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Unusual Rock Trivia?

#283
First time I'm seeing this thread an wanted to subscribe, so I'll make my contribution - which may have already been said. And most bass players might already know it anyhow...

The bass in the Beatles Something was fought over, and done against George's will. He wanted the song to be simple, with Paul following the roots. Paul seemed to take a very, "eff you on that," attitude towards that.

Which just reminded me of some Partridge Family trivia. In the song Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted, David Cassidy was vehemently opposed to doing the speaking part of the song. "Ya know... I'm no different than anybody else..." He was going to quit the show, break his contract, yada, yada... and he was finally convinced to just do it. You can hear his enthusiasm over the part if ya listen for it :).

Is this trivia? I don't care! I'm posting it anyway.
 
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#285
Not exactly trivia, but I had read a book "Full Moon" ("Moon the Loon" in the UK) by Dougal Butler, who was Keith Moon's personal assistant while with the Who for about a decade. When talking about all the wild stories told about Keith, his general answer was that the more crazy the story was, the more likely it was true. Great read if you can find it.
 
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#287
Honch said:
Since all this talk about recently deceased Chuck. His only number one hit in both US and UK was the 1972 novely hit (quite inane really) "My Ding'A'Ling". Guess who played bass on his session band, for that recording?

Nic Potter of Van Der Graaf Generator. Prog stalwarts at the time. You Never Know....(sorry again, mr @Son of Wobble , couldn't help myself).
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Another bit of trivia about the song, "My Ding-A-Ling". Chuck Berry did not write the song and it was a cover of a song originally done by Dave Bartholomew in 1952. Bartholomew rerecorded the song under the title "It Was Little Girl Sing Ting-a-Ling". The Bees covered the song with the title "Toy Bell" in 1954. Chuck Berry recorded a version called "My Tambourine" in 1968; but, the version which topped the charts was recorded live during the Lanchester Arts Festival at the Locarno ballroom in Coventry, England February 3, 1972, where Berry – backed by the Roy Young Band – topped a bill that also included Slade, George Carlin, and Billy Preston. The song is based on the melody of the 19th century folk song "Little Brown Jug".









 
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#288
Honch said:
But it could be very well like this, like it was for Frank Zappa: He didn't audition every average Joe for his band. He had head of rehearsal, and musicians in his current band that where chosen to pick out the gems, that they thought would fit BEFORE Frank ever got a chance to hear or play with them. Sort of a filter. I can't think of that Black Sabbath was the same, since they were already an established band. It may be enough to do an audition for managers or some other musically inclined, to filter it out first.
Frank Zappa expressed opinion on this, since people could just "audition for him" to get on their cVs that they did!!! I mean, so hyped and level above anything else, was it, that it was considered a merit just to have auditioned for him, without ever getting any chance to get the gig. Zappa was monster hard on peoples sight reading skills. So he used this filter first, where it wasn't mentioned at all that they auditioned for Zappa, but for a bunch of anonymous musicians ..FIRST.
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I used to be acquaintances with a fantastic guitar/percussion player (he even did a guitar solo on my first demo as a favor) who was a huge Zappa fan. This guy was off the charts talented (and schooled) and more than good enough to play with Zappa. He made his way into the inner circle and finally nagged them enough to get an audition. Afterwards he said that Zappa was such an ass, screaming at the musicians (THAT'S AN F SHARP MAJOR!!!!) and being so rude, that even if he was offered a job there was no way he would have been able to work with him. He was very disappointed.

Sorry for the thread derail...I will try to think of some real trivia!
 
