Archive for the 'Music' Category

The local River North restaurant Rockit uses former album covers as binders for their menus.  I was surprised one day to see Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

While Tarkus would be an obscure album today (the average person who is familiar with classic rock might know “Lucky Man” and a couple other songs) it is hard to think that in 1971, when this album came out, it reached #1 on the billboard charts in the UK (and #9 in the US).  According to wikipedia, this album landed between “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones and “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.

To put this in context – “Sticky Fingers” was one of the run of 4 fantastic albums that put the Rolling Stones in the pantheon of rock – they were 1) Beggars Banquet 2) Let it Bleed 3) Sticky Fingers 4) Exile on Main Street.  And everyone knows Bridge over Troubled Water.

And yet Tarkus, and mostly Emerson, Lake & Palmer, is completely and utterly unknown.  Nowadays Tarkus would be viewed as a niche product, un-commercial for radio / MP3 singles but perhaps capturing a tiny but devoted market.  The song Tarkus takes up a whole side, and is over 20 minutes long, a series of sub-songs linked into one big song.  If you even thought about releasing a jazz / semi-metal / progressive rock album (CD) like this today you’d get laughed out of the record executive’s office (if they have offices anymore).

At least I was entertained seeing Tarkus as part of my lunch menu.  To think that one day long ago that this would be more than a minor trivia item, or a piece of kind of ugly artwork, is almost unthinkable.

Cross posted at LITGM

Remember the standard: “If you are going to cover a song, rip it apart a bit and make it your own.”

Coldplay, in tribute to the recently departed MCA of Beastie Boys.

The prospect of terminating Barack Obama’s employment inspired Bookworm and her commenters to link various breakup songs.

Which reminded me of this great song: Goodbye to You!

Irritating 10-second ad at the beginning, but it’s worth it.

From an Amazon customer review of one of Tom Russell’s albums:

Twice in my life, while driving in heavy freeway traffic, I’ve heard songs so good on the radio that I had to pull off the road and collect my thoughts. Turns out Tom Russell wrote both of ‘em.

I’ve never had to actually pull off the road, but there’s no denying that TR’s songs pack a considerable emotional punch…indeed, I think Russell is one of the most talented singer/songwriters working today. I’ve been meaning to write a review of his work for some time, and was stirred into action by L C Reese’s post Grasshoppers and Frost, which reminded me of some lines from Russell’s song Ambrose Larsen:

The blackbirds and the locusts, destroyed our corn and wheat
The hawks they ate the chickens, the wolves our mutton meat
With traps and dogs and shotguns loud, we fought this old wild ground
Our children caught the fever, but no doctors were around

(listen here)

The above is from TR’s album The Man From God Knows Where, a song-cycle about the American immigrant experience based in part on the lives of his own Norwegian and Irish ancestors. “Concept albums often fall flat because they are too explicit” noted an SFGate review of this work, “…but The Man From God Knows Where triumphs by laying out the story of one man’s family in intimate detail while developing general themes that inform all our lives.”

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My New Mitt Romney Song
(Lexington Green, 2012)

(Sung to the Tune of “Give me that Old Time Religion”)

Chorus:

I’m votin’ for Mitt Romney
I’m votin’ for Mitt Romney
I’m votin’ for Mitt Romney
He’s good enough for me

Verses:

He’s not Barack Obama
He’s not Barack Obama
He’s not Barack Obama
That’s good enough for me

He can beat Barack Obama
He can beat Barack Obama
He can beat Barack Obama
That’s good enough for me

(Repeat until Tuesday, November 6, 2012)

Please feel free to make up as many additional verses as you want.

Instrumental accompaniment may include: handclaps, banjo, clarinet, tin whistle, accordion, maraccas, farfisa, harmonica, tambourine, drums, sousaphone, foot stomps, kazoo, harpsichord, etc.

Works best with one or more alcoholic beverages.

