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Oasis a really interesting rock band. Easy to identify their sound with the opening and a good part of the song to the tune Wonderwall. This British rock band formed a little before 1991 in Manchester with The Rain being their original name. The members of the band were Paul Mcguigan on bass, Tony McCarroll on drums, Liam Gallagher who mainly sang and played a little tambourine, and Paul Arthurs, playing the guitar. Before long, Liam’s older brother, Noel Gallagher, who was a very solid songwriter, had written some great songs. Maybe because he was the older brother, I don’t know, Noel wasn’t interested in what was going on with his little brother’s band. However, as time went by, he wants to get together with the band. He wants them to play the songs he’s written. He told them this and also informed them that he wanted to be the bands only songwriter.

They decided to take him on up on the proposal because they really needed some material and what they were going up with was really sub standard. Because is a great songwriter, once he joined up with the band, the great tunes turned them into a hit machine. They managed to put out 8 number one singles in the UK along with 7 number one albums. They won all kinds of awards, MTV, Q awards, and Europe music awards. In 2007 they produced one of the best albums of the past 30 years.

They were nominated for some Grammies after their BBC radio listeners voted for them. As of 2009, they have sold more than 30 million records. By the way, they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest top ten UK chart run for a group. This happened because they had 22 consecutive top ten hits. Really, this is unheard of. Even way back, the Beatles didn’t have that many. It’s certainly interesting when a band talks about or perhaps rarely proclaims that they are the next Beatles. This happens every now and then when the critics or the record labels, Sony, BMG, and others believe that their latest, hot band is on the way to being the next Beatles. People, this will never happen. There were things going on in history that made it possible for the Beatles to become who they were. Anyway, the band members signed on to the Creation Records label. This is when they started putting out their initial stuff.

Definitely Maybe. This came out a little after their early hits. Actually, what I wanted to talk about was how the song Wonderwall is in the first place, a take off of the Beatles. The very first Beatle to put out a solo album was George Harrison. It was the soundtrack to a movie called Wonderwall. Wonderwall Music as well as the album was called Wonderwall Music. It was mainly ambient stuff that wasn’t ready for the Beatles label. However, it came out on the Apple label. I think this was because EMI and Capital didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They knew it would never sell.

At least George had more musical content. John were a little bit more like revolutionized and his other experimental song What’s the New Mary Jane that didn’t show up, that wasn’t…They never showed up on official release. They finally put up an edited version, one of the edited versions on it on Beatles Anthology three ad lib. So, the song Wonderwall, getting back to Oasis, as I’m wandering off here in a daze. Whoops! Just a minute, my notes are disappearing. The band of course made appearances on MTV unplugged. They played on World Festival Hall but they also always have bickering between the brothers and it seems like now the plug has been pulled finally. And for every…As far as everybody else is concern, they are done. But Noel Gallagher is off and doing his own thing, writing his own stuff, playing…He spent some time playing with Zac Starkey, Ringo’s son. So another Beatles connection between Oasis and a member of the Beatles. So, the album, by the way, that Wonderwall was from came out in 1995. It is called “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”. It just rode, rode the charts for a while, because it had a lot of singles: “Some Might Say, ” “Roll With It, ” of course, “Wonderwall, ” “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Those were all big. They were, again, much bigger in the UK, in Britain, than they were in the United States. But, they did have two big hits in the US. Aside from “Wonderwall, ” “Champagne Supernova” was another one that became a radio staple for a while, and even a song I taught to a lot of people in the middle and late 1990s, when music was kind of sketchy and had entered a sort of void period at that point, anyway. There were some interesting complaints, or at least maybe critical comments about especially a lot of the stuff from “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”. Writer John Harris, in his article called “Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock, ” compares a lot of the songs and themes from that album directly to other songs.

He cites Gary Glitter’s “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again” as a song that has stuff clearly stolen from it. John Lennon’s “Imagine”… the song “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is a lot like “Imagine.” “You and Me, ” “She’s Electric, ” and the R.E.M song, “The One I Love.” “Morning Glory” is a lot like that. The songs really had such close resemblance to other existing pop songs, or older existing pop songs, that it really is hard to hand these guys a lot of credit for being very original.

This is exactly what happens in this type of Brit pop. Really, there is, in general, a lot of this kind of stuff going on all over the music industry. Not an abundance of creative, innovative ideas. Again, Oasis claimed to be much better than The Beatles. A lot like Michael Stipe. One of my students and I were having a conversation the other day about people. More specifically, self promoters and at one point, an interview with Michael Stipe from R.E.M. We were also talking about some of those really great R.E.M songs like Stand and Losing My Religion. Back to the point I was trying to make. At one time during the interview, Stipe said that the Beatles music was a lot like elevator music. Of course, that’s not an exact quote, but you get the point. It rather hard to believe that anyone, especially a musician, could entertain that thought, let alone say it out loud, in an interview. At the end, the interview said that had it not been for the makers of that elevator music and the elevator music itself, Micheal Stipe himself would have had to take the stairs forever. It really is a bit dicey when people try to compare themselves to the masters. One more thing I want to through is some other songs that were on the “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” It started with Hello. Gary Glitter got all the credit for that one, because it was one that really was taken. It was almost the cover of his song. Roll With It, Wonderwall, and Don’t Look Back in Anger were next in line. Don’t Look Back in anger sounded an awful lot like Imagine.

There you go; I just had to get Imagine back in my head. They also did Hey Now! And one called Untitled. It’s amazingly clever and creative to name a song Untitled. I mean, really, this is one of my all time favorite titles, I myself have dozens of songs by that name. “Some Might Say” was followed by “She’s Electric”, then “Morning Glory” and ending with a few more tunes, then one more “Untitled”. You know something, they gave these untitled songs subtitles. This one was called “The Swamp Song.” The other one was called “The Swamp Song.” Part 1, part 2. Or, “Excerpt 1″ and “Excerpt 2.” And, then it ended with “Champagne Supernova.” I must note that these two tracks, the Swamp tracks, were officially “Untitled, ” but it’s mainly because there were a few blank spots in the tapes, particularly on the ones that were produced in Mexico. There was a bonus track on the vinyl edition. Vinyl had kind of died about 10 years before, but it was still hanging around a little bit. There was an extra song on there, “Bonehead’s Bank Holiday.” If you’re ever looking for “Bonehead’s Bank Holiday” by Oasis, and you know it’s from the “Morning Glory” period, you’ve got to find it on the vinyl.

That is my last couple of thoughts on these guys. So, if you’re really interested in Oasis, I encourage you to check out some of their many interesting albums.Their songs are pretty fun to play. But, if you can play half a dozen Beatles songs, I guarantee you could play all the Oasis songs, because they’re a little bit simpler.

I enjoy writing about different rock bands and guitar. For acoustic guitar lessons or the Oasis Wonderwall Guitar Lesson visit TotallyGuitars.com