“The peo­ple who are try­ing to make this world worse aren’t tak­ing a day off. How can I?,” said Bob Mar­ley after a 1976 assas­si­na­tion attempt at his home in Jamaica in which Mar­ley, his wife Rita, man­ag­er Don Tay­lor, and employ­ee Louis Grif­fiths were all shot and, incred­i­bly, all sur­vived. Which peo­ple, exact­ly, did he mean? Was it Edward Seaga’s Jamaican Labour Par­ty, whose hired gun­men sup­pos­ed­ly car­ried out the attack? Was it, as some even con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ly alleged, Michael Man­ley’s People’s Nation­al Par­ty, attempt­ing to turn Mar­ley into a mar­tyr?

Mar­ley had, despite his efforts to the con­trary, been close­ly iden­ti­fied with the PNP, and his per­for­mance at the Smile Jamaica Con­cert, sched­uled for two days lat­er, was wide­ly seen as an endorse­ment of Manley’s pol­i­tics. When he made his now-famous­ly defi­ant state­ment from Island Records’ chief Chris Blackwell’s heav­i­ly guard­ed home, he had just decid­ed to play the concert–this despite the con­tin­ued risk of being gunned down in front of 80,000 peo­ple by the still-at-large killers, or some­one else paid by the CIA, whom Tay­lor and Mar­ley biog­ra­ph­er Tim­o­thy White claim were ulti­mate­ly behind the attack.

Mar­ley doesn’t just show up at the con­cert, he “gives the per­for­mance of his life­time,” notes a brief his­to­ry of the event, and “clos­es the show by lift­ing his shirt, expos­ing his ban­daged bul­let wounds to the crowd.” Erro­neous­ly report­ed dead in the press after the shoot­ing, Mar­ley emerged Lazarus-like, a Rasta­far­i­an folk-hero. Then he left Jamaica to make his career state­ment, Exo­dus, in Lon­don — as much a fusion of his right­eous polit­i­cal fury, reli­gious devo­tion, erot­ic cel­e­bra­tion, and peace, love & uni­ty vibes as it is a fusion of blues, rock, soul, funk, and even punk.

It’s a very dif­fer­ent album than what had come before in 1976’s Ras­ta­man Vibra­tions, which was an album of “hard, direct pol­i­tics” and right­eous, “macho” anger, wrote Vivien Gold­man, “with sur­pris­ing specifics like ‘Ras­ta don’t work for no C.I.A.’” The apoth­e­o­sis that was 1977’s Exo­dus begins, how­ev­er, not with Mar­ley’s pre­vi­ous album but with the Smile Jamaica con­cert. What was meant to be a brief, one-song, non-aligned appear­ance became after the shoot­ing “a tran­scen­den­tal 90-minute set for a coun­try being torn apart by inter­nal strife and exter­nal med­dling,” says Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video his­to­ry at the top. “It was the last show Bob Mar­ley would play in Jamaica for more than a year.”

See the full Smile Jamaica con­cert above and learn in the Poly­phon­ic video how “six months to the day” lat­er, on June 3, 1977, Mar­ley left on his own exo­dus and came to record and release what Time mag­a­zine named the “album of the cen­tu­ry” — the record that would “trans­form him from a nation­al icon to a glob­al prophet.” On Exo­dus, he achieves a syn­the­sis of glob­al sounds in a defin­ing cre­ative state­ment of his major themes. Mar­ley was “real­ly try­ing to give the African Dias­po­ra a sense of its strength and… uni­ty,” Gold­man told NPR on the album’s 30th anniver­sary, while at the same time, “real­ly embrac­ing, you know, white peo­ple, to an extent; doing his best to make a mul­ti­cul­tur­al world work.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bob Marley’s Redemp­tion Song Final­ly Gets an Offi­cial Video: Watch the Ani­mat­ed Video Made Up of 2747 Draw­ings

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

30 Fans Joy­ous­ly Sing the Entire­ty of Bob Marley’s Leg­end Album in Uni­son

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How many songs did Pat­tie Boyd — fash­ion mod­el, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, muse, and wife of George Har­ri­son and Eric Clap­ton — inspire? It’s hard to say, since some of the lyrics pur­port­ed­ly writ­ten for her, like those in Harrison’s break­out “Some­thing,” may have been for some­one else, then diplo­mat­i­cal­ly attrib­uted to Boyd. Or, in the case of “Some­thing” — the first Har­ri­son song to come out as a Bea­t­les A‑side sin­gle and the song that con­vinced the world of his for­mi­da­ble song­writ­ing tal­ents — they might have been about a big, blue super­nat­ur­al some­thing.