I was watching the TV show “Metal Evolution” (now I am going to have to watch all the shows online, too) when I heard a quote so funny I almost had tears running down my face.  They had an interview with Gary Holt of Exodus and he said (on the topic of his band “selling out” to the record company)

If I had to do it all over again I’d just keep writing songs about killing people

Instapundit linked to Remembering Earl Scruggs. I forwarded it to a friend who is a huge Scruggs fan and she returned the links she’s been listening to today. Thought I’d share: A handsome young Earl Scruggs. The elderly Scruggs picking with the brilliant Bela Fleck on the classic “Salty Dog”. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Earl Scruggs is featured at 1:37. Finally, 7-year old Ricky backed by Scruggs and Flatt.

I am an avid user of Facebook, for better or worse. The last few weeks many of my friends have been engaging in a large amount of slacktivism by linking a video called Kony 2012.

Some of the scenes in this video may be disturbing, as the topic is general violence and exploitation of children in Africa.
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Prison Bound by Social Distortion, 1992, at CBGB:

As an odd sidenote there is a chance I may have actually been at this show.

Prison Bound by Social Distortion, 2011, at the Guitar Center Sessions:

It is cool sometimes to see how we grow up. I love both versions.

Morning Dew, by Bonnie Dobson. She wrote it, and she did the original recording, which is just her and an accoustic guitar, live. This version, recorded later, in the studio, has a more emotional vocal performance. A beautiful evocation of the period, in my not so humble estimation.

There have been an enormous number of covers of this song.

This version by Nazareth takes an earnest folk song about nuclear war, and turns it into a blisteing, trippy, fuzz blues, acid-rock jam. Such strange permutations.

The weirdest thing is that until about 48 hours ago I had never heard of “Morning Dew”. I have been a devotee of rock and pop of the 1960s for the last 35 years or so, but this song, which has the status of a standard, has been under my radar all these years.

In a way, it is good to know that I have not exhausted the riches of that era.

One time I was stuck in a hotel room somewhere and an old rerun of “Welcome Back Kotter” came on. For some reason I stuck with the channel for a few minutes and was struck by something.

At one point the main character starts a monologue. They apparently had only one camera and he seemed to speak into it forever, without interruption. While it seemed like minutes, it probably was maybe 20 seconds or so.

This is how our brains were wired growing up. We watched TV shows (which supposedly rotted our brains, too, or so we were told) but they were in molasses and had few or no cuts compared to seemingly anything on TV today.
 

 
This video by a new singer out of England (I am not going to mention her name but it is easy to figure out – we don’t want the traffic) is designed for kids and younger people with the attention span of a gnat. The video is under 4 minutes long and it easily has 200 or so cuts… I lost track trying to count them. It is simply astonishing how much they pack into there. I think the longest pause is essentially an ad for a brand of watch (product placement) at the 2:32 mark – maybe a couple of seconds.

This is the future of attracting attention and it will certainly be a short-attention span future.

I am a bit ashamed to admit it but I find this song a bit catchy and certainly her looks did not hurt her choice of career.

Cross posted at LITGM

I was having a drink one night reading an article about someone’s “favorite things” and they mentioned an out-of-print book from the ’70s about the firm Hipgnosis that designed iconic album covers. Literally 5 or so clicks later I ordered it from my iPhone through Amazon and it recently arrived (amazing what the Internet can do).

Hipgnosis was the name of the now-defunct firm that produced all the record covers that you have in your collection from the era when a record cover was a work of art, something to look at for hours on end while the music played over your stereo (or headphones). Wikipedia has a good summary of the firm here and also the main designer (Storm Thogerson) here who even today still creates great CD Covers (it doesn’t sound the same, I admit) for bands like Muse. Here is a great site (non official) of Hipgnosis material, as well.

I was very impressed with these record covers growing up. At that time the internet didn’t exist so unless you went to a show and saw the band “in the flesh” or read a music magazine (which I never paid for) at a magazine stand you didn’t know much about the band “behind the music” so these iconic images helped you to imagine what the band stood for. Plus Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and similar artists never really toured the states when I was at an age to afford to attend shows so their “message” came through on album covers, posters, and sleeves.

Some of the album art that Hipgnosis made from the ’70s era is from great bands and albums like “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”, the Pink Floyd classics, and the Led Zeppelin era, as well as the Peter Gabriel unnamed solo albums. These bands seemed to stand well with the images.

