Bumper Christmas Retro Music Edition

1. Song Mining
I recently interviewed Greil Marcus about his book The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (it can be heard at Radio New Zealand's website here). With the imminent release of The Complete Basement Tapes – six CDs, well over 100 songs that Dylan wrote while woodshedding with the Band in 1967 – I had to ask about them. I wondered whether – now that the sessions were finally seeing daylight – this would change the public’s fascination with them. Marcus’s response shows that his fascination with the Basement Tapes hasn’t dimmed since he wrote a whole book on the sessions, Invisible Republic, in 1997:

You know there’s a lot of material – there’s 30 something songs – that have never been heard before, that haven’t been bootlegged or leaked out, song by song, on Dylan’s own Bootleg Series. Certainly there’s stuff I never heard before. And what’s fascinating about it, in the context of the whole set – which I think is going to start this conversation all over again – is you know how down-to-earth and ordinary and ah, work-like a lot of the stuff is.
The [phrase] that leapt to mind when I was listening to the stuff that I hadn’t heard before was “song mining”. These people are digging into what look like songs but they aren’t really. And you just keep digging to see if you find something in there that will explain itself, that will say, ‘No! No! Go in this direction, not that direction’ Really digging in the ground, and finding a root, and grabbing onto that root and thinking, ‘Well this root must lead somewhere, and maybe you find where it leads and maybe you don’t. These are people mining for songs.
And I think that when people listen to all of this material – and its 140 tracks – they’re going to be fascinated by the way that fragments and cover versions of songs that weren’t that interesting to begin with, and experiments that really don’t go anywhere, surround these songs that seem like gifts from the Gods. It’s going to make the whole question of creation, of creativity and writing, and playing and improvising, even more mysterious than it already is.
In some ways the mystique of the Basement Tapes I think is going to be washed away – replaced by the spectre of a bunch of people getting together every day to fool around – in a clubhouse, in a kind of boy’s club.
On the other hand you can say, Well okay, but where did this stuff come from. My God: ‘Tears of Rage’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ … did some visitation come down and strike these people with lightning, and then go away and leave them to play with ordinary hands – as they weren’t doing for a few weeks?
I don’t know. But I love the way there is stuff here that is mediocre, that is second rate, and stuff that seems like junk – it sounds bad and it’s very hard to hear – and has flashes in it that are as strong and as disturbing as anything in the formal masterpieces that these sessions produced.
So I think you can tell by the way I’m answering that I don’t know. That I don’t know how to answer your question. That it’s as if you have to learn how to start listening to the stuff as if you’ve never heard it before. And see what story it tells.

2. His Back Pages
At last, a one-stop shop of Greil Marcus’s archives: articles, interviews and reviews, regularly updated. It was a very smart idea to compile a series of links to all the songs in his “Treasure Island” of essential discs Marcus added to Stranded, the 1979 anthology he edited in which music writers wrote about their “desert island disc”. (The essays by Lester Bangs on Astral Weeks, and M Marks on It’s Too Late to Stop Now are unsurpassed. Bangs’s masterpiece aside, one of the best reviews of Astral Weeks I ever heard was from an older woman who just said, “You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out.”)
3. Writer’s block
Of the six artists featured in Marcus’s 1975 classic Mystery Train (Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley) only Newman’s career seems to have continue, rather than ended with pathos. Still, the exposure didn’t come without a cost to his productivity. In 1983 – I think in San Francisco’s BAM magazine – Newman said:

When I’m writing songs, the minutes are like hours – I sit there with nothing, just a big picture of Greil Marcus in my mind hanging over the piano as I think, ‘Ah, I don’t think this guy is gonna like this one, because I’m doing the same stuff he criticised me for before.

