I hate to be one of those peo­ple who goes on about how punk was an all-Amer­i­can phe­nom­e­non before it crossed the pond. But hell, I’ve no less an author­i­ty on the coun­ter­cul­ture than William S. Bur­roughs on my side, or on the side of Legs McNeil, at least, the music jour­nal­ist who just hap­pened to give punk its name by co-found­ing Punk mag­a­zine in 1975. Of McNeil’s sem­i­nal oral his­to­ry Please Kill Me, Bur­roughs remarks, “This book tells it like was.” More accu­rate­ly, it lets the music’s fron­tiers­men and women tell it, start­ing with Lou Reed and the Vel­vets and oth­er main­stays in Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry scene.

McNeil’s book sur­veys a num­ber of major Amer­i­can scen­esters, most of them from New York, with the excep­tion of The Stooges from Detroit, and one excep­tion­al band from, of all places, Cleve­land, Ohio. The Dead Boys rarely get their due, but they were as influ­en­tial as the Ramones in the down­town New York scene. Along with Iggy Pop, Dead Boys’ lead singer Stiv Bators indulged in the kind of thrilling onstage deprav­i­ty main­stream audi­ences came to think of as the spe­cial prove­nance of the Sex Pis­tols. In the mid-sev­en­ties, these bands, along with Pat­ti Smith, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, etc. invent­ed all the moves punk came to be known for.

An excel­lent com­pan­ion to McNeil’s print doc­u­men­tary, the short, 1978 film Punk­ing Out, above, sur­veys three key down­town New York bands—the Ramones, the Dead Boys, who moved to the city in ‘76, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. (Hell gave McNeil’s book its title, design­ing a t‑shirt with a bulls­eye paint­ed on it and the words “please kill me” scrawled above. He admit­ted he was “too much of a cow­ard” to wear it.) All three bands played cen­tral roles in the CBGB’s scene, and Hell—who also played in Neon Boys, Tele­vi­sion, and the Heartbreakers—gets cred­it for more or less invent­ing punk fashion—from spiked hair to DIY cloth­ing designs held togeth­er with safe­ty pins.

Made by Mag­gi Car­son, Juliusz Kos­sakows­ki and Ric Shore, the film serves as its own oral his­to­ry of sorts, fea­tur­ing inter­views with fans and the bands and CBGB’s own­er Hilly Kristal (who says, “the more crowd­ed and the loud­er it is, I think, the less vio­lence.”) Watch it for the his­to­ry, but also for the clas­sic per­for­mances, cap­tured from every angle in black and white, with sur­pris­ing­ly decent audio. And if you’d like to own your own copy, you can pur­chase it here for $11.95. The film’s site quotes one fan giv­ing it the ulti­mate old guy thumbs-up: “Great!!! Buy it for your kids!” It’s edu­ca­tion­al, for sure. Punk­ing Out belongs on every punk syl­labus right next to Please Kill Me.

Note: You can check out a copies of Punk­ing Out from the New York Pub­lic Library, and you can have them shipped any­where in the world.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sit­com Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club That Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of CBGB, the Ear­ly Home of Punk and New Wave

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

Ret­ro­spec­tives of Pink Floyd tend to devolve into rehash­ing fights between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, but there’s good rea­son for that. Some of the band’s best work came out of this per­son­al and cre­ative ten­sion, espe­cial­ly their most beloved song, “Com­fort­ably Numb,” which, as we know it, emerged as a com­pro­mise between two dif­fer­ent visions.

Unlike, say, Lennon and McCart­ney, who made some excel­lent music with­out each oth­er, Gilmour and Waters nev­er shined as bright­ly as when they con­tributed to each other’s work. Part of the bit­ter­sweet­ness of “Com­fort­ably Numb,” then, is that it rep­re­sents, as Gilmour him­self admit­ted, “the last embers of mine and Roger’s abil­i­ty to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly togeth­er.”

The song began life as a skele­tal demo left­over from song­writ­ing ses­sions for Gilmour’s first, 1978 solo album, but it only came togeth­er, with lyrics by Waters, dur­ing ses­sions for the fol­low­ing year’s epic The Wall.

