rock’n'roll whining is here to stay…

It is a time-honored rock-critical tradition to bemoan whatever the current trend is (even if it’s not a trend at all), to claim that this trend is going to kill rock’n'roll dead, and that this new trend is (variously) dull, lifeless, corporate, bland, excessively commercial, and (worst of all) quiet, sensitive, and sappy. A fine (read: crap) example of this article appeared recently in Pop Matters, written by one Chris Milam, who is — surprise! — a struggling musician himself. Milam’s hook is, of all things, Zach Braff’s character’s love of the Shins in Garden State, a movie that came out five years ago. Okay, so Milam isn’t fond of “sensitive” guys with acoustic guitars, whose music somehow manages to be “plaintive” and emotionally needy on the one hand, and “lifeless” and “bored” on the other. But he proceeds, rather ridiculously, to link this dislike not only to Braff’s character in Garden State, but to a rather jejune and elementary class argument (see, all these plaintive, emotionless, skinny white hipster dudes in “girl jeans” — shudder — are rich kids, from the wealthiest communities in the nation!) and the dullest possible contemporary pop-sociology (ooh! Facebook users are self-absorbed and bad, mm-kay?).

Speaking of “dull,” Milam assumes that if he finds music dull, it just is dull, and that it’s more or less intended as dull, but that its practitioners are so self-absorbed and entitled, what with being all 90210 and such, that they just don’t care that Milam wants them to sweat and bleed over a set of drums (which, even though all but one or two of Milam’s examples have drummers, he claims not to hear in their music). What Milam wants instead is someone from a poor family, which automatically grants authenticity, to groan and cry and emote all over the place, preferably while drinking and smoking and sweating a lot. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of Milam’s exemplary performers tend to play a conventional mode of masculinity to the hilt…and Milam’s gender-role anxiety bleeds a flop-sweat all over his page: the effete upper-class singers sensitively warble their quiet little tunes in falsetto or androgynous voices, they pack their slim, boyish physiques into skinny girl jeans, and they would never deign to anything so direct or manly as to use an instrument you have to hit forcefully, the drums.

Even if you accept Milam’s analysis because you happen to agree with his musical tastes, his attempts to add depthiness with his class analysis overfloweth with fail. The two best-known bands he namechecks as enemies of the state of rock’n'roll are the Shins and Death Cab for Cutie. So, James Mercer of the Shins, must’ve been born in Beverly Hills or something, right, and his parents must have been hobnobbing with the Kennedys and Rockefellers, right? Uh, no: his father was a long-term Air Force vet. And what about Ben Gibbard, from Death Cab for Cutie? He grew up in Bremerton, Washington…which, according to US Census data cited on the city’s Wikipedia entry, has a per capita income of about $16,700, which places it in the lower 40% of Washington state localities in terms of income. Look out, Grosse Pointe!

Milam also seems weirdly tone-deaf to signifiers of class and culture. He writes, “Youth culture is now practically sponsored by iTunes and Starbucks, and if that’s not a class statement, I don’t know what is.” In fact, Milam does not know what is. Starbucks’ ubiquity hardly confines it to wealthy consumers, and the fact that there’s a Starbucks seemingly on every corner suggests that even if people like to complain about their overpriced fare, they still can afford it. And iTunes is…free. Wow – gotta have a lot of money to download a free application.

As I said, Milam’s a musician himself. Click on that link to his website, above, where you’ll find a player streaming songs from his latest release. Play “Tin Angel.” Why, isn’t that…an acoustic guitar? And some “sensitive” singing? And no drums (not till a couple minutes into the song)?

Clearly, the man must be made of money…

to Hoan or not to Hoan…

As anyone who’s driven it recently can attest, the iconic Hoan Bridge is not in the best shape. The pavement needs to be replaced, and the complexity of the work involved has led consultants to estimates as high as $200 million (which would include reconfiguring the northern terminus). As if that weren’t enough, the bridge is estimated to reach the end of its useful life in 2035 or so, at which point it would need to be essentially rebuilt. It’s difficult to estimate costs that far into the future, but I’ve read figures anywhere from $1 billion to $3 billion.

As a consequence, proposals have come up to study alternatives, including tearing the bridge down and replacing it with an at-grade four-lane roadway and a lift bridge to accommodate the larger ships making use of the Port of Milwaukee.

A few people are upset. (That is an understatement.)

