Tag: The Beatles

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All about that bass: Chef Harrison Keevil gets a dream gift (a guitar, not a fish)

Chef Keevil and his beloved Höfner bass at his Belmont shop, Keevil & Keevil. Photo: John Robinson

Sometimes, when you hear the name of a well-known local chef, you think of him only for his culinary exploits. You may recognize Harrison Keevil for his corner store in Belmont, Keevil & Keevil, where he offers great sandwiches, salads, and desserts, and prepares meals for home delivery. If you’re into the Charlottesville restaurant scene, you might also know that Keevil once ran his own place, Brookville, on the Downtown Mall, and recently helped to create the concept of “modern Virginia cuisine” that informs the menu—and serves as the tagline—at Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar.

All of these things are impressive, and Keevil certainly cuts a figure in the local food landscape. But he also plays a mean bass guitar. We discovered this in July, when Keevil posted a photograph of a black Höfner 500 four-string—the signature instrument of Paul McCartney—on his Instagram feed. We knew right away that Keevil is more than a casual bassist, otherwise the photo wouldn’t have also shown a daisy chain of effects pedals on the floor.

“I have wanted this bass for over 30 years (since my mom and dad introduced me to the Beatles), and @jpkeevil made it happen on my 37th bday,” he wrote. “So awesome!”

The awesomeness was a gift from his wife, Jennifer (@jpkeevil). It struck a profound chord for the chef, whose aunt, a Long Islander, was present at the 1965 Beatles concert at Shea Stadium that solidified the British Invasion. Keevil’s mom was the younger sister, not old enough to attend the show. But back in rural Goochland County, she and her husband made sure that young Harrison (after his grandfather’s surname, not George Harrison) got an earful of the Fab Four from an early age.

“The first album I got was Revolver,” Keevil says. “That one definitely opened the door.”

His next move was to get the Beatles songbook and learn to play their songs on his Dean bass. (Mind you, the kid was still in grade school at the time.) That was what he calls his “cheap and cheerful” bass—nothing compared to the Hofner that Jennifer bought for him.

Keevil went on to perform in a band in high school, and in another group in college. Neither was established enough even to have a name, but they scratched the itch that Keevil first felt when he heard Revolver. Come to think of it, the fact that that album marked the beginning of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase may partly explain why Keevil’s college group was a trippy jam band and not a pop band.

Not long after college, Keevil found his way to the French Culinary Institute, in Manhattan, which propelled him into his career as a chef. But the Beatles—and especially, McCartney—remained an inspiration to him, even after the ex-Beatle started Wings. “I was really into James Bond at one point, so I loved Paul’s music, you know, ‘Live and Let Die.’”

Today, Keevil plays his bass daily, just noodling around or perhaps playing a song or two. He’s practicing for the Party Like a Rock Star event October 18 at the Music Resource Center. Jennifer is on the MRC committee organizing the event, and Keevil will play a favorite song, the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero.”

Playing the Hofner is the equivalent of working with just the right knife in the kitchen. It feels good in your hands and is easy to use.

“The Hofner makes a big difference for me,” he says. “I love the bass and its association with McCartney, but there’s also something great about the fretboard. You can play it more like a guitar, you know, multiple notes at once as opposed to just one at a time.

We get it. Why be “just” a chef when you can be a bass player, too.

“Playing the Hofner is the equivalent of working with just the right knife in the kitchen,” he “It feels good in your hands and is easy to use.”

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Arts

Ticket to write: Rock critic Rob Sheffield tells us what he sees in the Beatles

Rob Sheffield returns to his old stomping grounds this week for a variety of events, including co- hosting a show for WTJU’s rock marathon, and a reading from Dreaming the Beatles at CitySpace in tandem with Rich Tarbell’s “It’s A Music Town,” an interactive exhibit about Charlottesville music.publicity photo

After being wooed by four mop-haired musicians in matching black turtlenecks harmonizing “Help!” on a television screen, 5-year-old Rob Sheffield became a Beatles mega fan.

“Don’t you know that band broke up?” his parents would ask. “They don’t exist anymore,” his teacher would say. It was the early 1970s, and while they weren’t wrong—The Beatles called it quits in the final months of 1970—they weren’t right, either.

