Tag Archives: featured

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/)

I Hear Banjo Music

What kind of music do you expect to hear in the Big Apple? Big band? Jazz? Funk? Steel drums on the street corner?

Of course, New York city has it all.

But I was surprised to listen to two guys in Washington Park play blues, one on a banjo, and one on a green plastic melodica. Here is a bit of the sound:

It reminded me of this man I saw in San Francisco

Rock 'n Roll Banjo
cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

He was playing the Rolling Stones “Street Fighting Man” on a banjo, quite different from the way those boys from the UK did it.

It’s All About Soup

Because wordpress makes it easy to embed a video.

Find a video on Youtube or vimeo.

Copy it’s URL, or web address.

In my wordpress blog editor, just put that URL on an empty line, all alone (not as a hyperlink), e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CLVgJ7yoXc

And voila! It is embedded

Video in your page, mmmmmm good.