Aging rock act on new album: This time we wanted to go back to the basics

lol, but c'mon that makes sense

('together' being the key word)

Which is more than Anthony Kiedis does in that interview.

just four guys, in a room, doing heroin

Writin' songs, playin' instruments

In Caaaaaalllllaaaaafooooooorrrrrnnnnniiiiiia

when did ppl stop recording music primarily in rooms

though it faintly pains me to defend Tony Flow, my understanding is that RHCP have continued to record in rooms (regardless of other bands’ practices), but he is acknowledging that one of the four guys had departed the band for the previous ten to fifteen years of recording, and thus not been in said rooms.

John Wesley Harding, Let it Be, Beggars Banquet
― niels

I've been looking at the origins of back-to-basics for something I've been working on, and I always assumed it began with The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and JWH. I was surprised, then, to read Jann Wenner's original review of The White Album, where he's bored with the whole idea, like it's yesterday's news:

"...in the past few months we have been deluged with talk of 'going back to rock and roll,' so much that the idea (first expressed in the pages of Rolling Stone) is now a tiresome one, because it is, like all other superficial changes in rock and roll styles, one that soon becomes faddish, over-used and tired-out."

Never got into Let It Be, but JWH,BB, and The Beatles/White Album are not just rehashed rootz.

xxp Perhaps, though "square one" for RHCP wasn't those particular four guys (and he doesn't say "THESE four guys in a room together..."). This ties into it being such a weirdly vacant-feeling quote, as if it's somehow missing every fourth or fifth word.

Always thought of Beach Boys, "Wild Honey", as being a precursor of "back to basics".

In a fresh way, yeah.

xpost Keidis also had his own book to do:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71WwOBbOEzL.jpg

Keep in mind that, if the back-to-roots idea had been in the air for 10 or 11 months before Nov 1968, that was already more than half of Rolling Stone's lifespan. Also Wenner might have wanted to get out in front of the next trend by saying, "we pioneered this, but we're already onto the next thing".

Always thought of Beach Boys, "Wild Honey", as being a precursor of "back to basics".

Well, in a weird way, it was in fact Smiley Smile.

Well, yes, I thought of that, in terms of being stripped back and home recorded, but there's far too much psychedelic era weirdness going on!

Keidis book Co-written with Larry Sloman, dubbed "Ratso" by the Rolling Thunder Review, when he was the Stone's rolling Rolling correspondent. They assigned him to taking Dylan's dog for walkies. He dubbed Berlin The Sgt. Pepper's of the 70s. Sample text on Amazon page looks disappointingly normie so far.

have to imagine a lot of pretty much forgotten bands reacting to Pepper et al with "yeah we're taking it back to rock and roll" in the press?

home recorded, but there's far too much psychedelic era weirdness going on! That was home to Brian, his sandbox being thee least of it.

JWH,BB, and The Beatles/White Album are not just rehashed rootz..

No, but I think it was a somewhat amorphous concept that meant different things in different contexts. For Sha Na Na, it meant an imitation--a pretty dire one--of 1957. With those three albums, I take it to mean something like, "Last year we were doing '2000 Light Years from Home,' now we want to play things that sound like 'Prodigal Son.'"

Also, blues rock was coming up, first Canned Heat album was released '67.

OMG, they were uneven----w Al Wilson and John Lee Hooker, and sometimes even without, could be quite good, but a Rolling Stone reviewer (Ed Ward?) said another album should have been titled Yassuh Boss.

That's around the time I started seeing the term "blooze," although Mayall and some other dealers had their high points from time to tim.

I love Canned Heat!

Yeah, they could be very good!

Future Blues is a peak w Al Wilson (also there's a Wilson compilation now), also Hooker n Heat is uneven, but the Hook keeps it going, and The Very Best of Canned Heat is good.

I enjoyed Robert Johnson’s back to basics phase

hooker and heat is totally badass

I guess Zeppelins back to basics record is presence? Not really tho. Good on them to never have reached that point

I've been looking at the origins of back-to-basics for something I've been working on, and I always assumed it began with The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and JWH.

