Get Back (Let It Be Forever)

There's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the long-anticipated documentary film from Peter Jackson--The Beatles: Get Back--which was scheduled to premiere this September, has been rescheduled by Disney for August of 2021. This due to the COVID-19 pandemic that is currently plaguing every corner of the little blue planet we call home.

But the good news so greatly outweighs the bad that it will require this announcement and one or two follow-up articles to detail it all.

Don't let me down.

The video you watched at the top of this page is a clip taken from the last public performance by the Beatles. It was filmed in January of 1969 on a cold, overcast day (hence the fur coats borrowed from two significant others) on the rooftop of their newly-built Saville Row studios in London. Until now, this and a small handful of songs from the final act of Michael Lindsay-Hogg's documentary film Let It Be are all we have been able to see of the director's film for the several decades since it was allowed to go out of print.

This because the magical mystery tour that is the Beatles legacy had long since taken a sharp, oblique turn that is hard to understand and harder to explain. Which is especially puzzling considering that on March 16, 1971 the Fab Four's Let It Be album--five of whose tracks form the film's final reel--was awarded a Grammy for the Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture.

It's even more mysterious considering that a month later, on April 15th, who should show up to accept the Liverpudlians' Academy Award for the Best Original Song Score, but the television broadcast's musical director--coming up out of the orchestra pit for thirty seconds so that someone would take it--who then rushed back to work. No question, Quincy Jones was a good last-minute choice. But, really? 

What was immediately discernible to alert fans and other observers was that the apparent schisms in the band, particularly the one between Lennon and McCartney, had left us with the worst possible ending to the story of the most beloved musical organization in the last 50 years. In the wake of Lennon's bizarrely angry, badly-conducted-and-edited interview with Jann Wenner and published in Rolling Stone two months earlier, Wenner had left both us and the boyhood friends--the most successful songwriting team of the 20th Century--in a confused state. 

Yes, yes, yes... we know all about the terrible "truth" or "truths" that came spilling out of the cauldron of bile that filled our favorite tabloids. The real mystery is how people like Jann Wenner sleep at night.

But by August of next year, all of that will be an asterisk attached to a minor footnote--a steaming garbage skow floating down the Hudson or out to sea (San Francisco Bay will smell sweeter). 

The film was cut/edited from director Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 55 hours of original 1969 footage and 140 hours of audio, nearly all of which has never been seen or heard by anyone other than Peter Jackson, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. We know record producer Giles Martin (George's prodigal and actual son) listened carefully to every minute of the behemoth vault of Beatles (White Album) and Abbey Road recording tapes, so it is likely he did the same here. Mr. Martin, I am sure, has quite a CD planned for the occasion--he has the entirety of the Fab Four's rooftop concert (which will be part of the film) for doing one grand remaining remaster.

Look forward to it. Anticipate it. Historical revisionism will take several cannonades across the bow. And the band we've known for all these years will get back.      

Shine On, John, Like the Moon and the Stars and the Sun

"We'll get it right next time," you said.

Let's hope so. You left us with a lot to consider, not the least of which are the politics of gun control, the unworkable infighting of democratic republics, the abysmal failures of prison/mental institutionalization, the perpetual foreign entanglements and wars, and learning to love each other long enough to survive, in spite of it all. All of that with your sublime music, and all before you shuffled so soon off this mortal coil. 

Instant Dharma

Dharma (där'-ma, dûr'-) n.
1. (In Indian religion) the eternal and inherent nature of reality, regarded in Hinduism as a cosmic law underlying right behavior and social order. (Oxford Dictionary)

On December 8, 1980, as I walked into the Jilly's East tavern located half a block down the hill from where I lived on 24th Avenue E. in Seattle, the television above the bar showed Howard Cosell breaking into the Monday Night Football broadcast to announce that John Lennon had been killed outside the Dakota Hotel, in his adopted home of New York City. 

It turned out this was the second time the incorrigible Cosell had interrupted ABC's broadcast with the terrible news (minutes earlier, his was the first national media report). Which explained why none of the normally raucous football fans gathered around the TV above the bar were talking about the Miami Dolphins-New England Patriots game in progress.

Even patrons who detested Howard Cosell (part of a large viewership segment who disliked his unorthodoxy and haughty frankness) were listening raptly. Cosell was a Beatles fan speaking to Beatles fans. He was speaking to all of them. Punching through journalism's Isinglass ceiling to interject the news to the television audience in his typically hectoring manner, saying "this is just a football game," he was speaking to all of us.



