Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” competes with Lennon’s “Julia” as the most tender song on the Beatles’ White Album and maybe in the band’s entire catalogue. Inspired by a Bach piece that McCartney and George Harrison learned to play when they were young, its finger-picked acoustic guitar has the sound of a folk lullaby. But the song’s shifting time signatures and delicate melody make it something of a tricky one: recording sessions at Abbey Road involved a series of 32 takes, most of them false starts and only 11 complete. The version we hear on the album is the final take, finished while Lennon worked on “Revolution 9” in the studio next door.

You can see 1:33 of that session in the footage above, captured on 16mm by a film crew from Apple Records directed by Tony Bramwell, part of a 10-minute promo that also included footage of McCartney recording “Helter Skelter” and “various other scenes from inside the studio, in the Apple Boutique, Apple Tailoring, McCartney’s garden and other locations,” the Beatles Bible notes. It’s an ephemeral document of time passing peaceably during the grueling 5-month White Album sessions, which for all their legendary tension and rancor, included many moments like these.

The three-day ordeal that was the recording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” (after which engineer Geoff Emerick quit) provides stark contrast, and maybe confirmation that the Beatles were at their best when they worked separately in 1968. The brief film above also confirms a more technical recording concern: the ticking we hear in the studio track is not a metronome, but Paul’s feet alternately tapping on the wood studio floor to measure out the bars of the complex song, which shifts between 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4 time. “Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me,” he remembered, and we see him striving to get it right.

After the Beatles, McCartney made “Blackbird” a regular part of his set, playing it at nearly every concert from 1975 on. It wasn’t only the beauty of the song that has moved him all these years, but its inspiration, the Civil Rights movement, which “all of us cared passionately about,” he said. “Blackbird” is “symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem,” but the song’s intended message, he said, was “from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”

Below you can watch McCartney talk about the story behind “Blackbird” in a 2005 production called Chaos & Creation at Abbey Road.

via Boing Boing

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Dave Grohl, like many rock musicians, does not come from a classically trained background. Instead he has an ability to write according to what sounds good, and where noodling around in the studio can bring great rewards. That’s where The Foo Fighters’ best song “Everlong” originates.

In this 2020 clip from Oates Song Fest, Grohl tells the story of “Everlong,” and how it came to him in the studio one day in between working on the band’s second album. It started with a chord.

“I’m not a trained musician, so I don’t know what that chord is,” he says. (The Intertubes seem to agree it’s a Dmaj7). At first he thought it was a chord from Sonic Youth (“Schizophrenia,” in fact), one of his favorite bands of all time. So that was a good start. One chord led to another and soon he had a sketch of a song.

At the time, Grohl was essentially homeless after a divorce from his wife, photographer Jennifer Youngblood. And the band were at a low ebb as well, not happy that their debut album hadn’t taken off like they wanted. But Grohl then fell in love again, this time with Louise Post of the band Veruca Salt. Over Christmas 1996, he wrote the lyrics. He would tell Kerrang magazine in 2006: “That song’s about a girl that I’d fallen in love with and it was basically about being connected to someone so much, that not only do you love them physically and spiritually, but when you sing along with them you harmonize perfectly.”

He recorded a demo of the song, playing all the instruments (he might not be a *trained* musician, but he is a well rounded one), and the finished studio version really didn’t stray too far from the original. Post provided harmonies recorded down a telephone, as she was in Chicago at the time. (You can hear them isolated, along with a lot more gearhead chat on this Produce Like a Pro episode): “I never considered doing this acoustically, I thought it was a rock song,” Grohl adds. That was until he did the Howard Stern show, early in the morning at 6 a.m., and performed it with just solo guitar. “It gave the song a new life,” he said. “It makes the song feel the way I always wish it would.”

The song catapulted the band to the top of the charts, and is considered one of the great rock songs of the 1990s. David Letterman considers it his favorite song, and asked the band to play it at the close of his final show in 2015. For a very specific lyric written about a very specific woman, with chords discovered while just goofing about, it has a universal quality.

via BoingBoing

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness