The Beach Boys - ( B52 )

 It is the belief of Richie Unterberger that, "Before session musicians took over most of the parts, the Beach Boys could play respectably gutsy surf rock as a self-contained unit."

As Wilson's arrangements increased in complexity, he began employing a group of professional studio musicians, later known as "the Wrecking Crew", to assist with recording the instrumentation on select tracks. According to some reports, these musicians then completely replaced the Beach Boys on the backing tracks to their records. Much of the relevant documentation, while accounting for the attendance of unionized session players, had failed to record the presence of the Beach Boys themselves. These documents, along with the full unedited studio session tapes, were not available for public scrutiny until the 1990s.

Wilson started occasionally employing members of the Wrecking Crew for certain Beach Boys tracks during the 1963 Surfer Girl sessions – specifically, on two songs, "Hawaii" and "Our Car Club". The 1964 albums Shut Down Volume 2 and All Summer Long featured the Beach Boys themselves playing the vast majority of the instruments while occasionally being augmented by outside musicians. It is commonly misreported that Dennis in particular was replaced by Hal Blaine on drums. Dennis's drumming is documented on a number of the group's singles, including 1964's "I Get Around", "Fun, Fun, Fun", and "Don't Worry Baby". Starting with the 1965 albums Today! and Summer Days, Brian used the Wrecking Crew with greater frequency, "but still", Stebbins writes, "the Beach Boys continued to play the instruments on many of the key tracks and single releases.

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Diverse ( 244 )

 

Bob Dylan ( b33 )

 In August 2007, the award-winning film biography of Dylan I'm Not There, written and directed by Todd Haynes, was released—bearing the tagline "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". The movie used six different actors to represent different aspects of Dylan's life: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. Dylan's previously unreleased 1967 recording from which the film takes its name was released for the first time on the film's original soundtrack; all other tracks are covers of Dylan songs, specially recorded for the movie by a diverse range of artists, including Sonic Youth, Eddie Vedder, Mason Jennings, Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy, Karen O, Willie Nelson, Cat Power, Richie Havens and Tom Verlaine.

Bob Dylan performs at Air Canada Centre, Toronto, November 7, 2006

On October 1, 2007, Columbia Records released the triple CD retrospective album Dylan, anthologizing his entire career under the Dylan 07 logo. The sophistication of the Dylan 07 marketing campaign was a reminder that Dylan's commercial profile had risen considerably since the 1990s. This became evident in 2004, when Dylan appeared in a TV advertisement for Victoria's Secret lingerie. Three years later, in October 2007, he participated in a multi-media campaign for the 2008 Cadillac Escalade. Then, in 2009, he gave the highest profile endorsement of his career, appearing with rapper will.i.am in a Pepsi ad that debuted during the telecast of Super Bowl XLIII. The ad, broadcast to a record audience of 98 million viewers, opened with Dylan singing the first verse of "Forever Young" followed by will.i.am doing a hip hop version of the song's third and final verse.

The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs was released in October 2008, as both a two-CD set and a three-CD version with a 150-page hardcover book.

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The Beatles ( B44 )

 Residual disagreement emanating from Apple Corps' dispute with Apple, Inc., iTunes' owners, over the use of the name "Apple" was also partly responsible for the delay, although in 2008, McCartney stated that the main obstacle to making the Beatles' catalogue available online was that EMI "want[s] something we're not prepared to give them". In 2010, the official canon of thirteen Beatles studio albums, Past Masters, and the "Red" and "Blue" greatest-hits albums were made available on iTunes.

In 2012, EMI's recorded music operations were sold to Universal Music Group. In order for Universal Music to acquire EMI, the European Union, for antitrust reasons, forced EMI to spin off assets including Parlophone. Universal was allowed to keep the Beatles' recorded music catalogue, managed by Capitol Records under its Capitol Music Group division. The entire original Beatles album catalogue was also reissued on vinyl in 2012; available either individually or as a box set.

In 2013, a second volume of BBC recordings, On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2, was released. That December saw the release of another 59 Beatles recordings on iTunes. The set, titled The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963, had the opportunity to gain a 70-year copyright extension conditional on the songs being published at least once before the end of 2013. Apple Records released the recordings on 17 December to prevent them from going into the public domain and had them taken down from iTunes later that same day. Fan reactions to the release were mixed, with one blogger saying "the hardcore Beatles collectors who are trying to obtain everything will already have these.''

