This week, Merlin and John talk about:
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Table of Contents
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The Problem: There’s no new creative information, referring to a song by Owl City that John found to be a copy of Jane’s Addiction with too much Doors that was not an evolution of something that was there before with new creative information, but just polished with the good parts smoothed off.
The show title refers to John hearing a song on the radio that sounded like a new version of Jane’s Addiction that Perry Farrell has recently put together with Buckethead, Michael Schenker and Flea.
The audio starts with 3 seconds from the song Jet by Paul McCartney & Wings.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
Did ELO pick up where The Beatles left off? (RL97)
John answers the phone humming Sweet Talkin’ Woman by Electric Light Orchestra and Merlin follows along and inserts the identifying 1-second riff into the audio. John thinks that Jeff Lynne sometimes sounds like Barry Gibb and 98% of the rest of the time he sounds like the songs The Beatles should have done instead of breaking up. He and Roy Wood once said that they thought they would be picking up where The Beatles should have kept going, if alternate universe Beatles had decided in 1967 to follow George’s impulses and decided to keep making a better version of Magical Mystery Tour. There are a lot of better versions of that album, The Beatles made 3 of them.
Which Beatle would have made it on their own? (RL97)
Was there any one Beatle who had the creative trajectory to have gotten out of Liverpool on his own? You could argue it would have been Ringo. He already had a career with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He was the big cheese and he could have gone to London and been a session guy. Lennon was a self-sabotager, he would have never ever independently become a musician, certainly not better than Rory Storm who was a much better looking guy who put on a show that Lennon would not have done.
John Lennon was a very mad and unhappy guy. During the first couple of records the heart and soul of the band and also clearly the best songwriter pound for pound was John. He was running the band! The band bloomed when Paul started finding his own. When John got super-depressed and started smoking weed Paul ran with the ball. On the first couple records what made The Beatles The Beatles was the songwriting and John really propelled that. John made their Teen Pop music sound compelling through the application of his anger. Teen Pop music is not interesting unless there is anger and desperation behind it. John had all that. He was one year older than Paul.
If Sean Nelson were here he would be standing there with his hands jammed into his jacket pockets, trying to figure out a polite way to excuse himself. He would make the case that Paul had the talent and the capability of getting out of Liverpool on his own, but John would argue that he didn’t and he agrees with Merlin that Ringo could have made a go at it as a player, but George was going to be a Junior High teacher, John was going to be an angry alcoholic at the end of the bar who worked in manufacturing, Paul would work in a nursing home playing piano, and Lennon would have hated his guts.
The songwriting of The Beatles (RL97)
You can tell if a Beatles record is good by taking away the singles and asking the question if it is still really an album. Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine are two where a lot of vinyl had to die for no reason. Up through the time of Revolver they were still hugely influential on what made it onto the vinyl. You can hear how much they wrote that song together, but soon enough you can definitely hear that John or Paul wrote the bridge on that, but they definitely didn’t write the verses. They push each other so far forward!
Even when they started writing independently of one another they were still writing to impress one another. You can hear Paul being deeper than he maybe was on the first pass, but then he added an element of narrative tension to impress John and you can hear that in there. John was less trying to impress Paul, but trying to compete with him and trying to shove Yesterday back down his throat, but couldn’t match him and ultimately failed to compete with Paul’s Pop-generating madness and resented him, accusing him of doing the same old thing and being predictable.
In some of Merlin’s favorite Beatles songs Paul has written a beautiful thing that works as a unit, but then the bridge is John giving a rebuttal, and that is where the perfect amount of cynicism comes into it and why his Wings records are such turd piles. In a good Pop song there has to be parts for building and releasing tension. A lot of times in New Wave and Indie Rock you have a minor chorus and verse that are all about tension building and then the Pop explosion comes on the chorus, but you could invert that: If you have a 3-chord song with all major all the way through, like the Ramones, but even they knew when to throw in a minor chord.
For example the song Touch and Go by The Cars: ”All I need is what you’ve got!”, which incredibly angular and got to be the weirdest-sounding verse of a song Merlin has ever heard, but then the chorus is in a completely different way and you wonder how that could be the same song, but it works. Sonic Youth songs were like this, too, they were symphonic explosions in the choruses after all this angular stuff going on in the verses. It happens in pretty much any Beatles song, too.
