STOP: Yer' Album

I spent years, mostly in college, looking for music outside of classic rock. Why on earth would I do something like that? Well, I was so pro-classic that when I started djing at my college rock station, I wanted to do an 'artist feature' program, focusing on classic rock greats. I went over the idea with a friendly record store clerk (now owner) and he asked me why, if there are already four or five stations within the FM spectrum playing classic rock, we would need another one?

Good point! Such a good point that I dropped the idea and, when two people did put together a show that was more-or-less that, I scoffed.

But, after years of exploration, I fully understand that there is NOTHING like classic rock. Nothing hits home quite as solid as a good blues-boogie-rock album. The feelings associated with it cover everything from fishing, drinking, and wearing Carhartts to first crushes, tailspin depression, and personal revelation.

I finally got my hands on this not-so-rare yet not-so-available James Gang album, their first. I'm so into it, I was singing the last song, "Stop," on the way to work. Sorry fellow pedestrians! I'm feeling it. It's got that mid-tempo jive feeling that has about as broad an appeal as I could imagine. 1969 was the year, a landmark year for rock never to be repeated. If you're in need of some blues-rock (oh, by the way, it's seriously funky), then I recommend this.

Click here for a little russian blog that has a whole thing on Joe Walsh, the principal member of James Gang.

And, if you're drawing a blank on the James Gang, they had a song called "Funk #49" that you've probably heard. It was an instrumental that typifies "hard rock." It was the song that the 'cool kids' were listening to in the Simpsons when Homer wanted to hang out with them (flashback scene, Hullabalooza episode).

Balearic

It's time for me to get new dance music. At least, in my fantasy world where I'm booking two deejay nights a week, I'm having to make a shift to the largely anonymous songs that make up a dance club. Songs that blend into one another so even the soberest of club patrons is not sure where one begins and one ends.

Yesterday I went to Turntable Lab for some record cleaning supplies. What can I say? They do sell brushes and needles--things that you need if you actually play records. They even sell records, and since I buy so few new records I committed to purchasing something made in the last year. I grabbed some stuff:

DFA's Metro Area man Morgan Geist

Rong Records which has something to do with MOMA's P.S.1 I BELIEVE

"Pool Party Remixes" - no link, sorry

Eskimo Records' Balearic Beat Comp

So, I played the records on their turntable (yes, you can listen to new records there!), and the Rong Records' record was pressed on noisy wax which disqualified it. Morgan Geist, too jaunty. I needed something more cathartic, I wanted to listen to music to deactivate, not to get energized or think. This came through on the Eskimo records' E.P.: the big falling synths, space sounds, and 'sampled percussion sounds' struck me as the solution. In my fantasy D.J. residency, guys and girls might fade to nothing as they followed the Balearic sounds from Eskimo records.

The crowning feature of Eskimo's compilation was the big emphasis on warm melodic synths: each song centered around this. Too distracted in trying to make purchases and leave, I grabbed the record and went home. Later, after a couple hours of T.V., I plugged into the record to enjoy the experience again. On the second listen, though, I realized that this record had a close classic rock affiliation, which made it less anonymous than I originally hoped.

As Pink Floyd pushed through the seventies, they also used big, warm, melodic synths. The album that heralds this sound is Wish You Were Here, which is both cathartic and emotive. The album opens and closes with spacey fuzzy synth notes played over background synths. Within the album, though, Pink Floyd has emotive and painful songs that balance out the initial, "live from Outer Space" sounds.

Close to the center of the album, the title track, "Wish You Were Here," uses a bare, electrified (sounds a bit, doesn't it?) acoustic guitar, which is near opposite of a synth. "Wish You Were Here" is a crying howl of a song much like "Tears in Heaven" or "Leaving on a Jet Plane": it sounds like something reserved for wakes and once-in-a-lifetime hugs between friends. How do they contain this emotion? By placing "Welcome to the Machine" before it, which sounds like something based on the movie "Metropolis" or "Modern Times," and "Have a Cigar," which is a caricature of a record exec but so dominated by synths that it seems to be an exec from the future, promising sales on music contained solely on, aak!, computers.

Wish You Were Here helps define the difference between synths and guitars (at least, until they became nearly ubiquitous). In the mid seventies, synths didn't have nostalgia like guitars. A guitar, though, is chosen to reference a guitar from the past: rockabilly, country, blues, metal, Spanish, surf, garage, grunge, folk, slide, Ben Harper. So, Pink Floyd's album, largely based on synth, is more self-referential than anything, looking at its own catalog: Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon. It's the sounds of the Pink Floyd universe.

Sitting with my headphones turned up to club levels, I realized that the synths on the Balaeric record were recreating airs from Wish You Were Here. I was a little disappointed because it ruined the numbing effect I was looking for: As an overly emotive teen, I listened to Wish You Were Here whenever I had a sad face. So, this record brings me back to those confused times, just like if I listened to a pop song with a folk guitar, banjo, and mandolin, I'll probably think of the Grateful Dead album American Beauty and the sixth grade.

Pink Floyd does not own all synth sounds and melodies, so it would be possible to create a similar record that doesn't sound like Wish You Were Here. That would be the record for me: stripping away the classic rock roots that defined my, and many others', childhoods.