The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­thing of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers call it “the great­est shot in tele­vi­sion” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one view­ing to notice. In it, sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke speaks about how “cer­tain gas­es ignite, and that the ther­mos flask per­mits you to store vast quan­ti­ties of those gas­es safe­ly, in their frozen liq­uid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a suf­fi­cient­ly large flask filled with hydro­gen and oxy­gen, design it to mix the gas­es and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rock­et that launch­es behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.

One can only admire Burke’s com­po­sure in dis­cussing such tech­ni­cal mat­ters in a shot that had to be per­fect­ly timed on the first and only take. What you would­n’t know unless you saw it in con­text is that it also comes as the final, cul­mi­nat­ing moment of a 50-minute explana­to­ry jour­ney that begins with cred­it cards, then makes its way through the inven­tion of every­thing from a knight’s armor to canned food to air con­di­tion­ing to the Sat­urn V rock­et, which put man on the moon.

For­mal­ly speak­ing, this was a typ­i­cal episode of Con­nec­tions, Burke’s 1978 tele­vi­sion series that traces the most impor­tant and sur­pris­ing moves in the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy through­out human his­to­ry.

Though not as wide­ly remem­bered as Carl Sagan’s slight­ly lat­er Cos­mos, Con­nec­tions bears repeat view­ing here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least for the intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al brava­do typ­i­fied by this “great­est shot in tele­vi­sion,” now viewed near­ly 18 mil­lion times on Youtube. Watch it enough times your­self, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by hav­ing Burke walk from a non-time-sen­si­tive shot into anoth­er with the already-framed rock­et ready for liftoff. But that hard­ly lessens the feel­ing of achieve­ment when the launch comes off. “Des­ti­na­tion: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the plan­ets, or Peking” — a clos­ing line that sound­ed con­sid­er­ably more dat­ed a few years ago than it does today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Endeavour’s Launch Viewed from Boost­er Cam­eras

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

125 Great Sci­ence Videos: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Perform a Rollicking Cover of the Mary Tyler Moore Theme Song (1996)

?si=Pblv5Tzpi_F-a6cu

Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Son­ny Cur­tis and released in 1970, “Love Is All Around”–otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore theme song–has been cov­ered by many acts: Sam­my Davis JrHüsker Dü, and Joan Jett & the Black­hearts, to name a few. After releas­ing a stu­dio ver­sion in 1996, Jett per­formed the song live on the Late Show with David Let­ter­man that same year. If you’re old enough, this per­for­mance will give you a dou­ble dose of nos­tal­gia. It lets you recall the spir­it of 1970s sec­ond-wave-fem­i­nist tele­vi­sion, and it recap­tures the sheer play­ful­ness of Let­ter­man’s free­wheel­ing 90s late night show. Enjoy!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Joan Jett Start­ed the Run­aways at 15 and Faced Down Every Bar­ri­er for Women in Rock and Roll

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

What Makes a Cov­er Song Great?: Our Favorites & Yours

Frank Zappa’s 1980s Appear­ances on The David Let­ter­man Show

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

MTV stands for Music Tele­vi­sion, and when the net­work launched in 1981, its almost entire­ly music video-based pro­gram­ming was true to its name. With­in a decade, how­ev­er, its man­date had widened to the point that it had become the nat­ur­al home for prac­ti­cal­ly any excit­ing devel­op­ment in Amer­i­can youth cul­ture. And for many MTV view­ers in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, youth­ful or oth­er­wise, noth­ing was quite so excit­ing as Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, whose every broad­cast con­sti­tut­ed a ver­i­ta­ble fes­ti­val of ani­ma­tion that pushed the medi­um’s bound­aries of pos­si­bil­i­ty — as well, every so often, as its bound­aries of taste.

Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s orig­i­nal three-sea­son run began in the sum­mer of 1991 and end­ed in ear­ly 1995. All through­out, its for­mat remained con­sis­tent, round­ing up ten or so shorts, each cre­at­ed by dif­fer­ent artists. Their themes could vary wild­ly, and so could their aes­thet­ics: any giv­en broad­cast might con­tain more or less con­ven­tion­al-look­ing car­toons, but also stick­men, pup­pets, ear­ly com­put­er graph­ics, sub­vert­ed nine­teen-fifties imagery (that main­stay of the Gen‑X sen­si­bil­i­ty), Japan­ese ani­me, and even live action, as in the recur­ring drag-show sit­com “Art School Girls of Doom” or the mul­ti-part adap­ta­tion of Charles Burns’ Dog­boy.

Burns’ is hard­ly the the only name asso­ci­at­ed with Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion that comics and ani­ma­tion fans will rec­og­nize. Oth­ers who gained expo­sure through it include Bill Plymp­ton, John R. Dil­worth, Richard Sala, and Mike Judge, whose series Beav­is and Butthead and fea­ture film Office Space both began as shorts seen on Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion.

But no dis­cus­sion of the show can exclude Peter Chung’s futur­is­tic, qua­si-mys­ti­cal, dia­logue-free Æon Flux, whose epony­mous acro­bat­ic assas­sin became a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto her­self. The Æon Flux episodes have been cut out of this 22-video Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion playlist, but you can also find a col­lec­tion of uncut broad­casts at the Inter­net Archive.

The Ton­gal video above cred­its the show’s influ­ence to the insight of the show’s cre­ator Japhet Ash­er, who saw that “the atten­tion span of your aver­age TV view­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly young peo­ple, was get­ting short­er and short­er.” Hence Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s mod­el: “If you did­n’t like the cur­rent short, anoth­er one, which would be total­ly dif­fer­ent, would be along in a few min­utes. Fur­ther­more, if a seg­ment was so inex­plic­a­bly bizarre and brain-tick­ling, per­haps an even more com­pelling one would come next.” At the time, this would have been tak­en by some observers — much like MTV itself — as a dis­turb­ing reflec­tion of an addled, over-stim­u­lat­ed younger gen­er­a­tion. But with Youtube still about a decade and a half away, it’s fair to say they had­n’t seen any­thing yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

When a Young Sofia Cop­po­la & Zoe Cas­savetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revis­it Hi-Octane (1994)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear: Mirrors in Movies

If you’ve nev­er tried your hand at film­mak­ing, you might assume that its hard­est visu­al chal­lenges are the cre­ation of effects-laden spec­ta­cles: star­ships duk­ing it out in space, mon­sters stomp­ing through major cities, ani­mals speak­ing and danc­ing like Broad­way stars, that sort of thing. But con­sid­er the chal­lenge posed by sim­ply cap­tur­ing a scene set in a bath­room. Almost all such spaces include a large mir­ror, mean­ing that most angles from which you could shoot will vio­late an impor­tant rule cit­ed by Youtu­ber Paul E.T. in the video above: “Don’t show the cam­era in the shot.”

Yet we’ve all seen major motion pic­tures and tele­vi­sion series with scenes not just in bath­rooms but oth­er mir­ror-equipped spaces, from rooms used for inter­ro­gat­ing sus­pects to rooms used for prepar­ing to come out on stage. What’s more, the cam­era often pass­es blithe­ly before these mir­rors with a vam­pire-like lack of a reflec­tion. The tech­niques used to achieve such shots are now mature enough that we may not even notice that what we’re see­ing does­n’t make visu­al sense. How they work is the sub­ject of Paul E.T.‘s inves­ti­ga­tion, begin­ning with an episode of Crim­i­nal: Unit­ed King­dom in which a cam­era some­how floats around a room with a one-way mir­ror, nev­er appear­ing in that mir­ror.

