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Wednesday, April 7th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | AI Software Creates “New” Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Doors & Amy Winehouse Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club”
What would pop music sound like now if the musicians of the 27 club had lived into maturity? Can we know where Amy Winehouse would have gone, musically, if she had taken another path? What if Hendrix’s influence over guitar heroics (and less obvious styles) came not only from his sixties playing but from an unimaginable late-career cosmic blues? Whether questions like these can ever be given real flesh and blood, so to speak, by artificial intelligence may still be very much undecided. Of course, it may not be for us to decide. “The charts of 2046,” Mark Beaumont predicts at NME, “will be full of 12G code-pop songs, baffling to the human brain, written by banks of composerbots purely for the Spotify algorithm to recommend to its colonies of ÆPhone listening farms.” Seems as likely as any other future music scenario at this point. In the meantime, we still get to judge the successes, such as they are, of AI songwriters on human merits. The Beatles-esque “Daddy’s Car,” the most notable computer-generated tribute song to date, was “composed by AI… capable of learning to mimic a band’s style from its entire database of songs.” The program produced a competent pastiche that nonetheless sounds like “cold computer psychedelia — eerie stuff.” What do we, as humans, make of Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a compilation of songs composed in the style of musicians who infamously perished by suicide or overdose at the tender age of 27?
The “tapes” include four tracks designed to sound like lost songs from Hendrix, Winehouse, Nirvana, and the Doors. Highlighting a handful of artists who left us too soon in order to address “music’s mental health crisis,” the project used Magenta, the same Google AI as “Daddy’s Car,” to analyze the artists’ repertoires, as Rolling Stone explains:
There is significant human input, such as the curation of 20 or 30 songs fed to the computer, broken down separately into different parts of the arrangement. Things did not always go smoothly. Kurt Cobain’s “loose and aggressive guitar playing gave Magenta some trouble,” writes Endgadget, “with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies.”
Judge the end results for yourself in “Drowned by the Sun,” above. The music for all four songs is synthesized with MIDI files. “An artificial neural network was then used to generate the lyrics,” Eddie Fu writes at Consequence of Sound, “while the vocals were recorded by Eric Hogan, frontman of an Atlanta Nirvana tribute band.” Other songs feature different sound-alike vocalists (more or less). In no ways does the project claim that MIDI-generated computer files can replace actual musicians.
They’re affectionate tributes, made by players without hearts, but they don’t really tell us anything about what, say, Jim Morrison would have done if he hadn’t died at 27. Yet the cause is a noble one: a rejection of the romantic idea at the heart of the “27 Club” narrative — that mental illness, substance abuse, etc. should be glamorized in any way. “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club is the work of Over the Bridge,” notes Fu, “a Toronto organization that helps members of the music industry struggling with mental illness.” Learn more about the project here and about Over the Bridge’s programs here. Related Content: Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car” Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness AI Software Creates “New” Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Doors & Amy Winehouse Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 11:00a | A Long-Lost Soviet Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings Resurfaces on YouTube–and Tolkien Fans Rejoice (1991)
When Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, it heralded a cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that would, at long last, possess scale, production value, and sheer ambition enough to do justice to the original novels. This set it somewhat apart from the version of The Fellowship of the Ring that had aired just ten years before on Leningrad Television — and hasn’t been seen since, at least until its recent upload (in two parts) to Youtube. An unofficial adaptation, Khraniteli tells a story every single Tolkien reader around the world will recognize, even if they don’t understand unsubtitled Russian. The production’s appeal lies in any case not in its dialogue, but what we’ll call its look and feel. “Featuring a score by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvarium and some incredibly cheap production design, no one is going to confuse this Lord of the Rings with Jackson’s films,” writes /Film’s Chris Evangelista. “The sets look like, well, sets, and the special effects — if you can call them that — are delightfully hokey. This appears to have had almost no budget, and that only lends to the charm.” Despite its cheapness, Khraniteli displays exuberance on multiple levels, including its often-theatrical performances as well as visual effects, executed with the still-new video technology of the time, that oscillate between the hokily traditional and the nearly avant-garde. Some scenes, in fact, look not entirely dissimilar to those of Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s high-tech vision of Shakespeare that also premiered in 1991.
