Category Archives: music

Meta blogging; Ozzfest

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I spent some time today screwing around with the layout of my page. I came up with a couple of things that I kind of liked, but nothing that I was sure enough about to commit it to the internet. The thing is that without any advertising logos to put on here it just seems foolish for me to have it divided as it is, when there is so little information in the left column. I like the things that I do have over there, but on the occasions where I actually write a bit there is just a lot of dead space over there. Conversely, when I removed the left column the daily text stretched so far that it became difficult to keep the eyes on the correct line. That led to me reducing the size of the table, leaving about 40% of the screen as just background.

Once again I realize why I just ripped off this layout instead of coming up with something of my own.

Having written the previous, I went on to spend a lot of time looking for a few songs that I remember fondly, with hopes of updating my side bar. It turns out that the first three I thought of were absolute shit, and the one that I ended up placing there was not far behind. I guess that is why every generation hates the music that their parents listened to, considering that I can hardly listen to most of the hair band shit that I used to listen to. The one saving grace of my generation is that we have Megadeth and Metallica to listen to in a pinch. I don’t mean the horrible soap-opera-esque crap that they started putting out in the mid-late ’90s, I mean the real Metallica and the real Megadeth.

I am sure that every generation makes a stand like this at some point. Trying to defend the music that they grew up listening to against the new bands that are coming out. The thing that makes me think that some of the power bands that I was listening to when I was sixteen, Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera specifically, are better than the bands of today is the fact that they are being played on the radio in rotation with the new Metal. Perhaps that is just in the area I live, but the fact is that they are still being played, more than twenty years later. The only other songs that get that kind of air-play are oldies.

As I approach 30, I realize that I am no longer the kid that used to bang his head while listening to the old metal bands, but when I see kids half my age wearing ‘Master of Puppets’ t-shirts, I realize that some of the kids are still listening to it.

I had the opportunity to go to OzzFest last summer, thanks to my wife having an amazing job where she won V.I.P. tickets to the event. The one thing about that experience that really surprised me was the sheer number of old metal t-shirts I saw. I felt like I was damn near the oldest person there, but lots of the kids were wearing Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Slayer t-shirts, regardless of the fact that they weren’t even alive while those bands were in their prime.

I sure hope that by the time I reach say 50 I will quit trying to defend all of the metal that I listened to when I was a teen, but the sad truth is that there is just nothing coming out today that is as heavy and even tries to tell a story. Thunderous guitar riffs are pretty easy to come up with, the hard part is making something that will last. You can have the heaviest riff known to man, then have someone just scream, “keep on rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” over the top of it and it will be absolute garbage. Put that next to the riffs in a song such as Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”, which is basically an anti-drug campaign, but it tells a story and it sticks. I am sure you can see the difference. If you can’t then I am old.

• The aforementioned OZZFEST was by far the best show that I have ever seen. There were so many bands there that I could not possibly list them all. The ones that played the main stage, though, were Chevelle, Disturbed, Korn, Marilyn Manson and, of course, OZZY. We wandered around the festival for a good five hours or so before they actually opened the entrances to the main stage. I was able to see a couple of bands, like Voivod, on the second stage that I had always wanted to see. There was another band on the second stage called MotoGrater that I mention only so you will know the name.

I don’t remember the exact date that the show was, but it was in the middle of the summer, in Arizona. Temperatures outside that day were over 110 degrees, which led to us using our V.I.P. passes frequently to get to the only area with a misting system, and the V.I.P. restrooms, which were the only air-conditioned place in the whole venue. It was there, the bathroom, that I met the guys from MotoGrater as they were trying to wash off the silly make-up that they put on before they do a show. An hour or so later, I met the bassist for Korn in the same restroom. Keep in mind that it is tough to try to talk to someone while they are pissing in the urinal next to you, let alone ask for an autograph. I briefly thought about shaking his hand, as we were walking away, but considering that neither of us had stopped at the sink to wash our hands, I thought better of it. And NO, I didn’t look at his Johnson. I stared at the wall just like I always do. I did ask him if he was in the band ‘Korn’ and he said that he was. Then he asked me who was on stage, I told him who it was (though I can’t remember at this point), and he disappeared through a door marked “NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT”. I didn’t try to follow.

