Category Archives: Projects

Humming Maxwell

Today’s Daily challenge was “Hum your first musical memory” — I wrote it and recycled from one we did before as a DS106 Daily Create.

Part of my philosophy of doing Daily challenges is that the real creativity is in how you interpret the “assignment”. Since they are no grades, no critical reviews you are invited to change the rules.

I am not sure of the first song I recall hearing, but I dod vividly remember when one of my sisters brought into our home the first rock album, the Beatles Abbey Road. I know we listened and danced around to it playing on a tube powered record player housed in a wooden box. This is not the exact model, but it is close:

zenith

I remember the Octopuses Garden and Carry That Weight, but Maxwell’s Silver Hammer seemed to always be one I liked the most:

And maybe now I might be concerned as the words literally seem either violent or drug-related. What did I know, I was six.

According to Wikipedia

In 1994, McCartney said that the song merely epitomises the downfalls of life, being “my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don’t know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell’s hammer. It was needed for scanning. We still use that expression now when something unexpected happens.

Here is my hummed version:

(originally posted at http://cogdog.trubox.ca/2015/02/13/humming-maxwell/)