INTRODUCTION
Here's where I introduce the Songie Awards for Musical Excellence in Music. The complex and intricate nominating process, devised by the American Academy for Songie Award Recognition (hereafter referred to as The AASAR, The Academy, or Me, after its sole, self-ordained member), is as follows: the songs are selected by a panel of AASAR judges (also just me), and YouTube video* of the artist/performance/recording in question, along with a description of said artist/performance/recording outlining the opinion of the ruling Academy members (once again, just me; you get the jist of it). The nominees will be placed in categories determined by a vigorous classification system (my whims) befitting the artist/performance/recording's merits.
Once a Songie nominee is nominated, NO WINNERS WILL BE CHOSEN. Like the Special Olympics or Keith Olbermann's Worst Persons in the World, it is impossible to find a single, definite winner; to be nominated is honor enough. A single honoree in a category does not necessarily imply sole and absolute greatness. It could mean that, rather than being "the absolute greatest," it is "one of the greatest," or at least "really, really, really good." It may also imply laziness on the part of the Academy.
So, without further ado, the Academy's first list of nominees...
* * *
This batch of Songies originates from my own curiosity about songs The Beatles wrote and then gave away to other artists looking to see if that Lennon-McCartney magic might rub off on them. They gave "I Wanna Be Your Man" to the Rolling Stones, "A World Without Love" to Peter and Gordon, "Come And Get It" to Badfinger, and a bunch of other songs to a bunch of other people no one's heard of outside of Britain in the 1960s (as an American born in the 1980s, I'm fascinated by all this - "who the fuck are Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas?"). With this in mind, the Academy has chosen to honor two outstanding performances in this field:
BEST MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN BEATLES SONG:
"SOUR MILK SEA." Written by George Harrison, performed by Jackie Lomax, 1968.
Like Badfinger, Jackie Lomax was one of the star artists on The Beatles' ill-fated Apple Records; he was also the bassist and lead singer for The Undertakers, one of The Beatles' fellow Liverpool-area bands. For his first single on Apple as a solo artist, The Beatles gave him a song George had written in India while studying under the Maharishi. What adds to what is already a great song is that it's this close to being a Beatles recording - not only did George play but he's on guitar (including the second part of the guitar solo), but Paul is on bass and Ringo is on drums. In brief, you have all the instrumental makings, all the quirks and nuances, that makes a Beatles song great. Add to that Eric Clapton on lead guitar between the vocal lines, and session virtuoso Nicky Hopkins on piano, and you have a killer recording.
CORNIEST MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN BEATLES SONG:
"LIKE DREAMERS DO." Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, performed by The Applejacks, 1964.
So many of the early-60s Beatles covers I've heard show how instrumentally ahead of the rest of the British music scene The Beatles were. If Lennon's furiously strummed guitar, McCartney's deep, melodic bass, Harrison's country-twinged lead guitar, and Starr's pounding, open hi-hat drums all sound tame by today's standards, then their contemporaries of '63-'64 were complete and utter featherweights. The Stones had barely started out; The Kinks and The Who were still at the gates - no one else could do rock and roll seriously. If The Beatles were Beethoven and The Who were Wagner, everyone else was Montelvani or Muzak. It's hard to find the most sterile, tippy-toed version of a Beatles-penned song out there, but one must admit, The Applejacks' "Like Dreamers Do" takes the cake.
The song is among the first that Lennon/McCartney (actually, McCartney) wrote; The Beatles even recorded a version for their ill-fated Decca Records audition with Pete Best on drums - that turned up on the Anthology CD set in the 1990s. As for The Applejacks: from what those freeloaders on Wikipedia tell me, they were a bunch of scout members who decided to form a band together. A few years afterward, they scored some kind of a low-level hit with this one - after they added a cutesy piano hook and saccharined it up before saccharine even existed.
