Stones Studies, Part III: The once and future Mr. Jones

In which I am blinded by one brief shining moment

Let me tell you about my favorite member of the Rolling Stones (though I can’t seem to shut up about Charlie, so). He’s dead; he’s been dead a long time. Fifty-one years to the day, in fact.

As the received wisdom among fans goes, “no Jones, no Stones.” Brian Jones founded the group, and it was his vision and drive which constructed the platform they needed to make an impression. By the same token, it was his insecurities and indulgences which nearly toppled them from the great heights they reached.

From whatever angle you look, Brian was a force of nature, the band’s own Jenna Maroney: armed with formidable musical instincts, eloquent presentation, mild sociopathic tendencies, and a perfect blond head. Apparently he got his start on the clarinet, which gives me delightful mind’s-eye images of a little boy astounding his classmates by nailing the glissando intro to “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Don’t fact-check me.)

Initially he had the steepest goals for the group’s lineup (it took a little while to solidify), their repertoire (mostly the blues, his one true love), and their fortune (making phone calls, signing contracts, locking down gigs). He was most interested in, and best at, giving interviews—he had a real audiobook voice—so the host of whatever fishbowl they were trapped inside would gravitate toward him. Thus he was often the known quantity on their travels.

And he played a mean guitar. Six-string, twelve-string. Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix looked up to him. (Quite the compliment given his stature, for which his bandmates frequently mocked him; the things short people put up with…) Besides that, whenever a unique instrument popped up on a recording, like a marimba or sitar or dulcimer or mellotron (or even recorder), he was its master. He was arguably the primary composer of “Ruby Tuesday.” His innovations were briefly unparalleled and universally admired.

But he had other aspirations, other ideas for staying relevant beyond what he did in the studio. He was dropping acid before his peers had access to it, frequenting the most exclusive clubs, and soon enough jet-setting with Anita Pallenberg, the sophisticated and dangerous X factor who would simultaneously tie the band together creatively and fray their bond from the inside out. His drink/drug hobbies turned into habits and he grew paranoid about slipping from his bandleader’s pedestal. To be fair, he was slipping, as one does when one bails on rehearsals, recording sessions, even shows. I dare say Keith became as good as he is by being repeatedly left high and dry, forced to play for two. What events Brian did attend made it plain that he was no longer the center of attention, no longer the celebrated one. He took out his intensifying anxiety on Anita, verbally and physically, until she was driven into Keith’s arms and Keith finally confronted Brian during their legendarily shady Marrakesh excursion. Kind of like in Always Be My Maybe when Randall Park punches Keanu Reeves for Ali Wong, only less funny. (Is it any wonder that Keith went from looking like a nerd to looking like he could kill you with his bare hands?) As if all that weren’t enough, Brian had to watch his other bandmate Mick accomplish what he was supposed to be accomplishing, which was to ingratiate himself with the elite and assume the role of greatest influence and direction and desirability. The fact that Mick and Anita were also doing a film and had to have sex for real in one scene didn’t help Brian and subsequently prompted Keith to say of its late director, “Best work he ever did, besides shooting himself.”

I wish I were making this up. The art that emerged from this period was groundbreaking, but obviously it broke more than just ground. When people stereotype rock stars, the odds are they’re imagining a version of this story.

So, after a string of events testing the limits of what a mortal soul could bear, Brian formally checked out from reality at Cotchford Farm—a country house previously belonging to A. A. Milne—surrounded by his human and chemical companions of choice. He was fired from the band in June 1969, having done the odd bit of work for the next album. Less than a month later he was found at the bottom of his swimming pool, aged twenty-seven, ruled a “death by misadventure” though accounts vary. 5 July was the Stones’ big free concert in Hyde Park (their better big-free-concert idea that year by a long shot): Mick read out stanzas of Percy Shelley’s “Adonaïs” before releasing a swarm of white butterflies from the stage. I’ve never been a fan of those Romantic poets, but this seemed a poignant sendoff. (Meanwhile, the only Stone to be present at both the firing and the funeral was—you guessed it—Charlie.)

His passing shook the musical community. Pete Townshend and Jim Morrison penned elegies to him. He also wound up being the first of several musicians in a short time frame to die at the same age, a true founder even in death.

A couple years would pass before the group memorialized him in a song, and it didn’t disappoint. I talked about “Shine a Light” last week; it’s an emotional experience for me, evoking the complex and bittersweet memory of a person whose life differed drastically from mine yet with whom I empathize nonetheless. In my more vulnerable, attention-seeking moments, I know his pain; at bottom, borderline megalomania aside, this was a man who wanted to matter.

Part of what draws me to Brian is a feeling of kinship. He reminds me of my late-high-school self, the self who first got into the Stones. I was racking up distinctions, leading a pretty charmed artistic life, and growing perhaps a bit complacent. Don’t get me wrong, senior year remains one of my single best years to date, rich in relationships and activities and anticipation: as another artist put it, “when I was seventeen, it was a very good year.” But the transition to upperclassmen status brought with it a fear that I too would become irrelevant, that the posts of respect and sway I had worked so hard to attain might somehow be undermined—resulting in a bout of corrosive jealousy, an occasional diva moment, a spiral of selfish delusion. I can recall writing an angry (private) letter in an effort to expunge the negative energy, which took a long time to achieve the desired effect. I calculated my words with the end of establishing dominance, out of some twisted sense of entitlement, though I strove outwardly to be humble. And this was school, a far cry from the complications of adult success, no substances involved unless you count coffee. Power, of any kind, corrupts.

I am trying to be a good person. I was trying to be a good person then. I believe Brian Jones tried to be a good person. All that trying doesn’t keep us from sometimes succumbing to our inner darkness and doesn’t absolve us of what happens when we do. Brian’s story moved me from the start possibly because I intuited our similarities, even if my articulation is only in retrospect. As we push to hold people accountable for their actions, I could never posthumously excuse the violence he perpetrated against his partners or the harmful publicity stunts he pulled in a struggle against his own fading glory. Still, I want to acknowledge his contribution—short-lived, momentous, impossible to overstate—and the shame that such a promising figure became such a tragic one. These sentiments are not new; they follow him as any interesting person’s stories do. And the legacy he left behind is now the World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band. This must be a life worth remembering.

I hope he has found peace and forgiveness wherever he is. May the good Lord shine a light on him.