Sheffield had seen them, right there on TV. He heard them with his own ears, on the radio and the vinyl records he played.

Almost five decades later, Sheffield, who has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone since 1997 and is a New York Times best-selling author of five books, is still listening to The Beatles.

In advance of a reading from his latest book, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, at CitySpace on Thursday, Sheffield, who lived in Charlottesville and hosted a rock show on WTJU for many years before moving to Brooklyn, told us that in addition to checking out Paul McCartney’s set list from the previous night, he’d been listening to The Beatles just a few hours earlier.

The song was “Tell Me What You See,” a track on the B-side of Help!, the album that hooked him.

It’s “one of those Beatles songs that nobody seems to care an awful lot about,” the band included, says Sheffield.

Sheffield can’t stop thinking about this. It’s a “perfect example” of the band’s brilliance, that in 10 minutes, just to fill space on an album, “they could come up with just an absolutely, unbelievably beautiful and tender song like ‘Tell Me What You See,’” he says.

That re-listening, remembering, and discovering, which occurs often for Sheffield and for billions of other Beatles fans, is what prompted him to write Dreaming the Beatles.

It’s not another Beatles story set in the 1960s. “The Beatles are right now,” says Sheffield. They are “more famous and popular and beloved now than they were in their lifetime” as a band. “They tried breaking up and it didn’t work,” he says. The music “escaped from The Beatles and the world took over.”

Sheffield  says he didn’t try to interview the two surviving Beatles, Paul and Ringo—this isn’t their story. (Plus, he says they’re the only two people on the planet who could leave him starstruck. He’s never talked to Paul, but a phone interview with Ringo years ago left him “quivering in the knees.”)

It’s the music’s story, and as Sheffield wrote Dreaming the Beatles, the story grew—he knew it would. “That’s the way it goes with The Beatles,” he says. “The story never ends.”

The book has been out for two years, and Sheffield’s still having revelations about the songs, many of them tied to the six-CD White Album box set that came out in 2018, a year after Dreaming the Beatles.

There’s a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in which George Harrison misses a high note, stops singing and quips, “Sorry, that was my fault. I tried to do a Smokey, and I just aren’t Smokey.” Sheffield is moved by the fact that, 50 years after George made a Smokey Robinson joke that he likely forgot about and didn’t think anyone outside the studio would hear, millions of people have heard that line and “felt it in their souls.”

Before that box set came out, Sheffield visited with its producer, Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, who played him a version of “Good Night”—the last track on the White Album, with Ringo singing lead

This particular version features all four Beatles singing together—a rarity—and revealed to Sheffield beauty he hadn’t before heard in this song.

People assume it’s a Paul song, but it’s actually a John song, one that Giles told Sheffield was “too tender and melodic and emotional” for John to sing himself, so he made Ringo sing it. John himself only sang it twice—once when he showed Ringo how it went, and once with the full band—and he never told his bandmates why he couldn’t sing it himself.

Hearing this version of the song made Sheffield re-think his entire perception of John, who, at that point in his life (1968) had met Yoko Ono and was divorcing his first wife, Cynthia. Sheffield always thought of it as a “joke at the end of the album. Turns out, there’s all these emotional layers to it,” he says.

“My God!” he exclaims, basking in the warm glow of yet another revelation about the magic of the world’s most beloved band, knowing full well there’s more to come. “It’s going to take us the rest of our lives to even start listening to The Beatles.”

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Arts

Jack Hamilton parses the racial history of rock music

Jack Hamilton discusses his work with Tom Breihan on Friday before Robin Tomlin of Grits ’n’ Gravy DJs a funk, soul, R&B and rock ’n’ roll set at the Ante Room. Photo by Kristen Finn

Pop music critic Jack Hamilton didn’t listen to much pop music growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. His parents had a few Beatles albums and one Supremes record, but they mostly played classical music and show tunes in their suburban Boston home.

He can’t recall exactly when he heard The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” (“I was probably 14 or 15,” he says), or where he was at the time, but he remembers his reaction. “It was like the heavens opened up or something. I still think it’s the most perfect piece of pop music ever made,” he says.

