Tyneside friend Trev Gibb is going to be recording a collection of classics from The Great American Songbook, focusing on songs associated with Frank Sinatra. He’s collaborating transatlantically with accompanist Adel Francisco, and this is a demo of their latest effort.
The final tracks will be more finished, of course, but the emotion in this version will be hard to top.
This album sounds terrific in mono vinyl, no doubt about it, but I think it’s the first Beatles album that I’d prefer listening to in stereo vinyl. The Beatles were still thinking in terms of mono mixes at this point but their layering of musical elements in the studio was getting more and more complex, and the interplay of layers was becoming as interesting as the overall sound. I think you can appreciate that better in a stereo mix, at least where this album is concerned.
During the time of the recording of The Basement Tapes, Garth Hudson remembers Richard Manuel listening to this Gospel 45 over and over again.
. . . resides in America, creates his art out of America, helps illuminate America, but he doesn’t make his home in America.
Like David Crockett, Jim Bowie, William B. Travis, among others, he’s only at home, only himself, on the frontier, in places not yet settled, in places yet to be defined.
It’s hard to get your mind around Texas in 1835, a province of Mexico, officially, but really an experiment in political liberty and entrepreneurial skulduggery — a land of limitless corruption, limitless idealism, limitless possibility.
It was, in short, the heart of the American dream, where the only unforgivable sins were timidity and mediocrity. Dylan still sings from the heart of that heart.
Robbie Robertson on the origins of what became known as The Basement Tapes, one of the central documents of our culture.
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The king of them all is starting to fall — I lost my love at the boatman’s ball . . .
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