Last month, when I was suffering from a vertigo and unable to read for more than a few seconds at a time, my constant companion was the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, and especially her four great Songbooks: Gershwin, Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart. Collectively they constitute, I believe, one of the great achievements of 20th-century American art.
Ella recorded other “songbook” albums, including an Irving Berlin one, but these four are the masterpieces. And I might note that the Ellington songbook is different than the others, in two respects. First, here Ella sings with the composer and his orchestra; and second, the lyrics are undistinguished. Ella gets to show off her vocal chops, including scat singing — a style of which she is the undisputed champion — and that’s wonderful. But she doesn’t get to show us how she interprets great lyrics.
The other three Great Songbooks have her singing the words of some of the best lyricists of their (or any) time: Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter. The first two wrote lyrics to the music of others, while Porter wrote words for his own music. When the producer Norman Granz played Ella’s recordings of his songs, Porter said, “My, what marvelous diction that girl has” — a comment that has been taken as dismissive, but I don’t think it was. Porter would have heard his songs sung by many singers with lovely voices, but he had probably never heard a singer so intelligently attentive to his lyrics, of which he was very proud, and able to communicate their meaning clearly, vividly, and most musically. That would have captured his attention.
Ella indeed had marvelous diction, along with perfect pitch, a tone of exceptional purity from the top of her range to the bottom, and — something not often enough noted — great breath control. You never hear her breathe, no matter how long the line lasts or how fast the notes come. (This is a rare achievement. When Joni Mitchell, a great singer if there ever was one, sings “Twisted” — a vocalese gem that I don’t believe Ella ever recorded, though it was perfect for her — she nails every note but struggles to catch her breath. The only pop singer I can think of who has great breath control is k. d. lang, but she’s almost as freakishly talented as Ella.)
If you want to get started with this music, try these two songs: Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and the Gershwins’ “But Not For Me.” The latter is simply perfection: gorgeous and heartbreaking in the highest degree. I often think of what Ira Gershwin said: He knew that he and his brother had written some good songs, but he never knew just how good they were until he heard Ella sing them.
People often ask me why I don’t teach a YouTube lecture course on jazz history. It’s a great idea — but I can’t teach the course without playing music, and record labels would shut me down in a New York minute.
It’s absurd. I might be able to develop a huge new audience for jazz — maybe even a million new fans. The record labels would benefit enormously. But that doesn’t matter. They would still shut me down.
Rick Beato deserves better than this. His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.
If UMG wants to retain a shred of my respect, they need to act now. And if they don’t, maybe the folks at YouTube should get involved. They are bigger than any record labels, and this might be a good time for them to show where they stand.
Just as Universal Music Group should have the brains to know that their music showing up on Rick Beato’s channel is good for them, so also YouTube should know that it’s in their interest to support their creators when possible: the more people who watch Beato’s channel the better it is for YouTube. But one of the fascinating things about our megacorporations is how unenlightened and unreflective their self-interest (i.e. rapacity) is. Unlike Ted, I doubt that anyone in authority at YouTube cares about creators. They should; it’s stupid not to; but if they haven’t always been stupid they’ve been stupified.
Who stupefied them? Right now I’m reading Dan Wang’s brilliant book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, and the governing distinction of his book is a simple but, in its development, very powerful one: China is run by engineers, while America is run by lawyers. And engineers are very good at making things happen, while lawyers are very good at preventing things from happening.
This is not Wang’s way of saying that China is superior to America: he makes it clear that when engineers are in control they often end up making stuff that should never have been made, and that lawyers often prevent the bad stuff from being unleashed on the world. His point is that if you want to know which of these two massively powerful countries will dominate the next few decades, you need to know who’s in control in each country.
At Universal Music Group, the lawyers control the engineers, so they assign the engineers to write code that will auto-detect copyright violations and then auto-send takedown notices to the supposed violators. That the code returns a lot of false positives is of no concern to the lawyers: for them it’s better that ninety-nine innocent people be punished than one copyright violator go free. Likewise, while they know that U.S. copyright law has fair use provisions, they hate those provisions, and would prefer ninety-nine people who stay within the boundaries of fair use to be punished than to allow one person who transgresses fair use limits to go free.
When Rick Beato — like thousands of other music-focused YouTubers — gets a takedown notice from YouTube, he can contest it, arguing that his musical clips were so short that they clearly fell within the scope of fair use, or that he actually didn’t use the UMG-owned music at all. But then someone at YouTube has to evaluate his claim, and does YouTube have enough people assigned to the task of evaluating claims? Of course not. Is the evaluation of such claims the kind of thing that can be reliably assessed by bots? Of course not. So the easiest thing for YouTube to do is to sustain the takedown demand and demonetize the offending (or “offending”) videos.
The next step for Beato would be a lawsuit, against UMG or YouTube or both, but while Beato is a very rich man compared to me he is poverty-stricken in comparison with corporations like UMG and Alphabet. If he could survive financially long enough to get to trial — something that the corporations would do everything in their extensive power to prevent — he would surely win his case. But then there would be appeals.
The message of UMG and Alphabet to creators is simply this: It doesn’t matter if the law is on your side, we are so much bigger than you that we will destroy you. And they’re almost certainly right; I don’t even think a class-action suit entered by all the offended creators would be able to overcome the weight of megabucks.
As I say, it’s just stupid. Because the music companies are terrified of losing even more economic ground than they’ve already lost, they treat their best friends as enemies. They’d be appalled and disgusted by the idea that they need people like Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, but they do. They’re like a zillionaire being swept away by a flood: some redneck on the bank tosses him a lifeline, and before he goes under for the last time the zillionaire sputters, What’s in it for me?
I adored Walter Martin’s episode on Cheesy Music and Guilty Pleasures, but my mind organizes these things differently than his mind does. (By the way, if you don’t listen to the Walter Martin Radio Hour you are seriously missing out.) Some of the music he calls cheesy I think of as overly earnest or emotionally indulgent or saccharine — but not necessarily cheesy. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Bernard Williams, I think Walter suffers from a poverty of concepts.
For me, cheesiness is largely a sonic property: it’s a function of how a song is arranged and performed. So I think Walter is totally right to say that Elton’s “Daniel” and Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” are cheesy, because of the flutes + a chorusy electric piano in the former and the pulsing synths in the latter. But U2’s “With or Without You” isn’t cheesy! Good heavens, no. I mean, I think it’s a great song, and I don’t cringe at it one bit, but I get why Walter cringes at it a little: because of its intense earnestness and lyrical excess. But a song with a drum track that great can’t be cheesy.
Walter starts his show with “The Long and Winding Road,” which I think is probably saccharine in any arrangement but only cheesy when Phil Spector adds the strings. The strings on “Let It Be” are also cheesy, but without the strings it’s simply one of the greatest of pop sings.
Cheesiness for me is a function of vocal bad taste or (this is more common) instrumental excess: it’s a matter of gilding the lily, of pouring sugar on the ice cream. Once I listened to a recording of Aaron Copland rehearsing an orchestra for a performance of “Appalachian Spring,” and he told his string players to play dryly, not sweetly, because the music is already sweet enough. If he had let them lean into the vibrato and sweep, he’d have had a cheesy performance of his work.
I think maybe this is one reason why I like demos so much: no added cheese. An overly earnest or emotionally indulgent song can be great if the arrangement is suitably restrained. Dylan’s Blood in the Tracks is in many respects an emotionally excessive record, but the simplicity of the arrangements helps to make it not cringey but overwhelmingly powerful.
Even “Secret Garden” could, I think, be relatively cheese-free with a different arrangement. Springsteen’s love affair with synths in the Nineties was really a self-betrayal. Consider “Streets of Philadelphia,” an extremely earnest synth-heavy song. Listen to that original, and now listen to Waxahatchee’s cover of it: all she has to do is replace the synth with a Hammond organ and everything changes. Katie kills that vocal, also. That song did nothing for me until I heard her perform it.
Another example: Walter is right that “Downtown Train” is a weirdly cheesy song, given that it’s by Tom Waits — but that’s largely because it’s produced and arranged to sound like, I don’t know, maybe a Tom Petty song? Listen to this live version — a totally different beast. In fact, Waits specializes in songs that might well feel cheesy — or at best sentimental and overly earnest — if they were sung by someone with a normal voice in a normal pop arrangement. But when Tom sings “Take It With Me” it’s completely convincing, and deeply affecting. (By the way, the best commentary on Waits that I’ve ever read comes from Thom Yorke — scroll about 60% of the way down this page.)
And sometimes what you expect to be cheesy turns out not to be: see k. d. lang’s early album Shadowland for an example. This is an exercise in pure pastiche, as lang recreates the sound of Patsy Cline, using the Nashville String Machine and the Jordanaires, the whole apparatus. But it’s perfect: the arrangements suit the songs and the vocal performance right down to the ground. Buckle up your seat belt and listen to “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” if you want to know what I mean. Of course, lang is pretty much the finest singer in the world — there are great singers who don’t have great voices, and great voices belonging to people who don’t really know how to sing: lang has the best instrument and the best taste — but the arrangement is perfection. As I say: it ought to be cheesy but isn’t.
