[Mark Allinson]

O.K., this is a thread for Head-Bangers only, both young and old.

I remember when the 60's thing erupted, especially with the British bands, from Beatles to Led Zeppelin, and my father saying: "It's just a fad - it won't last more than a year or two".

Forty-five years later the world is still rocking. I know I am. I just can't seem to grow up and get comfortably numb. My skin still goes all goosey when I hear chunky power chords, big-bummed bass and snapping snares.

What the hell - I don't fight it. After all, Jagger is a few years older than me and he is still leaping and rocking, so why should I stop?

Anyway, paste your links to vids of chunky rock here.

To kick things off, here is my first contribution, the Oz band Grinspoon.

Click and turn your volume to 11.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmuD...eature=related

[Quincy Lehr]

Mark--

Where to begin?

On the subject of rocking out as such, here are the Drive-By Truckers. And few bands can really rock out like Motorhead.

If you like your rock a bit more atonal and unorthodox, King Crimson is still hard to beat after all these years. (Can't vouch for the video on this one, but the track is one of the all-time greats.)

And while on the prog theme, Van Der Graaf Generator is too often unjustly forgotten.

And for punk, there are some great bands, but Husker Du was one of the best, though fellow Minneapolis-St. Paul band The Replacements came close, though perhaps at a further remove from punk than the Huskers.

With post-punk, there were great bands from the U.S. such as Mission of Burma and groups from Britain like Wire.

Of course, a lot of the best rock in the 1990s was actually coming from alt-country bands such as Uncle Tupelo.

And while Horslips are hard to place genre-wise, they kicked serious butt.

But I could go on for hours with this, and maybe should just stop for now.

Quincy

[Orwn Acra]

Have you met ze monsta? I did. He came to me in the form of a beautiful woman wearing a pink jumpsuit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJTFEQTmPQ

[Mark Allinson]

Great stuff, fellas!

I am somewhat hampered by a dial-up, but I intend to play all the links here eventually.

Excellent fare, Quincy!

Yes, King Crimson - I am old enough to remember their advent with In the Court of the Crimson King! And what a line-up of members that band can boast of - a seminal band for sure.

Thanks for your link, Orwn. Yes, I like P.J. - is she encroaching on the pinkness of "Pink"?

One of my all-time favourite bands is the industrial strength rockers from East Germany - named after the air-base in Germany - Rammstein (hammer-stone). They sing mostly in German, and the lyrics to this song "Links" (Left) are interesting.

Here is a live version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hHE6TgaD7w

They sound like teutonic fascists but here is a translation of the lyrics:

Left 234

Can you break hearts
can hearts speak
can you torture hearts
can you steal hearts

They want my heart on the right side
but then I look below
it beats there on the left.

Can hearts sing
can a heart burst
can hearts be pure
can a heart be made of stone

They want my heart on the right side
but then I look below
it beats there on the left
left two three four left

Can you ask hearts
(can you) carry a child under yourself
can you give it away
(can you) think with your heart

They want my heart on the right side
but then I look below
it beats there in the left breast
the envious have not known it well

Left two three four left

[Quincy Lehr]

Mark--

In the Court of the Crimson King is a fine, incredibly influential album, but the link I posted is from the subsequent Fripp-Wetton-Bruford-Cross era, to which I am somewhat partial over the Greg Lake stuff. (How many bands have a run of studio albums like Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible-Black, and Red? Not many.)

[Mark Allinson]

Incredibly influential, King Crimson - named by Pete Sinfield, who wrote some fine lyrics too. Have you heard his Stillusion album?

I was looking back through the history of the band, and found this quote:

"Tool are widely held to have been heavily influenced by King Crimson, with their vocalist Maynard James Keenan even joking on a tour with them that 'Now you know who we ripped off. Just don't tell anyone, especially the members of King Crimson'".

[David Landrum]

Blast from the Past, Mountain, "Mississippi Queen." Mountain's first album, Climbing was, in my opinion, a rock masterpiece--very early seventies, raw, not particularly well produced, but great stuff. Here's their signature hit from that cut:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl6fL...eature=related

dwl

[Shaun J. Russell]

Jesus. I never thought I'd see a thread on a poetry thread featuring Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson. There was a time I would have called VdGG my favorite band ever...especially for their first four albums. Pawn Hearts is still among my faves.

I've got about 850 CDs, and a solid third or more of those are from the sixties and seventies, punctuated by Rush, Yes, Queen, VdGG, Yes, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Strawbs, Renaissance, Jethro Tull, Procul Harum and a bunch of others I'm surely missing. I don't think I could even scratch the surface of great older material, but some of the newer hard-edge stuff I enjoy would include:

The New Pornographers

Metric

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Queens Of The Stone Age

Anathema

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I'm afraid that YouTube quality is abysmal, but I'm also a bit of a snob when it comes to sound quality...

There's lots of other great current music out there as well...too much to even touch on! Great thread Mark!


Edited to add: and Quincy, those are my favorite three KC albums too. Apparently one or two of them (I can't recall which) were recorded live, with the audience sound edited out. I was absolutely stupefied when I learned that, as I'd known and loved the album as technical marvels for years prior. Knowing that the level of precision was carried out LIVE...man. There are no words.

[Mark Allinson]

Thanks for that contribution, Shaun.

Yes, Queens of the Stone age do some fine stuff.

Quincy, that Husker Du track suggests to me that you should have been in London with me in the late 70s. But I suppose you weren’t even a zygote in those days. It was a fantastic time, and here are some of the bands I recall seeing in pubs and clubs, very much like that H.D. track:

The Buzzcocks, Sore Throat, Punishment of Luxury, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshhes, Wire, Stiff Little Fingers, U.K. Subs, The Stranglers, Doll by Doll, and many, many more.

Born in ’47 meant that I was about 15 when The Beatles broke – and then the avalanche of talent that followed, and too many bands to name. What a time it was!

And when my time is up, I think I might go like Chairman Mao does in this comedy sketch from “Big Train”, rising from my death-bed to do a Roxy Music tune:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNBOknvbPL8

[Rory Waterman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4qTi7cDtI4

Ahem.