Tag: Music of the 1960’s

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 5, 2021

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched all eight hours of the new Disney opus on the Beatles, “Let It Be”.

Truthfully, a lot of it is boring. The lads are composing new tunes for a show that may or not also be a film. All of their noodling, the endless repetition and tweaking, can be hard to watch when you already know how good the final cuts are. And they’re still very good, even now, 50 years later.

But you can’t really appreciate how great they were until you watch the last hour which documents their final live performance on the roof of the Apple building in London. After a month of fumbling in the studio, including while rehearsing the day before, they go live on the roof where they show what a fantastic band they were.

Some of those live performances ultimately appear on the “Let It Be” album. They were cut live, outside on a cold day. John at one point says he’s too cold to play the chords on his guitar. It’s hard to believe how good what you’re hearing is. There were some moments of perfection in the studio, mostly with the vocals, sometimes with the instruments, but they rarely sounded as good as on the roof.

Later, they go back to the studio to record the seven tunes that were not performed live. In one case, Phil Spector is enlisted to add strings to “The Long and Winding Road“, but it also sounded great in the studio version in the documentary.

A few hot  takes:

  • By 1969, Paul is the driving force of the project. Despite what we’ve been told, they aren’t always at each other’s throats. There are disagreements. George briefly leaves the band during that month. There are power struggles over what they actually want the final product of the month’s work to be.
  • When they are playing, they clearly enjoy each other and feed off of each other’s talent. They are all capable of playing each other’s instruments at an accomplished amateur level.
  • We’ve heard how Yoko broke up the band, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Paul’s wife Linda is there, along with their young daughter Heather. Ringo’s wife Maureen and George’s then wife, Patti, all are around at various times during the recordings.
  • The band clearly had paid their dues. They seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of most musical genres. They know all the chords to the classics of the fifties, as you see when they spontaneously play them. They were a real band, the kind of band that was ubiquitous in the 1960s, but that rarely exists today.

They’re comfortable with each other even though they haven’t played live for years. There’s no rust once they’re back on stage. You see how a band that cut a great album every year for a decade, one that knew how to do it on the road, gear up for their swan song performance.

Watch it if you are a true fan, or if you’re into nostalgia. Watch it for the learning experience about the Beatles. On to cartoons.

The Beatles were an original, but the issues are the same as before:

GOP makes spreading Covid their top priority, blames Biden for spreading Covid:

Who buys their kid a gun, hears from the school that he’s a problem, and then lets him bring the gun to class?

The Supremes are going in a bad direction:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up – Martin Luther King, Jr

The Daily Escape:

Two mules draw a farm wagon bearing the casket of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. April 9, 1968.

From Katie Mitchell at Bustle:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. But as a country, in the half-century since King’s death, we haven’t come as far as many involved in the Civil Rights Movement would have hoped. Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018…comes in the midst of a turbulent social climate, where white nationalists can openly march on college campuses and the president of the United States calls Haiti, which has a majority Black population, a “sh*thole country”…

So true. But Wrongo wants us to focus today on the role of music in the 1960’s. Dr. King described how significant and liberating that music had been to activists in the Freedom Movement:

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

Wrongo was reminded of this by a NYT article describing a collaboration between Carnegie Hall and Robert Caro, the historian who has spent much of his lifetime chronicling president Lyndon Johnson. Together, they are hosting a 10-week festival about the 1960’s. Caro says this about the music of the time: (emphasis by Wrongo)

I’ve written about what to me, is the supreme moment showing the power of music to create social change, which was when Johnson took the title of the most important anthem in his 1965 televised address to Congress a week after the Selma march, when he called for passage of a voting rights act. “It’s not just Negroes,” he said, “but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” The president of the United States takes the key line of the anthem, and uses it to help push the bill through. That’s the power of music.

Today’s wake up is for all of us who remember the political role that music had in the 1960s. It was a call to action, it was a healing salve on wounds, and it united many behind an idea.

And where is today’s protest music? It exists, and has tried to land a few blows, like music did in the ‘60s. But where politically charged music comes from, what it sounds like, who performs it, and how someone identities with it is radically different.

Unlike earlier eras of American popular resistance, there is no single centralized scene for protest songs. Today, protest music travels in a wide range of styles. And today, “protest music” seems like a redundant term; when all identities are politicized, all music feels political.  From Pitchfork:

Joey Bada$$ lamented the “Three K’s, two A’s in AmeriKKKa,” and Kendrick Lamar parsed the prejudice pulling at society’s ever-tenuous seams. The punk band Downtown Boys, led by Latinx frontwoman Victoria Ruiz, flung their stones against “A Wall.” The electrosoul twins Ibeyi remixed Michelle Obama’s wisdom into an elegy, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, a queer Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, refracted Trump’s hostility towards minorities into a bilingual cry for courage. Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, who is gay, reveled in the euphoria of self-acceptance and teased the zealotry that would blithely stomp his civil rights.

Check out some, or none. Things are different in a different time.

Back to the 1960’s. Here are two selections from the first few days after Dr. King’s assassination. First, Otis Spann and his “Blues for Martin Luther King”. Spann, arguably the greatest blues pianist, and a feature in Muddy Waters’ band, performed this in a storefront church in Chicago, even as buildings were burning all around the church from the riots that erupted after the fatal shooting:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Second, listen to Nina Simone playing “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)”. The song was written by Simone’s bass player, Gene Taylor. Here it is performed live on April 7, 1968, three days after the death of MLK at Long Island NY’s Westbury Music Fair. At 12 minutes long, it is outstanding, and well worth your time:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid are all under assault right now. They were passed in the 1960s. Every day, the GOP is trying to dismantle them.

Reflect on that on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s death.

Facebooklinkedinrss