"Race" Records

Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey

I have been perusing an excellent book about African American music, Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey, subtitled A Journey to Music's Heart & Soul. The former Rolling Stones bass player and his co-author, Richard Havers, detail the development of African American music from earliest slave days on.

Remember the key dates 1606, the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia, and 1620, the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts? Well, another key date is 1619, when the first 20 African slaves were brought to Virginia. As American music developed from those earliest colonial days on, it was always part-African!

I got this book out of the library with an eye to finding out how the blues began, how jazz began, how spirituals/gospel began ... always with the assumption that these genres and others started as pure forms and then bled together over time. Wrong! If anything, just the opposite was true.

The roots of African-American music are hard to track because little of it was written down or notated during the roughly 300 years of slavery and post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Nor was it much written about. Neither was it ever pure and distinct from the music of white Americans, since Africans sang with whites in church and played instruments for whites' amusement all along.

Just as black and white churchgoers went their separate ways during the Reconstruction period in the South, there was the rise of minstrelsy, tent shows, and, later, vaudeville. African Americans, no longer slaves, made music professionally for other African Americans as well as for whites. In New Orleans, brass marching bands and bordello piano players were also pleasing two publics (actually, three, since Creoles and other mixed-race groups were thought of as distinct from both blacks and whites) while playing real good for cash.

Meanwhile, along came the phonograph. Phonograph records, also called gramophone records, replaced the phonograph cylinder as the recording medium of popular choice in the early 1900s. The cylinder's heyday was brief: from around 1888 to 1915. By 1910 the 10-inch 78-rpm disc was (according to Wikipedia) "by far the most popular standard, holding about three minutes of music or entertainment on a side."

Begun in 1916, the Paramount Records company was formed to produce records to be given away for free with phonographs whose wooden cabinets were manufactured by Paramount's parent, the Wisconsin Chair Company. Paramount launched its specialty label for black music one year after another legendary maker of "race" records, OKeh, debuted. Soon, race records were being released by Victor/Bluebird, Gennett/Champion, Black Patti, Black Swann, Meritt, QRS, Ajax, and (starting in 1934) Decca. That's just a partial list.

Race records were recordings of black artists intended to be sold to blacks. They were billed as "blues" records, "jazz" records, "rags," etc. — whatever the form of the actual music they contained.

The artists never thought of themselves as "pure blues," "pure jazz," or pure anything else. They were entertainers and musicians, first, last, and foremost. "Ma" Rainey, "The Mother of the Blues," recorded sides like "Last Minute Blues" and "Bo-Weevil Blues," often backed by musicians today called "jazz" greats, such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Fletcher Henderson. Mamie Smith and "Her Jazz Hounds" made "Wabash Blues" for OKeh (see picture at right). And on and on. None of the artists held themselves out to be performers of any one genre of African American music.

It was all about marketing, about cashing in on the crazes of the day. A veneer of respectability was applied by means of advertising. Mamie Smith was at one point being billed as an "exclusive AJAX artist" on promotional material that read:

The Quality Race Record ... Wide-awake Phonograph dealers, all over the country, are becoming more and more alive to the potential possibilities in the fast-growing Negro population and the musical demands of this special group. Wherever there are Negroes, Phonograph dealers can "tap" an amazingly rich market with very little effort. AJAX is a nationally advertised line, supported by the finest "blues" talent and excellent dealers' service.

The Mississippi Delta

You often hear the Mississippi Delta said to be the birthplace of the blues. But where is it? Here is a map that answers that question:



The map reveals that the Mississippi Delta is not really a river delta at all. It is, in fact, an alluvial plain between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River to the east. An alluvial plain is basically the site of a former river delta, while the river that originally formed it has extended itself — in this case southward to Baton Rouge and then southeast to New Orleans and the actual delta of today's Mississippi River.

In that alluvial plain, flooding distributes the silt that comes down the river evenly over a broad flood plain, forming a very flat land that is wonderful for growing crops — cotton, in this case.

African slaves once picked and ginned the cotton of the Mississippi Delta. Their descendants gave birth to the blues in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Meanwhile, other black slave descendants in New Orleans to the south had already created other music styles that likewise amalgamated African and European musical influences, just as the early blues in the Delta did. These New Orleans styles were the building blocks of, first, ragtime, and later on, jazz.

