Entertainment For Lively Minds
Crap instrumental breaks...
Sorry if this has come up before, but I've been brooding over it for most of a 5-hr drive...
She's Not There by the Zombies popped up on the shuffle, on one of the rare occasions when the Dame allowed someone else to have a go. (Still a lot of work to do on Shuffle Probability Theory, IMHO.)
Great song, but oh, that instro break! A sudden tsunami of look-at-me electric piano noodlings, all over the place and nothing like what you want to hear. A great relief when he gets to that major chord and the song starts again. I thought Rod Argent was supposed to be good at that sort of thing?
That got me thinking about other ill-advised instrumental breaks in otherwise great songs. It's All Over Now comes to mind. A great chunk of Keef, but seems to belong in another song altogether - they swap that great loping beat for something much chunkier and four-square just to accommodate it.
Any other suggestions?
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Jimmy Page tried to channel the spirit of James Burton...
but unfortunately the conduit he used was full of shit. Yes, I speak of the guitar solo on Led Zeppelin's Hot Dog, which is so terrible it's almost brilliant.
Not crap, but definitely out of place...
...are the breaks in the middle of Squeeze's "Cool For Cats" and Ian Dury & The Blockheads' "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick". Whether it's Jools Holland's honky-tonk doodlings, or Davey Payne'sattack of Coltrane-lite, both of them seem to have been spliced in for no readily apparent reason and have nowt to do with the songs on whose beach they've washed up.
Of course, they're so familiar now that the songs wouldn't seem the same without them, but it's baffling why they were put there in the first place.
Payneful
Yes, the twinkling in Cool for cats is out of place. Literally shoehorned, into that great and atmospheric slice of South London life. Needs a change of pace there. But surely not Jools' New Orleans noodling, which hikes you into a different and much more optimistic place.
But the sax in the middle of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, is just complete crap surely. Meaningless and annoying, not expressing anything apart from "ey up, we can do pretentious too y'know."
Completely disagree
I take the sax break as the carnal filth interlude. Two shagging saxophones, click, click, click.
It's All Over Now
I've always really liked that Keef mini freak-out in the middle there, it was a pretty revolutionary single-note attack that must have been quite weird at the time.
Also you can amuse
yourself by imagining the crazy frugging Jagger would get up to during it.
Imagine no longer...
http://youtu.be/PtSRD9i1Vyg
'White Horses'...
...is otherwise sublime, but check out the uinstrumental break - french horn moving into electric guitar, from memory: it's clunky and dire. It was presumably a one-take sight-read session and sounds it.
The reggae interlude...
... on Live and Let Die. What were they thinking?
reggae insert
Isn't it a bit like the reggae bit in the middle of Elton's Lucy in the Sky? Bit strange there, too.
Most saxophone solos in pop and rock are really filler, IMHO. Exception made for Baker Street, where the sax riff is the defining element of the song; the guitar solo is exactly rightly placed at the end of the record, and is a kind of extra-serving that is very welcome.
Saxophone solos on Dark Side of the Moon were great at the time, but sound more dated than anything else on the album now, and notably, Waters and Gilmore haven't incorporated them on later solo projects. On the live albums, the saxophone entry is always greeted with adulation, but I suspect it's mostly for nostalgic reasons.
Henry McCullough...
...the lead guitarist in Wings at the time of L&LD once told me he could never quite play the reggae bit and consequently never bothered doing so onstage!
Err "Rock on one more time for Ringo"
at about 1:18 has always made me laugh out loud
I love She's Not There
...it's just the thing a swinging dolly bird would groove to in a with-it club
Fab!
So do I!
I love the song, it's only the solo I'm objecting to. But you've nailed it for me: it's a Look at Life Swinging London solo.
Thunderclap Newman "Something In The Air"
If you are in a room with a piano it is enevitable in time you will have a go. You just have to.**
This is especially true if you can't actually play the thing.
That's was this sounds like.
**This is also true with drumkits
3/4 of Light My Fire
is a crap instumental break.
Yep...........
.....one of the rare occasions where the (slightly clumsy) single edit improves the song immeasurably, but the only version that appears on CD is the LP version.
I always thought
the instrumental break in the middle of unguarded moment by The Church sounded like something a record company exec would put in to make the song more "now".
Leonard Cohen
The Bontempi organ stylee solo on Tower of Song is so bad it disproves every comment ever made about Uncle Len being depressing.
Apparently it's now 'iconic' but...
...the mini moog solo to ELP's Lucky Man is just dreadful. Sounds like a man wondering 'How does this work?' without any reference to key signatures. Which is seemingly what it was.
We might also ask if Rod Argent's mid-song noodling really added anything to Hold Your Head Up.
And as for Mountain's 30 minute live versions of Nantucket Sleighride...