David Lynch Directs a New Music Video for Donovan
I often feel Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan has been misunderstood. When he shows up these days, it’s in songs like his creepy “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season of the Witch,” in films and TV series about serial killers. This may leave younger viewers with the impression that the psychedelic folk hero went down some scary musical paths. But those who remember Donovan in his heyday remember him as the singer of “Sunshine Superman,” his biggest hit, and “Mellow Yellow,” which hit Number 2 in the U.S. in 1966. The following year, he urged his listeners to wear their love like heaven, in verses that rivaled Syd Barrett’s for their love of color: “Color in sky, Prussian blue / Scarlet fleece changes hue.”
Maybe it’s hard to entertain the sentiments of flower power in 2021. But maybe, also, Donovan’s sunniest songs have always had darker threads woven through them. Take “Sunshine Superman”: kind of a creepy tune, with its Lou Reed-like observation about “hustlin’ just to have a little scene,” and its hippie lothario’s confession that he’ll use “any trick in the book” on the object of his desire. Maybe it was early fans who got him wrong. Donovan has always been a weirdo’s weirdo, if you will. And so, it stands to reason that he would pick David Lynch to produce his track, “I Am the Shaman,” and to direct a video for the song for his 75th birthday this past Monday.
The song itself is not new, but was produced by Lynch in 2010 for the album, Ritual Groove, a collection of recordings, “some dating as far back as 1976,” writes one reviewer, held together by the “premise… that the planet is stuffed, the Goddess won’t care if we drift off into oblivion but wait, a saviour appears in the form of the previously humble minstrel Donovan, now a true poet.” (If fans of the cult psychedelic horror film Mandy are reminded of Jeremiah Sand, then we are in grim territory, indeed.) The collaboration gets even more interesting when we learn that “I Am the Shaman” was largely improvised, as Donovan himself wrote on Facebook:
He had asked me to only bring in a song just emerging, not anywhere near finished. We would see what happens. It happened! I composed extempore… the verses came naturally. New chord patterns effortlessly appeared.
This way of working suited him perfectly, as did the backwards-talking production Lynch applied to the track. “David and I are ‘compadres’ on a creative path rarely traveled,” he noted. It is a path that leads straight through the wilds of Transcendental Meditation, for which the video is intended to raise money and awareness. Despite its lack of color, another affinity shared by Donovan Leitch and David Lynch, “I Am the Shaman” shows both artists vibrating at the same frequency, which may either confirm or unsettle what you thought you knew about the mystical poet/singer/shaman Donovan.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Pink Floyd’s First Masterpiece: An Audio/Video Exploration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)
Of the many things that can and have been said of Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece, The Dark Side of the Moon, one consistently bears repeating: it set a standard for how a rock album could function as a seamless, unified whole. There have been few releases since that meet this standard. Even Floyd themselves didn’t seem like they could measure up to Dark Side’s maturity just a few years earlier. But they were well on their way with 1971’s Meddle.
“Meddle is really the album where all four of us were finding our feet,” said David Gilmour. The observation especially applied to the 23-minute odyssey “Echoes,” the “masterwork of the album — the one where we were all discovering what Pink Floyd was all about.” All four members of the band learned to compose together in the rehearsal room, Nick Mason recalled, “just sitting there thinking, playing… It’s a nice way to work — and, I think, in a way, the most ‘Floyd-ian’ material we ever did came about that way.”
“Echoes,” indeed, was the band’s “first masterpiece,” argues Noah Lefevre in the Polyphonic “audio/visual companion” above. The song was originally titled “The Return of the Son of Nothing” because the band had gone into the studio with “nothing prepared,” Nick Mason remembered later that year. As they struggled to find their way forward after the experiments of Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, touring constantly, they felt uninspired, calling all their ideas “nothings.” They expected little from inspirations like the “ping” sound that opens “Echoes.”
Instead, they created the most substantial material of their career to date. Inspired by Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Two Planets,” Roger Waters “wrote lyrics to an epic piece” about being at sea, in every sense, yet glimpsing the potential for rescue and connection. Richard Wright wrote “the whole piano thing at the beginning and the chord structure for the song,” he told Mojo in his final interview, showcasing his serious compositional talents. And the range of tones, effects, and styles that Gilmour pioneered on “Echoes” have become legendary among guitarists and Floyd fans.
