My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Ted Nugent, Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (live, from Double Live Gonzo! including classic intro “anybody wants to get mellow you can turn around and get the F out of here”)
2. The Rolling Stones, If You Can’t Rock Me/Get Off Of My Cloud, (live, from Love You Live)
3. UFO, Rock Bottom (live, from Strangers In The Night)
4. Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)
5. Elton John, Street Kids
6. Chicago, Hideaway
7. Robin Trower, Day Of The Eagle
8. Budgie, Breaking All The House Rules
9. Iron Maiden, Holy Smoke
10. Deep Purple, Flight Of The Rat
11. Black Sabbath, Falling Off The Edge Of The World
12. AC/DC, Nervous Shakedown
13. Trapeze, Black Cloud
14. Headstones, The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald
15. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Spirit(s) In The Night
16. Gene Clark, No Other
17. Eagles, King Of Hollywood
18. John Mayall, Broken Wings
19. Television, Marquee Moon

My track-by-track tales:

1. Ted Nugent, Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (live, from Double Live Gonzo! including classic intro “anybody wants to get mellow you can turn around and get the F out of here”) . . . as we begin a mostly hard rocking set.

2. The Rolling Stones, If You Can’t Rock Me/Get Off Of My Cloud, (live, from Love You Live) . . . In those pre-internet days when you had no real chance to preview stuff and bought it sight unseen and unheard, and not having seen the 1975-76 tour, I remember being thrown a bit, upon buying the Love You Live album, at the re-arrangement of Get Off Of My Cloud tacked on to the rousing version of If You Can’t Rock Me, but quickly grew to love it as much as the original. My older sister did see the Toronto show in 1975 (I didn’t see my first Stones show until 1978 in Buffalo) so she could have warned me, but she’s not as anal and particular about music so I’ll forgive her. 🙂 The Stones have since played Cloud on various tours, in the original arrangement. I love the song – actually heard them rehearsing it at sound check as my older son and I walked around Toronto’s Rogers Centre before the Stones’ 2002 Licks tour show although they didn’t play it that night – and was happy to see/hear them open with it in 2013 in Toronto.

3. UFO, Rock Bottom (live, from Strangers In The Night) . . . Epic 12-minute shredder courtesy guitarist Michael Schenker and friends, from the band’s classic live album.

4. Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman) . . . I remember my older brother, huge musical influence, bringing home Led Zep II when it came out. We were living in Peru at the time as my father was working there, hence in those days a bit out of touch as to what was happening back home. My older brother and sister were back in Canada in high school and it was always neat when they brought back new stuff, particularly music. Anyway, so big brother brings Zep home and it was mind-blowing to we who to that point had been listening to early Stones and Beatles. Zep was SO heavy in comparison, to us, then. To the point that mom, presaging the mom in Frank Zappa’s song Joe’s Garage, told my brother to ‘turn it down!” But mom later grew to like it, she was very cool. As was dad, who knocked me out when John Lennon was shot and dad said “this is madness!” To that point, I would have bet that dad knew not who John Lennon was. The foolishness of youth.

5. Elton John, Street Kids . . . I’ve mentioned it before but the Rock of the Westies album is definitely one of those time and place things for me. It was one of just three albums – the others being Beatles and Stones compilations – in our high school weight room. So, my football teammates and I played them incessantly while working out. Sometimes I wonder if I’d have gotten into the Elton album so much otherwise. Probably, as I’m a fan of his 1970s stuff, but it’s a wonderful memory and a special album to me. I still ‘see’ the guys in my mind when I listen to any of the songs from it. I still don’t care so much for the single, Island Girl, obviously a well-constructed song with obvious commercial appeal, but the rest of it, EJ rocking out, makes it one of my favorite records of his.

6. Chicago, Hideaway . . . I’m a huge fan of Chicago’s first three albums, when they were an innovative jazz-rock fusion outfit and while I have all of the albums from the guitarist Terry Kath era and like them, I tend to focus on the first three records and then the big hits from the rest of the catalog from that period. But, a few years ago, a friend of mine reminded me of this great rocker from Chicago VIII and I played it on the show then. Here it is again.

7. Robin Trower, Day Of The Eagle . . . Speaking of great guitarists like Kath, here’s Trower, from the Bridge of Sighs album. This track is why you buy, or listen to, full studio albums. Amazingly, it’s not on any Trower compilations, to my knowledge.

8. Budgie, Breaking All The House Rules . . . As someone commented on YouTube about this song, more great riffs in one song than many bands manage on an entire album. Budgie never made it really big in a commercial sense but the hard-rocking Welsh group was influential. Metallica swears by them and has covered several of their tunes.

9. Iron Maiden, Holy Smoke . . . I like a lot of Iron Maiden, like this rocker (as if they do much else and that’s great) but I only listen to their studio stuff. I had a live album once, but I quickly got sick of frontman Bruce Dickinson urging the crowd to ‘scream for me (insert city/venue).” It’s as bad as Ozzy Osbourne live albums with his incessant “clap your effing hands!” etc. But I do like both artists, really I do.

10. Deep Purple, Flight Of The Rat . . . I really don’t know what to say anymore about this song, the In Rock album, or Deep Purple in general aside from I love ’em, every incarnation (OK, the one album, Slaves and Masters, they did with Joe Lynn Turner singing, not so much, aside from the song King of Dreams). What a kick-butt tune this is.

11. Black Sabbath, Falling Off The Edge Of The World . . . Starts slow but you just know it’s coming as the tension builds . . . and at about 1:30 in, it starts, then all hell breaks loose at 2:06 with yet another monumental Tony Iommi riff from his apparently bottomless basket, soon to be joined by the incomparable vocals of Ronnie James Dio. From the Mob Rules album.

     

12. AC/DC, Nervous Shakedown . . . 1983’s Flick of the Switch, the third album with Brian Johnson having replaced the dear departed Bon Scott, didn’t do nearly as well commercially as Back in Black and For Those About To Rock, mainly because it had no huge hit singles although the title cut did reasonably well and this track was a No. 35 hit in the UK. I just love the how would one describe it, descending sort of chorus? AC/DC didn’t really have another big hit album, in terms of universal appeal, until Thunderstruck and other hits carried The Razors Edge to such status in 1990. But the intervening albums, Flick of the Switch, Fly On The Wall, Who Made Who (a soundtrack to Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive movie) and Blow Up Your Video are full of great tracks like this one, Sink The Pink, Shake Your Foundations, Who Made Who, Heatseeker and others, just to name the singles alone.

13. Trapeze, Black Cloud . . . Terrific band, Trapeze, from which emerged bass player/singer Glenn Hughes, later of course to join Deep Purple, drive Ritchie Blackmore nuts with his more funky approach which I liked actually – see my earlier thoughts on every incarnation of Purple. But look on the bright side. Had Blackmore not gotten pissed off – which I never really understood, it was essentially his band, why if he didn’t like the direction didn’t he put his foot down? Anyway, had Blackmore not up and left, maybe we’d not have had the band Rainbow. So from ‘bad’ can always come good.

     

14. Headstones, The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald . . . Rocked up version of the Gordon Lightfoot classic, a song that never fails to bring a tear to my eye. I’ve never been a fan of music videos, to me they’re like when a movie is made from a novel and then re-releases of the book have an actor on the cover. It’s why I read the book first; I like to have a picture in my mind of the characters. Same with songs, I don’t want them interpreted for me via video although I respect it’s the artist’s interpretation. However, I will say that the Headstones video of this song, I do like, lead singer Hugh Dillon for the most part just singing, on a frozen lake and then into a performance video of the band playing.

15. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Spirit(s) In The Night . . . Terrific cover of the Bruce Springsteen-penned tune. Mann’s band also had a big hit, of course, with their cover of what had been a relatively obscure Springsteen tune, Blinded By The Light. Spirit In The Night was Springsteen’s original title but in some markets the Earth Band version was released as Spirits In The Night.

16. Gene Clark, No Other . . . Classic title cut from the Byrd-man’s 1974 album. Inexplicably, the record was savaged by critics and was not promoted by the record company, ensuring commercial failure. Later, of course, retrospective reviews praised it, and deservedly so. Critics (cue the eye rolls).

17. Eagles, King Of Hollywood . . . I’ve said it many times before. The Long Run, which tends to be dismissed by critics (and even Eagles band members) as inferior to its predecessor Hotel California, is that album’s equal in my opinion. Yeah, the band may have been fragmenting and so on at that point but some of the deep cuts, like this one, are dark, introspective and great art. Rolling Stone magazine liked it and I agree with the mag’s review: “Overall, The Long Run is a synthesis of previous macabre Eagles motifs, with cynical new insights that are underlined by slashing rock and roll . . . it is a bitter, wrathful, difficult record, full of piss and vinegar and poisoned expectations.” That’s why I like it.

18. John Mayall, Broken Wings . . . One of my favorite Mayall songs, from his The Blues Alone album, 1967. Sad, and beautiful.

19. Television, Marquee Moon . . . Another musician death. Tom Verlaine, Television leader, guitarist and frontman, died Saturday at age 73. As previously mentioned, it took me forever to ‘get’ the Marquee Moon album which may be strange given I was into new wave, punk and so on at the time, 1977, the record was released. But, I missed it, somehow although I owned it, perhaps as a ‘necessary’ or ‘influential’ album we music aficionados tend to have, just to have because they’re deemed important. And they are. Anyway, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I ‘got’ the record and, in particular, its title cut. I was in a used CD store and a song was playing, Marquee Moon it turned out. I liked it, as never before. It just hit me that day, for whatever reason. Interesting how that sort of thing happens.

My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list, after my preamble about the inspiration behind the set list.

The first half of the set is inspired by a documentary I watched this week – Under The Volcano, about AIR Studio on the volcanic Caribbean island of Montserrat. The first 12 songs I’m playing appeared on albums I own that were recorded there, in whole or in part. The result is an amalgam of artists, genres and styles.

AIR (Associated Independent Recordings) was established by the late Sir George Martin, best known as The Beatles’ longtime producer, and several other leading British producers. They opened a studio in London in 1970, adding Montserrat in 1979. The island studio flourished under the then-dormant Soufriere Hills volcano until 1989 when it was damaged not by an eruption but by Hurricane Hugo in September of that year, shortly after The Rolling Stones finished recording their Steel Wheels album.

The volcano emerged out of dormancy and became active in 1995 and has continued to erupt since although it’s been, apparently, relatively quiet for the last 10 years. The volcanic activity led the government of the island, a British Overseas Territory, to establish an exclusion zone in the area of volcanic activity, splitting the island in two.

Here’s the bare-bones set list:

1. Jimmy Buffett, Volcano
2. Mike + The Mechanics, Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)
3. The Police, Demolition Man
4. The Rolling Stones, Hearts For Sale
5. Paul McCartney, Ballroom Dancing
6. Gillan and Glover, I Can’t Dance To That
7. Dire Straits, Ride Across The River
8. Black Sabbath, The Shining
9. Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, Birthright
10. Nazareth, Boys In The Band
11. Rush, Middletown Dreams
12. Status Quo, The Wanderer
13. Free, Catch A Train
14. Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Last Rebel
15. Johnny Winter, Rollin’ ‘Cross The Country
16. Patti Smith Group, (Privilege) Set Me Free
17. Blue Cheer, Saturday Freedom
18. Bruce Springsteen, The Price You Pay
19. The Smashing Pumpkins, Zero
20. Marianne Faithfull, Truth Bitter Truth
21. Rod Stewart (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right
22. The J. Geils Band, Wreckage
23. Neil Young, No More
24. Fairport Convention, Farewell Farewell 

    And my track-by-track tales:

    1. Jimmy Buffett, Volcano . . . Buffett’s tongue in cheek title track take on recording under the gun, so to speak, on Montserrat for his 1979 album. The island’s volcano, then dormant, started erupting again in 1995, six years after AIR Studio was damaged by Hurricane Hugo. 
    2. Mike + The Mechanics, Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground) . . . I pulled this from the 3-CD Genesis compilation R-Kive which features Genesis band and solo work by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford. I wouldn’t own any Banks or Rutherford solo stuff otherwise. Silent Running, a hit single, was sung by Paul Carrack, well known for the Ace hit How Long and Squeeze’s Tempted. The (On Dangerous Ground) part was added to the song’s title when it became part of the movie Choke Canyon – which was called On Dangerous Ground outside the USA. To quote Robert Shaw’s character in the 1973 movie The Sting, ‘ya falla (follow)?’. I do actually, although I never saw Choke Canyon, as either Choke Canyon or On Dangerous Ground. I did, however, see The Sting, as I date myself. Great, fun flick, featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, along with Shaw. Fifty – 50 – years ago!
    3. The Police, Demolition Man . . . From 1981’s Ghost In The Machine album. The Police originally gave the Sting-penned song to Grace Jones, didn’t like what she did with it for her 1981 Nightclubbing album, so did their own version for later that year on Ghost In The Machine. I prefer The Police song but don’t mind Jones’s version. It’s an electronic/dance take and I like her vocals/singing style. The Police version is more straight rock. Great fun, regardless, if a quote about it from Police guitarist Andy Summers, via Wikipedia, is accurate: “It’s a very simple song. We all listened to the Grace Jones version and thought ‘shit, we can do it much better than that.’ It was a one-take job. To me, our version is more ballsy, which is what you’d expect from Grace Jones.”
    4. The Rolling Stones, Hearts For Sale . . . Triple guitar attack on this deep cut from Steel Wheels. Mick Jagger’s distorted riff (yup, him, not Keith Richards) starts the track and continues, for the most part, until various Jagger harmonica breaks four minutes into the tune while Richards and Ronnie Wood, who adds a fine solo, maintain the rhythm along with, of course, the so-called (by Richards) engine room of drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman.
    5. Paul McCartney, Ballroom Dancing . . . One of those infectious tunes McCartney can seemingly toss off without even thinking. But then, that’s why he’s McCartney with his innate sense of melody and hooks. Could easily have been a single, I think, from 1982’s Tug of War album, from which his duet with Stevie Wonder, Ebony and Ivory, became a No. 1 hit. The other hit single was Take It Away, with Ringo Starr on drums. The album was produced by George Martin.
    6. Gillan and Glover, I Can’t Dance To That . . . Up-tempo tune, one of the more rock-oriented ones on the quite diverse and interesting Accidentally On Purpose album released by the Deep Purple duo of singer Ian Gillan and bass player Roger Glover in 1988.
    7. Dire Straits, Ride Across The River . . . You can actually feel as if you are riding down a river, probably in the jungle, listening to this one. From the commercial monster, and deservedly so, Brothers In Arms album, one of the first albums recorded on a digital tape machine, in 1985.
    8. Black Sabbath, The Shining . . . From 1987’s The Eternal Idol, with Tony Martin on lead vocals for the first of five studio albums he recorded with the band between 1987 and 1995. It came during a period of time during which only guitarist Tony Iommi remained a constant original member amid a cast of seeming thousands, including original bassist Geezer Butler who was in and out while Iommi kept the brand going while producing those five, to me, very good and underappreciated albums. But then, I’m a big Sabbath fan and not one of those who say things like ‘no Ozzy (or Ronnie James Dio), no Sabbath’. No Iommi, no Sabbath, to that I’ll agree.
    9. Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, Birthright . . . Fleetwood Mac’s original leader, from the blues band days, later formed a band called Peter Green’s Splinter Group but that splinter group had nothing on Yes. Space doesn’t permit the full story but suffice it to say that the convoluted Yes saga makes for interesting reading, if one is so inclined. It’s led to competing versions of Yes, legal issues regarding the name, and various spinoff bands. So, in 1989 you had what many would consider ‘classic’ 1970s Yes members – singer Jon Anderson, drummer Bill Bruford, keyboardist Rick Wakeman and guitarist Steve Howe – coming out with their one and only album under that name. It sounds like, what else, 1970s Yes. That’s because Anderson wanted to return to progressive rock, having had enough of the pop-rock direction Yes had taken, with guitarist Trevor Rabin at the helm, for massive hits like Owner Of A Lonely Heart that Anderson did sing. Birthright is an appropriately haunting song about British nuclear tests during the 1950s and resulting radioactive waste left on aboriginal lands in Australia, for which compensation was eventually paid. As for Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, there was to be a second album but that morphed into Union, Yes’s 1991 album featuring various members of both factions, including original/constant Yes bass player Chris Squire, who died in 2015. The Union album resulted from a meeting in Los Angeles between Anderson and Rabin, who originally were working on separate albums by the respective camps but decided to merge them. What tangled webs are weaved.
    10. Nazareth, Boys In The Band . . . Abrasive, urgent, fast track from 1982’s 2XS album.
    11. Rush, Middletown Dreams . . . Like many who like Rush, perhaps, I’m not a big fan of the so-called keyboard or synthesizer era that is most pronounced, certainly in terms of production, on the trilogy of albums – Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows and Hold Your Fire – between 1984 and 1987. I have them, but don’t listen to them much although I do like hits like The Big Money, from Power Windows. That’s the album I pulled Middletown Dreams from. I hadn’t heard the song in ages but it was a nice rediscovery, some good guitar from Alex Lifeson but the song is compelling, to me, thanks to the propulsive percussion of the late great drummer Neil Peart.
    12. Status Quo, The Wanderer . . . Cover of the 1961 Dion hit. Quo’s version made No. 7 in the UK and No. 3 in Ireland in 1984, and was included on the expanded 2006 re-release of their 1983 album Back To Back. And with that, so ends the Montserrat AIR Studio segment of the show.
    13. Free, Catch A Train . . . Haven’t played Free in a while. I just picked a random track, but probably not so random given how my brain works as I realized it fits with The Wanderer, who is catching a train, setting me off on another of my song title connections.
    14. Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Last Rebel . . . Bluesy ballad, title cut from the 1993 album and among my favorites from the post-plane crash versions of the band.
    15. Johnny Winter, Rollin’ ‘Cross The Country . . . Johnny raunches and rolls with a tune written by brother Edgar, who plays organ on the track and on many more songs on Johnny’s 1974 album, Saints and Sinners.
    16. Patti Smith Group, (Privilege) Set Me Free . . . Spooky, powerful tune from the Easter album.
    17. Blue Cheer, Saturday Freedom . . . From the band’s self-titled fourth album, released in December, 1969. By that point the group had experienced some lineup changes and was offering a more laid back, bluesy yet still heavy sound. A nice groove on this one.
    18. Bruce Springsteen, The Price You Pay . . . From The River, the third of the amazing run of three albums Springsteen released from 1975-80, the other two being Born To Run (1975) and Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978). They remain my favorites of his, in terms of front-to-back listens.
    19. The Smashing Pumpkins, Zero . . . Sounds crazy, perhaps, but I had forgotten about this one. It was a single from the No. 1 album, Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, released in 1995. Good metallic rocker, I just happened to come across it while searching for other stuff I’ve loaded into the station computer. A worthwhile revisit.
    20. Marianne Faithfull, Truth Bitter Truth . . . From 1981’s Dangerous Acquaintances, the follow-up to Faithfull’s 1979 comeback record, Broken English. Music journalists didn’t like the album as much, considering it a safer/more conventional record than Broken English. Fair enough, perhaps, but this song has depth, if that’s what the critics were seeking. Besides, it’s Faithfull’s ‘a lived life’ cigarette and alcohol-affected vocals on Broken English forward that set her apart.
    21. Rod Stewart (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right . . . Stewart has written or co-written many great songs, like Maggie May, Mandolin Wind, the Faces’ Stay With Me to name just a few. But his genius during his heyday was also his ability to select great songs to cover and do them amazing justice. Like this one, by the Stax writing team of Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Raymond Jackson that was a deserved No. 3 Billboard and No. 1 R & B hit for Luther Ingram in 1972. Stewart’s version is from his 1978 album Footloose and Fancy Free.
    22. The J. Geils Band, Wreckage . . . Dark, bluesy cut from a largely dark album, 1977’s Monkey Island.
    23. Neil Young, No More . . . Well, one more, after this track from Young’s 1989 Freedom album.
    24. Fairport Convention, Farewell Farewell . . . The wonderful voice of Sandy Denny on lead vocals. A sad story, Denny. Beset by drug and alcohol abuse and what some suggest was a manic-depressive condition, depending what you read, she died after a fall down a flight of stairs in 1978, age 31. But we still have the music upon which her amazing voice rides, and elevates.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Peter Gabriel, Intruder
2. April Wine, Before The Dawn
3. Pink Floyd, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast
4. Pink Floyd, One Of These Days
5. Booker T. & The MGs, Melting Pot
6. Blondie, The Thin Line
7. John Mellencamp, Melting Pot
8. Kansas, Death Of Mother Nature Suite
9. Supertramp, Cannonball
10. The Rolling Stones, Saint Of Me
11. FM, One O’Clock Tomorrow
12. Bob Dylan, Highlands
13. Robert Johnson, Stop Breakin’ Down Blues
14. Neil Young, Ordinary People
15. Atomic Rooster, People You Can’t Trust
16. Rod Stewart, Ain’t Love A Bitch
17. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, It’s Over

