April 2007 Archives

ABBEY ROAD REUNION:
KNOB-TWIDDLERS REVEAL ALL IN NEW BOOK
by Tim Riley, NPR critic and Beatle author

http://www.rileyrockindex.com/AbbeyRoadReunion.mp3

In November of 2006, over 30 engineers gathered for a reunion at Abbey Road studios in London, where many of them worked uncredited on Beatles sessions. The occasion was the release of RECORDING THE BEATLES, by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, a major new entry in Beatle scholarship emphasizing recording techniques and analog equipment. It's a story about how EMI's rigorous training paradoxically led to numerous innovations, upending years of convention. The creative solutions these techies achieved helped the Beatles create rock's most ingenious and enduring sounds, and RECORDING THE BEATLES draws the curtain on many of their previously unexplained achievements. The podcast includes interviews with Kehew, engineers Ken Townshend, Richard Lush, Chris Thomas, and Ken Scott, as well as American producers Steve Albini (Nirvana, Stooges) and Steve Hoffman (DCC). With Beatle stories peppering the narrative, Riley provides a backstage glimpse at the wizards who helped translate Lennon and McCartney songs onto tape.

Tim Riley is the author of TELL ME WHY: A BEATLES COMMENTARY and other books on rock, and an NPR critic who files for WBUR's HERE AND NOW in Boston. He recently launched a new music resources, RILEY ROCK INDEX.com.

For more information, visit:

RECORDING THE BEATLES
by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew
Curvebender Publishing

http://www.recordingthebeatles.com

EMI's Abbey Road Studios

http://www.abbeyroad.com

RILEY ROCK INDEX.com

http://www.rileyrockindex.com

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/RileyRockIndex

The Last Magazine (Paperback)
by David Renard (Author), Steven Heller (Contributor), Jan Van Mol (Contributor), Rankin (Contributor), Robert Sacks (Contributor) (from Universe/Rizzoli)



Print is dying, so our current crop means we're watching the Last Mags -- a supernova, if this were music it would be Sleater-Kinney and Blonde Redheads and Arcade Fire and Reigning Sound and Beck's The Information slamming inside the heads of today's most insistent graphic designers.

Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975 by Jean-Francois Bizot and Barry Miles


These were the "glory days," and this brief snatch is mostly tragic, makes you ache for the piles of newspaper disintigrating in a thousand anonymous attics around the world, trickling out slowly on ebay but with little or no noise, some of it more newsworthy today than it was even back then, with graphics to make the first book's authors blush. Wolfe complained about where the great unwritten novel of the sixties was -- of course, that fiction happened AS rock'n'roll... but the soundtrack was the alternative paper, an irresistible onslaught of freedom and protest and dissent that shames today's anti-war movement. T-shirt slogan: "I never thought I'd miss Nixon..."

ALSO:

Word that both Rolling Stone and Playboy will be published in DVD format by the same folks who digitized the New Yorker. Long Live Print.

NPR's HERE AND NOW



The Legacy set piece aired today.

from ON THE MEDIA



Iraq Veterans Memorial