The Four Seasons of Rock

Hey there blog readers,

So it's been another weekend working on turning Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a rock composition, and I thought I'd start this blog to keep whoever's interested updated on the process. There'll be detail about the process of deciphering the actual music in the original piece and getting it into guitar format, the recording equipment I'm using, some copies of my notes, and other such things. But as this is the first blog, I thought I'd tell you why this whole project occurred to me in the first place.

I think we're in the winter of rock 'n roll. It's looking very much like guitar rock is dead or dying (there's LOTS of reasons for this, but that's the subject of another blog), and if it's going to recover and take back it's place as THE culturally important music of the western world, there's gonna have to be a spring-like rebirth. I ponder pop culture a lot. And while I was doing that very thing, a thought about the rock timeline popped into my head. You could look at the history of rock music as going thru 4 distinct phases.

Phase 1 are the early years of rock, starting with Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis (and you gotta include blues and gospel in there too) and moving into the Beatles. This is the Spring of rock and roll. The beginning. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan was the catalyst for thousands of kids to start bands. And in a way, that era after WW2 is the beginning of modern media culture as it coincides with the wide popularization of TV.

Phase 2 is the Summer of rock. This starts somewhere towards the end of the '60's (maybe Woodstock is the first day of summer?) and goes thru the entire 1970's. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Who, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and even acoustic folk like Dylan, CSNY and that ilk. This is probably when guitar rock was at it's most creative and intense.

Phase 3 starts with 1978 and the release of the first Van Halen album. Over the past decade, VH has eroded their own legacy so much that their influence on hard rock is VASTLY under-rated, but from what I read and hear, when Van Halen was released in Februrary 1978, it signaled a change not only for the sound of guitar rock in the following decade, but it changed everything about what kind of person was interested in that kind of music. Despite the fact that their first record was actually considered too heavy for the average rock listener, it attracted EVERYONE to guitar rock, and the genre became the most popular form of music in the world over the next 15 years. So this signals the end of the summer and the beginning of Autumn, with the year 1984 being a kind of labour day weekend of rock (I know this doesn't exactly fit the sequence of events on a calendar, but allow me this one stretch of the concept). This season starts with Van Halen and includes ZZ Top, Guns 'N Roses, Def Leppard, Ozzy Osbourne's solo career, and Metallica.

The Winter of rock creeps in with Nirvana and truly arrives with the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994. Even tho lots of people see the grunge era as a rebirth of guitar rock, I think Nirvana's success took the wind out the sails of the genre. It became cool to NOT know how to play and sing, and that very quickly killed the grass roots live rock scene ("who want's to see a band that sounds like crap? Let's all just go to a dance club and get laid there.."). On top of that, Cobain killed himself at the height of his popularity, before he could become old and irrelevant, and that basically cast his whole career in bronze and made the legacy of his persona and his music untouchable. To this day, most guitar rock is low on skill and full of what I like to call "fake anger". It isn't about escapism or enjoyment, it's about how bad life is. North American kids don't have any REAL problems as compared to people growing up in, say, Africa or Russia or Iraq - you know, places where violence and starvation are everywhere. To this listener, angry and bitter rock coming out of the richest most prosperous generation in the history of the world seems a bit low on honesty.

ANYWAY... that's the winter of rock: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden (the first wave of actually kinda talented, unique artists) and then their pathetic offspring: Bush, Creed, Puddle of Mudd and 17 years of crapulence, the most recent example being Chad Kreuger's fiefdom of 3 Days Grace, MDD, Nickelback, Thornley, etc.

So there it is - the four seasons of rock! Tune in next time where I actually talk a little about how I'm turning the Vivaldi piece into a reflection of this whole 55 year cycle of guitar music.

Cheers!