Musical Story

I don't really have a topic type for this article, but I had to write this for a class and its very music related and its good to be reminded sometimes what music is all about.

By the way, in case I actually have any regular readers, leave a comment and let me know what you think. If you have any general suggestions or things you would like to see, or just to say you like what I write or maybe that I suck, whatever you want. While I'm not really doing this for money or attention or anything, its nice to know that people are reading, so let me know.

Alright heres the article finally:

Everyone, whether they know it or not, has a musical story to tell, one that has helped define their musical tastes and feelings. It could be a person that has influenced you or maybe a concert that you will remember forever, or simply a song that touched you with its melody or message. One of the best musical experiences I have ever had happened over two days at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival in Grant Park.
For those that do not know, Lollapalooza is a three day music festival that happens every summer in Chicago. Seven stages are set up and groups play on the different stages from 11 AM to 10 PM, the idea being to walk around and see the bands you like when they happen to be playing. I highly recommend going if you have the chance.
After hearing how much fun all my friends had Friday night at the show, I decided to go see what all the fuss was about. After spending $80 dollars for the one-day ticket, I was expecting something great. I was not disappointed.
I consider Saturday my ‘New Music Discovery Day.’ I saw bands like Cold War Kids, The Hold Steady, and Muse that I either did not know or was vaguely familiar with play amazing shows that made me fall in love with them instantly. There is something about seeing a band play live that makes the music really come alive. It gets your blood pumping, your heart racing, and before you know it you’re jumping up and down yelling every word. There really isn’t anything like it. But music can also amplify more than just feelings about the chords being played or the words being sung. When shared between two people, music can create an atmosphere of perfect harmony and the feeling that you are the only two people on earth despite being surrounded by thousands of screaming fans.
I was fortunate enough to have this experience Sunday. After getting the opportunity to see two of my favorite bands up close and personal, I thought I may never be happier in my entire life. Then I met up with a girl who is a good friend of mine in time for Pearl Jam to play the last show of the festival, and I proved myself wrong. While neither of us are big Pearl Jam fans, the music combined with the magic of Chicago at night flipped a switch in both of us, sending us into an alternate dimension where time and space had no bearing on either of us, all that mattered was that we were together, floating along in a sea of our own feelings for each other, letting them and the music engulf us. It was a sense of calm despite being encompassed by chaos.
And as we walked out together, the magic of music and how it can affect people hit me square in the face. I realized that despite all of the problems I was having in various facets of my life, I had never been happier. It was like a vacation from real life that had completely washed away all my depressing thoughts and innermost fears, and as I thought about it more, I realized that music was the only thing that has ever had that sort of effect on me, and looking at the other people filing out of the show, I was sure I was not alone.
H.A. Overstreet once said, “I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.” I cannot even begin to explain why this is, and I think as a society we will never be able to. But one thing remains true: no matter what happens to you or me or any of us, music will always have the power to bring people together and express what words cannot.

-Kid Zeppelin

You Like This Band, You Just Don't Know It Yet: The Hold Steady

“I've said a number of times that people think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul. What we're doing is more cinematic. No one goes up to Quentin Tarantino and goes, "You must shoot a lot of people. You must do karate all the time." And yet, I think in the context of what we do in rock, there is this expectation that it's somewhat autobiographical. These things haven't happened to me, but they're stories of things I've been around that I package in characters.”

-Craig Finn (Pitchfork)

One of the fastest rising bands in the music scene right now, the Hold Steady are bringing back no-frills rock n’ roll and everything that music should be about. The Brooklyn-based band (though 4 of the 5 members are from Minneapolis) is a hard-rocking, endlessly touring, group of normal looking guys with one of the best live shows on the planet, doing it without fancy lighting techniques or pyrotechnics like a lot of bands do. Their local bar-band style highlighted with frontman Craig Finn’s story-telling, talk-sing lyrical style makes you want to bust out the air guitar and start riffing while singing along to the easily understandable lyrics.

The band started because another ended. Craig Finn and lead guitarist Tad Kubler are both former members of the group Lifter Puller, which was very popular in the Minneapolis area, but did not have many fans elsewhere. The band broke up because, as Finn says, “We set out to play shows and make records and we felt like we had accomplished that. At the time I really felt that it had reached its maximum potential. I may have been wrong about that. (Indieworkshop)” After the breakup, the band members went their separate ways, with Kubler going to Los Angeles and Finn to Brooklyn. After a couple of years they reconnected, by way of Finn inviting Kubler to play some filler music with him in between comedy sets his friends were doing. The band simply grew from there, “That's kind of how the Hold Steady grew, focusing more on writing good songs than on how we wanted to appear to people, what scene we wanted to be a part of. (Pitchfork)”

Quickly Finn and Kubler found more pieces to the Hold Steady puzzle, adding former auto mechanic Bobby Drake on drums, Franz Nicolay on keyboard, and Galen Polivka on bass, completing an odd-looking rock band. Nicolay could win a Groucho Marx look-alike contest, especially at Lollapalooza in 2007 when he came out in a suit and bowtie. Polivka seems like he would be more at home teaching kindergarten, and Drake just seems too quiet and nice to fit the rock star mold. But the oddest two are Finn and Kubler. With both wearing thick-rimmed glasses and neither in the best shape, they look more like the guys you would expect fixing your computer than up on stage blowing you away with explosive guitar riffs and lyrics any teenager could relate to on a personal level.