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#289
Richland123 said:
Musician, Songwriter, Playwright, and Author Rupert Holmes, who had some 1970s cheese hits with "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", "Him" and "Answering Machine" also wrote the song "Timothy" for The Buoys.
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A little Six-Degrees-Of-Kevin-Bacon trivia here: My closest friend (best man at my wedding, roommate for ~5 years back in the 1980s, and occasional musical/audio collaborator for over three decades) was employed by Rupert Holmes back when computer musical notation programs were first getting off the ground. His job consisted primarily of inputting Rupert's huge collection of manuscripts into Finale... Version 1. By all accounts it was not a fun job. :)
 
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#290
Sib Hashian's daughter, Lauren, is married to Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson.
Sib played drums on Boston's epic debut album & "Don't Look Back".

lauren-hashian-5-things-to-know-about-the-rocks-girlfriend-gty-ftr.jpg
SibHashianLaurenHashian2011.jpg
 
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#292
As an Amazon Associate, TalkBass may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via links on this site.
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#294
ptg said:
I used to be acquaintances with a fantastic guitar/percussion player (he even did a guitar solo on my first demo as a favor) who was a huge Zappa fan. This guy was off the charts talented (and schooled) and more than good enough to play with Zappa. He made his way into the inner circle and finally nagged them enough to get an audition. Afterwards he said that Zappa was such an ass, screaming at the musicians (THAT'S AN F SHARP MAJOR!!!!) and being so rude, that even if he was offered a job there was no way he would have been able to work with him. He was very disappointed.

Sorry for the thread derail...I will try to think of some real trivia!
Click to expand...

He sang about it in Yo'Mama. A song of his on Sheik Yerbouti album. Afterwards he was too fed up and tired to be at every audition, and then had "middle-men" to have a go, and filter out the duds. Eddie Jobson said in an interview that Z demanded maximum 3 days to learn any chart by heart, and then move on to new things, no matter how hard it was. If musicians wasn't interested in audition, he had very very little recreational listen time for them. He didn't check out new acts, or new musicians that made a career outside of him. Like, he didn't check out - say - Michael Hedges, or any of the new groups or guitarists or music at all. He just went back in time instead, and checked out old stuff. Most famous bands had a week or two of "tour rehearsals" with full gear, and full rigs including lights, while Zappa was the sole one who had A MONTH of tour rehearsals. They often rehearsed 110 songs (about) no matter how easy or hard, and you should be able to change set list on the go, and play something in the middle of the tour on the spot, that you hadn't played since the tour rehearsal. Requires some hefty kind of memory...and live, each song where laid end to end, automatically "segueing" into the next without breaks/pauses that allowed for audience applause. Zappa said "the audience haven't paid for silence, they will applaud anyway no matter what".

If the musician had too much of an "own" identity - like that of Lowell George, which he recommended to start his own band instead, because it was "too good" to be drowned and buried in Zappas band - he would fire or not hire them. As time passed, George Duke, Jean Luc Ponty, Steve Vai et al eventually cultivated their own thing, while a whole lot of others didn't make it on their own, in spite of being over the top super stellar musicians.

Invalid Link Removed


Here is excerpt from Tommy Mars 1980 interview (Invalid Link Removed. From The Publisher of Guitar Playes and Keyboard p.20-21)

"Frank wrote that song at the very beginning of the '77 European tour; and it has a personal relevance to me. We were doing the rehearsal in London and Frank was getting very tense. He expected certain thing to be there when we go to rehearsal, and certain things were not there. We were gonna do the song "Zoot Allures", and he started playing this 11th chord and got very angry at everybody because nothing was happening right. I got fined because I hadn't memorized this little piece called "The Little House I Used To Live In". I hadn't realized he wanted it totally memorized. So this rehearsal ended in a total fiasco. The next day, he came in with these lyrics: "Maybe you should stay with yo' mama..." It was really autobiographic; that's how things evolve with Frank."

- - - - -

What is sure, and a little pejorative of Zappa, that he himself wouldn't be able to play most of the music he'd written. He just hired "stunt" guitar players that could play things that he was too lazy to pull off, and just did improvised solos surfing on top of others, and those solos where just in ONE key ONE chord only, and mostly in 4/4. The only odd time signature solo he was able to pull off was "Watermelon In Easter Hay" which is a slow 7/4 signature. I would not even hesitate to say that he wouldn't stand a chance in memorizing someone elses music, if he was a hired gun for someone else as rabid pedantic as he was. When I heard him, I thought the band was stellar, but who the ***** is this sloppy guitarist wanking away with inane guitar solos... ?

