meghan9436 | Smoke on the Water

I was messing around on guitar tonight, and I figured out the melody to Smoke on the Water completely by accident. I just wanted to share the small success tonight.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Nagoya, Japan
Current Music: Smoke on the Water - Deep Purple

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

coffeetime

Yay!

During the summer between my second and third year at a university, I lived in a house with my boyfriend at the time and four other guys (I was the add-on, it wasn't my house). This house was named, by its residents, The Party Mansion. The basement apartment was rented separately to a guy whose name I never knew, because the upstairs residents just called him The Basement Dude. The Basement Dude was a bit of a metalhead who rarely emerged from the basement, except occasionally he'd drag a big recliner into the backyard and sit there for a while in jeans but no shirt, letting his skinny torso absorb some sun. He was very fond of Smoke on the Water and played it often (both inside the basement and with a cassette player out in the yard. I can never hear it without thinking of him.

From:

meghan9436

Thanks for sharing your story! Was this the 1980s by chance?

I can't pinpoint exactly my earliest memory of Smoke on the Water because the riff is overused so much in media. But sometime between 2003-2005, there was a Japan only release of a rhythm based Nintendo DS game called Daigasso Band Brothers. Smoke on the Water was one of the songs on there you got to choose from, and I had a blast playing the multiplayer with friends at local anime conventions.

The university dorms/hotels were just a big open party. We would leave our doors open, and people would come and go as they pleased. I remember there was a group of three or four of us playing in one of the rooms, and Smoke on the Water was such a banger. The technology wasn't what it is today, so we were rocking out to a lesser quality midi version, lol.

From:

coffeetime

Yes, the 1980s - I don't think college kids had cassette players after that, did they? That summer would have been either 84 or 85; I don't remember clearly now.

The Party Mansion was such a hole, haha. So dirty. All those guys and all those parties. Some of the guys played in a party band called The Soul Brothers of Kung Fu.

I should do a whole entry, because it was an amazing and crazy summer. I really hated to see it come to an end.

From:

meghan9436

Boom boxes, cassette players and Walkmans were still a thing in the 1990s! I still relied on the tape deck to record my favourite songs off the radio during the late 90s. Discmans quickly replaced our Walkmans, and we soon quit recording stuff off the radio when mp3 players and iPods became more common.

I was just an infant/toddler pooping in my diapers in the 1980s. I have no memory of the era apart from my parents' home, and my next door neighbour's house. I'm appreciative that I am old enough to have experienced the 90s and early 2000s. I think that Boomers are lucky in the sense that they got to experience the 1960s-1990s in their lifetime. Those decades were really iconic, and we will never have those experiences again.

I recently started getting into old home movies on YouTube to experience my childhood from a different perspective. I was never able to get my hands on a camcorder because of my family's economic status at the time, but I played with disposable cameras a lot.

This video was recommended on my homepage and it was really good to watch. I was appreciative of those kids taking in all the details of the environments around them because virtually everything is different now.

Edited (Edited because grammar, oof.) Date: 2023-11-20 03:26 am (UTC)

From:

coffeetime

I'll try to watch this later today, looks cool!

Have you seen the movie Super 8? I found the general look/feel of that movie to be very authentic to actual life in the period - really enjoyed it.

I have so many tales of late 70s/early 80s. I started kindergarten in 1970. I saw Nixon's resignation on TV (my mom made me watch it, though it didn't mean much at that time). Also saw an Apollo launch, and the Beatles pre-breakup on TV. I experienced middle school dances...my understanding is that kids don't dance now so much as grind. College time was MTV/Much and shows that cost $8 to get in, and disposable cameras (I have photos, I can post some). Movies in theaters. TV with commercials, for good or bad. Mr. Rogers before he was an old man. Dangerous toys, like Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. Adults who chain smoked, adults who had become parents at 21, adults who wore pantyhose on all but the hottest days. My own temp job in a bank, filing tiny cards that cut my fingertips. Babysitting for 50 cents an hour. Day camp that had actual BB guns. I was there for it all!

From:

meghan9436

I haven't seen Super 8, but I might have heard of the title in passing. It looks like it has a good rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll definitely keep this in mind.

Currently, I have ¥700 and some change on my Amazon Japan account. I was meaning to use up the credit to watch Good Will Hunting. (Which has a near perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, might I add!)

We were watching it in a random math class back in high school, but we never got to finish it. I'm not even sure why we were watching it in said class - probably because we had a sub.

Based on your comments, I would peg you as a Generation X, yeah? That is such a perfect age to experience those three decades. I remember the 90s from the perspective of a child, so I would imagine that the club, party, and concert experiences would have been something else. Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when the news broke about Kurt Cobain unaliving himself? I would have been just shy of eight at the time, so......

I remember the mid to late 90s better. I remember the first OJ Simpson trial, but not being old enough to appreciate or understand what was going on at the time. I just remember my parents being glued to the TV when it was on. The Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal led to some really embarrassing and awkward questions asked to our teachers. When Columbine happened, that was the beginning of the school lock down drills. Of course, everyone remembers 9/11 and that situation eclipsed Columbine in a lot of ways.

I missed out on most of the MTV heydays because almost nobody had satellite TV. One or two of our neighbours had satellite service, but I can't remember the company name for the life of me. I just remember it had Star something in its name. Maybe I'm confusing it with Starter sports gear, but who knows. By the time I got to high school, MTV Canada became a thing, but I didn't watch it much.

