ONE THE MOST SOULFUL AND MOVING PIECE OF MUSIC…
that I heard this week wasn’t sung, it was spoken. It was in Clarke Peters’ fine edition of Soul Music on Radio Four, Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. In the section on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”, a dusty, dry-as-paper voice starts speaking in restrained cadences, taking its own solemn time to tell its tale.

“My name is L. C. Cooke, I’m the brother of the late, great Sam Cooke. Well I know you remember “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan… Sam always said a black man shoulda wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind”. And he sat down and wrote,

I was born by the river
in a little tent
But just like the river
I’ve been running ev’r since
It’s been a long time coming
But I know
Change gonna come

and he said, “A Change is Gonna Come” was the hardest song he ever wrote in his life.” Cooke quietly gave the proceeds of the song to Martin Luther King and the Movement, but in his dignified way, L.C. won’t make more of that. “See, when Sam did something, he didn’t want to brag about it, you know… and so I’d really rather not talk about that.”
[It’s available on the iPlayer now].

TWO “COOL MODERNISM” AT THE ASHMOLEAN
A small and perfectly formed exhibition, on ’til July 22nd and highly recommended. As we left the gallery and made our way downstairs, passing the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Gallery (an exploration of the meeting of the West with the East through European exploration from 1492 onwards), I see a display of guitars and violins. It includes these three beautiful examples, with the central instrument being one of the few examples of a Stradivarius guitar. I had no idea that such a thing existed. Here and here are examples of what they sound like.

THREE GOSPEL BOB
Watching Trouble No More, the documentary/feature about the Gospel Years (sermons okay, music strangely inflexible) you couldn’t miss Dylan’s intense commitment to the material. Coated in sweat, he prowled and preached to the crowd. Best bit may well have been the harp solo at the end of “What Can I Do for You?” It wasn’t quite at ’66 levels of brilliance, but it provided a moment where the music went out on a limb, and towards the end resolved around the beautiful melody of “That Lucky Old Sun” – later to become a feature of the gospel tours.

FOUR A MUSICAL FREE FOR ALL
I was struck by this paragraph near the end of Original Rockers by Richard King, an elegiac account of his time working at Bristol’s Revolver Records in the mid 1990s:
“Visitors to the shop from outside Bristol would return months later, enriched by the experience of buying music that, before conversing with Roger, they had previously been unaware of. They treasured the atmosphere of enquiry and compulsion at the counter, even if it felt intimidating, and departed smiling and enlivened, carrying their purchases in the black and red-and-black Revolver bag, sure that in doing so some mutually appreciated form of status had been conferred. In turn, they brought their particular enthusiasms to the counter for discussion and used the opportunity of loitering in the shop to broaden their musical knowledge.”
When this was written (in 2015, about the mid-1990s) it was already nostalgic. Now, in the era of streaming, it feels that it’s come from the time of Jane Austen… Now the tech companies piggyback on the creative work that others have made, and become rich, by co-opting us into their business, while the creators, for the most part, make little. Read Amanda Petrusich in this week’s New Yorker, and weep.

nb. When I texted my friend Tim (he was at Bristol University) he replied: “A fantastic memoir, made even stranger by the fact that I worked at Revolver for a while. Highlights for me included a two-month stint when Chris the then manager insisted that Ornette Coleman’s “Dancing in My Head” was the first record played every morning. He also refused to stock the first Dire Straits album and badly abused anyone who dared ask for it.”

FIVE THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE
Creepy and greedy, Andrew Cunanan (compellingly played by Darren Criss) drives his would-be husband and will-be next victim, David, across the flatlands of Minnesota. They arrive in a bar, postponing the inevitable, and the singer on the small stage at the end of the bar sings, straightforwardly, “Drive”, the Cars song best known for its use as the soundtrack to films of the Ethiopian famine during Live Aid. It’s Aimee Mann, strumming an Epiphone J160E, a guitar synonymous with John Lennon due to featuring on the Help! movie songs. I’m not saying that’s deliberate (she has played that model for a long time), just interesting. And the song is perfect for the scene:

“Who’s gonna tell you when / it’s too late.
Who’s gonna tell you things / aren’t so great.
You can’t go on, thinkin’ nothing’s wrong,
But who’s gonna drive you home tonight?

As Cunanan breaks into tears, Mann improvises something close to the melody of “Save Me”, one of her songs that inspired (and were used in) Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, adding yet another layer to this small interlude.

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