A magic quote from Mikal Gilmore's califragilistic interview (Bob Dylan Rolling Stone cover story Sept. 27, 2012) comes at the end with a reference to Dylan's supposed nod to the Civil War poetry of Henry Timrod. This is so Zim:
"Oh yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. I mean, everybody else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you ever heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All them evil motherfuckers can rot in hell."
Monday, October 1, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Jimi & The Who Guitar World PromoSticker
All of these came to visit when Chandler arranged for Jimi's society "coming out," the first to be converted being Clapton, when Hendrix jammed with him on a version of "Killing Floor" at a Cream gig. The rest followed after a slew of barn-burning club appearances. The Who had a connection to Hendrix by virtue of the fact that the group's managing team of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp also owned Track Records, to which they aspired to sign the Experience.
Pete Townshend said at the time that he feared, "Oh God, Kit Lambert has found another guitar player." Then, in a packed London theater, Hendrix put the icing on it, making him a dangerous act to follow: He burned his guitar at the end of the set, causing absolute mayhem.
This was not lost on The Who, who previously had been famed for other, less incendiary stage antics, such as the simple destruction of a Rickenbacker guitar. At Monterey a little while later, the question of who was to follow Who came up again. The Who won the coin toss, in an effort to not repeat the debacle of the London Savile Theatre show in which Hendrix had wiped them out even before they hit the stage, they tore it up.
But Hendrix was not to be outdone. He followed The Who with a set of stellar pyrotechnics, climaxed by the burning of the midnight Strat.
Jimi&TheWho_GW-PromoSticker
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctor_noe/6387446891/in/set-72157605512202079
Jimi & The Who, original pic by Barry Peake, used here on a promo sticker (and a tee-shirt) promoting the Guitar World "Unpublished Hendrix" special issues.
www.flickr.com/photos/doctor_noe/2567714905/in/set-721576...
November 27 is Jimi's birthday!
It was a promo for this historic issue!
Saturday, June 30, 2012
More on Jimi Hendrix' meeting with Leonard Nimoy
More on Jimi Hendrix' meeting with Leonard Nimoy
JimiCleveland RadioWKYC_3-26-1968
Photo credit: George Shuba/Commerce Studio
This is from the
Guitar World SPECIAL COLLECTORS EDITION HENDRIX LIVES! March, 1988, P. 82.
Interestingly enough, on the same page, there are two more pics which relate to the "Jimi and Leonard Nimoy" post of last month. It details two photos, credited to "George Shuba/Commerce Studio" that fill in the blanks on Jimi's historic meeting with Spock March 26, 1968 at Cleveland Radio Station WKYC on a visit to deejay Chuck Knapp. Curiously, the Leonard Nimoy story in my earlier post was about WKYC personality Chuck Dunaway. They sure do look alike:.
Jimi Hendrix & Leonard Nimoy
Photo credited to "George Shuba/Commerce Studio" ... Jimi's historic meeting with Spock March 26, 1968 at Cleveland Radio Station WKYC on a visit to deejay Chuck Dunaway.
I got my copy from Hendrix collector David Pearcy.
Please see my earlier post:
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Les' birthday, RIP Les Paul - June 9, 1915 - August 13, 2009
By Noë Gold
Photo by the great John Peden
The Wizard of Waukesha was the cover subject in Guitar World March, 1983, in which we published Part I of the Les Paul odyssey to Mahwah known as Jersey Guitar Safari and which will be chronicled in a forthcoming tome. Les did say at the time that this visit by a half-dozen GW pilgrims was what got him off his ass to begin playing again, first at a place called Fat Tuesdays and later at Iridium, where he played every Monday night till the day he died, practically.
Noe the G and the Guitar World crew, composed of John Peden, photographer; Perry Margouleff, guitar maven; Bob Davis, "Les' adopted son"; Peter Mengaziol, the techno-wiz who did the full-on two-part interview, went on a guitar safari to Les Paul's house in Mahwah, NJ, where we got the royal tour of all his wondrous gadgets as we prepared an article about the "Wizard of Waukesha."
Go to doctornoemedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/les-paul-house-mahwah... for information.
Here is what the GW blog says currently:
http://www.guitarworld.com/photo-gallery-guitar-world-magazine-covers-through-years-1983#slide-2
Photo by the great John Peden
The Wizard of Waukesha was the cover subject in Guitar World March, 1983, in which we published Part I of the Les Paul odyssey to Mahwah known as Jersey Guitar Safari and which will be chronicled in a forthcoming tome. Les did say at the time that this visit by a half-dozen GW pilgrims was what got him off his ass to begin playing again, first at a place called Fat Tuesdays and later at Iridium, where he played every Monday night till the day he died, practically.
Noe the G and the Guitar World crew, composed of John Peden, photographer; Perry Margouleff, guitar maven; Bob Davis, "Les' adopted son"; Peter Mengaziol, the techno-wiz who did the full-on two-part interview, went on a guitar safari to Les Paul's house in Mahwah, NJ, where we got the royal tour of all his wondrous gadgets as we prepared an article about the "Wizard of Waukesha."
Go to doctornoemedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/les-paul-house-mahwah... for information.
Here is what the GW blog says currently:
http://www.guitarworld.com/photo-gallery-guitar-world-magazine-covers-through-years-1983#slide-2
You're not much of a guitar magazine if you don't acknowledge guitar inventor, recording innovator and master musician Les Paul. Guitar World writer Peter Mangaziol was fortunate enough to interview Paul at his home in New Jersey, which was described as a guitar tinkerer's playground.
By 1983 Guitar World was on its way. Readership was growing, feedback was voluminous (and mostly positive), and some of the world's biggest musicians were gracing the covers.
This year saw interviews with Pete Townshend, Jaco Pastorius and even the legendary Les Paul. Sadly, it also saw the death of Muddy Waters, one of the most important and influential guitarists of the 20th century. As the chronicles of Guitar World continued to grow, it would become evident that every new and exciting discovery would in turn be undercut by unavoidable loss.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Nimoy with Chuck Dunaway
Jimi w Leonard Nimoy, a photo by Doctor Noe on Flickr.Noel Redding, left, Leonard Nimoy, center, and Jimi Hendrix,second from right, in Ohio not long before the guitar hero’s death in 1970.
I've had this pic in my collection for some time, given to me by ace Hendrix historian David Pearcy. It chronicles a meeting in Cleveland on March 26th, 1968. The night before Jimi was already in town and played at Otto's Grotto jamming with local band Good Earth. The Experience played two shows on the night of the 26th, and Leonard Nimoy was in attendance. Later on, they met at the club and talked for hours. They even continued on to Jimi's hotel room and talked again until 2 or 3 a.m.
The man who put these two giants together was Cleveland radio veteran Chuck Dunaway. Here's how he tells it in his memoir:
"Two days before the phone call from Joe, I had made a fashion-show appearance at Higbee's department store with Leonard Nimoy of "Star Trek" fame. The night before the fashion show, Jerry Hall, the local promotion man for Nimoy's label and an old friend from Texas, had arranged for the three of us to have dinner together, even though I had nothing to do with picking music for the station.
"Nimoy and I hit it off, talking politics for hours after dinner in his hotel room. At the fashion show, I told Nimoy of the Time magazine article. Leonard said he had heard of Hendrix, and decided to stay in Cleveland another day, joining me at the Hendrix 'impromptu' guest shot with the local band. So we met Jimi at the club that night and the three of us began talking politics. We were all on the same wavelength, wanting to see the end of the war in Vietnam."
Only recently, in an interview with the LA Times' Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher here.
Nimoy recalls what that meeting was like (at 10:24 on the YouTube video):
"I was promoting a recording in Cleveland and [Chuck Dunaway says,] 'Hendrix is in the next room – he heard you were here and he wants to meet you.' I thought about it for a nanosecond, and I went to break some bread with him. He was a true genius – a great, great artist. A tragic end."
Jimi died on September 18th, 1970. He would have been 70 next November 27th.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Mick Taylor – Return of the Boo-Ga-Wee
Mick Taylor shows off that awesome jazzy-bluesy slide work on "You Shook Me" at the Iridium Jazz Club, NYC ~ May 12, 2012 ...
... with that sweet soul section of Hamish Stuart, guitar; Wilbur Bascomb, bass; Max Middleton, keyboards; Jeff Allen, drums; Arno Hecht, sax – the meandering Stone lays down a groove at they club that Les built, or at least made famous.
Mick burns on that Les Paul with the Bigsby vibrato. That, and the fact that Max Middleton is sitting there at the keyboard playing "You Shook Me" makes everything quite appropriate indeed.
"You Shook Me"
When he assays "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," it's more than a snippet, less than epic-length. A punch in the face with a licorice stick of slide goodness.
"Can't You Hear Me Knocking"
I had this to say about MT on my Flickr page:
Jimi & Mick Taylor GW March 1988 P. 33
Three of the four photos on the page (two of Jimi and Keith, two Jimi with Mick Taylor) were indeed stills from the Maysles' unreleased footage. There is a fourth one by photographer Ethan Russell. I blogged on this on Rock's Backpages …
www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2011/11/jimi-micktaylor....
My friend Tom Graves in Memphis calls Mick "one of the best slide players to ever walk the planet."
No lesser light than Keith Richards says that the Mick Taylor era – with a dash of Gram Parsons – was the best the Stones had to offer.