And when you’re done with that one, have some “Black Coffee.”
I should make my own playlists — subscribers to Walter’s Substack get playlists associated with his episodes — of songs that I think of as fitting these different categories. If I find time to do that I’ll post links on my micro.blog.
In May of 1942, as Sayers was writing the eleventh play in the sequence called The Man Born to be King, she shot a quick letter to her producer, Val Gielgud:
As proof that I am doing something, and because it is urgent, I am sending you Mary Magdalen’s song to be set. You remember where it comes — the Soldiers will not let her and her party through to the foot of the Cross unless she sings to them — “Give us one of the old songs, Mary!”
The song is thus the, so to speak, “Tipperary” of the period, and must be treated as such. That is to say, the solo portion is nostalgic and sentimental, and the chorus is nostalgic and noisy; and the whole thing has to be such as one can march to. We want a simple ballad tune, without any pedantry about Lydian modes or Oriental atmosphere….
I want a tune that is both obvious and haunting — the kind that when you first hear it you go away humming and can’t get out of your head! And quite, quite, low-brow.
In September, when the company were rehearsing the play, DLS wrote to a friend,
We had an awful time with rehearsals. Everything seemed to go wrong — it was one of those days. Claudia’s Dream had been done badly (owing to my not being there to explain just what I wanted!) and the ASS who set the song disregarded all my instructions, and not only set it in ¾ time instead of march time, but had the vile impertinence to alter my lines because they wouldn’t fit his tune. I threw my one and only fit of temperament, and we sang the thing in march-time and restored the line, but it wasn’t a good tune anyway!
In another letter she wrote, “I’m still furious with the man who wrote that silly tune.” Who was this “ASS”? His name was … Benjamin Britten. Probably never made much of himself.
It’s fun to write about DLS in part because she is very entertaining when she is outraged by something. Some years after this incident she reluctantly gave an interview to a reporter from the News Chronicle, who then announced to the world that Sayers had declared that there would be no more Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Sayers to the paper’s editor:
Your interviewer appears to have misunderstood me. I did not say that I had given up writing detective stories. I did not say that there would be no more Peter Wimseys. I made no announcement on the subject one way or the other. I only said that for the next few years, I had another job which would take me all my time.
(The “another job” was translating the Divine Comedy.) The editor’s reply merely created further exasperation:
There is no need to wonder how your reporter came to misinterpret me. Your own letter provides the explanation, since it shows you to have fallen into a similar misunderstanding, and for the same reason; namely, that Fleet Street renders a man incapable of taking in the plain meaning of an English sentence. You say you are “glad to hear that there will, in fact, be further Wimsey stories”; how, pray, do you contrive to extract that conclusion from my statement that “I made no announcement upon the subject one way or the other”?
I have not said, and I will not and cannot say, whether I shall write any more detective fiction or not; for the excellent reason that I do not know. Is that sufficiently clear?
Three times your reporter tried to force me into promising that I would write more of this kind of story; three times I refused to commit myself to any such thing. This refusal he interpreted to suit his own fancy; you in your turn have done the same.
Now, Gehry’s sketches are quite interesting, I think. My point is not that they’re worse than Wright’s, but that they are radically different and serve a different purpose. Gehry wasn’t going to spend a lot of time working out the details of a building — its structure or its appearance — because that’s what CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software is for. Before CAD came around, Gehry drew like this:
He would’ve had to learn to draw that way when at school. I wonder how much of that skill he retained … or maybe I should say, how long he retained it?
Architects have been debating the importance of drawing for several decades now. There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the business a decade ago when an architecture student said that he had been taught to draw, and acknowledged that “most people” he had asked thought it valuable, but did not seem to think that the skill had any real use. Indeed, he felt that drawing was a time-consuming distraction from what he thought his real job: “generating concepts.”
Me, I’m more interested in those who make art than those who generate concepts. But to each his own.
And I’m not just interested in works of art, I’m interested — passionately interested — in works of art that lead to other works of art. I love architectural drawings like Wright’s. I love the magnificent cartoons by Leonardo and Raphael. I prefer Constable’s sketches to his oil paintings.
And maybe above all I love musical demos.
The Beatles’ Esher demos mean more to me than the White Album. The gorgeous productions of Joni Mitchell’s Asylum albums just might be transcended, but in any case are put in their proper context, by her voice-and-guitar demos — and just listen to “Coyote” when she was still working it out. The best music Paul McCartney did in his post-Beatles career was his brief partnership with Elvis Costello, and their demo of “My Brave Face” is magnificent — far better than the more polished version that was eventually released. Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi” (from Love and Theft) is a fine song, but the earlier, simpler, demo-like version is truly great.
What I’m loving here — of course! — is human effort, human exploration, figuring it out, trial and error, rough edges, things in progress: the rough ground. I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to. But you all know that. Demos and sketches and architectural drawings are cool, is what I’m saying.
Since reading Ian Leslie’s John and Paul, I’ve been listening to the Beatles and thinking Beatly thoughts. Whenever I listen to them I always stumble across songs that are unprominent in their catalogue but still terrific — songs that we’d all remember more vividly if they had been recorded by anyone other than the Beatles, whose masterpieces tend to dominate our attention. The one for this week is “Yes It Is,” a little gem by John that features some lovely doo-wopish harmonizing.
The experience of music can be a peculiar thing. Here’s an example:
On a walk I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself, but as the middle-eight was coming … Do any of you do this? Sing or play a song and simultaneously think about and almost hear in your head what’s coming next? I suppose people who read music well and play from written music have this experience all the time, but I am a poor reader of music — I often say that I read music the way I read Greek, reasonably accurately but far too slowly and painstakingly to be good for much — and thus almost never sing or play anything from the page.
Anyway, I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself and realizing that I didn’t remember the middle-eight. But when I’m singing a song and think I don’t know what’s next I usually discover, when the moment arrives, that I do. I figured that the first word and note of the middle-eight would come to me when I needed it. It didn’t — but something else did: the bridge of “What a Wonderful World,” the part that begins “The colors of the rainbow” (right at the 1-minute mark in that video). I somehow found myself at that moment leaving one song and entering another — and then, when the bridge was over, I went right back to the next verse of “Yes It Is.”
The two songs aren’t in the same key — “Yes It Is” is in E, “Wonderful World” in F, but maybe, since the tonic notes are only a half-step apart, that’s close enough for someone with as poor an ear as I have to make a connection. The harmonic sequences are also similar. And probably someone with a better background in music theory than I have could tell me something about cadences that would help to explain it. But in any event it was a funny experience … and now, I suspect, for the rest of my life I’ll be unable to recall the actual middle-eight of “Yes It Is” and will find myself singing “The colors of the rainbow….”
Imagine a man who has another man in his life with whom he is deeply intimate and has been for a number of years, a person who understands him as no one else understands him — and he understands the other in the same way and to the same degree. One just looks at the other and knows what he is thinking. Moreover, these two men have a creative partnership, and their intimate friendship feeds creative partnership, and vice versa.
Now, imagine further that these two men are not lovers, but rather friends — and, moreover, friends in a society which has no real vocabulary for describing such intimate friendship, and sees no reason why such intimacy should ever happen, much less be encouraged and nurtured.
Imagine also that these two men are sexual beings, and however intense their friendship is, they still want sex with women, companionship with women, maybe even marriage with women. Imagine further that their pursuit of women, coupled with certain other (largely economic) circumstances, tends to limit the amount of time that they can spend with each other. Each of them also develops a distinctive set of artistic and intellectual interests not usually shared with the other, so that over time the intimacy which has sustained them emotionally, and has sustained their creative partnership, is diminished.
And now, finally, imagine that all of these forces that diminish the friendship eventually become strong enough to bring the partnership to an end. Inevitably, the friendship itself will then be damaged, perhaps beyond repair. It’s a kind of vicious circle in which the circumstances that weaken the partnership weaken the friendship also, which in turn makes the partnership even less plausible. The two men never cease to be connected, but the connection becomes less predictable, and is often interrupted. It never again will be what it once was, and both of them realize it, and oscillate among regret and acceptance and anger. They think: It didn’t have to be this way, it didn’t have to end and It ended and it’s your fault and … many other things.
That’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie. People will read it because they love the music of the Beatles — I read it because I love the music of the Beatles — but it’s really a sobering and moving meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of male friendship in the culture we inhabit. It’s an outstanding book, and an immensely sad one. I’ll keep it on my shelf next to the best book about the band’s music, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head.
Electric guitar guys spend a lot of time talking about tone: Who’s got the best tone, how does he get that tone, tone is in the hands, man. Tone tone tone, all day and all of the night … and dude, how did Dave Davies get that tone on that song? (He got it on “You Really Got Me” by slicing up the speaker of his amp.)
