Making It – Stew And The Negro Problem
Singer/songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart and bassist/vocalist Heidi Rodewald put out some of my favourite albums of the late 90s and early 2000s, both with their band The Negro Problem (a baroque-pop group whose ex-members have gone on to be, among other things, in Candypants, Cosmo Topper, the Wondermints and the solo artist Carolyn Edwards, all of whom have made wonderful music as well) and under the name of Stew – used for more acoustic, singer-songwriter type records. (This album uses both names, but doesn’t feature many of the musicians on previous Negro Problem albums, and has more of a ‘Stew’ sound than a ‘Negro Problem’ one).
But until today, they hadn’t released a proper album of new material since 2003′s Stew album Something Deeper Than These Changes. To put that in perspective, not only was I single, unemployed and in my twenties when Stew’s last album came out, but I actually went into a shop and bought the CD. An actual shop. Like people in the olden times used to do. So you can imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this.
This is not to say that they’ve not been busy. A number of ‘official bootlegs’ have come out over the years (and been deleted too quickly for me to buy copies). Stew’s worked as a jobbing songwriter, doing everything from a song for Spongebob Squarepants (Gary Come Home) to one for my wedding (he used to take commissions for songs by email. The song he wrote for our wedding, Now’s Eternity, is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard even without the special context for me). Stew and Heidi wrote a piece for The Asphalt Orchestra, and Stew’s put out a CD of music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Various tracks have been made downloadable over the internet.
But mostly, they’ve been doing theatre work – in particular, the wonderful Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Passing Strange, for which Stew wrote the book and lyrics and starred in, which Stew and Heidi wrote the music for, and for which Rodewald was musical director. The soundtrack album for this is a de facto Stew album, and one of the very strongest, and a film of the play, directed by Spike Lee, is now available on DVD.
But this has meant that those of us outside the US – or even, for the most part, outside New York, have been deprived of much from them for the best part of a decade now. Until Making It, which is their break-up record.
During the theatre run of Passing Strange, Stew and Heidi’s personal relationship broke up, and they had to keep performing on stage together while their private life was falling apart. Making It is the album that came out of that, and it sounds like the kind of album you expect from a couple who split up before making it.
(In fact, Making It is another album of songs from a theatre show, like Passing Strange, but where that was a full-cast recording, this only features Stew and Heidi on vocals.)
Thus, while the album is as good as anything they’ve done, there’s little of the joy of some of their earlier albums, only concerns. There’s nothing as light or laugh-out-loud funny here as Ken or Man In A Dress or Into Me, and in some ways that’s a shame, as those songs are always the best ‘in’ to a Stew album. Stew is a very subtle lyricist, and for someone like myself who’s more musically oriented it often takes many listens for me to really get what he’s doing in his more serious songs.
Which is not to say there’s no wit in this album – very far from it. But lines like “When did you first realise there was a problem with your relationship?” “When she left me” are a far cry from the playfulness of some of Stew’s earlier work.
At times, in fact, this can almost sound like the Beautiful South, with very pleasant melodies but utterly bitter, nasty lyrics sung as male/female duets – on possibly the best song, The Curse, Stew and Heidi both sing the exact same words, but just the different inflections, from two singers on opposite sides of the event, give very different impressions of what went on. But the music has far more bite than that, and also features things like some of the best saxophone skronking in rock music since the first two Roxy Music albums (on Speed, a song about methamphetamine).
Some of this material will be familiar to fans – Black Men Ski has been circulating on the internet for nearly six years now, and is utterly brilliant (I actually used it as one of the through-lines in my chapter on Mister Miracle in An Incomprehensible Condition, it has so many good lines in it about race and society), while Tomorrow Gone is a remake of a song from the last Stew album, Something Deeper Than These Changes.
I’m not doing a very good job of selling this album, I know – it only came out today, and it takes at least a year for me to get enough of a sense of perspective on a Stew album before I can talk intelligently about it. What I will say is that Stew is one of the great songwriters of all time – up there with Jimmy Webb or Ray Davies or Paul McCartney or Jake Thackray or Arthur Lee. (I’m referring to Stew as the songwriter here, but Heidi may well have contributed – she is an excellent songwriter herself, and has often collaborated with Stew. I don’t have access to the songwriting credits, and don’t want to underrate her contribution. The fact that Stew and Heidi still work together after their split shows that they are better as collaborators than either would be alone).
I have absolutely no doubt that this will be one of my two or three favourite albums of the year, and it’s almost certain to be the very best, once it’s had more chance to grow on me. It’s not the best introduction to Stew’s music – that would still be either Joys And Concerns or Guest Host, both of which are far more immediate, but it’s a subtle, heartbreaking album, but with an underlying touch of hope.
Stew and Heidi are currently working on a musical adaptation of the great graphic novel Stagger Lee, and I can’t imagine a better match for them. I hope a soundtrack or DVD of that will be forthcoming very soon, but I also hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for the next album like this.
But it’s worth the wait.
The Kinks’ Music 1 – Kinks
The Kinks’ first album, titled simply Kinks, is a mish-mash of different styles, only some of them effective. While Ray and Dave Davies had been playing together for many years, and had been working with bass player Pete Quaife for some time, the final line-up of the band, with drummer Mick Avory, had only settled down after the release of the band’s debut single, a lacklustre cover of Long Tall Sally, in February 1964. Avory was so new to the band that he doesn’t even appear on much of the album, being replaced by session player Bobbie Graham.
The band’s early singles set the pattern for this album. Long Tall Sally was a semi-competent cover of an American R&B classic, You Still Want Me, the band’s second single, was decent Merseybeat-by-numbers, and You Really Got Me, their third, was one of the greatest singles of all time, a crunchy garage-rock track with one of the best riffs ever committed to record.
And the album is as much of a mixed bag as the singles. Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material. When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!”
The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound. The Kinks, too, would make this move very soon, but in 1964 there was little to impress on their first album.
And while they don’t add very much to the sound, it should probably be mentioned that among the session players who played on this album are Jimmy Page (who added acoustic rhythm guitar on a couple of tracks but did not play any leads, despite some reports to the contrary) and Jon Lord.
The Album
Beautiful Delilah
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The album opener is a perfect example of where most British blues bands of the time were going wrong. A cover version of one of Chuck Berry’s more minor works, this misses everything that makes Berry’s original worth listening to – the wit in Berry’s vocals, and his distinctive guitar work.
