The Dynamic Society's Child

In a previous blog I was bemoaning the lack of dynamics in modern rock. Music these days is compressed to eliminate all the highs and lows from the volume and the speed is as constant as a drum machine, which many times it is.

A great example of dynamics is the song Society's Child by Janis Ian. I've been reading her autobiography, also titled Society's Child, and was surprised to learn that the song is not autobiographical. It seems so personal, even painful, but it's just a lyric she wrote "in character" and not from an actual experience of hers. The other surprise was when she dismissed the song as an early attempt at song writing and lamented that it wasn't even "in time". But Society's Child's slowing and speeding tempo is what gives it its drama and charm and uniqueness. It's a dramatic song and drama come from conflict and is inherently "uneven". Drama waxes and wanes, it builds and releases and it speed up and slows down. Opera and musical theater have no problem with changing tempos in a tune and pop songs shouldn't be any different. 

The problem with tempo changes in a Pop or Rock song is when the song is considered a dance song which would require a steady beat. People like to dance at the same tempo, not speed up or slow down. However, no one can call Society's Child a disco tune.

Society's Child is a great song and a great example of the sound of the Sixties with its harpsichord into and Jazz organ coda. I always liked harpsichords as in the tunes Walk Away Rene by the Left Banke and Love Is Blue by Paul Mauriat. In fact, when I was looking for an unusual sound for the intro to The Tooners' song Let Others Dream (Rocktasia CD) my wife jokingly suggested harpsichord but the joke was on her, that was exactly what I used.

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All That Jazz

My late mother used to say if you can't say something nice about someone don't say anything at all. Then she developed cancer and died. I don't think it's healthy to always hide behind a false smile and you eventually get to an age, if you're lucky, that the opinions of other people just don't don't count so much.

I have a friend who's a talented musician and has absolutely no qualms telling you why he doesn't like Rock & Roll or The Beatles (?!). Because of him I'm learning to be honest. In the past if he or anyone else asked me to go to a winery to hear a Jazz band I'd probably just go along thinking my friend wanted some company. Now I say I don't drink wine and I don't like Jazz. That's right; I DON'T LIKE JAZZ.

Jazz is a very unforgiving style of music. If it's played at all sloppy it's terrible, unlike the Blues, and if it's played pristine and precise it can come off as sterile. There's a fine line between accurate and robotic.

Another friend of mine took me to see a friend of his play recently and it turned out to be a band with a lot of Jazz influences along with some Pop and R & B. They played well but only old hits. Another aspect of reaching that age where you no longer care what other people think of you and can be brutally honest is that I can admit I don't like cover bands. Bands that play other people's songs, unless they change them so much as to make the tune their own such as Yes's version of Paul Simon's America or Devo's Satisfaction, serve only one purpose; dance music.

People who go to hear cover bands are actually coming to dance which means they're really coming to meet people of the opposite sex with whom to have sex. But you really can't dance to Jazz, unless you dance by yourself, so Jazz is, in my opinion, a strictly mental exercise and thus a more personal experience. There is a saying; Jazz is for musicians that don't remember how the song goes. It really does seem like Jazz musicians are indulging themselves and I like improvisation in Rock. Maybe it's the particular scales Jazz players use that sound to me like they're always running finger exercises. After a while I'm just not impressed with how fast you can play a scale.

Naturally, I can't write a review of the band I saw since I didn't care for the style of music they played so I didn't really enjoy them but that doesn't mean they weren't good at what they did. I just don't like what they do.

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The Master Of Mastering

One of the things that has all but disappeared from modern music is something called dynamics. Dynamics is the range that music has in its volume and speed. It used to be considered dramatic and exciting to have music that started softly, slowly built up in volume and then quiets down again only to peak once more at the crescendo at the end.

These days the "mastering engineer" will insist you should "equalize" all your tracks so that no part of a song is any louder than any other part of the song. Why is that? It's because radio puts everything it broadcasts through an compressor that evens out the volume and it's assumed that you want your music to sound like it's "on the radio". So everything gets evened out, all the highs and lows get squashed into the middle and all the drama and excitement goes away. Then it gets played on the radio and gets squished even more.

