Dotoar

Despite being a newcomer to this forum (which I even found by pure accident in search for something else) I've already found reasons to share my thoughts and views of music and other things. Maybe it's time then to call the dips on a table in the dark corner of the pub where I can put forth selected reports of my inner world.

I've chosen this table carefully so that I won't have to shout over the music, and in addition it gives us a chance to observe the hangaround and all its temporary inhabitants and what they do, say, think and drink. The issues I will bring up will all be somehow related to music in one way or another, wether it's a chronicle, an anecdote or just a piece of thought. You won't find any reviews here though; Those I save for that forum section. Apart from that, the thread may take off in any direction depending on what mood I'm in when I decide to refill the pint.

So please, have a seat. The next round's on me.

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Burning Down

I'm looking forward to this! You seem to always know what you're talking about when it comes to music I like reading your posts

Dotoar

Thanks! I just gotta figure out how to commence this journey, then I'll be on my way.

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RVCA

I'll be keeping an eye on thissss

Dotoar

With a little help from my friend


I recall one time when I was about 15, one summer break (in Sweden we have vacation between the grades from early June until late August) and I was browsing through the local newspaper. There was an article about two guys who had been granted a few weeks to perform on guitar in some kind of communal activity. It caught my eye because I had actually applied to that as well but was not picked for it. Instead I was granted a few weeks of work at a nearby camp, on which I and a couple of school friends spent most of the time playing cards and lending each other records, which was nice as well. What I for some reason noticed in the article however, was that one of the guys was cited to have been playing the guitar for like three years or so and I remember thinking "Wow, that's a long time! He must be really skilled.", since I myself hadn't been playing for much more than one year at the time. Set in perspective it's quite amusing to think about such thoughts of the past, considering I today have been playing guitar for 15 years, more than half of my life as of yet. That's a long time, I must be really skilled! On the other hand, I still haven't been picked for any communal musical activity.

I was a relative latecomer when it comes to music. Alright, not exactly music itself; I have always loved listening to music and trying to ape what I hear, but regarding a conscious approach to music, both in listening and practicing, it took until the 8th grade for me to finally reach the conclusion of who I was and what I was to be, as music would constitute a main pillar of my being ever since. It must have been around the summer of 1996 when I got my first guitar, an acoustic Levin bought at a local auction house, Roberts Auktioner, for 180 SEK (about $26). Towards the end of the spring term during the obligatory music lessons I had acquired a taste for the instrument and picked up a few chords in order to learn the song "Bandstarter" by the swedish band Brainpool, which had been a hit here. A friend of mine had a guitar in the house, belonging to his father, and I used to terrorize him with my very rudimentary skills on said song. As the summer came along and I got my own guitar I spent it almost entirely on perfecting the chord fingerings, which was D, G, A and a malformed Bm. The amount of attention span must have been gargantuan back then.



Remember that this was the mid-90's and the britpop wave was in full bloom, and the things that spun on the radio (that always was on in the background in our house) obviously had an affect on me during this crucial time. You see, I already had been playing trumpet in the musical school for several years by then, from which I had acquired general musical theory, such as an understanding of the sequencing of notes. I never cared that much about whether or not it was considered 'cool' to play trumpet but I couldn't help but notice how much more versatile the guitar was in order to reproduce a basic sound of any selected song. And you could sing over it as well, something which is not easy to do with a mouthpiece occupying your lips and lungs. In short, as I started to take interest in the britpopsters scenting the air around me as well as realize the potential of reproducing that sound myself, I quickly grew tired of the trumpet and eventually handed in my resignation to my musical teacher who by the way deserves his share of props for encouraging me all the way until I quit. It wasn't to happen until well into my 8th grade though, but I certainly didn't care much for practicing the trumpet by the time, and the trumpet proved to be my final touch ever with formal musical schooling.

I concentrated wholeheartedly on the guitar from the summer of 1996 and onward into the fall term. I borrowed books from the library to learn all the essential chords and in the process I found out that all those britpopsters I somewhat subconsciously had grown fond of were derived from a distant past which I until then only had been witnessing through vintage footage on TV, and maybe an occasional song airing on the radio. I somehow learned that the main inspiration for all these flowery melodies, jangly guitars and nasal vocals that scented many of the popular acts of the day, was a band which I certainly knew about but hadn't really conceived as much more than an object of general knowledge.

