Category Archives: Rock

Station to Station

Posted on by

Apparently David Bowie’s Thin White Duke phase, at its most warped and weird and disturbing, and amid mountains of the best quality cocaine, happened just down the street from here. I had always figured it was up in the Hollywood Hills. That’s what the story was, David Bowie going out of his mind up in the Hollywood Hills. Nope, it was here in my quiet neighborhood, on my quiet street, Waverly Drive, where Los Feliz and Silver Lake come together. He was staying at Glenn Hughes’ house. He of Deep Purple’s decline. Bowie decked out in Aryan pure white and Glenn in one of his heavy metal leisure suits, and neither sleeping ever. There was David, all his sensory inputs amplified, seeing spirits and demons and the ghosts of dead Nazis. He snorts another line and listens to the trains chug past down the Valley. Thoughts turn to twisted rock star madness, of Aleister Crowley, cocaine, witches, and cult murder. The return of the thin white duke. All is a swirl, every sense magnified, never sleeping, wide awake dreams. Women come, women go. The prettiest boys. Cocaine piled high as the mountains that loom inky black out of nothing when the night winds blow. Somehow he managed to find time to record Station to Station. Everyone has their own creative process.

(Originally posted as Thin White Duke in 2016)

Robbie Robertson

Posted on by

One of my very favorite moments from The Last Waltz, with Robbie Robertson and Eric Clapton out front with The Band on Clapton’s live standby Further On Up The Road. Clapton’s in fine form but far too polite an Englishman to engage in a tawdry North American style cutting contest, but Robbie, raised in gritty roadhouses on both sides of the border, doesn’t know any other way and goes for the jugular, blood all over the floor by the time he finishes. Eric grins a surrender and follows up with a fine solo but never tries to outdo Robbie, whose show it is afterall. Rock’n’roll can be so polite. In real jazz and old R&B it could have been Robertson’s deathbed solo and the other cat would have tried to bury him anyway, no mercy, no quarter. I always thought it a shame that Clapton didn’t come back with a solo to make this a cutting contest to the death, back and forth, each of them throwing everything they had into topping the other motherfucker’s solo till, exhausted, one or the other gave in, humiliated. I’ve watched saxophone players do that and you can see the moment one of them, laughing and vanquished, gives in. It’s macho to the core. Exhilarating. But Eric was a nice guy, and it was a bittersweet event in a San Francisco hall full of faded peace and love hippies and he let Robbie have this one in a classic Robbie Robertson explosion of rockabilly and blues licks.

Unrecorded and unfilmed

Posted on by

Hot damn. At the Orange County Fairgrounds, no less. The fact that this, and similar festivals in ‘67, ‘68, and ‘69 were not filmed and recorded is I suppose because the concept of doing so was so new. The technology was new and the people with the necessary technical skills to film and record live music in an anarchic festival setting were few and far between. Financial backing was very difficult to obtain (be honest, would you invest in a festival concert film?) No one even knew what you could do with a concert film—the huge success of “Woodstock” in 1970 was unimaginable. And then there was the fact that a live recording that would have to be a double or triple record, and the record industry was just trying to get used to double albums by single bands in 1968, let alone featuring a dozen bands. And the record industry was right to be skeptical, most of the festival live albums didn’t sell well, not even Woodstock 2. The few that were released wound up in the cut out bins for a quarter (about two bucks in today’s money.) So nearly all of the dozens or scores of huge festivals didn’t get filmed and released. Most weren’t even audio recorded. Bummer. Hell, even jazz festivals were under recorded and rarely filmed, and jazz fans were rarely naked or tripping or fucking at those (well, not as much anyway.) What an archaic anarchic time that was. A stone age stoned age.

Roll another number for the road

Posted on by

Rolled another number for the road. A perfect shot snapped by photographer Henry Diltz with his right hand as he takes the joint from album cover artist Gary Burden who hasn’t yet exhaled. Neil Young, way stoned, probably rolled the reefer. Or I hope he did, anyway. It’s somewhere in rural California, no doubt, sometime in the 70s. Diltz is still very lively and kicking and posts stuff like this on Facebook regularly, incredible photographs and memories of west coast rock’n’roll in the 60s and 70s. Gary Burden died a couple years ago, he did most of the Neil Young albums until Zuma, I think (I’m really aging myself here) and his list of album cover credits is like a playlist of early 70’s FM radio here in LA. I assume the three of them are on their way to a photo shoot.

Think I’ll roll another number for the road, Neil sang, feeling able to get under any load. Though his feet weren’t on the ground, he’d been standing’ on the sound of some open-hearted people goin’ down. I remember, as a teen, having no clue what the hell those last lines meant. Years later, stoned, it dawned on me. Years after that, unstoned, I was finally able to parse it grammatically. Closure.

Rock’n’roll

Posted on by

In 1957 a Philadelphia teenager in black top, black jeans and black boots howls like a wild animal at an Elvis Presley concert. Rock’n’roll had been unleashed. Elvis did a few quick tours that year and they were apparently frenzied affairs, Elvis and his band getting down, the audiences getting crazy. In one city the audience stormed the stage after the the last song and dismantled it, tore it apart. Ha. The problem with going to an Elvis concert is you can get killed, a reporter wrote. This chick has the right idea. And a couple decades later twenty something me would have been drawn to twenty something her like a moth to flame, of course. Must be the Irish in me.

I was born in Long Branch, New Jersey the day before this photo was snapped. I had newborn baby long black sideburns. My rock’n’roll crazed uncle—leather jacket, ducktail, the whole seventeen year old greaser look—brought all his similarly attired hoodlum buddies down to the maternity ward to see his nephew Elvis. They raised hell singing Elvis songs and making Elvis moves until the nurses scooted them out and they drove off in their fifties car to raise hell along the Jersey Shore. I suppose it was an omen.

