I had my show set up before I learned of the passing of singer/songwriter/actor Kris Kristofferson, so I’ll pay tribute to him either on my Saturday morning show Oct. 5 and/or next Monday night, Oct. 7/24. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops
2. Genesis, Squonk
3. Yes, Awaken
4. Rush, The Camera Eye
5. Santana, Blue Skies
6. Queen, Brighton Rock
7. Spirit, Mechanical World
8. Peter Frampton, The Lodger
9. Spooky Tooth, Lost In My Dream
10. U2, Volcano
11. Love, Stay Away
12. Tony Joe White, They Caught The Devil And Put Him In Jail In Eudora, Arkansas
13. Social Distortion, I Was Wrong
14. The Rolling Stones, I Don’t Know Why aka Don’t Know Why I Love You
15. Stevie Wonder, Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away
16. The Doors, When The Music’s Over

My track-by-track tales:

1. Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops . . . Near 10-minute piece from Zappa’s 1976 record Zoot Allures. As described by the allmusic review site, the album is a masterpiece of mostly dark, slow, sleazy rock exemplified by this track’s “suggestive lyrics, crawling riffs, searing solos, and female screams of pain”. It also is my tongue-in-cheek warning, for anyone who isn’t into extended, in particular prog-ish pieces, that you face ‘torture’ for the first hour of my set. Five songs to start including 15-plus minutes of Yes, 11 of Rush before we get to nine minutes of not prog but typically intoxicating Santana rhythmic adventures from the excellent 2019 release Africa Speaks.

2. Genesis, Squonk . . . One of my favorite Genesis tracks, from A Trick Of The Tail, the 1976 album that was the first for the band after the departure of lead singer Peter Gabriel. As often happens in such situations with such a key departure, people wondered whether the band would survive. But, as happened with similar occurences with AC/DC (the death of Bon Scott, replaced by Brian Johnson) and Van Halen (the departure of David Lee Roth, replaced by Sammy Hagar), the band persevered and went on to more triumphs although in all cases, probably least so with AC/DC, the music inevitably changed but while perhaps losing some fans, the band gained others.

In the case of Genesis, the music stayed largely progressive for a few albums: Wind and Wuthering, And Then There Were Three and Duke which, in order, followed A Trick Of The Tail – before going full-blown commercial with the 1981 album Abacab, which I quite like. But by then even Gabriel himself, in his solo career, had also and in fact even earlier than Genesis adapted his music to the changing nature of the market where, arguably, full-blown prog rock was relegated to the relative margins. As Phil Collins, who took over lead vocals from Gabriel in Genesis once remarked, Genesis likely would not have survived had the band not embraced a more commercial approach. It’s just the degree to which they did that arguably alienated some of the fan base, like me, for instance. I mean, Invisible Touch, the song? Ugh. Yet, loads of people liked it, massive hit, as was the parent album.

While I always knew of Genesis, it wasn’t until they had the commercial single hit Follow You, Follow Me from And Then There Were Three that I started to fully embrace them, then went back to the Gabriel period and forward with them. My first year of college, journalism school, 1978, playing football, I go to a post-game party with teammates and first song that greets us as we walk into the house that was the site of the gathering is Good Times Roll by The Cars, then someone changes the album on the stereo to A Trick Of The Tail and I’m having a beer with a senior teammate and I, the freshman to college, the team and to Genesis, mention to him that I’d just truly discovered Genesis via Follow You, Follow Me and the album And Then There Were Three. He shakes his head, the knowing vet schooling the rookie, tells me And Then There Were Three is ok, but holds up the album cover of A Trick Of The Tail he had grabbed from near the turntable and says “this is the one.” Thank you, Greg Colbeck, great defensive end, great guy, cool Fu Manchu mustache, heavy machinery equipment school, wherever you may now be.

3. Yes, Awaken . . . Fifteen-plus (15:28 to be exact) minutes of epic, prog-rock excellent excess. Enjoy, or not. I do. All the elements are there, heavy rock in spots, quiet introspection in others, all brilliantly played by master musicians. From the 1977 album Going For The One.

