Week 1 - 25 best live records of all time.

[3-LockBox]

I'm a long-winded writer...

And a fast typist. My last post was a third as long and it took me twice as long to type it as you typed your's. And it was obsolete from the moment I hit the Submit Reply button.

I too hope those viewing/lurking see these discussions as informational and not as flame wars, because they're not. Its what kept me coming back all those years ago and its more than welcome now.

[BradH]

I ain't moving, the music is what's important, listen to that & forget about the bells & whistles. This is more art to me than it should be entertainment to you.

I don't think this is the most horrible thing in the world, mind you. But I think that it led to a lapse in work ethic amongst certain types of musicians, who forget that they are following people who came up in an industry where entertaining the audience was as important as the music, because sometimes it was how musicians got the music over in the first place (which is a point you made earlier).

What you call a lapse in work ethic was nothing more than a new way of doing things. You included The Beatles in with The Stones and the earlier bands who understood showmanship. But the only concessions to showbiz visuals The Beatles made were the matching suits and occasionally shaking their heads. That was as far as it went because they actually sat down and had a discussion about where they were going with their stage presence. They decided to do the exact opposite of Elvis and just stand and play so the focus would be on the music. (Good luck with that). Lennon said when the Stones hit the scene in London they knew everything was going back to @ss wiggling, as he called it. My attitude is this: if the audience keeps coming back to whatever you're doing then who's to say? I used to have huge (tequila and herb fueled) arguments in the 80's with a friend who characterized the 70's prog stage shows & costumes as phony because people like Clapton and the Dead were able to just stand there and play. (And you could safely throw glitter and punk into the mix, too.) People have different definitions of "keeping it real" and, for whatever reason, I tend not to buy any of it. I've seen it done well both ways and I've seen it suck both ways.

My remarks are based on years of hearing hacks do this.

Who hasn't? That's why we listened to prog rock in the '70's instead. Clapton was just boring "regular rock" as we called it. Everybody was doing it, it goes back to the "moving the fingers" crutch I was talking about. Now, I don't think that's what Clapton himself was doing but the lack of imagination among legions of guitarists is not his fault. This is precisely what Robyn Hitchcock meant when he said music is destroyed by the best artists. If they weren't great then no one would listen to them. Remember when Paul Carrack played on Manifesto, cashed his check and then said Roxy Music had a lot to answer for because of all that synth-pop New Romanticism that exploded in the U.K.? same kind of argument. This happens over and over in all forms of art although it's really extreme in Clapton's case. But when the Allmans released Fillmore East they showed that someone like Cream or the Dead did not have a monopoly on how jamming could be done. It was fresh, it was new and it was a landmark album and should rank much higher than the bottom of any list for live albums.

> But audiences continued to pay to watch Parker & Gillespie just like they continued to pay to see The Allman Bros. In fact, they were the most popular American band of the 70's.

This ignores my point that rock isn't jazz.

No, jazz IS the point. How can you easily dismiss Louis Jordan's opinion of be-bop and then make the same argument against long guitar solos and say "rock isn't jazz". You know full well that many people didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was doing, much less think of it as jazz. My point is that other people liked it and paid to see it repeatedly so it's a bit of stretch to say that these guys were playing only for each other. Now, Ornettte Coleman on the other hand...

Experimentation is great, and it's a free country and all...it's just that, like so many other things, so few do it well. So I'd lean towards the idea that things would've been better with just a little less of it. And in this context I have no quarrel with prog: although I'm not a fan, I think it's a far more organic & interesting development than fusion AND turning a 3 minute blues song into a 20 minute showcase.

Oh, that line between fusion and prog is waaaay fuzzier than you might realize. Where does Tony Williams end and Soft Machine begin? Hard to say. But it's all good, bro...

The Rolling Stones WERE Elmore James....

I wish I'd said that.

Brian Jones permitted the Chuck Berry influence & covers to throw Keith Richards a bone. The Allman Brothers were the Grateful Dead by comparison--and that's not a damning condemnation, just an opinion.

Maybe in terms of long guitar solos. Jamming was definitely more experimental - same with Cream.

The hippies/progsters/jam bands/classic rock dinosaurs rode on other paths. Most of which are a one-way trip to sh*t-town for people like me, though of course not everyone is like me.

Give me David Lee Roth-era Eddie Van Halen, but hold up on the Vai & Satriani people, please.

To me, Eddie is the mayor of sh*t-town. I never liked Vai for the same reason. Satriaini comes up short but I think he has more music in his solos than the other two. Solos are subjective for the listener like anything else but if nobody does them then you don't get the good ones. I mean, I had to listen to Vai doing squealing pig solos in his jumpsuit when I saw Zappa. Although, "Whipping Post" was great. (Didja see what I did right there? Wasn't that awesome? Huh?)

I'm not as much of a traditionalist as you're framing me here.

Yeah, I know, but I'm using it for shorthand for a particular worldview. As you know, in its most extreme forms it says everything from Rubber Soul to Quadrophenia was just a speedbump on the road from Gene Vincent to Richard Hell. I know you don't believe that but "traditionalist" sounds more respectful than "out of his freaking mind".

Do you really think I'm so beholden to the perfect pop song that I would deny I Am The Walrus or A Day In the Life?

Hell yeah! I'm kind of shocked about that. Really? Btw, I've got a version of "I Am The Walrus" that's just the four of 'em without the backing tracks. Official quality too, it's from a Doc Ebbets release of a canceled comp thing from EMI/Capitol. I think I'll put it on the British Psych comp that millions are clamoring for. Millions, I tell ya.

Of course, if you start injecting drama or theatrics or even bells & whistles into rock music, you won't end up with a Quadrophenia or Tommy (which I'm still not a fan of), you won't have even a Satanic Majesties to peddle...

Now, how in the HELL can you have Tommy or Quadrophenia without drama and theatrics? This is precisely my argument against traditionalists. Okay, arch-traditionalists.

So is experimentation something that should be avoided, in & of itself? No, of course not. Expand a song length--or even write an opus along the lines of the titles 3-Lock listed? Go right ahead. Turn a bunch of blues songs upside down? That's fine, too. Do a 3 hour set that consists of a dozen blues songs? Uh...you'd better deliver.

But there were jazz purists saying the same thing about fusion. Prog rock had it's classical influences too. All of those genres had pursists who said, "Thou shall not trespass." I don't see what makes the blues more sacred than other genres when innovation comes sniffing around.

The problem is that too much is done by too many who I make a judgment as not being qualified to make the connection I feel with those experimental songs. Do you think the mall-punk bands could write something like American Idiot?)

I thought they did? Oh, sorry, was that out loud? Seriously, I know what you're saying but I just can't take Green Day seriously after being a fan of The Jam when they were kicking. I know that sounds like elitist bs but it's an honest, visceral reaction I've always had with them. Listening to that guy fake a British accent is just too much. I should probably give that album another listen because a lot of people say there's a there there.

Funny how I feel like I have to qualify certain things in this discussion because although we've had it before, probably more than once, there might be people reading this who haven't seen it, and therefore we can't really yell 'NO! You're WRONG! You're full of SH*T!' because someone might actually think we mean it.

When intellectuals say, "With all due respect" what they really mean is "You're the afterbirth that crawled out of the hospital dumpster." Have you noticed that? Man, I'd like to be a translator at the U.N. for a day. "Will the ambassador from Georgia kindly remove his trousers and bend over? Thank you."

For the record, while this board sorely misses Darius...

Yeah, it does. I enjoyed the hell out of him. All those guys, Rae, etc. Nothing wrong with anybody here either, there just needs to be more of 'em.