Category Archives: Music

IBFD

The sixth of June is famous (and infamous) for three reasons, among others:

  1. Today, we commemorate D-Day, when Allied Forces invaded the shores of Normandy in northern France 70 years ago, in what is remembered as a battle won, but at a horrifying cost. Still, it’s hard to calculate the span of Nazi Germany’s (and Russia’s) eventual stronghold in Europe had they not mounted the attack.
  2. Today is the birthday of our most awesome RtB fiend, BoomR. :-D
  3. Today is  International Beatles Fan Day! Now I can get behind that, Jim.

From the Fan Day site:

In June 1967, the first global satellite television show, Our World, was broadcast. Nineteen nations were invited to contribute to the show, and the Beatles appeared representing the UK. On that day, 400 million people in 31 countries all around the world listened to “All You Need Is Love” for the first time.

Photo by David Magnus / Rex Features (20093bp) The Beatles - Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr The Beatles at Abbey Road Studios for the 'Our World' live television broadcast, London, Britain - 1967

Photo by David Magnus / Rex Features

John Lennon wrote the song under the directive from the BBC that it contain a message that everyone around the world could understand. They picked the right band, that’s for sure. And with 1967 being the “Summer of Love,” the message couldn’t have been more culturally appropriate or important. (He did, however, wait until the very last minute to say, “Oh, [the broadcast is] coming up that soon? I guess we’d better write something.”)

The Fabs weren’t the only ones in the studio for the event; it was quite crowded with friends and fellow musicians (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Graham Nash and others). No politicians or heads of state were allowed to participate. I like that part.

Love is all you need. Yep. Put a flower in your hair and celebrate today.

Happy birthday, BoomR! :-D

Ain’t that somethin’…

Again, many thanks to awesome RtB fiend Ross for the great guest post yesterday. I loved it, because it got me thinking about lots of songs from my past, and indeed, music in general, and its mysterious power to affect heart and soul far more than any spoken word.

Isn’t it something how music can evoke such strong, associative memories, as if the events just happened recently? For instance, I can’t listen to Elvis’s gospel music without thinking of my mother, even though it was in the early 70s that she and I were in the same room with those records. I can’t hear the old close-harmony male quartets of the 1950s without thinking of Dad, and how he’d let me play his Suddenly it’s the Hi-Lo’s (before I ever knew what a Gene Puerling was) and The Four Lads Sing Frank Loesser albums over and over and over without ever saying Turn that stuff down!, like he did when I played my Beatles, Monkees, Al Green, Jackson Five and Rod Stewart records.

I can’t hear songs from The Sound of MusicThe King and I or My Fair Lady without being transported back to my living room floor as a 14-year-old, sitting in front of the enormous stereo that looked like this and memorizing every note of every tune, wishing that I could play the King of Siam or Henry Higgins on Broadway, because men got the best songs. (To this day, I can recite the completely mean-spirited — but delicious — Why Can’t the English?, verbatim.)

But the nostalgia isn’t all that gets me about listening to music. Cripes, I could write a dissertation on this. Being a singer, I’m unsurprisingly partial to the places songs take me (the definition of “song” being poetry set to music, therefore sung, as opposed to a sonata or symphony or concerto, which is instrumental). Regardless of the subject matter, some songs resonate with me for years; decades, even, and the connection is largely emotional. If you were to do a study (and I’m certain someone has, somewhere, sometime) on the psychological effects of the chromatic-fourth descending bass line in modern song, I’m sure you would find important links to certain emotions — mostly, melancholy or outright sadness. Get out your guitar or piano and play these changes in a slow four:

Am
E7/G#
C/G
F# dim

That progression, present in dozens of songs I can think of, and probably a hundred more, dictates a definite set of emotions. Consider just a few songs in which it’s used exactly as above, or pretty darn close:

Everything Must Change (Bernard Ighner – recorded by countless artists)
A Song for You (Leon Russell – recorded by countless artists)
Chim-Chim Cher-ee (Richard & Robert Sherman – Mary Poppins)
Hotel California (The Eagles)
Michelle (The Beatles)
My Funny Valentine (written by tortured genius Lorenz Hart)
This Masquerade (Leon Russell)

I can’t think of many (any?) “happy,” chirpy songs in which that device is employed, though they may exist. And I don’t think it’s entirely because there are few happy songs in minor keys. It’s a musical trick, designed to elicit the same emotional results every time: disquietude, nostalgia, sadness, loss, loneliness, uncertainty. And for me, it works, without fail.

