Category: Music

More Progress

I started at noon and got interrupted at about 1:45. Guitars, babie. Guitars. I did rhythm and leads on three songs. Well… one song still needs one little eight bar solo, but I’ll get to that after the christmas tree is done. The kids should be here any minute. After that I’ve got two more songs ready for leads and one song that needs rhythm and leads. After that… I don’t know. Maybe add up the total time for the eight songs currently part of the project and if it hits 30 minutes declare myself done, otherwise try to add another one. I still have two days after today, but there is also a lot of mixing to do.

I’m sure I’ll snap a guitar pic or two when I get back to it later tonight. It is GibSunday after all. As for now, the plan is to decorate, maybe watch a TV show for a bit, maybe eat some dinner, and then back to it! I think the Walking Dead spin offs are going to have to wait until tomorrow (it is Sunday, after all).

Now, where did I put that owl ornament?

Broken Promise

Last night, before I went to bed, I promised myself that I was going to spend a lot of time today working on music.

Guess how much work I did.

Go on, guess… I’ll wait…

That’s right. I did exactly zero seconds of work. None. Zilch.

I therefore am going to make the same promise for tomorrow, and hopefully I will actually keep this one.

Car music in the morning. Lots of guitars throughout the day. Maybe add at least one new song. Mix as many songs as I can get finished.

We also will have a visit from the kids so that we can decorate our new christmas tree together. Outside of that… music. You promise breaking twit.

For tonight though, it’s That Pedal Show and Supergirl.

November Music on Life Support

In just a few minutes the calendar will be changing from November 26 to November 27th, and that means only four days left to work on the November music project. I currently have three songs mixed but one of them is too terrible to use. There’s one more ready to mix. After that there is a whole lot of unfinished nothing.

Or at least there was.

I finished the arrangements and wrote lyrics to three. One other song already had lyrics. You know what that means, right? Car music tomorrow! Yup, you guessed it. Four songs ready to sing brings me up to a potential seven. There is an eighth song that should be an instrumental. There are a couple of additional songs in the basic idea stage. If I work my butt off I might be able to get a full National Solo Album Month thing finished.

There is also a Christmas tree to get tomorrow, and another (possibly) three hours of Beatles glory. Then Sunday there is Christmas tree decorating and a little bonus step kids time. Finishing the whole thing is doable, but maybe just barely.

Music tomorrow, my readers and only friends!

Get Back

I’ve seen The Beatles Let it Be movie. I’ve listened to the Twickenham bootleg. I’ve listened to the 30 Days bootleg. There is nothing in the new documentary that is a surprise to me.

Having said that, the new Get Back documentary is utterly riveting. We watched the second episode today and oh my god it was fascinating. I could not stop myself from smiling all the way through.

It demonstrates that when you carve away the fame and the fandom and the hype, they were just a band. Just like every basement or bar band. They had all of the same conflicts and problems that literally all of us have had. Seeing that on the screen was absolutely amazing.

No spoilers, of course, but the conversation between John and Paul in the Twickenham cafeteria when they didn’t know they were being recorded was just incredible. I mean, I have had that conversation with band mates before!!! Granted for me the stakes were reduced by about 99.99999999%, but I seriously have been there myself.

Outside of all of the political stuff, the second episode also demonstrates that they were just a killer live band. In the first episode they are aimless and distracted and playing pretty poorly. In the second episode they have a direction and a purpose and they are firing on all cylinders and they are starting to sound great.

The running time for the first two episodes is about 5.5 hours combined. Episode three is out tomorrow and I can’t wait to watch it.

The Next Day

Hey Rob and Jen, what are you having for lunch on this festive day after Thanksgiving?

Left overs, babie. Left overs.

Also, episode two of the new Beatles documentary. I find watching the Get Back rehearsal footage amazing, purely from a gear perspective. George playing Lucy the Les Paul. John playing the Epiphone Casino. Both of them playing through silver face Twins. Then there’s Paul playing that shitty Hofner through that frigging amazing Bassman stack. Drooool, babie. Drool.

Rain is a Douche

Our plans to cut down a christmas tree today are about to be washed away. Forecasts call for heavy rain to start at exactly the time we were planning to leave on our tree hunt. Oh good.

Hey, did you hear about the new Covid-19 variant that’s popping up in South Africa and early data (which could still be off) is suggesting it could be 500 times more contagious than the Delta variant? Oh good.

What else… I don’t know. I want to get some guitar playing in today, and pretty much all weekend. We’re looking into a minor thermostat upgrade that hopefully will be entirely wireless. We have a ton of turkey dinner leftovers and the stuffing is calling me, but for some reason I have a craving for toast right now. What’s up with that? I wish the kids didn’t have to leave today. I want them to stay, but I don’t want to hold them back, you know? Just call me Robert the Conflicted Red Head. Sounds like a band name.

A Weird Day So Far

My prediction of this being the slowest work day of the year hasn’t really come true, though there is still half a work day to get through. Lots of customer stuff has come in today. Nothing really involving my application directly, but we’re involved in a sort of tangential way. Lots of questions, lots of updates, lots of discussions. It’s enough to keep the perception of the day moving, and some of it has been a tad annoying, but these are good things compared to staring at the clock and watching it not move.

