That'll do it, little bird. Every time, ask not what your country
can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister
garbage off, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast with Peter Robinson
and Charles CW. Cook sitting in for rob Long. I'm James Lylax and
you are not gonna believe what we talk about today. So let's am Rezulo's
a podcast. I'm hearing neigba. It's a neighbor. It's what they said,
neighbor. Hello, mister walkin be Does this table worked for you?
Yeah? Yeah, we like. I just think it would be really nice
if people think that I make this. So that's my thing. Ladies and
gentlemen, The Beatles Welcome everybody. It's the Wickershy podcast numbers six hundred and
seventy nine. I'm James Lylax here in Minneapolis and I'm joined by Peter Robinson
and Charles C. W. You Cook, and gentlemen. It is past
Valentine's Day, past the super Bowl. The era of love and organized state
sanctioned violence is passed. But still we can talk about these things. Valentine's
Day, eh, who cares? But super Bowl? I know that you
guys are anxious and desperate to talk about it, because, as we've learned
from Twitter this week, it's raked. It's all a scio and it's all
you know. The people up here who just think that it's an honest contest
need to understand what's really going on. And Charlie, you're the world expert.
Now that there has been an interview with you in the New York Times
about this very subject of football, I'll go first and briefly, but that's
just to tee you up. Like so much in my life, I came
to football late and honestly didn't begin paying attention to it until my own boys
began playing high school football, at which point I began to realize it's an
extremely interest kit game, and on any given play, it is simply impossible
to watch all eleven little contests that are taking place. To put it in
a crude way, you just you just can't take it in. Therefore,
once you begin to realize what's going on, once you begin to realize what
the various assignments are, you feel a kind of richness about the game.
I missed that. But then you turn to the neighbor, what did what
did what did that alignment? Just do? I all right over to you,
Charlie. You're quicker. You're quicker on the uptake than I am on
these ways. You seem, you seem to indicatepe you to the difficulty of
fixing something that is that complex. We gues play after play, week after
week, team after team. It's nonsense. It's nonsense on still, but
still they believe it. Of course they put lots of things. So Charles,
your your view on the contest that we just saw. It was an
exceptional game. The whole wonderful americanness of the of the event, from its
commercial attributes, to with songs, to its to the to the game itself.
It is just a joy. And I am always deflated when it's when
it's over. Yeah, I must say, despite my admonitions of the conspiracy
theorists, I'm much more open to the idea that it's rigged this year,
given what happened to the Jaguars that made me feel bad. They were eight
and three, And when you can't even pronounce the name of the team,
you know, I met a lady last week in Miami and she made me
say the name three times because she thought it was so funny. Hey,
you don't have to worry. Yeah, we had a quarterback who went out
because somebody with laser vision or blowdout up in the stands too, you know
too, came in at his ankle. That's that's conspiracy we're going with here.
You did not have the kind of season that we did, but yes,
yes, so it was. It was an extraordinary game, lots of
everything that you want from it. But what I find also fascinating is the
ancillary commercial aspect to it. Because at the same time you have this contest,
this ballet of violence here, you also have and now we're going to
break for what we believe to be the kreme de la creme of this particular
artistic slash commercial medium advertising. And you see the spots, and so I
would just like to know if, because I think that's something more interesting to
our broader audience than the game itself. In the contest, what you thought
about those commercials, what they said about the state of the culture, the
state of the art, of the industry, et cetera. James, You're
doing exactly what unnerves me a little bit about the Super Bowl. What neerves
me a little bit about the Super Bowl is the extent to which it tails
away from actual football. Now, so I divide that into two subcategories,
and we'll see again what Charlie has to say. Charlie's given all of this
much more thought, and he has an English accent, so he sounds smarter
anyway. But we'll see what he has to say. There's the category that
may, of course it was the game took place in Las Vegas. But
there's a category that makes for example, the halftime shows I detest because they're
becoming They have nothing to do with music. They're just becoming pure spectacle,
pure sensory stimulation, light movement, noise. It's noise, not music.
I don't like those. On the other hand, in this fractured society,
this fractured time in which we live, football is one of the very few
non political moments that we all have in common. The convening power of the
game is enormous, and when there are advertisements that know that, that understand
the reach, and that have a certain lightness of touch that I do feel
enhances the whole fun of the experience, one of the biggest components of which
is that you're sharing it with one hundred million other Americans, and that's exactly
why the CIA chose to take it over with Tyler Swift and Travis Kelcey.
So before we get to the ads, the game taught me something in that
I have spent all years saying the Kansas City Chiefs aren't what they were.
I said it after they played the Jaguars and the Jaguars should have won.
I said it after their loss to the Bills in December, and I bet
against them three times in the postseason. And what I've learned is that after
a while, if a team that isn't quite good enough keeps winning, it
is good enough. Yes, exactly. You can't start with the premise.
And the thing is if they are put under pressure, they come out of
it, and their defense is good enough, and Patrick Mahomes is a phenom,
and they had enough offensively to get it done. And all the reasons
that you can contrive as to why that's not going to happen this year,
they just don't care if they keep winning games. Yes, I have to
admit there was several times hit this season. Actually, I thought Green Bay
outplayed the forty nine ers consistently except for the third. There was the drive
that the forty nine ers put together to score and win the game. I
think that they put together eight plays in a row that worked, and aside
from that, the other fifty some plays, Green Bay outplayed them. And
I found myself saying, oh, the final score is deceptive. And why
don't you start saying the score is deceptive? You need to re examine the
way you're looking at the game. The other thing I'd add is that Andy
Reid is a tough, patient, crafty coach. And this Super Bowl contest
was two games. The first half was one game and the second half was
Andy Reid making adjustments, waiting, watching for his openings, tightening, tweaking
the defense, putting Purty under more pressure. I just I you have to
give that tough, old, patient, old, crafty, old coach a
certain amount of credit. I think, no doubt, no doubt. All
Right to the ads. What do we make of the ads? I liked
a few of them. I thought that Michael sarah ad was hilarious. Yes,
And I like the Christopher walking ad partly because I'm a huge fan of
people doing Christopher walking impressions and look up YouTube videos of people doing Christopher walking
impressions. So this ad was tailored to me. Charlie, you are so
American now, no matter how you mispronounced the name of your team. And
I love Schwarzenegger, the sheer, good spiritedness of that, the willingness to
engage in a touch of self mockery. He's older now, he doesn't look
the way he used to look, but he still has a sense of fun.