“Echoes,” says Lefevre above, changed the band’s direction lyrically and musically, helping them break out of the critical box labeled “space rock.” Instead of “another song about looking upwards to the stars, Waters looked down into the cold, strange depths of the ocean.” It wasn’t the first time rock and roll had visited what Lefevre calls the “psychedelic underwater.” Hendrix was there three years earlier when he turned into a merman. But Floyd found something entirely their own in their exploration. Learn how they did it in the stylish video above, cleverly synced to the whole of “Echoes.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The History of the Guitar: See the Evolution of the Guitar in 7 Instruments
A thoroughly modern instrument with an ancient heritage, the guitar dates back some 500-plus years. If we take into account similar stringed instruments with similar designs, we can push that date back a few thousand years, but there is some scholarly disagreement over when the guitar emerged as an instrument distinct from the lute. In any case, stringed instrument historian Brandon Acker is here to walk us through some of the significant differences, with “seven checkpoints along the way of the history of the guitar,” he says above in a guest visit to Rob Scallon’s YouTube channel.
The guitar is part of the lute family, which dates back some “5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia.” Similar instruments existed all over the ancient world. Which of these eventually becomes the guitar? That is a question, says Acker, for another day, but the first instrument actually identified as a guitar dates from around 1500. Acker doesn’t toe a strict musicological line and begins with an oud from around 700 CE, the bowl-like stringed instrument still played today in Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like nearly all guitar precursors, the oud has strings that run in courses, meaning they are doubled up in pitch as in a mandolin.
Strings would have been made of gut — sheep intestines, to be exact — not metal or nylon. The larger oud is not much different in shape and construction from the Renaissance lute, which Acker demonstrates next, showing how polyphony led to the advent of fingerpicking. (He plays a bit of English composer John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” as an example.) We’re a long way from country and blues, but maybe not as far you might think. The lute was ideal both for solo accompaniment as an ensemble instrument in bands and helped usher in the era of secular song.
The lute set the course for other instruments to follow, such as the Renaissance guitar, the first instrument in the tour that resembles a modern guitar’s hourglass shape and straight headstock. Tuned like a ukulele (it is, in fact, the origin of ukulele tuning), the Renaissance guitars of Spain and Portugal also came in different sizes like the Polynesian version. A versatile instrument, it worked equally well for strumming easy chords or playing complex, fingerpicked melodies, sort of like… well, the modern guitar. Through a few changes in tuning, size, and number of strings, it doesn’t take us long to get there.
The guitar is so simple in construction it can be built with household items, and so old its ancestors predate most of the instruments in the orchestra. But it also revolutionized modern music and remains one of the primary compositional tools of singers and songwriters everywhere. Ever since Les Paul electrified the guitar, high-tech experimental designs pop up every few years, incorporating all kinds of keys, dials, buttons, and extra circuitry. But the instruments that stick around are still the most traditionally styled and easiest to learn and play. Acker’s survey of its history above gives us a better understanding of the instrument’s staying power.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...David Hockney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page
Still working and exhibiting in his eighties, and indeed seeming to grow more and more productive with age, David Hockney has become a living symbol of what it is to live as an artist. This entails not just making a lot of paintings, or even making a lot of paintings with an immediately recognizable style under a well-cultivated image. It means constantly and instinctively converting the reality in which one lives into art, an activity evidenced by Hockney’s sketchbooks. In the video above, the artist himself shows his sketchbook from 2019, one of the sources of the work in the exhibition Drawing from Life held last year at the National Portrait Gallery. (To accompany the exhibition, Hockney published a book, also called Drawing from Life, which features 150 drawings from the 1950s to the present day.)
Focused on Hockney’s renderings of himself and those close to him, Drawing from Life could run for only a few weeks before the NPG had to close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Though filled up the previous year, the artist’s sketchbook depicts a quiet world of domestic spaces and unpeopled outdoor scenes that will look oddly familiar to many viewing it after 2020.
He even appears to have included in its pages an exercise in the style of Giorgio de Chirico, whose aesthetic prescience about our locked-down cities we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. The Bradford-born Hockney’s American city of choice has long been Los Angeles, and certain of his sketches evoke its distinctive pockets of near-pastoral quietude amid urban massiveness.
