On Wednesday night, Christie’s brought in $361,938 for 46 previously unreleased photographs documenting The Beatles’ first US visit, well-surpassing a collective estimate of $100,000 and shocking photographer Mike Mitchell, who was just 18 when he took the pictures.

“I wasn’t expecting this, when I took those photos all those years ago. It’s a pretty good feeling,” Mr. Mitchell told The Observer after the auction had ended. During the bidding he watched wide-eyed from the audience as the prices kept rising, in some cases surpassing their estimates by a factor of ten. Frantically, he texted with his sister, who is in Florida.  “We were going ‘Wow, Wow, Wow!’”

The sums were impressive across all price-points for the shots, which largely document the band's arrival at Union Station in DC and performance at the Washington Coliseum. A Beatle-less shot of Ringo Starr’s drums went for a whopping $16,250. A photo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing in harmony at the microphone quickly jumped to $30,000. The high price of the night belonged to an image of the Fab Four with their backs silhouetted against a sliver of light.

As bidders dropped off one by one, the battle for that photo became a showdown between an anonymous phone bidder and a bidder in the room. The price teetered around the $38,000 mark, and the phone bidder, judging by his representative’s response, seemed to mull the price. The tense seconds ticked by.

“If someone doesn’t round it off to $40,000, I’m gonna cry,” said auctioneer Cathy Elkies, who was met with laughter — and the requested bid.

“C’mon, what’s another thousand?” she teased, when the applause died down. The price shot to $50,000 and kept climbing, going at hammer for $55,000. Upon close, the crowd erupted into a cheer. A flushed but grinning Elkies stood proudly at the podium.

“This is a room where people want to have fun and be engaged,” she told The Observer after the bidding. “You want to bring personality into room, and they’ll spend more because they feel you’re on their side… this kind of interplay between two bidders is amazing. It’s as fun as it gets.”

After the auction, The Observer caught up with onetime Lennon girlfriend May Pang, a curvy Asian woman with a black shaggy bob, as she chatted with her friends and Beatles memorabilia hounds.

“I didn’t buy anything, I just wanted to see what Mike saw in 1964,” she said. “I don’t need the pictures, I have them in my mind.”

She then proceeded to whip out her phone, and flip causally through her own never-released photos of Lennon, assuring The Observer that her private collection was priceless.

Writes The Times:

He was a favored photographer of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and he was the only photographer allowed backstage at the Beatles' last concert, in San Francisco in 1966. He was also the chief photographer at Woodstock.

Marshall lives in California but died in New York. He was in town to promote his most recent book, Match Prints.

"I have to tell you," Yoko Ono said to her audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday night, a few days before her 77th birthday, "you have a long life ahead of you, and it’s going to be beautiful." Her Brooklyn Academy of Music show--half concert, half tribute--was filled with all kinds of things: shimmying, screeching, thumping, family members, guitar gods, art films, drag, a tuba, a cello, and as Ms. Ono would say, a lot of cosmic splendor.

The first half was full of thick, loud, strange, twisting grooves, which probably wouldn't sound like promising news to those who know her only as a screechy-voiced Beatles destroyer. But this wasn't music for a pilates class in Westchester--it was interstellar and kaleidoscopic, with pelvic bass lines bouncing below gooey guitars and horns. She sashayed, shuffled, shook and swayed. Sometimes it took her across the stage, especially on the groovier songs from last year’s Between My Head and the Sky. The exclamation point in the title of "Ask the Elephant!" deserves to be there.

The first set ended unexpectedly gently. Over only trickles of piano from her son, Sean Lennon, and a late-night Tom Waits horn, Ms. Ono sang in Japanese and English about hell and earth: It was the kind of thing that could sound like bad Philip Glass, but it was smoky and sad.