Anoth­er more famil­iar exam­ple comes from Con­tact, direct­ed by the visu­al-effects maven Robert Zemeck­is. In its ear­ly flash­back sequence, an ado­les­cent ver­sion of its astronomer pro­tag­o­nist runs toward the back­ward-track­ing cam­era and reach­es out to open what turns out to be a bath­room med­i­cine cab­i­net, into whose mir­ror we must have — yet can­not pos­si­bly have — been look­ing into the whole time. What we’re see­ing is actu­al­ly a seam­less fusion of two shots, with the “emp­ty” (that is, blue-screen-filled) frame of the cab­i­net mir­ror super­im­posed on the end of the shot of the young actress run­ning toward it. While not tech­ni­cal­ly easy, it’s at least con­cep­tu­al­ly straight­for­ward.

Paul E.T. finds anoth­er, more com­pli­cat­ed mir­ror shot in no less a mas­ter­work of cin­e­ma than Zack Snider’s Suck­er Punch, which tracks all the way around from one side of a set of dress­ing-room mir­rors to the oth­er. “What you’re actu­al­ly see­ing when the cam­era moves is the tran­si­tion­ing from one side of a dupli­cat­ed set to the oth­er,” he explains, “with an invis­i­ble cut spliced in there” — which involves looka­like actress­es lit­er­al­ly try­ing to mir­ror each oth­er’s move­ments. No such elab­o­rate trick­ery for Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, which shoots straight-on into a bath­room mir­ror by build­ing the cam­era into the wall, then dig­i­tal­ly eras­ing it in post-pro­duc­tion.

While we do live in an age of “fix it in post” (an instinct with an arguably regret­table effect on cin­e­ma), mir­ror shots, on the whole, still require some degree of fore­sight and inven­tive­ness. Such was the case with that scene from Crim­i­nal: Unit­ed King­dom, which Paul E.T. sim­ply could­n’t fig­ure out on his own. His search for answers led him to e‑mail the episode’s B‑camera oper­a­tor, who explained that the pro­duc­tion involved nei­ther a blue screen nor dou­bles, but “a com­bi­na­tion of well-chore­o­graphed cam­era work and VFX.” The result: a shot that may look unre­mark­able at first, but on clos­er inspec­tion, attests to the sub­tle pow­er of movie mag­ic — or TV mag­ic, at any rate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

This Is What The Matrix Looks Like With­out CGI: A Spe­cial Effects Break­down

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

Many of us grew up see­ing hard­back copies of Shō­gun on var­i­ous domes­tic book­shelves. Whether their own­ers ever actu­al­ly got through James Clavel­l’s famous­ly hefty nov­el of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan is open to ques­tion, but they may well have seen the first tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion, which aired on NBC in 1980. Star­ring Richard Cham­ber­lain and Toshi­ro Mifu­ne (and nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles), that ten-hour minis­eries offered an unprece­dent­ed­ly cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence to the home view­ers of Amer­i­ca, pre­sent­ing them with things they’d nev­er before seen on tele­vi­sion — and things they’d nev­er heard on tele­vi­sion, not least numer­ous lines deliv­ered in untrans­lat­ed Japan­ese.

The idea, accord­ing to screen­writer Eric Bercovi­ci, was to put the view­ers in the shoes of Cham­ber­lain’s pro­tag­o­nist John Black­thorne, an Eng­lish ship pilot marooned in Japan with no knowl­edge of the local lan­guage. Dur­ing the show’s run, news­pa­pers print­ed glos­saries of the Japan­ese words most impor­tant to the sto­ry. The sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Shō­gun, which aired ear­li­er this year on FX, does things dif­fer­ent­ly. For one thing, it makes use of those help­ful devices known as sub­ti­tles, which over the past four and a half decades have become not just accept­ed but demand­ed by West­ern audi­ences (even for pro­duc­tions in their own lan­guage).

