Prince is one of my heroes, so you might be wondering why the Prince page on my website is fairly barren. Well, the truth is, I’d probably have every Prince music video and performance I could get my hands on if I could, but Prince and his legal team make it damn near impossible to for anyone on the internet to post his music and videos. Well, there is one performance that thankfully is available for the public to consume, and that is of Prince’s epic guitar heroics at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Prince was inducted in the same year George Harrison was honored as a solo artist, and so Dhani Harrison, George’s son, invited Prince on stage for the performance of the White Album classic, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I read somewhere that Prince had never even heard the song before, though that’s hard to believe as Prince peeled off one of the greatest and most showstopping flawless guitar solos of all time. What is especially spectacular about the performance is that the man who played the original solo on the record, Eric Clapton, was a bit of a guitar legend too, so Prince had a lot to live up to. The thing is, sometimes people forget that Prince is Prince. The man is rightfully one of the greatest musical geniuses of the pop era, and one of the more criminally underrated ones too. Rumor has it that Prince played such an insanely great solo in response to the snub he felt after being left off of Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 100 guitar players ever list. Prince proves that he belongs somewhere on that list, perhaps in the top ten, so watch this clip if you’ve never seen it, and take in the “purple’s one’s” majesty of rock. Oh, and lastly, at the end of the song, Prince hurls his guitar into the sky towards the audience, and it never lands…a new mystery for our time.
There is something about “Wild Horses,” something quite emotional. I remember driving home one snowy night when I was a 19 year old, thinking how perfect the song was against the lightly falling snow. Every time I hear it, time just seems to slow down, and it feels like the whole world is listening, all strung out on this gorgeous song. I really don’t have much to say about this song that hasn’t already been said. This post is just to honor a classic, plain and simple. The footage is taken from the “Gimmie Shelter” documentary, famous for unfortunately violent concert the Stones threw at Altamont Speedway, California in 1969. At that concert, a member of the Hell’s Angels stabbed a man to death, a public slaying at what was supposed to be a happy event, horribly caught on film. Today, everyone is still reeling from the shooting at the Colorado movie theater, another massacre at what should have been an otherwise fun public spectacle. I don’t really have much commentary about that except for guns are evil, and the Rolling Stones “Wild Horses” casts the appropriate somber atmosphere for these grim times. Lastly, my heart goes out to the victims and there families. RIP.
I’m nearly done with Peter Doggett’s excellent biography, You Never Give Me Your Money, a book that chronicles in precise detail the breakup of the Beatles. The book is one of the best Beatle books I’ve ever read, mainly because it delves into the Beatles’s complex interpersonal relationships and not so much their broader history of artistic and cultural achievements. The book details a moment in 2007 when ever self-conscious Paul McCartney is playing for 200 people at a California record shop, and nearly breaks down in tears singing his John Lennon tribute song, “Here Today.” The book describes the moment as one of, “naked reality almost unmatched in his career, a gesture of love and pain, and a wound that could never be healed.” Immediately after I read that line, I put the book down and raced to the internet. I was lucky enough to find the performance generously persevered on youtube by a fan filming Paul with their camera phone. The film is letter-boxed and a bit grainy, but the sound is good, and the moment is captured wonderfully. Paul plays his guitar beautifully, and visibly has trouble holding back his tears. Paul himself commented that he saw a young girl weeping in the audience, and once his eyes locked with hers, his emotion just poured out. “Here Today,” from 1982’s Tug of War, is one of the most haunting and bittersweet Paul McCartney songs ever. I’ve always felt a deep desire to hear more from Paul in this song and this subject, but its the nature of the song, and the nature of John’s death, that makes it impossible. Its a masterpiece coming from an artist of unparallelled decency. Check it out.
Andrew Lee is an amazing guitar player. Better then amazing actually, a genius. How do I know? Well outside of the fact that he has played lead on a ton of my recordings, including this one, he has just today started making no frills videos showcasing his incredible talent. The video below shows Andrew, matching Eric Clapton of Derek and the Dominos, note for bloody note. Andrew’s casual perfection was attained through a hard earned, borderline servile dedication to blues music, a dedication that if you know him in person, is awe inspiring. Andrew is a real talent who pours genuine emotion into everything he does with a guitar, so please, just take a few minutes to bask in the “Presence of the Lord,” and remember who brought you there, Andrew LEE!
