Posted on 01/01/2014 7:18:16 PM PST by hecht
Bookmark for when I get off work and can check out the links.
Like I say, I’m not a Jimmi fan, but there was never a better ‘feel player’. He was if anything extremely sloppy from a technical standpoint and could not hold a candle to someone like Steve Vai or Eric Johnson who are so clinically precise it’s almost inhuman.
But that technical precision is why Vai, who is my favorite guitarist hands down because of it, will never replace JH in the pantheon. Because that sloppy playing as some would call it, was filled with feel, groove, heart, soul, call it whatever. No one had it like he had it.
Personally, I go more for the technical stuff just because it’s more my thing. But JH music was alive because of his looseness. Not that the Vais’ of the world have no feel because they do. It’s just that if feel is a finite resource, Jimmi got 90% of the universal supply and the rest had to divide up the other 10.
And most people are drawn more to feel players than pure shredders. Sure JH could fly across a fretboard. But the way he played resonated with a lot of people, pro and fan. And moreso than anyone I could think of, even if I’m not one of the guys that worships at his altar as a player.
I’ve played since the 80s just for fun and like every other guy out there I ‘felt’ that I had to study Hendrix. Unlike most it was for about 5 min. because it just aint in me.But it did in fact reach into the VanHalens and a trainlength of other guitarists, pro and hobbyist on an educational level.
As to the subject of bands not listening to each other, I don’t understand how you can think that at all. Every guitarist mag, interview and album liner notes namechecks their influences. Hell their have always been dedicated articles and columns, entire special issue magazines dedicated to exactly that.
Just from my own perspective/Hendrix, as I said, I’m more a Vai guy and his playing was more of what I looked to. But I immeadiately think of Hendrix when I’m trying to write/play something with feel. Not copy what he did or play what he did since I can’t anyway. But it has informed my direction and approach. Even with my electronic/synth stuff. And I am willing to bet the vast majority of guys who ever picked up the instrument would say the same.
Fine, I agree with you pretty much on Hendrix and feel players. Isn’t Keith Richards, a rhythm guitarist in his band (that unofortunately for itself hired another rhythm guitarist after their 2nd lead guitarist departed) a feel player?
So bands listen to each other? Maybe that’s how I end up liking some (those who listen to their predecessors and folk root musicians), and dislike those who only listen to their contemporaries. I disliked the Dreadful Grape for their musical boredom, but I could hear that Garcia had listened to a lot of old stuff and not just to Buffalo Springfield. Who does Jack White listen to? We pretty much know who David Byrne listens to, and it ain’t Pink Floyd, that’s for sure.
There are two sources of popular music in my fave theory: folklore, and city craftmanship. Blues, bluegrass are folklore, obviously, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley are city craftmanship (for lack of a better term, or perhaps we can say, city or country.) Burt Bacharach, however good he was, was city, a classically trained musician, that is trained on previous centuries court music, not the street and village music, made rootless city music. Jimi Hendrix came from the folk tradition. So did Carl Perkins. Iron Butterfly, to use an extreme example was as rootless a band, as you they come. It showed in their pretensions like a sore thumb. The Stones remembered their roots, the Beatles, especially the post-Beatles, not so much. I prefer the rootsy music, if you will, and the roots are not always so obvious, but they are felt. Pop, Broadway are throwaway stuff. Everybody’s all time favorite Terry Jacks. German schlager tradition, that Fiji can tell you more about. Why is contemporary country coming out of Nashville so bad as most of us agree)? Because it is rootless, hack music.
VNV is awesome. Darkangel id a favroite of mine as is Perpetual. I am happy to have found them. Also in that genre, Apoptygma Beserk.
What really trips my trigger lately is the DEEP ungerground of 80s synth revival. The soundtrack stuff like you’d see in a John Carpenter movie. Check out http://www.synthetix.fm/ for the kind of thing I mean. Stuff like Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, Megadrive, Lost Years, Sellorekt LA, and more ‘Synth Romance/Breakfast Club/Top Gun stuff like “Kristine” (Greek chick that has damn good voice. Then there’s the Valerie Collective artists...
It’s niche for sure but I like it.
If I recall the essay by Lester Bangs in one of the two collected works books, he essentially said that Bob Seger’s middle of the road rock was designed to help listeners recapture that “high school moment” while engaged in whatever drudgery now occupied their lives.
Even with the big stadium bands, I think part of the nostalgia for those days is the people “you” went to the show with, and possibly the roadtrip to get there. How many “stadium” shows did anybody go to by him or herself, let alone enjoyed it with the performer so far removed and tiny (especially in the pre-big screen video days).
WOW!
Glad I missed them.
Both were bad.
Sonic Youth used to listen to Lee Hazelwood's solo albums while on tour and a pre-Cramps Lux & Ivy went backstage at an Alice Cooper show once to gab with him about the latest Stooges record and maybe T. Rex. Alice said that he didn't listen to that kind of music, I think he said he preferred to listen to classical music when he wasn't performing.
