The Ricochet Podcast - Rock Me Amadeus

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

We've got a special number for ya, folks. Instead of a guest or even politics, Charles Cooke, James Lileks and Peter Robinson talk football and music. Tune in for a recap on the Super Bowl—get Charles' take on the season and theLileksian review of the game's ads; plus the two of them give Peter a serious crash course in post-Beatles pop music! Sound clips from the open are from the State Farm, BMW, CeraVe ads, along with The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

That'll do it. That'll do it every time. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lileks and you are not going to believe what we talk about today. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I'm hearing neighbor. It's neighbor. That's what I said, neighbor. Hello, Mr. Walken. Does this table work for you? Yeah. Yeah. We like?

I just think it would be really nice if people think that I make this. So, that's my thing. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 679. I'm James Lalix here in Minneapolis, and I'm joined by Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook. And, gentlemen, it is past Valentine's Day, past the Super Bowl,

the era of love and organized state-sanctioned violence is past. But still, we can talk about these things. Valentine's Day? Eh, who cares. But Super Bowl, I know that you guys are anxious and desperate to talk about it. Because as we've learned from Twitter this week, it's rigged. It's all a psyop. And it's all, you know, the sheeple up here who just think that it's an honest contest need to understand what's really going on. And Charlie, you're the world expert now.

There has been an interview with you in the New York Times about this very subject of football. I'll go first and briefly, but that's just to tee you up. Like so much in my life, I came to football late and honestly didn't begin paying attention to it until my own boys began playing high school football, at which point I began to realize it's an extremely intricate game. And on any given play, it is simply impossible to watch all 11 little contests that are taking place, to put it in a crude way. You just can't take it in. Therefore, once you begin to realize what's going on, once you begin to realize what the various assignments are, you feel a kind of richness about the game i missed that but then you turn to the neighbor what did what did what did that lineman just do i all right over to you charlie you're quicker you're quicker on the uptake than i am on these you seem to indicate peter the difficulty of fixing something that is that complex we play, week after week, team after team. It's nonsense.

It's nonsense on stilts, but still they believe it. Of course, they believe lots of things. So, Charles, your view on the contest that we just saw. It was an exceptional game. The whole wonderful Americanness of the event, from its commercial attributes to its songs to the game itself, is just a joy. And I am always deflated when it's over. Yeah, I must say, despite my admonitions of the conspiracy theorists, I'm much more open to the idea that it's rigged this year,

given what happened to the Jaguars. That would make me feel better. They were 8-3 in cruising. What kind of fan are you when you can't even pronounce the name of the team? You know, I met a lady last week in Miami, and she made me say the name three times because she thought it was so funny. Hey, you don't have to worry. We had a quarterback who went out because somebody with laser vision

or a blow dart up in the stands took aim at his ankle. That's a conspiracy we're going with here. You did not have the kind of season that we did. But yes, yes. So it was an extraordinary game um lots of everything that you want from it but what i find also fascinating is the ancillary commercial aspect to it because at the same time you have this contest this ballet of violence here you also have and now we're going to break for what we believe to be the creme de la creme of the this particular artistic slash commercial medium advertising and you see the spots and so i would just like to know if i because i think that's something more interesting to our broader broader audience than the game itself in the contest what you

thought about those commercials what they said about the state of the culture the state of the art of the industry etc uh james you're doing exactly what unnerves me a little bit about the Super Bowl. What unnerves me a little bit about the Super Bowl is the extent to which it tails away from actual football. Now, so I divide that into two subcategories, and we'll see again what Charlie has to say. Charlie's given all of us much more thought, and he has an English accent, so he sounds smarter anyway. But we'll see what Charlie has to say. Charlie's given all of this much more thought, and he has an English accent, so he sounds smarter anyway. But we'll see what he has to say.

There's the category that, of course, the game took place in Las Vegas, but there's a category that makes, for example, the halftime shows, I detest. Because they have nothing to do with music. They're just becoming pure spectacle, pure sensory stimulation, light movement, noise. It's noise, not music. I don't like those. On the other hand, in this fractured society, this fractured time in which we live, football is one of the very few nonpolitical moments that we all have in common. The convening power of the game is enormous. And when there are advertisements that know that, that understand the reach, and that have a certain lightness of touch, that I do feel enhances the whole fun of the experience,

one of the biggest components of which is that you're sharing it with 100 million other Americans. And that's exactly why the CIA chose to take it over with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. So before we get to the ads, the game taught me something in that I have spent all year saying the kansas city chiefs aren't what they were i said it after they played the jaguars and the jaguars should have won i said it after their loss to the bills in december and i bet against them three times in the postseason and what i've learned is that after a while if a team that isn't quite good enough keeps winning it is good enough yes exactly you can't start with the premise and the thing is if they are put under pressure they come come out of it. And their defense is good enough, and Patrick Mahomes is a phenom, and they had enough offensively to get it done.

And all of the reasons that you can contrive as to why that's not going to happen this year, they just don't count if they keep winning games. Yes. I have to admit, there was several times this season, actually, I thought Green Bay outplayed the 49ers consistently, except for the third. There was a drive that the 49ers put together to score and win the game. I think that they put together eight plays in a row that worked. And aside from that, the other 50-some plays, Green Bay outplayed them. And I found myself saying, oh, the final score is deceptive.

And when you start saying the score is deceptive, you need to reexamine the way you're looking at the game. The other thing I'd add is that Andy Reid is a tough, patient, crafty coach. And this Super Bowl contest was two games. The first half was one game. And the second half was Andy Reid making adjustments, watching for his openings, tightening, tweaking the defense, putting Purdy under more pressure. I just, you have to give that tough old,

patient old, crafty old coach a certain amount of credit, I think. No doubt. No doubt. All right, to the ads. What did we make of the ads? I liked a few of them. I thought the Michael Cera ad was hilarious.

