A Question & Suggestion: Why Can't All Guitar Bands Sound Like The Ventures Live In Japan 1965?
I mean, I'm not saying by law. Just yet. And yes of course I love the glut of modern pop listening but with TIME TIGHT I am ALWAYS looking for ways of fascistically, with pointless doctrinairianism, reducing the cannon. BUT I’m partly serious.
Just fucking watch THIS.
MAN OH MAN THAT SOUND. Precise, heavy, just at the edge of distortion, bass right up in the mix but also basslines that have their own trebly melodic undertow to them, drums that snap hard yet roll with a brittle funk, and fuck me the guitar playing c’est INCROIABLE. No need for any phallocentric manouevres, in fact the band barely move at all. Just calm measured precision, a devestatingly executed sense of endless melody, enough mutual understanding and intuition to suck in every single unforced error and let it join the throb, the churn, the hit, the fix. The Ventures, in 1965 in Japan. What’s been better guitar music since?
(Precision and melody is tbh all I can stomach from white men in pop now. Excess, effects? Should only be accessible to women and minorities and Primitive Man ie. those who are not done with them yet. White guys are DONE with rock n roll - pretty much were by about 1980 - I see the final white rock and roll statements as being Motorhead’s ‘Overkill’ LP and that first Damned album - and should be ushered away from it, they have nothing new to add just different filtration-techniques enacted on the same bile n testosterone).
In idle moments I fantasise about being some kind of Tsar of pop, being able to lay down unbreakable laws that all musical artists must abide to. Of course, music is about freedom, it’s also about constraint and discipline and the freedom at the heart of great pop’s message to your soul and body absolutely depends upon limitations, confinements, and what can be squeezed out within those confines. This is the stuff that makes pop a billion times more interesting always than more self-consciously outre/ ‘challenging’ (ugh what a hateful thing to want your sound to be) music.
I still think that all pop could do with a year in which bands and artists are only allowed to put out ONE song, of less than five-minute duration. That’d sort out the wheat from the chaff, the self-indulgent from the self-inflammatory, those able to use consicion to focus their discipline, distinguish those able to make pop from those merely able to make music. At this point I also think three simple rules for guitarists should be instituted for at least a year.
No pedals. Pedals cannot fill the void where your imagination should be. How many times have you been waiting for a gig and seen a roadie or guitarist heft an enormous coffin of pedals on stage. What does that say? “Nothing of interest will ensue here - only a tour around the boutique electronics I have been able to afford”. Otoboke Beaver don’t need this shit, and I suspect OB are the only rock n roll band right now who might understand why the Ventures are so great.
No capos. Capos is cheating. You cheat.
White male musicians to hand in their electric guitars unless they can prove they are Vini Reilly or Mat Ball or a member of Primitive Man.
Until these laws can be enacted I periodically just keep checking in on the Ventures 1965 live in Japan. A standard set there that I don’t see (m)any bands getting remotely close to in 2022 bar the aforementioned Otoboke Beaver. All hail.
Dear Substack members,
I'm inviting you to visit my page and the last review I have uploaded recently. I'm going to do more reviews on a regular basis :)
Thank you in advance!
Jaroslav
https://jaroslavnovosyolov.substack.com/p/-?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
aint better than Jerry Lee Live at Hamburg