The structure of John's songs, Teaspoon (RL97)
When John is trying to write songs, which he has been doing for the last 6 years and failing, part of what he aspires to… the life of most Long Winters songs is all in the verses, they are expository, they are listicals, and when it comes to the chorus there is an attempt for explosive Indie Pop, but half the time it ends up being a pre-chorus to a later chorus where John tries again. The verse is where he expresses what he needs to express and then he tries to tie it together with a fun chorus. For the last 6 years he has been failing at making the verses as catchy as the choruses and making the choruses as important to the song as the verses and to tell you stuff about the ideas.
When John was writing Teaspoon he felt like each iteration of the word ”teaspoon” was conveying a different aspect of how a teaspoon played into the narration. A teaspoon to cook your heroin, a teaspoon as the most diminutive of all the silverwares, etc. He was counting on someone writing a dissertation on it later and he did not actually put all those different meanings in the lyrics, but into the different ways he sang this one word. That is frustrating as an artist because his meaning will never be clear unless he will explain it.
What is great about The Beatles is that they can come in and say they didn’t mean LSD, but Lucie was Paul’s aunt and the diamonds were something else, a lot of unnecessary explaining that is just obfuscating, tying to make something that is simple more difficult. In contrast, John’s problem as a songwriter is that his songs are impossibly more difficult than what is evident and explaining them is just after the fact. He had a chance to put it in the song, but instead he is hoping that people are telepathic. Merlin likes that about John’s songs and they don’t feel like they are deliberately opaque.
Paul McCartney & Wings (RL97)
The thing about Wings is that Paul stopped caring whether his songs meant anything. John is not sure if he ever did care. When Merlin was 8 he personally owned at least 3 Wings 45’s, but there is really only one song you need to hear to understand Wings: ”the major was a lady suffragette” (from the song Jet), which is a great song. The bass is way too loud, it is a canonical 3-chord song that would not have gotten past a first table read in The Beatles.
You would think that people had enough of Silly Love Songs (also by Wings) and it straight forward and as soon as Merlin starts singing it John is 7 years old again: ”What’s wrong with that, I need to know, ’Cause here I go again! I love you” John Lennon would have entered the scene here and asked why he would go again. They continue talking about different parts of that song, laughing heartily. At that point Paul felt that every idea he had was the greatest idea and he did not need a second idea.
Merlin starts singing ”We’re simply having a wonderful Christmastime (song Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney), which must have been the biggest selling single of all time (no, it was White Christmas by Bing Crosby). Or was it Mull of Kintyre (song by Paul McCartney and Wings)? That is such a good song and the best selling single in the UK (no, it is only number 4 with Elton John’s Candle in the Wind as number 1), probably until Bohemian Rhapsody (by Queen, no, that was before)
Silly Love Songs is about Linda (McCartney), but this was the music of John’s youth and he had no awareness of Linda really, she represented nothing to him then, and he has sympathy for those songs of his childhood, but his adult overlay of Paul and Linda with their simpering romance, vegetarian meals, just canoodling together on their fake sheepskin rug, Paul playing ”I love you” to her, clasping her hands under her chin with cartoon hearts floating around her head. Linda is such a cipher and John has no sense of her.
Merlin thinks they really loved each other, except that John has known enough people who became famous in their early 20s to know that it destroys humanity. To be famous before the age of 28 is a psychological burden on a person that handicaps their emotional development, and Paul McCartney was the most famous of all people and clearly an emotionally handicapped person anyway, so although John does believe that he and Linda loved each other because that is the story they told, he cannot imagine Paul McCartney loving really.
Paul sat in that hotel room in New York City after The Ed Sullivan Show (on February 9, 1964) with a cold and the streets around the hotel were thronging with screaming girls, and although he was sitting in bed with an ice pack on his head and a thermometer in his mouth there were 4 photographers in the room, he couldn’t even be sick without Life Magazine. The Beatles broke up in 1970 and that is when Paul turned 28 years old.
Merlin liked Listen to What the Man Said (by Paul McCartney) and had that on a 45. It is a very good song, but John always comes back to Jet, which is his exhibit A when it comes to Paul McCartney. It is incredible, but parse those lyrics for him and tell him what that song is about and that the lyrics are not indicative of a rot. He probably smoked a lot of pot.
