Also, I am someone who prefers being very clear-headed during the creative process and would like to work with others who are creative without chemical inducements.

I find the need for this disclaimer entirely amusing.

I find the need for this disclaimer entirely amusing.

She's hardly the only musician I know who is roughly my age and necessarily clean and sober. (Or less she wouldn't have made it to my age.)

Sorry, P-Cow, I didn't mean to make that sound so tut-tut and humorless. Just anecdotal evidence about the musicians I know.

'sokay. I don't know a lot of musicians personally, but I know the stereotype, and I found her wording priceless.

and I found her wording priceless.

I know from talking to her that it was guided by decades of experience.

I could tell.

Why do I love rock and roll? Because when I hear a really great tune, it makes me wish I was up on stage in front of a bunch of people, playing the song live. Not for the attention, or the rock star perks, but just to be blasting out a kick-ass song that makes people want to jump about, and holler along with the band. The songs I love make me want to jump about and holler along with the band.

As I was driving back from Burbank today, Weezer's My Name is Jonas and Bad Religion's new Los Angeles is Burning made me do this in the car. I am sure that watching me drive must be terribly amusing for other people. I don't just sing along. When it's a great tune like one of those two (among others), I bellow along. I belt it out as if I was competing for the top spot on Americon Punk Idol.

My Name is Jonas totally kicks my ass for the breaks and the switching back and forth between beautiful acoustic finger-picking and loud, in your face, 6/8 power chords, plus getting to belt out "THE WORKER'S ARE GOING HOME!" Deliciously subversive Wobbly overtones.

Los Angeles is Burning kicks my ass in a whole different way. I mean, Bad Religion is still Bad Religion, and LAiB is one of their best tunes. I have a strong love for the notion of LA as epicenter of the Malestrom that Destroys the world - it's one of the many reasons I chose this city for my home, and one of the things that endears this place to me - so the song has that going for it in the lyrics. Plus the melody for the whole song is just fantastic, with a great hook, and I get to bellow "LOS ANGELES IS BURNING!" in my car while driving through the Hollywood Hills.

Anyway, I just wanted to wax prosaic about rock music for a bit. Thank you all for indulging me.

Nice mixes, David.

I don't just sing along... I bellow along.

I like the word "bellow" a lot. Can't hear it w/o having a WKRP flashback:

Mama Carlson: HHIIIIIIRRRRRRRSSSSSCCCHHH!!!!!
Hirsch: You bellowed, madam?

Picked up The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix this weekend. Evans and Miles were HUGE Hendrix fans. "Mademoiselle Mabry" from Filles de Kilimanjaro, with uncredited Evans input, is based on "The Wind Cries Mary" and is one of Miles' high points. Gil really wanted to work with Hendrix & Miles kept urging Jimi to do so. Their initial meeting to work on the project was scheduled for the week after Hendrix died. Four years later Evans recorded an album of Hendrix's music, a number of which ended up in his basic repertoire for the rest of his life. It's good, although it's not Hendrix, and it's very different from what it would have been had Jimi lived and participated in it.

I mean, it's hard to say exactly what it would have sounded like w/ Hendrix on it, but Evans' idea was to do something along the lines of his collaborations with Miles (Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain), that is, a "concerto" with Evans providing the framework and arrangements and Jimi as the featured instrumentalist. Miles rose to the challenge spectacularly; I would love to hear what Jimi would have done, but the differences in their playing is enough to make me think that the same approach might not have worked.

Part of what appealed to Evans about Hendrix was the latter's sound. I'm reading the Evans bio Castles Made of Sound (the title is, in part, a play on the Hendrix song "Castles Made of Sand"), and I haven't got to the Hendrix section yet, but I assume that his love for Hendrix's "sound" referred not to this or that tone or timbre Jimi was able to coax from his guitar but to Hendrix's whole conception of music. I'm trying to think of an analog for what Hendrix did. It's not so much that he was a virtuoso, although he undeniably was, but that his approach to his instrument made it not simply spectacular and the dominant feature of his music, but that it was so central to what he did that his music was unthinkable without it. So maybe Monk is the analog, in that everything was contained in his playing. He could score his music for an ensemble, or his solos could be orchestrated (as Hall Overton and Bill Holman did) for a full horn section, but Monk's and Hendrix's music was complete. Each was capable of being a great accompanist and each could design his music to encourage (necessitate?) the input of others, but whether Hendrix was layering guitar tracks in the studio or setting up walls of feedback on stage or Monk was playing solo or leading a band each man was the irreducible element of his music. That sounds like a tautology, and maybe it is, but what I'm trying to say is that what seems to me the crucial thing about Hendrix's guitar or Monk's piano is that they weren't decorations, they were the music itself. I don't want to suggest that Miles' contributions to his collaborations with Evans were mere decorations. Gil wrote with Miles in mind and Miles went beyond what Gil imagined. That said, Evans took these great washes of sound he heard in Hendrix's playing and arranged them for horns, strings, guitars, keyboards, drums, etc. and I don't see where Jimi was going to fit into it. He was a great soloist, but that seems to me one of the least of his talents. Building that multi-layered sound was his real gift and if Gil was going to take over that task and just leave Jimi space to solo... well, I'd rather have Hendrix turned loose in the studio to orchestrate himself. Of course Gil Evans' imagination (musical, at least) is worlds away from mine, and even I can imagine that his approach with Hendrix would have been much different than his approach without him, so who knows what it would have sounded like? Anyway the album is what it is and that's pretty great.

I can blather on, can't I? Back to work, now that I've wasted a bunch of time.

Buffistas, talk to me about the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, if anyone is familiar with them. They were on the MTV Movie Awards, and I relaized that I'd heard the song they played before, and mistaken it for the Pretenders trying something new, just because the lead singer sounds so much like Chrissy Hynde. But I liked that song- does anyone know if the rest of the album holds up?