The Beach Boys - "SMiLE"

In the wake of Pet Sounds, as The Beatles released Revolver and popular music began to move irretrievably beyond its humble origins, Beach Boy Brian Wilson planned a follow-up album that would match and even surpass its already legendary predecessor. The album was to be called SMiLE, and famously, though the band and an incredible assortment of musicians would spend two years in the studio, what was finished of the album would be shelved. (The famous exception was "Good Vibrations," released while the sessions were ongoing and considered one of the greatest songs ever recorded.) Rumors circulated about Wilson's increasingly erratic behavior; nearly all of them, from having his musicians wear fire hats to building a giant sandbox in his dining room to house his grand piano, turned out to be true. Decades passed, and as innumerable rumored at-long-last releases of the album came and went uneventfully, both SMiLE and its creator assumed mythic statures. For years after, the Beach Boys continued to release material, with or without a dazed Wilson on board. Some of it was good, some of it appalling, but with the exception of a handful of intermittently released, retouched tracks, none of it was SMiLE. Throughout, fans rabidly traded session bootlegs and raved about the quality of the music, yet it appeared the vault was nonetheless sealed for good.

After years of reclusive behavior and the deaths of his brothers and bandmates, Dennis and Carl, with the help of friends, Wilson recorded a solo version of SMiLE in 2004. Though the release and accompanying tour were widely acclaimed, there remained no word on the original recordings - neither news of a future release nor an explanation of why they'd never been issued from Wilson, who despite his resurgance remained notoriously uncomfortable with interviews. Finally and suddenly, in March 2011, the band and its label confirmed the release of SMiLE and a wide selection of the studio sessions that went into its production. Appropriately enough, the announced release date was further pushed back three times, but on November 1, the album known for 45 years as the most famous one never released finally hit stores, lovingly remastered and ready for posterity.

To say that the expectations for the album were impossibly high could only be an understatement: SMiLE's tortured history notwithstanding, as early as 1966 Dennis Wilson had said the new recordings "[made] Pet Sounds stink," and he was hardly alone among insiders. Almost inconceivably, even if the youngest Wilson was somewhat exaggerated, SMiLE fails to disappoint. The album, which until recently existed only in fragments and without a tracklist, sounds, if anything, more cohesive than Pet Sounds. To create his music, Brian Wilson sketched out modules he called "feels," fragments he would then interweave into a cohesive whole. The result is exactly what he intended to achieve: the multiple movements of "Good Vibrations" expanded to an entire album, ingeniously peppered with recurring leitmotifs that lend the work a unity even more remarkable given the circumstances. The album's lyrics, penned by Van Dyke Parks (a friend of Wilson's and songwriter in his own right), are fittingly concerned with sweep, grandiosely attempting to encompass the American saga down to the plights of Native Americans and the environment. The undeniable flow of Parks' words generally outweighs their obscurity (and equally undeniable pretension), and results in a number of songs that qualify as great on those grounds alone.

Yet SMiLE is unquestionably about the music, and as Pet Sounds suggested it could, it entirely transcends the confines of rock (even by retrospective standards, much less those of its day), staking a claim on Wilson's behalf for the title of greatest American composer - fully deserving of comparison to Bernstein and Copland, Mingus and Ellington. Beginning with the soaring a capella chorale "Our Prayer," the album promptly gives way to an astounding variety of musical styles. In keeping with the album's Americana fixation, it draws from every corner of American music, and in so doing employs instuments ranging from the simple musical jug to the electro-theremin, tenor ukelele, and Beach Boy favorite bass harmonica. Then of course, there are the harmonies that made the group famous to begin with. As in all other facets of his composition, Wilson here pulled out all the stops on vocal arrangements, matching "Our Prayer" on the driving chorus of "Cabin Essence" (mirroring the Iron Horse being sung about) and the undulating "Good Vibrations." The centerpiece of SMiLE is "Surf's Up," which was first released in 1971 on the album bearing its name. That version is a classic itself, and indeed, has always been recognized as one of the band's greatest accomplishments. It was compliled, though - in parts, newly recorded - without the input of Brian Wilson, and it suffers by comparison. The 1971 arrangements were more than competently overseen by Carl Wilson, yet Brian's mastery as a producer reveals itself in the minor details: for instance, the punchier bass was undoubtedly due to Wilson's insistance that it be played with a pick (a recurring trend in the bonus discs), and it noticably strengthens the arrangement of the first section of the song. More importantly, Brian's 1966 vocal for once trumps his brother's angelic alto, imbuing the song with a raw emotion that years later Brian would reveal he worried about exposing to the public. The song is emblematic of the importance SMiLE's official release: any faithful recording of this material would qualify as great, but only here do we find it as conceived and personally directed by the era's most singularly visionary composer in popular music, and sung by those six golden voices in their prime. It's simply one of the greatest albums ever released.

The SMiLE Sessions box set contains 4+ discs of music from the studios, recorded between 1966 and '67; they offer more enlightenment than enjoyment on their own grounds. What's clear from the outset is the vision and purpose of Brian Wilson, and it's evidence that dispels the notion of an acid freak slowly losing his mind in a studio (though it wasn't for lack of acid). As he drives through take after take, either singing with the other 5 Beach Boys crowded around one mic or directing studio musicans from the booth, he displays an uncanny understanding of how the disparate parts being recorded are going to mesh with one another and an equally impressive ability to pick out the one clarinet in the ensemble who sounds a little flat. Though the extensive liner notes admit the same thing, these 4 discs - which constitute only a small fraction of the music actually recorded during these sessions - show exactly why SMiLE could probably never have been released in the 60s, or really, ever before the last decade. In addition to the strains of satifying both public and label, Wilson and co. would have had to assemble a literal mountain of tape into a cohesive sound collage using nothing but razors and glue. As the digital revolution enabled the delayed compilation of these marvelous recordings, so too did it make it possible to feasibly release enough studio takes to demonstrate exactly how hard it was to translate Brian Wilson's vision to wax. It's often astounding to hear elements of the music in the context of its creation -  especially the vocals, and especially to find that something so moving was most often directly preceded by strategizing or plain joking around. The special edition can nonetheless be easily skipped by all but the most interested: the music itself hardly requires any external proof to enhance its appreciation.

Jelly Roll Morton - "Ganjam"

To the extent that he's remembered at all, jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton's legacy lies in his oft-quoted (and misunderstood) claim to have invented jazz in 1902 and in his immortal 1926/7 recordings with his Red Hot Peppers (including such masterpieces as "Black Bottom Stomp" and "Grandpa's Spells"). Morton spent most of the years after 1927 nearly broke, struggling to scrape by in various setups around the country. His career experienced a minor resurgance in the last 3 years of his life, beginning with an 8-hour series of recorded interviews for the Library of Congress with musicologist Alan Lomax in 1938 and followed by a final spate of recording sessions that would produce some mostly middling bandwork (with some exceptions, marred by musicians that couldn't match their elite Red Hot Pepper counterparts) and some of the finest solo sides of his career. He nonetheless died broke in 1941, remembered by Down Beat (see above) but already forgotten by most of the record-buying populace, who had moved over to swing at least a decade earlier and subsequently dismissed him as an artifact of what was then mostly referred to as Hot Jazz.

