I like both the original version and the Wall of Sound version. I am reminded of Roger Whittaker who recorded “The Long Farewell” with a few instruments, himself as singer and on guitar. He was surprised to hear it on the radio with a brass fanfare and backing choir. I’m not sure this was all that unusual, though—the more I read about the Wrecking Crew (and what an impressive group of musicians they were!) the less I am sure who we have been listening to all these years.
Debra, thank you so much. I love everything Tony writes and am grateful for being able to post here. I have a question the answer to which I wonder if you or Tony has an insight.
In an issue of the Jesuit magazine “America,’’ sometime between 2003-2007, I read an article which fascinated me and stayed with me — I just wasn’t practical enough to save it. The article was by a Jesuit, perhaps the literary editor at the time. He described one of his favorite hobbies: when he was in a foreign country, he liked to go off the beaten path to walk through old cemeteries and read the inscriptions on the headstones. One day, when he was visiting in Scotland, he came upon just such an old cemetery, and again walked among the headstones, casually reading, when the inscription on one caught his eye, and, transfixed, he stopped to study it. It read: ‘’I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.’’
To the author’s knowledge, Robert Frost had never been in Scotland, let alone to this old and neglected cemetery. After long reflection, the author concluded that within our brains there are common speech patterns, and occasionally one phrase or another can occur to two or more people a continent apart. I mentioned this to a (now deceased) friend of mine who taught English literature and he said, ‘’Still . . . that phraseology is so unique. . .’’
If you or Tony has any knowledge of the subject, could you, when you have time, comment on it, please?
There is a stripped down version of “The Days of 49” by Bob Dylan that is sublime. It is on the album “Another Self Portrait- Bootleg Series, Volume 10”. Bob is feelin’ it.
When I was 22, hitchhiking and spending a few days with three American guys in Italy ~ Genoa to Florence to Rome ~ we had a melancholy parting when we all went our separate ways. On the last day, with Jim at a bar at the top of the Spanish Steps, I played this song on the jukebox over and over again! Every time I hear it, I'm back in Italy, at the top of the Spanish Steps. Years later, I reconnected with Jim when I saw his photo in TIME magazine after he'd for the first time become the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal "for best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise." James Nachtwey was to be awarded this Gold Medal an unprecedented five times in his career as a war photographer.
Jane, your youthful travels were good for a lifetime of memories. When we were in Rome in 1998 while Tony researched his Tasso translation (we went all over Italy from top to toe (almost), I saw the city from the kid's eye view for much of the time. Rome was the only city we visited with NO playground, so when we were there the kids played at the Forum and also at the park at the top of the Spanish Steps. The view from atop was stellar as I recall, and there was a place that rented bicycles. Tony was researching at the Vatican during our 10 days there, and he usually met us at lunch time and then we "toured," almost always on foot. We never met a single celebrity on our trip! We did see Pope John Paul at mass, but he was so far away that Davey thought of him as "the little green man," about the same size as the green stick figure of street crossing lights. We did get the (child-friendly) Tony Esolen tour of Rome, however. I'm glad the song brought back this wonderful memory for you of a wonderful adventure!
I thought of the three Americans, Jim, Denis, and Bob, and myself as the Four Musketeers! We were in Rome on Easter Sunday (1971) and I dragged them to St. Peter's Square to get the Pope's blessing. Denis made sangria by stuffing fruit into a bottle of red wine, leaving it overnight, and we celebrated Easter with a picnic in the Villa Borghese after we'd received Pope Paul VI's blessing. I was a lapsed Anglican, Bob was a lapsed Catholic, though I made him teach me the Hail Mary, little knowing how things would turn out many years later. Deo gratias! Your Rome sounds wonderful too. Rome by bike and the Esolen Guide would have been terrific, though you'd have had to look out for the cra-zy traffic! Jim wasn't a celebrity then, nor was Denis who later became a playwright and wrote The River Wild (1994).
Jane, you kept great company!! Wow. With kids, we had a different trip entirely from our previous (and separate) trips abroad. We walked EVERYWHERE. We stayed three months, so we needed those playgrounds! We hit ALL the Tasso places, and a lot more. After we came home, I wrote a joking Christmas newsletter called "How to Travel in Europe for $400 a Day (or LESS!) -- it was so expensive for us, back then, and we were really up the creek when the second of the two giant jars of peanut butter we brought with us ran out. I remember that day, because we ate our last peanut butter sandwiches at the playground in Sorrento (yes, there is a Tasso memorial in Sorrento!). And one of my jokes in the newsletter was that I was considering writing a new tour guide, called "Playgrounds of Europe!"
