Here’s my set list for Saturday morning, March 9/24 airing 8-10 am ET. My track-by-track commentary follows the bare-bones set.

1. The Beatles, Good Morning Good Morning
2. Free, Come Together In The Morning
3. Bob Dylan, When You Gonna Wake Up
4. Johnny Winter, Highway 61 Revisited
5. Jimi Hendrix, Like A Rolling Stone (live, 1967 Monterey Pop Festival version)
6. J. Geils Band, First I Look At The Purse (live, from Full House)
7. Savoy Brown, Money Can’t Save Your Soul
8. Rory Gallagher, Bad Penny
9. Eagles, Those Shoes
10. Supertramp, Another Man’s Woman
11. Status Quo, Big Fat Mama
12. The Rolling Stones, She Smiled Sweetly
13. Neil Young, Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown
14. AC/DC, Sin City
15. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Heavy Music (from Live Bullet)
16. Funkadelic, Maggot Brain
17. Pink Floyd, Pigs (Three Different Ones)
18. Steely Dan, Don’t Take Me Alive
19. Van Morrison, And The Healing Has Begun
20. Dire Straits, Follow Me Home

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Beatles, Good Morning Good Morning . . . Clever, aren’t I? 🙂 Morning show, so, good morning with a song John Lennon wrote for the Sgt. Pepper album after being inspired by watching a commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and adapting the jingle. So much good in so many songs comes not just from the tunes, but the vocals. Good morning-ah. That sort of thing often really makes it for me.

2. Free, Come Together In The Morning . . . Sticking with our morning theme, bluesy ballad from singer Paul Rodgers and company, some of whom (drummer Simon Kirke) later formed Bad Company along with Rodgers.

3. Bob Dylan, When You Gonna Wake Up . . . Up-tempo tune, biting lyrics, from Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album in 1979. It was his first after converting to Christianity and threw much of his fan base for a loop, which Dylan has always seemed to like doing or, at least, doing whatever it is he chooses to do, which of course is and should be up to him, then watching the reaction with likely amusement. The album gave us the hit single Gotta Serve Somebody for which Dylan won a Grammy Award but beyond that it’s a terrific listen, certainly musically including this track and the title cut.

4. Johnny Winter, Highway 61 Revisited . . . Playing a Dylan tune inspired me to play people covering Dylan tunes, so here’s Winter’s fiery interpretation of the Dylan classic.
5. Jimi Hendrix, Like A Rolling Stone (live from Monterey Pop Festival, 1967) . . . Great version of another Dylan classic. Hendrix was a huge Dylan fan and of course reinterpreted Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower to huge success and acclaim, so much so that Dylan himself started playing Watchtower in concert, or attempting to, a la Hendrix version. But this is the song, Like A Rolling Stone, as done by Hendrix, that got me into Jimi (and Otis Redding, too) when I heard it on a live album my older brother, a huge musical influence on me, had of the Monterey Pop Festival. It featured Hendrix on one side of the vinyl release and Otis Redding on the other. That album is called Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival.
6. J. Geils Band, First I Look At The Purse, (live, from Full House) . . . Propulsive track from a propulsive live band, best heard live and arguably my favorite by Geils in this live version, a song written by Smokey Robinson and his Miracles band partner Bobby Rogers.

7. Savoy Brown, Money Can’t Save Your Soul . . . I got into music discussions on Twitter/X the other night which inspired several tracks I’m playing Saturday morning. This is one of them, from the British blues/rock band Savoy Brown, an arguably underappreciated band but one of my favorites. I saw them, billed as Kim Simmonds (the late great guitarist/singer/songwriter/bandleader) and Savoy Brown, in the mid-2000s at the Kitchener Blues Festival. Great show. A band worth checking out and one that proved to be the building blocks for Foghat, which was formed by three members of Savoy Brown after a split in the original Savoy Brown band in 1971.

8. Rory Gallagher, Bad Penny . . . Another artist and track inspired by my Twitter/X discussions. Someone posted a question, asking for people’s favorite songs by Gallagher, the late great and arguably underrated/underappreciated by the masses, Irish guitarist, songwriter and leader of the band Taste before he went solo. So, I listed a few but Bad Penny is likely my alltimer by Rory G, who has been described as ‘the greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of.” People who know his material know how great he was, of course, and he’s been cited by the likes of Eric Clapton, Alex Lifeson of Rush, Brian May of Queen and U2’s The Edge as being a major influence on their playing.

9. Eagles, Those Shoes . . . Another of those songs that came up in the Twitter/X discussion when I mentioned The Long Run, in response to a discussion question, as being among my favorite Eagles albums despite its dismissal by many critics and even some members of the band in the wake of the monumental Hotel California that preceded it. This is my favorite song on The Long Run.

10. Supertramp, Another Man’s Woman . . . From Crisis, What Crisis?, the band’s 1975 album. Supertramp were huge in Canada by this time, on the heels of the brilliant 1974 record Crime Of The Century but it took a while for widespread U.S. chart success which didn’t happen for the band until the deliberately targeted Breakfast In America commercial monster from 1979 that was a worldwide No. 1 album but I consider to be, while good, too pop-oriented, almost candy-ass crap in spots with Bee Gee-like falsetto vocals the Bee Gees got criticized for yet Supertramp seemed to get a pass on. Breakfast is the worst, to me, of the 4-album run that started in 1974 with Crime Of The Century on through Crisis, What Crisis?, Even In The Quietest Moments and then Breakfast In America.
11. Status Quo, Big Fat Mama . . . Kick butt rocker from the band which first came to prominence with the psychedelic pop hit Pictures Of Matchstick Men in 1968 after which the band started going in a harder rock, boogie rock direction. They lost me after the mid-1970s for the most part, for me that early- to mid-70s period was their hard rocking best with songs like this from the appropriately named 1972 album Piledriver.

