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Post by Infinite Ego on Aug 4, 2012 15:35:05 GMT -5
And that raises another point: if we think of all these monster guitar players as primarily sales guys for gear manufacturers it makes perfectly good sense why SL was an abject financial failure. Here he was, the guy who could out-shred anybody on earth and he was as broke or more broke than some of the guys really famous for lots of talent and no money.
He had an endorsement deal with Ibanez that didn't last long and then he transformed (in terms of appearance) into what looked like a homeless dude who scrounged around camp sites. Grotesquely over weight, smoked, crazy beard, People's Republic of China Maoist hat (love the hat, by the way)...... he was the antimatter to the world of selling guitar stuff (not much "charisma" to reflect onto those shiny commodities). He played obscure amps and his signature guitar is made by an obscure French guy.
Now, take SL, same music, but give him the physical appearance of Vai, whoever, and he would have been at least as successful as any of these other professional gear demonstrators/teen idol guys.
At least it's an interesting thought experiment that, unfortunately, cannot be carried out.
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Post by dasein on Aug 4, 2012 21:59:16 GMT -5
This point has been argued too many times to count, but here we go again: We're not talking about machine-precision. We're talking about well-honed technique. I don't want my accountant to be passionate but sloppy. I don't want my mechanic to be passionate but sloppy. I don't want to listen to a Bach piece played passionately but sloppy. Why would I prefer passionate but (too) sloppy guitar playing (though it's tough to say what constitutes "too sloppy")? There is definitely a law of diminishing returns in both directions (too sloppy becomes a washy mess, and too pristine can sound lifeless). But I would argue that it is impossible for a human being to get to level of precision in guitar playing that sounds truly sterile. However, it's certainly true that without some rhythmic interaction, it bends in that direction. Shawn was definitely a technician, but he was far from perfect. There's not a single solo of his that I can think of that I would say is completely pristine and sterile. No offense, but you're comparing music to accounting, y'might wanna rethink your analogies. ;D The Bach example is interesting, because it does seem that the tendency in classical music performance is for an emphasis on mistake-free performance within a certain set of acceptable parameters. Take Chopin performance... early performers like Josef Hoffman or Ignatz Friedman seemed to play with a lot more abandon, freedom, joy... you get the impression they're really not concerned with technique (even though Hoffman has technique in spades... I've never heard anyone play the G Minor Ballade like he did). I think that Casal's classic recordings of the Bach Cello Suites are basically untouchable... there are a lot more recent recordings that are much more technically impressive, but again Casals seems willing to go places that others "dare not to tread." Any halfway decent conservatory will graduate piano performance majors that can play the Beethoven sonatas with fewer mistakes than Arthur Schnabel did... and yet I still turn to Schnabel over and over again to hear them rather than the latest wunderkind. Even someone like Glenn Gould probably couldn't get away with what he did... all those idiosyncratic tempo choices, nah, they'd run him out of town. I definitely think it's possible to be so technical that you become sterile. Perfect example of this is Michael Angelo Batio. He might be the fastest alternate picker ever, but who cares? Sounds like a goddamn dental drill, and his only fans are other guitar shredders. Really, once you reach a certain speed, your creativity is going to suffer in favor of heavily practiced, instrument-centric patterns. Compared to his playing from about '61 to '63, Coltrane actually played slower starting around '64. He stopped playing a lot of the fast scalar patterns, and started improvising by creating miniature symphonies out of small motives. He actually got pretty close to his earlier speed, which is more of a testament to his insane work ethic. |
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Post by aliensporebomb on Aug 4, 2012 23:18:58 GMT -5
And that raises another point: if we think of all these monster guitar players as primarily sales guys for gear manufacturers it makes perfectly good sense why SL was an abject financial failure. Here he was, the guy who could out-shred anybody on earth and he was as broke or more broke than some of the guys really famous for lots of talent and no money. He had an endorsement deal with Ibanez that didn't last long and then he transformed (in terms of appearance) into what looked like a homeless dude who scrounged around camp sites. Grotesquely over weight, smoked, crazy beard, People's Republic of China Maoist hat (love the hat, by the way)...... he was the antimatter to the world of selling guitar stuff (not much "charisma" to reflect onto those shiny commodities). He played obscure amps and his signature guitar is made by an obscure French guy. Now, take SL, same music, but give him the physical appearance of Vai, whoever, and he would have been at least as successful as any of these other professional gear demonstrators/teen idol guys. At least it's an interesting thought experiment that, unfortunately, cannot be carried out. Living proof that uninsured musicians with chronic debilitating health conditions are left to twist in the wind in this country. Is it any wonder he basically self-medicated himself to death? A horrific situation to say the least. I heard stories that strain credulity but I suppose it's possible that the memphis tenn hospital system had no way of addressing his condition without insurance. Yeah, not the poster boy for buying yourself an Ibanez. But at one point he was relatively clean-cut. I've wondered if maybe at a certain point he thought "I only have a few years left, might as well spend them playing rather than trying to manage my condition". A friend of mine who does have a health condition where there is no cure for it in this country literally has to have medication shipped from canada in a container with cold packs and he always worries the ice packs will have melted by the time it gets here. He's lucky he has insurance and that it does cover this extremely unusual medication. But since it's not available here sometimes it ships before a weekend and it gets here with the ice packs melted and the cultures in the meds die so they have to reship. Sometimes that's happened and when it does if he's not careful he starts bleeding internally and it's just a bad scene. He can die from that stuff. I think about guys like Shawn who had no insurance and looks at Jeff Golub - he played in Rod Stewart's band in the 80s on all the hits yet he lost his eyesight and there was a benefit at TGP to try and support him. Can you imagine? Total nightmare. |
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Post by Infinite Ego on Aug 5, 2012 8:41:00 GMT -5
Well, a for-profit medical system is fabulous .......... For those making the profits. if you don't represent a source of profit you're screwed
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Post by aliensporebomb on Aug 5, 2012 21:35:00 GMT -5
Yep, that's fur sure.
