Disco’s been dead for decades, yet disco bashing never seems to go out of style. The sleazy fashions, the soulless music, the lumpenproletariat streaming ‘cross bridge and tunnel to shake their sweaty, polyester-clad booties like cut rate Travoltas… it’s over, and yet it isn’t.
But even the most savagely anti-disco rocker should allow that its lead practitioners were possessed of a certain glamour and grace, their highly refined dance moves executed with the precision of Fred Astaire.
It’s a point a German film buff known on YouTube as “et7waage1” drives home by setting a mix of screen siren Rita Hayworth’s most memorable dance scenes from the ‘40s and ‘50s to one of disco’s best known anthems, ’ “Stayin’ Alive.”
It’s easy to imagine Rita and any of her co-stars (including Astaire) would have parted the crowds at Brooklyn’s legendary 2001 Odyssey, the scene of Saturday Night Fever’s famous lighted Plexiglass floor. Her celebrated stems are well suited to the demands of disco, even when her twirly skirt is traded in for pjs and fuzzy slippers or a dowdy turn-of-the-century swimming costume.
Here, for comparison’s sake are the stars of Saturday Night Fever,John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gomey, cutting the rug, urm, flashing floor in 1977 to the Bee Gees’ much more sedate “More Than a Woman.”
Hayworth films featured in the disco-scored revamp are:
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday
A good part of my youth was spent in front of my old family hi-fi system, listening to Beatles records. This was music I knew no longer existed in the modern world—not on contemporary pop radio, and not on MTV… nowhere but on what seemed to me those ancient plastic disks. To my untrained ears, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and especially Abbey Roadsounded like they had come down from an advanced alien civilization.
What I was hearing in part—especially on Abbey Road—was the perfection of the studio as an instrument, and the major influence of the last, best fifth Beatle, George Martin. Not to diminish the incredible musicianship and songwriting abilities of the Beatles themselves, but without their engineers, without Martin at the controls, and without the state-of-the-art studios—EMI, then, of course, Abbey Road—those albums would have sounded much more down to earth: still great, no doubt, but not the symphonic masterpieces they are, especially—in my opinion—Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together (though not their final release).
So how did such a brilliant recording come to being? You can piece its construction together yourself by sorting through all of the stuff that didn’t make it on the record—outtakes, alternate album cover photos—as well as through interviews with Martin and the band. At the top of the post, see one of the cover photos that didn’t make the cut. A self-effacingly-named blog called Stuff Nobody Cares About has several more alternate photos from that session on August 8, 1969 (which McCartney conceptualized beforehand in a series of sketches). Before the album got its iconic look, it came together—pun intended—as iconic sound. Just above, you can hear George Martin describe the process of producing the band’s last recording, a “very happy record,” he says, compared to the tense, unhappyLet it Be. Afterward, hear George, Paul, and Ringo recollect their bittersweet memories of the sessions.
Near the end of the documentary clip, Paul McCartney says, “I’m really glad that most of the songs dealt with love, peace, understanding….” If that’s what “Mean Mr. Mustard” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” are about, color me surprised, but I’ve never been one to get too hung up on the meanings of the Beatles songs—it’s the menagerie of sounds I love, the unusual chord changes, and the witty little narratives, touching vignettes, and almost shockingly apt lyrical images (“Hold you in his armchair / You can feel his disease”).
But like the band themselves coming back together, the songs on Abbey Road—including that masterful closing medley—didn’t immediately fall into place; they were the product of much studio noodling and idiosyncratic Beatles brainstorming—an activity one part music hall comedy improv, one part genius happy accident, and one part good-natured family squabble. In the three clips above and below, hear the powerful Abbey Road medley come together, in fits and starts, with plenty of playful banter and off-the-cuff inspiration.
Hearing the making of Abbey Road doesn’t take away from the otherworldly final product, but it does bring the exalted personalities of the band back down to earth, showing them as hardworking musicians and natural writers and comedians who just happened to have made—with no shortage of help—some of the most mind-blowing music of the 20th century.