As much as he is a frustrating character that band would not have been the same without him. He didn’t even play the Rickenbacker bass that long, and yet it is forever…. The Hoffner Violin Bass is the early Beatles thing, and who is going to play that now? You have to be a real dingeling. It is so inextricably Paul McCartney. But the Rickenbacker that he started playing at the end and then played in Wings, which admittedly Geddy Lee (of Rush) made a run at getting it be his signature instrument.
Billie Jean by Michael Jackson (RL97)
John was thinking about Billie Jean (by Michael Jackson). It is such a good song with a dynamite bass-line. It is super-menacing, super-dark, and the bass tone is shaped in a way that is not in your face. Quincy Jones (the producer of the album) could have doubled the volume of that bass line and they probably tried it when they were mixing it, but part of its menace is that it is subsumed.
John was walking along and was singing that song, but although it has the greatest bass line of all Pop music he had a hard time remembering it. Where in the Paul McCartney creative arc would he have left behind any chance of writing Billie Jean? There was so much wonderful stuff at the end, too, but the restraint that is on the first couple of Michael Jackson solo records… Quincy Jones probably still had some authority in the picture, whereas with the last three Beatles records there was no authority left.
Both Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson are natural musicians and musical people. Michael Jackson probably had a 4-track in his head where he could imagine what the stuff was like. Stevie Wonder making those records where he would play the drums is completely mind-blowing. There is Off The Wall and Thriller which are both pretty great. As with Pauls’ rise to power ca. 1965 was the timing and the taste that Michael Jackson had in the context of having Quincy Jones as a producer. His taste got channelled in the best conceivable way. Paul wrote You Won’t See Me, what a fantastic song with great edginess. Merlin thinks it might be just about the perfect song, like a lot of songs by The Beatles.
The taste that makes one of the richest men in the world write ”Simply having a Wonderful Christmastime”? The taste is off, the timing is wrong, and there is nobody there, telling him he got to stop, like with George Lucas.
Modern bands lacking creativity (RL97)
The other day John was listening to the radio while driving in his car and a song came on and he had the same experience that he has a lot now when listening to modern music: This is either a Jane’s Addiction outtake he had never heard before, which he knew it wasn’t because there is no Jane’s Addiction outtake he hasn’t heard, or it is some new version of Jane’s Addiction that Perry Farrell has recently put together with Buckethead, Michael Schenker (from the Scorpions) and Flea (from Red Hot Chili Peppers) which he hasn’t heard anything about, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, or this is another example of the Owl City situation (band by Adam Young) where a band is staking their claim on reproducing with no imagination the sound of an earlier band.
ELO hat the overarching concept to go into the direction that The Beatles would have gone if they had stuck around, kept taking acid, listened to George a little more, had a 24-track and a white cello, expunged the Blue Meanies (from the movie Yellow Submarine) and went into a Magical Mystery Tour that was not characterized by total dread and if it was not a response to the death of Brian Epstein (their manager).
John did the Shazaam and it turned out it was a young band. Jane’s Addiction was already influenced by The Doors enough by 10% too much, but the innovation of this new band was to hear that there was already too much Doors in Jane’s Addiction and they just added more Doors. That sounds like Merlin’s Guantanamo stress music. All of the tragedy in Perry Farrell, that he is a junkie, that he is a freak in a world that doesn’t accept freaks, that he is a Gothic pan person who inherently is going to be unhappy for the rest of his life because as a pan person you can’t find true happiness, all of that is erased because the singer of this new band is 22 and has no pain, then add more Doors.
John doesn’t blame the person who signed it and the label that is putting it out because that is the state of music today. John heard that Owl City song on the radio that sounds exactly like a song that The Postal Service would have rejected, that Ben (Gibbard) would never have done, and yet all of his vocal mannerisms are there without any of the qualities that make him an interesting or quirky vocalist, and yet there is no new creative information, it doesn’t sound like an evolution of it, but it is just polished with all the good parts smoothed off.
