My first post

Florestan

New member
Hi, was excited to find this site. It came up when I was researching Boris Godunov, my latest opera excursion.

I delved into classical in the 1980s and then was pretty much out of it for a long time. About 2009 I discovered MP3 players and proceeded to pursue ever disk I could find for my favorite non-classical artist, Johnny Winter. After nothing but Johnny Winter for about 2+ years, one day I picked up a cheap classical assortment for a dollar and ever since I have been crazy about classical, especially opera.

My favorites include all symphonies of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Mahler, many operas, especially Maria Stuarda, Fidelio, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Barber of Seville, Daughter of the Regiment, Der Freischutz, Elixir of Love, La Serva Padrona, Martha, L'amico Fritz, Tosca, and Boris Godunov. I am going to go looking for some Boris Godunov discussions here later today, or maybe start a thread on it.
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Nice to meet you Florestan, are you into chamber and choral as well? Opera is the one genre that I favour least ,, I do like the popular ones Puccini, Bizet etc but Britten, Wagner and the like leave me cold. :grin:
 

John Watt

Member
Florestan! Wow! I just met someone from Ubiquitestan where I live, near Niagara Falls.

I was telling them that even though I saw Jimi Hendrix, George Benson and Fiddlin'Fred,
it was jamming along with three and four chord blues by Johnny Winter that got me started.
You're saying discs, I had the first two albums.
Johnny Winter was famous in the first hippy days, the late sixties,
because Columbia records saw him as the ultimate freak of an LSD musician,
even if Johnny was more into the reds, whites and blues with narcotics needles.
He was a chatterbox on guitar and I liked his slide version of Highway 41 Revisited.
He got an advance of $100,000 to sign the contract, a big part of his publicity.

Almost every rock guitarist jammed his version, with Rick Derringer, a rock classic... yeah...
rock'n'roll hootchie-coo, yeah... go baby....yeah, right there...oooo....hootchie-cootchie..

When he came to play in that sweat-box of a bar on the beach at Crystal Beach,
very American, a big fight broke out outside and the gig was cancelled.
Nothing personal, Waverly Beach, the first lake-side amusement part attraction,
was shut and torn down after American "frat-fights" became unstoppable,
and Crystal Beach suffered the same fate, seeing it myself.
I've got friends with knife wounds from that entertainment era.

If I talk about Johnny Winter, I have to mention Edgar, his brother.
Edgar Winter's White Trash was one of the best, uh, gospel-funk-hard rock records,
and later, we all know how huge his synth hit "Frankenstein" was.

Jimi Hendrix talked a lot about Wagner, but I never seen no movie.
That sentence is dedicated to JHC.
 

Florestan

New member
^ "People been asking me, 'Where's your brother?'" Yeah, Johnny's first post rehab appearance was on the double live White Trash Roadwork album! Yeah, Johnny is my favorite guitarist. Johnny jammed with Jimi. Jimmy borrowed Tommy Shannon's bass at a club in NYC and Tommy said, Jimi was amazing, played it like a real bass player would, not like a lead guitarist would. You gotta read the biography of Johnny Winter. It is titled, Raisin Cain. Great book. I think I have every Johnny Winter album out there except the last couple Live Bootleg releases. I do like Jimi Hendris and Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Johnny Cash.
 

Florestan

New member
Nice to meet you Florestan, are you into chamber and choral as well? Opera is the one genre that I favour least ,, I do like the popular ones Puccini, Bizet etc but Britten, Wagner and the like leave me cold. :grin:

I do have choral works but haven't been listening to them much lately. I have a lot of Vivaldi. I have Mendelssohn Hymn of Praise (symphony 2), Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Mass in C. Some Hayden masses. Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. Haydn's Creation. Mendelssohn's Elijah. A lot of stuff. Oh I am not so much in choral as oratoria now. Ah, my favorite, Messiah!
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
A ha Oratorio, yes indeed, Handel is a long time favourite of mine although it took a while for me to appreciate him.
 

John Watt

Member
Jimi Hendrix showed up at an all-night, pre-rave, center in Toronto,
after his gig in Maple Leaf Gardens.
He got talking with the band that was playing, all wanting him to jam on guitar.
He said he just finished playing guitar for a while, and wanted to play bass.
He played the bass guitar of Terry Walsh, a homeboy from St. Catharines.
Terry became known as one of the best jazz to classical guitarists in the Niagara Peninsula.
Jimi did his own bass on recordings,
Noel Redding getting tired of just sitting around watching.
However, that's what got him one of his songs on the first album.

Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons", sounded better with synthesizers,
as used for the double album by Walter/Wendy Carlos.
He did "Switched on Bach", the biggest selling classical album of it's day,
and night.
 
