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

Xps

I think that sense of wonder of how they even designed those sounds is what really made me start obsessing about music.

this is an adult mistake but

until last year, I thought Real Life's "Send Me an Angel" was by the Scorpions. Not just because the Scorpions do have a song called "Send Me an Angel", but the vocals sounded to me like Klaus Meine.

I found out I was wrong last year after telling three people matter of factly that it was a Scorpions song.

I think even as a kid I did figure that Hysteria was done with a lot of studio processing tbf, though I still thought Rick Allen played his drum parts.

also when I was a kid I thought Floyd's "Have a Cigar" was Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train". had never heard Ozzy, and there's the line about the "gravy train" in Have a Cigar. I kept wondering why people raved about this song cos it sucked so bad.

By the way I'm pretty sure that I didn't REALLY believe that the Beastie Boys lived all together in a cool tricked-out space station. I was 27 years old when that album came out.

Look, I wasn't gonna ask! The Beasties did have G-Son studios though, in which they had a skate ramp and basketball court, iirc.

Plus lots of bands do start out living together, just not in glamourous conditions like the Monkees house.

Xpost: It sounds like I’m throwing shade at rock music for not “being real”, I was mirroring my experience with those of frogbs or peace upthread.

I didn’t really care if a song was actually being played live or not. I still don’t but I do find impressive when a musician manages to do things live that are too complex for most people (I mean, yeah it’s always inspiring to see people being the best at what they do, musicians or not) or when they find creative ways to overcome limitations.

I remembered another one:

When I first heard “Angel” by Robbie Williams on the radio, I misheard the artist as Robin Williams and 100% thought it was the actor singing it. I loved him as an actor and was seriously impressed at how good he was as a singer. Taped the song and obsessed with it until I found out it wasn’t actually Robin Williams singing it and lost plenty of its magic.

I still don’t but I do find impressive when a musician manages to do things live that are too complex for most people (I mean, yeah it’s always inspiring to see people being the best at what they do, musicians or not) or when they find creative ways to overcome limitations.

Agreed. The most extreme example of this for me was seeing Rush live and watching Geddy Lee sing and play bass while surrounded by keyboards which he'd also play (sometimes with foot pedals). Insanity.

I used to think Macy Gray was British. I'm not sure how I came to this conclusion.

we should start a club

Back in the 80s I thought that disco/house/techno DJ's could flawlessly mix random records that they had never (or maybe once) heard before, with smooth long transitions.

When I started DJing myself and met other DJs, of course I quickly found out that (almost) everyone practices the same transitions over and over, and memorizes cue points/sections, before they go out and play a set.

I was petrified of seeing Sparks on TV as a kid because I genuinely thought that evil Ron Mael was using his death stare to hypnotise Russell into singing in an unnerving high-pitched voice.

My friend in eighth grade claimed James Iha was "Siamese" and that's where the Smashing Pumpkins got the name for their second album.

Before I learned that there was a Top 40 chart rundown every Tuesday, I thought the charts were completely up-to-the minute, i.e. the positions of the songs in the charts fluctuated on an hourly basis depending on how many copies were being sold at that time.

The Beasties did have G-Son studios though, in which they had a skate ramp and basketball court, iirc.

A half-court iirc. And they DID all live together in a mansion while recording Paul's Boutique; much of their 70s costuming at the time came from the closets of the older couple they were renting from.

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.

as an annoyed teen, I phoned the radio to correct the DJ who back-announced Express Yourself with "Ice Cube there, out front of NWA..."

I knew Paul's Boutique was all samples, but I thought Check Your Head was almost all them playing instruments. Wasn't until I got familiar with sample sources in mid 2000s that I realized how much CYH still relied on them.

lol yeah when I heard "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" on the radio I was like whoa wait a minute

1) Although I knew what sampling was, I thought that it was more common for every element to be sampled separately (ie the guitar from here, the bass from there, the drums from there). Obviously that's been done on a Dilla or DJ Shadow level, but I was routinely shocked to learn that a hip hop track was usually some entire song looped + added drums.

2) Similarly I got that drum & bass and jungle were made with sampled breakbeats, but I couldn't really picture how it was done using samplers. I thought maybe every little hit (the cymbals, the snare, the kick) was programmed manually, which seemed monumental for a 7 min track. Of course that's how I did it when I eventually got a copy of Cubase (and often still do tbh).

Totally had the same idea about Check Your Head (although as far as I know the drums on 'So Whatcha Want' are original, which is an achievement)

I always thought frogbs was British. I only found out he isn't ladt month.

frogbeezyweezy

co-sign the Check Your Head thing, but also Ill Communication: I was very disappointed when I heard Root Down by Jimmy Smith.

There are loads of homemade sounds on Check Your Head, including the drums on Whatcha Want. They built a long tunnel around the kick drum out of cardboard boxes in a warehouse space. The snare has an 1176 in nuke mode. It was supposed to be their version of Bonham.

At the "G-Spot" house where they recorded Paul's Boutique, Ad Rock had his own underground guest house with a window that looked into the swimming pool.

Both those ones Jordan listed apply to me too. Think I was most disappointed by DJ Premier, virtually every track is a loop with tweaked drums. Still love his production though.