It's the same thing with tempos. Bands used to play a verse slowly then speed up to a rockin' chorus then slow down again (and get softer) in the verse in order to bring it all back up for the big finish. Then producers started using drum machines and click tracks to make digital recording easier and faster (cheaper) and playing different time signatures came to be considered "sloppy playing" and one constant beat became the only acceptable way to play.

This attitude in music is like telling a painter he or she can only use primary colors and anything else is "wrong". So what we have now in modern rock is no longer "Art" but "product", created by machines used by people who are now slaves to those machines.

There is NO WAY we are NOT going to have to FIGHT THE ROBOTS! NO WAY!

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It's Just Noise

 Take a minute and think about the SOUND of modern Rock & Roll music. Since the late 1970s the standard sound of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal has been the sound of a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar played through a Marshall amplifier. The guitar sound is the predominate sound along with the drums and bass that are generally in the "background". 

Listen to the sound of a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar played through a Marshall amplifier and think of how you'd describe it. Would you call it "heavy", "macho", "mean", "loud", "fuzzy" or "powerful'? What is it really? In actuality, without all the emotional coloration you personally bring to it, the sound is "distorted". It is the sound of an electric guitar being played so loud that the amplifier's speaker is being over-driven and the sound is a thick, "fuzzy sounding", buzz with a great amount of sustain or the slow fading out of a sound. Essentially, today's guitar sound is the sound of a broken instrument being played at an excessive volume causing the amplifier to distort and its speaker cone to crack.

The Kink's lead guitarist, Dave Davies, famously cut a triangle in the material of his amp's speaker cone with a razor blade in order to get the sound he made famous on the record You Really Got Me. These days you don't have to physically damage your equipment to get it to sound damaged, you can buy an effects pedal that electronically mimics the sound of a broken amp. What a concept.

Paul McCartney takes this idea even further and has explained how he can sing so forcefully and loud without blowing out his vocal chords. He doesn't really sing any louder at all, what he does is add a little "growl" or distortion to his voice which he can do without actually straining his voice and that gives the listener the impression that he's screaming out the vocals. It's the same thing as making your guitar sound like it being played too loud for the amp and the room when it's actually being played at a very reasonable volume, just with an artificial distortion added.

Why do you think bands like Black Sabbath and ACDC are so loud when you're listening to them on your car stereo right after listening to James Taylor at the exact same volume? It's all a big trick.

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Rock & Roll Hypocrite

In a new article on Cracked.com titled 5 Beloved Celebrities Everyone Forgets Did Terrible Things, the celebrity that allegedly did the number one most terrible thing (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT) was perpetrated by guitar God Eric Clapton. According to the Cracked article;

Eric Clapton is an unapologetic follower of first-class douche Enoch Powell, a member of the British Conservative Party and full-blown racist. His 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech, which basically foretold of an England in tatters if (non-white) immigration was allowed to run rampant, was ridiculously controversial and seriously damaged his political career. But Clapton stood by him.

In 1974, six years after Enoch was drummed out of political life by his remarks, a drunken Clapton was performing at a concert in Birmingham, and apparently saw an Arab man leering at his wife. This was too much for Clapton, who began a diatribe lambasting "wogs," "blacks," "Jamaicans," and anyone else who lived in England and wasn't white. No official recording exists of the speech, but some choice quotes that witnesses agree on include Clapton saying, "I think Enoch's right ... we should send them all back. Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!" and that Britain was on its way to becoming "a black colony."

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20560_5-beloved-celebrities-everyone-forgets-did-terrible-things_p2.html#ixzz2ZQl6bIpV

WTF?! Say it ain't so Eric! Even if he was drunk, which sometimes can excuse obnoxious behavior (it also can cause it which is why I won't drink around the wife's family), attacking whole races of people because one of their members made you jealous just isn't something you do if you're not secretly racist to begin with. If Eric Clapton was a professional stand up comedian, like Michael Richards, then maybe he was trying to be funny (offensively so) but Clapton's a guy whose whole life has been dedicated to the Blues so you'd assume he'd appreciate the people who created it.

I've never heard that story before and even if it's true, (No official recording exists of the speech) and keep in mind I'm getting this information from CRACKED.COM, I shouldn't be spreading it anyway. But... at this point I'm stretching for things to write about for this blog and no one reads the Rock & Roll Rehab blog anyway. Sorry Eric (if it's not true. If it is, FU Eric).