It does have a punk energy, especially in Dave Davies’ incoherent vocals, but even so it sounds forced. This is garage band music in a bad way – it’s the work of teenagers who aren’t very good yet, and who love R&B music without knowing what it is they love about it.
So Mystifying
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a much better attempt at the same kind of thing. It appears to have been written off the Rolling Stones’ version of It’s All Over Now, but has a more country-blues flavour, reminiscent both of early Chuck Berry tracks like Maybelline and of Carl Perkins rockabilly. The lead guitar part, in particular, has some unusual choices that point the way forward to the band’s later experimentation with country music on albums like Muswell Hillbillies.
The song, and the track, are still not especially good, but even on a by-the-numbers blues track like this Ray Davies is starting to develop a distinctive voice which suits the band far better than the cover versions they do.
Just Can’t Go To Sleep
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A simple exercise in a girl-group style, this is the kind of thing that bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans were having hits with at the time, and is a very competent piece in the style, but completely unmemorable except for the key change down a tone for the middle section, which is an unusually-long twelve bars. The hook line sounds like an early attempt at the hook for Stop Your Sobbing.
Long Tall Shorty
Writers: Don Covay and Herbert C Abramson
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This song was originally recorded by Tommy Tucker earlier in 1964 as a follow-up to his hit single Hi-Heeled Sneakers, and has almost exactly the same melody as that track. Probably the best of the R&B covers on this album, this has some very creditable harmonica playing from Ray Davies – nothing technically challenging, but with far more feeling than much of the music elsewhere on the album. It’s still fundamentally pointless though, especially in comparison with Tucker’s much more interesting original.
I Took My Baby Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Easily the catchiest and most commercial sounding of the tracks so far, this is a simple three-chord formula pop song of a kind that almost every band did dozens of during the sixties (probably its closest relation is I’m A Fool by Dino, Desi and Billy from a couple of years later, but every Merseybeat band had a few songs like this). The arrangement is more inventive than normal for this kind of song, though, with all instruments except the drums dropping out for the “I wo-o-o-o-on’t” line, and some quite complicated drum fills.
This was the B-side to the band’s first single, Long Tall Sally, and should really have been the A-side, being both a better performance and more in tune with the music that was having success in early 1964.
I’m A Lover Not A Fighter
Writer: Jay Miller
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A cover of a Cajun blues song by evil racist scumbag J.D. Miller, this features some very nice guitar picking from Dave Davies, but is unfortunately spoiled by his lead vocal, which has all the subtlety of a rutting rhinoceros.
You Really Got Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
It’s almost impossible to describe how much this track stands out from the dross around it. On paper, this should be more of the same – a simple two-note riff, played in three different keys, and a lyric with a 35-word vocabulary (significantly simpler than the average Doctor Seuss book). In fact the lyric originally only had thirty-four words in it, but Davies was persuaded to change some of the ‘yeah’s to ‘girl’, to avoid any possible implication of homosexuality.
The sound of this, though, is extraordinary. Forty-eight years later, this still packs a punch unlike anything else in the charts at that time. At a time when record companies were turning down tracks on the grounds that the guitar was distorted, this is recorded with a guitar put through a speaker cone that had been slashed with a knife. Everything about this track is designed to evoke adolescent sexual tension in the extreme – the riff, the repetitive single-note piano parts, Dave Davies’ long “yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” backing vocals, Ray Davies’ screaming, lustful vocals on the high notes. And nothing like Dave Davies’ finger-twisting guitar solo had ever been recorded before.
Angry, frustrated, raunchy, this is the precise moment when rock – as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll – was invented.
Cadillac
Writer: Bo Diddley
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we’re immediately back into the realms of R & B covers, although Bo Diddley’s thuggish simplicity is more suited to the band at this stage of their development than many of the other covers have been, and this isn’t too bad at all.
Bald Headed Woman
Writer: Shel Talmy
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of two covers of tracks by the folk singer Odetta, included on the album so that producer Shel Talmy could claim a ‘trad. arr.’ writing credit. The band do as competent a job as could be expected for a song so firmly out of their normal stylistic range (it sounds more like a work chant than anything else), but this is pointless.
Revenge
Writer: Ray Davies and Larry Page
Lead Vocalist: Instrumental
As is this, a by-the-numbers harmonica-led instrumental presumably included so that Larry Page, one of the band’s managers, could get some songwriting money too. It’s actually quite an advanced-sounding track – it could easily be a backing track from Love’s first album, two years later, but it sounds like a backing track for which someone’s forgotten to bother to record a vocal, rather than a proper instrumental.
Too Much Monkey Business
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another missing-the-point Chuck Berry cover, again of a song which depends almost entirely on Berry’s delivery for its effect, this one is even less successful than Beautiful Delilah because of the frankly incomprehensible decision to double track the lead vocal. For a wordy song such as this, so dependent on diction, this is fatal. Dave Davies’ guitar solo is quite nice though.
I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain
Writer: Odetta Felious
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The second of the Odetta covers, though on this one Odetta has regained her songwriting credit as the song isn’t actually traditional. The backing track is quite pleasant, in an acoustic hootenany kind of way, but then Dave Davies does his usual tuneless punk hollering over the top. He got much better as a vocalist.
Stop Your Sobbing
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is the second really good track on the album, and one of Ray Davies’ very best early songs. A simple Merseybeat track, this has a gorgeous melody and one of the catchiest hooks Davies ever came up with (“better stop sobbing now”).
It’s also more emotionally ambiguous than the rest of his early songs, paving the way for the more interesting work he’d be doing later on. The protagonist wants to help his girlfriend get over whatever is causing her to cry, but he’s also implicitly threatening to leave her if she doesn’t. There’s a weird unresolved tension here between the sympathetic and the extraordinarily callous, that makes this the most emotionally realistic song on the entire album.
This track is also the first to feature Rasa Didzpetris on backing vocals. Didzpetris was soon to become Ray Davies’ first wife, and as Rasa Davies her vocal lines became an essential part of many of the Kinks’ most memorable records.
While this was never released as a single, The Pretenders released a version in 1979 that was a minor hit.
