Saturday 17 October 2009

Missing beats round

In place of a gear-change this weekend, let's do 'missing beats' instead*.

Here's a fairly faithful version of "Rolling and tumbling" by Muddy Waters. The riff (which is in A) between the singing parts isn't repeated four times, it's repeated three-and-a-half times or it's three times with two empty beats where they slide up to the singing parts (which are in D or E) depending on which way you look at it. I'd been listening to this song for over twenty years before I noticed - it wasn't until I compared it with Bob Dylan's version on "Modern Times" (who just does the riff four times in a perfunctory sort of fashion) that the penny dropped...



* Other songs to be featured in this series will be "Heart of glass" by Blondie and "Hell in a bucket" by The Grateful Dead. I can't actually think of many others.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

Good to see you running some Muddy Waters.

Nick Drew said...

All You Need Is Love doesn't really count, I guess, it's more that Lennon was trying a burst of over-elaborate 7/4

never been convinced it did anything for it

PeterJ said...

A couple of obscure ones; Santana's 'FlameSky', and Peter Hammill's 'Hesitation', where the stumbling beat towards the end mirrors the title.

Oh, and there's a brief example in Curtis Mayfield's 'Move on Up' if I read it correctly.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, it makes a change from gear changes. I always preferred Howlin' Wolf (himself world champion at songs-taht-are-the-the-same-all-the-way-through) but Muddy will do.

ND, I'd never noticed that either (as I don't like the Beatles) but it isn't even proper 7/4, it's sort of 6-and-three-quarters/4. That is gloriously irritating.

PJ, ta for input, can you find a youtube video and pinpoint the second it happens?

PeterJ said...

Mark, here's the Santana one; the main riff I'm talking about starts at about 4:05.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GywKPvIaCj8

The Peter Hammill one isn't on YouTube, although I might try to drag an mp3 fragment out of ITunes.

And the Curtis Mayfield one is so fragmentary I'm a bit embarrassed at bringing it up. It's just one delayed beat in the drums that I've always loved, at about 0:41 here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lhvrHWtWHU

I've always been fond of those beats that defeat your expectations and keep you off-balance, and Heart of Glass was a great example. I'm glad you brought the subject up, and hope you can see what I mean in the examples.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PJ, thank you very much. I can add those to the series.