As an Eng­lish­man of a cer­tain age, George Mar­tin could, real­is­ti­cal­ly, choose only one means of con­veyance in Los Ange­les: a red Coupe de Ville con­vert­ible, and a gen­uine 1950s mod­el at that. But what­ev­er that era’s glo­ries of auto­mo­bile design, its music was still in the dark ages — at least accord­ing to the mil­lions upon mil­lions of Bea­t­les fans around the world today. The pop-cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion that band ignit­ed in the ear­ly 1960s owes, by some reck­on­ings, as much to Mar­t­in’s work as it does to that of the Fab Four them­selves. In his capac­i­ty as a pro­duc­er and arranger — not to men­tion as the man who signed them to Par­lophone records — Mar­tin arguably led the Bea­t­les to dis­cov­er their own musi­cal poten­tial. And once they’d become a phe­nom­e­non, they also felt pres­sure to sur­pass them­selves from oth­er sources.

One was a young Amer­i­can singing group called the Beach Boys, who in less than five years had gone from putting out sim­ple, repet­i­tive tunes about surf­ing and root beer to craft­ing the teenage-sym­phon­ic mas­ter­piece Pet Sounds. That album, so pop-music his­to­ry tells it, picked up the gaunt­let thrown down by the Bea­t­les’ Rub­ber Soul, and in response to it came Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band, an era-defin­ing release since pop­u­lar­ly thought to have won the bands’ friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion.

But with his ear for com­po­si­tion, Mar­tin sure­ly knew that Pet Sounds would nev­er tru­ly be defeat­ed, thanks in large part to “God Only Knows,” which Mar­tin describes as “one of my favorite Beach Boys songs.” He does so in the clip at the top of the post, of a 1997 vis­it to Los Ange­les in which he pilots his Cadil­lac to the home of the group’s musi­cal mas­ter­mind Bri­an Wil­son.

The two then enter the stu­dio and pull out the orig­i­nal mas­ter tapes of “Got Only Knows” to lis­ten to its com­po­nents one by one. You can see and hear more of what went into its record­ing ses­sions through this two-part video from Behind the Sounds that presents raw tracks from the stu­dio with notes on the var­i­ous tech­niques and play­ers (includ­ing the famous “Wreck­ing Crew,” with bassist Car­ol Kaye) involved. “What Bri­an had done was to write a beau­ti­ful song full of unusu­al changes,” says Mar­tin, “and then devise a tapes­try of sounds to enhance it.” As Mar­tin rebuilds the tracks on the con­sole, Wil­son says he’s “mak­ing a bet­ter mix of this than I did in the mas­ter.” It’s quite a com­pli­ment, con­sid­er­ing the source — but then so is the dec­la­ra­tion of “God Only Knows “as “the great­est song ever writ­ten,” issued as it was by a cer­tain Paul McCart­ney.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

Hear the Beach Boys’ Angel­ic Vocal Har­monies in Four Iso­lat­ed Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibra­tions”

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

Hear the Unique, Orig­i­nal Com­po­si­tions of George Mar­tin, Beloved Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er (RIP)

George Mar­tin, Leg­endary Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er, Shows How to Mix the Per­fect Song Dry Mar­ti­ni

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.

I was pos­sessed with a won­der­ful exam­ple of my Ital­ian Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. They would come over and join us every Sun­day, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them. I was 10 years old, and I was just say­ing, “Who am I? What am I sup­posed to do?” And they told me that they love the way I sang. It cre­at­ed a pas­sion in my life that exists to this moment as I speak to you, that is stronger now at 89 than in my whole life. I still feel that I can get bet­ter some­how. And I search for it all of the time. —Tony Ben­nett, Week­end Edi­tion inter­view, Octo­ber 10, 2015

Tony Ben­nett “is not just an artist for the ages, but an artist for all ages,” the Library of Con­gress wrote in its announce­ment of the icon­ic singer as the 2017 Gersh­win Prize Win­ner. Bennett’s life and career have tru­ly been extra­or­di­nary. The gold­en-voiced croon­er from Queens “has been on the front lines of his­to­ry” as a World War II vet­er­an who “fought in the Bat­tle of the Bulge and par­tic­i­pat­ed in the lib­er­a­tion of a con­cen­tra­tion camp.” He “marched with Mar­tin Luther King in Sel­ma to sup­port civ­il rights,” then went on to win 19 Gram­mys, sell 10 mil­lion records, per­form “for 11 U.S. pres­i­dents,” and become a pro­lif­ic visu­al artist who “con­tin­ues to paint every day, even as he tours inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

When he received the Gersh­win hon­or, Ben­nett had already been diag­nosed with Alzhiemers dis­ease, a diag­no­sis just revealed to the pub­lic by Bennett’s wife, Susan Benedet­to. He had been show­ing signs all the way back in 2014 when he released Cheek to Cheek, an album of jazz stan­dards record­ed with Lady Gaga. When AARP’s John Colap­in­to vis­it­ed him at his New York City apart­ment recent­ly, “there was lit­tle doubt that the dis­ease had pro­gressed.”

