Yeah.  That's pretty amazing.  I've heard this, but never seen the video with it.  I can only imagine what a rush it must have been to be there in person to see the two guitarists on either side.

(Oh, and yeah, I could do without the giant syringe and lab coat.)

you know, i actually have a huge fondness for van's '80s catalogue, especially beautiful vision, no guru, no method, no teacher, and irish heartbeat (with the chieftains).  he did flirt with scientology, but he flirted with a lot of other stuff too, and (as usual) he became belligerent in an interview about the press attaching him to scientology.  he basically said, "i'm not part of any organization and i never will be."  that's part of the reason why he released no guru.  it was a statement against those who wanted to pigeonhole him.

i like his contemplative stuff best, especially astral weeks and veedon fleece.

fuckin' A!  yeah, i know the story about him being pushed on stage.  the ironic thing about van is that he often struggles with stage fright, which was one of the things that bonded him with the band, since they deal with it too (hence the song "stage fright" ).  yes, his performance was show-stopping.  nobody else even came close that night.  i love when he starts kicking the air and then drops his mic as he leaves the stage.

another little-known fact: they were of course no relation at all, but jim morrison and van morrison were pretty good friends.  the doors did a cover of "gloria" and jim took a lot of his stage mannerisms from van.  i read that they once performed on the same bill and that at the end of the concert, van jammed with the doors on "gloria."  god, i would've loved to've seen that.

one piece of news: i read that in early november van will be REUNITING with the original band from the astral weeks sessions at the hollywood bowl and that they're going to do THE ENTIRE ASTRAL WEEKS ALBUM LIVE!  of course, i'll be in europe so it won't do me a FUCKING bit of good, but there's supposed to be a live album of the concert coming out in january '09. 

oh, and of course, along with helm and danko there is garth hudson.  how could i have forgotten the music teacher???  shame on me!

Pink Floyd is fucking god if god were real, that is.  Waters, Gilmour and Barrett are just awesome.  I read that one of their founding members passed away recently which blows if they ever have a reunion tour.  The fact that they have so many emulations and inspired so many people really says something.  My only complaint with their live shows is when they were doing their Wall Tour, Bryan Adams had to step in at some point to do lead vocals and back-up guitar which was just horrendous especially when he was covering my favorite song Young Lust.  Bryan Adams has a rasping, annoying voice that sounds like he just gargled sand for a week straight and his guitar skills are pretty weak, but anyway, the classics never die and what's so great about the classic music of the 70's and 80's is that only a very small percentage of the bands were shitty as opposed to the cloud of fecal matter that looms over the air waves and media in general today. 

Want a good laugh?  Look up Journey's replacement for Steve Perry on Youtube; it's unforgivable what that band did to it's reputation. 

You can't?  Really?  Try replacing All-American Steve Perry with a fucking long haired Filipino that sounds as if he's being castrated and having his ass sodomized with a cattle prod.  Go watch one of the shows on Youtube, dude.

All-American Steve Perry?  Is that like Malibu Barbie?  Is there an All-American Steve Perry Dreamhouse?  Is there a string on his back?  If you pull it, does he sing "Don't stop believin'"?

My point, Sage, was that I think Journey's a terrible, terrible band, whoever might be singing.  I won't dispute their technical talent, which is ample, but all of their taste is in their mouths.

Musical preference is subjective, Sage.  I don't need an argument.  Suffice it to say, I like earlier rock and roll.  Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Beatles and Stones, Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, the Band, Van Morrison, David Bowie...their music is simply much more exciting to me than that of Journey and Styx and their arena rock ilk.  And as for arguments, why did you feel the need to bring up the new Journey singer's Filipino heritage and contrast it unfavorably with All-American Steve?  That sounds a little bit ad hominem to me.  I mean, you wouldn't say that the reason Van Halen with David Lee Roth is better than Van Halen with Sammy Hagar because Hagar's a gentile, now would you?

Anyway, no hard fee-ee-ee-layin's.  

I also think musically that Dark Side eclipsed The Wall, but they're both worth listening to, of course.  By the way, to anyone accusing Pink Floyd of being over the top (and by the way, I agree that they were sometimes over the top) we need to remember to put it in context.

