My favorite record release of 2017 was released in 1967. I really can't describe how exciting the super deluxe boxset of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band by The Beatles is for someone like me. Let's start with the box set. It has the music (more about that in a bit), a big, thick book about the album, the cover, the road there, and the songs (and pictures of the handwritten lyric sheets), cutouts of insignia and mustaches to make your own Sgt. Pepper uniform, a replica of the Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite poster (this one is truly exciting, as you can look at it and find where John Lennon got the inspiration for his song), and a record store promotional poster replica. All really neat stuff...
Then there is the music. The 2017 mix is spectacular, and having the mono mix is nice, but... The earlier takes, listening to how they built the songs and tried things out. Feeling like you are listening in to parts of their creative process. Wow. Just wow. I am a lucky man, as Christine, my lovely girlfriend, knew how badly I had wanted this since its release and got it for me for Christmas. Getting both the girl and the music is a nice little perk, I must say...
So today, I will celebrate this release. One of the earlier takes of a song I like from this box set is the title track, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is take 9, and you can hear more of the raucous guitar in here. I love this song, I love this album, I love this box set - and I love my Christine.
On a day marred by another terrorist attack and an unhinged tweet by our "president," I choose to look at hate again. I was very moved by the responses of Heather Heyer's family following her death in the terrorist attack in Charlottesville last Saturday. They refused to give into the easy way out. They did not choose hatred. They chose love. Not love for the attacker, but for everything Heather Heyer stood for. Love for their fellow human beings. And the four wise men from Liverpool (well, technically I think this is a Lennon composition) showed us the way 50 years ago. All You Need Is Love. Indeed. And before you write it off as hippie bullshit, just give it a try. It might be easier to hate, but it is always better to love.
So yes, it's been 50 years since Sgt. Pepper shook the world, so I played the original stereo mix in my car on the way home from work again on Friday. I was singing along, probably pretty loudly, to the title track, With A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Getting Better, Fixing A Hole, and then... She's Leaving Home. My heart still drops when She's Leaving Home plays. The lyrics are pitch perfect - in many ways a companion piece to Revolver's Eleanor Rigby - and the line that always gets me is "She breaks down and cries to her husband, 'daddy, our baby's gone.'" It is a devastating line. The alternating points of view creates an emotional tension that really counteracts the sweet melody - and I love it. I couldn't find the original online, but I did find one from Paul McCartney's Back In The World album - with his great band that he still is touring with!
I am very excited today. I decided to forego the Thanksgiving Day shopping last night and instead focused on writing some more. And I am proud to say that I, in my pursuit of writing a novel, actually reached 50,000 words. The total word count is in the right hand margin. Reaching 50,000 words by the end of November seemed like a very lofty goal on November 1, but looking back at it, it is really all about sticking to it. Now, my novel isn't done yet, but I still thought I'd celebrate the milestone of actually winning National Novel Writing Month (everybody who reaches 50,000 words by November 30 is a winner) by playing an old Beatles song. However, I could not find the original version on YouTube, so I have to do two songs from Paul McCartney's 2009 tour, with the same stellar touring band he still has backing him. They start with I've Got A Feeling and then the final song is Paperback Writer. Although I have to say that I'd like mine in hardcover...
In 1968, The Beatles released the sprawling epic simply named The Beatles, but better known as the white album, as that was the entirety of the double album design. It is more a collection of solo material, with the full band recording some of the songs, but the majority being recorded using various constellations of the band. One of my favorite songs is a raunchy little rocker of Paul McCartney's called Why Don't We Do It In The Road.
This weekend, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, and Sir Paul McCartney were the big draws to the music festival Desert Trip - and what a trip it appears to have been - including what appears to have been the first ever appearance of Why Don't We Do It In The Road - with Neil Young helping out with both vocals and a guitar solo...
Last Friday, there was a "new" release by The Beatles - a remastered version of their Live At Hollywood Bowl, originally released in 1977. The new version accompanies the new movie, 8 Days A Week, which has Ron Howard exploring their touring years, which ended 50 years ago, in 1966. The sound on the recording is very dominated by screaming girls - and the booklet has news stories from the time of the concert that helps put things in perspective. It is also very moving to read George Martin's original liner notes - it so clearly shows his genuine affection and appreciation for his"boys."