The four of us were just out of university and "vagabonds" on the road! I can relate to the scarcity of peanut butter with kids; we found it hard to come by, believe it or not, in our clergy exchange in England in 1998. It was called "Peanut Butter" but it tasted nothing like ours. When our kids were really small (six and two) we couldn't get it on the Mosquito Coast of Costa Rica either! You must know Italy really well: three months. Walking and bikes are the best way to discover a new place.
We did get pretty comfortable, because we stayed at least a week everywhere we went, except for our first stop, in Trent (we had done the Rhine tour and Salzburg tour with my dad, who had always wanted to see "the old country" of his ancestors). Other than that, we got where we were going and stayed put, except for day trips aplenty. It wasn't practical to keep moving the kids all the time, so we'd settle in one place and go day tripping part of the time. It was fun, but tiring.
I recognize and fully acknowledge every single bit of information in this article. I love the Beatles, Ray Charles.. and Tom Jones, too. I get Phil Spector. But I never did like this song.
No accounting for individual human taste I s’pose!
I confess I had to research this one. And I try to apply that proverbial "grain of salt" to everything I read, at that. I was not surprised that PM had Ray Charles in mind, because jazz/blues of his sort was really formative for a lot of kids listening to music in the 1950's. (I am itching to do Ray Charles, with a particular tune that I have to have PATIENCE to match up with a word of the week!) But the idea of Tom Jones doing a first release of "Long and Winding Road" kind of floored me. Now I see (if I read between the lines correctly) that the band was falling apart and Paul was thinking of selling some songs that were "in the can" more or less -- and that's where the music for "Let It Be," the album came from largely. The fact that he gave Aretha Franklin "Let It Be," which she was the first to commercially record, sort of validates that suspicion. Did you get to listen to the "naked" version of "Winding Road"? Paul was a balladeer, at heart, and it shows in that demo made without all the overlays of the 1970 release. It's true, however, that this one doesn't tell a tale as his others, such as Elinor Rigby and Penny Lane do.
For me, this song is one of the less objectionable things in the Beatles' catalog. But the Beatles themselves, I like not at all. They were fab, and famous, but they were mighty agents in the corrosion of western culture. Their music did not make the world a better place.
I remember being a child and hearing my first Rolling Stones song. It was "Jumpin' Jack Flash." I was at my grandfather's home, and my older cousin was there with her friends playing records. I recall at the time feeling very uncomfortable by the music (and as I have said often here, in my childhood I was just soaking in music like a sponge, much of it from my mother's tremendous collection of the crooners.) My cousin and her friends, I would find out later, were into what we now call "the drug culture," which utterly derailed her life. I have seen Mick Jaggar perform a few times (notably in clips from the Ed Sullivan Show) he made my skin crawl, with the palpable and near-threatening anger in his body language and his contorted facial expressions. If you compare that to the Beatles appearances on Ed Sullivan you get an entirely different reaction, because at that time they were neatly dressed and upbeat and respectful of Ed, who even teased them about their hair. Now we know that seeds of the so-called "cultural revolution" were already in place long before the "British Invasion," and had begun as far back as the 1940's with, among other people, some of the most prominent singers of the folk music revival, and that included singers we all like such as Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. But in the early 1960s, most folks were utterly unaware of the coming cultural landslide, and life looked much more like the 1950's in the mid-60's than it would only a decade later. You will not see me do a Rolling Stones song here, due to that prevalent attitude in their music.
I've only one other time done a Beatles song, another of Paul McCartney's ballads, "The Fool on a Hill." It seems clear in retrospect when you look at the band's history that they were they were three talented but otherwise rather ordinary young men -- plus John Lennon, whose life was an open book and not a happy one. It's been my policy for Sometimes a Song to try to be as kind as possible when I talk about the singers and musicians we discuss, and if I stumble across a bad or negative bit of information about anyone not to put that information forward. Because at the end of the day, I'm discussing the music and the talent, and sharing that here.
