It's been a while.
I find myself struggling to express myself and I have returned to the scene of the crime.
I hope SOMEONE will be reading these. Despite my sarcasm, I will continue to force my interests and opinions ( maybe a recipe or two ) on YOU! My unsuspecting readers. Yes, both of you. Cheers
I am fixated on the reissue of The Beatles (White Album).
The Beatles returned from India in 1968 with plans, For their new album, they wanted to play together as a band once again, and to do so required practice. Why they picked Harrison’s home as the site of their rehearsals is up for debate. The vibes at Chez Lennon were understandably tense as divorce loomed, and McCartney’s Regency townhouse in central London was perhaps too close to the hustle and bustle of city life – to say nothing of EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, a five-minute walk away – to inspire calm.
So they hunkered down at Kinfauns with some acoustic guitars, light percussive instruments and an Ampex 4-track tape machine and just let it roll. The result was a joyous, stripped-down, warts-and-all peek inside the band’s creative process. Of the 27 songs known to exist from the day, 19 would wind up on the White Album, two would be held over for Abbey Road and six were never issued by the group as an active unit. Lennon contributed a whopping 15 compositions to the proceedings, McCartney seven and Harrison five. When all was said and done, Harrison made a mono mix of the tape and a presented a copy to each of his bandmates as a reference for the upcoming sessions.
Exactly what happened to the recordings afterwards remains a mystery. Although a handful of these takes saw the light of day nearly three decades later on the Beatles’ Anthology 3 collection, the vast majority remain officially – and tragically – unreleased. Thankfully, audio has leaked in recent years, becoming available to all on YouTube. As a document, the Esher demo tape is both entertaining and historically invaluable, providing a fascinating work-in-progress glimpse of the band’s most varied collection.
It was one of the first Bootlegs I ever purchased.
Blackbird is probably my favorite song - of all the songs recorded for the White Album, “Blackbird” dates back the furthest. The seeds were sewn in the late Fifties when a 16-year-old McCartney learned the introduction of Bach’s “Bourree in E Minor” on guitar in a somewhat misguided effort to impress girls. “You often did things just as party pieces, things to show off, literally, at a party,” McCartney recalled during a seminar at Rollins College in Orlando in 2014. “You know, ‘Hey girls …’ You would do that. Unfortunately, none of them bothered.” The budding musician’s rudimentary classical guitar skills rendered the rest of the movement prohibitively difficult, so he improvised an abbreviated ending – one he never forgot. “Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me,” he explained to Barry Miles. McCartney expanded on the guitar figure while visiting his Scottish farm shortly after returning from India in the spring of 1968. “I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted words to it,” he told Miles. “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States.” The words were fully in place by the time he debuted the song at Kinfauns, but the musical structure needed work. The opening line is played only once, rather than repeated, and the wordless mid-song guitar wind-down present on the White Album is absent. But given the stripped down nature of the final recorded version, the demo sounds fairly similar. The demo is primarily a solo venture, but McCartney’s double-tracked vocals and acoustic guitar picking get some help from Lennon, who enthusiastically contributes bird sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQ3Zhx0na4
Added BONUS!! The NYT Review of the White Album - classic
https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/arts/nikcohn1968.pdf
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