When I listened to Ticket To Ride from the Hollywood Bowl, I was once again struck by Ringo's drumming, how he is consistently just behind the beat on his toms during the verse. It is there in other versions as well, such as the one from the Beatles Anthology vol. 2. Ringo is often maligned, but the truth is that his drumming, largely self-taught, was an important aspect of their sound, and Ticket To Ride really shows this.
When I grew up, my father's brothers both lived in Ski, a smaller city about an hour outside of Oslo - and about 8 hours away from Trondheim, where they grew up and I lived with my family. My uncle Olav had sons who were quite a bit older than me, but my uncle Arne, my dad's youngest older brother, and my aunt Anicken, were the parents of two sons. This was not unusual in the Skogseth family. My grandma was the only girl among a boatload of boys (I never remember how many, but I think she had five brothers), and then she ended up with three sons herself, and as her sons started having kids, Olav had two sons, Arne had two sons, then there was me - and finally, breaking the "curse," was my sister, Elin, my grandmother's final grandchild - and only granddaughter.
Anyway, Arne and Anicken had two sons, Geir and Stein, and Stein just happened to be my age, born two months later than me. I got along great with Stein, and we started spending time with one another during the summers as we were teenagers. Sometimes we were at my grandparents' summer house at Frosta, which was great, especially when we started realizing that there were teenage girls in the neighbor's house (that was a little bit later). But I also got to spend time at their house in the summer. I remember discovering books there (one summer, the book Falketårnet by Erik Fosnes Hansen was read on the radio at Ungdommens Radioavis), listening to Kiss, as Stein had the album Dynasty, although it was thoroughly scratched by a cat if I remember right, getting exposed to science (I remember Geir being completely into Carl Sagan's Cosmos), and getting a more complete exposure to The Beatles.
My aunt Anicken had purchased a box set of all the records they released, and she even let me borrow them to listen to them. I was overwhelmed. I had been exposed to most of their early output already, and that is what I connected to. I am not sure if Magical Mystery Tour was in it - I remember it as if it were, and as if I discovered The Fool on the Hill, but I don't trust my memory with that kind of detail. However, I can tell you with an absolute certainty that when I got my The Beatles CD box a few years back, my thoughts went to my aunt Anicken again for letting me explore The Beatles fully.
I also mentioned books - and while Falketårnet was a favorite of mine, nothing surpassed the fact that I left their house one summer with The Lord of the Rings in my luggage. On the trainride from Oslo to Trondheim I devoured The Fellowship of the Ring, and within a week, I had read the entire tome. And they also came to my sister's wedding. Like I said yesterday, it was a great day. I brought my oldest daughter, Emma, to be the flower girl in the wedding, and the Skogseth side of my family kidnapped her and sat with her the entire evening. Arne and Anicken had bought one of the first Lego Friends sets for her, and they kept her entertained - or was it the other way around?
So - since this was one of the first later-era Beatles songs I connected with, and my memory insists it happened thanks to Anicken's lp box, here is The Beatles with The Fool on the Hill.
Today's song is the final song in the series of great album closers, and what a gem it is. A Day In The Life closes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and was one of the best songs The Beatles ever recorded. I state it as fact simply because it has widely been recognized as such - but even more so simply because I say so... :-)
To be honest, I never got the big deal about Sgt. Pepper. Is it a good album? Yes, absolutely, with some great songs on it. But is it really a concept album, as many suggest? I am not so sure. I would even suggest that it isn't. The songs don't tell a story - aside from the suggestion that they are all played by this fictitious band, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But, this is really immaterial when you start listening to the songs on the album, especially Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Getting Better, and She's Leaving Home. And then there's A Day In The Life, which so clearly represents both Lennon and McCartney. The first main theme ("I heard the news today, oh boy...") is Lennon, then second major theme - about the day itself ("Woke up, got out of bed...") - clearly is McCartney. In other words, more than being a collaboration, it is a collage of elements that they wrote separately - yet it works. And then there is the end of it. The most cathartic piano chord ever recorded. Just listen and enjoy this masterpiece.
