Thanks for recalling your memories with my grandfather. My email address is dipakpgadhvi@yahoo.co.in. Please do contact me at your conveneince. This has nothing to do with the blog above but while surfing i could establish contact with you through this blog.

thanks and regards

A pleasure to hear from you, even if this has little to do with the blog above. I remember your grandfather as one of the great bards of Western India and a wonderful human being. Meeting him in Bhuj, Kacch is an endearing memory. He taught me much about Carans, doha-chand, and the role of the court historian-poet in pre-independence India. I’ll see if I can get your email address from the blog editor and contact you separately.

Gordonbhai

Lennon believed the purpose entailed “destruction,” taking as his source Timothy Leary: they knew each other. (If you were a Beatle, you got to meet everyone.) My comments reference how Leary and others interpreted Buddhism, not how Buddhists understand the role of the ego. Lennon comments in several sources about how this era significantly set him back personally as an artist, enabling others to take advantage of him and his weakness.

Gordon

Although the solo has the same guitar+amp sound as “Taxman” (suggesting that it’s McCartney playing it), I think this is a live insertion. Here’s why.

On the stereo version of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” at the end of the guitar solo, you can hear the squeal of feedback. (They edit out this feedback on the more important mono version of the recording.) That little “mistake” suggests that this was done live in the studio. McDonald would have thread the tape on the deck backwards, cued the tape to where they wanted to insert the solo (and after realizing that the order of the tracks were now reversed), and, at Emerick’s signal, set the tape in motion with the record heads hot.

Remember, these are the days of analog recording. Having McCartney play the solo and inserting it would have been enough of a challenge. Finding an excerpt of the right length, altering its pitch with varispeed, and then copying it into the new recording would have been much more difficult. Besides, McCartney was clearly up to the challenge. Moreover, it was McCartney who had set up a home studio where he played with tape editing. The solo was probably his idea!

Gordon

I in no way meant to suggest that musicians in Asian traditions were ignorant. Quite the opposite. My other scholarly area of research and writing is South Asia and I still play sitar and tabla on occasion. What I meant to question was how the pop world and, in particular, the psychedelic “gurus” (a misappropriation of a term if ever there was one) used India and Buddhism as a foil for their own ends. I think it was the Westerners who were ignorant. Edward Said takes some of this into his discourse on Orientalism, so I probably do not need to elaborate. Clearly Harrison took Indian music quite seriously. And today is Ravi Shankar’s 91st birthday, so let’s recognize his contributions to this transformation too.

Interesting to hear that your grandfather was involved with a performance of Stockhausen’s music in Liverpool. I’d love to hear more about his activities in the fifties.

Gordon

It’s such a great track and such a group effort on the part of all of the Beatles and their production crew.