Guitar
I just saw a Facebook ad for a Steve Hackett album that touts him as the guitarist in Genesis and GTR. I was a little surprised to see the GTR moniker being mentioned as a feather in Hackett's career cap, given the many jokes that followed J.D. Considine's infamous one-word review of their album in Musician magazine: "SHT". That pithy review is the most famous of Considine's long career as a music critic and was an echo of the gag in This Is Spinal Tap where Marty DiBergi recounts to the band the two-word review for their album Shark Sandwich: "Shit Sandwich."
That's hard to get over.
GTR, active from 1985 to 1987, was a supergroup that combined the talents of legendary seventies prog rock guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. According to the Wikipedia article, the goal was to have a guitar and guitar synthesizer-driven band with hooky stadium hit songs. When the band went on the road, though, the late 80s guitar synthesizer technology let them down with its slow, buggy tracking of actual guitar playing and they had to add a keyboard player. GTR is coming into the picture as a hapless one-album band.
But that one album on Arista was certified gold and reached #11 on the album charts. "When The Heart Rules The Mind" was a hit single (and an oft-played MTV staple on video) that stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks. The Yes fans and Genesis fans who were the base for the live concerts were generally disappointed, though, with Max Bacon's voice and the large amount of filler on the album. The base would also have been disappointed with the slick commerciality of the music and the lack of particularly interesting guitar parts. And not long into the commercial success of GTR, Hackett left the band. According to Wikipedia,
Pretty tuneless stuff, if you ask me. But show me a hit single today that begins with 42 seconds of instrumental intro.
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- Shame, The Sequel: Guitar Synths.
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Guitar
GTR and shame.
That's hard to get over.
GTR, active from 1985 to 1987, was a supergroup that combined the talents of legendary seventies prog rock guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. According to the Wikipedia article, the goal was to have a guitar and guitar synthesizer-driven band with hooky stadium hit songs. When the band went on the road, though, the late 80s guitar synthesizer technology let them down with its slow, buggy tracking of actual guitar playing and they had to add a keyboard player. GTR is coming into the picture as a hapless one-album band.
But that one album on Arista was certified gold and reached #11 on the album charts. "When The Heart Rules The Mind" was a hit single (and an oft-played MTV staple on video) that stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks. The Yes fans and Genesis fans who were the base for the live concerts were generally disappointed, though, with Max Bacon's voice and the large amount of filler on the album. The base would also have been disappointed with the slick commerciality of the music and the lack of particularly interesting guitar parts. And not long into the commercial success of GTR, Hackett left the band. According to Wikipedia,
Subsequent to an abortive lineup change in 1987, Hackett left GTR, stating it had been "interesting for about five minutes". He once said of the group, "There are artistic limitations with any successful band and it was a successful band."This Hackett fansite gives a more sanguine account, though the bio is ten years out of date. Steve Howe, seeing no point in going on without Hackett, abandoned sessions for GTR's never-completed second album, and that was that. Hackett went on as a solo artists and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis. He has lately revisited his Genesis-era material as is nowadays common among the baby boomers' favorite musicians. This is his official website, hackettsongs.com, rather than stevehackett.com, which is owned and run by Steve's former manager.
Pretty tuneless stuff, if you ask me. But show me a hit single today that begins with 42 seconds of instrumental intro.
- More Sketches
music of the week: I recently discovered a great album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp by Giles, Giles and Fripp - you may never have heard of this band but they would later rename themselves King Crimson after a slight personal change....
- More Sketches
I've decided to cheer up my guitar sketches posts with a few lines about music - more exactly about the music I listen to while drawing. Most of the time I listen to many kinds of music on the radio or social networks, so I will focus...
- Cds Non Reviews: The Cds I Bought In The Last Months #2
As I’m currently travelling on some remote island, with no scanner and limited access to the Internet, it’s the perfect time for a new batch of vaguely reviewed CDs. Like last time, there are too many of them for real reviews, and again I insist...
- Cds Non Reviews: The Cds I Bought In The Last Months...
Last year I started to review some CDs, and I planed to go on, very subjectively and only about the stuff I'm interested in, but I failed at that - started some then postponed and now there are too many to do it seriously but without turning it into...
- Shame, The Sequel: Guitar Synths.
Confession time: for a couple of years in the early nineties, I owned and played a guitar synthesizer. Oh, the shame. How did this happen, and how did playing a guitar synthesizer become so shameful? Let's start at the start. Guitar...