Chuck's Music Blog

70's

2007-07-16T01:38:00.000+01:00

A few unavoidable social considerations aside, the analysis I'm trying to breakdown in this blog isn't social, but musical. What became of the hippies and weather they or their sons and daughters became yuppies, isn't the object here. Rock got harder.
Electronic music was still in its infancy steps.
The market seemed to finally be ripe for a popular rythm that had been trying for years to "make it" outside its local boundaries, into the world market: Reggae, which had evolved from Ska and Rocksteady, finally burst out "from Jamaica to the World" - yet, it took one Mr. Bob Marley, to do it.
Hard Rock detractors splintered into three main musical trends: those that said "it isn't hard enough!" broke out with what would come to be known as Metal Rock; those that said "it's not rebellious enough!" broke out with Punk Rock (Punks were suddenly cool! Or better yet, it wasn't cool to be cool!). The third splinter took the world radios, tv sets, movie houses, bars, discotheques, elevators, waiting rooms, you name it! They said "we want a soft but danceable kind of rock beat - heck, youngsters haven't danced properly since the early sixties' twist! It's time to go back to the dance floor! Yeah, we dig rock, but the soft swinging kind, that you can move your hips to, and invite a lady out to swing it with you." The discotheque venue was so important for this movement, the beat became known as Disco. In the long run, the new kids rediscovered a rockbeat they could dance to, and the old hippies discovered they too, could dance! (at the hight of the hippy movement, dance had been deconstructed into "body movement": ANY body movement was considered "dancing with nature: move your head from side to side and you're dancing with the stars and the planets, dig it, man?" - so, dance in itself, as a popular teen craze, with steps and moves - aside from wriggling like crazy, or shaking your braincells - died out in the laye 60's/early 70's.) Leo Sayer illustrated a bit of this, with his one big 70's hit "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance!)"I've posted audio illustrations with a few of the main hits of the day, which defy any categorization except 70's. It was the labels decade anyway: funky, soul, punk, disco, metal, reggae, they all flourished or were born (or eventually got "fused" together), as new styles in the 70's.
About 70's Rock: please refer to the still-to-be-published category/post named "Rock", for main references which haven't been mentioned in the category/posts published so far, as well as some of the main illustrative recordings that marked the history of Rock, and which, for some reason or other, just happened to take place in the 70's.)

Audio Files

Smoking In The Boys Room
Barry Manilow - Mandy
America - Horse With No Name
CCR - Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog (Joy To The World)
That'll Be The Day

60's/The Doors

2007-07-12T22:59:00.000+01:00

A definite contribution to the new sound of rock in the 60's, as well as to the radical rebellion, from the california beaches to the world, in psychedelic rock form, was the musical group The Doors - mainly, the leader, vocalist, poet, composer and image creator Jim Morrison. Ray Manzarek, on the keyboards, helped with the new sound. The electric organ sound was paving the way to the early 70's "moog" or electronic synthesizer - ideally, one instrument with ALL the sounds. It didn't make it all the way, but it still went quite far, specially in extending the sound capabilities of small musical groups, as were the ever emerging "rock bands".
"The Doors were unusual among rock groups because they did not use a bass guitar whilst playing live. Instead, Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand on the newly invented Fender Rhodes bass keyboard, an offshoot of the well-known Fender Rhodes electric piano, and other keyboards with his right hand." (source: Wikipedia)
The Doors brought on a definite 60's sound, influencing many artists, in as many musical categories; rock matured as a music category on it's own, no longer considered just an emotional and youthful type of country/rythm & blues with soul; it was still blues, but it had a whole new "progressive" sound and a whole new soul, it could have deep lyrics, it could go back to older, classic roots and bring out modern age, avant-garde, art. The New was happening. The Now was here. The Future was just around the corner. Anything else from then on, had to be called "post-modern".
As to rebellion? Break everything! No one gets out alive, anyway!

