Saw that about a year ago. As I recall, he often struggled to finish a sentence, but had no trouble with chord progressions and melodies?
Yes, absolutely right. But that was around the diagnosis time, and the documentary covered a couple more years after that, where he was beginning to have real trouble playing the guitar at the end of his goodbye tour. I didn't realise, until after I saw videos of the Wrecking Crew for myself, about 15-20 years ago, and saw excerpts of his playing, that he was quite so accomplished. I'd thought he was just a half-decent guitar player. Wow, was I wrong there. And you can probably count on one hand the number of great musicians who happen to have a jewel of voice too.
I am quite staggered by the success of Seasick Steve and remain to be convinced. He is ok but I would not swap any of his records for anything by the likes of Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell , Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson let alone any of the Chicago players from the 50's. When it comes to white players performing the blues, Delmark seem to put out plenty of decent blues records yet I find that Derek Trucks just seems to take the biscuit, sounding authentic whilst having a staggering technique. However his music covers many bases including Soul and Jazz.
One of my favourite guitar players is John Abercrombie. I have a good number of his records but this record from 42 years ago still sounds good. The organist is the Czech, Jan Hammer, probably best known these days for writing the music for " Miami Vice." The drummer is Jack DeJohnette.
He was so out on his own back then. And he continued to be out there. Occasionally, Lou Reed would sound like him, courtesy of his production, and perhaps Roxy Music with the genius of Brian Eno, but really Bowie wrote the avant-garde, sci-fi glam, new wave rock ballad like no other. It's difficult to pin him down because he was forever chi-chi-chi-changing [sorry, couldn't resist]. Occasionally he became one of my favourite music makers and then not. Guess I changed out of step with him. I could pick a huge number of songs from DB, but I'm going to go with Heroes, produced with the help of said Mr Eno, from the album of the same name. This is in no way the best rendition of it, but the occasion was the best, and it was still a time when baby boomers predominantly lived with hope, not fear and cynicism: The old Wembley Stadium will always have this.
Great choice TSS, and of course the video he was introducing at the end there was this one, one of the most harrowing things most of us had ever seen at the time:
Great, I'm glad you found that, Chilco. I was in two minds to do it myself. Remarkably, 32 years later we still haven't eradicated this from the planet. Nowadays, we could if we really wanted to. We'd just rather spend the necessary money on ourselves.
I hope you agree it merits a place on this thread, as even though that song isn't exactly inspiring in itself, it will forever be associated with the reason for holding Live Aid. That day, music was a powerful force for good.
