In this 2015 production, Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman revisits Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and makes the case for why “it was so far ahead of its time that it was actually the first ever concept album, making Vivaldi the world’s first rock superstar.”

“Uncovering the dark rumours surrounding the churches, orphanages and canals of Venice, Rick Wakeman sets out to investigate the extraordinary life of Antonio Vivaldi. From 18^th century scandals to interviews with fellow musician Mike Rutherford, uncover the mystery behind one of the world’s favourite composers.” Rick Wakeman: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons appears on the “Rick Wakeman’s World” YouTube channel.

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At the height of Motown’s powers in the 1960s they were setting trends, not chasing them, but even that record company fell under the spell of the British Invasion. Sure, the jukebox R’n’B singles that made their way across the Atlantic were in the DNA of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Who, but in the mid’60’s the label decided they needed a beat group of their own. That’s how one of the weirdest tales of pop music unfolded, and would have stayed a tiny footnote if it weren’t for the future fame of two of the Mynah Birds’ members: funk overlord Rick James and folk-rocker-noisemaker Neil Young.

Yes, for a brief period of time they were in the same band together in Toronto, Canada, part of an exploding beat group scene that was mostly all white. “I was an authentic R&B singer living in a city where white musicians were striving to play authentic R&B,” Rick James wrote in his autobiography quoted in Bandsplaining’s above video. “That added to my status. It also got me laid.”

James Ambrose Johnson Jr., had been in Canada for two years already, having escaped the Vietnam draft by fleeing north in 1964. Saved from a bar brawl by future members of The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, he entered the music scene and adopted the name Ricky Matthews, as a way to hide his identity. The Mynah Birds began in 1964 and even put out a single on Columbia that went nowhere. They tried (and failed) again in 1965, with an ever-changing line-up. Ricky Matthews though, remained the dynamic lead singer.

Enter Neil Young. As Rick James tells it, he was looking to change their sound and he saw Neil Young playing in a coffeehouse and asked him to join. (James’ recollection is in the above video.) However, Kevin Plummer in the Torontoist has a different version:

One day—most likely in the fall of 1965, but some say in early 1966—Young was walking down Yorkville Avenue with an amp on his shoulder. As he passed, Palmer struck up a conversation. The Mynah Birds were, once again, without a lead guitarist, so he asked Young to join—despite the fact that Young only owned the twelve-string acoustic. “I had to eat,” Young is quoted in John Einarson’s Neil Young: Don’t Be Denied (Quarry Press, 1992). “I needed a job and it seemed like a good thing to do. I still liked playing and I liked Bruce so I went along. There was no pressure on me. It was the first time that I was in a band where I wasn’t calling the shots.”

As Young and James were soon to share a basement apartment and a whole lot of drugs, the participants can be forgiven for their hazy memories.

The video also conflates their svengali (John Craig Eaton, a department store heir who bankrolled the band and gave them rehearsal space) with their manager (folk singer and fan Morley Shelman). Whether it was Eaton, Shelman, or just luck, within two months of having Young in the band, and a reputation for wild, amphetamine-driven concerts—the band had signed a seven-year contract with Motown, the first mostly-white act to do so.

Neil Young remembered the first album sessions in an interview with Cameron Crowe:

We went in and recorded five or six nights, and if we needed something, or if they thought we weren’t strong enough, a couple of Motown singers would just walk right in. And they’d Motown us! A couple of ’em would be right there, and they’d sing the part. They’d just appear and we’d all do it together. If somebody wasn’t confident or didn’t have it, they didn’t say, ‘Well, let’s work on this.’ Some guy would just come in who had it. Then everybody was grooving. And an amazing thing happened—we sounded hot. And all of a sudden it was Motown. That’s why all those records sounded like that.

Rick James was worried about entering the States and being arrested for avoiding the draft. But in Detroit he was safe. It was when he returned that the trouble began—he discovered that Shelman had apparently spent their advance on a fancy new motorbike and a not-so-fancy heroin habit. A fight broke out and Shelman retaliated by ratting James out. James turned himself in to the American authorities and the Mynah Birds’ career—at least the James/Young version—ended. Only four of the tracks recorded for the album were ever released, two at the time as a single, the other two in 2006 as part of a Rhino Records Motown retrospective. More are rumored to exist but they remain hidden away in a vault at best, destroyed at worst.

Young would move to California soon after and join Buffalo Springfield. James, once out of jail, would make his way back into the recording industry, ironically returning to Motown. Band members Goldy McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas would form Steppenwolf. And through it all, James and Young remained friends.

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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.

