Hello and welcome to Morganchem, the home of all things NErDy at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School and the official web presence of Michael Morgan.
I take your child's education very seriously. It is with that intention that I have provided this webpage for you and your child to help get a better understanding of what goes on in their Chemistry class. Here you will find our weekly and semester long schedules, copies of all the homework assignments and laboratories, daily announcements, and important information to help parents keep their children on track.
To learn more about my academic activities and the success of my students view my biography under the "about" menu. For those interested in the many different academic activities that my students are involved in on a daily basis outside normal class hours look at the Chem Club page on the "about" menu.
Over the past twenty years music education has disappeared from our schools. This becomes obvious when listening to new music on the radio only to hear music that is unoriginal or even bad. Most of today's so called artists do not write their own music or even play their own instruments.
So in the spirit of teaching you everything we can, this page features an Album of the Week. These are not ordinary albums in the history of music. These are the groundbreaking pieces of music that truly shaped how music was presented, recorded, and how it influenced other musicians and the public.
A few notes about the choices. They are albums and not collections of single songs thrown together willy-nilly. They were meant to be played in order. They often told a story or set a mood. Some of them defined a genre and some defined a generation. I strongly recommend that you ask your Parents/Grandparents to dig through their record collections and find their old copies of these and put them on the turntable and experience them the way they were meant to be experienced.
The first two albums that really invented this genre are by the Beatles. Before them an artist would go into the studio and record one or two songs that they "focused on" and then the producer would have the artist quickly record a bunch more to fill out an entire album. Often these songs were written by someone else and really had no similarities to the others on the album. But not this time!
The Beatles Rubber Soul and Revolver are where we begin. Rolling Stone magazine called Rubber Soul the fifth best album of all time. Time magazine called it the best. Revolver has repeatedly been chosen as one of the best of all time and it was Rolling Stone's choice as number one.
Rubber Soul had influences in it not regularly heard in rock and roll. At this point in time rock songs were only 2-3 minutes long and used only three chords. If you used four chords, to quote Pete Townsend, you could be "hauled up in front of the committee". These songs got longer. The lyrics went much deeper than had been heard in music before. Usually you just talked about how pretty the girl was and that was it. Now the...(continued)
The first two albums that really invented this genre are by the Beatles. Before them an artist would go into the studio and record one or two songs that they "focused on" and then the producer would have the artist quickly record a bunch more to fill out an entire album. Often these songs were written by someone else and really had no similarities to the others on the album. But not this time!
The Beatles Rubber Soul and Revolver are where we begin. Rolling Stone magazine called Rubber Soul the fifth best album of all time. Time magazine called it the best. Revolver has repeatedly been chosen as one of the best of all time and it was Rolling Stone's choice as number one.
Rubber Soul had influences in it not regularly heard in rock and roll. At this point in time rock songs were only 2-3 minutes long and used only three chords. If you used four chords, to quote Pete Townsend, you could be "hauled up in front of the committee". These songs got longer. The lyrics went much deeper than had been heard in music before. Usually you just talked about how pretty the girl was and that was it. Now the songs had meaning like the folk music acts that had been attacked during the McCarthy era. It was obvious that The Beatles had been listening to Bob Dylan. The use of a sitar was also groundbreaking. The Beatles used the recording studio as a laboratory and made new sounds not normally heard. The lyrics were quite complex for rock and roll and it served as the first step for the progressive artists who recorded incredibly complex lyrical songs ten years later.
Revolver was a battle cry to other musicians to move forward. The music was complicated and some of the tracks could not be performed live since they were so complex. The statements made by the songs on the album were also controversial. George Harrison’s piece Taxman was a direct attack on the British government. This album, and the song “Tomorrow Never Knows”(learn more here) in particular, began the psychedelic era. The impact of Revolver is still discussed today.
Many professional musicians cite it as a major shaping of music. In America where surf music ruled in 1965/1966 the king of surf music “The Beach Boys” took their cue for a major musical change from this album. They quit the bubble gum music and recorded Pet Sounds because of Revolver.