This is something something I wrote last year (December of '07) in response to the (then) latest downloadable content for Rock Band for the X-Box 360. It ended up being featured on antimusic.com shortly after. I wish I could take credit for the awesome title, but that honor belongs to the site's moderator.
Here's a link to the slightly edited published article: http://www.antimusic.com/news/07/dec/03And_Justice_for_Newsted.shtml
If for no other reason, it's worth checking out the published version for the awesome (and very serious) comment and the bottom of the page.
Anyways, enjoy.
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I haven't written anything in a long time, mainly due to apathy. Apathy is a bummer, which isn't exactly true because apathy is apathy. A bummer is something else entirely.
It's been mostly a quest for inspiration, and tonight I think that thirst was briefly satiated.
So, tonight I was playing Rock Band after having downloaded some extra content for the game on Xbox live. I downloaded a David Bowie pack (which included "Moonage Daydream" and covers of "Heroes" and "Queen Bitch"), a Runaways cover ("Cherry Bomb"), a T. Rex cover ("Bang a Gong"), and a Metallica pack ("Blackened", "And Justice For All", and "Ride the Lightning"). I wanted to try the Metallica songs right away, to see if they'd be hard to play. I'm still living on the 3rd floor of the Rice's home for another couple weeks, so playing the Rock Band drums so late was out of the question.
I switched over to "Blackened" and I noticed that you could play bass on it. A quick note on why this is noticeable: When "...And Justice For All" was released in 1988, it seemed to have been packaged with almost no low end, which mostly means that the bass guitar track was rendered inaudible. This was done for a bunch of reasons, mainly because of the band's lack of confidence due to the then recent loss of their bass player Cliff Burton. The new bassist Jason Newsted had a long bubbling annoyance regarding the erasing of his bass tracks. What happened? Why no bass? You could even almost hear it on two "Justice"-era b-sides, "Breadfan" and especially "The Prince", both of which boasted rough mixes and no real mastering job to speak for.
The resulting album, while being the 2nd greatest album in the Metallica corpus, had the lingering feeling of a joint workshop between Tascam Portastudios and Crate amps (Note to non-music nerds, that means it sounds really tinny and flat and maybe even sounding a bit bad to some with regards to the recording quality). This never ruined my love for the album. I got into it far before I ever noticed that there were good recordings and bad recordings, which might account for (along with my perpetual and unreasonable love for Metallica bootlegs throughout my junior high and high school years) my love for really trashy sounding recordings.
But a mystery remained: whatever happened to those bass tracks? You could hear the bass in live recordings of the "Justice" songs, no doubt at all. But I always wondered what happened to the mysteriously absent low end. Jason Newsted is a good metal bassist, but my curiousity was also tempered by the fact that hearing the bass could change the dynamic of the album.
Yet tonight, the veil was cast aside and I beheld these two "Justice" songs...with bass. I still don't get it. Rock Band evidently has access to the master tapes...otherwise, how else would Harmonix (the company that developed the game) be able to separate the tracks enough so that if you make a mistake on your "instrument" that it plays back as silence with the rest of the track still playing? Futhermore, did they bring the bass track back up or could they have had someone re-record the tracks?
By this point, most readers might have jumped ship and I can't say that I blame them. I can't expect anyone to get as excited about this as me. But still, the whole thing is at least kind of fascinating. For the kind of guy who in high school, though currently having no jean jacket to boast of, would gladly have carefully etched the cover of "Kill 'Em All" on the back of one with a black sharpie (though would have probably gotten in the same amount of trouble for wearing a T-Shirt of the album cover when I was in high school), this is of utmost importance. I now have an idea of what these songs sound like with bass guitar. The result? I kind of like it. I'll always prefer the same copy of the album that I've been listening to for over a decade, but thanks to Rock Band, I can kind of feel like Jason Newsted did when he first heard the playbacks of his performance, not knowing that a legion of subsequent fans with too much time on their hands would someday deconstruct the "...And Justice For All" experience in light of a videogame.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Oliver Stone's "The Doors"
When dealing with corporate music stores, it's good to recognize the big poppa of all corporate music stores: Walmart. I never realized the power of Walmart until I got to graduate school and moved to a town where a 24-hour Super Walmart was the high point for youth culture on a Friday night. Walmart fared better than the bowling alley, which as far as I could tell was the only other place opened at 11pm that wasn't a supermarket (of course meaning a supermarket that wasn't also a Walmart). It's easy to hate Walmart when it's just an idea, something that is destroying small businesses and eroding the foundations of middle America. I also think that it's funny that Walmart gets such flack in my area when pretty much any other business is a chain of some sort.
