Duga Nota

Duga Nota This page is created to accompany the book and the radio show on rock music and its culture, entitle The recovery was still ahead of me. How did I get to it?
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About Duga Nota

Duga Nota is a title of a book about growing up with rock and roll, an eponymous radio show at Yammat.fm station, and a FaceBook page. The Book was Born
With Pain I Was Born, is a title of a song by Croatian jazz vibraphonist Boško Petrović, that describes well how the text of the book was conceived during my rather serious illness. Writing it, however, was not painful at all, as

the memories flowed and jelled, page after page, during the year that followed. I started writing, barely out of the hospital immediately after I hung down the phone after talking to Vlatko Fras. Vlatko called me asking whether I would be ready to write a text for the book that Buca Popović was preparing about the late Belgrade pop Idol Vlada Divljan, whose great songs marked our youth. Vlatko didn’t have a clue that I was just out of the hospital and was surprised to find out I will have time to start writing immediately. Sure I would, I told him, and I knew immediately why and how. My memories came to the surface as my life slowed down during the heart viral infection, whose first phase I have had just barely overcome. As soon as I have finished those first twenty pages of what will become one of the last chapters of the book, I knew how will the rest of the chapters look like. I have written the first chapter, called April 1st, in Croatian, and have then continued writing the text in English. After just a few paragraphs I switched back to Croatian as memories that were surging were personal and intimate and I felt I would be taking some of the intimacy away if I would have continued in English. So, it was to be an autobiographic book first and foremost in spite of the fact that most of the text I wrote is at the same time essayist, full of my observations on the erosion of the liberal values following the demise of the rock culture by the end of the last century. The first chapter I wrote did contain exactly some of the remorseful observations on when did rock started succumbing to nationalism and other old fashioned social mores. Of course, for us growing up in the former Yugoslav Federation, the end was abrupt and clear and the deaths of our rock and roll buddies at the battlefields showed us that rock did not succeed in stopping what we have thought will never come. For every lost life of an individual enamored in rock culture and its liberal values, from Vietnam to Vukovar, we have an obligation to keep the flame of the liberal values alive. The memories that remained were of the time when rock and roll were saving our souls from the uniformity of communist politics and reductions of personal freedoms we had to live through while growing up. Those memories were surprisingly bright and cheerful, of something exaggerated fun we had while growing up and were successfully trying to enlarge the room of freedom of expression and I was confident that they will make an interesting read to those who did not live through those times. The Book Called Sustain
I wish to explain here the story of its title. Duga Nota in Croatian translates as a Long note in English. While searching for the title of the book, sometimes in the midst of writing of the text, I felt that one of the musical gestures that embodied the passion and belonging to a nonverbal expression of it is the sustained note of the electric guitar that countless a guitar player performed on stage and in the studio when they wished to transport a listener into a state of sentiment closer to their passion. That long howl or a screech hanging between tho hits at the drum. While toying with the term sustain, I understood that there is no Croatian translation of it, as local musicians would use the word “soosteyn” in English to describe what they are playing in Croatian. While searching for a translation, I was advised that a proper Croatian term for it would be a continuous tone (kontinuirani ton), which somehow lacked any poetic connotation and moved us in the realm of physics rather than poetry. I have therefore discarded the possibility to call the book Continued tone and continued searching for a proper equivalent of my idea. Black, Blue & White
I have briefly thought about the Blue note, as this term is describing a tone or a semi-tone that is sometimes played in sustain as well. I liked it but was immediately aware that the term is overused and that its main connotation is to jazz rather than to rock music I was primarily writing about. I did like its connotations to black music, and to Afro-American musicians because their role is so central to my story of the transformation of the Western civilization we have lived through and have had sustained as the participants of the rock counterculture. However, after a moment of thinking about all this, I have discarded it too and continued searching. I have then stumbled upon the term long note which is apparently sometimes used in Irish traditional, or Celtic music. I was fascinated to find out that the long note is used there to describe the semi-tone comparable to the blue note in jazz and discovered the fact that this is probably its only equivalent in western music. This was perfect, as it established a concise link between European and African musical styles that were never before the twentieth century merged into a single body of music which now did change our civilizations forever. This is why Keith Richards’ symbolical role in bringing these two traditions together and merging them into the expression that defined the kids of the twentieth century in a unique way, will elevate him to the role Leonardo Da Vinci had during the renaissance. Both will stay remembered as the giants that have changed the course of the history of human thought. Well, I now had the title in English. Long Note. Would it work in Croatian? It did. Duga nota is a catchy expression, somewhat poetic, due to the fact that this is not an idiomatic expression in Croatian language and it held the connotations to the rebellious nature of the musicians playing semi-tones in trying to build the world of their passion for their listeners. Then it struck me that the title also describes well the memoiristic character of my book. After all, by now, our lives in rock and roll have gotten long. After fifty years of living for rock music our passion did not diminish, it plays out as a single fifty-years long sustained note, full of passion and conviction. Duga Nota it was, and I wrote it for you.

