Unfinished Music Video Of the Week: November 8, 2024

"Cambridge 1969" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - August 16, 2024

"With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - May 10, 2024

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by the Band  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - March 15, 2024

"Dim" by Family (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Cream - Goodbye (1969)

It was the wrong goodbye.

Cream, rock and roll's first power trio, produced four albums, one a double set, within a quarter of a decade before they broke up over musical differences and sensitive egos.  Such a track record in a brief period seems impressive on first glance, but when you notice that their latter two albums (including Wheels of Fire, their 1968 double album) were supplemented by live versions of blues songs that were either hit or miss, you understand why Cream split - all that soloing distanced the members of Cream from the music, each other and themselves.  

Goodbye, released a few months after Cream's farewell concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, is a haphazard attempt at throwing their audience one last morsel before the breakup.  They produced an album much like a commuter running late for work would brew a cup of instant coffee - quickly, on the fly, with little regard for the quality of the result.  Each member of Cream - bassist Jack Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker - contributed a new song to record in the studio and then augmented them with live versions of songs they'd done in the studio on previous albums, the live remakes all taken from their October 1968 Los Angeles Forum concert.  The final product is rather disappointing.  "I'm So Glad" doesn't sound so great the second time around, the Skip James classic beng extended with soloing.  The Bruce original "Politician" and the cover of the blues standard "Sitting On Top Of the World," both originally recorded in the studio for Wheels of Fire, do sound menacing and gritty in concert, as blues rockers should, but the sonic quality isn't up to snuff.

The studio cuts are erratic, to put it charitably.  Bruce's "Doing That Scrapyard Thing" is an embarrassing blend of of American honky-tonk barroom piano and British music-hall posturing, and Baker's "What a Bringdown" is appropriately titled as an appropriate album closer.  Only Clapton's "Badge," which he wrote with George Harrison, is up to the Cream standard.  The lyrics are an enigmatic, Dylanesque look at relationships, romantic and otherwise, and it has one of Clapton's most elegant and direct solos with sincere backing on rhythm guitar from the guest artist, Italian jazz guitarist L'Angelo Misterioso (kidding, it's George Harrison appearing under a pseudonym).  It's the first inkling of Clapton's new direction toward simpler, more basic material in the style of the Band.  

Goodbye isn't a terrible album, but it's barely a cut above meh.  If Cream were the catalyst for future rock trios such as Rush and Nirvana, showing their successors how a power trio works, they also provided to future rock trios a lesson of what doesn't work in a three-person dynamic.  When a trio is focused and respectful of value for money, it can produce something as spellbinding as Rush's Permanent Waves (which, like Goodbye, has six tracks) or as influential as Nirvana's Nevermind.  Otherwise, oh, well . . .

The Band (1969)

 

They seemingly came out of nowhere in 1968, looking like a pack of dirt farmers who'd gotten lost on their way to California to escape the Dust Bowl and playing music that sounded more suitable for 1868, on rudimentary instruments.  But the Band were in fact seasoned musicians, having backed country singer Ronnie Hawkins in Canada and having played for Bob Dylan when he first went electric, and they arrived with experience in interpreting and illuminating American pop forms in their music - though all of them except Arkansas-born drummer-singer Levon Helm were Canadians.  They also arrived with perfect timing; their rustic, sparse rock and roll was an antidote to the more extravagant  sounds coming out of the progressive psychedelic craze.  The Band pretty much put an end to flower power and influenced generations of rock musicians to adopt a simpler approach to music.

Music From Big Pink, their 1968 debut, is considered the gold standard for the Band's approach to music, but it was their self-titled 1969 second LP - commonly known as the Brown Album for obvious reasons - in which the group hit their stride.   The songs explore numerous facets of American culture and history and demonstrate how modern America is inextricably tied to its past.  From the gambling drifter in "Up On Cripple Creek" to the tired old man looking for peace in "Rocking Chair" to the unionized laborer of "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)," the Brown Album evokes a world of vast, rugged valleys, honky-tonk carnivals, workers carousing over a bottle of bourbon, and hardscrabble farms.  It's a slice of Americana that's more realistic than romantic.  The power of class privilege in "The Unfaithful Servant" and the hard luck kid in "Jawbone" speak to the injustice and misfortune of a tumultuous way of life. 

The music befits the sometimes abstruse lyrics, sounding creaky and weathered but delivered with a fresh veneer of cheekiness and measured production.  Bassist Rick Danko's subtle bass lines blend perfectly with Helm's understated drumming, and keyboardists Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, respectively on piano and organ, work in concert as well as a first-class second baseman-shortstop team in baseball, their two-tiered approach rarely equaled in rock.  On top of all this are the expressive vocals - Manuel's haunting delivery, Danko's plaintive approach, and Helm's gentle Ozark growl all ecoking the raw country blues that rock and roll derived from.

