Ornamented with Leather outfits and chains, Birmingham Rockers Ian Hill, Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton and K. K. Downing formed a band in 1970 called Judas Priest. The band fused the gothic doom of Black Sabbath with the riffs and speed of Led Zeppelin, as well as adding a vicious two-lead guitar hit.
Judas Priest
They set the pace for much popular heavy metal from 1975 until 1985, as well as laying the groundwork for the speed and death metal of the ’80s.They have been cited as an influence on many heavy metal musicians and bands. Their influence was so important that MTV.com named Judas Priest the second most important band in heavy metal, just behind Black Sabbath.
Their popularity and status as one of the definitive heavy metal bands has earned them the nickname Metal Gods from their song of the same name.
In August 1974, the band released their debut single Rocka Rolla and followed this a month later with an album of the same name.
The ’80s were the decade Priest had the most success. They had a string of hit albums including Screaming for Vengeance, Defenders of the Faith and Turbo. They even had some radio and MTV success with songs like “Breaking the Law” and “Turbo Lover.”
1980 Judas Priest’s released British Steel. It is their finest album till date. Overall, the band has sold in excess of 35 million albums globally. It includes great hits like Breaking The Law and Living After Midnight. It saw the band leaving more experimental music behind and going for the arena rock anthems that Halford sings so well.
The 1982 album Screaming for Vengeance featured the song You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, which earned strong US radio airplay. Songs such as Electric Eye and Riding on the Wind also appeared off this album, and proved to be popular live tracks. By 1985, they had fully implemented the speed-metal tempo they inspired.
Some of the Best songs of Judas priest till date includes Delivering The Goods, Burnin’ Up, Genocide, and Savage.
With success came some problems. In the summer of 1990, the band was involved in a civil action that suspected they were responsible for the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in 1985 of 20-year old James Vance and 18-year old Raymond Belknap in Reno, Nevada, USA. On December 23, 1985 Vance and Belknap, after hours of drinking beer, smoking marijuana and listening to Judas Priest music, went to a playground at a church in Reno with a 12 gauge shotgun. Belknap decapitated himself; then Vance followed, but the weapon was very slippery by then and he survived with a grotesquely disfigured face.The men’s parents and their legal team alleged that a subliminal message of ‘do it’ had been included in the Judas Priest song “Better By You, Better Than Me” from the Stained Class album. They alleged the command in the song triggered the suicide attempt. The trial lasted from July 16 to August 24, 1990, when the suit was dismissed.
Judas Priest is very popular among teenagers. In 2006 their d song You’ve Got Another Thing Comin was included in the video games Prey, Guitar Hero and RoadKill.
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“Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.” Kurt Cobain
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The beginning of punk rock is often furiously debated. This is partially because everyone has different definition of punk rock, and partially because its foundation stones are found in several places.
The first concrete punk rock (often shortened to punk) scene appeared in the mid ’70s in New York. Bands like The Ramones, Wayne County, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Blondie and the Talking Heads are pioneers of punk rock. The bands were unified by their location, solidarity, and shared musical influences. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics.
Typical punk rock instrumentation includes one or two electric guitars, an electric bass, and a drum kit, along with vocals. Punk rock songs tend to be shorter than those of other popular genres—on the Ramones’ debut album, for instance, half of the fourteen tracks are under two minutes long.
Punk rock lyrics are typically frank and provoking; compared to the lyrics of other popular music genres, they frequently comment on social and political issues. Punk’s legacy lies in its introduction of self employment and activism. Trend-setting songs such as The Clash’s ‘Career Opportunities’ and Chelsea’s ‘Right to Work’ deal with unemployment and the grim realities of urban life.
By the late ’70s, punk had finished its beginning and had emerged as a solid musical force. With its rise in popularity, punk began to split into numerous sub-genres. A number of overlapping punk rock subgenres have developed since the emergence of punk rock in the mid 1970s. Even though punk genres at times are difficult to segregate, they usually show differing characteristics in overall structures, instrumental and vocal styles, and tempo. However, sometimes a particular trait is common in several genres, and thus punk genres are normally grouped by a combination of traits and twee.
