Skip to main content

Blue Sky Mining musings

Can a hard rocking protest song make you cry? It can if it's done by Midnight Oil. Driving in through a pouring rain this morning, I dug out my old copy of "Blue Sky Mining" to give it a listen and possibly put some tracks on my MP3 player. I have always loved the title track, but today was the first time I seemed to listened to how well crafted the song is constructed. It opens with just a guitar and gradually builds as each band member joins along. Then, it erupts with so much passion and anger, I was close to tears. It's not just the relevant lyrics (written back in 1990), but the beautiful harmonies, and the fact that each instrument plays a different role in the song. Both guitars are playing variations on lead guitar which reminds me of the kind song structure Pearl Jam often uses. In fact, the song "Forgotten Years" off the same Midnight Oil album would be a great song for P Jam to cover. And Peter Garrett performs with such conviction that anything he sings couldn't ring as false. This is one of the overlooked gems of the early alternative rock era. For some reason, the band fell through the cracks when the big MOVEMENT came to be. That's too bad, because we could use more bands like them today. With all of the crap going on in the world, we need more popular artists to speak up and rally the youth (and youthful) of the world.

Aloha

Comments

Anonymous said…
could you please tell me the structure of blue sky mine eg the verses of the song, bridge, where the instrumentals are etc
5:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MARATHON FOOTNOTES (for those who didn't think I would really footnote a stream of consciousness thought): Footnote #1 Academy Award Winning Best Picture Films from 1969 to the Present: Midnight Cowboy, Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather II, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Amadeus, Out of Africa, Platoon, The Last Emperor, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Dances With Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Footnote #2 Members of the band YES, from 1969 to the present: In 1969, Yes is formed with Jon Anderson on vocals Peter Banks on guitar, Bill Bruford on drums, Tony Kaye on keyboards and Chris Squire playing bass. This group records...
41 comments
Read more

Basement Songs: "Golden Gates" by John Cougar Mellencamp

I’m not sure when my brother, Budd, bought his copy of John (then) Cougar Mellencamp’s “Uh Huh”. The cassette just showed up in the basement on summer, years after its release. Like most of America, I was a big fan of “Pink Houses”, and I was thrilled that now had copies of his other big hits from that album, “Crumblin’ Down” and “The Authority Song.” At this point in his career, Mellencamp was ready to establish himself as a legitimate artist, hence the use of his real name (the record label wouldn’t allow him to ditch the “Cougar” until years later for fear record buyers may get confused….huh?) In addition, there was the radio staple (at least in Cleveland), “Play Guitar”, on side 2, which borrowed heavily from Them’s “Gloria” (Mellencamp often slipped the “G-L-O-R-I-A”’s into his concerts during that number). The rest of “Uh Huh” is filled with more of the same 60’s garage band type of rock that Mellencamp champions, as well as one of Budd’s favorite tunes, the John Prine co-pe...
1 comment
Read more

In Praise of Kanopy

When I was 17, I worked at American Video, a small business housed in the Great Northern shopping strip. My time there was short, as was American Video’s lifespan. The days of the mom-and-pop video stores were cycling out. Blockbuster had just opened in my hometown and within a couple years, American Video, as well as the store where I first fell in love with movies, First Run Video, would shutter their doors. What I loved about these indie video stores was the variety of choices and the limited number of copies of movies each store had. Come in looking for Back to the Future and it’s already rented? You strolled the aisles until you found something similar like Innerspace , or something completely different, like And Now for Something Completely Different, Monty Python’s first movie. Blockbuster, and its cousin Hollywood Video, may have offered more copies of movies, but they didn’t always have the quality. Maybe your Blockbuster was different.   When Netflix and the stre...
2 comments
Read more