The last thing I want to do is add to our current cultural misery, nor do I want in any way for Sometimes a Song to be like a scandal sheet. God knows (literally) that we all have our own sins to account for. But I won't be pumping any heavy metal here, or doing songs which are too edgy. Not when I have so many uplifting choices. However I do admire a lot of Beatles songs, including the one I covered today. And I was delighted recently to learn (this is "old news," as people now dismissingly call it in our times) that Paul McCartney has for about 20 years been composing classical music, full orchestral oratorios. He was commissioned by Oxford's Magdalen College to write a Sacred oratorio, parts of which I have listened to and found to be quite good, and far better than what has passed for Sacred music in the past 50 or more years. The one I refer to is Ecce Cor Meum, words he was inspired by when he saw the motto over the church of St. Ignatius in NYC. And it is that motto he chose for his coat of arms when he was knighted by the late Queen. You can find information about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Cor_Meum and listen to here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RMuoGhA84s . There's always so much more to any story than I can tell. But when the news is good, I really do like to share it.
Always my heart is in the great music of the early-through mid-20th Century. But when the song "fits," and is from a little later, I also like to include it here for the sake of our readers who really want to hear good music from their own era. <3
Well said. I am thrilled with the variety of entertainments you present. And no, certainly the Beatles weren't the solitary architects of our cultural slide! Many others share that burden, including yours truly. It's horrible to think how many souls I have sent the wrong way over the years. That group is just a sore spot with me, and I really didn't need to share that grievance with anyone here! As always, I appreciate you, and the light you bring in dark times.
Mrswu, intriguing point of view. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t like the Beatles! What did you think of their original hits like I Wanna Hold Your Hand?
I was 15 or so when I first heard any Beatles music, sung not by them but by two teenage boys, and I was charmed. Harmonies, and boys singing about romantic things! I loved Norwegian Wood, Michelle, many others. A half century later, I judge things differently.
I see. I always saw the Beatles as just Britain’s version of American rock n’ roll with weird hair and Mod fashion. The lyrical, romantic songs developed later.
I guess I would consider them a musical sort of Gateway Drug. Their popularity, like psychedelic pied pipers, was such that an entire generation shifted philosophies, just by going along with the tunes. By their fruits we shall know them... And I can't see any good fruits of Beatlemania, whatever the merits of individual songs. A cranky old curmudgeon am I.🤷
I like both the original version and the Wall of Sound version. I am reminded of Roger Whittaker who recorded “The Long Farewell” with a few instruments, himself as singer and on guitar. He was surprised to hear it on the radio with a brass fanfare and backing choir. I’m not sure this was all that unusual, though—the more I read about the Wrecking Crew (and what an impressive group of musicians they were!) the less I am sure who we have been listening to all these years.
Debra, thank you so much. I love everything Tony writes and am grateful for being able to post here. I have a question the answer to which I wonder if you or Tony has an insight.
In an issue of the Jesuit magazine “America,’’ sometime between 2003-2007, I read an article which fascinated me and stayed with me — I just wasn’t practical enough to save it. The article was by a Jesuit, perhaps the literary editor at the time. He described one of his favorite hobbies: when he was in a foreign country, he liked to go off the beaten path to walk through old cemeteries and read the inscriptions on the headstones. One day, when he was visiting in Scotland, he came upon just such an old cemetery, and again walked among the headstones, casually reading, when the inscription on one caught his eye, and, transfixed, he stopped to study it. It read: ‘’I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.’’
To the author’s knowledge, Robert Frost had never been in Scotland, let alone to this old and neglected cemetery. After long reflection, the author concluded that within our brains there are common speech patterns, and occasionally one phrase or another can occur to two or more people a continent apart. I mentioned this to a (now deceased) friend of mine who taught English literature and he said, ‘’Still . . . that phraseology is so unique. . .’’
If you or Tony has any knowledge of the subject, could you, when you have time, comment on it, please?
There is a stripped down version of “The Days of 49” by Bob Dylan that is sublime. It is on the album “Another Self Portrait- Bootleg Series, Volume 10”. Bob is feelin’ it.
Two “road’’ poems that are masterpieces of vulnerability and longing — the other, of course, by Robert Frost.
Frances, Frost's poem is excellent in its apparent simplicity, and I think the same of this song. I don't know if you saw Tony's essay on some time ago on "Stopping by Woods." He did it the past winter. https://open.substack.com/pub/anthonyesolen/p/robert-frost-stopping-by-woods-on-ddd?r=nweob&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
When I was 22, hitchhiking and spending a few days with three American guys in Italy ~ Genoa to Florence to Rome ~ we had a melancholy parting when we all went our separate ways. On the last day, with Jim at a bar at the top of the Spanish Steps, I played this song on the jukebox over and over again! Every time I hear it, I'm back in Italy, at the top of the Spanish Steps. Years later, I reconnected with Jim when I saw his photo in TIME magazine after he'd for the first time become the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal "for best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise." James Nachtwey was to be awarded this Gold Medal an unprecedented five times in his career as a war photographer.