While the Band can certainly adhere to tradition, they also can rock out ferociously, as "Look Out Cleveland," a warning to America of trouble on the way, demonstrates.  Guitarist Robbie Robertson, the Band's principal songwriter, foregoes his usual low-key approach to his six-string and pushes some riffs as heavy as the thunder the lyrics describe.  But Robertson's greatest moment on the Brown Album is possibly his greatest song ever, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."  Told from the perspective of a poor Southern farmer, masterfully voiced by Helm, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" illustrates the plight of the working-class white Southerner laboring under the yoke of the plantation-owning aristocrats and suffering the effects of a civil war initiated by those same slaveholding plantation owners but still willing to defend their homes and their families against Northern aggression.  As a Canadian, Robertson knew Americans better than they knew themselves; "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" showed how modern America was (and remains today) captive to the legacy of the Civil War and how the United States can't put its past adversity behind as it faces new challenges. 

The Beatles - Get Back (1969, 2021)

(This is a special record review.)

Peter Jackson's Disney + documentary on the Beatles' January 1969 Get Back sessions changed a lot of minds on how those sessions played out - we now know they were not the dismal, despondent affair that the Beatles themselves remembered them to be.  But no amount of historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight can change my verdict on the original attempt producer Glyn Johns made at making an album out of the sessions.  It's still a mess.

Johns, who engineered the original Get Back sessions that led to the Let It Be album that Phil Spector ultimately wrought, tried to make an LP out of the sessions in the spring of 1969 and concentrated on playing up the Beatles' rough edges - "warts and all," as it were.  He hoped to capture the relaxed nature of the sessions and preserve the feel of the original recordings, which were mostly recorded live, with as few overdubs and edits as possible.  Having circulated for decades as a bootleg, Johns' Get Back album has always been revered by Beatles fans who were displeased with Spector's efforts, but in actuality, there's little to recommend of it.  I have the bootleg, and EMI and Apple have made the original Get Back LP available in the new Let It Be box set and on YouTube, professionally remixed for the digital age.  Even after hearing the new remix of Get Back, though, I still don't get why so many Beatles fans prefer it to Let It Be.

The sound quality is the best asset of the Johns album; Johns went the extra mile to get an authentic, rootsy sound that is mostly lacking from Spector's Let It Be.  My big problem with Get Back is the choice of takes of the songs.  While Spector used more of the takes from the rooftop performance of January 30, 1969 and from the studio performance of the following day, Johns opted for earlier, unformed takes from earlier in the sessions.  Earlier recordings of "Dig a Pony" and "I've Got a Feeling" thus sound as unprofessional and sloppy as you might imagine, with flubbed lyrics and unnecessary improvisations.  An earlier recording of "Two Of Us" struggles with a slightly lower tempo and some disconcerting hesitation, and after hearing a longer, fuller version of "Dig It" here, I'm ever more grateful that Spector kept his remix to fifty seconds.  And while Johns' remix of the "The Long And Winding Road" - using the same take Spector used - is free of a Mantovani-style orchestra (this mix also appeared on Anthology 3), the better performance of this song remains the one seen in the original Let It Be movie (which made its debut on disc on Let It Be . . . Naked).      

Johns' inclusion of tune-ups, false starts and studio banter are just as distracting as those on Spector's Let It Be - more so, in fact, because Johns uses more of them.  It gets to be a distraction that diminishes even the better musical performances.  The takes Johns includes throws in some cross-talking, most annoyingly notable with John Lennon's disparagingly improvised square-dance lyric in Paul McCartney's "Teddy Boy," a song that didn't even make the final cut in either the Let It Be movie or on the album.  (And for good reason: It's not one of Paul's best.  It ended up on his first solo LP.)  A medley of an improvised instrumental with a brief cover of the  Drifters' "Save the Last Dance For Me" piques interest, but its over so quickly that you're left wondering why the Beatles couldn't follow though on a promising idea. 

Among the highlights of Get Back is its only rooftop track, "The One After 909," which is a lot more vivid than Spector's remix of the same take.  Johns also excelled with his mix of George Harrison's "For You Blue," as it uses the original vocal track and not the one George overdubbed later.  You can really hear "the warmth and freshness of a live performance" here that Spector's LP promised but rarely delivered.  But the ragged, demo-style quality of Get Back is tiresome and makes it sound like the Beatles didn't care what got put out in their name.  Except that they did; the Beatles rejected this album twice, even after Johns revised it by adding okay but undistinguished remixes of "Across the Universe" and "I Me Mine." 

No, Get Back is not the great lost treasure of the Beatles' January 1969 sessions.  It means well as an album that tries to present the Beatles in a more intimate and relaxed setting, but it doesn't do well in presenting the best elements of their music.  Spector doesn't get off the hook, though; Let It Be may be more presentable, but it suffers from its own deficiencies.  As for Get Back, Johns may have produced an album closer to the Beatles' original "live" idea and with a greater sense of consistency, but it depicts the Beatles not as a band rediscovering their roots but as a lackadaisical rock group going through the motions.  Inadvertently, it depicts Glyn Johns as a lackadaisical producer doing the same.

