Please

 

As they have every year since release on the 11^th of January 1963, the astonishing opening bars of ‘Please Please Me’ still astonish as they reverberate in the air. Whatever the miracle is that these four musicians discovered about their gifts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool everywhere, it is happening full force in this take. Every listener becomes party to a musical experiment where anything could happen and the air is literally electric. The up starts with a down beat, some of the chords defy explanation, they’re English but what kind of singing is that? Two minutes of what’s that? To me, the song refutes the palaver about greatest albums, the ’Revolver’ apotheosis theory, as what they can do and will do is already there as distinctly as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ ... every listener was party to seven years of, what’s that? Reflecting on this during intermissions in the last couple of years, it was pleasing to find Haruki Murakami has similar thoughts about ‘Please Please Me’. In his essay ‘On Originality’, Murakami remembers hearing the song aged 15 on his transistor, thinking “This is amazing, not like anything else I’ve heard!” It “totally blew my mind,” whatever blow my mind is in Japanese. Every Beatles Tragic knows that John Lennon wrote the song as a slow Roy Orbison ballad, but George Martin thought it wasn’t working, could they play it double time. Which immediately they did, being the Beatles, taking a sad song and making it better. The result was something typical of many of their songs, a melancholy or begging or frustration lyric performed with an elation breaking into ecstasy, a quizzical contradiction between word and music listeners happily overlooked, or took in their stride. Why do you make me blue? they shout at the tops of their voices. Even at the age of 7 it had an inexplicable beauty. Murakami admits he cannot explain either, other than in commonplaces: “nothing could be more different”, “they had something special”, “its quality was far and away the best.” Trying to define the difference, the Japanese novelist is reduced to saying “Your ears will tell!” True enough, no doubt. For him originality like ‘Please Please Me’ made him feel “a sense of profound well-being, a natural high. Liberated from the constraints of reality, it is as if my feet have left the ground.” Sixty years has not changed the fascination and delight inspired by this and all the sixties songs that followed. John’s witty play on the meanings of ‘please’ (should there be a comma in the title? Is anyone fussed?), the over-the-top Everly Brothers’ backing vocals, the perfect forward and backbeat control of the percussion, we hear them synthesising and transforming different musical forms, making them their own. Nothing could be more different. They had something special. Your ears will tell!

Image: Iso-mandala No. 80, made in August 2020 during lockdown. And here’s a collage of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUPfgC5IzGU

Grody (Zappa)

 Overture from the Mamas and the Papas.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgcdq3uceQ

One of the most sublime pop songs ever performed by the Mamas and the Papas, arguably one of their greatest, is a song about Valley girls called ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls are coming to the Canyon)’ (1967).   It was never a big hit. Oddly, the only Top Forty hit of the even more prolific Frank Zappa was an unsublime novelty song called ‘Valley Girl’ (1982), all about the idiolect of Valley girls in California, known as Valley Speak. For this reason, for some people, the most famous word in the Zappa lexicon is ‘grody’, used by Moon Unit Zappa near the end of the song in the line “Grody to the max.” When I first noticed grody over ten years ago I wrote innocently, “Grody has not travelled beyond the shores of North America. You will not hear this word in the streets of Melbourne, though gross is a close synonym.” At that time I quarried the Urban Dictionary, where the word was added as late as 2002, thus: “Nasty, dirty, disgusting, foul, revolting, yucky.” The example sentence: “Are you sure you want to eat that Chinese food? It looks all grody.” The compilers conjectured that it was an Americanised pronunciation of the British word grotty. The Free Dictionary traced usage to the mid-1960s, where grody was an adjective meaning “Repellent, dirty, disgusting, sleazy, seedy.” There is even the comparative grodier and superlative grodiest. Zappa’s lyric reaches for the superlative of grody, if not further. It’s a piece of social satire about indulged Valley girls that doesn’t bear relistening. Revisiting grody this weekend I find, to my surprise, that the Online Etymology Dictionary states it is a variant of grotty, then confusingly a slang shortening of grotesque. Grody “had a brief vogue in 1964 as part of the argot popularized by the Beatles in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’,” which explains a lot; we recall that Paul’s dodgy grandfather was a very clean man. Paul was possibly though unaware that the word “unconsciously echoes Middle English ‘groti’ “muddy, slimy”, from Old English grotig “earthy”, from grot “particle””, according to the Dictionary, which raises the question of when something is grotesque, a word derived from Italian not Old English, and when something is grotty. Ask a Valley Girl, I guess. She will tell you when the clothes from that shop are grotesque, or grotty, or both, and why having to wash the dishes for your mother, dishes with stuff that sticks to the plates and it’s like other people’s food and y’know it’s like grody, grody to the max.   