Singing the Blues

Last night, uncertain what type of music I felt like listening to, I aimed my digital cable-TV box at the "Music Choice" stations and settled for the Show Tunes channel. Good music ... but after several songs it began to pall. It hit me that all the music I was hearing was conspicuously "white folks' music." It lacked "soul."

Oh, there were one or two exceptions in the playlist I was getting, numbers that had a "rock" style and could therefore be imagined as a distant cousin to "black folks' music." But for the most part, the Show Tunes being played were as square as square could be.

They were giving me a headache. So I changed to the Gospel channel.

I have never listened to much gospel, for whatever reason, so I was surprised to find that the funky gospel sound going in my ears very quickly cured my headache!

I also realized how close gospel, at least as performed by African Americans — there is also a white gospel sound — is to the so-called soul music I listened to in the 1960s and thereafter: Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, et al. Intellectually, I already knew "soul" had emerged as a secularized, de-sanctified gospel, but listening to real gospel as it is performed today really brought that fact home to me. Owing to poor hearing in the upper registers, I can't really pick up the lyrics of a lot of the music I hear, so it was hard for me to tell these songs were praising Jesus rather than extolling the singer's own true love.

After getting "sanctified" by the gospel sound, I decided it was time to get down with some blues, so I popped my "Blues Brothers" DVD in the player. The songs on the soundtrack, as I well knew, were not just "blues" numbers. There were also soul golden oldies and R&B classics from the recent African-American musical past. The songs John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and company were spotlighting came from a repository selected by the film's creators that carefully avoided making fine distinctions among the various African American musical genres.

They were all funky. They were all bluesy. They all had soul.


What is it, I wondered, about funky, bluesy, soulful music that gives it its ability to cure a headache brought on by too much musical "whitebread?" A little bit of research shows me that the answer is not all that simple.

Furthermore, most of the sources I have found online tend to get real intellectual about the history, sociology, psychology, etc., of African American music. As Jake and Elwood Blues would say about that ... well, what they would say can't be put in a family-oriented blog like this one. Just play the freakin' song, their basic attitude would be. When you're "on a mission from God," you don't have time for intellectualities.

Still, it's patently obvious that this music has to have "plenty of rhythm" and "plenty of jive," to lift phrases from one of the songs that gave Ricky Nelson soul in the 1950s, "Be-bop Baby." A musicologist would point out how "syncopated" the rhythms are, meaning that beats are accented that wouldn't "normally" be accented.

African American music also features notes that don't come from the European DO-RE-MI diatonic order — not even the minor-scale version thereof, in which MI is flatted by a semitone. There is instead a note between MI and MI-flat, a "blue note" that can't be played on a piano unless you shift between two neighboring keys.

That in effect "bends" the note being played ... which is fine, because there are a lot of "bent" notes in African American singing and instrument playing. I believe the technical term is "melisma," and if you want to know how it sounds, listen to anything by Mariah Carey.

In fact, I recently watched a movie called "Songcatcher" about an early-20th century musicologist's journey into the Appalachian hill country to record the pure folk music there — music that came to America with early Scots and English settlers and hadn't changed for several centuries. It also involved alternate, non-diatonic tonalities and the bending of vocal notes. It was different from African American music, mainly because of its rhythms, I think, but it had those features in common.


As a result, it's not hard to see how its descendants — country 'n' western, bluegrass, Texas swing, etc. — could mix so easily with the musical styles of African Americans to make jazz, Big Band swing, rockabilly, and rock 'n' roll. You might note that all these genres originated with the music of peoples who were marginalized — black slaves and their descendants; hillbillies, dirt farmers, and Southern so-called "white trash."

That's why the white folk tunes captured by the fictional heroine of "Songcatcher" (or those first recorded by the very real Alan Lomax) and the black blues first recorded in about 1920 by the likes of Ralph Peer, of OKeh Records, belong together in the broad category, "early soul music."

It's why it makes sense that "Songcatcher" has a cameo by African American blues notable Taj Mahal as a member of the otherwise all-Caucasian music culture of the film.

