That is a weird secret language I was told would be easy to learn because I was good at math and it was all math based. It was the hardest thing I ever tried to learn and I didn’t ever learn it. I did once get a passing grade in it during college. The second I realized how hard it was I took it pass fail.
People will endlessly bicker about it. Do you need to speak it? Is it better, if you never learn to speak it?
They would have bands at one of its peaks where half spoke it and half didn’t.
I think one of the odder ways I’ve seen it in history was when Aimee Mann who went to Berklee College of Music in Masachusetts kept nagging Noel Gallagher, who pretty much never went to any school of any kind from Manchester, England about it.
“Why did you use this chord?”
“I don’t even know what chord it is, I just did it.”
“But this one key note holds the thing together. How did you come up with that?”
“I don’t know I just did it.”
It really doesn’t matter though it just has to be done.
I basically figured out that you could either do it or you can’t.
I could do none of it. I couldn’t master my instrument. Not even tablature would help me out. All I had was a guitar, teachers who could do it maybe once a week, and the desire to do it, but I never had a chance of doing it. It’s all on YouTube now. I spent weeks trying to learn the simplest songs. Now it’s all on YouTube.
You can watch someone play it as they explain it to you. You can watch someone break it and explain it musically. Then you can watch a third person laugh at the second person’s explaination of it.
The easiest way I can describe my awe at it is Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Only McCartney is around to tell it and he never tells you. He just says that he doesn’t know that language. He doesn’t tell you how much he knows.
I saw McCartney in person and he told a story about them going from town to town trying to find someone to show them how to play a B7 chord on guitar in any fashion. There are tons of different ways to play a B7 chord on guitar. So I don’t get how you can not use that secret language and wind up better than those who never had it.
The only thing I do understand about John Lennon was he had a desperation to do it, and gambled his whole life on whether he could figure out how to do it.
Then it happens and it gets analyzed and the people who did it claim they have no idea what the people explaining it are talking about. Some people can just do it, but not that guy, he had to fight for it.
So I love things like this, because they are fun and teach me nothing about it at all.
Basically the only thing I undestand in that video is “You wanna play like you’re really pissed off all the time too. You want to play it like you’re mad at your guitar. Because it looks tough .. and that’s kind of how John Lennon did it.”
I know enough about that kid that I can understand him being pissed off; I can understand him being mad at his guitar; most I understand why he wanted it to look tough.”
When he says tough, he’s not saying difficult. John Lennon wanted to make it look like it was easy to do. He wanted you to be intimidated when you saw him do it, whether he was angry or not at the time. I get all of that.
The rest just confuses me more. and I’ve seen the same types of videos by different people.
He never did this except in this song where he did it perfectly that way. He’s playing it here because it was easier at the time given where he played the previous chord onstange at the time, but then he didn’t do it here for some other reason. If you have to do some form of this only do it this way.
Every single thing he says makes sense given who I understand him to have been and how he wanted to come off. He basically just says in different ways that you have to make it look like you are a badass. You can find out how hard he worked every single day in Hamburg, Germany to be able to do that, and most of that time was in front of an audience. Then there are all kinds of women options around. I understand why he took all the amphetimines and never slept. There was no desire to stop doing all of it.
I want to see and understand how good or bad he was at it at all stages, but you don’t really get to hear it or see it as it happens. Given what happened you can only say at one point he couldn’t do it at all. Then by the time most people got to see it he could do it all.
Paul McCarntney has better things to do than tell you and who knows how much of it he was paying attention to at the time. Even if he were to tell you, he has an agenda about how he wants to himself look.
Klaus Voorman got to see it almost nightly for a time. He instantly wanted to be able to do it and was obsessed with figuring out how to do it. He wanted to be able to do it so bad that he lost his really attractive, smart and talented girlfriend to the bass player that couldn’t do it at all and had no desire to do it.
I wanted to do it that much too, because it appears that once you can do it you can do anything and be with anyone.
Then as the guy says hope you can sing.
That is the Beatles second English album and seems like the best approxmation of what might have been happening in Hamburg onstage, because it has so many songs that they did not write.
