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

that Peter Frampton licked peanut butter out of his armpits

(xp) I think you lose (much of) the centre part of the stereo spectrum. I used to do it all the time and you can do with it speakers too, but I've forgotten how.

I thought the singer on "Holding Back the Years" was a black woman and not Mick Hucknall

Similarly, my mental image of Rick Astley was closer to Aaron Neville. When I saw the music video, I thought they used a little white kid as a joke

Mistaken beliefs about music you had when you were younger

I remember when R.E.M.'s 'The One I Love" was rereleased a friend's older brother told me that it was originally recorded by their older brothers in the band The Cult, under its original title of 'Fire'

I think this is a common one but I thought the Grateful Dead were going to be like Black Sabbath/Priest early metal stuff

i thought live albums were inherently better than studio recordings because the former had no overdubs, which were ‘cheating’

basically wrong on every possible level

When I was about 4 I thought that when I played a 7" the singer was in a vocal booth somewhere singing it to me live. I must have seen film of someone in a recording studio on Blue Peter or whatever, hence my knowledge of what they looked like.

^finally, a truly "ridiculous" one!

(xp) I think you lose (much of) the centre part of the stereo spectrum. I used to do it all the time and you can do with it speakers too, but I've forgotten how.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Phase_Stereo

I used to think that the names after a song in brackets on a record sleeve or label were some kind of indication of the relative prominence of these group members on the recording, rather than the songwriting credits.

And also whether they were double-tracked!

I used to think everything on a CD was actually played live in the studio. It blew my mind to find out everyone was just playing their parts separately. Like I thought Sting just brought in some session singers who sounded just like him to do the backup vocals.

― frogbs, Wednesday, September 1, 2021 3:18 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It was on a hike down Old Rag with my Boy Scout troop. My best friend and I were enthusing over the virtues of heavy metal bands like Motley Crue, who played their instruments live in the studio, compared to the phony pop stars like Paula Abdul who used overdubs. I don't know why we were so certain about these facts or if we even had a full understanding of what we meant. But his dad was hiking with us that day and took us down a few notches.

i also thought all recordings were done live in real time with no overdubs, in the same order they appear on the album

I wondered how they did the fade-outs.

That rock stars all learned their instruments the way you learn in music schools, reading notes from the Hal Leonard books.

Actually they all learned from Mel Bay books.

When I saw those cheap Casio keyboards with buttons like "flute" and "guitar" and "violin," I assumed pretty all music was played with those, and that the original instruments were no longer necessary. (Kinda prescient, in a way)

Re: Mel Bay, my grandfather played with him as a duo (guitar/mandolin)

Damn! Legend in the game

Based on album cover photos, that bands all had a fabulous time hanging out with each other.

i thought macy gray was british for an embarrassingly long time b/c when the song was a hit here in the states someone i know who was from england mentioned that it had already been a hit over there

For a long time I thought The Pointer Sisters “jump for my love” was Kenny Loggins singing

At an age where pretty much everything I knew about the music industry came from sources like "Some of Your Friends are Already This Fucked", I had the vague yet terrifying sense that signing a record contract and never recouping your advance meant that you'd end up in some sort of hellish, lifelong peonage instead of just not getting to make any more records.

Xpost I was somewhat older than I'd like to admit when I found out Sparks weren't British

I thought there were no 'one hit wonders' before the 1980s.

Also that you needed to be able to write standard music notation in order to compose songs

I was somewhat older than I'd like to admit when I found out Sparks weren't British

I found this out this morning. I may have known at one point and forgotten it, though; that's increasingly common.

And, yeah, it obv makes sense that if you start learning from the Hal Leonard (or Mel Bay) books, you'd be writing your shit down on staff paper by the time you become a rock star.