    My track-by-track tales:

    1. Peter Gabriel, Intruder . . . Spooky, creepy opening track to the third Gabriel solo album, perhaps best known for the hit Games Without Frontiers. Former Gabriel bandmate in Genesis, Phil Collins, plays drums on several songs on the album, including this one.
    2. April Wine, Before The Dawn . . . A rocker from the band’s 1979 album Harder . . . Faster which yielded the hits I Like To Rock and Say Hello. Meantime, bandleader/chief songwriter/guitarist Myles Goodwyn, the founder and only remaining original member, recently announced he’s retiring from touring, for health reasons, effective the band’s show in Halifax, Nova Scotia on March 2. He’ll continue to write new material and produce any recordings the group might do, although no new studio material has been issued since 2006 and, like most veteran classic rock acts, the band has long relied on its extensive back catalog from the 1970s and ’80s for live shows. Fact is, it’s all most people beyond real diehards, of any band, want to hear. Replacing Goodwyn on guitar and vocals, with his blessing, is Marc Parent. According to a recent report, Parent was in an Ottawa band, Eight Seconds, for two years in the late 1980s; their claim to fame being opening slots for such acts as David Bowie and Duran Duran. Besides Goodwyn’s ongoing involvement, the lone connection to the band’s glory days now is guitarist Brian Greenway, who wrote Before The Dawn and has been with the group since 1978’s First Glance album.
    3. Pink Floyd, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast . . . Weird, perhaps, 13-minute epic from the Atom Heart Mother album, late 1970. But it’s far more musical than, say, The Beatles’ Revolution 9 or much of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica album. So, amid musical interludes we hear Pink Floyd roadie Alan Styles muttering, pouring milk onto and eating cereal, frying bacon and otherwise rummaging around the kitchen. In any event, I must be getting weirder in my old age because time was I dismissed the cut, but it’s better and more interesting than I first thought. Depends on one’s mood, obviously. And, after all, this is my morning show so . . . time for breakfast. And, you’ll note, as per my typical song title ‘creativity’, The Intruder broke in Before The Dawn and now he’s eating breakfast. Right, that’s enough. Next!
    4. Pink Floyd, One Of These Days . . . Pink Floyd again, next album, in fact, with ‘real’ music. It’s the lead cut from Meddle, 1971 featuring that great bass line recorded by guitarist David Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters, on two different bass guitars. Apparently, Gilmour came up with the original riff on guitar until it was decided to double track bass.
    5. Booker T. & The MGs, Melting Pot . . . This is definitely a ‘melting pot’ show of various genres, featuring several extended pieces, so naturally I’m going with this jazzy, sonic journey of eight minutes’ duration.
    6. Blondie, The Thin Line . . . Another shift, to punk/new wave, on this one that was issued on a 1994 compilation but was recorded as a demo in 1975, a year before the band’s first album was released. It’s since appeared as an extra track on reissues of the self-titled debut.
    7. John Mellencamp, Melting Pot . . . Not the same as the Booker T tune. Straight ahead propulsive rocker, from Mellencamp’s 1991 album Whenever We Wanted. It’s the first release where he went by his given surname, dropping ‘Cougar’.
    8. Kansas, Death Of Mother Nature Suite . . . All the way back to Kansas’ 1974 self-titled debut we go for this self-explanatory prog rocker. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kansas of late, they’ve got a 50^th anniverary 3-CD compilation out which has enabled me to catch up on some of the latter day stuff, their most recent studio work coming in 2020, but I decided to go back to the beginning. I’ll get to some of the more recent stuff soon. It’s interesting for me, with Kansas. For the longest time I was someone who essentially listened only to the Point of Know Return album, or compilations, for such hits as Dust In The Wind and Portrait (He Knew), and of course Carry On Wayward Son, the big hit from the previous album, Leftoverture. But those tracks aren’t fully representative of the band’s progressive rock output and as I’ve gotten more into prog rock overall as I’ve aged, Kansas has become more of a go-to band for me
    9. Supertramp, Cannonball . . . This was the single, and fairly successful, top 30, from Brother Where You Bound – the 1985 album that was the first for the band following the departure of Roger Hodgson, leaving the group’s other key songwriter, Rick Davies, in charge, although the commercial success for both factions soon declined.
    10. The Rolling Stones, Saint Of Me . . . No Keith Richards on this one. It’s Ronnie Wood and Waddy Wachtel – session man to the stars (like Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt etc.) and Richards’ bandmate in his X-Pensive Winos group – teaming up on guitars from this excellent tune from 1997’s Bridges To Babylon album. It was a single, but like most new output from veteran classic rock bands was relatively ignored except for big fans of the band, like me. It made No. 26 in the UK and No. 94 on the US Billboard chart. Had it been released during the 1970s I think it would have been a bigger hit, but such is likely true of more recent songs by many so-called classic rock bands. Which is why I try to play them on the show. Old bands, old tracks, old bands, their new stuff if they’re still releasing any, is my mantra.
    11. FM, One O’Clock Tomorrow . . . Great tune from the Canadian prog rockers featuring Nash The Slash, who later went solo. It’s from Black Noise, the science fiction-themed 1978 album that produced the Star Trek-influenced hit Phasors On Stun.
    12. Bob Dylan, Highlands . . . Big Dylan fans like me are eagerly awaiting this coming Friday, Jan. 27 which is the release date for Volume 17 of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series of releases featuring outtakes, live cuts, demos and so on from the various album recording sessions and tours over his long career. Volume 17, titled Fragments, focuses on his excellent 1997 return to form album, Time Out Of Mind. Highlands is a 16-minute epic on that album, never dull, flows along on great lyrics, a movie script set to music, essentially. A masterpiece.
    13. Robert Johnson, Stop Breakin’ Down Blues . . . From 1937 from one of the fathers of the blues, of course. A track covered by, among others, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and, more recently, The White Stripes. Johnson’s contribution to and influence on popular music can’t be overstated. A passage from the wonderfully-written liner notes to the 2004 reissue of King Of The Delta Blues Singers, Volume 2, by the late music historian Pete Welding I think nails it. “What is remarkable about his music is that, unlike blues rooted in the experiences and private vision of its writer, Johnson’s songs attain universality. Despite whatever relevance they might have as fragments of his autobiography, his blues – by virtue of the strength and directness of their language, the sharpness and richness of his poetic vision, and the telling statements they make about the human condition – speak to us eloquently and movingly.”
    14. Neil Young, Ordinary People . . . In Highlands, Dylan mentions he’s listening to Neil Young. So, I figured I’d have Neil go Bob two minutes better in this 18-minute track. It’s a different sort of song, not as spare, heavier in spots given some members of Crazy Horse play on it, and fueled by horns. But, like the Dylan song, it flows, never boring, another great story. It’s from Young’s 2007 album Chrome Dreams II. There was a Chrome Dreams album, in 1977 but it was unreleased although many of its songs – Star of Bethlehem, Like A Hurricane, Sedan Delivery and Powderfinger, among them – have been issued on various Young albums since. Hitchhiker, Young’s 2017 album, finally collected a few of them on one record. Further to do with Young: his sometime collaborator in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, David Crosby, died Thursday at age 81 as I was putting the show together. I’ll likely play something in tribute to him, solo, Byrds, CSN or CSN & Y or in some combination thereof, on Monday’s show.
    15. Atomic Rooster, People You Can’t Trust . . . From the Made In England album, 1972. It saw the prog band moving in a more soul/funk direction. Chris Farlowe, the band’s new singer at the time, had a big influence on the sound. He’s probably best known for having a No. 1 UK hit with the Stones’ Out Of Time in 1966.
    16. Rod Stewart, Ain’t Love A Bitch . . . Sometimes, it can be. A top 20 soft rock hit from 1978’s Blondes Have More Fun album, best known for Stewart’s No. 1 disco hit, Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? That song, very catchy of course, nevertheless was divisive for many fans and critics and marked the beginning of my losing interest in what Stewart was doing, although I hung around for a couple more albums and do like and have played on the show the song Passion, from his 1980 album Foolish Behaviour.

         

    17. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, It’s Over . . . And so it is over, the show, I mean, with this one from BTO’s Head On album. Until Monday . . .

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list

1. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Not Fragile
2. Aerosmith, Sick As A Dog
3. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Feelin’ Blue
4. Keith Richards, Will But You Won’t
5. Jethro Tull, Hunting Girl
6. Fleetwood Mac, Hypnotized
7. Tom Cochrane, Just Like Ali
8. Wilson Pickett, Hey Jude
9. The Allman Brothers Band, Rockin’ Horse
10. Patti Smith, Midnight Rider
11. Santana, Anywhere You Want To Go
12. Dire Straits, Once Upon A Time In The West
13. R.E.M., How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us
14. Little Feat, Mercenary Territory
15. Colin James, Into The Mystic
16. Van Morrison, A Sense Of Wonder
17. The Beatles, You Won’t See Me
18. Linda Ronstadt, I Won’t Be Hangin’ ‘Round
19. Paice, Ashton, Lord, Remember The Good Times
20. Lou Reed, There Is No Time
21. ZZ Top, Neighbor, Neighbor
22. Spirit, Topanga Windows
23. Pete Townshend, Exquisitely Bored
24. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Surfer Joe and Moe The Sleaze
25. Tony Joe White, Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll
26. The Doors, Moonlight Drive

    My track-by-track tales:

