The Beatles

[Sancho]

Rocky Racoon.

By the way, I know this quote is from a couple of years ago, but...

The question is: how many Beatles songs have orchestras recorded vs. how many Rolling Stones songs have orchestras recorded? I would guess about 50x1, but have no idea.

The Beatles had such variety!!!!

...somehow I think orchestras covering rocknroll tunes is not a good measure of the ROCK. Probably it's not good for either genre.

I never much cared for "rock operas" either. I like hard, driving, loud, sweaty, gutsy roadhouse -rock played with a beat that makes you want to get out on the dance floor and shake your money maker. No orchestra ever did that.

Rock-n-roll for the sake of rock-n-roll, and long-hair music for the sake of long-hair music, eh?

[Sancho]

This Bill Haley Remix gets at it pretty good:

http://youtu.be/XOZtaaYskqk

I dig the radio call-in bit, right in the middle.

[Emil Miller]

Rocky Racoon.

By the way, I know this quote is from a couple of years ago, but...



...somehow I think orchestras covering rocknroll tunes is not a good measure of the ROCK. Probably it's not good for either genre.

I never much cared for "rock operas" either. I like hard, driving, loud, sweaty, gutsy roadhouse -rock played with a beat that makes you want to get out on the dance floor and shake your money maker. No orchestra ever did that.

Rock-n-roll for the sake of rock-n-roll, and long-hair music for the sake of long-hair music, eh?

Why does it have to be electric guitars and off-key shouting ? This is he sort of thing I used to listen to at dances and concerts and it doesn't come more hard, driving, sweaty and gutsy than this:

https://youtu.be/S4iwRGLImfI

[Sancho]

Shake it but don't break it, Emil. I'm kinda surprised you posted a tune that features a banjo so prominently, a tenor banjo anyway - yot-digga-digga-digga-digga...

I think the one-word answer to the question - why the electric guitar? - is: AMPLIFICATION. To play to a big crowd ya gotta play loud.

Here's one of the two inventers of rock-n-roll playing a big crowd:

Bo Diddley, Road Runner

http://youtu.be/WOOFx9c6qyA

Anyway, great dance tune, Emil. Flappers, like rockers, broke all the rules.

Hey, here's a mish-mosh of Jazz, Big Band, and Rock-n-roll:

Brian Setzer covering Louis Prima's Jump Jive and Wail:

http://youtu.be/aHWcN5YxuYc

Just a tad more choreographed than the folks at the race track, but still good, eh?

[Emil Miller]

Shake it but don't break it, Emil. I'm kinda surprised you posted a tune that features a banjo so prominently, a tenor banjo anyway - yot-digga-digga-digga-digga...

I think the one-word answer to the question - why the electric guitar? - is: AMPLIFICATION. To play to a big crowd ya gotta play loud.

Here's one of the two inventers of rock-n-roll playing a big crowd:

Bo Diddley, Road Runner

http://youtu.be/WOOFx9c6qyA

Anyway, great dance tune, Emil. Flappers, like rockers, broke all the rules.

Hey, here's a mish-mosh of Jazz, Big Band, and Rock-n-roll:

Brian Setzer covering Louis Prima's Jump Jive and Wail:

http://youtu.be/aHWcN5YxuYc

Just a tad more choreographed than the folks at the race track, but still good, eh?

The dancers in the first number were retro Teddy boys dressed in the garb of the original 'Teds'
and prancing in a football stadium in the same manner as their forebears.
That's quite a line up of trombones and saxes in the Louis Prima piece and the dancing is a good deal less scurrilous.
The banjo backing on the Acker Bilk number is in accordance with virtually all traditional jazz
bands ,and one guy, Eric Silk, was a banjo player who was the actual leader of the band;
one of the best nights I can remember was at a local dance where his band was playing.
This was the music of my latter schooldays and early adult years although I had from childhood liked what is loosely called classical music. Listening to it now makes me nostalgic for rip roaring concerts and dances in pubs and municipal buildings that were the venues for the enormous number of people who followed traditional jazz in the UK. One of the pubs was called The Three Crowns where Acker Bilk used to play in a dance hall at the back and the whole place used to jump in an atmosphere of beer and smoke that wouldn't be tolerated today.
But the band I followed most avidly were these guys who were generally recognized as the kings of traditional jazz.

https://youtu.be/DCG7mZ27rdU

[Sancho]

Great stuff, Emil. Sounds like Dixieland to my ear. I know the Jazz purists have distinctions between Dixieland (white), New Orleans Jazz (black), Chicago style, St. Louis style, and suppose a bunch of others, but honestly they all build on and borrow from each other. You can't have Dixieland without New Orleans.

Right after 9/11 I was moseying down through the quarter in New Orleans, marveling at how empty it was - nobody was traveling yet - when I walked by Tipatinas, a place off Bourbon St, and heard a glorious noise. A small band was playing in a style I can only describe as a mix of rock-n-roll, zydeco, Cajun, Jazz, and probably a few others. Whatever it was, it worked. I stayed there all afternoon.

Then another time I was on a layover in Düsseldorf, actually we stay in Nuess, a small medieval town near Düsseldorf. Anyway, it was near Christmas and you know how the Germans are about Christmas. So a few of my coworkers and I were wandering around the festival huts, drinking these little mugs of hot wine, eating brats, and generally enjoying ourselves. One of the huts had an unusual band playing. Four guys in their 60s, with long, greasy, gray hair, and bad-Santa outfits were playing. They had a trombone, an alto sax, a snare drum and a tenor banjo, and they were playing standard Christmas songs interpreted in a Dixieland style. You wouldn't think it would work, but it did. Sort of. Anyway we had a great time.

At any rate, I get that same sense of nostalgia you mentioned when I listen to the songs of my youth. In fact I read somewhere that the music we grow up with in our teens and twenties leaves just that impression that you spoke of, which is unlucky for me since I grew up in the tackiest decade of known history - the 70s.