Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: The Last 68 Seconds of "Rock Show" by Paul McCartney

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Failed Letter of Recommendation: Let it Be (The Movie)

For some reason, Matt Domino writes an essay about the Beatles documentary "Let it Be."

Failed Letter of Recommendation: The Pipe Organ

For some reason, Matt Domino writes an essay about the pipe organ.

The Normcore of Paul McCartney

Your guide to Paul McCartney's perfectly normal legacy in the 1970's.

Nilsson Week: Domino and Stern Discuss Nilsson, Part 2

To conclude Nilsson week, we now give you Part 2 of the conversation between Matt Domino and David Stern, who might be two of the biggest Harry Nilsson fans under the age of 40.

The Importance of Being Al

David Stern (@davidaaronstern) explains why "Weird" Al Yankovic might be the most important musical artist of all-time.

Puddles of My Mad Men: "Lady Lazarus"

Once again, Matt Domino shills his weekly "Mad Men" column at the Montreal Review as well as give a brief state of Puddles address.

Pop Goes My Heart: David Stern Analyzes Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know"

The Stern Man, David Stern, takes off his podcast robe and slips on his Guest Columnist undergarments to dissect the pop merits of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011, (1961-1970)

We continue with the sixth installment of the World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011 list, which covers the years 1961-1970.

Free Forest City Redemption Project Day 9: Two Marbles

We are on Day 9 of the Free Forest Redemption Project.  Today's track marks the beginning of the stretch run for the actual album itself, which is eleven tracks long. I will also be posting three bonus tracks for you to download and enjoy as well. Today's track is "Two Marbles." It has nothing to do with the Japanese baseball player (Isuro Tanaka from Major League II fame due to his quote "You ain't got no marbles!") that you see above, but I thought we could diversity some of the headline pictures. In any case, this song revs us up for the end of the album and features some Byrds/Beatles '65-era guitar work from Ted Robinson towards the end of the track.  See for yourself.

Enjoy "Two Marbles."

Twenty Years Ago Today?

When I was in tenth grade, I resumed taking lessons from a math tutor.  I had originally used the tutor before I went to middle school in order to prepare me for the supposed leap in the difficulty of the work.  My tutor was a kind woman who had been a high school math teacher for years.  She taught in a different, tougher, school district of mine so she had honed a firm but warm teaching style.  She had children that went through my own school district as well, though they were quite a few years older than I was.  In any event, I had grown quite fond of her as a maternal figure (my mother was a terrific mother, but no matter how good our mothers and fathers are, we are always looking for similar figures out in the world) and felt quite happy to resume my lessons with her in preparation for taking the New York State Math Regents Part II, since it had become painfully obvious that at age 15 my mind was already extremely bored with math and would simply not pay attention to it.

This math tutor lived in a neighborhood that you wouldn’t call “across town,” but it was certainly across the train trestle and located about a mile or two from where my house was.  Her home sat on the hill above one of the other elementary schools that had fed into my former middle school (an elementary school whose back playing fields I would become quite acquainted with later on in high school when my friend moved to a house through the woods behind the school, where we would drag stolen kegs of beer from his basement and drink out underneath the stars and in the mist – but that is another image for another story and another album) and once or twice a week, my mother would drop me off at her cozy home that always carried the fading warmth of a dinner cooked, mixed with that faint, rich matronly smell of perfume that any woman over the age of fifty-five or sixty seems to carry.  The math teacher and I had known each other for a certain amount of years at this point and I was developing a dry sense of humor that had equal effects on adults as it did on people I went to school with, so we were able to joke around and, before you knew it, the hour lesson was over and I had my TI whatever packed up in my disintegrating Jansport backpack.

Now, at this time, my mother had started going back to school to become a teacher; I couldn’t drive yet; my younger sister had begun to participate in more after school activities; and my father continued to work late in order to properly run his business.  All of this led to the inevitable decision that I should walk home from my math lessons.  I had already been friends with a group of guys that took pride in walking long distances among the Three Villages that made up the town in which I lived; crossing busy roads; stealing cars; and engaging in the sort of intoxication that didn’t really seem to fit our years. So, this ability to walk myself home from my math lessons in the twilight of May fit in with everything else that was going on in my life.

The first time I left my lesson, my math tutor asked me if my mother was picking me up.  I told her no.

“Your mother?” she asked.  This of course came as a surprise because my mother was tenacious in her drive to live up to her matriarchal duties.

I nodded in the affirmative.  My father had to work late hours, she had to go to class and my sister needed to be picked up from her events and activities since she was younger.  I didn’t mind walking home and my mother knew this. She seemed to understand this sort of familial crossroads, being a mother of three herself, and patted me on the back as a firefly or three lit up in the grey light above the pavement of the cul-de-sac she lived in.  As I turned and placed the headphones of my Discman over my ears, she yelled something at me.  She was prone to yelling, of course in only a most endearing way.

“What?” I pulled off the headphones.

“Be careful with those things,” she said. “It’s a dangerous turn on the back way.  Cars won’t see you and you won’t hear them.”

“Ok,” I said, seriously.

“Don’t go the back way,” she said. “Go the longer way.”

I nodded my head and said I would.  Then I turned back and headed up the hill of her cul-de-sac and out into the remaining neighborhood as it turned that terrific color of gloaming that only hits its peak in May and June before the streetlight orange of July and August truly dominate one’s child or adolescent vision of the summer night.