Yes. And I liked the Christopher Walken ad, partly because I'm a huge fan of people doing Christopher Walken impressions. And look up YouTube videos of people doing Christopher Walken impressions and look up YouTube videos of people doing Christopher Walken impressions. So this ad was tailored to me. Charlie, you are so American now. No matter how you mispronounce the name of your team. And I love Schwarzenegger, the sheer good-spiritedness of that, the willingness to engage in a touch of self-mockery. He's older now. He doesn't look the way he used to look, but he still has a sense of fun. James, you're the master of the commercial analysis.

What did you make of it? Well, this is the kind of nerd and geek I am about these things. When the Walken ad came on at the start of it, something in the back of my brain lit up, and I knew exactly where he was. He was walking through the hallway of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. And when we walked out to the next scene, to the alleyway, I thought, that's it. I've been there. I was there 14 years ago. Why do I remember that? I went back in my pictures and my videos and found the exact spot where Christopher Walken was standing. So I thought, wow, interesting, but not interesting to anybody else. This is the thing that I took away from all of them. There was a dominant color

that's been working in advertising for about a year or two, and it's this sort of metallic teal, turquoise-y blue tint that was saturating almost 80% of the ads last year. This year, it's down to about 20%. Now, the reason that they chose this color, I think, is fascinating because it's not a pleasant color. There's something very off-putting about it, something unnerving about it. And for some reason, it was used over and over again.

I went back. I found original examples of the ads last year that ran on YouTube and then compared them to the ones that I saw on television. And you could tell that they'd added the color and dialed it up because they're always playing with these things. Part of that is fashion. A certain color becomes hot and the rest of them have to jump on it. But part of it may be because they have data that says this color does this to people and everybody decides to do it. I don't know. I asked my daughter and she says, it's mostly just people following, you know, following what everybody else is doing. She's in the industry. This year, the color that is rising is red, which is interesting

because that plays into the whole, you know, satanic thing that we got going on here with Taylor Swift and the rest. That's what they're saying. It was interesting for the ads that blew up brands and did them absolutely no help whatsoever. There was a homes.com series of ads that are supposed to be these little stories, but they didn't work at all. It didn't land. None of them did. There was one for a crypto for a data security company that was preventing breaches. As a matter of fact, that's their slogan. We stop breaches, which is really dull. Huge ad.

And you could tell that they'd taken a four-minute spot and edited it down to this thing with the idea that you would go on the web and say, gosh, that was interesting. Let me see the whole thing. Same thing with the Dunkin' Donuts ad. In the Dunkin' Donuts ad, it worked because there was enough there that we saw to make it interesting of itself. The other ad was just a complete and total waste of money. So, yes, some of the ads, the more focused and tight they were, the better at introducing a brand. Although there's one called Poppy, which is supposedly some sort of soda that's good for your gut health. And the more they mentioned gut health in reference to Poppy,

I kept thinking, it's Poopy. Poopy is the name of this soda, and that's just not working for me. There was Timu, which had a big buy, and attempted to introduce the brand name to everybody through a series of really circa 2016 animation. Not very good. And Timu is this reseller of cheap Chinese crap that if you're on Twitter,

you see the ads for it all the time. It's making a big bid to be the next Amazon. And everybody I saw who saw the ads kind of reeled back from it saying there's something dreadfully inauthentic about this. I don't like it. I don't like it at all. So, I saw who saw the ads kind of reeled back from it saying there's something dreadfully inauthentic about this. I don't like it. I don't like it at all. So, I mean, it's fascinating. Was it as clever and intelligent as previous years? I would like to say no, but then again, everybody says that. Everybody says every year. I don't go to the last year.

The most thing to remember, take away probably, is bringing back the Clydesdales. Because after the damage that Bud had with their whole brand, bringing back the Clydesdales and then ending the spot with a dog licking the muzzle of a Clydesdale was really about as naked an appeal to love us again as you can possibly get. And it probably worked. And if they... Not on me, it didn't. I know, but it may have with some. But then they made the mistake later of having the Clydesdales wash somebody's feet. And that just didn't work at all.

Where else could you get a review of Super Bowl ads like that? Where? Nowhere else. i'm just going to start only i'm kidding about the clivesdale washing somebody i know yes no no no all right because that one was that one really just it sparked more controversy more discussion online than i than any other ad that i'd seen which i of course was their intention yeah but you know you talk about the country being divided. There's a perfect symmetry to that because last year I wrote about this ad

that I thought was really good from the same people. Yeah, it was. It essentially said, look, we all disagree and shout at each other, but don't. And there was this outcry from the left against that one because some of the people who were depicted being shouted at were Donald Trump-loving MAGA types. Who should be shouted at. Right.

And the left said, oh, well, look, Jesus would have loved shouting at them. And I wrote a post at National Review saying, look, I'm not actually a Christian, but I was raised Christian, and I don't think Jesus made exceptions for people who wear red hats. And this is a good ad with a good message. So this year was the turn of the right to get really angry at the Jesus hat. There's a nice symmetry to that.

They're doing something right. They've annoyed everyone. They have annoyed everyone. And it did, the visual language that they used, these very striking saturated Renaissance tableaus, I think, was very effective from their previous stuff. Because when you saw one scene, just as your brain processed the dynamic, they moved to the next. I mean, it was a good piece of work.