    1. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Not Fragile . . . Title cut from the Canadian band’s 1974 album to honor the recent passing of BTO drummer Rob Bachman, age 69. Sadly, this obviously will continue to happen, as so many classic rockers are now well past official senior citizen age. Heavy rock lyric – ‘you ask do we play heavy music well are thunderheads just another cloud, we do’ – and, as usual, most of the best BTO songs, in my opinion, were sung by C.F. (Fred) Turner.
    2. Aerosmith, Sick As A Dog . . . From Rocks, one of my favorite Aerosmith albums. Full of great songs, especially deep cuts – the true test of an album – like this one, Nobody’s Fault (arguably my favorite Aerosmith tune, certainly among their deep cuts, but I resisted playing it yet again), etc.
    3. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Feelin’ Blue . . . Bluesy jam tune from Willie and The Poor Boys, the band’s third – third! – album release in the calendar year of 1969. All of them – Bayou Country, Green River and Poor Boys – were excellent and full of hits like Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising, Down on the Corner and Fortunate Son, just to name four among the many more hits/well known CCR tracks. Amazing songwriter, John Fogerty, from the hits to the deep cuts.
    4. Keith Richards, Will But You Won’t . . . The distinctive riffology of the, er, so-called Human Riff. From his second of three, to date, solo albums, 1992’s Main Offender.
    5. Jethro Tull, Hunting Girl . . . Speaking of riffs, I can never get enough of the descending Martin Barre riff on this one, from Songs From The Wood. And that’s just one facet of this great song.
    6. Fleetwood Mac, Hypnotized . . . It was a tossup between two of my favorite, and somewhat similar, Bob Welch-era Mac cuts last Monday. I chose Bermuda Triangle, from the 1974 album Heroes Are Hard To Find album. And I almost played Hypnotized, as well, but decided against doubling up in the same show. So, here it is, from Mystery To Me, in 1973. Hey, that rhymes. OK, I admit it, did it on purpose.
    7. Tom Cochrane, Just Like Ali . . . Another from the ‘I couldn’t decide between two songs from the same artist’ file. This past Saturday, I went with Cochrane’s Willie Dixon Said, and promised to soon play a similar song of his, one mentioning the late great heavyweight champion boxer. Voila!
    8. Wilson Pickett, Hey Jude . . . Duane Allman on guitar to start a mini-Allman Brothers-oriented set.
    9. The Allman Brothers Band, Rockin’ Horse . . . From the last studio album the band recorded, 2003’s Hittin’ The Note and an excellent album it is. Dickey Betts had been booted from the band due to substance/alcohol abuse (the other members had cleaned up by then), so the guitar tandem was Warren Haynes, in his second go-round with the group, and young gun Derek Trucks, who joined the Allmans in 1999 and has since achieved his own deserved fame alongside his wife Susan in the Tedeschi Trucks Band, formed in 2010. Derek is the nephew of the late Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks.
    10. Patti Smith, Midnight Rider . . . Back I go to the Twelve album, Smith’s 2007 covers release. It’s terrific and includes songs by Jimi Hendrix (Are You Experienced), the Stones (Gimme Shelter), Beatles (Within You Without You), Tears For Fears (Everybody Wants To Rule The World), Nirvana (Smells Like Teen Spirit) among others, some of which I’ve played before on the show. Eventually, I imagine, I’ll get to all 12.
    11. Santana, Anywhere You Want To Go . . . From IV, the 2016 reunion album featuring most of the original Santana band that produced the first three albums in the early 1970s. Naturally, it sounds just like those amazing records.
    12. Dire Straits, Once Upon A Time In The West . . . Opening cut to Communique, the second Dire Straits album, released in 1979. Typically bluesy, reliable rock from the Mark Knopfler-led band. Some people think it’s an homage to the Sergio Leone western. Lyrically I don’t really see it, at least on the surface, but if you go to various ‘songfact’ sites, there are interesting discussions about it.
    13. R.E.M., How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us . . . I just had to play this one after the Dire Straits tune. They’re actually somewhat similar: bluesy, hypnotic, great. It’s from the 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi.
    14. Little Feat, Mercenary Territory . . . The review site allmusic describes this track as ‘sublime’. I agree. It’s from The Last Record Album. It wasn’t the band’s last record – the title (and cover art) actually alludes to the 1971 movie The Last Picture Show.
    15. Colin James, Into The Mystic . . . Good cover of the Van Morrison classic by the Canadian blues rocker. It’s from his 2005 album Limelight. If you go to the track on YouTube, some suggest it’s better than the original to which I would respectfully say, ‘no’. It’s good but, sorry, nobody’s going to match Van’s original. So why didn’t I play Van’s version? Because I’ve played it too recently, so figured I’d give James a spin.
    16. Van Morrison, A Sense Of Wonder . . . And here’s Van The Man himself, with the beautiful title track from his 1985 album.
    17. The Beatles, You Won’t See Me . . . I’ve been digging into Rubber Soul a fair bit recently when I play The Beatles. In fact, I may have played this too recently, can’t keep track and been too lazy to check. In any event, Rubber Soul is a great album, as are they all by the Fab Four.
    18. Linda Ronstadt, I Won’t Be Hangin’ ‘Round . . . From Ronstadt’s self-titled 1972 album, her third studio release which was significant as it brought together future members of the Eagles. Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon all played on the album, after which they formed the Eagles.
    19. Paice, Ashton, Lord, Remember The Good Times . . . From the short-lived project featuring singer Tony Ashton along with Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice and keyboard player Jon Lord, resulting in the excellent Malice in Wonderland album released in 1977. Many of the songs, rockers most of them, also have an infectiously effective funky feel, like this one. This collaboration beat Nazareth to the album title by three years, Nazareth using the title for their 1980 release that featured the hit Holiday.
    20. Lou Reed, There Is No Time . . . A good rocker from the New York album. The year 1989 was a pretty good one for longtime classic rock artists. Among the other solid albums released that year were Eric Clapton’s Journeyman, Neil Young’s Freedom, Bob Dylan’s No Mercy and Steel Wheels by The Rolling Stones.
    21. ZZ Top, Neighbor, Neighbor . . . From the first album, titled – wait for it, ZZ Top’s First Album. According to guitarist Billy Gibbons, the album was so named because the band wanted people to know there’d be more coming. And, of course, there was.
    22. Spirit, Topanga Windows . . . Folky psychedelia from the first Taurus album, 1968. Topanga is a community in western Los Angeles County, where Taurus band member Randy California lived.
    23. Pete Townshend, Exquisitely Bored . . . In my opinion, the two best songs on Townshend’s 1982 album All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes weren’t issued as singles. They are this track, my favorite from the record, and The Sea Refuses No River, the latter of which has found a righful place on some Townshend compilations. The actual singles? Face Dances Pt. 2 and Uniforms. I don’t get it, either.
    24. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Surfer Joe and Moe The Sleaze . . . Love the title, love the song, love the grungry hard rock 1981 album from which it came, Re-ac-tor, even though critics didn’t. Eff ’em.
    25. Tony Joe White, Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll . . . From the swamp rocker, known as the Swamp Fox and best known for the song Polk Salad Annie, also done by Elvis Presley. Trolls was issued as a single in 1972. Didn’t chart. Ridiculous.
    26. The Doors, Moonlight Drive . . . B-side to the Love Me Two Times single from The Doors’ 1967 album Strange Days. A well-known track, as it’s appeared on various Doors’ compilations.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Muddy Waters, All Aboard (from Fathers and Sons featuring Otis Spann, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, Sam Lay and Buddy Miles)
2. The Chieftains with The Rolling Stones, The Rocky Road To Dublin
3. The Rolling Stones, Surprise, Surprise
4. James Brown, I’ll Go Crazy (from Live at The Apollo)
5. Tom Cochrane, Willie Dixon Said
6. Jeff Beck, Beck’s Bolero (from Truth)
7. Jeff Beck, Diamond Dust (from Blow By Blow)
8. Jeff Beck, Morning Dew (from Truth)
9. Jeff Beck Group, Plynth (Water Down The Drain) (from Beck-ola)
10. Jeff Beck, Wild Thing (UK-only single, 1986, Beck lead vocals)
11. Split Enz, What’s The Matter With You
12. Deep Purple, Strange King Of Woman (live, from Made in Japan)
13. Bruce Hornsby, Talk Of The Town
14. Social Distortion, I Was Wrong
15. Carole King, Corazon
16. Warren Zevon, The Sin (live, from Stand In The Fire)
17. Joe Jackson, Throw It Away
18. The Yardbirds, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago (Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on guitars)
19. Jeff Beck, Rock My Plimsoul (from Truth)
20. Jeff Beck, Freeway Jam (from Jeff Beck with The Jan Hammer Group Live)
21. Jeff Beck, Big Block (from Guitar Shop)
22. Beck, Bogert, Appice, Jizz Whizz (previously unreleased track, recorded 1973, issued on Beckology box set, 1991)
23. Jeff Beck Group, Going Down (from Jeff Beck Group ‘orange’ album)
24. Jeff Beck, Gets Us All In The End (from Flash)
25. The Band, (I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes (live, from Rock Of Ages)My track-by-track tales:
    1. Muddy Waters, All Aboard (from Fathers and Sons featuring Otis Spann, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, Sam Lay and Buddy Miles) . . . Not much more to say beyond my list of who plays on Muddy’s 1969 album, other than it’s great. It was wonderful how, as an elder statesman of the blues by then, Muddy’s ‘sons’ flocked to help him out on albums, including as the decade of the 1970s progressed, Johnny Winter who played on and produced three late period Muddy albums plus the fabulous Muddy ‘Mississippi’ Waters live record.
    2. The Chieftains with The Rolling Stones, The Rocky Road To Dublin . . . Listen closely and you’ll hear the Stones sneak a little snippet of the Satisfaction riff into this 19^th century traditional covered by the Irish band. It’s from 1995’s The Long Black Veil album, a collaborative effort that, besides the Stones, featured Mick Jagger on another track, Marianne Faithfull, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame, Sinead O’Connor, Sting, Tom Jones and Van Morrison.
    3. The Rolling Stones, Surprise, Surprise . . . I always play the Stones, my favorite band, my show, my rules…although I wasn’t going to necessarily do that once I got the Saturday morning gig in addition to my longtime Monday show. But I can’t help myself. Here are the rules, if anyone cares. Every Monday there’s a Stones’ track, or something Stones-related, from what I call Stones, Inc. ie solo material from any band member or associate, past and present. Saturdays: I’m not committed (although I probably should be) to the Stones in terms of my set list but…here they are again. Anyway, I was of two minds for Saturday’s show. This track, Surprise, Surprise, an early, up-tempo number from 1965 I’ve always liked. Or, another early Stones’ song, The Spider and The Fly but done up for the 1995 semi-acoustic live album Stripped. In the end, I chose Surprise, Surprise because I thought it fit with me playing a Chieftains track which may not be so unusual in that I’m into all forms of music but perhaps unusual given my usual fare on the show. But of course, the random element was the Stones’ participation. And enough about that, time to move on to the next song. Thank Christ, I hear the chorus.
    4. James Brown, I’ll Go Crazy (from Live at The Apollo) . . . Short, sweet, kick butt stuff from the “Hardest Working Man In Show Business’, the “Godfather of Soul’ and he who went by assorted other nicknames, via one of the greatest live albums of all time. It was recorded in late 1962 in Harlem and released in 1963. There wound up being four ‘live at the Apollo’ albums – Vol II in 1968, Revolution Of The Mind: Live At The Apollo Vol. III, from 1971 and Live At The Apollo 1995, the last live album Brown recorded before his death in 2006. All are excellent, typically high-energy James Brown, to me not much to choose between them musically, because as many artists repeatedly prove, as they age they can still ‘bring it’. But the original remains arguably definitive as a landmark album that cemented Brown’s reputation critically and commercially.
    5. Tom Cochrane, Willie Dixon Said . . . I like a lot of Tom Cochrane’s work including his days in Red Rider, the obvious hits, Big League, Life Is A Highway, the Red Rider stuff like Lunatic Fringe, Light In The Tunnel/Human Race, Napoleon Sheds His Skin, the latter three of which I’ve played over time on the show. As for this Willie Dixon-themed tune, I must admit that, years ago, when you had to buy music, I bought Cochrane’s Xray Sierra album specifically for this cut in honor of one of the blues greats. Here’s a tease: He’s got another, similar, great one, about boxer Muhammad Ali. I played it long ago. I’ll play it again soon.
    6. Jeff Beck, Beck’s Bolero (from Truth) . . . Interesting track in terms of songwriting. It’s always credited to Jimmy Page but if you read up on it, Beck claimed credit too, but never apparently got one. Wouldn’t be the first time Jimmy Page was involved in a songwriting controversy yet somehow he and Beck remained friends, apparently. Great track, in any event, featuring a supergroup – Beck, Page, future Zep bassist/keyboard player John Paul Jones and The Who’s drummer Keith Moon. Beck opens with it on the Live At Ronnie Scott’s album/DVD/Blu-ray and streaming, also on YouTube, a concert worth checking out.
    7. Jeff Beck, Diamond Dust (from Blow By Blow) . . . Beautiful stuff from a terrific album.
    8. Jeff Beck, Morning Dew (from Truth) . . . A song by Canadian writer Bonnie Dobson covered by so many including Nazareth and the Grateful Dead. Among the covers, I’ve always found it difficult to choose between the Nazareth and Jeff Beck Group versions. But since much of this set is in tribute to the late great Beck, here’s the version from the groundbreaking Truth album, lead vocals of course by Rod Stewart.
    9. Jeff Beck Group, Plynth (Water Down The Drain) (from Beck-ola) . . . Cool stop start sort of track, written by Rod Stewart, Ron Wood and Nicky Hopkins for the second, and last, album by the first incarnation of The Jeff Beck Group.
    10. Jeff Beck, Wild Thing (UK-only single, 1986, Beck lead vocals) . . . If you go back through Jeff Beck’s material dating to the Yardbirds, he could sing as well as play guitar. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not a true vocalist, but not too shabby, actually. This version of The Troggs hit got wider exposure via Beck’s 1991 box set release, Beckology. It’s an amazing 3-CD compilation. So good, in fact, that in tribute to Beck I considered just playing Beckology for Saturday morning or, at least, as much of it as I could squeeze in in two hours. But, I had a show planned already, then adjusted upon the sad news of Beck’s death, for a half-Beck, half other artists set.
    11. Split Enz, What’s The Matter With You . . . Remember these guys? Some of the key members eventually morphed into Crowded House. Split Enz’s big hit was I Got You but I’ve always preferred this track which wasn’t even a single, although it had fairly good airplay at the time, 1980, in Canada, at least.
        
    12. Deep Purple, Strange King Of Woman (live, from Made in Japan) . . . Total play off the Split Enz track ie what’s the matter with you, you strange kind of woman but of course totally different genres, the hard rock of Purple live vs the pop/new wave of Split Enz. But, it all works in musicland, I say.
    13. Bruce Hornsby, Talk Of The Town . . . Not sure when the last time was, or if there was such a time, that I played Bruce Hornsby. Beyond the two obvious hits he had, way back when, The Way It Is and The Valley Road, he’s an interesting/amazing artist, on his own, in sessions, and on the road in latter day versions of the Grateful Dead. Much respect to artists like him who do what moves them rather than what might bring them commercial success. So, in that sense, he especially belongs in a set largely dedicated to a similar artist, the late great Jeff Beck. Lovely piano as one would expect from Hornsby on a compelling tune about an interracial romance.
    14. Social Distortion, I Was Wrong . . . I got into Social Distortion via this song, from the 1996 album White Light, White Heat, White Trash back when commercial rock radio was still at least occasionally playing new material by relatively new bands, or even new music from longstanding bands. Social Distortion was into their fifth studio album by then, but thankfully I heard it and became a fan. Great lyrics.
    15. Carole King, Corazon . . . Funky, Santana-esque track, something many might not expect from the singer-songwriter who produced the amazing Tapestry album, released in 1971. Corazon is from King’s Fantasy album,  two years after Tapestry. I pulled it from a compilation I bought years ago, The Essential Carole King. It’s a nicely done compilation. The first CD features King as singer/songwriter/performer. The second disc is her songwriting, as done by others including well-known tunes like The Monkees’ Pleasant Valley Sunday and Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion, also done by Grand Funk Railroad.
    16. Warren Zevon, The Sin (live, from Stand In The Fire) . . . To my knowledge, this is the only version available of this song, recorded live in 1980 in West Hollywood, California. It was a new song at the time, debuted live, rock and roll, and there it sits on the Stand In The Fire album. The album was released in 1980 but quickly became hard to find, going out of print, apparently, before I had a chance to buy it. It finally was re-released on CD in 2007. Well worth having/listening to, all available online now of course. But be wary. Online stuff doesn’t always stay there.
    17. Joe Jackson, Throw It Away . . . I played JJ’s A Slow Song last Saturday so I figured I’d go with one of his fast ones this week. Just to show him that he, too, often turned music into the ‘savage beast’ he referenced in A Slow Song. And that’s great. Killer stuff from his debut, Look Sharp!
    18. The Yardbirds, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago (Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on guitars) . . . Back into the late great Jeff Beck we go on this rousing Yardbirds team-up featuring two of that band’s legendary guitarists, the other being Eric Clapton.
    19. Jeff Beck, Rock My Plimsoul (from Truth) . . . It’s hard to find words for the songs on Truth. The album is ridiculously great – a template for so much of the hard, bluesy rock it influenced.
    20. Jeff Beck, Freeway Jam (from Jeff Beck with The Jan Hammer Group Live) . . . This is why Jeff Beck was so great. He stepped out, into other genres, with different musicians, often on his previous tunes, like this one that first appeared on Blow By Blow, while incorporating all of it into who and what he was.
    21. Jeff Beck, Big Block (from Guitar Shop) . . . I always owned it but didn’t fully get into Guitar Shop until I heard a live version of this track on a later Jeff Beck release, Jeff Beck Live + from 2015. So, I went back to the original studio version and, as often happens, was rewarded. Worth the price of admission for the intro alone.
    22. Beck, Bogert, Appice, Jizz Whizz (previously unreleased track, recorded 1973, issued on Beckology box set, 1991) . . . From the early 1970s power trio, Beck and two-thirds of the original Vanilla Fudge, on a previously-unreleased 1973 recording that only saw the light of day on the aforementioned Beckology box.
    23. Jeff Beck Group, Going Down (from Jeff Beck Group ‘orange’ album, 1972) . . . Great cover of the Don Nix classic by the second Jeff Beck Group, this one comprised of Beck, Bobby Tench (vocals), Max Middleton (keyboards), Clive Chaman (bass) and Cozy Powell (drums) as opposed to the original Beck group featuring Rod Stewart on lead vocals and Ronnie Wood on bass.
    24. Jeff Beck, Gets Us All In The End (from Flash) . . . Killer riffology to start the track, which suffers a bit from 1980s overproduction. It was released in 1985 but yet another indication of Beck’s guitar prowess.
    25. The Band, (I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes (live, from Rock Of Ages) . . . A friend of mine mentioned he was listening to this album the other night, New Year’s Eve in fact which is when much of the album was recorded as 1971 passed into 1972. So, as always, a thought is planted and I play something. Hanging it up now, until Monday’s show.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Peter Gabriel, On The Air
2. Elton John, Funeral For A Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)
3. Styx, Miss America
4. Neil Young, Motorcycle Mama
5. The Rolling Stones, If You Really Want To Be My Friend
6. Phil Collins, Thru These Walls
7. Harry Chapin, Taxi
8. Harry Chapin, Sequel
9. Marianne Faithfull, Reason To Believe
10. The White Stripes, One More Cup Of Coffee
11. Bob Dylan, Sara
12. Roxy Music, While My Heart Is Still Beating
13. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, No Man’s Land
14. Fleetwood Mac, Bermuda Triangle
15. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Taxman
16. Ringo Starr, Back Off Boogaloo
17. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Lazy Days
18. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)
19. The Allman Brothers Band, In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed (live, At Fillmore East album version)
20. The Alan Parsons Project, The Turn Of A Friendly Card (The Turn Of A Friendly Card, Pt. 1/Snake Eyes/The Ace of Swords/Nothing Left To Lose/The Turn Of A Friendly Card, Pt. 2) 