Marcus’s response? “You know, anybody who reads something I’ve written and comes back and tells me something about it that I didn’t know – that’s a valuable a reader as I can ever hope to have. And that’s happened with musicians and people who aren’t musicians. I really can't talk about other people’s reactions to my work, at least not positive reactions, it just comes off as self-congratulation. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to write, to find people to publish me, and to find people who read me. So that’s all I can say.”
4. Country gentlemen mystique
Speaking of the Band, I stumbled upon these 1969 reviews from the Village Voice of the Band live at the Fillmore, and of their second album. The writer, Johanna Schier, has a charming straightforward style, with a wry wit, a talent for an apt metaphor – and musical insights. (Though she describes Robbie Robertson on stage as “sweetly bashful”, she also hears Smokey Robinson in the chorus of ‘I Shall Be Released’). Schier soon befriended Janis Joplin, and with her future husband John Hall wrote ‘Holy Moon’, the b-side of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. The pair then founded the group Orleans.
5. Ballad of a Teenage Queen
We have heard a lot from Jerry Lee Lewis over the years, especially about rock’n’roll and the Devil, but little from his child bride, Myra. At last, she breaks her silence. “They were looking for a place to stick the knife into rock & roll. And Jerry gave it to them—well, I did, I opened my mouth.”
6. Click track
From David Hepworth, a link to a batch of classic Motown hits with the vocals removed. I know, that seems criminal, but it is so illuminating to be able to concentrate on the Funk Brothers.
7. Down the avenue again
Van Morrison’s paranoia about YouTube seems to have dissipated. Three extraordinary, lengthy clips have recently been added to the site, without legal intervention thus far. The legendary It’s Too Late to Stop Now 1973 shows at London’s Rainbow were broadcast by TVNZ later in the 1970s on The Grunt Machine and talked about for years; a high-def version has been up for a while. Now, two other full-length concerts from the same period are online. At Winterland in February 1974, in B&W, the band is his usual combo from “Street Choir” period – also featured at the Rainbow, but lacking the string quartet. With a completely different – and integrated – band, but several of the same songs, he can be seen in full colour at the Orphanage, San Francisco in July 1974 (note the presence of Tom Donahue, the deep-throated influence on all FM rock jocks). Both feature Morrison’s ‘Caravan’ can-can schtick. Perhaps best of all is this 10-minute clip from the Fillmore East in September 1970, introduced by Bill Graham: maybe the earliest filmed version of his ‘Cyprus Avenue’ tease. As a taster to the Winterland gig, here he is covering Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.

8. Funky, funny and fun
More back pages: here is how the Victoria University of Wellington’s student newspaper Salient reviewed Abbey Road in 1969. Mike Bergin described the medley of songs on side two as “a mess”, whereas that was the only passage Nik Cohn liked in his New York Times review. But Bergin showed a lot of promise in this and other reviews; sadly, he died not long afterwards in a car accident.
9. Back to the Island
In July, Glenn Jowitt – one of New Zealand’s greatest photographers – died suddenly. He was mourned in Auckland by about 400 of his closest friends in a moving, multi-cultural ceremony. The NZ Herald asked me to write an obituary.
10. Take the Coltrane
A crucial influence on Glenn was the expatriate New York photographer Larence Shustak, who taught him at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch in the mid-1970s. Glenn was a dedicated music fan and an enthusiastic guitarist (in the 70s he even looked like his hero, Gram Parsons). A connection he had with Shustak that I never knew until researching for the obituary: in the 1950s Shustak took many compelling shots of New York jazz musicians.
11. A little bit frightening
Musical racism 101: ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, or how to express the whole of Asia in just nine notes. No, not the lyrics – which are bad enough – the influence of the arrangement has been even more pervasive, reports NPR.

Jazz Cigarettes

1. Burnt out

It was a rock & roll moment in a country & western temple. At the country music awards in 1975, what possessed Charlie Rich to burn the envelope after announcing the winner of the big award was … John Denver? Antipathy towards Denver, or the country music industry? Sam Phillips regarded Rich as the greatest talent on Sun Records. He had spent nearly 20 years playing rock’n’roll, country, jazz and gospel piano – often in the same song – and in 1973-74 he was finally riding high, after the huge crossover success of ‘Behind Closed Doors’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’.

