Yehudi and the Blowhards

Earl Fowler

Aug. 15, 1974. That was the edition of the Rolling Stone magazine interview in which classical pianist Glenn Gould, perhaps the greatest musical genius ever born in Canada, idiotically rated the writing and performance of Petula Clark’s hits as superior to the music of the Beatles.

If you’ve been around for long, long years, you might recall the world’s finest interpreter of Bach’s Goldberg Variations pontificating on the same topic in a Canadian road trip-style documentary (part of a three-part “Solitude Trilogy”) that I remember listening to on CBC Radio in the late 1960s.

Gould’s contention, essentially, was that the tunes written by English composer Tony Hatch that turned Clark into a star — “Downtown”, “I Know a Place”, and “Round Every Corner” — were three-chord ditties like those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but made proper use of them while the Fab Four “mangled” the chord progressions.

In his early forties and only eight years older than Ringo Starr, so hardly a fossil, Gould also maintained that Clark, like Barbra Streisand, knew how to “lead” with her voice, unlike you know whom.

Clark and Hatch were groovy contributors to the international pop scene of the Swinging Sixties, of course, the British equivalent of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city. Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty. How can you lose?

But though possessed of perfect pitch since at least age three, when he was first tested, Gould displayed an astoundingly rotten tin ear in proferring this asinine judgment.

As was the case with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd and others, it was precisely the Fab Four’s spontaneous, unschooled approach to music that most appealed to the original Me Generation.

Here’s Ian MacDonald in his acclaimed scholarly book titled Revolution in the Head:

Like Irving Berlin and Noel Coward, Lennon and McCartney were not only unable to read music, but firmly declined to learn. Writing, to begin with, mainly on guitars, they brought unpredictable twists to their turns by shifting chord-positions in unusual and often random ways, and pushing their lines in unexpected directions by harmonizing as they went along in fourths and fifths rather than in conventional thirds.

In short, they had no preconceptions about the next chord, an openness which they consciously exploited and which played a major role in some of their most commercially successful songs.

That includes such early songs as “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” not a patch on what was to come.

It’s a puzzle, in any case, why Gould would have latched onto the notion that Lennon, McCartney and George Harrison played three-chord songs, aside from some of the covers they did in the early days. “I’m Down” would be an exception, I suppose — “Yer Blues”, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”, “Tomorrow Never Knows” and maybe a few more if you think about it — but their discography is a lot more distinguished than variations of C, F and G.

MacDonald:

Knowing that their music’s lack of institutional structure was chiefly what made it so alive and authentic, they kept it from becoming stale by continually investigating new methods and concepts: beginning and ending songs in the “wrong” key, employing modal, pentatonic, and Indian scales, incorporating studio-effects and exotic instruments, and shuffling rhythms and idioms with a unique versatility. Forever seeking new stimuli, they experimented with everything from tape-loops to drugs and chance procedures borrowed from the intellectual avant-garde.

One might have expected Gould to be somewhat attuned to this, given his own avid experimentation with recording techniques after retiring from the concert platform in 1964.

If you watched Yehudi Menuhin’s eight-part 1979 television series The Music of Man, commissioned back when the CBC had some money and still stood for something, you might remember a spirited exchange over whether what Gould described as the “tight, clinical, X-ray-like view” of a Bach gigue — made possible only by dissecting and splicing sundry studio takes — yields a perfection superior to what’s achievable in a concert hall.

Menuhin, an American-born violinist and conductor who spent most of his virtuoso career in Britain, took the position that live concert hall performances are inherently loftier than anything possible in a studio and remain “the standard against which everything else is judged.”

That each had an opposing take on what constituted what the Germans call das Erhabene, the sublime, wobbled the certitude of neither. Inevitably, the innovative lads from Liverpool were drawn into the discussion:

GOULD: I believe the whole question of splicing is a red herring; I think it’s all mixed up — and improperly so — with the idea of “honesty” and “integrity.” Naturally, it’s antithetical to the concert process, where you go from first note to last, but that antiquated approach has nothing to do whatever with the major percepts of technology. It matters not to me whether I am “successful” in creating a performance through one take, or whether I do it with 262 tape splices. The issue is simply not important.

MENUHIN: You are building a structure corresponding to your vision and anything that helps is legitimate. But take the Beatles, who started out in public playing spontaneously; by the time they became accustomed to crutches which enabled them to record tracks separately and put them all together, to add notes and take them away, they could no longer play in public because the public expected something else, having become accustomed to this form of recorded creation.

GOULD: In a sense, that is also what happened to me. I found I was competing with my own recordings, which nobody can do really. My recordings represent my best thoughts.

Born before the outbreak of the First World War, Menuhin was 63 in 1979. So it’s less surprising, I guess, that this sophisticated man with an encyclopedic grasp of the history and aesthetics of music would be off key and out of tune in his gormless attempts to grapple with what was by then a full generation’s worth of the rock’n’roll hip-swivelled into existence in the 1950s with Elvis as its king.

Harrumphing like many a member of the so-called Greatest Generation, Menuhin was willing to accept that the Beatles evinced a degree of originality lacking in Presley’s LPs, “offering companionship and compassion rather than sex as bait.” Elvis the Pelvis repelled him, but that was just for openers.

To Menuhin — whose blithe, adamantine confidence in his musical taste was as supremely arrogant as Gould’s naff absolutism — Mick, Keef & Co. constituted a relentless, throbbing, unmitigated assault upon the eardrums. This was his description of a 1976 Stones concert at Earl’s Court in London:

Though we were some distance from the hall, I heard what sounded to me like a premonition of hell. We edged up the narrow stairs into the arena where the sound grew like a thunderstorm. I wanted to listen for the musical content, but for me the sheer volume obliterated the possibility. For the first time I experienced real physical pain hearing music. Of notes, pitches, musical design, I could distinguish little. It seemed to me quite unlike the music of the Beatles which has a real melodic quality, whereas this was aural overkill: a sheer sound wall.

