#he'd probably be a multi genre kinda guy

[listenupcupcakes]

What's your favorite song? You can't say the american anthem

Hmmm...

I DO NOT LISTEN TO ANYTHING ELSE!

[infriga]

I convinced my mom to try the live action One Piece, because she's the type to like this style of show even though she isn't into animation and would never read manga, but I didn't think I'd be able to convince my dad because he's usually a stickler for more grounded and realistic stories (his favourite genre is war movies, his favourite movie is Saving Private Ryan, for reference). But, when I brought up with him how I figured it probably wouldn't be his thing because it was fantasy, he mentioned to me that he does enjoy some fantastical stuff if it has like an internal universe logic, like Star Wars, and the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that he also enjoys campy fun action adventure stuff that doesn't take itself too seriously like Indiana Jones or Pirates of the Carribean.

And One Piece has both that internal logic for why people can perform crazy feats (even if it isn't explained right away) which I mentioned to him (just that there is a reason why people can do crazy things in this world), as well as the campy fun action adventure thing going for it, especially in the Live Action (the fight against Morgan's base even has a major Indiana Jones vibes ngl). So I explained that to him and asked if he wanted to try it, and he agreed to watching the first episode with me to decide if he'd watch it with my mom and me.

AND HE ACTUALLY SAID IT WAS INTERESTING SO FAR!! Like, he is NOT the kinda guy to enjoy anime or manga or even western cartoons, always refuses to watch anything anime and doesn't show any interest when I talk about it (I've managed to convince him to watch a few movies like Sword of the Stranger but it's obvious that even when he's not bored or doesn't hate it, it still doesn't catch or keep his interest), and he's really picky about anything fantasy or SciFi, if it like sets off his bullshit meter too much he starts nitpicking the logic behind certain abilities, or decisions, or explanations, etc. I once tried to get him to try Gravity Falls and he wanted to stop after the first episode. He's THAT picky.

So the fact that he actually laughed several times while watching the first episode of OPLA with me, commented about Luffy's character positively several times (he seems to think Luffy is really funny which surprised me cause I thought he'd be the most entertained by Zoro but I mean I can't blame him it is Luffy after all), never cringed or criticised or said anything about how ridiculous it was, means a lot coming from him cause he's always really blunt and honest about his opinion on this sort of stuff (which is fine I don't want him to pretend to enjoy stuff when he doesn't). He actually watched the whole first episode without it losing his attention, and seemed to have fun! And he agreed to watch the rest with my mom and me!

This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I dislike when people just dismiss the idea of live action adaptations entirely. I get that people are jaded with past failures, and don't like when live action is treated like a replacement for or improvement from animation when it isn't. But it is a valid medium just as much as animation or comics or writing are, and can be used to produce some amazing things. And the fact is, there are people who have a hard time connecting with other mediums who will otherwise never engage with this media in its original forms. Live Action, when done well and done right, can reach new audiences and welcome them into the fold in ways the original formats never can.

One Piece didn't need the live action to be popular, obviously, and the live action cannot and will not replace the original, nor should it. But I love that we get to have it alongside the manga and anime. It's just more of what we love, it's the cherry on top of an already stellar multi-layered cake. It complements the original rather than taking anything away from it. And for the first time in over a decade I might be able to share One Piece with my parents, who would only ever have a chance of experiencing it and enjoying it in live action. There's just something so awesome about that for me personally. I just wish more live action adaptations would understand what the One Piece live action understood about the adaptation process, and that's how to keep the heart of the story in-tact, so more people from more fandoms could have a chance to share something they love with more people who it would otherwise not reach.

Anyway, thank you Oda and the OPLA cast and crew for doing live action right for once!

[cruesuffix]

interview with mick about ‘Dr. Feelgood’: a small excerpt

Interview by Guitar Legends, circa 2008-2009

“The result was a career-, if not genre-defining album. Says Mars, “‘Feelgood’ was the standard that everyone else had to beat.” Prior to taking the stage at Madison Square Garden (where the band opens their set with the trademark guitar dive bombs that announce ‘Kickstart My Heart’), Mars sat with Guitar Legends to reflect on the making of Mötley Crüe’s 1989 smash effort. As the guitarist himself announces in the album’s title track: “Ladies and gentlemen, come play with Dr. Feelgood.”

Guitar Legends: ‘Dr. Feelgood’ was your first album working with Bob Rock. Previously, Mötley Crüe had a long and successful relationship with Tom Werman [Cheap Trick, Twisted Sister], who produced all your albums from ‘Shout At The Devil’ through ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’ Why did the group make a change at that point?

Mick Mars: Tom was too much into the older school- the Ted Nugents and stuff like that. In the early and mid eighties that kind of approach still worked, but by the time of ‘Feelgood’ we wanted to move to the next level and get a younger guy with a fresher mind and fresher ideas on production. I think Nikki found Bob through Ian Atsbury from the Cult [Rock produced the Cult’s 1989 album, Sonic Temple]. We sent him a demo of ‘Dr. Feelgood’, and he liked it a lot, and then we went up to Little Mountain [Rock’s studio in Vancouver] to talk with him. He had a lot of fresh ideas and different approaches to doing things. Bob taught me a lot about tones, amps, using different cabinets, different heads… I learned a lot from him.