Music Video Of the Week - April 3, 2020

"Come and Get It" by Badfinger  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - February 7, 2020

"I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - November 29, 2019

"Delta Lady" by Joe Cocker  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - October 25, 2019

"Come Together" by the Beatles  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - October 4, 2019

"Something" by the Beatles  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

'Abbey Road': The Release

The Beatles' Abbey Road was released in the United Kingdom fifty years ago this past Thursday (September 26) and released in the United States fifty years ago today.  Here's yet another outtake from the cover photo session.  (The police van may be gone, but, as you can see, Paul Cole is still there!) 

The Beatles' last album, though the penultimate release, was issued with little fanfare by Apple, and with good reason - the band was done.  The group spent little if any time promoting it, and after the generous packaging of Sgt. Pepper, the Magical Mystery Tour EP or LP (depending on which country you live in), and the White Album, there was no lyric sheet, no picture book or poster, and no cardboard cutouts - none of that stuff.  Without even their name on the front cover, the music was expected to do the selling.

It did.  Abbey Road spent seventeen out of eighteen consecutive weeks at number one on the British LP chart (displaced temporarily for that eighteenth week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed), and it spent eleven weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Two Hundred LP chart. in the United States, being certified by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers as the best-selling album of 1969 - and it was only out for the final three months of the year.  Ironically, it was Allen Klein who would report, two months after Paul McCartney announced the Beatles' split, that it was the best-selling Beatles album in America ever, with five million copies sold. Seven million more would be sold by 2001, and even though it would lose its status as the Beatles' American bestseller to the White Album, it remains extraordinarily popular.

It was popular with musicians, who would use the LP's high-gloss production and its complex arrangements as a template for their own records.  Seventies classic rock was born here - whether it was raw blues-rock from Bad Company and Humble Pie, the bright melodies of Elton John, or the moody, pensive art rock of Yes, it would be hard to find any rock music that played on mainstream radio during the Me Decade that was not inspired by Abbey Road.  Interestingly, some of what the Beatles did on Abbey Road was influenced by contemporaries that, in turn, influenced those same contemporaries; for example, the Beatles tired to copy the guitar musings of Fleetwood Mac, which at the time was a blues band led by Peter Green, on "Sun King;" half a decade and change later, a different Fleetwood Mac with a different lineup would be making the sort of bright pop-rock that characterized Abbey Road.

The influence of Abbey Road wouldn't last forever, though; punk bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash closed the curtain on the era the Beatles initiated just before their own end.  But echoes of Abbey Road still reverberate for any band that simply doesn't want to be the most popular band, but also the best band.

The reviews upon Abbey Road's release were as positive as the public's reaction. Writing in Melody Maker, Chris Welch declared that "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism . . .. While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive."  Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times called it "refreshingly terse and unpretentious," and Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn said it was "breathtakingly recorded" and was enthusiastic about the medley, calling the joining of various fragments a "uniformly wonderful suite" that proved the the Beatles had "far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."

Critical judgment on Abbey Road was not uniform, though, with a few critics finding the music too slick and artificial, and some of them thought it was quite boring.  The most interesting critique of Abbey Road, though, came from then-Family lead singer Roger Chapman.  Offering his opinion on Abbey Road and other record releases of the time for Melody Maker, he said he was largely unimpressed by the Beatles' LP, finding their music derivative and lacking in personality.  "In the past the Beatles have been able to borrow things and put themselves into it," Chapman said.  "This is a bit too obvious though."  He called "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" "an inferior version of 'When I’m Sixty-Four'" and said  that "Octopus’s Garden" would have been "a complete washout" from any other band.  But what seemed incredibly prophetic was Chapman's final kiss-off:

Ever since their last LP they have been making records as if it is something they have to do because they are the Beatles. Maybe the whole thing has got beyond them. If this album had been by anybody else it would have been a complete washout. The Beatles have been a major influence on the whole music scene, but I don’t see them being an influence anymore.

And just like that, the Beatles bowed out in the nick of time.  It took another musician to see that the Beatles' time was almost up.  But Abbey Road was a nice parting gift.

And it's the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to the new Super Deluxe Edition of the LP, which features:

• A new stereo mix of the album, produced by George Martin's son Giles Martin
• Two compact discs of demos and outtakes
• a CD with a Dolby Atmos mix of the album plus a 5.1 surround of the whole album plus a high-resolution stereo mix of the whole album
• a book - another super-cool book!

And soon you'll be able to hear it on YouTube.  No book, though.

That's the end.

*

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
But she doesn't have a lot to say.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day.
I want to tell her that I love her a lot,
But I gotta get a bellyful of wine.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
Someday I'm going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I'm going to make her mine.