This choice, as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak says in his video on the new Shō­gun, “lets us into the minds and con­ver­sa­tions of the Japan­ese char­ac­ters,” much like the omni­scient nar­ra­tion of Clavel­l’s nov­el. Puschak high­lights how the series “uses the act of trans­la­tion to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion across cul­tures and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, peri­od.” One notable exam­ple is its por­tray­al of the var­i­ous bilin­gual char­ac­ters who inter­pret for Black­thorne, each of whom does so dif­fer­ent­ly accord­ing to his or her moti­va­tions. The 1980 Shō­gun also had a few such scenes, but their dra­mat­ic irony was inac­ces­si­ble to mono­lin­gual view­ers.

Even if you speak both Eng­lish and Japan­ese, you know how lit­tle pro­tec­tion that real­ly offers against cul­tur­al mis­un­der­stand­ings. The new Shō­gun’s drama­ti­za­tion of that truth has sure­ly done its part to win the show more Emmy awards than any oth­er sin­gle sea­son of tele­vi­sion. A com­par­i­son to the 1980 adap­ta­tion, which rep­re­sent­ed the height of dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion in its day, reveals the ways in which our expec­ta­tions of the form have changed over time. Nev­er­the­less, even the 2024 Shō­gun takes its lib­er­ties, the most brazen being the use of Eng­lish instead of Por­tuguese, the real lan­guage of first con­tact between Japan and the West. Clear­ly, Por­tu­gal has its work cut out: to raise a gen­er­a­tion of actors ready to star in the next adap­ta­tion by the late twen­ty-six­ties. がんば っ て and boa sorte.

Relat­ed con­tent:

16th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese His­to­ri­ans Describe the Odd­ness of Meet­ing the First Euro­peans They Ever Saw

The 17th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Samu­rai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Cit­i­zen

The His­to­ry of Ancient Japan: The Sto­ry of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Wit­nessed It (297‑1274)

Meet Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Samu­rai War­rior

Let’s Learn Japan­ese: Two Clas­sic Video Series to Get You Start­ed in the Lan­guage

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

Watch enough clas­sic movies — espe­cial­ly clas­sic movies from slight­ly down­mar­ket stu­dios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again: once record­ed or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in anoth­er, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. No such fre­quent­ly employed record­ing has a more illus­tri­ous and well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry than the so-called “Wil­helm scream,” which, accord­ing to Oliv­er Macaulay at the Sci­ence + Media Muse­um, “has been used in over 400 films and TV pro­grams.”

“First record­ed in 1951, the ‘Wil­helm scream’ was ini­tial­ly fea­tured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s west­ern Dis­tant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feath­er Riv­er, from 1953: “When Pri­vate Wil­helm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-cur­dling cry which came to per­me­ate Hollywood’s sound­scape.”

It may well have been most wide­ly heard in the orig­i­nal Star Wars, “when Luke Sky­walk­er shoots a stormtroop­er off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault when­ev­er “char­ac­ters meet a grim and gris­ly end, from being shot to falling off a build­ing to being caught up in an explo­sion.”

Orig­i­nal­ly labeled “Man eat­en by an alli­ga­tor; screams” (for such was the fate of the char­ac­ter in Dis­tant Drums), the orig­i­nal record­ing ses­sion of this much-dis­cussed sound effect is now down­load­able from the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library at the Inter­net Archive. It con­tains three col­lec­tions: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “con­sist of high-qual­i­ty, first gen­er­a­tion copies of orig­i­nal nitrate opti­cal sound effects from the 1930s & 40s cre­at­ed for Hol­ly­wood stu­dios,” and the Sun­set Edi­to­r­i­al (SSE) Library, which “includes clas­sic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the epony­mous out­fit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiv­ing and preser­va­tion of the SSE Library, audio engi­neer Craig Smith notes that the com­pa­ny “main­ly did episod­ic tele­vi­sion shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jean­nie, The Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, and The Wal­tons.”

