Nico- The Immediate Label (1965) Part 1

(l to r: Tony Calder, Nico and Andrew Loog Oldham; taken from the booklet with 6CD box "The Immediate Story")

Nico was one of the many artists I included in a long list that I felt had been unfairly excluded from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while others with little connection to the music (and likely no desire to be associated with it) were inducted over the objections of confused fans. Most of the posts for this blog in the second half of 2011 were devoted to the Checklist of Shame (click on the "Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame" label on the right side of the screen), but I've excerpted her entry below:

1. NICO- Nobody's idea of a role model, certainly not going to win any 'mother of the year' awards, but definitely deserving of a permanent place in the rock pantheon. The minimalism of Talking Heads or Flying Lizards almost certainly can be traced directly to her post-CHELSEA GIRL solo albums, rather than Alban Berg or Erik Satie. Much of her personal history, marred by drug addiction and pathological lying, is a Gordian Knot of misinformation and contradictory accounts; I won't even attempt to address it here. For the curious, the only-- and I mean only-- trustworthy sources are the book "Nico: The Life & Lies Of An Icon" and the documentary film "Nico/Icon" it inspired. For supplemental reading, ex-band member James Young wrote a book that's been repackaged under a variety of titles by a variety of publishers and is filled with could-have-happened anecdotes from the early 1980's.

Rather than spend time on a disambiguation of her multiple biographies, I'll refer readers to the sources in the above paragraph and dive right into the music. After appearing in a number of films and television commercials in Europe, Nico turned up in England, dating Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Their manager, Andrew "Loog" Oldham, was using his experience as a publicist for Brian Epstein's artists, to launch his own record label while the Stones were still signed to Decca. His partner in that venture, Tony Calder, had been a publicist for Decca and both had their reasons to believe they had learned from what they considered the mistakes of such major labels.

The first three releases from the label were scheduled to be released by Friday, August 20th, 1965. This was the same day as the Rolling Stones' new single on Decca, "Satisfaction". Oldham was no doubt hoping for some synergistic publicity.

The first catalogue number was assigned to The McCoys for a single ("Hang On Sloopy") that was actually licensed from the Bang Records label, located in the U.S. That label (formed by Bert Berns, Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun and Jerry-- or, for the purposes of his first initial, Gerald-- Wexler) was only a few months old itself and formed by producers and executives at Atlantic Records. Berns also had business in England producing the band Them and writing their hit "Here Comes the Night". He would later bring Van Morrison to Bang as a solo artist. The Immediate label would continue to license recordings from Bang, including by artists like the Strangeloves.

The other two singles featured original recordings. IM002 was the only release by The Fifth Avenue, arranged and produced by Jimmy Page. Page was a prolific studio musician before becoming the fourth lead guitarist in the Yardbirds (he was approached for the job when Eric Clapton quit and recommended Jeff Beck; he later played with them alongside Beck and stayed after Beck left). The two members of The Fifth Avenue were Denny Gerrard and Kenny Rowe. After this, Gerrard formed another duo at Immediate (Warm Sounds) which signed to Decca subsidiary Deram. Rowe met Brian Epstein client Tony Rivers and his band The Castaways when they recorded a one-off single for Immediate shortly before they left EMI/Columbia. After Epstein died in 1967, the Beatles formed the Apple organization, eventually leading to the Apple label in 1968. Three members of the Castaways were recruited by the head of the publishing division to form a band for an artist with a publishing contract. As Grapefruit (named after the Yoko Ono book) they were one of the first bands signed to Apple but their recordings were licensed to other labels before Apple started manufacturing their own records. For perspective, remember that the Beatles themselves continued to release records through Parlophone until August 1968. Rowe joined Tony Rivers to form a new version of the Castaways. After one single on Polydor, they refashioned themselves as Harmony Grass and signed to RCA.

The A-side of the Fifth Avenue single was a pretty faithful cover of the Byrds' arrangement of "The Bells Of Rhymney". It appeared on their first album, which had only been out in the U.S. for two months and would be released in the U.K. in August, close to the Fifth Avenue single. The Byrds never released it as a single in the U.S., although it made it to the Greatest Hits album in 1967. It the U.K. it was included on an EP in February 1966.
The B-side was a Jimmy Page original, "Just Like Anyone Would Do". Musically, it sounds like the hooks from four different songs patched together. Any one of them is hummable, but it makes the full song difficult to remember. And being difficult to remember could be fatal given the competition these initial three singles were wading into. The third single was, of course, Nico's debut. The next post will look at the A-side. In the meantime, below is a list of the top 50 singles in the August 19th, 1965 Record Retailer. Instead of listing them as they appeared in the chart, in order of their rank that week, I've listed them in the order that they were released to give a sense of how long they had been in the British consciousness at the time. I then note how long they eventually lasted with their last chart date and total number of weeks. After the artist and song title I give their peak rank (not necessarily their rank on August 19) and their label.

Frozen Warnings/A Given Voice

Well, it's that time of year again. The Bob Dylan Covers project I began last year will continue this year. However, the point of that project is that Dylan has become perennial and that his covers are ubiquitous. At the moment I have realized that there is something more pressing, at least to me.