Image: the beautiful and damned, January 1967

Stones Studies, Part II: Character portraits, best practices

In which I dip into the cult of personality

Welcome back. Or, if you’re new here, welcome (and go get up to speed).

As I’ve mentioned, in paring down a fifty-plus-year career to what resonates with me, I arrived at the material spanning 1968-72, give or take a bit on each side; okay, let’s say 1967-73. That’s the gold mine. If you ask me, they’ve never done better.

My evidence relies heavily, though absolutely not wholly, on the character vignettes which dominated the period. These songs leave an enduring impression by functioning as short stories propelled by specific situations, problems, or personalities. What’s more, they often do double duty as analyses of contemporary social ills, and there were a lot of those. Now, any band that was paying attention would have done that: commentary has been a major purpose of art in every age and society. But the Stones made it stick in a special way—and this I attribute to them, to the blend of talent and ambition and chaos that defined them at the time.

Take the year they had in ’67, which more or less clarified the need for what followed. It was inconsistent but not necessarily unsuccessful. The first album, Between the Buttons, altered its track listings for the UK and US releases; both sound very English, because they were doing very English things (and doing them well), but the UK one explores idiosyncratically English themes. “Back Street Girl.” for example, is a portrait of an aristocrat who goes to great lengths to ensure the secrecy of his affair with a lower-class woman. People call it a put-down, and I guess they’ve got a point, but it’s always struck me as heartbreaking. It’s in waltz time, it’s accentuated by a vibraphone which sounds like a Wurlitzer organ (courtesy, naturally, of Brian Jones); the cumulative effect resembles a music box of broken dreams. Hardly a put-down in the vein of some preceding songs. (I like to construe “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid as a kind of response to this song.) For what it’s worth, it was the only song on the album that Mick Jagger liked. As I say, experimentation was crucial to things coming together in earnest.

Also on this album (both versions) is “Miss Amanda Jones,” an upbeat portrait of a girl who rejects the strictures of the upper-class debutante world in favor of a carefree lifestyle. One of my favorites, I might add. It features its share of criticism—“Hey girl, don’t you realize / the money invested in you?”—but it describes a sexist world without being sexist. I’m pretty sure that was just Mick the adventurous lyricist learning to approach a situation from multiple angles simultaneously.

Songs like these already demonstrate a shift away from the reportage of “Mother’s Little Helper” the previous year—an excellent song in its own right, but only in its wake do we hear a pivot toward first-person narration and the unreliable vantage points it invites. Put another way, had the song appeared two years later, we might have heard it from the perspective of the mother herself (though more likely we would not have heard it at all, because drug busts).

The rest of that year was rather marred by the failure of Their Satanic Majesties Request, which was basically their attempt at a Sgt. Pepper (John Lennon was like “seriously?”). They got desperate to fit a mold that they weren’t going to fit, that they had in fact spent their career thus far casting themselves in opposition to, and they were suppressing their natural selves. Hell, their songwriting duo lacked the time and energy to operate on all cylinders between dealing with said drug busts and accompanying prison time.

Speaking of which, it was actually lucky they hadn’t learned their lesson by the next year, because Mick and then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull’s arrest for cannabis possession on 24 May 1968 was great publicity for the concurrent release of their newest single and best song, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

Did you read that right? Yes: their best song, ever.* A three-minute-forty-two-second encapsulation of their finest qualities. A musical Bildungsroman. A thesis. There are enough proclamations of personal history (beginning at the beginning with “I was born”) to support that reading; the chorus is an even more fundamental statement of identity, augmented by the curious idiom “it’s a gas.” I have always been intrigued by this choice of catchphrase; it sounds like something from the ‘40s or ‘50s (I had to look up its origin). So it lends the character an anachronistic air, existing out of time, free to travel at will. He’s already a quirky variation on Keith Richards’s gardener, whom Keith had nicknamed “jumping Jack”—the abstract word-painting in the verses, including the quasi-Christlike image of being “crowned with a spike right through [his] head,” only adds to the quirk. Much of the imagery is quite violent, in fact, but we steadily return to the jarring conclusion that “it’s all right.” It occurred to me that part of the appeal of this lyric is the absence of women. No misogyny to get prematurely indignant over; the object is missing. A lot to think about here.

Except it’s tough to think when you’re caught up in that dynamite sound. Keith had finally discovered open tuning (a technique Joni Mitchell had made sexy years ago, but whatever), giving the guitar its glorious timbre, leaning into the root and fifth of the central triad. Unlike the glassy, smooth effect Joni went for, this effect is rough and crackling—in conjunction with Charlie’s hollow drums (sounding not unlike the toy kit he would play on “Street Fighting Man”), which he chugs on like the engine he is; and Mick’s maracas, which he keeps at like his life depends on them for the entire second half of the song. Meanwhile, Keith also takes up the bass (another foreshadowing of “Street Fighting Man”), freeing Bill Wyman to add the Hammond organ, which brings out the triad nicely at the end. And it was the last recording to boast a significant contribution from Brian Jones, this time on rhythm guitar.

Astonishingly, though, the most important thing about this track is that it signified to the world that the Stones were back. It served as a grand reintroduction (a resurrection, if we run with the Christ theme). They had tried their hand at several styles and genres and got a bit lost competing with their peers. Now they were funneling that energy into being themselves. And it shows. They identify closely with it—they’ve performed it over 1,100 times, the most of any song. Makes perfect sense. I like to call “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” the granola of songs: it’s crunchy and it energizes you.

Once the world was riding that high, the group were on the ascent. That fall’s LP, Beggars Banquet, upped its portrait game singlehandedly with “Sympathy for the Devil.” Its lyric, I told a friend recently, is airtight, the height of dramatic monologue. Robert Browning is green with envy in his grave. It’s a self-contained course in global conflict from the Crucifixion to the Protestant Reformation to the Russian Revolution–all out of order, though, as its narrator isn’t bound to any chronological rule. Everything is intentional: of all the monikers this figure goes by, Lucifer denotes the fallen angel, God’s former right-hand man, who has some good in him despite having been maligned over millennia, counterbalancing the overarching message that humanity fancies itself “good” when it is actually responsible for many of the listed atrocities. See what they did there?

