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Old Man Yells at Cloud (or "Classic" songs that suck)

Gil Bang

By Gil Bang
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Gil Bang

Gil Bang 25651

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I'm doing a project at the house.  Blasting Sirius "Classic Vinyl" station all damn day.

I've always hated it when a Doors song comes on.  I fucking hate the Doors.   

Today, I realized that I've come to hate The Who.  Most of the songs are complete dogshit.  "Baba O'Reilly" is nothing but annoying noise.  "Magic Bus" is hot garbage.  When I was a young dude, I used to think some of these songs were good at some level.  I'm older and wiser now.  

Get the fuck off my lawn.

 

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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My top (bottom) three are The Doors, The Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull.  I will turn the music off rather than listen to one of those bands.

I don't like The Who very much, but I enjoy a few songs ("My Generation", and ironically "Eminence Front").

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NTVTXN

NTVTXN 1429

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10-11yo me used to love anything Boston. 
They are now an immediate channel-switch for me.

Along with the doors, g’dead, tull, molly hatchet, bon jovi (classic?) and all of other craptastic stuff mentioned thus far.

70’s-80’s music was very much hit and miss with me. I truly think that during that time the music & radio industry was exploding and anyone with a pulse & a hook could be a star.

Edited by NTVTXN
I can’t spell…
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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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23 minutes ago, NTVTXN said:

10-11yo me used to love anything Boston. 
They are now an immediate channel-switch for me.

I will still rock anything from the first two albums if it pops up.  After that, hard pass.

 

Quote

Along with the doors, g’dead, tull, molly hatchet, bon jovi (classic?) and all of other craptastic stuff mentioned thus far.

I can't stand Bon Jovi or Def Leppard.  Molly Hatchett, I'm a fan.  They were the first big band I got to go backstage to see.  Let me tell you, that was an eye-opener for a guy still attending a rural high school.

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Gil Bang

Gil Bang 25651

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I remember being at a buddy's house when the first Boston album came out.  We had it on.  His dad says "do you guys realize that all of these songs sound the same?" 

He was right. 

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27181

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There is music I loved then and won't listen to now because it was overplayed. Boston is one of those. The Doors are another. As much as I still love ZZ Top there's a greater than zero chance that I will skip it if it gets suggested. 

Then there is the stuff that was popular then and I hated then and now.

I'm looking at you Dexy's. Also you Prince. This is not limited to pop rock. I don't want to hear Anne Murray ever again. 

I don't want to hear Pink Floyd play Money either. Again, this is a reaction to being overplayed. Journey is another one with insta punch out songs but others that I still like.

But, I ain't ever going to hear Echoes on the radio or La Villa Strangiato. 

Thank God we can curate our own lists now. 

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Gil Bang

Gil Bang 25651

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1 hour ago, Herpa Derpa said:

Nirvana.

GF and I rode our bikes to the beach today for lunch. It was a postcard day. just perfect.  In line at a coffee shop, there was a fat guy.  I mean REALLY fat.  450 lbs would be my guess.  Wearing a tshirt with Cobain's face on it.  Except it was 3 times the size of his actual face. 

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Paul Wesley

Paul Wesley 3273

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I grew up on terrestrial radio and album rock, spent a shit ton of money on albums and cassettes, and CDs --  and listened to that stuff into my 30's.  But I gotta say, the idea of listening to a "classic rock" station into your 50's - that just strikes me as horribly depressing.  

Haven't we heard those same songs a gajillion times already?  Their playlists are so short, it's hard to imagine many songs in their top 200 that I'd be surprised or excited to hear.  

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 30850

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Kind of OT, but related, and hey it's surly.  When I was in school, the longest-lasting radio station between Dallas and Austin was KLUV, 98.7.

At that time, it was an "oldies" station, meaning 50s-early 60s.  I always liked that stuff, but got a thorough grounding in early rawk n roll on my drives between home and UT.

It has changed format a couple of times in the last decade or so, and is now an "oldies" station and that means 80s, 90s.  😬😬

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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6 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

 

I grew up on terrestrial radio and album rock, spent a shit ton of money on albums and cassettes, and CDs --  and listened to that stuff into my 30's.  But I gotta say, the idea of listening to a "classic rock" station into your 50's - that just strikes me as horribly depressing.  

Haven't we heard those same songs a gajillion times already?  Their playlists are so short, it's hard to imagine many songs in their top 200 that I'd be surprised or excited to hear.  