'Abbey Road' Trivia

On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the British release of the Beatles' Abbey Road album (its American release anniversary date is October 1) , here are some things you may not have known about this monumental LP:

The final vocal track of "Oh! Darling," the only song I haven't brought up yet, was recorded after Paul McCartney screamed himself hoarse for days to perfect the vocal style he wanted.  He was going after a Little Richard sound, lamenting that he could have generated it quickly back in the Beatles' early days.  "I wanted it to sound like I'd been performing it on stage all week," Paul later said of the song.

"Oh! Darling," a Get Back / Let It Be reject, was a song John Lennon was convinced he could have sung better.

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, who had a huge hit in Britain in 1970 with "Saved By the Bell" when he was estranged from his brothers, would later cover "Oh! Darling" solo, with a ballad arrangement, for the ill-fated 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie.  It was released as a single, and its chart success in the U.S. was one of the few good things about that film, as it reached number fifteen on the Billboard singles chart.  (By contrast, "Saved by the Bell" only reached number 87 in the U.S.)

A fellow Beatle - likely Paul - can be heard shouting approval for John's scream at 4:32 into "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" in the background.  Many fans mistakenly believe it's an engineer telling John to lower his voice.

The final master of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was timed at eight minutes, four seconds before Geoff Emerick snipped off the end of the tape at John's request, hence the track on the record is missing the last twenty seconds.

A bridge verse of "Something," present on George Harrison's February 1969 demo of the song (which is available on Anthology 3), was dropped later.

Despite covers from artists like Frank Sinatra and Joe Cocker, George's favorite cover of "Something" was from Ray Charles.  Billy Preston - who was Charles' organist before working with the Beatles as a side man - played organ on the original Beatles recording.

What do Joe Cocker's self-titled second album and Ray Stevens' Everything Is Beautiful LP have in common?  Both albums contain covers of "Something" and "She Came In the Bathroom Window."  Ray Stevens recorded "She Came In the Bathroom Window?" Trust me, I'm not making that up.

John wrote "Mean Mr. Mustard" in India after reading a newspaper article about a miser who concealed his money to keep people from forcing him to spend it.  He denied that the line about Mr. Mustard keeping a ten-shilling note up his nose had anything to do with cocaine.  John left the song unfinished because he thought it was a "piece of garbage."

The lyric "Mean Mr. Mustard sleeps in the park, shaves in the dark" inspired country songwriters Debbie Hupp and Bob Morrison to write the line "Like a rhyme with no reason in an unfinished song, there was no harmony" in Kenny Rogers' 1979 hit song "You Decorated My Life."  (Okay, I made that one up! :-D ) 

Mean Mr Mustard's sister's name was originally Shirley, as evidenced from the May 1968 Esher demo of the song, but John changed it to Pam when he realized he could make a perfect segue into "Polythene Pam," which follows "Mean Mr. Mustard" in the Abbey Road medley.  He said he made the change "to make it sound like it had something to do with it."  I know what you're thinking - "Surely you can't be serious!"  I am serious.  And don't call me Shirley!

"Polythene Pam" was inspired by a woman John met in Jersey (the island in the English Channel, not the U.S. state of New Jersey) who was a hanger-on of British beat poet Royston Ellis.  The girl liked to dress in polythene, although John thought up the part about jack boots and kilts.  "Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about," John later said.

Though the lyrics of Paul's "Golden Slumbers" may have been a variation of a Thomas Dekker poem, the music was Paul's own. Dekker's words had in fact been set to music before, and Paul found the sheet music for the song in his stepsister's piano.  But since Paul couldn't remember the original melody and can't read music, he decided to set his spin of Dekker's words to his own tune.

John wanted straight rock and roll for Abbey Road, but Paul and George Martin wanted to make a conceptual work mirroring Sgt. Pepper, which John was dead-set against.  So side one was meant to please John, while side two was meant to please Paul.

During the Abbey Road sessions, Paul recorded the demo for "Come and Get It," the song he wrote for the Apple band Badfinger to record.  Badfinger (below) did the song exactly the way Paul taped it, and it became the theme song for the Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian, co-starring Ringo Starr.  When people heard "Come and Get It" in 1970, many of them thought it was a new Beatles single.  Of course it was a hit.  (Paul's original demo is on Anthology 3.)

Abbey Road was the first number-one album of the seventies in America, appearing at the top of the Billboard charts at the beginning of January 1970.

Alas, by then, the Beatles were unraveling, with only a few sessions and a couple of record releases left to them. :-(

The Whole Kitchen Sink

The Beatles' Abbey Road album marked a major leap forward for rock in terms of production and craftsmanship, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the eight-song medley the dominates side two.  It's as if the Beatles, knowing this LP would be their last hurrah, meant to save all of their best tricks for last and present all of them in a spellbinding finish, much like fireworks displays where numerous firecrackers are lit simultaneously and light up the sky for a grand finale.  But the genesis of the medley was actually more mundane than that.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney had all of these underdone and unfinished songs on file, and Paul proposed the idea of weaving these songs together to fill out Abbey Road so as not to let them go to waste.  A couple of these songs are actually in a complete state, and some of them would be covered outside the medley context - Joe Cocker's masterful remake of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" being one such example.

