Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” was not my first pick for today’s comic. I originally picked War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” as the title of the song just fit. But, alas, I could not stand listening to that damn song one more time. War’s song came out in 1975 and was all over the airwaves here in Chicagoland and is one of those songs I just learned to hate because of sheer repetition. Ugh.
So, Queen got the runner up today. I’m really liking Dr. Carlin and will probably work him into the regular “supporting cast” line-up once we all return to good ol’ Lombard, Illinois here very soon.
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A little bonus today. I am a fan of early Rolling Stones’ music, particularly the line up that included Brian Jones and oft ignored keyboardist Ian Stewart. I got hooked by “Honky Tonk Woman” and picked up their greatest hits *cassette* album called “Through the Past Darkly” which is kinda a cool title just to begin with. Then, while listening late at night on my old Koss headphones, I discovered a song called “2000 Light Years From Home”. By this time (1970) I was already hooked on NASA and Science Fiction, so the song rang home for me. BUT… it also is a great example of 60s psychedelic music. Backwards piano string strikes, Mellotrons, Theremin over dubs, ethereal background vocals, and lyrics that are, well, out of this world. This song is not for everyone. So, drop some acid, sit back, wait 5 minutes and turn on this song. You’ll be out of the galaxy in no time… Enjoy!
Discussion (34) ¬
I think you’ll find that’s *Brian* Jones. ‘Brain’ Jones would be Brian in his post-swimming-pool zombie period 😛
And well done Robyn! She’s my kinda girl…
Hey, I got Mellotron, Theremin, and ethereal right! I hate those damn typos that aren’t misspellings… and yes, I was just tying into the Halloween comic with “brains” on my, well, brain.
😉
All together now: ‘I love it when an excuse comes together!’ 😉
A little relevant science fiction trivia: the Stones’ 2,000 Light Years from Home inspired the title of brilliant SF writer James Tiptree junior’s first anthology of stories, which was originally published in the early mid-’70’s (very good; I used to have a copy) as 10,000 Light Years from Home – and one might say that Tiptree and Bud had ~cough cough~ something in common…
I guess that was Robyn’s patented right hook that flattened her…….
As only Irish-Catholic rock chicks can deliver. I love the little “stars” hovering over the floor where Karen is “out” for the count.
🙂
Haha!…and that’s for ‘Jambalayer’. God, I hated it.
Btw are you now under 10 feet of snow? Just seen the pictures on BBC.
Ah, the 10 feet of snow went North of us. We had a couple inches of snow/sleet/rain/ice which was SOOOOO much fun to drive in. But now with temps hovering around 4 to 8F, it’s just brutal with the winds. Thus, the Windy City… and I live in “farm” country out here in the far suburbs and nothing slows it down too. Brutal.
How about the theme from the Courtship of Eddies Father. Ok I know I go for the obscure.
“Baaa, ba-da-ba-da-baaaa… He’s my beeest friend…” Even more obscure, they “reunited” Bixby and the “kid” some years later for some damn stupid awards show and “Eddie” was now trying to be a punk rocker. Funny as hell, as well as REALLY awkward for Bixby who had to act next to this wanna be punk-star.
🙂
More or less ackward than Mike Meyers standing next to Kanye as he went off on GW.
urmm…i actually like dr know (brandon cruz’ band)…he wasn’t a wannabe, at least not in terms of musicianship. and dr know is still going on today…
–dee!
If you want to play “2000 Light Years from Home” and don’t have acid, the next best thing is to open Celestia on your machine and go out to each distance mark sung about…
Hmmm… I Googled Celestia and the page wouldn’t come up… perhaps it’s having some sort of 60s Flashback or something…
Never did anything beyond grass myself… my mind is “warped” enough without adding “chemicals” to the mixture. I’d be one of those guys in the straight jacket running from the “snakes” in the looney-bin as they use to show us in those “anti-drug” films in Junior High School.
🙂
You can get the program SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ Definitely worth it if you have an interest in astronomy.
Which makes this program a great accompanyment as well for Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdirve”…
Or… for a simulated acid “flashback” play both songs at once. Total freak out, man! I remember late night jocks on FM stations would do that at like 2:00am as they were getting bored and wanted to see if anyone was listening…
🙂
“2000 Light Years from Home” is the first rock song I ever remember listening to. My older brother thought that as a budding math and science geek I’d enjoy it. I was maybe 5 years old at the time.
Yeah, I don’t see a 5 year old getting the song, but it does have “weird” parts that amuse a little tyke…
The thing that I think that makes this song, and other songs like it, stand out is that the group was experimenting with organic and synthesized sounds. How many “modern” musicians open up a Grand Piano and start plucking the strings? Or experimented with devices like a Theremin? No, they “sample” stuff ALREADY done and call it original. Bullshit…
Even though I was a bass player, but I pounded on a drum kit, learned to play some basic piano, learned how to play power chords on a guitar, spent HOURS experimenting with synthesizers and different sounds, learned how to splice tape to play stuff backwards. How many kids today know that they can pick up a spring reverb unit, drop it slightly on the table and achieve this marvelous explosion of sound? None in my opinion. Or do they even now what the heck a spring reverb is?
This is why music is so generic today. The creativity is gone… given way to computers and drum machines. Put away the PC/Mac and go out in the garage, set up an amp and just crank… now that’s how you learn to play music.
🙂
Heh! Their Satantic Majesties Request was one of my Dad’s favorite albums when I was growing up… which was odd, as he was a Catholic Naval officer who still insists he’s never done drugs in his life. I keep reminding him that contact highs from all the concerts he – and later we – attended would have gotten him pretty stoned by proxy, but go figure… So, yeah – I pretty much grew up on that album. It has its crappy moments, but “Light Years” is not one of them. (For that, I’d rate “Gomper,” which is truly bloody awful.) Dad has always been a Stones guy, not a Beatles guy, although we listened to both in our home. We had the original 3D cover, which I ruined as a kid by running my fingernails across it ’cause I liked the way that felt!