Accord­ing to Joe Taysom at Far Out mag­a­zine, Har­ri­son “became obses­sive in his stud­ies of Krish­na Con­scious­ness when he wrote the song, and more specif­i­cal­ly, its orig­i­nal intent was as a devo­tion to Lord Krish­na.” Har­ri­son “insist­ed that the orig­i­nal lyric was ‘some­thing in the way HE moves,’ but he changed it.”

The mas­cu­line pro­noun would have removed all spec­u­la­tion about Boyd but also would have con­fused lis­ten­ers in oth­er ways. In any case, Some­thing’s ambi­gu­i­ty, inher­ent in the title, made it a clas­sic. Frank Sina­tra once called it “the great­est love song ever writ­ten.”

Har­ri­son, as usu­al, demurred: “The words are noth­ing real­ly,” he said in 1969. “There are lots of songs like that in my head. I must get them down.” The song first came togeth­er dur­ing the 1968 White Album ses­sions. “There was a peri­od dur­ing that album,” he remem­bered, “when we were all in dif­fer­ent stu­dios doing dif­fer­ent things try­ing to get it fin­ished, and I used to take some time out. So I went into an emp­ty stu­dio and wrote ‘Some­thing.’” Lack­ing con­fi­dence in his abil­i­ty to per­suade the band to record it, he first tried to give the song to Apple Records artist and old Liv­er­pool friend Jack­ie Lomax. The song, he felt, came too eas­i­ly and might not be good enough, and he had lift­ed the open­ing line direct­ly from James Tay­lor.

Lomax went with anoth­er Har­ri­son tune for his first sin­gle, and the Bea­t­le con­tin­ued to work on “Some­thing,” record­ing a demo of the fin­ished song in Feb­ru­ary of 1969. But he still didn’t think of it as Bea­t­les-wor­thy and gave it to Joe Cock­er instead, who released his ver­sion that year, with Har­ri­son on gui­tar. (Har­ri­son lat­er claimed to have writ­ten the song with Ray Charles in mind.) What­ev­er his reser­va­tions, he did, of course, final­ly record “Some­thing” with his band­mates, with results famil­iar to all and every­one. But you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard the song as you can hear it here, with iso­lat­ed vocal har­monies “you can’t put a cig­a­rette-paper between,” writes Julian Dut­ton on Twit­ter. “Total­ly in sim­pati­co; a syn­er­gy that began I sup­pose all those years ago on the school bus.”

At the top, hear the mul­ti­track vocals that made the Bea­t­les’ “Some­thing” such an incred­i­ble record­ing (includ­ing a fun, yelp­ing sing-along to the gui­tar solo at around 1:50). Fur­ther up, hear the whole song decon­struct­ed into its parts (with time­stamps for each one at the video’s YouTube page.) And just above, hear the band fig­ure out the har­monies in a stu­dio demo of the song. It was, John Lennon con­ced­ed after Abbey Road came out, “about the best track on the album, actu­al­ly.” Paul McCart­ney said of the Har­ri­son clas­sic that “it’s the best he’s writ­ten.” And Bob Dylan lat­er remarked that “if George had had his own group and was writ­ing his own songs back then, he’d have been prob­a­bly just as big as any­body,” a the­sis Har­ri­son got to prove the fol­low­ing year with his sur­pris­ing­ly amaz­ing All Things Must Pass.

via Julian Dut­ton

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Every Place Ref­er­enced in The Bea­t­les’ Lyrics: In 12 Min­utes, Trav­el 25,000 Miles Across Eng­land, France, Rus­sia, India & the US

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When a 17-year-old Mar­i­anne Faith­full fin­ished the final take of her 1965 hit “As Tears Go By” — penned by a young duo of Mick Jag­ger and Kei­th Richards as one of their first orig­i­nal songs — Rolling Stones man­ag­er Andrew Loog Old­ham “came and gave me a big hug,” she recalled “‘Con­grat­u­la­tions dar­ling. You’ve got your­self a num­ber six,’ he said.”

