I didn’t. 
djm
It shows.
Slan,
D. 
Interesting tidbit: Tonight, I watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, actor and director) which was recently released on DVD. Levon is featured in one of his unique movie roles, listening to Mexican music on the radio.
I read something recently somewhere that compared Robbie and Ry Cooder. It said something to the effect that they didn’t rely on fast licks, but their inherent senses of the music. They can both take my breath away with the simple beauty of their playing.
Exactly. It’s hard not to listen to Robertson in particular, but also Cooder, and not think that the speed merchant ‘guitar heroes’ had somehow missed the point.
There are other points, I suppose, and to make some of them you have to be a virtuoso, but the heart of roots-based rock and roll is groove. Often, if I listen to Mike Bloomfield, I just want to grab him and say, slow down, what’s the hurry?
What would you say to Steve Vai?
djm
Is he really faster than Bloomfield? About the same, I’d have thought, without doing a direct comparison. To the (not very great) extent to which I’m familiar with his playing, I don’t sense an underlying groove that’s capable of being spoiled by fast soloing nor one that would have any interest at all without that soloing. It’s a long way removed from roots rock though. Likewise Frank Zappa’s playing which I like in smallish doses and occasionally not so small doses. I like Coltrane’s playing where speed is integral to his way with fast tunes although he has a simple, unadorned way of playing ballads which I find achingly beautiful.
Virtually the whole of early heavy metal and large slabs of hard rock struck me as having been formed by taking the aspects of white blues playing that displayed the worst misunderstandings of black blues and playing them up and distorting them to a point where all interesting contact with the source had been lost. The misunderstandings I have in mind were the view that volume was a substitute for excitement, speed for groove and lots of notes a substitute for choosing the meaningful ones. There is a point, I suppose, where this music takes on an identity of its own, where it is clearly playing by new rules of its own invention. I understand that you can judge music by those new rules but, to me, it’s unswinging, emotionally shallow and bombastic. But I do think that some heavy metal and hard rock has transcended its bastard origins and, there, speed virtuosity and volume is intrinsic to the excitement.
For reasons I find hard to explain, I like the early Butterfield Blues Band albums featuring Bloomfield although they display all the faults I’ve just complained about in white blues. And I love Highway 61 Revisited in which Bloomfield’s style is harnessed and made to serve the music for reasons that are plainly obvious to me.
I never thought of the early metal stuff as coming from blues or R&B. The structure strikes me as totally different, being based on short melodic structures, simple but catchy. The need for speed is part of the need for excitement, which is not really an element in classic blues or R&B. I treat them each as different animals, and try to avoid comparisons, as if one is supposed to “measure up” to another, which I don’t agree with.
djm
Notes some favorite Chiffers here . . . listens in . . . and tiptoes back out again . . .
I think what you say about metal might well be true of post-punk metal but not of the earliest examples which would be ten years earlier at least. By far the most influential band on the early metal groups were the Yardbirds and the groups they spawned: Cream, the Jeff Beck groups and Led Zep. If you listen to Five Live Yardbirds and then to their experimental singles, hugely influential on both sides of the Atalantic, and then to the first two Jeff Beck group albums, you can hear the main elements of early metal coming together before your very ears. They started life as a blues band and their development was from that foundation. Other influences were undoubtedly the Who and Hendrix, both of whom started life playing different styles of R&B.
I didn’t think that what I just wrote was controversial.