1. The Electric Flag, Groovin’ Is Easy . . . From the 1968 debut studio album A Long Time Comin’, which came out after the band had already appeared at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.  It’s the one and only studio record Electric Flag co-founder Mike Bloomfield appeared on, before the mercurial guitarist of Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan session work fame departed. The band, which also featured co-founding drummer Buddy Miles of solo, Santana and Hendrix’ Band of Gypsys fame, went on for a couple more studio albums before calling it quits.

2. Eric Burdon & War, Paint It Black Medley (Black on Black in Black/Paint It Black I/Laurel & Hardy/Pintelo Negro II/P.C./Blackbird/Paint It Black III) . . . How I like my covers, a total reinterpretation of the Rolling Stones’ classic into a 13-minute soul funk rock epic.

3. Keith Richards, Locked Away . . . Soulful ballad from Richards’ great 1988 solo debut album, Talk Is Cheap.

4. Rush, Hope/The Main Monkey Business/Malignant Narcissism (instrumentals) . . . I strung together the three instrumentals from Rush’s 2007 album Snakes and Arrows. They don’t appear consecutively on the album. A different genre but as with, say, The Allman Brothers, Rush’s instrumentals are great songs all on their own. Hope is a wonderful solo acoustic guitar piece by Alex Lifeson followed by the two full-band instrumentals.

5. Gillan and Glover, I Can’t Dance To That . . . One of the rockier tunes from the Deep Purple singer and bass player’s 1988 collaboration, Accidentally On Purpose. Dr. John helps out on piano on the album.

6. David Wilcox, Cactus . . . Will there be cigarettes in heaven? Great opening line to this tune by the Canadian music veteran. And I don’t even smoke.

7. Screaming Trees, Nearly Lost You . . . Well, alas, we did lose former Screaming Trees lead singer Mark Lanegan last week at just 57. To my knowledge he had been clean for some years but had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Lanegan also had a solo career and appeared on several Queens of The Stone Age albums. I’ve played it before, relatively recently but to me, it’s Screaming Trees’ best song. So here it is again.

8. Procol Harum, Long Gone Geek . .. In tribute to another popular music loss, Procol’s lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Gary Brooker, who also died this past week, age 76.

9. Sass Jordan, Leaving Trunk . . . The Sleepy John Estes blues classic, also covered by the likes of Taj Mahal. Jordan did it for her fine 2020 blues covers album, Rebel Moon Blues.

10. Quicksilver Messenger Service, I Hear You Knockin’ (It’s Too Late) . . . Great bluesy tune that arguably inexplicably didn’t make the cut for the band’s self-titled debut album in 1968.
    
11. John Mellencamp, Another Sunny Day 12/25 . . . From 1994’s Dance Naked album, around the time Mellencamp’s sales started to decline as, arguably, his creativity further blossomed.

12. Duke Robillard, Don’t Bother Trying To Steal Her Love . . . From the Roomful of Blues band founder and former Fabulous Thunderbirds’ guitarist’s 2019 album Ear Worms. I pulled it from a great Stony Plain Records freebie promo compilation I happened upon in my friendly neighborhood record store recently. One of several coming up in the set from that fine collection.

13. Sue Foley, The Ice Queen . . . From that same Stony Plain compilation, the title cut from the Ottawa blues guitarist/singer’s 2018 album.

14. Donovan, Season Of The Witch . . . So many people have covered this, including Vanilla Fudge and the Super Session album boys (Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills). This is the original by Donovan, although his sometime collaborator Shawn Phillips has also claimed authorship.

15. Steve Strongman, Tired Of Talkin’ . . . Title cut from the Canadian guitarist/singer/songwriter’s 2019 album and the last song in tonight’s set pulled from the Stony Plain Records compilation.
    
16. The Beatles, Think For Yourself . . . Kick-butt George Harrison-penned tune from what I increasingly as time goes on have come to think of as arguably The Beatles’ finest album, or certainly way up there, Rubber Soul. Of course, there’s so many good ones it’s impossible to choose, but of late it’s the Beatles’ album I have been spinning the most. It’s one of the first non-compilation albums I ever heard, my older sister bringing it home back when it was released. In any event, interesting reading about the track, what with the two bass guitar parts, including one played by Paul McCartney through a fuzz box, which gives the tune its distinct sound.

17. The Hourglass (precursor to The Allman Brothers Band), B.B. King Medley (Sweet Little Angel/It’s My Own Fault/How Blue Can You Get?) . . . I perhaps cheated a bit for the next few songs. I’ve pulled them all from one of two fine Duane Allman anthologies I have that feature his work with myriad artists including of course the Allmans and their early bands, like The Hourglass, which featured Duane with Gregg on lead vocals.

18. Wilson Pickett, Hey Jude . . . Duane Allman does the lead guitar honors on Pickett’s Beatles’ cover.

19. Aretha Franklin, The Weight . . . Duane Allman again, on Aretha’s soulful interpretation of The Band tune.

20. Duane Allman, Goin’ Down Slow . . . A song that shows that Duane could easily have been a lead singer, too. Allman Brothers late great bassist Berry Oakley also appears on the track.

21. Wishbone Ash, Time Was . . . Perfect prog track, arguably. Starts slow, then the twin guitar attack of Andy Powell and Ted Turner kicks in as the tempo speeds up. Another one of those long songs, nearly 10 minutes, that doesn’t seem so.

22. Supertramp, Better Days . . . From the first album, Brother Where You Bound from 1985, that the band did after the departure of Rodger Hodgson, leaving Rick Davies in full command. It’s a good album musically, albeit dated lyrically in many of its 1980s references to people, places and circumstances of the still-ongoing Cold War. To me, the album is harder edged and harkens back to the glory days of Crime of The Century, Crisis What Crisis and Even In The Quietest Moments that preceded the commercial but to me somewhat overly pop-oriented monster that was Breakfast In America which was tailored for the US market. Things got worse with Breakfast’s followup, . . . Famous Last Words, a bland pop album which signified the split between Hodgson, who wanted to maintain that direction and Davies, who wanted a return to the more progressive rock approach of the pre-Breakfast albums.

    I’ll admit that, while I have it, band loyalty I guess, I don’t really know Famous Last Words, the lead single It’s Raining Again (yecch) having turned me off immediately. Maybe I should try again, and I will. In fact I just pulled it up online but it’s a struggle, folks. And I’m not down on Breakfast In America, either. Decent enough album and I saw that tour, amazing but of course it wasn’t just that album’s songs they played. But when people say it’s Supertramp’s best, to each their own but, er, no. Sales don’t necessarily reflect quality or creativity and I suppose a lot of it is how so many of Breakfast’s songs were played to death on radio. I remember at one point with Breakfast thinking, people are crapping all over the Bee Gees for their falsetto vocals on their disco stuff. Yet the yecch “take a look at my girlfriend’ opening salvo of the title cut to Breakfast In America was OK? Honestly, what a candy-ass song and vocal. I mean, this was the same band that did School, Bloody Well Right and so on? I suppose that was my emergence, at age 20, into critical thinking. The three albums that preceded Breakfast easily eclipse it musically. So there. And on that note, see you next week.

1. Fleetwood Mac, Before The Beginning . . . Then Play On, the 1969 album that was Peter Green’s swan song with the band he founded, is likely my favorite by the group. I love blues which were the foundation of Green’s version of the band, but Then Play On had a broader stylistic scope, dabbling in blues rock, folk rock and psychedelia. This Green-penned and sung track is a good example. Not that I ever need reminding of the album but I was prompted to play it by a review list last week on allmusic.com of Mac releases that people who know the band only from the Buckingham-Nicks commercial monster period might not be aware of. And, it’s also worth checking out the band’s middle period, up until 1974 and also mentioned by allmusic, when guitarist-songwriter Bob Welch was a member. It’s a great period I’ve mined before on the show and will again.

2. Sly and The Family Stone, Family Affair . . . A No. 1 hit single in 1971. I normally don’t play singles on this deep cuts show but figured it fit, in terms of the title at least. The lyrics, not so much.

3. Family, See Through Windows . . . I just had to get a song in by the band Family. So diverse, Family’s blend of various styles – hard rock, jazz rock, psychedelia – into a stirring stew. Among the members was Ric Grech on bass, violin and cello and he appears at the end of tonight’s set, as a member of Blind Faith. This one’s from Family’s 1968 debut album, Music In A Doll’s House, which prompted a name change for a record The Beatles were working on at the time. The fabs had planned to call their record A Doll’s House but when Family’s album came out in July, The Beatles changed their title to simply The Beatles for the album which has long since become better known as the White Album. It wasn’t released until November of 1968.

4. Genesis, The Return Of The Giant Hogweed . . . I’ve been trying to get this in for a while but it didn’t fit the tone of the last few shows. Not sure it really does now, but in terms of title it fits a pattern as you’ll see as we move along. Besides, sometimes I’ll play songs that fit a musical theme, other times I like to mix things up, sometimes drastically, like a ballad followed by a metal tune. Not doing that so much tonight though. Deliberately over the top lyrics about the invasive – and dangerous if you’re not careful with its toxic sap – species giant hogweed presented in typical early Genesis progressive style. From Nursery Cryme, 1971. It was the band’s third album and first to feature drummer/vocalist Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett along with lead singer Peter Gabriel, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford and keyboard player Tony Banks – the classic lineup of the group’s full-blown progressive rock period.

5. Bruce Springsteen, Jungleland . . . From hogweed to the jungle, get it? OK, that’s enough of that nonsense with song titles. Maybe. Great tune/lyrics from Born To Run. If a nearly 10-minute song can be too short, this may well be an example.

6. Jethro Tull, Hunt By Numbers . . . Now, if you listen to the lyrics, a cat is going hunting, maybe in the jungle. Remember, I did say ‘maybe’ with the title stuff. Last one, though. Promise. Good riff-rocker, interesting subject matter, from 1999’s j-tull dot com album, which I’ve been revisiting lately. It received lukewarm to poor reviews from critics but isn’t that generally the case with latter-day albums by veteran bands, with rare exceptions – like the mostly positive reviews Tull’s new album, The Zealot Gene, is deservedly getting. I played a track from the new one a few weeks back and will get back to it at some point as that release grows on me with repeated plays. As for j-tull dot com, it’s typically diverse Tull and I’ve always liked it, but I’m a big fan of all the band’s work – even to an extent their 1984 electronic, synth-laden release Under Wraps. The j-tull dot com (that’s how the title was written) record also stirs fond memories of the tour, my elder son’s first exposure, at age 12, to Tull live in July, 2000 at Hamilton Place. It was a great show, including Hunt By Numbers in the set. We saw the next three tours together, the last in 2007 at Massey Hall in Toronto. Just two years before that, we attended a fantastic 27-song Tull performance at Massey but sadly, Ian Anderson’s voice was pretty much totally shot, at least for live purposes, by 2007 at the same venue. It was still a good show, but my son and I agreed that it was over for us as far as live Tull was concerned.

7. Gov’t Mule, Helter Skelter (live) . . . Smokin’ live version of the Beatles’ track, from the Mule’s Bald Boy album. Just kidding and more on that in a bit. Actually, it’s from a sprawling 3-CD live album called Mulennium the group recorded as 1999 became 2000, at the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Ga. While I like the Mule’s original material, the Allman Brothers offshoot led by guitarist/vocalist Warren Haynes does terrific covers of classic rock tunes so I burned my own CD of them some years ago. Among the tracks, besides this one – King Crimson’s 21^st Century Schizoid Man, Humble Pie’s 30 Days In The Hole, Steppenwolf’s Don’t Step On The Grass, Sam, Free’s Mr. Big, Deep Purple’s Maybe I’m A Leo. The list is long, so I’ll have to do my own Vol. II, and beyond, at some point. The band has also done two separate live covers albums dedicated, respectively, to Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones: Dark Side Of The Mule and Stoned Side Of The Mule. The Stones’ covers album was a limited, vinyl-only release, to my knowledge, for a recent Record Store Day although it’s all available online, at least on YouTube.

8. David Bowie, All The Madmen . . . If you’re doing a deep cuts show, Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World album from 1970 (1971 in the UK) is a surefire place to go for material. Brilliant record. No huge commercial hits, not even the title cut which went somewhat unnoticed until Lulu covered it for a No. 3 UK hit in 1974 on a version produced by Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson. Nirvana covered it and it was released on their acclaimed 1994 MTV Unplugged album.

9. Robin Trower, A Tale Untold . . . Starts out kinda funky, uptempo, with typically great guitar by Trower and vocals by the late great James Dewar before transitioning into a slow blues for the last minute or so of the five and a half minute song.

10. Hawkwind, Magnu . . . Epic space rock from 1975’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time album. It was bassist Lemmy’s last album with Hawkwind. He was fired on the eve of the record’s release after an arrest for drug possession. Then came Motorhead.

11. Glenn Hughes, Into The Void . . . Not the Black Sabbath song, although a then messed-up on drugs and booze Hughes was briefly in Sabbath during a turbulent revolving door lineup period in that band’s history, the mid- to late 1980s after singer Ronnie James Dio departed. This one’s from the former Trapeze and Deep Purple bassist/singer’s 1994 album, From Now On. A touch overproduced for my taste, but a good song, nevertheless.

12. Blackmore’s Night, Village On The Sand . . . Celtic-type tune from former Deep Purple and (when the band is active) Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s now longtime folk rock/medieval rock project with his lead singer/multi-instrumentalist wife Candice Night.

13. Carole King, Way Over Yonder . . . This is a deep cuts show but to me there really isn’t a deep cut on Tapestry, one of the greatest albums ever, by anyone. All the songs are well known but we’ll call this a deep cut since it wasn’t one of the singles from the record.

14. Bobbie Gentry, Okolona River Bottom Band . . . She’s known for the great Ode To Billie Joe. But as I say probably every time I play her, Gentry, who retired at age 40 in 1982 and by choice virtually disappeared from view, is far more than just that one song, a No. 1 hit in 1967. Also a guitarist, she was a trailblazer, among the first female artists, in the United States at least, to write and produce her own material. Like this song, featuring her versatile vocals, in this case taking a sultry, raunchy approach. Gentry, now 79, is living in a gated community in Tennessee. But nobody knows for sure. That makes her forever cool, to me.

15. The Band, The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show . . . Great shared vocals by Rick Danko and Levon Helm on this jaunty tune from Stage Fright.

16. Chicken Shack, I’d Rather Go Blind . . . A song co-written and made famous by Etta James and covered by many including Rod Stewart, this version features Christine Perfect (later McVie) of future Fleetwood Mac fame on lead vocals during her brief period, 1968-69, with the British blues band.

17. The Rolling Stones, Stray Cat Blues (live, from Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out!) . . . A slower, bluesier arrangement than the rocking, raunchy studio version on Beggars Banquet. Equally excellent.

