Jon Lord

Okay, I'll admit that this blog entry is more reflective of my influences than necessarily the other guys in Rule 17. I'm the biggest Deep Purple nut in the bunch, so the passing of Jon Lord bothers me the same way losing any big musical influence bothers you. While I'm trying to avoid putting too much non-band-related stuff in this blog, I have to admit that without Jon Lord, Rule 17 would either not exist or would be musically somewhat different than it is.

Musicians are the products of their influences along with whatever percentage of themselves they bring to the table. Most of us could probably list 20 other musicians who influenced us in some degree within a few minutes. In that sense, the musicians from a previous generation almost have some level of parentage to those of us in the generations that follow.

When one of your influences passes on, it takes a bit out of you. In some ways, it’s more understandable when you look at the shocking and tragic deaths of young musicians, particularly when they seem random like the crashes that killed Ronnie Van Zant, Cliff Burton, and Randy Rhoads; or the senseless shooting of Darrel Abbott. But time rolls on and, I hate to say it, but as we get older so do our heroes.

This was the case with Jon Lord who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 71. Granted, I’d be hard-pressed to call 71 years a particularly long life, especially in this day and age. But after his retirement from Deep Purple in 2002, and even after his diagnosis, Jon Lord was still making music...and it was good music.

Jon Lord is responsible for giving me a case of “Hammond envy” that has not subsided since I first started actively listening to Deep Purple in the early 1990s. To be honest, I started listening because of Ritchie Blackmore, but it didn’t take long for my attention to turn to the real weight of the band, which was Jon Lord hammering away on a Hammond B or C3 through a distorted Marshall stack. The power of the combination dwarfed most of the distorted guitar sounds of the day. The harmonic content generated by the tonewheels of the Hammond created all sorts of interesting growls and textures, which he would further accentuate with ring modulation, shutting off the drive motor and leaving the amplifier on, which allowed him to “divebomb”, and shaking the Hammond itself to make horrendous “Crashes” of the spring reverb that would place a jarring exclamation point at the end of a jazz or R&B influenced run. In this sense, he was something of a Hendrix of the Hammond.

At the same time, he was a very schooled musician, well versed in the orthodoxy of the classical world. The second Deep Purple lineup is probably the most well-known, although it’s not particularly well known for its earliest output, which was built around Lord’s “Concerto for Group and Orchestra”, which was followed up by “the Gemini Suite”. In fact, prior to the release of “In Rock”, Deep Purple risked being pigeonholed as a quasi-classical sort of prog-rock experiment. Ritchie Blackmore is most often cited as the one who brought classical music into heavy rock, but Jon Lord deserves at least equal credit. Due to the nature of the instrument and his musical background, it wasn’t at all unusual for little bits of Bach to show up in a blistering, 120 decibel keyboard solo.

Of course, Lord’s musical output greatly exceeded his pioneering work in Deep Purple, but that’s definitely the element that drew me in. I can’t honestly say that there’s another modern keyboard player who has had a similar influence on my guitar playing in the sense of composition, phrasing, even tone. Realistically, speaking as a guitarist, the guitar players in classic bands tend to get too much credit for the band’s sound. John Bonham had as much or more to do with Zeppelin being heavy as Jimmy Page. Geezer Butler should get as much credit for the sonic weight of Black Sabbath as Tony Iommi. And Jon Lord added much more weight to the Purple sound than Ritchie Blackmore ever did - even if “going heavy” was Blackmore’s idea in the first place.

So farewell, Jon Lord. He did good work, and even though he wasn’t young, when the good die we very quickly realize how much they still had to offer.

Upcoming shows

Well, things are moving along quite nicely here in Rule 17 Land. We’re taking a little “summer vacation” for the rest of July and the first part of August, then our schedule of a gig a month starts in August.

