Well….as the title says, I can’t think of a political one that grabs me enough to cut through how overwhelmed I feel about the happenings in the world…just too much going on right now and I don’t have the energy to sort through it…so, let’s talk about music for a bit…when I was on the indoor bike yesterday, it dawned on me that the music that was in my ears was all nearly 50 years old…the Allman Brothers live at the Filmore east, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Cars, CSNY’s 4 way street, the Beatles and on and on…and I wonder if any of you are the same way? I’ve talked about this before that I have stopped listening to new music and I wonder why that would be? I know I may be one of those snobs that think that the best music was done when I was young…but, can you argue with “In memory of Elizibeth Reed” live from the Allman’s in 1970? Or “Southern Man” from 4 way street? Or the story from “Doctor Wu” that takes you from happiness to despair and back again in a 6 minute song? I admit that as I age the emotional aspects of songs have more meaning to me…or maybe I’ve become more perceptive to them as I spend more and more time alone? Who knows? I’m sure I’m bringing some of my own interpretations to the meanings and that fits with what is going on with me right now…to a point, but a lot of it relates to what I’ve been though in this life from the time my older brother played Elvis, Buddy Holley, and Roy Orbison that I guess I absorbed without knowing it at the time. Don’t get me started on Steely Dan or Pink Floyd…especially Dark Side where the run of “Time” and “Great Gig in the Sky” always takes my breath away and talks to me as I get older…and with SD, I see myself in the characters and worlds they create…about the losers and the underachievers and the people who just can’t help themselves like in “Black Cow” where the protagonist has poured everything into helping his friend or lover “talk it out til daylight” but then realizes that it’s over and sends her away…or from “Your Gold Teeth” where a woman comes back into a man’s life that she burned at least once before but he knows what’s coming and the dismissive line “you don’t have to dance for me, I’ve seen you dance before” describes that fact…I guess what I’m saying in this long one is that music has always been important to me and I wonder if anyone else has the intimate connection that I have or if it’s unhealthy? I know that even if it is, that won’t change how I feel….
Tag Archives: music
A little music…
Well…was going to do one on the conspiracy that it was just revealed that Sessions is part of…you know, that little thing called obstruction of justice? But, I think I’ll talk about something else first…as you know, I have been trying to broaden my topics some to keep my sanity (what there is left of it) intact, so I’ll just go off on a new direction. I wonder how many of you have gotten sucked into youtube? Had the Who’s “Eminence Front” running through my head all morning so I decided to go out and watch it…not just one but almost a dozen copies came up so I watched a few of those and then “Love Reign O’er Me” popped up so I had to watch a few of those. That led into some Steely Dan that kept me busy for almost another hour until I looked up and it was lunch time….then back to the tube for some Allman Brothers and found a copy of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and then I had to just stop or I’d still be watching them now at almost two. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours….and now I wait for Man U to play at 3…more later….
A funny music day…
Well….it was really an odd day yesterday…didn’t watch any shows but ones on music an AXS tv….the day started with a 2 hour doc on the Allman Brothers….then the farewell concert of Cream was on from 1968…then there was a concert by Eric Clapton from 2007, and the day ended with Joe Walsh on guitar Center sessions….so, I spent the day vegging it out and watching most of the day. Music has become much more important to me as I have been isolating myself from the world and it was cool to learn a bunch of stuff I didn’t know….so, you’ll probably see me writing more about it…
A little music…
Well…have been thinking about this one for a bit and thought I’d get the thought down before it passed…I wonder if Geico knows what the ZZ Top song “LaGrange” that they use in their motorcycle ads is about? And, I wonder if they care…that it is about a little whorehouse in Texas? Just another instance of a corporation using music that sounds good without thinking what it is really about…just like GMC using “Emenince front” by the Who…weird…oh, just watching a small concert by Peter Framton on tv…he sure looks like he is having fun and appreciates that people are still coming out to see him…
Strange music…
Well…as you can see, politics haven’t really been too interesting to me lately…after all, how do you comment on the absurdism that is the repub race…so, I think I’ll do one on some music I heard on the bike this morning. On the ride today, “Sunshine of my Love” by Cream came on and, since I was at my last water stop in the park, I could really listen to it without wind noise or any other distractions…well..it is the strangest engineering I have ever heard in a song….whoever did the recording put the drums in the right ear, the guitar in the left, and Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton singing in the middle….really a departure from the normal way that songs sound….I was going to do a similar one on how the drums sound on “Nantucket Sleighride” by Mountain…where they use the entire sonic range from ear to ear for the drums and then lay the rest of the music on top of it so it sounds like you are really at a live concert…and that contrasts to “White Room” by Cream where the drums sound like you are sitting a couple of feet in front of the kit….weird…or not weird but interesting how sound can be changed so your brain interprets it differently…yeah, okay….probably only interesting to me….