Punk Rock also introduced punk fashion which is very popular till date. It includes tattoos, piercings, metal-studded and -spiked accessories, bright colored funky hair styles. Punk fashion is extremely popular among both musicians and fans.
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Roger Keith Barrett was born on January 6, 1946, in Cambridge, England. He was one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd. The guitarist was the band’s first creative force and an influential songwriter. He was a musician, singer and songwriter. He used a play numerous instruments including Guitar, Vocals, Bass, Slide guitar, Ukulele, Mandolin, Banjo, and Piano.
He was also an innovative guitarist, using extended techniques and exploring the musical and sonic possibilities of dissonance, twist, feedback, the echo machine, tapes and other effects; his experimentation was partly inspired by free improvisation guitarist Keith Rowe. One of Barrett’s trademarks was playing his guitar through an old echo box while sliding a Zippo lighter up and down the fret-board to create the mysterious, otherworldly sounds that became associated with the group.
He joined Pink Floyd in 1965 but left three years later after one album. Around mid-1967, Barrett began to show increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. He would go catatonic onstage, playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group were nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio.
He left the band in 1968 and went on to live as a recluse, with his mental deterioration blamed on drugs. Just as Pink Floyd were about to achieve global success, Barrett retreated from public life and returned to Cambridge. He had a brief solo career with the albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, formed a short-lived band called Stars and then retreated from the public domain.
Little was known about his condition for 20 years until he was tracked down living with his mother. But his influence remained, with younger fans and artists discovering his music. Many artists have acknowledged Barrett’s influence on their work. Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie were early fans; Jimmy Page, Brian Eno, and The Damned all expressed interest in working with him at some point during the 1970s. He died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes.
Syd Barret in his Last Years
It is said that he was suffering from schizophrenia, in his last years. He hurt his girlfriend with mandolin and also locked her for three days. Doctors said that he was incurable. But these all are assumptions because he lived alone for many years and carried a low profile life. No one actually knows what was going on in his life. Neither band members of Pink Floyd know enough about mental health of Syd or his family. He was mentally ill or on LSD or couldn’t cope with the pressures of fame. What these problems were or whether they were indeed Barrett’s problems, remain unanswered in the public domain to this day.
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‘Christianity is dying and Beatles are more famous than Jesus’.
In 1966, during an interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave, John Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus now. People get really upset on this comment. Towns across the United States and South Africa started to burn Beatles records in protest. In that situation McCartney said, “They’ve got to buy them before they can burn them.”
Under tremendous pressure from the American media, Lennon apologized for his remarks at a press conference in Chicago on August 11, the eve of the first performance of what turned out to be their final tour. Time apparently heals all wounds. The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success.
The Beatles
In the same year, when The Beatles toured the Philippines, they unintentionally hurt the nation’s first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. When presented with the invitation, Brian Epstein politely declined on behalf of the group. After the news was broadcast on Philippine television and radio, all of The Beatles’ police protection disappeared. The group and their entourage had to make their way to Manila airport on their own. At the airport, road manager Mal Evans was beaten and kicked, and the band members were pushed and jostled about by a hostile crowd. Epstein was forced to give back all the money that the band had earned while they were there before being allowed back on the plane.
The group’s fate also took a strange twist in the United States when one of their publicity shots, used for a ‘Yesterday and Today’ album and a poster promoting the UK release of ‘Paperback Writer’, created an uproar, as it featured the band cover in meat and plastic dolls. Thousands of these copies had to be withdrawn.
In early 1967, The Beatles performed their last concert. From this time until the group dissolved in early 1970, the Beatles concentrated on making some of the most remarkable recorded pop music of the 20th century. The group’s compositions and musical experiments raised their artistic reputations while they retained their tremendous popularity. That same year, The Beatles became the first band ever globally broadcast on television but the members were drifting apart. The band officially broke up in 1970 and a few months later Let It Be followed as their last commercial album release. Any hopes of a reunion were crushed when Lennon was assassinated in 1980.
