Freedom of choice and expression is good so I’ll 'exercise' mine…(pun intended)
Unless you’ve fallen off a treadmill I probably won’t read a Facebook status update that has anything to do with you and your workout… how far you’ve run, how much you’ve lifted, etc. Congrats to you, but you won't get the positive affirmation you seek from me and by the way while we're on the subject 1) you still have a long way to go and 2)I'll look forward to your post later in the day of you shoveling one of these fuckers in your pie hole:
SO… this has nothing to do with my exercise routine other than the fact it took place in a gym. See, here's the thing with ol' mr. Peace. I’m only effective in getting off my ass and moving if I have music to listen to while I do it. It’s the difference between me running 3K or 8K (see what I did there? Crafty!)
Anyway, I’m at a gym here in Texas called LA FITNESS (that's LA as in Los Angeles not as in 'If I eat enough fromage et baguettes, I will have to workout a lot to achieve la fitness. Follow me? Bien). Everyone has headphones on or earbuds in, doing their thing. Lots of sweat, testosterone and too-tight Lycra (them not me). I'm a bit old school... Adidas old logo only kit and Sambas. Sod the 'Nautilus Quadricep Pumper', it's strictly ropes, a few dumbbells and then I'm hitting the heavy bag. I'm just finishing beating Joe Frasier with a KO in the 3rd in my mind when ‘Columbia’ by Oasis kicks in on my iPod. It’s loud and I realise I’m actually walking around the place with a bit of a ‘Manc swagger’- you know, the subtle ape swing of the arms. The wider stride. Something exactly like this:
It’s funny what music does to you…what memories it brings back and emotions it stirs. I took a look around and thought to myself, ‘Yea, I’m UK cool. I’m a part of this special ‘club’ for those in the know.You bunch of Texan tossers are probably pumping iron listening to Kanye or Drake but me, I was there. Mad fer it. Still am. I fookin own this place, see. I can feel the tension building....It's about to kick off....and then...
‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA came on.
So much for ‘Shuffle’
It did remind me though how much I love and miss Oasis. The music that becomes part of not just our playlist but our culture. The off-stage ‘piss and vinegar’ sorely lacking today. Only a few bands, The Pistols, The Libertines have given us that unpredictability in addition to their tremendous music. The tunes and the tension. A feeling that it’s about to 'kick off' at any minute.
It almost did in Dallas Texas yesterday in that gym. In my head.
So much has been written about it this past
week, another blog churning over the same accolades seems redundant.
No, we can't put a 'new and interesting spin' on what
you've doubtlessly already read. Nor can we offer any new insight. The
best we can give you, the reader and listener, is a paragraph from each of your
'Maximum Rhythm & Booze' hosts on an album that collectively changed
our lives. Really.
Age before beauty. Warren Peace:
Okay, so in 2016 the cover may look like an
adult coloring book, but that's more a reflection of the times we live in
than the failings of designer Klaus Voormann. The teens and twenty-
somethings of 1966 were fighting under hellacious conditions in Vietnam. Ours
are on the sofa playing 'Call of Duty 4' under the hellacious conditions of 'Mum...we've run out of Doritos.' In general, we're softer now than we were a half-century ago when Revolver came into this world, both mentally and in the midriff.
It's always fascinated me wondering what it must have been like back then; slicing open the shrink-wrap, feeling the static cling of the vinyl as it slid out of the inner sleeve and onto the turntable. The needle running through the grooves for the very first time as what was arguably the greatest 34.75 musical minutes of the nineteen-sixties pumps through your speakers. Excluding Revolver's sister album, 'Rubber Soul' (The 'Hail to the Thief 'to 'In Rainbows' for all you millennials), to that point in their careers, The Beatles had fed their fan-base a steady vanilla diet of 'Love ME do,' PS, I love YOU,' 'With
Love from ME to YOU.' There are a couple of notable experimental exceptions, of course. In the US, 'Yesterday & Today's' infamous butcher cover is one, but
that was quickly covered up (literally) before breaking a slew of delicate teen hearts and
sending them off packing to join the Herman's Hermits fan-club. The use of
feedback at the intro of 'I Feel Fine' is another, but it's not exactly
Hendrix, is it? There's a buzzzzzz and 10 seconds later, John's
"so glad" that you're "his little girl." Again.