Of course, what we don't know is how much product they moved. There are ad agencies all over the country right now trying to analyze tweets and is Bud Light moving off the shelves faster? It'll be a few days before they know that. Anyway. Well, Bud Light is dead. I think what Anheuser-Busch was trying to do there was contagion. They didn't want the whole Bud Light thing to completely spill into the Bud brand. I mean, I think they've written off Bud Light completely.

I see. Peter mentioned the music, and the music, ever since Prince's Halftime Show, which is the greatest ever, I agree, it's been generally meretricious. A couple of years ago, I mean, last year, it was dark and messy, and it had a tone to it that I just didn't like.

This year, I don't care. There wasn't a song in there that made me, that made me perk up my ears. What's interesting is at one point, Usher walks over to Alicia Keys, who's sitting at this piano, which it looks like they, they,

they chopped out the tongue of Godzilla and lacquered it. This huge weird thing. And she's playing, she starts to sing. And the first few notes that she said are, were, shall we say, inexpertly delivered. There was a frack frack a crack a sourness to it but she recovered and frankly if i was asked to sing

at the super bowl and i turned to the camera and there were 127 million people looking at me live i would improvise what had happened into some sort of commercial for depends because i wouldn't be able to speak and i would have emptied my bladder, my bowels. She recovered nicely. But here's the thing. When they uploaded it to YouTube, they corrected her singing. They corrected her notes. So she no longer has to live under the shame, the ignominy of messing those few notes. now it's been corrected and this is very bad this is a very bad thing to do is this not literally orwellian yes this is extremely creepy and is going to lead to the opposite of the outcomes that we are told flow from the super bowl which is that all of us have a shared experience and shared memories yep because those who saw it live

are going to have different conception of what happened than the people who watch it subsequently or those who say hey remember when that happened and then you go to the record and it didn't or at least it seems as if it didn't i find this really creepy and i've written a lot about this because this is an unexpected turn if you go back to the birth of the internet and i was an early adopter at or at least my parents were. I had a website when I was about 10. I've always been an internet guy. What year was that? 1994.

Okay. The promise of the internet was, look, finally, all of that George Orwell stuff can't happen. We have this distributed system that is not centrally controlled or controllable and as such any piece of information can be copied infinitely or put in different places or hosted in different ways such that the central state in a tyrannical society or even the cia in a non-tyrannical society can't do anything about it and yet what we've actually started to do voluntarily is the opposite

and it is voluntary there's one example of it that i think is really interesting but there was a movie a few years ago called juno i'm sure you saw it. Written by a woman from the Twin Cities, yes. Yeah, so there's an actress in it called Ellen Page, who at that point was a woman and her name was Ellen. And she was in the movie as Ellen. And it said Ellen

on the DVD cover and Ellen in the credits. She changed her name and decided that she was actually a man. Fine. I'm not getting into the details of that. Whether you think that's great or bad, it's not the point.

The point is now, if you look up the movie Juno on any single service that people watch movies on, whether that's Netflix, Apple, Amazon, whether you're buying a digital copy of it it doesn't say ellen page it says elliot page oh which is to say that the history of the movie the thing that actually happened when i went to the movie theater has gone at the end of the movie, in the credits, it says Elliot Page.

They redid the credits. And that's voluntary. That's not because President Biden came in and said, extirpate that. No, that is a voluntary decision. And it is really creepy. Imagine if Audrey Hepburn had at some point in the 1970s said, I am now a man. Oscar Hepburn. Yeah.

And all of the movies had been changed. And my dad would say, well, hang on a minute. When I used to go to the movies, it was Audrey Hepburn. But the only thing I could find was Oscar Hepburn. I think that's a very weird thing. And we've decided to do this without being forced to. I'm looking right now at Amazon. Do you remember Jan Morris? Yes.

The English writer who died last year, as I recall, perhaps a year before, was one of the first whatever it's called, and used to be James Morris. And by the way, James-Jan Morris, I thought was a beautiful prose writer, a little thin sometimes on the content, but the prose was so beguiling, you'd read page after page even so. And I'm just checking now, he, when he was happy to be, or at least when he was a he, wrote a trilogy on the British Empire called Farewell the Trumpets, and I see some old copies of the individual. Heaven's Command was one of the books, and that's advertised as by James Morris, but we see here Farewell the Trumpets by Jan Morris. It's happening all over. Yeah. It was Wendy Carlos who supplanted Walter Carlos,

so I mean, that goes back to the 70s. But the thing is, is what's next about this? If we can correct her performance because it's what she actually intended and everybody knows that she that i mean she did those were the notes that she was supposed to sing they were just a little bit off so what's the harm in auto-tuning that when we auto-tune every other performance what's possibly the harm well because it was done post-hoc well i know that exactly right right but so what's the harm? Well, because it was done post-hoc. Well, I know that. Exactly right. Right. But so what's the harm, really, if a candidate goes out and makes a speech and uses the wrong word,

in using AI to replace the word that he said and to fix his mouth so that he says the proper word? I mean, the word was there in the speech. The word was there in the teleprompter. What's the harm in fixing it? What's the harm, then, what's the harm in fixing it? What's the harm then in really doing it in real time? And AI will be able to do this six weeks from now to be able to make sure that the proper words are said or to get in front of the candidate if he's starting to go with something that isn't on the script. We don't want him to say that. What's the harm in using AI to keep Biden

from wandering off and gaffing and saying that he met somebody who's been dead for 30 years? I mean, after all, we're just framing the truth in a more truthy way. So I was, you know, the other day I was listening to Grieg's Piano Concerto, and there are many versions of it. They're all great, but my favorite is actually a mono recording that I think was reworked into stereo in 1960 with Leon Fleischer with George Sale and the Cleveland Orchestra. It was the first version that I had, the first one that I had when I was growing up, and I listened to it. And there's a part in the cadenza, these rolling chords. And at the end of it, there is this spectacular concatenation of dissonant notes that sounds like the piano is dealing with the end result of eating a burrito. It's just wow. And I always thought that was a very modern thing for Grieg to put in.