Got Love If You Want It
Writer: James H Moore
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we end with another cover version of a blues standard. This one is better than the album standard, because Ray Davies plays with his vocals here in a way he hasn’t on the rest of the album, and wins over on sheer strangeness. There’s some ferociously good drumming on this track too.
Bonus Tracks
I Believed You
Writer: Ray and Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An early demo recording, before the band had settled on the name The Kinks, this was recorded under the name The Bo Weevils. A much more sophisticated song and performance than most of what we can hear on the actual album, this could easily have been a hit for a band like The Zombies. It suggests that many of the problems with the first album can be laid at the door not of the band themselves, but of producer Shel Talmy, with whom the band didn’t get on, and who notably didn’t produce You Really Got Me, although he was credited with it.
I’m A Hog For You Baby
Writer: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another Bo Weevils demo, this one is a fairly poor-quality recording of a Coasters cover, but it still shows the band as far more assured than on the Kinks album, with some very good lead guitar and with the band members doing a variety of silly voices in the style of the original. Where most of the R&B covers on the album show an utter lack of comprehension, this one is a sympathetic cover of what is, ultimately, a fluffy piece of nothing.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A demo from January 1964, in very rough quality, this is a decent enough pop-rocker that would have made a perfectly acceptable album track had it been taken any further.
Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy (demo)
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a demo, recorded toward the end of 1964, for what would become the band’s sixth single. I’ll deal with the song more when I look at the Kinda Kinks album, but what I can say is that this demo shows every element of the finished record was conceived very early on – the arrangement barely changed at all, although the performance on the finished track is much tighter.
Long Tall Sally
Writer: Richard Penniman, Robert Blackwell and Enotis Johnson
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
For the band’s first single, they were persuaded to record Long Tall Sally, a Little Richard song that they’d never performed before, on the grounds that the Beatles were performing the song live (this was before the Beatles released their own studio version of the song).
On paper, an R&B song about a transsexual prostitute should have been perfect for the Kinks, but there’s no evidence they’d actually figured out what the lyrics were. While Paul McCartney got round the problem of not being able to understand Little Richard’s screeched vocals by gabbling, Ray Davies seems to have just made up some new lyrics for himself.
The song’s taken at too slow a pace – in fact the band are playing the riff from a different, slower, Little Richard song, Lucille, and for all their singing “we’re having some fun tonight” it sounds like they’re protesting too much. It’s not a bad track, as such, but nor is it a very good one, and it’s easy to see why this was a flop, only reaching number 42 despite a TV appearance on Ready, Steady, Go.
You Still Want Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The band’s second single, this was even less commercially successful than Long Tall Sally, but it’s harder to see why in retrospect. This would have been a great pop hit in 1963, the year of Gerry And The Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Searchers. Unfortunately for the band, it was released in 1964, at a time when a harder, bluesier style was starting to come into fashion, and sounded like they were trying to jump on the bandwagon just after it had pulled away.
With five decades’ hindsight, though, this was a massive improvement on their first single, and shows that they were headed in the right direction. While this didn’t chart, the lowest chart ranking any of their next thirteen singles would have would be number eleven.
You Do Something To Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to You Still Want Me, this uptempo pop track is equal parts Merseybeat (in the verses) and Buddy Holly (in the middle eight), with some quite gorgeous Everly Brothers style harmonies from the Davies brothers, in a style they never really returned to. This is easily as good as, say, any of the hits the Hollies had around this time, and is in much the same style. Quite why this and its A-side were left off the album is hard to say.
It’s Alright
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side of You Really Got Me is a standard Brit-blues riff-based track, possibly showing a little of the influence of Mose Allison, either directly or through contemporary bands like Manfred Mann. There’s no real song there – it sounds like something that evolved out of a jam session – but the performance and arrangement, with a prominent drum part and short spot of dead air when the entire band briefly drop out, are inventive enough that the track remains listenable.
All Day And All Of The Night
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The follow-up to You Really Got Me was very much a repeat of that single’s winning formula. Instead of a two-note riff, this time we have a three-note riff (F, G and B flat ). And whereas You Really Got Me goes up by a tone, then by another tone, this track goes up by a third, and then up by a tone into the chorus.
Otherwise, this sticks as closely as possible to the You Really Got Me template, and amazingly manages to capture lighting in a bottle twice. The band would very soon move on to more complex songs, but like their previous single this is one of the great pop-rock tracks of all time.
I Gotta Move
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to All Day And All Of The Night is again very similar to the previous B-side, a simple riffy blues track. By this point, the Kinks had become quite good at this kind of track, but there’s little of interest here other than the faint backing vocals, setting up a drone – a sound which would become of more interest to the band in the next year.
Louie Louie
Writer: Richard Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Apparently Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me while trying to work out the three-chord riff to Louie Louie, which had been a hit for the Kingsmen in the US the previous year, so it was natural that the Kinks would record their own version, which became the opening track of their Kinksize Session EP. This version is now the best-known version in the UK, and is notable for the band getting the chords wrong (they play I-IV-V rather than I-IV-v). This recording in turn seems to have been the inspiration for the Troggs’ hit version of Wild Thing in 1966 – a record produced by the Kinks’ manager Larry Page.
I’ve Got That Feeling
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The second track on Kinksize Session, this seems to be an attempt by Ray Davies to write in the style of the Zombies, who had recently had their first big hit with She’s Not There. Much like that song, this is keyboard based, and based around a jazzy riff centred on an Am chord, though this continues the habit Davies has at this time of making riffs out of single-tone differences, rather than having the more expansive changes of the Zombies song. This is again reminiscent of the riffs to You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, but the choice is probably made because unlike the Zombies’ singer Colin Blunstone, Ray Davies was at this time an incredibly limited vocalist, and keeping within a narrow range was probably necessary.
I Gotta Go Now
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
At 2:53, the third track on Kinksize Session is longer than anything on the band’s first album. Which is odd, because it must have taken much less time than that to write, consisting as it does mostly of two chords and six words. And unlike in the case of You Really Got Me, this doesn’t appear to be a deliberate choice as much as it’s an utter lack of effort. I actually managed to forget this track while listening to it.
Things Are Getting Better
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This track, the last on Kinksize Session is actually a rewrite of Cadillac. Ray Davies forgets the lyric to the last line on the last verse, and what little lyric there is is written in an attempt at American dialect (our protagonist “hasn’t got a dime”). Davies would soon move away from this kind of imitation and find a voice of his own though.
