I guess this isn't really music news, but it seemed like a nice place to post this.
I know it's funny, but a fake band inspired me to pay more attention to real bands.
A couple of years ago I was watching "Eddie and the Cruisers," the "Cruisers" being a fake band for the movie. In the scene where Eddie (Michael Pare) is singing (lip synching) "On the Dark Side," I noticed the band's drummer over Pare's shoulder. I don't know if David Wilson, who played Kenny Hopkins, the band's drummer, could really play drums, of if he was just "acting" it, but I thought he looked pretty good at it.
Anyway, after watching that scene, I started to pay attention to the drums in songs I heard on the radio--and lots of them sounded pretty good to my untrained ear.
From the drums, I went on to listening for the keyboards (I imagine by the 1980's a lot of that was electronic), and even for violins--I can't say if they're "real" violins or not. You can even hear clarinets in some songs.
While I don't much particularly care for John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane," there is some amazing (to me) acoustic guitar work (at least I think it's acoustic--sounds like it to me) in that song, and I wonder if it's Mellencamp himself playing the guitar.
(Thanks to vinyl album liner notes, I know it's Bryan Adams himself playing rhythm guitar on "Summer of '69.")
So who writes this stuff anyway?
