Category: Music

Record Straight, Setting The

Music

Apparently geriatric rocker Mick Jagger has had his memory go bad:

Mick Jagger has called out Paul McCartney for claiming The Beatles were bigger than The Rolling Stones.  The singer, 76, hit out at the Hey Jude hitmaker, 77, for suggesting The Rolling Stones copied whatever The Beatles did during their time as music rivals.
‘The big difference, though, is that The Rolling Stones is a big concert band in other decades and other areas when The Beatles never even did an arena tour. They broke up before the touring business started for real…  They [The Beatles] did that [Shea] stadium gig [in 1965].  But the Stones went on.  We started stadium gigs in the 1970s and are still doing them now.  That’s the real big difference between these two bands.’

Of course, ol’ Mick is showing signs of senility — or at best, selective memory.  As Paul pointed out:

‘I love the Stones but The Beatles were better.  Their stuff is rooted in the blues. Whereas we had a lot more influences.’

Paul’s being kind.  The Beatles created influences while the Stones just kept on playing their garage-band versions of blues.  And when the Stones didn’t do that, they copied the Beatles, as Paul noted:

Suggesting the Paint It Black hitmakers began to copy the Beatles, Paul added: ‘We started to notice that whatever we did the Stones sort of did it shortly thereafter.
‘We went to America and had huge success, then the Stones went to America.  We did Sergeant Pepper and the Stones did a psychedelic album. There was a lot of that.’

As for Mick’s comment:

‘One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums and then the other band doesn’t exist.’

Jagger’s confusing longevity with talent, which is like saying that Leonard Bernstein was a better composer than Mozart because he lived longer.

The Beatles broke up because they had three unbelievably-talented creative musicians who wanted to go their own way;  the Stones only ever had Keef as their creative source, so they were never going to break up:  since Let It Bleed, their music has always been about making money, not about the music.  And Keef, as he’s always admitted, is and always has been a blues musician.  Lennon, McCartney and Harrison played pretty much every kind of music — and created their own forms as well.  The Stones have never done that, ever.

Stick to prancing around the stage in skintight yoga outfits, Mick.  Nobody does it better.

Friday Night Music

Music

Add this guy to one of the greatest composers you never heard of.

Okay, that’s not exactly true, but Neil Innes was certainly the greatest satirical  composer ever.  Here’s just one example:  Hold My Hand (The Rutles).  Yes, that’s Monty Python’s Eric Idle on (McCartney-) bass, and Neil doing his John Lennon impersonation on vocals.

I’ve played song that to fanatical Beatle freaks, telling them that it was an undiscovered Beatles song which actually spawned Please Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand  and She Loves You — and not one ever called me on it.  And then there’s Get Back Get Up And Go… and I Am The Walrus  Piggy In The Middle.  The list is endless.

Here’s Neil talking about The Rutles, and here’s the entire All You Need Is Cash  TV show.

Let’s not even talk about Neil’s 1960s Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Urban Spaceman… which took aim at the drug culture before that became cool.

R.I.P. Neil Innes (1944-2019)

 

Both Sides

Business, Music

There’s apparently been some nastiness between Taylor Swift and her erstwhile recording company which has turned even more unpleasant since Swift egged her fans on to torment said record company.

I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs of this issue, but the rule of thumb in any imbroglio of this nature is that the money people (in this case the record company) are always going to try to screw the ideas people (that would be Swift, here);  so the default position in all this would be to think, with lots of justification, that once again, the record industry is trying to chisel the artist.  (Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty not able to perform Proud Mary  for years  because of the record company bastards and publishing deals.)

That said, however, this is  the serial feuder and generally-spiteful Taylor Swift we’re talking about, so I think I’ll reserve judgment, just this once.  Millionaires squabbling with millionaires:

The 100

Music

Let’s face it:  Rolling Stone  magazine was always awful.  I think it was them Frank Zappa was talking about when he characterized their writing as “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, aimed at people who can’t read.”  (I still miss Frank, a lot, as much for his intellect as for his music.)

RS‘s latest attempt at a “greatest” list (of singers) is a typical example:  muddled, ignorant and open to ridicule.

The muddle is easy:  they attempted to combine several genres of singing — rock, r&B, blues etc. — but while there may be some crossover in those particular ones, it falls completely on its face if you try to include people like Sinatra and Mel Torme, especially when it comes to ranking  the singers.  The muddle is also ignorant of actual vocal quality — and even worse if one tries to include “iconic” as part of it.  There are singers of extraordinary quality (such as Paul Rodgers of Free/Bad Company) who don’t have iconic tonality, and “ordinary” singers of limited range (like Ozzy Osbourne) who almost define an entire genre.  You can’t attempt to rank Rodgers and Ozzy against each other because they are two totally different singers, albeit in more or less similar genres of music.  Now rank Rodgers against Aretha Franklin, which the hapless Stoners did.  It is, as they say, to laugh.  (And by the way:  any compendium list of 100 singers which does not include Ian Gillan of Deep Purple or Steve Marriot of Humble Pie — to name just a couple which caught, or rather didn’t catch my eye —  is fatally flawed.)

Each genre of music requires a different kind of voice, and very few singers can cross over without failing.  And a singer’s inclusion in whatever genre is horribly personal, in any event.  (In the “jazz crooners” club, for example, Harry Connick Jr. is an infinitely-better singer than Sinatra, but without Sinatra there would likely be  no jazz crooners club.  YMMV.)

So Rolling Stone should have broken up the list into genres, just for starters, with the first being the aforementioned “iconic”voices — those which defined the genre — and then some attempt at vocal quality if they’re to be ranked at all.

