RocknRoll firsts

Well...if you followed the thread, you can see what happened when I questioned the veracity of the story. It's ridiculous.

 

Sorry my mistake.

 

Some people have a really hard time admitting a mistake, eh?

It's funny how the existence of a picture of Elvis, Campbell, and Priscilla (in which Elvis is seen holding a flashlight) somehow morphed into a story that Elvis broke Campbell's nose with the flashlight in a fight over Priscilla. It's like someone saw the picture and decided to make up a story to fit it.

 

I don't know...I think it goes beyond just a mistake.

 

The Story about Moon may be a myth or a couple of stories put together. On Keith's 21'rst birthday in America. Keith forgot to set the brake on a Lincoln and it rolled away near a pool at a hotel.. Another time Keith tried to drive his Rolls into a pond but got stuck in mud. In another story Keith drove his car into a empty swimming pool. The irony of the story is that Keith never had a drivers license.

 

Not the first from a rock group though:
From the Garage to Outer Space: Talking with the Chocolate Watchband’s David Aguilar

 

Well it depends on the definition of the word "true"

 

First "rock" triple album: A Cid Symphony from 1967



A Cid Symphony - A Cid Symphony

 

I consider this a negative (maybe not for Todd).

The Grateful Dead started using in-ear monitors their last few years and it ruined the spontaneity of their live playing........(along with Garcia's bad health)

 

Well, whaddya know? I figured I was safe naming May as the first. (Technically he is, since I qualified it with "guitarist").

Thanks for the link. I'd never heard of that band - another to add to the list!

 

That makes no sense. The Indian percussionists couldn't figure out 4/4?

I'm not sure about the chronology but I've heard (as someone else mentioned) that "See My Friends" was the first Indian-influenced rock song.

 

Second wind was recorded in 1991.
Joe Jackson-Big world in 1986!
Big World - Wikipedia

 

That would be the fault of the monitor engineer. A good one provides every player with what they need, not just what they want. They'll also provide the player with feedback from the audience via mics. An in-ear mix can sound like the monitor mix in a studio, but by using delays the engineer can provide a sound just like what the player would hear as if they were standing on a rehearsal stage.

It's hard to overstate how vital the job of the monitor engineer is.

Kate Bush paid tribute to Ian Newton, her monitor engineer for the Before The Dawn concert series:

It is so terribly sad that Ian Newton, our monitor engineer, died suddenly just a couple of days ago on 19th December. We are all so shocked by the news and send our deepest sympathies to his family. He was a complete sweetheart, a gentle man and an incredibly important part of the sound team right from the very beginning of the live project even before the first rehearsals. Then through to the tech rehearsals and on to the actual shows at Hammersmith.


It was Ian who encouraged me to use the in-ears system and oversaw the whole process using his huge experience in live work. He encouraged the whole band and Chorus to use in-ears so that all of us were using the same system for all the shows. Many people commented on the high quality of the sound and sound system at the venue and a great deal of this was because of Ian.


He was personally very supportive to me. There were quite a lot of things I was nervous about especially as I hadn’t sung or played live for such a long time. Ian loved his work and really cared about quality and detail, and spent a lot of time making sure that my monitors had exactly the right mix for every track, as he did with every member of the band and chorus.This meant that we could all work as confidently as possible with each other and in the context of the venue at Hammersmith. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him. He wanted it to be the best it could possibly be.


We’re all going to really miss him. All of the team but especially the sound team, the band, the singers and of course me too. It’s hard to take in that he’s no longer with us. It’s a real loss for the live music industry. He was only 52. He was a lovely, warm, generous-spirited man with a lovely sense of humour. Thank you Ian for being such an invaluable part of the team, for being so dependable and for being there for me and helping me have the confidence to get up there and perform live. I’ll always remember you sitting there, behind the monitor desk with your lovely big warm smile.

I can only think that the Dead just hadn't found the right mix, or the right person.

 

Band fires bass player, said bass player ends up producing the next album, and takes out all the bottom end during the final mix.

 

I think it's a red herring to blame the monitors when Garcia was rapidly killing himself with drugs. Nothing else contributed to their steep decline as much as that did.

That said, I think that one way the in-ear monitors may have helped kill some of the spontaneity was because they also used them to talk to each other onstage. So if someone wanted to call a song in the middle of a jam, they could just hit a footswitch and say it into the microphone, instead of suggesting it musically. That's probably what the previous poster was referring to, but my opinion is that that was a minor factor compared to Garcia nodding out onstage.

 

This six minute bio prepared for his being given the Les Paul Innovator Award at the NAMM Show will give one a decent overview of Todd's history of innovation:



For instance, at 1:58, he says "Music will be an aggregated service. You pay a monthly fee and listen to all the music you want"...in 1999. Of course, he predicted music on your home computer in 1978 according to Billboard, and was working with Time-Warner's Qube cable service to actually make it happen.

 

Actually, the fact that he had no license makes it not at all ironic that he tended to crash vehicles frequently when he attempted to drive.

 

Except that it wasn't a rock record.

 

There's no reason they couldn't have done exactly the same via the in-ears. Hit a foot-switch, and your vocal mic goes into everyone's in-ears and not the house. Trivially easy with a digital board, not much harder with analog.

 

What do you mean in mentioning Dinah Washington? She wasn’t Lee Morgan’s ex-wife, nor did she die on stage.

 

It's not the method..........it's about the during-concert conversations period. Beforehand, they let the music they were playing spontaneously direct the flow of the concert. It's probably fine for a lot of groups, but different/not good for the Grateful Dead. But yes...........Garcia's health was a bigger factor.

 

I must not have explained it very well. They *did* do it via the in-ears. I don't think they ever did it with their floor monitors or whatever they were using before. And as LandHorses pointed out, it was the fact that they were communicating in words that was the problem, not the technology used. Phil Lesh used to suffer from this really badly in his Phil & Friends bands.

 

I always thought that the first Indian-influenced rock song was Johnny Preston's "Running Bear" (1959) ha ha ha.

 

Maybe Dinah Washington got into a fight with Elvis and Glen Campbell.

 

They should have used the much more expressive medium of interpretive dance.