It's why it makes sense that Taj Mahal, born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, comes from a musical family wherein his father was a jazz pianist/composer/arranger of Jamaican descent, while his mother was a schoolteacher from South Carolina who sang gospel.

All these — including the "hillbilly" music of "Songcatcher" — are types of music that have soul. Even "white folks' music" can sing the blues.

Everything You Need to Know about Wagner ...

Anna Russell, who passed away at age 94 in October 2006, was a musical parodist and composer of such memorable songs as "Don Bonzo Alfonzo the Matador (with Castanets)," "I'd be a Red-Hot Mama if I hadn't got these Varicose Veins," and the aria, "Ah, Lover," from the mythical operetta "The Prince of Philadelphia, For Singers with Tremendous Artistry but no Voice," with a German lied, "Schlumpf," and a French chanson, "Je n'ai pas la plume de ma tante." In one of her famous skits, she told us everything we need to know about Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas:



The skit continued:



And then:



Is there anyone on the music scene today quite like the late, lamented Anna Russell. I don't think so!

Roots of Rock 'n' Roll (Pt. 1)

I was there at the time, strictly speaking, since I was born in 1947, but I was too young to know about the origins of rock 'n' roll as it was first performed. So I've always wanted to go back in time and try to figure them out.

The year of my birth, a blues artist named Roy Brown had a song, "Good Rockin' Tonight," that Paul McCartney revisited on his 1991 MTV Unplugged special:



When Roy Brown, an African American, first did it, it was considered "race music" in a segregated America. Black artists would make records to be sold to a black audience only. You could call the style of the music rhythm 'n' blues, or jump blues, or boogie woogie, or country blues, or electric blues, depending on exactly how it sounded. But you couldn't yet call it rock 'n' roll, for that name wasn't yet invented.

All of it derived from the pure blues, a song format using verses of 12 bars which African slaves and their descendants invented. The blues used "blue notes" not found on a piano keyboard, call-and-response patterns conspicuous in both the music and the lyrics, and heavy African rhythmic emphases ... but also European harmonic structures. Like its descendant rock 'n' roll, the blues was always a mix of black and white influences.

Here is the great Muddy Waters performing "Hoochie Coochie Man" in the style that became known as the Chicago blues or the electric blues:



The Chicago blues resulted when African Americans migrated north from the Mississippi delta and used electric guitars where acoustic guitars had been the rule in Delta blues.

Rhythm 'n' blues artists took elements from the blues and from two other African-American musical genres, jazz and gospel — not to mention Afro-Cuban rhythms and other African-descended musical styles from elsewhere in the Americas — and combined them into a high-voltage music for post-WWII American blacks. There were many distinctive R&B sounds. Here is the one pioneered by the legendary Bo Diddley:



The name rhythm 'n' blues was invented in 1947 by a white industry exec, Jerry Wexler, as a marketing category to replace "race music." The actual name used by blacks for the sounds created by Ray Brown and Wynonie Harris and many others in the late 1940s was "jump blues." Jump blues was derived from the big band sound in jazz, whose popularity was on its last legs.

The original jump blues was characterized by a jazzy sound featuring a saxophone and/or a trumpet or other brass horn. It had driving rhythms, shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. Unlike most other types of blues, the jump blues relegated the guitar to the rhythm section. Here — with no guitar at all — is one of the pioneers of jump blues, Louis Jordan, with "Caldonia":



A disc jockey named Alan Freed was one of the first to program R&B or jump blues records for a mostly white, mostly teen-aged audience in the early 1950s. Freed helped the blues "jump" the racial divide by taking advantage of the way AM radio waves can be picked up in distant locations after the sun goes down. White teens from all over the country would tune into his "Moondog Rock and Roll House Party," from Cleveland, when they should have been asleep.

In the supposedly segregated South, white kids like Elvis Presley rubbed musical shoulders with the black blues scene on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee and came away with a way to liven up the country 'n' western music whites played. Here is Elvis doing an early rock 'n' roll number, "Shake, Rattle and Roll":



A rock 'n' roll song that had a strong country 'n' western background would be called "rockabilly," a combination of "rock 'n' roll" and "hillbilly." Here is Elvis doing Carl Perkins' rockabilly classic, "Blue Suede Shoes":



More later ...

