PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase JUST FOR THE RECORD

Hi y’all,

some of you may know that silly game 'What does it take to be a real....' when everybody tries to make up the most absurd characterizations.

When we played that game with some friends a couple of weeks ago my lovely wife Maha looked at me in an unusually merciless way and came up with 'What does it take to be a real rock musician?' Actually she didn’t even give us the chance to think of some funny answers - instead she had us immediately have a share in her suggestions:

1. A real rock musician's got to suffer from severe hearing loss! (Easy - I can even show off with a polyphonic killer tinnitus)

2. Unlike Bill Clinton he must have inhaled at least once! (C'mon...)

3. He must have written at least one 'protest song'!

Oops - there she had got me: Almost 70 and no such song at all.... But a rock musician's got to do what a rock musician's got to do, so - before I'm running out of time - I decided to write my first ‘protest song’. But how the heck do you write a protest song?

Like so often Tom Lehrer had given the answer already in 1965 when he published the song „The Folk Song Army“:

„The tune don't have to be clever,
And it don't matter if you put a couple of extra syllables into a line.
It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English
And it don't even gotta rhyme... excuse me: rhyne!“

That sounds pretty easy, don’t you think... And I might add:

‘It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that sting!’.

So I already pictured myself sitting around a camp fire with my friends (maybe on chairs - the hip, y’know...), strumming my good old Ovation I hadn’t played on for decades.

But that good old Ovation and me - we turned out to no lomger be buddies, because that beautifully rounded body of an Ovation simply doesn’t go together with a (admittedlly far less beautifully) rounded German beer belly - it simply kept slipping away.

Obviously I wasn’t meant to write and perform a good old camp fire style protest song, so thinking of a solution I remembered my old motto:

‘Writing songs? When in doubt
make them fast and make them loud!
And if fast and loud is not enough,
you can still make them sound rough.“

So - at 140 BPM, meant to be cranked up, performed by my alter ego band ‘Alternative Lies’ - here’s my first (and most likely last) protest song:

JUST FOR THE RECORD.

Video on my website (with lyrics)

Video on YouTube

Audio (on SoundCloud)

Enjoy (if you can )

Stefan

These are the musical data:

Key=Bb , Tempo 140, Length (m:s)=3:08

ReakStyle is _RRTWIST.STY (Rock n Roll Twist Band) using the following RealTracks

RT 1731:Bass, Electric, TexasBluesRockNRoll Ev 165
RT 2353:Piano, Acoustic, Rhythm RockabillyRockNRollKevin Ev 165
RT 882:Guitar, Electric, Rhythm TexasBluesRockHighOffbeat Ev 165
RT 2352:Guitar, Electric, Rhythm RockabillyRockNRollBrent Ev 165
RealDrums: RocknRoll^02-a: Swinging Ride, b: Two Beat Cymbal

RT602:Harmonica, Soloist Train Ev 130

Vocals and that arthritic guitar solo: Me

Maha had huge fun appearing in the video and most of all working on the sound and mix. Like usually she used Realband + the following plug-ins: PGMusic Dynamics, PGMusic Reverb, EasyQ Parametric EQ and modestly mastered the song in Ozone 8 advanced.