4. Rush, The Camera Eye . . . Instrumental intro builds into a driving, 11-minute excursion from 1981’s Moving Pictures album which yielded the hit single Tom Sawyer and well-known tracks such as Red Barchetta, Limelight and YYZ (the code for Toronto’s Pearson International Airport).

5. Santana, Blue Skies . . . A brew of beautiful sound in that typical Santana smorgasbord, harkening back to the early days on this late career triumph from 2019’s Africa Speaks album. Rivetting vocals from Carlos Santana’s song co-writers Buika, a Spanish singer, and English a capella, jazz, soul and gospel singer Laura Mvula in an extended piece that starts slow until Santana goes off on a guitar shredding trip 4:42 in before the song settles back in to the denouement.

6. Queen, Brighton Rock . . . Hard rock opener to 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack album, which featured the hit Killer Queen but did not include the song Sheer Heart Attack, a furious fast one which was originally intended as the obvious title track but was unfinished and didn’t appear until three albums later, on 1977’s News Of The World. A similar situation happened with the Led Zeppelin song Houses Of The Holy. It was recorded as the title track to the 1973 album but was held back to the next album, 1975’s Physical Graffiti, as the band decided it didn’t with with the rest of the material on Houses Of The Holy.

7. Spirit, Mechanical World . . . Dark, brooding, stop-start hypnotic psychedelic stuff from Spirit’s self-titled debut album in 1968. The album also featured the instrumental Taurus, which became the subject of a lawsuit as, to many ears, Led Zeppelin, often embroiled in plagiarism problems and who had opened for Spirit on Zep’s first North American tour, ripped off the intro to Taurus for the intro to Stairway To Heaven. However, Zeppelin won the case. Suffice it to say there’s lots of interesting reading about it, easily available online.

8. Peter Frampton, The Lodger . . . Many people know, and were introduced to, Frampton’s solo stuff via the former Humble Pie guitarist/singer/songwriter’s 1976 live album Frampton Comes Alive! Count me among those people. But the great songs on that album, in almost all cases, obviously came from previously recorded studio versions from Frampton’s solo career, and they’re worth investigating. Most of them – material from the massively successful live album like It’s A Plain Shame, Lines On My Face, I’ll Give You Money, Baby (Somethin’s Happening) and All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side) – were on his earlier studio albums Wind Of Change, Frampton’s Camel, Somethin’s Happening and Frampton. The Lodger, however, a nice track from Frampton’s 1972 solo debut Wind Of Change, was not on Frampton Comes Alive! Also available on the Frampton compilation Shine On, it featured Ringo Starr on drums and early 1970s Rolling Stones’ horn-playing sideman both in studio and on tour, Jim Price.

9. Spooky Tooth, Lost In My Dream . . . Haunting, atmospheric track from Spooky Two. People sometimes talk about the so-called sophomore slump in terms of albums and there are such cases, The Cars’ Candy-O comes to mind, among many. Candy-O actually outsold the Cars’ self-titled debut, obviously largely because the first album established the band and interest was high in what the band would do next. But while it’s very good, let’s be honest, Candy-O is not as good and if forced to pick one Cars album I’d suggest the pick would be the debut album which, like Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, for instance, is essentially a greatest hits album. Back to Spooky Tooth: A great track, Lost In My Dream also served as the title to an excellent 2-CD anthology of Spooky Tooth’s work. The band featured Gary Wright, later of Dream Weaver album and song, and Love Is Alive (the song, from the Dream Weaver album) solo fame and also, in later versions of Spooky Tooth, Mick Jones who went on to form Foreigner.

10. U2, Volcano . . . I have loads of CDs, yeah I’m old fashioned, to quote The Who, talkin’ ’bout my generation . . . but I also do a radio show and you can’t always rely on online sources because uploads come and go, or artists or record companies don’t permit them. So, it’s good to have the physical copies in hand. Anyway, I was going to purge some of my U2, particularly the big hit albums like The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby which I realized I had years ago burned onto CDs, with my own bonus cuts. So I’m thinking, why am I keeping the actual studio CDs, I mean, the liner notes and lyrics are nice to have but . . . I want money, that’s what I want! to quote that famous song.

