 You can't talk unless you've seen the movie. There's nothing in it. What am I doing? Josh! Come back for a stupid reaction of Corbin. Rick! Keep following the Instagram, Twitter for more juicy content. Thanks for being so interesting. Don't forget to subscribe. Like, button. You know what's more disconcerting than that when you go to take a drink and there's nothing there? If you go to take a drink, for example, like you think it's a glass of milk and it turns out to be orange juice, that's disconcerting. Why would I, why wouldn't I know what it is? Have you never done that where you've been somewhere and you've reached for something and you grabbed the wrong beverage? No. You don't have more than one beverage at a time. Except when I put my hand down some of these pants and I'm just like okay with whatever I find. You've never been at a breakfast at a restaurant or a family breakfast of some kind and you have coffee, milk, juice, water? Why do I have four drinks? Because they're all breakfast beverages that are often served at a brunch. At the same time. Yes. No. Today we got a video. This is actually called How Ravi Shankar Sitar Became an American Obsession. George Harrison on the Beatles. Well, we don't even need to watch. Bye everybody. Goodbye. There's probably a little more to it than that. But that's probably definitely an element. Because I think he was a big deal before then though. Not in America. Here we go. Team 60s were an explosive, endlessly intriguing decade for music, thanks in large part to one man. I'm not talking about Elvis, Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles, but instead a sitar player from India. Ravi Shankar would end up changing the course of western music. He was a catalyst for the psychedelic revolution. You don't have Sergeant Peppers and Beyond for The Beatles without Ravi Shankar. And he regretted. There's Richard Harrison. He just says why did he regret it, by the way? Why did he regret it? Ravi Shankar was born in India in 1920. Wait, Ravi Shankar was Indian? He was part of a dance group alongside his brother Uday Shankar. They toured Europe and America, dancing for and educating audiences. Eventually, at age 18, he quit touring to study sitar. After six rigorous years of training, Ravi moved to Mumbai and composed for the Indian People's Theater Association. Shankar was invited into the Soviet Union in 1954 as part of a cultural delegation. One year later, he was invited to perform a demonstration in New York City. Ravi resigned from his post at All India Radio and focused on touring the UK, Germany and the US. Keep in mind, this was 1956, when the biggest song on the radio in the States was Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis. Man, the better off tears keep flowing. The death... Stole Black People's Music. Black Experimentation and The Foreign Wave were still only on the horizon. It was around this time that Ravi befriended the founder of World Pacific Records, Richard Bach, and recorded albums on his latest... Many relation to Bach or the composer. ...which being Three Raghats in 1956. For the most part, though, Ravi was playing for smaller audiences. It wasn't until the 60s that artists began to take note of Ravi's sound, and the assimilation didn't start with the Beatles or any rock group. It actually gained traction with a jazz artist, John Coltrane, to be exact. On his 1961 album, Africa, Brass, Coltrane replicated the sound of the tabla in Indian drum played with your palms and fingers. It was a key component to Ravi's instrumental lineup. To accomplish this, Coltrane hired two bass players to mirror the sound. He once told a journalist, his music moves me. I'm certain that if I recorded with him, I'd increase my possibilities tenfold. John never did get to record with Ravi, though he did name his second son after him. Wow. He reached a turning point for Ravi's sitar music in the West, 1965. The birds recorded at the same studio as Shankar... Who the hell are the birds? ...remember David Crosby got to see Ravi 5. What's their song? Really? What's their song? ...he was a vocal proponent of his music. The birds' advocacy for Ravi would soon reach the ears of Beatles member George Harrison. George was immediately taken with the sounds of the sitar. While recording a new Beatles song, Norwegian Wood, George would make an impulse decision to add an improvised sitar layer onto the track. This would be the first known rock song to utilize a sitar. That is correct. This track, along with numbers by the Yardbirds and the Kinks, would jump start a sitar wave that took over the West. The next year, 1966, was an explosive time for this music, now coined as Raga Rock. Hundreds of pop and rock songs would be influenced by Ravi. What a song. He became an icon for this growing psychedelic rock movement and bolstered up by his friendship with George Harrison, he became the world's most famous Indian musician of the 60s. In 1967, he opened up a western branch of the Canara School of Music in LA. Ravi Krieger, the guitarist for the Doors, studied music here and fell in love with the sound, employing it on songs like The End and Indian Summer. In 1967, the sitar fad was taken to New Heights when guitar company Dan Electro introduced the choral electric sitar. An instrument that made it easier than ever for the guitarist to tap into that exotic Indian sound. Ravi's influence and the Raga Rock genre had many unique characteristics outside of using the sitar. Notable attributes were a drone element traditionally provided by the Tamora or a harmonium, use of Indian scales, lyrical themes related to mysticism and the use of repetitive phrasings. There were definitely other elements at play during this time, specifically in California, where the drug