Hits

[ateolf]

Last night Mary Beth and I went up to Stax for the return of soul cinema to see In the Shadow of Motown, a documentary about the Funk Brothers (the dudes that played all the music). It was good. The part towards the end when someone was talking about how they ate lunch with Robert White shortly before he died and "My Girl" came on the overhead and he got really excited and started to say something to the waiter, but then stopped himself and just placed his order, because he'd had an impulse to say that he's responsible for that iconic fucking guitar part but kept it back because he was sure they'd just think he was an old fool. And James Jamerson buying a ticket to some show celebrating Motown to sit in and watch in the back in the early 80s shortly before he died. Speaking of him, I spent the whole documentary wondering if they were going to talk about "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." I wasn't even sure it was Motown or even him, I just remember kinda recently watching that visualization of the bass line that was going around online and as soon as they talked about his bass playing and hearing an example I figured it had to be him (which of course it is, it's insane that anyone is able to write a bass line like that while making it able to BLEND with the song, I don't capitalize because I think blending is the ultimate ideal or anything, it's just pretty insane). And I'm not a huge fan of Motown musically speaking. I don't tend to favor smooth and polished music. But it's definitely a good story and you feel for the musicians (but I guess most documentaries about musicians will have their pretty much getting screwed over and unrecognized as a central theme). Also, I'm not sure I knew about the setup of the actual studio they worked in. And the sound they got is pretty damn impressive. I mean, it's one thing to get a super clean and polished and smooth sound of a state of the art studio, but to get that sound from a small basement does stand to impress even a old noise-lover like myself. After that we went up to the Hi-Tone to see Foxglove play. When we got there some other band whose name I forget was in the middle of their set. It was a two-piece and I think they're from out of town, drummer and guitarist. Some of their stuff was good and some was bad. When we came in they were playing a pretty good post-rocky kinda thing. For the next song the guitarist was playing bad funk shredding solos. And they'd kinda do something good and then something bad. Foxglove was next and they were good as always. After them was a local band with horns and everyone seems like a music students (Monticello? their name was something like that if not that). While warming up they kept playing these fusiony licks and it was pretty terrible and I was getting a very bad feeling. When their actual set started they weren't nearly so bad though. They didn't quite grab me or anything either and being late and tired I didn't stick around for their whole set, just long enough to give 'em a chance (and actually a little longer than I was expecting). Today at work in some downtime I finished the last thing on my memfwd.org todo list (though it was the first thing to go into the list). I "optimized" the site for mobile. A pretty easy css fix adding a little @media bit for the screen size. Pizza has arrived and I should eat some.