After every terrible tragedy in the West, we expect celebrities to weigh in. And they do, with comments insightful and heartfelt, appalling and boorish, perfunctory and banal. Often, the larger the public profile, the more self-serving the soundbite. One take in particular has provoked sneers and ridicule: Bono—who paid respects with his band at music venue Le Bataclan—told an interviewer, “this is the first direct hit on music we’ve had in this so-called War on Terror.” Twitterati, the Commentariat, and, well, folks, did not take kindly to the statement, with many pointing out an earlier “hit on music” in February and accusing U2’s frontman of making the monstrous attacks on the Paris music venue about himself.
One can understand the sentiment, without excusing the verbiage. Le Bataclan—scene of what has rightly been called a “bloodbath”—has occupied a significant place in pop music history since it started booking rock bands in the 1970s; and it has hosted famous musicians and singers—like Edith Piaf—since its opening in 1864. It does not minimize the tremendous pain of the horrific murder of 89 Eagles of Death Metal fans this past Friday to say that the assault has also deeply disturbed musicians and music fans worldwide.
Grief leads us to remembrance, and we can memorialize le Bataclan (named after the French operetta Ba-ta-clan) for its long history before last Friday’s horror. One of the most historic concerts there occurred in 1972, when John Cale reunited with his former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and Nico for acoustic renditions of “Heroin,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” and “Femme Fatale.” We covered that concert in a previous post. See it again at the top of this one. The following year, a band at the height of its career—or the first phase of it anyway—graced le Bataclan’s stage before going on to blow minds at London’s Shepperton Studios. Just above, see the Peter Gabriel-fronted Genesis play “The Musical Box,” “Supper’s Ready,” “Return of the Giant Hogweed,” and “The Knife.”
Too many others to name have played le Bataclan through the years—from Prince (who jammed out Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”) to Oasis. Perhaps one of the most moving performances the venue hosted came from Jeff Buckley in 1995, whose concert there was released as a live album the following year. Buckley sang his medley of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin/Hymne A L’Amour” (above)—in hindsight an especially poignant rendition two years before his untimely death. “By the time Buckley switches over to French,” writes Allmusic, “the crowd erupts at the end of every phrase, catching him off guard with their enthusiasm.” He ended the show with the nearly 10-minute version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” below, a song he became known for and that serves as well as any other as a tribute to le Bataclan in these dark days of mourning, war, and retribution. “Love is not a victory march,” sings Buckley, his voice cracking, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”
It takes no great research pains to find out that Woody Allen loves jazz. He scores most of his movies with the music, never failing to include it at least under their signature simple black-and-white opening titles. He has worked jazz as a theme into some of the films themselves, most notably Sweet and Lowdown, the story of a dissolute 1930s jazz guitarist who heads for Hollywood. He plays the clarinet himself, touring with his jazz band as seen in the documentary Wild Man Blues. He makes no secret of his admiration for fellow clarinetist (and also saxophonist) Sidney Bechet, after whom he named one of his daughters.
Allen has publicly discussed a dream project called American Blues, a movie about the very beginning of jazz in New Orleans seen through the careers of Bechet and Louis Armstrong. He acknowledges that a story of that scale would require a far larger budget than the more modest films he makes just about every year, and so, in light of the unlikelihood of his commanding that budget, he has evidently contented himself with infusing the work that does come out with as much jazz as possible. You can hear almost two and a half hours of it in the Youtube playlist at the top of this post, which includes cuts from not just Bechet and Armstrong but from Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Django Reinhardt, Glenn Miller, Lester Young, Jelly Roll Morton, and many other respected players from prewar and wartime America. You can find a list of the songs featured in the jazz playlist, complete with timestamps, in the blurb beneath this YouTube clip.
Even apart from what film scholars would call the non-diegetic jazz in Allen’s pictures (i.e., the jazz we hear on the score, but the characters themselves presumably don’t) he also includes some diegetic jazz, as in the ending of Stardust Memories, when Allen’s character puts on a Louis Armstrong record. And isn’t now just the right time to revisit the sequence from Midnight in Paris just above, a montage celebrating life in the City of Lights set to Sidney Bechet’s “Si tu vois ma mère”? After that, have a look at the clip below, in which the man himself plays with the Woody Allen and Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band at New York’s Cafe Carlyle — where you can catch them every Monday night through December 14th.
The Harlem Renaissance lives in the form of Alice Barker, a soft spoken lady who just last week received a belated Happy 103rd Birthday card from the Obamas.
That’s her on the right in the first clip, below. She’s in the back right at the 2:07 mark. Perched on a lunch counter stool, showing off her shapely stems at 9:32.
Barker’s newfound celebrity is an unexpected reward for one who was never a marquee name.
She was a member of the chorus—a pretty, talented, hardworking young lady, whose name was misspelled on one of the occasions when she was credited. She danced throughout the 1930s and 40s in legendary Harlem venues like the Apollo, the Cotton Club, and the Zanzibar Club. Shared the stage with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Racked up a number of film, commercial and TV credits, getting paid to do something she later confided from a nursing home bed she would have gladly done for free.
Barker’s chorus girl days had been mothballed for decades when she crossed paths with video editor David Shuff, a volunteer visitor to the nursing home where she lives. Shuff seems to be a kindred spirit to the writer David Greenberger, whose Duplex Planet zines—and later books, comics, and performances—captured the stories (and personalities) of the elderly residents of a Boston nursing home where he served as activities director.
Intrigued by glimmers of Barker’s glamorous past, Shuff joined forces with recreational therapist Gail Campbell, to see if they could truffle up any evidence. Barker herself had lost all of the photos and memorabilia that would have backed up her claims.
Eventually, their search led them to historians Alicia Thompson and Mark Cantor, who were able to identify Barker strutting her stuff in a handful of extant 1940s jukebox shorts, aka “soundies.”
Though Barker had caught herself in a couple of commercials, she had never seen any of her soundie performances. A friend of Shuff’s serendipitously decided to record her reaction to her first private screening on Shuff’s iPad. The video went viral as soon as it hit the Internet, and suddenly, Barker was a star.
The loveliest aspect of her late-in-life celebrity is an abundance of old fashioned fan mail, flowers and artwork. She also received a Jimmie Lunceford Legacy Award for excellence in music and music education.
Fame is heady, but seems not to have gone to Barker’s, as evidenced by a remark she made to Shuff a couple of months after she blew up the Internet, “I got jobs because I had great legs, but also, I knew how to wink.”
Shuff maintains a website for fans who want to stay abreast of Alice Barker. You can also write her at the address below:
Alice Barker c/o Brooklyn Gardens 835 Herkimer Street Brooklyn, NY11233
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is running through November 20 in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday
In My Day, so much of the music we listened to seemed angrier, more raucous and unruly—more aggressive and plainly evil—than music today. Not that I have any hard evidence for these assertions; customarily none is required for an In My Day rant. But I submit to you this: all that musical rage, in my opinion, was a good thing.
And it seems at least in this case, I can substantiate my opinion with science. This past summer, we reported on a study done by researchers at Humboldt State, Ohio State, UC Riverside, and UT Austin showing that kids who listened to heavy metal in the 80s were “significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups.” Despite heated debates in the 80s and 90s over objectionable lyrical content in both popular and alternative music (remember the “Cop Killer” controversy?), researchers concluded that angry rock didn’t turn people into alienated maniacs. Instead, they found, “participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth.”
