Hocus Pocus by Focus
This is probably in my top 3 favorite progressive rock songs and is definitely one of the coolest pieces of music I've ever heard. It seems like they just don't make music with this kind of ENERGY anymore. Or maybe the drugs were really just that good
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Don't think my Dad would've even heard of Focus, honestly. All that ever got passed down to me were a handful of Dire Straits songs. Not too shabby, I guess. Lemme tell ya, them guys ain't dumb.
Speakin' of D. S., it baffles me when Richard shows up at my house, I can't even listen to anything Mark Knophler EVER did without him moaning and whining like a little bitch just 'cause it jes don' jive with his myopic range of "acceptable" music. (Anyway, that's about the time I max out the speaker volume on Why Aye Man or somethin' equally as insufferable to drown out whatever pointless gibberish he's sayin.)
Seems sort of odd to me how the majority of people (at least in my microcosmic slice of the world's population I've been exposed to) have that narrow band of musical tastes which disables them from even attesting to proficiency of variable X musician, whoever, whatever. It's only black, white, good, or bad.
Atkins is a prime example here.
In reference to Chet: "Dude, oh my GOD, like . . . That sounds like, uh, uhmm, you know, like some fuckin' kind of King of the Hill bullshit, man. Like, uhh, you know? Uhm."
Quote the Richard, nevermore
I'm not utterly immune to snobbish hyper-selectivity, either, now that I think about this more objectively.
It took me until I was 15 to get over the hurdle of "country" prejudice. Commercial country is I suppose what comes to mind whenever your average Alabamian youth evokes memories of the genre (i.e. Garth Brookes, Toby Keith, et cetera) . . . At least it used to for me.
John Prine & Todd Snider veer toward a more folkish side than chiefly country, but off the top of my head, they're the first two guys I come up with. When I first heard either of 'em, I instantly dropped the naive prejudice. Same kind of music, vocals, same embellishment with slidin' on pedal steels (which I grew to REALLY like), but what they had to SAY was radically different (radically liberal & saturated with the sort social commentary that needs to be heard) as opposed to your run of the mill drinkin' moon shine, beatin' your wife & kids, fuckin' some livestock lyrics.
OK, so maybe those themes aren't par for the course, but the lyrical matter that DOES tend to be par for the course for commercial country never really said anything that worth saying.
Voltaire once said, "Anything too stupid to be written is sung instead."
Oh yeah. Steve Goodman I like too. Both Prine and Goodman rose out of Chicago, IL's highly idiosyncratic 1970's country-folk scene. Goodman actually wrote "City of New Orleans", which of course, Arlo Guthrie helped to put a rocket in its ass & he really made it fly.
He met Arlo in a bar in Chicago one day. Arlo hadn't the foggiest notion who he was; the guy wanted to play him a song. Alro probably had a BUNCH of mediocre musicians approach him this exact way. Why would this asshole be anything refreshing?
Said, "Alright, guy, buy me a drink and I'll listen to you play yer little song until I finish it."
So Goodman bought 'im the drink, and that was that. Arlo was pleasantly surprised, to say the least.
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