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John Watt

Member
Noel Redding came to London to audition for the Animals.
The bass player for the Animals, Chas Chandler,
quit to be Jimi's manager, and asked Noel to try out,
because of the way he was dressed and his long hair,
obviously growing it out Beatle style and letting it go as L.A. hippies were.
When Jimi, Mitch and Noel went to visit Noel's mother,
to tell her about the new band, they had to stand around an older heater for warmth,
where Jimi said he got "let me stand next to your fire".

This is a good question.
If you were an electric guitarist, or any other type of instrumentalist,
would you quit your own career to play bass for Jimi Hendrix?
And just so you know, I think Jaco Pastorius would have been an equal creative partner,
just not lyrics.

I know I would rather get behind the organ of Frederik Magle,
and get into pumping it up myself, instead of just sitting out there listening.

Who cares what Tommy Shannon says.
He was tight with his drummer,
but he just made it backing up Stevie Ray Vaughn.
At least Tommy is still out there, able to play.
I'm sure he wishes one of his songs made it to one of those albums.

Midori Ito playing Paganini is on now.
 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Noel

This is a good question.
If you were an electric guitarist, or any other type of instrumentalist,
would you quit your own career to play bass for Jimi Hendrix?
No! never not nohow.
Midori Ito playing Paganini is on now.
I have her on CD playing the Caprices it was awarded a Penguin Rosette when she first came on the scene.
 

John Watt

Member
I just started a new thread in the General Music Debate,
about who you would leave your career success for,
just to back someone else up.

This Caprices CD was a library sale item, $1.
She goes really wild in the last piece,
just like a DJ spinning a dual turntable,
probably because it really is scratched.
 
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Florestan

New member
Who cares what Tommy Shannon says.
He was tight with his drummer,
but he just made it backing up Stevie Ray Vaughn.
At least Tommy is still out there, able to play.
I'm sure he wishes one of his songs made it to one of those albums.

Tommy got two good breaks and two bad breaks. First playing with Johnny when Johnny got to be a superstar. Then playing with SRV and SRV wasn't around very long.

Here is an interesting thing about Jimi. Johnny Winter never used a tremolo bar on his guitars. Said he didn't know how to use it anyway and that a lot of guys got ridiculed for their use of it. Johnny said something like (am reaching in my memory) that the only guitarist who really knew how to use a tremolo bar was Jimi Hendrix.

Am currently listening to Boris Godunov.
 

John Watt

Member
The Fender Stratocaster tremolo arm, a handle to a new world of sound.
Leo Fender invented the Stratocaster to be a stand-up steel guitar.
He designed the tremolo so you could lower pitch, and come back,
or start lowered, and come back up, detuning effects.
That's'a flatterussgo to repitchigo, hopefully, with no al dente, or sticking.
I see it as the most complicated part of any musical instrument ever made.

The Stratocaster featured, for the first time in our human history,
two way bridges for each string, lengthening and raising or lowering.
That allowed you to tune, not tempered tuning, but scientific tuning,
using an oscilloscope, what Jimi learned doing radar in the Air Force.
You could use volume feedback, or battery driven amplifier effects, and control them.
That's making sounds, or coping with what is happening even if you didn't make them.
At the very least, if you started feeding back uncontrollably,
you could detune the guitar to lower the feedback, or stop it.
That's playing guitar with the tremolo arm in your hand, using a lot of feel.
You had to set up your guitar by adjusting the five springs inside,
so you had that feel, and detuned as low as you wanted to go.
Using all five springs, four or three, was a flaming debate back then.
Leaving the spring cover off to get sounds by touching the springs,
was also debated, was it really playing your guitar?
Or, was your guitar playing you? It works both ways.

Some guitarists just used it for wild effects, calling it a whammy bar,
like Ritchie Blackmore, the second musician in history to use a Strat and Marshall,
just no effects, advertised as playing straight into the amplifier.
He first used an effect five albums in, the intro to "Stormbringer", a Dr. Q.
That was an Electro-Harmonix effect to simulate a wah-wah.
When Jimi passed away, Jeff Beck came out with a Strat and Marshall,
again, advertised as playing straight through to the amplifier.

This photo, with the receipt from when I made my final payment for my 1964 Stratocaster,
shows that I don't have the tremolo arm on, having a hard time with it,
not being reliable.
I'm using a 50 watt Marshall with the slanted, eight ten-inch speakers,
with a Crybaby wah-wah, a Small Stone phase shifter, and a Dallas Arbiter fuzz-distortion,
some of the same equipment Jimi used when I saw him in Toronto.
The Marshall was ordered direct from England before there was a franchise in Ontario.

