I won't even say that people shouldn't ever categorize things. It's probably a human tendency that does some kind of good somewhere.Music categories have always really bugged me. Great topic Les……
One of my original bands back through the 90’s was very successful. IF I had to inaccurately categorize it I’d say it was a cross between old ZZ Top, The Black Crowes, Cry of Love and the Allman Bros, but still different and original, not a copy of anything …..just for your own reference,……..see, I did it as well…. Jeez…At any rate………
One of the younger guys that wrote new music reviews in one of the local music rags wrote that we sounded like Foghat. really? Not on the same planet….
Another younger guy from another mag wrote that it was just a blues band…. There wasn’t a 1, 4 5 song in our entire catalog…..yes it was Bluesrock, …..but just a blues band? Singing guitars into old Marshalls, my PRS McCarty and old Les Paul for leads .and a crunchy old Tele sound and the McCarty for early break up rhythm tones….
All the Blues players in the New England scene then were all about Strats into Super Reverbs very clean with lots of treble (yikes), like what Ronnie Earl does….or trying to be like Stevie Ray……..that ain’t me.. never has been…always humbuckers…always some crunch or overdrive…and I go way beyond the minor pentatonic box in my lead playing…
At any rate, the only writer that ever got it right was A J Wactel, (Waddy’s brother) out of Boston, but he was our age , and he got it…He wrote for The Beat music magazine out of Boston published every 2 weeks… it was a great review and on the $$…
So Les, yes categories are so limited and really, how do you accurately describe music with words? Pretty hard to do. They are two completely different ways of communication…..
Here’s the 1 time our music was never categorized…
It was a call that i got at my music store. It was Musician Magazine and they asked for the Lead guitarist of the Bishop-Welles Band.. I said, well, you’re talkin to him. We’d sent them a CD and they loved it and had started to write a review for their popular magazine at the time and the caller/reviewer seemed very nice and charming…He went on to ask, (presumably a guitarist) how we got such a great guitar sound, what rack gear we used, how many speaker cabs were used at one time when recorded , what models of Neumann mics we used, what digital recorder we used, did Bob Ludwig master it, must of cost you guys a fortune, ect ect.
and I said…whoa, hold on. I told him Mark, the other guitarist and I just used our old Marshal JMP master volume heads on 6 (cause they sound big and fat on 6) through our old 4/12 Marshall strait front cabs loaded with old Greenbacks. No pedals used……Shute SM58 on the front, SM57 pointed down at a back corner of the closed back cab for more low mids and 1 AKG room mic…Analog English board into a 16 track Fostex reel to reel Tape machine…used tube rack compression a bit and had a very talented local musical engineer/producer and we recorded it in a finished basement locally.. We mastered it ourselves. I was very explicit , trying to help him out if that’s the kind of guitar tone he was looking for…..(they did sound great on tape..same tones as we got live)
He immediately became iirate and started swearing at me saying no F….n way, had to be digital with some unobtainable secret rack gear…, on and on and I told him I was being totally honest with him and that it was an all analog recording….(many Boston musicians were very competitive) and one of many reasons why I moved to Portsmouth NH back in the late 70’s….. I finally just had to hang up on him after he went all crazy on me Screaming and calling me a liar not telling me the real secrets to that sound! Yikes… Well…that didn’t go well….
Needless to say, they never reviewed our CD (that to this day still sounds quite good)….. But for once in my life, my music never got categorizedcause the review was never published and most likely ended up in the trash….
I’ve rambled enough….. thanks for listening….
What bugs me is that it sometimes prevents us from checking out some very good things.
I suppose I should get off a soapbox, but I like at least trying to be open-minded.
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