So Old It’s New archive

Facebook page

A St. Patrick’s Day set featuring Irish bands/artists and/or songs about Ireland. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. The Boomtown Rats, Up All Night
2. Taste, On The Boards
3. Rory Gallagher, Walk On Hot Coals (from Check Shirt Wizard Live In ’77)
4. Van Morrison, Cyprus Avenue
5. Gary Moore & Phil Lynott, Out In The Fields
6. U2, Bullet The Blue Sky
7. Paul McCartney/Wings, Give Ireland Back To The Irish
8. John Lennon, The Luck Of The Irish
9. The Chieftains with The Rolling Stones, The Rocky Road To Dublin
10. Rory Gallagher, Too Much Alcohol (live, Irish Tour ’74)
11. Van Morrison, It’s All In The Game/You Know What They’re Writing About (from Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast)
12. Rory Gallagher, A Million Miles Away (from Check Shirt Wizard Live In ’77)
13. The Chieftains with Mick Jagger, The Long Black Veil
14. Van Morrison, Rave On John Donne/Rave On Part Two (from Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast)
15. Rory Gallagher, Bad Penny
16. Van Morrison, And The Healing Has Begun
17. U2, Exit

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Boomtown Rats, Up All Night . . . While I was still – to paraphrase the lyrics to the song All The Young Dudes – for the most part at home with my Beatles and my Stones, there was a period during my college days and for a brief time after when I was sampling most of the punk and new wave stuff coming to North America from across the Atlantic. Not too many of those bands seemed to have staying power, though, or at least were more singles sellers than full album artists, which is fine. So my ride with the Rats was shortlived – three albums or, I should probably say, three songs – I Don’t Like Mondays from 1979’s The Fine Art Of Surfacing, Banana Republic from Mondo Bongo in 1981 and Up All Night, a catchy tune/ode to insomnia from V Deep in 1982. “Up all night ooh za za ooh staying up all night.” V Deep, by the way, is pronounced ‘five’ Deep as in the Roman numeral V, representing the group’s fifth album and the fact they had gone from a six- to five-piece band. Their commercial performance was falling, however, and soon enough frontman/chief songwriter Bob Geldof was making a bigger name for himself as an activist and organizer of benefit concerts like Live Aid and Live 8. The band broke up in 1986, two years after their to that point last studio album, 1984’s In the Long Grass. They reformed in 2013 for live gigs and released a studio album, Citizens Of Boomtown, in 2020.

2. Taste, On The Boards . . . Beautiful jazz-blues title track to Taste’s second album, with bandleader Rory Gallagher adding saxophone passages to the piece. On The Boards was Taste’s final studio album, coming out in 1970 although two live albums, Live Taste and Live At The Isle Of Wight, both recorded at 1970 concerts, were released in 1971 after the band broke up with Gallagher going solo. Live At The Isle Of Wight was reissued in expanded form in 2015 and retitled What’s Going On – Live At The Isle Of Wight.

3. Rory Gallagher, Walk On Hot Coals (from Check Shirt Wizard Live In ’77) . . . Speaking of Gallagher’s solo career . . . Live fireworks from the late great guitarist on this blistering version of a track originally on his 1973 studio album Blueprint. It’s one of two songs I’ve selected for the show from the 2020 archival release Check Shirt Wizard, put together from four concerts in early 1977.

4. Van Morrison, Cyprus Avenue . . . Slowing the pace down with this evocative jazz/folk rock piece from Van The Man’s 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks. It’s one of those critically-acclaimed records that can admittedly take some time to appreciate but once immersed in its grooves, once you ‘get it’, you’re forever in its embrace. The song is a wistful reflection on Morrison’s adolescence including, depending upon interpretation, apparent frustration regarding an unattainable love interest that he can only observe but not reach, one living outside his own economic station. Morrison described Cyprus Avenue as “a street in Belfast, a place where there’s a lot of wealth. It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.”

5. Gary Moore & Phil Lynott, Out In The Fields . . . Piercing guitar playing from Moore on this rocker, an anti-war anthem about ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, issued as a single in 1985 in a singing and playing collaboration with Lynott, Thin Lizzy’s frontman and Moore’s one-time bandmate in that group. The track also appeared on Moore’s 1985 hard rock/metal studio album Run For Cover which features Deep Purple family tree members Glenn Hughes (bass, vocals) and Don Airey (keyboards) among other of Moore’s musical friends.

6. U2, Bullet The Blue Sky . . . Nothing to do with Ireland, but it is from an Irish band and happens to be among my favorite U2 songs. From the 1987 blockbuster album The Joshua Tree, it’s a musically and lyrically powerful, politically-charged track inspired by U.S. involvement in Central America though its themes apply anywhere. U2 of course often wrote about their home country and in particular ‘The Troubles’ in the band’s hit single from 1983’s War album, Sunday Bloody Sunday.

7. Paul McCartney/Wings, Give Ireland Back To The Irish . . . Speaking of Bloody Sunday . . . an uncharacteristically overtly political song by McCartney, released as Wings’ first single in February 1972 in response to Bloody Sunday, an incident during ‘The Troubles’ when British soldiers shot and killed 13 civilians, injuring others, during a protest march in Derry, Northern Ireland. The song was banned from broadcast in the UK by the BBC and others, and McCartney was condemned by British media for his seemingly pro-IRA stance. The single, a mid-tempo rocker which topped the Irish charts, still made No. 16 in the UK and the top 40 elsewhere. It later appeared on CD reissues of Wild Life, the 1971 debut album by McCartney’s Wings band.

8. John Lennon, The Luck Of The Irish . . . A few months after the McCartney single, out came his old Beatles’ bandmate Lennon (with wife Yoko Ono) and his similar take on ‘The Troubles’ on this folk/waltz piece from the 1972 album Some Time In New York City, released in June. By that time, the former songwriting partners had resolved to stop taking shots at each other through song and, apparently, albeit briefly, separately took aim at the UK. The Luck Of The Irish was written in late 1971 and had already been performed live before its studio release. It was one of two such Irish situation-themed diatribes on Some Time In New York City, the other being the pulsating rocker Sunday Bloody Sunday, a title U2 later used for their musically and lyrically unrelated hit single.

9. The Chieftains with The Rolling Stones, The Rocky Road To Dublin . . . A mischievous momentary lick of the riff from (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction spices up this treatment of a fast-paced Irish folk tune done by world-renowned Dubliners The Chieftains teamed with the obviously delightfully engaged Rolling Stones. The track is from the 1995 release The Long Black Veil. The album, credited to The Chieftains, featured an all-star aggregation of artists including Van Morrison, Sting, Sinead O’Connor, Mark Knopfler, Ry Cooder, Tom Jones, Colin James, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger – who I’ll get to in a bit, singing the title cut. Morrison also worked with The Chieftains on Irish Heartbeat, a 1983 album of mostly traditional tunes.

10. Rory Gallagher, Too Much Alcohol (from Irish Tour ’74) . . . More live magic from Mr. Gallagher on this extended blues workout, a cover of a tune written by American bluesman J.B. Hutto.

11. Van Morrison, It’s All In The Game/You Know What They’re Writing About (from Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast) . . . Morrison combines the standard It’s All In The Game with an original piece in a meditative, emotional performance during a March, 1983 show released on his 1984 live album. The two songs first appeared back to back as the closing tracks on Morrison’s 1979 studio album Into The Music.

12. Rory Gallagher, A Million Miles Away (from Check Shirt Wizard Live In ’77) . . . Originally on the 1973 studio album Tattoo, beautiful mid-tempo blues rock propelled by Gallagher’s graceful guitar and lyrical imagery.

This hotel bar is full of people,
The piano man is really laying it down,
The old bartender is as high as a steeple,
So why tonight should I wear a frown? . . .

This hotel bar has lost all its people,
The piano man has caught the last bus home,
The old bartender just collapsed in the corner,
Why I’m still here, I just don’t know, I don’t know.

13. The Chieftains with Mick Jagger, The Long Black Veil . . . Spooky treatment, particularly the instrumental opening followed by Jagger’s haunting vocals on a traditional tune covered by countless artists, notably Johnny Cash and The Band. Colin James plays guitar and mandolin with Darryl Jones, bassist on most Stones’ studio albums and all tours since the departure of Bill Wyman in 1993, also contributing.

14. Van Morrison, Rave On John Donne/Rave On Part Two (from Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast) . . . A tribute to poets and visionaries in one of Morrison’s spiritual and mystical pieces. He name-checks John Donne and other literary figures (William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman among others) in a typically passionate vocal and instrumental performance blending blues, jazz, and Irish folk influences. And as of this show, off into a Van The Man phase I go. Again.

15. Rory Gallagher, Bad Penny . . . Or a Rory Gallagher phase, or one with any of these excellent artists. I always say that the best song/artist/album is the one you are listening to right now, in the moment, if you like it. That said, if I had to pick just one Gallagher tune, pretty sure it would be Bad Penny, a gritty blues-rocker from his 1979 album Top Priority. Great riff, searing solo, biting lyrics. I never tire of it, as soon as it ends, off I often go with it again.

16. Van Morrison, And The Healing Has Begun . . . Soulful song from 1979’s Into The Music, a terrific tune featuring the best of all instruments on his albums, Morrison’s voice.

“And we’ll walk down the avenue again, and we’ll sing all the songs from way back when, yeah, and we’ll walk down the avenue again and the healing has begun. . . . I want you to put on your pretty summer dress. You can wear your Easter bonnet and all the rest and I wanna make love to you yes, yes, yes.”

It occurred to me while prepping the show, just popped into my head after all these years and only he would know for sure, but the tapestry of threads that is a life had me wondering whether Morrison in 1979 was, at least figuratively, referring to that girl back on Cyprus Avenue from the Astral Weeks album in 1968?

17. U2, Exit . . . Dark, intense, atmospheric track from The Joshua Tree that ebbs and flows, slowly building to a climax then receding only to speed up again before the final fade.

So Old It’s New archive

Facebook page

A folk rock-oriented set from Canadian-born artists Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn. I’m playing Young’s 1978 album Comes A Time, Mitchell’s Blue from 1971 and Cockburn’s Humans, released in 1980.

My individual album thoughts appear under each record’s song list.

Neil Young – Comes A Time

1. Goin’ Back
2. Comes A Time
3. Look Out For My Love
4. Lotta Love
5. Peace Of Mind
6. Human Highway
7. Already One
8. Field Of Opportunity
9. Motorcycle Mama
10. Four Strong Winds

An album that balances folk and country influences and is also a showcase for Nicolette Larson, Young’s harmony vocals accomplice throughout most of the album including a great performance on the lone rocker on the record, the duet Motorcycle Mama. Interestingly, Larson didn’t sing on Young’s Lotta Love, which later became one of her solo hits.

Joni Mitchell – Blue

1. All I Want
2. My Old Man
3. Little Green
4. Carey
5. Blue
6. California
7. This Flight Tonight
8. River
9. A Case Of You
10. The Last Time I Saw Richard

Likely Mitchell’s most acclaimed album, a great fusion of folk, jazz and storytelling, said by some to be arguably the most confessional singer-songwriter album ever made as she laid bare her soul during and after relationships with Graham Nash and James Taylor, among others. Hard rock band Nazareth transformed This Flight Tonight into a hit single in 1973 to the point that Mitchell, who liked their version (and, no doubt, the royalty cheques), took to introducing it in her own concerts as “a Nazareth song.”

Bruce Cockburn – Humans

1. Grim Travellers
2. Rumours Of Glory
3. More Not More
4. You Get Bigger As You Go
5. What About The Bond
6. How I Spent My Fall Vacation
7. Guerilla Betrayed
8. Tokyo
9. Fascist Architecture
10. The Rose Above The Sky

In late 2022, the American website allmusic.com did an article on Cockburn headlined ‘Canada’s Forgotten Singer-Songwriter”. Outside of Canada, at least. He’s legendary here and rightly so but in fairness, the article was positive about his work; it was merely discussing his US success, or relative lack thereof, as compared to that of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

Years before that article, I experienced that sentiment firsthand. I was living in Peace River, northern Alberta, went out west 1981-83 for my first journalism job and wound up sharing a house with several people including a woman from Washington state who was getting into Cockburn and one day approached me, marvelling at how good he was but surprised at his relative anonymity in the United States. That’s not unique to Cockburn; many artists are popular in some countries but not in others, for various reasons including the distribution and/or marketing of their albums, or have particularly passionate fan bases in one country, like Cheap Trick in Japan. In any case, she’d never heard Cockburn, or of him, nor had any of her American circle of friends, until her entry point since moving north, the Humans album. By then, I was a big fan, having gotten into Cockburn myself not much earlier, during my second-last year of college back in Ontario via his previous album, the 1979 release Dancing In The Dragon’s Jaws and its hit single Wondering Where The Lions Are.

A great artist throughout his discography with by now many perhaps universally or at least relatively well-known tunes like The Trouble With Normal, Lovers In A Dangerous Time, If I Had A Rocket Launcher and Call It Democracy , among others. But Humans, which featured the hit single Tokyo (at least in Canada) remains probably his favorite of mine, a superbly consistent release.

So Old It’s New archive

Facebook page

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

1. The Rolling Stones, Look What The Cat Dragged In
2. The Monkees, Take A Giant Step
3. The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows
4. John Lennon, Meat City
5. Paul McCartney/Wings, Rockestra Theme
6. Paul McCartney/Wings, Old Siam, Sir
7. The Who, The Good’s Gone
8. Jethro Tull, Drink From The Same Well
9. Frank Zappa, Cosmik Debris
10. The Stooges, Dirt
11. Three Dog Night, Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues)
12. Joe Cocker, Blue Medley (I’ll Drown In My Own Tears/When Something Is Wrong With My Baby/I’ve Been Loving You Too Long) live, from Mad Dogs & Englishmen)
13. The Guess Who, Love And A Yellow Rose
14. Them, The Story of Them Parts 1 and 2
15. Detroit (featuring Mitch Ryder), Rock ‘N Roll
16. Peter Gabriel, The Family And The Fishing Net (from Peter Gabriel/Plays Live)
17. R.E.M., Living Well Is the Best Revenge
18. Queen, It’s Late

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Rolling Stones, Look What The Cat Dragged In . . . Garage riff rocker featuring some particularly fine soloing from guitarist Ron Wood, from 2005’s A Bigger Bang album. The song is described as ‘an absolute rocket’ in the album-by-album, track-by-track book The Rolling Stones: All The Songs. The riff bears a resemblance and is perhaps an homage to the 1987 INXS hit Need You Tonight although taken at a much faster tempo by the Stones.

2. The Monkees, Take A Giant Step . . . Terrific proto-psychedelic track from the self-titled 1966 debut album, written by the powerhouse songwriting team and onetime partners in love Carole King and Gerry Goffin. The pitter-patter percussion hook at various points just ‘makes’ the song for me. It was the B-side to the single Last Train To Clarksville and was later covered by bluesman/genre bending artist Taj Mahal in a rearranged version that was the title track to his 1969 double album Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home, comprised of electric (Giant Step) and acoustic (De Ole Folks At Home) albums.

3. The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows . . . Speaking of taking a giant step outside your mind, to quote the Monkees’ lyric . . . A mesmerizing, drug-influenced masterpiece from the 1966 album Revolver, a great leap forward in studio sophistication for The Beatles, beyond even the advances they’d made on the previous record, 1965’s Rubber Soul. The entire period is nicely summed up in the 1994 book The Complete Guide To The Music Of The Beatles as a time when John Lennon and Paul McCartney, still at the time the band’s prime songwriters, began “creating mind movies, extending webs of noise that were based around tape loops and ‘found sounds’.”

4. John Lennon, Meat City . . . Jagged, distortion-fueled funky boogie rocker that was the compellingly chaotic B-side to the single Mind Games, the title cut to that 1973 album.

5. Paul McCartney/Wings, Rockestra Theme . . . From the last album by Wings, Back To The Egg, released in 1979 before McCartney returned to releasing material solely under his own name. I distinctly recall the hype around not so much the album as this track due to it featuring a who’s who of rock stars of the day who formed the ‘rockestra’. Among the biggest names: David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Pete Townshend (The Who), John Paul Jones and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones of Faces fame. Jones by then was a member of The Who, having replaced Keith Moon, who had been scheduled to appear on the song but died a month before the recording sessions. Released as a single in France, the guitar-driven track won the 1980 Grammy Award for best rock instrumental performance.

6. Paul McCartney/Wings, Old Siam, Sir . . . Always loved this tune, also from Back To The Egg. A gritty rocker with a relatively slow tempo that just sort of marches along, to great effect. It was the B-side to Rockestra Theme in France, an A-side in the UK where it made No. 35 on the charts and a B-side to the US/North American single Arrow Through Me.

7. The Who, The Good’s Gone . . . From the band’s 1965 debut album, My Generation, a dark, droning song about a relationship breakup, apparently inspired by The Kinks’ song See My Friends that came out earlier the same year. Roger Daltrey’s vocals, sung in a deeper register than usual, fuels the brooding atmosphere.

8. Jethro Tull, Drink From The Same Well . . . Near 17-minute epic from the new Jethro Tull album, Curious Ruminant, released last Friday, March 7. After a listen or two, I’d describe the album as a placid overall performance and that’s meant in a positive way. It rocks in spots but overall is a very much flute-driven, meditative release. That’s particularly true of this song, an instrumental until halfway through. It was finally polished from a demo which, Tull leader Ian Anderson advises in his liner notes, had been lying around unfinished for several years.

9. Frank Zappa, Cosmik Debris . . . Funky, jazz-bluesy strut featuring Zappa’s typically great guitar and biting talk-singing delivery, from the 1974 album Apostrophe (‘)

10. The Stooges, Dirt . . . Primal, slow-burning blues, masterfully, menacingly ‘dirty’ indeed, from 1970’s Fun House album.

11. Three Dog Night, Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues) . . . Soulful number, written by Allen Toussaint, which naturally lends the song its New Orleans rhythm to go with Three Dog Night’s rock renderings. From the 1974 album Hard Labor whose cover art depicting the birth of a vinyl record was controversial. It was then re-released with a band-aid covering the birth but the original album art has since been restored on subsequent physical releases.

12. Joe Cocker, Blue Medley (I’ll Drown In My Own Tears/When Something Is Wrong With My Baby/I’ve Been Loving You Too Long) live, from Mad Dogs & Englishmen) . . . A typical vocal tour de force from Cocker backed by his traveling road show of singers/musicians that included Leon Russell, Rita Coolidge, session drummer supreme Jim Keltner, saxophone specialist Bobby Keys of Rolling Stones touring and session fame and various members of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and Eric Clapton’s Derek and The Dominos.

13. The Guess Who, Love And A Yellow Rose . . . A great deep cut from the 1969 album Wheatfield Soul. I’d wager that if you played this atypical psychedelic raga-rock in spots piece for someone who’s only ever heard the band’s hits, they’d never guess – unless they recognized Burton Cumming’s voice but even then – that it was The Guess Who. And that’s a cool thing, the essence of an album track.

14. Them, The Story of Them Parts 1 and 2 . . . Early, bluesy brilliance from Them featuring the incomparable vocals of Van The Man Morrison, all of that and hypnotic harmonica playing, too.

15. Detroit (featuring Mitch Ryder), Rock ‘N Roll . . From the one and only album Ryder, of Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels fame, released under the band name Detroit. It came out in 1971 and Lou Reed liked this cover of his Velvet Underground song so much he was quoted as saying the Detroit version was how the song was supposed to sound. Reed then recruited Detroit guitarist Steve Hunter for his own band, with Hunter appearing on the 1973 Reed studio album Berlin and subsequent live albums Rock ‘n Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live.

16. Peter Gabriel, The Family And The Fishing Net (from Peter Gabriel/Plays Live) . . . A typically percussive soundscape of a song about wedding rituals that is even more pronounced in the live environment. It was originally released on Gabriel’s fourth solo album, released in 1982 and featuring the hit single Shock The Monkey. Each of Gabriel’s first four albums were titled simply ‘Peter Gabriel’ although, to Gabriel’s chagrin, a sticker with the word ‘Security’ was slapped on the album wrapping in North America, which is what it became known as for many.

17. R.E.M., Living Well Is the Best Revenge . . . Fiery, fast-paced rocker that, appropriately enough, kicks off Accelerate, the band’s 2008 studio album of largely up-tempo tunes.

18. Queen, It’s Late . . . A terrific track written by guitarist Brian May in the form of a three-scene play alternating between power balladry and hard rock, from 1977’s News Of The World, the album that gave us the ubiquitous We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions.

A progressive rock show – ending with a Gov’t Mule blues/rock/jam band twist given the Mule’s take on a King Crimson song. Nothing to do with music, perhaps, but March 8 also happens to be the 54th anniversary of the so-called Fight Of The Century, the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match between then-unbeaten heavyweights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971. And, to digress further, 54 was my football number in high school and college. OK, enough of that; on with the show.

