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Al Green – “I Want to Hold Your Hand”

Al Green, who sang the best Beatles cover ever.

Al Green: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From 7″ (Hi, 1969)
This is a very obscure song, at least this version of it, which originally came out on 7″. I’ve spoken to several soul fans about this song, but no one I met ever heard it. Suffice it to say this is what the old folks call “fly.”

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Dashiell Hammett

Mystery writer Dashiell Hammett was born on this day in 1894. The three film adaptations of his most famous story, The Maltese Falcon, became staples of the film noir genre. His romantic relationship with Lillian Hellman, a well-known playwright, inspired The Thin Man, a story featuring heroine Nora Charles. The film adaptation of this novel was so successful that it spawned multiple sequels. Hammett was the founding father of the “hard-boiled” mystery, a subgenre characterized by its gritty characters and depictions of events.

Across the Universe

Listen to the Song

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John Lennon

Philip Norman. Ecco 2008, Hardcover, 864 pages, $3.99

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, They slither while they pass they slip away across the universe Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind, Possessing and caressing me Jai guru de va om Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box they
Tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter, shades of earth are ringing
Through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns and calls me on and on
Across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Jai guru deva [Repeat to fade]

Background

The following is mostly lifted from a great Beatles page called The Beatles Bible. Check it out for more information.

Some interpretations of Across the Universe can be found here.

This song’s lyrics came to John Lennon in the early hours one morning at his home in Kenwood.

I was lying next to my first wife in bed and I was thinking. It started off as a negative song and she must have been going on and on about something. She’d gone to sleep and I kept hearing, ‘Words are flowing out like endless streams…’ I was a bit irritated and I went downstairs and it turned into a sort of cosmic song rather than, ‘Why are you always mouthing off at me?…The words are purely inspirational and were given to me – except for maybe one or two where I had to resolve a line or something like that. I don’t own it; it came through like that.

Part of the song’s chorus – ‘Jai guru deva, om’ – is a Sanskrit phrase which roughly translates as ‘Victory to God divine’. It was likely inspired by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom The Beatles had met in August 1967. The Maharishi’s spiritual master was called Guru Dev. ‘Jai’ is a Hindi word meaning ‘long live’ or ‘victory’, and ‘om’ is a sacred syllable in the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist religions.

In 1970 John Lennon was quoted in Rolling Stone:

It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written. In fact, it could be the best. It’s good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewin’ it. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody. They don’t have to have any melody, like a poem, you can read them.

Watch a Session Video

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After Apple-Picking

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I agree very much with Seamus Heaney’s assessment that this poem is not about death, that to characterize it as such would be to rob it of its life. It is indeed Frost’s ode to autumn. In another vein, Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” could have been subtitled “The Fall.” A consequence of the Fall is that humans labor. Even the most commonplace human endeavor is steeped in larger significance, which is easy to see in this poem. But we cannot say if the lines following the reference to “dreaming” in line 17 refer to the day’s labor or a memory of it because of the subtle blending of memory and sensation as well as concept and precept.

AFTER APPLE-PICKING
by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair: the Song

The Irish pop group Divine Comedy recorded a song based on “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Here’s a snippet from the song. Give it a listen.

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New song from Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

A couple of months have passed since the “Once” duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won Oscars for their song “Falling Slowly” from John Carney’s independent hit of last summer. Now they have a brand-new track for another movie, which again is a bittersweet boy-meets-girl foreign movie.

The song is called “One More Word” and it’s from the independent Israeli movie “Strangers“, which was well received at Sundance in January. From what I’ve read the film goes for the docu-style urbanity of Once, but with an original twist: an Israeli Romeo meets a Palestinian Juliet. My understanding is that the duo recorded the song in Prague two weeks before the Academy Awards.

Hear it here:

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Muddy Waters’ Birthday

Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters was born on this day in 1915. He was an African-American blues singer and guitarist from Rolling Fork, Mississippi. His real name was McKinley Morganfield. As a teenager he began singing and playing traditional country blues on harmonica and guitar, and in 1941 he was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Two years later he settled in Chicago, where he switched from Delta blues to a more sophisticated urban rhythm and blues, using an electric guitar backed by other amplified instruments. He soon became known for his driving slide guitar technique and darkly expressive vocal style. From the 1950s on Waters recorded, toured, and played various music festivals. His electric blues influenced such American musicians as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan and such British rockers as the Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Waters song, and Eric Clapton, who recorded with him.

Hear a great Muddy Waters song, “Got My Mojo Working”:

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Hear the World’s First Recording

It turns out that Thomas Edison was not the first person to record sound. In 1860, about twenty years before Edison’s phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a recording of the French folk song “Au Claire de la Lune.” The device he used to do this was known as a phonautograph, which utilized paper blackened with smoke in order to make a pictorial representation of sound. Martinville believed that one day humans would be able to figure out how to derive sound from his smoky scratchings.The best article on this topic can be found at the New York Times:

The April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of “Au Clair de la Lune”

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An Audio Excerpt from a 1931 Recording of the Same Song

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