Thursday, January 13, 2005
Wave bye bye, Fibonacci
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glistening by the numbers: TO INFINITY
The Beatles - "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"
41: Ahh, another, one, of the few good beatles songs. Great sock hopping kitschy stuff.
Avi: I always like to hear John Lennon really let loose and scream, but otherwise this song is pretty much worthless.
Rosecrans: The goofy off-ramp. Works for me.
David: Ah, The Beatles. I know all their stuff so well I can barely actually hear it anymore.
Lee: One of my favorite Beatle songs. There really isn't enough material that got released that shows how funny and entertaining the Beatles could be, besides all the great music they wrote. I have a theory that most of the girls in the 60's were more in love with the Beatles' personalities than their music, so it's ironic that it took until 1969 for this recording to come out. Actually, the Christmas recordings are pretty charming, but more people heard those after they broke up. Too bad you couldn't fit the whole song on the disc - it finished at my favorite section.
Jamie: You know they were on something when they looked up this number. Prefer this version from the Anthology set over the original single, due to the ska section. You also picked a good point to cut it off before it starts meandering off into gibberish.
This bizarre curio took TWO YEARS to finish recording, finally seeing release as a single in 1970. Paul's called this his favorite Beatles track; one wonders if he'd still be ballsy enough to make that assertion these days. I daresay he's fallen back on 'Yesterday'.
I'm crazy about the goony John and Paul baby talk at 3.50, complete with cuckoo calls. The next time you have opportunity to give some kid their first Beatles track to listen to, queue up this part of the track and fuck them up for life. "THIS is the most popular band in the history of pop music? Forget this; I'm gonna go get me some Rachmaninoff."
Denis O'Dell, who is name checked repeatedly at 2.25 in, was a producer who worked with the Beatles on the movie version of "A Hard Day's Night". One can only imagine that he must've gotten a few prank calls.
Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones fills in to pull duty as guest solo sax for the finale of the piece.
The Beatles certainly rarely got weirder.
Space considerations dictated that I edit this song down for the mix; I see no reason why my gentle readers should be likewise subjected to such indignities.
Buy "Anthology 2", the Beatles much ballyhooed double disc collection of outtakes and rarities, from Amazon.
I must say that I've grown to like a number of the alternate takes on these discs more than the final cuts, 'Taxman' 'Across the Universe' and maybe even the sweet acoustic version of 'I'm Only Sleeping'.
The giggly 'And Your Bird Can Sing' is pretty damn good too.
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Visit the Beatles "1" site.
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Listen to these Beatles/Beastie Boys mashups.
I'm astonished this has managed to stay up as long as it has; I recommend a quick download if you have any interest.
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Fansites for the Beatles abound online; you might just as well start here and here.
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Also in Espanol!
Now where did I leave that tilde?
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Explore "What Goes On: The Beatles Anomolies Page"
4:10
At the start of John's incoherent mumbling, someone belches. This was attributed to Ringo (why?), but Paul and John were the only ones present (Lewisohn).
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Orbital - "Philosophy by Numbers"
What better way to end the collection than with this rambling road to nowhere?
'Philosophy' is a real wonk of a track; you can't dance to it any more than you could a broke metronome and it refuses to sit still long enough for you to give it a stern talking to. What you get instead is the Orbital speciality: dense layers of repetition and pulsing sound that course into one another until they get downright languorous and fuzzy. The beat is damp, soft and steady, like the sound of a mother through a unborn child's ears; 'Philosophy' is similarly guileless and without didacticism. It's an on-again-off-again aural mirage, full of splash and soothing but signifying nothing.
The wobbly sample of a woman's voice hawking enrollment in a vocational school is pure Orbital: inexplicable, seamlessly integrated and ostentatiously Anglo. God bless 'em; I hope we've not truly heard the last from Ms. Hartnoll's boys.
Buy "Snivilisation", Orbital's junior release, from Amazon.
Third times the charm here. Following the stellar (but somewhat two-dimensional) "Brown Album", the brothers Hartnoll lifted the bar in '94. Just SO many high points: the clever splicing of a freakshow barker with a radio advert for plastic surgery on 'I Wish I Had Duck Feet'; the glitchy, dreamy Churchillian ranting of 'Forever'; the neurotic Metropolis ant-hill fervor of 'Crash and Carry'; the epic search for intelligent life on this planet that is 'Are We Here?'.
It's Orbital's most organic, multifaceted work and one of my all-time favorite albums.
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Visit Loopz, the official Orbital site.
It's dense with information and downloads.
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Read this late '04 interview with Paul Hartnoll, discussing life after Orbital.
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And with that, we bid GOODBYE to the numbers CD and holy shit did I start this one in MID-OCTOBER? This must be some sort of official record for the longest playing LP.
I'd like to thank our friends and guest reviewers: 41, Avi, Lee, Rosecrans, David and Jamie. I didn't always agree with what you had to say but you hung in there like troopers right until the very end. Thanks a bunch for playing along! Give 'em a big hand everybody! And visit their sites!
I hope everybody found something to love on this VERY extended mix... and maybe we all learned a little something. I learned not to make any more two disc collections; even I was tired of these songs near the end.
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COMING SOON
As Frank White was prone to say, "I got a story to tell." It's a tale of record company intrigue and deception, drug addiction, underground explosions, mysterious death, Jean-Michael Basquiat, the Clash, civil disobedience, Jazz at Lincoln Center and an exciting and untrod path that rap could have followed... but didn't. It all culminates with the only release by the little band that almost did and a plea for the long overdue release of the never heard album that has some legit claim to being part of the foundation of the NYC hip hop movement.
If you're gonna download one song tomorrow, make it this one.
Then, in the weeks to come I've got a NEW mix with a gimmick I'm plenty excited about; this one's all about family and who better to help me review than my very own flesh and blood? I got my mom, my dad and my lil' sis to all contribute commentary.
It's like a Hut reality show! Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting jiggy with it.
Which of the Tofu clan will YOU like best?
And did I mention the interviews with Vinyl Mine and Government Names?
Don't touch that dial!
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