But the tribute half of the concert ("Act II," as it’s called on the We Are Plastic Ono Band program) stole the show. First of all, in the spirit of Ms. Ono’s canyon-sized proclamations, I’ve got to say that the sound Paul Simon and his son, Harper, made on the two songs they played and sang together was one of the most exceedingly warm things I’ve ever heard live on a stage. They played "Hold On" from John Lennon’s first solo album, and "Silver Horse" from Season of Glass, her first after his death. One is sung to a wife, and the other is sung by a widow.

Eric Clapton, the guest that came on afterward, turns 65 next month. But his guitar, especially on The White Album's "Yer Blues," was hysterical, sludgy, and huge. "In sound check, he was teaching me to play how my Dad did it,” said the younger Mr. Lennon. "A touch sophisticated."

Justin Bond, who performs in boozy drag as a half of Kiki and Herb, played Ms. Ono's jilted-woman torch song "What a Bastard the World Is." Beforehand there was a joke about Ms. Ono's Twitter, which gives advice about sending diagrams of your footsteps and flammable paper moons to friends: "A lot of the time I don’t know what she’s talking about," said Mr. Bond, "but I do everything she says."

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon played "Mulberry," which was not amused, not amusing, and what the Times politely referred to in its review of the show as "arrhythmic." With more rhythm, amusement and tuba, Bette Midler came on next to play "Yes, I’m Your Angel," a few minutes of caramelized bath house jazz.

After "Rising," one of the first set’s arty disco songs, full of Ms. Ono's points and crouches and marches, Mr. Lennon son whispered something to into her ear. "He's always saying, 'Oh it’s great, it’s great,' to make me feel good," she explained.

"I'm not lying, Mom," he said. The crowd sighed. A few days before the concert, Ms. Ono told this reporter about her maternal feelings: "You would never know, because you’re not old enough, I’m sorry to use those expressions, but when your son grows up, and he’s doing his own thing," she explained, "it’s nice to get a chance to be with him for a while."

She said the show’s guests had been his idea: "I'm doing a regular show of mine, and then they’re sort of added. Added bombs! Not bombs! Bombs is a bad word! What is it? Added sparkling stars."

mabelson@observer.com

In his 40-minute interview with Mr. Levitan, Mr. Lennon said peace was in the hands of the people and they had the power to overturn government warmongering. Mr. Levitan recorded the conversation on an old reel-to-reel tape machine and showed it off to friends at school and the local news station. But he mostly kept it to himself.

Over the years, Hollywood agents have been hounding him to make a movie or sell the rights to his photos and recordings. Mr. Levitan, now 55, finally decided to publish a book, I Met the Walrus: How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever, out this past May from Collins Design. In the back of the book, he includes a DVD of a five-minute, animated short he created with animator Josh Raskin. It was posted on YouTube in 2007. 

On Aug. 29th, at the 36th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards, Jerry Levitan got an award for I Met the Walrus, the web short that has been in the works for four decades. It won the "New Approaches- Daytime" category, and was up against the "All My Children" video podcast, the New York Times Style Magazine screen tests, an Web site called Tac.TV and Web show Imaginary Bitches. The short was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award and won Best Animation at the Manhattan Short Film Festival, but the Emmy is one of Mr. Levitan's most prestigious honors yet.

Mr. Levitan was on the phone from sunny Los Angeles. "It was bizarre," he said about the win. "Because when I saw the nominations we were up against--the New York Times and All My Children--I couldn't believe it."

But the film's message of peace during times of war and the current wave of Beatles mania sweeping the media gave the film a boost.

Mr. Levitan told the Observer that he locked up the materials for so long because he didn't want to exploit the experience. "I never wanted to do anything that was either cheesy or minimized the event or commercialized the events. I just got this crazy idea--I was sort of sick of people asking me about it. So I thought I'd make something that would be good for kids and grandkids and do something whacky."

"The thing is, there's never been anything like The Beatles and it's hard to explain to this generation or even generations before that The Beatles weren't just a rock band," Mr. Levitan continued. "They had influences politically and socially and cultrally that went beyond strutting on stage and putting out fancy records. John Lennon himself was an extremely intuitive person--he himself connected with people on so many different levels, it wasn't all about the music."

