A six string path

Sometimes I grow tired of repeating the stories that I tell about the Beatles; after all, I was hardly there, right?  One of the things about those for whom the Beatles were/[are] an intense experience is that they all have a different experience of what happened (“you can penetrate anyplace you go”).  Usually, I expect that others would know the stories – that is why I grow weary of telling them, who wants to be a bore about something that wasn’t really a direct experience?  Of course, that was part of the art, that we who lived then were part of the story; the Beatles documented something that happened to us all.  The story I was telling the other day was about Astrid & Stuart Sutcliffe & how Sutcliffe supposedly didn’t like to practice bass, which was “documented” in the film Backbeat, which led to McCartney being the bass player with the band ….

Many people have not heard the recorded interviews with John Lennon [“unfinished dialogue”] & Paul McCartney [“the McCartney interviews”] that were released in the 1980’s; shame, that.  In those interviews, Lennon & McCartney both gave away many of the secrets behind the art in their time with the Beatles.  While the “secrets” are actually in the lyrics also, it was some of the story telling about what was happening in their lives that revealed how the notes & chords were working together [“we can work it out”] – the connection between the spiritual & the physical is in the language of the playing, which is why practicing is so important.  What people “hear” is what the players intimate with the lyric & the music.  The note can be a leading voice, or the leading voice can be in the chord or chord changes, even the instrumentation ….

We all [seemingly] assume that time is linear; what the Beatles opened was the non linear time of a God viewpoint – God isn’t held to the linear construction, it is we who are.  In the mind of God, we can be at any point in our linear existence.  This is something that gave rise to the concept of somebody who “passes away” – they do not die, they return to another space in the mind of God, a structure of existence [“across the universe (univearth)”] to which we do not have direct access, except in the construction that God shares in the object oriented universe [“hon-mak-ku-kyo-to”].  As long as we access the memory of the recording, we access the continuum.  Looking forward, into the future of technology & music, we can hear “Nowhere Man” and see the point – the Buddha point which is reconciled by the Cross (and the death of Jesus Christ).  By understanding the construction, we can see into the story that was/is being told.

In the McCartney interviews, Sir Paul talked about how he used to sit around the radio as a child/young man and try to figure out the lyrics and parts to the music that was coming to the UK from America.  That process has been practiced by countless musicians who learn to love music from music ….  The more that one plays and practices connecting the brain to the construction, the easier it is to move into that transcendental state of playing and composing according to the construction “rules” of music theory; and then to “see” the construction as a language communication that is live for as long as the arrangement does not pass away.

Some of the interpretation that we make of music is internal to our own imagination; in some ways music is like types in the JavaScript language for the language interpreter (as opposed to the strict types of Java or C# or other computer languages).  For the really talented constructors of music, the interpretation of the voice leading is nearly a constant – they almost tell us what to think with the construction & and the construction with the lyric.  When the voice leading is from a blues “call & response” construction, sometimes there is a strict type interpretation, but other times the decay rate of the notes (the voicing strength, the playback frequency mixing/mastering, the language in which we think – and thus the rhythm of our cadence of language [not from the musical “nashville numbering” but from the spoken voice language we have]  --) influences what we hear as the leading voice/thought/construction. 

It is these “voicings” that are still alive in the Beatles, and why we still go see 70 plus year old musicians playing songs “out there” …

getting <strike>phony</strike> AT&T …[?] {out there}

This week I was listening to some old recordings by the Beatles, and for the first time – to my ears – they sounded more tied to their era than present.  For me, the memories are passing, and the reality is moving on ….

When I was in college, a long time ago, one of the best aspects of the Beatles was that they sounded current even as they were no more.  One of the experiences that I had as I dove into the pieces of the music to figure out “why is that” [?] was to find a whole different level of both engineering – on the technical side – and lyric structure – on the music side.  There will never be another explosion like the first, and the Beatles were the first – because of the circumstances of their rise in life & the art that they presented.

As I listened to the recordings, which still can take me back to the living moments when I first heard them & experienced them, I could also hear the distance of time washing over the memory of what is in the music itself.  There were two parts of the whole aural picture that were particularly special.  While there were other musicians recording on similar machines & creating similar sounds – listen to KRTH 101 while they still feature the 60’s, and you will know – the process fed the Beatles in ways that others did not get entirely, except as observers.  Learning about how George Martin produced music was a whole historical story – a lesson to be learned – in itself.  Piecing together the lyrical meaning in context and in expanded imagination is the “other half of the sky”.  Sadly, much of the importance of what is there is being washed away, at least in America, by the current crop of younger musicians – say those born in music after 1989 ….  The view of the 1960’s grows distant, lost in the current political fringes as they fight over the outcome of that previous era.  The rise of “rap music”, which was a rejection of 1960’s & 1970’s era jazz music, has penetrated the culture of “new musicians” to the point of making celebrity the point, dollars the the point, and quality of connection to History, well, not so much the point.

I hope people won’t get so lost in today that they forget yesterday … and the stories behind it …