Ghosts

We all know the way that songs can haunt us our whole life where they can immediately invoke a time and place that's buried in memory. But Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large also examines how the songs sometimes haunt their creator.

Chasing Phantoms - From Del Shannon to Neil Young: "Runaway" and "Like a Hurricane"

When I was six and driving in the car with my parents, the radio often provided comfort either by giving me voices in the larger world beyond the roads we travelled, or music that could take me inside the world of the singer. For myself, the rock & roll I heard in 1960 was about finding a place, to paraphrase John Lennon, where I could go when I felt low. The songs of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly could reach out to the friendless and disenfranchised and invite us to to be part of something larger than ourselves. Even if their tunes were about heartache and loss, the mere sharing of that pain gave credence to the idea that one could transcend it because the music was about giving pleasure. In one of his last recorded songs, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," Buddy Holly playfully teases himself about how foolish he was to be driven crazy by the woman who abandons him. Not only does the singer survive the loss, he understands the price he was willing to pay in the process so he could move on. (It was only in real life, unlike in the nowhere land of the song, that Buddy Holly could lose his life in a plane crash he couldn't control.)

Resurrection: Pete Townshend on Tommy

Since it is Easter, it seemed appropriate to turn to a rock opera with its own Christ story that continues to be resurrected: The Who's Tommy. Deirdre Kelly spoke to its creator Pete Townshend last fall when the production was enjoying a successful run at the Stratford Festival.

Adventures in Art, Expedient Creativity and Spirituality: Interview with Pete Townshend

Last June, critic Deirdre Kelly reviewed the Stratford production of Pete Townshend's rock opera Tommy in Critics at Large as "a feast of the senses." She went on to elaborate that "this new Tommy is spectacular, harnessing the latest in digital technologies for a series of punchy LED rear-screen projections which firmly anchor Tommy in its post-war, middle class British setting. The two-hour plus show also employs automated set pieces that tilt, fire and explode – not unlike a Townshend guitar solo." Speaking of the composer, Pete Townshend, the founder of The Who, Kelly had an opportunity to talk with him for The Globe and Mail a few weeks ago. The paper ran a portion of her long discussion with the artist. Here today, we supply the rest. Townshend discusses a range of subjects including autism in relation to Tommy, the spiritual guidance of Meher Baba, the generational conflict in post-War Britain and the continued relevance of Tommy today.

Common Ground

Our obsessions with pop figures sometimes takes on the staging of a turf war when it comes to defending their work against others who claim similarity. That was nowhere more than in the case of Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. When Lou Reed died last year it prompted Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large to examine the common ground occupied by both artists.   

The Wild Side: Lou Reed vs Frank Zappa

Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (illustration by Chris Grayson) 

It's curious how we recall certain moments only when death intervenes and creates a rent in our day. The sad passing of Lou Reed this past Sunday, at the age of 71, took me immediately to a typical party I attended as a teenager on a Saturday night back in the early Seventies. There's no significant reason to remember this party and I hadn't even thought about it since the night it happened. But that's what death does. It brings dormant moments back to life. On that evening, it was the first time I became aware of Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground. Their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, just happened to be playing on the turntable and I remember most the nursery rhyme beauty of the opening track, "Sunday Morning," the slashing guitar that droned under the driving beat of "I'm Waiting for the Man," and the pulsating intensity of "Heroin," where John Cale's shrieking violin seemed to create an electric blanket to surround Reed's determined voice and speaking for his heightened nervous system; the sensations brought on by milk-blood flowing in the veins (all of which made Steppenwolf's popular song "The Pusher" seem even sillier and more self-conscious by comparison). I also loved the Celtic melody that underscored "Venus in Furs" while the flattened out timbre of Nico's voice on "All Tomorrow's Parties" made me momentarily forget the party I was attending.

Man in the Shadows

Not all pop artists who make significant contributions to the work of others get the recognition they perhaps deserve when releasing their own work. Devin McKinney examines the work of one such artist in this review from Critics at Large.

