Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
The date was July 19, 1947. On that day, in two cities 4,000 miles apart -- London, England, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA -- two notable rock guitarists were born. Brian May was born in Hampton, which is part of the Greater London area. Although he took up the guitar as a kid (and even designed one of his own by the time he was 16), he intended to be a physicist. He got college degrees in physics and mathematics and began working toward a doctorate studying interplanetary dust. He put his studies aside in the early 1970s when Queen caught fire, and for almost 20 years, his distinctive guitar work was as important to Queen's sound as Freddie Mercury's voice. Following Mercury's death, he formed the Brian May Band with a shifting cast of players, which was active until 1998. In 2004, he joined the reformed Queen + Paul Rodgers project. During this period, he returned to his study of astrophysics. In 2007, he was named chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University, replacing the outgoing Cherie Blair, wife of Britain's former prime minister. May finally received his doctorate in 2008 with a dissertation titled A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.
After the jump, check out May's science-fiction tale "39" from A Night at the Opera, performed live in 1977, with Mercury on lead vocals, and read about the other guitarist born 62 years ago this weekend.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
We noticed in the wake of Michael Jackson's death how small his recorded output was. When you take out the compilations and remix albums, his record-setting solo career consists of six albums in 22 years, counting the disc of new material on the 1995 release HIStory: Past, Present and Future, which also included a disc of greatest hits.
By way of comparison, Creedence Clearwater Revival released six albums in a mere 2 1/2 years, between July 1968 and December 1970. Let's run 'em down:
Creedence Clearwater Revival: Released in July 1968, it includes a couple of tracks CCR recorded when they were still called the Golliwogs. It got them noticed, but it wasn't until their next album that they really broke through.
Bayou Country: Released in January 1969 with the the single Proud Mary leading the way. Mary would make #2 on the Hot 100, becoming the first of five CCR singles in the next two years to stall one step short of Number One.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
Here's the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac performing Albatross, which has been a hit in Britain several times since 1969, and is their most famous song over there.
A generation of rock fans has grown to adulthood thinking of Fleetwood Mac as a hit machine. But before the mid-'70s, Fleetwood Mac's existence was always precarious. From 1968 to 1970, the lineup contained three guitarists: Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, and Danny Kirwan. Each one of them would leave under stressful circumstances, putting the band in jeopardy.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
Every now and then an artist creates a work so striking and popular that it overshadows everything he did before, and everything he'll do in the future. Gary Wright is one of those artists, and the work of art is the album The Dream Weaver. Recorded in 1975, the album featured no guitars -- only a variety of keyboard instruments and drums. (In retrospect, it may seem surprising that nobody had done such a thing before 1975, but Wright benefited from advances in technology that made synthesizers, which were usually enormous, small enough to manipulate more easily onstage.) The album's spacy, hypnotic title song zoomed up the charts beginning in January 1976, eventually peaking at #2 by April. For an encore, the second single was a rocker, Love Is Alive, and it duplicated Dream Weaver's performance, reaching #2 at the beginning of August. The album itself made it to #7.
But Wright had quite an interesting career before 1976. Born in New Jersey, he was a child actor, appearing on Broadway and in early television. In 1967, at age 24, he met music mogul Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who introduced him to the guys in a band called Art. Later, Art morphed into Spooky Tooth and enjoyed a fair amount of success in the UK without breaking big in the States, despite supporting the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix on tours. Wright left Spooky Tooth in 1970 for a solo career, although he was better known as a session musician, playing most famously on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. (According to Wikipedia, he also played piano on Nilsson's #1 hit Without You.) Wright and Harrison became friends, and a trip to India with Ravi Shankar fired Wright's interest in the mystical/spiritual themes he would explore throughout his career.
There are a couple of ways to look back on the life and career of Michael Jackson. One is to dwell on the spectacle he made of himself on the downside of that career. The cable news channels are playing up this angle, and a lot of people are buying into it. "One less freak in the world," a caller told a radio DJ yesterday after the news of Jackson's death was announced. While it's true that Jackson's behavior had been unsavory and freakish for a long time, it's mean-spirited to dwell on only that. For one thing, the man had a family (his children are 12, 11, and 7). And for another, dwelling on the downside of his career ignores the history he made while on the upside.