Lis­ten­ing through the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library will thus prove a res­o­nant expe­ri­ence, as it were, with fans of mid-cen­tu­ry Hol­ly­wood movies and tele­vi­sion alike. It may also inspire an appre­ci­a­tion for the sheer amount of record­ing, index­ing, edit­ing, and mix­ing work that must have gone into even out­ward­ly sim­ple pro­duc­tions, which nev­er­the­less required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bod­ies — as well as the voic­es of men, women, chil­dren — to fill out a plau­si­ble audio­vi­su­al atmos­phere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared cul­ture of Hol­ly­wood’s take on what things ‘sound­ed like.’ ” Heard in iso­la­tion, some of these may seem no more real­is­tic than the Wil­helm scream, but that was­n’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fas­ci­nat­ing His­to­ry of the 20th Cen­tu­ry in Sound

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

The Wil­helm Scream is Back

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

Sur­vey the British pub­lic about the most impor­tant insti­tu­tion to arise in their coun­try after World War II, and a lot of respon­dents are going to say the Nation­al Health Ser­vice. But keep ask­ing around, and you’ll soon­er or lat­er encounter a few seri­ous elec­tron­ic-music enthu­si­asts who name the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. Estab­lished in 1958 to pro­vide music and sound effects for the Bee­b’s radio pro­duc­tions — not least the doc­u­men­taries and dra­mas of the artis­ti­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly ambi­tious Third Pro­gramme — the unit’s work even­tu­al­ly expand­ed to work on tele­vi­sion shows as well. One could scarce­ly imag­ine Doc­tor Who, which debuted in 1963, with­out the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s son­ic aes­thet­ic.

By the end of the nine­teen-six­ties, the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop had been cre­at­ing elec­tron­ic music and inject­ing it into the lives of ordi­nary lis­ten­ers and view­ers for more than a decade. Even so, that same pub­lic did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly pos­sess a clear under­stand­ing of what, exact­ly, elec­tron­ic music was. Hence this explana­to­ry BBC tele­vi­sion clip from 1969, which brings on Radio­phon­ic Work­shop head Desmond Briscoe as well as com­posers John Bak­er, David Cain, and Daphne Oram (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture).

Hav­ing long since built her own stu­dio, Oram also demon­strates her own tech­niques for cre­at­ing and manip­u­lat­ing sound, few of which will look famil­iar to fans of elec­tron­ic music in our dig­i­tal cul­ture today.

Even in 1969, none of Oram’s tools were dig­i­tal in the way we now under­stand the term. In fact, the work­ing process shown in this clip was so thor­ough­ly ana­log as to involve paint­ing the forms of sound waves direct­ly onto slides and strips of film. She craft­ed sounds by hand in this way not pure­ly due to tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, but because exten­sive expe­ri­ence had shown her that it pro­duced more inter­est­ing results: “if one does it by pure­ly elec­tron­ic means, one tends to get fixed on one vibra­tion, one fre­quen­cy of vibra­to, which becomes dull.” Believ­ing that “music should be a pro­jec­tion of a thought process in the mind of a human being,” Oram expressed reser­va­tions about a future in which com­put­ers pump out “music by the yard”: a future that, these 55 years lat­er, seems to have arrived.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Daphne Oram Cre­at­ed the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Elec­tron­ic Music (1957)

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear Elec­tron­ic Lady­land, a Mix­tape Fea­tur­ing 55 Tracks from 35 Pio­neer­ing Women in Elec­tron­ic Music

New Doc­u­men­tary Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors Tells the Sto­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music’s Female Pio­neers

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

Howl­in’ Wolf may well have been the great­est blues singer of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Cer­tain­ly many peo­ple have said so, but there are oth­er mea­sure­ments than mere opin­ion, though it’s one I hap­pen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Bur­nett also had a pro­found his­tor­i­cal effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture, and on the way the Chica­go blues car­ried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into Amer­i­can cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Record­ing for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man nev­er dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgent­ly urban and coun­try plain… south­ern and rur­al in instru­men­ta­tion and howl­ing­ly elec­tric in form.”

