sounds familiar

Monday night and I’ll kick off this music-centric entry with a prayer:

Dear Lord I’d like to thank you.

For the first time since I discovered Beatles bootlegs, became a fervent collector, and eventually amassed all that there was to hear (quite truthfully), and then quit the game once the unreleased material dried up, you have blessed us fanatics with something truly amazing. As always, I am in awe of the work of these sonic wizards, and I thank you for bringing new material to the forefront.

Blessed be the well-oiled and poorly-secured doors on the Apple vaults.

No but seriously, last week one of the holy grails of unreleased Beatles’ material leaked out to the web: the full eleven minute “take 20” of the White Album track, “Revolution 1,” which is the slowed-down, mellowed-out original version of the heavier (and more familiar to most) “Revolution” released earlier that summer in 1968 as a B-side to “Hey Jude.” This take is described in Beatles recording session expert Mark Lewisohn’s incredibly detailed book, Complete Beatles Chronicle, with the following entry:

Tuesday 4 June, 1968
Studio Three, EMI Studios, London

A session of unusual overdubs and experiments for “Revolution 1” 2:30pm-1:00am.  John re-taped his lead vocal – and, attempting to alter his voice in some way, he lay flat out on the floor of studio three while doing so.

Paul and George added a persistent backing vocal that went along the lines of “Mama Dada Mama Dada Mama Dada” towards the end of the ten-minute recording, Ringo added some percussive clicks, John a tone-pedal guitar part, Paul an organ part and the group then spent some time creating two tape loops, neither of which was used.

A rough mono mix of take 20 (which was a reduction of 19) and an additional copy of this made at the end of the session were taken away by John and one other person (unnamed on studio documents).

So there you go. Fifty years later that “additional copy” made for “one other unnamed person” has made it onto the internet. One of only two copies in the world, the other presumably still locked away in the studio gathering dust. Tip o’ the hat to you, unnamed person.  Too bad that I am, in all likelihood, celebrating the passing of unnamed person – as I’d be willing to bet that was the catalyst for a changing of hands, or sharing without repercussion, of this tape.

And, before I continue this essay on the new tape, I need  to wax a bit about the current state of the bootleg “scene…”  Please bear with me (or, skip three paragraphs ahead if you simply can’t).

While I’ve been away from the “Beatleg” trade for years now, I do still follow what small “development” there is in terms of new material, new labels and players, and what may be on the horizon. With most of the old-school European bootleggers now IFPI’d out of business, all physical production has moved to Japan. I have a hunch that most of the material appearing is still coming from the same European and US “sources,” but that it’s just too risky anymore to print the physical media in that arena. Besides, the internet has marginalized the market for physical bootlegs. Sure you’re still guaranteed the collectors who want the physical discs – but you don’t have to seek them out in order to hear the material, as the new generation will just wait until they are digitized and put on their favorite tracker to download.

Funny enough, hardcore bootleg addicts being a peculiar bunch, it’s not a surprise that there’s a growing “rip opposition” movement amongst the die-hards, in which they promise not to rip the discs and post them on torrent trackers for the world to hear. This somewhat anti-sharing, reveling in exclusivity snobbery is classic Beatleg hoarder behavior… so it’s not unexpected. After all, he who has the rarest cut wins.

But, in this day and age, you simply cannot keep things off the internet. Unless you’re unwilling to brag, unwilling to cut just that one copy for your best mate and fellow collector, it’s gonna end up online. And let’s face it, what good is having the rarest bit of tape in the world if you can’ brag about having the rarest bit of tape in the world, right? And so, even things shared amongst a privileged few under strict pacts of non-torrenting will, and do, end up online.

And so it is that I’m here listening to this amazing piece of history, five minutes into an eleven minute descent into John & Yoko tape-loop madness. I can remember the stories I read as a teenager, how John had taken some of the “stranger” bits of the extended “Revolution 1” sessions and warped, reversed, and wrecked them into his music-concrete stunner, “Revolution 9.” “Revolution 9,” the track that I used to be scared to listen to in the dark. Seriously. And, in this brilliant new leak, you can hear the elements John used to craft that piece of “musical” nonsense. The bassline Lennon buried as the “drive” for his piece, the tape-stretched and effect-drenched yelps and whoops, it’s all there. But here, in this take of “Revolution 1,” it’s still musical.

And, I’ll be honest, I listened to it at least ten times this morning, over and over and over. Hearing pristine new Beatles audio like this hasn’t been an experience I’ve had in a good while. Not since the “Hey Jude” sessions leaks back before Anthology have I been this intrigued with a new leak, nor has there been a leak this significant.

