Twice The Fun

The guitar is a wonderful instrument.  In the right hands, it can be strongly emotive, awe inspiring, gobsmacking.  Unfortunately, sometimes there can also be a bit too much look-at-me-look-at-me-look-at-me, as Guitar Player points out in Top 10 Guitar Tandems.

Two guitarists can keep that impulse in check.  And the bi-play between them can take a song to a whole new level.  Allman and Betts, Tipton and Downing, Angus and Malcolm, Keith Richards and whoever … some pretty good bands have decided that two guitars are better than one.

Nothing wrong with Guitar Player’s list, but there are lots of other acts you could add:  Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, Wishbone Ash – and, oh, this little band out of Liverpool called The Beatles.

Paying The Cost To Be The Boss

Imagine a world without Hendrix, Cream, Santana, Paul Butterfield, The Allman Brothers, Johnny Winter, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Robert Cray.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it?  Not something you’d want to imagine, is it?

Well, according to Rolling Stone’s 10 Legendary Acts That Wouldn’t Exist Without B.B. King, all that magic would not have happened were it not for B.B. King.

That’s 10 more thankyous we owe to B.B..

Undercover Agent For The Blues …

… and Rock!  Take a look at the influence John Mayall has had.  The connections.  The influences. The great music that came out of his influence.

It’s almost unbelievable.  The diagram just depicts the most obvious connections.  The ones that could fit on a page.  It’s missing the Yardbirds-Page-Zeppelin link.  It obscenely abridges Clapton’s reach.  It skips the whole Dylan universe outside the Willburys.  It doesn’t even try to show who Phil Collins has touched, which is, like, everybody.

Was John Mayall as influential as Lennon, Dylan, Jagger, Hendrix or Page?  Maybe not, but when you think about who he’s played with – and who they played with, he’s touched just about everything.  Mayall is one important cat.

Sounds Like …

Here’s an obvious truth: although they covered a lot of ground over many years (not enough, in the case of The Beatles), The Beatles always sound like The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones always sound like The Rolling Stones.

But here’s the thing:  what made them so darn good is that they could do anybody else.  The Beatles do Roy Orbison and come up with Please Please Me.  They do Dylan and come up with You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.  They start jamming Fleetwood Mac’s Green Manalishi and arrive at Sun King.

Same thing with The Stones.  While always true to their blues roots, they’ve absorbed and played back: Rock and Roll, British Invasion, Country, Folk Rock, Psychedelic, Hard Rock, Jazz Fusion – and just about everything that ever came out of Motown, Memphis and Muscle Shoals.  I know some cynics who think The Stones sold out and became silly by trying to stay relevant in the late 70’s as the world shifted into Disco and then 80’s R&B, but I disagree.

What I hear is a great band saying, “Yeah, we can do that.  Listen!”  And then they prove it by serving up a classic example of the style.  But even as the do that, they remind you they’re still The Stones.  The riffs, the grit, the guitar bi-play, the self-caricaturing vocals – they’re all there.  Miss You is both vintage Disco and vintage Stones.  Rock and A Hard Place sounds like it could have been recorded by Robert Palmer, but the presence of Keith and Ronnie make it better.  And just to drive the point home, they give us Sad Sad Sad on the same album.  “So much for this ‘new’ R&B thing.  Now here’s some rock and roll.”

Paul McCartney’s solo career proves that if The Beatles had lasted longer, they too would have remained relevant by continuing to listen to the new music around them, absorbing it, and the giving it back to us as fresh magic.

The Beatles and The Stones prove that you develop your own style by absorbing the music around you, and you evolve that style by continuing to listen.

The Thrill of It All

-->

Gibson has an overdue list of 10 Guitar Greats Who've Been Unduly Neglected, the list being:

Terry Kath

Ollie Halsall

Luther Grovenor

June Millington

Phil Manzanera

Lenny Breau

Jimmy Nolen

Randy California

Robert Quine

Bob Stinson

Amen, especially for Kath, California and Manzanera.  I might also add Peter Green, Kim Simmonds and Rory Gallagher.

