Saturday afternoon with the YouTube

A few of the YouTubers that I watch frequently were discussing pieces of music that I know well so it was a very entertaining time spent on the YouTube this afternoon.

First up was Doug Helvering listening to the entirety of 'The Yes Album'.  The six songs on this album are well known to me and I hear them frequently. On the 'walking headphones' they take their turn with all the other songs, but often during the working day I will play this album. I am, of course, very familiar with it.

According to Wikipedia, it was released on 19 February 1971. I saw Yes, supporting the forgettable Iron Butterfly, on 17 January 1971. Unfortunately I can't access my vinyl copy of the album at the moment, but I imagine that it was bought within the first days of its release. I wrote about this here.

Doug, of course, talks about the harmonic structures of the songs which is very interesting, as to be honest, apart from the third part of 'Starship Trooper', I've never really given much attention to the chord sequences. What I have listened to is the changing rhythms which come to the fore in the aptly titled 'Perpetual change'. This begins with a riff in 104 before resolving to a melody in 34. Elsewhere in the song there's a passage that can be counted in different ways: it's fourteen beats but seems to be grouped as 4, 2, 5 and 3. Incidentally, note the neat way of writing time signatures: someone was kind enough to develop some HTML code that displays the numbers vertically as opposed to an apparent fraction.

I've always considered the song 'A venture' to be a throwback to the earlier style of Yes, It doesn't seem to be as progressive as the other songs. Also, for the first time in 53 years, I wondered why 'Clap' was included; maybe there was a paucity of new material (that can also explain 'A venture') and 'Clap' helped fill out the time.

Anyway - compulsory listening.

Following that was 'The Charismatic Voice' (aka Elizabeth Zharoff) listening to 'The end' by The Doors. I love watching her videos: she is so enthusiastic about the music, spreading smiles and laughter, that it is a pleasure just to watch her reactions, never mind the music. Her videos with Kate Bush's music are outstanding examples of this.

What always amuses me is the fact that music that I consider to be well known is completely new to her - but what should one expect of someone who was/is an opera singer and was only born in 1986? As far as I am concerned, very little good music was made after that year. As someone said in a recent video, "were you brought up in a cave?".

Normally Elizabeth will frequently stop and replay sections of songs in order to point things out. At times I find this somewhat distracting as I would like to hear the song in its entirety before making a second, interrupted, run over it. This tendency was especially annoying in today's video as 'The end' is hardly a strophic song but rather a completely improvised live recording - although I imagine that most of the words were pre-written. Stopping and replaying doesn't allow the music and mood that it creates to build dramatically.

My teen years friend Jeremy was very much a Doors fan, especially when he was younger (ie until 16). He came to stay with me once at the beginning of July 1971 and I had to break to him the bad news that Jim Morrison had just died. At one stage I bought for him a biography of Jim entitled "Weird scenes inside the goldmine", which is a phrase uttered in this song. Elizabeth missed this.

I admit to not having heard this song in many years as it is not on my playlist, although I did have it on a Doors' compilation tape. I remember the famous Oedipal sequence, "Father ... I want to kill you. Mother ... I want to ......." and I remember the bit that comes after it about meeting at the back of the blue bus, but I don't remember what comes after that: a double time section with what can be politely described as explicit lyrics accompanying a musical description of someone having an orgasm. Maybe I simply blanked them out as these lyrics would definitely have been a no-no in 1967 and I certainly would have been aware of them otherwise. Elisabeth had to explain that it's the vowels that carry a melody, and consonants on their own ('f', 'ck') simply make percussive sounds. Maybe I'll dig out my cassette and listen to it for the first time in 40 years.

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This day in history:

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