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?

Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is about enough for today. Feel free to email me if you agree/disagree, that is why I put the link down there after all.

Song remakes; Tawny Kitaen

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Well today was a really shitty day for me on the work front. Mostly due to having to work a hated ‘split shift’. If you are unfamiliar with the term, that is a shift of eight hours that really screws over your entire day. In my case I worked from nine until noon, then had to go back from three until eight. That doesn not lend itself to actually accomplishing anything other than just work, it sucks basically.

That being said, I was not able to accomplish anything today. Not that I usually do anything on Saturdays anyway, still I can at least blame it on work. It is healthier that way, right? So I just have a few various things to bitch about today. I will jump right to it.

• I bitched in one of my early posts about my disgust of artists remaking songs. Not just any songs, but songs that were over the top hits when they were first released. D.J. Sammy is a horrible offender when it comes to this practice, so horrible in fact that the songs get airplay for about a week and then simply go away. So I won’t bitch too much about him.

So who am I going to bitch about? Jessica Simpson (I was forced to listen to some of her ‘music’ for the sake of adding that link, so I hope you appreciate it). Anyway, this girl who thinks that Chicken is Tuna took it upon herself to remake the wedding favorite “Take My Breath Away”, which was first performed by Berlin, even though they did not write it, but that is quite common for movie soundtracks. So why do I feel the urge to bitch about it? Because she did it horribly!

I have nothing against Jessica Simpson, but I think that someone close to her should have mentioned, at some point, that her singing voice is really not all that great. Were she to weight fifty pounds more than she does there would be no way in hell that she would have a recording contract. Why would she chose to remake a song that is still in circulation on light rock radio stations all over the U.S., and do it so poorly? Sure she likes to sing it in the shower, but isn’t that the reason that god created the shower (then completely forgot to tell the human population about it for 1800+ years)? So that we wouldn’t have to listen to Jessica Simpson singing a song that still stands as one of the great love ballads of all time?

I know that I am a cynical son-of-bitch, but when I heard her “render” that song, And no, I did not mean ‘rendition’, which would imply that it was her own personal spin on how the song should sound. I meant ‘render’ as in what meat-processors do to the carcasses of dead animals, which I think far more accurately describes what she did to that song, I was sickened. That is quite possibly the worst ‘cover tune’ of all time, BAR NONE. Someone please take away her microphone, which is sort-of penis shaped, and give her a penis, which will hopefully keep her mouth full long enough to keep her from singing! Not that I hate Jessica Simpson or anything…

• Well, as long as I am ripping on women and the music industry, I may as well toss out a bitch about Tawny Kitaen. Sorry, I am crutched by a dial-up modem and thusly can not find an official page for her (and why is it that the ‘official page’ for a celebrity or band is always on like page nine?). If you do not know who she is by name, I will just say that Tawny Kitaen is a serious actress that has landed a lot of roles, most notably the role of rolling on the hood of a Jaguar in WhiteSnake’s video for the song “Here I Go Again” (which I also can not find a link to).

If you are like me, that being a child of the ’80’s’, you probably saw that video roughly 11,000,000 times in your youth/pre-adulthood phase. You likely thought that there would be no way that you could land a girl that pretty. It turns out that you were lucky to not ‘land her’, or have that same thing happen conversely.

That woman has had sex with every musician that ever lived. I am still a little unclear on how she had sex with the classical composers, but I have no doubt that she did. Exhuming a body would be a day to day operation with her. Hell, that is kind of how she was living at that point. I do not mean to dog Miss Kitaen for her actions, just to mention that she has had sex with every rock star there ever was. Sure, she started small with a member of the band RATT, long before they ‘made it’, but she kept the taste for ‘Rock Stars’.