Richards remem­bered the song in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy as “a ter­ri­ble piece of tripe” and “mon­ey for old rope,” but it actu­al­ly peaked at num­ber 22 on the Bill­board Hot 100, where it stayed for nine weeks, no small thing. So pop­u­lar was “As Tears Go By” that the Stones them­selves record­ed a ver­sion the fol­low­ing year. Their take also entered the Hot 100, where it peaked at num­ber six.

The sto­ry of the song rep­re­sents in brief the evo­lu­tion of its orig­i­nal singer. Fat­ed in her ear­ly years to be known as lit­tle more than Jagger’s muse, an image she grew to hate, Faith­full went from hang­er-on in the six­ties, “an essen­tial com­po­nent of the Swing­ing Lon­don scene,” writes review­er alrockchick; to a home­less hero­in addict; to a leg­end revived, her “whiskey-soaked” croak of a voice the per­fect vehi­cle for deliv­er­ing smoke-filled tales of weari­ness and betray­al.

Along the way, there was “As Tears Go By,” a song Faith­full came to embody, though she didn’t think much of it as a teenag­er. (See Bri­an Epstein intro­duce her on Hula­baloo, above, in 1965.)

She was “nev­er that crazy” about it, she said. “God knows how Mick and Kei­th wrote it or where it came from…. In any case, it’s an absolute­ly aston­ish­ing thing for a boy of 20 to have writ­ten a song about a woman look­ing back nos­tal­gi­cal­ly on her life.”

The “boys” had help — at first they cribbed the title “As Time Goes By” from the famous tear­jerk­er in Casablan­ca. Accord­ing to Loog Old­ham, he locked the two Stones in a room togeth­er and said, “I want a song with brick walls all around it, high win­dows and no sex.” How that became a Mar­i­anne Faith­full sig­na­ture is some­thing of a mys­tery. At times she claimed Jag­ger wrote the song for her; at oth­ers, she emphat­i­cal­ly denied it. But as the con­trast between her voice and the song’s sac­cha­rine, maudlin nature changed, so too did the pow­er of her deliv­ery, which is not to say her first record­ing didn’t war­rant the atten­tion.

“The voice on ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Sum­mer Nights,’” altrockchick writes, “has an airy, sur­re­al qual­i­ty; the voice on Bro­ken Eng­lish,” her 1979 come­back (which does not include “As Tears Go By”), “is as real as it gets” and only got more real with time. In a Nico-esque monot­o­ne drone, she revis­it­ed the song she made famous in the mid-six­ties in the 1987 take above for the album Strange Weath­er. She had just recent­ly got­ten clean and lost a lover to sui­cide.

The weath­ered vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty she projects is worlds away from the dreamy melan­choly of the past, her voice “a far cry from the 60s sweet­ness,” The Music Afi­ciona­do blog notes. “Years of sub­stance abuse and con­stant smok­ing dropped her pitch and made it raspy.” These qual­i­ties are even more pro­nounced in a 2018 ver­sion of the song from the album Neg­a­tive Capa­bil­i­ty. It func­tions almost as a coda for a career as an inter­preter of the songs of oth­ers, though she’s writ­ten no few of her own (and may yet release anoth­er ver­sion of “As Time Goes By.”)

She is remem­bered for much more than her first hit, but Faithfull’s revis­i­ta­tion of “As Tears Go By” over the years seems to speak to an ambiva­lent accep­tance of Mick Jagger’s con­stant pres­ence in her sto­ry — and a grace­ful, if not exact­ly uplift­ing, accep­tance of the inevitable rav­ages of age and fame.