I’m not going to do that, at least, not today.  But here’s an example of ten of my favorite Rock vocalists in no special order, just as I think of them:

Robert Plant (Zep)
Joe Cocker
Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company)
Cilla Black
Graham Bonnet (Marbles, Rainbow)
Stephen Stills
David Bowie
Freddie Mercury
Ann Wilson (Heart)
Ian Gillan (Deep Purple)

And just for the hell of it, ten from R&B/soul, likewise unranked:  

Otis Redding
Wilson Pickett
Aretha Franklin
Joe Tex
Tina Turner (who could equally have been classified under Rock)
Al Green
Ella Fitzgerald
Sam Moore
Lionel Ritchie
Etta James

And both lists could change tomorrow.

Friday Night Music: The Hogwash Interlude

Entertainment, Military, Music

As I may have mentioned before, the vast preponderance of my Army time was spent as a draftee in the South African Defence Force, as a musician in the Entertainment Group, actually a small unit of some sixty personnel in the Permanent Force (PF), but augmented by the addition of a few draftee National Servicemen (NSMs) usually, like myself, having been professional musicians before being drafted — Trevor Rabin of Yes  was an alum, a couple years before I arrived.

There was a Big Band, managed by the unit’s Commanding Officer Maj. George Hayden and staffed almost exclusively by PF musicians, and was of astonishing virtuosity and quality — mostly older men, many of them recording stars of an earlier era, they performed Glenn Miller-type material and played concerts all over the country.  Sometimes the concerts would feature solo artists, singers, violinists and classical guitarists, most of these being NSMs who’d been sent there after completing their basic training (boot camp).

Then there also were a few dance bands which played mostly popular music of all kinds, whether Top Ten hits, country music or Afrikaans Boeremusiek, “sakkie-sakkie”  as we irreverently called it (here’s an example).

And then there was Hogwash.

(yes, that’s Yer Humble Narrator on the left, age 24)

We were thrown together one Friday night because some Army unit was having a dance and all the Entertainment Group steady bands were already booked — I mean, we found out at 3pm that we would be playing at 8pm, and a two-hour drive to the venue lay between.  A frantic scramble followed, to get some band equipment together  — only I had brought my own gear into camp, so everyone else had to content themselves with equipment that none of the other bands wanted.  At least it all functioned, more or less.

We were saved by the fact that we were all good musicians — the others, to be frank, quite a lot better than I — and fortunately, our keyboard player Boze knew the lyrics and music to a jillion popular songs, so the rest of us just followed him along.  I knew a bunch more, of the Creedence Clearwater- and early rock ‘n roll genres, so we busked our way through five hours of music — and enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to make the band a permanent one (or at least for the remaining time of our draft).  We found an empty practice room, and set about putting together a repertoire that was astonishing in its variety (as you will see below).  And because our whole job was to play music, we played all day and every day, five days a week — sometimes taking two or more days to master a complex song.  We played gigs at military bases all over South Africa and, to our great joy, at forward combat bases in the “Operational Area” of South West Africa (later Namibia).  And we rocked.  We were better than a lot of professional club house bands, all but the drummer could sing, and harmonies became our stock-in-trade:  nobody  could sing with us, not even the pros.  As we already had a good list of oldies and party songs, we could concentrate on playing stuff that we wanted to play, and which made us all better musicians.

Hogwash was together for just under eighteen months, but it was quite honestly one of the happiest times of my life.  We had no responsibilities and nothing else to do but play, and play, and play — and when we weren’t playing music, it was like being in Monty Python, with wicked humor, outrageous behavior and general mischief in abundance.  (We discovered, for example, that “gronsk” was not a word, but a letter  — the first letter of a magic word.)

Here’s some of the music.

The Fez (Steely Dan) — played note-perfect, as we did a couple other Dan songs

Who Loves You (4 Seasons) — ooooh those harmonies

Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (Alan Parsons Project) — we played several Alan Parsons songs, and loved them all

Lazy (Deep Purple) — we played this version, not the indulgent live one

Breezin’ (George Benson) — smooth jazz, baby

Fantasy (Earth Wind & Fire) — funky (well, the way we played it, anyway)

China Grove (Doobie Brothers) — and a whole bunch of other Doobies

One Chain (Santana) — and a couple others by Carlos

I Wish (Stevie Wonder) — tough bass part and complicated backup vocals… I sweated bricks playing this one;  thanks a bunch, Stevie

Jive Talkin’ (Bee Gees) — and all their other disco songs;  hey, it was 1978

I Just Wanna Make Love To You (Foghat) — hair band music, even though we had no hair

…and the song which we played in our very first impromptu gig, and never stopped playing thereafter because we loved it, and because Boze sang it better than Garfunkel:

I only Have Eyes For You (Art Garfunkel) — best version of this song ever recorded

Here we are playing at some dismal Army camp or other:

Sadly, although we’d planned on staying together and playing professionally after the Army service was complete, Boze decided that he didn’t want to play pro.  Without him, the whole thing fell apart.  “Grundelstein” the vocalist quit music altogether and went into the hotel management business.  I rejoined Atlantic Showband (believe me, it was no hardship) and played with them from 1979 until I emigrated in 1986.  “Bee” the guitarist and Franco the drummer went on to play for two of the most well-known club bands in South Africa (Circus and Ballyhoo, respectively, for those who might know what I’m talking about).

Not playing pro with these guys is one of my greatest disappointments in my musical career.  I miss them all still.