The Jackson Five saved Motown's bacon at a moment of peril in the late '60s. The label's core artists were moving on; the pop scene itself was changing, and "the Sound of Young America" started to seem quaint. But the Jackson Five kept the hit machine going past its expiration date with four straight #1 singles in 1970: I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save, and I'll Be There. They continued to score hits at Motown until 1975; after leaving for Epic in 1976, they scored a few more.
Michael had released some solo recordings as early as 1971, but when he starred in the film adaptation of The Wiz in 1978, it gained him a degree of attention he hadn't attracted for a while. About a year later, as the '70s turned to the '80s, he announced his coming dominance with the Quincy Jones-produced album Off the Wall. It generated two #1 singles (Don't Stop Til You Get Enough and Rock With You) and sold something like 20 million worldwide. But that was nothing compared to Thriller.
What Michael Jackson accomplished with Thriller can't be understated. He broke the color barrier on MTV for one thing; for another, he became the biggest star in the world when he moonwalked to Billie Jean on NBC's Motown 25 TV special. Exact sales figures for Thriller will never be known: estimates range from about 50 million to over 100 million. It contained seven Top-10 singles, two of which reached #1. MTV's premiere of the video for Thriller, in December 1983, remains one of the landmark events in the channel's history. When Michael accidentally set his hair on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984, the media reported on his condition as if he were a head of state -- which, in fact, he was: the King of Pop.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
Perhaps you had to live with a radio permanently attached to your ear in 1975 to understand just how big a star Elton John was that year. I did, so let me try to explain it.
Elton ended 1974 on an amazing roll. There was the release of a greatest-hits album that smashed to #1 and remains the biggest seller of his career to date. There was a Thanksgiving-night show in New York that featured a guest appearance by John Lennon. There was a now-legendary Christmas-Eve show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. And there was his version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, on which Lennon appeared, which would hit #1 on the first chart of 1975.
In January 1975, Elton's record label opened the vault to release Empty Sky, his original 1969 debut album, which had never been released in the United States. It was ragged in some spots and pretentious in others, but America's Elton-mania took it into the top 10. In February, he released Philadelphia Freedom, an elaborate tribute to Philadelphia soul that became his fifth stateside #1 single. The flipside,I Saw Her Standing There, was from the November New York concert with Lennon. While Philadelphia Freedom topped the charts, the film version of the Who's Tommy opened, with Elton playing the Pinball Wizard. His performance of the Who classic got a great deal of radio play during the summer without being officially released as a single.
The year wasn't a triumph for everyone in Elton's orbit, though. In April he fired two longtime bandmates, bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson, telling them he and they had gone as far as they could together, and that he wanted to change his sound. It surely wasn't because the old sound wasn't selling. One month later, his last album with the Murray-Olsson edition of his band, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, became the first album in the history of the American charts to debut at #1, even though Philadelphia Freedom wasn't on it.
In June, Elton began rehearsing a new band -- "a good driving rock-and-roll band," he told a reporter. (Lead guitarist Davey Johnstone was the lone holdover from the old band.) They had a good reason to get busy: In just three weeks, the new band would headline a daylong festival at Wembley Stadium in London. Other acts scheduled for the event: the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Joe Walsh (not yet a member of the Eagles), and Rufus featuring Chaka Khan. But on that day -- June 21, 1975 -- Elton made what turned out to be a bad decision.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
When the Beatles' song The Long and Winding Road hit #1 on the American singles charts in June 1970, fans knew it represented the end of an era. What they may not have understood at the time is that the breakup of the Beatles announced the previous April wasn't as sudden or as simple as it seemed.