But I think these conversations tend to miss the most important point, which is that excellence of tone is contextual. What matters is not primarily whether a particular tone sounds cool or not, but rather whether it suits the song. And in that regard it has long seemed to me that the all-time masters of tone-in-context are the Beatles. Their guitars have a remarkable range of tones and they’re always just right. Consider the diversity of
“Ticket to Ride”
“And Your Bird Can Sing”
“Revolution”
“I’ve Got a Feeling” (John’s little riff, used as an intro and then played through the whole song)
“Octopus’s Garden” (I’m serious)
I’m limiting myself to five, but the list could go on. Clapton’s tone on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is great, but it’s basically the same sound he used all the time in those days (before he switched from a Les Paul to a Strat). The Beatles had an uncannily perfect sense of what sound they needed from their instruments for any given song. People rarely say this, it seems to me, but they’re one of the great guitar bands.
More about the Beatles coming — I’m reading this, in the moments between meetings, emails from students, and exam grading.
In the summer of 2013, when we were getting ready to move to Texas, I went through our basement storage to figure out what we would keep, what we would sell, and what we would throw away. I lingered a long time over several boxes of LPs — records that I had owned for decades, but that I hadn’t listened to in … well, in at least a decade. After a long mental struggle, I asked my son to gather up the records and sell them to Half Price Books. I didn’t do it myself because I thought I might well chicken out and bring them back home. But the age of vinyl was over, right? We’d be streaming and listening to MPs from here on out, yes?
I try not to think about what we sold that day, because over the past few years I’ve resumed listening to vinyl, and am gradually rebuilding my collection. (So far I’ve managed to keep it small — fewer than 100 discs. So far.) Some blame for this state of affairs must be laid at the feet of my friend Rob Miner, whose record collection and vintage stereo system I used to enjoy when he still lived here in Waco. Damn, this sounds good, I would think.
The online wars between the Vinyl Partisans and the Digital Defenders are endless and not worth rehashing here, or anywhere else. But in essence the Defenders point to the indisputably greater fidelity of digital recordings, while the Partisans speak more vaguely of “warmth” and “presence.” And it’s hard to speak any less vaguely! While many, though not all, music lovers believe that recordings can have distinctive “character,” it’s not clear how to identify the particular sonic features of a given recording — beyond obvious and not-especially-helpful things like dynamic range and audio spectrum.
Pascal said of the Copernican universe, “Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” and while digital recordings do not frighten me, they estrange me: they seem to be coming from a great vacuum, some featureless un-environment, a cold and boring non-place. But when I listen to a well-engineered record, especially one made in the analog era, on vinyl, I feel that I’m sharing a perceptual space, a sensorium, with the musicians. I wish I could describe it better. It’s an experience the opposite of alienating; it’s what the Germans call heimlich. Digital recordings, by contrast, often seem to be unheimlich, uncanny, slightly and uncomfortably weird.
If you don’t feel that way and feel it pretty strongly, then vinyl isn’t for you. It’s kind of a pain in the neck to use — I am not one of those people who enjoys the “ritual” of changing records; I would strongly prefer to be able to listen to a record straight through, as I do when I put on a CD. For me it’s the sound only that appeals. Well, that and the packaging: readily visible cover art! Readable liner notes!
So, yeah, I spend a lot of time wishing that I still had those records I sold in 2013. But to be fair to myself, I think most music-lovers in that year would’ve been surprised to know that in the year 2025 vinyl records would still be made at all — and thus far more surprised that they now outsell CDs.
A few months ago, when Criterion was running a sale, I got this boxed set. It’s beautifully done, like all of Criterion’s editions, and the films come accompanied with informative essays, images, and videos.
But the interest here (while pretty intense, for me anyway) is almost purely historical and sociological, because the music … well, it’s largely really bad. Otis Redding is fantastic, and the pop acts — though they often seem out of place in this environment, Simon & Garfunkel especially — tend to sing on-pitch and play with some semblance of rhythm; but the rock acts are almost uniformly inept. Even Jimi Hendrix appeals largely as a showman rather than a musician. The group that sounds the best is probably the Byrds, and they’re more of a pop group than a rock band.
This shouldn’t have surprised me, because my friend John Wilson, who was living in California in this period and saw almost every famous performer, said that they often weren’t very good. Too many drugs, too much alcohol. Still, because the festival is such a famous one, I was a bit surprised by just how poorly almost everyone played and sang.
But: I don’t believe many of them were trying very hard, and if they had been, no one would have noticed. This was a classic Happening, an event conjured from vibes, pheromones, and bong hits. You had to be there, as the saying goes, and being there was the whole and the only point. The music was barely relevant: even when you see people swaying and dancing they’re almost never on the beat. They’re dancing to their own inner festival.
When the Beatles were recording Revolver, engineers at the Abbey Road studio invented a new technique called ADT — Automatic Double Tracking:
[Ken] Townsend came up with a system using tape delay…. Townsend’s system added a second tape recorder to the regular setup. When mixing a song, its vocal track was routed from the recording head of the multitrack tape, located before the playback head, and fed to the record head of the second tape recorder. An oscillator was used to vary the speed of the second machine, providing variation in delay and pitch depending on the change in the second machine speed. This signal was then routed from the playback head of the second machine to a separate channel on the mixer. This allowed the vocal delayed by a few milliseconds to be combined with the normal vocal, creating the double-tracked effect.
This made it sound like two almost identical voices were singing. Most of the songs on Revolver used it, and not just on vocals: for instance, the lead guitar on “Taxman” is ADT’d.
But a very similar effect was used decades earlier … in Citizen Kane. When near the beginning of the movie we hear the dying Kane whisper “Rosebud,” the sound of the voice was produced by doubling Orson Welles’s voice using two different periods of reverberation. Double tracking — just not automatic.
When Charlie Watts died in 2021, I wrote, “This feels like a big one” — and it did, it was. But the death yesterday of Garth Hudson is a bigger one for me personally; I’m genuinely grieving.
Of all the legendary musical groups of the rock era, The Band is the most difficult to assess. They weren’t around for all that long, and they made some indifferent music. But only Bob Dylan rivals them — and doesn’t obviously excel them — as the embodiment of what Greil Marcus called the music of “the old, weird America,” and what Dylan himself called “historical-traditional music.” Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing.
You have to remember how much the Discourse of the late Sixties was dominated by talk of the “Generation Gap,” how strong the tensions were between the young and the old, to recognize the vital and wonderfully generous thing The Band did when they made an album, Music from Big Pink, that you opened up only to see a photo of the band members with their families:
It seems like a small thing … but it wasn’t. It was a powerful statement about the bonds that hold us firm to our past, about the people and places we belong to. And their music made that statement even more powerfully, especially in “the brown album” — the one called simply The Band, which I think is the single finest recording of that era. The Beatles were the best group of that time, and created the greatest body of work, but for albums — well, it’s The Band and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and then everything else trailing well behind. Or so I say. Give a listen and discover for yourself.
Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012, Robbie Robertson in 2023 — but as long as Garth remained, that musical world seemed still a living world. Now it recedes into the past. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t linked to it — listening to the music of The Band is enough to remind us of that. But for all those guys to be gone now … it’s tough.
Points of interest include the 3 against 4 rhythms between the hands, the parallel (not relative) major/minor tonalities of E and E minor (by now a familiar feature of Joni’s composing, as well as Paul McCartney’s incidentally) and the frequent use of suspended “chords of inquiry,” as she called them.
“Chords of inquiry” is Joni’s term for sus chords — which “suspend” (i.e., don’t play) the third of a triad and instead go down to play the second or go up to play the fourth. When you remove that third the chord itself also becomes as it were suspended between major and minor. It is ambivalent; it moves us to inquiry into its character.
“Court and Spark” is a piano song, but Joni was in her younger days an exceptional guitarist and used many alternate tunings to help her find and play more elegantly those chords of inquiry. You can hear a classic example of how she liked to play guitar here — a live recording made in a café in Ottawa in 1968 by a Joni fanboy. The recording was lost for half-a-century and only saved at all because that fanboy was … Jimi Hendrix. (By the way, here’s the guitar tablature for that song. Look at all those sus chords! And in a “Joni tuning,” with four strings tuned to D!)
Back to the description of “Court and Spark”: the piano part’s three-against-four is noteworthy, but also you should listen for the big change in the rhythm (though not strictly speaking the tempo) at 1:14. And I haven’t even mentioned the singing: her endlessly flexible and imaginative timing, her trademark sliding up to target notes, etc. Or the distinctive elegance of the lyric.
So there’s a lot going on in this song, in pretty much all the ways that a song can have things going on. It’s haunting, meditative, reflective, full of musical inquiry — and this is how Joni Mitchell decided to start her album, which …
… went to Number Two on the Billboard chart, and finished as the thirteenth-best-selling album of 1974.
The big record labels today mastermind every step of a record’s making: they bring in songwriters and song consultants to write, edit, tweak, and doctor songs — Beyonce’s Lemonade famously had so many that no one seems to know the exact number (some say 60, some say 72). Then you get multiple producers and engineers, and arrangers who think only of whether songs can cross the 30-second mark on Spotify so people will get paid. The great majority of songs use four chords, the Axis of Awesome progression or one closely related.