The band was The Beatles.

I was aware of some of their biggest songs, like "She loves you", "I want to hold your hand" and "Help!" and they were among the first songs I learned on guitar (which forced me to expand my knowledge about chords). But at this point I more or less decided that this was a band I just had to get into since I somewhat realized that they were a crucial influence on just about everything I had begun to acknowledge as good music, or more precisely, my music. I feel I have to emphasize this factor; The quest to acquaint The Beatles was not really due to me being particularily exposed to their songs. It was more like a determination to grow a solid musical interest, both to exercise my guitar/singing aspirations and to sport a definite niche as a listener and as a dedicated fan.

My aforementioned friend tipped me off that his mom and dad (living separately) both had a few Beatles records in their collection and offered me to tape them which I thankfully did. One was the blue double album 1967-70 concisting of their most well-known songs from the later period. I remember us listening through it and I had one of my most revealing aha-experiences ever. I caught myself recognizing every second song that came on, up until then not even aware of that it was Beatles; "Penny Lane", "With a little help from my friends", "Hello goodbye", "All you need is love", "Revolution" and so on. And even those I hadn't heard before quickly grew on me and I felt a strange but wonderful kind of joy in that - and this might sound silly - I had picked a band for my liking that turned out to be simply awesome. And in addition, as luck would have it, the swedish national television was at the time airing the Anthology documentary, which I taped on our ancient VCR and watched repeatedly, all the while growing more and more enthusiastic of this band that had achieved so much in so little time.

The rumour of my newly-found fanboyism spread among friends and relatives and I remember I got "Sgt. Pepper" and the first volume of "Anthology" for christmas that year, as well as "Magical Mystery Tour" for my birthday in February thereafter. I started to save money to acquire their every album, for which I had to take the bus to Köping (about 15 km from where I was living) where the nearest record store was. I started to grow out my hair and comb down the fringe which I previously had been combing upwards and when it was time to upgrade my glasses, I chose a pair of thick black frames of the kind that in a few years would become very popular among the artsy crowd (which is to say that I was by far a pioneer in our little town, albeit without knowing it). All this meant that, while I always was kind of an outcast at school, I had finally taken the crucial step to prove that not only was I an outcast - I was consciously emphasizing it in order to show that I was fully comfortable with it. And I had a damn good reason to be as well; I listened to The Beatles and played the guitar! You can tell I did by my moptop and my turtlenecks!

And since I know that you wonder; I was John, thus I had to go for a nasal kind of singing voice and a side-parted fringe, which in turn meant I had to start using hairspray in order to fixate it. My morning habits became severely affected.

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Gavin B.

Great story. I'm a big fan of Swedish pop and rock bands but I never came across the Brainpool song. It reminds me a bit of something Pavement would come up with, only it would sound a lot more ragged if they were playing it.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Dotoar

(I'm more sane now so that alone will severely affect my postings from here on)

So, this 'digital revolution' as they call it, with all the home-made pros-and-cons-arguments about its influence on the duplication of multimedia files; is it justified? Wrong question, says I. One should ask: Is it wrong? Nay, says I, and I've written a truckload and a half about the subject elsewhere and may just as well do it again here some day. Not now though; I'm in a reminiscing mood right now, yearning for ghosts of file transfers past and an environment that in hindsight was a very unhealthy place for anyone who finally had learned to expand his (her?) views on musical alleys alongside the information highway. In order to set the right mood for this period of time, loosely spun around my senior high years (I believe that's the adequate english equivalent of the swedish school system), I'll take the liberty of beginning the journey with one of the records that happened to constitute the backdrop back then:



I'm not that old, but I am old enough to have been young when there was no such thing as a computerized music collection and way up to the late 90's I still had to save money for an occasional raid to the record store in order to satisfy my completion needs of Beatles, Who, Doors, Kinks, Hendrix and so on. This, in combination with the absence of information access that comes with an internet-less territory (did you know that by the mid-00's, half of all the stored information in the world had supervened in only three years?), led to a rather limited scope of knowledge about music and the musical preferences that had sprung out of the acknowledgement of 60's-related bands, not to mention the fear of the brash 70's and the post-Tommy Who material. That was not to happen until halfway through my senior high years.

