SamuelBLupowitz

Wow, always educational to hear the American R&B roots of British rock and soul. From subtle stylistic influence to full-on plagiarism, and everything in between! Slight tangent, but I always thought Led Zeppelin got a little too much flak for how liberally they lifted old blues licks and lyrics -- hadn't the Beatles and the Stones done plenty of that sort of thing, too? You can't copyright a I - IV - V progression. But then I heard the Small Faces' 1966 recording of You Need Loving and went "...oh... never mind then."

Between this and the $40 check I got for the out-of-town club gig I played with my trio earlier this month, I'll have enough saved up to invest in a more lucrative hobby, like setting dollar bills on fire.

Just wanted to give everyone a post-show update. All told, it went fine. We got through the 26-song set (which we never got all the way through in rehearsal once; we had to cut one or two big ones like I Won't Back Down for lack of time), it was well-attended, and the audience was very, very enthusiastic, despite it being -- and I say this with all sincerity as someone who plays in multiple projects and has done more than a handful of one-off tribute shows -- the sloppiest gig I've been a part of in years. Absolutely never want to work with that bass player again, though. What a disappointment from someone whose past work I've really admired. Aside from hacking his way through a bunch of the tunes, he kept wandering off between songs at the second rehearsal, adding even more time to how inefficiently we were getting through the music. My wife only sang two songs, so she left that rehearsal a lot sooner than I did, and when I got home I was fuming. We had this exchange: Me: <Bass player> is driving me insane. My wife: Was he randomly leaving the room when you were trying to start the next song the whole night, or just when I was there? Me: The whole night! My wife: Honey, he has a drug problem. Me: 😮 What can I say, I guess I can still be something of an innocent at times... my wife later added "I don't CARE that he has a drug problem, just don't waste everyone ELSE's time with it!" I thought he might get it together for the show, but he was a mess. He was drunk, he kept getting on (someone else's) mic to ramble at the audience, he was clearly using his (very developed) ear and chops to figure out how parts of the tunes went on the bandstand. Come on, man, use those powers for GOOD, not evil! I was giving him the Michael Scott "I'll kill you" look more than once over the course of the evening -- especially during Free Fallin', which is the same damn thing over and over and he just. Hadn't. Learned it. Absolutely unacceptable. Still, I made the most of it, squeezing a two-board rig onto the tiny stage (Yamaha CP88 for piano and Wurli, Nord Electro 4D for Hammond, synth pads, Mellotron strings, and also Wurli for the couple of songs when it's played in tandem with acoustic piano). I even brought my accordion along -- what the hell, everyone else was figuring shit out on the fly -- and had a lot of fun adding that texture to some of the quieter numbers, like Walls, Yer So Bad, and a gorgeous acoustic duet of Insider by the bandleader and the primary female vocalist. The bandleader (and several others) thanked me multiple times for my professionalism, said he hoped we could work together again, and invited me to play keys on the sessions for his original band's upcoming record in January. He then Venmo'ed me ... $80. Ah, the life of a gigging musician. 🤣

Copyright law is such a mess of rules tilted, so often, in favor of businessmen rather than creators. I'm certainly no expert, but this is an interesting conundrum to think about. On the one hand, Steely Dan has always been, at its core, a shared project by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. I know Fagen expressed some trepidation about going back out on the road billed as Steely Dan without his old partner, and I remember reading that he had suggested billing it as "Donald Fagen and the Steely Dan band," but ultimately the bankability of name recognition won out. But as far as the value of owning the catalog and the brand that is Steely Dan? It feels similar to Paul McCartney having to get along with Yoko Ono to make decisions about the Lennon/McCartney catalog (now that they own it again after decades) -- it's true, he's only half of that partnership, and it makes sense to have someone represent the interests of the other half of the partnership now that they're not around. But also, one could argue that Donald Fagen is better positioned to know what Walter Becker would want done with Steely Dan than Walter's family. How much of this is an issue of creative control, and how much of it is just an issue of who reaps the financial benefits? Those two issues are likely inextricable, and as we all know, sometimes what's best financially isn't what's best for the art... Interested to see where this leads.

