( continues...) drops a palpable ten degrees when you play it. Awesome.
7. Palestine/Coulter/Mathoul: Maximin
This won't be released until the end of October, but once it comes out there are some stereos on which it will continue playing until time stops. Drone music from a composer named Charlemagne Palestine about whom lots of people apparently know lots of things and have lots of opinions. I'd never heard of him, but I played this thing at ridiculously high volume when I first got it and I almost saw God.
8. Crude little drawings on construction paper adorned with mildly foreboding sentences like "He Will Always Be the Champion" or "They Will Come to Establish Their Colony." Plenty of people take up painting; me, I like to hand-make little booklets and tuck them away in a shoebox where they'll never be seen again. There are twenty-two such booklets so far, and they're some of the best work I've ever done, and my plan is to bury them in the backyard when I've finished with them. In partial shade. Near the raspberry bushes.
9. The Stockholm Monsters: Alma Mater
Best album ever. BEST ALBUM EVER. BEST ALBUM EVER.
10. Lifter Puller: Fiestas and Fiascos
Very nearly as good as Alma Mater. Craig Finn's lyrics make everybody else's sound like amateur hour at the poetry slam. The band sounds like they're all possessed by the same demon. Incredible.
11. Maps of Mexico, Ecuador, and San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, spread out on the floor showing several possible escape routes from one place to another for the characters who populate the songs I'm writing now. Somebody should warn these people that Ecuador will not actually be the peaceful haven that they've talked themselves into believing it is. I can't be the one to do it because I have a personal stake in their downfall. Everybody is doomed. Warn the neighbors.
12. Little Walter: My Babe
A cassette on an Albuquerque label sublimely named "Creative Sounds Limited." No liner notes, no credits, just the barest bones: track listing and a barcode. Put me in front of an artifact like this and I'm like a junkie in a cough syrup factory. I am not a guy who generally thinks much about guitar tone or anything, but the sound of the electric guitar on this thing rivals some of the best Howlin' Wolf sides, to say nothing of the song where the harmonica distorts so badly that it makes ghosts appear by the windows. Features a voraciously romantic line which I plan on stealing: "You're so fine/ You're a fine, healthy thing." As Leviathan said to the sailor: Ahhhh.
Y'all know you can get mp3s of Neutral Milk Hotel's famous Aquarius Records Show here, right?
Tonight's contender for Most Rockingest Song Ever: "I Got It Right" - Iggy & the Stooges.
Do you feel it?
John Darnielle's Last Plane To Jakarta is a pretty darn good music criticism blog (and former zine). You've got to get a kick out of anyone who can write as enthusiastically about a new John Prine song as a death metal album - the fact that he also wrote one of the best albums to be released so far this year just makes that all the sweeter.
Just back from seeing a new avant-garde play about Hans Christian Anderson that Stephin Merritt wrote the songs for. Despite starring Fiona Shaw and being lovely to look at, it was pretty terrible.
12. Little Walter: My Babe... I am not a guy who generally thinks much about guitar tone or anything, but the sound of the electric guitar on this thing rivals some of the best Howlin' Wolf sides, to say nothing of the song where the harmonica distorts so badly that it makes ghosts appear by the windows.
Time to wax pedantic... uh, I mean pedagogic. Little Walter is Little Walter Jacobs, king of the blues harp, (arguably) Muddy Waters' greatest sideman. I think "My Babe" was his biggest hit (My babe, she don't stand no cheatin', my babe). He's great, and you should definitely pick up one of his greatest hits packages or at least one of Muddy's, but I'm chiming in to relate Keith Richards' observation about Walter, namely that he transposed the innovations of jazz and r&b saxophonists to amplified blues harmonica (the electricity being a crucial component to his sound) which in turn influenced hordes of guitar players including KR.
ETA: Hubert Sumlin's intro to Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" is the greatest riff ever. Except for maybe Willie Johnson's on Wolf's "How Many More Years". Which has the Robert Johnson/Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" riff played by Ike Turner on the piano. Wolf's greatest side, among many many many.
but I'm chiming in to relate Keith Richards' observation about Walter, namely that he transposed the innovations of jazz and r&b saxophonists to amplified blues harmonica (the electricity being a crucial component to his sound) which in turn influenced hordes of guitar players including KR.