Famous Quote:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."
- William Blake

Audio

Hello, I Love You
Roadhouse Blues
Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)
Break On Through (To The Other Side)
Horse Lattitudes
Indian Summer
L.A. Woman
Light My Fire
Love Her Madly
Riders On The Storm
(This Is) The End
When You're Strange

60's/Janis Joplin

2007-06-28T00:35:00.000+01:00

Janis Joplin's story is much like the decade she grew up into: started out as a clean-cut kid in the early (necktie) sixties, ended up wild and psychadelic, and with no place else to go, in the later (hippy) sixties. She would only attain fame, though, in that second half of the decade.
She was an amazing blues voice: not clear, not crystal - rather rough and scratchy to the ear, making us all wonder how she was ever able to hit the notes she did, but she did, and when she did, her soul was all out in the open! Her voice was country, jazz, blues and rock&roll, all rolled-up into one!
According to Wiki, "Joplin is now remembered best for her powerful, and distinctive voice — her rasping, overtone-rich sound was significantly divergent from the soft folk and jazz-influenced styles that were common among many white artists at the time. To many, she personified that period of the Sixties when the San Francisco sound, along with (then considered) outlandish dress and life style, jolted the country."...and I would add, the world.
Her rebellious lifestyle was the decade, to the tragic end in 1970, (at age 27) when she was found dead in a hotel room, "most likely due to an overdose of heroin and whiskey."
We'll never forget you, Janis!

Have a smoke!

Audio Files:

Cry Baby

Down On Me
Mercedes Benz
Move Over
Piece Of My Heart
Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)
Me And Bobby McGee
Ball And Chain

Featured Video:

Little Girl Blue

60's/Bee Gees

2007-05-30T01:36:00.000+01:00

Born in England, migrated to Australia and then back to England, the Brothers Gibbs, Barry, Robin and Maurice, brought an unforgettable sound to the 60's with "soft rock" ballads sung in vocal harmony, with Barry's voice already standing out. They shocked society with the "surreal, haunting and macabre composition, New York Mining Disaster 1941 (1967), that made the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic." (src.: wikipedia).
"And the lights, all went down, in Messachussetts..." will be forever imprinted into our memories (those of us who lived those times), as a song that marked an era.
Their last big hit of the 60's era, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" hit the pop charts in 1971 - they would hardly be heard again until the Disco era boomed in 1975, and Barry's lead falsetto voice became their trademark.
But Disco is another category.

Audio Files

Messachussetts
I Started A Joke
I Just Gotta Get A Message To You
It's Only Words

60's/Beach Boys

2007-05-25T05:06:00.000+01:00

For a good part of the early 60's - the neck-tie years - the only time boys got to present themselves in public without a neck-tie, was at the beach. In those days, surfing was considered "cool" and even "radical". The Beach Boys created the "west coast sound" of the surfing generation rock & roll. Where is ev'rybody, this summer? - well,..."ev'rybody's gone surfin'!"
Considered by the experts as one of the best rock&roll songs ever, "Good Vibrations" is still a technical wonder of studio sound recording and mixing.

Audio files:

Surfing U.S.A.
I Get Around

60's

2007-05-18T02:08:00.000+01:00

All teens are rebellious - each new generation of adolescents tries to create something new, and differentiate itself from anything in the past: that's the definition of the term "modern" and, what teen doesn't want to be modern?
However, I believe the 60's were different. Other generations of youngsters before, and since, tried to (and most did) make their statement of modernism in such easy and obvious fields as clothes, hairstyle and of course, popular music fashion.
In the 60's, for the first and only time, they tried to (and did) make a statement of modernism in the political field, as well as all other fields. This point is arguable, inasmuch as political beliefs have been part of the "modern young fashion" before. Ok, no news there. What to me is new and unique, is the way ALL established "truths" were questioned, including the ego. It's as if they said, "ok, if everything is old, let's strip of everything! - literally: possessions, clothing, the body (gender is just a random accident of nature), beliefs - but wait, there's still the ego...is it old? - strip it off!" Or, go look for it!
There's no such thing as race, so - no need to rush! Take it easy, enjoy Mother-Nature, make babies (please don't step on them!), and all things shall in time, fall into place! With a little luck, even dinner will fall on my plate - as long as someone does my communal work on time, or daddy doesn't get layed off...either way, don't bogart that reefer!
Fun times! What happened to Rock&Roll? It got weird: at first it was evenly balanced, up untill the mid-sixties a symmetrical sense of esthetics prevailed, then,... it seemed to start tripping on acid, the beat got rocked out of balance with the roll, which in turn, seemed to fade off...
I would even go as far as dividing the decade into the 1st half and call it the "neck-tie" 60's, and the 2nd half - the "hippy" (or "bohemian" as some would have it) 60's.