He was also phe­nom­e­nal on stage. His hulk­ing six-foot-six frame and intense glow­er­ing stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edgi­ness. He seemed at any moment like he might actu­al­ly turn into a wolf, let­ting the impulse give out in plain­tive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howl­in’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean har­mon­i­ca and did acro­bat­ic gui­tar tricks before Hen­drix, picked up from his men­tor Char­lie Pat­ton. And he played with the best musi­cians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you want­ed to play elec­tric blues, Howl­in’ Wolf was a man to watch.

This rep­u­ta­tion was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC vari­ety show Shindig! in 1965, open­ing for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the Amer­i­can Folk Blues Fes­ti­val, play­ing to large, appre­cia­tive crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young lis­ten­ers with­out los­ing the deep blues feel­ing that stood as the cor­ner­stone of Wolf’s sound.” The fol­low­ing year, the Rolling Stones insist­ed that Shindig!’s pro­duc­ers “also fea­ture either Mud­dy Waters or Howl­in’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the the­atrics of his act for a more prud­ish white audi­ence, and “for the first time in his sto­ried career, the cel­e­brat­ed blues­man per­formed on a nation­al tele­vi­sion broad­cast.”

Why is this sig­nif­i­cant? Over the decades, the Stones reg­u­lar­ly per­formed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Bri­an Jones’ shy, starstruck intro­duc­tion to Wolf before his per­for­mance above con­veys what he saw as the impor­tance of the moment. Jones’ biog­ra­ph­er Paul Tryn­ka may over­state the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appear­ance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cul­tur­al abyss and con­nect­ed Amer­i­ca with its own black cul­ture.” The show con­sti­tut­ed “a life-chang­ing moment, both for the Amer­i­can teenagers clus­tered round the TV in their liv­ing rooms, and for a gen­er­a­tion of blues per­form­ers who had been stuck in a cul­tur­al ghet­to.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christ­mas morn­ing.”

Eric Lott points to the show’s for­ma­tive impor­tance to the Stones, who “sit scat­tered around the Shindig! set watch­ing Wolf in full-met­al idol­a­try” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zep­pelin would lat­er turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! per­for­mance of jan­g­ly, sub­dued “The Last Time,” here.)  The per­for­mance rep­re­sents more, how­ev­er, than the “British Inva­sion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s main­stream break­out, and the Stones pay­ing trib­ute to a found­ing father of rock and roll, an act of humil­i­ty in a band not espe­cial­ly known or appre­ci­at­ed for that qual­i­ty.

“It was alto­geth­er appro­pri­ate,” says music writer Peter Gural­nick, “that they would be sit­ting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it rep­re­sent­ed. His music was not sim­ply the foun­da­tion or the cor­ner­stone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imag­ine.” Gural­nick, notes John Bur­nett at NPR, calls it “one of the great­est cul­tur­al moments of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” At min­i­mum, Bur­nett writes, it’s “one of the most incon­gru­ous moments in Amer­i­can pop music”—up until the mid-six­ties, at least.

Whether or not the moment could live up to its leg­end, the peo­ple involved saw it as ground­break­ing. The ven­er­a­ble Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert John­son and Charley Pat­ton,” remarked Bri­an Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone posi­tion­ing him­self in def­er­ence to “Chica­go blues,” Tryn­ka writes, “uncom­pro­mis­ing music aimed at a black audi­ence, was a rad­i­cal, epoch-chang­ing step, both for baby boomer Amer­i­cans and the musi­cians them­selves. Four­teen and fif­teen-year-old kids… hard­ly under­stood the growth of civ­il rights; but they could under­stand the impor­tance of a hand­some Eng­lish­man who described the moun­tain­ous, grav­el-voiced blues­man as a ‘hero’ and sat smil­ing at his feet.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Mud­dy Waters

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

Mud­dy Waters, Howl­in’ Wolf, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe & Oth­er Amer­i­can Blues Leg­ends Per­form in the UK (1963–66)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.