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In order to grasp the scarce multimedial situation in the mid-90's in general, and for me in particular, I feel I've gotta draw a vague timeline to which my computer conditions are nailed. I got my first PC in around 1995 or so, a 486 equipped with a whole 4 MB working memory, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.11, no internet connection and no sound card which meant that whatever game I was playing that yielded any kind of sound effects had to be channeled through the PC squeaker, sorry, speaker. Naturally, digital music listening wasn't even present on the map. It took a good couple of years before I acquired an internet subscription with a then top-of-the-line 56K modem (I even remember having to replace the original chip in it with the upgraded one when I first installed the whole package) and up until then I had to rely on a slightly more updated friend's workstation whenever I felt the urge of scanning through the net for Beatles chords, which was basically the only thing on internet I found useful back then. Now, all of a sudden, I could do it all by myself at home whenever I wanted to! Sort of, at least, because I was only granted about an hour a day past 6 PM when the phone fee was lower, and with an already obsolete and painfully overclocked 486 burdened with the brand new Win 95, you can guess the amount of effective time that was spent entirely on loading all the dubious Geocities pages. I even had to turn off all image viewing in the browser to have a chance of getting a peek of the tricky chord changes of "I am the walrus" and "Martha my dear". And additional information about Beatles was all extra.

I remember the first time I stumbled upon the conception of having actual songs stored on the drive in compressed form, which at the time was through the mp2 format. A friend had somehow got hold on "All you need is love" (not that he or any of my other friends really liked the Beatles that much, it was more like me shoving it down their throats) and Monty Python's "Lumberjack" in mp2. Crappy as hell of course and nothing that would ever threaten the trusty old CD stereo, but nonetheless amazing, and we had heard of a new upcoming format that would be thoroughly improved in both compression and sound quality, called "mp3". Remember that this was just another file format and little did we know that it would turn out to be a world standard phenomenom in its own rights, giving name to both portable media players as well as copyright battles and for quite a while whenever one talked about such thing as compressed audio files, one could as well mean mp2 as mp3.

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And then nothing in particular happened. At least not until the mid-90's turned into the late 90's, and junior high turned into senior high where every student on my school each got a laptop for supposedly educational use. Also, the school had a freshly installed network with internet access which of course was nothing short of a small revolution on our (the students) part as the mp3 format by the time had stabilized itself as the equivalent to music files (apart from a weird *.ogg format in which a friend had come over "Pulse" by Pink Floyd and which required an even weirder media player with unreadable graphics called "Kö-fjol" or something, which at least sounds amusing in swedish). Anyway, this was still way before Napster, Kazaa, DC and Soulseek so the mp3 distribution was dubious, not seldom handled through FTP servers by shady demi-gurus kind enough to share them, and the overall supply was scarce. This was a time where "mp3" meant "mp3" and not "your momentarily desired song by any artist ever", and thus each file was a treasure. I even remember ripping selected tracks off my CD's onto the laptop (with a little help from a friend, since I didn't have a CD-rom player) just to increase my mp3 library on it. I never listened to them that way, of course; that would be stupid since I had the records anyway.

I wasn't nearly as enthusiastic over the mp3 craze as some of my classmates. One of them made it his mission to hunt down every single mp3 file he could find, download them and burn them onto CD's only to archive them on the shelf. I remember lending him my entire record collection in order for him to rip and burn and thus adding to his ever-growing mp3 library. I on the other hand, did handpick only what I was remotely interested in at the time which resulted in - at best - a handful of tracks by bands I only just had begun to gain an interest in and I still have a CD with a painfully put together collection of assorted mp3 crusts in true vintage fashion, peaking at 128 kbps and with an occasional error blurp. Once again, I had a friend whose dad had acquired a CD burner in his work computer and just for the sake of it, we burned just about anything we could get our hands on, including "The wall" by Floyd, "Isola" by Kent and said mixtape CD containing just about every hard-earned mp3 file I had mined during the goldrush, including a couple of tracks called "Kashmir" and "Whole lotta love" and a copy of an album my friend happened to have lying around on his harddrive; "Deep Purple in rock".

