Spotify playlist: https://spoti.fi/3EaXgb3

“He didn’t do it, he wasn’t there
He didn’t want it, he wouldn’t dare”

I don’t know why these words started going through my head twenty minutes ago but there they were, unable to be excised. And the more they played in my brain the happier I was. I was entranced by the music, in my own private bubble, if not Idaho. I was so happy I didn’t want to be free.

10cc. At this point known for “I’m Not in Love” and “The Things We Do for Love,” if they’re known at all. Scratch that, if they’re REMEMBERED at all. The latter hit came out in 1977, and that’s 44 years ago. And the opening cut on that album, entitled “Deceptive Bends,” was “Good Morning Judge.”

The track is jaunty. But would it close someone who never heard it before? “The Things We Do for Love” is a one listen smash, perfect, a hit in any era. And then there’s the suite that ends the album, “Feel the Benefit,” an eleven and a half minute opus that reminds me of the Sweet’s “Love is Like Oxygen,” from their 1977 LP “Level Headed,” the only one I ever bought, even though they’re not really similar tracks, but they’re both extended, majestic.

You didn’t quite get this majesty in the original iteration of 10cc, which had too much talent to maintain. Ultimately Kevin Godley and Lol Creme went on to make a triple album boxed set with their musical invention the Gizmo and when that failed they became legendary video directors, pushing the envelope in the original explosion of MTV. But Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart soldiered on under the old moniker.

But those initial LPs, especially the eponymous first one, whew! Now that’s a masterpiece of not only construction and production, writing and playing, but HUMOR! Which is completely absent in today’s music sphere, then again it was just a small part of the enterprise back when, but the band’s “Rubber Bullets” ran up the chart in the U.K., and meant nothing over here.

“Rubber Bullets” is the best Beach Boys song Brian Wilson never wrote. Well, maybe we need to include “Back in the U.S.S.R.” in the equation too, but…”Rubber Bullets exploded out of the speakers, you had to run to catch up with it. As for the other songs on the LP, they were tongue-in-cheek and in the style of classics and the whole album was infectious, one of my favorites, but it was on Mercury, which was poison, and was far from meat and potatoes, which was dominating FM rock in the United States, so it stiffed over here.

The second LP had a radio track, “The Wall Street Shuffle,” and then the third, which I did not think was as good as the first two, had the gigantic hit, “I’m Not in Love.”

The fourth LP sounded much more like the first two, especially the second, and it did nothing in the U.S. marketplace, despite containing “Art for Art’s Sake” and “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” and then the band splintered.

Now the truth is I actually prefer the second Gouldman/Stewart album, “Bloody Tourists,” over “Deceptive Bends.” “Dreadlock Holiday” was a hit seemingly everywhere but the States, but it’s actually the slower, dreamier numbers that ring my bell, like “Old Mister Time.”

Anyway, I was thrilled one of my favorite bands had another hit so I rushed out and bought “Deceptive Bends,” which I would have bought anyway, and thus I know “Good Morning Judge” by heart. Just like seemingly everybody in the U.K. and northern Europe, where it was a successful single, which even had a video!

https://bit.ly/3rnzzIU

I just learned that, doing some research on credits. And I watched it, wary of this early video, pre-MTV, when they were made as ads for Europe where state radio was hard to crack. But when I watched it…it was magical! That sense of humor. Never forget, conception supersedes production every day of the week. And the video just reinforced what I knew from revisiting the track, these guys could WAIL!

“Well good morning judge how are you today?
I’m in trouble please put me away”

There’s a brash guitar opening, a lick and a slash, this cut hits the track running, it needs no build, it’s already built.

But then leaning towards sotto voce:

“I couldn’t stop it so I let it be”

Then comes the part that is stuck in my head:

“He didn’t do it, he wasn’t there
He didn’t want it, he wouldn’t dare
I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there,
I didn’t want it, I wouldn’t dare”

And then a little over ninety seconds in the cut starts to explode, there’s a guitar flourish and then a dancing lead which ultimately gets syncopated akin to an Allman Brothers cut and then both guitars are playing and there’s more of the hooky riff, and then it’s back to the story:

“Alcatraz is like a home sweet home
I’m so wanted and I’m never alone
San Quentin is the place to be”

There’s that humor, the ranking of prisons, never mind the HAPPINESS!

