Tag: classic rock

One Track (Musical) Mind

This morning as I was starting the work day I made a playlist of David Gilmour solo records. First the five studio records in reverse order of release, then the two live records also in reverse order.

I have spent the entire work day listening to this playlist. I am on the 4th from last song on the first of the two live records (the Pompeii one). As I type this, David is wailing on Sorrow. It’s just friggin’ epic.

Listening to this guy play makes me want to play more. It makes me want to play better. It doesn’t quite make me feel young, but it’s weirdly in that ball park.

All of this and I haven’t listened to a single Pink Floyd record. Imagine how inspired I’d feel today if I was actually listening to the band that he’s famous for. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

He is touring to support his new record. Sort of. There are US shows in Los Angeles and in New York. I looked into tickets for some of the Madison Square Garden shows. The best I saw were a smidge under $900 a ticket. Yikes! There are tickets for Hollywood Bowl shows for $99 a pop, but they would involve actually traveling from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and that will jack up the total price.

I think Mr Gilmour and I are going to miss each other on this trip. Sorry, David. I’ve seen him twice before. Both with post-Roger Waters Pink Floyd. The first of the two shows was the night of my Junior Prom. Yeah, I will never, ever regret skipping that prom experience to go and see Floyd. I mean, talk about no brainers.

I tell you what, if I hit the lottery this weekend I’ll take Jen and the kids (Harry is a big Pink Floyd fan) to shows at both Madison Square Garden in New York and The Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. You know, to celebrate winning the lottery and stuff. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Finally Finished Listening

To my tiny little music obsessed brain, new music from David Gilmour is practically a religious experience. It had been almost exactly nine years since last he gave us an album of new material (2015’s Rattle that Lock) and the expectations for last Friday’s (four days ago) release of Luck and Strange were exceptionally high.

I started listening to it on Friday morning but it wasn’t until just a few minutes ago (on Tuesday afternoon) that I managed to listen to the whole record in one sitting. Mr. Gilmour* claims that it’s the best record he’s made since Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I mean… I love you, David but no one is going to mistake this for Dark Side. Having said that though, it is really fantastic.

There isn’t a whole hell of a lot of variety here, but that’s okay. Basically it’s a collection of moody, groovy, mid-tempo, mezzo piano songs with excellent vocals and stupendous melodic guitar playing. Basically what you expect from David Gilmour: an excellent singer and a phenomenal guitar soloist. There is also a bit of a family band vibe here. Normally when my aging rock heroes start hiring their kids to play in their bands it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Guys like Steve Howe and Jack Bruce had their kids in their bands and while they were all incredibly talented people I just didn’t want that. There were exceptions, of course, Teddy Thompson singing duets with Richard Thompson sounds incredible but might that be because his mother, Linda, was in Richard’s band at the beginning and he was just filling the gap that was left when she exited? Who knows.

In this case though, I am actually digging it. His wife has been co-writing songs with him for decades, going all the way back to Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, so maybe that’s why the vibe is different here. One of his kids sings lead on one song and I guess also plays the harp. Like… a real harp, not a harmonica. I think a couple of kids sing backups on another song, and one kid also contributed some lyrics. Like I said, a bit of a family band thing. I am not put off by it at all this time. Maybe it’s because I have a family of my own now? I don’t know.

What I will say about this album though is that Gilmour hasn’t lost a speck of magic in the guitar soloing category. He was never the technical guy. He’s basically just a blues guitarist playing in a very non-blues setting. All pentatonics and bend notes and things like that. He’s not going to shred like Steve Howe. He’s not going to redefine technique like Robert Fripp. He’s not going to invent entirely new styles of playing like Steve Hackett. Nope, he’s just Dave Gilmour improvising perfect melodic passages and nailing them to staggering, passionate, perfection. This album is flooded with such playing. It’s everywhere. From the first note of the record to the last. It is littered with signature moments. Allow me to give particular notice to the song Scattered which literally gave me chills the first time I heard it. I was in the car driving home from the grocery store yesterday and I thought I was going to have to pull over and wait for the feeling to pass.

So there you have it. My fanboy review of one of my all time favorite musician’s new album. Go give it a spin. Luck and Strange by David Gilmour. Enjoy.

Hey, King Charles. Don’t you think it’s time Mr. Gilmour became Sir David? Let’s get on that, pretty please.

New Music

A new David Gilmour single:

A new Deep Purple single:

What do I think? The Purple song is pretty good. It’s the first release with their new guitar player, Simon McBride. I had only ever heard him on an episode of That Pedal Show, but he’s good. Really good. He’s not Ritchie Blackmore. I should not judge him based on the fact that he’s not Ritchie Blackmore. I am a Tommy Bolin fan and when Bolin replaced Blackmore in 1975 most of the Purple fandom shat on him because he isn’t Ritchie Blackmore. I would like to think I would have given him a chance were I paying attention and not four years old so in that spirit I want to give Simon McBride a chance. I gave Steve Morse a chance too, but he’s Steve Freakin’ Morse and he was already an absolute legend when he joined the band back in the 90’s. I saw the Steve Morse Purple live a few times. The guy was shockingly good. This song is okay.