I was still not going to switch my listening habits from records to WinAmp for years to come, but this twilight zone that took place towards the turn of the century was about to expand my horizons from the long-haired 60's to the even longer-haired 70's, and in the process, harden up the aural texture.

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Guybrush

Ah, digital nostalgia I too remember the early days of digital lossy formats. It was a confusing new world at first. I remember I would sometimes drop by IRC channels dedicated to it where you could get login info to FTPs that would share them. I also remember badly written homepages that would sometimes share songs. The internet was so much sadder back then too.

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Something Completely Different

Dotoar

First of all: Regarding any kind of comparisation between european and american musical heritage, I will utilize at least some level of generalization to put forth my point. I would in no way ever consider supposedly 'american' music as being bad or anything, not least because such a statement would be simply untrue, but what I am going to do here, or at least try to do, is to put into words some kind thesis in order to explain (not least to myself) why I tend to gravitate toward certain strains of musical approaches rather than others. For me, such an obvious example is my perpetually dubious stance on the Rolling Stones, so that's where I will begin.

Yeah, let's have some music to go with that, will ya!



Now, well past the initiation of The Beatles and The Who during my teens, I was well determined to continue my quest to acquaint another obvious exponent of the sixties, namely the Stones. Of course, as any youngster with a western upbringing during the 20th century, I already knew about their most obvious hits due to the cultural osmosis, like "Satisfaction" and "Paint it, black" so the initial experience didn't take that much of an effort. What's more remarkable though is that to this day, they still don't quite crack it as being the highly accomplished milestone for me as they are traditionally revered for, only now I finally am beginning to see the background to why it's so.

See, the Stones disappointed me from the very beginning. Of course, most bands didn't really stand the chance when being upheld against the Beatles so any such comparisation is not really fair to anyone, but since the Who managed to pass the test without leaving me with a feeling of dissatisfaction there has to be more to the story here. I remember getting some money for my somethingeth birthday for which I immediately purchased the "London years" triple album which, as you all know, contains their entire singles catalogue from their start in 1963 up to 1971. It proved to be an essential buy, not least since it gives you a fairly decent picture of their evolution during the 60's and thus to this day remains probably one of the best introductions to them as a band, but I remember having to sort of fumble through the entire first disc which reaches up to around 1966. There were all these clunky and jagged old blues/r&b workouts which virtually all meshed together in an incomprehensive mess, bar a few standout tracks like "Play with fire", "Get off my cloud" and of course "Satisfaction". Well, I certainly knew someone who couldn't get no satisfaction. The alleged antithesis to the Beatles sure wasn't just a widespread myth and I can easily see why Stones fans may dismiss Beatles as well as the other way round; they simply did not sound alike on any significant count.

The second CD on the other hand, stretching from '66 up to '68, was a different story. Suddenly they came up with actual songs, built up on melodies and a variety of arrangements instead of the same ol' blues or whatever. Still today, I consider this to be the most interesting period of their career, with seemingly unjustly overseen gems like "Ruby tuesday", "She's a rainbow", "Dandelion", "The lantern" and "We love you". Yeah, let's put that one on:



Of course, critics residing in both the Beatles and the Stones camp will agree upon that they were simply unfit for psychedelia and that they only tried to ape Beatles and/or other more purely psychedelic acts of the period and that they accordingly didn't really blossomed until they went back to the roots in 1968. To be frank, I don't buy that at all. Stones were as worthy candidates of psychedelia (or at least psych-flavoured pop) as most of the other major act of the 60's, and there are much, much worse examples of acid-fuelled experimentation gone awry. "Their satanic majesties request" is a minor masterpiece by the Stones' own standard, not least since it sounds so unlike their commonly known repertoire.