I am a huge Michael Schenker / UFO fan and loved their covers, too, except I didn’t really understand them (especially “Force It” with the gleaming bathroom appliances). Obsession with the “ball bearing” images didn’t make the book but it also was iconic.

Then you get the more obscure bands like Montrose (Sammy Hagar’s band before he went solo) with their “arty” covers. Some of the band covers are hilarious when juxtaposition-ed against the fact that much of the underlying music was awful. Obviously these images were damn racy in the day; when I bought the book there were photocopies from a xerox machine inside the book of some of the racier album covers involving human body parts. These photocopies were likely 15 years old (nowadays way racier stuff is everywhere in the internet).

I also like the logos (in the collage) and the inside sleeve from “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. Hipgnosis really did outstanding work and I highly recommend the book if you can find it. The book is organized in a somewhat “cheeky” fashion (they are British, after all) with the famous “Flying Pig” over the power station for “Animals” filed under the category “Fiascos”.

Cross posted at LITGM

I do miss Ian from time to time.

Rolling Stone magazine compiles “top lists”. Their top lists used to be very bad; they seemed to solely represent the personal preferences of their editor. Recently the lists have gotten better as they use a “panel” of musicians and critics to select which is an improved system. And in any list, there is a lot of judgement, and should be a little fun.

Even with these improvements, in my opinion, Rolling Stone botched the Top 100 Guitarist list. The list is far too tilted to the past; their #1 guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, DIED OVER FORTY YEARS AGO. Thus my methodology includes “relevance” in the calculation, and someone who died over forty years ago, correspondingly scores lower. I read through the list carefully, consulted outside sources, reviewed my own music, and built a “methodology” that resulted in my own list.

Alternative Methodology:

In reading through the list Rolling Stone and the musicians doing the evaluations obviously employed a lot of criteria. This isn’t the “most talented” list, or we’d be looking at Steve Vai and John Petrucci as #1 and #2, but they don’t make the Rolling Stone(nor mine)list at all. Rather than use a “subjective” evaluation criteria, I made my own up, and made it more explicit.

- Skills – ranked 1-3, with Neil Young a 1 and Eddie Van Halen a 3
- Innovation – ranked 1-3, with Jimi Hendrix a 3 and Nick Mars a 1
- Relevance – ranked 1-3, with Dave Grohl a 3 and Hendrix a 1
- Songwriting – ranked 1-3, with Neil Young a 3 and Yngwie Malmsteen a 1
- “Bonus” – an arbitrary category I added which allows for 0-2 points to be added for outsized contributions beyond the above categories. Dave Grohl gets 2 points for being the best rock drummer in the entire world; Matthew Bellamy gets 1 point for being the best singer on the entire list

In the process you were either a “top 100″ guitarist or you weren’t; then I started scoring the methodology on the top 100. Then I looked at the results and seemed if they made sense, and adjusted the scores accordingly.

Results of the Analysis:

As a result, the list I came up with is dramatically different than the Rolling Stone list, since it doesn’t just contain dead blues or rockabilly musicians and it weighs newer contributions higher than what happened 40+ years ago.

- only 46 of the 100 guitarists on the RS 100 list made the adjusted list
- 4 of the top 10 in the adjusted list weren’t even ranked in the Top 100 by RS
- 13 of the top 25 guitarists in the adjusted list weren’t even ranked in the Top 100 by RS

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This is a totally perfect Mod era go go party on some French TV show. I want to be 19 years old, skinny, and at this party.

Minutes to Memories, John Mellencamp

RIP Wally Tax

A vintage garage rock song with a whimsical sound, brutal Brechtian lyrics, psychedelic tinges, a harpsichord, and Wally’s harmonica solo at the end pushing it over the edge into awesome.

Thanks to Carl Ortona for this one. And thanks to Monoman a/k/a Jeff Conolly for turning Carl on to the Outsiders so he could then spread the goodness.

UPDATE: Ha. I forgot I already posted this one a couple of years ago. Senility. But I’ll leave it up since I like it.

From Modculture.

Rock and roll review under the fold if you like.
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