So Mr. Levitan, who has recorded several children's music albums as Sir Jerry, worked with Mr. Raskin on the animated short, which includes pen work by James Braithwaite and digital illustration by Alex Kurina.

Don't expect a Pixar-like romp--but rather a reflective work of art, with its mild sepia tones, fast-paced illustrations and pop-up typography. "It's not really a cartoon, I just wanted to do something artistic, something with this generation's take on it," Mr. Levitan explained, "something that I thought John would love." 

He let Ms. Ono know what he was doing all along--with the book and the film. She congratulated him after his win. "You hear all these stories about her being difficult," he said. "She has been unbelievably accessible to me and supportive of me."

And so was Mr. Lennon it seemed, which is partially what makes the event so powerful, in this modern age of celebrity where stars hire Twitter ghost writers to shmooze with their fans. "He was the biggest star in the world--and even though he was under enormous pressure professionally and personally, he chose to spend a day with a kid who was amazed by him."

"He gave me quality time. He respected me. He was kind to me, who does that? That story in itself is what's propelling this around the world."

More from Gillian Reagan: 

The Blonde Ambition of Blip.tv

Boxee Gets $6M, Still Serious About Getting on Devices

A year later, they performed the very first concert ever held at Shea Stadium.

This week, Paul McCartney is back to christen that arena’s replacement, Citi Field. And while in town, he’ll be heading to the Ed Sullivan Theater July 14 to play for that theater’s new inhabitant, David Letterman.

The concerts and Late Show appearance kick off Mr. McCartney’s latest U.S. tour, which will take him across the country.

It’s somehow fitting that, both really and virtually, Mr. McCartney is returning to these epochal venues.

At times, Mr. McCartney’s most recent reinventions have, if anything, strained for the trappings of 21st-century relevance and ended up being pure nostalgia. At the end of the summer, both Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan will be featured in the Beatles version of the video game “Rock Band,” slated for a Sept. 9 release. The game comes packed with 45 Beatles songs to play (or to approximate playing) in your living room—like 21st-century sheet music!

But at Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, it’s the music that will be the center of attention. And that is good for Mr. McCartney, because nowadays, and for the first time in a long time, he is exhibiting some part of the ambition that made the Beatles, and an earlier Mr. McCartney, not just world-famous, rich, the center of the recording-industry universe, but actually great.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to speak of a man like Paul McCartney as having been unambitious. But given his early legendary status, it was easy to think that the fans’ connection to Mr. McCartney made success too easy for him.

How do you continue a career that seemingly can’t go wrong, and infuse it with the energy that accompanied that first American tour?

In many ways, this recent shift is the result of years spent in the dead center of the music industry, watching its decline. It’s also proof that Mr. McCartney the studio tinkerer, responsible for backward guitar lines and orchestral cacophonies in the Beatles days, hasn’t lost his curiosity.

It’s possible that no one was as entrenched or even as responsible for what happened to the music industry since 1970 as Paul McCartney (and by extension, the Beatles). He was signed to EMI for decades and made the label very rich (and he didn’t do so bad for himself). Yet by 2007, McCartney was convinced the industry had reached the end of its usefulness. He called EMI “boring.” He walked.

Mr. McCartney’s relationship to Big Music has often been contentious, but never has it propelled him so far outside its own conventional commercial wisdom as it has now.

Soon after the game’s release, downloadable versions of Beatles albums, starting with Abbey Road, will finally be made available. (The Beatles haven’t exactly been on the edge of new technologies; it took years before their catalog was first available on CD, too.) In a nice touch, a download of “All You Need Is Love” will be available exclusively to Xbox 360 users and proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

One return that isn’t in the cards for Sir Paul is those Beatles songs Michael Jackson owned before his death. In the past weeks, rumors swirled that he had willed the songs back to Mr. McCartney (and Ringo, one presumes), but this turned out to be untrue. On his Web site, Mr. McCartney explained that it was fine, because the alleged will was “something I didn’t believe for a second.” He also insisted that the famed rift between the two onetime collaborators (“The Girl Is Mine,” “Say Say Say”) was overplayed by the media: “In fact, though Michael and I drifted apart over the years, we never really fell out, and I have fond memories of our time together.” He did however call Michael a “boy man,” which may be accurate, as well as accurately creepy.