...including my beloved Corporate Music Store©.
Walmart, as must people know, has a 5 dollar DVD bin and that bin always seems to have Oliver Stone's "The Doors" which is essentially a meditation of the life of Jim Morrison. It's also probably the funniest movie I've ever seen.
When I was in the 9th grade, I was obsessed with the movie. I saw it the summer before 9th grade while visiting some family friends with my parents. The family's son was the coolest person I knew, which pretty much meant that he did everything I could never see myself doing in the 9th grade: drink, smoke, do drugs, drive, go out all the time, sleep with girls, and know people in bands. Moreover, he was only 1 year older than me. While I never really ended up doing anything seedy in my life, he represented everything I could've been within one year's time, even if I wouldn't really be. We also both listened to thrash metal, particularly Metallica. While my yearbook quote was "following an instinct not a trend/go against the grain until the end" (Damage, Inc.), he embodied that a whole lot more than I did. My life was more Nothing Else Matter than Damage, Inc.
The summer before I entered my freshman year, this guy was particularly into the Doors. I came over and he and his friends were watching Oliver Stone's "The Doors". He had a huge room (which seemed more like an awesome apartment than a room) and it was full of (who at the time I thought were) more really cool people. Oliver Stone's "The Doors" was on in the background and while all the cool people were doing whatever cool people do, I watched the life story of someone who was seemingly cooler than all of them: Jim Morrison.
Now, I hope you're seeing where I'm going with all of this and you're catching a sense of the self-deprecation in this little bit of writing. Jim Morrison is NOT awesome. Jim Morrison kinda sucked. He wrote really crappy poetry and sang on more crappy songs than good. It's easy to talk about how awesome the Doors are when you're only listening to the 2-disc "Best of..." or if you're Perry Farrell or Door's keyboardist Ran Manzarek. But the idea of the band The Doors is probably stronger than the reality of The Doors.
I bought the movie soon after at another Corporate Music Store© location which was located in the deadest mall in America (which I'm pleased to say is even deader than ever, though I did attend an advance screening for the new Incredible Hulk movie there tonight). I also picked up the soundtrack to the motion picture at, coincidentally, a Walmart that is located in the same plaza as my current Corporate Music Store© location. It was 1995 and I missed the Doors resurgence by a good 4 years, but it was all new to me. The soundtrack, in all honesty, was pretty awesome. It played on the Jim Morrison mystique flawlessly and you really get the sense that some mythical god walked this earth for a brief period in the mid-to-late 60's, an image that's just plain silly because at the end of the day (or the end of his day, really), he was a dopey guy in his mid-20's. I'm currently the same age Jim Morrison was when he died (he died at 27) but I feel generally more comfortable where I'm at. I don't think I've missed out, even in comparison to Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's "The Doors".
The soundtrack was also my first introduction to the Velvet Underground and I remember being really surprised when I found out what they really looked like because the band I pictured looked more like the Screaming Trees (I can't even explain why) than a bunch of sloppy mods with a supermodel.
The movie itself is unintentionally hilarious. I later learned that almost anyone involved with Jim Morrison was appalled by the movie. His mistress, Patricia Keneally (who, thanks to Google, I just found out 2 seconds ago is now a science fiction writer) hated how she was depicted, which is odd because she's portrayed (as far as the movie's concerned) pretty positively, being a voluptious pagan who initiates Jim Morrison into some faux-godhood by drinking each other's blood and dancing to the introduction of Carmina Burana. Doors drummer John Densmore also ripped into the movie, though he has a cameo as an engineer. Others probably would've been offended at their portrayal if they weren't already dead. Andy Warhol is portrayed as hitting on Jim Morrison while giving him a gold phone and the stoic Nico gets a little rawdy with some Love in an Elevator.
