4 Years Ago (2017)

You can have riffs in songs that sound similar and the song can still be original. Case in point; “Woman From Tokyo,” from Deep Purple which curiously has the same riff as Joe Walsh’s “Meadows,” from “The Smoker You Drink…” album.

Both songs were released the very same year, and no plagiarism lawsuits occurred. And guess what. Both artists had very successful careers.

So it’s a sad state of affairs when it comes to music and copyright these days. The metal and hard rock community has been sensible about it, but I am pretty sure that if another metal or rock artists broke through to the mainstream, there would be a long list of plagiarism cases filed.

The fact that “plagiarism” is used in music is pretty sad.

8 Years Ago (2013)

I found an old issue or Metal Edge in which Gerri Miller (RIP) did a track by track breakdown of the Motley Corabi album.

I did three separate posts on it. You can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

People focus on sales a lot. If something sold a lot of times, it’s seen as successful.

However, sale numbers mean nothing these days. What is important here, is the length of time the music has been out and are people still listening to it.

A Guitar World, March 1986 article of Angus Young got posted with some commentary by me.

For any guitarist starting off, AC/DC wrote the book on beginners Rock guitar. In the process, they also created songs that are timeless and a soundtrack to a whole generation of people in the seventies, eighties and nineties.  

And Angus always spoke his mind.

On EVH:

“Malcolm’s still a better guitarist than Eddie Van Halen. Van Halen certainly knows his scales, but I don’t enjoy listening to very technical guitarists who cram all the notes they know into one song. I mean, Van Halen can do what he does very well, but he’s really just doing finger exercises. If a guitarist wants to practice all the notes he can play, he should do it at home. There’s definitely a place for that type of playing, but it’s not in front of me.”

On Clapton:

“Clapton just sticks licks together that he has taken from other people – like B B King and the other old blues players—and puts them together in some mish-mashed fashion. The only great album he ever made was the “Blues Breaker” album he did with John Mayal and maybe a couple of good songs he did with Cream. The guy more or less built his reputation on that. I never saw what the big fuss was about Clapton to begin with.”

On Jeff Beck:

“There are guys out there who can play real good without boring people. Jeff Beck is one of them. He’s more of a technical guy, but when he wants to rock and roll he sure knows how to do it with guts. I really like the early albums he did with Rod Stewart.”

I did a douche Blabbermouth like post on Mike Portnoy as an experiment to see if traffic increased on the site. It did, but it’s not the kind of site I want to run or be involved in.

The post is all over the place in writing, and not very good from my point of view. And man, I got a lot of hate direct messages to me. Especially around my comments on Richie Kotzen. I basically said he can’t sing. And yes, Kotzen was also part of the douchebag experiment on this post.

For the record, I do like Mike Portnoy. His work ethic is unbelievable and as a musician all he wants to do is play, so he does that and he keeps getting involved in multiple projects, which for some reason, piss people off.

And people who do read the blog, know I have a lot of love for Kotzen. Plus his work on the Poison album, “Native Tongue” is outstanding.

In Sydney, a music festival was happening called “Stone Music Festival” which was getting news for the wrong reasons. Here are some other stories.

And while the organizers said it would be back in 2014, it never was. Because the 2013 one was a mess.

And a cover band called “Kings Of Chaos” stole the show at the festival. The band featured Matt Sorum on drums, Duff McKagan on bass, Gilby Clarke on rhythm guitar, Steve Stevens on lead guitar and vocals provided by Glenn Hughes, Joe Elliot and Sebastian Bach.

And UMG took down an official version of “God Is Dead”.

Take down requests are meant to take down content that is infringing. So how did the Official Black Sabbath YouTube page fall into that category is beyond me.  

And here is my view on the song. It’s not a bad song, nor is it a great song.

Kingdom Come was still getting a lot of listens from me. Here is a post on “Stargazer”.

It’s the keyboard synth intro that grabs ya from the outset.

Within three months from when “In Your Face” came out, the band that we had come to know had called it a day.

Rudolf Schenker had an interview in Guitar World, March 1986, which I posted here.

By March 1986, Rudolf had been in the game for over 26 years by now. Winners never quit. They persist. They persevere.  

Finally Storm Thorgerson passed away and I did a post on some of his iconic album covers for rock bands.

Dream Theater used him, Pink Floyd used him, Megadeth used him, Europe used him, Muse used him, Led Zeppelin used him and so many more.