https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2aqvKY6zLc

The YouTube frames the performance annoyingly in terms of woke 2012 politics, but the real story is stranger and funnier.

Beck and ZZ Top had performed two songs together in 2009, then a fan had mashed the performances together in a video hoax as though they were singing “Sixteen Tons.”
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When ZZ Top lead guitarist Billy Gibbons learned of the video, he concluded that it was created by “someone who obviously had too much time on his hands.” Beck took it a step further and suggested, “Bloody hell — we can do this!” and worked up the same arrangement used in the fan’s YouTube video.

–https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-zz-top-jeff-beck-hoax-video-sixteen-tons-greek-theatre-20140819-story.html
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I remember hearing the song on the radio as a child, late at night while my father drove the car.

If the right don’t get you, then the left one will.

Watching Prince again, I noticed he included Pete Townshend’s signature windmill stroke and a hint of Hendrix playing with his teeth. I’ll bet if I knew more about electric guitar solos, I’d find homages to other greats.

My favorite anecdote I read after Prince’s death was from Billy Gibbons, the lead guitarist for ZZ Top — you know, those white hillbilly-looking guys with the long, long beards. Gibbons and Prince happened to meet in a bar. Prince invited Gibbons to his table and they spent hours comparing notes on the guitar.

https://societyofrock.com/billy-gibbons-shares-his-favorite-prince-memory-reveals-the-moment-that-left-him-mesmerized/

I do believe Prince was staking a claim with his Hall of Fame performance to be part of the guitar god pantheon.

And he is.

“The Story Behind Prince’s Epic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo”
https://wxrt.radio.com/prince-while-my-guitar-gently-weeps-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame

Cue it up at 3:30 to get to the meat. That’s an all-star group on stage, but Prince, wearing a red fedora, shows up from another galaxy.

That showman bit where he turns his back on the audience and plays laying down at an angle, he’s playing for George Harrison’s son, Dhani, and Dhani beams a big smile back.

Cute story at the link. Apparently Prince refused to rehearse, so no one was ready for him to burn it down that way.

I still wonder who caught the guitar when he threw it away at the end.

Tom Grey: Here’s one from Bruce Springsteen in his prime. It’s not well-known, but Springsteen spent part of his musical apprenticeship chasing rock guitar godhood. However, he decided to focus on songwriting. Good thinking.

The first two-and-a-half minutes still give me chills. A live performance which blows the studio version entirely away.

–Bruce Springsteen, “Prove It All Night (Phoenix, 78)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrvOAUg-yY

Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk.

DNW: Sounds like a fine vein to mine! I learn more from what people like than what they don’t. I’ll check out some of those names.

As I was recalling the Sixties pop on my way home from the reunion, I was thinking of all the women there. I knew almost all of them, which is to say they’d been at least dating the guys prior to service. I hadn’t expected that, maybe thirty years later. And most of the guys had served.
Perhaps that was an odd bunch. Never occurred to me then or later that the same wouldn’t have been the case with any other bunch of old college buddies from that era.

I recall when I was a Training Officer in an Infantry AIT company, some of the guys would be formed up after dinner, presuming no night training, and marched off to GED. When my father was in (WWII), it was called “Three R” school, colloquially, so the guys could at least read road signs and so forth.

So, ultimately, no functional illiterates as far as I knew and with the GED, they had documentation.

But to get back to the music….still gets me. And youtube has some collections called Viet Nam music.

As I said, I didn’t follow pop music much back in those days. Lots of treasures on youtube. The Red Army Choir has “ave maria” with a fantastic soprano. And Paula bar Giese does “Mille Regretz”, along with other items. Great voice. Whatever you think of the selections,Vaughn Monroe has the pipes. And somebody, maybe a lot of somebodies, put Kipling to music and Leslie Fish does “Cold Iron” to make your skin crawl–in a good way.
Of all the Gunga Din offerings, Mike Farrow does it in prose. Excellent.
I’ll stop now.

“DNW: So what gets your “juices flowing,” regardless of others’ opinions? It seem you are quick enough to let us know what doesn’t.
Bach, Beethoven, Charles Ives, lieder, zydeco, zouk, “How Much is That Little Doggie in the Window?”
I don’t judge.”

LOL, And I thought I was being evenhanded and nonpartisan.