John wonders if The Beatles in 1964/65 or Michael Jackson in 1980/81 were aware that they were in such kinetic communication with their time that they were one step ahead, but not two steps ahead of their moment. Or were they thinking to themselves that they were far out and they were ready for it and by the 5th time everyone listened to this crazy music the world had changed? Merlin doesn’t think that Michael Jackson thought about it that way. He was such a creative wackadoodle guy who just wanted to make people dance.
Off The Wall is one of the greatest Disco albums when Disco was dead. Thriller sounds so dated in some ways, that is the problem. There are 6-7 singles on it and you know every song on that record. The problem seems to come later in the career where somebody starts to wonder how to get ahead of the curve, which is about where John is now. That is why every time there is something new by Paul McCartney Merlin exhales disappointedly that he is a 70 year old guy who still doesn’t know how to balance a song.
They start singing some lyrics from Off The Wall: ”gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf and just enjoy yourself, let the madness in the music get to you, Life ain’t so bad at all, If you live it off the wall” He couldn’t sing that if he were 70 years old. How great is that bass-line! It is tremendous!
Duff McKagan starting over and going to university again (RL97)
When Duff McKagan first started writing for the Seattle Weekly he was also getting to Seattle U, getting his degree, taking classes. He was in Rock’n’Roll from the very beginning of his life when he was 14 years old, he was in Guns N’ Roses, and then there was period when that was over, he was recovering from the drugs and there was a period of quiet in his life when he could go back to college and write for the newspaper, take another stab at life from an amazingly humble place.
Just enough time had passed that most of the students in his class might have heard of Guns N’ Roses, but they were not pawing at him. During this process he formed Velvet Revolver and he tells the story that one time he was in a hotel in Rio De Janeiro, trying to finish his term paper for his class, but he can’t concentrate because 200.000 people were chanting his name, throning the streets because they had just played Rock in Rio for a million plus people. The streets around his hotel were all barricaded and all the fans were chanting and screaming and he could hear it up on the 20th floor and he just wished they were quiet so that he could finish his term paper.
Imagine Paul McCartney going back to college in 1974!
The Long Winters owing a lot of gratitude to Harvey Danger for helping them off the ground (RL97)
In the early days of The Long Winters Eric (Corson) played a Rickenbacker bass that was given to John by Aaron Huffman of Harvey Danger and he gave it to Eric. At the time it was not only the most expensive thing that Eric owned, but John gave it to him for free and it was like somebody handed him Excalibur and he didn’t even have to pull it from the stone. John was just trying to capture some of that star dust of Paul McCartney and this was the closest he could come. Aaron Huffman had 30 basses, but the Rickenbacker was the one that John zoomed in on.
The Long Winters owe a big gratitude to Harvey Danger because they let them use their practice space, their van, Aaron gave them their bass, they couldn’t even have gotten out of the starting gate if Harvey Danger hadn’t just handed them the key and said: ”Use our PA and our big practice space and our instruments!” John should write them a thank you note. Merlin has only visited with them a little bit, but they strike him as very nice men, although they are pricks. All people in music are desperately broken, except for John and Duff McKagan and Quincy Jones.
John having dinner with Alan Parsons (RL97)
One time John had dinner with Alan Parsons (from The Alan Parsons Project, he first said Alan Partridge, but that is a TV character). They were a great-sounding musical act, but he doesn’t sing those songs and has a vocalist. He came to Seattle, giving a talk about recording Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd, which he had produced). Everybody wanted to know about the tape loop on Money and he was very generous in talking about that stuff. Afterwards a group of 20 people including John went out to dinner. John had been talking to him at the cocktail party beforehand and Alan was giving each person 2 minutes of his time because that is what he had to do.
As they got to the restaurant it was a long table, not a situation where Alan could talk to everyone at dinner, and rather than sit at the head of the table he moved down toward the middle of the table where Jesus would sit at the last supper. He put his hand on the back of a chair and the other 19 people all freeze like in Musical Chairs when the music has stopped, everybody freezes, and Alan Parsons has chosen a chair and now what? There was a pregnant 5 seconds where no-one knew what to do. Nobody wants to sit at the end where they can’t talk to him, but no-one wants to sit directly across from him, his wife was there, so John said: ”Whatever the social faux pas, there were people who outranked him in a lot of ways in terms of who should sit next to Alan Parsons, but who gives a fuck?” and John just walked over and sat down in the chair next to him.
