Category: Music

HELPed Back

The second Beatles movie, HELP!, first mentioned here nearly a year ago, is being re-re-released on DVD. The Beatles were terrorized by a fanatical eastern religion that was out for blood! I love this movie, it always makes me laugh, and I think it HELPed prime my generation for enjoying Monty Python.

John Lennon knocked HELP!, but it had much more influence on the 60’s as an era than A Hard Day’s Night. And, in fact, I think it had influence on the Beatles themselves, as seen in this video I spliced together.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/HELP.flv 400 300]

“I can say no more” has been a running joke between me and D. F. Rogers for decades. Did you notice three things seen for the first time that would be seen again later?

  1. John’s wire-rim glasses
  2. Indian instruments
  3. The boys in Sgt. Pepper-ish garb

George Martin is also not particularly fond of HELP! because he didn’t score the incidental music. This is what Martin had to say about it in his book, All You Need Is Ears:

On the Beatle front, the next film was Help!, and that was done without my help! I produced all the Beatles recordings for it, of course, and they certainly thought I was going to do the film music; but since the director was Dick Lester again, it was hardly surprising that, to quote Sam Goldwyn, I was included out. The music was done by Ken Thorne, a buddy of Lester’s.

Petula Clark: Driven By Emotion, Driven Off The Web

A regular comment writer on Petula Clark: Driven By Emotion was Davie, who has written to me with an explanation of the blog’s sudden disappearance.

The blogger was getting a lot of hate mail and abuse from some nutty people. However, the final straw came when a copy of the blog was put up with a slightly different title, and it contained an upload of Petula’s new album.

Making some obscure pieces of Pet’s enormous catalogue available was a fantastic service to her fans. The blogger would NEVER, however, have put out an entire album, and most definitely, not her latest one. That would be seen to interfere with Petula’s career.

Clearly the person with a grudge against this blog, albeit that he is a complete ass hole, can find his way round a computer.

Presumably our blogger was standing on someone’s toes, costing them money perhaps, and the saboteur, went to work to end it all.

The blogger knows who the culprit is.

It’s sad because we have lost a really good, interesting blog, created with love and attention to detail. I think all of us who enjoyed the blog would want to thank the blogger, for putting up with all the shit that they did… and hope that they will come back at some stage in the future.

Incidentally, this information was posted on the blog on Saturday. Then it closed down.

I’ve had the honour to meet Petula on quite a few occasions over the years. My impression of her is that she would HATE people who did this kind of thing.

But then, as the saboteur is almost certainly mentally deranged… why would he care about that?

Thanks very much for the information, Davie. I wish I hadn’t missed that last post on the blog. Yes, thanks go to the blogger and let’s hope for a return of the blog. I’ll carry on with my occasional Pet posts. By the way, Goodbye Mr. Chips with Pet is on Turner Classic Movies TODAY at 11 ET.

Sounds Good! Or Does It?

Some of the tech blogs recently highlighted an article from the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers called The Future of Sound. This sort of thing is fascinating to me, but the gist of it is that recorded music today is loud and overly compressed so that its volume level changes very little.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Singles were “cut hot” to sound good on cheap record players and AM radio, and a lot of rock albums had a lot of compression. For example, here’s a track that I had posted back in May, that was unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — Nick Lowe’s production of his song “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”, performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAY07/PeaceLoveUnderstanding.mp3]

Audio Spectrum from Elvis Costello LPAudio Spectrum from Dan Hicks LP
Click to enlarge

I transfered this song from the 1979 American version of the “Armed Forces” LP. The audio spectrum shows the recording to be highly compressed, with relatively little variation in loudness. For contrast, next to it is the audio spectrum for the Dan Hicks song “I Scare Myself,” taken from LP and posted back here.

Obviously the Hicks recording is much more dynamic than Costello’s, but that’s to be expected, in part because it’s a recording of acoustic instruments. The problem is, this music is harder to listen to in a car, or on an MP3 player. And that’s the way most music is heard today. The age of the golden-eared audiophile sitting back and listening to the latest equipment while sipping wine and marveling at the “silky highs” and “controlled bass” is over. Was it ever really about the music for these guys anyway, or was it about the gear?

Speaking of MP3 players, The Boston Globe has an article called The Running Debate, about banning headphones in road races. For a long time I thought of running while listening to music the same way as I still think about using a cellphone while driving — NO! The latter I still believe, but I changed my mind about running.

I’ve been running for nearly 35 years, and as much as I enjoy it, the idea of going out for more than, say, 10 miles just listening to my own foot falls is a bore, now that I’ve done it with music. I buy $10 Sony open-ear headphones for my SanDisk player. They let me to hear approaching cars, and I toss them the moment that one channel inevitably starts to cut out. I don’t use sound-isolating earbuds because they’re expensive and I worry they might cut out too much ambient noise.

Having said that, I don’t listen to music when I race, mostly because I want to be as unencumbered as possible. I don’t wear my wedding ring when racing, for that matter. But I think the races banning players is silly because you have to sign a waiver anyway, saying you’re taking full responsibility for yourself. So I assume the ban is nothing more than a way for race officials to cover their bases if there’s an accident while racing. The idea that somebody would actually be disqualified for a music player is ridiculous.