Talk:Magic Dick

Magic Stick Dick!

Where did his name come from?! I say goddamn! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.189.145.72 (talk) 19:12, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Dave Marsh

"In the Rolling Stone Record Guide series, music critic Dave Marsh described Salwitz as possibly the best white musician to ever play blues harmonica"

I contest Marsh as a reliable source. Marsh is a close friend of Salwitz and Geils. He has a habit of listing any member of the J. Geils band on any list of the "best" of anything, to the point where his impartiality is non-existent. Geils, Salwitz, and Wolf are the best at virtually everything, and the band is the greatest of all time, to hear Marsh tell it. Such a biased source is untrustworthy in this context; as he is merely a fan boy and close friend rather than a reliable source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.19.204.197 (talk) 16:18, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. I think he's truly one of the greatest... but in the context of a WP article, this ought be set off as Marsh's opinion.

Also, the citation is to an article that quotes Marsh from The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979), later changed to The Rolling Stone Album Guide. As the cited article's author (one Dana Spiardi) mentions that title specifically -- the only year it was used -- I have incorporated that as well. For all we know, Marsh might have revised his opinion in the intervening 38 (!!) years.

I do find it disingenuous that whoever brought in this quotation attached the "possibly" to Marsh's comment, as that word comes from Spiardi.
Weeb Dingle (talk) 05:31, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

could benefit from proper expansion

Greater editorial interest seems to be in Salwitz being a Jew than in his musicality. There's no mention of why/when he began playing harmonica, who he felt/feels were his major influences, and so on.

There's also some near-plagiarism from other sources, which ought be cleaned up. For instance, in the cited Spardi piece: In the early ’90s, Salwitz formed Bluestime with John Geils, his former college schoolmate from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The band fused Chicago blues with classic jazz, and released two albums: “Bluestime” (1994) and “Little Car Blues” (1996). ... In 1992, he and musician Pierre Beauregard were awarded a U.S. patent for an improved harp they call the “Magic Harmonica.”
Weeb Dingle (talk) 05:50, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Any MD fans are welcome to steal this: while Pierre Beauregard has no WP article, you CAN find Pierre Beauregard, Confederate general and the grandfather of the harmonica guy. The younger Pierre moved to Boston and launched band Beauregard's Blues Dusters.

Per the Magic Harp: some mentions online have very little further info, but the Toledo Blade (Jan 27 2008) adds some clarity —
Along with his business partner Pierre Beauregard, he also has patented a line of harmonicas that are in different tunings than standard harps. They allow musicians to play different chord structures and notes and expand the instrument s range, he said. The hard part is marketing them, something Dick said has been frustrating.
"People have been asking me about this for years and they've heard me play some of these and when they hear them demonstrated they say, Wow, that's unbelievable. When can we get them? Why can't we get them?" he said. "I have to give this explanation that s very frustrating. My forte is not being a businessman." ... "I'm an artist and an inventor. I'm not comfortable wearing the businessman's hat."

They applied for the patent 09/28/1988, and it was published 11/24/1992, US patent #5166461. The claims and description are readable for free (though the drawings are harder to locate). (Beauregard also received #8153875 in 2012 for the "Balanced harmonic minor harmonica".)

In the Tahoe Daily Tribune (10/24/2007) —
After the J. Geils Band parted ways in 1985, Salwitz spent time working on a harmonica design of his own, which he labeled the “Magic Harmonica,” a co-invention with Pierre Beauregard.
“The two of us had this love of jazz and swing, and always wanted to be able to play like Louis Armstrong or Lester Young on the harp. Not on a chromatic — on a Marine Band blues harp,” Magic Dick said in an interview with 2/3 X-Perts. “You run into a problem. Not all the notes are there, particularly when it comes to playing jazz. The harmonica is well suited to playing Chicago style blues.
“The tuning arrangement — the particular set up of the notes — is very good for straight ahead blues, but it’s not that good for classic jazz, and it’s not very good for certain other styles of blues one might want to do.
"So, necessity became the mother of invention,” he said. “There must be a way — by tuning the reeds to different notes, changing the chords, changing the relationship of the blow chord to the draw chord — to find different tuning arrangements beneficial for playing different styles of music. Using pencil and paper and trial and error we would work on tuning diagrams, ‘OK, if you change this reed to this note, and this one to that, this one to that, look what you get out of this harp!’ We applied music theory, in terms of the chord changes and melodies we were trying to play.”

The article also notes "The J. Geils Band actually began as Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels, while both Geils and Magic Dick were attending Worcester Polytechbic. In 1968 they started playing electric guitar and bass, and recruited drummer Stephen Jo Bladd and singer Peter Wolf, then brought in organist Seth Justman."
Weeb Dingle (talk) 16:01, 30 April 2017 (UTC)