18. Pat Travers Band, Is This Love . . . A buddy of mine suggested I think Jamaica for this week, implying reggae. I said if you want reggae, get your own show and stop trying to influence mine. Then mentioned I had played Peter Tosh recently so, so there. Kidding around, bud! About the ‘get your own show’ part. I love reggae. Actually I do appreciate suggestions, at least of genres, because they trigger the thought process and I did tell him it was a worthy one. Maybe a reggae show soon, or a segment of one. The risk with a full themed show – although my recent blues show went over big – is that you might lose listeners who might not be into a full genre-based show. And the station does have reggae shows. All of which is a roundabout way of saying I did think Jamaica – Canadian rocker Travers covered this Bob Marley tune on his 1980 Crash and Burn album. A nice version, too.

19. Steve Miller Band, Jackson-Kent Blues . . . Amazing song in my opinion, both musically and lyrically, about the Kent State and Jackson State shootings of students by the National Guard (Kent) and state police in 1970. Great wah wah guitar, for one thing. It was released on Miller’s 1970 album, Number 5, still a few years before the band transitioned from their early (and terrific) more psychedelic sound to the more melodic rock and pop that brought big commercial success with songs like The Joker and the Fly Like An Eagle and Book of Dreams albums. For those not up on early Miller, it’s worth checking out.

20. The J. Geils Band, Night Time . . . Cover of a tune by 1960s New York City band The Strangeloves. It appeared on Geils’ 1980 album, Love Stinks. Interesting creation, The Strangeloves, well worth reading about. They were a three-man songwriting and production team comprised of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer who wrote such hits as My Boyfriend’s Back by American girl group The Angels. They then decided to form a foreign beat group, pretending to be a band of Australian brothers raised on a sheep farm, complete with fictional backstory. Trouble arose when they got successful enough to tour, which they did but were much more comfortable being in the background, writing and doing studio work. So they hired a group of musicians to play on the road while they continued writing. Somewhat the reverse of The Monkees who, at least at first, wrote very little of their own material. Highly recommended reading, about The Strangeloves. All three members are still around, having made a major mark on the music industry including co-founding Sire Records and working with such artists as Blondie, Eric Burdon & War and Marshall Crenshaw.

21. Blind Faith, Do What You Like . . . I love the one and only Blind Faith album, introduced to me by my older, late brother so many years ago. But I hadn’t played this near-16 minute album-closing epic in ages. Silly me. The reason was, while I always liked the groove for the majority of the tune, I recalled a long drum solo by Ginger Baker. And you know how it can be, say, in a concert, with drum solos. Or any solos, the self-indulgent ones where everything comes to a stop as an artist the audience knows can play has to show us that he or she can, indeed, play. I rarely, for instance, listen to the 16-minute live version of Cream’s Toad on the Wheels of Fire album, with of course Baker drumming. Lots of people love it, Baker was a great drummer, but I much prefer the five-minute version on Cream’s debut album, Fresh Cream where it’s more of an actual song.That’s why I like The Allman Brothers; they’re a so-called jam band but their solos are always incorporated nicely into the song, so they don’t come across as interminable and a good excuse for a bathroom or beer break. I like Santana a lot but I remember seeing the band ages ago in Toronto and sheesh, first Santana himself takes a solo, or maybe it was the drummer but then the bass player got into it, too. Three extended odes to excess, back to back to back. I was there with my then-wife but a friend of mine, also a big Santana fan, and I the next day at work compared notes on the show, which was otherwise great. I asked him what he thought of the solos, knowing he’s a guitarist fanatic. “Oh, I went to the bathroom during that,” he said. But maybe he was referring to the bass or drum solos.

    Anyway, off on another tangent I just went. All,in a ridiculously roundabout way, to stress that my memory of this great Blind Faith tune was faulty. Baker’s drum solo is only about four minutes long, from the nine-minute mark to 12:51 and, Allmans-like, it fits perfectly as part of the hypnotic, extended piece. The rest of the band – guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Ric Grech of Family fame and singer Steve Winwood – rejoin the parade at 12:51, making this the epitome of an extended supergroup track. I’ll never stop after track five of the six-song album again.

I wasn’t going to do a Valentine’s Day-themed show – because I abhor cliches/never like doing what anyone might be expecting. But I was going to dip into it a bit, as maybe an admittedly juvenile joke, and start the show with Zappa’s Dinah Moe Humm followed by The Who’s Trick of the Light, about an encounter with a hooker. Then, lo and behold as I was into show prep on Saturday evening, a friend and show supporter texted me and asked what I might be playing specific to Valentine’s Day. He knows my nature but I did mention to him my Zappa and Who plans, after which he requested The Beatles’ Run For Your Life. That set us off on a  tangent after his Beatles’ suggestion prompted me to think of The Rolling Stones’ Stupid Girl. He then mentioned that a work colleague of his has a playlist he calls Psycho Love Songs. Just having fun. In any event, I wound up going on a quite different path for tonight’s show than my original plans. The result is not so much a Valentine’s Day show but a show whose song titles and lyrics reflect the human condition in the ongoing ups and downs of relationships.

1. Goddo, Cock On . . . The title of this tune, featuring great guitar work from Gino Scarpelli, dates to Greg Godovitz’s days in Fludd. That band wanted to title its second album Cock On, with the group dressed as flashers in trenchcoats on the cover, but it didn’t, er, fly with their record company. Subsequent companies that distributed Goddo’s work weren’t as skittish. I would never have seen Goddo live if it weren’t for a wonderful reunion I had about seven years ago with two brothers with whom I grew up as we spent some of our childhood years together in Peru, where our parents were working from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Hadn’t seen the boys in, by that time, nearly 50 years but we had earlier reconnected via social media, discovered a shared love for music, settled on our reunion get-together being a rock show, and Goddo came through for us at a great show in Cambridge, Ontario.

1. 2. Frank Zappa, Dinah Moe Humm . . . Yeah, well. The lyrics tell the tale.

1. 3. The Firm, Satisfaction Guaranteed . . . Nice tune, was a single, from the short-lived Firm featuring Zep’s Jimmy Page and Free/Bad Company’s voice of all rock voices, Paul Rodgers. Chris Slade, best known for drumming on several AC/DC albums including the big seller The Razors Edge (yes, Razors, AC/DC doesn’t believe in much punctuation) that brought us Thunderstruck, was behind the kit for The Firm. Bassist to the stars Tony Franklin held down the bottom end.

1. 4. Electric Light Orchestra, Little Town Flirt . . . ELO leader Jeff Lynne’s tribute to Del Shannon’s hit. It was played around with on the sessions for ELO’s 1979 Discovery album but never finished and released until the 2001 CD re-issue of the album, which featured the hits Don’t Bring Me Down, Shine A Little Love and Confusion.

1. 5. The Who, Trick Of The Light . . . John Entwistle’s adventure with a prostitute or, at least, his thoughts on what that might be like. Killer track, loud, aggressive, one of my favorite Who songs from one of my favorite Who albums, Who Are You, the final one with Keith Moon on drums.

1. 6. The Rolling Stones, Stupid Girl . . . Typical early Stones put down of women. From Aftermath, 1966. Mick Jagger must have just been in an argument with his girl at the time, Chrissie Shrimpton. Shrimpton, a model and actrress, was apparently embarrassed by this song and the similar tone of several tracks on the album, which she figured, with reason, many people associated with her relationship with Jagger. The couple broke up the same year.

1. 7. Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind (The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 version) . . . Spare, acoustic treatment of what, as the song progresses, goes from a diatribe to shared guilt at the breaking up of a relationship. From ‘you’re an idiot, babe’ to ‘we’re idiots, babe”. Originally released on the Blood On The Tracks album with more instrumentation, there are many versions of this on the various Dylan bootleg series albums. This one’s from More Blood, More Tracks, No. 14. Blood On The Tracks is often considered and reviewed as autobiographical in terms of Dylan’s relationship with his then-wife Sara. Yet he has said his life is not the source material. It makes for interesting reading and analysis of the album. In any event, Blood On The Tracks, and to a slightly lesser extent the follow-up, Desire, particularly in the song Sara, are raw treatments of the emotions of relationships that would resonate with anyone, just brilliant stuff. Pain is, maybe sadly, good for art.

1. 8. The Beatles, Run For Your Life . . . John Lennon apparently regretted this song, it might be autobiographical, he wasn’t always the nicest individual. Yet musically, I’ve always liked it, despite many critics dismissing it. It was one of the songs that always stood out to me when my older sister brought Rubber Soul home, and played it to death.

1. 9. Robert Palmer, In Walks Love Again . . . From Secrets, the album that got me into Palmer via the hits Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor Doctor) and, especially for me, Jealous, great riff tune from a great album, top to bottom.

1. 10. Robert Plant, Dance With You Tonight . . . Lovely ballad of love and loss from his most recent studio album, Carry Fire, 2017.

1. 11. King Crimson, Three Of A Perfect Pair . . . Not necessarily about a threesome, I don’t think. Telling lyrics, though, from the third in the set of albums Crimson did upon their return to recording after seven years away, with a new lineup, starting with 1981’s Discipline. Other albums in the threesome are Beat, 1982, and this one, 1984. I’m not alone in calling it the Talking Heads-sound alike version of Crimson although who influenced who, given Crimson’s pedigree, who can say?

1. 12. The Guess Who, Silver Bird . . . Outtake, with typically beautiful vocals by Burton Cummings, from the Canned Wheat sessions but not released, or at least added, to the album until an expanded re-release in 2000. The track also appeared on a bonus disc on an expanded re-release of the American Woman album.

1. 13. The Animals, A Girl Named Sandoz . . . This was going to be in my set tonight regardless of Valentine’s Day or a ‘relationship’ set so, while it fits the theme, it’s a ‘survivor’ of my original plan, which also included some prog like early Genesis. But as I went along with the theme, that stuff (Genesis, etc.) just didn’t fit. Next week, perhaps. In any event, what a brilliant, heavy, psychedelic, whatever you want to call it, track by The Animals.

1. 14. Iron Butterfly, Possession . . . Same with this one, like the Animals track preceding it, was in my original set before ‘the text’ from my buddy set the show off in another direction. Said it before but these guys were so much more than In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It’s almost menacing stuff, the sound, to me, including Doug Ingle’s vocals. Deep and dark. Short, sweet or not so sweet, and to the point lyrics. One verse, that’s it. “When a man has a woman and he doesn’t really love her, why does he turn inside, when she starts to love another . . . it’s possession (repeated).”

1. 15. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Dirty Pool . . . Typical ‘I been done wrong’ lyrics to this great slow blues original from SRV’s debut album, Texas Flood.

1. 16. Parliament, All Your Goodies Are Gone . . . I love Parliament, and Funkadelic, too. George Clinton is a genius. Haven’t played anything from his collective in a while. Here we are.

1. 17. Joe Jackson, We Can’t Live Together . . . JJ”s lyrics, on this cut from his 1986 Big World album arguably accurately sum up lots of relationships.

1. 18. Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City . . . I feel as if I’ve played this beauty fairly recently, too recently, but it fit the show. Whitesnake did a cover I really like, during their early, bluesier period shortly after Deep Purple broke up in 1976 and final (at the time) leader singer David Coverdale formed Whitesnake, eventually incorporating former Purple mates Ian Paice (drums) and Jon Lord (keyboards) into his new band.

1. 19. Stevie Wonder, Blame It On The Sun . . . Beautiful ballad, touching lyrics of love lost, from Talking Book, which gave us the hit Superstition.

1. 20. Leonard Cohen, The Guests . . . Genius, really, from this late Canadian icon. Great song, great lyrics, great delivery.

1. 21. Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It . . . I realized, after I did my blues show last week, that I had not played any Paul Butterfield, a blues icon I admire. I have before of course and in any event, I played 29 songs which of course left out countless others which is why I intend to revisit the blues show soon. And I do include blues throughout my sets, because that’s of course the roots of the classic rock I play. This one, from Butterfield’s later band, Better Days, isn’t necessarily blues, though. It’s a funky cool workout from the second Better Days album, It All Comes Back.

1. 22. Love, Always See Your Face . . . Despite my natural misgivings about cliches, I could not do a show, on Valentine’s Day, without playing a song by a band named Love, which I planned to do regardless. I love Love, terrific band led by the immortal Arthur Lee. Love never sold a lot but so influential and beyond that, just great to listen to. They, to me, are one of those bands that, when one gets deeper into music, sees an album like Forever Changes which to that point one has not heard, acclaimed as one of the greatest albums in history to which the initial response might be, then why have I not heard it? Well, because it didn’t get played much, for whatever reason. But then you listen to it, and all of the band’s stuff, and you are blown away in fact my favorite Love song if I had to pick one from so many, and which I’ve played on the show before, Signed D.C. , about drug addiction, isn’t even on Forever Changes. It’s on the self-titled debut album. Always See Your Face is from the band’s fourth album, Four Sail, by which time the group was already splintering in terms of membership from the core original band led by Lee that had produced the first three albums.

1. 23. Van Morrison, Warm Love (live, from It’s Too Late To Stop Now) . . . A hit single of some note originally on the Hard Nose The Highway studio album, this is the live version from Van The Man’s terrific 1974 live album It’s Too Late To Stop Now. Either version is terrific, the live one might be, as live versions can be, slightly more up-tempo; I just happened to pick the concert version.

1. 24. Mountain, Back Where I Belong . . . Hard rocker from Mountain’s Avalanche album.

1. 25. The Doors, You Make Me Real . . . Smokin’ track from Morrison Hotel. This one goes out to my old, and renewed acquaintance, high school and college friend 4C (names changed to protect the innocent but it’s his cool nomenclature). A cool guy I’ve known since 1972 (!!) with whom I’ve reconnected via a shared deep love of music. 4C discovered my show at some point and the rest is now not so much history but happening. And through it all I’ve discovered he loves the Doors, likely more than me although I love ’em, and particularly it seems the Morrison Hotel album from which I drew this wonderful track. Only problem with it is it’s too short!

1. 26. Elton John, It Ain’t Gonna Be Easy . . . Long, slow blues, always been my favorite song from 1978’s A Single Man album and another one I feel as if I’ve played too recently but it fits the show theme so . . . A Single Man album was interesting in that EJ had parted ways with lyricist/collaborator Bernie Taupin, entering into a working relationship with lyricist Gary Osborne for several albums, as EJ’s commercial fortunes faded. To my ears, EJ still had this one good album left in him, particularly this track and others like Part Time Love, the single, and Big Dipper. Then, arguably, he went off the rails, at least to my taste.

1. 27. John Mayall (featuring Buddy Guy), I Could Cry . . . Guy shares vocals with Mayall – and is directly referenced in the somewhat adjusted lyrics – on this tune from Mayall’s 1993 album Wake Up Call. The original song was written by longtime Guy collaborator and blues legend Junior Wells. Amazing guitar solo but what else would one expect from Buddy Guy. That said, there’s a terrific live version of this song available on YouTube, with Mayall, featuring Coco Montoya, then in the Bluesbreakers and who later went solo, matching Guy’s brilliance.