On August 18th, we play the Shoreham Block Party, which should be a great time. It’s out by Detroit Lakes, right off the lake - we'll have directions available. It’ll be a nice “end of summer” type of gig. It’s open to the public, so if you want to go just B.Y.O.B. and a few bucks to chip in for paying the bands. Chris’ other band “Relevant” will be playing after Rule 17, and that show will be my final performance with “Back For More”.

Moving into September, we’ll be headlining two nights at Rick’s Bar in Fargo - September 21 and 22. We’re really looking forward to being able to play a whole lot more of our songs, since every show up to this point has been in the one hour range, and we have nearly two hours worth of songs. The extra time, plus the extra night gives us the opportunity to play with song selections and setlists a little bit more so we can offer a different show on Saturday night than on Friday night.

On October 20, we will be playing at the Nestor, which was the site of the final 7th Seal show in 2008.
More details about other bands and whatnot are forthcoming. This will be another full night for us, and once again we look forward to being able to play more new and new-to-us material for everybody.

If you have any ideas for places that you'd like to see us play, just leave a comment below!

Gig recap: June 30, 2012

So, it's been a week since Rule 17 officially played the last note of our "first" gig. Special thanks go out to everybody who came out to support us, and also to Vindictus for inviting us to play.

So, the last note was played, and it was hot - really hot. The four of us sweatballs hustled to get our stuff off the stage so Vindictus could get rolling, and the thought immediately crossed my mind: this is totally worth it.












Economics being what they are, we probably broke even money-wise that night. We intend to ultimately turn that around somewhat, but the important thing is what the real payoff was. We had a blast, and played pretty well too. Ultimately, that's what keeps you wanting to play music. There's a lot of work involved, and it's easy to get done with a set and wind up thinking, "well, that went okay". Nobody does all that work to wind up with "okay". Nobody writes a song hoping that it'll be "fine". Nobody spends years of their lives practicing an instrument in hopes that their playing is "competent", and nobody spends hours sweating in a humid basement with the desire to play a show that is "good enough". The Rick's show wasn't "good enough", it was just plain fun.

That all being said, we are planning on adding some more dates through the fall. We are finally moving into the position where we will have more material than we need for a given night, and intend to keep adding to that list. As I mentioned in the previous blog posting, there are a lot of new original songs to work up. Further, there are a lot more ideas for fun covers to do than we will ever have time to work up. That means that we will soon be able to offer considerably different sets for different nights. On June 30, we did a 7th Seal-heavy set, with a couple of newer originals and a couple of covers. Other nights, we might play more covers, or we might focus on new originals. Changing it up makes it more fun for the audience and for the band.

After all, if it's not fun, why bother?

Summertime's here babe, need something to keep you cool...

Well, Summertime will be here by the time we play. That's right, we're actually booking some shows. Thus far, it's June 30 with Vindictus at Rick's Bar and then possibly something in August out at the lakes. Our goal is to be playing once per month in various venues around the area, then pick up a few out-of-town dates once we have our sets solidified.

I know I've mentioned this before, but this lineup hasn't played live since the summer of 2008 - almost 4 years exactly. To the casual observer, it may seem that we pretty much played our last show, wrote and recorded 3 songs, and did little else other than repeatedly change the band name and lineup. A little bit about the writing process was addressed in the previous entry, but the other week local music maven Scot Heinze asked me a question that I'd never been asked before.

"How many songs have you guys written, including the stuff from 7th Seal?" I had to think about it for a few moments. In 7th Seal, we did 9 originals live at various points, 7 of which made the album.

Veracity
Genocide
Dusk
Original Sin
Spitting Lies
Out the Door
7th Seal
Dystopia
Blood on Your Head
(You can hear what studio versions were recorded here: (7th Seal)

I think we did Dystopia a couple of times live before we decided that it either wasn't gelling, or just wasn't a good live tune. It wound up becoming a "parts tune" instead of making the Conspiracies of Thieves album. I might have to revisit that one, because a couple of the riffs were pretty cool.