That was my initial reaction to him. After a while I came to my senses again...;)
 
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#296
Honch said:
He sang about it in Yo'Mama. A song of his on Sheik Yerbouti album. Afterwards he was too fed up and tired to be at every audition, and then had "middle-men" to have a go, and filter out the duds. Eddie Jobson said in an interview that Z demanded maximum 3 days to learn any chart by heart, and then move on to new things, no matter how hard it was. If musicians wasn't interested in audition, he had very very little recreational listen time for them. He didn't check out new acts, or new musicians that made a career outside of him. Like, he didn't check out - say - Michael Hedges, or any of the new groups or guitarists or music at all. He just went back in time instead, and checked out old stuff. Most famous bands had a week or two of "tour rehearsals" with full gear, and full rigs including lights, while Zappa was the sole one who had A MONTH of tour rehearsals. They often rehearsed 110 songs (about) no matter how easy or hard, and you should be able to change set list on the go, and play something in the middle of the tour on the spot, that you hadn't played since the tour rehearsal. Requires some hefty kind of memory...and live, each song where laid end to end, automatically "segueing" into the next without breaks/pauses that allowed for audience applause. Zappa said "the audience haven't paid for silence, they will applaud anyway no matter what".

If the musician had too much of an "own" identity - like that of Lowell George, which he recommended to start his own band instead, because it was "too good" to be drowned and buried in Zappas band - he would fire or not hire them. As time passed, George Duke, Jean Luc Ponty, Steve Vai et al eventually cultivated their own thing, while a whole lot of others didn't make it on their own, in spite of being over the top super stellar musicians.

Invalid Link Removed


Here is excerpt from Tommy Mars 1980 interview (Invalid Link Removed. From The Publisher of Guitar Playes and Keyboard p.20-21)

"Frank wrote that song at the very beginning of the '77 European tour; and it has a personal relevance to me. We were doing the rehearsal in London and Frank was getting very tense. He expected certain thing to be there when we go to rehearsal, and certain things were not there. We were gonna do the song "Zoot Allures", and he started playing this 11th chord and got very angry at everybody because nothing was happening right. I got fined because I hadn't memorized this little piece called "The Little House I Used To Live In". I hadn't realized he wanted it totally memorized. So this rehearsal ended in a total fiasco. The next day, he came in with these lyrics: "Maybe you should stay with yo' mama..." It was really autobiographic; that's how things evolve with Frank."

- - - - -

What is sure, and a little pejorative of Zappa, that he himself wouldn't be able to play most of the music he'd written. He just hired "stunt" guitar players that could play things that he was too lazy to pull off, and just did improvised solos surfing on top of others, and those solos where just in ONE key ONE chord only, and mostly in 4/4. The only odd time signature solo he was able to pull off was "Watermelon In Easter Hay" which is a slow 7/4 signature. I would not even hesitate to say that he wouldn't stand a chance in memorizing someone elses music, if he was a hired gun for someone else as rabid pedantic as he was. When I heard him, I thought the band was stellar, but who the ***** is this sloppy guitarist wanking away with inane guitar solos... ?

That was my initial reaction to him. After a while I came to my senses again...;)
Click to expand...


All that being said, there is no reason to treat people like poop. He got away with it because of his success and it seemed he was very lenient with his own deficiencies but not so much for others. I'm not an FZ hater, I like some of his stuff, but as a person I'm not a big fan.
 
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#297
Honch said:
As time passed, George Duke, Jean Luc Ponty, Steve Vai et al eventually cultivated their own thing
Click to expand...

It's perhaps worth noting that Jean-Luc Ponty insists that he did not use his tenure in Zappa's band (nor The Mahavishnu Orchestra fwiw) as a springboard for his career and/or a way to develop his musical voice; in interviews he has adamantly claimed that Zappa and McLaughlin hired him because of the musician he already was and what he brought to their respective bands. (Talking about his musicianship, not his notoriety.) I.e., Ponty already had cultivated his own thing, and Zappa wanted some of that thing in his band.
 
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