... and speaking' of those bad boys, it's funny that this recent article (May 3, 2012) is in the New York Daily News. My picture was in the NY Post, I mean a picture of me ... not a picture I took:
My sister Anna and I went to see the Stones at Madison Square Garden sometime in the mid-seventies, or maybe it was the Nov. 1969 MSG concert – I am not sure now. We moved up to the front row — in those days you could do that; note the absence of a guard rail and phalanx of beefy mofos. That's us on the lower left hand portion of your screen. We got doused by Mick and made the front page of the New York Post.
PS, I love this bit from the interview with Mick in the Daily News:
Only way I know to close out this blog about Mick is with another video. He really burns on "Blind Willie McTell," a Bob Dylan tune.
"Blind Willie McTell"
... with that sweet soul section of Hamish Stuart, guitar; Wilbur Bascomb, bass; Max Middleton, keyboards; Jeff Allen, drums; Arno Hecht, sax – the meandering Stone lays down a groove at they club that Les built, or at least made famous.
Mick burns on that Les Paul with the Bigsby vibrato. That, and the fact that Max Middleton is sitting there at the keyboard playing "You Shook Me" makes everything quite appropriate indeed.
When he assays "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," it's more than a snippet, less than epic-length. A punch in the face with a licorice stick of slide goodness.
I had this to say about MT on my Flickr page:
Jimi & Mick Taylor GW March 1988 P. 33
Three of the four photos on the page (two of Jimi and Keith, two Jimi with Mick Taylor) were indeed stills from the Maysles' unreleased footage. There is a fourth one by photographer Ethan Russell. I blogged on this on Rock's Backpages …
www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2011/11/jimi-micktaylor....
My friend Tom Graves in Memphis calls Mick "one of the best slide players to ever walk the planet."
No lesser light than Keith Richards says that the Mick Taylor era – with a dash of Gram Parsons – was the best the Stones had to offer.
... and speaking' of those bad boys, it's funny that this recent article (May 3, 2012) is in the New York Daily News. My picture was in the NY Post, I mean a picture of me ... not a picture I took:
My sister Anna and I went to see the Stones at Madison Square Garden sometime in the mid-seventies, or maybe it was the Nov. 1969 MSG concert – I am not sure now. We moved up to the front row — in those days you could do that; note the absence of a guard rail and phalanx of beefy mofos. That's us on the lower left hand portion of your screen. We got doused by Mick and made the front page of the New York Post.
PS, I love this bit from the interview with Mick in the Daily News:
Mick Taylor: The best musician ever to play with the Rolling Stones returns
By Jim Farber
Guitarist plays Iridium
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
May 3, 2012
Since his departure, Taylor has worked with the band periodically, adding bits to “Tattoo You” in 1981 and even recording overdubs for last year’s re-release of “Exile on Main Street,” which includes his sole songwriting credit (“Ventilator Blues”). But he remains cagey about rumors he’ll rejoin the Stones on a proposed 50th anniversary tour next year. “I don’t know,” is all he’ll say.
In the meantime, Taylor just collaborated with Ron Wood on a song for “CSI: Miami.” And he plans to continue the rambling life of the journeyman musician he’s enjoyed for over three decades. It’s a role that allows him to indulge his truest love: the blues. “It all comes back to the blues,” he says. “Ultimately, that’s where we all go for nourishment and for warmth.”
Only way I know to close out this blog about Mick is with another video. He really burns on "Blind Willie McTell," a Bob Dylan tune.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Jimmy Page – Magnificent Obsession
GW: What was your primary guitar at that stage [early session work days]?
PAGE: A Les Paul Custom – the one that got ripped off over here. The "Black Beauty," I think they called it. It's the one that has the frets pretty far down. I had it re-fretted anyway, so the frets were higher. Yeah, most of the session work was done on that, using a Burns amplifier, and then also I had a Fender Super Reverb. …
GW: When did the Marshall enter your life?
PAGE: I was producing John Mayall and Eric Clapton for Immediate Records and that's the first time I saw [laughs] and experienced that. I thought it was fabulous but I couldn't have one of these – not in the studio environment that I was working in. 'Cause the volume and such wasn't quite the thing.
…….
GW: What about the wah-wah?
PAGE: [noticing Guitar World's special issue on JIMMY PAGE opened to the spread on his guitars] ...
... I see you've got a picture of [the Danelectro] here. They did a great job [on the issue], didn't they?I had no idea at the time that that's what they were doing. Anyhow, that's the one that I used for the slide part – the Danelectro. And I've always used that [for slide], actually.
…
GW: You also used the Danelectro during the "Atlantic Fortieth Anniversary" show, as I recall.
PAGE: "Kashmir" was done on that, anyway initially – the recording of it.
GW: So your primary axes are still the '58 Les Paul Standard, the Danelectro and the Telecaster with the B-String Bender –
PAGE: And the '60 Strat.
…….
GW: … Does the setup of the album ("Outrider")'s two side – the rockers and the blues songs – follow the chronology of the recordings?
PAGE: No, it wasn't done like that.
GW: It was just a free-for-all, then.
PAGE: Not quite a free-for-all. A very controlled free-for-all
GW: I'm just trying to understand the specifics of your process.
PAGE: It fascinates you, doesn't it, this process?
GW: Yeah, it does. What could be more fascinating than an artist's creative process?
PAGE: I don't see how the creative process with me is any different than it can be with anybody else, really. I wouldn't think so. I mean, as far as the initial spark goes, anyway.
GW: Well, I understand that the initial spark just arrives – but then you have to direct, refine and focus it.
PAGE: Mmm, of course, absolutely. And I wouldn't think that was any different with anybody else, either. Well, Maybe so.
WITH THAT, Page was off to LAX to catch a flight back to London, but not before sayingh, with optimum magnanimity, "See you in the fall, I guess." While loading up my notes and tape recorder in the now-empty hotel room, I spotted the bag, still packed with burgers and fries, on the floor beneath the chair where Page had been sitting. He'd been too polite, or too self-conscious, to eat in front of me. Oh Well – they'd feed him on the plane. But it wouldn't be Burger King.
 |
| Pagey in 2009 – photo by © Noe Gold |
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This Note inpired by ...
Led Zep "Heartbreaker" – ...like a steam roller rolling over a chicken coup.
a thread on FB:
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=298964116854915&id=564797197
By Greg Martin
8 May, 2012 at 10:15 ·
When this kicks in, it's like a steam roller rolling over a chicken coup. This still fires me up today, Jimmy's solo is over the top. Wonder what he was using on this track? Les Paul or Telecaster, Marshall or Supro amp? We want to know
– Perry Margouleff!
Led Zeppelin - Heartbreaker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwZ4Px57cWA&feature=share
Led Zeppelin - Heartbreaker Copyright - 1969 Atlantic Records
"Heartbreaker" is a song from English rock band Led Zeppelin's 1969 album, Led Zeppelin II. It ...
Greg Martin I always said Page's solo was like a "Slinky" coming down the steps, it's too cool!
Bruce Reed I think he had switched to the LP/Marshall setup at this time
Perry Margouleff Call me and we can talk.
Doug TheSubstitutes Ginther ‘58 Les Paul Standard and Marshall 100-watt amps Vox electric 12-string and a Vox solid-state amp.
Kim Shaheen I have this album on 4 track, not the 8tr cartridge, an actual 1/8-inch tape reel. LZ II actually has a name. I've never seen it mentioned but it's called "The Only Way to Fly."
Jim Gaines I'd be willing to bet on the LP. This month's Guitar World has a cover story featuring Joe Walsh where he tells about the James Gang touring with LZ right before the first album hit big and his flying to NYC to sell Page one of his 59s for 1200 dollars.
Wade Daffron I'm thinking Tele through Supro.
Bruce Reed
http://guitarinternational.com/2010/08/20/zep-gear-a-look-at-jimmy-pages-gear-during-the-age-of-led-zeppelin/
Chris McElrath I agree with Wade Daffron.
Bruce Reed Tele through Valco (Supro) on 1st album, then it's a whole new ballgame!
Jim Gaines Before I forget, it's the LP that became Page's Number One, according to Joe.
Chris McElrath For one thing, he is getting some insane behind-the-nut bends that I have never been able to come close to approximating on anything besides a Telecaster, because there simply isn't enough space between the string and the headstock wood to push down on the string that far unless you are playing a six-on-a-side, Fender-type headstock. Just my wild guess. ...
Wade Daffron I'm sure many of y'all have done this already, but it's really worth the time and trouble to seek out some of the old Yardbirds bootlegs (on vinyl!) and you will certainly hear the genesis of Page's early Zep sound.
Wade Daffron Oh man, Mr. McElrath, I never thought about that! That's genius! I know exactly what you mean about reaching up there and pushing those strings. Teles are also good for rolling the volume knob for that pedal steel sound, of course.
Greg Martin I still have "Yardbirds: Live At The Anderson Theater" and "Little Games" on Vinyl, bought them when they came out. I bought the Anderson Theater LP for a $1 at Grant's Department Store in Louisville, after Page had it pulled off the market. They had a pile of them in 1972. I also have the new "Glimpses" box set.
Wade Daffron Oh my, that's some good stuff right there. I'm gonna have to go look and see what I've got for sure. I know I have some kind of box set, and some others. Some people are amazed when I play them the Yardbirds' version of "Dazed & Confused." They're like, "So, Zep did a cover version?" Oyyy....
Chris McElrath Yeah Wade, I love and own all kinds of different guitars, but at the end of the day I am and always have been a tele man, so I do admittedly have a bias in that direction. But seriously, that section of Page's solo from about 2:08 to 2:14 just SCREAMS Telecaster to me. But I have been wrong a time or two in my life. ...
Greg Martin Here's the genesis of "Dazed And Confused," it's listed as "I'm Confused" on the Yardbirds Anderson Theater LP.
