Tags: ears

The three-part almost nine-hour long documentary Get Back is quite fascinating.

First of all, the fact that all this footage exists is remarkable. It’s as if Disney had announced that they’d found the footage for a film shot between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

Still, does this treasure trove really warrant the daunting length of this new Beatles documentary? As Terence puts it:

There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff.

In some ways, watching Get Back is liking watching one of those Andy Warhol art projects where he just pointed a camera at someone for 24 hours. It’s simultaneously boring and yet oddly mesmerising.

What struck myself and Jessica watching Get Back was how much it was like our experience of playing with Salter Cane. I’m not saying Salter Cane are like The Beatles. I’m saying that The Beatles are like Salter Cane and every other band on the planet when it comes to how the sausage gets made. The same kind of highs. The same kind of lows. And above all, the same kind of tedium. Spending hours and hours in a practice room or a recording studio is simultaneously exciting and dull. This documentary captures that perfectly.

I suppose Peter Jackson could’ve made a three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary series about any band and I would’ve found it equally interesting. But this is The Beatles and that means there’s a whole mythology that comes along for the ride. So, yes, it’s like watching paint dry, but on the other hand, it’s paint painted by The Beatles.

What I liked about Get Back is that it demystified the band. The revelation for me was really understanding that this was just four lads from Liverpool making music together. And I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that—the Beatles themselves spent years insisting they were just four lads from Liverpool making music together, but, y’know …it’s The Beatles!

There’s a scene in the Danny Boyle film Yesterday where the main character plays Let It Be for the first time in a world where The Beatles have never existed. It’s one of the few funny parts of the film. It’s funny because to everyone else it’s just some new song but we, the audience, know that it’s not just some new song…

Christ, this is Let It Be! You’re the first people on Earth to hear this song! This is like watching Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa right in front of your bloody eyes!

But truth is even more amusing than fiction. In the first episode of Get Back, we get to see when Paul starts noodling on the piano playing Let It Be for the first time. It’s a momentous occasion and the reaction from everyone around him is …complete indifference. People are chatting, discussing a set design that will never get built, and generally ignoring the nascent song being played. I laughed out loud.

There’s another moment when George brings in the song he wrote the night before, I Me Mine. He plays it while John and Yoko waltz around. It’s in 3/4 time and it’s minor key. I turned to Jessica and said “That’s the most Salter Cane sounding one.” Then, I swear at that moment, after George has stopped playing that song, he plays a brief little riff on the guitar that sounded exactly like a Salter Cane song we’re working on right now. Myself and Jessica turned to each other and said, “What was that‽”

Funnily enough, when we told this to Chris, the singer in Salter Cane, he mentioned how that was the scene that had stood out to him as well, but not for that riff (he hadn’t noticed the similarity). For him, it was about how George had brought just a scrap of a song. Chris realised it was the kind of scrap that he would come up with, but then discard, thinking there’s not enough there. So maybe there’s a lesson here about sharing those scraps.

Watching Get Back, I was trying to figure out if it was so fascinating to me and Jessica (and Chris) because we’re in a band. Would it resonate with other people?

The answer, it turns out, is yes, very much so. Everyone’s been sharing that clip of Paul coming up with the beginnings of the song Get Back. The general reaction is one of breathless wonder. But as Chris said, “How did you think songs happened?” His reaction was more like “yup, accurate.”

Inevitably, there are people mining the documentary for lessons in creativity, design, and leadership. There are already Medium think-pieces and newsletters analysing the processes on display. I guarantee you that there will be multiple conference talks at UX events over the next few years that will include footage from Get Back.

I understand how you could watch this documentary and take away the lesson that these were musical geniuses forging remarkable works of cultural importance. But that’s not what I took from it. I came away from it thinking they’re just a band who wrote and recorded some songs. Weirdly, that made me appreciate The Beatles even more. And it made me appreciate all the other bands and all the other songs out there.

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. I’ve been a member for quite a few years now …which, in the grand scheme of things, is not very long at all.

One of their projects is Long Bets. It sets out to tackle the problem that “there’s no tax on bullshit.” Here’s how it works: you make a prediction about something that will (or won’t happen) by a particular date. So far, so typical thought leadery. But then someone else can challenge your prediction. And here’s the crucial bit: you’ve both got to place your monies where your mouths are.

Ten years ago, I made a prediction on the Long Bets website. It’s kind of meta:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

I made the prediction on February 22nd, 2011 when my mind was preoccupied with digital preservation.

One year later I was on stage in Wellington, New Zealand, giving a talk called Of Time And The Network. I mentioned my prediction in the talk and said:

If anybody would like to take me up on that bet, you can put your money down.

Matt was also speaking at Webstock. When he gave his talk, he officially accepted my challenge.

So now it’s a bet. We both put $500 into the pot. If I win, the Bletchly Park Trust gets that money. If Matt wins, the money goes to The Internet Archive.

As I said in my original prediction:

I would love to be proven wrong.

That was ten years ago today. There’s just one more year to go until the pleasingly alliterative date of 2022-02-22 …or as the Long Now Foundation would write it, 02022-02-22 (gotta avoid that Y10K bug).

It is looking more and more likely that I will lose this bet. This pleases me.

It has been exactly six years to the day since I instantiated this prediction:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

It is exactly five years to the day until the prediction condition resolves to a Boolean true or false.

If it resolves to true, The Bletchly Park Trust will receive $1000.

If it resolves to false, The Internet Archive will receive $1000.

Much as I would like Bletchley Park to get the cash, I’m hoping to lose this bet. I don’t want my pessimism about URL longevity to be rewarded.

So, to recap, the bet was placed on

02011-02-22

It is currently

02017-02-22

And the bet times out on

02022-02-22.

I had band practice with Salter Cane today. It’s been ages since the last rehearsal. Our drummer, Emily, has been recovering from surgery on her foot, hence the hiatus.

I was sure that this practice would be a hard slog. Not only had we not played together for a long time, but we’re trying out a new rehearsal space too. Sure enough, there were plenty of technical difficulties that arose from trying to get things working in the new space. But I was pleasantly surprised by how the songs sounded. We were pretty tight. One might even say we rocked.