“We discovered that it was OK to have a little high-brow as long you have a lot of low-brow. That’s entertainment value. The one thing you want to avoid is the middle brow, because the whole world is frigging middle brow at the moment.” – Jon Langford
Some people have Alex Lifeson and Rush, or Steve Howe and Yes, but when I was younger my guitar geek hero was Mike Oldfield. The bit he gets to about halfway in (to a piece already chopped in half on YouTube) still thrills me, I'm afraid to say. And yes, this is a take-off on a Philip Glass motif.
posted by George at 11:30 AM
George markets only for the forces of good for a living. He has a paid hobby that involves eating, drinking, and writing, things he’d do for free, which is almost what he’s doing it for. In a previous life he taught mostly illiterate and generally ungrateful college students how to write. He has been a body guard for Jodie Foster, a walk-on dancer with French avant garde troupe Maguy Marin, a film programmer, a judge at an Iron Chef style competition, a political activist, a textbook author, a bassist in a band, a two-time league winning fantasy baseball manager, a union local president, a pr flack helping run a red carpet at an Angelina Jolie event, a janitor, a chauffeur to folks from TC Boyle to Andrei Codrescu, a delivery man to Plato's Retreat, a reluctant writer of a non-snarky intro for Colin Powell, a radio DJ, a corn detassler, an escort van driver, a rock journalist, a lab assistant for a company that made everything from mouthwash to super skin lubricant, and even, once, a poet. His biggest brush with fame was when Julie Christie fondled his tie, a tie George Lopez belittled to 1000 people minutes later. The best thing about him is his wife. His dogs aren't bad, either.
5 Comments:
I forgot to mention--how cool is it they get served champagne in the middle of the song?
And that dress Maggie Reilly is wearing is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.
OK, I meant about a quarter of the way in.
And, alas, Maggie sounds almost as ugly as her dress, which is weird because she usually is great.
Tubular Bells was on my prog list, but I have to admit to being partial to Steve Howe's guitar work before Yes tried to be a pop band in the 80's.
Some prog has aged well, and some hasn't... nostalgia can be the only explanation for anyone liking this one, G, (unless it's Oldfield's trouser bulge? Or way way way too much cocaine?).
Then again, I'm a big Rush fan, so who knows?
Steve Howe was no longer in Yes when they went pop in the 80s. That was Trevor Rabin on guitar. Howe went pop with Asia.
You're right about the 80's, Rabin and Downs, etc. My memory was faulty about when their first "poppy" albums started coming out, and I put it at Going for the One and Tormato ("Don't Kill the Whale" obviously whores to a mainstream late '70s audience), which do include Howe. I preferred the Sanskrit pomposity of Tales of Topographic Oceans. I mean, indulgent pomposity was the point of prog, really, and all that instrumentation transitioned poorly into pop. Punk was the antidote.
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