“I think people who create and write, it actually does flow – just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they right it down. It’s simple.”
― Paul McCartney“What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.”
― Paul McCartney
Neil Young inducts Paul McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999:
“A decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation”
– Kenneth Tynan, The Times
“Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do.”
– John Lennon
The opening track:
We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists.
– Paul McCartney
I love Sgt. Pepper and it will always be in my top 5 Beatles album, sometimes at number 5 sometimes at the top spot. It’s a great Beatles album, and it’s one of the best album in Rock history. It is laid out as a concept album, but the idea held for two songs, the coda, and the album’s sleeve design.
The Beatles songs now did not sound practiced or rehearsed, and the reason for this is that they weren’t. They were studio snippets put together in sections and pieces. I think that’s the reason that the outtakes from the Sgt. Pepper sessions are so uninspiring, so unfinished. There are several bootlegs with alternative versions, and for Beatles-nerds they are of course something to seek out. That said, I think the best Sgt.Pepper outtakes are presented on Anthology 2, and, yes, they are put together in the same way as the original album, each song constructed from different takes and sound bites.
I’m guessing it would be a difficult record to play live.
I believe that this album represent a shift in popular music, we look at pop/rock music before and after Sgt. Pepper. Almost everything on the album was new. And it still sounds new and fresh.
Happy birthday, Sgt. Pepper!
The Making of Sgt. Pepper documentary made for the 25 year anniversary :
Continue reading June 1: The Beatles released Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967
Bob Dylan & The Hawks: Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England 17 May 1966 (read more)Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert is a two-disc live album by Bob Dylan, released in 1998. It was recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall during Dylan’s world tour in 1966. Extensively bootlegged for decades, it is an important document in the development of popular music during the 1960s. |
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The Bob Dylan documentary, Dont look back premiered in 1967 (read more)
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| Henry Saint Clair Fredericks (born May 17, 1942),who uses the stage nameTaj Mahal,is an American Grammy Award winning blues musician. He incorporates elements of world music into his music. A self-taught singer-songwriter and film composer who plays the guitar, banjo and harmonica (among many other instruments), Mahal has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his almost 50 year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa and the South Pacific. |  |
| Johnny “Guitar” Watson (February 3, 1935 – May 17, 1996)was an American blues and funk guitarist and singer.A flamboyant showman and guitar picker in the style of T-Bone Walker, Watson recorded throughout the 1950s and 1960s with some success. His raunchy reinvention in the 1970s with disco and funk overtones, saw Watson have hits with “Ain’t That a Bitch”, “I Need It” and “Superman Lover”. His successful recording career spanned forty years, with his biggest hit being the 1977 “A Real Mother For Ya”. |  |
| James Ridout “Jesse” Winchester (May 17, 1944 – April 11, 2014)was an American musician and songwriter who was born and raised in the southern United States. To avoid the Vietnam War draft he moved to Canada in 1967, where he began his career as a solo artist. His highest charting recordings were of his own tunes, “Yankee Lady” in 1970 and “Say What” in 1981. He became a Canadian citizen in 1973, gained amnesty in the U.S. in 1977 and resettled there in 2002. |  |
| Wave is an album by the Patti Smith Group, released May 17, 1979The title track was a tribute to Pope John Paul I, whose brief papacy coincided with the recording sessions. The first single off the album was “Frederick”, a love song for her husband-to-be Fred “Sonic” Smith with a melody and structure bearing resemblance to “Because the Night”, the group’s biggest hit. The second single, “Dancing Barefoot”, has been covered by many art |  |
| Ram is a studio album by recording artists Paul and Linda McCartney, released 17 May 1971 on Apple Records.The album was recorded amid Paul McCartney’s legal action in Britain’s High Court to dissolvethe Beatles‘ partnership, following their break-up the year before. The only album credited to the couple, Ram was the second of two albums that McCartney released between quitting the Beatles and forming his own band, Wings. He and Linda recorded it in New York with guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken, and future Wings drummer Denny Seiwell. Its release coincided with a period of bitter acrimony between McCartney and his former bandmate John Lennon, who perceived verbal slights in the lyrics to songs such as “Too Many People“. |  |
Spotify Playlist – |
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That’s what I am, a Delta blues man. And now I’m considered the king of the Delta blues.
~Johnny Shines (1989 Living Blues Interview)Best known as a traveling companion of Robert Johnson, Johnny Shines’ own contributions to the blues have often been unfairly shortchanged, simply because Johnson’s own legend casts such a long shadow. In his early days, Shines was one of the top slide guitarists in Delta blues, with his own distinctive, energized style; one that may have echoed Johnson’s spirit and influence, but was never a mere imitation.
~Steve Huey (allmusic.com)
Sweet Home Chicago:
Continue reading April 20: Johnny Shines passed away in 1992
When musicians decides to write their memoirs they are often uneven (this is a kind statement). They often struggle to give words the life that do in their songs, this “new” format may not come naturally to them. That said, many of these men and women have great stories to tell and often provide compulsive reading. They do stumble in their wording and structure from time to time, but the stories are compelling and they succeed in capturing the spirit of their cultural moment with astonishing insight.
These twelve ten books are great examples of how it can be done if the authors manage to adjust to the new form. They are good period, not because they are written by famous artists, but because they reflect all the creativity, movement and human drama you’d expect from people driven by art. We kept it to memoirs, so no fictional prose (sorry, Nick Cave), no poetry (sorry, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen), there are some of the books that touches different genres but all these books are mainly memoirs.
They are not necessarily the best biographies about artists written (although sometimes they are) but they are the best books written/narrated by the musicians themselves!