What Are You Listening To?

[pfife]

1 hour ago, Biff Mayhem said:

I didn’t like when he got deep into the jazz but the things he could do with a guitar were mind blowing. Absolutely perfect control over the wiggle stick. 

Yep.   I've really gained an appreciation for pickless players and he's amongst the best.   Hand on the whammy bar all the time and pinky wrapped around the volume knob almost as much.   No one does that shit like he can.   Watching all these videos on twitter right now give me chills up my back.

[pfife]

Jeff Beck - Truth

[chasfh]

13 hours ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Very futuristic. I dig the fins. 

I mean, this is unbelievable, are you a Virgo?

[chasfh]

14 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

 

Kind of weird to see him playing with a pick. But then because of the nature of thos particular songs you definitely need to play them with a pick.

[chasfh]

9 hours ago, pfife said:

Jeff Beck - Truth

Rod Stewart at his best.

”Let me love you, baby … you’re drivin’ my poor heart crazy …”

[oblong]

A well known guitarist I follow wrote about Jeff yesterday and said that Jeff was one of the best but it's possible, probable even, that you have to play guitar to understand why.

I think that's true.  I don't play.  He doesn't do anything for me but I am not going to tell all of these great guitar players and all of you that you are wrong.  That would be ignorant.  

 

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

5 minutes ago, oblong said:

A well known guitarist I follow wrote about Jeff yesterday and said that Jeff was one of the best but it's possible, probable even, that you have to play guitar to understand why.

I think that's true.  I don't play.  He doesn't do anything for me but I am not going to tell all of these great guitar players and all of you that you are wrong.  That would be ignorant.  

 

What?!?!?! If we can't post ignorant opinions on the internet, then what are we even doing here...

[Biff Mayhem]

3 minutes ago, oblong said:

A well known guitarist I follow wrote about Jeff yesterday and said that Jeff was one of the best but it's possible, probable even, that you have to play guitar to understand why.

100% correct. Before I understood what he was doing, I didn't really appreciate him. Once I observed and thought about what he was doing, I really appreciated the talent and discipline to create the sounds he produced.

Still Freeway Jam and The Pump are pretty accessible to the average music listener.

 

 

 

[oblong]

This person, Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule and ABB fame, said he would not listen to him very often because he was afraid he'd copy him and didn't want to do that.

 

[oblong]

This is what Warren wrote:

 

I’m devastated. People ask me a lot “who’s your favorite living guitarist?” and the answer would always have to be Jeff Beck. So much so that I’ve always made a point of being careful not to listen to him too much for fear of wanting to imitate him. I was lucky, thanks to my older brothers, to have discovered Beck at a very early age, even before I started playing guitar. He was ferocious — not just inventive but totally unique. Nobody played like that. I loved everything he did. All the “guitar heroes” back then were thrust into recording at an early age so we could hear tremendous growth in a lot of cases from album to album, year to year, but with Jeff Beck even more so. Every time he released something new we all waited with anticipation to hear what new direction or directions he would take. It was uncanny. He seemed to not want to define himself with what he had already done so each new venture just added to an already broad scope of not only “influences" but also the uniqueness that was there from the start. No matter what direction he chose he approached it in a way that only he could. As someone who started singing before I started playing guitar I always loved the vocalists that he worked with in addition to the great musicians so I was a bit surprised, as were a lot of people, when Jeff released Blow By Blow in 1975 which turned out to be his first all instrumental album. It came at a good time for me as I had been playing guitar for 3 or 4 years at that point and was just starting to discover a lot of instrumental music but none of us were prepared for the huge stylistic leap we were about to hear in Jeff’s playing. His last studio recording prior was the collaborative Beck, Bogert & Appice which was great like all his previous works but gave no indication as to what doors would be opened up with Blow By Blow. Every guitar player I knew was mesmerized. This changed everything. We were all dropping back the needle incessantly to try to learn anything we could from Blow By Blow. And then along comes Wired, a year later, which took his playing to even greater heights. I think the most remarkable thing about Jeff Beck as a guitarist however is the way he continued to grow and expand his own style year after year, album after album, in a way that I can’t recall anyone else ever doing — EVER! He didn’t record or tour nearly as much for quite a while after the release of Wired but every time he did there was some new chapter that came with the new music. Thankfully in recent years he appeared to have been on a mission and was incredibly prolific. But again the most amazing thing was his playing that somehow continued to get better. I saw him perform quite a few times over the last fifteen years or so and I have to say that every time he played even better than the time before. I’ve never seen anything like it. Jeff Beck changed music in a very profound way but unless you’re a guitar player you may not understand. He changed our lives. He created a style of playing that was instantly recognizable and almost impossible to replicate. I made the decision a long time ago not to try to copy him — what’s the point? Any of us would only wind up sounding like a bad Jeff Beck imitator. For over fifty years however I have studied him and learned from him and a large part of my style and vocabulary came from him. So, now when someone asks me “Who’s your favorite guitarist — living or dead?” I will say what I always say: “I can’t answer that.” But my very short list will include Jeff. There will never be another Jeff Beck.- WH