Frankly, I’m not sure what I think of this issue. At the very least, though, it seems to me that studies should be done. The Hoan may be iconic, but I wonder how much people want to pay to maintain that icon. (My guess is, if taxes rise to accommodate the cost, people will gripe…no matter how strenuously they yelled in support of keeping the bridge.) The arguments in favor of replacing the Hoan point first to the high cost of maintaining and replacing it, and secondly to the benefits of a roadway better integrated into its surroundings, with the potential for development that situation might offer. (One thing not often mentioned: the frequently proposed notion to add bike lanes to the Hoan seems like a bad idea: between very high winds and the steep grade, only the most hardy cyclists would use the lanes. But an at-grade solution would offer a much more convenient bicycle route from the south shore areas to downtown.)

There are, though, significant problems that might hinder development. First, whether development would follow is by no means certain. On the one hand, the teardown of the old Sixth Street Viaduct has been a success: the new bridge is an enormous aesthetic improvement, and the new Harley museum chose the land midway between the two spans of the new bridge for its location, which it certainly would not have done had the old viaduct been replaced as an elevated roadway. On the other, the teardown of the Park East Freeway Spur has been far less successful than anticipated…although to be fair, the city wanted to vet development in that area for the best fit with the rest of the neighborhood, and a lot of projects in the planning stages (or even in the groundbreaking stages) were put on hold or cancelled in the wake of the recession.

Another huge problem with development beneath the Hoan is that a lot of the land is, most likely, brownfield or at least a bit iffy due to its history of industrial usage. And of course, all this is right near (read: sometimes downwind from) the Milwaukee sewage treatment facility…not the best recommendation for developers.

Finally, residents, business owners, and officials in Bay View and the suburbs to its south are understandably concerned that the elimination of the Hoan’s connection to the Lake Parkway, which has been a boon to development in the areas, would cause severe economic difficulties. Proponents of the at-grade plan argue that it can bear just as much traffic, with only about a 90-second delay in overall transit time, and with the lift bridge opening on average once a day for about six minutes. That sounds pretty good…until you do the math. The span of the Hoan is about two miles: at 60 mph, that means it takes about two minutes to cross. In other words, the at-grade plan would nearly double the time it takes. Sure, two and a half minutes doesn’t sound too long (and of course, that 60-mph figure assumes no traffic jams or other delays—somewhat unrealistic during rush hour), but factor in a once-daily six-minute delay, and what was once a two-minute zip turns into a ten-minute trip punctuated by a long wait at a lifted bridge. I suspect some folks would simply turn left or right and decide to go elsewhere. Of course, if development does succeed, those elsewheres will be in the neighborhood of the Third Ward…and unsurprisingly, many backers of the at-grade plan are Third Ward business owners. (While one county supervisor representing residents at the southern end of the Hoan has been quoted to the effect that many people come to the Third Ward via the Hoan, I’m dubious: that may be true for businesses at the northern end of the Ward, but not so much for the newer businesses near the new condos.)

Another issue is this: do the cost projections for the at-grade alternative include the costs of tearing down the Hoan? Because as we found out a decade ago when a portion of the bridge collapsed, tearing down such a massive structure, in such a sensitive location, is a delicate, careful (i.e., expensive) operation. And if traffic is to be kept flowing, that teardown would ideally happen only after the at-grade roadway is built…but is the proposed route for that roadway distant enough that it would remain open while the Hoan is being torn down?

On balance, it’s beginning to look like refurbishing the Hoan, expensive as it may be, might well be the best option. But study is definitely needed—and the more ridiculous statements of its supporters (that it’s a conspiracy to cut off the south side, say) are not helping their position. And in any event, it would be nice to have the southern exits redone: they are currently a ridiculous, hallucinatory tangle of loops within loops, often over crumbling bridges with no direct access to the most likely destinations. A bridge over the railroad track offering a direct connection to East Lincoln Ave. would be nice: perhaps supplementing the existing exit to Carferry and points east with that connection to the intersection of Lincoln and Bay would be the best choice.

looka me, I’m part of a vanishing remnant!

It’s a bit weird reading an article in the New York Times that is, more or less, about yourself…or more accurately, about people in your situation. As those of you who know me personally know, I do not own a cell phone. But the reasons offered or proposed in the article don’t really describe my situation. Essentially, I just don’t feel the need: the need to call people constantly with pointless updates of my situation (we’ve become a world of Tony Robertses in Play it Again Sam…), the need to be constantly available to anyone with my number, etc. I’m pretty sure I’d feel differently if we had kids, or if I traveled a lot, or if I didn’t have internet access at home and work. But I don’t really feel like I’m making any sort of noble gesture: when I did have a cell phone, I mostly just never bothered to use it, and since I never bothered to use it, few people bothered to call me on it…and so, when we decided a few years ago to cut back on needless expenses, it was one of the first things to go. And I haven’t missed it.

