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46a6ba4
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The Chiffons had so many hits better than "He's So Fine"--"Out of This World," "Why Am I So Shy," "I Have a Boyfriend"--and it's a shame George never got around to rewriting those.) Just"
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Rob Sheffield |
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cb4b8df
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They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow's nastiest and best noirs, Where Danger Lives and His Kind of Woman) said he was the only director who could outdrink him. When he wasn't hitting the bar, Farrow liked to discuss theology with visiting nuns and priests.
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Rob Sheffield |
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1b8c521
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And complaining about Paul is what the rest of us do. That's his role in our lives. We prosecute Paul for the flaws we despise in ourselves. In real life I've always been attracted to Paul types because they don't sit around and talk about the shit they're going to do--they get it done. They're quick to say "good enough" and move on. Paul was a closer, not a tinker-forever artist like Brian Wilson, who set out to top Sgt. Pepper with Smile ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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d2e7507
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CARY GRANT IS THE MCCARTNEY OF MOVIE STARS--HIS STORY has much to tell us about Paul's. They share a spiritual connection, beyond their pronunciation of "Judy." (Paul described his "hey Judy-Judy-Judy" ad libs as "Cary Grant on heat.") They dazzled Americans as the ultimate English dream dates--yet both were self-inventions, street guys who taught themselves to pose as posh charmers. Both grew up working-class in hardscrabble industrial cit..
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Rob Sheffield |
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1a282c2
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PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you're under thirty, you have never heard of a song called "Spies Like Us," and I am a horrible person for being the one to tell you. It was the theme for a big-budget Hollywood spy comedy starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Nobody saw the movie, but Paul's theme was worse than the movie could have been. MTV playe..
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Rob Sheffield |
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02598cf
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Some records turned out better than others: Off the Ground quite rotten, Flaming Pie and New and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard quite excellent. One of my favorites is Run Devil Run, from 1999, the year after Linda died,
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Rob Sheffield |
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43bdced
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Silly Love Songs" wanders on for a bizarre and very unpop six minutes. Paul was passionate about music-making, which is different from being passionate about music."
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Rob Sheffield |
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f51bd87
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Gaye released "Got to Give It Up" a year after Bowie released "Station to Station"--two long grooves stretching into double-digit minutes, blatantly unconventional, with quizzical vocals and rubberband-man bass and hypnotically repetitive rhythm, going for synthetic effects while rejecting any kind of laid-back comforts. These records were a fuck-you to all the musicians their age who were content to play it safe and pander to the audience...
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Rob Sheffield |
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54d06e3
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Bowie arrived late for the sixties party, so he missed the idealistic hippie days and had to settle for being the quintessential seventies rock star along with Neil Young. It's funny how much those two have in common, despite their opposite fashion sense. Both arrived as solo artists just as the sixties were imploding, a little too late to be Bob Dylan, and they never got over it. Both built their massive seventies mystique around abrupt st..
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Rob Sheffield |
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3851a7a
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by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001--"Space Oddity" and "After the Gold Rush." Both did classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando--"China Girl" and "Pocahontas." Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to c..
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Rob Sheffield |
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15da0b9
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LOW PRESENTS BOWIE AT THIRTY, IN ALL HIS CONTRADICTIONS: artist, hedonist, introvert, astral traveler, sexual tourist, depressive, con man, charmer, liar. Low, released in January 1977, was a new beginning for Bowie, kicking off what is forever revered as his "Berlin trilogy," despite the fact that Low was mostly recorded in France. Side 1 consists of seven fragments, some manic synth pop songs, some just chilly atmospherics. Side 2 has fou..
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Rob Sheffield |
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b7dba02
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They asked me what sonically I could bring to the table, and I told them about this new gadget I had just bought, the Eventide Harmonizer. They asked what it did, and I said, it fucks with the fabric of time.
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Rob Sheffield |
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d8e1638
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As Iggy later recalled, in a typical week they'd spend two days drunk, two days nursing their hangovers, and three days straight--"which is a pretty good balance for musicians."
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Rob Sheffield |
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729d0d5
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Give Me Love" was a hit around the same time as Cat Stevens's "Morning Has Broken," a superficially similar hippie-dad prayer, yet I violently hated "Morning Has Broken," just hated it, despised the choked sobs and prissy whispers, still hate it, because it sounded to my ears (and might still sound, if I had the stomach to investigate) like a phony version of what "Give Me Love" does for real. All four Beatles were surrogate dads to Seventi..
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Rob Sheffield |
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73f1d14
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I'd have too much John ("Oh Yoko!," "I'm Steppin' Out," "Oh My Love," "New York City," "Nobody Told Me") and too much Paul ("Jet," "Friends to Go," "Flaming Pie," "Too Many People," "We Got Married," "Simple as That," "Hi, Hi, Hi," "You Gave Me the Answer")."
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Rob Sheffield |
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d6f1634
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Ziggy was a requiem: Bowie came to bury the sixties, not praise them. He hit the road and toured like a madman, spreading the glitter gospel in a rock scene full of interchangeable flannel-and-denim sincerity pimps.
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Rob Sheffield |
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c9abc1e
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But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he'd never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofessional. It worked, too, with Hugh McCracken playing that great guitar break in "Too Many People." (My favorite McCracken solo, except maybe Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen.") For Paul, country life meant stretching himself. He kept featuring"
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Rob Sheffield |
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1ac7e8a
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always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: "The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which just doesn't work." So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing--just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible."
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Rob Sheffield |
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ba06617
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Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by "Mind Games" when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise money for the cause of spaying cats and dogs. (You'd think the sound of Toad the Wet Sprocket doing "Instant Karma" would be enough to neuter any animal.)"
