How the Clash Embraced New York’s Hip Hop Scene and Released the Dance Track, “The Magnificent Dance” (1981)
“Before playing guitar for Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley,” John Kruth writes at the Observer, “Gary Lucas worked as a copywriter for CBS/Epic Records,” where he fell in love with a punk band called the Clash, just signed to the label in 1977. “They weren’t easy to work with,” he remembered. “Like Frank Zappa, they spoke about politics, government and corporate interference with radio. They were, as I said, when I came up with the slogan to promote the album: ‘The only group that matters.’”
The slogan stuck and has become something more than marketing hype. Of the slew of British punk bands who made their way to the US in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the Clash had more impact than most others in some unexpected ways. Their classic double album London Calling made Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (the only 90s rap-rock band that matters) take notice and change direction. “It was music I could relate to lyrically,” he says, “much more than the dungeons-and-dragons type lyrics of my metal forebears.”
Moreover, godfathers of political rap Public Enemy found their catalyst in the Clash, and went on to create a raucous, militant sound that was the punk equivalent in hip hop, full of snarling guitars, strident declarations and sirens. The song that most had an impact on PE founder and chief lyricist Chuck D came from the band’s even more sprawling triple album Sandinista!. When Chuck heard “The Magnificent Seven,” the Clash’s attempt to incorporate Grandmaster Flash and the Sugar Hill Gang — six months before Blondie released “Rapture” — “that’s when I started to pay attention,” he says.
“Magnificent Seven” came out of the band’s increasing musical adventurousness in the recording of 1980’s Sandinista!, in which they soaked up influences from every place they toured. “When we visited places,” Mick Jones remembered, “we were affected by that… And for me, New York City was really happening at that moment.” Jones took to carrying a boom box around blasting the latest hip hop. “Joe looked at the graffiti artists,” he says, “and I was taking in things like breakdancing and rap.” The band, bassist Paul Simenon recalls, was “open for information” when they met “people like Futura and Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow.”
The Clash didn’t only take from hip hop, but they tried to give back as well. Their 1981 run at “an aging Times Square Disco,” Jeff Chang writes, proved to be a major opportunity for graffiti artists like Futura, who painted a huge banner that was unfurled onstage every night and got to deliver his own rap while the band backed him. When the Clash announced an additional 11 shows after the NYPD limited capacity, they showed what Chang calls a “naive act of solidarity,” booking Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as an opening act. White American punks sneered at the group; the Clash “responded by excoriating their own fans in interviews, and future Bronx-bred openers, The Treacherous Three and ESG, received marginally better treatment.”
Even more exciting was the fact that the B‑side to “The Magnificent Seven,” a dub remix called “The Magnificent Dance,” had made it to New York hip hop radio and made the band unlikely stars among black American listeners. “The Clash were ecstatic to tune into WBLS and find that the DJs were not only playing ‘The Magnificent Dance’ up to five times a day, but also doing their own remixes of it,” writes Marcus Gray, “dubbing on samples from the soundtrack of Dirty Harry.” While the track, with its loping bass line played by Ian Drury and the Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy, primed dance floors for the success of the following year’s funk/disco “Rock the Casbah,” it was the lyrics that most grabbed listeners like Morello and Chuck D.
“They talked about important subjects,” says Chuck, “so therefore journalists printed what they said.… We took that from the Clash, because we were very similar in that regard. Public Enemy just did it 10 years later.” It may have taken that long for the barriers between punk and hip hop fans to come down, but to the extent that they did, it was in large part thanks to the musical adventurousness of the Clash and the early icons and fans who saw their revolutionary potential.
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“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash” Narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Podcast
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Watch Audio Ammunition: A Documentary Series on The Clash and Their Five Classic Albums
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Parrot Sings AC/DCs “Whole Lotta Rosie”
Here’s the original from AC/DC. And here you can find more sing-alongs from Frank Maglio Tico & the Man. Enjoy.
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Read More...Critics Celebrate Two-Lane Blacktop, the 1971 Existential Road-Movie Masterpiece by Monte Hellman (RIP), Starring James Taylor & Dennis Wilson
The road movie has long since proven itself as one of the great American cultural forms, not least by capturing the imagination of other societies, no matter how distant or different. As New York Times critic A.O. Scott declares in the video above, “one of the finest road movies, and perhaps the purest of them all, is Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop.” In his original 1971 review of the film, a Roger Ebert described Hellman as “an American director whose work is much prized by the French, who have a knack for finding existential truths in movies we thought were Westerns.” In some sense Two-Lane Blacktop is indeed a Western, but Hellman’s death earlier this week will prompt many to revisit the film and see that it’s also much more — as well as much less.