"Blood On Your Head" became "Awake". It was the first song that we worked up after Chris Fritz joined us, and we played it at the last two 7th Seal shows.

Since then, we added:

Act of Defiance
In the Wake of Fear
Waste Away
Perfect World
Another Life
(You can hear a couple studio versions here: (Rule 17)

These have all been played live in one form or another by all the lineups of "Act of Defiance". It was after this point that we've had to play some catch-up, so the following two have been added; Beyond and Inversion.

We still have to run these two through the final QC processes, so they won't be ready for the 30th. All told, that's 16 songs, with another 9 on the "to be learned" pile.

SO! We're doing an hour on the 30th at Rick's Bar with Vindictus. We're going to play a selection of these tunes (both from the 7th Seal era and after) in a way that we haven't before. Most of the set hasn't been heard since 2008, so it'll be fun to knock the cobwebs off the old tunes.

Hope to see you there!

A Song is Born

I thought it might be interesting to post how a song gets created. Naturally, anybody who writes music has a different method. Heck, I don't do the same thing every time. Some songs almost write themselves. Some just become "parts songs", where you have some neat ideas but they never jell. With us, a song typically starts with a couple of guitar riffs.

Back when I first started writing, I relied on playing a part until it was burned into my memory, or recording it on a 1970s vintage GE tape recorder. Later, I moved on to 4-track tape recording and eventually to using the computer.

The computer has completely revolutionized writing music. In the past, recording consisted of micing up my amp, setting the levels on the track, making a rough plan of which part would be on which track, hooking up a click source, setting the tempo, then actually going through and hitting "Record" and hoping I didn't screw up to the point where what I had initially set out to record was unrecognizable. Roughing out a song arrangement was worse, because you pretty much needed one instrument running through the whole thing so that you could get your cues. The relative ease of computer recording has led to me creating hours of guitar riffs. This is the root from which a lot of songs start, or at least get their parts.

So, here's a guided tour through the creation of the song "Act of Defiance".

This first clip is from the "first" actual rendering of the tune. Parts show up in other demos, but this would get to be a terribly long post if I posted every little bit and piece. The big differences are the lack of "punchy" parts at the beginning and end, the length of the solo sections, an extra harmony section at 2:50 that wound up in the middle section of "Perfect World", and another harmony bit at 4:05. I play both solos, somewhat poorly, just as "placeholders". With the verses, choruses, and extra sections, the original wound up being about 8 minutes long (I trimmed it significantly for this so it'd be easier to listen through).

Act of Defiance Mk 1


The second clip is from the first rehearsal where we worked out the arrangement. Arrangement-wise, this is the first rendering that's pretty much like the eventual demo. The process was fairly extensive, but pretty simple: record, listen, change, lather, rinse, and repeat. You can hear where we dumped the two harmony sections and final verse. One guitar goes off-track at the end, largely due to the number of changes we had made to the last part of the song right before recording this. There are no lyrics. I'm babbling "labba jai, gabba flibberty-doo" and that sort of thing for the duration of it, just to test out vocal rhythms and so we know where the lyrics are supposed to go (that can be tricky when starting with a pile of guitar riffs). Recording was done "Boombox-style" on a Korg Pandora. It's no Dark Side of the Moon, but good enough for arranging.

Act of Defiance - first rehearsal recording


And here's the final "demo" version. When the time comes to do an actual album recording, I can't imagine that there will be many changes - possibly a word or two in the lyrics or a couple notes in the solos.

Act of Defiance - Final Demo


So, take that times however many songs we're doing, and that's more or less how they come together. The most time-consuming part is the second phase, where there's a whole lot of listening and discussion of what works and what doesn't. It's also the most important for ensuring that the final product is as good as we, as a group, can make it.

Subgenrefication

This blog was originally going to be all about Rule 17. Then I deleted it all and started it over, just so I could rant.

Once upon a time, people got together and started bands. Most bands were assembled to play hit songs for people to dance to. Some people assembled groups of musicians to see what would happen when they wrote original music. Some people had a vision of the type of music that they wanted to do, and hand-picked the right people for the job.