Don’t Ever Let Me Go
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This was apparently an attempt at a follow-up to You Really Got Me, wisely scrapped in favour of All Day And All Of The Night. It features the same riff as You Really Got Me, but married to a more conventional, and thus less interesting, song.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An utterly by-the-numbers garage rock track, with absolutely nothing of any interest about it.
Little Queenie
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Recorded during a live BBC session, and introduced by Brian Matthew (who is still to this day a BBC DJ, having been a broadcaster for 64 years), this is yet another attempt at a Chuck Berry cover. This time, they miss out half of the lyrics and don’t seem to really have understood the rest. The liner notes for the Kinks deluxe edition claim Ray Davies is singing this, but if so he sounds very like his brother Dave (although the two could often sound alike).
Overall, Kinks, and the material recorded around that time, is a sloppy mess for the most part, with occasional flashes of brilliance, though sloppiness was the norm for every band other than the Beatles or the Beach Boys at the end of 1964. 1965 would see the Kinks improve dramatically…
Paul McCartney, MEN Arena 19/12/11
I sometimes think Paul McCartney can’t win. One of the big complaints I’d read from reviewers after the previous shows on this tour was “He’s doing too many hits. Why doesn’t he do some more obscure stuff? It’s just the obvious set.”
And yes, of the thirty-six songs in the set, twenty-five are the absolutely obvious choices that everyone would expect. But then, if you were Paul McCartney, you’d put Can’t Buy Me Love, Michelle, Penny Lane, My Love, Mull Of Kintyre, We Can Work It Out, Silly Love Songs, Coming Up, Let ‘Em In, Another Day, Drive My Car, Here, There And Everywhere, Love Me Do, Things We Said Today, I’m Down, I’ve Just Seen a Face, I Saw Her Standing There and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the set, wouldn’t you?
And that’s the problem, of course. Paul McCartney is the most commercially successful songwriter in the history of the world, and has as good a claim as any to be the most artistically successful. So much so that he didn’t have space to fit *any* of those songs in last night. Nor did he do Mary Had A Little Lamb, Hi Hi Hi, Listen To What The Man Said, With A Little Luck, Goodnight Tonight, Waterfalls, Ebony And Ivory, The Girl Is Mine, Say Say Say, Pipes Of Peace, No More Lonely Nights, We All Stand Together or Once Upon A Long Ago, all of which went top ten. Yet he’s *still* apparently doing too many of his hits!
What he did do was a perfect mix of songs – weighted, yes, towards the Beatles years (and frankly I’d have loved him to have dropped at least three of those songs for solo songs, as he did Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da, Let It Be and The Long And Winding Road, none of which I have any time for) but with a good mix of solo material – both hits like Jet and Band On The Run and more obscure tracks like Mrs Vanderbilt and Ram On. He even did Sing The Changes, from the third Fireman album. And while there’s no such thing as an obscure Beatles song, choices like The Night Before or The Word are as close as it gets, and it was wonderful to hear them live.
McCartney is a stunning live performer – I can hardly even believe he’s human, frankly. His voice is *very* slightly gone at the very top end, but the set was chosen well enough that this was not noticeable, and in the mid and low ranges he sounds a good forty years younger than he is, and he can still scream with the best of them. He also got through the whole two-and-a-half hour show without as much as a sip of water, which given the amount of dry ice and the vocal gymnastics he was having to do is nothing short of miraculous. This is, remember, someone who was at school with my grandfather, yet there’s no way I could perform even half this show without taking a break.
The only thing that showed McCartney’s age at all was that he’s taking less strenuous instrumental parts these days, playing rhythm guitar or second keyboard for the most part. While he plays bass on a few songs, he leaves the complex stuff like Paperback Writer to his guitarists, and his few lead guitar spots are mediocre. But if he can no longer play complex counterpoints to his lead vocals the way he could when he was twenty-three, the fact that he can still sing those vocals at all is more than enough for me.
It was one of those shows that are all highlights from start to finish – whether the expected sort,like the mass crowd singalong to Hey Jude or the fireworks in Live And Let Die, or the unexpected, like Sing The Changes, a rather arty track on record, turning out to be a wonderful chantalong arena-rock song in a live setting (sounding spookily like a cousin of Stay Positive by The Hold Steady actually). Even Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da wasn’t too horrible, thanks to some ska keyboards from Wix Wickens. But a few of the standout moments:
Dance Tonight, with drummer Abe Laborio Jr dancing with his hands. When McCartney put on his mandolin, someone in the audience shouted “Petrushka!” which McCartney misheard as “Red Rooster”. (Oddly, this didn’t look like a scripted bit).
Ram On – just beautiful, one of those lovely little fragments that McCartney does so well.
Junior’s Farm – a brave choice for second song, and it worked very well.
A Day In The Life – the orchestral build works surprisingly well as a garage-psych rock section, though it was truncated to only 16 bars. Wonderful to hear the man who co-wrote this perform it live. Instead of the last verse and orchestral build, they went from the end of the “woke up” section into Give Peace A Chance.
Something – not performed solo like on the Back In The World tour, but instead done as he did it at the tribute to George, starting as a solo ukulele performance, but the full band coming in for the solo and finishing the song in the same style as the record.
But there were two moments that for me made the gig, and rose above the slick professionalism of the show to something approaching great art. The first was Here Today, performed solo on acoustic guitar. I’ve always loved this song, McCartney’s 1981 tribute to John Lennon, because even though the latter half is too generic by far, the first verse is as good a tribute to the loss of a particular kind of friend as I could imagine (“And if I said I really knew you well, what would your answer be/if you were here today?/Well knowing you, you’d probably laugh and say that we were worlds apart…”). I don’t mind saying I cried.
The other real highlight was Come And Get It, the song McCartney wrote for Badfinger in the late 60s. With McCartney banging away at the piano, for a moment he seemed to transform into the man he was when he wrote the song – a cocksure lad in his mid-twenties, able to turn out classic pop songs without even thinking about it, discovering the song as it came out of his fingers and mouth, and grinning a stupid grin at his own cleverness.