Now a video of that notorious TV moment has been unearthed, and it suggests that, rather than antipathy towards Denver, Rich was riding high on gin and tonic, as well as bitterness towards the country industry. The debate that follows this posting is worth reading, as is the take of his son, Charlie Rich Jr. The incident scandalised Nashville, and did Rich’s career no favours. It’s certainly hard to imagine this happening at an country awards ceremony now, though there have been those awkward Taylor Swift/Kanye West moments. And let’s not forget the notorious Goftas …

2. Those young Dudes

Writing about Th’ Dudes recently for the AudioCulture New Zealand music website, I came across “Th’ Dudes: Modern Music”. It was the first article In Rip It Up about the band, published in February 1978, before Th’ Dudes had even entered a recording studio:

“We don’t want to end up as ‘old farts’,” says Dave Dobbyn. “Right now, we know that what we are doing is good, but by the time we’ve been around for a bit we’ll have lost that edge. When you’re 30 you’re finished. Even if we split now and joined other bands, those bands would not be the same or as good as Th’ Dudes.”

The writer, Glenn Barclay, responds: “A bit arrogant but not totally unjustified. 

3. Pop for Potheads

A friend of mine was once at function with Paul McCartney, and got very close. “He was the coolest man in the room, and he knew he was.” Defending McCartney takes too long when talking to the narrow-minded who prefer a simple, heroes’n’villains take on music history. The Lennonists are usually unaware of the experimental side of McCartney, which often appeared on the B-sides of Wings 45s; nor have they ever suffered through the rebellious Beatle’s Some Time in New York City. Bill Brewster has compiled an eclectic mix tape called McCartney’s Left: a tribute to the funkier and left-field side of Paul McCartney. Why he opened with soporific ‘Waterfalls’ is beyond me, but the reggae version of Mickey & Sylvia’s ‘Love is Strange’ (from 1971) is curiously captivating, the epitome of his pot-for-potheads B-side style. And the slow-groove big band excursion ‘Bridge on the River Suite’ (recorded in Nashville in 1974) could be by Quincy Jones. Leaving out 1989’s dreamlike doodle ‘Distractions’ is only a slight disappointment. The person who has written most about this side of solo McCartney is Graham Reid, in his epic three-part series. The first part is called “Success in the Seventies”. I don’t agree with him about ‘Another Day’ – okay, Roy Carr was right when he compared the lyrics to a deodorant commercial, but the chord changes could come from Bach’s Even-Tempered Clavier. The chorus is glorious, Linda included, but the pause in the verse between “bedroom” and “… chair” used to annoy the hell out of Ian Morris.

4. Tea for Texas

When I was writing the Crowded House biography Something So Strong in 1996 it was this genre – melodic, lo-fi pop – that dominated the stereo. Simple influences, rather than elaborate competitors such as XTC or the High Llamas. McCartney’s self-titled solo album from 1970; Donovan’s greatest hits, especially ‘Riki Tiki Tavi’. Top of the playlist was the Everly Brothers’ Roots album. This 1968 late-career classic stands alongside Sweetheart of the Rodeo as a seminal influence on country-rock, with the difference – as archival audio from their childhood radio show confirms – that these were genuine roots, not affectations. Compared to the Byrds they may have looked square but musically they share the same head-space, with songs by Merle Haggard, the Beau Brummels, and Randy Newman sharing space comfortably with ‘I Wonder If I Care as Much’, ‘Living Too Close to the Ground"’ and ‘Kentucky’. The session musicians are LA’s finest, a Hollywood honky-tonk band filtered through a wah-wah. I just came across this amazing footage of the Everlys performing in Australia in 1971. The guitarist is a stunner, and the song selection shows how the brothers were trying to loosen up their clean-cut image, or reveal what was really going on backstage and after hours.

Breaking the rules

Christopher Isherwood on Mick Jagger:

Mick seems almost entirely without vanity. … He hardly ever refers to his career or himself as a famous and successful person and you might be with him for hours and not know what it is he does. Also, he seems equally capable of group fun, clowning, entertaining, getting along with other people, and of entering into a serious one-to-one dialogue with anybody who wants to. He talked seriously but not at all pretentiously about Jung, and about India (he has a brother who has become a monk in the Himalayas), and about religion in general. He also seems tolerant and not bitchy. He told me with amusement that the real reason why the Beatles left the Maharishi was that he made a pass at one of them: “They’re simple north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.” Am still not sure if I believe this story.

