Freddie Mercury mentioned in interview with Sid Vicious and John Lydon

Actually, they played well enough and had good songs. They're not musical prodigies, but neither are 99.99% of rock musicians anyway.

"Well enough" and "good songs" are subjective, and don't pick apart my use of subjective ;) There are bar bands playing in every city in the world tonight with better chops. They were a fantastically well packaged/marketed social phenomenon that needed to blow up quickly or else their lack of quality would have bit them in the ass. It was brilliant to implode after one album and be legends, if they did a second album they'd have been the Knack or Hootie and the Blowfish or a thousand other bands who had monster first albums, but no good tunes to deliver on the second album and disappeared.

Well, Lydon published P.I.L., one of the most influential albums of all the times...and later some good albums.
And I think Nevermind the Bollocks is a masterpiece, very good musicians (Steve Jones is a great guitarrist)...the only thing wrong? Well, read the Lydon biography.

You can love Queen's music and also Sex Pistols's music. For example, Wayne Hussey from The Mission only loves the first 4 queen albums, and hates the 80's period...and what? I love both bands. This is not the school....

[QUOTE] [b]pittrek wrote:[/b]

[QUOTE] [b]thomasquinn 32989 wrote:[/b]

I think the Sex Pistols are the fakest punk band ever, their members are complete and total jerks with no brains and no talent and their songs suck. I'll take, say, The Clash over them any day of the week. Any insult by any of them seems a compliment to me.[/QUOTE]

The Pistols were trying to have fun. The Clash were trying to change the world via music.[/QUOTE]

Strange kind of fun, if you ask me. Violent, racist and angry, that's a great way to have fun...

Racist? I'm not sure what you're talking about. But I agree with you.

[QUOTE] [b]Sebastian wrote:[/b]

Actually, they played well enough and had good songs. They're not musical prodigies, but neither are 99.99% of rock musicians anyway.[/QUOTE]

Sebastian, I assume you would include Freddie in the 0.01% fraction of prodigies? Anyone else? Asking purely out of interest, by the way.

It depends on the area. As a composer, definitely; as a singer, yeah (although it depends on the era and work in question). As a piano player he was good with some excellent moments but that was it. As a guitarist, he wasn't as bad as he claimed, but surely there are thousands who play much better.

To say 99.9% of rock musicians aren't very good is rather a sweeping statement. What are we measuring them against? I know some people viewed as brilliant virtuosos in the jazz or classical world that aren't able play a simple verse and chorus of Back in Black or Highway to Hell with the right groove and feel, yet that doesn't make them bad musicians, just stronger in their chosen field. Same with the much maligned 'rock'.

^ I really doubt that claim. For instance, most professional jazz musicians (excluding a few really big stars) also play in blues/rock/rhythm&blues groups, simply because they need to do that to make money. I do notice that the more classically trained a musician is, the more trouble they tend to have with playing from lead sheets and improvising (excluding organists, who are still trained in (classical) improvisation).

Just search out an interview with famed fusion drummer Rod Morgenstein, who when joining Winger thought it was almost beneath him, but then realised playing the simpler rock passages of their material was far harder and needed far more discipline than he had thought.

I'm not saying they can't play it, but there is usually an absolutely evident difference in delivery of feel and emotion between someone playing a rock part that they wrote and a session guy playing the same part from charts.

I think the WWRY musical is a great example - the drums are played by totally pro excellent musicians, playing Roger's parts, but even one bar of listening tells me it ain't Roger.

"the drums are played by totally pro excellent musicians, playing Roger's parts, but even one bar of listening tells me it ain't Roger. "

Well yeah, but I don't think that has anything to do with what genre one usually plays. Every musician has his own touch, so to the trained ear, distinguishing between two rock drummers (or two jazz drummers) and distinguishing between a rock and a jazz drummer might well amount to the same thing. It's the thought behind the "blindfold tests" a number of music magazines had (have?) musicians take. I do think that, if they're given insufficiently specific instructions, you can tell if a session musician is usually active in, say, jazz, or ska, or rock. But that's not a matter of musicianship and style as much as what a given musician considers the 'default' way of treating an unspecified piece of music, and it's something that results from vague instructions rather than musical habits per se. To illustrate what I mean by that - if you made a transcription (not an excessively detailed one) of the drums of, say, "Modern Times Rock And Roll", and you had a competent jazz drummer, a competent rock drummer and a competent metal drummer play it, you'd get three totally different drum tracks, each reflecting the style the respective drummers consider the 'default'. But if you had them listen to the track and then play it, I don't think there would be many perceivable differences any more.

[QUOTE] [b]cmsdrums wrote:[/b]

To say 99.9% of rock musicians aren't very good is rather a sweeping statement.[/QUOTE]

I didn't say 'not very good'. I said 'not musical prodigies.' It's not the same. There are hundreds of thousands of people who can be very good without being prodigies.