As for the artwork, it’s a progression of rocks, in acknowledgement of the progressive rock theme.

So Old It’s New show archive

Facebook page

1. King Crimson, Book Of Saturday
2. Genesis, The Musical Box
3. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Knife-Edge
4. Yes, The Gates Of Delirium
5. Soft Machine, Chloe And The Pirates
6. Kansas, The Pinnacle
7. Jethro Tull, Baker St. Muse
8. Supertramp, Rudy (live, from Paris)
9. Pink Floyd, Echoes
10. Gov’t Mule, 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson cover, live, from Mulennium)

My track-by-track tales:

1. King Crimson, Book Of Saturday . . . A natural for a Saturday show, from Crimson’s 1973 album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. A pastoral song with typically interesting instrumental accents courtesy Robert Fripp’s guitar and David Cross’s violin, all propelled by John Wetton’s warm vocals. Wetton was later part of the first lineup of prog/pop rock band Asia that also featured drummer Carl Palmer of Atomic Rooster and Emerson, Lake & Palmer fame, plus Yes-men Steve Howe on guitar and keyboardist Geoff Downes. Downes, back in Yes since 2011, played on the one-off Yes album Drama, released in 1980 featuring former Buggles members Downes and vocalist/bassistTrevor Horn of Video Killed The Radio Star fame. It was a controversial albeit I think excellent Yes release featuring my favorite track from that period, the metallic Machine Messiah.

2. Genesis, The Musical Box . . . A powerful performance of shifting elements of light and heavy music from 1971’s Nursery Cryme album, the first to feature drummer Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett in what fans of truly prog-period Genesis consider the classic lineup of Collins, Hackett, singer Peter Gabriel, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford and keyboardist Tony Banks.

3. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Knife-Edge . . . A hard-edged, dark track from ELP’s self-titled 1970 debut album, adapting classical pieces – as ELP often did – in this case by Czech composer Leoš Janáček and Germany’s Johann Sebastian Bach. The classical-meets-rock approach is, to use a term music critics love to employ, accurate but overused so I write it with tongue planted firmly in cheek, “quintessential” ELP.

4. Yes, The Gates Of Delirium . . . Music is is an experience often fueled by one’s mood, so while obviously I’m primed for progressive rock for this show, it’s still fun to suggest that Yes represents the ultimate in prog-rock excess. Between 1972 and 1974 the band released three studio albums – Close To The Edge, double vinyl album Tales From Topographic Oceans and Relayer, from which The Gates Of Delirium comes. Total song count over the three albums: 10 – three on Close To The Edge (albeit two of them featuring multi-part suites, essentially songs in themselves), four (one per vinyl album side) on Topographic Oceans and three on Relayer. Relayer is the only Yes studio album to feature keyboardist Patrick Moraz, who brought jazz fusion elements to the party. The 22-minute Gates Of Delirium is loosely based on the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and includes heavy rock portions depicting battle, with the soothing final section, Soon, extracted as a single.

5. Soft Machine, Chloe And The Pirates . . . Hauntingly beautiful, dreamlike jazz fusion from Six, the 1973 release split between live and studio albums, by which time the band and its ever-changing roster of musicians had long since abandoned vocals and become a purely instrumental unit.

6. Kansas, The Pinnacle . . . Perhaps the, er, pinnacle of Kansas’s progressive rock achievements? Difficult to say, lots to choose from although this symphonic epic from the 1975 album Masque is up there with the band’s best such statements. It took me a while to embrace Kansas as a prog act. Like perhaps many people, I discovered them via their 1970s hit singles Carry On Wayward Son and Dust In The Wind and aside from, in high school, owning Dust In The Wind’s parent album Point Of Know Return and thus discovering excellent songs like Portrait (He Knew), I really wasn’t much aware of their output beyond those singles and compilation albums. Until, that is, I got into other progressive rock acts, almost exclusively British bands like Genesis, Yes, ELP and King Crimson and finally decided to take a full crack at this American act that was travelling some of the same territory. It’s been a rewarding experience.

7. Jethro Tull, Baker St. Muse . . . I’m a big Jethro Tull fan and about to go out and purchase the new album Curious Ruminant, released today, once I finish writing these track tales on Friday, March 7, in advance of Saturday’s show. Curious Ruminant is the suddenly wildly productive band’s third album in four years after a long hiatus of formal Jethro Tull releases during which leader/singer/flautist/multi-instrumentalist Ian Anderson was releasing albums under his own name, eventually essentially stamping his solo band with the Tull label.

The new album has been getting mostly good to excellent reviews, despite the challenges faced by Anderson’s ‘shot’ voice which is too painful even for me, fan that I am, to consider ever seeing the band live again since the disappointment of a less-than stellar 2007 gig in Toronto. The show was still decent enough, but not up to previous standards I had experienced. But the studio setting, particularly on new material, can be tailored to adapt to those vocal limitations, as has been the case on recent Anderson and Tull releases. We shall see and hear of course. I’ve heard a couple earlier-released tracks online, they’re fine, harken somewhat back to the period of the album Songs From The Wood in 1977, and I plan to play at least one cut from the new record on Monday night’s show.

All of which is a long, roundabout way of saying that the new album features a long song – Drink From The Same Well – of exactly the same length, 16 minutes, 42 seconds, as Baker St. Muse from 1975’s Minstrel In The Gallery album. Perhaps that’s why the new track is titled, with a twinkle in Anderson’s eye, what it is. As for Baker St. Muse, the lyrics muse, with a typical Tull mixture of wit and introspective social commentary, about city life amid a musical menu of acoustic passages and full-band bombast.

8. Supertramp, Rudy (live, from Paris album) . . . A song from 1974’s studio album Crime Of The Century, taken from the live document of 1979’s Breakfast In America tour, when Supertramp was among the biggest bands on the planet. I saw the tour in Toronto, the last of three summer stadium shows before a combined audience of more than 150,000. I hadn’t planned on going but, on a whim one Saturday afternoon, a college friend and I decided to head to the show, ticketless but aiming to purchase entry from scalpers. We got tickets, at not much higher than list price, perhaps an hour before the gates opened only to soon discover that our tickets were forged, good forgeries but lacking the grocery store chain logo of legitimate tickets. Thankfully, they were general admission tickets, not assigned seats, we got in, unlikely these days with scanners and such, ran like hell in the stampede to the front of the stage, and enjoyed the show. But I remember thinking ‘there but for the grace of god go I’ might-have-been of that risky race to the Supertramp stage when, sadly, five months later dozens of people were trampled and 11 died in similar general admission circumstances at a Who show in Cincinnati, at least temporarily putting a pause on what’s known as festival seating.

9. Pink Floyd, Echoes . . . Mind-blowing music that closes 1971’s Meddle. It’s the album that arguably broke Pink Floyd more into the mainstream after the band’s earlier more experimental phase often guided in large measure by the creative vision of co-founder Syd Barrett. Thanks in part to drug use, Barrett sadly became increasingly erratic and was ousted from the band in 1968, leaving one to wonder sometimes in what direction Pink Floyd might have headed, would they have been as commercially successful, had he stayed. At 23 minutes and change, Echoes is an immersive experience in various musical forms from spacey atmospherics to blues-based improvisation, not to mention those ‘pings’ that start the song and always make me think of submarine warfare books and movies. And then, after Meddle, came The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall during a dynamically creative period through the 1970s.

10. Gov’t Mule, 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson cover, live, from Mulennium) . . . A twist in the prog tale, a progressive rock group’s song covered by a blues rock jam band. That said, 21st Century Schizoid Man, from King Crimson’s 1969 debut album In The Court Of The Crimson King is more hard rock, even metal, than it is progressive rock but then again, there are myriad heavy musical moments throughout the influential King Crimson catalogue. This live version by the Mule appeared on the band’s 2010 release Mulennium, documenting a show at the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia as 1999 became 2000. Gov’t Mule, a band led by guitarist/singer/songwriter Warren Haynes that formed in 1994 as a side project of The Allman Brothers Band, shines on its own material but has proved so proficient on covers of classic rock tunes that, long ago, I burned my own mix CD of that material.

The list is a long one, including The Beatles’ She Said She Said and Helter Skelter, Steppenwolf’s Don’t Step On The Grass, Sam, Free’s Mr. Big, War Pigs by Black Sabbath, Humble Pie’s 30 Days In The Hole, Deep Purple’s Maybe I’m A Leo and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man. The Mule has also pulled off excellent full covers albums like Dark Side Of The Mule (Pink Floyd), Stoned Side Of The Mule (The Rolling Stones) and Dub Side Of The Mule, a largely reggae-tinged release of Mule songs, classic rock covers and a set fronted by the late Toots Hibbert of the Maytals fame, featuring tracks like Pressure Drop and Reggae Got Soul.

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

So Old It’s New show archive

My Facebook page

1. Spirit, Fresh Garbage
2. Led Zeppelin, In My Time Of Dying
3. Bob Dylan, Ain’t Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody (previously unreleased track recorded live in 1980 in Montreal, taken from The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 Trouble No More 1979-1981, Dylan’s ‘Christian’ period
4. Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul
5. Slim Harpo, Folsom Prison Blues
6. Gary Moore, The Prophet
7. The Rolling Stones, Parachute Woman
8. Neil Young, Ordinary People
9. Little Feat, Rock & Roll Everynight (from Live From Neon Park)
10. J.J. Cale, Money Talks
11. T. Rex, Mambo Sun
12. Graham Parker, Howlin’ Wind
13. Parliament, Chocolate City
14. James Brown, It’s Too Funky In Here
15. Wilson Pickett, In The Midnight Hour (live extended version)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Spirit, Fresh Garbage . . . Jazzy psychedelic rock from Spirit’s self-titled debut album, 1968, featuring Randy California’s sharp guitar work. An impressive trip in various musical directions, all in just a shade over three minutes.

2. Led Zeppelin, In My Time Of Dying . . . From the 1975 double vinyl album Physical Graffiti. One of the things I think of when I think of Physical Graffiti, it being a double studio album, is how so many great groups/artists seem to have at least one classic double vinyl studio album in their catalogue. I’m not talking albums like Cream’s Wheels Of Fire which featured sides of live tracks; great as they were but I’m speaking of original studio material spread over four sides of vinyl. That’s a lot of work, lots of songs, yet in all cases, consistent quality which is a testament to these great artists’ abilities and creativity.

Albums like, and it’s quite a list, just off the top of my head while I’m sure I’ve left more than a few out: The Beatles White Album, Exile On Main St. from The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway from Genesis and yes, even the overblown and not to all tastes four-song, one per vinyl side, Yes album Tales From Topographic Oceans, arguably the ultimate in prog rock excess . . . Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, London Calling from The Clash followed up by their triple-vinyl studio release Sandinista! . . .

As for Zep’s Physical Graffiti and the song In My Time Of Dying . . . it’s a traditional, composer actually unknown – as far as is, uh, known 🙂 – but originally known to be first recorded if not perhaps written by bluesman Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. Bob Dylan recorded it on his debut album in 1962. Zep, as was their often disturbing plaigiaristic wont, ‘adapted’ it and took full songwriting credit although later releases of Graffiti do add Johnson to the credits. All that aside, I love that initial drum break – and John Bonham’s drums throughout – off the slow intro and then into Jimmy Page’s guitar riff, the full band comes in followed by Robert Plant’s bluesy vocal. A raw and apocalyptic adventure, nicely done.

3. Bob Dylan, Ain’t Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody (previously unreleased track recorded live in 1980 in Montreal, taken from The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 Trouble No More 1979-1981) . . . A fiery track including effective female gospel backup singers, from Dylan’s controversial ‘Christian’ period. It was a time during which he released the albums Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot Of Love although by Shot Of Love in 1981 it was evident he, mercurial and ‘do whatever I feel like, whenever’ as always, was already moving on from that period. He was soon to release the great 1983 album Infidels featuring Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame and former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar.

While the ‘Christian’ period is a controversial time in Dylan’s career given his then-new religious leanings, musically it was a brilliant slice in time during which he employed, as always, crack bands. Knopfler guested on guitar on Slow Train Coming while aces like latter-day Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett, keyboardist/producer/man for all seasons musically Al Kooper and session drumming ace Jim Keltner were in Dylan’s touring band. Over time, I think, the ‘religious’ controversy around that period of Dylan’s career has rightly faded such that one can simply enjoy the great music on the individual albums and in the live environment on Vol. 13 of his ongoing Bootleg Series, released in 2017. It’s really good.

4. Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul . . . The Dylan of today, or at least his talk-singing voice of recent times. It’s still very effective as he adapts to his aging vocal limitations. This 17-minute epic from the 2020 album Rough And Rowdy Ways takes us through the assassination of JFK in 1963 fused with all manner of cultural and musical references – The Rolling Stones’ ill-fated 1969 Altamont concert, John Lee Hooker, Guitar Slim, Etta James, members of The Beach Boys, Wolfman Jack, Billy Joel referenced not in name but by the title of his song Only The Good Die Young, the Eagles, Oscar Peterson, Houdini gets a mention, on and on . . . it’s Dylan at his best both in the spare musical treatment and lyrically in this tapestry of pop culture, history, and mysticism. Dylan has many great long songs. Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, Brownsville Girl, Highlands just to name three that immediately come to mind for me. Murder Most Foul takes its place among them.

5. Slim Harpo, Folsom Prison Blues . . . Harpo gives Johnny Cash’s signature song a swamp-blues groove makeover with classic, understated but effective harmonica playing on a track recorded in 1969. Another example of what to me makes a great cover – it’s a reinvention.

6. Gary Moore, The Prophet . . . Expressive slow blues via Moore’s guitar on this track from his 2001 album Back To The Blues as he continued to go back and forth between always interesting and compelling rock, hard rock/metal and blues albums. Sadly long lost to us in 2011 to a heart attack at age 58, Moore was marvelous as he continually straddled myriad genres – rock (including with Thin Lizzy for a time), hard rock/metal, and blues including not only his big hit Still Got The Blues (For You) but albums like Blues For Greeny, his 1995 covers tribute to Fleetwood Mac founder/guitarist Peter Green.

7. The Rolling Stones, Parachute Woman . . . A friend of mine has ‘Beggars Banquet’ nights, whether his mood is good, bad, or indifferent it seems to be his go-to album, drink(s) in hand, just letting one of the Stones’ classic albums envelop him. I like it, too. Including, from Beggars, this dirty, swampy blues track, full of murky guitar and Mick Jagger’s slurred, suggestive vocals as the Stones embrace their roots while adding their own sleazy edge.

The production is raw and unpolished, giving it an almost demo-like feel that works in its favor. It’s one of their deep cuts that perfectly captures the band’s bluesy swagger. And for me, major Stones fan, it’s amazing how, within a year, 1967 to 1968, and I like all their albums, the Stones progressed or changed from the pop/psychedelia of releases like Their Satanic Majesties Request and Between The Buttons to the down and dirty nature of Beggars Banquet and songs like Parachute Woman. It’s as if they were an entirely new and different band. However it transpired creatively, it signalled a new phase of The Rolling Stones, soon to be fortified by the addition of virtuoso guitarist Mick Taylor starting with the next album, Let It Bleed. It was a period that yielded the so-called in Stones’ lore ‘Big Four’ albums Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St. and I’ll always add a fifth album, the live Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out smack in the middle of the studio releases. All in all a widely acknowledged brilliant period for a band who I submit, despite some critics’ and fans’ views, has continued to issue quality music to the present day. The eclecticism of their output over 60-plus years of recording is remarkable.

8. Neil Young, Ordinary People . . . Dylan-like, albeit with grungier guitar accents, a lengthy ‘story’ track of 18 minutes that is so compelling it flies by. It’s from the Chrome Dreams II album released in 2007. There was a Chrome Dreams I, held back but eventually released in 2023 and it’s more a compilation – with some previously unreleased tracks – of reworked or remixed or otherwise redone songs like Like A Hurricane, Pocahontas, Sedan Delivery and Powderfinger that had appeared on previous Neil Young albums.

9. Little Feat, Rock & Roll Everynight (from Live From Neon Park) . . . Shaun Murphy on lead vocals during her time with the latter day configuration of Little Feat on this up-tempo boogie number from Live From Neon Park that first appeared on the band’s 1995 studio album Ain’t Had Enough Fun. Nice boogie-woogie piano by the perennial Bill Payne, co-founder of the band in 1969 along with (RIP) Lowell George. Payne is the last original member of Little Feat, which continues to record and tour to this day. And yes, ‘Everynight’ is written that way, one word, on both the studio and live albums.

10. J.J. Cale, Money Talks . . . Typical signature shuffle, detached delivery from J.J. and another example of his huge influence on people like Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. It’s from his eighth studio album, issued in 1983 and titled, wait for it, #8, in line with his fifth album (5) and 10th (Number 10) although J.J. for the most part used more creative/conventional titles like Naturally, his 1972 debut, Really, Shades, Grasshopper, Guitar Man, etc.

11. T. Rex, Mambo Sun . . . From 1971’s Electric Warrior, the album that featured the band’s big hit – at least in North America; the UK had long since embraced the group where it was consistently high on the charts – Get It On, which was retitled Bang a Gong (Get It On) for the US market. But, like, say, a band like Free known by some, particularly in North America, only for the hit single All Right Now, T. Rex was so much more. Earlier known as full dinosaur Tyrannosaurus Rex, they’d already seen success on home shores in the UK before the worldwide breakthrough as T. Rex via Get It On. Some things are just a matter of time and place. As for Mambo Sun, it’s the lead track on Electric Warrior and could easily have been a single; a funky, slinky song driven by Marc Bolan’s hypnotic guitar riff and signature boogie swagger.

12. Graham Parker, Howlin’ Wind . . . We’ve had some windy weather of late where I live in southern Ontario, so I’ve been planning to play this and finally getting around to doing so, naturally enough now that the wind, for the most part, has waned. It’s the title track from Parker’s debut album in 1976.

13. Parliament, Chocolate City . . . Typical funk excursion by Parliament in a tribute to Washington, D.C. and its black cultural influence, the title cut to an album released in April, 1975. The lyrics assign various political positions to black icons including Muhammad Ali as president, James Brown as VP, Stevie Wonder as Secretary of Fine Arts and Aretha Franklin as First Lady.

14. James Brown, It’s Too Funky In Here . . . Every time I listen to James Brown I find myself singing along, out loud or in my mind, engaging along with him in various vocalizations like ‘ugh, agh, humph, hump, yeah, yeh, oooww” . . . etc. You don’t even need any musical instruments, just groove to his voice. He’s another of those artists – Bob Dylan, Van Morrison come to my mind – whose voices are intrinsic to their sound. A song by any of them, great as covers can be, is simply not the same if it’s not them singing. And Brown kept that going through this cut from his 1979 album The Original Disco Man, and beyond.

15. Wilson Pickett, In The Midnight Hour (live extended version) . . . From the excellent, arguably all you really need 2-CD compilation A Man And A Half. It’s a previously unreleased version where Pickett, backed by Booker T. & The MGs, transforms one of his signature songs into an eight-minute, still recognizable soul workout.

I’m featuring The Concert For Bangladesh from George Harrison and musical friends released in December 1971 after the actual concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden on August 1 of that year. The show was a triumph for Harrison – whose 82nd birthday would have been this past Tuesday, February 25 – and set a precedent for benefit concerts, inspiring Live Aid and other major charity events. I’ve filled in the remainder of my 2-hour slot with a couple instrumental tracks from the “Apple Jam” portion of the former Beatle’s 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass.

So Old It’s New show archive

My Facebook page

The Concert For Bangladesh

1. George Harrison/Ravi Shankar Introduction
2. Ravi Shankar, Bangla Dhun
3. George Harrison, Wah-Wah
4. George Harrison, My Sweet Lord
5. George Harrison, Awaiting On You All
6. Billy Preston, That’s The Way God Planned It
7. Ringo Starr, It Don’t Come Easy
8. George Harrison and Leon Russell, Beware Of Darkness
9. George Harrison with Eric Clapton, While My Guitar Gently Weeps
10. Leon Russell, Jumpin’ Jack Flash/Youngblood
11. George Harrison, Here Comes The Sun
12. Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
13. Bob Dylan, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
14. Bob Dylan, Blowin’ In The Wind
15. Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man
16. Bob Dylan, Just Like A Woman
17. George Harrison, Something
18. George Harrison, Bangla Desh

Apple Jam (from All Things Must Pass)

19. Plug Me In
20. Out Of The Blue

My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list and are also on my Facebook page.