James, you're the master of advertise, of the commercial analysis. What
did you make of it? Well, this is the kind of nerd and
geek I am about these things. When the Walking ad came on, at
the start of it, something in the back of my brain lit up and
I knew exactly where he was. He was walking through the hallway the Builtmore
hotel in Los Angeles, And when we walked out to the next scene to
the alleyway, I thought, that's it. I've been there. I was
there fourteen years ago. Why do I remember that. I went back in
my pictures in my videos and found the exact spot where Christopher walk and was
standing. So I thought, wow, interesting, but not interesting to anybody
else. This is the thing that I took away from all of them.
There was a dominant color that's been working in advertising for about a year or
two, and it's this sort of metallic teal turquoise sea blue tint that was
saturating almost eighty percent of the ads last year. This year it's found about
twenty percent now. The reason that they chose this color, I think is
fascinating because it's not a pleasant color. There's something very off putting about it,
something unnerving about it, and for some reason, it was used over
and over again. I went back. I found original examples of the of
the ads last year that ran on YouTube, and then compared them to the
ones that I saw on television, and you could tell that they'd added the
color and dialed it. I up because they're always playing with these things.
Part of that is fashion. A certain color becomes hot and the rest of
them have to jump on it. But part of it maybe because they have
data that says this color does this to people, and everybody decides to do
it. I don't know. I asked my daughter and she says, it's
mostly just people following following what everybody else is doing. She's in the industry.
This year, the color that is rising is red, which is interesting
because that plays into the whole satanic thing that we got going on here with
Taylor Swift and the rest. That's what they're saying. It was interesting for
the ads that blew up brands and did them absolutely no help whatsoever. There
was a homes dot com series of ads that are supposed to be these little
stories, but they didn't work at all. They didn't land, None of
them did. There was one for a crypt for a data security company that
was preventing break preventing breaches, as a matter of fact, that's their slogan,
we stop breaches, which is really dull, huge ady, And you
could tell that they'd taken a four minute spot and edited it down to this
thing, with the idea that you would go on the web and say,
gosh, that was interesting. Let me see the whole thing. Same thing
with the Dunkin Donuts ad. In the Dunkin Donuts ad, it worked because
there was enough there that we saw to make it interesting of itself. The
other ad was just a complete and total waste of money. So yes,
some of the ads that the more focused and tight they were, the better
at introducing a brand. Although there's one called Poppy, which is supposedly some
sort of soda that's good for your gut health. And the more they mentioned
gut health in relig in reference to Poppy, I kept thinking, it's poopy.
Poopy is the name of the soda, and that's just not working for
me. There was Timu, which had a big buy and attempted to introduce
the brand name to everybody through a series of really circa twenty sixteen animation not
very good. And Timu is this reseller of cheap Chinese crap that if you're
on Twitter you see the ads for it all the time. It's making a
big bid to be the next amaz On, and everybody I saw who saw
the ads kind of reeled back from it, saying there's something dreadfully and authentic
about this. I don't like it. I don't like it at all.
So I mean, as fascinating, was it as clever and intelligent as previous
years? I would like to say no, But then again, everybody says
that. Everybody says every year to the last year, the most thing to
remember take away probably is bringing back the Clydesdale's, because after the damage that
Bud had with their whole brand, bringing back the Clydesdale's and then ending the
spot with a dog licking the muzzle of a Clydesdale. Was really about as
naked an appeal to you love us again as you can possibly get, and
it probably worked. And if they not on me, it didn't I know,
but it may have with some. But you know, then they made
the mistake later of having the Clydesdales wash somebody's feet, and that that just
that just didn't that just didn't work at all. Where else could you get
a review of Super Bowl ads like that? Where else? I'm just going
to start only I'm kidding about the Clivesdale watching somebody I know. Yes,
no, no, no, no, all right, because that one was
that one really just it sparked more controversy, more discussion online than I than
any other ad that I'd seen, which I of course was their intention.
Yeah, but you know, you talk about the country being divided. There's
a perfect symmetry to that, because last year I wrote about this ad that
I thought was really good from the same people. Yeah, essentially said look,
we all disagree and shouted each other, but don't And there was this
outcry from the left against that one because some of the people who were depicted
being shouted at were Donald Trump loving maga types who should be shouted at,
right, and the left said, oh well, look Jesus would have loved
shouting at them. And I wrote a post at National reviewsay, look,
I'm not actually a Christian, but I was raised Christian and I don't think
Jesus made exceptions for people who have red hats. And this is a good
ad with a good message. So this year was the turn of the right
to get really angry at the Jesus. There's a nice symmetry to that.
They've they've they're doing something right. They've annoyed everyone. They have annoyed everyone,
and it did. The visual language that they used, these these very
striking, saturated renaissance tableau is I think was very effective from from their previous
stuff because when you saw one scene, just as your brain processed the dynamic,
they moved to the next. I mean, it was a good piece
of work. Of course, what we don't know is how much product they
moved their ad agencies right all over the country right now trying to analyze tweets
and is bud light moving off the shelves faster. It'll be a few days
before they know that anyway. Well, but my bud light is dead.
I think what what anheiser Busch was trying to do? There was contagion.