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ck1
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Post by ck1 on Aug 7, 2012 7:21:15 GMT -5
No offense, but you're comparing music to accounting, y'might wanna rethink your analogies. ;D The Bach example is interesting, because it does seem that the tendency in classical music performance is for an emphasis on mistake-free performance within a certain set of acceptable parameters. Take Chopin performance... early performers like Josef Hoffman or Ignatz Friedman seemed to play with a lot more abandon, freedom, joy... you get the impression they're really not concerned with technique (even though Hoffman has technique in spades... I've never heard anyone play the G Minor Ballade like he did). I think that Casal's classic recordings of the Bach Cello Suites are basically untouchable... there are a lot more recent recordings that are much more technically impressive, but again Casals seems willing to go places that others "dare not to tread." Any halfway decent conservatory will graduate piano performance majors that can play the Beethoven sonatas with fewer mistakes than Arthur Schnabel did... and yet I still turn to Schnabel over and over again to hear them rather than the latest wunderkind. Even someone like Glenn Gould probably couldn't get away with what he did... all those idiosyncratic tempo choices, nah, they'd run him out of town. I definitely think it's possible to be so technical that you become sterile. Perfect example of this is Michael Angelo Batio. He might be the fastest alternate picker ever, but who cares? Sounds like a goddamn dental drill, and his only fans are other guitar shredders. Really, once you reach a certain speed, your creativity is going to suffer in favor of heavily practiced, instrument-centric patterns. Compared to his playing from about '61 to '63, Coltrane actually played slower starting around '64. He stopped playing a lot of the fast scalar patterns, and started improvising by creating miniature symphonies out of small motives. He actually got pretty close to his earlier speed, which is more of a testament to his insane work ethic. These are interesting ideas that I debated nearly endlessly in college, and I feel like the answers can be different depending on the composer. How do you really compare Bach and Chopin, for instance? Can you approach playing both the same way? But with that caveat, the 2 performers that I think typify this discussion's extremes would be Horowitz and Rubenstein: Horowitz being a "dangerous" performer who would have his share of clams, but the overall sound was spectacular; Rubenstein being the polished, fluid performer who never seemed to make a mistake. I certainly agree about conservatories and music schools teaching mistake-free technique as the basis of their training, for better or worse. As for the analogy, I thought it was apt from a "professional" standpoint. Art can be professional, right?  |
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ck1
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Post by ck1 on Aug 7, 2012 7:22:35 GMT -5
You're forgetting that I like to pull every chain I see, right? ;-) You're forgetting that we've played this game before, and I already know your MO, right?  |
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ck1
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Post by ck1 on Aug 7, 2012 7:33:45 GMT -5
And I don't take cheap shots at people. I see everybody here as products of their societies. Everybody here, with maybe a couple of exceptions, expresses contradictory tendencies toward life and death, progress and regress, revolution and reaction, freedom and obedience, egoism and altruism, generosity and resentment, etc. Since I don't think anybody is "programed" and capable of self-reflexivity I try to throw some of this material up in faces to examine the reaction. Some people react and rationalize, some explain, some ponder, some change. All part of the laboratory that we've been running 'here' for 13 years. Notice that only a handful have ever stuck it out for the duration. LOL. So it's a controlled "survival of the fittest" in your little corner of teh internets, eh? Remember, the experimenter is always intimately tied into the experiment, and perceptions and preconceived notions can change the observed outcome. I know the "proof is in the pudding" comment was meant to drag me in (and that was well-played, though I took it further than necessary on purpose), but I'm fairly sure you really DO like Vernon Reid more than Lane from an aesthetic perspective. Vernon seems like he could have been in Saviour Onasis, so perhaps that's why. Or you just don't like fat, homeless-looking guys. ;D |
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Post by aliensporebomb on Aug 7, 2012 7:53:37 GMT -5
"for the discerning few".