One of the most exciting elements of the latest season of Mad Men was how the series creator, Matthew Weiner, somehow scored the rights to broadcast an actual Beatles song on his show. The Beatles had never allowed their actual recordings to be directly featured in a television show, and have rarely allowed the privilege in movies. It was interesting to read of how Weiner managed to pull off the feat. It wasn’t an issue of money, though the price of airing the culturally priceless cut from Revolver, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” wasn’t cheap, but rather, he needed to get approval from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison. Weiner took a big risk because securing the rights for the song meant having the Beatle people approving the script for a television show with a limited window for production time. If his plan failed, he’d have to drastically alter the episode on short notice. Luckily, his ploy worked, and us die hard Mad Men fans finally got to hear the musical group that dominated the decade in which the fictional show takes place. In the original scene, Don Draper, feeling out of touch with the musical trends of 1966, asks his wife to bring him up to date on what the Beatles were up. She gives him Revolver, and tells him to play “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the last, and most avant-garde far out psychedelic track on the legendary LP. Don Draper dutifully plays the track, pours a drink, and tries to get into it. As John Lennon drones on, we are treated to a montage of various characters that gets abruptly shut off when Don angrily stops the song midway through. This scene annoyed me for a few critical reasons. First of all, his wife, Megan, should have just told him to play the album from the start. Don would have appreciated the conservative wit and word games of George Harrison’s “Taxman.” Then, I have no doubt, that when “Eleanor Rigby’s” gorgeous harmonies and fast paced string quartet struck, that would have hooked him. It’s the sort of song that speaks to Don’s character, a tale of anonymous lonely people living futile lives. The pure black and white beauty of the song, combined with the commercial accessibility that only Paul McCartney can manufacture, might have stunned him emotionally and kept him listening. Playing “Tomorrow Never Knows,” to someone who hasn’t heard too many Beatles songs,out of the blue, even in the year 2012, is just not the best way to indoctrinate a potential Beatle enthusiast. I think Weiner chose the song because he wanted to contrast the insanely advanced sonic world the Beatles were operating in, with the old fashioned world that Don and many of his contemporaries were still living in, in 1966. That in itself is cool, but to me, Don needed to hear a few other songs first before diving off the Tibetan Book of the Dead deep end. So, I have rectified the situation. The video I present below substitutes “Tomorrow Never Knows,” with “Eleanor Rigby.” The montage of shots that follow are also of my choosing. I tried to match the song to what I considered some of the most striking scenes and images from Season 5. I also tried matching the images to the song in a loose abstract way. All in all, I think it came out very well, and am very excited to share it. Mad Men is currently my favorite TV show, and it goes without saying that the Beatles are my favorite band ever, so getting to mess around with two things I love so much was just a lot of fun. So, enjoy it, and feel free to share it around town.
Superhero movies are everywhere these days, coldly destroying the competition in the movie theaters in the summer. Their omnipresence is even sparking interesting debate from elitist movie critics at the New York Times. With movies starring classic comic book characters like Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, and the X-Men, the question rises as to what collection of creative geniuses could have possibly come up with these zillion dollar ideas that millions of people have become fiercely loyal to? The obvious answer is that it boils down to two Jewish guys from New York City, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. However, if you really deep fry the question, the answer might just boil down to one man, Jack Kirby. The real story of the history of Marvel Comics is not exactly the tale of a happy collaboration between the revolutionary pop artwork of Kirby and the bottomless imagination of Stan Lee. In actuality, the authorship of these legends is a jumbled and bitter history featuring bad work for hire contracts and editorial self-aggrandizement. According to Jack Kirby, he basically not only created and drew every Marvel Comic of significance, but plotted and wrote all the dialog, a telling of history that leaves little room for one Stan Lee. Jack recollected Stan as a “bother” and “office prankster,” hired as an office boy by Marvel’s owner Martin Goodman as a favor because they were related, and overtime graduated from office paperboy to over-glorified editor. Stan would change some dialog to make it snappier or funnier, as well as changing character’s names on a whim, but Jack did all the heavy lifting, and because he worked at home, had little contact or interaction with Stan Lee. Evidence speaking to this arrangement is found in this wonderful article published in a Jack Kirby fanzine, which you can read here. In that article, you can read more about the troubled history between Stand and Jack, and see Jack’s original artwork and dialog, as well as the light notes Stan put in the margins. Jack’s version of history is very negative towards Stan Lee, probably to an unfair degree. Marvel Comics never properly took care of Jack over the years, treating him as a standard work for hire artist, and not the genius who revolutionized the way comic books are written and drawn, thus creating in Jack a deep bitterness. A popular story out there is that Jack once entered a toy store towards the end of his life, (he died in 1994), and started to cry because he saw that every toy was of something he created, and he wasn’t getting a dime. Stan, to his credit, did have more of a role in Marvel’s success then Jack would ever admit. While Stan’s role in the creation of the Fantastic Four, the hit that saved Marvel from closing its doors in the early 60s, is questionable, Stan did create Spider-Man with artist Steve Ditko, the greatest superhero in the Marvel roster. Jack, filled with bitterness, would claim for years that he was actually the one that created Spider-Man, a claim knocked down by numerous people close to the situation. I could go on and on, but you can see the depth of wonderful intrigue to this history, and I hope one day, someone makes a smart and serious period piece movie about Stan and Jack, bringing this complicated history to light. In light of this history, the global success of the multi-billion dollar Avengers/X-Men/ and Spider-Man franchises, is a bit bittersweet for two reasons. First, Jack never lived to see it, and the second is that Jack’s name is not as well known as Stan’s, who has received an undue level of credit for something that essentially belongs to Kirby. Anyway, the interview below is an incredible document. Its Jack reflecting on his long life, how he started making comics, his stories from being a soldier in Patton’s army, and his personal cosmic philosophy that influenced all of his creations. The interview took place in 1990, and while the interviewers do a wonderful job in allowing Jack to speak, as well as asking pertinent questions, the callers at the end basically have no idea of who Jack Kirby is, and thus ask a series of ludicrous questions, that are equally humorous and slightly disrespectful to a man of Jack’s stature. It’s a great interview and well worth listening to because this is the man who facilitated the enjoyment of millions of people’s childhoods. So, enough yapping, here is Jack Kirby, King of Comics. Oh, the transcript of the interview is here, handy if you want to follow along more closely.