I remember watching the documentary about Chris Thile's first tour with the band that would become Punch Brothers -- which, for those who don't know, has the instrumentation of and old time string band (mandolin, acoustic guitar, violin, banjo, upright bass), but is equal parts classical, jazz, art song, and alt-rock; it's "progressive acoustic" music. There is a moment in the film where the documentarian catches Thile on a frustrated phone call with his management, about how they can't bill the group as "hot bluegrass" or any other such things, especially when they play Bluegrass festivals, because they're coming out and playing a multi-sectioned, through-composed suite about his divorce when people are expecting stomp-and-clap fiddle tunes, and it was alienating the audience. I really felt that. I too love an old-school approach where a group of musicians decide "this is the thing that we do." But I also have a special love for groups that use a traditional instrumentation to try new things. I'm really enjoying the breadth of styles evident in the groups shared here -- soul, jazz, rock, avant-garde, anything you can imagine, all with organ, drums, and some other combination of guitar, bass, or horn. Keep it coming, y'all!

Great tune, great playing, and gnarly synth patch, Josh!

Absolutely, and I'm not talking about "the arrangements this group is playing don't sound exactly like the recorded version, and I'm annoyed." Mostly I was surprised and had to realign my expectations, because I assumed that the people in charge of this show would know the basic forms and chord progressions of these songs, including some that were new to me, and instead I found myself doing a lot of teaching and asking about riffs and sections that we were skipping over. You know, being the "counting guy." I'm also 100% on board with some of the reimagined arrangements in different keys. I just would have preferred to have been told about those changes in advance, before I tried to cram for nailing parts that were no longer necessary to learn. But again, my reaction to this is mostly amusement and the adjustment of my expectations to reality, not offense at things not being Up to My Standards (because when it comes down to it, who cares about MY standards when I'm just a hired gun?).

I've been playing a lot with a drummer who can navigate mixed meter more fluidly than maybe any musician I've ever met. If you get him talking about it, he just says "listen, the trick is just that everything breaks down to 2s and 3s." Simple! I'll keep writing in alternating 4/4 and 5/8, I guess. 🤣 Since we're doing Heartbreakers and Traveling Wilburys tunes, I didn't bat an eye thinking about there being three, maybe four guitars at a time onstage. The keyboards are generally the sauce on these tunes, whereas the interlocking guitar parts are the main dish. But the trick there is that the parts are very meticulously worked out so that every layer has a purpose, and these guys were still in the "what are the chords to that part" stage -- there were honestly moments where I was wanting more guitar, because the one guy who kept going for the leads didn't have anyone harmonizing with him or playing the fat riffs underneath the solo. I've played in CSNY and Eagles tribute shows with three guitars, and it was awesome, but there was a lot of dedication to the three players working together to find their place in the arrangement -- we'll see if this pans out that way!

"Wow, a 76 key, extremely flexible workhorse board that would be great to round out a big rig or as a one-board solution for oh sweet mercy it's 6 grand forget it." 🤣

I gotta tell ya, unlike a lot of boards from the early 2000s that kinda look like clunky spaceships now, its visual aesthetic is still pretty cool!

Since there's so much Soulive love on this thread, worth sharing a performance. Neal Evans is always the coolest guy in the room, and he does things with his left hand that I struggle to play on an actual bass guitar. I am noticing that he's not using his typical rig with a third controller board for bass between the Hammond and the Clav -- it looks like he's playing on the lower manual of the organ, but I'm definitely hearing his more typical VST bass sound in the mix. As a bassist/keyboardist who is currently playing a lot of key bass, I'm always looking for ways to get the bass sounds feeling a little punchier and more fluid. Also since "organ quartets" were the other category mentioned in the thread title, it's worth shouting out a couple of the influential classics: Booker T and the MG's, and The Meters!

Glad to see some love for Sam Fribush, a relatively recent discovery for me whose playing I've been enthralled by. Since Soulive (who I've been listening to a ton of lately) and Stanton Moore have both been mentioned, worth checking out the Krasno-Moore Project, featuring Eric Krasno on guitar (from Soulive, Lettuce, many others), Stanton Moore on drums (from Galactic and his own aforementioned trio), and a younger organist named Eric Finland. It's a little more traditional in its overall sound than Soulive, and their one release, Book of Queens, is all arrangements of songs made famous by female vocalists, from Nina Simone to Billie Eilish. (Anyone know how Eric Finland gets the Hammond bass sounding so unbelievably fat, by the way? Looks like he's splitting it off into a bass amp somehow, but it also doesn't hurt how in the pocket with Moore's kick drum he is.) Anyway, I know there are a handful of forumites with their own organ trios; I'll circle back here after my group Pocket Bandits makes its first record in early 2024!