12. The Rolling Stones, She Smiled Sweetly . . . Beautiful ballad from the 1967 album Between The Buttons, recorded when founding member/guitarist Brian Jones was still in the band and the Stones arguably sometimes explored tangents they later discarded when they became more the bloozy raunch and roll Stones of legend starting with the 1968 album Beggars Banquet. The late Roy Carr (he died in 2018 at 73), a respected English rock music critic, somewhat dismissed Between The Buttons in his fine 1976 book The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record. Carr termed Buttons an album that “sounds more like a bunch of vaudevillian Kinks’ outtakes than a bona fide Stones’ collection.” To which I would say a few things, me being a major Stones fan and all, and even if I weren’t:
1. Roy, my boy, what’s your problem with The Kinks? Amazing band, arguably grossly underappreciated when discussed amid the other big original British Invasion bands like The Beatles, Stones and The Who and possessed, in Ray Davies, of one of the all-time songwriters. And if the Stones were maybe sounding like The Kinks, well, they weren’t; no matter what the Stones do or have ever done – rock, reggae, folk, country, disco, whatever – they always sound like the Stones. That’s why they’re so great – they put their own unique stamp on everything they try and moreso, they’re fearless; they try anything yeah sometimes more successfully than other times but at least they give it a go and by doing so open perhaps unknown or undiscovered avenues to their many listeners.

2. Between The Buttons has really grown on me over the years. I think it’s a brilliant album, full of great tunes like She Smiled Sweetly, My Obession, Backstreet Girl, Connection, Please Go Home to name a few not to mention, on the U.S. version released at that time when bands like The Beatles and Stones had different track listings on many albums in the US and UK, the singles Ruby Tuesday and Let’s Spend The Night Together. But I won’t be too harsh on Roy; he did cite Backstreet Girl and Connection as being worthy . . .
3. But so is She Smiled Sweetly. Great song, great vocal performance by Mick Jagger.
13. Neil Young, Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown . . . Notice the pattern here, in terms of song titles as I typically can’t help myself? We started off with the morning motif. Then we got into money, with it not being able to save a soul, a bad penny and looking at purses when selecting a mate . . . and then . . . relationship issues, another man’s woman, a big fat mama who smiles sweetly and now Neil Young wants to go downtown with her on this track that appeared on his bleak, grief-prompted 1975 release Tonight’s The Night, much of which was written in memory of Young’s Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, both lost to drug overdoses. A good rocker, nevertheless.
14. AC/DC, Sin City . . . And now we’re downtown, in Sin City, one of my favorite AC/DC tracks, from the Bon Scott era and 1978’s Powerage album.

15. Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Heavy Music . . . From Live Bullet, the 1976 live album, recorded in 1975, that brought Seger into the wider public consciousness beyond his home stomping grounds of Detroit and the state of Michigan. It came out during that 1970s period where double vinyl live albums were breaking some bands, like Seger’s, big; others being KISS with KISS Alive and Peter Frampton with Frampton Comes Alive! This is the second live song in my set that was recorded in Detroit. This Seger tune was recorded at Cobo Hall, which was once the home arena of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons. The other Detroit live recording was earlier in my set, the J. Geils Band’s First I Look At The Purse, recorded at Detroit’s Cinderella Ballroom. Geils was a Boston-area band but developed a huge following in Detroit.
16. Funkadelic, Maggot Brain . . . 10-minute title track improvisation workout by guitar great Eddie Hazel, from the 1971 album by George Clinton’s Funkadelic, part of his music collective P-Funk that also includes Parliament. It’s complex, and space doesn’t permit but it’s all only a keystroke away on the web and worthwhile reading if one is so inclined.
17. Pink Floyd, Pigs (Three Different Ones) . . . Lengthy, nearly 12-minute almost metallic piece, a Roger Waters diatribe against the manipulative elites of our society, from Floyd’s 1977 album Animals and one of my alltime favorite Floyd songs from an album which tends sometimes to get overlooked amid The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall but is, I think, on par with all of them and then there’s Meddle, before Dark Side, too . . . And The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn debut when Syd Barrett was still in the band and, and, and. Just get all of it, you’ll like it if you don’t already. But, I will say that the run from Meddle through The Wall, if forced to choose, would my favorite five by Floyd.

18. Steely Dan, Don’t Take Me Alive . . . Great guitar work from Larry Charlton, who played on four Steely Dan albums including the one from which I pulled this track, The Royal Scam. Others were Katy Lied, Aja and Gaucho in a career that has seen Charlton play on albums from the likes of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Johnny Rivers, Barbra Streisand, The Partridge Family (yes, The Partridge Family and David Cassidy solo stuff, too), on and on. Look Charlton up, a lengthy, eclectic discography – not to mention his own work as a solo artist/bandleader.
19. Van Morrison, And The Healing Has Begun . . . One of my favorites, of which yeah there are likely too many to count, from Van The Man, the man whose voice is so much, more so in my opinion than many artists, an amazing instrument in itself. From 1979’s Into The Music album. Brilliant stuff.

20. Dire Straits, Follow Me Home . . . Last track on the second Straits’ album, Communique and a good one to finish up on, this bluesy track, because I am going home in the sense that the show’s done for Saturday morning. Back Monday, live in studio, 8-10 pm ET. Thanks for listening, and reading, if you have and even if not . . . Take care, all.