Originally Posted By: Jim Fogle
One neat trick is the editors strung together multiple performances of the same song spread over several decades. It's amazing how a song tempo rarely changes.


Particularly evident on Choo Choo Ch'Boogie. So many people think Louis Jordan wrote that song. Oh nay nay. A team of 3 guys who had some lesser level of success as writers wrote it, one of them being the guy who wrote Mockingbird Hill. 12 bar blues at its finest!

As I watched that (again - for maybe the 10th time) it made me really sad to think about how this younger generation of alleged musicians doesn't really care about music anymore. I read my local Craigslist ads for musicians (pure for entertainment) and it is ridiculous what they say. There was an ad that ran for about a week looking for musicians to assemble a tribute to Dream Theater. Let that sing in. A drummer who can play like Mike Mangini, a guitar player that can play like John Petrucci, and a keyboard player who can play like Jordan Rudess. Are people at that level cruising Craigslist looking for a startup project band or sifting through offers they have?

These kids all want to find 3 playing pieces and a singer, learn those 45 cliche songs, get it to where they start and stop at the same time, and rush to the stage to make 50 bucks a night, with NO care whatsoever if music is any kind of good and any kind of different from the other 100 bands n the area competing for those 50 a night jobs. Part of it is the state of the business, but part of it is the participation trophy mentality of this pampered generation.

The Wheel retrospective video makes me sad because it makes me remember how often I started nosing around the community trying to find people to do that very band, which is largely a tribute to Bob Wills. Try to find find 8 players and convince them to care enough that they will spend 4 months learning, practicing alone, then rehearsing before the band is good enough to even record a rehearsal to shop it. I would want to line it up with drums, bass, main guitar, main piano, main sax, me playing second chair on all of those, 2 fiddle players and a pedal steel player, and at least 6 people able to sing. That's 9 pieces. In this music world, where do you take a band that size to earn enough money to make the carrot at the end of the stick look good enough to keep the mules interested? Makes me sad.

EDIT to add: Their most recent album, New Routes (a play on New Roots) is glorious. Still a huge now to his inspiration, Bill Wills, but Katie Shore has a bigger front role and that's a great idea. She is outstanding.

Last edited by eddie1261; 11/11/20 04:23 PM.