Simon Weil

The book's a great read. Don't know the series.

A lot of the drop seems to have come in the last 2 years. This from FT.com (30th October): "[GE] is forecasting it will require $3bn to pump into GE Capital next year. To understand how much the division used to prop up the entire GE enterprise, two years ago it paid its parent company $16bn in dividends."

https://www.axios.com/general-electric-ge-stock-value-drop-171e4fac-f1e8-455d-ad32-7d2dbc4d99c6.html

I don't believe you can explain Rock wholly in terms of great artists. Rather, in so many cases, the important milestones are achieved by lesser figures operating (as above) within the frame of "a group". There's a magic that helps to creates there and you get a "more than the sum of the parts" effect. So that, with so many (most?) groups, the individual artist (say Lennon, McCartney) never quite achieves that level of creativity.

This brings up how Rock is seen in terms of "the band" - the Beatles and the Stones in this thread - as against Jazz being seen in terms of individuals - Armstrong, Ellington, Parker etc.. The concept of the Rock band has always seemed akin to that of a nuclear family to me (hence perhaps the addictiveness of Rock Family Trees by Pete Frame), to bring us back to the idea of "home".

That's an interesting review - especially the thing about them having to work to sound spontaneous. 6CDs???!!!...I've just started to go back to this period and it's amazing the number of super-duper, "deluxe" versions of various albums out there. I just confess to finding this over the top.

You're not that much younger than I am (three years) and I'm a 60s person so how did you miss it, unless you were being facetious. Maybe I wasn't old enough to partake of the whole 60s experience is a central way. I mean I was there dancing and listening to the Beatles White Album in 1968, when I was just 15 - so I was "there" in that sense, did feel part of whatever was going on. But, I also felt, say, that Sergeant Peppers wasn't for me (at 13). And I would say there was a general sense of stuff going on which was somewhere else from where I was.

"well, sorry, you missed it" I did miss it. I'm a 70s person. That is to say I came of age (21) in 1974. There is a whole cohort of us who wonder what the 60s were about - because we "weren't there". I question whether the " it" you experienced was necessarily the core "it" of the 60s - After all they named "IT" (International Times) because they had "it" (Sue Miles "Well, call it IT. We've got IT."/Green p119).

"If you saw the place [The Roundhouse, London October 1966, IT Launch Party. Seminal event in UK Rock History] in daylight you would have been horrified. It was dank, really cold and wet and horrible, but the excitement at the gig was enormous. It was like 'Wow! This is our place'"/Peter Jenner* The Beatles flip to psychedelia is often put down to Paul McCartney's presence at this gig and related interactions. 'Wow! This is our place' sounds related to Buddy Bolden "calling his children home". Our place...home. *From Days in the Life, Voices From the English Underground/ Jonathon Green p121

I agree - I wish the album were longer. On the UK reissue, there's other psychedelia relayed stuff added - but.... Of course this is the "music of the [TV] movie" - and I think the movie is the more satisfying experience - thoroughly flawed, but quite disturbing in parts. Not at all the "wholesome" Beatles we know. I get the feeling you're not quite addressing my point. Which is of the universality of this music. Specifically, it's true that Japanese culture remains Japanese - but it has had a real ad-mixture of Western culture since Meiji times.

It works for me. I recently bought this (and some other Beatles CDs) as part of a background thing I'm doing on Rock of that time (I've got the LPs, but somehow I wanted to start fresh) and I found it lived. Sometimes - with other artists - they can sound flat, or, in one case, the whole thing falls to bits and it sounds curiously mechanical. I think frame of mind is part of it.

Whenever I go up to my dentist (I cycle up), I go past Abbey Road. I actually turn off just before the zebra crossing on the cover of Abbey Road. It's always got a bunch of people standing there - having their pictures taken in the exact same position as the Beatles. Or I guess just being there in this iconic place (as they see it). They come from all over the world, making this updated version of a pilgrimage. There's always guys from Japan or China there.

Got to have new stuff, new substance to keep you going. That's more or less it for me. It doesn't have to be in Rock, Jazz, whatever. Just stuff, that you feel there's something happening here, something going on. In a way, that seems to me what life is about. But, yes, it can be old stuff - that you haven't "heard" before and suddenly becomes new to you. And then there can be stuff inside you. [Contrary to the quote, it was JSngry who said it]

LOL.