They didn't they didn't want the whole the idea completely into the Bud brand.
I mean, I think they've written off bud like completely. I see Peter
mentioned the music and the music ever since Prince's Halftime Show, which is the
greatest ever, I agree, it's been generally meretricious a couple of years ago.
I mean, last year it was just it was dark and messy,
and it had a tone to it that I just didn't like. This year,
I don't care. There wasn't a song in there that made me perk
up my ears. What's interesting is at one point, I shu walks over
to Alicia Keys was sitting at this piano which it looks like they chopped out
the tongue of Godzilla and lacquered it. It's huge, weird thing. And
she's playing and she starts to sing, and the first few notes that she
sayed are were she always say? Inexpertly delivered? There was a frack,
a crack a sourness to it, but she recovered and frankly, if I
was asked to sing at the Super Bowl, and I turned to the camera
and there were one hundred and twenty seven million people looking at me live.
I would improvise what it had happened into some sort of commercial for depends,
because I wouldn't be able to speak, and I would have emptied my bladder,
my bottles. She recovered nicely. But here's the thing. When they
uploaded it to YouTube, they corrected her singing. They corrected her notes,
so she no longer has to live under the shame ignominy of missing those few
notes. Now it's been corrected. And this is very bad. This is
a very bad thing to do. Is this not literally or Willian? Yes?
This is extremely creepy, and it's going to lead to the opposite of
the outcomes that we are told flow from the Super Bowl, which is that
all of us have a shad experience in shad memories, yep, because those
who saw it live are going to have different conception of what happened than the
people who watch it. Subsequently, all those who say, hey, remember
when that happened, and then you go to the record and it didn't,
or at least it seems as if it didn't. I find this really creepou
And I've written a lot about this because this is an unexpected turn. If
you go back to the birth of the Internet, and I was an early
adopter, at least my parents were. I had a website when I was
about ten. I've always been an Internet guy. What year was that to
in nineteen ninety four? Okay, the promise of the internet was Look,
finally all of that, George orwell, stuff can't happen. We have this
distributed system that is not centrally controlled or controllable, and as such, any
piece of information can be copied infinitely, or put in different places, or
hosted in different ways, such that the central state in a tyrannical society,
or even the CIA in a non tyrannical society can't do anything about it.
And yet what we've actually started to do voluntarily is the opposite, and it
is voluntary. Is one example of it that I think is really interesting.
But there was a movie a few years ago called Juno I'm sure you sorry
with written by a woman from the Twin City. Yes, so there's an
actress in it called Ellen Page, who at that point was a woman and
her name was Ellen and she was in the movie as Ellen, and it
said Ellen on the DVD cover and Ellen in the credits. She changed her
name and decided that she was actually a man. Fine, I'm not getting
into the details of that. Whether you think that's great or bad, it's
not the point. The point is now, if you look up the movie
Juno on any single service that people watch movies on, whether that's Netflix,
Apple, Amazon, whether you're buying a digital copy of it, it doesn't
say Ellen Page. It says Elliott Page, which is to say that the
history of the movie, the thing that actually happened when I went to the
movie theater has gone. At the end of the movie, in the credits,
it says Elliott Page. They redid the credits. And that's voluntary.
That's not because President Biden came in and said, extirpate that. No,
that is a voluntary decision. And it is really creepy. Imagine if Audrey
Hepburn had at some point in the nineteen seventies said I am now a man
oscar. Yeah, and all of the movies had been changed, and my
dad would say, we hang on a minute. When I used to go
to the movies, it was Audrey Hepburn, but the only thing I could
find was Oscar Hepbert. I think that's a very weird, and we've decided
to do this without being forced. I'm looking right now at Amazon. You
remember Jan Morris, the English writer who died last year, as I recall
perhaps a year before, was one of the first whatever it's called, and
used to be James Morris, and by the way, James desh Jan Morris
I thought was a beautiful prose writer. Little finn sometimes on the content,
but the prose was so beguiling you'd read page after page even so, and
I'm just checking now. He when he was happy to be, or at
least do when he was a he wrote a trilogy on the British Empire called
Farewell the Trumpets, and I see some old copies of the individual. Heaven's
Command was one of the books, and that's advertised as by James Morris.
But we see here Farewell to Trumpets by Jan Morris. It's happening all over.
Yeah. It was Wendy Carlos who has planted Walter Carlos. So I
mean that goes back to the seventies. But the thing is is what's next
about this? If we can correct her performance because it's what she actually intended
and everybody knows that she I mean, she did those word the notes that
she was supposed to sing, they were just a little bit off. So
what's the harm in autotuning that when we autotune every other performance? What's possibly
the harm? Well, because it's just done post hawk, Well, I
know that is exactly right, right, But so what's the harm really if
a candidate goes out and makes a speech and uses the wrong word in using
AI to replace the word that he said and to fix his mouth so he
says the proper word. I mean, the word was there in the speech,
The word was there in the teleprompter. What's the harm in fixing it?
What's the harm then in really doing it in real time? And AI
will be able to do this and you know, six weeks from now,
to be able to make sure that the proper words are said, or to
you know, to get in front of the candidate if he says something,
if he's starting to go with something that isn't on the script, we don't
want him to say that. What's the harm in using AI to keep Biden
from wandering off and gaffing and saying that he met somebody who's been dead for
thirty years. I mean, after all, we're just framing the truth in
a more truthy way. So I was, you know, the other day,
I was listening to Greeg's Piano Concerto, and there are many versions of
it. They're all great, but my favorite is actually a mono recording that
I think was reworked in the stereo in nineteen sixty Leon Fleischer with George l
and the Cleveland Orchestra. It was the first version that I had, first
one that I had when I was growing up, and I listened to it
and there's a part in the cadenza there's these rolling chords, dun dun,
dun un dumb, and at the end of it there is this spectacular concatenation
of dissonant notes that sounds like the piano is dealing with the end result of
eating a burrito. It's this. It's just wow. And I always thought
there was a very modern thing for Greg to put in. It wasn't later
until I went back and listened to other version stuff that I realized that Fleischer
made a mistake. He screwed up that recording. His hands got tangled if
he'd held them up. It would have been like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
We're all you know, he's at the piano and his fingers were all
knotted together. It was a mistake, and there was too much for them
to do it, barely to go back and re record it. Now we
could go back now with computers and fix that complete, so that Fleischer,
who was a beautiful pianist, just does it flawlessly like Rubinstein and Bernstein and
everybody else. Yeah, well, we can't go on, but we mustn't.
