Copper

The Story of "All I Wanna Do", Redux

I was talking to Paul McGowan a week or so ago, and he asked again about how the song’s lyrics came about. This is as I remember it: Originally, on Election night 1992 [November 3rd, Clinton was elected—for obsessives like me—Ed.], there was the usual Tuesday night gathering. By the time I got there, a song was well under way. David Baerwald, like an excited kid, yelled out “Dan! Country disco!” Sure enough, everybody, the four guys with Sheryl, was engaged in playing some sort of country-ish riff with a... Read more...

A Survey of Recordings of Shostakovich Symphony No. 4

Back in Copper #39 I wrote a piece on the unsung 4th Symphony of the great 20th Century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and I hadn’t managed to cover a selection of the available recordings, or make a recommendation. So I decided to return to the subject for this column and finish the job. I have confined myself to those recordings I have in my personal Library, which means I have by necessity had to omit some highly regarded and notable performances, such as the original recordings by Kondrashin with the Moscow Philharmonic. But there are... Read more...

Station 3

WELK (no relation to Lawrence the champagne music maker) was another “daytimer” on 1010 AM. Its studios were neat and functional, and not at the transmitter, but in full view... Read more...

The Adventures of Jeff Beck: Third Movement

Sorting through the flotsam that is rock lore to figure out how events happened, who was involved and when, especially through the substance addled ’60s and ’70s is like trying... Read more...

From The Cylinder To The Disk Record...And Back?

When the first demonstrations of sound recording and subsequent reproduction were conducted, using Edison’s original 1877 phonograph, the emphasis was placed on promoting the machine, not the recordings. In fact,... Read more...

Tony Visconti, Part 1

When Marc Bolan and David Bowie put Glam Rock on the map, they both owed a large part of their sonic success to a New York-born musician and producer named... Read more...

Drive, He Said Part 5

In Part 4 of this series, the last turntable mentioned was the unusual Mag-Lev levitating turntable. It was first offered as a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and has now joined the Crowdfunding Hall of Infamy as yet another campaign that has failed to deliver products to its backers. Oops. Anyone remember the solar-powered cooler that raised $12M on Kickstarter and then told backers, “gee, we can’t produce these at the price we promised. If you’ll send us $xxx more, we’ll see what we can do”? Anyway. Scratch Mag-Lev. In this wrap-up, the last Vintage Whine, we’ll look at... Read more...

Three Wins and a Loss

The Beatles – Abbey Road – Anniversary Edition When the Beatles Sgt. Pepper 50th Anniversary remix/remaster came out in 2017, I have to admit….I was, at the least, skeptical. Should we be messing with history like this? I mean, yeah, there was the Giles Martin/Beatles Love thing, which was pretty amazingly well done, but it was essentially a completely new experience for Beatles fans. But to go in and completely remix an absolute classic like Sgt. Pepper—that was darn near blasphemy, right? The rationale was that all the Beatles’ albums up to a certain point had been... Read more...

So Long to the Cynic

Over the last 95 issues of Copper, it’s been mentioned more than once that as a cynic…I might be a bit of a fraud. I’ll own up to that. “Disappointed idealist” is... Read more...

96 Tears

Welcome to Copper #96! One thousand, three hundred and twenty-three days ago, the first issue of Copper came out. What you're now reading is, as stated, the ninety-sixth issue. That means that a new... Read more...

Top Chef

“Dad, can you lend me $2000? I’m good for it.” My son Ilan was a line cook in a New York restaurant called Casa Mono. He enjoyed the cook’s world: sixty-hour workweeks, minimum wages, screaming bosses, and the dangers of sharp knives and hot flames. It also came with perks: cooks and chefs getting together in the wee small hours, hanging out at restaurants closed to the public, imbibing unlimited alcohol and gorging on huge amounts of food, then returning home at dawn to sleep for a few hours, then... Read more...

Maurice Duruflé

Maybe you’ve heard about FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. It’s a disease I know, having caught it once or twice over the years. I was the first kid on my block to own a Bob Dylan LP (Freewheelin’, 1963), also the first to possess Miles Davis’s now-semi-classic Someday My Prince Will Come. It was fun to be first. Now it may be time to coin another useful acronym, JOMO. That would be Joy of Missing Out, which has multiple uses. When you feel the urge to pull those covers up, assume the fetal position,... Read more...

Bach Cello Suites

In a thoroughly unscientific survey, I found over a dozen new recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites released just within the past 12 months. That’s a lot of unaccompanied cello! Not that I’m complaining. These are some of the greatest works created by humanity. And see it from the cellist’s perspective: Who wouldn’t want to record these masterpieces, even multiple times? This has not always been the case, by the way. As with many of Bach’s works, the six solo suites were ignored after the composer’s death. But unlike some of his pieces,... Read more...

The Isley Brothers

While the Isley Brothers may have started out singing gospel in church, it was having a father on the vaudeville circuit that guaranteed there was showbiz in their blood. The four brothers were Ronald, O’Kelly (named after their dad), Vernon, and Rudolph. With Vernon singing lead, they won some local talent contests in their native Cincinnati. But in 1955, Vernon died in an accident. Still determined to make music their lives, the three surviving brothers headed for New York City in 1957. Almost immediately, they started making an impact on... Read more...

Stylin'

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