I may well end up getting a cell phone more or less incidentally: again through Rose’s job, if she upgrades her phone and buys an iPhone, the service deal the company offers is cheaper for two than for two individuals – so I’d get an iPhone. (Otherwise I’d probably just get an iPod Touch.)

But there’s no deep principle I feel I’m upholding, and if I were seriously inconvenienced I’d just go ahead and buy one.

with botches like this, who needs friends?

I was reading an article at the BBC News website last week on Windows 7 – my laptop is a Mac, but inevitably at work I’ll eventually have to become familiar with Windows 7, so I was still curious – and while most of the article addressed the economic importance to Microsoft of Windows 7’s success, given the abysmal failure of Vista, as an aside the reviewer made reference to Apple having “botched” Mac’s latest OS, Snow Leopard.

Huh?

Almost all the reviews I’ve read of Snow Leopard have been positive, and my own experience has been almost completely without difficulties (except for one or two laggard vendors who didn’t have their own upgrades in place for early adopters). And while it’s hardly an earth-shattering paradigm shift of a new OS, by making it available for only $29, Apple effectively lowered expectations on that score. So I’m left to wonder: where’s the “botch”? I guess that since the OS installed cleanly in less than an hour, required very little in the way of upgrades to existing applications, and generally was nearly invisible to the user, it didn’t generate loads of stories about how to improve the experience of installing Snow Leopard…unlike installing new versions of Windows, which invariably takes hours, often requires the reinstallation of nearly every app on your machine, and which, notoriously, is full of bugs in its first iteration. I love the quote in the article about not having to wait for “Service Pack 1″: wow, imagine that: they’re  waiting until it’s a working OS to actually release the thing. And, of course, the article warns that if you’re trying to move directly from XP to Windows 7, that’s a huge giant pain in the ass. Because, of course, with less than a third of PC users adapting Vista, you’d want to make it difficult to upgrade from the OS two-thirds of your users are actually using.

I think the key word in the writer’s description of Snow Leopard’s launch is “uncharacteristically” – as in, “Apple…uncharacteristically botched its new operating system Snow Leopard.” For Microsoft, in other words, a botched OS is SOP.

l’amour?

I downloaded this song from another mp3 site about a month ago. As I do, I backed it up onto a CD-R, which when full became my listening in the car. I try to make a note of which tracks grab my attention, so at very least I make a mental note about the artist (if it’s someone I’m not familiar with) or just make it easier to familiarize myself with the particular song.

So I’m driving along – I was somewhere downtown, curving along the lakefront on a sunny fall day – when Vic Chesnutt got to the key turning point in this song’s lyric.

And I was not ready.

Usually, I anticipate more or less where a song’s going if it’s got a coherent or narrative lyric. I didn’t this time. I went back and listened again. No giveaways…but no false moves, no stretching, either. Just a perfectly poised balance, a tightrope walk.

Really, it’s a shame that, for where he wanted to take the song eventually, Chesnutt had to perform that turn at all…rather than leave it, a subtle sort of seed, or a small lit fuse, slowly burning its hidden length until, for whatever reason, it exploded its meaning into focus.

Vic Chesnutt “Flirted With You All My Life” (At the Cut, 2009)

oh. oh. oh. oh. oh. what a feeling.

I recently downloaded (legally! For reals! So don’t sue me RIAA!) the live recording of Lou Reed’s Berlin recorded at St. Ann’s Warehouse a few years ago. (Also, note to self: do not listen to Berlin first thing in the morning – makes you just want to turn around, go home, and crawl back into bed in a big depressive sulk.) I don’t usually buy live albums (the excitement of live music is rarely realized on recordings, and too often, it sounds more like a half-assed version of the album played louder, quicker, and with lower sound quality…and recorded next to a jet-engine testing facility.

That last comes from the stupid, annoying habit of including loads of crowd noise in live albums (including That Guy With The Super-Loud Whistle, who attends every concert ever). And I have to ask: why? I understand that one wants to mix in a bit of hall ambience with the recording, because otherwise it would sound a bit sterile and freeze-dried – but the crowd noise I’m talking about is between tracks. What is the point of having thirty seconds of applause screaming into your eardrums after every track? Worse, if the album purports to reproduce the concert in order, there are sometimes even longer stretches, up to a minute or more in the worst cases I can think of, while we wait for the encore.