Now, at this time I had been participating in certain extra-curricular activities with my friends at poolside, in side yards, on the beach and under bushes that were not necessarily smiled upon.  Under the guise of studying, we shouted European capitals and events for AP History while jumping into a pool amid a faint, sweet trail of smoke.  After one of these events, my friend had left a burnt copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the stereo by my pool.  I had never really listened to the Beatles up until then, other than the culturally omniscient songs (I know they all are) such as “Yellow Submarine,” “Hey Jude,” “Revolution,” “Twist and Shout,” “Hello Goodbye,” “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I had picked up their Blue Volume of hits from 1967-1970 and was beginning to digest that, but it wasn’t really a comprehensive listening experience.  So, when this album, with its legendary title written in red Sharpie, appeared in my stereo, I decided to place it in my Discman, where it would remain for the rest of that summer.

I walked through my math tutor’s neighborhood and looked at the wood-sided homes with their fresh white paint trim, their drooping wisterias and hyacinths and felt the itch of grass from the street while the searing guitar of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” band filled my head and Paul screamed among the horns, fanfare and crowd noise.  At that time, I had no thorough love and devotion to the intricacies of Paul McCartney’s voice or its evolution from 1963 to 1973. I only knew that I loved the richness of the backing track; rich because of the variety of sounds, not because of the quality, which I now know was very inferior, however, then there were horns and guitar and harmonies and it sounded so far-away, so much a part of history that it grabbed my imagination. What grabbed my imagination, too, was the seamless segue of that title track into “A Little Help From My Friends.” There he was, Billy Shears, Ringo, taking this character and bringing him to life if only for a song.  And for a moment, it was like a story, and I loved stories. I loved concepts, I loved big ideas.  I, who had nearly destroyed his reputation in school by writing a one act play in iambic pentameter about a girl he had a crush on and distributing it to the entire school. This was important stuff.

And, as I came to the wide bend where one could continue straight and go the long way down Gnarled Hollow Road or go down the big hill and save some time by meeting up with the busier and curvier Old Town Road, I decided to go down the hill – because my math tutor had told me not to. Lights in the windows of homes, below the heavy leaf-lines of trees, became more prevalent.  The orange streetlights came on and so too did the evening sprinklers, projecting their spray out, wasteward, to the street where the water collected in streams and then pools, that turned some strange deep purple in the evening’s light. And I listened to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and thought about all of the terrific imagery and the psychedelic feeling of the song.  At that time I had already become familiar with the myths and histories of psychedelia and as I walked along listening to one of the “pinnacles” of psychedelic-pop, there was some feeling deep inside of myself that appreciated this walking, the feel of my feet on the gravel, the kick of the small pebbles along the off-white of the curb, more than those visions I had read some much about and pursued. 

At that time, my favorite song was “Lovely Rita,” and it was a remarkable song of the every day. A song that celebrated a meter maid of all people and how lovely and enchanting she was.  However, even in that everyday occurrence, something bizarre occurred and the narrator found himself sitting on the couch with a sister or two. In its coda, the song turned into a bizarre collage of moaning and panting, however, before it there had been soaring vocals and those helium-sounding harmonies that could only be described by my inexperienced mind as “Beatlesque.”  That song just sounded like The Beatles to me and it made sense.  It soared and it always came on just as I was reaching the bend by the train trestle, across the street from one of those small farms that had been obscured by the improvement of roads and the insertion of train tracks.  And the cars did fly past and it was night, and you could see the open space where they had inserted power-lines, that open space that used to be farm fields and something in me soared along with this “Lovely Rita.”

I read later that summer, after my initial springtime experiences with Sgt. Pepper, an article that Allen Ginsberg wrote after listening to the album.  He claimed it was an album that celebrated the everyday.  That it was not an album of the psychedelic experience, but an album that cherished those sensations that we can gain from moving about our day.  This should not have been a surprise from the band that created “Penny Lane.” Now, the argument could be that that was Paul McCartney and not John Lennon, the John Lennon that wrote “Strawberry Fields.”  However, although John claimed his songs were all throwaways on Sgt. Pepper even he was involved in the everyday.  “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” has ordinary objects that become fantastical hallucinations, “Good Morning, Good Morning” is about a person conducting their daily routine, going by their old school and realizing that nothing has changed.  “A Day in the Life” is probably the perfect example of being concerned with the everyday. It’s title says it all.  And it focuses on the everyday just as much as any novel or short story in the modernist tradition of literature.  The newspaper is the object that allows us to enter a gateway of kaleidoscopic hallucination of the mind, that turns ordinary things in our realm into the powerful signifiers of human history and emotion.  After Paul takes his turn waking up and dragging a comb across his head we are taken to what could be the pinnacle of pop music with the soaring “ahhhhhh” section before we are brought back into John Lennon’s narrator explaining the last item he saw in the news that day.  And as the final piano chord would sound, I’d still be about another mile from home and thinking of encountering those strange feelings of “Getting Better,” and the bittersweet heartbreak of “She’s Leaving Home,” where an ordinary family is broken up by a girl leaving home.  So, all I could do was to hit the stop button and then the play button so that the album would start in its entirety all over again and each little nuance, each vocal and melodic hook would become embedded in my brain as I passed town landmarks: my friend Dan’s house, the Country Corner Bar, the Setauket Automotive, the Se Port Deli, Fox’ Hardware Store, the Korean War Monument, the Field, Jay’s House, Rich’s House, the Rowe Tavern Sign, the Abandoned House.  All of these things and places were a part of my everyday and I’d see them bathed in the orange and purple swaths of the May or June evening, with the fireflies marking their territory in and around the dark space of the night. The crickets would sing and chirp when I’d pause the album to check my back, but of course no one was there, not even the ghosts that would later appear as I grew older and went to college and got drunker.  And by the time the album finished a second time, I was plodding my feet against the cement as I entered the cul-de-sac where I lived.  Sometimes the lights would be on, sometimes they would be off, but I’d always be coming home with the sound of music in my ear, that last piano chord.  Then’ I’d pull the headphones off my head and let my little puppy out into the yard to eat dirt and rocks and I’d smell the mulch around my mother’s flowerbeds and think of summer vacation.