Virginia Festival of the Book
Under the Influence with Jack Hamilton
The Ante Room
March 24

Officially hooked, Hamilton started buying music “really copiously,” and with the purchase of the four-disc box set Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection, 1959-1971 he became obsessed with Motown.

“I lived in that for like, a year,” Hamilton says of Hitsville. He’d sit in his room and put headphones on to listen to Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want),” Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me,” and Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” and “Dancing in the Street.” He heard pure, perfect pop: catchy hooks, innovative musicianship and extraordinary songwriting.

After graduating from high school, Hamilton dropped out of college to play in a Boston-based R&B band. He says that people often asked why he wasn’t in a rock band, and he began to wonder: Why do people assume that a young white person would be playing rock music? What happened where we now associate rock music with white musicians?

The question followed Hamilton through college and graduate school, and he started to think of the question within the framework of 1960s popular music after writing a paper on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” He thought about it as he wrote pop criticism for NPR, Slate and The Atlantic. He thought about it as he continued to listen to Motown, still his “favorite music on the face of the Earth.”

“There’s been a tendency in rock discourse and the way rock music has been written about, to think about black influences and black music as source material for rock ’n’ roll, for white rock ’n’ roll. There’s the notion that it’s the raw materials from which The Beatles and Dylan and the Stones went out and made great art from. I think that’s a silly, misinformed way of looking at it,” Hamilton says.

JustAroundMidnight

In his recent book, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, Hamilton, a professor of media studies and American studies at UVA, declares his intent to “disrupt the stories that we have told ourselves about what we’ve partitioned as ‘black music’ and ‘white music’ and to identify what we are actually talking about when we say these things.”

By putting rock titans in conversation with artists they’re not usually connected with—Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke; The Beatles and Motown’s Funk Brothers (James Jamerson in particular); Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Janis Joplin—Hamilton introduces a new level of understanding of some of the most popular music of all time.

Take The Rolling Stones. In the early 1960s, they emerge out of London as a group of white British kids who are curiously obsessed with the blues and soul, what was considered to be black American music. In the mid-’60s, the Stones are celebrated for their fluency in that tradition, but by the end of the decade, “instead of being viewed as channelers of the authentic, they are the authentic, and that’s a weird shift,” caused partly by the fact that recognition of the Stones’ engagement with their influences slipped as the band’s own story grew, says Hamilton. Mick Jagger becomes “the real thing,” and not just “the white British kid who can sort of sing like Muddy Waters.”

Just Around Midnight is partly devoted to finding out where, why and how some of those erasures occurred and shining light on artists who have been left out of the broader rock music conversation. Hamilton doesn’t blame white musicians for stealing or borrowing from black music; “the greatest musicians are sponges,” he says. “They’re people who are forever open to an enormous generosity of influences,” and he believes that “the sort of misunderstandings and transgressions and erasures [that] have occurred are due to much larger forces.”

But it’s important to identify the transgressions, fill in the erasures and confront those larger forces, he says. Because when you do, you’ll never hear “Gimme Shelter” or “Like a Rolling Stone,” Are You Experienced? or Revolver, the same way again.

“All music begins life as a person or group of people at a specific moment in time,” and knowing the specifics of that moment—who was there, what they were into, where they were—makes for a richer listening experience, Hamilton says. “Those are really important histories, and the more you learn them, the more you can really marvel at how remarkable this stuff is.”

Hear it for yourself

Jack Hamilton wants the stories in Just Around Midnight “to suggest ways to hear this music differently, more complexly, and more clearly; in other words, to hear it better.” Queue up these tunes to hear it for yourself:

Listen to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind” (released in 1963 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) and then Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” (recorded January 1964), which Hamilton says is a direct response to Dylan’s tune. Where “Blowin’ in the Wind” asks question after question, Cooke’s “corrects the indeterminate ambiguity invoked by the ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ refrain, declaring that, in fact, a change is going to come,” Hamilton says in the first chapter. “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man,” Dylan sings, keeping racism and morality in the abstract. “I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep tellin’ me don’t hang around,” Cooke sings in reply—he’s lived the reality of Dylan’s abstract.