So Old It’s New archive

1. Elton John, Have Mercy On The Criminal
2. Black Sabbath, Falling Off The Edge Of The World
3. Steppenwolf, Renegade
4. Bad Company, Painted Face
5. Warren Zevon, Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner (live, from Learning To Flinch)
6. The Tragically Hip, Fight
7. Roxy Music, My Only Love (from Roxy Music Live, a document of the band’s 2001 reunion tour, released in 2003)
8. The Beach Boys, I Know There’s An Answer
9. Frank Zappa, Dumb All Over (previously unreleased live version of the You Are What You Is studio track from 1981, issued on the 1997 compilation Have I Offended Someone?)
10. John Lennon, Well Well Well
11. Pete Townshend, I Am An Animal
12. The Rolling Stones, Too Tight
13. Chicago, Devil’s Sweet
14. Tom Waits, Shore Leave
15. The Butterfield Blues Band, Driftin’ And Driftin’ (from The Butterfield Blues Band Live)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Elton John, Have Mercy On The Criminal . . . Yet another deep cut from EJ’s 1970s heyday that essentially made all or most of his studio albums hits compilations. It’s from 1973’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player which yielded the hit singles Daniel and Crocodile Rock but is filled with great songs, like this one. Noted arranger, composer, conductor and longtime Elton John collaborator Paul Buckmaster handled the orchestration on a song that starts with a dramatic, fast flourish before settling in to a ballad painting, via Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, a picture of an outlaw on the run.

2. Black Sabbath, Falling Off The Edge Of The World . . . I went down the internet rabbit hole the other day when an article popped up in my feed listing what the author thought were the best Sabbath songs from the Ronnie James Dio on lead vocals era. This song, from 1981’s Mob Rules album, Dio’s second with Sabbath after 1980’s Heaven And Hell, was on the list and I agree. A moody, atmospheric opening builds the tension that you know is going to soon explode, as it does, into a full-throttle hard rock/metal assault.

3. Steppenwolf, Renegade . . . A brooding, bluesy autobiographical track about Steppenwolf leader/singer John Kay, then age 4, and his mother’s 1948 escape to the West from the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, where Kay was born. It’s from the album Steppenwolf 7, released in 1970.

4. Bad Company, Painted Face . . . Funky boogie from 1982’s Rough Diamonds album. It was the last studio album from the original Paul Rodgers-fronted Bad Company lineup that also included guitarist Mick Ralphs, drummer Simon Kirke and bassist Boz Burrell. Rodgers later returned, off and on, in various later configurations of the band for tours and to record four then-new songs for the 1999 original lineup reunion compilation The ‘Original’ Bad Co. Anthology.

5. Warren Zevon, Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner (live, from Learning To Flinch) . . . Live albums aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and while I generally prefer studio versions of songs, I do like concert albums because they can obviously go down entirely new avenues as artists may rearrange or otherwise adjust and adapt their tunes. This version of the track originally on Zevon’s 1978 breakthrough album Excitable Boy (which featured the hit single Werwolves Of London) is a perfect example. Learning To Flinch, released in 1993, is from a solo acoustic world tour Zevon did in 1992, just him on guitar, keyboards, harmonica and vocals. On Roland, he takes what was a shade under four-minute studio track and reworks it into an 11-minute haunting epic. It starts with “Roland Chorale”, an instrumental intro that merges into a familiar yet, in Zevon’s voice and piano playing, transformed yet still-recognizable song about his fictional mercenary.

6. The Tragically Hip, Fight . . . I had the Hip on my list of artists I hadn’t played in a while so here they are, finally, again prompted in some measure by a discussion about the band I had with a friend last week. Fight is from the classic 1991 album Road Apples. It’s a bluesy groove tune with lyrics to which anyone who’s been in a relationship can relate.

“We wake up different, rifle through our dreams
Another placid day ripples at the seams
Do you think I bow out ’cause I think you’re right
Or ’cause I don’t want to fight?
Do you think I bow out ’cause I think you’re right

“We lay down seething, smell our pillows burn
And drift off to the place where you’d think we’d learn
Do you think I bow out ’cause I think you’re right
Or ’cause I don’t want to fight?
“Do you think I bow out ’cause I think you’re right
Or ’cause I don’t want to fight?
Oh, go ahead and fight
I give, oh, I give, I said, I give”

7. Roxy Music, My Only Love (from Roxy Music Live, a document of the band’s 2001 reunion tour, released in 2003) . . . Extended version of a song originally on 1980’s Flesh And Blood studio album. It’s a terrific live album with, on this track, Phil Manzanera’s expressive guitar solo near the end leading into a showcase, as lead singer Bryan Ferry cedes the stage, for the vocalizations of backing singers Sarah Brown, Yanick Etienne, Michelle John and Sharon White. It’s reminiscent to me of Clare Torry’s performance on Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In The Sky.

8. The Beach Boys, I Know There’s An Answer . . . From Pet Sounds, the 1966 album that, by most accounts, inspired The Beatles to produce their Sgt. Pepper album, released in 1967. I Know There’s An Answer was originally titled Hang On To Your Ego but objections arose within the band as to lyrics referring to drug culture, so it was rewritten although Hang On To Your Ego has appeared as a bonus track on various reissues of Pet Sounds. Musically, the song features an unorthodox structure driven by myriad instruments including guitars, tambourine, piano, banjo, clarinets, flutes, electric keyboards, timpani and harmonica.

9. Frank Zappa, Dumb All Over (previously unreleased live version of the You Are What You Is studio track from 1981, issued on the 1997 compilation Have I Offended Someone?) . . . A typically scathing Zappa social commentary punctuated by an incendiary guitar solo.

10. John Lennon, Well Well Well . . . Grungy guitars from well before ‘grunge’ was a musical genre, spare production, raw, primal scream therapy vocals, all from the harrowing, personal, Plastic Ono Band album, released in 1970. Hugely influential album on my impressionable young mind, musically but particularly lyrically in the songs God and Working Class Hero, both of which I’ve played before on the show and inevitably will return to.

11. Pete Townshend, I Am An Animal . . . . An introspective song from 1980’s Empty Glass, featuring the immortal line “I will be immersed, Queen of the fucking universe.” A terrific hit album full of great songs that prompted Who singer Roger Daltrey to suggest that Townshend was by that point saving his best stuff for himself or, at least, spreading himself too thin in terms of providing material for the mother ship band. The counter to Daltrey’s argument would be that Townshend’s songs can be intensely personal and even as far back as 1975’s album The Who By Numbers, Daltrey was reluctant to sing songs like However Much I Booze – lead vocals by Townshend – since they were so clearly tales of Townshend’s travails.

12. The Rolling Stones, Too Tight . . . The kind of energetic riff rocker the Stones seem to be able to toss off in their sleep, which isn’t a criticism by any stretch. It’s another indication of their innate songwriting abilities resulting in deep cuts like this, from 1997’s Bridges To Babylon album, that many bands would love to have as a single.

13. Chicago, Devil’s Sweet . . . Some have compared this 10-minute instrumental jazz-rock fusion piece from Chicago VII in 1974 to Weather Report with slices of Miles Davis, Santana and Soft Machine. It’s all of those things in at least some measure but really, it’s simply Chicago in their early glory days of inventive, experimental energy, this time propelled by shifting time signatures and Danny Seraphine’s great drumming. A universe away from the schlock show, albeit a commercially successful schlock show, they later became.

14. Tom Waits, Shore Leave . . . Surreal, percussive, almost industrial sounds on this noir-like track from 1983’s Swordfishtrombones album. And that’s just the music. Lyrically, we follow . . . No, check that, we ‘see’, through Waits’ words, a sailor on shore leave through various encounters in, apparently, Hong Kong while “trying to make it all last, squeezing all the life out of a lousy two day pass.”

Someone on YouTube summed it up nicely: “A movie in 4:16” (the song time).

15. The Butterfield Blues Band, Driftin’ And Driftin’ (from The Butterfield Blues Band Live) . . . Live version of a track originally on the third Butterfield Band studio album, The Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw, released in 1967. By the time of The Butterfield Blues Band Live’s recording at The Troubador in Los Angeles in early 1970, Pigboy (guitarist Elvin Bishop’s nickname) had left the band which now featured a four-man horn section with Ralph Wash on guitar. The group had evolved into a blues outfit with jazz and R & B chops ranging all over the musical map. It’s compelling stuff, led always by Butterfield’s singing and harmonica playing which is well described in liner notes.

“His mix of amplified and acoustic work on Driftin’ and Driftin’ show how he could capture and enthrall an audience with his emotive style; his instrumental is a mini-history of the blues harp, not only calling to mind Butterfield’s mentor Little Walter but Sonny Boy Williamson, Rice Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson II) and others. However it is never the work of a copyist. It is always the immediately recognizable sound and style of Paul Butterfield.”

A show loosely tied – via song titles, band names and a couple compilations I’ve drawn from – to the Family Day holiday in most Canadian provinces. Also, a ‘winter’ portion as a nod to the relentless snow we’ve been getting in southern Ontario and much of Canada of late. In between, a week late, a celebration of the 55th anniversary release of a classic Doors album – Morrison Hotel – I was reminded of by a friend which was timely, since I was thinking of playing The Doors in any event. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list. Audio log will be posted after the show airs. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

1. Family, The Weaver’s Answer
2. Jethro Tull, Back To The Family
3. John Mellencamp, Case 795 (The Family)
4. The Rolling Stones, Family
5. Danny Kirwan, Ram Jam City (from his solo album Second Chapter via The Fleetwood Mac Family Album compilation)
6. Rossington Collins Band, Tashauna (from the 1981 album This Is The Way via the Lynyrd Skynyrd: Family compilation)
——–
The Doors – Morrison Hotel

Original vinyl

Side One – Hard Rock Cafe (original name for the album)

1. Roadhouse Blues
2. Waiting For The Sun
3. You Make Me Real
4. Peace Frog
5. Blue Sunday
6. Ship Of Fools

Side Two – Morrison Hotel

7. Land Ho!
8. The Spy
9. Queen Of The Highway
10. Indian Summer
11. Maggie M’Gill

——

7. Judas Priest, Winter/Deep Freeze/Winter Retreat
8. Genesis, Snowbound
9. Black Sabbath, Snowblind
10. Joe Jackson, Heart Of Ice
11. J. Geils Band, The Lady Makes Demands
12. Santana, Savor/Toussaint L’Overture (live, from Moonflower)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Family, The Weaver’s Answer . . . From the English progressive rock band’s 1969 album Family Entertainment, their second studio release. Arguably the band’s signature song, it tells the tale of a man looking back on his life as he nears death. Roger Chapman’s vibrato vocals add an urgent, theatrical quality to the shifting time signatures arrangement.

2. Jethro Tull, Back To The Family . . . A track that blends rock and folk, with often sarcastic lyrics contrasting the comforts of family life with its realities and one’s desire for independence from it. The song is from Stand Up, Tull’s 1969 album. It was the band’s second studio release and marked a change in direction – and introduced new guitarist Martin Barre – from the blues-based sound of the 1968 debut This Was that featured guitarist Mick Abrahams. Abrahams and lead singer/songwriter/flautist/multi-instrumentalist Ian Anderson then clashed over musical direction, with Abrahams leaving to continue his blues approach with Blodwyn Pig, a great if short-lived band in its own right I’ve played recently. Anderson has forever referred to This Was as being an appropriate album title, given that it ‘was’ Jethro Tull, at the time, before his creative vision prevailed although Tull has often still delved into the blues, just not in as singularly pronounced a manner as on the debut album.

I remember my musically influential on me older brother, by eight years, bringing Stand Up – and Led Zeppelin II – home upon release. We were living in Peru at the time, where my father was working. My older brother and sister were attending high school in Canada and in those days, the late 1960s, things weren’t as immediate as they are now. So, when the older siblings attending school in North America came home for holidays, it was not only a reunion celebration for all the American and Canadian families in town but a window, via what they brought back with them, through which we could see what was fresh and happening, particularly in entertainment. Hence albums like Stand Up and Zep II, which shook us out of our early Beatles and Stones listening habits, great as they obviously were, and further expanded our musical horizons.

3. John Mellencamp, Case 795 (The Family) . . . A gritty, grisly, bluesy song from Mellencamp’s 1993 album Human Wheels. The lyrics reveal a definitely dysfunctional family where things are rationalized as ‘everything’s all right’ despite various instances of violence amid family struggles, economic hardship and personal conflict. Not exactly Family Day fare, perhaps, but the title fits. Great tune, regardless, nice swampy groove.

4. The Rolling Stones, Family . . . An obscure Stones track, darkly cynical in a spare, mostly acoustic arrangement with unsettling lyrics about dysfunction and decay within a family in which, among other things, a daughter aspires to be a prostitute having her father as a customer and other such upbeat ideas. It’s from the 1968 Beggars Banquet album sessions, finally appearing in 1975 on Metamorphosis, a pseudo-official compilation of outtakes and alternate versions. It was issued by the Stones’ former manager Allen Klein, who at that point still retained rights to the band’s pre-1971 material, coming out on the same day as the Stones’ first authorized 1970s hits compilation, Made In The Shade.

5. Danny Kirwan, Ram Jam City . . . From the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist’s debut solo album, Second Chapter, issued in 1975. It ties into Family Day because I pulled it from a compilation – The Fleetwood Mac Family album – I own that features solo and offshoot band material from Fleetwood Mac members past and present. A melodic track with a folk-rock feel, it’s described in the compilation liner notes, accurately enough, as having a Celtic feel within a bluegrass – and I’d suggest almost rockabilly – context. Engaging stuff.

6. Rossington Collins Band, Tashauna . . . Beautiful, Lynyrd Skynyrd-like track but then that’s to be expected from a band formed from the surviving post-1977 plane crash members of Skynyrd, issued on the Rossington Collins band’s second release, 1981’s This Is The Way. Among the Skynyrd alumni on the album were guitarists Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, bassist Leon Wilkeson and pianist Billy Powell backing the terrifically atmospheric and emotional lead vocals of Dale Krantz-Rossington, Gary’s wife. I pulled it from another ‘family’ album, the 2006 compilation Lynyrd Skynyrd: Family that features various Skynyrd tracks as well as those by offshoot bands.

——–

The Doors – Morrison Hotel

Original vinyl Side One Hard Rock Cafe (original name for the album)

1. Roadhouse Blues . . . Likely the best-known track on the album, a blues-rock anthem driven by a gritty riff and Jim Morrison’s commanding vocal delivery. “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel . . . let it roll, baby, roll . . . ”

2. Waiting For The Sun . . . It could have been the title cut to the band’s 1968 album but one of those cases – like Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack just one example – where a song done for one album wound up being held back for a future release. Sheer Heart Attack was left unfinished during the sessions for Queen’s 1974 album of that name and didn’t appear on record until three releases later, 1977’s News Of The World. Similar happened with The Doors on this hazy, dreamlike, spooky track with an anthemic chorus, finally released on Morrison Hotel in 1970.

3. You Make Me Real . . . A fast-paced, piano-driven energetic toe-tapping rocker that showcases Ray Manzarek’s rollicking keyboard work combined with Jim Morrison’s wild and playful vocals.

4. Peace Frog . . . Funky rocker with striking lyrical imagery, referencing police violence and blood on the streets, mentioning various American cities including Chicago, a reference to the violence-plagued 1968 Democratic Party convention. Then the song abruptly stops and we’re into . . .

5. Blue Sunday . . . A slow, crooning love song contrasting sharply with Peace Frog. The pacing on the album is exemplary. It’s why, while hits compilations are great, often it pays to immerse oneself in a full album as a statement designed by an artist.

6. Ship Of Fools . . . A mid-tempo track lyrically playing on the metaphor of a world heading toward destruction. Musically compelling to draw you in, social commentary lyrics to make you think.

Side Two Morrison Hotel

7. Land Ho! . . . A lighthearted sea shanty-style rocker with a catchy chorus. Propulsive.

8. The Spy . . . A slow, sultry blues number I played, independent of the album, some time ago. Dark, mysterious and at once seductive and almost menacing, but such could be the quality of Jim Morrison’s vocals coupled with the band’s music.

9. Queen Of The Highway . . . Hypnotic groove with a driving rhythm fueled by the bassline and percussion.

10. Indian Summer . . . A quiet, meditative piece, sparse instrumentation and gentle delivery. Personal preference of course but it’s one of those songs that is another argument for listening to individual albums over just hits compilations, as good as those usually are.

11. Maggie M’Gill . . . A gritty album closer with a swampy feel arguably presaging the bluesy brilliance of the band’s next album, L.A. Woman. The opening part of this one could easily fit on something like ZZ Top’s Deguello album – nine years before the ZZ record was released. Perhaps the Texas trio was listening.

——

7. Judas Priest, Winter/Deep Freeze/Winter Retreat . . . We start the ‘winter’ portion of the overall set with this trilogy from the first Priest album, 1974’s Rocka Rolla. It was a time before the band fully embraced metal and was more a hard rocking yet bluesy band with progressive rock elements. It’s dark, eerie and atmospheric across the near seven minutes of the combined songs, best heard as a single piece.

8. Genesis, Snowbound . . . A delicate, haunting track from the 1978 album And Then There Were Three which, via its hit single Follow You Follow Me introduced many people to Genesis – which to that point was rarely if ever played on AM radio. It broadened the band’s horizons and fan base while causing many who were more fond of the fully progressive rock epics of the Peter Gabriel era to abandon ship. Still, after Gabriel left, the group was able to strike a balance between prog and mass popularity on albums like 1976’s A Trick Of The Tail, And Then There Were Three and Duke in 1980 before 1981’s Abacab, which I really like, brought a new, even more commercial sound including horns.

9. Black Sabbath, Snowblind . . . A heavy, sludgy slab from 1972’s Vol. 4 album. The musical heaviness is trademark Sabbath of course but what often strikes me about early Sabbath is Ozzy Osbourne’s detached vocals. Perhaps it’s a function of production, or how I hear things, but however it comes about, his voice seems to enter each song from sideways somehow, from parts unknown if that description makes sense. It’s a potent mix of musical talent, both vocal and instrumental.

10. Joe Jackson, Heart Of Ice . . . A moody, jazz-infused track that starts and continues for the longest time in its seven-minute duration as an instrumental but finally incorporates sparse, haunting vocals in an intoxicating arrangement featuring saxophone and keyboards. It’s from JJ’s 1984 album Body And Soul which featured the hit single You Can’t Get What You Want (Until You Know What You Want).

11. J. Geils Band, The Lady Makes Demands . . . Typical J. Geils R & B/rock fusion energy on a track from the band’s 1973 album Ladies Invited. Lyrically, it pretty much sums up the push-and-pull of at least some relationships. From a man’s perspective, at least.

12. Santana, Savor/Toussaint L’Overture (live, from Moonflower) . . . An extended 13-minute jam highlighting Santana’s blend of Latin rock, jazz fusion and typically great playing, from the 1977 album that combined live with studio cuts.

Two classic albums. One of them – Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience – is widely celebrated with at least three songs on it – Crosstown Traffic, All Along The Watchtower and Voodoo Child (Slight Return) – known by even casual rock music fans. The other – Love’s Forever Changes – is arguably relatively obscure to many but an influential album incorporating myriad genres from psychedelia to pop to folk rock.

The artists are connected, as Hendrix and Love leader Arthur Lee had a friendly relationship with Hendrix – then working with The Isley Brothers – playing on some pre-Love sessions of Lee’s as early as 1964. And at one point they discussed forming a band together. Later on, Lee’s 1972 solo album Vindicator, which I’ve delved into on the show and eventually will again, was a guitar-fueled hard rock record reflecting Hendrix’s influence.

I’m starting the set with Love, as a nod to Valentine’s Day. More of my commentary on the albums, under each record’s track list.

Love – Forever Changes

1. Alone Again Or
2. A House Is Not A Motel
3. Andmoreagain
4. The Daily Planet
5. Old Man
6. The Red Telephone
7. Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale
8. Live And Let Live
9. The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This
10. Bummer In The Summer
11. You Set The Scene

It’s been said of The Velvet Underground that the group, noted for its creative force Lou Reed, sold few records, but everyone who bought one started a band. The same could arguably be applied to Love, a brilliant band I was initially drawn to long ago by the critical hype over an album that I’d never heard. Or even heard of. So, I bought it. And soon enough, I ‘got it’, realized why it was so well-regarded, loved the music and by extension the band to the point I over time have accumulated every studio album, all of now late leader Arthur Lee’s solo stuff, and assorted compilations that include previously unreleased tracks.

