the long-play

It’s a full two months following The Great Hard Drive Meltdown of 2011 and the lingering reminders still pop up at least a couple times a week. Most of what I’m missing comes in the way of music, through some glitch in my iTunes folders, as even having an external hard drive failed to prevent the loss of nearly 4000 songs. Rebuilding the library has been a slow process, not helped by the fact that a good chunk of the source discs I no longer (or never) physically possess. As I flip through the master lists and playlists that were saved I am taunted that iTunes has kept file information and cover art for all these songs but not the actual song files themselves. It’s like paging through an album of lost relatives whose voices you can no longer hear.

Despite the initial shock and frustration, I’m not angry. Not anymore. Among other things, the loss and rebuilding has given me a chance to step back and reassess what my music is and means to me. It’s forced me to listen to songs that have long been overlooked in the grand shuffle, forced me to reconsider random shuffling of music in general, to rethink radio and my history of and with music, and made me a little sad over the loss of the vinyl album format.

The LP, the long-player. Such a strange evolution, both in format and in experience.

Early recordings began as cylinders of wax and then plastic holding between two and four minutes of sound. Leading up to World War I cylinders and early flat disk recordings were equal but the format that dominated a good chunk of the 20th century became the phonograph record. Originally 10 inches, then 12, the early disks ran at 78 RPM and would hold one song per side up of up to 3 minutes per side. This constraint established the 3-minute song as a standard that still rules pop music today, to some extent. Collections of 78s were sold in massive books with pages consisting of heavy paper sleeves that held three or four or even five of these two-sided records – up to ten songs in all! – and these were called albums. By the 1930s microgroove technology made it possible for disks to play at 33 1/3 RPM and allowed for up to four songs per side of a 10-inch record, an entire album’s worth of music on a single disk. The two-song, two-sided 78 became the 45 “singles” that filled jukeboxes and sold to a hungry post-war teen audience in the 50s while the 12-inch album collections of 8 to 10 songs became the standard for popular artists. Jazz and classical recordings were the first to utilize the expanded spaces on albums though rock and roll in the late 60s and early 70s would fully test the limits of continuous play. The Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (or The Beach Boys with Pet Sounds, depending on preferences) first exposed listeners to the idea of the album as a conceptual whole instead of a mere collection of recent songs. The songs could stand on their own, but the albums were programmed with flow and progression and a grander sense of concept. Soon there were true concept albums, music with a theme or a mood intended for a specific effect.

I’m pausing here because it was at this point in the 1970s when music first entered my pubescent consciousness. It’s when I first heard many of what are now classic albums enter the world as new music, and perhaps why I find myself in recent circumstances mourning the loss of this sort of sonic development. Mind, this is not a nostalgia, but a sense of something lost as a result of our growing digital technology.

Leaving aside the actual genres (many of which will divide diehard fans on all sides) when music went digital we made two very large leaps that changed the way we used to listen. First, compact discs gave us seamless collections of songs for an expanded length of 80 minutes which doubled the space available on a single LP record. Second, digital players quickly gave the listener the option of programmability, to not play certain tracks or to rearrange their order so that they would always sound fresh. The carefully, sometimes artfully, artist-programmed album was now simply raw material for the listener. It falsely empowered the music lover to believe they knew better than the musicians which songs were best and which order they should be heard in. Digital programming encouraged impatience, encouraged intolerance, encouraged the entitlement of ownership. All of this control at the simple touch of a button promised to make every listener a DJ of their own custom music collections but instead it enslaved us to the idea of the infinite shuffle.

Shuffle is what we do, it is the current cultural default. It was so subtle a shift, but a sizable one. We got our MP3 players and loaded them up with only the songs we really wanted, mostly due to space constraints but also because the individual songs were more important than their original organic sonic environments. We put our player in shuffle mode and thrilled at the effect of always being able to hear our favorite songs, and in an unpredictable but not unpleasant order. Our iPods grew in memory, the diversity of our libraries grew, and we entered the era of the perfect and personalized portable commercial-free radio station. And when it came time to add new music, iTunes and Amazon made it easy for us to download only the songs we wanted. Musicians and bands still release “albums” of new material, and people do download entire albums, but the majority experience is still filtered through our library in shuffle mode.