So, you obviously subconsciously recalled, or otherwise intuited, that I previously stated I was by and large repelled by the pop tunes of the late 40s and early 50s; when as a kind of research project, I discovered what they were. The only thing I think of as equally bad is disco, and the creepy afternoon delight and muskrat love shit of the 70s.

But I also, by and large, recognize the validity of some of the points you have made regarding the melding of middling effects, and how they may produce something estimable once combined.

Famously, La vie an Rose/ Piaf, maybe, eh?

But my own tastes in music are not very profound. And, I listen to music more for enjoyment than to get the juices flowing.

As for styles of music, well sorry guys, but as I have previously admitted, I got kind of burned out on rock and country, and drifted toward jazz standard performances that tend to go well with cocktails on the patio.

What has come to bore me, and seems dreary, is anthem music. Whereas I once was mesmerized by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and still appreciate the musicianship, I would not really bother to go out of my was to play that, or Clapton, nor the psychedelic rock I once liked, nor the British invasion bands that my older friends introduced me to, a half decade or more after their releases.

If Green River comes up on some oldies station, I’ll crank it up for Auld Lang Syne, but doubt there are two other Creedence tunes I would bother to sit through. Same with my one time favorites – the early stuff only- of Steve Miller, or Dave Edmunds.

I “was there”, as you were, during the MTV classic era, and was fascinated, in a mild way, by everything from Nirvana, to Billy Idol, and Lenny Kravitz. But while I’ll listen to an old tune here and there. I would not put the stuff out for friends or spend so much as an hour straight with it on on my own. Those mix tapes of Modern English, Green Day, and Hootie and the Blowfish, lay in some back corner of a entertainment center cabinet somewhere.

I remember when A Gentleman’s Honor by Phillip Glass came out. I ran out and bought it and spent some hours hypnotized. But it never compelled me to go in search of more of the same.

Bluegrass and Irish music? I was “into it” for awhile, as so many were who listened to WFAE in Charlotte, or some of their Arkansas Traveller or Fionna Ritchie programming.

Then of course there was the period in college when I stumbled across reissues of Django Reinhardt, who I had read mentioned on the liner notes of a Chet Atkins album when I was a kid. I went out and bought everything I could find as “gifts for my dad”. Even the fact that that POS Woody Allen began shortly thereafter to use some of the tunes as background music, did not deter me. And Allen was not a known reprobate at the time anyway.

Classical. Yeah, to a limited degree. Was a big fan of Bream and Parkening performances. Never liked Williams sterile guitar work.

YouTube has proved to be a real boon for someone like me. You can cherry pick through a performer’s oevure and take the good and leave the rest.

In this vein, I recently discovered two Jerry Reed performances, Wayfaring Stranger, and Georgia on My Mind, that thankfully exhibit none of that awful shtick he was notorious for. They are from 1969; and in Wayfaring, he does a clever thing that is more identified with Peter Frampton years later, than ever with any white country performer, all while playing Bose Nova style.

Skilled if oddball older and overlooked performances like that hold my interest mostly.

While not an oddball exactly, I’d recommend Lenny Breau’s performance of Lullaby of Birdland, as an underappreciated minor gem. Don’t bother with any of this unless you have good speakers and are interested in guitar. m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFdETRF87o0

For those who didn’t get their fill of Tom Jonesey late 60s cool when they were 10 years old, I’d suggest they check out the half dozen worthwhile and definitely unconventional offbeat performances by some English 60s trio called the Peddlars. “On a Clear Day” is one example. m.youtube.com/watch?v=yxf1IFgPH5s

“Ebb Tide” is interesting, as are” People”, and “Say No More”. All songs I hate in themselves, by the way. LOL

A back stage performance I stumbled across about two years ago, is “Stomping at the Savoy” with Tommy Emmanuel (whose demonstrativeness and antics I don’t usually care for), some former youth prodigy named Richard Smith, now dangerously obese ( a damn shame) and another skilled studio guitarist named Jim Nichols. If you are a guitarist, if you have good speakers, and if you appreciate a fun if virtuoso impromptu performance, check it out. I think it ranks with the Julian Lage and Frank Vignola “Caravan” capture made at the luthier convention. What Lage does there, using a 70 year old Gibson L5 is nothing short of supernatural.

So, if predisposed …Otherwise beware. By the way, You will have to seek it yourself, as Godda#ned YouTube is effen with my tablet at the moment.

Anyway … because you asked.