Reading about music

Some thoughts on why I enjoy reading about music, revised from an old email:

There’s this great early take of “It Won’t Be Long,” take 7. It unfortunately only exists as a monitor mix, so the sound is a bit distant, but compelling nonetheless.  It chugs along pretty much the same as the released version, until it gets to this magical point right after the first verse and before the chorus: right before John sings “It won’t be long, yeah,” the whole band comes to a halt and there’s this one great beat of silence, a stop-time moment that changes the whole tenor of the song.  They repeat this before every chorus in the song.  It’s one of those moments that, once you hear it, makes you never hear the released version the same again.  It’s not better than the released version (hours of listening to Beatle outtakes and alternates proves nothing if not that they almost always made the right choices on what to keep in and what to discard), but it’s a knockout version in its own right.  It’s powerful, it’s dynamic, and it reaffirms for me that “It Won’t Be Long” is one of the Beatles’ absolute greatest early rockers.

In reading Richie Unterberger’s book The Unreleased Beatles, I was interested to get to his take on this version.  Here’s what he says:  it “isn’t much different from the With the Beatles track at all.  The main difference is how the fellows periodically come to dead pauses between the verse and chorus instead of playing all the way through” (p. 66).  Huh.  Is that all he could find to say about it?  How could he hear something so totally different from what I hear?  And how could he not be excited about the difference?

While I disagree with Unterberger from time to time on his assessment of many of the unreleased tracks, he does pay attention to detail.  What bothers me most is that his prose is pedestrian and lackluster, and he tends to second-guess the Beatles a lot (saying things like “this probably means they meant to...”).

But the point I’m trying to make is that reading what he wrote about “It Won’t Be Long” helped me articulate what I think about it.  I thought it all along, from the first time I heard it, but seeing a counter-opinion in words helped me put into words what I thought.  Potentially, those words could help others articulate their own thoughts—and thus you get discourse, communication, exchange of ideas—a positive thing.  And, thinking about the words made me think more about the music...and sent me back to listen again.

These points make up a large part of why I read about music. 

I spend a lot of time rereading Shakespeare.  I’m reading different editions and really getting into the variations between the quarto and folio texts, and I enjoy getting mired in the scholarly discourse over the tiniest bibliographical details.  I’m also slowly working through the ArkAngel series of BBC recordings of every play on CD; reading the plays along with the voices is tons of fun.  I find this work endlessly fascinating.  I came across a nice quote when reading Ron Rosenbaum’s excellent book The Shakespeare Wars.  In it, he sums up many of the recent controversies and issues in the Shakespeare community (did he revise his plays or not?  is the “Hand D” sample his actual handwriting?  is it better to read the plays in their original spelling? etc.).  At one point in the first chapter, he’s addressing the issue of why Shakespeare is so revered—what is the value of his work, and what’s made it so enduring?  He quotes scholar Christopher Ricks:  “the test of value in a work of art is ‘whether it continues to repay attention’ “ (p. 21).  Note that he makes a point of saying not just that it repays attention, but that it continues to repay attention.

Two things struck me here, not huge flashes of insight, surely, but compelling to me anyway:  Shakespeare surely does that, continues to repay attention, and so, too, do the Beatles, and so, too, does Sun Ra.  These are lifelong endeavors; these bodies of work will continue to reward and re-reward us however close and detailed the attention paid to them is.  I have certainly found that to be true with the Beatles, and I’m finding it to be true the more I delve into the music of Ra.

The second thing that struck me is that if these bodies of work, these works of art, are indeed bottomless wells of inspiration, then part of that inspiration, no small part for me, comes from reading what others have had to say about them.  This, then, goes a long way toward justifying writing about music. And it means I don't buy into that old canard "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Pshaw!