newcritics

I had never heard this anecdote before. It’s from Jonathan Gould’s luminescent book on the Beatles, Can’t Buy Me Love:
“And Your Bird Can Sing” sounds like the second act of “She Said, She Said” — another song about personal pretention, sung by John to the accompaniment of George’s crazed, cacophonous guitar. [N.B., it should be [...]

(Crossposted at my joint)

John Lennon: The Life
Philip Norman
2008, Ecco, ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3
With several very large biographies of John Lennon in existence (most notably Ray Coleman’s Lennon [1984] and Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon* [1988]) and countless rehashings of the Beatles’ collective career (perhaps the most informative being Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from [...]

It’s a very nice thing indeed to collaborate with Blue Girl on these annual Christmas songs. In 2006, we did a very quiet, meditative, woody version of the Vince Guaraldi number, “Christmas Time Is Here”; for last year’s project we acknowledged the Inner Rockabilly, doing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Keep this up, we’ll have [...]

(Cross-posted at my hovel.)
Tom has asked us to honor the one-year anniversary of NewCritics by posting on “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year”. Fair enough — there have been many, but this is the latest one…

A friend, knowing the kind of research I’m doing for my book on [...]

Art by The Skimmer. I do wear suits like that pretty much every day.
Among all that it has wrought, the digital revolution has changed utterly the way we mere amateurs, without access to mindbogglingly expensive and carefully calibrated recording equipment, collaborate in the creation of music when we live hundreds of miles from each other. [...]

On a particularly savage bender last night — who knew that raspberries soaked in ether could be such a kick? — my consciousness faded like a blow to the back of the head just as an announcement came on the teevee that the third season of Deadwood had come out on DVD. This morning, [...]

Well that was me
Royal Iris
On the river
MerseybeatinÂ’
With the band
That was me
There will come a time — distressingly soon, I have a feeling — that the only Beatle who isn’t dead is Paul McCartney. I don’t say this because I have some inside track on the state of Ringo Starr’s health — I fondly wish him [...]

(Crossposted at my hovel)
An article in the latest New York Review of Books, a review of a book on the creation of the Royal Society of London, one of history’s premiere scientific bodies, had a passage that made me sit up and whinny. Under discussion is Francis Bacon:
After [Bacon's] death in 1626, his most imaginative [...]

A NewCritics/Neddie Jingo Exclusive!
Andy Partridge, founding genius of popcraft masters XTC, has reunited with his old bandmate Barry Andrews, the leading light of Shriekback, and that band’s drummer, Martyn Barker, to create a double-CD album of entirely improvised music. “Monstrance” was released in the U.S., on Partridge’s label APE, yesterday.
The phrase “entirely improvised music” [...]

(#2 in a series)
Recently, a dear friend lent me a guitar he wasn’t using.
Not just any guitar. He lent me a Rickenbacker 360-12:

You can be forgiven if the words “Rickenbacker 360-12″ don’t send shivers up your spine. Guitar fetishes quickly grow tiresome to the uninitiated, and it’s hilarious to me that adult men (I’ve [...]

(Cross-posted at my hovel.)
It was with a hearty whinny of joy that I stumbled quite by accident recently upon a rebroadcast on The Biography Channel of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” one of the Sherlock Holmes series made by Granada Television between 1984 and 1994. The prospect of spending even the merest hour [...]

As with any artform, the history of modern humor hopscotches from one cataclysmic breakthrough to another. The periods between these explosions are relatively stable; humorists and their students pick up and minutely examine the shards left by the blast, and strategize small new variations, insignificant new wrinkles, on their freshly detonated craft.
But what we [...]