We mustn't. But also, James, if we do, you will
be able to say, hey, I have physical copies of this that differ
from the altered form, right, freaks me out. But if you only
have online distribution for certain things, so there is an article and National Review
that is only on the website, or a Netflix show that is only streamed,
and you fix that in inverted comments, well then you've actually rewritten in
history, and no one can prove otherwise. I know that's the thing.
I tell somebody that that's not right, Fleischer Blue. If you frecked that
like nobody's business the first time was, well, prove it. I suppose
you believe that. You know, I suppose you believe the fruit of loom
Logo didn't have a cornicopia, So yes, I had. So I have
copies of these things, but I and I have hard drives backed up.
But I feel like I'm part of some Fahrenheit four fifty one group which gets
together and talks about the things that are no longer you know, that are
that are no longer allowed to be spoken of. So I worry about that,
and people's just absolute acquiescence in it, because you know, who cares.
We all ought to care, because this is I mean, I mean,
you're right about it being voluntary. The strange thing about nineteen eighty four
is it turned out to be a completely voluntary thing to do. The government,
Big Brother didn't have to put listening devices in all of our homes.
We did that. We did that, right, tell us screens and the
like, all just waiting for the wake word. Uh Peter, Speaking of
music, though, I know that what you really wanted out of this this
was sort of like a Stars on forty five thing where they did all your
favorite Beatles songs set to the same beat and you could just nod your head
along with what is regarded as the greatest songbook of the post war era,
right, something like that. A listener to this podcast, an old friend
of mine whom I haven't actually set eyes on in forty years, Michael Garrett.
At one point I said to you and Rob, when Rob was on
the podcast He's Traveling Today, that I had just discovered the Beatles, and
of course you both rolled your eyes and laughed, and my friend, Michael
Garrett said, no, actually tell us about this. So I'm going to
tell you why I'm ignorant of pop music. I'm going to tell you three
groups, three artists that I think actually are musicians, and then I would
like you briefly to tell me what's wrong with me. And then it's somewhat
somewhat more like you can go ahead and discuss tell me whether I'm right or
wrong about the value that I now assign to these artists, Ladies and gentlemen.
The idea of somebody waking up from a coma and discovering the Beetles,
Yes, is a fascinating subject. And it's one of those things that we're
going to get to right after the break, because I know that you want
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Fume for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. All right, Peter, you have the
floor the polarion. All right, I'm going to treat the two of you
as as therapists. Here's the story. When I was a kid Charlie,
I predate you by some years. When I was a kid, we had
a thing called a stereo in our home, and it was in the living
room, in a place where it was perfectly visible, because it was considered
a nice piece of furniture, a console console exactly, stereo console. Both
words got used. It was that lavish. However, we were much too
poor to buy very many records, but my father found a bargain and bought
the Reader's Digest collection of great band music, with the result that when I
was a kid, what got played in my house over and over and over
again was my father's youth, not mine. On the other hand, I
still think Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Duke Ellington was a
good Benny Good. I still think that they shouldn't have been as completely forgotten
as they are today. But those I thought were real musicians, don't ask
me why. And furthermore, as they went through high school and college.
We're talking about the seventies, Charlie, before you came into this world,
somehow or other, I don't know, I was a really at a very
young age, I became an old curmudgeon. I somehow condescended to contemporary music
and just didn't think much of it. Okay, So that's one question that
could be touched upon briefly, what the hell was going on with me?
But here's what's happened. All these decades later. My wife was traveling.
I'm fine during the day when she's traveling, but I can't sleep at night.
And I found myself watching a documentary about Paul McCartney, and it interviewed
the contemporary Paul McCartney, and I looked at him. I looked at the
way he talked about the sixties. I looked at the way he talked about
how they composed their music, the rhythms, the sounds. How he added
a uh, I can't remember the word for it. There's a particular kind
of trump at the very high neck, thank you exactly how he added a
pil And I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, this man is
a serious musician. I don't know whether he's memorized scores of Bach or Beethoven
or Brahms, but he's a he thinks musically, he's aware of And then
I thought to myself, what I, who paid no attention at all to
the Beatles, can hum to myself, let it be yesterday. People who
can produce melodies that stay in the mind, stay happily in the minds of
people such as me, who essentially ignored them when they were at center stage.
The sheer musicality that is a feat and I have been a fool for
ignoring it. It am one of three, but the other two are much
quicker. Like millions of people. Apparently I somehow or other tripped across on
YouTube or Twitter or something like that. Joni Mitchell at last year's Newport Festival.
