LET IT BE . . . . . 

The end of The Beatles

THE EMPRESS

Born on this day: January 19, 1943 - Rock vocal icon Janis Joplin (born Janis Lyn Joplin in Port Arthur, TX). 

Happy Birthday to “Pearl” on what would have been her 76th Birthday!!

INSIDE POP: THE ROCK REVOLUTION

with Leonard Bernstein

_

HERMAN'S HERMITS

"Can't You Feel My Heartbeat?"

On this day in music history: January 19, 1965 - “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” by Herman’s Hermits is released. Written by John Carter and Ken Lewis, it is the second US single for the pop band from Manchester, UK. Making a splash with their cover of the Carole King and Gerry Goffin penned song “I’m Into Something Good” (#1 UK, #13 US Pop), Herman’s Hermits quickly establish themselves as one of the biggest acts of the British Invasion. In the UK, “Show Me Girl” (#19 UK) is issued as the follow up, but not released in the US. For their next single, the band cut a pair of songs for the A and B-sides. The first features them covering The Rays’ 50’s doo wop classic “Silhouettes”, and one titled “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat”. Written by British songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis also members of The Ivy League (“What More Do You Want?”), “Heartbeat” is initially recorded by the American all female band Goldie & The Gingerbreads. Their version is produced and arranged by Animals keyboardist Alan Price. Though all competant musicians in their own right, producer Mickie Most at times augments Herman’s Hermits with outside studio musicians, or in the case of “Silhouettes” and “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat”, replaces them virtually altogether on the session (with the exception of lead singer Peter Noone). Recorded on December 1, 1964 at De Lane Lea Studios in London, the two tracks feature future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, Bobby Graham (drums), Big Jim Sullivan (rhythm guitar), and Ken Lewis and John Carter (backing vocals). Though in later years it is claimed that Jones’ Zeppelin band mate Jimmy Page played lead guitar on the two songs, the actual guitarist is Vic Flick, best known for playing the signature guitar riff on composer John Barry’s famed “James Bond Theme”. When the two songs are released, “Heartbeat” is regulated to the B-side of the single by their UK label EMI/Columbia, while in the US MGM Records immediately realizes its hit potential, issuing as an A-side and holding “Silhouettes” back for future release. The move proves to be a shrewd one, as “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” takes off even faster than its predecessor in the US. Entering the Hot 100 at #85 on January 30, 1965, it races up the chart, peaking eight weeks later at #2 on March 27, 1965. It becomes the first of eleven top ten singles that Herman’s Hermits rack up over the next two years. They are the only act to match The Beatles who also score eleven US top ten hits in the exact same time period, from early 1965 to mid 1967. Despite the interest of being involved with John Paul Jones and the possibility of Jimmy Page playing on this they were soon to lose their lustre. Within those two years they were done, a spent force and reduced ever after to tour banging out their previous hits like a sad showband and still Peter didn't quite get why . . . . . . .

"(Something Tell's Me) I'm Into Something Good" was a great song that I bought when it came out (1965?) and well sung too but Peter Noone was never a hero, too poppy and too cutesy pie to make it big with the guys I guess but later got to enjoy his exchanges with Graham Nash in chats in the sixties and rarely have you seen someone get so left behind in front of your very eyes. A conservative with right wing political overtones, he merely makes a fool of himself . Check out this classic CBS documentary about contemporary music as "a symptom and generator" of social unrest and the generation gap

Inside Pop -- The Rock Revolution is a CBS News special, broadcast in April 1967. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein and is probably one of the first examples of pop music being examined as a "serious" art form. The film features many scenes shot in Los Angeles in late 1966, including interviews with Frank Zappa and Graham Nash, as well as the now-legendary Brian Wilson solo performance of "Surf's Up." Quite why Herman's Hermits were given quite such an inordinately large part of the airtime is beyond me w but it is worth viewing

Music of that time featured The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Beach Boys, Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Rush, Sabbath, Velvet Underground, The Doors, Mamas & Pappas, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and the beat goes on. Interesting to hear that Leonard Bernstein knew Tim Buckly's work

It might also be worth noting that the second half of the film was the films director TV producer and inveterate classicist, David Oppenheim not Bernstein showing his ignorance and intolerant behaviour and attitude to what was happening in music and Bernstein who acts as host singing Beatles references shows a man who 'got it'!