But Bennett’s gold­en voice and insa­tiable desire to get bet­ter remain. He still paints every day and rehears­es twice a week, and even as his symp­toms wors­ened over the past few years, he per­formed and record­ed with younger artists, deter­mined to pass on the tra­di­tion of the “Great Amer­i­can Song­book” in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Bennett’s advo­ca­cy for jazz singing through his duets with singers like Lady Gaga and Amy Wine­house may turn out to be his most endur­ing lega­cy. 2011’s Duets II began the col­lab­o­ra­tions with Lady Gaga. Dur­ing the record­ing of Cheek to Cheek, Ben­net enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly told NPR that “It’s the first time that young peo­ple that love [her] so much will fall in love with George Gersh­win, with Cole Porter, with Irv­ing Berlin.” She added, “Tony’s real­ly open­ing up a whole new gen­er­a­tion.” The two then got togeth­er again four years lat­er, going into the stu­dio between 2018 and 2020. “Tony was a con­sid­er­ably more mut­ed pres­ence dur­ing the record­ing of the new album,” writes Colap­in­to. “In raw doc­u­men­tary footage of the ses­sions, he speaks rarely, and when he does his words are halt­ing; at times he seems lost and bewil­dered.” It may “very well be the last Tony Ben­nett record.”

This sense of final­i­ty is why Benedet­to and their son Dan­ny “have joint­ly decid­ed to break the silence around his con­di­tion, a deci­sion they have, nec­es­sar­i­ly, had to make with­out Tony’s input, since he is, Susan said, inca­pable of under­stand­ing the dis­ease.” Nonethe­less, the new album of duets, due out this spring, promis­es to show Ben­nett in the fine form he has main­tained through­out the pro­gres­sion of his dis­ease, exer­cis­ing his voice to keep the worst symp­toms at bay. “He is doing so many things, at 94, that many peo­ple with­out demen­tia can­not do,” says Bennett’s neu­rol­o­gist Gay­a­tri Devi. “He real­ly is the sym­bol of hope for some­one with a cog­ni­tive dis­or­der.” Benedet­to is open about what’s been lost. “There’s a lot about him that I miss,” she says. “Because he’s not the old Tony any­more. … But when he sings, he’s the old Tony.”

See Ben­nett in clas­sic duets with Amy Wine­house and Lady Gaga above, includ­ing the stun­ning live ver­sion of “Any­thing Goes” with Gaga, just above, from 2014. “I feel very val­i­dat­ed by this,” she said that year. “You know, he’s giv­en my fans a gift by say­ing to them that he likes the way I sing jazz.” See those fans look on with rapt atten­tion, absorb­ing the songs Ben­nett loved so much through a new gen­er­a­tion of singers inspired by his incred­i­ble lega­cy. Just below, see sev­er­al more career-cap­ping duets from Duets II, and even more at the YouTube playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Music Can Awak­en Patients with Alzheimer’s and Demen­tia

Demen­tia Patients Find Some Eter­nal Youth in the Sounds of AC/DC

Christo­pher Walken Reads Lady Gaga

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

In a 1992 jour­nal arti­cle “Erup­tions: heavy met­al appro­pri­a­tions of clas­si­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty,” musi­col­o­gist Robert Walser explored the link between heavy met­al and clas­si­cal music–the way in which met­al gui­tarists stud­ied clas­si­cal music and cre­at­ed “a new kind of gui­tar vir­tu­os­i­ty.” Pub­lished by Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press, Walser’s essay comes to focus on Eddie Van Halen’s “Erup­tion,” the “solo that trans­formed rock gui­tar.” He writes: “Released in 1978 on Van Halen’s first album, ‘Erup­tion’ [see an extend­ed live ver­sion below] is one minute and twen­ty-sev­en sec­onds of exu­ber­ant and play­ful vir­tu­os­i­ty, a vio­lin­ist’s pre­cise and showy tech­nique inflect­ed by the vocal rhetoric of the blues and rock ’n’ roll irrev­er­ence.” The solo fea­tures rhyth­mic pat­terns rem­i­nis­cent of J. S. Bach’s famous ‘Pre­lude in C major’, while “the har­mon­ic pro­gres­sions of ‘Erup­tion’ lead the lis­ten­er along an aur­al adven­ture,” much like you’d find in the music of Vival­di. None of this was an acci­dent. As a young­ster, Eddie Van Halen was raised on a diet of Mozart and Beethoven.