One former associate whose passing likely did not elicit fond memories for Mr. McCartney was Allen Klein, who died July 4. The noted cutthroat manager who once quipped “Don’t talk to me about ethics” tried to wrest the Beatles catalog just as the band was splitting up (he’d conned his way into many valuable Rolling Stones rights years before), but thanks in part to Mr. McCartney’s vocal dissent, he never got a chance.

Mr. McCartney learned from these un-square dealers. He’s been working to extricate himself from middlemen for the past two years. He’s in a video game. He’s circumventing the major-label system that once revolved around him. He was quoted in the press saying he’d like to work with MGMT (they’re opening a few dates on this tour). Who is this old hipster?

He became the first artist on the Starbucks–Concord Music Group’s Hear Music Record Co. Memory Almost Full was well received, among critics but especially by the public, and sold more than a million copies in the U.S.—his highest-selling stateside release in 25 years. The 2007 album was solid though comfortable, not much of a musical surprise. Mr. McCartney also made a deal to sell the album through iTunes, and even allowed a song to be used in a commercial for the online music giant.

Hear Music seemed like a sure thing. But by 2008, Starbucks’ model wasn’t looking so rosy anymore. Returns diminished through Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and James Taylor and onto, uh, Cat Power (apparently just being in a Starbucks isn’t enough to make people buy music by someone other than someone who was in the Beatles). As Starbucks started slashing prices and closing hundreds of branches, Hear Music got shunted over entirely to Concord Music, and Starbucks focused on its partnership with iTunes rather than cultivating a label.

But set adrift, Mr. McCartney did not return to the majors. In fact the decline of Hear Music may have been even more liberating for him. His next album was self-released in late 2008 by MPL, an imprint of his own London-based publishing company, and distributed through indie labels (ATO, One Little Indian) as well as on his own Web site. It was also released under the name Fireman, not as Paul McCartney—the return to that moniker for the first time in a decade. (He’s used it twice before in non-vocal electronic collaborations with producer (and ex–Killing Joke bassist) Martin “Youth” Glover, in 1993 and 1998).

All the Fireman albums have been expressly about pushing Paul McCartney to places where he sounds very un-McCartney. In the past, that’s meant rather drippy electronica. This time it meant a rather joyous (and noisy!) psychedelic pop album titled Electric Arguments, in which there’s no piano balladeering and even less anthemized “Hey Jude”–like formula-ism. The album ranges from the heavy kerrang of the opener (“Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight”) to the plaintive and lo-fi follow-up (“Two Magpies”), reminiscent of the hushed urgency of his early solo albums, and on through string sections and rousing marching-band fervor and even a bit of hymn singing (“Is This Love?”).

The collaborative duo worked swiftly, crafting 13 tracks in as many days, yet the results feel vital rather than slapdash. There are thunderous, Zeppelin-like rockers and Paul duetting with his own falsetto and Paul’s voice at a shout, nearly subsumed in more than a few reverb storms of epic proportions. He’s done nothing like this in many years. It’s proof that McCartney’s legendary experimental streak is still around and can be folded into his more prosaic pop songwriting.

A statement released about the album bragged that it was “made with no record company restraints or a set release date to work to” and “with complete artistic and creative freedom.”

It shows, and it will be interesting to see how much Macca makes of his newfound freedom.

editorial@observer.com

Since the game is still in the earliest stages of production and won’t see the light of day until the end of 2009, details are predictably sketchy. Billboard was able to confirm that Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and dead Beatle wives Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison are creatively involved. As for the music, Giles Martin (George’s son) and co-producer of the Love album, will produce the tunes, though there are currently no plans to re-mix them in anyway. And neither should we think this will take the Beatles’ catalogue any step closer to landing on iTunes or other digital music services.