I agree with most music writer critics that 1967’s Forever Changes is likely Love’s masterpiece but perhaps interestingly, probably my favorite song of Love’s is Signed D.C., a harrowing yet musically beautiful song, a bluesy acoustic ballad about heroin addiction I’ve played before on the show. It’s from the group’s self-titled debut album, released in 1966. As for Forever Changes, it’s a terrific full listen – much as Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is – but favorite tracks for me are the jaunty pop-rocker Bummer In The Summer, the uptempo, slightly wonderfully off-kilter album opener Alone Again Or followed immediately on the album by A House Is Not A Motel. Highly recommended, all of it, as is the rest of Love/Arthur Lee.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland

1. . . . And The Gods Made Love
2. Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)
3. Crosstown Traffic
4. Voodoo Chile
5. Little Miss Strange
6. Long Hot Summer Night
7. Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)
8. Gypsy Eyes
9. Burning Of The Midnight Lamp
10. Rainy Day, Dream Away
11. 1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
12. Moon, Turn The Tides . . . gently gently away
13. Still Raining, Still Dreaming
14. House Burning Down
15. All Along The Watchtower
16. Voodoo Child (Slight Return)

A few weeks ago I played 1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) and said on air how, by playing the extended psychedelic track, I was reminded how great an album Electric Ladyland is and that I may play it in full on one of my album shows. Here it is. A terrific sonic experience, mind-blowing, really, Hendrix arguably at his creative peak in terms of myriad musical directions and production all on one double vinyl album. It was the final studio release, unleashed upon us in October 1968, by the Experience lineup of Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who sings lead vocals on the track Little Miss Strange.

Among those contributing to the album as session players were Traffic members Chris Wood (flute on 1983 . . . ) and Steve Winwood, organ on the lengthy, psychedelic Voodoo Chile, a companion piece to its shorter, better-known cousin Voodoo Child (Slight Return) which features that immortal opening guitar riff, a song that closes the record and is on most Hendrix compilations. Winwood’s presence is interesting in that at one point there was talk of Hendrix forming a band with Winwood and Love’s Arthur Lee, though it never happened. According to Lee, it was to be called Band Aid, suggested by Hendrix. Lee liked the name and wound up using it on the album I mentioned in my overall preamble, Lee’s 1972 Hendrix-like solo album Vindicator, subtitled “With the group Band-Aid.”

My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

1. Wishbone Ash, The King Will Come
2. Bill Wyman, Every Sixty Seconds
3. Mick Taylor, Late At Night
4. Mick Taylor, Blind Willie McTell (Bob Dylan cover)
5. The Rolling Stones, Watching The River Flow (Bob Dylan cover)
6. Mark Knopfler, Boom, Like That
7. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Bare Wires Suite
8. Spooky Tooth, Weird
9. Ian Hunter, Rain
10. Phil Collins, The Roof Is Leaking
11. Robert Palmer, Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley
12. Bruce Springsteen, Missing
13. Johnny and Edgar Winter, Baby, Watcha Want Me To Do (live)
14. Van Morrison, Take Me Back

My track-by-track tales:

1. Wishbone Ash, The King Will Come . . . Progressive rock from arguably the definitive Ash album, 1972’s Argus. Famous for the twin guitar attack of Andy Powell and Ted Turner that proved a big influence on Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, and others. The song has a mythic, medieval feel, common to at least some British bands of the time and beyond, with lyrics that could be interpreted in a biblical or fantasy context.

2. Bill Wyman, Every Sixty Seconds . . . From the former/longtime Rolling Stones bassist’s second solo album, the 1976 release Stone Alone, a title he later used for his 1990 book about the band. It’s a lazy in a great way tune featuring Wyman on bass and guitar, Joe Walsh on slide guitar, Van the Man Morrison on harmonica and session drummer to the stars Jim Keltner. The album overall features a long list of musical luminaries of the time, and forever, like Dr. John, Bob Welch, Nicky Hopkins, Al Kooper and Ron Wood, among others.

3. Mick Taylor, Late At Night . . . Nice groove on this one from the former Rolling Stones’ guitarist’s 2000 release A Stone’s Throw. Some have suggested it could be a Steely Dan track in terms of sound and production, which I can see/hear. It’s an excellent jazz rock tune, written and sung by Taylor, that also features longtime Who collaborator John “Rabbit’ Bundrick on keyboards.

4. Mick Taylor, Blind Willie McTell (Bob Dylan cover) . . . This reinterpretation of the Dylan classic – it starts slow and bluesy before shifting into a harder-edged blues rocker two minutes into its near nine-minutes duration – is also from Taylor’s A Stone’s Throw album. Blind Willie McTell, recorded during the sessions for Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels that Taylor played on, wasn’t released until 1991 when it came out on Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. That was the first installment of what is now a 17-volume series. When it was revealed that Blind Willie McTell was an outtake from Infidels, the music world was perplexed as to why Dylan had decided to not include such a great track on the album. He later told interviewers that he didn’t think he “recorded it right” but in any event it was finally released and has since been placed on various Dylan compilations. I played it a few weeks ago as part of a blue/blues rock show.

5. The Rolling Stones, Watching The River Flow (Bob Dylan cover) . . . A Dylan tune that appeared on the Boogie 4 Stu tribute album to the late “sixth Stone” pianist Ian Stewart, who was originally in the band but then deemed not to have the right ‘look’ by management although Stewart continued to play on the group’s albums and most tours. Watching The River Flow is not an ‘official’ Stones’ release technically but the various band members past and present at the time were easily convinced to come together in studio or online in tribute to their cherished friend, who died of a heart attack at age 47 in 1985. The Boogie 4 Stu album, released in 2011 and featuring a variety of musicians, was assembled and coordinated by English pianist Ben Waters. He’s worked with the Stones including solo excursions by Ron Wood and Mick Taylor as well as Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck and The Kinks’ Ray Davies.

6. Mark Knopfler, Boom, Like That . . . Up-tempo tune from the former Dire Straits leader’s 2004 album Shangri-La, inspired by Knopfler’s reading of a book about McDonald’s entrepreneur Ray Kroc.

7. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Bare Wires Suite (Bare Wires/Where Did I Belong/I Started Walking/Open Up A New Door/Fire/I Know Now/Look In The Mirror. . . Intoxicating extended trip from Mayall’s 1968 album Bare Wires which featured future Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar. The various parts of the piece feature a host of approaches, mellow to heavy, over the 23 minutes.

8. Spooky Tooth, Weird . . . Non-album B-side to a 1968 single, Sunshine Help Me, which did not chart at least in North America. Weird is, apropos to its title, a moody, atmospheric, psychedelic piece featuring the eerie, hypnotic keyboard work of Gary Wright who later successfully went solo, achieving hit status via his 1975 Dream Weaver album which featured the title cut single along with Love Is Alive. Not on this track but two notables who later passed through Spooky Tooth lineups were Henry McCullough, guitarist/drummer with Paul McCartney’s Wings, and Mick Jones who went on to form Foreigner.

9. Ian Hunter, Rain . . . From 1981’s Short Back N’ Sides album from the former frontman for Mott The Hoople. Hunter was coming off a solo commercial sales rebirth via his excellent 1979 album You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic and followup live disc Welcome To The Club. He then released this equally excellent but somewhat different in sound album co-produced by The Clash’s Mick Jones (not the Foreigner guy) and Hunter’s perennial guitarist Mick Ronson. Topper Headon of The Clash is on drums with Ellen Foley of Meat Loaf, Clash and solo fame on backing vocals. It’s a somber and reflective tune with a touch of reggae influence, perhaps a nod, given who was producing, to various Clash tracks from the London Calling and Sandinista! albums of that period.

10. Phil Collins, The Roof Is Leaking . . . One of those deep cuts, this from Collins’ 1981 debut solo album, Face Value, that when I play it, as I did the other day as a possible show candidate, it immediately comes to mind as an ‘oh yeah, I remember this’ tune beyond the hits from that album – In The Air Tonight and I Missed Again. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, playing albums I have not played in eons, revisiting them, listening to them straight through and being rewarded by their enduring quality at least some of which I intend to keep passing on, via my show, as songs occur.

11. Robert Palmer, Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley . . . I got into Robert Palmer while in college through his 1979 album Secrets which featured hits/great songs like Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor) and riff-rocker Jealous, among many others. I followed him from then on but also went back to things like this earlier relative hit, the title cut from his 1974 debut album. It’s a great funky tune, written by Allen Toussaint of myriad musical genres fame, with Lowell George of Little Feat on guitar and in fact Palmer opens the album with Feat’s Sailin’ Shoes, written by George.

12. Bruce Springsteen, Missing . . . . Sparse, dark, haunting track written during the 1990s but finally officially released on a Springteeen album on the excellent 2003 compilation The Essential Bruce Springsteen. It’s on the limited edition 3-CD bonus disc on that album and also long available on the web. According to Springsteen’s own liner notes on the compilation, after writing it he played it for Sean Penn, who liked and used it in the 1995 movie The Crossing Guard which Penn wrote, directed and co-produced, starring Jack Nicholson.

13. Johnny and Edgar Winter, Baby, Watcha Want Me To Do (live) . . . A rousing 11-minute cover of the Jimmy Reed tune. Johnny’s typically great guitar teamed with Edgar’s sax and keyboard accents is compelling as the Winter brothers’ bands of the time combine forces on the ‘Together’ live album, released in 1976.

14. Van Morrison, Take Me Back . . . A typical Van The Man epic, this one from the Hymns To The Silence album, released in 1991. It’s another of those tracks where his vocalizations are so stirring and compelling. Nobody can repeat lines ‘take me back take me back take me back’ and not bore you but instead draw you further into the song, as Van can as on this musical trip through R & B, folk, pop, Celtic, rock and gospel. It’s a satisfying journey through the mystic, to paraphrase one of his song titles, that Morrison has always travelled.

At risk of being insensitive or seeming to make light of it, no renowned music artist died this past week, that I’m aware of, at least as of Thursday night and Friday morning as I prep the show. So, unlike the past two Saturdays when I played songs from The Band (RIP Garth Hudson) and Marianne Faithfull, no tribute set for this Saturday. That is, unless one looks at this three-album play, delayed for three weeks, as tribute to the following artists’ 1970s excellence. We have Elton John’s Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy from 1975, Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals and Who Do We Think We Are by Deep Purple, released in 1973. A commentary on each album appears below each record’s track list. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

Elton John – Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy

1. Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy
2. Tower Of Babel
3. Bitter Fingers
4. Tell Me When The Whistle Blows
5. Someone Saved My Life Tonight
6. (Gotta Get A) Meal Ticket
7. Better Off Dead
8. Writing
9. We All Fall In Love Sometimes
10. Curtains

A concept album that traces the early careers of Elton John (Captain Fantastic) and lyricist Bernie Taupin (the Brown Dirt Cowboy) as they struggled to establish themselves in the music industry in late 1960s London. There’s loads of available literature on the album, which also works as a collection of individual songs, continuing the duo’s early to mid-1970s hot streak. And, like most EJ albums of that period – and many 1960s and ’70s albums – the so-called deep cuts are as strong as the singles. There was just one single released from the album, Someone Saved My Life Tonight. Two essential songs for me: Tell Me When The Whistle Blows and the title track.

Pink Floyd – Animals

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

A concept album about sociopolitical conditions in mid-1970s Great Britain, it doesn’t seem to get the universal critical acclaim of Pink Floyd albums like The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here or The Wall but it’s always been one of my favorites, and that of many fans, amid that run of albums that was predated by another winner, 1971’s Meddle. The album nicely brackets the three extended pieces with the opening and closing acoustic entries. The centrepiece for me is Pigs (Three Different Ones). It’s in part a diatribe against British morality crusader Mary Whitehouse, with aggressive musical accompaniment adding to the impact of the repeated refrain “ha ha, charade you are.”

Deep Purple – Who Do We Think We Are

1. Woman From Tokyo
2. Mary Long
3. Super Trouper
4. Smooth Dancer
5. Rat Bat Blue
6. Place In Line
7. Our Lady

The last album in the first go-around of the so-called Mark II version of Deep Purple that featured Ian Gillan (vocals), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Roger Glover (bass), Ian Paice (drums) and Jon Lord (keyboards). The guys who did Smoke On The Water, on Machine Head. That lineup reunited for two albums – Perfect Strangers and The House Of Blue Light – and, after another breakup, another album in the 1990s – The Battle Rages On – before Blackmore took permanent leave. Music critics seem to denigrate it, but most Purple fans I know like Who Do We Think We Are and if the band was in tatters in interpersonal terms and supposedly in musical terms, more bands should use that creative formula. And, of course, there are instances where such push and pull in a group setting results in compelling art.

How can an album with songs like opener Woman From Tokyo, Mary Long – another assault on Mary Whitehouse and fellow morality campaigner Lord Longford, four years before Roger Waters/Pink Floyd had at her – and others be deemed so flawed and not rate with Mark II’s other ’70s stuff? I don’t get it, but everyone hears things differently. Another great track, certainly lyrically, is Smooth Dancer. Gillan and Blackmore never got along, at least for very long, which often fueled Mark II’s breakups. However, they did make musical magic together and Smooth Dancer stands out as lyrically, Gillan takes shots at his rival, called ‘black suede’ in a reference to Blackmore’s clothing preferences. Interesting how Blackmore could play so well – or even not apparently raise a stink over such a song being on the album – given the subject matter. Granted, they didn’t necessarily have to be in studio at the same time but Blackmore would have seen/heard the lyrics, so he probably just didn’t care, which would fit his mercurial nature.

My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

1. The Rolling Stones, If You Can’t Rock Me
2. Uriah Heep, The Magician’s Birthday
3. Scorpions, Top Of The Bill (live, from Tokyo Tapes)
4. Iron Maiden, When The Wild Wind Blows
5. Judas Priest, Burn In Hell
6. Judas Priest, Invincible Shield
7. Arthur Lee, Stay Away From Evil
8. Jethro Tull, With You There To Help Me
9. Blodwyn Pig, San Francisco Sketches (Beach Scape/Fisherman’s Wharf/Telegraph Hill/I’m Falling Out Of The Room)
10. Tame Impala, Elephant
11. April Wine, Slow Poke
12. Savoy Brown, All I Can Do
13. Simon McBride (Deep Purple guitarist), One More Try
14. U2, Surrender
15. Free, Soon I Will Be Gone
16. Blood, Sweat & Tears, Maiden Voyage

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Rolling Stones, If You Can’t Rock Me . . . Energetic rocker with a great mid-song bass break, it’s the opening track on 1974’s It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll album, guitarist Mick Taylor’s last with the band after five fruitful years. He was replaced by Ronnie Wood, who was at least the inspiration if not an uncredited co-writer of the album’s title track, while still in the Faces but inexorably moving into the Stones’ orbit in large measure via his friendship with Keith Richards. The Stones effectively paired this with a rearranged Get Off Of My Cloud during their 1975-76 tours of North America and Europe – available on the 1977 live album Love You Live plus subsequent archival releases – but to my knowledge and research didn’t get back to If You Can’t Rock Me, on its own and well done, until the 2002 Licks tour celebrating the band’s 40th anniversary. They’ve since gone 20-plus years beyond that milestone.

2. Uriah Heep, The Magician’s Birthday . . . We begin a hard rock/metal segment of the set with this progressive 10-minutes and change title cut to the band’s 1973 album. The track shifts between mellow verses and powerful, heavy, what I term ‘galloping’ choruses including rat-a-tat drumming and great guitar soloing. The future members of Iron Maiden were obviously listening. We’ll get to Maiden in about seven minutes but first we’ll sting you with Scorpions.

3. Scorpions, Top Of The Bill (live, from Tokyo Tapes) . . . Originally a three and one half minute track on the 1975 studio album In Trance, this is the pile-driving live version, or at least more pile-driving than the studio song, at double the length, from Tokyo Tapes. The live set was released in 1978 featuring early Scorpions slabs of heavy rock/metal before they became more a pop-metal and power ballad hitmaking machine. A 2015 expanded re-release of the live album includes an 11-minute version of Top Of The Bill, recorded on the same tour that yielded Tokyo Tapes. That version is also available on YouTube if not various streaming services.

4. Iron Maiden, When The Wild Wind Blows . . . Eleven-minute epic from 2010’s The Final Frontier album. It’s one of Iron Maiden’s lengthy prog-metal excursions, something the band has always done but increasingly so later in its career. This track is loosely based on the 1982 nuclear war-themed graphic novel I’ve not read, titled When The Wind Blows.

5. Judas Priest, Burn In Hell . . . Dun, dun, dun, dun dun nun . . . hypnotic, ever-building opening guitar riff preceding all, er, hell breaking loose on this, my favorite track from the Tim (Ripper) Owens on lead vocals version of Priest. It’s from the 1997 album Jugulator, the first of two, Demolition in 2001 the other, released during the period singer Rob Halford left to pursue other projects including the short-lived thrash-metal outfit Fight.

6. Judas Priest, Invincible Shield . . . Smokin’, immediate, heavy riff rocking metal title cut from the 2024 album. It’s the fifth Priest studio platter, as Priest continues to pack a powerful punch, no treading water or resting on laurels, since Halford returned to the fold for the 2005 album Angel Of Retribution. I saw the reunion tour with Halford in 2004, before any new album was out, Slayer opened, great show by both bands.

7. Arthur Lee, Stay Away From Evil . . . Total change of direction into this toe-tapping bouncy funky wah wah guitar-laced groove tune from the band Love leader’s 1981 self-titled solo album. “I wrote the song about myself,” Love says in the album’s song-by-song liner notes. “It means just what it says, but then how can you?”

8. Jethro Tull, With You There To Help Me . . . Progressive folk-rock fusion might be how best to describe this track, and most of Tull’s material in general, aside from the first, blues-oriented album This Was. That album was so named because it ‘was’ Tull before the split between Ian Anderson and Tull’s first guitarist, blues-oriented Mick Abrahams, over musical direction. This is from the 1970 album Benefit which I’ve always thought of as a two-fer musical piece, stylistically flowing together with 1969’s Stand Up which introduced guitarist Martin Barre to the Tull team.

9. Blodwyn Pig, San Francisco Sketches (Beach Scape/Fisherman’s Wharf/Telegraph Hill/I’m Falling Out Of The Room) . . . . A multi-part suite, each offering a different mood while blending jazz, blues, and rock elements, from the band Mick Abrahams formed after leaving Jethro Tull. The song even features some flute, a seemingly obvious tip of the cap to Tull. San Francisco Sketches is from Getting To This, Blodwyn Pig’s 1970 release and second album, after debut Ahead Rings Out in 1969. Terrific name, Blodwyn Pig, Blodwyn being a Welsh name meaning fair, or white, flower. The band name was apparently coined by a stoned friend of the band.

10. Tame Impala, Elephant . . . Retro-psychedelic rock, great riff, could have come out in the 1960s but it’s actually from 2012 by the one-person (at least in studio) project Tame Impala, aka Australian singer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Parker. I remember my older son mentioning Tame Impala some years ago and I got into the music for a while but, while I like it, it sort of just faded from my playlists until the other day when, rummaging around, I picked up a compilation CD from a 2012 issue of Classic Rock Magazine and, voila. Tame Impala has become worthy of reinvestigation, for me.

11. April Wine, Slow Poke . . . Bluesy ribald subject matter groove tune from the 1975 album Stand Back which featured the hit single Tonite Is A Wonderful Time To Fall In Love. I was generally more an April Wine compilation collector until the 1977 album Live At The El Mocambo, taken from the famous (or infamous) Toronto club shows April Wine opened for The Rolling Stones, and that April Wine live album is actually where I first heard Slow Poke.

12. Savoy Brown, All I Can Do . . . Lengthy, soulful blues rock track, nearly 11 minutes, from the band’s 1971 Street Corner Talking album. As always, it features the sterling guitar playing of the late Kim Simmonds, who I saw live with Savoy Brown at the 2013 Kitchener Blues Festival.

13. Simon McBride, One More Try . . . Gary Moore-like blues rock ballad, when Moore did blues rock as opposed to his forays into hard rock and metal, and another one I pulled from that Classic Rock Magazine compilation CD I found lying around via which I rediscovered Tame Impala. This is from McBride’s 2012 solo album Crossing The Line. As of 2022, he’s Deep Purple’s new permanent guitarist, having replaced Steve Morse. Morse temporarily left Deep Purple to tend to his ailing wife, who has sadly since passed, with McBride taking over on tour until Morse decided to leave permanently, saying he was ‘handing over the keys to the vault” to McBride who, the always classy Morse added, had ‘nailed’ the Purple gig. That was confirmed by a friend of mine who saw Purple last summer and was impressed by McBride’s playing which had its first studio outing with Purple on the band’s 2024 release = 1.

14. U2, Surrender . . . Great song with a terrific rhythmic groove, from the 1983 album War, U2’s third studio release and one that arguably truly broke them big, featuring such hits as New Year’s Day and Sunday Bloody Sunday. Playing it for the show is a classic case, for me, anyway, of rediscovering a song after not having played an album in ages. As soon as it started I was “oh, yeah, I remember this.” Someone on YouTube put it this way and it would be difficult for me to provide a better analysis, so here’s his: “Every great album has at least one or two songs that weren’t a commercial hit, but add to the feel, acts as connective tissue, and gives an album substance and style. This is one of those songs.” Well put.

15. Free, Soon I Will Be Gone . . . And soon this show will be over, one song to go after this one, a beautiful ballad from the 1970 album Highway as I prepare to hit the road home.

