Music

The Art of the Remake V

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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.

Our Short Attention Span Future

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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

The Art Of Hipgnosis

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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

Joy Division – Transmission

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I do miss Ian from time to time.

Rolling Stone Botches Top 100 Guitarists

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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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