On the heels of the hardworking text, this track ushers in a new personality for the band to inhabit: the jam band. It ends after a couple solid minutes of Mick doing his thing and everyone else maintaining the background “whoo-whoo” (they are flagging; he is not). Later, “Stray Cat Blues,” whose lyric you could not pay me to discuss, goes on for a minute and forty-five seconds until Keith’s guitar sounds to me like a chair scraping backwards against the floor…in a cool way. They would stretch this personality onto Let It Bleed with “Let It Bleed,” “Monkey Man,” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (bonus points for being choral); and even more so onto Sticky Fingers with “Sway,” “Sister Morphine,” “Bitch,” “Moonlight Mile,” and the aforementioned “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” (bonus points for being jazz). This period demonstrates the peak of both their synchronized musicianship and their power to surprise.

Fun fact: “Sympathy” began life as a slow Dylanesque pilgrimage through its lyric. Can you imagine? The narrative wound up a bit too linear and the theme too united for that to work. Another track, “Jigsaw Puzzle,” adheres more recognizably to the Dylan model; each verse meditates on a different subject, including the band members themselves, and we never really find out what the jigsaw puzzle is, although we can take a guess.

Beggars Banquet, it should be noted, not only sustained but expanded the social-commentary trend with “Street Fighting Man,” an expression of perennial relevance. If you’re looking for a portrait there, look no further than the straight-up personification of ideas: “…my name is called disturbance / I shout and scream / I kill the king / I rail at all his servants.” Mick’s lyrical catalogue was becoming a damn portrait gallery.

One year and one member replacement later (hi there, Taylor) came Let It Bleed, my favorite of their albums. It accomplishes a tremendous amount in nine tracks: each track is unique (hell, Charlie’s drum parts alone are unique to each track!); there’s no filler whatsoever (I appreciate their continued allegiance to covering old blues tunes, in this case Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain”); and enough band mythology has accumulated at this point to lend the recording process some contour and history. Not all of it pleasant: a twenty-one-year-old Merry Clayton *might* have miscarried due to the physical exertion of hollering her head off on the “Gimme Shelter” solo, and Brian Jones departed the band and this plane before the record hit shelves—more on him next week. But you can hardly call it boring.

The opener and closer, respectively “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” are twin giants of the canon. In between, the group bend genres—like the countrified (and I believe original…?) take on “Honky Tonk Women”**—and carry on with the portraits—like “Midnight Rambler,” which presumes to be about the Boston Strangler with nary a reference to strangling (only shooting, stabbing, and raping). Clearly that character tradition had been trending darker since “Sympathy.” Elsewhere, Keith gets his first lead vocal on the tender ballad he wrote for his hard-won muse Anita Pallenberg, “You Got the Silver.” Speaking of surprise, we’re pretty quick to forget their ability to write a heartstring-tugger, but several songs from this period pick up where “As Tears Go By” left off (see also: “Wild Horses” and “Angie”). Then there’s “Monkey Man,” Mick’s ironic retort to the public assumption that the group were strung out (heroin = the monkey on your back), an observation that people who purposefully see you as the bad guy will soon enough turn you into the bad guy. I love this track. It trips and blusters and is still somehow graceful. Everyone is in top form. The four-and that Charlie pounds out when your guard is down; Keith’s slinking harmonized riff; Nicky Hopkins’ deft piano flourishes…and I must admit, at the risk of exposing myself for a basic bitch, there is a seductive thrall about a singer who can screech “I’m a monkey” and make you believe it.

The Let It Bleed track I haven’t yet mentioned is “Live with Me.” I will do so now in tandem with possibly my single favorite Stones track, the opener of 1972’s Exile on Main St., “Rocks Off.” These are two prime examples of the final point I’ll make about this period: for all the lyrical conventions the band supposedly cemented, they buck those conventions regularly. The former is a classic stomp—I had it in mind when I wrote about Charlie—full of all their endearingly obnoxious isms, except it’s an offer of domesticity. It uses some trademark coercive language, but with the end of…commitment. What? Mick singing about settling down? That’s not a thing! Or is it? The latter—rendering “Monkey Man” a self-fulfilling prophecy, as by now a few of them were on the hard stuff—refers to doing so much heroin that you can’t get it up. A Stones song about being unable to perform sexually. Who’d have believed it?

Both tracks are a ton of fun besides. To shout out Nicky Hopkins again, he really makes them, particularly “Rocks Off,” whose piano riff rivals any (and those horns). If nothing else, the track would be brilliant simply for the line “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.” I think it’s a contender for all-time best album opener. But I digress, which I really can’t afford to do at this late hour.

Another, sadder, component of the history they were collectively accruing was the need for closure in regards to the trials they had survived while others had not. Three years after Brian drowned, “Shine a Light” appeared as Exile‘s penultimate track. It was a tribute to him and to his bandmates’ affection for him despite how difficult and distant he could sometimes be. It reduces me to sobs every time; it’s laced with haunting imagery, and if the dam hasn’t burst by the verse about the angels, the line “Thought I heard one sigh for you” finishes me off without fail. Certain vocal effects even mimic submersion in water. I’m reminded of a friend who drowned when we were teenagers, the first peer of mine to die, how his body looked at the wake. I’m reminded of a host of people who aren’t physically dead but who have been estranged from me over time, whom I still wish the best. And I’m reminded of Brian himself, for reasons I’ll delve into next time. Heavy themes.

In the ill-advised hope of summing all this up, let me reiterate that this roughly five-year run had many moments which illuminated the past, present, and future of popular music. It’s a source of far-reaching inspiration, not only in the work itself but in the philosophy behind the work. I hope to be learning from it still when I am very old.

For now, unless your name is Keith Richards, you are susceptible. Wear a mask.

*To those who would call me crazy for thinking any song tops “Satisfaction,” I would reply that context is everything. Rousing fuzz-box anti-capitalist anthem that it is, “Satisfaction” is a very British Invasion song, representative of its era; it made them an entity to look out for, but it gives a sort of in medias res impression, like a snapshot of a group still on the way to becoming themselves. “Flash” feels timeless, like an arrival at the sonic persona that would carry them a long way forward. And can you say it didn’t?

**If you’ve heard “Give Your Best” from the Bee Gees’ Odessa, released the same year, they sound almost identical. It’s that fiddle.

Check out the playlist!