Above, you can watch “Jill,” a mem­ber of the Japan­ese met­al band Unlucky Mor­pheus, per­form a vio­lin-dri­ven ver­sion of “Erup­tion.” It’s clas­si­cal meets met­al once again, except this time a clas­si­cal instru­ment takes the lead. Enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

14-Year-Old Girl’s Blis­ter­ing Heavy Met­al Per­for­mance of Vival­di

Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Great­est Per­for­mances: “Shred­ding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

The Great Illus­tra­tion That Accom­pa­nied Eddie Van Halen’s Appli­ca­tion to the U.S. Patent and Trade­mark Office (1987)

15-Year-Old French Gui­tar Prodi­gy Flaw­less­ly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yng­wie Malm­steen & Steve Vai

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are like block­buster Hol­ly­wood movies. Instead of the painful, con­fus­ing tedi­um of his­tor­i­cal detail that meets us when we try to under­stand the world, they offer spec­ta­cle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemp­tive res­o­lu­tion. If only, say, we could rid our­selves of scur­rilous fig­ures behind the scenes, we could get back to the gar­den and make every­thing great. Or, if only we could change the fre­quen­cy of stan­dard musi­cal pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind con­trol, expe­ri­ence pure med­i­ta­tive bliss, open our root chakras, and.… Wait… what? 

If this one’s new to you, you’ll find rab­bit holes aplen­ty to fall into online. Retired den­tist Leonard Horowitz, for exam­ple, has elab­o­rat­ed a the­o­ry that has “the Rock­e­feller Foundation’s mil­i­tary com­mer­cial­iza­tion of music,” then Nazi pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels, trick­ing the world into 440 Hz, “effec­tive­ly per­suad­ing Hitler’s sup­posed ene­mies in Britain to adopt this alleged­ly supe­ri­or stan­dard tun­ing for the ‘Mas­ter Race.’” Mean­while, on YouTube (and even in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals), notes Thom Dunn at Boing Boing, pseu­do­science about the “‘med­i­ta­tive qual­i­ties of 432 Hertz” pro­lif­er­ates, “which, of course, relates back to Horow­itz’s the­o­ry that 440 Hertz is a weapon of Nazi aggres­sion.”

Like most con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, “there is a ker­nel of truth here—that there has been an his­tor­i­cal debate between these fre­quen­cies for mid­dle ‘A,’ and that 440 Hertz won out large­ly because of West­ern indus­tri­al­iza­tion, which coin­cid­ed with some World Wars.” The his­to­ry, how­ev­er, pre­dates the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion and the Nazis, extend­ing back at least to 1885, as Alan Cross writes at Glob­al News, when “the Music Com­mis­sion of the Ital­ian Gov­ern­ment declared that all instru­ments and orches­tras should use a tun­ing fork that vibrat­ed at 440 Hz, which was dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal stan­dard of 435 Hz and the com­pet­ing 432 Hz used in France.”

The push for world­wide com­mer­cial stan­dard­iza­tion final­ly decid­ed the ques­tion in the 20th cen­tu­ry, not mind con­trol. It was just busi­ness, but why do the pro­po­nents of 432 Hz believe this is the supe­ri­or fre­quen­cy? In the video above, gui­tar teacher Paul Davids sat­i­rizes the rea­son­ing (over the X‑Files theme): some­thing to do with “the nat­ur­al har­mon­ics found in sacred num­bers” and the “psy­chic poi­son­ing of the mass of human­i­ty.” Davids quick­ly moves on to dis­cuss the actu­al his­to­ry of tun­ing, from the 15th cen­tu­ry onward, when stan­dards ranged from coun­try to coun­try, even city to city, any­where between 400 and 500 Hz. (Learn more about the his­to­ry of pitch in the video above.)

Some clas­si­cal musi­cians who play Bach, for exam­ple, tune to 415 Hz, not because it has mag­i­cal qual­i­ties but because it’s the fre­quen­cy Bach used, one semi­tone below today’s stan­dard 440 Hz. But all of this is aca­d­e­m­ic. Should not our ears and chakras be the judge? I stick close­ly to the cri­te­ri­on, “if it sounds good, it is good,” so I’m open to con­sid­er­ing the supe­ri­or­i­ty of 432 Hz. So is Davids, and he demon­strates the dif­fer­ence between the two pitch­es in some fin­ger­picked exam­ples of clas­si­cal and con­tem­po­rary hits. What do we hear?