On 26 January 2014, McCartney and Starr performed together at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The following day, The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles television special was taped in the Los Angeles Convention Center's West Hall. It aired on 9 February, the exact date of – and at the same time, and on the same network as – the original broadcast of the Beatles' first US television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, 50 years earlier.

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Traffic - House for Everyone ( L3 )

My bed is made of candy floss, the house is made of cheese
It's lit by lots of glow-worms; if I'm wrong correct me please.
The village is a pop-up book, the people wooden dolls.
The roads are made of treacle things, it's time that I moved on.

My home is half a walnut shell, the journey will be long
So I filled the whole with peppermints and creamy pink blanc-mange.
I sailed away for fifteen days, it never once got dark
And came upon two large houses set out in a park.

On the door of one was truth, on the other door was lies.
Which one should I enter thru? I really must decide
The door of lies had lots of flowers growing round outside
But looking close I noticed it was crumbling inside

The door of truth was very plain, but stood up very strong,
And when I entered thru its door I knew I wasn't wrong.

 

The Beach Boys ( B51 )

 On the group's blend, Carl said: "[Love] has a beautifully rich, very full-sounding bass voice. Yet his lead singing is real nasal, real punk. [Jardine]'s voice has a bright timbre to it; it really cuts. My voice has a kind of calm sound. We're big oooh-ers; we love to oooh. It's a big, full sound, that's very pleasing to us; it opens up the heart.'' Rock critic Erik Davis wrote, "The 'purity' of tone and genetic proximity that smoothed their voices was almost creepy, pseudo-castrato, [and] a 'barbershop' sound. Jimmy Webb said, "They used very little vibrato and sing in very straight tones. The voices all lie down beside each other very easily – there's no bumping between them because the pitch is very precise." According to Brian: "Jack Good once told us, 'You sing like eunuchs in a Sistine Chapel,' which was a pretty good quote." Writer Richard Goldstein reported that, according to a fellow journalist who asked Brian about the black roots of his music, Brian's response was: "We're white and we sing white." Goldstein added that when he asked where his approach to vocal harmonies had derived from, Wilson answered: 'Barbershop'."

Use of studio musicians

The Beach Boys performing in 1964

Biographer James Murphy said, "By most contemporary accounts, they were not a very good live band when they started. ... The Beach Boys learned to play as a band in front of live audiences", eventually to become "one of the best and enduring live bands". With only a few exceptions, the Beach Boys played every instrument heard on their first four albums and first five singles.

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Thin Lizzy - Fighting ( D2 )

 

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Canned Heat - Evil is Going On ( L3 )

It's a long way from home,

Can't sleep at night.
Call on your telephone;
Something just ain't right.
That's evil, evil is going on wrong.
I want to warn you brother,
You better watch your happy home.

You make it to your house,
Knock on the front door,
Run 'round to the back;
You'll catch him just before he goes.
That's evil, evil is going on.
I have warned you brother,
You better watch your happy home.

If you call on the telephone
And she answers long and slow,
Grab the first thing smoking
And you have to haul her home.
That's evil, evil is going on wrong.
I have warned you brother,
You better watch your happy home.

Bob Dylan ( b32 )

 The show was praised by fans and critics, as Dylan told stories and made eclectic references, commenting on his musical choices. In April 2009, Dylan broadcast the 100th show in his radio series; the theme was "Goodbye" and the final record played was Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh". Dylan resurrected his Theme Time Radio Hour format when he broadcast a two-hour special on the theme of "Whiskey" on Sirius Radio on September 21, 2020.

Dylan, the Spectrum, 2007

Dylan released his Modern Times album in August 2006. Despite some coarsening of Dylan's voice (a critic for The Guardian characterized his singing on the album as "a catarrhal death rattle") most reviewers praised the album, and many described it as the final installment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft". Modern Times entered the US charts at number one, making it Dylan's first album to reach that position since 1976's Desire. The New York Times published an article exploring similarities between some of Dylan's lyrics in Modern Times and the work of the Civil War poet Henry Timrod.

Nominated for three Grammy Awards, Modern Times won Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album and Bob Dylan also won Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for "Someday Baby". Modern Times was named Album of the Year, 2006, by Rolling Stone magazine, and by Uncut in the UK. On the same day that Modern Times was released the iTunes Music Store released Bob Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all of his albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare and unreleased tracks.

