Posts Tagged ‘Band’

Deep Purple

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Deep Purple is the greatest rock band ever.  Never mind what I said in the last post; the Beatles are the default greatest band ever, but Deep Purple walks the fucking walk.  What did the Beatles ever say, “All you need is love?”  Are we that naive?  What if someone asked you, no, told you “Let’s go Space Truckin!’”  You’re getting in that truck.

Deep Purple came around that time in rock when things were starting to get stupid.  The politics and spirituality of the Sixties was coming to an end, but the party would not stop.  Deep Purple carried that torch into the next decade.

Both Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin were gaining attention around the same time in the late Sixties, and both have a similar chunky blues derivative about them.  Led Zeppelin veered off into a world of increasing complexities and Hobbits; the Viking hordes attacking the soft fields so green and moving through Kashmir.  While Led Zeppelin floated in the clouds Deep Purple was in your basement, packing your bong and lighting your black light posters.

Deep Purple beat you over the face with rock with lumbering visceral sounds that seemed to bubble from the belly of Satan and rattle your eardrums into submission.  They hold the Guinness record for “The Loudest Band”.  They never gave that shit to Motley Crue.

When my psychiatrist gave me a word association test the other day, one of the things he said was “classic rock”.  Even if I were responding beyond a subconscious state, I would have responded Deep Purple.  The psychiatrist was taken aback, like I had so many other bands to choose from.  How could I associate all of classic rock with Deep Purple?  The real question is, how can you not?

Classic rock in it purest form started in the Seventies where the venues got bigger, the speakers got louder, and everyone in the band had long hair, beards, and performed with their shirts open.  All the other bands of this golden era of classic rock had a gimmick or theme that drove the band.  Not Deep Purple.  If you stripped any of the golden era classic rock bands down to their basics, they would be Deep Purple.  That is why Deep Purple is the greatest classic rock band.

That, and because they rock.

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Posted in Dumbass Rock, Observations | No Comments »

Beatles Backlash

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

The video game Rock Band released their Beatles volume about a month ago.  Everyone went nuts over the release of the video game.  Classic rock radio stations were dedicating days exclusive to the Beatles catalog with the DJs falling over themselves in the way they were lauding the music.  They never got that excited over Molly Hatchet.  VH1 started showing Beatles videos, but they weren’t actual videos, they were clips of the Rock Band video games.

Some New York myopic master craftsman of bloviation even declared Rock Band:Beatles to be the “most important video game ever.”  Fist of all, this guy probably never beat Super Mario Bros. and shouldn’t even get to talk about video games until he does.  And second…really?  Is jamming out Helter Skelter on a toy guitar going to open my eyes to life’s possibilities for the first time?  The basis for his title was the camaraderie and bridging of the generations the game would create.  The Wii already did that, taking videogames out of the basement and into the living room.  If mom wasn’t playing Wii, or any of the ten other Guitar Hero or Rock Band games out there, she’s not going to change her mind with this edition.

What makes the Beatles so great?  What makes them better than the Rolling Stones or the Kinks, both of which their contemporaries and still performing?  Pink Floyd, Velvet Underground, even the Beach Boys who were involved in a rivalry with the Beatles were experimenting and pushing the boundaries of rock and roll.  The debate never arises, like there are three certainties to life: death, taxes, and the Beatles are the greatest rock band ever.

The Beatles are credited for being the voice of their generation.  John Lennon is revered by many, even beyond Baby Boomers, as some mystical and spiritual institution.  People hang off his words and ideas like they have any more philosophical and spiritual meaning than Peter Noone’s.  Love, love, love wasn’t a two way street.  Lennon was a documented misogynist.  After all, this is the guy who wrote Norwegian Wood, a song about buring down some lady’s house because she wouldn’t sleep with him.  Paul McCartney is considered the asshole Beatle since he wanted to take what was so pure, magical and creative as the Beatles’ music and capitalize its lucrative potential to the max.  That drove the rift between John and Paul.  Selling records isn’t cool, and by that rational Ringo is by far the coolest Beatle.

Initially I blame the Baby Boomers for holding the Beatles in their lofty position in rock history.  Baby Boomers are convinced everything they ever did is the most important thing the world has ever seen.  Their ideas were infallible, their culture was absolute utopia, and their music was truly peerless; no other band shall ever approach the brilliance the bands of the 60s achieved.  I blame the Baby Boomers for a great many other things, like the ruinous state of the world.  We now see few of the radical ideas of the Baby Boomers ever changed the world.  We’ve moved on, except for the music, which even contemporary music publications linger the standard bands of the Sixties as the apex of music.