It wasn't later until I went back and listened to other versions of it that I realized that Fleischer made a mistake. He screwed up that recording. His hands got tangled. If he'd held them up, it would have been like a Tom and Jerry cartoon where all, you know, he's at the piano and his fingers are all knotted together. It was a mistake. And there was too much for them to do, apparently, to go back and re-record it. Now, we could go back now with computers and fix that. So that Fleischer, who was a beautiful pianist, just does it flawlessly like Rubenstein and Bernstein and everybody else. Yes, but what we can't, go on.

But we mustn't. We mustn't, but also, James, if we do, you will be able to say, hey, I have physical copies of this that differ from the altered form. What freaks me out is that if you only have online distribution for certain things whether it's an article a national review that is only on the website or a netflix show that is only streamed and you fix that in inverted commas well then you've actually rewritten history and no one can prove otherwise i know that's the thing i I tell somebody that that's not right. Fleischer blew he fracked that like nobody's business

the first time. Well, prove it. I suppose you believe that, you know, I suppose you believe the Fruit of the Loom logo didn't have a cornucopia. So, yes, I have copies of these things, and I have hard drives backed up, but I feel like I'm part of some Fahrenheit 451 group, which gets together

and talks about the things that are no longer, know that are that are no longer allowed to be spoken of so i worry about that and people's just absolute acquiescence in it because you know who cares we all ought to care because this is i mean i mean you're right about it being voluntary the strange thing about 1984 is it turned out to be a completely voluntary thing to do the government big brother didn't have to put listening devices in all of our homes. We did that. We did that. Right.

Telescreens and the like, all just waiting for the wake word. Peter, speaking of music, though, I know that what you really wanted out of this was sort of like a Stars on 45 thing, where they did all your favorite Beatles songs set to the same beat, and you could just nod your head along with what is regarded as the greatest songbook of the post-war era, right? Something like that. A listener to this podcast, an old friend of mine whom I haven't actually set eyes on in 40 years, Michael Garrett, at one point I said to you and Rob, when Rob was on the podcast, he's traveling today, that I had just discovered the Beatles. And of course, you both rolled your eyes and laughed. And my friend Michael Garrett said, no, actually, tell us about this.

So I'm going to tell you why I'm ignorant of pop music. I'm going to tell you three groups, three artists that I think actually are musicians, and then I would like you briefly to tell me what's wrong with me. And then at somewhat more length, you can go ahead and discuss, tell me whether I'm right or wrong about the value that I now assign to these artists. Ladies and gentlemen, the idea of somebody waking up from a coma and discovering the Beatles is a fascinating subject. And it's one of those things we're going to get to right after the break because I know that you want to hear it.

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10 off your order today and we thank fume for sponsoring the ricochet podcast all right peter you have the floor the podium the microphone all right i'm going to treat the two of you as therapists. Here's the story. When I was a kid, Charlie, I predate you by some years. When I was a kid, we had a thing called a stereo in our home, and it was in the living room in a place where it was perfectly visible because it was considered a nice piece of furniture. A console. Console, exactly. Stereo console. Both words got used. It was that lavish. However, we were much too poor to buy very many records. But my father found a bargain and bought the

Reader's Digest collection of great band music with the result that when I was a kid, what got played in my house over and over and over again was my father's youth, not mine. On the other hand, I still think Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington was a good, Benny Good, I still think that they shouldn't have been as completely forgotten as they are today, but those I thought were real musicians. Don't ask me why. And furthermore, as I went through high school and college, we're talking about the 70s, Charlie, before you came into this world. Somehow or other, I don't know, I was really, at a very young age, I became an old curmudgeon. I somehow condescended to contemporary music and just didn't think much

of it. Okay. So, that's one question that could be touched upon briefly, what the hell was going on with me? But here's what's happened all these decades later. My wife was traveling. I'm fine during the day when she's traveling, but I can't sleep at night. And I found myself watching a documentary about Paul McCartney, and it interviewed the contemporary Paul McCartney. And I looked at him, I looked at the way he talked about the 60s, I looked at the way he talked about how they composed their music, the rhythms, the sounds, how he added a, I can't remember the word for it, but there's a particular kind of trumpet, very high notes. Pickle or trumpet.

Thank you. Exactly how he added a pickle. And I thought to myself, oh, my goodness. This man is a serious musician. I don't know whether he's memorized scores of Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, but he thinks musically. He's aware of... And then I thought to myself, what I who paid no attention at all to the Beatles can hum to myself, let it be yesterday, obla di obla da. People who can produce melodies that stay happily in the minds of people such as me who essentially ignored them when they were at center stage,

the sheer musicality, that is a feat. And I have been a fool for ignoring it. Item one of three, but the other two are much quicker like millions of people apparently i somehow or other tripped across on youtube or twitter or something like that joni mitchell at last year's newport festival this 80 year old woman who's in bad health singing both Sides Now, a song that dates back to when she was in her 20s and she's now 80 years old. Her voice has dropped almost an octave, it's husky from, she's a perpetual smoker apparently, which may have led to her health troubles. But the rendition was sort of magnificent. She had kind of reinvented the way to handle this.

