8/12 Gameday Thread: Groome Day & the Drive play the flute

OK, soooo, a game thread but I'm going to go off topic a wee bit.

While in college 9/69 to 6/74, I had ummmmm Italian connections. I pretty much went to almost every concert in New England by Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, The Moody Blues and whenever I wanted, The J. Geils band who were based in upstate New York so played in the area frequently. Always, two tickets right in front of the sound mixers and complete with backstage passes. For the most part, I got to know the sound engineers, moreso than the performers who were usually swamped with groupies to deal with.

Ian was another matter. He was incredibly friendly, didn't go crazy for the groupies and didn't particularly like the media, especially the music critics. He preferred chatting with the fans so, I got to speak to him several times. One night he even came to a party at a house I was renting in Belchertown Mass.

Flash forward, 15 years or thereabouts. I was living in Southern California and Tull came to play in San Bernardino. My customer at the time was an owner of the venue they were playing at, Orange somethingorother. It happen that my step-daughter was having a (about 13) birthday pj party on one of the nights so I got permission from all the parents to take them to the concert as a surprise. I got front row tickets, backstage passes and rented a bus and off we went.

It worked out great. To start, my step-daughter was almost mortified that we were going to an old peoples show and thought nobody would be happy. The band was great but the best part was that all the girls were screaming for the drummer (The "A" album tour whoever that was). They were all talking about forming a fan club.

The girls didn't know about the back stage passes and wondered why everyone except us was exiting the other way. The backstage pass area at the Orange whatever was the loading dock where the limos were parked. Out came Ian and per usual, he avoided talking to the press and I got to chat. He remembered coming to my house several years earlier. He had seen the girls screaming for the drummer and asked which one was my step-daughter whose birthday it was. He said 'I owe you one' and went in and got the drummer. The drummer came out, chatted with the girls and gave each girl a nice hug and thanked them for being fans. When he got to my daughter he bent her over backwards and planted a huge kiss and wished her the best birthday. lol, she almost fainted. That was cool and she still remembers to this day although she did break her vow to never wash her lips again.

OK, back to besbal.

Ian cracked me up knowing his feelings about the music critics. During a live broadcast of the MTV music awards, they interviewed him after his group won MTV's first ever "Best Heavy Metal Band" award. He said "Heavy metal ? Has anyone that voted ever heard our music ?"

lol, I always say that in recent years you have to remember that the c in crap is silent.

I'm mostly a blues fan and can say that at a free concert at Boston Commons, I went to see the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. During the performance they stopped to introduce a guest and James Cotton came out and harmonica jammed with Butterfield. Again they stopped and Muddy Waters came out and three were rockin' down when they stopped one more time and Magic Dick came out and pretty much blew them all away. It was particularly amazing because Boston wasn't exactly the Mecca of the blues world.

ADD: For an inkling of how musically talented the J. Geils Band was, consider that Magic Dick's 'Wammer Jammer' was a live recording.

lol, can you do it while standing on one leg and flipping your guitar in the air between riffs. Even before the Benefit album, he'd do that for entire concerts. Never dropped the flute and never went to two legs during a song.

Other details I remember. When Hendix did indoor concerts like Boston Gardens, he brought his own sound system. Imagine Hendrix sitting in the middle of 64 Dual Showmans.

When The Moody Blues played, the audience was so into it that you could hear a pin drop during musical pauses.

When Tull did the Thick as a Brick tour, they surprised the audience by coming out dressed in while coveralls and pretended to be setting up the instruments. Then all of a sudden you would hear the beginning of Aqualung do do do do do doot.

When I saw Hendrix was before he stopped putting on stage performances. Multicolored shirts, headbands, acrobatics, behind the back playing, purple smoke for Purple Haze. Hendrix's advantage was a 13 inch handspan. Measure yours then think about that.

ADD one more: I was demoing Mastercam at a CAD/CAM trade show and met Paul? Fender. He brought the prototype of the professional base and asked if our software was capable of making a template for the head. That's easy but I surprised him when I answered yes but we'd have a better product. He one eyed me and I told him his arcs weren't tangent and it seemed to me that he'd likely get a better sound with tangent arcs. He hired me to do the templates for the pro base and professional elite models and one other that I don't remember the name of.


lol, ADD 1 more. The drummer for Iron Butterfly (and his father) were considered key physicists for the Department of Defense. So much so that when he disappeared, the gov't was convinced he was kidnapped by the Russians. He wasn't, several years later his van and body were discovered at the bottom of a ravine. That sort of blew my first assignment for DoD before it happened but that's another story.