When the Mystique Evaporates: Bobby Whitlock

"Derek and the Dominos", Oct 1970:  (from left) Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton

“Bobby Whitlock” is familiar as a name, if not quite an identity, to any fan of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Derek & The Dominoes’ Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, and Delaney and Bonnie and Friends’ On Tour with Eric Clapton; Whitlock played and sang on all of those 1970 albums. Born in Memphis, whose clubs seasoned his soul vocals and guitar and keyboard skills, Whitlock was protégé to Booker T. Jones at Stax Studios before joining the band that developed around highly-touted husband-wife soul shouters Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. From there, he grew tight with Bramlett fans and sidemen George Harrison and Eric Clapton – whence his recruitment as a Domino and subsequent appearance on All Things Must Pass. For a few years, Bobby Whitlock soared with the eagles; and while the getting was good, he recorded two solo albums, Bobby Whitlock and Raw Velvet, both released on ABC Dunhill in 1972.

Sojourn Through the American Heartland

Usually when a Coen brothers' film opens, there's quite a fanfare among their followers. With their latest, Inside Llewyn Davis, it began that way and then it disappeared into history like its main character. Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large wishes that it had hung around longer.

The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

All the Right Notes

It's been a great era for documentaries and, according to Shlomo Schwartzberg in Critics at Large, especially music docs.

The Lasting Impact and Joy of Cross-Cultural Currents: Muscle Shoals and Hava Nagila (The Movie)

As long as there has been music there has been fertilization of different sounds and rhythms between musicians from various countries and continents. From African slaves bringing their music to America and giving birth to the blues and later jazz to the British, in turns, absorbing American tunes, and melding their essences to proffer their unique brand of rock and roll, music has functioned as one of the best ambassadors for cross-cultural connections and co-operation. Two new documentaries, Muscle Shoals and Hava Nagila (The Movie) attest to that fact, examining, in turn, a specific sound and one particular song, while offering some provocative theories as to why things turned out the way they did.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

When David Bowie Is arrived last year at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, it was a great opportunity to let three of our reviewers from Critics at Large address from their specific area of interest which included fashion (Deirdre Kelly), music (John Corcelli) and cultural (Kevin Courrier).

David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

What Goes Around...

When the Coen Brothers conceived Inside Llewyn Davis, they used as their inspiration Dave Van Ronk, one of American folk music's most revered figures (even though he didn't come to define, or change, the culture the way Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan did). Susan Green shed some light on his fascinating career last year in Critics at Large.

A Walking Museum of the Blues: Dave Van Ronk Remembered

As music luminaries prepare to strut their glitzy stuff at tonight’s Grammy Awards, I am thinking back to a 20th-century hopeful who was the antithesis of glitz and who died on this date in 2002....

Why now, in particular?” a bewildered Dave Van Ronk asked rhetorically, a few days after learning about his Grammy nomination for a 1995 album titled From...Another Time & Place. “I made something like 26, actually closer to 30 records but nobody noticed before.” Well, hardly nobody. The blues performer had been in the game for four decades at the time of our January 1996 pre-Grammy interview. He was a legend whose career had returned to the kind of cutting edge made possible by that curious what-goes-around-comes-around law of the universe.

Jukebox Junkie: The Movie Music of Martin Scorsese

When music first began providing the dramatic underscoring of a movie, it was generally orchestral and followed the style of 19th Century romantic opera. By the Fifties and Sixties, however, pop music became more prominent in providing the inner voice of a new frontier in cinema. One of the most insistent directors using pop music is Martin Scorsese. Kevin Courrier writes about the peaks and valleys of his style of film scoring in Critics at Large.

Scorsese's Jukebox

John McCabe 'listening' to Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller

When author/critic Paul Coates first saw Robert Altman's seductive and allusive 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he was immediately struck by the director's compelling use of Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song" and "Sisters of Mercy." In his book The Story of the Lost Reflection, Coates wrote that Cohen's music, which wasn't composed for the film, seemed to come "from the inner voice to which the characters alone attend." The film's soundtrack, according to Coates, wasn't providing emotional cues to nudge the audience into whatever mood the picture was trying to impose on the viewer. Altman was instead letting the music speak for the unacknowledged inner lives of the characters on the screen. "[E]ven on the frontier, people walked around with headphones on," Coates observed. The audience at this movie, who in the Seventies did own records and even headphones, came to imagine that the gambler John McCabe was actually living out the experience heard in "The Stranger Song."