To his dying day, however, Morton continued planning for a resurgance, and unbeknowst to them - and to virtually anyone for decades after - he had, in fact, been absorbing the musical changes to which he appeared to so stubbornly be refusing to adapt. In fact, one of his last compositions, the cryptically-titled "Ganjam," not only is arranged for an adapted big band, but even looks past swing, presaging the swirling haze and carefully-measured dissonance that would characterize some of the finest work of Duke Ellington, and in particular, Morton acolyte Charles Mingus, even more than 20 years later. In their excellent biography Jelly's Blues, Howard Reich and William Gaines describe the piece as unfolding "like the first movement of a symphony - complete with primary and secondary themes, a development section, and a recapitulation." To their thinking, had "Ganjam" - with its "astringent chords, bizarre key changes, and exotic scales of a sort that would not be heard in jazz until at least the early 1950s" - been heard in Morton's lifetime, contemporary musicians would have had to acknowledge him as "the most forward-thinking and accomplished composer in jazz."

"Ganjam" wasn't heard then, though, nor at any point until six years after its discovery in the archives of Morton archivist William Russell following his death in 1992, when it received its inaugural performance in May 1998. With the exception of a handful of subsequent live performances, it would not be heard again for 7 years, after which the piece was finally recorded by trumpeter Randy Sandke for his 2005 album Outside In. The album is actually bookended by two versions of "Ganjam," the first a wonderful arrangement by Sandke, and the closer, "Ganjam" as written down by Morton himself. It's an astounding piece for anyone familiar with his work, containing plenty of Morton hallmarks that help with orientation - for instance, the famous Spanish Tinge or The Roll's beloved breaks - but otherwise bearing little resemblance to anything else in his catalog. (One truly wonders what he could have done had his highly preventable death been postponed even a few years.) Sandke's recording of Morton's arrangement can be heard below, available online in its entirety for the first time; interested parties are encouraged to support the artist by picking up the track (or the entire album) here.

9/11/11

Ballpoint pen, markers, pencil,

newspaper, newspaper ash

September 11, 2001 was in many ways a nightmarish initiation into adulthood - a demonstration of mankind's oxymoronic capacity for inhumanity on an inconceivable scale, experienced transcontinentally as though it were occurring in view of my family's front door. A decade later, words remain hard to come by, and in any event inadequate (as, lamentably, do drawings, though the example reproduced above - drawn in my annual state of abstract sadness and anger after a night of little sleep - was certainly heartfelt). I'll certainly never forget that awful day, and can never forgive those hateful cowards who then did and will continue to deliberately and specifically target innocent civilians. More powerfully than I can express in prose, this photo of Robert Peraza embodies what evil leaves in its wake.

In loving memory of the 2977 lives lost and the countless others torn asunder on September 11, 2001

Out of Print Gems: The Genius of Ravi Shankar

Though Ravi Shankar's recording career in the West began in the mid-1950s, it wasn't until after his introduction to George Harrison in the mid-60s that his fame (and the profile of Indian classical music as a whole) transcended the fringes of Western cultural consciousness. Within three years of Harrison's inclusion of the sitar on "Norwegian Wood," Indian instrumentation on pop records had already become something of a successful cliche, used to lend psychedelic ambience to the work of derivative songwriters unable to create something genuinely trippy on their own. An unintended consequence - and an unwelcome one for Harrison, whose obsessed admiration for the music was genuine - was that sitar music began to sell, primarily as an exotic soundtrack for journeys to altered states of consciousness. Record labels proved shameless in their exploitation of their unexpected target audience for music previously considered genuinely unmarketable, and though their classically trained musicians declined to adapt their art to contemporary tastes, their marketing departments showed no such compunction. Predictably, the anonymous liner notes to The Genius of Ravi Shankar describe the music the album contains as "more of [Shankar's] enthralling psychedelicacies," "as fresh and impelling and new as tomorrow night's dreams." Luckily, as the era in which record labels lost the audacity to publicly suggest that their customers "tune in and turn on" faded, the music endured, meaning large discographies, especially for Shankar and his most frequent collaborators. Liner notes aside, The Genius is something of an anomaly in that it's faded from print. Though most of Shankar's albums have been multiply reissued, and though Genius was issued on Columbia - perhaps the king among labels of quality rereleases of its back catalog - it has appeared only once on CD as it was originally issued. The music itself, if perhaps not quite as memorable as some of his astounding duets with Ali Akbar Khan, is nonetheless up to Shankar's formidable technical standard, and the album also features an excellent tabla solo from an uncredited Alla Rakha. It's a worthy addition to his legendary discography, one that deserves to be detached from its historical pigeonhole and enjoyed on its own terms. Interested parties can download it here.

Out of Print Gems: Beethoven

London Records - most widely known for having issued the Rolling Stones' albums through Sticky Fingers - was a pioneering classical label throughout the 1950s and 60s, whose output helped to standardize the 12" 33⅓ RPM format and remains remarkable to this day for its consistently outstanding quality. The 1966 recording of Beethoven's immortal Ninth symphony done by Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt for London fits the template perfectly. The engineering is immaculate, and the music is warm and clear. The performances, featuring the famous soprano Joan Sutherland, are terrific across the board; the vocal soloists in particular are strong, managing to be expressive without succumbing to the vaguely strained frenzy that often characterizes the last movement. The recording was issued once on CD (in 1988) but has since fallen sadly out of print. It's nonetheless a worthy candidate in the eternal search for the best recording of one of history's most famous pieces of music. Interested parties can download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Four Lads - "Dry Bones"

The 1950s and early 60s constituted an era of vocal quartets, and the only thing separating The Four Lads from any other group whose name began with The Four - Freshmen, Tops, what have you - was the ensemble's Canadian citizenship and the hit it scored with "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." In early 1968, an obscure spiritual adaptation the group had recorded for a 1961 Dixieland-inspired album served as a memorable leitmotif in the final episode of the landmark TV series The Prisoner ("Fall Out" - see video below), and was thus ensured unlikely immortality.

