I auditioned with a grunge band yesterday, they were a lot more grungier than I thought from the demos they had sent me, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. About an hour of playing with them and the wanton mix of major and minor chords and scales, none of it elegantly matched (there are ways to do it, but grunge bands don't seem to have the songwriter knack someone like Albert Hammond had when he wrote the non harmony rules-abiding chord changes for The Air that I breathe - as stolen by Radiohead for their Creep), I began to feel physical discomfort. It's been more than twenty years since the heyday of Nirvana and Soundgarden, but to me 90% of that stuff still sounds like someone is moving bar chords on a guitar neck who doesn't really know what should go where.
I feel guilty about, I really do. It is uncool to despise grunge, I know. Something is wrong with me. I try to be open to most kinds of music, but when someone alternates in one song between keys of A minor and C Minor coupled with too many diminished fifths and major scale runs over minor chords with - of course - a D major chorus that ends in Bb major, my tolerance is tested severely.
After two hours I told them that they did what they did well, but that it was just too grungy for me (they took that as a compliment). I did test one of the guitarists by - at his invitation - playing a blues with which I started in E minor before moving on to a G major blues after a couple of minutes. He could have just stayed in his E minor pentatonic blues scale for that and it would have sounded nicely majorish with my G major bass lines, but of course he had nothing better to do than to revert to his minor pentatonic blues riffs, this time in G minor pentatonic blues scale ("sounds more natural to me"). It was the final straw that broke the harmony camel's back. Major scale solos have become a dying art unless you go to Status Quo concerts.
In the car I then listened to Night Ranger (even though Nirvana's remastered debut has been in the car for more than 18 months, but I have only gotten myself to listening to it once). What a relief it was to listen to two guitarists - Brad Gillis and Jeff Watson - who know the difference between major and minor.
And all the way back on the drive home, I had this melody in my head as if to exorcise the grunge harmony demons!!!!
I've come to the realization that I'm old-fashioned!