If you wish to check out the uncomfortable moments between Noone and Nash check out the film at about 35.50. It's sad to reflect that Herman's Hermits were largely an oldies band by late 1967 which was when they had their last U.S. Top 40 hit

B ★ O ★ W ★ I ★ E 

@

This just in from the excellent Midnight Cafe

David Bowie & Stevie Ray Vaughan rehearsal tapes Dallas TEXAS

This is an excellent quality document of DB and the rehearsal sessions with Stevie Ray Vaughan who it is easy to forget was first really 'discovered' playing on Let's Dance and early Bowie choice for lead guitar. Vaughan obviously went on to his own superstardom before his own untimely death but one doesn't normally associate him with Bowie and that style of music, his own music genre being more blues rooted. This fact and his involvement with Bowie's 'Serious Moonlight' tour in particular has always fascinated me 

Enjoy this I know I did . . . . . . 


Details here:

Dallas Moonlight. [RED DEVIL. RD013-1/2]
Las Colinas Soundstage
Dallas, TX, USA
April 27, 1983.
Excellent Soundboard Recording 

Disc 1
01. Star
02. Heroes
03. What In The World
04. Look Back In Anger
05. Joe The Lion
06. Wild Is The Wind
07. Golden Years
08. Fashion
09. Lets Dance
10. Red Sails
11. Breaking Glass
12. Life On Mars
13. Sorrow
14. Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
15. China Girl
16. Scary Monsters (Super Creeps)
17. Rebel Rebel
18. I Can’t Explain
19. White Light White Heat

Disc 2
01. Station To Station
02. Cracked Actor
03. Ashes To Ashes
04. Space Oddity
05. Young Americans
06. Soul Love
07. Hang Onto Yourself
08. Fame
09. TVC15
10. Stay
11. Jean Genie
12. Modern Love
13. Life On Mars (Mess Up)

NOTES: Rehearsals for Bowie’s “Serious Moonlight Tour”. Soundboard Recording / Stereo.
Total playing time 132 minutes.

KURT VONNEGUT

This Teacher Asked Her Students to Write to an Author. Kurt Vonnegut Wrote Back This

In 2006 Ms. Lockwood, an English teacher at Xavier High School, asked her students to write a letter to a famous author. She wanted them discuss the author’s work and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was the only one to write back and his advice is worth reading. 

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

 Bonnie Guitar, Music Industry Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95 

Bonnie Guitar, who had hit records as a country singer and guitarist, but whose biggest achievement may have been her work as a businesswoman in the male-dominated music industry, died on Saturday in Soap Lake, Washington. She was 95. 

Ms. Guitar was best known for her recording of “Dark Moon,” a Top 20 country single on the Dot label that crossed over to the pop Top 10 in 1957. The record, a haunting nocturne sung in a clear-toned alto, was, along with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” — which reached the pop Top 40 the same year — one of the earliest records by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart…  

ALISTAIR McNAUGHT 

- THE TRAGICALL HISTORY OF CAMPBEL McCLUSKIE

Well that was a rare treat! I went out to a book launch at my old employers Blackwell's Book Shop in Oxford last night for the launching of a book by one of my dearest and oldest friends. Now Alistair won't mind my saying it has been a long time coming and I was privileged to be asked by him to store an archival copy of the first draft of this his first book. He worked alongside me at Blackwell's Art and Poster shop as my deputy and I well remember every tea break, every lunch break him huddled over his notebooks as he laboured away at his labyrinthine task in that unique and inimitable spidery hand his friends have come to love and, after many years practice, the actual ability to read. 

Having read various sections and realising the complexity and sheer pleasure of the idea, I am overjoyed a publisher has edited and finally published his debut novel. 'The Tragicall History of Campbell McCluskie' is a magical knot of a book at once a unique kind of magic realism and contemporary gothic conundrum. I believed it worthy of publishing then as I do know so I am overjoyed to discover someone has had the wit and insight to take the bull by its horns and actually help edit and publish the damned thing! 