[chasfh]

Jeff Beck and the Yardbirds' Shapes of Things on the Springboard label was literally the first LP I ever bought with my own money. I had owned 45s before, but never my own LP.

I was still at St. Anne Elementary, so this was probably sixth or seventh grade—so, maybe 1973, possibly early 1974?

I bought the album at the Cunningham Drugs at Tech Plaza in Warren for, probably, $1.99 or $2.99, because it was a cheap cutout. They had a whole rack for cutout records there. (I also bought Grateful Dead's Wake of the Flood not long after that, for probably the same price.)

I'm not sure exactly why I got that particular album for my first one. I didn't have much money because I had a relatively small Free Press route at the time (which I wasn't very good at anyway), so it was cheap was definitely a big reason. And I felt compelled to buy my own album for the first time, as an age-appropriate rite of passage.

Why this album, though? I had never heard of either Jeff Beck or the Yardbirds before. Channeling my memory of how I was back then, I likely bought it because I thought Jeff Beck just looked so damn cool on the front of that album. Hey, man, like I said, it was 1973 or 4.

I had never heard any of the songs from the album before, and in fact was steeped in the mix of pre-disco funk, soft rock hits, bubblegum pop, and the occasional three-minute 4/4 guitar rock hits that CKLW and Keener 13 and WDRQ were playing at the time, so I wasn't even listening to Yardbirds-type music, really. I was taking a complete flyer on the record.

After getting through the initial shock of how different the music was from anything I'd heard before, I started playing the shit out of that album. None of my brothers cared for it, but I fell in love with it. My favorite song quickly became Mr. You're A Better Man Than I. So super cool, and just socially-conscious enough for an 11- or 12-year-old to get. There was nothing else like it for me. Nobody else I knew at school or around the neighborhood knew the album even existed. I was in my own club of one with it.

It opened my eyes to a whole new type of pop/rock music, the heavy blues-influenced songs that, I later learned, came from the mid 1960s rather than 1973 or 4. I think it knocked down whatever barriers I might have experienced about trying other 60s and 70s blues rock, blues music by actual blues artists, and even traditional jazz music that I was exposed to later in life.

Had I decided to buy some other record on that day—had I bought some Jim Croce or Seals & Crofts or other artist's cutout if they were available—I am convinced I would be listening to an entirely other type of music than I do today, and speaking only for myself, I would have been musically the lesser for it.

You can find that album now on places like eBay and Etsy. That's where I got these images.

You can't find this exact album with the songs in this exact order on any of the music streamers—because of course not, since it was a cheap cutout made and sold for a very short period of time—but I'm going to create a playlist on YouTube Music of this album. I only wish I could assign this album art to it.

Thank you, Jeff Beck, for opening up my ears—and my mind—in 1973 or 4.

 

 

Edited January 12, 2023 by chasfh

[Biff Mayhem]

Satriani channels Beck a lot on his new album but especially so on this song.

 

 

[Motor City Sonics]

 Even though I am a big fan of indie rock, "alternative", punk, post punk, proto-punk, classical, old school soul and funk, trip hop, dream pop and ambient, psychedelic rock, sunshine rock, Brit Pop, 60s, 'classic rock'/   I have a soft spot for Yacht Rock and I am no longer ashamed to admit it. 

Go ahead, make fun of me.  I don't care, you like what you like.    But if you can listen to Lowdown by Boz Scaggs and tell me that the musicianship in that song (the members of Toto) is not top-notch (especially Jeff Porcaro's drumming), then I don't know what you are hearing.  