I've pretty much disavowed the movie from my life, with the occasional relapse whenever it's featured on VH1 Classic. But recently, I was thinking about it and something kinda bothersome hit me: Val Kilmer is a better Jim Morrison than Jim Morrison.
The real Jim Morrison was a little pudgy and awkward. Val Kilmer had better delivery, better stage presence, looked better, and kinda sounded better than the real Jim Morrison, ALL while still being Val Kilmer. Regardless of the film's artistic value (very little) or historical value (even less), I think that the shot of Val Kilmer as the dead Jim Morrison, laying perfectly still in a bathtub is probably one of the most iconic images in rock cinema. This is no way what Jim Morrison looked like when he died. I saw a picture of Jim Morrison in an old Rolling Stone that was taken just days before he died, and it looked like someone ate Jim Morrison and wore his skin. Even in death, Jim Morrison is trumped by Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
Which brings me to a last point with bio-pics. I can't help but picture the band in the movie more easily than the real deal. Maybe that's why there are movies like Eddie and the Cruisers. It's easier to mess with a made-up legend than a real one. In the case of the Doors, the other Doors were portrayed by Frank Whaley (as Robbie Krieger), Kevin Dillon (as John Densmore) and Kyle Maclaughlin (as Ray Manzarek). Frank Whaley also played a fake Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone's equally overblown "J.F.K." and Kyle Maclaughlin was in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. In real life, the other Doors look like a bunch of skeezy and/or ratty old guys. I almost need to picture the fake band more. I've put off seeing Anton Corbijn's "Control" because I don't want a definitive film verson of Ian Curtis and Joy Division when I've already been messed up by the fake versions in "24 Hour Party People". This also means that there are now 2 sets of fake Joy Divisions, which is as odd and arbitrary as having 2 fake versons of Steve Prefontaine, who was himself the subject of 2 films about his life.
As a result, I would not be able to pick out the real Steve Prefontaine in a police line-up, and I guess that's okay.
...including my beloved Corporate Music Store©.
Walmart, as must people know, has a 5 dollar DVD bin and that bin always seems to have Oliver Stone's "The Doors" which is essentially a meditation of the life of Jim Morrison. It's also probably the funniest movie I've ever seen.
When I was in the 9th grade, I was obsessed with the movie. I saw it the summer before 9th grade while visiting some family friends with my parents. The family's son was the coolest person I knew, which pretty much meant that he did everything I could never see myself doing in the 9th grade: drink, smoke, do drugs, drive, go out all the time, sleep with girls, and know people in bands. Moreover, he was only 1 year older than me. While I never really ended up doing anything seedy in my life, he represented everything I could've been within one year's time, even if I wouldn't really be. We also both listened to thrash metal, particularly Metallica. While my yearbook quote was "following an instinct not a trend/go against the grain until the end" (Damage, Inc.), he embodied that a whole lot more than I did. My life was more Nothing Else Matter than Damage, Inc.
The summer before I entered my freshman year, this guy was particularly into the Doors. I came over and he and his friends were watching Oliver Stone's "The Doors". He had a huge room (which seemed more like an awesome apartment than a room) and it was full of (who at the time I thought were) more really cool people. Oliver Stone's "The Doors" was on in the background and while all the cool people were doing whatever cool people do, I watched the life story of someone who was seemingly cooler than all of them: Jim Morrison.
Now, I hope you're seeing where I'm going with all of this and you're catching a sense of the self-deprecation in this little bit of writing. Jim Morrison is NOT awesome. Jim Morrison kinda sucked. He wrote really crappy poetry and sang on more crappy songs than good. It's easy to talk about how awesome the Doors are when you're only listening to the 2-disc "Best of..." or if you're Perry Farrell or Door's keyboardist Ran Manzarek. But the idea of the band The Doors is probably stronger than the reality of The Doors.