But fifty years ago an eccentric Canadian singer-songwriter, armed only with her own unique voice and musical imagination, wrote and sang — and produced! She’s the one who roped in the extraordinary musicians that play on Court and Spark — an album of songs that went almost to the top of the charts then and still sounds brilliant today. There’s a lesson here for those with ears to hear.
“I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That’s why I spend my time now painting.”
The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.
The most important technology of sound reproduction so far?
I recently got a wonderful email from my student Annalise Shero, who is spending what we here in Texas call “summer” in Sydney, Australia. (Which sounds pretty great.) With her permission, I’m sharing her message below.
Last semester in Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century, you told us about Rachmaninoff’s Vespers and played a portion of them in class for us. Since you introduced me to this piece, I would like to tell you a story about it.
This evening, I attended a live performance of the Vespers in the Sydney Town Hall, which had a unique staging. The choir was placed centrally in the cavernous hall, and the audience could sit right around them. Those seats were very expensive, however, and I am currently a Budget Patron of the Arts, and so my seat was not close to the choir at all. In fact, I was barely inside the door, tucked in an alcove.
My seat provided a very interesting visual and auditory subtext to my experience of the evening, especially considering the history of the piece. When the performance began, the lights in my little alcove dimmed completely. I sat in the dark, observing the lights over the choir and most of the audience, yet not included in it. Likewise, the acoustics of the hall and my alcove created auditory distance. I could hear the distance between me and the choir.
I suffered no true loss in quality, the choir was brilliant and beautiful, yet I felt the metaphoric poverty of my seat through the presence and distance of this glory. I felt like Zacchaeus, immensely glad to have as much proximity as I did, and I felt like I was with Simone Weil, reveling in the beauty while among the outsiders.
The choir filed out the side doors, and the small ensemble played a contemplative interlude. Was it over? Perhaps the ending was different than I remembered, ending with gentleness instead of glory. But then! But then!! The doors immediately behind me opened letting in great golden light, and there in the entryway the choir sang the final movement of the Vespers. I was immersed in sound and light. I sobbed.
When the choir concluded, not a soul moved, nor breathed. (I was desperately trying to weep as quietly as possible). We spent several seconds suspended in silence, the sound of the liturgy still sinking into our bones. Then it was as if the applause would never end, and at this point I laughed until I couldn’t breathe all over again.
In 1969, when the Beatles were recording the album that became Abbey Road, Paul McCartney would come in every day to record a vocal track. (He lived near the studio, so it was easy for him to drop by.) The vocal he was trying to get right was “Oh! Darling” — a song that, some years later, John Lennon would say was better suited to his voice than Paul’s — and each day Paul would perform one take and one take only. There’s some serious shouting on that song, and Paul was taking care to protect his voice; several takes might do damage that would take time to heal.
Six years earlier, when the lads were recording their first album, they did the whole thing — fourteen songs — in one day, and they saved “Twist and Shout” for the end because John knew that once he had done that one, he wouldn’t have any voice left to do anything else.
But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year — a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort.
Why should Teachout have made that effort? He “eschewed” political controversy so he could write about the things he most cared about: the arts. Seems a reasonable decision to me, and one I wish more writers made. There aren’t enough writers who are conservative in Teachout’s mode.
(Teachout was a terrific writer in so many ways, but I must pause to note that the one great outlier in his body of work was his absurdly unfair, tendentious, and just plain hostile biography of Duke Ellington. I’ve never understood his attitude towards the Duke. Ethan Iverson’s detailed critique of the biography, mentioned in the Nation essay, is very good, and is usefully supplemented by an equally detailed response by the Duke’s nephew.)
On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. We paused to talk a bit about the musical language of late Romanticism, about Rachmaninoff’s gift for lush melody, etc. Then I played them this:
Hard to believe it was composed by the same man, isn’t it? But (I suggested) that’s the difference between a young Russian composer in 1901 — he wrote that concerto when he was 27 — and a middle-aged Russian composer living through overwhelming political turmoil and world war. In time of desperate need Rachmaninoff, not a churchgoer, turned to the liturgical and musical inheritance of Orthodoxy to make sense of his world, to begin the long healing that would be necessary.
But the healing didn’t happen. Russia was further broken by the war, then entered the long nightmare of Bolshevik rule, and Rachmaninoff became one of many exiles. In some ways he never recovered from this experience. Many years later, while living in California, he lamented his inability to compose music: “Losing my country, I lost myself also.” (Exile versus homecoming — one of the themes of my class.) But the All-Night Vigil remains, for me, one of the transcendent works of music. Rachmaninoff himself thought it perhaps his best composition.
But I have another motive in having my students listen to this music, which is to get them to listen to music. People these days, especially but not only young people, have music on all the time, but that’s not the same as listening to it. Indeed, as Ted Gioia and Damon Krukowski have documented repeatedly, Spotify — and pretty much all my students use Spotify — positively wants its users to unlisten, to merely have music on in the background, in part because that allows the company to shift from actual music made by human musicians to AI-generated neo-Muzak. The tiny amount that Spotify pays musicians is already shameful, but it’s too much for a company that doesn’t have a workable business model, so the best way to limit costs is to cut human musicians out of the game altogether. But this will only work if Spotify can habituate its users to empty, mindless schlock, made up of endless variations on the same four chords.
I’ve made it a classroom practice in the last year or so to indulge in theatrical rants against Spotify, which is fun for me and for my students. They argue with me and I denounce them, all in good humor. But for all the smiles, I am quite serious. Spotify is creating in millions and millions of its users a new kind of Attention Deficit Disorder, not one that has them jumping from one thing to another, but rather has them in a kind of vague trance state. Spotify is like soma from Brave New World in audio form. And to be in such a state is to experience a deficit of attention, an inability genuine to attend to what one is hearing.
So one of the things I am doing in this class, and will be trying in other classes, is to get my students to spend five minutes listening to music. I forbid digital devices in my classes, so they just have their books and notebooks in front of them — they can of course be distracted from the music, but it’s not automatic, not easy. If listening is the path of least resistance, then maybe they’ll listen. I’ve started with five minutes, but I hope to work our way up to longer pieces. My dream — and alas, it is but a dream — is, one Holy Week, to sit together with my students and listen to the single 70-minute movement that is Arvo Pärt’s Passio.
As part of my ongoing project to understand myth and mythmaking in the modern era I have been sitting down to a full encounter with Wagner’s Ring cycle — which I’ve never before listened to completely and in sequence. I’m doing this by listening to the legendary Georg Solti Decca recording and following along with the excellent Penguin Classics bilingual edition of the libretto. I have some reservations about John Deathridge’s translation, but fortunately my German is (barely) good enough that I can make it through without only occasional consultations of the English version. (I’ve got the beautiful hardcover edition, which I think may have been printed only in the U.K.)
I’m not finished yet but I have gotten far enough along to say with some confidence that Wagner’s celebrants who think him a nearly incomparable genius are absolutely correct, and Wagner’s detractors who think him unforgivably self-indulgent are also correct. And I’ve also come to some conclusions about why both of these things are true. (Probably many other people have come to the same conclusions, but I have read very little Wagner criticism, with one major exception noted below.)
Again, I am not fluent in German but anyone with even minimal competence in the language can see how brilliant a poet Wagner is, and especially how skillfully he employs alliteration and assonance to create his effects — and with a remarkable economy of language. Nietzsche’s inclination to compare Wagner as poetonly with Goethe is remarkable but not utterly extravagant.
But in a way Wagner’s greatness as a poet is a problem — or perhaps I should say that it became a problem when he made the fateful decision to write the entire libretto before composing a single note of music. Why was that decision so fateful? Because Wagner knew he was a great poet. He knew that he had written magnificent poetry and he didn’t want to sacrifice any of it once he got to the stage of musical composition
That isn’t that big of a problem in Das Rheingold, which in fact moves with remarkable fluidity and pace: it has almost none of the longeurs that the later dramas in the cycle suffer from. The difficulties kick in with the first act of Die Walküre. If you haven’t heard this work … well, imagine something like the Prologue to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, except instead of lasting six minutes it lasts more than an hour. More than an hour of pure exposition, in which characters — well, mainly one character, Siegmund, tells us his entire history. C. S. Lewis (famously) wrote that the final books of Paradise Lost, in which the archangel Michael tells Adam of the future of humanity, is an “untransmuted lump of futurity”; likewise, the first act of Die Walküre is an untransmuted lump of historicity, with only occasional orchestral coloration to enliven matters.
Wagner trusts overmuch in the power of his own verse, or is simply overly attached to it — which is a reminder that often it’s good to divide the labor of the librettist and the poet. When Auden was writing his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, he did so hoping that his friend Benjamin Britten would set it to music. But when he gave to Britten the magnificent fugal chorus on Caesar he had written, Britten couldn’t help laughing. He told Auden that if he wanted an actual fugue to be written, and a figure that would set a single scene in an oratorio with many scenes, then he should have written three lines, not seventy. So Auden kept the poem as written and gave up on the idea of having it set to music. By contrast, Wagner never had anyone to remind him of the necessary constraints; so he ignored them.
