Who was “baby blue?”  Was it Joan Baez, Dylan’s folk loving audience, Bob Dylan himself?  No one knows, maybe not even Bob.  “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” is one of the greatest pieces of symbolist poetry ever, one of the greatest folk songs ever, and one of Bob’s best.  Released in 1965 0n the incredible album, Bringing it All Back Home, the song was some kind of farewell ode to love, society, success, or failure.  Maybe it was a portent of a coming apocalypse, or a grim nihilistic expression of desolation.  Whatever it was about, it was beautiful, and British folkie Donovan knew it.  The video clip below is from the 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” which focused on Dylan’s 64-65 tour of England.  In the clip, we see Donovan play a lovely little tune, which is really great, but then request Bob play one of his favorites, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”  I was always struck by what the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand Alex Kapranos had to say on the encounter.

“That guy was so self-assured. It’s breathtaking to watch him at the pinnacle of his cruel glory in this film. The most intense scene is when Donovan meets his mentor. The lovely wee guy plays an optimistic Dylanesque tune on his guitar. Dylan then plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and sniggers at Donovan’s amateurism through the acid of his delivery. Watch the muscles flinch in Donovan’s jaw.”

I’m not sure if Dylan was sniggering at Donovan’s song, and if Donovan’s jaw was flinching, it was out of awe and respect, not jealousy.  Still, Alex, captures the essence of the effect Dylan’s music must have been having on his rabid and possessive folk audience that Bob was now ditching. “Don’t Look Back,” captures the Dylan fan rebellion as they openly boo Bob when he plugs in electric guitars and starts to rock.  It’s one of the more stunning moments in rock and roll history, and an example of how different culture was back then; one that held hard onto icons, status qu0, and familiarity.  The clip, the song, and the moment is one of the greatest in rock history so buckle up your brain before you press play.

Some Girls is one of the best Rolling Stones records.  It’s sleazy, dirty, punky, and country.  It came out in 1978, and has just been reissued it a nice little collectors package.  You should get it; I know I will.  To celebrate its corporate repackaging, I present to you a thoroughly scandalous fan made music video of the title song from the record.  The video features classic films such as “Easy Rider,” “Backbeat,” “Quadrophenia,” “Death Proof,” “Goodfellas,” and “Dr. No.”  It also has great clips of the Sex Pistols, Blondie, and the Rolling Stones, all vamping it up for one of the Stones most booziest songs.

The Black Keys are guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney.  Together they have forged a highly successful blues rock revivalist band that are the darlings of the upper tiers of the indie rock world.  I’ve always like them, but have not extensively combed through their catalog.  Perhaps I’ve finally found a reason to.  The reason comes in the form of their cover of the Beatles “She Said, She Said,” from their debut album The Big Come Up.  The original Beatles song, from Revolver, is about one of John’s most infamous LSD trips.  In 1966, he was tripping in LA with the rest of the Beatles, the Byrds, and Peter Fonda.  Fonda, tweaking out, began to obsessively tell a story about how he nearly died as a boy, and couldn’t stop saying, “I know what its like to be dead.”  John, understandably freaked out by Fonda’s dark ramblings, promptly wrote a song, and changed Fonda into a girl to fit the Beatle songwriting mold.  Though, by 1966, the Beatle mold now included feedback, acid drenched distorted guitars, and glorious swirling psychedelic harmonies.  The song was a progressive leap forward for the Beatles, and for rock and roll as a whole.  36 years later, the Black Keys took that song, a song that was still in mid leap mind you, and gave it a real throwback treatment, turning it into a hip 60s blues club rocker.  I love the Black Keys version, as it gives the song a grungy and gritty makeover and reveals the essence of the song’s fantastic pop melody.  Because it is so fantastic, I’m giving you two versions, the unofficial music video, and a cool live performance.  Check em out.

The clip below is how The Beatle’s “I am the Walrus,” will be preserved forever, remastered in HD stereo glory.  It’s hard to imagine the scope of the genius behind this song.  Lennon himself said, “Let the fuckers work that one out.”  By putting on fresh ears, and letting the song just hit you in 2011, an experience I am sad John himself never got to try, what comes across is the ultimate post-modern anthem.  It doesn’t sound like it came from 1967, but rather from some timeless place in someones imagination.  The mere fact that “I am the Walrus” did emerge from 1967, is one of the things that gives people like me, who never lived then, the magical impression that 1967 was a year when human creativity knew no limit, and was so powerful that it transcended time.  The song both hurls itself at you while simultaneously digging trenches of mad gorgeous beauty in your brain.  It changes your thinking somehow, giving you an epileptic cinematic insight into a few minutes of a John Lennon LSD trip.  It’s both profound and silly, and its profoundly silly; 2 opposite forces interacting on their own, but also interlocked somehow.  It’s simply a musical masterpiece, and I hope you serviceable villains enjoy it in bright psychedelic HD as much as I have.

