Something Old Something New

One thing that I really love about the internet is that it's really allowed those with a bit of curiosity to re-discover old things that we thought were cool when we first found them, but in the mists of time, these things have been forgotten. It's part of the Long Tail, of which I have spoken of here before. The cataloging and indexing and search-ability of the internet has really facilitated this mucking around on the fringes of our culture and the things we like - often in very off the beaten path places. And the path that takes us there is often interesting. Here's an example:

I was reading the recent Outside Magazine( the June print version - the one they mail to your house!) a side bar about the phenomenon of Slab Breaks - waves that break from deep water over steep shallow reefs, as apposed to normal sand beach breaks. They are rare, unusual and hard to surf, but big wave surfers seek them out, still. The article mentioned one of the world's famous Slab Breaks was called Teahupoo in Tahiti.

When I finished reading the short article I loaded "Teahupoo" in Google. At the top of the search results page were some amazing still photos of people surfing at the Teahupoo Break as well as some awesome images of surfers in the water and off to the side of the wave, but up high, as the wave started to roll underneath them and them looking into this Grand Canyon of water!( See picture at top) There was then the ubiquitous Wikipedia entry, some short YouTube clips and then a listing, "Laid Hamilton at Teahupoo". This was actually a full 37 minute movie someone had up-loaded onto the Google Video pages. The link is below:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3455695848495347871

I watched the movie. I can watch surf movies like this all day. This was very nicely done with some amazing footage of Hamilton surfing a vareity of some of the famous big wave breaks around the world culminating in some stunning video of him surfing Teahupoo. The music in the video caught my ear. It was all great stuff and went well with the surf action. Two tunes really stood out. I had heard them maybe once before - but a long time ago. It sounded a lot like Ben Haper, but I was not sure. At the end of the video, in the credits, they did list two Ben Harper tunes - "Faded" and "Glory & Consequence". I wrote that info down. Next stop was at another of my favourite websites www.allmusic.com , to do some background and information checking on which of Harper's albums these tunes were from. Then it was onto YouTube to confirm, that these were the tunes that I had heard. You can hear them here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2iPulbZgro ( Faded)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPRYGbhFREE ( Glory & Consequence)

The first video is a live version of "Faded" recorded at a club in Italy with the intro in Italian, and Harper demonstrating some wicked lap, slide guitar chops. The second is just a straight-up studio recording of, "Glory & Consequence".

Now it was off to down-load those tunes, so I could have them as part of my mp3 collection. I have been listening to them as I write this blog post.

So the cycle was complete - a print article in Outside Magazine, ultimately, via the internet, led me to re-discovering to Ben Harper tunes that I really liked that I had long ago forgot about.