115 posts tagged “rock”
I onIy ever bought one hits album that was advertised on TV--it was so good I never had to buy another one! Ronco's 1974 compilation Get It On! boasted "20 ORIGINAL HITS 20 ORIGINAL ARTISTS", and it is a wonderful cross section of the popular music of the day. That was a time when different genres could still coexist on the same radio station, liking one genre did not preclude liking another, and the most negative emotion expressed was the stylized melancholia of the blues in B.B. King's "To Know You Is To Love You". Since mentioning Get It On! in yesterday's post I thought I'd see if I could recreate the album in a Grooveshark playlist; lo and behold, all the songs were available for streaming, so voila! You can listen to the album on Grooveshark here, or just play the convenient widget below. What a great bunch of songs! Just look at that track list! Don't delay, press play!
Spending seven hours in a car with a broken CD player on Wednesday and another seven hours today gave me plenty of time to survey the contemporary radio landscape, and what a dismal scene it is. There were a few bright spots (every one of them a college or public station), but they were emphatically not the stations playing current hits. I can't decide which is worse, Autotuned vocals (can't call it "singing") that sound like robotic mosquitoes, or country music, which has figured out how to mimic every other genre of music until the telltale plaintive twang of the singer comes in and drenches everything in bathos. But what it all has in common is that it's all overdone and overproduced; like our food, it's been overprocessed until most of the nourishment disappears. The song I happened upon that really pointed out all this excess was Free's "All Right Now." That has to be the cleanest, simplest production I've ever heard on a hit single, ample proof that you don't need 48 tracks and Autotune to make a great record:
Who is the Free of today?
Elephant9's DodoVoodoo is such an exciting slab of jazz-rock fusion that I wish they had more than just the one album. So I thought I'd try out some of those Web 2.0 music visualization and discovery tools to find similar music. Back in 2007 I bookmarked a page that linked to several such tools; the most common approach was to create a dynamic mind-map chart based on Amazon's API. I won't bother linking to that page, because two years on, some of the sites are gone, some don't work with the new Amazon API, some don't find Elephant9, and the ones that do give poor results or have an unusable interface. But Last.fm, which tallies up every track that its members listen to, offered up some fruitful avenues for exploration on the Similar Artists tab, all in lowly hyperlinked text format. And thus on the second page of Similar Artists I discovered Naikaku, "a young Tokyo based four-piece band featuring a female flautist that creates music that is both aggressive and lyrical.... [T]hey’ve been compared to bands ranging from Osanna and King Crimson to Dream Theater." Heavy prog rock with jazz flute? Check. Band members perform in lab coats? Check. At least one band member's performance consists of eating a bowl of noodles? Check. Bring'em on!
That was a serendipitous find, because my next search was going to be for more jazz flautists, so bravo to Last.fm! The most recent Naikaku album I could find is Shell from 2006; here is a track from it called "i found a deep dark hole and i am going to jump in!" (though I prefer Mrs. V.'s alternate title for it, "Spy Party!") --
Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler. But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins. Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:
It occurred to me today that "I'm So Glad" by Cream and "I'm Unsatisfied" by the Godfathers sum up the entirety of rock and roll; everything else is just mixtures and variations of those two themes.
And now for something completely different: a trip into my vinyl vault! John Fred and his Playboy Band had been together, off and on, for over ten years by the time their song "Judy In Disguise (with Glasses)" (my one and only karaoke experience) rocketed to #1 in 1967. While the song is always described as a parody of the Beatles' "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds", I think it's more accurate to say that the song's title is a parody of the Beatles' song's title; that's where the similarities end. Still, John Fred remained in the shadow of the Fab Four; despite having a crack Lousiana R&B band behind him, his songwriting always leaned towards Beatlesque pop. This holds true on his last album for a major label, 1970's Love My Soul (with a largely reconstituted Playboy Band). The leadoff track, "The Big Show", is an intro song in the manner of "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", and even links the Playboys to the Beatles with the lyrics, "While Judy in disguise, her glasses hide her eyes, is walking hand in hand with the leader of some lonely hearts club band" (cue trumpets):
(Oddly, "The Big Show" was not written by John Fred but by Robin Hood Brians, owner of the Tyler, Texas, studio where the album was recorded, and two co-writers. Amazingly, Brians and his studio are still around.) And then, when the Playboys stretch out into a real southern groove, it's on... a cover of a Beatles song!
