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jlowe

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His Majesty
Wrote it, yes, played it all, no.

The music works great for it's intended use.

It shows that claims, like Stu's that "Brian was incapable of writing music!" is nonsense.

But, it also some what confirms Jagger and Oldhams view that Brian's music was a bit too busy with lots of chord changes for pop music.

BUT...and it's a big but, I've often thought that Brian had the potential to do a Mike Oldfield, he of Tubular Bells fame.
Brian had the instrumental skills surely. Lyrics were not his strength obviously.

Actually the fore-runner and inspiration to Tubular bells - and I believe Oldfield has himself admitted this - was Fleetwood Mac's incredible Oh Well Pts 1 & 2. The way the song shifts from a rock song to a guitar symphony echoing Ennio Morriconi's epic spaghetti western soundtracks.











Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-02-04 12:43 by Silver Dagger.

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Mathijs

Well, in the end it is still not more than bits and pieces of Brian playing harmonica over an R&B beat (and even clashing with the strings during some of his bends) and some musings on recorder. It is still far away from being actual songs.

Mathijs

No, there's a lot more to it than that and there is a lot more to music than songs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-02-04 12:48 by His Majesty.

So, what did Brian actually play on this...?

This is from the original March 10 1967 pressrelease:

Brian, in London, explained that in writing and producing the soundtrack he had used various styles and sizes of units - ´ranging from one musician to ten´. He added, Í ran the gamut of line-ups - from the conventional brass combination to a country-band with Jews-harp, violin and banjo. In the main the musicians were established session men - though some of the boys from the group also played´.
What did Brian personally play? Sitar, organ, dulcimer, auto-harp and harmonica.
(Taken from Roy Carr´s excellent 1976 book "The Rolling Stones an illustrated record")

By the sound of it, it seems obvious that Brian also played recorder.

Felix Aeppli has the following:

Brian: sitar, organ, dulcimer, recorder, clarinet, harmonica, harpsichord, composer;
Jimmy Page: guitar; Nicky Hopkins: piano; Peter Gosling: vocals, mellotron, keyboards; Kenney Jones: drums; Mike Leander: orchestral score; Keith Richards: hand in the production.

And Nico Zentgraf:

Brian (gtr, sitar, org, dulcimer, recorder, clarinet, harpsichord, harm, cello, bass, banjo and maybe even more)/
Jimmy Page (gtr)/Nicky Hopkins(p)/Kenney Jones (dr)Peter Gosling (keyb, mellotron, voc on one track)/Mike Leander (conductor of orchestra)/& maybe some of the other members of The Rolling Stones (quite sure KR had a hand in the post-production).

By Brian´s description in the pressrelease, I don´t think he played banjo.

Apparently Bill has denied playing bass (can´t remember the source...) - so maybe Keith played bass. (Did Brian ever play bass?)

Gosling on mellotron...? Is there even mellotron in there?

Are there any more solid info available, perhaps?

There's mo mellotron on the film soundtrack.

More likely a session player played cello. Probably the banjo as well.

A Brian focused part of an interview with Volker Schlondorff about the Mord Und Totschlag soundtrack and related situation. Screen recording from recent Blue-Ray/DVD release.

[www.youtube.com]

Any chances to share this wonderful dvd privately, dear friends ?? please please please...




could be an iorr upload of the year indeed..... zillion thanks in advance!!

I managed to copy it, but without subtitles.

I got the audio for the soundtrack which is the most important thing.

yes the soundtrack is important, but the film itself is not bad too, imo.... great to see young Anita, and i think there is a very very short cameo of Brian himself, maybe in the bar scene ??? as Laura Jackson stated in her book... i may be wrong though...

subtitles are not that necessary particularily for me, and maybe to some more iorrians who, and i have no doubt in this, are willing to watch this outstanding release along with meself....

could you be so kind to upload this gem on wt in due time, please please ?? i'll wait as long as it could take, my friend. my email is open. hope there are some more people dying to watch this one too

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NathanLaze
yes the soundtrack is important, but the film itself is not bad too, imo.... great to see young Anita, and i think there is a very very short cameo of Brian himself, maybe in the bar scene ??? as Laura Jackson stated in her book... i may be wrong though...

No sign of Brian anywhere in the film.

I'd rather you buy it as the more sales happen the more viable a soundtrack release becomes.

Jones’ only tangible solo musical legacy is the soundtrack he provided for the German movie Mord Und Totschlag in 1967. This job came about because the movie starred Jones’ then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Young director Volker Schlondorff (later to win an Oscar for The Tin Drum) was a big Stones fan and was intrigued to find the band’s guitarist accompanying his star as shooting began in Munich in September 1966. Schlondorff and Jones (who was staying at the directors apartment on an doff with Pallenberg to escape the press) got to know each other. “He asked me if he couldn’t do the music for the movie,” says Schlondorff. Sclondorff had seen enough of Jones talent at first hand to know that acquiring his services would give him something more than lucrative novelty value: “I was around him all the time and I’d been to his apartment in London and he had a huge collection of instruments. I trusted that he could do it. He had this poetic quality. He was a Shelley type of character and the dandy. It was not like hard rock. He was much more into melody and feeling and, therefore, he was perfectly fine for the film. It struck me what an amazing character he was. He could be extremely nasty and spoilt, but at the same time he really was creativity incarnate and talent incarnate, and had a great intuition. Also he had quite an education, he had quite a horizon. It was not a calculating thing. I really felt “this is the best music I will ever get for a movie’.” Another thing that made a Rolling Stone ideal for Mord Und Totschlag was the fact that the movie was very much of the 60’s zeitgeist: its passionless, non-judgmental depiction of the female protagonist (Pallenberg) scheming to dump the body of her ex-boyfriend ater accidentally killing him made it one of the first movies to feature an anti-hero.

