A fun look at harcore music geeks

I consider myself a music geek so it was fun to hear a Soundcheck interview with Steve Almond, author of "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life."

Almond is a bit more over the top in his music passion than I am but I do share his unabashed appreciation of guilty pleasures. I too owned a few Styx and Toto albums back in the day, and still consider Side 1 of Toto's "Hydra" well worth my time. Drummers know what I'm talking about.

I've downloaded a sample of the book onto my Kindle. I'll let you know what I think, but 17 customer reviews so far peg it at 4.5 stars.

"How to wreck a nice beach"

Souncheck has a fun and illuminating segment on the vocoder that tracks the history of the technology from Trans-Atlantic communication and military security to pop-music abuse by the likes of Cher and T-Pain.

Dave Tompkins is author of "How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks" -- the core title is a play on bad translation of "How to recognize speech" -- and chronicles all kinds of wrinkles on a technology that started out to clean up speech but now is used artistically to distort speech.

From the book's website:

"We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, 'We must go off!' "

Fascinating stuff. Let's hope society takes the vocoder back in a better direction, such as restoring voice to people, like film critic Roger Ebert, who can no longer speak.

Gotta “stick” up for my fellow drummers

Soundcheck has a semi-lame/semi-enjoyable “Smackdown” on drummers, subtitled “Heart of the Band ... Or Butt of the Joke?”

As a former drummer, you can guess which side of the debate I’m on. Don’t get me started about guitarists who think “11” is a starting point or lead singers who think they’re all that (Charlie Watts reputedly punched out Mick Jagger after Mick introduced him as “my drummer”; Watts was said to have replied, “No, you’re my singer”).

The "Smackdown" at its core taps into a perception that’s more real than you think, as evidenced by many of the 80+ comments, but ultimately devolves into hackneyed -- but still funny -- jokes that every musician (particularly thin-skinned guitarists) have told over the years:

Q: What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians?
A: A drummer!Legendary Spinal Tap drummer Mick Shrimpton, the ultimate amalgam of drummer jokes

Q: What happened when the bass player locked the keys in the van?
A: It took all day to get the drummer out!

Q: What did the drummer get on his IQ test?
A: Drool!

Q: What’s the difference between a drum solo and a broken vacuum cleaner?
A: A broken vacuum cleaner doesn't suck!

I actually agree with the last one. Maybe it’s because I never learned to solo, but even when I watched the best, there’s nothing worse than a drum solo.

If you're a musician, you've heard all those jokes, and probably, like me, substituted other words like “guitarists” in retelling them. Example: How do you get a guitarist to shut up? Put sheet music in front of them.

Exactly.