1. 28. Ian Hunter, We Gotta Get Out Of Here . . . From Ian Hunter’s 1980 live album, Welcome To The Club. Always credited as a live version, sure sounds like a studio add-on to me and always has. In any case, backup singer/foil Ellen Foley, who was Meat Loaf’s foil on Paradise By The Dashboard Light, just makes the track with her rant near the end.“Oh please I don’t want to go home yet. Come on, can’t you do anything I want to do? . . . What are we gonna do? Go home and watch the (pregnant pause) Super Bowl? (well, yes, actually). Re-runs of the Muhammad Ali, uh, Marlene Dietrich fight?” The uh, plus the pairing of Ali and actress Dietrich, just makes the line. Too funny, worth checking out the whole verse, and the song. And now I’m outta here because as I write this Sunday evening, I actually am going to go watch the Super Bowl.

1. Buddy Guy, Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues . . . Title cut from the 1991 album that brought Buddy Guy back to mainstream prominence. He had not released a studio album for nine years to that point. Little Feat drummer Richie Hayward was in the core band on the record, which also featured guest spots on assorted tracks by guitarists Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. The album was the start of a three-album best contemporary blues album Grammy Award streak for Guy, with his next two albums, Feels Like Rain (title cut written by John Hiatt) and Slippin’ In earning Grammy laurels.

2. Albert King, I’ll Play The Blues For You, Parts 1 & 2 . . . Soulful blues brilliance by one of the three Kings of the blues, the others of course B.B. and Freddie. They weren’t related, in fact Albert’s birth surname was Nelson and Freddie’s was Christian, though he later took the King surname of his mother. But, as B.B. was quoted as saying, about Albert and could be applied to Freddie, “he’s not my brother by blood, but he is my brother in blues.” But Albert is the only King I’m playing tonight. Just didn’t fit the others in and besides, I’ve enjoyed putting this blues show together so much there will be more, perhaps as soon as next week.

3. Alvin Lee, The Bluest Blues . . . Most of tonight’s show is comprised of cuts from many of the fathers and mothers of the blues from which the inspiration of so many classic rockers came. But I’ve thrown a few from those classic rockers into the set, including this beautiful slow blues from Lee, the late leader of Ten Years After who by 1994 had – aside from a 1989 reunion album of the original band – long since gone solo. This one features Lee’s good friend George Harrison, from some band you may have heard of, on slide guitar. The two met in a pub in the early 1970s, Harrison offered Lee the song So Sad, which appeared on Harrison’s Dark Horse album, Lee used it on one of his records and so began several collaborations between the two artists.

4. Blind Willie Johnson, Dark Was The Night Cold Was The Ground . . . Speaking of the bluest blues, this is truly deep blues stuff. Spooky gospel blues, written and recorded by Johnson in 1927. I’ve always loved this tune, just the title alone is cool, and somewhat menacing, to me. Throw in vocals that are essentially just humming and moaning, more vocalizations than articulated words, and, well, it’s great. So good that it’s one of 27 samples of music on the Voyager Golden Record, sent into space, as a sort of time capsule, in 1977 on Voyager space probes. The music, sounds and images were selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might encounter them. Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode represents rock and roll among the classical works by the likes of Bach and Mozart featured on the sounds sent to space.

5. Muddy Waters, Rollin’ Stone . . . The song that gave my favorite band their name, which leads into an original, and recent, blues tune of The Rolling Stones’ own plus a run of originals of blues songs the Stones, among others, covered. And that’s the beauty of music, isn’t it? It’s arguably the greatest gift humanity has given itself, and it keeps on giving. I can say without reservation that my calmest, most carefree moments come while listening to music I love including putting this show together every week. It speaks to a point made by Keith Richards of the Stones; that being that the greatest legacy a musician – and I would add music aficionados – can have is that they ‘passed it on.” Muddy took from his roots, passed it on to the Stones and so many others, and here we are, enriched forever by it.

6. The Rolling Stones, Back Of My Hand . . . Mick Jagger is thought of, generally and obviously, as a singer, but as Keith Richards has said, the pure Mick Jagger comes out when he plays harmonica. And he’s become a decent guitarist, too, including his nice slide work on top of his harp playing on this original blues track from 2005’s A Bigger Bang album. It’s the most recent album of original material by the boys, who did release the excellent blues covers album Blue and Lonesome in 2016. Who knows what will happen in the wake of Charlie Watts’ death; the band has always spoken since A Bigger Bang of having lots of material in the can, being worked on, etc. which was actually the genesis for Blue and Lonesome, where they as usual warmed up for a new release by playing old blues tracks until they realized, heck, this is great, let’s release this. As a big fan, I’d love to see them polish up the various tracks they’ve apparently been working on over the years, with Watts drumming, and finally release the long-promised new studio album of originals. I’d also be up for them continuing with studio work with Steve Jordan on the drum kit. Jordan, of course, is an accomplished musician and songwriter who came to widespread prominence playing in Richards’ X-Pensive Winos solo band both live and on studio record, and filled in admirably for Watts, to great reviews, on the most recent Stones’ tour. So, we’ll see, obviously.

    

7. Rev. Robert Wilkins, Prodigal Son . . . Ten minutes of hypnotic brilliance. The Stones covered it, in truncated form on the Beggars Banquet album. The Stones also played it on their 1969 American tour, just Keith Richards and Mick Jagger would come out, Richards strumming on a stool and Jagger singing, as an acoustic blues interlude. My own great memory of the Stones playing Prodigal Son live was the 1979 Keith Richards benefit for the blind concert in Oshawa, Ontario, his sentence/penance for the 1977 heroin drug bust in Toronto during the time the Stones appeared at the El Mocambo and were recording tracks that eventually appeared on Love You Live. Anyway, Keith and Ron Wood’s New Barbarians band had completed their opening set, the lights went down, except for a spotlight, back out came Richards on an acoustic and then out of the dark came Jagger, all dressed in white, and the dynamic duo broke into Prodigal Son. Great entrance, and then all hell broke loose, on came the rest of the Stones with Chuck Berry’s Let It Rock and on we rocked in the afternoon show. My buddy and I tried to stay for the evening reprise, hid in an arena bathroom, but security found and tossed us.

8. Robert Johnson, Stop Breaking Down Blues . . . Covered by many, Stones rocked it up on Exile On Main St. Back in ’72, just 13, it drew me to Robert Johnson.

9. Mississippi Fred McDowell, You Gotta Move . . . The great thing about bands you like, to me, is digging back into their influences – again, the ‘passed it on’ thing to which Keith Richards refers. It’s how I got into blues, and tracks like this, first heard by me on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers. But as much as I love the Stones, when I listen to the originals, Mick Jagger’s thoughts on Slim Harpo’s I’m A King Bee come to mind, although I have a tough time picking versions, if pressed. “What’s the point of listening to us doing “I’m A King Bee’ when you can hear Slim Harpo do it?” Agreed, Mick. BUT, you guys did it, and tunes like You Gotta Move, and it took many of us back to the originals and hence deeper into the blues greats’ catalogs, to endless reward. It’s actually what often perplexed the Stones and other British Invasion bands like The Beatles, Who and Kinks; that in many respects all they were doing was bringing American music to Americans who already had it, but didn’t apparently appreciate it.

10. Slim Harpo, Shake Your Hips . . . Speaking of Slim Harpo, not I’m A King Bee but another one the Stones covered for Exile On Main Street. Charlie Watts’s drumming is ridiculous. It’s not just the backbeat; to me it’s the little touches now and then that sound like someone hitting an empty pop can, plastic pail or garbage can or whatever, just the occasional single stroke. Pop! Brilliant. Yeah, sorry; I’m talking more about the Stones than Slim Harpo. Well, my excuse is that among my sources for tonight’s show is an excellent double CD compilation, curated by the Stones, from 2018. It’s called Confessin’ The Blues, features artwork by Ron Wood, and is excellent as an overall blues collection.

11. Howlin’ Wolf, Little Baby . . . The Stones covered this one on 1995’s Stripped, their excellent semi-acoustic let’s sort of do an unplugged album which was all the rage in the early to mid-1990s. But, we’re the Stones so we’ll do it our way with studio and live cuts including some plugged-in material.

12. Jimmy Reed, Little Rain . . . Great slow blues from Reed, somewhat uncharacteristic to me from other material I know from him. It’s another I plucked from the CD curated by the Stones and one they covered for the Blue and Lonesome album.

13. Son Seals, Telephone Angel . . . A modern electric blues guitarist/singer, he definitely led the stereotypical life of the blues. Shot in the jaw by his wife, requiring reconstructive surgery, lost part of his left leg due to diabetes complications, lost his belongings in a house fire while away on tour . . . He died in 2004 at age 62 of complications from diabetes. But he left us much enduring work, like this tune from his 1976 release, Midnight Son, acknowledged by many as his best album.

14. Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell . . . When this Infidels album outtake from 1983 came out on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 in 1991, fans and critics alike were amazed and perplexed all at once. How could he have held this back from release at the time? Well, that’s Dylan. Just a brilliant song, with spiritual overtones, like much of Dylan’s work, both musically and lyrically.

15. Blind Willie McTell, Statesboro Blues . . . And here’s Blind Willie himself, singing those blues as nobody else could or can, on a song The Allman Brothers later took to the masses via their live version on At Fillmore East.

16. Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers, Taylor’s Rock . . . Blistering instrumental featuring Taylor’s great guitar playing, from the longtime bluesman’s first studio album, Hound Dog Taylor and The Houserockers, which came out in 1971 after many unrecorded years on the road.

17. John Lee Hooker, It Serves You Right To Suffer . . . Spooky Hooker tune, the title cut from his 1966 album. The J. Geils Band later recorded an extended near-10 minute version on their great Live Full House album.

18. Bo Diddley, Crawdad . . . B-side to Diddley’s Walkin’ and Talkin’ single in 1960; typical of the propulsive Diddley sound. I like it better than the A-side.

19. Robert Nighthawk & His Flames Of Rhythm, Maxwell Street Medley . . . Nighthawk taught Muddy Waters and our next player, Earl Hooker, slide guitar but never achieved the commercial success of, particularly, Waters. And Nighthawk was influential beyond those two greats; B.B. King adapted parts of this tune for his own Sweet Little Angel.

20. Earl Hooker, Wah Wah Blues . . . Speaking of Earl Hooker . . . A great wah wah guitar instrumental from 1968.

21. Koko Taylor, I’m A Woman . . . Taylor’s adapted lyrics answer, from a female perspective, to Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man and Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy. Terrific stuff, from her appropriately titled 1978 release, The Earthshaker.

22. Willie Mae “Big Mama’ Thornton, Hound Dog . . . Yes, the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller-penned tune that Elvis Presley made famous. But it was a No. 1 hit for Thornton on the R & B charts for seven of the 14 weeks it spent on that list in 1953. Elvis did his more rocked-up version in 1956. Great versions, both.

23. Zu Zu Bollin, Why Don’t You Eat Where You Slept Last Night . . . Up tempo jazzy blues recorded in 1952 by the somewhat obscure Bollin that I dug up from a great series of blues compilations I own, a multi-volume set called Blues Masters: The Essential Blues Collection. Bollin, a Texas bluesman, worked with such arguably better-known talents as Duke Robillard and Percy Mayfield.

24. Johnny Copeland, Down On Bending Knees . . . Fun relationship-oriented stuff from Copeland, a T-Bone Walker disciple.

25. Dinah Washington, Baby, Get Lost . . . Speaking of relationships, Dinah ain’t taking no shit, here. “I got so many men they’re standing in line’ she sings. No kidding. She was married seven (!) times. Or six, depending on your source. All in 39 years on the planet, a life cut short due to hard living, booze and pills she took to battle insomnia, apparently. Her last husband was 1950s and 60s football great Dick (Night Train) Lane. A sad loss of a wonderful, expressive voice.

26. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mojo Hand . . . Great up-tempo title cut from the Texas guitarist-songwriter’s 1962 album.

27. Bessie Smith, Me & My Gin . . . You listen to these old blues tracks and so much of it is so mind-blowing; one can hear the obvious influences on the artists, especially the white blues rock/rock and rollers, that followed. Sight unseen, I hear Janis Joplin in Smith’s terrific raw vocals, and Joplin indeed credited Smith as an influence.

28. Little Walter, I Got To Go . . . A giant of blues harmonica, a major influence on so many, including Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones covered it, one of four Little Walter (born Marion Walter Jacobs)-penned tunes, on their 2016 album Blue and Lonesome.

29. Lead Belly, Good Night, Irene . . . So many versions of this standard, including several by Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter) himself. This is the 2:38-length version I pulled from The Essential Recordings. And on that note, good night until next week.

1. Creedence Clearwater Revival, It Came Out Of The Sky . . . Satirical Chuck Berry-type rock and roller about what happens when a UFO falls on an Illinois farmer’s land. It was a single in some countries but is largely considered a CCR deep cut. It appeared on the band’s third album release – Willy and The Poor Boys – in one year (!!), 1969, just three months after their previous album, Green River, which came out eight months after Bayou Country. CCR lore has it that bandleader John Fogerty pushed the group to continue releasing albums as quickly as possible as he feared the band would be forgotten if they didn’t appear in the charts. This caused friction with the other band members, who chafed at the workload and figured it wiser to spread things out.

2. Gov’t Mule, Revolution Come, Revolution Go . . . Eight-minute title cut, with a nice groove, from the Mule’s most recent studio album, released in 2017. Gov’t Mule is an Allman Brothers Band offshoot that started in 1994, which sounds funny now since the Warren Haynes-led band has become a much-lauded entity in itself, having released 10 studio albums and a long list of live albums.

3. Warren Zevon, Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song) . . . A tune that I’d say accurately sums up the role and perhaps plight of enforcers in hockey, particularly up to the time of the song’s release on Zevon’s 2002 album My Ride’s Here. The lyrics were co-written with former sports journalist turned acclaimed author (Tuesdays With Morrie, etc.) and multi-media talent Mitch Albom. David Letterman, a big Zevon fan who had the late great on his show many times, does the ‘hit somebody!’ backing vocals on the track.

4. Ian Thomas, Painted Ladies . . . Mine is a deep cuts show but I’m not so rigid as to ignore an occasional single, especially one that is now nearly 50 years old! This one came up in the station computer system while, as often happens, I was looking for something else – which often leads to welcome finds. Great song, most of us of a certain vintage know and remember it well. It was a No. 4 Canadian hit for Thomas in 1973. It made No. 34 on the US charts.

5. Bruce Springsteen, Johnny 99 . . . I was discussing Springsteen’s sometimes harrowing Nebraska album with a friend some time back. I thought I had played this. But I think I just thought about playing it, because I didn’t, my searches show. Now I am. Good tune, lyrics, album – an essential Springsteen release.

