Bands that opened up my eyes

Good God is that a reprehensible title. Sounds like I’m starting an infomercial for “Jesus’ Favourite Gospel Tunes” or something equally egregious from K-Tel.

During the lead up to this year’s Blogging Challenge, there was some discussion of covering some general topics that a lot of people could all blog about. One of the possible topics suggested was something along the lines of ‘Your 3 favourite songs’.

For me, topics like that are impossible because they represent a moving target. I am constantly shifting around a list of favourite books, songs, movies, etc. because I’m constantly hearing or reading or seeing things for the first time. Also, my tastes are always evolving. So that sort of a basic idea didn’t exactly thrill me.

But then I thought back to the days when my tastes WEREN’T as inclusive as they are now, and the idea hit me…why not mention some of the songs that expanded my musical horizons in the first place?

Then I realized that I really don’t remember any specific tunes that did that…but I do remember many of the artists and bands that were responsible. And that is the point of this post.

Before we can move forward though, we need to look at the past. So let’s step in to the way back machine and visit the Cliff of the early 90’s…

It’s the early 90’s. Grunge is about to hit, I’m locked in the midst of my ‘Stop trying!’ period, and I have a mullet. And frankly, those last two things are probably quite related…maybe I’m like a Bizarro Sampson.

Musically speaking, if it doesn’t have power chords, I do not give a fuck about it. My personal musical tastes ranged from such ‘disparate’ bands as Pantera to Metallica to Motley Crue. Yes, what a cornucopia of sound! I’m surprised my ears didn’t go on strike due to sheer repetitive boredom.

Yet apparently, some little fragment of sense existed in my head, because over time a gradual shift began to take place. A part of me that I was trying to drown out with screaming hot metal was yearning to hear something else mixed in. And eventually it began to make its presence felt.

The first shift was actually getting in to classic rock. Led Zeppelin and Hendrix and all that stuff is good, but for me it came down to one band over the others…

The Rolling fuckin’ Stones. I think it came down to the first time I listened to Gimme Shelter (aka the song Scorsese uses whenever a bunch of gangsters are getting wacked in one of his flicks) and realized “This kicks ASS.” This is a band that hasn’t released much of consequence since about 1980, and I wish they’d just be honest and tour on their old material since that’s all anyone wants to hear, anyway (Iron Maiden does it…follow that lesson!). Their original lead guitarist died under weird circumstances. One of their members is probably undead. The zombie and the lead singer have repeatedly scuffled…the zombie pissed off that the singer who enjoyed just as much booze, dope and pussy as the rest of them is accepted in society and he isn’t, while the singer hates the fact that the guitarist is accepted more than he was by other bands (even the punk bands of the late 70’s would couch their cries of “We started this to fight against bloated bands like the Stones” with “We do think Keith would be with us if he was coming up now, though”). The drummer looks like a cast away from a jazz quartet (and actually plays in a jazz group on the side now). But it just works. I tend towards the lesser known stuff, like Tumbling Dice, Can’t You Hear me Knocking and You Got the Silver (with the aforementioned zombified one on vocals)…

This led in two different directions. First off was the horrified realization I actually liked my dad’s Roy Orbison albums now. Road trips weren’t quite as awful as they had been in the past, since at least we could agree on music. Well, one kind of music…I will never, ever be in to shit like Roger Whittaker. I’m sorry, but whistling is not music unto itself. Second was a straight shot to the Blues.

I could probably spend a goddamn eternity talking about Blues artists that turned me around, but I’ll focus on one that was quite different from the rest. While most Blues musicians in the last 50 years spend a lot of their time plugged in, the really early ones…the forefathers…didn’t. And right at the front of that pack was…

Robert Johnson. Anyone remember the movie Crossroads, starring Ralph Macchio when he wasn’t crane kicking punks at the behest of Mr. Miyagi? The whole legend of the crossroads was actually lifted entirely from the life of Robert Johnson, who often stated that he had sold his soul to the devil at a specific crossroads at midnight in exchange for the ability to play the blues.

Two reasons I’m singling Robert out.

1. That story is just badass rock n’ roll personified (as was his death at 27, possibly from poison due to a woman).

2. See Robert and his guitar in the picture there? That’s what you get in his music…him and that acoustic. Nothing else.

So this was one of the first people I ever listened to that was pulling out everything that I had previously considered indispensable in music. There were no electric guitars and Marshall stacks, no drummer, no bass, no nothing. And goddammit, I liked it.

This led me on a further journey in to a genre that I had previously declared toxic. And the person who led me there certainly has a pointed message for what I could do with sentiments like that…

Yes indeed, that is actually the thanks Johnny Cash sent to the country music establishment that had ignored and sidelined him for many years. Again, that’s definitely very ‘rock n’ roll’. However, my brain was still operating in overdrive…I LIKED someone who did country music? Really? No, I must be wrong…after all that’s just twangy bullshit and nasal vocals about dogs running away and…holy shit, did he just sing about shooting some chick he was obsessed with? Fuck!