GL: I’ve heard that prior to hiring Bob, there was talk of getting Quincy Jones to produce ‘Dr. Feelgood.’

Mars: Yes! I think that Nikki put the request in. But you know, it’s Quincy Jones. [laughs] He was probably like, “Who the hell is this band? Who do they think they are?”

GL: Bob was known in those days as something of a perfectionist. You’ve talked in the past about spending as much as two weeks tracking the guitars for just one song on the album.

Mars: That's the truth. He really nitpicked. If I had to double a rhythm, l would get maybe a quarter of the way through the song before he'd stop me. And that really interrupted my thought process- I mean, I could have played through and then gone back and fixed any problems, you know? But Bob would stop the tape and be like, “What’re you doing? You missed that little click," talking about the way my pick hit the string or something. That's how picky he was. I might have done something by accident, and when doubling the part he'd stop me and say, "You didn't get that.” And I’d go, "I didn't get what?" And he'd say, "That." And I'd go, "But I don't hear anything!"

GL: It’s rumored that, when it came to Vince's vocals, at the end of a day of singing he would often have only one word down on tape that Bob would deem useable.

Mars: That's completely true. I don't really know how Vince felt about that, to be honest. I should ask him! But truthfully I wasn't really too surprised, due to the condition Vince was in then. We were all coming out of this haze that we'd been in for a long time. Gradually, we all slipped back into it again.

GL: Did you appreciate Bob's attention to detail?

Mars: It kinda got on my nerves after a while. I mean, some of the things that Bob was picky about, they were so minute you couldn’t even hear them. I listen to my favorite older albums and hear mistakes all over them, and that's what makes them sound human, you know? But I get what he was trying to do with us, and in the end it worked.

GL: Your guitar sound on the album is huge. Part of that stems from the fact that you tune down a whole step to D, but it also sounds as if your rhythms are heavily layered and multi-tracked.

Mars: There's a lot of guitar on ‘Feelgood.’ I think I was doing about five rhythm tracks per song and then had different little parts going on and stuff. When we were done and I looked at all the tape we had used, there were about 120 two-inch reels. That's a lot. Of course, when we did our next album with Bob [1994’s Motley Crüe] I had 80 tracks of guitars!

GL: What guitars were you using on ‘Dr. Feelgood’?

Mars: A bunch of stuff. My black Les Paul from the early days [Mars' 72 Les Paul Special], a couple of Kramers, a couple of Strats, a Telecaster. Then I also had some lap steels and Dobros.

GL: You played a lot of slide on that album, like on "Slice of Your Pie" and "Without You."

Mars: Nikki and Tommy at that time loved it. So they were always going, "Play slide!" And I was like, "I don't wanna play slide." And they would respond, "Play slide!" So I did.

GL: What was your amp setup?

Mars: I was using my Marshalls that were modded by a guy named Jose Arredondo [Arredondo was an in-demend amp technician, known for having worked on Eddie Van Halen's rig in the Eighties.] I had maybe five of six of them, all old - everything from a '67 to a 72 - and they all sounded really different. I think I had about seven stacks in the studio all together, with different heads on them. And then I had a few 50-watt Hiwatt half stacks, a Vox AC30 combo, and also this amp called a Garnet. I used that strictly for its bottom end, to thicken up my tone. It was just this old head that I stuck on a Marshall cab. All it did was go pffftttt. It sounded like crap! But it worked. So the whole setup was just really loud and powerful. We'd have fans and all these kids standing outside the studio, behind the building, because they could hear me through the walls. It was leaking through everything. Aerosmith were in the next room recording ‘Pump’, and it leaked all over their album, too!

GL: So you can hear Mick Mars’ guitar playing on ‘Pump’?

Mars: If you listen hard enough you probably can. Unless they gated it off tight enough. Steven [Tyler] actually came over one day and said, "Hey dude! You gotta tum those amps down!"

GL: At that time both your band and the guys in Aerosmith had recently gotten sober and were committed to living a healthy lifestyle. I remember hearing that the two bands would go jogging together during the daytime.

Mars: The others would. Not me! But yeah, that was in interesting time for all of us. I remember one time the receptionist at the studio brought in a cake for some reason or another. It was a rum cake, but I didn't know it. And I took a bite of it and almost spit it out, like, "That's got rum in it!" And Steven Tyler was just sitting there freaking out, because he really wanted a plece of cake but knew he couldn't have any. That's how serious it was at that time.

GL: How was the vibe within Mötley given that everyone was sober for the first time?

Mars: It was all right. I guess. Tommy and I would joke around about it, just to yank Bob's chain. We would get frustrated because Bob was so on top of every little thing we did. With Tommy it was always "Play it harder," or "Play more like this." And then with me it was, "That part ain't right!" Every time he'd say something like that, Tommy and I would go boom! and act like we were slamming back a big shot of Jack. We tried to have some fun, because there were definitely some frayed nerves. But we got along ok.

GL: How did you deal with sobriety?

