Category Archives: The New Zoo Music Review

Jan 19 2013
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Hanging Chad: The Life, The New Zoo Music Review

An Orange-Blue Hue: Allman Brothers All-Time Top Five

gregg_allman_img01_hires653d9bGreg Allman is at it again. He’s writing memoirs and having seventh marriages. He has hepatitis and is long-lived for a man who’s lived so many lives. Hanging Chad doesn’t really care so much about the current messy details. The Allman Brothers make Hanging Chad’s Top Five All-Time, and that’s that. You already know about Led Zeppelin. Who else should really be in the Top Five all-time? Suggestions? Always open to changing my mind. The Dude abides. Hanging Chad hangs.

But what about the top five of one of the top five? Now we’re even moving on the existential reality of High Fidelity.

They are driving the big orange wagon. It’s about anything or nothing else. It’s about the road. It’s about leaving. Cleaving. Meaning, I am not departing. Or maybe I am, and always. Whatever, I am not taking another whack out of the mole. They are forever leaving and arriving, forever born rambling. They are from Georgia. Savannah of all places. No father for Greg by the time he was two. Felt inspired to the blues when he saw his first live show at 10. Turns out, his younger brother Duane is the guitar phenom. No problem. Greg turns to other things like his soulful voice, and hitting the keys.

Okay, so I’m not writing a Rolling Stone article here. Just a top five of a top five band. So here goes:

Technically, for the best song overall you probably have to say “Whipping Post,” I have to say that growing up I always valued “Rambling Man” and “Blue Sky” so much more. “Jessica” is so classic, and I just love when the piano solo erupts about halfway through. So that leaves room for just one more. I’m tempted to choose a lesser known “B-side” selection, but I think it would be wrong to ignore “Midnight Rider.” As simple and repetitive as it is, it’s also a defining Allman Brothers song, and let’s face it, part of the genius is in its very simplicity. Okay, now I’m regretting keeping “Southbound” off the top five. I can’t do this…

While Greg Allman gets all the media attention lately (and of course he founded the band with his late-great brother), the great Dickey Betts really gets very little credit for the defining Allman Brothers sound, not to mention he wrote some of the very best songs. The dude was wild. The dude was outrageous. The dude was kicked out of the band? I don’t know why. Apparently some issues between him and Greg? In the video below, you can tell he hardly knows what to do with himself when he isn’t touring and on the road. You can also tell he’s lived a hard life. Safe enough to say? Maybe the band has become almost a caricature of itself. Maybe they’re pushing for one last glow in the spotlight of relevance. Whatever the case, they’ve always been some bad dudes.

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Nov 17 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Sizing Up The Tallest Man on Earth

Just how tall is he, you ask?

WHO IS HE? He’s the enchanting wizard of rhythm. Wait. That’s Beck. You can call him “the next Bob Dylan” all you want, but Bob Dylan never even approached this vocal aptitude (and I’ve been vocal in my defense for Dylan’s vocals). Some say he’s got a “Dylan-esque croon.” I can see that I guess.

Anyway, it is highly improbable that ANYONE will ever be the next Bob Dylan period. It’s more likely that there will be a next Michael Jordan than a next Bob Dylan.  But I digress, and I’ve now said “Bob Dylan” enough to hugely increase my SEO. His name, by the way, is Kristian Matsson and he’s 5’5. The Washington Post described him as “less a towering titan than an ex-jockey on his way to audition for Grease.” He says he chose the moniker, The Tallest Man on Earth, because:

“I needed a great name. I needed that name to force myself to write good enough songs and make good enough performances. If the songs weren’t good enough, or the crowd didn’t like me, then the name would seem stupid. To make that name seem right, I have to try and be amazing.”

And amazing he is. “The Wild Hunt,” a good strum style example:

He grew up among the placid lakes, dense woods and rolling hills of the Dalarna region of Sweden, northwest of Stockholm. He says that coming from such a beautiful place, and growing up riding his bike through those woods “stays with you.”

