Music listening thread

this arvo's sesh lying on the rug in the sun.

tapes:

WINDHAND soma. couldnt seem to get it dialled in for max munt
EARTH bees
EARTH hex. these 2 are like western soundtracks played real slow and laconic like. deeply repetitive and relaxing

then onto LP's. 

ROBERT PALMER clues LP. goddamnit I love my tapes but the even bog standard LP pressings still crush tapes in their sleep. I should really get shot of the spooly little cuntz and just splurge on the LP versions like I'm dying of cancer or some shit. 
PIXIES surfer rosa LP. hadnt played this for yonks damnit it sounds awesome
PETER GABRIEL so LP. quite rooting the quiet ones on this. there mustve been BILLIONS of this album pressed, still an easy enough find in $1 bins. actually, I wonder if this wasnt one of the last ever lp's pressed in truly massive numbers? 1986, right there on the cusp of cd's taking over...

That is such gold. Stuff like that pressed to vinyl would sell like mennnnnnntalllll. Damnit the band only released TWO lp's and they were done ffs.

Have I detailed My Marquee Moon 30/30 Rule here?

So named by me after the Television LP I idiotically had on my wantlist for years and years but because I'm such a stingy dope, could never spring for.

It's never in the cutout bin and I'm a stingy dummy. So instead of paying $20-$30 for a record I KNEW I would 100% like, I kept buying other $3 or $4 records that I kind of 60% liked... but after I couple of listens didn't like much at all.... so I'd still spent the $30 and still didnt have a copy of Marquee Moon. So dumb. I do this all the time and I know it's dumb as hell.

In the end I splurged on a $30 copy of Marquee Moon and now think of it as worth about any 30 of my other records to me. The Marquee Moon 30/30 Rule.

I'm listening/watching to a lot of live Rockpile this last week. What is wrong with me?

Kind of annoys me that I legitimately cannot hear a thing with powerpop. Feels like I'm missing out on this wonderful big secret. 

Although, on the other hand, it is a relief not to be lured down the most financially ruinous rabbit hole in the entire musical animal kingdom

I don't rave about music much these days, but Marquee Moon still gets played here again and again. How such a band did not get "re-discovered" by somebody other than the Edge I do not know. It's just that the Edge ruined what was so good in Television by using delay instead of a second guitarist. And now I have ruined this post by mentioning the Edge. Marquee Moon is magical for me. For others it may be a piece of crap. Whatever. 

I only had Smack's first album on cassette. I would probably be driven to violence if somebody tried to take my copy of Rattlesnake Bite. 1985 seemed so great at the time. I did not see all the Neil Young wannabe grunge folks lurking about. As usual, I was an idiot. 

All great music there. I like this guy Gonzo Sombrero, who I think is from Finland, but I can't find his music on YouTube. I'll try to find it elsewhere when I am more lucid. This is all I could find: Gonzo Playing Some Hippy Tune

non-hippie ramblings channeling Bach or Howard Jones (how the fuck would I know?)

been on a bit of a hawkwind kick since old nik turner kicked the bucket the other day

*nik turner was not in the version of the hawkwind in this vid

Death to old hipsters indeed...I knew Lemmy had "graduated" from Hawkwind but it took me years to get to them. Ever glad I did, not the least reason is the ability is to further laugh at dead heads, "hey, wanna hear a band that is really really acid-fried hippy in all the best aggro ways?" Imagine an ex-member of the Dead releasing something like this in 1984:


Or even being alive in 2019...fuck those stupid dancing bears ffs...



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PiL "Paris in Spring" was one of the first albums I ever bought...A little beyond my 14-year old capacities...

wow, you must have a good ear. i mean, i'm assuming that the only way to do that before y/tube etc. would be to just obsessively listen and play along with the records, right?