Each of us will have a dif­fer­ent response to these fre­quen­cies, depend­ing on sev­er­al fac­tors, not least of which is our degree of con­di­tion­ing to 440 Hz. Musi­cians and com­posers, for exam­ple, are far more sen­si­tive to changes in pitch and more like­ly to feel the dif­fer­ence, espe­cial­ly if they try to sing or play along. What does Davids hear? He per­son­al­ly dis­miss­es any notion that 432 Hz tun­ing will “let a dif­fer­ent part of the uni­verse vibrate,” or what­ev­er. For one thing, play­ing in a dif­fer­ent key makes the fre­quen­cy change large­ly irrel­e­vant. For anoth­er, every musi­cal note res­onates at mul­ti­ple fre­quen­cies, nev­er only one.

Log­i­cal­ly, the dif­fer­ence between 432 and 440 Hz is arbi­trary, even in the most med­i­ta­tive of relax­ing 432 Hz videos on YouTube. “It all comes down,” says Davids, “to what you’re play­ing and how it sounds.” Or as Thelo­nious Monk put it in his indis­pens­able advice to musi­cians, “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” and “A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imag­i­na­tion.”

For more, read Ted Gioia’s 2017 piece in The Dai­ly Beast, Are We All Mis­tun­ing Our Instru­ments, and Can We Blame the Nazis?.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Music Told in Sev­en Rapid­ly Illus­trat­ed Min­utes

Music Is Tru­ly a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage: New Research Shows That Music World­wide Has Impor­tant Com­mon­al­i­ties

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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

On the final August morn­ing of Wood­stock, after a pre­vi­ous day’s down­pour had turned most of the field near the stage into mud, after an evening of blues and rock and the come­down of what­ev­er drugs had peaked every­body ear­li­er, as the sun­light crept over what was left of the 500,000 music lovers, now less than half in num­ber, wrapped in blan­kets and still vib­ing, Jimi Hen­drix took the stage. Now, the Star-Span­gled Ban­ner wasn’t his final song, but it was a finale of sorts, a coda for a three-day event where love tri­umphed for just a lit­tle while over war, that war rag­ing across the ocean in the sim­i­lar mud of Viet­nam. Hen­drix ripped the Nation­al Anthem, with its famous lyrics about bombs and its hid­den stan­zas about slaves, a new one. He turned that gui­tar into its own kind of weapon, sound­ing like those jet bombers rain­ing fire and napalm down, inter­rupt­ing Fran­cis Scott Key’s melody like a pro­tes­tor beg­ging to dif­fer at the Chica­go con­ven­tion. Hen­drix was going to send his audi­ence out into Amer­i­ca, back into soci­ety, with some­thing to chew on.

“All I did was play it. I’m Amer­i­can, so I played it,” Hen­drix tells Dick Cavett in the above clip from Sep­tem­ber 9, 1969, less than a month after the con­cert. “They made me sing it in school, so it was a flash­back, you know?”

But there was more to it than that. Hen­drix him­self was a vet­er­an. He joined the 101st Air­borne Divi­sion in 1961 under duress—it was either that or jail. He last­ed a year, dis­charged for “behav­ior prob­lems,” “lit­tle regard for reg­u­la­tions,” and “mas­tur­bat­ing in pla­toon area while sup­posed to be on detail.” Even while there, he had time to play gui­tar. Did this give him a “buffer” to lam­baste the war? Not real­ly. Right wing Amer­i­cans tend to be very touchy about the anthem, and any­thing that strays from the usu­al army band arrange­ment brings dis­trust and nasty let­ters, as Cavett notes in the video. (And being a per­son of col­or sure­ly had some­thing to do with it too.) To wit: folk singer José Feli­ciano per­formed a soul­ful ver­sion of the anthem before Game Five of the 1968 World Series in Detroit, where the Tigers played the Car­di­nals. Nowhere near the cor­us­cat­ing ver­sion of Hen­drix, but still the audi­ence, even the play­ers them­selves, were divid­ed.

Hen­drix raised the game and the ire. It was all jour­nal­ists want­ed to ask Hen­drix, hop­ing to goad him into a state­ment about the war. Hen­drix didn’t take the bait. “We’re all Amer­i­cans,” he answered at a press con­fer­ence after the con­cert. “…it was like ‘Go, Amer­i­ca!’”

But then the more telling line fol­lowed. “We play it the way the air is in Amer­i­ca today. The air is slight­ly sta­t­ic, see.”

Cavett is kinder, allow­ing Hen­drix to cor­rect him when he calls the ver­sion unortho­dox.

“No, no. I thought it was beau­ti­ful,” the mod­est musi­cian says. “But there you go, you know?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hendrix’s Home Audio Sys­tem & Record Col­lec­tion Gets Recre­at­ed in His Lon­don Flat

How Sci­ence Fic­tion Formed Jimi Hen­drix

Watch Rare Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Per­form­ing “Voodoo Child” in Maui, Plus a Trail­er for a New Doc­u­men­tary on Jimi Hendrix’s Leg­endary Maui Per­for­mances (1970)

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.