You can hear her very recent inter­view on the Bro­ken Record pod­cast below:

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Mar­i­anne Faith­full Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Mar­i­anne Faith­full in His Very Last Per­for­mance As Zig­gy Star­dust (1973)

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

And now for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent…

Above, the Wiener Cel­loensem­ble 5 + 1–“an untra­di­tion­al cel­lo ensem­ble” found­ed by the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic’s Ger­hard Kaufmann–presents an uncon­ven­tion­al per­for­mance of Ravel’s “Bolero.” It’s min­i­mal­ist, in a cer­tain way. Four musi­cians. One instru­ment. And noth­ing more…

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via Clas­sicFM/MyModernMet

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 1930 Record­ing of Boléro, Con­duct­ed by Rav­el Him­self

Juil­liard Stu­dents & the New York Phil­har­mon­ic Per­form Ravel’s Bolero While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Copen­hagen Phil­har­mon­ic Plays Ravel’s Bolero at Train Sta­tion

Pen­nie Smith was not a fan. Maybe that’s what made her the per­fect pho­tog­ra­ph­er for The Clash. “She was nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly into rock music,” writes Rob Walk­er at The Guardian; she wasn’t starstruck or over­awed by her sub­jects; and she also was­n’t even par­tic­u­lar­ly in love with the most famous shot of her career — the icon­ic pho­to of bassist Paul Simonon rais­ing his Fend­er Pre­ci­sion at New York’s Pal­la­di­um, sec­onds before smash­ing it to bits. “I said, ‘it’s com­plete­ly out of focus,’” Smith remem­bers of the image when Joe Strum­mer insist­ed on using it for the cov­er of leg­endary dou­ble-LP Lon­don Call­ing. “But Joe wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘That one is the pho­to.’”

He was obvi­ous­ly cor­rect, though Smith still doesn’t sound con­vinced. “I’m pleased I took it,” she says, “but it’s a bit of a weight around my neck. It keeps com­ing back to whack me on the back of the head — nice­ly in some instances, but aggra­vat­ing­ly in oth­ers.” Hit­ting one in the head — front or back — is the aim of the best album cov­ers in punk, and “punk rock’s rage and dis­sent have always been easy to rep­re­sent visu­al­ly,” says Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video above. Tak­ing the per­fect punk pho­to­graph, how­ev­er, depend­ed on a num­ber of vari­ables all com­ing togeth­er per­fect­ly for a once-in-a-life­time shot.

For one thing, Smith had to have made the gig. She near­ly accept­ed an offer to go out with friends instead. She also decid­ed to change it up that night and stand on Simonon’s side of the stage instead of next to gui­tarist Mick Jones. And then, as Lefevre explains, there was the show itself. “In Lon­don, the Clash would play rau­cous punk bars and dance­halls full of stand­ing room crowds. In the U.S.,” dur­ing their first tour in 1979, “they often found them­selves play­ing in the­aters with fixed seat­ing.” The Pal­la­di­um was such a venue. “Bounc­ers would hold crowds back, make sure they stayed sta­pled to their seats.”

The seden­tary crowd killed the vibe. By the end of the show, “Paul’s frus­tra­tion turned to anger,” notes Snap Gal­leries, “and then he lost it com­plete­ly. His watch stopped at 9:50pm.” Smith remem­bers see­ing him sud­den­ly spin toward her. “He was in a real­ly bad mood, and that wasn’t like him.” She was so star­tled, she got the pho­to­graph. “It wasn’t a choice to take the shot. My fin­ger just went off.” That chance moment gave the band an ide­al image for the Lon­don Call­ing cov­er.

It was illus­tra­tor Ray Lowry’s idea to crib the typog­ra­phy of Elvis’ first record, and the font “called back to the roots of punk rock,” born out of the ‘50s rock­a­bil­ly tra­di­tion of sim­ple songs and bare-bones instru­men­ta­tion and arrange­ments. “Punk and rock and roll held the same cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance,” Lefevre says, but The Clash announced them­selves on the album cov­er as puri­fiers of the tra­di­tion, strip­ping out the “pho­ny Beat­le­ma­nia” Strum­mer decried in the title track and replac­ing it with right­eous, if bare­ly-in-focus, rage. Hear the full gig just above, includ­ing the bass-smash­ing at the end at 1:08:10.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare Live Footage Doc­u­ments The Clash From Their Raw Debut to the Career-Defin­ing Lon­don Call­ing (1977–1980)

