It’s one of those classical melodies everyone is familiar with even if they can’t name it.
“An der schönen blauen Donau” (“On the Beautiful Blue Danube”) was written by Johann Strauss II in 1866. Its recognizability over a century later is thanks probably in large part to “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and parodies on “The Simpsons” and elsewhere.
In 2013 I worked up an abbreviated rock instrumental arrangement of Danube for Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. We provided a live soundtrack for a theater production of “Alice in Wonderland.” The director wanted Danube to accompany a scene where the characters play flamingo croquet in slow motion.
Danube would appear to have nothing to do with Wonderland — which is why the Frost Heaves excluded it when we recorded our Lewis Carroll poem adaptations for an album called “Contrariwise.” But in fact we were not the first to make a connection between the two works.
Donovan kicks off his meandering treatment of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (1971) with a not-quite-right excerpt on organ and calliope. And the music folks at Disney in 1947 demoed a version of “Beautiful Soup” set to the Danube melody. The Mock Turtle and his greenish broth never made it into the film, however, and we only know of his song today thanks to the DVD extras.
The version presented here sticks close to my 2013 adaptation, which covers just the first 76 bars of a 420-bar composition. Except now I’ve given the melody to the bass, in the tradition of the other fuzzyinterpretations I’ve been recording lately. Daniel Hales returns as accompanist, but switches his guitar for a ukulele to counterbalance the low-end lead.
We’ve altered the title in tribute to the Frost Heaves’ home base, Greenfield, which got its name from a tributary of a certain tinge, and which was incorporated on this day in 1753.
Pardon all the scare quotes. These as just some song groupings I discovered and dug over the last 12 months, give or take.
Whack World – Tierra Whack (2018)
My big thing lately is getting away from repetition, and this piece does that of necessity — each song is only a minute long. Thematically, stylistically, it covers an incredible amount of ground in its total runtime of 15 minutes. Also, I’m not sure the music should be separated from its accompanying video, which accentuates its careful crafting and sense of humor.
General Dome – Buke and Gase (2013)
Between the relentless stomping and unconventional plucking it’s almost possible to lose track of the hugely expressive and sneakily high-ranging voice tying it all together.
A State of Wonder – Glenn Gould (1955, 1981)
I eventually developed a strong preference between these two recordings of Johann Sebastain Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But having the chance to contrast two such different interpretations of the same compositions by the same superhuman performer is a rare treat.
A Good Thing Lost – The Poppy Family (1968-1973)
A magnificent voice backed up by ingenious pop craftsmanship. These songs ought to be part of the groovy pantheon, but I’d never gotten a whiff of any of them until this year.
For Certain Because – The Hollies (1966)
Delightful Britpop with just enough psychedelic spice, and fantastic two- and three-part harmonies.
Splendor and Misery – Clipping (2016)
The story of the sole survivor of an uprising on an interstellar slave ship. Glitchy beats created by, among other things, a dot-matrix printer like my grandmother had circa 1992. The album title is a reference to an unfinished Samuel R. Delany novel, one song references Ursula K. LeGuinn. How can I resist?
How does one listen to Chopin’s “Funeral March” in a post-“Looney Toons” world? The doomy, plodding left hand and ominous melody feature prominently in 1948’s “Scaredy Cat” and plenty of other cartoon and comedy settings where death and defeat require a soundtrack. Keep listening to the piece, though, and it gets sentimental, almost sweet. Media reductions put an unwelcome slant on any listening to the complete piece (Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 35, 1839). On the other hand, when the music evolves beyond this popculture touchstone, the surprises are that much more surprising.
As I’ve been reading classical music reviews I’ve been awed by critics who can contrast subtle stylistic differences in various recordings of the same piece. I notice superficial differences, but my ear is not that sophisticated.
There’s one case, however, where I thought I had identified one superior and one inferior recording. I returned to them this week to see if those earlier impressions held up and if I could put them into words.
I’ve owned many copies of Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta performing Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” from 1992. I keep lending it to people who, quite understandably, never give it back. At some point I replaced it with a recording from a couple years later by Joanna Kozlowska and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which didn’t seem to live up to the one I was familiar with.
In my most recent listenings, I’ve identified a few reasons. It’s meant to be a slow, meditative piece. The London version, clocking in at 53:43, hits the sweet spot, whereas the Warsaw version is too slow, stretching to 59:06.
One has to wait more than two minutes longer for the real draw of the piece — the vocals — to enter (13:18 vs. 15:23). And how can anyone compete with Dawn Upshaw? She and the Sinfonietta lean into the drama of the piece, where Kozlowska’s reading feels a bit flat.
The difference between the two versions is most stark in the third movement. The London version is legato, producing a serene, rocking sensation. The Warsaw version, on the other hand, disconnects the two repeated notes of the movement’s foundation, lurching through the whole thing.
Where the Warsaw version is superior is in the recording itself. All the elements can be heard more clearly. The best example is at the very beginning. In the London version, the murmuring doublebasses get lost in a fog, whereas in the Warsaw version they stand out like whispers across a domed gallery.