Is all that noise supposed to connote authenticity – to establish that the music we’re hearing was actually played live in front of audience? I mean, first, who really cares…but even if you do, it’s obvious that applause can be dubbed in after the fact of an anything-but-truly-live, doctored “performance” (and has been done so, on several sometimes notorious recordings). Is it supposed to be exciting? “Excitement,” though, works by a principal of contrast: if everything’s “exciting,” nothing is “exciting.” If you’re in a metal band and you’re screaming through your acid-corroded, Satan-promised sulphur-belching throat, it’s no longer scary or intense or evil – it’s just annoying. (Actually, that sort of vocal approach is annoying from the beginning…) If every chord is bizarre or unexpected, no chord is bizarre or unexpected…since each one of them appears to be equally likely or not. So blanketing the recording with non-stop enthusiastic crowd noise isn’t exciting – it’s annoying, especially with very loud crowds whose noise really does end up sounding like a big jet whoosh.

(And unless you’re a small avant-garde jazz ensemble, having crowd noise on your live recording that consists of eight people politely applauding and the busboy accidentally dropping a tray of drinks, uh, that’s embarrassing. Then again, it’d be amusing to be a big giant huge sunglass-wearing, bald-headed-guy-with-a-hat, loads-of-echoplex-and-Christianity band and have the crowd register merely as the occasional sprinkle of polite golf claps.)

Anyway, back to that live Berlin recording. It’s rather good, in fact: the arrangements are very similar to Bob Ezrin’s from the album, but Lou plays electric guitar much, much more, and some songs drop back the arrangement to let Reed, fellow guitarist Steve Hunter, and the bass-and-drum combo of Rob Wassermann and the wonderfully named “Thunder” Smith play off one another in real time. Reed’s phrasing is occasionally…perverse – but the songs still pack fairly intense emotional punch: this is Reed’s poetry of emotional poverty and its consequences, and the series of small verbal bombs Reed’s packed the lyrics with explode with clean intensity. Except when they’re squibbed out by the affective buzzkill of a screaming crowd. This is most noticeable at the join between the spooky, post-Penderecki vocal coda of “The Bed” and the bright, proto-Philip Glass woodwinds that begin “Sad Song”: the ending of “The Bed” is perhaps the most interior moment of the whole album, and it’s destroyed by the sudden reminder of all these people in a large, stagelit room clapping and yelling.

I find it amusingly ironic – and tellingly so, given the album’s look at dysfunctionality – that Berlin’s closing “Sad Song” is, musically, nearly triumphal in mood (arguably, ever other song on the record sounds much sadder)…and that the nearest the song comes to a chorus is the backing vocalists repeating that title phrase, over and over…the narrator never says it. It’s a “sad song” entirely by virtue of being pointed to as a sad song – or rather, the main lyric seems, rather, bemused…when he’s not singing the chorus: the charming (and, though not from the narrator’s perspective, truly sad) lyric: “I’m going to stop wasting my time / Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.”

sirens, Prius!

Tom Vanderbilt, whose blog “How We Drive” originated as essentially a promotional device for his book Traffic (which, for some reason, I still haven’t bought) but has come to be a fascinating compendium of traffic- and driving-related…blogginess, wrote the other day about the alleged problem that the Prius is so quiet in parking lots and such that people don’t hear it coming. First, I wonder whether there’s any actual data on whether anyone’s actually been injured from not noticing a Prius, when it’d be likely they’d have noticed another vehicle, or whether this is one of those ideas that comes about because someone’s startled by an approaching Prius, and then rants (in the usual dumb macho way of meathead americanus) about them thar Priuses are quiet…too quiet, like a sneaky terrorist car or something.

Anyway, Vanderbilt quotes Lawrence Rosenblum, who suggests that if the Prius is made artificially noisier, the last thing it should do is have some annoying beep or honk, etc. Instead, it should merely add or enhance actual car noise – the route of the digital camera, most of whose models feature, by default, an artificial shutter-click sound to let you know that you have, indeed, taken a picture.

On the other hand, as several of Vanderbilt’s commenters notice, should we really default the paying of attention from the driver (and pedestrians) onto a mechanical device? Plus which if the problem is that the Prius isn’t louder than the ambient environment, making the car louder also makes the environment louder. And I’m suddenly wondering whether the morons who believe “loud pipes save lives” is more than just an advertising slogan but an expression of some sort of truth are behind this effort.

And of course, if a Prius driver isn’t paying attention, at least it’s only a Prius: the other night, driving on a small urban street, looking for a parking space, I spotted one and began to turn into it. Despite my signal being on, and despite it being a commercial district with almost exclusively street parking, this shocking move to pull into a parking space startled the oversized pickup truck driver behind me (Janet, record this date – and actually, I’m not sure whether the driver was oversized, but the pickup definitely was) into blasting his horn at me. He then roared by far faster than the narrow street, and the multitude of pedestrians and crosswalks, should have allowed.

Whether my car (a Mini Cooper) or his truck had been louder would have made no difference, so long as drivers aren’t paying attention or going too fast.

