What Makes Ringo Starr a Great Drummer: Demonstrations from a German Teenager & Ringo Himself

The ques­tion of whether or not Ringo Starr is a great rock drum­mer — maybe one of the great­est– seems more or less set­tled among drum­mers. “From the sim­plis­tic heavy-hit­ting of Dave Grohl, to the pro­gres­sive mind bend­ing of Mike Port­noy, and way beyond,” writes Stu­art Williams at Music Radar, “all roads lead back to Ringo.” Not only is Ringo “your favorite drummer’s favorite drum­mer,” but when he took the stage in 1964 on The Ed Sul­li­van Show, “you’d be hard-pushed to find anoth­er moment where one drum­mer inspired an entire gen­er­a­tion of kids and teenagers to pick up a pair of sticks and beg their par­ents to buy them a kit.”

There was lit­tle prece­dent for what he did in rock drum­ming even in the band’s ear­li­est years. Ringo helped change “the role of the drums from an ortho­dox, mil­i­tary and jazz-led dis­ci­pline into a more democ­ra­tised art form. If there was a blue­print for what drum­mers ‘did’ in rock ’n’ roll, Ringo’s approach widened it,” adds Music Radar. Much of his expan­sive vocab­u­lary was acci­den­tal, at least at first, a prod­uct of what Bea­t­les biog­ra­ph­er Bob Spitz calls a child­hood beset by “a Dick­en­sian chron­i­cle of mis­for­tune.”

Like many a ground­break­ing musi­cian, Ringo played at what might be con­sid­ered a phys­i­cal dis­ad­van­tage. He learned the drums in “the hos­pi­tal band,” he once said, while con­va­lesc­ing from tuber­cu­lo­sis. “My grand­par­ents gave me a man­dolin and a ban­jo, but I didn’t want them. My grand­fa­ther gave me a har­mon­i­ca… we had a piano — noth­ing. Only the drums.” Like Hen­drix, he was a lefty forced to adapt to a right-hand­ed ver­sion of the instru­ment, thus enlarg­ing what right- (and left) hand­ed drum­mers thought could be done with it.

As Ger­man drum­mer Sina demon­strates at the top of the post, Ringo’s unique style involves a great deal of sub­tle­ty, “tone, taste, musi­cal­i­ty, and that left-hand­ed drum­mer on a right-hand­ed kit reverse-fell tom-tom work,” writes Boing Boing. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Sina in a post in which great drum­mers pay trib­ute to Ringo. The daugh­ter of a musi­cian in Ger­man Bea­t­les trib­ute band the Sil­ver Bea­t­les, she shows off an unim­peach­able grasp of Star­r’s sig­na­ture moves.

In the clip above, Ringo him­self demon­strates his tech­nique on “Tick­et to Ride,” “Come Togeth­er,” and his high­est-chart­ing solo sin­gle “Back Off Booga­loo.” In explain­ing how he employed his most high­ly praised tal­ent — play­ing exact­ly what the song need­ed and no more — he shows how the drum pat­tern in the Abbey Road open­er came direct­ly from John’s vocals and Paul’s bass line. In “Tick­et to Ride,” he shows how he works from his shoul­der, pro­duc­ing a down­beat that’s slight­ly ahead.

Where do Ringo’s quirks come from, accord­ing to Ringo? “It has to do with swing,” he dead­pans, “or as we keep men­tion­ing, med­ica­tion.” More seri­ous­ly, he explains above in an inter­view with Conan O’Brien, he “leads with his left,” a lim­i­ta­tion that he turned into a musi­cal lega­cy on his favorite Bea­t­les drum moments and on every­one else’s.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Musi­cian Plays Sig­na­ture Drum Parts of 71 Bea­t­les Songs in 5 Min­utes: A Whirl­wind Trib­ute to Ringo Starr

How Can You Tell a Good Drum­mer from a Bad Drum­mer?: Ringo Starr as Case Study

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

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

The Rolling Stones Jam with Muddy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Legendary Checkerboard Lounge (1981)

What­ev­er mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als may claim, the Rolling Stones did not just hap­pen upon Bud­dy Guy’s Checker­board Lounge on Chicago’s South Side (before it closed, reopened in Hyde Park, then closed again for good) on a night when Mud­dy Waters hap­pened to be there in 1981. And they did not spon­ta­neous­ly get invit­ed to jam, as it seems, when they “climbed over tables” to get onstage with their hero and blues leg­ends Bud­dy Guy and Junior Wells.