Finn’s lyrics and his talk-sing style are what make this band stand out from other hard rock groups. Finn clearly isn’t the best singer to grace the rock n’ roll landscape, but he more than compensates for it with what he is saying. The songs tell stories of teenage abuse of alcohol, sex, and drugs, usually revolving around central characters. But while a lot of times rock glorifies the party lifestyle, these lyrics show a different side of the story, “I’ve known people who have had drug and alcohol problems and I don’t think its funny. I don’t think it’s something to be glorified. It’s just a story I’m telling… I think the people who are really paying attention realize that. I can tell you that the people who are fucked up the most are singing those lines the loudest. There’s a bit of an irony there. (Aversion)” The stories and characters portrayed are people or at least bits of people we’ve all known in our lives, and its weird to think that a band whose lyrics generally deal with the downsides of drugs and alcohol could be up onstage rocking out to largely drunk audiences, even having a beer or two themselves while playing.

But there they are, dishing out pure head-banging bliss with all the pure joy and excitement that seems to be missing from the music scene in this day and age of greedy record labels and shallow MTV manufactured fame. The Hold Steady represents everything that music should be about, the music and the joy it can bring to the masses. They’re not out there preaching that we should all be sober or that we should all get drunk and high as hell. They aren’t out there for money or fame or groupies. They simply love playing music, and it comes out in every show they play, “Last year we said this was the most fun we’ve ever had before 3 PM. I think this is the most fun we’ve ever had.” I heard them say that at Lollapalooza this year, and as I watched at the end of their show as Polivka jumped on top of the bass drum and started banging relentlessly on the drum set, and Finn and Nicolay jumped off the stage to give high fives to the front row, I realized that any band can say something like that, but not many can truly show it like The Hold Steady do. That is what truly makes them the greatest rock band around.

-Kid Zeppelin

Website:

http://www.theholdsteady.com/

Line up:

• Bobby Drake – drums
• Craig Finn – guitar, vocals
• Tad Kubler – lead guitar
• Franz Nicolay– keyboards, accordian, harmonica
• Galen Polivka – bass guitar

Albums:

• Almost Killed Me (2004)
• Separation Sunday (2005)
• Live at Lollapalooza 2006: The Hold Steady (2006)
• Boys And Girls In America (2006)

The band also just announced new tour dates with Art Brut:

http://www.theholdsteady.com/shows.php

References:

Pitchfork: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/14668-interview-the-hold-steady

Indieworkshop: http://www.indieworkshop.com/interviews.php?id=18

Aversion: http://www.aversion.com/bands/interviews.cfm?f_id=232

When I'm Sixty-Four: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

"Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out."

-Timothy Leary

The hippie counterculture was in full swing in the 1960’s San Francisco, with young people from all over America coming to join the movement. Bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and most notably, The Grateful Dead, fueled the music scene and aided in the entertainment of the “Acid Tests” put on by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, where they would have large parties with everyone taking LSD. The idea was to see what would happen when people took the drug in a situation with no rules or boundaries. However as the government began to view the hippies as only druggies and trouble makers the laws became stricter, including the illegalization of LSD in October of 1966. This new pressure brought on the need for advocates of LSD and the counterculture to come to the forefront.

Timothy Leary was one of those advocates. He was a psychology professor at Harvard, until he tried psilocybin mushrooms and became so obsessed with psychedelics that he was dismissed for giving them to students through his experiments and other activities, though the official reason was he wasn’t giving his class lectures (1). He continued to experiment with LSD and its effects on others, and became extremely popular among the counter culture movement, participating in numerous gatherings such as the Human Be-In in San Francisco.

He argued that LSD helped open up the mind to new experiences and ideas and helped people have deep religious and personal awakenings, and conducted numerous studies and experiments on anyone willing to participate, including clergymen. However with all the government resistance to LSD and the hippie movement at large, he needed a catchy phrase to help popularize the movement, and he came up with “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.”

The saying was meant to urge people to join the counter culture and tune into their inner selves. He explains it in his autobiography Flashbacks:

"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'(2)"

The reason I use this as the title of my blog has nothing to do with drugs or getting in touch with your inner self, but rather getting in touch with your musical self and in touch with music you may not have heard of, old and new. For my purposes, Turn On means get involved with music and the music scene, Tune In means find your kind of music and new stuff you haven’t heard yet, and Drop Out means rid yourself of MTV and over-hyped “popular” music and find the real music that still exists under the surface.

As the idea behind these history posts is for you to learn something, I hope you did just that, and hopefully learned something new about this blog and its author. And remember to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out.

-Kid Zeppelin

Cited Sources:

1. http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/leary_timothy/
2. Leary, Timothy F. Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1983. 2 Aug. 2007.