The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show" (AP file photo)/Mick Jagger and Keith Richards perform in 2006 (AP photo)

In “The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Rivalry” (Voyageur Press), Tribune music critic Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis,  cohosts of the nationally syndicated public-radio show “Sound Opinions,” tackle one of the liveliest debates in rock history: Who’s cooler, the Beatles or the Stones? The dueling critics discuss and debate the bands’ hard-scrabble beginnings in Britain during the early ‘60s, make head-to-head comparisons of iconic albums (which is the better double album, the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” or the Beatles’ self-titled “white album”?), evaluate the band members’ individual contributions (who’s really the more accomplished drummer, Charlie Watts or Ringo Starr?) and assess the bands’ legacies as trend-setters, image-makers and musical visionaries. In the following excerpt about the bands’ psychedelic phase, Kot (GK) and DeRogatis (JD) dish on the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” 

JD: When it comes to the psychedelic years, I have to say that it always bugs me that the Beatles are portrayed as the “Acid Apostles of the New Age,” leading rock ’n’ roll into the psychedelic flowering of the mid-‘60s. The Rolling Stones are considered to have sneered at the genre — the drugs, the sounds, and the whole "peace and love" hippie movement — dabbling in it reluctantly, at best, and laughing at it, at worst. Conventional wisdom is that the Stones were mocking “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” with “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” never really buying into the idea of using psychedelic drugs as the portal to journey "toward the white light," to use the phraseology of the time. I’m going to argue that this view isn’t right at all, and that the Beatles and the Stones really got to psychedelia at pretty much the same time, beginning in 1965 and coming to full fruition in 1966.

GK: Yes, the Stones did more than just dabble in the sounds of that era, and the key was Brian Jones. Many remember him as being the purest of the blues purists among the Stones, at least initially, but he was also the guy visiting Morocco to study and record the Master Musicians of Joujouka. During the Stones’ middle period (1965-67), Jones’ influence on those records was profound in the way he was able to bring in all these exotic instruments and help Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turn this blues-rock band into a Swinging London pop group — edgy and nasty, sure, but still a force on the pop charts with distinctive-sounding singles (“Paint It, Black,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Lady Jane,” “Under My Thumb”). A lot of these instruments, most of them played by Jones, influenced the psychedelic sound that you’re talking about: dulcimer, sitar, marimba, recorder, oboe, Mellotron.

A scene from "Gimme Shelter."

What are the best rock movies of all time? The question’s on my mind because I’ll be cohosting an evening devoted to the theme Friday at the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee with my "Sound Opinions" colleague and Chicago Sun-Times counterpart Jim DeRogatis. We’ll discuss our favorites and show clips of key scenes. Mine include those listed below. Further down, you’ll find the rock movies that I definitely won’t be endorsing.

My top five rock movies, listed chronologically:

“Don’t Look Back” (1967): D.A. Pennebaker documents Bob Dylan’s 1965 solo tour of the U.K., and illuminates the inscrutable poet-rock star like no movie or book has since. Dylan’s in the midst of a career turning point, and he’s in a prickly mood, jousting with everyone from journalists to Joan Baez. He emerges as a driven genius who sometimes acts like a jerk.

“Gimme Shelter” (1970): Harrowing account of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 North American tour and its climactic free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California. The on-screen slaying of a fan at the hands of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, hired as concert “security,” still sends chills. Directors Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin lay out the evidence without pontificating or judging, yet no one – including the Stones -- is exonerated.

“Stop Making Sense” (1984): It’ll make you want to jump out of your seat and dance. This is the Talking Heads at the height of their powers, with the concert as a journey that incrementally builds in audacity and physical impact. Jonathan Demme captures the infectious interaction of the large band by situating his cameras at a comfortable distance to provide perspective, instead of resorting to the jumpy cuts, close-ups and audience reaction shots that bog down so many concert films.

“This is Spinal Tap” (1984): Rob Reiner’s mockumentary of a fictional heavy-metal band on the way down tells us more about Rock Inc. than any movie ever made, with a punch line nearly every minute: “It's such a fine line between stupid and clever”; “Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year -- it's just not really widely reported”; “These go to 11.”
   