And there’s another problem as well. Recently I read Walter Murch’s famous meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and was taken by his articulation of one of his chief rules: “You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” It’s interesting that Wagner understands this principle so well in his music, which often is rich and deep with suggestion, without understanding it at all in his writing. Exposition often dominates. I think his addiction to detailed exposition has something to do with his belief in himself as a sage and a mythographer.
I may have more to say as I move through this extraordinary work of art — though maybe not, because the experience is tiring. Right now I feel about it much as Virginia Woolf felt about Joyce’s Ulysses, which she called “a memorable catastrophe — immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” But it fascinates me as a myth, especially as a humanist myth — a myth about the ending of the gods and what Bonhoeffer would later call the “coming of age” of humanity. I think that is why Roger Scruton — a man convinced of the absolute necessity of religion to humans but without any firm faith in Christianity — loves the Ring cycle so much. His book about it is magnificent, I think, but also somewhat depressing, because as a Christian I certainly don’t think that a humanist myth has the power to sustain us. But Wagner put an enormous charge into his effort to make it do so.
One of the many provocative (or brilliant) (or crazy) assertions Ian MacDonald makes is his Revolution in the Head concerns the relationship between the personnel of a band and the band’s songwriting. MacDonald’s entry on “Helter Skelter” begins thus:
The ‘heavy metal’ idiom of the Seventies originated in the mid-Sixties switch from the low-volume standard pop four-piece to the vastly amplified rock ‘power trio’, a format change in which the redundant rhythm guitarist was replaced by turning up the bass, close-miking the drums, and adding a range of signal-distortion effects to the lead guitar. Led by groups like The Who, Cream, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, this move was, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of bigger and better amps and speakers designed for larger and more remunerative venues. Yet the loss of the craft of the rhythm guitarist was soon felt in a degradation of texture and a decline in overall musical subtlety. Rhythm guitarists were usually songwriters, and the variety of articulation and accenting techniques they used also shaped their compositions. The average power trio, lacking such a musical brain, was in effect an excuse to replace songs with riffs and discard nuance for noise.
Is this claim true? Even though I’ve thought about it a lot since I’ve first read it, I’m still not sure. But here’s an interesting data point. In his biography of John Lennon, Philip Norman quotes George Martin on how different John and Paul were in their songwriting practices:
“Paul would think of a tune and then think ‘What words can I put to it?’ John tended to develop his melodies as the thing went along. Generally he built up a song on a structure of chords which he would ramble and find on his guitar until he had an interesting sequence. After that, the words were more important than anything else. They used to come out sometimes as a monotone, just one note punctuated by the rhythm of the words. He never set out to write a melody and put lyrics to it. He always thought of the structure, the harmonic content and the lyrics first, and the melody would then come out of that.”
And it makes sense that a rhythm guitarist, who spends most of his time playing chords — and maybe also looking for some new or different chords to play — might be especially attentive to “the structure, the harmonic content.” And that in turn might lead to songs with unexpected chord progressions, which John Lennon’s songs have plenty of.
As I’ve noted before, guitarists who play in standard tuning are helped in this search by certain elementary principles of physics: among the common chords (“cowboy chords”) the two easiest to make are D major and A minor. And once you’ve gripped one of those it’s the easiest thing in the world to slide up a couple of frets to see what that sounds like. And then maybe a couple of frets more. You can find some weird and wonderful harmonies that way. And new chords and new harmonies are what the rhythm guitarist needs — unlike the lead guitarist, who has other business to attend to, business that doesn’t often result in the discovery of an unexpected melody.
The production didn’t always make it clear who was speaking at any given time, but one guy made the fascinating comment that, in the Beatles, George was to the guitar what Ringo was to the drums: he didn’t play many solos, and when he did they tended to be worked out carefully in advance for the purpose of enhancing the songs. No guitar hero stuff; no drum hero stuff. (Of course, Ringo famously played only one solo in his career as a Beatle.)
There’s an excerpt from an interview with Harrison during which he remarks on his dismay when he first heard Phil Spector’s production of “Wah-Wah”: “I hated it.” Then, he says, he got used to it, came to like it. But at another moment in the documentary, the engineer Ken Scott, who participated in the making of All Things Must Pass, talks about getting together with Harrison thirty years later to work on an anniversary edition of the album. They sat down to listen to it and simply laughed out loud at how bad it sounded. The interviewer didn’t like hearing this. He loves the sound of Spector’s production. He says it sounds contemporary. Yeah, I silently replied, contemporary crap. Compare Spector’s wall-of-crap sound with the demo that Harrison did with just his guitar and Klaus Voorman’s bass. The latter is infinitely superior.
Or so I think, and I don’t believe I am alone. You could make a plausible case that modern pop-music production on average makes songs worse than they would be if recorded as simply as possible. And that might help account for the otherwise odd fact that record labels reliably make money — not tons of money, grant you, but a profit — through releasing outtakes, alternative arrangements, and demos: those versions sound better.
Example: Flowers in the Dirt is one of Paul McCartney’s better solo recordings, but the finished record is a pale shadow of the acoustic demos Paul made with Elvis Costello. Those demos are, I think, the very finest work Paul has done in his post-Beatles career.
Example: Listen to the album version of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi.” Good song, right? Now listen to the mostly-acoustic version, a sparer, simpler performance with a classic blues walking bass. Fantastic song.
Example: The Daniel Lanois-produced version of Dylan’s “Most of the Time,” from Oh Mercy. Cool — but not nearly as cool as this acoustic version, which sounds like it could’ve come straight from Blood on the Tracks.
Example: Noel Gallagher was doing a run-through of a song at a studio in Dublin — he didn’t even know he was being recorded — and, with just his voice, his acoustic guitar, and a supporting piano player, happened to come up with the performance of his career.
And wasn’t this the appeal of MTV Unplugged? — and also why some performers didn’t want to do it? Take away the studio tricks and you’re left with … you. Not everyone passed the test, but those who did created some magic. Nirvana is the most famous case, not unjustifiably, but there were some other cool surprises also — for instance, it was while watching Unplugged that a lot of us discovered that 10,000 Maniacs was a great band. (Even though they look like some assistant professors of English at your local university, playing music to distract themselves from the terrors of their upcoming tenure decisions.)
The fascinating and deeply sad documentary Once Were Brothers concerns the career of The Band — primarily as seen through the eyes of Robbie Robertson. Levon Helm, dead lone before the documentary was made, would have told a rather different story, and for damn sure wouldn’t have subtitled the movie “Robbie Robertson and The Band.” For Levon they were always The Band, five equal partners. But that’s a debate for another day.
In the documentary, the one song that gets the most attention is “The Weight.” And for good reason. It was a step forward for Robertson as a songwriter – there’s a touching moment when he describes playing it for Dylan and notes how proud Dylan was of him. You can tell that that pride meant a lot to Robbie. But it was also a step forward for The Band. In an old interview clip Richard Manuel says that in making that song “we found a vocal thing that we didn’t know we had,” and he’s surely talking primarily about the harmonies on that song, especially the rising “and-and-and” at the end of each chorus. (There’s a great passage in Mystery Train where Greil Marcus recalls living in San Francisco when Music from Big Pink was released: “The day after the record hit the stores you could hear people on the street singing the chorus to ‘The Weight’; before long, the music became part of the fabric of daily life.”)
Elsewhere in the documentary Bruce Springsteen marvels at the presence in a single group of three singers as extraordinary as Manuel, Levon, and Rick Danko; and George Harrison muses on the boon to a songwriter of being able to compose for such singers, knowing that any given song might be a better fit for one than for the others. But the three voices complemented one another so beautifully, with Danko as an absolute master of bluegrass-style high harmony singing, Levon somewhere in the middle, and Manuel able to go high or low as the situation demanded. (One of the amazing things about “The Weight” is that, right in the middle of the song, Danko picks up the lead vocal from Levon — and it sounds fantastic.)
So “The Weight” was the moment The Band discovered what it could do in songwriting and singing, and maybe arranging as well. Soon after recording Music from Big Pink Danko broke his neck in a car accident and was immobile for quite some time, so instead of going on tour the guys continued to hang out in Woodstock and made another record: The Band, or, as it’s commonly known, the Brown Album. And this is when they put into practice everything they learned when making their first album; this is when they came into their inheritance.
It’s an astonishing record, in my view one of the half-dozen best in the history of rock music. Not one song is anything less than superb — and that makes it different than any of their other albums, including Big Pink, all of which are very much hit-and-miss. Nothing else they ever did comes close to this masterpiece.