Image: somewhere, sometime in 1970. Mick Taylor on the far right. He didn’t last long, through no fault of his own; I’m guessing merely because one Mick was plenty.

A Birthday Salute to Paul Laurence Dunbar

In which I mark a poet whose work has occupied my mind

Allow me a moment out of my other endeavors to devote to a topic of true import.

A few months or lifetimes ago, as social institutions and governments responded to the pandemic by mandating masks in public, it didn’t take long for a poem called “We Wear the Mask” to surface in the recesses of my mind. Of course it had nothing to do with contagious disease prevention; I knew it came from the pen of a Black writer (whose name escaped me) and dealt with the Black experience in America.

Luckily, I recovered his pertinent details just in time to commemorate his birthday. Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African American poets to achieve widespread prominence—and one of the most prominent still—was born on this date in 1872 to formerly enslaved parents. He grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and went to high school in Dayton, where he was voted class president and class poet. (Class poet! Oh, how little we value wordsmithing anymore!)

Though he struggled to find meaningful work due to entrenched discriminatory systems—he finally became an elevator operator, which I for one find pretty dapper—he dedicated himself to writing on the side and soon had published enough poems in various publications to win some wealthy and well-connected admirers. The subsequent course of his literary career spanned multiple collections of poetry, several short stories, three novels, and the libretto of an operetta, “Dream Lovers” (with the musician Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—what a name). He also took a six-month reading tour of England when he was twenty-five (goals).

Tuberculosis afflicted him on and off for much of his life; he died from additional complications of pneumonia in 1906, aged thirty-three and internationally renowned. While much of his work received critical acclaim, he was known chiefly as the premier Black voice of American poetry, and it’s easy to see why.

“We Wear the Mask” spoke to me in the early throes of a large-scale viral threat. Since the breakout of protests across my home country, it’s only spoken louder. By now it might as well be shouting itself hoarse. And while no life should have to be exceptional to matter, this one merits a spotlight today: for its keen chronicling of the daily condition of a recently freed people; for its unflinching observation of a nation which hadn’t (and still hasn’t) sorted out what that freedom really meant; for its crystalline testimony to the power of poetry.

Thank you for your gift, Mr. Dunbar. May we all absorb a fraction of your sympathy.

Image: from the Library of America

Stones Studies, Part I: Watts happening

In which I pay tribute to the single one of these people that I know what to make of

Consider a band. They build a reputation on noise and pugnacity, in both their music and their behavior. One of them has wildly surpassed the once-improbable fantasy of upward mobility he set for himself. One has, against all odds, survived a frightening array of substance-related traumas. One has allegedly slept with over a thousand women (and it’s not who you think it is).

One is arguably out of place among the rest, and yet makes them unmistakably what they are. That’s the one I want to discuss, the one I feel is under-discussed: the Drummer, Charlie Watts.

As a respected forebear of mine points out, Charlie has never bothered to cultivate a look akin to that of his bandmates, nor to engage in the antics for which they are notorious. He is a bit too…together. He’s got all his ducks in a row, his ducks have been sitting in a row for decades, and he knows it. He’s a clean-cut kid at seventy-nine; you wouldn’t believe he’s seen some of what he’s seen. But he’s been there basically from the start, and he’s seen just about everything it’s possible for a successful musician to see.

What fascinates me about his musicianship is that it appears to run counterintuitive to his image, at least within the context of the group. His driving, propulsive percussion—racing, four-on-the-floor, heavy on downbeat—is largely responsible for their aggressive sound (because, well, collectively they’re nothing if not aggressors). I might even argue that his contributions constitute the single most recognizable feature of their work. On any given track, he knows how to make an entrance. And it’s unexpected, these gritty, tough, boastful patterns coming from such a proper- and meek-looking guy. Compared to the others—all of the others, over time—he is what you would call unassuming.

Here’s the thing. We may take for granted that this is not exactly subtle music. But Charlie’s playing is no more simple than it is subtle; the traits are hardly mutually exclusive. Enter his original love of jazz and its attendant fluidity. He has no qualms switching time signatures mid-song: he takes “Midnight Rambler” (on Let It Bleed) from shuffle to straight time and back over nearly seven minutes, and he can go from laid-back tripping along to insistent and attention-commanding within a bar’s time. Similarly, he is game to mix and mangle genres: that aforementioned switch renders “Rambler” a corrupted blues; and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” (on Sticky Fingers) is one part structured rock & roll to two parts jazz-informed jam, in which he does minimal solo improvising but keeps tabs diligently on Bobby Keys’ saxophone and Mick Taylor’s guitar. During the evolution of the whole, more flexibility and dexterity has been demanded of him, and he’s risen to the occasion.

Not to mention he’s accumulated a host of endearing personal isms for our listening enjoyment. He doesn’t shy away from the toms, always a musical power move. There’s one drum fill he’s immensely fond of, a pounding syncopation on the three-four of the measure—it’s hard to explain verbally without charts and stuff, but it’s all over Let It Bleed and also makes an appearance on “Honky Tonk Women” (though to catch it you have to listen past the cowbell, and that’s no easy feat). Speaking of cowbell, he’s happy to go wild on the bells and whistles, literally. Cymbals, hi-hat, tambourine, bongos…oh, and even if he isn’t the mastermind behind the shakers, he cooperates closely enough with them for some songs to actually rattle your bones.

All this to say that, in a group who went out of their way on principle to be neither classy nor stylish, Charlie Watts remains a paragon of class and style, from his ties to his semi-bored facial expressions as he pounds out those patterns. (Well, most of the time.) We salute you, sir.

Image: 2010 didn’t have much in the way of dapper, but when it did… (radiox.co.uk)

Stones Studies: An Overview

In which I introduce a thermostat-inspired trilogy

Something happens to me as spring turns into summer. It’s been an annual occurrence since 2012. The change in the weather, the ratcheting-up of the heat, impels me to spend some amount of time (brief or not) absorbing everything the “World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band” did between approximately 1968 and 1972. I’ll elaborate on the specific period later—I’ve spent years winnowing it down—but suffice it to say that whenever it gets too hot or humid to keep my attention span from functioning at full capacity, I start thinking about the Rolling Stones.

