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

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".

Yes, YMP. Forgive my boring challops but I always think singing is a thing like playing guitar: lots of people can sing a litle something or play a few cowboy chords, but to do either at a high level requires quite a bit of work.

There was an interview with one of Dylan's engineers from one of his self-produced records from the last 20 years, who was recounting when Bob learned about pro tools and how he could rerecord individual lines and even words or take a line from one version and add to the rest of a song and it blew Bob's mind because now he could fix his flubs.

But clearly he knew about fixing flubs with tape, they were doing it in the '60s. Obv Pro Tools makes it easier.

Here it is, sTadows anecdote and all:

https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/recording-with-bob-dylan-chris-shaw-tells-all-37854/

Also, I love this part:

Part of the problem for me on that record was because he didn’t want to wear headphones. We were sitting there on the first day of mixing, and he said, “I wanna rerecord the second verse again, change a couple of lines.” And I said, “Okay, let me get a headphone mix together so you can have something to sing to.” And he’s like, “Nah, nah, I don’t like wearing headphones.” So I said, “Kay, well, let me get a pair of speakers rigged up and you can sing to the speakers.” And he goes, “Oh, I used to do that with Daniel, I dunno if I like doing that.” So what I wound up having to do was, we put the whole band back in the room with him, and *the band* would wear headphones, and then the band would play along with the track, and Bob would kind of look over at Charlie Sexton, and Charlie would be mouthing the words to the song so Bob would know where he was, and then Bob would sit there and start singing into the microphone, and the I’d just drop-in Bob’s new mic, onto the existing track. And the great thing was, all the spill from the “new” band would still be there, all this bleed, so a lot of times on that record, you’re actually hearing two bands playing on each track.

My parents listened exclusively to classical music when I was a child. (Still the case, actually.) I was familiar only with the instruments of the orchestra and to me, a "bass player" was someone who wore a tuxedo and bowed sedately at what looked like a giant cello. I would have been five or so when the news broke of the death of "Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious". I remember looking in incomprehension at his photo, wondering how this guy, with his sinister leer and bicycle lock necklace, had been allowed to join an orchestra.

Had a stand-up argument with a mate because I refused to believe that this wasn't a Japan track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRk9nwvVH20

in my Fundamentalist days I still listened to secular music cos I hated the Christian music I heard in church but I feared each rock band was secretly mega-Satanic and evil, like there was this secret cabal of bands like Metallica who would drink goat's blood ,but that they were deliberately trying to trick people into thinking they weren't, so that they weren't exposed. this is why I thought Sabbath had Christian lyrics on Master of Reality.

i also took lyrics hyper-literally so I thought Metallica's "Leper Messiah" was about Jesus being a leper.

I thought "Maneater" by Hall and Oates was about a cannibal. Scary stuff, thought my mom was weird for happily humming along to it

First time I heard Star Me Kitten by REM, on holiday in France, I thought the devil had possessed the cassette.

My parents listened exclusively to classical music when I was a child.

Mine too, and I had a related misunderstanding when I was maybe seven years old and an older cousin played me a miami bass comp. "I don't get it, where's the bass?"

My parents listened exclusively to classical music when I was a child. (Still the case, actually.) I was familiar only with the instruments of the orchestra and to me, a "bass player" was someone who wore a tuxedo and bowed sedately at what looked like a giant cello. I would have been five or so when the news broke of the death of "Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious". I remember looking in incomprehension at his photo, wondering how this guy, with his sinister leer and bicycle lock necklace, had been allowed to join an orchestra.

This is a good one.

Being around classical music 90% of the time as a kid, I tended to call songs "pieces" like they were classical music. Nobody corrected me so it just continued. When I was 10 I was called out on it, "why do you keep calling them 'pieces'? They're songs!" It was a struggle to correct this.

Like it was actually a "oh, "Straight Up" by Paula Abdul? I love that piece!" moment that prompted somebody to tell me how ridiculous it sounded

This is why, at most rock concerts, people don't clap between songs. They wait until the band has played everything from one of its albums, and THEN they clap.

I just call everything a song. “That’s my favorite Xenakis song!” “I love Jimmy Lyons’ solo on that Cecil Taylor song.” It’s easier that way.

Ugh

It's dumb that it bothers me that people call something a song even though nobody is singing, but it always seems wrong to me

I may have commented elsewhere on the Taboo-like elegant variation bandstand avoidance of the word “song”: That was a Charlie Parker tune called “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.” This next number blah blah blah…

It's dumb that it bothers me that people call something a song even though nobody is singing, but it always seems wrong to me

It's not dumb!

One of the definitions given for "song" is: a musical composition suggestive of a song.
I don't really know what to make of that. Is it saying compositions that have similar structure to songs can be called a song even if there's no lyrics or singing?

I think that's what they mean, yes, e.g. Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words.