I only listen to FM in the car, which means basically twice a week save very short trips to the store.  One of the stations I'll flip through is classic rock (KLBJ).  I mostly default to KUTX or Sun Radio, but sometimes, they insist upon themselves and I need a jolt of Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Doobie Bros, etc.  It's OK in small doses.  Or, I listen to one of my Pandora stations, of which I've created about a million.

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Carl Spackler

Carl Spackler 3457

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Nope to pretty much anything considered "prog rock," so that means the channel gets changed when I start hearing Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer, a lot of Yes' catalog, King Crimson, etc.

Never got into the Dead (well, Terrepin Station isn't bad), Phish, etc.  Did see one Dead show.  I'm glad I went just to experience it, but I've never felt the need to see another one.

Get thee behind me, hair metal bands (Poison, Ratt, Cinderella, etc.).  Same goes for Bon Jovi and Def Leppard.  Oh, and except for a couple of their earlier songs, Aerosmith sucks.  Mostly I can't stand Steven Tyler.

     

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hullabelew

hullabelew 3698

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9 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

 

I grew up on terrestrial radio and album rock, spent a shit ton of money on albums and cassettes, and CDs --  and listened to that stuff into my 30's.  But I gotta say, the idea of listening to a "classic rock" station into your 50's - that just strikes me as horribly depressing.  

Haven't we heard those same songs a gajillion times already?  Their playlists are so short, it's hard to imagine many songs in their top 200 that I'd be surprised or excited to hear.  

When my BBQ team was going strong, one guy always put the radio on an Atlanta classic rock station.  We would play Classic Rock Roulette.  $1 in the pot each round.  Goal is to guess the next artist.  No one gets it, the pot rolls over.  You could never win much money because between the 6 of us, someone almost always guessed it.  I think 3 rounds was the largest pot we ever had.  

About like Amanda Shires talking about country radio.  I can hold my breath longer than I can listen to classic rock radio.  

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Al_4_ISU

Al_4_ISU 12324

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13 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

I don't really get the Doors hate other than I guess Morrison being a pretentious prick. 

I like Manzareks keyboard work and I don't really even like symths much. 

It always bothered me that they didn't have a bass player, but there was plenty of bass guitar on those records.  It's more of a reaction to them being lauded as great and being real fucking average at best (besides the two songs I do think are stone cold bangers).

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Al_4_ISU

Al_4_ISU 12324

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2 hours ago, Carl Spackler said:

Nope to pretty much anything considered "prog rock," so that means the channel gets changed when I start hearing Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer, a lot of Yes' catalog, King Crimson, etc.

Never got into the Dead (well, Terrepin Station isn't bad), Phish, etc.  Did see one Dead show.  I'm glad I went just to experience it, but I've never felt the need to see another one.

Get thee behind me, hair metal bands (Poison, Ratt, Cinderella, etc.).  Same goes for Bon Jovi and Def Leppard.  Oh, and except for a couple of their earlier songs, Aerosmith sucks.  Mostly I can't stand Steven Tyler.

     

100% on board with this.  Their first 2-3 records had some pretty great stuff, but they've been irredeemably bad for 90% of their career.

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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15 minutes ago, Al_4_ISU said:

It always bothered me that they didn't have a bass player, but there was plenty of bass guitar on those records.  It's more of a reaction to them being lauded as great and being real fucking average at best (besides the two songs I do think are stone cold bangers).

I simply hate everything about them.  The stupid keyboards, the stupid lyrics, the banal blues-ish songwriting, the drug haze, everything about it is just lazy dumb blues rock that real blues guys from Jimi to Stevie to Led Zep (theft notwithstanding) exceeded.

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 25968

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15 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

 

I grew up on terrestrial radio and album rock, spent a shit ton of money on albums and cassettes, and CDs --  and listened to that stuff into my 30's.  But I gotta say, the idea of listening to a "classic rock" station into your 50's - that just strikes me as horribly depressing.  

Haven't we heard those same songs a gajillion times already?  Their playlists are so short, it's hard to imagine many songs in their top 200 that I'd be surprised or excited to hear.  

Sometimes you just wanna roll the windows down and wail about how you're a COWBOY (cowboy) on a stee-eel horse I ride...

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Dennis Taylor

Dennis Taylor 18607

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On 6/16/2024 at 12:34 PM, Gil Bang said:

I remember being at a buddy's house when the first Boston album came out.  We had it on.  His dad says "do you guys realize that all of these songs sound the same?" 