    Set list with my track-by-track tales

    1. Peter Gabriel, On The Air . . . Gabriel’s first four solo albums were all simply called ‘Peter Gabriel’ so they came to be known by their album covers. This is from his second album, the ‘scratch’ record. No big hits but it’s arguably one of his most interesting albums, not least due to the presence of guitarist Robert Fripp, of King Crimson fame, on many of the songs.
    2. Elton John, Funeral For A Friend (Love Lies Bleeding) . . . Classic, epic opener from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. So why didn’t I open with it today? Well, I did open a show with it a few years ago. And I was going to again, but then decided Gabriel’s tune fit better, by title.
    3. Styx, Miss America . . . Not a big Styx fan, one of my younger brothers was so I couldn’t help but know their stuff, and this rocker is one of their best, in my opinion.
    4. Neil Young, Motorcycle Mama . . . From 1978’s Comes A Time, with the late Nicolette Larson sharing lead vocals with Young.
    5. The Rolling Stones, If You Really Want To Be My Friend . . . Lovely ballad from the It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll album, featuring Philadelphia soul crooners Blue Magic on backing vocals.
    6. Phil Collins, Thru These Walls . . . Phil Collins pretty much lost me after his first two solo albums but I like this spooky track from the second album, Hello, I Must Be Going! It was the first single released, albeit only in the UK, where it only managed to make No. 56 on the charts. Much more successful was the album’s second single, the worldwide smash cover of You Can’t Hurry Love, the song made famous by The Supremes.
    7. Harry Chapin, Taxi . . . The story of Harry the cab driver and Sue, his old flame.
    8. Harry Chapin, Sequel . . . Eight years later, in 1980 for his album Sequel, Chapin picks up the story, as they meet again . . . It’s a beautiful pairing of songs, with the touching ending: “I guess it’s a sequel to our story, from the journey ‘tween Heaven and Hell, with half the time thinking of what might have been and half thinkin’ just as well . . . I guess only time will tell.” Chapin, a noted philanthropist, died in a traffic accident in July of 1981, at age 38, on his way to playing at a benefit concert. I remember hearing the report on the radio.
    9. Marianne Faithfull, Reason To Believe . . . Faithfull’s 1967 cover of the 1965 Tim Hardin classic, done by many artists including The Carpenters and Rod Stewart, to great effect, on his 1971 album, Every Picture Tells A Story. The B-side of Stewart’s single version was Maggie May, which radio stations started playing more than the A-side as Maggie May became a huge hit. As for the Faithfull version, her at this point sweet vocals are a sharp contrast to the later world-weary sound of her voice, changed by drug abuse and cigarettes, as it appeared on her big 1979 comeback album, Broken English. It’s like listening to two different artists, and both sound great, suited to the songs.
    10. The White Stripes, One More Cup Of Coffee . . . Cover of one of my favorite Bob Dylan tunes, from his 1976 album, Desire.
    11. Bob Dylan, Sara . . . Speaking of the Desire album . . . Again, inspiration coming from everywhere and anywhere, a friend of mine mentioned he was listening to the album last week, which prompted me to think of One More Cup Of Coffee and others among my favorites from the record. This is one of them, a touching love song to Dylan’s then-estranged wife Sara, who visited the studio when he recorded it, telling her ‘this is for you.” They later reconciled, but finally divorced in 1977.
    12. Roxy Music, While My Heart Is Still Beating . . . Yet another beautiful song from the wonderful Avalon album, a lovely soundscape from start to finish.
    13. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, No Man’s Land . . . Haven’t played Seger in a while, and a great one this is, musically and lyrically, from the Against The Wind album. The album wound up knocking Pink Floyd’s The Wall from its No. 1 perch atop the charts.
    14. Fleetwood Mac, Bermuda Triangle . . . Haunting track from the fifth and final album, Heroes Are Hard To Find, of the guitarist/songwriter Bob Welch period of Fleetwood Mac. It’s the middle, arguably underappreciated time between the early, Peter Green-led blues band and the later Stevie Nicks-Lindsey Buckingham commercial behemoth.
    15. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Taxman . . . Cover of the Beatles/George Harrison tune, which I played recently, that appeared on Vaughan’s posthumously-released first greatest hits album in 1995. According to the album’s liner notes, the song was done for a never-completed animated film project initiated by Michael Jackson, who owned the publishing rights to The Beatles’ catalog. The record company suggested Vaughan’s band do Taxman, but what band members have described as ‘Howlin’ Wolf Sings The Beatles’ due to the growly vocals, remained unreleased until after Vaughan’s death.
    16. Ringo Starr, Back Off Boogaloo . . . Ringo usually employed outside songwriters, include his fellow Beatles. This is one he wrote himself, inspired by a conversation with Marc Bolan of T-Rex, who used the phrase Ringo wound up taking as inspiration and song title. Among the players on the tune are George Harrison (slide guitar), Gary Wright (keyboards) and longtime Beatles’ associate Klaus Voorman (bass), who appeared on several solo albums by the various members except for Paul McCartney.
    17. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Lazy Days . . . Infectious country/rockabilly toe-tapper written by Gram Parsons.
    18. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On) . . . While Jimmy Page continues to spend his time re-remastering and re-releasing Led Zeppelin albums for the billionth time, Robert Plant just gets on with interesting things like the wonderful 2007 collaboration with country/bluegrass artist Krauss that resulted in the Raising Sand album. This is their version of the Everly Brothers song. In 2021, the duo released their second album together, Raise The Roof.
    19. The Allman Brothers Band, In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed (live, At Fillmore East album version) . . . One of the band’s finest of many instrumentals written by guitarist Dickey Betts, about a woman he was involved with. Betts used the name of a woman he saw on a headstone in a cemetery as a means of cloaking the real person’s identity.
    20. The Alan Parsons Project, The Turn Of A Friendly Card (The Turn Of A Friendly Card, Pt. 1/Snake Eyes/The Ace of Swords/Nothing Left To Lose/The Turn Of A Friendly Card, Pt. 2) . . . Epic 16-minute track broken down into five individual songs, from the prog band’s 1980 album.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Led Zeppelin, Out On The Tiles
2. Billy Joel, Travelin’ Prayer
3. David Bowie, Up The Hill Backwards
4. Bad Company, Crazy Circles
5. Taste, Blister On The Moon
6. The Rolling Stones, Ventilator Blues
7. The Kinks, Art Lover
8. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Runaway Trains
9. The Byrds, The Day Walk (Never Before)
10. Eric Clapton, Sign Language
11. Genesis, The Musical Box
12. Joe Jackson, A Slow Song
13. Dire Straits, Millionaire Blues
14. The Cars, Double Life
15. George Harrison, Crackerbox Palace
16. The Who, Drowned
17. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Comin’ Home
18. Rod Stewart, Gasoline Alley
19. Beck, Bogert & Appice, Superstition
20. Peter Green, White Sky (Love That Evil Woman)
21. Spooky Tooth, Evil Woman
22. Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops
23. Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills, Stop

    Set list with my track-by-track tales:

    1. Led Zeppelin, Out On The Tiles . . . Da doona doona doona doona….My vocalization of that infectious I’d describe as descending riff on this one from Zep III. I always remember my older brother’s original vinyl copy cover sleeve with the spinner thing (called a volvelle, or wheel chart) – via which one could spin to see the various images through holes in the front cover. Endless fun while listenig to the record.
    2. Billy Joel, Travelin’ Prayer . . . Country/bluegrass banjo-driven blast of fun which was the third single from Joel’s 1973 Piano Man album. The single did fairly well, inside the top 60 depending on the chart. Country artists loved it. Earl Scruggs covered it in 1974 and Dolly Parton earned a 1999 Grammy Award nomination for her version.
    3. David Bowie, Up The Hill Backwards . . . Ashes To Ashes and Fashion were the big hits on Bowie’s 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), but Up The Hill Backwards is arguably the album’s most interesting track. I always find it to be one of those songs that, when one hears it, it’s ‘oh yeah, I remember this one’ because you’d listened to the full album and without you realizing it, all the tracks embedded themselves in your consciousness. As a single, though, the song was arguably too complex for mass consumption, making ‘only’ No. 32 in the UK and No. 49 in Canada.
    4. Bad Company, Crazy Circles . . . I’ve always liked this one, the maybe obvious lyrics nevertheless working their magic on my then age 20 mind, second year of college and the world continuing to reveal itself. The song was the B-side to the hit Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy.

        

    5. Taste, Blister On The Moon . . . A, er, blistering track from the Rory Gallagher-led band’s self-titled debut album in 1969.
    6. The Rolling Stones, Ventilator Blues . . . Hypnotic track from Exile On Main St. and one of only two songs on which guitarist Mick Taylor received an official writing credit alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The other is Criss Cross, an outtake from 1973’s Goats Head Soup that didn’t see official release until a 2020 re-release featuring assorted demos and previously unreleased tracks. I’ll have to do a Stones (or anyone’s) previously unreleased bonus tracks show at some point – just a matter of getting off my lazy butt and doing it.
    7. The Kinks, Art Lover . . . Lovely tune musically, possibly creepy lyrically, apparently written from the perspective of a pervert/stalker. But as Ray Davies said, it’s deliberately ambiguous. It’s worth reading about on ‘song meaning’ sites.

        

    8. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Runaway Trains . . . Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is something of a ‘lost’ album amid Petty’s best known/big hit works, and it took a while for it to resonate with me. But it’s one of those albums, and this track is an indication of that, that rewards repeat listens.
    9. The Byrds, The Day Walk (Never Before) . . . A bit of a Satisfaction riff drives this Gene Clark-penned track, an outtake from 1965’s Turn! Turn! Turn! album. It didn’t come out until later re-releases of the record. It’s a nice tune, but, some stories suggest, it was originally left off the album due to the other band members’ resentment of Clark’s songwriting dominance within the group. He wrote or co-wrote many of the early Byrds’ hits like I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better and Eight Miles High, among others.
    10. Eric Clapton, Sign Language . . . When The Band released their influential debut album, Music From Big Pink, in 1968, Clapton was quoted as saying he wanted to be in The Band. He never was, although their sound influenced his post-Cream work and he sort of joined them, or they joined him, as all The Band members appeared on Clapton’s 1976 album No Reason To Cry – on which this Bob Dylan-written song appears. Dylan and Clapton share vocals on the song, which Dylan himself never officially released. Ronnie Wood plays guitar on the track and wound up getting another Dylan song, Seven Days, out of the deal. Dylan originally offered it to Clapton, who declined it, but Wood recorded it for his 1979 album, Gimme Some Neck. Joe Cocker also covered Seven Days on his 1982 album Sheffield Steel.
    11. Genesis, The Musical Box . . . Never box yourself in, musically, I say. So we go from the roots sort of rock of Clapton’s tune to some prog with Genesis, who I have not played in a while.
    12. Joe Jackson, A Slow Song . . . I was going to stick this in the middle of my hard rock/metal show last Saturday, just for a laugh amid the mayhem, given JJ’s lyrical diatribe about some people turning music into a ‘savage beast’. I probably should have, but in the end just carried on because, Joe, love your music but, to again quote from A Slow Song’s lyrics, you might get tired of DJs but, sorry, it IS always what he (me) plays. So there. Great tune from a great album – 1982’s Night and Day – by one of my favorite artists.
    13. Dire Straits, Millionaire Blues . . . Typical fun, cynical lyrics from Mark Knopfler on this somewhat obscure track which was originally on the CD and 12-inch vinyl single versions of Calliing Elvis, from the last Dire Straits album, 1991’s On Every Street. I saw that tour. Excellent, but what else would one expect from Knopfler/Dire Straits?
    14. The Cars, Double Life . . . Third single from the second Cars album, 1979’s Candy-O. It didn’t chart after the hits Let’s Go and It’s All I Can Do but to me, it’s arguably the best of the three, albeit probably not as instantly catchy which is the usual driving force for singles.
    15. George Harrison, Crackerbox Palace . . . Great track, a top 20 single from Harrison’s 1976 album 33 and 1/3.
    16. The Who, Drowned . . . A discussion with my two sons about The Beatles on Thursday afternoon led me down a YouTube rabbit hole that settled on some Roger Daltrey interviews, wherein he was singing the praises of Pete Townshend as a writer and Quadrophenia as an album. So, inspiration wonderfully coming from anywhere and everywhere, I dug into that album and picked out this great rocker which, apparently, was one of all Who band members’ favorite tracks to play live. Another one of those Who tracks (arguably all of them) where Keith Moon’s unique let’s call it rat-a-tat drumming style is so evident.
    17. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Comin’ Home . . . Early, beautiful Skynyrd from the post-plane crash posthumous release, Skynyrd’s First and . . . Last album which was later expanded and re-released as Skynyrd’s First: The Complete Muscle Shoals Album. It features early tracks, recorded in 1971 and 1972, originally intended for release as the band’s debut album. That plan was shelved and 1973’s Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd instead became the official debut. The First and . . . Last sessions included Rickey Medlocke on drums on many of the songs, although he doesn’t play on Comin’ Home. Medlocke later formed Blackfoot and returned, as a guitarist, to post-crash versions of Skynyrd and he’s been in latter-day versions of the group since 1997.

         

    18. Rod Stewart, Gasoline Alley . . . Title cut, written by Stewart and Ronnie Wood> It’s from Stewart’s second solo album, during the 1969-74 period when Stewart could seemingly do no wrong while maintaining parallel careers as a solo artist along with his lead vocal/frontman duties with Faces – most of whom backed him on his solo work.
    19. Beck, Bogert & Appice, Superstition . . . Cover of the Stevie Wonder hit by the power trio of guitarist Jeff Beck, bassist/singer Tim Bogert and drummer/singer Carmine Appice, from the one and only studio album released by BBA, in 1973. The song has its genesis in a jam between Beck and Wonder, with Wonder giving it to Beck for the BBA album originally scheduled to be released before Wonder’s Talking Book. However, Wonder’s version wound up coming out first, was an obvious massive hit, and the rest is history, as the saying goes. Wonder’s is the definitive version, but the BBA one ain’t bad, either.
    20. Peter Green, White Sky (Love That Evil Woman) . . . Extended piece, title cut from Green’s 1982 album and likely my favorite of the original Fleetwood Mac leader’s solo songs.
    21. Spooky Tooth, Evil Woman . . . Gary Wright, later of Dream Weaver fame, wrote most of Spooky Tooth’s stuff but this one was written by American musician Larry Weiss, perhaps best known as the writer of Glen Campbell’s No. 1 hit Rhinestone Cowboy. Spooky Tooth’s heavy, nine-minute version was released on the band’s second album, Spooky Two, in 1969. Weiss recorded his own song, in a three-minute version that appeared, along with Rhinestone Cowboy, on his 1974 Black and Blue Suite album.
    22. Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops . . . Bluesy, extended piece from Zappa’s 1976 album Zoot Allures.
    23. Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills, Stop . . . And so we come to a stop, until Monday’s show, with this instrumental from the classic Super Session album, 1968. It features multi-intrumentalist and producer Al Kooper along with guitarists Mike Bloomfield (on this track) and Stephen Stills.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. Fight, Into The Pit
2. Queen, We Will Rock You (fast version, from Live Killers)
3. Alannah Myles, Rock This Joint
4. Triumph, Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine
5. Montrose, Space Station #5
6. Stray, Feel Like I’ve Been Here Before
7. Hawkwind, Silver Machine
8. Judas Priest, Painkiller
9. KK’s Priest, Hellfire Thunderbolt
10. Ted Nugent, Stranglehold
11. The Beatles, Helter Skelter
12. The J. Geils Band, Musta Got Lost (live, including Peter Wolf stage rap, from Blow Your Face Out)
13. Midnight Oil, Redneck Wonderland
14. Status Quo, Big Fat Mama
15. Deep Purple, Lady Double Dealer
16. The Rolling Stones, Lies
17. Budgie, Crash Course In Brain Surgery
18. Black Sabbath, Supernaut (Ozzy Osbourne vocals)
19. Black Sabbath, Neon Knights (Ronnie James Dio vocals)
20. Black Sabbath, Digital Bitch (Ian Gillan vocals)
21. Black Sabbath, Get A Grip (Tony Martin vocals)
22. Thin Lizzy, The Rocker
23. AC/DC, The Furor
24. Headstones, Flight Risk
25. Iron Maiden, 2 Minutes To Midnight 

    Set list with my track-by-track tales:

    1. Fight, Into The Pit . . . A thrash metal scorcher from Rob Halford’s short-lived band, early 1990s, during a period when the lead singer left Judas Priest. Priest carried on for two studio and a couple live albums and concert video releases with Tim “Ripper” Owens, a Halford sound-alike recruited from a Priest tribute band, on lead vocals. Owens departed when Halford returned but has since returned to the Priest fold as that band has splintered. Owens is now lead singer for former Priest guitarist KK Downing’s band KK’s Priest, a track of whose I’m playing later in the set.
    2. Queen, We Will Rock You (fast version, from Live Killers) . . . I’ll never forget them opening with this when I saw the Jazz album tour at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens in early December, 1978, a couple months after the album’s release. In those pre-internet and instant information availability days, the speeded up arrangement version was a total, fantastic surprise in what was one of the best concerts I’ve seen. Blistering. Queen closed the show with We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions in the version as it appeared on the double single from 1977’s News Of The World studio album, followed by their usual instrumental closer, God Save the (then) Queen.
    3. Alannah Myles, Rock This Joint . . . The song and the title fit my mood in putting this show together. It’s from her 1989 debut album, the one featuring the blockbuster single Black Velvet.
    4. Triumph, Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine . . . Title cut from the Canadian hard rockers’ second album, released in 1977. I’m not a big Triumph fan. I thought a lot of their later stuff – when they were actually more commercially successful, certainly in the US market – suffered from 1980s overproduction, although I probably haven’t investigated it thoroughly enough although I just checked out one of their, apparently, hits, A World Of Fantasy (it’s on their first compilation album) and, ugh but it’s approaching Starship schlock, to my ears. To each one’s own of course but how does such shit appeal to people?All that said, I do like Triumph’s earlier material, like Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine. I suppose it comes down to four Triumph tracks, for me, counting Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine. The other three, in no particular order, if anyone’s interested:

       * Lay It On The Line – which, music often being a place and time thing, reminds me of a college girlfriend and our relationship. I remember the song playing one night, on the radio, when I was at her place and how it resonated. We broke up soon after, maybe due to the song, maybe not, but in some ways, although never look back, one of those ‘what-if’ scenarios albeit in what was in the end an insignificant, early relationship.
       * Rocky Mountain Way, Triumph’s cover of the Joe Walsh/Barnstorm band tune.
       * Blinding Light Show/Moonchild, an epic hard rock/prog combo track from the debut album that I’ve previously played on the show, and will again.

