grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
And I respect it. I find you aren't necessarilly a man of many words but when you do have something to say, it's usually worth reading.
And I can dig that too, partly because when I first thought about actually playing music, I never thought or rarely thought about writing my own stuff. I just wanted to do the songs I liked. But once I got the idea to write my own, covers just never became part of my thought process. For me, the best versions are the ones I dig and already listen to. I'm hardly going to add anything of worth and neither do I want to try.
Interestingly, I played and sang in church bands of various guises for 22 years and for the most part, you have to play covers {
}. One good thing about that was that most of the time I never had to hear the original version, either because it was written 300 years previous or because I'd just say to whoever 'just play me the song on piano/guitar and we'll add our own flavour'. On the few occasions I heard a record of one of those numbers, I always thought it was twee and I used to laugh. I was always so much more aggressive.
It's funny, I feel completely the opposite. So often when people ask for a critique of their singing or song, it's a cover. I find that there's a healthy respect for covers. In the guitar tone thread for instance, much of the guitar pieces were covers.
Don't get me wrong, there were. There still are !When you say 60's do you mean the 1960's?Some of us go back a lot farther than that. I would say there were plenty of great songs before then
But it's undeniable fact that most, the overwhelming majority, of artists that made records or played concerts prior to the mid 60s did not write their own stuff. That's how places like the Brill building, the "he wrote the lyrics, he did the music" and "Holland/Dozier/Holland at Motown" type scenarios became legendary. There were people who wrote songs for a living. But they rarely made records. Young people that wrote songs and actually performed them are so rare in the history of popular music up until then.
And so it follows that as more people wrote their own stuff, it would add to the number of great stuff already out there.
It was harsh in relation to where the OP was coming from but not in general. I totally agree with you about egos.
I remember a phrase that I came across in a biography on Eric Clapton back in 1979. In it the writer, John Pidgen, was describing how he got tired of endless jamming in gigs with Cream and was really struck by the music on the Band's first album, "Music at Big Pink" and what he describes as "the egoless unity of their playing" {George Harrison, fast getting tired of life in the Beatles went through the same thing}.
Fast forward 25 years and I'm reading Levon Helm's autobiography "This wheel's on fire" and if there was any to start with, that egoless unity soon disappeared ! I have read thousands of books/interviews and seen hundreds of documentaries on artists/bands and ego has gotten in the way, whether to a greater or lesser extent in virtually every single case, at some point.
It's almost like it can't not get in the way !
There have been gazillions of good bands or artists {perhaps they were only good for one album or one year or one decade} that never did well ! As we all know, public tastes, ours included, are about what one likes, not intrinsically "what is good". What we like, we consider to be good.
