John Lennon Knows Your Name 

Один из моих любимых альбомов Пола...он сильно недооценен, но это меня ничуть не смущает... пусть

Спасибо за поздравления, спасибо, что помните обо мне! Вам всего самого доброго!

Да, я был на двух его концертах, оба были великолепными, особенно первый в Лукке (Италия) запомнился...

Для меня каждый день - это день Битлз... не вижу причину отмечать особенно 16 января

Ну, наконец! Правда, сейчас эти права нужны несколько меньше, чем лет 30 тому назад... ну да лучше поздно, чем никогда

а сами компакты выглядели так (надо отметить, что производители не экономили на носителях, болванки были качественные)

Эти издания подчас радовали глубиной проникновения в тему и подробным и ясным анализом происхождения треков, которые мы знали только по записям или по голубым флекси... вот пример

Хотелось бы узнать, сохранилось ли у моих друзей по форуму что-то подобное... или все было в свое время благополучно выкинуто на свалку

А вот на тему дворах, в которых мы проводили так много времени (наверное, из-за скученности коммунальных квартир)

А вот сборник, очень кстати талантливо подобранная последовательность

Вот вам образчик этого жанра

Да, ledzep, sic transit gloria mundi,действительно, они выглядят довольно общипанными, несмотря на все свое более чем обеспеченное положение, это признак смены эпохи, я помню, в начале 90-х так же выглядела Марлен Дитрих, время проходит для всех, очень мало кто остается в веках, да и то, это бывает скорее возращение, нежели пребывание в благодати... будущие поколения вычленяют что-то из прошлого, что им созвучно и заставляют его звучать по новому... пример, вечнозеленого, даже не знаю, может быть Моцарт, может быть Бах, Бетховен, Чайковский, но все они прошли через период забвения... прежде чем вновь стать актуальными...

Действительно, мы не всегда помним о том, что именно Харрисон ввел моду на индийскую музыку, без него не было был большого пласта нью-эйжда, не было бы общего помешательства на Индии в нашем поколении

Возвращаюсь к теме:
Of George Harrison’s second incarnation on Revolver, Melody Maker said it best, crediting the Beatles on “Love You To” with “going the whole Indian hog.” From its first cascading arabesque of shimmery, bejeweled notes, the track unfolds like a musicological expedition East of Suez, as the first in a series of quixotic attempts to translate the formal elements of Indian raga into the format of Western pop. Though Paul adds a spot of harmony and Ringo a tambourine, the track is a one-Beatle show, spotlighting George alone, singing and playing the sitar to the rather shaky accompaniment of a tabla drummer, recruited from the Asia Music Circle, by the name of Anil Bhagwat. The track begins with an unaccompanied sitar prelude that corresponds to the ruminative, introductory movement of a raga known by the term alap. Filled with croaking drones, pregnant pauses, and softly elasticized notes, the effect is both a stereotypic evocation of the Mysterious East and a total surprise (in its very presence on a pop album). Eventually the sitar settles on a ceremonious eight-note riff that serves the song as a hook, the tabla come bounding in, and the song itself begins. Lyrically, “Love You To” is the pop equivalent of a carpe diem poem. It means to counterpoise an ecstatic and presumably Eastern sensibility (“Make love all day long! Make love singing songs!”) against a repressive and presumably Western one (the second verse refers darkly to “people standing round, who’ll screw you in the ground”). But the tone of George’s vocal is so priggish and judgmental that it’s hard to know which side he’s on. “Love You To” plays at metaphysics the way that other bad pop lyrics play at romance; it trades in puppy wisdom in place of puppy love.

And still, despite its shortcomings, the presence of this little outpost of internationalism on Revolver was a signal pop event. By inspiring other musicians to take up Indian instruments, or to simulate Indian tonality using electric guitars, it loosed upon the music scene a torrent of “raga-rock.” And as one of the most brazenly exotic acts of stylistic experimentation ever heard on a popular LP, the track represented a bold declaration of artistic autonomy on the Beatles’ part. It showed the extent to which recording stars who could afford to do so would henceforth do as they liked on their records, regardless of whether the results had any redeeming commercial value, or conformed in the least to the current stylistic parameters of pop. And for George Harrison himself, the track was the first overt manifestation of the Orientalist bent that would provide him with the sharply defined identity, as a musician and as a public personality, that had eluded him thus far.

2Макс Жолобов:
Простите, Макс... я понимаю, что не надо растекаться мыслию по древу

>Желательно, конечно, про Револвер, да. Это сейчас
>актуально прям очень-очень.