Exactly how the game will fit in with Harmonix’s Rock Band franchise is unclear. None of the collaborators would specify whether the Beatles' songs would be available as downloads through Rock Band, nor would they say if the new game would be compatible with existing Rock Band instruments such as the wireless guitar or digital drum set. We for one hope the Beatles game comes with a whole new set of trinkets. It’s all about the digital sitar, baby…

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.

Which brings us to Distortion, an album with its own thematic conceit. The Magnetic Fields' eighth album, in stores today, begins with a howling, surfy stormer of a song, its title and only lyrics, "Three-way!" repeated three times in three minutes, accompanying a fantastically distant piano roll fit neatly behind a twanging guitar line. It's a clever introduction to an album the theme of which is so simple it becomes the title: Distortion.

Mr. Merritt wanted to build an album that would pay homage to the Jesus And Mary Chain's epochal Psychocandy, itself a fawning pastiche of surf music and 50's pop fed through distortion pedals and amplifiers and then fed back through the guitars. Think of the fuzzy thrash of "He's A Rebel," "Be My Baby," or "Leader of the Pack" turned all the way to its screeching metallic most.

Mr. Merritt has said the album is meant to "sound more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain," though fans will be happy
to know that many of the tunes sound more like the intricate chamber pop for which the band is best known delivered through a blissful, noisy haze.

"My reason for emulating Psychocandy," Merritt told The Observer, "was that I thought it would be a great way to make a record quickly."

"I was wrong," he went on to say.

And in fact, like the music he is responding to, the simplicity hides the workmanship. Perhaps that's why Mr. Merritt and a lot of pop purists like him believe that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and all those who worked with Phil Spector through the 60's ushered in the greatest era of studio experimentation and perfection ever seen.

Mr. Merritt said that Distortion was an effort "to respond to what I see as the last significant event in pop production."

The formalism of the Jesus And Mary Chain owes plenty to Spector et al, and suits the obsessive Mr. Merritt, but in place of moaning paeans to wayward bikers and dumb love, we have smart love and nuns wishing they were porn stars.

Italicized after the production credits in the liner notes is the phrase "No Synths," and indeed the band seems to have upped the ante of their thematic self-challenge by using their usual instruments.

"There are no mistakes of any kind on this album," Mr. Merritt said, "and it's been edited to death for 18 months. Every available technology has been used in this process."

But in fact, the recording itself took only a month. A lot of the technical work on the album was coming up with the D.I.Y. techniques to deliver distortion and reverb from an unlikely instrumentation, all without manipulation on a synthesizer. For Claudia Gonson's piano and farfisa, the amp was laid next to the piano frame and turned up until it fed back; John Woo's guitar was outfitted with tiny amps to channel vibrations directly back into the instrument. All this is to say nothing of Sam Davol's cello and Daniel Handler's accordion (a tiny amp was taped to the bellows). The only thing not distorted with amps was Ms. Gonson's drumkit, which was recorded in a cavernous stairwell for maximum reverb, distortion's gentler cousin.

All of the tracks flirt with the three-minute mark, none missing it by more than a few seconds, and the result is startlingly refreshing brevity unknown to most current pop albums. Mr. Merritt is at pains to stress that the album is an offering to rock fans, long left in the cold by the band's meanderings. "Three-minute songs with distorted guitars: that's a complete definition of rock," he said.

