What are you listening to...?

+1 for bagpipes

 

1981 !

 

Dreams - Uriah Heep
Wonderworld - June 1974

 

Great post, as always, Spice! That video was so long ago, Angus looked like he actually belonged in his school boy outifit!


The Grass Roots
Let's Live for Today

T

 

Nothing can replicate rock concerts. Nothing. For some reason I expect Tom to be out in the California jamming some Pantera this weekend.

 

SRV

 

Quality DFW rock legends gents!
T

 

Another DFW legend. If you got 10 free minutes.

Meatloaf
Paradise by the Dashboard Light


T

 

WXRT
Saturday Mornng Flashback
1974

 

The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

"When the gales of November came early"

 

R.I.P. Malcolm Young

 

Man, and we were just enjoying their music. ☹️
Vaya con Dios, amigo.
T

 

The start of the Disco years, Ron! This is from 1974.


Elton John - Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me.

T

 

Image Unavailable, Please Login


Malcolm Mitchell Young (6 January 1953 – 18 November 2017)

Rest in Peace Malcolm

Baby Please Don't Go - AC / DC
High Voltage - February 1975

 

AC/DC Thunderstruck



For Those About To Rock

 

Are You Happy - Iron Butterfly
Live - April 1970

 

3 Dog Night - Shambala

 

Guilty - Mike Oldfield
Exposed - July 1979

 

With the death of Charles Manson, I remembered that he was busking in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love in the Haight before he wandered to LA. There, he crossed paths with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and even did some demos with the Laurel Canyon musicians. This lead me to remember that a lot of those 60's classics weren't even played by the bands who sang them, but were performed and recorded by The Wrecking Crew of LA studio musicians that included Glen Campbell and Carol Kaye. So I went to Wikipedia and found this entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrecking_Crew_(music)

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, there is a PARTIAL list of the hits the Wrecking Crew played on. Everything from Herb Alpert's The Lonely Bull (1962) - my dad had that album, so I grew up listening to it - through Mr. Tamborine Man by The Birds (1965) - a song that changed pop music forever - all the way to Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) - one of my favorite songs as a kid - and beyond!

So, I've spent the past few days looking up all those songs on YouTube and listening to them. It is really and truly unbelievable how much music those guys (and one girl) gave us.

This was a revelation:


My solo classical guitar arrangement of Classical Gas is played by guitarists all over the world - literally - and I've performed it myself for decades. Never knew it was a Wrecking Crew studio arrangement!

 

Excellent !

Glen Campbell was a highly underrated guitar player, session musician, backing vocals, production, etc. Viva Las Vegas.

Another fantastic session group from back in the day was The Swampers. Skynard's famous hat tip:

"Now, Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers"
"And they've been known to pick a song or two"
"Lord, they get me off so much"
"They pick me up when I'm feeling blue"
"Now, how 'bout you?"

Me too !

 

Haha! You're going to love this. I graduated from MacArthur high school in San Antonio in 1976. We voted Kodachrome to be our class song, but the admin wouldn't have it.

I don't even remember what the replacement was, because Kodachrome will always be my class song. The one I voted for (American Pie was on the list too, and that might have been the winner).

LA, Nashville, and Mussel Shoals all had a cadre of amazing session players. I was never a sharp enough player to do that, I was the quiet guy playing rhythm who wrote the songs.

Then I went solo, and that is when I got really comfortable as a performer/arranger. My classical guitar Stairway to Heaven is also very popular. I even got the solo in there, with the first two licks perfect Page.

 

Yeah, I remember the "class song" vote. In 1970 we voted for "Hitchin A Ride". Of course the teachers said we couldn't have that one because "hitchhiking is illegal". Our first lesson in Democracy vs. Dictatorship. In high school we voted for Paul Anka's "You're Having My Baby". They didn't like that one either.

Playing music is a real natural high. More people should do it.

The Swampers feat. The Staple Singers

 

Beautiful song (if a bit depressing)...

 

Inspired by the poem "45 Mercy Street" by Anne Sexton

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign –
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant’s teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger’s seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down –
I don’t care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

 

The Crystal Ship - The Doors
13 - November 1970