I’m not sure if it’s coincidental or completely logical that this should happen concurrently with my (and others’) exploration of Black musical traditions and their appropriation or exploitation throughout white culture. Almost no one has benefited from such appropriation quite like these guys have: or, whoever else has, they learned it from the group who have predicated a fifty-plus-year career on it. They got their start playing the Delta blues and, were it not for certain early handlers nudging them in the direction they eventually went in, might have gone on doing just that until they either gained a modicum of status within that niche or simply faded into obscurity. Instead they took their favorite genres, just about all of which originated in the American South—blues, country, jazz, of course the classic first strain of rock & roll—and updated them for a new generation, in fact basically transformed them into a brand, one which mainstream (read: white) audiences found appealing.

The paradox is that if white suburban postwar parents were so distressed about their kids absorbing the music of pioneering Black artists—even though they themselves had done the same in the nostalgically-named Jazz Age—then they ought to have been even more riled up by these unkempt boys whose presence on and offstage was actually less benign than the very artists they were imitating. But at the end of the day, as unacceptable as they supposedly were, the Stones were still acceptable. They could get away with it. That’s the West for you.

Variations of this cultural story had played out before and have played out since. The good news is that these musicians don’t hesitate to give the greater glory to Big Mama Thornton or Muddy Waters or James Brown or any of the vast array of influences they have credited for the feel of their sound. The bad news is that in spite of all this, we somehow ended up with a lyric like “Brown Sugar”* (or “Under My Thumb” or “Stupid Girl” or, again, any of a vast array), which likely would not have been a thing in the present day and age because it would have gotten them cancelled. Apple Music calls it “pushing boundaries.” I don’t think that goes far enough.

But I’ve renewed my ticket on this train of thought (oy with the trains already) for other reasons, too. Maybe the quarantine experience’s distortion of reality draws one too many parallels to the Exile on Main St. sessions at Villa Nellcôte, summer ’71, with its serial distractions and interminable anxiety and threatened, thwarted creativity. Maybe this soundtrack represents a last-ditch effort to romanticize the harrowing uncertainty of being young and on your own in a foreign place and sorting out the next way to get by. Maybe, after what has essentially been a months-long psychological obstacle course, I just need to jump around.

Whatever the case, the next few entries will probe the mystique, the madness, and the miraculously tenable formula that took the Stones from success to SUCCESS. It will make for a rather specialized study, as the stretch I care about is the stuff I really care about, and if I were to try to treat the whole half-century run with the same critical eye I wouldn’t live to see the end. Call it a bit of escapism, courtesy of one of the most alluring band mythologies in the book. Who knows, I might even tell you what their best song is—and it’s not up for debate.

Just go with it. You’ll see.

*I’ll refer you here once more, because this one might top that list. It possibly invented the tradition (followed by songs like “My Sharona”) of a riff absolutely wasted on a lyric.

Image: not totally sure where this one comes from, but I hadn’t seen it before and I took an instant liking to it, and not only due to the presence of Brian Jones

The Manly Men of Motown (& More)

In which I give into temptation (I’m so sorry, please don’t leave)

This week is the week I sit down and hash out something I’ve had on the brain for years now, which involves taking a closer look at two musical factions which were essential to my musical education. I do say factions, because they were forces to be reckoned with at the peak of their powers.

I’m speaking first of Motown Records, which celebrated the sixtieth (6-0!) anniversary of its incorporation back in April. In the wake of the death—literally and figuratively—of the first wave of rock & roll, the label became a fixture of American popular music as well as a prestigious platform for artists and groups of color. The packaging and presentation of these artists and groups was famously pristine, each ensemble armed with impeccable uniforms, clean harmonies, and synchronized dance moves. They set a standard of attractiveness and discipline the likes of which was rarely seen—because, well, their white counterparts seemed to garner recognition without being held to a certain standard. Unsurprisingly, such a standard took a physical and emotional toll on the performers, particularly the women, as Mary Wells or Martha Reeves or literally any of the Supremes will tell you.

Much as I love harping on the (mis)treatment of women, that isn’t my focus here. Instead, I’ll draw attention to two singles that evoke the Motown sound at its most potent and also seem to reinforce a tenet of so-called masculinity: the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

Now, I, like many people, straight-up love these songs; whatever sins they commit are nothing comparable to the “problematic faves” I called out a couple weeks ago. But I’ve long noticed a uniting theme between them—that of grudging vulnerability. Both songs credit Norman Whitfield as a co-writer, so I suppose it checks out that the same songwriters would explore the same themes, especially when producing material for artists on the same label. While these songs add their two cents to the common subject of romantic trouble, and even give a fair amount of free will and control to the women depicted, they pointedly condemn the act of crying as unmanly and shameful.

Observe: for the Temptations it’s

Now I’ve heard a crying man is half a man

With no sense of pride

But if I have to cry to keep you, I don’t mind weeping

If it will keep you by my side

and for Gaye it’s

I know a man ain’t supposed to cry

But these tears I can’t hold inside

Losing you would end my life, you see

‘Cause you mean that much to me

Superficially these lines suggest forward progress: the male narrators are willing to endure the stigma of open emotion because of how dear they hold their jeopardized relationships. The problem is the stigma itself, so stiff that it worked its way into music, so taboo that Black songwriters and artists felt compelled to disclaim and justify emotional displays and relay the message that such displays should occur only in the most dire situations and only as a last resort. What’s more, this message came wrapped in sugary, easily digestible pop coatings. Black listeners must have absorbed it; of course, continuing brutality and violence from a white-supremacist system was all the more reason to internalize it, to be strong in the face of a social structure designed to oppress them. (This is a good example of what is meant by the adage that America loves Black culture and not Black people.) The effects, I need not say, are still being felt. At bottom, these lines signify how much farther we had, and have, to go.

To paint a fuller picture of this uncomfortable trend, though, and to honor the “& more” of my title, let me take you back another twenty-odd years to the heyday of my favorite bandleader, Glenn Miller, and his hit “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

Wait a minute, what’s this white guy got to do with anything? We appear to be veering off-topic, at least on the surface. But if we examine this particular song in the context of the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade—which was one giant vehicle for Miller and his orchestra—it takes on more than its share of complexity. The main thrust of the song is performed by Miller’s longtime vocal collaborators Tex Beneke and the Modernaires, all of whom are white. In the first verse, the Modernaires pose the question, “Can you afford to board the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?” to which Beneke responds, “I’ve got my fare, and just a trifle to spare.”