Mr. Merritt clearly adores the Jesus And Mary Chain, along with the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, yet he is clever, and talented enough to put the Magnetic Fields stamp on everything he does. The consistent fuzz harkens back to earlier albums like Holiday, yet nowhere has the band been so rocking so much of the time, and the sonic assault is addictive, especially in such small chunks. "Too Drunk To Dream" is perhaps the best example of the meeting of Mr. Merritt's wit and the album's textural force. He sings a capella: "Sober, life is a prison / Shit-faced, it is a blessing. / Sober, nobody wants you / Shit-faced they're all undressing ... / Sober, you're old and ugly / Shit-faced who needs a mirror." As the lines continue to roll by the echo increases until the song begins in earnest with a swinging tune and a screeching, tinny guitar. Other tracks deal with the damning march of time ("Old Fools"), the sublimated erotic desires and regrets of a nun ("The Nun's Litany") and a hopelessly lonesome Christmas ("Mr. Mistletoe"), where the plant in question is called a "useless weed." Mr. Merritt told The Observer he prefers his lyrics "to involve conflict, drama, and tension," which may be putting it lightly. Songs alternate between Mr. Merritt and a female singer, though in place of the usual Claudia Gonson is Shirley Simms, whom Mr. Merritt employed on tracks he felt were too pop for his deep baritone. Ms. Simms shines on the second track "California Girls," whose refrain is (of course) "I hate California girls" as well as the noirish "Till The Bitter End," and the two singers trade verses on the giddily contrarian "Please Stop Dancing." While Mr. Merritt's lyrics always return to themes of love and melancholy, there's an iciness to many of the tracks here.

Mr. Merritt has long suffered from hearing problems, making live Magnetic Fields shows into pretty stripped-down affairs (the tour for this album will not involve the reverb and distortion techniques used to create it). But it's not simply volume that makes a wall of sound, but the texture and interplay of instruments and vocals.

In the "loudness wars," a trend critics say has led to songs so dense with sound that they lack dynamics, and so processed in the studio that they lack any personality, does this album take a side? "The loudness wars have been the normal way of making records for the last fifty years," he said. "The aberration was the insertion of dynamics into popular music, as happened in the early '90s when music radio became less relevant. Normally, producers try to make their records loud all the way through, to sound good on radio and other degrading audio media (laptop speakers, iPod headphones). Consumer audio, on MP3 especially, sounds better the more it gets compression in the studio and the less it relies on compression by the consumer's crummy, unpredictable equipment."

The challenge of so much noise doesn't come without pitfalls, one being that Mr. Merritt's delightful rhymes are occasionally swallowed by the imposing fracas. But then, that's somewhat the point, since the echoing voice is just another instrument in the greater musical texture, and though Mr. Merritt's wit is often touted as his strongest suit, perhaps he would rather we hear more of the totality of his songwriting, and hear music the way it sounds in of Stephin Merritt's wonderful, defective ear.

]]> There are two people's voices I can impersonate well: that of Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt and Project Runway frontman Tim Gunn. It seems Merritt is forever impersonating as well, or perhaps just exploring the many forms of his beloved pop and rock songcraft. (Alas, Mr. Gunn specializes in another kind of craft, one that falls outside the purview of this review.) Of course this diversity was most prominent on the Magnetic Fields' 1999 compendium 69 Love Songs, for which he and the band ran through nearly every permutation of the love-song conceit, and came to rest on the lucky number.

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.

Which brings us to Distortion, an album with its own thematic conceit. The Magnetic Fields' eighth album, in stores today, begins with a howling, surfy stormer of a song, its title and only lyrics, "Three-way!" repeated three times in three minutes, accompanying a fantastically distant piano roll fit neatly behind a twanging guitar line. It's a clever introduction to an album the theme of which is so simple it becomes the title: Distortion.

Mr. Merritt wanted to build an album that would pay homage to the Jesus And Mary Chain's epochal Psychocandy, itself a fawning pastiche of surf music and 50's pop fed through distortion pedals and amplifiers and then fed back through the guitars. Think of the fuzzy thrash of "He's A Rebel," "Be My Baby," or "Leader of the Pack" turned all the way to its screeching metallic most.

Mr. Merritt has said the album is meant to "sound more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain," though fans will be happy
to know that many of the tunes sound more like the intricate chamber pop for which the band is best known delivered through a blissful, noisy haze.

"My reason for emulating Psychocandy," Merritt told The Observer, "was that I thought it would be a great way to make a record quickly."

"I was wrong," he went on to say.