To listen to the song itself is enough to merit its nomination, but the video here pushes it over the top. Showing the full scope of their rock 'n roll rebellion, these long-haired badasses (actually, only one of them has long hair - and she's a girl) duke out the shit by sitting rigidly still - in sweater vests! - with their instruments cocked about 35 degrees to the right, and with artifically cheery smiles placed unnaturally on their faces! I can't stop laughing when I catch sight of the drummer, who, apart from being the spitting image of Eric "Stumpy" Pepys (Spinal Tap's first drummer, who died in a bizarre gardening accident), was born with an industrial-strength rod up his ass. One YouTube user compared him to Ringo in his overall geekiness, but I dispute that by the fact that Ringo's torso isn't fused to a block of granite.
I shouldn't say any more - just watch and enjoy.
*Video may consist of an album cover or still image slideshow over the sound of music, where actual video may be unavailable.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Non-Literature Literature: Shakespeare & Pink Floyd
I always thought you can get a fantastic level of truth from any form of art - be it music, film, visual art, photography, or whatever. We teach English and American literature in public schools, as if the printed page were the only conduit of truth - yet there are surprising parallels between poetry and prose and other forms of art. We concentrate on literacy, which obviously is important to a functioning society, but we leave out the appreciation of the higher arts - and even some of the lower arts - to develop a full-bodied mind, a mind capable of thinking fluidly and communicating with images and sounds as well as letters and numbers.
I was considering the following passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (I feel that, despite the fact that all we can credit as Shakespeare's is the text, the full experience comes from seeing and hearing one of his plays well stage and delivered. Nevertheless, I'm reproducing the text only here - imagine whichever intonation and visual image you want):
[THESEUS:] The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imatination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imatination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!
[Act V, Scene i, Lines 7-22]
The whole celebration of what one might call deliciously warped minds - atypical thinking - and the rolling of the lines in my mind: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...The lunatic...The lunatic..."
Naturally, where was there to go but the song "Brain Damage," from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon? Obviously songwriter Roger Waters had former bandmate Syd Barrett in mind, who had written most of their first record and pointed the band toward a trippy, spacey musical direction. Of course, in the year since their first record, Barrett's overuse of LSD, combined with an already less-than-stable mental condition (speculations run from schizophrenia to Asperger's syndrome) led him to erratic, unpredictable performances and his inevitable departure from the band, from whence he released a few solo albums and lived in seculsion in his Cambridge home before dying in 2006. This fascination shows up constantly in Waters' songwriting with Pink Floyd, and no more poigniantly than in "Brain Damage."
The version below is not the 1973 album version (which is fantastic nonetheless), but a very recent video of Waters playing the song solo, preceded by him describing the song and his motives behind it. The lack of any accompaniment other than his own sparse, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, combined with his own voice, which by now has cracked and weakened with age, gives the performance an incredible frailty and tenderness that makes it transcendent, and one of my favorite recordings.
London 1595
London 1973
Brooklyn 2008
I was considering the following passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (I feel that, despite the fact that all we can credit as Shakespeare's is the text, the full experience comes from seeing and hearing one of his plays well stage and delivered. Nevertheless, I'm reproducing the text only here - imagine whichever intonation and visual image you want):
[THESEUS:] The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imatination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imatination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!
[Act V, Scene i, Lines 7-22]
The whole celebration of what one might call deliciously warped minds - atypical thinking - and the rolling of the lines in my mind: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...The lunatic...The lunatic..."
Naturally, where was there to go but the song "Brain Damage," from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon? Obviously songwriter Roger Waters had former bandmate Syd Barrett in mind, who had written most of their first record and pointed the band toward a trippy, spacey musical direction. Of course, in the year since their first record, Barrett's overuse of LSD, combined with an already less-than-stable mental condition (speculations run from schizophrenia to Asperger's syndrome) led him to erratic, unpredictable performances and his inevitable departure from the band, from whence he released a few solo albums and lived in seculsion in his Cambridge home before dying in 2006. This fascination shows up constantly in Waters' songwriting with Pink Floyd, and no more poigniantly than in "Brain Damage."
The version below is not the 1973 album version (which is fantastic nonetheless), but a very recent video of Waters playing the song solo, preceded by him describing the song and his motives behind it. The lack of any accompaniment other than his own sparse, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, combined with his own voice, which by now has cracked and weakened with age, gives the performance an incredible frailty and tenderness that makes it transcendent, and one of my favorite recordings.
London 1595
London 1973
Brooklyn 2008
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