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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021
- A Case Of You (Demo) 0:00:00
- California (Demo) 0:04:00
- Hunter (Outtake) 0:07:30
- River (Outtake with French Horns) 0:10:25
- Urge For Going (Outtake with Strings) 0:14:27
| Time | Event |
| 7:01a | The Captivating Art of Restoring Vintage Guitars
Mention the Martin D-28 and you need say no more to fans of folk, country, rock and roll, country-rock, folk-rock, country-folk, etc. Elvis, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Neil Young… all played one. (Neil, in fact, owns Hank’s guitar, and calls it “Hank.”) It is the standard against which all “Dreadnought”-style guitars are measured, because it was the first, and is still, arguably, the best. Named after the Royal British Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, a famous vessel that “spawned a new class of battleships around the world,” writes Daryl Nerl, the larger-bodied D-28 (D for “Dreadnought”), first arrived in 1917, at a time when small parlor guitar and ukuleles were the norm. The D-28 has lived up to its name, says Jason Ahner, C.F. Martin & Co.’s archivist. “If you were on that ship, you wouldn’t fear anything else and if you were playing that guitar you wouldn’t fear not being heard over a banjo or another instrument.” Built like battleships, D-28s don’t only take up space in an ensemble, they fill a room perfectly well on their own, with delicate fingerpicked figures or big booming strums. The D-28 flopped on arrival but exploded in popularity after it was advertised in 1935 as a “bass guitar,” before such things as bass guitars existed. As more and more folk and country players fell for the D-28’s square shoulders, broad waist, and rich, almost symphonic, tonal range, the guitar became an object no player, once they got their hands on one, would part with easily, or ever. Repairing and maintaining vintage Martins, however, is a delicate business that requires an intimate understanding of the guitar’s construction. Not every luthier is up to the task, but as you can see in the video above, Norwegian guitarmaker Lars Dalin has the experience, patience, and know-how to disassemble and restore one head (and neck) to tail.
Dalin’s D-28 restoration video should not only interest students of guitar repair. In it, we learn about the special features of Martin’s build that give the instrument its special tonal qualities, those we’ve been dancing and crying to for over a century. For those more interested in electric guitars, Dalin presents a refret and restoration of another American classic — one that also didn’t get its due at first, but has since become an icon: the Fender Jazzmaster. Introduced in 1958, the guitars didn’t catch on until the 1970s when they could be picked up cheaply at pawn shops by punk and new wave pioneers like Television and Elvis Costello. The 1960 model above is a joy to behold, and a lesson in guitar building, repair, engineering, like no other. See more of Dalin’s guitar restoration projects on his Instagram. Related Content: Watch a Luthier Birth a Cello in This Hypnotic Documentary Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Captivating Art of Restoring Vintage Guitars is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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.  |
| 2:00p | The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not pioneering carmaker Henry Ford actually uttered that quip, it has long held near-Biblical status in the realm of American business. On the other side of the Pacific, Sony founder Akio Morita put it less memorably but more generally: “If you ask the public what they think they’ll need, you’ll always be behind in this world. You’ll never catch up unless you think one to ten years in advance, and create a market for the items you think the public will accept at that time.” And had Sony, creator of the Walkman and co-creator of the Compact Disc, asked its customers what they wanted in the late 1980s, they may well have said digital cassette tapes. In fact Philips, Sony’s partner in the development of the Compact Disc, did want to make a digital cassette tape. But Sony saw the future differently, imagining optical discs that were even more compact, and rewritable to boot. The result was MiniDisc, which within a few years of its launch in 1992 managed to see off the Digital Compact Cassette, the competing format Philips ended up developing with Matsushita. But then the story gets even more interesting, and you can see it told in detail by the half-hour This Does Not Compute documentary above. Though the MiniDisc wasn’t a straightforward success, it turns out neither to have been the sort of Betamax-style failure many Americans seem to remember today. As a consumer audio format, MiniDisc actually became a massive phenomenon, at least back in Sony’s homeland of Japan. The peculiar economics of the Japanese music market, especially back in the 