David Kelly of the New York Times writes: “In the usual telling of that gossipy anecdote, the Maharishi made a pass at a young woman — sometimes it’s Mia Farrow, sometimes not — infuriating the Fabs. True or not, Jagger’s version is more appealing. As Christopher Hitchens says in his foreword to [Isherwood’s diaries] The Sixties, regarding this attempted seduction of an unspecified Beatle, “I wonder which one, don’t you?” Indeed I do, and I wouldn’t put my money on Ringo.”

It was 40 years ago today

A good little band, at its happiest, playing live, the final curtain in sight.

Sgt Kosher's Jewish Hearts Club Band

From memory, Brian Epstein wanted the Beatles to use a plain
brown-paper wrapper for the cover of Sgt Pepper's. Maybe this version would have persuaded him ... or, with Gene Simmons comparing tongues with Einstein, maybe not. It's from the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and I found it at Harry's Place. Click here for a larger image. 

A love that lasts forever

Graham Reid talks to Yoko Ono and reviews Philip Norman's new biography; Kim Hill talks to the author.

Meanwhile, the dream is over ...

It's my birthday too, yeah

It was a special moment when two guests I had booked for a radio programme met in the green room. One was Neil Innes, of Rutles and Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band fame, and Python first cousin. The other was Noel Crombie, who helped put Python into Split Enz, and a man not untouched by the Bonzos. Both men wear their dada-ism lightly and are wry, no-fuss gentlemen whose success never quite managed to reach the polluting level of real fame. After his interview Innes was happy to sit and chat, even about his recently deceased close friend George Harrison (especially his love of gardening).

It's been the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' "White Album" this week, and while the flurry of coverage didn't bring any new insights, just thinking about it is almost synaesthetic. It was the third record I ever owned, and when I received it for my birthday I was so musically naive that it was like learning to read and then being given the Shorter Oxford Dictionary and being told, have fun. Now that music and popular culture is inescapable it's hard to fathom, but it was 18 months before I got another record, so it was just as well it is such a rich album. It can take you in any number of directions from Chuck Berry to Noel Coward to Stockhausen to  Bert Jansch, country, reggae, white blues ... and then there's 'Happiness is a Warm Gun'.

But I've just realised that it's the 30th anniversary of the Rutles' film All You Need Is Cash. When it was first shown in 1978, it was before videos, but so perfect was it as a parody that one instantly knew the best lines forever (without becoming a Python parrot-reciting bore, promise). From the start in New Orleans, meeting an old bluesman ("He's lyin!" says Blind Lemon Peel's wife. "Last week he said he started the Everly Brothers!") to their first manager's mother explaining what her dead son saw in the band ("It was the trousers ... they were ... tight") to their demise with the Let It Rot project ("released as a film, an album and a lawsuit") and their brutish last manager Allen Decline ("a man whose right hand never knew who his left hand was doing"), it was brilliant and unforgettable.

When I met Derek Taylor a few years later - he is parodied as Eric Manchester, and played by George Harrison - he was happier to talk Rutles than Beatles. They were probably more interesting to him by that stage and, besides, he was a director of Rutland Weekend Television. But he was too discreet to mention the then-unknown dark side of the Rutles: Neil Innes was sued for plagiarism of the Beatles' songs by ATV, who then owned Northern Songs (before selling the catalogue to Michael Jackson). This had nothing to do with the Beatles, who had to sell Northern to split up the band, and were actually great friends of Innes and the other Rutles. Harrison saw Python as the Beatles' true successors and one day Innes went around to visit Harrison at his home. Ringo was there, and they greeted Innes with a chorus of 'Ouch!' - the Rutles' parody of 'Help!'. Harrison also helped get the Rutles' film made and - so I read in the December issue of The Word - Lennon was also a fan, even warning Innes that 'Get Up And Go' in the rooftop scene was 'a bit close'. No, this was between lawyers not musicians, and ATV had more cash for lawsuits, so Innes settled by signing over 50 percent of his royalties and relinquishing the right to put his name in the credits. Ironically the Rutles were hugely influential in their own right: without them, no tribute-band industry, and no songs by Oasis, which are like the Rutles devoid of wit, intelligence or much melody. Liam Gallagher thought the Rutles were a real band: is that because the concept was so clever, or he is so fick?