The only positive that I can take about looking for information regarding her is that she did eventually go into rehab, break out and start to run amok through our cities. That is the purpose of rehab, right? She eventually did settle down, and, as I read it, is pretty happy now just being a mom.

I have a dollar in my pocket that says she probably really regrets ever doing the “splits on the hood of the Jaguar” thing that made every male that was near puberty hope for her. While that same dollar is saying that she wishes that she hadn’t given herself to anyone who could play an instrument at that same time.

If you are a little groupie whore, what do you expect to happen? History will change when you decide to settle down? Personally, I think it is a great thing that she has found a purpose (raising her children), but I still remember her as the groupie slut that let a nipple slip out while filming a video. Whether I am right or wrong about her past, I am certainly right about her present, best of luck to her in raising a family…Especially when those kids reach puberity, and start to say, “well, you danced naked on the hood of a car,” because what could her comeback possibly be…

That is all for today. Tune in the day after today to see a new post. Please, do not search for the word that means the same as the ‘day after today’ on google, it might skew my stats.

Country Thunder

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Well, I guess I didn’t blog yesterday. I actually did, unfortunately both the index page and the archive page have mysteriously disappeared. That just goes to show that you should never break from a habit once you have formed one in doing this sort of thing. Usually what I do is write this, then upload the index page only. The next day I will then save the index page as the archive page before starting to write the next blog. Yesterday I saved them both at the same time and uploaded them at the same time. They were both working at the time so I figured it was all working properly. After I had deleted the old index page, I went to my site to try to grab a quote that I had put in there only to find that the index page was from the previous day. No problem, I thought, and I tried to access the archive page, not there at all.

I suppose it is possible that one of you still has it in your history, unfortunately by the time you read this, it will have been over written by this. Strange irony, that. It does beg the question, if I blog and no one reads it, did I really blog at all? The answer to that question is yes, or else I would have given up on this whole thing a long time ago. In the future I will just continue to handle one upload the day I write it and the other upload the day after, it has actually saved my ass a couple of times when, for one reason or another, one of the two uploads didn’t stay uploaded. I wonder if it is a problem with my server or my ftp client, but not enough to change either, just enough that I will be a bit more careful in the future.

I know that you must all be crushed about missing out on one of my blogs, so I will do a quick recap of what you actually missed. I spent a long time talking about the battle.net community, after having read a recent guest article over at DII.net, and then had just a little blurb about the impending Country Thunder festival. I may just go into that again, as it is only a few days away now, and the signs of it are everywhere.

Yes, I will go into that again. The aforementioned festival is the bane of my existance. I absolutely loathe Country music. I mean, hell, that is not even a good title for it. Most of the people who whine those songs have never been to the country. Sure they will whine about growing up on the farm, but that doesn’t change the fact that they likely grew up in some manicured little suburb and that the boots that they wear have never touched anything other than concrete and asphalt (perhaps a dance floor as well). I know a lot of genres of music are like that, possibly all of them. You have your “Gangsta rappers”, some of whom I understand are from the ‘hood’, while others are from the same ‘hood’ that a lot of us came from. Then there is the rock scene, where every band seems to claim that they were living out of their drummer’s van for a couple of years eating nothing but ramen noodles waiting for that one big break, while in reality they were just living with their wealthy parents in SoCal. That is the way of the musician, I guess I shouldn’t slight Country “artists” for that.

You may have noticed that I used the word ‘whine’ a couple of times in the previous paragraph. I did not mean that in a bitching sense, I meant that they sound like crying three year olds when they sing. Though that is more in the male artists than the female. This is one of the two things about the songs that really annoy me, the other is the combination of slide guitar and guitars that have a thing called a “b-bender” (which is like a whammy bar, but works on only one string of the guitar, the b-string, and makes the music sound even more like a crying child). I am pretty sure that it is not really healthy, but I actually begin to get angry when I have to listen to country music for too long at a time, more on that below.