Later this year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Nico. It is unlikely to be observed in mass media. Although her music is widely respected by other musicians and fans of innovative music, it is not likely to ever be widely popular. I've written in this blog before about the mix of confusion and vindication I've felt watching music I had been told for years was "commercially unviable" becoming the soundtrack for actual television commercials. Ramones, Nick Drake, Joy Division, the Stooges and even Syd Barrett were licensed for ads in the last 20 years, but Nico, who was featured in a series of television ads in Europe before becoming a musician? Not so much. Wes Anderson soundtracks, maybe, but Nico wasn't going to get onto broadcast television unless it was in one of the three Velvet Underground songs she sang on or a track from her first solo album, "Chelsea Girls". Both sets of songs were released on the Verve label and the recordings would be licensed through UMC, presumably. But going through Warner Music isn't the reason TV shows and ads don't license tracks from "Marble Index". There's also the fact that however fascinating her life has been she had spent much of it as an unsympathetic figure. Heroin addicts and pathological liars are a dime a dozen on basic cable scandal shows but rarely get network retrospectives or tribute concerts.

Despite all of that, I still contend that Nico is overdue for a comprehensive career retrospective of her music. In fact, I felt that way over twenty years ago when I compiled the two-cassette, three hour overview that appears in the scans on the right. Like most of the compilations I made in the 90's it was a compilation of hits and rarities plus representative album tracks in roughly chronological order of their recording. In this case, 'hits' translates to anything released on a single or songs that became concert staples.

One should be aware that creating a compilation such as this, drawing on as many different sources held by so many different interests, for retail purposes is markedly different from me creating these tapes for my own enjoyment. Since I never sold these I never had to pay licensing fees or royalties. I also didn't have to locate the original masters from numerous points around the globe. These songs were all dubbed from standard store-bought CD's and vinyl. They were individually equalized and the volume levels had to be readjusted when changing sources, but the differences between formats of pre-recorded music are minor compared to trying to mix from one song to another from reels that have differing numbers of tracks recorded years apart on equipment sometimes separated by generations.

The expense of engaging capable engineers on top of the expenses of providing them with the original recordings in question all has to be balanced against the likelihood of the end results selling. Also, the more sophisticated and attractive the packaging, the higher the suggested retail price and the smaller the pool of potential customers despite its greater desirability.

Below are the final drafts of the notes for the compilation, handwritten on notebook paper (keepin' it classy). You should note that each side of the 90-minute cassettes are about the length of an LP and I saw fit to correspondingly give each side its own title as though it were a self-contained album. The particular selection of tracks allowed me to make a clean break between sides at points where Nico changed labels in different years.

In the coming months I hope to look at each track considered for this compilation and why they did or didn't make the cut. I'll also try to look at the releases made since these were compiled and consider how the retrospective might be expanded or improved. If I can complete these posts before the anniversary of her death in July, perhaps someone in a better position than I might assemble a fitting commemoration for her (likely) 80th birthday in October.

See you soon.

Plowmen Till My Earth: Introduction

.....After Thanksgiving I continued listening to The Band's Last Waltz 4CD set released in 2002 (diplomatically, between the silver anniversaries of the concert in 1976 and resulting film/album project in 1978) and reading an excellent examination of the different configurations of recordings released over the last forty years available on their website. Most versions are incomplete and the songs presented out of the order in which they were performed. The article provided a clearer picture of the events of the day and I couldn't think of anything I could comment on here that would add anything of value, beyond going into detail about The Band's relationship to each of the guests on the bill and that information is already available online, albeit scattered.

.....As I put together newspapers for recycling I noticed an obituary I had seen before, but which had slipped my mind during the fuss over holidays. There have been many deaths in the music business this year (David Bowie's 70th birthday is in a week; don't think you won't hear about that), so it would have easy for many and excusable for some to have overlooked it, but Milt Okun died just before Thanksgiving. Okun was best known as a producer, but he has touched the lives of many musicians in many ways, including as a publisher, composer and even as a sound editor. He played a large part in the background of the emergence of what I used to call "barbershop folk", characterized by traditional (or at least public domain) songs sung by scrubbed, clean shaven young people in matching outfits. (Think of the film "A Mighty Wind". Or the Bob Dylan song "Talkin' New York Blues".) It wasn't completely unrelated to the real folk music scene; most if not all of the acts played in the same clubs as people who would never get on the Ed Sullivan Show. But Okun produced the recordings that brought folk to middle America just as Nat King Cole did for jazz.The Band only ever became known to most Americans because Bob Dylan recruited them to be his touring band in the mid-60's and Bob Dylan was only ever able to tour enough to need a band because of a ball set in motion by several people including Milt Okun.

.....To set some perspective, in the late 1950's the emergence of rock music was being met with resistance, sometimes violently but more often from state and local officials under pressure from white supremacist groups who objected to the fact that it drew upon both traditionally white and black music forms and moreso that white teenagers enjoyed it. Sometimes that pressure was direct and sometimes it was through national elected officials who relied on these domestic terrorist groups as a part of their campaign apparatus. In a short period of time the major players were either dead (Buddy Holly, et al), drafted (Elvis Presley), jailed (Chuck Berry) or otherwise blackballed (Jerry Lee Lewis). Of course, there were many who simply objected to rock for aesthetic reasons. One of the most strident of these voices was Mitch Miller, a recording industry fixture for many years who wore several hats: arranger, conductor and producer, but to the general public he was best known as the host of the television show "Sing Along With Mitch". Most importantly in music history, he was the head of the Artists and Repertoire department at Columbia Records. Having issued the first major contracts to Aretha Franklin and Johnny Mathis and having put Leslie Uggams on television every week, Miller couldn't possibly have perceived himself as being in the same boat as the various "Citizens Councils" that kept rock records off certain radio stations. And it would unfair and inaccurate to paint him that way. However, he was very likely among the many at the time who saw blues and jazz as forms of minstrelsy used to demean and oppress African Americans, and that black musicians were 'liberated' to the extent that they sounded like white musicians. There's little doubt that his heavy hand regarding selecting material and arrangements drove Franklin to Atlantic records after recording eight albums for Columbia in six years. For all her effort, only the 1961 single, "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody" barely squeaked into the top 40. By contrast, her first nine Altantic A-sides were each Top 10 Pop chart hits (that's Billboard Pop, not the R&B chart which skewed to black artists). It's no wonder most people think her career started with "Respect" in 1967. Her last Columbia album may have been called "Soul Sister", but with material like "Ol' Man River", "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You", she probably couldn't care less that nobody remembers it.