I could go on for hours, but I have to get stuff done. So how about you? What music is transcendent and intensely meaningful for you? I’ll bet you can think of quite a few examples.

Adventures with Another’s iPod

Today’s post is written by my online writing Yoda — a talented (and published) writer, who has inspired and encouraged me since our chance email meeting back in 2008, after I read one of his “5 things” articles in one of the many magazines for which he freelances. Anything he writes is interesting to me. I admire his style, his attitude and his sense of humor, and I’m proud to call him friend and mentor, even though we’ve never met face-to-face. It’s my pleasure to have RtB pal Ross guest-post for us today. Enjoy his take on some musical stew.

Thanks for the space and the patience, Fink. I had another idea for this guest spot, but felt it was too morose. So I’m going with this, which, I warn you, lacks a satisfying ending.

Here it is: I lose things. Of low to intermediate value. Often. I don’t lose expensive things, and I don’t lose worthless things. My camera? I always know where it is. Every note ever given to me in high school? Still got ’em. Every pair of sunglasses? Gone, all of them. If I started the day with a note of each denomination from $1 to $100, by the end of the day I would be at a loss as to where the $10 went.itouch

A couple months ago my cracked iTouch (pictured right, not sure why I took a picture of it in the first place) went missing. Unlike times before, this time it didn’t come back. My wife, being the sweet person she is, gave me her 3rd generation iPod, saying she didn’t like the user interface and preferred her iPod shuffle anyway.

Our musical tastes are like middle schoolers in a slow dance: they touch one another but the gap between them is enormous.

On top of that, my iTunes library is not shuffle-friendly. Setting it to shuffle means hearing random symphonic movements and two minute recitatifs. But my wife’s iPod isn’t burdened like that. So I started setting it to shuffle, and heard a few choice cuts along the way:

Mash-up: In da Club vs Stayin’ Alive

70s skatersI’m currently having a mid-life crisis, which involves playing ice hockey again. In order to get back into shape, I’ve had to skate around our townhome complex in roller blades. Well one afternoon I was doing just that when shuffle delivered this 50 Cent / Bee Gees mash up. Unexpectedly hearing disco music while rollerblading, well suddenly I understood the decade of the 1970’s. Tube socks, sweatbands, shoot the duck, disco-grooving-white-guy-on-wheels with all the rhythm in the world. It made sense to me.

Bryan Adams: Summer of ’69

People think I exaggerate this story, I do not: I went to Dublin, Ireland in 2008 as part of a media junket for the 250th anniversary of Guinness. The group consisted of a couple writers and some magazine editors and we went out to pubs or bars every night. On one of the last nights as we were returning to our hotel we came upon a crowd big enough to clog the street. A fight? We’d seen a few, but no. We get closer, and there’s a homeless-looking street musician playing Summer of ’69 on a nylon string acoustic guitar … and everybody was singing along. They were singing like it was Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve, drowning in emotion, arms around one another belting it out.Jim

Then it hit me. “Hey, this happened at the pub tonight. Last night too. And at the restaurant our first night here. And–”

Every time this song came over the sound system in Dublin—radio, in-house DJ, cover band, no matter, every time—life stopped so that each and every person could sing along at the tops of their lungs. Every. Single. Time.

The Beatles: Two of Us

There are at least four tracks laid down in this world that take both my wife and me back to a profound loss, and this is one of them. When this came on Shuffle I scrambled to hit the advance button. My wife says, “My iPod is the iPod of a happy person.” Not all the time sweetheart and you know it.

Toto: Africa

I was 11 or 12 when this song came out, and it become that song, the song the lyrics of which I was wrong about for years. The line is “There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.” I sang, “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.” I remember exactly where I was when I was corrected: outside my friend’s mother’s condo lit up by a streetlamp, watching friends Cori and Kevin howl at me. At any rate, the harmony on that chorus does not get old.

