Re: My Generation/Who vs Zep/Pagey/Brainwashed

[mleaman@sccoast.net (Mark Leaman)]

>It's easy to see by comparing the music before and after MG.

>Obviously it's not easy if people aside from myself disagree with you on 
>this list.  Instead of saying "because it is" we would like to know how 
>and why.  If what you claim is really true, then this is real discovery.

Ian:

I haven't seen any disagreement with this, just where the song came from.
Seeing ghosts, are we?
Look at the music before and after MG by the major bands for yourself. To
quote John Lennon: "Tell me what you see..."

>Are you sitting in your Toyota 4X4 with Helen Hunt escaping a tornado?  

I have a `76 Pontiac Le Mans I'm quite proud of...black, of course...and no
tornado could budge it, so heavy is it.

>You just totally paraphrased my statements backwards.  I seem to remember 
>stating that the blues is documented as early as 1890, yet any feelings 
>of jazz was after 1920.  

Ragtime is documented as early as the mid-1880s, my friend. And I quote:
"Next to the black-oriented songs of Stephen Foster, in the mid-19th Century
Ragtime was the most published music from a black tradition until the 1940s."
You said yourself that Blues was first used as a term in the early 1900s...I
wasn't going to argue that (since it served my purpose). Now you claim that
The Blues were around in the 1800s. Make up your mind. But surely you aren't
going to claim that Blues created Ragtime now!
Again, let me quote:
"By the beginning of the 20th Century, there were significant Blues singers
who were influencial in the Blues and most other forms."
The book: The Rock And Roll Story by Charles T. Brown, published 1983 by
Prentice-Hall.
What you are talking about as "Blues" in the 1800s was black folk music, not
the yet in the form we now call Blues (as I've pointed out to you before).
And that was what we were talking about here...the form.

>It would be totally impossible for jazz to 
>exsist before the turn of the century since ragtime wasn't prominent 
>until after 1900.

Wrong. See above.

>Are you really that confused with the musical styles?  
>Bessie Smith's song(s) are so strongly blues it would be impossible to 
>dismiss it.  It's certainly not jazz by any means.  But if you call 
>Chicago Blues jazz, then maybe I can see why you would stand by this.

I didn't say it was Jazz, you did. 

>Since when was the blues considered popular, until the mid 60's?  

What do you want now, sales figures? I think you're nit-picking every thing
I say. What I meant by "popular" was that major bands began to play
them...you know, like Bessie Smith and Louie Armstrong.

>And of course, why question the patience of this list when you LOVE to
write >100 line posts in response?   

Ha! And you don't.
I make no apologies, though...I'm a writer and I write until I've said what
I think needs to be said.

>Of course, but since you claim to never hear the first, how do you know 
>if his first demo wasn't similar?  Pete never claimed to say "second 
>demo" or "I made some serious changes on the demo I submitted to the 
>Who".  What you claim for my speculation can be easily said for yours.  I 
>take Pete's quotes as fact, and you may not hear it in it's "looseness" 
>but to me it does sound a song played in the Jimmy Reed style.  

Ian, have you read anything about The Who? Or do you want to make me write
100 word posts so you can rag me about it later? Here's a little quote for ya:

"Townshend assembled the music on his tape recorders. The resulting demo
'sounded like...Jimmy Reed at ten years old suffering from nervous
indigestion.' Townshend claimed. 
The only person who saw much in it was Chris Stamp, who was convinced My
Generation was the song to take The Who over the top. And it was basically
Stamp's enthusiasm that made Lambert encourage Townshend to do another demo
of the number. 'Make it beefier,' Lambert suggested.
So Townshend went back and turned his walking Blues into a chunky, chugging
Blues (Note: Of course I disagree with that definition, but we're talking
about how many demos were made and why I knew what the first one sounded
different). This version of MG resembles nothing so much as the Heavy Metal
version of the song included on the later album LAL." (Note: Which I would
hardly call "chunky, chugging Blues"...or anything like a Jimmy Reed song!)

Before I Get Old, Dave Marsh. BTW, it also mentions that it's the second
version that's in Barnes' book.
There you go...



                   Cheers                   ML

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."  L. Long