Money, fame, power, and prestige; Pink Floyd had it all, but by their bloated 1977 stadium romp known as the “Flesh Tour,” Roger Waters and company became disgusted with what they had become.  Boorish fans in large intoxicated and stoned numbers were ruining the concerts, and Roger loathed them so much that he literally spit on them, then imagined what it would be like to place a wall between the stage and the audience.  This growing apathy for churning out area rock combined with bad business deals draining the band’s fortunes, Pink Floyd got to work on a new double album and film.  The product was The Wall, and ambitious rock opera about a character named “Pink,” based on a combination of Roger and Syd Barrett.  I think its kind of amazing that for how marginalized and separated Syd became from the actual band, the remaining guys still couldn’t stop thinking about him, and openly used his persona for inspiration.  The album, one of Pink Floyd’s best selling, touched on themes of class oppression, nihilism, fascism, and most dominantly isolation, symbolized by the wall itself.  One thing you can say about Pink Floyd was that they certainly knew how to keep upping the bleakness levels to 11.  I have two clips from the film.  The first is a gorgeous animated presentation of “Goodbye Blue Sky,” one of the briefest, but best songs on the record.  It’s a mix of dirge like militarism and beautiful Beatle-esque harmonies, and the video itself is an incredible anti-war/violence statement if there ever was one.  The next video is for “Another Brick in the Wall,” the album’s anthem that melds Pink Floyd’s dark psychedelia with a funky disco beat.  If you’ve never seen the clip, its slightly disturbing with the children wearing those ghoulish melted masks of oppressive conformity.  The Wall appropriately brings Pink Floyd week to its conclusion, but that won’t be the end of the band on this site.  There are many hidden gems and massive hits I’ve left out obviously, and expect this particular psychedelic bunch to roll up again.  Cheers.

Animals by Pink Floyd is my absolute favorite Floyd album and one of my favorite albums ever.  For me, this is the highlight of Pink Floyd week as I get to share a live performance of “Pigs on a Wing 1” as an intro to “Dogs,” my favorite Pink Floyd song.  Animals is Pink Floyd’s real masterpiece, with better songs then Dark Side of the Moon, and is way more thematically focused then The Wall.  Animals has 5 songs, with the intro “Pigs on a Wing 1,” being brought back at the end with slightly different lyrics, so its really 4 songs.  The record is mostly the work of Roger Waters, who at this point took full creative control of the band.  It’s a concept album loosely based on George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, mainly a railing against with the oppressive social-political of Great Britain.  The whole thing is a psychedelic progressive folk rock masterpiece.  It is also an angry finely manicured response to the emerging punk rock movement.  Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols famously wore an “I hate Pink Floyd,” t-shirt, and Roger Waters and company wanted to remind the punkers they too emerged from an underground movement determined to unmoor the uptight and conformist British hierarchy.  For “Dogs,” Waters wrote the lyrics, and Gilmour, in his only songwriting contribution to the record, wrote the music.  It was originally titled, “You’ve Got to Be Crazy,” and features some of Pink Floyd’s best lyrics and dynamic guitar solos.  It’s a piece of fantastic psychedelic dark funk, and demands worship.  So check out this live performance and go for the gold by sitting through the whole thing, its worth it.

Part 2 cannot be embedded, so just click this link to be taken to it on youtube.

Here is a clean recording of “Dogs,” but with no live footage.

In yesterdays post I alluded to how Dark Side of the Moon reminded me strongly of Abbey Road.  I must not be the only one, because the image above is all over the internet.  This leads to an interesting debate amongst music fans, mostly ardent Pink Floyd people, that claim that Pink Floyd is the spiritual successor to the Fab Four.  Some go even further claiming that Pink Floyd’s dazzling studio mastery and reflections on more mature philosophical themes elevate them as a technically greater band then the Beatles.  I’ll address the claims in reverse order.  While its true that Pink Floyd was a massive commercial success in the 70s, among the top 3 bands in the decade, they are not the Beatles of the 70s.  What Pink Floyd did was continue the Beatles psychedelic studio experimentation in the pop rock format, pushing its boundaries and increasing its sonic power.  Like the Beatles, their best songs had strong melodies, beautiful harmonies, and precise arrangements.  The difference is, Pink Floyd was a psychedelic folk band, while the Beatles were an ever expanding rock and roll outfit, encompassing a wide variety of styles and sensibilities.  At their height, Pink Floyd reached a massive arena audience and influenced youth culture strongly with their detached nihilistic messages railing against a corrupt and oppressive system.  At the Beatles height, they did all things Pink Floyd accomplished, times a factor of  100, plus creating the universe of youth culture that Pink Floyd successfully tapped into.  Tracing back to the first argument, in which people claim that Pink Floyd are spiritual successors of the Beatles, it is true, but so was practically every other band that came after the Beatles.  Pink Floyd were the best group that continued the Beatles perfect psychedelic folk experimentation heard on the White Album and copped the professionalism and thematic track linking the Beatles employed in creating Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road.  It was just a few aspects of the Beatles that Pink Floyd carried on, not the whole bundle, but honestly, who could do everything the Beatles did?  This is no knock on Pink Floyd, merely a comment on the truly extraordinary accomplishments the Beatles achieved.  I’m sure most Pink Floyders would probably agree this because I’d be hard pressed to find a PF fan that didn’t like the Beatles.  Those that disagree are just not being fair to history and are letting their Pink Floyd love cloud their objective judgement.  Anyway, those are my opinions on the subject, and I have no problem with others thinking otherwise, its a fun debate.  I have one more song today from Dark Side of the Moon, “Time.”  “Time” is one of the best songs on the album, a sweeping collage of sound effects, guitar power, and haunting lyrics.  It’s a philosophical song about wasting ones life presented as an angry rant.  It’s almost a call to arms, and its fascinating.  Enjoy.