Well, I suppose the Sgt. Pepper multi-tracks were about equal in importance, but you don’t get the gravity of hearing “new” material with them – just the underlying 4-tracks of songs you’re already intimately familiar with. That said, to me the availability of this recording trumps the Pepper multi-tracks in terms of sheer enjoyment derived from listening.

I got into a bit of an academic discussion about the track with Ben today… the only one I really know who can stand to get “academic” about music, other than a close buddy in Florida who wasn’t online at the time and doesn’t quite share my Gods-on-high view of the Beatles. I shared the track with him and he queued it up at work for a listen. His reaction interested me, as he remarked something like, “This is very shoegazer-ish, just epic. Goes on and on and on and on. Like a Ride song. This track is downright great. Love it.”

At which point, I got on a favorite soapbox of mine and tried to explain how, listening to stuff like this now, with our modern appreciation of music, it’s hard to imagine just how groundbreaking and ahead of its time it was back in 1968. I tell this to Sharaun all the time when she says things like, “Yeah, the Beatles are good, but I don’t hear why people think they were so revolutionary or groundbreaking.”

It’s all well and good to say something like that having had the luxury of hearing all the areas music has managed to explore since the Beatles were around. What they invented, modern music has emulated… so without going back into the past and unhearing what those musical seeds blossomed into post-Beatles it’s virtually impossible to hear the stuff as one would have then, that is – in a context all its own.

Anyway, I make a similar argument to Ben, saying how, at the time, some of the more inspired bits the Beatles did stood wholly on their own ground, without reference and completely new unto the world. He agrees with me, and we both wonder at how some of the interesting techniques were achieved in the pre-digital world. Before Pro Tools and Cubase, the kind of stretched and warped vocals Lennon gets on the recording were done completely manually, pressing pencil erasers to running tapes, feeding microphones through hand-built effects pedals, physically cutting and looping tape (yes, with scissors and tape). We both bask for a while in the combined glow of the recording and our hipster music-nerd pomp, and close the conversation by agreeing that it’s like someone travelled back in time and anonymously dropped a copy of Nowhere at Lennon’s flat.

Yeah, it really is that advanced. I know, after all this you might want to hear it too, right? Well OK, here ‘tis. Enjoy.

And now that you’ve heard it, you’re free to accuse me of gushing over nothing. But you have to understand where I’m coming from, the history of the matter here. What’s that, you don’t really understand the history? I’ve never told you the history? Oh man… this is… big.

In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve written about bits and snatches of my history with bootlegs over the years, but a quick search of the blog annals shows I’ve never tacked a concise overview of how it all started, how it all got just a little bit out of control, and how it arrived where it is today.

But, I’ll get to it tomorrow, as I’ve already written a ton today.  Hope someone enjoyed it, take care  – I’m off to the gym (but not before I load up this new leak on the iPod for some more ear-time).

Goodnight.

Hey Tuesday.

Turns out I set the automatic-publish date on Monday’s entry for last Thursday, so chances are you didn’t catch yesterday’s entry (as it was mistakenly buried back amongst last week’s noise).  So, I’ve fixed that and it’s now where it should be, which is yesterday.

I wrote a lot today, and I don’t even know if it’s a good read.  Somehow I think not.  Enjoy.

As a kid growing up, my interests bounced around a lot. I like to think I was “well rounded,” but who am I to say. As my likes went, I think back on them and naturally separate things into the tangible and the conceptual. For the tangible, I was into the classic nerd items: electronics kits, model rockets, Mad Magazine, fire, Garbage Pail Kids, girls, dinosaurs; all standard fair. And, conceptually I leaned towards things mysterious, supernatural, and occult: UFOs, spontaneous combustion, Egyptian pyramids, magic, etc. For the purpose of this setup paragraph, I want to focus on the conceptual part.

Now, not to say this was all I was into… I liked all manner of “regular” kid stuff (He Man, smashing up Hot Wheels, wrestling, you know the drill), but there definitely was a period where “unsolved mysteries” were my thing. I think this carried over into my adult life quite a bit. I still enjoy a good 48 Hours Mystery, am still intrigued by the occult and all manner of mysticism, and love a good puzzle. There’s evidence of these predilections even here on sounds familiar in my writings about spiritual alchemy, religion, serial killers, and the like.

The point of the preceding, because I feel like I’m taking a little too long getting around to one, is that, by the time the events of the next paragraph took place I was perfectly mentally receptive – that is: The pump had been primed and I ate this stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So then – Sometime back around the good old 7th grade, a year where a young man learns much of what he’ll ever know of different slang terms for sexual acts (in addition to a little algebra and earth science), a dear friend of mine introduced me to a book called Big Secrets. Checked out from our local library, the bright primary yellow cover looked interesting enough – but once I dived into the pages I was hooked beyond description. The cover purported to reveal all manner of “secrets,” from the recipe for KFC chicken, secret alcohol-serving clubs at Disneyland, to beating a lie-detector test, and how to mark playing cards.