I started playing music about age 6 with lessons every day for one instrument or the other so practiced both at home every night. Slow the turntable down, switch to the left or right speaker depending on the guitar part, tune the guitar down as the music was slowed down, have nothing better to do, and it was no big deal to me as a kid. So, yeah, I have a good ear, but, really, the thing is that I have stupidly good hearing. Even now, I have the hearing of a 15-year old so the combination of taking music forever and having good hearing made learning by ear easy for me. It's not always fun. Songs come on, famous ones, and what I hear is out of tune guitars or bass. Enter The Troggs, for examples of many out of tune songs that "work", or Bob Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately" and its out tune guitar and other instruments or David Bowie's Suffragette City's bassline or The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and its out of tune guitar, which wasn't all that easy to listen to in the first place when it first was released. I can remember hearing "Runnin' With The Devil" for the first time at a basketball game with my dad. I could just hear that the B-string of the guitar was out of tune. And being obsessive is exactly what makes playing by ear possible. Every person I have ever met who can play things by ear note for note is obsessive. I know exactly which position Mick Jones and Brian James played a lot of things because I can hear the open notes they played inadvertently while bending strings. I wish that I was joking. Obsession. Some kind of motivator music really is. I was talking to a friend of a friend who plays guitar for Michael Monroe, Paul Simon, The New York Dolls (Mach 2,I suppose), and so on. He and I were talking about how many "rock guys" are proud to know nothing about music theory, which really helps make a lot of things on piano and guitar easier to play by ear due to the likelihood of what is to come next so it allows you to listen to where the original guitarist on the recording decided to voice the part. The "if I learn to read music it will destroy my creativity argument" is one that I have heard for so long as is the "if I learn other songs note for note I will lose creativity" argument. No, you will get to play with your musical heroes, should you want to. I am a hard core classical guitarist now, but when I do play with my "rock guy" and "jazzer" friends they are surprised because unless they are reading this post right here prior to picking up the guitar and playing with them they have no idea that I spent far more than 10, 000 hours working on both electric and classical guitar. I didn't do it impress anybody else. I just love the music. My parents didn't want me to be a music major after sending me to a music school as child. I was a dutiful moron and didn't take music in university. I did continue to study privately, which is just as well when I remember what many music majors were like where I went to university. They looked down on far too many types of music that I enjoy. And "playing by ear" is not something encouraged by classically-trained teachers in the main. Sad. So many implicit "rules" that just take away the fun out of an obsession that just keeps paying one back for life. Music is the last thing people lose with many degenerative brain conditions. Even in stroke recovery, people can sing what they want when speech has left them. So all this music listening people do on this board can only serve them well in future bad times. Oh yeah, I used cassette recorders as well, but bought ones on the cheap with broken motors so that they would be slower. I would tune the guitar about a whole tone lower (close enough to be the average) and be able to use it to learn songs while using only one of the headphones so as not to wake up my family. Obsession. John McGeoch was fucking incredible to learn from as child. Still is amazing to learn from. Fucking guy was talented. Made an electric guitar sound like a symphony.

Jerusalem Slim. Oh, I hit that link and it reminded me of some interviews about it as well. MM had to tour every bloody nook and cranny on earth to pay off the record company for that record. Who wants to replace Sami Yaffa? Steve Stevens. Bizarre. Johnny Thunders called Steve Stevens "Johnny Muppet", which was harsh but, perhaps, in the ballpark. Weird bits of information are triggering strange memories of all these guys. Thunders used to wear some deer hoof around his neck. The song "Bad Luck Charm" by Stiv Bators is about that damn thing. Back then John would ask anybody for fifty bucks. The number of people who had to say, "I'd love to, but I don't want your death on my conscience" grew and grew. Hard to believe JT could have given us Steve Stevens in any way, shape, or form, but I did get John's point. Stiv and Mike were good friends. Stiv's old songwriting partner, plus his beloved wife, are like family. Freaking pandemic has made visiting difficult. And the worst thing for me was that Toronto's most interesting singer, Rude Van Steenes, died from COVID-19. He was a connection among many of us. Loved his band, ARSON, so much. Rude was always so great, even when I was a stupid kid. He loved art, dogs, music of all types, and just having a good laugh. People (rock friends of mine) go on about how criminally underrated MM is. I would argue that Rude and David Quinton Steinberg and The Infidels (Youngstown, Ohio) are better candidates for that distinction, plus Blue Ash who had a singer that is better to my ears than Robin Zander, who is probably my favorite pop singer who anybody knows.

shit, apologies for super slow reply. life gets in the way, y’know? impressive and crazy as hell to me that you can play things as idiosyncratic and individualistic as levine as mcgeoch by ear. i too got my first guitar at a similar young age, but thats about where the similarities end. in fact i’m like the polar opposite. i couldn’t play a cover version of anything all the way thru if you put a gun to my head. i’ve never really tried that hard. its never been my thing. i mean, i’d like to be able to sometimes and i can play a few classic riffs and bits n pieces but thats about as far as i could ever get. while i can and do admire virtousity. for me its just been about trying to play the noise whats inside my head. and that fuct up shit in there has never required much in the way of technique to get it out. as far as musical ability goes, i am shit. but it doesn’t matter. occasionally lack of technique has been frustrating. but i have fun. i mean thats the great thing about music is theres room for everyone and everything and everyone can have a go.

I will fight you for worst guitarist here fuckface! Actually, I don't want to fight - it's 10:46 PM on a Thursday night and I overcome the urge to play Capitol Radio One by the Clash and just play some Chet. West Coast of the USA 1957...the nation's hep driftwood would make it there soon enough...