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The Beatles ( B43 )

 In 2003, Let It Be... Naked, a reconceived version of the Let It Be album, with McCartney supervising production, was released. One of the main differences from the Spector-produced version was the omission of the original string arrangements. It was a top-ten hit in both Britain and America. The US album configurations from 1964 to 1965 were released as box sets in 2004 and 2006; The Capitol Albums, Volume 1 and Volume 2 included both stereo and mono versions based on the mixes that were prepared for vinyl at the time of the music's original American release.

As a soundtrack for Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas Beatles stage revue, Love, George Martin and his son Giles remixed and blended 130 of the band's recordings to create what Martin called "a way of re-living the whole Beatles musical lifespan in a very condensed period". The show premiered in June 2006, and the Love album was released that November. In April 2009, Starr performed three songs with McCartney at a benefit concert held at New York's Radio City Music Hall and organised by McCartney.

On 9 September 2009, the Beatles' entire back catalogue was reissued following an extensive digital remastering process that lasted four years. Stereo editions of all twelve original UK studio albums, along with Magical Mystery Tour and the Past Masters compilation, were released on compact disc both individually and as a box set. A second collection, The Beatles in Mono, included remastered versions of every Beatles album released in true mono along with the original 1965 stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul (both of which Martin had remixed for the 1987 editions). The Beatles: Rock Band, a music video game in the Rock Band series, was issued on the same day. In December 2009, the band's catalogue was officially released in FLAC and MP3 format in a limited edition of 30,000 USB flash drives.

2010s

Owing to a long-running royalty disagreement, the Beatles were among the last major artists to sign deals with online music services

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Istoric ( 341 )

 17.01. 1969 - Led Zeppelin lanseaza discul de debut.

The Beach Boys ( B50 )

 He declared in 1966 that his greatest interest was to expand modern vocal harmony, owing to his fascination with a voice to the Four Freshmen, which he considered a "groovy sectional sound." He added, "The harmonies that we are able to produce give us a uniqueness which is really the only important thing you can put into records – some quality that no one else has got. I love peaks in a song – and enhancing them on the control panel. Most of all, I love the human voice for its own sake." For a period, Brian avoided singing falsetto for the group, saying, "I thought people thought I was a fairy...the band told me, 'If that's the way you sing, don't worry about it.'"

In the group's early recordings, from lowest intervals to highest, the group's vocal harmony stack usually began with Love or Dennis, followed by Jardine or Carl, and finally Brian on top, according to Jardine, while Carl said that the blend was Love on bottom, Carl above, followed by Dennis or Jardine, and then Brian on top. Jardine explains, "We always sang the same vocal intervals. ... As soon as we heard the chords on the piano we'd figure it out pretty easily. If there was a vocal move [Brian] envisioned, he'd show that particular singer that move. We had somewhat photographic memory as far as the vocal parts were concerned so that [was] never a problem for us." Striving for perfection, Brian insured that his intricate vocal arrangements exercised the group's calculated blend of intonation, attack, phrasing, and expression. Sometimes, he would sing each vocal harmony part alone through multi-track tape.

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[Love] had a hand in a lot of the arrangements. He would bring out the funkier approaches, whether to go shoo-boo-bop or bom-bom-did-di-did-did. It makes a big difference, because it can change the whole rhythm, the whole color and tone of it.

— Carl Wilson

Anthrax - I'm Eighteen ( L3 )

Lines form on my face and hands
Lines form from the ups and downs
I'm in the middle without any plans
I'm a boy and I'm a man

I'm eighteen and I don't know what I want
Eighteen, I just don't know what I want
Eighteen, I got to get away
I got to get out of this place

I'll go runnin' in outer space!

I've got a baby's brain and an old man's heart
Took eighteen years to get this far
Don't always know what I'm talking about
Feels like I'm living in the middle of doubt

'Cause I'm eighteen, I get confused every day
Eighteen, I just don't know what to say
Eighteen, I've got to get away

Lines form on my face and my hands
Lines form from the left and right
I'm in the middle, the middle of life
I'm a boy and I'm a man


I'm eighteen and I like it

George Michael - Faith ( s 1.4 )

 

