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effects, ear-drilling compression, distortion, delay. He also favored all sorts of unorthodox
instruments such as pots and pans, pocket combs, milk bottles, and flushing toilets. Stomping feet in
lieu of drums might be called his signature.
An early Meek effort penned for the British teen idol Billy Fury became a vehicle for Les Paul
and Mary Ford. Talk about serendipity. Their cover version of Put a Ring on My Finger reached the
U.S. Top 40 in 1958. Meek took the money and set up shop, so to speak. Let Phil Spector have his
Wall of Sound; Joe Meek perfected the Curtain of Buzz.
Meek produced scores of records for various labels. He commanded an eccentric retinue of
performers and protégés and contracted a sturdy backing band to supplement his studio gadgetry.
But his budding pop empire couldn t last. The fortress was built on sand.
For all its technical savvy and warped style, most of his work is worthless as music per se; it s
pure kitsch. Somehow, Meek managed to run up a sizable handful of chart records in the U.K. during
the first half of the 1960s. Johnny Remember Me by Anton Hollywood death rock complete with
ethereal voice from beyond the grave sat on top of the U.K. pop charts for a mind-boggling fifteen
weeks in 1961.
Believe it or not, two U.S. Top 10 hits of the time also bear Meek s indelible mark. Telstar by
the Tornados (1962) deploys a cheap battery-powered keyboard in a quavering tribute to the satellite.
Have I the Right? by the Honeycombs is a bright, simple blast of vintage Brit pop; that hand-clap
beat practically slaps you in the face.
His moment was brief. Eclipsed by psychedelia, hounded by public homophobia and personal
demons, Meek spiraled downward. He died in 1967 by his own hand after killing his landlady in a
long-brewing altercation. His madness and his odd-duck music can be conflated into a campy joke all
too easily. Joe Meek s recording methods, however, have proven to be unusually influential. The
synth-pop sounds of the eighties, for example, echoed the wired, tinny intensity of Joe Meek records
with an eerie precision.
Headphone Music
In the wake of Sgt. Pepper s, the rock concept album stood as the prime example of technology s
expansive effect on music. Convoluted compositions and electronically enhanced ambitions defined
the field or a significant patch of it for years to come. Rather than rely on the usual studio
musicians, rock bands reached out to new machines. The next technological milestone after Sgt.
Pepper s, Pink Floyd s Dark Side of the Moon, owes much of its perennial success to synthesizers
(electronic keyboards) and sound effects. Pink Floyd pioneered the use of prerecorded click tracks
and loops, manipulating tape to achieve metronome-perfect mechanized rhythms. And all of Dark
Side of the Moon s spoken interjections and haunting audio verité bits (such as coins clinking and
registers cashing on Money ) were accomplished on tape. Interestingly, these techniques resemble
the very same hiphop effects that so effectively spelled rock s doom a few years later. Could the art of
sampling have originated on the classic rock album?
Multitracking reached its logical conclusion or nadir in the mid seventies, specifically on a hit
album called Tubular Bells. The LP was one forty-nine-minute-long instrumental, stretching across
both sides. It reached number three on U.S. album charts and supplied the creepy, catchy theme music
for the film The Exorcist. Credit Mike Oldfield as overall auteur of Tubular Bells. He served as both
musician and producer, playing all the instruments and stacking all the tracks. Tubular Bells works as
a brilliant exercise in this multilayering technique, but it s something less than genius as music. Sir
George Martin considered it a fluke, the work of a lucky amateur. The human touch was lost, replaced
by scientific protocol. Production itself the act of recording now formed the core creative
experience.
Tubular Bells was strongly reminiscent of earlier breakthrough novelty hits. The seductive allure
of tech-generated music often begins and ends as a gimmick. The 1970s version of a ricocheting hi-fi
demonstration record is that multitracked rock operetta Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Perhaps
Dark Side of the Moon did for headphones what Persuasive Percussion did for stereo speakers.
By the mid seventies, for a sizable audience, enhanced sound quality represented an end in itself,
just like in the fifties. But headphone music comes equipped with built-in limitations. Sometimes, a
comfortably equipped cocoon can turn into a hightech tomb.
Snap, Crackle, and Pop
The Beatles set the pace for the late sixties music scene. The competition followed their every move,
in music and technology. On some Abbey Road songs, for example, they used a spiffy new electronic
instrument called a Moog synthesizer. Just a couple of years later, Moogs and similar synthesizers
became commonplace, another tool in the rock n roll band s growing electronic arsenal.
For the first half of the twentieth century, electronic music was the province of inventors and
fanatics, the futurists and mad professors, the nerds and starving artists, the geeks and freaks.
Electronic instruments were eminently impractical. Outside of an Alfred Hitchcock soundtrack, they
just sounded weird.
Synthesize means to fuse or merge parts into a whole. A synthesizer combines electronic (or
digital) parts to form a complete sound. The musical instruments we know as synthesizers produce
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