Next, listen to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run,” released on Gordy/Motown in February 1965, then The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man,” recorded for the Rubber Soul album in October of that same year. Paul McCartney’s bass playing borrows quite a bit from the octave intervals and anticipated downbeats of Funk Brothers bass player James Jamerson; McCartney has admitted the influence.

C–VILLE LIVE

Watch Jack Hamilton and Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum, discuss Hamilton’s book, Just Around Midnight, during our Facebook Live event at 10:30am Thursday, March 23. Can’t make it? See the full video at c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

Ron Campbell on being a crew member of the Yellow Submarine

Ron Campbell, the artist who produced “The Beatles” cartoon series and contributed to Yellow Submarine, is visiting Charlottesville for an exhibition of his work at Graves  International Art starting on September 30. Courtesy of the artist

Ron Campbell is best-known by legions of Beatles fans for his work directing the cartoon series “The Beatles” and animating parts of Yellow Submarine, but his résumé is deeper than that. After working on various Beatles projects, he went on to animate, produce and storyboard “Scooby-Doo,” “The Flintstones” and “Rugrats.” Campbell’s creative fingerprints are all over decades of cartoon history. He also spent 10 years working on “The Smurfs.”

“Actually, I love ‘The Smurfs,’” Campbell says. “For a long while it was rather like the European comics. …Gradually [the network] would bring in new elements. Networks are always doing this kind of thing when ratings drop a bit and it always seems to ruin them. Like Scooby-Doo had Scrappy-Doo. And it didn’t work with ‘The Smurfs.’ …They brought in Baby Smurf. Lovely. But they also had a ruling from the network that everyone could carry Baby Smurf except for Smurfette. Because of women’s lib sort of stuff. In point of fact, all of the girls watching the show identified with Smurfette and would have loved to hold Baby Smurf. We were shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Beginning on Friday, September 30, Graves International Art will exhibit Campbell’s original watercolor paintings of characters from the many shows he has worked on. Campbell will be at the gallery on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, doing live painting, signing (and sometimes even doodling on) memorabilia for fans.

“He’s very personable, vital, energetic,” says John Graves Sr., owner of Graves International Art. “He loves working with the public. When you buy a signed print, he’ll usually do a little sketch for you at the same time.”

Psychedelic pop artist and former Charlottesville resident Peter Max has often claimed to have been responsible for the art and animation of Yellow Submarine, but Campbell says that isn’t true.

“Al Brodax [the producer] confronted him once and said, ‘Why do you always let people think you worked on Yellow Submarine?’” Campbell says. “And Brodax says he said that ‘It’s so complicated to tell people that I didn’t.’ Peter Max had nothing to do with it. I’ve even heard Peter Max made up a whole story about how The Beatles called him up and asked him to do it. But The Beatles were happy to give us the songs and go away. Peter felt like he owned the psychedelic look and, in a way, he did.”

“For me especially, given my generation, given the connection to The Beatles, my favorite [art by Ron Campbell] would be the Yellow Submarine work,” says Graves. “I love the head Blue Meanie. He’s a fantastic, surreal character.”

Shows such as “The Beatles” and “The Flintstones” were originally aimed at an adult audience as much as they were toward children. Over the course of Campbell’s career, cartoons became more typically designed for children, with tie-ins to toys and breakfast cereals. But when working on “Rugrats,” he and the other writers found ways of winking at any parents who were also watching. Were the frequent mentions of Dr. Lipschitz, fictional child psychologist, an attempt at getting away with something? “Damn straight!” says Campbell.

Graves believes his gallery is a natural location for this particular show. An original Andy Warhol print of a can of Campbell’s soup greets visitors as they step through the front door. And prints by pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Jim Dine are displayed too.

Campbell’s work also has a slight connection to Art Spiegelman, the great cartoonist and author of the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel, Maus. Early in his career, Spiegelman made ends meet by creating the classic Garbage Pail Kids cards for Topps. Campbell was hired to help turn the cards into a TV show. It didn’t go well.

“I’m proud of everything except for the ‘Garbage Pail Kids,’” Campbell says. “I worked on a few episodes for CBS and I’m not sure that the show ever aired. Whatever the merits of the cards were, the show was just vulgar.”