Ongoing History of New Music

Building and maintaining a band is a lot like building and maintaining a sports team…you struggle and wheel-and-deal and trade and sometimes steal to put together just the right lineup…

And it’s not just sound and talent…it’s chemistry…leadership…stamina…all those intangible things that goes into making the whole greater than the sum of its parts…

The perils are the same, too…your star quarterback goes down…that guy on the second line has tons of talent but he’s a cancer in the dressing room…the person you thought was healthy and strong turns out to have some kind of issue that’s getting worse and worse…or someone just might die on you…

When everything goes pair-shaped, you have two choices: give it all up and call it a day…or you rebuild….

With a sports team, there are enough players out there that you can find a replacement…a trade, some cash, a draft pick, a free agent and you’re back in business…or maybe someone on the team steps up and unexpectedly fills that hole with talent and leadership…

The same kind of thing can happen with a band, too—but not always…when a star departs—especially a lead singer and front person—that can create a fatal vacancy that can never be filled and so the band breaks up…

Sometimes…but not always…here’s a study of groups who ended up changing their front person—and survived…

Seeing as it's the time of the year when many people explore their inner Goth, we thought we'd dig deep into the Ongoing History archieves and pull out our 2 part series on Goth.

This is the second part of out examination of the Alt-Rock scene and this time we go from mid 80's right up to today.

Goth has always had a bad rap so we're going to try to clear everything up with our deep dive. Don't worry...no one's going to get hurt.

Being a kid of a rock star isn't the easiest life to live. The celebrity, the expectations to be like your dad or mom who's a famous rock star. Everyone watching you to make a mistake. But there are times it has its rewards too.

This is a look at what it's like to be a Rock Star kid

There’s just something fun about learning to play one of your favourite songs for yourself…you know, learning the lyrics, figuring out the chords and the rhythm and deconstructing all the constituent parts…

Then you get deeper…you begin to appreciate how everything fits together, the artistic decisions made by songwriter made, what kind of musical skill is required, the sort of production that was employed all that…and by the time you’ve learned the song, you’ve learned a whole lot of other things, too…and you’re probably a better musician as a result…this is why learning to play other people’s music is so important…

Now let’s look at it from the other side…if a song can be interpreted multiple times by many different people and it still sounds good, then that is a great song…

The best compositions not only sound great when played by a full band, but also sound great when performed by one person around a campfire…

And finally, there’s the fan aspect of all this…people love to hear songs done in different ways by different artists…sometimes the cover is even better than the original—or, at the very least, is revealed to be something more in the hands of someone else…

With all this in mind, I’ve assembled a list of cover songs…and we’re going to go through with them to determine what makes them (and the original) great…

I hope you’re ready for an interesting interview with Ash and Jay from USS…because this is another one of those occasional “in their own words” profiles where I just let the artist tell their stories in whatever fashion they choose…and if listened to part one, this talk with USS was not in anyway ordinary…

When you sit down with Ash Boschultz and Jay “The Human Kebab” Parsons of USS, you end up having a conversation where you’re not sure how you arrived at this place, but there you are…so just open your mind, sit back and take it all in…

It’s part two of USS: in their own words…

If you’re a fan of a particular artist, you want to know everything you can about them…maybe you scour things like their official bios, their Wikipedia pages and maybe read through as many interviews and articles as you can…

All that is fine…but what if there’s a way to get more?....

