Well, golly, hello. Do you love music as much as I do? I don't know if you do. You probably do.
You may listen to it on the radio. You may go home and listen. Not me. Oh, hell no.
I love music so much. I love listening to it live. I love listening to recordings. I love listening to it on vinyl.
I love listening to it on a very good audio system. I just appreciate music so much, and I am so grateful for it. And now I'm going to do a damn podcast about being grateful for wonderful music, and I'm going to talk about music, but damn it, I can't play any of this music that I'm going to talk about with you. I just, I cannot play it.
Why, you say? Because of companies like ASCAP and BMI. If I played that music for you on this podcast, they would send people to my house, and they would steal my cats. They would.
That's, that's what they, plus find me a ton of money, and all of the people like Apple Music and, or Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all these people would say, Michael, we like you, but we're not going to play your podcast anymore. So I can't play the music, but I, you do hear music on here, like you hear this music. That is our opening music here on The Daily Grateful. And I, once again, am Michael Gross, and I own the rights to that music.
I paid money. I have the rights for that music. And the closing music, uh, I own the rights for my closing music. My closing music was composed by a guy by the name of Mike Stewart.
He composed and recorded it, uh, in his studio at the time. I believe in Alperetta, Georgia. He now works out of Nashville. But I paid money and bought the rights to use that music, and I can play it for you, and nobody can mess with me.
All right? Nobody can mess with me, but I cannot play the music that I'm going to talk about today. When I was young, in Catholic school, I took a music appreciation course. It wasn't my idea, by the way.
It was, you know, the nuns. There was a sister there who taught music, and she did a music appreciation course, and she wanted us to learn how to sight-read music. And she picked out the people in the class that she felt had potential to learn how to do that. There was about, I don't know, we had a class of, what, 20 kids in that class?
And out of there, there was about four of us that she kind of centered in on. I was one of the four to learn how to sight-read music. And her methods for teaching sight-reading were rather interesting. She would pull out a piece of music and place it, uh, in front of me, you know, on the, on the easel.
And she would play the first note on the piano. And then I was to take off from there, and I was to sing the song, sight-reading the music, music I'd never seen before. And the way she would teach you how to do this is she would, you know, do that, then she would stand behind you. And if you got a note wrong, she would hit you in the back with her closed fist on the side, not directly, but on the side, with whap on your back.
And I learned how to sight-read music really damn fast because, you know, this nun, she could, she could womp you. She was a very loving woman, but she loved music, and she could tell that I loved music, and she wanted me to learn. So this is how she taught. I think candy would have been better, but I took it.
I, I learned. And when, by the way, another story is, years later, when I moved to Florida and I was in the choir at Dunedin Junior High School, Mrs. Moore was our choir teacher, and I loved her so much. Uh, she was so talented and so good, even though she picked, and we had a special high-end group as part of that called the Bonnie Lads and Lassies.
And I auditioned for the Bonnie Lads and Lassies, and I didn't get in. The part that I auditioned for, I was a tenor at the time, uh, and another guy got it. And I used to, I'm not going to use his real name. I'm going to make up a name because I don't know, he's a nice person, and he could not sing.
I used to call him Foghorn. I would call him Dave Foghorn Wilson. That's not his real name. I just made that up, but I put Foghorn in there because he just, you know, a tenor, and he would do it.
And he was terrible. But his dad was a surgeon. And in those days, it was a popularity contest, especially for the teachers. And I always, you know, Anyway, at the end of the year, we're taking our final exams, right?
And as part of our final exams in choir, Mrs. Moore selected some of us, and she did the little sight-reading trick. And she pulled out music that none of us knew. And not every kid had to do it, right?
Not every kid had to do it. But she stuck a piece of sheet music in front of me and said, Okay, Mr. Gross, now it is your turn. And I, boom, she did the first note on the piano, and she needed me to do four bars.
Oh, no, Michael not gonna do four bars. Michael does the whole damn song. Boom. Never heard it before in my life.
Did the whole song. Did not miss a note. I just kept, after the four bars, I kept going. And I saw her eyes, and they just got like really big.