Do Your Remember the British Invasion (Pt. 2)

The night was Sunday, October 25, 1964. The time slot was 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM. The network was CBS. The show was the one which had launched Beatlemania in America almost ten months before, the Ed Sullivan Show.

Sullivan's show was a true variety show, in which the host, who was a converted newspaper columnist, stood before a stage curtain and introduced one act after another to the studio and TV audiences. When we impatient teenagers tuned in to see the hottest British band since the Beatles — the name was, I believe, the Rolling Stones — we first had to watch:

• Ed's welcome
• A commercial for Lipton Tea
• Crooner Jack Jones singing "Gotta Travel On"
• Comedy team Stiller and Meara doing a parody of European commercials
• Another commercial for Lipton Tea
• Actor Lawrence Harvey reading from Tennyson's poem "Charge of the Light Brigade," then presenting the original 1854 bugle to a Major Barryman (while a bugler played)
• Youthful comedian London Lee talking in defense of teenagers
• A commercial for Anacin pain reliever

(See this rundown on the TV.com website.)

Then, finally, came this:



The song was "Around and Around," as performed by Mick Jagger on lead vocal, Keith Richards on solo guitar, Brian Jones also on guitar, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts on drums.

Then we had to wait again while:

• Charlie Drake, pantomime comedian, played "The Little Picture Hanger," a character who created chaos while trying a hang a picture
• Kent cigarettes presented a commercial
  
• The Kim Sisters performed "Joshua"
• Jim Hammerstein, son of Oscar Hammerstein of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame, made a cameo appearance
  
• The Kim Sisters returned to perform a traditional bagpipe song with a Scottish bagpipe band
• The Berosini Family did acrobatics
• Commercials advertised Pillsbury Crescent Dinner Rolls and Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.
• Jack Jones returned to sing "Bewitched"

Just as we were beginning to worry that the show had run long and the Rolling Stones would not reappear after all, our patience was rewarded:



(Just ignore the unwelcome "What are you people, on dope?" spliced into the beginning ... that did not — repeat, did not — occur on the actual Sullivan broadcast.)

"Time Is on My Side" was to become one of the early hits for a band that went on to become a veritable rock legend!

Do You Remember the British Invasion ? (Pt. 1)

When the Beatles appeared in America on Ed Sullivan's TV show on February 9, 1964, watched by 73.7 million viewers, what would come to be called "the British Invasion" had its official start. In the wake of the rock 'n' roll foursome from Liverpool would come such bestselling bands as the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, and the Rolling Stones.

One of the most significant of these follow-on bands, though it didn't sell as many records as the Beatles or the Stones, began as a founding father to the emerging British blues scene. Going through several lineup changes in a few short years during the 1960s, it became the launching pad for three of the legendary blues-rock guitarists of the day: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Page went on to found one of the more successful rock bands ever, Led Zeppelin.

Here they are in a clip from the American rock 'n' roll TV show "Shindig," doing their hit "For Your Love" ... the Yardbirds!



The Yardbirds performed "For Your Love" twice on episodes of "Shindig." The clip above comes from the first one, the September 23, 1965, episode. Later, they reprised "For Your Love" on "Shindig Goes To London, Part 2" filmed at the Richmond-On-Thames Jazz Festival, August 6 – 8, 1965, to be aired on December 9, 1965. (Information about the Yardbirds' TV appearances can be found here at the TV.com website.)

By this time, Eric Clapton had already left the group, citing a lack of blues purity. He had played on the decidedly non-blues "For Your Love" — on the original record, that is — but by the time the Yardbirds started to go places in the transatlantic rock world he had been replaced as lead guitarist by Jeff Beck, who plays 12-string acoustic in the clip above.

In the clip, the lead singer is Keith Relf, the rhythm guitarist is Chris Dreja, the bassist is Paul Samwell-Smith, and the drummer is Jim McCarty.