——————————————————————————
Duga Nota the book is closely tied to the Duga Nota the radio show that runs every fourth Saturday in a month at 10 PM at the Yammat.fm radio station. Each episode of the radio show corresponds to a chapter in the book and usually contains two excerpts from the chapter it corresponds to. Listen Duga Nota @ MixCloud.com

03/07/2024
03/07/2024
Hvala Ranko
03/07/2024

Hvala Ranko

03/07/2024

Have you ever kept your ticket to any of my concerts?

03/07/2024

Nortlands Live
Swanzey, NH
July 2, 2021

03/07/2024

Today we are remembering guitarist and studio musician Tommy Tedesco on what would’ve been his 94th birthday. He was part of the loose collective of the Los Angeles area's leading session musicians later popularly known as The Wrecking Crew, who played on thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, including several hundred Top 40 hits.

Tedesco's playing credits include the theme from television's Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, Vic Mizzy's theme from Green Acres, M*A*S*H, Batman, and Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special. Tedesco was shown on-camera in a number of game and comedy shows, and played ex-con guitarist Tommy Marinucci, a member of Happy Kyne's Mirth-Makers, in the 1977-78 talk-show spoof Fernwood 2 Night and America 2 Night.

Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Tedesco moved to the West Coast where he became one of the most-sought-after studio musicians between the 1960s and 1980s. Although he was primarily a guitar player, he also played mandolin, ukulele, sitar and over twenty other stringed instruments.

Tedesco was described by Guitar Player magazine as the most recorded guitarist in history, having played on thousands of recordings, many of which were top 20 hits. He recorded with most of the top musicians working in the Los Angeles area including the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, the Everly Brothers, the Association, Barbra Streisand, Jan and Dean, the 5th Dimension, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Zappa, Ricky Nelson, Cher, and Nancy and Frank Sinatra as well as on Richard Harris's classic "MacArthur Park". His playing can be found on Jack Nitzsche's "The Lonely Surfer", on Wayne Newton's version of "Danke Schoen", B. Bumble and the Stingers's "Nut Rocker", the Rip Chords' "Hey Little Cobra", the Ronettes' "Be My Baby", the Sandpipers' "Guantanamera", the T-Bones' "No Matter What Shape'" and Nino Tempo & April Stevens' version of "Deep Purple". For Guitar Player, Tedesco wrote a regular column called "Studio Log" in which he would describe a day's work recording a movie, TV show or album, the special challenges each job posed and how he solved them, what instruments he used, and how much money he made on the job.

Tedesco also performed on film soundtracks such as The French Connection, The Godfather, Jaws, The Deer Hunter, Field of Dreams, Gloria plus several Elvis Presley films. He was also the guitarist for the Original Roxy cast of The Rocky Horror Show. Additionally, he performed the opening guitar solo for the Howard Hawks and John Wayne film Rio Lobo. He was one of the very few sidemen credited for work on animated cartoons for The Ant and the Aardvark cartoons (1968–1971).

As a solo artist, Tedesco recorded a number of jazz guitar albums, but his musical career ended in 1992 when he suffered a stroke that resulted in partial paralysis. The following year he published his autobiography, Confessions of a Guitar Player.

Tedesco died of lung cancer in 1997, at the age of 67, in Northridge, California. His son, Denny Tedesco, directed the 2008 documentary film The Wrecking Crew, which features interviews with Tommy and many of his fellow session musicians. The film finally saw theatrical release in 2015.

Source: Wikipedia

Happy birthday, Mr. Tedesco. Thank you for all the music.

03/07/2024
03/07/2024

Rod Stewart
British singer Rod Stewart, of the English rock band Faces, talks to an unidentified man prior to their show at the Madison Square Garden in New York, New York, February 24, 1975.

03/07/2024

It was 55 years ago on July 3, 1969, that Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones was found dead at the house at Pooh Corner, at his home at Cotchford Farm.

Just a few weeks after he left the band, he was discovered floating facedown in the pool by Anna Wohlin, his Swedish lover. She managed to pull him out, but it was too late to do anything, Brian Jones was gone. 😢

The news sent shockwaves through the rock world. Jones' life was in the midst of a severe upheaval at the time of his passing. The year before, he’d been arrested for the second time for possession of cannabis, which further exacerbated tensions he’d been having with the Rolling Stones. On top of that, it seemed to many that his heart just wasn’t in the band anymore.