So let's travel back in time and meet Jane and Sarah in Dayton, Ohio.
They've set their alarm, rushed out to the local record store just as it opens
and there, in the 'file under Beatles' section, they see the black, the white, the beautiful... Revolver!
"Gee Sarah... the Beeddles named
their new album after a gun."
"I know Jane. Isn't it the MOST! Hey,
look at the cover. (She says, wistfully glancing at McCartney smiling back at her from the cover of 'Beatles VI' in the next rack). Aren't their eyes kinda....I dunno... creepy?"
They run home screaming with excitement
and before Jane can get her coat off, Sarah has the needle on the vinyl.
Minutes later they're bopping to 'Taxman' smiling to 'Good Day Sunshine,' crying
to 'Here There & Everywhere,' and singing along to 'Yellow Submarine.' And
then, it happens... Side 2 track 5 starts to play. Sarah scratches her head and searches for her 45 of 'I Saw Her Standing There.' Jane however... 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' The sonic eulogy to four smiling mop-tops.
The drum and bass vinyl assassination of the velvet collar jacket. The teaser trailer for the decades second act.
The times were changing. Attitudes
were changing. People (John George, Paul and Ringo...and Jane) were changing. The Beatles were defining that change with albums as timeless as Revolver. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to turn off my mind, relax
and...you know the rest.
Penny Lane:
50 years ago... Can you picture it, sitting down after a long day at work, drink in hand, side B of the latest Beatles record is just about done, and while it's got that familiar Beatles "sound," there's something fresh and new about it..
Then the last track starts, a swirl of confusing notes that, like jazz, feels a second away from falling into chaos but somehow remains in sync, fills your ears.
The world was dangling its feet off the cliffs of change at that point... Revolver pushed it off into a new stratosphere...
"When did music become so important?"
"It's always been important..."
Many people argue with me at length how the
Beatles are not a 'Mod' band. I've said it often: there is no Mod music, just
music Mod's listen to. Revolver is a work of art that has stood the test of
time and is as relevant now as it was a half-century ago when it was unleashed on the
world. It's sounds created a divide - either you embraced the changing face of
music and you felt the shift or you watched from the sidelines as the world ran
away from you one song at a time. The Beatles were maturing; as was their
sound, their audience and their message. The Beatles weren't the only ones
growing up. Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones, For What It's Worth by
Buffalo Springfield and the album Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys all were
released around the same time.
Many would argue that by 1966, the original
Mods were starting trade in their scooters and forget the scene. By 1967 Mod
was mostly a memory. Who knows, maybe the changes heard in Revolver pushed the
scene towards its slow end. But I would also argue that true modernists would
have embraced the tracks in Revolver and have understood and found its message
relevant. There is no Mod music, and amazing music should be enjoyed by all.
Happy birthday Revolver. I hope I'm this incredibly beautiful when I'm 50 too.
Jonny Owen:
Jonny has always been very vocal about his love for The Beatles and how the album Revolver, in particular, was defining for him. Here, along with actor Martin Freeman and Gary Crowley, he shares his personal take on the impact of Revolver on his own life.
xxx Maximum Rhythm & Booze Our radio show/podcast airing bi-weekly is available at www.MaximumRandB.com
The world was a very different place in 1979...Sony had just released The Walkman, Michael Jackson released his amazing Off The Wall album, Voyage I photos revealed Jupiter's rings for the first time, the Snowboard was invented, I was born and The Buggles released the now classic track, Video Killed The Radio Star.
We all know the song. Not only was it popular (the track topped sixteen international music charts, including the official singles chart of the groups home country of the UK, and also peaked into the top 10 in Canada and the Top 40 in the United States), but the songs video has the dubious honor of being the very first music video ever played on MTV, airing the moment the station went live at 12:01 am on August 1, 1981.