 

This is the second of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.

Beatles

 

Paul is the one who wills it to keep going. His determination to make new songs from airy nothing is the first noticeable thing. He invents musical lines then experiments with them, tries new tricks, extends the possibilities. Like the others, the repertoire in Paul’s head is immense. They can all play with it, fool with it, improve on it. Their famed ability to shift direction creatively is ever on show here, one reason why eight hours of film is about right. We watch the conception, gestation, delivery, and life of the song. A year after everyone else, I watch Get Back over consecutive summer nights, a magical mystery tour that is a superlative historical document. John mocks, jokes, parodies, zones out. Behind the bravura Goons fireworks though is a listener, whether to the musical sounds or others’ words. He reads the room. His connection with Paul is strange, powerful, magical and mysterious. Ringo is a calm, amused presence. And then there is George, the astonishing riffer, turning very good into something else again. His role, almost taken for granted, is to take it higher, one reason why his leaving the band is the surprise dramatic climax at the end of 1/3. Around them swirl circles, the inner circle of lovers and studio music assistants and old friends. Then the next circle, imposing and slightly sinister, of business dealers, egotistical directors, and wannabe managers, the last obviously crooks. Meanwhile the Fabs sing about all of these types, all of them, in their lyrics, the knowingness going on in the actual artistic process, one of the film’s more subtle delights. 3/3 is the unique cultural symbol of their rooftop concert, something viewers understand so well it takes time to absorb that within the film’s narrative, it’s more like an unexpected transcendent lead break. Instead of going to Africa, the expectation set up through these January sessions, they go upstairs. Only we know it will be their last live concert together, the first time live for two years also about the first time they’ve heard themselves live for five. Down in Savile Row below, Londoners look up for the music source, fans who recognise the band instantly, day workers who think the band are “a good thing”, snobs who complain the noise disrupts business, bobbies with the task of having to turn off the amp. A bemused clergyman says it’s good to see there’s something for free in this country. The shift from the dour hangar at Twickenham to the bright new Apple studio of 2/2, to the rooftop colours the mood of each part, but it’s all studio. Which is part of the problem, Did the band break up because they were tired of being cooped up day and night, month after month? It must have been a contributing cause. What is never in doubt is the continuous original creativity shared in real time by the world.

Breakup

Things we said today begin to sound like something we said yesterday when all our troubles were so far away. The Get Back blitz ignites the same excitement, the fifty year reply to, will you still be sending me a valentine. Being minus Disney+, I get by with a little help from trailers, newspaper blogs, reviews, interviews, and all the online ‘what do you do after the White Album?’ It’s not Yoko, Brian, George or George… Might it not be much simpler to say that the [breakup] occurred because they were four young musicians with a perfect sense of timing?

Split

Split theories are intrinsic to the mythology. Ringo left first, during the White Album; they patched it up with flowers. George left next, after a row about a plectrum or something. Now Paul says John broke up the band. Even though it took Paul decades to admit it wasn’t Yoko. Reports claim Paul shouldered the blame for decades. Say what? Everyone knows Paul was the only one who wanted it to keep going. Announcement. Unless they all wanted it to keep going. Obviously it wasn’t Linda. The breakup came in December 1980. After that everything was retrospective, including [split] talk.  

 

[split] Melbourne iPhone photograph 8 of 10: Southland carpark, Cheltenham, 29^th of October 2020, 7:07 am.

 

Beatles

1.     A Hard Day’s Night. This is happening because I was asked and because I'd like to. I must post ten albums that “greatly influenced my taste in music.” I will defy the rules and talk about these recordings, drawing only from albums in my own collection. All the Beatles albums are brilliant. Time and familiarity does not dull them because we are in the middle of a creative storm direct to tape. This one is my first big sound at-home encounter with the Parlophone masterpieces. They are doing several things at once. They are merging the elements of existing American rock and roll into combinations of voice and sound that transform it into something higher and more thrilling. They are replacing hackneyed English lyric with a cross of street talk and BBC comedy that takes everyone by surprise. They comprise a band of four vocalists who can all compose and improvise at a moment’s notice. Our family saw the film at the Queenscliff Cinema that summer and I remember the main effect being well, the music, but equally the fact that these people everything they said and did was utterly hilarious. That Goons-like infectiousness is another underlying element of their perennial charm.