RIP Brian.... Yet another member of Rock’s "27 Club."

Please, I’d rather not open up a lengthy discussion who might have been responsible or circumstances surrounding his tragic demise.

Still remembered and Loved❣️
👉🏼🕊️Professor Poster🕊️👈🏼

03/07/2024

On this day in 1978, the Graham Parker & The Rumour LP “The Parkerilla” debuted on the US Billboard 200 Albums Chart at #162 (July 1)

The live double album was recorded at Winter Gardens, Bournemouth, Manchester Opera House, Apollo Theatre, Oxford and The Palladium, New York City.

The single "Hey Lord Don't Ask Me Questions" though, was a studio re-recording of a song from Parker’s first album “Howlin’ Wind” (slightly retitled, with the added “Hey Lord”)

In 1991, Rolling Stone ranked The Parkerilla #64 on its list of 100 greatest album covers.
The cover photography was by Brian Griffin, and the artwork by Barney Bubbles.

The album peaked at #14 in the UK, #22 in Australia, and #144 in the US.

Click on the link below watch “Hey Lord, Don’t Ask Me Questions”:

https://youtu.be/v7NlS-f29xM

03/07/2024

ON THIS DATE (58 YEARS AGO)
July 2, 1966 - The Rolling Stones: "Mothers Little Helper" b/w "Lady Jane"
(London 45-902) 45 single is released in the US.

"Mother's Little Helper" is a song by The Rolling Stones. It first appeared as the opening track to the United Kingdom version of their 1966 album Aftermath. It was released as a single in the United States and peaked at # 8 on the Billboard Singles Charts in 1966. The B-side "Lady Jane" peaked at # 24.

Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "Mother's Little Helper" was recorded in Los Angeles from 3–8 December 1965. The song deals with the darker perspective of the use of barbiturates, specifically Nembutal (pentobarbitone), among housewives.

"Kids are different today, I hear ev'ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day”

Toward the end of the song, the mothers are warned:
"And if you take more of those
you will get an overdose
No more running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
They just helped you on your way
through your busy dying day”

The song is based around folksy chords and an eastern-flavored guitar riff sounding like a sitar. Keith Richards has been quoted that he remembers the signature riff as being slide played on an electric 12-string. It has also been documented that it was played by Brian Jones on his Vox 12-string Mando-Guitar. Richards also remembers the ending of the song is the idea of Bill Wyman, whose driving bass is a distinctive feature of the studio track.
_______

SONGFACTS

This song is about a housewife who abuses prescription drugs to "get her through the day." It turns around the image of a suburban housewife, who is usually portrayed as cooking and caring for her family, by showing her as a drug abuser. The Stones could get away with this because their image was that of cynical, somewhat dangerous rockers.

+++++

Mick Jagger: "It's about drug dependence, but in a sort of like spoofy way. As a songwriter, I didn't really think about addressing things like that. It was just everyday stuff that I'd observe and write about. It's what writing is for really. There is a sort of naivety, but there's also a lot of humor in those songs. They're a lot based on humor. It was almost like a different band, a different world, a different view when we wrote them."

+++++

Keith Richards: "The strange guitar sound is a 12-string with a slide on it. It's played slightly Oriental-ish. The track just needed something to make it twang. Otherwise, the song was quite vaudeville in a way. I wanted to add some nice bite to it. And it was just one of those things where someone walked in and, Look, it's an electric 12-string. It was some gashed-up job. No name on it. God knows where it came from. Or where it went. But I put it together with a bottleneck. Then we had a riff that tied the whole thing together. And I think we overdubbed onto that. Because I played an acoustic guitar as well."

+++++

Jagger: "I get inspiration from things that are happening around me - everyday life as I see it. People say I'm always singing about pills and breakdowns, therefore I must be an addict - this is ridiculous. Some people are so narrow-minded they won't admit to themselves that this really does happen to other people beside pop stars."

+++++

Stones guitarist Brian Jones played the sitar on this track - it was one of the first pop songs to use the instrument. The Beatles "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," which came out the year before, was the first.

+++++

This condemns the many women in England who were abusing prescription drugs, even though The Stones were becoming heavy drug users themselves. The band wanted to make the point that housewives popping pills whatnot that much different than rock stars taking smack, even though drug laws in England strongly favored the housewives.

+++++

This was the first track on Aftermath, the first Stones album with all original songs. Their earlier albums were full of Blues covers.

+++++

In England, this wasn't released as a single.

+++++

The Stones recorded this in Los Angeles in a custom-built studio. It had no windows because The Stones did not want to know if it was day or night.