And in fact, like the music he is responding to, the simplicity hides the workmanship. Perhaps that's why Mr. Merritt and a lot of pop purists like him believe that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and all those who worked with Phil Spector through the 60's ushered in the greatest era of studio experimentation and perfection ever seen.

Mr. Merritt said that Distortion was an effort "to respond to what I see as the last significant event in pop production."

The formalism of the Jesus And Mary Chain owes plenty to Spector et al, and suits the obsessive Mr. Merritt, but in place of moaning paeans to wayward bikers and dumb love, we have smart love and nuns wishing they were porn stars.

Italicized after the production credits in the liner notes is the phrase "No Synths," and indeed the band seems to have upped the ante of their thematic self-challenge by using their usual instruments.

"There are no mistakes of any kind on this album," Mr. Merritt said, "and it's been edited to death for 18 months. Every available technology has been used in this process."

But in fact, the recording itself took only a month. A lot of the technical work on the album was coming up with the D.I.Y. techniques to deliver distortion and reverb from an unlikely instrumentation, all without manipulation on a synthesizer. For Claudia Gonson's piano and farfisa, the amp was laid next to the piano frame and turned up until it fed back; John Woo's guitar was outfitted with tiny amps to channel vibrations directly back into the instrument. All this is to say nothing of Sam Davol's cello and Daniel Handler's accordion (a tiny amp was taped to the bellows). The only thing not distorted with amps was Ms. Gonson's drumkit, which was recorded in a cavernous stairwell for maximum reverb, distortion's gentler cousin.

All of the tracks flirt with the three-minute mark, none missing it by more than a few seconds, and the result is startlingly refreshing brevity unknown to most current pop albums. Mr. Merritt is at pains to stress that the album is an offering to rock fans, long left in the cold by the band's meanderings. "Three-minute songs with distorted guitars: that's a complete definition of rock," he said.

Mr. Merritt clearly adores the Jesus And Mary Chain, along with the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, yet he is clever, and talented enough to put the Magnetic Fields stamp on everything he does. The consistent fuzz harkens back to earlier albums like Holiday, yet nowhere has the band been so rocking so much of the time, and the sonic assault is addictive, especially in such small chunks. "Too Drunk To Dream" is perhaps the best example of the meeting of Mr. Merritt's wit and the album's textural force. He sings a capella: "Sober, life is a prison / Shit-faced, it is a blessing. / Sober, nobody wants you / Shit-faced they're all undressing ... / Sober, you're old and ugly / Shit-faced who needs a mirror." As the lines continue to roll by the echo increases until the song begins in earnest with a swinging tune and a screeching, tinny guitar. Other tracks deal with the damning march of time ("Old Fools"), the sublimated erotic desires and regrets of a nun ("The Nun's Litany") and a hopelessly lonesome Christmas ("Mr. Mistletoe"), where the plant in question is called a "useless weed." Mr. Merritt told The Observer he prefers his lyrics "to involve conflict, drama, and tension," which may be putting it lightly. Songs alternate between Mr. Merritt and a female singer, though in place of the usual Claudia Gonson is Shirley Simms, whom Mr. Merritt employed on tracks he felt were too pop for his deep baritone. Ms. Simms shines on the second track "California Girls," whose refrain is (of course) "I hate California girls" as well as the noirish "Till The Bitter End," and the two singers trade verses on the giddily contrarian "Please Stop Dancing." While Mr. Merritt's lyrics always return to themes of love and melancholy, there's an iciness to many of the tracks here.

Mr. Merritt has long suffered from hearing problems, making live Magnetic Fields shows into pretty stripped-down affairs (the tour for this album will not involve the reverb and distortion techniques used to create it). But it's not simply volume that makes a wall of sound, but the texture and interplay of instruments and vocals.

