Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive. ~Maria Popova
06 Apr 2024 Leave a comment
in Video of the Week Tags: billy joel
01 Apr 2024 Leave a comment
(Answered by Rik Elswit)
Harrison had a rare ability that’s cherished in studio players like Louie Shelton, Brent Mason, and Larry Carlton. He could craft an unforgettable two bar phrase that becomes the signature to the song. Elliot Easton of the Cars and Keith Richards of the Stones, had this as well.
The classic example is Harrison’s intro to “Something”. Six notes with a released bend, all on one string. Anyone can do it. Even your little sister can do it. But he thought of it. This is a gift.
31 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in Video of the Week Tags: carpenters, karen carpenter, tori holub
31 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: devo
(via LouderSound) by Paul Lester
The concept behind Devo was created during a single shocking event in 1970. From their earliest moments they had a point to make – but they also had a specific way of wanting to make it, and it wasn’t an easy journey. In 2015, Gerald V Casale looked back on the band’s career with Prog.
“God, those were exciting times,” says Gerald V Casale, vocalist, bassist, synth player and joint founder of Devo, über-geeks of the States’ late-70s new wave. “When you’re just so energised by what you’re doing and you’re the chief believer in your own vision.”
Casale is reminiscing about Miracle Witness Hour, a live album, previously unreleased, of his band performing in a biker bar in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977. That was just before Devo’s “full bloom,” when they became America’s Public Anomaly No.1.
“It was a very strange place,” he says of the Eagle Street Saloon. “It was mouldy and decrepit. There’d be a towny bike-bar scene and then the music would start. Some locals would stick around and create tension and terror for the artsy punks there, and then we’d play to them – around 40 people. Then we’d just get out of there.
“I remember being really afraid. I had things said to me and figured the best thing to do was ignore them. Whenever I got accosted on the street by a crazy maniac, the best thing to do was walk away. I always felt threatened. We had to leave by the back door at a lot of places.”
31 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: abbey road, beatles
(via Loudersound) by Ian Fortnam
In contrast to the White Album and Let It Be, Abbey Road – released in September 1969 – found The Beatles operating relatively cohesively; attempting to pull together, in step with one another if not exactly on the same page. “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together,” bemoaned John Lennon. “None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.”
It was the final collection of songs The Beatles recorded together, and our track-by-track guide tells its story.
Very much John Lennon’s song, Abbey Road’s opener started out as Let’s Get It Together, a campaign song for Timothy Leary, standing against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California.
Lennon kick-started his lyric with a phrase from Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me (‘Here come old flat-top’), but neglected to cut the line from the finished recording. Berry’s publishers initiated plagiarism proceedings but settled out of court in 1973 on condition Lennon record three of their songs (hence his 1975 album Rock ’N’ Roll).
With a thinly veiled Lennon as central protagonist, Come Together is a groove-based espousal of the counter-culture, rich in selfconfessed ‘gobbledygook’, which references Yoko Ono (then recovering from a car accident, in a hospital bed actually in Abbey Road Studios) and features the zeitgeist-defining line ‘you got to be free’.
Recorded across nine days in July, all four Beatles featured, with Lennon on double-tracked guitar solo, Paul McCartney on bass and piano, and Ringo shuffling beautifully on juju drums. Outwardly good-natured, there was tension in the air; “Shoot me” Lennon whispered over the opening bars. McCartney told journalist Ray Coleman: “On Come Together I’d have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he’d have liked me to, but I was too embarrassed to ask him.”
Every Moment Has A Song 