Sometimes, I wish I hadn't spent a good portion of my youngerish years practicing guitar like crazy, mostly in living rooms and rarely recording. Now (today at least) I'm happy to have something very straightforward to learn as a hobby (playing a Cmaj7 scale is never going to fluctuate, unlike my adeptness day-to-day in writing) and, I guess, there's some synthesizing I can do with my navel-gazing mind when listening to certain music.
This is all an unnecessary way of saying I felt like writing a blog about some nostalgia-triggering songs with some possible incidental music appreciation thrown in. Each of these is a forgotten gem as well.
I'm going to tell you some stories.
—
Television - Little Johnny Jewel (live): I was living in New York City, in a kind-of second-guitar position in a garageish band. The band leaders were way into The Brian Jonestown Massacre, as well as The Band (like everyone else in NYC for some reason; maybe The Last Waltz was the culprit).
We played one gig at a place called Sputnik. For the first number of the set my amp was switched off, unbeknownst to me. We had a nice moment where everything else in the world freezes and the whole band starts rowing the ship in perfect precise motion performing Ball and Chain by Big Brother and the Holding Company, but that was our finale and the end of The Blow Up, circa 2008.
Lo and behold a few months later some stranger on the street at a record fair gets into a conversation with me about good guitar solos and tells me to listen to Television, particularly Little Johnny Jewel, the live version, which is in the same key and of a similar sound as Ball and Chain.
Someone in the Youtube comments writes that John Coltrane's soul found its way into the fingers of this skinny white boy that night during this performance. I don't know much else about Tom Verlaine, except to guess that he has good taste in poetry to take his stage name after the french symbolist. There are guitarists who take inspiration from performing on other instruments and from other instrumentalists, but I don't know many who do what Tom does after Coltrane on this track. It also feels convulsive and, I don't know, plaintive and lamenting for lack of better words, which is a genial way of putting what I experienced at the end of the same year I earlier stumbled into this conversation. It's like A Love Supreme's transmutation from awakening spiritual warmth to burning stomach acid rain. I love this track, but it's kind of dangerous to listen to, at least while driving. Hell has an exit that's a moving target, difficult to find. And so forth.
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VAST - Touched: I was, I want to guess, 13 when I heard this track first. I think I'm about to use words like cassettes and cable and mtv2 and music videos. Thank goodness we had extra channels on cable. I would spend most of Sunday mornings waiting for my parents to drive me to go to a Catholic Church called St. Louis in Miami or weekday mornings at 6am before school waiting for something good to come on mtv2, which was entirely devoted to music videos. I had a portable CD player but it skipped and ate batteries, so I put the VAST cd in a boombox with a cassette recorder and put it on tape and put that in a Walkman I took everywhere. Anyway, I've been putting off trying to find info on this but I just did from Wikipedia— "Touched" contains elements of the song "Pilentze Pe", sung by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir.
From what I remember reading somewhere the Bulgarian chants are very old and sacred devotional music. The production foregrounds the Choir singing and backgrounds the piano. The overdriven but not distorted (I think) guitars are beautifully restrained. Beautiful drumming. The singing somehow avoids cliche even with words like dying roses and hungry ghosts.
The Cult - Painted On My Heart: Aerosmith and The Cult sent in competing demos to have this Diane Warren song recorded for the Gone in 60 Seconds soundtrack, circa the first year of the new millennium. The Cult won. I can't always listen to them but this band is beautifully over the top when the mood takes. Sidebar— Giancarlo DiTrapano said he loved The Cult in a tweet sometime before he passed (he also said, in loving memory: 'when I hear this song, my heart takes its shirt off' in reference to The Outfield). Josie is still on that vacation in the usual world of The Cult, but their deep cuts are so powerful when they combine their arena writing with sober material— "Edie" and this cover being exemplars.
Nothing in this song could function on its own, not the vibrato on both Billy's guitar and Ian's vocals as always turned up to 11, the perfect fifths, james bond-sountrack-like, that glissade over chord sequences to the chorus into some incredibly unlikely relative key (I think), and all that. The string-section performs some sort of acoustic tremolo maneuver at the end as it all disappears. A barbaric "woo" as the track fades out into the sunset, having impossibly pulled this all together.
Performing Living with You,
Lee
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