Two things to note already:

First, the use of call-and-response. This is a staple not only of jazz, which originated in Black communities, but also of the field-song genre, which had its origins in the group mentality of slaves picking cotton or doing other outdoor plantation work. Such experiences also gave rise to the modern spiritual (and I’ve sung way too many of those in all-white choirs).

Second, the train theme. Since the Industrial Revolution of the previous century and the subsequent “shrinking” of the world, mechanical transportation had become etched in the public psyche, cultural consciousness, and musical tradition—specifically in the blues, yet another Black-originated genre. Trains are synonymous with the blues. They analogize the relentless forward motion of life or fate or whatever force has the singer down. Jazz and the blues overlap in many qualities, often including subject matter, as indicated here.

But on to the crux of my point. After the song (lyrical segment, shout chorus, etc.) is completed by Beneke, Miller, and the group, we get a reprise from a new set of performers: Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers, all among the most acclaimed Black entertainers of the era. The Nicholas Brothers especially were known for stunning feats of contortionism in their choreography, which they showcase in the finale of the number. This represented both the idea that Black artists needed to demonstrate almost superhuman talent to be considered worthy of a career and the idea that Black performance was strictly for the edification of white audiences rather than for their own artistic fulfillment (residue from the days of minstrelsy which would find a later incarnation in the “Magical Negro” media trope). Foreshadowing Motown, methinks?

Anyway, for all these reasons, the reprise sets this act apart from the preceding white act. When the Nicholas Brothers echo the Modernaires’ question, Dandridge turns the tables: “I’ve got my fare, but not a nickel to spare.” Beneke has “a trifle” left over, which is no great sum; but Dandridge has nothing at all. Is this a commentary on the general disenfranchisement of African Americans, an assumption that most of them—even one who managed to make a name for herself in Hollywood—would only barely be able to cover their expenses? While we’re at it, we can infer that the disembodied “boy” to whom Beneke earlier says “you can give me a shine” (referring to his shoes) is also Black. Another jazz standard would soon make the rounds among the usual suspects (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, et al.) called “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” That sounds suspiciously like dialectical appropriation. Maybe I’m reading too far into it—maybe it’s my deep dedication to lyrics talking—but the choice of diction strikes me as very telling. The fact that the songwriters would modify the lyric just so for singers of color is their own brand of message, just like the Motown songwriters’. It sheds light on perceptions and expectations of Blackness in the American arts, which have changed less than we probably think they have over time.

Tying it back to the discussion of masculinity, one of the last lines of the song—“she’s gonna cry / until I tell her that I’ll never roam”—was altered, for female-sung covers, to “he’s gonna sigh.” Clearly, right from the get-go, it was God forbid that a man shed even a hypothetical tear.

All these observations may or may not be practical; at the end of the day they are meant simply to raise awareness. I don’t claim to be an expert on the minutiae, but this through-line has only become more obvious to me, and I believe it is worth talking about. Or, at the very least, worth keeping in mind on your next listen.

Image: I can only hope to presume it will be back once Broadway is back…

An Emergence/Emergency Kit

In which I prepare a launch pad

The wave of protests across the United States and beyond in pursuit of just responses to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and a whole horrible timeline of others—protests which, in their own right, have been mostly peaceful and entirely necessary—is different from previous expressions of outrage. Different for all the right reasons, as hitherto-quiet intersections of people voice (and back up, physically or financially) their intolerance of the violence perpetrated and perpetuated by the state.

Accompanying the movement is a heartening push toward encouraging and enabling self-education, particularly the self-education of white America. Social media channels overflow with threads of Black-owned businesses in need of support, Black creators in need of patronage, and Black perspectives in need of amplification. Not to mention long reading lists in which political theory meets Black history—Black history being essential to, and synonymous with, American history.

It remains only for us to genuinely work our way through those lists, as we prepared to do more, so that we might be able to do more.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have not, up to now, done The Most Work to consistently further the cause of true equity and justice despite my love and respect for my Black friends and colleagues. Love and respect don’t hold much weight without Work. But the ideas were heavy. The reading was difficult. News flash: that’s the point. Heavy and difficult don’t begin to describe the lives fraught with exploitation, abuse, and immanent fear of institutions designed more for their persecution than for their protection.

In the present moment, as the potential for real change looms large, as I search for ways to contribute meaningfully from a great geographical distance, I am trying to do The Most Work. Commit to being vocal for the long haul. Make up for lost time, for the lenient attitude I once intuited—and from whom?—that I could afford to adopt. Leniency was never an option.

During this quest to fill the holes in my own education (left by the public school system, might I add), I owe what little platform I have to providing resources for the education of privileged individuals, and to spotlighting the thoughts of a community still resisting the extermination they have resisted for four centuries and counting.

To say there’s a wealth of material out there—on intersectionality, civil rights history, abolition of prisons and police, etc.—would be a gross understatement. It can be hard to know where to begin. So here is a (hopefully) non-overwhelming selection of media which have informed me and inspired continued learning. I hope they can do the same for you.

Texts:

Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein, “What Abolitionists Do” (2017)

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics” (1989)

Angela Davis, Women, Race, & Class (1981)

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1982)

Lewis Nkosi, “An UnAmerican in New York” (2000)

Podcasts:

NPR’s Code Switch, hosted (primarily) by Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby

Call Your Girlfriend, hosted by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow

Waiting on Reparations (brand-new—only one full episode—a great way to get in on the ground floor), hosted by Dope Knife and Linqua Franqa

•

And, as a starting point for access to petitions, funds, and other avenues of action: Black Lives Matter.

•

Change begins with understanding, and understanding begins with us.

Abolish corrupt systems. Fight fascism. Uplift underrepresented and undervalued groups.

And do your part. It’s a bigger part than you realize.

P.S. As it’s Pride Month as well, we would do well to strive to specifically illuminate and validate the Black and Brown LGBTQ+ community.

Image: the Black Power salute, officially dating back to 1966

Every Musical Biopic Ever

In which I map it out

(trailer is a miniature of the following)

ACT I

Establishment of band of hometown/university friends. Shots of small-time gigs at local clubs. Unrecognizable snippets/early drafts of what will evolve into hits.

Idiosyncratic performance methods (e.g., dancing) which lead family/naysayers to ridicule the band’s dream of mainstream success. Band members stand by these peculiarities, knowing they can’t abandon what makes them them.

