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Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:44 pm
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Occasionally there is some generic guy trying out gear at GC who is insane, sick, you can't believe this guy is not some huge star. They're around. Heard a guy last year at the San Jose GC--mindblowing skills. And totally unknown.

25 years from now, Jimi and SRV and Clapton will be known, and revered. John Mayer, if he's lucky...REAL lucky, will be about like Peter Frampton is today: doing Geico commercials. I'm Bigger Than My Body will be the theme song for Weight Watchers. Waiting on the World to Change will be Barack Obama Jr.'s campaign theme song. This is not a heavy dude.


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Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 5:03 pm
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Maruuk wrote:
Occasionally there is some generic guy trying out gear at GC who is insane, sick, you can't believe this guy is not some huge star. They're around. Heard a guy last year at the San Jose GC--mindblowing skills. And totally unknown.

25 years from now, Jimi and SRV and Clapton will be known, and revered. John Mayer, if he's lucky...REAL lucky, will be about like Peter Frampton is today: doing Geico commercials. I'm Bigger Than My Body will be the theme song for Weight Watchers. Waiting on the World to Change will be Barack Obama Jr.'s campaign theme song. This is not a heavy dude.


His status in the future is unknown, why don't we wait and see what he turns into.
I have to agree with you about guitar players though. We're a dime a dozen. Some of the best I've ever heard have been guys in local bands that no one will ever hear of. There's studio musicians out there that would blow anyone away and they're completely anonymous. No matter how great you think your hero's are, there's plenty who are better. Ever since MTV it hasn't been about how good you are that gets you famous, it's how you look in a video, how well you fit into the mold thats being marketed at the time. Hell, Jimmy Page wouldn't even get thru a labels door these days with a mug like his.

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Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 5:18 pm
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Everyone is entitled to they're own opinions. You might like something that I don't like at all, or vice versa. It doesn't matter. You can keep liking whatever you want if you want. Some people like John Mayer, thats why they buy his cd's and go to his concerts. Thats why Fender produces a signature guitar with his name on it. Some people don't. So what?


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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:37 am
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Everyone needs to understand that Hendrix was not the first electric blues man by any stretch of the imagination. BB King was the original guitar king in the 1950s, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters were all writing and playing electric guitar blues that were so far ahead of his time it took Clapton to catch up in the late 1960s. Clapton also pre-dates Hendrix and was helping Hendrix get his due along with other 1960s music heroes. Imho, Hendrix never comes close to matching the guitar virtuoso licks of BB King and Clapton, and he's not even trying because to his credit he took things in a different and brilliant direction all his own. If you're talking "notes per second" - and they are picked not tapped with legato as an additional dimension not the whole story - Hendrix was not doing what BB King and Clapton do. Far from playing a correct blues style like BB King or Eric Clapton, Hendrix was a wildman that broke the rules for quick-change blues generally followed by electric blues musicians. It caused him a lot of problems trying to get a record deal and hold down backing gigs in the States, but once his talent was recognized in the UK he created great and lasting music.

Imho, Mayer is no Hendrix clone. Mayer is far more of a classic blues man in the style of greats like BB King, Buddy Guy, Clapton, Robin Trower, SRV and many others. Hendrix and SRV didn't invent blues guitar. They stood on shoulders of many who are still playing hard today, and in fact Hendrix branched off in a very different direction.

Mayer hasn't reached the level of the greats, but he's doing it. He plays hard. The reason he lacks credibility is because he doesn't play everything flat-out like BB King, SRV and others did. He's pulling back to service the song like a Chet Atkins, Lindsey Buckingham and Clapton has done at times, which is fine but won't make him a classic guitar hero.

What I'd say to Mayer if I could is, forget about getting the blues out of your system playing live and then pulling back for the songs - floor it like SRV, Jimi (in a different way), BB King's 1950s classics, and the best Clapton. Floor it and make that into the song and you will light up the night sky, because you can play and you can write. You just need to bring the licks into the hits flat out. That's what SRV did, and he lives on forever.


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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:01 pm
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I don't think of Mayer as a bluesman in any remote sense whatsoever. He's a kid who plays the blues, but any comparison between him and Hubert Sumlin or Son House or Robert Johnson or Skip James or JB Lenoir or even actual dedicated White bluesmen like Stevie Ray or John Mayall is ludicrous.

