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.
