Think For Yourself.
Shoulda known you’d know that one, sir.
I am assuming you are cool with my definitions so far - given your deep experience with this stuff (**Crotalus **and I geek out about guitar stuff offline) I expect you’d chime in if I am missing anything…
Oh - and one other observation. This is not explicitly called for by **tdn **in the OP, but it is something I discuss when helping folks with guitar stuff, so it might help here.
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Musical styles are often innovated when someone is trying to replicate a certain musical style but is limited by something. E.g., it is my understanding that blues bending and vibrato were innovated because folks like BB King were trying to replicate the sound of a slide guitar. BB has described many times how much he loved the slide playing of his cousin, Bukka White, but that his (BB’s) fingers were too “slow and fat” to play slide, so he faked it with his vibrato.
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a leading musical style in the 40’s was jump blues - basically, straight-up blues structured songs, played with a full orchestra and some jazzier chording, including a horn section, etc. T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan are great examples of jump blues masters.
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Chuck Berry was a country boy who didn’t have money, wasn’t trained in music theory and was playing with combos on the chitlin’ circuit. He wanted to play songs in the jump blues style but didn’t have access to a full orchestra, and probably wouldn’t have known what to do with them (in terms of arrangements, etc.) if he did. So Chuck Berry faked the sound of horn section embellishments by playing double-stops on his guitar (that is the technical name for a Chuck Berry lick, if you didn’t know)…
The point being that one of the most definitive, influential elements of rock came about simply because Chuck Berry was trying to replicate what the big boys were doing on an economical scale - it just ended up being a huge part of a new style of music…
By the same token, Tommy Ramone (nee Erdelyi) wanted to replicate the Phil Spector Wall of Sound feel for the Ramones’ first record. They clearly couldn’t afford a horn section - and it wasn’t that they wanted horns; they just wanted to saturate the entire spectrum of sound and have that hit the listener hard, like Spector did. So instead of layers of instrumentation like Spector, they used layers of distortion. It turns out that a distorted (i.e., clipped) guitar has a number of the higher-order harmonics of the signal eliminated. You’d think that would make it sound thinner, since stuff is being cut out - but instead, it ends up making the remaining harmonic overtones sound clearer - there’s fewer of them, so they stand out more - which creates easier-to-hear harmonic complexity (that’s why simple, so-called “power chords” sound much thicker than the two strings they are typically played on). So that Wall of Distortion has a Jackson Pollack-like saturation of harmonic layers careening through the sound - leading to the Wall of Sound effect that the Ramones wanted - and changed the way rock music was recorded after that…
**tdn **- is that the type of stuff you are looking for?
That’s not accurate. Joe Walsh wasn’t even the first rock act to use the talk box; AFAIK that would be Iron Butterfly on “Butterfly Bleu” in 1970. Pete Drake apparently invented the modern tube-in-mouth version in the '60s and used it on country records as far back as 1963 or so, and his version was just a refinement of the Sonovox used by Alvino Rey in the 1940s. (The Sonovox used a transducer attached to the player’s throat.)
As far as as the generation of musical tones by purely electronic means (as opposed to the electronic amplification of notes generated by some other means), the nod for being first is most often given to Thaddaeus Cahill and his Telharmonium, a giant mostrosity that electrically generated tones in telephone lines, patented in 1898.
Several sources are saying the first drummer to put two basses in his kit was Louie Bellson in the late 1930s. As far as the first rock drummer to emulate him, I don’t know.
Chuck Berry’s duck walk comes to mind, but I’m sure there’s someone earlier. Jump-blues man Louie Jordan preceded him and was famous for his wild stage theatrics, but he’s not quite rock ‘n’ roll.
Sam Phillips Sun Studios were famous for their “slap-echo” sound, a natural condition of the rooms. In general reverb has been a huge consideration in music for centuries. My high school chorus toured Austria, and some of the churches there are designed so that a sound can still be heard loudly 15-20 seconds after it has actually stopped.
Delay on the other hand (signature example: “Us and Them” by Pink Floyd) has been possible since the first reel-to-reel tape recorders with a separate playback head positioned after the record head were built, but I don’t know which rock musician used them first.
There might be a rock song that featured electronically generated sounds that was not popular, but I doubt it. So I’m giving a double nod to “Runaway” by Del Shannon which featured a Musitron, and “Telstar” by The Tornados, that featured a Clavinone, both from 1961-2.
It should be noted however, that Theremins had been in use in movie soundtracks for at least a decade by that point.
From the book Louie Louie by Dave Marsh, Regarding Paul Revere and the Raiders, circa 1964:
I’ll be they weren’t the first, either.
My guess was going to be Ginger Baker, but a little research reveals that Keith Moon beat him to it. According to Baker himself, he had told Moon about his plans to get a double bass drum kit, and Moon immediately went out and acquired an extra bass drum for his own set before Baker had the chance.
Don’t know how much leaping wa sinvolved, but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins certainly set the bar for stage theatrics pretty goshdarn high in the mid 50’s.
mm
Not on the OP’s list, but the wireless headset performance microphone was invented for Kate Bush’s (NO relation!) first (and sadly, only) tour in 1979. The small (though huge by today’s standards) microphone was attached to a boom arm made from a bent coat hanger.
Oh yeah! Though I should comment that it’s interesting (and not surprising) that there are few really definitive conclusions drawn.
Re: smashing pumpkins…oh, wait
Re: smashing instruments
I’ve been told, by those who were there, that Jimmy Durante would play a piano and then bring out an axe and smash that puppy to kindling.
Re: smashing hotel rooms
Groucho was surprised that the whole destruction of hotel rooms thing got so much interest. The story was that he and his brothers finished their room-service dinner and then threw all the dirty dishes out the hotel room window because they “didn’t want to make work for the help.” Once started, they–of course–threw everything else that would fit out the window. They were foiled in their attempt to throw the room’s piano out with everything else.
Sorry, no cites.
Please see Harvey Mandel