He was the lead singer on the Moody Blues’ classic ’60s song “Go Now” (1964). Here he is singing it live while playing piano with Paul McCartney and Wings:
JoniMitchell, the Canadian singer / songwriter / guitarist / pianist / genius, turns 80 today.
Here she is playing “Big Yellow Taxi” (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”):
Rolling Stone recently ranked her the 9th greatest guitarist of all time, saying:
Joni Mitchell has reigned as rock’s ultimate acoustic guitarist for over 50 years, using alternate tunings to devise her own complex guitar language. “I wanted to play the guitar like an orchestra,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999. “I know I have a unique way of playing, but nobody seemed to notice. I found it kinda silly that they kept describing it as folk guitar when it was more like Duke Ellington.” After childhood polio weakened her left hand, she compensated by using over 50 different tunings. “I always thought of the top three strings as a horn section and the bottom three as a rhythm section.”
Here’s a transcendently beautiful song, “Both Sides Now” (from the same concert as the first video). The way she changes just one word in the last line of each chorus is so moving.
10 years ago today, in 2013, Lorde put out her debut album, Pure Heroine. This is one of my favorite songs of hers, “400 Lux.”
So many young musical prodigies try to impress us with their talents by emulating adults. One of the great things about how this singer/songwriter from New Zealand broke into the public consciousness at age 16 is that she seemed to feel no need to aspire to mature respectability. She presented herself as a young person hanging out with other young people — but a unique young person who happens to be uncommonly reflective and expressive. Pure Heroine is a pop masterpiece precisely because it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be a masterpiece.
30 years ago today, in 1993, Nirvana put out their third and last studio album, In Utero.
“Serve the Servants” kicks off the album perfectly with a chaotically discordant chord (like the ’90s equivalent to the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night”). The first line is a droll take on the band’s success: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.” At the end of each chorus, Kurt Cobain seemingly mocks himself for overdramatizing how he was affected by his parents’ divorce in interviews: “That legendary divorce is such a bore!” The song is unusual in that the singing in the chorus is in a lower register and more relaxed than in the verse; the other way around is far more common.
“Heart-Shaped Box,” the first single from the album, is the one song on In Utero that sounds like what listeners to the poppier Nevermind would have expected from a follow-up. Krist Novoselic explained that songs like this and “All Apologies” were “gateways” to the rest of the album, which would cause more people to discover the album’s “aggressive wild sound — a true alternative record.”
“Dumb” serves the same role on In Utero as “Polly” does on Nevermind. Both are track 6 of a 12-song album, and they have a similar chord progression. But “Dumb” is more fully satisfying, with atmospheric cello adding depth to the soft side of the band. The cellist on this song and “All Apologies” was Kera Schaley, the only musician to play on a Nirvana studio album without being in the band.
“Milk It” is an aggressively un-commercial song with shockingly dissonant guitar playing. One line is heart-breaking knowing what happened the next year: “Look on the bright side is suicide.”
“Pennyroyal Tea” was going to be released as the third single from the album in April 1994 (following “All Apologies”), but the single was canceled because of Cobain’s suicide that month. He looked forward to the afterlife in an oddly non-rhyming couplet: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/So I can sigh eternally.” Cobain said: “The song is about a person who’s beyond depressed; they’re in their death bed, pretty much.” Asked about the Leonard Cohen line, Cobain said: “That was my therapy, when I was depressed and sick. I’d … listen to Leonard Cohen, which would actually make it worse.” After Cobain died, Cohen was asked about that line in an MTV interview:
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have spoken to the young man,” Cohen said of Cobain, recognizing some of his own past excesses in Cobain’s downfall. “I see a lot of people at the Zen Center, who have gone through drugs and found a way out that is not just Sunday school. There are always alternatives, and I might have been able to lay something on him. Or maybe not.”
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song isn’t radio-friendly, but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”
“All Apologies” brings the album to a bittersweet close, culminating in a meditative chant over droning guitars. Cobain had this song around since 1990, before Nevermind. When Dave Grohl heard a demo of it in the early days, he thought: “This guy has such a beautiful sense of melody — I can’t believe he’s screaming all the time.”