16. Blood, Sweat & Tears, Maiden Voyage . . . A cover of the 1965 Herbie Hancock tune that’s become a jazz standard, blending BS & T’s typical jazz and rock elements and recorded for the band’s 1972 studio release New Blood. The album indeed represented new blood for the band, with lead singer David Clayton Thomas having gone solo although he later returned for a few more 1970s BS & T albums. Clayton Thomas was replaced by R & B singer Jerry Fisher on New Blood and other albums, although Maiden Voyage is an instrumental.

I had a show ready to go, then on Thursday came news that Marianne Faithfull had died. So, my show instead is a tribute to Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger’s 1960s girlfriend Faithfull who was a great artist in her own right, particularly long after leaving the Stones’ orbit.

That was evident on her return to prominence brilliant 1979 album Broken English which fit with the punk/new wave ethos of that time and was the first in a hot streak trilogy of the albums Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure into the mid-1980s. The Broken English album in particular and subsequent releases featured her, well, broken english by booze, cigarettes and substance abuse voice. It was a far cry from the sweet sounds of her 1960s material like the Stones’ As Tears Go By, such that she came across as an entirely new artist, possessed by the passage of time and life experience as one of character and authenticity.

So, I’m playing the entire Broken English album plus assorted tracks, covers and otherwise, from throughout Faithfull’s career. Additional commentary after the bare-bones list. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

Marianne Faithfull – Broken English

1. Broken English
2. Witches’ Song
3. Brain Drain
4. Guilt
5. The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan
6. What’s The Hurry?
7. Working Class Hero . . . John Lennon cover, brilliantly done.
8. Why D’Ya Do It . . . last but not least, the essential centerpiece of the album, a vitriolic rant over a lover’s infidelity.
——————
9. House Of The Rising Sun
10. The Blue Millionaire (extended 8:23 minute version)
11. A Stranger On Earth
12. Strange Weather
13. Falling From Grace
14. I’m A Loser (Beatles cover)
15. As Tears Go By
16. Intrigue
17. Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin cover)
18. For Beauty’s Sake
19. Sister Morphine (1969 version)
20. Sister Morphine (1979 version)
21. Running For Our Lives
22. Sweetheart
23. Bored By Dreams
24. Truth Bitter Truth
25. Monday Monday (The Mamas And The Papas cover)
——————

My track tales, outside of the Broken English album already covered:

9. House Of The Rising Sun . . . From 1964, Marianne Faithfull’s take on the traditional song done by so many but arguably most notably by The Animals.

10. The Blue Millionaire (extended 8:23 minute version) . . . A shorter version was released on the 1983 album A Child’s Adventure. This is the extended 12-inch vinyl single later also released on the excellent 2-CD compilation Marianne Faithfull A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology released on Island Records in 1998.

11. A Stranger On Earth . . . A heartfelt, hurtin’ torch song from her 1987 album Strange Weather.

12. Strange Weather . . . And the title cut from that album, similar vein. Among the luminaries on the album: Dr. John and the recently departed Garth Hudson of The Band fame – who I honored last week via a Band song set – on piano and accordion, respectively.

13. Falling From Grace . . . From that hot streak trio of albums I mentioned once Faithfull returned to prominence late 1970s – Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure. This one’s from 1983’s A Child’s Adventure.

14. I’m A Loser . . . Her 1965 cover of The Beatles’ tune, with Faithfull’s then-pristine, beautiful voice carrying it to great effect.

15. As Tears Go By . . . Not her original cover of the song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, which became (to them) an unexpected hit, No. 9 on the UK charts, such that they then quickly recorded it as a Rolling Stones track and made No. 6. What I’m playing, though, is Faithfull’s more haunting version from her Strange Weather album, released in 1987.

16. Intrigue . . . From Dangerous Acquaintances, the 1981 followup to 1979’s Broken English and critically panned, relatively speaking, even by Faithfull herself at the time as it apparently was a difficult recording due to conflicts among the various musicians yet . . . How can an album featuring a compelling ‘lost love’ song like this plus others like Sweetheart, For Beauty’s Sake and Truth Bitter Truth be anything but terrific?

17. Reason To Believe . . . Back to 1967 we go for this Tim Hardin classic also memorably done by Rod Stewart on his 1971 album Every Picture Tells A Story.

18. For Beauty’s Sake . . . Up tempo number from the Dangerous Acquaintances album, a track co-written by Faithfull and Steve Winwood of Traffic/Blind Faith and solo fame.

19. Sister Morphine . . . Faithfull’s original 1969 version, co-written with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, later to appear as a Stones’ track on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers.

20. Sister Morphine . . . And her 1979 version, recorded during the sessions for the Broken English album and later reworked and released in this studio version on the 1998 compilation A Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology.

21. Running For Our Lives . . . From the 1983 album A Child’s Adventure, it’s always been one of my favorite Faithfull tracks.

22. Sweetheart . . . Back to Dangerous Acquaintances we go.

23. Bored By Dreams . . . A pulsating rock tune, great drumming by various session players, from Faithfull’s 1995 album A Secret Life.

24. Truth Bitter Truth . . . Another of my favorite Faithfull tracks, from Dangerous Acquaintances.

25. Monday Monday . . . Marianne’s 1967 cover of The Mamas & the Papas’ hit as I look ahead to my Monday show, coming up on February 3, 8-10 pm ET.

My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list. Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

1. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5
2. Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over Beethoven
3. John Mellencamp, Play Guitar
4. John Mellencamp, Serious Business
5. Otis Redding, Satisfaction
6. Ray Charles, Let’s Go Get Stoned
7. Warren Zevon, Bo Diddley’s A Gunslinger/Bo Diddley (live, from Stand In The Fire)
8. Ron Wood & Bo Diddley, Who Do You Love (from Live At The Ritz)
9. The Rolling Stones, Too Tough
10. Pink Floyd, Empty Spaces
11. Pink Floyd, Young Lust
12. Aerosmith, One Way Street
13. ZZ Top, Lowdown In The Street
14. Procol Harum, Long Gone Geek
15. Mountain, Solution
16. Rush, Chemistry
17. Pretenders, Mystery Achievement
18. Van Halen, Up For Breakfast
19. The Black Crowes, Been A Long Time (Waiting On Love)
20. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Ain’t No Sunshine (from Live At The Fillmore 1997)
21. Fleetwood Mac, That’s All For Everyone

My track-by-track tales:

1. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 . . . Everyone knows those first, dramatic notes . . . da na na na! Etc. Depending on version, or excerpt, the piece can go on for half an hour or more, or less. In this case, it’s about six minutes of me having fun throwing a curveball, perhaps, into an otherwise usual rock and roll show but I’ve done it before. As always, it depends on my mood, my thought process at a given time, what I may have been conversing about, reading, watching, listening to, or whatever. Ideas come from everywhere and anywhere. In this case, I was thinking of playing Electric Light Orchestra so then I thought about Roll Over Beethoven, ELO’s cover of Chuck Berry so it then followed that, what the heck, play Beethoven himself. So here we are.

2. Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over Beethoven . . . The original 8-minutes and change version as it appeared on the ELO 2 album in 1973 when the band was still in its early phases finding its way and experimenting with psychedelic and progressive rock forms, always with an ear to catchy tunes. So, a Chuck Berry cover like Roll Over Beethoven was perhaps an obvious ‘easy’ thing to do, quite successfully; a great hard rocking/prog version.

3. John Mellencamp, Play Guitar . . . “Forget all about that macho shit and learn how to play guitar” the signature line from a great tune from his 1983 album Uh Huh, still in naming transition between early stage name John Cougar then to his actual surname Mellencamp. The album was released under the name John Cougar Mellencamp but in any event nothing truly matters but the music and it’s one of those albums easily listened to, straight through, with not a dud track in the list.

4. John Mellencamp, Serious Business . . . Another from Uh Huh; I couldn’t decide between this and Play Guitar so, I’m playing both.

5. Otis Redding, Satisfaction . . . Otis’s version of The Rolling Stones’ classic, released on his Otis Blue album that came out three months after the Stones’ 1965 hit single. It is, based on available literature, at least somewhat how Keith Richards of the Stones initially envisioned the song as being, complete with horns. Which, interestingly, with the Stones being augmented in concert by various horn sections over the years since, the song has at least somewhat become a hybrid of the original and Redding versions when the Stones play it live. That often depends on where it is in the set. I’ve seen them open with it, playing it ‘straight’ without horns, and seen them close with it in extended almost orchestra versions.

6. Ray Charles, Let’s Go Get Stoned . . . I’ve been in something of a Ray Charles phase of late, likely started when I played Humble Pie’s live version of I Don’t Need No Doctor fairly recently but in any case, always a good time to play something by one of the masters of music.

7. Warren Zevon, Bo Diddley’s A Gunslinger/Bo Diddley (live, from Stand In The Fire) . . . Incendiary stuff, in line with the album title.

8. Ron Wood & Bo Diddley, Who Do You Love (from Live At The Ritz) . . . I hadn’t planned on playing this but when I decided to play Zevon doing Diddley it just seemed to follow that I would or should play Diddley and this version of arguably his signature song, accompanied by the Stones’ guitarist, from the collaborative 1988 album Live At The Ritz.

9. The Rolling Stones, Too Tough . . . Nice riff rocker from the 1983 album Undercover. It’s something of a ‘lost’ album in the Stones’ extensive catalog. The band didn’t tour behind it as the so-called “World War III’ between songwriting principals Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was heating up as Jagger was in process of launching a solo career, splitting his musical focus. That battle went to greater extremes on the subsequent 1986 album Dirty Work which has been savaged by critics and some fans but which I love due to its naked aggression, reflecting band dynamics at the time. More on that, next time I play a song from the Dirty Work album. Suffice it to say that eventually, by the 1990s, all concerned seem to come to the understanding that they could – and did – pursue solo projects without sabotaging the mother ship.

On that score, it’s interesting in The Beatles’ documentary Get Back, there’s a scene where John Lennon and George Harrison are in studio, musing about doing solo albums in parallel with The Beatles. Paul McCartney wasn’t in the room but apparently later said that, had he known of the conversation, he would have been supportive of the idea. It didn’t happen – outside of some members doing experimental music while the band was still together, things like Harrison’s Wonderwall Music in 1968 and Electronic Sound in 1969 or Lennon’s avant-garde experiments with Yoko Ono – so it’s one of those interesting ‘what ifs’ of history. Lennon, Harrison and Ringo Starr did work together on some of each other’s post-breakup solo albums and McCartney joined the others – although not in studio at the same time – on Starr’s 1973 album Ringo.

As for the Stones’ Undercover album, it actually had its share of hits including the top 10 in most countries funk rock title cut plus She Was Hot and the funk rock/rap Too Much Blood. And Too Tough, to me a ‘shoulda /coulda been’ hit that wasn’t released as a single although it did get some radio play.

10. Pink Floyd, Empty Spaces . . . From The Wall, a lead-in into Young Lust, best listened to as a unified piece, as I’m presenting it.

11. Pink Floyd, Young Lust . . . Featuring the immortal line “I need a dirty woman, I need a dirty girl . . . ” Always reminds me of college days in my off-campus apartment when I got home one night to hear my neighbor, apparently impromptu but maybe he was listening to Pink Floyd, cry out “I want a woman!” Apparently, he didn’t have or get one, at least that night.

12. Aerosmith, One Way Street . . . A seven-minute bluesy cut from the band’s self-titled 1973 debut album that featured the hit single Dream On.

13. ZZ Top, Lowdown In The Street . . . Music is, or can be, very much a time and place thing and that’s what ZZ Top’s 1979 album Deguello, from which this track comes, is for me. I had of course known of the band, their various hits to that point like Tush and Le Grange, owned their first compilation featuring those tunes but during college here came Deguello, with hits like I Thank You and Cheap Sunglasses and I was totally sold, prompting me to go back to the individual albums preceding Deguello, with obvious rewards.

14. Procol Harum, Long Gone Geek . . . Heavy rocker was the B-side to the title cut single from the 1969 album A Salty Dog.

15. Mountain, Solution . . . A new track at the time of its release, 1994, on the excellent/comprehensive Mountain compilation Over The Top which has now, according to a magazine I was perusing in my neighborhood record store last Friday, been re-released after going out of print. It’s a worthwhile compilation to pick up or listen to online, showing how Mountain was excellent beyond their best-known hit Mississippi Queen. Solution, the 1994 track in all its heavy guitar glory, is up to Mountain’s established standards.

16. Rush, Chemistry . . . From the 1982 album Signals which featured the hit single Subdivisions. Typical Rush, the song Chemistry, but upon deeper investigation there are musical signs, (maybe that’s why they called the album Signals) in the song of Rush’s impending move into the controversial and divisive to the fan base synthesizer rock phase over the next three albums – Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows and Hold Your Fire.

17. Pretenders, Mystery Achievement . . . Irresistible rocker, great bass line, from the band’s self-titled debut album, 1979. The hits/best known tracks were Brass In Pocket and Precious but it’s one of those albums where every song is superb.

18. Van Halen, Up For Breakfast . . . Perhaps an indication of what may have been but never happened/continued. Up For Breakfast, hard yet melodic stuff from the Van (Sammy) Hagar version of the band was a new track recorded in 2004 along with two others for the 2-disc compilation The Best Of Both Worlds (the David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar on lead vocals versions of the band, totally ignoring the ill-fated Gary Cherone-fronted Van Halen III album). The compilation came out in support of a reunion tour with Hagar. I saw the show in July, 2004 in Toronto and it was terrific but it apparently was an illusion of sorts as relationships within the band were fraying thanks to musical differences compounded by guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s assorted drug and personal demons. There’s many interviews available on YouTube with, at least, Hagar’s views on what transpired.

19. The Black Crowes, Been A Long Time (Waiting On Love) . . . Unapologetically derivative of their heroes like Faces, Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones, among others, with the added influence of ‘jam bands’ that the Crowes – originally a hit singles band via songs like Jealous Again and Otis Redding’s Hard To Handle – have long since become in the vein of The Allman Brothers Band and others. It’s terrific music, regardless, that I haven’t played on the show in ages and thus is long overdue, so here we come with this track from the 2009 album Before The Frost . . . Until The Freeze. It was recorded before a live audience at Levon Helm of The Band fame’s Woodstock, New York studio, The Barn.

20. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Ain’t No Sunshine (from Live At The Fillmore 1997) . . . The Bill Withers classic done by Petty and The Heartbreakers on a terrific live album that came out in physical copies in 2022. It’s a great listen as Petty and pals go through their own material but also covers like Ain’t No Sunshine, J.J. Cale’s Call Me The Breeze, the Stones’ Time Is On My Side and Satisfaction, The Byrds’ Eight Miles High and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, among others.

21. Fleetwood Mac, That’s All For Everyone . . . And that is indeed all, for this show at least, as we part, until next time, via this cool cut I’ve always enjoyed, from the 1979 album Tusk.

I hadn’t played anything from The Band recently, then this week the group came to mind with the passing, at age 87, of multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. All of the original members – Hudson, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel – are now sadly gone but the music of course lives on. Here they are in all their live glory on the 1972 album Rock Of Ages, followed by some studio tracks by the group to fill out my two-hour slot.

The live album is notable for The Band being augmented by – as Robertson advises in the introduction – something different than the group to that point had tried in the live arena, a horn section arranged by the renowned Allen Toussaint. The result is indeed an album for the ages.

The Band – Rock Of Ages

1. Introduction
2. Don’t Do It
3. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
4. Caledonia Mission
5. Get Up Jake
6. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show
7. Stage Fright
8. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
9. Across The Great Divide
10. This Wheel’s On Fire
11. Rag Mama Rag
12. The Weight
13. The Shape I’m In
14. Unfaithful Servant
15. Life Is A Carnival
16. The Genetic Method
17. Chest Fever
18. (I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes

Studio tracks:

19. Acadian Driftwood
20. Up On Cripple Creek
21. The Saga Of Pepote Rouge
22. Endless Highway
23. It Makes No Difference
24. Knockin’ Lost John
25. Mystery Train

Song clips also available on my Facebook page. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. The Clash, The Magnificent Seven
2. Television, Torn Curtain
3. Little Feat, Texas Twister
4. Steve Miller Band, Serenade From The Stars aka Serenade
5. Deep Purple, Birds Of Prey
6. Lou Reed, Street Hassle
7. Patti Smith, Are You Experienced?
8. Jimi Hendrix, 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)
9. Andrew Stockdale, Meridian
10. John Lennon, Steel And Glass
11. The Rolling Stones with Lady Gaga, Sweet Sounds Of Heaven
12. Boz Scaggs, Harbor Lights
13. Bonnie Raitt, Guilty
14. Steve Winwood, Spanish Dancer
15. Blind Faith, Do What You Like
16. Funkadelic, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Clash, The Magnificent Seven . . . The Clash were often billed as ‘the only band that matters’ – I recall that being a sticker on my original vinyl copy of the London Calling album – and for the period of time between the release of that worldwide commercial breakthrough album in 1979 through Sandinista! in 1980 and Combat Rock in 1982, for me, they essentially were.

I still was into the Beatles and Stones and so on – in defiance of The Clash’s lyrics for the song 1977 “No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones in 1977” to which I enjoyed Mick Jagger’s riposte “Keith Richards is the original punk rocker. You can’t really out-punk keith – it’s a useless gesture.” – but had become major into The Clash and all the new wave and punk rock of that time to the point where one of my younger brothers took a look at my record collection and said ‘what’s happened to you?’ lol, to which I replied, ‘nothing, outside of going to college, among other things, expanding my horizons, try it, you might like it” while he went back to his Stones, Elton John and KISS albums.

I think what really did my brother in was the sight of me owning Haircut 100 and Fabulous Poodles albums and such and when I think and/or listen back on it, he may have been on the right track there. Those infatuations didn’t last long – but The Clash did, for me. Meantime, bands like The Clash later admitted to their admiration for and inspiration taken from groups like the Stones that they criticized, partly at least tongue in cheek, in songs such as 1977.

As for The Magnificent Seven, of course an old movie title not sure the song had anything to do with, the flick featuring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen that served as the title to the opening cut on Sandinista! It was the sprawling 3-album vinyl set that came out in 1980 and featured The Clash in all their by then rock/reggae/dub/rap/funk/terrifically cynical lyrics glory.

“Ring! Ring! It’s 7:00 A.M.!
Move y’self to go again
Cold water in the face
Brings you back to this awful place . . . ”

“Gimme Honda, Gimme Sony
So cheap and real phony
Hong Kong dollars and Indian cents
English pounds and Eskimo pence . . . ”

they’d never get away with, or at least would be censured if not outright censored for, such politically incorrect lyrics nowadays.

“So get back to work an’ sweat some more
The sun will sink an’ we’ll get out the door
It’s no good for man to work in cages
Hits the town, he drinks his wages
You’re frettin’, you’re sweatin’
But did you notice you ain’t gettin’? . . . ”

“Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi
Went to the park to check on the game
But they was murdered by the other team
Who went on to win fifty-nil
You can be true, you can be false
You be given the same reward
Socrates and Milhous Nixon
Both went the same way – through the kitchen
Plato the Greek or Rin Tin Tin
Who’s more famous to the billion millions?
News Flash: Vacuum Cleaner Sucks Up Budgie
Oooohh…bub-bye
Magnificence!!”

Truly magnificent. Great band. And maybe/probably that’s enough verbose commentary for one song, enough for my entire set, but there’s 15 more to go!

2. Television, Torn Curtain . . . I thought of playing this, from Television’s Marquee Moon album (and a great song, that title cut, which I’ve played before on the show) because I was going through all the “I’ll get to it, eventually” shows/movies/documentaries I’ve recorded on my PVR and I have an Alfred Hitchcock movie, Torn Curtain, on my list. It’s a spy movie from 1966. It stars the great actor Paul Newman, but it’s considered by critics to be not up to Hitchock’s usual standard and I’ve seen most if not all of Hitchcock’s classics but I have not seen Torn Curtain so I was curious and recorded it but I’ll reserve judgment until viewed. As for Torn Curtain, the song: A haunting, spooky track, starts with a quick drum roll then into melancholic lyrics – “I’m uncertain when beauty meets abuse, torn curtain loves all ridicule” underscored by stirring guitar work on a seven-minute trip. As I’ve mentioned before, Marquee Moon is a critically acclaimed album I tried several times and never ‘got’ until one day some years ago I happened to be in a used CD store, the title track was playing and, suddenly, I was sold. Funny how music can work that way.

3. Little Feat, Texas Twister . . . From the reconstituted Little Feat that, post-leader Lowell George’s death in 1979, re-emerged in 1988 with most of the key members of the original band still on board for the album and title cut hit single Let It Roll. At the time, I’d barely been aware that Little Feat was back but picked up their trail upon hearing on the radio this uptempo boogie rock toe-tapping minor hit single from the 1990 followup album Representing The Mambo. I eventually saw Little Feat live at a club in Hamilton, Ontario during the summer of 2004; great show.