Yeah, as much as I love Shawn's playing I would not have pursued some of the career tangents he did. There's some great music but there was only one or two times he seemed poised for mass success and something happened. I think his illness really limited what he could and couldn't do. It's too bad.
Vernon on the other hand had actually recorded an entire record only to have his label "shelve" it except limited quantities in France ("This little house", a link to which was once on this forum as the only way you could get it was to illegally download it which may have been instigated by Mr. Reed).
Another guy who was kicked in the teeth by record labels.
That was a good record - there are plenty of examples that he can play but on COP he was obviously going for it, technique be damned.
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Post by Infinite Ego on Aug 7, 2012 8:11:56 GMT -5
I actually look just like a fat homeless dude
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ck1
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Post by ck1 on Aug 7, 2012 8:18:36 GMT -5
Self-loathing, then |
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mirth
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Post by mirth on Aug 7, 2012 10:35:16 GMT -5
I think Vernon's popularity is a bit out of context here. He's marginally more popular than Shawn in terms of name recognition at this point. Yeah Living Colour was big, but by most they are considered a one hit wonder. You cannot grab a random 30/40 something person off the street and they probably won't even remember the name of the band, let alone any tune other than Cult of Personality (which my wife didn't even remember). She actually like's the Corey Glover solo album (which is fantastic) more than anything Living Colour I've played for her.
Vernon is big in the guitar world, but has already been established, it's such a small, small niche. Most guitarists don't know either guy. And I would say a fair share of the people who like Vernon are the same who like Lane.
Not to keep this going any longer, just thought it was worth pointing out.
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Post by Infinite Ego on Aug 7, 2012 12:54:01 GMT -5
These don't quite add up:
"I think Vernon's popularity is a bit out of context here. He's marginally more popular than Shawn in terms of name recognition at this point."
"Vernon is big in the guitar world, but has already been established, it's such a small, small niche."
VR is in a band that is still current that has sold I would imagine more than 4 or 5 million million records. Vivid was double platinum and the next one went gold and the third hit #26 on the charts.....
People are still hearing LC all the time. The most it would take for anybody who likes rock to recognize VR's name is, at most, point out that he is the guitarist for LC or, if they've forgotten what that is, sing the riff to CoP
As for Lane, again I don't want to come off as anti-Lane, I'm not, but finding a person who knows anything about him or his music is pretty tough. When he was still alive his online fan base seemed pretty small and I doubt it has grown in the mean time.
From wiki:
Living Colour was ranked No. 70 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.
"Cult of Personality" was part of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas repertoire of radio songs in Radio X. It was also the first song to be confirmed for the tracklist of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. The version featured in Guitar Hero III is a new master recording of the song that features an updated solo, as the original masters could not be used.
In October 2006, "Love Rears Its Ugly Head" was ranked and voted 303 out of 2006 songs featured in the Triple M Essential 2006 Countdown.
Rolling Stone have called the band, "funk-metal pioneers."[4]
In early 2009, WWE used "Cult of Personality" in the video promoting the induction of Stone Cold Steve Austin into its Hall of Fame. Current WWE performer CM Punk used the song as his entrance theme in Ring of Honor for a period of time. CM Punk used other licensed music while working with WWE, but, after feigning a departure from the company in July 2011, he returned with "Cult of Personality" as his entrance theme. In the same week that Punk returned to WWE TV using the song, it jumped into the iTunes Top 200. The YouTube video of 'Cult of Personality' has gained more than one million more views since CM Punk has used it as his entrance theme.
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Post by chrissh on Aug 7, 2012 13:10:26 GMT -5
Self-loathing, then Look ... once you internalize the ground rules, this 'place' is a walk in the park: it puts fun in dysfunctional. Lampoons are implicitly projective, yes, philosophies are autobiographical. That's kind of how insight works, resonating with an Other and assessing the effects. We do a little teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing, and things remain interesting. Maybe the occasional hurt feeling but no hard feelings. Just take a vacation now and then and this place can hold its value for you. |
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mirth
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Post by mirth on Aug 7, 2012 13:21:15 GMT -5
Please tell me one other song that a non-guitarist would know of theirs? They are an one hit wonder whether or not they are still together or not. They aren't selling out large places. Maybe 500 seats, if they're lucky these days. I'm not trying to knock them, I think they're fantastic, but they're hardly that popular other than CoP.
Also, the popularity comment had to do with guitarists, just like Shawn Lane is only popular among guitarists.
As far as that top hundred heavy rock bands...how many of the guitarists could you name from those bands?
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