The spiritual itself is "Dem Bones," one familiar for its "knee bone's connected to your thigh bone" refrain, but whose biblical content tends to be overlooked. In fact, the opening line, "Ezekiel cried dem dry bones," refers to Ezekiel 37, where the prophet, set down by god in a valley of full of long-dry bones, causes them to reanimate and form a vast army. Given series creator and star Patrick McGoohan's attention to detail, it's safe to assume the choice was intentional, meant to reflect his character's struggle to rouse his fellow prisoners against their repressive captors - and, presumably, McGoohan's own desire to rally support against a world he saw as repressive, soulless, and dangerously overautomated. Of course, the woozy effect of the song's modulating structure also perfectly mirrored his intentionally confusing and open-ended finale to the series. Interestingly, the liner notes to Dixieland Doin's indicate that the album's songs were meant to demonstrate the "happy, humor side of the Four Lads," and indeed, the song's effect is radically different when it's enjoyed outside the context of "Fall Out." This makes it all the more unfortunate that the track is almost impossible to find, having been omitted (possibly for copyright reasons) from the otherwise extensive 3 volume soundtrack to The Prisoner, as well the various Four Lads compilations on the market (for no discernable reason). Used vinyl copies of Dixieland Doin's are said to appear on eBay every few months. Meanwhile, the mp3 of "Dry Bones" is available here.

Chromosomes and Cell Division

The internet (along with textbooks and teachers) demonstrates an appalling unwillingness to explain simply how many chromosomes there are at any given point in a cell - or for that matter, what chromosomes are! (A pair of squiggly lines? Just one?) For all you Google searchers looking for what I couldn't find, here's the answer in plain terms. Chromosomes are what you find illustrated as a squiggly line. A somatic (body) cell has 23 kinds of them, and 2 copies of each - a total of 46. Before mitosis or meiosis, each squiggly line replicates, producing 46 of the structures we generally associate with the term "chromosome": 2 squiggly lines joined in the middle. In mitosis, these 46 replicated chromosomes are broken back down into their unreplicated predecessors and split amongst two cells.

(In explaining meiosis we'll ignore crossing over, which is explained adequately in many other places.) In Meiosis I, the 46 replicated chromosomes are not split as they are in mitosis, but rather divied up. That is to say, instead of each daughter cell having one copy of both homologous chromosomes, the daughter cell has a replicated set of only one. Even after Meiosis I, then, the daughter cells are already haploid, containing only 23 chromosomes, rather than the normal 46. In Meiosis II, the replicated chromosomes in each daughter cell are split (as in Mitosis) and divided amongst 4 final daughter cells, giving a final product of 4 cells with only one copy apiece of the 23 human chromosomes. These are gamete cells, which combine to form a brand new cell with a full, double set of these 23 chromosomes - half from one parent, and half from the other. The entire process is drawn out below. Enjoy.

And to any teachers or (especially) textbook writers out there: spend the extra four minutes/1 page and draw the whole thing out. It makes everything make sense. Fight the conventional idiocy - if not for our sake, then for that of the poor, defamed chromosomes you've made us resent.

Wouldn't You Miss Me at All?

Today marks the 5 year anniversary of the death of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett, the most famous acid casualty of the 60s and one of the guiding lights of psychedelic rock. Where so much of the era's freakout music was characterized by self-indulgent, free associated lyrics designed to sound more profound than they were, Barrett's took precisely the opposite approach: his view of the world was a childlike one, imbuing his songs with a unique balance of carefree euphoria and unease. His melodic sensibilities were also superb, and early Floyd singles like "Arnold Layne" are, ignoring their other virtues, simply great, effortless pieces of songwriting. Of course, he's most widely remembered even by many Floyd fans as the man who disappeared, shaved off all his hair, and lived the rest of his life in his mother's home, obese and cut off from the world he no longer trusted. His subsequent solo albums are fascinating, exhibiting in equal parts the musician he once was and the increasingly fragmented mind he'd become; they're frequently as great as they are troubling. His legacy mostly (and rightfully) leans on his band's towering debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Ultimately, though, his greatest gift to the world, beginning as early as the 60s, may have been providing a much loved face to the then-taboo perils of mental health. The tragic way he spent the majority of his life - as well as songs like "Dark Globe" (below), a shattering chronicle of a fully conscious, reluctant descent into madness - continue to serve as a stark reminder of the patience and care we owe to all those in similar straits.

In Memoriam

1946-2006

Out of Print Gems: "For a Few Dollars More"

Ennio Morricone is one of the all-time greatest film composers, and one of the few to have composed pieces as instantly identifiable as any by John Williams or Bernard Hermann. He managed to score an indirect hit in 1966 when Hugo Montenegro's cover of the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was held out the number one spot on the charts only by Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson"; Morricone's own soundtrack to the album hit as high as #4 on the album charts and hung around for more than a year. Previously, though, Morricone had also been instrumental in the success (and quality) of the film's kickass predecessors, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Ugly's soundtrack had, in fact, been built pretty neatly upon the scores to the other two films, centered around ringing Stratocasters and echoing, nonlingual vocals. Both scores are outstanding yet hard to find. Fistful has been rereleased relatively recently in Europe and can be had at reasonable cost. More, however, is hopelessly hard to find, and so, enormously expensive - particularly given that the album is only 17 minutes long! Despite its brevity, the soundtrack packs an incredible punch: "La resa dei conti" is every bit as stirring as its more famous Ugly cousin "The Ecstasy of Gold," and the haunting pocket watch theme "Carillon" resounds long after the dwarf soundtrack (or the epic film) has finished. "Carillon" can be heard below; the whole soundtrack can be downloaded here.



Joshua Bell in the Subway

In 2007, a social experiment turned phenomenal, Pulitzer Prize-winning article in the Washington Post was conducted with renowned violinist Joshua Bell playing his $3.5 million Stradivarius in a Washington DC subway station during rush hour. The idea was to see how many people would notice that this street performer was a cut above the average and pause in their daily routine to take in some or all of the concert. The article is certainly a success on a thought-provoking level - so many people like to think they would have stopped (or at least noticed), but how many would? - but it succeeds to the degree it does because it's accompanied by a recording of the entire performance. The audio is more than a simple curiosity: it's fascinating to hear Bell's wonderful performance placed in such an abrasive context (fortunately, helped by the choice of L'Enfant Plaza subway station, whose acoustics are surprisingly amenable to the project). With classical music usually confined to cough-between-movements sanctuaries of high society, the street noises here not only imbue the music with an impressive extra dose of vitality, but really show that great music is great music regardless of context - and that the yearning climactic strains of Bach's Chaconne can be, if anything, more uplifting when directly contrasted to the banality of everyday life. The performance makes the concert compelling listening; the context makes it essential. Interested parties can download the album here.

