumbling, uncomprehending little worker.
Before their physical symptoms started to manifest, the Radium Girls believed what they had been told — that the radium-based paint they used on the timepieces’ faces and hands posed no threat to their well being.
Compounding the problem, the paint’s glow-in-the-dark properties proved irresistible to high-spirited teens, as the niece of Margaret “Peg” Looney — 17 when she started work at the Illinois Radium Dial Company (now a Superfund Site) — recounted to NPR:
I can remember my family talking about my aunt bringing home the little vials (of radium paint.) They would go into their bedroom with the lights off and paint their fingernails, their eyelids, their lips and then they’d laugh at each other because they glowed in the dark.
Looney died at 24, having suffered from anemia, debilitating hip pain, and the loss of teeth and bits of her jaw. Although her family harbored suspicions as to the cause of her bewildering decline, no attorney would take their case. They later learned that the Illinois Radium Dial Company had arranged for medical tests to be performed on workers, without truthfully advising them of the results.
Eventually, the mounting death toll made the connection between workers’ health and the workplace impossible to ignore. Lawsuits such as La Porte v. United States Radium Corporation led to improved industrial safety regulations and other labor reforms.
Too late, Charming Disaster notes, for the Radium Girls themselves:
(Our song) Radium Girls is dedicated to the young women who were unwittingly poisoned by their work and who were ignored and maligned in seeking justice. Their plight led to laws and safeguards that eventually became the occupational safety protections we have today. Of course that is still a battle that’s being fought, but it started with them. We wanted to pay tribute to these young women, honor their memory, and give them a voice.
Preorder Charming Disaster’s Our Lady of Radium here.
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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash recorded his famous live concerts within the walls of Folsom State Prison, California, a week into what would be one of his busiest years of touring. While Columbia Records worked on trimming down the two sets into one LP, Cash set off across the States, into Canada and back, playing almost every night, and returning to the West Coast for a final stop at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco.
Recording the gig that night was Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s engineer and also the man responsible for creating the purest LSD on the West Coast. As Rolling Stone once asked, would there have been a Summer of Love if not for Stanley? Apparently, Stanley had *another* secret stash, and we are only now hearing a tiny fraction of it. This gig is one of over 1,300 the engineer recorded and kept in his private collection. Stanley died in 2011, and ten years later the Oswald Stanley Foundation is selectively releasing recordings from this treasure trove as a way to preserve the recordings and fund more releases. This Cash set was one of the first releases in the “Bear’s Sonic Journals” series, released in October of 2021.
Cash’s new bride June Carter Cash joined him onstage. It was on the Ontario stop of the aforementioned tour that Cash proposed to her live on stage, and they were married March 1 in Kentucky. You can hear his pride as he introduces her to the audience; the two immediately launch into “Jackson.” “We got married in a fever,” indeed. (The two remained married until her death in 2003.) June sings several numbers, including “Wabash Cannonball,” and Carl Perkins’ “Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man.”
The other artist figuring prominently in these recordings (as an influence) is Bob Dylan. The two had been circling each other in admiration for years, and here Cash covers “One Too Many Mornings” and then “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” The man owns it, turns it into what sounds like a Tennessee Three original. Dylan and Cash would finally record together in 1969, in sessions that would be bootlegged until a recent official release.
Stanley recorded these sets for himself, coming straight out of the soundboard. Where the Carousel Ballroom concert lacks in quality—-vocals, audience, and Cash’s guitar are on the left, the band to the right—-they make up for in history and excitement.
Currently, the label has released full concerts from Tim Buckley, Ali Akbar Khan, with Indranil Bhattacharya and Zakir Hussain, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, New Riders of The Purple Sage, Jorma Kaukonen & Jack Casady, The Allman Brothers Band, and Doc and Merle Watson. As Stanley recorded for two decades of his career, the catalog promises untold delights.
The full playlist from the Carousel Ballroom gig is below:
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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.
I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me. – Bob Dylan, 1997 Newsweek interview
A too-cool-for-school rock star emerged from seemingly nowhere when Bob Dylan went electric at Newport with his touring band, the Band — a Dylan unrecognizable to the earnest folkies who followed Bob Dylan the Greenwich Village troubadour and protest singer. Where did the real Dylan go — the Dylan every singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar tried to become, until the coffee shop scene sagged with thousands of Dylan-wannabees? Dont Look Back, warned D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary on Dylan in his mid-sixties heyday.
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you,” said Satchel Paige, giving Pennebaker his title and Dylan a career outlook. Those who stay stuck in the past — even the very recent past — would never get it, like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a song critic Andy Gill described as “a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited.” Those who looked for answers found them blowing in the wind, even when they went straight to the source.
Just above, see the only fully televised press conference Dylan ever gave, for KQED, the educational TV station in San Francisco. In attendance were members of the local and national press, reporters from several high school papers, Dylan’s entourage, and famous friends like Allen Ginsberg and promoter Bill Graham. It’s as much a performance as the next night’s show at the Berkeley Community Theater would be. “The questions,” notes Jonathan Cott, editor of The Essential Interviews, “ranged from standard straight press and TV reporters’ questions to teenage fan club questions to in-group personal queries and put ons, to questions by those who really had listened to Dylan’s songs.”
Dylan’s demeanor during the interview was perfectly captured by Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated performance of a character named “Jude Quinn” in Todd Haynes’ 2007 art-house biopic, I’m Not There. In scenes inspired by the KQED press conference, Blanchett-as-Quinn toys with the press, just as Dylan threw labels like “folk rock” back at them and refused to get drawn into discussions of philosophy or politics. “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know,” he says in mock self-effacement, his gaze impenetrable behind Ray-Bans and clouds of cigarette smoke.