But, surprisingly to me, no place that gives money for used physical music wants anything to do with these hit U2 albums. Not right now, anyway. Why? Well, as was explained to me, so many copies of those records were sold, so as they’ve been returned as formats and listening habits changed, most stores as a result have a glut of them. Fair enough, and understandable. At any rate, the whole ‘let’s see if I can get cash for these” scenario re U2 also involved their later stuff but I figured, give those albums another listen, maybe there’s something actually worth keeping there. And, blow me down, there is! Like this track, propulsive, addictive bass line for one thing, from U2’s 2014 Songs Of Innocence album. It’s the album that U2 had just sort of appear on iTunes downloads to people’s phones and other devices, which ticked lots of people off, including many musicians who thought, why are you just giving music away, you are enabling that practice. Lots of available reading on that topic, I won’t further indulge it here.

Bottom line, I went back and re-listened to latter day U2, and I’m keeping all of it. Great bands, think what one might want to think of them, but they are great for a reason: Most are incapable of doing bad work, no matter at what stage they’re at in their careers. Volcano, and its parent album, yet another example.

11. Love, Stay Away . . . A diatribe about and lament to lost love, from a Love album that could be seen as an Arthur Lee, Love’s leader and creative force, solo album, originally recorded in 1973. It featured a new version of Love, an all-black band, where the original Love had been integrated but Lee wanted to try different musicians and explore a funky direction also by that point influenced by the music of his by then late friend Jimi Hendrix. What became the album Black Beauty was issued on a label, Buffalo Records, that went out of business so, aside from bootlegs, the album didn’t see widespread light of day until 2014 via the reissue label High Moon. An album worth investigating, as is all of Arthur Lee and Love’s work.

12. Tony Joe White, They Caught The Devil And Put Him In Jail In Eudora, Arkansas . . . Irresistible title, irresistible swamp rock song by the late Louisiana-born artist best known for Polk Salad Annie, which was covered by Elvis Presley. Eudora is located in the southeastern tip of Arkansas, right by the border with Mississippi. Population, as of last reported, 2010 census, 2,269. That’s down 550 from 2000. Maybe the devil escaped and has something to do with the drop off.

13. Social Distortion, I Was Wrong . . . Arguably the California punk band’s lone mainstream hit, my favorite Social Distortion song, from the 1996 album White Light, White Heat, White Trash by which I was introduced to them. Lots of great stuff from the band, including a cover of Ring Of Fire, made famous by Johnny Cash.

14. The Rolling Stones, I Don’t Know Why aka Don’t Know Why I Love You . . . A Stevie Wonder cover from the Let It Bleed sessions with new guitarist Mick Taylor in place of Brian Jones, who had been in serious decline due to substance abuse and was fired by the band. This song was, apparently, recorded the night news came that Jones had died. It has appeared on the ridiculously rich musically Singles Collection: The London Years and on the 1975 Metamorphosis compilation released by former Stones’ manager Allen Klein on his ABKCO Records. Klein’s company – which had gained the rights to the Stones’ Decca/London Records catalog while the Stones had by then launched their own label, Rolling Stones Records featuring the iconic lips and tongue logo – was dredging the vaults for various unauthorized by the Stones yet successful compilation releases like Hot Rocks 1964-71 and its followup, More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies) which features deeper cuts.

15. Stevie Wonder, Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away . . . Here’s Wonder himself, from his 1974 album Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Always relevant if sadly not always followed lyrics – essentially summarizing live and let live, walk a mile and the golden rule.

16. The Doors, When The Music’s Over . . . And so it is, for another show. From the Strange Days album, the band’s second, a 1967 release and their that year. The self-titled first album came out in January, Strange Days in September.