We were into the first Dire Straits album quite a bit but I havent heard it in along time. Great guitar work, simple perhaps but Mark was very unique in expression in those days,thats why Dire Straits stood out, awesome fingerstyle single coil tone. I recieved a best of as a gift its great when Im in the mood, most of them have had excessive air play. The songs "Brothers in Arms", "On Every Street" and "Romeo and Juliet" tug at the emotions pretty hard, thus I think they are excellent songs. On the flip side the song "Money for Nothing" always made me want to slam my head off a concrete wall to end the pain, cool opening guitar riff that wont go away soon enough as the song progresses nowhere into Stings nasty falsetto chorus and drags on for a painfull... 4 minutes
Foreigner also had me thinking about the concrete wall as well. Something about steady 1/8th beat bass pedals that at times never even changed pitch for what seemed like hours, combined with equally elementary drum beats... yikes! I dont know, my drummer claims to have really been into them at one point in time so maybe some of the songs that werent on the radio and jukebox every 10 minutes were OK.
Traffic was already an extinct band when I started getting into music, the people a few years older were into them. I had some played for me years ago, cant really remember them. Traffic had Steve Windwood singing... once again... concrete wall, I cant stand the tone of his voice. However they had a guitar player... Dave Mason... now Dave Masons solo work after Traffic was just great good feeling rock music, there was a few albums around back then, cant remember which. Dave also played acoustic guitar on Hendrixs recording of All Along the Watchtower, so thats Dave you hear at the beginning of that song... something I just learned about within the past year.
The Cars first two albums represent lots of good times for me "Let the Good Times Roll" sums it up. Some great songs and once again unique in their day. "Bye Bye Love" will always stand the test of time.
The rest I never heard, but Shadowfax is ringing some bell and now has me very curious. OK, looked them up, seems they were some kind of "new age" fusion, jazz, "electronic" band, appears they were a fairly large band with sax, flute and violin, so must be one of my fusion buddies checked them out and played something for me. Appears the legendary Jerry Goodman did some violin work for them. Jerry was the Mahavishnu Orchestras first violinist and now gigs with The Dixie Dregs when they gig. Check out some Goodman era Mahavishnu on youtube if you want to hear someone playing advanced stuff like todays guitars players long before guitarists ever thought of it. He was the highlight of the Mahavishnu IMO, even looked the part of a metalhead in his younger days... only that was the Hippie thing and not uncommon then.
Anyways, thanks for the advice.
