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Jerry Lee Lewis and the Death of Rock


LucSulla

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All right, I may be a tad drunk... semester is wrapping up, and I'm listening to tunes.  One thing leads to another...

A micro manifesto:

If you've never heard the Jerry Lee Lewis album Live at the Star Club from 1964, check it out.  The version of "Good Golly Miss Molly" on there might as well have been the beginning of punk rock. 

How exciting is that even, what, 55 years later?  The band is hanging on for dear life while this redneck from Louisiana hopped up on enough speed to kill a rhino is just killing.  It still translates.  

Fast forward several decades, and rock became this quantized, click-tracked, bullshit.  And bars got all scared about volume - don't want it to make anyone's ears ring.   Basically, everything that makes this special has been just sucked out of the genre.  

It became a product.  And folks wonder why it died off.  Simple - Rock 'n' Roll cannot be politically correct.  It's loud music that's supposed to make you shake your ass, get drunk, and help you take someone home and do filthy things while your ears are ringing away.   I'm not even offering that for debate - that's where rock music came from.  It's roots are a soundtrack to drinking, dancing, fighting, and fucking (excuse the f-bomb). 

All that got stripped out, and thus it has wilted on the vine.  It's not rap, kids-these-days, or any of that.  We let the greatest music-of-the-people ever created lose its soul.  

I hope someday young folks rediscover how amazing it is to get with a group of your friends and make a really loud noise all together with your hands and throat.  Feeling your jeans rattle from an E chord at 115 db the whole band just hit on is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. 
 

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Well, rock music evolved fast. Where was the time when jazz became more popular than classical music? Ever since R'n'R started in the 50's, it always changed every decade. So did social behaviour, politics, technics and everything else. Rock music is dependent on that too. Looking at the cover of that album they couldn't have been as loud as the bands that followed in later years. People in the audience still dressed up nicely. I always liked the raw power of those bands, in the 60 you could find that in bands of any genre, be it jazz, blues, funk, rock, progressive, whatever. That is what I liked about that music. I still try to keep that attitude in my playing. When I think of decades of good music, I think it is just a bit of illusion. Many of the stuff I have always listened to wasn't the radio friendly stuff. When I think of the albums that I always loved, Jeff Beck Group's Rough and Ready, Deep Purple's Made in Europe, Rainbow's Rising, Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell, those bands didn't sell out in those times, small audiences, and they only stayed together for a short time only. Now, look what the 80's had to offer, a band like Motely Crue, Twisted Sister or Guns and Roses is that considered rock attitude? Was Bon Jovi considered rock then? And how did 80's Journey w/steve Perry compare to the band's early beginnings in the 70's? Ah, lost the thread... I hope you still understand, what I mean...

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47 minutes ago, Hamer_SS_guy said:

Jeff Beck Group's Rough and Ready, Deep Purple's Made in Europe, Rainbow's Rising, Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell, those bands didn't sell out in those times, small audiences...

I think I follow you with most of what you said. You lost me with the quote above. Small audiences? These folks filled stadiums.

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41 minutes ago, gtrdaddy said:

I think I follow you with most of what you said. You lost me with the quote above. Small audiences? These folks filled stadiums.

Well, being in Europe, there weren't big stadium concerts of those groups over here in Germany in the 70's. Of those bands I mentioned, only deep Purple were big, Black Sabbath started their tour 1980 with Dio as singer here in Germany and they started playing very small locations (also playing in my hometown). Here, there was nothing like California Jam or something like that. The Star Club in Hamburg had lots of big bands in the 60's, Beatles, Hendrix, Bill Haley, Cream, Black Sabbath, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Yes, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Vanilla Fudge, Duane Eddy, Bo Diddley, Everly Brothers, Manfred Mann, Walker Brothers, Spencer Davis Group... yet it was a small club only.
 

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YES @LucSulla. +1000

I love this album for the same reasons you outline. Rock and roll the way it is supposed to be. I bet Angus & Mal we’re laying attention. A killer performance by the Killer himself backed up by the Nashville Teens (Tobacco Road) who sound just great here. Nasty guitar for the time. Albums like this inspire me when I record. 
 

This reminds me of The Pretty Things first two albums in the early 60s...nasty and raw. I will spin this on headphones today at the gym.

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Johnny Allen of the Teens played guitar and a coup,e of his solos are just on fire. No pedals existed in 1964....he simp,y cranked his amp into serious OD, which few outside of the blues genre did , and he kills it. It is so great. And the Killer is crazy on this date..,,you can hear him POUNDING the keys.

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I actually completely forgot about this, haha.  I was definitely feeling the spirit the other night.  😂

@Hamer_SS_guy - this could have just as easily been going on about Devil-era Crue or seeing Soundgarden in the early 90s.  

I think the main thread is that up until about 2000, rock was pretty much made in the same way, even heavily produced acts like Def Leppard.  In the late-90s/early-00s, things like Autotune and Beat Detective came on the scene, and I remember them coming into studios.  I never remember anyone saying, "Man, this is going to make recordings so much better."   What I do remember was people saying, "Man, this is going to make recordings so much quicker."   And what that REALLY meant was, "Man, this is going to make recordings so much cheaper."

And shit made quick on the cheap is never better than shit made right.  

I guess I get the quieter thing.  I'd guess the vast majority of rock consumers are between 30 and 70 these days and too old to not give a damn about having our ears aurally assaulted.  But I really do miss being able to crank up loud enough to actually feel the way the sound would compress when you start to clip a signal through big glass - EL34s, 6L6s, and so on.  Your pick turns into a paddle digging through a current of sound pressure waves, and you can literally feel yourself shaping each note.  The pick is like a hammer, and the string is the anvil - right there where the power tubes really start breathing fire.  All the dB makes it seem like your amp has actually cleaned up, but that's just part of the mystery of a note supercharged with all those electrons spun out in the plasma-like glow of a technology more than a century old and then exploding out of your speakers.  They just bloom out of the cabinet and into existence.

I love that shit.  How could you not?  
.

 

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2 hours ago, LucSulla said:

I guess I get the quieter thing.  I'd guess the vast majority of rock consumers are between 30 and 70 these days and too old to not give a damn about having our ears aurally assaulted.  But I really do miss being able to crank up loud enough to actually feel the way the sound would compress when you start to clip a signal through big glass - EL34s, 6L6s, and so on.  

I love that shit.  How could you not?  
 

 

Yeah, I hate volume regulations. Okay, I've been to clubs with deafening volume levels. Not just rock, dance clubs too. But wtf. Life is supposed to be lived. Going to a concert where the sound levels are to low just does not drag you in to the music. I just get irritated as I don't get that right live feel. I want the bass to rattle my bones and the lead guitar to shatter my ears.

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