Bands you keep trying to like but can't get into

“Over under sideways down” is the freakiest danciest freakbeat madness

I’ll give it another shot

(I guess “British Invasion Rock” in general is something I have tried and failed to get into, with a few minor exceptions...)

Totally with you on this. I find the next stage, British teacups-and-lace-cuffs psychedelia, similarly worthless.

there’s a smokin live disc with page that came out recently too... disc 2 of that “yardbirds 68” set... that’ll get your motor running

no lace or teacups there, just straight up whiskey soaked blues rock terror

yes, this is killer

I've never been able to get into the Yardbirds. Or Traffic. Or Blind Faith. Or Clapton in anything, not even much of Derek & the Dominoes, tbh, though I want to keep trying with that one.

Clapton is a nobhead though so understandable. What about Cream?

Traffic are great.

yardbirds are great but they sound pretty different from any later clapton stuff to me. i like cream and some of the layla album well enough but can't really get into anything else.

Wouldn't lump Traffic in with the other bands listed at all.

Apart from Blind Faith!

I think I cut off liking Clapton at about the Laylah lp too. May have been way too mainstream after that.
Do like the earlier stuff for the main part though.

I'm not a big Cream fan, either - though I do like Ginger Baker solo!

I did have a Best if Cream tape that I liked as a kid; those are good songs, though I wouldn’t listen on purpose these days.

Beck's playing style kind of annoys me (Wired/Blow by Blow and on) Yardbirds are good but if you don't like the 2cd Rhino comp mentioned up thread you don't like them

Cream has a bit of "you had to be there" I think, influential but so quickly eclipsed by a wave of Cream inspired heavy rock/proto metal

Small Faces/Faces are fantastic

I do like the Cream pop tunes, maybe those were Bruce mostly?

Beck's playing style now is the end product of a natural impulse to throw in little licks and inventive tricks to spice things up in a song you've played forever... problem is that these little touches accumulate over time and eventually you've lost the core of what it was, it's all these little doo-dads and volume knob squiggles

like at what point do you cease being a fish with feet and start being an amphibian?

Like many, I pretty much have no use for Clapton's music after the Layla album.

The moment he shut himself away as a smack-addled recluse in the early '70s, it was over, and coaxing him out to do tours when he'd merely swapped smack for booze and coke was a huge mistake.

i love disraeli gears, mainly for clapton's leslie-boosted guitar tone, but cream is basically a singles band, and a ten-track comp of their best songs would be a bit disjointed but it would also rip

yeah I like their quirky pop Tales of Brave Ulysses/I Feel Free type shit

Clapton was such a purist he quit the Yardbirds because they finally wrote a good song

I honest will give the Yardbirds comp another go; it’s been a while.

(xp) Jack Bruce songs. Though Clapton did write "Badge".

Actually I'm wrong, Clapton wrote "Tales of Brave Ulysses"!

yeah I thought that was Bruce as well and just looked it up!

He sang it, which is where the confusion arose.

i was surprised that their lyricist pete brown wasn't involved with that one--written by martin sharp, who designed the album covers

Sounded pretentious enough to be Pete Brown, true.

"'Wrapping Paper' is the biggest heap of shit I've ever heard in my entire life" - Ginger Baker

famously agreeable ginger baker

In this case, I actually do agree with him!

I eventually changed my mind about Meshuggah fwiw, I like them now

I kind of hate Cream and Ginger Baker especially fwiw. I think he's the shittiest "good" drummer, thuddy and lacking in soul.

I feel like the Yardbirds were handicapped at every turn by Keith Relf...just not a lot of presence, not an interesting voice or a great singer

I can't really get into any of the white straight blues bands of that era either -- they birthed good people but just weren't very interesting themselves.

I kind of hate Cream and Ginger Baker especially fwiw. I think he's the shittiest "good" drummer, thuddy and lacking in soul.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, May 21, 2019 2:41 PM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He's infinitely better than, say, Charlie Watts.

"better" lol

ginger baker would ruin every stones song

yeah that opinion (xp) is rong enough to bring back the RONG thread

I kind of hate Cream and Ginger Baker especially fwiw. I think he's the shittiest "good" drummer, thuddy and lacking in soul.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, May 21, 2019 10:41 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like Cream, for the most part, but Baker is the most colossally overrated musician who ever lived. Everything he's given credit for -- heaviness; "wildness", however defined; being "able" to "play" both "jazz" and "rock" -- was done far more definitively by drummers before, during, and very soon after his emergence.

His "jazz" playing sounds like A Drummer Trying To Play Jazz, and would barely go over in a high school Jazz Band competition. His playing in Cream moves things along decently, and the long improvised sections are shockingly not terrible to my ears...until Bruce and Clapton drop out. There is no more tedious or pointless span of time than a Ginger Baker drum solo.

I disagree, just listen to the recordings - Charlie Watts struggles with staying in time and can't do a drum fill to save his life. Ginger Baker may be an immense dick, but he doesn't have a problem with either.

(x-post)

d'ILM for Murder (Hadrian VIII) at 9:42 21 May 19

I feel like the Yardbirds were handicapped at every turn by Keith Relf...just not a lot of presence, not an interesting voice or a great singer

yeah, Relf is just so mediocre, sometimes wonder if they'd had Steve Marriott instead

I mean, there's a zillion drummers I'd rate higher than Ginger Baker, but Watts isn't one of them.

in a world where instead of music there is just drummer magazine

"Toad"'s a banger before EC & JB drop out, it's true.

I guess I'll be Cap'n Save-A-Relf here and say ARMAGEDDON.

'I'm Free' is a decent Stones song until Watts ruins it.

I'm with the anti-Ginger Baker contingent, sadly. I used to like a few things he played on - the collaboration with Fela, the trio with Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden, the "No Material" group with Peter Brötzmann and Sonny Sharrock - but have changed my mind after revisiting his work just in the last few months; "thuddy and lacking in soul" and "A Drummer Trying To Play Jazz" pretty much nail him.

I can't really get into any of the white straight blues bands of that era either -- they birthed good people but just weren't very interesting themselves.

Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac can be pretty magical. Sometimes he sounds like the only white blues player of his era that "gets it."

I like Ginger Baker's Africa stuff. Anyone ever see this Cream clip where it seems/sounds like clean-tone Clapton was forbidden any fuzz or whatever?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX1lH0VQRaA

I guess I'll be Cap'n Save-A-Relf here and say ARMAGEDDON

Best Led Zep rip-off band of the 70s! I'd rather listen to Relf than Plant any day.

Watts didn't struggle to stay in time, he played behind the beat