Now here’s a nostalgic image, the kind you can see in movies from the 50s and 60s mostly. A person comes home after a hectic day, perhaps after work or some other activity, and they are transitioning between the day and the evening. They may be planning a quiet evening in, or may be getting ready to go out on the town – no internet addiction, no instant movie downloads, or any other digital distractions. They maybe kick off their shoes, make themselves a lovely adult beverage, and then go to the stereo and put a record on to play. Could be jazz, or some breezy lounge music, something cool and soothing to the soul. It could even be a lazy way for the filmmaker to get some music in the soundtrack to keep things feel like they’re moving along when little is happening. Then, as the album side ends, they either get up and change for the night out, or flip the record over, or put on a different one. Rarely do we ever get to see or hear the entire album side played, the idea is implied as a shorthand for what people watching the movie would recognize as a commonplace ritual: the conscious listening of music.

This is what I thought of as I internalized the loss of the LP.

Though technology has always defined and driven the restrictions and formatting of recorded music, up until the digital age I had this sense that there was a certain level of respect paid to the music. The reasons and the uses of the end product varied – dance music versus contemplative classical for example  – but from the listener perspective the music was given its own space. It’s that space that’s missing, that conscious decision to settle in and let the music deliberately fill our heads, our rooms, our lives with whatever joy music gives us. We program our phones with playlists for the gym, we run Pandora or Spotify stations to play in the background at work, we play plenty of music as a wallpaper soundtrack to our lives but we scarcely give it the attention we once did.

Another image. I’m in ninth grade, I’ve got a pair of headphones as a birthday gift (mostly so I can listen without disturbing my brothers in our shared bedroom) and I’ve gathered enough allowance to buy a new record. I didn’t have a big collection, nor the means to build one, so any purchase had to be carefully considered. I won’t go into specifics, but there was this band (Pink Floyd) who had a new album coming out (Animals) and it would be the first new album they released since I discovered them. I had to decide whether I wanted to spend my hard-earned lawn-mowing dollars on an unknown album of music or purchase an earlier disk that was chock full of songs I knew I liked. I decided to take the plunge, bought the new album, and took it home. I listened to it intensely that first time, just listened. I played both sides then flipped back to side one and played it again, reading along with the lyrics. After the second listening I had to take a break because plastic-covered foam “cans” on my headphones had matted down my hair with sweat. I listened one more time that evening and then went to sleep planning when I would next have the house to myself in order to play the music loud, to hear what it sounded like when it filled a room and could pound against my chest and rattle the windows.

When was the last time I did that? When was the last time a new album of music came out and I just sat with it? When was the last time I listened to any album of music from beginning to end, doing nothing more but listen?

You hear things in music, your head fills with images and races with ideas. I feel like there is something in that noisy meditation, something that has been lost. Though we still have the freedom to listen to the music as it was presented that very freedom has managed to abandon the long-play in exchange for the short-gratification.

As I rebuild my digital library I am taking note of albums I haven’t heard in a long time. I have a mental list growing that I may need to write down soon. One by one I intend to call up those albums when I have the time and simply listen to them as I once did. Perhaps I’ll grow impatient, or my attention span will wander out of a recently acquired habit and I’ll divert myself with some chore or task. But I want to give it a try.

I owe the music that much.

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#poetry friday: LP

I lost a large chunk of my digital music library recently, and in rebuilding it I found myself replacing music i hadn’t heard in a long time, music ignored in favor of what was selected for me by my digital playlists. It made me think about how different my listening has become, how passive, how I used to seek out things to fit my mood as opposed to simply skipping what popped up in my library playback.

Then in selecting items to digitally upload, listening to songs I haven’t heard in perhaps a decade, I felt something was missing. Especially while listening to old jazz recordings I found their digital remastering so clean and cold that I began longing for the surface noises of old vinyl. I found myself becoming oddly nostalgic for the days when one chose an album and played entire sides, not deleting or skipping unliked songs, but listening through. There was a different pace, a sort of patience, something I hadn’t realized I was missing.

Naturally, I began writing about it.

i miss
analog hiss
bacony pop
versus digital bop

& pine
for that vinyl shine
inwardly spiral
sonically viral

long play
groovy decay
diamond cut tracks
licorice & wax

beflawed
& honestly shod
focused attention
aural comprehension

the sound
spindle bound
linear traction
delayed satisfaction

endure
recordings impure
to watch platters turn

for all this i yearn

 

Far from my best efforts, but perhaps I can revisit this once I’ve dug out the old vinyl records. It’s entirely possible this is one of those nostalgias that doesn’t hold up to the reality.

