Julian Lennon remembers ‘Lucy’
November 26, 2009
The real-life Lucy of “Lucy in the Skies With Diamonds” is inspiring Julian Lennon once again. On Dec. 15, he’s releasing the single “Lucy” in her memory, with proceeds going to fight lupus, the disease that killed her.
Lucy Vodden’s death in September reminded Beatle fans of the genesis of the “Sgt. Pepper” psychedelic classic.
Julian, John Lennon’s son, brought home a picture he’d drawn in preschool. He titled it “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” providing his dad with material for the song.
Lennon always maintained the song was about the boy’s drawing, not LSD, but the content and initials suggested otherwise.
The new “Lucy” song was being recorded by Julian Lennon’s colleague James Scott Cook near the time of Vodden’s death at age 46. Lennon and Cook rewrote some of the lyrics and cut the “Lucy” record as a duet. Cook’s grandmother, Lucy, also suffers from lupus.
Lennon looked up his old classmate after learning she had the autoimmune disease. “She created millions with her name,” he told USA Today. “The least I could do was try to support her and make sure she was comfortable.”
Vodden, who died at 46, tried to keep a low profile regarding the song. She liked the Beatles, but not “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” “I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told the Associated Press before she died.
The “Lucy” EP will feature a foldout copy of the original Lennon drawing (pictured). The digital download will be exclusive to the iTunes Store for now, as was the 40th anniversary release of “Give Peace a Chance” released by Lennon, Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono earlier this month. That single benefited the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund.
Lennon runs a new digital-media record label — theRevolution — whose first release will be “Lucy.” Next year Lennon plans to release an album, “Everything Changes.” The musician and filmmaker has not released new music in almost a decade.
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a top 10 entry on our list of the Top 100 Psychedelic Songs of all time.
Heroes of Woodstock in a last hurrah
November 24, 2009
The Heroes of Woodstock tour plans to continue for at least one more night, ringing in the New Year at a New Mexico concert.
Jefferson Starship and Quicksilver Messenger Service are wrapping up a European swing before the holiday gig. They were joined on the summer Heroes of Woodstock tour by Big Brother and the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Country Joe McDonald and a few other acts such as Ten Years After and Mountain.
The concerts were far above the usual oldies merry-go-rounds, but nothing came near artistic triumphs — such as Jack Bruce’s sets on last year’s Hippiefest tour. The 50- and 60somethings who came to Heroes of Woodstock hoping for the hits got most of them. A few artists mentioned the Woodstock festival, but the tie-in proved largely marketing and packaging.
Headliner Jefferson Starship had but one Woodstock veteran, band leader Paul Kantner. The band performed all Airplane songs. The singer was Cathy Richardson, who displayed plenty of attitude as well as capable/passable vocals. Richardson didn’t try to channel Grace Slick, to her credit. Her take on “White Rabbit” include some theatrics that were … plenty odd.
The “Airplane” came out swinging with Fred Neil’s “Other Side of This Life,” which the originals played at Woodstock. This version had plenty of muscle, as in decades past, promising more than the band ultimately delivered. Watering down the set was a jam session on “St. Stephen” that featured ex-Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten.
Country Joe MacDonald played host, singing some of his old band’s psychedelic classics such as “Porpoise Mouth.” In between acts, he abused deserving members of the audience (”I hate hippies”) and led the Fish/Fuck cheer.
The early highlight was the Big Brother set, with singer Sophia Ramos getting her share of standing ovations as she sang the songs Janis Joplin made famous. She brought something to each number, but gave the Joplin fans a taste of the original. On some numbers, we swear, she actually outdid the late great singer.
Sure, Ramos’ always-on showmanship felt a bit much for Joplin’s raw classics, but there were undeniable thrills — cheap and otherwise.
The tour edition of the band featured three original members: guitarist Sam Andrew, bassist Peter Albin and drummer Dave Getz. Andrew made way for newcomer Ben Nieves, but still had some jaw-dropping chops to display on “Summertime.”
Canned Heat, which has remained active through the decades, recording some decent albums along the way, brought their boogie vibe nightly. The hits included “Goin’ Up the Country,” “Let’s Work Together” and “On the Road Again.”
Original members Larry “The Mole” Taylor and Harvey “The Snake” Mandel made the trip, along with franchise player Fito de la Parra on drums. Bassist Greg Kage and guitarist/harp player Dale Spalding handled the bulk of vocals. Canned Heat in any form is worth seeing.
Ten Years After is fronted these days by Joe Gooch, a capable singer and guitarist in the awkward spot of subbing for long-gone Alvin Lee. While he hit all the licks and sang all the right lyrics, the fire and passion must have been buried in the mix.
This was no cover act, however, considering Ten Years After came with original members Leo Lyons (bass), Chick Churchill (keyboards) and Ric Lee (drums). Lyons’ classic bass runs brought on cheers, as on “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” In L.A., the audience got off on “I’m Going Home” and a couple of rockers, but seemed lukewarm on the relatively lengthy set.
Mountain played some of the tour’s stops, but unfortunately none on the left coast. The New York Times noted that band leader Leslie West was “rasping and yowling and making his guitar sear through a flamboyant set” during the stop in the Woodstock area of Bethel, N.Y. He married his fiance on stage, and immediately ripped into “Mississippi Queen.” Awww.
The “Airplane,” Country Joe, Canned Heat and Big Brother are doing the New Year’s Eve gig.
The Velvet Underground, in person
November 23, 2009
Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, Maureen (Moe) Tucker and Doug Yule are reuniting, sort of.
The art rockers will discuss their music and history Dec. 8 as part of the New York Public Library’s “Live From the NYPL” series. The conversation wrangler will be rock journalist David Fricke.