And everyone in the English art-music scene of the early 1960s (including Ringo Starr) was listening to the Lightnin' Hopkins records they could manage to get their hands on.
I will say that the Beatles and the Beach Boys were engaging in a somewhat friendly rivalry (Paul McCartney even visited Brian while he was working on SMiLE). The Rolling Stones visited the Beatles while recording Sgt. Pepper's.
But none of those bands albums were intended to be sound-alikes or knockoffs of each other's sound.
This sums up what happened to country and the rest of the music industry. If you have 2 hours, this is well worth watching by anyone on this thread.
http://www.pensadosplace.tv/2013/11/28/nashvillept1/
Dave Pensado is one of the top mixers in the biz with his own youtube show on the tech/industry stuff. they took the show to do a thanksgiving special at Blackbird Studio, Which is a high dollar super top to the world whizbang studio lauded as perhaps ‘the’ best. It is Martina McBride and her husband’s venture.
They sit around a table for thanksgiving dinner with a bynch of Nashville old and new pros/writers/musicians and discuss a lot of what we are talking about now with a focus on country, but an overall nod. It’s 2 videos, an hour each.
Lux (RIP), I remember, was a crazy mad hunter of obscure records in Salvation Army bins. How would we ever have heard of Hasil Adkins if not for Lux and Ivy?
Dex Romwebber/Flat Duo Jets (often a two piece, sometimes a soloist, sometimes more)
Also he had to be aware of the Dirtbombs (namechecked elsewhere in this thread) because they were both living in/playing Detroit in roughly the same circles (but from different musical camps).
Sorry, I forgot to write the most important part. DUH!
What they don’t ssay in this vid but id blatantly obvious is that for all the things they do explain and get right, they are so ‘inside baseball’ that they in some ways look like totally clueless rubes unaware about the reality around them. They are still very locked into saving the old model even as they speak of a brave new world.
Thats the TLDR version.
And that's why I participate in these threads, not to reminisce about the music I grew up with or the bands I've discovered last week. An assessment needs to be made of what still works and how does culture go forward since the “above ground” is largely a closed shop.
The more I look back, the harder it is to see how any of the "game changers" came into prominence (it barely happened even for those who got through and a lot of credible recordings by others never did and never get recognized by PBS/HoF/Top 10 lists etc).
I guess a take-away from all of this is that just because something was recorded sometime in the past, doesn't make it "old". It's "new" to you (and others). And just because something isn't a top yahoo trending name doesn't mean a thing. The culture is fractured, the common reference points are diminishing and I've unplugged from the liberal establishment media circus.
About the only business model I can see bringing back is a variation on the old Chitlin' Circuit where artists play independent venues (not just in the top 60 major cities) and those likeminded souls on tour play roughly the same handful of clubs on their travels.
Some of the bands are doing their own booking, others have agencies. I don't think it's like in the OLD chiltlin' circuit days when a promoter booked a stable of acts through the venues (I'll give you BB King if you also take shows for Johnny Ace, Big Mama Thornton, and Suzy Whatshername and Joe Doe...).
Basically each act today tries to re-invent the wheel for music distribution, touring, publicity, etc. A lot of wasted time and energy and expense.
I’m a big Pensado fan (his show and his actual technical mixing, even if I dont like the music he mixes (Pink, The Dream, Maraia Cary, Byonce and that crowd)...he knows his stuff ;)
The thanksgiving show is pretty much the tail end of this thread discussed by the actual pros. WELL worth the time.
HEH! They discuss that too ;)
Video killed the radio star.
Back when all the monopoly madness began, those that warned of the straight line from monopoly to politics to totalitarianism were called tinfoilers. Yet here we sit in a monopolized world under very literal political tyranny.
Sad that prophets are ‘always’ laughed at in their own time.
Thanks, I’ll have to watch it when time allows.
And in reference to what a fool said, there are great bands that travel the small club circuit for years on end, survive and even thrive, Red Wanting Blue is one of them, these boys have been on the road a dozen or more years, and it shows in how tight they play, how developed they are musically, the Gramblers are another one. Ray Wylie Hubbard. How has this guy survived being the most obscure of the obscure for what, 4 decades? And then, in one of his talking blues he says of the long gone 13th Floor Elevators, as the best rock and roll band ever, and I nod, damn right (with a proper perspective, to be sure.)
I have pulled out of mainstream as well, mainstream has always been a sewer, with exceptions in the 60s, and short periods since then. I remember when Lyle Lovett was being played on mainstream country radio in the 1980s, before it went to hat acts and stayed there to this day.
I always hope to find new acts or new old that I somehow missed, and thse threads sometimes help. I recently apologized sincerely on Fakebook to Shannon McNally for not having heard of her until last year, when she released a superb album recorded over several previous years, with Dr John, Vince Gill (a great guitarist, Norm!) among others of songs by Bobby Charles. Check her out! It’s a dirty shame an artist like her is not on top of the charts worldwide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRgJ2K3O4pM
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