That is what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was for me then.  It was some slight signal that what I thought was experimental and psychedelic was really just the outskirts of the everyday. That album is a celebration of the life around us.  The funny sounds we can make, the strange occurrences that we read in the newspaper, found phrases, things that become fantastic, like a meter maid in her silly uniform, who in reality is a freak in the bed, as is her sister, her roommate.  They said that it ushered in the Summer of Love.  Perhaps that is true; because of it gives off a feeling of open-arms, embracing different levels of life.  For me, it opened up one of the better summers of my life. A summer I spent walking all over the place, spending time with girls, swimming and continuing my extra-curricular activities.  So, in a way, it did open up some kind of Summer of Love, whatever that means.  Perhaps there is no such thing as a Summer of Love, because those kinds of things are repeatable, they are really only about how you approach the everyday with open arms, the people you see on the street with a warm-feeling.  If that happens, then the rest is usually easy.

Now, I listen to Sgt. Pepper’s and it has been beautifully remastered along with the rest of the Beatles catalogue.  I have approached the album from a variety of mindsets, perspectives and points of life. I still love it in some strange way.  However, now with the bass so fluid, round and prominent and every overdub so clear and shining over the speakers of my living room or on my headphones I see something deeper.  My friend recently told me, when he heard the remastered Beatles, that he’d still prefer the old muddled versions. I understood his point, that he liked the sounds he’d known and grown up with, and respectfully called him an idiot.  I explained to him that you want to enjoy something in the best sound that you can, you want to enjoy these albums in the way that they, perhaps, were intended to sound in the moment: clear, full, complicated and rich with sound and music. In these new, rich, remastered versions, I listen to a song like “With a Little Help from My Friends” and the bass, the drums and the solid mid-tempo rhythm are so much more up front than they ever were; the song picks up a relevance that it never had before for me.  For, when I was younger, it signaled a greater idea and concept (which I found out was a failed endeavor). It also signaled a call to your friends.  That you could all band together and help each other out through the hard times.  And perhaps it all means that still – and part of me believes it.  Yet, I still can’t help but see it as another cry for help.  A self-reflective look at how far an individual has come in life and how much he or she is able to remain happy when they have to face themselves, or find themselves alone for even a second.  And sometimes not even your friends can assist you with that.  For, as much as the melodic bass and the overall Beatles feel of the song makes you tap your foot and bob your head along with the melody; makes you feel as though you are on some television program in 1967 and just as famous as the Beatles themselves, there is something more desperate and complicated there, something more Replacements than Beatles, or at least what we identify the Beatles as being.  These new remastered versions not only make the songs sound as they perhaps were always supposed to sound, they in many ways seem to reveal the true intent of the songs as well, especially a song like “With a Little Help From My Friends.”

Even if that isn’t the true meaning of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” my feelings about the album remain the same.  As I find myself in the peak of yet another summer, at the pinnacle of heat, I look back fondly at the May and June that it was borne out of and ahead to the late-August and September that it will inevitably fade into.  I think of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and what it meant as a Summer of Love at one point to a generation; what it meant as part of an idyllic summer to one guy; and what it meant to a band at one point who were questioning their own existence and their own enjoyment of what exactly what they were doing. How they ventured into the kaleidoscopic ability of the everyday, the enjoyment of the imagination in order to create an art.  Those kinds of things will never get old.  I will always appreciate those virtues; no matter what kind of antics I seem to take pride in.

Friends 2

I’m going to write about Rafael Nadal winning Wimbledon another evening during this brutally hot week.  For now, there are other things I need to address, but there is something elemental about his struggles and achievement in all of this – at least I suppose so.

As someone who has spent the majority of his youth trying to understand the  impossibility of friendship rather than comprehend the fathoms of love, I again found myself, the day after the Fourth of July, staring into the azure blue of the deep end of my childhood pool and cleaning dirt and mulch from the shimmering bottom.  This isn’t to say that I never enjoyed cleaning my pool – in fact I always have loved it in some strange way.  I’ve loved it because you can stand outside in the heat, away from your neighbors and listen to the radio in private.  You can become the shrieking heretic in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the snide hipster of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then when you’re done, you can jump in the pool, submerge the heat and the sounds of the radio, only to emerge once more, pleasantly surprised by the heat of the air and the slick feeling of your hair as you push it or flick it back on your head.  Then, if you choose to, you can get out and touch the soles of your feet to the bricks that your parents paid for to surround the pool.  Or, if you choose to, you can simply float.

Jay Gatsby was shot in a pool, but I was never anything like him, though I did think I could’ve made an admirable Nick Carraway.  What I always admired about the whole mess that led to Gatsby’s demise, besides the idea of creating an image of yourself and building an identity in America, was the illusive notion of friendship that Nick Carraway seemed to identify with the Gatsby.  This idea was recently resuscitated with an almost equal level of eloquence by Joseph O’Neill in his novel Netherland.  These are both novels about men who are lost and who are able to find out truths about themselves by making acquaintances with two different criminals.  Gatsby is by all means a high level bootlegger and gambler as we are led to believe, while Chuck Ramkissoon runs an intricate but low-level Caribbean “lottery” throughout New York City. These narrators, Nick Carraway and Hans, are both looking to make an identity for themselves in New York, and have lost touch or have chosen to the lose touch with the places they came from. For Nick, that is the Midwest, for Hans it is London and his native Netherlands. Hans actually has a wife that he is estranged from, where Nick Carraway looks for love with the distant, independent, and modern female tennis player (see, I told you Nadal was in here!) Jordan Baker.  Because their love lives are unreliable, they look to notions of friendship they find in unreliable males.  Both Hans and Nick are able to find the sensations of masculinity in male friendship in both Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon: feeling privileged to be in the other’s company, the sense of adventure of moving about in the world with the other, the sense of sharing a similar desolation, the ability to drink a beer in the sun and share a private moment.  However, each one is left grasping at what their friendship meant or could have done after their “friend” has been murdered in each story.  Nick Carraway tells us in the beginning of The Great Gatsby that he wants no more “privileged glimpses into the hearts of other men.”  That, in essence, is what male friendship boils down to.