The psychedelic heydays didn't last very long though and it was probably just as well that they made a 180 turn in 1968, commencing with "Jumping Jack Flash" (or as on the third CD, with "Street fighting man"), both of which are ace and there's little doubt even in my mind that the third half of this triple album is just as good as the second. They somehow resorted to their initial roots as present on the first CD, albeit this time much tighter and suspended in memorable riffs and more melodic and profilic vocal delivery from Jagger which is probably the one reason why I can stand their late 60's/early 70's output while the counterparts of the early 60's leave me cold. I mean, it's not that songs like "Sympathy for the devil" and "You can't always get what you want" sport much of a melody, but the arrangements are as intriguing as anything, and you can hear that this pseudo-american rootsy sound is their main forte after all.

Now, back then I was kind of a purist in terms of albums and I made it a rule to focus on any band's official studio output and when possible acquire the albums chronologically. With the key at hand in the form of "The London years" I decided to skip forward to their supposedly interesting period, starting around 1966 with the purchase of "Aftermath". And wow, that was an anticlimax if there ever was one! I really, really tried, nay, forced myself to like it after discovering that past the initial tracks it was just as dull as the early singles collection, if not duller. The first few tracks I had already heard, starting with a by now rather tiresome "Paint it, black" and ending with "Under my thumb" which I already had heard as performed by The Who in a superior way. All in all the album was okay up until then although I didn't have much use for it with the singles collection at hand. Then it just took a nose-dive with melody-less, hookless, bland and on occasion simply annoying r&b workouts, ending with a neverending pile of drivel called "Going home". This was supposed to be the Stones' big breakthrough as an album band?! In hindsight I sort of wish that "Between the buttons" had been present in the store instead as I probably wouldn't have had to actually force myself to like it. Not as much, at least.

I gave them one more serious chance though, based on the positive impression of the last third of "London years", and grabbed a vinyl copy of "Goat's head soup" that happened to be lying around in that same record store. Once again, big disappointment, even if I years later learned that this particular album wasn't that big a favourite even among fans. I recall a vague liking for "Dancing with mr. D" and "Heartbreaker" at first, which quickly wore off, and a more consistent appeal in "Angie" and most of all in "100 years ago", something I still stand for. But apart from those it was all a messy, rootsy-tootsy pile of mud, as suggested on the murky album cover. Yawnfests like "Winter" and "Silver train" only added to the harm initiated by "Aftermath". Seems like I just couldn't 'get' the Stones after all. On with The Doors!

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As the years have gone by, I have provided myself with several of their albums ever since and have given them an occasional listen, including the obligatory "Beggar's banquet" (underwritten), "Let it bleed" (overrated) and "Exile on Main Street" (dull and interminable), and equipped with a more academic approach to just about anything, I think I'm beginning to see my main problem with the Stones. It's not so much them as a band - they are masters of their game - as the styles they choose to cover. See, it's no secret that they preferred to dabble with american roots, especially Richards nurturing a great love for blues, and keeping in mind my ever present liking for their least american-sounding (and thusly most british-sounding) era it's not that hard to see why they don't speak to me on a general level. Not that they or their fans need my approval or anything, but neither do I need them to fulfill my scewed preferences as there are still enough artsy-fartsy european-sounding bands to fill a lifetime and a half that I can give the full attention they deserve, and thus leave Stones to the attention they deserve. Life is too short to spend it on picking on music just because it doesn't appeal to you (and the Stones do appeal to me on occasion, mind you, which is why I bother to write this much about them). One could learn a thing or two from the fact that both Rolling Stones and Beatles had the uttermost respect for each other during the 60's, maybe because they simply didn't aspire to intrude on each other's musical territorry, maybe not.

Now one might state that I'm being ethnocentric for dismissing purely american influences, and I'm not gonna argue with that (on a european level at least; as a swede, I cannot afford to be that ethnocentric). The interesting question is rather why I am, and I was originally going to slide into that strain of thought after my Stones-related introduction but since I already have written a mouthful I'm gonna go ahead and stop right here and save the rest of my thesis for the time being. As of now, my ultimate verdict on the Stones is and will always be: They're alright, and certain parts of their discography deserve an occasional run, preferrably on a friday evening accompanied with a beer or two.

And with that I will leave you with what I consider one of their more obscure stellar moments:

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Blarobbarg

Wow. Nice blog. Looking forward to reading more.

And although I don't agree with most of your comments about the Stones (I LOVE old blues), I did find it all quite interesting and well thought out. Keep it up!