When did the first rooftop concert happen? Probably not long after construction of the first rooftop. How could early humans resist such an opportunity to project sound over the heads of a crowd? But if we’re talking about a Rooftop Concert, we’re talking about a special genre of gig defined by The Beatles’ farewell rooftop show in London on January 30, 1969. Since that historic moment, each time musicians take to a rooftop, they inevitably face comparisons with the Fab Four, even if their rooftop concert happened first.

Before Paul McCartney sang “You’ve been playing on the roofs again” in an improvised “Get Back” in London, Jefferson Airplane “performed on a New York City rooftop in 1968,” writes Rajesh Kumar Jha at The Citizen.

“The context for the concert was provided by events like the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the accelerating Vietnam War.” The affair was organized by Jean-Luc Godard, who “wanted to film the radical mood of the times under his 1 AM. Project, for which the Airplane were best suited.”

Grace Slick opened “The House at Pooneil Corners” by shouting from the roof, “Hello, New York! Wake up, you fuc&ers! Free music! Nice songs! Free love!” They made it 7 minutes into a set before the police broke it up and made arrests. Godard ended up abandoning the film, leaving it to D.A. Pennebaker to finish and release it as 1 P.M. Can we credit Godard for the rooftop concert as a thing? Or did he steal it from an even earlier antecedent, Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos, nicknamed “the Elvis Presley of Brazil”? Carlos staged a rooftop concert living room set below for his song “Quando” in 1967.

Whoever invented the rooftop concert, by the time U2 did it on an L.A. rooftop — legally — playing “Where the Streets Have No Name” to kick off the Joshua Tree tour, the trick had become old hat. Acknowledging their debt, Bono joked in an interview, “it’s not the first time we’ve ripped off the Beatles.” Little did he know, perhaps, that they were also ripping off Jefferson Airplane, who themselves were only imitations, when it came to rooftop concerts, of “the Frank Sinatra of Latin America.” Roberto Carlos might be lip synching, and seemingly sans audience in his appearance on a São Paulo rooftop, but we must admit he set a stylish standard for the genre of the rooftop concert all his own, two years before the Beatles made it theirs.

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

To me Robert Johnson’s influence — he was like a comet or a meteor that came along and, BOOM, suddenly he raised the ante, suddenly you just had to aim that much higher. 

As Keith Richards tells it, the first time he met Brian Jones, the two “went around to his apartment crash-pad,” where all Jones had was “a chair, a record player, and a few records, one of which was Robert Johnson.” Jones put on the record, and the moment changed Richards’ life. He wasn’t so much interested in the devil at the crossroads. The first question he asked — “Who’s that?” — was followed by, “Yeah, but who’s the other guy playing with him? That, too, was Robert Johnson, playing rhythm with his thumb while bending and sliding with his fingers, the fancy guitar work that earned him the envy of fellow bluesmen, and led to the rumor his skills came from hell.

“One of the staples of Johnson’s style is his ability to sound at times like two guitar players,” writes Andy Aledort at Guitar World, “combining driving rhythms on the lower strings with melodic figures with the higher strings.” Like every other British guitarist of his generation, Richards was enchanted. “I’ve never heard anybody before or since use the form and bend it quite so much to make it work for himself…. The guitar playing — it was almost like listening to Bach. You know, you think you’re getting a handle on playing the blues, and then you hear Robert Johnson….”

The legendary bluesman became not only Richards’ hero, but also his teacher. “We all felt there was a certain gap in our education,” he tells The Guardian, “so we all scrambled back to the 20s and 30s to figure out how Charlie Patton did this, or Robert Johnson, who, after all, was and still probably is the supremo.”

Figuring out what Johnson did still consumes his biggest fans. Since his recordings were intentionally sped up, interpreters of his music must make their best guesses about his tunings, which “can be broken down into four categories: standard tuning, open G, open D and drop D,” Aledort notes. (There are other arguments for alternate tunings.) Richards frequently used open tunings like Johnson’s before he learned 5-string open G from Ry Cooder, on songs, for example, like “Street Fighting Man.” At the top, he gives us his interpretation of Johnson’s “32-20 Blues,” in standard tuning.

And just above, Keef offers a brief lesson on how to play the blues, mumbling and growling over a 12-bar vamp. The music took him over, he says, “it’s just something you’ve got to do. You have no choice. I mean, we had other things to do and everything, but once you got bitten by the bug, you had to find out how it’s done, and every three minutes of soundbite would be like an education.”

What did their blues heroes think of the Stones? The band never got to meet Robert Johnson, of course, but he might have been appreciative. “I got the chance to sit around with Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack,” says Keith, “and they just wanted to share ideas.” Johnson didn’t leave much behind to learn from, but his keenest students found exactly what they needed in his few haunting recordings.