“Some Kind of Monster” (2004): Metallica is led by two opposites -- gruff, macho James Hetfield and garrulous, frequently full-of-himself Lars Ulrich. They fight, their band nearly unravels, and a $40,000-a-month “performance coach” is called in to mediate. Metallica financed this warts-and-more movie, which is either perversely courageous or akin to sanctioning a “Spinal Tap”-like evisceration of your own career. In any case, it’s a jaw-dropper in this era of micro-managed, spin-the-message celebrity.

A scene from "Shine a Light."

And here are five rock movies that fell flat:

“The Song Remains the Same” (1976): Golden gods (Led Zeppelin) on a less-than-god-like night.

“U2: Rattle and Hum” (1988): Bono on a mission to rescue America.

“Imagine: John Lennon” (1988): In response to Albert Goldman’s scathing biography of her late husband, Yoko Ono hatched this fawning snooze-fest.

“Meeting People is Easy” (1998): Radiohead is a terrific band, but this documentary reduces them to dull whiners.    

“Shine a Light” (2008): I suppose it’s silly of me to expect a great movie out of the Rolling Stones at this late stage, but with Martin Scorsese directing I was hoping for the best. I was wrong.

    
greg@gregkot.com

Dhani Harrison (left) talks with Ringo Star, center, and Tom Petty in 2003. (Mark J. Terrill, AP)

There was a bit of disconnect between the sleepy debut album by Dhani Harrison’s band Thenewno2,  “You are Here” (Vagrant), and the galvanizing performance the band put on last summer at Lollapalooza in Grant Park. The album was slow-moving and introspective, tinged by psychedelic textures and electro rhythms, while Harrison’s vocals suggested the unhurried cadences of his late father, the Beatles’ George Harrison. At Grant Park, however, the sound morphed into a forceful, Technicolor swirl that rocked beneath the noon-day sun.

“The first record is like [Thom Yorke’s] ‘The Eraser’ – it’s a laptop record with two people who played everything – and the live show is more like Radiohead. It’s a different feel, a different intent,” Dhani Harrison says. “When we translated that sound into more of a band thing on the road, it became bigger and more powerful. There are moments up there when I feel like Rage Against the Machine, and other moments when you feel you’re in a trip-hop band.”

Harrison, 31, says shifting the feel, sound and personnel in the band was always the intent when he and childhood friend Oli Hecks formed Thenewno2 in Britain. They named their fledgling band after a character in the short-lived but now-classic U.K. sci-fi television series “The Prisoner.” In the show, “Number Two” is dismissed a couple of times in his futile efforts to extract information from the show’s protagonist, a captured spy, and is replaced by a new “Number Two.”

“I do get a lot of criticism because I had a dad who played music,” Harrison says. “So you’d automatically get questions about what type of band I was in, and assumptions about what it might sound like. So Oli and I always aimed to keep things moving, keep changing the band and have fun with it instead of letting it get stuck in one place. There’s always a ‘new Number Two’ with us.”

Harrison says because of his pedigree he initially resisted becoming a musician, even though he was around music all his life.
       
“I was so paranoid about being Dhani Harrison, so I became a bit of an over-achiever, working really hard at school and aiming to become a racing-car designer,” says Harrison, who attended Brown University, where he studied industrial design and physics.
       
But after a stint working with the Formula 1 racing team, he finally turned his attention back to music. He was adept at recording in a studio long before he had a band, in part because he spent so much time watching his father work.
       
“My dad and I were similar people,” he says. “My love of music is rooted in blues, gypsy jazz, Indian classical music, the psychedelic music of the ‘60s. I was in the studio in nappies watching him and Ravi Shankar playing together, and I was versed in tape and then Pro Tools. Getting away from music for a while, it was my way of making sure that I really wanted to do this. I didn’t want to do it blindly. Then I was finishing off some music for my dad’s last album when he died [in 2001], and finally, I just had to face it: I’m a musician. It was obvious.”
       
