Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Another great guitar picker has left us.

Scotty Moore was the king.

Cool interview done a few years ago by Deke Dickerson.



http://www.guitarplayer.com/artists/1013/scotty-moores-royal-legacy/16077?curator=MusicREDEF

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Marriage
Jim Harrison

I just remembered a serious argument.
On my seventy-fifth birthday I had the firm sense
that I was a hundred seventy-five. She disagreed.
“Look at your driver’s license,” she said. I said you know
the state of Montana took my license from me. She
went to my briefcase and got out my passport.
“You’re a mere seventy-five,” she said.
I said, “How can you trust the government
in this important matter?” I went to bed
after a couple of drinks believing I was a hundred
seventy-five. In the morning I felt
only seventy-five and apologized at breakfast.
I’d lost a hundred years and felt light,
younger, more energetic. As a boy I saw in Life
magazine photos of the Civil War veterans. I don’t
think there are any left, are there?
They would have to be a hundred seventy-five.
Sometimes I remember aspects of that damnable war.





Wish I could lose a hundred years.

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Gary Ewer has some great ideas.

If you're looking to increase your songwriting output, here are some tips that might help:

1-Schedule your songwriting. It doesn't have to be the same time every day, but scheduling it into your day equates to treating your songwriting efforts with respect.

2-Keep several songs on the go at any one time. Some of the best progress you can make on a song happens when you've set it aside, apparently not thinking about it. Use that time to start working on something new. You won't get them confused, so there's almost no way to have too many irons in the fire.

3-Explore many different styles. If you write standard pop songs, you need to branch out and start to explore the many different sub-genres that will give your music a new, unique sound. The best way to facilitate this is...

4-Listen to music every day. Listening is one of the best ways to expand your own personal writing style. It's easy to get advice these days on what you could or should be listening to. Type "best metal music", "best country music", etc., into a search engine, and you'll be amazed at how it can change your own approach to songwriting.

5-Partner up with another songwriter. Finding a songwriting collaborator that you really feel comfortable with may not be easy, but you'll reap the rewards. That other writer will take your own writing in a new direction, and as long as it's someone you find easy to work with, there's almost no downside.




Tip 2 is my holy grail. Things jump up and grab you after sleeping in a file for a week or two.

Tip 4 is a no brainer.

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String Theory
Ronald Wallace

I have to believe a Beethoven
string quartet is not unlike
the elliptical music of gossip:
one violin excited
to pass its small story along
to the next violin and the next
until, finally, come full circle,
the whole conversation is changed.

And I have to believe such music
is at work at the deep heart of things,
that under the protons and electrons,
behind the bosons and quarks,
with their bonds and strange attractors,
these strings, these tiny vibrations,
abuzz with their big ideas,
are filling the universe with gossip,
the unsung art of small talk

that, not unlike busybody Beethoven,
keeps us forever together, even
when everything’s flying apart.

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Canned Heat         “Going Up The Country”
Rick Moore



Bonnaroo starts in a few days, with dozens of bands and artists taking its stages. Lollapalooza, Summerfest, and many more huge music festivals occur around the world these days. But nothing will ever be quite like the one that started it all in August 1969: Woodstock. And there will never be another artist quite like Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson, who wrote and sang the band’s single “Going Up The Country” and performed it on the second day of that legendary, record-shattering event.

A song about getting away from the rat race of the city and heading for a rural area, “Going Up The Country” had been a Canned Heat hit before Woodstock. But it became Woodstock’s unofficial anthem, since getting out of town and back to nature was what the festival on Max Yasgur’s New York farm represented to so many. The song had been a track on Canned Heat’s Living the Blues album the year before, and had reached number 11 on the Billboard singles chart. Being performed at Woodstock, and its inclusion on the festival’s triple-LP soundtrack recording, helped prolong the song’s life and the life of the band as well. The studio version of the song was played over a video montage in the Woodstock movie, but the band’s live performance wasn’t included in the original film.

“Going Up the Country” is basically a 12-bar blues that was undeniably inspired by the song “Bull-Doze Blues” by 1920s songster Henry Thomas. Alan Wilson, a devotee of the music from that era, was no doubt familiar with Thomas’ song. The lyrics of “Bull-Doze Blues,” repetitious lines about Thomas leaving his woman and then changing his mind, have nothing in common with Wilson’s lyrics, lines like I’m going where the water tastes like wine/ We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time. But the flute introduction by Jim Horn (who has since played with everyone from U2 to Garth Brooks) is a nearly note-for-note re-creation of Thomas’ 1927 intro, which Thomas played on the “quills,” or a type of cane reed flute. What really caught the ear of 1968 radio listeners, though, was Wilson’s voice, a falsetto/high tenor influenced by bluesman Skip James that was instantly recognizable. Wilson was also an accomplished blues guitar and harmonica player who was actually enlisted to teach Son House to play his own songs after House had forgotten them.

Given even the royalty rates of that era, Wilson should have done well financially with sole authorship of a song that was on a successful album, was a hit single, and was part of both the Woodstock album and movie. Sadly, he wasn’t around long enough to collect much of it. The 27-year-old Wilson became a member of the “27 Club” when he died from an overdose (perhaps intentional) in 1970, just two weeks before another Woodstock performer, Jimi Hendrix, joined that club as well.


Give it a listen-

https://youtu.be/Hf0Dm-OaTNk

Live from Woodstock.

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