The Last Bass Outpost
Main Forums => The Outpost Cafe => Topic started by: lowend1 on February 12, 2018, 09:17:56 AM
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These years aren’t getting any easier, are they? :sad:
http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/judas-priest-guitarist-glenn-tipton-diagnosed-with-parkinsons-disease/
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This age thing is not getting ain't easier, is it... :sad:
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nope
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Au Mann. :-\ :-\ :-\
I had noticed on the last few gigs I saw how he is getting frailer and frailer and leaving more and more of the lead guitar work to new kid Richie Faulkner - I thought ok, he might not have his former dexterity anymore (Tipton is vastly underrated for his solos) and he's played those lead breaks often enough in the last four decades and lets "the kid" have a try at them -, but this is crushing.
Halford is the voice of Priest, but Tipton was the heart and brain. Without him (he joined shortly before their debut album), they would have never left that rehearsal space in Birmingham.
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Maybe we should open a new section of the site for "Who's going to peg-out next...? :sad:
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Uh-oh ... family feud!
http://www.metalinjection.net/latest-news/drama/rob-halford-isnt-happy-k-k-downing-insinuated-glenn-tipton-didnt-play-guitar-on-the-new-album
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Odd that Tipton himself didn't confirm or deny...
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He has confirmed that he has been suffering from Parkinson's for the last 10 years and that it has now reached a stage where it impedes his live playing. As regards the studio recordings, who knows what was played by Richie Faulkner and what was Glenn Tipton's share, all they are saying now is that Glenn played "his parts", but not how much these parts amount in the overall picture. Faulkner has certainly - even live - taken a larger space than KK Downing ever had, who in essence was Priest's rhythm guitarist with a sizeable chunk of solos whenever the music called for a "dirtier break" than Tipton with his very structured, gentlemanly style could have naturally provided. KK with his Jimi Hendrix influence (in contrast, Tipton is more Clapton'esque) excelled at being the "gyrating guitar hero - noisy, bluesy & rock'n'roll". He kept Priest from sounding too clinical.
With all due respect to KK who was an integral part of classic Priest, I would doubt that he could cover all of Tipton's parts for the sheer necessary technique (and I've seen both dozens of times playing solos up close). While Tipton became evidently more analytical, even professoral in his playing over the years, KK didn't develop much, he's an intuitive devil-may-care attitude player, more Slash than - to mention a name rarely dropped in these quarters - Ritchie Blackmore. KK's on record for having himself stated in an interview that he admires Tipton's "overall fretboard dexterity which I fail to ever match" and it is true that KK tended to play solos in one or two scale positions only (the second position being generally the same one, only 12 frets higher) while Tipton's solos traverse the full length of the fretboard. It's a bit like Keith Richard saying that he could replace Mick Taylor. Something Keith would have never claimed.
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I don't really get why K.K Downing was "shocked and stunned" that he was'nt asked to rejoin. He was the one leaving in the first place, he was'nt fired. But OTOH, if you take a look at his initial statement when he left and pair it with his recent you'll see that it was Glenn he had a fall out with, and now he feels that he ..."was and is unappreciated by more than one member"..
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Priest and Member go together like Pope and Vatican... :vader:
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You think it was Glenn he had issues with? I never thought about it that way - I thought there were issues between KK and Halford. During Halford's wilderness years - AWOL from Priest - it was always KK who was most emotional about his departure "Rob simply doesn't deserve to be back in Priest". To me, there was always a trace of irritation in KK's reaction to Halford's coming out - along the lines of "yeah, we know you're gay, but don't let it get into the way of the band". It never went away, he seemed to be uncomfortable about the whole thing.
It seems to me that KK had been aware of Tipton's health issues for a long time - just like the rest of the band. Who knows, maybe he thought the live performance of Priest was no longer up to scratch and left because of that. It would explain why he is now offended not to be asked back when Glenn Tipton has finally realized that he cannot continue after all.
OTOH, if Richie Faulkner and KK Downing shared the same stage, it would look a bit as if KK was playing with his son!
(http://deansimmonarchives.com/ssp/p.php?a=X0dWQEBVW0FNT1hWTFtCSjI4LzYkODlDRit%2BZGA8bWV1Pjc%2FMzsjKDw7Mj80LTI3JicrOjwmMD4qOS0yPjI5JyI%3D&m=1467127682)
(http://loudwire.com/files/2015/05/Judas-Priest-9.jpg)
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OTOH, if Richie Faulkner and KK Downing shared the same stage, it would look a bit as if KK was playing with his son!
Or himself. 8)
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Visuals aside, Faulkner is more Tipton in style than he is KK. He is too fluent and modern, lacks that bit of Hendrix flamboyance and grit KK had always so carefully cultivated. He plays KK's parts, but he plays them like Tipton would. Which is probably just as well because my hunch is that Priest's twin guitar arrangements were mostly Tipton's do.
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Or himself. 8)
That just reads soooo wrong... :vader:
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That just reads soooo wrong... :vader:
Does it? How politically incorrect of me.
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Tipton or not, this new album's as solid an effort from the band as any for as long as they've been around.