He was right. 

"Are you sure that's a Boston song?"

- absolutely nobody ever

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Dennis Taylor

Dennis Taylor 18607

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On 6/16/2024 at 12:48 PM, cactusflinthead said:

. As much as I still love ZZ Top there's a greater than zero chance that I will skip it if it gets suggested. 

Pre- and Post- Eliminator ZZ Top might as well be two different bands. And I am the exact age that Eliminator should have been my wheelhouse but other than Got Me Under Pressure I pretty much skip anything "new" from them. Love their classic stuff though 

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59 Burst

59 Burst 434

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2 hours ago, Dennis Taylor said:

Pre- and Post- Eliminator ZZ Top might as well be two different bands. And I am the exact age that Eliminator should have been my wheelhouse but other than Got Me Under Pressure I pretty much skip anything "new" from them. Love their classic stuff though 

I break it down by blue jeans vs Nudie suits. Billy found a formula and kept cranking them out, and got rich doing it. Their concerts were the same way. What you saw from them prior to 76, was nothing like post 76. Though there is a warm spot in my heart for Billy’s sound on Fandango’s live side. I believe that to be the greatest recording of PAF pickups ever captured on vinyl. 

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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52093

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13 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Kind of OT, but related, and hey it's surly.  When I was in school, the longest-lasting radio station between Dallas and Austin was KLUV, 98.7.

At that time, it was an "oldies" station, meaning 50s-early 60s.  I always liked that stuff, but got a thorough grounding in early rawk n roll on my drives between home and UT.

It has changed format a couple of times in the last decade or so, and is now an "oldies" station and that means 80s, 90s.  😬😬

My high school job was at a store that had kluv playing as their store music, so I heard all of those golden oldies songs a million times. 

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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2 hours ago, Dennis Taylor said:

Pre- and Post- Eliminator ZZ Top might as well be two different bands. And I am the exact age that Eliminator should have been my wheelhouse but other than Got Me Under Pressure I pretty much skip anything "new" from them. Love their classic stuff though 

I've communicated with Terry Manning for near 20 years now, not that he's a friend, I've never met him, but he has given me all kinds of advice both in public (forums) and in private (messages/email).  He engineered Eliminator.  Here is the text of a post he made on a recording forum about that record:

Quote

The full story of the making of Eliminator (the politics, the chicannery, the technical aberrations, the high social drama, the exodus, the payback) is one that I cannot tell. Even if I could, there certainly wouldn't be room for it here! It probably won't even make it into "the book" (or the movie). Just don't forget that truth is often stranger than fiction!

However, I will address certain specific musical or technical issues, and I'll begin with your guitar amp question.

THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO ROCKMAN USED ON THIS RECORDING!
Not a little bit, not a tiny bit; NOT ANY. I don't know how these stories get started. Billy may indeed have used Rockman at a later date, after I left the situation, but I did not allow it when I was working with him. He did bring one in to try, but I was not satisfied with the sound, compared to an amplifier.

The amp used, almost exclusively, on Eliminator was a Legend. This was about a 50 watt hybrid unit, employing a tube/valve preamp, and a transistor power amp. This is the amp which has a finished wood case, and a rattan-type cane grill. It has one 12" Celestion speaker. Legend were later bought by, or at least distributed by, Gibson, but they were independent when we started using them. I still have this amp; it is almost new. A couple of years ago I plugged one of the Eliminator guitars into it, just to see...there was the sound!

The guitars were custom built by Dean. Dean were out of Chicago, and were trying to break into the high end (a la Jackson, PRS) market. They were very nice, albeit different, instruments. Subsequently however, they got a contract with Sears to make guitars, so they opted for the big bucks, Korean manufactured, low end market instead. But the ones we used were very nicely made. There were two which we employed. One was somewhat like a cross between a Flying-V and a Moderne shape, very long "ears," and the other was a sort of a warped, pointy Stratocaster-y shape. Both guitars had a single DiMarzio Super Distortion high output pickup, and almost no controls. I don't think there is even a tone control...what would you need one for? They have big, heavy, brass bridge/tail pieces bolted into the body. These guitars were very live, very resonant, and would verge on resonant feedback at all times; they were also very hard to keep in tune because of this. But they were always alive. Billy has the first one mentioned, and he gave me the latter, which I still have.