The Yardbirds - Dazed And Confused (1968)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsjo92lJ9vg
The Yardbirds are an English rock band that had a string of hits in the mid 1960...
Wade Daffron I gotta learn how to upload pics. I just found my copy of "Yardbirds-Last Rave-Up in L.A." It's a THREE-record set (456 of 1,000) on Glimpses Records. Nice, full-color cover and liner notes by "D.S. Cole" (?!). BTW – Nine-minute version of "Dazed And Confused."
Greg Martin Actually, here's the true genius of "Dazed And Confused":
Jake Holmes - Dazed and Confused
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTsvs-pAGDc
Dazed and Confused was written by the folk-rock singer Jake Holmes and released ...
Wade Daffron Holy cow! I had no clue! Great find! I just hope there's not a William Shatner version floating around somewhere...
Greg Martin LOL! Not that I know of, Wade. As far as know, Jake was the inspiration.
Wade Daffron Hey, if you don't mind, y'all (there I go again) check out my most recent post and see if I'm on to something, or need to be put out to pasture. THANKS!
Greg Martin ........and the inspiration for "Whole Lotta Love"?
Small Faces - You Need Loving
http://youtu.be/LkQpZpFLpv4
Wade Daffron Everything I know is wrong. I thought I had read/seen/heard all there is, but I am being schooled seven ways to Sunday!
Greg Martin I absolutely love Jimmy Page. No matter what inspired what, Led Zep and Jimmy are one of the big reasons I wanted to play Guitar in the '60s. I still aspire to learn something from the master himself anytime I can. Thank God for youtube! :)
Nancy Woods Stairway to Heaven was always one of my faves ... that song will take you to another place.
Greg Martin Yep, that one and a little organic help in the '70s took me to another dimension a few times. :)
Wade Daffron I think there's some good "lost" Page stuff-like "I Can't Quit You, Baby" on Coda, and ESPECIALLY "Prison Blues" on the Outrider solo album. I swear, that song has the most sizzling guitar work I've ever heard!
Wade Daffron Hope it's not a "Wet Willie". Dixon. "Keep On Smiling!"
Gregg Hopkins Not the wet one.
Noe Gold Mr. McElrath, the "nut job" theory is a bit of alright!
Mac Whiteside Sounds like an LP at the first, not positive though, then the Tele fer the leads, it just cuts too good ... ditto on the bends ... could we all be right? Always thought he used the Tele on the first couple of albums ... corrections please.
Noe Gold Think the Tele was main ax ...
... but ...
The Yardbirds - Dazed And Confused (1968)
http://youtu.be/58mQvW0ROag
... and yet ...
From the man himself Mr. Jimmy Page
http://youtu.be/uoBs3vyI3Q0
Jimmy Page talks about his #1 Les Paul.
Visit www.authenticzeppelin.com
 www.youtube.com/watch?v=euLLhQnrMAI Photo copyright © 2009 By Noe Gold - All Rights Reserved or I will kill you. | |||||
"It Might Get Loud" Filmmakers 6-19-19 | I took this at an intimate press conference for the movie. Watch for my story on fandango.com -- I'll update here when it posts. |
Friday, March 9, 2012
My take on the John Carter Movie
Andrew STANTON-JohnCarterMovie, a photo by Doctor Noe on Flickr.
I wanted so much for it to be good for my man Andrew Stanton, whom I have admired for his animation work (see my interview referenced below), but when compared to the more on-the-surface technoid-inspired aesthetic of Jim Cameron, I have to declare, along with Putney Swope, that Putney says the man's got to have more soul. The heart is what is missing from this venture, and as my 15-year-old son noticed, so is Cameron's painstaking attention to detail, seen all too annoyingly in the under-lit 3-D interior scenes.
Here is a heartfelt discussion with Stanton – I wish he could have captured this excitement on the screen:
Uploaded by AtGoogleTalks on Mar 8, 2012
Andrew Stanton stops by Google for a conversation with Chris DiBona. Andrew discusses his inspiration for "John Carter," … traces the evolution of his creative process – from childhood, to Pixar to "John Carter."
The video is supplied for my readers by Walt Disney Studios Publicity.
John Carter clips are Courtesy of The Walt Disney Studios. © 2012 Disney. John Carter TM ERB, Inc.
For my interview with Stanton for Variety, go here:
For Pixar, it's about the story, not the glory
Helmer Stanton keeps innocence, love of storytelling
By NOE GOLD
Andrew Stanton is on the phone from the Bay Area, where he is packing his bags for Tokyo. The movie he directed, "Finding Nemo," will have its premiere in Japan, six months after it opened in the U.S.
"Japan is the last country in the whole world that's getting it," he says. "They speed up the English-speaking countries because of the piracy issues, but the other countries where it's dubbed there's not as much pressure, so Christmas is the best time to open." ...
for more go to www.variety.com/article/VR1117896898
Monday, January 23, 2012
NAMM 2012 Noë & Seymour
This is Seymour Duncan, a legend in his own right. After covering just about all the square footage at the NAMM show and imbibing of as many free hors d'oeuvres and shots as I could bear, I bumped into Seymour, the legendary maker of pickups and other sound-refracting devices for the likes of Jeff Beck, Yngwie Malmsteen and my beloved compadre Roy Buchanan ...
This one's Roy Buchanan in the glory days with pickup-meister Seymour Duncan. Seymour made his luthier's bones via the apprentice route in Leo Fender's factory in Fullerton. He later applied his craft secrets to the mojo of Tele-masters like Roy Buchanan and Jeff Beck. Seymour will be featured in the full-on "director's cut" documentary version of "Roy Buchanan Telly Talk."
The photo is featured in Noe the G's teaser trailer for the Roy Buchanan Telly Talk DVD here ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ggDm3wh3IM
I joined Seymour as he was setting out to sample the Tennesee soul stew of ...
… Legendary Roots/Blues Guitarist, Grammy Award-winning Producer Pete Anderson, who was holding forth at the lobby of the Hilton Hotel across the way.
You could do worse than to check out my little Youtube report here:
Copyright © 2012 Noë Gold
Meandering at NAMM 2012 - Pete Anderson Live
Pete performs "Blue Guitar" in this buzz clip.
Meandering at NAMM 2012 - Pete Anderson Live
Pete performs "Blue Guitar" in this buzz clip.
Do check out these links for some highly entertaining and elucidating footage about Seymour:
Seymour Intvw Pt. 1
Seymour Intvw Pt. 2
Seymour Intvw Pt. 3
Seymour Intvw Pt. 4
OK, a lot of groovy coincidences at the NAMM Show in Anaheim yesterday. I'm meandering around the floor, as is my wont, checking out various and sundry devices, maestros, hucksters and weirdos. The usual menagerie of sound and bupkiss.
Back in the day when I was the editor of a national guitar rag, this was a bi-yearly perambulation – summertime they used to hold them in Chicago, but the perk-like excursion for a New York City boy was mos' def the one in January.
So in the spirit of old times I embarked once more into the Orange County breech.
On the advice of Seymour, I went to check out Legendary Roots/Blues Guitarist, Grammy Award-winning Producer Pete Anderson, who was holding forth at the lobby of the Hilton Hotel across the way.
Seymour Intvw Pt. 1
Seymour Intvw Pt. 2
Seymour Intvw Pt. 3
Seymour Intvw Pt. 4
OK, a lot of groovy coincidences at the NAMM Show in Anaheim yesterday. I'm meandering around the floor, as is my wont, checking out various and sundry devices, maestros, hucksters and weirdos. The usual menagerie of sound and bupkiss.
Back in the day when I was the editor of a national guitar rag, this was a bi-yearly perambulation – summertime they used to hold them in Chicago, but the perk-like excursion for a New York City boy was mos' def the one in January.
So in the spirit of old times I embarked once more into the Orange County breech.
On the advice of Seymour, I went to check out Legendary Roots/Blues Guitarist, Grammy Award-winning Producer Pete Anderson, who was holding forth at the lobby of the Hilton Hotel across the way.
Copyright © 2012 Noë Gold
So I went and indulged. What a show this was! I was overwhelmed and blown away. And while I was thus occupied, I also rubbed elbows with just about every other amigo in the Guitar World I had hoped to see.
So by and large it was a swell day.
So I went and indulged. What a show this was! I was overwhelmed and blown away. And while I was thus occupied, I also rubbed elbows with just about every other amigo in the Guitar World I had hoped to see.
So by and large it was a swell day.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Seymour gave me a CD of his music, pointing out that one of the cuts, " OK Roy," was dedicated to Roy Buchanan. You can check out Seymour's music here:
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Zappa's Inferno
from an interview first published in Guitar World April 1987 on the occasion of the release of THE GUITAR WORLD ACCORDING TO FRANK ZAPPA distributed by Guitar Galaxy in association with Barking Pumpkin
Zappa by Noe the G. - Guitar World, April 1987Zappa's Inferno
By Noë the G
copyright © Noe Gold
FRANK ZAPPA'S FULLY-EQUIPPED HOME RECORDING STUDIO is where he'd most rather be. "I never go out," he says, though his Laurel Canyon home commands a panoramic view of Los Angeles. "I could be just as happy if all this" – gesturing toward the array of equipment that surrounds him in this devil's advocate's workshop – "were in Utah. Except for the fact that the hardware and technicians are available in the L.A. area, and the stuff can be serviced here." The fact is, all Frank really wants to do is work.
Whether he acknowledges it or not, Zappa has been admired by guitarists for years because of the sheer free-flying gonzo-ness of his solos within the otherwise-precise organization of his compositions. He's always been a real Mother of a player. As a bandleader, his draconian insistence on perfection has brought out the best in his players, especially the guitarists he has introduced to the world through his succession of bands: Lowell George, Adrian Belew, Warren Cuccurullo and Steve Vai all cut their teeth in Zappa's marching society.
We thought about this – your editor, Noe the G., and Associate Publisher Greg Di Benedetto – as we descended with Frank into the bowels of his private inferno, otherwise known as the United Muffin Research Kitchen (U.M.R.K.).
Our purpose was to plan the Guitar World According To Frank Zappa tape-a 34-minute collection of rare Zappa solos on a special GW audio cassette which this magazine will make available in the spring-and to talk about guitar stuff.
Well, Frank was perfectly poised to talk about guitar and to play us some of the hours of great solos he has on all those tapes in his vault. But as far as performing on the instrument, we were surprised to discover, the guitar guru has been getting his playing jollies from entering notes and manipulating them with his Synclavier. For various reasons you will hear in his own words in this interview, Frank hadn't played serious guitar in two years (the last recorded example of Frank playing will be available on our Guitar World According To Frank Zappa tape). He'd even lost his callouses!
But fear not, dear reader. Zappa had plenty to say about playing guitar and where the instrument is going. And, believe us, there's reams of guitar in Frank's vaults, which he continues to classify and release to the public as long as the demand is there, through his own Barking Pumpkin organization. The Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar collections did quite well worldwide, so you can expect more to be released in the future.
And we hear that since our talk with Frank, he's been building up his callouses and thinking about going back on the road with his guitar and a band. The moral: you can take the Zappa out of guitar playing, but it'll take a long time to get all the guitar playing out of Frank Zappa.
Let me get a level on the tape recorder. Say, "The poodle bites."
Frank Zappa: The poodle chews it.
Come on, Frenchie! Do you see a conceptual continuum between, say, "Call Any Vegetable" and Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar? Or between the Mothers 0f Invention and the Mothers of Prevention?
There are some links, yeah. The main drawback of the medium I'm working in is, until I got the computer I was locked into making music based on the assets and/or liabilities of the guys in the band. In other words, if you want to write something that's faster than what the guys can play, you can't hear it, because they can't play it that fast. Or if you want something for an instrumentation that you don't have in the band, then you won't hear it. But now that I can do it with a computer, that's not a problem anymore.
Was it always that way? When you were writing parts for, say Roy Estrada, or anybody in the early days for instance, it was all charted out, and-
N0--because, the only time I ever had a band where everybody could read [music] was the band that had Jean-Luc Ponty and Ralph Humphrey, and Ian and Ruth [Underwood] and George [Duke], that was a reading band. And Grand Wazoo, that was a reading band. All the rest of 'em were like half-and-half. Half the guys could read, half of 'em couldn't.
Now with the computer--the Synclavier-- you don't need the band to work out the music. What about the quality of the sound itself?
I'll play you some tapes; you tell me.
What about MIDI? Some say it's the next big thing. Others say, "it's not a guitar anymore."
It's either guitar plus or guitar minus, depending on how you look at it. The big problem with doing anything MIDI is the lag. It's like learning how to play a church pipe organ. Because when you press a key on a pipe organ, the sound doesn't come out right away. It's the same thing with MIDI. You have to get used to the lag. I can't. I haven't played a guitar synthesizer yet that feels comfortable.
With the Synclavier, can you explain that? The mechanical differences in working with that.
What? for the way I compose on it? I can enter information with the octapad, and I can enter it with the keyboard, or I can type it in.
Can you spontaneously jam with it?
Yeah. You can take a completely improvised line and build an entire composition out of it.
You see, it's still a single line. But with this, you can improvise a single line and have that line being played by a whole ensemble of instruments and actually have those instruments play that line in harmony. It's not an improvised line anymore. It's an arrangement.
What is all that activity doing to your guitar playing per se---
Haven't touched it in two years.
[There is a brief pause as the interviewers collect what's left of their minds from the floor.]
You haven't?
[Zappa sits back in his chair, letting this one sink in.]
You don't miss it at all?
Every once in a while... but I don't play a style that is contemporary, you know? I don't do all the 1980s guitar noises. Unfortunately, the audience for guitar playing has a real narrow interest span. If you don't sound like Eddie Van Halen, then apparently you don't actually play guitar any more. I have no intention of ever sounding like Eddie Van Halen, and, uh, it makes you wonder why you would even bother to play the guitar, because the current audience would listen to it and go, "That's not a guitar. It doesn't go 'wee wee wee wee, wee wee wee wee.'" So why do it?
Dweezil would probably rebut that, what with his own infatuation for Ed Van Halen.
I'm not saying anything against Eddie because I think what he's done for the guitar is wonderful. But the thing that's tragic
about the marketplace is that everybody decided that they were all going to do that, and then the competition is not musical. It's gymnastic. Okay, they say, "I want to sound like Eddie, but in order to be better than Eddie I have to be faster than Eddie." That seems to be the aesthetic operating procedure in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Edward probably sits back and goes, "These guys are really stupid." Because I don't think that's what he had in mind when he developed the style.
It's just like with MTV. MTV has a certain look, because it has a limited pictorial vocabulary. All the videos are made up of certain icons. If you don't work in that vocabulary, then the MTV audience doesn't perceive it as a real video, know what I mean? It's gotta have certain things in it. So, take your pick. You can write hooks and go in there and do that shit, or you can do something else. I decided to do something else.
I'm looking for whatever else is out there. I'm looking for different structures, different sounds, different types of harmonic combinations. Different rhythms.
The guitar ... aside from being busy with other stuff, the reason you put it down two years ago or whatever ... does it not give you that anymore? Because I personally--and a lot of our readers--love your guitar sound. To me that always meant your personal voice within whatever music we were hearing. If you had the band going precision and precise ... but when you hit the guitar solo, it was not precise at all. It was something transcendent, something out.
It's another vegetable. The problem is, most of the best stuff that I will physically be able to do on the guitar is already on tape. You just haven't heard it yet. I mean, I don't have much incentive to play it. I don't have any callouses anymore. I can still think guitar. But to physically manipulate it, I would have to go back in and woodshed for months on end just to be able to do it. For what? There's really no audience for it. Which is not to say that there's a great audience for this new digital stuff either, but I have more incentive to work on this, because it leads to other more interesting things than to sit in there and practice the guitar. Because even when I was playing the guitar I didn't practice. You know? When I was on the road I would do an hour a day before the show, but, I've never been one of those guys ... Dweezil practices non-stop, day in, day out.
So the guitar solo right now, doesn't really play a role in your music? Even for things that can't be done with the Synclavier?
Well, look at it this way: I got plenty of tapes of these things. I can release another guitar solo album. And, when you see what the guitar solo has been reduced to in contemporary music, it's like an eight-bar fill. And during that fill, you're supposed to play every hammer-on lick that you know as fast as you can play it, followed by 15 feedback noises and then get the fuck out of there. You know, that's what the guitar solo has been reduced to, and that's not the medium I've ever worked in.
I recall you saying once that the hardest thing to accomplish in a guitar solo is to come up with a distinct melody within that solo. The solo itself would be ... improvised.
Yeah, just make it up on the spot--
But a melody--
--Yeah, well listen to what's going on in solos today. When was the last time you heard someone make one up with a melody?
When you're composing, and you're working with the Synclavier, and you get to a point where in the old days you were thinking about composing for the guitar as well, what do you do at that juncture? Do you put a coda-type thing in there?
It would be difficult to talk about what I'm doing over there since you don't know what it is. I should just stop the tape and go over there and show you what I'm doing.
[Stops tape and we get a demo of Frank composing on the Synclavier He taps out a few seemingly random rhythms, makes some observations of the CRT screen and manipulates parameters of music around the "random rhythms." The music coming out of the Synclavier is many-faceted, but typical Zappa, with percussive marimbaesque runs and odd cat growls prancing about together.]
That sounds like your music. Same guy.
Are you familiar with the piece on the Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar album called "While You Were Out?" Well, on the new album [Jazz From Hell] there's a deluxe computer version of that. But it's not played by a guitar.
I look at that thing-the recording console-and it's like a musical instrument, if you use it the right way. You've gotta start with a musical idea. if it's not a musical idea what is it? An equation?
How do you get that? How do you start? Do you have entire complicated things full-blown that spring out of your brain, or do you start with something small and you build it up?
Sometimes, I have a complete vision of what the thing is and it's just drudgery to go in there and execute the vision. And another way is, you start by hitting a couple of notes on that [Synclavier], and if you like it you save 'em and make a piece on it, and if you don't you throw it away.
How do you keep track of everything? On each floppy, there's like a million things...
Aaah! then you have to have a good memory.
Yet, when we first started talking about this interview, we discussed guitar noisemakers and these devices that you seem to have a fondness for--the Green Ringers and the Uni-Vibes and such. Things that give that idiosyncratic, anarchic tone.
Well, I like the sound of a guitar. My idea of the best use of a guitar is some thing that's personal ... not necessarily commercially viable. There are things I like to hear coming out of a guitar. But that's my personal taste.
The Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar series, how did the three records do commercially?
Real good, as a matter of fact. And it surprised the shit out of a lot of people. For example, when it was first released, there
were 30,000 units of that three-record box sold in France alone. Which is some thing of a merchandising miracle in that country. It's done well and it's still selling.
So, are you going to do any more of those?
Yeah, I got another one that I've been fooling around with.