Revisionism: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

The history of The Beatles and Capitol Records has been spotty from the beginning when they first refused to released their albums in America. This past winter, Capitol put out a box set of their U.S. releases, which Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large, called a mixed blessing.

Bittersweet Symphony: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

This past Tuesday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' invasion of America in February 1964, Capitol Records released The U.S. Albums, a 13-CD Beatles collection that spans from 1964’s Meet The Beatles! to 1970’s Hey Jude. While many fans back in 2009 already shelled out a fair chunk of cash for the official U.K. remastered stereo CDs and the subsequent box set of the mono versions,The U.S. Albums can seem like a redundant cash grab. But these albums actually differed considerably from the band’s U.K. versions, including having different track lists, song mixes, album titles, and even cover art. For those of us who grew up in North America during the Sixties, these were the albums we knew, and the history we were familiar with. The albums presented here are also in both mono and stereo, with the exception of the embarrassingly fawning 2-LP documentary,The Beatles’ Story, and Hey Jude, a collection of mostly unreleased singles, which are in stereo only.

But there are a number of issues that bring a sour taste to this spirit of celebration. To begin with, Capitol had already released two box sets (The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 & 2) containing their first eight American albums a decade ago. So why didn't they just put out Volume 3 to fill out the rest? For those of us who bought those sets, we now have to repurchase them to get the remaining discs. On top of that, do we really need The Beatles' Story added instead of, say, The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which was only made available on LP? Hey Jude is also not a Capitol album, but an Apple product devised by then manager Allen Klein in 1969 after he'd negotiated a new contract for the band and wanted to massage the deal. The only reason it's being included here is because of the inclusion of tracks like "Paperback Writer," "Hey Jude" and "Lady Madonna." So why not then include in the box set Rarities (which is a Capitol release and collects the magical "There's a Place" and "Misery" that were missing on The Early Beatles, as well as "The Inner Light" (the B-side of "Lady Madonna"), and the rare promotional single "Penny Lane" that featured the French horn coda at the end)? But what is worse: Capitol has decided in this new box to largely ignore the original American mixes and use the 2009 ones instead. Even if the 2009 versions sound better, and they do, we are just re-purchasing what we already bought a few years ago. Whatever you think of the altered sound of the North American albums (with their added reverb, duophonic simulated stereo, and remixed songs), you're supposed to be paying tribute to one culture's way of hearing and remembering the past. As always, when it comes to The Beatles' catalogue, Capitol Records finds new and imaginative ways to botch things up. And they've done it right from the beginning just before the group landed in New York to change the world almost half a century ago. 

In 1964, America was within The Beatles' sights. It was the land of dreams. But it wouldn't be the land where they would go to be buried like all the other British acts. What stood in their way was Capitol Records who had been ignoring all their singles. The group lacked a foothold in the very country whose music made their own possible. The Beatles remained adamant, however, insisting that they weren't going to America until they had a #1 song there. Unfortunately, their manager Brian Epstein had already booked the band for The Ed Sullivan Show, North America's most popular TV variety show, in February, to follow with a concert in Washington, and a separate date at Carnegie Hall. Ed Sullivan had witnessed the delirious reaction to the group firsthand, when he was in the U.K. earlier in the year at Heathrow Airport. The Beatles were returning to a rousing homecoming after a show in Sweden. Sullivan was stunned at the furor and assumed it must be for someone from the Royal Family. When one of the kids told him that all the excitement was for this new pop group, Sullivan gambled that they just might grab the spotlight on his own show. He contacted Brian Epstein and booked them for his Sunday night program for three appearances – two live and one taped where the group would get paid $10,000.

The Beatles arrive in America

While all the deals were falling into place, The Beatles were playing a series of shows at the L'Olympia in Paris. But they found that there wasn't a mob of Brigitte Bardots chasing them through the City of Light, or young girls screaming their names. Instead, it was a collection of hysterical young boys. The ability to cross gender lines in their music, covering girl group songs especially, had now broadened their appeal beyond imagination, making it possible for Beatlemania to include everyone. One night, while coming home from their second show, they got the news they'd been hoping to hear, but never expected. As if by pure serendipity, plus some much needed luck, a song they released in England a few months earlier, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," had just gone to #1 in the United States. It was no less ironic that the song's title seemed an enticing invitation. It was as if an appealing stranger was calling out to you from across the water.

