Year ago during my early years of building and hosting web sites I happened upon some musicians who decided they would re-record every Beatles song – for no particular reason. I was already impressed with their “… because it’s there,” philosophy.
“Hmmm,” I thought to myself, a lofty goal. In my mind I felt that to be more fun than re-recording, let’s say, the Glen Campbell catalog – even though I have a ton of respect for his work and the numerous hits Glen enjoyed written by an old acquaintance of mine, Jimmy Webb (Wichita Lineman, Rhinestone Cowboy, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston… well he could write hit songs, including hits like MacArthur Park, Up, Up & Away and more).
I contacted these musicians and told them I would be glad to host their educational and musical effort on my servers at no cost to them, explaining that I respect and was very impressed by what they’ve done. They fancied that as a grand idea and I proceeded to bog down my hard drive with gigs of Beatlesque music, video and more.
I did my “Google for Google Puffs” search engine magic announcing the newly hosted web site and immediately watched my server stats soar with lots of web traffic. The new web site was now receiving way more visitors than any other web site I was hosting. Fortunately, I do have extremely robust servers and “superfast” (that’s a tech term for high-speed) bandwidth so I “can” handle the traffic. I have to admit it was a little intimidating at first glance to see all this web traffic. I was born and raised in Los Angeles so I’m all about traffic! The number of visitors to the site remains huge.
Go to: “The Spinal Cracker Project”
PabloCruise.com get’s the second most visits and for the more than a decade I hosted and ran Table Mountain Casino’s web site. They, too, were pretty heavily visited online.
Stay with me now… there is a huge payoff I talk about in the next paragraph – and there’s no way you can win this at Table Mountain – AND it’s completely free for you to enjoy.
I was doing a bit of server maintenance this weekend when I stumbled into some new (hidden) content in the Spinal Cracker Project web folders. From what I gathered there must have been some kind of festival in Montreal that featured young classical musicians playing instrumental versions of Beatles’ songs. “Nothing (that) new,” you might be thinking. However, the secret (lost tapes) were recorded in Quicktime and Windows Media Player format. I decided I’d check one out, then another, then another. Wow! … and here I am dedicating an entire article about the discovery.
These are a few screen grabs from “Across the Universe” which was really enjoyable to watch. These young artists are amazing. What’s more, is that whoever pulled off this event and did the arrangements gets a tip from my hat as well. I’d love for my non-profit, Fresno Conservatory, to make an event of this caliper happen in my community.
Time for the Payoff! Check them out!
Les Boreades
Discovery is a trip!
I loved finding the “lost tapes.” I felt like I was the star in a Hollywood blockbuster about to lunge into the the second segment of a great adventure script where the setup was complete and the action begins to grow. Oh my? How will this conclude?
Here’s a little side story about “Discovery” I enjoyed.
While in England photographing a famous instrument: “The Curves Guitar” years ago my friend, the owner of the guitar and producer of the Fender Curves project, took me to the very south tip of Great Britain and had me swear not to contact Yoko Ono. When we settled in to a private loft in a small town in Devon (close to where the Pirates of Penzance happened) he pulled out a hidden box with an old reel (to reel) tape enclosed.
He told me to shut down any of my recording devices and have a listen. The tape contained the “original” voice and one-instrument tracks of John Lennon working on “I Am the Walrus” and Paul McCartney still writing “Fool on the Hill.” He was given this original studio recording from a friend of his that ran the studio in Liverpool where The Beatles were recording in those early days.
While listening to “I Am the Walrus” the lone drone musical track with nothing extra except Lennon’s voice came to a break. A complete stop! A few seconds later the song continued. At first I thought this was some glitch then realized that this was the part where George Martin introduced that bizarre backwards-sounding musical interlude and that made me feel cool to discover that while trippin’ on this absolutely raw and rare demo recording.
After that song was complete, McCartney and only his piano (all one take – on one track – by the way) began singing “Fool on the Hill.” This was incredible to hear something nobody, for the most part, has ever heard. So all is nice and McCartney gets part way through the song and begins singing, “doo, doo, doo, do, do, do, doo…” because he has not written the middle eight yet. I wanted to say, “hey, I know what lyrics to use there. No problem.” This was the first time the tape had been played in over 30 years and it made me feel like I was on top of the world – alone, but on top of the world.
Oh… and the reason I was not to contact Yoko (who I had photographed when I was on assignment in Hollywood when John Lennon’s star was unveiled in front of the Capital Records building on Vine Street, just a few hundred feet North of Hollywood Blvd.) is because she, apparently is very careful to insure that she owns anything that would (have) had anything to do with intimate work by her late husband. Thus, she would likely work very diligently to get this tape into her possession.
Say, if anyone has re-recorded every James Taylor, or Donovan, or Leonard Cohen song let me know. I’ll host your work on my servers free as well.