(Note: I apologize for the subject line, both for its hideous pun and appalling insensitivity to stereotypical notions of implied foreign accents – but I simply find myself powerless sometimes in the face of puns.)

ushi dumi (yes she does)

Since it’s stuffed at the very bottom of the Beatles box (well, just above the DVD in early editions…but I’ve moved my DVD to the video shelves), I’ll conclude my series of Beatles posts with Past Masters set. First, following up on a comment I made in an earlier post: I suggested it might have been better to have scrapped Yellow Submarine entirely and folded the four “new” tracks on that album into an expanded Past Masters second disc. And in fact, when I was listening to the Past Masters set earlier this evening, the jump from 1966 (“Rain”) to 1968 (“Lady Madonna”) was rather jarring: all the stray ‘67 tracks were collected on Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine. The other jarring thing about this compilation is that in its first half, the differences in sonic approach – from mono, to radical stereo that puts vocals in one channel and instruments in the other (along with an astonishing amount of cross-channel vocal reverb), to stereo imaging approximately the contemporary standard – prove to be rather jarring. I think these tracks would have sounded better appended as either bonus tracks (with silent separation from the album proper) or on bonus discs along with the albums as such.

In fact, as a summary statement on the whole remasters series, I would say this: It’s great that we now have definitive versions of the original mixes, mono and stereo (or not necessarily original in the case of the stereo Help! and Rubber Soul…), and that’s of tremendous importance archivally…but can we please move on and remix the entire catalog? It would be an artful compromise: preserving as far as possible without distortion the sonic character of 196x recording technology while presenting the songs’ various components deployed about the stereo image in what has come to be a more naturalistic fashion (insofar as any such artificial construction can be “natural,” I would say that the placement of bass in dead center is one…since the longer waves of lower frequencies mean that in most spaces, there simply isn’t room for them to be localized: when we think we’re hearing localized bass sounds, we’re hearing the higher frequency components of the bass instrument: the attack on bass drum and bass guitar, certain higher overtones and distortion, etc.). Also, a minor aside: has anyone else ever noticed that some of the later Beatles guitar tones, particularly rhythm parts, are astonishingly similar, timbre-wise, to the electric piano they often also added to the mix (frequently courtesy Billy Preston)? It’s a sort of clean, ever-so-slightly-overdriven sound, but something about its overtones make it sound very electric-piano-like. I think “Dig a Pony” on Let it Be is a good example…and the similarity holds up even when all the instruments are distorted (such as in “Revolution”).

Anyway, some things I noticed on the Past Masters set: Is it too late to stake my claim in stating that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is an utterly brilliant song? Try to strip away the extent to which, probably having heard it literally thousands of times over the years, its every texture is nearly a constituent element of your very persona – and hear that, in its combination of starkly basic instrumentation and cleverly unexpected yet utterly right chordal construction, it’s really rather stunningly contemporary in sound. The opening just charges in its syncopation, a burst of energy that is not dissipated but merely tamped down in the more regular accents of the verse. The somewhat unusual chord in the fourth measure of each phrase (a B major, in the key of G major: you might expect a B minor here) has the effect of introducing a sense of wonder to the proceedings, a sense that blossoms into full-blown ecstasy in the falsetto harmonies of its second occurrence. The chorus cycles through a typical circle-of-fifths progression, but at twice the speed of the verse harmonic changes – a sort of churning effect. The bridge seems a bit tentative – in some ways it’s not entirely clear how to parse the phrasing, which bars are rising or falling in the phrase’s cadence – and indeed, the whole thing is asymmetrical and yields to a reprise of the intro, this time stating for sure the narrator’s impassioned state. After the last verse, we have what at first seems to be a stock three-times-through repeat of the song’s chorus – but then, brilliantly paying off the introduction of that unusual B-major chord, the band shines a light on it at the end of the second phrase…and then, one more repeat of half the chorus phrase, with a breathless quarter-note triplet lead-out to the final chord.

So yeah: lots of essential single material here on the Past Masters set. Some less essential stuff, too: no one but completists really needs to hear the German versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” (both seemingly tossed off in a few stray moments), and I find myself always confusing “Thank You Girl” and “I’ll Get You” except when I’m actually listening to them. On the other hand, although “I Call Your Name” is not in the top ranks of Beatles songs, there’s something interesting about what it tries to do with that chord sequence (plus, John Lennon discovers early ska…but doesn’t quite convey its flavor to the rest of the band). Elsewhere on the first disc, Paul very nearly achieves the seemingly impossible: he almost owns a song from Little Richard (“Long Tall Sally”). To be a bit safer, he writes his own Little Richard song with “I’m Down” – which really deserved a better fate than b-side – the band both rocks it up and has a grand old time doing so. (Note: are those bongos, or someone banging on the back of an acoustic guitar? Either way, they’re strangely arrhythmic…). So, yeah: Paul can sing. And so can John: there may be no better demonstration of the fabulous texture of the man’s voice than “Bad Boy”: there’s something indescribably complex in there, a roughness, a sweetness, a wink, a knowingness, and both exhilaration and exhaustion – all that’s below the surface here, which is just plain having a good time.