6. The Guess Who, Of A Dropping Pin . . . Jaunty track was the first single from 1969’s Canned Wheat album but barely scraped into the top 100 (No. 98) in Canada. Laughing/Undun, a two-sided single, the big hits off the album although they preceded the full record. Space does not permit but it makes interesting reading: suffice it to say Canned Wheat has an interesting history. The band and the record company haggled over which studio best served the band’s sound, the result being that the Laughing/Undun release was surreptitiously recorded in The Guess Who’s preferred studio while the rest of the record was done elsewhere. No Time, which appears on Canned Wheat, was later re-recorded for the American Woman album and that version became a hit single.

7. Drive-By Truckers, Zip City . . . I don’t know a lot by the Drive-By Truckers but what I do, I like, like this mid-tempo tune. The band has cool album covers, too.

8. Ronnie Wood & Bo Diddley, Who Do You Love (from Live at The Ritz) . . . Extended blitz through the Diddley classic, from the live album Rolling Stone Wood did with Mr. Elias McDaniel, aka Bo, or maybe it’s Bo aka Elias, in 1987 in New York. The album was released in 1988.

9. The Who, How Can You Do It Alone . . . A song about masturbation. A good one, too, the song I mean. It’s from the first post-Keith Moon Who album, Face Dances, with Kenney Jones on drums, from 1981. Despite what some critics say about the post-Moon work, it’s a good album, perhaps leaning towards being a Pete Townshend solo record, but I’ve always liked it.

10. Metallica, Low Man’s Lyric . . . Bluesy tune from 1997’s Reload album. Metallica took heat from some of their fan base for ‘selling out’ starting arguably with 1991’s Black Album and those criticisms got stronger with the Load (1996) and Reload albums which had a more mainstream sound, certainly for the most part different from the band’s previous thrash leanings. But I agree with a fan’s thoughts on it, via a YouTube comments field. “Metallica took a big chance that would see them look and sound different. Songs such as this were risky but the lyrics to their more accessible songs still had a sharp edge to them and were meaningful. This song is an example.”

11. Rush, The Way The Wind Blows . . . Beautiful latter-day tune featuring Alex Lifeson’s hypnotic guitar riff, and the late great Neil Peart’s typically fine drumming, from 2007’s Snakes & Arrows album. Peart named it as his favorite track on the record, from a drumming, and listening, perspective.

12. Spooky Tooth, The Mirror . . . Gary Wright of Dream Weaver and Love Is Alive fame was in Spooky Tooth. So, later and on this tune, was Mick Jones, of Foreigner fame. Great band, could rock, often with a pinch of blues, go psychedelic and prog-ish, just one of those perhaps somewhat under the radar British bands that, to use a British expression, I’ve always fancied.

13. U2, Silver and Gold . . . Perhaps the best-known version of this pulsating track is the live version from Rattle and Hum. This is the studio version, about a minute shorter and equally good. It was the B-side to the Joshua Tree’s Where The Streets Have No Name single.

14. John Mayall, Got To Find A Better Way . . . The mantra for my show, one of my catch phrases, has long been: So old it’s new – old bands, old tracks, old bands, their new stuff if they’re still around, alive and kicking. As Mayall is, at age 88 currently on what he’s announced will finally be his last tour. In any event, this is a typically fine, self-penned cut from Mayall’s freshly-released new album, The Sun Is Shining Down, which came out this past Friday, Jan. 28.

15. Jethro Tull, Where Did Saturday Go? . . . Another new one, from old friends. Ian Anderson has been releasing albums under his own name for about 20 years now but has revived the Tull moniker for a new album, The Zealot Game, which also came out this past Friday. “At last, the new collection of songs you have not really been waiting for,” Anderson quips in his typically witty album liner notes. In many ways, Anderson’s recent work is interchangeable as Tull because in so many respects he has long BEEN Tull, and his solo work has featured current Tull band members. So, one wonders what the difference is, really. Maybe it’s all done for tax reasons for Anderson’s myriad companies, always listed on his work as The Ian Anderson Group of Companies Ltd. But what do I know? I’m just a huge Tull/Anderson fan, musically, even though his sometimes snotty supercilious arrogance in interviews can rub me the wrong way. But hey, leader types can tend to be that way; they have a vision and they’re going to pursue it how they so choose. Anyway, a typical acoustic-type Tull track, this one, and one listen in, a fine addition to the extensive Tull/Anderson album catalog.

16. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Gypsy Eyes . . . From Electric Ladyland, an album featuring well-known Hendrix tracks like Crosstown Traffic, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and of course his immortal reinvention of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. Gypsy Eyes is another of the more conventional songs on the album amid some of the interesting experimentation or simple jamming exhibited elsewhere in extended workouts like Voodoo Chile and 1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).

17. Bob Dylan, I and I . . . “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed . . . Look how sweet she sleeps . . . Think I’ll go out and go for a walk. Not much happenin’ here, nothin’ ever does. Besides, if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk; I got nothing to say, especially about whatever was.” Dylan, arguably nailing relationships, or potential ones.

18. Santana, Taboo . . . Said it many times, while I like most Santana, the first three albums remain for me the zenith of the band’s work. As evidence, I offer this intoxicating piece from the third album.

19. Roxy Music, Both Ends Burning . . . A song in the vein of Roxy’s edgier, early work, although the same 1975 Siren album featured their breakthrough, more conventional hit, Love Is The Drug. Oh, and that’s Roxy singer/songwriter Bryan Ferry’s then-girlfriend Jerry Hall, soon to be stolen by Mick Jagger, crawling on the album cover, which also got let’s say somewhat duller as Roxy Music became more mainstream.

20. The Beatles, Happiness Is A Warm Gun . . . One of my all-time favorite Beatles’ tunes. “She’s well-acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane…” then shortly after into that great wahhhaaawaaa guitar in what is about three or four songs in one – the intro, I need a fix, Mother Superior, happiness is a warm gun – all with great lyrics, all in two minutes, 44 seconds. Brilliance.

21. The Allman Brothers Band, Seven Turns . . . Title cut, and a beauty written by guitarist Dickey Betts, from the band’s 1990 album.

22. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tuesday’s Gone . . . Another beauty, from another great southern rock band.

23. The Rolling Stones, Gotta Get Away . . . Short, sweet and terrific early Stones and in some ways a precursor to their later what I call ‘effortlessly and confidently casual’ tunes such as Tumbling Dice, Torn and Frayed and many others. And on that note, getting away until next week.

1. J. Geils Band, First I Look At The Purse (live, from Full House) . . . Probably my favorite J. Geils song and version; they are best served live, terrific band, propulsive track I could listen to 100 times in a row and never tire of.

2. The Rolling Stones, Rocks Off . . . ‘The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.” etc. That lyric ‘makes’ this song, the opening cut to the Exile On Main St. album, for me.

3. Groundhogs, Cherry Red . . . Not sure how I got into the Groundhogs, the British blues-rock powerhouse yet something of an underground act. Probably one of those times, ages ago now, I was in a music store, an independent one like Kitchener’s amazing Encore Records, and the band was playing. In any event, glad I did.

4. AC/DC, Demon Fire . . . Similar riff to Safe In New York City from the band’s 2000 album Stiff Upper Lip but what the heck, it’s 20 years later, this one’s from the most recent record Power Up in 2020 and when has AC/DC not repeated itself – yet remained excellent? And, Angus Young did raid the vaults of unreleased material in putting together the album, which was a tribute to longtime rhythm guitarist and band co-founder Malcolm Young, who died in 2017. He’s since been replaced by Stevie Young, Malcolm’s nephew. The new album was something of a comeback/reunion album for the boys, what with drummer Phil Rudd returning from legal issues, singer Brian Johnson returning from hearing issues and bassist Cliff Williams back in the fold after coming out of retirement. Demonstrating the staying power of classic rock bands, it was a No. 1 album in many countries, including the US, UK and Germany, and was 2020’s sixth-best album, worldwide, in sales counting physical copies, downloads, etc.

5. Judas Priest, Lightning Strike . . . Smokin’ track from the powerhouse 2018 album Firepower, wherein Priest got away from the somewhat progressive concept metal of their previous two albums, Nostradamus and Redeemer of Souls and largely turned the clock back to the 1970s or 80s. The two previous albums are good, but Firepower is a return to more straight-ahead blistering songwriting, with Lightning Strike, one of the singles from the album, a perfect example. Great stuff, if you like Priest and hard rock/metal.

6. Black Sabbath, The Shining . . . From The Eternal Idol, from the underappreciated – aside from dedicated Sabbath fans – Tony Martin on lead vocals version of Sabbath. Very interesting period in the band’s history; guitarist Tony Iommi the only constant, holding it all together and producing some terrific, if relatively unheard, material with typically monstrous riffs.

7. Ozzy Osbourne, Over The Mountain . . . A single and well-known track from Ozzy’s second solo album, 1981’s Diary of A Madman, the second and final Ozzy album featuring the late great guitarist Randy Rhodes. I like the tune, and the album but to me it also marks perhaps the beginning of the overproduced 80s sound that became pervasive in all genres and frankly I don’t like. The sound became the staple of ‘hair metal’ bands, mostly garbage like Poison and Winger and whoever else, Bon Jovi whose success I’ve never understood beyond the song Wanted Dead Or Alive and crap like Motley Crue, which has to be the absolute worst successful band in music history, just shit to my ears . . . OK, stream of consciousness rant over. Ozzy wasn’t shit here, but the sound was getting there. Interestingly, Sabbath, with Dio at the same time doing albums like Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, avoided the overproduction sound.

8. Thin Lizzy, Bad Reputation . . . So many great Thin Lizzy songs beyond The Boys Are Back In Town, a great song but which, to some, particularly hockey arena programmers, is the only thing the band ever did. There’s so much depth to Lizzy’s catalog it’s ridiculous. This title cut to the band’s 1977 album is a perfect example.

9. Rory Gallagher, Big Guns . . . Title cut to a compilation that years ago truly got me deep into Rory Gallagher. The song was originally on 1982’s Jinx album. I love Gallagher’s music and that of his previous band, Taste, but was somewhat late to the party but have long since made up for lost time. I recall Rory auditioning for the Stones at the Black and Blue sessions (that would have been interesting and likely amazing, Rory in the Stones) but more so I recall a college friend late 1970s raving about Rory, which further turned me on to him and so here I am, again, playing the late great guitarist/songwriter.

10. Pink Floyd, One Of These Days . . . Classic bass line on this one, the well-known instrumental opener from Meddle, the 1971 album preceding the monster The Dark Side Of The Moon.

11. Traffic, Rock and Roll Stew, Parts 1 & 2 . . . Traffic recorded various versions of this one, which appeared as a four-minute plus track on The Low Spark OF High Heeled Boys album and then, as Parts 1 & 2, as a longer single that later appeared on expanded reissues of the album and on the 2-CD Gold compilation. Great tune from a great band, in any version.

12. Pete Townshend/Ronnie Lane, Heart To Hang Onto . . . 1977’s Rough Mix, credited to The Who’s Pete Townshend and Faces’ Ronnie Lane helped out by a host of their musical friends including the likes of Eric Clapton and Charlie Watts, is quite simply one of the greatest albums ever, in my book. This is just one of many terrific songs on it.

13. Jefferson Airplane, She Has Funny Cars . . . Opening track to Surrealistic Pillow, another of those albums handed down to me, so to speak, by my older siblings, in this case my older sister. The hits were the only two top 40 hits the Airplane ever had, Somebody To Love and White Rabbit, eternal classics of course, but the whole album is amazing.

14. Murray McLauchlan, Sixteen Lanes Of Highway . . . From McLauchlan’s 1971 debut album, Songs From The Street. The track also appears on the wonderful 2-CD compilation, issued in 2007, The Best of Murray McLauchlan: Songs From The Street.

15. Junkhouse, Burned Out Car . . . Speaking of McLauchlan, his own version of this song about homelessness is on the Songs from the Street compilation. The Junkhouse version, which came out on the Birthday Boy album in 1995, features duet vocals by Sarah McLauchlan and Junkhouse leader and artiste extraordinaire Tom Wilson.

16. Headstones, Heart Of Darkness . . . From the Picture of Health debut album, 1993. If Headstones did nothing else, and they’ve done lots since, this album alone would cement their legacy and brilliance, in my opinion. Just kick butt rock and roll.

17. Bruce Cockburn, You Get Bigger As You Go . . . Another from Humans, arguably my favorite Cockburn album and one I tend to dig into for the show every now and then.

18. Elton John, Midnight Creeper . . . The last in my Elton John series, for now. It started several weeks ago when I couldn’t decide between this song, Have Mercy On The Criminal and High Flying Bird, all from the Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player album, or Slave, from Honky Chateau. So, over the last while, I’ve now played them all.

19. Ten Years After, If You Should Love Me . . . Still fresh, bluesy and excellent after all these years. From TYA’s 1969 release, Ssssh.

20. Little Feat, All That You Dream . . . Linda Ronstadt helps out Lowell George on vocals on this cut from 1975’s The Last Record Album, which it wasn’t as the band kept going Somehow I feel like I’ve said the exact same thing fairly recently after playing this song. Oh well, if so. Great band, great tune.

21. The Band featuring Van Morrison, Caravan (live from The Last Waltz) . . . Originally on Van the Man’s 1970 Moondance album, this is a terrific live version with The Band.

22. Savoy Brown, Hellbound Train . . . Spooky, hypnotic, nine-minute blues-rock title cut from the band’s 1972 album.

23. Tommy Bolin, Post Toastee . . . Another nine-minute epic as we close the show with some extended stuff. Great riff on this one from the late great Bolin’s second solo album, 1976’s Private Eyes, after his version of Deep Purple broke up following that lineup’s lone, and fine, album Come Taste The Band.

24. Deep Purple, Bird Has Flown . . . Any follower of the show by now knows I’m a huge Deep Purple fan, all eras of the band, and its offshoots like Rainbow, early Whitesnake, Gillan, etc. It wasn’t always this way but in recent years, OK, the last 30, ha, I’ve really come to appreciate the early, progressive/psychedelic material produced by the first incarnation of Purple with Rod Evans on lead vocals and Nick Simper on bass. Like this track, from the third and final album before Evans and Simper left to be replaced by Ian Gillan and Roger Glover for 1970’s In Rock.