John having sat down at The Catbird Seat everyone else had to scramble to get chairs in earshot of him. He looked over at John and said basically: ”Oh, you! Well, you managed to sit there!” Maybe he was hoping it would be a beautiful lady or someone famous, but it was John. John spent the whole evening chatting with him and everyone around them was struggling like EF Hutton (American stock broker) was speaking. It was the worst setup for a one-person based dinner and it was a loud noisy restaurant and everyone was leaning in. It sounds like the last supper, it was great, although no-one betrayed him.
At one point John asked: ”What if I asked you to produce one of my records?” and he said: ”For the right amount of money I will produce your record!” - ”Ah, yes, money!” John still thinks about putting together enough cash to make an offer on Alan Parsons coming out of retirement and recording an album for him. It would be obscene and would cost more than $50.000. He was a very handsome man, but now he looks like someone animated a volcano.
Can you overdo a horns section? (RL97)
Merlin thinks that Paul could overdo the horn arrangements (like on Silly Love Songs), but John is of the opinion that you cannot overdo a horn arrangement. There is footage of the legendary Stax (record label) tour in 1967 (see here), which is on YouTube with Booker T. & the M.G.’s as the band and then every singer comes out and does their 2-4 signature numbers.
It is worth watching just to see how beautiful everybody was in 1967 with the coolest clothes, the coolest dumb hair and their little Beatnik beards and their chunky glasses and they were so excited to see Marvin Gaye. The had 3 horn players, 2 saxophones and a trumpet, and they were doing all the horn arrangements of all the Stax stuff and it is really all you need. On the record you probably had 14 horns, but one trumpet does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of emotional impact.
Because of the whole Elephant 6, Neutral Milk Hotel, Bolero Trumpet (?) thing that happened, there was a while in Indie Rock during the early 2000s where the trumpet was the equivalent of The Head and the Heart Banjo. The Mumford & Sons Banjo is now used by every Pop band, and in 2001 the Neutral Milk Hotel Trumpet was the signifier and John was shy to use it himself. John’s song Blue Diamond has French Horn, which is the secret weapon of every great Pop song. There is Neil Young and John Entwistle. French Horn is a very difficult instrument to play and John couldn’t find a young person to play it, so he had to use a High School music teacher.
Good makeout music, John’s imagination about his early sex life (RL97)
Merlin used to love Year of the Cat by Al Stewart. Those songs are inextricably linked to the television show Taxi and what is lonelier about being a pre-teen than watching Taxi and Barney Miller (also a TV show) Merlin dated a girl in college that had a Bob James record (who wrote the theme song for Taxi). It was very strange sitting around necking and have the Taxi song come on. When you are necking with a girl in a dark room and your 6 CD Changer flips over to Rush you are in, but if it flips over to John Vanderslice’s Life and Death of an American Fourtracker it is like somebody just poured cold water over both of you.
Merlin would have guessed there is a certain contingent that would find that very slippery as a record. John didn’t give the girl the chance because he lunged. He knows John Vanderslice and loves him, and you sir are no John Vanderslice. He did not want to make out with John Vanderslice singing with a British accent in his other ear, he wanted Geddy Lee, more than J.V. You don’t want to make out to your friends singing!
Merlin liked to make out to New Order, which is good makeout music, but he hasn’t made out in a while. John recommends The Honeydrippers, which is a bad record, but good makeout music. A lot of kids today might never even have heard of that album. One of the main problems in John’s life is that he grew up thinking that his sex life was going to be a Led Zeppelin based landscape. Led Zeppelin established the bass line for what John imagined being a fully adult person was going to be like.
He was going to reach the age of manhood and he was going to enter into this Led Zeppelin universe where he is going to have sex on an airplane with somebody he doesn’t even know while all of his friends are OD:ing and the airplane is taking him to Heffner’s mansion (Playboy Mansion). Merlin wants to have sex on a plane that is going to Montserrat although he doesn’t even know where that is. The language of John’s early sex life was encoded in Led Zeppelin runes and the moment he arrived at his sexual maturity suddenly the world was written in Alanis Morissette runes. Was it that late (John was 27 years old in 1995)? Isn’t it ironic? (Actually John’s first time was when he was almost 20, see RL305)