Ongoing History of New Music

Latest Episodes:

Headstones: In Their Own Words Part 1 Jan 15, 2020

Show notes

At one time, The Headstones were the scariest band in Canadian music…they scared audiences, scared record companies—hell, they scared themselves…

There were other words to describe them…intense…self-destructive…but I think the word the group liked the most was “furious”

But that doesn’t been to tell the story of The Headstones…strap in…this is a good one… The Headstones In Their Own Words…Part 1…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remembering Neil Peart Jan 13, 2020

Show notes

Over the decades, drummers haven’t received a lot of respect…all the jokes…the running gag in “Spinal Tap”…the issues so many groups seem to have finding the right drummer…

But there are also those who stand out and are not only admired but worshipped…and not just by music fans, not just by other drummers, not by just other musicians, but by everyone has a chance to hear them play…they’re that good, that special…

I’ve been a drummer since I was in high school…I later played in bands and worked as a drum teacher to get my way through university…and I still play today…and you know why?...Neil Peart of Rush…

My first exposure to him was a stereo salesman who was demonstrating a pair of speakers by playing “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” from Rush’s “Fly By Night” album…I was immediately sucked into it by Neil’s playing…and when the song gets to those three drum breaks, I was hooked for life…

Later, someone played the “Overture” from “2112” for…and that’s when I decided I needed to learn how to play the drums…same thing for millions of other kids…

For someone who played so hard and so loud, Neil was the quiet one, the introvert, the reluctant drumming institution…interviews with Neil were rare…meet’n’greets with fans were always handled by Alex and Geddy…it was just understood that Neil didn’t do these things…

I’ve probably seen rush in concert more than any other artist…I’ve traveled to different countries to see them…I’ve worked on Rush projects for their record label and their management company…I know all the people behind scenes…I’ve hung out with Alex and worked with Geddy…but I never got a chance to meet Neil…

I, like so many others, have unending respect for his abilities as a drummer, a lyricist, and a writer…he was a thinker, articulate, and extremely well-read…he also had a wicked sense of humour…

Stay with me as we remember Neil Peart…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deconstructing the Arctic Monkeys Jan 08, 2020

Show notes

I love trying to figure out why things are the way they are…it’s a need to understand, you know?...

Take a guy like Jack White, for example…if you go deep into his background, you have a much better understanding of why he is the way he is and why his music sounds the way it does…

Another example is the Beastie Boys…how did they grow to what they became…if you look at Green Day’s upbringing, you get them even more…

Same goes for Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, Eddie Vedder—they all have life experiences unique to them and crucial to the music they end up making…

Lemme give you another name: The Arctic Monkeys…you may, like me, have always found something different about these guys…they rock pretty good, but their songs are constructed in a distinctive fashion….and lyrically, they’re above and beyond so many bands…

And they started so young…they got it while they were still teenagers…and the way they became famous was completely antithetical to the way you’re supposed to do things in the music business…

To put it another way, The Arctic Monkeys are unusual—and I mean that with the utmost admiration…tell you what: let’s see if we can deconstruct the band to see what makes them tick…then maybe we’ll figure how why they are the way they are…

For a total of $70 off your first three weeks of Hello Fresh, go to HelloFresh.ca/OngoingHistory70 and enter the code “OngoingHistory70”.

That’s HelloFresh.ca/OngoingHistory70 and enter the code “OngoingHistory70”.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Catching Up With The Black Keys Dec 27, 2019

Show notes

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition…

If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job…

It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums…

Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”…

Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Milk” and then the big breakthrough with “Blood Sugar Sex Magick”…

And look at REM…they released five indie records, each better than the last, before they were signed to a big major record label deal…that was hard…they were on a treadmill of recording and touring and recording and touring with little downtime…but they wanted it bad, so they did what they had to…it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll, y’know?...

You can say the same of the Black Keys…a lot of people might think that these guys have what, three records in their catalogue…nope…

They have eight full albums, two eps, one live album and close to two dozen singles…and unless you’re a longtime or hardcore fan, you may not know about some of the stuff they’ve done…

Let’s fix that for all the latecomers…this is catching up with the Black Keys…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

60 Mind Blowing Facts in 60 Minutes: The 5th Edition Dec 18, 2019

Show notes

I have a long list of music-related facts that came to my attention this year…many of them were incorporated in various “ongoing history” programs over the last 12 months…but there’s also a lot of orphaned stuff—material that is interesting and fascinating but didn’t make it into any program for whatever reason…

Maybe they didn’t fit into any of this year’s topics…maybe it was too off-brand…maybe they were just too “out there”…

But this research will not go to waste…i have distilled this information to a tight list of 60 so i may present them to you…this is the fifth annual edition of “60 mind-blowing facts in 60 minutes”….

