Musical Nooz from NPR

[captainsblog]

Long day today, from here to Rochester to Syracuse and back in just under eight hours. Therefore, lots of time spent in the car. As the Buffalo sports-talk station faded and, with it, its agitas about the Sabres' do-or-die game tonight (they're leading! this minute! yay! but the Crapitals are also leading! boo! but beating Florida! who we could still pass if they lose out! yay!), I wound up finding out that WRUR carries almost all the way to the 'Cuse.

Early in the drive, I discovered a World Cafe segment featuring an Edmonton punk band called Propagahndi.  Eleanor and I have had a long-running joke about a particularly odd phrase being "a good name for a band." Well, this? Is not only a good name for a band, it IS the name of a band.  I did get wondering, though, about the motivation in the Western Canadian prairie for punk. "It's cold, eh?"  "Our hockey team sucks since we lost Gretzky, eh?" That's about all I can come oop with.

On the way home, they were simulcasting All Things Considered, but even that wound up on a musical note, when Scott read an obituary for Jim Marshall, who died today in England at the age of 88. He was the father of the Marshall amp, famed among rockers of the 60s and onward for their inherent ability to boldly go to eleven where no amps had gone before. The story replayed a Fresh Air interview with Pete Townshend, who may have been the first to lay hands on the beast:

Townsend said that he went into Marshall's shop because he was unsatisfied with the two American-made amps he had been using. " 'The trouble is that I can hear the audience,' " Townsend said he told Marshall. " 'I can hear what they're saying. I don't want to hear them, OK?' And I said, 'So I need something bigger and louder.' And his eyes lit up."

For Townsend, Marshall amplifiers were a signal of more than just volume.

"I realized at that moment that what was actually happening was that I was demanding a more powerful machine gun, and Jim Marshall was going to build it for me and then we were going to go out and blow people away all around the world. And the generation we were going to blow away was the generation immediately preceding us, the ones who had the gall to tell us that we were wimps because we had long hair, wimps because we didn't have wars to fight in, wimps because we couldn't prove ourselves in military service, because we didn't have it," Townsend said. "Everybody wanted it to be bigger, louder. I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been."

After more than 30 years of my life digging The Who and various Pete projects, I'd say he blowed up real good.

The piece also recounted how Jimi Hendrix set his own guitar on fire during a Monterey Pop gig, which he put out by smashing it into the equipment, all of which was pretty much destroyed.... except for the Marshall amp.  Dude knew what needed to be saved.

As does Ryan Miller, as of this slightly later moment:)