Wow, this is great! I was about to go to the trouble of posting all of the Christmas records the Beatles made for their fan club, but I see somebody has already done an excellent job of it. Click here, and be patient with the MP3 downloads.
If you have time for only one of them right now, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND listening to 1967. Wonderful stuff. This is what Magical Mystery Tour should have been.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/DEC06/HELP.flv 400 300]
Previously I offered studio take 6 of the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” The audio player has takes 1 through 5 of “HELP!” The vocals weren’t introduced until take 9.
John considered this song to be a personal breakthrough, because it was a sincere cry for help. For all of the Beatles trivia I’ve picked up over the years, I’ve never seen confirmation of my suspicion that the song title HELP! was inspired by a magazine cover, as discussed here.
I’d like to offer a scan of the picture sleeve to the original single, as well as the single itself, but it’s in the possession of Mr. Dennis F. Rogers; so, instead, you can watch the Beatles performing the song on TV. This is from the last Ed Sullivan show ever broadcast in black and white. It’s fitting, I suppose, as this is, I imagine, the very last appearance of the Beatles in their Fab Four incarnation. “Rubber Soul” was released in December, and it was obvious to everybody that the times, they were a changin’.
One other piece of trivia I can pass along is that the man sitting at the control console on Tuesday, April 13, 1965, engineering the recording of HELP! was Norman Smith. He later had a hit single of his own, on the charts in late 1972. Some may consider it silly fluff, but I’ve always loved this song. Perhaps you remember it?
On the Media, The NPR show, seemed for a long time to be a bunch of newspaper reporters sitting around talking about the newspaper business, so I’d flip past it. But a while ago I found myself stopping to listen to the show, sometimes intently.
One item today that caught my interest is about American music labels pushing to get European copyright laws changed. As my buddy Dennis Rogers recently pointed out, the 50-year limit on copyrighted material in Europe means there’s a flood of CD’s headed our way from overseas from the era of Elvis and beyond. He predicts the laws will change when the Beatles’ material nears the 50-year mark.
America’s copyright laws extend 95 years, and that’s what the U.S. music labels want Europe to also set as their standard. Open the audio player and listen to what was hot 95 years ago. Gene Greene performing “King of the Bungaloos.” Greene does a bit of jazzy scat and for a moment he sounds like the voice of Popeye, as done by Jack Mercer 25 years later.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/GeneGreene.mp3]Puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Let’s compromise. How about 60 years?
Here’s a link to On the Media’s piece, which I would rate as a must-listen. If you have any problems with it, and you shouldn’t because it’s done the same way I do my embedded audio, let me know and I’ll put it here.
Friday, December 8, has no entry. It’s blank. The day that John Lennon was killed in 1980. I’d like to say I did that intentionally, to symbolize the space that could never be filled; but, the fact is, I screwed up.
The first Beatles song that I was aware as being “a John song,” was “I Feel Fine.” I’ve always considered “I Feel Fine” to be very innovative, and not just for the guitar feedback intro. To me it represents the point when The Beatles started to really break away musically from Beatlemania.
The audio player has the original single, 42 years old, that belonged to my big sister. Perhaps it still does, but she’ll never get it back! 😉 When that finishes, a second track will kick in with take 6 of the instrumental for “I Feel Fine.” This one you won’t find on “Anthology.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/IFeelFine45.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/IFeelFine.mp3]Technical note: Listen to the cymbals in the left channel of the studio session recording. Hear the smearing and slurping effect? The original is perfectly clear and clean. This is a good example of where 128 Kbps MP3 comes up short.
I’m not a huge Jazz fan. Somewhere along the line, for my taste Jazz became so much about improvisation there wasn’t enough structure left to hang onto. Sunday evenings there’s a radio show on WGBH in Boston I enjoy, called The Jazz Decades, hosted by Ray Smith, who by now must be in his 80’s. He specializes in music from the 20’s and 30’s, playing both original recordings from then, as well as more recent renditions of old songs. When necessary, Smith resorts to vinyl, as he did tonight.
The audio player below has 35 minutes of The Jazz Decades show. I was going to offer only 10 minutes of it, but tonight’s selections were interesting, so I let it roll. I was surprised to hear my town, Hopkinton, MA, mentioned. Apparently, there was a legendary place here called The Sticky Wicket, that featured live Jazz until about 15 years ago, which is news to me.
There are some splices in this recording. The first 24 minutes were taken from the FM tuner in my PC. Then, for contrast, right after he says, “This is Ray Smith,” I switched over to WGBH’s live streaming Net audio. For the 1930’s recordings, the loss in sound quality isn’t all that apparent. But I still look forward to the time when all live Net radio is at least 128 Kbps.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/JazzDecades.mp3]
Being the once-upon-a-time radio guy that I am, some of the doings in the broadcasting business interest me. I have a more than casual appreciation of Classical music, although I would not call myself a connoisseur, by any means. There are two Classical music stations in Boston — WGBH 89.7 FM and WCRB, which from 1954 until today (Friday) was at 102.5 FM. WGBH is a public station, named after the Great Blue Hill. WCRB stands for Charles River Broadcasting, and it’s a commercial station.
WCRB has in recent years been derided as “Classical Lite.” Playings of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons have become a bit too frequent, and during “drive time” no complete works are played. But still, one can count on WCRB to be playing Classical music, even when WGBH switches to Jazz in the evening.
Earlier this year, WCRB was sold. The business dealings were a little complicated, and if you want to read about them, click here. The upshot is that today at noon, WCRB swapped frequencies with a Country music station, WKLB at 99.5. WCRB is now broadcasting over an antenna that’s not west of Boston, but north, near the New Hampshire border, far away from the Charles River. The general consensus is that WCRB is the loser in the deal, but we’re lucky it’s still a Classical format.
The recording on the audio player below is from the FM tuner in my computer. I shortened the gap of dead air between the end of WCRB and the start of WKLB, but otherwise this is how the rather abrupt end of an era sounded today in Boston. If you know the piece of music that WCRB used to close its 52 years at 102.5, you’ll get the sly and wry joke.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/FM1025.mp3]