A chance meet­ing, of course, would have been mag­i­cal, but the truth is the event was prob­a­bly “planned and coor­di­nat­ed,” writes W. Scott Poole at Pop­mat­ters. These were the biggest names in the blues and rock and roll, after all. “Why,” before the Stones and their entourage arrive, “is there an emp­ty table on the night Mud­dy Waters came back to South­side?”

And why did the Rolling Stones’ man­ag­er claim he “approached the Checker­board high­er-ups a week in advance,” Ted Schein­man writes at Slant, “propos­ing a sur­prise con­cert and prof­fer­ing $500 as proof-of earnest”?

Was it a cyn­i­cal ploy to re-estab­lish the band’s blues cred dur­ing what would turn out to be the largest gross­ing tour of the year — one fea­tur­ing what Jag­ger called “enor­mous images of a gui­tar, a car and a record — an Amer­i­cana idea.” In some sense, Mud­dy Waters was also an “Amer­i­cana idea,” but how could he be oth­er­wise to the Stones, giv­en that they’d grown up lis­ten­ing to him from across the Atlantic, asso­ci­at­ing him with expe­ri­ences they had nev­er known first­hand?

And so what if the his­toric meet­ing at the Checker­board Lounge was stage-man­aged behind the scenes? That’s what man­agers do — they arrange things behind the scenes and let per­form­ers cre­ate the illu­sion of spon­tane­ity, as though they hadn’t spent an entire tour, or decades of tours, mak­ing the same songs seem fresh on any giv­en night. When it comes to the blues, play­ing the same songs over again is a key part of the game, see­ing how much atti­tude and style one can wring out of a few chords, dogged­ly per­sis­tent themes of sex, love, death, betray­al, and maybe a bot­tle­neck slide.

It’s a les­son the Stones learned well, and their ado­ra­tion and respect for Mud­dy Waters is noth­ing less than gen­uine, even if it took some back­stage nego­ti­a­tion to bring them togeth­er this one and only time. Mud­dy is spec­tac­u­lar. “Even as one of the aging elder states­men of the Chica­go blues in 1981,” writes Poole, “he exudes an aura of sex and pow­er, show­ing off every attribute that so inspired Mick and Kei­th and that became an inef­fa­ble part of their own music and their per­sona.”

Mean­while, the absolute­ly boy­ish glee on the faces of Jag­ger, Richards, Ron­nie Wood, and Stones’ pianist Ian Stew­art as they per­form onstage with an artist who had giv­en them so much more than just their name speaks for itself. The con­cert video and live album “began appear­ing as boot­leg and unof­fi­cial releas­es almost imme­di­ate­ly,” All­mu­sic notes, “from LP and CD to VHS and DVD.” Here, you can see them jam out three songs from the night: “Baby Please Don’t Go” (on which Waters brings Jag­ger onstage at 5:30 for an extend­ed ver­sion and Kei­th joins at 6:50), “Man­nish Boy,” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

10-Sto­ry High Mur­al of Mud­dy Waters Goes Up in Chica­go

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Fea­tur­ing Led Zeppelin’s Jim­my Page

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

Freddie Mercury & Rami Malek’s Live Aid Performance: A Side-By-Side Comparison

All Hol­ly­wood musi­cals need a big final set piece, one final rous­ing num­ber to bring all the nar­ra­tive threads back togeth­er, and pro­vide redemp­tion to our fall­en hero. Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the 2018 biopic about Fred­die Mer­cury and the band Queen, uses Live Aid as its final num­ber. We’ve writ­ten else­where about how this was not real­ly the final hur­rah for the band, nor was this some kind of tri­umphant return after years in the Wilder­ness. (“Radio Gaga” and “I Want to Break Free” had been in the charts just over a year pre­vi­ous.) Nei­ther was it their biggest con­cert of the 1980s. That would be the Wem­b­ley con­cert of 1986, where they would fill the exact same sta­di­um used for Live Aid, but this time it was just for them.

But Hol­ly­wood cares not for that, so instead lets look at how faith­ful­ly Rami Malek and his fel­low actors (along with what might have been Bryan Singer as direc­tor or pos­si­bly Dex­ter Fletch­er, the man who replaced him after events we’d rather not go into, look it up) faith­ful­ly recre­ate those 20 glo­ri­ous min­utes. After all, it was one of the most watched events in the sum­mer of 1985. There is video evi­dence!