    5. Montrose, Space Station #5 . . .Well, I spent way too much time on Triumph than I intended to. Might happen with Montrose, too. It’s how my mind sometimes works. Originally, I just had that Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine was the title cut of Triumph’s 1977 album, but reconsidered and thought I should say more, so then my stream of consciousness thought process got the better of me, perhaps. On to Montrose, which reminds me of what I love about music, almost as much of the actual music and that’s the various threads and connections, which results in people (not me, so far) making money from things like designing and writing about rock family trees. It’s true of any industry, of course, but music is a popular culture thing so it’s arguably of more interest, especially to obsessives like me. So . . . Guitarist Ronnie Montrose, the titular head of the band, was originally a session musician and played on such albums as Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey (one of my favorites), which was produced by Ted Templeman, who produced the first Montrose album, and later produced the early Van Halen albums and then co-produced For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, by which time Sammy Hagar, Montrose’s original lead singer, was three albums into and firmly in place replacing David Lee Roth as Van Halen’s singer. Montrose was also in Edgar Winter’s band, specifically for the album They Only Come Out At Night and hit singles Frankenstein and Free Ride. As for Space Station #5, the title says it – a ‘spacey’ rocker, and a good one.
    6. Stray, Feel Like I’ve Been Here Before . . . Perfect song, because I’ve said this before but bears repeating. I discovered Stray via a compilation, I’m A Freak, Baby – A Journey Through the British Heavy Rock and Underground Scene, 1968-72 that a friend excitedly recommended to me years ago now. “You have to get this!’ he advised me one night on Facebook Messenger. So, I got it, the 3-CD compilation that was released in 2016. Later, I was the one recommending he get the subsequent “I’m A Freak Baby 2” comp that came out three years later, expanding the palate to include 1973. And there’s a ‘Freak Baby’ third compilation, issued in 2021, all of them excellent. As for Stray, I liked the band so much via the one track – All In Your Mind which I’ve played before – on the original Freak Baby comp that I bought a Stray anthology, from which I discovered this ‘galloping’ track. Future Iron Maiden members were probably listening, and planning.
    7. Hawkwind, Silver Machine . . . Lemmy Kilmister’s band before he formed Motorhead. And, in a hard rock show, I forgot to play Motorhead, today at least. Next time. Which might be as soon as Saturday morning’s show. Or not. I might go totally singer-songwriter acoustic, depends on mood. Stay tuned.
    8. Judas Priest, Painkiller . . . And so it is, intentionally, that after my opening cut, by the Rob Halford-led Fight, we come ’round to Judas Priest via the thrash metal title track to arguably Priest’s heaviest album, from 1990. Intense stuff.
    9. KK’s Priest, Hellfire Thunderbolt . . . And intense is also this, from the aforementioned band formed by former Priest guitarist KK Downing, featuring former Priest singer Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens. As someone on YouTube commented: ‘there’s now 2 Priests? I’m in heaven!’ Or hell. I agree.
    10. Ted Nugent, Stranglehold . . . Heavy, hypnotic riff. Not necessarily a fan of the man’s politics but his music that I like, I like, a lot. Always cracks me up with some people who, when an entertainer comes out with views they might disagree with, state (usually in self-righteous public fashion these days on social media) that said entertainer is dead to them. Fine, whatever. But you’re going to give up what entertains you simply due to a differing point of view? 1. Sounds strange and narrow-minded to me. 2. I doubt such people actually do give it up, although they’d never admit to it.
    11. The Beatles, Helter Skelter . . . The Beatles were often trailblazers and some have suggested this might be the first heavy metal tune, from 1968’s White Album albeit I’d dispute that given some prior work by the likes of, say, Link Wray and so many others. It’s actually hilarious, at least in one video I’ve seen, which purports to reveal who originated heavy metal but no answer is arrived at after the host goes through just about anyone with even the slightest connection to the genre. Put it this way: stuff evolves; everything is influenced by everything else, the present is built on the past. In any event, obviously a great tune, blisters on Ringo’s fingers included.
    12. The J. Geils Band, Musta Got Lost (live, including Peter Wolf stage rap, from Blow Your Face Out) . . . This might actually be the slowest-paced song among all these fast songs today, in part due to the inherent slowdown of Geils’ lead singer Peter Wolf’s classic rap to open the song, which was one of the fairly successful hit singles Geils had before the massive commercial heights of the Freeze Frame album era that featured such hits as Centerfold.
    13. Midnight Oil, Redneck Wonderland . . . One might not typically think Midnight Oil belongs in a hard rock set but they went close to metallic on this title cut from the Australian band’s 1998 album. Love it. And I love the cover art – a kangaroo toting a rifle. Two years later, I was covering the Sydney Olympics for my newspaper and saw such a kangaroo employed as security. Just kidding. I did see kangaroos, in an enclosure at the media village. No rifles.
    14. Status Quo, Big Fat Mama . . . Another kick-butt rocker from the appropriately titled Piledriver album.
    15. Deep Purple, Lady Double Dealer . . . Aren’t they all? Kidding. Maybe. From the Stormbringer album. I, and I think a lot of Purple fans, have never understood Ritchie Blackmore’s dislike of the 1974 record, the last of the so-called Mark III version of Purple with Blackmore on guitar and featuring lead vocalist David Coverdale and bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes. Too funky for Blackmore’s tastes yet, and I’m no guitar expert, his playing seems more than fine to me including on this rocker. Who can truly know the creative, mercurial mind? In any case, Blackmore was soon on to form Rainbow.
    16. The Rolling Stones, Lies . . . Stones go particularly punk on this one from Some Girls. I used to consider it one of the weaker cuts on the excellent album, too overtly an attempt at putting it to the punk rockers who had called out by then establishment bands like the Stones, who of course were among the original punks, but it’s grown on me over time. Had it been, say, a Ramones song, it likely would be on a greatest hits compilation by that band which, while great and influential and I like them, arguably just did the same song over and over.
    17. Budgie, Crash Course In Brain Surgery . . . Short, sweet, typically great riff rock from Budgie.
    18. Black Sabbath, Supernaut (Ozzy Osbourne vocals) . . . I probably play this too often but can never get enough of it and that great riff courtesy guitarist Tony Iommi. First of a set of four Sabbath tunes, with four different singers, over time and various lineup changes.
    19. Black Sabbath, Neon Knights (Ronnie James Dio vocals) . . . Ozzy leaves, in comes Dio, at the time most recently with Blackmore’s Rainbow. As with any big band getting a new singer, people wonder. So the band places this as lead cut on the Heaven and Hell album and, people no longer wonder. Sabbath sailed on.
    20. Black Sabbath, Digital Bitch (Ian Gillan vocals) . . . An almost out of control vehicle of a song screeching along, on the one and only Sabs album fronted by Deep Purple’s most renowned singer. Gillan apparently joined the band sometime amid a drunken evening with Sabs’ guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, after which Gillan’s agent lamentably advised Gillan to please consult him in such future decisions. In any event, out came the what I think is the brilliant Born Again album in 1983, all of this despite Gillan’s hilarious struggles with lyrics and such on the subsequent tour – read his book, Child In Time, or various other accounts of a tour which at least in part inspired the classic rock spoof movie This Is Spinal Tap. The amp goes to 11! Etc.
    21. Black Sabbath, Get A Grip (Tony Martin vocals) . . . The Tony Martin era, where Tony Iommi soldiered on with assorted players, with original bassist Geezer Butler in and out on various albums, is generally considered the runt of the litter of the band’s output but I like the Martin albums as much as those done with the other various vocalists. Really. Worth checking out, if one has an open mind. Some of Iommi’s most prodigious riffs lurk, largely unheard, on many of the Martin records.
    22. Thin Lizzy, The Rocker . . . Title says it all, really. What a great band Lizzy was, so much more than The Boys Are Back In Town. “In walks this chick and I knew she was up to something . . . “ Probably would be held to account on misogynist grounds for such an obvious realistic situation lyric, these days. It’s the birds and the bees, you know? Amazing guitar, too, by Eric Bell.
    23. AC/DC, The Furor . . . Love this cut from Ballbreaker, just the way it opens, the arrangement, the lyrics, Phil Rudd’s solid, serve the song drumming, all of it. Saw the tour. Great stuff. Two hours of power, as the friend I went with termed it.
    24. Headstones, Flight Risk . . . Another blistering cut from Headstones, this the title cut from their most recent, late 2022-released album. I’ve said it before, but a very consistent band, rarely an easily-dismissed track, their albums are always good, front to back listens, to my ears.
    25. Iron Maiden, 2 Minutes To Midnight . . . I suppose I should have played this on my Saturday morning show, which was New Year’s Eve. But, I didn’t. In any event it’s about war, the threat of wars, not new years, none of which ever seem to change much.

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

1. 1. Pearl Jam, Spin The Black Circle
   2. U2, New Year’s Day
   3. Graham Parker, Mercury Poisoning
   4. Jimi Hendrix, Manic Depression
   5. Nirvana, Polly
   6. Smashing Pumpkins, Drown
   7. Alice In Chains, Dam That River
   8. Soundgarden, Jesus Christ Pose
   9. Mudhoney, Overblown
   10. Mother Love Bone, Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns
   11. Dead Kennedys, The Man With The Dogs
   12. Megadeth, Anarchy In The UK
   13. Nash The Slash, Dead Man’s Curve
   14. Ike & Tina Turner, Sexy Ida – Part 1
   15. Ike & Tina Turner, Sexy Ida – Part 2
   16. Blackie and The Rodeo Kings, Folsom Prison Blues
   17. Johnny Cash, Solitary Man
   18. Jason and The Scorchers, 19^th Nervous Breakdown
   19. The Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger, Memo From Turner (Performance movie soundtrack version featuring Ry Cooder on slide guitar)
   20. David Baerwald, Hello Mary
   21. Fludd, Cousin Mary
   22. Tommy James, Draggin’ The Line
   23. AC/DC, Dogs Of War
   24. James Gang, The Bomber
   25. Alice Cooper, Devil’s Food/The Black Widow
   26. Joe Cocker, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (live, Mad Dogs & Englishmen album version)
   27. The Guess Who, Coming Down Off The Money Bag/Song Of The Dog
   28. Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town
   29. Pearl Jam, Last Kiss

Set list with my track-by-track tales:

1. Pearl Jam, Spin The Black Circle . . . Pearl Jam goes punk about their love for vinyl records amid ambiguous lyrics arguably, depending on various interpretations, comparing addiction to music to drug addiction. All songs, if one digs into them, have interesting histories and backgrounds as does this one, from the band’s Vitalogy album, 1994. Not all band members, apparently, were on board with the punk rock direction the song took, but it was an outlier, for the most part, amid the album overall.

2. U2, New Year’s Day . . . I don’t usually play hits, it’s a deep cuts show as I probably say too often in perhaps trying to ‘excuse’ playing hits. Thing is, though, that this song is 40 years old now (!!??) and 1. The show is called So Old It’s New (so, theoretically, this could be new to some). 2. one of my catchphrases for the show has forever been “old bands, old tracks, old bands, their new stuff if they’re still active plus occasional singles one may not have heard in a long time’. And by that I mean singles from not only very prominent bands but singles from others like, dunno, say Stray or Savoy Brown or The Velvet Underground or whoever, that never charted. In any event, so, I present to you New Year’s Day with the great – and almost always true – opening verse lyric: Nothing changes on New Year’s Day. And it usually doesn’t, just as on Christmas or any other ‘special’ day, stuff still happens, good and bad. They’re all just another day amid the flawed human condition, albeit all of them celebrated for obvious reasons and the idealistic hopes and dreams they promise and, sometimes, deliver.
3. Graham Parker, Mercury Poisoning . . . The then very angry young man’s diatribe about his former record label. And it’s good, musically, too, so you actually listen to it. And by that I mean, there’s many great songs lyrically but if you don’t have compelling music to carry it, nobody’s going to listen to/hear it.

4. Jimi Hendrix, Manic Depression . . . Look at the track listing for Hendrix’s 1967 debut album Are You Experienced and it’s essentially a greatest hits album, but then that was the case for the three Experience studio records. Amazing stuff, amazing artist. Anyway, Manic Depression is one of the tracks and I’m using it for two reasons. 1. It’s great and I like it. 2. It introduces a ‘depressing’ Seattle grunge sounds set from the 1990s when bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and so on broke big with great music and often depressing, lived-life lyrics. Not that other artists had ever written about such things, they had, but the Seattle sound seemed ALL about that to the point that one was like, people, try to be happy and they probably were but perhaps it was also a clever marketing tool. In any event, great music resulted. A lot of those bands, some who made it bigger than others, were featured on the 1992 Singles movie soundtrack album, from which I’ve drawn much of the succeeding set.

5. Nirvana, Polly . . . I’ve always loved and hated this song. Check that. Hated is too strong a word. I’ve always been uncomfortable with liking it, perhaps better expressed, and that’s due to its subject matter which is of course what makes great art – we can love it but it can also make us uncomfortable. It’s a compelling and arresting song, musically, but it’s about the abduction, rape and torture of a 14-year-old girl returning home from a concert in Tacoma, Washington, in 1987. Horrible.
   
6. Smashing Pumpkins, Drown . . . I don’t play guitar – have one but have been too lazy to learn, maybe a 2023 resolution – but love the what I’ll term the ‘scratchy’ guitar on this one. It’s the extended version of the track, from the Singles soundtrack of Seattle sounds that broke big via Nirvana, that I mentioned earlier.

7. Alice In Chains, Dam That River . . . Hard, bleak, brilliant. “Maybe I don’t give a dam anyway’. Yeah.

8. Soundgarden, Jesus Christ Pose . . . Kick butt tune from Badmotorfinger, the 1991 album that first brought Soundgarden to mainstream notice before their blockbuster breakthrough with 1994’s Superunknown album and hits like Black Hole Sun and Fell On Black Days.

9. Mudhoney, Overblown . . . Hard, fast stuff from one of the somewhat less well known Seattle bands, still around, always interesting reading about the family trees of such groups which, in Mudhoney’s case, featured future members of Pearl Jam – Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard.

10. Mother Love Bone, Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns . . . See my thoughts on Mudhoney, re the band. As for the music, a great extended track – it’s I suppose grunge if one wants to categorize such things but it’s also at parts progressive, ‘naked’ vocals just out there over a bed of largely acoustic instrumentation at first, just a cohesive, interesting, compelling track.

11. Dead Kennedys, The Man With The Dogs . . . If you need a head shred to, as Funkadelic once titled a great album I’ve drawn from, free your mind and your ass will follow, I suggest playing the Dead Kennedys. Crazy good.

12. Megadeth, Anarchy In The UK . . . Kick ass cover of the kick ass Sex Pistols tune.

13. Nash The Slash, Dead Man’s Curve . . . Screeeech on the brakes and turning the musical wheel as we negotiate the curve, musically, from the grunge and such to this as always interesting in whatever Nash The Slash did, cover of the 1964 Jan and Dean hit. On to some funk.

14. Ike & Tina Turner, Sexy Ida – Part 1 . . . As I said, funk. Crazy good. Tina, perhaps more, justifiably, celebrated as a performer, wrote this sexy sucker.

15. Ike & Tina Turner, Sexy Ida – Part 2 . . . Tina wrote this continuation, too.

16. Blackie and The Rodeo Kings, Folsom Prison Blues . . . Cover of the Johnny Cash tune by the brilliant Canadian combo of Tom Wilson, Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden. Another of those instances where a side project becomes a working band.

17. Johnny Cash, Solitary Man . . . Somebody covers Cash, Cash covers somebody. In this case, Neil Diamond on what is my favorite Neil Diamond song and just a great tune, regardless and no artist could eff it up. Nor does Cash.

18. Jason and The Scorchers, 19^th Nervous Breakdown . . . I find it interesting that my favorite band, The Rolling Stones, don’t often play this great tune live yet it’s been covered by many, including this, er, scorching version by The Scorchers.

19. The Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger, Memo From Turner (Performance movie soundtrack version featuring Ry Cooder on slide guitar). . . . Interesting history on this tune. This is the version, essentially a Jagger solo version and likely the best known as it appears as a Rolling Stones track on some compilations, from the movie Performance. Ry Cooder shines on slide guitar. The Stones did their own, jauntier, arguably rawer since Keith Richards was on guitar, version which later appeared on the grab-bag Metamorphosis compilation issued during the Stones/Allen Klein/Abkco Records battles, but the Performance version likely remains the best take.

20. David Baerwald, Hello Mary . . . From one of the two Davids (the other, Ricketts, went into production work) from the one and only brilliant David + David Boomtown album release in 1986. Baerwald, amid film soundtrack and other work, has released sporadic albums since, this one from his first solo release, Bedtime Stories, in 1990. He did a few widely-released albums released via conventional physical means after that but since then any new music, so far, from him has been released only on the web and even so it’s difficult to find.

21. Fludd, Cousin Mary . . . From the ‘old singles you haven’t heard in a while so they fit in a deep cuts context’ file.