1. Nazareth, Morning Dew . . . Written by Canadian singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson and covered by so many, including the Rod Stewart-fronted Jeff Beck Group on Truth, The Grateful Dead, Lulu, Robert Plant, Long John Baldry, early incarnations of what became The Allman Brothers Band and many others. I could do a whole Morning Dew show, or leave it to you, the listener, to try the various versions, all good, that are readily available online including a stirring duet between Dobson and Plant during a 2000s Plant concert. So hard to choose, but Nazareth’s extended seven-minute version from their self-titled 1971 debut album remains among my favorites, particularly for its pulsating, hypnotic, intro. Most of the well-known covers follow the rocked-up pattern of the Tim Rose version, for which he controversially claimed a writing credit after rearranging Dobson’s more pure folk version. Lots of interesting literature about the song, a post-apocalyptic lament Dobson was inspired to write and sing in her ethereal tone by the 1959 movie On The Beach, starring Gregory Peck. It’s a good movie (spoiler alert) about inhabitants of the earth’s southern hemisphere, specifically Australia, awaiting the inevitable as air currents slowly carry nuclear fallout south from the devastated north.

2. The Beatles, Rain . . . The B-side to Paperback Writer, yet another example of bands as fine as The Beatles having B-sides or album tracks that most bands would sell their souls for. Ringo considers it his best recorded drumming and the song demonstrated the band’s increasing use of the studio as an instrument in itself, what with a backing track recorded at high speed, then slowed down for release, and the opposite being done on John Lennon’s lead vocal. As detailed in a Beatles’ book I own, “the juxtaposition of speed and laziness heightened the unearthly tension of this brilliant record.” Indeed.

3. The Rolling Stones, Child Of The Moon . . . Spacey track with remnants of the sound of 1967’s Satanic Majesties album, this was the B-side to the Stones’ return to kick-butt rock and roll, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, in 1968.

4. Paul McCartney/Wings, Famous Groupies . . . Fun little ditty of the type McCartney has always done so well, in my opinion. It just happened to come up while I was plotting this little Beatles-Stones mini-set, so I decided to play it. From 1978’s London Town album.

5. Ron Wood, Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . Terrific cut from, for me, Wood’s best solo album (and he’s got many good ones), 1992’s Slide On This.

6. The Monkees, Daily Nightly . . . One of my favorite Monkees’ tunes (and there are many), this somewhat spooky 1967 song about the 1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots in Hollywood, penned by guitarist Mike Nesmith and sung by drummer Mickey Dolenz, is apparently one of the first commercial rock/pop songs to feature the Moog synthesizer, played by Dolenz.

7. Free, Broad Daylight . . . Haven’t played Free in a while. I have played Bad Company, the band which evolved out of the ashes of Free. Bad Co was of course much more successful commercially, but in many ways I (and many others) still prefer the rawer, bluesier, in some cases heavier band that was Free, both groups fronted of course by the incomparably great rock singer Paul Rodgers. Hard to pick between the two bands, though, both great. Nice guitar solo by the late great Paul Kossoff on this one, from the second, self-titled, Free album.

8. Jeff Beck, Blue Wind . . . Written by Jan Hammer, who by the time of 1976’s Wired album was collaborating extensively with Beck. Great jazz/rock/funk fusion, Beck’s fingers are on fire on the fretboard. You actually used to hear stuff like this on commercial FM radio during the 1970s.

9. George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Want Ad Blues . . . Nice bass line to open this extended cover of the John Lee Hooker tune. Thorogood, of course, doesn’t write much, but he built a solid career out of his ability, born of his love for the music that inspired him, for choosing and covering/re-interpreting some fine material. All with gloriously ‘dirty’ guitar, of course.

10. Aerosmith, No Surprize . . . Lead cut telling the story of the band from the kick-ass Night In The Ruts (Right In The Nuts on the back cover) album, 1979. It got critically panned, the band was largely out of it on booze and drugs, guitarist Joe Perry left partway through but many Aerosmith fans, me included, consider it among their best albums. It rocks. The black and white cover of the band, all grimy in a mine shaft, with “Aerosmith” and the album title scrawled on the rocks, is cool and, well, it’s just a great album, critics be damned. One of those examples in rock and roll of a band fraying at the edges yet still producing good music. And the best part, paradoxically, is that because it wasn’t hugely successful, the album has not been overplayed to death over the years so remains fresh. And how can you beat a lyric like “Midnight lady situation fetal vaccinate your ass with a phonograph needle” or the bang-on commentary on the music industry: “Candy store rock and roll corporation jelly roll play the singles it ain’t me it’s programmed insanity” ‘Nuff said.

11. Humble Pie, I Wonder . . . Out goes guitarist Peter Frampton for a successful solo career, in comes Clem Clempson for 1972’s Smokin’ album, which lived up to its title and, thanks to the hit single 30 Days In The Hole, became the Steve Marriott-led band’s best-selling album. Clempson’s guitar work on this extended slow blues cut ain’t bad, either.

12. Rod Stewart, My Way Of Giving . . . The Small Faces originally did this one, written by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, before Rod Stewart and Ron Wood came out of The Jeff Beck Group to form what became Faces – many of whom, as was typical of the period, played on Stewart’s solo version of the track, on 1970’s Gasoline Alley album.

13. Led Zeppelin, Over The Hills And Far Away . . . For some unknown reason, this song, and a good one it is, was playing in my head the other night when I got up in the middle of the night to answer nature’s call. So I went back to bed, got up in the morning and was thinking “what’s the name of that Zep song that starts slow, with ‘hey lady’ and then gets gloriously heavy? I should play it.” So, I am.

14. Fleetwood Mac, Although The Sun Is Shining . . . Beautiful song, penned by guitarist Danny Kirwan for the final Peter Green-led Mac album, 1969’s brilliant Then Play On. One of the formative records of my youth, among many brought home to me by my older brother, eight years senior. What a resource and influence he was.

15. John Stewart, Gold . . . Speaking of Fleetwood Mac, remember this hit single by Stewart from 1979? Great tune, nice memories, pulled from a “Fleetwood Mac Family Album” CD I own that features various Mac members and their solo and/or collaborative ventures. Stevie Nicks of Mac is on backing vocals. Apparently Stewart, who also wrote The Monkees’ Daydream Believer, grew to dislike Gold, refusing to perform it live, calling it ‘vapid’ and ’empty’ and having no meaning for him, saying he did it for the money and to please his record company. I can see his view. If you research Stewart he was an accomplished artist and songwriter who then perhaps became associated with one song that to him perhaps became an albatross. But a good tune, nonetheless, and a deserved hit.

16. Eagles, Hollywood Waltz . . . Not much to say about this one. Hadn’t heard it in a while, came up on the computer while programming something else, nice tune from the One Of These Nights album, decided to play it.

17. Queen, Sleeping On The Sidewalk . . . I’ve said it perhaps too many times, and I haven’t actually added them up but I’d say most of my favorite Queen songs are those written by guitarist Brian May; this being yet another. Nice bluesy tune from News Of The World, 1977, a terrific album overshadowed by the good, but by now ridiculously overplayed, particularly in sports arenas, hit singles We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions.

18. Elton John, Slave . . . So, a few weeks back I mentioned I was having difficulty choosing between several Elton John tunes, and would eventually get to them all. Songs on the docket were three from 1973’s Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player (High Flying Bird, Have Mercy On The Criminal and Midnight Creeper) and this one, Slave, a countryish tune from Honky Chateau in 1972. All that’s now left to play from my list, in an upcoming show, perhaps next week, maybe later, is Midnight Creeper.

19. ZZ Top, A Fool For Your Stockings . . . One of my all-time favorite ZZ tunes, from 1979’s Deguello, a few years before synthesizers and huge commercial success came into the equation. I read it described by a rock journalist as ‘a fine fetish blues.”

20. Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey . . . Title cut from Van Morrison’s 1971 album, simply, to me, one of his finest ever songs.

21. Leon Russell, Out In The Woods . . . Such a funky, cool track; the instrumentation and of course the vocals. It’s obvious and self-evident but vocals, the styling, the tone, the pitch, are such an immense instrument in themselves in music.

22. Peter Tosh, Equal Rights/Downpressor Man (live) . . . It didn’t occur to me while I was planning the show but perhaps some sort of thing was going on because today, Monday, January 17 is Martin Luther King Day in the United States. And so, unplanned yet fitting, here’s this combo track from Tosh’s great Captured Live album. “Everyone is crying out for peace, none is crying out for justice. But there will be no peace, ’til man gets equal rights and justice.”

23. Bob Marley & The Wailers, Could You Be Loved . . . Funky reggae from the late great . . . and great lyrics, too, open to interpretation in an individual or collective sense. To each one’s own.

24. The Allman Brothers Band, Old Friend . . . Fantastic acoustic guitar pickin’ by Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks on this blues cut. Not sure they intended it this way because the band kept up with live performance for many years until retiring in 2014, so there was always the possibility of another studio album. But perhaps in retrospect and appropriately, it’s the last song on the last Allmans studio album, 2003’s Hittin’ The Note. The whole album is terrific but I’m a huge fan. In any event, they did hit the note on what became their final studio release.

25. Shirley Bassey, If You Go Away . . . Many versions of this song but I love Shirley Bassey’s vocals and she did several James Bond themes including the immortal version of Goldfinger, which I’ve played before and will again, perhaps in another ‘Bond’ set at some point. In any event, this came up as I was sorting CDs and came across a Bassey singles collection I own. Beautiful, sad song. And on that note, going away until next week.

1. Elvis Costello, Welcome To The Working Week
2. Elvis Costello, Waiting For The End Of The World
3. The Selecter, On My Radio
4. Pretenders, Mystery Achievement
5. Graham Parker and The Rumour, Don’t Ask Me Questions
6. Talking Heads, Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
7. Ramones, Beat On The Brat
8. Blondie, Rip Her To Shreds
9. Dead Kennedys, Holiday In Cambodia
10. The Clash, The Guns Of Brixton
11. BB Gabor, Simulated Groove
12. XTC, Ten Feet Tall
13. Teenage Head, Brand New Cadillac
14. Ian Dury, I’m Partial To Your Abracadabra
15. The Boomtown Rats, Mary Of The 4^th Form
16. The Cars, Dangerous Type
17. The Police, Bring On The Night
18. Joe Jackson, In Every Dream Home (A Nightmare)
19. The Beat, Tears Of A Clown
20. The B-52’s, Planet Claire
21. Nick Lowe, American Squirm
22. The Specials, Ghost Town
23. The Sex Pistols, Submission
24. Love Sculpture, Sabre Dance (single version)
25. The Rolling Stones, Hey Negrita
26. Joe Walsh, I Can Play That Rock & Roll
27. Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler, Yakety Axe
28. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Lovin’ Cup
29. J.J. Cale, Crazy Mama
30. Elton John, Have Mercy On The Criminal
31. David Bowie, Fascination

It was suggested to me I might play a punk/new wave show and I dabble in such tunes on occasion, what I call my ‘college days’ soundtrack, for me that being 1978-80. But I’ve rarely done the bulk of a show to this extent. So anyway, here it is, happy to do it, followed towards the end by some more let’s say my typical classic rock fare. It was interesting in putting the set together because while I still like the ‘new wave’ tunes, and it was a fun period in my musical life, it also occurred to me that many of the bands represented, to me anyway, were good singles bands but didn’t have much depth to their catalogs. Blondie, for instance. I like the hits but not much else grabs me, the same certainly for The B-52’s – two good songs/singles to me, Planet Claire and even Rock Lobster hasn’t aged well – and XTC whose music, aside from a few cuts, I find to be pretty wimpy Brit pop type stuff. Even The Police, to me, have not aged well and I was a huge fan at one time. Just my changing ears, what can I say? And the Ramones, I dunno, love-hate relationship, I ‘get’ them and their influence I guess but at same time, it’s pretty much all one interchangeable song. Most of the early punk and new wave bands that lasted (The Clash, Joe Jackson, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Pretenders, Talking Heads etc.) wound up doing exactly what some of them initially criticized their forebears for doing – creatively expanding their musical palettes. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.

1. The Mothers of Invention/Frank Zappa, My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama . . . Among Zappa’s more conventional tunes, complete with an acoustic guitar solo in the middle and an electric one towards the end. All in three and a half minutes.

2. Neil Young, Down By The River . . . One of my favorite Neil Young tunes, edited from nine minutes to three for a single release; this is the full version. Simple, repetitive yet hypnotic guitar, starting at five seconds from the two minute mark, makes the tune.

3. Whitesnake, Sweet Talker . . . Early, bluesier, better (in my opinion) Whitesnake, from 1980 and featuring three fifths of the Mk III version of Deep Purple – Whitesnake leader/singer David Coverdale with old Purple mates Jon Lord on keyboards and drummer Ian Paice.

4. Deep Purple, You Fool No One . . . And here’s Coverdale pre-Whitesnake, belting out a funky tune in harmony with bassist Glenn Hughes on 1974’s Burn album, the first of the Mk III lineup.

5. Guns N’ Roses, Estranged . . . A nine-minute epic single, that as far as I’ve researched was not released in any edited form, and a good thing, too, editing would have ruined it. It came out on Use Your Illusion II which, along with Illusion I was released on the same day in 1991. I remember people lining up at record stores to buy the albums, G N’ R was so big at the time. I’ve always liked the way the vocals change from mellow to rock on the second verse “so nobody every told you baby, how it was gonna be…”

6. The Rolling Stones, Out Of Tears . . . Here I go again, by accident or design, getting into another of these song title things; notice the pattern? First off, Mama is under siege down by the river…then a bunch of relationship titles including this one, not that any of them are necessarily connected and I can say at this point in my life have zero to do with me, but anyway.

7. Bad Company, Weep No More . . . Sticking with the weeping motif, from Bad Co’s second album, Straight Shooter, in 1974.

8. Rare Earth, What I’d Say (live) . . . I feel like I played this recently, although my research suggests it wasn’t too recently, although I did play a different Rare Earth song, Long Time Leavin’, some weeks back. I have played the studio version of Rare Earth’s interpretation of this Ray Charles classic. This is the live version, from 1971’s In Concert album, the ‘backpack cover’ one, which is how one of my old friends refers to it.

9. Blood, Sweat & Tears, I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know . . . Bluesy cut from Child Is Father To The Man, the first BS & T album, after which founder/leader Al Kooper left, David Clayton-Thomas came in on lead vocals, the band went in more of a pop direction and, for a few albums, was a massive commercial success. Kooper, meantime, went into production and session work. His extensive resume includes producing and playing on early Lynyrd Skynyrd albums as well as releases by The Who, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Ringo Starr among many others. He also played piano, french horn and organ on the studio version of The Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

10. Bob Welch, Hot Love, Cold World . . . From Bob Welch’s debut solo album, French Kiss, in 1977. This was the third single from the album and a minor hit behind the two previous singles – Ebony Eyes and Sentimental Lady, which Welch wrote for Fleetwood Mac’s Bare Trees album in 1972 and updated for his solo release.

11. Bob Dylan, When You Gonna Wake Up . . . There are many opinions on Dylan’s Christian album period from 1979-81 but there’s no denying the quality of the music, and the musicians (like Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers of Dire Straits) he had in his band at the time.