Music in advertising…
Well…I have talked to Tom about this before but I had to get it down here since it is something that I am a little amazed about…and that is the use of certain kind of songs in advertising….the first time this struck me was a Ford ad that used a Deep Purple song “‘On the highway stoned”…now I wonder if anyone listened to that before the made the ad…and they even left the lyrics in that one that you could hear plainly playing as the cars were driving across the screen…probably not the message that they wanted to convey. Then, I just heard a shoe company using “Who are you?” by the Who which is about a drunken night where the lyrics talk about passing out in a Soho doorway and getting in a drunken brawl….and now I will always connect drinking with that shoe company….and the last one that just came on is the use of the Who’s “Eminence Front” as the background for a GMC commercial when the song is about how people are getting screwed and used by the institutions and people that they believed in…maybe that one is appropo for GM…not sure….geez…
Playlists…
Well…as you know, I joined the digital music age with the purchase of an 8 gig mp-3 player a couple of years ago…and I still marvel at the fact that I have my entire music collection stored on the thing and still have about 3 gigs of space left…all that for 79 bucks…oh, nope, not an Apple..it’s a Sony. But that’s not the topic that I wanted to deal with here, this hit me while I was out on the bike..the place that these things usually float into my consciousness…and that is the playlists I have on the player and how it appears that the lists reflect the mood I was in when I made them. That’s not the whole story, though, the other part is the name of these lists; I’ll bet mine are weirder than yours….well…some of them are…the others are kind of self-explanatory..
1. 4Way Street album two…had to make this one since WMP decided to break up the album into chunks…
2. 56 Miles….made this one for the 56 mile ride I did on my 56th birthday last year…
3. Led Zeppelin….pretty much what it says…
4. Lee Michaels….and obscure performer from the 60′s that was part of my growing up…
5. Mixed songs…the first one I made that was not one performer or group..
6. More other songs….just another mix but of second tier songs that didn’t make the first list…
7. More songs….this one was really done before the last one….but alphabetically, the machine put it here…
8. Mountain….another one group list by what I consider one of the best bands of the 70′s…
9. Newest one….I did this one after being in Chicago and getting a bunch of music from my daughter…
10. Obscure….started this one with some David Bowie and then went deep into some less known artists..
11. Others…was just bored and getting bored with the other lists so I made this new one…
12. Steely Dan….if you’ve been here before….you know how I feel about the Dan….
Without breaking them down to further the point…I’ll just give one example of the mood thing I talked about earlier…there are some of these lists that most of the songs are played in a minor key, what I call “lonely music” like “Doctor Wu” and “Black” by Pearl Jam, and I know that I favor this type of music when I’m at one of the low points that hit occasionally….
See…I told you I was trying to lower the outrage quotient some….but don’t let this fool you…it’s still there and bubbling and I know it will come out later today or tomorrow…
Haven’t talked about music in a while…
Well…this topic popped into my head when I was reading an article about Robert Plant and his new band on tour this morning. It wasn’t really the article which was pretty complimentary but then, like an idiot, I have to read the comments that were posted by other readers. Why do people hate so much? I know I’ve touched on this subject quite a few times but it still confuses me when there are these nuclear reactions to what was just a fluff piece. Some the respondents even went so far to think anyone his age should never be seen doing the music that has been their lives work. When are you too old to entertain? Doesn’t the marketplace determine when you should stay home? Should we stop reading books or enjoying paintings done by people that are in the later stages of life?
I just don’t understand the psyche of people that can’t enjoy entertainers just because they have aged. Would you have Neil Young stay home and never tour again because he over 60? I know you may feel that I have these feelings because I’m getting up there and I have started to think about my age and how I relate to the world, but good music is good music and great writers are great no matter what their age. Music has given me so much enjoyment and extra understanding of life through that shared experience and I want to keep the ones I love around until they can’t do it anymore…and maybe longer than that. What do you think?
Music and Me….more onion skin…
If there is anything that anyone knows about me is how important music has been to me all of my life and that fact makes it inevitable that I would want to share how that came to be…but the problem is that I really don’t know why intellectually; it’s like seeing a painting that immediately evokes a response but to try to explain it to anyone else then pollutes their reaction to it. Or, it invokes an argument on the meaning where there is no need for one since art can and should mean different things to different people. Does that make sense? I guess music has helped me to understand that we are not alone in the world for one thing; it is a shorthand that connects us to shared thoughts and feelings and even at times has helped me realize that there are emotions to be felt that had never been a part of me.
I’ll get specific in a later post….