The Beatles are one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands in the history of popular music, selling over one billion records internationally. On April 4, 1964, The Beatles set a record that has yet to be broken when they occupied all five top positions on Billboard’s Top Pop Singles chart. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked The Beatles number one on its list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
The Beatles are among the most influential popular music artists of the second half of the 20th century. Even after 38 years of break up, the songs of the Lennon-McCartney brand have shown an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time, becoming a source of inspiration for more than one generation of pop musicians.
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Who says girls don’t have a female role model in rock world. Only factor is this that it takes real courage to bear humiliation and pressure to go in a new direction. One such name, who showed the world that girls can also make a name in rock world, is Joan Jett. In the Rolling stone’s 100 greatest guitarist of all time she was one of the three lady guitarists.
Joan Jett
Joan Jett, an American rock and roll guitarist, singer, and actress was born on September 22, 1958 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She later moved to Hollywood, California, where, when still in her teens, she first gained attention as the guitarist, main songwriter and back-up singer in the pioneering all-women band The Runaways, known for pre-punk hard rock and the classic song “Cherry Bomb.”
Although the band was misconstrued in the U.S. as a novelty act, they were very popular almost everywhere else, particularly in Japan. Subsequently, they have proved enormously influential for other women in bands and are regarded as pioneers. She once said that, ‘I feel like it’s my job to carry the torch’.
She is best known for her hit ‘I Love Rock N’ Roll,’ which was #1 on the Billboard charts from March 20th to May 8th, 1982.
Her musical and song-writing approach is heavily influenced by the hard beat rhythms. Her lyrics themes are mostly of lost love, criticisms of insincerity, the struggles and resolution of the American working class, and the quest for authenticity.
Jett, a huge sports fan, remained actively involved in the sports world. Her song ‘Love is All Around’ became an anthem in women’s sports and was used by the NCAA to promote the Women’s Final Four. ‘Love Is All Around’ went into heavy radio play and became a number one requested song without an existing support CD. She also sang the national anthem, at the Baltimore Orioles game in which he broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played.
She also worked in some movies. She made her acting debut in 1987, co-starring with Gena Rowlands and Michael J. Fox in the Paul Schrader film Light of Day. She has also appeared in some independent films, including The Sweet Life and Boogie Boy.
She is also engage in some social issues as an activist. She supported Howard Dean in the 2004 election because of his position on the War in Iraq and his gay marriage policy. She has been a consistent supporter of the US Armed Forces, has toured for the USO for over 20 years, and even played West Point. Jett is a vegan and always emphasize on not using products and food that involve animal slaughter.
In February 1989, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for the song ‘I Hate Myself for loving you’.
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Kurt Donald Cobain an American musician who served as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the famous band Nirvana. He died on April 5, 1994 at the age of 27. He is remembered as an iconic rock musician in the history of alternate music.
Kurt Cobain
April 8th Kurt’s body was found in his Seattle home. In his arms was a shotgun, which had been fired into his head. Near him laid a suicide note written in red ink. It was addressed to his wife Courtney Love and his daughter Frances Cobain. Hearing upon his death people gathered in Seattle, they began setting fires, chanting profanities, and fighting with police officers.
It is believed by many people that his death was nota suicide attempt, it was a murder. There are some evidences in this regard.When the body was discovered, the level of heroin was very high. And a person can not pull the trigger of a shot gun, which such a massive doze in his bloodstreams.Last lines of his suicide note do not match his hand writing and there are no finger prints on the shot gun found with his body.
His most popular songs include About a Girl, Been a Son, Negative Creep,
Aneurysm, Dive, Sliver, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Lithium, You Know You’re Right (written and recorded shortly before his death but not officially released until October 2002) and many more.
His most famous song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, was voted by Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV as the 3rd best pop song out of 100 of all time and he was also ranked as 12th greatest guitar player of all-time by Rolling Stone magazine in 2003.
After his death, many musicians recorded tribute songs to him. Some of the better known of these include Let Me In by R.E.M, About a Boy by Patti Smith, Sleeps with Angels By Neil Young and The Fall By Cher.Gus Van Sant based his 2005 movie Last Days on what might have happened in the final hours of Cobain’s life.
