Category Archives: Music et al

Stones Meet Sullivan

Stones Meet Sullivan

October 25, 1964
but first, Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace

The Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace on June 3, 1964. It was the the start of their first American tour (June 5 > June 20) promoting the release of their first album, The Rolling Stones, England’s Newest Hitmakers

You can easily hear how so-called established musicians like Martin thought these visitors were a temporary fad and one easily made fun of. Certainly Martin’s writers thought so.

True to their roots, the Stones played Willie Dixon’s  “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”

The band’s tour had eleven shows. While not having the kind of success that the Beatles had, the tour did give the Stones enough visibility and radio-play to keep them amongst the many British musicians dominating the charts.

Stones Meet Sullivan

After meeting Dean Martin

It had been 259 days since THE night. That is, 259 days since John, Paul, George, and Ringo changed the way we Americans listened to music and what music we listened to.

For three weeks in a row we had sat in our Sunday evening seats–likely a living room–in front of the TV–likely a black and white–and smiled at our group. Not our parents’ group.

British Invasion

The Beatles were dominating the charts. By October 1964 they’d had five #1 songs and three #1 albums. In fact, the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack album had just dropped out of the #1 spot on October 24 after 14 weeks!

Of course, it wasn’t just the Beatles. The flood gates had opened and British performer after British performer saturated the top ten airwaves:

  • Dusty Springfield
  • Dave Clark Five
  • The Searchers
  • Billy J Kramer
  • Peter and Gordon
  • Gerry & the Pacemakers
  • The Animals
  • Manfred MAnn
  • Chad & Jeremy
  • The Honeycombs
  • The Nashville Teens
  • The Kinks
  • The Zombies
  • Herman’s Hermits

Stones Meet Sullivan

October 7, 1966

Ed Sullivan Meets Rolling Stones

And here came the Rolling Stones. Now their second American tour of 1964. This one from October 24 thru November 15, 1964. On this tour, the band supported their second album 12 X 5. There first chart hit would not come until “Time Is On My Side” which reached a high point of #6 on Billboard on November 7 that year.

They performed on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time on October 25. Still true to their roots, their first song was Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.”  Their second song, also a cover was “Time On My Side” written by record producer extraordinaire, Jerry Ragovoy.

The audience, mainly teenage girls, screamed over their song, an occurrence now familiar to viewers. Ed Sullivan, as he’d done with the Beatles, gushed over their performance while some critics felt that the Beatles, formally not very clean-cut, appeared dapper compared to the “unkempt” Stones. Such it would be. One critic sent a telegram calling the act “trash.”

Rolling Stones Meet Ed Sullivan

The Rolling Stones returned to the Sullivan show the following spring and eventually went on to make 6 appearances. Here’s the list.

Stones Meet Sullivan

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree

Wings of Desire

I’m not sure, but I think the first time I encountered the music of Nick Cave and Cave himself was in Wim Wender’s movie, Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). I really liked the film and how Cave’s music enhanced the film’s eerie emotionally intense atmosphere.  Cave’s music, though not Cave, was also in Wings’ sequel Faraway, So Close.

Cave seemed to pop up regularly in my meandering musical journey, but I never stopped to listen very long. That was a mistake and I’m trying to catch up.

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Nick Cave

Out of ignorance, I thought Cave was either American or English and living in Germany.

He is Australian and surprisingly survived his tumultuous teens. Those years included excessive underage drinking, sexual assault (pulling down a school girl’s pants), the subsequent school expulsion, stripping in public for fun, and gangster obsession. His teens ended with the death of his father in a car crash. His mother told him of the death as she bailed him out of jail for burglary.

Cave has said that he has no memories of his father’s funeral, but remembers that “he died at a point in my life when I was most confused.” Cave later wrote that “the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose.”

Cave Music

While still in school, Cave and some other students started a cover band called Concrete Vulture. As the name might imply, the covers were by artists such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Alice Cooper.

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016
Boys Next Door

Out of school and still in Australia, they changed the band’s name to The Boys Next Door. Their Cave-led performances successfully got them banned from venue after venue.

Birthday Party

The Boys Next Door made one album and went to London and became The Birthday Party. The stage act, often described as riotous with Cave yelling, howling, and jumping around the stage.

John Peel, a disc jockey, record producer,  and journalist announced their “Release the Bats” the best record of 1981 and success followed.