I wasn't even that young - nearly an adult - when I believed that a band's lyrical output corresponded with their real-life behaviour and preoccupations, so a band whose lyrics dealt mostly with sexual matters must be raving priapists. I remember being concerned about a girl in high-school whose godfather was apparently [the Scottish lead singer of a famous Australian hard rock group]. Just on the basis of the words he sang, I pictured him walking into the room and treating every female he saw like Monty Python's Dirty Vicar.
Some of this prejudice remains in that I'm distrustful of acts whose lyricists focus obsessively on specific topics like cars, robots or corpse mutilation, in favour of those who explore more broad and diverse areas.

Not me, I was a jaded soul...but one summer I did tell my little sister that "the lady in Missing Persons" was going to be her 1st grade teacher and she was sorely disappointed when school started!

None of the shame you guys feel compares to the guilt I feel about my evil teenage self.

I thought all radio was freeform and disc jockeys always played whatever they felt like.

I was almost the opposite. I was a little surprised when it turned out that a lot of rock stars who sang about intoxication and casual promiscuity were in fact just drug and sex addicts. I'd sort of just assumed it was metaphor and imagination. (I mean, surely they were spending their time practising scales and writing down music.)xp

(I mean, surely they were spending their time practising scales and writing down music.)

Lol

This gets at an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a while now, which is that no artist has a richer or more exemplary relationship with the cultural shift of the last 30ish years from audiences needing to believe that artists are bad people to audiences needing to believe that artists are good people than Insane Clown Posse.

I assumed all musicians were always dressed immaculately, a drink in hand, looking out the floor to ceiling windows of their penthouse suite (they're in a big city of course... it's raining... neon signs, etc...). They spend all their time with interesting people only and talk about art and philosophy exclusively.

This was the effect of mainlining imagery and/or music from Japan, ABC, Roxy Music, etc... before my brain knew what to do with the information. Oh to be that innocent again...

I thought there were live drums on Endtroducing and drove myself crazy trying to figure out how to play like that.

This was the effect of mainlining imagery and/or music from Japan, ABC, Roxy Music, etc... before my brain knew what to do with the information. Oh to be that innocent again...

― mr.raffles, Wednesday, September 1, 2021 8:56 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sometime on ilx someone called stuff in this vein "silk bathrobe music"

that scans

i thought macy gray was british for an embarrassingly long time b/c when the song was a hit here in the states someone i know who was from england mentioned that it had already been a hit over there

― dyl, Wednesday, September 1, 2021 7:41 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

The first time I saw Brad Mehldau live, sitting in the Village Vanguard before the show I said to the person I was with “I think he’s British” - then simultaneously realized it had come out way louder than I meant and that he was sitting two tables away in obvious earshot. Then shortly after he was on stage and spoke to the audience in a very clearly American accent.

That my classical music loving dad would be impressed with string-laden rock music like ELP and Moody Blues.

Haha, I remember playing Classic Yes for a friend who was really into classical piano in Grade 9 or 10. He didn't get it at all.

I was convinced that all the 60s/70s stars who had hits on MTV in the 80s were completely brand new, pretty much just putting out music for the first time, which was confusing because a lot of them seemed pretty old and not at all in tune with the synth pop styles of the day.

When I was a child I used to assume that people had simply stopped writing classical music years ago. I didn't realise there was such a thing as contemporary composers still writing in the same tradition.

I also thought Macy Gray was British until about a month ago, really not sure why.

As a small child I was watching a kids' tv show with a jazz band playing. At one point the trombonist had to stop and tip sand out of his horn (maybe they were playing on a beach, idk). For yeeears I thought trombones were filled with sand and that this was somehow integral to how they worked. In a music lesson at school when I was about 10 we were discussing how various instruments made their sound, and when we got to trombones I raised my hand and told the teacher about the sand.

Not my story, but my mother once told me about being a small child in Scotland, in the time before most households had TVs, but it was coming. So one day she was sitting there listening to a radio program, when her father said to her “You just watch! Someday soon there’s going to be moving pictures to go along with the sounds” and she misunderstood, took him literally and just stared the shit out of that radio for ages.

I thought Morrissey wasn't a cunt

Lock thread.

As a young boy, I couldn't work out how the TOTP singles chart was compiled; the concept of physical sales was totally foreign to me. So I concluded that it must have been done by polling all the cool and trendy people each week. Maybe they all sent postcards to Radio One.