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

Image via Ebay

The big, stand-up double bass or “bull fiddle,” as it’s been called, dates to the 15th century. The design has evolved, but its four strings and EADG tuning have remained standard features of basses for several hundred years of classical and, later, jazz, country, and early rock and roll. Its booming tone and unwieldy size notwithstanding, the venerable instrument is a member of the violin family. So, when did the four-string bass become a bass guitar?

Leo Fender’s 1951 Precision Bass is frequently cited as the first — “such a special instrument,” writes the Fender company, that “if Clarence Leo Fender were to be remembered for nothing else, surely it would be the Precision — an instrument — indeed a whole new kind of instrument — that simply didn’t exist before he invented it.”

Prior to Fender’s innovation, it was thought that the earliest examples of electric basses were stand-up models like Regal’s Electrified Double Bass and Rickenbacker’s Electro-Bass-Viol, both dating from 1936.

Image via Ebay

But as historian and writer Peter Blecha found out, the first electric bass guitar actually appeared that same year, invented in ‘36 by “musician/instructor/basement tinkerer” Paul H. Tutmarc, “a pioneer in electric pickup design who marketed a line of electric lapsteel guitars under the Audiovox brand out of the unlikely town of Seattle.” Throughout the thirties and forties, notes Guitar World, Tutmarc “made a number of guitars and amplifiers under the Audiovox brand.” In 1935, he invented a “New Type Bull Fiddle,” an electric stand-up bass. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced it at the time as good news for the “poor bass-fiddler… who has to lug his big bull-fiddle home” at the end of the night.

The following year, Tutmarc combined his instrument-making skills into the world’s first bass guitar, the Audiovox 736 Electric Bass Fiddle, a true original and a “radical design breakthrough,” Blecha writes. Tutmarc’s instrument solved the bassist’s problems of being inaudible in a big band setting and being barely able to carry one’s instrument to and from a gig. The 736 did not catch on outside Seattle, but it did get out a lot around the city.

Tutmarc “gave the bass to his wife Lorraine, who used it while performing with the Tutmarc family band. [He] also sold copies to various gospel, Hawaiian, and country players.” (The bass cost around $65, or $1,150 today, with a separate amp that sold for $95.) Now, there are only three known Audiovox 736s in existence: one held by a private collector, another at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and a third auctioned a few years ago on Ebay for $23,000.

Did Leo Fender see one of Tutmarc’s creations when he invented the first truly mass-market electric bass guitar? Perhaps, but it hardly matters. It was Fender’s instrument that would catch on — for good — fifteen years after the Audiovox 736, and it was Tutmarc’s fate to be largely forgotten by musical history, “destined to remain obscure,” Blecha writes, “to the extent that, in the wake of Leo Fender’s Precision Bass… the very existence of a previous electric fretted bass (played horizontally) was effectively forgotten.” See an introduction and demonstration of the first bass guitar just above.

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

If you’re a seasoned bass player, the diversity of bass sounds in the “Bass Sounds” videos here will hardly surprise you. Most other people — including many musicians — have little understanding of the range of the bass, an instrument thought to just hold down the low end. Yes, it does do that, but it doesn’t always do it with bass frequencies. Bass tones and overtones fall anywhere in the range of 40hz — a low rumble more felt than heard — to a snappy 4000hz, the high-midrange frequency of snare drums and guitars.

That’s a lot of sonic territory for an instrument to explore. It includes the sound of Paul McCartney’s Hofner Violin Bass on “Penny Lane,” a “bass-heavy tone with almost no mids or treble,” Joel McIver writes at MusicRader; the smooth top end of Jaco Pastorious’ homemade fretless Fender Jazz bass; and the buzzsaw power chords of Lemmy Kilmister’s Rickenbacker 4001, which he played with midrange turned to 11 and bass controls completely off.

Of course, amplifiers and effects make all the difference in famous bassists’ tones, but it starts at the fingers, the body, the pickups, and the frets, as bass player Bart Soeters demonstrates with a series of classic, modern, and obscure bass guitars, accompanied by the music of Joris Holtackers. Basses here include such recognizable shapes as the Hofner, with its chambered body and f-holes, the Fender Jazz and Precision basses, and the Gibson SG. They also include unusual or unique instruments like the NS Design Basscello and Soeters’ own Adamovic FBC signature bass.

Boomy, woody, even reedy — bass guitars can rumble and they can croon. They can be imitated by an electric cello — as Soeters demonstrates in the follow-up Bass Sounds II video at the top — make lovely acoustic thumps, and generally sound as percussive or melodic as you like. Will educating others about the range of bass guitar tones change unfortunate stereotypes about bass players (demonstrated below via interpretive dance and spoken word by The Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald and Bruce McCulloch)? Only time will tell. But it can certainly  sharpen the music appreciation skills of musicians and non-musicians alike. See all the different basses listed on the Bass Sounds YouTube pages here and here.

via Laughing Squid

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