How excit­ed would you be to lis­ten to a record­ing, made at an AM radio sta­tion in 1963, labeled “JONI ANDERSON AUDITION TAPE”? If you know much about the singer-song­writ­ers of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, you’d be quite excit­ed indeed. For Joni Ander­son is none oth­er than Joni Mitchell, who under that mar­ried name would go on to become one of the most influ­en­tial solo per­form­ers to come out of the folk-music scene. Not that she prized the des­ig­na­tion that thus accom­pa­nied her to star­dom: “I was nev­er a folksinger,” she recent­ly remem­bered her­self insist­ing. “I would get pissed off if they put that label on me.”

She had a point. Lis­ten to that 1963 audi­tion tape, on which she sings “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” while accom­pa­ny­ing her­self on the ukulele, and on some lev­el you’ve got to call it folk music. But even at the age of 19, Mitchell — or rather Ander­son — exhib­it­ed the dis­tinc­tive­ly cap­ti­vat­ing musi­cal pres­ence that would get lis­ten­ers of more than one gen­er­a­tion play­ing her records until they wore through.

Whether the teenage DJ who record­ed her demo had any idea of what she would become at the time, he knew full well the cul­tur­al val­ue of the tape when his daugh­ter redis­cov­ered it in the base­ment more than fifty years lat­er.

In the video just above, you can see that DJ, one Bar­ry Bow­man, react to Mitchel­l’s ear­li­est-known record­ing after thread­ing it up in his home stu­dio. “Damn!” he says, mar­veling at the crisp­ness of the sound after all these decades — and the fact that he some­how man­aged to do jus­tice to both her voice and her strings with the rel­a­tive­ly mea­ger equip­ment avail­able to him at CFQC-AM. The tape even cap­tures the dis­tinc­tive sound of her alter­nate-tuned bari­tone ukulele, which she orig­i­nal­ly took up while grow­ing up in Saska­toon when her moth­er vetoed the gui­tar.

Last year Mitchel­l’s 1963 ver­sion of “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” saw offi­cial release as part of the box set Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Ear­ly Years (1963–1967). Lis­ten­ing back to the mate­r­i­al of that peri­od sur­prised even Mitchell, and made her change her mind about her ear­li­er folk-relat­ed resent­ments: “It was beau­ti­ful. It made me for­give my begin­nings. And I had this real­iza­tion… I was a folksinger!” She may have tran­scend­ed folk music — just as she left Saska­toon for Toron­to, and then Toron­to for south­ern Cal­i­for­nia — but even Joni Mitchell had to start some­where.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Watch Joni Mitchell’s Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the years fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union a “tri­umphal­ist dis­course” arose in the U.S., writes his­to­ri­an Richard Sak­wa, “which sug­gests that the Sovi­et demise was a delib­er­ate act plot­ted and exe­cut­ed by pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan” with mas­sive mil­i­tary bud­gets and nuclear threats. This nar­ra­tive has less exclu­sive cur­ren­cy today. There are as many the­o­ries as the­o­rists of Sovi­et demise, among them the “com­pelling argu­ment,” says Jim Brown, pro­duc­er of a doc­u­men­tary called Free to Rock, “that rock and roll was a fac­tor — a con­tribut­ing fac­tor of many — in end­ing the Cold War.”

It’s not a face­tious claim and may have lit­tle to do, as some allege, with the CIA spread­ing for­eign influ­ence in the U.S.S.R. dur­ing the 1980s. A home­grown “rock sub­cul­ture,” writes Carl Schreck at The Atlantic, “had been per­co­lat­ing in the Sovi­et Union for decades by the time Gor­bachev came to pow­er in 1985.”

As Metal­li­ca came to pow­er in 1991 with The Black Album, their best-sell­ing record — and one of the biggest sell­ing albums of all time, world­wide — young Rus­sians did not need to be instruct­ed in the fin­er points of rock­ing out against author­i­tar­i­an­ism and gov­ern­ment con­trol.

Nev­er before, how­ev­er, had Russ­ian rock­ers gath­ered in the open as they did in ‘91, when the heavy met­al fes­ti­val Mon­sters of Rock stopped in Moscow for the first time since its found­ing in 1980, attract­ing a report­ed 1.6 mil­lion fans — one of the largest con­certs in his­to­ry — to see head­lin­ers AC/DC, Metal­li­ca, and Pan­tera. The show “was not the first time West­ern heavy-met­al acts have played Moscow,” wrote The New York Times. “In 1989, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and Mot­ley Crue filled Lenin Sta­di­um for two days to help raise mon­ey for Sovi­et char­i­ties.” But Mon­sters of Rock was some­thing dif­fer­ent.

