NOTE: This blog was originally posted at BretAlexanderMusic.com
To start, I finally got around to watching Dave Grohl’s Sound City movie. If you want to hear a bunch of famous musicians expound on the subject of last week’s blog, well check that movie out. I had the opportunity to work at Sound City for a few weeks in the late ’90s. It was a special place, for sure.
On to the topic at hand: Context. In music and just about everything else in life, everything hinges on context. The author Tom Robbins said, “Style is the conduit through which substance must flow.” In other words, if you have an important message for someone you have to get their attention first. No one is going to take the time to listen to your wonderful message to the world unless they are first drawn to you. Or to the way you are presenting it. >And rightfully so.
But I think musicians lose sight of this point all the time. There was a story I read a while ago where a virtuoso violinist played a show to a sold out crowd one evening. The next day he put on a baseball cap and played on the street of the same city. Day one he played to a few thousand. Day two he made about $50 in change and people walked right by him. Context.
If you are a musician, you need to “own a sound”. The Rolling Stones have dabbled in country, blues, rock, disco, R&b, etc, etc. But I can always tell a Stones song when it comes on the radio. Even before Mick sings. They own a sound.
Keith Richards was a guy who loved the blues. He took that Telecaster and poured his attitude, personality, and balls out into the air. It became a living, breathing thing. The people connected and he is still doing it to this day.
Now, there are 5 million other legendary tales and twists and turns to The Stones’s story. But that is where it started. It doesn’t matter who you are or how far you go. That is always the beginning of things that last. People become good at something by spending years honing their craft. They become successful by taking that skill and offering something of value to the world. Something the world can understand and use.
Many musicians take the attitude that they are unsuccessful because the public “doesn’t get it”. It has nothing to do with them. To me that means you have an unused skill. There are not that many poets making a living sitting in a tower anymore. You have to enter the world and be part of things. I don’t think there is anything noble about being tragic.
Put yourself in the right context.
Now, I think this is a pretty academic discussion of something that comes intuitively to most great musicians. I doubt Stevie Ray Vaughn thought about any of this shit. But still, when most of his fans think about him they don’t think about the specific notes he played or musical notation. They think about the guy from Texas with the hat and the white boots who played blues guitar like no other. They remember where they were when they first heard his music.
And in their minds they hear the sound…
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Bret Alexander is the owner of Saturation Acres Recording Studio as well as the guitarist and chief songwriter for The Badlees.
