One that won’t make me fat, one that won’t make me buy new pants, or make me feel like a bag of crap.
I used to pull out this big analogy about the sun and cosmic space travel to relate song and music. It worked to a certain extent so long as you wanted to perceive things in black and white, and for a while I was happy to do so. Lately I’ve been revisiting my positions on various matters and I think I need a new metaphor / analogy to reflect my views - with CAKE!
Cake is awesome. You get the chewy satisfaction from the baked batter combined with the sweetness from the frosting for a mouthful of glory. For those of you who don’t like cake… GTFO! my thread.
MMMmmmmmmmmm
At this point I see music like the batter and song like the frosting, different people are going to like different ratios of both. Personally I don’t mind cake without frosting (music in its rawest form), at the same time I don’t mind a little frosting on my cake either (composed songs), but I’m generally not a huge fan of a mouthful of frosting with no actual cake inside (the vast majority of commercial pop music).
Just like a real cake there’s something to be said for the difference you’ll enjoy between something homemade from scratch versus homemade from a box versus something mass produced when it comes to music. One of the biggest challenges I faced when dealing with other musicians was getting them to recognize the difference between homemade from scratch vs. homemade from a box. The majority of independent musicians I’ve met have all convinced themselves that making it from a box will garner them the same respect and appreciation as the people who made it from scratch before them; OR that loading on the frosting but having originally baked the cake themselves (by following the directions on the box) like creating some homemade mass produced garbage retains their integrity. I obviously disagree.
On the other hand it’s kind of hard to blame the listeners. If they’ve never been exposed to anything more than frosting with a few crumbs of actual cake how are they supposed to know that it was originally intended to be mostly cake with just a bit of frosting on top? The other issue I see is the inherent insecurity found within the majority of musicians – we’re always looking to prove ourselves or our creations as being valid. That’s understandable; the problem I see is when people start limiting what they’ll attempt in order to maintain that level of external validation. It’s like trying to talk to a music fan who claims to ‘like everything’; they are, generally speaking, the most boring people to try discussing music with because they end up being more concerned with appearing to like everything than actually liking anything.
That inherent insecurity also seems to limit the scope of creative experimentation most people will publically attempt. It’s like they won’t deviate from the norm to a greater degree than their influences deviated from their own baseline back in their day. Going back to cakes let’s call a plain vanilla cake with plain vanilla frosting the mainstream baseline. Then someone came along and decided to drop some chocolate shavings onto that frosting, and people LIKED it. Well alrighty then! A slight twist to the frosting makes for a ‘new’ cake for a lot of people, so another band/baker comes along and decides to add candy sprinkles to the frosting on top of the chocolate shavings. NEW! Except, it’s not, it’s just another minor addition to (an ultimately superficial) major element. Now if the change would have been from Vanilla to Chocolate cake batter then yeah, that would be like a new style or genre becoming established and recognized, but for the most part it seems most people are content to just tweak the frosting.
Problem being, due to the proclivity of exposing everything on the internet and our social desire for the recognition of individual cultural/commercial exclusivity it’s become damn near impossible for any worthwhile subculture to germinate into anything of real worth or substance (can you tell I read a lot of William Gibson?). In the time it would take to bake a new cake the public has already decided what the new flavor or topping will be called, what it will look like, how it will taste, be consumed, and ultimately rejected for the next proposed ‘big thing’. If anything I thought the shift to the internet as the new defacto media distribution medium would increase the amount of creativity. Instead it’s proven to be just the opposite and obscured the vast majority of legitimate creativity with an exponential order of magnitude worth of derivative crap. Napster and P2P sharing didn’t lead to an increase in creativity or a wider range of listening, nor did they lead the way to the destruction of the recording industry, just way more of the same, only now you can download an artist’s entire discography with one click. Whooptee-dooo. Quantity wins over Quality yet again.
Even with a new flavor for the batter, like the example of Vanilla and Chocolate above it’s still the same basic cake. Flavored baked batter topped with sugary frosting. I want a new kind of cake! Like the difference between a typical layer cake and a Baked Alaska (for those unfamiliar it’s a personal sized cake, covered in meringue, served hot – with ice cream in the middle). That’s not to say there aren’t people experimenting in their kitchen, bedroom studio, or jam room, but most of them don’t seem to willing to replicate those experiments on a stage and that bums me out. It’s only rock and roll after all right? Don’t sweat the details and just rock it the hell out.