Although I’m not a huge fan of Lenny Kravitz, the dude agrees with you here. He proudly does everything on his albums old-school. I read an article once where he said that if a musical technology was invented after 1980 or so, he won’t use it on his albums. I suspect he employs digital recording, but the instrumentation is all ’50s-’70s vintage.
Perhaps your father differentiates between doing drugs and drugs doing him. I know I’d rather face friendly smoke than friendly fire.
I think you can largely blame certain Japanese synth manufacturers for starting the ‘everything is electronic and everything sounds alike’ decline…which thought always brings to my mind a bit from an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, in which bionic Steve has to go into some jungle to bring out the last Japanese World War 2 soldier, a hereditary samurai who’s been hiding out for decades and doesn’t realise that the war’s been over for quite some time. At the end, as the now elderly soldier is being repatriated with honour and they’re flying in to land in Tokyo, he looks down at the shining skyscrapers and looks around the cockpit at all the Japanese-made instrumentation and says to Steve Austin with wonderment and confusion, ‘Are you SURE we lost?’
There was a story in Analog in the late 80s or early 90s where a Japanese nationalist went back from the 21st century to WWII to try to save Yamamoto and change the outcome of WWII. When Yamamoto found out how history went after WWII he got into the plane that would fly him to his death because he didn’t want to change that history. “But we have to win!” the time traveler insisted. “We did win,” he replied and ordered the pilot to take off. Not sure how I’d feel about the story now, but I thought it was pretty cool at the time.
I wonder if the author – given the date you remember for the story – had seen that Six Million Dollar Man episode 😛
Hey, I do love me my Nihon electronics. And synths and samplers did make it easier for a keyboard player to travel – my early ’70s rig consisted of an flight-cased acoustic upright piano (with the sounding board removed and pickups installed, and of course a road crew to carry it), Hammond B3 with HUGE mutha Leslies, and Hohner clavi, which by the mid-’80s I’d replaced with a pair of (also flight-cased) synths that I could carry by myself – but it took me a long, long time to accept the trade-off (less realistic sounds versus a greater variety of sounds *and* total portability) and I still prefer the old-fashioned rig. And I’m soooo glad to see that sensible young rock keyboardists still go for the latter whenever they can…
I’ve never quite taken digital recording – including software packages of an orchestra-worth of samples – into my heart. I can drive it, and I’m very good at it, but there’s something far more physical and ‘immediate’ and REAL-feeling about watching those big two-inch tape reels go round and round 🙂
i agree with you tafkan … unfortunately, a lot of that gear (leslies, b3’s, moogs, etc) has just gotten to be stupidly unaffordable to the younger generation, not to mention back-breaking to have to lug around. but those pieces of gear, at this point in time, can never be completely duplicated by digital means yet. you can get pretty gosh-damned close with plugins and digital physical modeling has come VERY FAR in terms of being able to emulate how those instruments, effects and speaker cabs sound and react … but man, there ain’t nuffin’ like the real thing, baby.
i’ve compared the softsynth version of the minimoog with the real thing side-by-side (with identical knob settings on each), and its really quite amazing how close they get. that feeling in yer stomach that you get from the uber-low bass the mini can output is almost akin to motion sickness, and the plugin was pretty close in terms of both sound and that ‘ill’ feeling…
as far as the 80’s synth invasion goes, i think that some things got better (analog synths and digitally controlled analog synths for example), but proliferation of some other means of synthesis (ie FM synthesis) that wasn’t quite up to the same quality kinda ruined it imho. i dunno. i can’t completely badmouth FM synthesis because i like some of the things the DX7 can do as sad as that sounds (especially when abused/misprogrammed), but i think FM synthesis was largely responsible for synths being viewed as cheesy…
i’ve heard some amazing softsynths, but, to paraphrase what you said … nothing comes close to the real thing.
–dee!
Love the “unconsciousness stars”. You can’t be knocked out without them. 🙂
I thought stars meant pain. Damn, I gotta get me a Cartoon-English dictionary.
I thought out cold was “Tweety Birds” or “Mad Planets”.
This is the beauty of having synonymous symbols. It’s not a cartoon-English dictionary you need so much as a cartoon thesaurus.
Stars are pain? I need this dictionary too… Though, Karen IS in pain, so there you go…
🙂
Robyn’s a violent one… SHE’S the one not to mess with.
Seems Robyn hung out in trees a lot as a young girl… 🙂
Both great songs you have listed there!
I agree with you, Byron, that Queen’s “… Best Friend” if far better than War’s “Why Can’t We…” simply because of overkill. (Also, “…Best Friend was one of my wedding songs!) While I really liked War, the song was played to death here in Albuquerque where I grew up, too. Great music references! Early ‘Stones (Brian Jones era) stuff comprises the majority of my favorites by them, too, altho I also think that some of the stuff they did with Mick Taylor is some of their best as well. Also, I agree with you that the old technology – tube amps, 60’s & 70’s era effects (how many of the kids around today know what an Echoplex is?…) are the best, & while digital has made everything smaller & more portable, you’re right TAFKAN : nothing beats a Hammond B3 thru Marshall cabinets & Leslie speakers a’la Jon Lord & Ken Hensley!
Trust me, Unclemac, my honkin’ stonkin’ Leslies materially helped make Byron the man he is today 😀
As for War, IMO the definitive War song is Low Rider. It still kicks hard today, after all these years.