The last thing about the music that I can not stand is the “Country Accent”. It is not an accent. If you go to Boston, you will hear people with that accent, similar in New York or any place you visit. The “Country Accent” seems to be an accent that one can be infected by while living anywhere in the U.S., it simply involves trying to sound like you have a southern accent when you really don’t, and the end result is that you really sound/look like an idiot. I don’t mean while they are singing the songs, I mean while they are talking. These country artists keep that twangy, weird accent while they are talking to reporters and on talk shows, it is just sick. To site a couple of examples, from the genre of music I listen to, of other artists not doing it, look at Dave Mustaine of Megadeth and Axl Rose from the tragically doomed Guns and Roses. They both had very distinct singing voices that you either loved or hated, but sounded damn near human while actually speaking. Dave Mustaine in particular, as I heard a radio interview with him, over the course of the thirty minutes of listening to him talk I couldn’t believe that he was the man behind that acid-like, gravelly (is that a word?) tone in their songs.

But wait, I was planning to talk about the festival…Here we go. Despite my best efforts to try to find the actual population of florence, all of the estimates that I find look exactly like This. There are certainly not 17,000 free people living in this town, as the 14 new home constructions in the last year should prove (I think they count the inmates for tax benefit reasons). I have heard the number 10,000 thrown around a few times to count the number of people in the 4 male and one female prisons here. That would make the population be 7,000, which I still think is about double the actual population, but I can not find the real numbers on the internet. What I can find is a total school attendance, Kindergarten to 12th grade, of less than a thousand. I think that would support my theory that the population is far lower, but that is merely speculation. The site that I linked to said that there are 2,900 women in florence, I believe that the prison holds about 500 of them, bringing the actual population to about 2,400 women. Then, assuming that the split of men to women is nearly equal, I guess there are about 5,000 free people living in this town. That is all speculation, but I bet my number is far closer than theirs.

Now, throw in Contry Thunder. I don’t know the numbers, and I can’t find them on the internet, but imagain a show like OZZFEST, that has as many die-hard fans, and runs for four days, with ticket prices starting at free at the shops in town. There must be hundreds of thousands of people that go to the show, and the ones who camp there will invariably come into town for things like ice, water, beer, soda and chips. Never do they buy anything like, well, you know, actual food, only the items that I listed. The entire town is in chaos for four days.

Florence has two Circle K stores, placed strategically directly across the street from one another(I say that this was strategic, ’cause why in the hell else would a company put two stores within a 12 second walk of each other?). Both of them bring in those ugly port-a-potty type things (four each last year) to accomodate all of the people that show up there to buy beer, ice, water, soda and chips, never anything else at the Circle K either, as I found out from conversations with the managers at them.

At any rate, when there are like say 50,000 people invading a town of 5,000 people, it is quite insane. The roads leading to town have been revamped since last year, but the rest of the town remains the same. There are barely two lanes on main street, and they are made with a patchwork of pavement that has two inch gaps in it every fifteen feet (that is quite literal, not cracking pavement, that is how they had planned it, back in the forties, also I think it is concrete, not asphalt).

It is a major economic boom for all of the stores and resaraunts here, of course, but it is also a bit much for any of us to deal with. We all, where I work, have to work pretty much from open to close to accomodate it. The people who deliver us ice, normally twice a week in the warmer months, have to deliver it sometimes twice a day during this festival. Also, the people who work at the various museums here in town have a large spike in traffic (I think that is the leading reason that tourism has been so much higher in the last year, we actually got a group from Germany in the store a week or so ago, when I asked why they decided to visit florence for their vacation, they said that they had found a link to the tourism board from the Country Thunder website.). Perhaps German children rebel against groups like Rammstein by listening to Country?