STYLE and INFLUENCES: Matsson’smusical style is described a LOT of ways. He first heard Bob Dylan at fifteen, and became slowly exposed to early American folk, such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. But he is careful to say, “I don’t consider my work to be a part of any tradition. This is how I play. This is how I write songs.”

Matsson had classical guitar training in his youth, but says he “never really focuses on it” and that by the end of high school he even “got bored playing guitar because it was like math.” In his early twenties, he discovered open tunings listening to Nick Drake. Open tunings allowed him to focus on singing and perform intricate music.

“I’ve always tried to pick the guitar like the old blues guys, like Skip James, Son House, Booker White. Try as I might, I never succeeded in playing like them. But, all of a sudden, one night I realized that I could use the energy of those songs to fill my own songs. I made one song, then another one came, then another one. It was effortless, like I finally found my way to make music.”

A Swede playing the blues? It works. His songwriting and delivery–his performance–is as authentic as they come, more than the sum total of his influences. Just listen to the picking here:

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Nov 10 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Three Reasons Why I’m Man-Crushing on Ryan Adams

I remember the day like it was yesterday. Actually, it was two months ago. The day after this year’s Decatur Book Festival. I was driving north on I-75, following Shelley from Atlanta back to Chattanooga. This cool music filled the air on the Sunday mid-morning NPR station. It sounded like a band influenced by The Grateful Dead with the aloof lead solo licks, the reverb, the very title of the song, “Easy Plateau.” Who was it?

The DJ said, Ryan Adams. From his Cold Roses CD. Ryan Adams? A friend had shared with me his whole Ryan Adams discography, but I’d never really given him a chance, and had always associated him with Brian Adams. I vaguely knew they weren’t the same artists. I never really liked “Cuts Like a Knife” by Brian Adams in the late 80s, or whenever that song was overplayed.

To say I came late to the party late on the phenomenon otherwise known as Ryan Adams surely does not come as a shock. Come to find out, he writes and plays country, blues, blues rock, bluegrass, pop-country-alt-rock, and he’s even got a 2003 heavy rock album. That one loses many of the qualities that otherwise make Ryan Adams distinctive. Here’s what Twang Nation had to say about an appearance of Adams’ on The David Letterman Show. He’s been on the show several times. Here’s a really nice take of “Lucky Now.”

For someone like me, coming late to the party, you start with the beginning and work your way down. You sort of get a sense of the seasoned, higher-profile, more mature artist, and as you work your way down you get a clearer sense of the evolution. But it’s bigger picture, flying from a higher view, I guess. When you’ve been an early loyalist, you may not like certain new directions. You may think, for instance, that Ryan Adams hasn’t really “done anything” since Jacksonville City Nights or Heartbreaker, as someone recently told me. But Jacksonville City Nights is so 1998, am I right? Lots of great songs that for the past seven or eight weeks I just can’t seem to get enough of. Here’s what I love:

Killer voice: His voice is pure. That’s what I think when I hear it. I don’t know anything about describing a voice, but he definitely has vocal range, strength, and interprets his songs. He can bellow it out, but he steps lightly and has a lot of different approaches to song, some delicate, some wistful. Always clear. For all that charisma, he often hides his eyes beneath long brown bangs. To me, the hidden eyes thing suggests he’s insecure but paradoxically at the same time demonstrates the confidence he has to execute these marvelous stories and compel a huge audience’s attention. That takes guts, even if he also seems insecure.

Great songwriting: All the way around. Everyone starts with lyrics when they mean “songwriting.” I wouldn’t say it’s his forte, but I wouldn’t call it a deficit either. Sometimes they’re killer. Sometimes they’re pretty good. Sometimes they may be a tad cliche-sounding. However, it’s his overall skill, the way the songs are constructed, produced, everything. It’s one thing to appreciate wide ranges of music. It’s completely different in being able to pull that off as a creative artist.

Adaptive: Chameleon might be a good word for it, but would you want to be compared to a lizard–albeit a colorful one–just because you were multi-talented? Well, yeah! Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind that at all, especially in light of all this recent talk about “Niche-ing” yourself. It’s cool to see someone integrate their overall musical persona, to manage to be prolific even amongst what sounds like a lot of stress and occasional breakdowns.