Track Listing
1) Bach: Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 - 5. Chaconne
2) Schubert: Ellens Gesang III, D 839 - "Ave Maria"
3) Ponce: Estrellita
4) Massenet: Méditation from Thaïs
5) Bach: Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006 - 3. Gavotte en Rondeau
6) Bach: Chaconne (Reprise)

Peter Falk, 1927-2011

Though the grind of the traditional continuous streak of summer midterms demands the bulk of my time and attention, I'm compelled to offer a brief appreciation in memory of Peter Falk, who died yesterday at the age of 83. He's best remembered, of course, as Columbo, a the titular character of a show carried exclusively by Falk's inimitable capacity to play an unremarkable-looking man who was nonetheless believable as an infallable detective. He also brought a grandfatherly charm to The Princess Bride that made him the only castmember to compare with the otherworldly lovability of Andre the Giant. The greatest role of his career was a small but indelible turn in Wings of Desire, where he played himself, Peter Falk - an angel who'd surrendered immortality for a chance to live among the mortals he'd only been able to watch from afar, and never regretted it. It was precisely that strength of character, as manifested in real life, that made Peter Falk a hero to me: one who overcame half-blindness (also in his right eye), certainly to great success and acclaim, but more importantly, with the humor and fortitude that endeared each of his characters to so many. It feels most appropriate to end with a baseball story of his: "I remember once in high school the umpire called me out at third base when I was sure I was safe. I got so mad I took out my glass eye, handed it to him and said, 'Try this.' I got such a laugh you wouldn't believe."

In Memoriam

Out of Print Gems: "Chimes at Midnight"

Past posts have dealt with Orson Welles, and they, like most stories about him, have concerned a decline in luck and resources that, unusually for Hollywood, was not precipitated or accompanied by a decline in talent. They've also noted that by a combination of curious disinterest and copyright disputes, many of his films have been released on home video only on VHS - or in some cases, never at all.

Chimes at Midnight (also called Falstaff) falls somewhere in between. The film has been sporadically released by different companies, often at a dearth of expense that (intentionally or not) mirrors the making of the film itself. "Official" DVD copies are available in Spain, and nowhere else. Unsurprisingly, the prints of Chimes that do circulate are often pretty shoddy, further complicating the already muddy original audio, recorded four and a half decades ago on substandard equipment. Yet the film is truly outstanding. Welles' enormous familiarity with Shakespeare allowed him to condense five Shakespeare plays - Henry IV Pts. 1 & 2, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor - into a perfectly coherent narrative with minimal added dialogue. His enormous corpus make him an even better Falstaff than he was an Othello; his naturally resonant laugh rings true to the larger-than-life lovability of the character, and his formidable acting chops really bring out a usually underemphasized sadness that makes his hard breaks all the more touching. Direction is carried out with the flair you can almost come to take for granted in his work: deep focus as characters listen in on what would otherwise have been soliloquies; seemingly cavernous palatial sets that given the budget, in reality, couldn't have been; and a similarly miraculously choreographed battle scene, making the Battle of Shrewsbury out of a handful of extras and expertly contrasting the hilarious sight of a walrus-sized man crammed into a suit of armor with shots that suggest how awful the battle must really have been. Greed and inertia may see to it that Chimes at Midnight never sees the release it deserves, but thanks to the glory of the internet, at least can never be lost. Interested parties can download the film here.

[EDIT 8/30/2016: Against nearly impossible odds, the best case scenario has played out, and the Criterion Collection has been granted access to the best of all existing elements and allowed to remaster the film to their peerless standard. Chimes at Midnight was at long last released today for the first time on American home video (and the download link consequently disabled). It's a landmark day for film.]

Gnarls Barkley - "Live from the Astoria 2"

Gnarls Barkley played a show at London's Astoria 2 on June 8, 2008 that was filmed, purportedly for release on DVD. As with many other events in the lifespan of the casual collaboration between Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse, the DVD news quietly receded from circulation as the two artists turned their attention to different things. The show did, however, get aired as part of a series of live concerts hosted by internet has-been corporation MSN, and subsequently made the rounds on Youtube. Over the course of the show Gnarls runs through highlights from both studio albums. St. Elsewhere's "Just a Thought" receives an unbelievably intense rendition (see first video, below), while "Transformer" is performed in the wonderful acoustic version first widely heard in 2006 on Live from Abbey Road. Though the concert was sparing in terms of the usual, eclectic selection of covers, the group does run through an excellent performance of Radiohead's "Reckoner" (off of the then-recent album In Rainbows; second video below), which went on to be one of the Gnarls's most popular videos on Youtube other than its hit. An mp3 version of the set - excellent other than a few lamentably (and poorly) bleeped obsceneties from the original online broadcast - is available here.

VHS of the Month: "San Francisco 49ers 1989 Video Yearbook"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

The 1989 San Francisco 49ers were perhaps the finest team ever assembled. It's rightfully remembered as an offensive juggernaut, having featured the game's smartest, most clutch quarterback and greatest ever wide receiver, both in their prime; a runningback/fullback duo that combined for over 2400 yards and 8 TDs; and a backup quarterback who threw for 1000 yards and 8 TDs. People forget, though, that they also featured a dominant defense, featuring stars Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, Keena Turner, and Bill Romanowski, and ranking 3rd overall in the NFL that year. It's true that the team's explosive offense helped it score an astonishing 126 points in 3 playoff games, but it was the defense alone that yielded 100 fewer points - that's 26 in total - to opponents in those same contests. And of course, the year culminated in an unprecedented laugher of a Super Bowl, a 55-10 thrashing of John Elway's hopelessly outmatched Denver Broncos. The 1989 Video Yearbook presents a game-by-game recap of the 14-2 regular season, and a more in-depth look back at the 3 playoff games (including the Super Bowl XXIV highlights advertised on the cover). Featuring the same glorious melodrama that has endeared NFL Films to sports fans for generations, the Yearbook has nonetheless fallen out of print, like all of the original team videos celebrating the Team of the 80s. However, it's an excellent testament to a squad whose unbelievable prowess was poetry in motion and is ideal to track down for any hardcore football fan, whether a member of the success-starved 49er Faithful or not.

My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (1) OK Computer - Radiohead

[This is the last in a series of ten posts.]