Yeah, but transposing to other instruments is practically the story of music innovation. Keith also noted that Chuck Berry was ripping off his pianist, and Sonny Sharrock wanted to play electric guitar like a saxophone. Whereas Lester Young wanted to play saxophone the way Billie Holiday sang.
So, Joe, when does electric guitar get
thick?
When does it stop being a trebly little rhythm adjunct and become a big beefy practically-a-brass-section?
Obviously "Satisfaction" is where the fuzztone starts to rewrite R&R, but I think you've got something else in mind.
Paul Burlison in the Rock & Roll Trio with Johnny Burnette definitely pushed that sound in the 50s, maybe Ike too, but that's not when it became the dominant sound. I'm thinkin'....Jeff Beck.
Ooh! Me!
Done and done. (Note: When I say done, know that I mean "Will most certainly be done sometime in the next week.")
So, Joe, when does electric guitar get thick?
I think that's what Keith was talking about, the influence of Walter's timbre which, with the help of amplification and his mic technique, took the sound of saxophonists and made it something for guitarists to emulate, not that young Keef heard Little Walter and said, Hey, I wanna play like Charlie Parker! Much of the early Stones is an attempt to capture the sound of records they loved, especially those of the great Chess artists (Muddy, Wolf, Walter, etc.).
And it's a great sound, as was the Sun sound (blues as well as rockabilly; cf. "How Many More Years"), but it's a sound of limitations being turned to advantage. That is, you had the older guys (Wolf & Muddy) taking an acoustic music, Delta blues, and using then-new technology (guitar amps) out of the necessity of being heard at crowded Saturday night fish fries and parties. Once they moved north to Chicago and playing jam-packed clubs the problem became more acute.
The solution: turn it up! Except of course that you didn't have stacks of Marshall amps back then. Turning those little amps and p.a.'s way up meant a new problem: distortion and feedback. Except that... hey, I kinda dig that sound! Do it again, do it again! How do I do it again? SKREEEEE!! Yaaaah! Maybe not like that. But through trial and error people learned the techniques, and new techniques and sounds led to more techniques and sounds and to figuring how to use them, not just to make them.
The same thing happened in the studios when engineers had to figure out how to capture the new sounds, which led to cool effects that couldn't be replicated on stage. So the children of Les Paul heard the sounds and said unto themselves and others, Verily I can recreate that sound, daddy-o, and I will put it in a box that you can step on, and you, too, my children, can go CLANG clang clang. And John Lennon and Keith Richards and Jeff Beck heard the rockin' sounds on tiny radios or record players not much better than a victrola, further distorting the really happenin' but poorly recorded sounds (but IS it really poorly recorded if it sounds great, whether it's "accurate" or not?), and they said, "Oh, man, I want to sound like THAT!" But like the stylized speech of Raymond Chandler's characters or the mobsters in The Godfather those sounds were not sounds found in nature, so when they tried to recreate them they came up with something new and different. (Although the Beach Boys nailed Chuck Berry's guitar to the point where I can't tell if I'm listening to "Roll Over Beethoven" or "Fun, Fun, Fun" until the intro ends. Or is it "School Days" and "Surfin' USA" that throw me? Been a while since I've listened to them.)
Anyway, to answer your question, I'd say 1965 was when the whole thing coalesced. I'd use that Malcolm Gladwell phrase but I'm sick of it. I'll even say that the feedback intro to "I Feel Fine," a no. 1 hit, was the signal that distortion was back and it was a bloody animal. Had Link Wray been able to patent the power chord he'd be a rich man and most of you reading this wouldn't say, Who's Link Wray? Beck's climb up the fretboard in "I'm a Man," where the guitar solo morphs into what's essentially a percussion solo, is another landmark from that period (and also from the upper reaches of the charts.) Ultimately the expansion of the sound palette is the important part, not the dawning of the Guitar God Era. And yes, I'm shuddering as I type that, even though I love lots and lots of Classic Rock and AOR. "Why do you hate classic rock?" I dont hate it. I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! (That was for you, mi Texas amigo. But you knew that.)
Oh, and it wasn't that Lester wanted to sound like Billie, it's that they both loved Louis. Listen to Pops' trumpet, not his singing (although his vocal timbre opened doors for Billie that might not have opened otherwise), and then listen to Holiday. Direct connection.