As befits an internationally renowned artist, Hockney lives in more than one part of the world. It was at home in the more thoroughly pastoral setting of his native Yorkshire that he created the drawings constituting My Window, a limited-edition artist book published by Taschen in 2019. Those images don’t come from his sketchbook, or rather, they don’t come from his analog sketchbook: he executed them all on his iPhone and iPad, devices whose artistic possibilities he’s been enthusiastically exploring for more than a decade. In this readiness to use any medium available, he shows more comfort with technology than do many younger artists. And however many of them have, under the limitations of the past year and a half, got used to sketching the view from their bedroom window, Hockney was doing it long before.
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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...Watch the Most Expensive Scene in Silent Film History: The Train Wreck From Buster Keaton “The General” (1926)
Were it filmed today, the set piece of Buster Keaton’s The General (watch it online here) would surely be computer generated.
The studio would insist upon that.
We like to think Keaton, who both directed and starred, would fight them tooth and nail.
Elaborate stunts thrilled him, and what could be more thrilling — or costly — than sending a 26-ton locomotive over a burning train trestle in hopes the structure would crumble, plunging the locomotive into the river below?
The fact that he had but one chance to get it right must’ve upped the ante in a good way.
The Cottage Grove, Oregon Sentinel reported that the silent legend, having spent the summer filming on location in and around town, was “happy as a kid” to have nailed this most challenging shot.
The making of silent film’s most expensive stunt seems like it would make an excellent subject for a movie, but for the fact there was very little drama surrounding it.
Keaton ingratiated himself with the residents of Cottage Grove, hosting weekly baseball games and presiding over the wedding reception of a local and a crew member. 1500 locals — half the town’s population — found work behind the scenes or as extras.
His relationship with his his 24-year-old costar, Sennett Bathing Beauty Marion Mack, was strictly professional.
When his wife raised objections to his plans to ride the locomotive across the trestle as cameras rolled, he capitulated, installing a papier-mâche dummy as engineer. (At least one of the 3000 spectators who lined the banks to witness the stunt was fooled, when the dummy’s severed head floated past.)
And although the sequence cost a shockingly expensive $42,000 — roughly $600,000 in today’s money — it left little to chance. Carpenters spent two weeks building a 215-foot-long trestle 34 feet above the Row River, then sawed partway through the supporting structures to make them extra vulnerable to the explosive charge that would be triggered soon after action was called. Engineers constructed a downstream dam so the water level would be high enough to receive the train.
The community was so invested by the time cameras rolled, the local government declared July 23 a holiday, so the entire town would be free to attend. (The Sentinel noted how earlier in the summer Keaton himself approached overzealous onlookers to “courteously request, ‘Will you please stand back so as not to cast a shadow on the picture?’”)
The stunt went off without a hitch, its one and only take captured by six strategically positioned cameramen, but The General, one of the American Film Institute’s top 20 films of all time and Keaton’s personal favorite, flopped with both critics and the public. Its domestic box office returns were a mere $50,000 above the $750,000 it cost to make. It caused studios to rethink how much control to grant Keaton.
The train remained where it had landed until WWII, when it was fished up and salvaged for its iron. According to a representative of the Cottage Grove Historical Society, a few leftover pieces of track and steel were still visible as recently as 2006. A mural in town commemorates The General, its star, and the 10 weeks of 1926 when Cottage Grove was the “HOLLYWOOD OF OREGON” (or so the Cottage Grove Sentinel claimed at the time.)
The General enjoys a sterling reputation with silent film buffs, though its Civil War storyline is out of step with 2021 — Keaton’s character aspires to join the Confederacy, and the Union soldiers are the bad guys whose train plummets into the Row.
Perhaps nostalgia will shift to Cottage Grove’s role in Stand By Me — another picture in which trains loom large.
Failing that, the Chamber of Commerce has a replica of Animal House’s Deathmobile they could put on display …
Learn more about the filming of The General’s most celebrated scene and Keaton’s visit to Cottage Grove in Julien Smith’s fascinating article for the Alta Journal.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Search for Origins
Where exactly did “heavy metal” start? Like a similar question—“what is the first rock and roll song?”–there’s not so much a direct answer as a spreading of ingredients over a number of years, all of which combine to create “heavy metal,” and its numerous sub-genres that have sprung forth from it. There’s not so much a year of origin as there is a year after which one cannot claim a beginning. (Now that’s a sentence!)
