Tag: Music

Do It Again – The Kinks

Standing in the middle of nowhere
Wondering how to begin
Lost between tomorrow and yesterday
Between now and then
And now we’re back where we started
Here we go round again
Day after day I get up and I say
I better do it again
Where are all the people going
Round and round till we reach the end
One day leading to another
Get up go out do it again
Then it’s back where you started
Here we go round again
Back where you started
Come on do it again
And you think today is going to be better
Change the world and do it again
Give it all up and start all over
You say you will but you don’t know when
Then it’s back where you started
Here we go round again
Day after day I get up and I say
Come on better do it again
The days go by and you wish you were a different guy
Different friends and a new set of clothes
You make alterations and (a fact in you knows)
A new house a new car a new job a new nose
But it’s superficial and it’s only skin deep
Cause the voices in your head keep shouting in your sleep
Get back, get back
Back where you started, here we go round again
Back where you started, come on do it again
Back where you started, here we go round again
Day after day I get up and I say, do it again
Do it again
Day after day I get up and I say, do it again

Benny Andersson’s Dansband

Andersson, 72, sees his group, which goes by BAO (pronounced “bah-oh”), as part of the tradition of the hardworking “dansbands” that entertained Swedes for generations. Dansbands, whose popularity peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, would roam the country and play mainly pop, rock, disco and the cheesy easy-listening known as schlager with one goal in mind: Get people to dance. Many wore fantastically garish matching costumes.

BAO’s sets are puzzlingly diverse, as if someone had grafted together the playlists of 20 genres on Spotify. Attending four tour stops last week, I took in 16 hours of music — like Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, only more upbeat — and heard waltzes, big-band jazz, pop tunes, polkas, boogie, chansons, rockabilly, glam-rock stomps and traditional folk tunes. The band basically went through all the styles Abba smoothly integrated into its signature hits.

“They capture the Swedishness of the music,” Jan Ryden, 55, said of BAO, at the end of the show in Eskilstuna, 90 minutes west of Stockholm.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, A Bus Journey to a Time Before Abba

Interview with Pete Townshend – NY Times

I have spent 55 years working in rock. I remain in familiar territory. I’ve always regarded the rock-star phenomenon with immense disdain. I’ve had my moments, which have been gloriously recorded and exalted — but brief — when I’ve felt: I’m going to try and do this job. I’m going to try to be a proper rock star. Then I would do it, and it wouldn’t work. I was counterfeit. There are very few people truly authentic to the cause: David Byrne. Mick Jagger. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell. Deborah Harry.

NYTIMES

Ray Manzarek interview. Fresh Air – July 6, 1998

Keyboard player and now record producer RAY MANZAREK, has written the new autobiography “Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors.”(Putnam Books) MANZAREK talks about his experience playing in one of the 1960’s most influential bands. The Doors disbanded after its lead singer Jim Morrison died in 1971. Since The Doors, MANZAREK has produced four albums for the punk rock band X and recorded several solo albums.

navigate to NPR Page if you have any problems with embedded player: NPR

Would you have been the same you had things been otherwise?

PASADENA, Calif. — On a Thursday in mid-October, Flea sat in a patio chair he’d dragged down to the lawn, looking out at the green lake in his backyard. As the late-morning sun beat down on his graying skull and the tattoo-dotted arms under his Vin Scully T-shirt, he curled his battered bare toes in the grass just centimeters from an ashy fossil that was once a piece of dog waste, and began reckoning with the unanswerable:

“Like, your heart, your spirit, who you are — does it come out no matter what context you get put in?” he asked, “Or is it shaped immeasurably and irretrievably by your circumstances? I don’t know.”

He’s just written his first book, a memoir called “Acid for the Children” that’s out Nov. 5. In it he recounts how he took up bass guitar, learned to thumb and finger-pop its strings and formed a band with three high-school buddies: Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons and Anthony Kiedis. That band became the Red Hot Chili Peppers and persevered for three wild, shirtless decades, weathering the loss of members to addiction and attrition, not to mention the waning of alternative rock as a commercial force.

