If the river was whiskey And I was a diving duck I would dive on the bottom baby and I’d never come up
yesssssssssssssssss“Birdie Num Num.”
Track-Making
Our (newfound) friends over at Dangerous Minds have recently posted track-by-track breakdowns of “Gimme Shelter” and “Helter Skelter,” and the results are, if not quite as “Holy shit this is revelatory” as they claim, pretty damn interesting. Yes, you can hear Mick and Merry Clayton by themselves, howling at the world in all their hair-raising glory. Yes, George’s guitar tracks on their own just about put Public Image, Ltd. to shame. Charlie Watts is a shuffling madman, and Ringo sounds better than expected (as expected). Nothing too shocking on the whole.
What is interesting, though, is the relative simplicity of the tracks. These are the complete songs, broken down into a mere five parts. Somehow I would’ve expected (especially with these two songs) that there would be more going on - more effects, or more guitar overdubs, or more vocal tracks. What’s most impressive, what adds most to the depth of these songs as a whole, is that their construction is so basic. All of the extra parts and micro-producing that you might expect from a big-label rock band in today’s music world are just that here: extraneous. As if any of us needed another reason to appreciate the Beatles or the Stones, well, there’s one.
Of course, a track-by-track breakdown of “Born to Run,” complete with 24 or 65 or however many guitar parts would be welcome any time.
HR
For the record, Sox catcher Sherm Lollar hit a 3-run homer to tie the game at four in the top of the seventh, but Dodgers 1B Gil Hodges knocked a solo shot to put the former bums ahead for good in the bottom of the eighth. The win put the Dodgers ahead 3-1 in the series; they would go on to claim the championship in game six. It was their second season in Los Angeles.
92,650 fans were at the game.
Dodgers vs. White Sox. You can see the Win Expectancy chart here. Annnnnnnnnd it’s so awesome that you can do that.1959
For the record, Sox catcher Sherm Lollar hit a 3-run homer to tie the game at four in the top of the seventh, but Dodgers 1B Gil Hodges knocked a solo shot to put the former bums ahead for good in the bottom of the eighth. The win put the Dodgers ahead 3-1 in the series; they would go on to claim the championship in game six. It was their second season in Los Angeles.
92,650 fans were at the game.
HR
This is the back cover of Miles Davis’s Live-Evil, by the by. Here’s the front, also by Mati Klarwein:
Mati Klarwein, Evil-1972. From shawna-bo-bonna’s flickr set. Another flickr user commented, “This is the spiritual portrait of a Belgian duchess,” and I don’t know if he’s joking!
This is the back cover of Miles Davis’s Live-Evil, by the by. Here’s the front, also by Mati Klarwein:
Artificer
Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky
and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.
Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that shines,
but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.
He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children’s cries, the thud of a head banging against the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.
He wonders at his brother’s skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything sprouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose, flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.
Czeslaw Milosz
Wilno, 1931
(birthday today)
TRANSLATED BY CZESLAW MILOSZ AND ROBERT HASS