Mars: I didn’t have any withdrawals or real cravings, but I missed the way it made me relax, especially during the recording procese. The flipside, of course, was that drinking made me a much sloppier player. So it was better that I wasn’t doing it.

GL: Around that time the band was also engaged in group therapy sessions.

Mars: That was never for me. The way I felt about therapy and rehab and all that is that I’d seen it all fail, so many times. My feeling is, if you want to quit, you set the shit down and go “I’m done. That’s it." A couple of the guys in the band had a hard time with that. I didn't.

GL: Were you all sober during the writing process for ‘Dr. Feelgood’?

Mars: I’m not sure. It was around that time after the Girls’ tour, that we all started getting straight. Although I remember one time Nikki came to my house to do some writing, and he rode his bike over and was a bit high. That pissed me off. That was the day I played him a rough demo of "Dr. Feelgood."

GL: That was a song you had completely mapped out on your own?

Mars: Pretty much. I was just goofing around and came up with the lick and put it down on a little eight track. I don't know where it came from… it came from my brain! I had to take that song into the band maybe four or five times before I could get the rest of the guys to pay attention to it. It was the same with "Slice of Your Pie." It took me a while to convince them to really hear it. The problem was that when Nikki had a song, like "Kickstart My Heart,” it would be much more complete, with lyrics and everything. But while I write a lot of music, I'm not so good with lyrics, so as a result my songs came together later. For instance. one time we went up to Vancouver to meet with Bob, and in the car on the way back to Los Angeles I wrote the song "Sticky Sweet" in my head. When I got home, I picked up the guitar and I could just play it.

GL: The main riff always reminded me of "The Wanton Song” by Led Zeppelin.

Mars: Yes! Although that wasn't intentional. But when I listened back to the song after it was done, I definitely heard that. It's like George Harrison with ‘My Sweet Lord’ -I'm positive the guy didn't realize he was doing [The Chiffons] "He's So Fine," but it happens, you know?

GL: Speaking of Harrison, the outro to “Slice Of Your Pie” quotes directly from the Beatles “I Want You (She's So Heavy)."

Mars: That was obviously intentional. l don’t think we had a real ending for the song, so we started goofing around with ideas. It was fun doing that, figuring out the chords that would be reminiscent of the song, but with a twist. We did a lot of that kind of stuff on the album, little nods to the classics. Near the end of my solo on “Time for Change,” for instance, I lift a little of the melody from [Mott the Hoople’s] “All the Young Dudes.”

GL: I noticed that. I also caught the "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” reference in “Rattlesnake Shake.”

Mars: That's right! [laughs] And I took the chorus from [The James Gang’s] "Funk #49”!

GL: Your rhythm guitar parts were obviously well thought out. How about the solos?

Mars: Some were, some weren't. "Dr. Feelgood" was one that was completely improvised But there were some solos that I really had to work on, like “Sticky Sweet,” and “Rattlesnake Shake.” A couple of them I thought needed a more melodic thing, rather than just the wheedle - wee stuff.

GL: How did the talk box solo at the end of "Kickstart My Heart" come about?

Mars: I wanted something a little different. I was thinking about how Jimi Hendrix would "talk" in colors, and this was a different color, rather than me just plugging into a stack of Marshalls and ripping a lead. Sort of like how in "Crosstown Traffic" Hendrix used a comb with wax paper to double the lead guitar line. That became my way to add a different color.

GL: Another big hit from the album was "Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)," which was a bit of a stylistic departure for the band in the way you mixed acoustic and electric guitars and didn't bring in the chorus until the last part of the song.

Mars: Nikki came up with the parts, but he didn’t know how to put it all together. There’s the verse, and then the chorus, and then the third part which is the real chorus. But it was like, How do we get back to the beginning? So we decided to do all the verse and chorus stuff first, and then end with the third part and let it go from there. We put the hook at the end of the song which was a little different for us.

GL: ‘Dr. Feelgood’ was Mötley Crüe's only Number One album and remains your biggest-selling effort. At the time, did it feel to you like you were creating your definitive record?

Mars: To be honest, it seemed like just another record. I didn’t think it was a milestone for us. But having my first Number One record was a big deal. I remember my manager calling me up and telling me that we did it. I was like "That's all good!”

GL: It was validating for you?

Mars: Definitely. That album was like the standard that everyone else had to beat. And all the other bands that were around at that time… can I mention them?

GL: Go ahead.

Mars: Your Firehouses, your Poisons, your Warrants, Great Whites, Dokkens… all those guys just went woosh! Gone. I mean, they still played, but they didn't take that next step, in my opinion. They just kinda stayed in 1985. So I may not have anticipated it at the time, but ‘Feelgood’ set a certain standard for the day and, actually, for what was to come as well.

GL: In what sense?

Mars: Well, I remember shortly after the album was released, the Metallica guys went to see Bob Rock about working together (for 1991's "Black Album”]. And when you first meet with Bob, he always goes, "So, what do you want?" And they threw down ‘Feelgood’ and said, “We want that." I think their album wound up doing okay too.

and that was the interview!! i know there’s probably more of this with the rest of the band, but this was all i could find so… yeah! this was pretty informative in my opinion, and i learned something from it at least.