.....With Miller's influence in the music business and preference for repertoire in public domain (no royalties, you see), there became an inroad into the recording industry for people with a knowledge of traditional American music so long as they were willing to perform it in a stiff, almost neo-classicist style. While this wasn't Milt Okun's mission in life, it meant work for performers who would have been unlikely to get a recording contract even a few years earlier. It didn't take long for other labels to follow suit. It also didn't take long for a folk revival to take root on American college campuses. With the most vital rock acts missing it was easy for young adults to dismiss rock music as a passé and juvenile fad. These were people who came of age in the Cold War being told that American freedoms must be preserved at all costs and as they prepared to enter the adult world and be the ones who would be responsible for that preservation, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the greatest threats to the American Dream were coming from within-- the selfsame officials and Citizens Councils that pursued segregationist policies (and worse) and pushed rock into relative obscurity. They didn't know it yet, but the nation's racist power brokers had made the same mistake that the Shah of Iran would make years later, but in reverse. The Shah eliminated his most civilized and reasoned critics in every aspect of modern Iranian culture-- academics, politics, economics; intellectuals and respected civic leaders of all kinds were exiled or imprisoned, tortured or intimidated into silence, some dying in custody or simply disappearing. The only ones he didn't bother with were the craziest of the religious polemicists because the general public didn't have any respect for them, so they couldn't form an effective opposition. However, because of his purges, the Shah left the public with no one to voice their concerns except the severest religious extremists. He essentially delivered to them the public support they could never get on their own. Enter the Ayatollah. In America in 1959, those who needed civil rights repression in order to stay in power put all their energies into persecuting whoever couldn't fight back, had no political inclinations or insights, little or no formal education, no extended network of social support in the form of middle class families or military background and the least articulate. What was left was an army of English majors with a decades long history of organizing social and political activism who now had the flag and apple pie on their side. There was something distinctly American about American folk music and something distinctly anti-American about the Confederacy.

.....One of those young fans of folk music was a Cornell freshman named Lenny Lipton who, having read an Ogden Nash poem, "The Tale of Custard The Dragon" about a girl named Belinda and her cowardly pet dragon, was inspired to write his own poem about a boy who "prepared to enter the adult world" and take on greater responsibilities, leaving his own pet dragon to carry on without him. A fellow student named Peter Yarrow set it to music and would sometimes include it while performing. (You realize we're talking about "Puff, The Magic Dragon", right?) In Ithaca, New York, where Cornell is located, there's a Cherry Road and a Cherry Street. There's even a Cherry Street in Brooklyn, where Lipton was born, but not a Cherry Lane. How that made it into the song, I don't know. I also don't know why a theatrical troupe in Greenwich Village back in the 1920's would refurbish a box factory on Commercial St. and rename it the Cherry Lane Theater when there's no Cherry Lane in Manhattan, either. But in 1960, while Lipton was working on his physics degree, Milt Okun formed a music publishing company, Cherry Lane Music Publishing, in the offices above the theater. Also working in New York was a young man who left his home in the midwest with hopes of becoming a rock musician. During the course of that journey he, too, became deeply impressed by the power of American folk, as exemplified by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, to touch people and spell out the human condition in stark, honest terms. And Mitch Miller couldn't have had any idea what he was getting into when Bob Dylan signed to Columbia Records in 1961, but in just two years after that Yarrow, Okun, Dylan and others would ignite a phenomenon of the 1960's that's still burning today: Dylan covers.

Next post: "Plowmen Till My Earth" continues with "Broadsides, Blowin' and Brothers", plus the reason why that's not the right lyric

V05-T04b Radio One Theme

.....

.....At the time that The Who released LP THE WHO SELL OUT Jimi Hendrix was recording a jingle of his own.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 4b

• 01:19 "RADIO ONE THEME" (Jimi Hendrix)
• performed by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• original source: BBC radio broadcast, "Top Gear", December 24th, 1967
• and my source: CD RADIO ONE RYKOdisc RCD20078 (Canada) 1988

.....After this cassette was compiled a superior sounding copy was made commercially available on 2CD BBC SESSIONS Experience Hendrix/MCA MCAD 2-11742 (US) 06/02/98.

.....This track was recorded December 15th, 1967, the same day that the stereo copy of LP THE WHO SELL OUT was released. (The mono copy could have been out as early as November 17th in the U.S., the originally scheduled British date; the release was postponed because the anticipated clearances for using the product names were late coming back. The official U.S. release date was the first week of January 1968 but lines of communication overseas then were not what they are today and not every retailer reads every telegram in a timely fashion.) The BBC session was recorded at their Playhouse Theatre on Northumberland Avenue in London, according to the excellent Chrome Oxide website. These sessions were necessary due to a BBC policy strictly limiting airtime use of commercial prerecorded music. The way for musicians to promote themselves (and for producers to retain the attention of the younger post-war public) was to make new recordings of their current material for exclusive use by the BBC. The more creative and adventurous musicians (well, that would certainly include Hendrix) were known to 'go off the farm' a bit and take advantage of the government run network's absence of commercial concerns to record things that they thought were interesting or funny but which they didn't expect would sell as a record. The purpose of Hendrix' appearance must have been to promote his then current album LP AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE, out two weeks earlier. However, out of the five songs recorded only two ("SPANISH CASTLE MAGIC" and "WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW") were from the album. the others were a cover of the Beatles' "DAY TRIPPER", two takes of an original called "HEAR MY TRAIN A'COMING" (which never made it onto his next album; a later recording was badly overdubbed for release years after he died but a more honest mix came out on CD VALLEYS OF NEPTUNE in 2010) and this song.