Haven’t meant to be away from Poetry Friday these last couple weeks, but, you know how it goes. Tabatha over at The Opposite of Indifference is hosting the roundup this week (along with Bulwinkle) and you should check it out if you haven’t already. No, really.

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totally random thought regarding juliana hatfield

I’m plowing my way through my final essays for the semester and for that I require music. I’m listening to Juliana Hatfiled’s Made In China and thinking how different it feels from In Exile Deo, which I was listening to last week at this time. And it hits me:

Juliana Hatfield is like femme Neil Young. She can go hard, she can go soft, she can run punk or stream commercial, she does what she wants, she endures out of the limelight. Granted, she hasn’t had the same level of popularity, never was part of an eponymously named supergroup, but maybe if you put her together with Susanna Hoffs, Aimee Mann, and Mary Lou Lord — all people she’s sung back-up for — maybe we’d see something to rival CSNY.

That’s all I’m saying, totally random and nothing to do with writing. Juliana Hatfield is like Neil Young.

And Neil, by the way, is more jazz than he is rock and roll.

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why i am not a filmmaker

If you had asked my friends in high school what I was destined to be they wouldn’t have hesitated to anoint me the next Spielberg, the next Lucas.  In the late 1970′s there could probably be no greater honor, akin to calling a young golfer today the next Tiger Woods, or tapping a teen hacker the next Bill Gates.  It’s a heady thing to know you’re thought so highly of, that your peers see something in you that you do not see in yourself.

The problem wasn’t a question of self-esteem, it was that the people I was being compared to and the things they produced didn’t resonate with what I wanted to do.  I had always felt that I wanted to do something with film, in motion pictures, something that had to do with sequential storytelling in a visual media, but by the time I trucked off to college I still didn’t have my definitive role model.  I held onto the “dream” and went along for the ride through college, coming out the other end only slightly less clueless.

It’s taken me nearly 30 years to figure it out, but today while reading a newspaper article about the band R.E.M. I realized why I’m not a filmmaker.

It’s because I wanted to be in a band.

I didn’t want to be in a rock band, or a blues band, or any kind of musical organization.  I wanted to be in a film band.  I wanted to join up with a bunch of like-minded people and pool our collective talents into filmmaking.  Like music, film is a collective medium, with individuals specializing and participating for the whole.  The problem is that filmmaking is generally consumed by people full of authorial ego and is collaborative in the most mercenary of ways.  You don’t see the bassists union making pay and lifestyle demands while the drummer’s union stipulates the length of a workday.  You don’t see lead singers with their agents holding off until contracts arrive stipulating their name above the title of the album.

Sure, there are film production companies that are formed by people who have gained enough clout to make the films they want.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about a small crew of people who get together and jam out some ideas until a cohesive image comes together.  Not some cheesy collective, like some holdover from the hippie days, but a group artistic endeavor that expresses themselves visually the way musicians do aurally.

Oh, Hollywood tries to market their movies this way with “From the producer of” and “From the director of,” and historically you have director/star match-ups like Burton-Depp and Scorsese-DeNiro but these are hardly what I’m talking about.

Imagine you’re off to see a new film by The Seven Samurai, or Die Wenders Staat, or perhaps a little something from Un Petit Chat.  As with bands, over time would would come to know their strengths, could fairly compare them with their previous works, and have a better sense of the quality of the work going in.

Perhaps then, with bands as brands, we could address the ticket price issue.  A local band playing a local gig isn’t going to command the same door fee as a big ticket band commanding seven nights at the local arena.  A paperback doesn’t fetch the same prices as a hardcover.  So why does the low budget indie film get stuck helping foot the bill at the box office as a big budget box office failure?

But I digress.  The sad fact is that it’s taken me 30 years to see now what I wish I could have seen then.  Bands are for the young.  No forty-something dude is going to pick up a guitar and pull together his poker buddies and start making waves as The Midlife Crises.  Sure, you can age into the scene but you can’t capture the market, you can’t reach the hearts and minds of viewers and listeners open to your ideas.  Couch surfing and living in a van just isn’t conducive to folks in need of daily fiber and condroitin supplements.

In the off chance there’s a band of filmmakers out there looking for an elder member with a sense of history and humor; I’m totally into the French and German New Wave (Godard, Wenders, Herzog), early 80′s indie films (Cox, Syales), classic screwball comedies (Sturges is king), and any film that isn’t afraid to go longer than 45 seconds before cutting.