After the fractious sessions for the White Album in 1968, the Beatles went into limbo. Never mind the creative chaos in the studio -- disagreements over the operation of their business entity, Apple Corps, didn't help, either. John Lennon clashed with Paul McCartney over who should manage the struggling company. Lennon preferred Allan Klein, who had been advising him regarding his solo career; McCartney preferred Lee Eastman, his father-in-law. George Harrison and Ringo Starr ended up siding with Lennon. In September 1969, as the group papered over its creative differences (if not its financial ones) to record Let It Be and Abbey Road, Lennon told his mates he was quitting, although the news didn't become public. He had been angered by the decision to drop his song Cold Turkey from Abbey Road; when he released it as a solo single at year's end, it was credited only to "Lennon" instead of "Lennon/McCartney." He was also upset over the other Beatles' refusal to work with Yoko Ono. George, ever the quiet one, quietly fumed over the fact that he was still limited to only a couple of songs per album, and he was deeply discouraged by the Apple Corps debacle. Ringo kept a brave face, telling a reporter in March 1970, "Everything's fine." But it was Paul who took the formal steps that shattered the group.
Up to a certain point, Koko Taylor's story could have been anyone's story. A sharecropper's daughter, she started singing in church as a child. In the early '50s, she migrated north from Tennessee to Chicago with her husband, who was looking for work. The couple settled on the south side where, like so many others, they began frequenting blues clubs. The Taylors liked to sing blues songs for their own entertainment at home; one night, Howlin' Wolf coaxed her up on stage at a club. And that's where Koko's story stops being anyone's and starts being hers alone.
Koko soon met Willie Dixon, the songwriter, producer, and sideman who worked with both Wolf and Muddy Waters, and he got her a contract with Chess Records. I Got What it Takes was her first hit, but her signature song would be Wang Dang Doodle, which made the top 10 on the R&B charts and got some pop airplay in the early summer of 1966. It was the last big hit anyone had on Chess.
Here's a clip from Godfathers and Sons, a film by Mark Levin, part of the 2003 PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, in which Koko talks about being discovered:
Koko Taylor's hybrid sound -- the tradition of female blues singers like Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton infused with the spirit of Muddy Waters and Wolf -- quickly made her the queen of Chicago blues. After Chess went under, she signed with Alligator, another label based in Chicago, and helped build it into one of the premier blues labels in the country. Through the 1970s, she continued to attract large audiences, and in 1980, began winning W.C. Handy Awards (the blues equivalent of the Grammys, now renamed the Blues Music Awards) almost every year. An actual Grammy followed in 1984, with more nominations in succeeding years.
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
You've gotta hand it to the prog rockers -- there was almost nothing they wouldn't try. Adaptations of classical works, unusual instruments, elaborate staging -- there was something in the air of the 1970s that encouraged experimentation and excess. And in the summer of 1977, one of prog rock's most successful headliners, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, embarked on their most elaborate tour yet. It didn't exactly come off as planned.
ELP had released Works Volume 1 earlier that spring. It was their first album of all-new material in four years, a sort of White Album in which each member took a solo side before coming together on side four. The album contained several pieces with a full orchestra and choir, so the band decided to try touring with one. They auditioned hundreds of musicians before hiring upwards of 75 musicians and singers in all. The entire traveling entourage consisted of 130 people. It was a financial gamble, but after the huge success of their 1973-74 world tour, they figured the gamble was worth it.
The Works tour opened with two shows in Louisville, Kentucky, and almost immediately ran into problems. Many of the musicians were union members, and union regulations prohibited ELP from requiring them to play more than three days per week or travel more than 250 miles per day. A show in Cincinnati had to be postponed during the first week. By the second week, the costs of the tour were out of control. The payroll alone ran to nearly $150,000 a week on top of the travel expenses. On pace to lose three million dollars over the course of the tour, ELP began shedding members from the orchestra and choir to keep costs under control.
The orchestra and choir were still together when ELP swung into the Upper Midwest in early June. On June 4, they headlined one of those fabulous all-day outdoor stadium shows so common during the 1970s, at Soldier Field in Chicago. They shared the bill with the J. Geils Band, Foghat, the Climax Blues Band, and a giant rainstorm. That night, they packed it up and headed for Milwaukee (about 90 miles away), where the four bands did it all again the next day. On Tuesday, they played Indianapolis before turning northward again. On June 9, 1977, the band, still with the incredible shrinking orchestra, played in Madison, Wisconsin. It was the first concert I ever attended without parental supervision. (Ticket price: $7.50 -- $8.50 on the day of the show.) But by the time my friends and I saw ELP, the tour as originally conceived was nearly over. One week later, a show in Evansville, Indiana, was the last with the orchestra (except for one show at Madison Square Garden in New York in July). The trio continued to tour through the end of August, took six weeks off, and then took off for another six weeks on the road, playing smaller American cities---and returning to Madison in November. A planned series of Christmas shows in London was scrapped, and another two-month American stretch began in January 1978. The tour ended in Providence, Rhode Island, in March. It would be Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's last tour together until 1992.