These similar tropes have been seen in the work of Jack Kerouac, whom I think in the 21st century should be madatory reading for elementary school boys instead of Treasure Island and that kind of book.  The Duluoz Legend of Keroauc’s mind’s eye represents the what should be the new “adventure book.”  Kids know about all the dirty things earlier now anyway, why should they not read about unbridled enthusiasm and driving across the country, climbing mountains, driving in cars, when they are young and are forced to be driven around by their parents.  No one wrote better about a fall day coming home from school and eating peanut butter crackers with milk than Kerouac anyway.  He was a maudlin and unapologetic nostaligist.  And, he often depicted the search for friendship in the cast of characters in one’s life better than most writers in any medium.  You may find him amateurish and by all means he certainly is, but even in the most amateur of technique, or brutish sensibilities, we can find the truths of the world.  The friendship between Kerouac and Neal Cassidy as it was fictionalized or marginalized by Kerouac’s work is something that should be admired as the representation of a relationship between two people in this world, two friends, two men trying to make sense of the years and whims that rose up within them and without them.

So, because of novels like these, I spent much of my youth looking for that kernel of truth in friendship, in male friendship that would answer me some kind of question.  What does it truly mean to be a friend to someone?  How does one get by when those friends have to travel and move on to do the different things with their lives?  What happens when our adventures end? Do our adventures ever end? Is it even possible to love somebody else?  These are the questions that the illusive search for friendship can raise up in your mind.  And I spent much time cleaning my pool and thinking about these types of things.  I found myself doing the same thing the day after this past Fourth of July because I had a variety of friends staying at my home from different levels of life: elementary school, junior high and high school, college, and post college.  Some of them knew each other very well, some of them knew me very well, some didn’t and vice versa.  Yet, we all got along and had a memorable time.  The kind of time that sticks to your memory and leaves the details there, so, that even if you are one who loses tracks of the details to distinct places and “times” easily, you would be able to recall the year, the light and perhaps who was even there.  And of course, when it was all over, when the beer and other litter had been dragged to the curb, I was there cleaning the pool, thinking about all that had happened and all of the fun that had ended.  The radio played and the mercury in the temperature inched closer and closer to 100 degrees – ambition echoed hollow In my gut and I just wanted to be finished with it all and be able to swim.  I wanted to run out into the shade and the swaying of the trees and the heat.  After that, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen – I just wanted that.

Then, a song I had been longing to hear came on the radio.  It was “Mother” by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band.  I, thinking of friends, of course thought of The Beatles and about how stories end and how we move on as I have written about before.  If you have listened to Plastic Ono Band it is all about moving on and how we do it in the different areas and through the different traumas of our lives.  I grew up loving the album, because when I was younger, I related to John Lennon more than any of The Beatles just like most kids do.  You gravitate towards John Lennon because he was the “smart one.”  All the Beatles were funny, but he had the quickest and most biting wit.  He made the bold statements.  He was the leader.  You don’t think about the finer shades that you do the longer you spend with the Beatles: “Paul was the most melodic,” “Paul was the most natural musician,” “George’s songwriting was held back just look at All Things Must Pass,” “I agree with George’s pragmaticism and spirituality more than with anything harsh that John had to say, or simple that Paul had to say.” When you are young, you love John Lennon, because that is what time has taught us about the Beatles.

And I loved John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band because he said all the bold things, because he screamed in his John Lennon way and because he made hooks out of the syllables in his verses in that singular John Lennon/Beatles/mostly John Lennon way (just listen to “Mother” when he says “Sooo, ayyyyyeee”).  However, I loved it the most because no matter what I was going through, I could listen to it and feel clean again.  It was like getting a haircut for your soul.  That image seems demeaning, but the sentiment is true.  Whenever you go for a haircut, you go for that feeling of newness, of freshness. “With this haircut, I’m going to do something. I’m going to impress someone. Something’s gonna be different.”  Whenever I put on Plastic Ono Band that is the intent that I have. From the refrain of “Mother” when Lennon says “So, I/I just have to tell you/Goodbye, goodbye” to the thrilling coda when he screams “Momma don’t go/Daddy come home” you know that he is losing the demons and  whatever yours may be, you can lose them to with his screams and with the hypnotic piano and drums. Then we get to “I Found Out” where John tells whoever is listening that “I’ve seen the junkets/I’ve been through it all/I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul/Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/No one can harm you/Feel your own pain.” And of course he throws the double entendre in there with the loaded word “Paul,” making you think just a little bit harder about what he means because he is saying it with such conviction.  As the album veers from harsher commentary to the brooding slower numbers such as “Love,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Look At Me,” you get the ultimate sense of someone stripping themselves to the essentials.  There are no comments on what friendship is or what love is, besides to say that “Love is real/Real is love.”  This effect is refreshing since there is no overarching statement leading you in a direction.  Love is real, is merely an indicator of a feeling.  Because even John probably didn’t even know what it was that he was calling his love with Yoko Ono at that time.