All of the rock sub-genres that would develop in the following decades, were born in the 60's - even techno: with the "grandfather" of electronic music hits - sounding quite weird at the time - "Hot Butter Popcorn"...
Another interesting phenomenon was the "incorporation" of rock&roll into the established "serious music", via Broadway Rock Operas ("Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" are the relevant examples), and the so-called Symphonic Rock, covering many sub-genres but mainly, accompanied by classical orchestra instruments.
In the latter part of the decade, Jazz went "free", which means free of any melodic obligations or entanglements.
Suddenly, for the arts, too much freedom brought on an empty void, devoid of meaning, with nothing, staring right at your face...the universe was boiled down to either "good" (positive) or "bad" (negative) vibrations - and that's all you really are: a good or a bad vibration - just like music!

"He's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans, for nobody..." - John Lennon

Of course the genius of The Beatles (mainly Lennon and McCartney) were partly to blame (with a BIG part), but also drugs, (their extensive use), properly fed and hardship-ignoring kids, the horrors of war televised into the living-room, and a "new" (because not practiced) way of understanding love: not romantic, but universal. The 60's generation went all out for a synthesis of all cultures, all religions, all music.
Fun times...when globalization was a left-wing idea. Revolution? "Well, you know...we all wanna change our heads! But...it's gonna be alright!"
Rock & Roll would never be the same again, neither would society...Peace, Man!
A note on the category: since Rock is a category on its own, under this "label" I chose to include all the popular tunes that marked the decade, even though they are mostly also rock & roll.

Audio Illustrations:
- necktie 60's
Otis Redding - Reach Out (I'll Be There)
Los Bravos - Black is Black
Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Were Made For Walking
Animals - House Of The Rising Sun
- hippy 60's
Scott McKenzie - If You're Going To San Francisco
Melanie - Look What They've Done To My Song, Ma
Sonny & Cher - The Beat Goes On
5th Dimension - Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (from the musical "Hair" score)
- Woodstock soundtracks:
Jimmy Hendrix - Star Spangled Banner
Jimmy Hendrix - Purple Haze (Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky)
Janis Joplin - Summertime

Video Illustrations:
The Mamas And The Papas - California Dreamin'

50's Rock/Elvis Presley

2007-05-13T01:33:00.000+01:00

Known to this date as "The King of Rock&Roll", Elvis Presley was a worlwide phenomenon that marked the start of the history of rock, mixing looks, rebellion, voice, rythm and sensuality.
He introduced a "cool" style that has never really gone out of date.
In 1954, Elvis recorded what was to become his first major hit: "That's Alright Mama" a blues tune against a country-western beat backdrop. Such were the roots of rock'n'roll!
By 1957, the music industry was at hands with a new social phenomenon: mass hysteria. Even though he's been deceased since 1977, he has often been spotted "entering buildings".
Social considerations aside, Elvis' contribution to music was remarkable and paved the way for decades of sensuality and rebellion linked to rock, and its transe-intensifying beat.

Featured Video - Love Me Tender

Links to audio:

Heartbreak Hotel
Blue Suede Shoes
Jailhouse Rock

50's Rock

2007-05-12T00:50:00.012+01:00

The dance style, the vocal groups, the swinging beat - all of these transfered from the 40's into the 50's with a small twist (the big one was still to come): the beat, instead of just swinging, rocked.
Many analysts have developed theories over how it all came about, how what came to be known as Rock & Roll was born, what details and events triggered it. It seems to me clear that when they added rythm to blues, (with jazz sub-genres ragtime and boogie-woogie, et al), it could only develop into this (some point out the native american indian tom-tom beat as a clear influence, others the country-western beat, which in turn derived fron the horse gallop). But rather than trying to develop one more theory or to account events (more than enough accounts are out there), I will present directly, relevant illustrative examples.
Elvis Presley is of course the main influence, but there were others, with a place of distinction for The Platters. Chuck Berry introduced Johnny B. Good to the world, and Bill Haley & The Comets rocked kids around the clock - suddenly somewhere along the way, someone plugged a guitar into an electric socket, and it was the Rock & Roll era!
Post-note: It seems that that someone is credited to have been none other than Les Paul, a jazz musician playing around with electronics, who came up with the idea of plugging-in the acoustic guitar, fusion country-western with jazz and turn-up with a new sound in the early 50's, with several hits on the charts, with help from his wife Mary Ford's vocal talents.
According to Wiki, "...[Les Paul] is a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which 'made the sound of rock and roll possible.' "
It's not rock&roll yet, but you can hear "pre-form" samples of what later on would become typical rock guitar riffs.
Audio illustration:
"How High The Moon" - Les Paul & Mary Ford
(1951 original recording)

