Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Creamtastic Gil Trythalls, 'Nashville Moog'
Posted by Steve Haruch on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:02 AM
"What you got there? That ain't no fiddle."
"Mister...this here's a cotton-pickin', finger-lickin', barbecued, 110-volt Nashville Moog."
In 1972, Gyl Trythall made an "experimental" album called Country Moog: Switched On Nashville. Two things strike me as interesting to me about this whole exercise. First, that a piece of musical instrument technology like the synthesizer could seem so revolutionary. (Sure, we've got Auto-Tune, but no one's re-orchestrating Bach or Beethoven's Ninth as a result. I hope.) Second, in this clip, Trythall's underlying premise is that country music is country music no matter what kind of crazy newfangled instrument you play it on--even if it's a big crazy-looking synthesizer with so many wires coming out of it that it looks like "a stump full of daddy long-legs."
What a stark contrast to today, when you put some banjo or fiddle in the background of a pop song and call it country. In any case, let's have more synth-country bands, shall we?
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