Rock Isn’t Innovative Anymore

From reading my blog, my tastes in music should be obvious. I like Progressive Rock, Classic Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Blues, Folk, and even some experimental stuff. But my tastes tend to be rather limited. I like guitar in my songs… and not just guitar, but, at least most of the time, guitar solos. But even with those, I’m picky. I don’t like “look at how fast I can play” odes to toxic masculinity (let’s be really… straight speed is basically “look how big my dick is”). I don’t mind speed, but only as one technique in a guitarist’s arsenal of techniques. And considering that David Gilmour is one of my three number one all-time favorite guitarists, speed isn’t even the most important technique, in my opinion (though he did have it to a point, he barely ever used it).

To be fair, no guitar isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer is another of my top 10 bands of all-time, and they only had guitar sometimes, with most of the leads being taken by Keith Emerson on keys, while the guitarist, Greg Lake, favored playing the bass guitar, instead. But even then…

Perhaps it’s because I’m a songwriter, but I don’t really listen to music as an escape. I don’t like going to clubs (too many people, too loud, not enough personal space), and I hate dancing (because I’m really, truly, honestly bad at it… I promise you… you don’t ever want to see me dance… you’ll have nightmares). So I’m not listening to music for the rhythm. I also don’t listen to music as background for something. The best time I have listening to music is, in fact, when I can gather a small group of friends, we can pour some drinks, grab some snacks, turn some music on, and sit and discuss it. I only got to do this rarely (and I haven’t done it in a long time… I miss it), but I have done it with Jimi Hendrix, ELP, Led Zeppelin, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Chantel McGregor, Anna Calvi, Living Colour, and Steven Wilson.

And this means that most of today’s mainstream music, including Pop, Rap, Hip Hop, R&B, Top 40 Rock, New-Age, etc isn’t my jam. I don’t hate them… I realize music is subjective, and I absolutely acknowledge the monster talents that can exist in these and other mainstream genres (Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar are just two of many, many examples [yes, I genuinely believe that Kendrick Lamar deserved that Pulitzer for “Damn”]). But, overall, when I look for music to listen to, I look, basically, for guitar-driven Rock… whatever that may mean. In short: I’m absolutely a music snob of sorts. (I still have trouble with Metal, though… I don’t like 80’s Metal at all, and I have a lot of trouble with the harsh growls and screams of heavier, darker Metal [some Prog Metal, and most Death Metal, Doom Metal, Black Metal, etc], despite the fact that the music in these genres is often incredible.)

So you might be surprised to find that I kind of agree with Steven Wilson, here…

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Great Guitar Solos – Pink Floyd Plays Sorrow Live on P*U*L*S*E*

More David Gilmour because… well… it’s David Gilmour…

This is from the P*U*L*S*E* DVD (that entire show is a treasure trove of amazing solos, to be honest). It’s the song “Sorrow”, from their 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

The song opens with a guitar solo, which ends at 3:15. The second solo starts at 3:57 and ends at 4:26. The third solo starts at 5:11 and ends at 5:31, which starts a very short ambient section. The final solo starts at 6:57, which closes out the song.

Special thanks to VolcanoMan in the comments on my last GGS post for suggesting this one…

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Streaming Service for Rare, Hard-to-Find, and Out of Print Music

I’ve already posted most of this on Facebook, so it will be familiar to some or all of y’all. But here I’m gonna expand a tad…

First, like I said on Facebook… I’ve been going over the take-down of What.CD, a private torrent site that, yes, shared official material (music, audiobooks, e-books, etc… no video, though).

Now, before I continue, I’m going to quote what I said on Facebook:

No, I don’t want to talk about how or why I know as much as I do about it, and yes, I agree that piracy is wrong, it’s right that piracy is illegal, people should support artists they love with money, and blah blah blah… we’re not having that conversation here.

And I’m gonna stress that here. We’re not here to discuss the relative morality of torrenting sites, question why I know as much as I do about the site, etc. So that’s the commenting policy. And that includes you, too, NSA, CIA, and FBI.

So anyways… I called What.CD the Library of Alexandria of music, and one of the reasons for that is because What.CD amassed an amazing collection of out of print, rare, hard to find, and/or prohibitively expensive music you basically couldn’t find anywhere else. It was incredible what could be found on What.CD, what new music you could find that you never heard before, and so on. And now that’s gone. Sure, torrent sites are like a massively exagerrated Hydra (shut down one site, a thousand more will pop up in its place), but it’s going to take a seriously long time to rebuild the What.CD Library.