When it came time to work that album’s songs—essentially a Roger Waters’ solo con­cept pre­sent­ed to the band—Gilmour wise­ly took the rudi­men­ta­ry pro­gres­sion off the shelf and offered it to his band­mate. It con­sist­ed then, as you can hear above, of noth­ing more than the chord pro­gres­sion in the cho­rus and a vocal melody con­veyed by “doo doo doos.” In the inter­view clip below, Gilmour talks about the demo’s “gen­e­sis” on a “high strung gui­tar.”

Despite the del­i­cate acoustic strum­ming of the demo, Gilmour want­ed the Floyd ver­sion of the song to have a hard­er edge. Waters, on the oth­er hand, want­ed a big, the­atri­cal sound. As Waters remem­bers it in an inter­view with Absolute Radio at the top, the dis­agree­ment boiled down to a rhythm track, and the nego­ti­a­tion involved tak­ing pieces of the verse and cho­rus from two dif­fer­ent ver­sions and piec­ing them togeth­er.

Writer Mark Blake, cit­ing co-pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin, describes the argu­ment in much more detail, as between a “stripped-down and hard­er” take and what Ezrin calls “the grander Tech­ni­col­or, orches­tral ver­sion” Waters liked. “That turned into a real arm-wres­tle,” Ezrin recalled. “But at least this time there were only two sides to the argu­ment. Dave on one side; Roger and I on the oth­er.” After much wran­gling, “the deal was struck,” Blake explains: “The body of the song would com­prise the orches­tral arrange­ment; the out­ro, includ­ing that final, incen­di­ary gui­tar solo, would be tak­en from the Gilmour-favoured, hard­er ver­sion.”

As the song was inte­grat­ed into Waters’ con­cep­tu­al scheme (which Gilmour lat­er admit­ted he found “a bit whinge­ing”), ear­ly ver­sions like “The Doc­tor,” above, show the grit­ti­er sound Gilmour want­ed. This take also show­cas­es some lyri­cal howlers (“I am a physi­cian / who can han­dle your con­di­tion / like a magi­cian”) that, thank­ful­ly, didn’t make the final cut. The Final Cut also hap­pens to be the title of The Wall’s fol­low-up, anoth­er Waters’ solo con­cept and the effec­tive end of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gilmour for good.

Learn­ing the his­to­ry of “Com­fort­ably Numb” makes us appre­ci­ate all of the maneu­ver­ing that went into turn­ing the song into the mas­ter­piece it became. In lis­ten­ing to it again (below, in a video with the wrong album cov­er), I’m amazed at how split­ting the dif­fer­ence between two com­pet­ing cre­ative direc­tions cre­at­ed a piece of music that could not be improved upon in any way. If you can think of such a thing hap­pen­ing before or since, in any art form, I’d love to hear about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Pink Floyd Albums: The Evo­lu­tion of the Band Revealed in 209 Tracks (1967–2014)

Under­stand­ing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Trib­ute to Depart­ed Band­mate Syd Bar­rett

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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

We now remem­ber Karl­heinz Stock­hausen as a pio­neer of elec­tron­ic music, labor­ing away in stu­dios dom­i­nat­ed by hulk­ing ear­ly syn­the­siz­ers and tape machines toward a new son­ic expe­ri­ence, but he wrote his most pop­u­lar work for much hum­bler devices: music box­es. Com­posed in 1974 and 1975, Tierkreis, the Ger­man word for zodi­ac, con­sists of twelve melodies, each rep­re­sent­ing a sign on that astro­log­i­cal cal­en­dar, each cen­tered on a dif­fer­ent pitch, each played on its own ded­i­cat­ed music box. You can hear (and see) all of the Tierkreis box­es in action in these videos:

• Tau­rus
• Aquar­ius
• Scor­pio
• Can­cer
• Libra
• Capri­corn
• Leo
• Gem­i­ni
• Sagit­tar­ius
• Aries
• Pisces
• Vir­go

Despite their sim­plic­i­ty, Stock­hausen’s twelve- and some­times four­teen-tone ser­i­al com­po­si­tions may sound like noth­ing you ever heard come out of a music box in child­hood. But chil­dren must have made up a sig­nif­i­cant part of their ear­ly audi­ence: these melodies made their debut as part of the fairy-tale music the­ater piece called Musik im Bauch, or “Music in the Bel­ly,” a phrase Stock­hausen used to describe the nois­es that would issue from the insides of his young daugh­ter Juli­ka, to her great delight. After com­ing up with the twelve melodies, quite pos­si­bly the first music ever orig­i­nal­ly com­posed for the music box, he had to order the box­es them­selves cus­tom-made from the Swiss man­u­fac­tur­er Reuge. You can see an orig­i­nal Tierkreis box, play­ing the Aries melody, in the video below.

