Couch Potato Guitar

March 4, 2018 – This week there is actual rock news, I’m sure. In fact I know there is a little. Robert Plant finished off a short U.S. tour this past Friday in Los Angeles, playing in small venues. He was on whatever late night show too, saying something about how he was once beat at Karaoke in Taiwan by a Thai chap doing an Elvis song. He was interviewed by Esquire, and while I’m sure I’m supposed to have found the article good … because it’s Esquire magazine, I thought it was mediocre at best. The same questions about a Led Zeppelin reunion prompted the same response from Robert Plant – that he’s moving forward, never happy to look back. But seriously, it’s the 50th anniversary of Led Zeppelin right now, so we should get more than what the press is saying well get – a book (perhaps that might be sort of good), and a special “Record Store Day” release of a different take of the songs Rock ‘n’ Roll and Friends. And what bugs me the very most is that in these Robert Plant concerts, half of the set list is Zep material. If Robert doesn’t want to play Led Zeppelin, why is okay for him to do it? Honestly, I don’t think adding blue grass musicians as the backing to him makes it anything other than Robert Plant doing Led Zeppelin. Yep, it’s true, I’m starting to get annoyed by Robert Plant. Either play Led Zeppelin … or don’t, but don’t play it with blue grass musicians to crowds who go at $350 for the cheapest seat as the best way there is to see Led Zeppelin.

That rant over, my normal influences were not helping me much this week, probably because I felt too sick to do much of anything. By the way, it’s very hard to be sick in my world. The deadlines are there, always, so what that means is I don’t do much in the way of entertainment. I just go to sleep after doing whatever work is needed. Still, on Saturday, I was full-on couch potato for a good three hours. Oh and I went to the grocery store for $5 Friday also. In those travels … and sits, I noticed very strongly something I always notice but never actually consider. The guitar; actually I noticed the guitar’s presence in these couch potato things, even if it’s not so present in the actual music on the radio.

Guitar. Guitar is on the TV. Do you want to know where? In TV shows where they fix things, houses, cars, basically if the TV is showing someone installing a beam, hanging sheet rock, installing an engine, or pretty much anything of the physical work nature, there is backing music that sounds quite like a guitar solo, or at least couch potato guitar noodling. And least you think I’m only talking about the hard-core shows, you’re wrong. Two episodes into Fixer Upper, Chip and Joanna Gaines television show where they remodel houses with soft whites, painted brick, and flower pots, the requisite scenes showing Chip (the husband of that team) removing walls (the must-do remodel in his wife’s design for every house), guitar is prominently featured. Mind you, I was sick, so that means I’m going to stray more heavily than normal into what might be referred to as chick shows, but in normal times I watch many of those car shows on Velocity (well, usually when I’m at my brother’s house). Still my Fixer Upper episodes had just as much guitar as background music as any show where those engines don’t seem like they are going to get done on those shows with dudes fighting over car rebuilding time deadlines.

All of that guitar makes me want to know who does the soundtracks to these shows. Are there guitar players across the country playing TV background music? And how do they do to come up with the song they are playing? What is the direction they are given? Heck, do they play bluegrass for Robert Plant too? Zeppelin covers for a singer who claims to not want to sing Zeppelin? I found myself listening to try to discern an influence, to try to see if I could hear a pattern. What I noticed is that, at times, the background guitar players really do rock out. The fact that so much background music is actually a rocking-out solo is funny to me. I even found myself about half laughing when the solo parts would really get going.

Then there’s this other phenomenon I saw, and that is, the resurgence of 80’s culture, or older culture in general, into other things. I heard this one on the radio, a good thing because the actual trailer was so violent it turned me off, but the trailer for the upcoming movie Death Wish, featuring Bruce Willis, a husband turned vigilante crime fighter, stars the AC/DC song Back ‘n’ Black, playing not so much as background music, but instead almost a star of the trailer. Not even related, I kept running into a commercial that I think played in the Superbowl, and which played on every commercial break of the Hallmark Channel movie I watched after the Fixer Upper binge (told you, I was girling out), some unknown movie about a book-ish girl who owned a book store who is teamed with a bad-boy hockey player as a joint mission to save her failing book store and to save his tarnished image. The commercial is for Pepsi, and it’s cute. It features older Pepsi commercials as the star — “a model and his mother”; the mother is ‘80s icon Cindy Crawford; the king of pop, Michael Jackson. It features older times, the Pepsi of your grandfather, etc. It features many others too, the newest (or so I think, the newest) being  the first incarnation of Britney Spears (a timeless look in my world because my car wash still has that live-size Britney cut out behind the cash register area).

I suppose, at some point this weekend, I should take my own guitar out as I sit potatoed on the couch as something better to do than watch this ridiculousness, but to now, I have found inspiration, or perhaps a message. And that message is an interesting one: TV, movies, and the guitar soundtrack to my fixer shows are using guitar, they are using ‘80s cultural references; they are not in the present as much as looking back. What this all means I can only guess. Perhaps the demographic of the shows I was watching is such that it’s trying to appeal to older folks, the ones who grew up with AC/DC, Cindy Crawford, Michael Jackson, even Britney, and most certainly the guitar. Or perhaps the music coordinators of these shows, movies and networks are the ones who grew up in that time frame, and those folks are trying to influence other generations. Perhaps when the younger folks see that Pepsi commercial they say “who’s that” when the older images of Cindy or Michael pop up. Perhaps they don’t. I honestly don’t know. But whatever it is, guitar, 80’s cultural references, things that are not really on the radio abounded in my world this weekend. Good? Bad? I don’t even know that. But I was thankful it distracted me from Robert Plant. Did I mention I’m mad at him?