Then, of course we get to “God,” which has always been one of my favorite songs of all time because it doesn’t let you get away with anything.  Now, many people may call this song merely self-important sermonizing, but I can’t stress how powerful I used to find this song and how necessary I still find it.  How often to you address a statement to God that could be addressed to the earth or to something more definite, when all you are doing is trying to measure out the amount of pain or confusion you are feeling?  How often to you place meaning on a false idol of any kind, God or anything else?  When John lists through the names of all the things he doesn’t believe in anymore, all the icons that he is tearing down, it is timeless in a careening way of never letting yourself get consumed in the things that you have consumed your time with.  It is an exercise in separation, in distance and in seeing something from a new perspective.  When punk music came around, they did the same thing, in a less eloquent and less conscious way.  They wanted to tear down icons because it looked cool, not because it trapped them.  This is all the stuff of James Joyce.  There should be no nets that trap you.  All our Elvis’, our Zimmermans, our Kennedys, and our Beatles need to be overthrown at every turn because they are wait rein is in to saying “we can’t.” Those images and icons, while showing us what is possible, also indicate to us that there is something that we can’t or shouldn’t do or that we aren’t capable of doing, but we are always more than capable.  So we have to get rid of what we’ve already known from time to time, we need to start over again to remember that there is only us in the end and that’s all that there ever was to begin with.  That is the haircut that allows us to see what we’ve been consumed with better than we’ve ever been able to see it before.  That allows us to understand what our love is; what the feelings of friendship we are longing to define are.

This was supposed to be a manual on cleaning pools, but now its about cleaning something else.  I guess what it’s all about is realizing that the Midwest of your youth never really existed, that no matter how many books you read, how many words you learn, you’ll never come upon that word known to all men, you’ll never truly understand how to describe the impossibility of friendship or the fathoms and blue shades of love.  All you can do is remember all of the things that brought you to a certain point and then try to forget them all, try to forget the way you saw them so that you can see them in the way that they really are.  Because in the end, its all about what you can accomplish and very often you can’t accomplish much without other people, but with them you can often lose yourself by forgetting what’s important or forgetting how you see them. So, you have to get a haircut from time to time – alter that identity and those identifications, if ever so slighlty, in order to keep chasing what you’ll never be able to fully capture.

Actually, this was a pitch for a new TV show called Friends 2.

Crossing Abbey Road

There are two sources I use to find out all I need to know about rock and roll music: my soul and Allmusic.com.  This is what the Allmusic.com biography for the Beatles says:

So much has been said and written about the Beatles — and their story is so mythic in its sweep — that it's difficult to summarize their career without restating clichés that have already been digested by tens of millions of rock fans. To start with the obvious, they were the greatest and most influential act of the rock era, and introduced more innovations into popular music than any other rock band of the 20th century. Moreover, they were among the few artists of any discipline that were simultaneously the best at what they did and the most popular at what they did.

This quote is absolutely on point regarding writing or speaking anything about the Beatles. Like John sang in “All You Need is Love,” when it comes to the Beatles there’s nothing you can do that can’t or hasn’t been done.  However, like that statement also implies, the same fact holds true for life in general.  That is why when I finally decided that I had to write about the Beatles in some way on this blog, I knew I had to just jump right in and write about them headlong. Obviously, you can write about any number of the Beatles’ albums.  They each contain pleasures that are revealed upon each listen; they are each enjoyable; and they each require multiple listens.  The one album that has always fascinated me for its elevated mystique and stature as a cultural icon within the Beatles catalogue has been Abbey Road. Now, I know that it is nearly impossible to raise one Beatles album or song above the others in mystique or in iconic nature, but I truly believe that there is some quality about Abbey Road that does just that. It stands alone in album history – there is no other that sounds like it.  It sounded simultaneously of time and out of time with the world of 1969-1970 and opened the door for the overproduction of the 1970’s when the music was placed in lesser hands.  It leaves one to wonder what the Beatles would have done had they stayed together.

But first we have to begin with the album itself and you have to start with the artwork.  The image of the Beatles walking across the crosswalk outside of the Abbey Road Studios has been imprinted on t-shirts, blankets and banners all across the world. Moreso than the inner artwork for The White Album, it shows the Beatles as the individuals that they were becoming.  The image was interpreted as an “Italian funeral procession” and mythologized in the Beatles canon for the perceived messages regarding the supposed death of Paul McCartney towards the end of the Beatles’ time as a band.  It is a clean, balanced image with a sense of depth. It is an everyday image on which the mythological and the supernatural can be imposed: that is the quality that all great works of art achieve, namely (haha!) James Joyce’s Ulysses. When I was younger, and had my initial delusions of writing a novel, I came up with a concept for a novel that would revolve around a young boy who loved a band (a fictional version of the Beatles) so much that he sought them each out individually after they had broken up in an attempt to have them reunite.  The album image I used as the focal point to describe the band in the initial pages of an ill-fated draft, was a rip-off of the Abbey Road cover.  That is exactly what sets Abbey Road apart; it is that element of story that the album artwork emits.  The album benefits from being the last recorded album in the band’s chronology so one can see it as an end, which allows the story itself to then become fully formed. Abbey Road shows four individuals growing from boys or young men, through the guise of friendship (a band) into adult individuals.  The Beatles were a cocoon that allowed each member to emerge as their individual self, fully formed and tinted with their own color and personality.  Abbey Road is the point when you realize that original form is truly and utterly gone. When I describe why I enjoy the Beatles to other people, I say it is because it is the closest real life has ever come to a fairy tale; the closest real life has ever come to fitting in place. Abbey Road for its cover art and the strange wistful feeling of the music that lies within its grooves and tracks captures that wistful notion of wanting to go back to the beginning of a story; of not wanting to say goodbye to the characters; it is the end of a novel, the end of the saga, and although our characters continue on, they do not exist in the same way that we knew them. Abbey Road is what completes that image of the Beatles as a band and in turn allows the image of the band as story – the band as fairy tale.

