This is a clip from a live show of the Allman Brothers band at Stony Brook University in September 1971. My first rock show was the year before, also at Stony Brook, with my buddies Big Jim and Bobby. The Allman Brothers opened for Mountain. We were fans of Mountain and had never heard of the Allman Brothers before my mom dropped us off. Wow.
Richard and Linda Thompson were members of the great English folk group, Fairport Convention. They left and made an amazing sequence of great albums of folk/rock music, which culminated with their breakup album, Shoot Out the Lights, which rocked as hard as their hearts undoubtedly hurt.
It is a harrowing collaboration telling the story of their estrangement, its vortices and its troughs. Afterwards, Linda of the lovely voice lost her ability to sing for a while, but managed to win an Oscar for best song anyway. But Richard never stopped playing the songs, no matter how darkly he was implicated. Making such solos seems to be why he is here.
I was at Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks tonight. I enjoy watching great basketball players occasionally make great plays. But for years I’ve hated the entertainment bubble the Garden blows up around you. Relentless noise and flashing lights, it was an embarrassment.
They remodeled the Garden in the past year and it is a different place. The architecture is better, though the $95 seats are crammed together in humiliatingly long rows, so if you’re in the middle you have to climb over 20 people to get out. And without clear rows to walk in the arena you have drop under the seats to move around the auditorium. Every once in a while some guy climbs over you, steps on your toes (because there’s no knee or leg room) to get to the next aisle over. It is a design of density, with little care for customer comfort. As sucky as that is, everything is nicer, plainer, less like some pervert’s basement and more like the Barclay Center.
In any case, I’m not here to analyze, but only to say that it was not awful enduring the interstitial schtick that takes up so much time during any sporting event. One of those highlights was music mixes during the game that skewed hip hop, but grabbed snippets of new and old, catchy and hard, mixed with soul and rock so that one was never ground down by relentless ugliness. In fact, most of it was pretty nice (helped by an excellent sound system).
And after the local community dance troop finished their set on the floor at half time, we had a some good tunes. One of which was Love is the Drug. Nice.
And the Knicks won.
I had a paper route through my neighborhood when I was growing up. I learned then that everybody watched the World Series when the games were played during the day.
I also learned that people other than I played this song really loud. This might be rock’s greatest song. Please argue.
One of the problems of the Beatles is that the music has been heard so often for so long that it’s hard to bring fresh ears to it. Gene’s comment about the innovations of this great hit brought me back to try to listen as if I haven’t heard it 10,000 times before.
Another issue is what mix one is actually listening to. I’m not enough of a student to talk about innovations. What I can say for sure listening to this clip is that it is a marvelously appealing concoction, that each of the instrumental lines and each of the vocal harmonies is utterly distinct and greater for being a part of the whole than notable on its own. Plus the song, as seemingly simple as it is, is really three songs in one lovely shell.
One can imagine any band taking one of the three sections and turning it into a hit pop song, but it is perhaps the schizo genius of Lennon-McCartney filtered through George Martin, with other important voices at hand, that makes this music not only simple pop but appealingly and enduringly complex.
This curiosity, with the German version of the song laid over the English lipsynch, shows that singing in one’s native tongue brings more passion (but the German version was a big hit with Germans). So there is that.
I went to the recording of the radio show, Soundcheck, tonight, at the NY Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Dubbed Soundcheck Smackdown, the program was something of a debate about who was/is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Hosted and refereed by Soundcheck host John Schaefer, who wore the zebra stripes and had a yellow penalty flag that he threw once, and a whistle that went unemployed, maybe because he swallowed it when Ophira Eisenberg popped the f-word into her argument for the Stones, as in the Beatles asked to hold your hand, but who didn’t imagine fucking all of the Stones. Round to Stones.
Eisenberg’s partner on the Stones team was Bill Janovitz, who wrote a highly-praised essay about Exile on Main Street in the 33 1/3 book series and another book about the 50 most meaningful Stones songs.
Team Beatles was Paul Myers, who is an author and musician and the older brother of his partner, Mike Myers, who is known as the keen wit and lover of language who created Wayne’s World and Austin Powers. Notably the Myers brother have very similar body types, wore matching black t-shirts with the words “John&Paul&Ringo&George” on them, but had dramatically different hair colors (Paul pure white, Mike pure brown).
I don’t know when the show will air, but you can check the Soundcheck site for the airdate.
Before the show we were all handed index cards and pencils and asked to write in 20 words or less why we liked the Beatles or the Stones. I think the Beatles are more important culturally, but after thinking about this more than I had earlier in the week, I came up with this:
“The Beatles were the soundtrack of my life in middle school. The Stones were the soundtrack of my life in high school. I have to go with the Stones.” (What I actually wrote on the card was only 19 words, and probably better).
I think you might enjoy the show, so I’m not going to go into much detail here. But SPOILER ALERT, there was one thing to talk about that gives away who won. Sort of.
Before the show John Schaefer asked how many people favored the Stones. My sense was that all of us who went Stones knew that the Beatles were really better/more important, and our applause was half-hearted, lacking confidence.