Gary Wright, an American singer, songwriter, and keyboardist, has died at age 80. His biggest hit was “Dream Weaver,” which is such a beautiful song! Here he is playing it live in 1975:
He was a close collaborator with George Harrison, playing keyboards on all of Harrison’s post-Beatles studio albums, starting with All Things Must Pass in 1970. For example, Wright played piano on “When We Was Fab,” a wryly nostalgic homage to the Beatles on Harrison’s 1987 album Cloud Nine:
30 years ago today, in 1993, the Smashing Pumpkins put out their breakthrough album, Siamese Dream. Here’s a video of me playing a song from the album: “Disarm.”
25 years ago today, in 1998, the Smashing Pumpkins put out their 4th studio album, Adore, and it sounded like no album they had put out before. The band cast aside their trademark wall-of-fuzz-guitars sound in favor of a newly light and loving quality, but the album was also tinged with a bittersweet wistfulness. After their previous album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995), the Pumpkins had been through a lot: their touring keyboardist died of a heroin overdose, they fired their irreplaceable drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (who also had a heroin problem — fortunately he was able to rejoin the band for later albums), and singer Billy Corgan was suffering one personal loss on top of another with the death of his mother and the end of his marriage.
Adore was a commercial disappointment for the band at the time, but it’s become a fan favorite. That’s reflected in my own history with the album: when I first heard it I thought the Pumpkins had lost their spark, but today I listened to it from beginning to end and felt like I finally appreciated it. It helps that by now I’ve seen the band play some of the songs in a great concert in New York City in 2018. I remember watching Corgan put aside his guitar in the middle of the show and go up to a higher level to play piano while singing this poignant ballad about his late mother, “For Martha”:
Maybe this is the album that should’ve been called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
Tina Turner, the earthshaking soul singer whose rasping vocals, sexual magnetism and explosive energy made her an unforgettable live performer and one of the most successful recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, near Zurich. She was 83 …
Ms. Turner embarked on her half-century career in the late 1950s, while still attending high school in East St. Louis, Ill., when she began singing with Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm. At first she was only an occasional performer, but she soon became the group’s star attraction — and Mr. Turner’s wife. With her potent, bluesy voice and her frenetic dancing style, she made an instant impression.
“I’d be writing songs with Little Richard in mind, but I didn’t have no Little Richard to sing them, so Tina was my Little Richard,” Mr. Turner wrote in “Takin’ Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner” (1999), written with Nigel Cawthorne. “Listen closely to Tina and who do you hear? Little Richard singing in the female voice.”
Their ensemble, soon renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, became one of the premier touring soul acts in Black venues on the so-called chitlin’ circuit. After the Rolling Stones invited the group to open for them, first on a British tour in 1966 and then on an American tour in 1969, white listeners in both countries began paying attention.
Ms. Turner, who insisted on adding rock songs by the Beatles and the Stones to her repertoire, reached an enormous new audience, giving the Ike and Tina Turner Revue its first Top 10 hit with her version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” in 1971 and a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a group. …
But if the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was a success, the Ike and Tina Turner marriage was troubled, and Ms. Turner’s career faltered after a painful breakup in the late 1970s. Her album “Private Dancer,” released in 1984, returned her to the spotlight — and lifted her into the pop stratosphere.
Working with younger songwriters, and backed by a smooth, synthesized sound that provided a lustrous wrapping for her raw, urgent vocals, she delivered three mammoth hits: the title song, written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits; “Better Be Good to Me”; and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”
The brilliant singer/songwriter/pianist ToriAmos put out her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel, 25 years ago today, in 1998. The first song, “Spark,” kicks off the album with a great energy (while dealing with a personal tragedy):
“Cruel” brings out Tori Amos’s grunge rock side at the beginning of this concert:
Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer/songwriter, has died at age 84.
Here’s a live performance of his beautiful song “If You Could Read My Mind” (1970), which he wrote about his divorce:
In the live video he sings, “I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack,” which is in the original recording too. Later on when he played it live, he changed one word at his daughter’s request, instead singing “… the feelings that we lack.” He realized that the deeply personal subject matter had prevented him from being objective enough to think of that improvement.
Rick Beato spends 20 minutes on what makes that song great:
The English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943. When I was starting to become a fan of classical music, his fresh, energetic approach got me excited about listening to Beethoven’s complete symphonies.