Track listing

7": UK / Epic EMU 2

1. "Faith" – 3:16
2. "Hand To Mouth" – 4:36

12": UK / Epic EMU T2

1. "Faith" – 3:16
2. "Faith" (Instrumental) – 3:07
3. "Hand to Mouth" – 4:36

Mixes

1. Album version – 3:16
2. Instrumental – 3:07

Personnel

• Vocals, programming, percussion – George Michael
• Bass – Deon Estus
• Guitars – Hugh Burns
• Cathedral organ – Chris Cameron

George Michael - Faith ( s 1.3 )

 

Music video

The official music video for the song was directed by Andy Morahan. It features Michael, with noticeable stubble on his face, wearing a black leather jacket with 'Rockers Revenge' and BSA logo, Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and a pair of Levi's blue jeans with cowboy boots, playing a guitar near a classic-design Wurlitzer jukebox. Writers Bob Batchelor and Scott Stoddart say the music video positions him as a "masculine sex object", breaking him up into individual body parts such as "stubbled"  chin and butt.

The music video also features part of another song by Michael. The video starts by playing "I Want Your Sex", and then is interrupted by the jukebox starting into "Faith". The intro of "Faith" is the chorus of Wham!'s song "Freedom", played on a church organ.

Chart performance

The song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and number two on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in late October and early November 1987. It entered the UK Singles Chart at number 10 but was kept off the top spot by "You Win Again" from the Bee Gees.

On the Billboard Hot 100 chart, "Faith" went from number 54 to number 37, the week of 31 October 1987. It reached number one on 12 December 1987 and remained there for four consecutive weeks. Altogether, "Faith" stayed in the top 10 for nine weeks, the top 20 for 11 weeks and the top 40 for 15 weeks.

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Bob Dylan ( b31 )

 In 2003, Dylan revisited the evangelical songs from his Christian period and participated in the CD project Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. That year Dylan also released the film Masked & Anonymous, which he co-wrote with director Larry Charles under the alias Sergei Petrov. Dylan played the central character in the film, Jack Fate, alongside a cast that included Jeff Bridges, Penélope Cruz and John Goodman. The film polarised critics: many dismissed it as an "incoherent mess"; a few treated it as a serious work of art.

In October 2004, Dylan published the first part of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. Confounding expectations, Dylan devoted three chapters to his first year in New York City in 1961–1962, virtually ignoring the mid-1960s when his fame was at its height. He also devoted chapters to the albums New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989). The book reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover Non-Fiction best seller list in December 2004 and was nominated for a National Book Award.

No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's acclaimed film biography of Dylan, was first broadcast on September 26–27, 2005, on BBC Two in the UK and PBS in the US. The documentary focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to his motorcycle crash in 1966, featuring interviews with Suze Rotolo, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples and Dylan himself. The film received a Peabody Award in April 2006 and a Columbia-duPont Award in January 2007. The accompanying soundtrack featured unreleased songs from Dylan's early career.

Modern Times

Dylan's career as a radio presenter commenced on May 3, 2006, with his weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour for XM Satellite Radio, with song selections on chosen themes.

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The Beatles ( B42 )

 That same year McCartney, Harrison and Starr collaborated on the Anthology project. Anthology was the culmination of work begun in 1970, when Apple Corps director Neil Aspinall, their former road manager and personal assistant, had started to gather material for a documentary with the working title The Long and Winding Road. Documenting their history in the band's own words, the Anthology project included the release of several unissued Beatles recordings. McCartney, Harrison and Starr also added new instrumental and vocal parts to songs recorded as demos by Lennon in the late 1970s.

During 1995–96, the project yielded a television miniseries, an eight-volume video set, and three two-CD/three-LP box sets featuring artwork by Klaus Voormann. Two songs based on Lennon demos, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", were issued as new Beatles singles. The releases were commercially successful and the television series was viewed by an estimated 400 million people. In 1999, to coincide with the re-release of the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, an expanded soundtrack album, Yellow Submarine Songtrack, was issued.

2000s

The Beatles' 1 a compilation album of the band's British and American number-one hits, was released on 13 November 2000. It became the fastest-selling album of all time, with 3.6 million sold in its first week and 13 million within a month. It topped albums charts in at least 28 countries. The compilation had sold 31 million copies globally by April 2009.

Harrison died from metastatic lung cancer in November 2001. McCartney and Starr were among the musicians who performed at the Concert for George, organised by Eric Clapton and Harrison's widow, Olivia. The tribute event took place at the Royal Albert Hall on the first anniversary of Harrison's death.

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