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“No Pakistanis”: The racial satire the Beatles don’t want you to hear

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Imagine that a popular American rock band – say, the Black Keys – wrote a song about immigrants. There are too many of them, the lyrics suggest, and they take jobs away from native-born workers. The chorus recommends that they go back to their countries of origin, where they really belong. Though the song was meant to satirize xenophobia, “No Mexicans” could be easily interpreted as an anthem of racism.

This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom. The strange story of "Get Back," its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music -- and what's at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.

The ballad of John and Yoko — and Paul — continues more than 40 years later

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

In 2000, a New York-based architect named Cass Calder Smith was helping his father move into a new apartment, when he discovered a tremendous inventory of interview tapes — hundreds of hours of conversations with the biggest rock legends. His journalist father, Howard Smith, had enviable gigs as both a New York City radio personality (for WABC, later WPLJ) and a star columnist at the Village Voice during its heyday, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when every revolution — sexual, anti-war, civil rights, gay liberation— was not only at its height, but converging. Unflappable, immensely knowledgeable, and sharp-witted, he earned the confidence of his subjects — people like Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (freshly returned from Cannes, after the premiere of "Easy Rider"), Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Jerry Garcia (though Howard admits to John Lennon in an interview that he's not a fan of the Dead) — who spoke with him, on repeat occasions, often at a crucial juncture in history, or in their lives, and opened up at length and with rare candor. These original reels from the interviews, which were conducted for Howard Smith’s column and radio show, were packed away in boxes, untouched for 40 years, in the back of his West Village loft. Howard Smith, now 76, and fighting cancer, confessed to Ben Sisario in the New York Times in November that he’d kept them around, half-hoping to use them for his memoirs, thinking they would be “a good memory jogger. Things were happening every day that were just incredible.”

Check out these never-before-seen photos of the Beatles

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:18:00 +0000

Photographer Henry Grossman, who has taken classic shots of celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Jimi Hendrix and seven presidents, is releasing a collection of over 1,000 mostly never-before-seen images of the Beatles in his book, "Places I Remember: My Time With the Beatles."

Unprecedented in its scope and intimacy, "this is among the most significant collection of Beatles images in existence, both artistically and historically," said book co-editor Kevin Ryan.

Grossman first got access to the band in 1964, when he first photographed them during their first performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." By 1965, he was traveling with the group as a companion, and continued to capture private moments for the next three years. "From private moments at home with their loved ones, to late-night parties and recording sessions," the press release states, "Grossman took more photos of The Beatles over a longer period of time than any other photographer."

McGovern candidacy a cultural landmark

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:44:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Abbie Hoffman sobbed that fateful night at the downtown Manhattan apartment of fellow activist Jerry Rubin. So did Rubin and Allen Ginsberg. John Lennon was drunk, and out of control, shouting "Up the Revolution!" in mock celebration of a dream defeated.

It was November 1972 and George McGovern had just been whipped in a landslide by Richard Nixon.

McGovern, who died Sunday at age 90, was the earnest son of a minister, raised on a South Dakota farm. He wasn't a longhair and he wasn't charismatic, not a man you'd expect to win the loyalty of rock stars or win the heart of Hoffman, the Yippie prankster who just four years earlier had suggested a pig should run for president and said what America needed was nonstop sex in the streets.

But the candidate's steady liberal principles, and the timing of his run, made McGovern the first presidential nominee of a major political party to attract a broad and public following from the rebels who had come of age the decade before.

"He was the first candidate I voted for," says the activist and historian Todd Gitlin, who was in his late 20s at the time. "I think the support he got was a sign that the era of radical obstinacy was over."

Black Power: American as apple pie

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:28:00 +0000

“WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?” Langston Hughes asked in 1951, “Or does it explode?” An answer came when the Black Power Movement burst upon the American political and cultural landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Movement took on significant dimensions in many realms — politics, public policy, education — but nowhere was its impact more tangible than in the culture, especially music. Movement activists utilized more than speeches, proclamations and marches to motivate their followers: rhythmic, expressive, improvisational music also propelled the struggle. Unlike the gospel-fueled Civil Rights Movement, Black Power had fewer ties to the church than to the street. Its rhetorical models included the self-aggrandizing rhymes of Muhammad Ali and the militant sloganeering of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, while its urgent resilience found a danceable counterpart in the soul music of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and hundreds of others.