One year ago today: December 26, 2016, long-winded!
Five years ago today: December 26, 2012, fill ‘er up.
Nine years ago today: December 26, 2008, still planning databases.
Random years ago today: December 26, 2003, At the planetarium.
I read a brief history on Radio Shack, the early days. That’s when it sold a lot of kits, and one was the small crystal radio kit. I was completely taken by the concept; the advertising said it needed no battery. That had me imagining a small radio on my belt where I could listen to any information in the world. My guess is that most people who bought it found out later that the antenna was thirty feet of grounded wire, making it somewhat less than portable. I was still fascinated but the $4 price tag was out of my range. Also, I knew that the kit required things like a soldering iron that I could never have been able to keep a secret.
Of course, getting the parts and finding some way to get the 65 miles to the fair, stuff like that, took longer than I’d figured. More than fifty years longer. Now I know the radio is not the device shown in the picture and the three round objects are not the transistors. I later took pride in my ability to build a radio out of items found on your regular office desk and a few gum wrappers. I used the blade from a pencil sharpener as tuner, which had to be held a certain way to pick up even one station. Over the years, I’ve thought of building a better radio, but every time I look at ham radio regulations, I get discouraged. They are heavily regulated and prohibited from transmitting almost any useful information.
It doesn’t make sense to invest in expensive equipment to listen to others sending weather reports, soccer scores, and such enthralling data as where they lived. While I recognize the need, nor do I like the fact that all this activity is constantly monitored. I feel that is some holdover from the world wars when radio used for spying. No doubt it still is, but that does not appear to be the primary reason the government is still so interested. Admit it, any spy of any real consequence is way too smart to use the radio. Has anyone ever heard of a spy being caught for using a radio? Folks, there is some other motive at work in all this.
You want to know something funny? I thought as a child there was a worldwide system of radios run by the government that did nothing but broadcast the latest scientific information and the space program. If you were rich, you could listen to all this and become the most informed kid in the world. You might say if Bill Gates had not been born, I would have, at least in theory, invented him around the same time. Right to this day, you’ll still find me listening to the radio but not the TV. Both lack content, but radio isn’t addicting. Certainly not American radio.
And always remember the difference between AM and FM. American Music and Foreign Music.
[Author’s note: it is not the radio programming that interests me, but the mechanics of how information is carried by the radio waves. It’s a wonderment to me how they ever figured this out. What’s more, I have a sneaking suspicion there is a completely new way to accomplish the task that has not been invented, or if it has, it is super hush-hush.
My old college pal Greg and I used to speculate on this for hours, our cafeteria time while other students toked their brains out. He thinks it is a combining of AM and FM, while I believe it has something to do with a complete new form of modulation itself. Then he got his wife pregnant and I never really saw him much again.]
Um, this is in Germany.
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As before, each targeted exercise works, but it shifts the deep, clicking pain to another location. All of those sites happen to be in my bass playing shoulder. This is really not good. In another month, by extrapolation, we are looking at a desperate situation. I have to be able to play bass four hours at a stretch. No pun intended.
ADDENDUM
Here’s the promised observations on audience behavior. You already know that I’ll go out of my way to provide the best listening experience I can. I just spent six hours getting every note right to “Mama’s Broken Heart”. In the end, it was a studio bass line, chopped apart and put back together by an engineer, with all his mistakes. This means it had to be memorized start to finish. Yet, I’ll choose this over any degree of musical correctness because it is what the audience expects to hear.
It’s important because I’ve noted there is a saturation point with music. If you go past it, no matter how good you are, they won’t listen. That’s the basis of my comment that people who go out for a good time don’t want to be educated. They just want to be entertained. Playing Mozart to most people isn’t going to get them on the dance floor. Playing guitar ballads has a similar effect. They’ll smile, turn away, and clap a bit when it is over. Hardly my definition of good entertainment.
The crowd is the reason I dropped half a lifetime of rock music and switched to classic country. There’s school of thought that says all generations prefer the music heard when they first started dating. My conclusion is that explanation is much too simple. I examined it in such detail that I feel the phrase is a borderline urban legend. It took root because it seems so obvious. It was with that in mind that I originally tried country music in my third set of the evening.
If you study the adult crowd, you’ll find they say they don’t like the new teen music. Now, a preference for your own music is not the same as disliking something else. I was soon following up on why they didn’t like it. Most will say it is shallow and all sounds alike. Fine, but that does not explain why the generation before the people saying it felt the same way. Thus, it must be some quality that is not strictly confined to the musical notes, which don’t change over time.
The next layer of logic told me there was something about the music causing the previous people to outright not like it. My family found the rock music I first played to be horrible, and seldom missed a chance to say so. But even in a family with no music of any kind, they didn’t mind country. What element was I overlooking? The first answer was to try all types of music and see what works, but we’ve all heard bands that try to do that and it isn’t pretty. What if, I thought, the real reason a type of music became popular with a younger crowd was the reverse of conventional logic? What if they were picking up on the fact that the music got rid of all the old people in the room? They’d like it no matter how it sounded.
That would explain metal and grunge. In my teens, I attended every high school dance I could. Everybody liked the popular tunes of the day, but I noticed every wise band would include at least one country song. That was the only event of the evening that got all ages on the dance floor. I even learned how to polka so I would never miss the song, and it was always a fast tune. (Actually, the dance I do is a slick version of the Samba. It goes back and forth instead of side to side like a polka.)
Thus, when I was 33 and started my last trio band, “Not Half Bad”, I was already including a third set that was almost entirely country music. That third set is normally the highest tipping and if you crank your best material too early or too late, you may be playing to an empty house. Country music was drawing the tips, and that says most of it. I remind you when I say country, that could also mean Buffet or Creedence. It’s a sound I’m after, not a particular artist. “Not Half Bad” was also the last band I used a drum box. That band broke up in 1991 because of interference by the new guitar player’s wife, Louise.
That’s when I figured it out. The working class crowd I play to wants to hear the good old version of the song, the one they sort of know the lyrics to. That’s where you get your rock bars, your blues bars, and your country bars. It was a short leap to find out which style had the biggest appeal to the largest number. Hands down, it is country music. This New Country, like pop, or disco, is likely a fad that will fade. But those classic country tunes have stood the test of time. It’s hard to overplay the music, at least in the same sense as certain rock tunes are vastly overplayed.
Wouldn’t it be nice to meet another musician who had this figured out on their own? No guitar player I ever met has managed to get that far. And consider the differences between myself and other bassists, especially those with a guitar background. I solo all the time on either bass, vocals, or both. But, have you ever seen either a guitarist or bassist get up on stage at Karaoke and sing? They would not dare. It’s not the expected excuse that they don’t like canned music. I say it is because they know what they look and sound like in any other environment. Their music is not arranged.
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