Pro­mot­ed as a “cel­e­bra­tion of democ­ra­cy and free­dom” by its cor­po­rate spon­sor, Time Warn­er, and arriv­ing just a month after a failed coup attempt by Sovi­et hard­lin­ers, the con­cert was some­thing of a suc­cess­ful coup for AC/DC, who “until a few years ago… were for­mal­ly banned in the Sovi­et Union.” (One 1985 list com­piled by the Young Com­mu­nist League said they pro­mot­ed “neo­fas­cism” and “vio­lence.”) Sovi­et music crit­ic and writer Andrei Orlov ges­tured toward realpoli­tik in a remark on the sub­ject: “Look at the graf­fi­ti in the city. AC/DC is writ­ten on every wall.”

Even more rev­o­lu­tion­ary, in heavy met­al terms, was the appear­ance of Metal­li­ca at sec­ond billing on the tour. It would prove to be one of sev­er­al “ live coups,” for the band, K.J. Daughton writes. After their mas­sive suc­cess on MTV with “Enter Sand­man,” “Unfor­giv­en,” and “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters,” the band played sev­er­al major con­certs, includ­ing their “his­toric musi­cal tour de force” at Tushi­no Air­field in Moscow. “In a video of the set,” writes Didi­er Cade­na (watch it in full above), “one can see the ocean of peo­ple mov­ing around and singing along, even though the major­i­ty of the crowd only knew Eng­lish through the music.”

The con­cert was not with­out its moments of vio­lence. “The bru­tal inter­ven­tion of Sovi­et police left 53 peo­ple injured,” writes Daughton (see some of the offi­cial over­re­ac­tion above). But these were the rat­tles of a dying police state. Just a few months lat­er in Decem­ber, the Sovi­et Union offi­cial­ly dis­solved.

Can AC/DC or Metal­li­ca take cred­it? No, but they were impor­tant sym­bols for a wave of dis­af­fect­ed Russ­ian youth the Sovi­et leader him­self had no desire to hold back. Gor­bachev, after all, was “a fan of Elvis Pres­ley,” says Brown. “He liked rock and roll… And I think he takes pride in the fact that after wast­ing, you know, tril­lions of dol­lars on weapons, that words and actions and cul­ture brought these two coun­tries togeth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Sovi­et Rock: From the 70s Under­ground Rock Scene, to Sovi­et Punk & New Wave in the 1980s

The Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Dark­er is a bleak mas­ter­piece. Released just 19 days before his death, the album sounds like a warn­ing from beyond, one Cohen seemed to know we’d nev­er heed. His sym­pa­thy for human fail­ure reached its denoue­ment in the posthu­mous Thanks for the Dance, a project “much less apoc­a­lyp­tic” in tone than its pre­de­ces­sor, writes Thomas Hobbs at NME. Unlike many a posthu­mous album, “this point of dif­fer­ence more than jus­ti­fies the record’s release,” even if the mate­r­i­al can “sound a lit­tle scrap­py” at times.

The posthu­mous album’s exis­tence is also jus­ti­fied by the fact that Cohen want­ed it released. He turned that respon­si­bil­i­ty over to his son, Adam, who also pro­duced You Want It Dark­er and who recruit­ed Beck, Feist, Bryce Dess­ner of the Nation­al, Damien Rice, Richard Reed Par­ry of Arcade Fire, and “long-time Cohen col­lab­o­ra­tors Javier Mas and Jen­nifer Warn­er” to fin­ish Thanks for the Dance.

Many of the songs began as strained vocal read­ings Adam record­ed, then lat­er craft­ed arrange­ments around, as he tells NPR.

I begged him, often “Just record this lyric. Let me sketch some­thing and based on your reac­tion, we’ll adapt.” I was very, very lucky to get him to have these read­ings. Some­times they were read­ings with no metro­nom­ic sig­na­tures, it was just a read­ing of poet­ry. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, on a few occa­sions, that’s all I was left with — just bare musi­cal sketch­es. But they were also so laden with instruc­tion.

