I think I'm getting the hang of these guitar chords. For some reason scales were pretty easy, but it's taken a while to 'get' the connection from them to the chords on the fretboard. Don't matter how many times I read it and looked at diagrams, it was only when I had a enough muscle memory that there were some AHA!!!!!!!!! moments
The AHA! Moments on piano started with this guy. Probably not one's first thought as a source, but the days of running into Sunnyland Slim and offering a pint of Jim Beam to learn a few tricks are long gone. Especially if you lived in Goathugger, Arizona.
Shaharazade and I were in the Pearl District of Portland this afternoon. She needed new tennis shoes and the shop that sells a certain brand is there. We picked up a pair for her and she had to go to another shop around the corner. I think that's really why she wanted to go to the Pearl. It's a very nice store called Anthropologie. You might know it. They have lots of locations. Anyway, my point is they were playing music, as they always do, over the sound system and one song in particular, a modern one, reminded me of this first one and the one it reminded me of, reminded me of the rest.
Recently I uploaded my latest creation, a garage rock-y kind of song, "Boo-hoo-hoo". It got a pretty decent reception and I've been working on various possible follow-ups, like "My Old Man is a Drag" and "A Thorn By Any Other Name"...you know, the usual. To fire me up I've been listening to and watching the old school songs. Thought I'd share my inspiration with you...
Sometimes you never know what's going to go through your head. I've kept a list lately of tunes that just popped up for no good reason and then went looking for the videos.
Well....it's been known around here for a month or so that the 90s weren't my favorite years for music. Combined with a disturbing tendency of some talented but not necessarily big-time performers having their videos "embed-disabled" it took me a little longer to finally get it together. But there were some individual songs I liked. I'm cheating big-time here, doing the whole decade instead of a year or two at a time but at least I'll get this over with!
(actually Fri. evening rambling)
NOW WITH PRE-UPDATED UPDATES!!!!!!!!
So I got to thinking...it weren't not too long ago when radical environmentalist were blowing up stuff. (Not that I was in any way even remotely associated with, or aware of such activities, except for what I saw on the news.)
So I'm sure that they'll be happy to know that the (h/t brobin) media Wurlitzer now allows the defense: THEY MADE ME DO IT !!!!!! as in: OBAMAPELOSIMONSTER made me throw bricks, cut propane lines, bash in cars etc. because they're ruining MY COUNTRY!!!! i.e. They're ruining the whole fucking ecosystem.
Apparently the chronological thing is over. I just can't find 9 or 10 songs from the 90s that I like enough to post for your entertainment. Instead we're just going to free form it, with today's group of tunes being folk related, which includes blues and folk-rock. So here we go! Turn the hi-fi high and the lights down low! 'Cause here we go with the folk music show!
Taking a break from the chronological review of the pop world, here's a glimpse of my iPod. It's chock full of 50s and 60s stuff. I put it on shuffle and listed what came up. Some of these might be repeats but they're goodies so here we go!
As we moved into the later 1980s the music world was getting away from me. We had Whitney Houston, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Richard Marx, Miami Sound Machine....not my cup of tea. Some of the tunes today were big enough hits and some...well you have to dig a little but there's always good music, somewhere!
I'm mad at Prince! Ok, the Beatles don't have songs on iTunes for some reason but at least you can see tons and tons of their stuff on youtube. Prince has made it impossible to see his videos so no Raspberry Beret, which ticks me off! And **** Bryan Adams too. Bryan Adams! Who does he think he is? I like his music, he fits in here but I wanted to use Summer of '69. So **** you, Bryan! Now on to some great performances and some very guilty pleasures.
And then we danced! The early 80s had a lot of entertaining music and these tunes are the kinds of things I was listening to. We'd moved to San Francisco and frequented a club called Echo Beach. These tunes seem like the modern era, thanks to MTV. I didn't get a deja vu feeling exactly, while I was putting this together, but the memories are stronger than any of the previous weeks.
So this disco thing was fading out. Baseball fans were rioting over it in Cleveland. Or maybe that was the 5 cent beer. In Manhattan a different kind of music was growing that soon spread to London and then back to other parts of the U.S.
Here are my favorites of the late 70s, very early 80s punk/new wave scene.
You saw the list yesterday, the one with Barry Manilow, the Captain and Tennille, Olivia Newton-Fig, the Carpenters and so on. Today's stroll will not include any of them, due to my insistence that I have to like something to post it!
1975 was, in retrospect, the last year of the 60s in music. Heavily influenced by what had come before, often performed by the same people. Soon it would be all disco, punk, new wave.
Ok, so I'm skipping ahead a little but I got on a train of thought which led me to my own short-lived career. When 1975 rolled around I found myself in Los Angeles. Shaharazade and I had been in a small town on the Oregon coast and I had to go. I had ambition! We moved to San Francisco but I soon found that SF wasn't the place. I had to go to Hollywood.
While America was entertained or tormented by disco, England was going through an odd phase, where hippies and makeup combined to create the Glam Rock scene. Satin was in. Nuttiness was in. It eventually played itself out by becoming too bubble-gummy. The goofball outfits of Slade and the pop of The Sweet
led to the nice, safe, calculated Bay City Rollers. But for awhile it was a lot of fun.
So the Beatles broke up and things got confusing. The Rolling Stones, for example, no longer had an example to catch up with. Thanks to The Band's rusticana (is that a word?), the Beatles getting back, Dylan's catching rainbow trout being what it must be all about, and hippies in droves leaving the cities to become country dwellers, rock 'n roll was getting soft.
Some real mindbending happened in the later 60s...as some of us remember so well! And that bit about "if you remember the 60s, you weren't there", well, that's not true at all! It's some kind of anti-hippie propaganda.
The times, they a-changed in 1967. Here's a collection of crazy garage music and early psychedelia, culled from my memory and the wonderful world of youtube. Thanks, youtube! You've saved me late fees at my local movie store. I've got two I like. One is Clinton Street Video, a smallish store that has a very good selection of obscure music plus lots of Italian movies. The other is Movie Madness, a much larger place, whose owner goes to Hollywood auctions and stocks his display windows with Rita Moreno's nightie from West Side Story or Tony Curtis' flapper hat from Some Like It Hot. But I digress...
