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Re: Lennon's feedback
- Subject: Re: Lennon's feedback
- From: briancady@juno.com (Brian S Cady)
- Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 18:18:57 PST
Mark R. Leaman writes:
>That's what McCartney said, but I'm not buying it. The Who were using
>feedback before this and had opened for The Beatles. So were The Kinks
>and Tridents (Jeff Beck's group). If Lennon "discovered" it "by
>accident," he must have been completely oblivious of the music scene
>in
>England...do you think that could possibly be the case? I don't know
>for
>sure, but I sincerely doubt it.
I had to go back to the sources to look this up. Here's what Lennon told
Playboy magazine in 1980:
"That's me completely. Including the electric guitar lick
and the record with the first feedback anywhere. I defy
anybody to find a record - unless it's some old blues
record in 1922 - that uses feedback that way. I mean,
everybody played with feedback on stage, and the Jimi
Hendrix stuff was going on long before....Before Hendrix,
before The Who, before anybody. The first feedback on
any record." (Playboy, p. 184)
Now here's Pete from an interview in Hullabaloo magazine (circa 1968):
"It was very much us and The Yardbirds who were into
feedback. I mean, everyone seems to be arguing who
invented feedback. I mean, I did - without a doubt.
I know that I did because I was the only one who had
a big enough amplifier to do it!...I used to play at
this place where I used to put my amplifier very
regularly on a piano so that the speaker was right
opposite my guitar. I just turned around and I was
hitting this note and I was going ba-ba-ba-bum, and
the amplifier was going ur-ur-ur-ur all on its own.
I said to myself, "that's fun; I'll fool around with
that," and I started to pretend I was an airplane...
I started to use it, I started to control it."
And this from the 1994 book "Revolution In The Head: The Beatles' Records
and The Sixties" by Ian McDonald:
"[Lennon] later conceded that 'eveyone' then playing live
was using it...The ONLY [my emphasis] local guitarist
using feedback as pure noise in 1964 was Pete Townshend...
A couple of days after recording 'I'm a Loser,' The
Beatles shared a Blackpool bill with The High Numbers
(a few weeks before they became The Who). Did Lennon -
as he had after hearing harmonica-player Delbert McClinton
at the Tower Ballroom, New Brighton, two years earlier -
mark, learn, and inwardly digest?" (p. 108)
-Brian in Atlanta