The aimless ramblings of a 40+ smart but under educated male:
The main purpose is to entertain and inform, hopefully the views expressed here will not be to myopic.
Ok...
that can be read a few ways, and I'll let you worry about that. For me (for now) it's about two wheels. What does a riding song have to be like? What do want it to achieve?
First day back in the saddle;
Frankly I want it to kick my ass....Ok so take this song 'Heart Attack America' by the Bronx; I love this song, it's so balls out that... well you get the picture. I'm thinking a nice down hill rip on a MTB or a tear along a particularly tight road, sport bike, knee down, wheelie out of the corner...maybe a motard...don't care; fast, crazy, outta hand, against the law.
But the epic ride, oh buddy;
oh oh oh ha ha heee he he....epic...damn these guys can play, I hadn't seen this live vid yet, it's shorter then the album version but wow...I saw these guys live and they are probably just like this all the time, note to note perfect. Neil Peart digs these guys and you can see why.
Alright you and your ADD...get back on topic. This is for a ride that is a little longer. Maybe a twisty road just short of full warp factor 8, you now where you are actually looking around as opposed to just looking through the next corner. Sooth pavement, flowing from turn to turn slowly amping up to a crescendo and coasting down to the pub as the song ends....summer at about 8 pm after a long day. A patio, a lake and a bench to race on.
Amp it up now...we're just getting going;
If this song doesn't make you drive faster you have stones in your butt. That's right....rocks, and god forbid you are on a proper sport bike that will try to eat you (think '99 R1). All bent in half and flexed up like some WWE star. This song is like a blunt trauma to your head...
Pounding, cranking...fighting till the end;
Ok...sorry about the video but this band is a little out of the past, sorta pre-internet (remember that?) so the footage is really at odds with the song. I love this song for 'beating myself up.' The last few miles, tired, worn and ready for a shower...not at all like the ending above, after this kind of ride I want to sleep, or hide by myself, or lie on the sofa and stare at the cracks in the ceiling. Spent, done, down for the count. Try jumping jacks on tempo for this whole song....you'll kinda get what I mean.
There, you feel that? Should I go on? Oh I could keep going but it's kinda pointless as you can kinda see where I am off to with this....sorry no Jazz, Hip-Hop, classical, folk, whatever, I am sure there is a ride and a road for all of that, but that is for another day and another useless ramble.
So some cheesy shit.....like hair band cheesy.
Last night, New Years Eve was spent with my son (we went to the Zoo and watch the animals try to figure out how to eat us) not a partner..no kiss at the bell. Sure it was a little lonely after the boy was in bed but it made me realize that I miss writing this blog and truthfully I was in bed by 11 pm.
So as I wandered around the internet I found myself looking at 80s Hair Metal videos and giggling to my self. So here is 10 good servings of 80's cheese. This is in no way a definitive list, it's just a bunch of videos that make me laugh and shake my head.
Pretty Boy Floyd: Rock and Roll
Really? look at the make up on these dudes. Tammy Faye Baker would be proud, love the start with the guns into the guitar part. And these guys studied at the school of Motley Crue, at least Crue where the first.
Crue
Ok....This is for comparison; it is cheesy (love the silhouette of the girls getting the bath and lots of fist waving) but consider this; PBF is '89 to Crue in '84 so you have to give Crue a few props here for setting the stage stylistically. I'm particularly partial to the terrible fight sequence, what a great video. Devil signs everyone!
WASP
Skeleton hand....nice. Blackie Lawless is an ugly dude, grey hair? Always thought that was weird. Notice the pelvic thrusts, they are a genre requirement I am sure, and fist waving and scowling...
And why are they standing on their toes?
White Lion
Oh ya....who didn't like this song? More wide spread legs and tip toes... did all these ladies want to be ballerinas? Mike why do you looks so sad? Pretty girls are dying to get your hair secrets and... ah.... your pelvic thrusts. Then there is Vito; he was a good player, weird eyes...kinda like a frog, wonder is all the young girls thought if they kissed him he would turn into a prince. Speaking of kissing; pouty lips! Forgot about those.
Y&T
How could I not include this? The bathing suits alone are awesome....and really, are you even aloud to make a video like this any more? I mean motor oil on the beach has got to be an environmental crime. Super hot s&m chicks on the beach...it's crazy but I remember walking to high school in black leather in June and almost passing out from the heat...so a leather bikini, why no? Volley ball, nice touch.
Autograph
Ah the perm....and look at the special effects, state of the art. Medals, I had medals, I got them at a head shop (not at war, kinda a mockery in hind sight) and they got caught on everything, but things like that do go better with rock. Japanese Kamikaze head bands... he he he. I'm having fun can you tell? Van Halen tapping... but who's play while they're all pumping their fists? I can hear the director 'just stand there...closer oh oh...pump you fist....oh this is so cool, you guys rock hard metal ya ! YA!'
