Orkie

This discussion is interesting and all, but it truly is the first time I have heard anyone stake out the position that Gilmore is not a great guitarist.

No kidding.

as John Smith stated, this is the first I have heard of anyone stating that David Gilmore isn't one of the greatest of all time.. Therefore as far as I'm concerned he belongs on the list.

Yes, very strange. Fender even had a huge poll for their 60th anniversary and he was rated #1 all time.

Calling my crazy is off-topic (and frankly old news)!

 

2-4 are all done with effects or in the studio. #4 is a preset on my Pod board (plugging a mic into it is fun for tape loopy goodness).

Well there wasn't a pod board in the 60's and 70's, was there?

Also, as for "in the studio only":

That example showcases Gilmour's otherworldly string effect (from about 5:45 on) and his experimental use of effects on a live platform.

He takes the tools and does some amazing things with it. You're convinced and I understand that. Anything I've heard him do acoustically is pretty elementary.

Acoustic *should* sound elementary or you end up sounding like a douchebag head bopping picker who plays at the entrances of Dave Matthews concerts for tips. Less is more. I take it you have never heard "A Pillow of Winds" or "Fearless" from Meddle?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n33j2b3cLE0

I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth after reading this...

 

The guy has so much feeling, soul, emotion in his playing that no one else can match.. He may like to bend notes, but no one can bend notes and make them sound like David Gilmore... He's one of the few players in the world that you can identify by only hearing a few notes.

Yeah absolutely crazy. Gilmour is known for quite a few distinct styles too.

I feel what you're saying but I debate whether the feeling, soul, emotion would have an outlet without the volume and sustain it brings, and the effects that give the limited depth of style some variation.

 

EDIT: Oh, and go brush your teeth!

Limited depth? Gilmour is known for several major sounds, more so than most other guitarists.

:

1. Obviously his amazing solo ability - the best ever in the business other than Hendrix, Garcia and Betts.

2. His incredible steel guitar playing - he crafted that device into a giant wall of sound. See "One of These Days"

3. An otherworldly string effect which he had passed to him by Syd Barrett and which was copied numerous times.

4. The staccato guitar sound which was later picked up by U2. See "Run Like Hell" and the re-emergence portion of "Echoes".

When you then factor in Gilmour's ability to craft a vocal melody, well........

Gilmour aslo finished #1 in the Fender Greatest Players poll, which had a huge sample size.

David Gilmour

Jimi Hendrix

Jimmy Page

Syd Barrett

Jeff Beck

Jerry Garcia

Keith Richards

Bo Diddley

Eddie Van Halen

Angus Young

Robert Johnson

Chuck Berry

Robert Fripp

Dickey Betts

Neil Young

Joe Walsh

Scratch the city theme since most of the driving will be out of it.

Recs:

Blonde on Blonde - Dylan

In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson

Trace - Son Volt

The Soft Bulletin - Flaming Lips

Hollywood Town Hall - The Jayhawks

Abbey Road - The Beatles

Our Mother the Mountain - Townes Van Zandt

Meddle - Pink Floyd

I Feel Alright - Steve Earle

The Dirty South - The Drive By Truckers

Sea Change - Beck

If You're Feeling Sinister - Belle and Sebastian

Cosmo's Factory - CCR

American Beauty - The Grateful Dead

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Ennio Morricone

Felice Brothers - The Felice Brothers

YS - Joanna Newsom

Songs III Bird on the Water - Marissa Nadler

Blueberry Boat - The Fiery Furnaces

Revelator - Gillian Welch

Sumday - Grandaddy

Boys and Girls in America - The Hold Steady

Houses of the Holy - Led Zeppelin

Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts - M83

Sticky Fingers - The Rolling stones

Decade - Neil Young

Mono - You Are There

It's a Wonderful Life - Sparklehorse

The Mollusk - Ween

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

A tried and true list(of course I'm leaving a ton out). Also, grab anything you can from the Art Bell paranormal themed radio show(lots of programs on torrent). Fantastic to listen to while driving those lonely roads at night.....

Yeah I still think Okemah is a touch better than this overall. But this might havea stronger set of around 3-4 songs.

Bandages and Scars is IMHO classic Son Volt.

American Central Dust is pretty amazing, no question. The song about Keith Richards snorting his dad's ashes with cocaine is shockingly good.