From first page to last page I was fascinated. This was the kind of stuff I thrived on just “knowing.” To feel like I had inside information, especially if that “secret” info gave me some perceived advantage in “life,” or even a funny nugget of wisdom I could use in conversation – I loved that. To be able to bet someone that I could find the fifty states on a $5 bill; or drop word that I could make a bomb from a deck of playing cards… these were the kind of quirky nuggets I filed away in my brain. Big Secrets, then, was a goldmine for me. I read it with vigor, front to back. And, as I approached the last few pages in the book, one chapter away from the very last chapter, it happened. The chapter was called “Secret Messages on Records.”

I read with zeal the notion that recording artists would purposely put hidden messages in their music, by way of recording them, flipping the audio around so as to make it unintelligible, and then integrating that into the music.  In the days of records (that’s “vinyl” for you digital-agers), un-masking these hidden messages was as easy plopping a firm finger onto the disc as it spun and then forcing the turntable to operate in reverse, approximating the right speed to unveil the secret.

Reversed recordings came into prominence when artists began seriously using the recording studio as a virtual instrument, experimenting with sound as never before.  Of course, the Beatles led this charge (didn’t they lead it all, really?) – laying down what most to consider to be the first purposefully backwards song element in John’s guitar solo in “I’m Only Sleeping.”  By the late 60s and into the 70s and on, more artists experimented with the novelty of what had become known as “backmasking.”  Soon it was a common recording term, and backwards messages were sometimes put into records as jokes.

As a quick aside – backmasking really got a lot of attention during the whole “Satanic panic” the US went through back in the late 80s and early 90s (they even put Judas Priest on trial for it!).  Turns out that, because words spoken aloud have phonetic reversals that often sound nothing like the word spoken normally (forwards), you can “hear” all sort of interesting things in backwards music (if you listen hard enough, I suppose).  So, while some backwards messages are surely done with purpose, most of the “scary” ones (i.e., “you should commit suicide,” or “here’s to my sweet Satan”) are just backwards gibberish that may resemble a real-English phrase.

Anyway, Kyle and I became obsessed with hearing everything backwards.  We suddenly wanted to hear all our music backwards, chiefly the songs in the book that we already knew and loved.  Problem was, our music wasn’t on vinyl, and we couldn’t simply drag the turntable backwards to hear the hidden secrets.  So, being industrious young lads, we set about perfecting a way of reversing audio cassettes.  Remember, this is before the whole “digital music” thing, even before computers for that matter.  Nowadays one can just download an MP3, drop it into the free audio programs that come with Windows, and go to Effect|Reverse.  Back in the dark ages of my youth, however, things weren’t quite as simple.

In the end, we had “invented” a hand-cranked mechanical contraption, cobbled together from several dissected blank audio cassettes, a paperclip, and some Scotch tape, whereby one could extract a bit of recorded sound on tape, reel it into a “holding” tape, flip the whole machine, re-attach, and reel the whole thing back into the original cassette.  The labor-intensive process effectively cut out a bit of tape, flipped it upside down (remember, even though audio tapes have two “sides” these are just the two halves of the same surface of magnetic tape, not two physical sides), and then spliced it back into the existing tape.  When the magnetic tape-read head interpreted the sound on the tape from the opposite side it was recorded on, you got a perfect-speed (albeit a bit muddy sounding) backwards version of the audio.

Before long, we’d heard everything backwards. The Beatles, Zeppelin, Floyd.  We were wholesale reversing entire 90min tapes of songs, just to listen and see what might be hiding.  Soon, we began to experiment with recorded-and-reversed sounds of our own.  Our names, names of girls we had crushes on, the alphabet, you name it.  Logically, the next step was to then listen to these recorded sounds in reverse, learn to approximate the gibberish they’d become, and then say that into a microphone and reverse it – all to see how close we could get to “talking backwards.”  You think this is silly, but I still remember how to say several things in reverse: “Ian Ichamore,” “And the lost see ‘Nam,” “Turn me on dead man”… they’re still taking up space in the old noggin to this day.

I can remember eagerly attempting to play the notes to “Mary Had A Little Lamb” in reverse order on the old Casio, seeing if we could get it right when the tape was flipped.  I remember reading passages from the Bible, making all manner of sounds like a foley artist just to see what they’d sound like backwards.  We even drew up detailed user instructions for our little reversal machine, diagramming the flow of audio on a cassette tape and showing precisely how to reverse it with our invention.

Somewhere in this house today, in a shoebox, I have that tape-reversing machine and the handwritten user manual (on graph paper, because it was more official of course).

And with that story, I conclude today’s blog.  Goodnight, web denizens.