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Berlin

In 1983 Birthday Party moved to Berlin where it dissolved and some pieces reformed as The Bad Seeds. Simon Reynolds has described Cave’s songwriting as  “the fullest, most hideously voluptuous flowering of the abject in rock.”

Life imitates Art

Cave’s career has careened through other arts such as the above mentioned acting as well as screen writer, author, playwright, and lecturer.

Cave and Viviane Carneiro had a son Luke. Cave had another son Jethro who lives with his mother in Australia.

Cave controlled his demons and found family life in Brighton, England and with his third wife Susie Bick had twins, Earl and Arthur.

On July 14, 2015 darkness descended on Cave. His son Arthur, 15, under the influence of LSD,  suffered a fatal brain injury after plunging onto the underpass of Ovingdean Gap in Brighton.

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Skeleton Tree

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Skeleton Tree  is Cave’s 16th album with the Bad Seeds. Arthur Cave’s death occurred during Skeleton Tree‘s writing and recording and sadness surrounds each song. Though the circumstances are somewhat different, I am reminded of David Bowie’s Blackstar.

Knowing what we know, it is a wonderfully difficult album to listen to. W.B. Yeat’s “terrible beauty.”

The album’s fifth song, “Anthrocene” expresses that horrible sadness best:

All the things we love, we love, we love, we lose
It’s our bodies that fall when they try to rise
And I hear you been looking out for something to love
Sit down beside me and I’ll name it for you
Behold, behold
The heaven bound sea
The wind cast its shadow and moves for the tree
Behold the animals and the birds and the sky entire
I hear you been out there looking for something to set on fire
The head bow children fall to their knees
Humbled in the age of the Anthrocene
Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Post Skeleton Tree

In May 2017, Mark Mordue interviewed Cave in the Guardian during his first tour since Arthur’s death. Mordue wrote, “he is…slowly attempting to come back into the world, step by step. I suspect it won’t be long before he is up and running at a terrifying pace; Cave possesses a momentum that can knock you over through sheer proximity alone. He tells me he is already writing new songs. “Not to answer Skeleton Tree,” he emphasises, “but to artistically complete the trilogy of albums we began with Push the Sky Away.” 

Nick Cave Skeleton Tree 2016

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

Remembering and appreciating
October 20, 1925 – October 27, 2002

Tom Dowd

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

The Triumvirate

The Atlantic Records triumvirate: Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, and Tom Dowd.

Thomas John “Tom” Dowd was born on October 20, 1925 in New York City and into a musical atmosphere: his father was a concertmaster, his mother an opera singer.

While attending Columbia University the military drafted him, but he continued to attend Columbia University and also working on the Manhattan Project” the secret development of the atomic bomb.

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

Physics lab to recording studio

He thought he would continue his studies in nuclear physics, but decided to work in music.

According to his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bio, “After the war, he was hired as a sound engineer at a New York studio in 1947 and began doing freelance work for Atlantic Records in 1949. Under Dowd’s direction, the label switched from recording onto acetate discs to tape, resulting in improved fidelity and preservation. He introduced the label to stereo recording in 1952. Atlantic hired him as a full-time engineer in 1954. In addition to engineering countless sessions, he built the label’s recording console and designed its eight-track studio.sole and designed its eight-track studio.”

In his memoir, Rhythm & the Blues: A Life in American Music, Jerry Wexler described the relationship between Ahmet Ertegun, himself, and Dowd: “Our gig [Wexler and Ertegun] was to get the music played right and righteous in the studio; Tom’s job was to capture it on tape. It was up to him to find a mix of timbres, bass, treble and midrange; to load a much volume as possible without distortion. Tom pushed [the volume controls] like a painter sorting colors. He turned microphone placement into an art.”

Whose music was Dowd an integral part of? The list is a who’s who of great music over the decades:

  • Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife
  • John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things
  • Aretha Franklin’s Respect
  • Cream’s Disraeli Gears
  • Allman Brothers Idewild South, Eat a Peach, Live at the Fillmore East
  • Derek and the Dominos’ Layla
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd
  • Ronnie Van Zant
  • Eric Clapton
  • Rod Steward
Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

In his own words…

Here he speaks about the evolution of recording music

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd

Lifetime Achievement

In 2002 he was presented a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Dowd died October 27, 2002 (NYT obit) and in 2003 an outstanding documentary about his life  came out: Tom Dowd and the Language of Music.

Tom Dowd was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Recording Engineer Tom Dowd