Radiohead's towering landmark OK Computer is probably chosen as the best album of its decade more frequently than any other album from any other decade. Unsurprisingly, it has been analyzed from all conceivable angles, its every attribute dissected and submitted for critical approval. Most of its critics sing the same praises, and most of these are merited. In the scope of the band's career, for instance, OK Computer does mark a quantum leap. For all its shining moments on The Bends, it was here that Radiohead transcended its Jeff Buckley-esque wails and grunge-derived guitar roars and emerged sounding like no other band in the world. Inevitably, though, reviewers of OK Computer feel obliged to discuss the album's significance as a product of the 1990s: they portray the decade as one of greater uncertainty than any other since the 1960s, and go on to praise frontman Thom Yorke's prescience and name "Fitter Happier" the most "important" track on the album. In doing so, they forget that every era in human history was seen as a time of transition by those living through it (see: Dylan's times a-changin' in 1964; Dickens' best of times and worst of times in 1859; or Shakepeare's winter of discontent in 1591). More importantly, though, amidst all the grandiose stabs at significance, they also tend to completely overlook the album itself. OK Computer is not the album of the 90s because it captured some angsty zeitgeist, preserving the feel of war in Kosovo - or of life after the death of Cobain or the birth of the internet - for posterity. Rather, its success lies in Radiohead's newly expanded sound, accompanied by tighter songwriting that belied the group's burgeoning confidence. While songs like "Airbag" still featured the powerful angularity in Jonny Greenwood's guitars that had made "Creep" a worldwide hit, the majority of OK Computer's tracks explored different textures. On "The Tourist," Greenwood's guitar is subdued to a languid wash, while the superlative "No Surprises" lends it Beach Boy reverb, echoing cleanly off into eternity; significantly, "Climbing Up the Walls" features Greenwood's emergence as an arranger, showcasing the measured dissonance that would later define such pieces as "How to Disappear Completely." The high standard set by Greenwood and human drum machine Phil Selway - the precision on "Airbag" is truly impeccable - is matched step-for-step by Thom Yorke. His lyrics are sharp and poignant, yet (generally) free of their standard, occasional descent into melodrama. His vocals, meanwhile, are perhaps his strongest ever, effortlessly ranging from his snarling growl ("Electioneering") to his trademark, soaring falsetto (the end of "Karma Police") - sometimes, as on the epic "Paranoid Android," in the course of a single song! The story of the album is, if anything, more dramatic knowing that within three years, Radiohead would scrap most identifyable aspects of its sound and recreate itself for the album's equally acclaimed follow-up, Kid A. On its own, though, OK Computer stands as an album of very nearly incomparable quality - made of and for the 1990s, but extending forever beyond them, note-perfect.

Wayman Tisdale - "The Fonk Record"

Following an outstanding career at the University of Oklahoma - one which saw his number retired and the national award for best freshman named after him - and a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, Wayman Tisdale was taken with the second pick in the 1985 NBA Draft. Though his professional career was marked by a number of excellent seasons, Tisdale remained as widely known for his delightful personality and surprising virtuosity on the bass guitar as his performance on-court, and he actually retired early in 1997 to focus on his music. Unfortunately for some of the fans the Tiz made in the NBA, he chose to make his career in smooth jazz. Though his music was always well-played and immaculately produced, it nonetheless was prone to much of the generic feel endemic to the genre, and Tisdale may thus have never enjoyed the full commercial success his extramusical celebrity should have afforded him. In 2007, to the dismay of basketball fans nationwide, Tisdale was diagnosed with cancer that would remain an issue for the rest of his life and lead to the partial amputation of his right leg the following year. He carried on through his illness with characteristic grace, and even founded the Wayman Tisdale Foundation to raise funds for fellow amputees without enough money for prosthetic limbs. However, he died suddenly in May 2009, an abrupt end that not only robbed the world of an inspiring, gentle spirit, but even worse, seemingly took him without a chance to say goodbye. The October 2010 release of The Fonk Record therefore came as an enormous surprise. For one thing, it contained recordings made gradually over the course of 12 years, without any outside attention. It was also naturally strange to hear Tisdale more than a year after his death, not only on the bass, but even singing. Most disorienting of all, though, was that the album's name turned out to accurately describe its contents: it really is nothing less than an honest-to-god funk album, and one that could have been pulled out of a Bootsy Collins time capsule, at that.

Even without the added novelty of Wayman Tisdale releasing an album like The Fonk Record, it would have been odd to find anyone recording this kind of music in 2010. After all, by most any account, though it lived on in derivative forms, the funk proper had died by the early 80s: P-Funk ran out of gas, James Brown was reduced to a used carbon copy of himself, and Sly Stone literally disappeared into a tear in the fabric of time and space. Yet upon investigation, Tisdale's move makes perfect sense. Funk had been born in the context of a sad state of affairs for black Americans in the late 60s and early 70s, when the choice for socially concerned black popular musicians was either to produce a soul-searching affair like What's Going On or simply to forge ahead and (admittedly, anachronistically) Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. In the face of life-threatening - and, according to subsequent interviews with his widow, painfully debilitating - illness, Tiz, like so many of his bass forebears, turned to the fountain of funk as a source of spiritual comfort. It's as much a testament to his strength of character as his musicianship that The Fonk Record genuinely manages to be as good as the story behind it would make his fans hope. Perhaps Tisdale's wisest decision was to remain true to the genre and ensure that the music never feels overly sentimental. So though there are some moments rendered more meaningful by circumstance - when Tiz sings "there ain't never gonna be another jam like this" on his George Clinton duet "This Fonk Is 4U," or when his bandmates transform the breakup ballad "Been Here Before" into a goodbye to Wayman - the album remains, first and by far foremost, an excuse to simply have a great fucking time. It's the most appropriate goodbye conceivable, and convincing proof that he was as gifted a musician as he was a basketball player or a human being.

Out of Print Gems: Smetana, Stauss, & Stravinsky

Since the advent of recorded music, classical music has remained the hardest type to collect: after all, a popular composer is likely to have his pieces recorded by every label in the business, and the process of tracking down the definitive recording of any composition is usually as difficult as it is subjective. A further consequence of the continual rerecording and reissuing of classical music is that inevitably, as record labels change formats, switch owners, or cease to exist, some recordings fall out of print - even those once considered outstanding, or even authoritative.

Two such works are offered here. The first collection consists of the only recordings led by the famous conductor Jascha Horenstein to have fallen out of print, originally issued in 1954 on the Angel label, #35101. The A-side contains Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms; the B-side, Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings. It has been unavailable commercially since its original release. The second is from a 1965 German release, Telefunken 30237, a 10" record featuring selections from Má vlast by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, conducted by Joseph Keilberth. These recordings have been sparesely reissued on CD in Europe and Japan but are not available in the United States; these files in particular, like the Horenstein recordings, were ripped from LP. The recordings are uniformly excellent, particularly Horenstein's Psalm CL and Metamorphosen and Keilberth's Vltava. They can be downloaded here.

Eleh Ezkerah

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day - very nearly exactly the 66th anniversary of the final liberation of Germany's concentration camps (the last "big one," Bergen-Belsen, was liberated on April 15, 1945). It's an appropriate moment to remember that there are two components to the "Never Forget" motto so inextricably associated with the Holocaust. The first is to defend the victims themselves: to fight to remember each extinguished soul as an identity, rather than a statistic. There are, of course, any number of ways to connect. Projects like Francesco Lotoro's miraculous KZ Musik series demonstrate how music allowed the spirits of imprisoned composers to escape the darkness of the camps. Documentaries like Alain Resnais' Night and Fog make the overwhelming inhumanity of the Holocaust less abstract, while dramatizations like Steven Spielberg's immortal Schindler's List can highlight the essence of basic human decency even in the face of the unspeakable. (I humbly encourage you to check out a Holocaust memorial journal issue I worked on last year, available here; free hard copies are available by mail on request.)

