Ongoing History Of New Music

At some point, all of us will shuffle off this mortal choir and join the choir invisible…doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you may have or how famous you might be…in the end, we’re all mortal… This really hits home when musicians we love disappear forever…it’s not like we personally know these people, but because their music helps us know ourselves, a little piece of us dies with them… The circumstances of their passing’s vary…misadventure, accidents, overdoses, suicide…some can be explained away while other deaths will forever remain a mystery… With that in mind, let’s take a look back on the last hours of some of those musician’s who have left us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of… Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again. Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music… I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another… I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”… But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition… If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job… It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums… Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”… Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Mi

You probably know someone like this: a guy (or a woman) who through having loads of talent or tons of luck or both has become successful…they have everything anyone could ever hope to have…money, notoriety, stuff…access to all kinds of pleasure and adventures and opportunity...everyone you know wishes they cold be this person… And then they screw it all up…not by bad luck or illness or any other misfortune, necessarily…they just make some bad decisions or questionable moves that damage or destroy their careers and their lives… Sometimes this downfall happens in slow motion over a period of weeks or months or even years…but sometimes, the crash comes in seconds…and in the end, there’s no one to blame except the person themselves…. This sort of things happens in music a lot…ego, bad advice, hubris, arrogance, drugs, stubbornness, being out of touch, mental illness—all these things can lead to tarnished legacies at the very least and full-on catastrophes at worse… These are stories of spectacular acts of sel

The last few years have been rough for music fans…Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Prince and a dozen more have left us…2017 has also had its share of loss…Chuck Berry…Gregg Allman…Chris Cornell—and now Chester Bennington of Linkin Park…  A new ongoing history show about Linkin Park is on the schedule for the fall…but in light of the events of the past week, we’ve pulled out an older show dating to 2008…this tells the story of Chester and Linkin Park to that point… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being in a band seems straightforward…you pick up some instruments and start playing…but it’s much more complicated than that…the music that you end up making is influenced by so many outside forces…where you grew up…what music you listened to as a kid…what music you listen to now…the city in which you’re writing songs…the city in which you’re recording those songs… All these factors (and more!) Affect the music you make…but how?...and fans love this stuff…they love to know what other bands influenced their favorite musicians…it’s all part of the understanding and discovery of music… The Foo Fighters know this…and they set out to document all the stuff that goes into one particular album: Sonic Highways…eight songs recorded in eight different cities…and not only did they make a record, but they made an HBO tv series documenting the whole process… Here’s how it worked:  the band set up in a new city for each of the eight songs on the record…they’d hang out, talk with musicians from that city…and then at the

We’ve all done something that we’ve later regretted...it seemed so right at the time, you know? In hindsight, though, it turned out to be really, really dumb… Maybe we were misinformed or lacking all the information we needed…maybe it was emotion or ego that prompted us down that path… or maybe we just disobey what our gut was telling us… “Hey! What’s that big wooden horse outside the city gates! Let’s bring it inside!”…that kind of thing… Prohibition…New Coke…the Ford Edsel…the U.S. invasion of Iraq…. Or the doofuses at mars refusing to allow M&M’s to be used in the movie “ET”…that’s why Elliott ended up using Reese’s Pieces… Listen, everyone has regrets, right?…the best we can do is minimize the number we have...so how can we do that?...the first thing we can do is study the mistakes of other people…if Hitler had learned anything from Napoleon and not decided to invade Russia during the winter, what kind of world would we be living in now? Then there all the bad decisions we’ve seen in the music indus

There are many ways to clear or expand your mind to allow creativity to flow, stress to dissipate and peace to descend on the mind and body…exercise, meditation, prayer…but that takes exertion, practice and devotion…what if there was a simpler way? Well, there is…drugs…it’s not the smartest way to solve your problems, but for centuries and centuries, drugs have worked for artists… We can go all the way back to cave paintings made in France, Spain, Italy, southern Africa and the Americas 50,000 years ago that some anthropologists claim were made after these ancient artists took drugs, probably some kind of hallucinogenic mushrooms or plant extract…  Why do scientists think that? because many of these paintings feature specific geometric shapes and images that scientists say are common visions resulting from the ingestion of certain types of chemicals…in other words, some of humankinds first artists were junkies… Art and genius drugs have gone together ever since—not always, but more than you might realize…

It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake…. And as tough as that is, it’s even more difficult to move from being pigeonholed as a novelty act to one that carries gravitas and serious artistic merit…yet that’s what the beastie boys managed to do… No one took them seriously for the first eight years of their career…they were spoiled, snotty frat boys writing goofy songs and making funny videos… “Licensed to Ill” was a parody of hip hop…a good one, but a still a parody…let’s not forget that “Rolling Stone” described the album as “three idiots make a masterpiece”… But then something changed…The Beastie Boys grew up…they grew as artists…they grew as businessmen…they grew as humans… They took risks…they experimented…they branched out…they sought to make a difference—not just in music but in the world…and by the time it all came to an end with the death of