If you’re confused, this quick history by Polyphonic will answer all of your questions, and hopefully turn you on to a few tracks you’ve never heard before.
So what makes a heavy metal track? Well, first you have to have some loud, heavy, distorted guitars. Polyphonic goes back to blues musicians, as so many rock guitarists continue to do, to suggest the guitar sounds of Pat Hare and Joe Hill Lewis as precursors to that sound. Next you have to have some lighting-fast fingerwork all over the frets—maybe the hyperfast riffage of surf rock legend Dick Dale will do?
That’s all fine and good. But we need to get *heavy* in this metal. And it was the Brits who took on this job. Creating a mood and experimenting with sound marked bands like the Beatles, Stones, and The Who, as they tried to out-do each other. When Paul McCartney heard that The Who had delivered the heaviest song so far in “I Can See for Miles” (which now sounds surprisingly twee compared to later Who songs), he sat down with the band and blasted out “Helter Skelter.” Take that, Pete Townshend.
The Beatles weren’t steeped in the blues, but so many other British bands were, and here’s where blues picked up the gauntlet thrown down by these heavy, droning, bass-laden sounds. While the British Invasion bands wore their Englishness on their (record) sleeves, trad- and psych-blues bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin wanted to sound American. Things got louder, crunchier, slower, and darker. They got really dark with Black Sabbath, which named themselves after the Mario Bava horror film, and brought another ingredient to the stew: dark, fantastic, Satanic imagery. Finally, Deep Purple brought the banshee screechings of Ian Gillan as a final part to the puzzle. Put it all together and what you have is heavy metal, man.
Heavy Metal has gone on to delight generations and piss off all the right people at the same time. It’s given rise to a new sub genre every year, and come out of it with a hard-earned respectability.
The above animated video from Pitchfork will get you caught up with the evolution into chart domination and back out into purist obscurity.
And for those who would rather listen to a history rather than watch one, check this out.
Polyphonic hits most of the well known signposts on the journey, but if you think an essential song is missing, let us know in the comments.
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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.
Read More...Foo Fighters Perform “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson: When Live Music Returns
At Saturday’s benefit concert, “Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World,” the Foo Fighters took the stage and performed “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. It’s a tantalizing taste of the world to come, if we all do our part…
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Read More...
Japanese Carpenters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joineries While Taking Apart a Traditional House
According to myth, the first Japanese poet, Susano‑o, the storm god, named the activity of building as equal to the works of nature. Travel blog Kansai Odyssey writes, “Susano‑o felt rather inspired” while at Suga Shrine in Shimane Prefecture, “and recited the first poem in Japanese literature.” Roughly translated, it reads: “In Izumo, where the clouds form, / I see a fence of clouds. / To protect my wife, I too, built a fence. / These clouds are as my fence.”
An embrace of the natural world intermingles in Japanese culture with a craft tradition renowned the world over, not least in the building arts. “Since the 12th Century,” Grace Ebert writes at Colossal, “Japanese artisans have been employing a construction technique that uses just one simple material: wood. Rather than utilize glue, nails, and other fasteners, the tradition of Japanese wood joinery notches slabs of timber so that the grooves lock together and form a sturdy structure.”
Although mostly practiced in the repair and preservation of historic buildings these days, Japanese joinery still inspires modern woodworkers, engineers, and architects for its incredible precision and endurance. Traditional Japanese buildings are “structures built from natural materials and the knowledge and skills passed down generations,” writes Yamanashi-based carpenter Dylan Iwakuni. “Through the fine skills and knowledge, Japanese Wooden Architecture has been standing for (thousands of) years.”
In the video at the top, you can see Iwakuni and his team’s excitement as they discover traditional joinery while disassembling a 100-year-old Japanese house. The video shows each joint in close-up, adding a title that names its particular type. “As it became a tradition in Japan,” wrote Colin Marshall in a previous post on Iwakuni’s craft, “this carpentry developed a canon of joining methods.” All of the joints, from the very simple to the mind-bogglingly puzzle-like, were of course cut by hand. No power tools in medieval Japan.