I really can’t recommend McCartney’s show highly enough. While I’ve seen better gigs, and certainly cheaper ones, he really is astonishingly good, and given that he’s nearly 70 and has had heart trouble in the past, I can’t imagine he’ll tour too many more times, so go and see him while you can.
If nothing else, when else are you going to get a chance to see the late lamented Liberal MP Clement Freud projected on a screen the size of several houses? (During Band On The Run they show footage from the album cover shooting, featuring Freud, Michael Parkinson, Christopher Lee and others).
There are only two complaints I could make about the show. The first, which McCartney couldn’t really do anything about, is the Everton supporter who was sat next to me. He confirmed my opinion of footballists (which some would call a low opinion – I prefer the term ‘accurate’) by deciding that what delicate, thoughtful ballads like Eleanor Rigby really need is a drunk moron bellowing along to them with no attempt to either keep his voice down or have any idea of the tune or the words. He even managed to sing the wrong words to the ‘na na na nanana na’ section of Hey Jude, which is impressive. Luckily, he also didn’t seem to know anything that wasn’t on the Beatles’ red and blue albums.
What McCartney *could* do though is augment his band. Wix Wickens is a fine keyboard player, but when you’re playing to 21,000-seater arenas, with audiences paying up to a hundred and fifty quid a ticket (not mine, I was in the nosebleed seats), there is no possible excuse for not having real strings and horns. If Brian Wilson or The Monkees can do it playing theatre venues with lower ticket prices, there’s no reason to skimp on the musical side of things. Leave Wix to play the piano and organ parts, but get some real cello and violin players for Eleanor Rigby, and real horns for Got To Get You Into My Life. Those songs deserve better than tinny synth patches.
Setlist:
Magical Mystery Tour
Junior’s Farm
All My Loving
Jet
Got To Get You Into My Life
Sing The Changes
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady
Paperback Writer
The Long And Winding Road
Come And Get It
Nineteen Hundred And Eight-Five
Maybe I’m Amazed
I’m Looking Through You
And I Love Her
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Ram On
Something
Band On The Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back In The USSR
I’ve Got A Feeling
A Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance
Let It Be
Live And Let Die
Hey Jude
First Encore
The Word / All You Need Is Love
Wonderful Christmastime
Day Tripper
Get Back
Second Encore
Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
While waiting for Smile, some contemporary albums on Spotify
My Smile Sessions box set is in the post right now. It should be arriving tomorrow. If, like me, you are getting incredibly excited for this box set’s release tomorrow, here’s a dozen or so albums from 1966 through 1968 that go well with the feel of Smile, or in some cases contrast well with it. All can be listened to free on Spotify.
First up, the Beach Boys’ own releases of 1967, Smiley Smile and Wild Honey.
These are often overlooked because they’re not Smile, but there are a number of incredible moments of beauty on them.
The Many Moods Of Murry Wilson, on the other hand, is much less good. But it’s interesting to note that while Brian couldn’t get his masterwork completed, his dad was able to release his own album the same year.
Song Cycle is what Van Dyke Parks did next after Smile, and is his most Smile-like material. Beautiful, baffling, utterly wonderful, this is unlike any other music Parks made later, and unlike anything anyone else did either.
Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart may seem an odd choice, but at this time, when the boundary between pop music and countercultural rock was far more porous, and the unlikeliest people were having commercial success, Beefheart’s first album actually has a lot in common with the pop music of the time. There’s a definite L.A. *sound* at this time, and there’s a continuum from Zappa and Beefheart at the most extreme end to the Beach Boys and Monkees at the other end, with Love and the Doors somewhere in the middle.
How To Speak Hip by Del Close is a comedy album with which Brian Wilson was obsessed in 1966.
Odessa by the Bee Gees is actually from 1969, so outside this timeframe, but I include it because it’s another example of a resolutely ‘square’ vocal harmony group, with three brothers in, doing something utterly bizarre and uncommercial. Oddly, Black Sheep, Van Dyke Parks’ Smile parody written and recorded for the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, sounds far more like Odessa than it does Smile.
Present Tense by Sagittarius is one of several collaborations under various names by Curt Boettcher and Brian Wilson’s old songwriting partner Gary Usher. My World Fell Down, the main single from this, is sung by Glen Campbell (who had toured as a Beach Boy) and Bruce Johnston (of the Beach Boys) and is possibly the best attempt at a Smile-alike I’ve ever heard. The album also features comedy interludes in some songs, performed by the Firesign Theatre – again, very like Wilson’s idea of doing an album full of humour.
The Pentangle by Pentangle is a bit of an odd one. In the mid-late 60s there was actually almost no back-and-forth influence between the LA musicians and their British contemporaries, apart from the huge names like the Beatles. But I think there’s something of the same spirit that animated Smile about this, with its marrying of older, ‘outdated’ forms of music (traditional folk in the case of Pentangle, vaudeville and Americana for Smile) with attempts to move popular music as a whole forward.
And likewise Gorilla by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band mixes 1920s novelty songs, comedy bits, and up-to-the-moment progressive pop.
Da Capo by Love is half of the greatest album ever made (the side-long blues jam rather spoils it for me). Intense and paranoid, yet utterly beautiful, this has a lot of the childlike creepiness of Smile.
Head by the Monkees I’ve already discussed.
Feelin’ Groovy by Harper’s Bizarre combines harmonies that are, if anything, over-sweet, with songwriting by people like Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and Van Dyke Parks, the last of whom also arranged the album.
(Albums I would have included but which are not Spotifiable – Genuine Imitation Life Gazette by the Four Seasons, Absolutely Free by the Mothers Of Invention, Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos, The Wichita Train Whistle Sings by Michael Nesmith, Carnival Of Sound by Jan & Dean, Place Vendôme by the Swingle Singers with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina by the Left Banke)
In Praise Of The Future
One of the things it’s very easy to do – and something I do a lot myself – is to romanticise scarcity. I used to be a record collector, because being a record collector and being a music lover were, until very, very recently, the same thing. I remember the excitement of finding a 60s copy, on lovely thick, heavy vinyl, of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music, for 50p in the pile of unfiled albums they always kept in Empire Exchange in Manchester city centre in the back section with the old porn mags. I remember being the first person in the UK to hear a recording of Brian Wilson live with his new band, because of a tape trade I arranged with someone on the internet!. I remember a friend in Sweden sending me a CD in the post, and my dad being worried when he saw the stamp in case I was receiving material from ‘behind the iron curtain’ (this was in 1998).