.....From my 1994 notes: "...one of rock's most persistent experimenters had the power of radio very much on his mind. During Woodstock's anniversary a huge amount of the hyperbole concerning Hendrix was dredged up again. Unlike most performers, Hendrix deserves his or the better part of it, but it still pains me to know that people considered to be journalists are in fact prattling off meaningless abstractions as an excuse for not sitting down and listening to his records. If they had, you would have heard them mention the one obvious thing that I kept listening for and never heard [them say]. In addition to being 'a guitar god' and a 'cultural icon' he was a loving fan of pop music. In interviews he would shamelessly gush over other musicians when he should have been promoting his own latest release. His reworking of other people's material ("ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER", "HEY JOE", "WILD THING", various Cream and Beatles covers, etc.) were so heartfelt, people often mistake them for Hendrix originals. In live performance (at least on most of the video footage I've seen) he made a point of introducing the songs by noting the original artists.

....."By the end of '67, after THE WHO SELL OUT, SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND ... and the Monterey Pop Festival, Dylan's long awaited comeback album, JOHN WESLEY HARDING, was released containing "ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER". Hendrix must have been in pop music heaven, even though he had yet to go Top 40 in his own country. Teenagers in the U.S. were growing up fast and took the choice of albums over singles as a signifier of their newly attenuated attention spans (and convenient if you happen to be stoned because you don't have to get up and change an LP as frequently). In the U.K., however, singles still ruled and Jimi wasn't doing too badly either. He knew that the difference was non-formatted radio, oblivious to the never-do-anything-untested mentality that was keeping him off the air and off the charts in the U.S. The reason for raising this point is that at the beginning of this track his introduction degenerates into a barely suppressed giggle that could easily be taken to mean that the song was intended as a joke. (In fact, when these sessions were reissued in this country on RYKOdisc's CD RADIO ONE, I seem to remember a reviewer saying exactly that.) It's possible, but more likely that he meant every word and was giggling from giddiness, exchanging Christmas gifts with a new friend."

.....Tomorrow one guitar legend leads to another. Or two.

V05-T04a "...It's smooth sailing..."

.....

.....Tito Larriva of the Plugz (see the previous post) played the character Ramon in David Byrne's movie "True Stories". Ramon claims to receive radio waves and refers to himself as Radiohead (and yes, that's where the band got their name). While the guitar-heavy "I'M A CADILLAC" naturally leads into "HOMBRE SECRETO", and that song's British mid-60's origins as a cover of "SECRET AGENT MAN" seem like the reasonable relations to this next track, I think that knowing about Larriva's contributions to both "Repo Man" and "True Stories" may have prompted my choice of this interstitial and the song that follows it.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 4a

• 00:18 [excerpt from "ODORONO"]
• performed (nominally) by The Wh♂
• original source: LP THE WHO SELL OUT Track Records 612 002[mono] or 613 002[stereo] (UK) 12/15/67
• and my source: CD THE WHO SELL OUT MCA MCAD-31332 (US) 10/88

.....The actual vocal used is obviously not one of the Who; it's a woman's voice over a string section singing, "It's smooth sailing with the highly successful sound of Wonderful Radio London", one of the more succinct and to the point Radio London jingles of the many on the album. Radio London had American financial backers who would supply them with custom jingles recorded by a professional service called Production Advertising Merchandising Service, better known by the acronym on its packaging, PAMS. The female vocalists on staff as of 1965 included Judy Parma, Camilla Duncan, Jean Oliver and Tinker Rautenberg, although I doubt that there are any surviving records specifying who was used on this particular recording. The station broadcast from a ship anchored off the coast of England to provide a commercial model to compete with the government owned BBC. It only existed from shortly before Christmas 1964 to mid August 1967, just two months before most of the recording was done for the Who's album. Actual Radio London jingles were edited onto the beginnings and endings of songs and faux ads recorded by the Who. Things like jingles, commercial sponsorship, programming to meet public demand and DJ's as well known as the records they played were all foreign concepts in UK radio prior to that. It was all as much an American import as Andy Warhol's ideas about pop art, something central to the Who's identity at the time.

.....From my notes in 1994:"The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album is widely touted as rock's first concept album. The concept at work there is that the album is supposed to simulate, in your living room, the experience of attending a concert by Billy Shears and various other performers. You can see what they're getting at on the first two tracks, "FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE" and again on the title track's reprise, but most of that album doesn't give that impression at all. And what's with the barking dogs in the trail off groove? Is that a 'concert experience'?

....."Let's not kid ourselves. The first side of LP THE WHO SELL OUT leaves absolutely no question as to what you're listening to: a radio station that plays nothing but the Who, even in its advertisements for Odorono deodorant, Medac pimple cream and Heinz Baked Beans. Unfortunately for the band they hadn't accounted for the fact that in American slang to 'sell out' means betraying your ideals for commercial reasons, while they meant to say that they had greater popular support than the 'safer' performers. They lost sales due to negative criticism of the title, but worse, they lost the recognition they deserved as innovators of the format."