Protagonist/narrator musician confesses to first girlfriend that he wants more from his life. Dramatic irony: he should be careful what he wishes for…

Influential somebody likes aforementioned idiosyncratic performance methods. Career gathers speed. Collective pact that fame and fortune will never come before friendship.

ACT II

Worldwide acclaim. Fame and fortune starting to come before friendship. Montage of sold-out shows, crazy afterparties, and introduction to hard drugs.

Pivotal songwriting scene: emergence of one of the Big Ones. May or may not also be the movie title.

Crossover from strictly commercial into critical approval. Collective acknowledgment of imminent legendary status. First evident cracks in foundation—flare-up of members’ festering differences and exacerbated character flaws.

Major scandal involving drugs/politics. Future success jeopardized. Dark/blue-lit scenes manifesting protagonist’s doubt of self and system.

Possible courtroom scene featuring quotes and general irreverence which reinforce the mythology.

Protagonist admits that despite his promiscuity he does ultimately want love, as a total rejection of conventional romantic partnership would threaten societal norms. ‘Funny’ bandmate jokes that protagonist’s notorious sexual escapades aren’t quite finished yet. Comic smash cut to bedroom scene, where protagonist confirms bandmate’s prediction.

Career headed for the rocks. Someone dies, or nearly.

ACT III

Tough late-night conversations. Squandered recording sessions. Mutual admission to missing the lighthearted simplicity of the early days.

Shot at redemption. Protagonist apologizes to bandmates/family/love interest(s). Montage of work charged by renewed vigor (and more hits).

Spectacular comeback signified by limited engagement or series of shows. Once-idiosyncratic performance methods now iconic. Authenticity wins out.

Vignette and/or text tying up “where are they now” loose ends. At least one is funny because this isn’t all drama.

Credits supplemented by live stills from respected photographer. Soundtrack streamed thousands of times, sparking a resurgence in the group’s popularity and speculation over whether its (living) members will go on tour.

Optional: scene featuring deep cut which turns it into a belated hit

Optional: Discovery of Sexuality

Lit Review: THE GIRLS

In which I defect to the dark side

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

*CW: violence*

Social distancing has inspired me to make considerable room for pleasure reading. And I find myself branching out, an instinct which was enabled but not precipitated by our isolated conditions. While to some extent I’ve been drawn to beautiful dark twisted tales since reading Lord of the Flies in eighth grade over ten years ago, I’m consciously letting myself be swept along in the psychological-thriller current these days. It’s what led me to Bunny (which I reviewed here) and, most recently, to Emma Cline’s The Girls.

Even so, there’s a pattern to the specific subgenres that hook me. Both these works happen to be horror stories written by women about women. They use their own distinctive methods—for the former, magical realism; for the latter, a blueprint of real-life events—to depict young women’s mutual envy, torment, and influence. And while the former appealed to my literary-minded-twentysomething current self, the latter tapped into the difficulty and darkness which confronted me in my younger and more vulnerable years. I might even go so far as to call it the desperation.

Desperation is an inexorable undercurrent of The Girls, which was published in 2016 and which seems slated for ‘summertime classic.’ Set in the thick of summer 1969 in small-town California, it follows lonely, observant fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd, who is on the cusp of shipping off to boarding school and unsure of her place in the world. At first she is desperate for her parents’ attention: a losing battle, as her father has run off with his assistant and seems much happier in his new life, and her mother is distracted trying every homeopathic trick in the book. Next she is desperate for Peter’s attention, the elder brother of her best friend Connie—even committing petty destruction of property to catch his eye—and she does get something of a reward, though she doesn’t know what to make of their encounter. But this too comes to naught; and finally, having found herself at odds with everyone in her life, she funnels all her desperation into a desire for the attention of a strange black-haired girl she sees in the park one afternoon.

This girl, leading a ragtag band of girls in raiding a dumpster for scraps, is Suzanne.

Suzanne is the single catalytic force driving almost all of Evie’s subsequent actions. She makes an impression on Evie that day at the park, though they do not interact; it is only on the black bus barreling through town, during which ride she spots Evie beside a broken bicycle, that she pauses and makes the conscious decision to pull Evie into the world of the girls. And it isn’t all girls, Evie discovers upon accompanying them back to their ranch—there are boys, playful and dangerous, as well as the man at their center. Russell, the commune’s seemingly eternally patient and loving leader, who constitutes Evie’s first sexual experiences, albeit not necessarily as she’d imagined them. She intuits, correctly, that Russell has relations with all the girls—most consistently the core group she falls into, Donna and Helen and Roos (Roosevelt) and Suzanne—and feels honored to be included, even accepted. The girls are older (most are at least sixteen; Suzanne is nineteen) and appear impossibly sophisticated to Evie, ironic given their community’s philosophy of detachment from the harsh material world. She wants to emulate all of them, but she wants especially to be close to Suzanne.

And Suzanne seems to reciprocate the desire for closeness, or at least demonstrate a special brand of tolerance, taking Evie under her wing and letting her sleep in her bed alongside her. What Suzanne doesn’t realize until the last possible moment, after all their drink- and drug-fueled nights around bonfires is the depth and intensity of Evie’s burgeoning feeling for her, a feeling Evie identifies relatively early on:

I sat on the floor in front of Suzanne, her legs on either side of me, and tried to feel comfortable with the closeness, the sudden, guileless intimacy. My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum. It was an unexplained blessing. Her tangy breath on my neck as she swept my hair to one side. Walking her fingers along my scalp, drawing a straight part. Even the pimples I’d seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible. (112)

Cline’s narration is ruthless, unapologetically probing every nook and cranny of her protagonist’s brain. We can watch her thought process play by play. As Evie separates herself from her family and spends more time at the ranch, she develops increasingly possessive feelings—mostly toward Suzanne—and engages in increasingly exploitative behavior to cement her place and prove her worth in the community. She shakes down a neighbor boy for drug money (though the weed supply she promises is nonexistent) and takes advantage of his adolescent attraction to her; later, she, Donna, and Suzanne actually break into the same neighbor boy’s house, but are caught in the act. Evie’s mother sends her to spend some time with her father and his mistress, delaying her return to the ranch for a considerable time. Then she exploits a good-natured Berkeley student for a ride back to the ranch, at which point she is so wound up about the possibility of having let Suzanne and the others down that she begs her way into participating in the main event.