I remember making a sixteen mile round trip, on foot, to the nearest decent record shop when I was growing up, to order a single. And then repeating that trip a week later to pick the single up.I remember buying my very first bootleg – a terrible double CD of Get Back sessions. I remember treating music as a scarce resource that needed to be hoarded – I have maybe a dozen Johny Cash albums that I’ve not listened to more than once or twice, but which I bought because I didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance to get them again when I found them in second-hand shops.
No-one growing up today has that experience, and they’re missing out on something very precious.
I can even understand, in this context, the cretins who don’t want the Beach Boys’ Smile Sessions to be released next month because it will stop that music being something ‘special’, for the cognoscenti only. They’re wrong, for many reasons – not the least of which is that the amount of effort it takes to spend £120 on a nine-disc box of what is mostly two-chord plinking harpsichord instrumentals is much greater than the effort it takes to type “Smile bootleg” into Google – but I can sort of see it.
But the benefits of having essentially unlimited access to music are, paradoxically, so great that they’re easy to miss in this nostalgia. I have 26935 MP3s in my MP3 collection (a mixture of five years’ worth of eMusic (RIP) purchases, things I’ve ripped from my CDs, and downloaded bootlegs – only a very, very small proportion is commercially-available but illegally-downloaded music) and if for any reason I don’t fancy listening to any of those, I can use Spotify to find the exact piece of music I do want to hear, or play last.fm radio and discover new music.
But the benefits are greater than that, even. I have a huge record and CD collection, too. But I’m mildly autistic (in the actually-autistic sense, not the ‘all men are *so* autistic, am I right girls?’ sense of newspaper columns) and I have a tendency to become fixated on a single band or single album. If I’m left to choose a piece of music to listen to, I’ll often choose the same thing for months on end – right now, for example, I’m in a mid-period Monkees phase, and were you to ask me to choose an album to play, it would be either Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd or The Birds, the Bees And The Monkees – or maybe my live DVD of the Monkees I got last week and have already played ten times.
But this isn’t good for me, because there is so much beauty in music – so much good stuff out there, so much that will move me, give me ideas, make me feel better, make me a better person. And so I can use shuffle.
In fact, I have a playlist in Rhythmbox, automatically updated, which plays only MP3s I’ve not played before (or at least not played in Rhythmbox since I last lost my home directory or whatever – I have multiple pieces of music software on my computer, and if I want to listen to a specific album I’ll use something more lightweight), on shuffle.
So, just as an example, the last five songs I’ve heard as I type this are The 59th Street Bridge Song by Simon And Garfunkel, Density 21.5 by Edgard Varese, You’ll Be Mine by Howlin’ Wolf, The Casket by Mike McGear and Just A-Sittin’ And A-Rockin’ by Duke Ellington. Currently Drowning Butterflies by the Cleaners From Venus is playing.
Now, all those songs have two things in common. Actually, they have three, but the male-centric nature of my music collection is something I am slowly working on. The first is that they are all worth listening to – they vary in quality from astonishingly brilliant (Varese) down to catchy-but-inane (Simon & Garfunkel), but all improve my life in some way – all have moments that make me want to dance, or move me emotionally, or make me think “that’s clever…”
(Imitation Of Life by R.E.M. just came on).
The other thing they have in common is that I wouldn’t have listened to them if I had to play them on a record player. If I had to get up, take the Simon & Garfunkel album off, put the Edgard Varese record on… it would just be easier to just play the same album again.
(Girl On The Phone by The Jam)
But even more than the ease of it, I didn’t remember half those tracks – I didn’t even know I had the Mike McGear album – and so it wouldn’t occur to me to put them on. Yet there’s some genuinely wonderful music there.
(The Allegro from Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto)
So I can hear all this music – music that I know I’ll enjoy, because it’s music I’ve chosen to own, but music that would possibly have lain unlistened for decades had I had to own it physically, and be overjoyed by it. And I can share it with my friends.
(Henry Lee by Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey)
(My wife just phoned, and Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles by Captain Beefheart came on while I was on the phone).
I can create a playlist of all the songs I’ve mentioned (except the McGear one which isn’t on spotify), and now anyone who wants to hear that music that’s made me feel so good over the last hour or so can hear it too.
And they don’t have to go into the second-hand-porn-mag section of a shop to do it.
New Spotify Playlist: In Memoriam Arthur Lee
I’ve still got quite a bit of writer’s block, and am working on a book and on the Mindless Ones stuff, but didn’t want to let this anniversary pass unmarked.
Five years ago today, Arthur Lee died. I still find it nearly impossible to believe that. While I was never lucky enough to know him, I *was* lucky enough to see him perform live five times between 2002 and 2005, during the all-too-brief creative renaissance he had after his release from prison, when he was planning a new album and being celebrated in the House of Commons (Early Day Motion 1369 – “That this House pays tribute to the legendary Arthur Lee, also known as Arthurly, frontman and inspiration of Love, the world’s greatest rock band and creators of Forever Changes, the greatest album of all time; notes that following his release from jail he is currently touring Europe; and urges honourable and especially Right honourable Members to consider the potential benefit to their constituents if they were, with the indulgence of their whips, to lighten up and tune in to one of his forthcoming British gigs.”).
I’ve never seen anyone more *alive* than Lee was, and I still can’t really believe he’s dead. Even in the last year of his life, he had an astonishing, beautiful voice and was moving like a man half his age, as well as, of course, performing the wonderful songs he’d written.
Here’s a spotify playlist of some of my favourite things by Lee. I’ll try to find time in the next few days to go through it track-by-track, but it’s too hot for me to think right now, and I want to get this up today.
Listen to his song.
Happy Birthday @troutcircs !
My friend plok is apparently Officially Old today (I don’t know how old, but those were his words) and has decided that for a birthday present he wants people to post YouTube videos of songs he asks for on their blogs. From me he asked for this – Gimme A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith.