Cohen was a lit­er­ary per­fec­tion­ist. “He’s sort of the oppo­site of Dylan, who had this from the hip [song­writ­ing process],” says his son. “My father was much more method­i­cal, he had a chis­el… there were big, big pieces at which he’d been at work for years.” That Cohen would leave work behind for oth­ers to fin­ish, how­ev­er, is ful­ly in keep­ing with his biggest themes: noth­ing is ever per­fect.

In my opin­ion, there’s some­thing about the the­sis of this man’s work, which is about bro­ken­ness. One of the main points of inter­est was this idea of “the bro­ken hal­lelu­jah,” or “the crack in every­thing, that’s how the light gets in.” I think I’m not trans­gress­ing by say­ing one of the posi­tions of what “Hap­pens to the Heart” is bleak, that it breaks. But it’s how one sees one’s own heart break­ing: if you see it as every­one’s heart break­ing, it recon­tex­tu­al­izes it. 

“Hap­pens to the Heart” is also the first posthu­mous film in a “new series of artis­tic respons­es to Leonard Cohen’s posthu­mous album,” curat­ed by Now­ness who “invit­ed a glob­al ros­ter of film­mak­ers and artists to present visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions of Leonard Cohen’s life and lyrics.”

Four of those short films are avail­able on YouTube, and you can watch them here. In addi­tion to “Hap­pens to the Heart,” they include “Mov­ing On,” “Thanks for the Dance,” and “The Hills.” They do not include “The Goal,” but you can stream three dif­fer­ent ver­sions on the Now­ness site. One of these uses “footage from NOWNESS’s exten­sive film archive” in a “visu­al elab­o­ra­tion on the album’s sixth track,” the site notes, “which evolved from a 1998 Cohen poem of the same name” — a quin­tes­sen­tial Cohen lyric filled with wry, mor­bid humor and com­pas­sion for uni­ver­sal human suf­fer­ing.

I can’t leave my house
Or answer the phone
I’m going down again
But I’m not alone

Set­tling at last
Accounts of the soul
This for the trash
That paid in full

As for the fall, it began long ago
Can’t stop the rain
Can’t stop the snow

I sit in my chair
I look at the street
The neigh­bor returns
My smile of defeat

I move with the leaves
I shine with the chrome
I’m almost alive
I’m almost at home

No one to fol­low
And noth­ing to teach
Except that the goal
Falls short of the reach

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

New Ani­ma­tion Brings to Life a Lost 1974 Inter­view with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen Read­ing His Poem “Two Slept Togeth­er”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Over the past twen­ty years Radio­head man­aged to achieve some­thing no oth­er rock band ever has: endur­ing out­sider art rock cred­i­bil­i­ty that shield­ed them from the media machin­ery they came to loathe at the end of the mil­len­ni­um, and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty that meant they could drop their last, 2016 LP, A Moon Shaped Pool “with­out doing a sin­gle inter­view and it still topped the charts all over the world,” Rolling Stone writes,” even if Drake and Bey­once kept them stuck at Num­ber Three in Amer­i­ca.” How did they do it?

Twen­ty years ago, New York­er music writer Alex Ross described pop music as “in a state of sus­pense. On the one hand, the Top Forty chart is over­run with dancers, mod­els, actors, and the like; on the oth­er hand, there are signs that pop music is once again becom­ing a safe place for cre­ative musi­cians. The world fame of Radio­head is a case in point.” Do we still see a dichoto­my between “dancers, mod­els, actors” and “cre­ative musi­cians” like Radio­head in pop music? Per­haps it was a false one to begin with.

Despite their ambiva­lence about pop (and halls of fame), Radio­head hasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want­ed to be pegged as stan­dard bear­ers of the avant garde either. As drum­mer Phil Sel­way put it in the year they released Amne­sia, the sec­ond of two of the most baf­fling­ly oblique, yet strange­ly dance­able rock albums in pop­u­lar music: “we don’t want peo­ple twid­dling their goa­tees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism.” Yet after OK Com­put­er, they emerged sound­ing like a band try­ing to escape itself.

They nev­er want­ed to be a col­lec­tion of celebri­ties. They were hap­pi­est in the base­ment, co-cre­at­ing a sound that is cer­tain­ly greater than the sum of its parts but is also very much, Ross writes, the sum of its parts: “Take away any one ele­ment — Selway’s flick­er­ing rhyth­mic grid, for exam­ple, fierce in exe­cu­tion and trip­py in effect — and Radio­head are a dif­fer­ent band.” Even their pro­grammed, elec­tron­ic beats sound like Selway’s play­ing. “The five togeth­er form a sin­gle mind, with its own habits and tics — the Radio­head Com­pos­er.”