12. The Byrds, This Wheel’s On Fire . . . The Byrds were great interpreters, especially of Dylan stuff, and I’ve always liked this more rocked-up treatment, great gritty vocals by Roger McGuinn, of a tune written by Dylan and The Band’s Rick Danko. It appeared on The Band’s Music From Big Pink and the Dylan/Band collaboration The Basement Tapes. Three different versions, all excellent.

13. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, My Life/Your World . . . I was discussing Petty deep cuts with a U.S.-based music aficionado acquaintance on Twitter the other day. He was looking for suggestions for a deep cuts playlist, I mentioned this one, so I decided to play it myself. I like what I describe as hypnotic tracks, of which this is a great example.

14. Joe Cocker, Sandpaper Cadillac . . . Appropriate album title, With A Little Help From My Friends, on which Cocker famously covered The Beatles’ tune. Helping him out on his 1969 solo album debut were such luminaries as Jimmy Page, Steve Winwood, Henry McCulloch of McCartney and Wings fame, etc.

15. Yes, Heart Of The Sunrise . . . From bluesy to prog to, next track, punk as we steer the show in a couple different directions. Killer riff on this one, from Fragile, another one of those 10-minute songs that, while extended, remains compelling as it goes back and forth between riff rock and the quieter sections.

16. The Sex Pistols, Holidays In The Sun . . . So, the story goes, the Pistols really did want a holiday in the sun, on the Channel island of Jersey. But they got thrown out and went instead to Berlin, which was still divided by the wall at the time, hence the lyrics. Kick-butt rocker, regardless.

17. Black Sabbath, Junior’s Eyes . . . Sabbath’s 1978 album Never Say Die seems to get panned by critics and even fans. The band was falling apart, out of it on booze and drugs in large measure, Ozzy had temporarily quit and returned but in view of all that, they still managed to produce some good stuff. Side one of the original vinyl, in particular, is quite good, featuring the title cut, Johnny Blade and this nicely-arranged industrial-type track.

18. The Who, Pictures Of Lily . . . I was talking about essential Who albums with a friend the other day and we agreed that, although it’s a compilation, 1971’s Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy is one of them, collecting as it does the band’s 60s singles, like this one, in one tight, intoxicating package.

19. Jim Croce, Roller Derby Queen . . . I suppose this song, which came out in 1973, could be about Raquel Welch in the 1972 movie Kansas City Bomber but Raquel wasn’t fat and two-fifteen, as go the song’s lyrics. Maybe Croce was disguising it, who knows? I saw the movie ages ago, having watched roller derby a bit as a kid during the early 1970s and, OK, because I wanted to see Raquel, but I barely remember it, much less whether it was any good. Welch, apparently, said it was the first movie she ever did where she actually liked her own performance. Oh, the song’s pretty good, too. Croce, alas, died at age 30 in a plane crash in 1973, while on tour.

20. Procol Harum, Simple Sister . . . Nice hard rock riff amid the progressive, somewhat operatic leanings of the band.

21. Chris Whitley, Poison Girl . . . Whitely died of lung cancer in 2005 at age 45 but he left behind a fine catalog of blues and blues rock, including this one from his 1991 debut and I think his best album, Living With The Law.

22. Nina Simone, Wild Is The Wind . . . Written by composer Dimitri Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington for the 1957 film of the same name, it was a hit at the time for Johnny Mathis. Simone did a live version in 1959 and then this more well-known studio version in 1966. David Bowie covered it 10 years later, as a tribute to Simone, on his Station To Station album. I’ve played Bowie’s version before so I figured I’d go with Simone this time.

1. Tramp, Put A Record On . . . Who is Tramp? Well, they were an on again, off again British blues band often comprised of assorted members of Fleetwood Mac like drummer Mick Fleetwood, original bassist Bob Brunning, who formed Tramp in 1969, and guitarist Danny Kirwan. Tramp, fronted by the brother sister guitarist/singer combo of Dave and Jo Ann Kelly, released just two albums. The debut was out in 1969 and then in 1974 came Put A Record On, the title cut of which appears on a Fleetwood Mac Family Album CD I have. The album features the outside and solo work of the various Mac members over the many years and lineups of the parent group. Jo Ann Kelly was so highly thought of that both Canned Heat and Johnny Winter wanted her to join their bands, but she declined due to her desire to stay in England. Sadly, she died in 1990 at age 46 of a brain tumor.

2. The James Gang, The Bomber . . . Haven’t played the James Gang in a while. So I figured I’d bring them back into the loop via this epic, from the second album, Rides Again.

3. The Who, The Punk and the Godfather . . . An old friend of mine loves The Who and always swore by Quadrophenia as their best, or at least his favorite album by the band but then he’s into ‘concept’ albums and likes The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis, which I’ve never fully gotten into so, there’s that if one is considering sources, ha. He’s also the guy I once got into a fun drunken argument with over whether Genesis was even rock akin to, say, the raunch and roll of The Rolling Stones, his argument being “ever heard The Knife, dammit!” So yeah, I’ve heard The Knife, it’s heavy, it’s on the Trespass album; Genesis can play rock, of a sort though not raunch, so I concede the point but anyway . . . back to The Who. I like Tommy, which is a concept album, but of The Who’s works I’d say I like Who’s Next, Who Are You and yes, The Who By Numbers, which I grew up with, more. But I’m more a song guy than a concept guy, when it comes to music. I do like Quadrophenia, certainly several of the songs from it, like The Punk and the Godfather, so here you go. I’d still take the more well-known 5:15, The Real Me and Love, Reign O’er Me from Quad, ahead of it, though, but this is a deep cuts show. Actually, while I’m writing these commentary notes, I just put on the Lamb and, you know, I could get more deeply into it, actually, and I realize I do know the album pretty well, The Cage, Carpet Crawlers, the title cut, etc. Next!

4. Bob Dylan, Everything Is Broken . . . Up-tempo Zimmy to kick off his fine 1989 album, Oh Mercy, wall to wall one of his best, any era. But you’ll get that when you hire Canada’s own Daniel Lanois as producer. Anything he touches turns to gold, ask U2, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, on and on. Lanois is not a bad music maker in his own right, either, judging by his solo albums.

5. Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust . . . Speaking of Dylan, this 1975 song is all about him and for my money is one of the finest songs about love, love lost and all that stuff, ever written. Always brings a tear to my eye. It’s brilliant, sung by the voice of an angel. Judas Priest, of course, later in the 1970s covered it in their metal fashion, had a hit with it and Baez liked it. A long time later, in the 2000s, Priest re-did it in acoustic, Baez style to great effect but one would expect nothing less, given Priest lead singer Rob Halford’s pipes.

6. Leon Russell and Willie Nelson, Heartbreak Hotel . . . Leon and Willie team up on the song Elvis Presley made famous. It’s actually credited to Willie Nelson and Leon Russell but I pulled it from a Leon Russell compilation I own so I put Leon first. Just to be different.

7. The Kinks, Hatred (A Duet) . . . Famously feuding and fighting brothers Ray and Dave Davies have great fun on this one, from The Kinks’ last studio album, Phobia, which came out in 1993. It’s a great commentary on their always-tempestuous relationship, and society in general. “Why don’t you just drop dead and don’t recover. I’m the mirror to your mood, you hate me and I hate you so at least we understand each other.” Ah, brotherly love. I imagine they had a riot recording it.

8. Tim Curry, No Love On The Street . . . Great original tune by the multi-talented Curry, who came to fame as Dr. Frank-N-Furter (you’ll recall Sweet Transvestite) in The Rocky Horror Picture show. I was major into the whole Rocky Horror schtick at the time so when I heard Curry’s Fearless album playing in a record store in 1979, I liked it, bought it and soon owned the three albums he released between 1978 and 1981. He always had major music people helping him, too, like producers Michael Kamen and Bob Ezrin and guitarist Dick Wagner of Alice Cooper and Lou Reed fame. Curry, who was a scream in the 1985 movie adaptation of the board game Clue, alas is confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke in 2012, although he still does voice work.

9. Bee Gees, Lonely Days . . . Probably my favorite Bee Gees’ song, essentially three songs in one as it quietly builds to a crescendo, calms down again, then rebuilds to another peak. These guys were so good, yes, even the disco stuff. Just great songwriters.

10. Steppenwolf, It’s Never Too Late . . . Yet another great one by the Canadian-rooted band which is SO much more than endless classic rock station plays of Magic Carpet Ride and Born To Be Wild, great songs of course but . . .

11. Bad Company, Company Of Strangers . . . Title cut from the band’s 1995 album, with Paul Rodgers soundalike Robert Hart on lead vocals. An old work colleague of mine once said that Bad Company without Rodgers singing isn’t Bad Company. I agree for the most part, certainly given the overproduced (though commercially successful) schlock they released with Brian Howe on lead vocals during the 1980s, which is when my old work friend commented. But Company of Strangers, which features founding guitarist Mick Ralphs and drummer Simon Kirke, is pretty good, actually. It could pass for the band’s 1970s work with Rodgers, I think.

12. The Rolling Stones, Sway . . . Great guitar work, especially on the outro, from Mick Taylor on one of those what I term ‘effortlessly and effectively lazy’ Stones cuts, which nobody does better than, well, the Stones. This one’s from Sticky Fingers.

13. The Guess Who, Key . . . A nice combo of psychedelia and pop rock on this epic, near 12-minute excursion from 1969’s Wheatfield Soul album.

14. Simon and Garfunkel, Baby Driver . . . Like many 1960s and 70s albums, Bridge Over Troubled Water is so good any of its songs could have been singles. This one wasn’t though, which tells you what a quality work the album was.

15. Steve Miller Band, Space Cowboy . . . By now this is a well-known Miller tune but it arguably wasn’t when it came out in 1969 on the Brave New World album when the Steve Miller Band was still in its psychedelic/blues rock phase. The band was still some years away from its commercial mid- to late-1970s heyday starting with The Joker album and subsequent releases Fly Like An Eagle, Book of Dreams and the ubiquitous Greatest Hits 1974-78 album. But if you’re looking to sample earlier Miller, I’d recommend The Anthology and The Best of 1968-73 compilations, either physical copies or online.

16. Blue Rodeo, Diamond Mine . . . I’ve been meaning to get to some Blue Rodeo, was discussing them with a friend recently and mentioned to him that I ought to play them. Reason I haven’t, to be honest, is that my place is an unholy mess, CDs not racked (it’s a forever project) because I’m too lazy to put them away after each show. In a way, I think it helps my set list creativity because I just randomly pick up a disc, yeah I still own CDs, and load them into our station computer. So anyway, was rummaging around and, voila, found a Blue Rodeo disc so I figured I’d play the title cut, probably my favorite song of theirs, from their 1989 album. It’s quite Doors-ish, in my opinion, akin to The End or When The Music’s Over.

17. Elton John, High Flying Bird . . . Here’s the problem with Elton John in the 1970s and doing a radio show just once a week. How are you supposed to choose among his many great songs and we’re talking deep cuts, let alone hits. So, at first I was going to go with Street Kids, a rocker I like from Rock of The Westies but I realized I’ve played that fairly recently. Then up came Slave, a nice country blues-ish tune from Honky Chateau which I’ve never played I don’t think, but then that CD rummage session revealed Elton’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player album so it came down to either High Flying Bird or Have Mercy On The Criminal, and Bird won out. But, now you have an indication of some Elton John titles to look for in future shows.

18. Bloomfield Kooper Stills, His Holy Modal Majesty . . . From the legendary Super Session album, which features Al Kooper and guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Stephen Stills. It was a two-day session but Bloomfield, who played on this tribute to jazz giant John Coltrane, left – apparently he was having trouble sleeping and wanted to rest – so Kooper scrambled and brought Stills in to finish the album. The whole project, either guitarist, is terrific.

19. Rory Gallagher, Calling Card . . . Anyone who knows me, and the show, knows how much I like Rory Gallagher, from his days leading Taste to his extensive solo work. Just a brilliant guitarist and songwriter, yet in many ways not well known to the masses. But his brother Donal has kept the late Rory’s music alive over the years via various reissue projects, compilations, concert film re-releases and the like. That’s a good thing. Rory was amazing. Asked once how it felt to be the greatest guitarist in the world, Jimi Hendrix is said to have said, “I don’t know. Go ask Rory Gallagher.”. But of course Hendrix said similar things about Chicago’s late great Terry Kath, and B.B. King said of Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green that Green was ‘the only living guitarist to make me sweat. He had the sweetest tone I’ve ever heard.” Which really says it all about all these guys; it’s not a competition. It’s about their respective creative muses, and resulting mutual respect and admiration. 
20. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Sedan Delivery . . . Kick butt distortion tune, which is what Neil Young does when Crazy Horse is in the building with him. From 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. Young originally recorded Sedan Delivery during the sessions for his 1975 album Zuma but it didn’t make the cut. The song was offered to Lynyrd Skynyrd for their final pre-plane crash album, Street Survivors, but they passed on it.

21. Ocean Colour Scene, The Riverboat Song . . . What an infectious, irresistible riff from these Britpop boys. I’m not super up on them but heard them playing in one of my favorite local independent record stores some years back, that would be Encore Records in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (free plug, boys), bought a compilation and here we are.

22. Chuck Leavell, Evening Train . . . This is an interesting one, perhaps, in how I came to play it. Pianist/keyboard player Leavell, of course, is a former Allman Brother and has been playing live and on studio records with The Rolling Stones since the 1980s and also at one time fronted the Allmans’ offshoot band Sea Level, which I’ve periodically played. Anyway, I was digging through my stuff and back in 2019, the Stones’ Keith Richards was ‘guest editor’ of MOJO music magazine so the mag included with purchase a CD of some of Keef’s favorite tunes. It’s a diverse disc, featuring stuff like Funkadelic, Buckwhat Zydeco, Dion, Toots and The Maytalls (Richards loves reggae), Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And, this bluesy Leavell track from his 2013 album, Back To The Woods, a tribute to the pioneers of blues piano.  
23. Ringo Starr, Goodnight Vienna/Goodnight Vienna Reprise . . . Title cut, a fun rocker and its short reprise, from Ringo’s 1974 album, written by John Lennon. And on that note, goodnight until next week.

1. Jethro Tull, To Cry You A Song . . . I always listen to music in the gym but been using my workout time lately to dig back into and savor many of my favorite albums, particularly ones I haven’t listened to in a while, because I think what often happens is, for me at least, is you know an album so well that it’s as if you don’t need to play it because you know it in your mind. But then you actually do play it again and you think, wow, is this ever good. Like Tull’s third album, Benefit, from which this song comes. As always, credit to my late older brother for introducing me to Tull all those years ago.

