Rock and Roll hasn’t really changed much the last four years. The drums are pretty much the same.  Guitars have quit a number of new effects pedals and such. The best amps are still the ones from the 60’s like Vox made.   

I played in a few rock bands like 20% of the kids in my generation. I am not sure what that would be now. I suspect less. I prefer the garage band sound or the U2 sound these days.They have the rawness of what I remember as an early player. 

If Rock shows nothing else it shows that every generation has its background sound playing. My ipod is full of all kinds of music. Last night I fell off to sleep listening to the Wallflowers the group run by Bob Dylan’s son. But every so often I like a Mahler symphony to mellow a day out as well. 

I subscribe to XM radio. I love it. I have become fond of listening to the background music of my parent’s cohort. The music of the 30’s and 40’s. You can hear the bluesy early cousins to rock and roll begin to appear. And they had some pretty cool harmonies you don’t hear any more. It can be coming at you hard too. But there are often many more changes in tempo volume and harmony to keep things interesting. 

I recently watch the U2 3D concert at the theater. I actually got Lori to go with me. She doesn’t care much for U2. I am wild about them. There is something hymnodical about them (new word).  Their  music grabs me by the throat and pulls me into their world.  I noticed quit a few people my age and mostly people twenty years younger than me.  But not many 20 something’s. I guess they aren’t their background music. 

It amazed me a few years back when my stepson and his friends began pilfering my Beatles records.  They were wild about them. He gave me discs of alternate takes from the White Album. They were a treat to hear. They liked the more raw sounding stuff. Material I hadn’t listened to for a long time was particularly what they liked. It took me back to sitting in my parent’s basement cross-legged listening to the White Album for spiritual clues to life at volume 10. I have it on my ipod now and I still know there is something in that Rocky Raccoon tale that we are supposed to get. 
 
The Grammy’s stank this year. I think they should have two of them. One, for rappers because it is so huge and yet so far away from the standard Grammy material. How is it that the Eagles put out a gorgeous album and don’t even get mentioned? The gospel portion was better than most years this year. Vince Gill got an award from Ringo which made his life he said. And Herbie Hancock one album of the year.  I thought he did. I love the songs of Joni Mitchell, which was the stuff of his album, and I have always liked Herbie Hancock as much as any Jazz Musician. But Jazz players from my experience are bunch of snobs. They play stuff most of us don’t want to hear. Mainly a bunch of scales played really fast. And then when we don’t like it they call us stupid. But I think Herbie felt pretty good that more of us liked his stuff. 

Last night I went to a concert of a top-flight Christian rock band. We knew the band and sat pretty close. I couldn’t tell any difference between this group and the high school rock dance bands in 1968. The instruments were way loud and the PA was so bad you couldn’t distinguish a word. I had heard their record so I recognized a few of the hooks and guitar parts otherwise I would have been lost. They are great in the studio but just as cluttered as the 60’s were live. The band is a superb band don’t get me wrong. 

Any group that can make four guitars sound like a symphony is great. 

Not a whole lot has changed between the 60’s and 2008.  You would think more should have changed. I think it is still the aggression of the music that got the kids rocking last night. I couldn’t see that the band had any different moves than the 60’s either, other than jumping up and down a bit more. I had a bass player in one of my bands that could do the splits on stage, now that was theatrics. 

I guess I concluded this morning that we really are a monolithic culture. I think the differences between boomers, busters, millennial and all are pretty over-exaggerated. We all basically want to differentiate ourselves from the previous bunch but we don’t wander that far anymore. Now the boomers wander long from the background noise their parents had. But since then it’s only been a few steps either way. It’s all rock and roll to me.