Two odd health-type things to note for future reference. First, my back hurts. Usually my back pain flares up when I’m moving around or being somewhat active (as active as my gargantuan fat-assed self gets at least) but today it’s pretty much constant. That’s annoying. The second thing is more sporadic, but equally annoying. I sort of feel like my left calf is constantly on the verge of a charlie horse. If I’m walking around and I put my left foot down in just the right way, bang – charlie horse. If I am standing in just the right way, bang – charlie horse. It only lasts a few seconds at most and then I correct whatever I did and it’s gone… but it’s always there. Stupid charlie horse.

As I mentioned in a post last night, I came up with a really simple musical idea to add to the November music thing, now that we’re down to less than a week and still miles away from finishing. Today I came up with another one. Now I just have to wait for my MacBook Pro to get home from that fact finding mission to Guyana. I’m sure everything there is fine and it will be home soon. I hope to spend some quality recording time this weekend.

Okay, folks. We’re half a work day away from a four day weekend. Let’s get to it and get through it and at around 5:30 tonight the sigh of relief you hear will be me.

Jam

I just decided that the November music project thing is going to include an instrumental that is just two guitars taking turns soloing over a really simple bass/drum groove and it’s going to be about seven minutes long.

You heard it here first. The bass and drum parts are already down. It’s going to happen and it is going to bore you to tears.

Pointless jamming is life!

David Longdon

I am a total prog rock snob. Prog rock in general is a snobby kinda thing, but I am maximum snob. I don’t apologize for it. I don’t care if sharing my musical tastes make me sound like an asshole. I just don’t. I’m snobby about all music, but I am extra snobby about prog.

Prog started with In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson in 1969 and pretty much ended with the horrible Love Beach by Emerson Lake and Palmer. Everything that came after that is something else. Prog-ish. Prog-adjacent. Whatever. It became something else. I’ll still call it prog but I don’t know that I agree that it is. Asia was prog musicians, but is it prog? Hell no. Yes in the ’80s, same thing. Is it? Not really. A few moments here and there, but mostly no. Genesis in the 80s certainly wasn’t either, though they were sneaky and slipped some ideas in now and again. Rush… Rush, in my opinion, is the best thing that has ever happened in popular music, but was it really prog in the 80s? Prog-adjacent, yes, but authentic? I don’t know.

What about the bands that came after that? The next tier, so to speak. This is where my snobbery hits it’s heights and it’s all because of one band: Dream Theater. I had so many friends who saw Dream Theater as the second coming of Rush. The next best thing, so to speak. The bringers of a progressive rock meets metal movement that would usher in the future of prog blah blah blah. Music school friends. Rush fandom friends. So many people telling me how awesome Dream Theater was. Unfortunately, I fucking hated them. Loathed them. Listening to that band makes me feel physically ill, much like most country music makes me sick. I just cannot express in words how much I hate that band.

Clearly I was in the minority and that’s fine. I can respect the people involved for making music out of the mainstream and being successful at it. I very much admire them for that, but the music had such a negative effect on me that it made me avoid any band from the late 80s on that even gave a hint at progginess. No thanks. If this is what it’s come to then I don’t want anything to do with it.

As we got into the 2010s though, realizing that the actual authentic people who were involved in the 70s were starting to go away more and more often, I started wondering if I had missed anything worthwhile. I heard a Steven Wilson record a few years ago that I liked quite a lot. It wasn’t very prog, but it was in the ball park. I knew him as the guy who was remixing so many of the classic records. I dug a little deeper and his work got proggier and better and then I realized he was the guy from Porcupine Tree. That was one of those bands that I had purposely avoided. Should I bother? Yeah, let’s try it. I picked a record at random. It was really good. I picked another at random and it really wasn’t good. Okay. A little more digging and I find that they took a while to evolve, but once they got where they were going they were excellent. Their last 5-6 records are great.

Okay, so if that band is worth a listen then maybe what passes for progressive rock in the 21st century is worthy of more study. Who else should I listen to?

I’ve stumbled across a few good bands. One used to have a guitar player from the band XTC who, in my younger days, I liked sometimes. Not always. They were quirky and weird and those are plusses to me. The band was called Big Big Train. They had just released a record called World Tour. I took it for a spin. Good stuff. Great songs. Not even a hint of “heavy” but that’s okay. I really liked that album. Track two is called Alive and it is a spectacular song.

Apart from knowing one guy used to be in XTC, I didn’t know anything about them. Who are these folks? Who plays what? How many people played on the record? All good questions, but the biggest question that first listen prompted was WHO THE HELL IS THIS SINGER WHO SOUNDS MORE LIKE PETER GABRIEL THAN PETER GABRIEL??? The guy sounded great.

And finally, eight paragraphs later. We get to the point of the post, which realistically should only be about three sentences. That singer who sounded like a young Peter Gabriel on a really good day was named David Longdon and a few days ago, at the ripe young age of 56, he passed away. No details have been released outside of saying it was an accident. I suddenly wish I had started listening to him a decade or so sooner than I did. I missed out on a lot. They were going to tour the US in 2020 but Covid. I think they tried touring in 2021 too but Covid. That means a lot of people who are legitimate fans will never get to see him live. That’s really sad to me. I didn’t see him live because I am a prog snob, but people who are more open than I am will miss him too. Damn it. Rest in peace, sir. Everyone else, give one of his records a spin today. You’ll be very happy you did.