Of course it was the obvious choice. The song was a anthem for the ever changing landscape of how people accessed music. Gone were the day of hearing your favorite bands on a radio, being blissfully unaware at times of what they looked like. The transistor radio of the late 1950s made it possible to be mobile with your music and now, with the release of the Walkman, not only could you take your music with you but you had the CHOICE in what you wanted to hear.
Perhaps Diane said it best in Trainspotting: "Your not getting any younger, Mark. The world is changing, music is changing, even drugs are changing."
Nothing is stagnant, especially the music industry. In the eleven years I've been involved in radio, I have seen the way we access and listen to music morph and change in ways I never dreamed. The medium sure is the fucking is the message, Mr. McLuhan. From the age of 16 to now I went from buying tapes and vinyl, to switching to CD, then biting my nails in fear that the FBI would come knocking on my door and arrest me for downloading hundreds upon hundreds of MP3s via Limewire and Napster, to using iTunes to purchase said MP3s (and lose some of the guilt) and finally, as of late, streaming all the music I want via Spotify. The medium has shifted and morphed so much in the past twenty years that we would be completely oblivious to think that it did not affect how we experience music, or even to go a step further, how it is created.
Music, despite what people will tell you, always was and always will be a business and any business has the main goal of making money - full stop. And it would be naive to think that with all these changes in how the consumer interacts with the product, that the way artist make music wouldn't have changed too. It has, climaxing hard with the creation of one simple, little concept...
Random.
Love it or curse it, the random button which first came into play with the rise of digital music forever changed the interaction people have with music. Musicians created singles as something that could stand alone - it could be shuffled into a jutebox or easily picked up and spun on the radio. The single was a huge promotional item that many artist lived or died by. It was often on the strength of these singles that fans would decided if they would or would not spend their money on a full length album.
A full length album was something special. It was a carefully crafted piece of art, designed from start to finish with the sole purpose to take the listener along on some incredible musical journey. Everything from flow and tempo and feel was given every consideration when laying out album tracks. Listen to Abbey Road, Days of Future Past, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds if you think I'm wrong. Albums became complete slices of time that only broke for a slight, well thought out pause before you got up and flipped over the record to continue on the second half of the journey.
The mass digitalization of music forever changed that art form. Now, not only could you just select your favorite tracks from an album, but you could pair them up with whatever you wanted, create your own set list. Worst of all, you could now put on Abbey Road and hit that tiny little 'random' button and listen to that album in a way it was never intended. It now gave the consumer the ability to be the creator.
But just because you have a general idea of how a human heart works, doesn't mean you should preform open heart surgery any time soon.
The random button took away what was so amazing about those classic albums - what gave them the moniker 'classic' to begin with. It took songs out of context, it interrupted flow and the build up to your favorite song was forever scratched away due to impatience and the 'I want it now' mentality that is ingrained in so many of us these days.
Soon artists had to work with this simple fact in mind - that their songs needed to be stand alone, individual pieces of art that would survive within and without the context of a complete album. The single, which was the calling card of so many artist in the 1950s and 1960s soon because the be all end all. If you wanted to succeed, you needed to be able to produce a single. Fuck if the album on a whole was good or not..
Maybe that's why I'm so happy about the resurgence of vinyl again. There simply is no random button. It's a rainy August morning here in Winnipeg and I'm typing this at my desk while John Coltrane's Stardust plays against the pattering of the rain on my windows and the flow is...well, it's nothing short of magnificent. I couldn't have picked the wax and wane of the sounds any better, and the reason behind that is simple.
This is not my art. This is Coltrane's art, listened to as Coltrane intended. I am letting John take me on the journey of his choosing. He is painting pictures, he is in control of his own palette and I am along for the ride.
Side one has finished, and it's stopped the music at the point John intended, not me. Now I will get up, flip over the record, and think while the first crackles of needle to vinyl start, about how he knows his art so much better than me, otherwise I would have created it and not him. I respect his musical choices and I do so by letting the album as a whole move me - not by making piecemeal decisions that not only break the integrity of the art, but remove all meaning from it.
Peace Out x