A Scottish whodunit if you will with Gaelic murder mystery overtones awash with pathos and mystery. Replete with much humour and an unerring eye for the extraordinary in the detail, Alistair has written his masterpiece here. Don't let the idioms 'whodunnit' and 'murder mystery' put you off if that is not your genre of choice, this is a magical jewel of a book wrought with intricacy, smiles and at heart an awareness of the human condition and all of life's peculiar little twists and turns, I defy you you not to enjoy it with a wry smile and the compulsion to turn each page. I urge you to go out and buy it!

Alistair McNaught

ALISTAIR McNAUGHT

Alistair McNaught was born in Lennoxtown, Scotland and grew up in Bearsden, a burgh on the outskirts of Glasgow. After graduating in history and philosophy at Glasgow University, he moved to Oxford, where he worked as a bookseller for sixteen years, before becoming a sales representative for a London-based book distribution company. The Tragicall History of Campbell McCluskie is his first novel to be published. He now lives in Wantage with his wife, Sarah, their two daughters, Iona and Heather, and a melancholic white rescue cat named Alba.
​

The question that haunts Ian Alexander MacDuffy is why the playwright Campbell McCluskie was murdered at 10.30 p.m. on Wednesday 16 June 1954, for that was the very moment that Ian’s mother died giving birth to him. 

The coincidence suggests that some universal meaning may lie behind that gratuitous and painful event. Ian tries to uncover every detail of Campbell’s short but colourful life: the guilt-ridden hypocrisy of his grandfather; his father’s success as a shoe manufacturer; his childhood in Clydebank; the death of his favourite aunt; his bewildering role in the D-Day landings; his post-war success as a playwright; his passionate and eventful love life; his ambiguous relations with the criminal underworld; his violent death – because as Campbell himself wrote, in his inimitable style, ‘It’s all down tae patterns and figures; if you can decipher them, then Auld Nickie-Ben’ll dance tae your tune.’

Cover art by Andy Kinnear

‘Alistair McNaught’s ingenious fictional biography brings to life not only slain playwright McCluskie but also the mid-twentieth-century Glasgow he inhabited. McCluskie’s literary career, social life and erotic escapades are vividly evoked against a backdrop of smoke-filled bars, sombre tenements, and back streets haunted by prostitutes and razor gangs.’ 

Andrew Crumey

Awen Publications - the author

Awen Publications

Possibly (probably - ED) one of the most important albums of all time, this day saw the release of Bob Dylan's 'Blood On The Tracks' 

On this day in music history: January 17, 1975 - “Blood On The Tracks”, the fifteenth studio album by Bob Dylan is released. Produced by Bob Dylan, it is recorded at A&R Recording Studios in New York City from and Sound 80 in Minneapolis, MN from September 16 - 19, and December 27 - 30, 1974. The album marks his return to Columbia Records after briefly departing for the Asylum label. Many of the albums’ songs deal with the disintegration of Dylan’s nine year marriage to Sara Lownds, though he publicly denies this. Again, recording quickly, Dylan changes his mind about certain songs, he returns to the studio in late December and re-record several songs originally cut during the sessions in New York. It is a major critical and commercial success upon its release, and is regarded by many as the best album of his 70’s era output. “Tracks” is also supported by the now legendary “Rolling Thunder Revue” Tour. First remastered and reissued as a hybrid SACD in 2003, “Tracks” is also reissued as a 180 gram vinyl LP by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab in 2013. In November of 2018, Sony Legacy issues a six CD box set, and double vinyl LP + CD (available separately) of the album. The CD set is Volume 14 in the Dylan Bootleg Series and is titled “More Blood, More Tracks”. The six CD set features ninety-seven tracks of previously unreleased material from the New York and Minneapolis sessions. The 2 LP + CD set features  eleven tracks. The classic title is also scheduled to be released as a limited edition One Step 2 LP 45 RPM set by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab in 2019.  "Blood On The Tracks" spends two weeks at number one on the Billboard Top 200, and is certified 2x Platinum in the US by the RIAA.

thanks Jeff Harris - 

LINER NOTES:

Blood On The Tracks

Released 01/20/1975

Musicians:

Tony Brown -- Bass

Buddy Cage -- Steel Guitar

Paul Griffin -- Organ

Eric Weissberg & Deliverance

In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud.

