Simels Is Just Dershing Around

Well, since the challenge Simels first made to me was comparing "Edmund Fitzgerald" to "Day In The Life" I'm going to deal with that and not his switching his argument to Revolver after my first answer to him.

And Sims, stop with the Dershing, what I'm going to from now on call the kind of subject changing that is one of the tactics you've got in common with Alan Dershowitz.

I am not surprised someone as superficial and soft-handed as Simels would think a song about a drug addled millionaire buddy of the mop heads killing himself in a car crash intercut with a bit about a drugged up desk worker who's late for work is deeper than a song about 29 men who did a dangerous, hard, dirty job dying when the ore ship they were on went down in a storm.

I suppose it's all of the mild aleatoric stuff copy-cat that was taken by people who didn't listen to the contemporary avant garde as being so innovative, which isn't song writing as such.  Only, you see, I'd already heard the kind of technique they were only copying. And, compared to the real thing the mop head's modernism was kind of bland,  For example Iannis Xenakis' pithoprakta from about 11 years earlier.

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
Lukas Foss, director

Or Gyorgy Ligeti's very famous piece and quite beautiful Atmosphères from about six years earlier.

The Virginia Governor's School for the Arts Orchestra with the East Carolina University Orchestra
Stephen Coxe, director

Or any number of other pieces that used moving sound masses well before the mop heads blew the minds of kiddies who had never heard it before.   I will grant them this, they did give some excellent London based orchestral musicians a day's work and I've heard the refreshments were good.

Their other dabblings in avant guarde techniques were quite silly,  Revolution #9's musique concrète was old hat by the time they used it.  And so ham handed and unimpressive as compared to the real thing.   Steve Reich, working at about the same time had already produced his haunting "Come Out To Show Them" in 1966.

The hair on my arms and the back of my neck still rises when I hear it almost fifty years later.

But getting back to the comparison, I'll point out that both the pretty and the, um, "smart" mophead wrote it.  Almost everything with Lennon's name on it that people remember was co-written with McCartney.  I don't think it's a valid comparison with a song written by one person, though I think "Edmund Fitzgerald" is a better song.

I would guess that if you asked a random sample of people who were familiar with both songs that more would say that "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" stuck with them more and meant more to them, especially people who did real work for a living, though I'm sure that the scribbling class who have never done anything more risky than having lunch with the wrong person might not find it as compelling.  That entire album that your choice ends sounds more like bubble gum pop to me more than some great artistic achievement the older I get.  And I've heard the thing often enough so that I could sing every single song on the thing,  I could probably write out the music to lots of it from memory.  That's the the test of time, Sims.  I've already told you that I liked Carla Bley's response to it a lot better,  it was way more innovative.

Though I've enjoyed this little exercise, I haven't listened to some of the pieces I've reviewed for years.  The Ligeti and Reich, especially.  I'm sorry I couldn't post some of the others as they aren't available online.   I've enjoyed listening to Gordon Lightfoot again, after many years, as well.  Listen to the stories.