Along the way we meet Mitch Lewis, a record mogul who seems to have made some sort of arrangement with Russell. Evie ends up losing her virginity to this monstrous man one night while Suzanne looks on; but Suzanne’s very presence changes the game for Evie, who takes every opportunity to kiss Suzanne and explore her desires. This is what makes her able to tolerate Mitch. Evie and Suzanne certainly share a bond by this point, but one wonders if Evie eventually begins to project her desires onto Suzanne and imagine that Suzanne reciprocates them. This distorted reality reaches its apex, along with everything else, on the night Russell decides Mitch has screwed him over.

From there, it’s only a matter of time until the story plays out like the one you know. There is a Sharon Tate figure (in this alternate universe, she has had the child, a young son) and attending unfortunates (the caretaker, his girlfriend Gwen), all of whom pay the price for Mitch’s stubbornness at the hands of Russell’s crew. Cline describes the scene in grisly detail, the methodical dispatching of each victim. When Gwen makes a break for the front gate, Donna catches her and “crawl[s] over her back, stabbing until Gwen ask[s], politely, if she could die already.”

You get the gist.

Ultimately, Evie’s weakness for Suzanne, a soft spot which grows beyond her control, is…well, her weakness. But I won’t spoil the mechanics of that sequence. Suffice it to say that most of the story is middle-aged Evie’s remembering, sometimes recounting aloud, from the house one of her friends has lent her, decades down the line. The cult predictably met its end and has gained a measure of notoriety with history, leaving her ample time to muse on her petulant teenage wants with an adult wisdom. Though the experience hardens her in many ways, she observes the oddly mellowing effect it had on her opinion of her father:

I didn’t hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted [her new boyfriend] Frank. You wanted things, and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong? (278)

We see a young woman rather violently coming into her own in a violent age, gaining awareness of her body and her physicality, trying to use them to enact the changes she wants to see in her world. But, as her adult self astutely and acutely tells us, her actions are bound up with jealousy, possession, powerlessness. Coming of age at the height of American involvement in Vietnam, she understands death in more than the abstract and at least begins to understand the ways in which some people are able to hurt and control others.

Not to mention she is a teenage girl, and teenage girls are renowned for their manipulative skills. Herein lie the most unsettling commonalities. I did not expect the story to hold a mirror up to me quite as it did. Mind you, I’ve never come close to committing murder, and even my day-to-day life as a fourteen-year-old differed from Evie’s in almost every way; but I recognized the ache to belong, recognized the brazen and sometimes irrational behavior of a girl who has never fit in easily and for whom fitting in is only getting harder. I have said and done many regrettable things, especially in that period, in the name of belonging. And I have used those experiences to write stories—some of these my first full-length stories, not too long after the fact—about girls and young women who do some awful things to one another. The Girls is a painful and gorgeous portrait of what can happen when those social patterns find a hospitable environment, and when they go too far.

Image: cover from Random House’s 2017 reprint

Jai Guru Deva Om

In which I mark the last major moment in the ‘Beatles 50’ decade

The past ten years have been one long fiftieth-anniversary party for Beatles fans. Album after album, moment after famous (or infamous) moment, has celebrated its half-centennial.

On Friday, we celebrated the last one, or at least the last of the official releases.

Let It Be was the final studio album from the by-then-formidable business entity known as The Beatles–on their own label, Apple, and after some label-related ventures (e.g. the store) which ended in financial near-disaster. But, as many fans know, it did not correlate with the final material they recorded. Most of its tracks were laid down in January-February 1969, right around the time of the storied rooftop concert; “Across the Universe” was even done the year before, while they were putting the finishing touches on the White Album. But aside from that they were preoccupied with refining, recording, and releasing Abbey Road, which appeared in the UK on 26 September 1969. I’ve always considered that one their formal sign-off and Let It Be more of an afterthought. An epilogue. A coda.

Listening to it now, I would say it almost functions as a mini-White Album in its exploration of a wide range of styles and genres; the members’ distinct musical personalities have become even more entrenched. (Producer George Martin had famously encouraged the group to pare the White Album down to a single album; perhaps this one, in his book, was where they finally got it right.) It’s often described as a ‘back-to-the-roots’ project, and we certainly hear that element: “One After 909” was a very early Lennon-McCartney effort, at least seven years old by then, and “For You Blue” was Harrison’s blues contribution. “Maggie Mae” was also their take on a Liverpudlian folk song. But there’s more to it than that. McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road” feels closer to the Great American Songbook than to British music-hall tradition (see “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” on Abbey Road for that). The title track, for reasons that are probably obvious, reflects discernible gospel influences. “I’ve Got a Feeling” taps into the burgeoning British progressive-rock scene (hi, Led Zeppelin). “Two of Us” is super country. “I Me Mine” is Harrison’s chronicle of the band’s toxic internal environment, the product of years of baleful accumulation. And it’s Lennon, rather than the expected Harrison, who channels tenets of Eastern mysticism on “Across the Universe.”

The album also contains a rare listed credit for a musician besides the four Beatles. Eric Clapton’s lead guitar on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” might have gone unlisted back in the day, but former child prodigy Billy Preston gets a shout-out for the keyboard on “Get Back” (among other tracks). He was twenty-three at the time; he had known the group since age sixteen, when they were Tony Sheridan’s backing group and he was part of Little Richard’s touring band.

(Moment of silence.)

This recording really made him pop off—he was a fixture throughout Harrison’s solo career; he later worked with Clapton, incidentally; and he contributed to the two pretty obscure projects Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. Not bad.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Let It Be one of the albums that has best stood the test of time, because every Beatles album has demonstrated some sort of staying power. But it does contain a couple of their most enduring statements, and the lesser-known ones are great as well. I love me some “Dig a Pony.” Then there are the pieces that didn’t even make the final cut, like the beautifully raw “Don’t Let Me Down” or the silly “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”—which was the B-side to the single “Let It Be,” and which always comforts me for its portrait of a band who still knew how to goof around even though they basically couldn’t stand one another anymore. Let It Be is a testament to hope.

If you need me, I’ll be giving the proverbial record another proverbial spin on the proverbial turntable. Or I might switch to Let It Be…Naked, a solid alternative. Nothing’s gonna change my world.