The second critical component of "Never Forget" concerns the perpetrators, rather than the victims. Appropriately, this evening President Obama announced the death of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden - a man, much like Adolf Hitler, driven by a virulently hateful ideology, willing and even eager to extinguish the lives of however many innocents stood in the way of the realization of his plans for the world. History tells us with unflinching regularity that mankind is wont to produce men of unrepentant evil. Just as we are bound to protect their would-be victims and remember the fallen, so too are we required to do all in our power to wrest from them the capacity to harm, from rapists to the perpetrators of genocide in Sudan. For so long as evil persists, none of us are truly free.

לזכר ששת המליון

May their memories never be forgotten.

My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (2) Urban Hymns - The Verve

[This is the ninth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Having already dissolved once following the 1995 release of the tortured masterpiece A Northern Soul (after years of record-shattering ecstasy consumption and arguments between guitar wizard Nick McCabe and electric frontman Richard Ashcroft), the Verve and added guitarist Simon Tong decided to try again in 1997. Unlikelier still than the reformation was the immediate, worldwide success the band was to become, riding on the coattails of its signature song, "Bitter Sweet Symphony." Famously, the band would ultimately derive little benefit from the track, as courts ruled that the sample around which it had been built - not the lead violin riff, but the orchestral backing part, taken from a symphonic recording of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" - had been used more than the publishers' permission had allowed for. Yet the song and the album on which it appeared would finally herald the arrival of the group which the Verve's back catalog had always suggested they could be. Musically, Urban Hymns was in every sense a progression from their previous work: the song structures were tighter, the instrumental work (particularly McCabe's guitar and Peter Salisbury's thunderous drumming) more muscular, and the ballad-with-strings formula finally perfected, not only on "Bitter Sweet Symphony," but also on a pair of equally stunning singles, "The Drugs Don't Work" and "Lucky Man." However, the most momentous change came in Ashcroft, as the sweeping lyrical tendencies he'd nurtured since the birth of the band appeared fully matured and in miraculous harmony with the shaman-like charisma he was known to exhibit on stage. So where his whispered assurances ("You've got to tie yourself to the mast, my friend/And the storm will end") and frenzied barks ("This is a big fuck you") would elsewhere seem incongruous, they here feel of a piece and actually reinforce one another. The result is an album that plays like a soundtrack to life itself, encompassing its lows and its highs; its pain and its beauty; its merciless gut-punches and its ethereal moments of redemption. Following another acrimonious breakup Ashcroft would pursue a solo career sadly marked primarily by a descent from prophecy to platitudes, and indeed, no music from members of the Verve would subsequently come near recapturing the magic (2007's solid reunion album Forth notwithstanding). However, Urban Hymns will forever demonstrate the group operating at the peak of its ambition and inspiration – with truly remarkable results.

VHS of the Month: "The Magnificent Ambersons"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Following Citizen Kane - a movie whose lavish acclaim has mostly been applied in retrospect, and whose controversy and unprofitability in 1941 destroyed its creator's career - Orson Welles directed 10 films whose production and distribution reflected Hollywood's distrust in him. The saddest casualty of this neglect was Kane's immediate successor, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's familial saga The Magnificent Ambersons. As originally made, the film was nearly 2½ hours long; however, after a few unenthusiastic screenings it was slashed by studio executives at RKO while Welles was directing a wartime documentary in South America. The resulting film runs a full hour shorter and features a happier ending to the story than Welles had intended. To make matters worse, the excised footage was burned by RKO (possibly to prevent Welles from tampering), thus dashing any chance of future reconstruction.

Yet the film that remains, like so many of the under-financed projects Welles would undertake in his later career, is nonetheless a remarkable piece of work. The deep focus and dramatic camera technique which had been so shocking in Kane were, if anything, even more fluid and confident in Ambersons, and Welles' inimitable touch leaves its mark on every scene (even the end credits are memorable!). The film presents Tarkington's story - which chronicles the decline and collapse of a Southern family after years of unchallenged prominence in its community - in suitably sweeping fashion, and contrasts the decline of the Ambersons with the rise of the automobile in a particularly moving fashion. Ambersons also features great performances from Kane/Mercury Theater holdovers Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, the latter of whom in particular is every bit as impressive as the spinster Fanny as she was in her extremely brief role as Charlie Kane's mother. Like far too much of Welles' filmography, factors including estate disputes have kept Ambersons from ever having been released on DVD; in fact, the most recent VHS was a Turner Classic Movies release in 1996 that was essentially the version they'd show on TV (including the TCM intro segment). Even chopped up and hard-to-find, though, Ambersons is still simply one of the best movies made by perhaps the greatest of all American directors.

[UPDATE: Spurred exclusively by my recent mention of the film, Warner Brothers has announced a pending DVD release of Ambersons - unadorned, but remastered and on DVD nonetheless. Coincidentally, the release also coincides with the BluRay release of Citizen Kane and the 70th anniversary of that landmark.  -5/20/11]

Out of Print Gems: Pink Floyd - "Embryo"

A previous post discussed the 8-track exclusive release of a Pink Floyd song from the band's 1977 album Animals. In 1983, as Columbia was releasing The Final Cut (Pink Floyd's last album as a 4-membered group), the band's former label, Capitol Records, put out a compilation called Works to try to cash in on the buzz. Predictably, the album was nothing more than a cash-in composed of seemingly random tracks culled from the pre-Wish You Were Here material that Capitol still owned the rights to. The only major changes made to the first 9 tracks on the 10 song album was the addition of Dark Side sound effects to the beginning of "One of These Days" and a vague remix of "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" made by flattening the quadraphonic mix of those two songs down to stereo. As contemporary advertising demonstrates (see above), Capitol seemed to understand beforehand that Works wouldn't offer any reason to Pink Floyd fans to waste their money, so they included "Embryo," a track recorded in 1968 that until then had only been available on a sampler put out by Capitol subsidiary Harvest Records known as Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air.

Why the track was never released otherwise is a mystery. Though it conflicts with the "solo songs" aesthetic of the studio album that composed half of 1969's Ummagumma, it's as good as or better than any of those tracks; it also would have been perfectly at home on the excellent rarities compilation Capitol had already released, Relics. Whatever the case, the song itself is a much-truncated version of one of the band's setlist staples for much of the early 70s. It's typical of Roger Waters' tracks of the period: quiet, accompanied by gongs and swirling organs, and featuring an understated vocal (by David Gilmour) with some squeaky, manipulated vocal sounds thrown in for good measure. You can hear the song below or download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Flowerpot Men - "Beat City"

The soundtrack to John Hughes' classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off is nearly as iconic as the film itself: Yello's "Oh Yeah" as leitmotif; Ferris' ebullient "performances" of "Danke Schoen" and "Twist and Shout" during a massive parade through downtown Chicago; and Dream Academy's hypnotic instrumental cover of the Smith's "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" helping Cameron mind meld with a pointillated child in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte are but a few of the greatest musical moments in the movie. What's ironic is that perhaps the greatest motion picture soundtrack of the 1980s was never released, due to Hughes' concern that the eclectic mix of music offered in the movie wouldn't appeal to anyone as an album.