I bought the movie soon after at another Corporate Music Store© location which was located in the deadest mall in America (which I'm pleased to say is even deader than ever, though I did attend an advance screening for the new Incredible Hulk movie there tonight). I also picked up the soundtrack to the motion picture at, coincidentally, a Walmart that is located in the same plaza as my current Corporate Music Store© location. It was 1995 and I missed the Doors resurgence by a good 4 years, but it was all new to me. The soundtrack, in all honesty, was pretty awesome. It played on the Jim Morrison mystique flawlessly and you really get the sense that some mythical god walked this earth for a brief period in the mid-to-late 60's, an image that's just plain silly because at the end of the day (or the end of his day, really), he was a dopey guy in his mid-20's. I'm currently the same age Jim Morrison was when he died (he died at 27) but I feel generally more comfortable where I'm at. I don't think I've missed out, even in comparison to Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's "The Doors".
The soundtrack was also my first introduction to the Velvet Underground and I remember being really surprised when I found out what they really looked like because the band I pictured looked more like the Screaming Trees (I can't even explain why) than a bunch of sloppy mods with a supermodel.
The movie itself is unintentionally hilarious. I later learned that almost anyone involved with Jim Morrison was appalled by the movie. His mistress, Patricia Keneally (who, thanks to Google, I just found out 2 seconds ago is now a science fiction writer) hated how she was depicted, which is odd because she's portrayed (as far as the movie's concerned) pretty positively, being a voluptious pagan who initiates Jim Morrison into some faux-godhood by drinking each other's blood and dancing to the introduction of Carmina Burana. Doors drummer John Densmore also ripped into the movie, though he has a cameo as an engineer. Others probably would've been offended at their portrayal if they weren't already dead. Andy Warhol is portrayed as hitting on Jim Morrison while giving him a gold phone and the stoic Nico gets a little rawdy with some Love in an Elevator.
I've pretty much disavowed the movie from my life, with the occasional relapse whenever it's featured on VH1 Classic. But recently, I was thinking about it and something kinda bothersome hit me: Val Kilmer is a better Jim Morrison than Jim Morrison.
The real Jim Morrison was a little pudgy and awkward. Val Kilmer had better delivery, better stage presence, looked better, and kinda sounded better than the real Jim Morrison, ALL while still being Val Kilmer. Regardless of the film's artistic value (very little) or historical value (even less), I think that the shot of Val Kilmer as the dead Jim Morrison, laying perfectly still in a bathtub is probably one of the most iconic images in rock cinema. This is no way what Jim Morrison looked like when he died. I saw a picture of Jim Morrison in an old Rolling Stone that was taken just days before he died, and it looked like someone ate Jim Morrison and wore his skin. Even in death, Jim Morrison is trumped by Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
Which brings me to a last point with bio-pics. I can't help but picture the band in the movie more easily than the real deal. Maybe that's why there are movies like Eddie and the Cruisers. It's easier to mess with a made-up legend than a real one. In the case of the Doors, the other Doors were portrayed by Frank Whaley (as Robbie Krieger), Kevin Dillon (as John Densmore) and Kyle Maclaughlin (as Ray Manzarek). Frank Whaley also played a fake Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone's equally overblown "J.F.K." and Kyle Maclaughlin was in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. In real life, the other Doors look like a bunch of skeezy and/or ratty old guys. I almost need to picture the fake band more. I've put off seeing Anton Corbijn's "Control" because I don't want a definitive film verson of Ian Curtis and Joy Division when I've already been messed up by the fake versions in "24 Hour Party People". This also means that there are now 2 sets of fake Joy Divisions, which is as odd and arbitrary as having 2 fake versons of Steve Prefontaine, who was himself the subject of 2 films about his life.
As a result, I would not be able to pick out the real Steve Prefontaine in a police line-up, and I guess that's okay.
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