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unfortunate Sonic Coincidences Dec 11, 2019

Show notes

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of…

Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again.
Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music…

I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another…

I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”…

But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Musicians With Disabilities Dec 04, 2019

Show notes

The human body can be both very strong and very fragile…given its complexity, it generally works pretty well…but there are those among us who face challenges because of various disabilities…

Some of these are genetic…others come as the result of accidents, trauma or some other kind of misfortune…then there’s the effect of disease…

It can be very rough…there can be discrimination…and there can be a lot of misunderstanding…

At the same time, though, there are opportunities for learning, compassion, and dialogue about what some of our fellow humans need in this life—and, just importantly, what special things they can offer back…

Musicians are just like the rest of us, subject to the whims and frailties of this bag of water and chemicals we inhabit…these are some of their stories…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lost Canadian Bands 3 Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

There are a lot of things wrong with Facebook—don’t get me started—but there’s no denying that it can be addictive…

The best thing for me is finding out where people from my life have ended up…high school, university, my home town, other places I’ve worked…and with over 2 billion active monthly users, there’s an excellent chance that almost everyone you’ve ever known as a Facebook account…

But the “where are they now” thing doesn’t have to be restricted to people you know…you can lurk on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn to track down the current whereabouts of just about anyone…that includes musicians and bands that seem to have dropped off the radar…

For example, where are some of these Canadian alt-rock artists of the past?...what are they doing now?...I’ve been doing some lurking—and here’s what I’ve found out…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Golden Age of Synths as told by OMD Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

There have been many times over the last one hundred years where technology has changed the way we make music…

Take the microphone, for example…before it came along, singers had to be naturally louder than the orchestra…they needed to have a voice that could reach the back rows of the theatre…but when the microphone came along, certain singers like Bing Crosby, realized that you could use it to create a whole new mood for singing by getting up close and personal…

Amplification was another game-changer…at one point, you needed a dozen or more people in a band to fill the room with music…with amps, you needed fewer people to make as much noise…

Magnetic tape and multitrack recording made it possible to create entirely new soundscapes, the kind you could never get in the real world…the studio became an instrument for new sonic frontiers…

And then we had developments like the electric guitar—and I don’t need to tell you how much that changed everything…

This is how things were for the late 50s, all through the 60s, and into the 1970s…amps and mics and electric guitars and multi-track recording gear…those were the tools for making music…

But then there was another change in that started to really be felt in the mid-70s…a new era featuring electronic machines that made sounds that had never been imagined anywhere in the universe…

So many new possibilities opened up during an era that’s become known as “the golden age of synthesizers”…everything changed—and changed fast…

If you’re into any flavour of today’s electronic music, you will find this fascinating…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Sum 41 Story As Told By Deryck Whibley: Part 2 Nov 06, 2019

Show notes

You don’t need me to tell you that being a rock star isn’t a normal kind of job…you live in a bubble that’s as far removed from the regular 9-5, Monday-to-Friday thing…

You spend a lot of time living in hotel rooms…there’s a lot of downtime between gigs which can get really, really boring…and your working hours are almost completely opposite to your natural circadian rhythms…

A lot of people will end up coping with bad food, drugs, alcohol and self-destructive behavior—anything to alleviate the boredom…or the pain…or the loneliness…or the insecurities…

And because you’re a rock star, there aren’t many people who are going to tell you to smarten up and sort out your life…in fact, your bad behavior is more likely to be encouraged than police…

And it can be even worse when you get off the road…suddenly, any day-to-day structure you had on tour is gone…and all that’s left you in your house with your bad habits…

I bring all this up because this is where we’re going to pick up the story of Deryck Whibley and Sum 41…

The band burned very hot and very bright from 1996 through to 2005…and finally, something had to give…and it got real scary…

This is the Sum 41 story according to front man Deryck Whibley, part 2…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Ongoing History of New Music

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected