The SUBSIM Music Thread

[propbeanie]

Originally Posted by vienna

...



<O>

I've got a picture around here of my mom & dad dancing to a Glenn Miller song (In The Mood?? Pennsylvania 6-5-Thousand?? Little Brown Jug?? - talk about innuendo!), and mom's garter is shining (well, maybe not quite as much), just like above... Rock & Roll was a bad influence? We got it from mom & dad's "swing" music...

[vienna]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

I've got a picture around here of my mom & dad dancing to a Glenn Miller song (In The Mood?? Pennsylvania 6-5-Thousand?? Little Brown Jug?? - talk about innuendo!), and mom's garter is shining (well, maybe not quite as much), just like above... Rock & Roll was a bad influence? We got it from mom & dad's "swing" music...

Reminds me of when my first ex's mother made a comment saying all rock songs were full of silly lyrics; I proceed to sing a couple of verses each of these songs from her day:







I still remember her glare and the stoney silence...






<>

[Kaye T. Bai]

Tonight's X-Files episode wuz da bomb.

[FullMetalADCAP]

"Time" by Pink Floyd on their Darkside of the Moon album. (Which is THE greatest musical album in the universe)

[FullMetalADCAP]

"Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. This is just such a badass song. Love it!

[Eichhörnchen]

Originally Posted by vienna

Let me know what you think...

I see what you mean and I'll definitely be looking for more... but they need to be wearing black and performing in a night-time venue for the full effect.

Edit: I just found this, which I can easily imagine played by The Velvets back in the day. But in another clip I viewed, a band member played some open strings just before they launched into a song and I thought his guitar sounded way out of tune; even if their music is meant to be discordant, they still need to tune their guitars, right? I noticed this too while listening to the video you posted.



Do you think that they are emulating the VU, or is this something they feel is entirely their own? It's easy for me to say they should all be in black leathers and torn jeans and look like they came from the street, but (and feel free to disagree) we are not young now and this isn't "ours"... The Velvets, in their music and dangerous lifestyle, were responding to their time... the drugs and all that, whereas these guys (I feel) are just nice boys playing the music. But I guess it's because I am not young.

[Jimbuna]

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Eichhörnchen

I see what you mean and I'll definitely be looking for more... but they need to be wearing black and performing in a night-time venue for the full effect.

Edit: I just found this, which I can easily imagine played by The Velvets back in the day. But in another clip I viewed, a band member played some open strings just before they launched into a song and I thought his guitar sounded way out of tune; even if their music is meant to be discordant, they still need to tune their guitars, right? I noticed this too while listening to the video you posted.

...

Do you think that they are emulating the VU, or is this something they feel is entirely their own? It's easy for me to say they should all be in black leathers and torn jeans and look like they came from the street, but (and feel free to disagree) we are not young now and this isn't "ours"... The Velvets, in their music and dangerous lifestyle, were responding to their time... the drugs and all that, whereas these guys (I feel) are just nice boys playing the music. But I guess it's because I am not young.

About tuning: well, there's tuning and there's tuning. Guitarists have been experimenting with and using all kinds of tunings probably since guitars were created. Lou Reed sometimes used what is called 'open tuning', particularly in his early VU days. Open tuning, for those unfamiliar, is tuning a guitar, not in the standard way, but to some sort of setting usually based on a chord or scale. For example, an open G Tuning consists of setting the stings to emulate the notes generated by fingering a normal G chord; if you strum the stings, it will sound as if you had actually fingered the chord itself. Tuning to an open tuning gives a whole new range of sounds and structures to the player. If you listen to The Rolling Stones, a very significant portion of their hits have Keith Richards playing in open G or open E tuning. Other artists such as Joni Mitchell, Prince, George Thorogood, Steve Stills, to name a few have used open tuning extensively...

Now for the other tunings. Some musicians have experimented with unorthodox tuning and some have even used the idea as a source of "found music", where one tries to find something concrete out of the chaos of an untuned or 'ill-tuned' instrument. The group, Sonic Youth, leaps to mind; The two guitarists in the band have made an art of using open tunings and "found" chords and scales. They also possess one of the finest collections of unusual and rare stringed instruments around; I have been amazed at how they managed to get hold of some of the most 'out there' guitars produced during the mid- to late-60s, you know, those strange electric guitars with all those bizarre pickup configurations and attendant knobs and switches...

...and they had one of the best looking bass players in rock...:





Back in the late 90s, a young lady in my then workplace was a bit of a music snob in the sense she thought all people over the age of about thirty-five didn't know what 'real' rock music was, that only the latest 'cool' bands really mattered; old relics, like myself (then pushing fifty), could never understand or appreciate the new music (you know, like we all thought about our parents back in the day). When I happened to mention I liked Sonic Youth. she immediately challenged me to name a SY song; now, I'm the sort of person who often has a bit of trouble getting song titles right; I'm usually "I can't recall the name, but it goes like this..." sort of person. When I had difficulty getting a title right, she thought she'd caught me; that is until I rattled off the names of the guitarists and the bassist (could never forget her) and I went on to note the various guitars they used; you could have knocked her over with a feather...

We may be getting old and, yes, we do tend to measure newer music by what we came up the road with, but, in the end, it is all part of the great musical and sonic 'soup' and we can be secure in the knowledge that, when they reach our current age, they will be saying to the youngsters, "You call that music?? Back in my day...". Its a bit like living like an open tuning: stay open and you never know what new creation you may find...

Thinking about open tunings and 'found' music has brought to mind this group I like; a past friend of mine, who was the original founder of the Go-Go's, once played bass in an incarnation of this group:











<O>

[Eichhörnchen]

Oh well, I'm no guitarist anyway... thank goodness I never had to tune my saxophone

(And my favourite bassist was/is Tina Weymouth)

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Eichhörnchen

Oh well, I'm no guitarist anyway... thank goodness I never had to tune my saxophone

(And my favourite bassist was/is Tina Weymouth)

Yeah, but a guitar doesn't have a spit valve...






<O>

[u crank]

Another guy who plays almost exclusively in open tunings is Sonny Landreth.



Ce garçon .... qu'il peut jouer.

[vienna]

Here ya go, Eichhörnchen, ya ol' sax fiend...











<O>

[Eichhörnchen]

Thanks for that... a reminder of a favourite comedy show over here which had it as its theme tune.... "Bottom"

I once had a decent collection of jazz albums featuring guys like Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins. Away from the rock music I played a lot of this stuff with a dear old friend Jens ('Bill') Boysen who was a wonderful jazz pianist. We'd usually have to hire out a church or village hall for just the two of us, usually with a badly tuned piano (there we go again)... which always made him cranky. He'd sit hunched over it with a soggy, unlit roll-up cigarette hanging out of his beard; I often wondered whether he even knew I was there as he went through his repertoire.

[Eisenwurst]

"I Feel Love" - Donna Summer.



"Bad Girls" - Donna Summer.