Eminem: My Darling

Here’s an artist my wife and I agree on, one hundred percent: We are huge fans. I always knew he’d flunked the 9th grade, but not until I read his bio over at Rolling Stone did I learn he flunked it three times. As his class is wrapping up their junior year, he’s failing out of freshman year, again. Can you imagine what you’d have thought of that kid? I know what I would have thought.

…..

Slowly I began adding my own music. One day I was looking through the alphabetical list of songs trying to find one called “Enter Tragedy” by the melodic death metal band In Flames. Found it, played it. With shuffle off, when it was over the next thing I heard was Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.” And then—Vladimir Horowitz playing Moritz Moszkowski’s Etude in F (Op 72).

To be chronological about it, I played Horowitz again, first this time, followed by Van Halen. Are there similarities? Yes, but they’re something of a stretch:

  • Virtuoso, mercurial musicians whose fame and influence far exceeded their peers.
  • Horowitz’s audiences were often filled with fellow pianists, craning to see his other-worldly technique, his sonority and thunder with almost no pedal. The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg believed that Horowitz possessed the greatest technique in the history of the piano, and postulated that he was likely the highest paid musician in history; he’d make outrageous demands to play a concert, and they would inevitably be met.
  • The great Les Paul marveled at Eddie Van Halen’s innovative finger tapping and vibrato work, and every guitar player from the late 1970s on can tell you where they were when they first heard “Eruption”. Guitar players flocked to Van Halen shows trying to see how he did what he did, and they would go home and fail at it. He sounded, played and composed like no one before him.  Steve Vai hit the right note when he said that “it is only the most elite of elite musicians whose unconventional approach becomes convention.”

Of course, Horowitz’s playing style is simply impossible to copy. Who would teach their student to keep their hands so flat, or to curl up their left pinkie the way he did? Here Horowitz smokes through the Etude, afterwards marginalizing it as no better than “an after dinner mint.”

It’s impossible to find footage of Eddie playing “Eruption” as it is on the 1978 album, so here it is played brilliantly by a 14 year-old:

So the adventures are done, I’ve taken over the iPod and made it my own. Here’s where I say “Y’know, looking back, I think I kinda miss that ol’ shuffle…” but I don’t. I miss Dublin and I miss who Two of Us is about, but I’ll use the World Clock before I use Shuffle again.

It was fifty years ago today

(Actually, 9 February will be “that” date, but I wanted to be among the first to title a post with what will likely become the most overused phrase of 2014. Heh.) Fifty years ago come February, the world changed.

I just bought my twenty-somethingth book on the Beatles. Do I have a problem? No, I can quit anytime I want. I mean it.

Over coffee this morning, I’ve walked down Memory Lane and watched some great videos on the Fabs. Here’s one my fellow crusties will like, with the Lads doing a Buddy Holly tune underneath some new animation. Put it on full-screen view.

All right, time to get bizzy. Much music to write today. My life is rhythm section parts. Have I mentioned that I love Christmas, but it’s the lead-up to it that makes me crazy? Shooting for the 18th. If we make it to that morning, it’s all good from there.

Until January, of course.

:P

Happy weekend, fiends!

Still mad

J’ever think about someone who passed away and go, “Dangit! It’s not fair!” ?

Stevie Ray Vaughan died on this day in 1990, and I’m still mad about it. Soon after he’d made a triumphant comeback after quitting drinking and drugs (his cocktail of choice was rinsing down cocaine with Crown Royal), he boarded a helicopter in Wisconsin and never made it to his next destination.

He was a quiet man, humble and friendly, in spite of being “raised” in an unloving, violent home, and getting the crap beat out of him at school every day. Starting on booze in junior high, he played his way through the dark days in Graham, Texas to the glare of the rock star lifestyle, while never really scoring the megastar status that sold out huge arenas. Some hoity-toities called him “overrated,” and a Texas joke who wore silly clothes with music notes on them, and had his initials emblazoned on his guitar, and played with too little finesse. Yeah, there’s no law against being an idiot, so we’ll give them a pass.

I highly recommend Caught in the Crossfire, the first biography written about SRV. Informative, funny and sad. This was a man who deserved to live out his life, and whose best music was yet to be made.

For the truly faithful, here is a vid of a sound check, featuring a sleepy (and likely hung over) Stevie. Man, to play like that when you’re barely conscious…

For greatest effect, let it play while you read this.

Dangit. It’s not fair.