A video of The Hollies, singing "Bus Stop" because I just FREAKING love the Hollies. (link corrected. Thanks, VB)
I love "Bus Stop" because it's terribly archaic and because it is about umbrellas, buses and falling in love in a queue. Who sings about such things now? (Here's a beautiful Bollywood song, circa 1975, also about a love affair that starts at a bus stop.)
There are a couple of interesting things in the Hollies' video. There's Graham Nash playing a Gibson Les Paul. I always thought "Bus Stop" was all acoustic guitars. (Interesting how different British bands captured the same electric guitar sounds. Right around this time (1965), you had Beatles with their bright, shiny, treble-y production, Yardbirds (and the Bluesbreakers) doing the blues/rock sound, Stones doing the muddy, blotchy guitar thing and then you had bands like the Hollies with their own gentle, folksy sound.)
Oh, then there's drummer Bobby Elliott doing a very Keith Moonesque cymbal crash at 1:59.
There's a lovely counterpoint guitar solo that Nash and the other guitarist play in "Bus Stop", very much in the vein of twin-guitar attacks by Iron Maiden or Metallica.
Could this sappy little pop song be the real Mother of Prog/Metal? Were there any other bands, circa 1964-65, excluding Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers, that had two lead guitars and played contrapuntal lines?
4 comments:
Nice video, but your link does not go to it.
Also, Table Tennis while smoking a pipe? It is so R.K.Narayan-meets-Jacques Tati. :) We need more movies like this.
Gah. *That* as the mother of prog/metal?
Can we gloss that over and go back to attributing everything good, heavy and with awesome solos and really, really low-tuned bass to Black Sabbath? :)
[PS: On the NY thing; 19/20 Oct are pretty much certain.]
VB: thanks for pointing out the wrong link. I've fixed it. And yeah, delightful man, that Ashok Kumar. Though I didn't think of the Tati connection there :)
Salil: way before Iommi drop-tuned his guitar to a D, there were a couple of others who did that too :)) But let me not get pedantic. Sabbath IS metal.
Those dates look pretty open. I'll shoot you an email.
Good point. My first thought was ABB, but they came a few years later. As far as I'm concerned, they're the ones that mastered the two-guitar thing first.
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