025 - No Reply - Jessie Murphy In The Woods

DOWNLOAD HERE

Song - No Reply

Artist - Jessie Murphy In The Woods

Original Version recorded September 30, 1964

Ukulele Version recorded June 6, 2009

Jessie Murphy: Guitar, Vocals.

Amy Stratton: French Horn, Bass,Vocals.

Marcia Webb: Clarinet, Flute, Wurlitzer Piano, Vocals.

With:

Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele.

Johnathan Tortora: Drums.

Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio, Brooklyn.

For best results, play No Reply on loop on your audio player while reading this essay.

Ready? Go!

No Reply is a John Lennon song about an obsessive creep who won’t take no for an answer. Himself. It is another of John’s Audio Restraining Orders, in the vein of Run For Your Life, It Won’t Be Long, and I’ll Get You.

No Reply is also the first song on the melancholy Beatles For Sale album. It is followed by the troubling I’m A Loser, and the morbid Baby’s In Black. Lennon’s sadness continues unabated on side two, with the self-pitying I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party. What a pooper.

Yes John, you do want to spoil the party. You’d be Carrie at The Prom if you could. You hate us, we the few, the happy.

What the hell was eating Lennon? And why was he eating so much? From my perspective, being a Beatle in late 1964 seems like a pretty good gig. For all intents and purposes, John had become a Living God. Perhaps only Napoleon or Alexander had experienced anything like it. But here’s our hero turning into Fat Elvis years before Elvis had the idea himself and writing totally bummed out material.

Lennon was a moody man, and a jealous guy. Complex enough to get angry while clinically depressed. Hence truly dangerous. A fractured personality built upon the shaky foundation of a bad tempered blind orphan. It may not have been chemically possible for him to just cheer up and grow a stiff upper lip. He needed medication. Drugs. Help!

No Reply is a crappy song, but you have to admire Lennon’s honesty. It wouldn’t occur to me to share such ugly, insecure behavior and sentiments with my millions of teenage fans. I would tend to put on a pretend positive public face, despite my shaky, icky personality, like Michael Jackson.

Bad example. Back to the song:

We imagine a poor pretty girl is hiding in her house, tormented by a penniless jilted ex-boyfriend who’s skulking around, keeping close watch on her every movement.

At least our hero isn’t a homosexual pedophile. Uh oh, I just checked the lyrics.

The gender of the love object in No Reply is never mentioned. It is only “You.” "You" at one point is seen walking hand in hand with another man. This tells us nothing. The love object could be Daniel Radcliffe for all we know.

I’ve always assumed that the new man walking hand in hand with the No Reply character is the same guy that John murders two songs later in Baby’s In Black. But it could be even worse than that.

Caribou Barbie Hiking On The Appalachian Trail Crazy. God only knows.

No Reply, like Run For Your Life, is not just sick and anti-social, it’s unoriginal. The concept closely follows the narrative of the 1957 mega-hit, Silhouettes (On The Shade).

“Took a walk and passed your house, late last night.” Silhouettes.

“This happened once before, when I came to your door, No Reply.”

“All the shades were closed and drawn, way down tight.” Silhouettes.

“They said it wasn’t you, but I saw you peep through, your window.” No Reply.

“From within the dim light cast, two silhouettes on the shade.”

Different tunes, same story.

The sound and orchestration of No Reply is gentle and acoustic. Why?

Like Led Zeppelin in 1968, two traits viscerally separated The Beatles of 1963 from every other band on earth.

They were the loudest band, and they had the longest hair. (Still not time for the big hair essay.)

Why did they "suddenly" forget to kick ass? (Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be.)

There remains a huge audience to this day for any band that is both Def and Tap, both Spinal and Leopard. So why should the biggest act in the world, the Beatles, drastically alter their style in late 64? What external influence was turning their volume down, besides Lennon’s deteriorating mental state?

It was the gravity of Planet Bob.

The Beatles and Bob Dylan were like two bodies orbiting each other circa 64-65. John and Paul’s writing and music increasingly resembled Dylan’s, and Dylan became more and more noisy like the Beatles. By 65 he went electric at a folk festival, royally pissing off Pete Seeger. (Something wrong in my broken anarchist heart is warmed by the thought of Saint Pete Seeger blowing his stack and looking for a plug to pull backstage. Pete needed to chill out and puff the magic dragon.) It was just a matter of time before Dylan killed Pete Seeger off metaphorically and stole his audience, and his mojo.

Bob and Pete are neighbors. But they are not friends.

No Reply does not rock, neither does it roll. John and George play acoustic guitar; the feel is Fab Faux-Latin. Lennon sings his own double tracked lead vocals, and as is typical of this period, the performance is botched. One of the vocal doubles disappears at 41 seconds on the word “your”. At 48 seconds there is a terrible fuck up on “I nearly died”, where it sounds like an extra Lennon voice going “died/tried.” Possibly the worst Beatle vocal mistake ever. At 59 seconds there is a clipped punch in on the vocal, “In my place.” There is no double on “In my” and it comes back spastically at “place”. No excuse darlings. Bad Norman. Bad George Martin for not starting the track over.