Schlondorff: “I was finished with the first editing around February of ‘67, then he came to Munich again and we did what’s called professionally spotting of the music. You had your spotting list by the frame and by the second and what composers did was compose to that list with the stopwatch with their piano and metronome. Brian had prepared that. He had a theme prepared for each little section. He was intuitive and it was very much on the mark, thinking not only of himself. [It was his] idea to have Nicky Hopkins do a piano piece [that] was kind of like a country-folk theme for an excursion into the country.” Asked about Jones’ apparent inability to write songs as opposed to incidental music, Schlondorff says, “he would not admit it. Quite the opposite. He would say , ‘but I know all that.’ He would insist that a lot of the Stones songs, actually there was a large part of his in there.”

However, when recording of the soundtrack started in Britain on 17th February, the director was disappointed to find Jones’ original energy and inspiration turning to quasi-paralysis, with him having to continually entice Jones out of his home into the car that would take him to the recording studio. “It was like a writer with writer’s block,” he says. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘but I’m not finished’ and ‘I need more time’. “Jones, probably with the assistance of the sessions’ engineer Glyn Johns, had put together a red-hot band to perform his compositions: Jimmy Page on guitar, Kenney Jones on drums and Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, even if Schlondorff remembers them mostly recording their parts separately. Brian Jones played just about everything else. Schlondorff: “We carried them all in the Rolls Royce. There certainly was the Indian sitar and a flute but I don’t whether he played that himself.”

Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones remembers his own contribution as being merely one day’s session work. “I had to watch a film of a fairground chase and I had to watch this guy run, and play drums freeform, anything that came into my head to make it exciting. Which was a very peculiar solo moment for me.” Although Kenney Jones had naturally run into the stones at various TV studios, this was the first time he’d spoken to Brian. “My first impression was, “@#$%&, he’s got a deep voice!’ It was like, [speaks in sonorous, upper class tones]: ’Hello Kenney, how are you?’ Very posh. I thought, ’Farkin ’ell! He’s a Rolling Stone and he’s a posh git from Eton!’ But he was very lovely, very accommodating, very sweet. It was done at IBC in Portland Place where The Small Faces virtually lived in the early days.” For that session at least Kenney Jones remembers Brian as being “very compos mentis”.

Most of the recording was done at Olympic Studios, Barnes. As this has latterly become the stones studio of choice, it’s not surprising that the odd Rolling Stone was also sometimes present. “When we finished they would keep going,” says Schlondorff of the Stones. “We finished mostly like 1 or 2am and then they would be going on at that point and doing some work for an album or something.” Had there been any suggestion at any point that the Rolling Stone would collectively play on the soundtrack? “No. Actually he would not have liked that. He was very jealous that this should be his own original solo. He wanted to prove - that was the whole point - that he could do this without the rest of the stones. Therefore, he wasn’t so happy when Keith came in to give a hand. It happened out of sheer necessity, to get it done.” Schlondorff estimates that Richards played on the session from the second or third night onwards. “Keith showed up and he’d just take an instrument or talk to the musicians.” All of this done literally against the backdrop of the movie: in the days before videos, the band had to get their music in synch with the scenes projected for their benefit.

Despite Jones’ stage-fright, Schlondorff was pleased with the results when recording finished after around six consecutive days of recording in three or four hour chunks. His criticism of Jones’ score is that, if anything, he did his job too well: “It worked well with the film but it was very subdued, it was self-effacing. He didn’t impose his sound or anything beyond the pictures. He just tried to serve the picture and, as a result, it doesn’t stand out as a score on it own. It’s fine with the picture but if you listen to it without anything. It’s still a nice little piece but it’s not striking.” Perhaps the highlight of the score is a car journey with some snarling hard rock featuring mellifluous organ and piano work. There is also a track with a vocal reputed to be provided by Peter Gosling of Moon’s Train, a band produced by Bill Wyman. Gosling (who recalls providing organ) can’t remember the vocal part but it would seem to be on a blues track around 20 minutes into the film which can’t be clearly heard because it is played beneath dialogue.

Despite a good reception at the Cannes Film Festival, Mord Und Totschlag (renamed A Degree Of Murder in English-speaking territories, although a literal translation would be Murder And Manslaughter?) was not a box-office smash. Schlondorff: “It did well in the sense that Fassbinder says he was very influenced by it and that was his favourite German movie and so on, but with the larger audience it didn’t [do] well at all.” Schlondorff never saw Jones again after Cannes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-15 19:04 by His Majesty.

Thanks HM.
A very good summary of Brian's musical talent....and limitations
Also nice to read about him as a musician rather than about his lifestyle.

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NathanLaze


could you be so kind to upload this gem on wt in due time, please please ??

You have an email.

got it and watched it already, thanks a ton my friend His Majesty... very nice film indeed, picture restoration is fine and more delightful that Brian's sondtrack seems to be much clear and prominent in the sound mix than on boot dvds... you are very generous, thanks again!

Mord Und Totschlag official DVD is for sale for a limited time with a 24% price reduction. [edition-deutsche-vita.de]

I tried to order ....I dont think they ship to usa....

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detroitken
I tried to order ....I dont think they ship to usa....

delivery zone Per order total
National € 0.00 3,99 €
EU (Customs Union) 8,00 € 8,00 €
EU (rest) 8,00 € 8,00 €
rest of the world 8,40 € 8,40 €