That year was the Soviet Union’s last, and the prolonged political shakeup that ensued could partially explain why Khraniteli went unseen for so long. Until now, obscurity-hunters have had to make do with The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit (previously featured here on Open Culture), Leningrad Television’s earlier adaptation of Tolkien’s pre-Lord of the Rings children’s novel. It was the now long-gone Leningrad Television’s successor entity 5TV that just put the Soviet Fellowship of the Ring online — and in seemingly pristine condition at that — to the delight of global Tolkien enthusiasts who’d known only rumors of its existence. And as many of them have already found, for all the shortcomings, Khraniteli still has Tom Bombadil, for whose omission from his sprawling blockbusters Jackson will surely never hear the end. Related Content: The 1985 Soviet TV Adaptation of The Hobbit: Cheap and Yet Strangely Charming Illustrations of The Lord of the Rings in Russian Iconography Style (1993) Soviet-Era Illustrations Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976) The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained in 10 Minutes, in Two Illustrated Videos Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. A Long-Lost Soviet Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings Resurfaces on YouTube–and Tolkien Fans Rejoice (1991) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:33p | How The Wrecking Crew Secretly Recorded Some of the Biggest Hits of the 1960s & 70s
The top flight crew of L.A. studio musicians known as The Wrecking Crew acquired their name, legend has it, because they “were wrecking the business for everyone else,” writes Janet Maslin at The New York Times, meaning older session players who couldn’t keep up. Drummers like Hal Blaine (“who justifiably calls himself ’10 of Your Favorite Drummers’ on his Web site”) and guitarists like Tommy Tedesco and Carol Kaye could play anything put in front of them perfectly, in one take, with the style and perfect timing that characterize the absolute best rock, folk, pop, and soul of the 1960s.
With some exceptions, this group kept a low profile and have only become known in subsequent retrospectives that reveal just how much they contributed to the music of the era. The answer is: more than anyone surely suspected at the time. But “the Wrecking Crew was not supposed to attract attention. Groups like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Monkees and many others didn’t care to point out why they sounded so much better on records than on the road.”
Not only did members of the Crew “work miracles,” playing a “first-take, no-glitch version of ‘The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,’” for example, but in many cases, they composed iconic parts without which songs like “The Beat Goes On” or “These Boots Were Made For Walking” would probably not have become hits. “Nine times out of ten the producer or arranger would tell us to use the charts as a guide, that’s all,” Blaine remembered. “We were encouraged to go for it, to go beyond what had been written. We had the opportunity to create, to be a team of arrangers.”
Though mostly unknown to listeners, the couple dozen or so musicians in this group of exceptional performers did produce two major stars, Leon Russell and Glen Campbell, who toured with the Beach Boys in the mid-60s until he became a major superstar with the Jimmy Webb-penned songs “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Wichita Lineman,” both recorded, of course, with members of the Crew. They played on jazz records and recorded iconic TV theme songs like The Twilight Zone, Green Acres, Bonanza, M*A*S*H*, Batman, Mission: Impossible, and Hawaii Five-O.
The only female member of the Crew, Carol Kaye, was described as “the greatest bass player I’ve ever met,” by no less than Brian Wilson. Reported to have played on something like 10,000 sessions, she wrote basslines for songs from “California Girls” to the “Theme from Shaft.”
You can learn much more about the once-hidden work of some of the best studio musicians in the country, rivals of the best players in Motown, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals, in the documentary above directed by Danny Tedesco, son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tony Tedesco. Or Kent Hartman’s book, The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret. Listen to a YouTube playlist of classic Wrecking Crew tracks here. And see why when you thought you were listening to The Byrds, Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, Monkees and even Simon & Garfunkel, you were really often listening to the Wrecking Crew. Related Content: How Carol Kaye Became the Most Prolific Session Musician in History Meet Carol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How The Wrecking Crew Secretly Recorded Some of the Biggest Hits of the 1960s & 70s is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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