The San Diego Fair Show

THE FIRST LONG CONCERT PERFORMED BY CHILDREN MEDIEVAL BAND
– presenting a short history of rock music

July 1, 2013
Last night, at the San Diego Fair – California, CMB played 15 (!) songs during a full one hour concert. No CMB fans were present, the whole fair is a too crowded place and difficult to reach, but the people which happened to be around were profoundly surprised. They had never heard before of Children Medieval Band, not even of Rammstein (which the kids played five covers at the end of the show), but they cheered and applauded warmly after each song.
It was an impressive success for CMB. It’s very rare that a kids band (7-11 yo) can entertain successfully an audience for a full hour, playing a lot of songs.
Many visitors, while going to other activities, stopped by to watch and just couldn’t go away until the end. It was a good show.

Here are the videos. The sound is quite bad, recorded through the camera – due to some technical problems we couldn’t record from the mixer.

The kids played 15 songs, starting with their favorite
1. Call of the Vikings
and continued following the timeline of the history of rock, which contains these most important moments:
– the early rock (late fifties) – Chuck Berry, Ventures, Little Richards, Elvis, etc
2. Walk Don’t Run – by Ventures
3. Talking bout You – by Chuck Berry
– the British invasion – Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Who, etc
4. Love Me Do – by Beatles
5. There’s a Place – by Beatles
6. Heart Full of Soul – by Yardbirds
– psychedelic era – Cream, Hendrix, Pink Floyd etc
7. Purple Haze – by Hendrix
– electronic, techno
8. Robots – by Kraftwerk – (and a 2nd version from Cornelia’s angle)
– punk – Stranglers, S. Pistols, Devo, B52s, Police, etc
9. Problems – by S. Pistols
– after punk – alternativ – industrial, the hard to define period of the past 30 years. Most notable of this period is Rammstein.
10. Seven Nation Army – by White Stripes
11. The Old Man – by Rammstein
12. Donaukinder – by Rammstein
13. Sonne – by Rammstein
14. Ich Will – by Rammstein
15. Du Riechst So Gut – by Rammstein

The kids had very good stage presence, confident and inspired all along.
In spite of the audio quality, all songs are well interpreted, especially the last two – IchWill and DuRiechst – which we like better than the home recordings made last year.

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This repertoire reflects the efforts of the CMB kids during a two year study of rock music. It is not necessarily a ‘best of’ selection, they like hundreds of songs, but their choice was based on various criteria. One priority was to avoid mainstream, frivolous, evil and generally that so called ‘drugs-sex-rock’n’roll’ type of music.

Many people who dislike rock don’t really understand this phenomenon. Their perception is based on whatever the major media channels distribute incessantly. We detected three major parts of rock music:
1. bad rock – mainstream – generally frivolous, pornographic, ‘shake-butt’, etc
2. evil rock – bad-ass, cruelty, no mercy, etc
3. good rock – which includes protest rock and any non-evil and non-frivolous songs created on the rock foundation: accented rhythm, heavy riffs, truthful singing. This is the type of rock we are interested to learn and play.

The rock music has a nice future if it uses the strong, simple, rough way of musical expression as a mean against the evils of the world. Unfortunately, there always will be a tendency towards a cheap use of rock form on a frivolous level. This will keep dividing audiences into two irreconcilable social classes. Hopefully the majority won’t be always on the wrong side.