One of the funny things about growing up is that you don't always learn things in the right order, which is why I knew Tim Curry as a recording artist before I knew he was an actor. His song "I Do the Rock" was a minor hit in 1979 (reaching #91 on the Billboard chart) and I enjoyed it whenever it came on the radio. What I notice about the song now are (1) the variety of first names in the lyrics are not just random first names (a la "Games Without Frontiers" or "88 Lines About 44 Women") (I think those are random, at least), they refer to actual people, most of whom I can guess and all of whom are explained on this helpful page; (2) the soundstage has a lot of "Virginia Plain" in it, and Curry's vocal cadences may be an homage to, or parody of, Bryan Ferry's (or they may not); and (3) he is not actually singing, it's more like rapping.
Back in the 80s, when Sting first started "acting" in films, an interviewer asked him rather bluntly, "What makes you think you can act?" To which Sting adroitly replied, "What makes Tim Curry think he can make records?" Touché.
Phil Manzanera was actually Roxy Music's third guitarist. The first, Roger Bunn, left the group before they had recorded anything. Bryan Ferry recruited Davy O'List, late of The Nice, to take his place. O'List was in the band for their first BBC session, recorded in January 1972. He was dismissed from the band by the end of February, for a variety of reasons which may be libellous to repeat here; but to my ears the most important reason is that his bluesy guitar style just did not fit in with Roxy's retro-futuristic sound. Here is "Sea Breezes" with O'List on guitar:
Or, as Simon Galloway puts it on the Roxyrama website, "Although a fluent musician (and not forgetting, the only professional musician in the band) his bluesy style appears sloppy within the Roxy sound, he becomes lost within the songs and drops many a bum note." On O'List's post-Roxy career, Jonathan Rigby writes:
After a period in the doldrums, he would resurface in 1974 via a lacerating guitar break on Ferry's solo version of The 'In' Crowd, soon afterwards forming the short-lived Jet with vocalist Andy Ellison, a band that, if nothing else, confirmed the lingering impact on O'List of his brief flirtation with Roxy Music. "If Jet's first single, an O'List composition called My River, is anything to go by," commented David Fudger in Disc, "they have taken hold of the essence of Virginia Plain and added a dynamism sadly lacking in R Music's current output."
Indeed, the Roxy influence in "My River" is undeniable:
O'List then vanished from the music scene, reappearing with a solo album, Flight of the Eagle, in 1997. (I haven't turned that one up that.)
The Little Britain scenes of Emily Howard, David Walliams' bad transvestite, have always reminded me of Queen's "Seaside Rendezvous." So for my first video I've made an Emily Howard montage to accompany that song.
The live album documenting the 1980 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donnington speedway came out at the same time I was becoming a huge April Wine fan, and since April Wine had a track on the album ("I Like To Rock"), I had to have it. Sort of; I settled for taping the album off the radio when WAVA featured it on their whole-album-at-11:00 weeknightly program. It's possible that the tape still exists somewhere in the sedimentary layers of my parents' basement, but for listening purposes it's long gone. But now the bona fide vinyl is in my possession, thanks once again to Platters That Matter Records. Spinning it this evening I was struck by one thing, and in yet another installment of I Hear Roxy Music Everywhere, it is that the verse sections of Rainbow's "All Night Long" sound like Eno-era Roxy Music. Close your eyes, ignore the intro and choruses, and try to imagine Bryan Ferry singing it:
What do you think? Another game to play is "spot the Deep Purple/Whitesnake formula": Blackmore's main guitar riff shows up in slightly altered form in Whitesnake's "Fool for Your Lovin'", released the year after "All Night Long". Then there's the modulation up a minor third from the intro to the verse, just like in "Woman From Tokyo" from 1972.
"All Night Long" was the second single from Rainbow's 1979 album Down To Earth; the first one, "Since You Been Gone", was one of those second-tier AOR tracks that I have such a fondness for:
A while back I when I was on a 70s AOR kick I spent a few days listening to the catalog of Head East, and I was surprised to the very same song on their self-titled 1978 album (which was actually their fourth):
Eh... That flanged-drum effect is pretty annoying, but as it turns out, that's a holdover from the song's original recording by the man who wrote it, Russ Ballard:
I think Blackmore and company's version is the definitive one; they took a good song and made it great.
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