i love led zeppelin

Fuck yeah buddy, they were brilliant. There’s a perfect chemistry between those four dudes. With Led Zep, Jimi, the Stones and Sabbath the late 60s and early-mid 70s kicked the most ass in rock history.

Also, I consider Whole Lotta Love one of the most romantic songs of all time.

“Gonna give you every inch of my love …”

Bing is a little closer to my position on Zepplin. They happened, and I don’t really dislike them, but I don’t care for them at all either. Most of the 60s and 70s rock is what I don’t like. There is some from the mid to late 70s that I like… but not most. I like when rock got harder and just generally tougher sounding. BTW: I can’t listen to Hendrix, I think he’s very overrated.

I’m more of an AC/DC, Van Halen, Sabbath/Post Sabbath Ozzy kinda rock fan.

@rob 45225 wrote:

Something, Something, Something, Chicken and Monkeys.

Well said.

Look at Bucho trying to give the artist’s lecture on music and music legends…

Like everyone who gets massive credit for their huge influence on change, you have to also concede that a ton of this is timing. You can’t influence anyone if nobody is ready to listen. Rock music was going through changes already, and Jimi neither started nor completed these changes. He’s iconic in that people can pick him out and attribute some sounds and techniques to him and his style -which by the way is what I don’t care for. Obviously we have to give him a ton of credit for showmanship, something that was really just emerging as we see it today, during the time that he was famous for it.

If you take all of the modern guitar players and put them in a room now… then erase 70% of them, people would elevate not only Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani to world iconic status (though they are among the greats already, they aren’t casual conversation legends for not music lovers) but it would rope in the Slash’s, Mark Knopfler’s, Tom Morello’s and Carlos Santa’s quite obviously as well. I’m not saying these guys are not world-class famous for playing… I’m saying that if the pool were smaller, they’d be pop culture legends.

Timing, competition and dumb fucking luck often play just as big a role in success, and status as talent does. Even with the so-called greats. For me, Jimi Hendrix is Elvis. -And by the way, I feel exactly the same as the Lark about the “King” and the Beatles as well.

Elvis was the King because nobody else was. Jimi, Elvis nor the boys across the pond could break through the white noise if they were forced to compete with the pool of talent available today (let’s leave the studio processed folks out for discussion sake), or if you remove them from the music ‘revolution’ they were a part of. In all three cases, they neither started, embodied or completed the trends they were a part of. In all three cases, history tries to give them credit for all three.

Just my $0.02.

What the hell is a Juatin Bier?

@Version3 45230 wrote:

Like everyone who gets massive credit for their huge influence on change, you have to also concede that a ton of this is timing. You can’t influence anyone if nobody is ready to listen. Rock music was going through changes already, and Jimi neither started nor completed these changes. He’s iconic in that people can pick him out and attribute some sounds and techniques to him and his style -which by the way is what I don’t care for. Obviously we have to give him a ton of credit for showmanship, something that was really just emerging as we see it today, during the time that he was famous for it.

If you take all of the modern guitar players and put them in a room now… then erase 70% of them, people would elevate not only Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani to world iconic status (though they are among the greats already, they aren’t casual conversation legends for not music lovers) but it would rope in the Slash’s, Mark Knopfler’s, Tom Morello’s and Carlos Santa’s quite obviously as well. I’m not saying these guys are not world-class famous for playing… I’m saying that if the pool were smaller, they’d be pop culture legends.

Timing, competition and dumb fucking luck often play just as big a role in success, and status as talent does. Even with the so-called greats. For me, Jimi Hendrix is Elvis. -And by the way, I feel exactly the same as the Lark about the “King” and the Beatles as well.

Elvis was the King because nobody else was. Jimi, Elvis nor the boys across the pond could break through the white noise if they were forced to compete with the pool of talent available today (let’s leave the studio processed folks out for discussion sake), or if you remove them from the music ‘revolution’ they were a part of. In all three cases, they neither started, embodied or completed the trends they were a part of. In all three cases, history tries to give them credit for all three.

Just my $0.02.

Now you made me change my mind about what I wrote before. You should enjoy his music.

No, but as for doing the mental “what if” experiment you’re talking about and changing the sizes of pools and volumes of pop culture white noises and all that malarky, I can’t say one way or the other. Maybe if the world’s population in the 60s was the same as it is today then Hendrix would have been beaten to the punch by some other freakish talent. Maybe not.

All I know is what the people who were around at the time said about what happened. Of course the major changes were already in motion, and of course they continued after Hendrix checked out. Nobody says otherwise. But what that particular dude brought to the party was a fire and inventiveness they’d never seen before, and he changed the way everybody thought about and related to the electric guitar in a way nobody else did before or has done since. His showmanship was part of it, but in that time where it was much harder for a mass audience to see a musician, his sound was a much bigger part.

For more in my lecture series check out my spiel on how Rosario Dawson is in fact the sexiest woman on the planet, as well as my famous argument for how Oprah Winfrey is the smartest and most talented human being who has ever walked the Earth.

@Larkitect 45231 wrote:

a big reason i like jimi so much (and stevie ray vaughan and b.b. king) is because i love to watch them play. therefore i’ll concede to bryan that a lot of the “great” guitar players have a knack for showmanship that elevates their actual music talent. even though they’ve played their whole life there is only so much you can do when you haven’t had any music theory education.

It depends what you listen to music for. Do you want to be amazed by physical feats, or do you want to hear truth being channeled through audio? Yngwie Malmsteen seems like a “better” musician than BB King because he can perform physical techniques that King can’t and has studied a lot of theory that King hasn’t. But music isn’t a purely physical or mental thing, like masturbation, it’s an emotional one, like fucking. And trying to escape from genetically manipulated sharks.

When I listen to a lot of guitar “virtuosos” it’s like watching super talented acrobats in the circus, or like an amazingly fast sprinter or racing car driver. It’s fun in that it’s about amazing and entertaining the audience with physical feats, but there’s almost always very little beyond that. Music is art, so its primary function is to engage the emotions. A fancypants speed jockey like Malmsteen may be a faster, more dextrous guitar player than an old blues warhorse like BB King, but whether or not he’s a better musician in the truest sense is in the eye of the beholder.

There’s a tendency to look at the likes of King and SRV as “limited” musicians because they only really played with blues and jazz type styles. The way I’ve always felt about it is that those guys didn’t need to play in other styles they weren’t interested in because those styles didn’t move them and they were so adept at using blues and jazz phrasings to express themselves. Many, many guitarists can play blues and jazz physically, but very, very few can play them in a way that feels like flying.

You can’t learn what makes great music great sitting in your bedroom playing repetitious scales or studying in books. It’s in a motherfucker’s soul.