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Paul Wesley

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Posts posted by Paul Wesley

  1. 5 hours ago, TexasHooch said:

     the didgeridoo.  

    Hippies, man.   They smell bad and they’re off-the-charts annoying (though some of their political beliefs turn out to be right, which is also annoying).   

  2. 14 hours ago, ohchaucer said:


    I was gonna say alto sax. Why do we need this?

    In 6th grade band, I needed to pick an instrument.  About a week before school started, my mother said, 'How about saxophone?  You should play saxophone!"  I ended up playing alto sax for two years. 

    Ugh.  

    Man, I would trade that for ANYTHING else:  cello, violin, drums... even oboe or bassoon would be cooler.  

    I'm surprised no one said "fretless bass," because that's another one that everyone else in the room just has to kind of cringe and pray to God that it stays in the case all day.  

    How about a trio of alto sax, fretless bass, and cajon?  They could name themselves something annoying, like "Phish."

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  3. 20 hours ago, Celery Man said:

    When I was probably a junior in high school my band (which at that point still considered itself somewhat "ska") opened for them an Los Skarnales upstairs at Fitzgeralds and I thought I had basically made it at that point.

    Screenshot-2024-03-25-at-10-10-57-AM.png

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  4. I hope we play smart.  I can’t take watching another turnover festival peppered with off-balance threes from Disu and stupid hero-ball shots from our guys.  
     

    We hit only one three because the vast majority of our threes were off-balance and out of rhythm.  Hell, Abmas hit that one from the logo, but at least his shoulders were square and his feet were set.  

  5. Whoops.  The blonde one was miscategorized.  I put American-made as one of the filters but the results included that made-in-Japan model.  Still might be a good guitar, but it's not how it was represented.  

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  6. On 3/19/2024 at 1:25 PM, CoTex said:

    Asking for advice:

    Son wants a telecaster.  I don’t mind spending money and want something that he will appreciate for a long time.

    Can someone recommend to me a Tele or two that are nice enough that they will retain value?  I’m not looking to ride an investment to the stratosphere, but I would rather buy this once, and it be nice forever, than be 2 years down the road and the purchase being inadequate - falling apart - or not nice enough.

    So, what’s a good long-term telecaster? Buy gently used or vintage or new?

    You're an awesome dad.

    Personally, I'd look at an 1990's American-made guitar.  In my opinion, it was a pretty good era, and they're not perceived as "vintage," so the values aren't too crazy.  

    You can find one in good shape in the $1200-1500 range, and there are a lot of options in there to find something that he loves cosmetically.  

    Stay away from "noiseless" pickups.  They suck.  

    "Buy this once" - check

    "Be nice forever" - check

    If it doesn't work out, you should get your money back out of it.  

    A few from a 10-minute Reverb search:

    Lipstick red for $1080:  https://reverb.com/item/69542092-fender-american-standard-telecaster-1992-1993-lipstick-red

    Sunburst with rosewood neck, $1350 and accepting offers:  https://reverb.com/item/77910288-1995-fender-american-standard-telecaster-with-rosewood-fretboard-3-color-sunburst

    Blonde, $1600 and accepting offers:  https://reverb.com/item/78163624-fender-50th-anniversary-telecaster-1996-blonde

    edit to add:  Understand that a 30-year old guitar is almost certainly going to have some minor scratches and dings.  That's normal.  If that feels disappointing to him, then he should get something new or nearly new.  

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  7. Both sound great.  The custom definitely sounds meatier and has more low mids.  When they started, I thought it was just mic placement (closer to sound hole ---> more boom), but the difference was obvious as they passed them back and forth.  I can imagine a lot of recordings where you'd prefer the standard's brightness/clarity.  

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  8. I agree with all the Willie and Pink Floyd nominees.  All remarkable achievements, but for different reasons.  Willie did it in a genre where pretty much no one was even thinking about a "concept" album, and he took simple themes (Phases) and narratives (Stranger) and - even with often bare-bones arrangements and instrumentation - turned those into far-reaching epics.  

