Graceland

Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon played Newport a day apart at the end of July. Versions of Graceland and the Boxer showed up on YouTube, and a beautiful cover of Summertime by Mitchell. One night many years ago, I sat up all night with my friend Eric Andersen and Joni Mitchell in an open air court in a West 4th St. restaurant. I remember nothing about the night, save for my fanboy foolish grin. The other near visitation was in an elevator with Art Garfunkel which made very clear just how short Paul Simon is. I was a few inches taller than Garfunkel, you see.

You think of these people as just regular folks, but at some point you’re reminded that they possess something, or a lot of somethings, that stand out from the crowd and even their contemporaries. During the performance of Graceland, Simon kicks off an instrumental riff in the middle of the song where he strums a chord so powerfully that it changes the section from a nice interlude into something that shouts out what the writer and performer knew was the core of the performance. You can see it on one of the videos¹, more a function of the camera mic’s relation to the stage speakers, but not so much on other angles. Even the authorized Newport version doesn’t really catch it, but once you’ve seen it you can’t forget it. At that moment, the artist’s age, humor, height, all fade away into the glorious realization of the miracle of life we are so lucky to share.

One of the strange things about growing up in this perfect age of musical innovation is the knowledge of its essential unique power. So often when I express in joking form the idea that everything since the Beatles was aftermath, I know that’s not right. But there’s something about right place, right time that just can’t be denied. As I transitioned from the world of the sixties to the one of the eighties, the dawning of the digital era produced a similar sensation. Time and again, the same visual cues, a kind of nodding assent, accompanied the creation of art and technology. I say that knowing full well that I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. The earlier experience of being there—whether in a coffee shop or on the radio, in a screaming hurricane of 57,000 screaming boys and girls at Shea Stadium, or the open delight Steve Jobs projected as he announced the iPhone—is evident like a carrier frequency in what comes next.

In a way, these two intersecting worlds are reflections of the technology of recording, amplifying, shaping the material to the emotional needs of the time. The evolutionary arc of the Beatles from touring to the studio set the stage for music, just as the advent of lightweight and quiet hand-held cameras and sound recorders led to the proliferation of documentary filmmakers and the attendant impact of Europe’s New Wave filmmaking. The studio-bound directors of Hitchcock and Welles morphed into the personal dialogues of Truffaut, Resnais, and eventually folded back into American acolytes like Scorcese, Coppola, and even Lucas. His motion control innovation in Star Wars built on the pioneering work of Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and produced a hybrid of studio and optical printing that took filmmakers out of the studio and into the apparent stars and bygone past.

The Firesign Theatre may seem like a favorite reference of the college town subculture that drove the underground radio transformation of top 40 AM radio to the album-oriented FM radio platform, but it also referenced the intersection of the music and technology scenes. The Beatles strategy of releasing singles for the first market but leaving them off the subsequent albums created a unique product for FM stations, particularly those in college towns like Boston and San Francisco. These small (or in some cases powerful) college stations would play entire sides of records late at night, driving airplay for deep cuts not released on AM radio. As the Beatles’ output shifted to the notion of albums as the product, records like Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper became the only way to hear the full impact of the shift in writing, production, and global distribution.

By the release of Sgt. Pepper in 1967, the complexity and the sophistication of the Beatles’ recording process had reached the entire record business, but ironically not EMI’s studios where Beatles records were recorded on 4 track machines and mixed for release primarily in mono. But other artists, particularly those hubbed in the Bay Area, were graduating to 8 and even 16 tracks, mixed both in mono and more and more in stereo for the burgeoning FM markets. By the sessions for The Beatles colloquially known as the White Album, the group had fragmented into multiple sessions for Paul, John, and George tracks, overwhelming EMI studio resources and booking other London studios with their more advanced recording setups. Worldwide, artists emulated not only the style and look of the album cover art, but the multitracking techniques of double-tracked vocals, orchestral backgrounds, and even sound effects such as the audience laughter on Sgt. Pepper’s opening tracks and tape loops on Yellow Submarine (Revolver) and I Am The Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour.) In the wake of the White Album, the Firesign recording process merged the 40’s radio play ethos with the Beatles’ studio explorations to produce a series of records venturing into the coming technology age.

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