22. Tommy James, Draggin’ The Line . . . As with the Fludd tune. He had lots of hits but this is likely my favorite.

23. AC/DC, Dogs Of War . . . From the 2014 album Rock Or Bust, the first to feature rhythm guitarist Stevie Young, replacing his uncle Malcolm, who was ailing at the time and eventually died. Stevie had also replaced Malcolm, then battling alcohol abuse, during the band’s 1988 Blow Up Your Video album tour.

24. James Gang, The Bomber . . . Extended killer cut from the Joe Walsh-led band’s second album, Rides Again, 1970.

25. Alice Cooper, Devil’s Food/The Black Widow . . . Vincent Price is, er, priceless near the end of the first tune, and a great rocker it is, from Welcome To My Nightmare, the first Alice album after the breakup of the original band which was a name Vincent Furnier adopted but also the name of the band to that point. Great combo track.

26. Joe Cocker, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (live, Mad Dogs & Englishmen album version) . . . Beatles cover, of course. And brilliantly done by Cocker, arguably one of the kings of covers.

27. The Guess Who, Coming Down Off The Money Bag/Song Of The Dog . . . Such a fantastic ditty from the Share The Land album. It came after Randy Bachman left the band, which then increasingly became the Burton Cummings band as he asserted dominance albeit within the context of brilliant post-Bachman guitarists like Kurt Winter, Greg Leskiw and, later, Don McDougall.

28. Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town . . . Cover, done by many but I think this is the best one, for me at least, since it’s a more rock-oriented take, of the Mel Tillis tune. I always think of my late dad when I hear it. I remember him playing it, was first time I heard it. He emigrated from Europe after World War II, was into classical and opera but interestingly developed a love for country and country-ish music, from whence I by osmosis got into such artists as Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. And this tune. An old work colleague once told me he thought it was a shitty song. What? Ridiculous. Also, interestingly, the ‘crazy Asian war’ in the lyrics is usually assumed to be about the Vietnam War but Tillis always said it referred to the Pacific war in World War II, mainly the USA vs Japan although other countries like the UK and its then-empire were heavily involved.

29. Pearl Jam, Last Kiss . . . Cover of the 1961 hit by Wayne Cochrane. And on that note, a last kiss to 2022 as we embark on 2023. Back on Monday, Jan. 2. Happy New Year, everyone.

Set list with my track-by-track commentary follows the bare-bones list.

1. Chicago, Sing A Mean Tune Kid
2. Van Halen, Mean Street
3. Black Sabbath, Warning
4. April Wine, Crash and Burn
5. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Flat Broke Love
6. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, F*!#N’ Up
7. Atomic Rooster, Stand By Me
8. Budgie, Parents
9. Golden Earring, Stand By Me
10. Warren Zevon, Nighttime In The Switching Yard
11. Savoy Brown, Hellbound Train
12. Rainbow, Man On The Silver Mountain
13. Deep Purple, The Mule
14. Electric Light Orchestra, Poker
15. Them, One Two Brown Eyes
16. The Rolling Stones, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking
17. Yes, Heart Of The Sunrise
18. Led Zeppelin, Achilles Last Stand 

    Set list with my track-by-track tales:

    1. Chicago, Sing A Mean Tune Kid . . . Extended funky jazz-rock fusion track that was the lead cut on Chicago III, 1971.
    2. Van Halen, Mean Street . . . Speaking of mean tunes. . . . Best song on Van Halen’s dark 1981 album Fair Warning. Played it too recently but, it fits the theme.
    3. Black Sabbath, Warning . . . A fair number of long tracks today, including this one from the debut Sabbath album. Spooky.
    4. April Wine, Crash and Burn . . . Longtime great Canadian band goes proto-metal in attempt to break the US market in 1981 via The Nature Of The Beast album. It worked, although I largely prefer the earlier stuff. Kick butt tune, though.
    5. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Flat Broke Love . . . I watched an excellent documentary on Randy Bachman the other night. So, naturally . . .
    6. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, F*!#N’ Up . . . And Neil Young, Bachman’s longtime friend and sometime collaborator, was in the documentary but what really prompted me playing this was that I was talking with friends the other night about Young’s ‘distortion’ album Ragged Glory, although for the life of me (might have been the beer) couldn’t at the time remember the name of the album. None of my friends, did, either but then again we flit from topic to topic so fast who could be expected to keep track?
    7. Atomic Rooster, Stand By Me . . . Not the Ben E. King tune, covered by so many. This is an entirely different song, by the Brit prog/hard rockers.
       
    8. Budgie, Parents . . . Another of the extended pieces in tonight’s set, 10 minutes of slow, fast, soft, hard stuff of the type Budgie did so well.
    9. Golden Earring, Stand By Me . . . Again, not the Ben E. King tune, covered by so many. This is an entirely different song, not by the Brit prog/hard rockers Atomic Rooster that I played earlier, either. Can’t people think of unused song titles? Especially with well-known classics like Stand By Me. Many people might assume your song is a cover and not give it a chance because they figure, correctly in many cases, that the original can’t be improved upon. But what do I know? Nice guitar work, though.
       
    10. Warren Zevon, Nighttime In The Switching Yard . . . I’m playing this not only because it’s one of my favorites from Zevon’s Excitable Boy album (actually, every song from that terrific album is) but because the lyrics mention trains and I’m shamelessly using it to set up the next track. 
    11. Savoy Brown, Hellbound Train . . . Kim Simmonds, the only constant member of Savoy Brown from its formation in 1965 to 2022, died of colon cancer on Dec. 13. The band had still been active live and on record throughout, including studio material as recently as 2020, until in August of 2022 Simmonds announced all activity was ceasing as he was undergoing chemotherapy for stage four of the disease. A sad loss for blues rock. I saw Simmonds and his band at the Kitchener Blues Festival in 2013. Good show, with some video evidence of it and of course other shows, albums and assorted songs, on YouTube and other online sources.
    12. Rainbow, Man On The Silver Mountain . . . From the first Rainbow album, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, 1975, the first of three featuring Ronnie James Dio on lead vocals. After that, Blackmore wanted to go in a more commercial, almost pop, direction, Dio lost interest, and so did I – although I’m a big Blackmore fan.
    13. Deep Purple, The Mule . . . From Fireball. Inside joke I share with a good friend, on this one. It’s probably petty, I realize, but I know someone I call the mule due to their narrow-mindedness and the fact that talking to them and trying to get them to even remotely consider alternate points of view – you know, have an open mind – is like talking to a brick wall since they’re stubborn as a, well, mule.
    14. Electric Light Orchestra, Poker . . . Another from my ‘recent conversation inspiration’ files. Was out with the boys the other night, music inevitably comes into the conversation along with everything else under the sun and moon, and ELO was a brief topic. None of us are huge fans, but all of us remembered – but didn’t go see – when ELO on their late 1970s Out Of The Blue album tour had a stage set that included a flying saucer the band played under, the saucer housing the lights and such. ELO was a massive concert draw then, one of the biggest acts in the world at the time. A reported 70,000 people filled Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium to see them. Poker, quite the rocker, at least for ELO, isn’t from Out Of The Blue but from an earlier album, 1975’s Face The Music which yielded the hits Evil Woman and Strange Magic. 
    15. Them, One Two Brown Eyes . . . From 1965, I’ll call it a hypnotic shuffle rocker, written and sung of course by Van The Man Morrison. It appeared on an album simply titled Them in the US. In England, the album was more creatively called The Angry Young Them, but One Two Brown Eyes wasn’t on that version, back in the days when US and UK releases of the same album were often quite different in content, title and artwork.
    16. The Rolling Stones, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking . . . Keith Richards’ hellacious opening riff kicks off the song, one of three tracks I’ve played before but not for a long time. I could (and have) listen to that opening riff, and then Charlie Watts’ drums coming in, bap bap, countless times without getting tired of it. And then of course Mick Taylor with his extended Santana-esque coda. From Sticky Fingers. 
    17. Yes, Heart Of The Sunrise . . . One of the many tracks that puts a lie to the claim made by some that progressive rock isn’t really rock. Try that opening riff on for size. And it repeats throughout this epic from Fragile.
    18. Led Zeppelin, Achilles Last Stand . . . Back to the boys in the bar and my ‘recent conversation inspiration’. Another guy in the group and I have radio shows and we were chatting about song selections and such. I mentioned that one time, I was doing a double show, four hours, filling in the slot behind me for a DJ who was ill or whatever, and after my first two hours I put Zep’s Achilles on, great extended opener to the Presence album. Next thing I know, an old high school and college pal with whom I’ve reconnected via my show and our shared love of music, sends me a message saying ‘bathroom break?” Yup. So this is, in part, for him.

A Christmas show for Christmas Eve morning, at risk of being a show, at this busy time of year, that perhaps poses a variation on the question “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there, does anyone hear it?” I’m leading off with classical guitarist Liona Boyd’s wonderful instrumental sampling of various carols. The set is anchored by Jethro Tull’s Christmas album, released in 2003 and featuring some traditionals and other re-recorded Tull tracks by the version of the band, in terms of personnel, as it then existed. As Tull leader Ian Anderson writes in the album’s liner notes, if you fancied the song Bouree, from Stand Up, and the Songs From The Wood album, you’ll likely enjoy the record. It is a truly fine Christmas – or any other time – set of songs.

Speaking of Christmas records, I forgot to include one of my favorite artists, Bob Dylan, croaking his Dylan-esque way through various carols on his 2009 Christmas In The Heart. Perhaps next year. Merry Christmas, all.

1. Liona Boyd, Christmas Overture
2. The Payolas, Christmas Is Coming
3. John Lennon, Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
4. Elton John, Step Into Christmas
5. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, I Believe In Father Christmas
6. The Kinks, Father Christmas
7. The Who, Christmas

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (2003)

8. Birthday Card At Christmas
9. Holly Herald
10. A Christmas Song
11. Another Christmas Song
12. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
13. Jack Frost And The Hooded Crow
14. Last Man At The Party
15. Weathercock
16. Pavane
17. First Snow On Brooklyn
18. Greensleeved
19. Fire At Midnight
20. We Five Kings
21. Ring Out Solstice Bells
22. Bouree
23. A Winter Snowscape

24. Paul McCartney & Wings, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reggae
25. Argent, Christmas For The Free
26. McKenna Mendelson Mainline, Don’t Give Me No Goose For Christmas, Grandma
27. AC/DC, Mistress For Christmas
28. Tom Waits, Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis
29. Chuck Berry, Merry Christmas Baby
30. Ramones, Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)
31. Canned Heat, Christmas Blues

Set list with my track-by-track commentary follows the bare-bones list.

1. Black Sabbath, Turn Up The Night
2. Pantera, Cowboys From Hell
3. Metallica, Of Wolf And Man
4. Megadeth, Kill The King
5. Slayer, Dead Skin Mask
6. Judas Priest, Beyond The Realms Of Death
7. Van Halen, Atomic Punk
8. Link Wray, Climbing A High Wall
9. The Rolling Stones, Living In A Ghost Town
10. George Harrison, Brainwashed
11. Ian Hunter, Lisa Likes Rock ‘n’ Roll
12. The Clash, Pressure Drop
13. Rockpile, Play That Fast Thing (One More Time)
14. Elton John, Your Sister Can’t Twist But She Can Rock and Roll
15. T. Rex, Hot Love
16. Gordon Lightfoot, Make Way For The Lady
17. Iggy Pop, Nightclubbing
18. Otis Redding with Carla Thomas, Tramp
19. Queen, Get Down, Make Love
20. Pat Travers Band, Material Eyes
21. Bad Company, Master Of Ceremony
22. The Firm, Fortune Hunter
23. Shirley Bassey, The Fool On The Hill
24. Can, Spoon
25. April Wine, Mama Laye
26. Blackfoot, Road Fever (live)

    Set list with my track-by-track tales:

    1. Black Sabbath, Turn Up The Night . . . In a hard rock/metal mood, at least for the first few songs tonight. If you don’t like it, wait, as Mick Jagger once told a concert audience, on the Love You Live El Mocambo side, if memory serves. My mood changes. You’ll see. This rocker kicks off the second of the Sabbath albums, 1981’s Mob Rules, with Ronnie James Dio replacing Ozzy Osbourne, to great effect.

     

    2. Pantera, Cowboys From Hell . . . Title cut from the 1990 album from whence Pantera shed its original glam metal roots for the harder, metallic/thrash sound for which they came to be known. Very Metallica like, to me. A good blueprint to follow, obviously. Speaking of which . . .

     

    3. Metallica, Of Wolf And Man . . . One of these days, when I play Metallica, I’ll play something from their early thrash metal days. Which I like. But I suppose I’ve been playing 1991’s so-called Black Album on up through Loads I and II because they’re just as good, albeit obviously more commercial, than their predecessors, despite some fans’ continuing carping that the band ‘sold out’. As if Of Wolf And Man is ‘selling out’. Yeah, maybe, but if you can get more people to listen to you and buy your stuff, that gives you the freedom to later – as Metallica has – go back, at least somewhat, to your thrash roots. Smart business practice, really. And you can always play all of it, live.

        

    4. Megadeth, Kill The King . . . This machine-gun delivery type track first appeared on the, as far as I have researched, since deleted Capitol Punishment contractual obligation final record with the label. It was a best-of album Megadeth released in 2000. It’s since appeared on various newer collections issued by the band on current labels. A rare, perhaps, example of a track recorded for a compilation that is actually well worth hearing and not just a cheap inducement to buy other songs one already owns. This one’s definitely worth it.
    4. Slayer, Dead Skin Mask . . . If you don’t like thrash/speed metal, find it too intense/relatively tuneless and non-melodic, best not listen to Slayer. I like the band, every album, their brand of metal freed my mind somehow for instance seemed to focus me, bizarre as that may sound, driving through blizzards when I was commuting. But I’ll admit to this day, part of me thinks of some of their stuff (and Pantera’s) as “is this even music” while other parts of me are “yeah!”. But if you do want to sample the band, I’d suggest the album from which I pulled this track, Seasons In The Abyss. It’s more melodic, such as it is, and is essentially just good,  listenable hard rock. The title cut, which I’ve played before, is also well worth a listen.
    4. Judas Priest, Beyond The Realms Of Death . . . Power ballad rocker from the Stained Class album, one of those great fusions of guitar with Rob Halford’s typically powerful vocals. And that’s the thing with bands like Priest, which I was discussing with a friend and fellow fan of the band over beers the other week. People who haven’t heard them, or enough of them, consign them to some hard rock/metal place they may not want to visit, yet the band also has beautiful songs like this which, yes, ascend in parts to metal heights but actually within a ballad context well worth exploring. And remember, this is the band that covered Joan Baez’s absolutely beautiful Diamonds and Rust, rocked it up for a hit, then later did it acoustically, more faithful to the original Baez version, to great effect. Priest can do such things thanks to its amazingly versatile singer, Halford.
    7. Van Halen, Atomic Punk . . . Wild intro leads into one of the heaviest cuts on Van Halen’s debut album, 1978.

     

    8. Link Wray, Climbing A High Wall . . . He sings! Link Wray, I mean. Usually he just plays the instrumental shit out of his guitar, which he does here, too. The dean of distortion leans hard into this one from 1969’s Yesterday-Today album, a combo record of previous material on one side of the original vinyl and new, to that point, songs like Climbing A Wall on the other side.

     

    9. The Rolling Stones, Living In A Ghost Town . . . Stones’ pandemic single, issued in 2020 when everyone was under lockdown. A good song, regardless and to my knowledge and research, the last studio song by the band, to date, on which the late great drummer Charlie Watts appeared. The Stones played it as part of their set lists on their most recent, first tour without Watts, Steve Jordan now on the drum stool with Watts’s blessing.

     

    10. George Harrison, Brainwashed . . . Many years later, 2002, Harrison essentially channels old mate John Lennon’s lyrics from Working Class Hero from 1970 on this title cut from Harrison’s final studio album, issued after his death in 2001. The difference being, Harrison seems to perhaps see God as the ultimate answer where Lennon addressed that, too, in an obviously different way, in his own song titled God.

     

    11. Ian Hunter, Lisa Likes Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . Although this isn’t rock. It’s more Clash-ish reggae/dub/etc, not surprisingly as it comes from Hunter’s 1981 Short Back ‘n’ Sides album, produced by The Clash’s Mick Jones at a time Jones’ band was dabbling deeply into Caribbean island sounds.

     

    12. The Clash, Pressure Drop . . . Speaking of which, here’s the Clash’s cover of the Toots and The Maytals tune. A friend of mine was talking about the Clash version a fair bit of time back and I meant to eventually get to playing it on the show.

     

    13. Rockpile, Play That Fast Thing (One More Time) . . . A Nick Lowe-penned and sung tune from Seconds Of Pleasure, the one and only Rockpile album but not the only album the band recorded. What, you say? Well, Lowe and Dave Edmunds were the principals in the band and at one point in 1979, Rockpile backed Lowe on his Labour Of Lust album and also Edmunds on his Repeat When Necessary. I’m simplifying things in the interests of brevity but then they all reassembled for the one and only standalone Rockpile album, 1980’s Seconds Of Pleasure.

         

    14. Elton John, Your Sister Can’t Twist But She Can Rock and Roll . . . Speaking of fast songs . . .Here’s one of EJ’s fastest, from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. Elton came to mind via a recent chat with my two sons, one of whom is going to be in the UK in the new year and will be seeing EJ on his farewell tour.