I thought the forum would enjoy this adventure. This is the story of how sometimes you think you'll be the least prepared person in the room, and then you realize you're used to working at a certain level that not everyone else is used to. My wife and I were asked to take part in a Tom Petty tribute show later this month. It's a collection of musicians we are familiar with, but haven't really worked with before; they did a version of this show with a slightly different lineup (no keyboards, some other different players) over the summer, and were asked by a club in Rochester to reprise the show for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, guaranteeing a sold-out house and a good payday for everyone. I always love to connect with and work with new musicians, and Benmont Tench is one of my top influences, so I jumped at the chance to learn two hours of Petty tunes. Given the number of busy people involved and the proximity to the holidays, there were only two rehearsals on the schedule, one of which was last night. I knew from the time that we were hired that, given the 20-plus-song set list (along with the call for "hey, do any of the folks who didn't do this show last time want to request some new tunes to do?"), the first rehearsal would be a "finding my way through" situation. I know a lot of these songs by heart (though there were a good chunk that were new to me), and Tom Petty's music doesn't tend to have a lot of complicated changes, but I just didn't have the time to learn the specific parts for every tune on the list. I just made sure I had chord charts for all the tunes, and told myself that while I'd be a little underprepared, I'd make my way through with the ensemble and then iron out the details over the following week. Well, not only were a lot of the other people involved in my boat, but my wife and I wound up feeling MUCH more prepared than most of the other people. There was a lot of "oh yeah we do this in a different key” and “oh wait where does that section go?” and a few instances of “oh yeah we might not have told you we added this song." I wasn't phased by it, just amused -- everyone was absolutely delightful, but the people I've worked with doing tribute shows in the past are usually operating at a certain level of organization and expectation, and this was just ... different! My wife came to the early part of rehearsal to run her two tunes, both of which were in the original keys without any arrangement changes from the record, and she found herself teaching people how to count through the form correctly, just because there are little bars of 2 or uneven numbers of measures between verses. Things you might not notice if you didn’t study the recording, because Tom Petty was a master of invisible songcraft. So I was also recognized as "a counting guy" pretty early on into the rehearsal: “how would YOU count that section? You’re a Counting Guy!” (Shouldn't we all be Counting Guys, though...?) But honestly, it was a little bit of an ego boost to go from The New Guy to The Guy Who Makes Things Happen within the first hour. When they called "You Got Lucky," which was NOT on the set list I was sent, the singer also said “hmmm maybe this is a little high for me.” So I tried not to look too self-satisfied while the whole room reacted to me, in the span of about thirty seconds, 1) figuring out a really solid approximation of the signature keyboard lick to a song I didn’t know we would be playing and 2) transposing it on the fly. The drummer is someone I've known for years but never actually played with, and he and I were grinning ear to ear at each other when we'd each catch the "oh yes that's THAT thing from the record" parts. "You and I HAVE to be next to each other onstage," he said to me after a few tunes. The bass player is also a monster who I'm psyched to play with, but he was coming directly from a trip out of state with an "I have not been able to do my homework yet but I will" disclaimer (him winging it was pretty damn good, it's just that these songs have such specific parts a lot of the time). So yeah, a situation I'm sure many of us have found ourselves in -- not having quite the same standards for running things musically as guitar players. 😉 But the show is definitely going to be a lot of fun, even if it's rough around the edges. People love Tom Petty, and hey, it's not MY rodeo. I will bring what I have to offer to it, and then it will be what it will be (as will the paycheck). I also get to sing a few deep cuts, and I may have to break out the accordion for the slow, folky arrangement of "Yer So Bad" (again, in a new key)... so I will absolutely be making the most of it. Now it's just a question of if the keyboard rig I *want* to use for this show will fit on the club's stage...

We can only suppose what went into the decisions about arrangement and finished composition for the Beatles version of Now and Then, and what decisions were made in the 1995 sessions with George and Jeff Lynne, and which ones were made in 2022 as a McCartney/Martin production. I do remember all three surviving Beatles, in the Anthology doc, talking about how much more fun it was to make Free as a Bird than Real Love, because Free as a Bird was unfinished, while Real Love had a complete lyric and form, so Real Love felt more like creating a backing track for John, and Free as a Bird felt more like making a new Beatles record for them. What I will say is, I do think Paul McCartney is a little more qualified than any of us to know what John Lennon might have enjoyed or wanted as a collaborator! 😉