On that particularly dreary December night in 1980, he didn't seem the least bit concerned with the game on the field. He and his associate in the broadcast booth, NFL icon Frank Gifford (who had here introduced Lennon to yet another fan and future U.S. President), had lost a friend. Cosell was a John Lennon fan speaking to John Lennon fans. 

The same abrasive, cigar-chewing New Yorker (and NYU law school graduate) had once interviewed Muhammad Ali and championed his conscientious objection to military service. Never shy about expressing himself, he was openly aggrieved now and in a state of shock. Once again he was taking umbrage, taking it personally. Among other things, he had been an early advocate for Lennon's ultimately successful struggle to acquire a green card, despite enormous politically-motivated legal opposition. 




[Note to reader--references in this article to the linked interviews and music recordings will make more sense if you can take the time to listen to them.]  

Sailing Into the Mystic

A revelatory discovery can occur when you're alone in a room with a book, or with a recording of someone singing as beautifully as John Lennon could. The Author of the Universe can be revealed to be not a single lonely, islolated, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-pervading deity, but instead a singing, guitar-picking, piano-chording working-class songwriter from Liverpool, England... as well as his friends Paul, George and Ringo. And thee.

Or in the case of Mark David Chapman, as he bounded rabidly through the gates of Hell, authorship can be dictated by a hallucinated apparition in the guise of an unsuspecting American author, a typewriter-pounding novelist who, if he'd ever toyed with coming out of seclusion to do an interview with the New Yorker before 1980, immediately abandoned all hope as he re-entered his own private Idaho/New Hampshire.

Because it's personal. It remains personal, even when you fancy yourself to be Shiva the Destroyer and decide to shatter all the clockworks during the blackest hour after midnight in the garden of good and evil. 

Chapman was denied parole for the tenth time last August. He can recant all he wants, continue to consume all the nerve-rending psychiatric drugs he's fed by his uniformed and lab-coated keepers, but when he's eligible again in August of 2020, it will just result in parole denial #11. 

It's about deeply personal choices and living with the consequences. 

Looking Through A Glass Onion

My own timeline is demarcated by hearing particular Beatles recordings for the first time. One occasion was a day that a girl I didn't know brought a copy of Meet the Beatles to my Jim Hill Junior High School science class, invited by a gracious teacher whose name I also don't remember, to play "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on a portable hi-fi for the class to hear. Another was when my pal Russ Hansen lowered the stereo needle and I heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Or the night I stepped into the lounge area inside Brantley Hall, the University of Montana dormitory where my future bride Kathy lived, and heard John Lennon singing "Dear Prudence" to Mia Farrow's sister. 

This past November 22nd marked the 50th anniversary of that Montana milestone. For the last few weeks my music-listening rotation has almost exclusively consisted of discs #1 and #2 (and a bit of the Esher demos on disc #3) of the reissued The Beatles, a.k.a. the White Album, on which Prudence was famously invited to "come out to play." The nostalgia pangs have been fierce, thanks in great measure to personal vicissitudes and the re-issue's producer, Giles Martin, who was recently named the Universal Music Group (UMG) Head of Audio & Sound, based at Abbey Road Studios. Giles was, of course, raised by another big Beatles fan, his father and the Beatles' producer from day one, George Martin.

For anyone who has heard the astonishing new 50th anniversary CD reissue, the following comments will amount to preaching to the choir. The 2009 remaster (linked below, now available on YouTube for reasons known only to mad solicitors and Englishmen... for how much longer?) is by no means relegated to the ash heap of history--with a flick of a browser click you can listen to these seminal recordings in stereo on your laptop. But if you have not heard the new 50th anniversary edition, well, you ain't heard nothin' yet. If such things matter to you, immediately send a telegram, text message, FedEx overnight letter or well-fed carrier pigeon to the North Pole and ask Santa for a copy. Or if you would like to celebrate John Lennon's October 9th birthday, get it now. 



Imagine listening what you just heard from the 2009 CD re-issue, but with such sound fidelity that you can hear the doubled harmonies of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison as three distinct, uniquely musical voices. Or Ringo's endless snap and sizzle on the snares and cymbals. Imagine hearing both baritone and alto saxophones in separate and integrated performances in the "Savoy Truffle" horn arrangement. Imagine hearing Eric Clapton wring tears from his strings on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" as John plays a bass guitar line so dense that it sounds like he's beating a rug with a lead pipe. 

Forget all the cliché reissues that have become such a joke in recent years. That's not what Giles Martin and his bosses Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono were doing with Sgt. Pepper and now the White Album. This isn't a record label desperately cashing in by issuing scraps. These are immaculately remixed and remastered works of art. 