.....The American sales actually weren't that badly impacted. They were experiencing a meteoric rise in the U.S. following what was their only top ten hit at the time, "I CAN SEE FOR MILES" and a literally explosive appearance on the Smothers Brothers' television show. It could be that American audiences correctly read the title as self-deprecating humor. In England, however, it became the band's lowest charting studio album, not counting soundtracks. In the U.S. it charted higher (at 48) than their previous album (at 67). Their first album didn't chart in the U.S. at all. Their next album, a shabby compilation deceptively packaged as a live album without the band's knowledge or consent, made it to 39, lending credence to my suspicion that an original album riding a hit should have made a greater impact. By comparison, most of their albums, including many of their compilations, were in the top ten in England since the beginning as they would be in the U.S. starting with 2LP TOMMY in 1969. As for what was the earliest concept album, that depends on how strictly you define a concept album. Operas predate rock operas, of course, and themed albums predate even the LP format, since the word album refers to bound sets of 78's. In the rock idiom, the first might be the Beach Boys LP PET SOUNDS, followed closely by the Kinks' LP FACE TO FACE in 1966. After that it was kind of a free for all, with the first high concept rock album probably being the Moody Blues' LP DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, released between Sgt. Pepper and Sell Out.

.....This interstitial introduces the next track, which was roughly contemporary to the Who album.

V04-T16b "...and I hope we passed the audition."

.....Finally, the end of cassette two.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 16b

• 00:13 [excerpt from "GET BACK", ad lib by John Lennon]
• performed by The Beatles [nominally]
• original source: LP LET IT BE Apple PCS7096 (UK) May 8th, 1970
• and my source: CD LET IT BE Parlophone CDP7 46447 2 (US) 1987

.....The full text of the quote at the end of the song "GET BACK" is, "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition". Actually, the working title of the album was also GET BACK, until the tapes were eventually selected and packaged as LET IT BE. Maybe a little timeline is in order.

1. In 1968 the Beatles take five months to record the double album nicknamed "The White Album" (THE BEATLES). Much of the time was spent writing and recording separately.
2. Jan. 1969 the YELLOW SUBMARINE album is released. One side contains songs used in the movie, some of them old outtakes, the other side has George Martin's soundtrack instrumentals from the movie.
3. Jan. to May 1969: In order to work more collaboratively as a band, the Beatles began recording jam sessions of oldies: rockers, R&B and blues like "BLUE SUEDE SHOES", "BYE BYE LOVE", "LAWDY MISS CLAWDY", etc. Eventually they were inspired to write original songs together again. Sessions were filmed for possible use in a documentary and the music was produced by George Martin and their engineer, Glyn Johns. The project was called GET BACK, as in "Get back to your roots".
4. The album version of "GET BACK" was recorded January 27th. The single version and its B-side were recorded on the 28th. Then, on the 30th, the famous rooftop concert was filmed. It would turn out to be their last public performance and ended with the song "GET BACK" followed by Maureen Starr (Ringo's wife) applauding, Paul McCartney thanking her ("Thanks, Mo!") and John Lennon goofing around with the theme of returning to their early days by giving the quote I repeated at the top of this list. That snippet was later grafted on to the end of the studio version for the album.
5. Apr. 1969 the 7" version of "GET BACK" b?w "DON'T LET ME DOWN" is released in UK. (May in US.)
6. May 1969 the GET BACK album is completed. For a cover photo, the band recreates their pose from the photo sessions that yielded the cover to LP PLEASE PLEASE ME in 1963. Unfortunately, returning to an earlier, simpler approach to playing and recording created an album that sounded much rougher and more raw than the band felt comfortable with and they cancelled its release.
7. Jun. 1969 the 7" version of "THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO" b/w "OLD BROWN SHOE" is released in UK and US.
8. Jul. to Aug. 1969 the LP ABBEY ROAD is recorded with George Martin "really producing" (his words). He apparently didn't care for the GET BACK experiment.
9. Sep. 1969 Lennon, Ono and Clapton go to Toronto for the live debut of Plastic Ono Band at the end of an otherwise 1950's nostalgia concert with Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and many others. Two weeks later LP ABBEY ROAD is released.
10. Oct. 1969 the 7" version of "SOMETHING" b/w "COME TOGETHER" is released in UK and US.
11. Jan. 1970 the song "I ME MINE" is recorded and a second version of LP GET BACK is proposed and rejected.
12. Feb. 1970 the LP HEY JUDE, a collection of non-LP singles and two songs from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is released in the US only.
13. Mar. 1970 the 7" version of "LET IT BE" b/w "YOU KNOW MY NAME" is released in UK and US.
14. Mar. to Apr. 1970 Phil Spector is hired to remix existing unreleased tapes to salvage the GET BACK project. He radically remixes a 1968 recording of "ACROSS THE UNIVERSE", leading many fans to believe the band had recorded a new version. He also uses the 1970 song "I ME MINE", but the majority of the material comes from the year-old GET BACK sessions.
15. May 1970 the film and album, both named LET IT BE, are released. There's also a derivative US-only 7" of album tracks "LONG AND WINDING ROAD" b/w "FOR YOU BLUE".