In the "loudness wars," a trend critics say has led to songs so dense with sound that they lack dynamics, and so processed in the studio that they lack any personality, does this album take a side? "The loudness wars have been the normal way of making records for the last fifty years," he said. "The aberration was the insertion of dynamics into popular music, as happened in the early '90s when music radio became less relevant. Normally, producers try to make their records loud all the way through, to sound good on radio and other degrading audio media (laptop speakers, iPod headphones). Consumer audio, on MP3 especially, sounds better the more it gets compression in the studio and the less it relies on compression by the consumer's crummy, unpredictable equipment."

The challenge of so much noise doesn't come without pitfalls, one being that Mr. Merritt's delightful rhymes are occasionally swallowed by the imposing fracas. But then, that's somewhat the point, since the echoing voice is just another instrument in the greater musical texture, and though Mr. Merritt's wit is often touted as his strongest suit, perhaps he would rather we hear more of the totality of his songwriting, and hear music the way it sounds in of Stephin Merritt's wonderful, defective ear.

]]> http://observer.com/2008/01/magnetic-personality-disorder/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver http://observer.com/2007/12/i-want-to-hold-your-hair-john-lennons-locks-get-48000-at-auction/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:37:37 -0400 http://observer.com/2007/12/i-want-to-hold-your-hair-john-lennons-locks-get-48000-at-auction/ David Foxley http://www.observer.com/2007/12/i-want-to-hold-your-hair-john-lennons-locks-get-48000-at-auction/

Paying $100 million for Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull seemed, to us, outrageous until this afternoon. That’s because someone just bought a lock of John Lennon’s hair—of all things—for $48,000 from the Beatles’ onetime hairdresser, Betty Glasgow. The anonymous, winning bid came into London’s Gorringes auction house over the phone. Preliminary estimates for the wad of brown hairs—which, when rolled up as they are, roughly equal the size of a silver dollar—stood at between four and six thousand dollars. Of course, the lucky buyer won’t just walk away with the piece-o’-mop alone; they’ll also get to keep an autographed copy of Mr. Lennon’s book, A Spaniard in the Works. (Sadly, however, the singer addressed it to his coiffeur; it reads, “To Betty, Lots of Love and Hair, John Lennon xx.”)

“It is astonishing that there is still so much interest in the Beatles and the sale goes to prove that John Lennon is still an icon," said Francesca Collin, a spokeswoman for Gorringes. “To have some of Lennon's hair along with a signed note from him really does give it fantastic provenance and authenticity.” Fittingly, Ms. Glasgow was the band’s hairdresser during the filming of the Beatles’ film Help!

But the big story for Manhattan box office continues to be the success of Eastern Promises (#2) and Across the Universe (#3). The Cronenberg-helmed thriller Promises expanded into 10 theaters from 1 last week, tripling its gross (while quartering its average). It bumped down the Beatles-scored musical Universe, which expanded from 3 theaters into 7, from its number 2 perch.

In Manhattan, both movies easily beat out Good Luck Chuck (#4), the romantic comedy starring Jessica Alba and Dane Cook. The movie averaged about $13,000 on 10 screens, grossing little more than Superbad had—in its 5th week. Despite bad reviews and, well, Dane Cook and Jessica Alba, the movie grossed a total $14 million. Expect a steep drop-off next weekend as its male audience begins to realize that the closest they’re going to get to seeing Ms. Alba naked is the panty-shot they already saw in the preview. Or so I hear … ahem.

The Sean Penn-directed Into the Wild (#6) opened strong on 2 screens with a $46,000 average. If this film does well, it will make Emile Hirsch more successful at 22, than well … all of us. Good luck with Speed Racer!

And the Straight-to-Netflix-Queue Award this week goes to In the Valley of Elah (#10). Not even a cast of more stars than you could shake a stick at could save this one. Susan Sarandon! Tommy Lee Jones! Charlize Theron! Jason Patric! Iraq! Er … The movie, now in its second week, just barely broke into the top ten here in Manhattan. It has an anemic $6,896 average and it hasn’t even hit its stride. You think the other studios with movies that take place in the Middle East are getting a little bit nervous? Uh, yea.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Today's Page Six reports:

It was reported, was it? And where might it have been reported?

-New York Post, Sept. 4