Interesting.

Live analog sounds are still going strong here at SG101.

His interview kind of reminds of the new wave British invasion in the late 70's early 80. Lots of synth, with drums and bass machines.

It was like the guitar was forgotten for while then U2 comes blasting out of Ireland and I am thinking wow haven't heard a guitar like that in a while.

Instro/Surf: Three guitars and drum set baby- can't ever go wrong with that.

Don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for Joe. James Gang was a local band. It's the only reason I will listen to an Eagles cut, to hear Joe play.

I saw him on one of those oldie hits of rock tours in the 80's, Leslie West, Alex Chilton, etc. They all did three songs, the hits, and then the next one came up to play. Like the early rock and roll reviews. Joe either forgot the words to his songs, just didn't care, or was wasted. It was sad. Alex C had holes in his shoes when we spoke with him after the show. Oh to be a big rock star.

http://www.reverbnation.com/thegreasemonkeyz

I agree with Joe.

Matt "tha Kat" Lentz
Skippy and the Skipjacks: 2018-2020
Skippyandtheskipjacks.net
https://www.facebook.com/skippyandtheskipjacks
Otto and the Ottomans: 2014-2015
The Coconauts surf band: 2009-2014
www.theamazingcoconauts.com
Group Captain and the Mandrakes 2013
http://www.gcmband.com/
The Surfside IV: 2002-2005, 2008-2009
the Del-Vamps: 1992-1999, 2006-2007
http://www.dblcrown.com/delvamps.html

Nicely said, Jake. I agree with a lot of it.

However, I don't think it's about bands watering down the earnings as much as it is untalented "artists" selling their "looks," their "controversial publicity stunts that keep them in the headlines," or their "brands" through corporate entities who aren't interested in the least about creativity, but rather in the "formula" that sells their shitty "songs" to the public. It's idiocracy of the music industry. People eat up this shit because they're told it's cool through ingenious/devious marketing paid by these same corporations, who pay a selected group of "songwriters" to write songs based on what computer programs tell them will appeal to the people, who really have no idea what it takes to actually write and play good music.

I would venture to say that most of the people on this forum are doing quite a bit about it.

Matt "tha Kat" Lentz
Skippy and the Skipjacks: 2018-2020
Skippyandtheskipjacks.net
https://www.facebook.com/skippyandtheskipjacks
Otto and the Ottomans: 2014-2015
The Coconauts surf band: 2009-2014
www.theamazingcoconauts.com
Group Captain and the Mandrakes 2013
http://www.gcmband.com/
The Surfside IV: 2002-2005, 2008-2009
the Del-Vamps: 1992-1999, 2006-2007
http://www.dblcrown.com/delvamps.html

Matt, totally! When I said bands/artists I did not mean to imply 'good'!

And Badger, the issue with digital is "How do I play this?", "do I own this?", "where do I get it from?", "why doesn't this play?".

The eco-system is still figuring itself out. There is no standard, the most common format has shown signs of ages for a long time. That, coupled with the question if you actually own a download or if you are renting is a big deal.

A terabyte is easy to buy and install... for me, for you, for a small portion of the country. It is something I could probably do blind folded on a tower PC, but the rest of the country cannot, and especially with Apple's new designs, laptops, etc... Those issues are a big deal, not for me... but for the nation as a whole. I would say it is clear that owning as a download that lives as 0s and 1s on your hard drive is absolutely not the future. Cloud based is the future, but data plans, free and open wireless network ubiquity, and network speeds are a serious roadblock at the moment. America's big ISPs show not interest in any of the above.

I have no problem with the digital future and listen to a lot of music digitally(yet nothing plays nice between iTunes, Amazon Player, and Google Music). I have a massive LP collection, which is around for the long haul. Got rid of my CDs. Converted them to digital years ago.

As for Cars, can't hook most phones/players up. Some cars have iPhone/iPod connectivity, some have Thunderbolt connectivity, some have USB... It just isn't friendly. 1/4 is a clear solution that works for everyone, but it does lack some cool features that a digital connection allows.

It is going to be a painful next 5-10 years!

JakeDobner wrote:

America's big ISPs show not interest in any of the above.

I'll give you a big +1 on that. They have not shown to be interested in much innovation for innovation's sake. (Sound familiar to a topic above?)

I still maintain though that one of my grand-daughters could locate, purchase & install a 1TB external USB drive in pretty short order (I did say most folks...) Then again, she's a genius, objectively speaking ya understand.

Until that first thing is addressed about access then putting my stuff that I own that I paid money for out on 'the cloud is a non-starter. I spent several decades in/out of uniform working for the big Leviathan and understand all about single-points of failure.

I will say ol' Joe certainly has fostered a worthy discussion. However I believe his argument could be flipped on its head to sing the praises of those still taking creativity in brain, and translating it to hands so that it comes out to be heard & felt the old-fashioned way.

Maybe someone should drop him a note & invite him to the Instro Summit.

Wes
SoCal ex-pat with a snow shovel

DISCLAIMER: The above is opinion/suggestion only & should not be used for mission planning/navigation, tweaking of instruments, beverage selection, or wardrobe choices.

Last edited: Mar 08, 2014 20:42:59

You're off base on some of it, Jake. In the last week or so, I read a story of one of the big providers upgrading home modem/routers to serve out 2 wireless networks. One is the usual home wifi, the other available to any of their customers. Not a good idea with respect to security, but clearly shows that ubiquitous wireless is on someone's mind.

Every single car stereo I've had in the last 25 years has had an external input. I've never had trouble getting any device to play in a car, even when it was a cassette player.

Cloud is an amusing marketing term and means nothing more than the commoditization of computing and storage resources. In essence, it's a mainframe with a browser as a terminal. And nothing new. Sharing of resources transparently over a network has been around nearly as long as networks, and browser terminals nearly as long as browsers.

The reason owning downloads is not the future is that the large music producers have finally figured out that renting to you is better for their profits than a one time sale.

Adding storage gets easier all the time. Buy a drive, plug it in. Done. Certainly easier than dealing with MFM drives in the '80's.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/14/03/05/0154229/comcast-turning-chicago-homes-into-xfinity-hotspots

I'll also mention that while looking for that story I saw a couple more on ubiquitous wireless in various forms. So where I disagree is on whether providers want ubiquity. They do. However, they do not want it either free or open. And the issue of ubiquity is orthogonal to throttling, data caps and the like.

We probably agree that the state of the physical internet in the US would be much better off had the US government handled it like telephone.

And I really must disagree with your assessment of how USB drives are being used. They are being used a permanent hard drives for precisely the reasons you give, and a couple more. Looking at sales figures, sales of towers are down. Laptops are marginally up. More and more it's tablets and phones, but most still have some sort of PC/Mac/Linux. And putting a USB drive on one of those is a snap, especially when the alternative is opening a laptop. One thing you may not have accounted for is that it's also easily moved to your new computer. That's the driver, in my experience, for using USB drives. No more screwing around with trying to hook up an older internal drive just to suck the data off it that you need to migrate. When my company's marketing interns are using USB drives as permanent storage, I'm pretty sure it does get used.

And as far as 'magic' goes, basic computing has always been marketed as such. It'll make your children smarter and your teeth whiter. I've been dealing with computing (it is my career) since before Microsoft and Apple even existed. On the marketing side, not a whole lot has changed on that score, except that instead of focusing on snowing executives, they want to do the same to the general public.

Where I don't disagree with you is on the state of things. It sucks. Where I may disagree with you is where it's going. I'm probably less optimistic than you are.