2. R.E.M., Oh, My Heart . . . Beautiful song from the band’s final album, 2011’s Collapse Into Now. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia entry about the album, which details how the group, which was on the down slope of commercial success, came to the decision to disband and it wasn’t just due to sales. And, also, how they developed the album as they accepted that times had changed concepts of what an ‘album’ meant. To pull a bit from Wikipedia, the group did videos for each song on the album, not just the singles,of which Oh, My Heart was the fourth. Lead singer Michael Stipe: “The idea was to present a 21^st-century version of an album. What does an album mean in the year 2011, particularly to generations of people for whom the word ‘album’ is an archaic term? An album for me as a teenager in the ’70s was a fully-formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the era of YouTube and the internet. This is what we do. We put together and sequenced the strongest body of work we could possibly come up with at this moment in time and put it onto this record.” I love listening to creative people discuss their work, whoever it is because, while I like them, I’m not even a massive R.E.M. fan.

3. George Harrison, I Dig Love . . . Same thing here as with my comments re the Jethro Tull song/album I started today’s show with. I hadn’t listened to Harrison’s All Things Must Pass in a long time but did so in the gym, over two workouts, last week. It’s a sprawling album, of course, three vinyl records in its original configuration as Harrison unleashed his muse after the breakup of The Beatles, using some material that didn’t ‘make’ Beatles’ albums, and his records is filled with gems. Like this very interesting, almost experimental/somewhat unconventional track. Very cool.

4. The Beatles, She’s Leaving Home . . . Interesting how things change as time offers perspective. I always liked this song, and the whole Sgt. Pepper album, but as time and life experience goes on, it’s moved up to become one of my favorites on the album. Same with George Harrison’s sitar-laden and ultimately influential Within You Without You on Pepper, which in my youth was a song I skipped – and I wasn’t alone – by lifting the needle from the vinyl record (no programming in those days).

5. Tyrannosaurus Rex, By The Light Of A Magical Moon . . . Great jaunty mid-tempo ballad with some nice guitar from 1970’s A Beard Of Stars, the last of four studio albums by the Marc Bolan-led band before they shortened their name and continued as T. Rex.

6. The Doors, The Spy . . . Nothing intentional, just developed this way, maybe it’s some Freudian sort of thing, who knows, but many of the songs in the set tonight have to do with relationships. Like this one from the bluesy Morrison Hotel album.

7. Johnny Cash, No Expectations . . . As I’ve often said, to me the best covers are reinventions, the most famous arguably being Jimi Hendrix’s reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. No Expectations by the man in black isn’t as well known, but in 1978 he took the great Rolling Stones’ track from 1968’s Beggars Banquet and gave it the Cash rockabilly-type treatment. Great stuff.

8. The Rolling Stones, Dance (Pt. 1)/If I Was A Dancer (Dance Pt. 2) . . . And, speaking of the Stones, now for something completely different, from 1980’s Emotional Rescue album. Part 1 was the opening cut on the album but Part 2 didn’t appear until the 1981 compilation, Sucking In The Seventies. I’ve slotted them back to back, and thanks to whoever, on YouTube, for connecting the tunes into one 10-minute package that I’ve used for the usual song clips on my Facebook page.

9. Elvis Presley, Little Sister . . . Always loved this Elvis tune. And, see how it goes from the Stones’ Dance to Elvis’s Little Sister, a nod to the Stones’ Dance Little Sister? Clever, aren’t I? Ha.

10. Van Morrison, Precious Time . . . I need to listen to this tune and its lyrics more because I have too many interests, which results in me having difficulty prioritizing, at times. Time is indeed precious, to be used wisely.

11. Delaney and Bonnie (with Eric Clapton), Comin’ Home . . . Here’s what happens when you dig into a box set you haven’t listened to in a while, in this case Clapton’s 1988 release Crossroads. You remember this band and this song, a good rocker from the group/then married couple of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and friends which at various times featured Clapton, Duane and Gregg Allman, Dave Mason, George Harrison (under the pseudonym L’Angelo Misterioso), Bobby Keys, Gram Parsons, on and on and which led to the formation of . . .

12. Derek and The Dominos, Got To Get Better In A Little While . . . Three members of Delaney Bramlett’s band, who had helped Clapton out on his first, self-titled solo album, had a falling out with Bramlett. So, Clapton scooped up keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon and the result was Derek and The Dominos. This is an early version, from the Crossroads box and without Whitlock, of a rocker scheduled for what was to be a second Dominos album, after the Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs album.

     

13. Creedence Clearwater Revival, It’s Just A Thought . . . Who says CCR was just a hit singles band? They have many great deep cuts, like this nice groove tune from the Pendulum album.

14. Blackie and The Rodeo Kings, 49 Tons . . . Cool shuffle from the Canadian combo of Stephen Fearing, Colin Linden and Tom Wilson. What began as something of a fun side project by guys with their own gigs – Fearing solo, Linden lots of production work and some solo stuff and Wilson with Junkhouse and assorted other projects – soon became a full-fledged band, and a good one.

15. Rod Stewart, Stone Cold Sober . . . I feel like I’ve played this one too recently, although I can’t find it in 2021 shows but in any event, what the heck. Good, fun rocker from Stewart’s 1975 Atlantic Crossing album, his first after he moved to the United States and first without most members of Faces as his backing band for his solo work. The album was the first of a great run in Stewart’s second distinct solo period, one that brought him great commercial and critical success up until about 1980, after which he lost the plot, went schlock, and lost me.

16. Joe Jackson, What’s The Use Of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again) . . . J.J.’s version of a song Louis Jordan took to No. 1 on Billboard’s ‘race record chart’ (really, a ‘race’ record chart) in 1942. It appeared on Jackson’s 1981 jump blues/swing album Jumpin’ Jive, at which time, after his early angry young man punk/new wave period, I realized Jackson was an artist I wanted to follow in his various directions. He’s never disappointed me.

17. Heart, White Lightning and Wine . . . I like most Heart stuff but prefer the 1970s stuff, like this album track from 1976’s Dreamboat Annie, to the band’s (typically for the period) at least somewhat overproduced 1980s sound, although that sound gave Heart huge commercial success for a few 80s albums.

18. Mark Knopfler, Why Aye Man . . . I prefer Dire Straits to Knopfler’s solo material, which some friends remember I drunkenly and loudly proclaimed one day a few summers ago while throwing back beer on a lakeside patio. But I do like his solo work, like this tune, and need to dig back in.

19. Dire Straits, Telegraph Road . . . One of those epic tunes, 14 minutes worth, that is so good the time just flies by.

20. Buddy Guy, It’s A Jungle Out There . . . Written by Guy, the lone self-penned cut from his terrific 2001 album, Sweet Tea, which deservedly was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

21. Bruce Cockburn, Tibetan Side Of Town . . . From the Big Circumstance album in 1988, nice groove and guitar picking by Cockburn and a nice sax solo by Richie Cannata, a member of Billy Joel’s band during my favorite Joel period, the mid- to late 1970s.

22. The Allman Brothers Band, Instrumental Illness . . . Typically great extended (12 minutes) Allmans instrumental, from what turned out to be their last studio album, 2003’s Hittin’ The Note, although the band continued playing live until retiring in 2014.

1. 54-40, Music Man . . . Apparently a single, I don’t remember it being such.  Nice groove including the wah-wah guitar. Got into 54-40 via the first two singles – Nice To Luv You and She La – from the Dear Dear album in 1992, from which I took this song. I saw them about a decade later, good show.

2. Romantics, Open Up Your Door . . . A cover of the 1966 hit by Richard and The Young Lions released on the Romantics’ 1983 album In Heat. Good time, good rock and roll.

3. Deep Purple, What’s Going On Here . . . Great boogie rock tune featuring nice dual vocals from David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, from the first Mk. III Purple album, Burn. Already getting funky, Purple was, to the great distaste of mercurial guitarist and arguably de facto leader Ritchie Blackmore, yet he plays brilliantly on the album.

4. The Allman Brothers Band, No One To Run With . . . Jaunty sort of tune from the reconstituted band’s 1994 album, Where It All Begins, guitarist Dickey Betts’ last studio work as a Brother. Speaking of the studio, Gregg Allman didn’t like recording in studios, preferring the live arena so, the story goes, producer Tom Dowd arranged for the band’s full concert setup to be housed on a Florida film sound stage owned by actor Burt Reynolds and the band recorded that way, as a live unit, rather than as many albums are done, with parts done individually and then mixed.

5. Spooky Tooth, That Was Only Yesterday . . . Yet another great one from the Spooky Two album, which I think ought to be retitled No. 1 since it’s arguably the band’s best work.

6. Tommy Bolin, Bustin’ Out For Rosey . . . From the late great Bolin, solo artist, replacement guitarist for Joe Walsh in the James Gang and Ritchie Blackmore in Deep Purple but a brilliant artist in his own right, gone too soon as a result of his drug demons.

7. Genesis, Eleventh Earl Of Mar . . . Epic track from the second post-Peter Gabriel album, Wind and Wuthering, and the last one with guitarist Steve Hackett before his departure left Genesis a trio (Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins) that would go on to huge commercial heights.

8. Can, Spoon . . . Typically propulsive Can track, among their more accessible works in fact if you’re not into ‘weird’ stuff I’d recommend picking up, or listening to online, their Can: The Singles album, a good run-through of the band’s more conventional work.

9. King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part 1 (abridged) . . . Slow build on this instrumental title cut to the 1973 album, until the heavy, metallic assault at the 3:45 mark and then again a minute later. The song is nearly 14 minutes long on the album but for tonight’s show I used bandleader Robert Fripp’s just under seven-minute, tighter abridged version which in some ways I like better; depends on my mood.

10. Soft Machine, All White . . . By the time of the ‘5’ album, Soft Machine had dispensed with vocals and was essentially a jazz, or jazz-fusion band; this slow-building cut a great example.

11. Iron Maiden, Hallowed Be Thy Name . . . I like Iron Maiden well enough but sometimes Bruce Dickinson’s somewhat to me overwrought ‘operatic’ vocals can be irritating. Not on this one, though. Early Maiden progressive metal I suppose one would call it, which they’ve expanded upon and continue to do, to great effect, on their latter-day releases. One of those bands I have great respect for in that they’ve maintained a high standard throughout their now 40-plus year career.

12. Metallica, Poor Twisted Me . . . As described by one You Tube commenter, it’s a blues metal tune. This one from the Load album, a controversial release at the time because many Metallica fans still wanted thrash but the band was evolving into a more commercial entity.

13. Pretenders, Bad Boys Get Spanked . . . From Pretenders II, released in 1981 when people were still pogo-ing on dance floors to punk and new wave music and this would be a perfect tune for that. It occurred to me for the first time in all these years, in playing it, that Concrete Blonde’s 1992 song Ghost Of A Texas Ladies Man, which I’ve played before on the show, has a very similar rhythm, to my ears, anyway. Not saying Concrete Blonde ‘pinched it’ as the Brits might say, and Concrete Blonde is a band I really like, but there it is. Interesting that I never really noticed it until now but I think that’s because I’ve actually played the Concrete Blonde tune more often.

14. The Kinks, National Health . . . From Low Budget, 1979, great album that got lots of people back into The Kinks. And, around the same time, Kinks’ leader/chief songwriter Ray Davies was romantically involved with the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, and Pretenders recorded the Kinks’ Stop Your Sobbing on their 1979 debut album. So, I must admit when I slotted in the Pretenders’ track that The Kinks came to mind, so there you have it. Besides, I can never get enough Kinks. Or Pretenders, for that matter.

15. Chilliwack, Guilty . . . I’ve always liked the band’s 1979 Breakdown In Paradise album, or at least most of it, including this track featuring some nice piano playing amid a nice arrangement. The two other songs I really like on the record are Communication Breakdown (not the Zeppelin tune) and 148 Heavy, both of which I’ve played over time on the show. The album didn’t do well, though, thanks in part to promotion issues born of Mushroom Records’ financial problems at the time.

16. BTO, A Long Time For A Little While . . . I played Madison Avenue from BTO’s first post-Randy Bachman album Street Action last week, which prompted a full re-listen to the 1978 effort for which the band brought in former April Wine stalwart Jim Clench on bass, with C.F. (Fred) Turner moving from bass to rhythm guitar along with lead axeman Blair Thornton and drummer Rob Bachman. It’s a good album, including this song, which reminds me a bit of Looking Out For No. 1, albeit heavier.

17. Peter Frampton, Jumping Jack Flash (live) . . . Frampton covered the Stones’ tune on his 1972 studio album Winds of Change. I pulled this extended seven-minute version from Frampton’s breakthrough live album, Frampton Comes Alive.

18. The Rolling Stones, Loving Cup . . . This completes my little Exile On Main St. trilogy, spread over about five weeks. Some weeks ago I couldn’t decide between Torn and Frayed, Let It Loose and Loving Cup from Exile, so decided to play all three, over a period of weeks, in and around some other Stones’ stuff (Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow and Salt Of The Earth). So, here’s Loving Cup.

19. Pete Townshend, The Sea Refuses No River . . . Two singles – Face Dances Pt. 2 and Uniforms – were released from Townshend’s 1982 album All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. I think he picked the wrong two. This song, and Exquisitely Bored, which I’ve played before and should again soon, are clearly better in my opinion.

20. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Christine’s Tune (aka Devil In Disguise) . . . Posting YouTube clips of the songs I play often helps my commentary, given some of the comments one sees about songs. Like this one, about this track: “This is where country should have gone instead of morphing into sewage”. I’m not super up on modern country, know some of it, and the criticisms, so I’d have to agree with the sentiments expressed.

21. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fire Brothers . . . Spooky and haunting, enough said.

22. Ten Years After, Let The Sky Fall . . . Was listening to TYA’s A Space In Time album in the gym the other day, this came on and I made a mental note to play it this week. Alvin Lee was always rightly revered for his guitar playing, but he’s no slouch as a singer, either. Always liked his bluesy vocals.

23. Dire Straits, Where Do You Think You’re Going? . . . Journalism critics can be ridiculous. One wrote that Communique, the band’s second album and source for this great track, was nothing more than a pale imitation of the first Dire Straits album. Well, if that were true, then just about every J.J. Cale album is an imitation of the previous ones, yet Cale never released a poor album and neither did Dire Straits.

24. Peter Gabriel, Home Sweet Home . . . From Gabriel’s second solo album, at the point at which all his albums were called “Peter Gabriel’ so people started ascribing titles to them based on the cover art, in this case, Scratch. No hits to speak of on the second one, after Solsbury Hill had charted on his debut solo album, but Scratch is nevertheless a good album and worth checking out.

1. Joe Jackson, Alchemy . . . From J.J.’s most recent album, 2019’s Fool. He opened (and closed, with a short reprise) his shows supporting the album with this track, a perhaps now typical late career jazzy excursion from one of my favorite artists. Jackson just announced another tour, starting in March, 2022.

