So Old It’s New ‘2’ set list for Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023 – on air 7-9 am ET

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

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

    My track-by-track tales:

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

       

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

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