The Beatles began, like most bands of the 60’s did, as a band that focused on singles.  That is exactly what Side 1 of the album accomplishes.  Each song is a snapshot of what the band meant when they were all together as a unit, as an object that they were directly seen and consumed as.  “Come Together” is a classic example of John’s self-deprecating wit and word games.  However, here, unlike his solo career, the groove feels slinkier rather than sparse or slick, which were the two poles his solo career veered between.  And in the remastered version, the song has an overall immediate groove to the rhythm section that the original recording sorely lacked. Paul’s harmonies on the verses give the song a sonic depth that much of John’s solo work only grasped at with either heavy-handed production or excess echo (which did work in certain instances). George’s slide guitar playing would also be missed on much of John’s solo work, or, if said instrument was present, was terribly overproduced. “Something” is soulful, spiritual and universal without being too preachy as George was often wont to do when he was out on his own. Although All Things Must Pass is arguably the best solo Beatles album, and on it, George often sings very direct lyrics, he was never more direct in his message and lyricism than on this track. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” although detested by the band has a McCartney playfulness that lacks the sap that would almost surely have been featured in the final product had he gone about recording the track himself.  There is something in the brief guitar bite in the chorus and the devilishness of the over innocence of the backing vocals that Paul could only accomplish as a part of The Beatles. The same sentiment goes for “Oh, Darling!”  Paul came close to duplicating the effect on both “Baby I’m Amazed” and “Monkberry Moon Delight,” however each track was either too schlocky (the former) or too repetitive and nonsensical, albeit rocking (the latter). “Octopus’ Garden” features Ringo’s inspired writing to see a concept through as well as the support of the entire Beatles cast, rather than just one or two as most of Ringo’s solo albums did, which leads to its success; that and George’s excellent guitar playing, especially the catchy little guitar line at the end of his solo.  John could have only successfully pulled off “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” in the Beatles.  If he was solo, the guitar wouldn’t be as melodic and he would have lacked the almost “round” backing vocals that help the chorus build into a steady storm that eventually will become the track’s coda. Without George and Paul (and of course Ringo) this would have been a more one-dimensional rocker that many of John’s solo albums would feature. And with the brimming confidence of the moniker the Beatles, comes the ability to cut the tape at the very end of the side.

Unlike The White Album, we do not necessarily see the Beatles as complete separate entities on Abbey Road. It has been well documented that Abbey Road was acknowledged by the Beatles as being the last album that they would record together, so perhaps that plays a great part in their taking a posture as being “a band.” The acrimony between the members was well documented by the time they reconvened to record the album and each member had his own desires of being a grown adult individual, as we all surely do when we come to a certain age. And that is where “The Medley” comes in.

Side 2 is known more or less as “The Medley.”  We all know how terrific a song “Here Comes the Sun Is” and in the remastered version, its sonic power is even more evident and unstoppable than originally heard.  As for “Because,” well, Paul could finally say that he really beat Brian Wilson at his own game – although it was a John song. What we really come to Side 2 for is “The Medley.”  Allow me to tell a story.  Last weekend, I had to leave a friend’s barbeque in Westchester in order to make it to Park Slope for another barbeque.  This friend was visiting from Texas and so a bunch of us went up to his family’s home to enjoy the afternoon and the charcoal smoke.  I, like I often find myself doing, helped myself to a bevy of afternoon beers.  When it was time to catch the 6:52 train, I found myself jogging away from my friend’s home at 6:42 towards the train station, which was just down the hill.  I ran down the hill breathing in the cool air of the May evening. Young girls, presumably without driver’s licenses, passed me, talking on the street; talking probably of what boys they liked or what tests they had or even how to score a bag of pot.  I jogged and crossed a creek, pausing midway when I saw a clearing just adjacent to the creek itself, where the sunlight filtered through the trees.  There was warmth, there was light and there was coolness. The shape of the space made me want to run to it, but I needed to run to the train instead, which I did.  I boarded the train and as it barreled back to New York City, I sat slouched in my seat looking out the window.  I was daytime drunk and feeling pleased.  The light filtered through trees as I passed them rapidly.  I felt a certain freshness, a sense of being alive, of how big New York City was and of how much it encompassed.  How this motion of riding a Metro North train down to Grand Central Station was inherent in New York.  I rode while listening to “The Medley” and its vague sense of melancholy.  One does not gain very much from listening to the Beatles’ lyrics.  At best, they grope at an obtuse poetry that merely aims to please.  However, the Beatles succeeded so well because they could mix melody and put a phrase to it to make it sound profound, which is what “The Medley” perfectly exemplifies. “Out of college money spent/See no future, pay no rent/All the money’s gone, nowhere to go/But, oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.”  That sequence from “You Never Give Me Your Money” seems to have nothing to do with the song as a whole.  However, it fits nicely with the melancholy of the melody.  There is a wistfulness to it all, that, when riding on a train or a bus in the dimming sunlight of a late spring evening, makes you think of leaving college behind, makes you think of those green idyllic lawns of your college education and of the route you now find yourself on.  What would you do to go back there?  What would you give to be able to continue to leave it behind?