The only real problem with this whole thing is that I literally get angry when I have to listen to country music. We play country music, exclusively, on the radio while the show is in town. I don’t get angry like I am going to go and kill, or anything like that, it just shortens my temper and makes me not the frienly butcher I usually am. I certainly don’t think that there is a drug that could help me, if you dislike something to the point of anger, the only solution is to stop doing that something. If you don’t have a choice in the matter, I guess you should look for your happy place. I can usually keep from being too angry or disgusted by the music if I just replay some old Metallica album in my head. Yet, sometimes when the combination of the slide guitar and ‘b-bender’ hit, I can no longer block it out. (I must say, again, that I am sure that it is not healthy to hate something so much, but I do.) My only respite is to turn off the radio, or go far enough away from it that I can no longer hear it, which is difficult on the four busiest days of the year.

I don’t think I have yet killed anyone in a “Country Music” induced rage, but if I had, would I actually remember it?

Crosby; pain

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I did only work for four hours today, but they were the wrong four. The pain that I feel in my neck has now spread to the point that I always have a head-ache and a lower back ache at the same time. That is because I can only even attempt to sleep in a few postitions, when I try anything else the pain is just death. I have to turn over while I sleep, first because my neck starts to hurt if I stay in one position too long, second because my back does also.

If I have ever bitched about anyone elses’ pain, then I think that this is my retribution, but, I don’t think that I have ever done that. The fact that my neck now seems to be the least of my problems does concern me though. It seems like the problems with my neck are working themselves out just fine, but I still end up with a throbbing head-ache, and my lower back has been in pain for two or three days -that is directly related to not being able to move around a lot in my sleep-.

I really can not emphasize ehough just how much Pain I am feeling right now, and even if I could I am not sure that anyone would really believe it. In fact, I am going to just stop typing now and go and lay down.

It is Saturday, March 06, 2004

Well, in case you didn’t notice, I did not do an update yesterday. I found the beginning of it here, and decided to just leave it as is, since today’s will be more of the same. I certainly wish that I had something more profound to write about than all the pain that I am feeling, unfortunately the dice have not rolled as such and I don’t like to just sit at home and bitch about how much pain I am in -well, I guess I do, but when you are reading it you do have the liberty of being able to just skip past it-.

Last night I slept like something that sleeps for a really long time without ever waking up from pain. That is the way that I guess a lot of humans sleep, I am just not one of them. Even before I had the injury in my neck I often would wake up with pain in my back and be forced to pop it a bit before being able to get back to sleep. Last night I slept for at least ten hours, and I did not wake up even once, I was just that exhausted. Upon waking I stayed in bed and let myself drift in and out of sleep for a couple more hours, just happy that I was not feeling any pain in my neck or head.

I got up to take a shower at about 11:30 and found that I had a bit of lower back pain but my head and neck were holding up pretty well. Since I didn’t have to be to work until 2:00, I just layed there in bed and watched some mindless dribble on t.v. I ate a couple of cheeseburgers also.

I didn’t take any Ibuprofen to work with me, sicne I was feeling so good, that turned out to be a big mistake. The thing is that I can lay or sit for just about any length of time without having any problems. When I am both standing and moving around (especially if I am moving around with things in my hands) the pain starts to come back. I thought that it was possible that this would not be the case today, since I just felt so wonderful when I did go in to work.

The first two and a half hours or so really did go quite good, I was not feeling any pain in my neck at all, only a bit of lower back pain. At about the three hour point my neck was hurting again, and then came the head-ache. I did not have any Ibuprofen with me, so I asked the boss for whatever pain killer they had available. The only thing that they had were these 81mg aspirin pills. I read the back of the bottle and it said that you should take 8 every four hours or 12 every six hours, not to exceed 48 pills in 24 hours. I really thought that they must have the numbers backwards on that, I mean really 12 pills, I took six of them, and they did nothing.

At about 7:00 my head was throbbing to the point that I was able to count the “lubs” and “dubs”, by some stroke of luck my wife came in for something and I asked her to bring me some Ibuprofen, which she did. I gobbled down one more of those pills than I was supposed to (800mg) and it did not start to kick in until well after I had gotten home. The funny thing is that after all the aspirin, Ibuprofen and about 5 beers, my head-ache is now gone and I am finally starting to feel the pain in my neck again…

There is one news item that I simply have to put down here, I don’t know why, maybe the insanity is finally starting to kick in and I will be using my shoe for a telephone by the end of the week. Anyway, the headline is “David Crosby arrested on gun, drug charges in NY” and you can find the story Here

The 62-year-old musician, who rose to fame with the Byrds and later Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in the late 1960s and 1970s, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and unlawful drug possession, said Manhattan District Attorney spokeswoman Barbara Thompson.