Piecarts and pie charts

1. What, me worry?

Our own election has been almost totally eclipsed by the US election, so once theirs is all over - late on Wednesday NZ time - there may be a scurrying to establish points of difference. But one thing is inescapable: whoever wins New Zealand's election on Saturday night is going to present a cabinet of mostly tired faces from the 1980s to 2000s. So while there are just nail-biting polls to come from the States, a last piece of excellent election writing. In "Obama & Sweet Potato Pie" Mark Danner compares small town outdoor election meetings from both camps (from the November 20 New York Review of Books). He covers a lot of political territory with complete ease, and an extended riff on potato pie that comes to a neat conclusion in an encounter with a Republican pie-maker. For light relief, the Village Voice has a slideshow parodying the era-defining Obama "Hope" posters designed by Shepard Fairey. And just in from wacky Canada, Palin is victim of a phone call from pranksters posing as Nicolas Sarkozy.

2. Bus Stop

For an impassioned, clear-sighted explanation of why others should vote the way a black, female Democratic super-delegate is expected to vote, here is Donna Brazille saying "Don't ever put me in the back of the bus!" The clip is from a New Yorker festival panel early in October, in which she stole the show while on stage with a group of campaign strategists from both parties. Warming up, she says that yes, US society has changed since she became politically aware aged eight when Martin Luther King was assassinated:

"This is a more tolerant, open, progressive society. And yet, we're having this conversation because [Obama] is biracial. He spent nine months in the womb of a white woman. He was raised...by his white grandparents...He got out of school and went to Harvard, and all of a sudden he's "uppity" and there's something wrong with him? What is wrong with us?...You can vote against him, but don't ever put me in the back of the bus. I'm not going to the back of the bus! I'm not going to be afraid! My black skin does not make me inferior! And may I add: being a female does not make me dumb!"

3. Dancing to architecture

The extraordinary breadth and usefulness of Graham Reid's Elsewhere is even more apparent - and accessible - since the site's makeover. It acts as a one-stop music and cultural magazine when so many printed on paper are no longer worth picking up, let alone your dollar, and with an RSS feed anything new on Elsewhere is home delivered. Just posted is Reid's account of a 1988 press conference in Wellington with conductor Maxim Shostakovich and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich: I can't imagine anyone else present would have put together something of such substance from the event. It includes this aside from Rostropovich about the acoustic difficulties faced since his audiences had expanded from 200 in a hall to 4000, say, in an events centre:

“It’s significant that modern architects can make a condominium with many apartments and on the 10th floor you can hear anything said on the third. But if the same architect made a concert hall you could not hear anything from some seats. That’s a miracle.”

Elsewhere on his site Reid writes of the pointlessness of press conferences. When we were together at the same events in the 1980s, 90 percent of those present only warmed their seats, five percent asked asinine questions, any good questions had their answers poached, and the Auckland Star's Oscar Kightley could be relied upon to derail pretensions by always asking "Will the Beatles get back together?" I wish I could remember Billy Joel's excellent, cheerful response.

4. Grumpy Old Men

Ringo Starr recently announced that, 38 years after the demise of the Beatles, he will no longer be giving autographs. Now he can attempt to eat in restaurants and walk through airports in peace (flash V-sign here). A month before, Van Morrison banned alcohol from his concerts because he finds it "off-putting" when fans walk around the venue to visit the bar during his shows. Both understandable, though if you're paying $300 US for a seat at the Hollywood Bowl later this week when Morrison performs and records his legendary Astral Weeks in concert for the first time, you can probably afford table service or a hip flask. The occasion means that Morrison will have control over a version of Astral Weeks, after years of battles which have only added to his bitterness about the music industry. The concert features two of the musicians who played in the original sessions, guitarist Jay Berliner and the great double-bassist, Richard Davis. Yet, even in a rare interview in the LA Times this week - his most extended ever about the album he usually doesn't wish to discuss - Morrison remains churlish while plugging the concert. (And it's odd the interview reveals he didn't know the Astral Weeks arranger Larry Fallon has been dead for some time, yet Morrison's legal team surfs the net daily to check for unauthorised use of his music on YouTube, etc.) Part of the continued attraction of Morrison, apart from the timelessness of his great albums, is the incongruity that for someone so notoriously grumpy and introspective, he has also come up with some of the sunniest moments in pop. Here he is with 'Brown Eyed Girl' - not a pop song, according to the new interview - from the legendary 1973 concert at London's Rainbow Theatre with his Caledonia Soul Orchestra. About time this became a DVD. Update: in today's Observer an excellent essay by Sean O'Hagan backgrounding Astral Weeks.

