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Thursday, Jun 1 2017, 6AM
It was twenty....no...fifty years ago today that The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and with the anniversary there will be a lot of interesting events, including an updated and re-imagined re-release of the album and PBS will explore the album with a new hour-long documentary, Sgt. Pepper's Musical Revolution, premiering Saturday, June 3rd at 8 p.m. ET.
You should watch this BBC produced story behind Heroes as told by the album's producer and David's friend Tony Visconti. www.youtube.com
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles release of "Sgt. Peppers..." we're playing the greatest albums and songs in the history of contemporary music and one could argue that Marvin's Gaye's "What's Going On" is one of the greatest achievments in the history of music. According to AllMusic.com, It was in "late in 1970, Gaye decided to record a song that the Four Tops' Obie Benson had brought him, "What's Going On." When (Motown President) Berry Gordy decided not to issue the single, deeming it uncommercial, Gaye refused to record any more material until he relented. Confirmed by its tremendous commercial success in January 1971, he recorded the rest of the album over ten days in March, and Motown released it in late May. Besides cementing Marvin Gaye as one of the most important artists in pop music, What's Going On was far and away the best full-length to issue from the singles-dominated Motown factory, and arguably the best soul album of all time."
There's a great interview with Thom Yorke in the current issue of Rolling Stone about this album, released 20-years ago in 1997, in which he looks back at himself and says `"Lighten the fuck up," Yorke says, laughing hard.' www.rollingstone.com
Songs in the Key of Life is often cited as one of the greatest albums in popular music history. It was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll; in 2001 the TV network VH1 named it the seventh greatest album of all time...but most importantly, Prince called it the best album ever recorded. Game. Set. Match.
The unusual noises during the song after the lines "and the bag across her shoulder/ made her look a little like a military man" were Lennon, McCartney and Harrison playing comb and paper.
Pink Floyd watched the Beatles recording "Lovely Rita" (and) used effects inspired by "Lovely Rita" for recording their instrumental composition "Pow R. Toc H." from their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, selling 422,624 copies in its first week, which broke a record for first-week sales by a female artist. At the 41st Annual Grammy Awards, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill earned 10 nominations, winning five awards, making Hill the first woman to receive that many nominations and awards in one night. It has sold over 8 million copies in the US and over 19 million copies worldwide.
Paul's Boutique was produced with the Dust Brothers, whose extensive, innovative use of sampling helped establish the practice of multi-layered sampling as an art in itself. While the Dust Brothers were set on making a hit record, the duo agreed with the group on producing a more experimental and sonically different record. In total, 105 songs were sampled on the album, including 24 individual samples on the last track alone. The song Shadrach alone samples all of these songs:
"Say What?" by Trouble Funk
"That's the Joint" by Funky 4+1
"Do Your Dance" by Rose Royce
"Never Let 'Em Say" by Ballin' Jack
"Funky Drummer" by James Brown
"Hot and Nasty" by Black Oak Arkansas
"Sugarhill Groove" by the Sugarhill Gang
"Loose Booty" by Sly Stone
It was my understanding that this song is about cartography (from Greek χάρτης khartēs, "papyrus, sheet of paper, map"; and γράφειν graphein, "write"), or the study and practice of making maps.
Playing #theClash #LondonCalling "London calling, now don't look to us, Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust." HAPPY #SgtPepper50
The abbreviations used in the lyrics are a selection of civil war references from 1970s headlines, a suggestion of what could happen in the United Kingdom. The IRA and the UDA were the largest paramilitary armies in the conflict in Northern Ireland: the heavily armed IRA (Irish Republican Army) were on the Republican (anti-British, pro-unification) side, while the thousands-strong UDA (Ulster Defence Association) were on the Loyalist (pro-British, anti-unification) side. The MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were the political group that took control of Angola, formerly one of Portugal’s African colonies, in a 1975-76 civil war, and still run the country today. When Rotten sings, “I use the enemy,” it’s a deliberate homonym for “I use the NME,” or New Musical Express, the British weekly music newspaper.
The lyrics of "Iron Man," are not about the Marvel super hero, but were inspired by singer Ozzy Osbourne who asked bass player Geezer Butler to write a song about an `iron bloke.' The storyline – a self-fulfilment prophecy, mixed up with time travel – is actually quite complex. It’s about a man who goes into the future and witnesses the apocalypse. Going back to his own time, he encounters a rogue magnetic field, which turns him into a mute, steel creature. Unable to talk, he still tries to warn people about the impending end of the world, but is only mocked for his troubles. Angry and bitter, he eventually causes the devastation he’d warned everyone about. Ultimately the would-be hero becomes the villain. For more: teamrock.com
"I’m a polar bear and I’m with five hundred polar bears, just tramping over a city. The lyric is about people who feel sorry for themselves all the time and don’t get their shit together. You come to a point with people like that where you’ve done everything you can do for them, and the only thing that’s going to sort them out is themselves. It’s time to get things done. I identify with polar bears. They’re very cuddly and cute and quite calm, but if they meet you they can be very strong."
—Björk talking to Jon Savage about the song
Exile on Main St was not well received by most critics, who found the quality of the songs inconsistent. In a review for Rolling Stone, Lenny Kaye said the record had "a tight focus on basic components of the Stones' sound as we've always known it," but added the uneven quality of songs meant "the great Stones album of their mature period is yet to come". He was wrong. In a year-end list for Newsday, Robert Christgau, or "Bobby" to his pals, named it the year's best album and was the peak of rock music in 1972 as it "explored new depths of record-studio murk, burying Mick's voice under layers of cynicism, angst and ennui".
Liz Phair's says her debut album Exile in Guyville is a direct song-by-song "response" of sorts to Exile on Main St. The term Guyville comes from a song of the same name by Urge Overkill. Liz Phair has explained the concept of the album, saying "For me, Guyville is a concept that combines the smalltown mentality of a 500-person Knawbone, KY-type town with the Wicker Park indie music scene in Chicago...(t)his kind of guy mentality, you know, where men are men and women are learning. (Guyville guys) always dominated the stereo like it was their music. They'd talk about it, and I would just sit on the sidelines."
The album's lyrics were also prominently influenced by the recent birth of singer/guitarist Corrin Tucker's son Marshall Tucker Bangs. According to Tucker, "Marshall is all over One Beat. The last year was definitely a difficult time for me, as he was born nine weeks premature and he was in the hospital for a while. It was the hardest thing that I've ever lived through, that fear and anxiety, and I think I was able to let go into the music."
You (and I) have never been as cool as Chrissie Hynde. Need proof? Hynde, originally from Akron, Ohio, moved to London in 1973, working at the weekly music paper NME and at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothes store. She was involved with early versions of the Clash and the Damned. The Pretenders formed in 1978 after Dave Hill at Anchor Records heard some demos of Hynde's music. He arranged a rehearsal studio in Denmark Street, where a 3-piece band consisting of Hynde, Mal Hart on bass and Phil Taylor of Motörhead on drums played a selection of Hynde's original songs. Oh, and then she released some of the greatest albums in the history of music.
This song was originally called 110% and was about giving your all. This is a fact I just made up.
It is my understanding that "now" he wants to "be your dog." This is the same kind of thing that led to an argument in KEXP DJ Troy Nelson's basement. www.youtube.com
Regarding "Hands All Over", the late Chris Cornell said that "it's just sort of an environmental thing. Not strictly environmental, but mostly. It's basically about how we humans tend to screw up everything that's good enough as it is ... or everything that we're attracted to, we love to go and defile it."