Two-Lane Blacktop ostensibly tells the story of a cross-country race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C. In one car, a customized 1955 Chevrolet 150, are quasi-hippie gearheads known only as the Driver and the Mechanic (joined for a stretch by a hitchhiking Girl). In the other, a brand-new GTO, is a middle-aged man known only as GTO. “The mysticism of this movie is in its absence of mysticism,” says Scott. “It’s so literal-minded, so bare-bones, so absurd, and it exposes not only the romance of the open road and the car culture, but the emptiness, the nihilism.” Hellman, as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody puts it in his own video essay, “shears this composition down to its existential bare bones,” leaving not much more in its reality than what Ebert calls “miscellaneous establishments thrown up along the sides of the road to support life: motels, gas stations, hamburger stands.”
As stripped-down as its ’55 Chevy, Two-Lane Blacktop rolled up in the wake of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, whose success convinced more than a few studios that cheaply produced, counter-culturally themed road movies could hit the box-office jackpot. Though unsuccessful upon its initial release just shy of 50 years ago, the film has only consolidated its power since. Some of that power comes from unexpected sources, such as the casting of singer-songwriter James Taylor and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson as the Driver and the Mechanic. These musicians, to Brody’s mind, “exert a negative charisma: their presence is both powerful and blank, deeply expressive in its neutrality.” Scott sees Taylor’s turn in particular as occupying “a realm beyond acting, in a kind of deadpan, stoned, zen state of non-performance.”
As GTO, Warren Oates brings all the traditional acting chops Two-Lane Blacktop requires, shifting between braggadocio, pathos, and a kind of postmodern posturing as often as he changes his boldly colored V‑neck sweaters. “This nameless driver has bought the James Bond ideal of the well-rounded man,” writes Kent Jones in his essay on the film for the Criterion Collection, “but he prefigures Woody Allen’s Zelig in the desperate speed with which he adapts himself to every new situation and passenger.” These tendencies can’t save him on the entropic open road, only emphasizing as it does what Brody calls “the impossibility of solitude, the tendril-like encroachment of the outside world.” But then, neither can the mechanical single-mindedness of the Driver and Mechanic. This is the American condition, but only in that it’s a high-octane distillation of the human one.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...Hear Joni Mitchell’s Earliest Recording, Rediscovered After More than 50 Years
How excited would you be to listen to a recording, made at an AM radio station in 1963, labeled “JONI ANDERSON AUDITION TAPE”? If you know much about the singer-songwriters of the mid-20th century, you’d be quite excited indeed. For Joni Anderson is none other than Joni Mitchell, who under that married name would go on to become one of the most influential solo performers to come out of the folk-music scene. Not that she prized the designation that thus accompanied her to stardom: “I was never a folksinger,” she recently remembered herself insisting. “I would get pissed off if they put that label on me.”
She had a point. Listen to that 1963 audition tape, on which she sings “The House of the Rising Sun” while accompanying herself on the ukulele, and on some level you’ve got to call it folk music. But even at the age of 19, Mitchell — or rather Anderson — exhibited the distinctively captivating musical presence that would get listeners of more than one generation playing her records until they wore through.
Whether the teenage DJ who recorded her demo had any idea of what she would become at the time, he knew full well the cultural value of the tape when his daughter rediscovered it in the basement more than fifty years later.
In the video just above, you can see that DJ, one Barry Bowman, react to Mitchell’s earliest-known recording after threading it up in his home studio. “Damn!” he says, marveling at the crispness of the sound after all these decades — and the fact that he somehow managed to do justice to both her voice and her strings with the relatively meager equipment available to him at CFQC-AM. The tape even captures the distinctive sound of her alternate-tuned baritone ukulele, which she originally took up while growing up in Saskatoon when her mother vetoed the guitar.