Some people, only because so many are now gone,
say that I'm one of three musicians in Ontario, maybe Canada,
to be playing with the same equipment Jimi Hendrix used, while he was alive.
I know I was. I still remember, a life-long non-smoker, non-drinker, not even tea or coffee.
It is so nice to be so acutely aware of the instantaneous changes in sound,
all this electronic equipment can generate, louder than an entire symphony.
Just like sax players wear their reed around their neck,
Strat players would keep their tremolo arm on them,
because if someone made off with it, you felt you really couldn't play.

I can understand Johnny Winter not getting into, what was then, something totally new.
He used an electric guitar, to be loud for sure, but he was more about the tone.
His tone. Not just making a lot of sounds you could E.Q. and dub together in the studio.
Again in Texas, Jimi gave Billy Gibbons a Strat and Marshall so he had a chance onstage,
as his opening act.
That made Z.Z.Top into one of the biggest touring bands ever.
You either let the tremolo arm hang from your little finger,
and use it sometimes as a vibrato effect,
or you were palming it all the way, deep into the feedback, a new tone zone.

I'd love to get into the combination of tremolo with various levels of pick-guard,
aluminum plate lining, exposures to the volumes of the speakers,
with considerations of 15' or 25' double-grounded cord length, even curly cords,
but that can only be described as environmental to the actuality of only playing,
nothing you can describe until it's gone, and the air around you does feel sad,
without all those deep tones and movements of sound,
while even the.. wind.. cries.. Mary.. juana, or you don't wanna.
It's one of those spring things for me, and I'm still extending them.

Jimi had a groove, waist high, carved into the side of his Marshall stack,
so he could, uh, rest the tremolo arm as the amplifier held it,
and take away his arms to move them around, while he used his hips to move it,
getting the sounds and tones of his only smash hit albums,
while, as they say, he made love to his amplifier. That's very satisfying.
Especially when it's the big bucks getting thrown at you backstage.

This comment is for JHC. Feedback is an after-effect, a following up,
especially if you are using echo with reverb. That's spring reverb.
Fender had two little springs for reverb, a Hammond organ had three bigger ones.

I had a Hammond reverb custom built into an incredible amplifier,
custom ordered from Scotland, the Redmere Soloist.
I could have deep reverb and kick the amp, and it sounded like low, rolling thunder,
or with heavy volume and distortion, with phasing to add that 9-volt battery juice,
start by rubbing my finger lightly over the bridge, to moving it up the strings hard,
to sound exactly like a steam locomotive coming through the wall at you.
Some bars limited me to doing that only once a night,
because customers would spill drinks or think their train was a'comin'.
"Can you hear your train a'comin', yes I can hear my train a'comin'."
Lyrics to a song by Jimi Hendrix.
Anything Jimi Hendrix played, me too, can be played at a conversational level.
Drowning out your audience, is a hazardous watt age, massive turbo-generator result.
Even the armatures at Niagara Falls remember the night Jimi played in Toronto.
They too, thought that all rock concerts were going to sound like that,
but no-one ever did, speakers in all four corners and sides of the arena,
stereo miking before there was stereo equipment, stereo roadies panning,
while never taking their eyes offa Jimi Hendrix and his waving, watted up, '64 Stratocaster.
Just like I've ever only used an electric shaver,
I've never played an acoustic up on any professional stage.
I still get lost in the sounds around me,
and where they go, oh yeah, nobody knows, except now, maybe Jimi,
but he wasn't known for sticking around.

What "sheet of sound" is playing now?
"The Very Best of John Coltrane", a 2000 Rhino Entertainment Company product,
a CD, as new, with the booklet, $1.
Music can engender just like birds of a feather. This is at the end of the booklet.
"Move The Money. Military spending is still at Cold War levels,
TRIPLE the federal support for education, job training, crime prevention,
and environmental protection COMBINED.
You can help move the money to where it belongs".
Jimi: "When the power of love is greater than the love of power, there will be peace".
May All Peace Be Upon Us, or, PULL THAT PLUG!!! PULL THAT PLUG!!!! whew....
That Central Music phone number is still good, now starting with a 905.
 

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Florestan

New member
Great info John Watt. Johnny Winter played a lot of slide guitar, and bent strings a lot. I really like the guitar he started using in the 1980s:

lazer-fat.jpg
 

John Watt

Member
yeah! Talking, and typing, about music, is almost, almost as good as playing it.

I remember when these "practice" and "travelling" mini-guitars first came out.
They were even advertised as being playable in buses and airplanes.
The first one I ever got my hands on was called "The Banana", yes, it was yellow.

Ned Steinberger manufactured the first guitar without a head-stock,
originating this design.
He's making electric violins, cellos, inventing new types of stringed, electric instruments.
I used to subscribe to his domain, where I'd wander for the wonder.

Johnny Winter was one of the better slide guitarists, acoustic and electric.
I got away with using a mike or cymbal stand for my string swiping.
We all can talk about slide, but eventually, it becomes about laptops and steel.