Ultimately, the Beatles were a perfect storm of a band, probably never to be repeated in the predictable future of music.  Their pop hits and friendly charm in the early Sixties built a base of loyal teenie-boppers (The damn New Kids on the Block are on a successful tour right now).  Plus with such a narrow and yet to be fragmented range of popular music at the time more people defaulted to liking the Beatles with the limited other options.  Then when all music went psychedelic, so did the Beatles, and so went their fanbase for the ride.  All of a sudden the teenie-boppers are all Hari Krishnahs and the Beatles are the greatest band ever for their creative daring, even though every other band was doing similar things.

Rock more or less peaked in the Sixties.  Though it hasn’t become less popular per se, rock’s diversity began to grow and splinter into different categories as did the rest of popular music.  Music has splintered into exponential categories and subcategories that appeal to their certain niche and never gather as substantial an audience as the Beatles enjoyed in the Sixties.  All that, and they made pretty good music too.

There is no good way to write about the Beatles.  If you fawn all over them you sound like everyone else in the world.  But if you critique the Beatles you’re that guy, that contrarian who’s just being a jagg trying to get a rise out of people cuz everyone loves the Beatles.   I’ve come to the conclusion that the Beatles will be the greatest band in the history of music for at least the next twenty years.  By then maybe there will be a consolidation of media as more companies buy other companies offering less options for receiving information.  Until then, the Beatles are the greatest rock and roll band ever.  Second best, Deep Purple.

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Big Ol’ Jet Airliner

Friday, August 28th, 2009

The Steve Miller Band is a classic rock staple, but not a band lauded and praised like others.  They don’t draw much attention to themselves, yet they don’t offend.  When you hear one of their songs at the grocery store you don’t get excited, but you do look to the speakers in the ceiling and say, “Good tunes.”

This song popped up on Q95 while driving through BF Hancock county for my job.  That big ol’ jet airliner always takes me back to the summer of ‘99, a simpler time before shoe bombers, bailouts, and the Department of Homeland Security.  The neo-hippy movement was in its dying throes of cultural relevance ready to be replaced by the aughts’ 1980’s redux blugh. That is, except at the Deer Creek Music Center for the Steve Miller Band concert.

Sorry to say, but that big ol’ jet airliner fills me with memories of frustration and disappointment.  The whirlwind of teenage hormone and chemical consciousness grew ripe in the lawn of that amphitheater.  Particularly struck was a nubile young nymph in a high-cropped t-shirt showing a midsection I’ve never seen comparable on another woman.  She approached my friend and I with a face of chemically misguided intent on the legs of a baby horse taking its first steps.

Quickly I learned I was not her target.  She was after my friend, who had a girlfriend, and I endured an entire night of this downright abnormally attractive woman desperately putting the moves on a man who’d have none.  Many times I tried to redirect her attention from my friend onto me, even with the help of said friend, but she remained undeterred, even to the point of asking me what was wrong with my friend.  Why wouldn’t he maul her?

Staring out 200 yards away at the stage the Steve Miller Band played oblivious to my problems.  The soundtrack to the height of my frustration, Big Ol’ Jet Airliner.  Yes, carry me far away; far, far away for this inescapable madness.  It’s not here that I want to stay!

That jet airliner carried me ten years later to now.  No one to my knowledge made the nymph that night.  Even if the tables turned, and I did roll around in the cool lawn with this teenage aberration, my luck would have left me with cold sores at best.  A worst I’d have made her my wife after knocking her up at 17.  I’d bounce from factory temp jobs while she’d stay at home with the kids and whatever drug dealer she was romping with while I was away.  And as I’d watch her perfect body quickly deteriorate, I’d be wishing I was where I am right now.

Even as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping; the frustrations of that night diminish more and more.  The only regrets now are those felt by my friend, whose girlfriend he so supernaturally maintained his loyalty for repaid him by dropping him on his ass a few weeks later.  Now everytime I see him he mentions what could have been.  Time has made the memory nothing to get excited about, kind of like the Steve Miller Band.

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Posted in Inert Rock, Memories | 1 Comment »