Author: Zögernd

Musings on music.

Whose side is time on, exactly?

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

  1. 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.
  2. Elliott, Martin. The Rolling Stones complete recording sessions 1963-1989. Sterling, 1990, p. 40.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Puckered chiminess

Classical Music Diary No. 5

Bach, Goldberg Variations (from Glenn Gould’s “A State of Wonder” three-disc set). This is what I’ve listened to the most of any piece since I started my new classical music diet. Perhaps because there are so many ways to listen to it — the 1955 recording, the 1981 recording; as a complete 45-minute piece or in discrete 1- to 5-minute chunks.

In the end I think the later recording is my favorite: For one it sounds nicer, and I’m persuaded by Gould’s critique of his own earlier performance as a little too cute. I especially love when he coaxes from his acoustic piano a sound like an electric Wurlitzer, that sort of puckered chiminess (see especially variations 3, 9, and 13). 

Unfortunately, I haven’t found anyone playing the Goldberg Variations on an actual Wurlitzer (although there is a pretty good version of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” on a Rhodes).

Of course Bach wrote the Variations for harpsichord, and so I’ve sampled a few in that direction. Jean Rondeau’s version is wonderful for its visuals and sound quality, though his reading is herky-jerky to my ear.

Listening puzzle

Classical Music Diary No. 4

My own rules for rock and pop listening don’t quite fit classical. I’m used to listening while driving or folding laundry. Lately I’ve added creating blog illustrations and assembling puzzles to that repertoire. If my hands are idle, I’ve found, my mind starts wandering away from the music.

When I’m driving my Prius, rock songs cut through the road noise. Classical pieces, with more dynamic subtlety, get swallowed up. So that’s one listening opportunity lost.

Meanwhile I’m finding my formerly mind-focusing activities now take up a little too much attention. With (most) classical music, the lack of repetition gives the listener more work to do. You’ve got to concentrate more if you want to catch the wave; otherwise it just passes over you.

And the final problem is ear fatigue. My auditory cortex gets tired a lot faster listening to classical than it does with other types of music. Smaller doses of classical seems to be the solution. I can’t binge for hours.

Waterfalls of notes

Classical Music Diary No. 3

David Diamond, “Rounds for String Orchestra” (1944). Bartok’s strings put me in the mood for an old favorite, a palate cleanser. Diamond’s strings start and end like a swashbuckling adventure, with great waterfalls of notes. In the middle there’s something like anguish. I heard this on the radio as a teenager and got very excited about it and tracked it down on CD. Glad I still have it; it still produces the same reaction.

Withered and belligerent

Classical Music Diary No. 2

Bela Bartok, “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” (1936). I liked the second and fourth (allegro) movements the best; the first and third (slower) felt meandery.

1: Unsettled. It studiously avoids any kind of pleasing sonority or resolution.
2: Opens with the piano mangling “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”: same rhythm, but a melody line that’s withered into a minor key and turned belligerent. At about 3:00 begins a soundtrack for dwarves scurrying around a mine.
3. A bit of piano plinkplonk that’s offputting.
4. Spends the most time in conventional territory but still gets spicy.

Still not what I’m looking for. Gotta go earlier, I guess, or at least more conventional.

Nobody likes the autoscroll levels

Classical Music Diary No. 1

John Adams’ “Harmonielehre” (1985) is modern but still entirely tonal. Repetitive, with glacial development. It’s an orchestra playing, but it might as well be a sequencer.

The first movement is fairly visual: I see a landscape scrolling by like in a video game, passing from craggy mountains or something threatening like that, to somewhere more pastoral, and back again. In the second movement there’s a sort of “Shepherd tone” neverending ascent.

Not really the type of classical music I’m looking for.

Overture

As mentioned earlier, I never delved into much classical music. Now I’m ready.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I’ve been frustrated with the glut of rock and pop. Classical music, in contrast, has an aura of finiteness I find comforting. That is, there’s a fairly well defined canon of composers and recordings, and plenty of discourse about them to guide me.

I’m craving two things in music — attributes that, to my ears lately, rock and pop offer in meager portions.

The first is melody. My sense is that most songwriting today starts with a piecing together of chords. Melody follows from there, and as a result it can be quite static.

The second thing I’m after is structural variety. The absence or very sparing use of repetition. After a while, verse-chorus-verse starts to feel like a hamster wheel, even when sometimes there’s a bridge thrown in.

In short, more complexity and ingenuity is what I’m after.

As I explore, I’ll keep a diary of considered reactions to individual classical pieces, posting them occasionally on this blog. The goal is to keep them concise and impressionistic and not too cerebral. There are to be very few sidetracks into anything like analysis.

Several guides will aid in my quest for classical music knowledge and appreciation. Foremost is the excellent “That Classical Podcast,” which will prove to anyone that classical fans need not be snobbish or even, shall we say, mature. There’s also “The New York Times Essential Library: Classical Music” by Allan Kozinn, which reviews 100 important recordings and lists 100 more. And there are the reviews from various periodicals like American Record Guide that I’m turning up by the dozen in the course of a little research project I’ve got going. (More in that in, oh, 2025.)

Your recommendations, dear reader, are also most welcome.

Happy birthday, Claude

I never delved too deep into classical music. Probably because one of the first classical CDs I ever picked up was Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Debussy. Try and top that!

My favorite piece of the bunch was also the shortest: “Tarantelle Styrienne” (a tarantella dance in 6/8 time named for the Styria region of Austria). It’s also known by the title “Danse.”

Achille Claude Debussy (born outside Paris on this day in 1862) wrote the piece for piano at age 28. Check out Zoltan Kocsis playing it in 1998 — way too fast, in the opinion of some YouTube commenters. Maurice Ravel arranged it for orchestra in 1922, and the Ormandy version was recorded in 1959.

Add to the vaunted list of interpreters me, who, at some point after developing similar treatments for music from “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” decided to do a fuzz bass rendition of “Danse.”

What drew me to Debussy was his lush harmonies, which sometimes seem to prefigure Duke Ellington. To strip all that richness down to a monophonic bass solo may seem counterintuitive. But harmony is only in service of melody, of which “Danse” has enough for weeks. It’s sick riff after sick riff after sick riff.

The point of fuzz bass is to be in your face, loud and snarling. But as I’ve experimented with the medium over the last couple years, I’ve found plenty of dynamic range. Plucked very, very softly, the flatwound strings of my P-Bass bring out of my ICBM pedal a soothing sinewave. Meanwhile artificial harmonics, picking close to the bridge, plucking over the fretboard, and sliding up and down strings with a thumb knuckle contribute to a variety of tone color approaching, if not an orchestra, then certainly a piano.

Although I work at it daily, reading notes on a page is a massive chore for me. My preferred method for learning any new piece of music has always been to pick it out by ear, memorizing in the process. That’s mostly how I learned “Danse,” turning to the score in a couple of places where it was hard to discern the right note or boil down a dense chord. The piece was written in the key of E, but I’ve moved it down a half step to take advantage of open strings in a couple places.

I started learning the piece at the end of January. It wasn’t long before it was all there in my head, but it’s taken all these months to get my fingers to do what I wanted them too. They still don’t cooperate 100% of the time, but this video represents my best effort of many, many attempts over a couple of weekends. A conservatory-trained professional I am not, but I can still have fun imagining Carnegie Hall in my basement.