.....And that's the over-simplified account of the events. I left out the ugly legal tangles and television appearances. The excessive studio behavior (during the "White Album" sessions there were 70 takes of "HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN") inevitably led to the band's desire to simplify. The problem was that they weren't the same persons, the same musicians or the same band they were in 1962. It was as though the accelerated lives their fame brought them provoked a mid-life crisis at age thirty. Having got that out of their systems they went back home to their wife (Martin) and created one of their best albums. McCartney cited the release of the LET IT BE album in court documents regarding the dissolution of the Beatles as evidence that the band's direction and business decisions were being harmful to his career. It's not that bad, even if Martin was a better judge of the band's strengths than Spector had been.

.....My reasons for closing with this clip? Like most of these selections it was mostly instinct at the time. In retrospect, I knew that one mix tape is an impulse and two is a proposal. The second implies a series not implied by the first. Of course, when I made the first one I had no delusions that I could distill the character of my music collection to 90 minutes. By continuing the format I had insinuated that the was no time limit being imposed. Therefore, distilling the character of my collection becomes, theoretically anyway, a legitimate objective to pursue. And it would be an objective that would take more than four cassette sides to seriously address. This blog reaches its first anniversary this week and the past year, if you've been reading it, has been the audition. And if you come back, I guess that means "we passed".

V04-T07 I Want Candy

.....Sandwiched between two covers I placed the original version of a song better known as a cover.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 7

• 02:36 "I WANT CANDY" (Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, Richard Gottehrer, Bert Berns)
• performed by The Strangeloves
• original source: A-side 7" BANG!Records B-501(US) 1965
• and my source: the same

.....I don't know if my copy is a first pressing but I don't think it would matter if it was. Unfortunately from a collector's standpoint it is a deleted sleeveless stock copy in rough condition and bought for chump change out of a bargain box somewhere. Still plays though. The reason that a first pressing would be a better conversation piece is that this is a little bit of rock history-- the first(?) official release from BANG! Records.

.....Atlantic Records was formed by Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun in the 1940's to indulge their love of American jazz and blues. By the 1960's they had diversified somewhat, as most successful labels will. In the course of their expansion they had enlisted a number of talented producers. In 1964 two of them, Bert Berns and Jerry Wexler, convinced them to launch a competing label as committed to purely commercial, hit-making producer's projects as Atlantic had been committed to capturing artists authentically. They called it "BANG!", named for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui and Gerald. Initially they recorded content for other labels, producing finished recordings instead of demos and shopping them around to other small labels in need of a chart hit. One such song was "LOVE LOVE(THAT'S ALL I WANT FROM YOU)" on the Swan label by three producers masquerading as a group called The Strangeloves. Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer could play instruments, but generally left the heavy lifting to session men. One day they laid down the instrumental backing for a cover of "BO DIDDLEY" that turned out so well, Berns suggested they make it the basis for a new song instead of squandering it on a B-side. The result was "I WANT CANDY".

.....Seeing that this single was catalog number B-501 with matrix numbers W-1003 and W-1004 (A and B, respectively), it occurred to me that the previous single would have been B-500 with matrices W-1001 and W-1002. Not only could I not find any release like that for any of the artists I knew to be on their roster, I found out that W-1001 is in the trail-off groove of a Neil Diamond album they released two years later.

.....When the single became a hit, Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer took four of the musicians from the session on the road with them to play concerts. They were Jack Raczka (guitar), John Shine (bass, vocals), Richie Lauro (sax, vocals) and Tom Kobus (drums). The line-ups were perpetually changing later, but this would have been representative of the studio band on the single. The three 'real' Strangeloves continued writing and producing with and without the pseudonym. In fact, Gottehrer was producing the Go-Go's when they recorded that B-side I used a few posts ago. The song's been pretty durable, too, covered by the Count Bishops (in the 70's) and perhaps most famously by Bow Wow Wow in 1982, changing the 'girl' in the song to a 'guy'.

.....Next up, a cover more appropriate than it immediately appears.

V03-T02 Sally Go Round The Roses

.....While discussing a Jim Carroll song on Volume 2 I mentioned that by the late 1960's Andy Warhol was forced to change his policy allowing many different strangers from different backgrounds to hang out at The Factory, his studio and headquarters of an art collective he sponsored. For a while the variety of people fueled the creativity of the artists working there, but after an attempt on his life he could no longer be certain of their safety or even his own. We would have to be content with what preceded that incident. In addition to the art, one unintentional side effect of having so many different people passing through an area is that you can get corroborations on some pretty far-fetched stories...

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 2

• 03:01 "SALLY GO ROUND THE ROSES" (Zelma Sanders, Lona Stevens)
• performed by The Jaynetts
• original source: A-side, 7"Tuff 369 (US) 1963
• and my source: CD GOLDEN GIRL GROUPS K-Tel CD 341-2 (US) Nov., 1989

.....As far back as when I made this mix tape (early 1994?) I was aware that Andy Warhol played this record in the Factory while working (except for the films, obviously). I've since seen that fact repeated by Lou Reed, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga and a few others who were there at the time. Reed in particular noted that Warhol didn't seem to own many records in all, but played this one repeatedly. It's hard to know exactly what he liked about it, but an educated guess would be the hypnotic, mantra effect it has since successive plays would emphasize that. Although supposedly written as an original it certainly sounds as though it was derived from a nursery rhyme or a rope-jumping chant.

.....The Jaynetts themselves are a bit of a mystery. Sanders' account is that she created the group as the head of J&S Records as a way to keep singers productive while they were between vocal groups. However, even if it were possible to pinpoint who was in the group at the time of the recording, it was made with multiple overdubs of whatever vocalists were on hand during an extended weekend. I can't find anyone involved with the recording who can claim to have reliable studio logs that detail the personnel. A Wikipedia entry names ten women known to have been working under Sanders' supervision at the time and engineer Artie Butler's website http://www.artiebutler.com/ describes, in his own words, overdubbing the vocals onto a finished instrumental track: "Each time when I added another element I added a different type of reverb." This approach to recording makes it a practical impossibility to even count distinct voices, let alone distinguish one from another.