Music without words

To "voice" music, that is, to use the vocal system (from lungs, through throat, to mouth) as a musical instrument, words - lyrics - are most often used. But humming, or "lah-lah-lah-ing", are of course, almost instinctively used, since times immemorial. With Jazz came "scat" and with 50's rock came "doo-wop": an official sub-genre. The "bop-shoo-wops", the "shang-alang-alangs" marked an era, or at least, the collective memory of a generation of teenagers, as illustrated in the doo-wop nostalgic Carpenters' hit "Ev'ry Sha La La" (maybe not the song's official title, but the one that it's best known as). One thing's for sure: who ever it was that put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop, should be thanked for it!

Famous Quotes:

"If you tried to give rock&roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
- John Lennon

Links to audio:

Danny & the Juniors - At The Hop
Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall in Love
Marty Robbins - A White Sport Coat And A Pink Carnation
Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire
Sam Cooke - Don't Know Much About History or Biology
The Platters - Only You
The Platters - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Ben E. King - Stand By Me
Del Shannon - Runaway
The Marcels - Blue Moon

50's

2007-05-10T04:22:00.004+01:00

The phenomenon covered in the next category - 50's Rock - doesn't seem to leave much room for anything else in this decade.
Jazz was still going strong and kept growing, and expanding, and exploring styles and possibilities: the easy swing was making way to harder beats, as though the beat suddenly said: "Hey, you've been playing me down for so many centuries, now I'm going to explode!". The beatnicks snapped their fingers to "cool" jazz; latin rythms were starting to permeate the mainstream anglo-saxon market and culture, and jazz started to fusion with music from other parts of the world.
Doris Day was singing Que Será, Será!, The Chordettes popularized Mr. Sandman.
In the movies, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were trying to surpass each other's dance choreographies. (Strange as it may sound, I believe they both succeeded).
Marilyn Monroe was ripping the screen apart from silver to staggering color and singing a cover of Betty Boop's I Wanna Be Loved By You which made all the boys, and most men, go completely berserk.

30's & 40's/The Andrews Sisters

2007-05-09T00:03:00.008+01:00

On a lighter note (then the previous category), another unmistakeable sound of the "war years", with breathtaking (close) vocal harmonies, were the unforgettable and unavoidable Andrews Sisters. Laverne, Maxene and Patty (the blonde lead vocal), were releasing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen (Means That You're Grand)" into the air-waves in 1937, when the craze started spreading throughout the U.S.A. and then went on to Europe and conquered the world in less then two years.
According to Wiki, "The Andrews Sisters became the best-selling female vocal group in the history of popular music, setting records that remain unsurpassed today: approximately 75-100 million records sold from a little over 600 recorded tunes."
For your enjoyment, here's a selection of some the most popular hits:

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen (Means That You're Grand)
Beat Me Daddy Eight To The Bar
Hold Tight! (Want Some Seafood, Mama!)
Sonny Boy
In The Mood
Rum & Coca-Cola

In 1942, Hollywood stars (with Bette Davis in the lead) joined efforts to entertain the troops, opening and running a club called Hollywood Canteen, where "glamorous stars volunteered to wait on tables, cook in the kitchen and clean up." All servicemen on their way overseas were invited to come in, eat, drink, watch the show, or dance swing with the on-duty patriotic "jitter bug". Here's the Sisters' tribute to the girls "Gettin' corns for my country".

Rare recordings:

In this "rare recording" Al Jolson and The Andrews Sisters join harmonies in "The Old Piano Roll Blues":

Featured Videos:

Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree

(I'm Gettin') Corns For My Country

30's & 40's/Marlene Dietrich

2007-05-07T04:09:00.001+01:00

The first sub-category for a major influence artist is Marlene Dietrich - a strange, gloomy, unmistakeable and unforgettable voice, that engraves itself into the mind of the listener and portrays dispair, dis-enchantment and seems to say "we're headed for doom, but what can we do about it, except maybe sing a sad song, light up another cigarette and have another drink..."
Fitting the pre-war years, 30's music cannot even be thought of, without reference to "The Blue Angel".
From Berlin back-drop cabarets to Hollywood stardom, she marked the era and contributed definitively with her unique style and voice, to the collective memory of the 20th century.