Written and recorded in the late fall of 1963, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was the greeting card that made Beatlemania an international phenomenon. "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You" had prepared British audiences for this pure explosion of happiness. But never before had vocal harmonies, so rich in texture, been delivered with such volume, such determination, and such ecstasy. Composed by Lennon and McCartney in the den of Jane Asher's home on Wimpole Street, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was written by two men, who described their method, as closely playing into each other's noses. According to Gordon Waller (of Peter & Gordon), who was present the day Lennon and McCartney wrote it, Lennon was on a pedal organ and McCartney on piano. When McCartney hit a chord on the piano, it immediately grabbed Lennon. The two men kept finding lost chords that became a perfect fit for their song. As they wrote, they kept reaching the peak of pop's greatest appeal: the joy of surrendering to irresistible and fleeting elation. "It was, and remains, a great song, a joyous, reassuring sentiment riding gently atop an exuberantly beautiful melody," Martin Goldsmith wrote in The Beatles Come to America. "The words may be simple, but they express tender longing and the heartfelt magic of human touch in a sentiment both innocent and profoundly worldly." 

Part of the song's greatness did lie in the smooth transitions between the descending phrases that begin the song, when the singer starts to tell his girl what he wants her to know. At which point, according to Goldsmith, "the melody leaps up an entire octave to land joyfully on the word 'hand,' the punch line of the song. The first lines are all breathless anticipation, and when the central idea of the lover's message is delivered, it comes bursting out in a manner that transcends everything that comes before." Their fifth single was hugely anticipated in Britain with advance orders of over 940,000 two days before it was released on November 29. The factory pressing alone was an unprecedented 500,000 copies in pre-release. A week after "I Want to Hold Your Hand" hit the shops, it entered the UK pop charts at #1, where it would stay for six weeks. By the end of the year, it sold 1,250,00, making "I Want to Hold Your Hand" the second-highest top selling single of the year – right behind "She Loves You." 

Journalist Tom Wolfe once proclaimed that The Beatles wanted to hold your hand, while The Rolling Stones would burn down your town. Besides deliberately misreading the song, in order to indulge in self-conscious literary hyperbole, Wolfe misses the point. If you were to superficially compare "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to, say, The Rolling Stones' cover of Muddy Waters' classic "I Just Want to Make Love to You," The Beatles appear to be catering only to teeny-bopper conventions. When The Stones perform Muddy Waters, the sentiment is blatant, so deliberately clear, that there's no room for romantic mystery. "I Just Want to Make Love to You" is as dynamically straightforward a blues song about the satisfactions of sexual intercourse as you're likely to find anywhere. But "I Want to Hold Your Hand" carries much more of an emotional charge because it expresses and explores the anticipation of romantic excitement just before consummation. Their song communicates the exhilarating expectancy of sex, while delving into the beguiling bliss of imagining such carnal pleasures existing. The Beatles make it very clear that holding your hand is only the beginning of the story.

Dave Dexter Jr.

Despite the thunderous reaction to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in Britain, Dave Dexter Jr., the A&R executive at Captiol Records in the United States, wasn't impressed. An exasperated Brian Epstein, having seen Dexter turn down every early single including "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You," demanded that Capitol Records' president Alan Livingston listen to the record himself, which eventually led to it finally being released. Despite all of Dexter's dismissals, the November 27th issue of Variety stated that the tune had been receiving large advance orders in Britain, forcing Livingston to reconsider the decision of his A&R expert. It's likely that the reason Livingston had trusted Dexter's judgment to this point was that Livingston's own musical background was equally limited. This was a man known specifically for creating Bozo the Clown, and producing children's records by Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny (with one composing credit for Tweety Bird's "I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat"). But did this ignominious oversight spell the end of Dave Dexter Jr.? Hardly. He was instead promoted to the status of issuing all The Beatles' singles and albums in the U.S. Besides picking and choosing what he deemed to be good singles (regardless of what was released in Britain), he issued albums contrary to The Beatles' U.K. originals. So the first American Beatles album he titled Meet The Beatles!, which contained most of the songs from the Beatles' second album, With The Beatles. He added the single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," its B-side "This Boy," plus "I Saw Her Standing There" (from their first U.K. album Please Please Me). Furthermore, Dexter gave himself a production credit (as he would on the next six bastardized U.S. releases). His "production" work consisted of adding reverb echo to George Martin's clean mixes and taking the mono mix of original U.K. singles to create a fake stereo sound. He did this by recording two mono versions together, slightly out of sync, then adding echo, and calling it Duophonic.

