When the Crotchety Kid picked up a bass guitar at the beginning of the seventies, he was completely ignorant of harmonic structure. As a first step to composing bass lines, he bought and read a book in the Teach Yourself series. Those books had distinctive yellow and blue covers, which served as a stamp of…Read more Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
1950s
Sick Note
Dear Reader, I trust you will excuse little Johnny Crotchety from blogging today. The sniffle he has had for the last three days has become a lot worse and blocked nasal sinuses made for a very restless night. With hindsight, it was probably a mistake to amble across the moors of Derbyshire yesterday. Although the…Read more Sick Note
Take Five
Never was a track less likely to trouble the pop charts. Take Five is a jazz piece; it's an instrumental; it's in 5/4 time; and it was supposed to be a drum solo. In spite of all that Take Five reached number 25 on the US Billboard charts and did even better in the UK, spending 14…Read more Take Five
The Rising Sun
This time, for my Track Of The Week, I'm going to do something a bit different. Instead of focusing on a specific recording I'm going to explore about a dozen different versions of the same song: The House of the Rising Sun. The link is to a Spotify playlist containing recordings from 1941 to 2001…Read more The Rising Sun
Crotchety Man 