Drunk

This blog has become entirely too respectable. Time for a drunken ramble. Which is good, since I'm drunk, thanks to a wedding, and feeling all rambly, and now I'm drunk and will write and regret it in the morning. There are worse things to regret on a Sunday morning, I guess.

About 10:43 tonight I had the strongest desire to watch either a Whit Stillman film, a screwball comedy set in New York City, or listen to Vampire Weekend. None of these things came true. How I wish they could! My ipod died on the car ride home and it made me sad. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just entirely too strange and nerdy to ever find someone who can appreciate the thought of Central Park in the rain, a Thursday afternoon on Broadway and 79th, an evening watching French New Wave double-featured with Will Ferrell movies. I'm planning to move to Los Angeles, for a change, for a new career, for the weather, for God knows what, and of course, being from working class detroit, no one seems to understand why, "you're a writer? Oh. so what do you really do?" -- i'm dreaming that in l.a. they don't respond so practically, that in l.a. they'll ask you what you're working on and not judge in that harsh midwestern way, i'm hoping, i'm dreaming, but it's hard to move when you have no cash.

I wish I could muster the intellect to write about the old movies I've watched recently. I saw Raw Deal the other day. Claire Trevor, so flousy-tragic, voice-over noir, how could I resist. It's a chiaroscuro girl-fight between her and Gloria Grahame for the title of Favorite Noir Moll. Dennis O'Keefe is what Dennis Morgan would be if he'd been knifed in the face and sent up to San Quentin for a misunderstanding and a stolen 12 Gs. In a bit of What-the-hell! Dennis O'Keefe was in an episode of Petticoat Junction. Petticoat. Junction.

I would write more if I were motivated. But that's the problem: I'm not. I've watched some perfectly good writable movies -- Raw Deal, Mr. Lucky -- and shows -- PBS's Sense and Sensibility, Mad Men (which I've been rewatching in reruns and I'm not sure if it reinforces Baby Boomer narcissism or rejects it), John Adams, The Tudors (God help me, I'm only watching till St. Thomas More is martyred, I swear!) -- but nothing comes of it. Is anyone else worried that the film blogosphere is dying?

I guess I'm just tired of cyber-conversations. I want to discuss my random interests with a flesh and blood, is there no one else out there in my sad small town who can argue which is better: Pre-Code Babs Stanwyck or Ms. Bette Davis, Hays Code-style, or is Faye-Dunaway-fucking-William-Holden-in-Network better than them all? Can I have an intelligent conversation about Montgomery Clift already? Is there anybody out there who knows what these words mean: Gaius Baltar, Jeremiah Wright, Moqtardo Sadr, Madeline Kahn, Ron Stoppable??? I despair.

In my room, I have an entire wall covered in pictures of the Beatles. It is my Beatles Wall. At this moment, greatest Beatles song ever? Mr. Moonlight.

No. I kid. That's the worst fucking Beatles song in history.

True answer, right this moment? Hey Jude. Anthology 3, track 17 (maybe). I don't care if it's obvious or cliche or too popular, it's a great effin' song and sounds great at 1 am saturday drunk-like. No. Now I'm changing my vote to Rocky Raccoon. Try writing a masterpiece like that Mick and Keith!

I heard the best wedding toast tonight. My cousin -- the best man at his brother's wedding -- three lines (if that), ending with "To health and happiness." Perfect. We were rolling, everyone at my table. It followed fifteen minutes of bad poetry and crying and barely funny "funny" stories, which however heartfelt they may seem to those who are saying them had me wishing for a double gin martini to go with my Jack and Coke and put me to bed momma.

Then! A message sent down from heaven, the best man's (my cousin's) speech was an antidote, the equivalent of those old Oscar speeches where Clark Gable simply says, "Thank you very much" and then sits down. Succinct, gracious, maybe ten seconds in length. Rub-a-dub-dub time for some grub. It was the Gettysburg Address of wedding toasts.

Now: I'm sminking of gin. Only about 0.02% might ever get that reference, but for those of you who do, you're welcome. See: Rocky Raccoon, above (Anthology 3)

This isn't nearly as funny as it should be, i'm frickin' drunk yo! Oh well. Regret: The best motivation to do better next time.

On this date in Beatles recording history...

Wednesday 29 March, 1967*

The group recorded the animals sounds on "Good Morning Good Morning" on March 28, but they were spun into the four-track tape of the song on this date, the 29th. The order of the sounds, according to a story from Geoff Emerick, was decided because John Lennon wanted "to have the sound of animals escaping" and that each animal should be a capable of eating or frightening the animal that came before it. So the sounds, in order, are: A cock crowing, a cat meowing, dogs barking, horses neighing , sheep bleating (though, it's unclear to me how sheep can frighten horses), lions roaring, elephants making elephant noises, a fox being chased by hounds, horses galloping, a cow mooing, and then a hen clucking, to bring it back full-circle, I guess.