2. Deep Purple, Caught In The Act (Going Down/Green Onions/Hot ‘Lanta/Dazed and Confused/Gimme Some Lovin’) . . . From the new Turning To Crime covers album, short excerpts from each song to form a seven-minute medley during which the band, as on the entire album, is clearly having lots of fun. Purple has played Green Onions on various tours since Steve Morse joined on guitar, replacing Ritchie Blackmore, in the mid-1990s so no surprise it’s included in the medley. As I mentioned last week about covers albums, I prefer new original material by bands I like, like Purple, but – as with the Stones’ Blue and Lonesome covers album – it’s clear the boys had great fun putting it together and there are some interesting takes on the various tunes, in Purple’s case, like Bob Dylan’s Watching The River Flow, Love’s 7 and 7 Is and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well. Also interesting, given the pandemic, IS how they recorded it as detailed in the album liner notes – mostly from each band members’ home studios aside from singer Ian Gillan who went into an an outside studio.

3. Ohio Players, Jive Turkey . . . I just wanted to look at sexy Ohio Players album covers, in this case Skin Tight. No, seriously, I love funk, and the Players, and this came up during a station computer search of stuff I’d previously downloaded, hadn’t played the Players in a while, so here we are.

4. Gov’t Mule, She Said She Said . . . I love it when the Mule does cover tunes in fact I pulled this off a CD I burned for myself long ago that features the Allmans offshoot doing covers of various classic rock tunes over the years. This one, from The Beatles of course, begins a mini-set of covers from the Revolver album, concluding with The Beatles themselves.

    

5. Phil Collins, Tomorrow Never Knows . . . From Collins’ debut album, Face Value, in 1981 after which he started concurrent careers while becoming arguably as big, or bigger, solo as was Genesis.

6. The Beatles, I’m Only Sleeping . . . Always liked this one, from Revolver, to conclude our little mini-set of Beatles’ tunes. Sgt. Pepper gets most of the hype but Revolver and Rubber Soul, when the boys – perhaps taking Dylan’s little dig at Lennon that ‘your songs don’t say anything’ seriously – really went to another level creatively, are easily as good.

7. John Lennon, Bring On The Lucie (Freda People) . . . “All right boys, this is it, over the hill.” Lennon’s first line is worth the price of the album. Good song, too, from the Mind Games album, 1973.

8. Groundhogs, Strange Town . . . I love the ascending, hypnotic riff to this tune by these Brit blues-rock boys, from 1970’sThank Christ For The Bomb album.

9. BTO, Madison Avenue . . . An almost progressive tune, for this band at least, from the first post Randy Bachman album, Street Action, 1978. I remember having it on vinyl, almost out of curiousity at the time, and some years ago got it as a two-fer paired with the 1979 followup Rock ‘n’ Roll Nights. And you pretty much knew Randy had left simply by the album cover, of a woman, on the street, perhaps a hooker, which I doubt the strait-laced Bachman would ever have allowed. The band replaced Bachman with former April Wine member Jim Clench, who took over on bass while bassist C.F. (Fred) Turner moved to rhythm guitar alongside lead guitarist Blair Thornton and drummer Rob Bachman. And Turner handled most of the lead vocals, which suited me because I always liked the BTO songs he sung best and outside of, off top of my head, Takin’ Care of Business and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, maybe Looking Out For No. 1, Randy Bachman’s vocals (Rock Is My Life, This Is My Song, anyone, yecch) are pretty much embarrassing in my view.

10. Robin Trower, A Tale Untold . . . Trower was amazing during his heyday (he’s still going) in the 1970s, especially with the late great James Dewar on bass/lead vocals. This typical tour de force is from the For Earth Below album, which featured the typically cool Trower album covers of the period.

11. Social Distortion, I Was Wrong . . . My favorite Social Distortion tune and the one that got me into the band, late, 1996 via the White Light, White Heat, White Trash album (cool cover) which by that point was their fifth studio platter but hell, when before this more commercial single was released did anyone ever hear Social Distortion on mainstream radio? Or ever again? They also did a nice cover of Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire, too, but I decided to go with this song, this time. Ring Of Fire maybe another week.

12. Ozzy Osbourne, Diary Of A Madman . . . Almost prog metal, this title cut from Ozzy’s 1981 album. Iron Maiden, at the time just one album into their career, was probably listening, learning and being influenced.

13. KK’s Priest, Hellfire Thunderbolt . .. Founding member/guitarist K.K. Downing left Judas Priest under acrimonious circumstances in 2011. In the meantime, he wrote a book about the band, and this kick butt metallic rocker is from his first post-Priest album, out just recently this year, featuring former Priest singer Ripper Owens on lead vocals. Owens, of course, famously was found by Priest in a Preist covers band when the group was searching for a replacement for Rob Halford, who left Priest for a few years to go solo during the mid-1990s. Owens did two studio albums with Priest, which I liked, before returning to relative obscurity (until now) once Halford returned for a reunion tour in 2004 (which I saw, good show) and subsequent studio work.

14. Judas Priest, Blood Red Skies . . . And here’s Priest before all of the drama, a kinetic extended piece from the Ram It Down album, 1988.

15. Marianne Faithfull, What’s The Hurry . . . Was listening to Faithfull’s terrific Broken English album, for first time in a long time in its entirety, in the gym the other day, had somewhat forgotten this propulsive track from that record.

16. The Rolling Stones, Salt Of The Earth . . . Keith Richards croaks out the opening line in one of his early forays into singing on Stones’ tunes, then in comes Mick Jagger on this closer to 1968’s Beggars Banquet which marked the beginning of a whole new phase of brilliance from the band.

17. The Tragically Hip, Born In The Water . . . I wanted to play a Hip song today. Road Apples album is always a good source.

18. Headstones, Where Does It Go? . . . See the Hip reference above. Love these guys, Headstones, maybe more than I like the Hip, actually. Darker, dirtier, harder, rougher. . . maybe, to employ a cliché, akin to a Beatles-Stones thing although there, too, I love both bands.

19. Tom Waits, Jockey Full Of Bourbon . . . I don’t even drink bourbon. Nor does Waits, anymore, apparently, having kicked booze. But drinking songs are great, aren’t they?

20. Rare Earth, Long Time Leavin’ . . . Had my parents not sent we kids off to day camp, a ‘thing’ back in the early 1970s, perhaps still is, who knows how or if I would have gotten into Rare Earth. But, I did, because one of the camp counselors kept playing the shit out of Rare Earth’s live album. So, here we are. Speaking of day camp, mentioning it brought to mind an old Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown and Linus are celebrating the last day of school only to have Lucy immediately herd them onto a bus headed for summer camp, to which Linus asks, “whatever happened to going home?”

21. U2, Last Night On Earth . . . OK, so I do a ‘deep cuts’ show with allowances (my rules) to play the occasional single, which this is, one of six, (SIX) U2 released out of 12 tracks on their 1997 album Pop.

22. The Doors, When The Music’s Over . . . And off we go, for another week, via this epic Doors’ track from their second album, Strange Days. Akin, somewhat, to The End from the first studio album by the band. Great tunes, both.

1. Ian Hunter, Noises . . . Let’s make some noise, starting with this experimental-type track from Hunter’s 1981 new wavish-album, Short Back ‘n’ Sides. And it presages, later in the set, some late 1970s-early 1980s my college days new wave, including one by The Clash, whose Mick Jones co-produced the Hunter album while Clash drummer Topper Headon played on a few tracks.

2. Led Zeppelin, Night Flight . . . Always have liked the intro to this one from Physical Graffiti. The whole song, too, from a great album. Every major band seems to have a great what were then double vinyl studio albums. Zep has this one, Beatles’ White Album, Stones’ Exile On Main St., The Clash London Calling, just to name a few.

3. The Rolling Stones, Let It Loose . . . Speaking of Exile…Two weeks ago I played the great Torn and Frayed from the album, settling on it from among a group of personal choices that week that included Let It Loose and Loving Cup. So you can probably expect Loving Cup next week, or soon.

4. Molly Hatchet, Bounty Hunter . . . One of those tunes, and a great up tempo track it is, that I had previously loaded and came up in our station computer when I was looking for the Ian Hunter song, Noises, that started tonight’s show.

5. Deep Purple, Fools . . . Played this one long long time ago, from the Fireball album,which prompted a show follower to comment that I play a fair bit of Deep Purple. True. I love Deep Purple, every version of the band. Which reminds me, I have to pick up their new covers album, just out. It’s called Turning To Crime and features a diverse set of tracks including Love’s 7 and 7 is, Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken, Bob Dylan’s Watching The River Flow and Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well, among others. When I heard they were doing a new album, then heard it was covers, I was a bit disappointed as I prefer original material but I’ve heard it online and it’s good, but I still like getting physical copies of albums by bands I like.

6. Warren Zevon, Genius . . . I first heard this typically great Zevon track on a latter-day compilation titled Genius: The Best of Warren Zevon, which prompted me to fill in some blanks I had in his catalog and get the song’s parent album, My Ride’s Here. Both the compilation and the studio album were released in 2002. And Zevon came to mind via yet another recent fun Twitter discussion with fellow music aficionados.

    

7. Bruce Cockburn, All’s Quiet On The Inner City Front . . . And so, master singer-songwriter Zevon propels us into a mini-set by notable Canadian singer-songwriters, starting with this one from Cockburn’s 1981 Inner City Front album.

8. Gordon Lightfoot, Hangdog Hotel Room . . . I played Songs The Minstrel Sang in a recent show, which prompted me to dig back into Lightfoot’s 1978 Endless Wire album, from which this track also comes. I like the guitar work but at the risk of erring, am loath to credit any one of the three session players, plus Lightfoot, who play the instrument on the album.

9. Murray McLauchlan, Harder To Get Along . . . Speaking of some nice guitar work, here’s a fine one with a nice sort of descending rhythm motif, from McLauchlan’s 1976 On The Boulevard album. Typically good lyrics, too.

10. The Guess Who, Got To Find Another Way . . . A nice ballad from the American Woman sessions that didn’t originally make the cut but was later included in various remastered re-releases of the album.

11. Steve Winwood, Spanish Dancer . . . Difficult to pick a favorite tune from Winwood’s smash 1979 album Arc Of A Diver, it’s so good front to back but this song has always been right up there for me.

12. Roxy Music, Angel Eyes . . . There are at least three versions of this tune. The one I’m playing, and prefer, is the more rock-oriented album cut from 1979’s Manifesto. A re-recorded, shorter and more disco-type version was later released as a single along with an extended near seven-minute dance remix.

     

13. Elvis Costello, The Bridge I Burned . . . I pretty much gave up on Costello after his early, angry young man phase though I recognize he’s a great artist. Yet, unlike say, where I’ve followed his contemporary Joe Jackson’s various muses over the years, I really didn’t ride with Elvis much beyond about 1986. Then I recently found the perfect thing for me, a compilation, Extreme Honey, I had not to that point even heard of but found cheap in a used CD store. It came out in 1997 so is obviously already way out of date but for me it’s great because it collects tracks from albums like Spike and Mighty Like A Rose and beyond that, that I tried but gave up on. Yet by distilling it all down, it’s more palatable, for me, anyway. This song wasn’t on any of those albums, though. Costello wrote it, new, for the compilation after initially recording Prince’s song Pop Life only to have Prince deny Costello the right to release it. So, Elvis wrote and performed The Bridge I Burned in an arrangement he had envisioned for the Prince tune.

14. Linda Ronstadt, Girls Talk . . . Speaking of Costello, Dave Edmunds made great hay with this Elvis-penned tune on his 1979 album Repeat When Necessary. Ronstadt did it a year later on her new-wavish Mad Love album. And so it launches us into a little new-wave themed set. Costello himself released Girls Talk as a B-side to his drastically rearranged 1980 single I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, originally popularized by Sam and Dave in a soul ballad version, 1967. And all of this research got me listening to a bunch of Sam and Dave tunes.

15. Martha and The Muffins/M + M, Several Styles Of Blonde Girls Dancing . . . From 1983’s Danseparc album, the start of a brief period when, due to a spat between then-current and former band members, the Muffins briefly went by M + M, but the new moniker never really took hold and both names, as a compromise, appeared on the album cover, after which the band soon reverted to going by Marth and The Muffins.

     

16. Ian Dury, Wake Up And Make Love With Me . . . I got into Dury, this tune and the album New Boots and Panties!! a year after its September 1977 release. One of those horizon-expanding college things where a classmate was driving us both to a party and threw a cassette of the album into the player. And so began my foray into Dury and all kinds of similar stuff that was breaking big at the time.

17. Teenage Head, Somethin’ Else . . . Kick butt, and what else is Teenage Head but kick butt, version of the Eddie Cochran tune, from 1980’s Frantic City album, and a great album it is.

18. Graham Parker and The Rumour, Howlin’ Wind . . . Title cut from Parker’s 1976 debut album, produced by Nick Lowe at the beginning of that period that would soon lead to Parker, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson and Lowe himself breaking big as leaders of a new wave of artists.

19. Talking Heads, Cities . . . Propulsive track from Fear Of Music, one of those albums one buys for a hit single (Life During Wartime) and then wind up liking the whole thing. Cities was actually the third single released from the album (the second was I Zimbra) but I don’t remember ever hearing Cities on radio, my memory perhaps dulled by time.

20. Flash and The Pan, War Games . . . I’ve always played Flash and The Pan’s first two albums, the self-titled debut and Lights In The Night the most. They’re arguably the group’s most popular to this day but the more I’ve listened to Headlines, 1982’s third release, over the years the more I think it’s as good. And this short epic, if short can be construed as epic, is among many of Headlines’ fine tunes.

21. The Clash, Police On My Back . . . From the sprawling (3 vinyl records upon release) 1980 album Sandinista! Written by Eddy Grant (well known for his 1983 smash hit Electric Avenue), it was originally done by his band The Equals, during the 1960s. Yet another example of what the Stones’ Keith Richards has said about the best thing musicians can do, pass it on. So you’re a college student immersed in The Clash at the time and then you dig into some of their source material for a cover tune and discover The Equals. And while you might not become a huge fan, you’re at least aware of them and might become one.

22. The Police, Shadows In The Rain . . . I’ve always liked this hypnotic track from 1980’s Zenyatta Mondatta. Sting sped and jazzed it up in a rearranged version on his 1985 debut solo album, The Dream Of The Blue Turtles, which I had, and while his solo version is good, I much prefer the Police take on the tune.

23. Jethro Tull, Baker St. Muse . . . And back we go, and run out the show, with more let’s say traditional fare, for me in terms of bands like Tull, the Stones etc. who I grew up on and will forever listen to. This is a true epic, 16 minutes and change, from the Minstrel In The Gallery album. But, like say The Allman Brothers Band albeit in a different context and genre, Tull can do epic tracks like this yet in such a way that it’s never boring and doesn’t seem like it’s 16 minutes long. A story song, in Ian Anderson’s words “a series of little observations on the pavements of Baker Street (London, where he was living at the time) and its surrounding area – the people you meet, the things you see.”