[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Lennon's feedback



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