Meanwhile, here's Ringo making toast:

68

Karma Chameleon

The Maharishi has left the building.

New Zealand discovered the Maharishi long before the Beatles. He visited here in March 1962 and it has to be said reactions were sceptical. Truth’s reporter walked out of the lecture in the Wellington town hall. The yogi said that meditation can release tension, he scoffed. The yogi said that tension is the cause of all diseases. And, said the yogi, to meditate a person had to have the word.

To get the “word,’ the Maharishi told us, one has to see him privately. Because everybody needs a different word. “Ridiculous,” somebody muttered. I agreed and left. So did others in the audience.
Next day, overcome by curiosity, I telephoned to find out how much it costs to get the “word”. “A week’s wages,” one of the Maharishi’s assistants told me.

Nevertheless the reporter, shoeless and gazing, fronts up to a personal session with the Maharishi:

I felt I should say something and asked if he used the Tantric system. “Do not speak to me of the Tantric system.” I asked him to tell me about the “word.” He pierced me with a look as sharp as a quaint oriental dagger and asked did I, or did I not, want to be initiated? “You come to my lecture tonight and hear me more,” he said. I didn’t get the word. But I got the message.

Just in case their readers didn’t get the message, Truth placed the story underneath another about a hairy recluse who had gone missing in the Coromandel:

The Maharishi also fronted up to a parliament of Wellington students. David McGill, then a student teacher, mentions the occasion in last year’s eccentric memoir The Treadmill Tapes: Confessions of a Compulsive Pop Picker:

I [was] one of the students packed into the Victoria University Little Theatre to hear him enlighten us. Instead, he was asking for money. One of us explained that we had none. “Ask your parents,” he chuckled.

Couldn’t they take out a student loan?

John Lennon was looking in some kaleidoscope mirror when he sang that the transcendental meditation guru “made a fool out of everyone.” I suspect that was why he wrote ‘Sexy Sadie’, about the Beatles’ time in India, rather than outrage at the twinkling Indian’s alleged groping of Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence.

Ringo left early because he didn’t like the food, although he had brought a suitcase full of baked beans with him.

The others brought their acoustic guitars – and probably suitcases full of jazz cigarettes – so they got a lot more out of the 1968 sojourn in Rishikesh, at least in the material world.

Lennon and McCartney composed many of the songs on “White Album” there. Among them was ‘Dear Prudence’ (“won’t you come out and play”), written about Miss Farrow when she wouldn’t come out of her ashram to join the celebrity karmathon: all four Beatles, Donovan, Patti Boyd and sister Jenny, Cynthia Lennon and Mike (Give Me) Love of the Beach Boys. Also in that batch of songs were ‘Julia’, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Blackbird’ (the latter written with Diana Ross in mind).

As it turns out the alleged groping of Farrow was a rumour spread by hippie opportunist Alexis Mardas, the in-house “inventor” at Apple Records, who wanted to undermine the Maharishi’s influence on the Beatles. I can hear “Magic Alex” manipulating his patrons: Why leave London, when I have a machine to make you levitate? Sadly, there were four vulnerable fools on the hill.

Left: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi descends with Mia Farrow.

The Beatles – and especially Harrison’s – interest in India had a huge effect on future generations, in lifestyles, attitudes to Eastern religions and what became “world music”. For everything but chicken tikka, we can give thanks to George.