How dare you , Share, butting into the conversation abut early British
rock music and posting about the weather and those California bands -
like Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Young! This is just outrageous! LoL!
On 11/6/2013 6:30 PM, [email protected] wrote:
The California dreamin' scene we both liked was maybe a false dawn?
The paradisiacal image of a sunny, optimistic, carefree lifestyle that
appealed to me was given the lie by the sordid revelations of the
antics of "Papa John" Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. Turns out he
was a fully-paid-up sleazeball. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys
spent his life tormented by his personal demons and his musical vision
could take a very dark turn.
The superficial gloss of that Californian sound is probably what made
some of the other FFL posters find more satisfaction in sardonic Dylan
songs or the hard-edged Detroit scene. (Way, way too hard edged for
me. Listening to MC5 playing Kick Out the Jams has always been a
consciousness-lowering endurance test.) So the Wuthering Heights
gothic, doomed-romanticism vibe with its perverse appeal is maybe a
safer route to take. At least life won't disappoint you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI5qEQAvOcY
---In [email protected], <sharelong60@...> wrote:
Seraphita, I chuckled at your comment because I've been experiencing
exactly what you're writing about. Why? Because of the weather!
October was mostly glorious here, moderate temps, golden sunlight
pouring down day after day, gentle breezes, blue skies, the leaves on
trees bursting in crimson, peachy orange and saffron yellow. I reveled
in walking around town, drinking in all of it.
Now November is happening with rain and gusty winds, both of which
have torn hundreds of leaves from trees. The bare branches are wet and
loamy brown. I find myself drowning willingly in heavy, dark, gray
clouds that sit swollen in the sky. They have their own kind of beauty
which nourishes my soul.
I may prefer sunny skies but I also love cloudy ones. Just grateful
for that polarity, for being human, for being alive.
On Tuesday, November 5, 2013 10:26 PM, "s3raphita@..." <s3raphita@...>
wrote:
Re "And how about the California Dreamin music scene: Mamas and Papas,
Beach Boys, etc":
Yes. As a Brit they were the acts that most impressed me. They
conjured up a paradisiacal image of a sunny, optimistic, carefree
lifestyle very, very far removed from the cold, wet, repressed north
east of England where I was growing up. I'm not complaining though, as
I went to school a few miles from Haworth where Emily Brontë wrote
Wuthering Heights and that kind of doomed-romanticism vibe has a
perverse appeal of its own.
---In [email protected], <sharelong60@...> wrote:
And how about California dreamin music scene: Mamas and Papas, Beach
Boys, etc.
---In [email protected], <noozguru@...> wrote:
Before for the Beatles it was regional rock groups that were the scene
in the US. There was Northwest Rock which included the Kingsmen,
Sonics and way back the Ventures (playing their cover of a jazz tune
"Walk Don't Run"). Then the northwest do-wap groups like the
Fleetwoods (I played on a revival album they did). There was also an
east coast scene, a Chicago area scene and New Orleans scene. These
were often regional because the labels were regional without national
distribution.
Also before the Beatles let's not forget folk period which includes
The Kingston Trio, Lamplighters (I backed them up once) and other spin
offs. Those morphed into folk rock groups in the later 60s.
Regional music scenes in the US would be a lot like European country's
and their own scenes.
Romance languages didn't translate well into rock so you have the soft
muzak rock those countries created.
On 11/05/2013 10:37 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
--- In [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>, s3raphita wrote:
>
> Yep, but we were talking about British imitation rock so
> Vince Taylor and Cliff Richard are two important pioneers
> in the UK. I'm guessing one reason they never made a name
> for themselves in the States is because Americans didn't
> need second-rate copies of their own stars.
Couldn't have said it better. :-)
Plus, the music industry mechanism really wasn't in place
to allow for mass distribution of non-US acts at that time.
There was no market perceived for it, so it didn't really
exist.
BTW, you find the same thing in France, but for another
reason -- the language difference. Plus the fact that rock
sounds *terrible* in French. Rap, it can handle, but rock,
fuggedaboudit. In France, old pop stars like Francoise
Hardy are still minor goddesses, but old rockers like
Johnny Hallyday are major Gods, right up there with
Thor. :-)
> The Beatles probably made it because they came along
> after rock 'n' roll's heyday and added enough original
> touches of their own to make it more appealing than
> the saccharine-sweet pop that had by then become the
> norm.
Tell it, sista. The US pop music scene was really in its
doldrums before the Beatles. Many of the people who
had grown up on it had gravitated to folk music because
there was *energy* there, and there t'weren't none in
pop.
Then the Beatles arrived, preceded by a wave of near-
hysterical media hype. I'm honestly not sure which con-
tributed more to the Beatles' success in the US -- their
talent, or the hype. I lean to the latter. See enough TV
stories (or, in those days, movie News trailers before
your movie) of star-struck Beatles fans and your young
impressionable mind has already been pre-programmed
to love them when you see them live.
Still, it *was* a phenomenon in the US, Beatlemania.
By the time it struck, I was a full-fledged folkie, both
listening to and performing the "real music," folk
music performed by upscale white artists. :-) So they
had to drag me away from my Dylan and Baez and
the like to listen to a Beatles album. And to be honest,
I wasn't knocked out at first by the sound. Even then,
I was more fascinated by the *trend*, the fact that
so many were so gaga over them.
It took the Rolling Stones to knock my socks off. :-)