“I’m so happy I don’t wanna be free
So happy I don’t wanna be free”

That’s rock and roll, it takes you prisoner, you can’t shake it, you can think you’re burned out, done, but then it creeps back in. And it’s a big tent, the guitar is a key element, but there are so many styles, there’s a whole world to explore and relish. And the thing is you believe you’re the only fan and then you go to the show and find all these people who feel exactly like you, who were in their bedrooms alone, spinning the records, who are now at the gig to bond with the sound. They don’t need to talk, they don’t shoot selfies, they may even close their eyes as the music washes over them, a live version of what they know so well.

And I went to see 10cc at the Santa Monica Civic and…

Now they no longer have shows there.

And rock and roll no longer dominates the chart.

And chances are the obscure album you’re into has few other fans, there’s just so much product.

And everybody’s complaining they can’t make any money while they’re grubbing for it.

And the audience itself believes it’s entitled to be stars, as rich and well known as those on stage.

And the work is secondary to money and fame.

But if you were there, it was different. And it’s not coming back. But the tunes, the magic remains. I’m so happy I don’t wanna be free!

It’s always the stars that change the paradigm.

Credit John Meglen with starting the Vegas residency trend, with Celine Dion. And over the years more and more acts have played there for extended periods. And now we’ve got Adele.

The traveling is hell. Isn’t that what Dan Fogelberg said? The traveling kills you. The best part is the hour or so you’re on stage, the rest of the time…you’re unable to sleep, hanging with the same people every damn day and just trying to hang on. As for the rock star shenanigans, those are history now that everybody has a smartphone with a camera, never mind the #MeToo movement.

But let’s not forget Garth Brooks. Who plays until demand is exhausted. At low prices. This is the best way to kill scalpers ever invented. Why do more people not do this?

Because they want the money, they’d rather not work that hard, a lot of the old acts are pissed they’ve got to go on the road to earn their keep now that recording income is down.

But having the audience come to you?

It’s no longer the 1960s. Everybody’s been on a plane, flight is no longer classy, as evidenced by the air rage incidents of the last eighteen months.

And if you want to go to Vegas, not only are there numerous direct flights, but there are a zillion hotel rooms, and not all of them expensive, and Vegas needs to fill them. It’s a win win win. For the acts, the audience and the hotels.

There’s nothing cool about it, but it turns out cool is out of style. Do you want to go to Bonnaroo or JazzFest, do you want to camp in the mud or retire every night to your hotel room? Which is why the most successful new festivals are based in cities, not only are there a ton of customers in the surrounding area, you don’t have to camp and live together with everybody else. People don’t want to get together and live together, that faded with the sixties too.

As for Vegas… The truth is if acts are willing to commit to dates, tickets become available. Much of the mania of on sale dates is overblown. The flames of the hysteria are fanned by the absence of tickets, many having gone to scalpers, prices are driven up beyond demand. This is the Garth model. You could always get tickets for Celine. The showroom might be full at the end but you didn’t have to buy your tickets a year in advance to make sure you could see the show.

It’s business, it’s mature. You don’t go backwards. Concerts were nascent fifty and sixty years ago. There weren’t that many rooms, they weren’t all for music and sound was a challenge. Those problems have been fixed. In addition, with the roll-up in the nineties, the business has become professionalized. You’re not worried about Live Nation stiffing you, you’re willing to be paid by check instead of cash. So in what other ways can the business evolve beyond the old slog from town to town?

Credit country music, they figured it out years ago, with Branson. I’m not saying we need a whole new city, costs are too high and Vegas has the infrastructure. You’ve just got to train the public to go to Vegas to see their favorite acts.

And it’s well known that superstars don’t travel from city to city anyway, they park their butts in one metropolis and jet out to local gigs and then relocate to another hub. Maybe there can be residencies in these other hubs. You can play Vegas, Chicago, Atlanta and New York. Everybody is close enough to one of these cities. Forget the people who bitch, the truth is fans are willing to pay umpteen bucks to see their favorites, money is not the issue, why shouldn’t the burden be shouldered by the fans instead of the acts?

We haven’t had a revolution in touring in decades. Recorded music was disrupted, but not touring. But touring is ripe. The model can be changed to the benefit of everyone. Adele is going to do a better show if she’s not hassled with all that travel.

As for the coronavirus, did you read about Phish’s Halloween shows in Vegas?

“COVID from Vegas.’ Phish concerts leave a long trail of infections, fans say – Those who attended the Vermont-based band’s Las Vegas concerts over Halloween weekend say few wore masks and air was stagnant”: https://bit.ly/3EaixBv

Bring everybody to one location and they bring everything back all around the country.

Food for thought.

John Lennon is an asshole.

But Paul McCartney can be passive-aggressive.