Interestingly, I’d always liked this track but never looked up who the backing band were. Turns out it’s a pretty stellar line-up – Buck Washington (piano). Frank Newton (cornet), Benny Goodman (clarinet), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Chu Berry (sax) and Billy Taylor (bass). It’s a shame the recording is so muddy, because this is so different from the music Goodman or Teagarden would normally play I wish I could make out their lines better (Goodman is one of the major influences on my own melodic thinking), but the only instruments that can be heard with any clarity are Washington and Newton (playing in a style very obviously influenced by Louis Armstrong).
The Monkees, Manchester Apollo May 14 2011
The Monkees (and my elbow)
I bought tickets to this show a couple of months back, knowing I’d either want to celebrate winning the AV referendum, or need cheering up after losing the AV referendum. As turns out, it’s done a good enough job of cheering me up I think I’m ready to get back to blogging.
I was sat in Row E, which I didn’t realise until I got in was actually the second row, next to possibly the most enthusiastic people in the world – two women in their twenties who looked like stereotypical Goths but spent the pre-show talking to each other about which of the two reunion albums – Pool It! or Justus – was better, and who squealed every time Peter Tork did anything, and their enthusiasm was catching. (When they saw where they were sitting, one of them said “YES! We’re going to get extreme Tork!”)
For those of you wanting to listen along at home, by the way, I’ve created a playlist of all the songs they played.
The show was a strange mix of two completely different styles. On the one hand, the setlist itself was of a type familiar to me from shows by Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee and so on – you do twenty or so obscure album tracks to please the die-hard fans, then you have an interval, after which you perform your most famous ‘classic album’ in full, and then finish with a ton of hits. This is usually the kind of thing that is done by Serious Musos and involves much stroking of beards and furrowing of brows at the Importance of the Serious Artist on stage.
But everything else about the show was showbiz razzle-dazzle, of a kind I very rarely go and see but can certainly appreciate – costume changes, physical comedy, giant video screens, dance routines – the sort of attention to putting on a show and actually entertaining the audience who’ve paid fifty quid to see you that very, very few people bother with. The end result was something that came out equal parts The Goodies and Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds tours, and will I think have pleased both the MOJO-reading crowd and the grannies wanting to relive their teenage crushes.
They also seemed to be desperate to prove themselves as multi-instrumentalists – possibly still hurt by the jibes at them for not playing on their first two albums (a criticism that can be raised for *every* American band of the 60s to a greater or lesser extent, from the Byrds to the Mothers Of Invention). Micky spent pretty much every song where he wasn’t the lead singer behind one of the two drum kits (one with the Monkees logo, the other with ‘DRUM’ written on it a la Head) and strummed an acoustic guitar on a few other songs, Davy played acoustic on a few songs, and Peter played keyboard, guitar, banjo and French horn.
In fact Peter Tork was the revelation of the show. He was a little rusty still on some of his instrumental parts (some slightly stiff banjo picking on What Am I Doing Hanging Round and a single very slightly flatted note on his French horn solo on Shades Of Gray), which can presumably be explained by the fact that he’s spent ten years ostentatiously *NOT* being a Monkee, and the band apparently only had three days’ rehearsal before the tour started – I’m sure those problems will be completely ironed out by the middle of next week – but his dancing and over-emoting facial expressions reminded me of nothing so much as Harpo Marx ( I know of no higher praise). And the absence of Mike Nesmith meant that Tork got to sing Nesmith’s lead vocals, meaning he had a decent share of the spotlight (Tork rarely sang leads on the records).
Davy was about as you’d expect – the showbiz song and dance man with a joke for every occasion, an all-round entertainer of a type they don’t really make any more. You could easily imagine Davy in another life as Ernie Wise or someone (again a compliment). As I get older I have more and more time for this kind of old-school entertainer, as I have less time for ‘authentic’ rock posing, though Davy’s still never going to be my favourite Monkee (a view shared by the women next to me, who before the show were discussing the dilemmas faced when you come to songs like Star Collector – “but it’s great… but it’s Davy! But it’s great… but it’s Davy!”)
And Micky is one of the great rock vocalists of all time – seriously. The only performer I’ve seen live who was as strong a singer was Arthur Lee, who is of course sadly no longer with us. I’ve seen some extraordinarily good singers in my time (Jeff Buckley, Al Green, Robert Plant) but Micky is at least the equal of all of those, as well as being a great performer. To an extent he was saving his voice for his lead parts – on songs where he wasn’t singing lead, his parts were doubled (and sometimes covered) by a keyboard player who sounded scarily like him – but when he did sing lead (on sixteen songs, so we’re not talking about him being lazy) he was astounding.
Before the show, the PA played cover versions of Monkees songs, ranging from the obvious (the Association doing Come On In, Nilsson’s Daddy’s Song) to the obscure (what sounded like a Japanese indie band) to the plain odd (a slow string arrangement of Your Auntie Grizelda which I can only presume was incidental music for the Monkees TV show or something) – along with, for some reason, Davy Jones’ cover version of McCartney’s Man We Was Lonely.
Then the backing band came on, and over a five minute montage of clips from the band’s career, played a medley of bits from maybe a dozen songs, before Davy, Micky and Peter came on. The backing band (guitar, bass, drums, two keyboardists (one of whom doubled on sax and flute) and three horn players (one of whom doubled on percussion)) were all extremely good, and thankfully mostly free of the 80s slickness audible in some of the recordings of earlier reunion tours.
I’ll reproduce the setlist below, along with relevant comments:
I’m A Believer Micky ended this with “thank you Liverpool!” – I’m still not sure if this was a joke or not.
Mary Mary introduced as ‘a Mike Nesmith tune’, the only time Nesmith got mentioned during the show
The Girl I Knew Somewhere
She Hangs Out
Randy Scouse Git/Alternate Title Micky’s scat singing here was great, sounding like Louis Jordan.
Your Auntie Grizelda the girls next to me screamed at this. I never in my life thought I’d hear two goths in their twenties screaming with lust because a nearly-70-year-old man who looks like Catweazle was doing a silly dance and singing a comedy song. Peter stuck in the line from Head “I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it” into the scat section.
It’s Nice To Be With You Sung in front of a backdrop of Davy from the 60s. Davy – “I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary”.
I Don’t Think You Know Me Sung by Peter, whose facial expressions on this were priceless.
Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow At the end, where Davy says “Mary, I love you, Sandra, I love you too”, instead he said “Mary, I love you, Sandra, you love Mary… it’s a new world”
Words
Cuddly Toy
Papa Gene’s Blues Sung by Peter.