Anyway...........this British guy Dan Croll, who I think nobody hear has probably heard of because most radio people don't even know him (I know Tigerbomb knows who he is), has kind of this Yacht Rock for the 2020''s vibe to him, and he does it very well.   I am home sick from work with some kind of gastro hell virus and I was listening to this song from last year and it has one of my favorite uplifting key changes of all time.     The uplifting key change is one of the key elements in so many hit records and this one is fantastic (at the 2:45 mark).     I mean, the guy looks like Paul Pfiefer from The Wonder Years, so he's never going to be accepted by the cool people (the reason rock radio wouldn't play Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet is because he looked to nerdy - yep, that's a fact, stupid, ain't it? -- and I heard that from two rock PDs). 

 

You can keep Modern Country and any Hip Hop after about 1990.   Don't need them.  Not for me.  If you like them, cool, great, but to me both genres are stale. 

[oblong]

I saw an ad for a documentary or series about yacht rock.  I cannot remember what service it was going to be on.

 

[Biff Mayhem]

I'm a huge honk for Yacht Rock. Love 90% of what they play on that Sirius channel.

[Motor City Sonics]

4 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

I'm a huge honk for Yacht Rock. Love 90% of what they play on that Sirius channel.

Even as a kid I was never into metal.   Now, there is some metal that is really good, but the thing that nobody wants to bring up about that is, the best metal songs, are basically pop songs amped up.     Like Blues music.  Nobody likes to talk about the fact that great Blues music is catchy.............sad, but catchy.      I used to listen to American Top 40 every Sunday because I wanted to be Casey Kasem.   At least I got into radio.........

And Smells Like Teen Spirit.   That's a pop song.  

[Motor City Sonics]

I've pissed many Nirvana fans by saying they are basically a pop band with distortion and feedback and to me, there is nothing wrong with that.   Those songs don't become big hits (almost no song does) without being catchy.   It's the way they are packaged that makes the difference.   

Dave Grohl knows this.  It's what he does so amazingly well with the Foo Fighters.   Dude can write a hook, and sorry that this would ruffle some feathers, but I think he's a better songwriter than Cobain.     I liked Cobain, but I thought he was quite overrated and honestly, I think even he thought that.      In Utero, was not as poppy as Nevermind, it was so much sonically subdued and darker and I think it was a concerted effort by Cobain to not have a hit record.   It was a Be Careful What  You Wish for scenario.  It still sold a ton, because at that time, any follow up to Nevermind would have.    I think Cobain was horrified that it was embraced as well as it was, he was trying the anti-hit and he couldn't do it, no matter what.  He could have had an album of fart noises set to music and it would have sold in 1993.   

[Motor City Sonics]

28 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Satriani channels Beck a lot on his new album but especially so on this song.

 

 

Biff, I gotta ask you.........your avatar............is that from the John Lennon/Chuck Berry "Memphis" clip?     

You ever see Bill Burr's take on that.  I won't post it here because it's incredibly offensive, but it's also funny (and accurate).    Watch at your own risk.  

[Motor City Sonics]

21 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

I'm a huge honk for Yacht Rock. Love 90% of what they play on that Sirius channel.

Have you heard of a group called Drugdealer?    Had an album out in '22 called "Hiding In Plain Sight".   It's like being in Laurel Canyon in 1977...........I think you'd like it.    It's all on Spotify. 

[Biff Mayhem]

10 minutes ago, Motor City Sonics said:

Biff, I gotta ask you.........your avatar............is that from the John Lennon/Chuck Berry "Memphis" clip?     

You ever see Bill Burr's take on that.  I won't post it here because it's incredibly offensive, but it's also funny (and accurate).    Watch at your own risk.  

Yes and yes!

[Biff Mayhem]

9 minutes ago, Motor City Sonics said:

Have you heard of a group called Drugdealer?    Had an album out in '22 called "Hiding In Plain Sight".   It's like being in Laurel Canyon in 1977...........I think you'd like it.    It's all on Spotify. 

On my list now....

[oblong]

Burr's take on The Boys are Back in Town is great.... I listen to it every few months.

 

[Motor City Sonics]

6 hours ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Yes and yes!

Chuck Berry's reaction

 

[Hongbit]

6 hours ago, Motor City Sonics said:

Have you heard of a group called Drugdealer?   

One of my all-time favorites.   Never heard of the band, though.

[chasfh]

I didn’t realize that Jeff Beck played on the song Hang on Sloopy.

Also that Stevie Wonder wrote the song “Superstition” for Jeff Beck.

Wow.