He's a pop star who plays some blues, in addition to mostly cute, inoffensive pop pablum. Hardly a "bluesman" by any stretch of the imagination.

Hendrix was an R&B sideman for years. He's much more steeped in that tradition.


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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:50 pm
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Hey, agreed, he's no BB King or Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters. Still, in a lot of ways the Rock & Roll lifestyle and many ladies it brings along with other things are a lot of what the bluesmen from the Delta did because in their time it was a scandal and now it's a shrug. When Mayer plays blues, he plays it pretty old school and not like Hendrix did. If he'll floor it, if he can, and blend it with song writing skills without pulling back for the pop audience, he has potential. It won't be Delta Blues, but it may be good. Even white boys get the blues, especially with the stock market down..


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:07 am
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Blues shares a very interesting component with Jazz: it's birthing inititiated something of a Half-Life: it can die. Some say should.

When Miles Davis was asked around the Bitches Brew electric "rock" phase time "What are you doing to keep Jazz alive?" He looked incredulous.

"What am I doin? What am I doin? NUTHIN! Everything dies, man. Just let the m*&*&^&%$#@ die!"

People still play jazz today. As they do Swing Era Big Band music, and flapper music of the twenties, Stephen Foster songs, and somewhere in the world, a group is gathering to dance the Minuet.

People will always play the Blues. But in the era of Barack Obama, Hip Hop and Madden '09, it's appropriate to wonder if the Jazz Age isn't accompanied arm in arm by the Blues Age into the dustbin of fading genres.

When Otis Spann fell out of the rusting old Muddy Waters Band van in 1963 stone drunk in front of the Club 47 in Cambridge MA with the starry-eyed line of kids waiting to get in watching their folk heroes in horror, you kind of got the message. These guys wore clothes out of the '40s. They were broke, and at least one of them was drunk. That's how it was.

And even then, in 1963, Blues as a way of life, as an Age, was fading fast. A dinosaur. The Blues Age, like the Jazz Age, has a right to go extinct. When Wynton Marsalis plays Scott Joplin today, it's merely charming, not relevant.

And when John Mayer plays Crossroads, he ain't no bluesman. He's a docent in a museum.


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:41 am
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The Blues will never die, because they evolve and at the core are elemental and mysterious. Shredding will fade with disco, unless it merges with Blues to find meaning. If you play a BB King song, are you playing the Blues? You're playing a BB King song in the form of the Blues, but you aren't playing the blues. When you know the form of say quick-change blues, and you know the scale of say Blues in A, and then you sing through the guitar and you sing your own Blues, then you are playing the Blues. It's right hemisphere, not something debaters can debate - it's the elemental music in the soul of mankind that the Delta blues and electric blues pioneers found and discovered. That's why real blues is always different from player to player - Johnson, Buddy Guy, BB King, Clapton, Hendrix, Santana - are always very different because they're singing their soul through the instrument. Hail hail the Blues. It will never die as long as people express themselves through simple forms that they make their own and sing their souls through them. Shredding is fast scales with no meaning except speed. It's impressive and young men love it because it's their thing to show how fast they can be. The Blues can be very fast - Clapton is - or slowed down like Trower's good stuff or some BB King and Buddy Guy. The Blues is played through scales but it's not scales. BB King says he sings and then he sings through his guitar, and that's the pacing of the Blues - the guitar like a human voice singing. The Blues will never die as long as human souls cry out through guitars and push that feeling out into the air. The Blues doesn't have to be as popular as disco, or metal, or shredding. The people who can't hear the Blues never could, whether or not it was in. The people who hear and play the Blues always do.


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:01 pm
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Of course Blues can die. It already has. Now when it's played, it's restoration just like Restoration Hall in New Orleans. We play Ragtime, we play Dixieland, we play Swing, but is this the Ragtime Era? The Dixieland Era? The Swing Era? Naw. It's over, past. Dead as it should be. Let the blues die a dignified natural death like Terry Sciavo. No heroic measures.

Then we can all move on to celebrating the past age, each in our own way. Time marches on, everything dies. Don't mean we have to forget it. Or never play it. Or even not feel it. But Blues Age, like the Jet Age and the Jazz Age, is a by-gone era. We gotta let go and move on.