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tristan tzara programmed my ipod

Suze left her iPod at work this weekend. Normally this isn’t a major disaster but we were having company over and needed to have music playing while we cleaned up the house, if not during company itself.  So I was asked to bring my iPod out of it’s protective gym casing and allowed to set it into the docking station for the day.

Needless to say, my wife and I have different tastes in music. And just to be on the safe side (in case I didn’t realize it) she let me know we had different tastes in music this evening, which was her polite way of saying that she didn’t really like everything my pod was shuffling through. Funny how the fact that I don’t dig what her pod shuffles most of the time doesn’t matter, especially since she hogs the docking station. But I digress.

What I was reminded of tonight, and one of the first times I ever put an iPod in shuffle songs mode, was how well-matched the music seemed to be. Even when it shifted genres or decades or styles, somehow the pod knew how best to match things: when to bring the tempo up or down, how to match beats, matching closing and opening keys. Man, I thought, that’s one smart program they’ve written for a music player.

Except Apple didn’t write that program. I did. And I did it using the time-honored methods outlined by Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara back in the 1920s. And I didn’t even know it (which is really the only proper way to do it). Allow me to explain.

In 1924 little Sami Rosenstock, a.k.a. Tristan Tzara, as one of the founders of the Dada art movement published a book entitled Seven Dada Manifestos. Among the manifestos Tzara included instructions for writing a Dada poem. Here are the complete instructions:

To make a Dadaist poem:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the point of this little exercise.  The poem will be like you because, in a sense, you have consciously chosen the elements to be included even if you had no real say in their order.  In choosing the article and the length, in choosing the words, you have in essence subconsciously programmed all the possible meanings and permutations of your poem.  In the end, only one order will emerge of all the possibilities, and it couldn’t possibly be otherwise.

You see where I’m going:  my iPod is the bag, the songs I’ve loaded are the words, and the shuffle element randomly chooses songs.  That the final playlist “works” is because in pre-selecting the songs to be included the final playback of those songs in whatever order “resembles me.”  Where I find myself wishing to skip songs when the pod is in shuffle is when it’s playing back a song I loaded for reasons other than personal enjoyment — like songs I loaded in order to make mix discs for my girls, or for specific playlists (like the gym list) that have their own separate applications.  Of course I’m going to think the iPod can read my mind, I’ve loaned it the building blocks of my own subconscious programming.

It’s nice to think of all these pod people walking around with a little bit of Dada filling their ears.

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3x 33 1/3 publications

When I saw a blog post over at Powells.com about this series of books featuring in-depth uberfan-written examinations of key music albums in history, well, it was hook meet fish. The idea of book-length essays discussing key moments in musical history from the 60s, 70s, 80′s (and to a lesser extent the 90s) exactly like what I feel is missing from middle grade and YA non-fiction.

Parents and grandparents can pass down the personal predilections, but the music itself is an artifact out of place; it’s one thing to appreciate the early Bob Dylan but without context how can you explain what a break from style and tradition the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was without discussing the Dylan-goes-electric controversy. Not to take away from the work of more contemporary artists, but “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is clearly an early forerunner to rap and hip-hop (complete with video). My guess is there aren’t many adults who can share that with kids who might be interested in Bob’s music.

Here now we have a small press that is filling a gap so wide I’m surprised o one else has really seen it. The idea was to let fans give a personal, in-depth analysis of a specific album in an artists oeuvre and give it a place, a purpose, a meaning, a reason for what makes it exemplary. What’s more interesting are the album choices. Some are obvious pinnacles in an artist’s or group’s career — The Pixies Doolittle, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds — while others make their case for more difficult, less commercial, or just plain unique presentation — Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces.

Curious, and prodded by a buy-two-get-one-free offer at Powells, I took the bait and called up three titles whose albums I knew like the back of my hand (musically at least) so I could get a sense on where the series was coming from: The Beatles Let It Be, David Bowie’s Low, and Steely Dan’s Aja.

Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt

It was a good thing I bought three and didn’t get just this one, because if I had I might have made the mistake that they were all like this volume and I wouldn’t have written about this series at all. You have to understand, this might be the best technically written examination of any Steely Dan product in the known universe, but it was written by a music geek for music geeks who understand composition, music theory, and the nuts and bolts of jazz right down to its modal chord progressions. Even for fans, the Dan have always been morbidly obtuse, but the music can be appreciated without a degree in music from Berklee or a PhD in cultural anthropology.