The guitar was recorded with basically only one setup; one amp (Legend), one speaker (12"), one guitar (Deans, the two were almost exactly the same), one mic (AKG 414B-ULS, I still have it) in one position (about 5" from the cone, placed at a slight angle off axis), one mic pre (the SpectraSonics console). 98% of ALL guitar on this album, whether lead or rhythm was done this way. Any variations were from the player himself, who, remember, did not even have a tone control. That's how good Billy was back then. We did use very briefly a small amp by Ross, but we didn't like it much, and I think only a tiny part or two was kept from this, if any.

The rhythm guitars were done in a precursor-to-Protools style. Short phrases were played, and then double tracked, onto one set of tracks, and then the chord change/next phrase was played on a second set of tracks. This allowed a seamless transition between changes; since the Deans were so close to feedback at all times (acoustically, through the fairly loud JBL monitors), we couldn't even lift the fingers to change chords! Then I would trim the edges of each section by punching in and out to silence at the beginnings and ends of the phrases (somewhat analogous to "trimming the region" today). This method also "eliminated" to a degree the loud harmonic squeaks between chord changes. The punch in/out points, if done exactly perfectly, made for a primitive cross fade of probably 10-20 ms, and ended up sounding very different as rhythm guitar, sort of like a big train rolling down a track, almost out of control; without knowing how it was done, one wouldn't really realise why it was different.

For the leads, as always, there was a lot of punching done.

The bass was mostly played either by Billy or by me, and was either a bass instrument, or a Moog Source (the Source was a Mini Moog [rhymes with 'Vouge'] analogue synth with digitally controlled parameters...I still have this, too). Synth chords were played on a Memory Moog (polyphonic Mini).

Billy sang great, different vocals, as usual, and the harmonies were done either by Jimmy Jamison or by me.

There are a MILLION more things which could be told about this distinctive album, but as mentioned, most of it is probably better left unsaid. But one interesting thing, at least to me, was the recording of "Legs." We had tried it a couple of ways unsuccessfully at Ardent, so I decided to try a new approach. I had a 24 track studio in my attic at home, so I took Billy's lead guitar and vocal home on a 1/2" two track L/R ("samples"). I recut the entire track myself, and then hand flew in Billy's parts onto the track. This meant careful timing of the play button on my MCI 1/2", for each and every phrase, as after a few seconds, they would drift out of sync. I mixed it there through my Soundcraft 1200 console (these were also the mic pre's) onto the MCI 1/2". The multitrack was also the Soundcraft 2" machine, which I really loved. Then I did a totally different version, which became the long "dance mix" later released to clubs, and it is now included in the new box set. Later, I saw a review of this dance version credited, to Jellybean Benitez ...go figure!

Anyway, that's a lot about Eliminator for now. Thanks for your interest!

 

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YGIFS

YGIFS 19445

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22 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

GF and I rode our bikes to the beach today for lunch. It was a postcard day. just perfect.  In line at a coffee shop, there was a fat guy.  I mean REALLY fat.  450 lbs would be my guess.  Wearing a tshirt with Cobain's face on it.  Except it was 3 times the size of his actual face. 

Well considering what happened to his head, your coffee cup was probably 3x the size of Cobain's actual face.  

The Doors were original in their initial blending of 'beach rock', psychedelic rock, and blues.  I listened to them a lot and played them on my radio show in the early 90's.  Likely due to their resurgence after the movie came out.  But it's been 25 years since I listened to one of their songs all the way through. their concept just didn't hold up well, at all.  

I'm burned out on Southern Rock like Doobie Bros, Allman Bros, et. al.  

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ajax

ajax 2568

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Third Eye Blind isn't classic but they have a huge, dedicated following.

There's not a single second of their music that doesn't get on my nerves. Can't stand them.

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45192

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Just now, ajax said:

Third Eye Blind isn't classic but they have a huge, dedicated following.

There's not a single second of their music that doesn't get on my nerves. Can't stand them.

As I related above, I just made a run to the grocery store.  Third Eye Blind popped up on whatever FM station I had on.  I immediately just turned it to silence.  Garbage.  (No, not the band Garbage.)

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Paul Wesley

Paul Wesley 3273

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2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

The amp used, almost exclusively, on Eliminator was a Legend. This was about a 50 watt hybrid unit, employing a tube/valve preamp, and a transistor power amp. This is the amp which has a finished wood case, and a rattan-type cane grill. It has one 12" Celestion speaker.

Holy shit, I have that exact amp in my closet right now.  

https://reverb.com/item/81778797-legend-model-a60-series-ii-hybrid-amplifier-system

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