Accept
Where did these guys fit in? Ok they are German....Not a pretty boy in sight, you know maybe they where ahead of their time? No wait, wide leg poses and choreographed lunging and head banging till the wall comes down, all things are possible with metal.
Ratt
We had Germans so now we need an Italian, where did Stephen Pearcy get his moves? He must have seen Roth on sunset...but that kick, lame. Not cheesy? The doubled guitar, always loved that. No I take it back, it's cheesy. Priest and Maiden nailed the double guitar thing before these guys anyway.
I just an epiphany...did Pearcy have a little foo-foo dog with hair in front of it's eyes? That is all I think of when I see his hair in this video, some poor sappy dog walking around an old ladies living room smacking into furniture.
Def Leppard
Wizards, Perms and white pant ass shots....still a great song.
When we dressed like this did we actually think we looked good? And who's ideal was the sword? Oh ya....axe, Breakin' the Chains...
Dokken
George Lynch, did he ever wear a shirt? Don Dokken, buddy, you can punch whatever you want but you will never look tough. Oh my....the upset girlfriend, that is cheesy. More wizard crap...and more chains, more breakin' chains.
I can sit here and beat this crap up but I am sure I owned all of this at some point and there is so much more of it, Poison, Warrant, Winger, it didn't get better it got even worse. Then you enter the power ballad era and that took whatever 'tough' there was in metal and threw it out the door.
Don't get me wrong there where some good songs but it was all to slick and exaggerated and when 'Smells like Teen Spirit, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, and Rusty Cage' came out this posturing disappeared overnight.
Not a bad thing...cause in hindsight the kitsch was, well...fun.
Still fun....Glad it's in retrospect, no wait Buck Cherry.
*sigh*
Well
Damn....new years eve and I am at home, my son is asleep and as I was up last night rocking....I'm damn tired, so I'm gonna sign off shortly.
A good friend of mine came out last night and posted this...thanks for the props Spencer (follow Spenc's superb blogg... much better at posting then I am) and after seeing 'sheezer,' (who are awesome for sure...) YouTube lead me to this;
And I gotta say there is something awesome (brings a tear to my eye...really) about 50k people singing at the top of their lungs, mint.
I think that is the ultimate affirmation of success as a musician when you look out and some dude is singing along as you play live. I learned the song because I have to, that guy's singing (all liquor'd up and slurred) because he want to.
That and the Wheatus song is great, like Corn Flakes go listen to it again for the first time.
Ok, All you piss-ant whining about Justin Bieber…shut up.
Let me preface this by saying I am not any sort of a Bieber aficionado and my understanding of Mr. Bieber is based on news footage and internet media so I probably rival the loudest whiners in Bieber knowledge.
First off teen sensations have been around since Elvis?No further back, Benny Goodman, so the Bieber phenomenon is nothing new.Shall we trip down memory lane? NKOTB, Backstreet Boys, Hanson, Bay City Rollers, Kiss, Elvis, Beatles, Frank Sinatra, I could go on there are lots.Every few years a new artist will bulldoze their way into our lives and dominate popular media. As life becomes less private and our world more invasive we will meet these stars and have all the fine details surrounding them presented to us in full Technicolor.
So for now we have Justin Bieber and what about all the complaints?
He can’t perform.
He doesn’t write his own songs
He doesn’t play an instrument
He is annoying
He has funny hair.
Fauk….whiners, Ok:
1) He Can’t Perform: Really? Come on now, he can fill an arena, he’s got to be doing something right. Right? Your personal taste has nothing to do with his ability to do his job.Watching Oasis is like watching paint dry but nobody bothers them about it.
2) He doesn’t write his own songs: Big deal, the following artists don’t either: Aerosmith, Kiss, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Leanne Rimes, Joe Cocker, Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Trisha Yearwood, Meatloaf, Cher, Bon Jovi, Garth Brooks, Billie Myers, Ricky Martin, Hanson, Joan Jett, Elvis, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, Jerry Lewis.Look up Diane Warren (http://www.realsongs.com/), Desmond Child ( http://desmondchild.com/ ) and Otis Blackwell (http://www.spectropop.com/remembers/OBobit.htm ) and that is just the tip of a rather large iceberg Nashville and New York have warehouses full of song writers.Sure some of those artists ‘collaborated’ with these songwriters but I am sure Bieber has his two cents to throw in and if he doesn’t who cares? Remember ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston? Dolly Parton wrote that in 1973…12 million copies later everyone is happy.
3) He doesn’t play an instrument: Right….he sings (try to tell any singer they aren’t a musician because they don’t play an instrument) plays drums, piano, guitar and trumpet.