Producer George Martin (above, with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr during the Abbey Road sessions) provided the impetus for the medley, hoping to get John and Paul to think more seriously about music and take a more professional, conceptual approach to sound.  John, of course, couldn't be bothered with such a grandiose idea (he famously hated the medley), but he did contribute some of his lyrical doodles and he also added some of the heaviest guitar playing the Beatles got on disc.

"You Never Give Me Your Money," the opening song in the medley, sets the stage for what's to come by illustrating Paul's frustrations with Apple and with business manger Allen Klein and his desire to get away with his wife Linda.  The song itself is a series of fragments that starts out as a piano ballad, goes to a heavy blues arrangement, and then concludes with an exhilarating expression of freedom - "Soon we'll be away from here, step on the gas and wipe that tear away"  before fading into a series of interludes from John, in which he shows off his inventiveness and his word play before handing the baton back to Paul.

John's "Sun King" provides a soft landing for the urgency of "You Never Give Me Your Money" with the gentle. reverberating electric guitar symbolizing the dawn of a new day.  The Beatles' harmony vocals welcoming the Sun King are warm and full, drifting into a nonsense verse of pseudo-Spanish and pseudo-Italian words that set up the listener for a sprightlier excursion in the form of "Mean Mr. Mustard," about an unsavory fellow with weird habits, but then followed by the intense, gritty rock of "Polythene Pam," presumably Mr. Mustard's sister, a very kinky girl and the kind you don't take home to Mother - and whom the protagonist of Rick James' "Super Freak" could never have held a candle to.  The trio of Lennon songs are a four-and-a-half-minute tour of John's mind, showing the quirkiness he brought to the Beatles as they were preparing for their final curtain call.  (Nicholas Schaffner once suggested that Mr. Mustard and his sister Pam could have been characters in Lennon's books "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard In the Works.")  John then leaves it to Paul to bring it all home.

The bright pop of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" - inspired by an overzealous female fan who broke into Paul's house - gives way to Paul's tender lullaby "Golden Slumbers," a set of regretful lyrics reworked from a poem by the seventeenth-century English dramatist Thomas Dekker.  Paul's pensive piano and vocals, backed by George Martin's string arrangements, find Paul, older and wiser than his days as a young rock and roll musician, looking for a way to get back home and find peace after seven tumultuous years as a Beatle.  That weariness is accentuated in "Carry That Weight," a majestically arranged expression of the pressure Paul and the other Beatles were feeling in late 1969, and one that brings everything back full circle with a musical reprise of "You Never Give Me Your Money" that adds a new lyric to that song's melody about breaking down in the middle of the celebrations - the celebrations of the Beatles.

Finally, "The End" has all four Beatles showing off their instrumental chops as John, Paul and George Harrison duel each other with their heavy guitar solos, with Ringo Starr playing a drum solo - for only the second time in his career - to clear a path for his bandmates to let 'er rip.  After that, all that's left is for Paul to go out with a symphonic flourish with this parting word of wisdom - "And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make . . ."  It was a simple way to sum up the medley and the Beatles' mutual partnership.

Except that it didn't.  After nearly fifteen seconds of silence, a chunky rock chord bursts out of nowhere to introduce "Her Majesty," a 23-second ditty that lightly makes fun of Queen Elizabeth II as an object of desire.  The song was originally placed in the medley in between "Mean Mr Mustard" and "Polythene Pam," but Paul didn't think it fit, so he had it taken out.  Engineer John Kurlander, who was told never to destroy a Beatles outtake, tacked it onto the lead-out tape at the end of the medley so it wouldn't get thrown out, and when Paul heard it after the fourteen-second gap of silence that followed "The End," he liked the surprise effect so much, he decided to keep it on - and not list it on Abbey Road's back cover with the rest of the tracks to surprise the fans.  (Compact disc re-issues list the song on the back cover.)  

"Her Majesty" was edited out rather haphazardly, but it was only supposed to a rough mix that was to be fixed later. The crashing chord that begins the song as actually the closing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard," and the final chord of "Her Majesty" was buried in the opening of "Polythene Pam."  So the song is cut off at the end, leaving abrupt silence at the end of side two of Abbey Road  just as the end of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" does at the end of side one.  In the case of "Her Majesty," it was a perfect way to conclude the last album the Beatles would ever record together. They bowed out the way they came in back in 1962 - unexpectedly and without warning.

That's one hell of a fireworks show. :-)           

Music Video Of the Week - August 30, 2019

"The Star-Spangled Banner" by Jimi Hendrix  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Here Comes Something

Although fans regard George Harrison's White Album songs as his best work in the Beatles, his Abbey Road songs are undoubtedly his most popular work with the group.