I also remember the drive in theatres! I don't think that's a thing anymore.

I think that it's maybe a good thing that I didn't get my hands on a camcorder. When I was in junior high school, I was watching every trash TV show that there was. Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel Williams. Sick days home from school meant that I watched even more of this trash TV that I didn't get to watch during off school hours.

I remember so badly wanting to parody the episodes where they sent out of control teenagers to boot camp. F*** you! You don't know me! I can do whatever I want! As a teen, I thought this was the most amazing idea ever. But as I reflect on this as an adult, it just sounds bad. Not even entertaining bad like The Room (2003). Just bad bad.

I did however get a hold of a camcorder in grade 9, and my friend/classmate (badly) and I parodied The Blair Witch Project as part of a school project? I don't remember exactly. That VHS exists somewhere...

Edited (Grammar.) Date: 2023-11-20 04:03 pm (UTC)

From:

coffeetime

I definitely place myself in Generation X, though on some time scales I'm considered a boomer - 1965. My ex-husband is definitely a Boomer, though the late end of it (1958). My late daughter was born in 1996 and loved Old Tech so much - she had two typewriters, she could use the fax machine at her high school, that kind of stuff fascinated her. No Luddite though, she was a huge gamer and had way more current tech knowledge than I did.

I never had a camcorder. The only videos I have of her were shot with pocket digital cameras. So they are jerky, and short, and not great quality. My father had an 8mm movie camera, and my sister has a box of these movies that we'll get digitized someday (I hope before they disintegrate). The movie projector had a distinctive smell - all old movie projectors smell like that, and there is nothing else remotely like that. VHS players didn't smell like MOVIES. My ex and I had a VHS recorder that enabled us to continue watching The X-Files after our daughter was born, because she invariably had a meltdown in her crib 5 minutes into the show if we watched in real time.

I had a Walkman and used it pretty regularly until I got my first iPod. I still have that old brick of an iPod; the hard disk won't move anymore. I loved that thing. I still have a functioning iPod Nano that I use occasionally. But when we were kids, we had a record player - a portable, but also my family had one of those huge wooden stereo consoles, acquired from my uncle when he got all new furniture (he did that a lot). My father had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and at some point there was an 8-track player in the house.

I had one of these well-known ubiquitous clock radios. I got it for my fourteenth birthday, and I only got rid of it two years ago. It went with me to college, it was on my nightstand for a while, when my ex and I had our first house it went on a little shelf in the kitchen, in our second house it went onto the nightstand in the guest room (which eventually became my bedroom), and when I got divorced I took it with me. I only got rid of it because the radio had completely ceased to function and it was too big to fit on my new tiny nightstand. (I got a vintage folding battery-powered alarm clock to replace it.)

I guess when I start looking back, I've actually done a lot of stuff that is now fascinating historical stuff for people who missed it. I remember when I was a kid, thinking about things my grandmother had seen, thinking I wasn't so far removed from the time when she was a young badass (1920s). I suppose my childhood looks that antique to kids now.

From:

meghan9436

Replying by email. (How shiny!)

I did however get a hold of a camcorder in grade 9, and my friend/classmate (badly) and I parodied The Blair Witch Project as part of a school project?

Apparently you can’t edit your posts after someone replied to it. But that’s good in the fact that it creates accountability, and people can’t go back and edit their posts in order to mislead others. But anyway, I meant today that we both were acting badly in this home movie, lol.

Sorry to hear about your daughter. She was born exactly ten years after I was -1986. 1996 was a year I look back fondly on. I associate that year with Ace of Base, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and Tamagotchi/Nano/Giga Pet. We were also into The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Animorphs! Those were the things that were big with my peers and I that year.

My parents used to have one of those radio alarm clocks, but I don’t know what became of it. They replaced it a few times with assorted alarm clocks over the years. I used assorted alarm clocks too, including what was called a Clocky that literally rolled away to help me wake up in the mornings. I gave up the Clocky because the alarm sound was so horrendous that it triggered headaches/migraines in me. These days, I just use my iPhone alarms.

I remember a lot of pre-1990s technology because people never got rid of anything. I remember eight track tapes, and my parents eventually got rid of those in a garage sale at some point. My grandmother used to have one of those enormous TV’s that had the wooden frame base thing.

I never got attached to any one house or apartment because of how much my family moved in my youth. A lot of units we stayed at were unrenovated, and a lot of places still had that wooden wall paneling.

Oh, and remember when car stereos were purchased separately from the car? You had to lock it down or take it with you to prevent theft! People also used to use The Club on their steering wheels, but I have no idea if those ever worked to prevent car theft.

I got a generic mp3 player from Korea for my birthday in 2002. It eventually died, and I upgraded to an iPod Nano with the video function in 2009 ish? That, along with my iPod shuffle died sometime along the way.

It has been stated over and over again on Reddit, but doesn’t it feel like just a collective fever dream? It feels like all this stuff happened a lifetime ago.

As much as I have complained recently about where social media and society is going, maybe at some point in the future we will feel nostalgic for the times we’re living in now. I remember back in the 90s, I used to complain about animal prints and bright colours. But now I gravitate to those things because they remind me of my youth. Maybe it as always been this way in that we don’t appreciate those fleeting moments until they have long since passed.

Sent from my iPhone

Edited (Full emailed response was cut off. Copy-pasta'd from my email sent box.) Date: 2023-11-21 12:00 pm (UTC)