I have occasionally referred to a distinction made by Bill James in his work on evaluating the quality of baseball players: career value vs. peak value. How do you compare a player like (for example) Eddie Murray, who was a superb if not absolutely great player for a very long time, with Pete Reiser, who was transcendently great but (because of injuries) only for a short time? Similarly: The Band’s career value can’t compare with that of U2 – but no rock group’s peak value has ever been higher.
Did it have to be that way? Did they just have it in them to make one great album? Sometimes that’s all a group, or a musician, has. But I think they were so deeply immersed in what Dylan used to call “historical-traditional music” that they could have and should have produced much more excellent work. Drugs did them in, frankly, and in an especially ugly way.
In Once Were Brothers we hear from the wonderful photographer Elliot Landy, who did so much to document life in Woodstock in those days. What struck him is how “grounded” the members of The Band were, how “gracious” — the way country people are gracious, he said. He was taken with their evident love for one another, and — here I think of something Robbie said somewhere else, that “We were rebelling against the rebellion” — their determination to put a photo of their families in the album gatefold.
Yet they came to hate one another, or something close to hate. When two guys (Robbie and Garth Hudson) are coming to work every morning while the other three are in bed till mid-afternoon, sleeping off the previous night’s festivities … well, that’s not a recipe for fellow-feeling. Robbie loved Richard Manuel – everybody seems to have loved him – but when Manuel insisted on driving while dead drunk, with Robbie’s wife Dominique in the car, and then crashed it…. “Richard could’ve killed my wife,” Robbie says in the documentary — not angrily, but, the point is, that’s not something you easily forget, easily set aside. And there were many such events in Woodstock in those days.
My suspicion is this: if they had stayed off the drugs, or even kept their use to a reasonable level, then I think we would have gotten much more great music from The Band. And then maybe some guys who really loved one another would have had friendships to sustain them in their later years. As I say, it’s a deeply sad story.
PLAYBOY: Just to stay on the track, what first turned you on to folk singing? You actually started out in Minnesota playing the electric guitar with a rock group, didn’t you?
DYLAN: Yeah. The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in ’58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.
PLAYBOY: What was so special to you about that Odetta record?
DYLAN: Just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record. It was her first and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Waterboy,” “Buked and Scorned.”
Though with Dylan you can never tell, I hope this is true. (Especially since Odetta and I share a home town.)
Twenty-five years ago I wrote an essay about Dylan that was published first in Books & Culture and then at bobdylan.com — the former of which was a pleasure to have published and the second rather disorientingly exciting. (I got paid in CDs.) I think this is the B&C version.
ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter’ you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier,’ is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
I’ve written before about the waves of death that are coming for some of our cultural giants, but this is a big one. Robbie Robertson’s influence has always been vastly underrated, and the music he and his bandmates made at the end of the Sixties is some of the most lastingly wonderful of that era. I would be hard-pressed to name five rock records better than the Brown Album, which I’ll be listening to tonight. Only Garth Hudson remains from a group that really did deserve to be called The Band.
Boredom is built into the [Spotify] platform, because they lose money if you get too excited about music — you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans, and they created their interface with them in mind. In other words, Spotify’s highest aspiration is to be the Applebee’s of music.
Here I’ve joined together two posts that I wrote a decade or so ago at The American Conservative (which has memory-holed most if not all I wrote for it). The first one:
The Kinks’ “Come Dancing” (1982) is a bouncy, catchy, almost silly little song with one of the saddest back-stories I’ve ever heard.
Ray Davies, the leader and songwriter of the Kinks, grew up in a large and eccentric working-class family in north London. He was the seventh of eight children, a somewhat shy and easily frightened child whose chief comforter was his sister Rene, who was eighteen years older than him. During the Second World War, when Ray was just an infant, Rene had fallen in love with a Canadian soldier posted in London, married him, and moved to Canada.
But their marriage was unhappy. Rene’s husband drank heavily and sometimes beat her; they argued constantly, and to escape him she would frequently return to the family home in Muswell Hill for extended stays, at first alone, later with her son. Like all of the Davieses she was musical, and enjoyed playing show tunes on the piano; the family tended to sing and play its way through hard times, of which they had plenty.
Rene was making one of her visits home when her kid brother turned thirteen, which she believed to be a special birthday deserving of a special present: she bought him a Spanish guitar he had been coveting for some time. She sat at the piano and they played a song together.
That evening, Rene decided to go dancing with friends at the Lyceum Ballroom in the West End. This was not, in the opinion of her doctor or her mother, a good idea: Rene had had rheumatic fever as a child, and it had weakened her heart. But, as Ray would write later in his autobiography, she had always loved to dance, and her life was hard and her violent husband very far away; she was not inclined to deny herself a cherished pleasure. On the dance floor of the Lyceum that evening she collapsed and died, as the big band played a tune from Oklahoma!
Only a quarter-century later did Ray Davies write the lively song that celebrated his sister Rene’s love of dancing: a song that gave her a longer, and happier, life than had been her actual lot. Ever since I learned what lies behind this little song, it has touched me.
Come dancing,
Come on sister, have yourself a ball,
Dont be afraid to come dancing,
Its only natural.
Come dancing,
Just like the Palais on a Saturday,
And all her friends will come dancing
Where the big bands used to play.
And here’s the second post:
In the comments to my previous post on Ray Davies of The Kinks, one reader linked to a YouTube version of a lovely ballad called “Oklahoma U.S.A.” The kind person who made that video (which I’ve not linked to here) seems to be under the impression that the song is about Oklahoma, but it’s not: it’s about the romance of America for working-class Brits half-a-century ago, as they saw America on the movie screen.
That is, the song isn’t about Oklahoma but Oklahoma!, which Davies’s sister Rene especially loved — she was dancing to a song from that musical when she died. For people who lived in Muswell Hill — and the song comes from the Kinks’ album Muswell Hillbillies — images of Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae and the sound of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” offered a powerful alternative to the shabby workaday world they struggled through.
And yet the Muswell Hillbillies loved their place in the world. Rene repeatedly escaped from her unhappy marriage by returning to a home which, however shabby it may have been, gave her love and stability. It seems that for her there was something particularly consoling about hearing those American show tunes at the Lyceum Ballroom not far away, and playing them on the beaten-up old piano in her parents’ front parlor. And Ray Davies’s nostalgia for the world of his childhood is palpable throughout his music and well as in his autobiography.
I’m reminded here of several books by the remarkable English writer Richard Hoggart in which he celebrates his own urban working-class upbringing, in Leeds rather than London, and laments its displacement by an electrically-disseminated mass culture. But as he describes the place of singing in his upbringing — his community was intensely musical in much the same way that Davies’s family was — something odd emerges: these people weren’t singing English folk songs, but rather hit tunes they had heard on the wireless. He describes, for instance, the huge influence of Bing Crosby’s “crooning” style on the amateur singers in the local “workingmen’s clubs.”
There seems to have been a period, then, in England and I think in America too, when electrical technologies (primarily radio and movies) connected people with a larger world that shaped their dreams and aspirations — but without wholly disconnecting them from their local culture. Instead, it seems, they managed to incorporate those new and foreign songs into their local culture. Oklahoma! might show you some of the shortcomings of your world, but it didn’t necessarily make you hate it. There was a way to bring those distant beauties into your everyday life.
But perhaps this can only be done if you’re a creator and performer as well as a consumer. Davies’s sister Rene went to the movies, yes, but she also danced in the ballrooms and played piano with her brother. She made those songs her own by using her body and her voice, rather than merely observing the words and movements of others. Perhaps we have the power to incorporate mass culture into our lives — but not by just consuming it.
When Charlie Watts died in August of 2021, I wrote: “This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come.” I didn’t know at the time that Damon Linker had written two years earlier about “The coming death of just about every rock legend.”
But it’s not just musicians, is it? Consider some of our most famous film directors:
Woody Allen is 87
Francis Ford Coppola is 83
Werner Herzog is 80
David Lynch is 77
George Lucas is 78
Terrence Malick is 79
George Miller is 78
Hayao Miyazaki is 82
Martin Scorsese is 80
Ridley Scott is 85
Steven Spielberg is 76
Wim Wenders is 77
(Obviously, other distinguished names could be added to the list.) Interesting how closely their ages correlate with those of the great rock stars — though the rock stars became famous a decade or more earlier. Won’t be terribly long before we’re saying “There were giants on the earth in those days.”
Damon Krukowski: “I know it can be difficult, with so much choice, to figure out what to focus on. But on top of everything, you can preview most anything before committing. What’s not to like? Build a library, and you can be your own algorithm.”
Ah, here it is: the musical equivalent of ChatGPT. Cool. I want to see more of this. I’ve written before — see the links here — about the ways that musicians have been forced into more inflexibly formulaic compositions and performances. Given the way that the music industry thinks today, who needs musicians? If you want the inflexibly formulaic, computers do that better than humans.
My advice to the big music labels: Cut out the middleman (i.e. the musicians).
My advice to musicians and people who love actual music: Check out Bandcamp.