The thing is, in the 60s and 70s, international politics, domestic policy, poverty, war, and social responsibility were far important to the "average" American than today.  Let's face it.  Britney Spears and Ludacris are very good representations of what's on the mind of the average American.  Music always reflects a society.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the thread about whether or not there will be riots if the GOP steals the election.  I don't think there will be.  Whether it was a conscious decision by leadership or not, the public has given up on real issues.  They want to know whether or not Britney's snatch is still shaved.

You must enjoy that laid back classic rock.  I like some of that shit, but give me wailing guitar rifts over sad bastard blues-type hymns any day of the week.

As for Journey's new "frontman," if you'd call him that, it's in no way ad hominem because I have nothing against the singer; I have a problem with the band replacing Steve Perry not only because of a bullshit reason, but with someone that fits into the fold as well as ketchup and ice cream.  The fact that the band added this guy shows that they could give two fucks about how their past generation, present generation and future generations have, are and will percieve their band's image.  Fuck Journey up the ass with a concrete-barbed dildo.  At least I still have their classics WITHOUT Fake Perry.   

On that note, no, there's no hard fee-layings.  We'll go our separate ways, someday love will find you and the wheel in the sky keeps on turn-in'.

Iwbiek, I despise all forms of country.  Conway Twitty might be a legend in his genre, but for all I care he can get devoured by a pack of starving mutated rabid dogs.

Don't ever come at me about diversity in regards to music.  EVER.  Country sucks.  Only religious nut jobs, redneck assholes, naive Republicans, country bumpkins or those teetering on the brink of poor musical taste listens to the appauling horseshit that is country.  Also, realize that I'm talking about modern day country that pretty much spans from 1970-present.  I can listen to Johnny Cash and some old western stuff, but modern day country is disgusting.  Cash is about as modern day country as I get.  You like country drivel, fine, but telling me to get diverse because you listen to something I don't listen to is insulting. 

...I REALLY hope you're kidding about everything you just said.  Even if you aren't, I don't care; that's just weird...

Do I have to?  I've had a pretty shitty week already.  I don't see how the Van Zants are supposed to make me feel better.

i actually disagree with you here, hamby, and i think at least john and alan lomax would too.  while there were definitely cross influences (jimmie rodgers and gus cannon being big ones on both sides of the tracks), i would argue that country and blues ultimately sprang from two different sources: blues from african tribal chants and country from celtic and germanic ballads and dance music (mostly with fiddle).

Van Morrison could put out an album of himself babbling incoherently and I'd buy it.

I was just listening to the intro song to SEC college football on.. um.. CBS, I think. 

Forget the country accent and the fiddle for a second and listen to just the guitar, bass and drums.  Then, listen to the second song and see if there aren't a TON of similarities.  Once you're done listening to both, stop for a second and ask, "Which of these is 25 years older than the other?"

Country has been following rock for quite some time.

true, but the origins of all three, as commercial entities at least, can be pretty clearly traced.  in that sense, yes, blues came first.  it started appearing on sheet music around 1912 and the first vocal recording was "crazy blues" by mamie smith in 1920.  country is generally traced back to fiddlin' john carson's "the little old log cabin in the lane," recorded in 1923, and was further crystallized as a style at the famed "bristol sessions" in 1927, which gave us both jimmie rodgers and the carter family. 

i don't know what you mean here.  i'm pretty sure i said country has germanic roots.  the european roots of country stem from the music styles, not from the origins of the instruments.  that's not what i meant when i said "fiddle music."  besides, the dulcimer is very limited and so has also been its use in country or hillbilly or whatever you choose to call it.

that doesn't aggravate me at all.  what counts is how the banjo is used.  listen to gus cannon or any of the african-american banjo players in the library of congress field recordings and you won't hear very much clawhammer or scruggs-style--or anything that approximates it, for that matter.  in their hands, the banjo tends to be either a single-string style solo instrument, as in the case of gus cannon, or a highly percussive rhythm instrument as in early jazz or some of the black string bands you could find, say, in the piedmont region or the mississippi hill country in the early 20th century.