“Come Pick Me Up” just slays me. Especially when I’m feeling down and maybe it’s late at night and I’ve had a beer or two. Please don’t tell me how old he was when he wrote this.

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Nov 03 2012
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Hanging Chad: The Life, The New Zoo Music Review, Trends and Culture

Losing My Virginity to Led Zeppelin

The first time I ever heard Led Zeppelin in 1985 I was almost fourteen. It was the summer before I became a high school freshman, and I was already training for the cross country team. I remember the moment. It was sort of like losing my virginity. I’d just finished a long run with my friend Scott Riddell and we were driving home in his Pinto which he’d rigged with a stereo system surely worth more than the car. It was “Black Dog,” the first song of Led Zeppelin IV. I didn’t love or hate it. I was mostly overwhelmed. I’d never heard anything quite like it, from the past or present. The guitar riff had a horn-like tone, the drums thunderous. Not classifiable. What really gave it that odd, mysterious sort of sound though was Robert Plant’s voice. Plant had this capacity, in his voice and persona, of containing multitudes, at once bold and masculine and yet also sensual and almost feminine. It was a strange blend. For me, it was a turning point.

Up to that point I had embraced the pop music that my dad liked and on some level approved of. Bruce Springsteen, Dire Straits, Genesis. I’d taken to The Violent Femmes a few months back, but for as classic as that first album of theirs will always be, you pretty much consume that content pretty fast. Soon I was on my way to getting a lot of mileage out of ZZ Top, Van Halen, even Iron Maiden and Metallica and who knows what all. But Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin. It’s like they had a secret sauce no one could really predict the outcome of.

Put it this way, a couple of years later, I did literally give away my virginity while playing the B side to Led Zeppelin IV. As Plant often said at the beginning of their “Stairway to Heaven” live performances, “This is a song about hope.” When that song ended, I was left hoping that sex would get better.

The puzzling thing to me about Zeppelin is that the music really isn’t given its due. People get lost in the look, the style, the rumors, what they seem to symbolize. They may be forerunners of a “whole lotta” things in popular music, positive and negative, but let’s get one thing straight: They are not the forerunners of heavy metal. Not even close. Blues bombers? I guess you could make more of an argument for that, but not exactly that either. Way too creative and way too varied. In a lot of ways these dudes were hippies. I mean, how many heavy metal bands or “blues bombers” feature a lead singer hitting on a tambourine? Yes, Plant does in fact galavant on stage tapping a tambourine and bobbing his head during Jimmy Page solos. Hanging Chad does not kid about such things. Plus, they lived on farms, okay? They lived on farms in England.

Things got sleazy, though. I mean, really quite bad. One would have to think that today not only would the rumors and  antics not be mythologized and revered, but that they couldn’t even begin to get away with it all. Apparently, John “Bonzo” Bonham was a very nice guy when sober, but a maniac when drunk–which he was a lot during the 70s. It doesn’t help that manager Peter Grant, an imposing figure with a massive frame and 6’5 height, intimidated show managers and anyone attempting to profit on Zeppelin’s merchandise. Not necessarily a bad thing. Still, was it easier to be Led Zeppelin then or Bob Dylan?

The band never had the prolific songwriting talent or melody-making as The Beatles, of course, nor does it quite have the business genius and endurance as The Rolling Stones (just compare The Stones continued push to the very latest about “any kind of reunion” for Zeppelin), but their legacy in rock and roll culture, permeates even in today’s shallow, processed, cheesy, glamrock, Clear Channel-dominated landscape. I could have sworn that the band Cameron Crowe based Stillwater on in Almost Famous was Led Zeppelin, but apparently it was the Allman Brothers. Whatever the case, Led Zeppelin’s influence is all over that 2000 classic. They do occasionally go on tour, as they did in 2007.

Truth? I did write a prose poem, “Letter to Plant from Easter Island,” which was published in a couple of different books in ’07 and ’08, and reasonably reviewed by Claire Keyes. Has anyone ever figured out why John Paul Jones has always kept his distance from Page and Plant? Was it all the craziness of the past? Or is their some kind of rift? He seems always to have kept a distance.