And she's just like, and then I saw tears coming out of her eyes. And then I, you know, when it was all done, she said, Why didn't you use these talents all year? And I did use those damn talents all year because I got into Allstate Choir. You know, I got into Allstate Choir.
I went to contest. I won all of those things. Didn't get into Bonnie Lads and Lassies, but I did all that. But my dad was not a famous doctor in our hometown.
Anyway, totally off the subject. Let's go back to music and what I learned in the sisters' music appreciation. Back in the old days, and I'm talking, you know, the 14th, 15th centuries, you know, way, way back when, when classical music was born, the pure, you know, the essence of, of composition, sheet music was developed. And it was written in.
And the way that these fine artists, that's why when you listen to Mozart today, you're listening to it the way that he wanted you to listen to it because of the way he wrote the sheet music. And there's something in sheet music called dynamics. Okay? Dynamics are very important.
Like on the piano, if they want you to play the piano softly, you have a P in the sheet music, above the sheet music, or forte plays softly or mezzo piano, MP moderately soft, mezzo forte, MF moderately loud. These things are all part of sheet music, and they tell, you know, the people who are going to play it, which has gone out now for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years because of the brilliance of sheet music. And how orchestras today can play fantastic music. And if you have a wonderful conductor, I remember in the 1950s, I used to watch religiously, Religiously, I would watch on our black and white television.
What was his name? It just left my mind. Bernstein, Young People's concerts, where he would teach you about the classical music. And he would play, you know, with an orchestra, the classical music and talk about the history of the particular piece of music and why the composer wrote it this way.
And he was a brilliant composer himself, and he would do some of his own music and talk about that. And it was brilliant. Now let's go into more modern, modern talk now, as far as music is concerned. As we got into modern days, the music of Frank Sinatra and all of these people were recorded in recording studios.
And they were recorded by brilliant artists. And there were producers. Now, in music is the producer who has the vision. He's the producer in a music composition on an album is the genius with the Beatles.
It was George Martin. He had the vision. The Beatles wrote these fabulous songs, and they worked with George Martin who helped them produce this and send this out. And this was done not only by his help in deciding where, you know, music would come in and this sort of thing, but also the technology and the technology in the 1960s was totally different than the technology that we have today.
It was all done on four and eight track audio tape. And it was all, you know, analog, but it was done in such a way. They had boards that they would equalize out the music and all of these things, and they could do this. Let's move over to the Beach Boys.
This is going to be my big example. The Beach Boys had a leader of the group. The leader of the group was Brian Wilson and Pet Sounds was their, their best album, their best album ever. And here's something that you don't know.
The music that you hear on Pet Sounds, the singing are all of the Beach Boys. But if you hear Good Vibrations or California Girls or Help Me, Rhonda, any of these songs, the musicians that played on play a lot of classical bombs and things like this, and she's so good at doing the sheet music and she knows, you know, she knows, and she's so good. You can take somebody who's a technical pianist and then they will play and they will hit the notes correctly. But because she knows and she feels as though what the artist was doing and she will hit that key softly, okay, she will hit that particular note softly and you can just feel the difference.
If you ever have seen a wonderful pianist play classically, it will bring tears to your eyes. Getting back to the Beach Boys, getting back to Brian Wilson, he once wrote, and I can't play it for you, damn it, I can't play it for you, but he says, at a movie, you can feel it touching you in your heart and every day of the summertime, you'll hear the children chasing the ice cream carts. They'll play it on your wedding day. They'll play it about a million ways, or there must be about a million ways to add some music to your day.
And as I take you out with the original composition that I have the rights to, written and played by Mike Stewart, the name of this song is My Piano Mic. And listen to how he plays the piano. Listen to the emphasis when he gets down into boom. Did you hear that?
Yeah, that's talent. That's talent. You're not paying close attention to it because you're listening to it and you've enjoyed it for as long as you've listened to this podcast, but there are all these things that are added on and the base that you hear that is being played. He's playing the bass on this as well.
Wonderful. We'll see you tomorrow.