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Rob Sheffield |
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8761050
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But "God" is the best song any Beatle wrote about religion, with all due respect to George's "My Sweet Lord." Both were produced by Phil Spector the same year--with Ringo on drums. (Talk about ecumenical.) "God" is where John does his most beautiful singing, reaching for a doo-wop tremble straight out of his beloved Rosie and the Originals, with that "Elvis echo" on his voice. It's one of the two or three songs I'd play if I had ten minutes..
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Rob Sheffield |
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ba76461
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The real high point of his film career is The Hunger,
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Rob Sheffield |
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3f31cb0
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five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps
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Rob Sheffield |
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bf1696c
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Despite all the solo vocals, each using the others as a back-up group, the White Album still sounds haunted by memories of friendship--that "dreamlike state" they could still zoom into hearing each other sing. They translated Rishikesh into their own style of English pagan pastoral--so many talking animals, so many changes in the weather. One of my favorite British songwriters, Luke Haines from the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, once told ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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345142c
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That's another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul's scatting at the end of the "Pepper" reprise. The mono version was the one the Beatles, Martin, and Emerick spent three weeks mixing. The stereo mix was a quickie afterthought, with none of the Beatles involved or even present"
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Rob Sheffield |
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98fb7ee
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The other songs they recorded that May were silly ones--"All Together Now," "Baby You're a Rich Man," "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)." "It's All Too Much" might seem silly too, but it rocks, which the Beatles weren't much interested in doing in 1967, a chance to hear all four Beatles concentrating on a single idea for a stretch of time. They show off individually (at any moment, you can pick out what any particular Beatle is doing) ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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f2c985e
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The only heroic act one can fucking well pull out of the bag in a situation like that is to get on with life and derive some joy from the very simple pleasure of remaining alive, despite every attempt being made to kill you.
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Rob Sheffield |
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fde681c
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Dandelion" is easily the best faux-McCartney song of the Sixties."
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Rob Sheffield |
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056d66c
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They made their greatest music in a five-year rush, starting in 1968: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street. I can't really argue that the Stones were better when they were ripping the Beatles; I'm not going to look you in the eye and claim that "Dandelion" beats "Gimme Shelter" or "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Rocks Off." But it's tempting. For a couple of years there, in 1966 and 1967, Mick was the bitchiest r..
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Rob Sheffield |
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a5a5671
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will always ride hard for Mick's Paul phase, summed up by the compilation Through the Past, Darkly, with its awesomely ridiculous octagonal cover.
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Rob Sheffield |
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c0d6bba
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True, there's nothing as great as "A Day in the Life," but "2000 Light Years From Home" isn't far behind, while "Citadel," "2000 Man," or "The Lantern" can hang with anything else on Pepper. The psychedelic Stones peaked with the August 1967 double-sided single of "Dandelion" and "We Love You," an "All You Need Is Love" parody with backing vocals from John and Paul. The Stones filmed a video for "We Love You" as a commentary on their drug t..
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Rob Sheffield |
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fa12cf9
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One of the things I love about the Stones is that whenever they aimed for Beatle-style warmth--as in "The Singer Not the Song" or "Wild Horses"--they still sounded fabulously surly. That's what made them the Stones. They never got close to the unzipped exuberance of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" or "I Feel Fine" or "Eight Days a Week"--part of Mick's vast intelligence was to understand he didn't have that kind of sincerity in his empty heart, ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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5271375
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THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever called it The Beatles.) In the predigital days, everybody made their own cassette for actual listening, with each fan taping a different playlist.
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Rob Sheffield |
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decc879
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What was going on with this guy? It was hard to tell, all through his forties. He was more beloved than ever, though his new music had no impact at all. He looked divine posing for photos with Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, who presented him with one of his many Lifetime Achievement Awards. He was excited about his Web site. He had shiny new teeth. He'd become one of those Thanks for the Memories guys, which wasn't really the kind of artist he'd eve..
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Rob Sheffield |
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87a826f
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Earthling and the next record Hours were so damn good, it was startling to hear them, but it was tough to convince my friends they were worth getting excited about.
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Rob Sheffield |
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5c5fd8b
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Hours, packaged as "Bowie's R&B album," went equally deep. "Seven," "Survive," and "Thursday's Child" felt like Babyface and Toni Braxton doing Young Americans. The major flaw of these records, one that many listeners understandably found (and still find) impossible to get past, was the butt-ugly guitar sound of Tin Machine leftover Reeves Gabrels, which was even more irritating than the techno effects. It would have been great to hear Bowi..
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Rob Sheffield |
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c4a39e1
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Was this a total joke, or only a half joke? Was he suggesting that being a boy and being in drag were the same thing? Was he making fun of boys or coaxing me to see humor in the fact that I had to be one? Was "other boys check you out" gay? Was "you'll get your share when you're a boy" his feminist critique? Did the hook "when you're a boy" mean being a boy was something temporary, a switch you could turn on and off, a mood you could be in ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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5d38c27
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wearing straight clothes but still in costume--as Rodgers summed it up, "His seemingly casual appearance was actually the flowering of his next drag: He was delving into the eighties metrosexual world of high fashion, a precursor to what's called 'Executive Realness' in vogueing competions."
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Rob Sheffield |
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6b6d435
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It's the usual sensation mongering; the news services will say anything for an effect.
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Charles Sheffield |
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1e24837
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War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.
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Charles Sheffield |
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bc7c277
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They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.
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Charles Sheffield |
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87027b7
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He was still young enough to hate looking like a fool more than anything in the world.
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Charles Sheffield |
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6d3549b
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To a political mind, everything is politics.
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Charles Sheffield |
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68c78a6
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Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.
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Charles Sheffield |
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15e0e1e
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It sounds reasonable to me.""Reasonable, but not true. Big difference."
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Charles Sheffield |