I’m not proud of a whole lot about the band’s biography, but I stand by their music–and my experience.

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Jul 31 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Blast from the Past: Iron Maiden Revisited

Eddie has come back from the grave to haunt me. I’ve been playing Powerslave and Piece of Mind wondering what it was that made me such a fan. Around 1984 it was pretty potent stuff. Iron Maiden. Not kidding. I hear they recently had a sold-out stadium show of 100,000 in Brazil. Brazil? Aren’t they from Britain?

One cool thing is that they were such great musicians. One not so cool thing was that weird Eddie guy. I mean Eddie could really scare aware some otherwise potential fans. But besides that, Iron Maiden’s weirdness was how “intellectual”—dare I say—their lyrics became once they were established with Bruce Dickinson (Steve Harris, the bassist is apparently the lyricist). At least I know a great deal of credit given to Rush’s lyrics because Neil Pert writes them and he has a Ph.D., and they don’t write about “typical” subjects like love and fame and sex. Iron Maiden never sings about love. That’s for sure. But what did/do they sing about? It was usually a concept (war, curses, life/death).

They got better at it. By 1983 with Piece of Mind—to my mind—they really hit it lyrically. I like the semi-raw quality it. While the second side really fell off after “The Trooper,” those first five songs of ‘Piece’ seem at a high level for any band.

Powerslave was probably a big step up in terms of production and the level of overall even-ess. For me though songs like “Aces High” were almost too smooth—plus how much is a 14 or 15 year old kid supposed to connect with some kind of fighter pilot idea?

I realize Dickinson is opera trained or whatever, but through the early to late 80s, while they had the operatic powerhouse, they were just really great and relatively unheralded. What hasn’t survived the test of time is the dissonance between their musicianship, concepts, and even lyrics AND their image.

Their image. Yes. It was compelling. I mean at my age I was easily led by the sheer fascination of “Eddie.” It was other things, too. The smell of the new cassette in my hands. The fact that I had gone to Sam Goodies to buy it. Casettes were small, and when they were hot and shiny and unfolded in lengths of eight or more featuring the entire song list of lyrics, was powerful.

I was still holding on strong for their 1986 Somewhere in Time with songs like “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” I was a runner. It applied to me. Sort of. It was kind of cool. And the song did come fourth on what sounded like an even more sophisticated sound, but there was also something less urgent.

Maybe it’s those song concepts that explains why we don’t feel connected with them years later other than through respect about what they’re doing “in their time” upon a nostalgic revisitation. Sort of like going back and playing your Atari for a half hour. On the other hand, they’re finding a whole new generation of fans. Not bad for some scraggly long hairs from mid-70s London.

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Mar 28 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Renaming Jazz to BAM = Bad Idea

I’m no jazz aficionado, just a fan, a lifelong fan. I know a fair share of jazz’s history. While I’ve taken some jazz guitar lessons, learned some scales, and know first hand the complexity of this rich and varied music, I claim no special expertise. So, why is it so troubling to learn about the movement with the intent to rename Jazz to Black American Music? Apparently, Nicholas Payton believes jazz died in 1959, that it was a limited concept anyway.

Whatever we want to say about Jazz’s history, where the term came from, or what it may have come to mean, even the way jazz (like so many things American) is embedded with racial strife, it’s a bad idea to try and change the name of an entire history. That’s what it is. Jazz is a history of music, not just some convenient marketing label or genre tag. Attempting to rename it because not enough people understand what it is, or because young kids don’t know who Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington is, is a band-aid to a larger problem related to education and how music in general is marketed and popularized. I’m not saying I know all the solutions, but such a re-branding effort is mistaken.

Here’s a summary the basic arguments for why Jazz should be renamed BAM: (1) It’s an effort toward correcting the historical record; (2) It will educate people about where the music really comes from; (3) It is actually more inclusive than exclusive (there is no intent, anyway, to be exclusive); and (4) To renew the interest in Jazz, especially for the audience “that isn’t there.”

