“Let us rejoice and let us sing…
And dance and ring in the new…
Hail Atlantis”…Donovan
Ideally, the use of music in film is to accentuate the action being shown on the screen. When the director makes the right choice, the synergy can be incredible (such as when Antonioni layered Pink Floyd’s “Careful That Axe Eugene” onto his Dali-esque final scene of Zabriskie Point).
I have a tremendous affinity for cover songs that are so different from the originals that you’d have to know the original in order to recognize that the song is actually a cover.
A perfect example of such as song is Joe Cocker’s “With A Little Help From My Friends”. The only thing in common between Cocker’s version and The Beatles original is the lyrics. There are no other commonalities whatsoever as Cocker put his trademark manic emotional bombast on the Beatles excellent but very mid-tempo original.
My company PPC Associates just returned from a corporate retreat in Las Vegas. It was a wonderful trip and I got some face time with my fellow co-workers that I don’t see all that often. The trip ran from Thursday to Saturday…half the folks left Saturday and the remainder (including myself) stayed until Sunday. Before the trip, I checked the concert listings and noticed that I could see Rod Stewart play Caesars Palace (the same location where I saw Leonard Cohen a couple years earlier). I knew that the demographic of my co-workers was such that nobody else would be interested in joining me, so I bought one “nosebleed” ticket for the show.
I used to purchase music on Albums / Cassettes / CD’s. Music purchases were an “event” for me and the first time I grooved to a new album, I always followed along with the lyrics as I listened. Because I rarely listened to the radio except in the car, everything I owned always got played in heavy rotation and through this way, I inadvertently memorized the lyrics off of most every disc that I owned.
At some point in the past, I read somewhere that Bob Dylan never liked to do more than a few takes on any song he cut in the studio. He would “coach” the musicians as to what he wanted and they would just play the track. Whatever they ended up with was what ended up on the album…and given the incredible nature of his performances, once can’t say that Dylan’s output suffered from a lack of polish.
The first verse of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” (probably Dylan’s greatest tune IMO) begins thusly:
Portland in the 90’s is where and when I started to attend club shows. While I did attend shows at The Aladdin Theater (Richard Thompson & Steve Earle), the Roseland (Leo Kottke), or even the Melody Ballroom (Albert Collins), La Luna was the center of the Portland musical club scene as far as I was concerned and looking back at the setlists posted for the club (which is only a small fraction of the shows that were put on), I regret terribly not hanging out at La Luna more often.
I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to talk about something that really struck me as powerful and moving when I witnessed it occurring…but here goes…
I spent last Halloween at a Richard Thompson concert, seeing him for probably the 7th time (one of my favorite artists and an amazing live performer). During this concert tour, one of his gimmicks was that he’d write the name of each of his albums on a little piece of paper and drop them in his hat. He’d select someone in the audience to pull out one of the pieces of paper from the hat and whichever album was picked, he’d would play three songs from that album.