contrast this to the "frailing" or "finger-rolling" styles of dock boggs, buell kazee, or hobart smith and you're in another world.  while there was definitely a cross-pollination going on, one can still trace two distinct sources.  i've never said the lines aren't blurred--heavily blurred--i've just said it's still possible to trace them.

true, but you seemed to do the exact same thing when you called country a child of the blues.  and i am definitely saying country ultimately is more indebted to european styles than blues. 

not in every case, hamby, not by a long shot.  many white artists were often marketed as black and vice-versa, because of the sound.  there would never be any danger of buell kazee or bascom lamar lunsford being marketed on a race label, but it did happen to dock boggs and clarence ashley.  there are some artists whose race we still don't know: bayless rose, for example, or the two poor boys.

race politics in music was very touchy, of course, but sound still determined genre more than skin color.  often the white artists pictured in photos were substituted for the black artists who had actually played on the record.  this was because the record, musically, was country, and country, unfortunately, was considered the white domain.  

hamby, this is just plain not true.  "hillbilly" music was big business and more hillbilly records were made in prewar america than blues records and "white" hillbilly record catalogues were much thicker and lavishly produced than their "black" blues counterparts.  blues itself didn't take america by storm until the '60s with the folk and blues revival.  both blues and hillbilly sold much less than big band or jazz or even classical, but the blues recording industry did not survive the depression near as well as the hillbilly industry.  the carter family, for example, recorded non-stop right through the depression.  blind lemon jefferson, had he lived, would never have pulled that off, and he was the best-selling blues artist in america.

this is interesting, hamby.  "as early as 1920" is pretty early, since this is when we really start getting the very first recorded commercial blues.  before that, the only evidence we have of what blues even sounded like is based on hearsay from guys like lead belly and son house, who gave their recollections in the '50s and '60s.  since rock hadn't even been dreamed of in 1920, i think a better choice of words would be "elements rock later borrowed were evident as early as 1920" and i would totally agree with you.  when i said country is the wellspring of rock, i certainly didn't mean that exclusively.

in the words of rocco lampone, "difficult, not impossible."  maybe not a single genre, at least not in most cases, but you can certainly narrow it down and also give a pretty good idea of ratios of influence.  the lomaxes invented a system for it.  so have others.
 

well, at the time of "heartbreak hotel," elvis was marketed as rockabilly.

hamby, it's impossible to prove that, and there's no evidence for it.  the songs you hear on old blues records and the songs you hear on old country records were both rolling around as early as the mid-nineteenth century.  pick up any of the great song collections of harold child or john jacob niles or carl sandburg and you'll see it right away.  the appalachian music that a great deal of country sprang from and the earliest delta field hollers that a great deal of blues sprang from existed simultaneously and, thanks to a wall of limestone ridges and fir trees, almost independently.  all i'm saying is there's a fork in the road if you go back far enough, and neither fork can be said to be older than the other.  also, to recap arguments as far as the commercial recording industry goes, blues outdates country by a mere three years.

i suppose so.  looking back, i think you jumped in because you didn't feel i had given blues its just due.  blues was the first music i ever played, both from my stereo and my hands, so i certainly tip my hat.

granted, i don't have any sheepskin backing me in this field, but i do have an embarrassing amount of polycarbonate plastic and five good calluses behind me, so i feel i can converse confidently.  i suppose we differ only in the degree to which we believe the tangled web can be unravelled.  alan lomax, for example, makes a very good investigation of various blues and rural african-american styles in the land where the blues began, even tracing the styles of certain regions of the american south back to specific african countries.  even if some of his fellow musicologists took issue with a few of his finer points, these kinds of studies at least show us that this research is not a lost cause.

if you've never read that book, i highly recommend it.  alan lomax is kind of an asshole in reality and, to me anyway, there is an embarrassing latent racism evident in his work, but it is still very entertaining and very valuable.  for harder, more technical musicology, john fahey's analysis of charley patton's recordings is also fascinating, if you can find it.  fahey was a helluva musician too.  here's a clip, for anyone who's interested.