I also thought that every pop group must be made up of best friends, who lived together and did everything together, like a family. I once convinced myself that I saw all of Middle Of The Road taking a stroll together along a canal towpath - this seemed entirely plausible.

I probably thought that video clips were a faithful representation of how stars spent their time in real life

I thought that the way rave music was represented on TOTP was how it was composed in real life,

eg; lively guys prodding keyboards and e-drums while a guy fusses with decks and a diva wails her one or 2 line vocal.

It was quite a shock to realise later that it was all made by sullen looking blokes chainsmoking while prodding at an Atari ST, and the onstage 'diva' was always their housemate miming to a nicked acapella sample.

I thought Morrissey wasn't a cunt

― pings and noodles (Noodle Vague)

I mean I always thought Morrissey was a cunt but I thought he was my cunt.

I thought that the way rave music was represented on TOTP was how it was composed in real life,

eg; lively guys prodding keyboards and e-drums while a guy fusses with decks and a diva wails her one or 2 line vocal.

I saw one of these recently and it was absolutely hilarious.

A Child's Cocaine Christmas in Queens

― henry s

(Over 'Venus in Furs') "He's had quite a strange career, he also wrote 'Cocaine', the Eric Clapton song..."

When I was maybe 10, I heard the son of one of my parents' friends play bass at their house. He played the breakdown from Metallica's Orion and I was absolutely blown away. I stewed over it for a month or two before deciding to make a big announcement to my dad: "I want to play bass! Do you know what bass guitar sounds like? I've got a great song right here." And I proceed to play a cassette of Guns 'n' Roses Sweet Child of Mine. Cue Slash's intro lick: "You hear that? THAT'S bass guitar!" "That's not bass guitar," says dad, to my immediate confusion and embarrassment. A few seconds later the rest of the band kicks in, along with Duff McKagan's equally iconic bassline. "THAT'S bass guitar."

I think that there are certain melodic similarities between the Orion bass line and the SCOM intro and maybe I got confused there. Or maybe it had something to do with Slash's tone.

Anyway, my dad's little brother had played bass in a rock band during high school and college, so I was not going to be fooling him! Lesson much appreciated, dad.

It also didn't help that I listened to most music on a cheap little boombox, so I didn't hear much of the bass frequencies anyway. During the incident above, I had brought my tape downstairs to dad's larger stereo system.

Hey, take it over to bass guitar through a guitar amp? and other questions from an ignorant beginner

but this amp melts FACES, dood

omg that whole contretemps was fifteen years ago.

it is older than my oldest child

i thought when a band was named after a member of the band (as opposed to a solo artist) that the guy was an asshole

I still think that, mostly.

There must be a note that feels better than any other to end a song or piece on. I have to test them on the piano, both singly, and with simple tunes.

**time passes**

It's probably E. A tune should preferably end on an E.

I thought electric guitars were mains powered via the lead, I think based on hearing a story about a guitarist being electrocuted onstage because it rained or something

^^^ seems almost certain that i thought this at some point

I thought, when listening to Sting and having little other pop music to compare it with, that Sting had this really clever technique of coming up with a catchy contrasting section of his songs. I knew about sonata form, but not verse/chorus.
― raven, Thursday, 9 September 2021 13:59

This is staggering.

I was also told the story about the Stone the Crows guy getting zapped on stage and was prang about playing outside for years

Raven, where did you grow up that you knew sonata form before hearing any verse-chorus songs like "Jingle Bells" or "Oh Susanna"?

I was also told the story about the Stone the Crows guy getting zapped on stage and was prang about playing outside for years

https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/blog/top-5-most-shocking-deaths-the-show-wont-go-on/

I could have sworn a young singer/pianist died onstage in france in the past month or so, but I can't for the life of me find a news story about it. Pretty sure it wasn't Barbara Weldens either.

Wait, nevermind. It was totally her. I must have got linked to it as a news story and thought it was recent.

Let us not forget Beef from The Phantom of the Paradise as well.

