Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Another way of saying it

Cow Milk Blues dropped by for a visit and a musical discussion ensued that led from Linda Ronstadt's Heart Like a Wheel album as an example of a session band that was too perfect...to Little Feat (founder wrote the song Willin') which was a better approach to bar music...to Frank Zappa who worked with the Little Feat founder)...and then to Captain Beefheart (who worked with Zappa) who should be known only to old hippies and artistic type snobs. Beefheart was an interesting cat and the part that I liked most is how he would try to describe how he wanted the music to be played... 

"Play it like a bat being dragged out of oil and it's trying to survive, but it's dying from asphyxiation."

I don't think the Italians have a single phrase like Legato or Pianissimo that would cover such a dynamic. It reminds me of Brian Wilson trying to describe to the studio musicians in his attempt to record Smile. "Play it [a trombone] like a rain drop on a Sunday morning." Not long after that he lost his marbles and the album got shelved for three decades.

Raise a glass to the artists of the world because busted pipelines in Walmart-istan are never in their agendas.


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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.