Death of Cobain is a great loss to the music world. Cobain has no gravesite, he was cremated, with his ashes scattered into the Wishkah River in Washington. Many Nirvana fans visit Viretta Park, near Cobain’s former Lake Washington home, to pay tribute. On the anniversary of his death, fans gather in the park to celebrate his life and memory.
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If anyone asks a person to name some instruments, surely guitar will be in the first three choices. Today there is a hype of guitar everywhere. From teenagers to adults and beyond age limit guitar is everyone’s favorite instrument because of its soothing melodies and touching feel. It’s one of the most versatile instrument and probably only one which is used to generate a wide range of music genres including jazz, folk, blues, metal etc.
A question sometimes come into mind that when the guitar was made. Who invented it? When it was popularized? Is it an instrument of modern era or it has deep roots into the ancient times. Very few people know about this and it’s a shame that no one had gone into the trouble of storing the history of such a widely used and much-admired instrument.
Some say that guitar is the development of another instrument lute. But research has shown that this claim is without any merit and also that Lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution.
Like all others even I have only a handful of information in this regard and on the basis of that I am able to conclude that guitar is not a gift of modern era but Guitar-like instruments have existed since ancient times, but the first written mention of the guitar proper is from the 14th century. In its earliest form it had three double courses (pairs) of strings plus a single string (the highest).
The name “guitar” comes from the ancient Sanskrit word for ’string’ i.e. ‘tar‘. Many stringed folk instruments exist in Central Asia to this day have names that end in ‘tar’, with a prefix indicating the number of strings.
In the mid-18th century the guitar attained its modern form, when the double courses were made single and a sixth string was added above the lower five. Guitar makers in the 19th century broadened the body, increased the curve of the waist, thinned the belly, and changed the internal bracing. The old wooden tuning pegs were replaced by a modern machine head.
The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. So, it will be wrong to say that guitar was invented in modern era.
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Is U2 Grammy’s Favorite? A question, that rises in everyone’s mind when he hears that U2 won 22 Grammy Awards more than any other band. But if a person gets a glimpse of the hard work behind this prestigious achievement, he will conclude that Grammy was not biased. They have won Best Rock Duo or Group seven times, Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Rock Album all twice.
U2 is one of a few bands who achieve consistent commercial and critical success across three decades, on its own terms on both the artistic and business sides of the music industry. From the band’s earliest days in Dublin, Ireland, to the present, U2 has broken free from the traditional limitations of what a rock band and rock music could and couldn’t do.
U2
U2 is a rock band from Dublin, Ireland. It was formed in n 1978. The band consists of:
The four teenagers, who initially called themselves ‘Feedback’, Afterwards Feedback become ‘The Hype’ and then ‘U2′.
In October, 1980 their first album Boy was released. The album offered a fresh, new sound that earned rave reviews in both the Irish and UK press. Bono’s lyrics tackled subjects like faith, spirituality, and death. Subjects generally avoided by even the most seasoned rock acts.
U2 enjoyed its first international success with the 1983 release of War, U2’s third album. An all-out attack against the keyboard and drum machine based songs that made up the song and album charts.
The album’s first single, “New Year’s Day,” was U2’s first legitimate hit single, reaching the #10 spot on the UK charts and almost cracking the Top 50 in the U.S. MTV put the song’s video into heavy rotation, and helped introduce U2 to a new audience of fans.
Their success as a live act was greater than their success at selling records until their 1987 album The Joshua Tree. According to Rolling Stone this album elevated the band’s stature “from heroes to superstars,”
Till date U2 has released 12 albums and have sold more than 145 million albums worldwide. In 2005, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone magazine listed U2 at #22 in its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
The music of U2 has always been about heart and mind, body and soul. Down the years the band has successfully thrown a spotlight on the work of key campaigning groups who are trying to make the world a better place. U2 have used benefit concerts, songwriting, public campaigning, special visits and fund-raising projects to promote a range of charities and activist communities worldwide. They have campaigned for human rights and social justice causes, including Amnesty International, the ONE Campaign, and Bono’s DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa) campaign.