She slowed it down. She made it elegiac in a way that it didn't quite used to be. It wasn't a young girl who was confused by the world. It was an old woman now. And it was just heart-wrenching. But you could see this person was a professional. She was a real musician. She'd taken the text and the music and reworked it, phrasing, intonation, all still there. Fantastic. And I thought to myself, how did I miss this? Final point. The one piece of music that I did love when it happened, although again, Charlie, this predates you, was Don McLean, Miss American Pie, or American Pie, I guess is the title of the song. And that stayed in my head. I hummed it all summer long in the summer of 1976, as I recall, when I was an intern at the state capital in

Albany, New York. And so, I've never understood what it meant. I've never had the slightest clue what the lyrics refer to, although it seemed kind of wildly enjoyable and almost effervescent in its energy, but elegiac at the same time, A. And B, whatever happened to Don McLean? Why was that his, okay. That's it, boys. You may now psychoanalyze me, give me an education, make of this what you will. Charlie, you were raised as a musician. You were a choir boy in Cambridge, which means that you were taught music in a very serious fashion. So there must be at least some residue of that professionalism in you. All right, over to you guys.

Well, there is. It's funny you mention your upbringing, though, because I had the same thing. It's just that I also was interested in the music that was being produced when I was younger. My dad had an enormous collection of records, and he recorded them onto tape for

me, and I had a player in my room. So I had all the Beatles albums when I was five or six, And I had Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and The Who and pretty much everything. And then I also followed music that was current. And then at school, I had a great classical music education. So I had the same thing you did. I just had the rest. You had the rest on top of it on top of it i think the piccolo

story that you identify is actually quite funny because that was used on penny lane yes yes that's the double a side in 1967 it was actually recorded during the sergeant pepper sessions the guy who played it was a fabulous musician called david m, who was one of the great piccolo trumpet players. And Paul McCartney had not come up with that idea himself. It was suggested by George Martin, the Beatles producer who was classically trained. But McCartney, because he's a genius, understood broadly what it was that David Mason needed to play. So McCartney conveyed to David Mason, here's what I want it to sound like.

And then he would say yes or no. But I eventually get the take that you hear on the record today. And McCartney, who was really good at motivating people, but wasn't classically trained enough to understand when the limits of the instrument had been reached, says to david mason that was really good david but i think you could do it just a little bit better and david mason exploded at him he said no one could do it better that was a perfect take you're never going

to get a better take than that and he was right and george martin diplomatically came in and said i think that's perfect and now you hear that on that record. So McCartney understood how to use this stuff, but the idea was that of his classically trained producer. So how much was George Martin and how much was the Beatles themselves? They were sort of geniuses, weren't they? Oh, no question about it. Off the charts, they had three wonderful songwriters with George Harrison harrison as well but they needed in my view they later resented this but they needed in my view george martin to pull them together and george martin was interesting because he wasn't phased by anything if they came to him completely high strumming the same chord and singing the lyrics from the Tibetan Book of

the Dead, he found a way to turn that into a song, which they did with Tomorrow Never Knows. When McCartney would write these astonishingly beautiful ballads, ballads that have the same harmonic characteristic as, say, Purcell, then George Martin would say, well, we'll use a harpsichord and we'll bring in trumpets or trombone. And he just knew how to do that. And then McCartney was good enough to understand how to utilize that idea that he probably wouldn't have had himself. By the way, is George Martin still alive? We're talking about... Unfortunately not.

Right. So we have McCartney and Ringo Starr still, and that's all. And Ringo Starr was not... Ringo Starr was a more than adequate drummer, all right as a vocalist, but he was not a composer. Is that correct? Correct. He couldn't write. He's not a great vocalist, although his performance on With Little Help From My Friends is good.

But I would quibble with more than adequate drummer. I think Ringo Starr is one of the greatest rock drummers in the history of the world. Oh, my goodness. Because... And I'll'll let james talk sorry he started me on the beatles the thing is with ringo is it's not just that he's an extremely good and tight drummer it's that he understood what every song needed instinctively and so you get these peculiar peculiar rhythms on say Ticket to Ride where he makes the song move or in both Revolver and Sgt. Pepper his drumming is almost melodic he's almost using the toms as instruments that are are tied to certain notes and you get this odd non-rock drumming was baroque drumming on that album that no one had done before and that no one has done since so i i would put him at the top of

his profession he's not the most technically gifted drummer he's not john bonham of led zeppelin or keith moon of the who but for the beat, he couldn't have been more perfect. Right. Bonham or Moon in the Beatles would have been a disaster. Yeah. Take your three points backwards, Peter. American Pie, yes. How we learned to endure that song when it came on. DJ's friend,

it's like one of those tunes, you put it on and you know you've got time to run to the cannon back. It's a long allegory about American music and society. Oh, the gesture, the gesture is supposed to be Bob Dylan, and the day the music died was the day that Buddy Holly's plane went down with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. And I, you know, while that may be true, I'm more interested in the Holly part of the story

rather than the Donald McLean recap of it, because Buddy Holly was a great, fresh American talent who had some great ideas and really made some extraordinary music. The rest of the guys in the plane, not so much. Big Bopper was a DJ who just lucked into a novelty song. But Buddy Holly was a tragic loss. Then again, Buddy Holly at that time was touring

Iowa at that point in his career. Really made you realize that if he'd lived, he was covering other people's work by then. If he'd lived, he would have probably been eclipsed completely by what came along in the wake of the Beatles. Not so much the Beatles type stuff, but the psychedelia and the post-psychedelia and the rest of the crap and the dreck that infected the basement of the 60s. And Buddy Harley, if he lived, would be doing casinos. And that would be kind of sad, but it also meant that

all of us could have possibly seen him, which would have been a gift. To the next one, to Joni Mitchell. I never liked Joni Mitchell. I found that hippy-dippy stuff to just be annoying. And yes, both sides, and that was a sweet tune. no fellow feeling with, because oddly enough, I felt no connection or desire to claim that I could possess the music of the people immediately before me. The music of the people in the past, the 40s, the 50s, the classical, yes, yes, I could connect to that. But the stuff of the immediate boomers from the Beatles to the Stones, the rest of it was somebody else's stuff.

