Riders on the Storm

[mvuent]

i wish dissensus had a resident classic rock boomer. one of those old guys who write extremely detailed defenses of classic rock acts, with absolutely no use of commas or paragraph breaks over 500+ words. always talking about the band members as if they're close personal friends. one of those characters could be an interesting foil for padraig when he's talking about this stuff.

 

[forclosure]

i wish dissensus had a resident classic rock boomer. one of those old guys who write extremely detailed defenses of classic rock acts, with absolutely no use of commas or indentation over 500+ words. always talking about the band members as if they're close personal friends. i just think one of those characters could be an interesting foil for padraig when he's talking about this stuff.

A friend of mine's mums boyfriend was in a hard rock band called Incredible Hog they reformed and did some festival shows etc really eccentric guy sadly died earlier this year

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

i wish dissensus had a resident classic rock boomer

I am that guy, or as close to it as we have. the (intermittent) resident guitars head.

people here mostly only like guitars when they're weird/danceable, which I do like, but I also like em straightforward, riffs, heavy, psychedelic, etc

as far as boomer icons go, the big ones I'd ride for would be Neil Young, The Who, early Floyd (up to about Live In Pompeii), Zep within reason

Jimi is more important than "good" outside of a couple things like Machine Gun (and ofc 1983 A Merman)

the Stones are alright when they're young, before they go back to roots rock and get hella boring

the Beatles have some undeniable things ofc, tho after they retreat to the studio they're not really a guitars band, more chamber pop employing guitars

one thing the Beatles, Stones, Neil Young, VU all had that the Doors emphatically do not - genius songwriters

tbf that's not a shortcoming limited to the Doors

 

[droid]

This reminds me a little of what barty said about droids hatred of paul and linda mccartney... for someone who hates something, you certainly know alot about them.

To truly hate something you have to understand it!

Although I dont hate Paul and Linda per se, its more pity, or disappointment.

Also - Padraig - havent seen you in a while. Hope youre doing OK there fella.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I'm not the one insisting on evaluating Morrison as a poet: he was

it's in every single thing the guy ever did, a sub-10th rate Rimbaud knockoff without the a whit of the talent or the conviction

I agree 100% being a frontperson, rock or otherwise, doesn't require deep insight into the human condition

there is no cult of Reed in the same way there is a cult of Morrison, b/c Reed never tried to come across as some otherworldly figure

i.e. you'd never have caught him in a million years referring to himself as Mr Mojo Risin, let alone the Lizard King

he's difficult in the way asshole renowned Picassoid white male artists often were, albeit complicated somewhat by his queerness/attitudes/milieu

but it's not in his art the same way Morrison is in the Doors. Reed was mostly a (very good) purveyor of other (more interesting) people's stories.

and he was very, very much of this world - bitchy, canny, a working musician

whereas Morrison aspired to mythopoesis

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Also - Padraig - havent seen you in a while. Hope youre doing OK there fella.

hey droid, sorry I haven't emailed you back, I'll get around to it

yeah I'm alright, just things going on

 

[droid]

Just glad to see youre OK!

 

[thirdform]

it's people like Morrison who are the post-fascist liberal archetype. men lacking no merit required for the perpetuation of capitals cultural and sexual dominance. no girl would have fucked him if he didn't have the status, but all feminist ideals flew out of the window at that very moment for the bourgeois.

Quite odd that Bennie B didn't realise this.

Also Kerouac - an utterly vile writer, the peak dwelling on the existential purpose of life, everything conformist and conservative I despise in literature condensed and sold as revolutionary.

give me mods or soulboys any day. Speed kills, indeed. it kills nirvana, and that's great.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Far better than the MC5, who are surely one of the most (critically) overrrated bands of that era

they're admittedly a much more complicated sell than the Stooges, let alone VU

killer live act that unfortunately never came across on record

witness here, young Wayne Kramer as a stonecold killer (and Fred Sonic Smith ain't bad either)

they're also a lot more straightforward than the Stooges, who are made timeless by youthful nihilism/wall of noise/etc of the first 2 records

(Raw Power is fucking -great- don't get me wrong but if that was their only record they be vastly less renowned outside of rock dudes)

but they're important for a number reasons - really the first to employ the full power of dual guitar heavy sonic attack

the transition from garage rock to heavy guitars (or "hard rock" however you want to put it)

and at their most tranced-out - i.e. "Black to Comm" - they prefigure Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, etc - a truly great legacy of heavy psychedelic guitars