Under such overpowering circumstances, I understood how deliberately the whole madness is engineered. It aims to numb all aware senses, to leave no choice but to surrender and participate. I did neither — I left after ten minutes.

The Rolling Stones are trying desperately to generate and liberate emotion, but as they know little of those disciplines and structures through which emotions are transformed into art, they can only generate hysteria. Their music is more like the elimination of structure, dissolving everything back to crude clay. It is a form of self-glorification, demonstrating how much people need to drown their identities.

By 1979 — when he was saying this, remember — the Sex Pistols had already had their brief crack of klieg lights between two eternities of darkness. The Clash would release the album London Calling that December, further establishing that when you’re an old poop, you can’t always hear what you want.

(Good thing Yehudi knew a coffee shop down on Fifty-Second Street.)

Clearly, like most of the adults we kids from the era knew (excepting that one cool aunt or English teacher who dug “Eleanor Rigby”), Menuhin grokked neither the music nor the whole pop star/hero worship phenomenon.

I find the second half of that dyadic failure almost more surprising than the first, given the renown Menuhin’s magic fingers and Soil Stradivarius had once enjoyed:

The only time I experienced something akin to the adulation of a crowd of some two hundred thousand people — fellow Jews — was in Bucharest just after World War II, where I came not only as a disciple of Romania’s adored Georges Enesco, but also as an American and a Jew. There were at that time some four hundred thousand Jews in Bucharest who had escaped to Romania from all parts of Europe.

King Michael was still on the throne, though Russia was at work behind the scenes to oust the old order. There was plenty of good food and wine, a crush of cars in the streets, a sense of well-being returning. But what I recall most vividly was the crowd in the street waiting for me, particularly when walking to the nearby synagogue. We could hardly get through, ever, at any time of day or night. The people were full of affection and warmth, but the situation really became tedious. Finally, the management put up a police barrier.

I hated it. But just as rock stars must, I felt that the borderline between admiration and the desire for contact was shrinking; when the impulse of the fans to take away a shred of something personal as a souvenir can so suddenly turn into a free-for-all.

Cue the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night”, the opening scene in the movie of the giggling boys running from a rabble of rabid fans. (The relentless stalking and privacy invasions had become less of a gas and a giggle by the time the Beatles were filming Help. Turns out it’s not lonely enough at the toppermost of the poppermost.)

OK, boomer. So it’s time to get to the point, which is that you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

If people with musical palates as refined as Gould’s and Menuhin’s had lost the ability half a century ago to hear the uptight, outta-sight pop cadences galvanizing the youth of that era, c’est-`a-dire, us, maybe a tad more humility wouldn’t come amiss when we try to fathom why our kids and grandkids adore the strident fare that strikes me and most of my friends as Auto-Tuned crude clay.

It’s going to get much worse with the advent of generative artificial intelligence programs, but we’ve been at a stage for years where you no longer have to be able to sing, play an instrument, write catchy lyrics or have a record contract to go viral on one platform or another and self-catapult into the pantheon of the wealthy and the talentless. Plagiarize — I mean, sample — at will and you’re into the great wide open, under them skies of blue.

Hey hey, my my. Out of the blue and into the black.

Doesn’t mean we have to like it. Simply that suckled as we were on that old-time rock’n’roll, most of us just don’t get it. It’s a turn-around jump shot. It’s everybody jump start. It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.

One thing you can count on.

As is repeatedly driven home to any piebald parent who starts off trying to reasonably remonstrate in the face of the cool, disapproving implacability of po-faced teenagers, concluding by screaming imprecations and tearing out one’s remaining hair over musical preferences leaves one treading perilously close to the footsteps left in the wake of Menuhin’s hasty flight from a Stones concert.

Might as well be a trumpet blast of “wah wah wah” in one of those old Peanuts movies whenever an adult was speaking. Might as well be a skirl of bagpipes played by some kind of animal skin-wearing, blue-skinned Druid dudes, dyed in woad, or an Etruscan haruspice descrying portents by dangling fingers in bovine entrails. Might as well be interred with the remains of Anne Boleyn in the Tower of London. Suddenly, you’re the Wicked Fairy at the christening.

For goodness sake, you’ve got the hippie hippie shake. You ain’t never caught a rabbit and the kids won’t pay you no mind. Your gabbling questions and criticisms will be as mal vu as the notion that “Downtown” surpasses “A Day in the Life.”

Take a breather. Reculez pour mieux sauter and think of it this way.

The ancient Greeks viewed existence as a contest between nomos (rationality, order, artifice) and physis (irrationality, chaos, nature). Rock’n’roll turned up the physis amplifier dial to 11, discombobulating dedicated nomos devotees like Gould and Menuhin. By the time hip hop had hoved into view at New York block parties in the 1970s and onto vinyl in the early Eighties, it was time to admit that the waters around us had grown. The waters of oblivion.

There’s no accounting for tastes, no universally applicable objective measures at play here. Hast thou ears of flesh, or hearest thou as men hearest? It’s pointless to stand in the doorway. Don’t block up the hall. For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.

So I contradict myself. Tallying the relative merits of Singing Sweetheart Petula versus those of the Beatles is the prerogative of each listener. If it makes you happy, then why the hell would I get mad?

And the next time you’re feeling like a ghost living in a ghost town, stuck at a red light beside a gargantuan SUV with killer subwoofers blasting industrial-strength mumble rap, ask yourself a Goats Head Soup question from the mid-Seventies, now the midpoint to 100 years ago.

Don’t you think it’s sometimes wise not to grow up?