Now, even more recent research into the effects of angry hardcore punk and metal on the psyches of young people seems to confirm these results and further suggest that aggressive music has a paradoxically calming effect. In a study titled “Extreme metal music and anger processing,” University of Queensland psychologists Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle describe how they subjected “39 extreme music listeners aged 18–34 years of age” to “anger induction,” during which time, writes Consequence of Sound, “they talked about such irritating things as relationships, money, and work.” Once the test subjects were good and stressed, Sharman and Dingle had them listen either to a “random assignment” of “extreme music from their own playlist” for ten minutes or to ten minutes of silence.
As university publication UQ News summarizes, “In contrast to previous studies linking loud and chaotic music to aggression and delinquency,” this study “showed listeners mostly became inspired and calmed” by their metal. “The music helped them explore the full gamut of emotion they felt,” says Sharman, “but also left them feeling more active and inspired.” The researchers also provide a brief history of what they call “extreme music” and define it in terms of several genres and subgenres:
Following the rise of punk and heavy metal, a range of new genres and subgenres surfaced. Hardcore, death metal, emotional/emotional-hardcore (emo), and screamo appeared throughout the 1980s, gradually becoming more a part of mainstream culture. Each of these genres and their subgenres are socio-politically charged and, as mentioned earlier, are characterized by heavy and powerful sounds with expressive vocals.
“At the forefront of [the] controversy surrounding extreme music,” they write, “is the prominence of aggressive lyrics and titles.” In additional experiments, Sharman and Dingle found that “violent lyrics” did increase “participants’ state hostility,” but the effect was fleeting. Against prevailing assumptions that angry-sounding, aggressive music causes or correlates with depression, violence, self-harm, substance abuse, or suicide, the Queensland researchers found exactly the opposite—that “extreme music” alleviated listeners’ “angst and aggression,” made them happier, calmer, and better able to cope with the anger-inducing stressors that surround us all.
A quick note: Thanks to NPR’s First Listen site, you can now stream for free (but only for a limited time) The Best Of Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years Of The Grateful Dead. This new double record, featuring 16 tracks recorded during the Dead’s farewell shows in Chicago this summer, will be officially released on November 20th. But you can get a sneak peek right here, right now by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
Tracks includes “Box Of Rain,” “Shakedown Street,” “Truckin’,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Fire On The Mountain,” “Not Fade Away,” “Touch of Grey” and other fan favorites.
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In the late 50s, a fearful, racist backlash against rock and roll, coupled with money-grubbing corporate payola, pushed out the blues and R&B that drove rock’s sound. In its place came easy listening orchestration more palatable to conservative white audiences. As sexy electric guitars gave way to string and horn sections, the comparatively aggressive sound of rock and roll seemed so much a passing fad that Decca’s senior A&R man rejected the Beatles’ demo in 1962, telling Brian Epstein, “guitar groups are on their way out.”
But it wasn’t only the blues, R&B, and doo wop revivalism of British Invasion bands that saved the American art form. It was also the often unintentional influence of audio engineers who—with their incessant tinkering and a number of happy accidents—created new sounds that defined the countercultural rock and roll of the 60s and 70s. Ironically, the two technical developments that most characterized those decades’ rock guitar sounds—the wah-wah and fuzz pedals—were originally marketed as ways to imitate strings, horns, and other non-rock and roll instruments.
As you’ll learn in the documentary above, Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World, the wah-wah pedal, with its “waka-waka” sound so familiar from “Shaft” and 70s porn soundtracks, officially came into being in 1967, when the Thomas Organ company released the first incarnation of the effect. But before it acquired the brand name “Cry Baby” (still the name of the wah-wah pedal manufactured by Jim Dunlop), it went by the name “Clyde McCoy,” a backward-looking bit of branding that attempted to market the effect through nostalgia for pre-rock and roll music. Clyde McCoy was a jazz trumpet player known for his “wah-wah” muting technique on songs like “Sugar Blues” in the 20s, and the pedal was thought to mimic McCoy’s jazz-age effects. (McCoy himself had nothing to do with the marketing.)