The first of these songs, "Something," was actually written during the White Album sessions.  George did a run-through of "Something" while the studio was being set up to record his song "Piggies," and co-producer Chris Thomas liked "Something" so much that he suggested to George that the Beatles record that instead, ensuring him that it was worthy of release.  A nonchalant George said that maybe he'd give it to Jackie Lomax, the singer he'd discovered for Apple, for a single. 

Apple had even made a bigger discovery in the form of American singer-songwriter James Taylor, who was signed by Apple A&R man Peter Asher (brother of Jane, partner of Gordon), and George had a good reason not to want to give "Something" to him.  Because one of James Taylor's songs inspired it!

Taylor recorded a song for his Apple album called "Something In the Way She Moves," and George was moved to write a similar song.  Both songs start with the same lyric - the title of the Taylor song - but apart from the sentiment of having a woman by one's side, the resemblance between the two songs ends there.  "Something In the Way She Moves" has an entirely different set of verses and a different chorus, and as recorded in 1968, it's a brittle, sparse song that opens with a harpsichord.  (Most listeners are more familiar with the more relaxed, re-recorded version that appeared on Taylor's 1976 greatest-hits compilation, his first album having been out of print throughout the seventies for legal reasons.)  "Something," the George Harrison song, was recorded by the Beatles as a lush power ballad, anchored by Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's tumbling drums, with an understated guitar solo and a similar low-keyed piano line from John Lennon backed by a string arrangement from George Martin.  Despite taking a line from James Taylor - who left Apple with Peter Asher, his manager and producer, after Asher was fired by Allen Klein from the label - George said he was trying to write a soulful ballad in the style of Ray Charles, and the feel is indeed far more soulful than the more folkish leanings of Taylor's song.

Little did George know that the song would define his time with the Beatles forever.  The group hadn't planned a single to accompany Abbey Road, and so when Allen Klein decided that a corresponding single was needed, he instigated the release of "Something" as a 45.  It was released as a single in the United States on October 6, 1969, five days after the American release of Abbey Road, and it was released as a single in Great Britain on October 31 of that year - more than a month after Abbey Road's September 26 British release.  Thus, "Something" is the only Beatles single in either country issued from an already issued album.  But it was also the first and only Beatles single written by George, which was long overdue.  George was surprisingly as nonchalant about such a milestone as he'd been about the song itself.  "They blessed me with a couple of B-sides," he said at the time, "but this is the first time I've had an A-side.  Big deal!"

It was indeed.  It was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and while it only made number four in Britain - understandable, since record buyers in Britain usually bought singles and albums, while Americans tended to buy either singles or albums - it hit number one in the U.S., meaning that even casual record buyers who didn't invest much in LPs wanted this song in their collections.  In fact, "Something" became the Beatles' third bestselling single in America, after "Hey Jude" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand." Frank Sinatra (below, in 1969) called "Something" "the greatest love song in fifty years, and he recorded it and performed it in concert.  He once told his audience that the song was indicative of Lennon and McCartney's songwriting genius . . . inadvertently yet perfectly summing up George's role in the Beatles. :-D

The crediting error notwithstanding, one must wonder what song from 1919 that Sinatra - who released an album of Rod McKuen songs in 1969 - must have been thinking of, and why Lennon and McCartney couldn't match it.  As for George's attitude toward John and Paul for being dismissive of his work, he told them, "Maybe now I just don't care whether you like 'em or not, I just do 'em."

And what he did was not just admired by Sinatra but by Joe Cocker, who was the first artiste to record "Something" - before the Beatles! - for his second album, though it came out after Abbey Road.  George in fact played guitar on Cocker's recording.  (For the record, Jackie Lomax never recorded "Something," as George once envisioned.)  Other cover versions came from James Brown, Shirley Bassey, and, I kid you not, Ray Stevens.

But that wasn't all.

"Here Comes the Sun" was George's other contribution to Abbey Road, written in the spring of 1969 when he chose to spend the day in Eric Clapton's garden rather than go to a business meeting at Apple.  It was the first really warm day since the end of winter, and George found bright optimism in the change of seasons.  Clapton's garden inspired a song that felt as warm and inviting as the sun itself, with a light folk melody anchored by time signatures inspired by Indian music.  The Beatles' recording - for which John was absent - centered around George's inviting acoustic guitar line, augmented by the enveloping comfort of the sound his Moog synthesizer.  It's the sound of renewal, the sonic equivalent of a bright ray of light piercing the fading winter clouds.  The Moog, together with George Martin's score, is a potent symbol of spring having spring again.

