June 2004 in Watercolour Paradise, I still read it and it still strikes me, the maturity, the understanding, the soul, that only a true musician could write with I thought I'd post it here {hope you don't mind George}, its long but well worth the read it really will blow you away and this is why I respect him soo much he is an amazing guy : You know, I am unable to answer this. Mainly because I don't like... I really don't like rock and roll, you know. Well, I like music a lot. That's easy for anyone to see. I accept rock and roll for what it is, but it's not really my thing, you know. Rock and Roll is quite simple really. It's jazz and blues, you know, but people have added their personal touches to it and made it, essentially, a part of themselves. I've never really had anyone agree or disagree with my view, though. I love the 50s because that was a great time of evolution... it was the stone age and people like fats domino were singin' blueberry hill and then you had people like Buddy Holly and The Crickets who was, in my opinion, the first to be recognized as "guitar rock and roll"... he popularized it. And, you know, I can't leave out Elvis Presley or The Everly Brothers... Anyway... take Buddy Holly, he was from Texas and there was a lot of rockabilly and such being thrown around. You had people like Chuck Berry who started around '55... Buddy Holly came around '57 and then sadly died in a plane crash in '59... I mean, Bo Diddley, the Everly Brothers... these people all came from Rockabilly/Blues and everything. Bo Diddley played a Gretsch, which is essentially the standard for Rockbilly... though he had his own strange boxy looking guitars (you'll know what I mean if you look his pics up)... Anyway, Buddy Holly got started on the Fender Strat... standard turning of EADGBE, no tremolo use, and sometimes a capo at the fifth fret... this is quite simple and standard. Chuck Berry, the Gibson ES.. simi-hollowbody guitars.... Anyway, I don't want to get into guitars because not all of us know about them. I'm just saying that it all came from, essentially, jazz... blues was just hot rodded jazz... and Rock and Roll has all of that in it. These people started the craze... Elvis had his Gibson J-200 acoustic guitars. I don't really like Elvis's music a whole lot, personally. I'm more of a Rick Nelson fan. I've met Rick Nelson's sons Gunnar and Math , who are a duo.... and their name is simply "Nelson"... Now, not too many people know about the Nelson family. Matthew and Gunnar's grandparents were Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, who had a show. Ozzie had a hit in 1934 entitled "And Then Some" that made #1 on the charts. Their son Rick got into Western music and roots rock and roll and released, in 1960, "poor little fool", and in 1962, "Travelin' Man"... both made #1. Ricky had two sons, Matthew and Gunnar, who, in 1990, released "I can't live (without your love and affection)"... - This is the only family who has ever had three generations of #1 hits. Not too many people know about that... Anyway, in the early 60s, you saw, of course, Ricky, who was kind of a spin off of the 50s stuff. In about ten years, he suddenly was a different person... instead of being this blue-eyed Frank Sinatra type, he became a long hair... lol, and that's where his song Garden Party came from... when he got booed off of Madison Square Garden after playing his new stuff, when the old fans were expecting the same guy they knew back then... My point - Musical change is ineveitable... Ok, so, I'll jump to the 80s really quick... MTV dubuted. Who created MTV? Surely there has to be a single person who led to the idea of artist's videos on TV. The man responsible for MTV is none other than Bob Dylan. Without Bob Dylan, there wouldn't be the music video. Well, ok, maybe someone else may have thought it up, but they didn't, Bob did. In 1966 he released Subterranean Homesick Blues. I'm sure many of you have seen the video before... Bob holds posters of words from, mostly, the last word(s) from each verse he sings and then throws each one on the ground as he stands in an alley.... hahaha, it's so simple that it's pure genius. As far as I know, he was the first, and if I'm wrong, I stand corrected. My best friend from the forums was the first to tell me... and she knows Dylan pretty much head to toe, so I take her word for it. It just blows my mind that Dylan did it. In the 60s, lots of great music came out. And I'll have to start, yet again, with 50s influence. A man by the name of Dick Dale bought one of the first Fender Stratocasters, in 1954, the year the strat came out. He also purchased and blew up, I believe.. something around 46-58 amplifiers as well (not sure of the exact number) because of his personal style of music - Surf Rock. He started before anybody else and was the true, yet unknown, pioneer of the electric guitar. His style known as "shredding" is known by pretty much anyone who plays the guitar. Because of this very heavy technique, it was also heavy on his guitar amplifiers that weren't meant for rock... The guitar wasn't intended to be THE fronting instrument of Rock and Roll as the concept of rock and roll had yet to be evolved in 1954. Well, the thing is, the genius behind it, Leo Fender, was more-so geared towards amplifiers, P.A. systems, and