“Stay Free: The Sto­ry of the Clash” Nar­rat­ed by Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Pod­cast

The Clash Play Their Final Show (San Bernardi­no, 1983)

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When William Basin­s­ki released The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops in the years after the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 attacks, it was the sound of decay pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty — record­ings of decades-old tape loops lit­er­al­ly falling apart on their reels, as the World Trade Cen­ter ruins smol­dered across the riv­er from the composer’s Brook­lyn stu­dio. The piece was per­formed ten years lat­er by an orches­tra at the Tem­ple of Den­dur, at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, for the tenth anniver­sary of the attacks. Anohni (then known as Antony of Antony and the John­sons) called it “the most help­ful and use­ful music I have ever known.”

This might mark the first time a piece of ambi­ent music has been award­ed such grav­i­tas and made the cen­ter­piece of a sig­nif­i­cant memo­r­i­al. It seems a long way from the ori­gins of the form in Bri­an Eno’s Dis­creet Music (1975) and Music for Air­ports (1978), in which Eno pushed music to the periph­ery of expe­ri­ence, turn­ing it into unob­tru­sive back­ground stim­u­lus that “cre­at­ed a sort of land­scape you could belong to,” he says above, like the end­less­ly repeat­ing worlds of a video game. In music, how­ev­er, “rep­e­ti­tion is a form of change,” Eno remind­ed us, or as Basinski’s loops sug­gest­ed, writes Sasha Frere-Jones at The New York­er, “rep­e­ti­tion is change.”

Anoth­er curi­ous trait links Basinski’s 21st cen­tu­ry lamen­ta­tions and Eno’s 70s air­port lounge music, one that seems to change the terms of the con­tract that ambi­ent music, as we usu­al­ly under­stand it, makes with the lis­ten­er. We might think of it as music that makes no par­tic­u­lar demands on us and take Eno’s state­ments about it as encour­ag­ing a kind of pas­sive con­sump­tion: ambi­ent music as no more than pleas­ant accom­pa­ni­ment for bet­ter queu­ing-up and calmer shop­ping. (Not that there’s any­thing wrong with stress relief….)

But what Basin­s­ki and Eno both describe in intense acts of ambi­ent cre­ation is more extreme. It begins with a kind of help­less­ness in the face of dis­tress — in the first case an of help­less­ly watch­ing low­er Man­hat­tan burn from the roof of a Williams­burg loft. Eno’s predica­ment was more per­son­al and inti­mate, he tells Riz Khan above, but no less help­less. Con­va­lesc­ing in his bed after a car acci­dent, he found him­self unable to move when a friend put on a record and left him alone. The expe­ri­ence of immo­bil­i­ty became a cat­a­lyst.

The album of “18th cen­tu­ry harp music” was too qui­et. He couldn’t turn it up over the sound of rain out­side his win­dow. At first, Eno says, he was frus­trat­ed by his lack of con­trol over the envi­ron­ment. But as he “start­ed lis­ten­ing to the rain and lis­ten­ing to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain,” it became for him “a great musi­cal expe­ri­ence…. I sud­den­ly thought of this idea of mak­ing music that didn’t impose itself on your space in the same way.”

In pay­ing atten­tion to a loss of con­trol, Eno dis­cov­ered music that relin­quish­es con­trol over the lis­ten­er. In lis­ten­ing to his own shock and grief, Basin­s­ki dis­cov­ered music that lets itself fall apart, slow­ly and beau­ti­ful­ly over time. What he “pompous­ly called” ambi­ent music, Eno jokes above, “became some­thing I no longer rec­og­nize.” And, yes, it may have come to take up more space than he intend­ed. But it still func­tions as a cre­ative response to cir­cum­stances in which, it seems, there may be lit­tle else to do but lis­ten care­ful­ly and wait.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Bri­an Eno Rein­vent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Dis­cov­er the Ambi­ent Music of Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra, the Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese Com­pos­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.