MLT Club Member David Herrick
MLT Club MemberForum Replies Created
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Don’t forget LaserDiscs, JP! We also witnessed the going, if not the coming, of 8-track tapes and audio cassettes.
It does seem that the lifetimes of new media formats are much shorter now than they used to be. I can’t think of any innovations from our parents’ generation other than television, and anything from our grandparents’ generation other than radio, and they’re both still around.
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Hello, JP! Glad you made it to the party.
I know exactly what you mean about the cringeworthiness of “back in the 80’s”. I’ve only recently become comfortable using that expression, and even then only in situations where it’s helpful to make them seem like a long time ago.
As a kid in the 70’s I found the concept of the 80’s to be unimaginably futuristic: I’ll graduate from high school in 1983… like that year will ever happen. I was finally brought down to earth by a comic strip that appeared on the first day of the new decade:
https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1980/01/01
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Very nice, Howard! And it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the extended dance mix of the song.
I don’t actually know much about Vivaldi. I remember in the late 80’s I was running around to all the record stores in a desperate search for a compilation of hits by Frankie Valli, and I kept getting my hopes raised and immediately dashed by albums titled “The Four Seasons: Vivaldi”. I guess it’s time to get over the emotional scars and give him a listen.
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Hi, Jacki.
Sorry, I was geeking out there a little. Here’s a pretty good and relatively mathless visual intro to standing waves, with application to music and a brief reference to quantum stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rfushlee0U
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That’s a great article, Jung! I can’t think of a single class I’ve ever taken in which the connection between math and music has been explored, and yet I see it all over the place in things I’ve read. Now I can add Einstein to Pythagoras and Kepler on my list of greats who have combined the two in their fundamental way of thinking about nature.
A couple of years ago I attended a talk in which a LIGO scientist summarized the lab’s recent results on gravitational waves, and played that “chirp” of the colliding black holes. It was a quite memorable moment associated with literally a whole new way to see the universe.
As part of my college major I took an introductory course in quantum mechanics, hoping to find out what inspired the whole idea of quantization in the first place, and I was surprised to learn that quantum energy states in an atom were mathematically identical to standing waves on a plucked string or in a column of air. Different combinations of standing waves are what give different musical instruments their distinct sounds. So there’s yet another fundamental aspect of nature with a connection to music!
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In both of these videos (Bach and Beethoven), we’re looking at mathematical ratios of frequencies in music. It’s just a matter of whether the frequencies are hundreds of times per second in the case of consonant note harmonies, or once every few seconds in the case of Bach’s harmonic patterns. I now feel like I should read a book about this.
I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to transcribe some Beatles songs the way they did with the Bach composition and run a computer analysis, something akin to a Fourier transform, to determine if there are any signs of these meta-harmonies. (Wow, I absolutely never thought I would have an occasion to invoke a topic from my old college math classes on this discussion board!)
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When I found this clip on YouTube I was amazed at how many of the comments below said “I saw this when I was four years old and it made me cry even then.” Again we’re looking at the amazing power of music (along with a visual, in this case) to conjure up deep feelings, even in the very young.
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Once again, truly fascinating, Jung!
It seems to me that writing a song this way requires deliberate planning, and having different tempos for the same pattern of notes removes the basic structure of verse and chorus that pretty much defines classic rock and roll. I imagine the Beatles and other groups were more concerned with the second-by-second construction of chords and individual lines of music, rather than this lovely but relatively unpunctuated type of composition.
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An interesting analysis, but I refuse to believe that Danny and the Juniors lied to me:
“Rock and roll is here to stay. It will never die. It was meant to be that way, though I don’t know why. I don’t care what people say. Rock and roll is here to stay.”
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Now that I think about it, the dripping flower imagery was probably inspired by my early childhood viewing of this moving film from Sesame Street, with an accompanying Vivaldi composition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kojxgL3nf0Y
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I just did a little reading about “Susan”. Apparently the weird part is a snippet of a song written in 1906 by modernist composer Charles Ives. The producer inserted it into the finished song, and the whole band hated it.
From the first time I heard it, I visualized gathering storm clouds followed by thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour. Then suddenly it stops and the sun comes out and the raindrops drip off the flowers as they sing “love, love, love, love…”
When I was teething on 60’s music with my oldies radio station in the 80’s, they frequently played the songs you mentioned, plus “Hey Baby” and “Kind of a Drag” (my favorite), and I became quite smitten with their sound. I thought they would have been much better remembered than they actually are.
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I thought for a second that I had come up with a pop song with “movements” that pre-dates “A Day in the Life”, but it turns out that it was released a few months later: “Susan” by the Buckinghams. Perhaps the cacophonous middle part was even inspired by the structure of “A Day in the Life”.
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I posted a reply a week ago, but it’s still in purgatory (“awaiting moderation”) due to my committing the minor sin of trying to include both a photo and a video in the same post. The gist of it was that the first Mad Max movie came out in 1979, close to the advent of punk fashion. Also I offered this reflection on punk culture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr82dZpCr48
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I know what you mean about music and memories, Jung. Every time I hear someone say “that’s the way it should be”, I immediately start silently singing a Coca Cola jingle from 40 years ago that used that line.
I wonder about that Flemming recording too. I checked out their YouTube channel, and pretty much every other song they’ve done is traditional and probably in the public domain. I don’t know how the legalities work, but given that they’re selling downloads of the song on their web site, I imagine they at least had to get MLT’s permission. They do credit MLT and Woolgoose Records on the site.
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Wow, Lisa’s drawing is very reminiscent of the pose they later struck in the “Birds” video! They must have had it in mind.
That’s a very nice Beach Boys song you linked to, Jung. I might have heard it once before, but I’m not sure. The video now has me researching the Big Sur Folk Festival, which I was not familiar with. A lot of big names were there, as evidenced by that photo of CSN, Joni Mitchell, and John Sebastian all on the stage together.
A few months ago I found a cover of “Birds” on YouTube, performed by a family group from Minnesota called The Flemming Fold. The vocals were sung by the two daughters, aged approximately 13 and 11 at the time. Not a bad effort.