Jane, your youthful travels were good for a lifetime of memories. When we were in Rome in 1998 while Tony researched his Tasso translation (we went all over Italy from top to toe (almost), I saw the city from the kid's eye view for much of the time. Rome was the only city we visited with NO playground, so when we were there the kids played at the Forum and also at the park at the top of the Spanish Steps. The view from atop was stellar as I recall, and there was a place that rented bicycles. Tony was researching at the Vatican during our 10 days there, and he usually met us at lunch time and then we "toured," almost always on foot. We never met a single celebrity on our trip! We did see Pope John Paul at mass, but he was so far away that Davey thought of him as "the little green man," about the same size as the green stick figure of street crossing lights. We did get the (child-friendly) Tony Esolen tour of Rome, however. I'm glad the song brought back this wonderful memory for you of a wonderful adventure!
I thought of the three Americans, Jim, Denis, and Bob, and myself as the Four Musketeers! We were in Rome on Easter Sunday (1971) and I dragged them to St. Peter's Square to get the Pope's blessing. Denis made sangria by stuffing fruit into a bottle of red wine, leaving it overnight, and we celebrated Easter with a picnic in the Villa Borghese after we'd received Pope Paul VI's blessing. I was a lapsed Anglican, Bob was a lapsed Catholic, though I made him teach me the Hail Mary, little knowing how things would turn out many years later. Deo gratias! Your Rome sounds wonderful too. Rome by bike and the Esolen Guide would have been terrific, though you'd have had to look out for the cra-zy traffic! Jim wasn't a celebrity then, nor was Denis who later became a playwright and wrote The River Wild (1994).
Jane, you kept great company!! Wow. With kids, we had a different trip entirely from our previous (and separate) trips abroad. We walked EVERYWHERE. We stayed three months, so we needed those playgrounds! We hit ALL the Tasso places, and a lot more. After we came home, I wrote a joking Christmas newsletter called "How to Travel in Europe for $400 a Day (or LESS!) -- it was so expensive for us, back then, and we were really up the creek when the second of the two giant jars of peanut butter we brought with us ran out. I remember that day, because we ate our last peanut butter sandwiches at the playground in Sorrento (yes, there is a Tasso memorial in Sorrento!). And one of my jokes in the newsletter was that I was considering writing a new tour guide, called "Playgrounds of Europe!"
The four of us were just out of university and "vagabonds" on the road! I can relate to the scarcity of peanut butter with kids; we found it hard to come by, believe it or not, in our clergy exchange in England in 1998. It was called "Peanut Butter" but it tasted nothing like ours. When our kids were really small (six and two) we couldn't get it on the Mosquito Coast of Costa Rica either! You must know Italy really well: three months. Walking and bikes are the best way to discover a new place.
We did get pretty comfortable, because we stayed at least a week everywhere we went, except for our first stop, in Trent (we had done the Rhine tour and Salzburg tour with my dad, who had always wanted to see "the old country" of his ancestors). Other than that, we got where we were going and stayed put, except for day trips aplenty. It wasn't practical to keep moving the kids all the time, so we'd settle in one place and go day tripping part of the time. It was fun, but tiring.
I recognize and fully acknowledge every single bit of information in this article. I love the Beatles, Ray Charles.. and Tom Jones, too. I get Phil Spector. But I never did like this song.
No accounting for individual human taste I s’pose!
I confess I had to research this one. And I try to apply that proverbial "grain of salt" to everything I read, at that. I was not surprised that PM had Ray Charles in mind, because jazz/blues of his sort was really formative for a lot of kids listening to music in the 1950's. (I am itching to do Ray Charles, with a particular tune that I have to have PATIENCE to match up with a word of the week!) But the idea of Tom Jones doing a first release of "Long and Winding Road" kind of floored me. Now I see (if I read between the lines correctly) that the band was falling apart and Paul was thinking of selling some songs that were "in the can" more or less -- and that's where the music for "Let It Be," the album came from largely. The fact that he gave Aretha Franklin "Let It Be," which she was the first to commercially record, sort of validates that suspicion. Did you get to listen to the "naked" version of "Winding Road"? Paul was a balladeer, at heart, and it shows in that demo made without all the overlays of the 1970 release. It's true, however, that this one doesn't tell a tale as his others, such as Elinor Rigby and Penny Lane do.
Debra, I just listened to the naked version. It’s far better by a mile, but I still couldn’t wait for the song to be over.