Flea Had a Wild Life. Then He Joined Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Alex Pappademas
nytimes

Taxonomy of Music Genres

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

Pavement:
alternative rock, indie rock, lo-fi, noise pop, anti-folk, modern rock, slow core, dream pop, noise rock, post-punk

My Bloody Valentine:
dream pop, noise pop, nu gaze, shoegaze, alternative rock, lo-fi, indie rock, noise rock, experimental rock, slow core

Black Sabbath:
birmingham metal, rock, hard rock, metal, uk doom metal, album rock, stoner rock, classic rock

INXS:
funk rock, australian rock, dance rock, new romantic, new wave, rock, new wave pop, mellow gold, soft rock, pop rock

What does Swedish Rockabilly sound like?
http://everynoise.com/engenremap-swedishrockabilly.html
Not bad! Who knew.

via Kottke

Dust My Broom

I’m a get up soon in the mornin’
I believe I’ll dust my broom
I’m a get up soon in the mornin’
I believe I’ll dust my broom
I’ll quit the best gal, I’m lovin’
Now my friends can get in my room
I’m gonna write a letter, gonna call every town I know
I’m gonna write a letter, telephone every town I know
If I don’t find her in Mississippi
She be in East Monroe I know
And I don’t want no woman
Want every downtown man she meets
No I don’t want no woman
Want every downtown man she meets
Man, she’s a no good doney
They shouldn’t allow her on the street, yeah
I believe, I believe my time ain’t long
I believe, I believe my time ain’t long
I ain’t gonna leave my baby
And break up my happy home

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: James Elmore / Robert Johnson

1970 review of Elton John at the Troubadour – Los Angeles Times

Beyond his vocals, melodies and arrangements, there is a certain sense of the absurd about John as a performer that is reminiscent of the American rock stars of the mid-1950s.

Only someone with that wild, uninhibited view of his music would dare ask the audience to sing along — something that is almost never done anymore — or drop to his knees, like Jerry Lee Lewis used to do, in a rousing piano finale on “Burn Down the Mission.” It worked wonderfully well.

Robert Hilburn, LA Times

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-elton-john-1970-at-the-troubadour-hilburn-20190523-story.html

Minglewood Blues, Cannon’s Jug Stompers

Minglewood Blues by Noah Lewis

Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Said she keep you worried, troubled all the time

Don’t you think your fairer was li’l and cute like mine
Don’t you wish your fairer was li’l and cute like mine
She’s a mar- She’s a married woman,
But she comes to see me all the time

Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Said she keep you worried, troubled all the time

Well I got a letter mama and you ought to hear it read
Well I got a letter Lord and you ought to hear it read
If you comin’ back baby now be on your way”

via reddit

Robert Christgau, excerpts from Consumer Guide, November 21, 1989

MEAT PUPPETS: Monsters (SST) Supposedly a combination of their two 1988 albums (a mirage omelet, thanks a lot), this is really the guitar-god record Curt Kirkwood always had in him–on all but a couple of cuts the arena-rock bottom that’s an interview fantasy for those who haven’t caught them on a ZZ Top night powers his chunky riffs and psychedelic axemanship. What’ll keep them from turning into plutonium is the utterly unmacho vocals, brother harmonies making even “Party Till the World Obeys” and the one that begins “Tie me up/Get it right” seem like critiques of power, which is what they are–psychedelic in the nicest way yet again. A MINUS

MEKONS: Rock ‘n’ Roll (A&M) If you love rock and roll (which is possible even if you slum the spelling with apostrophes), but don’t think Rock and Roll (much less Rock ‘n’ Roll) a propitious title right now, you could love this album, which takes their love-hate relationship with America to the bank. Musically, it’s rock and roll despite the fiddles sawing louder than ever, almost as Clashlike as the promo claims, with Steve Goulding bashing away louder than ever too. Lyrically, in great song after great song, rock and roll is devil’s-breath perfume, capitalism’s “favourite boy child,” a commodity like sex, a log to throw on the fire, a “shining path back to reconquer Americay.” Are they implicated? Of course. Do they love it? Yes and no. A

EDDIE MURPHY: So Happy (Columbia) The failure of this wicked Prince rip to scale the charts reminds us once again how difficult it is for defiant outsiders to fracture pop stereotypes. Murphy will never be El DeBarge, but he’s perfect for cartoon funk, and over the years his wheedling croon has gotten serious. Maybe the problem is that his sexual urges still don’t emanate from very deep inside. Often, in fact, they’re inspired by his bathroom reading–he’s big on locations, spends an entire song convincing her to do it in a chair. Inspirational Dialogue: She: “Are you close?” He: “If I get any closer I be behind you.” B PLUS

PIXIES: Doolittle (4AD/Elektra) They’re in love and they don’t know why–with rock and roll, which is heartening in a time when so many college dropouts have lost touch with the verities. You can tell from the bruising riffs, the rousing choruses, the cute little bass melodies, the solid if changeable beat. But not from any words they sing. They’ll improve in direct relation to their improved contact with the outside world. Getting famous too fast could ruin them. B PLUS

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