     

    15. T. Rex, Hot Love . . . Interesting how things happen. I was watching a documentary on the dinosaur and it occurred to me I hadn’t played the band in a while.

     

    16. Gordon Lightfoot, Make Way For The Lady . . . Nothing necessarily to do with music but Gordon Lightfoot does, or did, pay his TV cable bill on an annual basis. How do I know this, as I related last week to my beer-drinking, chicken-wing scarfing fat-inducing weekly group of great pals I’ve foolishly (fitness wise) rejoined recently? Well, someone in the group raised the point of people maybe foolishly paying by the year. So I said, that may be true but you know, Gordon Lightfoot does – although I doubt he has to worry about financial concerns. At least he did pay annually, at one point up to recently and perhaps even now. I know he did at least at one point, because I briefly in my retirement had a part-time gig in a call center and, lo and behold, one afternoon who calls up to renew, not Gord himself but his wife. True story. As for the music, this beautiful song is from his 1980 album Dream Street Rose, a somewhat under the radar release in that it yielded no big hit singles and arguably marked the beginning of a commercial though not necessarily creative decline after 1978’s Endless Wire album.

     

    17. Iggy Pop, Nightclubbing . . . Inspiration comes from everywhere, quite often conversations, which is often a lot of the fun in putting together shows. A good buddy told me he had a crazy week so, out came a glass or two of his beverage of choice and on went the music. I’ve always said the best bands/artists ever are the ones you are listening to, right now, if you like them, because it’s all so subjective, rendering ‘best ever’ lists irrelevant, albeit interesting to discuss, in my view. So Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, which my friend recently purchased on a prized pristine vinyl copy, went on his platter so I figured I’d play this cut from the album in both his and Iggy’s honor. It’s a great album, The Idiot, not idiotic at all but rather creative, industrial in spots and interesting, David Bowie, Iggy’s pal, is on it, helped write some tunes.

     

    18. Otis Redding with Carla Thomas, Tramp . . . And then artist 2 inspiration from my friend. He was listening to an Otis live album which I don’t have, nor could I find it in the station computer so I went with this fun collaboration with the Queen of Memphis Soul.

     

    19. Queen, Get Down, Make Love . . . Long been one of my favorite Queen tracks from News Of The World and among all the great cuts in the band’s catalog. I couldn’t begin to describe it. Start, stop? Yes. Great drumming? Magnificent. Vocals? Progressive-type sounds? Yes. Ah, hell, you know it, listen to it. From back when albums were a thing and, among the great bands at least, every cut on a record was usually well worth listening to – hence deep cuts shows like mine.

         

    20. Pat Travers Band, Material Eyes . . . Somewhat experimental, musically, progressive in spots track. It’s from Travers’ Crash and Burn album. I saw him at a recent Kitchener Blues Festival. Good show.

     

    21. Bad Company, Master Of Ceremony . . . Another of those extended, groove-type pieces you’ll never likely find on a compilation and I’m not down on compilations by any stretch. I own my share. But this is a great example of a deep cut by a band that had many hit singles yet had much depth in its albums via tracks like this one from Burnin’ Sky.

         

    22. The Firm, Fortune Hunter . . . Here’s a similar track from the Bad Company singer, Paul Rodgers, during his 1980s teamup with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page for what became a two-album project. This Zep-like extended cut was on the second and final Firm album, Mean Business, in 1986. To me, it could easily have fit on Zep’s Presence album. It was written by Rodgers, Page and Chris Squire of Yes, who had collaborated on an unreleased demo of the track with Page for the aborted 1981 XYZ (for ex-Yes/Zeppelin) project that also included Yes drummer Alan White.

         

    23. Shirley Bassey, The Fool On The Hill . . . I’ve always loved Bassey’s Goldfinger, the theme song to the James Bond movie which I’ve played before and likely will again at some point. To wit, at one point I bought a CD featuring all the Bond themes, then decided I’d dig deeper and bought a Bassey compilation, of which this Beatles’ cover was part.

     

    24. Can, Spoon . . . They’re cracking down on plastic spoons in Canada soon. Here’s what the band Can thinks. No, not really. But anyway . . .

     

    25. April Wine, Mama Laye . . . Forever For Now, April Wine’s 1977 album, is a diverse release featuring country, blues, rock and this Caribbean-type track. The album had a sort of delayed effect, only gathering momentum months after its January release once radio and the public discovered what became the band’s biggest hit single to that point, You Won’t Dance With Me.

    26. Blackfoot, Road Fever (live) . . . Smoking hot live version from an album, Highway Song Live, that initially appeared only in the UK. It’s from an early 1980s tour by the southern rock stalwarts led by Rickey Medlocke. He was the drummer in an early version of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before they released an album, later becoming a full-time guitarist in the post-plane crash version of that band.

1. The Rolling Stones, Flip The Switch . . . One of those great kick butt album openers by the boys. At that point, it was 1997’s Bridges To Babylon album, the latest in a line of bracing opening tracks including Sticky Fingers’ Brown Sugar, Exile On Main St.’s Rocks Off, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’s If You Can’t Rock Me, Start Me Up from Tattoo You and One Hit (To The Body) from Dirty Work. And then in 2005 came Rough Justice, from the band’s most recent but to this fan hopefully not last full album of original recorded material, A Bigger Bang.

2. Jefferson Airplane, Blues From An Airplane . . . Opening cut from the band’s debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, in 1966. Written and sung by Marty Balin, before Grace Slick joined the group. Signe Anderson was the female vocalist at the time – with powerful lead singing on the record’s Chauffeur Blues – before quitting to raise a family. Yeah, I know. Why didn’t I play Chauffeur Blues, then? Didn’t think about it. Soon, perhaps.

3. Status Quo, Paper Plane . . . Good rocker from the appropriately titled Pile Driver album. It made No. 8 on the UK singles charts.

4. The Kinks, Give The People What They Want . . . Title cut from the band’s 1981 album. I like the tune, great lyrics as always from Ray Davies, but I’m playing it deliberately to set up a request I had after last Monday’s show.

5. Ry Cooder, Tattler . . . That request was for some Ry Cooder. No song specified, so I randomly picked this one from Cooder’s 1974 album Paradise and Lunch, featuring his typically fine guitar work. Linda Ronstadt covered the tune, written by American gospel artist George Washington Phillips under the title You Can’t Stop A Tattler, as The Tattler on her 1976 album Hasten Down The Wind.

6. Bert Jansch, Angie . . . Wonderful acoustic guitar picking instrumental from the influential Scottish artist and founder of the band Pentangle.

7. The Doobie Brothers, Steamer Lane Breakdown . . . Aside from the song Takin’ It To The Streets, I’m not big into the Michael McDonald-fronted, massively commercially successful version of The Doobie Brothers. But there’s a track here and there amid what I consider largely schlock that I like, like this toe-tapper instrumental by founding and forever band member Patrick Simmons.

8. Black Oak Arkansas, Jim Dandy . . . He’s not a household name, especially all these years later from the band’s1970s heyday, but were it not for Black Oak frontman Jim “Dandy’ Mangrum, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth might never have existed, so to speak. Check out some old live clips of Black Oak Arkansas.

9. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Lost In The Ozone . . . One drink of wine, two drinks of gin, I’m lost in the ozone again.

10. Pete Townshend/Ronnie Lane, Nowhere To Run . . . From one of those albums, 1977’s Rough Mix, you pick up at random because you’re a Who and Faces fan and are endlessly rewarded for it to this day and forever. One of the best albums of all time, period.

11. Leon Russell, Out In The Woods . . . Love this funky gumbo type stuff.

12. Steve Winwood, Night Train . . . Such a talent. Winwood played every instrument on his breakthrough 1980 solo album Arc Of A Diver, from which this track comes.

13. Supertramp, Brother Where You Bound . . . Epic, 16-minute title track from the band’s 1985 album, the first after the split between chief songwriters Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, who departed for a solo career leaving Davies in charge. The group produced arguably a harder-edged album than some of the syrupy commercially-oriented material that had brought them mainstream success with Breakfast In America, and this song is indicative of that. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame guests on guitar.

14. Danny Kirwan, Ram Jam City . . . Up-tempo ditty from the late former Fleetwood Mac guitarist’s debut solo album, Second Chapter, released in 1975.

15. Warren Zevon, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead . . . From the Mr. Bad Example album, 1991. I was chatting with fellow music fan friends the other night, we were talking about great session players populating myriad albums and there he is, drummer Jim Keltner, on this track.

16. UFO, Mother Mary . . . Three words: Guitarist Michael Schenker.

17. Nick Lowe, Switchboard Susan . . . A minor hit single, in Canada at least, from Labour Of Lust, the album that got me into Lowe during my college days.

18. Headstones, Supersmart . . . Typical raunch and roll from one of my favorite bands, Canadian or otherwise.

19. Bob Dylan, Ballad Of A Thin Man . . . Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Poor Mr. Jones. So much available literature on this song. Worth reading.

20. Junkhouse, Down In The Liver . . . Harrowing lyrics by Tom Wilson, the subject matter reminiscent of Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.

21. Rush, Cinderella Man . . . One of my favorite Rush songs, from probably my favorite Rush album, 1977’s A Farewell To Kings. It’s one of the few songs whose lyrics weren’t written by drummer Neil Peart after he joined the band after the debut album, replacing John Rutsey as the group went in a more progressive rock direction. Bassist/singer Geddy Lee wrote the words.

22. Kansas, The Pinnacle . . . American prog from a band likely best known to the masses for the hits Carry On Wayward Son and Dust In The Wind but a catalog with far more depth than those two excellent songs. Kansas is celebrating its 50^th anniversary (!) in 2023, with a comprehensive new 3-CD career-spanning compilation just out to mark the milestone. It covers from their first release up to their most recent studio work, the 2020 album The Absence of Presence.

23. King Crimson, Red . . . British prog. Sort of. The highly-influential Crimson is a bit of everything, really, isn’t it? Metal, hard rock, ballads, inventive progressive stylings, often all in the same song. It’s what’s made them consistently great, amid myriad lineups under the direction of leader Robert Fripp, since the debut album in 1969.

24. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Trilogy . . . More British prog, featuring beautiful piano from Keith Emerson on a track that eventually highlights the prowess of all the players including the ethereal vocals of Greg Lake.

25. The Beach Boys, Shut Down . . . OK, that’s enough. Here come The Beach Boys to shut down that indulgent prog stuff with a short rock and roller that was the B-side to Surfin’ USA and later a hit single in its own right.

26. T Bone Burnett, Kill Switch . . . Stones open with Flip The Switch. T Bone closes with Kill Switch. Outta here until Monday. Take care, all.

Set list with commentary follows the bare-bones list.

1. The Beatles, Taxman
2. Richie Havens, Here Comes The Sun
3. Love, You Set The Scene
4. Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler, There’ll Be Some Changes Made
5. Doug and The Slugs, No No No (Nobody But Me)
6. The Guess Who, When The Band Was Singin’ Shakin’ All Over
7. Little Feat, Lafayette Railroad
8. Grand Funk Railroad, Sin’s A Good Man’s Brother
9. Hindu Love Gods, Raspberry Beret
10. Simon and Garfunkel, A Hazy Shade Of Winter
11. The Motels, Suddenly Last Summer
12. Procol Harum, Pandora’s Box
13. The Clash, Spanish Bombs
14. Flash and The Pan, War Games
15. Deep Purple, Sun Goes Down
16. The Rolling Stones, Take It Or Leave It
17. Joe Jackson, The Old Songs
18. Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode/Carol/Promised Land (Live, Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival 1969)
19. Canned Heat, Can’t Hold On Much Longer
20. The Steve Miller Band, Mercury Blues (Live at Monterey Pop Festival, 1967)
21. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Homemade Wine
22. Gerry Rafferty, Get It Right Next Time
23. Pink Floyd, Echoes
    
    Set list with my track-by-track tales: 
    1. The Beatles, Taxman . . . I read somewhere once where, during the early 1960s, Bob Dylan was talking to John Lennon and Dylan said that while he liked The Beatles, he told Lennon that ‘your songs don’t say anything’ because they were to that point what songs often typically are about, love and relationships. And that’s of course fine, and Dylan did and does write such songs too. But the slight criticism no doubt sparked Lennon, and The Beatles, to writing more topical, often politically-charged songs. Like this one, actually written by George Harrison, with some help on lyrics from Lennon and great and innovative musically with that ridiculously great guitar solo between 1:12 and 1:24, played by Paul McCartney. It’s the most effective sort of solo, too, in my view: short, compelling, leaves you wanting more which is often such a key to great art even though you want it to go on but in the end realize it’s better short, like CCR’s song Fortunate Son, for instance. Taxman (later covered by Stevie Ray Vaughan) was the lead cut on Revolver, which has recently been re-released in a big box set treatment, the latest in a series of such remastered/remixed Beatles re-releases.
    2. Richie Havens, Here Comes The Sun . . . Speaking of George Harrison, here’s Havens’ treatment of Harrison’s Abbey Road cut. Havens, who opened the Woodstock Festival (apparently wasn’t supposed to but other performers were stuck in traffic en route) to great acclaim, had that distinctive heavy acoustic guitar strumming that, to me at least, is instantly identifiable. A commenter on YouTube on this song perhaps put it best: “this is acoustic but it’s the most electric song I know.”
    3. Love, You Set The Scene . . . Another of my periodic digs into Love’s great Forever Changes album. It’s one of those records that is critically-renowned, didn’t sell much, one wonders what all the fuss is about, then one buys it and it’s like, OK, yeah, I get it, why wasn’t this massive commercially? Of course, then there are other critically-acclaimed albums one does that with and comes away with the thought, huh? The mysteries of life.
    4. Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler, There’ll Be Some Changes Made . . . What a fun shuffle from the Neck and Neck 1990 album collaboration between the two great axemen. The song itself goes back a century, well worth reading up on, and has been covered by countless artists including Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett and in various styles and genres, often with adapted lyrics as on the Atkins-Knopfler version. Their extended take includes name-dropping Prince and Michael Jackson as well as fun references to their own songs and guitar playing. Just a great tune from a terrific album.

        

    5. Doug and The Slugs, No No No (Nobody But Me) . . . Written by members of The Isley Brothers, the track is one of the few cover tunes in the Slugs’ discography of which the vast majority were written by lead singer Doug Bennett. The Slugs’ version was the third single from Music For The Hard Of Thinking, released in 1982 but didn’t chart in Canada, although to me it’s arguably better than the Bennett-penned charting singles Who Knows How To Make Love Stay and Making It Work. I liked Doug Bennett’s work, and the album was nominated for a 1983 Juno Award although I’ll always prefer the debut release, Cognac and Bologna. And as I recall from a recent documentary I watched on the group, Doug and The Slugs and Me, by the Time Music For The Hard Of Thinking was released, the band members felt their creativity was being compromised by record company demands (a typical music industry story) and the decline set in although the original group continued on for several years, recording several more albums and backing the late Bennett on his solo album Animato, released in 1986. Bennett, a lifelong heavy drinker, died in 2004 of liver cirrhosis at age 52. By that point, the original band had long since broken up but Bennett was still fronting a rotating group of musicians, still billed as Doug and The Slugs. The original group reunited in 2009 and now does live shows with new lead singer Ted Okos. I highly recommend the documentary, which seems to be getting regular rotation on The Documentary Channel in Canada and apparently will get wider release on CBC TV sometime in 2023 and, hopefully, online.

        

    6. The Guess Who, When The Band Was Singin’ Shakin’ All Over . . . From 1975’s Power In The Music, the last album on which Burton Cummings sang lead vocals and featuring Domenic Triano on guitar in his second outing with The Guess Who, the first being the previous year’s Flavours album. The song references a time when, indeed, The Guess Who, then known as Chad Allan and The Expressions, had covered the Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ tune, taking it to No. 1 in Canada in 1965.
    7. Little Feat, Lafayette Railroad . . . I feel like I’ve played this too recently. Ah, well, one can never get enough Little Feat, I say.
    8. Grand Funk Railroad, Sin’s A Good Man’s Brother . . . Last time I played a Grand Funk tune an old journalism pal good-naturedly ripped me but that’s the kind of thing the band itself dealt with from music snobs throughout their career. I like ’em – especially the earlier stuff – and ain’t apologizing.
    9. Hindu Love Gods, Raspberry Beret . . . In which Zevon and R.E.M.’s Bill Berry, Peter Buck and Mike Mills, who backed Zevon on his Sentimental Hygiene album in 1987 and were already a largely unrecorded R.E.M. side project, get drunk one night during the Hygiene sessions, record a bunch of blues standards and this Prince tune. It all came out three years later on the self-titled Hindu Love Gods album. I prefer the Love Gods’ reiterpretation but then while I respect him and have tried, I’ve really tried, I’ve just never ‘gotten’ Prince.