Oh no! Looks like I have no—-Patience—- for this song!
Well, if the category had been "impatience," I might have nominated, "Hey Jude," which NO ONE ever wished longer!
For me, this song is one of the less objectionable things in the Beatles' catalog. But the Beatles themselves, I like not at all. They were fab, and famous, but they were mighty agents in the corrosion of western culture. Their music did not make the world a better place.
I remember being a child and hearing my first Rolling Stones song. It was "Jumpin' Jack Flash." I was at my grandfather's home, and my older cousin was there with her friends playing records. I recall at the time feeling very uncomfortable by the music (and as I have said often here, in my childhood I was just soaking in music like a sponge, much of it from my mother's tremendous collection of the crooners.) My cousin and her friends, I would find out later, were into what we now call "the drug culture," which utterly derailed her life. I have seen Mick Jaggar perform a few times (notably in clips from the Ed Sullivan Show) he made my skin crawl, with the palpable and near-threatening anger in his body language and his contorted facial expressions. If you compare that to the Beatles appearances on Ed Sullivan you get an entirely different reaction, because at that time they were neatly dressed and upbeat and respectful of Ed, who even teased them about their hair. Now we know that seeds of the so-called "cultural revolution" were already in place long before the "British Invasion," and had begun as far back as the 1940's with, among other people, some of the most prominent singers of the folk music revival, and that included singers we all like such as Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. But in the early 1960s, most folks were utterly unaware of the coming cultural landslide, and life looked much more like the 1950's in the mid-60's than it would only a decade later. You will not see me do a Rolling Stones song here, due to that prevalent attitude in their music.
I've only one other time done a Beatles song, another of Paul McCartney's ballads, "The Fool on a Hill." It seems clear in retrospect when you look at the band's history that they were they were three talented but otherwise rather ordinary young men -- plus John Lennon, whose life was an open book and not a happy one. It's been my policy for Sometimes a Song to try to be as kind as possible when I talk about the singers and musicians we discuss, and if I stumble across a bad or negative bit of information about anyone not to put that information forward. Because at the end of the day, I'm discussing the music and the talent, and sharing that here.
The last thing I want to do is add to our current cultural misery, nor do I want in any way for Sometimes a Song to be like a scandal sheet. God knows (literally) that we all have our own sins to account for. But I won't be pumping any heavy metal here, or doing songs which are too edgy. Not when I have so many uplifting choices. However I do admire a lot of Beatles songs, including the one I covered today. And I was delighted recently to learn (this is "old news," as people now dismissingly call it in our times) that Paul McCartney has for about 20 years been composing classical music, full orchestral oratorios. He was commissioned by Oxford's Magdalen College to write a Sacred oratorio, parts of which I have listened to and found to be quite good, and far better than what has passed for Sacred music in the past 50 or more years. The one I refer to is Ecce Cor Meum, words he was inspired by when he saw the motto over the church of St. Ignatius in NYC. And it is that motto he chose for his coat of arms when he was knighted by the late Queen. You can find information about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Cor_Meum and listen to here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RMuoGhA84s . There's always so much more to any story than I can tell. But when the news is good, I really do like to share it.
Always my heart is in the great music of the early-through mid-20th Century. But when the song "fits," and is from a little later, I also like to include it here for the sake of our readers who really want to hear good music from their own era. <3
Well said. I am thrilled with the variety of entertainments you present. And no, certainly the Beatles weren't the solitary architects of our cultural slide! Many others share that burden, including yours truly. It's horrible to think how many souls I have sent the wrong way over the years. That group is just a sore spot with me, and I really didn't need to share that grievance with anyone here! As always, I appreciate you, and the light you bring in dark times.
Mrswu, intriguing point of view. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t like the Beatles! What did you think of their original hits like I Wanna Hold Your Hand?
I was 15 or so when I first heard any Beatles music, sung not by them but by two teenage boys, and I was charmed. Harmonies, and boys singing about romantic things! I loved Norwegian Wood, Michelle, many others. A half century later, I judge things differently.
I see. I always saw the Beatles as just Britain’s version of American rock n’ roll with weird hair and Mod fashion. The lyrical, romantic songs developed later.
I guess I would consider them a musical sort of Gateway Drug. Their popularity, like psychedelic pied pipers, was such that an entire generation shifted philosophies, just by going along with the tunes. By their fruits we shall know them... And I can't see any good fruits of Beatlemania, whatever the merits of individual songs. A cranky old curmudgeon am I.🤷
No, not cranky. It’s a point of view.