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Aug. 30th, 2003
I guess I'm pretty good...
Aug. 30th, 2003 01:38 pm...when it comes to music. I plugged my headphones in Thursday night and there was a song playing on NPR that I'd never heard, and I immediately thought "Hey, that sounds like Uncle Tupelo!" And it was!
Mind you, I never listened to Uncle Tupelo until this Spring when I bought "Feel So Gone". But they have a fairly distinctive sound.
So I listened to an hour radio show about Uncle Tupelo. Their story is fairly typical of rock and roll. I don't mean the part where they founded their own branch of music ("alternative country" is so closely identified with Uncle Tupelo that the major magazine/newsletter of the movement was named "No Depression" after the first Uncle Tupelo albumn). No, I mean the rest of the story besides that.
You know the story. High school friends form a band. They're very close. Two of them develop into powerful songwriters, and the tensions between the two first fuel the greatness within the band and then drive them apart, until the band splits up. Afterwards, both parties say that it was inevitable, that they needed to break up in order to grow as artists.
I mean, it was interesting to hear about such a unique and influential band and how they formed and developed, but overall the story was a big yawn... I've heard the same thing so many times before. Afterwards, as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is even the core plot of Spinal Tap. Heh.
The week before I'd listened to an interview of the members of the Wailers. The Wailers were just about the original Northwest rock and roll band (from Tacoma). Others around at that time included the Kingsmen (the ones that made Louie Louie famous, though every NW band covered it), The Ventures (known as a "surf rock" instrumental rock band, although they came from Tacoma), Paul Revere and the Raiders, and another Tacoma band, The Sonics.
Most of them were present at Cheney Stadium last week, by the way. They got 754 guitars to play "Louie Louie" at a concert event.
I've been wanting to listen to the Wailers and the Sonics for a long time (Sonics especially) so Friday I picked up cds by each of these two bands... "The Fabulous Wailers" and "Psycho-Sonic". I also picked up "No Depression" by Uncle Tupelo and that green albumn by Weezer. So I had lots of energetic music to listen to while I sat in labor day traffic on my way to work.
The Sonics are pretty cool. Some people call them "the first punk rock band" and they ARE extremely hard and energetic considering when they appeared. There's a lot of the Kinks in their sound, and their lead singer screams and growls like Little Richard. Fun stuff, doesn't sound that dated at all, really.
Mind you, I never listened to Uncle Tupelo until this Spring when I bought "Feel So Gone". But they have a fairly distinctive sound.
So I listened to an hour radio show about Uncle Tupelo. Their story is fairly typical of rock and roll. I don't mean the part where they founded their own branch of music ("alternative country" is so closely identified with Uncle Tupelo that the major magazine/newsletter of the movement was named "No Depression" after the first Uncle Tupelo albumn). No, I mean the rest of the story besides that.
You know the story. High school friends form a band. They're very close. Two of them develop into powerful songwriters, and the tensions between the two first fuel the greatness within the band and then drive them apart, until the band splits up. Afterwards, both parties say that it was inevitable, that they needed to break up in order to grow as artists.
I mean, it was interesting to hear about such a unique and influential band and how they formed and developed, but overall the story was a big yawn... I've heard the same thing so many times before. Afterwards, as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is even the core plot of Spinal Tap. Heh.
The week before I'd listened to an interview of the members of the Wailers. The Wailers were just about the original Northwest rock and roll band (from Tacoma). Others around at that time included the Kingsmen (the ones that made Louie Louie famous, though every NW band covered it), The Ventures (known as a "surf rock" instrumental rock band, although they came from Tacoma), Paul Revere and the Raiders, and another Tacoma band, The Sonics.
Most of them were present at Cheney Stadium last week, by the way. They got 754 guitars to play "Louie Louie" at a concert event.
I've been wanting to listen to the Wailers and the Sonics for a long time (Sonics especially) so Friday I picked up cds by each of these two bands... "The Fabulous Wailers" and "Psycho-Sonic". I also picked up "No Depression" by Uncle Tupelo and that green albumn by Weezer. So I had lots of energetic music to listen to while I sat in labor day traffic on my way to work.
The Sonics are pretty cool. Some people call them "the first punk rock band" and they ARE extremely hard and energetic considering when they appeared. There's a lot of the Kinks in their sound, and their lead singer screams and growls like Little Richard. Fun stuff, doesn't sound that dated at all, really.