Sound effects were added to the tape track of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" today, as was the organ music, with was played by producer George Martin.

Up until this point, poor Ringo hadn't recorded a song as lead vocalist, so John and Paul wrote a song just for him: "With a Little Help From My Friends." Of course, at this point, the song was titled "Bad Finger Boogie," for what reason I have no idea. George Martin played organ on the song, Paul played piano, George on lead guitar, Ringo on drums and lead vocals, and John on cowbell. None of my Beatles books, however, mention whether or non George Martin ever made any calls for "more cowbell."

*My source for all this is a wonderfully wonkish book called "The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962-1970" by Mark Lewisohn

You Never Give Me Your Money

by the Beatles.

I could listen to this song forever. Of course, it's famous for being the beginning of that delicious pop medley from Abbey Road, the one that introduces the melodic sounds which will come to comprise the second half of the album. But even in isolation, it feels like it's own mini rock-pop epic, every bit as good as Stairway to Heaven or Bohemian Rhapsody or Free Bird. Am I overreaching? Yeah, okay, it's not as grandiose and ambitious as Stairway, and it doesn't have the operatic bigness of Rhapsody. And it certainly doesn't have the full-frontal sonic assault of ROCK that Free Bird's got going for it with it's barrage of dueling guitar licks and rock star lifestyle lyrics. But. You Never Give Me Your Money is the pop music answer to the rock music stadium anthem. It can be performed live, I think (and didn't Paul do it during one of his latest U.S. tours?). But on the album, its album-ness is so completely overwhelming and perfect that the London studio can't help feeling like its natural habitat.

And that's pop music: it's music meant to sound produced, to sound engineered, to be recorded and then pressed into vinyl and sold in shops. It's not the rawness of rock; it's the perfection of pop. You Never Give Me Your Money is on the album titled after the studio it was recorded in, and nothing could feel more appropriate. It's got all the sound of the Abbey Road studios, all the changing melodies and instrumentation that sum up the essence of what made the Beatles' studio recordings so ingenious and groundbreaking.

It's also a lot of nonsense. Supposedly it's about the group's business disputes, but that meaning gets lost after the first few lines, and the rest of the lyrics are so all-over-the-place that the overall effect is one of mood more so than meaning. And that mood is melancholy. The opening piano melody just drips with longing, with a resigned sadness that nevertheless grasps for warm contentment. "You never give me your money,/ you only give me your funny paper." Sure, the business table talk is there, but it seems more like a metaphor, something that can mean anything to anyone who yearns for one thing and ends up with something else. It's also a bit of a silly pun -- for what else is money but "funny paper" -- that gives an illusion of profundity even as it winks at us in jest.

When it switches to the second section, the sound of yearning gives way to a saloon hall riff on the piano and talk of "yellow lorries" and "outta college money spent," and it's all a bit happier, a bit jauntier, though we're not sure why. The speaker in the song is suddenly younger, he's on his way out into the world, there's money to be made, but then suddenly the yellow lorry has "nowhere to go," and meaning escapes us again, even as we can't escape the feeling that we're grasping at something and just missing it, longing for a thing that's never going to come. The lyrics don't "mean" anything in a direct sense, but the overall effect -- the sound of the nonsense words together with the melodies -- imparts a feeling, an emotional state, something beyond pure rationality, and it is that something which draws the human heart to music in the first place. The song has an illusion of substance, and at the same time the sugary emptiness of candy. It's seems powerful but remains pop-y without incongruity.

I'm reminded of my first response to the poetry of Gerard Manely Hopkins: I didn't necessarily understand all the meanings in "Pied Beauty" the first time around, but I understood its sound, its rhythms and sonic qualities, and I immediately loved it. Just to speak those words, those lines, aloud was enough to know the poem's beauty. There's a bit of that going on in the nonsense lyrics of You Never Give Me Your Money, as well. Just the sound of those words as they roll off the tongue and suddenly the mood is conjured. As the song fades out to the repetition of a nursery rhyme ("One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,/ All good children go to heaven"), the nonsense almost lifts up into a prayer, the melody and the words pulling us higher and higher into the clouds until all that's left to do is to fade out and up into who knows where.

The song is endlessly listenable because it's got those five different melodic sections that all flow seamlessly into one another so that when the song ends in a completely different place from where it started, it feels totally organic. It's the beginning of the Abbey Road medley, but the song itself is a medley, and yet it never feels pieced together or random. There's a sense that this is the overture to some Broadway musical, with all the melodies integrated into a complete and satisfying story, preparing its audience for what's to come. That one can listen to the song a hundred times and still feel surprised as each new melody is introduced, is a testament to the magic of the thing. "Oh that magic feeling,/ Nowhere to go." The song is a sonic journey; it uses some kind of magic to weave its nonsense into the listener, and while we're still listening, we're not sure where it has left to go. And then by the end, we're not sure where we've been. Once the song finishes, we realize that what we mistook for meaning has evaporated, and only melodies and a mood remain. But somehow, that is enough.