Eryl also remembers the night that Kippington Lodge came dangerously close to losing their bass player. In addition to the ballroom tours backing artists such as Billie Davis and J. J. Jackson, the group’s most prestigious live work was their regular support slot at London’s Marquee Club. On 5 July 1969, just a few hours after the Rolling Stones had performed their famous free concert in Hyde Park, the Kippingtons opened for the organ-based trio, Village, at the Marquee. ‘Nick got electrocuted while playing,’ recalls Eryl. ‘He fell down, writhing on the stage. Faulty wiring was blamed.’

‘I had one hand on my bass strings and the other reaching for the mic, and about to say, “How’re ya doing, London?” says Nick. ‘But as soon as I grasped the mic, a circuit was created and I was in big trouble. According to witnesses, I leapt about four feet in the air and was flung across the stage where I crashed into the amps and lay writhing and twitching on the floor, unable to let go of either my bass or the mic. In my head, I knew exactly what had happened. It was very unpleasant but I was strangely calm. I couldn’t see anything – it was like looking through frosted glass. All I could hear was a deep electronic drone note.

Birch, Will. Cruel to Be Kind (pp. 60-61)

Here's another misconception that I only corrected about 10 years ago. I was browsing in a record store, picked up the 1971 record by McDonald and Giles, and was shocked to see that the store had put on a sticker to the effect of: "Hey DJs! Great breakbeat!"
See, I was naive enough to believe that if someone sampled a record as relatively obscure as McDonald and Giles, it was because they were King Crimson or prog superfans, not because a sticker in a record store had alerted them to the existence of a breakbeat on the record. I was also naive enough to be surprised that a record store would thus cater to people who make music from samples rather than "real music fans", i.e. people who look for the meaning of life in a McDonald and Giles LP.

Interesting.

That Nick Lowe story is amazing :o. xp

gimme the breakbeats
and free my soul
I wanna get lost
in some neo-soul

I crashed into the amps and lay writhing and twitching on the floor, unable to let go of either my bass or the mic.

I'd always wondered what inspired the the couplet in "So It Goes", "He got fifty thousand watts / In a big acoustic tower". Now I know!

Ha, never made that connection before!

Neither had he, apparently

I also never knew Nick Lowe's main source of income is The Bodyguard soundtrack

<blockquote> Raven, where did you grow up that you knew sonata form before hearing any verse-chorus songs like "Jingle Bells" or "Oh Susanna"?

― Sequel to Sadness (Sund4r), Saturday, 11 September 2021 7:24 AM</blockquote>

I mean, I must have heard plenty of songs with verse/chorus before mustn't I?
I think I just didn't actually engage until a certain point, and I'd already learnt some kind of music theory.
I was naïve but I was also hella young. I was late to "pop music" and voraciously accelerated - Sting/The Police was the starting point of actual fandom I think.

<blockquote>Raven, where did you grow up that you knew sonata form before hearing any verse-chorus songs like "Jingle Bells" or "Oh Susanna"?

― Sequel to Sadness (Sund4r), Saturday, 11 September 2021 7:24 AM</blockquote>

I mean, I must have heard plenty of songs with verse/chorus before mustn't I?
I think I just didn't actually engage until a certain point, and I'd already learnt some kind of music theory.
I was naïve but I was also hella young. I was late to "pop music" and voraciously accelerated - Sting/The Police was the starting point of actual fandom I think.

Ugh forgot BBcode.

The Police were especially good at bringing out a strong contrast between verse and chorus tbf.

I remember conflating the various Van Zan(d)ts. Like, there was one who was dead, one or more who were alive. And somehow one played with Bruce Springsteen, presumably one of the alive ones.

I'm not sure at what point I heard of Townes Van Zandt, but I probably tried to fit him into the same overall Van Zystem.

I used to think that 'Trad. Arr.' on song credits was an actual person's name, or possibly a writing duo.

Or a pirate.

Led Zeppelin used to think songs that were written by 20th century musicians were 'standards'

(xp) sea shanties