The second disc begins with one of the band’s best tracks, “Day Tripper.” Obvious: killer riff. Slightly less so: that bridge, with its slow, scalar build – utterly fantastic (even though the last guitar note is a bit of a muff). But damn: in headphones particularly, the stereo version bathes the vocals in a penumbra of reverb that rather dissipates their impact. Sounds better through speakers – and even though the stereo allows us to hear the nice rhythm guitar part (yes, there is a rhythm guitar part), the mono presents the vocals to best effect. And hey: has there been a better single, ever, than “Paperback Writer” b/w “Rain”? I’m willing to accept nominations from the floor – but both tracks are drop-dead fantastic, brilliantly recorded, fantastically played (even despite the handful of vocal fluffs in “Paperback Writer”) – and the second appearance of the guitar riff in “Paperback Writer” has one of the best filthy guitar sounds ever… As I said, it’s a bit jarring to move from “Rain” to the very different musical approach of “Lady Madonna” – the distance the band had traveled in less than two years is pretty astonishing – but get beyond that, and you have one of Paul’s more fun tunes (with a wry bit of wordplay that’s positively Lennonesque, in the second occurrence of “see how they run” after the line about stockings needing mending).

Too bad George hadn’t done “Old Brown Shoe” during the Let it Be sessions: it’s similar in flavor to “For You Blue” in some ways, but a better song. And what the hell was anyone thinking by omitting the fabulous and powerful “Don’t Let Me Down” from that album? It’s better than any Lennon song on that album, and quite possibly would have been the best song period on that record. A powerhouse, impassioned vocal from John: again, what I most appreciate about his singing is the emotional complexity the tone and timbre of his voice conveys. He’s in love (we knew that) but he’s also worried and insecure, a bit frustrated (at the worry, at himself), but angry and defiant at the same time…yet vulnerable… Paul may, in some ways, have been a more versatile vocalist (ever notice how he really has like three or four different voices he uses?), but he rarely got as raw vocally as John. Even when Paul’s stripping his larynx bare (the outchorus on “Don’t Let Me Down”…or the huge coda to “Hey Jude”) it always feels a bit performative and modulated.

Finally: one beneficiary of the hypothetical remixing project would, one hopes, be “Revolution.” No stereo version of that track has ever fully captured the incredibly fractalized distortion of the guitars on that track: the mono version presents their brute power, but the parts themselves get slightly lost. I’m hoping that that’s the next refurbishing of the catalog – I suppose they’d wait a while, to let the impact of the box sets sink in…and to figure out what the hell’s going on with the preferred consumer sound medium: more than one commentator has referred to the Beatles remasters as the last great compact disc release. We’ll see.

in which Paul McCartney reads Alfred Jarry

It’s unclear, the extent to which various Beatles felt or knew that Abbey Road was going to be their final album together…but in many respects, it feels very much fitting as the band’s finale – most obviously in ending (almost) with a song called “The End.” Since McCartney remained the band’s driving force on this project (although the band’s collective mood was much improved from its nadir during the interminable Get Back/Let it Be project), still, much tension is evident. Several tracks lack a member or two, George Martin, Billy Preston, and Mal Evans (!) are called in to play parts that band members easily could have played…and everyone else, to a man, hated McCartney’s song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (more on that later).

Abbey Road has one of the more distinctive openings of any Beatles album: the immediately recognizable bass and percussion riff of “Come Together.” Apparently the song was originally faster, more obviously an homage to the artist from whom Lennon borrowed that “here come old flat-top” line (Chuck Berry), but that didn’t quite work: it was slowed down and rendered more “swampy,” and that made all the difference. Lennon’s imagery here is odd, often indecipherable…but distinctly dark, even somewhat queasy in places – in conjunction with the raw, desperate intensity of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” it’s clear this was a man deep in thrall to some object of desire. Lennon’s always said these songs are about Yoko…if I were Yoko, I’m not sure I’d want the sound of these songs to be about me; they sound much more like they’re about Lennon’s bout with heroin addiction. Regardless, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is not only a triumph of intensity, but the band achieves a new sound here (due in part, apparently, to the new equipment at Abbey Road, which had a warmer sound) – bluesy, almost jazz-like in its sounds and chords – and then (in the “She’s So Heavy”) foreboding, massive, frighteningly powerful. (Harrison and Lennon apparently tracked that guitar riff many times over to get the sound.) The song builds, adding layer after layer of noise (literally: the band used a very early Moog synth to generate white noise) – and then, in one of Lennon’s most brilliant and spontaneous musical decisions, stops dead, brutal, done. (A note on the remaster: I really, really wish they’d put a bit more silence prior to the beginning of “Here Comes the Sun.” They’re in the same key, but couldn’t be further apart in mood…a break here would improve things.)