As we have been progressing with chronological normality through Pink Floyd’s career during “Pink Floyd Week,” the video clips have matched the time in which the songs were produced.  Now that we have reached the seminal Pink Floyd record, Dark Side of the Moon, an album about madness and time, I figured we’d jump ahead several decades to see the guys rock “Money” at Live 8.  Because of Richard Wright’s death in 2008, this would represent the only full band reunion (sans Syd Barrett) that the world would ever see since Richard Wright left in 1979.  So, this is a rather historic performance, and a surprisingly relevant one given that Live 8 and Occupy Wall Street have similar philosophical roots.  It also goes without saying that the song “Money” is the ultimate ironic anthem on the subject of the crushing evil of greed.  It’s an awesome Roger Waters tune set to his greatest bass line.  I always thought Dark Side of the Moon was a continuation of the sonic ground broken by the Beatles on Abbey Road.  Lyrically and thematically, the two records have nothing in common, but there is such a high level of musical accomplishment and precision on both records.  The gapless linked tracks on Abbey Road were also a huge influence on Dark Side as well.  It actually should come as no surprise that both records share many musical similarities because they were both recorded at Abbey Road Studios with many of the same technicians and engineers that worked with the Beatles.  That’s enough Beatle/Pink Floyd comparisons, as I’ll have a more thorough analysis on the subject tomorrow.  Anyway, enjoy this thrilling rendition of “Money,” and make sure to click the ads on my site so I can put my hands on Google’s stack…Jack.

Pink Floyd has some lengthy songs.  I think most of the time, it sounds like they rode in on a long traveling cosmic wave from Neptune.  They made sure to reflect the journey accurately with long gentle harmonized verses and guitar solos that surge and bend like celestial orbits.  “Echoes,” from the 1970 album Meddle, was credited to all four members of the group, and is a gorgeous galactic ballad about some undersea magic, or something.  Originally, the song was about two planetary bodies meeting, but Roger Waters was concerned that the band would be pegged as a “space-rock” band, so he made sure to change the imagery to the more aquatic themed variety.  Sorry Roger, the song still sounds like space-rock, and that’s how your band will forever be remembered, nice try though.  Anyway, these clips of “Echoes” are culled from the 1972 film, “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii,” probably one of the pompous cinematic events that greatly inspired the boys in Spinal Tap.  I mean, the drummer Nick Mason looks exactly like Harry Shearer’s character Derek Smalls, no coincidence in my opinion.  Want more “Echoes” fun facts?  Ok, I got two.  The first is the Waters’s claim that Andrew Lloyd Webber plagiarized the riff of the song for his “Phantom of the Opera” musical.  In a great quote Waters said, “I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.  It’s the same time signature, it’s 12/8, and it’s the same structure and it’s the same notes and it’s the same everything.  Bastard.  It probably is actionable.  It really is!  But I think that life’s too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber.”  Fun fact #2 is that one of my favorite bands Ween used a 5 second clip of “Echoes” for their song “Birthday Boy.”  This was no plagiarism, it was a DIRECT LIFT!  I have no idea how Ween got away with putting a Pink Floyd recording on their major label debut record, but sometimes miracles happen.  Anyway, take a 15 minute break and enjoy “Echoes” parts 1 and 2 live in Pompeii, Italy.

So, despite their love for the man, Syd was barred from entering Abbey Road studios when Pink Floyd was recording.  Syd went on to do a few slapped together solo records, with Roger and Dave actually helping with the production, and then Syd entered oblivion, thus propelling his cult like status to mythic proportions.  In 1969, Pink Floyd was Britain’s top rising psychedelic band, but they were no where near the megastars they became by 1973.  Still, they carried enough swagger to be offered the chance to provide a soundtrack for “More,” an avantgarde film about heroin.  The song below, “Cymbaline,” is a gorgeous psychedelic folk ballad that feels more like Simon and Garfunkel than it does “Interstellar Overdrive.”  I think at their heart, Pink Floyd were more folk rockers than anything else.  Their best songs, no matter how steeped they are in special effects, crushing guitar solos, and wailing experimentation, are folk ballads.  “Cymbaline,” a twisted song about a nightmare, was a progressive step forward the band, and would point to the future dramatic heights they would aim for.  By the way, this video performance, is a fantastic moody and cinematic slice of footage of the band in its most natural setting, a church.  Enjoy.