I’ll leave it up to you out there to debate over Malek’s per­for­mance, which is going to suf­fer no mat­ter what he does in a side-by-side with the real thing. Instead, notice how the film­mak­ers use cer­tain parts of the per­for­mance to com­plete the nar­ra­tives of the film. We get a cut­away to Bri­an May (Gwilym Lee) with a “by George he’s actu­al­ly got it” look on his face—relief that Mer­cury final­ly got it togeth­er for the per­for­mance. There’s no equiv­a­lent shot in real life. The kiss that Mer­cury blows to some­body off cam­era is received by his moth­er and sis­ter back at his child­hood home.

After Mercury’s call-and-response with the teem­ing audi­ence, the band dives into “Ham­mer to Fall” and the film cuts to a mon­tage to show Live Aid’s phones ring­ing off the hook, anx­ious view­ers want­i­ng to donate even more because of Queen’s per­for­mance. This is again Hol­ly­wood hokum, as dona­tions only real­ly stepped up after Bob Geld­of got in front of the cam­eras a lit­tle after Queen brought the house down and harangued view­ers.

Still, you have to hand it to the movie for hav­ing the stones to indulge in the full 20 minute set, despite sil­ly moves like cut­ting away to the movie’s “you’ll nev­er go any­where” record exec­u­tive for the line “no time for losers” dur­ing the final song. (D’oh!)

YouTube user Juan Dela Cruz, who assem­bled this side-by-side, has made two oth­er com­par­i­son videos using exist­ing footage and the film: Part One is here, and here’s Part Two.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen Rehearse & Metic­u­lous­ly Pre­pare for Their Leg­endary 1985 Live Aid Per­for­mance

Watch 16 Hours of His­toric Live Aid Per­for­mances: Queen, Led Zep­pelin, Neil Young & Much More

Bob Geld­of Talks About the Great­est Day of His Life, Step­ping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Mor­ris

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.

Watch a Newly-Restored Peter Gabriel-Era Genesis Concert Film From 1973 in Stunning 4K Quality

There are two late-20th cen­tu­ry rock bands named Gen­e­sis and both of them fea­tured Phil Collins, Mike Ruther­ford, and Tony Banks. The sec­ond Gen­e­sis we know of as one of the biggest-sell­ing bands of all time and authors of such mas­sive hits as “Land of Con­fu­sion,” “In Too Deep,” and “Throw­ing It All Away.” The first we may not know at all, except indi­rect­ly by way of its front­man, Peter Gabriel, bet­ter known as… solo artist Peter Gabriel.

One rea­son Gen­e­sis, the sec­ond, is more famous than its pre­de­ces­sor must be the unabashed pop ambi­tions of the remain­ing three mem­bers after Gabriel depart­ed in 1975 and pio­neer­ing lead gui­tarist Steve Hack­ett left in ‘77. Anoth­er, relat­ed, rea­son must sure­ly be that Gen­e­sis, the first, made music that was not what most peo­ple would call acces­si­ble, even in the ‘70s, though it is unde­ni­ably beau­ti­ful and strange. Lovers of the song “Invis­i­ble Touch” might find them­selves unpre­pared for “The Lamb Lies Down on Broad­way.”

Gabriel, too, went pop in the 80s, though he only got a lit­tle less weird. Yet what large­ly drove the suc­cess of his solo career also drove the suc­cess of Gen­e­sis II: MTV made it impos­si­ble to escape “Big Time” and “No Reply at All.” Can we imag­ine an alter­nate ‘80s, per­haps, in which Gabriel’s odd-pop lean­ings and the earnest bal­ladry of Collins & com­pa­ny found a mid­dle ground? That is to say, if Peter Gabriel-era Gen­e­sis had made music videos? What too-lit­tle visu­al record we have of the first Gen­e­sis looks more and more promis­ing in the YouTube age.…

A few years back, we brought you news of a restored Peter Gabriel-era Gen­e­sis con­cert film from a 1973 show at England’s Shep­per­ton Stu­dios. Now, we have, from that same year, the con­cert above in Paris at the Bat­a­clan in “a 4K restora­tion that is a stun­ning improve­ment over any­thing seen before,” writes Rolling Stone. “Sim­ply put, it’s the most pris­tine video of a Peter Gabriel-era show that has ever sur­faced.”