Fortunately, there are still plenty of bands on the road who just play on a stage, doing live arrangements of their tunes. Tedeschi Trucks Band, Dawes, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Theo Katzman, Brandi Carlile, the list goes on. Do they play stadiums? Usually no. Does playing a stadium actually sound like that much fun? I mean, I'd love the money and that many people wanting to see me, but we all know it's not the best acoustic or visual venue for live, interactive, intimate music. That's what theaters and clubs and even smaller arenas are for. And the tradeoff for the ticket sales of a massive venue is that you need to make the show worth it for the people in the nosebleeds who can't see you playing, which is how we got this escalation of production over the past 30+ years. Of course, the economics of being a smaller band are getting harder and harder. I think that sort of systemic problem is particularly worthy of our collective effort and attention, rather than placing the blame on individual artists who, for various reasons, are better positioned to adapt to the climate.

I was always happy in videos from the later years when that guy (I forget his name, but it was the same guy for much of the band's run) would actually come onstage and rock out next to Brian May. I always thought "let's not let anyone see this human who is also playing with the band" was a strange choice visually, but to each their own.

That's another point I'm not sure I agree with! In the later years especially, the Beatles (and Geoff Emerick, George Martin, and their other collaborators) LOVED to compress the hell out of piano as an effect (Lovely Rita, for example). Of course, cranking an analog compressor sounds different than modern digital hypercompression. But it makes sense if we're looking at a contemporary production (albeit with certain vintage elements) from the same four musicians. Whether it's to anyone's taste, or whether this was an intentional attempt at an "effect" or just "this is how we do things these days," that's up for debate, but it's very much in keeping with the tradition of the band. They always wanted to try the newest available technology, and would occasionally find other studios to work in because EMI did not care to keep up with their biggest act's desire for the newest cutting-edge gear. They were anything but purists. Just to go off on a slight tangent, this is one of the things that makes all the "Beatles or Stones" comparisons feel pointless to me. The Stones, at their core, are a blues/R&B band in the Chess style, and their records (with notable exceptions; here's looking at you, Satanic Majesties' Request) are reflective of trying to capture that groove and rawness, regardless of the modern trends. They're a feel band first, albeit a feel band with killer songwriting by Mick and Keith. Of course, they've captured that vibe in different sonic ways as technology has changed, but an 80s Stones record, for better or for worse, generally sounds like a Stones record with 80s production, rather than an attempt to Reimagine the Stones for the 80s. The 2023 Stones album doesn't have the same sonic profile as Exile on Main St, but it does have that similar commitment to Feeling Like the Rolling Stones. But with the Beatles, even though they had similar American R&B influences that they proudly tried to emulate, particularly in the early years, they were always dedicated to capturing new sounds and diversifying their sonic profile. In the Anthology doc, Paul talks about how they would get bored of some of their favorite American artists who would put out a great record, and then every subsequent song would sound like they were trying to remake that initial hit. So they were always looking for the New Sound, whether that was off-the-wall mic techniques, unusual instrumentation, or using technology to make things sound weird (vocals through the Leslie, overcompressing the piano, overdriving an acoustic guitar through the console, playing tapes backwards, distorting the horn section overdub). Of course, there's a reason "Beatley" is such an easy adjective to apply to music -- much like the Stones, the Beatles produced in 2023 still sound like the Beatles, even just from Paul and Ringo's unique feel as a rhythm section. But generally speaking, I think we can note that the sonic approach to Abbey Road vs Sgt. Pepper vs Rubber Soul vs A Hard Day's Night shows a band with a very different set of creative goals than the band that made Beggar's Banquet, Sticky Fingers, Goat's Head Soup, and Tattoo You. I would never say either is better or worse than the other, just different goals with different results. Man, I could talk about this ALL DAY. 😁

Like any other technology use for music, it all depends on style and application. I've tried to divorce myself from the biases I grew up with of what is "good" and "bad" to use while playing live. I've seen artists use onstage clicks and backing tracks in really creative ways, and I'm not just talking young pop performers -- Peter Gabriel's band could never be accused of phoning it in, and they still work with sequences and tracks on certain songs as textures to incorporate into the live playing. Sometimes you just want those layered "it's me multitracking" vocal effects at a big pop show, especially when the vocalists are doing choreography (and singing, not lip syncing) for three hours. Performers that have specific video and lighting production that syncs to the music often rely on at least a click track for cues. And all of us who have done studio sessions know that playing to a click track does not make a musician's job *easier* -- it's a skill in and of itself. If it's up to me, I'd almost always hear a creative live arrangement by visible onstage players, even if it's different from what we hear on the record. I don't need to hear the string arrangement just like the album if the keyboard player picks up an accordion or a dials in a Mellotron patch to fill that space. I love a band that can go different places every single night. But hell, even Queen played a tape for the choir section of Bohemian Rhapsody onstage.

