How Did the Artists We Love Actually Write Music?

Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

About The Nice's "America":

"The band took itself seriously. On June 6 [1968], after Robert F. Kennedy had been shot, Emerson thought about the allegorical power og the song the band was rehearsing - Leonard Bernstein's "America" from West Side Story. "If Bob Dylan, and his counterpart Donovan, could make protest songs, shouldn't we?" he asked himself. "It could be the first protest instrumental."
  In the hands of Emerson, Jackson, Brian Davison, and O'List, "America" lasted six minutes or longer. The first sounds on it: dark organ chords, wailing chorus, muffled gunshots, screams. The last sounds: a three-year-old boy nervously saying, "America is pregnant with promise and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable!" Folded right into the middle of all that was a staccato figure from the fourth movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony."

(from David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends, 2017, p. 35, 36)

Edited by David_D - August 12 2025 at 05:40

Author	Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic
David_D Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: October 26 2010 Location: Copenhagen Status: Offline Points: 16196	Post Options Post Reply Quote David_D Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: August 12 2025 at 05:29
	About The Nice's "America": "The band took itself seriously. On June 6 [1968], after Robert F. Kennedy had been shot, Emerson thought about the allegorical power og the song the band was rehearsing - Leonard Bernstein's "America" from West Side Story. "If Bob Dylan, and his counterpart Donovan, could make protest songs, shouldn't we?" he asked himself. "It could be the first protest instrumental." In the hands of Emerson, Jackson, Brian Davison, and O'List, "America" lasted six minutes or longer. The first sounds on it: dark organ chords, wailing chorus, muffled gunshots, screams. The last sounds: a three-year-old boy nervously saying, "America is pregnant with promise and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable!" Folded right into the middle of all that was a staccato figure from the fourth movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony." (from David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends, 2017, p. 35, 36) Edited by David_D - August 12 2025 at 05:40
	quality over quantity, and all kind of PopcoRn almost beyond

David_D Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: October 26 2010 Location: Copenhagen Status: Offline Points: 16196	Post Options Post Reply Quote David_D Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: August 13 2025 at 16:22
	This little story is truely enough not about writing music, buy it's at least about playing it: "King Crimson settled into a sound and image. Fripp, never comfortable standing up to play guitar, decided at the band's May 14 [1969] gig that he would play seated on a stool. "You can't sit down," warned an exasperated Greg Lake. "You'll look like a mushroom!" Fripp was unmoved. "My considered opinion," he'd tell an audience at a later concert, "was that the mushroom is a fertility symbol in many cultures."" (from David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends, 2017, p. 48) Edited by David_D - Yesterday at 04:34
	quality over quantity, and all kind of PopcoRn almost beyond

verslibre Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: July 01 2004 Location: CA Status: Offline Points: 19906	Post Options Post Reply Quote verslibre Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: August 13 2025 at 16:55
	Another example of a happy accident: During playback review of "Thru Metamorphic Rocks," the epic that closes Tangerine Dream's 1979 album Force Majeure, Edgar Froese and Chris Franke found that the bass sequence had sustained "distortion due to a burnt-out transistor in the mixing desk." They liked how it sounded, and kept it!
	eBay