Reuge, accord­ing to Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Oliv­er Hall, “con­tin­ued to man­u­fac­ture the zodi­ac box­es into the eight­ies. In ‘98, Stock­hausen-Ver­lag pro­duced a lim­it­ed run for the composer’s 70th birth­day, fol­lowed by anoth­er series in 2005. The Pisces, Aries and Sagit­tar­ius box­es are sold out, but the shop still has a few of the oth­ers left at €310 a piece.” Pricey, cer­tain­ly, but what a gift they would make for musi­cal­ly inclined friends born under the oth­er zodi­ac signs, giv­en that Stock­hausen, writes All Music Guide’s Robert Kirzinger, “care­ful­ly con­sid­ered the char­ac­ter­is­tics of each sign and each month of the year, as well as the per­son­al­i­ties of peo­ple he knew were born under a par­tic­u­lar sign, in com­pos­ing this work.” Such a com­po­si­tion­al scheme may strike astro­log­i­cal non-believ­ers as odd, but remem­ber: this was back in the age of Aquar­ius.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Watch Karl­heinz Stockhausen’s Great Heli­copter String Quar­tet, Star­ring 4 Musi­cians, 4 Cam­eras & 4 Copters

A Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Brand­ed Car: A Play­ful Trib­ute to the Ground­break­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er

Pachelbel’s Music Box Canon

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.

Think of “inter­view­ing Bri­an Eno” (lis­ten to it here) like a piece of his gen­er­a­tive music. Yes, the man has no prob­lems talk­ing and actu­al­ly encour­ages it. But input the same old ques­tions about those same four albums (you know them, right?) and you get the same old answers as out­put. Feed in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent subject–like his favorite film soundtracks–and lo and behold, a very intrigu­ing 80 min­utes fol­lows.

That’s what hap­pened when Hugh Corn­well (lead vocal­ist of The Stran­glers) inter­viewed Mr. Peter George St John le Bap­tiste de la Salle Eno–that’s Bri­an to you–in 2013 for his short-lived inter­net radio show on film.

Eno has always had an inter­est in film. As he men­tions in the sec­ond half of the show, he pro­duced his 1976/78 album Music for Films not for any spe­cif­ic film, but in the hopes that they would be used for sound­tracks in the future. Also, he hoped that the descrip­tive titles–“Alternative 3,” “Patrolling Wire Borders”–and the evoca­tive music would lead lis­ten­ers to cre­ate films in their heads. Since then every track has been used at least once, and doc­u­men­tar­i­ans like Adam Cur­tis have used Eno to great effect.

The only track, he reveals, on that album to be writ­ten for a film was clos­er “Final Sun­set” put to great, tran­scen­dent use in Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebas­tiane.

But if you think Eno might choose sim­i­lar ambi­ent tracks or instru­men­tals dur­ing the rest of the inter­view, you’re in for a sur­prise.

As he grew up, Eno had no expo­sure to what was “cool” and what was not. And that led to an ear that heard things stripped of cul­tur­al con­text. When he plays a track from the musi­cal Okla­homa called “The Farmer and the Cow­boy,” we might just be able to put aside our mem­o­ries of high school pro­duc­tions and hear the weird, humor­ous and very excit­ing vocal arrange­ment under­neath. Sim­i­lar­ly, despite not being the biggest fan of Elvis Pres­ley at the time (“I was a snob,” Eno says), he selects this jaun­ty pop num­ber “Did­ja Ever” from G.I. Blues. “One of the wit­ti­est, clever­est bits of writ­ing,” as he calls it, writ­ten by Sid Wayne and Sher­man Edwards, who wrote at least one song in every sub­se­quent Pres­ley movie.

Eno also has space for the jazz of Miles Davis and the evoca­tive score for Louis Malle’s 1961 film Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, in par­tic­u­lar how it was record­ed: impro­vised live while watch­ing the screen. (Not men­tioned: its huge influ­ence on Ange­lo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks sound­track.)

There’s much more in the inter­view to check out, includ­ing the source of a sam­ple used in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and one of David Bowie’s best but most under­rat­ed songs. Lis­ten here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.