Tag: Music

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.

Do Something

It’s 9:30pm. I’m sitting at my desk on a Windows machine (why?) watching last Friday’s That Pedal Show (finally) and thinking that I should post something without having any clue what to post.

TV? I finished Foundation last night. Two thumbs up, says the guy who never read the Azimov books. I watched both Walking Dead spin offs today. World Beyond was good. Fear wasn’t. At least I don’t think it was. I have to fess up that it was so boring I was barely paying attention to any of it.

That Pedal Show has an old SR&D Rockman headphone amp on the board. I haven’t gotten far enough into the episode for them to use it, but it did send me on a hunt. I used to own a Rockman headphone amp. Which model was it? Ebay and Reverb searches make me think that it was a Soloist. The original Rockmans apparently had a little gain control on the back. Mine didn’t. I know it wasn’t an X100 because my memory seems to think that the X100 was the latest and greatest model when I bought mine and I didn’t want to pay the full price so I bought an older model used. I used to use it to record a direct line into Mike’s Fostex cassette 4-track recorder. Larry had a couple of the rack units. The Sustainer, the Stereo Chorus and the Delay… was it called the Stereo Delay? I can’t remember. I do know the Sustainer was awesome as a direct signal into the 4-track. I would think about buying a Soloist for the nostalgia value, but I don’t want to spend $100. I need them to be cheaper than that.

Okay. So I am going to get into bed and maybe watch a little more That Pedal Show, or maybe go look for a new TV show, or maybe just watch a random Futurama, or maybe just go to sleep. As mentioned in a previous post, I am so freakin’ tired.

Until next time, good night everyone.

Wah Pedals

I search for boutique wah pedals and get link after link telling me I have to get my hands on the wah pedal I dumped into my closet when that frat boy fucker in California went on his idiotic racist rant following the George Floyd protests and implied that people who put more value on a human being’s life than on their neighbor’s windows are both unworthy of his products and incapable of pissing while standing up. Fuck that guy. I’m never using his pedals again, I don’t care how amazing his fucking deluxe wah pedal is.

End rant.

So where do I go? There is Xotic and Jam Pedals. They are both supposed to have excellent wahs. One company that I know nothing about keeps popping up too. Real McCoy Custom, or RMC. they seem to have a ton of models, all with stellar reviews, but only a few are in production. Is that info correct? They are pretty expensive and there aren’t a whole lot of dealers (just one in Massachusetts).

I’m thinking when the time comes, this is probably where I want to go. The RMC10 reviews are all stellar, but I’m only seeing RMC11’s for sale around here.

One of these days.

Wasting Away

The last week or so… what a waste.

Have I given up on the November Music thing? A few days ago I would have said no, but over the last couple of days I have had a ton of time to work on things but instead I just sat on my ever expanding ass, eating junk food and watching TV (Foundation on Apple TV+). Literally the only thing I have accomplished this week is gaining weight. The last two nights I’ve gotten to bed time, right around now, and realized that I still have exercise to do to close my Activity rings. Instead of going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep I am about to march around trying to close the rings. About two minutes in my back is going to start screaming at me. I don’t know if I can keep it up with things hurting as much as they are. Failure, thy name is Robert. Crud.

How do I motivate myself again? I don’t know. Was I ever honestly motivated or was I just fooling myself somehow. I hate feeling like this!

On the upside, having never read Foundation I can say that I am enjoying the show. From what I’ve heard, the TV show has absolutely nothing to do with the book apart from a few character names. So I guess that’s a thing.

Ugh… what the hell is wrong with me?

New Song

National Solo Album Month needs to come up with a better name because I’m not writing that dumb acronym again. I’m just calling it November Music, m’kay? That works for me.

Three songs down. I don’t have a count in mind as a goal, I just want to hit the challenge mandated minimum of 29 minutes and however many seconds. Eight seconds? I don’t remember. Let’s round it up to 30 minutes. This puts me at 15 minutes, but one of the songs is disgustingly terrible so if I drop it I’m at 11 minutes. The songs tend to be running a little long this month so I am still in good shape.

I want to like this one. I am not sold yet, but I am hoping it turns out to be track one and kind of the signature song for the month… I just don’t know if I pulled it off.

I’ve been listening to a lot of prog lately… it shows.