I'm going to take a deep breath and avoid invoking comparisons to the Sistine Chapel... I hope. I've been listening to iterations of these recordings for decades now, but every time I listen to the new reissue I hear something new. Arguments and discussions about warm analog on vinyl vs. cold and lifeless digital on compact disc? Been there, argued both sides long and well. Forget it. These new Giles Martin-produced reissues are the proverbial shit. Or if you prefer more genteel language, the bomb. Or a more sacred appellation, the Holy freaking Grail. Find a good playback system, a pair of good speakers or headphones, and play it loud and proud. 

Then go back to the top of the slide, stop and turn, and go for another ride.

All You Need is Love

One more thing about the White Album (which, for the benefit of all you audiophiles, critics, graphic artists, fact-checkers and other readers of tea leaves, is correctly titled The BEATLES, per both sleeves' original and reissued embossings):

For the last fifty years we have been hearing tall journalistic tales of the acrimony that supposedly dominated the Beatles' musical and personal relationships during these waning days of their association. Sniping, whining, trash-talking, threats, and worst of all, mutual desire to virtually break up the band and record separately from each other. Like a latter-day Inspector Alan Grant from Josephine Tey's novel Daughter of Time (a title taken from Sir Francis Bacon's wise comment that "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority"), I had scrutinized photos of the Liverpool Lads during these recording sessions and could never see a bit of evidence to support any of the stories. 



Turns out, I wasn't mad. In fact, these guys loved each other. I know, I know... some will ask about Lennon's song "God" in which he says "I don't believe in Beatles," or later, his song "How Do You Sleep?" that was directed at the other half of the most successful songwriting team of the 20th Century. What about it? Anyone who has ever been through a divorce, or endured a real heartbreak with someone close, knows the answer. To paraphrase the H.W. Longfellow poem, in a relationship this close (c'mon, for over two years, these ambitious friends literally huddled and slept together for warmth, traveling back and forth to Hamburg in the back of a van with their equipment): when it was bad it was horrid. But when it was good, it was very, very good.  

And when John, Paul, George and Ringo (whose pithy analysis was "I love the White Album!") recorded these tunes, it was very, very good. They were having tons of fun. Many of the recordings were done not off in separate facilities, but live in the studio. Much to George Martin's chagrin, his protégés eschewed the refinement and complicated technical trickery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, and went back to basics. From simple and sweet to raw, loudly distorted, rip-it-up rock 'n' roll. In Giles Martin's assiduous detective work while archiving and carefully listening to the hundreds of hours of unedited tape recordings replete with ongoing studio instruction and collaborative discussions between tunes, he was able to shed the light of truth on the petty fictions and half-truths perpetuated all these years by controversy-hungry music journalists. He confirmed what millions of Beatles fans had suspected all along while listening to this music: the boys were having the time of their lives. 

John Lennon and his mates left us with an incredible musical legacy that not only has outlived him and his friend George Harrison, it's one that will outlive us all. But where does that leave us, me and thee, now that our friends are long gone? Who's to say? "What on Earth are you trying to do?" he asks as he sings in "Instant Karma." And then answers, "It's up to you, yeah you." 



Instant karma 

Again the question is, "What on Earth are you trying to do?" and the answer is still "It's up to you, yeah you."

I like that advice. For right now, I'd like to not mourn the death of my friend John Winston Ono Lennon, but instead, celebrate his life in a manner he himself would have appreciated. I think I owe him that. He gave me so much. And he left me no doubt that we are only beginning to solve some of the biggest mysteries of this life. 

Thank you, John. Your life does indeed shine on, like the moon, and the stars and the sun. And if you really did immediately get out of one car and into another... then give or take a few days, Happy Birthday, mate.
   

Help Is On The Way

Image courtesy of moviehousememories.com. This is one of the many movie posters made for the 1965 Richard Lester film with the Beatles called Help! To a practiced eye, there are significant differences between this poster and the Capitol Records soundtrack album cover, e.g., the exclamation point has been removed from the film's title and added to the tagline. The greatest difference is in the sequence of the Beatles positions atop the letters--which would be a big goof if their semaphore signal poses were intended to spell out "H-E-L-P," as is commonly believed. But it turns out the photographer, Robert Freeman, decided the positions for the letters "N-U-J-V" made a better design than the semaphore poses for "H-E-L-P." The artwork for the American Capitol Records LP switched the positions of the Liverpool Lads again from Freeman's original concept to now spell "N-V-U-J." There, don't you feel better knowing that?