DJ Carroll James and Marsha Albert

When "I Want to Hold Your Hand" became The Beatles' first #1 song in America, it might not have ever happened if it had not been for the American TV network coverage of the mass hysteria over their show at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth in the late fall of 1963. Marsha Albert was a teenager in Washington D.C., who just happened to see the film clip, and became so taken with their music that she phoned her local radio station, WWDC. She asked the DJ if he could play something – anything – by The Beatles. Carroll James, the DJ who took the call, was hardly a rock fan. (His taste that ran towards the current jazz pop of Nat King Cole.) He wasn't even the least bit aware of The Beatles. But he was curious enough to try and hunt down one of their songs. On a station break, he happened upon a copy of the British import of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." On a whim, he invited Albert to the station to introduce it on the air. Marsha excitedly arrived at the station to read an introduction that James had written on the back of a traffic report. Within moments, she helped launch The Beatles into the consciousness of the nation’s capital. After playing the song, James asked listeners to call in with their own responses to "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The switchboard went berserk. There wasn't a free line anywhere as people swarmed to express their enthusiasm. Not only did James play the song within the next hour, he played it every night that week while announcing it as a WDDC exclusive.

When Capitol Records caught wind of the flurry of activity at WDDC, they faced a curious problem. Although company President Alan Livingston was set to issue “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” finally overruling Dave Dexter Jr., Capitol wasn't planning to do so until January. Because of the huge demand inspired by WDDC's daily broadcast of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," they moved the date up to December 17 in the U.S. Nobody was prepared for the explosion of interest. After all, the last American #1 for a British act had been The Tornadoes with "Telstar" in 1962. Before that, you had to reach back to the non-rock of Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" in 1961, or Vera Lynn's "Auf Wiedersehen" in 1952. By January 10, 1964, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold its first million in the United States, just in time for The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. 

The albums created and collected in The U.S. Albums were to chart that intensity as America reeled from the cultural invasion from England in the coming years. But these bastardized records, with banal titles like Something New (really?), Beatles '65 and Beatles VI, demonstrated (despite all their musical excitement) that their record company used greed and negligence to cover up its lack of foresight. They exploited the cultural storm for maximum impact and profit. But issuing this new box set, in such a cavalier manner, by airbrushing some of their past sins, Capitol Records continues that dishonoured tradition of paying tribute to one of their most successful acts by taking full advantage of those who made them so.

- originally published on January 23, 2014 in Critics at Large.

- Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Freedom and Fusion and Gliding Melisimas: The Music of Joni Mitchell

If you happen to play an acoustic guitar and sing love songs chances are you will be termed a confessional songwriter rather than a composer. No performer had to shake that label more than Joni Mitchell. To remedy it, writer Amanda Shubert in Critics at Large rightly identifies Mitchell as a method artist.

Method Acting: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period

Joni Mitchell is fond of describing songwriting and performing in theatrical terms. “Ella Fitzgerald was mostly just a singer; Billie Holiday was more than a singer; Frank Sinatra was more than a singer,” she told Michelle Mercer, author of Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period. “There were a lot that were Method actor singers. Etta James, you can’t beat her read on ‘At Last.’” Will You Take Me As I Am, which was released in paperback last year, looks at the series of magnificent albums Joni Mitchell made between 1971 and 1976 – Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, Miles of Aisles, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and Hejira, all of them masterpieces in the American popular music canon. The “Blue Period,” as Mercer calls it, brought a new subjectivity to pop music, all in the spirit of avant-garde experimentation that blended the musical, the literary and the visual. (The name “Blue Period” conjures up the synesthesia of the nineteenth century French poets, composers and artists like Mallarmé, Debussy and Bonnard.)