Just above, see Iwakuni introduce the art of joinery, and see several more of his demonstrations here. Those interested in going further should see our previous posts at the links below. Find even more hands-on resources at the Japan Woodcraft Association.
via Twisted Sifter
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An Immersive Pink Floyd Museum Exhibition Is Coming to the U.S.: Get Tickets Online
While it’s not technically incorrect to call Pink Floyd a rock band, the term feels somehow unequal to the descriptive task at hand. One doesn’t so much listen to albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as experience them, and this went even more so for their elaborate, increasingly colossal live performances. A retrospective of Pink Floyd’s history, which stretched back to 1965, must do justice to Pink Floyd’s transcendent ambition: this was the goal of Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, an exhibition that first opened at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2017 and is now preparing to make its United States debut at Los Angeles’ Vogue Multicultural Museum this summer.
“You arrive into Their Mortal Remains via a life-size replica of the band’s Bedford van, their black-and-white touring vehicle in the mid-Sixties,” Rolling Stone’s Emily Zemler writes of the V&A show. “The story is told by letters, drawings, posters, video footage, newspaper clippings, music instruments, ticket stubs and odd objects, some of them replicas.”
The items on display come not just from the professional life of the band but the personal lives of it members as well: “Syd Barrett’s red-orange bicycle,” for instance, or “the actual cane used on Waters during his early years” to deliver punishment for misbehavior at school.
Also on display are no few notable musical instruments, including a kit painted for drummer Nick Mason with ukiyo‑e artist Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. “Once it’s behind glass, it just looks a million dollars,” Mason says in one of Their Mortal Remains’ trailers, appearing in his capacity as a consultant to the project. It main curator, graphic designer Aubrey “Po” Powell, co-created the cover art for The Dark Side of the Moon, and brings to bear a thorough knowledge of Pink Floyd’s music, their history, and their sensibility. “It’s way out of scale to anything that you’ve ever seen before,” he says of the exhibition’s design, “and that sort of journey is very reminiscent of psychedelia, of being on psychedelic drugs.”
In its way, the alteration of consciousness is as essential to the Pink Floyd phenomenon as the incorporation of technology (subject of a recent Mason-hosted BBC podcast series) and the expansion of rock music’s sonic territory. On a deeper level, there’s also what V&A director Tristram Hunt calls “an English pastoral idiom,” which will certainly make for an intriguing juxtaposition when Their Mortal Remains completes its installation in the thick of Hollywood Boulevard. There it will run from August 3rd to November 28th, though tickets are already on sale at the Vogue Multicultural Museum’s web site. Though in Los Angeles the consciousness-altering substances that have traditionally accompanied their music are now more legal than ever, be warned that what Salvador Dalí said of himself also holds true for Pink Floyd: they are drugs.
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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...Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)
We can break popular music into two periods: before the Moog and after the Moog. Upon its debut in 1964, that synthesizer made a big splash in the small but long-established electronic-music world by, among other innovative qualities, being smaller than an entire room. Over the next few years, inventor Bob Moog (whose previous line was in theremins) refined his eponymous brainchild to the point that it became accessible to composers not already on the cutting edge of music technology. But for Wendy Carlos, the cutting edge of music technology was where she’d spent most of her life; hence her ability to create the first bestselling all-Moog album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach.
By the beginning of the 1970s, great public curiosity had built up about these new music-making machines, thanks to Carlos’ work as well as that of composers like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Daphne Oram. It was the BBC that produced the clip above, in which Carlos explains the fundamentals of not just the Moog but sound synthesis itself.
She even plays a bit of the second movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #4, Carlos’ rendition of which on Switch-On Bach’s follow-up The Well-Tempered Synthesizer moved no less an authority than Glenn Gould to call it “the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs — live, canned, or intuited — I’ve ever heard.”
In this footage, more than half a century old as it is, only an evident skill at operating the Moog and understanding of the principles of synthesizers suggest Carlos’ identity. At that time in her career she was still known as Walter Carlos, and she has since spoken of having maintained that image by applying a pair of fake sideburns for public appearances. (She would return to the BBC to do another Moog demonstration as Wendy nineteen years later.) Today one dares say those mutton chops look a bit obvious, but it isn’t as a master of disguise that Carlos has gone down in history. Rather, her work has showed the way for generations of musicians, well outside of campus laboratories, to make use of electronically generated sounds in a manner that resonates, as it were, with the wider listening public.
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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.
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