Further, there is the refrain of “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time” from “Carry that Weight.”  This line obviously has no direct correlation to the rest of the medley about Polythene Pam (my favorite Beatles song) or Mean Mr. Mustard or “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”  Yet, it sounds profound, because, yes, we are all going to carry a weight through our lives.  That weight is usually that nostalgia to get back to that time that came before – the beginning of the story. Now, perhaps Paul didn’t mean that when he wrote these lyrics. However, there is something that strikes you as true about “once there was a way to get back home.”  For some reason, there seems to be no real way to get back home and that’s what all our greatest literature and music seem to echo. Abbey Road magnifies this because of its falling into place at the end of the Beatles catalogue and makes one think of the simpler times.  The Beatles as young boys before all of the music business games they had to play and their identity as cultural and global icons. “The Medley” manages to pull this effect off through its melody, which changes hue from melancholy to triumphant with “The End.” There was no better way to end an album than with each band member (I know, I know, not Ringo) taking a turn at guitar solos.  That just makes sense as a swan song. Paired with Paul’s lyrics, which have since become a modern day proverb, of “And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make” and you have what is perhaps the perfect coda to a career.

So, then, that weight is not just the want to go back, it is that greater sensation that we have to love others or to love a time and to feel that love again when the weather is warm and the sunlight falls in such a way that it reminds of something within ourselves, it reminds us as Joyce once said, “of that word known to all men.” What that word is, can be interpreted in many ways, but it is that feeling that makes us feel those overarching senses of longing and melancholy and love, which a train ride, while drunk during the day can certainly make you feel. Especially as you feel stuck in between the vastness of New York, its sense of history and the impossibility of your future and some image of an idyllic past that most likely belongs to a work of fiction. This is what well-placed phrases can do when mixed with a melancholy melody.

Before I conclude, I just want to mention the Extras Special, which was in fact the finale to Ricky Gervais’ show Extras. Extras explored the notion of fame and loyalty and the decision a person or artist has to make about whether they want to be creatively viable or famous. The Extras Special is perhaps the best television I have ever seen in my life and it fits nicely into the idea of the weight that we carry. At some point, we have to decide what we actually want out of life and our creative endeavors. I have had no level of notoriety at all for my creative work, but I know different people at different levels of creative achievement in different areas of the arts and I see these crossroads rapidly approaching in different directions. How does one remain creatively viable and successful? It is nearly an impossible feat to achieve and at some point, you have to remember that pride can only be carried in bulk for a certain amount of years before you have to make room for other priorities.  I don’t know if this blog will catch on with anyone or if this writing will, but I want to avoid a fate of ignorance.

This post may not be very enlightening and, to be frank, there is very often nothing enlightening about the Beatles.  They simply trusted in themselves and made the smartest creative decision in the moment.  When they recorded “Long, Long, Long” on The White Album there was a wine bottle on top of one of the pianos in the studio.  As the piano was played during the recording, the glass of the bottle made a groaning sound, which George imitated in the song. This gives the song a better sense of longing, which makes it more powerful.  Trusting coincidence and leaving yourself open to creative opportunities will create success.  Will there be another Beatles? Of course not, it was a fairy tale.  A mixture of timing, coincidence, talent and friendship.  Those four virtues are hard to come by.  However, that is not enlightening. I love the Beatles.  They made the most enjoyable music I can think of, they seemed to make every smart decision possible. The Beatles were able to balance creative viability with success and that is the weight you have to carry as you grow older.  Abbey Road makes you think of what the Beatles could have accomplished had they remained together as band, however the truth is that they never would have remained together. But maybe one of the reasons that we keep coming back to the album is because we like to think that perhaps there was a chance they could have. We keep coming back to Abbey Road because there is the fairy tale; there we don’t have to grow up and leave our friends and have to make decisions between success and loyalty, creative viability or economic survival; there we don’t have to take that uncertain step into adulthood and the mature (hopefully) individualism that lies there. That is the weight that we must certainly carry as we try to find that balance in our lives, while we ride on trains in dimming sunlight back and forth between cities.

RED ROSE SPEEDWAY

Basketball season is heating up and we are getting towards the playoffs. Some interesting storylines need to be discussed, but that will come at another time. "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie" from Little Feat's first album is playing now and I feel the energy to write about Red Rose Speedway - Paul McCarney's fourth solo album.

I know I have mentioned this album a lot on this blog if any of you follow it. I know one guy does because he wrote a comment so I thank you Lautreamont, my first blog commentator. Anyway, Red Rose Speedway is pretty shitty by most people's standards I would think, but not for me. My good friend Nick Mencia was always raving about it while I was in the majority, raving about Ram, which most people consider the only bearable (aka not too sticky sweet though very semisweet chocoloate) Paul solo album. So I picked up the album and gave it a listen.

When first song "Big Barn Bed" comes on you are in full 70's mode. The sound is terrific I think and I am no real judge other than I like to listen to a lot of music and I know what I like. So when I hear chiming acoustic guitars, a slinky electric guitar and some good drums and bass with Paul singing in funny voices and running his voice all over his register, I know it's a great song. See, really Big Barn Bed could sum up all of McCartney solo and it was what he was really all about even though he had his missteps like anyone - I mean Lennon's shit sucked a lot of the time, lets be honest and he is my second favorite singer of all time - fun. McCartney had all the tools and he wanted to have fun with his music. Overproduced? Who cares? Too sweet for you? Who cares?

The second song "My Love" is absolutely too sweet. Overproduced as hell with a line that YOU could not make up "When the cupboard's bare, my love's still there." If you were that smart then you would not be reading these words about this song or even writing the words about the song - you would be a billionaire riding across the country in an old Ford Bronco.

