For Beatles fans here. My friend Fran is a very talented musician who toured years ago with Beatlemania as Paul. Currently he plays bass with the Hooters as well as fronting his own band.

Fran's original songs can be quite Beatlesque: Leonardo 

He's still a Beatles afficianado and two of his sons have clearly inherited his talent, Graham, performing as Paul on Broadway and the other, Beats as Ringo in separate Beatles bands. His son Graham also has a new album out that is fabulous. Fran has inspired me and produced two of my albums and hooked me up with other people in the music biz. A great down-to earth guy and good friend. 

As I've said before on these pages, there is a lot of (relatively) unknown talent out there!

Bonus McCartney tribute here  -original song from Graham.

Got to get you into my life live

Happy Birthday Ricochet!

That's the trouble with statistics, averages and looking at past events to predict the future. The deeper you look into the variants and special cases, the more it becomes obvious that the data in aggregate tells us nothing about what is likely to occur. The future is always a special case.

The idea that you can put data from a 1966 election with different personalities, a different media environment, different political issues and, hell, a different culture, and weigh that equally with the 2014 scenario is absolute idiocy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2009562/John-Lennon-closet-conservative-fan-Reagan.html

John wrote Revolution, a pointed put-down of lefty radicals. Yes,  Imagine is horrid. Not a bad song - just an extraordinarily naive message. But that's why it's called "imagine", because that's the only way anything close to that can occur - in someone's imagination (Yoko's?) but John is not my favorite Beatle, George is.

Paul is extremely talented and as Dan Hanson says above, the combiniation of John and Paul (and George Martin, don't forget) made them spectacular.

In the 80's I was co-owner of a small fashion design and manufacturing company. Ringo wore one of our vests! Saw a picture of him in USA Today wearing it. I know, big deal.... but it was a kick for me. But I had to include Ringo. He was down-to-earth which translates into conservative usually.

They take conservative votes for granted as long as there is a boogeyman as a Democrat against the GOP squish. They have relied on this strategy for decades and this strategy has produced quite an unfortunate result.  McCain and Romney in the last two elections, case in point. First, THEY LOST. Why? Not middle enough? (!) Or not conservative (or principled) enough?

Looking at the big picture, chasing the elusive "middle" has the effect of moving the entire political debate leftward. If the country keeps moving leftward, it doesn't matter what the name of the party is. Today's Republican is yesterday's Democrat. How do we halt this? Not by voting for someone who is likely to lose and if he does win, someone who is likely to slightly slow the leftward drift before preparing the way for an even more radical Democrat to be voted in next time.

Voting for the relatively more 'conservative' candidate sends the wrong message to a failing party with a failing strategy. Rewarding failure creates more failure. 

Joseph,

When you vote you are sending a message, when you don't vote, that also sends a message. Today's GOP insiders keep saying that the party needs to move "to the middle" in order to capture new votes and a majority.  There can only be two results, defeat or victory. I believe the the last two defeats were due in large part to lack of ideological commitment and resulting lack of ability to articulate a coherant message. The GOP will never get the message if everyone sees the game as an iterative choice between the lesser evil. If the direction is always toward the *evil*, then what is the inevitabe result ? Eventually it will be *evil*. No thanks. I'm off the merry-go-round, and it is a noble and valid strategy.

In victory, as in the case of Bush II, the country continued a slow march leftward (bigger government) while the party brand was damaged to the point where the likes of an Obama was elected for two terms. So there is more to this in the long run than winning the next election with a nominal Republican, preventing the election of a Democrat. 

This could be a case-study of how and why most polls are meaningless, absurd and wildly misleading. The partisan divide has nothing to do with musical tastes and everything to do with the perception of lifestyle and/or performance choices (Madonna).

The poll did not control for age. Republicans tend to be older. The poll broke down eras of music, 50,60,70,80,90's etc. Anyone wish to speculate why the two oldest categories (50's and 60's) won out?

According to this poll, 11% of respondents believe Elvis to be alive.

8% voted for the fifth Beatle, Not Sure as their fave.

Paul beat out John as overall favorite Beatle, but I'm sure Lennon's inability to get a half-time gig at the Super Bowl or to crack the Billboard 100 in the last 33 years had nothing to do with that result.

Do you think drugs make someone a better musician or not? Is the kind of question that leaves too much up to the respondent. Which drugs? Caffiene? Heroin? Coke? Speed? Pot? Are they asking long-term effects or performance enhancement?

My view of this poll? Unfavorable.

Interesting. The Paging Penelope post was before your post. Then Penelope put it on the main feed. We are all obsessing over Amy's dillema of whether or not to go to a wedding #firstworldprobs. But we are getting close to violating the CoC - conspiracy theorists!

