Heart in a studio concert just before their US album debut of Dreamboat Annie, and they still look like teenagers. Soul Of The Sea, Devil Delight, Magic Man
From the same show: Dreamboat Annie, Crazy On You (loud), Mainstage (loud), Heartless (loud). The sound levels vary because of the different sources.
As luck would have it, I saw Heart twice that summer, opening for Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and later on a triple bill with Rush and the Doobie Brothers. They clearly knew what they were doing performance-wise right from the beginning.
X Offender, Detroit 442, Denis, Touched By Your Presence
Also, In The Flesh foreshadows Videodrome. The earliest Blondie video so far, Rip Her To Shreds (thanks to misteraitch).
Blondie always seemed to me like Joey Ramones' little sister. The cute kid who had secretly paid attention. Patti Smith and Joan Jett hewed closer to the punk ideal, but Deborah Harry was right in there with them.
Recently, I glimpsed a bit of the bigger picture behind Blondie's rise to fame, and the mastermind appears to have been Shep Gordon, who has managed Alice Cooper since "day one". Apparently, Gordon got Blondie out of a bad deal and into a better one, or from another perspective, Gordon put his name behind the band.
Chris Stein: "Shep Gordon, a friend of ours told us, 'You shouldn't spend all your money on a real expensive straight jacket,' which I think is a great truth of this business." - Rolling Stone
The Ventures - Wipeout
Roy Buchanan - Title Unknown
Bill Kirchen - Hot Rod Lincoln
Jeff Healey - See The Light
All live. I was a bit surprised at how much distortion is on the lead guitar of "Wipeout", kind of like the missing link. I don't know the name of the Roy Buchanan song, but the tone is classic Telecaster.
Bill Kirchen played guitar on the original single of Commander Cody's "Hot Rod Lincoln". Here he adds an amazing interlude of guitar riffs he hears as he's passing the other cars' radios on the highway. A full course on rock 'n' roll guitar in 4 minutes.
This Jeff Healey video spotlights his technique. Try thinking of his style in terms of slide guitar.
In the Keyboard Corner
I have played guitar for almost 35 years now, almost exclusively rock, and I picked up a cheap synth 5 years ago. Yes, guitarists have a ton of tab available to them, and that tab (often) includes the rhythm parts. Also, a lot of tab (especially in the old guitar magazines and readily available on eBay) includes a staff in conventional notation.
So, if you want to learn what works well against what a rhythm guitarist plays, learn the rhythm guitar parts. We don't use all that many notes in our chords (max of 6) and usually one or two are doubled an octave up. So, if you ignore the octave notes you should be able to play the bulk of the rhythm part with your left hand.
That frees up your right hand to work out a keyboard part to play over it. (It also allows you to fill in when the guitarist encounters a technical problem, if you know what I mean. This ability could be the key to landing a place in a band.) Further, this forces you to use a pitch range that won't interfere with the guitar.
Learning to pedal will get you a long way; that is, stabbing the chord root and playing intermittent broken chords. Randy Rhodes on Ozzy Osbourne's "I Don't Know" is a perfect example.
Did I mention trills yet? Especially using your weak fingers? No, I guess I haven't. So here goes. Trills!
Hey, as long you have that tab, learn the guitar leads too. If you really want to understand rock, you should understand what the guitars do, especially slides and bends and where they occur in a measure.
Two words: Franz Liszt.
Additionally, one thing in common between drums, bass and guitar is that these instruments have huge attacks (that can be somewhat tamed using volume controls, but I digress). This is an advantage that keyboardists have over guitars and the reason I bought a synth. Keyboardists have much greater control over their attack envelope and the better rock keyboardists exploit that ability to add an often needed missing texture, even in the most diabolic black metal. Just don't exploit it too much. Don't forget the converse either, you can also get an even bigger attack than all the other instruments combined because guitar pickups and drums have an inherent limiter on their attacks.
One of the greatest rock keyboardists was John Lord of Deep Purple, and quite a few of their concert DVDs have been released. "Live in Concert 1972/73" has many shots looking over John's shoulder. Blackmore may have held the spotlight but to me, the soul of Deep Purple was Jon Lord's comping, both during Gillan's singing and Blackmore's solos.
Finally, I also had a lot of trouble getting that boogie feel of Jerry Lee Lewis. I struggled with that for months. Then one weekend I got the bright idea to buy a fifth of Jack Daniels and got good and stumbling drunk. (I hope I didn't break any forum rules with that.) After a couple hours, I had it nailed. The key was to pound those chords directly on the beat or slightly ahead and to let your technique get a little sloppy. If your technique is still perfect, you're not pounding hard enough. You really want to push that beat. Remember too, when Jerry Lee started out, he played an unamplified piano in noisy honky tonks.
I can't answer your questions directly, but realize that at the heart of rock is attitude, that aural assault, cranking up the amps and trying to mow down your audience with pure sound, even when you are playing a ballad. Forget "just playing nice stuff against chords", play aggressive, raunchy stuff for the mid-tempo and fast songs. That gives you a dynamic to play from when it's time to play the ballad.
Borrow someone's tube guitar amp, plug your keyboard into it (better yet, go buy a used keyboard that you can bang the heck out of; you really don't want to take your expensive keyboards to a rock gig), and turn it up until the sound begins to distort. Get rid of your piano stool, play standing up with the keyboard at crotch height, lock into the kick drum, and then work up some anger and some sweat.
