Ridiculously incorrect beliefs you had about music and musicians while growing up

There's an urban legend that Richard Sanders (Les Nessman) sang the WKRP theme.

Am I remembering right that Minder is Dennis Waterman?

Yes.Hence the (overdone) Little Britain sketch about him insisting on singing (and writing) the theme tune for whatever TV series he appears in.

Linda Lavin sang the theme to Alice, so that's another one from that period. Funnily enough the theme to The Jeffersons was sung by a cast member of Good Times, Ja'Net DuBois.

I’m certain there’s a thread specifically for this but when I was a little kid I was certain that Spiral Staircase’s “I Love You More Today..” and Todd’s “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light” we’re sung by women doing contralto(??)

Brady Bunch is another one where cast sang theme song

Pretty sure I thought it was Woody singing the Cheers theme when I was a kid

^A friend of mine insisted that the vintage photos at the opening of Cheers were “baby pictures“ of the cast members.

Interestingly, prolific sitcom themesmith Alan Thicke neither wrote nor sung the Growing Pains theme (you can hear him on the Diff'rent Strokes theme, tho).

Hence the (overdone) Little Britain sketch about him insisting on singing (and writing) the theme tune for whatever TV series he appears in.

Waterman also sang the theme tunes for New Tricks, On the Up, and Stay Lucky. He did not write any of them, though: the arch-feminists and definitely not lazy writers behind Little Britain just saw his wife’s credit for lyrics on the first one and stopped there.

I was so fascinated by the Cheers intro as a kid

i wrote a parody when i was like 9 or 10, i don't remember most of it but it started

"staying alive in a bar today takes all the brawn ya got"

I think when I was a kid I thought that every TV theme song had a longer full length version with multiple verses and stuff

After I got over the whole "cast members always sing the theme songs" thing, I thought that the Cheers theme was sung by Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Loool!

Has anyone posted yet one of the biggest of all: that session men were hacks?

aww, Lavator, i'm touched that the Dr. Casino listening thread (credit to fact checking cuz) was an ilx gateway for you! good to know it had a good impact. it's funny because i was already gonna respond to your post before that about getting into classic rock as a teen in the mid 90s, our stories are similar!

Has anyone posted yet one of the biggest of all: that session men were hacks?

I always figured the opposite - that you couldn't just be called in to nail a take of whatever unless you were a real pro who had really put in your time with the method books. The people you could be called in to replace in the studio might be hacks, though.

I think I did have the misconception that this was, like, a job that you could apply for and get outside of three or four big cities.

Yeah, I thought they were all mid-level hired hands who didn’t give a fuck about what they were playing.

I thought the bass on sgt pepper was played by Ringo on a series of tuned bass drums. I was 5.

_Has anyone posted yet one of the biggest of all: that session men were hacks?
_


I always figured the opposite - that you couldn't just be called in to nail a take of whatever unless you were a real pro who had really put in your time with the method books. The people you could be called in to replace in the studio might be hacks, though.

Actually I have a passing acquaintance with one of the NYC Brill Building session men. I sometimes bug him with fanboy questions, and sometimes he even answers. I sometimes feel self-conscious about this but then again, James Redd is gonna James Redd.

That guy is kind of one of my heroes for various reasons. I probably posted about him here before but am a little self-conscious about going into further detail now.

i was disappointed that the 'electric guitar' patch on my keyboard did not sound like a guitar solo

Ha!

lol. is any set of standard keyboard sounds more universally disappointing?

I thought the bass on sgt pepper was played by Ringo on a series of tuned bass drums.

This would have been really cool

Still laughing about the sand trombone

yeah that's so excellent

sand_trombone.wav

i was disappointed that the 'electric guitar' patch on my keyboard did not sound like a guitar solo

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Saturday, September 4, 2021 4:12 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my yamaha midi keyboard led me to believe that "distortion guitar" and "overdrive guitar" were specific kinds of guitars

I used to think the purpose of the bass drum was to display the band’s logo. I thought the sound of the bass drum actually came from the floor tom, that is, a drummer would play the hi-hat with their left hand, and alternate between the snare and floor tom with their right. I didn’t know there was a foot pedal behind the bass drum. (I was maybe six or seven. This was pre-MTV, and I had never seen someone play the drums, either in person or on film.)

if you'll recall the "Once in a Lifetime" video, there are four copies of David Byrne in the background doing various moves, but i didn't know about video trickery when i was little so i thought those were the other four members of the band doing dances that were somehow perfectly in sync, which i thought was really impressive

i've been rifling through my memories all day trying to think of some of these and generally coming up short. as a kid i don't think i really invested a lot of imagination into how music was made or what the musicians were like, i just sort of took the songs as things that were around to sing along to. i didn't even have a lot of curiosity about Raffi. so i think most of my ridiculously incorrect beliefs were just in the category of getting lyrics wildly, impossibly wrong and accepting it because it didn't occur to me that lyrics would typically make sense or use real words. e.g. on "Say Say Say" :

