Tag: Music

Dear Jill… from the Pig.

We’re all crazy now.  Or something like that.

Like Velcro, this one… I’m tossing & turning.

And it’s relevant to today’s Beauty.

10 UNDERRATED Guitarists Who Changed Rock Forever

Okay, to just about any musician and relevant band fan, none of these guys is a stranger;  we all know who they are (or were).  It’s just nice to see Robert Quine, Jan Akkerman and Roy Buchanan get a little respect, for a change.  And all the rest are total monsters.  (Kath?  Ronson?  Lifeson?  Barre?  Have mercy.)

Enjoy.  My only quibble is that the video should have been a couple hours long.

I described this little performance to Longtime Buddy Trevor as “two old Jews making wonderful music together”, and I stand by the statement.  Listen to it tonight after dinner, and marvel at the virtuosity.

Had Edvard Grieg also been Jewish, it would have been a Tribe Trifecta, but I’ll take what I can get.

I see that Phil Collins is in a deep funk:

The drummer-singer for the band Genesis who became a chart-topping solo artist, says he has no drive to make new music because of severe health issues.

“I keep thinking I should go downstairs to the studio and see what happens,” Collins tells MOJO’s Mark Blake. “But I’m not hungry for it anymore. The thing is, I’ve been sick, I mean very sick…”

Collins suffered severe nerve damage following a spinal injury in 2007 and has had deteriorating mobility in recent years, meaning that for Genesis’s farewell shows in 2022 he had to sing sitting down while his son Nic played drums.

I know, I know:  everyone gets old, everyone loses the will to do things, all that.  I just can’t face it happening to Phil Collins.

I also know that a lot of people got very sick of Phil Collins during the late 1980s and early -90s, because it seemed like you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing his voice.

But let’s get real about this.  Quite apart from his singing, Phil was an absolute monster behind a drum kit, an integral part of Genesis’s music behind the mixing desk, and then there’s the fact that it was his voice that powered Genesis into the stratosphere when nobody thought they would survive the fallout of Peter Gabriel leaving the band.

His contribution to rock music has been incalculable, and to see him leaving the music scene makes my heart break.

Hang in there, Phil:  life can be a cast-iron bitch sometimes, but just remember that yours has made a whole lot of other lives better — hell, never mind “better”; wonderful would be no exaggeration, if my own experience is anything to go by.  Take at least a little comfort from that, buddy.

I think I’ll go and listen to a couple of Genesis albums now.