When it comes to telling the story of an artist, it is always best if you get the artist to tell it themselves…you get the unvarnished truth, told from the heart by the people who are actually making the music…

That’s great in theory, but it’s awfully difficult to get everyone in one place at one time, what with touring schedules, recording commitments and life…but if there’s just two people, then it’s a little easier…

With a little bit of wrangling, I managed to get Ash and Jay from USS into the studio…has their story been told before?...yes, of course…but not like this…

This is USS in their own words, part 1…

I love the smell and feel of recording studios…if you’ve been inside a proper one, you’ll know what i mean…

The air is kept clean and dust-free to protect the equipment…the a/c is usually cranked up to offset the heat generated by the electronics…there’s a slight whiff of ozone created by all the electrical circuits…and it’s usually very, very quiet…loads of isolation and baffling and sound-proofing…

To me, a recording studio is the musical equivalent of an operating theatre; a place that’s dedicated to one thing and one thing only…and what goes on within the walls is deadly serious…

Okay, I’m not saying that recording a song is the same as a heart transplant or something, but there is the same sort of vibe…

There used to be dozens and dozens of these places around the planet…people would travel thousands of kilometers to work there because they were thought to be magical in some way…

But that’s when you needed a full-equipped recording studio to make a record…today, you can do a pretty good job with a laptop in your bedroom…

Many of the legendary studios are gone, a victim of the changing economics of the music industry…a few of these behemoth still exist…

This is another look at the world’s legendary recording studios, both past and present…

 

Songs in this Episode:

David Bowie - Life on Mars

Sex Pistols - Holiday in the Sun

The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony

Mumford & Sons - Believe

The Clash - The Magnificent Seven

The Black Keys - Tighten Up

The Tragically Hip - Poets

Bob Marley and the Wailers - No Woman, No Cry

It's another bonus episode and this one by request. Someone asked recently: "Have you ever done a show about alt-rocks really out-there people? I don't mean that they've done terrible things...just...they have their challenges?"

Why yes we have...about 12 years ago in fact.

This is Alt-Rocks Craziest People.

Songs used in this episode:

Iggy Pop - Real Wild Child

David Bowie - Alladin Sane

Joy Division - She's Lost Control

Killing Joke - Love Like Blood

The Verve - The Drugs Don't Work

Nivana - On A Plain

Courtney Love - Mono

The Vines - Highly Evolved

The Libertines - Up The Bracket

Pre) Thing - Faded Love

Here’s one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the English language: “psychedelic” …

The word first came into use in 1956 when a psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond was studying a new class of pharmaceuticals that had potential when it came to treating certain mental disorders…

A chemical known as lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD, for short—had been extracted by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman from a fungus called “ergot”…from 1943 on, medical professionals tried to figure out what it could be used for…it was even marketed commercially for a while under the brand name “delysid”…

Then the CIA got involved, thinking that LSD could be used for things like interrogation, chemical warfare and mind control…but that’s a whole other story...

Because the chemical resulted in people entering an altered state of perception, some started using it recreationally… artists discovered its properties and started taking acid trip, looking for inspiration and new creative roads…

Then other psychedelics went mainstream, including mescaline (which comes from the peyote plant) and psylocybin (which you get from certain mushrooms) before just about all of these drugs were made illegal…

Meanwhile, “psychedelic”—which means “soul-revealing” in Greek—became an adjective…it describes anything that could be described as mind expanding, anything that alters the way we perceive reality…

Naturally, this quickly extended to music…psych became a thing in the 60s—that sound, feel, vibe, attitude continues today with alt-rock…

This is a quick history of psych in the world of alternative music…

 

Songs used in this episode:

Kula Skaker - Tattva

The Soft Boys - Give It To The Soft Boys

Teardrop Explodes - Sleeping Gas

Echo and the Bunnymen - Bring on the Dancing Horses

Siousxie and the Banshees - Dear Prudence

Spaceman 3 - Revolution

The Bangles - Hero Takes A Fall

My Bloody Valentine - Soon

The Verve - Slide Away

Tame Impala - Elephant

When we started posting "bonus" epiosodes of the Ongoing History, lots of people began requesting topics...wondering if we had ever covered them.

With 800+ shows in the vault, there is a good chance that we have.

One request came to us from a drummer who asked "I'm sure you've done shows about singers and guitarists...but what about drummers? I play the drums and often am the butt of jokes because...well I play the drums".

Well...good thing you asked becasue in May of 2004 we paid homage to the Drummer.

And here it is...in Podcast form.