Standin' here
Baptizin' all my tears
Baby Thulious
You know I'm cryin', ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh!

as a teen i probably had a share of more pedestrian misconceptions that i've now forgotten. definitely the whole "recording live as a band in the studio" thing. i'm still vague on whether and to what extent that's still a thing. like don't some bands do at least the instrumental performance together and only do the vocals as separate overdubs? right? dunno. but probably most of my wrongheaded notions were artist-specific, like being introduced to Beck via the "Where It's At" video, and having to be talked out of the notion that he should be primarily categorized as a "rapper."

For Hail to the Thief, the five members of Radiohead, along with longtime producer and collaborator Nigel Godrich, entered Hollywood's Ocean Way Recording studios with a plan to finish the record relatively quickly and without much fuss. Six weeks later, they emerged with an album mostly recorded live, with minimal overdubs and a return to the guitars that helped spark their second album (and first classic) in 1995, The Bends.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/radiohead-hail-to-the-thief/

My earliest memory of watching Top of the Pops was an episode playing out with an Abba song (Waterloo?), accompanied by the studio audience bopping away to a playback of the finely-crafted Swedish hitmakers. In my naivete I assumed the dancers were actually the band, and that Abba had about 30 people in them. Not sure how long that misconception lasted, probably until the "back-to-back" video was made.

I guess the way i felt about the session cats was something like the jobbers in pro wrestling, they just didn't have cool nicknames and colorful costumes

Until embarrassingly recently I had it in my head that Charles Hayward (of This Heat, Camberwell Now and numerous other projects) and Charles Hazlewood (conductor, composer and radio presenter) were the same person. Even now when someone mentions Hayward, I picture Hazlewood automatically. I didn't even have the excuse of being a stupid kid either, so goodness knows where it came from.

Very into British beat records as a kid, and would read the band lineups that would mention Roger Daltery or Keith Relf on “vocals, harp” and listen closely for those Joanna Newsom sparkles.

I assumed all musicians were always dressed immaculately, a drink in hand, looking out the floor to ceiling windows of their penthouse suite

This was how I used to imagine ILX posters.

i imagine ILXors wearing bibs and covered in their own filth

I think of both artists and ILXors as burnt out solitary average joes thinking a lot about the world and their career and living in front of their computers in their basement, but maybe that's uncharitable

I was very young and had no idea what punk sounded like but I saw pictures of The Clash and thought I had an idea.

"Rock the Casbah" was huge (which means I was around 13 at the time which is about right; I only heard classic rock and disco on the NYC radio stations I listened to) but I thought there was no way that was "punk" based on those pictures and the reputation. So I convinced myself that it must have been a cover. Now, whether this meant it was The Clash doing a cover or someone covering The Clash, I don't recall.

Haha, yeah, I don't recall any punk rock getting commercial airplay before Green Day (unless you count Nirvana) so ime most people were confused about what it was, if they thought of it at all. From reading, I knew Billy Idol had been in a punk band and that the Clash were supposed to be a punk band ("Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" did get play) so ... maybe it had something to do with those? Except they didn't sound that different from other 80s pop/rock so it was still confusing. I knew it was supposed to be stripped-down and simple rock n roll so ... maybe it was a bit like George Thorogood? That could sort of fit with "Should I Stay..." When I first heard It's a Shame About Ray, I figured it was probably a punk album.

Friend of mine in college thought that "Rock The Casbah" was about blowjobs, as she heard the chorus as "Cheree, she don't like it..."

I thought the bass on sgt pepper was played by Ringo on a series of tuned bass drums.

flaming lips did this on "waitin for a superman" and it kinda sucked. don't know whether it was actual separate bass drums or just edited, or completely synthetic, or what though

My partner has a "punk mix" tape made by an older cousin in the 80s that mostly consists of stuff like Cowboy Junkies and Edie Brickell. Also "Some Kind of Wonderful".xps

It was definitely confusing to read the rock history books where writers were saying that punk rock killed off the old dinosaurs, while I was hearing Zep, Floyd, and Rush daily on the radio and was still trying to figure out what punk even was.

“I Wanna Be Sedated” got wider airplay and was played at parties etc. but yeah you wouldn’t really hear too much punk per se outside of college radio and certain corners of New Wave stations. Feel like London Calling was pretty big though too.

Although the sound of London Calling was not really punk at that point of course. Still, it was apparently a Top Ten album in the UK.

There were also a few notorious punk rock episodes of certain TV shows.