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Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
FM is one of the lost movies of the 1970s.Although it's been released on video a couple of times, it's out of print at the moment, and it shows up on cable infrequently. Even back in the day (1978), more people heard the music from the movie than saw the movie itself -- the two-disc soundtrack album reached #5 in Billboard. (I’ve still got my copy, including the QSKY poster that came with it, which adorned the wall of my college apartment for a couple of years.)
The basic plot of FM is this: Noncommercial QSKY (71.1 on the FM dial) hits #1 in the Los Angeles radio ratings. Its owner decides to capitalize on this by selling advertising, including a buy from the U.S. Army, which the staff doesn't want. The station's DJs, led by program director/morning guy Jeff Dugan (played by Michael Brandon), end up going on strike to stop the buy, and the listening public rallies to their cause. I won’t tell you what happens next, but everyone ends up living happily ever after as Steely Dan’s theme song plays over the credits.
Subplots are many: Dugan has a thing for the new midday DJ, Laura (Cassie Yates); the afternoon guy (Martin Mull) tries and fails to get a gig hosting a game show; the night jock (Eileen Brennan) decides she wants to quit radio altogether. The first half of the movie deals with the surreptitious live broadcast of another station’s Linda Ronstadt concert, which is done simply by sneaking in and hooking up a transmitter. Ronstadt and Jimmy Buffett perform in the film; Tom Petty is seen giving an interview on the air; REO Speedwagon is shown signing albums at a live appearance.
There's a lot for an old radio guy such as myself to love about FM. One representative scene: When the staff is celebrating its success in the ratings, the sales manager toasts by saying, "To profits, and the quality they bring," to which Dugan responds, "To quality, and the profits they bring." There you have it -- the creative tension at the heart of radio, in 14 words. QSKY is supposed to be in revolt against the corporatization of radio, even though it plays nothing but the biggest stars from the major corporate record labels: Boston, Foreigner, Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, the Eagles, James Taylor, Billy Joel, and others.
FM got a DVD release most recently in 2002, but it’s out of print now, and used copies are pricey. Fortunately, the original trailer shows you the whole movie in three minutes.
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Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
Bob Seger, born this week in 1945, is known to the latest generation of rock fans as the guy whose song Like a Rock got played to death in truck commercials (at least until John Mellencamp's Our Country replaced it atop the truck-commercial hit parade). For over a decade, however, from Live Bullet in 1976 through his only #1 single, Shakedown in 1987, Seger was one of the most reliable hitmakers and stadium-fillers in rock. For a decade before that, he was the ultimate regional star -- an absolute rock god among audiences in greater Detroit, but largely unknown everywhere else. This post is about those years.
In 1961, at age 16, Seger joined his first band. It was a significant event only in that one of his bandmates was Edward "Punch" Andrews, who would serve as his manager and producer. Seger played in other Detroit/Ann Arbor-area bands before scoring his first regional hit in 1966 with East Side Story under the name Bob Seger and the Last Heard. Persecution Smith was also a hit single in Detroit, and Heavy Music was ready to go national until Seger's record label, Cameo/Parkway, assumed room temperature just as the song was released.
Seger's first national hit and the title song of his first album on Capitol Records was Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, released in 1968, under the name of the Bob Seger System. Here's a nearly unrecognizable Seger and band lip-syncing Ramblin' Gamblin' Man on TV:
A second album, Noah, released a year later, failed to match the national chart performance of the debut. Neither did Mongrel (1970) or Brand New Morning (1971), although record buyers in Detroit continued to vacuum them up. At that point, Seger dumped the band concept and went the singer/songwriter route, although each year, another album release failed to have much impact outside of Michigan: Smokin' O.P.'s, Back in '72, and Seven.
