IceCreamMan wrote
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ICM, that doesn't quite show what old Pete can do, but I know what your on about....
As far as the "originality" debate is concerned: I personally have more time for a guy that's on-stage, playing Bad Moon Rising to an audience than some dude strumming 3 chords and singing his own lyrics in a bedroom. Playing live, on-stage, no matter what you're playing, is the real deal. It takes a certain amount of guts to do it, cos you open yourself up for all sorts of criticism, so I vote for the guy on they stage every time. Also, yes, you can never please everybody, so I agree with that statement as well.
The whole "originality" thing escalated after Cobain off-ed himself. Up until then, we wouldn't even have thought about going to club-owners and asking for gigs if you could't hack, Sultans of Swing, Hotel California and a whole bunch of other "standard" pub/club tunes. Then BANG! Cobain dead. Every teenager went and bought a guitar, wrote some teenage lyrics and learned to strum 3 chords to make a song. Crappy "Battle of the Bands" events every weekend from then on...
I personally believe that you, as a guitar player or any other musician for that matter, should learn they ropes by learning "covers". After a while you'll pick up the skills to start applying what you've learnt to your own song-writing or playing and by doing that start developing your own "unique" style. Like Alan said much earlier in the thread...for 20 years he refused to play "other" people's songs and it held him back...