There’s plenty of music that excites me mentally, but the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” is a rare piece that also excites me dermally. At key moments it sends ripples of surface goosebumps and subsurface chills up and down my arms, my sides, my scalp.
But how do I reconcile my abiding love of this piece with my newfound dislike of repetition? I’ll evade the question and reply with an observation about intervals. Each note is rarely more than a major second away from the one that preceded it, sometimes a third in epiphanic moments.
This is a different kind of minimalism from the scrolling landscape of Adams’ “Harmonielehre.” Both tonally and structurally, “Sorrowful Songs” paces within a confined space, something like the prisoner in the Gestapo cell at Zakopane. But even within these strictures there is still the possibility of transcendence — so many higher octaves within reach.
There’s nothing more frustrating than when a piece of music has a clear shot at perfection but doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye.
Cécile Chaminade’s Flute Concertino in D major, Op. 107 (1902), is just such a piece. It’s very showoffy, with scales racing up and down and notes jumping to their octave in a split second. Although I suppose the point of a concerto (or even its diminutive) is to showcase the technical prowess of the soloist. But on top of that concedable reservation I have an unshakable one: At seven or eight minutes, it’s too long.
The piece is exciting, and it has wonderful melodic ideas. But after they’re developed they’re restated, like the head of a jazz tune, and in the process they overstay their welcome. There’s my old nemesis, Repetition. These ideas are strong enough that they don’t need repetition to legitimize them. Could some clever arranger out there perform an abridgement?
Sometimes I think “classical music” is not quite the best descriptor for what I’m writing about in this diary. A more accurate but clunkier term would be “rigorously composed music.” Speaking chronologically, the classical period was only from 1750 to 1820, but I’m interested in a broader sweep than even the more casual definition encompasses.
Prime example: Many of Conlon Nancarrow’s “Studies for Player Piano” (1948-1992) sound more blues-inspired than classical. But they’re painstakingly constructed, with higher technical ambitions and more harmonic wonkery than goes into even a very high-minded Steely Dan tune.
Earlier in this diary I disparaged piano plinkplonk, a term that applies very comfortably to many of the Studies. Yet I’m quite receptive to them, at least in brief listening sessions. The difference, perhaps, is that here the plinking and plonking is the main event rather than part of an ensemble with contrasting textures. As bizarro-world boogie-woogie extrapolations performed by 88-fingered automatons on Benzedrine, I like them. Good leaf raking music.
One day the Rolling Stones’ “Time is On My Side” came on my iPod, and I was shocked by what I heard.
Everybody’s heard this song a million times, including me. But somehow I never before noticed the astonishing rhythmic irregularity of the tambourine. Suddenly the song was unlistenable.
Others have remarked on this, particularly percussionists. “I can’t think of another song with worse tambourine playing,” one wrote on DrumForum.org in 2013. A commenter on the Rolling Stones Fan Club online forum compared “waiting to hear how far off the beat the next hit will be” to Chinese water torture. “Now I can’t hear anything else on the track,” they wrote.
But apparently the main stream of fans and casual listeners is able to hear the song just fine. Even if the tambourine raises a few eyebrows, it has done nothing to detract from the song’s status as a key recording by a seminal rock band.
Before exploring this rhythmical Rorschach test, it’s necessary to establish a few specifics.
First, the Stones issued two studio recordings of “Time.” Both are from 1964, and each is a fairly faithful reading of Irma Thomas’ rendition from earlier that year. The first Stones version, cut in London in May, was released as a single in the U.S. and rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the band’s biggest hit in the States to date. But it is the second version, recorded five months later in Chicago, that listeners today hear most.1 It’s the one that made my jaw drop, listening in 2020.
The tambourine on Version 1 is shaky, but nowhere near as bad as it is on Version 2. That may be because the first recording is almost 10 beats per minute faster than the second, and it’s harder to keep the rhythm in a slow song than in a fast one.
While the earlier version is quicker, the later one has more of what we’ve come to expect from the Stones in terms of attitude. Discographer Martin Elliott writes: “It seemed as though it was necessary to re-record the song in order to liven it up for the British market. It became a popular live song, even if the screams tended to drown this rousing ballad.”2
Speaking of live performances, there are two (from October 25 and 29, 1964) available on YouTube. Both are indeed accompanied by incessantly screaming American teenage girls, who probably were already familiar with Version 1. But both live performances are closer — in terms of calendar as well as tempo — to Version 2, clocking in at about 100 bpm. In neither live performance does anybody play tambourine.
Most sources say the studio tambourinist was Mick Jagger. Which makes sense, because both Versions 1 and 2 likely were recorded live, as opposed to using overdubs, and Mick would have had his hands free while singing. The tambourine is relatively loud in both mixes, suggesting it was close to Mick’s vocal mic.
The fan club has Brian Jones on the tambourine for both studio recordings, but this seems unlikely. His guitar arpeggios can be heard throughout the studio and live recordings (though they are far less prominent in Version 2).