This eighty year old woman who's in bad health, singing both sides now
a song that dates back to when she was in her twenties and she's now
eighty years old. Her voices dropped almost an octave. It's husky from She's
a perpetual smoker apparently, which may have led to her health troubles. But
the rendition was sort of magnificent. She had kind of reinvented the way to
handle this. She slowed it down, She made it elegaic in a way
that it didn't quite used to be. It wasn't a young girl who was
confused by the world. It was an old woman now and it was just
heart wrenching and done. But you could see this was this person was a
professional, she was a real musician. She'd taken the text and the music
and reworked it. Phrasing, intonation, all still there, fantastic, And
I thought to myself, how did I miss this final point, the one
piece of music that I did love when it happened. Although, again,
Charlie, this pre day to you was Don McClain miss American Pie or what
the American Pie? I guess is the title of the song, and that
stayed in my head. I hummed it all summer long, in the summer
of nineteen seventy six, as I recall, when I was an intern at
the State Capitol in Albany, New York. And so I've never understood what
it meant. I've never had the slightest clue what the lyrics referred to,
although it seemed kind of wildly enjoyable and almost effervescent in its energy, but
elegaic at the same time, A and B. Whatever happened to Don McClain,
Why that is? Okay, that's it. Boys. You may now
psychoanalyze me, give me an education. Make of this what you will Charlie,
you were raised as a musician. You were a choir boy in Cambridge,
which means that you were taught music in a very serious fashion. So
there must be at least some residue of that for you professionalism in you.
All right over to you guys, well there is. It's funny you mentioned
your upbringing there, because I had the same thing. It's just that I
also was interested in the music that was being produced when I was younger.
My dad had an enormous collection of records and he recorded them onto tape for
me, and I had a player in my room, so I had all
the Beatles albums when I was five or six, and I had Fleetwood Mac
and Pink Floyd and led Zeppelin and the Who and pretty much everything. And
then I also followed music that was current, and then at school I had
a great classical music education. So I have the same thing you did.
I just had the rest. You had the rest on top of it,
on top of it. I think the piccolo story that you identify is actually
quite funny because it was used on Penny Lane. Yes, yes, that's
exact. Double A side in nineteen sixty seven was actually recorded during the Sergeant
Pepper Sessions. The guy who played it was a fabulous musician called David Mason,
who was one of the great piccolo trumpet players, and Paul McCartney had
not come up with that idea himself. It was suggested by George Martin,
the Beatles producer, who was classically trained. But McCartney, because he's a
genius, understood broadly what it was that David Mason needed to play. So
McCartney conveyed to David Mason, here's what I wanted to sound like, and
then he would say yes or no. Well, I eventually get the take
that you're hear on the record today. And McCartney, who was really good
at motivating people but wasn't basically trained enough to understand when the limits of the
instrument had been reached, says to David Mason, that was really good,
David, but I think you could do it just a little bit better.
And David Mason exploded at him. He said, no, one could do
it better. That was a perfect take. You're never going to get a
better take than that, and he was right, And George Martin diplomatically came
in and said, I think that's perfect. And now you hear that on
that record. So McCartney understood how to use this stuff. But the idea
was that of his classically trained producer. So how much was George Martin and
how much was the Beatles themselves? They were sort of geniuses, weren't they,
Oh, no question about it. Off the charts. They had three
wonderful songwriters, with George Harrison as well, but they needed, in my
view, they later resented this, but they needed, in my view,
George Martin to pull them together. And George Martin was interesting because he wasn't
phased by anything. If they came to him completely high strumming the same chord
and singing the lyrics from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, he found a
way to turn that into a song, which they did with Tomorrow. Never
knows. When McCartney would write these astonishingly beautiful ballads, ballads that have the
same harmonic characteristic as say Percel, then George Martin would say, well,
we'll use a harpsichord and we'll bring in trumpets or trombone, and he just
knew how to do that. And then McCartney was good enough to understand how
to utilize that idea that he probably wouldn't have had himself. By the way,
George Martin still alive. We're talking about unfortunately not right. So we
have McCartney and Ringo Starr still and that's all correct. And Ringo Star was
not. Ringo Star was a more than adequate drummer, all writer as a
vocalist, but he was not a composer. Is that correct? Correct?
He couldn't write. He's not a great vocalist, although his performance song with
Little Help from My Friends is good. But I would quibble with more than
adequate drummer. I think Ringo Stars one of the greatest rock drummers. And
oh my goodness, because and I'll let James talk. Sorry he started me
on the Beatles. The thing is with Ringo is it's not just that he's
an extremely good and tight drummer. It's that he understood what every song needed
instinctively, and so you get these peculiar rhythms on say Ticket to Ride,
where he makes the song move, or in both Revolver and Sergeant Pepper,
his drumming is almost melodic. He's almost using the toms as instruments that are
are tied to certain notes, and you get this odd non rock drumming.
Was Barock drumming on that album that no one had done before and that no
one has done since. So I would put in at the top of his
profession. He's not the most technically gifted drummer. He's not John Bonham of
led Zeppelin or Keith Moon of the Who. But for the Beatles, he
couldn't have been more perfect right bottom or Moon in the Beatles, it would
have been a disaster. Yeah, take you three points backwards, Peter American
Pie. Yes, how we learned to endure that song when it came on
DJ's Friend. It's like one of those tunes you put it on and you
know you got time to run to the cannon back. It's a long allegory
about American music in society. Oh the gesture. The gesture is supposed to
be Bob Dylan. And the day the music died was the day that Buddy
Holly's plane went down with Richie Allens or the Big Bopper, And I you
know, while that may be true, I'm more interested in the Holly part
of the story rather than the Donald McLean recap of it, because Buddy Holly
was a great fresh American talent who had some great ideas and really made some
extraordinary music. The rest of the guys in the plane not so much.
Big Bopper was a DJ who just you know, lucked into a novelty song.