It’s very rockist to recommend an album or a band as “real music” which made me think all rock bands just went in the studio, recorded a couple of live takes all playing at the same time and picked the one they liked better.

I mean...before the early 1960s, that's exactly what they did. (And even after that; I have tons of Elvis compilations where he's coaching the entire band, backup singers and all, through take after take in the studio.)

― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, 2 September 2021 13:24 (two hours ago) link

Well, in a lot of cases “the band” was just session ringers a la the wrecking crew. But yes.

At the "G-Spot" house where they recorded Paul's Boutique

They lived there (and the center spread / gatefold photo is taken through that underwater window) but recorded in Matt Dike’s 1bdr apartment iirc

until the early-2000s, i thought billy idol was david bowie. or more like, i thought bowie was billy idol

Like his alter-ego?

nah, i just didn't listen to music much and in my mind there was only my memory of billy idol in the 80s. someone would reference david bowie and i'd just think of billy idol and be like "yeah, i don't really like him that much but i don't know..."

david bowie songs i had never heard, once, at that point: all of them except for maybe let's dance. no space oddity, no ziggy stardust, nothing from the 70s to my knowledge. also, i guess at that time bowie was coming off of his late 90s NIN/goatee look, so he resembled billy idol more than any other time in his career. plus, the internet didn't exist in the early 2000s, so

I used to get those two confused, as well.

I prpbably associate his 'Earthling' era look with Keith Flint and Geri Halliwell more than NIN. He looked like 1996.

just about everybody I went to school with thought Billy Jo Armstrong was British

Billy Joe Forsyth-Smythe

1st thing I remember hearing about Billy Jo was criticism for him trying to sound British

billy Idol as star of Labyrinth?

Keith Flint

This reminds me that when "Firestarter" came out I had it in my teenage head for at least a few months that the vocal hook was a John Lydon feature.

My friend in eighth grade claimed James Iha was "Siamese" and that's where the Smashing Pumpkins got the name for their second album.

For whatever reason, I also remember that this band was without equal in its ability to inspire schoolyard kremlinology.

I also thought every song was played live, particularly rock music. It’s very rockist to recommend an album or a band as “real music” which made me think all rock bands just went in the studio, recorded a couple of live takes all playing at the same time and picked the one they liked better.

Dylan recorded this way at least through John Wesley Harding. He didn’t have overdubs on his records in part because, by his own admission, he didn’t know overdubs were possible. He operated on the same assumption, that everything (including something like Sgt. Pepper) was recorded live in the studio.

Now I’m wondering: what was the first Dylan record with overdubs?

Some internet sleuthing suggests that Charlie McCoy's guitar fills on "Desolation Row" are overdubbed. Also, TIL that those guitar fills were played by Charlie McCoy!

sounds like you found the same reddit thread as me :)

So nobody told him about overdubs?? Were the producers and studio engineers too scared of Bobby Z?

haha, yup. then I followed it to this website which provides a little more interesting information, though no reason to think it's definitive. It notes that Tombstone Blues had the Chambers Brothers recorded separately as backup singers, but it wasn't used. Also -- and this is some serious sleuthing -- re "Outlaw Blues" from Bringing it All Back Home:

In all the stereo mixes we can more clearly hear a harmonica that riffs away throughout the song. This goes on behind Dylan's vocal, so it was often assumed to have been played by one of the other musicians - maybe John Sebastian. However, it's now clear that the harmonica was played by Dylan himself. On the Collector's Edition of The Cutting Edge, at the beginning of the abortive Take 2, Dylan says, "When we get done, I'm gonna dub in the harmonica". The studio recording sheet indeed shows that after the complete Take 3, there was an overdub take of identical length. Curiously, The Cutting Edge makes no mention of this, and fails to give any musician credit for the harmonica; only the overdubbed version of this final take is included.

Sorry to derail thread, but I am surprised to see that this ridiculously incorrect belief that many of us had about Back to Basics recording was actually pretty correct for longer than I thought!

that anecdote also calls into question the already highly dubious claim that Bob didn't know overdubs were possible. Maybe on his first album or two though...

He originally planned to have Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson dub electric guitar and organ over John Wesley Harding (hey, it could still happen!). Self Portrait was mostly overdubbed after Dylan and a couple of other musicians recorded acoustic tracks.

When I was a child I disparaged someone - I think it was Laura Branigan - for not playing any instruments or writing her own songs. My mother gently said "Pufflet, singers are a thing. The voice is an instrument."

Weird how much I'd internalized the post-Beatle snobbery about singer-songwriters being nobler than interpreters. I was speaking in perhaps 1980, and espousing an attitude that was barely 15 years old at that point.

I had a ton of these misconceptions when I was younger - about the writing/recording process, "realness", artistic personas vs. real life, expecting the dead to sound like sabbath, etc.

For me the biggest factual one was that I somehow recalled seeing the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald, which sank when I was 16 months old approximately 160 miles from where I lived. The song was so ubiquitous when I was younger that I convinced myself I saw it going down offshore at the nearby state park that was my only context for lake superior at the time. I thought this was kind of weird to have thought but later learned a friend who wasn't even born at the time had pretty much the same memory that I did.

Also on Self Portrait, Bob harmonized with himself for the first time on "The Boxer".