4) He’s annoying: Sure. But so is Metal and I love metal…dance music irks the shit outta me but I understand the ‘art’ behind it.Again this is personal taste boys and girls think of a better reason to dislike the kid.
5) He has funny hair: Two words Jennifer Aniston, man a lot of ink has and is still spent talking about her hair.Really, who cares because he cut it off anyway? As an aside to jolt your teen idol memory didn’t our favorite train wreck Britney shave her bean to the wood?Too much time is spent by to many people on Hollywood Hair.
I think the kid is a star. At least he is not another trumped up American Idol wanna-be. You look at his history (it’s there to be seen) and you can see he was born with talent. There will always be ‘pop’ stars and screaming tween girls crying and passing out for artists. Really older, cooler, folk should get over it because the kid has some substance.The internet is full of kids growing up online with no concept of privacy, posting the most insignificant or brilliant videos to YouTube and tweeting incessantly. If Bieber wasn’t that good he would be relegated to the freak show that YouTube has become.
There is something there, one man saw it and stalked the kid and now millions of screaming kids see it as well.I personally don’t get it, which speaks to the fact that I don’t know his music and have very little interest in pursuing it.He seems well adjusted, smart and has an entourage of good people all willing to make a buck.He has taken the internet, the mother of his career, and used it to move forward; he tweets, he faces, he talks to his fans.
So will he be a coke-head-freak-out driving around Stratford Ont. with his son in the trunk?Who knows?That fact that people qualify their dislike for him this way is tiring and lacks imagination, Lindsay Lohen has got that covered and Britney does a damn good job of it as well.
But who is to say he won’t blossom like other child stars? Natalie Portman comes to mind…she was 12 in ‘The Professional’ ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/ ) wasn’t she?She’s turned pretty well, and what about Drew Berrymore (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000106/) even after a decidedly rough childhood she has come around nicely.
My knowledge of the kid is from interviews, news, and other media I haven’t been to a show and if a song came on the radio you have to tell me it was him.Considering that, I probably have heard his tunes and like them. I have a bit of a weak spot for canned pop.
Personally I wish the kid all the success in the world and I would love to have his money. If you don’t like him change the station back to your 24h Phish channel.
Now I’m going to listen to some Yngwie Malmsteen because he is truly annoying… on so many levels.
What the hell is it with Dad’s? I mean we are all the same? We see something silly, crazy or dangerous and immediately revert back to 12 years old.
Now 12 years old is a good age, at 12 you are old enough to take the bus by yourself, you can ride your bike all day and keep up with the big kids, and you can jump the creek on a toboggan. At the same time you are too young to have a job (save maybe shoveling snow and cutting a senior’s lawn) and as a result summers are free and easy and weekends are empty.
Which brings me to tobogganing with Max on the weekend; we happened to be up in Barrie and with the cousins and sauntered off to a hill on the west side of the highway that was amazingly packed to stupid fast.
My first reaction is to load up my son and let loose the hounds of hell.We where riding one of those ‘flying saucers’ that handle like a piece of shit and has no brakes.This form of toboggan is most defiantly a throw back to the 70’s because I don’t believe it would get through any legal department these days.With conditions as they where it ripped, but good sense and my Dad instincts kicked in and I dialed it back a couple of notches, that and I know Max hates snow in his face….who doesn’t?So down the hill we go dragging my hands to keep us going straight and at a reasonable pace playing dodge the dumb kid walking up the middle of the run, did I do that?Even slow this was fun…but dumb Dad kept trying to go faster, carefully, safety first old man.
So let’s talk about my internal 12 year old; solo run. I get on the ‘Flying Saucer’ and, fat gut down, toes dragging, head off down the hill.I mentioned it was fast right? I realized quiet suddenly those bumpy rides and a Walmart ‘Flying Saucer’ are kind of hard on a man’s delicates. I have memories of a red disk made of space age industrial strength plastic that, short of -20 degrees and a tree, would never break let along pound your nuts like a Nutcracker does a Christmas walnut. So I prop myself up on my elbows and knees to alleviate the pressure on my nether regions only to find myself on the jump side of the run, elbows are not equipped with cushy fat or movable joints for suspension so I went from a nut pounding to an arm beating… my head is 12 but my body isn’t.
But all that taken into account, a slow climb to my feet and back up the hill (giggling like a giddy school boy I might add) didn’t deter me from not going down the hill again.
But all this boils down to my son; at four years old he could care less about big fast hills and riding down at suicide-speed with his old man.He enjoyed our relaxed rides, from the laughter and the ‘lets go again’ I know for sure he had a good time. But when we relocated to a tiny hill, about a 3 foot drop over a gradual 20 feet, he was perfectly happy to ride the disk by himself…he didn’t need Dad’s help and his independence is starting to show.
