Beatles

HERE begins an ongoing series of song lists that will attempt to create, restore, retrieve, amplify, or defy the traditional rock 'n' roll canon.  Most of these creations don't really "exist" (whatever that means anymore in a free-floating universe of whathaveyou). 

In addition, the series will dig up lost (often demeaned) albums that have been denied their position in the established rock-crit canon.

Please keep in mind that I will NOT be sharing MP3s or any downloadable material.  Just like I had to do, you will have to seek this stuff out yourself. (It's not that I'm selfish--I fear the dreaded, albeit friendly, Web Sheriff.)

Below is a list of songs, all from The Beatles' Live at the BBC collection from 1994.  I swear to its repeated playability, which will be the primary criteria for creating or digging up a new contender for the canon.

Rock & Roll!!!! or The Beatles Sing the Oldies But Goldiest

1) I Got a Woman

2) Soldier of Love

3) Clarabella

4) Sweet Little Sixteen

5) I Just Don't Understand

6) The Hippy Hippy Shake

7) To Know Her Is To Love Her

8) Some Other Guy

9) I Got to Find My Baby

10) So How Come (No One Loves Me)

11) Crying, Waiting, Hoping

12) A Shot of Rhythm and Blues

13) Lonesome Tears in My Eyes

14) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)

Late in the pivotal year of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard, then a Marxist-Leninist filmmaker, came to America to make a revolutionary film about the '68 American revolution. With documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, Godard began shooting on locations in and around New York City on a project he called One A.M. ("One American Movie").

But One A.M. was never completed. Eventually, from some of the footage shot, the team of Leacock-Pennebaker put together another film called One P.M. ("One Parallel Movie").

One P.M. included the cast of Godard's One A.M.—Rip Torn, Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, The Jefferson Airplane, LeRoi Jones, among others. It also showed lots of scenes of Godard directing and Richard Leacock photographing One A.M (along with much footage of a couple of sound girls, some New York policemen,and Godard's wife, Anne Wiazemski.) One P.M. works as the record of the making of a movie, and it may be all that is left of a movie that was not finally made.

It's hard to say why One A.M. was abandoned. Some film scholars say that Godard failed to understand the nature of the movement in America.

The highlight of the film may be the footage of Jefferson Airplane performing "House at Pooneil Corners" live on the rooftop in Midtown Manhattan on December 7, 1968. Remember, this was shot over a year before the Beatles pulled the same stunt while rehearsing and recording their Let It Be film.

Once again, Godard was intuitively and radically ahead of his times.

[One P.M. is currently available in 10 short clips on YouTube.)

It was 1966 or so.  The 45 came in a box of potato chips, and it was mine, more or less, since no one else in my family called dibs on it.  Until I heard Petula Clark, this is what Downtown was to me:

I thought it was pretty happening--we had the Majestic and Ellis movie theaters, Woolworth's (that's it at the end of the street, boarded up), a toy store, a shoe store, the A&P, the Gas Light Lounge.  It was a revelation to me that there were downtowns in other cities, and they sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than Downtown Beloit.  

....only

Somewhere Else ....