So the shock here is the old cars. Watching the miniseries you believe you’re in the present, so why are the cars in the street so ancient? It’s cognitive dissonance. Paul may be complaining about the quality of 16mm film, but just like the Beatles’ recordings themselves, the images are pristine.

So in the second part George is back, the songs are coming together and the Beatle magic is evident. It’s the vocals, not only Paul’s pure voice but John’s light grade sandpapery one too.

And there are revelations… John plays the into guitar part of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and solos too. And he can play the lap steel, it’s him on “For You Blue.” And Ringo can even play the piano, but he’s definitely a secondary character here. He plays the drums, you can’t have a band without them, but he’s not a major songwriter, a good part of the time he’s staring into the distance, that is when he’s not camping it up, a la “A Hard Day’s Night.”

As for George… There’s really no room for him. Oh, there’s plenty of room for his guitar, just not his input. He’s relatively quiet, thoughtful, and he speaks slowly, at times self-consciously, whereas Lennon just spouts whatever comes into his brain and McCartney oozes a subtle confidence. And most of the time the music creation is a conversation between John and Paul, this is how they’ve done it for years. But George was in the band from almost the beginning. As for Ringo, not only is the drummer, but he’s a latecomer, a la Jason Newsted in Metallica, and never fully accepted by the others, or should I say never feels completely comfortable with them.

So for decades we’ve seen the Beatles as the epitome of the sixties, the paragon, the tertiary acts have faded away and everybody else has become secondary. But that’s not the way it was. As a matter of fact, the way it was was music was everything for the younger generation. TV was a joke. As for films… The renaissance started in ’67, with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” but it really didn’t gain full traction until ’69 and then the seventies. But in the interim, the youngsters had not only taken over music, but seemingly every other walk of life. This was the era when it became cool to be young, before this was not the case, your elders were respected and in control. Today, the boomers are in many cases out of it, just ask them for tech help, but they want to hold on to power and the younger generations believe that youth continues to rule, even though they have not demonstrated any reason why it should.

Bottom line, the Beatles were part of a scene, they weren’t the entire scene. Today the Beatles represent the sixties, during the era they were just part of the sixties.

And the band knew it.

When John talks about Fleetwood Mac… He’s not verbalizing from the perspective of a superior, but a contemporary, he digs what they do, he’s not quite envious, but he’s wowed.

There’s constant context. The Beatles are alone in a room, but they’re reading the newspaper, talking about what’s going on around them, yet still…

Self-referential.

We see the Beatle albums as discrete, each one individual, with a definite forward progression. But to the band itself, it’s all just part of their work, all accessible, not in the past but still in the present. In the first episode John goes off on my favorite Beatle song, “Every Little Thing.” In the second episode, he sings “I Feel Fine” and…these songs are part of the band’s history, part of their conversation, they’re their catalog, not to be discarded and forgotten, but referred to on a regular basis.

And they’re not above publicity. They’re reading what’s written about them constantly, despite remarking on its falsehood and asking Derek Taylor if they can sue. Then again, this was the sixties, WHEN THERE WAS SO MUCH ROCK PRESS! Funny how in the internet era there are more words, but fewer facts, and the stories don’t drive the culture, whereas back then they were everything.

So John Lennon acts like that kid in high school…who bats below his intelligence, but does not care, who believes he’s superior to the system and doesn’t need it anyway, he can survive without it. He’s constantly cracking jokes, throwing off asides, but almost always they have an edge to them, if you’re the recipient of his words you can feel bad. The band tolerates him, would anybody else?

Well the truth is when you’re a rock star you can get away with so much, but as you age this personality wears thin. Most people mellow out, the ones who don’t end up isolated. I wouldn’t say John can’t read the room so much as he doesn’t care what the room has to say or think. This makes him John Lennon, a singular rock hero, but it also demonstrates how if he were not a Beatle he’d have a hard time making it in life, getting along with everyday people.

As for Paul McCartney…when the going gets rough, he shuts up. You can tell he’s pissed, but he won’t tell you why, never mind proffer a solution. So the others keep talking while Paul stays quiet, waiting for a breaking point. Can you imagine being in a band with these guys?

They’ve all got issues. Which is why they’re musicians, artists. They’ve got a calling, they know they don’t fit in anywhere else, and they’re not big on compromise, because if it’s not right, it’s worthless.

But George does say the band always meanders to a conclusion, and that’s the best result. It’s the opposite of business, which has a distinct target and is regimented in its journey to the destination. The Beatles are messing around, they’ll get it done, but they’ll also have some laughs, and they’ll do a ton of experimentation, but when it’s all said and done it has to reach a certain bar, they insist upon it.