Nonetheless the development of the wah-wah pedal came right out of the most current sixties’ technology made for the most current of acts, the Beatles. Increasingly drowned out by screaming crowds in larger and larger venues, the band required louder and louder amplifiers, and British amp company Vox obliged, creating the 100-watt “Super Beatle” amp in 1964 for their first U.S. tour. As Priceonomics details, when Thomas Organ scored a contract to manufacture the amps stateside, a young engineer named Brad Plunkett was given the task of learning how to make them for less. While experimenting with the smooth dial of a rotary potentiometer in place of an expensive switch, he discovered the wah-wah effect, then had the bright idea to combine the dial—which swept a resonant peak across the upper mid-range frequency—with the foot pedal of an organ.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—a fascinating history at that, one that leads from Elvis Presley studio guitarist Del Casher, to Frank Zappa, Clapton and Hendrix, and to dozens of 70s funk guitarists and beyond.
Art Thompson, editor of Guitar Player Magazine, notes in the star-studded Cry Baby documentary that prior to the invention of the wah-wah pedal, guitarists had a limited range of effects—tape delay, tremolo, spring reverb, and fuzz. Only one of these effects, however, was then available in pedal form, and that pedal, Gibson’s Maestro Fuzz-Tone, would also revolutionize the sound of sixties rock. But as you can hear in the short 1962 demonstration record above for the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, the fuzz effect was also marketed as a way of simulating other instruments: “Organ-like tones, mellow woodwinds, and whispering reeds,” says the announcer, “booming brass, and bell-clear horns.”
In fact, Keith Richards, in the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—the song credited with introducing the Maestro’s sound to rock and roll in 1965—originally recorded his fuzzed-out guitar part as a placeholder for a horn section. “But we didn’t have any horns,” he wrote in his autobiography, Life; “the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s attention.”
The assertion isn’t strictly true. While “Satisfaction” brought fuzz to the forefront, the effect first appeared, by accident, in 1961, with “a faulty connection in a mixing board,” writes William Weir in a history of fuzz for The Atlantic. Fuzz, “a term of art… came to define the sound of rock guitar,” but it first appeared in “the bass solo of country singer Marty Robbins on ‘Don’t Worry,’” an “otherwise sweet and mostly acoustic tune.” At the time, engineers argued over whether to leave the mistaken distortion in the mix. Luckily, they opted to keep it, and listeners loved it. When Nancy Sinatra asked engineer Glen Snoddy to replicate the sound, he recreated it in the form of the Maestro.
Guitarists had experimented deliberately with similar distortion effects since the very beginnings of rock and roll, cutting through their amp’s speakers—like Link Wray in his menacing classic instrumental “Rumble”—or pushing small, tube-powered amplifiers past their limits. But none of these experiments, nor the pedals that later emulated them, sound like the fuzz pedal, which achieves its buzzing effect by severely clipping the guitar’s signal. Later iterations from other manufacturers—the Tone Bender, Big Muff, and Fuzz Face—have acquired their own cache, in large part because of Jimi Hendrix’s heavy use of various fuzz pedals throughout his career. “Like the shop talk of wine enthusiasts,” writes Weir, “discussions among distortion cognoscenti on nuances of tone can baffle outsiders.”
Indeed. Those early experiments with effects pedals now fetch upwards of several thousand dollars on the vintage market. And a recent boom in boutique pedals has sent prices for handcrafted replicas of those original models—along with several innovative new designs—into the hundreds of dollars for a single pedal. (One handmade overdrive, the Klon Centaur, has become the most imitated of modern pedals; originals can go for up to two thousand dollars.) The specialization of effects pedal technology, and the hefty pricing for vintage and contemporary effects alike, can be daunting for beginning guitarists who want to sound like their favorite players. But what early players and engineers figured out still holds true—musical innovation is all about creating original sounds by experimenting with whatever you have at hand.
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