Lasurgic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was exploding and it wasn't going to be illegal for another two years. The psychedelic properties of acid made this foreign... Oh man, those hippies love that stuff. ...hippies were infatuated, not just... I love you mom and dad. They love Indian music, but Eastern culture and religious spirituality. Many associated the meditative and spiritual nature of Indian classical music with the euphoria and surreal effects of psychedelics. Drugs played a major role in the rise of Raga Rock, and Ravi was burdened with its connection to the sitar. Ravi's first sign of hesitation regarding the fashionable use of the sitar in Western music actually coincided with the first use of the sitar in Western music, Norwegian wood by the Beatles. The last-minute improvisational manner of using the sitar is one that's faced some criticism. In a 1966 issue of Craw Daddy, critic Sandy Perlman said, if used only in the interest of exoticism, it can quickly become not particularly justifiable, since the sitar simply echoes Lenin's guitar melody, its presence conveys gimmicky orientalism, and not much else. Ravi himself seemed to be shocked to hear his native instrument being used in popular music, and also being played incorrectly. I couldn't believe it. It sounded so strange. Just imagine some Indian villager trying to play the violin when you know what it should sound like. Even Harrison himself admitted that the sitar on the song was very rudimentary. I didn't know how to tune it properly, and it was a very cheap sitar to begin with. This example is indicative of the criticism with a lot of Raga Rock. It's worth noting that one of the only people to fully embody the culture and meaning behind Indian classical music was actually George Harrison. After Norwegian wood came out, his admiration with Indian culture didn't stop, but instead triggered him to immerse himself in Indian music and study it under him. They went to India and studied under him. Shankar was taken aback by Harrison's devotion to the instrument, and realized it wasn't just a fashion for the Beatles member. In 1968, Harrison went to India to take lessons from Shankar. It was this lifelong friendship that was the catalyst for the success of Raga Rock and Indian influence on the West. However, the clash between Ravi's world and that of the West persisted. Ravi recounts being horrified after playing a successful set at Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 when Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar. That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments. They are like part of God. I can see why for an Indian that would be jarring. Yeah. The crowd of rock fans broke into applause. Shankar responded, if you like our tuning, I hope you will enjoy the playing more. Ravi's relationship with hippie culture came to a boiling point at the famous 1969 Woodstock Festival, a performance that became one of his greatest regrets. Calling it a terrifying experience. Ravi likened the audience to water buffalos in India, submerged in mud. Calling for a mass audience of tripping hippies seemed to be the final straw for Ravi. After Woodstock, he wouldn't return to the US for over a year and a half, distancing himself from the whole Raga Rock movement. It makes me feel rather hurt when I see the association of drugs with our music. People would come to my concerts stoned and they would sit in the audience, drinking coke and making out with their girlfriends. I found it very humiliating. I can see why he would coming from an Indian. It was a terrible experience at the time. People often think that there must be an end to the connection between Indian music and drugs, maybe because of the bizarre sound and the play that way. Bizarre? Yikes. I don't think Ravi was prepared to enter the sphere of western popular culture, especially in the context of the drug scene at the time. Already, Ravi was decades older than this counterculture generation. He had committed the first part of his life to mastering his instrument, making a name for himself in the classical community, and then sought to educate the world on these sounds. His world was not one of sex, drugs or rock and roll. By the 70s, use of the sitar in popular music had decreased, but the spirit of Raga Rock continued well into the 70s and beyond. It's been an integral evolution from modern psychedelic rock with artists like Animal Collective, Krongbin, MGMT, King Gizzard and Spongil. All the artists who, whether they even know or not, adopted many of the same characteristics established in Raga Rock. Although he did have regrets, Ravi was still proud of what he managed to accomplish during this time. After all, he helped to forever alter the course of western music. Interesting. Great video. Really informative. Yeah, well done. Very informative video. A bunch of stuff that obviously did not know, and also hadn't ever thought about the element of when it first started, and was it George Harrison playing it? Yeah, George Harrison played it in Norwegian Wood, and it was just very simple. It's just melody replication. But you can easily understand why, especially, there's so many things that are coming from what we know of Indian culture, especially Indian classical music culture, and their respect for the music and the instrument, and then to force it into the hippie culture. Not that they forced it, but the fact that those two things kind of collided at the exact same time. Two basically opposite kind of cultures. Yeah, and Harrison, all of the Beatles, but especially Harrison, they were very vocal. I mean, I think that's probably one of the reasons among many. I think the primary reason Harrison and the Beatles went to India and studied under Ravi Shankar was because