And that's all stuff, like what you said before, "I don't have to play guitar because I have so much stuff already" and it's--
--it's on tape, right.
Do you have any urge to play at all in public any more?
I'd have to have an awful good reason, and in order to play in public I'd have to learn to how to play the guitar again--literally. I don't have any callouses. I couldn't bend the strings.
It's weird because we're from a guitar magazine and you're not really into playing guitar anymore.
Well, what's that got to do with releasing guitar records? As I told you, there's plenty of stuff on tape. I can play you some stuff--examples of what's lurking in the archives. I've even sequenced a few of the solos, but I haven't come up with a satisfactory sequence for about six sides of guitar stuff ... there's just masses to choose from [Solos Frank is talking about will be available as The Guitar World According To Frank Zappa in a future issue of this magazine. Watch for it--GW Ed.]
How were these recorded?
All live.
They are live. So how do you deal with the 24-track?
They're all different. Some of them were recorded four-track live, but that doesn't mean they sound cheesy. One thing I always hated to do was play guitar in a studio. I always thought it was an incredibly boring experience.
Like playing in a vacuum, isn't it? So therefore, in order to really play guitar, you've got to hire a band, and that becomes cumbersome. And I guess nobody's going to want to audition just to be in Frank's back-up band, just so Frank can play guitar. If it's not necessarily going to go on a record or something.
That's true. It's the law of supply and demand, you know? There ya go.
But with all this involvement, do you still keep up with who the musicians are around here?
No. I mean, the guys who were good yesterday are still good today-unless they've nuked themselves with drugs. The guys that are going to be good, we'll eventually hear about 'em anyway.
Do you still hear from some of the guys you've played with? Does Steve Vai, for instance, keep in touch with you?
Yeah, he comes over every once in a while. But he was on the road for a year.
How did you first meet up with him?
He sent me a cassette. When he was 17.
And he was in a music school at the time.
Berklee.
How about Adrian Belew?
I found Adrian working in a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. He was working in a bar band. They were all dressed like the Godfather. They had, you know, fake mob-type suits on and stuff and he was doing Roy Orbison imitations.
I never would have thought of him like that. Did you hire him on the spot?
No. I don't hire people right away. I give them a chance to audition.
Was he always into that Hendrix thing, or did he develop it later?
He was doing some of it at that show.
Can you give our readers any practical advice?
Give me a field. Help them with what? Getting a job? How's this?: You want to get a job? Practice all your licks real fast. Get a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Want to get a record contract? Get a good wardrobe, get a good barber. Don't even worry about how you play. They're not signing musicians anymore, they're signing models. Make sure you look good.
Look, everybody who buys a record has a right to buy what they like. And obviously, somebody really enjoys what's being produced today, or they wouldn't buy it. However, I think there's more to music than what is being made available by the record companies because they have been completely bamboozled by the video music syndrome. Record companies have made a major mistake. MTV came along and they thought, "Oh! this is it. We're no longer going to make records"--those little plastic things that people listen to?--"What we're going to do, we're going to sign groups that look like models, so that they can have a video on MTV."
The down side of this is the record companies are now totally at the mercy of MTV--that's their main outlet. How many videos can they show on MTV? Not that many. This limits the opportunity for people who actually play music. To play music, because you're not going on MTV unless you belong on MTV; furthermore, you're probably not going to get a record contract unless the guy at the record company thinks you look good.
Now, not all musicians are beautiful people. In fact a lot of 'em would generally qualify as being physically unattractive. But so what? If you like a record, you can listen to that record a hundred times and still get off on it. If you like a video, how many times can you watch it? Six, ten? Thirty, if you're a vegetable. And then it's old.
So the record industry has kind of chosen this one path and I think they made a mistake. Thev have igoored the desires of that segment of the audience that likes to listen to music. They like to hear it. It goes in through your ears. Video music is another thing. It goes in through your eyes. And better than 50 percent of what you experience is visual. The music is secondary to the pictures. So, if musicians who are just beginning think only of how much money they're going to make and whether or not they're going to have that big video career ... they have to decide right now whether or not they want to play music or be a model. And if it's the bucks they're after, like I said, "Get yourself a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Don't worry too much about what you're going to play," because the chances are, if your publicity picture really looks good, the guy at the record company won't even listen to your tape. If you got the look, they'll find a producer to make you sound like something, because all you're ever going to do is lip-sync it anyway. Okay? You're never really gonna have to play it live. Chances are some producer hired by the company will come in and do what you're supposed to be able to do. And if that sounds like science fiction, I bet there's plenty of people right now, readin' the magazine saying, "Yeah, that's what I want to do!" And they should do it. Because there's somebody who wants to buy that. But that's not music as far as I'm concerned.
Did you give Dweezil that advice before he put his lp out? Apparently, it's worked, because he's gotten on MTV. And he looks good, so----
--well, I can't help the way he looks. And he chooses his own wardrobe, but the fact of the matter is that Dweezil can actually play an instrument.
So that's a fluke, according to your theory of how musicians make it these days.
Yeah, yeah. Uh, he's a mutation.
No more school for him, right?
He was out of school at 15 because in California you can take the high school equivalency test at 15 and get a diploma. So he's out. Moon did the same thing.
So he's not going to college, or ...
Why should he? He doesn't want to be a dentist, he doesn't want to be a lawyer. He wants to be a guitar player.
Are you aware of people like Yngwie Malmsteen?
I know who he is. Dweezil played me a tape of his.
What do you think of him?
Uh, not my style. Good ...
Does Dweezil look up to him? Is he influenced by him?
I think everybody who does gymnastic guitar and looks at other gymnastic guitarists sort of goes, "How fast is he movin' his fingers?" It is a competitive thing. But you have to ask him about that.
Yngwie himself might be an original, but if everybody's copying him, that shows you how bankrupt people are.
Yeah, but come on; in the seventies everybody was going as fast as John McLaughiin. As long as the media celebrates the guy who is the fastest, that's what people are going to go for.
I think it is wonderful to be able to play fast. It's even more wonderful to play things that are impossible. It's even more wonderful to defeat the law of averages. Things that you play fast are usually things that you rehearse fast. I'll tell ya a fast guitar player--Tommy Tedesco. You want to hear somebody play some scales? Go hear Tommy. Tommy can play other stuff, too.
You've talked about your antecedents, like Johnny Guitar Watson and others you were influenced by. There's no obvious trace of them. It must be less literal.
What I've taken from them is not from their sound it's their attitude. I'm probably stylistically closer to Guitar Slim than anybody else. But since nobody knows what he did ...[laughter]. There's a couple of solos he played that I thought were landmarks--but they were very obscure.
Watson, he's the original minimalist guitar player. The solo on "Lonely Nights," the one-note guitar solo? Says it all! Gets the point across. I can remember guitar players in high school learning that solo and just going, "But how does he get it to sound that way?" lt really- was one note. If you can play that note against those chord changes and derive the same emotional impact that he got from playing that note, then you're onto something. He can make that one be so nasty. You know, like, "What's behind that note? What is the mode? Why are you continuing to play the tonic when the dominant chord comes around? Are you goin' like this
[gestures with his middle finger in the "F-you" position] with your playing or what?" You have to learn how to do that.
A lot of the new kids playing today aren't really concerned with all that. And they should be.
Really, though, if you take away the gymnastics, you have to say, "What's the message here!" It's like, uh, a pissing contest [laughter].
But it's weird, Frank. Here we are, the editors of a guitar magazine, we keep seeing the evidence of this copying of styles that is so prevalent today. And we keep going, like, "What can we do to turn these people onto somebody, like, 'Listen to a Wes Montgomery record'" or something like that?
You know what happens if you turn 'em on to that? They'll copy Wes Montgomery. Because this is a copycat society.
Why is that? It wasn't always like that.
The answer is very simple. It's the same way you train a dog. When you don't want him to do something, you hit him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. When you do want him to do something. you give him a biscuit. Okay? All the biscuits have been given to copycats. Does anybody in guitar magazines ever say, "Wait a minute. You should get the newspaper on the nose if you're coming out sounding like the guy next door." You don't get the newspaper on the nose. People are being praised and rewarded for copying other people. Look at the award shows on television, People become exalted because they sound the same. And you say, "Why do they do it?" Because there's nothing to tell a new guy not to do it. Everything tells him, "Yes, do it." That's the key to success today, to be the same as the next guy, only faster.
You know why that happens? Because generally the people who write ahout music don't know music. Anybody can tell whether these four notes are faster than these four notes. But what does it take to listen to Johnny Guitar Watson's one note, and know that he's doin' that? Did you ever point that out to a reader. Did you ever get across that there's something more to it than rilly-rilly-ree?
If the criticism or reporting of current musical events is left to people who do not have enough of a musicological back ground to even know where the licks were stolen from--whaddaya got? There's nothing wrong with themes so long as you admit where the shit came from.
Was there ever a practitioner of the guitar--- Hendrix, say----that blew you away in terms of being a total original?
One of the most interesting guys on guitar on the planet is Allan Holdsworth. I really respect his playing.
Billy Gibbons is an original. The style that he does, although I know a lot of the blues antecedents that it was derived from, he goes like that [raises middle finger again]. You've gotta have that in your playing.
I thought Hendrix was great. But the very first time I saw him I had the incredible misfortune to be sitting real close to him at the Au Go Go in New York City, and he had a whole stack of Marshalls and I was right in front of it. I was physically ill--I couldn't get out, it was so packed I couldn't escape. And although it was great, I didn't see how anybody could inflict that kind of volume on himself let alone other people. That particular show he ended by taking the guitar and impaling it in the low ceiling of the club. Just walked away and left it squealing.