Ian Gillan sounds particularly good here. I’ll wait for the full album release before I decide what I think for reals. I am not sure when it comes out, but it will be called =1, which is a name I probably would have tried to talk them out of if I were their A&R guy, or their producer, or their friend, or their neighbor who they occasionally talk to when we both happen to be outside doing yard work or something.

As for the David Gilmour song… woah. My one fear with his new record is that it sounds like it’s sort of a family band kind of thing. His wife has been his lyricist since the 90’s, but this time around his kids are playing all over the record as well. That sort of thing usually rubs me the wrong way. Other than that one irrational hang up, this song makes me really want this new album. The song is a killer. If it’s any indication of what we’re going to get with the full album then… yeah, bring it on. I want it now. Now!

Rock stars from the 60’s and 70’s who are still getting the job done in the 2020’s. Gilmour is 78 years old. Ian Gillan is 78 years old. Ian Paice is 75. Roger Glover is 78. Don Airey is 75. Simon McBride is 45 so… yeah, he’s younger than me so he doesn’t count for this discussion. Old people rocking. Who would have thought? Keep up the good work, old people. You too, young mister McBride.

We Need a Plan – Follow Up

On Sunday I wrote a post about trying to form a plan for moving forward with my band. I wrote out what I thought we might do to find a new singer and hold auditions and all of that fun stuff. I said I was going to send it to the other two guys in the band and that I would probably do it some time on Monday… then I immediately sent them what I had written. It wasn’t the next day, it was the next minute.

Both Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer agreed with all of it. The first of our singer-audition-preparation-practice will be a week from Sunday. One week after Easter. Over the intervening week and a half I’ll get the conversation started regarding which songs we should work on. I want at least five and at most 10. Enough to give potential new singers something to work with, but not enough to overwhelm us as we try to shake the rust off. We should try and be diverse in singing styles but I am thinking we should stay away from Bon Scott. Something about Greg the Former Singer allowed him to handle Bon Scott era AC/DC while most normal humans probably couldn’t deal with that high pitched screechiness. Greg didn’t sound like Bon Scott at all, yet somehow he could do it. Let’s not ask any potential new singers to go there. Okay… maybe we brush up one song just in case someone is feeling ambitious.

We also need to figure out the P.A. situation. We had a little one that was barely powerful enough to get a voice loud enough to be heard over the drums. That little dinky P.A. thing was replaced by something Greg bought. We don’t have that anymore because… ya know… it is Greg’s, not ours. Hopefully the little dinky thing still works.

So the ball will start rolling again in 12 days. I’ll likely share every single thought the three of us have as we work toward the next step. You know how it is for oversharing nerds like me.

New Years Eve

It’s New Years Eve again. Wasn’t it just New Years Eve a few weeks ago? 2023 is ending? How the hell did that happen?

We don’t have any solid plans for today apart from picking up some take-out Chinese food. Maybe some board games? Maybe another round of Yahtzee?

I watched Rebel Moon on Netflix. I was conflicted. I wanted to watch it but I also did not want to watch it. See the conflict? My spoiler free review is to recommend that you wait until part two comes out in April. This movie feels like two hours worth of a four hour heist movie, where generally the first half of a heist movie is assembling the team. That means the movie that is out now is really just the assembling of the team. That’s why it doesn’t have a coherent story. It’s more like a bunch of mini-movies introducing all of the characters. Hopefully part two will make sense on it’s own. So if you wait for part two to come out and then watch them both together, maybe it will be a decent movie as a whole. For now though… eh.

I have to play guitar today. I have two songs in progress for this month’s Record Every Month challenge. They both need lead guitar parts. I need to record them today and then mix the two songs and then I will have my first R.E.M. win since September. It’s a must.

Speaking of guitar, I went down a rabbit hole last week that I find myself visiting once every couple of years. If you read this page you might have noticed that I have been obsessed with the band Rush since 1981. Back then there were two bands that I was obsessed with. The other was Led Zeppelin. As I got older though, the whole unending adolescence vibe that Zeppelin had sort of got tiring for me and I moved away from them. Also, Jimmy Page is one of my guitar heroes, and he is definitely one of the reasons I NEEDED to learn to play guitar when I was a kid. When I look at my own playing objectively though (if that’s even possible) I don’t hear a lot of his style in my playing. I think as I moved away from the debauchery that Zeppelin represented, I sort of moved away from Page too.

Every once in a while though, I feel the need to really dig into the catalog and try to remind myself that there is a lot of value there. That comes up once every couple of years, and it came up for me on Thursday. I put together a playlist with all of their studio records and over the course of the work day I plowed through all of it. Did the old musical feelings I used to get when I listened to Led Zeppelin as a teenager come back? Yes. Not exactly the same, as I am no longer that kid that I used to be, but it was close enough that I felt good about the whole experience. Now I can move on to other things again until the next time I feel cosmically compelled to examine the Zeppelin again. Probably some time in 2025, I think.

Okay then, it’s almost 11:00am. I have not had anything to eat for about three hours. It’s time to have a snack to keep my stomach happy. Gastric Bypass for the win!

