Turn Me On, Dead Man

When thinking about a title to use, I chose the phrase "turn me on, dead man" because it's memorable and provacative, but the strange thing about this often repeated phrase is that no one actually spoke those words. The phrase "turn me on, dead man" entered popular culture in the late-1960s when people looking for clues about the death of Paul McCartney played the Beatles track "Revolution 9" backwards. When reversed, the repeated phrase "number nine... number nine... number nine..." becomes "turn me on, dead man... turn me on, dead man... turn me on, dead man..." Like other catch-phrase memes, "turn me on, dead man" has now spread beyond its original context and has been used for a variety of purposes. There's this website, of course, and the associated internet-only radio station on Live365.com. The radio station came first, actually. I set up the website and included an article about the "Paul is dead" rumor with the intention of explaining the significance of the name. Only later did I discover that Andru Reeve (now a contributor to this blog) had written a book about the "Paul is dead" rumor using the same title years earlier that went into considerable detail about this strange story. Andru has now written two editions of his book. The first edition was part of the "Rock and Roll Remembrances" series and carried the subtitle "The Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax." The expanded second edition is subtitled "The Beatles and the 'Paul Is Dead' Hoax." Another book entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man by Jerald Ford published earlier this year is a fictional account of the "Paul is dead" story. A recent movie called Turn Me On, Dead Man (2009) is also a fictional account of "Paul is dead" but I believe the book and the movie were created independently.

A repackaging of a 1979 radio broadcast about the "Paul is dead" rumor carries the subtitle "Turn Me On, Dead Man." Other Beatles-related uses of the title "turn me on, dead man" include a blog about the Beatles, an episode of Ground Zero TV that discusses Charles Manson's bizarre interpretation of the Beatles' White Album (and adds some "out there" conspiracy theories of its own), and the Beatles bootleg album Turn Me On, Dead Man: the John Barrett Tapes. Most of the uses of the phrase "turn me on, dead man," however, have little to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor. To my knowledge the band Turn Me On Dead Man has never made reference to "Revolution 9" or the "Paul is dead" rumor (although one of their tracks is called "Beatle George"). Also, several songs with little or no connection to "Paul is dead" are entitled "Turn Me On, Dead Man":

	Artist	Album	Year
	Game Theory	Lolita Nation	1987
	Swell Maps	A Trip to Marineville [reissue with bonus tracks]	1989 (original release, 1979)
	The Tear Garden	Last Man to Fly	1992
	Exit	Disco Sucks (compilation)	1996
	23 Degrees	From Here to Tranquility Vol. 5: The Silent Channel (compilation)	1996
	Bill Lloyd	Standing on Shoulders of Giants	1999
	Swifts	Quiet Little Mouse	2004
	The Brettster	Everything But Why	2008
	Tauntaun	Tauntaun	2009
	Ceremony(NL)	Reflections of a Decade	2009
	Spirit of the Matter	Zuble Land	2010

Other variations on the title include "Turn Me On 'Mr. Deadman'" (2000) by the Union Underground, "Turn Me On Again, Dead Man" (2008) by Tape Recorder Three, and "You Turn Me On" (1992) by the Beat Happening, where the line "turn me on, dead man" is repeated several times.

I did some Googling and found several articles that have used the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man." A Scientific American article by Michael Shermer uses the "Paul is dead" rumor as an example of how we make false associations. Our brains are good at pattern recognition, but this capability sometimes leads us to make associations where none exist. According to Shermer, in the search for clues about the death of Paul McCartney, "What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world." Shermer refers to this as "the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not." Also, an article about video game design on the website Game Design Advance uses the "Paul is dead" rumor to put forth the argument that urban legends make for the best alternate-reality games. Once again, however, most of the articles that use this title have nothing to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor. A Screen Rant article describing a recent movie where the Beatles become zombies uses the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man" even though the movie itself has little to do with the "Paul is dead" rumor, except that "Paul is undead" in the movie. The title was also used by the Boston Phoenix for an interview with George Romero. This article put the word "Dead" in quotes, as Romero was the director of The Night of the Living Dead (I see a "turn me on, dead man"-zombie connection building here). An article lamenting the lack of new music in the 2008 Grammy awards used the title "Turn Me On, Dead Man" to make light of the practice of giving the awards to dead musicians over living artists. An article in the University of Toronto student newspaper used the same title to highlight the excessive use of death imagery in the language we use to describe sexuality. Perhaps the most tenuous use of the phrase "turn me on, dead man" is in the Hollywood Elsewhere article about the most overpaid actors in Hollywood.

Like other catch-phrase memes, "turn me on, dead man" has gone well beyond its origins. What makes this unique, however, is that it is a line that no one actually said. Perhaps there are other examples of misheard lyrics or misquoted movie lines that have taken on a life of their own, but none immediately come to mind. Examples, anyone?