I have a personal confession to make. Seriously.  If confessions make you laugh uncomfortably, that’s okay. This one makes me laugh sometimes, too—whenever it isn’t making me weep for joy.

I’m a writer. Not a blogger. Not a music journalist. Not a jazz advocate. Not a social crusader. Not a champion of the arts.

It is true that as a writer, I assume all those guises at different times because of the very fact that what I love to do most is write about what I care about. When musicians hire me to write liner notes or others hire me to write for projects for them, I try to choose things I care about (or want to learn to care about), because I know these are opportunities for me to do good work.  When I care very much about current world events, I enjoy writing about them in my blog. I also care very much about music and the positive effect it has on the world—as a teenager I seriously considered studying classical music theory and performance and making it my life’s work… which conflicted with my ongoing years spent in pursuing the visual arts. I wanted to do big things. My later activities as a champion of the arts, social reformer, journalist, and editor for the world’s biggest online jazz publication, all eventually led me to the conclusion that the way to best accomplish every one of them was through doing what I liked best, writing.

My Great American Novel

Here is the heart of my confession. Late last year I discovered that what I like to write most is several hundred words a day on a project that no one has yet had a chance to read. What I like—love—to write most, is the next page or two of a novel I began working on a few years ago. From time to time over the last few years, I would go back to it and work away feverishly, only to be distracted by any and all of life’s myriad concerns. But a funny thing happened. I reached a tipping point, a stage in the story’s development at which my fictional characters started talking to me. My characters were collaborating with me. If I made one of them say something that he would never say, or do something he would never do, he’d object. Suddenly, everything I care most about was given a loud voice and a place to say it. Everything.

So when I take the time to work on anything else, whether for a client who is paying me for my time, for a magazine article, or for my blog Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing), I try to make it count. Because whether it is helping me to pay the bills or not, it means spending time away from the work I am itching to get back to.

It also means that, while I once used Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing) exclusively as a place to talk about—and solicit opinions about—jazz, and “Directions in Music” as Miles Davis described his revolutionary work on Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970), I have recently been using it as an outlet for talking about other things that concern me. And beginning soon, any day now, another significant change is coming to Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing). 

Love Is All You Need

My second-most favorite thing to do in life is to read. Everything from Shakespeare’s plays to Ray Bradbury’s poetry to Bruce Fergusson’s fiction to William Strunk/E.B. White’s sage advice on the craft of writing. But when it comes to reading other people’s commentaries about music, not so much.

Somehow, the bulk of music writing has become irrelevant. And unread. A typical review is a humorless porridge of hyperbole, filled with shopworn adjectives and tortured metaphors. Why waste your time reading it when you could be doing something useful, like making a sandwich? The state of music journalism could easily be ascribed to the utter irrelevance of much of the music being produced, but that is an excuse, and a poor one. There is still a lot of good music to write about. The seven billion unpaid (mostly) reviewers working for Amazon, or elsewhere in the trenches of Web 2.0, have certainly diluted the writing pool, but even the bulk of the stuff on professional sites lacks that mysterious element that keeps you turning the page, or clicking the “Next” button at the bottom of the screen. It’s dull reading.

Back in the heyday of music journalism, writers like Ralph Gleason and Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff, et al., set a truly high standard for jazz criticism. Cameron Crowe, P.J. O’Rourke and Lester Bangs did the same for rock and roll. But the standard they set isn’t an unattainable standard at all. What has changed is that a great number of people writing about music now aren’t really writers. Worse than that, the people minding the store don’t seem to include any of the editors needed by these wannabe writers to fix them up. What’s left is an island populated with a cadre of good writers who do a decent job of self-editing… and from island’s shore to the horizon it’s a veritable sea of crap.

Whilst contemplating my role in all this—my own personal responsibility for how the world of music journalism has turned to shit—it occurred to me that I had recently read insightful, well-written music commentary from some writers I know, people with track records of style, humor, and a developed sense of journalistic professionalism. Not coincidentally, all are personal friends. It’s a funny thing with writers. Incompetent boobs who are in competition with you and making more money, or getting more work published, are objects of scorn. But damn, when you meet someone who can write his or her ass off, it’s love.



One thing led to another. Mutual admiration. A love of music (all kinds). A desire to write something so damn good that it makes your eyes water. Boredom with the same old crap. I extended the invitation to them and they all RSVP’d.

Meet the new Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing).

The writers who are going to start contributing to this blog will be introduced as is useful and appropriate. Their names will appear in their individual bylines, of course. We can work on a short one- or two-line bio for each, but they will likely want to simply be known by their work. I am really looking forward to introducing you to these writers, and the others who will follow.