        

    10. Simon and Garfunkel, A Hazy Shade Of Winter . . . Interesting how you can be going through a band or artist’s work and immediately it’s like, oh yeah, this one. I know it was a top-20 hit, almost top 10 (No. 11 in Canada) but dunno, I had somewhat forgotten about it. Silly me. Here it is.
    11. The Motels, Suddenly Last Summer . . . I had The Motels on vinyl when I was out west in Alberta early 1980s but over time had gotten rid of the couple albums I owned. Then, a couple weeks ago, I was in my favorite friendly neighborhood record store and somebody had just dumped a pile of used CDs on them, including a Motels’ compilation. So, now I have the Motels again in my collection and yes I could just listen online and I do, but I still like owning physical copies. Anyway, I like this track which was a successful single but, perhaps contrary to some opinions, it has nothing to do with the Tennessee Williams play, nor the 1959 movie adapted from it, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Good flick. Pure coincidence, according to the Motels’ Martha Davis, who had not read the play nor seen the movie until long after the song was released.
    12. Procol Harum, Pandora’s Box . . . From Procol’s Ninth, signifying the band’s ninth album (eight studio works) to that point, 1975.
    13. The Clash, Spanish Bombs . . . My younger son has of late taken great interest in the histories of various wars and international relations that bred them, which led us to talking a bit about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. It’s a conflict touched on, among other things, in this song from London Calling. So that’s probably why, unconsciously, I decided to play it, besides the fact anything from that album is, as the English soccer/football commentators say, quality.
    14. Flash and The Pan, War Games . . . From Headlines, 1982. Great lyrics.
    15. Deep Purple, Sun Goes Down . . . Kind of a heavy ballad, if that’s such a thing, from the 2003 album Bananas. It was the first to feature Don Airey on keyboards, with the blessing of Jon Lord, who had retired.

         

    16. The Rolling Stones, Take It Or Leave It . . . Back I go to my likely tiresome US/UK Aftermath/Between The Buttons/Flowers compilation discussion, as I’ve been mining those albums for Stones songs of late. It stems from back when track listings often differed depending on what country one was in. This song appeared on the UK version of Aftermath in 1966 but not on the version released in the colonies across the pond. I first heard it on the Flowers compilation put together by London Records, Decca’s North American distributor, that my older sister owned.
    17. Joe Jackson, The Old Songs . . . Another song that could be my theme song, along with Free’s Songs of Yesterday which I played recently. This is from JJ’s 1991 Laughter and Lust album, which came up in a discussion with friends last week. The lyrics are likely appropriate to many relationships including my long-over marriage. It sticks out because I saw the tour at Toronto’s Massey Hall with my then-wife but what started as a fun night went off the rails. Why? Well, we spent most of the day in Toronto, ate an early dinner then split up (before we actually split up 10 years later) to go shop our respective interests on Yonge St. Naturally, I went to Sam The Record Man where they happened to have a big sale on CDs, including those by The Rolling Stones, my favorite band. Bear in mind that back then, CDs were still new and expensive, but the store had the Stones’ stuff on for $10 each as I recall, so I bought 6 as I was in the process of replacing my vinyl. Ooh, that did not go over well. Here we were, combined making damn good money, but $60 plus tax was an undisciplined expense, apparently. And sure, I was let’s say a bit cavalier with money then but we never wanted for anything nor did our kids, you only live once and what, spend $60 for 6 or wait and spend, at the time, $20-$25 each, over time? I’ll take the bargain when it presents itself. Whatever. So, I got the silent treatment as we watched JJ from row 2 at Toronto’s Massey Hall. I still had fun. Turned out a solo ticket holder came down and sat beside me, he was a big JJ fan so we spent the evening chatting and enjoying. It pissed her off and we were talking again by the end. Ah, marriage/relationships.
    18. Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode/Carol/Promised Land (Live, Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival 1969) . . . Ever since Jerry Lee Lewis died a while ago and I played some tracks in tribute to him, plus a full live album on my Saturday show, I’ve really been back into the 1950s rock and roll greats. Like Chuck Berry, whose performance at the 1969 Toronto festival is now available on CD, which I picked up recently. Great medley, here, You can watch it, too, on YouTube where film of the performance – and Jerry Lee’s and Little Richard’s energetic sets at the same event – has long been available. This of course was the show, also with Chicago, Alice Cooper and The Doors among others, which featured John Lennon and his Plastic Ono Band, immortalized in film and on the Live Peace In Toronto album.
    19. Canned Heat, Can’t Hold On Much Longer . . . From Vintage, with the cool (or hot) cover of flames coming out of a can. I picked it up on CD recently. I’ve got two truly comprehensive Canned Heat compilations, one a 2-CD and the other a 3-CD version with not a lot of duplication, and Hooker N Heat, their collaboration with John Lee Hooker. So I’ve really seen no need to get the other individual albums but I saw this in a used rack and had to have it, largely for sentimental reasons in memory of my late older brother. He was such a musical influence on me, as I often mention in these missives, and who I remember having the record on vinyl. RIP, Rob.
    20. The Steve Miller Band, Mercury Blues (Live at Monterey Pop Festival, 1967) . . . Way different than the slower, recorded version on his later album Fly Like An Eagle and different again from perhaps the most well-known version by David Lindley. All three versions are well worth a listen.
    21. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Homemade Wine . . . Best known for Jackie Blue (great song which actually is arguably uncharacteristic of the band’s output) and If You Wanna Get To Heaven, the Daredevils are so much more than those two songs and worth checking out for their countryish southern rock. A great toe-tapper, this one. And, speaking of homemade wine, 3 things. 1. Forget it, buy from the liquor store. 2. My late uncle made his own, got better over the years but still, buy it from the liquor store. 3. Had a neighbor once, made wine and beer. Offered it to my then-wife and I. Great guy. But again: buy it from the liquor store. Sorry, I’m sure there are great home wine makers, distillers and brewers but I’ve yet to experience any such product.
    22. Gerry Rafferty, Get It Right Next Time . . . Speaking of drink, another victim, sadly. Anyway, great tune from his 1979 Night Owl album, was a successful single and I’m going to stop saying I rarely play singles because while this is a deep cuts show, I do play singles – just ones that may not have been massive hits or that you, me or we haven’t heard in ages. Like this one. Great stuff from a period when the former Stealers Wheel member was enjoying great solo success with 1978’s City To City album and its 1979 follow-up Night Owl, the two albums featuring such great singles as Baker Street, Right Down The Line (both from City To City), Days Gone Down (Still Got The Light In Your Eyes) and Get It Right Next Time (from Night Owl).
    23. Pink Floyd, Echoes . . . Always good to have a 23-minute cut in hand when you’re behind on the day, rushing to put the show together and need to fill time. But it’s not just for that reason I’m playing Echoes (again). I love the track, most people do, how could you not, and I was discussing the Meddle album with an old friend and work colleague the other day. So, here we go.

Three classics for this Saturday: Elvis Costello’s 1977 debut My Aim Is True, The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet from 1968 and Lou Reed’s Transformer, from 1972.

Elvis Costello – My Aim Is True

1. Welcome To The Working Week
2. Miracle Man
3. No Dancing
4. Blame It On Cain
5. Alison
6. Sneaky Feelings
7. Watching The Detectives (UK single, added as last track on original side one of North American vinyl release)
8. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
9. Less Than Zero
10. Mystery Dance
11. Pay It Back
12. I’m Not Angry
13. Waiting For The End Of The World

The Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet

1. Sympathy For The Devil
2. No Expectations
3. Dear Doctor
4. Parachute Woman
5. Jigsaw Puzzle
6. Street Fighting Man
7. Prodigal Son
8. Stray Cat Blues
9. Factory Girl
10. Salt Of The Earth

Lou Reed – Transformer

1. Vicious
2. Andy’s Chest
3. Perfect Day
4. Hangin’ ‘Round
5. Walk On The Wild Side
6. Make Up
7. Satellite Of Love
8. Wagon Wheel
9. New York Telephone Conversation
10. I’m So Free
11. Goodnight Ladies

1. Chicago, Movin’ In . . . From the Chicago I like, the early jazz-rock fusion version, this one from the second album, 1970. I got into a fun bar-room discussion about pre-Terry Kath and post-Terry Kath Chicago the other day. For those who may not know, Kath was the band’s original guitarist and, along with keyboard player Robert Lamm, arguably the man who kept Chicago to its jazz-rock fusion roots. After his untimely death due to a self-inflicted accidental gunshot wound in 1978 when he put what he thought was an unloaded gun to his head, the band slid into commercially successful but artistically awful schlock although the malaise had already set in two years earlier with the successful syrupy single If You Leave Me Now. That was sung by bass player Peter Cetera who had earlier sung such great hits as 25 or 6 to 4. But the massive success of the single – and I do like it but not as a template for every future song – got the record company thinking, hmm, can you guys do that again and keep doing it, maybe ditch the horns for the most part while we make Cetera the focus of the group even though you guys had always previously and firmly been a collective enterprise?All of which is a long way of getting to the point that, the consensus among the beer-drinking, chicken-wing inhaling group at our gathering was that schlock producer David Foster, the energy behind most of the excrement, was the real villain of the piece as he led Chicago to middle of the road success while producing maudlin music that actually sold, proving that most people have awful ears.

2. Free, Songs Of Yesterday . . . Could easily be my show’s theme song. You know the catch line: Old bands, old tracks, old bands, their new stuff if they’re still around, alive and kicking.

3. Paul Kossoff, Molten Gold . . . An interesting one. It’s a Free song, in large measure yet credited to Free guitarist Kossoff from his first solo album, Back Street Crawler. Kossoff’s record came out in 1973, the same year Free disbanded. Paul Rodgers, who went on to big commercial success with Bad Company, sings lead vocals on the track, backed by guitarist Jess Roden and that’s because the track had its genesis in the sessions for Free’s 1972 album Free At Last. But it didn’t come out until Kossoff’s record. Apparently the band, or the record company, thought enough of it that it’s the title of and appears on a Free compilation. 
4. Funkadelic, Super Stupid . . . Yet another guitar showcase from the late great Eddie Hazel, who co-wrote the tune for Funkadelic’s 1971 album Maggot Brain.

5. Atomic Rooster, Winter . . . The band from which drummer Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer came, not to mention Vincent Crane, the troubled keyboardist and once a member of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. Crane co-wrote The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown’s hit single Fire.

6. The Rolling Stones, Backstreet Girl . . . A beautiful song that belies its lyrics of forbidden, or hidden, love and sex. According to the book The Rolling Stones Complete Recording Sessions, Mick Jagger rated it his favorite from 1967’s Between The Buttons album, UK version. It wasn’t on the US/North American version of the record but did appear on the North American compilation Flowers. That was one of the first Stones’ albums I heard, along with 1966’s Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass), another of the compilations my older sister owned. This was back in the days when UK and North American versions of albums often differed due to the British practice of not putting singles on albums, while the North American labels often offered bastardized versions of similarly-titled albums or their own, stand-alone compilations – like the excellent Flowers.

7. Todd Rundgren, Can We Still Be Friends . . . I was actually looking for Robert Palmer songs in the station computer system when this came up, since Palmer covered it for his 1979 Secrets album. So, what the heck, rarely play Rundgren.I know he’s renowned and I respect that, especially his production work (like with Meat Loaf, for instance) but I’m not much into him besides his hits (of which this was one). And we’ll get to Palmer in a few minutes.

8. Rory Gallagher, In Your Town . . . I’m a huge fan so admittedly biased, but there’s nothing from the late great Gallagher I won’t listen to or think is worthwhile listening – whether that be in his solo career or before that, with Taste. This one’s from the Gallagher album Deuce, 1971. 
9. Robert Palmer, Woman You’re Wonderful . . . Speaking of Robert Palmer and the Secrets album . . . A funky cool song in its own right but I’m deliberately using it as an intro to a six-song set of songs sung by Christine (Perfect) McVie’s career with British blues band Chicken Shack, her early solo work and later stuff that she’s best known for with Fleetwood Mac. McVie died last week at age 79. Yet another classic rocker passing but the sad reality is so many of the greats those of a certain vintage (like me) grew up listening to are in their 70s and 80s now so . . . As I mentioned to my buddies over beer last week, The Atlantic magazine recently did an article about exactly that. But the great thing is, we and our descendants, if they are interested, have the music to listen to, forever.

10. Chicken Shack, I’d Rather Go Blind . . . Christine McVie singing lead vocals on the blues classic co-written by Etta James in this version for Chicken Shack. McVie also covered the tune after leaving that band, and before she joined Fleetwood Mac, on her self-titled debut solo album under her maiden name Christine Perfect, in 1970.

11. Christine Perfect (McVie), When You Say . . . Speaking of that Christine Perfect debut album. Beautiful stuff.

12. Fleetwood Mac, Show Me A Smile . . . From the 1971 album Future Games, the first on which McVie was a full Fleetwood Mac band member and contributed writing. She wrote three songs for the record, all of which she also sang lead vocals on, and this is one of them.

13. Fleetwood Mac, Over And Over . . . From Tusk, the 1979 album that followed the monster commerical success of 1977’s Rumours. Tusk sold millions as well, just not as many millions, so was considered a relative failure in that sense although, given that it was a double album, it contains many overlooked and lasting gems. 
14. Fleetwood Mac, Honey Hi . . . Another McVie lead vocal from the Tusk album.

15. Fleetwood Mac, Morning Rain . . . Back to Future Games we go for this uptempo number, another one written and sung by McVie and featuring fine guitar interplay from Bob Welch and Danny Kirwan.

16. Rare Earth, (I Know) I’m Losing You (live) . . . I can’t imagine how much money from royalties the mainly Motown songwriters/musicians Cornelius Grant, Eddie Holland and Norman Whitfield made with this amazing tune, covered by countless including Rod Stewart/Faces, The Commodores, many others and, originally, a 1966 hit by The Temptations for which Grant played guitar. This is the 14-minute epic from Rare Earth’s ‘backpack cover’ live album In Concert. The album always sticks in my memory not only because I own it but because I probably own it because a camp counsellor at day camp the summer before high school started for me, September, 1972, played the living you know what out of it on his prerecorded cassette tape copy. Great stuff.

17. David Bowie, Saviour Machine . . . From The Man Who Sold The World album, which did poorly upon initial release in 1970 but was more successful upon re-release in 1972, by which time Bowie had released the Ziggy Stardust album and, as a result, was a household name. The Man Who Sold The World marked the first appearance of guitarist Mick Ronson as part of Bowie’s band.

18. Groundhogs, Earth Is Not Room Enough . . . From the 1972 album Who Will Save The World? The Mighty Groundhogs. It’s a concept album, of sorts, dealing with the ills of war, over-population, war, religion, pollution, all the perpetual real and/or perceived evils we still have no real answers for. Yet we’re still here, somehow.

19. Frank Zappa, Wonderful Wino . . . Sad, funny, typical Zappa I suppose, as social commentary coupled with typically fine guitar playing, from 1976’s Zoot Allures album, one of his most commercially accessible releases.

20. Paice Ashton Lord, I’m Gonna Stop Drinking Again . . . I keep trying. But I like the vino. From Malice In Wonderland, the 1977 album put together as a one-off by Deep Purple mates Ian Paice (drums) and Jon Lord (keyboards), accompanied by singer/instrumentalist Tony Ashton. I’ve mentioned it before, but Nazareth released an album by the same title, in 1980, featuring the hit Holiday. I like Nazareth a lot, but I remember when their album came out I thought, you lazy you know whats, come up with your own title. But of course, few people aside from Purple fanatics like me knew of the somewhat obscure Paice Ashton Lord release.

21. The Butterfield Blues Band, Driftin’ and Driftin’ . . . Extended (13 minutes plus) version from The Butterfield Blues Band Live album, 1970, featuring the fine harmonica playing one would expect of Paul Butterfield.

22. Aerosmith, Movin’ Out (alternate version) . . . Different albeit still similar version from the same sessions that resulted in the band’s debut album in 1973, on which the song appears. This version was released on the Pandora’s Box 3-cd compilation, in 1991.

The latest in my periodic/ongoing series of album replay shows: I’m opening with a progressive rock/concept album in Pink Floyd’s 1977 work Animals, which is one of my favorites by the band yet seemingly sometimes overlooked amid the run of great albums the band released starting with Meddle in 1971 (also often overlooked), The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973 and continuing through Wish You Were Here in 1975, Animals and The Wall in 1979.

And then a genre shift as we go full reggae with Peter Tosh’s first solo album after he left The (Bob Marley’s) Wailers, the 1976 release Legalize It. Wrapping things up is one of the best live albums of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Live At The Star-Club, Hamburg, from 1964. I’ve been in a Jerry Lee mood since he died recently, built one of my recent shows around him and his 1950s rock and roll contemporaries, so here he is again in that blistering 1964 release.

Set list:

Pink Floyd – Animals

1. Pigs On The Wing (Part One)
2. Dogs
3. Pigs (Three Different Ones)
4. Sheep
5. Pigs On The Wing (Part Two)

Peter Tosh – Legalize It

1. Legalize It
2. Burial
3. Watcha Gonna Do
4. No Sympathy
5. Why Must I Cry
6. Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)
7. Ketchy Shuby
8. Till Your Well Runs Dry
9. Brand New Second Hand

Jerry Lee Lewis – Live At The Star-Club, Hamburg

1. I Got A Woman (Mean Woman Blues)
2. High School Confidential
3. Money
4. Matchbox
5. What’d I Say – Part I
6. What’d I Say – Part II
7. Great Balls Of Fire
8. Good Golly, Miss Molly
9. Lewis’ Boogie
10. Your Cheating Heart
11. Hound Dog
12. Long Tall Sally
13. Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On