Last year Mitchell’s 1963 version of “The House of the Rising Sun” saw official release as part of the box set Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967). Listening back to the material of that period surprised even Mitchell, and made her change her mind about her earlier folk-related resentments: “It was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings. And I had this realization… I was a folksinger!” She may have transcended folk music — just as she left Saskatoon for Toronto, and then Toronto for southern California — but even Joni Mitchell had to start somewhere.
via Metafilter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)
How many architectural careers have been kindled by Lincoln Logs? Since their invention in the mid-1910s, these deceptively simple wooden building blocks have entertained generations of children, whichever profession they entered upon growing up. I myself have fond memories of playing with Lincoln Logs, which, with about 70 years of history already behind them, were a venerable playtime institution, not that I knew it at the time. I certainly had no idea that they’d been invented by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright — nor, indeed, did I have any idea who Frank Lloyd Wright was. I just knew, as many kids did before me and many do still today, that they were fun to stack up into cabins, or at least cabin-like shapes.
This enduring toy’s full origin story is told in the Decades TV video above. When Wright designed his own family home in Oak Park, Illinois, he included a custom playroom for his six children. Its stock of innovative toys included “geometric building blocks developed by Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who came up with the concept of kindergarten.”
The special fascination for these blocks exhibited by Wright’s second son John Lloyd Wright hinted at a conflict of interests to come: though John “began to feel that spirit of being an architect” in the playroom, says toy historian Steven Sommers, “there was always a tension between his father, who was an architect, and his [own] love for building toys that he’d begun to learn in that Froebel system of early childhood education.” The two intersected when Wright fils assisted Wright père on one of the latter’s most famous works, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
John Lloyd Wright took note of the interlocking timber beams used to make the structure “earthquake-proof” — a design later tested by 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake, which left most of the city destroyed but the Imperial Hotel standing. By that time, the younger Wright had already acted on his inspiration to invent the similarly interlocking Lincoln Logs (see patent drawing above), which quickly proved a hit on the market. Named after the sixteenth president of the United States and the log cabin in which he’d grown up, the product tapped into American frontier nostalgia even at its debut. In the century since, Lincoln Logs have survived wartime material rationing, the rise and fall of countless toy trends, the buying and selling of parent companies, a brief and unappealing late-60s attempt to make them out of plastic, and even the Imperial Hotel itself. For “America’s national toy,” structural endurance and cultural endurance have gone together.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...The Digital Lomax Archive Provides Free Access to the Pioneering Recordings of John & Alan Lomax, Compiled Across 7 Decades
The work of ethnomusicologist father and son team John and Alan Lomax was intended to preserve the local musical cultures of the United States and regions around the world against an encroaching mass media threatening to erase them. But the thousands of Lomax recordings, films, books, articles, and other documents not only conserved regional music; they also helped transform mass culture by introducing local forms that have since become part of a global musical grammar. Lomax and his son Alan — “the man who recorded the world,” as biographer John Szwed called him — popularized folk music thirty years before Dylan recorded his first album and were among the first white listeners to recognize the genius of Robert Johnson.
Alan Lomax began traveling the country with his father in 1933. In 1939, “while doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University,” notes a biography at Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity, “he produced the first of several radio series for CBS. American Folk Songs, Wellsprings of Music, and the prime-time series, Back Where I Come From, exposed national audiences to regional American music and such homegrown talents as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger,” who described Lomax as “more responsible than any other person for the twentieth-century folk song revival.”
Alan Lomax brought blues, flamenco, calypso, and Southern ballad singing, “all still relatively unknown genres,” to New York in the 1940s with concert series like The Midnight Special at Town Hall. “The main point of my activity,” he once said, “was… to put sound technology at the disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas.” A performer himself, he coined the term “cultural equity” to describe this work, a means of advocating for musical cultures left behind by commercialization, the “cultural gray-out,” as he called it. From his first field recordings in 1933 to his 1993 Land Where the Blues Began, which earned a National Book Critics Award, he stayed true to that mission.
Lomax and his father’s work has been “compiled across seven decades” by the Lomax Digital Archive, which provides free and open access to “the entirety of Alan’s photographs and open-reel tape recordings — made between 1946 and 1991… as well as transcriptions of his 1940s radio programs, and a selection of clips from his film and video-work of the 1970s and 1980s.” This huge, searchable library supplements already massive Lomax collections online, such as that housed at the Association for Cultural Equity, and includes “the entire 70 hours of their Kentucky recordings and the 39 hours of Mississippi recordings,” notes a press release. “This latter material includes the first recordings of Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Sid Hemphill.”