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You. Do not know. The rules.
snargle bargle - you do not know the rules
(Unfortunately this clip is stuck on Google video, it was too large for youtube back in the day and GVs embedding code doesn't work so a link will have to suffice. Music starts at about 3:20)
I’ve been lucky, both with the people I’ve jammed with, and with the materials available to me during those periods. At this point I’d say about 90% of anything I’ve created with other people was recorded in one form or another, though a fair amount of it has been lost to time, dead hard drives, deteriorated cassette tapes, laziness in getting something digitized etc. I still have LOTS of personal material though, and for the most part that’s what it will remain as – personal material. It’s not that I worry about how people will react to it, so much as I recognize a lot of it is filler and would be boring to pretty much anyone who wasn’t there when it happened. At the same time though, there’s almost always at the very least a fleeting moment or two when everything clicks and something special comes through, even if it’s just for a few seconds, it’s worth it to me.
This clip is my 2nd performance in front of people and the most substantial result of my first real jam room (which was really just a storage room for the lecture theatre at our school). I look like such a grungy kid with my hair down over my eyes haha (I also really miss that White Zombie t-shirt). We had a prepared tape intro (featuring some Trans Am / RHCP / and a French proto-Gollum mini aria) but the soundguy kept killing the mic volume because he thought something was messed up due to ‘weird feedback’ even though we warned him we’d have a lot of weird feedback. Whatever.
It was a college variety show, and organized as such so some friends and I decided to put together a one shot thing. All the performers were supposed to meet at the bar an hour before the show was supposed to start to figure out the order of the acts. Yeah… they ‘organized’ a variety show and had no idea of the talent or scope involved, no tryouts, rehearsals, just add your name to a list and show up at the venue on the day and we’ll do stuff. My kinda gig
The only thing we planned was to play in A because the keyboard guy only knew how to play in either A or C and playing in A was easier on guitar (just skip the bottom string). Also this was normally a dance bar, the ‘stage’ was 4 feet wide, tops.
The girl organizing the show decided we should be first even though our bass player had become AWOL between the earlier part of the clip and the bar footage (turns out he was taking a nap). Not that it really mattered, he showed up 10 minutes after everything was supposed to start while another couple were doing their best Mazzy Star impression, then we spent about 20 minutes on stage helping with the sound guy to get all the gear mic’ed up. I think her logic was that since we’d be using most of the gear we should use it first and get as much of it out of the way as soon as possible. I don’t remember more than one other band using the drums that night. We were also only supposed to be up there for about 10 minutes, all said and done with the setup time counted we were probably up there for most of an hour.
Musically we had planned the tape intro (obviously) and the introductory crescendo from open A to its octave, there was also a plan to lift the ‘Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!’ bit from Mr. Bungle’s cover of The Existential Blues which was pretty much the main reason for the vocalist everything else happened on the fly. As stated earlier the guy on keyboards knew how to play in A and C but mainly only because he knew it meant only hitting white keys. The drummer actually studied at PIT (Percussion Institute of Technology) in LA back in the early 90s and was in every way shape or form the superior musician in the group by a lot. Bass player is the same dude as from The Mountain Song story. The guy who filmed everything happened to score a spot at the top of a flight of stairs that happened to put him parallel with the ceiling over the dance floor where the stage was setup. We also had 2 friends in the dj booth with one handling getting Geiss running on a projector while the other worked the light for the club part-time already. He was so happy that he was able to push the light machine all the way since the normal club dancers would normally get uppity when things got too trippy; like when the strobe lights make the footage pixelate midway haha.
One thing to note, when the bass player pretty much stops everything to call for a switch to a ‘reggae’ / rasta jam he also cranked both his and my amps at which point (we were later told) people had to step back from the stage because the highs from my guitar were too painful haha. I remember thinking of how awesome my tone was on the stage at that point, I had never fully cranked that little Marshall all the way before that. It kind of becomes a 3 person thing after that with the voice and keys being completely drowned out though the light show makes it look like the keyboard guy is head banging pretty hard throughout (he’s not).
About 9 minutes in is one of those points I alluded to earlier. Where everything just falls away and you just play music in that moment for however long it lasts. For myself it was only about a minute haha I remember ending that lead bit while thinking of how Clapton apparently had recorded a solo with Cream where it was all played entirely on one string and tried doing something like that. Never liked how that ended. Then again I’m also proving the old adage of ‘If you’re thinking, you’re stinking’ true with that reflection. But the switch at 11:20 blows my mind every time, where all 3 of us just change time on the fly with trade-offs and just run with it.
We all knew we had to end eventually and were waiting on the vocalist to come out and do his thing but it didn’t quite pan out, you can kind of see me shrug my shoulders at him before kicking into a final crescendo. Which I screwed up and played in G hahaha.
Turns out the girl organizing the show had been shooting him death stares and pointing at her watch, then at him, then at us, then at OFF THE FREAKING STAGE!!! for the last couple of minutes. Whatever. All she did was some Cranberries cover or something, we rocked the hell out. hahaha
