Scanner : the sixties

The Beatles Get Back to Where They Once Belonged

Brian Fairbanks — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:05:00 GMT

It was forty years ago today when Paul McCartney told the band to play.

The Beatles were on the roof of Apple Corp., their record company's building, gearing up to play and record the songs from their stalled "Get Back" sessions. It was freezing as hell and they hadn't performed live in over three years, but as you can see here, the band was in great spirits...

Today, Apple employees in London wanted to have a memorial party in the same spot as the Beatles' last public performance, but the police vetoed it. Wouldn't that have been incredible?

Luckily for us Americans, Ken Mansfield is holding a similar tribute concert on the roof of Seattle's Pike Place Market:

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Beatles' last performance, the band's former U.S. manager, Ken Mansfield, is teaming up with Seattle Beatles cover band Crème Tangerine for a free performance at Pike Place Market Friday. Mansfield was standing with Yoko Ono for the Beatle's final show, just steps away from the band. It was an impromptu performance to a London lunch crowd atop the rooftop of their record company, Apple... [Seattle Times]

If you're there, check it out and report back to us, will you?

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Top 10 Cover Songs of All-Time

Brian Fairbanks — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:10:00 GMT

A while ago, someone pointed out to us that ever list of the best cover songs of all-time includes cuts like "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" by Guns 'N Roses or hits by-- gulp-- Cher. Hopefully, this will be at least a step in the right direction...

10. Step Into a World (Rapture's Delight) - KRS-One. We have to admit, this is only on here because there's no other hiphop cover that's as close to our hearts. You can keep your lame Fugees cover of "Killing Me Softly," which even that group's members despise. You can keep your P. Diddy sampling/ripoff garbage. KRS-One didn't need to cover or even sample Blondie's "Rapture" for us to remember this cut from the mid-90s-- that's how superior it is to other hiphop covers.

Step Into A World (Rapture's Delight)

9. Comfortably Numb - The Scissor Sisters. This is pure pop, and maybe the disposable kind: disco. However, to take a classic like Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" and not only turn into a catchy dance freakout, complete with a far more memorable melody has gotta count for something, no?

[YouTube link]

8. Crossroads - Cream. This is an old Robert Johnson song, one that guitar player Eric Clapton was dying to tear into for years before this live performance at the Fillmore. He's never been able to top this, not even on Layla. After years of listening to it, we're still awed by that brutal solo.

Crossroads

7. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley. It's come down to this-- it takes an angry backlash by a dead singer's internet fanbase to give Jeff Buckley the Top 5 hit he always deserved with this Leonard Cohen song. Although pretty much every version except the John Cale attempt (which is arguably even more famous, since it was used in Shrek) is worthy of the Master, it would be hard to top the simple beauty of young Buckley's 1994 release, which grows sadder every year. "All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya."

Hallelujah

6. Hurt - Johnny Cash. Neither one of his best songs nor one of his best covers (those would be Folsom Prison Blues and Sam Hall, respectively), but seeing how there are so many people that think this is his peak, we find ourselves including it here anyway. In this version, recorded shortly before his death, Cash stripped away the anger of Trent Reznor's initial take on the material, giving it the devastating treatment it really deserved. Even notoriously pop-minded country music fans dug it-- it went on to win the CMA for Single of the Year.

Hurt

5. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin. "If it sounds country, man, that's what it is-- it's a country song." Despite being a very pop version of a nostalgic Southern anthem by Kris Kristofferson, Joplin's first and only #1 is still essential for road trip mixes more than three decades after her death.

Me And Bobby McGee

4. House of the Rising Sun - the Animals. When Eric Burdon bought Bob Dylan's first album, he discovered, amid a bunch of forgettable covers, an obscure traditional folk song about a little girl in New Orleans. Alan Price provided the unmistakable keyboard intro and the Animals had a #1 song, just like that, a prize that should have been their first of many. Unfortunately, this is the one for which they are best remembered.

House Of The Rising Sun

3. With A Little Help From My Friends - Joe Cocker. This cover of a song from the Sgt. Pepper album was such a tremendous success that the Beatles took out a full page ad in a newspaper to congratulate Cocker on the arrangement. And that was before he'd performed what for us is the single greatest concert number of the 1960s-- seen here at Woodstock:

2. Respect - Aretha Franklin. "That woman stole my song," Otis Redding said of this version, his tone a mixture of pride and despair. Today, you can't play the songs back to back without saying, "Ouch, she really whipped the original's ass, didn't she?"

Respect [Album Version]

1. All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix. We don't really need to explain why this is #1, do we? Just for fun, we'll remind you of the story of a London studio in early 1968, where Jimi sat working on a new record, when someone burst in with tapes from Bob Dylan's late-'67 Nashville sessions. Hendrix immediately began reworking the short, sparse, and folkie tune into a full-on electric guitar assault. We'll let Dylan tell you the rest:

"It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way... Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way." [Biograph liner notes, via Wikipedia]

All Along The Watchtower

Honorable mentions: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - the Animals (by Nina Simone); Soul Man by the Blues Brothers and I Thank You by ZZ Top (both recorded by Sam & Dave and written by Isaac Hayes); Mr. Tambourine Man - the Byrds (by Bob Dylan); and Stop Your Sobbing - the Pretenders (written by Ray Davies.)

