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memory retrieved
Aug. 10th, 2005 11:40 pmI have been trying to figure out just what is so familiar about Jason Webley's style of singing. I finally managed to pull it out of my head.
There was a time in my life that I aspired to go into the Foreign Service as a Soviet foreign policy analyst. I studied both at Lewis and Clark College and at U of O. Before the fall of the Sov, there were underground protest networks, and that included music. One musician whose music was banned was Vladimir Visotsky. Russians would trade his cassette tapes on the black market. One of his songs figures prominently in the Movie "White Nights", but didn't end up on the soundtrack, disappointingly (guess they couldn't make money off it!). Anyway, Visotsky has this low gravelly voice that Webley sometimes sings in. He uses it in a very similar manner.
Which brings up something else that bugs me. When I travelled in the Soviet Union in 1976, I pitied the poor Russians who couldn't move around their own country without an internal passport, who couldn't do simple things like take pictures of trains, whose phones could be bugged without a due cause at any time because someone thought they were a threat to the State...does any of this sound familiar?
There was a time in my life that I aspired to go into the Foreign Service as a Soviet foreign policy analyst. I studied both at Lewis and Clark College and at U of O. Before the fall of the Sov, there were underground protest networks, and that included music. One musician whose music was banned was Vladimir Visotsky. Russians would trade his cassette tapes on the black market. One of his songs figures prominently in the Movie "White Nights", but didn't end up on the soundtrack, disappointingly (guess they couldn't make money off it!). Anyway, Visotsky has this low gravelly voice that Webley sometimes sings in. He uses it in a very similar manner.
Which brings up something else that bugs me. When I travelled in the Soviet Union in 1976, I pitied the poor Russians who couldn't move around their own country without an internal passport, who couldn't do simple things like take pictures of trains, whose phones could be bugged without a due cause at any time because someone thought they were a threat to the State...does any of this sound familiar?
