Rilo Kiley's lead guitarist, Blake Sennett, also creator and front man of The Elected, was a child actor, playing the roles of Ronnie Pinsky on Salute Your Shorts and Joseph "Joey the Rat" Epstein on Boy Meets World. He and Jenny Lewis dated for about four years while playing together as Rilo Kiley, but despite each musician's side projects, they have released two albums together since breaking up.
For its first six years, animated talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast featured an opening theme called "Hit Single" by guitarist Sonny Sharrock and drummer Lance Carter. Seasons four, five and six had a closing theme by surf-rock group Man or Astro-man?. Many musicians were guests on SGC2C, including Björk, Radiohead's Thom Yorke, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Alice Cooper and Pavement (whom Space Ghost introduces as The Beatles).
The song "One Way Out" was originally written and recorded by the King of the Slide Guitar, Elmore James, in 1960-61. Blues man Sonny Boy Williamson II, who is often credited with writing the song, released another version of it for Chess Records later in 1961. It was then popularized by The Allman Brothers Band and released as a live track on 1972's Eat a Peach.
Folk singer/activist Pete Seeger, most well-known for writing "If I Had a Hammer" and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", was a banjo aficionado. In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of How to Play the Five-String Banjo. He also invented the Long Neck or Seeger banjo, which is three frets longer than a typical banjo, and slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo.
Metal band Quiet Riot's cover of the 1973 Slade hit "Cum On Feel the Noize" shot to No. 5 on the Billboard chart in late 1983 and spent two weeks there, making it the first heavy metal song to make the top 5 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. Subsequently, the group's album Metal Health was the first American heavy metal debut album to reach No. 1 in the United States. It was No. 1 on Nov. 26, 1983, making Quiet Riot the first heavy metal band to have a top 5 hit and a No. 1 album the same week.
Music collective Elephant 6 Recording Company was founded in 1991 by Robert Schneider, who went on to form The Apples in Stereo; Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart of The Olivia Tremor Control; and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. The Apples in Stereo's 1993 Tidal Wave 7" EP was the first E6 release, and though the label has since disbanded, the Apples' 2007 New Magnetic Wonder also bears the E6 logo.
Recently, I was in my car, scanning radio stations in the D.C. area, looking for anything at all that was 1) in English and 2) didn't necessitate the bleeping of any words starting with "n," and I came across a classic rock station playing "A Day in the Life." Good enough, I thought. I performed that song with my high school marching band, so I'm even more familiar with it than I am with other Beatles songs. Out of habit I start to sing along. My boyfriend, who was in the passenger seat, asked, "What's this song called?" I told him. He said, "This is the Beatles? I've never heard it."
Yes, he's never heard "A Day in the Life." Meanwhile, my own mother tells me regularly that she knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I tried not to make a big deal out of it, since I know he's not the biggest music aficionado. But seriously? How does anyone who has ever owned a radio, or had parents with a record player, not know one of the most famous songs from one of the most famous rock albums of all time? I thought it was bad enough when my best friend said he'd never heard "Stairway to Heaven." (He immediately regretted the admission, since my mom was within earshot.)
Do I just hang out with musically challenged people? Are they in the minority? Or does my generation truly not have any concept of musical history? It got me thinking about my own musical education, and I realized the only real source I had growing up was my parents, and they might be disproportionately obsessed with their own generation's culture. My dad can tell you what guitar Eric Clapton is playing on any given song with any band he ever played with, and I've never seen him as proud of me as he was when I snagged his Allman Brothers t-shirt and started wearing it to school.
So maybe I got lucky. But what about everyone else? My American history class ran out of time at the end of the semester, so we didn't even get to the Cuban Missile Crisis, let alone Woodstock. Even playing trumpet in band, I was never taught about Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong. Our teacher made us attend a performance by Maynard Ferguson, but at the time I had no appreciation for it, probably because I had no background.
Having in the past few years discovered a great interest in indie music, I started writing about it. I got a CD few reviews in the newspaper where I was a copy editor, and last month I started writing about music for a national news outlet. But an appreciation music is not an understanding of music. A foundation in the Beatles and Ten Years After is a good start, but I had never heard a Smiths song until a few months ago. I have huge gaps even in my own musical education, and my writing suffers because of it. You have to have points of reference -- it's like hearing a cover of a song before the original.
So I've decided to remedy that. I've been looking for something to stimulate my brain since college, and this is it. I'll do short studies of prominent people and events in American culture as related to music, and I hope by the end to education other people as well as myself. As I'll be doing this mostly as a way to pass the time at work, I'll spend a lot of time with Wikipedia, but I'll supplement that information with whatever else I can find -- books, magazines, mp3s. Maybe I'll even learn to play guitar. Thanks for the inspiration, Jack Black.