Obviously, it's much easier to think of atrocious cover songs that radio stations see fit to play these days: Limp Bizkit's "Behind Blue Eyes," Madonna's "American Pie" (never the greatest set of lyrics to begin with, but then you add her insipid melody to it), Britney Spears and Hillary Duff butchering everything imaginable, and just about anything Sheryl Crow has released this century-- especially "The First Cut is the Deepest," which should've made Cat Stevens come out of retirement and do a world tour just to show her how it's done.

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Jack Kerouac's New Year's Resolutions

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Jack Kerouac is dead, so obviously these are what we call "vintage" rules to live by. (In fact, this coming year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Beat Generation writer's death, which was due to cirrhosis of the liver.)

And while these chunks of wisdom, taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose (or, at least, the style of rapid-fire modern prose he invented and brought down with him), are geared toward writers, they are words to live by in 2009-- so says us:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

True, we don't understand half of what he says, but everyone can take a line or two and run with it. The man who once wrote "I want to marry my novels and have short stories for children" would have turned 86 this past year.

Via Wikipedia.

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Arlo Guthrie Hopes You Can Still Get Anything You Want This Thanksgiving

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:43:00 GMT

Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute masterpiece Alice's Restaurant was released 41 years ago this month and it's still an essential part of America's Thanksgiving radio broadcasts.

Play this, plus the hilarious and unforgettable coda seen here, tomorrow and you'll do just fine...

Here's the original recording, in two parts:

And the coda, seen here at Farm Aid in 1987, is our real reason for this post. He did a much better and funnier version of this story in the mid-90s, but this'll do:

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Apparently We Were Supposed to Be Upset By This Poster

Emily Farris — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:51:00 GMT

Remember this poster—a recreation of a Joan Baez poster from the 60's—we posted yesterday? Well, we thought it was all in good fun, but apparently it's pissed off quite a few female bloggers, including some of our old friends.

Over at Salon the women of Broadsheet had a heated discussion.

Rebecca Traistor despises the poster, and says that "the idea of any kind of political action is being taken to impress the opposite sex — or that guys would only vote a certain way if a woman promised sex at the end (that's also totally the only way you get them to pay for dinner, incidentally) — sort of makes me want to drown myself."

While we get where Traistor is coming from, we can't imagine anyone would actually vote a certain way just to impress the opposite sex. And if he did, we surely wouldn't have sex with him—we're not attracted to men who aren't passionate about their own politics.

Sarah Hepola, formerly Salon Sarah, seems to be somewhere between us, and Traistor, but still dislikes it:

"It doesn't bother me as much, but it's kind of gross. Are the women in this photo going to say yes to every boy who says Obama? Because if so, they are going to be very, very tired. And sore!

Considering this poster was made, according to Bust, by 'a couple cheeky ladies in Brooklyn" —where I (and Rebecca and Judy! [and Scanner Emily]) proudly live -- I would suggest it should be tweaked to read, 'Girls say yes to boys who say Obama and also wear skinny jeans and have scruffy hair and buy me Stella Artois while I crochet an adorable bong cozy.'"

So, so right, Scanner Sarah. But of all the things to get pissed off in the world, this poster isn't one of them. We don't have the energy (you know, especially since we're only halfway through the Democratic men in Brooklyn).

What do you think? Good fun or highly offensive?

Related:

Scanner : the sixties

The Beatles Get Back to Where They Once Belonged

Top 10 Cover Songs of All-Time

C-Love in HEEB's Wasted Issue

Sloppy Seconds: The Craigslist Crackdown on Hookers

While You Were Sleeping: Who The Hell Is Gerald Butler?

Top 10 Cover Songs of All-Time

Lou Reed's Classic Example Of How To Give An Interview

Jack Kerouac's New Year's Resolutions

3 Things We Wish We'd Gotten For Christmas, Or: Scanner Verena Is A Sucker For Infomercials

New Year's Celebrations Lacking Balls

What Do Cubans Really Think of Cuba?

Arlo Guthrie Hopes You Can Still Get Anything You Want This Thanksgiving

While You Were Sleeping: The Gyllenhaal Divorce

This Thanksgiving, Just Shut Up and Be Thankful for Your Faithful Mate (Who You Probably Don't Really Have)

"Don't Mess With My Governor!" Turkey Guy From Palin Video Speaks Out

Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart Mash the Potatoes

While You Were Sleeping: 93% Prefer Real Boobs

Apparently We Were Supposed to Be Upset By This Poster

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Trojan Girls Try To Get Republicans To Wear, Learn Uses Of Condoms