Now, of all the expansion of my musical tastes, this has been the most limited. I still consider a lot of country music to be twangy, boring bullshit about the same old thing. I do like a lot of older stuff, but there are only a few exceptions in terms of modern material. One is Shooter Jennings (son of Waylon who likes to plug his guitars in) and the other is Hank Williams III, a tatted up, longhaired grease ball who sounds like his grandfather while singing about drinking, drugging and waiting to die. That is, when he’s not working on his side project, a metal band called Superjoint Ritual with Phil Anselmo (of Pantera fame) as lead vocalist.

Still, it was Johnny done brought me here, so it’s Johnny who will pass us along to the other MASSIVE “Holy crap, I LIKE this?!” moment when it comes to my personal taste in music. Everyone’s seen and heard the video cover he did of Hurt, so I’ll hit something else…a cover of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage (if you’re a fellow MMA fan, the album version of this is Jon Fitch’s entrance music)…

You know what, to keep the flow going, I’m taking this in a different direction. Swinging back to the early 90’s, I HATED the whole grunge/alternative scene. DESPISED it. It took years for me to actually like Nine Inch Nails (which I have ever since). And I was not exactly a Nirvana fan. In fact, I STILL don’t think Nirvana was close to the best band to come out of that whole movement…there are two others I’d put ahead of them. One is Alice in Chains, and the other is Soundgarden.

For some reason, I immediately latched on to AiC, and immediately though of Soundgarden as dreck. I recall Liam and I being brothers in hatred for that fucking band…until some guy he worked with leant him their Superunknown CD and asked him to listen to two songs. One was Fell on Black Days, the other was The Day I Tried to Live. They didn’t suck. In fact, they were really, REALLY good. That was it…another wall hurdled.

Okay, off this little side road and back to the main street we were traveling down before (both the Wayback Machine and my rambling are known for tangents). So far, everything I’ve covered still features one important thing as one of the core pieces of the music…the guitar. My next big voyage involved the guitar being something of a side concern.

James Brown. The Godfather of Soul. The dude who led me off the garden path of the guitar being something that has to be a part of music to realizing it’s just another instrument (though I’m still a sucker for crunching riffage, and probably will always remain so). This guy ran the gamut from early Motown sounds (and I am also a big Motown fan) to bad ass funk. I was lucky enough to see him live before he died, and it was a show. Dude was in his late 60’s and had an artificial hip, and watching him sweat gallons on stage still made me feel like an under working slackass bastard. Just an absolute force of nature live and in recorded form.

So, from here I started listening to Motown and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and all of that. And I also hopped on board the funk mother ship and followed it to its crazy destinations.

Parliament – Funkadelic…like the chocolate and peanut butter of funk, though Funkadelic was actually a lot more diverse and gigantic. Okay, creepily enough MediaMonkey started playing some P-Funk as soon as I started typing up this entry…weird…

If anyone thinks that the rock bands of the 70’s were hoarding all the good drugs for themselves, they REALLY need to look at these mofos. Or listen to some lyrics. Seriously, this band was clearly in to hallucinogenics. However, if you can listen to some P-Funk and actually keep still, there is something wrong with you. You may actually be crippled.

Now, all of this…the James Brown, the P-Funk, led to the most insane landing I could have imagined. All of them are some of the most heavily sampled by the next world…

RAP? I liked RAP? Holy shit, that’s it, I’m apparently insane. Time to check in to some kind of a rehabilitation facility, because I’ve apparently started abusing heroin without any knowledge of it or something. How in the fuck did this happen?!

The first exposure to Tupac was actually him as an actor, in the movie Gang Related. I kind of liked it, and that’s saying something considering it co stars Jim fucking Belushi. What really caught my attention was the soundtrack, though. It was pretty hard to tell myself “No, you don’t like rap…” after I bought a copy of the damn thing. That was the first rap album I ever owned. So apparently my earlier thoughts of “You know, the few times I’ve heard Public Enemy, I’ve liked em” weren’t flukes.

And oh yes, I had had those thoughts. I kept them to myself, though…Christ, one couldn’t go public with an admission like THAT. The world would collapse around me! But it was there. And with that soundtrack bought, I went nuts. Public Enemy, Run DMC, Dr. Dre, NWA, all of that was soon in my collection.

As time has passed, I’ve gotten a lot more choosy. The typical, cliche, boring as shit MC bragging about all the expensive crap he’s got is not interesting. Nope, I’ve headed off in another direction. Stuff like Saul Williams, Sage Francis and Talib Kweli. Or older stuff by guys like (the criminally underrated) Eric B & Rakim.

But it always comes back to Public Enemy. Not only did they kick me in the balls and make me realize how wrong I’d been about an entire genre, they also led me along the socially conscious/political hip hop path to the stuff I favour now. And they’re still at it.

So there ya go. This is how a moronic adolescent’s musical tastes grew the Hell up and expanded outwards. Of course, history does indeed have a habit of repeating itself. Apologies for the earlier censored lyric Youtube version. Seriously…shouting dong is perfectly cool, but apparently it’s unacceptable to say dick? Who determines these fucked up rules?