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:23 pm
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Maruuk wrote:
Of course Blues can die. It already has. Now when it's played, it's restoration just like Restoration Hall in New Orleans. We play Ragtime, we play Dixieland, we play Swing, but is this the Ragtime Era? The Dixieland Era? The Swing Era? Naw. It's over, past. Dead as it should be. Let the blues die a dignified natural death like Terry Sciavo. No heroic measures.

Then we can all move on to celebrating the past age, each in our own way. Time marches on, everything dies. Don't mean we have to forget it. Or never play it. Or even not feel it. But Blues Age, like the Jet Age and the Jazz Age, is a by-gone era. We gotta let go and move on.


Ya know, sometimes I think maybe we should let rock n roll die out. Not that I don't love it, I'll be playing it on my deathbed. It just seems that every step forward rock hs taken in the last 15 years...it get worse, diluted, less like rock. We've gotten to the point where we're starting to go backwards to rock again. To me thats kinda the point where a genre has spent itself. It's not a bad thing. Maybe it's just time.

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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:32 pm
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Exactly! You've hit on the exact point, very intuitive! Trying to flog a genre, an age, an era long past its time results in just what we have now: nostalgic feedback loops endlessly replicating the golden Age of Rock, regurgitating it worse and worse until it's almost a self-parody. Let's show the courage to let it die so we can all let go, and move on to the Next Thing, whatever that is. Onward and upward!


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:41 pm
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Strat58cat is right, of course. But I might add Big Mamma Thorton to the list (the Ladies need their Recognition).

The simple fact that John Mayer wants to play the blues, along with everbody else who plays the blues and wants to play the blues, proves the blues is not dead. Neither is Dixie Land, Rocka Billy, Swing (the Glen Miller Orchestra hasn't missed a Date since Glen Died), Classical, Metal, or any other section in the Barnes and Noble back room. Dead music that has listeners? What a silly notion.

If you need any more proof that the blues isn't dead, I'd be glad to Jamm with you. And, yes, my Jamms deserve two M's.

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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:58 pm
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The Era, the Age has past. Time to grow up and move on. Stop living in the past. Like the late 60's--it was time to move on from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, from Doo Wop, from Elvis, from the Four Seasons. That age had passed, had become stagnant and hopelessly redundant. Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Clapton, Johnny Winter, Jimmy Page--this was seriously new stuff, new information. Radical departures.

It's time again for new stuff. Radical departures. Blues and rock have become hopelessly redundant and stagnant. We need to show some courage and get on with it.


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Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:57 pm
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I don't have any Mayer CDs. I don't know if I've seen/heard an entire song of his. I have seen him on TV when channel surfing and listened for a few seconds. It was okay.

I guess I will try to catch him for a whole set to see what the buzz is.

I suppose I could start with You Tube ...

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Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:51 am
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Maruuk wrote:
The Era, the Age has past. Time to grow up and move on. Stop living in the past. Like the late 60's--it was time to move on from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, from Doo Wop, from Elvis, from the Four Seasons. That age had passed, had become stagnant and hopelessly redundant. Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Clapton, Johnny Winter, Jimmy Page--this was seriously new stuff, new information. Radical departures.

It's time again for new stuff. Radical departures. Blues and rock have become hopelessly redundant and stagnant. We need to show some courage and get on with it.


You better get hot creating this super-new sound and music. What Time signatures are we gonna dance to? 5/4? 11/18? That would be interesting to two step to.

What instruments do we get to use in leu of these Electric Guitars? I suppose you have one ready, and a powers source other than electricity?
Concert Pianist will be sad to hear their Pianos are too old and Stale. I wonder how they can justify 185 bucks a seat for a symphony, if it's relevance has gone the way of Disco and Ska?

Silly audiences, they just don't know when to stop listening to some things. And generations yet unborn, I'm sure thier born weary of A good E Boogie. Makes sence to me.

I'm sold, I hate the blues and Rock and Metal and all that Stale Crud.

I no longer get off on '57 Chevys;
I No longer get off on screaming guitar.
I'm over the way it hits me every time it hits me.
I've lost my rock and roll, I've lost my rock and roll heart.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna wash my mouth out with Layla.

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Last edited by FirstMeasure on Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

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