Ahhh, Rush. Amongst a certain demographic, the ne plus ultra of rock groups. It took me a while, but I finally got there. They’d been active pretty much all of my musically conscious life, but none of the parental generation in my family was into them, and I never listened to the radio stations that […]
Content
Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
Tagged: 1990s
2014-04-28 ::
Edward Semblance //
Snapsongs
Snapsongs: “What Is And What Should Never Be” by Led Zeppelin
Snapsongs: “What Is And What Should Never Be” by Led Zeppelin
As I am a male of a certain age, no series of musical memoirs should be considered complete without some mention of Led Zeppelin. Every young man needs to select a particular British supergroup to obsess about, and my choice was Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones annoyed me, Pink Floyd was too full of themselves, […]
It all begins with a bassline. In this case, it’s a solo ascending scale that drops back to E, but that’s merely part of the story. The real story is the reason that bassline is included here. In my early life I was diagnosed with many talents; as a child I would regularly draw cartoons, […]
Early spring in Texas, out in the parking lot of the apartment complex I called home. Cool day, cloudy mostly with some patches of sun glinting through the branches of the trees above me. As sunset deepened, the clearing sky lit up the neighborhood with a diffuse orange glow. 99.9 F° was playing on my […]
When you’re stuck in a musty filing office running credit cards for the Accounts/Receivable department of a high-tech equipment manufacturer, there’s not a whole lot you can say about the situation. So you tend to try to focus on the positive. Nobody bothered me much, the invoice printer would loudly do my job for me, […]
Five bored young men, stuffed into a borrowed BMW, driving around Austin, Texas in the late afternoon in the late autumn. Windows down, air cool, sunroof open. I can’t remember if it was a Thursday or Friday, but nothing was going on, nothing was on the slate, nothing was happening. Nothing except burning gas and […]
Let’s start off with a truism: for anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the Beastie Boys’ album Licensed to Ill was a seminal piece of work. For those in the know, it was the commercialization of a culture that had been building and evolving for at least ten years. For those far from the […]
Sometimes a song doesn’t have to necessarily evoke a particular, specific reaction in its playing or construction. It doesn’t have to speak to the situation in its words or style. It just has to be at the right place and the right time, and enhance what is already there. The album Reach the Beach by […]
Summer of 1996. I was living with two roommates in a funky little house in central Austin, where the floor in the living room had an odd wobble near the kitchen and you couldn’t run the air conditioning and dryer at the same time or else you’d blow a breaker. Besides that, it was a […]
How do I put this kindly? Well, there’s no way to do it. I am probably, as one of my high school friends told me, one of the whitest people in the world. I am a technical guy, a computer geek, a space nut, fascinated with processes and cerebral complications. I can’t dance, I can’t […]