wild greens
Well-known member
i saw someone play zombie nation on the piano in st pancras once that was great
music writing that feels like a relic from the past: a repository
- Thread starter shakahislop
- Start date
IdleRich
IdleRich
I feel that there are two points here...
1. Going to a gig is, as a rule, pretty far from the pure musical experience we want to think it is - though I definitely agree that it can be nearer depending on the band, the venue, the crowd etc and it tends to be that smaller gigs with smaller bands have less of the bullshit. The sad fact is that if your favourite band is U2 or Rolling Stones then you are not gonna be able to see them in a real, pure, intimate space unless you are the absolute ruler of an oil rich state.
Then again I'm not sure that pureness is necessarily to be aimed for as in the gigs I have enjoyed it's often been the extra bits - the impurities - that made it fun
2. I wanna make a Luka-style statement about how live music is the worst invention of all time and all musicians should be forced to eat their instruments - but it would be dishonest. Truer to say that I've had quite a lot of underwhelming gig experiences over the years and the number of times I've been bored out of my skull has certainly restricted my enthusiasm for future gigs... and yet, there have been enough brilliant - and fairly good - moments to prevent me writing off the whole thing as a dead loss.
1. Going to a gig is, as a rule, pretty far from the pure musical experience we want to think it is - though I definitely agree that it can be nearer depending on the band, the venue, the crowd etc and it tends to be that smaller gigs with smaller bands have less of the bullshit. The sad fact is that if your favourite band is U2 or Rolling Stones then you are not gonna be able to see them in a real, pure, intimate space unless you are the absolute ruler of an oil rich state.
Then again I'm not sure that pureness is necessarily to be aimed for as in the gigs I have enjoyed it's often been the extra bits - the impurities - that made it fun
2. I wanna make a Luka-style statement about how live music is the worst invention of all time and all musicians should be forced to eat their instruments - but it would be dishonest. Truer to say that I've had quite a lot of underwhelming gig experiences over the years and the number of times I've been bored out of my skull has certainly restricted my enthusiasm for future gigs... and yet, there have been enough brilliant - and fairly good - moments to prevent me writing off the whole thing as a dead loss.
shakahislop
Well-known member
It's a hit and miss pastime. It's quite inconvenient as a form of entertainment. It's great on the odd occasion that it hits. There's nothing reliable about it. It's people on stage and people in the room, you need all of them to be in the right place emotionally, psychologically, there's no way to predict it. Like everything it's entirely interlaced with the internet, most specifically in terms of who turns up, who had it come up on thier Songkick
wild greens
Well-known member
Almost on topic but not quite, thought this was a great little piece about a Robert Johnson obsessive/folk archivist slowly going mad amid his archive & detrtius
"Each of us are connected by an infinite number of threads"
www.texasmonthly.com
"Each of us are connected by an infinite number of threads"
Hellhounds on His Trail: Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson
For decades, McCormick labored over his biography of Johnson. Seven years after his death, the book is finally out—and so are the author’s secrets.
www.texasmonthly.com
IdleRich
IdleRich
It's great that there are these, I dunno, maniacs let's call them seeking out (popular) culture and archiving it like pre-internet Versions for us. Hardly surprising the people who dig so deep into things go a little mad.
Reminds me of this thing I saw recently about, arguably, a modern take on this kind of discovery. I found it fascinating and doesn't really belong anywhere so I'll mention it here, it pertains to the US pilot of Peep Show. Well there was a pilot that you can see on YouTube and it is famously disastrous and as a result the show never got made. But it turns out a few years later there was another pilot made but just to show to executives, never screened. And it was actually overseen by the guys who made the original show, so it clearly had more potential than the other one. But noone really knows cos you can't see it....
But you can see bits of it, and that's cos this Peep Show obsessive heard about it and started to investigate. From knowing the writers he got to the producers and from there he somehow got hold of a list of the actors in the pilot - mostly unknowns. And basically he sought out every actor and found their websites and went through their show reels hoping that - as they hadn't done loads of more famous stuff - some might have included clips from the unshown pilot. It turns out that they did, and this nutter was able to collect a few bits of footage and work out which UK episode it was based on and then edit the bits he had together into the right order to create a sort of excerpt of the second pilot.
So hearing this guy explaining all that was crazy, but really he could do it all from his bedroom, his predecessors who were folk-music obsessives had to travel to nameless villages that appeared on no map, traverse muddy lanes and knock on countless doors - mostly to no end. True nutters and I for one am very glad for their existence despite their tendency to go a bit... wrong, rip people off and denigrate those who don't share their purity of vision
Reminds me of this thing I saw recently about, arguably, a modern take on this kind of discovery. I found it fascinating and doesn't really belong anywhere so I'll mention it here, it pertains to the US pilot of Peep Show. Well there was a pilot that you can see on YouTube and it is famously disastrous and as a result the show never got made. But it turns out a few years later there was another pilot made but just to show to executives, never screened. And it was actually overseen by the guys who made the original show, so it clearly had more potential than the other one. But noone really knows cos you can't see it....
But you can see bits of it, and that's cos this Peep Show obsessive heard about it and started to investigate. From knowing the writers he got to the producers and from there he somehow got hold of a list of the actors in the pilot - mostly unknowns. And basically he sought out every actor and found their websites and went through their show reels hoping that - as they hadn't done loads of more famous stuff - some might have included clips from the unshown pilot. It turns out that they did, and this nutter was able to collect a few bits of footage and work out which UK episode it was based on and then edit the bits he had together into the right order to create a sort of excerpt of the second pilot.
So hearing this guy explaining all that was crazy, but really he could do it all from his bedroom, his predecessors who were folk-music obsessives had to travel to nameless villages that appeared on no map, traverse muddy lanes and knock on countless doors - mostly to no end. True nutters and I for one am very glad for their existence despite their tendency to go a bit... wrong, rip people off and denigrate those who don't share their purity of vision