But there could be another way, too… a… perhaps… more legal way… to rebuild a part of that library and make it accessible to everyone…

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Great Guitar Solos – Pink Floyd Plays Dogs

Another long one from the great Pink Floyd… with David Gilmour on lead guitar, obviously…

We’re going to their album Animals, and the song Dogs. I really love this one, and of course, as usual for David Gilmour, the solos are perfect.

Let’s get to the song…

The first guitar solo starts at 1:50 and ends at 2:25. The second solo, a guitar duet, starts at 3:40 and ends at 4:47. Then the third solo starts at 5:32 and ends at 6:46. The fourth solos starts at 13:25 and ends at 14:07, which is where a repeat of the second guitar solo (the duet) begins, which ends at 15:18.

IMO, it’s an incredible song. Sure, it’s long, but that’s Pink Floyd… and, for me, at least, they do an amazing job of keeping my attention through the entirety of their longer songs, so…

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Great Guitar Solos – Jimmy Page Plays White Summer/Black Mountain Side Live on the Julie Felix Show (April 26, 1970)

Late! I’m so sorry…

Jimmy Page is here on the Julie Felix show, playing White Summer/Black Mountain Side on acoustic guitar. It’s probably my favorite version of the instrumental.

Sadly, the video quality is… poor… but then this is recovered raw footage. It aired on April 26, 1970.

If you listen closely, from 2:57 to 3:21, it sounds like he’s riffing on “Friends” just a tiny bit (different key and arrangement, obviously, but still).

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Great Guitar Solos – Eddie Van Halen Plays Eruption Live

So, I have to admit up front that I’m just not a fan of Van Halen. But it’s pretty much only because of the lyrics. For whatever reason, no matter who the vocalist was, the lyrics were nearly always crap… at least in my opinion (and I understand others don’t agree… that’s fine).

See… lyrics are pretty important to me. If you’re going to write music that involves lyrics, all I ask is that you don’t make them out-and-out cringey. A lot of 80s hair metal bands claim to take their inspiration from Led Zeppelin, but it sometimes seems like they took their inspiration from Whole Lotta Love and Sick Again while ignoring basically everything else. Yes, Robert Plant had his lyrical duds, but he also had his lyrical genius, and at least with him, even his worst, most uninspired lyrics (like Thank You), aren’t ridiculously cringey (except maybe that line about bustles and may queens in Stairway to Heaven… because a bustle is a pair of panties, and May Queen was a popular brand of washing machine at the time… and I really cannot see how it fits with the rest of the song; I think it’s that line that really throws off any attempt to find a deeper meaning to the song). But so much of the 80s hair metal lyrics somehow manage to fly past cringey to just plain insulting, and Van Halen was no exception.

That said, if Van Halen had been a purely instrumental group, I would listen to them every single day, because musically they were phenomenal, and a lot of that was in no small part to Eddie.

So I want to highlight Eddie playing Eruption. I know this one is quite cliche, to the point where it’s relative “goodness” may be somewhat controversial these days, but to my ears, even though it absolutely is a technical masterclass missing much of the emotion I usually look for in guitarists, it’s still an absolutely brilliant piece of guitar work.

What I’m highlighting here is not the studio version. This is the live, 10 minute and 57 second solo. There isn’t much in the way of backing music, either. This is a guitar solo in the truest sense of the word…

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Great Guitar Solos – Anna Calvi Plays I’ll Be Your Man Live in Hamburg

I really need to go back to scheduling these. Sorry I keep missing the original dates and such. *sigh*

Anyways…

About 24 hours late, here’s some more Anna Calvi. The song is called “I’ll Be Your Man”. They’re playing live in Hamburg on March 13, 2014. The studio version doesn’t have much of a solo, but live, she opens with an amazing, dissonant, tension-filled improvised solo that I absolutely love…

Keep in mind that this is an audience video recording…

The solo starts at 0:34 and ends at 2:34.

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Great Guitar Solos – Jimi Hendrix Plays The Star Spangled Banner Live at Woodstock 1969

I decided to go with a classic, and also, perhaps, a cliche. I absolutely adore this. Hendrix often gets flack for “sloppiness” or “lack of technical ability”, but I’d argue that that’s not true at all. What’s true is that Hendrix was far more interested in emotion, and was very unconventional in his playing. But he did know what he was doing.

Anyways… this is obviously an instrumental, so the guitar solo is the whole thing. And immediately following the footage is a clip of an interview he did where he talked about playing it, so stay tuned for that, as well.

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