Monday, March 22, 2004
Cross-blogging from Outside Counsel: As Dave will tell you (because I called him up at ten o'clock last night to warn him), our patron saint was on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction show, ostensibly to introduce the newly-inducted ZZ Top. He was his usual fabulous mess, and took the opportunity to yet again remind everyone that he was the hardest partier of all time, etc.
Bill's comment on the lameness of a hall of fame for rock and roll was well-illustrated by the event itself, with creaky bastards like inductees Bob Seger and ZZ Top croaking out a couple of hits each. However, one of the inductees was Jackson Browne, who I really liked during the early 70s, with "For Everyman" and "Late For the Sky." I saw him once at the Century Theatre in 1976 (thank you Harvey Weinstein) from the fifth row, with David Lindley and all those famous LA session guys in the band, and it was great. However, after a while, he was on the radio so much, and was so anti-"punk", that I couldn't listen to him anymore. But last night, he played "The Pretender" and "Running on Empty" and both, and especially "Pretender", sounded really good.
So my thought for the night was that the big problem with a lot of the music that is now "classic rock" is NOT that it was or is weak, but that it got played to death at the time, and gets overplayed even still today, for obvious, oft-repeated and depressing reasons.
Bill's comment on the lameness of a hall of fame for rock and roll was well-illustrated by the event itself, with creaky bastards like inductees Bob Seger and ZZ Top croaking out a couple of hits each. However, one of the inductees was Jackson Browne, who I really liked during the early 70s, with "For Everyman" and "Late For the Sky." I saw him once at the Century Theatre in 1976 (thank you Harvey Weinstein) from the fifth row, with David Lindley and all those famous LA session guys in the band, and it was great. However, after a while, he was on the radio so much, and was so anti-"punk", that I couldn't listen to him anymore. But last night, he played "The Pretender" and "Running on Empty" and both, and especially "Pretender", sounded really good.
So my thought for the night was that the big problem with a lot of the music that is now "classic rock" is NOT that it was or is weak, but that it got played to death at the time, and gets overplayed even still today, for obvious, oft-repeated and depressing reasons.
