In the Spring of 1998 I was all but done with college, the only thing left was my Summer internship. It ended up being in my hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. with the minor league baseball team, the Buffalo Bisons.
For the most part, I was behind the scenes, but my boss knew that if I wanted to do anything in radio, I needed to have a demo tape of some sort. I had a few clips from my WFAL years, but I needed some variety on the resume. So once in July, and on the last day of my internship at the end of August, Jim stepped out of the booth and allowed me to be the color commentator while his color guy Duke did play-by-play.
I did my best to stay out of Duke’s way, and for the most part I succeeded during my brief moments in the booth. The key, of course, is to know when to shut up. Baseball radio broadcasts don’t require constant banter. Much like the game itself, as someone said a long time ago, it’s long stretches of boredom punctuated by quick bursts of excitement or terror, just depends which side your on.
Keep in mind, there was no computer in the press box for me to pull out of town scores. Those came off of a dot matrix printer in the general press that continually updated scores. I had to write them down and deliver them to Jim and Duke every couple of innings. Now, you’d just have a laptop or tablet computer with the scores streaming off ESPN or some website.
Power Ballad Update 9/22/11
40,000 words. That’s a lot. At the moment, I only have to write entries on 22 more songs, which means I’ll probably finish and hit my goal of 50,000 by the end of the year. In the mean time, I’m giving another snippet from the book.
Silent Lucidity by Queensrÿche
From the album Empire (1990)
Queensrÿche didn’t write many ballads, as evidenced by this being their only appearance on the list, but they did write something pretty unique. And by unique, I mean totally bizarre.
This bizarreness is probably due to the fact that Queensrÿche were the band Winger was trying to be: serious and progressive. Sure, they wrote their share of hair/glam rock, but nobody in the ‘80s tackled the concept album with more fervor than Queensrÿche did on Operation: Mindcrime. Queensrÿche is the closest anyone got to melding the progressive sounds of Rush with the NWOBHM.
So, of course, the result is the mind-bender known as Silent Lucidity, which somehow manages to combine lines from the movie Hellraiser II and the theme from Brahms’ Lullaby. And if that’s not enough, the lyrics are, well, I’m quite frankly lost. See, they could be about a relationship, but that seems too obvious, so the next thought is literally about lucid dreaming, since the title more than alludes to it.
As far as orchestration goes in Power Ballads, Silent Lucidity wins, no contest. John Williams is probably jealous of how epic sounding this song is. Perhaps that’s because Michael freaking Kamen arranged the strings. You know, that Michael Kamen, composer of scores for such little films as Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and the Band of Brothers mini-series. Yeah, so, holy shit.
I was almost worried this would get the boot for lack of power, but then I re-listened and heard Chris DeGarmo’s epic solo and punched myself in the face for even considering such nonsense.
Silent Lucidity by Queensrÿche
From the album Empire (1990)
Queensrÿche didn’t write many ballads, as evidenced by this being their only appearance on the list, but they did write something pretty unique. And by unique, I mean totally bizarre.
This bizarreness is probably due to the fact that Queensrÿche were the band Winger was trying to be: serious and progressive. Sure, they wrote their share of hair/glam rock, but nobody in the ‘80s tackled the concept album with more fervor than Queensrÿche did on Operation: Mindcrime. Queensrÿche is the closest anyone got to melding the progressive sounds of Rush with the NWOBHM.
So, of course, the result is the mind-bender known as Silent Lucidity, which somehow manages to combine lines from the movie Hellraiser II and the theme from Brahms’ Lullaby. And if that’s not enough, the lyrics are, well, I’m quite frankly lost. See, they could be about a relationship, but that seems too obvious, so the next thought is literally about lucid dreaming, since the title more than alludes to it.
As far as orchestration goes in Power Ballads, Silent Lucidity wins, no contest. John Williams is probably jealous of how epic sounding this song is. Perhaps that’s because Michael freaking Kamen arranged the strings. You know, that Michael Kamen, composer of scores for such little films as Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and the Band of Brothers mini-series. Yeah, so, holy shit.
I was almost worried this would get the boot for lack of power, but then I re-listened and heard Chris DeGarmo’s epic solo and punched myself in the face for even considering such nonsense.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)