Posted on 11/03/2012 1:38:09 PM PDT by OddLane
Buried Treasure and the Dylan show are both awesome.
This “Last DJ” guy is pretty good too, other than he has gone on some obnoxious Dem political rants.
My post 80 is also to you with reference to the thanks to telling me about Mr. Scott.
I haven’t listened to much music since Jim Morrison died.
I don’t think I’ve missed much, either.
Darrell Scott’s music is not the polished pop C&W heard on the airwaves. It is first and foremost great song writing (story-telling with thoughtful, clever lyrics) backed up by very impressive, savvy guitar playing. The album linked by Dust In The Wind above is his latest, and the only instruments used are guitar, mandolin, banjo, and I believe I may have heard a bouzouki.
Okay, I’m puzzled. The guy is German but he’s driving an El Camino? Or maybe it’s an American band with German vocals since German is so perfectly suited to that genre. Anyway, pretty good example of the genre I think.
Oh, like that rant didn’t apply throughout history.
Only difference now is we can record, distribute, and replay particular performances with ease.
“Complaining about “the music today” is one of signs of growing old. Your parents complained, now you do.”
I believe there is an absolute exceptionalism to very much of the first 25 years or so of rock and roll music.
We never complained about our parents’ rock and roll, we kinda made fun of it but we did like it. That’s what American Graffiti meant to us.
Later on, I realized that besides their being nostalgic for those days, it was also a generation of Americans making fun of themselves as youths, which is cool because you can’t have a good time if you’re taking yourself too seriously.
I’m nostalgic for the periods within that 25 years that are most relevant to my time. I like most of the rest of it. When I was a 9th grader we had “50’s Day at school. Kids would dress up on a spring Friday and then there would be a dance held that night. By the time we got to high school, it turned into a full “50’s Week” where people would participate in day-long events like the dance marathon and other whacky stunts that were typical of our parents’ era. Some of them affected personnas of 50’s characters with made up nicknames. It was total immersion for some. The jukebox was loaded with all the period music Student Council reps and others could gather. Lots of burgers and malts being sold at the pretend malt shop, guys and chicks driving around in their cars acting all 50’s-like...There was a student band that would try like hell to play Do-wop at the dance that even today occasionally reunites to commemorate those days.
Nowadays, I look back at that and I think, “what was that all about?”. All of that so-called nostalgia for a time we didn’t experience ourselves but through the music, iconography and stories, we created a reasonable superficial facsimilie of the real thing which by then, no longer existed because it was already the mid-to-late 70’s. And now we have still “The Heartbreakers”, our very own pretend original Do-wop group reuniting for getting nostalgic over a fantasized nostalgia for a time that no longer existed or applied to our own lives except for the historic aspects of it.
Maybe Fantasyland is not a good place to be for very long if you ever hope to leave an original impression of quality in your own time.
As an aging R&R aficionado, I find oldies to be the proverbial "soundtrack of my life"; I associate certain songs with people, places and experiences of my glorious yute.
The newer music only connects me with the associated videos.
It is awesome...
History of popular music’s reception is as interesting as history of popular music. By the time of Sgt Pepper, rock and roll of the 50s was forgotten and the music became ‘rock’ and, unfortunately and pretentiously, ‘art’. In the late 1960s Chuck Berry returned to Chess Records, and recorded one last album with a great hit, that like the album went nowhere and wasn’t a hit, titled “Tulane”. Warner Brothers, then a very progressive record company, put out great albums by Little Richard, Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers that went nowhere and had no follow ups on the label. Elvis’ “comeback” wasn’t one really, as he soon ended up in Las Vegas, and was considered unhip since the first record of the Beatles (deservedly so, by the way.)
Bobby Darin, Dion, Gene Vincent still living then, the Ventures, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich both recording country, all of those and others, still active, were forgotten. Roy Orbison disappeared forgotten for the entire 1970s. Then, to the surprise of his willfully ignorant audience, Paul McCartney writes a hit song for the Everly Brothers, and much later, all these 70s and 80s stars of ‘rock’ show up for Roy Orbison’s TV special, shocking, I suspect, their still clueless fans.
To a lot of people, regrettably.
The problem with music today is that the publishing companies have figured out what makes music popular. Figured it out to the point of a Bisquick recipe. This has killed the experimentation in the music business, few are the artists that get to stretch out and try anything new anymore, because the publishing companies want their money back, and they know exactly how to do it. This makes everything that’s popular sound the same, because it is the same.
The good news is that the big music companies don’t have a monopoly, and in the internet age “off brand” music (which is still allowed to experiment) is easy to find. When in doubt Pandora, I’ve never thrown a band at it that was so obscure they couldn’t make a channel out of them (and I’ve got some pretty obscure stuff in my catalog), and once they get a handle on what you like they’ll introduce you to more you like, and a surprising amount will be current.
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