Listen To The Band Sung by all three in unison, all strumming acoustic guitars, with an extended instrumental break to introduce the backing band members. Davy had to keep looking at his fingers.
That Was Then, This Is Now Performed with photos of the band as children projected behind them. Micky and Davy were joking to each other about these off-mic, and Davy said something that made Micky laugh so much he was still laughing half-way through the next song.
All Of Your Toys
Hard To Believe
What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ Round Peter sang and played banjo
Sometime In The Morning
Valleri – this was *much* better live than on the record.
No Time – all three took a verse each on this.
We’ll Be Back In A Minute – the music that they used to end the first half of each TV episode led into the interval, during which we saw various 60s vintage commercials by the band, for Kellogg’s cereals, Yardley aftershave and Kool-Aid.
The second half started with the full, long trailer for Head, including the full Ditty Diego War Chant (which I was *very* surprised they kept in) before the band came out and played every song on the Head album while the relevant sections of the film played behind them.
Circle Sky Sung by all three in unison. This was the only song whose video footage was edited, to cut out the shots of Nesmith singing lead.
Can You Dig It When it was announced before the start of the tour that Davy Jones’ wife (who’s a dancer half his age) would be taking part in the show, a massive uproar rose up on the various Monkees fan fora, saying that she’d wreck it. This turns out to have been pure Yoko Ono Syndrome (the unfounded belief among fans of a male musician that that musician’s wife must in all cases be evil and talentless. QV Linda McCartney, Gail Zappa, Melinda Wilson, Courtney Love). In this case she performed a belly-dance to match the ones being projected behind the band from the film, and in so far as I’m any judge, she did so perfectly well. She certainly added to, rather than detracted from, the show.
As We Go Along
Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again? Peter sang lead.
Porpoise Song The long version with the extended outro. Micky sang Davy’s part as well as his own, as Davy was offstage getting changed.
Daddy’s Song Davy and his wife, in black and white outfits, recreated the dance routine from the film. Davy looked *absolutely exhausted* at the end of this, and out of breath, but managed to keep a smile on.
For Pete’s Sake Sung by Peter rather than Micky.
When Love Comes Knocking At Your Door
She
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
Shades of Gray Peter played the French horn. He also ruffled Davy’s hair on the last ‘only shades of gray’.
Last Train To Clarksville
Goin’ Down Micky made this *slightly* easier on himself by changing some of the phrasing to allow more room to breathe, but it’s still an astonishingly difficult song to sing and he pulled it off tremendously. This was the song everyone talked about as they were leaving.
I Wanna Be Free Davy missed the first line of this.
Saturday’s Child
Someday Man Wonderful to hear these two.
I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone
Daydream Believer Peter told the security guards off for not singing along with the rest of us, after which one of them did some half-hearted arm-waving.
ENCORE:
Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky – Peter had to shut Micky up so he could do this.
Pleasant Valley Sunday Micky sounded *astonishing* on this.
I’m A Believer a shortened version with no second verse.
Given the band’s fractious history – roughly speaking they have a reunion tour once every decade, at the start of which they’re best friends, but by the end they hate each other’s guts and won’t speak to each other for ten years – and their age (they’re all in their mid-late 60s now) this is almost certainly the last chance you’ll get to see them live, and you should take it. For all the jokes about ‘the prefab four’ and so on, they are simultaneously the last of the old-style variety performers *and* a band with a catalogue of great songs any three other bands would kill for.
For those of you who can view Flash, here’s two Youtube videos of last night’s show:
I’m off tomorrow to see Van Dyke Parks in London, which will be equally great but in a very different way. I’ll post a review of that on my return, and then get back to my much-postponed Seven Soldiers posts, now I’m physically and mentally well enough to handle them. Thanks for your patience.
New Book – The Beach Boys On CD vol 1: 1961 – 1969 and Lulu Sale
My new book is now out from Lulu.com . As always, I’ve not yet received a proof copy, so caveat emptor for a couple of days. Ebook versions will be available from Amazon (Kindle) and Smashwords (ePub) from tomorrow night. I’ll update the ‘my books’ page then. The PDF version is currently available from Lulu.
Cover:
Between 1961 and 1969 the Beach Boys made nineteen albums, including some of the best music ever recorded – and some not so good.
In this book, Andrew Hickey looks at this music track by track, analysing every song that Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al, Bruce and David recorded and released during that time period.
From early surf and car classics like 409 to sophisticated masterpieces like Time To Get Alone, in this book you’ll learn how they were recorded, why they work the way they do, and which albums to buy if you want to hear a great band at their best.
As always, if you buy this book and enjoy it, PLEASE tell your friends. I’m not a big publisher and have literally no marketing budget – the only way anyone will get to hear about this is if you tell people.
Coincidentally, just as I was about to click publish here, Lulu have announced that for the next five days you can get 20% off any order (up to a maximum saving of £250) by entering the code HOPUK305 at checkout. So why not try some of my other books, or those by Andrew Rilstone, Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Burton or my uncle?
And on a different note…
I’ve been busy lately. As well as this blog (and the books I’m hoping will come out of the essays from it – the first of three Beach Boys books will be out some time this month), I’ve also been working full time, trying to pull together PEP! 3 (I’ve got great material from Plok, David A and Richard F, but nothing else to work with – everyone else I’ve asked to contribute has had too many problems (that is NOT a dig at anyone, before anyone gets paranoid. I KNOW how hard these things can be)), working on a proposal for a novel, and working on a super-sekrit project of Plok’s.
And I’ve also-also been planning my first solo album.
It’s a baroque pop album, it’ll probably take at least the rest of the year to do, and it’ll be a proper Roy Wood style “write the songs, play all the instruments, sing everything, drive the van and make the sandwiches” solo album.
Here’s a little fragment – the first minute or so of a longer piece I’m working on, almost as an exercise. As I’ve been writing the Beach Boys book I’ve been noticing more and more of the techniques Brian Wilson used, and this is me piling in as many as I can of the Smile-era tricks into one minute or so of harpsichord, timpani, ‘cello and cor anglais.
(I’ve just dumped the raw MIDI to MP3 here – the actual finished album will have a proper sound font used, not this cheap tinny stuff).
Let me know what you think.Smile.
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