Not too many songs encapsulate the mere pleasure of sitting in a garden, though Stephen Stills' Manassas song "Johnny's Garden" (inspired by a garden on an English estate he'd bought, Johnny being the gardener) is right up there with "Here Comes the Sun."  The Beatles' original recording of this song could have easily been released as a single in Britain and America as a follow-up to "Something."  It never was (though it appeared as the B-side to "Oh! Darling," another Abbey Road track, in Japan), but the song would find success on singles charts in the form of covers.  Steve Harley and his group Cockney Rebel released their version of "Here Comes the Sun" as a single in 1976, and that record went to number ten in Britain.  In America, though, Richie Havens' 1971 version of "Here Comes the Sun," which made it up to number sixteen on the Billboard singles chart, is the definitive cover.  Here is a clip of Havens performing the song on the German pop show "Beat-Club" in 1971.

As Beatles author Chris Ingham noted, George's song struck a chord with many black American performers who, having come out of the civil rights struggle, expected better times to come, which is why Nina Simone covered "Here Comes the Sun" a year after Havens did; they saw the song as a metaphor for their optimism.  As for this version, Ingham wrote, "This elated, upbeat campfire arrangement for acoustic guitar, pedal steel and bongos captures the Woodstock vibe Havens was famous for."

Maybe if John Lennon and Paul McCartney had taken George as seriously as Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker, Nina Simone, and Richie Havens all did, the Beatles might have stayed together into the 1970s and made some fine records matching if not exceeding Abbey Road.  But in the fall of 1969, it was already too late for that.

Music Video Of the Week - August 23, 2019

"Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Weighing Heavy On His Mind

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was the first song on Abbey Road to be started and the last song to be completed.  The Beatles commenced it under peculiar circumstances; it was started on February 22, 1969, three weeks after the end of the Get Back / Let It Be sessions at Apple Studios in Savile Row. By that February, the Apple Studios facility was being rebuilt (it would close in 1975), and EMI Studios at Abbey Road were booked solid, so "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was begun at Trident Studios (defunct since 1981).  The first session on this song was overseen by Glyn Johns and augmented by Billy Preston on keyboards, just as the Get Back / Let It Be sessions had been.  Though left off Let It Be, the Beatles would include "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" on Abbey Road.  It was one of a handful of songs recorded between February and May of 1969, before the group got serious about making one more album with George Martin, so it seems ironic that a recording that began somewhat haphazardly and at the start of a quite random period for the group (the Beatles stumbled through the late winter and spring of 1969 with little rhyme or reason) would become a cornerstone of an album known for its professionalism and polish.

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was such a complex recording, yet the song - the longest song the Beatles ever recorded (note to wiseacres - "Revolution 9" is a sound collage, not a song!) - is actually quite simple.  After helping to re-invent songwriting with literary songs such as "Norwegian Wood," "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," John Lennon was now offering a song comprised of lyrics with only fifteen words, with a pronoun-laden title that recalled songs from the Beatles' earlier career more than anything from their later years.  But after having married Yoko Ono, John was going in a different direction, writing words that were more direct and raw to express himself.  And "I Want You (She's So Heavy) was a perfect expression of his feelings for Yoko.

John, who would take this style to the extreme on his first solo album, would explain it this way to Rolling Stone. "When you're drowning," he said, "you don't say, 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me.' You just scream."  And here he was screaming how much and how badly he wanted Yoko, and how heavily she weighed on his life.  Unlike with John Hartford, nothing rested gentle on John Lennon's mind.

The gritty, metallic rock and roll music of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was another move by John to get back to basics, as it's dominated by John's and George Harrison's biting guitars and Paul McCartney's elliptical bass, with a low-keyed by steamy guitar solo part of the way through, all carried by Ringo Starr's understated drums.  John lets the tension build through the song leading up to one of his most vivid, larynx-tearing vocal shouts - "Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"- in a fashion not heard since the old days of Please Please Me and With the Beatles and a couple of Larry Williams covers. 

But the song really gets cooking when the Beatles go into the instrumental coda.  We hear John sing, "She's so . . . " and we wait for him to finish his thought.  He never does.  Not only the music get heavier - one critic said that "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" "pre-dated Black Sabbath's creation of doom rock by several months" - but it gets dirtier and denser as what sounds like a gale-force wind comes in and envelops the repetitive riff, as if to suggest, like the rainbow murals of artist and hippie nun Corita Kent do, turbulent emotional complexity.  The sound is actually white noise, not unlike the sound from a radio tuned to a frequency unavailable in the immediate area.  White noise has long been a problem in recording sound, kept out as much as possible by recording engineers, yet here John Lennon, with the use of George's Moog synthesizer, generated white noise on purpose and turned it into music.  When Abbey Road was remastered for compact disc in the 1980s, though, that same white noise on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" would be a problem because of the higher range of digital sound.