Here he is conducting Beethoven’s Ninth, performed by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir in 2020:
Here’s an interview with him:
Something he says in that interview is very relevant to Beethoven’s Ninth:
There is a difference in conducting a choir and an orchestra, but I try to minimize it, because part of my aim is always to try to get the orchestra to imitate voices, to “speak their lines” … to give a sense of rhetoric, a sense of the underlying narration of the music. So I try to make [the orchestra] as choral as possible, and I try to make my choir as orchestral as possible.
Barrett Strong in 2019. Photo by Dan MacMedan, USA Today Network.
Strong co-wrote numerous songs with Motown producer Norman Whitfield, including “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (which was originally recorded in 1967 by Marvin Gaye even though his version wasn’t the first to be released) and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (recorded by the Temptations, 1972).
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” started when Strong was walking on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and thought about how people often say that phrase. It’s unclear if he knew that the term “grapevine” was connected to the days of slavery, when enslaved people weren’t allowed to learn to read or use telegrams, so the only way they could pass around news was talking to each other directly. I like the image of Strong appearing on the surface to be simply an ordinary person walking down the street, while in his mind he was mulling over a common sentence, possibly repeating it over and over in a simple two-note melody imitating speech, and through that possibly obsessive repetition, it eventually transformed into a thing of greatness …
Crosby cowrote “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds (1966). Wikipedia says it was “[m]usically influenced by sitar player Ravi Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane,” and has been called “the first bona fide psychedelic rock song, as well as a classic of the counterculture era”:
Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired, and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Surrey, England. He was 78.
The cause was bacterial meningitis. …
Here he is last year covering “Isolation,” from John Lennon’s debut solo album, Plastic Ono Band album (1970), with Johnny Depp singing and playing rhythm guitar. Notice how Beck plays guitar solos using his thumb instead of a pick — that makes it much harder to play fast, so that’s a sign he cared less about drawing attention to his own speed or virtuosity than about allowing us, the listeners, to savor the tone and expressiveness of each note:
From the NYT obituary:
During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.
In 1965, when Mr. Beck joined the Yardbirds, to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.
Three years later, when he formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with a then little-known singer, Rod Stewart, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to devise Led Zeppelin several months later.
Jeff Beck plays lead guitar on a beautiful song on Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book album (1972), “Lookin’ for Another Pure Love.” Listen to the whole song and notice Jeff Beck’s solo starting just after 1:45. You can sense Wonder delighting over the solo, laughing and saying: “Do it, Jeff!” After the solo, Beck’s leads continue interacting with Wonder’s singing.
For a change of pace, here he is playing with Stevie Wonder on “Superstition,” a more upbeat and better-known song from the same album. Wikipedia says the song was created in the studio when Jeff Beck started playing not guitar but the drum beat. Stevie Wonder told him to keep playing it; they started improvising together, and that turned into this song:
More from the Times:
In 1974, when Mr. Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he refigured the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its influences from jazz to rock and funk and in the process creating a sound that was both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top Five, a platinum hit and his most popular work.
Along the way, Mr. Beck helped either pioneer, or amplify, some important technical innovations on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar; and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices amended to the guitar like the whammy bar.
Drawing on such techniques, Mr. Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun gun, or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor too, with licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.…
Here’s an 11-minute video by Rick Beato on “why Jeff Beck is uncopyable.” Recording this video in October 2022, Beato emphasized that Jeff Beck was still “as good as he ever was” at age 78:
Jeff Beck was ranked #5 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, in 2015. (The voters for that list included Eddie Van Halen, Brian May of Queen, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, Kirk Hammett of Metallica, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.) Beck’s entry on the list was written by Mike Campbell, from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who said:
Jeff Beck has the combination of brilliant technique with personality. It’s like he’s saying, “I’m Jeff Beck. I’m right here. And you can’t ignore me.” Even in the Yardbirds, he had a tone that was melodic but in-your-face — bright, urgent and edgy, but sweet at the same time. …
There is a real artistry to playing with and around a vocalist, answering and pushing him. That’s the beauty of those two records he made with Rod Stewart, 1968’s Truth and 1969’s Beck-Ola. Jeff is not getting in the way, but he’s holding his own. …
I saw him last year at a casino in San Diego, and the guitar was the voice. You didn’t miss the singer, because the guitar was so lyrical.
