…she should know wrong from right.
(and this is just wrong)
You might not know it to listen to DWLB records but I’m a classic rock kid to a great extent. REO Speedwagon, Boston, Styx and Journey were a big part of the soundtrack of my early teens. For years that’s been an uncool thing to talk about, and it seems the only time one hears any of their music outside nostalgia radio is when a bar full of White Sox fans sing “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Recently though, the new “shuffle play” radio stations have been bringing much of this music back, and in one instance I’m a little puzzled and somewhat miffed.
The Journey double-single “Feelin’ That Way/Anytime” is what I’m taking about. It was classic rock candy for Journey fans when that first song would come on, because you always knew you’d hear two Journey tunes back-to-back (I am talking about 12-year-olds here). And this was back before Escape, when Gregg Rolie was still in the band, and the Steve Perry era was just getting started. When the combination of an amazing lead singer and a strong group of backup singers led to rich, thick vocal arrangements that somehow vanished when Jonathon Cain replaced Rolie after the double-live Captured record. You can hear the inter-band tension on these two tracks as Rolie struggles to keep his presence in the face of Perry’s vastly superior vocal ability; the duets are carefully arranged but there’s no getting around the fact that Rolie, the weaker singer, is obviously double-tracked and Perry needs no such studio crutch. It must have been tough; Rolie was, after all, the guy who sang on Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” and who was this head-voice upstart usurping his position as lead vocalist? Can’t we be a two-lead-singer band like the Beatles? Alas, it was not to be. But the lush harmonies on the choruses make it all okay…and the a capella ending of “Feelin’ That Way” gives way to the a capella opening of “Anytime” and the delicious drama starts all over.
But wait. The opening chorus is supposed to be in time with the song, there’s this awesome rest between the first line and the second that creates a fantastic tension…but not on JACK FM, no sir! They’ve cut the rest in half, the second line comes in two beats too soon, totally blowing the groove of the intro. What’s going on here, guys? Two more counts of radio silence is too much for you? You think your listeners will get bored during that one second and switch the dial? You must have felt strongly enough about it to load the song into your computer and make the edit. It’s completely silly. You made a completely unmusical edit for…well, for no good reason, apparently. To quote the late Orson Welles, come on, fellas, you’re losing your heads here.
In his car, Joe has a 6-CD changer, 12 radio presets and a short attention span. He primarily listens to NPR.