4. Steve Miller Band, Serenade From The Stars aka Serenade . . . Sometimes you see it listed as Serenade, sometimes as Serenade From The Stars. In any event, this spacey song appeared on Miller’s 1976 hit album Fly Like An Eagle and, although not a big hit single, made the cut for his ubiquitous, massively-selling 1978 compilation Greatest Hits 1974-78. I was reminded of it when I threw another Miller compilation, the 2-CD Ultimate Hits, into the car player during some recent runnings around.

5. Deep Purple, Birds Of Prey . . . One of my favorite bands, Deep Purple has been doing some terrific late-career music, particularly since hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin for the 2013 studio album Now What?! and four more albums since including the 2024 release = 1 with new guitarist Simon McBride. He replaced Steve Morse, whose great work is featured on this sort of psychedelic/progressive rocker from the 2017 album Infinite. Morse – with Purple for eight studio sets since the 1996 release Purpendicular – left the group on good terms as he departed to care for his then-ill wife Janine who, sadly, subsequently died, with McBride at first replacing Morse on tour and then permanently. Ezrin, meantime, is well known for his work with Alice Cooper, particularly during Cooper’s 1970s heyday, and Pink Floyd including The Wall album, among many other credits.

6. Lou Reed, Street Hassle . . . Eleven-minute title track to Reed’s 1978 album exploring, arguably, the seedy sides – depending upon one’s point of view – of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

7. Patti Smith, Are You Experienced? . . . Smith is rightly renowned for her albums Horses and Easter, among others, but right up there, for me, is her 2007 covers album Twelve (for the number of songs; thirteen if you count a bonus track on some copies, not mine) from which I pulled this haunting Hendrix cover. Among the other songs on the set, some of which I’ve played on previous shows, are the Stones’ Gimme Shelter, The Beatles’ Within You Without You, Bob Dylan’s Changing Of The Guards, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.

8. Jimi Hendrix, 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) . . . A sprawling, 13-minute psychedelic masterpiece from the Electric Ladyland album, released in October, 1968. It’s a quite remarkable piece of music incorporating all Hendrix blessed us with in terms of riff rock, psychedelia, funk, soul and so on, as I’ve been reminded while playing it while writing these commentary notes. So much so that I’m now tempted to play the entire Electric Ladyland album on one of my Saturday morning ‘album play’ shows.

9. Andrew Stockdale, Meridian . . . Typical riff rocker from Wolfmother’s leader, aka essentially he who is Wolfmother as the songwriting brains behind the operation, from his 2013 solo album Keep Moving. It was originally to be a Wolfmother album but became a Stockdale set after various personnel changes in the band. Stockdale/Wolfmother are essentially one and the same and if you’re not aware of the artist, I refer you to my eldest musician son’s somewhat dismissive assessment when the first Wolfmother album, and a good one, came out in 2005: “Dad, it’s (Led) Zeppelin”. It was a fun chat during which I recall replying, “yup but so what, I can still enjoy it” which I still do.

10. John Lennon, Steel And Glass . . . Spooky cool brooding stuff from the 1974 album Walls And Bridges, a record that featured the hit single Whatever Gets You Thru The Night.

11. The Rolling Stones with Lady Gaga, Sweet Sounds Of Heaven . . . Great gospel type tune from the 2023 album Hackney Diamonds that many – and I agree – think is akin to songs like Let It Loose or Shine A Light and could have fit on those songs’ parent 1972 album Exile On Main St. It features Lady Gaga’s dueling vocal performance with Mick Jagger. It’s perhaps interesting in that I don’t listen to Lady Gaga’s original music much if at all yet I know about her and, as with, say, Taylor Swift, I respect them both because they actually write and play instruments in addition to performing so to me they have credibility even if their material is not to my taste, though I have sampled it. It’s akin I suppose to Norah Jones, a great artist in her own right who I also don’t listen to much. A female friend gave me an album of hers as a gift years ago, but I prefer Jones in the co-lead vocal she did with Keith Richards on the song Illusion from Richards’ most recent solo release, the 2015 album Crosseyed Heart.

Sweet Sounds Of Heaven, also featuring Stevie Wonder on keyboards and synthesizer, was a single and a hit to some degree, depending on whatever chart one consults in our multi-platform world. The song has a false ending 5:10 in which is when the single edit ends but it goes on for two more minutes of Jagger/Gaga vocal vamping on the album version.

12. Boz Scaggs, Harbor Lights . . . Hauntingly smooth jazzy jam love song from the 1977 Silk Degrees album. That record brought Boz – who had previously been in the early blues rock/psychedelic version of the Steve Miller Band and sessions with Duane Allman on songs like the lengthy blues track Loan Me A Dime I’ve previously played – to solo prominence and widespread recognition via the hit singles Lowdown and Lido Shuffle.

13. Bonnie Raitt, Guilty . . . A tender, heart-wrenching cover of a Randy Newman song about relationships and the human condition, from Raitt’s 1973 album Takin’ My Time, long before she became a major hit artist, and deservedly so, in the late 1980s.

14. Steve Winwood, Spanish Dancer . . . From Winwood’s 1980 release Arc Of A Diver, a true solo work where this brilliant artist of Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith and solo fame played every instrument – guitar, bass, drums, keyboards – in addition to producing the album.

15. Blind Faith, Do What You Like . . . Long, always interesting musically, jam from the supergroup’s – Winwood, lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, Eric Clapton guitar, Ginger Baker drums, Ric Grech bass – one and only studio album, the self-titled release that came out in 1969.

16. Funkadelic, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow . . . Extended acid rock/psychedelic song featuring the guitar playing of Eddie Hazel on this title cut from the band’s second studio album, released in July, 1970.

So Old It’s New blues and blues/rock set of influencers and those influenced by them and on down the line, generation by generation.

I initially was planning a straight blues/rock show and was going to leave it at individual, random songs. But it evolved into direct connections between artists – from a precursor Allman Brothers band playing B.B. King to B.B. King himself to another King, Albert, to Muddy Waters working with Johnny Winter to Johnny Winter on his own to John Lee Hooker to Hooker with Canned Heat, etc. So it’s all of a piece, of sorts, as the sets, to me often wonderfully, can take on lives of their own.

So we have, in some cases, various versions of the same song, like Blind Willie McTell’s original Statesboro Blues as later done by Taj Mahal which then inspired The Allman Brothers Band. Then, things like Leadbelly’s Gallis Pole and Led Zeppelin’s Gallows Pole – both derived from a centuries-old folk song The Maid Freed From The Gallows. And some songs, in a bluesy vein, like Jethro Tull’s It’s Breaking Me Up, just on their own. All of it bracketed by The Rolling Stones’ take on the Little Walter tune Blue And Lonesome, from the Stones’ 2016 blues covers album of the same name, and ending the show with Little Walter’s original version of that song. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list. Song clips on my Facebook page.

1. The Rolling Stones, Blue And Lonesome
2. The Hourglass, B.B. King Medley (Sweet Little Angel/It’s My Own Fault/How Blue Can You Get?)
3. B.B. King with Ruth Brown, Ain’t Nobody’s Business (live at B.B. King’s Blues Club, Memphis 1993)
4. Albert King, Cadillac Assembly Line
5. Muddy Waters, Bus Driver
6. Johnny Winter, Lone Wolf
7. John Lee Hooker, I’m Bad Like Jesse James
8. John Lee Hooker with Canned Heat, Burning Hell
9. Canned Heat, Election Blues
10. Jethro Tull, It’s Breaking Me Up
11. Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
12. Blind Willie McTell, Statesboro Blues
13. Taj Mahal, Statesboro Blues
14. The Allman Brothers Band, Statesboro Blues (live, from At Fillmore East)
15. Leadbelly, The Gallis Pole
16. Led Zeppelin, Gallows Pole
17. Robert Johnson, Ramblin’ On My Mind
18. Eric Clapton, Ramblin’ On My Mind (live, from E.C. Was Here)
19. Ten Years After, Help Me
20. Buddy Guy, Baby Please Don’t Leave Me
21. Little Walter, Blue And Lonesome

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Rolling Stones, Blue and Lonesome . . . A cover that not only pays homage to the Chicago blues but also mirrors the Stones’ beginnings as a blues band. Mick Jagger’s harmonica playing echoes Little Walter’s original, but the Stones inject their distinct rock edge, bridging the gap between traditional blues and modern rock.

2. The Hourglass, B.B. King Medley ((Sweet Little Angel/It’s My Own Fault/How Blue Can You Get?) . . . From 1968. The Hourglass was a precursor to the eventual full blown Allman Brothers Band. At first it was Duane Allman on guitar and brother Gregg on vocals and keyboards accompanied by various other musicians, within two years morphing into the initial lineups of the legendary Allman Brothers Band. I first cottoned to this tribute via the first of two Duane Allman compilations – An Anthology and An Anthology Volume II – I investigated once I became, beyond hits compilations, fully invested in the Allmans, who have come to be one of my alltime favorite bands. The Duane Allman anthologies feature Allmans Brothers tracks but more arguably interesting – since one can listen to the Allmans on their own – are the various sessions Duane played on outside of the parent band.

3. B.B. King with Ruth Brown, Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Live At B.B. King’s Blues Club, Memphis 1993) . . . B.B. largely gives the actual singing vocals over to Ruth, adding spoken word ‘accents’ to lead her on in this near 10-minute ribald, flirtatious classic featuring, as always, King’s smooth, tasteful and emotive guitar work that is a language in itself.

4. Albert King, Cadillac Assembly Line . . . A funky, bluesy working-class story set to King’s cutting guitar tone and silky smooth vocals.

5. Muddy Waters, Bus Driver . . . From Muddy’s first of three ‘comeback’ albums produced and played on by Johnny Winter, this extended blues rock tune from Hard Again, released in 1977. The other two albums in the trilogy were I’m Ready and King Bee, King Bee being Muddy’s last studio statement, all released between 1977 and 1981 and all more than worthy listens.

6. Johnny Winter, Lone Wolf . . Up-tempo blues rocker from Winter’s 2004 studio album I’m A Bluesman. I saw him at the Kitchener Blues Festival in 2011, three years before his death by which time Winter’s health was failing. He was playing concerts sitting in a chair up front, helped to the stage, but even so his guitar playing and the overall vibe was smokin’ hot and of course even when standing up during healthier days, Winter “just stood there’ out front, little movement, wailing away, wonderfully.

7. John Lee Hooker, I’m Bad Like Jesse James . . . I was listening to this the other night while prepping the show and, as often happens with great music, I think “why listen to anything else but John Lee Hooker?” But that merely fits my mantra of ‘the best song/band/artist ever is the one you are listening to, now, if you like it.’ Typically haunting if not menacing spoken-word Hooker singing style minimalist mood piece. This version is from the 1967 album Live at Cafe Au Go Go, recorded in New York City in 1966 with Hooker backed by members of Muddy Waters’ band.

8. John Lee Hooker with Canned Heat, Burning Hell . . . Hooker teamed with Heat for the 1971 album Hooker ‘n Heat. . . After about a minute of in-studio chat about record company machinations, various musicians, cooking food, yes they talk about cooking food . . . eventually in comes the music, 90 seconds in, unannounced as the banter just stops, with Hooker’s hypnotic boogie style taking over and blending seamlessly with Canned Heat’s rock and blues energy.

9. Canned Heat, Election Blues . . . Written and released in 1973 as a lament about Richard Nixon having won a landslide victory in the 1972 US election which of course later led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in August, 1974. While written back then, the thoughts expressed in the lyrics, about voter turnout or lack of same, about being informed if and before one votes, however one votes, forever resonate. Beyond that, it’s just a great slow blues tune.

10. Jethro Tull, It’s Breaking Me Up . . . Tull leader/singer/songwriter/flautist/myriad instrumentalist Ian Anderson has always said that the title of Tull’s first album, This Was, was appropriate in that ‘this was’ Jethro Tull because by the time the album was released in 1968, original guitarist and blues aficionado Mick Abrahams was already on his way out as Anderson wanted to embrace a different direction (while still sometimes returning to bluesy tracks like It’s Breaking Me Up) as the two men didn’t see eye-to-eye in terms of musical vision. Abrahams went on to form the blues-rock band Blodwyn Pig, great name with some great tunes I’ve played before on the show and must return to at some point.

11. Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell . . . It’s among the biggest ‘WTF?’ songs in Dylan’s catalogue in terms of, why did it take so long to officially release? A brilliant tribute to the legendary bluesman I’ll get to in about six minutes of song time but before that, more on Dylan. Mercurial as ever, his tribute to McTell was shelved, inexplicably to most Dylan fans once they knew of it, during the sessions for the otherwise excellent 1983 album Infidels. The song Blind Willie McTell first saw widespread commercial release – emphasis on the plaintive, emotional lyric “And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell” that ends most of the verses – on the first of the now 17-volume and counting Booleg Series, Volumes 1-3 1961-1991 released in the spring of 1991. It’s essential Dylan that by now has appeared on various compilations. It’s a worthy introduction to McTell’s own work, including signature tune Statesboro Blues, and some of those who covered that classic.

12. Blind Willie McTell, Statesboro Blues . . . Intricate and influential fingerpicking and lyrical wit. McTell’s relaxed delivery belies the complexity of his technique, making it a blueprint for later interpretations.

13. Taj Mahal, Statesboro Blues . . . A revitilization of McTell’s original via a modern, roots-oriented approach from the multi-faceted Taj, who first recorded the tune in the band Rising Sons, with guitarist Ry Cooder, during the mid-1960s. Mahal reworked it for this version, released on his self-titled debut solo album in 1968.

14. The Allman Brothers Band, Statesboro Blues (live, from At Fillmore East) . . . Blind Willie McTell originally recorded the song in 1928. So it’s now nearly 100 years old! A tribute to the power of excellence and permanence because it doesn’t really age; it just evolves through the ages. Taj Mahal took it further in 1968 and then the Allmans, influenced by Taj’s arrangement, made it their own, transforming an acoustic blues into a rock anthem, upon release of the live album At Fillmore East in 1971 that established the band as a force in blues/rock music.

15. Leadbelly, The Gallis Pole . . . People accuse Led Zeppelin of ripping stuff off from influential blues artists and I’ve been a critic, too, while maintaining enjoyment of Zep’s music although I’ve tempered my tirades over time with the realization that lots of borrowing goes on in music, to varying degrees. And if it’s proven to be plagiarism, then a price is usually paid. The Gallis Pole is another example but at least when Zep covered it and released it on Led Zeppelin III in 1970 it was credited as ‘traditional arranged by’ unlike how they often credited songs they didn’t actually write to themselves – and in some cases later, rightly, paid for it via copyright infringement lawsuits. In any event, Leadbelly’s version wasn’t original, either. It’s all derived from a centuries-old folk song, specific origin unknown, called The Maid Freed from the Gallows, about someone facing the hangman. Great song in all its incarnations including this one featuring Leadbelly’s amazing guitar strumming.

16. Led Zeppelin, Gallows Pole . . . And here’s the Zeppelin version, which arguably many people heard first but the beauty of it all is then you can go back to the original source material. It’s as Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones has said is among the highest compliments that can be paid a musician: They passed it on.

17. Robert Johnson, Ramblin’ On My Mind . . . Amazing the emotional pull one can evoke via just an acoustic guitar and haunting, personal, deeply felt vocals. He inspired so many, of course.

18. Eric Clapton, Ramblin’ On My Mind (live, from EC Was Here) . . . Speaking of those Robert Johnson inspired, Clapton pays tribute to one of his heroes and influences on this extended, guitar solos extraordinaire, live cut from an album released in 1975. Clapton originally sang and played it on the 1966 John Mayall album Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. It was, with Mayall’s encouragement, an at the time reluctant to sing Clapton’s first solo vocal recording.

19. Ten Years After, Help Me . . . Slow, intoxicating extended blues treatment of a song made famous by Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller), taken from the self-titled debut TYA album, released late in 1967. Williamson’s 1963 version, particularly the bass riff played by Willie Dixon, is based on the Booker T. & the M.G.’s 1962 smash instrumental hit Green Onions and it’s evident in the TYA version as well.

20. Buddy Guy, Baby Please Don’t Leave Me . . . A mesmerizing display of vocal and guitar intensity on this hypnotic cut from Guy’s 2001 album Sweet Tea, named for the Oxford, Mississippi studio in which it was recorded.

21. Little Walter, Blue and Lonesome . . . We finish as we started, sort of, in this case with the original Little Walter tune The Rolling Stones covered to start the set.

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

Song clips also available on my Facebook page.

1. Budgie, Napoleon Bona Part 1 & 2
2. George Thorogood and The Destroyers, Night Time (from Live In Boston 1982: The Complete Concert
3. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Midnight Moses
4. The Everly Brothers, Lord Of The Manor
5. Murray McLauchlan, Child’s Song
6. Gene Clark, Some Misunderstanding
7. Joe Jackson, Fools In Love (from Live 1980-86)
8. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Brave Strangers
9. David Bowie, Beauty And The Beast (live, from Stage)
10. King Crimson, Frame By Frame
11. Lee Harvey Osmond, Kingdom Come
12. T-Bone Burnett, Monkey Dance
13. T. Rex, Life’s An Elevator
14. The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile
15. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mona/Maiden Of The Cancer Moon/Calvary (live, from Happy Trails)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Budgie, Napoleon Bona Part 1 & 2 . . . A slow build for two minutes then the musical “galloping” begins and from 2:45 onward in this seven-minute track we’re in Iron Maiden territory . . . except that Iron Maiden, which came into existence after Budgie had long been around with its galloping sound, complete with great echo effect, is actually in and has always been, in Budgie territory. A highly influential band from Wales but as can happen, Budgie was not nearly as commercially successful as many of the groups (like Maiden and Metallica to name two, both of whom have covered Budgie songs like, in Metallica’s case, Breadfan and Crash Course In Brain Surgery) it influenced.

2. George Thorogood and The Destroyers, Night Time (from Live In Boston 1982: The Complete Concert) . . . From a concert initially released that year as a 12-track album simply called Live In Boston, 1982 but re-released as the full 25-song show (plus two spoken-word intro to song tracks including audience participation) in a 2-CD set in 2020. Typical Thorogood raunch and roll, taken to more raucous heights in the live arena.

3. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Midnight Moses . . . A driving rocker from the band’s 1972 debut album Frame. Nice guitar work from Zal Cleminson, later a member of Nazareth for two albums – 1979’s No Mean City and the 1980 release Malice In Wonderland with its hit single Holiday.

4. The Everly Brothers, Lord Of The Manor . . . A haunting soundscape from 1968. Hey, that rhymes. 🙂 An at least somewhat uncharacteristic song if all you know about the Everlys is their early hits and sound, material like Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie. Great ones, those two, and many others, to be sure. But this one, after their halcyon days, is as good in its own way.

5. Murray McLauchlan, Child’s Song . . . A beautiful, touching, at least somewhat sad, definitely thought-provoking song about family. It’s from MM’s 1971 debut album Song From The Street, a title echoed in the excellent 2-disc compilation The Best Of Murray McLauchlan: Songs From The Street, released in 2007.

6. Gene Clark, Some Misunderstanding . . . From a song about family by Murray McLauchlan to one digging even deeper, perhaps. A meaning of life song of questions and attempts at answers from what was apparently a tortured soul in Clark, a founding member of The Byrds who arguably – despite his writing such Byrds hits as I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better and Eight Miles High – tends to be given short shrift as compared to Jim/Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of that great group. Clark later went solo and the highlight of his output, to me, anyway, is the 1974 album No Other with its terrific title cut I’ve played on the show before, among many great songs, like this outstanding extended ballad. Yet the album bombed, commercially, much to the fragile Clark’s consternation as he, thanks in part to circumstances such as a divorce, and drug abuse, declined both personally and professionally. He died at age 46, in 1991 from heart disease resulting in part from a bleeding ulcer after he had already been diagnosed with throat cancer.

7. Joe Jackson, Fools In Love (from Live 1980-86) . . . As the album subtitle says “new interpretations of 22 classic songs featuring four different bands”. It’s divided into selections from various Jackson albums and their supporting tours between 1980 and ’86. Songs are drawn from the 1980 Beat Crazy tour, the Night And Day trek of 1982-83, Body And Soul in 1984 and the Big World tour of 1986 which was the first time I saw him live. The twist is, you get revamps of songs, like this seven-minute version of Fools In Love. It first appeared, at a shade more than half this live length, on JJ’s punk/new wave album debut Look Sharp! in 1979. But, taken from the Night And Day tour for the live album, it’s rearranged (while still recognizable) in the jazzy style of that 1982 studio record that featured the top 10 single Steppin’ Out. Not to all tastes, perhaps, but I like this version. I’m a big fan, seen Jackson in concert a few times and, as he writes in the live album liner notes, he likes to keep things interesting for himself and his bands and hopefully the audiences appreciate it. I think most of his fan base does, knowing his wide variety of musical approaches through the years. And, as he says, you can always play the studio albums if you prefer those versions although inevitably, you might jar some concert-goers not fully up on Jackson and expecting note-for-note copies of the studio songs.

8. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Brave Strangers . . . . From that period of the mid- to late 1970s into the 1980s when Seger was on an amazing hot streak of hit albums and singles. The breakthrough came via Live Bullet in 1976 which – as with Kiss Alive and Frampton Comes Alive! – featured his earlier material like Turn The Page and Beautiful Loser, done in the live environment and released on what became a hit double vinyl album. Then came the studio album Night Moves in 1976 with its title cut hit single along with the song Mainstreet followed in 1978 by the Stranger In Town album that yielded Brave Strangers but also four of Seger’s enduring songs – Still The Same, Hollywood Nights, We’ve Got Tonite and the ubiquitous party hit Old Time Rock and Roll. The roll continued with the 1980 album Against The Wind, its title cut hit single and others like Fire Lake and You’ll Accomp’ny Me. I remember browsing in the old Yonge Street Sam The Record Man store in downtown Toronto when Against The Wind came out; it was playing on the store’s sound system and I overheard someone perusing the records racks close to me and all he said was ‘sounds like new Seger’ and it was. Instant buy.

9. David Bowie, Beauty And The Beast (live, from Stage) . . . From Bowie’s 1978 tour, live version of a song that met with minor singles chart success in the UK, from Bowie’s 1977 studio album “Heroes”. Fine guitar interplay between Carlos Alomar, who was in Bowie’s band from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, and Adrian Belew, known for stints with Frank Zappa, guest appearances with Talking Heads around the time of the Heads’ 1980 album Remain In Light, and as a member of King Crimson from 1981-2013.

10. King Crimson, Frame By Frame . . . Speaking of Adrian Belew in King Crimson . . . From the 1981 album Discipline which marked the return of King Crimson, with a Talking Heads-like sound of that period, after the initial disbanding of the group in 1974. The new lineup – initially called Discipline – was founding member/leader Robert Fripp on guitar along with Belew, drummer Bill Bruford, noted for his work in Yes and earlier versions of King Crimson, and bassist Tony Levin. Frame By Frame also became the name of a 1991 Crimson box set.

11. Lee Harvey Osmond, Kingdom Come . . . Up tempo chugger from one of Canadian artist Tom Wilson’s many projects, all of which I’m a big fan of including The Florida Razors, Junkhouse, Blackie and The Rodeo Kings and his solo work.

12. T-Bone Burnett, Monkey Dance . . . Swirling, hypnotic stuff from Burnett’s 1987 album The Talking Animals. A reputable artist in his own right, Burnett, a guitarist in Bob Dylan’s band during the 1970s, is perhaps better known for his production work with myriad musicians – Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Los Lobos, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, Elton John and Gregg Allman among them – as well as film soundtrack work including the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line.

13. T. Rex, Life’s An Elevator . . . A spooky, acoustic selection about how, yes, life, like an elevator, goes up and down. Profound. 🙂 T. Rex, led by the late Marc Bolan, remains universally known for the 1972 hit Get It On aka Bang A Gong (Get It On) but consistently topped the singles and album charts in the UK. Life’s An Elevator was the B-side to the 1976 non-album single Laser Love.

14. The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile . . . About cocaine (‘a head full of snow”) although Mick Jagger denied it, although given the lyrics it’s part of it. But, more so, a tale of life on the road for a rock band, any touring artist or, really, people like long-haul truck drivers.

Here’s the full lyrics of this beautiful song from the Sticky Fingers album, a deep cut (although well-known and highly regarded by Stones fans) which I was blown away to see and hear the band play in 1999 in Toronto on their No Security tour.

When the wind blows and the rain feels cold
with a head full of snow
with a head full of snow
In the window there’s a face you know
Don’t the night pass slow
Don’t the night pass slow

I’m hiding sister and I’m dreaming
I’m riding down your moonlight mile
I’m hiding sister and I’m dreaming
I’m riding down your moonlight mile
There I go now coming home now baby
Yeah, there I go now coming home now baby
Yeah, I’m coming home ’cause
I’m just about a moonlight mile on down the road
On down the road, down the road

15. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mona/Maiden Of The Cancer Moon/Calvary (live, from Happy Trails) . . . Improvisational psychedelic/acid rock from the San Francisco band that incorporates Bo Diddley’s Mona with two of Quicksilver’s instrumental originals. The songs, which segue into each other, total almost 24 minutes which momentarily gave me pause in terms of whether to play them together but this is independent radio, we’re not wedded to formatted or corporately-mandated song sets so, what the heck? I’ve done similar before with long pieces like Pink Floyd’s 23-minute Echoes, just one example. I was originally just going to go with the 13-minute Calvary but the three songs belong together as a suite. Besides which, it’s never boring, at least to me, and features great guitar interplay between John Cipollina on lead and Gary Duncan on rhythm. It formed most of the second side of the original vinyl of 1969’s Happy Trails album which concludes with the band’s version of that Roy Rogers/Dale Evans song as the title track. The first side was Quicksilver’s take on Diddley’s Who Do You Love, known as the Who Do You Love Suite. It’s split into Diddley’s song, which opens and closes the suite, around improvisations from the individual band members titled When You Love, Where You Love, How You Love and Which Do You Love.

No So Old It’s New classic rock deep cuts show until Monday, Jan. 13, at least not with me at the mixing board/controls. Taking a break. Happy New Year to all. If you happen to tune in, AI (i.e. the auto computer feed, da dum) will be selecting songs in the genre I generally play, usually from stuff I’ve entered into the system, between 8-10 pm ET Mondays and 8-10 am ET Saturdays. I’m curious myself as to what the system will select. It better be good and if so, I might be out of a (volunteer) job. 🙂 Take care, everyone.

Hard rock/metal set, a bit less of a deep cuts show than usual in spots. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. Ted Nugent, Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (from Double Live Gonzo!)
2. Judas Priest, Ram It Down
3. UFO, Rock Bottom (live, from Strangers In The Night)
4. Iron Maiden, Bring Your Daughter . . . To The Slaughter
5. Black Sabbath, Digital Bitch
6. The Rolling Stones, Bitch
7. Metallica, Ain’t My Bitch
8. Slayer, Seasons In The Abyss
9. Pantera, Drag The Waters
10. AC/DC, Emission Control
11. The Who, Trick Of The Light
12. Led Zeppelin, Communication Breakdown
13. Deep Purple, Speed King
14. April Wine, 21st Century Schizoid Man
15. Nazareth, Steamroller
16. Uriah Heep, One Way Or Another
17. Pink Floyd, The Nile Song
18. Iggy & The Stooges, I’m Sick Of You
19. Blue Oyster Cult, Mommy
20. Whitesnake, Sweet Talker
21. Grand Funk Railroad, Mr. Limousine Driver
22. Ted Nugent, Motor City Madhouse (from Double Live Gonzo!)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Ted Nugent, Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (from Double Live Gonzo!) . . . At risk of repetition (guilty) this has become an occasional go-to song for me whenever I decide on a hard rock/metal show. The song itself is a driving rocker but what makes it the perfect intro is Nugent’s classic, politically incorrect pre-song rap, not to all tastes but . . . “Anybody wants to get mellow you can turn around and get the fuck out of here . . . This is a love song, I’d like to dedicate this to all that Nashville pussy.”

That last line, as the song is taken from a 1977 show in Nashville, inspired the name of an actual band, hard rock/southern rock group Nashville Pussy (from Georgia, actually). Two of that band’s four members are women, lead guitarist Ruyter Suys (pronounced Rider Sighs and wife of rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist Blaine Cartwright) and bassist Bonnie Buitrago. I’ve heard them but can’t say I’m familiar with any Nashville Pussy material but I do find it interesting how bands come by their names, including song names. The title of Southern rock band the Outlaws’ signature song Green Grass and High Tides, for instance, was a play on The Rolling Stones’ 1966 compilation album title Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).

I’m not necessarily a fan of Nugent’s political views but I can still like much of his music. It is possible and I’d suggest even necessary, with any artist, to separate the two as previously mentioned when playing Nugent. So, as I dig myself out of this lengthy digression, with the original working title, More Fast Numbers, to The Rolling Stones’ 1978 album Some Girls in mind, here we go, nothing slow for a Saturday morning. I’d say wake up the neighbors, to paraphrase a Bryan Adams album title but I’m not into his music. So, think of it as your alarm clock, even if you do sleep in on weekends.

2. Judas Priest, Ram It Down . . . A pile-driving title cut from Priest’s 1988 album. It starts with lead singer Rob Halford’s banshee wail and goes from there. ‘Metal maniacs’ is in the lyrics, appropriately.

3. UFO, Rock Bottom (live, from Strangers In The Night) . . . UFO extends the original six-minute studio cut to nearly twice the length on this version from one of the acknowledged best live albums of all time, certainly in the hard rock genre. It’s one I was listening to in the car while on various runnings around this past week.

4. Iron Maiden, Bring Your Daughter . . . To The Slaughter . . . As with Nugent, speaking of politically incorrect. But, an irresistible rocker and that’s what usually draws me in, music first, lyrics later because, my theory is, you could write the greatest lyrics ever but if your tune doesn’t compel people to listen, nobody will ever hear your words of wisdom. And if you don’t like the lyrics, you can still enjoy the music.

5. Black Sabbath, Digital Bitch . . . From the controversial 1983 album Born Again, sometimes referred to as Deep Sabbath or Black Purple because Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan was fronting Sabbath, for just one album, after original singer Ozzy Osbourne’s replacement Ronnie James Dio left. Space does not permit, so I’m linking to a couple articles about the escapades that in part inspired the classic comedy This Is Spinal Tap. All that said, I like the album, among Sabbath’s heaviest.

6. The Rolling Stones, Bitch . . . Pretty well known B-side to hit single Brown Sugar from the Sticky Fingers album, released in 1971 and among my favorite Stones tunes, and albums.

The story of the song, via engineer/producer Andy Johns, from various books on the band:
“When we were doing “Bitch”, Keith (Richards) was very late. (Mick) Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him and it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said, Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar. I handed him his guitar, he put it on, kicked the song up in tempo, and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought, Wow. THAT’S what he does.”

Included is a great Richards solo in the middle which Mick Taylor, certainly more a virtuoso than Richards in purely technical terms, but they obviously worked well musically together, acknowledged as among Keith’s best. But the whole band is firing on all cylinders.

7. Metallica, Ain’t My Bitch . . . I like Metallica’s early thrash stuff, which they’ve returned to in some measure in recent years. I like their more conventional melodic stuff that began with the so-called Black album, the self-titled 1991 record that made them superstars via commercial hit songs like Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters and The Unforgiven. And they weren’t forgiven by some fans for then, egads, cutting their hair and embracing an even more commercial sound for the 1996 album Load, from which this track comes. Yet this is heavy, driving, quality rock and roll. Bands evolve. Be stuck in the past if you want, but you might miss something good.

8. Slayer, Seasons In The Abyss . . . What starts out like doomy Black Sabbath before speeding up is one of Slayer’s most conventional and accessible songs for those who might not like their speed metal/thrash stuff like Raining Blood, etc. I got into Slayer 30-plus years ago when I decided to sample them after reading an album guide to heavy metal bands. At first, as with Pantera (more on them in a moment) I thought, this isn’t even music as I was jarred by and unused to the thrash nature of their output. But it soon grew on me and it wound up for whatever reason, when I was commuting for work on my then hourlong drive, being my “in blizzard” music. Somehow, maybe the violence of the music, Slayer seemed to focus me as I drove through the sometimes scary snowstorms. As did Pantera.

9. Pantera, Drag The Waters . . . As with Slayer, same story, one of Pantera’s more conventional, accessible tunes. Heavy, yet melodic.

10. AC/DC, Emission Control . . . AC/DC’s climate change anthem. No, not really. It seems to be about sex. From the 2016 album Rock Or Bust.

11. The Who, Trick Of The Light . . . I’m about halfway through a biography of the late Who bassist John Entwistle, called The Ox, his nickname, written by Paul Rees. So he and The Who have been top of mind. This heavy rocker, written by Entwistle, has always been musically and lyrically one of my favorites from the 1978 album Who Are You as it describes a session with a prostitute with typical wry/dry Entwistle humor evidenced in previous Who songs he wrote like Boris The Spider and My Wife.

“Did I take you to the height of ecstacy, did a shadow of emotion cross your face or was it just another trick of the light?

“And I’d like to get to know you
On closer terms than this
But I guess you’ve heard it all before
Lady of the night
Won’t you steal away with me?
Lady of the night
Won’t you steal away with me?
The money’s lyin’ on the floor, she looks at me
Shakes her head and sighs
Out of time, out the door
Red light shinin’ in my eyes

But was I all right?”

12. Led Zeppelin, Communication Breakdown . . . From the first Zep album. Driving riff, passionate vocals, the whole band in sync. Short, sweet, superb.

13. Deep Purple, Speed King . . . A well-known Purple song from In Rock, the 1970 album that firmly established the band’s hard rock bona fides, yet perhaps surprisingly it didn’t chart as a single.

14. April Wine, 21st Century Schizoid Man . . . April Wine’s take, pretty much rote but worthwhile and perhaps they sent some people in the direction of the King Crimson classic which was the opening cut to Crimson’s seminal 1969 album In The Court Of The Crimson King. April Wine’s version appeared on the band’s 1979 album Harder . . . . Faster which spawned such well-known Wine tracks as I Like To Rock and Say Hello.

15. Nazareth, Steamroller . . . From the 1994 album Move Me, which was criticized from being overproduced and too much schlock rock as Nazareth seemed to be chasing musical trends around this time rather than doing what the band does best: rock. It’s a good assessment but on this one, they definitely do rock, perfectly reflecting the song title.

16. Uriah Heep, One Way Or Another . . . Great hook on this one, a riff underlying the whole song that is incessant throughout; you’re almost unknowingly immersed in it as you listen to the song as a whole, with all its other instrumental excursions. It’s from the 1976 album High And Mighty.

17. Pink Floyd, The Nile Song . . . What’s a Pink Floyd song doing in a hard rock set? Seems uncharacteristic, but listen. A heavy tune, raging vocals by David Gilmour also of course on guitar, from the More movie soundtrack that also serves as an official Floyd album, released in 1969.

18. Iggy & The Stooges, I’m Sick Of You . . . A track from the sessions for the 1973 album Raw Power that didn’t see wide release until an EP of the same name came out in 1977. The song has subsequently appeared on various Iggy Pop/Stooges compilations. A slow building track for the first two of its six-plus minutes, before all hell breaks loose.

19. Blue Oyster Cult, Mommy . . . Driving rocker outtake from the sessions for the 1974 album Secret Treaties.

20. Whitesnake, Sweet Talker . . . From the early days of Whitesnake before they went hair metal in the mid-1980s, to much commercial success and I like a lot of that stuff but . . . Before that, coming out of Deep Purple, lead singer David Coverdale and friends were more a blues-hard rock band. It’s my favorite period of the group via songs like this from the 1980 album Ready an’ Willing which also featured Deep Purple alumni Ian Paice (drums) and Jon Lord (keyboards). “The bitch is in heat’ is one of the lyrics so I suppose I should have placed this higher up with Sabbath’s Digital Bitch, the Stones’ Bitch and Metallica’s Ain’t My Bitch but, well, life’s a bitch sometimes.

21. Grand Funk Railroad, Mr. Limousine Driver . . . Funky rocker from the Railroad’s second record, simply titled Grand Funk, released in late December, 1969.

22. Ted Nugent, Motor City Madhouse (from Double Live Gonzo!) . . . Started with “The Nuge” and finishing with the Motor City Madman as he takes the original almost five-minute studio cut to epic 10-minute lengths filled with guitar and other assorted pyrotechnics.

A Christmas show with selected songs from various artists bracketing The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, a terrific 2003 studio release by one of my favorite bands. As Tull leader Ian Anderson says in the liner notes: “If you liked (the song) Bouree and the Songs From The Wood record, you will love this Jethro Tull Christmas Album. The aim was to find some uplifting traditional Christmas carols, some new songs and to re-record some old Tull pieces on the Christmas topic.”

Tull’s aim was true, as the album hits the bull’s-eye. It’s a Christmas album but an atypical one – indeed harkening back to the 1977 album Songs From The Wood – thanks to the group’s typically outstanding musicianship that results in what is a great folk-rock record, regardless its theme. It stands on its own considerable merits in the band’s catalogue.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Song clips on my Facebook page And listen to the show in the audio logs posted above.

1. Elton John, Step Into Christmas
2. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, I Believe In Father Christmas
3. The Kinks, Father Christmas
————————————————————————-
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album

1. Birthday Card At Christmas
2. Holly Herald
3. A Christmas Song
4. Another Christmas Song
5. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
6. Jack Frost And The Hooded Crow
7. Last Man At The Party
8. Weathercock
9. Pavane
10. First Snow On Brooklyn
11. Greensleeved
12. Fire At Midnight
13. We Five Kings
14. Ring Out Solstice Bells
15. Bouree
16. A Winter Snowscape
—————————————————————–
4. Roy Orbison, Pretty Paper
5. Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas
6. Bob Dylan, Here Comes Santa Claus
7. AC/DC, Mistress For Christmas
8. Paul McCartney/Wings, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reggae
9. Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
10. Chuck Berry, Merry Christmas Baby
11. Eagles, Please Come Home For Christmas
12. John Lennon/Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band with The Harlem Community Choir, Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Elton John, Step Into Christmas . . . Up-tempo pop tune, upbeat lyrics celebrating the season, a happy song EJ released as a single in late November, 1973. It made No. 8 on the UK regular charts and No. 1 on US Billboard’s Christmas singles chart. Starting in 2007 it’s been released in the UK most Christmas seasons and continues to chart, ranging anywhere from the top 10 to the top 100. Just this past week it was re-released as a parody video starring actor and model Cara Delevingne, who plays a young Elton in a new take incorporating the new video with the original. The song itself was added, as a bonus track, to the 1995 reissue of the 1974 album Caribou and has also appeared on various compilations.

2. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, I Believe In Father Christmas . . . The beautiful voice of Greg Lake on a track that appeared on ELP’s Works Volume 2 album, 1977.

3. The Kinks, Father Christmas . . . A non-album single rocker from 1977 and not your typical happy Christmas song. Rather, it’s trademark Ray Davies’ ascerbic social commentary. To wit:

When I was small I believed in Santa Claus
Though I knew it was my dad
And I would hang up my stocking at Christmas
Open my presents and I’d be glad
But the last time I played Father Christmas
I stood outside a department store
A gang of kids came over and mugged me
And knocked my reindeer to the floor
They said
Father Christmas, give us some money
Don’t mess around with those silly toys
We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over
We want your bread so don’t make us annoyed
Give all the toys to the little rich boys
But give my daddy a job ’cause he needs one
He’s got lots of mouths to feed

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin’
While you’re drinkin’ down your wine

Dave Davies, Ray’s brother and Kinks’ lead guitarist, on the song, in the liner notes to a compilation it appears on: “I love the humor of it, and the aggression and bitternesss of it. People do think like that at Christmas, especially people who grew up in an environment where . . . not that we were poor or anything, we were just a regular working-class house.”

————————————————————————-

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album

1. Birthday Card At Christmas . . . A new track, at least it was in 2003, written by Ian Anderson. Fine flute playing throughout on one of the heavier numbers on the album. Anderson said he was inspired to write it due to his daughter’s birthday being close to and, as can be the case, overshadowed by Christmas.

People have showered me with presents
While their minds were fixed on other things
Sleigh bells, bearded red suit uncles, pointy trees and angel wings
I am the shadow in your Christmas. I am the corner of your smile
Perfunctory in celebration. You offer content but no style

2. Holly Herald . . . An instrumental medley, arranged by Anderson, comprised of the traditional British folk Christmas carol The Holly and the Ivy and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

3. A Christmas Song . . . A single from 1968, redone but retaining (how could they not?) the classic spoken word ending “Hey! Santa! Pass us that bottle, will you?” by Tull’s 2003 lineup – Anderson (flute, vocals, acoustic guitars, mandolin, piccolo), guitarist Martin Barre, drummer Doane Perry, bassist Jonathan Noyce and keyboardist Andrew Giddings. A tight and cohesive unit from 1995-2006, it was one of the longest serving of the many Tull lineups over the years. It’s the version of Tull I saw most often live in my many concert experiences with the band.

4. Another Christmas Song . . . Another redo of a previous release. Another Christmas Song, a mid-tempo tune with lyrics, in part, about an old man thinking of his children, first appeared on the 1989 album Rock Island.

5. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen . . . Arranged by Anderson as an instrumental.

