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I had no reason to question why Guns N' Roses covered music from other artists. I've always hear the original composer gets 50% of the royalties. I blogged about this before as music of the 50's often were covered many times by lots of no-name artists looking for exposure.
It was just a boost as we already know guns N' Roses. Last year, I heard on my local classic rock station they were asked by Dylan to record the song as he was broke and needed some royalty money.
Last week, it was reported Bob Dylan sold his song catalog to Universal Media Group to an undisclosed amount. People on the grapevine are saying it's around $300 million.
Hearing songs like this makes me feel love is magical..
Cover songs can be good or not so good depending on your taste in music and the quality of the song being remade. A friend of mine yesterday put this song on my Facebook timeline and I have to say it is one of the best remakes I have ever heard, To top that off the band doing the remake is from The Ukraine and their English is near perfect. Without further ado, enjoy Leonid & Friends doing Chicago's 25 Or 6 To 4.
From Wikipedia;
In response to:
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner was born on 2 October 1951, in Wallsend, Northumberland, England, the eldest of four children of Audrey (née Cowell), a hairdresser, and Ernest Matthew Sumner, a milkman and engineer. He grew up near Wallsend's shipyards, which made an impression on him. At eight or ten years old, he was inspired by the Queen Mother waving at him from a Rolls-Royce to divert from the shipyard prospect towards a more glamorous life. He helped his father deliver milk and by ten was "obsessed" with an old Spanish guitar left by an emigrating friend of his father.
He attended St Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne. He visited nightclubs such as Club A'Gogo to see Cream and Manfred Mann, who influenced his music. After being a bus conductor, building labourer and tax officer, he attended Northern Counties College of Education (now Northumbria University) from 1971 to 1974 and qualified as a teacher. He taught at St Paul's First School in Cramlington for two years.
Sting performed jazz in the evening, weekends and during breaks from college and teaching. He played with the Phoenix Jazzmen, Newcastle Big Band, and Last Exit. He gained his nickname after his habit of wearing a black and yellow sweater with hooped stripes with the Phoenix Jazzmen. Bandleader Gordon Solomon thought he looked like a bee (or according to Sting himself, "they thought I looked like a wasp"), which prompted the name "Sting". In the 1985 documentary Bring on the Night a journalist called him Gordon, to which he replied, "My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting, who is this Gordon character?" In 2011, he told Time that "I was never called Gordon. You could shout 'Gordon' in the street and I would just move out of your way."
He was the principal songwriter, lead singer, and bassist for the new wave rock band the Police from 1977 to 1984, and launched a solo career in 1985.
He has included elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new-age and worldbeat in his music. As a solo musician and a member of the Police, he has received 17 Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year for "Every Breath You Take", three Brit Awards, including Best British Male in 1994 and Outstanding Contribution in 2002, a Golden Globe, an Emmy and four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2002, he received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Police in 2003. In 2000, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for recording. In 2003, Sting received a CBE from Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for services to music. He was made a Kennedy Center Honoree at the White House in 2014, and was awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2017.
With the Police, Sting became one of the world's best-selling music artists. Solo and with the Police combined, he has sold over 100 million records. In 2006, Paste ranked him 62nd of the 100 best living songwriters. He was 63rd of VH1's 100 greatest artists of rock, and 80th of Q magazine's 100 greatest musical stars of the 20th century. He has collaborated with other musicians on songs such as "Money for Nothing" with Dire Straits, "Rise & Fall" with Craig David, "All for Love", with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, "You Will Be My Ain True Love" with Alison Krauss, and introduced the North African music genre raï to Western audiences through his international hit "Desert Rose" with Cheb Mami. In 2018, he released the album 44/876, a collaboration with Jamaican musician Shaggy, which won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album in 2019.
Pure unadulterated talent
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Music of The Beatles changed my life. Sure other artists influenced me too, but it's said The Beatles were inspired from many of the American musical artists.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bob Dylan to name a few.
Oddly, I never really followed the music of the musicians who influenced The Beatles. What a concept!
Early Beatles trivia I learned was from the album covers and 'teen' magazines that were filled with stupid things unrelated to their music. Like, Ringo's birthday or John's favorite color and had little or nothing to do with the music.
Usually on the weekends, I immerse myself in YouTube videos. Sometimes they are instructional, or science related... but there is always room for music and a few documentaries about musicians.
It seems the more I research things about The Beatles, the more I realize what little I really knew along the way.
55+ years later I found out that Abby Road Studios was really EMI studios. I knew that the recording equipment in America was far superior to what was in use in England at the time and I'm not sure why they didn't import those tape recording machines.
EMI studio was setup to have full musical scores used in movie soundtracks. One large room where a symphony of 40 musicians, lots of microphones and a control panel would record as though the listener were present in a live performance. Sound was recorded to 4-track machines. That means while recording, 4 discreet channels could be filled. Let's say drums, bass and rhythm guitar could be on the first track, piano and lead guitar on the second track, main vocal on the third track and backing vocals on the fourth track. That's it. If something wasn't right, either a mistake or a wrong recording level, the entire track had to be done again... including all the instruments or voices on that track. That would take days to perfect one song.
What happened then is, after each take was right, the recording engineer would 'mix down' the good parts to another 4-track machine so they have room for more parts. Maybe sound effects or orchestra arrangements added to the original recording. Often I would read about the original tapes used to create other versions of a song that would be decided later which version would make it to a record. Remastered is a word to describe when they make a new version (mix) using the original tapes.
I know all of this 'technology' existed, I didn't know exactly how it was applied to each song of every album. It originally came as a surprise, but it's been documented and there are lots of recording engineers who have all that information.
Many recording studios in the United States used 8-track recording machines giving a track for each voice or instrument. An example, if the piano track had a mistake, they only had to rerecord that one part and not an entire section where drums, guitar and piano shared a single track.
Paul McCartney made famous a bass guitar manufactured by the German company Höfner. It had a unique hollow body violin appearance, 30" long scale and he was seen in all live performances with that bass guitar. He also used a British VOX amplifier by Jennings Musical Instruments.
The song 'Come Together' was recorded in 1969 and to my ear, the bass guitar didn't sound like a Höfner. I later learned McCartney had switched to an American made Rickenbacker with a solid body, 34" long scale and an American made Fender bass amplifier. Much of his later recordings and performances with Wings had his Rickenbacker bass with Mesa-Boogie amplification.
The Beatles music changed with a few short years. It evolved from the live band sound to a more complex studio band, probably due to many factors... that included their experiments with psychedelic drugs, study of Eastern philosophy and the use of recording machines that could vary speed/pitch, double track for added voices, playback in reverse.
That brings me to the 1966 album REVOLVER...
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