.....Tomorrow, a different kind of dubbing mix-up.

V03-T01a Sound effect of jail doors

.....Today begins the second cassette. As it happens, we open with a closing. Slam, slam, go the jail guitar doors, alright, but this isn't a Clash song.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 1a

• 00:09 [excerpt from "WE LOVE YOU" (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards)]
• performed by The Rolling Stones
• original source: A-side, 7" Decca F12654 (UK) 08/18/67
• and my source: 3CD THE ROLLING STONES SINGLES COLLECTION* THE LONDON YEARS Abkco 1218-2 (US) 08/15/89

.....On February 12th, 1967, Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely led a raid on Keith Richards' country home while numerous guests were there. An American from the West Coast was allowed to leave carrying a suitcase filled to the gills with LSD and a bit of everything else. He was apparently a wannabe dealer planted there by a Murdoch-style scandal paper that was being sued by the Stones for libel and likely to lose the case. They alerted the police that there would be a drug fueled party at the address, and had a man on the inside to make sure that there was. Unfortunately for them he disappeared with most of it. All that was found was a small amount of heroin on an art gallery owner and a few amphetamine pills for which Jagger may or may not have had a prescription. When the Stones failed to drop the libel suit, another well-publicized raid occurred at Brian Jones' house (this time with no set up necessary) in May. (Jones readily admitted to having a small amount of hash, but not the panoply of addictive substances the police seemed to expect would be there.) In June, when Jagger and Richards were sentenced, Richards was given a year in prison simply for owning that house the police chose to target. The sentences were overturned after review (with the reasoning that, if you're going to put someone in jail for a crime, it would be nice to produce tangible evidence), but only after widespread public outcry, including an editorial from the staunchly conservative London Times. Editor William Rees-Mogg was appalled that police powers and resources were so blatantly abused and that Judge Block (who handed out the original sentences) would use his position to indulge his cultural bigotries.

.....In June the Stones recorded this single at Olympic Studios with Lennon and McCartney providing backing vocals for release in August. In the meantime, the Who rush released a cover single ("Under My Thumb" b/w "The Last Time") in July as a show of support. But it was the slamming of the doors that opens the song (excerpted here) more than the sarcastic chorus that set the tone for rebellion and outsider culture that permeates much of side three.

V02-T16 The Dust Blows Forward...

.....If you were one of the lucky few to be given one of these compilations, and assuming you didn't recognize this final song on Volume 2, you may have wondered just how old this recording was or how bad the condition of the record from which it was taken. The recording is younger than I am and it was recorded from a CD.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 16

• 01:53 "THE DUST BLOWS FORWARD (AND THE DUST BLOWS BACK) (Don Van Vliet)
• performed by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
• original source: 2LP TROUT MASK REPLICA Straight STS-1013 (US) 10/69
• and my source: CD TROUT MASK REPLICA Reprise 2027-2 (US) 11/89

.....Many of the liner notes that I wrote for this series of mix tapes became hopelessly out of date and I've been rewriting them on this blog. This particular track was not as obvious a choice for a 'closer' as the two tracks that began each side/volume were 'openers'. In fact, it's only the second track on the first side of the double LP from which it was taken. My choice to use it for this purpose was ultimately instinctive and I put some thought in after the fact to work out (for my own peace of mind, mostly) what was driving those instincts. I'm going to quote those thoughts below, unedited, and then fact-check myself immediately after that (and remember this is 1993):

.....This man could fill a book. You still might not understand him after reading it, but you'll hate putting it down.

.....Captain Beefheart is an infuriating artist, the sort who, along with Syd Barrett, Nico, Lord Buckley and others will often be the first names on your tongue when someone asks you why you don't like Air Supply (no, that's pretty dated; say 'Vanilla Ice' instead). "If you don't like what they play on the radio, then WHAT DO YOU LIKE?" they always ask.

.....And sometimes, if I'm feeling charitable, this is what I'd say:

....."I like Captain Beefheart."

.....Now, I'm not stupid. I know that if I say this to one hundred people that less than half a dozen of them will buy one of his albums and most of them will make the mistake of trying to dance to it. But if even one person 'gets' it, it will be worth it. Of course, their first reaction will be to wrinkle their nose and check the sleeve/jewel box to make sure they didn't pick up the wrong item. Then they'll check their sound system, headphones, etc. It was only because I found some of these songs mildly amusing that I gave them repeated listenings and found, to my amazement, that taken collectively they can be revelatory. In the case of Beefheart in particular, more so than the others I mentioned above, you should find that he doesn't simply have a perspective on things that's slightly different from the rest of us, but that his perspective is nearly independent of ours. With some effort you can catch a glimpse of it; it's a mad world where objects are interchangeable with circumstances (and vice versa) and words are more powerful than what they are chosen to describe.

.....About this recording specifically: it was produced by Frank Zappa, probably in someone's living room. (The Captain had already been lied to and cheated by a number of producers and labels and was fitfully uncomfortable around studios.)

.....This track was taped from CD; the scratchy sound in the background, periodically interrupted by a crackling >thwippp< , is the sound of a needle in the trail-off groove of an old record. Both Beefheart and Zappa frequently listened to blues 45's and 78's. It acts as a metronome on an otherwise a capella track. Maybe the intention was to lay the vocal part over an instrumental background afterwards and that proved too difficult due to the record's "background noise". I'd like to think that it was more the result of two genuine record lovers who wanted to convey to listeners the sound that most recalls their true passion-- and mine.