And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism. Painters lift the easel to scrawl their innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for ideology.

And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal the worms, many retreated into that past that never was, the place of balcony dreams in Loew's Met, fair women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves in the Creamsicle summers, only faintly hearing the young men march to the troopships, while Jo Stafford gladly promised her fidelity. Poor America. Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died.

Except for Dylan.

He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and remained true. He was not the only one, of course; he is not the only one now. But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass.

Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.

So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust. Remember that he gave us voice, When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that moment into art. The wonder is that he survived.

That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed; the maps are blurred. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant as the tarnished statues in the public parks. We live with a callous on the heart. Only the artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the poor land again to feel.

And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album, he is as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. They are the poems of a survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy. It is not his voice that has grown richer, stronger, more certain; it is Dylan himself. And his poetry, his troubadour's traveling art, seems to me to be more meaningful than ever. I thought, listening to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.

If you see her,

Say hello.

She might be in Tangiers...*

So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice, and as dangerous. Dylan doesn't fall in. Instead, he tells us the essentials; a woman once lived, gone off, vanished into the wild places of the earth, still loved.

If you're makin' love to her,

Kiss her for the kid.

Who always has respected her,

for doin' what she did...*

It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of poets, but is about love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so few people can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a life. That song, and some of the other love poems in this collection, seem to me absolutely right, in this moment at the end of wars, as all of us, old, young, middle-aged, men and women, are searching for some simple things to believe in. Dylan here tips his hat to Rimbaud and Verlaine, knowing all about the seasons in hell, but he insists on his right to speak of love, that human emotion that still exists, in Faulkner's phrase, in spite of, not because.

And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over the hurt, delivered almost casually, as if the poet could control the chaos of feeling with a few simply chosen words:

Life is sad

Life is a bust.

All ya can do.

Is do what you must.

You do what you must do,

And ya do it will.

I'll do it for you,

Ah, honey baby, can't ya tell?**

A simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing Deam Mariarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music drove them; they always knew they were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance and read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme's dream flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artist generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their promise.

Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self. Listen to "Idiot Wind." It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor's anger, as personal as anything ever committed to a record. And yet is can also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with them.

Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts." It should not be reduced to notes, or taken out of context; it should be experienced in full. The compression of story is masterful, but its real wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist left out of his painting. To me, that has always been the key to Dylan's art. To state things plainly is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.

Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan's art feels, and invites us to join him.

That quality is in all the work in this collection, the long, major works, the casual drawings and etchings. There are some who attack Dylan because he will not rewrite "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gates of Eden." They are fools because they are cheating themselves of a shot at wonder. Every artist owns a vision of the world, and he shouts his protest when he sees evil mangling that vision. But he must also tell us the vision. Now we are getting Dylan's vision, rich and loamy, against which the world moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned world, is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom.

So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind. Don't mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into the courtyard, padding across the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about "flowers on the hillside bloomin' crazy/Crickets talkin' back and forth in rhyme..." A girl, red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the poet sings to all of us:

But I'll see you in the sky above,

In the tall grass,

In the ones I love.

You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.***

-- Pete Hamill, New York, 1974

Cover Photo -- Paul Till

Back Cover Illustration -- David Oppenheim

Art Direction -- Ron Coro

*from "If You See Her, Say Hello," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

**from "Buckets of Rain," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

***from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You Go," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

Rolling Stone - 40 facts about Blood on the Tracks

QUOTE OF THE WEEK!

"When I stopped doing cocaine, it was amazing to me that I didn't need to carry a gun anymore.     I just didn't need one!" 

– Joe Walsh, The Eagles

Leonard Cohen and 'Marianne'

Marianne Ihlen 28 July 2016 - Leonard Cohen 7 November 2016

Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

— Leonard Cohen

After they met in early 1960, Cohen and Ihlen began living together on Hydra the Greek island later that year, Cohen drove her to Oslo where she finalised her divorce from novelist Alex Jensen. For the next few years, Ihlen became Cohen's muse, inspiring him to write several songs on his first two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs from a Room (1969). The back sleeve of Songs from a Room features a famous photograph of her at Cohen's typewriter, draped in a white towel in their simple home in Greece.