Tag: The Who

  • Edvard Grieg – In the Hall of the Mountain King

    Classical composer Edvar Grieg wrote In the Hall of the Mountain King for the play Peer Gynt which premiered in 1876. As such, it had a cinematic soundtrack quality to it, long before cinema became a broad popular pastime. Because of this it has long been a favorite background music for television and film. Most recently a rendition by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross popped up on the award-winning soundtrack of The Social Network.

    A lot of musicians covered or sampled it, without it being specifically intended to accompany moving images. Notable covers are the versions by The Lancasters (titled Satan’s Holiday in 1965) ELO (1973), Apollo 100 as Mad Mountain King (1972) The Who (recorded in 1967, released in 1995), metal cello-quartet Apocalyptica (2000) and Epica (2009).

    But sampling it has been done quite a lot too. Whistle used the melody as a short hook in Just Buggin’ (1986). Master-sampler Coldcut featured a sample in Stop This Crazy Thing (1988) from (I think) the jazz-cover by Hugo Montenegro. Tango used it in the acid-track Can’t Stop the Rush. The song is among the classical tunes used in the title theme for the Sonic the Hedgehog-cartoon (1993). Vibes & Wishdokta used it in Motorway Madness (1996). A personal hardcore favorite: Juggernaut’s Ruffneck Rules da Artcore Scene (1996) Eurodance-artists Captain Jack used it in Dream a Dream (1999 and the 2009 version too). Delinquent Habits used it impressively in The Kind (1999). Most recently parts of it were used by Votchi in Unicorn (2004).

    As a bit of trivia, according to the Wikipedia-article the tune also served as the basis for the Inspector Gadget theme.

  • The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time

    All aboard the sample train, this is going to be a long ride.

    Let’s start in 1948. Roebuck Staples forms a gospel group with his family called The Staple Singers. Not even mentioned in their Wikipedia-page is the fact that in 1955 they released a recording of the traditional gospel song This May be the Last Time in a blues style.

    Ten years later in 1965, The Rolling Stones ‘borrowed’ most of the lyrics for their single The Last Time. This was not uncommon in those days (see: When the Levee Breaks). On a side note: also not uncommon was for the big bands of that era (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) to cover each other’s songs. So when half of the Rolling Stones were sentenced to prison for drug charges in 1967, The Who recorded their cover version of the song out of support and a bit of irony.

    Back on track, in 1966 Andrew Oldham, former manager/producer of the Rolling Stones created an orchestrated version of the Last Time and released it on the 1966 album The Rolling Stones Songbook. Even though the song barely resembles the original, copyrights were attributed to the Stones. This became an important issue decades later in 1997 when The Verve released their song Bitter Sweet Symphony. It clearly uses a sample of the Oldham version, which they licensed. Strangely enough however they got sued by The Rolling Stones, because according to them they used a lot more of their own song than the license had specified. Eventually, the Verve also got sued by Andrew Oldham. The result was that all of the credits on Bitter Sweet Symphony now point to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, writers of the Rolling Stones song The Last Time. Which in itself is ‘stolen’ from a 1955 song. An irony also pointed out in the sample-documentary RIP, a Remix Manifesto.

    The Verve’s song has led to many other artists sampling their track again. Our last stop on this long ride ends with just one of them: Mark van Dale’s Water Verve. Although it’s arguable that this track was probably sampled from the Oldham version, the fact that it was released just a year after Bitter Sweet Symphony should be proof enough that it was riding The Verve’s popularity wave. Oh and the title Water Verve is a play on words, since  the word waterverf not only sounds like Water Verve, it means “water paint” in Dutch.

    After all the music that was inspired by each other, here’s the place where we started: The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time:

    Keith Richards and Mick Jagger