The article hints that maybe you need a larger-than-life personality to get all the attention.  Maybe.  Maybe it was the tunes, the bands, the PR, the hair …

It certainly wasn’t the licks

Say It Ain’t So

Aw…   New Musical Expresses piece on 29 Rock Myths Exploded is just a party-pooping downer.

No stomach pumps? no song-induced suicides? no mud sharks? no ash-snorting? no doobies in the john at Buck House? no Mars bars? no ham sandwiches?

Aw, come on!  They were such great stories!

Anyway, how do we know Charles Mansion didn’t audition for The Monkees?  Did anyone ask Stephen Stills?  Are we sure Paul didn’t die?  And what about Dylan?  Are we really sure?

And dammit, we gotta believe Keef had those full-body blood transfusions!  It’s just part of who he is!

Who are these people at NME?  Of course Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil!  Everyone’s known that for, like, 75 years.

This is what’s wrong with the Internet.  People can just make stuff up!  Deniers!  Truthers!  Balloon-prickers!  Liars!

Good on Keith Richards, by the way, who, true or not, got himself involved in 2 ½ of the 29 myths.  1^st place, even if it is in an alternative reality.

Ooh baby, baby!

The first thing that jumps at out you when you look at Rolling Stone’s Women Who Rock: The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time (by women), is that there had to be a lot of stretching to come up with a list that long.

Here’s the Top 10:

 1. Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You

 2. Joni Mitchell, Blue

 3. Dusty Springfield, Dusty In Memphis

 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours

 5. Patti Smith, Horses

 6. Adele, 21

 7. Missy Elliott, Under Construction

 8. Blondie, Parallel Lines

 9. The Supremes, Anthology

10. Bikini Kill, The Singles

No one, I mean no one, is going to argue with Aretha being number one, even though she was the Queen Of Soul.  Close enough.  But Taylor Swift?  Bjork?  Dolly Parton?  Yoko Ono?

I know I go on endlessly about how it was so much better before we splintered into so many subcultures, but Dionne Warwick?  Donna Summer?  It’s supposed to be Women Who Rock, not Queens of Pop.

Stevie Nicks, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Janis Joplin, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett?  Absolute rockers.

Carole King, Dolly Parton and Dionne Warwick?  Nope.

Listen:  there’s a lot of talent on this list and all of the names are deserving of respect.  I know rock is a verb that has also come to mean, “cool.”  But rock is rock, and not all these ladies do.

A Change’ll Do You Good

A sad but inevitable (inescapable?  inexorable?) truth in music is that the line ups of our favourite bands keep changing.  Gibson’s 10 Bands That Changed Singers ... and Won deals with this reality, and reminds us that change is not always a bad thing.

Here’s the list:  Deep Purple, Van Halen, AC/DC, Faith No More, Judas Priest, Journey, Iron Maiden, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, Pink Floyd.

Winning seems to mean, “enjoyed increased commercial success,” so that ducks the question of whether the band actually got better.  For a lot of these transitions, it’s debatable whether the band improved, especially in the eyes of their existing fans.

David Lee Roth for Sammy Hagar?  Not sure.  Bon Scott for Brian Johnson?  I think so, but many wouldn’t.  Syd Barrett for David Gilmour?  Well, for me, Floyd’s music was finally approachable with Waters and Gilmour at the helm, and maybe that illustrates the problem with “winning.”  Commercial success means, well, “more commercial” (ya I know we’re talking about Pink Floyd but everything is relative).

Take Genesis.  By the time Collins is through with them, a (some would say) pretentious prog rock band becomes a pop act.  Makes you wonder how much of the original fan base was still around to celebrate the victory.

Or take Fleetwood Mac.  Trying to reconcile the dichotomy between the Peter Green and the Buckingham/Nicks eras, the article suggests that FM is “arguably not a band, but a brand.”   Maybe, but don’t brands have a core sound/image/look/feel/quality/certain-something that is supposed to endure and is therefore protected?  I would suggest that Fleetwood Mac is not a brand, but simply a name that got re-used.