Remember when we listen to Beatle records, we are not listening to live performances. We are listening to Loudspeaker Paintings performed on Tape Recorders via Microphones and Amplifiers. This was fresh thinking, and in the early days of every medium, there is a lot of messiness. Incunabula is a cornucopia of typos. That’s part of the charm. Like the clumsiness of children. Adorable. So too multi-track recording.

EMI studios, later Abbey Road, was designed to document live performances. The Beatles, from the get go, recorded in layers, a new concept, and this only increased in complexity over time. In 1964, the reel-to-reel tape machines used on Beatle records were in a completely different room than where the producer and engineer were sitting. Some poor tape operator - who we suspect was Chris Neal - was down the hall, listening on an intercom doing punch-ins, or more vitally, punch–outs. This made it needlessly difficult to start recording or to stop recording and not erase any important information. Imagine you were a cameraman and you had to yell on an intercom “click” or “action” to take a picture. That would be retarded. You should be able to activate such a primary action yourself.

So, tough and primitive technical conditions prevailed, but upon assessing the sonic abortion that is No Reply, that is scant defense. Lots of other contemporaneous recordings were less bad. But musically, somebody did something right. Such as Paul. Let’s look at the playing.

McCartney doubles his vocal harmonies on the B section and the end of each verse. The reason people don’t notice all the flubs on this song is the fantastic sound of 2 McCartney’s and 2 Lennon’s singing super in tune with each other. That’s what the people wanted, and that’s what they got. McCartney always enjoyed the Bill Clintonesque transaction of pleasing the public, while John always felt dirty about it.

Or Maybe John was always suicidal and nuts and there was never any pleasing him and that’s why he was always subconsciously inviting some imaginary enemy to kill him. And realistically, Lennon should have been assassinated in Memphis in 1966. The KKK was holding a rally outside their concert, re the Bigger Than Jesus controversy. But he lived. That time. It was Dr. King who was killed in Memphis 18 months later. I wonder what Lennon thought that day in April 1968?

Glad it wasn’t him? Heavy is the crown upon the head of Caesar?

Back to music.

Paul is solid as usual on bass. George Martin plays eighth note piano in the bridge, and handclaps are added on quarter notes.

Near the end of the song is a rare Ringo form mistake. He goes to the No Reply refrain one bar early at 2:01. It’s a fill and kick/crash cymbal to nowhere. How did they let this go?

No Reply is an awful recording, a ghastly performance, and a grisly result.

But I like it. Or what I really mean is, I like my memory of myself listening to No Reply over all these years. The way I like grilled American cheese on white bread, The Mets, and Regis and Kelly.

It’s just embarrassing to admit when you love something, that upon close consideration, sucks so deeply.

Like reality......

Postscript:

Two arch villains from our period of interest, the serial embezzler, Allen Klein, and the glib war criminal Robert McNamara, had the decency to die this week. Considering Paul McCartney’s Fierce Karma, it is wonder that Klein lived so long.

McNamara was US Secretary of Defense from 61-68, almost exactly concurrent with The Beatles career. Instead of writing 185 songs, he was the primary architect of the Vietnam War, with an impressive body-count of 2 to 3 million. McNamara died in his sleep at age 93. Proving once again, that in the real world in which we are stuck, there is no such thing as Karma, only luck. Sometimes the wicked just get away with it.

Our version of No Reply features the star struck female trio, Jessie Murphy In The Woods. Jessie is a big fan of the actor Daniel Radcliffe, he of Harry Potter fame.

Yes, it was weird that she attended every single performance of Equus on Broadway, where Daniel starred as a horse maiming nudist. But there’s no law against that. Jessie is also obsessed with horses, which of course, is not illegal either. But when she started riding by Daniel’s house in New York City every day on her Icelandic Pony, leaving little love packages, the authorities, inevitably, became involved. Luckily the recent benefit concert Roger And Dave organized for her Legal Defense Fund was a big success.

Reality is in our mind.

Enjoy.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A lonely little girl is riding a big brown horse on a perfect sunny day. She doesn’t know it yet, but this is the happiest moment of her life. Recapturing that feeling is the special mission of Jessie Murphy In The Woods.

Jessie Murphy In The Woods is a New York City based all female “chamber pop” trio. That means no distorted electric guitars, no boys and their nonsense whatsoever. Never.

What’s left is a delicate crystal bell jar filled with potpourri. They are Emily Dickinson in a distressed tutu. Theatrical. Victorian. Feminine.

The ladies have just returned from a U.K. trip: where they made a special visit to Daniel's house. His reaction exceeded their wildest expectations.

Enter their world at

http://www.myspace.com/jessiemurphyinthewoods