Time is On Our Side

Given that it's St. Patrick's Day, I thought we'd feature Devin McKinney's fine review in Critics at Large of the documentary film, Charlie is My Darling, which focuses on The Rolling Stones turbulent and exciting tour of Ireland in 1965.

Hearing History: Peter Whitehead's Charlie is My Darling

Toward the end of Charlie Is My Darling – Peter Whitehead’s documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 Ireland stopover, recently recovered, restored, and released on DVD – bassist Bill Wyman is informed that a young female fan fractured a leg in the mob rush that followed that night’s show. “Oh,” he sighs, appearing as genuinely distressed as it is possible for someone as inexpressive as Bill Wyman to appear. His response calls back the moment in Gimme Shelter (1970), chronicle of the group’s 1969 US tour, when Mick Jagger, after viewing footage of the murder that occurred while the Stones performed at the Altamont festival, murmurs, “Oh. It’s so horrible.” From a fractured leg to a knife in the back: the arc of the ‘60s is there, if you are into arcs. Other moments in the Whitehead film likewise seem ripe for omen-spotting – like the interview with Brian Jones, his speech articulate but his eyes gazing from some decadent darkness to the drugged and drunken ending he met in his swimming pool less than four years later; or the little riot that devastates a Dublin concert stage, as neatly-dressed lads and lasses maul their idols in a grade-school run-through of uglier scenes to come.

Revisiting Rubber Soul

It's been over half a century since The Beatles recorded and released what many consider to be their masterpiece. Kevin Courrier, in Critics at Large, not only examined what made the album their best, but the progeny that came in its wake.

A Masterpiece and its Spiritual Cousins: Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds and Aftermath

Over 45 years ago,The Beatles released Rubber Soul which is arguably their best album.While taking over 113 hours to record, compared to the one-day they took putting together their debut Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul was startlingly innovative taking the R&B genre beyond its purist roots. Unlike many other white pop artists, especially the ones who merely paid reverence to the style and attitude of black blues and R&B, or channelled the essence of the form (as did Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac), The Beatles sublimated rhythm and blues into their continually expanding musical fabric. And the record would irrevocably change the direction and sound of pop music.

With a densely intelligent collection of love songs, Rubber Soul confronted a variety of issues: the cost of romantic desire (“I’m Looking Through You”), the power of love to heal (“The Word”), as well as to hurt (“Girl”); contemplation (“In My Life”); and the deep regrets of loss (“Nowhere Man”). On the record, The Beatles broadened their musical identity, too, by introducing an original interpretation of classic R&B (specifically the Memphis Stax soul sound) while refusing to become defined by black music (as many other British blues bands had). The Beatles instead defined their own interpretation of American black music.

Hypnotized

Most people are familiar with Fleetwood Mac, but few know that they began as a blues band in the late Sixties (or that "Black Magic Woman" is originally a Fleetwood Mac song, not a Santana composition). Even fewer, however, know the middle period of the band that preceded the era of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. That era included singer/songwriter Bob Welch who died earlier this year. Susan Green wrote thoughtfully and perceptively about his time in Fleetwood Mac in Critics at Large.

Hippie in a Hypnotic Place and Time: Songs that Made Sense

Early Fleetwood Mac: Bob Welch, Mick Fleetwood, (back row), John McVie and Christine McVie

“It’s the same kind of story that seems to come down from long ago...”

With news of Bob Welch’s death last week, I was transported back to 1974. That’s when I first heard his former band, Fleetwood Mac, while living in the theoretically sleepy Vermont village of Huntington Center with my young daughter Jennie and a part-collie named Red Cloud. Our small red cabin in the woods was up a steep, twisting dirt road at the foot of a 4,083-foot-high mountain called Camel’s Hump. Local people were wary then of counterculture types, like me, who came to the area seeking a back-to-the-land existence in their midst. Undaunted, we newcomers were busy letting our freak flags fly, in the parlance of the 1960s.