As you can certainly tell by the photo, this man is a hardened criminal. He is one of the guys that are out there “banging” to protect his “hood”.. At his age I think that any drug he does should be considered ‘medicinal’ and the most likely reason that he has a gun is just in case the pressure/pain of his life becomes overwhelming and he just wants to end it all. He looks far more like Santa Claus than a musician and I bet he has arthritis and other such maladies that he is not able to take care of with over-the-counter pills. Would you hold your wallet/purse any tighter if you saw him board a plane?

The story goes on to say this;

Crosby later gained notoriety when he donated sperm to fellow rocker Melissa Etheridge so she and her lesbian partner could have a baby through artificial insemination.

Now I have nothing against homosexuals, but Egads man, what are they expecting the child to look like? It is probably possible that there could be two sets of genes that would result in a child less attrictive than that particular pairing but you would really have to look for them.

At any rate, I really don’t think that Crosby was going to try to take over any embassies in New York, and it is funny (to me) that this is getting any press coverage at all. There are far more important things going on in the world than a rocker 30 years passed his prime getting arrested for possesion of miniscule amounts of marijuana, and a firearm.

If John Lennon had realized that his life was in danger, so long after he was out of the public eye, he may have carried a firearm, and as such he may be alive today. Let us not fault persons who live in situations that only they can understand.

Song remkaes

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It turns out that I had a SNAFU and a FUBAR going on the entire time I have been doing these updates. I only found that out because Flux had mentioned in an email that he could help me get my table working properly. I did not know that I had a problem with the table, so I fired up Netscape (which I rarely use) and yep, you could not see a single word that I had written. I spent the majority of the afternoon taking care of that problem on the site pages, yet did not take the time to fix the previous updates, and likely never will. Also, just because of the sheer amount of time that it will take to redo all of the poetry pages, those have not yet been updated either.

On the up side, I did add a Mission statement to the page that I feel is well worth a look. One other thing that is site related is that I scrapped the demon background that I had been using for a really long time (six years or so) on the free site. I didn’t really like the look of it for the purpose of a ‘real’ website, and I was only using it on the front page anyway. It is amazing how much your taste can change in only a few years.

For some strange reason I am feeling the desire to bitch about musical artists right now. I guess the reason is not really all that strange since I am forced to listen to K-lite while I am at work every day. I do so despise the music…

It seems to me that for the last several years there have been a lot more song remakes than ever before. I can not be sure of that, of course, since I only recognize the songs as remakes when I am familiar with the original song. There are a lot of songs that I thought were original when they were released in the ’80s that I found out later were remakes of oldies. I am no authority on the subject, but paying for this domain gives me a license to bitch about anything…The power…

The thing with the new song covers is that they are mostly re-making songs that were at least top twenty material when they were originally released. Take, as a for instance Madona’s cover of Don McLean’s timeless song American Pie. (sorry I could not find linkage for the original). I saw an interview with Madonna where she said that she really felt strange about re-making such an american classic, so I will give her props for that.

Then you have the remakes of Don Henley’s timeless song The Boys of Summer , where one of the people actually substituted their own band name where it says “I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac”. That is just wrong!!

Then, when I am listening to “Uncle Kracker’s” latest version of the rock and roll classic “drift Away” by Dobie Gray, I just hate music in general.

Out of nowhere comes “the Counting Crows” version of Big Yellow Taxi If you have never heard that song beforehand, you are not alone. I had only heard it because I had a hippy teaching music in my school back in the day. I just give this group props for digging one out of the trash can and getting it into the adult contemporary top 40.

It is much easier to re-do a verified hit than it is to turn a folk classic into one.