For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music… But we’ll always remember their contributions…and there were a lot…this is part one of “Remembering The Beastie Boys”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music scene…not true… The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos who hung out at places like CBGB, the mudd club and Max’s Kansas city in the uglier end of town… The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of 1976, pretty much every London punk fit into a single club on oxford street for a two-night music festival…capacity at the 100 club was official 350, but there was plenty of room to move around… The start of the english technopop scene focused around the few people who hung around the blitz club in Covent Garden… The same can be said for a dozen other scenes that resulted in sounds that eventually spread around the world…that includes grunge… Grunge started with maybe a dozen people in and around Seattle…that’s it…but within a few years, it expanded to became the dominant sound of western rock for much of the 90s… To become this in such a short period of time, this req

Every once in a while, something extraordinary happens in rock’n’roll…I hate the use the cliché of “a perfect storm,” but that’s exactly what I’m talking about…a bunch of things involving culture, politics, demographics, economics and technology all collide and mix in just the right way for something totally new and unexpected to be created… Lemme give you some examples…Elvis came along in the 1950s just as million post-war kids—these new constructs that were now called “teenagers”—began gravitating to new radio stations that played music derived from a mix of the blues, country and r&b…this music greatly annoyed their parents, something that made it dangerous and forbidden… In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show with a fresh, new sound that helped drag America out of the funk that followed the assassination of JFK…as far as rock is concerned, the 60s really began that February night in 1964… Let’s try something more current…you might remember the appearance of the music video in the early 8

Myths and legends come in all sizes…Atlantis…that’s a big one that we can’t seem to wrap our heads around…but maybe homer was just yanking our chain… “feed a cold, starve a fever”…turns out that’s wrong…depriving yourself of calories may make it harder for your body to fight off that infection or virus… “we only ever use 10% of our brain”…wrong…neuroscience has proven that to be false…the right number may be 20%--but there’s a lot of dispute over that… Here are some other myths I’ve run across…don’t feed pigeons uncooked rice or they’ll blow up…the great wall of china isn’t the only man-made object that can be seen from space…and you can’t certainly see it from the moon… Oh—and the “fact” that men think about sex every seconds…untrue…it happens a lot every day, but there’s no basis in any scientific literature that it happens every seven seconds…we’d never get anything done… There are also myths and legends in music, too…Robert Johnson’ pact with the devil at the crossroads…Gene Simmons of Kiss did not h

Some years ago, I had a conversation with Don Letts, the DJ, filmmaker and confidant of The Clash…and he said something that stuck with me: “the average lifespan of a band is seven years…that’s enough for them to form, get big, become stars, develop creative differences and break up” … He’s not wrong…the clash did their best work from ’76 to ’83…The Beatles from ’63 to ’70…Nirvana was around from ’87 to ’94…  But then there are the exceptions, groups that have survived multiple seven-year cycle…U2, the Stones, Oasis, Green Day, Foo Fighters…and if we’re going to make a list, we must include Blink-182…this is a band who had a big rise and then a big fall before clawing back again…  This kind of roller coaster career can be really hard on a band—and there are often casualties…you’ll see what I mean as we get into part three of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s rare that a band has a career with two acts…it’s not impossible…the survivors of Joy Division managed to do quite well as new order…the Barenaked Ladies were once written off before roaring back to life…and how many times has Black Sabbath risen from the ashes?... I’ll give you another one…Green Day…they’d run out of gas by the end of the 90s and contemplated breaking up for good…but then they reinvigorated themselves with their “American idiot” period and continue to do well… And then there’s the story of Blink-182…by 2000, they’d made it to the top and were selling albums by the tens of millions…but then things slowly started to go sideways—badly… However, like Green Day, Blink-182 was able to recover from that career nosedive—but not before having to enduring some serious—and literal—casualties…this is part two of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After grunge blew up in the early 1990s, the walls between mainstream rock and the alternative universe crumbled completely…what other music had been hiding in the plain sight?... There was goth and industrial and various forms of electronica…and there was all this punk rock…tons of it…all different flavours, too…pop punk, punk-funk, hardcore, garage punk, glam punk, queercore, riot grrrl, ska-punk… Punk had always been there, waiting to be discovered by a whole new generation…and finally, the time was right… There was green day, offspring, rancid…then there was sublime, no doubt and 311…NOFX, Pennywise and Bad Religion…some of these bands were brand new…others had been doing their thing for a while… Alot of the big action seemed to be centred in California…orange county, the bay area…but down in the skatepark suburbs of San Diego, something began brewing that would end up being responsible for selling 35 million records… These guys went from zero to worldwide superstars and then almost back to zero agai