The gathering of three Velvets is quite unusual — the Library calls it “unprecedented.” MIA is (to no one’s suprise) John Cale, who has performed with the band only a few times since the 1970s. Sterling Morrison and Nico have both died.
The The Velvet Underground
The talk is sold out, alas (tickets “may” be available at the door). Here’s the good news: The “Live From the NYPL” series is archived in audio and/or video on the library site, and video excerpts find their way to the Live from the NYPL playlist on YouTube.
Meanwhile, fans can revisit the band’s formative years with the short-but-sweet audio documentary series “Psychedelics” from Seattle’s KEXP. The series, which just wrapped, covers the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, the Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, Pink Floyd, the Orb, Spiritualized, the Flaming Lips and Animal Collective.
The Velvet Underground radio docu covers the band’s history, starting with Warhol’s traveling multimedia experience “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Reed recalls: “It was an interesting conglomeration. We were known all the way downtown, and then a lot of the uptown people came to it.” Cale says, “It was an attempt to be revolutionary. It was an attempt to combine both the avant-garde and the commercial.”
The Velvets, positioned as an East Coast answer to the California psychedelic bands, turned to heroin, not LSD. The band’s songs such as “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man” generated some minor media shockwaves at the time, when drug references almost always were cloaked in rock music. The street-level reporting in Reed’s lyrics had nothing to do with peace and love, but plenty to do with reality.
Their early music was darkly experimental and trance-like, largely due to Cale’s interest in the droning musical styles of India and Tucker’s primitive drumming style, oriented more toward Africa than U.S./U.K. rock. This before the music of Ravi Shankar and other world musicians was widely heard in the West.
Listen to the the Velvet Underground radio documentary, which runs 10 minutes.
‘The Prisoner’: stoned immaculate on Blu-ray
November 22, 2009
Before the Beatles got lost with their “Magical Mystery Tour” TV show, they had a more promising psychedelic screen project in mind: a follow-up to “Help” that was on the same wavelength as “The Prisoner.”
George Harrison’s son Dhani Harrison told Wired: “They were going to be in a movie written and directed by Patrick McGoohan in the same vein as ‘The Prisoner,’ because they thought it was one of the best series ever. They were so into his psychedelic weirdness.”
The project never happened, of course, but the Fabs did license “All You Need Is Love” for the McGoohan series’ surreal finale, the only time a Beatles song popped up on a TV show at the time.
“The Prisoner” is back with us these days thanks in part to the AMC miniseries that updates the ’60s psych-spy series. While the new six-episode series has its moments — provided mainly by No. 2 actor Ian McKellen — the big event is the Blu-ray release of the original 17-episode series, from A&E. “The Prisoner: The Complete Series
The series was hands down the most psychedelically influenced TV series of the era, with frequent detours into mind-expanding plot points and imagery. To this day, it is the strangest series ever broadcast by CBS. The show shared studio space with Kubrick’s “2001,” another mind-blower, with the show even lifting some space shots from the master.
“Twin Peaks” certainly showed the influence of “The Prisoner,” as do the movies of David Cronenberg, who cast creator McGoohan in one of his projects.
“The Prisoner’s” influence on musicians continues to this day. Wikipedia lists at least 20 instances of tributes to the show, starting with the 18-minute song “McGoohan’s Blues” by English seeker Roy Harper. The Clash’s “The Prisoner” was about the series. XTC and Supergrass are among the bands that shot “Prisoner”-driven music videos, on location in Portmeirion.
Extras on the Blu-ray set include crew commentaries, in which some of the key players discuss dropping acid on the set. CBS refused to air one of the episodes because of its depiction of hallucinogenic drugs.
On Blu-ray, the op art/pop art imagery of “The Prisoner” leaps from the screen. Colors are bold and vivid, yet not oversaturated. The clarity is remarkable, almost too good — the actors’ perspiration and skin blemishes are borderline distracting (the kind of thing industry folks fretted about in the early days of HD).
Audio is OK, whether you choose the 5.1 track (with its once-over-lightly mix) or the 2.0 mono. The audio does have bouts of that tinniness associated with pop soundtracks of the day.
Psychedelic Beatles rarities up for auction
November 7, 2009
What appear to be the rarest and strangest of all Beatles album pressings are coming to auction next week.
The story begins back in the twilight of the vinyl era. A Capitol Records employee who worked in the label’s Toronto pressing plant killed time by making multicolored vinyl records, colorful psychedelic things. Among them, appropriately, were the psychedelic classics “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Revolver.”
Canadian collectors Akim Boldireff and Aaron Keele bought the vinyl beauties from the ex-record presser, who apparently kept them in a closet. They said the presser had access to the original plates of the Beatles records.
Keele told the Vancouver Sun: “The real thing that makes this fascinating is that they were pressed at the original plants, using original stampers with the catalogue number of the original release as issued and created by Capitol Records.”
The eBay sale might have gone relatively quiety, except for the Guardian newspaper in Britain, which decided to dub them “the rarest Beatles albums ever.”
(This days after bestowing the title on an in-house version of “Sgt. Pepper” that had Capitol execs’ faces replacing the 1960s celebrities’ mugs found on the famed cover.)
Here is the Guardian’s description of the eBay goods:
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on bright baby-blue marble vinyl, the 1967-70 greatest hits compilation on swirled blue-and-white vinyl, and a translucent blue LP with side A of “Revolver” and side B of John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” album. However, the most beautiful item in the collection is the Beatles’ “Love Songs” anthology, made with gold vinyl. This is streaked with an abstract expressionist rainbow, like an explosion at a paint factory.
Opening bids for each of the albums is $1,000, but this being the Beatles, look for soaring values. The fun starts on eBay on Nov. 10.