+++++

Stones drummer Charlie Watts said of this song in In the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones: "We've often tried to perform 'Mother's Little Helper' and it's never been any good, never gelled for some reason - it's either me not playing it right or Keith not wanting to do it like that. It's never worked. It's just one of those songs. We used to try it live but it's a bloody hard record to play."

03/07/2024

Can you believe we're in July already?! Here's a pic taken in a July - 52 years ago in 1972

03/07/2024

Christopher Russell Edward Squire (March 4, 1948 – June 27, 2015) was an English musician, singer and songwriter best known as the bassist and backing vocalist of the progressive rock band Yes. He was the longest-serving original member, having remained in the band until his death and appearing on every studio album released from 1969 to 2014. In 2017, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Yes.

Squire was widely regarded as the dominant bassist among the English progressive rock bands, influencing peers and later generations of bassists with his incisive sound and elaborately contoured, melodic bass lines. His name was associated with his trademark instrument, the Rickenbacker 4001 (British model RM1999). From 1991 to 2000, Rickenbacker produced a limited-edition signature model bass in his name, the 4001CS.

In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 18th greatest bass player of all time. Here he is pictured in the mid-70’s around the time of the Relayer tour of 1974-75.

Well said Jerry
03/07/2024

Well said Jerry

Jerry Garcia's opinion on Eddie Van Halen:
- Do you listen to Eddie Van Halen?
- Jerry: “Not seriously, no. Because I can hear what’s happening in there. There isn’t much there that interests me. It isn’t played with enough deliberateness. It lacks a certain kind of rhythmic elegance that I like music to have, that I like notes to have. There’s a lot of notes and stuff. But the notes aren’t saying much, you know. They’re like little clusters. It’s a certain kind of music which I understand on one level. But it isn’t attractive to me,”

(Frets Magazine Interview 1985)

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Duga nota

With Pain I Was Born, is a title of a song by Croatian jazz vibraphonist Boško Petrović, that describes well how the text of the book was conceived during my rather serious illness. Writing it, however, was not painful at all, as the memories flowed and jelled, page after page, during the year that followed. I started writing, barely out of the hospital immediately after I hung down the phone after talking to Vlatko Fras. Vlatko called me asking whether I would be ready to write a text for the book that Buca Popović was preparing about the late Belgrade pop Idol Vlada Divljan, whose great songs marked our youth. Vlatko didn’t have a clue that I was just out of the hospital and was surprised to find out I will have time to start writing immediately. Sure I would, I told him, and I knew immediately why and how. My memories came to the surface as my life slowed down during the heart viral infection, whose first phase I have had just barely overcome. The recovery was still ahead of me.

As soon as I have finished those first twenty pages of what will become one of the last chapters of the book, I knew how will the rest of the chapters look like. I have written the first chapter, called April 1st, in Croatian, and have then continued writing the text in English. After just a few paragraphs I switched back to Croatian as memories that were surging were personal and intimate and I felt I would be taking some of the intimacy away if I would have continued in English. So, it was to be a autobiographic book first and foremost in spite of the fact that most of the text I wrote is at the same time essayist, full of my observations on the erosion of the liberal values following the demise of the rock culture by the end of the last century. The first chapter I wrote did contain exactly some of the remorseful observations on when did rock started succumbing to nationalism and other old fashioned social mores. Of course, for us growing up in the former Yugoslav Federation the end was abrupt and clear and the deaths of our rock and roll buddies at the battlefields showed us that rock did not succeed in stopping what we have thought will never come. For every lost life of an individual enamored in rock culture and its liberal values, from Vietnam to Vukovar, we have an obligation to keep the flame of the liberal values alive.

The memories that remained were of the time when rock and roll was saving our souls form the uniformity of communist politics and reductions of personal freedoms we had to live through while growing up. Those memories were surprisingly bright and cheerful, of something exaggerated fun we had while growing up and were successfully trying to enlarge the room of freedom of expression and I was confident that they will make an interesting read to those who did not live through those times.

I wish to explain here the story of the title. Duga nota in Croatian means Long note in English. While searching for the title of the book, sometimes in the midst of writing of the text, I felt that one of musical gestures that embodied the passion and belonging to a non verbal expression of it is the sustained note of the electric guitar that countless a guitar player performed on stage and in the studio when they wished to transport a listener into a state of sentiment closer to their passion. While toying with the term sustain, I understood that there is no Croatian translation of it as local musician would use the word “susteyn” in English to describe what they are playing in Croatian. While searching for a translation, I was advised that a proper Croatian term for it would be “a continued tone” (“kontinuirani ton”), which somehow lacked any poetic connotation and moved us in realm of physics rather than poetry. I have therefore discarded the possibility to call the book “Continued tone” and continued searching for a proper equivalent of my idea.

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