How does it feel to be a great guitar player, a great song writer, and a great singer and know that regardless of what you do - and how well you do it - it will always be compared to arguably the greatest songwriter duos of all time because you spent 12 years in a band with them? Of course, the alternative way of looking at it is how incredibly lucky he was to be able to grow up and into music along with the same two men - but regardless of how you view it, Paul McCartney and John Lennon cast mighty big shadows, and it would have been hard for anyone to get out into the sun with those two always looming closely.
The man I am talking about is, of course, George Harrison. The quiet Beatle. The one who lost his first wife to his best friend, Eric Clapton - yet remained friends with him. I'll choose to stop there - knowing there were other sides of him as well. But the George Harrison I choose to remember was quiet, stoic, and an immense talent that always was overshadowed by Lennon/McCartney. He was the youngest Beatle, but he was also the Beatle that led the other three spiritually towards Hinduism - and while it didn't stick with the others, he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life.
When George Harrison died in 2001, I found out at a hotel room in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I was there because of a new job I had started - I was a Student Services Assistant at Montcalm Community College, and their student management system (SMS) was Jenzabar, who had their headquarters in Harrisonburg. I was excited to go on this trip - the first real business trip ever, and I had arranged to stay a little longer than the training - it would keep airfare down, which more than paid for the very modest accommodations I required. I did not have a rental car there, and that was a mistake. While there actually was public transportation that also came very close to my hotel, it did not run often and it had longer distances to walk. But - I still prevailed. Staying the extra two days without money to get a rental for myself became an exercise in futility. I remember stumbling over a movie theater that showed From Hell, the Johnny Depp movie about Jack the Ripper based on Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel, but aside from that, I was cooped up in my hotel room for a couple of damp and rainy days with next to no money (we didn't have much extra at all).
And then, to top it off, the news came that George Harrison had died. I was sitting in my hotel room, thinking about conversations I had overheard at a local Italian restaurant about what a good kid so an so was. Of course, I didn't know the people talking - or who they were talking about - but it gave me a lot of good ideas; ideas that still need to be put into action (read: converted to a book). But I do remember that the news hit me with the proverbial ton of bricks. I don't know what made him my favorite Beatle, but I think it was his very unassuming nature. I greatly appreciate his deep religious devotion - even though I am not religious in the least myself. I respect his desire to share his religion - but I never felt he was pushy about it (not even on My Sweet Lord). He wrote a few of my favorite Beatles songs: While My Guitar Gently Weeps, I Me Mine, and If I Needed Someone are high on my list in addition to the more commonly referred to Taxman, Something, and Here Comes the Sun. I have since come to appreciate a little more of his solo work as well - especially the title track to his first proper solo album (the first one that wasn't all instrumental), All Things Must Pass
Yesterday's news are still reverberating. I was hoping that the string of deaths of great musicians would have ended, but yesterday, the news that George Martin had died surfaced. As someone with an above average interest in The Beatles even in my childhood, I believe I know how instrumental he was in their success and their growth as musicians and composers.
I remember reading about him in the book Historien om The Beatles (The Story of The Beatles), a biography written for young adults (maybe even children - I don't think I was very old when I read it - I had a phase in elementary school when I was completely hooked on biographies). I think he was the very first record producer I knew about - and as such, he helped spur an unhealthy obsession with reading record covers, and eventually following producers as much as artists in some cases (such as Daniel Lanois, whom you might remember from a track I shared earlier this year).
George Martin was a musical genius, and his experience working with classical music clearly helped The Beatles as they started using string quartets (Yesterday) and orchestras (A Day In The Life). He also knew how to push them - and he came from a place of love for the four musicians that grew into a love for their music as well. His role can never be overstated - including his role in experimenting with studio equipment, which is clearly present in the song Rain, where he took it upon himself to play John Lennon's vocal backwards towards the end, creating an eerie effect that was new to rock music.
"And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make." 15 perfect words, finishing the proper part of Abbey Road - however, they were followed by Her Majesty, a funny little novelty song that on the surface seems completely misplaced, yet it really exemplifies everything The Beatles was all about - always a balance between the playful and the heavier material. Abbey Road was the last album The Beatles recorded, but it was released 1969, the year before Let It Be. The year before the best band ever officially called it quits.
The Beatles was a huge part of the soundtrack of my childhood. How could they not be? I was born in 1972, and my parents were both pretty interested in music (although not obsessed, like me). Their teenage years had been shaped by The Beatles, and from I became aware that there was a band called The Beatles, I was always hoping they would get together again. Of course, that all changed in 1980, when John Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota Building in New York City. I still remember that day.