Prior to the advent of the internet, this meant that many of the songs were nearly impossible to find in any format. The only exception Hughes made was a limited release - 100,000 copies - of a 7" single featuring two songs from the movie that he owned the rights to, a "labor of love" that cost $30 apiece to produce. The A-side, "Beat City," is one of the more memorable songs of the movie, synced up to the high-octane escape in the 1961 Ferarri GT California. It pefectly captures the undescribable elation that comes with freedom from responsibilities, and it's easy to see why Hughes wanted it to be purchasable somewhere. The only other release of the song by the short-lived outfit Flowerpot Men came on a live EP called the Janice Long Session - it's unclear whether this is the same version heard in the movie, or whether the circulating track came from an otherwise forgotten studio session. The "soundtrack" version can be heard below and interested parties can download it here.

The Universal Sigh

In discussing the forthcoming special "newspaper" edition of the recent Radiohead album King of Limbs, longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood mentioned that, "[w]hat I like about newspaper is its ephemeral nature, I like the way the paper goes yellow and brittle when you leave it out in the sunlight. I wanted to do this thing like a really annoying Sunday paper, you know when you buy the paper and all this crap falls out? I wanted to do something really annoying with all these crappy bits of floppy, glossy paper." Evidently, the aesthetic was inspired by a sense of the band's music "not coming to a halt - it was almost like this was kind of a report on its current status."

In keeping with the motif, Radiohead produced a limited run of "newspapers" distributed free around the world to promote the physical release of the new album last Tuesday. Because of the limited number of locations at which the paper was distributed, it soon leaked online through a variety of out-of-the-way sources. Overall, it contains what fans would expect: stray lyrics and song titles, rambling passages echoing Thom Yorke's everpresent "Fitter Happier" outlook on life, and some cool artwork (including one woodcut-like forest scene that resembles a better-rendered cousin of the tracing paper cover to "These Are My Twisted Words"). It also contains short stories by British authors Jay Griffiths and Robert Macfarlane, and interestingly, by Donwood, who previously had usually kept his contributions strictly visual. Interested parties can download the PDF here.

VHS of the Month: "Zelig"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Woody Allen has always treated his work strangely by Hollywood standards: he usually refuses to talk about old films, and though his movies are often cited for their brilliant use of music, he generally hasn't sanctioned the release of soundtracks. Unsurprisingly, probably on his insistence, his classic movies have been sparsely issued on DVD. Most were simultaneously released in 3 volumes of box sets called "The Woody Allen Collection," each movie including a short booklet, a theatrical trailer, and French and Spanish subtitles. The transfer and packaging on the discs was uniformly fine, and it's probably a testament to the lavish treatment movies are accustomed to that his DVDs seem like a raw deal. That said, Annie Hall probably holds the unfortunate distinction of having the least supplemented DVD of any film to ever win Best Picture. (It's a shame, because even among Best Pictures it's a film of unusual quality.) Yet the Woody Allen movie that could most benefit from a lavish modern release has to be Zelig, an undeservedly overlooked masterwork in Allen's filmography.

The film, released in 1983, is a mockumentary centered around the phenomenon of Leonard Zelig, a man whose chameleon-like ability to physically and socially transform himself to blend in with any crowd in which he finds himself makes him an unlikely celebrity of the Roaring Twenties. In addition to being an extremely touching and funny movie, Zelig was a visual miracle, seamlessly integrating Zelig into archival photographic and video footage a decade before computer imagery made such a feat commonplace. Exploration of the technical achievements of a film like this is the very sort of thing special edition DVDs were designed for. Whether or not such a release will ever take place is hard to say. Until then, used VHS editions are not only absurdly cheap, but in many ways, even a more appropriate way to enjoy one of the last and greatest accomplishments to have been literally created on film.

My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (3) The Soft Bulletin - The Flaming Lips

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The early story of the Flaming Lips was one of minimal creative success. Following the arrival of the brilliant drummer/guitarist Steven Drozd, though the band experienced a minor hit in 1993 with the goofy "She Don't Use Jelly," it nonetheless felt trapped by the idiosyncratic version of typical mid-90s alt-rock that defined its sound. Looking to branch out artistically, frontman Wayne Coyne conducted a number of "parking lot experiments," where he rounded up large crowds and played pieces of music – perfectly synchronized or otherwise – out of multiple boomboxes surrounding the fans. Along with the ascendancy of Drozd following the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones, these experiments led to 1996's fascinating Zaireeka, a 4-CD album that required the use of 4 stereos, ensuring that no two listens could be quite the same. The music on Zaireeka signified as dramatic an evolution in the band's identity as did the album's elaborate physical conceit. Lush arrangements, thunderous, intricate drum patterns, and experimentation with intense frequencies of sound resulted in intense, detailed soundscapes that lent the lyrics a weight that the band could never have achieved before. Coyne, too, was maturing rapidly: his songs came to deal more with serious explorations of life, love, and death (even as they retained their bizarrely quirky use of imagery and storytelling), and his singing fully embraced the strained upper-register style that would become his calling card and give his songs their emotional foundation. These changes would come together on 1999's The Soft Bulletin, with an execution and unity of vision that even the impressive strides forward on Zaireeka could never have anticipated. Opening with the sweeping Zaireeka­-era track "Race for the Prize" – which thankfully proved impossible to satisfactorily mix to four CDs – The Soft Bulletin flows effortlessly from track to track with songs of unyieldingly high quality. The eternal comparisons to Pet Sounds are fully warranted: both are symphonic, in sound and scale; both use everyday occurrences as launching points for emotional exploration (sailing and spider bites, for instance, respectively); and both have their soul centered squarely in the middle of the album, with the stunning "Waiting for a Superman" serving as The Soft Bulletin’s "God Only Knows." Yet the album has a sublime quality all its own, as beautiful as it ponders mortality on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" as when it basks in the unfettered glow of love on "What Is the Light?" and "Buggin'." With their superb 2002 follow-up, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Flaming Lips would complete one of the greatest back-to-back album sequences in the history of popular music. In the meantime, The Soft Bulletin marked the summation of a decade of remarkable growth and a note-perfect way to ring out the departing millennium.

[NOTE: Despite its relatively recent genesis, The Soft Bulletin has already seen many different releases on CD and LP, with varying tracklistings and runtimes. The CD included in the 5.1 Surround Sound release is by far the best and should be considered definitive.]