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The Physics Of Rock & Roll

In a previous blog post I tried to make a case for the music of the Sixties changing the world of today. One of the things I attributed to the music was Quantum Physics. Before I get flack from fans of The Big Bang series allow me to explain.

There is a gentleman by the name of Rick Stack. Rick is considered the ultimate authority on Jane Roberts and her "alter-ego", a channeled personality named Seth. Seth's teachings (through Jane) are considered to be the basis for the New Age Movement.

Rick Stack and his friends back in the early Seventies, when they were in their early twenties, attended Jane's Seth sessions. He describes himself and his friends as having been "long haired hippies". I'm not going to accuse Rick Stack of having taken drugs in his youth, however, marijuana smoking was a part of being a "long haired hippie" in the Sixties and pot does have a way of opening your mind to new ideas. Another large part of being a hippie was being a rock and roll music fan.

In the course of someone like Rick eventually becoming the caretaker of the legacy of the "Grandfather of the New Age Movement (Seth)", the attraction to music would most likely have come first, then the long hair, then the drugs, then the interest in metaphysics which would have lead to Seth.

Let me illustrate how this might have worked:

* You discover The Beatles and like their music.

* You discover and like the music of the other bands contemporary with The Beatles and become a fan.

* You assume the lifestyle of the fans (long hair, colorful clothes, smoking grass, etc.) which leads to;

* The music (Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, I Am The Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows, etc.) leads to curiosity about psychedelics (LSD. Psilocybin, Mescaline) which leads to;

* Experimentation with psychedelic drugs which leads to a desire to learn about them (Tim Leary, Carlos Castaneda, etc. ) which leads to;

* Curiosity about the "Hidden Universe" and metaphysics (Alan Watts, Ram Dass, etc.) which leads to;

* Experimentation with Transcendental Meditation, Yoga and Eastern and ancient teachings and practices which leads to;

* A desire to understand the mechanics behind physical reality and metaphysics (Seth Material, New Age teachings) which leads to;  

* The study of Physics which leads to research in  QUANTUM PHYSICS.

Now, certainly not all physicists traveled this road, there are other roads. For instance, replace THE BEATLES with SCIENCE FICTION (Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, etc.), replace PSYCHEDELICS with THE TWILIGHT ZONE (One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits, etc.),

replace NEW AGE with STAR TREK (The Matrix, Groundhog's Day, etc.) and you'll probably end up in college as a Physics major.

Before you start complaining that I have no business writing about Physics I'll have you know I received an "A" in Physics at California State University San Diego.

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Okay, I was  in the Physics class just to make holograms but I did get an "A"!

They'd Love To Change The World

The Tooners' lead singer Greg Piper sent out a Tweet that quoted Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills & Nash as saying, "We thought we'd change the world..." It got re-Tweeted by someone called Graceslick77, who I imagine is a big Jefferson Airplane fan.

"We thought we'd change the world..." sounds as if old Graham is lamenting NOT having changed the world and that seems to be the prevailing attitude among old hippies. But stop for just a moment and try to imagine what would have happened and how the world would be different today if the folks of the Sixties had in fact NOT changed the world.

The Viet Nam War would have dragged on and on with the "full support" of the American public causing the needless deaths of many more thousands of American sons, the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement and the Women's Movement would have progressed even slower than they did and without the support of the youth may even have died out for yet another generation. 

The music of the last twenty years, thought to generally be awful by those of us old enough to remember the Sixties, would have nothing better by which to judge it but music itself may not have been so big a cultural phenomena and just another distraction and minor form of entertainment. In fact pre-Sixties music was pretty much considered background sound to other more important forms of entertainment such as dining out at a restaurant, shopping at a department or grocery store or as soundtrack to a movie or TV show.

If the use of music in the Sixties as a form of communication and education didn't happen then the political landscape of today might be much more like that of the Fifties; white, conservative and intolerant (kind of like the Bush years now that I think about it). Maybe Graham's quote was from 2000 to 2008 in which that case I can understand how he may have felt all that happened in the Sixties was for naught but things go in cycles and if you look around right NOW at the first African America President of the United States, the push for nonpolluting energy systems, the growing ecology movement and even the booming of Quantum Physics you see how they DID change the world.

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