McCartney tries to bring a similar intensity to his vocal performance in “Oh! Darling”…and nearly succeeds, done in primarily by the slightly creaky, fifties-blues set-up of the song. Still, it’s a tremendous performance (and I quite like the song)…but Paul’s weakness always has been for genre pastiche.

“Here Comes the Sun” is a wonderful, bright piece of brilliance – nearly the best song George Harrison had written to date. (And some very nice synth playing – too bad the band broke up too soon to explore the use of that instrument.) Except, of course, that he also had written “Something”…and even the rest of the band, egos in full engorgement at the time, acknowledged this as the album’s best song. It errs perhaps just this side of saccharine with its orchestration (I would have preferred a smaller ensemble, or even the use of a Mellotron instead), but its otherwise direct, seemingly simple approach is quite powerful (and less simple than it seems: some of those modulations are quite unusual). George was also reaching a peak as a guitarist: the solo here is one of his best – hell, among the better guitar solos period – and he played it live, in one take, during the orchestral overdub.

I’m not sure what I can add to all the praise for the vocal harmonies on “Because” – except to note that you can really hear them in the remasters. The band had a fabulously intuitive sense of how their voices worked together, which they’d developed to a wonderful peak of craft by this point in their careers. And while this and the soloing on “The End” are among the better instances of the band working together, the one song on Abbey Road that most exposed the disharmony among them is Paul’s “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

I get it…it is rather “fruity” (Ringo’s term), at least musically, and for the most part the lyrics seem as if they could be outtakes from a failed musical. A failed musical about a serial killer, that is. Paul’s so “cute” that people, weirdly, sorta overlook that fact. It’s odd that John, in particular, hated this song so much…since arguably it’s cousin to his own “Bungalow Bill”: a comical genre song laden with a satirical lyric about violence and (for Lennon, at least) hypocrisy. But whereas Lennon’s sarcastic humor is quite obvious, McCartney is subtler, presented without comment, even with merriment, as if the song were only about a magical blanket or something. (Oh – and “pataphysical” here is from Jarry’s Ubu Roi – which Linda McCartney confirms Paul was reading at the time.)

Still, the song does sit a bit oddly on the album, and maybe would have made a better b-side.

Speaking of, McCartney did a masterful job sweeping up what might otherwise have been a handful of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time tracks by working them (his and Lennon’s) into the renowned medley that originally occupied side 2 of the album. While “You Never Give Me Your Money” and, probably, “Golden Slumbers”/”Carry That Weight” (considered as a single track) might make the grade as full-fledged songs, everything else here, on its own, would feel like underdeveloped fragments. But the sequencing and cumulative context actually give them a bit more weight (a bit more) than they would otherwise have had. Maybe the clearest illustration of that is “The End” itself. Strictly speaking, it’s not much of a song: four lines of words that barely rise above the level of la-la-la (“Oh yeah/alright/are you gonna be in my dreams/tonight”), several minutes over two chords, a transition for, curiously, full orchestra, two more lines, and out. And all that goes to prove that verbal description is inadequate in the face of music: those several minutes include, a first, Ringo playing a drum solo (in stereo!), and, a last, the other three band members playing together, in the famous trading bars solo round-robin. It’s Paul, George, John, in that order, if you’re keeping score: odd that there’s debate, since John’s primarily rhythmic parts are clearly his, and Paul’s solo style is obvious (“Taxman,” “Good Morning, Good Morning,” to name two), while George, in his second or third solo, does a bit of a Chet Atkins-type thing that’s clearly him. And I have to admit: when I read Geoff Emerick’s description of the band preparing to play those solos…ah hell, I teared up (hey – I also cried at the end of Spinal Tap – yeah, this is like a guy’s chick-flick thing, I guess).

Finally: even though on paper, McCartney’s mantra-like couplet that closes the song (“And in the end the love you take/is equal to the love you make”) might seem facile, even meaningless, what it actually meant, and means, is clearer after that cathartic build-up – cathartic in part because, it’s hard to avoid imagining, the band knew it was their last hurrah: it sounds great as it falls, slowly, into that final chord sequence, a summary hope of an equivalence that wasn’t sufficient to keep this band together.