In 1975, Seger released Beautiful Loser. For this album, Seger formed the band that would later be named the Silver Bullet Band, including guitarist Drew Abbott and saxophone player Alto Reed. That fall, during a two-night stand at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Capitol recorded tracks that would become the two-disc album Live Bullet, released in 1976. The ecstasy of Seger's audience is nearly as exciting as the music on the record, although Seger's live rep had yet to spread much beyond Michigan. The album's Wikipedia entry notes that one night after Seger shared a bill with Point Blank, Todd Rundgren, and Elvin Bishop in front of 78,000 fans in Detroit, he drew less than a thousand to a show in Chicago. Live Bullet changed all that, making #34 on the national album chart and paving the way for Seger's radio breakthrough with the Night Moves album at the end of 1976.
No artist with a major reputation would benefit more from a comprehensive box-set release than Bob Seger. Except for Smokin' O.P.'s, everything he recorded before Beautiful Loser, even the single Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, is out of print. Most of it has never been released on CD, although the Ramblin' Gamblin' Man album, Mongrel, and Seven had a brief release in 1993. (Copies are rare and expensive.) Some of that early music is positively fascinating, and some of it is not at all like the stuff that made Seger famous during his decade on top. Here are some other rare Seger tracks worth a listen:
Much of rock's history is shrouded in the haze of legend, or even in danger of being forgotten. Join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' each Saturday as he reminds us why we love this music like we do ...
From 1966 through 1968, Tommy James and the Shondells scored hits with some of the great AM-radio pop of all time, including Hanky Panky, I Think We're Alone Now, Do Something to Me, Mirage, and Mony Mony, under the direction of producer/songwriters Bo Gentry and Ritchie Cordell. But like many musicians during those years of cultural ferment, James and his mates developed the desire to take greater control over their art, and like musicians from the Beatles to Marvin Gaye, they were eventually granted this wish.
At the end of 1968, James and the Shondells recorded Crimson and Clover, an album that stands squarely in the middle of the intersection of bubblegum and psychedelia. It produced two #1 singles, Crimson and Clover (with that famous tremolo vocal, produced by plugging a mike into a guitar amplifier) and Crystal Blue Persuasion, one of the most gorgeously blissed-out records anyone ever made. The album also contains I Am a Tangerine, which sounds like an alternate take of Strawberry Fields Forever, and Sugar on Sunday, which became a Top-10 hit for the Clique. It had the unique ability to appeal both to stoners who dug its trippy edge and to their younger brothers and sisters still plugged in to their favorite AM stations. It sold something like five million copies.
The Crimson and Clover album was such a monster that James and the Shondells were invited to play Woodstock in August of '69, but they turned it down, reportedly because they thought it was just another outdoor gig in some pig farmer's field. The album sold so well that Roulette Records delayed releasing the band's followup album, Cellophane Symphony, until the end of 1969. That album contains another trippy hippie anthem in Sweet Cherry Wine, but also experiments with prog rock, including the title track, which is a nine-minute instrumental that sounds like Pink Floyd.
After a final album with the Shondells, Travelin', released in 1970, James took up a solo career. His 1971 album Christian of the World contained three hit singles, the iconic Draggin' the Line, Nothing to Hide, and I'm Comin' Home. The momentum would cool after that, however. James would make only three more albums in the 1970s, including the 1977 release Midnight Rider. Although it was produced by bubblegum god Jeff Barry, it featured guest appearances by Michael McDonald and Timothy B. Schmit, and it was fairly far-removed from the sort of thing that had made James famous a decade before. It wasn't a hit. James (born this week in 1947, by the way) would return to the Top 40 in 1980 with Three Times in Love, and he continues to play today, occasionally. Here he is in 2005:
Over at my personal blog, I have frequently written about James, and argued that he should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The most deserving members of the Hall are those who went where no one had ever gone before, and who did it in such a way that the rest of us wanted to come along. Or, they're those whose artistic vision made us hear the music in new or different ways. James did both, and without sacrificing the pleasures that pure pop music can bring. But now that the Hall has moved on to inducting artists who debuted in the '80s, James probably won't get in. Perhaps if he'd played Woodstock, we'd remember him differently.
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