2ledzep:
Я очень любил фильм Oh, Lucky Man! Для меня он был настоящей Библией того времени... Когда я приехал в Англию в середине 80-х я с большим трудом достал VHS этого фильма и смотрел его несколько раз дома (до сих пор хранится как реликвия)... потом я помнится купил переиздание в начале нулевых на DVD из двух дисков

>2еж ушастый:
>>"hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way"
>вот ведь интересно, этот текст был мной переведён
>в детстве третьим после ComeTogether и Oh!Lucky Man
>и фраза, мне четырнадцатилетнему, не показалась
>ни сложной ни заумной - понятной и естественной
>, так же как catch up with the Sun...

Впрочем, я совершенно отвлекся от темы Револьвера... это оффтопик

In the blink of an eye, the musical setting has shifted from the orchestral uplift of strings and brass to the rawest variety of rock ’n’ roll. Instead of a grand symphonic ending, McCartney had chosen—at the last possible moment—to bring the Beatles and their listeners back to the place where it all began: before the marathon recording sessions, before the stadium concerts and provincial package tours, before the grueling one-nighters in dance halls and cellar dives—to the simple setting of John, Paul, and George, sawing away on their three guitars, as they had done in hotel rooms, dressing rooms, and before that in bedrooms, from the time George joined the Quarry Men eleven years before. The one concession to the whole incredible saga that had elapsed between then and now was the presence of Ringo Starr, the steady, solid drummer the Beatles had always lacked during their years of musical apprenticeship in Liverpool and Hamburg. In recognition of this, the next eight bars are given over to Ringo for his only drum solo on record, a barrage of brawny tom-tom figures (each of them followed by a moment in which he seems to pause for the approval of the others) underlain by the time-keeping pulse of his bass drum. Then a crescendo of steady eighth-notes orchestrates the reentry of the bass and rhythm guitar, vamping in flatted-seventh chords on an elementary tonic-subdominant cadence in A major. “Love you” the Beatles chant, until the bare alternation of A7 and D7 chords is joined by the four-note pickup of a searing lead guitar and the start of an instrumental round-robin composed of nine two-bar solo breaks in which Paul, George, and John (in that order) trade licks, with each guitarist playing off or building on his predecessor’s effort. Recorded live in the studio, these rotating two-bar solos are like little musical character sketches, in which each of the Beatles assumes his customary role: Paul the initiator, George the embellisher, John holding out for the last word. (At the same time, the solos are uncredited, and between the speed of the transitions and the similarities in the timbre and content of the different parts, it is by no means clear how many guitarists are playing, much less the identity of the player at any given point.) Paul opens with a characteristically fluid and melodically balanced line that sounds a high A before snaking an octave down the scale; George responds by soaring to an even higher D and sustaining it for half a bar before descending in syncopated pairs of sixteenth notes; John then picks up on the pattern of George’s sixteenths with a series of choppy thirds that hammer relentlessly on the second and flatted seventh degrees of the scale. The second time through, Paul answers John’s bluesy flatted sevenths with bluesy minor thirds and then proceeds to echo George’s earlier line, spiraling up to that same high D; George responds with some minor thirds of his own, while mimicking the choppy rhythm of John’s part; John then drops down two octaves to unleash a growling single-note line. On his final two-bar solo, Paul plays almost nothing but minor thirds and flatted sevenths in a herky-jerky rhythm that ends with a sudden plunge to a low A; George then reaches for the stars with a steeply ascending line that is pitched an octave above any notes heard so far; and John finishes with a string of insistent and heavily distorted fourths, phrased in triplets, that drag behind the beat and grate against the background harmony.

Finally, as abruptly as this old-fashioned rave-up began, it ends, with the band stopping short, leaving only the faint eighth-note pulse of a piano sounding tinny A major chords. “And in the end…” Paul sings, his voice rising. A pair of lightning-quick guitar licks sound a sixteenth note apart, as John and George join in a three-part harmony on the shallow arc of melody with which the Beatles deliver the line that would serve as their epitaph: “The love you take…is equal to the love you make.” The inverted chords behind their voices enact a slow chromatic descent across four bars of 3/8 meter to arrive in the key of C major on the phrase “the love you make.” This long-awaited resolution (which was prefigured by the opening of the medley in the key of A minor) is first softened by the reentry of George Martin’s strings, then deepened by the return of the drums. As George Harrison’s lead guitar plays an extended arpeggio that rises two octaves up the scale, the singers add a final curtain of “Ahhs” as the harmony lifts from C to D to E flat to F. Ringo’s tom-toms provide a final nudging emphasis, and with a gentle plagal cadence, the song, the medley, and the album come to rest on a common C major chord.