And it was on the other side of a wall, a cultural wall that I didn't share. I grew up in the 70s, and I may have peeked my head over the wall and taken a look at what I regarded as the nadir of 60s counterculture, but it wasn't me, and I didn't want anything to do with it. It was flower power. It was groovy. It was acid. I didn't like it. That said, if you put a gun to my head tomorrow and said, you are going to a desert isle, you can take one record. It would be Joni Mitchell. It would be Hajira by Joni Mitchell, because I think it's the most, welling up as I say, I think it's the most beautiful, mystical, romantic thing i've ever

heard in my life i listened to it about every two or three years or so and i'm i'm moved beyond compare it it when i first heard it in 1978 79 it hit me where i live like few things ever had and so i've never been apart from it it's it's discursive. It's liquid. It's basically heard on electric guitar. And Jaco Pastore is a fretless bass guy who is a marvel. The Beatles, same thing as I said before about Joni Mitchell and the rest of them. They were on the other side of the wall. And I really didn't care much for their later work. The middle period doesn't do a lot for me. I could recognize what was great about them, though. And that's the thing. Even if you're not a Beatles guy, and I was never a Beatles guy to the point where it was a self-identification and I had to know everything

about them and the rest of it, I was aware that this was absolutely incredible stuff. And even if I didn't get Day in the Life, I got the reason for the chord at the end and the chaos that came before it. But for me, it's all the early songs. It's all the early stuff. What was British music, frankly, Charlie, before the Beatles came along? It was a renaissance of American traditional jazz, right? Hard Day's Night was its trad dad, where all the kids come from the school and pile into the soda joint and start listening to clarinet and banjo stuff taken out of Dixieland America. It's hilarious. No wonder the Beatles came along and were so popular.

British popular music was an absolute just, my friend Dennis King will probably chide me for this, but he was part of it. It was boring. It was really boring. When you listen to Hard Day's Night, that first chord is a galvanizing event. It's a gong, it's a hammer that shatters every single musical preconception about the culture that was in place at the time. It is just magnificent. And then they go on from that to this great tune. And those early songs took everything that had been done before in blues and rock in America and the Buddy Holly, the Chubby Checkers, the Rock Around the Clock, the Bill, everything,

and created something because they were compositional geniuses that had chord changes and under harmonies and the rest of it that just remade it and created a songbook that was the equal of the american songbook that that preceded the war so yeah so yeah to come to the beatles late in life is a boon it's a mitzvah it's a blessing because you now can hear it truly without any of the youthful passions that generally attend music like this when you're younger. You can look at it dispassionately, and you can realize and see the genius that is there. And McCartney is an amazing—I'm not a Lennon guy at all, personally, or his subsequent contributions sort of prove the point.

But Paul McCartney, who everybody regarded as this purveyor of saccharine melodies, this guy who ran off with wings and turned out silly stuff. I'm sorry, the wings, a lot of the wing stuff is great, but his effortless ability to channel and to summon beauty from out of nowhere, it seems, without breaking a sweat. He did a song with Elvis Costello called Veronica that is, I mean, and Elvis Costello, I think, is one of the greatest musicians of the rock era as well. And the two of them together create something, a melody you never heard before in your life, but that you are sure existed in some pure platonic form out there, just waiting for somebody of their talent to find it and speak it.

So yeah, McCartney's great. Joni Mitchell, that one thing I love. And Don McLean, whatever happened to him? People were afraid that the second follow-up hit was going to be 19 minutes long instead of 17, so they didn't sign him to another album. Nah, he had more than just that one song. That whole album is terrific,

with Vincent and Empty Chairs and The Grave and Fatima. That's a good record. It's not my style of stuff. I'm not into the acoustic singer-songwriter stuff. But yes, I'm not going to discount that it has its merits or that people like it. That's the thing.

McCartney and Elvis Costello worked together on a record called Flowers in the Dirt. And it has the most terrific song on it called That Day Is Done, which everyone should go and listen to. It's a beautiful song. Charlie, you on Joni Mitchell. What's your view?

I am not the world's biggest Joni Mitchell fan. That isn't to say. Charlie, you on Joni Mitchell. What's your view? I am not the world's biggest Joni Mitchell fan. That isn't to say I don't think she's really talented. It's just not quite my thing. But Both Sides Now is one of the greatest songs ever written. I was listening the other day to something, because I'm doing on my website the bottom 50 songs of

1964. Because everybody knows the top 10, but what are the bottom ones? Are they any good? Turns out that they are. I own the top 300 songs of every year of the 20th century going back to about 1910. Thank you, Usenet. And as such, I want, I can dip in and find the stuff that didn't sell. And you're surprised sometimes. You don't know, for example, that Booker T, they did another version of Green Onions called More Green Onions, which is essentially green onions with a couple of different things thrown in.

