Dog In New Zealand Plays A Mean Blues Guitar!

When I look at my YouTube or Google feeds I often wonder how so many sublimely boring posts get hundreds of thousands of views. Then I realized I have to get the hang of using ‘clickbait’ titles. How many items have you clicked in to due to a sensational title? Once you view one category of video/post you are inundated with hundreds of the same type. You know how many videos there are of Uber drivers kicking out drunk passengers trying to overload the ride with too many people? The excitement never ends!

So I’m not really in New Zealand and I don’t have a dog playing blues guitar (yet). Although Samantha is starting to take lessons. I’ll probably start her on classical guitar.

But there are a few things to talk about.

First:

One of the goals of ‘Messin’ With The Music’ is to give it a ‘live’ feel by playing tracks straight through as much as possible. So if you listen through you’ll certainly find ‘mistakes’. Two of my favorite guitarists are Jimmy Page and Jack White. They both go for feel and spontaneity over the idea of ‘perfection’. For me personally that technique gives me goosebumps over perfectly quantized and punched in shredding. I found this article on Page on Cheatsheet.com:

For a meticulous producer like Page, these mistakes couldn’t have been an accident. In interviews over the years, he’s spoken of leaving in mistakes because he thought it sounded realer than heavily edited albums.

In a 1977 interview with Guitar World’s Steve Rosen, Page didn’t seem embarrassed at all by mistakes he’d left on record. This time, the issue came up with “I Can’t Quit You Babe,” another signature early Zep track (off the band’s 1969 debut).

After Rosen described Page’s solo as “sloppy but amazingly inventive,” Page noted that it didn’t bother him. “There are mistakes in it, but it doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “You’ve got to be reasonably honest about it.” Of course, part of it came down to Page’s habit of recording solos.

“I usually just limber up for a while and then maybe do three solos and take the best of three,” Page explained. He also compared it to his live performances. When the band released The Song Remains The Same, the material didn’t come close to Zeppelin’s best nights in concert.

But Page left it in nonetheless. “It’s a very honest film track,” he told Rosen. “Rather than just trailing around through a tour with a recording mobile truck waiting for the magic night, it was just, ‘There you are – take it or leave it.’”

Page has long considered his work as a composer, arranger, and producer to be his most important contribution.

“My vocation is more in composition, really, than in anything else,” he said in 1977. “Building up harmonies, orchestrating the guitar like an army – a guitar army – I think that’s where it’s at, really, for me.”

Page is also a king of ‘riffs’. Rather than chorded passages and then a guitar solo, the verses and choruses were built on guitar riffs throughout the song. Here’s one of my favorites:

Jack White has the same type of loose, open feel to his guitar playing (and all the other instruments he touches). A beautiful disdain for ‘perfection’.

“I love analog because of what it makes you do. Digital recording gives you all this freedom, all these options to change the sounds that you are putting down, and those are for the most part not good choices to have for an artist,” and “Mechanics are always going to provide inherent little flaws and tiny little specks and hisses that will add to the idea of something beautiful, something romantic. Perfection, making things perfectly in time and perfectly free of extraneous noise, is not something to aspire to! Why would anyone aspire to such a thing?”

—Jack White

And the riffs! Just think of ‘Seven Nation Army’, ‘I Think I Smell A Rat’ or the Raconteurs ‘Salute Your Solution’. The energy and feeling that comes with his playing makes me want to headbang and bounce off the walls. Jack White is one of those artists that keep guitar emotion and the pure energy of garage rock alive. Let’s indulge in ‘Icky Thump’:

Another Thing:

When we saw Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band he had J.D. Wilkes open for him as a solo performer. I just read that Wilkes’ band The Legendary Shack Shakers are going out on tour. I haven’t seen any dates in our area yet (what a shock). But for the live total insanity they bring to the stage, here’s an older clip of the band doing ‘Shake Your Hips’. Can’t express how much I’d love to be on stage playing this.

The search for feel over ‘perfection’ continues!