Dylan liked I’m Not There, a film that tells his story through six fictional characters, played by six different actors. (“Do you think that the director was worried that people would understand it or not?” he said. “I don’t think he cared one bit.”) Unlike “Jude Quinn,” his post-folk manifestation in the mid-sixties did not burn out and die in a motorcycle accident, and he didn’t sneer at every question, though he did say he wrote “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a “response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while.… I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right?”
But precisely what we do not find in Dylan’s music is biography. He keeps his interviewers (including Ginsberg, at 33:00 and Graham, at 25:31 ) guessing, often grasping after a soundbite that will sum up the new sound and image. Perhaps the most truthful one he gives them comes in response to the question, “What are you thinking about right now?” Dylan stares down at his cigarette, and the now-Nobel-prize-winning singer/songwriter says, “I’m thinking about this ash… the ash is creeping up on me somewhere — I’ve lost — lost touch with myself so I can’t tell where exactly it is.”
Read a full transcript of the press conference here.
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Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Claude Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55: still quite young for a composer, and still quite early in the history of sound recording. This means that, a little over a century later, we have a great many recordings of Debussy’s music, but precious few recordings of Debussy’s music played by the man himself. Once he accompanied opera singer Mary Garden in the performance of three mélodies from Ariettes oubliées, his cycle based on the poetry of Paul Verlaine. Those recordings were made in 1904, and sound it. But in his final years, Debussy also preserved his playing with an outwardly more primitive technology that nevertheless sounds much more pleasing today: the piano roll.
Designed to be fed into and automatically reproduced by specially engineered instruments, the piano roll — an early form of the music media we’ve enjoyed over the past few generations — was commercially pioneered by the American company M. Welte & Sons. “It is impossible to attain a greater perfection of reproduction than that of the Welte apparatus,” Debussy once wrote to Edwin Welte, co-inventor of the family company’s Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano.
The fourteen pieces Debussy recorded for Welte include the Symbolist- and Impressionist-inspired “La soirée dans Grenade,” previously featured here on Open Culture, as well as his most beloved and widely heard work, “Clair de lune.”
Immediately recognizable in isolation, the also Verlaine-based “Clair de lune” constitutes one of the four movements of the Suite bergamasque. The entire piece was first published in 1905, but Debussy had actually begun its composition fifteen years before that. The still-frequent use of the third movement in popular culture has, at this point, made it difficult to hear the essential qualities of the piece itself; under such circumstances, who better to bring those qualities out than the composer himself? The video at the top of the post presents a reproduction of “Clair de lune” from the piano roll that Debussy made 109 years ago, the next best thing to having him at the piano. Enthusiasts wonder what Debussy would have written had he lived longer; hearing this, they may also wonder what he would have recorded had he stuck around for the hi-fi age.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 story of Nirvana’s first album, first single, and first video launching the band to instant mega-stardom, and the story of their tragic crash back down to Earth, have been told too many times to count. Less well known are the years of the band’s early ascent through the local Pacific Northwest scene, opening for then-bigger acts like TAD (who got swept up, then left behind in grunge’s first wave). Nirvana first formed in 1987 in Aberdeen, WA and played as a few iterations with names like Fecal Matter and Skid Row, always as a three-piece with Kurt Cobain out front and Krist Novoselic on bass.
As they ironed out their image (avoiding a lawsuit from the Jersey hair metal band), Nirvana also moved through a couple different drummers behind the kit before lucking into Dave Grohl. “Aaron Burckhard was Nirvana’s first drummer,” writes the Museum of Pop Culture, “but he and the band ultimately parted ways. While the band searched for a replacement, Dale Crover helped Nirvana with their first demo and Dave Foster honored their live bookings. Chad Channing officially joined Nirvana in 1988, and the band began work on their debut album Bleach, which was officially released in June of 1989 followed by a short American tour and a lengthy UK tour.” Just above, you can see them open for TAD on December 1, 1989 at Fahrenheit, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.
Signed to Seattle indie label Sub Pop at the time, the band was eager for success but hadn’t quite nailed down their sound. When Nevermind producer Butch Vig heard Bleach the following year, after Sub Pop recruited him to work with the band, he “thought it was pretty one-dimensional,” he writes, “except that one song, ‘About a Girl.’ ” Cobain would only say he wanted the band to sound like “Black Sabbath.” The label’s Jonathan Poneman assured Vig that Nirvana “would be as big as The Beatles,” but that wouldn’t happen until Channing left, or felt pushed out. As Vig remembers, there was considerable “tension between Kurt and Chad” during their first sessions in Madison, Wisconsin in 1990. “Kurt would sometimes go behind the drums and show Chad how to play.” Of course, that’s something the moody Cobain was also known to do to Channing’s replacement.
Musical tension did not result in long-term hard feelings, Channing says. “I found out what a really nice guy Dave is.” For his part, Grohl has pushed for recognition of Channing’s contributions, objecting to his exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. “Grohl took steps to rectify the injustice,” notes Far Out Magazine. “With Channing in attendance, Grohl publicly applauded and thanked Channing for his vital contributions to the band, and more critically, noted that some of Nirvana’s most iconic drum riffs from the period were, in fact, Channing’s.” Hear some of the evidence above in a setlist that includes several tracks from Bleach, including “About a Girl,” and “Polly” from the upcoming Nevermind. And stick around for TAD, forgotten stalwarts of the Seattle scene.
via Boing Boing
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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