Furthermore, the Lomax Digital Archive features online exhibits that “allow for thoughtful, context-rich explorations into specific aspects of the collection.” The first presentation, “Trouble Won’t Last Always,” compiles songs from a series launched during the pandemic that “speak to themes of loneliness, isolation, optimism, endurance, transcendence..,” all universal human experiences. Lomax believed, his daughter Anna Lomax Wood said, “that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field. Not that they’re all alike. But that they should be given the same dignity.” His own dignified approach helped ensure that we could hear and learn from local historical voices from around the world even as economic and political inequities sought to silence them for good. Enter the Lomax Digital Archive here.
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Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 17,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Experience Footage of Roaring 1920s Berlin, Restored & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence
Offered the chance to travel back in time to any city in any period, surely more than a few would choose Berlin in the 1920s. Ideally it would be Berlin in the mid-1920s: after much of the social and economic damage of the Great War had been repaired, but before the Great Depression reached Germany at the end of the decade, doing its part to enable the rise of Hitler. The closest experience to stepping in that time machine yet developed is the video above, a series of clips from Walther Ruttmann’s 1927 documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, previously featured here in Open Culture — but smoothed out, scaled up, and colorized with the aid of applications powered by artificial intelligence.
Describing it as “the real Babylon Berlin of the 1920s” portrayed “from dawn until dusk in three minutes,” the video’s poster emphasizes that the Berlin of the Weimar Republic (the German state from 1918 to 1933) “was a multi-cultural city” — which it is again today, though a little less than a century ago it was one “teeming with flappers, bobbed hair, cloche hats, and the dancing girls of Berlin’s infamous cabaret scene.”
During these Weimar “Golden Years,” Berlin experienced a “cultural explosion,” the vividness of which is underscored by the myriad enhancements performed on Ruttmann’s already striking original footage. These include the use of DeNoise, the interpolation of motion “using a deep learning open source program Dain-App,” and the addition of color with Deoldify.
You may recognize the name of that last application, which was used a couple of years ago to create a “remixed” version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, now nowhere to be found on the internet. Other, more benign uses of DeOldify include the colorization of dance sequences from black-and-white films like Stormy Weather and Hellzapoppin’, as well as of an 1896 snowball fight originally captured by the Lumière Brothers. Ruttmann’s work, and that of other creators of “city symphonies” in the 1920s, builds on that of those cinema pioneers for whom real life was the natural subject, capturing livelier urban environments with dynamic and innovative shooting and editing techniques to match. If you enjoy your three minutes in the DeOldified version of his Berlin, why not spent a little more of your day in similarly deep-learning-enhanced Paris, New York, and Havana of the past as well?
via MessyNessy
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...Is “Rain” the Perfect Beatles Song?: A New Video Explores the Radical Innovations of the 1966 B‑Side
“That one was the gift of God… of Ja actually—the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one.”
The Beatles 1966 Revolver, a mini-masterpiece, contains all the elements that would inform the band’s revolutionary late-60s sound on Sgt. Pepper’s, Abbey Road, The White Album, and Let it Be. The album’s first track, “Taxman,” announced “a sweeping shift in the essential nature of the Beatles’ sound,” writes music historian Kenneth Womack. Its ultimate track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was “the greatest leap into the future” up to that point in their career, argues pop culture writer Robert Rodriguez, who literally wrote the book, or a book, on the sea change that was Revolver.
Critical to discussion of this period, however, is a single that appeared at the same time, and proved just as important to the Beatles’, and thus pop music’s, evolution. Though not especially innovative musically or lyrically, “Paperback Writer” was the first Beatles’ recording to bring Paul McCartney’s bass forward in the mix, showcasing the utterly distinctive playing that would later form the backbone of songs like “Come Together.” The record’s B‑side, “Rain,” moreover, is the first Beatles song to use backwards tape, a staple of psychedelic music thereafter.
In fact, “Rain” was “the first backwards tape on any record anywhere. Before Hendrix, before The Who, before any f*cker,” John Lennon bragged. (He conceded that the novelty hit “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Haaa!” got there a little earlier, “but it’s not the same thing.”). Lennon claimed the song as his, although McCartney later claimed co-authorship. But Lennon gave credit for the backwards voices and guitars to “Ja,” telling Playboy in 1980:
I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana… and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint.