But the band is constantly playing material that ends up on other albums, your jaw drops when you hear McCartney sing “Her Majesty,” the throwaway coda at the end of “Abbey Road.” You thought it was written that way, an afterthought. Hm, no. It was a piece from the past that was jiggled into the second side.

And there’s “Oh! Darling” and so many other “Abbey Road” songs, as well as McCartney’s “Another Day” and “Teddy Boy,” the former of which is not going to come out on wax for years.

And Glyn Johns is the engineer, quiet, as most of them are, unwilling to weigh in for fear of losing their job, trying to get the sound right while the band is ready to go.

But the studio equipment! It looks like it’s out of a war room from the forties, maybe even the thirties! Now the truth is recording takes a giant leap forward at just about this time, with 16 track machines and Neve and other consoles, this is the last vestige of the old. But it’s cognitive dissonance once again, everything is so modern, where did they get this equipment, is this a joke?

And there’s not the constant overdubbing and comping of vocals which took hold in the seventies and are even worse in the era of Pro Tools. That’s why they’re doing it this way, as a band, to get back to where they once belonged.

So yes, the second episode moves forward, the songs come together, the tracks are laid down, they’re building to a conclusion.

Yet George Martin is there in his suit, on the floor reading the newspaper, about as engaged as Yoko, what is he doing, the vaunted producer?

So if you don’t want to invest eight hours, you can start with Part Two.

And a completist can watch it all, even over again, but that’s not the way the Beatles themselves were. They were just making another record, other than Paul, they were not taking it that seriously. As Paul tightens up, John actually gets looser and more involved. George enjoys playing every day. They’re a band again, the way it once was. As for being worried that the new record has to be as good as what came before, it has to top the chart, we hear nothing of that. That’s the modern paradigm. Which is inhibiting. Because if you feel the pressure of the audience/world, you can rarely deliver.

And the truth is in this episode the band is removed, in their own private world, they don’t even acknowledge the Scruffs outside the building.

And of course I must mention Billy Preston. This is how music works, behind the scenes it’s a culture, a family, if you don’t keep up relationships you get no opportunities. And Billy is invited to sit down at the piano as a casual thought, he’d just stopped by to say hi, this spontaneity, this refusal to weigh every decision heavily, is what results in the unexpectedly great, if you want to push forward you can’t rigidly adhere to the manual. As a matter of fact, so many famous rock sounds were created by musicians messing with the equipment.

And Billy is so skilled. He doesn’t have to go home and study, he’s paid his dues for years, on the road, in the studio, he can just sit down and play what is right, it’s amazing.

So the truth is George and Ringo evolved. After his solo albums hit a wall, George got the Traveling Wilburys together. Ringo became an actor, made music in different genres and ultimately went on the road. John? John recorded solo tunes, many worked out in these sessions, and then canceled his subscription to “Billboard” and retired, he wanted to have a life, see what he had missed. Being famous was not important. Then again, he had plenty of money. And then just when he came back, he was killed.

Paul?

He’s done the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Sure, the initial “McCartney,” done all by himself, was a revelation. And then Wings. But thereafter it became the McCartney show, the same thing over and over, he continued to hold the Beatles torch, but he was crippled by it. (Of course Paul eventually did the Fireman and recorded classical music, but he was never a leader in these areas, pushing the envelope.)

All the peripheral people… They were working with the Beatles, but if that’s all they had, they were heading for a big fall. Only the Beatles were the Beatles, only they could rest on their laurels. Glyn Johns and George Martin had to get other gigs. Ditto Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Even Derek Taylor. Time keeps running, you’ve got to keep moving, which can be hard to do after you’ve reached the pinnacle of success.

So the second episode moves faster, and is more interesting, but what you’ve got to remember is you may have more reverence for what you see on screen than the band itself. For them it was just another project, part of their life. It is not everything, it was just something. “Let It Be” was just another song. Ditto “Get Back.” Hell, they let Joe Cocker record “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” before they did. The band was in motion, and only Paul seems to be linked to the past, the others are exploring, wanting to move forward, the Beatles is something they’re doing now, but it’s not the only thing they want to do in life. There’s so much more to life. But in the ensuing years, when music has been commoditized, when it panders, when it’s massaged to be a hit, it’s hard not to look back at the glory days evidenced here without being wowed. But that was then and this is now. And in many ways, just like in so many other walks of modern life, then was better than now.

Tune in today, November 30th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863 

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

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