Guitar Hero games, are they not due a comeback? Every few years they start appearing in what is left of the UK's retail sector in those large oversized boxes, with those plastic instruments, only to vanish shortly after when everyone gets bored again.
In the lull times, good condition box sets go for quite decent money on eBay. All you need to do is wait for the right time to offload that bunch of 'plastic crap' you no longer use as it's no longer 'a thing'.
You can always buy it again when fashion dictates.
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...'Guitar Hero II, March 2007, this is when it all happened'...
I have good memories of creating a plastic instrument band, with myself on lead. You always needed someone a little outgoing to be cast as the vocalist, and the rest of the crew was easy if you had the people.
Many iterations including ‘Rock Band’ followed Guitar Hero II, not the first, but my first exposure to this franchise. The fact most of the songs were done by cheap rip-off artists hardly distracted me at the time.
It was all about the guitar, and Harmonix jacked up the solo parts so we could really here them, or hear them get balls’d up if you didn’t have the skill to pull off the parts.
I owe Harmonix for introducing me to songs I had never heard previously, only these versions below are by the original artists.
Strutter – Kiss (Kiss – 1974)
Kiss was a band I liked at around 15 years old. Was it the music or the image?, probably the latter, but I do remember 'Detroit Rock City', and the Destroyer and Kiss Alive albums, all of which I owned.
My art teacher also will remember me liking the band, as I was quite adamant that I would draw the Kiss logo perfectly in his classroom instead of concentrating on 'real art'. He was not amused at all, and I ended up with an 'E' for Art. Maybe it wasn't my thing?
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...'my attempts are drawing the above went unnoticed, I could have been a world-class replica creator if my Art teacher was into American hard rock'...
'Strutter' was a track on Guitar Hero II, and not by the ‘real’ Kiss. As I had not heard it previously, I was not fazed by the cheesy imitation and the solos in the song really caught me ear, especially the mid-section one.
It was one of the easier tracks to master and with a lot of practice I could manage it on ‘Medium’ difficulty. Anything beyond that meant moving your left hand up and down the fret board. Fuck that!
Stop! – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual de lo Habitual – 1990)
It's strange I should choose a song which I don't particularly like right from the start..., from the initial cliched foreign female voice over talking, to the indifferent verse right after.
Perry Farrell has a squeaky high-pitched annoying voice, sounding somewhat similar to Rush’s Geddy Lee, except I can cope with Geddy, and Rush are one of my favourite vintage bands from the 1970's.
'Stop!' changes direction around 1 minute 40 seconds in and for a short while that grungy heavy sound does float my boat. A shame is doesn’t last for the rest of it, and we get thrown back into the humdrum only too soon.
Apparently the band was famous for the live shows, but in the UK they didn't catch on. If it wasn't for Guitar Hero, I would have never heard the middle section I am so fond of. As for their other songs, I have never bothered seeking them out.
Tattooed Love Boys – The Pretenders (Pretenders – 1979)
A couple of years ago, I listened to Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) autobiography in the form of an unabridged audio book. It was a great entertaining 'read', full of explicit language and very different from John Lydons' which was the previous listen.
When young, Steve was an insatiable sex monster and Chrissie Hynde happened to be a fan at the time the Pistols band took off. If you believe what Steve says, then Chrissie got done over many times.
It didn't stop her from creating her own band a couple of years later and what a fan I was. Their debut album is patchy, but contains this, the monster hit, 'Brass in Pocket' and a song beloved to me, 'Lovers of Today' which I highlighted in a STEEM post long ago.
If there’s an element of ‘punk’ in ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ then I can equate that with the tempo (fast) and length (short) only. It contains an irregular time signature, more often found in complex pieces of music that got my ear.
Playing it on Guitar Hero was highly problematic. This is no simple tune, and I am kind of glad it was reserved for the expert players later on in the game.
Guitar Image - Source
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