The most interesting case for me is that of Deep Purple.  No question that Ian Gillan was an improvement over Rod Evans, and their popularity certainly jumped with the change.  But there was something very cool about those early albums.  I felt at the time, and I guess I still feel now, that they made the switch to try and sound more like Led Zeppelin.  They succeeded, and it was great and all, but they also lost some Deep Purpleness in the process.  They might have become highway stars, but the bird had flown.

Excitable Boys

Gibson has this fun list called Mad Geniuses: 10 Brilliantly Eccentric Musicians.  People, so they say, “who seem wired differently from the rest of us.”

It’s a matter of degree, I suppose, but you could probably say that about most artists.

Here’s the list: Roky Erikson, Peter Green, Brian Wilson, Prince, Joe South, Phil Spector, Wayne Coyne, Scott Walker, Skip Spence, Syd Barrett.

Don’t pretend to know much about many on this list, but what I do know about the ones I do know about tells me that drugs might have a thing or two more to do with the madness than any innate wiring.

Whatever the cause, it’s too bad we lost Peter Green, one of the best guitarists of all time who just happened to also be a great singer and songwriter.  Who knows what he could have accomplished?

Can’t say I agree with Phil Spector’s inclusion on this list, and not just because I’ve never been a “wall of sound” fan.  Just suggesting there is bit of a difference between mad genius and sick creep, you know?

Queens of Rock

Saw a PBS special a while back entitled Women Who Rock.

I usually put such shows on as time fillers, not expecting to learn - or be entertained - all that much.

It was pretty good though. Cyndi Lauper did an impressive job as host. Knowledgeable, passionate – and, of course, fun.

Lots of familiar territory and expected coverage: Carol King, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, the Wilson sisters from Heart. But a couple of surprises. Never heard of Wanda Jackson before. Don't know how I missed her, but glad to have that little gap in my history databanks plugged. The other surprise was no coverage of Fleetwood Mac.

You kidding me? Weren't they like the biggest band in the world for a couple of years, with not one but two women singing, playing and writing? Kinda strange.

Two small insights came at me:
1) Sister Rosetta Tharpe really was vastly influential. The male testosterone dominated pantheon of guitar heroes borrowed a lot from her. A lot.
2) Madonna has a lot to answer for. The show covered a lot of female artists who have arisen in the last 20 years, and made a big deal about the music scene actually being (finally) dominated by women. That may be, but are they rockers or dancers? With a few notable exceptions, like, say, Christine Aguilera, the voices aren't noteworthy at all. But the dancing's pretty good, I guess.

It kinda confirms this uneasy feeling I've had for a long time now. It's about the marketing, not the music. Eye candy and Broadway, not rock and roll. Would Janis Joplin or Chrissie Hynde even get a record deal now?

You gotta admire what Madonna has accomplished, but I'm not sure she did us any favours.

Blitzkrieg Pop

Funny how I do a piece on Power Pop (not liking it so much) and then Gibson goes and puts out a 10 Greatest-Ever Power Pop Bands list.

According to Gibson, Pete Townshend coined the term (I didn't know that; thanks, Gibson), and the definition is "infectious melodies, airtight arrangements, soaring vocal harmonies and unforgettable guitar riffs." Similar to Wikipedia's, so I'm outvoted here, 'cause I still think of Power Pop as soppy ballads with furry guitar.

At least that's what I remember the DJ's spinning those lame Foreigner, Journey, REO Speedwagon and Styx tunes calling it.

Anyway, I'm happier with Gibson's definition, 'cause it yields a great list, which is:
1. Cheap Trick - yes!
2. The Who - OK, Pete coined the term, and the band kinda defies pigeon-holing, but I still dunno.
3. Big Star
4. Teenage Fanclub
5. The Raspberries
6. Slade
7. Fountains Of Wayne
8. The Posies
9. Badfinger - awesome! Very under-rated band
10. The Sweet - cool! OK, sweet!

Not sure if I would add anyone else. Maybe ELO? Fleetwood Mac (Stevie Nicks's, not Peter Green's)? Anyway, it's all just only rock and roll - and I like it.