Zappa's Inferno
By Noë the G
copyright © Noe Gold
FRANK ZAPPA'S FULLY-EQUIPPED HOME RECORDING STUDIO is where he'd most rather be. "I never go out," he says, though his Laurel Canyon home commands a panoramic view of Los Angeles. "I could be just as happy if all this" – gesturing toward the array of equipment that surrounds him in this devil's advocate's workshop – "were in Utah. Except for the fact that the hardware and technicians are available in the L.A. area, and the stuff can be serviced here." The fact is, all Frank really wants to do is work.
Whether he acknowledges it or not, Zappa has been admired by guitarists for years because of the sheer free-flying gonzo-ness of his solos within the otherwise-precise organization of his compositions. He's always been a real Mother of a player. As a bandleader, his draconian insistence on perfection has brought out the best in his players, especially the guitarists he has introduced to the world through his succession of bands: Lowell George, Adrian Belew, Warren Cuccurullo and Steve Vai all cut their teeth in Zappa's marching society.
We thought about this – your editor, Noe the G., and Associate Publisher Greg Di Benedetto – as we descended with Frank into the bowels of his private inferno, otherwise known as the United Muffin Research Kitchen (U.M.R.K.).
Our purpose was to plan the Guitar World According To Frank Zappa tape-a 34-minute collection of rare Zappa solos on a special GW audio cassette which this magazine will make available in the spring-and to talk about guitar stuff.
Well, Frank was perfectly poised to talk about guitar and to play us some of the hours of great solos he has on all those tapes in his vault. But as far as performing on the instrument, we were surprised to discover, the guitar guru has been getting his playing jollies from entering notes and manipulating them with his Synclavier. For various reasons you will hear in his own words in this interview, Frank hadn't played serious guitar in two years (the last recorded example of Frank playing will be available on our Guitar World According To Frank Zappa tape). He'd even lost his callouses!
But fear not, dear reader. Zappa had plenty to say about playing guitar and where the instrument is going. And, believe us, there's reams of guitar in Frank's vaults, which he continues to classify and release to the public as long as the demand is there, through his own Barking Pumpkin organization. The Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar collections did quite well worldwide, so you can expect more to be released in the future.
And we hear that since our talk with Frank, he's been building up his callouses and thinking about going back on the road with his guitar and a band. The moral: you can take the Zappa out of guitar playing, but it'll take a long time to get all the guitar playing out of Frank Zappa.
Let me get a level on the tape recorder. Say, "The poodle bites."
Frank Zappa: The poodle chews it.
Come on, Frenchie! Do you see a conceptual continuum between, say, "Call Any Vegetable" and Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar? Or between the Mothers 0f Invention and the Mothers of Prevention?
There are some links, yeah. The main drawback of the medium I'm working in is, until I got the computer I was locked into making music based on the assets and/or liabilities of the guys in the band. In other words, if you want to write something that's faster than what the guys can play, you can't hear it, because they can't play it that fast. Or if you want something for an instrumentation that you don't have in the band, then you won't hear it. But now that I can do it with a computer, that's not a problem anymore.
Was it always that way? When you were writing parts for, say Roy Estrada, or anybody in the early days for instance, it was all charted out, and-
N0--because, the only time I ever had a band where everybody could read [music] was the band that had Jean-Luc Ponty and Ralph Humphrey, and Ian and Ruth [Underwood] and George [Duke], that was a reading band. And Grand Wazoo, that was a reading band. All the rest of 'em were like half-and-half. Half the guys could read, half of 'em couldn't.
Now with the computer--the Synclavier-- you don't need the band to work out the music. What about the quality of the sound itself?
I'll play you some tapes; you tell me.
What about MIDI? Some say it's the next big thing. Others say, "it's not a guitar anymore."
It's either guitar plus or guitar minus, depending on how you look at it. The big problem with doing anything MIDI is the lag. It's like learning how to play a church pipe organ. Because when you press a key on a pipe organ, the sound doesn't come out right away. It's the same thing with MIDI. You have to get used to the lag. I can't. I haven't played a guitar synthesizer yet that feels comfortable.
With the Synclavier, can you explain that? The mechanical differences in working with that.
What? for the way I compose on it? I can enter information with the octapad, and I can enter it with the keyboard, or I can type it in.
Can you spontaneously jam with it?
Yeah. You can take a completely improvised line and build an entire composition out of it.
You see, it's still a single line. But with this, you can improvise a single line and have that line being played by a whole ensemble of instruments and actually have those instruments play that line in harmony. It's not an improvised line anymore. It's an arrangement.
What is all that activity doing to your guitar playing per se---
Haven't touched it in two years.
[There is a brief pause as the interviewers collect what's left of their minds from the floor.]
You haven't?
[Zappa sits back in his chair, letting this one sink in.]
You don't miss it at all?
Every once in a while... but I don't play a style that is contemporary, you know? I don't do all the 1980s guitar noises. Unfortunately, the audience for guitar playing has a real narrow interest span. If you don't sound like Eddie Van Halen, then apparently you don't actually play guitar any more. I have no intention of ever sounding like Eddie Van Halen, and, uh, it makes you wonder why you would even bother to play the guitar, because the current audience would listen to it and go, "That's not a guitar. It doesn't go 'wee wee wee wee, wee wee wee wee.'" So why do it?
Dweezil would probably rebut that, what with his own infatuation for Ed Van Halen.
I'm not saying anything against Eddie because I think what he's done for the guitar is wonderful. But the thing that's tragic
about the marketplace is that everybody decided that they were all going to do that, and then the competition is not musical. It's gymnastic. Okay, they say, "I want to sound like Eddie, but in order to be better than Eddie I have to be faster than Eddie." That seems to be the aesthetic operating procedure in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Edward probably sits back and goes, "These guys are really stupid." Because I don't think that's what he had in mind when he developed the style.
It's just like with MTV. MTV has a certain look, because it has a limited pictorial vocabulary. All the videos are made up of certain icons. If you don't work in that vocabulary, then the MTV audience doesn't perceive it as a real video, know what I mean? It's gotta have certain things in it. So, take your pick. You can write hooks and go in there and do that shit, or you can do something else. I decided to do something else.
I'm looking for whatever else is out there. I'm looking for different structures, different sounds, different types of harmonic combinations. Different rhythms.
The guitar ... aside from being busy with other stuff, the reason you put it down two years ago or whatever ... does it not give you that anymore? Because I personally--and a lot of our readers--love your guitar sound. To me that always meant your personal voice within whatever music we were hearing. If you had the band going precision and precise ... but when you hit the guitar solo, it was not precise at all. It was something transcendent, something out.
It's another vegetable. The problem is, most of the best stuff that I will physically be able to do on the guitar is already on tape. You just haven't heard it yet. I mean, I don't have much incentive to play it. I don't have any callouses anymore. I can still think guitar. But to physically manipulate it, I would have to go back in and woodshed for months on end just to be able to do it. For what? There's really no audience for it. Which is not to say that there's a great audience for this new digital stuff either, but I have more incentive to work on this, because it leads to other more interesting things than to sit in there and practice the guitar. Because even when I was playing the guitar I didn't practice. You know? When I was on the road I would do an hour a day before the show, but, I've never been one of those guys ... Dweezil practices non-stop, day in, day out.
So the guitar solo right now, doesn't really play a role in your music? Even for things that can't be done with the Synclavier?
Well, look at it this way: I got plenty of tapes of these things. I can release another guitar solo album. And, when you see what the guitar solo has been reduced to in contemporary music, it's like an eight-bar fill. And during that fill, you're supposed to play every hammer-on lick that you know as fast as you can play it, followed by 15 feedback noises and then get the fuck out of there. You know, that's what the guitar solo has been reduced to, and that's not the medium I've ever worked in.
I recall you saying once that the hardest thing to accomplish in a guitar solo is to come up with a distinct melody within that solo. The solo itself would be ... improvised.
Yeah, just make it up on the spot--
But a melody--
--Yeah, well listen to what's going on in solos today. When was the last time you heard someone make one up with a melody?
When you're composing, and you're working with the Synclavier, and you get to a point where in the old days you were thinking about composing for the guitar as well, what do you do at that juncture? Do you put a coda-type thing in there?
It would be difficult to talk about what I'm doing over there since you don't know what it is. I should just stop the tape and go over there and show you what I'm doing.
[Stops tape and we get a demo of Frank composing on the Synclavier He taps out a few seemingly random rhythms, makes some observations of the CRT screen and manipulates parameters of music around the "random rhythms." The music coming out of the Synclavier is many-faceted, but typical Zappa, with percussive marimbaesque runs and odd cat growls prancing about together.]
That sounds like your music. Same guy.
Are you familiar with the piece on the Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar album called "While You Were Out?" Well, on the new album [Jazz From Hell] there's a deluxe computer version of that. But it's not played by a guitar.
I look at that thing-the recording console-and it's like a musical instrument, if you use it the right way. You've gotta start with a musical idea. if it's not a musical idea what is it? An equation?
How do you get that? How do you start? Do you have entire complicated things full-blown that spring out of your brain, or do you start with something small and you build it up?
Sometimes, I have a complete vision of what the thing is and it's just drudgery to go in there and execute the vision. And another way is, you start by hitting a couple of notes on that [Synclavier], and if you like it you save 'em and make a piece on it, and if you don't you throw it away.
How do you keep track of everything? On each floppy, there's like a million things...
Aaah! then you have to have a good memory.