My experience (also in the US, mostly the northeast) tends to jive with @Stokely, though it varies from venue to venue. Here's the biggest difference I think, from even 25 years ago: we have MUCH more low end in music and (consequently) playback systems than we did in decades past. Technological changes and stylistic developments go hand in hand; hip-hop surely had something to do with the rise of modern Big Low End as did the wider dynamic range of digital, because a pop or rock record that would have had very little information below, say, 60 hz in the 80s can now be BUMPIN', and PAs and sound systems have caught up. This is just me spitballing; I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons for having these experiences and the "more low end" theory doesn't always apply, but the thought occurred to me.

I remember reading that when making Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles were obsessed with making every instrument sound like other instruments -- they wanted guitars to sound like pianos, pianos to sound like guitars, that sort of thing. They put the compressors and limiters and whatever studio toys they had at their disposal through the ringer to achieve these unusual effects. It's a lot easier to process sounds these days, for better or worse. I would also be interested to know if there is some sort of fun acoustic/analog effect to get that piano sound, or if it's creative use of plugins. You'd have to ask Giles Martin, I suspect.

What a great read.

Y'all, this thread is so cool. I do not play the kind of gigs where I have ever thought "I should try to move my A100 to the venue" (thank goodness for my Mojo), but there was a time when it was that or nothing, and I love to see the creative solutions.

I'm pretty sure this is the only narrative the Beatles have been pushing. Every other narrative I've heard is from random, unconnected people being pre-outraged about a DeepFaked John Lennon, which was never what this was. The short making-of film makes that pretty clear, as is everything Paul and Ringo have said about the track (which you could compare to the existing Lennon demo that's been floating around for decades and recognize that it's the same vocal). It's not on the Beatles to correct people who willfully misunderstand what has been made very clear. I also have to disagree with the calls to "redo" Free as a Bird and Real Love with this technology, for the same reason I'm not interested in the 21st-century remixes of Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road from the original source tapes. The technology of the time was used as a creative tool to achieve a certain sound. Sgt. Pepper's layers and layers of overdubs being bounced from one four track to the next to the next to the next, all of that was being taken into account as a part of the process and the end result, even if it meant making certain sacrifices. The creative decisions were made in a context that should be respected. So I think those redone versions are interesting from a historical perspective, but not to be seen as improvements or replacements for the original mixes, lest we rob them of what made them important and influential at the time (in addition to the stunning songwriting, of course). Pushing available technology to its limits has always been a part of the Beatles' story, and I think Free as a Bird and Real Love are just as important historically to see how they could do that in the 90s, vs what it allowed for this final track in 2023. As you may deduce, I also only watch the original, pre-additional-CGI 70s and 80s versions of the Star Wars trilogy. 🤣

It's sort of off topic, but who among us can't count The Beatles as, at the very least, an indirect influence on our musicianship? If you haven't heard about this, there was a third unfinished John Lennon demo that Paul, George, and Ringo worked on during the Anthology project, which gave us Free as a Bird and Real Love. But the balance between the piano and John's voice on the third song, Now and Then, left the vocal irreparably obscured, and despite recording drums, bass, and guitars in the 90s, the track went abandoned. Then, 25 years later, Peter Jackson worked his magic on the vaulted Let It Be footage to create 2021's Get Back films. Part of that process was the creation of a machine learning algorithm that could recognize the individual Beatles' voices and separate them from other sounds on a recording. Paul realized this same approach could be used to isolate John's vocal on his old demo tape. So the work on the track from the 90s (which already featured some guitar by George Harrison) was resumed, with Paul and Ringo adding new bass, drums, piano, and guitar, and Giles Martin (son of Beatles producer George) contributing a string arrangement. It's been a rough few weeks in the world, and I wasn't ready for what it would be like to hear a new song (in all likelihood, the last) by the band that made me a musician. While I quietly weep at my desk, I wanted to share with all of you, too. More information in this mini-doc about the process of finishing the track:

It's cool, I actually own a home myself. But I'm a lucky one in my generation. Like so many other things about the landscape, it's very different than it was 30 years ago.