of his admiration for the music, and the expansion of their understanding of musical possibilities, as well as their openness to seeing what else could be expanded in consciousness that classical Indian music was connected to with Hinduism, and it just happened for the Beatles to coincide with the world of hallucinogenics at the time. But it wasn't predominant, and so it wouldn't surprise me if that was also one of the things that, you know, I first heard the name of Ravi Shankar. I was two or three, probably, because my dad's biggest influence was the Beatles, the first songs I ever learned. I learned how to harmonize. I learned everything about musicality from my dad's music and from the Beatles, and I used to sing with my dad with the Beatles. The first song I ever sang was the Beatles, and the first time I ever heard a sitar was on Norwegian Wood and the rest of the other Beatles albums, and particularly George. My dad just educated me on the fact that they were so enamored with this instrument and wanted to learn more about the instrument. It is a shame that more people just used it as a novelty, and even Harrison agreed. He said, I loved the instrument, and I was trying to do the best with it what I could, and that's why I wanted to go learn more. But I could absolutely see, it would be comparable to me today of seeing someone like Astaji Sakir Hussein seeing somebody set fire to a set of drums thinking, what are you doing? It would absolutely be tough on the sensitivities. Because it's a classical instrument with a completely different mindset about the respect of the music. I'm sure George Harrison, and I think he said it, probably regrets how he incorporated it, as opposed to having Ravi actually come play it. I think that's why he did it. One of the beautiful things about musical expression is the creativity and the fact that you can take something and use it outside of the norms that it's typically used for or just try to experiment with it. But it really shows you how deeply he respected Ravi Shankar and music and the instrument by going and studying with him. I'm sure he would probably, if you could do it differently, you would probably have had Ravi come and actually play as opposed to, because it's like what Shankar said. It's like watching somebody play the violin that's never played it before. Or it could almost seem cultural appropriation-wise. Like if there's a Native American instrument, and I wanted to do something, I had no idea how to play, and I was like, what are you doing? As opposed to having a Native American person who can actually come play it on it and beautifully incorporate the two cultures. So that element, I totally, and I didn't know that it was just George Harrison just fucking around on a sit-top. To show you the depth of it, for any of you who don't know, do a deep dive into the history of the Beatles and the relationship of Ravi Shankar and Indian music. So the importance of Sergeant Pepper as an album can't be overstated, because prior to that album, records were just a compilation of songs with some hits. And each song was just, is it a hit? We're gonna have a slow song, we're gonna have a dance song. Sergeant Pepper was the first concept album where song one to song last. Side A and B was a full experience for you, including the artwork on the album that stood as a singular piece of musical art and pop music. Every album that's come after that, where you have an album cover that matches it, that's not just highlighting the artists, that has songs that blend and go one into the other and tell a whole story from start to finish. It used to be back in the 70s after Sergeant Pepper. Everybody's album, the Stones did it, Led Zeppelin did it. What you would do is you would lay down, you put your headphones on, you'd start the album and you would just go on the journey of the album, not just listen to the individual songs. That's because of what happened to them having their mind opened, not just with psychedelics, but to Indian classical music and taking that to new places. That's why Hey Jude got Airplay as a seven minute song. No song was longer than two and a half minutes. People said to the Beatles, Hey Jude will never get Airplay. They said, we don't care, we're releasing it. You have a seven minute song like Hey Jude because they were looking at Indian classical music going, these pieces go on forever, why not? The influence is unmeasurable. Great video. And the birds, you know the birds. What song? You'll know two immediately. Hey Mr. Tambourine, man play a song for me. I know that is Bob Dylan. He wrote it. They covered it. And then you know this, to everything, turn, turn, turn. That's the birds. Great video as always. Let us know what you thought about it. Any other information, obviously? Great video. I know she's touring. I would love to actually talk to her and always go to his daughter's concert. Absolutely. He would love to. And we've seen her. We've seen her. But I would love to. I know she kind of does tours and stuff. I'd love to know her take on it as well. Because she would obviously have firsthand memories of those kinds of things and the influence and what she thinks about it. That just makes me sad. Like knowing what we know about it. Watching Zikir Hussein see somebody set tabloids on fire. Yeah, I would be disappointed. I'm sure Indians would have been as well. Just to have seen him. To see, it would be comparable to seeing a Zikir Hussein at some really rank grunge festival where everybody's just peeing on the stage and you're like, do you guys even have any idea what is on stage with you right now? I can absolutely understand that. Such different musical cultures for sure. I can totally understand. Anyway, sounds great. Let us know what you thought down below.