There's no one reading this that knows what that means.

You've contributed absolutely nothing at all to this conversation. Perhaps on this subject matter, you should type less and read more.

I see your point, and actually, the music I listen to the most comes from that time period. I just don't think it's necessary to push the drug issue. I would like to think it was more than that - as a lot of things were going down at the time.

I completely agree.

On the other hand, it's foolish for a few here who have never listened to psych records on psych "drugs"(I put that in quotes because mushrooms are now used to get people off of real drugs like cocaine and heroin)

to say that it's "stupid". It's like someone who has never been to Madison Wisconsin telling you how to get to the capitol building, and then reviewing the experience. They should really read more and type less in this specific instance.

And also - we are talking about a very talented group of people, spread over several bands, so something must be said for talent and natural creativity.

Absolutely. A mediocre artist who takes drugs and goes into the studio will mostly likely make a mediocre album. You still have to be able to write really good songs regardless of any other influencing factors.

I'd love to see your list of all the albums made while artists were on hallucinogens and specifically designed for listeners on hallucinogens.

Almost all of the great rock albums of the late 60's were influenced by LSD.

http://home.att.net/~chuckayoub/the_beatles_biography.html

In early 1965, Lennon and Harrison were dosed with LSD by their dentist. In the ensuing years, the Beatles met with psychedelic counterculture icon Timothy Leary, experimented extensively with LSD and released two heavily LSD-influenced albums, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Jefferson Airplane, John Lennon, Country Joe, The Grateful Dead were among others who wrote songs while on LSD.

You're an idiot. That's about all I gained from reading this.

That is just your hostile reaction to your own insecurities which stem from your lack of experience on this subject matter.

How LSD rocked the world:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...rld-818714.html

Music

The combination of flower power and hallucinogenic drugs in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 was as potent as gunpowder and matches. Rockers who'd tried the big blotting-paper experience strove to replicate it in performances that were floaty, spacey, woozy and seemingly without beginning or end. The result was called acid rock: it was supposed to suggest the album had been recorded by a band in the grip of LSD, and was to be listened to by fans similarly stimulated. Lyrics were often minimal, and the sound often relied on randomly wacky special effects, complemented, during live shows, by a light show of wiggly patterns playing against a wall.

The Grateful Dead, from San Francisco's Bay Area, were the key US acid rock band; their leader, Jerry Garcia, a portly figure with a prodigious beard, could spin out the solo on "Dark Star" for 25 minutes. Jefferson Airplane also hailed from San Francisco and defined acid rock in 1967 with their album, Surrealistic Pillow. It featured "White Rabbit," which sneakily refers to the apparent drug consumption in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and ends on the line: "Remember what the Dormouse said: Feed your head, Feed your head." Elsewhere The Doors drew their name from Aldous Huxley's book, and their leader Jim Morrison sang "The End" and "Riders on the Storm" in a blurry, reflective drone, like one intensely drugged.

In the UK, 1967 was the year of The Beatles' masterpiece, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose early highlight was an hallucinogenic vision of tangerine trees and marmalade skies called "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The capitalised letters seemed a dead giveaway, but Paul McCartney always denied it was a song about LSD. He later revealed that he'd tried the hallucinogenic, and is thought to be the person who first introduced it to Bob Dylan. The pre-eminent UK acid band was Pink Floyd in the days of Syd Barrett and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Their song titles took their cue from space travel – "Astronomy Domine", "Interstellar Overdrive" – as did the Rolling Stones in their single burst of psychedelia, "2000 Light Years From Home".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_rock

Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture, or attempts to replicate the mind-altering experiences of hallucinogenic drugs.[1] It emerged during the mid 1960s among garage and folk rock bands in Britain and the United States. Psychedelic rock bridged the transition from early blues-based rock to progressive rock, art rock, experimental rock and heavy metal; and also drew on non-Western sources such as Indian music's ragas and sitars.

And a big time "must watch" for more understanding on this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO6zOZHpPkk

Cream was a blues band. They jammed, they got 'jazzy', but they weren't "trippy".

