B-52's are from Athens GA (same as R.E.M). There was a disco down there with a TV screen showing random content. One of the scenes showed a lobster preparation for food. Schneider (a vegetarian) said 'A disco lobster? Let's make Rock Lobster!'
The guitar work of Ricky Wilson is one in a kind!
Two favorite songs:
Ha! Stefan a B52s fan?! Outstanding! One very odd thing a friend of mine and I noticed purely by accident: Rock Lobster sounds almost the same at 45 RPM vs. 33 and 1/3. The next morning, we cued up the album again, convinced that this idea was an artifact of... little pieces of paper we had chewed the night before. Strangely, while the similarity between the double-speed and the normal-speed version was not quite so pronounced, we could still hear it. I think it's just such an unusual song that the timbre of the instruments is more important than the tempo or pitch, but I cannot really explain this.
Roll it over in your mind
The kiddie Steinway hook is classic
The main reason I went to see them so many times was not just the music, it was the crowd and the venues. They played a lot of small clubs in New England, where you could jam on the dance floor right at the edge of the stage. Every show was a huge party. We'd see people we'd met at the last show. I'd be wiped and soaked through with sweat on the way home.
Athens is also home to one of the best nighttime criteriums in the US, the
Athens Twilight Criterium.
They did, indeed, but also some medium-sized ones. One of my favorites was U Mass at Amherst in '78 or '79 on a double bill with The Talking Heads. Amazing show, and great vibe. That might have been the first time I heard the B52s. The Talking Heads I had already enjoyed on the album, but were staggeringly good live.
Athens was an underground highly curated college radio incubator.
Dick Dale used extra thick stings to make his near east-sounds extra-tight.
@Catalyzt can explain more as a suffer and guitarist. The Zoroastrian music flow follows deep with natural patterns. These tap and reflect natural patterns. That is why it is moving. Waves. Surfing.
My friend just made the call to move the First Friday group ride from July, 4th to the 11th because of Independence day. I asked him if he thought of the implications of that on things such as clocks and cosmologically; it could really mess up the moon and tides.
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The whole string tension issue is extremely complicated; for Dale, I think, that rapid double-stroke strumming would require it. As I shift to lighter string due to osteoarthritis, I find that I have to switch to lighter picks as well. In terms of the tonal quality, the physics of it is somehow that both the tone is more pure and the intonation is better at higher string tension, but that is a pretty exotic subject. It is the theory behind fanned-fret guitars, where you get higher string tension by a longer scale length rather than thicker string; my own impression is that yeah, if the scale is longer even by a half inch or an inch, the increased string tension does seem to make a difference, but it's ephemeral; I could be imagining it. It's a hotly debate issue.
I have heard rumors that Dale was not only a pain in the ass with record labels, but also to musicians he worked with-- very difficult, beyond uncompromising, just kind of mean, but they are only rumors. I did see him once at a small to medium-sized club-- I can't remember where, could have been the Troubador or even the Viper room-- sometime in the late '90s or early 2000s, and I was struck by how
psychedelic he and his band sounded. I hadn't expected it; it was much more like a Hendrix power-trio kind of experience than I remembered, and I hadn't expected it to be so fast and high energy, either. Quite astounding.
I went to see this band in the 90s, I miss this adherence to iconic style in music thesedays.
The had a few good hits when skinny arms and cheesy videos were no barrier to success.
I was so down on this band for decades; I didn't get the genre, I thought it was really throwback and commercial.
That all changed this year, when I started jamming with a cover band that does Stray Cat Strut-- and another guitarist who can cover the hooks. For me, I still don't like to listen to the song that much-- though I like it much more than I used to-- but it's a marvel to play, just a ton of fun. The changes are much more interesting than they sound; it's kind of like a Beatles song in that respect: It seems really easy until you actually try to cover it, and then you're like, "What is a C sharp minor doing there?! That shouldn't work, but it sounds great!" Unlike many Beatles songs, however, you actually can figure them out, and the inversions of the chords are not too bizarre.
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