George Martin had hoped to enlist the Beatles in making an album that would go beyond Sgt. Pepper in its thematic structure and unified form. But Martin was a musician in the traditional sense, and he conceived of surpassing the Beatles’ acknowledged masterpiece as an essentially musical challenge. As a group of popular artists par excellence, however, the Beatles understood intuitively—and in the case of John Lennon, gratefully—that surpassing Sgt. Pepper was no longer within the realm of possibility for them, because Sgt. Pepper, like Revolver, Rubber Soul, and the seven other Beatles albums that preceded it, was the work of a group of collaborative singers and songwriters that had subsequently ceased to exist. No one understood this better than Paul McCartney, whose earnest, energetic, and at times overbearing efforts to cajole his bandmates into soldiering on after the triumph of Sgt. Pepper and the tragedy of Brian Epstein’s death were based on his conviction that nothing the Beatles might ever achieve as individuals could possibly compare with what they had accomplished—and might still accomplish—as a group. The enthusiasm with which McCartney embraced Martin’s suggestion that they try to surpass Sgt. Pepper was not based on his belief that they would succeed; rather it was based on his stubborn hope that by trying once again to outdo themselves, the Beatles might rekindle the musical camaraderie and collaborative genius that had placed them in a league of their own. To that end, Paul reserved all of his best material for the concluding medley (unlike John, who contributed nothing but odds and ends). And he used all of his considerable powers of persuasion and organization to enlist the other Beatles’ participation in this project as well.

Ultimately, however, Paul’s loyalty to the Beatles was stronger than his loyalty to George Martin or anyone else, and so, rather than end the album with the sort of grand “symphonic” gesture that Martin had in mind, he came up with the last of the Beatles’ great surprises, a final, brilliant twist that was, in its own way, closer to the inspired spirit of Sgt. Pepper than anything else on Abbey Road. Just as the booming chorus and ringing arpeggios of “Carry That Weight” combine to create the expectation that the album is coming to a close, the music seems to jump right out of its skin: the tempo surging, the orchestra fleeing, the harmony changing direction in a series of wrenching guitar chords that leap first from A to D, then from B to E, in both cases landing hard on the beat, and then again from A to D, this time in a pair of jarringly syncopated accents that bring the band up short. Ringo leaps into the breach with a rackety two-bar fill and the sequence of chords repeats over a brisk, Sgt. Pepper–style backbeat. “Oh yeah!” Paul shrieks. “All right! …Are you going to be in my dreams…tonight?”

“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” eventually comes to a full stop on an A major chord, which reverts to a somber A minor for the opening of “Golden Slumbers.” This exceedingly tender, melancholy number was based on a lullaby by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker that Paul found in a piano songbook and set to a tune of his own. It was recorded during John Lennon’s absence from the Abbey Road sessions in July, when it was combined with another McCartney fragment called “Carry That Weight” and a thematic reprise of “You Never Give Me Your Money”—thereby enabling McCartney and George Martin to present the “symphonic” concept of the medley as a fait accompli to Lennon upon his return. “Once there was a way to get back homeward,” Paul muses quietly in the opening bars, his voice supported by a gently rocking figure on piano and Martin’s swelling arrangement for strings. “Sleep pretty darling, do not cry,” he offers, “And I will sing a lullaby.” His promise is answered by a stop-start drum fill that propels the song with unexpected force into the text of Dekker’s poem—“Golden slumbers fill your eyes / Smiles awake you when you rise”—set to a melody in C major whose stentorian delivery and straining harmony (an F9 chord sounds behind the words “slumbers” and “awake”) defy all expectations of what is meant by the term “lullaby.” Then the music subsides and Paul repeats the homeward-looking verse, which is followed again by Ringo’s fill. Only this time, instead of the promised lullaby, Paul, George, and Ringo join in a rousing chant of “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight / Carry that weight a long time!” Singing in unison (with Ringo’s voice predominating) and sounding less like the harmonized angels of “Because” and “Sun King” than like the crowd at a soccer match, they repeat this dour prophecy until a chorus of horns lets loose with the opening strains (in A minor) of “You Never Give Me Your Money.” The melodic allusion is followed by a new verse of the song itself, which Paul concludes with the line “And in the middle of the celebrations, I break down.” A downbeat of truly symphonic proportions from the brass (on a pivotal G7 chord) then plunges the music back into the chorus of “Carry That Weight,” which is played and sung with immense power, accompanied this time by arpeggiated chords on guitar. While the bass descends the scale from C to B to A, the broken chords ascend from C to G to A, their accented tonic notes subdividing the stately 4/4 rhythm into groups of three, as the musical motifs of the medley seem to be sounding together in preparation for a grand finale that feels as if it is just moments away.