But Buddy Holly was a tragic loss. Then again, Buddy Holly at
that time was touring Iowa at that point in his career. Really realize that,
you know, if he'd lived, he was covering other people's work by
then. If he lived, he would have probably been eclipsed completely by what
came along in the wake of the Beatles, not so much the Beatles type
stuff, but the psychedelia and the post psychedelia and the rest of the crap
in the direct that infected the bait, you know, the basement of the
sixties. And Buddy Harley, if you lived, would be doing casinos and
that would be kind of sad, But it also meant that all of us
could have possibly seen him, which would have been a gift to the next
one. To Joni mitchell I never liked Jonny mitchell I found that hippie top
stuff to just be annoying. And yes, both sides now is a sweet
tune, but it's part of us. It's part of a sixties cohort of
music that I have absolutely no fellow feeling with, because, oddly enough,
I felt no connection or desire to claim that I could possess the music of
the people immediately before me, the music of the people in the past,
the forties, the fifties. Classically, yes, yes, I could connect
to that, but the off of the immediate boomers, from the Beatles to
the Stones to the rest of it was somebody else's stuff, and it was
on the other side of a wall, a cultural wall that I didn't share.
I grew up in the seventies and I may have peeked my head over
the wall and taken a look at what I regarded as the nadir of sixties
counterculture. But it wasn't me, and I didn't want anything to do with
it. It was flower power, it was groovy, it was acid.
As you know. I didn't like it. That said, if you put
a gun to my head tomorrow and said you are going to a desert aisle,
you can take one record. It would be Joni Mitchell. It would
why it would be Agyra by Joni Mitchell, because I think it's the most
welling up. As I say, I think it's the most beautiful, mystical,
romantic thing I've ever heard in my life. I listened to it about
every two or three years or so, and I'm moved beyond compare it.
When I first heard it in nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine, it hit
me where I lived like few things ever had, and so I've never been
apart from it. It's discursive, it's liquid, it's it's it's basically heard
an electric guitar, and Yaco Pastoria is a fretless bass guy who uh,
it's just marvel. The Beatles, same thing as I said before about johny
Mitchell and the rest of them. They were on the other side of the
wall, and I really didn't care much for their later work. The middle
period. Done knew a lot for me. I could recognize what was great
about them, though, even and that's the thing, even if you're not
a Beatles guy, and I was never a Beatles guy to the point where
a self identification and I had to know everything about them and the rest of
it, I was aware that this was absolutely incredible stuff. And even if
I didn't get day in the life, I got the reason for the chord
at the end and the chaos that came before it. But for me,
it's all the early songs. It's all the early stuff. What was British
music, Frankly Charlie before the Beatles came along. It was a renaissance of
American traditional jazz, right. Richard Lester's movie before he made Hard Day's Night
was its trad Dad, where all the kids come from the school and pile
into the end of the soda joint and start listening to clarinet and banjo,
stuff taken out of Dixie Land, America. It's hilarious. No wonder the
Beatles came along and resot bobular British popular music was an absolute just My friend
Dennis King will probably hied me for this, but he was part of it.
It was boring, It was really boring. When you listen to Hard
Day's Night, that first chord is a galvanizing event. It's a gong,
it's a hammer that shatters every single musical preconception about the culture that was in
place at the time. It is just magnificent. And then they go on
from that to this great tune. And those early songs took everything that had
been done before in blues and rock and America and the you know, the
Buddy Holly, the Chubby Checkers, the brock around the clock to build everything
and created something because they were composition geniuses that had chord changes and under harmonies
and the rest of it that just remade it and created a songbook that was
the equal of the American songbook that preceded the war. So yeah, so
yeah. To come to the Beatles late in life is a boon to a
mitzvah. It's a blessing to you because you now can hear it truly without
any of the youthful passions that generally attend the music like this when you're younger,
you can you can look at it dispassionately, and you can realize and
see the genius that is there. And McCartney is an amazing I'm not a
Lenin guy at all personally, or his subsequent contribution sort of proved the point.
But Paul McCartney, who everybody regarded as this, this purveyor of saccharine
melodies, this guy who ran off with wings and turned out silly stuff.
I'm sorry the wings. A lot of the wing stuff is great, but
his effortless ability to channel and to summon beauty from out of nowhere, it
seems without breaking a sweat. Hated a song with Elvis Costello called Veronica.
That is I mean in Elvis Costello, I think is one of the greatest
musicians of the rock era as well, and the two of them together creates
something a melody you never heard before in your life, but that you are
sure existed in some purefect puber platonic format that are just waiting for somebody of
their talent to find it and speak it. So Yeah, McCartney's great,
Joni Mitchell that one thing I love and Don McLean whatever happened to him.
People were afraid that the second follow up hit was going to be nineteen minutes
long instead of seventeen, so they didn't sign him to another album. Nah,
he had more. I'm just that one song. That whole album is
terrific with Vincent and Empty Chaz and the Grave and Fatima. That's a good
record. It's not my style of stuff. I'm not into the acoustics singer
songwriter stuff, but yes, I'm not going to discount that it has its
merits or that people like it. That's the thing. It's and Elvis Costello
worked together on a record called Flowers in the Dirt, and it has the
most terrific song on it called that Day Is Done, which I want you
to go in listen to a beautiful song. Charlie You and Joni Mitchell.
What's your view? I am not the world's biggest Jenni Mitchell find that isn't
to say I don't think she's really talented. It's just not quite my thing.
But both sides now is one of the greatest songs ever written. I
was listening the other day to something because I'm doing on my website the bottom
fifty songs of nineteen sixty four, because we all you know that everybody knows
the top ten, but what are the bottom ones? Are they any good?
Turns out that they are. I own the top three hundred songs of
every year of the twentieth century, going back to about nineteen ten, thank
you Usenet. And as such, I can you know I want I can.
I can dip in and find the stuff that didn't sell and you're surprised.
Sometimes you don't know, for example that that Booker t They did another
version of Green Onions called More Green Onions, which is essentially green Onions with
a couple of different things thrown in, and green Onions is an absolutely fantastic
piece, and Moe green Onions is not, which is why it's at number
two hundred and eighty five. But then you find some sabby Italian singer in
the teen heart Throb Mold in nineteen sixty three with a backing female chorus and
the echoe strings Owen Bradley and the rest of it, and you realize that
this was the stuff that the Beatles just came in and kipped out of the
room. It would persist for a while, but it's remarkable. You would
find the funkiest gut bucket gritty blues in you know, at number two hundred
and ninety nine, but that was still something they played on the air.
