On August 14, 1965, The Beatles made their final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The last song in their last set was “Help!” At the very end, they took off their guitars and Sullivan waved them over. He raised his hand, waited for the crowd to stop, and then said, “I just want to congratulate the four of you on the way you’ve handled yourselves. You’ve handled yourselves magnificently. You’re honored by your own country, and you’re loved by our country. God love you all.”
Bed head, feedback, black spectacles. Of course. In fact, there must have been a bed positioned right off stage for bed head hair styling. The crowd included a number of aging Thurston Moore lookalikes. (In 1986 a lot of people wanted to be just like Thurston.) The only thing missing at this show was Billy Ruane standing in front of the stage conducting the band. RIP Billy.
Thurston read poems and told some funny stories between songs. He said that in the late 1980s, Sonic Youth played a show here and he had a freak-out in the middle and was so mad that he threw down his guitar and stormed off the stage. The set continued without him. It was the middle of Winter, and he went out to the tour van, zipped into his parka, and just sat there until the rest of the band came out.
He’s mellowed out since then, like most of us. The setup was two acoustic guitars, drums, violin, and harp. The show had an “unplugged” feel, but occasionally built to a mild feedback frenzy (harp feedback?). That seems to be the thing now: acoustic guitars through heavy distortion. I enjoyed watching drummer and Boston native John Moloney, who managed the dynamics nicely while sporting a Black Flag logo on his kick drum.
Kurt Vile opened but we walked in just as he was finishing his last number. After the show, we went to the Burren, where two different folky sets were going on, one in the front playing the theme from “Smokey and the Bandit” and the other in the back which I couldn’t hear very well. Thurston had announced he was coming over to the bar after the show, but he never appeared. Our friend Jeremy told us how Sonic Youth slept on his couch in Hartford one night. Everyone at the Burren had a beard, including the women. Davis Square is so great that I wish I was 21 again. I plan go there more often when they build a high speed tunnel from Jamaica Plain.
So how come no one has ever seen Bigfoot? Here is some leftover lo-fi musical fooling around from last year at the former Hummelvision studio. I used a piano, guitars, drums and radio in a Garageband loop. “Which portion of our continents remain untouched?” [link] Bigfoot by fredwhite
Back in 1985 when I got my first Mac, there was a program called MusicWorks by Hayden Software. It was a beautiful little application that allowed you compose and play synthesized music using either regular notation or a grid form. The latter was perfect for me since I’m a play-by-ear musician and only read music at about a first grade level. The Mac’s built-in sound chip could only produce four voices, and Musicworks gave you a half-dozen or so instruments and a few effects. You could make a little figure, copy it, paste it, invert it, raise or lower the octave, duplicate it, etc. It was a natural for looping, before that was even a word. Other than MacWord, I definitely spent more time on MusicWorks during the 1980s than any other piece of software. When Steve Jobs died recently I got the old Mac out and listened to some of the files from way back. This one was called “So Long.”
Wrote this on a 1985 Mac 512K running Hayden Software “MusicWorks” Ripped the sound in Garageband (using the 3.5mm miniplug audio out on the Mac). Video done with iPhone. Edited in iMovie.
On August 14, 1965, The Beatles made their final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The last song in their last set was “Help!” At the very end, they took off their guitars and Sullivan waved them over. He raised his hand, waited for the crowd to stop, and then said, “I just want to congratulate the four of you on the way you’ve handled yourselves. You’ve handled yourselves magnificently. You’re honored by your own country, and you’re loved by our country. God love you all.”