Recently Rolling Stone magazine updated their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The current list makes only minor alterations to the original version of this list, which was published in 2004. For the original list "Rolling Stone asked a blue-ribbon panel of 162 artists, producers, industry executives and journalists to pick the greatest songs of all time." Here is a graph showing the count of songs by year of release, the gray bars represent the 2004 list and the black bars represent the 2010 list. The "Special Collectors Edition" included a similar, but less detailed figure, showing only counts by decade. Breaking it out by year is revealing, though, with a peak in 1956 capturing the impact of Elvis and the artists at Sun Records, followed by the breakout of the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the middle of the 1960s. The two peak years being 1965 and 1967, the year Rolling Stone began publication.

The criticisms of this sort of list are obvious: the great majority of artists featured in this list are either from the United States or the United Kingdom, with only one song is not sung in English ("La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens). I don't want to criticize the list for what it is not, because a list like this can never please anyone. The list is what it is: a retrospective of popular music filtered through Rolling Stone, an undeniably influential publication. I'm not taking issue with any particular song included in the list. Wait, I take that back--"Rock Lobster" is the 147th best song of all-time? Is this some kind of in-joke? If you're going to include novelty songs with animals in the title, why stop there? How about "Disco Duck" or "Who Let the Dogs Out"? or reach back to "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?" But, then again, looking at the appendix entitled "How We Made the List" (which has no information about how they actually made the list) reveals that Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider of the B-52s were both on Rolling Stone's "blue ribbon panel".

But I digress. As I said, I don't want to criticize the list for what it is not, but instead to look at the list on its own terms. I have two main criticisms. My first criticism is that this "update" seems pretty pointless to me--even more pointless than the whole idea of assembling a "blue ribbon panel" to validate what was probably a mostly predetermined list of songs to begin with, that is. According to the appendix, in 2009 Rolling Stone assembled "a similar group of 100 experts" to pick the best songs released since 2000, which ended up bringing the total number of songs released in the last decade to 27. The order of the original list was altered very little for the updated version. Instead, the more recent entries bumped older songs that have somehow lost their luster in the last six years. Like most everything else with this list, however, the deletions were arbitrary. How is it that "Da Doo Ron Ron" went from being the 114th best song of all time on the 2004 list--better even than "Rock Lobster"!--to being thrown off the list altogether? Despite the minimal changes to the 2004 list, the 2010 edition features an intro written by Jay-Z, so I guess that makes it more "current".

My other, and more general criticism is that it strikes me as odd that it portrays the last four decades, the period of time that Rolling Stone has been in publication, as a period of relentless decline. Really? All downhill musically since the Summer of Love? Haven't there been a few innovations in music in the last 43 years? Even if you don't like the genres that have developed in the last 43 years, haven't a number of excellent songwriters and bands risen during this period? Writing in the late-1990s, Jann Wenner pointed out,

Rolling Stone was quick to recognize punk rock (which traded heroes for anti-heroes), but slower and more ambivalent about 1970s funk, heavy metal, dance music and hip-hop, which have turned out to be significant influences on the 1990’s. Lately, as rock’s center has collapsed, the magazine is still sorting out which subgenres and subcultures to certify.

The way I interpret this is that as the music market has splintered it's gotten harder to find good music, so if you're Rolling Stone magazine, why bother? Or maybe it's that Rolling Stone has never seen the need to challenge the somewhat narrow musical aesthetic it's had since it began publication.

Oh sure, it's fun to read lists like this, but I could do without the self-importance of it all. Is it really necessary to call it "The ultimate playlist, created by the editors of Rolling Stone and a panel of experts"? As I said in an earlier post, I highly recommend This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin. Levitin notes that are brains are hard-wired for music and asserts that,

In what is a recurring theme of your brain on music, even those of us who lack explicit training in musical theory and performance have musical brains, and are expert listeners.

So go ahead make your own list of the 500 (or any other arbitrary number) greatest songs of all time. I'd love to read anyone's list. Where would you rank "Rock Lobster"?

This week, a somewhat legendary, almost mythical Beatles outtake emerged from...well, somewhere.  It's the much-discussed Take 20 of the White Album track "Revolution 1".  Why is it legendary?  Well, I'll let Mark Lewisohn explain, with a 1968 entry from his book The Beatles: Recording Sessions:



Now, I'll bet you want to hear it, don't you?  Of course you do.  Here it is:

Subways and music go together like, well, subways and music. That is to say, they go together well and nothing else is quite like hearing music in the subway. Mike Kobal has filmed several musicians performing the New York subway.

Next, "Artificial," directed by Paul Bryan uses images from the London Underground set to "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" by Mogwai to capture a sense of traveling in the London Underground.

And finally, in 2007 the Washington Post did an experiment in the Washington DC metro, the system I ride most every day. They filmed acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell performing incognito in L'enfant Plaza, one of the hub stations of the metro system. Over 1000 people walked by but almost no one took any notice of his playing, only a people people slowed down for a moment to listed and he took in about $50 who tossed money into his violin case, including $20 from the one person who recognized him. The full article "Pearls Before Breakfast" by Gene Weingarten, appeared in the Washington Post in 2007, along with audio of Joshua Bell's full performance in the metro station.