6. Jack Frost And The Hooded Crow . . . A redo of a 1986 single, about helping those in need at Christmas, that also appeared on the 1988 box set 20 Years Of Jethro Tull.

7. Last Man At The Party . . . A new song written for the Christmas album, a lively tune about celebrating the season.

Sister Bridget by the stair… a glass of wine and she’s almost there.
Cousin Jimmy at the door… another beer and he’s on the floor.
Friends and neighbours come around,
waste no time we’re heaven-bound.
But not before we raise a glass to good camaraderie. . .

So make yourselves jolly under mistletoe, holly and ivy.
Get to it – and be in good cheer.
And when it’s all over… pigs gone to clover –
Will the last man at the party wish me a happy New Year.

8. Weathercock . . . Beautiful song, originally released on the 1978 album Heavy Horses, the middle record in the so-called rustic trio of mostly folk rock Tull records that began with Songs From The Wood in 1977 and ended with Stormwatch in 1979. That said, I’ve never felt Stormwatch – which was arguably ahead of its time with some of its focus on environmental among other societal concerns – quite fits with the other two. It’s darker, still folk in spots but heavier overall. I didn’t warm to it at first but Stormwatch, as albums can tend to do, has grown on me over repeat listens.

9. Pavane . . . Written by French composer Gabriel Faure in 1887 and titled after a Spanish processional dance common in Europe during the Renaissance. It features flute among the instruments played, perfect for Tull in this arrangement by Ian Anderson.

10. First Snow On Brooklyn . . . Thought-provoking lyrical imagery tied to the title. You can visualize the light snow falling en route to becoming a blizzard as the protagonist of the piece returns to the New York City borough, questioning his decision to do so, apparently in a lament for the might have beens of a relationship.

I flew in on the evening plane
Is it such a good idea that I’m here again?
And I could cut my cold breath with a knife
and taste the winter of another life

. . . And the snow covers my footprints, deep regrets and heavy heartbeats; when you wake you’ll never see the spot that I was standing on . . . some things are best forgotten; some are better half-remembered. I just thought that I might be there, on your Christmas night.

The song epitomizes to me the quality and depth of the album and why I termed it an atypical Christmas album. It’s not simply a rock band doing Christmas carols, though they are part of the song lineup in various forms arranged by the group. It goes beyond that, songs that are set in the snow of the season but using Christmas as a vehicle to comment on the human condition.

11. Greensleeved . . . The classic traditional English folk song Greensleeves, done in so many ways by so many over the years, here retitled slightly, and arranged in instrumental form by Ian Anderson.

12. Fire At Midnight . . . The closing track on the original release of the Songs From The Wood album, redone by the 2003 version of Tull. Nothing really to do with Christmas but it fits the folk rock, traditional tune theme and to reiterate what Ian Anderson says in his liner notes to the Christmas album, if you liked Songs From The Wood, you’ll feel the same way about the Christmas album.

13. We Five Kings . . . We Three Kings, arranged by Anderson in instrumental form and cheekily retitled because there were five guys in the Tull band at the time. As for We Three Kings, I always remember the version my late father had on his reel-to-reel Sony tape deck through the late 1960s into the 1970s. I often talk about my older brother as a huge influence on me in terms of the rock and roll I listen to and embraced, and he was, but so was dad in the sense that music in all its forms was always playing thanks to his love of opera, classical and . . . American country music from the likes of Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell.

Anyway, back to We Three Kings and my dad’s version: Each of the wise men sings his verse, speaking of the gift he brings to baby Jesus in Bethlehem and then comes a big, booming voice . . . “And Gaspar spoke . . . ” It’s just so powerful, not just that specific part but the whole thing and has stuck with me since those childhood days whenever I hear or think of We Three Kings.

14. Ring Out Solstice Bells . . . Another one redone by the 2003 Tull lineup of a track originally on Songs From The Wood. It mentions mistletoe but again, one of those Tull ‘Christmas’ songs that isn’t a carol but fits the context of the album perfectly.

15. Bouree . . . One of the perpetually popular Jethro Tull instrumental pieces, by Johann Sebastian Bach and originally adapted and released on Tull’s second studio album, Stand Up, from 1969. It’s redone for the Christmas album by the 2003 version of Tull.

16. A Winter Snowscape . . . A rare composition, this one an instrumental by guitarist Martin Barre, on a Tull album that is not written by leader/chief songwriter/focal point Ian Anderson. Together in Tull since the second album, Stand Up, the longtime collaborators had something of an acrimonious split in 2011. That’s when Anderson decided to put Tull on apparently permanent hold and proceed as a solo artist, which he had done previously while pursuing parallel careers. In the end what resulted in 2017 was Anderson essentially rebranding his solo band as a new version of Tull which has since released two studio albums without Barre, who unlike Anderson is not a songwriter of note but has been touring Tull’s catalogue as a live solo act.

An interesting and compelling album, Tull’s Christmas offering. It was done at the behest of a record company executive who, according to Ian Anderson’s liner notes, emailed him two days before Christmas 2002, suggesting a Tull Christmas album for the following year. Anderson, who says he had considered the idea over time, got down to it and we have the results. The original 2003 release was reissued earlier this month as a five-disc box set including two concerts on CD and a blu-ray disc of the shows.

—————————————————————–

4. Roy Orbison, Pretty Paper . . . Written by Willie Nelson, it became a hit for Orbison in 1963. A tale of a lonely street vendor selling pencils and paper on the streets as busy Christmas shoppers swirl around him, oblivious, uncaring, it could easily have been titled Pretty Pauper.

5. Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas . . . From Elvis’ Christmas Album, released in 1957 and considered a classic of such seasonal songs. “I’ll have a blue Christmas, without you . . . ”

6. Bob Dylan, Here Comes Santa Claus . . . From his 2009 album Christmas In The Heart. Like anything/everything with the enigmatic Dylan, there’s a WTF? aspect to it all but every artist seems to do a Christmas album, in one form or other, so why not Mr. Zimmerman, by this point, croaky voice and all? It’s good, bad, fun, funny, ridiculous and he’s obviously in on the joke, so what the hell?

7. AC/DC, Mistress For Christmas . . . So, you see, Dylan sings of Santa Claus coming and AC/DC has a request of the jolly ol’ elf. Typical tongue in cheek lewd and yeah maybe dumb or crass but so what, it’s AC/DC, from the 1990 album The Razors Edge.

“I just can’t wait ’til Christmastime when I can grope you in the hay” and “I want the woman in red at the bottom of my bed . . . Mistress for Christmas I can hear you coming down my smoke stack, yeah I want to ride on your reindeer, honey, and ring my bells, yeah” As lead singer Brian Johnson was once quoted as saying, “We’re a filthy band.”

8. Paul McCartney/Wings, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reggae . . . Instrumental cover of the perennial Christmas song by noted American holiday standards writer Johnny Marks (look him up, extensive catalog of such tunes) with a slight title twist. McCartney recorded it in 1975, it appeared as a 1979 single and was a bonus track on expanded editions of the 1979 Wings album Back To The Egg.

9. Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run . . . Typical Chuck Berry rocker, themed to Christmas.

10. Chuck Berry, Merry Christmas Baby . . . I couldn’t decide between two Chuck Berry tunes so I’m playing them both, provided I can squeeze them into the time slot. This one’s a deep blues of the sort for which Berry isn’t usually widely recognized. Check out the 2003 compilation of his early blues material, Chuck Berry Blues, for further evidence of his bona fides.

11. Eagles, Please Come Home For Christmas . . . Holiday single from 1978 of the song made famous by blues great Charles Brown, who, along with “the Queen of R & B” Ruth Brown (unrelated) I saw open for Bonnie Raitt in 1995 in Toronto as part of Raitt’s North American tour.

12. John Lennon/Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band with The Harlem Community Choir, Happy Xmas (War Is Over) . . .

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very Merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear

And on that note . . .

The original intent was an album play show and Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums came to mind and if I played one, I should play the other since they’re of a piece. But playing both of them – released on the same day in 1991 when the band was so big that I remember lineups waiting for record stores to open on release day back pre-streaming when everyone bought physical product – came out half an hour longer than my 2-hour slot. So, I made my own compilation – and in doing so was reminded of how raunch and roll good G N’ R were and are – of some favorites from each album. So we have eight songs from Use Your Illusion I and seven from II, and I filled in the remaining time in the slot with The Doors’ second album, the 1967 release Strange Days.

Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion I/II compilation

1. Dust N’ Bones
2. Live And Let Die
3. Don’t Cry
4. You Ain’t The First
5. Bad Obsession
6. Double Talkin’ Jive
7. November Rain
8. The Garden
9. Civil War
10. 14 Years
11. Yesterdays
12. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
13. Locomotive
14. Estranged
15. You Could Be Mine

The Doors – Strange Days

1. Strange Days
2. You’re Lost Little Girl
3. Love Me Two Times
4. Unhappy Girl
5. Horse Latitudes
6. Moonlight Drive
7. People Are Strange
8. My Eyes Have Seen You
9. I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind
10. When The Music’s Over

More than a few songs with ‘house’ or ‘home’ in the title as a tribute to my younger of two sons. He and his fiancee have bought a home and take possession today. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. Humble Pie, I Don’t Need No Doctor (live, from Performance – Rockin’ The Fillmore)
2. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, The House Is Rockin’
3 . Paul McCartney, House Of Wax (live, from Amoeba Gig)
4. AC/DC, House Of Jazz
5. The Kinks, A House In The Country
6. Talking Heads, Houses In Motion
7. Jimi Hendrix, Red House (live, from In The West)
8. Cheap Trick, Gonna Raise Hell
9. Genesis, The Dividing Line
10. The Yardbirds, Drinking Muddy Water
11. Muddy Waters, Mean Disposition
12. The Rolling Stones, Brand New Car (live, from Welcome To Shepherd’s Bush)
13. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Loner/Cinnamon Girl/Down By The River (live, from 4 Way Street)
14. The Mamas & The Papas, Dancing Bear
15. Van Halen, Take Your Whiskey Home
16. Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, Can’t Find My Way Home (from Live From Madison Square Garden)

My track-by-track tales:

1. Humble Pie, I Don’t Need No Doctor (live, from Performance – Rockin’ The Fillmore) . . . Rockin’, indeed. An incendiary nine-minute performance of a song, also famously done by Ray Charles, which was cut to around four minutes for release as a single from Humble Pie’s 1971 live album. The record was Peter Frampton’s last with Humble Pie before he went solo. Singer/guitarist Steve Marriott carried on as the band released the album Smokin’, which featured likely the group’s best-known song, 30 Days In The Hole.

2. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, The House Is Rockin’ . . . A toe-tapper from In Step, the 1989 album that, alas, proved to be the last one released during Vaughan’s lifetime. He died in a helicopter crash, after a concert in Wisconsin, in August, 1990 at age 35.

3 . Paul McCartney, House Of Wax (live, from Amoeba Gig) . . . The California independent chain Amoeba Music is a house of wax given that it sells vinyl records, along with CDs and other entertainment products while continuing to thrive selling physical material in the web streaming age thanks in some measure to its trade-in programs adopted by many such stores. So it’s an appropriate selection for McCartney to play. This track, featuring some nice guitar interplay between longtime McCartney band members Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, is from McCartney’s 2007 studio release Memory Almost Full and was played in a ‘secret show’ at the Amoeba outlet in Hollywood that summer. Selected tracks from the concert were released as a four-song EP, Amoeba’s Secret, in November 2007 before the entire show – featuring Beatles’ and McCartney solo tunes – was released as Amoeba Gig in 2019. House Of Wax is the type of song, from a latter-day album by a legacy act like McCartney whose newer material might otherwise get overlooked, that when you put it on a live album amid the well-known hits, perhaps gets deserved exposure.

4. AC/DC, House Of Jazz . . . The title mentions jazz but it’s actually a slow-burning bluesy cut with a typically catchy AC/DC riff, from the band’s Stiff Upper Lip album, released in 2000.

5. The Kinks, A House In The Country . . . Jaunty pop rocker from the 1966 album Face To Face during a period in which Kinks’ chief songwriter Ray Davies’ fascination with English class and social structure was reflected in the concept albums, replete with often cynical, biting lyrics, the group was releasing at the time.

For instance, the first verse and first line of the second:

“He don’t need no sedatives to ease his troubled mind.
At work he is invariably unpleasant and unkind.
Why should he care if he is hated in his home,
‘Cause he’s got a house in the country,
And a big sports car.

“But he ain’t got a home, oh no . . . ”

Etc.

6. Talking Heads, Houses In Motion . . . A potent brew of stimulating sounds on this song from a terrific album, 1980’s Remain In Light, that is full of such rhythmic adventures. Adrian Belew is a guest guitarist on the album, later to join King Crimson whose trio of albums – Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair – released between 1981 and 1984 have, perhaps unsurprisingly, always to me sounded musically similar to Remain In Light.

7. Jimi Hendrix, Red House (live, from In The West) . . . What is widely considered Hendrix’s finest-ever live performance of his signature blues tune. It’s a 13-minute tour de force take, recorded in May 1969 in San Diego, on the four-minute track originally on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut studio album, Are You Experienced, released in 1967.

8. Cheap Trick, Gonna Raise Hell . . . Nice groove on this pulsating nine-minute piece from the band’s 1979 album Dream Police. Cheap Trick was top of mind thanks to a chat with an artist friend of mine the other day. He’s painting portraits of various music legends on the front window of my local independent music store. He hasn’t done Cheap Trick, at least not yet. I don’t expect he will because good as Cheap Trick might be they don’t have the cachet of artists like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and David Bowie that he’s done so far and he’s following the store owner’s direction in terms of who to draw.

That’s why KISS is on the window, which prompted a conversation about how I am not a big KISS fan but, by accident, really, saw them in concert, with Cheap Trick as their support act, in the summer of 1979. It’s a story I’ve likely told far too often whenever I play Cheap Trick, but this was the first time my artist friend had heard it so bear with me. It resulted from me and a college friend wanting to see Cheap Trick, hot at the time as a result of their blockbuster live album At Budokan. We couldn’t get tickets for the Toronto show but they were playing at the old Silverdome football stadium in Pontiac, Michigan, outside Detroit the next week. So, down to Detroit we drove to learn, while picking up a newspaper over lunch, that Cheap Trick was ‘special guest’ opening for KISS in all their over-the-top glory, painted-face and costumed KISS Army fans, young and old alike, included. I still chuckle at the memory of what was a good show by both bands. My youngest brother, the big KISS fan in our family through which I knew their music, was at least mildly miffed that I saw them while he didn’t.

9. Genesis, The Dividing Line . . . A showcase for session drummer Nir Zidkyahu, aka Nir Z. It’s from Calling All Stations, the ill-fated Genesis album released in 1997 after the departure of drummer and frontman Phil Collins, who was replaced on lead vocals, for the one album and subsequent tour, by Ray Wilson. The album, something of a return to Genesis’ art/prog rock roots as evidenced by this song, and tour were successful in the UK and Europe. North America was a different story, where first an arena tour and then a scaled-down theatre run were both cancelled due to poor ticket sales as fans apparently were unaccepting of a Genesis without Collins. In any case, this fulfills a promise I made last week to soon play something from the I think underappreciated Wilson period, which I discussed while playing Conversations With 2 Stools. That drum duel between Collins and longtime touring drummer Chester Thompson was released on the 2007 album Live Over Europe, a document of the reunion tour with Collins that also welcomed back touring members Thompson and guitarist Daryl Stuermer who were not on board for the Calling All Stations dates. I’m not suggesting Calling All Stations is necessarily prime Genesis at the level of some of the classic Peter Gabriel or Collins-fronted material, but it’s a worthwhile listen, in my opinion.

10. The Yardbirds, Drinking Muddy Water . . . Appropriate that the title namedrops the blues legend as it’s essentially a cover of Rollin’ And Tumblin’ as done by Muddy Waters but a driving, effective one nevertheless. It’s from the 1967 Little Games album during the period Jimmy Page was Yardbirds’ guitarist. Ian Stewart of Rolling Stones fame guests on piano.

11. Muddy Waters (Fathers And Sons), Mean Disposition . . . Soulful deep blues from the aptly-titled Fathers And Sons album from 1969. ‘Sons’ Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield of Butterfield Blues Band fame, along with Donald “Duck” Dunn of Booker T. & The MG’s, help out ‘Fathers’ Muddy Waters and Otis Spann on an excellent album collaboration.

12. The Rolling Stones, Brand New Car (live, from Welcome To Shepherd’s Bush) . . . The wah-wah guitar from the studio version of this song from 1994’s Voodoo Lounge album is taken to greater heights on this live version from the Stones’ latest archival release, which came out a week ago. It’s from a theatre show in London before 1,800 fans in June, 1999 that served as a warmup to the group’s dates a few days later at Wembley Stadium. It’s a deep cuts fan’s delight, featuring rarely if ever played in concert songs like the title track to the Some Girls album, Melody from Black And Blue, I Got The Blues from Sticky Fingers and Moon Is Up, also from Voodoo Lounge. As Mick Jagger states from the stage, ‘If you want to hear the hits, go to the big place down the road’ although the Stones do play the usual suspects like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Women, Tumbling Dice and It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It).

13. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Loner/Cinnamon Girl/Down By The River (live, from 4 Way Street) . . . It’s CSNY but really in this case a Neil Young acoustic solo set medley within the overall show, and it’s awesome.

14. The Mamas & The Papas, Dancing Bear . . . Beautiful balladry, spooky and haunting at times, featuring the vocals of Denny Doherty, Cass Elliott and Michelle Phillips interpreting the words of chief songwriter John Phillips. It’s from the group’s self-titled second album, released in 1966.

15. Van Halen, Take Your Whiskey Home . . . Acoustic finger picking and then into the heavy electric riff on this one from the 1980 album Women And Children First.

16. Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, Can’t Find My Way Home (from Live From Madison Square Garden) … Onetime Blind Faith bandmates Clapton and Winwood (who wrote this Blind Faith tune) teamed up for a short American tour in 2009. The result was a live album and DVD/Blu-Ray nicely combining their solo work with material from Blind Faith and Traffic along with some rock and blues covers. Perhaps surprisingly, no Cream songs like Strange Brew, Crossroads or Badge on which Clapton was lead vocalist.

A three-album play, with my commentary beneath each album’s song list.

Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

1. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
2. A National Acrobat
3. Fluff
4. Sabbra Cadabra
5. Killing Yourself To Live
6. Who Are You
7. Looking For Today
8. Spiral Architect

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, crazy good album as are all in this album set, in my opinion but of course it’s my set. The Sabs’ record often reminds me of my Grade 10 English class in high school. It was a segment where the teacher asked us to present poetry that had been impactful, perhaps to that point, on our lives. If memory serves, I chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” which, a few years earlier, I had been chosen to deliver to an elementary school assembly.

The outlier in Grade 10 English, though, came from a classmate of mine who brought in Sabbath Bloody Sabbath with the lyrics to every song on Black Sabbath’s 1973 record. There were some raised eyebrows from teacher and class members but I admired his gumption in terms of pushing the envelope and maybe breaking whatever rules may have existed. His presentation was convincing and in the end it turned me on to the album, full of great tracks starting with the killer title track, and I’m a forever fan of the band.

Van Halen – Fair Warning

1. Mean Street
2. Dirty Movies
3. Sinner’s Swing!
4. Hear About It Later
5. Unchained
6. Push Comes To Shove
7. So This Is Love?
8. Sunday Afternoon In The Park
9. One Foot Out The Door

In all respects and reviews, Fair Warning is acknowledged as being Van Halen’s darkest album. And that’s why it’s so good albeit not as commercially successful but just canvas listeners on various online platforms and the consensus as to quality is universally positive.

No hit singles to speak of, really, although Unchained is well known but even it, perhaps surprisingly, barely dented the charts. The key forever to me has been the deep dark opener, Mean Street, one of my alltime favorite VH songs which contains the lyric “fair warning’ from which the album is named. Who knows why they didn’t release it as a single or put it on any compilations. And, amid the heavy rock is the cool bluesy boozy Push Comes To Shove with David Lee Roth’s cooly expressed “anything left in that bottle?’ talk/sing line amid an apparent conversation among friends partying the night away to which I can well relate from my errant youth.

Rainbow – Rising

1. Tarot Woman
2. Run With The Wolf
3. Starstruck
4. Do You Close Your Eyes
5. Stargazer
6. A Light In The Black

Widely acknowledged as one of the best and most influential hard rock albums of all time, Rainbow’s Rising. It was the second release by the former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s band formed in 1975 and featuring the one and only vocals of the late great Ronnie James Dio. Dio came to Blackmore’s attention when Dio’s band Elf opened for Deep Purple on early 1970s tours. By 1975, Blackmore had left Deep Purple and formed Rainbow with elements of Dio’s previous band Elf but by the time of Rising, outside of Dio, former Elf members were gone in favour of aces like drummer Cozy Powell.