Links:
Marlene Dietrich at Wikipedia
Marlene Dietrich at The Internet Movie Database
Streaming Audio:
Falling In Love Again
Lili Marlene
Where Have All The Flowers Gone

30's & 40's

2007-05-05T03:56:00.004+01:00

Why join together two decades into one category? I call that whole era the "war years": pre, during and post. The mainstream popular music was swing jazz, spanning both decades, and the mainly relevant mark is to realize weather a tune was playing before, during or after the war.

In the early 30's the "silver screen" tried to help folks ellude the depression, with lavish musical productions, then the screen turned black, forewarning the war; during the war it portrayed mostly the heroes and the fronts, and after 45, the party began - or restarted.
Some people do not appreciate the "musical" film genre, because musicals do not portray reality. For the "war years", I would like to point out the music of a non-musical film, portraying hard reality: Casablanca. In response to german soldiers singing their hymn in Rick's Café, the french patriots wring out "Allons, enfants de la Patrie...", shutting out and up the germans. As for those to whom the war had just meant frustrated love affairs..."You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss"..."it's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory"..."no matter what the future brings...as time goes by!"

In terms of "evolution" the fact I believe stands out in the 40's, is the definite widespread acceptance that in music, rythm - tempo or "beat" - was at least as important as melody. It had been before, although not as widespread, with jazz (and before that, with spirituals and blues, which had been around since slavery). We owe it all to the intermingling of african and european cultures, that went on in the american melting pot, for about 300 years. Swing Jazz and the "Big Bands" (Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, et al) stepped it up and refined it, exploring many tempo variations and allowing entertainment of the notion that syncopated rythm music could ever become known as classical. Both popular and erudite music evolved. If only folks then had any idea of what was to come next, even if only in musical terms!

Audio files:

Betty Grable - There's Danger In A Dance

Fred Astaire - Cheek To Cheek (Top Hat-1935)

Fred Astaire - Let's Call The Whole Thing Off
(Shall We Dance-1937)

Glenn Miller - Pennsylvania 6-5000

Featured Videos

Fred Astaire & Eleanor Powell - Broadway Melody (1940)

Humphrey Bogart & Ingmar Bergman - Casablanca (1942)

20's

2007-05-02T01:43:00.032+01:00

The first of the categories, in (computer) alphabetical order, is the 20's decade of the 20th century.
About the decades categories: in them I catalogued all that would not easily fit into categories or sub-categories set apart on their own, due to their importance, but still constitute portrait of an "era". For example, the most important type of music that came out of the 1920's is Jazz music, but, as I consider it a category on its own, under Jazz/Classic, examples of 20's jazz pieces won't be included in this post.
Also, sub-categories are a way to categorize sub-genres, as well as Artists, who stand on their own as a category, be it for organizational purposes or due to their significance and contribution to the genre.
Nonetheless, it was the Jazz era...or as I like to call it, the "early between wars" era - new forms of mass communication were being set into place, creating roots, as the true beginning of the 20th century. The "war to end all wars" was over, and life couldn't be sweeter. What were the masses listening to? Easy, quick-paced, uplifting tunes, that came out of their roots in southern united states and spread to the "western" world like a bikini bomb, through radio and the first commercial films and animations. Speaking of animations, the examples presented include two "Betty Boop" (Helen Kane's remarkable voice) tunes: the unavoidable (and original) "I Wanna Be Loved By You" and the lesser known "He's So Unusual".
Betty Boop's "boop-oop-a-doop" somehow marked the era, and continued to be covered throughout the later decades.
In one cartoon show, Betty went to court and asked the judge to be leanient and not take her "boop-oop-a-doop" away.

Betty Boop (Helen Kane) - Don't Take My "boop-oop-a-doop" away.