Our first motto: Music is music. Jazz, blues, rock, pop, classical, avant-garde, klezmer, comb, “other”, all of them count!

Our second motto: No more dull music writing!

Our third motto: Reading about music is fun!

Our fourth motto: Anything you can do in connection with music—reading, writing, cooking and eating food, quaffing craft beer or sipping California wine, playing sports, falling in love, having sex—all are potential topics for music writing!

Our fifth motto: The more mottos, the better!

Well, Love Is Almost All You Need

One last thing, another confession: I lied earlier. I am certainly a writer, but I am also a blogger. And a music journalist. And a jazz advocate, a social crusader, and as it happens, a very pissed-off champion of the arts. If you are a writer about music and haven’t been out of the house lately (it happens all the time), the worlds of music recording and performance, and particularly songwriting, are in serious trouble. There will be much more to report on this in coming weeks and months, but if the decline in CD sales and rapid consumer movement to streaming services continues at the rate it has been, without some adjustment of current royalty schedules with ASCAP and BMI, Don McLean is going to have to write American Pie, Vol. II, including a new version of “Vincent” for all the songwriters who decide jumping off a bridge is preferable to living through the day the music actually dies for good.  
  
Spotify and Pandora are the new faces of Napster. Theft is theft. Whether there are laws sanctioning or preventing it is irrelevant. These services have managed to convince themselves that their business models can operate without the messy problem of paying the songwriters who create the music they are flogging. Taken to its logical conclusion, their plundering approach will at some point very soon—if it hasn’t already—deprive all the affected songwriters of any substantial royalties, and eventually starve them out of existence. At which point, all these pathetic vultures will have to offer is old music written by people who have died or moved on.

For you students of Twentieth Century music, remember the Beatles and their historical Magical Mystery tour of 1960-1970? Amongst musicians, jazzers and otherwise, it is widely understood that the era of the Beatles is what changed everything. Certainly there were many, many other musicians who had an enormous impact on the world around them. But not like the Beatles. I can remember where I was the first time I heard Abbey Road, but the thing that makes my memory so significant is that Béla Fleck can remember where he was when he heard it for the first time, too. So can Stanley Clarke. So can George Benson. So can John (and Bucky) Pizzarelli. So can you.

For anyone who was around to see it happen (or anyone who can see or hear adequately right now) the impact on this civilization of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show is right in there with NASA landing a man on the moon.

Now consider what life in the second half of the Twentieth Century would have been like if the John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t come along—it’s like imagining what life would have been like if Mozart hadn’t come along, only worse (I’m kidding) (sort of). Can you imagine it? Really? Because I can’t.



If you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451 or watched It’s A Wonderful Life recently, now would be a good time. Our actions and inactions have an impact on all that follows in our wake. Even a brief study of history reveals that all the different conditions in the world are the result of an endless series of causes and effects. One thing leads to the next in a chain of events. Nothing you see today was pre-determined, but in many ways it could have been predicted. If, due to music licensing laws and regulations, Lennon and McCartney had been unable to make enough in songwriting royalties to keep the Beatles fed and clothed, it is unlikely the famous London club scene of the 1960s would have flourished to the extent that Dave Holland ended up playing a regular gig at Ronnie Scott’s club, where Miles Davis saw him and extended the invitation to come to New York when Bitches Brew was recorded. Without Holland’s startling transformation in moving from acoustic bass to electric, Miles might not have felt the need to hire the brilliant electric guitarist John McLaughlin for the session, and McLaughlin might never have gone on to make Birds of Fire (Columbia, 1973).

A couple weeks ago, Taylor Swift announced she was pulling all her music from Spotify. To a cynical jazz fan, a spoiled millionaire pop star making a public statement might seem like gratuitous grandstanding.  But three days ago, as Google was preparing to launch its own YouTube monster death star subscription service, Music Key, to compete with Spotify and Pandora in the music streaming racket, industry titan Irving Azoff announced that he was poised to take the libraries of 42 of his clients out of the running—artists such as John Lennon, Pharrell Williams, the Eagles, Smokey Robinson, George and Ira Gershwin—unless Google ignores the ASCAP/BMI model and renegotiates higher songwriting royalty rates for his clients.

There’s hope. Maybe we could make it cool to buy CDs or LPs or downloads again, instead of stealing them like abandoned shopping carts to support our humble lifestyles.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/irving-azoff-threatens-yank-20000-748631

 Let’s keep the music alive.