I’m a Texas guy now and proud of it, but Chicago is deep in my heart and always will be — and an essential part of my Chicagoland experience for three decades was WXRT, one of the handful of truly great American radio stations. What made WXRT so wonderful could be summed up by pointing to Lin Brehmer, who came to Chicago a couple of months after I arrived in the area and who hand-crafted amazing musical sequences, year after year after year, until shortly before his death yesterday. (XRT was one of the last big stations to trust its DJs to program their own music — I don’t know whether they still do.)
For much of his time at XRT Lin featured little audio essays under the general title “Lin’s Bin,” and they were reliably entertaining. I particularly remember two of them.
One came soon after the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990, when Lin was tasked with trying to get comments on SRV from various musicians. He described his comical attempts to get in touch with Keith Richards, attempts that ended when he was hung up on by the assistant to Keef’s assistant. Discouraged, he turned to the next person on his list: the great blues singer Koko Taylor. He dialed the number he had, and a male voice answered:
Voice: “Hello?”
Lin: “Um, yeah, I’m trying to get in touch with Koko Taylor.”
Voice: “Hang on [hand over receiver to muffle voice] … HEY MOM!!!”
The second story involved Lin’s remembrance of growing up in New York City and getting his first opportunity, as a teenager, to go to a show at the now-legendary Fillmore East. Did he decide to see Jimi Hendrix? Led Zeppelin? The Allman Brothers? Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young? No, Lin didn’t choose any of those. He decided, he said, to see … and here he paused, only to resume with sonorous sobriety: Grand Funk Railroad.
Lin, you were one of the greats. R.I.P.
UPDATE: A really nice Twitter-thread tribute to Lin by the legendary producer Steve Albini.
I began to learn that instrumentalists and singers often didn’t want or need … validation from the accompanist. Actually, most of the time, they preferred that you supply your steady support by staying clear of their path, not answering their every idea, but rather laying something down more locked into the bass and drums, even grid-like. If you are constantly trying to interact with every idea they present, you are not really accompanying, properly speaking — you are hijacking their ideas in a sense, and putting the focus on what you’re doing instead. It becomes more, “Look at me everyone, I’m so hip and adept at catching the soloist/singer’s ideas!” But what it’s really saying to the soloist/singer (and the audience) is: “Please like me!” It’s overbearing. It feels like one of those people you know who, when in a conversation with you, is constantly affirming what you’re saying — “Yeah … totally … exactly!” — before you’ve even finished your thought.
Mehldau started thinking back to his teenage years when he worked in a pizza joint in West Hartford, Connecticut:
I remembered the guy Jeremy at Papa Gino’s who was flipping pies within a few short months while I struggled at the grill. He didn’t give a shit — it was 5:45 evening rush hour, the place was packed and customers were eyeing him impatiently. But he was as cool as a cucumber, getting the pizzas in and out of the big oven. Maybe the thing was to just not give a shit with comping as well — not to throw away your taste and sensibility, mind you, but to bring a little of that cavalier pie-flipping thing into it. I started watching this less sensitive kind of comping going on at jam sessions or on gigs, and I didn’t always dig it. But I also noticed that other people often did — most importantly, the soloists they were comping behind. So what did it matter what I thought?
What a great analogy.
“Comping” is a universal term in jazz. It probably derives from “accompaniment,” maybe also from “complement,” but it has a distinctive valence: the good comper is the musician who can support the soloist in meaningful ways without becoming a rival for the audience’s attention. The best comper improves and strengthens the audience’s response to the soloist without anyone ever noticing.
Albert Murray, whom I’ve been thinking about a lot — see this post, and I’ll have an essay on him in the next issue of Comment, which I will no doubt call your attention to when it appears — used to say that his role was to comp for other artists: his friend Ralph Ellison (who was a music major in college and played the trumpet) was a great soloist, but Murray’s job was so support that kind of high-flying virtuosity with an imaginative but also reliable groove.
I love this idea of critical and essayistic writing as a kind of comping for the artists and thinkers I admire and learn from. I’d like to think that my best work exhibits some of the virtues of the quiet, cool, comping jazz pianist.
We are in a far worse situation than we were in 1991. Thurston’s part-jokey, part-deadly serious condemnation of the industry then — “When youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do?” — feels like an understatement today. It’s no longer just about youth culture; it’s all cultural production that’s monopolized by big business. Thirty years of capital consolidation have created monopolies larger and more disconnected from “content” than we could have imagined even at our snottiest in the 90s. The major labels, music mags, and MTV still needed musicians, after all.
But Apple doesn’t – music is the least of their business. Same goes for Amazon. And what Spotify seems to need is to get away from music as fast as it can. With so much attention paid to Tesla’s precipitous fall in value, many seem to have overlooked that Spotify also lost nearly 70% of its market capital this year.
I think this points to something important: Professionally-made music — music you buy, played by musicians you’d pay to see live — is now under the nearly complete control of companies that don’t give a rat’s ass about music or musicians.
I don’t want to ask whether pop music is worse than it used to me, because that’s an unanswerable question — for several reasons. But some things we can certainly say:
Songs are becoming harmonically and structurally simpler
Recordings have become more compressed and louder, with less dynamic range
The dominance of streaming has led to shorter songs with front-loaded choruses
All this is clearly established. Now, maybe you like this kind of music, and if so, you should definitely be you. I have a question, though: Is there a connection between these developments in recorded music and the increasing prevalence of listening to songs at double-speed?
A Japanese dictionary publisher has just chosen its Word of the Year for 2022: taipa.
The word kosupa, an abbreviated form of “cost performance” meaning “value for money,” has become a standard part of the Japanese language. Dictionary publisher Sanseidō chose a variation on this theme, taipa, or “time performance,” as its word of the year for 2022.
Taipa is used for talking about efficient use of time, and is particularly associated with the members of Generation Z, born roughly between 1995 and 2010. In search of optimum “time performance,” they might watch films and drama at double speed or via recut versions that only show major plot points, and skip to the catchy parts of songs.
For these zoomers, learning to make the best use of their time is the only way to save themselves from drowning in an ocean of online content and to keep up with friends’ conversations.
Maybe people are ready to get through music as quickly as possible because — well, because there’s not a whole lotta there there. If a song has a basic three- or four-chord structure, with no intro and no bridge, and has simple and simply repeated lyrics, then, really, why would you want to listen for more than 30 seconds, or at anything less than double-speed? I mean, why take five minutes to eat a cracker? (Even if it’s a tasty cracker.)
And maybe the movies tell a similar story: given the dominance of sequels, which feature characters we already know and don’t need to see developed, why not watch at an accelerated rate, or just skip to the fight scenes? It’s not like there’s anything else going on that would be of interest.
So maybe when people practice taipa they’re responding rationally to what’s being offered them.
Still, it must be said: taipa isn’t “efficient use of time.” Instead, it’s about the worst use of one’s time, especially one’s leisure time, that I can imagine. There are no canons of “efficiency” that apply here unless you think that there’s some kind of value in watching more movies and listening to more music, regardless of quality or interest. And if you think that you’re nuts — as I have recently suggested. As I said in that post: If you’re accelerating the rate at which you listen and watch, what are you trying to get to?
What’s being offered you isn’t always what’s best for you. If you’re worried about “drowning in an ocean of online content” you can get out of the ocean. (You might even find some new friends who have done the same. You could chill together on the beach, in the sunshine.) Remember this: the past is an always-available counterculture. There’s a great wide world of music and movies and books available to you, and you can use them to retrain your mind and spirit to a different and healthier pace.
I developed a new way of thinking about how we listen to music, together or alone. My alliterative schema for the various listening environments, designed to be annoyingly mnemonic, is corner, club, cathedral, and cocoon. The corner (as in street corner) is where people take priority over sound, and this model encompasses both a block party using a multi-speaker sound system on the street and the digital commons of web radio stations and streaming platforms like Mixcloud and SoundCloud. One of my favorite web radio stations, LYL Radio, was established by Lucas Bouissou, who stated his view firmly: “About audio quality, honestly, I don’t give a shit.” LYL Radio is very much the corner, in every sense.
The cathedral is an environment built by the audiophile, where reflection is the norm. You don’t have to be alone, but if there are a bunch of listeners together, you’re not talking to one another. You listen, and only listen. One arrives here with a certain amount of time and money, introducing an exclusive element, which I don’t love, but if I imagine a house of worship with its doors flung wide open, I am less uneasy, because the resources are oriented toward establishing a common good.
The club is halfway between these two points, presenting a certain level of audio quality, but not at the expense of interaction. If there is an emphasis in the club, it is about people connecting through music. The cocoon, meanwhile, is where most people find music now, through earbuds and headphones, locked into the cycle of wage labor or exercise.
Emphases mine. I like this taxonomy. I am very much a cathedral guy, though without either the budget or the inclination to be an audiophile. (As Free-Jones says later in his excellent essay, “An obsession with the quality of recordings is, on some level, antithetical to the spirit of mindful listening.“) Let’s say that my preferred environment isn’t a cathedral but rather a mere chapel.