And Green Onions is an absolutely fantastic piece, and Mo Green Onions is not, which is why it's at number 285. Then you find some sobby Italian singer in the teen heartthrob mold in 1963 with a backing female chorus and the echoey strings a la Owen Bradley and the rest of it. And you realize that this was the stuff

that the Beatles just came in and kicked out of the room. It would persist for a while, but it's remarkable. You would find the funkiest gut-bucket gritty blues at number 299, but that was still something they played on the air. It was probably regarded as race music down in the South and the rest of it, but the diversity of voices and sounds on the radio in the 1960s was really quite extraordinary,

and I at least was there to pick up part of that, even into the 70s. Was it the same for you, Charlie, or were you listening to Radio Luxembourg? My dad listened to Radio Luxembourg. He would go to bed at night and pretend he was asleep, and then he would lie under the covers with this crystal set that he had

and listen to Radio Luxembourg, which was the only place that he could get the records that had been banned for whatever reason by the British government. People in America forget or don't know how censorious the BBC was at the behest of the british government until about 1968 a lot of beatles songs were not played on the radio you mentioned a day in the life that was banned because it makes an apparent reference to heroin and talks about getting high some of the beatles 1966 album tracks weren't allowed to be played on the radio and anything that even remotely smacked of counterculture, including Bob Dylan was blacklisted. So the only place you could hear it was from this boat that was parked in international waters off the British Isles

and broadcast in. Charlie, was your father a musician? No, but his father was a concert pianist. So that jumped for generations. I see. I see. Okay. so next question. Where do these people come from? It's not a put-on, it's not a made-up backstory. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were both, what is it called, Liverpudlians? Is that the way? Liverpudlians. They both came from working class families they had i think

english educations in those days just the sort of standard working class education was not bad but there was nothing fancy about them they didn't go to a school like the one excuse me i'm not implying there's anything fancy about you either but they didn't have a rigorous classical education at all where did george martin come from uh or or come to that we're talking about people who seem in some strange way one-offs george martin was classically trained i just think when you're talking about paul mccartney as opposed to many other rock musicians you are asking well where did mozart come from yes I'm not saying that they are the same thing but no no no Paul McCartney's talent is there's nothing that explains them no it's so intuitive and prodigious that you could have put him on a desert island with no

one around him and only a guitar and he'd have worked out how to do what he did. And Lennon was the same. So it's tough with the Beatles compared to some other bands where you can sort of see how they got there and who their influences were and how they jammed it out. Because McCartney, yesterday came to McCartney in a dream, fully formed. That's Mozart-level composition. Mozart used to wander around and you know he'd be in the supermarket and i'm obviously kidding and he would just come just go oh the 40th symphony

and then he would go home and write it down i thought this was a lie i thought this was one of these apocryphal stories but he wrote the overture to don giovanni at three o'clock in the morning while completely drunk on the day that it premiered because he hadn't done it so you can't ask the question with him or beethoven well where does it come from it just does and i know this is william f buckley's line right that this is the moment when he is most convinced there's a god is when he listens to mozart's requiem well but it does seem to come from somewhere outside they do seem to be transcribing the music of the spheres in some weird way but the creative acts are like that at their best and i'm not comparing any of us to mozart or paul mccartney but you know that when

you're writing something and you stop writing and you feel as if you're taking dictation, that it is coming from another place besides the frontal lobe here that you're just, you're tight. That is what they have. And it is something that is a combination of innate ability and knowing how to exercise that power. So he's right mccarty being on a desert island but at the same time the fact that he was able to be in a studio with other people and producing something um meant that he did more and the more you do i think the wider the pipe gets so that it does come a little bit more easier i mean if mozart had never written a symphony before the number 40th wouldn't have come to him in the supermarket at that point of his life.

It's the fact that 39 preceded it that had shaped his brain in the way that it did. Rossini, the story goes, wrote the Overture for Marriage of Figaro. No, not Figaro, but... William Tell. William Tell Overture. The story was that he was so lazy, he wrote it in bed, and the pages fell out, and rather than actually get up and get the pages he just wrote the other one and that's the one that we have i don't believe it but it's kind of a fun tale you know it's interesting though how some of this genius is able to intuit things that other people needed to be taught the second beatles album with the

beatles in england they were different in america until the mid 60s has a song on it which is full of aeolian cadences and a reviewer pointed this out to john lennon and said you chose to use aeolian cadences and john lennon said i don't know what that is that sounds like an exotic bird i know of course they didn't he didn't know what it was but he still knew how to use them i find that really interesting and then yes but then there were there are hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who know what aeolian cadence is but couldn't use them in a useful way if their life depended on it could use the phrase in astonishing that pink floyd's latest effort in the phrygian mode and you know yeah no exactly. Sometimes the more you know, the less you can do

because you're held back by constraints. A serious songwriter would never have begun Hard Day's Night with that chord. It doesn't have anything to do with it. They would have gone to the song. F at 9. Extraordinary. Well, here's the thing. We should probably get out of here.

And we haven't even touched on all the other music that Peter doesn't know, but is now going to go out and go forth and explain. Charles, tell him the next thing that should probably get out of here. And we haven't even touched on all the other music that Peter doesn't know, but is now going to go out and go forth and explain. Charles, tell him the next thing that he should go out and find. Well, do you like Pink Floyd? No. You don't like them or you don't know them? Well, I think I know.

I think I heard them once at some fraternity basement at Dartmouth College and didn't like it. That sounds about right. Yeah, yeah. The actual greatest guitar solo probably of the 1970s is by David Gilmour with Pink Floyd. You know what I'm talking about, Charlie? Comfortably numb? Yeah, I think so. I think so, too.