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Tipton or not, this new album's as solid an effort from the band as any for as long as they've been around.
I attended a party on saturday, someone put on the whole record.
Not shure what to think, most comments was in the 'impressing concidering Halford's age' area.
Maybe it's just me listening to modern productions with a sceptical ear. I agree that this album is a solid effort, but the energy
of the music just does not reach me. Towards the end of the album they turned up the volume, but the music still was more loud than hard. Then they put on defenders of the faith and later a couple of 50's rock albums,all oozing with energy at proper volume levels.
Maybe I'm too picky - but I hear this on so many albums - and specially on recent (post 2000) records by classic rock bands.
Comparing these albums with work from their heydays might not be fair, but when I hear 'this is my best album since school's out' and so on, I tend to translate it to 'the producers found a way to add energy that wasn't there to begin with'.
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Yes, most of the surviving old bands' modern albums are soundwise overprocessed IMO. Like Accept who has made good albums for the last 8 years but soundwise, while they have an "in your face"-sound they lack the airy dynamic feel of for example Balls to the wall.
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Halford and Hill are in their late sixties. It would be rather ridiculous if they sounded like a bunch of twenty year olds.
I listened to a song of the new Judas Priest album yesterday to see what you guys are talking about.
I have to admit I've never been a Judas Priest fan. And that new song sure did not change that. It sounds rather generic to me.
It must be hard to be a metal band who had their hey day more than three decades ago. Putting out a new album every two years or so, with songs that no fan really cares to hear. On tour they have to play the old songs every night and when they throw in a new song everyone goes for a piss or a drink.
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Personally, I'd take any of their output from Painkiller and after over most of the stuff that came before. I didn't grow up being a huge Judas Priest fan so I'm not clouded by nostalgia like most. The demand for the older material is frustrating for the band as they admit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTw7ww8QdD4
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IMHO, everything after Screaming For Vengeance is instantly forgettable.
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As usual, I'm the odd man out, my favourite Priest albums are the ones regularly damned by the faithful: I like the new-wavy Point Of Entry and the Priest-goes-Billy-Idol Turbo best. Of the older albums I like Sin after Sin and Killing Machine/Hell Bent For Leather (US title) for their sheer variety. Never a huge fan of Painkiller which was produced by Chris Tsangarides - I preferred Tom Allom's more dry previous productions, perhaps because he is similar to Martin Birch who forged the Deep Purple sound. (When Priest first became known in Germany in the late 70ies, the "Poor man's Deep Purple - they sold the Hammond and bought leather outfits instead!"-allegations came thick and fast.)
I still have to listen to the new album more often to pass judgement. Halford sounds good on it, but the vocal tracks are much more laboriously treated than in the days of yore. He beefs up his voice by adding falsetto tracks in the background where in the past he would have screamed his pure "falsetto" (according to Tom Allom, Halford's high voice is not a falsetto in a singing technique sense). On the first two listens I also noticed "decidedly less Glenn" in the guitar arrangements department. Scott Travis is a great guy and an impeccable heavy metal drummer - as usual, his machine gun bass drum drowns out most of Ian Hill! :mrgreen:
I agree that modern heavy metal productions suffer from an extremely compressed and overly massive sound, "the Nickelback syndrome". A little air and space would do those productions good, but I guess prevailing tastes have changed.
"I've never been a Judas Priest fan." That figures, Rob, they are so pleasantly un-Zep! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
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This is a very instructive piece, confirms how long and how intensively he has been battling the disease, his work on Firepower is obviously cut and paste which must be bitter for someone as fluid and dexterous on the guitar as he once was:
http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/rob-halford-says-parkinsons-stricken-glenn-tipton-rejected-idea-of-performing-with-backing-tapes/
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IMHO, everything after Screaming For Vengeance is instantly forgettable.
Yup. For me, it's all about Unleashed in the East. The only Priest I've ever owned.
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Yes, one of their more popular studio albums. Japanese handclaps were flown in. ;D
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"I've never been a Judas Priest fan." That figures, Rob, they are so pleasantly un-Zep! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Never been a real Zep fan either ;-)
As a young lad I was into Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy and Dio. And later Queensrÿche and Satan/Blind Fury.
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Pah, Iron Maiden and their cluttered compositions, no chance against the steely elegance of my beloved Priest! :mrgreen:
And Saxon were more fun than Iron Maiden too!
But Iron Maiden have balls. When they release an off-the-wall album they tour it mercilessly, playing it full length and ditching their usual concert hits. Priest chickened out when they released Nostradamus, their failed concept album, they should have taken that on the road full length, but they flinched and only played two or three songs from it, self-defeating the whole concept.
In fact, all three - Iron Maiden, Judas Priest & Saxon - are pretty much devoid of Zep influences. That was more a thing found with US hard rock and heavy metal bands.
"Never been a real Zep fan either ..." - I know, but you have that thing for rock bands with a black groove - Mother's Finest, Vintage Trouble or Living Colour - and JP is obviously totally devoid of that, their rhythm feel is as Yüröpeän as a vampire movie. Zep is much less guilty in that department, in fact for a bunch of Brits they could be relatively groovy and funky. Perhaps one of the reasons they left such an imprint on the US of A.