Etymologically, jazz is a fascinating word. The slang word “jasm” appears as early as 1842 (some say 1860), and means “spirit, energy, spunk.” It seems to have become a part of American parlance in the early part of the 20th century. For instance, one of its earliest recorded uses sprung up from the West Coast in 1912, and didn’t even have a musical connotation. It was used by a minor league pitcher, Ben Henderson, who referred to his new curve ball as the Jazz Ball “because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” The word did refer to music in Chicago as early as 1915. As a noun in the 1920s it seems to have generally meant “to make more decorative.” According to A Historical Dictionary of American Slang, as an adjective, in the 1910s “to excite or enthuse.” As an adjective, “jazzed” seems to have connoted being drunk (which, again, seems related to “spirits”). There are several strains of where the term actually comes from, and no doubt there are plenty of sexual slang connotations related to “jizz,” “spunk,” “jism” and so on, but that’s pretty weak ground for changing the entire name of over a centuries-worth of a serious musical art form.

Hanging Chad can’t possibly take on this complex topic systematically, but one problem is radio play itself. It hasn’t just ruined a generation of rock, it’s pretty much calcified every other musical form that seeks to express itself in any way other than what is deemed as mass-market potential. At least there are people like Esperanza Spalding trying to do something about it. Orrin Evans seems to be a leading spokesperson for the BAM movement, and while he seems convinced of BAM’s essential efficacy and doesn’t have an intent to exclude, it seems this effort does just that (he was frustrated by the fact-shaping of Annette John-Hall’s interpretation of his reasoning in a recent article from the Philly Inquirer). While it may be frustrating that most audiences these days are “white guys,” it seems to me that the irony of these rebranding efforts only does exactly what it suggests we shouldn’t do: re-create racial antipathy. For instance, do I not have a right to voice these very opinions because I’m a “white guy”? And aren’t there quite a number of white pioneers in the music form throughout the 20th century? I wonder what the 91-year-old Dave Brubeck has to say on the subject, or late-greats like Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Bill Evans and others?

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Mar 20 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

I Used To Be A Sparrow’s Debut

Paperwings Records asked me to consider doing a review on the recently released debut album of italian-swedish band “I Used To Be A Sparrow.” I listened to them and was impressed enough to agree to help spread the word in the form of this small post. The duo is getting some really nice feedback about their debut single “Life is good,” whose video premiered ealier this month on MTV New Generation.
I Used To Be A Sparrow is a unique blend between the powerful impact of an arena rock act and the urgency and dirt of a garage band, with a fondness for heartfelt songs. Dick Pettersson and Andrea Caccese definitely know how to stay busy. The former has been rocking the swedish indie music scene with acclaimed alt-rock group “In These Woods,” and the latter is an italian-born songwriter who has been gaining recognition all over Europe as “Songs For The Sleepwalkers.”
The pair teamed up in December 2011 to create something new and exciting. The ideas and songs that were brought up to the table eventually turned into a full length album. “Luke” is a collection of 11 songs heading in different directions while sharing a common watermark thanks to the band’s straight forward  approach.
You can download the full album promo HERE or stream on SPOTIFY.
To see their video click here
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Feb 20 2012
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Community, Hanging Chad: The Life, The New Zoo Music Review

All in a Friday Night at JJs: Christabel and the Jons, Ashley and the X’s, Stagolee

When they get the sound right in the oddly-shaped rectangular venue at JJ’s–as each band did on Friday night–you get the makings of a magical night. While it may not be the premier spot for acts in Chattanooga that it once was, JJ’s Bohemia serves an important niche for the music scene. For Friday night’s line-up, each band shared the distinction of featuring a female lead vocalist. And I will say, in each case, the singers had such strong voices–and presences–they lifted the music to an even higher level of quality, especially when you consider that in a venue such as JJ’s, subtlety can be difficult to achieve.

Stagolee, a seasoned, indie-rock, blues-based band started off the night. They began as a duo in Starkville, Mississippi, but are currently based out of Nashville. They balance an eclectic mix of genres, at times sounding like an indie pop rock band, at others folk rock–and everything in between these apparent distances. As the opening act, they really laid down it down. We all knew this was not going to be amateur night.