Life at the 30th Street Studio of Columbia Records, 1955: Glenn Gould in the morning, Rosemary Clooney in the evening. (And at another studio, an advertisement for Anacin in the afternoon.)
There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a modest allocation of resources. If the Duke Foundation, for example, funded 50 people in 50 cities with $50K per year to cover their local music scene it would cost a grand total of $2.5 million. And, if they got ambitious, they could place 4 writers in each city, and still only spend around $10 million.
Did you get that? You could have in-depth arts coverage in every major city for less than the cost of a sneaker endorsement from a third-tier NBA star or the salary of the University of Alabama’s football coach. That’s chump change for those well-funded arts institutions, and it would have an immediate positive impact on culture and arts everywhere in this country.
But they don’t do it. They don’t even consider doing it, as far as I can tell. Who can say why. Maybe journalism isn’t glamorous enough for institutions that prefer to anoint geniuses.
This is a brilliant idea by Ted, and I desperately hope some foundation leaders will read it. Throwing money at “geniuses” — the great majority of whom are already well-fixed — is like giving your money to Yale or Harvard, AKA hedge funds with universities loosely attached. It does nothing to nurture or generate a culture of creativity — and a culture is precisely what we need.
Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”
It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.
Hey, everybody is different and there are a thousand ways to use the streaming services other than the model outlined here, but still: Count me a big fan of this move. I have for the past few years almost completely abandoned streaming: I buy records (vinyl and CD, sometimes digital files) whenever I can, and having purchased them I tend to listen to them more often and more carefully.
If you can’t afford to stream and buy, then consider this: with the money you’d save by cancelling your streaming service, you could buy one new or two used recordings a month. Imagine that you had a much smaller collection of music, but it consisted of the most important music to you, and you came to know that music intimately. Wouldn’t that be a pretty good trade-off? It’s worth considering anyway.
I’m not a huge fan of the music of Kelly Lee Owens, but I am a huge fan of this interview:
“I grew up in a working class village in Wales and choirs were part of everyday life,” explains Owens. “It’s almost like National Service; everybody has to join a choir. People talk about this idea of finding your voice and I think that’s what happened when I was listening to those choirs. Hard men, ex-miners in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, singing with so much passion. Music had never hit me like that before. It made me want to explore my own voice. How could I express my emotions with this sound?
“The next step was Kate Bush,” she says, laughing.
Of course that’s how it works: you go from Welsh miners’ choirs to Kate Bush and then you become a successful musician. (Also: “My God, don’t you miss that? Don’t you miss hearing something that good in the Top 5?”) Later:
Much as I love working on the laptop, there is something about a machine like Dark Time that I find truly inspiring. You can program whatever you want and it doesn’t matter if it’s correct or not. It’s as if analogue is designed to go wrong because you always make mistakes. You press this button or put the kick here instead of here. So much of my stuff has that. I wish you could get plugins to fuck up more than they do. I think we need more of that randomness in music!
When the interviewer agrees and continues, “Obviously, you can do mouse clicks just as easily,” KLO replies,
But is it as much fun? Can you still create chaos? Will that kick be ridiculously late? Are you interested in making perfect music? I’m not. What does that even mean? Perfect music. What is perfect? A lot of time in the studio seems to be spent reintroducing variation and accident. I suppose you might call it humanness. Nudging things forward, nudging them back, dipping the volumes, trying to keep the listener engaged…. Analogue keeps things interesting. It rebels against stability.
There’s a great moment in the Beatles’ Get Back documentary — the 9 January 1969 session — when Mal Evans points out that the previous day had been Elvis’s birthday. Paul puts on his best Elvis voice and sings “God save our gracious King” … funny and appropriate too. Here are some relevant numbers:
Elvis had just turned 34
Paul was 26
Queen Elizabeth II had reigned for just short of 17 years
Paul had been 9 when Elizabeth came to the throne
So Paul probably remembered (and perhaps still remembers) singing “God Save the King.” What goes around comes around.
Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog – the last of my own records made that way was Galaxie 500’s second album, in 1989 – the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records.
In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound. The record is.
There is a further irony as we add digital into the picture. Digital reproduction does not alter the master the way that analog does. For many commercial CDs, the final product actually is the original master, and vice-versa. Even when a digital master is higher resolution than CDs can reproduce, it is still possible to listen to them via computers without any degradation at all.
When CDs first came out, many of them sounded awful in part for this very transparency – they were duplicating analog master tapes more or less directly, rather than interpreting how they were meant to sound at the end of the process for reproducing records. Digital was blamed for those “harsh” CDs – but that is also simply how some analog master tapes can sound.
In every corner of pop culture — movies, TV, music, books, and video games — a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one.
Remember when we were looking forward to the era of the Long Tail? Nah, that didn’t happen. At least not in the way predicted. We do, praise God, have unprecedented access to art, books, music, movies — but we often get to choose between the colorless tasteless mega-productions of the oligopoly or very small things made at the cultural and economic margins.
This works out differently in different art forms, and I want to think more about the details. But it does seem to me that there’s a kind of squeezing-out of the middle. The midlist author is disappearing — heck, in another time and place I might well have been a midlist author, but I could never sell enough books in the current environment to make a living. Also, it seems that only a few bands — good old-fashioned guitar/keyboards/bass/drum bands — can afford to tour any more, and most of those are comprised of people over sixty. Younger musicians tend to work solo or duo, or form short-term collaborations, and thick musical textures tend to be developed (when they’re developed all) through digital instrumentation rather than through people learning how to play together. The new economics of art has been hard on all musical genres, but especially, I think, on jazz. Which was struggling anyway.
Obviously you can’t generalize too grossly here; the situation in the visual arts is rather different. But in many art forms, it seems to me, we have the massive-in-scale and massive-in-popularity and small-in-scale and small-in-popularity — and not much in between.
[Brian] Wilson’s post-Pet Sounds career, like his pre-Pet Sounds career, is an extraordinary mix of the bizarre, the shockingly bad, the beautiful, and the awe-inspiring, often in the same song. Wilson appears to have no filters, and while this means his music at its best is the most emotionally truthful I’ve ever heard, it also means he has no quality control. His best work is as likely to be an allegorical fairytale about a prince with a magic transistor radio, written while listening to a Randy Newman album on repeat, or a two-minute as-yet-unreleased song about baseball, or a song about Johnny Carson done in mock-Weimar cabaret style backed by a Moog set on “fart sounds,” as it is to be an eight-minute psychedelic country epic about the Rio Grande.
Just as there are an infinite number of reasons to seek God in prayer, so there are an infinite number of reasons to check out YouTube. But for me YouTube is primarily a place of contemplation. I love the YouTube channels that help me relax – even, in the best possible circumstance, reach a Zen-like stage of contemplative peace. For the last year or so I have primarily been fascinated by videos of train journeys – the ones from Britain’s National Rail are especially compelling. I watch the Scottish Highlands pass by; my heart rate slows; my blood pressure lowers. It’s great.
But lately I have discovered another Zen domain of YouTube: the world of guitar repair and restoration. Apparently I’m not the only one: many guitar-repair videos specify that they have no narration: you just watch some master craftsman at work, and all you hear is the sound of a fine-grained file or a brush sweeping a lovely oil finish over the body of a guitar. You watch something like the Andy Bass and Guitar channel and it’s like looking at a de la Tour, only with shellac and scrapers.
You can also find stories of intrigue. For instance, take a look at this one, in which another master craftsman is charged with the task of repairing and restoring a Gibson Les Paul guitar from 1958 — but without making any of the repairs look new. It’s especially cool when you see the guy distressing a part of the guitar he has just repaired to give it a look consistent with the beaten-up, well-used character of everything else on the instrument.
There are several subgenres of restoration: Many videos feature expensive guitars — there are more Martins than anything else — but more down my alley is the work of Gabriele Réti, who likes to restore guitars found in the trash.
And then: the multi-part restoration of a 1902 guitar by Carlos at Anjuda Guitars, a luthier shop in Madrid. A story still in process. There have been four acts so far, interesting but not dramatic at first — and then at the beginning of the third part tragedy suddenly threatens: a humidifier has kicked into overdrive and instead of preserving the old dried wood of this ancient instrument makes it fall apart. But … irreparably? The tension! The suspense! Carlos’s future as a luthier is at stake. It’s only as the third installment goes along that you discover that Carlos may actually be equal to this great task, a feeling that grows in strength with the fourth installment.
There’s a great moment in the third video when Carlos decides that he has to repair one of the guitar’s internal braces, but decides to use mahogany rather than the original cedar, because he wants to provide clear evidence, for future owners, that a later repair has happened. He wants to create layers of history in this guitar! Carlos is an artist with a conscience.
But will he be able to complete his task? Alas, we don’t yet know. We live in tense wonderment. Every day I go back to check to see whether there is a new installment.
So it turns out that there are two sides to guitar-restoration YouTube: the contemplative side, comprised of the sorts of videos you go to when you are in need of relaxation; but then you can also find suspense, a tightrope walk. Both sides are great.