From that same "Shindig," here is the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul":



It is not easy to find TV clips with Clapton as a Yardbird. Here is one that apparently aired in spring 1964 on the British television program "Go Tell It On the Mountain." The band performs the John Lee Hooker blues classic "Louise":



With Beck on lead guitar the Yardbirds appeared on the American TV show "Hullabaloo" on December 6, 1965, performing the Bo Diddley blues classic "I'm a Man":



Jeff Beck was fired from the group in late 1966, but in June of that year Jimmy Page joined, replacing Samwell-Smith, with Dreja moving from rhythm guitar to bass. For about half a year, the Yardbirds had two of the all-time-great lead guitarists!

With that lineup they appeared on American TV, on the Milton Berle Show on November, 11, 1966, performing "Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago":



While Page and Beck were both Yardbirds, the group was featured in the 1966 movie Blow Up performing "Stroll On":



With the departure of Beck the Yardbirds became — and stayed — a foursome until July 1968, when they technically disbanded ... only to evolve into Led Zeppelin. While a foursome they appeared on the German TV show "BEAT BEAT BEAT" on March 16, 1967, playing (among other songs) "Shapes of Things," with a guitar solo by Page:



From that same TV gig, here's their earlier hit "Over Under Sideways Down," originally recorded while Beck (along with Page) was still with the group:

The Beatles on the Box (Pt. 3)

The Beatles' reign can be divided into two parts according to the types of TV appearances they made. From about October 1962 until mid-June 1966 they would appear often on TV, either live or on videotape. They would actually perform their songs live for the TV cameras, or they would mime (lip-sync) their latest hits.

Starting in late 1965, that stopped. They began filming promos of their releases. Some of these very occasional promos showed actual or mimed performances by the Beatles, and some were more like today's music videos, with fanciful scenes unfolding on-screen while the actual sound of the record was heard as the audio track.

Here is a filmed promo for "Hey Jude." It was filmed at Twickenham studios in the Greater London area on September 4, 1968 — one of at least three versions filmed of "Hey Jude" that day, along with at least two versions of "Revolution" filmed the same day:



This may well be the version that I saw shown in America on October 6, 1968, on the "Smothers Brothers' Comedy Hour" on CBS TV.

On October 7, 1968, the day after the Smothers' Brothers "Hey Jude" broadcast, the Motion Picture Association of America adopted the film rating system that, with some changes, we still have today. It replaced the Production Code, which kept any supposedly objectionable material from appearing in motion pictures, with a system by which the amount and kinds of such material would determine a rating. By virtue of the rating, younger people could be excluded from seeing a film — entirely, or unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Here is one of the "Revolution" promos filmed also at Twickenham on September 4, 1968:



It may be the one which was screened on the Smothers Brothers' show on October 13, 1968. The very next day, October 14, the world saw the first live telecast from a manned US spacecraft (Apollo 7).

The Beatles on the Box (Pt. 2)

The Beatles took America by storm when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. They appeared a total of three times in as many weeks on the Sunday evening show, the first time being February 9, 1964. Here, from that show watched by 73.7 million viewers, are the Beatles performing "I Want To Hold Your Hand":



On February 9, 1964, a newspaper headline read, "GI Joe character created."

"All You Need Is Love" was first performed by The Beatles on "Our World," the first ever live global television link. The BBC had commissioned the Beatles to write the song for the U.K.'s contribution to the program, which was broadcast via satellite to 26 countries and watched by 350 million people on Sunday, June 25, 1967:



"Muhammad Ali sentenced to 5 years," ran a headline on June 25, 1967, the day of the broadcast. The boxer, born Cassius Clay, had been found guilty of draft evasion, having refused to submit to induction by the Selective Service because of his Muslim religious beliefs. Ali was released from custody pending appeal, and eventually his conviction was overturned.

By mid-June 1966 the Beatles were no longer interested making live TV appearances. Their final live TV gig was on "Top of the Pops" in the U.K. on June 16, to mime (or lip-sync) to "Paperback Writer" and "Rain." That footage apparently no longer exists, having been deleted by the BBC! But the Beatles had also filmed multiple TV promos of both songs on May 19-20 at Twickenham Studios. One of those promos for "Rain" appeared in the U.S. (with a specially filmed intro by the Beatles) on the Ed Sullivan show of June 5, 1966:



On Thursday, June 16, 1966, "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" debuted on U.S. TV.