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&a...10:kifwxqe5ldde

Cream teamed up with producer Felix Pappalardi for their second album, Disraeli Gears, a move that helped push the power trio toward psychedelia and also helped give the album a thematic coherence missing from the debut. This, of course, means that Disraeli Gears gets further away from the pure blues improvisatory troupe they were intended to be, but it does get them to be who they truly are: a massive, innovative power trio. The blues still courses throughout Disraeli Gears

Nevermind, this is even sillier.

You perceive it as "silly" because that's your emotionally defensive reaction to not experiencing or properly understanding that particular topic.

I am just saying I don't think one needs to take drugs to enjoy the music. If the only way one can enjoy something is in an altered state, it may be time to re-think what you are doing.

While I agree that you shouldn't need drugs to enjoy music, my personal feelings have no relevance to the fact that psychedelic music was created while on LSD and for those using LSD. That's a fact that can't be disputed. And, based on my experience and many others, great psychedelic records are far, far superior to listen to while on mushrooms or LSD. What the truly great bands were able to do is make records that were both brilliant stone cold sober, and brilliant under the use of "enhancement"(and I'm not talking about pot. That makes any music sound better). The bottom line is that if you listen to psych records sober, you are not getting the full intended effect that was built into the record, kind of like buying a large HDTV and not ordering the HD package from your cable provider. That doesn't mean that the shows or games still aren't great, it's just not the full enchilada.

Do you think Roger was setting around eating acid when he made Dark Side of The Moon? I am not the Pink Floyd scholar you are, but I would be surprised if he was doing such things. He is too much of a control freak to do that, I would think.

No, he was just stoned out of his mind. But what Roger learned, he learned from Syd Barrett (so did all art rock acts). Waters learned to make trippy, "out there" music. By the time Dark Side came around, it was just what they were good at and what came out of them after their great 60's psych pioneering. So in effect, their entire output was based on their experimentation early on, and it's why they wrote one of the greatest psych records of all time in "Wish You Were Here", and dedicated to their founder, Syd Barrett.

And I don't think American Beauty or Workingman's Dead would fall under the category of psychedelic music - far from it.

It's the Dead's own unique brand of it, this sort of folksy, cosmic Americana style. The interplay and mixing are key reasons why it's often classified as such. I have heard the album sober and on mushrooms, and I can tell you it's as good as most psych albums in that regard. For example, on "Ripple", there's just much more going on than meets the eye. Guitars are phased in and out, there's little licks popping up all over the stereo field, a bouncy Sgt. Peppers kind of beat bobs along - with Jerry's voice is locked right in the center as all this swirls around that focal point.

That's one of the dumbest statements I've ever read.

Your terse, emotional attack response indicates you really haven't experienced this either.

Psychedelic records were crafted by people who were tripping, *for* people who were tripping. Other music does not sound nearly as good under that influence. There are certain patterns, sounds, chord changes and effects that create a magical psychedelic experience that other records do not deliver. Had you experienced this,. you would understand that taking psychedelics to Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Stone Temple Pilots Greatest Hits are very far apart in terms of quality while under the influence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_music

Psychedelic rock evolved in the 60s as an offshoot of the rock and roll movement combining elements of rock, electronic music, eastern influences, and other diverse elements. Inspired by the use of mind altering drugs like cannabis, mescaline, psilocybin, and especially LSD, psychedelic rock broke with traditional rock and laid the roots for krautrock and experimental rock genres of the eighties and nineties. In 1965-1967, The Beatles also were recording psychedelic rock with tracks like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" to name a few, but were not strictly classified as psychedelic rock. Cream and Pink Floyd (with original founder Syd Barrett) embraced psychedelic music fully becoming two of the first truly psychedelic bands.

Psychedelic music could also be interpreted as simply a "surreal and dreamy feeling" in a particular song, instead of a specific genre with rules to follow. In some cases, this simply requires writing one coherent song, then to experiment recording that song in the studio while under "psychedelic influence", yielding very surreal musical results. A classic example of this method is "Bass Strings", by Country Joe And The Fish. This early track, written and recorded by Country Joe and the rest of his band in 1966, was obviously an upbeat, hasty, and offensive song of protest in a raw jug band influenced style. In 1967, this song changed dramatically, not to meet more contemporary commercial standards, but rather to re-record it as an experimental track while under the influence of LSD. The new psychedelic result was clearly self-evident in Country Joe's first studio album ("Electric Music for the Mind and Body") when "Bass Strings" featured a much slower tempo, delayed vocals, added reverb, studio reversed cymbals, electric organ, desert traveler lyrics, and a continuous blues guitar solo which together make this song a very, in the true sense of the word, "psychedelic" track.[/i]

I've been listening to that music since I was a kid, and I never call it psychedelic music, or classic rock, for that matter. Some of what you are saying sounds like bullshit to me. And don't give me a lecture about drugs.