1990s, made CDs about twice as expensive there as they were in the United States. Enter the music-rental shop, where customers could check out a dozen albums for the cost of buying a single one of them, then go home and copy them all to their MiniDiscs. Veritably printing money, Sony and other MiniDisc hardware manufacturers came to the defense of music-rental chains when the displeased Japanese record industry took them to court. By the time the issue was settled, MiniDisc had already entrenched itself in the Japanese market to the point that its devices surpassed CD players in sales. Confused by the sudden preponderance of options, most of them pricey and of uncertain value, American music consumers of the early 1990s stuck with what they knew: the high-quality CD for home listening, and the “good-enough” analog cassette tape elsewhere. In the world of professional audio, and especially among radio producers, the flexibility, reliability, convenience, and clarity of MiniDisc proved undeniable. But never cheap or widespread enough for the average listener, nor quite high-fidelity enough for the exacting audiophile, it spent most of its life in the West as a niche product. Today, a decade after its discontinuation, the history of technology has come to recognize MiniDisc as the evolutionary link between the Walkman and the iPod, each of which revolutionized the way we listen to music. And what with the newly retro appeal of 1990s technology, its aesthetic stock has never been higher. Related Content: The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music All Praise Lou Ottens: The Inventor of the Cassette Tape Dies at Age 94 A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too 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. The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 7:00p | Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album
When Joni Mitchell released Blue in 1971, she revealed herself to the world as a poet with a hard-boiled interior life. The album, writes Rolling Stone, challenged the image many had of her as an innocent flower child. “The West Coast feminine ideal” was a role “Mitchell hadn’t asked for and did not want.” Of her writing of the album, she said in a 2013 interview, “They better find out who they’re worshipping. Let’s see if they can take it. Let’s get real.” Get real she did, shocking the men around her, some of whom she’d written about candidly, including Graham Nash, Leonard Cohen, and James Taylor, who played on several tracks. She wrote about the heartbreak of leaving her daughter and rewrote the breakup song as a confessional on “River.” The album’s cultural impact, 50 years after its release, has much to do with Mitchell as a lone female protagonist in a male-dominated industry. “Along with its romantic melancholy,” Rolling Stone writes, “Blue was the sound of a woman availing herself of the romantic and sexual freedom that was, until then, an exclusively male province in rock.” We listen to Blue now and hear the voices of later generations of singer-songwriters, from Tracy Chapman and Tori Amos to Phoebe Bridgers, who seized their own power. By the time of Blue’s release, Mitchell had become a powerful voice of her generation, penning “Woodstock” just the year before. “Blue is Mitchell’s first song cycle whereby all the songs interrelate in their themes of loss and transformation,” writes Classic Album Sundays. “The album reflects the disillusionment and disenchantment felt by a generation during the closing of The Sixties.”
As if capturing the feelings of her own personal losses and those of millions of others weren’t enough, Mitchell’s songwriting and musicianship on the album are consistently astonishing, each word married to a suspended note, an unexpected chord voicing, a pregnant breath. “My words and music are locked together,” she says. She proved on Blue that she was a talent to be reckoned with and never underestimated. On the 50th anniversary of Blue’s release, Mitchell is releasing a five song EP, Blue 50 (Demos & Outtakes), which you can hear above (see tracklist below). It’s a document of a different album, one that might have included “Hunter” — a country-like strummer — and might have had french horns on “River,” perhaps the album’s best-known song and one of the most beloved Christmas songs of the past 50 years. Look for the next release celebrating a half-century of Blue on October 29th. Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971) “will explore the period leading up to Blue,” notes her official YouTube, “through nearly six hours of unreleased home, studio, and live recordings.” Or, you could just listen to Blue over and over. It seems to reveal something different every time. Related Content: How Joni Mitchell’s Song of Heartbreak, “River,” Became a Christmas Classic Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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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