Close listening to Version 2 reveals there are actually two tambourines in the mix. That fact is most apparent at about 00:34, on the most out-of-time tambourine tap of them all. Unfortunately, it’s the quieter of the two tambourines that’s more accurate.
If Version 2 is a live take, were there two people playing tambourine at the same time? Did Charlie Watts have a tambourine attached to his hi-hat? Could the second tambourine be an overdub — a salvage attempt?
Whomever the rhythmically challenged tambourinist may have been, it’s shocking to me that this is the performance they went with. Nobody wanted to try it again? Nobody suggested taking a pass without tambourine, as they had done on Ed Sullivan and in Santa Monica? Had their studio time run out? Did Andrew Loog Oldham and the lads listen back to what they’d recorded and say, “Good enough”?
Well, it has been good enough, for enough listeners, for over half a century. “I’m pretty sure they did it to add to the overall relaxed theme of the song,” writes one DrumForum commenter. “Usually something like that would [bother] me, but I feel it fits with the song.”
All this has prompted me to interrogate my attitudes about rhythm and recording.
My practice regimen and recording approach has been guided for years by a metronome or some other precise, nonhuman rhythmkeeper. This undoubtedly has increased my sensitivity to musical gestures that don’t conform to the grid.
But it’s not simply that the tambourine on “Time” is not exactly on the beat. Sometimes it’s a little before the beat. Other times it’s way before the beat. The irregularity is what makes it so maddening.
The song is in 6/8 time, and the tambourine attempts to land on the fourth beat of each bar. There are 87 tambourine taps in all, with most of the errors occurring in the first half of the song. I would classify the majority of the taps as close enough. Four you could get away with calling flams, making (with Watts’ snare drum and the second tambourine) one beat of two closely spaced strokes. Eleven taps are sore thumbs, so far ahead of the beat as to undermine the entire performance.
Instrumentally the rest of the recording is solid enough, but there is another blemish: Mick and the backup singers (Jones and/or Keith Richards and/or Bill Wyman) aren’t always in tune when they sing, “You’ll come runnin’ back to me-ee-ee.” While the tambourine dominates my attention, other listeners might be more offended by the singers’ pitchiness.
I couldn’t help but think how easy it would be, were the song recorded today, to clean up this mess. What if Chess Records had isolation booths and a digital recording setup? The instrumental tracks could have been recorded first, as a live take or even individually. The singing and tambourine could have been added later. Finally, the mixing engineer could have adjusted the backing vocalists’ pitch and nudged each errant tambourine tap closer to where it ought to be.
Of course here we run into questions of authenticity. If it were somehow possible to alter the original recording, to smooth its rough edges, Stones diehards probably would feel it had lost its magic. And not just Stones diehards: There are music listeners and practitioners for whom “feel” is preferable to sterile accuracy. Roots drummer Questlove says in an oft-quoted soundbite: “The sloppier that you deliver it, the more heartfelt and human it is.”
Tim Barnes asserts that mistakes in Rolling Stones songs generally, and on “Time Is On My Side” in particular, “are themselves an important characteristic.”
On an earlier single, “Not Fade Away,” some overdubbed handclaps lose the beat as the rest of the music fades out. Barnes sees this as an aesthetic choice, an “acceptance of the unmusical.” (For the record, these claps are not nearly as distracting as the “Time” tambourine.)
Barnes writes: “Once the Stones achieved the perfect distillation of this attitude — not bothering to re-record such a simple but important performance — they had developed a musical and stylistic approach that was eventually to become more of a rock ‘n’ roll standard than any of the songs they began their career covering.”
The argument here is that deliberate sloppiness, or at least disregard for refined playing, is a hallmark of rock music. But that sounds more like punk or grunge than the British invasion. And in any case that standard has long since worn away: Major label releases these days are quantized and autotuned to perfection. Mistakes are once again considered mistakes.
In whatever time they inhabit, rock stars of the Rolling Stones variety are supposed to make it look easy while also sounding somewhat decent. Rawness is part of the Rolling Stones brand, but I wouldn’t say unpreparedness is. “Time Is On My Side” seems to straddle the line between these two attitudes. It doesn’t quite hit the note, it’s not quite on the beat, and whether through determination or carefreeness it just keeps on going.
Notes
Version 2 is included on most “best of” compilations. On the official Rolling Stones YouTube channel, Version 2 has 1.3 million views, compared to 40,000 for Version 1. There’s a similar gulf between the two versions on the iTunes Store.
Elliott, Martin. The Rolling Stones complete recording sessions 1963-1989. Sterling, 1990, p. 40.
The Rolling Stones: All the Songs, by Phillip Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2016, pp. 80-81), asserts the tambourine is overdubbed in both studio recordings. But if that’s true it raises even more questions about why it wasn’t redone, mixed lower, or left out altogether.
Barnes, Tim. “Loosen Up.” Living Through Pop, edited by Andrew Blake, Routledge, 1999, p. 22.
More sloppiness on tape
The intro of “Rock’n Me” by the Steve Miller Band (1976) is pretty, pretty, pretty loose.
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