Voodoo Macbeth

In 1936, 20-year-old Orson Welles staged a production of Macbeth in Harlem starring an all-black cast, composed largely of non-professional actors. Carried out under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (one of the many bureaus of the WPA established by FDR to jumpstart the American economy during the Great Depression), the play kept the basic plot and dialogue of the original intact, but transposed the action to a fictitious Caribbean island modeled on Haiti and changed the witches to voodoo practitioners. The resulting "Voodoo Macbeth" was something of a historical milestone: against all odds, it was an enormous commercial success, and it marked one of the first instances in American theater of a serious production starring black actors that was respected and sustained by white audiences. The play would go on tour, and the publicity would be a major factor in Welles' rise to fame. (He would go on to direct and star in a more traditional - if typically idiosyncratic - film adaptation in 1948.)

Unfortunately, not much of Voodoo Macbeth remains. The bulk of the production is detailed only in Welles' annotated promptbook, which gives an outline of the structure of the play; contemporary reviews also preserve something of the character of the show. Luckily, the last 4 minutes of the play were preserved in a WPA film called We Work Again, which documented the bureau's efforts to provide black Americans with work during the 30s. It's a priceless glimpse into a small but sadly overlooked event in the history of American entertainment. You can see those four minutes below, or download We Work Again for free courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Brian Wilson - "Our Prayer (Freeform Reform)"

A week ago, news broke that Capitol/EMI is going to officially release SMiLE, the legendary lost Beach Boys albums that Brian Wilson planned as his follow-up to the immortal Pet Sounds but proved unable to complete in 1967. The project had seen innumerable promises of and attempts at ressurection over the years, but outside of bootlegs, the album has never seen the light of day. The release is set for a still-to-be-determined date in 2011, and as is standard industry practice nowadays, it will be available in a wide assortment of normal and deluxe editions.

Assuming the plan comes to fruition, it will provide an even happier ending to the strange story that, in fact, already had one. Though bits and pieces of SMiLE had been released on Beach Boys albums throughout the rest of the 60s and into the 70s, in 2004 Wilson decided to revisit and newly record the album. This time, the project was a success, and SMiLE was rapturously received upon its release, marking the end of a remarkable comeback for Wilson himself after decades of instability in every sense of the term.

An odd footnote to the 2004 album was the release of the ethereal opener, "Our Prayer," in the form of an electro remix single by London DJ Freeform Five. Pressed on one-sided, clear 10" vinyl, released only in Europe, and limited to 1000 copies, it's unclear who the release was intended for - though it sounds nothing like anything else in the extended Beach Boys catalog, it bears Wilson's name on the label, rather than the DJ's. That said, according to Freeform's Soundcloud account it was "approved by Mr. Wilson himself," and evidently, also by his label, Nonesuch Records. The song gives you what you would expect from a solid electro remix, and though it omits the composition's sublime final hum, it nonetheless does justice to the source material. It's never seen a digital release, but interested parties can check it out below or download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Pink Floyd Holy Grail

Simultaneously one of the most endearing and irritating aspects of the resurgently popular LP format is that (at least) once during the playing of each album, you have to get up and flip the record over to continue. The most noteworthy aspect of the persistently unpopular, defunct 8-track format is that it plays in a continuous loop until stopped. Countless bands designed their albums with the 2-sided format in mind: an easy example is Led Zeppelin IV, on which each side begins with 2 rockers, is followed by a ballad, and ends with a 7-minute+ song of absurdly epic proportions. Even at the height of the 8-track, though - and it's easy to forget that there was a time when the ridiculous tapes were enormously popular, especially in cars - few bands, popular or otherwise, tailored their albums to the format.

The most notable exception by far was Pink Floyd, who by the late 70s were riding high in the wake of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, and were, with the possible exceptions of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, the most popular band in the world. In 1977, the Floyd released Animals, the second in a trilogy of albums which toyed with the idea of cyclical music. 1975's Wish You Were Here was bookended with two halves of an extended song, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," and 1979's The Wall ended with the question fragment "Isn't this where..." and began with its completion, "...we came in?" Similarly, Animals was bookended by two short acoustic song fragments, "Pigs on the Wing," parts 1 and 2. Given the nature of the 8-track format, the band decided to record a guitar solo that would connect the 2 halves of the song and explicitly bring the album back full circle. Floyd associate Snowy White was assigned the task after David Gilmour's take was accidentally erased, and the resulting "complete" version of "Pigs on the Wing" was included exclusively on British and American pressings of the 8-track tape when the album was released.

As time passed and the 8-track went extinct, though the Floyd remained as popular as ever well on through the beginning of the CD era, this solo slipped out of the discography as the catalog was standardized to reflect the more familiar tracklisting associated with the original LP. As time went by, Snowy White's solo took on mythic stature among the band's fanbase, particularly as reissues continued and it became the only commercially unavailable piece of music the band had ever officially released.

Spurred by a love of outmoded electronic crap and the challenge of tracking down a cartridge that included the solo (and there were 2 unsuccessful attempts), over my last year in college, I procured an 8-track deck and the original British-release tape. You can listen to the long-lost track in the video below, and until such time as the song sees an official re-release, an mp3 ripped from the tape can be downloaded here.

A Polychrome Glimpse Through Time

Over the course of the past week, the first (and probably only) color photos have hit the internet of San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. They were taken by Frederic Eugene Ives, an early proponent of color and 3D photography and an inventor whose halftone process is still used for newspaper and magazine photographs today. The images were intended for use with his own Krömgram system, a cumbersome and expensive system of producing color 3D images that could be viewed through the device seen above. The color imagery was created with a process that used mirrors and filters to create separate slides for each primary color of light, which were bound together in a special order with cloth tapes. The Krömgram was a commercial failure: the viewing device cost $50 when it came out in 1907 (equivalent to $1000 today), was complex to operate, and according to Smithsonian photography curator Shannon Perich, suffered from "poor product placement and advertising." These photos, then, largely represent the last legacy of the failed format, but they're a remarkably contemporary-feeling look into a bygone era (or for that matter, century/millenium).

Most of the reproductions of these images floating around the internet are extremely low quality. You can find the full resolution files from the Smithsonian archives here; below, you can see smaller resolution versions of those images as well as a few details that I found particularly amazing. The first was taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives was staying at the time of the quake, the Majestic (still extant, at 1500 Sutter St.):

 Magnification of the rubble skyline...

...and a house either already being reassembled or having picked a tragic time to begin construction.

Photo 2, taken from the neighborhood of City Hall:

Photo 3, taken at Van Ness Blvd.:

Three close-ups of remarkably clear ads:

The last two photos, stills of Market St. produced from a slightly different angle from the same spot. The still-standing Flood Building is prominent in the foreground, and the Ferry Building can be made out just out by the horizon:

And in this particularly touching set of contrasts, the enlargement on top is of a man wandering Market St. and a cable car off in the distance, while the bottom shows both of them, perhaps by some Krömgram fluke, vanished into a yellow haze - rather like the former skyscrapers that lay in ruins around them.