Harrison initially tried working the band through traditional record-company channels, but is now funneling a lot of songs and videos through the band’s Web site. Thenewno2 initially found an outlet for its music through the then-fledgling video game “Rock Band” a couple years ago. Harrison was hired by the Massachusetts-based Harmonix Music Systems Inc. to help develop the game, and it was a natural platform for his band’s music. A few weeks ago, his father’s old band made its digital debut when “The Beatles Rock Band” was introduced, and sold 600,000 copies in its first month.

“I guess I’m accidentally responsible for ‘Rock Band’ becoming the Beatles digital platform, but it was a no-brainer,” he says. “It’s really difficult to get the Beatles to agree on anything, but I set up demos for them and [longtime Beatles confidante] Neil Aspinall instantly saw the potential.”
       
Harrison continues to work on developing “Rock Band” and says its potential has barely been scraped.

“I’m working on ‘Rock Band 3’ and making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game,” he says. “Give me a couple years, it’s going to happen.”
       

greg@gregkot.com

Thenewno2 with Wolfmother and the Heartless Bastards: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13 at the Riviera, 4750 N. Broadway, $24; ticketmaster.com.      

Related:

Review: The Beatles: Rock Band

The Beatles remastered: Is it worth the price?

Maniacs critique the Beatles reissues

        In what could be a prelude to making the Beatles catalog available as digital files at on-line stores, the band’s entire collection of compact discs will be digitally remastered for the first time in two decades and re-released Sept. 9.

        The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music made the joint announcement Tuesday. The CDs will be released with new liner notes and photos, and will be embedded for a limited period with a brief digital documentary film about each album. Two new Beatles CD boxed sets, one in mono and one in stereo, will also be released.

        The release date will coincide with the debut of “The Beatles: Rock Band” video game, the band’s first foray into digital music.

         For many Beatles fans, much of the anticipation regarding the back catalog has centered on when and how it would become available as high-quality digital downloads. In separate interviews with the Tribune two years ago, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both said there would be a digital roll-out of the Beatles catalog “soon,” but would not give a specific date.

        With Tuesday’s announcement, that conversion appears to be a little closer to reality, though in typical Beatles fashion, “no further information [is] available at this time.”

         The four-year CD remastering process will result in “the highest fidelity the catalog has seen since its original release,” according to the band’s media statement. It encompasses 14 discs: all 12 original Beatles albums in stereo, plus “Past Masters Vol. I and II,” which will combined as one title, and “Magical Mystery Tour,” introduced in 1987 when the Beatles catalog was first mastered for CD. The 14 discs will also be available as a stereo box set. The second box will gather all the Beatles recordings mixed for mono release, including 10 original albums and two discs of mono master recordings.

        The remastering is long overdue, given that most of the Beatles CDs now on the market haven’t been upgraded since they were originally issued in 1987, and sound like it. The 26-track “Love” remix in 2006 for Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas tribute to the band hinted at what listeners might hear if the Beatles catalog were given a 21st Century sonic upgrade. Working with original source tapes, the “Love” engineers created stereo and DVD surround-sound remixes that revealed or enhanced nuances in the Beatles music: the ripples of percussion in “Come Together,” the bite of the guitars in “Revolution,” the swooping strings in “I Am the Walrus,” the shake of maracas in “A Day in the Life.”

        But “Love” was just a teaser and a cruel one at that, reminding listeners just how inferior and unsatisfying their vintage Beatles CDs now sound. The ‘87 CDs were digital copies of electronically processed tapes of the original recordings.

        The upgraded CDs, according to the Beatles press release, were copied a track at a time into the digital format from the analog master tapes. Some “limiting” was used to increase the volume of the CDs, but “it was unanimously agreed [by the engineers] that because of the importance of the Beatles’ music, limiting would be used moderately, so as to retain the original dynamics of the recordings.”

        We await the finished versions --- and the price tag. Will the Beatles demand top dollar for the remastered versions of their albums, many of which contain less than 35 minutes of music and many of which their fans already own on vinyl and CD? If past history is any guide, you can bet the individual titles will retail for $15 and up. In which case, the remastering had better be the next best thing to sitting by John Lennon’s side while the Beatles recorded at Abbey Road. 

    greg@gregkot.com