Happy New Years Eve, everyone. HoHoHo.

Classic Rock Throw Back Day

Today during my lunch break I was poking around on bookfayce and somehow ended up looking at some classic rock magazine site. There were a bunch of random articles that were about 10% of interesting, but I spent almost the whole hour there.

One article was the singer from 80’s hair metal band Warlock listing off the 10 albums that influenced her. Okay, I’ll bite. First on the list was Live In the Heart of the City by Whitesnake.

Now there’s a band that I probably should have liked back in the 80’s that I really did not like. Whitesnake more or less is David Coverdale, and he was the singer on one of my all time favorite albums. Burn by Deep Purple.

Coverdale made three albums with Purple between ’73 and ’75 (or was it ’74 and ’75, I used to know for sure but I’m old and senile now). Burn was the first one and it was amazing (apart from one song that’s just okay and one that is a complete dud. Everything else is outstanding, especially the title song). Stormbringer was the second. That’s the opposite of Burn. The title track is perfect and every other song on the album is about as interesting as listening to a toilet flush. The third album was Come Taste the Band and it’s divisive among Purple fans because it had Tommy Bolin on guitar instead of Ritchie Blackmore. I am not on the negative side of that fight. Tommy Bolin is a guitar hero of mine (so is Ritchie Blackmore) and I think the album is pretty good.

Now David Coverdale, in my humble opinion, is pretty good on those records. Not great, but good. There are times when Glen Hughes, the bass player and other singer at the time, shows him up but for the most part he’s fine. When you view them all as a whole you can see patterns emerge though, that were much clearer in Whitesnake during the 80’s.

David is a good singer, but he’s not the best lyricist. Yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black, and compared to me he’s freakin’ Shakespeare, but when compared to his lyric writing peers he does come up a little short. As a front man… well… it’s pretty clear that he saw Robert Plant when he was a kid and just decided to do that for a living. If Coverdale did something, it’s likely that Plant did it first.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the guy. He made Burn. He is in my personal rock music hall of fame. The guy gets an A+ for life in my book. It’s just… you know… compared to his immediate peers in both the mid to late 70’s and the hair spray 80’s… he comes up a little short, that’s all. Less so in the 80’s, I think, but… I mean… he did replace Ian Gillan who for my money is the best rock vocalist we’ve ever had… so even with a world class effort in Burn, he’s always going to be “the other guy.” I mean no offense, even though it seems like I am meaning offense. Seriously. Burn… you can do no wrong in my book after that, David. My hat is eternally tipped.

Anyway, I was talking about lyrics. Let’s just say that stylistically he is a little… repetitive. There are words and themes and such that he used A LOT on those three Purple albums that were still being hammered home in the mid-80s when Whitesnake broke in the US. He kinda seems to have a few binkies that he clings very tightly too, lyrically speaking.

So today I read that article where Doro Pesche… Peche… the singer from Warlock listed her favorite albums and that Whitesnake live album from 1980 or so was the first on the list.

Now we’ve made it clear that I love Deep Purple, and that I didn’t really love Whitesnake in the hair band phase in the 80’s. What about Whitesnake before then? I was always curious. Ian Paice and Jon Lord from Purple were also in the band for a while and those two guys are absolute giants in my book. Is it possible that 70’s Whitesnake would work for me in a way that Purple did and 80’s Whitesnake didn’t? I always wondered, but I never looked into it. They had a reputation for sleaze even before they sold any records to speak of in the US and my tolerance for sleaze rock is slim to none.

Now here we are in the quarantine wasteland that is 2020. Should I give ol’ David’s first post-Purple band a shot? Did Doro inspire me to do some digging in Apple Music?

Yes, yes she did.

While I was making dinner tonight I brought up that live album. I figured I’d play a little Mr Coverdale Bingo. I was assuming he’d use the phrase Rock and Roll in one of the first songs. Sure enough, it’s right there in the first chorus. I was a little more interested in another binky though. I asked myself, what’s the over under on the first time he says the word “gypsy?” Two songs? No, three. He’ll say it in the third song.

First song, second verse, first line. “It must be the gypsy in me.”

Oh, David.

I listened to about half of the record. It wasn’t bad. It was actually better than I thought it would be, though I wasn’t giving it the closest listen ever. It felt a little like Deep Purple Junior, which wasn’t too different from what I expected. One of the guitar players (David frequently gave the names of the soloists [thank you, David] and I may have missed them while prepping the quinoa, but I’m pretty sure there were two lead guitar players) was a little too fond of slide. The other guy was pretty good. Mostly though it just hammered home the undeniable fact that Ian Paice is pretty much untouchable on the drums, and Jon Lord is a god on the B3.

Anyway, that’s my very long and very pointless classic rock throw back story for today. Again, no offense to David Coverdale. Burn. Perfect. Enough said. I could listen to you sing “Might Just Take Your Life” or “Mistreated” all day long. Perfect. Coverdale and Hughes in harmony on “You Fool No One,” spot on. The two of them trading lines on “Lay Down, Stay Down” is basically a template for all rock bands with two voices that followed. “Sail Away”…. just 100% full on perfect.