He’ll catch me and pass me no doubt. For a few more years I get to be the crazy hero that he looks up to…but eventually he will build the kicker to jump the creek, and I’ll stand by with the hot chocolate…after I have racked myself up testing the jump out.
It’s what Dads do…it’s why I love having a son so much.
It’s why I will always be a 12 year old kid at heart.
I met an old friend last night, it was strange being told she used to be mine and getting to plug and crank up, I missed her. God bless Ampeg for making the seminal bass cabinet, there really isn't anything like it...really. http://www.ampeg.com/products/classic/svt810e/index.html GV told it was my old cab, said that players loved it, it was warmer then the new ones....I should steal the fucker back. It wasn't like I looked at it and hundreds of 'good' memories came flooding back, it wasn't that at all, as a mater of fact it was more like; ‘oh ya, that’s what rock bass is supposed to sound like.’Sure you can have you Trace, SWR, Bag End, Peavey, G&K whatever, but nothing pushes sound like an 8x10. There is a reason that for years this has been the cabinet in the backline of hundreds of thousands of shows. So many pros choose this cabinet as their choice for amplification, it has the attack that you want, the lows that you need and the sheer brilliant size to move all that air.Guitarists add volume, bass players add speakers. In the rental room I was in the had an G&K 800RB ( http://www.gallien-krueger.com/products_rb_series.html ) I love my old Traynor Mono Bloc-B but a RB gives so much clean power that when left relatively flat the amp nicely relays what the bass sounds like. I remember working my way through various cabinets/amp combinations looking for the right sound, and then getting ripped off on an extremely fragile ‘75 SVT head.But one day I plated it on top of an 8x10 and the light went on.I sold the SVT because it was a pain it sounded great but was constantly breaking, I lost my shirt on that stupid amp, but years later I finally bought the cabinet. I carried that monster up stairs and pulled it up onto stages, it was worth it. Needless to say, regardless of the good tunes and company I was perfectly happy to just stand there and play quarter notes, *sigh* That was close to a religious experience.
I felt like writing today, but didn't have a subject.
Hummmm.
I found I was still snickering about Machete so I figured hell...nobody give a shit anyway?
So here my Pointlessly Self Indulgent reviews of RED and Machete.
K, so I watched a couple of movies, and that has got to be some sort of an understatement as I am on a first name basis with the employees at the local Blockbuster.I watch more then a couple of movies as a rule, but I digress
Now I like this type of movie, I am not going to delude anybody and mention crap about Academy Awards and the like; I am simply going to say that this movie entertained.Sure as many noted the first half hour was a little slow but to me it really set the speed for what Frank Moses was going through in retirement. Kind of reminds me of a conversation between Frodo and Bilbo (maybe Sam? Can’t find the quote right now) the bit about regular life just not being the same after adventure.
When the action does ramp up you have a cast that has not trouble carrying it, and it’s nice to see some real quality actors in what some might say is a throw-away roll.Bruce Willis is just doing his action thing but John Malkovich (I’m gonna get the pig!) and Helen Mirren are great. Morgan Freeman who could probably make me care about lint rollers if he where to do a TV spot for them, I just like him and his characters.There is a little dose of romance as well, chemistry is mediocre but it’s more like a couple of sub plots to the rest of the story, thankfully not getting the flick into RomCom territory.
Finally: John C. Reilly was originally cast as ‘Marvin Boggs’ and Malkovich stepped in just prior to shooting, for me?Nice save; Reilly would have been too goofy for me…common Cal Naughton Jr. a super spy?No way.
Nice.Really loved the floating heads in the opening scene, I did a lot of laughing out loud at the absurdity of this move. Director Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Grindhouse) mentions that he had wanted to develop Danny Trejo in Machete since first seeing him in Desperado he also cites ‘The Killer (John Woo)’ and an influence, the movie has a similar flow to it.
Another loaded cast to…a little on the ‘B’ side Don Johnston, Cheech Marin…so much fun. It was neat to see Robert de Niro is this type of roll I am always surprised when you see a Hollywood heavy in movies like this, I guess everyone needs to let their hair down.
Understand there was little stretching done in the acting arena for any of the players it was more about pouting, grimacing, making faces and blowing shit up.There is a great scene at the finally where Machete jumps a ridiculously stretched Harley through a tower of flames while firing a Gatling Gun (with no bullet magazine I might add) at a crowd of right-wing-racist-whiteys…priceless.Suspend my sense of reality?Hell Ya.
Oh and just to make sure it’s a proper B-type-movie there are the required topless ladies. So if that offends your mom…don’t watch it with her.
And and…snicker…
Lindsay Lohan is a junkie in the movie…is that even acting?