No, that's not how I respond. I hear something that's of value (or not) - that's my core relationship to the music (or anything). There can also be levels of value. I don't hear stuff as a curiosity - it's not part of my aesthetic experience. My reaction to Sergeant Peppers was set by the marketing campaign, which had big displays focused around the cover art. This concentrated on the "avant-garde"ness of it - and gave a sense of an abrupt change - which the sometimes psychedelic (as I would now see it) content does confirm. Revolver came across as something I could fit into my already existing mental boxes. I suppose, if you came right down to it, The White Album would be the only Beatles record I would characterise as unequivocally "Rock". They are a transitional band - one of the core transitional bands on the move between pop and rock. I There's also a question of the times. In the 60s-70s period, there was a whole cohort of people who were willing to have their preconceptions changed - to whom that idea was a positive good.

I probably agree with you about Rubber Soul. But I don't know that it appeared as something suddenly new and different at the time. It's only in retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight that one can say "Yes, that was a Rock record" because it fits in with what we know Rock became. Sergeant Peppers struck me at the time - aged 13 - as that something new and different. I couldn't say it was Rock (I mean at the time) or what the hell it was. We did have Revolver in the house (again my mother's desire to be in tune with the intellectual happenings of the day), but it seemed relatively conservative and comprehensible to my ears. Of course, being 13 gives a not-perfect perspective. But, by 15, I was dancing to the newly released White Album - and I think my reaction to that was in line with it being Rock - i.e. it was "serious" and not just pop (or as well as pop).

I can hear something, not particularly like it - but recognise it has something in it of value. So then nothing might happen. I might just stick in a mental box marked "stuff of interest, but not necessarily to me". Then months - or years - or even decades - later, I decide to open it and delve in. That happened to me recently over the Lifetime Emergency record. The uneasiness of it just suddenly spoke to me. I actually have a counter experience. I went to a 1964 Beatles Christmas concert. My mother was an intellectual and the Beatles got talked about on the BBC and in the press as comparable to the greats in Classical music. She wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so she gave me this 11th Birthday "treat" - so she could. You couldn't hear a damn thing, just the sound of a (couple of?) thousand screaming teenage girls.

I guess you can say it's the potential in art in general - though music does touch the emotions in a particularly immediate way. But I'm talking about a mass cohort thing - that people feel part of a group - that is "we hear ourselves in that". That's a form of social glue - where suddenly there is a "we" where before there was just a bunch of individuals. You can have a musician, who's putting herself into the music - and it can just go out there and nothing happens. Even if it's very good, music can just not hit the spot - or maybe it can be the wrong time (or place) for it to hit the spot.

OK, I'm going to state my underlying idea That is that the appearance of Jazz parallels the appearance of Rock in that it became a form in which some (black) people saw themselves. That when Buddy Bolden would "call his children home", this is what it would amount to - people seeing themselves in his music on a mass cohort level. There was a form of catharsis, where people felt the music spoke for and of them.

Rock originated as the music of a subsection (youth) of a section of the majority (white) culture. In the case of groups like the Beatles, it morphed out of pre-existing mass-market white pop. So there was already potential for mass-market sales out there. It wouldn't have been a case of promoting a sub-culture for the entrepreneurs involved (IMO), they just followed the potential for making money as that market exploded. Rock seems to me what happened when youth of a certain generation came of age and found a music that defined them into their adult years - sort of central to their identity, a mirror. So it became the defining mass market form, because people went on listening to it even when they became adults. Thus it became not a subsection of the majority culture, but its very core.

Rock appears in Jazz's history as the competitor that drove it off the popular stage. So it would be rather unusual for Jazz historians to look at the sudden explosion of this competing form in the late 60s and early 70s to see if one could glean any insights as to how new musical forms appear - and thus an insight into how Jazz might have appeared. But it strikes me that Rock is so microscopically recorded in the process of its gestation, that...Well, it might help us make up for the lack of any recordings at all in Jazz's parallel period.

Happy Birthday.

When I saw the Coltrane Legacy band (McCoy, Elvin, Reggie Workman), he was the standout. RIP

There is a series of Mail stories with female celebrities opposing the MeToo movement - an indicator of an editorial agenda.

The three versions of Bud Powell playing Un Poco Loco are a counter-example.