Esplin with the platinum sombrero in his first game back.

Yeah, not all hip hop is bad, but my God most of the current crop is pretty damn awful. Obviously Kendrick is legendary and Vince Staples is also pretty damn good and you have older dudes like Killer Mike still being awesome, but huge names like Drake and even critical darlings like Chance the Rapper are pretty terrible to my ears. The Life of Pablo? That was disgusting and I dread to live in a world where one of the biggest artists alive pull out stuff about making that b**ch famous. Let's have some class, shall we? Even when Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith were writing full on sex songs, the stuff was always about that, you know, sex, not about reducing women to faceless offensive names.

Opinions and stuff, but hip hop peaked in the 90's just like Prog Rock peaked in the 70's.

Saw Jethro Tull during the Tick as a Brick tour. Probably the best big stadium type concert I ever saw. Complete with rabbits and frogmen and the works. Very under rated artists. Several solid albums start to finish.

Jay Groome is on awesome mode for quite sometime.
This organization needs an elite level prospect after Devers promotion.

I somehow missed Tull live until about 5 years ago, when they played the Bank of America Pavilion (or whatever it now is) in Boston. The bank rocked out and obviously the material was first rate. Ian Anderson's voice is half-shot now, but he has enough left to get the key moments right.

But the only reason I was there was to see opening act Procol Harum, whose lead singer, Gary Brooker, sang the old hits and a bunch of treasured album tracks better than on the recordings. The Tull crowd gave them a long standing ovation.

One of the reasons I now devote almost all of the time I used to devote to music to film instead is that there are great tools in place for me to find the films I would like but I can't find any to identify new music I'd like.

One of the top 10 shows I ever saw was Arrested Development on Peter Gabriel's world music tour with Midnight Oil and others. So I knew there's great hip-hop out there. But there's no tool that I know of that will point me at it, if I tell them I'm above all into Beethoven, Magma, The Beach Boys / Brian Wilson, Mission of Burma, Throwing Muses / Kristin Hersh, Jack Bruce solo, Procol Harum, Big Star, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, The Who, Spirit, The 13th Floor Elevators, late period John Coltrane, Randy Newman, and The Shaggs. To name 16 artists. (Admittedly, an eclectic list.)

"90% of everything is crap." -- (Theodore) Sturgeon's Law.

Self-indulgence was part of the concept of prog rock. I'm not sure how the idea of giving the musicians space to show off their chops differs from jazz. If it's good, it works.

Magma, whom most folks have never heard of, has to my ears produced the best body of "popular" music of the rock and post-rock era. Yes's music was brilliant and their lyrics were terrible. Pink Floyd, at the height of their actual prog phase (before Dark Side of the Moon), produced "Atom Hear Mother Suite," which I will go balls-to-the-wall to argue is the best long composition to come out of rock, excluding the best few Magma pieces. The live "Astronomy Domine" is amazing, too. I have musician friends whose taste I respect 100% who adore King Crimson, which I need to give a second chance to.

I differentiate between Prog Rock and Art Rock, which is musically and lyrically adventurous but largely works within song-like structures. IOW, it's prog without the intentional self-indulgence. Procol Harum and Jack Bruce were the pinnacle, the aforementioned DSOTM is another obvious one, Spirit, Tull before Thick as a Brick ... there's a lot of that stuff, and if the self-indulgence of Prog bothers you, it absolutely proves the concept that rock music can be created that has the musical sophistication of the best 20th century "classical" music. I love Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but I think Magma's Christian Vander (also their (astonishingly good) drummer and sometimes lead singer) is a better composer than either.

I dig Magma. I love King Crimson and think their first album I the Court of the Crimson King is a revolutionary masterpiece. I'm more of a fan of "art-rock" for the reasons you explained really. My problem with a lot of Prog-Rock is not that rock can't be avant garde or stray from it's conceived structure. I get bored with stuff that feels like it's main point is to show that they have chops to play jazz and classical structures. Doing that for 20 minutes loses me. At the same time, part of the greatness of Kendrick Lamar is that he has done things like infused jazz and other elements that are rarely found within the structure of hip-hop. I actually think I have some common ground with you in taste as far as that list. My Uncle used to play with Mission of Burma guys and I think they kind of played outside structure in punk or post-punk. Although do you really jam out to the Shaggs? I love their weird story and have gotten a kick out of listening to the weirdness they brought, I can't imagine anyone popping them into the car and listening to My Pal Foot Foot more than a couple times.