Bold as Love

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, he left a body of work that's still compelling today. But it's where his work was heading towards the end that captivated Kevin Courrier in this piece in Critics at Large.

Jimi Hendrix Drifting

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, over forty years ago this month, I was in high school. It was a time when a number of key pop figures – all in their twenties – never got to see thirty. A year earlier, it was Brian Jones of The Stones, and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison would soon follow Hendrix to the grave. Besides providing you with a keen sensitivity regarding death (right at that moment when you saw nothing but life straight ahead), you also realized that a person's genius, their gifts, even their youth, could do nothing to protect them.

Hendrix's death hit me harder than the others because I came to truly love the paradoxical nature of his music. (In a song that fundamentally came out of the blues like "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," he combined a harpsichord with a wah-wah electric guitar and a chorale section to create a powerfully intense emotional soundscape.) Although Jimi Hendrix was always fully recognized as a virtuoso and theatrical guitar stylist, he was rarely discussed in any great depth in terms of his gifts as a poet, singer and music innovator. (For those insights, it's best to read David Henderson's 1978 biography 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky which still hasn't been equalled.) But John Morthland, writing in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, captured key aspects of those many gifts that Henderson elaborates on. "As a guitarist, Hendrix quite simply redefined the instrument, in the same way that Cecil Taylor redefined the piano or John Coltrane the tenor sax," he wrote. "As a songwriter, Hendrix was capable of startling, mystical imagery as well as the down-to-earth sexual allusions of the bluesman." Those sexual allusions though also led to a particular kind of theatricality that the artist himself was growing tired of indulging. Joni Mitchell, who met Hendrix in Ottawa towards the end of his life, recognized immediately his frustration about the public and critical perception of him based on those sexual allusions. "He made his reputation by setting his guitar on fire, but that eventually became repugnant to him," Mitchell told The Guardian in 1970. "'I can't stand to do that anymore,' he said, 'but they've come to expect it. I'd like to just stand still'."

Paying Tribute

When a number of artists, both veteran and contemporary, paid tribute to Bob Dylan last year in a four-disc omnibus for Amnesty International, Kevin Courrier wrote in Critics at Large about the daunting task of paying tribute to the artist's voice while not losing your own.

The Author's Voice: Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International

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Film critic André Bazin

The French film critic André Bazin once offered that the reason we get so few great movies from great books is that film directors are intimidated by the author's voice. He speculated that the film adapter, who obviously loves the work of fiction, feels in danger of falling short of the book's greatness. Therefore, Bazin thought, it was much easier for filmmakers to make great movies out of ordinary books, bad books, or even pulp fiction. It's an interesting theory. He's right, for example, that there are few great films made out of classic writers such as Dostoyevsky (remember William Shatner in Richard Brooks' woebegotten The Brothers Karamazov?), Virginia Woolf (let's just give a huge pass to Michael Cunningham's nod to Woolf in The Hours), or Tolstoy (War and Peace with Rod Steiger, anyone?). But Jim Thompson (The Grifters), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) have provided some pretty terrific pictures. Coppola's The Godfather may be the best example of a great film coming out of a mostly lousy book. The only exception to Bazin's rule perhaps is Charles Dickens, celebrating his 200th birthday this year somewhere in the great beyond, who has had more good movies made from his books than any other great writer. But that's likely due to Dickens writing in a popular dramatic style; that is, constructing his stories in a manner that anticipated the model for film narrative which D.W. Griffith would build upon in his first silent pictures. (Outside of Dickens, Henry James and James Joyce might be two other exceptions.)

Coming of Age

When a favourite artist takes a hiatus and then plans a comeback, we cross our fingers and hope it was worth it. Laura Warner writing in Critics at Large in 2011 found Ryan Adams' return to recording worth the wait.

The King of Sad Bastard Songs All Grown Up: Ryan Adams’ Ashes & Fire

The ever prolific king of sad bastard songs, Ryan Adams, has emerged from his “retirement” with new material. Since announcing his hiatus from music in 2009, little was heard from the artist. By 2010, we saw Orion, a metal endeavour released only on vinyl. That same year also marked the release of III/IV, the shelved sessions from the 2007 Easy Tiger recording with the Cardinals. While I respected Adams’ genre-bending talents, I found the latter album just too loud. (Yes, I’m 70-years-old and can’t stand those kids and their guitars.)