    Pink Floyd aimed higher in their themes and stories (it seems to me that they set out to make something epic), and also absolutely knocked them out of the stratosphere.  I think DSOTM was on the billboard charts for 19 years (!!!!!).

    I was incredibly lucky that I happened to be in London a few years ago when the Who did "Tommy" at Royal Albert Hall.  It was amazing, but that record drops off quite a bit in the back half - they even omitted a couple of of those songs when doing the record in its "entirety" - so that one can't be considered to be on the same level, IMO.  

    It would be even harder to pick a "worst" concept album, because 99% of them are shit.  But if you put a gun to my head, I'd pick a guy who grifted evangelical Christians for two decades, making straight trash with zero artistic merit.  Then it got worse.  He tried to grift a whole new audience with shit that had even less artistic merit.  Nothing fails more spectacularly than trying to be outrageous, but just being fucking stupid.

    Screenshot-2024-03-07-at-1-01-14-PM.png

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  9. * I'm aware that the "new" genre that Elvis brought to Americans was a straight-up ripoff of black music.  You could write a pretty persuasive thesis statement that every *new* American genre of music since the Civil War followed exactly that same pattern.

  10. 1 hour ago, Steamboat1874 said:

    How do those numbers translate to "It's Elvis" ?

    Beatles played to an America where 28% more households had a TV.  But the Beatles' audience was only 22% bigger than Elvis'.  

    And that doesn't even account for the fact that the Beatles' *potential* audience was WAY bigger - by maybe 20 million people, AND thanks to the post-war baby boom, they had a much bigger % of that bigger audience who were teens.  

    TV viewership just seemed like an easy and fair metric for "popular."  If the question is "most influential," I agree it's the Beatles.  

    If we wanted to compare their number of #1 hits, Elvis is going to do very poorly.  Consider that he was drafted and joined the army a mere 2 years post Ed Sullivan, and then his manager sent him off to Hollywood for a decade of schlock and cringe.  

    The 2018 documentary "Elvis the Searcher" on HBO spent a lot of time on this, and I think that's the lens I've always seen him through:  he was gorgeous, he had an A+ voice, he was charismatic, he brought a new genre to Americans in a way that a single person has never done before or since.  He had the most widely recognized name on the planet for a time... and then he just sort of pissed it away, he missed out on the musical explosion of the 60's, and he returned as a fat drug addict in a sequined jumpsuit, and since America loves nothing more than a profound fall from a really high place, he was the punchline of a million jokes from that day forward.   

     

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  11. 8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    I'd like to see what the Ed Sullivan numbers were on average, though.  There were very few options back then.  Almost everybody watched Ed Sullivan every week, regardless of guest.

    Yeah, that’s fair.  
     

    But also, how many 15-year old girls - who are arguably the peak demographic of pop culture - were alive for Elvis compared to the Beatles?  

    Beatles came along right at the moment that the huge bump in population (boomers) were adolescents, so the wave they surfed was much bigger.   You could take that as an argument for either artist… I’m just saying that the world changed an awful lot in the decade between.  

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  12. Here’s a data point:  viewers of their appearance on Ed Sullivan:

    1956 Elvis

    72% of US homes had a TV

    60 million viewers

    —-

    1964 Beatles

    92% of US homes had a TV

    73 million viewers

     

     

    Does not control for total population, but just eyeballing those numbers…

    It’s Elvis   

     

    Again, that’s just one data point, but that’s a pretty fair apples to apples, I think.  
     

    We’re also looking at different eras… the world changed a LOT from peak Elvis to peak Beatles to peak Michael (who I would say peaked with MTV airing “Thriller” every hour).

  13. Funny, I was going to say either Elvis or the Beatles.  
     

    They introduced an entirely new genre (at least for whitey), and they did it at a time when the country (and world) all consumed popular culture at exactly the same moment.  
     

    For a long time, the most recognized words on the planet were (allegedly) Elvis, Jesus, and Coca-Cola.  

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