Yet, when we first started talking about this interview, we discussed guitar noisemakers and these devices that you seem to have a fondness for--the Green Ringers and the Uni-Vibes and such. Things that give that idiosyncratic, anarchic tone.
Well, I like the sound of a guitar. My idea of the best use of a guitar is some thing that's personal ... not necessarily commercially viable. There are things I like to hear coming out of a guitar. But that's my personal taste.
The Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar series, how did the three records do commercially?
Real good, as a matter of fact. And it surprised the shit out of a lot of people. For example, when it was first released, there
were 30,000 units of that three-record box sold in France alone. Which is some thing of a merchandising miracle in that country. It's done well and it's still selling.
So, are you going to do any more of those?
Yeah, I got another one that I've been fooling around with.
And that's all stuff, like what you said before, "I don't have to play guitar because I have so much stuff already" and it's--
--it's on tape, right.
Do you have any urge to play at all in public any more?
I'd have to have an awful good reason, and in order to play in public I'd have to learn to how to play the guitar again--literally. I don't have any callouses. I couldn't bend the strings.
It's weird because we're from a guitar magazine and you're not really into playing guitar anymore.
Well, what's that got to do with releasing guitar records? As I told you, there's plenty of stuff on tape. I can play you some stuff--examples of what's lurking in the archives. I've even sequenced a few of the solos, but I haven't come up with a satisfactory sequence for about six sides of guitar stuff ... there's just masses to choose from [Solos Frank is talking about will be available as The Guitar World According To Frank Zappa in a future issue of this magazine. Watch for it--GW Ed.]
How were these recorded?
All live.
They are live. So how do you deal with the 24-track?
They're all different. Some of them were recorded four-track live, but that doesn't mean they sound cheesy. One thing I always hated to do was play guitar in a studio. I always thought it was an incredibly boring experience.
Like playing in a vacuum, isn't it? So therefore, in order to really play guitar, you've got to hire a band, and that becomes cumbersome. And I guess nobody's going to want to audition just to be in Frank's back-up band, just so Frank can play guitar. If it's not necessarily going to go on a record or something.
That's true. It's the law of supply and demand, you know? There ya go.
But with all this involvement, do you still keep up with who the musicians are around here?
No. I mean, the guys who were good yesterday are still good today-unless they've nuked themselves with drugs. The guys that are going to be good, we'll eventually hear about 'em anyway.
Do you still hear from some of the guys you've played with? Does Steve Vai, for instance, keep in touch with you?
Yeah, he comes over every once in a while. But he was on the road for a year.
How did you first meet up with him?
He sent me a cassette. When he was 17.
And he was in a music school at the time.
Berklee.
How about Adrian Belew?
I found Adrian working in a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. He was working in a bar band. They were all dressed like the Godfather. They had, you know, fake mob-type suits on and stuff and he was doing Roy Orbison imitations.
I never would have thought of him like that. Did you hire him on the spot?
No. I don't hire people right away. I give them a chance to audition.
Was he always into that Hendrix thing, or did he develop it later?
He was doing some of it at that show.
Can you give our readers any practical advice?
Give me a field. Help them with what? Getting a job? How's this?: You want to get a job? Practice all your licks real fast. Get a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Want to get a record contract? Get a good wardrobe, get a good barber. Don't even worry about how you play. They're not signing musicians anymore, they're signing models. Make sure you look good.
Look, everybody who buys a record has a right to buy what they like. And obviously, somebody really enjoys what's being produced today, or they wouldn't buy it. However, I think there's more to music than what is being made available by the record companies because they have been completely bamboozled by the video music syndrome. Record companies have made a major mistake. MTV came along and they thought, "Oh! this is it. We're no longer going to make records"--those little plastic things that people listen to?--"What we're going to do, we're going to sign groups that look like models, so that they can have a video on MTV."
The down side of this is the record companies are now totally at the mercy of MTV--that's their main outlet. How many videos can they show on MTV? Not that many. This limits the opportunity for people who actually play music. To play music, because you're not going on MTV unless you belong on MTV; furthermore, you're probably not going to get a record contract unless the guy at the record company thinks you look good.
Now, not all musicians are beautiful people. In fact a lot of 'em would generally qualify as being physically unattractive. But so what? If you like a record, you can listen to that record a hundred times and still get off on it. If you like a video, how many times can you watch it? Six, ten? Thirty, if you're a vegetable. And then it's old.
So the record industry has kind of chosen this one path and I think they made a mistake. Thev have igoored the desires of that segment of the audience that likes to listen to music. They like to hear it. It goes in through your ears. Video music is another thing. It goes in through your eyes. And better than 50 percent of what you experience is visual. The music is secondary to the pictures. So, if musicians who are just beginning think only of how much money they're going to make and whether or not they're going to have that big video career ... they have to decide right now whether or not they want to play music or be a model. And if it's the bucks they're after, like I said, "Get yourself a good wardrobe. Get a good barber. Don't worry too much about what you're going to play," because the chances are, if your publicity picture really looks good, the guy at the record company won't even listen to your tape. If you got the look, they'll find a producer to make you sound like something, because all you're ever going to do is lip-sync it anyway. Okay? You're never really gonna have to play it live. Chances are some producer hired by the company will come in and do what you're supposed to be able to do. And if that sounds like science fiction, I bet there's plenty of people right now, readin' the magazine saying, "Yeah, that's what I want to do!" And they should do it. Because there's somebody who wants to buy that. But that's not music as far as I'm concerned.
Did you give Dweezil that advice before he put his lp out? Apparently, it's worked, because he's gotten on MTV. And he looks good, so----
--well, I can't help the way he looks. And he chooses his own wardrobe, but the fact of the matter is that Dweezil can actually play an instrument.
So that's a fluke, according to your theory of how musicians make it these days.
Yeah, yeah. Uh, he's a mutation.
No more school for him, right?
He was out of school at 15 because in California you can take the high school equivalency test at 15 and get a diploma. So he's out. Moon did the same thing.
So he's not going to college, or ...
Why should he? He doesn't want to be a dentist, he doesn't want to be a lawyer. He wants to be a guitar player.
Are you aware of people like Yngwie Malmsteen?
I know who he is. Dweezil played me a tape of his.
What do you think of him?
Uh, not my style. Good ...
Does Dweezil look up to him? Is he influenced by him?
I think everybody who does gymnastic guitar and looks at other gymnastic guitarists sort of goes, "How fast is he movin' his fingers?" It is a competitive thing. But you have to ask him about that.
Yngwie himself might be an original, but if everybody's copying him, that shows you how bankrupt people are.
Yeah, but come on; in the seventies everybody was going as fast as John McLaughiin. As long as the media celebrates the guy who is the fastest, that's what people are going to go for.
I think it is wonderful to be able to play fast. It's even more wonderful to play things that are impossible. It's even more wonderful to defeat the law of averages. Things that you play fast are usually things that you rehearse fast. I'll tell ya a fast guitar player--Tommy Tedesco. You want to hear somebody play some scales? Go hear Tommy. Tommy can play other stuff, too.
You've talked about your antecedents, like Johnny Guitar Watson and others you were influenced by. There's no obvious trace of them. It must be less literal.
What I've taken from them is not from their sound it's their attitude. I'm probably stylistically closer to Guitar Slim than anybody else. But since nobody knows what he did ...[laughter]. There's a couple of solos he played that I thought were landmarks--but they were very obscure.
Watson, he's the original minimalist guitar player. The solo on "Lonely Nights," the one-note guitar solo? Says it all! Gets the point across. I can remember guitar players in high school learning that solo and just going, "But how does he get it to sound that way?" lt really- was one note. If you can play that note against those chord changes and derive the same emotional impact that he got from playing that note, then you're onto something. He can make that one be so nasty. You know, like, "What's behind that note? What is the mode? Why are you continuing to play the tonic when the dominant chord comes around? Are you goin' like this
[gestures with his middle finger in the "F-you" position] with your playing or what?" You have to learn how to do that.
A lot of the new kids playing today aren't really concerned with all that. And they should be.
Really, though, if you take away the gymnastics, you have to say, "What's the message here!" It's like, uh, a pissing contest [laughter].
But it's weird, Frank. Here we are, the editors of a guitar magazine, we keep seeing the evidence of this copying of styles that is so prevalent today. And we keep going, like, "What can we do to turn these people onto somebody, like, 'Listen to a Wes Montgomery record'" or something like that?
You know what happens if you turn 'em on to that? They'll copy Wes Montgomery. Because this is a copycat society.
Why is that? It wasn't always like that.
The answer is very simple. It's the same way you train a dog. When you don't want him to do something, you hit him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. When you do want him to do something. you give him a biscuit. Okay? All the biscuits have been given to copycats. Does anybody in guitar magazines ever say, "Wait a minute. You should get the newspaper on the nose if you're coming out sounding like the guy next door." You don't get the newspaper on the nose. People are being praised and rewarded for copying other people. Look at the award shows on television, People become exalted because they sound the same. And you say, "Why do they do it?" Because there's nothing to tell a new guy not to do it. Everything tells him, "Yes, do it." That's the key to success today, to be the same as the next guy, only faster.
You know why that happens? Because generally the people who write ahout music don't know music. Anybody can tell whether these four notes are faster than these four notes. But what does it take to listen to Johnny Guitar Watson's one note, and know that he's doin' that? Did you ever point that out to a reader. Did you ever get across that there's something more to it than rilly-rilly-ree?
If the criticism or reporting of current musical events is left to people who do not have enough of a musicological back ground to even know where the licks were stolen from--whaddaya got? There's nothing wrong with themes so long as you admit where the shit came from.