The first Beatles appearance on U.S. TV was not on Ed Sullivan, but on the Jack Paar program of January 3, 1964. This was not a live appearance but a film of them doing "She Loves You." It was taken from a 30-minute British TV documentary, "The Mersey Sound," produced by the BBC during August of that year and aired on October 9:



On October 9, 1963, a headline read, "French air force gets 1st nuclear weapons."

(Many of the this-day-in-history headlines in this post come from dMarie Time Capsule.)

The Beatles on the Box (Pt. 1)

The early Beatles were on television (called "the telly" or "the box" in Britain) quite a lot as a way of promoting the band. Here are some of their appearances from the days of black and white TV.

Below, the Fab Four sings "This Boy," in a clip which (I believe) aired on "Scene at 6:30" on Britain's Granada TV on December 20, 1963, though it was taped earlier, on November 25:



On November 25, 1963, slain president John F. Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery, beneath an eternal flame.

One of the Beatles' standard numbers on the telly in those days was the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout." On October 30, 1963, the Beatles performed it in Stockholm on the Swedish TV show "Drop In":



On October 10, 1963, the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the planet's atmosphere.

"I Feel Fine" was a hit for the Beatles in December 1964/January 1965. They began performing it on TV in November 1964, having recorded it at Abbey Road on October 18. Here they are doing the number on "Ready Steady Go!" on November 27, the date of the record's U.K. release. The record was released in the U.S. on November 23, the actual date when this "Ready Steady Go!" clip was taped. "I Feel Fine" was the first rock song to incorporate intentional audio feedback, audible following the first note Paul plucks ostentatiously on bass:



On November 27, 1965, France became the third nation to launch a space satellite, following the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.

"Ticket To Ride" reached number one on the British charts the week of May 22, 1965. By the end of 1965 the Beatles had performed it on British, French, and American TV at least seven times — not counting the rendition filmed as part of their August 15, 1965, concert at Shea Stadium and first broadcast by the BBC on March 1, 1966. This is a promo version the lads — perhaps tired of repeating themselves — made at Twickenham Film Studios on November 23, 1965:



On March 1, 1966, when the Shea Stadium concert was broadcast on the BBC, a newspaper headline read, "Venera 3 becomes 1st man-made object to impact on a planet (Venus)."

There are a lot more Beatles videos where those came from ... stay tuned.

(Much of the information about the Beatles' TV appearances in this post comes from the Fab4TV web site.)

Origins of "Heavy" Rock

"Helter Skelter" may be the "heaviest" song the Beatles ever recorded. Below, former Beatle Paul McCartney and his band recreate it at the 2006 Grammys:



The song first appeared on the Beatles' "White Album" in 1968 — now almost 40 years old.

In England, A helter skelter is an amusement park ride with a slide built in a spiral around a high tower. Users climb the tower and slide down, usually on a mat. It is a precursor to the water slide.

Paul is well known for taking something ordinary, like an amusement park ride, and making it the starting point of a song. He did the same with the sights and sounds of "Penny Lane," in the Liverpool of his childhood.

McCartney was inspired to write "Helter Skelter" after reading an interview with the Who's Pete Townsend where Townsend described their latest single, "I Can See for Miles," as the loudest, rawest, dirtiest song the Who had ever recorded. The reviewer said that "I Can See for Miles" was the "heaviest" song he'd ever heard. Then McCartney, who had not actually heard the song, wrote "Helter Skelter" in an attempt to make an even "heavier" song than that one, which is presented below:



In 1968 the word "heavy" was just beginning to be applied to rock music. Loud, raw, dirty — those were its synonyms. Not that "heavy" rock had to be dirty in the sense of appealing directly to one's prurient interests or talking overtly about sex. The sound was amplified and recorded in a way that overdrove the electronics, so that it came out messy and possibly full of feedback — and that could be taken by those in the know as representing "dirty" in the other sense.

