Other Voices, No. 3
[Editor Note: I am fortunate to have friends who write compelling and entertaining items which they graciously allow me to share with you. Such is the case again this week, with my friend Rob Simbeck‘s take on his favorite song, Penny Lane.
Given Rob’s extensive musical background, I was surprised he chose this song out of the thousands of our shared history as his favorite. So I asked him to expound on his choice, which he did. He didn’t write the following with the idea that I’d ask to publish it, but good writers do what they do. Enjoy.]
To set the stage, I have always been smitten with the strength of singles of all kinds from 1965-67, with the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Rolling Stones all hitting it out of the park pretty much every time. Lots more from the Animals, Kinks, Byrds, Hollies…
For my money, the Beatles’ Penny Lane has all the elements: sophistication, along the lines of Eleanor Rigby or Good Vibrations (my #2 of the decade); great orchestration (again like those two songs); wonderful melody; and a brightness and poppiness that make it feel like a quintessentially ‘60s experience.
Yes, Penny Lane is a pop story song, but it transcends that. It’s got a descending bass line a la the Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon, but whereas that goes where you expect it, the B-minor chord on the word “know” in the first verse of Penny Lane throws a grenade into the progression in the coolest, most artistic way:
It makes it dark, or as dark as McCartney got. It makes the listener pause on this jaunty sunlit ride and experience a bit of rain, a tension that holds us for a second — and even though the lyrics are still jaunty (“the people that come and go / stop and say hello”), we remain in a holding pattern until the music catches up and gets jaunty again, with “On the corner…”
Light and dark again with the banker, and this time we do get rain, with the lyric on the darker pause. But this time the release is to the chorus, which is in a brand new key, with a melody jump that makes it feel higher, brighter, joyful…
…with great harmonies through to “in summer,” which leads us to “meanwhile back” which takes us to the verse again. It just feels like a magical journey all the way, with hidden doors and magic portals. This time, the nurse whose life is a play anyway, meets the darker chords…
…and in the last verse it’s fire and rain.
Penny Lane is a story but it’s surrealistic, bringing in different scenes, different weather. It feels music-hall meets psychedelic to me, tying them together, and it just jumps out of the speakers. The bass line is smooth and complex and almost circusy. And the piccolo trumpet solo is British and Baroque and wonderful. And there’s yet another key change toward the end to freshen it up once again.
To me it just synthesizes everything The Beatles did well, everything the ’60s did well, and makes it a fun and palatable and engaging journey.
• • •
As for others, yes, Eleanor Rigby is brilliant and has a lot of those good elements, but it’s really only two chords. John did all his most brilliant stuff during this period, and All You Need Is Love may have a claim to being more iconically ’60s — and I love the way it plays with the time signatures — but it doesn’t jump out of the speakers quite like Penny Lane. And Hey Jude was a bigger hit, but it’s not the adventure this is. It’s more an anthem.
Except for A Day In The Life, I didn’t think the rest of “Sgt. Pepper” continued the upward progression that had led to “Revolver” as their best album. I didn’t buy “Sgt. Pepper” or anything after that, until I bought everything, probably in my 30s.
Thus endeth my analysis.
[The Beatles single Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever was released February 13, 1967 — 59 years ago today. Very strange.]
Last year, I posted an editorial cartoon about Melania Trump cashing in on the dubious and now quickly-fading NFT fad. To refresh your memory, NFTs are to actual art what cryptocurrency is to real money — a few hundred bits of computer memory, backed by no authority whatsoever, which supposedly denotes ownership of an item of value. You can read about how NFTs are supposed to work, and why they exist, here.
But the point of this post is not that NFTs are exploited by savvy grifters like Melania, which they certainly are; rather, it is that NFTs reveal just how lazy such grifters are, laziness being the essential quality that defines people like the Trumps. Donald J. and Melania and Don and Eric and Ivanka — they all have trained themselves to look for the lowest-hanging, most-readily-dropped fruits to gather into their bottomless ego-baskets. NFTs were practically designed for people like the Trumps. Whom I wish were rarer.
As a point of evidence, here is one of Melania Trump’s NFTs, titled Melania’s Vision and touted thus by the so-called NFT “broker” that offered it:
Melania Trump’s personal journey has been enlightening; from Slovenia through Europe and into the United States of America — including as First Lady. The beauty and hardships of individuals, majestic landscapes and profound architecture have entered her lens and remain in her heart. Marc-Antoine Coulon’s breathtaking watercolor embodies Melania Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire. Melania’s Vision provides the collector with strength and hope.
I’ll give you a moment to catch a fresh breath after that inspirational floe of rotten algae.
[Inhale through your nose, draw the breath into your belly… hold the breath a moment… now exhale slowly through your mouth… it’s okay if you make a soft, cleansing sound.]
According to the NFT trading site OpenSea, this digital rendition of Melania’s eyes is going for 0.o2 Ethereum (the second-most-popular cryptocurrency) or $38.o6.
May I venture that $38.o6 is pretty generous for this piece of flotsam. One needn’t look very closely to see that this image signed by PERSON WHOSE SIGNATURE HAS DENSE VERTICAL STROKES JUST LIKE DONALD’S is less an original watercolor than a Photoshop creation. Melania’s right eye is an obvious digital mirror image of the left, or vice versa. The computer-artist simply did a cut-and-paste-and-flip. Only Melania’s washy eyebrow strokes are non-mirror-image.
Not that time-to-create is the essence of art, but I genuinely doubt that Melania’s Vision took more than 20 minutes to produce. Graphic artists, as I once hoped to be, learn to do things super-quickly because they are paid so little. The majority of the time spent on this work no doubt took place on the upper floors of Trump Tower, discussing the best way the Trump grift family could make a buck off it. They could care less that Melania’s right eye was a mirror-image, down to the smallest eyelash detail, of her left eye.
To them, it’s just another part of the unreality show that the Trumps star in.
Half of Americans want this guy, and his family, to rule this country again. If only I could make an NFT of my head-slap, but it may not matter. Americans vote for people of their class these days: Trump the Grifter, along with his Fagin Family, has somehow convinced a multitude that he’s one of them. This doesn’t speak well of the multitude.
As to the other half of America… well, there’s my market. If I want to make a difference, I had better start perfecting my head-slap and hire a graphic artist who works cheap but markets well.