Was there ever a practitioner of the guitar--- Hendrix, say----that blew you away in terms of being a total original?
One of the most interesting guys on guitar on the planet is Allan Holdsworth. I really respect his playing.
Billy Gibbons is an original. The style that he does, although I know a lot of the blues antecedents that it was derived from, he goes like that [raises middle finger again]. You've gotta have that in your playing.
I thought Hendrix was great. But the very first time I saw him I had the incredible misfortune to be sitting real close to him at the Au Go Go in New York City, and he had a whole stack of Marshalls and I was right in front of it. I was physically ill--I couldn't get out, it was so packed I couldn't escape. And although it was great, I didn't see how anybody could inflict that kind of volume on himself let alone other people. That particular show he ended by taking the guitar and impaling it in the low ceiling of the club. Just walked away and left it squealing.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Have Harps Will Travel
♥.•*¨`*•.¸.•´ ♥.._██_ ....(´• ̮•) ♥..( . • . ) ..... (... • .. ). Merry Christmas & Happy New Year ♥ from Middle Walter blues harmonica du jour.
Here's some links to my Middle Walter persona.
youtu.be/QBDjpF2bmxU
youtu.be/4ggDm3wh3IM
I have played with Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Van Morrison and the East Coast band The Bluetones. Have not been gigging too much lately – I am a writer by trade – but if you ever need a harp player who is into the deep blues and the country blues (both personified by my master Sonny Boy II), please do give me a shout.
"Remember, a gift of the Deep Blues is like a pardon from the governor"
Now please enjoy this special performance from my Master, Sonny Boy II and some funky friends …
Friday, December 23, 2011
FILEmag-Summer-1978_01
FILE MAGAZINE VOL 4 NO 1 (SUMMER 1978) alternative to the Alternative Press, legendary Toronto collaborative General Idea's FILE Megazine – published from 1972 to 1989.
FILE magazine Summer-1978 General Idea
General Idea: FILE megazine, vol 4, issue 1, summer 1978 (the “1984: A Year in Pictures” issue), edition of 3,000 copies.
7001/6556725711_de61f8f165.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Hard-BoiledDefective_22">
General Idea, Fluxus, Mail Art, Ray Johnson and the importance of Art Magazines as the forerunners of Social Networking:
The first issues of FILE, the publication launched in April 1972 by the Toronto-based group General Idea (comprising artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal), leave a different, less sober impression than previous magazine-based Conceptual art projects. Lifting its name and logo from the most famous (and popular) postwar US glossy, Life, FILE clearly anticipated a strategy that today is an everyday youth-cultural ploy: namely, logo-busting, an ironic game with the powerful markers of consumer culture, a small act of semiotic subversion whereby one borrows power from the public side of capital--and momentarily uses it against itself.
For the better part of a century artists have been using the format of the periodical to create and disseminate their work. Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void, another iconic work, was published in the artist’s broadsheet publication Dimanche, which was sold at Parisian newsstands in 1960. Artists' magazines were integral to numerous important movements, such as Conceptual Art, Mail Art, Performance Art, Intermedia, Concrete Poetry, Neo-Dadaism and Fluxus.
The name Fluxus was originally coined by George Maciunas for the title of a magazine of experimental notation that he had hoped to produce.
For the uninitiated, a simple distinction suffices: the “artist periodical” is a primary source and an “art magazine” is a secondary one. That is to say, whereas an art magazine features reproductions and documentation of artwork as illustrations, the artist periodical is an alternative site for the realization of art works rather than their review.
Like their cousins, artists’ books and multiples, artists’ periodicals were intended to be easily distributable, affordable and accessible. And now – much like artists’ books and multiples – they can be difficult to track down and often costly. Complete sets of FILE megazine can sell for upwards of $5,000. Depending on the issue, a single copy of Aspen magazine might sell for the same price. Putting together complete collections piecemeal is the artworld equivalent of collecting a complete set of baseball cards. Critical discourse, too, has been hard to come by; apart from a few key articles, very little has been published on the subject of artists’ magazines.
Publications by General Idea:
THIS IS A LIST OF PUBLICATIONS DESIGNED AND EDITED BY GENERAL IDEA
(Note: FILE Megazine was published by Art Official Inc. in varying edition sizes ranging from 1,500 to 3,500 copies)
A Side note about A.A. Bronson: He wrote …
TWENTY-TWO WOMEN TALK FRANKLY ABOUT THEIR ORGASMS
(Bronson, A.A.) Harrison, A.S.A. TWENTY-TWO WOMEN TALK FRANKLY ABOUT THEIR ORGASMS Toronto: Coachhouse Press, 1974 31 x 23cm, 78pp. Boards with pictorial dustjacket.
First edition of this feminist investigation of the female phenomenology of the orgasm (at the time such investigations were part of a concerted attempt to de-mystify female sexuality and empower women into exploring their bodies and, for some, enjoying sex for the first time). Verbatum texts of 22 different women explaining how they trigger and what they experience orgasms. This book was designed for Harrison by A.A. Bronson of General Idea who also contributes a short note of approval on the inside back dustjacket about his friend. The book is in part dedicated to General Idea. One of 2,500 published - this copy has a couple of tears on the edges of the dj and is slightly bowed but may interest not only those considering feminism in the 70s but also the association with Bronson and G.I.
=================
FILE MAGAZINE VOL 4 NO 1 (SUMMER 1978). Toronto: General Idea, 1978
35 X 27.5cm, 64pp plus pictorial wrappers. A single number from General Idea's art periodical where the trio published conceptual, mail and intermedia art including the GI's own work - often with a homoerotic element. This number has GI's "General Idea flees the burning pavilion in 1984" and several articles on Miss General idea 1984. One slight crease on the back cover and front lower-right corner and spine wear and, as ever, browned internal newsprint pages else VG+. Scarce.
1978
FILE Megazine ("1984: A Year in Pictures," Vol. 4, #1, summer 1978)
see also: FILEmag-Vol.4Nos.1-2-3_13a
GENERAL IDEA 1969-1994
An alternative to the Alternative Press, legendary Toronto collaborative General Idea's FILE Megazine --published from 1972 to 1989--
Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson of General Idea lived and worked together for 25 years. Partz and Zontal died in 1994. AA Bronson continues to work under his own name
The General Idea Archive is now on deposit at the National Gallery of Canada. You can access the finding aid here:
national.gallery.ca/english/library/biblio/ngc112.html
In 1974, General Idea founded Art Metropole, an organization devoted to collecting, publishing and distributing artists' books, multiples, audio and video.
Read about FILE Megazine in Artforum here:
www.aabronson.com/art/gi.org/artforum.htm
==================
www.panmodern.com/newobservations.html
Communities Collaged: Mail Art and The Internet
By Mark Bloch
(Originally appeared in New Observations)
NEW YORK June 6, 2000- Is it a coincidence that both international mail art and the Internet reached a critical mass in the late 1960s?
Mail art was expanding exponentially as ….
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Sunday, November 27, 2011
Jimi & Mick Taylor at Madison Square Garden Nov. 1969 Pt. II
There is more to this story as I post this on Jimi's birthday November 27 2011 – if Six was Nine he would have been 69!
This video, an official one, from Albert Maysles, is a back-in-time back story of what happened backstage:
Jimi Hendrix with the Rolling Stones / Rocks Off Message Board - Thanks Albert Maysles!
Jimi Hendrix with the Rolling Stones / Rocks Off Message Board - Thanks Albert Maysles!
Pix and videos from the deserved Stu tribute with 4 out of the 6 surviving Stones Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood at
rocksoff.org/messageboard/YaBB.pl?num=1299688523;start=all
TRANSCRIPT COURTESY OF YOUTUBE USER "LIMEGINGER"
[5:51-5:54] Black guy [to Keith]: Well, like, no reaction. He went back to what he was talking about, so...
[5:54-5:56] Keith: Well, y'know, it's cool, y'know I, I [inaudible] we'll get it together.
[5:55-5:58] Black guy: Yeah yeah Ok (exits)
[6:00-6:07] Jimi: Been watching too many formal dinner parties on TV. Everybody HAS to do this. You HAVE to say [mock ass-kissing, bowing and scraping] "Oh yes, Mr richards--"
[6:07-6:12: laughter - inaudible chit chat]
[6:12-6:14: silence]
[6:15-6:18] Jimi: D'you know--? nah, I shouldn't ask [scratching his head, laughing]
[6:18-6:20: Keith and Jimi laughter]
[6:19-6:26] Jimi: I dunno that's a big [inaudible] ever since I seen you Monday. Have--? When's last t-ttime you see- s-seen [clears throat]. Naaah, I shouldn't--
[6:25-6:26] Keith: [inaudible]
[6:26-6:27] Jimi: No. What was the last time you seen Linda?
[6:28-6:34] Keith: Oh, man, a long time ago. I mean, I tell ya, uh, some time last summer in--
[6:34] Jimi: Yeah...
[6:35-6:38] Keith: --on the coast [inaudible]
[6:38-6:39] Jimi: Oh, that far? You ain't seen her here?
[6:39-6:44] Keith: I haven't seen her for [inaudible]...You?
[6:44-6:45] Jimi: No. No...
[6:46-6:48] Laughter - Keith smooshes affectionately into Jimi.
[6:48-6:53] Keith gets up and walks away
[6:48-6:51] Jimi: I been watching too much TV too.
[6:54-7:01] Jimi sits smoking.
For more information, pictures and everything about Jimi with the Rolling Stones, with much more about the takes of "My Little One", check http://rocksoff.org/jimi.htm
More on Mick Taylor here:
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