Before the mid-'60s, amplifiers and recording equipment were not powerful or flexible enough to do this sort of thing at the musician's beck and call. The first intentional use of feedback on a rock record, for example, came in 1964 on the Beatles' "I Feel Fine," written by John Lennon:



The Beatles' first recording to use an overdriven guitar amp may have been Paul's "What You're Doing" in that same year of 1964 (sorry, no video of an actual performance of "What You're Doing" seems to be available):



The Beatles' use of overdriving, distortion, feedback, and other "heavy" recording techniques was influenced by their starting to use recreational drugs at about the same time. Other pioneers of the "heavy" sound — possibly also influenced by drugs — included the Kinks, with "You Really Got Me" in 1964:



It was during this period that the name "rock 'n' roll," which had been used for the genre since its beginnings in the early '50s, got shortened to just "rock." Not all rock was "heavy," but all popular music that was "heavy, man" was "rock." It wouldn't be long before "heavy," as in "heavy metal," was a dominant form of rock. Even '70s punk rock borrowed from the "heavy" sound of the '60s.

Paul Is Not Dead

This week marks the peak of a new wave of Paul McCartney mania, as his new CD "Memory Almost Full" arrives at record stores ... including, for the first time for a Macca release, the iTunes Store ... and at Starbucks coffee emporiums worldwide, where the CD was being promoted by constant play yesterday.

The ex-Beatle turns 65 later in the year, and my happy ears tell me — I downloaded "Memory Almost Full" from iTunes yesterday — he can still rock.

He can also still write songs. MAF contains some of his best work ever. No one knows better than Paul how to combine all the elements of a song in a way that keeps you playing it over and over again without your getting sick of it. I imagine thousands of Starbucks employees were grateful for that yesterday.

A lot of that replay ability is because, beneath the deceptive simplicity of the CD's tracks, there is (as usual with Sir Paul) a lot of melodic and harmonic complexity. Combine that with exciting rhythms, piquant lyrics, a vocal capability that is still supple and multifaceted, and razor-sharp record production, and you have any number of pop-rock classics in the making on MAF.

This is a CD that, were it to have been issued by a young, unknown rock artist, would have all the critics lauding the second coming of ... well, of Paul McCartney.


Of course, McCartney is the past master at pop-rock classics. Which makes for a conundrum. After all, rock is supposed to be the iconoclastic antithesis of any sort of classic-oriented mentality. It is the bull in the china factory that breaks all the molds. The Beatles did exactly that, in fact, thanks in no small part to Paul's prodigious contributions.

Paul's work with Wings and as a solo act have added all kinds of welcome filigree and embroidery to his Beatles oeuvre, but nothing quite so groundbreaking as, say, "Paperback Writer" or "Penny Lane," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or the connected suite of great-song-after-great-song Paul wrote for the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album. "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," "Yesterday," "Michelle," "Lady Madonna," "Hello Goodbye," "We Can Work It Out" — there was a time when those songs and many others by Beatle Paul were the very soundtrack of our baby-boomer lives.

True, there are those a decade or two younger than I am, the formative moments of whose young lives replay to "Band on the Run" or "Maybe I'm Amazed" or "Ebony and Ivory" — all from the '70s Wings era, the time when Generation X was coming out of teeth braces and putting on training bras.

Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of Gen Y'ers, born after 1982, for whom a Paul-song is in their personal top ten ... even though much of his finest work has been done in the period during which that generation reached its teen and young adult years.


Again, the problem is not that Paul as a former Beatle hasn't lived up to expectations — though there are many people who will tell you that he hasn't. They're wrong; the problem is that he has, in spades. Which means, to so many, ho hum. "Paul does it again" is not a mantra for why-is-my-generation's-life- not-like-any-other, the way the initial surge of Beatlemania was for us boomers.

We stayed up nights looking for clues to prove "Paul Is Dead," back then. Now we have, in "Memory Almost Full," proof that Paul Is Most Certainly Not Dead. It is testament to his genius that MAF is at this moment the proud occupant of positions 3 and 5 on the Amazon.com top ten (it comes in standard and deluxe editions), with the "Sgt. Pepper" CD number 6 ... and his mate George Harrison's "Traveling Wilburys" retrospective at number 4.

But, back in the day, anything by Paul's original band would have been an instant number 1.