And so it goes on and on and on and on . . . lulling the listener into a hypnotic state . . . and suddenly, nothing, which likely caused many a Beatles fan to jerk forward in shock.  The abrupt volume slash at mid-bar was meant to do just that, as well as to give "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" an ending as powerful as the music itself.  According to tape operator Alan Parsons, who was present at the mix-and-running-order session for Abbey Road, John was listening to the master of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" during the session, deciding where and how to end the song, when in a burst of inspiration, he pointed to the tape and told Geoff Emerick, "There! Cut the tape there!"  And so Emerick did.  A simple act, but one that was revolutionary - there likely wasn't a song or an LP side before this in the history of recorded music that ended so definitively.  The element of surprise fades with repeated listenings and also when heard on the sideless compact disc version, as "Here Comes the Sun," which began side two on the original vinyl release, begins almost immediately. But it's still a powerful ending.

Emerick's simple act also underscored the gravity of the Abbey Road mix-and-running-order session that finalized the LP, which took place fifty years ago today.  Though there would be additional Beatles recording sessions in 1970 to finalize Let It Be, this session on August 20, 1969 marked the last time all four Beatles were present in the studio from which they began their careers and changed popular music forever.

Half a Million Strong

Woodstock may not be an historic event on the level of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Wellington's victory at Waterloo, Lincoln's second inaugural address, or the Versailles peace conference, but when you have nearly 500,000 kids assembling in a field in Bethel, New York for three days of peace and music and having just that with no trouble at all, you have to admit that it's quite an achievement.

Everything that could have gone wrong with having a massive outdoor festival being overrun by more people who came with than without tickets and having too little food and too many drugs did, in fact, go wrong, but the audience was in a peaceful, relaxed mood in a peaceful, relaxed field on Max Yasgur's dairy farm, and they got to listen to great music from bands such as the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Jefferson Airplane, as well as solo artists such as Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, and Jimi Hendrix.  They were so well-behaved that they turned lemons in to lemonade by sharing food, accepting food from the locals, and sliding through mud caused by a severe rainstorm (this was, after all, summer in upstate New York) and enjoying the moment, and when the festival was over, they picked up their trash and left Mr. Yasgur's field they way they found it.  When things did go terribly wrong, there was someone around to set things right, like when a young woman cut her foot on broken glass and a New York state trooper - this was when young people feared authority - helped her get into his car so he could bring her to the hospital and fourteen concertgoers helped him drive out of the mud by pushing his car for him.

Cynics look at Woodstock and lament the liberal use of recreational drugs, the torrential rains, the inadequate sound, and the lack of amenities, and there were other shortcomings.  One was the lack of diversity in the audience despite the inclusion of black performers and also Carlos Santana's band, and a black music festival in Harlem that same month was more orderly and more family-friendly than Woodstock could ever be.  The hard truth is that this was where the divergence of white music and black music accelerated, though it wasn't necessarily racially motivated.  Most of the performers at Woodstock were unattached to traditional show-business standards, while many mainstream black artists were more conventional.  I can't imagine any of the popular Motown acts of the time, like the Supremes or the Temptations, bringing their exquisitely choreographed moves and their immaculately polished looks to an audience that had rejected that sort of thing, and it should be noted that some Motown acts were big draws on the nightclub circuit.  In fact, the last Supremes show featuring Diana Ross, which took place five months after Woodstock, was at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.  I'm still perplexed as to why B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Odetta, or Muddy Waters - blues singers who were much more in sync with the Woodstock nation - weren't among the performers featured there.  (Though Otis Redding would certainly have been there if he were still alive.)

And if blacks didn't go to Woodstock in mass numbers, well, you can't help it if black people weren't so much into folk, straight rock and roll, or country-rock.  Conan O'Brien once joked that there are fewer blacks at concerts from English folk-rock bands like Mumford & Sons then there are in the U.S. Senate, so you have to make allowances.  But in 1969, when whites had as much trepidation about going to a soul revue - no matter how much they loved the music - as blacks had in going to Woodstock during a time of racial unease in the wake of Martin Luther King's death, integration was not going to magically happen.

The biggest criticism about Woodstock, though, was that the 500,000 kids who went thought that, by sheer will and through rock music, they could make a more peaceful world and a more just America magically happen.  Many of them would soon give up on that dream, particularly after Altamont and Kent State, but somehow the baby boomers managed to help end an unjust war by protesting against it, they popularized ecological awareness, and they were part of the movement that drove President Richard Nixon from office.  They didn't do all that by themselves, but they did move the world a couple of millimeters, and it's a shame that they didn't build on what successes they did have.  But then two oil crises and and runaway inflation, which we got in the seventies, can put a damper on a dream.  And it didn't help that rock music became a bigger business when record companies saw enough people to make a gold record out of one album in this massive field and realized they could turn rock into a commodity, which sowed the seeds of its still-in-progress decline.

Woodstock did allow its audience, though, to act more human and be more kind to each other, as David Crosby recently noted.  And that - the very idea that we can get along with perfect strangers through a shared bond - is probably Woodstock's greatest legacy ever.

I'll end with this quote from Max Yasgur (below) himself.

"I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world - not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State; you've proven something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that, you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of . . . they'd enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids - and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you - a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it!"