Apple Computer Inc. made a big stink this week by posting a teaser on their homepage suggesting their iTunes service would add something new and exciting on Tuesday morning. Well, it's been a long and winding road, but finally The Beatles' catalogue is now available for digital download on the music service. It took until 2009 for The Beatles' catalogue to be digitally remastered from its original stereo analogue recordings, leaving fans salivating and yearning for nearly two decades longer than they had to wait for the remasters of other contemporaneous rock acts.
While it is inevitable that these canonical tomes of modern popular music eventually become reduced to a floating binary of kilobytical ephemera, there are those that pine the loss of sound quality, aural fidelity, and visceral connection that came with unwrapping a 12 inch disc of weighty vinyl from illustrious spans of cover art and dropping the kinetic needle on the groove. There is something to be said, as well, for the way in which digital downloads have facilitated the hyperactive hashing and repackaging of music to the point where a song in a tiny .mp3 file is completely severed from any notion of the album to which it was once intended to be a part. That said, there is a bit of revisionist history in this view, given the entire music industry of the 1950s was premised on the 45 rpm single. Of course, even The Beatles owe their great fortunes to that rapid wave of early singles, before they dabbled in their more ambitious projects suited only for long playing records.
While I believe that the current paranoia suggesting "The Album" has met its death as an artform is rather premature, there is no denying there was a Golden Age for the self-contained LP, of which this era only retains a flaxen patina. Yes, that Golden Age was borne of the Progressive Rock movement of the late-60s and early-70s that attempted to elevate rock music to the credible and immortal station of classical symphonies and arias. Popularized by the likes of King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Deep Purple, there is no group that has left its mark so indelibly upon this movement as Pink Floyd. It is nigh impossible to breath the words "concept album" without hanging your hat on the Floyd's 1973 opus The Dark Side of the Moon. In wanting to protect the integrity of their music as part of a larger whole, Pink Floyd brought a law suit against its longtime record label EMI in 2010, attempting to block the sale of the group's songs individually on services like iTunes. A High Court in the U.K. agreed with the Floyd that the band could "preserve the artistic integrity" of whole albums by not breaking them up into individual song sales.
With the entire Fab Four catalogue being released this week for your splicing and dicing pleasure, it seems an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the argument made by Pink Floyd's legal victory. It is not to say that what works for a Prog Rock band is what's best for everybody, but there is some value in taking stock of the fact that music is capable of grander statements when its part of a cohesive whole than when it is severed into one-off snacks of pop delight. And with that, this week's finger on the steam Hump Day Hitslist will not present an assortment of 5 tracks from various artists, across multiple albums. Instead, we feature a full five song, 42 minute LP from Pink Floyd entitled Animals, without breaks or track separation.
Pink Floyd - Animals Side One
1. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 1"
2. "Dogs"
Side Two
3. "Pigs, Three Different Ones"
4. "Sheep"
5. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 2"
Released in 1977, Animals was a concept album loosely based on George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, with lyrical depictions of various social classes as different kinds of animals: the political dogs that wage war, the ruthless pigs who devour in the name of wealth, and the mindless and unquestioning populism that reduced the masses to a herd of sheep. This concept was developed by Pink Floyd's bassist and co-vocalist, Roger Waters, who felt great disdain at the social and political conditions of 1970s Britain. In a sense, this was Waters' response to the U.K. punk movement that had risen in the previous two years, by demonstrating that Progressive Rock bands who filled stadiums and sold millions of records for their labels could be equally as political as anti-establishment punk rock acts.
Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, famously wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words "I hate" scrawled above to demonstrate his contempt for the arena rock giants. Rotten wasn't wrong in pinning the Floyd as a bloated behemoth that far transcended the four members of the group; the Floyd had indeed become large to the point of nation-state status. The live shows for the Animals album were part of the massive In the Flesh tour that saw the Floyd playing to crowds nearing 100,000 strong in vacuous stadiums. David Gilmour would later intimate that by the end of the tour he realized the band had finally achieved all of the success he could have dreamed of and that there was nothing left to do; a feeling that saddened, rather than pleased him. Similarly, Waters would feel increasingly alienated by the large crowds, leading to his famously erupting on stage in Montreal and spitting on a fan that had annoyed him. These depressive and estranged feelings would become Waters' source of inspiration for writing the Floyd's subsequent album The Wall, that was symbolically represented in later theatric concerts by the building of a great white brick wall between the band and its audiences.
The cover for The Beatles' 'Yesterday'...and Today release is perhaps the best known banned album cover of all time, and is certainly among the most sought after. Produced as a sampler of singles from the previously released Help! and Rubber Soul albums and the upcoming Revolver, this album quickly garnered massive attention by way of a public outcry over the cover. Dubbed the "Butcher Baby" cover, Capitol Records was forced to withdraw nearly 750,000 copies it had already printed and made ready for distribution. To save a dime, the company decided not to destroy the records, but opted instead to paste over a much more tame photograph of the Fab Four looking rather bored around a piece of luggage.
Before long, enterprising teens discovered they could peel off the milquetoast photo in such a way as to preserve the Butcher cover underneath. Those who did it best began hocking their skills to assist others, and soon it was possible to say you had had your copy "professionally peeled". The obsessive bunch that are collectors of rare vinyl records have developed a taxonomy to describe copies of the album in its various conditions: "First State" being one of the original uncovered versions that survived the Capitol recall, "Second State" being a still-covered luggage version, and "Third State" being a peeled copy. Due to the fact so many people have opted to peel their personal copies over the years, and many damaged the covers in the process, a mint copy of the "Second State" non-peeled version has now, oddly, returned to being a particularly prized possession. Of course, the rarest of the rare, a "First State" never-covered Butcher cover remains the most valuable of the bunch.
As legend has it, the Butcher cover was shot in 1966, when photographer Robert Whitaker asked The Beatles to pose for a conceptual art piece entitled "A Somnambulant Adventure" -- referring to the state of sleepwalking. For the shoot, Whitaker had the lads dress in butcher smocks as he draped them with pieces of meat and body parts from plastic dolls. Bored with their usual photo shoots, and playing to their inclination for black humour, the boys were more than happy to oblige. Though not originally intended as an album cover, when The Beatles were asked to submit pictures to accompany a sampler album before the release of their next studio LP Revolver, they included shots from the Butcher shoot. The president of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, claims it was Paul McCartney who was most vigorous in asking for the photo's inclusion on the cover, stating that it would be the band's commentary on the Vietnam War -- a fact that might surprise Beatles' fans given it is John who is most usually associated with such political commentary and noir satire. Though the cover may have caused Capitol a major headache in the late-1960s, Alan Livingston's son, Peter, would make good for himself in 1987 by arriving at a Beatles convention with a crate of 24 sealed original "First State" Butcher records that he had no doubt pilfered from his father's credenza. These "Livingston copies" have since become the crown jewel in the heraldry of banned album covers.
If you happen to own a copy of the record with the steamer trunk cover you might be lucky enough that it is one of the 750,000 Butcher covers that had to be pasted over. The "Second State" covers are discoverable by looking for a small black triangle of colour bleeding through the white background of the conservative cover about mid-way down the right edge. This triangle is Ringo's black turtleneck that he sports on the Butcher cover. If you are fortunate enough to see this black triangle, don't go peeling away, as the "Second State" version has become more prized than a peeled away version. If you don't discover a black triangle, then you likely have one on the later prints of the album after the Butcher covers had all been unloaded, and you will just have to enjoy the music.