But the site is running faster for me today - by a lot. 

My advice to you Brent (disclaimer, I'm not a trained therapist) is to take less ownership and treat this site for what it is - a business, act accordingly. 

BTW I'm beginning to cringe when the phrase "Ricochet's own ______" is employed. 

Joseph, I'm still following this conversation and I wonder why you have no response for my comments. 

I understand that you feel everyone should vote for the most conservative candidate. This is trotted out every election, but in the long run it has gotten us here. So then I have to wonder, at what point would you not vote for "the most conservative candidate? If the election was between Hillary and Barack O, then I would think that Hillary would be the more conservative. But would she do more damage to the conservative cause, or less? 

This tactic may be a case of treating the symptoms and masking a life-threatening disease.

I don't understand this post. People who have nothing to do with the attacks except for having the *same* religion, giving condolences and 'condemnations'. So what? In effect they are saying ,"It's not us." It's not me, either. 

I can't argue with the pessimists here, they have too much history going for them. However the IRS scandal has an ideological resonance that Democrats seem to understand better than Republicans. If high levels in the WH instigated this it's bad;  if this was simply a culture of partisanship within a powerful government agency - it's worse. This vindicates the conservative position(s) and Dems can't argue government is a positive force any time soon (see Lanny Davis).

Lets also look at the dynamics. Obama is a lame duck. If the heat continues on these scandals there will be Democrats who want to get out from under and turn on the administration. The press is finally somewhat antagonistic and skeptical and they need to recover some of their lost credibility.

Let's not forget, these are real scandals. There is no way they can be spun or dismissed as partisan 'gotcha' witch hunts. 

If the Dems suffer loses in 2014, there will be more dissention  in the Democratic party.

The key here is to track down the leads. Obama should not be the target. Dems at some point may actually prefer that for their own salvation.

My question is, why the zombie craze? I think it may be because there are no groups you can dislike anymore and corporate white males are now cliche...Zombies! And, you can kill them because they are already dead!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KYkGVZM5w4

Thomas Dolby, I Love You Goodbye 

Everyone has seen his brilliant (and now overplayed) She Blinded Me with Science but I Love You Goodbye is great song with a groove and great mix of fiddle, banjo, electronic piano, accordian and a funky beat, plus a brilliant lyric "The hardest words I know - I love you, goodbye"

Note: Turn up the volume so you can hear everything.

You can't charge people AND have intrusive ads. I agree. This doean't happen to me with my browser but if it did I'd be supremely annoyed.

Advertising is rapidly becoming an out-dated business model, which is WHY a site or a television network/radio network can charge a subscription rate, and WHY people are willing to pay. 

Many podcasters and others are discovering the model of simply providing something so good that people WANT to contribute, people feel a part of something, which is why you bought swag and gave a subscription away. When you hector people with ads, you diminish (or kill) that impulse. 

You must always have respect for your audience to start out with, not just notice when they complain and then say something to placate them, which is generally what happens here. The whole idea of "membership" is great, except those people will then feel attacked when you try to use their attention for more revenue.

for the most part, guitars are limited by their configuration- that is precisely why you see so many alternate tunings (e.g., double-drop D); unless we are talking Segovia's clean picking, they tend to be limited to the open string keys and 4/4 time; different keys and 3/4 time don't work.

The Piano is limited by the well-tempered tuning.  You can't easily re-tune a piano to conform to a given key. The piano's tuning is a compromise so that it can play in all keys but is always slightly out of tune. Whereas a stringed instrument can easily adjust the tuning to play in various keys. Another limitation of the piano - you can't play in-between notes, you can't slide or "bend" notes. Dynamics are limited too - once a note is played on a piano, it will only decay or stop.  You can't make it louder or stronger. Technically the piano is a percussion instrument, with those limitations.

The ability to re-tune an instrument is a feature, not a bug.

3/4,  6/8 time don't work? Flat out wrong. 

Duane's words in italics:

But, if you read the above, there was no assertion that the comparison was between rock and pop.

You made this strawman comparison : instead of Deeply Meaningful Comments About Poverty And mother Gaia I don't know what gernre that refers to, other than amature singer-songwriter stuff, which nearly everyone hates.

but later, you said this:

I said that ABBA' songs have more musical (melodic) content than most rock offerings

very few rock groups have vocalists who can actually sing, and you can't build a musically excellent group around guitars for a variety of reasons)

Define musically excellent - on second thought, please don't.

Clapton sings better than most rock singers

Most people would disagree with you on this, including Clapton himself. There are a lot of good singers in rock, Clapton, of all people, isn't one of them)

But then you also say this:

You are quite correct that I don't keep a "rock catalogue"

That makes sense when considering your general statements about rock.