That being said, I didn’t know what to expect when I was forwarded an NPR First Listen of Ashes and Fire (PAX-AM/Capitol). About thirty seconds in, however, I was hooked. Adams makes a full come back with this signature country, Americana mix. Ashes and Fire is Adams’ presenting himself stripped down and soulful. Probably the most refined album of his career. The title track and especially the opener, “Dirty Rain,” contains that slow, familiar, twang evident in Adams’ earlier albums. Ashes and Fire is a solid autumnal delivery that perfectly matches the timing of the album’s release.

For the Ages

There are some singers who have voices that don't seem to come from this time; they seem mysterious and ancient. That quality accounts for David Churchill's reaction upon hearing Cold Specks, whose album he reviewed for Critics at Large.  

Doom Soul: Cold Specks' I Predict A Graceful Expulsion

Al Spx, aka Cold Specks

Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness
 – James Joyce, Ulysses

The first time I heard of Al Spx (the pseudonymous name of the Etobicoke-raised singer/songwriter
– and Cold Specks is another of her made-up names – she now lives in London, England), I was listening to Metro Morning on CBC Radio in Toronto last February. Host Matt Galloway, whose musical taste I rarely find interesting (his middlebrow views which he thinks are so multi-culti can be frequently infuriating), introduced the first single, "Holland," from her soon-to-be-released album, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion (it came out last month). The thing that stopped me cold (no pun intended) was not the song (he hadn't played it yet), but rather the term he used to describe the type of music she plays. Al Spx calls it: doom soul.

The Longevity of Leonard Cohen

Uncut Magazine just named this record the best of 2012 which would be concurred by Laura Warner in her review from early last year in Critics at Large.

Still Alive and Well: Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas

One warm evening in the spring of 2008, I filed into the Sony Centre in downtown Toronto where you could feel in this company of strangers a communal certainty that what we were about to witness was something captivating. Moments later, garbed in a grey suit and fedora, a Canadian legend took the stage. The applause only ceased when the opening chords of “Dance Me To The End of Love” wafted over us. So began our intimate three-hour encounter with the Canadian icon Leonard Cohen. Like many of his recordings, the performance was simple but urbane; humble but iconic; mournful but beautiful; thus making each detail unforgettable.

Several years after that epic world tour, in his 77th year, Cohen returned to the studio. The result is Old Ideas (Sony Music Canada., 2012) the twelfth studio album in his 44 year career and the first since Dear Heather in 2004. Living off of the vivid memory of that evening almost four years ago, the announcement of Old Ideas was a warm welcome. The album itself proof that Cohen’s artistic crux is still aglow in his twilight years. A Montreal native, Cohen was a published poet before his twentieth birthday. His poetic and literary accomplishments, which also include two novels that capture the quintessential melancholy of CanLit, might have established his foundation, but it is through song, however, that he became immortalized.

In Sinatra's Shoes

There have been many singers who have tried to walk in the shoes of Frank Sinatra since his death. Last year in Critics at Large, John Corcelli focused on Seth MacFarlane.

The Frank: Seth MacFarlane's Music is Better Than Words

At Capitol Records, the Neumann U47 microphone is known as "The Frank" because it was used to record the voice of Frank Sinatra during the 1950s. For Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy and an out-of-the-closet crooner, "The Frank" symbolizes the passion he feels for the music of an era that featured the kind of orchestral arrangements that put Sinatra on the musical map.

Music Is Better Than Words (Universal Republic, 2011) is Seth MacFarlane's auspicious debut on CD. The album is a throwback to a time when vocalists literally sang with the orchestra in the same studio. Sinatra's Capitol recordings in particular captured an emotional dynamic that distinguished them from just about everything else in music. This was partly due to their technical achievements. But it was also due to the arrangements and the close proximity of the vocalist with the band. MacFarlane's record is not a tribute per se, but an attempt to capture the sound and energy of Sinatra's recordings. That's a worthy goal, but it's only as valuable as the music we hear. On Music Is Better Than Words, we hear it.