Nym's Schtuff

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND: Baroque music is really really fucking cool. You could see it as a reaction to more constrained medieval/renaissance music, which was often obsessive about certain musical rules. Baroque comes from the Portuguese barroco, "an irregularly-shaped pearl", and was actually used as a criticism meaning something very weird, dissonant, overly extravagant, etc. It's seen as very structured but is in fact a collection of big ol' "fuck yous" to the previous era of musical structure. SECOND THING TO UNDERSTAND: Vivaldi was really really fucking cool. He was nicknamed "The Red Priest" as a young spicey ginger, and for many years he was the violin maestro at a combo orphanage/music school for girls. He wrote a zillion works specifically for the girls to perform, coached them in music theory and instruments, and helped many of them launch esteemed careers abroad. Also the board of directors hated him and kept firing him and then realizing they needed him and bringing him back, for reasons completely lost to history, but probably related to his spiciness. THIRD THING TO UNDERSTAND: "The Four Seasons" is really really fucking cool. It's written to accompany four sonnets with super vivid imagery including sudden spring/summer storms ("Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven!"), mad drunken revelry, the chase of hunting dogs, slipping on ice and eating shit, etc. When you hear it played properly it's very much not "this pretty song kinda reminds me of spring" but "oh wow I can hear dogs barking in the viola section, chirping birds in the violins, a summer storm wrecking the fuck out of my grain, and dangerously crackling ice!" FOURTH THING TO UNDERSTAND: "The Four Seasons" is rarely played in the spirit of its time. This is Mozart's fault. Well, not really, he didn't tell anyone to play it wrong. But he did give rise to a cult of strings players who play in a very "Mozartian" style - light, pretty, clean, effortless. And for some reason (ahem. some reason i won't go into as this is long enough), this playing style has become the predominant mode for The Four Seasons. Which makes it sound like light, pretty, clean, fancy music.

As we covered above, it is baroque music, so it is not any those things! It's weird and crunchy and extravagant, with musical affectations that would have been considered revolutionary at the time. If you're playing it in the baroque tradition you're also going to be adding your own ornamentations and expressions. Bringing your own weirdness is encouraged in baroque music.

Basically, it's a crime that everyone sees Four Seasons as "fancy music that plays in movies when rich people are onscreen" when it was written by The Red Priest Who Ran A Girls School For Orphans When That Was Very Much Not The Done Thing And Pissed Off the Board At Every Opportunity, and written during a musical period that history has classified specifically as a fuck-you to "pretty and clean and fancy."

For some real crunchy Four Seasons, I will always recommend Adrian Chandler & the Serenissima. BUCKLE UP TO GET YOUR SHIT WRECKED AND YOUR WHEAT CROPS MURDERED BY A SUMMER STORM!!

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.