It can be difficult when you bring along your personal baggage to someone else’s party, and for me with Aja that baggage is heavy. The summer that Aja was released my closest friend Pete and I hung out at my girlfriend Laura’s house listening to that album endlessly while planning films we would and would not get around to making. The way Mozart can have an effect on the learning and retention of information for young children, Aja was like a creative elixir that seemed to be feeding something inside our 16 year old brains. It could have been the heady mix of accessible jazz and raging hormones that made us write a 25 minute silent slapstick comedy adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, shoot another couple weekends worth of cut-out animation a la Monty Python, and send prank letters to our “mortal enemy” who was off leading a Boy Scout camp that summer. We would listen to that album in silence sometimes before finally flipping the sides, starting over and getting down to business. In fact, on the rare occasions when Laura was home (and where was she anyway?) she kept a daily diary of our film-to-be and only one entry was noted simply as “did NOT listen to Aja today.”

From that perspective it would be easy for me to fill a book that would delve into the essence of the Dan on the teenage psyche, when our taste for bland pop wasn’t easily or comfortably sated by the emerging punk and new wave music but by a pair of articulate throwbacks to another era. While the other outsider kids were eating up the beat generation we had the Dan teaching us hipster sex slang and leading us to Charlie Parker. There was a kid named Larry who, at the end of that school year, joked about how we’d all be totally into rock and roll until we got married or turned 30, whichever came first, and then we’d mellow out to jazz. “Except for you Steely Dan fans, who are going to be the ones telling us what we should be listening to because you’ll have been there all along.”

While it is true that the jazz runs deep and thick throughout the later efforts of Steely Dan it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on without being schooled. In that sense it falls into the “you-know-it-when-you hear-it” category, as Breithaupt’s book very quickly points out because without that schooling you’ll never really get what he lays down. Song after song, track after track, chords and chord progressions are striped-searched to the point where it might as well be a textbook of modern math. Nine years of playing the viola didn’t come close to preparing me for what I was reading and so I found myself skimming over whole sections looking for the nuggets that would feed me what I wanted.

What I wanted, what I think many Dan fans want, is the impossible; clear, concise answers to the lyrical and musical inspirations of the Dan core, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Cryptic and elusive, Becker and Fagen have made a life’s game out of shutting the doors and throwing misinformation out the windows to the fans. It isn’t necessarily a hatred of fandom and fame — though it sometimes can come off as arrogance — but an operational ethic that basically says “We do what we do, you either like it or you don’t.” What I wanted was a book that could never be written.

To that end I give Breithaupt high marks for writing the book that could be written, that lays down the law and breaks it. I’m willing to guess no other album in this series of equal or greater popularity could have withstood the mechanical scrutiny of Breithaupt’s analysis. Cold, yet informed, he marks every segment of the album’s DNA and shows you how it was constructed.

But even all that science can’t explain why I wore through two copies during the summer of 1978.

David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken

I’m feeling it here, as Wilcken examines the first in Bowie’s mythical “Berlin trilogy” of albums (Low, Heroes, Lodger). Stepping back he sets the scene by showing us a coked-out Bowie in LA working his Station To Station mojo and running down the significance of that particular time in Bowie’s life. It’s here that he hooks up with his buddy Jim Osterberg (Iggy Pop to the rest of us) and they dash off to tour the world before hunkering down in France to begin work almost simultaneously on Bowie’s Low and Iggy’s solo album The Idiot.

Yes, France. At the same Château d’Hérouville the the rockin’ Elton John called home in the 70′s was where the first moody Bowie album was birthed. Wilcken opens the doors and lets us watch as Bowie makes his break from reworked American funk and pop and begins to embrace his inner European. Producer Tony Visconti is on hand, Brian Eno is called forth, and musicians are called in randomly as Bowie attempts to construct the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth. His ideas for a soundtrack, ambient and avant garde, were eschewed before he even got started but as Wilcken points out Bowie sends the final product along to the film’s director to let him know what he missed.

By the time it comes to mixing the album Bowie’s moved to Berlin where the divided city’s vibe seems to be feeding his soul. His fairly open marriage is in ruins and he’s hanging out with folks like Kraftwerk and noted transsexual Romy Haag. He’s about as out there as he can get and still be mainstream enough to get some radio play out of the barest snippets of songs. This was the overture of this particular suite of albums, a bold career-bending move that forced the pop arena to join him in exile rather than feel alienated.