.....and it's 2010 again. O.K., in order:

1. "This man could fill a book." Several, in fact, since I wrote those words. Only a handful are really good, the best being Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad)'s "Lunar Notes"(1998); Mike Barnes' "The Biography"(2002); Kevin Courrier's contribution to the 33 1/3 series, a volume about this very album, TROUT MASK REPLICA (2007); and there's been a lot of anticipation for John (Drumbo) French's "Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic", released earlier this year. He also wrote the excellent liner notes for the GROW FINS boxed set of CD's.
2. Air Supply was dated then, and Vanilla Ice is dated now.
3. The phrase, "where objects are interchangeable with circumstances" should probably read, "...with events". The idea was that if solid tangible things and experienced activities were both nouns (linguistically, at least), that they could be equivalent in some other sense as well. That is, you could sprinkle a bus ride on your corn flakes. Or you could reach a higher shelf by standing on ceremony. In the Captain's world, those sentences would make perfect sense.
4. I don't know where I might have read about TROUT MASK REPLICA being recorded in someone's living room, but the album was famously demoed in a suburban house that was converted into a giant studio by Zappa and the Magic Band. By the late 1960's the experimentation in using multi-track recording on pop music had made it the rule and not the exception to record each instrument independently and then incorporate the mixing stage of production into the creative process. They bought a house in Woodland Hills, CA and wired the individual rooms. The musicians moved in and the lines between living, working and creating began to blur resulting in an extreme form of cabin fever. Some people never left the house for months.

.....Well, I'm starting to feel a bit of that cabin fever myself. Tomorrow is a day off. I'll be doing another recommendation. Then beginning next week I'll be posting Monday through Friday in order to work in more research to update the notes as well as doing a little home maintenance.

V02-T13 21st Century Schizoid Man

.....Still in England, and definitely not Kansas.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 13

• 07:20 "21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN (including MIRRORS)" (Robert Fripp, Ian McDonald, Greg Lake, Michael Giles, Pete Sinfield)
• performed by King Crimson
• original source: LP IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING Atlantic SD8245 (US) 10/69
• and my source: CD IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING E'G/Caroline EGCD 1 (US) 1989

.....As for why this particular track was selected, when you're putting together a cross-section of a large and eclectic music collection and your objective is to be both listenable and avoiding predictable patterns, it isn't a question of whether you'll include a King Crimson number, it's a question of which one and when. The answer, in this case, is this one and here.

V02-T07b Batman

.....I expected people to recognize the tune but not necessarily the band.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7b

• 01:27 BATMAN (Neal Hefti)
• performed by The Who
• original source: EP READY, STEADY, WHO! Reaction 592001 (UK) Nov. 11, 1966
• and my source: CD RARITIES 1966-1972 Vols. 1 and 2 Polydor 847670-2 (UK) 1991

.....Like most bands appearing on the BBC's "Ready, Steady, Go!" television series, The Who recorded their music at the network's studios a few days in advance and then lip-synched to themselves on the show. That was mid-October, 1966. Their management intended to release an EP of the studio recordings to coincide with the airing but ran into legal hassles. It would take less time and mean fewer headaches to actually rerecord everything from scratch and rush release it, which is what they did. It's not surprising that some fans came to assume that the Reaction EP was taken from the show anyway, despite switching out some of the songs for others.

.....On the show they appeared to be playing "BATMAN", "BUCKET T", "I'M A BOY" and "DISGUISES". They also goofed around to Cliff Richard's song "SUMMER HOLIDAY". There are incomplete bits of the instrumental "COBWEBS AND STRANGE". The finale was intended to be a medley of their own "MY GENERATION" in a medley with Elgar's "LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY", but for some reason the Elgar was replaced with "RULE BRITTANIA". The medley was too much of a pain to reproduce and "I'M A BOY" had just been an A-side and was likely still in stores, so those two were dropped and replaced with "BARBARA ANN" (to indulge Keith Moon's surf music fixation) and yet another version of "CIRCLES", probably to undercut the sales of earlier versions being released under different names by an ex-producer they were fighting in court.

.....In 1977 The Jam used "BATMAN" to close side one of their first album IN THE CITY. Considering their retro Mod image in the midst of height-of-punk London, this was clearly a nod to The Who and not to the Batman TV show. When The Jam broke up (really so that Paul Weller could form the even more retro Style Council) in 1982, The Who released what would be their last studio album for the foreseeable future and gave the first of many 'farewell' tours. In 1983 their old label in England released a matching pair of 'rarities' LP's to cash in on the tour. They were actually the non-album singles prior to the ODDS & SODS album, which may all have lapsed out of print at the time but were circulated in large numbers when originally released. The CD I own that combines the two albums was manufactured in 1991 and then imported to this country, which means I probably bought it shortly before making this mix tape. That would explain it being on my mind and at hand. (NOTE: The title of the previous volume of this tape series, "The Pitchfork Approach", was only half joking.) A quick trip to Amazon suggests that finding a copy might get expensive. In 1995 most of the EP (minus "CIRCLES") showed up as bonus tracks on the mono mix CD of the album A QUICK ONE. On the plus side, it includes an unused outtake of the "MY GENERATION"/"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" medley. That CD was supposedly rereleased a few years later in stereo but with identical packaging. Caveat Emptor.

.....Did I mention something about "height-of-punk London" just now? Hold that thought until tomorrow.