Self Care – Great Guitar (and Bass Guitar) Solos: Jeff Beck and Tal Wilkenfeld Play ‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers live at the 2007 Crossroads Festival

I’m showing you this for two reasons:

1. Jeff Beck is amazing.

2. Tal Wilkenfeld is a phenomenal bass guitarist that more people need to know.

This one is an instrumental, so it’s mostly Jeff Beck playing an incredible guitar solo. But do not miss Tal Wilkenfeld’s incredible bass guitar solo, starting at 1:34 and ending at 2:27.

If you don’t know about Tal Wilkenfeld, please check her out. She’s incredible. I might actually bend the rules* of my GGS series to show you some of Tal’s solo work, as well. She’s definitely worth it.

*You could definitely argue that bass guitar solos count as guitar solos, and you would not be wrong. And in that case, I wouldn’t be bending the rules at all. In fact, now that I think about it, I never actually established any rules for the series, so… how about this! Any solo on a stringed instrument played with a pick or fingers, a slide, etc counts. This would rule out violin/fiddle solos (for example), but would include sitars, mandolins, banjos, lap steel guitars, and other such instruments. What do you think?

Self Care – My Led Zeppelin Holy Grails

I’m moving another post over from my old blog. I’ve thought about putting this here in the past, so here it is. Also, yet again I’ve got another series of days of just Self Care posts. I’ve decided to stop getting myself stressed over the daily disgusting Agent Orange headlines darkening the news and focus on two posts I’ve been promising for a while now… the policing post and the ableism and slurs post. Both of these have taken me so long because they both require a lot of research, formatting, editing, and so on. I can’t just bang these out in a few minutes and throw them on here. Which, of course, means I’m procrastinating. But not any more. I’m getting them done, whether I want to or not!

But anyways… let’s talk about Led Zeppelin…

As a collector of unofficial Led Zeppelin material, there are so many things I wish to have but don’t. A few rare things are simply because I haven’t been able to find them. Some more are because they’re being horded.

But there’s some material that, as far as most collectors know, simply isn’t being circulated. Indeed, for some of this stuff, whether or not recordings exist is a question hotly debated.

But my interests aren’t limited to unofficial stuff. They extend towards potential official material, as well.

I got in to collecting unofficial Led Zeppelin material on an old, sadly no longer existing forum known as Planet Zeppelin. My very first unofficial recording was known as “The Secret History of Led Zeppelin”, which was a 1-cd compilation putting together some of the material from the BBC sessions that wasn’t officially released. I can’t put in to words how I felt when I listened to it for the first time, but it certainly made me addicted, and I haven’t stopped collecting since.

I’d like to go ahead and list, with short explanations, my top 10 “holy grails” of Led Zeppelin material, both official and unofficial.

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Self Care – How Vinyl Records Are Made

This is a clip from the How It’s Made series… a series I used to love very much.

As for vinyl records; yup, I’m a fan. Initially it was for audiophile reasons. I very much used to believe that analog recordings were better overall than digital recordings. And I’m sure that was true back in the 80s when digital was new and in the 90s when it was upgrading and coming into its own.

Now, though?

Now even downloadable digital files can come in high enough quality that the claim “vinyl records sound better” can, at the very least, be challenged. I do still prefer lossless compression to lossy compression (though, of course, I still use MP3 to carry music with me on my phone), especially for unofficial recordings (like audience recordings of live shows). The reason is because the quality of the recording, especially of a recording of a live show done in the 60s and 70s, is iffy at best (and sometimes quite terrible), and so keeping the audio files as close to the master recording as possible is preferred, as a loss in musical data can easily make an already iffy recording sound utterly horrid. FLAC is the standard lossless format, and my favorite, as well.

That said, though, I do, indeed, listen to vinyl when I can, if for no other reason than I’m the type who likes to sit back and just listen to music, and, mostly for cultural reasons, vinyl is the preferred way of doing that.

So anyways…

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Reminder: GGS, AP of the W, and Self Care in General All Open for Submissions

I just want to remind readers that Self Care in general, as well as Great Guitar Solos and Astronomy Picture of the Week are open for submissions. I’m eventually going to run out of stuff to post in these series, and would love to know what space pictures/videos/ideas you find interesting, what guitar solos you love, and what videos, pictures, recipes, etc you just enjoy and make you feel good, so I can post them here.

Don’t be shy! I’m genuinely curious, and I’d be happy to share it!

Self Care – Great Guitar Solos: Jeff Beck and David Gilmour Play Hi Ho Silver Lining Live at the Royal Albert Hall on July 4, 2009

This is an audience recording, so the quality isn’t entirely great, but seeing Jeff Beck and David Gilmour play together is just… it’s damn well near a spiritual experience…

This solo may not be technically flashy or pack an emotional punch, but I adore this one because it’s just fun! They’re clearly enjoying themselves.

They both play the guitar solo… it’s a guitar solo duet! It starts at 2:13 and ends at 2:44. There’s a second one (which actually looks like it wasn’t entirely expected, but hey! That means improv!) starting at 3:07 and ending at 3:43.

Enjoy!

Self Care – Great Guitar Solos: Styx and James Young Play Renegade Live in 1996

Admittedly, I don’t like a lot of Styx (just personal preference in this case… nothing against ’em, and they are talented), but there are two Styx songs I love: Come Sail Away and…

Renegade

This one is live in 1996 at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. For something that I’m guess is supposed to be an official release, this isn’t the greatest quality (some unofficially released Led Zeppelin pro-shot videos have better quality, and those were recorded in the 70s). However, it’s pretty darn good.

I was trying to find video of Styx playing it live in 1978 or 1979, but that’s okay. This works rather nicely…

The first guitar solo starts at 2:51 and ends at 3:47. The second solo starts at 4:21 and ends at 5:31. The third, and final, solo follows up a rather cheesy lyrical call-and-response section and a shout-out to “I Shot the Sheriff”. It starts at 6:56 and ends at 7:13.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Considering how much I love guitar solos, it should be no surprise that I have thoughts, here. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an interesting, and perhaps polarizing, institution in music.

On April 20, 1983, the late Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder and president of Atlantic Records, put together a team that included attorney Suzan Evans, Rolling Stone magazine editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner, attorney Allen Grubman, and record executives Seymour Stein, Bob Krasnow, and Noreen Woods, and founded the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. They started inducting artists in 1986, but they still had no home for the museum. So they put together a search committee, and ultimately chose shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.

The very first performing artist inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1986 was, of course, Chuck Berry, considered by many who think they know to be the founder of Rock and Roll (I, personally, disagree, but I’ll get to that). Others inducted that same year included Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They all fit the original criteria of the foundation:

Artists—a group encompassing performers, composers and/or musicians—become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. Besides demonstrating unquestionable musical excellence and talent, inductees will have had a significant impact on the development, evolution and preservation of rock & roll.

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Self Care – Dad and I Singing “Oseh Shalom”

My Dad’s a Hazan, I’ve mentioned this many times, so that’s out there.

He also writes music, and likes to take Jewish prayers and arrange them into these rather nice songs. Here’s a clip of Dad and I singing his arrangement of “Oseh Shalom” at his Cantorial concert last year.

(Obligatory self-criticism incoming…)

I really shouldn’t have had my hair pulled back like that, and I really… really… don’t like wearing suits. I also honestly feel awkward singing on a stage without also playing a guitar, which is why I mostly stare at the music stand… while the music is there, I’m not really reading it so much as wishing I had a guitar… heh…

But otherwise… this is pretty nice…

Sorry for the self-promotion, here…

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