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

they were also very much unreconstructed dudes of their time, without intellectuality, fluid sexuality, weirdness, etc to smooth that out

also they're in that weird moment where rock was transitioning from the single to the album

too late for garage rock, too early for 20 minute heavy drone rock epics to be a thing anyone did/could envision on an LP (live another story)

fwiw this track by a later Fred Smith project is one of very favorite guitar things ever, amazing

literally everything about how you wish MC5 would've sounded on record

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Kerouac - an utterly vile writer, the peak dwelling on the existential purpose of life, everything conformist and conservative I despise in literature

yeah, he's the worst

another failed poet to boot

 

[Leo]

no girl would have fucked him if he didn't have the status...

wha? dude was total sex on a stick, before he got the vegas-elvis bloat, anyway. maybe not the sharpest tool in the draw but definitely f-worthy in his flowing locks and tight leather pants.

 

[entertainment]

Good rant. Forum needed a zap like that to unclog the hemoglobin.

 

[Benny Bunter]

i wish dissensus had a resident classic rock boomer. one of those old guys who write extremely detailed defenses of classic rock acts, with absolutely no use of commas or paragraph breaks over 500+ words. always talking about the band members as if they're close personal friends. one of those characters could be an interesting foil for padraig when he's talking about this stuff.

I definitely have one of these guys inside me but it's frowned upon here on dissensus, probably quite rightly.

 

[Leo]

I definitely have one of these guys inside me but it's frowned upon here on dissensus, probably quite rightly.

I've still got bad company and led zep albums. and I grew up with Aerosmith back when they were a pretty great hard rock version of the Stones, saw them at least a half-dozen times from first album through "rocks" (or maybe it was "draw the line") and still have those albums as well. "get your wings" and "toys in the attic" are still great major-label commercial rock albums, "rocks" starts getting into their excessive drug use years but still, um, rocks.

and I bought the "city slang" 7" when it came out and posted the vid in the best songs thread a few months ago. https://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=15347&page=8&p=430924#post430924

 

[Benny Bunter]

No one in the UK knows any Aerosmith songs apart from walk this way and possibly love in an elevator, me included tbh. They're like KISS or Tom Petty or Creedance or Grand Funk Railroad or someone in that way.

To me MC5 are quite like the New York Dolls in that they're 'important' and influential etc as padraig says, but don't really have any decent records to show for it.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Aerosmith is a poor man's Stones/Zep hybrid, which isn't the worst thing to be

they have a couple jams, all from the initial 70s period - Sweet Emotion, Back in the Saddle, etc. the 80s + after, trash obv.

Bad Company I wouldn't even put in the category of heavy guitars, tho 2 of the original guys were in Free which was at the heavier end of British blues rock

where I would distinguish between MC5 + the Dolls is that the MC5 have sonic as as well as cultural importance

as well as some truly transcendent moments i.e. Black to Comm (whence Spacemen 3 "Revolution" and 100 other lesser but cool things)

whereas the Dolls are important only for approach/inspiring other people, which tbf they did

they're very different contexts too - Detroit late 60s vs NYC early 70s, hippie era vs glam

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

like anyone I have my biases

I like many classic rock era things - garage rock, heavy psych, 70s hard rock, protopunk, odd bits of glam, etc - plenty of which isn't "cool" in the sense Neu! etc is

but it pretty much always has to be heavy, weird, frenetic (teenage idiot energy) or some combination thereof

one of the curses, for me, of guitars up to and thru punk is an infatuation with/wanting to recreate 50s rocknroll as some innocent golden age

the Dolls (protopunk/77 punk as sped-up Chuck Berry) and MC5 both suffer from this

but for the Dolls it's like, their whole deal, whereas for MC5 it marred their attempts to ever make a single cohesive LP

like, look at their first record - it has a cover of Chuck Berry and fucking Tutti Frutti

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

100% respect to Little Richard (RIP btw), of course, for many reasons

but 50s rocknroll is sonically for me beyond the time barrier - like, it sucks

guitars get interesting for me starting in about 1965

(this 50s infatuation btw is the curse of 2 other otherwise great 70s hard rock scenes - Australia and Japan)

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

having said that, I think a big part of what bothers me is that there are so many better and more interesting things than the Doors, for example

whether it be heavy, dark, psychedelic, deep, you're looking for

some are obscurities, sure, but not all by any means

and instead you get Break On Through and/or The End as the laziest possible shorthand for an era

also, as I've said many times - a large majority of what people think of as cool/interesting art of the 60s was actually made in the 70s

the 60s proper does have some things but things stand the test of the time are definitely in the minority

the 60s was more about breaking barriers/figuring possibilities/etc to set the stage for the first half of the 70s