After det­o­nat­ing expec­ta­tions that they’d con­tin­ue on as a typ­i­cal are­na rock band, they were free to make music that met no one’s expec­ta­tions but their own. That cre­ative free­dom unleashed in the next two decades a hand­ful of albums solid­i­fy­ing their sta­tus as “Knights Tem­plar of rock and roll” because of their will­ing­ness to change and adapt, while always play­ing to their strengths: their sin­gle-mind­ed­ness when play­ing togeth­er and the refined song­writ­ing of Thom Yorke, show­cased solo in the first episode of their pro­duc­er Nigel Godrich’s “From the Base­ment” series. As men­tioned in anoth­er recent post, the series fea­tured inti­mate live music per­for­mances of bands, with­out a host or audi­ence.

In lat­er episodes, how­ev­er, from 2008 and 2011, respec­tive­ly, fur­ther up, the band played the full albums In Rain­bows and The King of Limbs to per­fec­tion. Under the for­mer video, on their YouTube page, one com­menter jokes, “what a great band. I hope they can get out of the base­ment some­day.” It’s fun­ny because it seems like that’s exact­ly where they’d rather be. See more live per­for­mances from the “From the Base­ment” series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Inti­mate Live Per­for­mances of Radio­head, Son­ic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Har­vey & More: No Host, No Audi­ence, Just Pure Live Music

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A few years ago we told you about the Wall of Sound. Not the one cre­at­ed in the stu­dio by Phil Spec­tor, but the one cre­at­ed by Grate­ful Dead tech engi­neer Owsley “Bear” Stan­ley out of over 600 speak­ers. Before the Dead worked to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how rock con­certs could sound, the speak­ers at live shows were tre­bly, under­pow­ered things, hav­ing not been designed for the sud­den change in musi­cal tex­ture and sound dur­ing the 1960s. In the ear­ly days, speak­ers were most­ly used to make sure the drums didn’t drown out the oth­er band mem­bers. Stanley’s three-sto­ry, 28,800-watt mas­sive wall, with columns of speak­ers ded­i­cat­ed to each musi­cian, promised crisp fideli­ty more so than pure loud­ness. In devel­op­ing the set-up, Stan­ley and his fel­low engi­neers helped intro­duce ideas still being used in live sound today.

For all that, how­ev­er, the Wall only got used for sev­en months of tour­ing in 1974. It took hours and hours to assem­ble and dis­as­sem­ble. For those who heard it, the sys­tem lived up to its hype. And it was immor­tal­ized in the Win­ter­land, San Fran­cis­co shows filmed for The Grate­ful Dead Movie (watch it online).

Now, near­ly 50 years lat­er a ded­i­cat­ed fan has rebuilt the wall as a 1/6th scale mod­el in his base­ment. While some of us took up bak­ing dur­ing 2020’s COVID lock­down, Antho­ny Cos­cia began to work four hours a day, every day, for two months, on this mod­el. He post­ed his progress on Insta­gram and Dead­heads, most of which hadn’t seen the real thing in per­son, lost their minds. (See this video to get a good taste of things.) Cos­cia also had nev­er seen the fabled Wall in real life—he would have been a tod­dler at the time. But he made up for it lat­er in the late ‘80s, see­ing the band 35 times, and the Jer­ry Gar­cia Band 25 times.

An archi­tect by day, Cos­cia insist­ed on the small­est details being repli­cat­ed, urged on by social media. The fin­ished mod­el is 6 foot, 8 inch­es tall and 10 feet wide, and fea­tures 390 work­ing speak­ers. It pumps out a not-exact­ly-Win­ter­land-wor­thy 800 watts.

“It’s a mas­sive glo­ri­fied clock radio but it sounds bet­ter than I thought,” he told the Wall Street Jour­nal.

And although he spent $2,000 in total, he’s already been offered $100,000 for it from an anony­mous donor.

The obses­sion with the band con­tin­ues a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er. A just announced series of shows by Bob Weir’s Dead & Com­pa­ny in Jan­u­ary 2022—in Can­cun, of course, where it’s warm—have sold out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Grate­ful Dead Slip Past Secu­ri­ty & Play a Gig at Colum­bia University’s Anti-Viet­nam Protest (1968)

Take a Long, Strange Trip and Stream a 346-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Live Grate­ful Dead Per­for­mances (1966–1995)

The Grate­ful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.