Dark Side of Rock #1

There is a dark side to rock culture and the rock industry. 

Today the former bassist of Alice in Chains died.  Likely, it was related to drug use. 


Another piece to this dark side is band worship.  Rockers are just humans and are not perfect or worthy of the exaltation they sometimes receive from their fans.  


The following is a copied article from "Amplified" concerning Mike Starr's death:

Ex-Alice in Chains Bassist Mike Starr Dead at 44

Posted Tue Mar 8, 2011 3:34pm PST by Caryn Ganz in Amplifier

Former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr, who played on the band's first two influential albums and was one of the last people to see singer Layne Staley alive, has been found dead in a Salt Lake City, Utah home, TMZ reports. Starr, who was 44, was arrested earlier this month in Salt Lake City and found to be in possession of six Xanax pills and six Opana painkillers. According to a police report, Starr asked an officer if he'd heard of Alice in Chains, and said he was in Utah with a friend to put together a new band. "It's a terrible shock and tragedy," the rocker's father told the website today.

Starr played on the Seattle band's 1990 album Facelift and cowrote "It Ain't Like That" and "Confusion." He also performed on 1992's Sap EP and Dirt LP, which featured the band's breakout tracks "Down in a Hole," "Rooster," and "Would?" which also appeared on the soundtrack to the film Singles (the band also briefly performed onstage in the movie, too). Starr exited the band in 1993 and later admitted he'd been booted because his drug problem was out of control.

The musician, who appeared on VH1's Celebrity Rehab and Sober House in 2010, displayed erratic behavior while battling a vicious heroin addiction on TV. He wore headphones most of the time, and said, "My singer dies, and the only way I can hear him is through this... It takes me back to when Layne was alive." In a pivotal episode of Rehab, Starr spoke with Staley's mother and apologized for not doing more to help her drug-addled son. "I wish I would have called 911, he told me if I did, he'd never talk to me again," Starr said. "I was too high. I got mad at him, I said, 'I'll just leave' and his last words were 'not like this.' And I just left. I can't believe that. I'm so ashamed." Staley was found dead of a lethal mix of heroin and cocaine in his Seattle apartment in 2002.

When Starr first appeared on Rehab, his onetime bandmate Jerry Cantrell criticized the show for sensationalizing drug recovery: "[Mike is] a friend of ours, and we wish him the best. But that show's not really cool." Starr seemed to have kicked his dangerous addiction, and appeared on an episode of the following season's Rehab to demonstrate his progress. He was six months sober at the time of the taping.

Henrdix Painting - Tim Bonner

Jimi Hendrix - By Tim Bonner

My friend from high school, Tim Bonner, painted this Jimi Hendrix artwork.  It's four feet wide.  He lives in TN and did it for a doctor in Alabama.  If you'd like an original painting of similar nature, or of anything, let me know and I can get you into contact with Tim. 

Chuck Berry is the King of Rock

I'm not sure about you... but I think Chuck Berry is the king of rock 'n' roll, not Elvis Presley.  From my non-theory, non-musician perspective, rock is the blues turned up a nodge, at least in it's origins.


I thought about Chuck Berry, because I actually thought about George Thorogood.  Riding around with my wife this weekend, the song, "No Particular Place to Go" came to mind.  I am most familiar with the the Thorogood version, but it dawned on me that Berry did it first.

Here's Berry playing the song... Is this not more rock than anything Elvis did? And of course there are much better Chuck Berry songs.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Live Intro Jams

John Frucsiante

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a very diverse band and blend many genres of music - rock, pop, jazz, blues, rap, hip/hop, ska, and funk.  Listening to their evolution over the years is pretty cool.

I've never seen them play live, but I know someone who has and he said they were amazing!

I have their Live at Slane Castle DVD, picked that one up for a buck in China. That gig starts off with an amazing jam before ripping into "Can't Stop", one of my least favorite Peppers songs.  I did a search for them on youtube and it appears that they usually start shows with an intro jam.  Here are a few those jams.  Enjoy.



FUJI ROCK FESTIVAL 06

Video from Green Fest in Indjija,Serbia, 26/06/2007.

From Live at Slane Castle.Click here to buy.

Which intro jam do you like best?

Collection of Intro Jams!!!

Reasons to buy Music #1

Some people don't buy CDs anymore.

Here's one reason to buy CDs:

The artwork.

Some CDs have lots of cool pieces of art in the sleeve.  The art can help you get inside the music as you listen to it.  With some bands, I can't understand the words of a song at all.  But if I bought the CD, I can easily read the lyrics since many bands supply them inside the sleeve.  Once I've read the lyrics to a song I couldn't normally understand, I can then easily remember the words and understand them every time I listen to them after that.

Here's some of the artwork within a CD I just recently purchased: Leviathan by the band, Mastodon.

The album cover.  The album is a concept album based on the novel Moby Dick.

This piece of art gives an idea to the craziness that lurks beneath the sea!

These images all accompany the songs on Leviathan and help ignite my imagination to picture what the riffs of this album are depicting as Ahab does battle with the white whale!  If I didn't purchase the CD, I might have also missed that these songs all piece together to form one complete story arch.  This is by no means a rock opera, but it still tells a story and the artwork is part of that story.  I even saw an interview with one of the band members and he mentioned that they have an art team and that even though the music was complete, it was still going to take months for the art team to finish their job. 

Movies in Rock #1

I've never seen any of the Japanese Godzilla movies.  I've only seen the Matthew Broderick, American made version with the Puff Daddy (P Diddy) destruction of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".  But with that said, I am a big fan of "Godzilla", simply because of the Blue Oyster Cult song, "Godzilla".  If the big lizard can inspire such an awesome song, then Godzilla must be great.

Here's the band playing "Godzilla" live with Godzilla footage spliced throughout!

Jay Chou - Nunchucks

I lived in China for three years. During this time, I heard a few Chinese songs played again and again and again over speakers in restaurants, stores, and in taxis. It seemed like the Chinese only had a few songs that were standard on the radio or for playing. Most of them were all Chinese pop songs.

One Chinese pop singer named Jay Chou stood out to me, and it was because of his song, "Nunchuks". It reminded me of rap-rock with a Chinese flair because it has a breakdown in the middle with a traditional Chinese instrument, and I liked it very much, because I finally heard something tough being played, so it stood out for me. 

Jay is also a movie star in China! Just recently he starred in an American film, The Green Hornet.  So I was already familiar with him, before his big American debut.  At the end of The Green Hornet as the credits roll, Jay's "Nunchucks" plays!  I recognized, and I said, "Yes!!!", but no one else probably thought much about it, which is why I'm bringing attention to it now!  And yes, I used a lot of exclamation marks for this post.

P.S.  He's actually Taiwanese, not Chinese, but in Mainland China, Taiwan is China! Here's the music video for "Nunchucks".  Don't worry if you can't understand anything he's saying, the Chinese don't understand this song much either: he's rapping with too much slang, and way too fast.