I was actually listening to R.E.M. this morning! I liked Finest Worksong, The One I Love and Everybody Hurts.
Finest Worksong is one that always seemed like it should’ve been a huge hit. Maybe if it had come out a few years later.
There's a great video of him talking about his time with Zappa. You ever hear of Thundercat? He's sort of a spiritual successor to Duke. Great bass player.
That’s the first one I heard on the radio, on our local alternative/new wave station. I knew about them before from an older cousin but hadn’t heard any of their music.
Do you mean a successor to Stanley Clarke, who is still alive? Duke was a keyboardist. Yeah. Thundercat is a badass. I wish Pattitucci played that Tcat Ibanez signature instead of his own Yamaha.
Maybe it unfolded a little differently on the US west coast, and in the states in general, than in Germany, and Europe in general. Here, the industry was pumping out these crap metal bands with their cheesy music at a nauseating rate, songs like Cherry Pie, Here I Go Again, Talk Dirty To Me were front and center, and then (as if that wasn't bad enough), they all then cranked out their ballads like Every Rose Has Its Thorn...these were dark days for rock music. I'm sure there were bands like Dinosaur Jr that were trying to penetrate the market, but they weren't having much luck. Here anyway, it was Nirvana that kicked that door down and put a lid on all that hair metal...to hear the hair metal guys tell it, their stock plummeted almost overnight once Nirvana arrived on the scene. Nirvana had a bunch of great songs... 1. Smells Like Teen Spirit 2. Lithium 3. Heart-Shaped Box 4. Come As You Are 5. All Apologies 6. Aneurysm 7. Drain You 8. Breed 9. In Bloom 10. You Know You're Right 11. Territorial Pissings 12. Lounge Act 13. Where Did You Sleep Last Night 14. About A Girl 15. Pennyroyal Tea I listened to quite a bit of techno in the 90's too, but it was really more a part of the underground scene here back then, raves were still word of mouth warehouse parties, the clubs were playing a little techno too, you didn't hear it on the radio or MTV, except for maybe Connected, by Stereo MC's. Some of this is subjective of course but the way I remember it, radio and MTV in the early 90's took a sharp turn right around the time this first appeared... ...it was as if a switch had been flipped and almost overnight rock music was good again.
My first R.E.M. was Reckoning. Read about them and bought the album without having heard a note. I was 16 or maybe 17, still living in a small town but starting to spread my wings as far as my taste in music. This was rural Nebraska in the early 80s, so if you were going to discover new music and you didn't have a cool older sibling at college, you obsessively read whatever music mags you could get your hands on for record reviews. Reckoning remains an all-time favorite album for me; I positively wore it out playing one side and then the other over and over for weeks at a time. That will always be the "real" R.E.M. for me.
Ddddd College radio was a savior. And by that I mean it saved me from the bullshit that was "classic rock" and top 40 in those days. My freshman year at college I met a couple of people who liked some of what I was listening to and we started going to all the concerts we could afford. From the Reckoning era I will leave you something I found the other day. It's my favorite cover REM did. June 1984. I was at this concert. Strange to find something from one's youth on the internet like this.
In terms of sound is what I'm referring to. Especially his first album. I saw Thundercat open for Flying Lotus on my 27th birthday. Fun show.
I liked Moral Kiosk and Catapult quite a a bit myself (in addition to Radio Free Europe, which goes without saying). When I first got to grad school a few months after the album came out, I saw a campus security kiosk near the football stadium on which someone had stenciled the word "MORAL!" I got the reference.
Speaking of grad school. . . I saw REM perform with a few guys from Love Tractor as . . . can't remember if it was Hindu Love Gods or It Crawled Up From the South. I think the former. Anyway, the whole gig was them doing metal covers. Then they hit it big, and didn't have time to play venues like that anymore.
If you can't remember exactly there's also some websites that have all the concerts complete with setlists. Love Tractor used to be one of their most frequent bill mates.
Nirvana did have a lot of great tunes, but I think you do a disservice to glam rock. Those guys were on top of the same world that REM and you and the Stones and Dave Morrisey and Howard Hughes and the Koch brothers are on top of. There's no reason to bash them for living and making music the way their station in life allowed them to live.
Well this was a crazy magazine cover. 4 didn’t make it by my count, all drug related, and one barely beyond, gun related. What’s more interesting is how many are still with us and making music.
Yeah I wonder if different people did the photo collage and the headline. “Well they’re mostly under 30?”
I think it maybe misses the mark a bit because there's no way they could predict the future. Aside from Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin, the bigger deaths came in the 80s or later- Lennon, Bonham, Harrison, all three BeeGees, Moon, those Grateful Dead keyboard guys, etc.