The legendary rock bands of the past and present seem to have been built around a combination of the second and third types. Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Queen, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult...the list goes on and on. These bands are all very influential, share a level of internal stylistic similarity, and yet are diverse in their influences and in their output. At the same time, they always sounded like themselves. If you hear a song from any of the aforementioned groups, it takes a matter of moments before you figure out who it is.

Today, particularly in the realm of hard rock and into heavier, more extreme styles, the goal seems to have been to decide very finitely on the direction of the band, then point everybody in that direction. This has been particularly true in the realm of heavy metal, which has fractured into a hodge-podge of subgenres with only a trifling difference between them. You have the "-cores", the various death metal subgenres, the various "regular metal" subgenres, and probably tons more that I'm not aware of.

It started in the 80s as ambitious rock journalists tried to fit handy labels to describe various bands. New adjectives started cropping up. To a degree they were useful, but there wound up being so much overlap that more adjectives started getting added to the mix. I have yet to discover a "Thrash" band that didn't stylistically play something that could be called "Speed Metal", and vice versa. Bands like Possessed and Kreator blurred the lines between extreme "Thrash" and "Death" metal, before the notion of death grunts were totally incorporated. So, "Death Metal" became a style distinct from Thrash, mostly due to the vocal difference (at this point, most Thrash vocalists still sang to varying degrees).

Eventually, you wound up with "Progressive" Thrash Metal, "Technical" Death Metal, and "Power Metal" became a term to describe bands that more or less are like a 20bpm faster version of Iron Maiden with newer amps. "Black Metal" originally meant bands like Mercyful Fate or Venom that sang about the devil a lot. Eventually, it became an aesthetic that was associated with a handful of Norwegian bands from the early 1990s.

From here, we wound up with an incestuous cross-pollination of subgenres, where black metal wound up influencing death metal, and you wound up with "Blackened Death Metal." So, is that Death Metal about the devil, Death Metal played while wearing makeup, or Death Metal played while the singer screeches a bit higher rather than in the more traditional guttural Death Metal delivery? I honestly don't know. If it's the first, then Possessed could just as easily have been a "Blackened Death Metal" band 25 years ago. If it's the second, it's just silly. If it's the third, then I guess we could have called the later period of Death "Technical Progressive Blackened Death Metal." I'd like to add a "-core" to the end, just to make it even more absurd.

It hasn't just hit extreme metal, either. "Doom", "Stoner", "Groove", and other terms have been used to the point of complete meaninglessness. I've mentioned how silly I think the term "Power Metal" is, and adding the word "Progressive" only makes it worse. We can pretty much drop the term "Progressive" from any band that we already say plays "Metal", because all of the originators of the "Metal" style came from the same scene that gave birth to Progressive Rock (Purple, Zeppelin, Sabbath), or were influenced by Progressive Rock (Priest, Maiden). I think it would be more appropriate to refer to ultra-simple metal as "Regressive Metal", since that would be the exception to the norm anyway.

So, what does this have to do with Rule 17? Those of you who have been listening to the 3-song demo that the 4 of us made have been hearing the result of 4 different people interpreting the same basic tune. I wrote the basis of all of the songs that we do (same as with the 7th Seal album for the most part). But, I don't decide how the drums go. I don't hammer out exactly how the bass lines should go. I don't dictate how the arrangement should go. Troy and I work out the guitar parts in the way that they seem to work best. I write guitar parts and lyrics and then as a band we work out how it should flow, how it should sound, where it should be punchy, and where it should lay back.

Going back to the beginning of this blog, my ideal is that Rule 17 is four guys heading in roughly the same musical direction - a combination of type 2 and type 3. I have no desire to play "Bla-bla-bla-metal". In a lot of ways, I identify more with Lemmy when he says "We're Motorhead, and we play Rock n' Roll".