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Pah, Iron Maiden and their cluttered compositions, no chance against the steely elegance of my beloved Priest! :mrgreen:
And Saxon were more fun than Iron Maiden too!
Haha, true about the cluttered compositions.
As if I cared when I was thirteen/fourteen! In hindsight I guess that was what I liked in heavy metal bands back then.
It took me a few years to recognize the beauty of a good AC/DC or ZZ Top song.
I said goodbye to Iron Maiden when I saw them on the Seventh Son tour. All of a sudden I thought they were rather ridiculous. And retroactively I started to think lots of their songs were indeed cluttered compositions.
And oh yeah, Saxon. I liked some of their songs too. Stop! Get out! We are the strong arm of thew law-ooooh!
Never saw the "steely elegance" of Judas Priest though...
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AC/DC is simple stuff but they have an excuse since they're Australian and the more rootsy blues based rock riffage is a saving grace. ZZtop is also compositionally simple but again, Billy Gibbons has Texas blues based mojo for days. Songs like, you've got another thing coming, breaking the law and living after midnight simply sound like they were written by someone with Down's syndrome, no offense to those with Down's syndrome of course.
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sound like they were written by someone with Down's syndrome.
You mean they are joyous, open, straight forward and honest?
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Sure, either that or it makes Icelandic people want to euthanize them.
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"Songs like, you've got another thing coming, breaking the law and living after midnight simply sound like they were written by someone with Down's syndrome, no offense to those with Down's syndrome of course."
:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Yes, Priest can be dumb, just like a Marvel Comic can be dumb, but dumb in a classy way!
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I don't know the deep catalogue, but I've always liked Priest's big singles. Nothing wrong with good simple rock, and they had it down. "Head Out to the Highway" is perfect.
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Probably my favourite Priest riff - megalomaniacallygargantuan!
And the video showed the Priest bunch's profound method-acting talents ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKuuHfMx3CQ
Plus, if anyone still had any doubts after this particular vid where Rob's extra-musical interests might abound ... ???
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And I notice they were'nt sent to acting school in between albums.
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Well, to be fair, the religion-infused performances in Breaking the Law were hard to beat. Stellar stuff throughout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L397TWLwrUU
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You know times have changed (in a good way) when Rob Halford finally starts kissing men on stage - here at 4:17:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4futlhR2B0
Tipton guesting with Priest in Newark, NJ, yesterday. Touching.
And poor Andy Sneap (the touring guitarist and co-producer of Priest's latest album) caught so much flak from fans for not wearing (enough) leather at the first few Priest gigs he did that he now dutifully does - hey, give the people what they want! :mrgreen:
Tipton has released a statement that he learned of his diagnosis only four years ago, but that his doctor told him that he has probably been afflicted with Parkinson's for as long as 10 years. He had realized his deteriorating dexterity on the guitar before, but failed to make the connection and tried to compensate with hard rehearsal work at first.
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I didn't know until a few days ago that Dave Holland (their former drummer, not the jazz bassist) died in January due to liver cancer in a Spanish hospital. Holland had served time (full sentence of 8 years for attempted rape and sexual assault of a challenged drum pupil he had, he denied it until the very end, which probably saw him staying as long in prison as he did).
He was an untypical heavy metal drummer, very much in the "don't get in the way of the guitars"-vein. You might say that he drummed much like a simplistic drum machine. And in fact, starting around Defenders of the Faith, much of the Priest drumming on records wasn't him anymore. But it was a choice the band made in the early 80ies, when they dumped his predecessor Les Binks who was a much more complex and technical drummer. And they reverted back to that with his successor (Racer X refugee) Scott Travis.
No matter, his sparse style was part of the 80ies Priest sound. Uncluttered.
(https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/1st-january-drummer-dave-holland-from-rock-group-trapeze-performs-in-picture-id179605464?s=612x612)
He played quite a bit differently with Trapeze - the only video material available from them is apparently from their 1994 reunion tour which saw Galley, Hughes and Holland reunite with Caig Erickson on 2nd lead guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsX4FbqSvBw
Priest (and Glenn Hughes too) at least had the decency to say a few nice words about him and not blend him out altogether. It is highly unlikely that he was a court trial victim, but whatever happened, he paid dearly for it.
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Dave Holland (the drummer), not Glenn Tipton-related, I was unaware of this new twist:
https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/was-late-judas-priest-drummer-dave-holland-victim-of-a-very-sad-injustice/
The English criminal court system by and large works, but no criminal system is foolproof. If you died before being able to prove your innocence, it's especially bitter.
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Dave Holland (the drummer), not Glenn Tipton-related, I was unaware of this new twist:
https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/was-late-judas-priest-drummer-dave-holland-victim-of-a-very-sad-injustice/
The English criminal court system by and large works, but no criminal system is foolproof. If you died before being able to prove your innocence, it's especially bitter.
Wow, it sounds like quite a lot of reasonable doubt. Of course it's true I'm a believer in Blackstone's Ratio.