I've included a version of "We're In The Money", a huge 20's hit, although I'm not sure who the performer is, in this case- Ginger Rogers has been suggested, but I have reasonable doubts about it. If it is her, it's probably a 30's recording.
Silent films were dead, and Al Jolson ripped the silver screen apart in full sound!
The "young and rebel" girls were lifting the rim of their skirts above the ankle and dancing the "charleston" with their partners in the dance-halls.
For music, it was the pre-swing era that established jazz as a "pop" genre and produced what is today considered "classic jazz".
The technology allowing the preservation of musical performances for future generations was starting to widespread and consolidate its commercial and industrial base. There was suddenly "big" money to be made in the entertainment business.
Anything and everything in the past can be said to have had effect on the present state of things as we know it, but I believe the 1920's decade did it in a style unmatchable to other eras, that marked the start of mass communication and the release from old shackles into a bloom of expression of freedom in the western world, specially symbolized by jazz music.
_________________________________________
Audio files:

Betty Boop (Helen Kane) - I Wanna Be Loved By You

Betty Boop (Helen Kane) - He's So Unusual (1929)

Ginger Rogers (?) - We're in the money!

Introduction - What is music

2007-05-01T22:40:00.000+01:00

Of course, the scholarly definition of music is: an organized sequence of sounds produced in such a way that it will alter and provoke emotional states or "moods" to the person listening, and thus portraying "meaning" to the listener.
Or as wikipedia puts it, "an art form that involves organised sounds and silence."
In any case, it involves "organized" sound. Other definitions might relate it to just the concept of sound, any sound, specially if it is pleasurable - hence the expression: "that's music to my ears!"
The Bible says "in the beginning there was the verb". In my humble opinion, sound must have preceded the verb. And the verb as I understand it, being an organized super-structure of sound. The "organization of sound" evolved through history of course, along with the world; nature's way of organizing sound has its own characteristics, which I shall attempt to analyze, in the Chapter/Category "Nature Music". And after he realized he could organize sound himself, so did man's art and craft and perception of music, evolve. I shall be humbly attempting to categorize, analyze and illustrate each type of music, or the most important ones, in terms of usage.

How this blog is organized

As a consequence of a "battle" between my idea for this blog, and the technical issues risen, I shall be presenting in the next chapters (posts), categories of music, one for each chapter/post, in which I intend to expose as much information as I can on the subject (the featured category), as well as illustrate it as much as I can with significant examples: downloadable or streaming audio files, representative of the category. In number, such examples might not be exhaustive, but they will be continually growing, so check back regularly. For a list of (eventually) all the audio files presented in this blog, please visit Chuck's Music Blog Audio Files.
One last introductory question, before the chapter-categories: in which order?
Three possibilities:
1. Chronological - It would be the most logical order, yet I shan't be attempting to relate a chronology of categories, because it isn't clear nor clarifying which categories "came first", except where, appropriately and explicitly, there is a time-sequence relation between categories, in which cases such relations will be pointed out.
2. "Ad impromptu" - as the feeling comes, the most illogical order. It would be easy to fall into this temptation, due to the personal passion for some categories. I'll try to leave "personal passions" out. It wouldn't help anyone looking for a particular category, either.
3. Alphabetical - Logical enough to be organized, allowing for an impersonal yet at times surprising sequence (oh!, next is THAT category), I have chosen to take this order.
So, without further ado, earnestly hoping you the reader and listener, enjoy and get something out of it...await next posts! :)

Welcome

2007-04-28T01:46:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Chuck's Music!
As by popular demand, I am starting a new Blog, dedicated to music.
Where to start?
First the technical problems: if it's going to be about music, then it has to have music!
I won't bore you with the details, but I'm still working out a way for people to come in and listen to music as they browse. There are logistic problems involved (file storage and access). And let's not forget the copyright problems, which I intend to discuss further on in this blog - for now, I will just state that if the inventor of the wheel (and his descendancy), who worked hard at his invention, ever decided to charge copyrights on his idea...we'd still be in the stone age!

Another problem: what baffles newcomers to the blog concept, is the unavoidable "last in, first seen" structure, which might just stray me from telling [my version of] the story from beginning to end, in a neat chronological sequence. (Please use the Blog Archive on the top sidebar to navigate chronologically through the blog)

"How I tell a story" - Click on drawing to enlarge

Because that's the idea behind this blog: an illustrated story, not history, of music.
So enough for today, tomorrow the first chapter. Or maybe an introduction, first. Then again, maybe I'll start with the epilogue. Whatever clanks. Hopefuly, to music!