Posts Tagged ‘Beatles’
“Cold, cold, cold”*…
Around the millennium, [David] Lynch and sound engineer John Neff worked on a number of projects together, one of which was their band BlueBOB (whose “Thank You, Judge” was an example of high-quality streaming video at the time). Another was a “restored” CD of the Eraserhead soundtrack released on Lynch’s Absurda label in 2001. “Eraserhead Soundtrack cleaned with Waves Restoration-X Plugins for ProTools treated with the Aphex 204 Aural Exciter,” the liner notes explained.
Original Soundtrack Plus was so named because it dangled a bonus track: Lynch and Neff’s ten-minute, 16-second “Eraserhead Dance Mix.” It may not transport you to the exact same place as the original album, but it will take you to a nearby, very cold region of that territory…
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More of the backstory at “In heaven everything is funky fresh: David Lynch’s dance mix of the Eraserhead soundtrack.”
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As we tap our toes, we might recall that on this date in 1964, The Beatles had the #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 spots on Billboard‘s U.S. Singles chart: #1, “Can’t Buy Me Love”; #2, “Love Me Do”; #3, “She Loves You”; #4, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”; and #5 ,”Please Please Me.” It was the first and only time any recording act has ever achieved that feat. At the same time the Fab Four also had nine other singles on the Hot 100 for a total of 14 at the same time– also still a record.
“Communism is like one big phone company”*…
The Beatles were big enough that even the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had to deal with it, somehow. In 1976 Soviet-controlled TV—the only available televised media in the entire country—played a peculiar Russian version of Paul McCartney’s deathless song “Let It Be” as an oddly baroque and defiantly un-glitzy bit of variety TV. Odd to say about television in the worker’s paradise, but the trappings of the proceedings seem to me somewhat … bourgeois?…
The totalitarian tale in toto: “Bizarre video of the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ from Soviet TV of the 1970s.”
* Lenny Bruce
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As we wonder if imitation is, in fact, the sincerest form of flattery, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that the Beatles, fresh back from Hamburg, played their first date at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. The band swiftly became a regular fixture at the Cavern, attracting a loyal audience to over 290 performances until their final appearance on August 3, 1963. For this first show, lasting from 1-2pm, they earned a £5 fee to share among them.
The Beatles (with Pete Best on drums) at the Cavern Club
“I get so lonely, I could die”*…
Elvis, with the Gold Record he received for his first Number One single
The story has been repeated thousands of times, with minor variations, in magazines, books, blogs and documentaries. In some versions, the heartbroken man shoots himself; in others, he leaps to his death from a hotel window. There are occasional references to a failed romance and to the destruction of all traces of identification before the fatal act. There’s always a one-line suicide note: “I walk a lonely street.”
But there’s never a name. For 60 years, the true identity of the man whose death inspired “Heartbreak Hotel” has remained a mystery. Florida songwriters Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton always claimed the creative spark for Elvis Presley‘s first-ever Number One hit was a 1955 newspaper story about an anonymous man’s suicide and his cryptic note about that “lonely street.” (The paper cited is usually The Miami Herald.) And yet, no one has ever turned up the article, or even provided much clarifying detail.
This is surprising, considering that “Heartbreak Hotel” had a colossal impact – both on Elvis’ career and on rock & roll history. It was Elvis’ first nationwide hit after a string of regional successes, and it changed the lives of countless future stars – John Lennon, George Harrison, Keith Richards and Robert Plant have all proclaimed its transformative effect. Elton John, recalling the day he first heard the song, said, “That weekend, my mum came home with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and that changed my life. … Elvis Presley changed everyone’s life. I mean, there would be no Beatles, there would be no Hendrix. There would be no Dylan.” Paul McCartney once declared it nothing less than the most important artistic creation of the modern era…
Finally, the full story at: “Solving the Mystery of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.”
* From “Heartbreak Hotel,” written by Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton.
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As we walk down a lonely street, we might recall that it was on this this date in 1961 that Bill Harry’s pioneering English music paper, Mersey Beat, announced that the Beat Brothers had signed a recording contract. The Beat Brothers? They had performed with another British musician, Tony Sheridan, in Hamburg for several months earlier that year; but while the partnership worked, Sheridan chose to remain in Germany when the quartet returned to Liverpool. We know the group better by the name they soon after adopted: The Beatles. Two years later, on this very day, they would go to No. 1 on the U.K. album chart for the first time.
The Beat Brothers in Hamburg (with Pete Best on drums); Tony Sheridan, seated
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock-n-roll”*…
Readers may recall our recent visit to The Internet Arcade, an online repository of payable versions of old arcade games. Now, also from Internet Archive, an incredible collection of vintage MS-DOS computer games. From Oregon Trail (from which, many readers will have known, the above image comes) to Prince of Persia, there are 2,400 of them available to play for free at Software Library: MS-DOS Games.
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As we relearn the arrow keys, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that the Beatles entered the U.S. pop charts for the first time, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” debuted at #35 on the Billboard Hot 100; it went to #1 the following week. The single had already ascended to the pinnacle of the British charts: indeed, with advance orders exceeding one million copies in the U.K., “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would ordinarily have hit the top of the British record charts on its day of release (November 29, 1963), but it was blocked for two weeks by the group’s first million-seller, “She Loves You.” The release order was reversed in the U.S.; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” held the number one spot for seven weeks before being replaced by “She Loves You.” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” remained on the U.S. charts for a total of fifteen weeks, and remains the Beatles’ best-selling single worldwide.
“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them”*…
The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is tiny; it has only has 302 neurons. These connections have been completely mapped in the OpenWorm project, which is building a complete simulation of the worm in software. One of the founders of OpenWorm, Timothy Busbice, has embedded the connectome in an an object-oriented neuron program– which he has installed in the simple Lego robot pictured above…
And the result?
It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward…
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Are we just the sum of our neural networks? More at “A Worm’s Mind In A Lego Body.”
* Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth
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As we cram for the Turing Test, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that the BBC banned “I Am The Walrus” for play on their air. The Beatles had grabbed and used a snippet of a BBC broadcast of King Lear (which has also influenced Lennon’s lyrics), but that wasn’t the problem. Rather, the lines “pornographic priestess” and “let your knickers down” were deemed inappropriate.
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