It probably wouldn't hurt, too, to learn how to fix broken keys.
One day while waiting for a bus, I heard a rather mesmerizing sound that I associated with new-age and trance music. On the other side of the bus stop, a guy was playing a kalimba. I waited for him to finish the song and I asked him about it. Turns out, he had a jazz degree from Julliard, but here in Vegas such cats are a dime a dozen, so he was enhancing his employability by mastering rare ethnic instruments.
As for me, my guitars and keyboards are still stored at my parent's house in South Carolina, and it will probably cost $300 to get them shipped to Vegas. A kalimba however only cost $35 including shipping and I wanted some kind of musical instrument, so the choice was fairly easy to make.
Learning to play was not too difficult since I am already fairly well-versed in music theory. Typically, kalimbas are tuned to a major key with the notes alternating from one side to the other, and from this arises some rather interesting limitations in composing songs.
At first I transcribed some standard melodies, but I soon learned that a kalimba is fairly weak as a lead instrument and it is far better suited to a rhythmic role. The closest equivalents I have found to other instruments are banjo rolls, highly repetitive phrases that stay interesting because of their length and speed. For slower music, a mindset similar to the work of Philip Glass works very well.
As for playing with others, the kalimba presents two problems. First, it is not very loud and needs electronic amplification, even a moderately heavy strum of an acoustic guitar would drown it out. Second, retuning is very time-consuming and the short keys are very sensitive to temperature changes. Since Vegas is in a desert, the daily temperature swings are quite extreme. Musicians in this city quickly learn to leave an instrument in the same building where it will be played.
The kalimba is a fun little instrument and pulling interesting music from it is fairly easy. I cannot think of a better instrument for a beginning musician. Not only is it an inexpensive investment, it forces the musician into a rhythmic mindset. Also with its tuning, hitting a wrong note is virtually impossible. Still too, the kalimba offers some rather complex challenges to a more experienced musician that can be more than satisfying.
5 things you don't know about me?
1. I play a kalimba.
2. In the early 70s, my letter was published in Vampirella, the Warren horror magazine, and three years ago, my picture was published in Guitar World.
3. I discovered a simple one-step calculation for determining pot odds of any given hand in Texas Hold 'Em that is accurate to +/- 4%.
4. I recycle small glass jars to store my spices and seasonings.
5. My first major in college, at Penn State in the late 70s, was physics. I would have switched to Computer Science but I did not feel (correctly as it happens) that the technology was sufficiently advanced at the time to warrant my interest. I majored in German Literature instead.
Of all the bands who could have recorded and had a hit with the
title song of the musical "Hair", the Cowsills bucked their family
image and went for broke. However, it works. The tongue-in-cheek
lyrics, as sung by the kissing cousins of Beaver and his mom June,
probably did more to make rebellion acceptable to a generation of
pre-adolescents than any other song or TV show before its time.
Too bad the video quality here is so bad, but in a way, it works.
I have few memories of Tommy Roe's "Dizzy" because no one owned the
single. However, our local AM station (no FM where I lived) played the
Top 5 songs after the 8 am news. A couple of us had transistor radios,
and we would try to sneak them past our parents when the school bus
came. So, hearing "Dizzy" was pretty much catch-as-catch-can.
I liked the song as did many of the girls; the other boys were of a
different opinion. What caught my attention was how the background
vocals pushed the meaning of the lyrics, making the song sound dizzy.
Oh, and those organ stabs! Bubblegum does not get much more basic than
this.
Two elements are at work here. The lyrics and the passion in the melody, of course, but for me, the most interesting part of this song was that piano!
Slightly out of tune with that honky-tonk tone, but played as though all the bar's patrons had left while a breeze through an open window blows out the stench of tobacco smoke and overflowing urinals. This was also the first song I ever picked out on a piano, and mastering that slightly out-of-time harmony was a bear, let me tell you.
"My eyes are not blue, but mine won't leave you." Wow, what a line! So much imagery in those ten short words. The dead blue eyes of a cold, buried wife, the firey-eyed rage that only love can conjure, a bit of contempt for the previous woman for causing such pain in her husband, and finally the continuing love of the living. This is the summit of songwriting, and indeed, this was the only successful song for Jessi Colter.
"In The Year 2525" was the other song that got heavy play on that record player in fifth grade. I guess my little hometown was too poor to afford more than two records among 20 students.
That this song sparks the imagination goes without saying, especially for an eleven year old who devoured L. Frank Baum's Oz books. However, where many heard this song as pessimistic, I found it oddly optimistic and more than a little anti-religion. Reading through the lyrics now, I am not exactly sure why I felt that way, but I am proud that I went against the grain.
Today, l leave you with this bit of lyric:
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
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Recent Comments
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Eideteker said:
[this is good][this is motherfucking epic*]Seriously, I can't thank you enough for this post. I really, really, really love Heart. I don't... read more
on Heart in early '76 -
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gaspode said:
Thanks, Ardiril! This was interesting. I'd never heard of a kalimba before. I'm not at all musical though - my... read more
on Ma-ma-ma-ma My Kalimba -
Ardiril said:
Hi gaspode! I answered your questions in a new post. Thanks for asking. read more
on Tagged, hmm...
on The Archies - Sugar Sugar