It pretty much started with Music From Big Pink, which — along with bootlegs of The Basement Tapes — essentially forced all UK rock musicians to simultaneously stop taking acid. Two hugely successful bands (the Small Faces and Cream) broke up because of the Band, and every other remaining group tried to sound like the Band.

Yeah, although that wasn't just going back to roots, it was what you could do with them: a fairly slow set, kicking off with a dirge ffs---but so intense in its way, in layers and segments of genres, subgenres, within as well as among tracks---psychedelic in its way, expanding and contracting thee lines around things (I don't love it, but I think I understand it).

Understand its influence, for better and worse.

Perhaps, though "square one" for RHCP wasn't those particular four guys (and he doesn't say "THESE four guys in a room together..."). This ties into it being such a weirdly vacant-feeling quote, as if it's somehow missing every fourth or fifth word.

not unlike Kiedis’ lyrics amirite

and while it pains me still, this is at least the third time that Frusciante has joined the band, and he pursues decidedly non-Chi-Pep musical interests during his interregna, so it plausibly does take the 3.1 musicians learning from scratch how to play together each time.

(None of this lessens the quote’s qualifications for starring itt obv!)

stop taking acid.

Also I really do think it's vanishingly rare for a huge band to track drums/bass/guitar live together these days (as RHCP does) , rather than layering them.

Related--not sure where else to put it...Saw a trailer for this tonight before the Neil Young film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YRb0qY5eKc

The whole back-to-basics thing started in '68, but this really accelerated it.

Geddy Lee was there and taking notes: "One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

getting back to basics is cool but i wanna get back to getting it together in the country

"One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

lol, but also…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDlK52SvJVY

WTF about the voice of Geddy Lee?

That's amazing, Tarfumes, had no idea--he really was taking notes. Hard to unhear that voice, but they do pretty well otherwise.

Mr. Bungle: https://thefoxoakland.com/events/mr-bungle-230523

Even in their last tours of the millennium they played songs from their very first demo, the self-produced, amateurish gem The Raging Wrath of The Easter Bunny (1986). The pull of returning to full-on metal was too strong to avoid and the idea arose to re-record that primal demo giving the music the much needed presentation and precision it deserved. Spruance, Patton & Dunn decided to go to the source, The Big Four of course, and hand-pick the two guys who could help them realize this body of work with the utmost brutality.

...

Because this was a musical homecoming of 35 years, the relearning and re-recording felt brand new and was able to be enjoyed objectively, not to mention reinvigorated by the likes of the masters Ian and Lombardo. Mr. Bungle maintained the rawness and severity of the original demo without too much embellishment preferring to let the music speak for itself in all of its teenage-angst glory.

actually turned out pretty well in their case

just as a 'hey it's the pandemic let's revisit our past' one off

This new Radiohead side project The Smile feels very aging rock act getting back to basics

Just four computers in a room

Yorke told MTV: "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear. So everything was about performance, like staging a play."[12]
― new noise, Saturday, March 10, 2018

Thing about the Mr Bungle revamp is that it was pre-pandemic — I caught the SF show of their first burst of dates about a month before lockdown.

i knew they'd played it live but i figured they hadn't planned to actually, like, record it until the world shut down...buuut my memory may be wrong on that one.

Art-pop department:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/11/patrick-wolf-addiction-bankruptcy-hit-and-run-night-safari

This confidence in telling the story of his decade of disaster and recovery came from Wolf’s “thrill” at working alone with the same instruments he used on his first two albums. “I reconnected with my craft – it’s how I started when I was 14, just with my four-track,” he says.

"“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums. Though not terribly surprising for a group nearing its 30th year, they have sometimes seemed in the past decade to be grasping for gimmicks and overarching concepts to differentiate one record from the next: “Medicine at Midnight,” from 2021, was a forgettable foray into ’80s-inspired dance rock and funk grooves. (As a companion piece, they also released a cheeky collection of Bee Gees covers.) The songwriting on “Sonic Highways,” from 2014, was a bit stronger, but that album still felt yoked a little too tightly to its concept — recording each song in a different city and paying tribute to its musical history, as explored on the Grohl-directed documentary series of the same name."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/arts/music/foo-fighters-but-here-we-are-review.html

"We decided to make an album where none of us was ever in the room."