It was probably regarded as race music done in the South and the rest of
it. But the diversity of voices and sounds on the radio in the nineteen
in the in the nineteen sixties was really quite extraordinary, and I you know,
at least was there to pick up part of that even into the seventies.
Was it the same for you, Charlie, are you listening to Radio
Luxembourg. My dad listened to Radio Luxembourg. He would go to bed at
night and pretend he was asleep, and he would lie under the covers with
this crystal set that he had and listened to Radio Luxembourg, which was the
only place that he could get the records that had been banned for whatever reason
by the British government. People in America forget or don't know how censorious the
BBC was at the behest of the British government until about nineteen sixty eight.
A lot of Beatles songs were not played on the radio. You mentioned A
Day in the Life that was banned because it makes an apparent reference to heroin
and talks about getting high. Some of the Beatles nineteen sixty six album tracks
weren't allowed to be played on the radio, and anything that even remotely smacked
of counterculture, including Bob Dylan, was blacklisted. So the only place you
could hear it was from this boat that was parked in international waters off the
British Art broadcast in. Was your father a musician, No, but his
father was a concert piers, so that the generations I see, I see,
Okay, So next question, where do these people come from. It's
not a put on, it's not a made up backstory. Paul McCartney and
John Lennon were both liver What is it called Liverpudlians? Is that the waver
Pudlians. They both came from working class families. They had I think English
educations in those days, just this sort of standard working class education was not
bad. But there was nothing fancy about them. They didn't go to a
school like the one. Excuse me, I'm not supplying there's anything fancy about
you either, but they didn't have a rigorous classical education at all. Where
did George Martin come from or come to that joint these we're talking about people
who seem, in some strange way one offs George Martin was classically trade.
I just think when you're talking about Paul McCartney as opposed to many other rock
musicians, you are asking, well, where did Mozart come from? Yes,
and I'm not saying that they are the same thing, But no,
Paul McCartney's talent is something that explains them. No, it's so intuitive and
prodigious that you could have put him on a desert island with no one around
him and only a guitar and he'd have worked out how to do what he
did. And Lennon was the same. So it's tough with the Beatles compared
to some other bands where you can sort of see how they got there and
who their influences were and how they jammed it out. Because I mean McCartney
yesterday came to McCartney in a dream fully formed. That's Mozart level composition.
Mozart used to wander around and you know, he'd be in the supermarket and
I'm obviously kidding, and he would just go, oh, the forty eth
Symphony, and then he would go home and write it down. I thought
this was a lie. I thought this was one of these parcop stories.
But he wrote the Overture to Don Giovanni at three o'clock in the morning while
completely drunk on the day that it premiad because he hadn't done it. So
you can't ask the question with him or Beethoven, well where does it come
from? It just does. And I know this is when of F.
Buckley's line right, that this is the moment when he is most convinced as
a god, is when he listens a Mozauce requim well, but it does
seem to come from somewhere outside. They do seem to be transcribing the music
of the spheres in some weird way. But the creative acts are like that
at their best. And I'm not comparing any of us to Mozart or Paul
McCartney, but you know that when you're writing something and you stop writing and
you feel as if you're taking dictation that it is coming from another place besides
the fun of lobe here, that you're just your type. That is what
they have, and it is something that is a combination of innate ability and
knowing how to exercise that power. So he's right about McCarty being on a
desert island. But at the same time, the fact that he was able
to be in a studio with other people and producing something meant that he did
more. And the more you do, I think the wider the pipe gets,
so that it does come a little bit more easier. I mean,
Mozart had never written a symphony before the number fortieth wouldn't have come to him
and the supermarket at that point of his life. It's the fact that thirty
nine preceded it that had shaped his brain in the way that it did.
Rassini. The story goes wrote the overture for marriage to figure out. No,
not Figuro, but William Tell. William Tell overture. The story was
that he was so lazy he wrote it in bed and the pages fell out,
and he'd rather than actually get up and get the pages, he just
wrote the other one. And that's the one that we have. I don't
believe it, but it's kind of a fun tale, you know. It's
interesting that how some of this genius is able to intew it things that other
people needed to be taught. Beatles album with the Beatles in England they were
different in America until the mid sixties has a song on it which is full
of Aolian cadences and a reviewer pointed this out to John Lennon and said,
you chose to use Aolian cadences And John Lennon said, I don't know what
that is. That sounds like an exotic bird. I know. Of course
they didn't. He didn't know what it was, but he still knew how
to use them. I find that really interesting. And then if yes,
but then were there are hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who
know what alien cadences is, but couldn't use them in a useful way.
If that life depended on I could use the phrase it's astonishing the Pink Floyd's
latest effort in the Phrygian mode. And you know, yeah, no,
I know exactly. Sometimes the more you know, the less you can do
because you're held back by constraints. A serious songwriter would never have begun Hard
Day's Night with that chord hasn't anything to do with it. They would have
gone to the song at nine right, extraordinary. Well, here's the thing
weish probably get out of here, and we haven't even touched on all the
other music that Peter doesn't know, but is now going to go out and
go forth and explain. Charles tell him the next thing that he should go
out and find. Wow, do you like Pink Floyd? No, I
don't I know them? Well, I think I know. I think I
heard them once at some fraternity basement at Dartmouth College and didn't like it.
Right, Yeah, The actual greatest guitar solo probably of the nineteen seventies is
by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. You know what I'm talking about, Charlie
I think so. I mean, it gets a lot of you know,
it's it's the go to one for the greatest, the other go to pizza.