Ashley and the Xs are a Chattanoooga-based band who’ve recently added my very own brother, John Prevost, as a bassist to their own distinctive mix. Actually, John brings a custom-made electric, eight-string guitar to the mix (three of the eight strings correlate to a standard bass, the A, D, and G strings). It brings all the bass you need, and more importantly also offers the possibilities of bass-like chordal structures, which give the music an extra dimension and natural sophistication. Besides the obvious strength of Ashley’s performance and vocal quality, in a lot of ways the band centers around the metronomic-precision of Dan Walker on the drums. In spite of this being the first time the band has played out in several months, and with the recent addition of a fifth member, they more than held their own between the two touring acts from Knoxville and Nashville between them.

It was my own loss that I was out back for most of Christabel and the Jons. When you have three bands, as JJ’s often does, and when the first act doesn’t begin until, what? 10:30? sometimes it can become an endurance race to hang in there. When I did come back in, I witnessed an especially distinctive, impressive act who look like they’re on a quest for greater things yet, and there’s not reason to think they won’t. If the upright bass and accordion aren’t enough to catch your attention, the semi-hollow Gibson guitar is sure to resonate. An original act, I hear they’ve already done a commercial for Apple.

What a night. If JJ’s can keep bringing in such seasoned talent, and perhaps shifting back the opening acts and pretending we’re on Central Time Zone, they’re sure to keep bringing the crowds.

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Feb 18 2012
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Hanging Chad: The Life, The New Zoo Music Review

Jack White is Coming to Town. So Why Do I Have the Blues?

Why? Well, it started out like any ordinary teacher-student-conference Friday “holiday” morning. I had my almost-three-year old Lennyn all day. My boys would be out at 11:30. No big deal. Daddy day. I just accept the fact that I won’t be getting much writing done. Go to the grocery store. Explore a playground. Maybe have a popsicle. Maybe color in a Mickey Mouse coloring book. Jack White tickets are going on sale at 1:00 for a March 10 show here at Track 29? Got it covered. My buddies Erik Schmidt and Reuben Summerlin are aiming to get 4 each. My brother John and Randy Gibson are going to get all they can. Brian Carisch too. One way or another, I’m golden.

Then, one by one, my best laid plans “gang aft aglee,” as Robert Burns once famously said. Erik and Reuben never get access at all. John and Randy break through once. Enough to get 4 tickets–for them and their life partners. Same deal with Carisch and company. Oh, and I received this litany of bad news as Lennyn wept for 45 minutes over coloring Minnie Mouse’s right shoe outside the lines. There was no fixing the mistake, and there was no assuaging or redirecting her grief.

Where does that leave me? With the blues.

Frankly, I deserve to be one of the 1,000 who get to go to this show, and I shouldn’t have to pay a scalper $183 (the current cheapest rate) to do so. For one, I am the one who wrote a poem about the person who parades around as Jack White, which was not only published at The Huffington Post, but also became the first poem for my chapbook collection, White-Feathered Bodies (and for inquiring minds, can be easily accessed here on Scribd).

I’ve been a part of the glorifying-bandwagon. I’ve watched It Might Get Loud, the movie with the Edge and Jimmy Page and Jack White. I’ve seen him on that DVD playing under the Black Pool lights in the UK, which was the inspiration for my poem. Come on, man! I should get in free! No, Jack White should pay me to go to his show, and he should have me read my poem to open the set.

So why did it feel so good when two of my friends asked what the big deal was? One said only in Chattanooga would a guy who’s best days were in circa 2002 have a run on tickets in 2012. Another wrote,

All you just did was save money.  Now you can come over to my house and I will play the same five blues licks over and over really loud while [my daughter] bangs a trash can lid. I will also turn up the heat, blow pot smoke in your face, and sell you my Fat Tires for $5 a pop . . . and then it will be the exact same thing as seeing Jack White at Track 29. I feel like the Black Keys fully occupied the space that was created by the White Stripes.  It sounds silly, but it’s true.

It was only a short-lived satisfaction. I don’t really believe either one of them. First, Jack White has re-invented himself and grown into the thin air of rock god stardom over the past ten years. He’s miles away from his origins as The White Stripes guy. He’s also just a hell of a performer, and there is no way this will be anything other than an amazing show.

