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Ghosts of Jam Bands Past
The Definition of a Jam Band
Edited by Sister Mary Carmen
Well it is nice to be back to the Land of the Living after three months of illness and one month of recovering from surgery. I just want to thank andy and Dean for their understanding and well wishes. To all of those who sent me get well emails, I am grateful, your wishes meant a lot to me.
Being at home can be really beat after you have been living away from home for five years. Coming home for visits and holidays is nice, but having to stay for a month with nothing to do is especially painful. I must admit that I spent most of my stay playing Mike's Sony Playstation that he graciously left with me. silent Hill and Crash Bandicoot Warped are terribly addicting.
I also spent most of my time listening to music. This is the one good aspect of being home. I have this rule about buying music: if my father owns it and it is downstairs in my basement, I will not buy it. I usually break this rule on a regular basis, but when I am in financial crisis, I enforce it to make myself feel better. I usually bring blank tapes home and go to town with my dad's collection. This is the chief reason my tape collection has reached obscene proportions.
The one band that I continually listened to all month was the Talking Heads. I listened to a lot of live recordings and found myself contemplating some thoughts. Mike and I usually have the same conversation every time I write an article for this column. we also discuss what exactly a jam Band is. Do the songs have to be at least ten minutes long? Does one or more band members have to solo extensively for a period? Do they have to have that distinct "crunchy" sound?
My answers to all these questions is usually no. There are many bands that I think qualify as Jam Bands, but most people would not label them that way. I am not really into labeling music as one way or another. To me it is just music and it is either good or bad. However the Talking Heads aroused some interesting ideas in my head.
Born out of and influenced by the New York City punk rock scene, the Heads prided themselves on the simplicity of their sound. David Byrne states, "I wanted my guitar to sound thin, clean, and clanky. Not chunky, distorted, and macho, like a lot of what was around. My philosophy at the time being that this puny sound was in the true nature of this instrument...the first truly modern instrument."
I believe that this statement is key to understanding or interpreting their music. I sort of compare the Heads to the Velvet Underground. The velvets were a band whose music was also extremely simple on paper, but when you listened to it you could be overwhelmed by the fullness and richness of their sound. Lou Reed was an amazing guitar player, but if you listen to any of the Velvets albums, you rarely hear him really go off.
The live performance is really where the fullness of the Heads and the Velvets sound came through. Listening to a December 1983 recording of a performance in Hollywood, I was completely taken over by the Heads sound. One song in particular really enthralled me. Life During Wartime is a song that really holds a lot of truth in the lyrics. Every time I hear it, I can not help but think of the approaching millennium and all of the people who are going to go nuts when the year 2000 finally hits. I have visions of riots and blackouts in my mind, and this song truly reflects chaos and the energy that is found within it. The lead instrument on this song is the keyboard. There are some interesting keyboard solos and it really gives that sense of future chaos to the song. It sounds mechanized and staticy, like a bad radio transmitter, sounds you would hear during war. The thing that gets me is that for such a simple song, there is a hell of a lot going on. a large full sound is created by a limited variety of instruments that are playing repetitive sounds.
The other song that really illustrates this point is Road to Nowhere. The song for the most part is two chords. However, I hardly noticed it. Between the vocals and the percussion the sound was completely full, not flat and thin.
I guess my answer is that I do believe a Jam band can be a band that write five minute, catchy pop songs. I think one of the great testament to the Heads being a Jam Band was Phish's cover of Remain in Light. There you had a Jam Band covering a punk band and really jamming out the songs. I do believe that when Phish covers a song, they truly make it there own, but I also believe that they must have seen the Heads music as a launching pad for their jamming. I thought Phish's cover of Remain in Light sounded incredible and I also think that all the songs on that album were Jam songs. To me the Heads are a Jam/Punk Band. To someone else they may not be. It is all a matter of opinion and I would love to hear yours.
May is looking like it is going to be a pretty hectic month for me. I will be graduating and unfortunately I will be having surgery again and then I will be moving to Philadelphia for graduate school. So all you writers out there get cracking. I would love it if someone would write a piece for next month's issue. Please send all submissions to me via email. I would really appreciate it if someone or ones would help me out next month.
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