Although you will have been exposed to this band in some form. Is
the Beach Boys? Ah, yes, familiar with the song God Only Knows
the Greatest song? Yes? Yes, yes, yes, okay, so
you do have that, But you were about to call it the something song,
the greatest something. I think that's the greatest pop song ever written,
really, I do ever written. Or the way it's the way it's mixed
and both, all right? Is that from the famous pet album Pets Sounds?
That's right? And it inspired the Beatles to do Sergeant Pepper and all
that came afterwards because they were so envious of it and of it. It
is an absolute master because he writes himself into a corner and he has to
get himself out of it, and he manages to do it. He played
it to his dad. This is he is Brian Wilson. Correct, Yeah,
sorry, this is Brian Wilson. I know we're running over time,
but there's no no, no. This story kills me. He was this
remarkable genius. His dad was this driving force behind the band. Which in
some way was good because it created some motivation, but his dad also had
terrible judgment and he didn't know what was good and what wasn't. And anyway,
in nineteen sixty six, Brian Wilson writes this song and he plays it
to his dad and his dad says, it's no good. Why didn't you
go back to writing, you know, twelve bar songs about cars. That's
what people want. And I just think that's the most that must have been
the most crushing thing to do. I mean, it would be like Beethoven
writing, you know, Cavatina or something and then playing it to his dad
and his dad says, nah, I just I just can't get my head
around this. But that's that's actually happened quite a lot in history. As
I mentioned before, I have a friend who was in a boy band in
the fifties and sixties in England, and last time we were there, they'd
uncovered more footage of them performing on the Charlie helped me out Morecombe and why
morecamb and Wise. They were a staple on Morecombe and Wise for years and
they did all kinds of bits for them. And I'm watching my friend in
his twenties here just swinging along and doing well with his two brothers who had
to memorize every single step, and they one of his brothers became a plumber
and the other just sort of drifted into other things. But Dennis stayed with
it and taught himself more and more as he went along, so he he
willed himself into being as a musician. Really sort of this the father formed
this this band, shoved guitars in their hands and put them on tour until
they were actually selling records and doing well. George George Harrison asked for an
autograph, by the way, because they loved the King brothers, uh and
so. But but Dennis went on to learn how to write music, learn
how to compose music, and he ended up as a writing one of the
most beloved apparently musical themes for British television show called Black Beauty, and did
all of the music for Lovejoy with with Ian McShane, uh did brought did
did body musicals like Privates on Parade, which was his and and it carves
out quite a career for himself as a musician now. And he knows he
knew everybody at the time. So you bring up a composer from the time,
and he'll tell you some stories how nobody liked John Barry for as a
matter of fact, and I don't know, but that's another day. But
it's so whenever we think of the people who are the geniuses, from whom
it just flows naturally like water, we have to think of all the other
people for whom it is a job. They're good at it, they're very
talented, but they don't have the luxury of having a theme of great beauty
to send in their head, as with Wilson or McCartney or even Costello.
At that point, it's a job. And I love those guys. I
love the guys who just that's their job and they can pick up a guitar
and they can play an extraordinary solo that they never wrote and probably never could
come up with, but damn they can do it. They can do it
well. And then they're guys like Brian Setzer. I think you might like
Brian Setzer. Peter, he's my age. He lives here. He started
the rockabilly a craze back in the eighties, which really wasn' much of a
craze, and he's still doing it. He produces some of the most American
music possible in rockabilly fashion, and he's a fantastic guitarist. Other than that,
I don't know who I would reckon, but I'm going to send you
some. I'm also going to send you a link to the Reader's Digest Big
Band collection, which is available online. Is it really? Oh yeah,
everything is? Everything is. I'm not sure whether or not they fixed the
notes that were wrong here and there, but it is. And I too,
grew up my dad was a country Western guy, so we had all
the country Western stuff, but there was something in my dad he would buy
over and over. He would buy a pop tune that Bobby Fuller. He'd
buy this stuff if he grabbed him, and he liked it, and so
I always had that in the back of the mind too. And then I
listened to Disney compilations of their musicals too, because that was music that was
familiar to me, and then moved into classical, but always in the back,
always in the back, always back. There was the nineteen forties Big
Ben Big Swing because that was my dad's era as well, and I finally
rediscovered it when I was in my late twenties or early thirties when one day
but in the cutout bin took it home Harry James dropped the needle and was
transported and then it was Miller and Good and all the rest. And to
this day there's not a week that goes by before I don't be without listening
to one of those guys and realizing how they had it. For that matter,
and we should probably leave with this because it's out of copyright. I
sent my daughter a copy of Happy Feet nineteen thirty. King of Jazz,
Paul Whiteman, who was anything but the epitome of jazz right in our modern
mind, a big stout guy with a little hit or mustache and his hair
plastered down. But he brought jazz to the masses and he turned out this
tune called Happy Days, which slaps. As the kids would say today,
it's all over the road, the solos, the changes in tempt, the
changes. I mean, it's just a delight. And you can imagine people
in nineteen thirty in a room with this going full blast and everybody playing at
the top of their lungs, and the joy and the exultation of the absolute
American originality coming out of this. Now we have this tiny, little monotone
version, but you can imagine what it was like at the time. Music
the twentieth century and the West is one of the greatest accomplishments that we have
as a human race. Should we end there and by fume and thanks Charles
for showing up, unless have you terms have something else that you want to
add to that. Now, I was just gonna ask you whether Bobby Fuller
is the Bobby Filler of the Bobby Philler four who did that cover of I
Fought the Law. Yes, indeed it was and a tragic story. They
found him dead in a car burned with gasoline. One of the guys who
was also in the band turned out to be late from the Crickets, was
Sonny Curtis, who wrote Love Is All Around, which is the Mary Telllermore
theme song, which of course you knew. Charlie will now take us out
by humming The Queen of the Knight Aria by Wolf Kang Amedeus Mozar. Goodbye
boys, Doctor, Doctor Doctors. Next week Ricochet join the conversation