This is a good thing for fans of Gen­e­sis One. The band played their final album with Gabriel, The Lamb Lies Down on Broad­way, in its entire­ty on all 104 tour stops two years lat­er. It was “the most elab­o­rate pro­duc­tion they’d ever attempt­ed,” and “in a deci­sion they lived to regret, they nev­er both­ered to film it.” The Paris con­cert, if sad­ly incom­plete, may be the clos­est we’ll get visu­al­ly to the glo­ri­ous high weird­ness of the orig­i­nal Gen­e­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Gen­e­sis (from the Peter Gabriel Era) Per­form in a Glo­ri­ous, 1973 Restored Con­cert Film

Peter Gabriel Re-Records “Biko,” His Anti-Apartheid Protest Song, with Musi­cians Around the World

Revis­it Kate Bush’s Pecu­liar Christ­mas Spe­cial, Fea­tur­ing Peter Gabriel (1979)

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

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satirical Film About the Invention of the Audiophile (1959)

Some­time in the mid-1990s, my father gave me his hi-end, hi-fi stereo sys­tem from the mid-1970s: a vac­u­um tube-pow­ered ampli­fi­er, pair of stereo speak­ers in wal­nut cab­i­nets, and a turntable. Heavy, bulky, and built with hard­ly an ounce of plas­tic between them, these com­po­nents lacked all of the func­tion­al­i­ty we look for in con­sumer audio today: no 4K HDMI, no Blue­tooth, no sur­round sound of any kind. As such fea­tures became de rigeur, my stereo migrat­ed to the clos­et, piece by piece, then out the door, to make room for new, shiny black plas­tic box­es.

Now, a search for that same equip­ment turns up auc­tions for hun­dreds more than its worth ten, twen­ty, fifty years ago. Why does obso­lete audio tech­nol­o­gy fetch such high prices, when there are appli­ance grave­yards filled with CRT TVs and oth­er relics of the ana­logue past? Blame the audio­phile, a very spe­cif­ic kind of nerd who spends their days obsess­ing over fre­quen­cy response curves, speak­er place­ment, and the opti­mal track­ing force of a sty­lus, immersed in mag­a­zine arti­cles, online forums, and prod­uct reviews.

While the rest of the world con­tents itself with stream­ing MP3s and tin­ny com­put­er speak­ers, audio­philes buy and restore old ana­logue stereo equip­ment, pair it with the lat­est in high-tech engi­neer­ing, wire it togeth­er with con­nec­tors that cost more than your TV, and build spe­cial­ized lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ments more like bou­tique show­rooms than any run-of-the-mill man- or woman-cave. In short, they tend to ori­ent their lives, as much pos­si­ble, around the pur­suit of per­fect sound repro­duc­tion.

Audio­phil­ia has trick­led down, some­what, in the renewed con­sumer love for vinyl records, but to com­pare the big box-store sys­tems on which most peo­ple lis­ten to LPs to the gear of the well-heeled cognoscen­ti is to spit upon the very name of Audio. The snob­bery and end­less dis­sat­is­fac­tion of the audio­phile are noth­ing new, as the 1959 BBC short film above shows, address­ing the ques­tion asked of audio­philes every­where, at all times: “Do they like music? Or are they in love with equip­ment?”

The charm­ing, satir­i­cal BBC por­trait brings this char­ac­ter to life for non-audio­philes, who tend to find the audiophile’s obses­sions unbear­ably tedious. But if appre­ci­a­tion for such things makes audio­philes just slight­ly bet­ter than ordi­nary lis­ten­ers, so be it. What­ev­er the dis­agree­ments, and they are numer­ous, among them, all audio­philes “agree on the fun­da­men­tal facts in life,” writes Lucio Caded­du in a “Survivor’s Guide on Audio­phile Behav­ior.”

Enjoy­ment of rhyth­mic, orga­nized sound may be uni­ver­sal­ly human, but for the audio­phile, that pedes­tri­an plea­sure is sec­ondary to “hav­ing a wide fre­quen­cy response and get­ting a real­is­tic vir­tu­al image, what­ev­er that means.” Audio­phil­ia, for all its priv­i­leged invest­ment in equip­ment the aver­age per­son can’t afford, can be seen as no more than an advanced form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Or it can be seen as a life “devot­ed,” Caded­du writes, “to for­mal per­fec­tion.”

via Ted Gioia 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An 82-Year-Old Japan­ese Audio­phile Search­es for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Elec­tric Util­i­ty Pole in His Yard

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

How Old School Records Were Made, From Start to Fin­ish: A 1937 Video Fea­tur­ing Duke Elling­ton

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

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

Hear Joni Mitchell’s Earliest Recording, Rediscovered After More than 50 Years

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.

Watch Metallica Play “Enter Sandman” Before a Crowd of 1.6 Million in Moscow, During the Final Days of the Soviet Union (1991)

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

Watch 4 Music Videos That Bring to Life Songs from Leonard Cohen’s Final Album, Thanks for the Dance

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

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