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Why Don’t We Do It in the Doll’s House?: A Peek Inside the Beatles’ White Album
I remember what they sounded like. As obnoxious as auctioneers, the loud, peppy DJs on the Top 40 radio stations crammed in as many words as they could between commercials and hit songs that grew increasingly stale, but the disc jockeys on the underground station were low-key. With deep voices, they spoke slowly and softly, and listening to them it was easy to imagine bearded hippies with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock ‘n’ roll. They never played hit singles, and they waited until several songs played before they identified anything, which was frustrating to someone trying to become familiar with at least a small fraction of the overwhelming amount of rock ‘n’ roll that was out there. It really didn’t matter, though: At that point, I still had to hear most songs several times before they penetrated.
This was in Des Moines, Iowa in the early ’70s—early enough that it still seemed like the late ’60s. I was in sixth and seventh grade when I listened to the underground radio station. Occasionally, on a Saturday I would walk to a hippie shop called Elysian Fields and try to figure out who the bands were on the posters covering the walls and flip through record bins while wondering what all the records sounded like. As with the underground radio station, you never heard any Top 40 hits in Elysian Fields. I took in what I could, but I processed little of what I heard. Fortunately, a friend whose older brothers left their record collections behind when they moved out set his selling price at a quarter; it was because of him that I first had a chance to listen to, at my leisure, bands like Captain Beefheart and the Electric Prunes.
One day, one of the deep-voiced hippies announced that the underground station was going to play The White Album by the Beatles in its entirety. Because most of the other Beatles LPs had number one singles, The White Album was probably the only serious candidate for an underground station—that or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Although none of its songs were hits, Pepper’s generally had more of a pop sound than The White Album, and because at that point the wow factor associated with Pepper’s was still fresh, it got much more press. Of all the Beatles records, The White Album seemed the most underground.
Rick Danko: Infectious Joy and Non-Showbiz Charisma
We all know what happened when the rain came down at Woodstock: Rather than run for cover or whine about substandard concert conditions, 300,000 hippies experienced a Dionysian rebirth. Wet, muddy, and occasionally buck-naked, they all had shit-eating smiles as Mother Nature turned Max Yasgur’s farm into sludge.
That was 1969, when hippies ruled the earth. About 10 years later I attended a much smaller music festival with a different vibe. The headliner that day was the country artist Waylon Jennings. Also listed were Buddy Holly’s old back-up band, the Crickets, J.J. Cale, Rick Danko, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Something about the way the concert was advertised suggested that Danko and Butterfield might play together, but that wasn’t completely clear.
The concert took place at a ski resort near Bellefontaine, a small town in Western Ohio. In those days and in that area of Ohio, Southern rock was all the rage, as was outlaw country music, and on jukeboxes you might hear the Outlaws followed by Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Johnny Paycheck. Had Molly Hatchet headlined that day, the scene would have been similar, with motorcycles and giant pickup trucks filling a dirt lot; concert-goers sporting tattoos, cowboy hats, and scraggly beards; and, from the time the doors opened at noon, large quantities of plastic beer containers getting guzzled.
Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Leonard Cohen
by: Jeff Wilson
– Leonard Cohen, “First We Take Manhattan”
During the halcyon days of public education, the grade school I attended boasted a fine music program that included, along with in-depth music instruction by a stern old lady who cared deeply about preserving the heritage of classical music, a full-scale orchestra with French horns and bassoons and all that. Why, in fourth grade, I chose to take lessons on the violin, I don’t know. I imagine that, because it was the instrument I most associated with orchestral music, I shrugged my shoulders and said something like, “Sounds good, sign me up.”
Although I quickly found classical music boring and the violin passé, I enjoyed learning about things like sharps and flats and quarter notes. And listening to the classical music we performed and the records our music teacher played helped me form, by the end of sixth grade, a theory of musical history that spanned the ages. It went something like this: Until rock ‘n’ roll came around, people all over the planet labored to create good music, and while all of them failed to produce anything exciting, credit should be given to all the musicians who preceded rock ‘n’ roll. After all, they made sure that music continued to exist until, finally, in the late ’60s, immortal musical icons like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix delivered full-scale sonic annihilation, which was the apex of civilization. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it quite like that, but basically that was what I thought.
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by: Jeff Wilson
published: June 19, 2009
in column: Feature Story
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