There’s much more to the story of “Rain,” as you’ll hear in the You Can’t Unhear This video above. The track came out of “what would arguably be the most revolutionary week of their recording career… working closely with their beloved producer George Martin and an eager young EMI engineer named Geoff Emerick.” In “Rain,” specifically, they took full advantage of a discovery made on “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the impact of slowing down recordings.
The band “played the rhythm track really fast,” during recording, “so that when the tape was played back at normal speed everything would be so much slower, changing the texture,” remembered Emerick. This led to what McCartney would call a “big ominous noise”:
The drums became a giant drum kit. If you slow down a footstep it becomes a giant’s footstep, it adds a few tones to the weight of the person. So we got a big, ponderous, thunderous backing and then we worked on top of that as normal.
Ringo called it the greatest performance of his musical career: “I think I just played amazing… I think it was the first time I used this trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat.”
Contrarians love takes about iconic artists like the Beatles that overstate the importance of deep cuts and minor recordings. But in the case of “Rain” — the B‑side of a 1966 single that didn’t appear on the album that changed rock and roll and the counterculture that same year– believe the hype. The Beatles themselves single out the song as seminally important to their musical development for good reason. Or as Sir Paul recalls, “It was nice, I really enjoyed that one.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Tony Alva Story
From Jeff Grosso comes The Tony Alva Story, a 2019 documentary about the legendary skateboarder:
One of the key figures in the early evolution of skateboarding from a wholesome, contest based “sport” into the freewheeling art form that it is today was Tony Alva.
Tony is now 63 years old, the oldest professional skateboarder in the world, is considered by many to be the godfather of modern day skateboarding. Alva’s brand of aggression and bravado in the 70’s set the stage for the way skateboarding would be forever defined.
Vans’ The Tony Alva Story chronicles T.A.’s humble beginnings on the streets of Santa Monica to his rise to superstardom as part of the legendary Z‑Boys, his inevitable drug-induced implosion and his ultimate rise from the ashes to accept his rightful place as a beacon of hope and inspiration for generations of skateboarders the world over.
You can find The Tony Alva Story added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Read More...Dave Grohl Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Everlong”
Dave Grohl, like many rock musicians, does not come from a classically trained background. Instead he has an ability to write according to what sounds good, and where noodling around in the studio can bring great rewards. That’s where The Foo Fighters’ best song “Everlong” originates.
In this 2020 clip from Oates Song Fest, Grohl tells the story of “Everlong,” and how it came to him in the studio one day in between working on the band’s second album. It started with a chord.
“I’m not a trained musician, so I don’t know what that chord is,” he says. (The Intertubes seem to agree it’s a Dmaj7). At first he thought it was a chord from Sonic Youth (“Schizophrenia,” in fact), one of his favorite bands of all time. So that was a good start. One chord led to another and soon he had a sketch of a song.
At the time, Grohl was essentially homeless after a divorce from his wife, photographer Jennifer Youngblood. And the band were at a low ebb as well, not happy that their debut album hadn’t taken off like they wanted. But Grohl then fell in love again, this time with Louise Post of the band Veruca Salt. Over Christmas 1996, he wrote the lyrics. He would tell Kerrang magazine in 2006: “That song’s about a girl that I’d fallen in love with and it was basically about being connected to someone so much, that not only do you love them physically and spiritually, but when you sing along with them you harmonize perfectly.”
He recorded a demo of the song, playing all the instruments (he might not be a *trained* musician, but he is a well rounded one), and the finished studio version really didn’t stray too far from the original. Post provided harmonies recorded down a telephone, as she was in Chicago at the time. (You can hear them isolated, along with a lot more gearhead chat on this Produce Like a Pro episode): “I never considered doing this acoustically, I thought it was a rock song,” Grohl adds. That was until he did the Howard Stern show, early in the morning at 6 a.m., and performed it with just solo guitar. “It gave the song a new life,” he said. “It makes the song feel the way I always wish it would.”
The song catapulted the band to the top of the charts, and is considered one of the great rock songs of the 1990s. David Letterman considers it his favorite song, and asked the band to play it at the close of his final show in 2015. For a very specific lyric written about a very specific woman, with chords discovered while just goofing about, it has a universal quality.
via BoingBoing
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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.
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