It gets a lot of, you know, it's the go-to one for the greatest. Well, the other go-to piece, although you will have been exposed to this band in some form is the beach boys ah yes you're familiar with the song god only knows the greatest song yes yes yes yes okay so you do have that no no but you're about to call it the something song the greatest something i think that's the greatest pop song ever written really i do ever written or the way it's the way it's mixed and both all right is that from the famous pet album pets or sounds that's right and it inspired the beatles to do sergeant pepper and all that came afterwards because they were so envious of it and they should be envious of it

it is an absolute masterpiece he writes himself into a corner and he has to get himself out of it he manages to do it he played it to his dad this is he is brian wilson correct yeah sorry this is brian wilson i know we're running over time but this no no no this story kills me he was this remarkable genius his dad was this driving force behind the band which in some way was good because it created some motivation but his dad also had terrible judgment and he didn't know what was good and what wasn't and anyway in 1966 brian wilson writes this song and he plays it to his dad and his dad says it's no good why don't you go back to writing you know 12 bar songs about cars

that's what people want and i just think that's the most that must have been the most crushing thing to do i mean it would be like beethoven writing you know cavatina or something and then playing it to his dad and his dad says nah i just i just can't get my head around this but that's that's actually happened quite a lot in history as i mentioned before i have a friend who uh was in a boy band in the 50s and 60s in england uh and uh last time we were there we they they'd uncovered more footage of them performing on the uh charlie helped me out more come and uh wise they were a staple on more come and wise for years and they did all kinds of bits for them and i'm watching my friend in his 20s here just swinging along and doing well with his two brothers who had to memorize every single step. And one of his brothers became a plumber, and the other just sort of drifted into

other things, but Dennis stayed with it and taught himself more and more as he went along. So he willed himself into being as a musician, really. Sort of this, the father formed this band, shoved guitars in their hands and put them on tour until they were actually selling records and doing well. That's awesome. George Harrison asked for an autograph, by the way. Oh, really? They loved the King brothers. But Dennis went on to learn how to write music, learn how to compose music. And he ended up writing one of the most beloved, apparently, musical themes for British television, a show called Black Beauty.

And did all of the music for Lovejoy with Ian McShane. Did bawdy musicals like Privates on Parade, which was his, and carved out quite a career for himself as a musician. Now, and he knew everybody at the time. So you bring up a composer from the time, and he'll tell you some stories, how nobody liked

John Barry, as a matter of fact, and on and on, but that's another day. So whenever we think of the people who are the geniuses, from whom it just flows naturally like water, we have to think of all the other people for whom it is a job. They're good at it, and they're very talented, but they don't have the luxury of having a theme of great beauty descend in their head,

as with Wilson or McCartney or even Costello for that point. It's a job, and I love those guys. I love the guys who just. It's a job. And I love those guys. I love the guys who just, that's their job. And they can pick up a guitar and they can play an extraordinary solo that they never wrote and probably never could come up with. But damn, they can do it. They can do it well. And then there are guys like Brian Setzer.

I think you might like Brian Setzer, Peter. He's my age. He lives here. He started the rockabilly craze back in the 80s, which really wasn't much of a craze, and he's still doing it. He produces some of the most American music possible in rockabilly fashion, and he's a fantastic guitarist. Other than that, I don't know who I would recommend, but I'm going to send you some. I'm also going to send you a link to the Reader's Digest Big Band Collection, which is available online. Is it really? Oh yeah, everything is. Everything is. I'm not sure whether or not they fixed the notes that were wrong here and there.

But it is. And I too grew up, my dad was a country Western guy, so we had all the country Western stuff. But there was something that my dad, he would buy over and over. He would buy a pop tune that Bobby Fullerer he'd buy this stuff if he grabbed him and he liked it and so i always had that in the back of the mind too and then i listened to disney compilations of their musicals to uh because that was music that was familiar to me and then moved into classical but always in the back always in the back always back there was the 1940s big ben big swing because that was my dad's era as well. And I finally rediscovered it when I was in my late 20s, early 30s, when one day Buck in the cutout bin took it home, Harry James dropped the needle and was transported.

And then it was Miller and Goodman and all the rest. And to this day, there's not a week that goes by before I don't be without listening to one of those guys and realizing how they had it. For that matter, and we should probably leave with this because it's out of copyright, I sent my daughter a copy of Happy Feet,

1930, King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, who was anything but the epitome of jazz, right, in our modern mind. A big stout guy with a little Hitler mustache and his hair plastered down. But he brought jazz to the masses, and he turned out this tune called Happy Days, which slaps, as the kids would say today.

It's all over the road. The solos, the changes in tempo, the changes. I mean, it's just a delight. And you can imagine people in 1930 in a room with this going full blast and everybody playing at the top of their lungs and the joy and the exultation, the absolute American originality coming out of this. Now we have this teeny little monotone version, but you can imagine what it was like at the time. Music, the 20th century, and the West is one of the greatest accomplishments that we have as a human race. Should we end there?

And by fume. And thanks, Charles, for showing up. Unless of you, Charles, has something else that you want to add to that? No, I was just going to ask you whether Bobby Fuller is the Bobby Fuller of the Bobby Fuller Four, who did that cover of I Fought the Law. Yes, indeed it was. And a tragic story, they found him dead in a car, burned with gasoline. One of the guys who was also in the band turned out to be, late from the crickets,

was Sonny Curtis, who wrote Love Is All Around, which is the Mary Tyler Moore theme song, which, of course, you knew. Charlie will now take us out by humming the Queen of the Night aria by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Goodbye, boys. Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius. Dr. Zaius.

Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.