It sounds like "bullshit" to you because that's your quick emotional reaction to an aspect of that music you've never fully understood or experienced.

the dead are folk/bluegrass-based, definitely not a psych band (regardless of their lysergic ingestion habits).

You are completely wrong.

I think psychedelic was a marketing term made up to sell records. I have never used that term when describing such bands. To me, they are a San Francisco band, and thus, part of the San Francisco music scene.

Not really. Psychedelic music is most definitely a distinct and useful classification. When someone says, "hey, that album is a psychedleic classic", what they are saying is that the album sounds awesome both on psychedelic drugs and stone cold sober. The entire scene was based around hallucinogens, and there was a particular type of music made for that experience by many of the rock bands at that time (and many current ones to this day - see the Flaming Lips as a popular example). The Grateful Dead mixed their records while tripping for the optimum effect. Even the Beatles were working on that angle. It takes more skill to craft a record that works incredibly well on hallucinogens like LSD and also sober. This is why albums like Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt. Peppers and American Beauty have continually captured the imagination of future generations, and still top "best of lists" 40 years down the road.

Unless you ever took those kinds of mind altering substances (LSD, mushrooms) while listening to those records, it's difficult to have a full understanding of a psychedelic live performance or record. The description is there for a reason

The "White Album" is mindblowingly good.

no, they were some sort of lame-ass jug band.

I really hope you are pulling my leg.

http://www.forcedexposure.com/labels/akarma.italy.html

The Dead were a better psych band than anything on that page.

See, to me it reads like an angry young 6th former doodled it on their notebook. But, like I said - I think it's a good song when you listen to it, I just have to ignore the message behind them and just listen to the way they are sung. I've never really read anyone say that Pink Floyd were great lyricists as such, I've read them say Barrett wrote interesting/weird/original lyrics certainly, but what I've read of them they focus on the music and the concepts behind the albums because that's where all the interest & originality lies.

That's where you're kind of missing the boat. Pink floyd is highly regarded for both the lyrical work of Barrett and Waters. As for "angry young 6th grader notebook doodle", you want to look at the lyrics that Portishead put out(from their latest album, "third"):

if only I could see

You turn myself to me

and recognise the poison in my heart

there is no other place

no one else I face

remedy, we

ok - i've just always heard the opposite from everyone i know. 'pink floyd lyrics are for angry grammar-school 6th-formers, the who's lyrics are laughable, and the jim morrison shouldn't sing his poetry' - those three comments normally come together as a group. so i guess i'm hanging around with the bad crowd.

Sounds like they are getting Pink Floyd confused with Portishead.

guessing at others' motives and interpretations is always a dangerous game.

 

 

 

 

your definition of 'psychedelic' and 'greatest live act' wildly differs from mine...the Dead are neither.

The Grateful Dead weren't a psychedelic band?

Any Pink Floyd or Grateful Dead albums.

The two greatest psychedelic bands of all time, and also the two single greatest live acts in rock history(ok, throw the young WHO in there as well) both in terms of the show and the technology they pushed to change the live experience as we know it today.

Sad that you are missing out on such talented acts. They made albums that worked great while on psychedelics and while sober. The only artists more influential were the Beatles and Dylan.

I think even The Who wrote better lyrics than Pink Floyd, and that's saying something! It's a good song though, it works for some reason.

I think you are confused or something. Waters and Barrett are considered two of the finest in rock history, with Waters frequently mentioned along with Lennon, Hunter, Townsend and Dylan. The imagery in that lyrical snippet is outstanding.

What bands are you listening to with better lyrics than those?

So, so you think you can tell

Heaven from Hell,

Blue skies from pain.

Can you tell a green field

From a cold steel rail?

A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?

-Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,

And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes,

And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,

Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?

-Bob Dylan, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

No one ever wrote better opening lines than those two.