"Get On the Right Thing," the third song, is my favorite song. Its a classic Paul rocker with some of the best lines in the history of rock music. "All at once you get love on your mind and your world is as unkind as a penny." That is just one line of genius. But while those kind of lines are going on, someone is playing ungodly Ringoesque drums and we have soul singers backing Paul and Paul is playing some honky tonk/Ray Charles piano. Then the drums really kick, the piano pounds, the soul singers belt it out and Paul starts putting on the Lady Madonna/Abbey Road medley voice that we all know and love. We get more of this and Little Richard shrieking for a blissful 4 minutes or so - I don't have the time in front of me.

Next is the country ditty "One More Kiss," which is so effortlessly melodic and perfect only Paul would've written it.

Fifth, is "Little Lamb Dragonfly." With a title like that and with Paul behind the wheel, you know this is one melancholy son of a bitch. A wistful acoustic guitar brings it in and then the strings swell and take over. Soon melodramatic horns are blowing and Paul is singing in some weird voice you never heard in the Beatles, like a strange opera singer. The song cascades and finishes, and I bet you (insert number) dollars that you will be humming this song when you walk down the street for a week after you hear it. Even if one lyric is "Dragonfly, fly by my window. You and I still have a way to go."

"Single Pigeon" is literally classic McCartney. Nice piano line, Paul singing perfectly. Even putting in obscure and abstract lines like "Sunday Morning, fight about Saturday night," that he hadn't touched on since "You Never Give Me Your Money." Perfect Paul. Put this one in the time capsule along with the next.

"When the Night" is another in Paul's great R&B line. It's in there with "Oh, Darling," "Why Don't We Do It In the Road," "She's A Woman," "Lady Madonna." This may be the best out of them all though. He really nails it. Steady piano, his voice doing that crazy Paul deep voice and then in the end the crazy Paul shriek. He even does the funny Beatle groove and quiet voice jams they would do at the end of the song.

"Loup (First Indian on the Moon)" Instrumental weird McCartney. You have to love it. The man liked tape loops. They aren't here, but it came from that Stockhausen part of his heart.

"Medley: a)Hold Me Tight; b)Lazy Dynamite; c)Hands of Love; d) Power Cut." Abbey Road medley? This is the only medley we should ever speak of.

This is one of the masterpieces of western music. Put it on with friends over on a Sunday night when you are drinking the hair of the dog to get better for work. Have a home cooked hot meal, enjoy the taste of beer and this album will reveal its miracles to you.


Now, From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt.


Maggie

I’m sitting with Eve in the living room. She’s watching me play the piano. I haven’t played in a long time. I would’ve played at Easter if I’d been home. Something sounds off with it. No one has kept it in tune I’m sure. I used to spend hours here playing and playing in the afternoon. Mom would sit with me. She’d fold laundry or read the Times or whatever book she was reading. The philosophy she dabbled in too. But now it’s Eve and I and I’m playing a Bach etude that I learned to long ago. I forget if it even has a name. I like seeing my fingers move along the white and black keys. My fingers still look young even though I’m not. Thirty-two, dear God! I always dreaded when I would be able to say, “When I was thirty.” The past tense of being thirty, which is everyone’s cut off age for kids and marriage and all of that. I stop playing. Eve looks at me.

“Does it upset you to see Ben this way?” She asks. Her legs are crossed in jeans and she’s bouncing the right one, which is crossed on top.

“Why? Does it bother you?”

“You were the only one who was alive when he last had a drink. James treats that like its folk-lore or some sort of holy myth.”

“He does?” I ask.

She smiles and her eyes widen. “Yes, I think that you all do.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. “You’re right,” I say.

“It’s because of how legendary Ben was, isn’t it? How he was going to be famous?”

I know she knows this, but it’s the first time she has asked me directly about it.

“That’s what they say. He was famous in a way I suppose.”

“As a doctor in the town.”

"Well I guess that makes it more than one way.”

She smiles at me. I always liked her. I’m glad James married her. I hate that they’re married, though. What does it take to do that? What do they both have that I don’t? Or is the key word both?

I play around in the key of A. Linking subdominant chords, minor chords. Eve’s knee and draped thigh are bouncing.

“Did James tell you we’re trying to have a baby?”

No one had told me that. I didn’t know.

“No, was he supposed to?”

Eve shrugs and rests her chin in her palm. She looks French. I don’t think she is, though. What is she? Now she’s shaking her head. The light from outside is falling in. It’s grey and not so light but it gives the room that atmosphere. The atmosphere that something is heavy and that somehow that light is in your stomach and weighing you down like a big brick of dough.

“He wasn’t supposed to,” she says. “I just thought he might’ve shared.”

“Well we were never the closest, you know that.”

“That’s true.”

“He was closest to Liza I think. For some reason.”

Eve laughs. “I always wanted to be from a big family.”

“We’re not big,” I say.

“To me it seems like it. It was only my older sister and I. I just love the way it works between all of you.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, who is closer to who and how everyone has to vie for attention.”

I’ve never had anyone talk to me in admiration about my family. And I never gave it a thought. You never do, or maybe there is a point growing up when you’re supposed to see your family as a whole unit. A whole and complete entity as its own that you are within and without. I must have missed that stage. I was too busy being without - chasing images, photos in my lens. Stories. Maybe if I called Jake he’d come to the funeral, though if I were him I wouldn’t.

“I’ve never really thought about it in that way.”

Eve stretches out on the couch. “I guess if it was my family I wouldn’t either. But then again, maybe I would.”

This is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with her. She is my sister-in-law now. She has been for two years. That’s another thing you don’t think of - in-laws and who they are going to be. Eve and I are very different. I think a man would get the sense if he just happened to walk in the room and see the two of us, the two of us sitting relaxed in a grey heavy morning.

Eve sighs. “I’m going to miss this house.”

I nod my head and play an old progression that sounds familiar. F, A minor, G. “I don’t think any of us have any idea.”