If you take a slide, metal or plastic, depending on your strings,
and move it quickly side to side at the fifth fret, very quickly,
you can draw the harmonics out of an acoustic guitar,
and with some hand feel, move it up the neck, or down, if you're lucky.
That's the sounds Pink Floyd used for "Meddle".

www.nedsteinberger.com
 
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Florestan

New member
Speaking of guitars on a stand, and this guy has a custom built guitar, have you heard of Junior Brown. He does more country, but check out this Rock and Roll medley:
 

John Watt

Member
I couldn't listen very long.
He's just playing one note at a time.
Too plinky a tone too.

That could just be Youtube.
Tiny guitars, tiny technology, tinny sounds.

Not TINKICKER sounds, just tinny sounds.

Here's someone I was standing beside backstage, 1970.
I gave up trying to show the videos the way you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z02J_kPincA
 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
OK getting away from Eelectic Geetars for a bit, this is the first band I ever played with in the mid-late 50s the only original players as shown here are Trumpet Brian Bates and Trombone Brian Watham this version is quite a bit slower that we played it in my day but they are a lot older now.
This video must be about 2005-10 vintage
Bei Mir Bist Du Schön - Tierra Buena Jazz Band

 

John Watt

Member
In order of appearance:

JHC! I listened all the way, very, very nice to listen to.
What you're saying about not being as fast sounds a little apologetic.
Here's my string theory, and strung-out theory too, if you don't mind.
I'm hearing some jitterbug music,
when people caught the jitters, or were bugging out.
That's as much a war and post-war, stress, as it was the substances.

I don't hear any muscle relaxants or Ambient, with no visible Viagara symptoms,
and no-one's huddling around behind an amp drinking out of the bottle,
so I'm hep to these cats, digging and swinging to it, in my imagination.
Modern music is slacker beats, hip-hop, raggae, all slower.
Am I right to think they're working around just three chords?
And what these musicians are accomplishing is about my next comments.

Florestan! This new link is one I can't click, seeing youtu.be in the code.
My computer has absorbed a virus this last week, so I'm taking it easy.

This might seem more than just a little preposterous,
but if you can imagine someone with the same stage equipment as Jimi Hendrix,
learning to sound and play like he did, for me, starting out,
and then getting into John Coltrane and Nicolo Paganini riffage and notage,
that's me.
I was playing Allman Brother double-note leads in the early seventies.
People were saying my rhythm guitar was like playing chord solos. It was.
I imitated the sounds of a violin, steel guitar, banjo, steam locomotives,
investing heavily into equipment.

And I was never about droning bass lines with tap-tap drummers,
all about the entire band grooving it all up, and featuring a soloist.
No band ever took me more than two weeks, before I was dancing it up.
Agents would be saying you have to let this guy have his side of the stage.
Showmen and show-women who hired me, sometimes,
would say John, when I'm on stage you have to stay behind your mike.
You can whip the bassist and help the drummer play the cymbals,
just not behind me.

That's the kind of rehearsals I had, towards the end, just showing up to play.
When sad, wondering what happened band-mates came up to me after,
saying John, admit it, you never learned our songs, I'd have to agree.
That always made everyone comfortable,
especially if they were eating and drinking all the goodies sent to my room.

I might sound stuck-up, oh yeah, I can get sticky,
but what surprised bar people and restaurants was me coming back,
when I wasn't on stage, just wanting to visit and spend some of my cash,
always being a big tipper.
You lives your life, you takes your chances.
You come back as a big tipper, you get to be the big dipper.
Only once, did I ever hear a waiter say, John, that's too much parmesan cheese.

No-one ever threw a drink in my face, did a ciggie burn in my shirt,
slap my face, or spit on me, including puking.
And as the straight guy, everyone let me have a room to myself.
That's the best, alone time for real.

I play with the bass strings on the bottom, and the highs on top.
It's so easy that way, always touching or holding all six strings.

If I was jamming with the Tierre Buena Jazz Band, thinking some New Orleans swing,
I'd put my '58 P.A.F. Humbucker on, by the neck, sounding like a big old f-hole jazzer,
and I'd start chicken-pickin' my way in, until I hit some slight distortion with a Crybaby,
for my solo up front.
When I'm rubbing my high strings across the upper G string of the upright bass,
above the bridge, slowly moving up, we'll all be entering the twilight zone,
unless I lick a new 9-volt battery and touch it to JHC's ear.

"Pat Benatar, Live in New Haven", a DVD, as new, complete, for $3, is displayin' right beside me.
Fourteen of her greatest hits. A Rhino DVD. Once she gets going, she never lets up.
"Hit Me With Your Best Shot", is a very, if not totally, misunderstood song,
unless you agree that "Hell, Hell is for children".
 
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