It’s taken me most of these last 30 years to come around to Low (I was on board with Heroes from the start) and I think it might have taken a trip to Berlin and a personal career shift to get there. The aural landscapes and the disjointed lyrical imagery aren’t of time or place but of mindset; it’s not enough to hear or feel these songs, you have to be able to live them is some way to make them truly relevant. At least I did, and understanding what went on behind the scenes only confirms that Bowie’s mind was in transit to someplace else. This album, then, became his interior monologue.

Another fascinating element is how Bowie is working these two projects at the same time — Iggy’s and his — and in the end realizes he needs to release his first so as not to sound derivative. The irony is that by producing and writing much of Iggy’s album he’s worried about being perceived as borrowing from himself, but no matter. Image is kind and Bowie did his fair share of muddling his image up to that point.

Wilcken’s book is well-informed and well-rounded in its interpretations and readings. He places Bowie in context of Bowie, pop music of the time, various cultural influences, with just enough personal drama to give it flair without seeming gossipy. Writing about music should make you want to dig out that music and listen along; good writing about music will make you appreciate the music in ways that compliment and improve both the music and the listener. Wilcken succeeds.

The Beatles Let It Be by Steve Matteo

In some ways writing about this album is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Anywhere you aim, you’ll hit something.  I saved this for last because it was the album I felt closest to in terms of knowing cold, the album I knew the most background about going in, and was my least favorite album for many reasons.

When Let It Be first hit my ears I found it to be the sloppiest sounding album ever recorded.  Granted, I was young and hadn’t had much to go by, but after all the previous Beatles albums even the raw energy of the early music had a kind of polish on it that this lacked.  Only later when I learned that it was a deliberate attempt by the band to capture their early, pure roots did I understand the documentary nature of the exercise. Even so, I still wondered what these songs would have sounded like if they’d made them as “real” studio albums, or at least practiced a bit more.

Post The White Album The Beatles were in a state of dynamic entropy. They were as prolific as they had ever been yet couldn’t stand to work together for a variety of reasons.  Yoko gets kicked a lot during this time for per perceived meddling, but there’s just as much kicking of George by John and Paul. What emerges in Matteo’s examination of this album is nothing short of a day-by-day diary of the rehearsals and filming that was to become part of a TV documentary.  The end result was to be a concert but all that happened was the short live performance on the top of the Beatles Apple Headquarters.  Recordings were made, and while it should have been placed before Abbey Road in the chronology complications caused the album to be released after the Beatles had already announced they had broken up.  Much can be said of Let It Be standing as the Beatles last statement — moving to just let things be and move on — and in the end, as Paul and their producer George Martin cobbled together a final album from various bits and pieces the boys spat it, the black-rimmed album became the perfect tombstone for a band that had come to the end of its long and winding road.

For those unfamiliar with the sessions, or only mildly familiar with a strong desire to know more, Matteo’s book puts those sessions together in a way that connects the dots with everything going on at the time.  If you are familiar with the songs, have seen the Let It Be video and the Get Back session on the roof, what you can read in Matteo’s recounting of the events will out it all neatly in place.  That said, there is a lot of discussion about songs never officially released, unfamiliar oldies, and a general sense that the Let It Be album only represents the tip of an iceberg that has never been fully appreciated. Of all the songs practiced and worked on, why were these selected in the end?  We may never know as many of the tapes and documentary recordings disappeared.  Some of these recordings did show up in Amsterdam recently and perhaps there’s a chance we’ll have a better context for this album in the future, but for now all we have are the primary document and the subsequent attempts to put that document into perspective.

Interesting but unsatisfying ultimately, both the album and Matteo’s examination of it.  Perhaps that’s all we can really hope for.

*    *    *    *    *

Looking back I suppose it wasn’t fair to judge the series by titles I was familiar with; the sign of a good review would be the desire to hunt down the album being featured and want to listen to it.  I like what Continuum has set out to do with this series and, if anything, would hope they have a long and fruitful run of titles.  There’s so much music out there, and so little of it documented in this kind of detail, that I wonder sometimes what future generations will make of our era culturally.  Bach didn’t invent classical music, nor did Beethoven, nor Stravinsky, but know what they did and how they achieved it in their time and what it’s meant since.  Perhaps it’s too early to suggest that rock and roll albums of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s have their relevant moments in history but it’s fun to study the possibilities.

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