The debate had many jabs and ripostes and good theater, but it was clear as it went along that the Ophira and Bill’s argument that the Stones were all rock ‘n’ roll-y, good for sex and burning stuff down, was a better argument than the Myers’s argument that the Beatles changed all of culture riff (even though that is almost certainly true, in a way).
At the end of the show, John Schaefer polled the crowd again about their favorites. This time, the Stones fans, buoyed by Team Stones excellent performance, cheered robustly and with confidence. But the Beatles fans were still louder. No minds were changed, but a rollicking good time was had by all.
The following two songs are the one’s each team chose as their band’s most emblematic:
Each team was also asked to name the other band’s worst song. Team Stones did quite well, though the song they cite is terribly catchy, while Team Beatles latched onto some obvious flaws in a Stones’ tune that time has embiggened. Or, at least, revealed virtues that overcome some of the disco silliness.
This list was a lot more difficult than the seven minutes or more. In fact, I probably could do a best of one minute or less, but I ruined it now.
I’m off to LABR tomorrow, so I probably won’t post again until next week. Peter should’ve saved his 10 posts from today and spread them out to cover for me.
Again, no ranking here. Too great, too challenging.
Disclaimer – These aren’t about Beatles vs. Bob Dylan vs. Rolling Stones. These aren’t necessarily the “correct” choices that you can find on every other internet or magazine list. These aren’t about who was the first to do this or that. Steveslist doesn’t care. These are about what I reach for and what turns my crank and what makes me smile.
Not sure I knew there was music this crazy before this. Loved loved loved the Misfits back in the late ’70s and even dragged my college buddies out to see them one night at the 4th Street Saloon in Bethlehem, the Lehigh Valley’s place for punk. (Now they probably tell their grandkids, “Grandpa saw that band a long, long time ago” whenever they pass some knucklehead kid in the mall with a Misfits shirt.)
This version jumps a little at the beginning, but every other youtube version didn’t sound right to me.
The Dickies were quick, short (common dickie traits) and full of covers. This is an early original. It was on 10″ white vinyl and fairly hard to find at the time.
You couldn’t beat Lee Ving for mean-spirited. Fear’s appearance in “The Decline Of Western Civilization” is arguably the highlight of the film.
When he appeared in the original “Flashdance” I had mixed feelings.
“Back From Samoa” was on my all-time top 50 list, I forget where.
Dylan, Springsteen and Costello working together couldn’t touch these lyrics.
The Supershit 666 EP is my all-time favorite piece of recorded music. Last year when I was working a shit third-shift data entry job while enduring a non-compete I would play it every night to begin my shift, drowning out the awfulness of Pitbull and Mumford and Sons on the radio.
Everyone on earth needs this EP. Seriously. The youtube fidelity sucks and I apologize for that. It’s not Supershit’s fault.
Not authentic, using the Bobby Bland charts rather than T-Bone Walker’s originals, as if I even know what that means.
What I know now is that this is perfection. What I knew then was that this music made high school tolerable.
http://youtu.be/1gDhR1R3S0s
I’m tired of doing Good Night Music, so I’m starting something new – Steveslist, which will consist of five songs or bands or whatever in some category I make up. Sometimes I’ll put them in order, sometimes not, when it’s too difficult.
Disclaimer – These aren’t about Beatles vs. Bob Dylan vs. Rolling Stones. These aren’t necessarily the “correct” choices that you can find on every other internet or magazine list. These aren’t about who was the first to do this or that. Steveslist doesn’t care. These are about what I reach for and what turns my crank and what makes me smile.
I couldn’t rank this first list, so here they are, in alphabetical order:
Don’t know why the studio version wasn’t on youtube when I last looked, but it’s there now – way better than any of the live versions. White Reggae at its finest with a hard edge. Not even sure where else to find that combo.
Who can make a 12-bar blues exciting for over seven minutes? The MC5. Damn straight.
Trumpet? Cheesy bossa nova from my mom’s 1970’s home organ (remember when every housewife had one in the living room?)?. What a groove. This song could go on forever as far as I’m concerned.
Listened to this album in the car yesterday and it’s what gave me this brilliant idea. Enough said.
Makes me want to fuck on the floor and break things as much as anything punk.
I’m reading this book, called Beatles vs. Stones
The New York Library is having a debate, with Mike Meyers and some other folks facing off on this hot issue, on February 27th, at Lincoln Center.
In anticipation of that, Gothamist has a post today declaring the Beatles clear winners, by comparing three truly awful late Stones songs no one has ever heard of to Revolver, Abbey Road and The Beatles. It’s worth listening to the Stones songs just to make the question somewhat more interesting.
For my part, I listen to the Stones much more than the Beatles, even records I played out decades ago, but without specific criteria it’s a tough choice between them. Seems likely the Beatles were the more creative while bridging the transition from early 60s pop forms to rock, while the Stones were more influential twisting blues and r’n’b forms into rock and pop music going forward into the future.
In any case, giving the Stones demerits for continuing to write material, no matter how crappy, long after they could have stopped trying, doesn’t seem fair. Especially when the other guys, the non-aligned Beatles, made plenty of crap music as solo artists. But it does make me wonder why the Stones they didn’t recognize how awful so much of it was and have the self-respect to bury it. Could their taste have become that rotten?