U2 is a band that has always uses their music as a teaching of peace and set example for the bands that use music for creating destructive minds. 22 Grammy’s are very few for a band whose goal is to create a world of magnificent beauty and eternal glory.
Very few musical artists achieve a true signature style. One who makes comparisons to other musicians impossible? But Texas guitarist Eric Johnson rise to a certain level, which was not achieved by the guitarists of last quarter century.
Eric Johnson, an American guitarist, was born on August 17, 1954 in Austin, Texas. He is best known for his success in the instrumental rock format. He regularly incorporates jazz, fusion, New Age, country and western elements into his recordings.
Guitar Player magazine calls Johnson ‘One of the most respected guitarists on the planet’. He also composes and plays instrumental songs. He also learned piano at the age of 5, and still plays it really well.
Eric Johnson
He became a member of The ID band at the age of thirteen. Afterwards, he played in a series of bands mostly with elder kids, who recognized his talent.
In 1976, Johnson hit the studio to record his first solo album, Seven Worlds. The album, which was released first, was Tones, called ‘A majestic Debut’ by a Guitar player magazine.
In 1990, Eric’s critically-acclaimed platinum selling album, ‘Ah Via Musicom’, was released. For the song “Cliffs of Dover,” Johnson won the 1991 Grammy Award, for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Johnson has a reputation as a perfectionist because of the same album. It took him nearly six years to record ‘Ah Via Musicom’. He has often said that he is more interested in tone than technique, and he spent much time in the studio fiddling with amps and speakers in search of new sounds, that intrigue him.
Eric Johnson was also a member of G3 tours. His 1996 G3 tour with fellow guitarists Joe Satriani and Steve Vai yielded a bestselling album and platinum DVD, G3: Live in Concert. In Germany and France, the album makes its way onto the charts, and in its first week is Epic’s second biggest selling album in Europe.
Eric Johnson’s harmonious journey is still going on; to fulfill his musical goals. One of which is to be breaking new artistic ground as a player, composer, performer and recording artist. He says, ‘I want to open up and dilate and be the best I can be’. He has attained certain height, which now one can say undoubtedly that Eric is a legend guitarist and best of his kind.
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It’s the big irony of the electric guitar; its body mimics the waist and curves of a woman. And yet, alone among instruments, the electric guitar is still regarded as mainly male territory.
Where are all the female guitarists? Why haven’t we have Josie Satriani, Erica Johnson or Jenny Hendrix? If an average person is asked to think of some electric guitarists, he would be able to think only about male players.
In June, 1996 Mojo Magazine celebrated ‘The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’. Only three out of them were women: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt.
One thing is obvious: Women basically sat out, or kept sidelined during the first 20 years of development of the rock guitar. Reason is that, there is a limit to the number of different sounds and styles that can be created and adapted from any instrument, and by the time women like Raitt arrived on the scene in the early ’70s, many of those sounds and styles had been staked out.
The biggest factor which keeps girls away from lead guitarists post is that, they don’t have any role model female player. This stigmatizes the instrument a bit further discouraging girls from taking up guitar and so on.
Social Acceptance is another major reason. We live in a culture where the electric guitar, at least when it’s played at full and distorted blaze, is considered unladylike.
Another fact is that: the market out there for guitar-wielding women has never been huge, particularly among girls. The gender divide at live concerts is often pretty stark. Boys generally want to see men play guitar, and girls generally want to watch men to play the guitar and the women to sing.
Females are also not signed up for projects by many record companies. Marketing departments worry that the guitar gets in the way of the audience viewing the woman purely as a sexual image, although guitar magazines still sell their products by draping female models all over them.
Role of men in all this is of a hypocrite. He talks about why women are not seen as mainstream guitarists and on the other hand if any girl, after so many physical and symbolic obstacles, manages to get on the stage, he abuses her like ‘show us yer tits’. This sort of abuse reflects the fact that role of women on stage is legitimate only if she take her clothes off. Such comments are upsetting and repulsive. A reasonable conclusion from all this might be that, men are just mastodon brutes who have kept women away from guitars, and that’s not entirely wrong. Neither, though, is it the full story.
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