Guilty pleasure: I am a fan of the BIG DUMB ROCK. True, I love smart writers and smart music, Aimee Mann is it in my book, Leonard Cohen, Red House Painters, John Prine, Me’Shell Ndegeocello, Nick Drake get lots of play in my iTunes list, I have a huge collection of Western classical music and jazz, and I even bought and devoured the new They Might Be Giants album for science geeks. (If you laugh because these examples are not sufficiently smart/obscure/hip/geeky enough for you, please email your enlightened listening lists to me at chuck.bramlet@gmail.com. No joke.)
But sometimes only AC/DC, Priest, and The Cult will do. When the Zeppelin remasters came out, I bought the whole thing. I now have every conceivable version of Black Dog on the planet. Sometimes, on the LA freeway, you NEED this stuff cranked up just to get by. If I go overboard and start playing Neurosis while driving, we are all in trouble. Physicality and brute force can be assets.
I wanted to add to this canon. I started playing an idea for a verse. 4 chords. I started to go into a seperate chorus feel, Rich said, “Wait, stay there. Make the chorus and the verse the same.” We ended up making the entire song one pattern, changing lights and darks, like Hey Joe, Gloria, 96 Tears.
Obama was running at the time, still with all the promise of “reformer” on him. I wanted the lyrics to be a call to revolution, to enlightenment. But simple.
Next post: Recording Time To Wake Up
