Musicians acting up is old news if you know your history. The entire concept of excess and above-the-law behavior started long before some high school dropout teased his hair or refused to get some much-needed dental work.
If you want to go to the Grandaddy of excessive, over-the top, entitlement, look no further than Johann Strauss Jr. ….
Sometimes meeting your heroes can be very disappointing. They could just be having a bad day or had a fight with their significant other or their manager, or recently received bad news about a pet project…or as is sometimes the case, they could just be an asshole.
On the other hand, some heroes exceed your expectations and then some.
Jaimie Does the Rock
I find myself at the front end of yet another re-invention of myself. When last I spoke of my day job I was driving automobiles for a subcontractor to one of Canada’s only two railroads. It wasn’t CN. The job nearly killed me. It was so labour intensive and the hours were so long that I actually don’t remember getting to or from work some days.
Bravo to those that waded into the Neil Young debate with my blog from last week. I’m still getting hate mail so clearly it hit a nerve. When Neil solves the energy crisis, world peace and how to tune a guitar, let me know. I’ll retract the entire piece. Now on to something a little more frivolous…
This week Forbes magazine released their straw poll of the Top 20 best driving songs. The list is here. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2014/01/14/journey-places-two-hits-among-best-driving-songs-list-really/
I belong to the MAC Generation. Okay, maybe not MAC (but it sounded better in the context of the Richard Hell lyric) more like the Maybelline or Yardley Slicker generation. Now Elvis may have rocked a bit of guyliner in “Love Me Tender” or “Jailhouse Rock” but it was my generation of rockers who started to sport the serious makeup. I imagine they were sick of hippies, beads and tie-dye and wanted to, as Alice Cooper once quipped “to drive a stake through the love generation”. Alice, Iggy, The New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Kiss and scores of others brought the glam to rock. A decade or so later “hair bands” from the west coast would, with a healthy spray of Aqua Net, redefine the look and claim it as their own.
This week a meme went viral on Facebook of a poll asking readers to identify the number of albums they owned from a random list of 100 ‘Most Influential Albums of All Time’. In the end it was discovered that this was nothing but a front for an app that hijacked Facebook user personal info. However, the debate about the validity of the list itself remained. Music, like all artistic disciplines, is in the ears of the beholder. I expect that had I actually taken the quiz there would have been little commonality between the contents of my personal collection and the ones deemed ‘most influential’.
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Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 