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First Guy Who Makes A Penny Rane Joke Gets Thrown Out On His Ear

September 11, 2024 1 Comment

The Beatles wrote lots of “hardy perennials.” They’re songs that most every recognizes instantly and likes well enough to hear you butcher them in cover bands. The beginning of their songbook is filled with stuff any garage band can bang out.

Then they got a little weird. Good weird, mostly, but not rock weird. Paul McCartney was a music hall guy at heart, and he started to take over the proceedings after their manager died in a haze of booze and seconals. Lennon had a harder edge, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t do the same sort of musical things if he wanted to. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was an engaging, offhand shot at McCartney’s satin suit suites, for instance.

The real dividing line began when they stopped playing live, because no one made amplifiers loud enough to hear themselves over all the screaming. Then they started making artifacts, not songs. The songs were put together out of disparate pieces into a whole, and they essentially couldn’t be performed live in their final form. Hell, some of the stuff featured tapes being played backwards. The songs were assembled by the very able producer George Martin into vinyl confections that exceeded anything that had come before.

It’s still not easy to put together the same sort of musical agglomerations in today’s world, but technology makes it at least possible. You’re still going to need someone who knows their way around a piccolo trumpet if you want to keep it real. David Mason, the fellow who played the original track, was from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. Not a slouch.

Luckily for Eisuke Yoshino, he knows Manami Nishiyama.

The Sippican Cottage Musical Test dell’Acidità

March 21, 2017 10 Comments

Everyone likes what they like. They don’t know why they like it. They assemble reasons to explain their affection after the fact. It’s a weird form of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because things happened in sequence, the first caused the second. With pop music, it’s a sequence of one thing. I like it. Fire up the confirmation bias furnace. Unroll your cart-building plans after the horse steps on your foot. He couldn’t do that if he had a cart in front of him.

I mentioned pop music, but music is no different than any other topic in this regard. Everyone works backwards. It goes something like this:

  • I like it
  • If I like it, it’s good. No way I could like something bad
  • If I like it, there must be a good reason
  • I am wise, so the entity that produced the thing I like must be important
  • Liking important things makes me more important
  • If you do not like what I like, it’s because you’re a philistine

I have never successfully convinced another human that it’s perfectly OK to like dreck. I have pointed out many things that are dreck to persons who liked them, but did not think they were dreck. This always led to one of two reactions, either of which resulted in enmity towards me, not the thing itself:

  •  You’re right, it is dreck. I can’t like dreck, so I can’t like it any more. I hate you for ruining my fun
  • It’s not dreck. [Insert name of person with no talent here] is a genius, and [insert name of magazine here] says so.

The whole mindset leads to 50 year old men telling you that Motorhead is Mozart, and Camille Paglia telling you that Madonna is Moliere.

So, to make things easier, I’ve invented the Sippican Cottage Musical Acid Test:

If you’re from Liverpool, and your composition is played Santuario-di-Madonna-di-San-Luca-skiffle style by five Bolognese men a half a century after you wrote it, you’re on to something with your approach to songwriting. That’s as far as I’ll go.

I’ll Have the Beatles Bolognese With an Insalata Caprese and Seven Beers, Please

August 12, 2015 4 Comments

All my friends aren’t imaginary, but they are theoretical.

I live in a world of ghosts and shadows. I look for fellow travelers but they all seem to have gotten off already and I think we’re all Bozos on this bus now.  I’ll settle for people I never met and will never meet and shake hands in the electronic ether and be done with it.

Here comes the sun.

Sippican Cottage. Your Home for Bolognese Skiffle

May 31, 2015 6 Comments

I can never figure out if the world is wonderful or a dreadful bore. Whenever I’m feeling particularly jaded, I usually head on out to the Intertunnels and look for Bolognese Beatles cover bands doing outre versions of Liverpudlian rockabilly songs.

The fellow singing the McCartney part  in this video is Galeazzo Frudua. He taught my son how to sing the harmony parts of All My Loving, although Galeazzo might be surprised to know that.

Galeazzo and his charming coven of friends have been featured here before:
It Won’t Be Long
More Beatles Bolognese
How to Avoid Norwegian Wood Splinters
Hey Giuda

[Update: Many thanks to Kathleen M. from Connecticut for her constant support of my children’s efforts via the TipJar. It is greatly appreciated]

Paperback Writer, All Shipshape and Bristol Fashion

February 18, 2015 7 Comments

The Moon Loungers are listed on these here Intertunnels as the “Finest wedding band in Bristol and the South West.” It doesn’t specify the southwest of what, exactly.

Playing at weddings is a tough gig. I’ve done it. I remember, distinctly, one wedding job in Newport, Rhode Island. It was held on the second floor of a converted building on a pier over the ocean. The groom and the best man were musicians, and they played as a duo around Newport at many of the same places we did. I still have a few happy bruises on my person from Salve Regina night down there.

There are always early indications of how any wedding job is going to go. Certain cues that are invisible to a newbie but a billboard for an old hand. In this case, a woman so old that she was inside-out shambled up to us with a walker, looked at me with a glass eye and the guitar player with a milky one, and asked, “What time does the orchestra start?”

The guitar player is a carpenter, and we used to work together building things from time to time. Whenever things were going really badly — if you’d just nailed your foot to the floor; if you’d just cut through a water pipe; if you’d just fallen off a ladder; if the check bounced; if the building inspector showed up and he turned out to be a guy you beat up every day in high school; no matter what — we’d turn to each other and ask in unison, “What time does the orchestra start?”

The groom jumped out the window halfway through our second set, by the way.

Tag: Beatles

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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