In my earlier years, I was obsessed with the singles of the first half of their career, when they were "just" a spectacular rock and roll band, playing cover songs as well as really raucous self-penned songs, such as She Loves You, Please Please Me, and Help! My aunt Anicken had a box set of all the albums they released, and even though I borrowed it and listened to it in my early teenage years, I still focused on their earlier work. When I approached my 20s, my good friends Svein and Vegard played Two Of Us from Let It Be for me without telling me who I was listening to, and I guessed Simon and Garfunkel - all while knowing and acknowledging The Beatles as possibly the best band ever.
As I have grown older and hopefully matured a little, I have a very different view of The Beatles and their music. When they released a box set of all the remastered albums in 2009, I was pretty quick to make sure I had a copy, and the music has been played through and through many a time. One part that gets to me every time I play it is the end of Abbey Road. The whole of side 2 is really a medley, but it is the last trio of songs in that medley - the three immediately preceding Her Majesty - that really brings out tears of joy and goosebumps every time. Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End is a perfect trio of songs in my mind. It even includes a drum solo by Ringo and dueling guitar solos between John, Paul, and George. It doesn't get much better than that.
In my eyes, there never has been a better band than The Beatles. Yes, my favorite band is still Motorpsycho, but they pale next to the four young men from Liverpool. Unfortunately there is no good version of this medley on YouTube, so I am cheating and showing Paul McCartney's touring band, led by Sir Paul, in a very inspired performance. I have seen several recordings of this band, and I am convinced this is the best band he has had since The Beatles - and you can often see how they inspire him. This recording is from 2013, when Sir Paul was 71 years old - and he plays the ass off of most younger performers these days. Hats off to him and his touring band for this fantastic version of Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End at the Tokyo Dome in Japan.
When I was born, I have a feeling that my parents dropped a giant rock in the ocean. This rock was my musical starting point. It had The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Abba, Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Simon, and Chris de Burgh. That was music both of them liked - although my mom was more Beatles and my dad was more Rolling Stones. Then my dad brought in some songs that were more out of left field, and the one that really sticks with me was Norwegian new wave band The Cut and their version of In Dieser Stadt (I'll have to include that later). That was on the fringe of the rock, but it was definitely part of it. There was probably more to the rock as well, but the pieces that entered the ocean were definitely the ones I remember best.
What happens when you drop a rock in the ocean - or water in general? Waves... Waves form like rings way, way out. And that is what my musical life has been all about - chasing those wavy rings... I found a rock of my own to toss in and create some disturbances in the pattern when I discovered Kiss in 1980, my music teachers tossed in a rock of some classical music, especially Die Moldau by Smetana, which still stays with me, and then Arve started tossing in country music. These disruptions in the patterns didn't stop me, they made me look farther and farther - always seeking the new and the different. The fascinating thing is when you discover rings from rocks that had been tossed in earlier - such as my middle school music teacher Reidar Fiske's love for 10CC - or when they merge unexpectedly, creating new starting points for yet other rings to explore.
The reason I went to such great lengths to describe how I found Opeth, and then in turn Steven Wilson, is that this is once more a set of rings that both separate and unite. From Porcupine Tree I discovered the extraordinary drummer Gavin Harrison, who in turn has been playing for King Crimson, whose records have been remastered and mixed for 5.1 surround sound by Steven Wilson again - and who use Tony Levin as a bass player, whom I first encountered when listening to Peter Gabriel. And, as I previously mentioned, Steven Wilson worked with Fish - and I decided to see what those two albums were all about and found that I had given up on him too soon. I keep chasing those rings in the water, and by following them once more, I found Gavin Harrison's release from 2015, Cheating the Polygraph. It turned out that he had taken some of Porcupine Tree's compositions and arranged them for big band. Now, my experiences with big band music have been limited, but watching the movie Whiplash really made me appreciate some of it a little bit more - and I have had a taste for the work of Mingus and his big band for some time - so this sounded interesting to me. And then I listened, and my mind was blown away. This is challenging music, but man, is it good... Please, give mr. Gavin Harrison a chance and listen to Hatesong/Halo...