speakers way before he became a guitar luthier. I realize that not all of you are into the technicalities, but there's a lot behind the history. Leo Fender and Dick Dale got together and Dick started giving Leo ideas on how to improve his inventions. Together they sought out an amp to suit rock and roll techniques and that's when they turned to James B. Lansing (JBL speakers)... together they had a 15 inch JBL speaker installed into a Fender amp, which handled Dick Dale's guitar style... Dick Dale also thought up the 5 way selector/position switch for Fender Strats, which are a key componant behind the Fender tone... it enables you to get different combinations of the three single coil pickups. This was standardized after 1957, previously, they used the same three position switch as the ones used on Fender Broadcasters and today's Fender Telecasters... Dick Dale's shredding techniques were popularized in the late 70s and mainly Hard Rock and Metal of the 1980s... anyone who was petty much anyone used the technique, and still do. So Dick Dale is also called the father of Metal because of his guitar techniques he pioneered. In the 1962, a man by the name of Bob Dylan emerged in Greenwich Village, in New York City. He set the standard for Folk and Folk-Rock, created the first music video, and was most likely the main reason and influence of the explosion of folk music of the 60s and an acoustic pioneer. He traded in his electric guitar in for a mahogany 1949 Martin 00-17 in 1959 and made his way from Minnesota. I would have to say he is also the father of heartland rock. People such as John Cougar emerged later on... then there was people like Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band who came from the same kind of influence. My favorite musician that sprang from the genre, I believe, also came from Minnesota. A man by the name of John Hiatt. He's a little guy who inspired big people... he has written songs covered by Eric Clapton, BB King, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett, and Jewel Kilcher... a key band member is guitarist Sonny Landreth who played Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival this year in Dallas. Another man, Richie Havens, emerged at the same period as Bob Dylan and they had their run-ins in the village back then. Both played Folk and both had their own style, which I don't want to get into too deeply for the sake of length. Havens had a reputation for being innovative with his altered tunings and one of his most popular songs at the time was All Along The Watchtower. The rest is history and if you don't know, he and his band did the soundcheck at Woodstock 69 and was the first to play... the set included popular war protest songs such as Handsome Johnny and Freedom. You had, in 1964, Beetlemania... bowl haircuts and such... which was the start of the British Invasion. Everyone from Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, and Eric Clapton to The Who, covered the spectrum... At the same time, from the mid to late sixties, you had the psychedelia craze and the bands coming out of San Francisco and the Haight area. Carlos Santana and the Grateful Dead were some bands to be popularized in California and San Francisco... and we all know of the famous concerts that came to the Fillmore and Berkely. A huge impact on the music and counter-culture was of course, the Vietnam war. People like Tom and Dan Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival were some to popularize protests songs such as "Fortunate Son"... so much can be said about it all. The period's craze was psychedelic hits during the summer of love (think Incense and peppermints) and the jaw dropping guitar work of Jimi Hendrix who popularized Wah Wahs and Fuzz as well as Marshall Amplification... of course, The Who's wild performances as well... I have a vivid image of Pete Townshend smashing his Gibson SG at woodstock and one of Jimi lighting his guitar on fire. The same guitar that gave him that reputation made its way into the hands of Frank Zappa. In the late 60s and into 70s, you had the post-woodstock bands and more mainstream sounds as the evolution leveled off a little. You had Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page who along with Dicky Betts and Gregg Allman of the Allman Bros., popularize the Gibson Les Paul. There were the 60s bands still around doing their thing. Janis died, Jimi died, and countless others made their way into the 27 club... heroin was a big thing and many failed to overcome their addictions. Eric Clapton formed Derek and the Dominoes and had his hits such as Layla and Bell Bottom Blues and his trademark guitars were now, instead of Gibsons and his famous Woman Tone, Fender Stratocasters that went by the names Blackie and Brownie, most prominently, Blackie, which I believe, made the record books at Christie's this year for the most expensive guitar... can't remember the exact figure... around 800 something thousand. Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Lenny" hit around $650,000 at Christie's. Anywho, there was progressive rock such as Styx, Rush, and Yes. I often say that Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience) and Ginger Baker (Cream) set the standards and the professor, Neil Peart (Rush), fine tuned them, as far as drums go. In, I believe, '76, Styx made it pretty big with their album, the Grand Illusion. My dad saw one of the concerts during that tour in Johnson City, TN... that was his favorite concert he had ever seen up until the time I paid for his ticket to make him see Crosby, Stills, and Nash this year. I've asked his point of view and he tells me he has always been a big fan of 60s rock, but he used to work at CJs Pizza in Marion, VA back then and he just got tired of hearing the stuff on the jukebox. He also says that he was forced to like the 70s as he went through highschool in the 70s and if he said he liked 60s bands, it would be somewhat like saying you liked Duran Duran nowadays. My dad grew up listening to blues as well, which was more tolerated, is it was the roots of rock, as I said. He picked up a dobro and played a song and joined a band when he lived in the appalachians after they said he was a natural at it... he often tells me stories of him and his friend Rocky when he worked clearing and making sure things were in order, walking stretches of the Appalachian trail. His friend built guitars and introduced him to Robert Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell... He joined the coast guard then was almost kicked out 30 days before he was supposed to get an honorable discharge. Reason being, he lived in Alaska and he didn't do much else besides grow weed, smoke weed, go hunting/fishing/camping, and listen to music all winter with his friends... but although weed was legal up until 1989 in AK, he wrote a four page letter to the head of the coast guard in DC and was demoted from doing rescue missions - piloting and basket operating, to managing a parts department and working on turbines... Anyway... there was the disco craze (oh god, I'm not even going to go any further than that), and Neil Young was quite popular (he's one of my favorites... I'm big on folk-rock) with "Southern Man" off of the "After The Goldrush" album. He also reorded Harvest with the Stray Gators, and then with his band, Crazy Horse, did Rust Never Sleeps and the Weld tour... all of that good stuff. You had Lynyrd Skynyrd who were big fans of and were inspired by Neil, who shot back at Neil's views of the south with the famous versus of "A Southern Man don't need Neil Young around anyhow" in Sweet Home Alabama. Then came Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne and another innovator who died young, Randy Rhoads. He was one of the most influential guitarists that brought Rock into the 80s. Afterwards, Van Halen and Sammy Hagar... all of that good stuff, came into play and suddenly people quit buying acoustic guitars and went from brass nuts to Floyd Rose locking nuts and temolos and metal. Eddie (who now wants to be called, Edward, but for time period's sake, he was Eddie then) popularized Peavey guitars with the Wolfgang model and the Ernie Ball Musicman (Ernie Ball makes damn good strings, but I don't care for their guitars that much). Eddie had his Kramer Barettas with Electrical Tape. The electric tape designs became his trademark. Back when the brothers came to the US from The Netherlands, they moved to California, I believe, and started a band. They were quite broke at the time and were renting a P.A. system. They couldn't come up with rent payments, so they offered the owner to join... none other than Sammy Hagar. If I recall, Hagar left for New York to train to become a paramedic after the break up and issues with Eddie's health in '95. I'm not a big fan of metal, but I like Steve Vai... he was popular with poison and all... Anyway... this is getting too long. I left out many things and you know the rest of it. You had Nirvana and Grunge, Alice and Chains and such. Nirvana... Neil Young played with a lot as he was one of their influences and was deemed grandfather of grunge.... I personally think he was more involved with the 70s punk and had influence from Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols... I think it was great when Neil Young toured with Pearl Jam.. and the mirror ball album. Neil also did all of the song arrangements for the movie soundtrack of "Dead man"... the Johnny Depp movie. I can't leave out two of my 90s favorites... Jeff Buckley and also Blind Melon, both no longer around. Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi/OD'd and Shannon Hoon OD'd (lead singer, Blind Melon) from Cocaine while on his bus in New Orleans... Anyway, I really can't answer it to my feelings on it all... I love it way too much and I love roots music like Folk, Blues, and such just as much. If I had to pick anything, it's probably going to be the 60s... but without one decade, there isn't a future in it...change is inevitable, for better or for worse... My favorites... Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Fogerty, Buddy Guy, Grateful Dead, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, Django Reinhardt, Stephen Stills, Andres Segovia, Mississippi John Hurt (his gravestone is in my sig)... I can't list them all. Being a musician/songwriter/artist myself, I can't stick to one genre...
That's gotta be the longest post in HF history. Maybe I'll set aside a day and try to read through it.
Bet you never thought something you posted in a forum 2 years ago where only Matagari Bush grows would be brought up here {laughs}