And I will be at home watching the first season of Lost or something. Why? Because I am that far behind, and because there will be no assuaging or re-directing my grief.

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Feb 13 2012
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The New Zoo Music Review

Defamiliarizing the Beatles: Revolver (1966)

1966? Wow. I’ve always pretty much just “liked” The Beatles, which is why I’ve lived in such ignorance about one of the highest ranked rock albums of all time, I guess. But recently, I’ve “discovered” something in Revolver, the band’s seventh album, that is as innovative as it gets for any album. In fact, it would lead to a virtual endless opening of doors for musicians afterwards. Pretty heady stuff for a rock album recorded in the middle of 1966.

In terms of classic, famous, Brit-rock invasion bands, I’ve never been all that excited about The Rolling Stones or The Who. I loved Led Zeppelin, and appreciated The Beatles. Okay, but Zeppelin didn’t produce their first album until early 1969. In ’66 there were essentially three different ways of using music as a vehicle: the profound bard, the street punk, the sound sculptor. The Beatles were definitely the sound sculptors, and the polar opposite of, say, a politically conscious Dylan, generally removed from the ideological and social struggles of the time.

As a casual listener, here’s what’s always stood out to me about The Beatles’ music (followed by a BUT).

(1) Great songwriters. But their famous pieces were inescapable and culturally ubiquitous. Sometimes they were even a little…cheesy? Light?

(2) Prolific. Yes, they catalog hundreds of songs but there are so many castoffs, and so many two-minute ditties, you begin to cherry-pick the albums looking for the two or three famous pieces. (And Zeppelin gets all the credit as the makers of “the concept album”).

(3) Distinctive sound. But you don’t expect things like hot improv guitar, or really innovation. And if you do think of innovation you probably think material from ‘Sgt. Peppers’, which followed Revolver and has more famous material (“Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds,” “Little Help from My Friends”).

What Lennon is doing with the guitar melodies and background jangling sound, reminds me of what Peter Buck maximized for 30 years with R.E.M. (“And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Dr. Robert”). Lennon also demonstrates what you do as a guitarist when you aren’t a great soloist. You play cool riffs and harmonize the melodies. The day of the guitar solo has burned out and faded away for probably about the past two decades. Bands like Cake have since perfected the precision riff.

And McCartney’s motown-inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life” reminds me of Neil Diamond (okay, not so innovative there).  But even this relatively unheralded song signaled a major prelude to the 70s with the band orchestration and fade-out. And check out those horns! Some wild, eccentric sound-sculpting here for sure! And all in two-and-a-half minutes.

But have you heard of “Tomorrow Never Knows”? This is the song that truly blows me away. Way ahead of its time. I would go so far as to say you wouldn’t know the difference between it and a given song produced today. What a way to conclude an album. The song begins, “Turn off your mind and look downstream…it is not dying” and concludes with the repeated phrase “…in the beginning.” It was a beginning. Pioneering more than subtle sounds, but an explosion of experimental and psychedelic music to follow for decades. It includes such groundbreaking techniques as reverse guitar, processed vocals and looped tape effects. Musically, it’s drone-like, with a strongly syncopated, repetitive drum-beat played over a single chord. Lennon’s processed lead vocal was another innovation. Always seeking ways to enhance or alter the sound of his voice, Lennon told EMI engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted to sound like he was the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a high mountain. The end result is an ethereal, filtered quality. Just amazing.

Of course there are the homages, and the specific, direct attempts to recreate a “Beatles-influenced” song, such as Wilco’s “Hummingbird” from A Ghost is Born CD (who themselves are now considered to be “boundary-pushing”). And there are bands like The Jayhawks who have a natural harmony that can at times, and at their best (say, the 1995 Tomorrow the Green Grass CD), sound reminiscent of that distinctive Beatles harmony. But I’m pretty excited by my de-familiarized listening to The Beatles and how they laid claim to so many distinctive sounds for, well, the rest of rock n’ roll history when it comes down to it.

Does this sound like 1966?

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