Doris gets her oats

Although Abbey Road was released first, Let it Be was recorded first (for the most part), so I’m treating it before Abbey Road. Actually, it’s a good thing Abbey Road came out first…following the somewhat half-assed Yellow Submarine (“half-assed” as a product, anyway), had Let it Be been the Beatles’ next release, speculation that they were drifting or losing it would have abounded. That said, it’s not a terrible album – and it has some considerable virtues as well. But the songs…the songs for the most part fall quite a bit short of Beatles standards.

After a couple albums’ worth of hot writing, John Lennon falls almost completely flat here. His best song on this album is “Across the Universe”…but that was written in 1967. “Dig a Pony” is interesting mostly for the band’s playing and, especially, the very fine dual vocals on the chorus…but it’s more a sketch than a song. And “One After 909″ was nearly ten years old when it was finally recorded and released.

George’s recent hot streak has hit a rough patch, too. While “For You Blue” is a fun little number, and the recording has an appealing sound with John’s slide rhythm playing and Paul’s tack piano…it’s just a blues with rudimentary lyrics. And “I Me Mine” is a sketch, and an unappealingly whiny lyric…made into a whole song by the blunt expedient of mechanically repeating one of the verses (if I recall my Lewisohn, Spector merely dubbed the tape and spliced it in). Some points for the nice rhythmic shift between verse and chorus, though.

And the playing is one thing that redeems this album. Not that it’s particularly flashy, but the band’s back-to-basics approach (and wasn’t this one of the first instances of that often tired, now-clichéd philosophy?) results in a very spare record, quite nicely recorded, that reveals the band’s interplay. (“Spare?” some of you say, thinking of Phil Spector’s orchestrations…yeah, I know: I’ll get to that.) In particular, Paul’s in fine vocal form on this record (no surprise, since he was nearly the only Beatle to retain his enthusiasm for the band during this project). And it’s his songwriting that saves the album…even though Phil Spector’s production on those songs very nearly destroys them. McCartney contributes the fine, emotive “Two of Us,” the impassioned title track, “Get Back” (his only real rocker this time), and the beautiful “Long and Winding Road.” (“I’ve Got a Feeling” is a “collaboration” between Lennon and McCartney by way of cramming together two unfinished songs, neither of which is much to speak of…but again, Paul sings hell out of it, so there’s that. And some nice playing too.)

So: Phil Spector. He pretty much leaves a handful of tracks alone, the best of which are “Get Back” and “Two of Us”…but he pastes some needless glop onto “Let it Be” and “I Me Mine” (although, as noted, that was barely a song before he got to it)…and almost kills “Across the Universe” and “The Long and Winding Road.”[addendum: I'd forgotten: the orchestration on "Let it Be" was George Martin's, under Paul's direction...no wonder it gets in the way less...] “Across the Universe” just about survives: some of the countermelodies work well (although why he removed the perfectly good ones on the earlier versions, on the chorus, I don’t know), and I suppose the cosmic vocal choir vaguely fits some notion of the song’s sentiments. But “The Long and Winding Road” turns into the worst sort of overorchestrated plop: when George Martin piled a ton of strings, flutes, and a choir on top of the White Album’s “Good Night,” it was primarily satirical. Spector seems to think that heavenly choirs, a thousand strings, and churchy brass help McCartney’s quite sturdy melody – when in fact (as a listen to the “Naked” version demonstrates), the song doesn’t need it. The orchestration buries the vulnerability underlying the song’s sense of striving and hope – and while it would have been nice to have a recording without John half-assing the bass part a few times, I’d prefer human error over inhumane saccharine.

I know…it’s such a cliché to hate on the Spectorization of this record. I wanted to find some redeeming aspects (and I did: see the parentheticals re the countermelodies, which also applies to that building motif in the instrumental section of “Long and Winding Road”), but as Paul said once, “Please everybody – if we haven’t done what we could’ve done, we’ve tried.”

Addendum, too good not to add: At the Beatles Bible site, Paul McCartney’s letter to Allen Klein (copied to Phil Spector) is reproduced – he wrote it after hearing the acetate of the Spectorized version:

Dear Sir,

In future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission.

I had considered orchestrating The Long And Winding Road but I had decided against it. I therefore want it altered to these specifications:-

1. Strings, horns, voices and all added noises to be reduced in volume.
2. Vocal and Beatle instrumentation to be brought up in volume.
3. Harp to be removed completely at the end of the song and original piano notes to be substituted.
4. Don’t ever do it again.

Signed

Paul McCartney