Unleashed.

Mississippi Charles Bevel

Posted on by

Picked up this album from 1973 in the back room at Rockaway probably twenty some years ago. Sale day and everything in that room was 75% off and nothing had been over three bucks anyway. This was the nadir of vinyl, everyone was buying CDs and most records weren’t worth much of anything anymore. Those were good days. I’d go full nerd in there, walk out with a stack of records for less than $50. Jazz to die for, nearly all of it mint or unopened. Rock albums people now pay ridiculous money for. Country they couldn’t give away (I remember getting a whole stack of classic Buck Owens in flawless condition for less than a buck a piece). And all kinds of music from all over the world. When records are under a buck you really can’t lose buying whatever. This was one of those. Probably paid six bits for it, unopened. I had never heard it, and his name was only vaguely and very distantly a memory and I had no idea from when or where or how. Later at home I put it on the turntable. This tune caught my ear. Listened to it again. Again. The liner notes gave an interesting backstory, how he’d lived in Liberia for a couple years and this was a conversation he’d heard on the local bus, hence “Overheard”. I put it aside and played some other records, then later went back and played the tune again. And again. And again again. I bet I listened to it—just this song—a dozen times in a couple days. And I just now listened to it now three times in a quick row. Weird how some songs get into your ear and under your skin like that, and you find’ll yourself hearing it from memory at odd times forever after, and have no idea why.

Terry Reid

Posted on by

Just love this, Terry Reid—I so dig his voice and guitar playing, both unique as hell—performing ”Dean” at Glastonbury Fayre in 1971. He’s got David Lindley (Kaleidoscope had called it a day in 1970), and that’s Alan White laying down an incredibly loose unYes groove on the traps, and just as the tune is ending a thoroughly psychedelicized Linda Lewis wanders up on stage and carries it along tripping another four minutes (of which she remembers nothing, she confessed later, but she did remember dancing with a tree.) I never did understand why Terry Reid never made it, I suppose his thing was just a little too off center, his groove a little too serpentine and scratchy, even for those days. Oh well, rock’n’roll. This is from the Glastonbury Fayre documentary, which if not Nicholas Roeg’s finest moment is one of those incredibly hippie things with lots of naked muddy way out people way out on acid, and lots of way out great music. Even extremely way out music. Apparently they never got round to tell us who’s playing what, not even band names, which will drive you slightly nuts, but subtities are for squares anyway.

Alas, in the year since writing this, the clip from Glastonbury Fayre has been removed from YouTube, and hence I never posted this. It seemed a shame to throw out such a nice little piece, though, and now someone has posted the audio recording from the Glastonbury documentary so here that clip is. The still is from the film. I heartily recommend purchasing a copy of the film, though. It’s no Woodstock as far as production quality goes, but it still a pretty amazing document.

John Sebastian

Posted on by

The 400,000 people at Woodstock were still antsy, high and loud after Santana’s starmaking performance, but the crew didn’t dare put another electric band on stage till the weather settled down. That upstate New York weather. John Sebastian was hanging around back stage just tripping on the acid he’d dosed somehow, when Chip Monck—that’s his voice, introducing him—told him he needed to play. John, way too buzzed, said no. He hadn’t even brought a guitar with him. Not even an autoharp. Someone handed him Tim Hardin’s guitar. (Tim didn’t make the cut for the movie so his guitar is as close as he got to Woodstock movie stardom that day.) Darling Be Home Soon is one of Lovin’ Spoonful’s classics, a hit you don’t hear on the classic rock stations, one of those earnest folkie things, like a Simon and Garfunkel tune, overly arranged, a loud horn section, perfect grammar and sweet melody, rhyming dawdled with toddled and with an unforgettable hook in the melody. He begins the song and the crowd cheers, like they’d been hoping that he’d sing it, and within a few seconds the vast throng is hushed, swaying slightly with the rhythm, quiet as a church, listening to the words, just John Sebastian and a guitar and a melody and the 400,000 people not making a sound. Go, he sings, and beat your crazy heads against the sky, the melody somehow soaring like a big rock band, try and see beyond the houses and your eyes, it’s OK to shoot the moon, which a half century later sounds a little clumsy, but in the summer of 1969 in a sea of 400,000 heads and hippies it must’ve sounded like pure poetry, and it wasn’t until he sang the last few words that you can hear the sounds of 400,000 stoned people again, their cheers like waves rolling in from the deep to inundate the stage.

Present at the creation

Posted on by

Present at the creation. Well, slightly after the creation, but still way early. Dig all the long hair, the band’s and the audience. Tommy’s is the hippiest. Johnny takes care of his. And everyone looks so nice. Rock’n’roll was still very nice in 1976. It had probably never been nicer. Nice people, nice music. I don’t think anyone had a clue about what was to erupt in a year. Punk rock—were we even calling it that yet?—was still a college kid thing. Not a drop out thing or a fuck up thing or a this close to being put away psycho thing. And it looks like somebody was recording the show on the state of the art portable recording machines (I’d say recorders instead of recording machines but recorders were still those inexpensive little woodwinds that hippies drove us up the wall with). The cassette he recorded would have sounded like he’d recorded inside a blender. Unlistenable. He probably still has it somewhere, Ramones scrawled across it in ball point pen, the venue and the date. Sometimes he finds it in a junk drawer and remembers.

The Ramones at CBGB, September 9, 1976. Photo by Bob Gruen.

Ronnie Hawkins

Posted on by

Ronnie Hawkins, RIP. How he made it to 87 the Lord only knows. An genuwine Arkansas rockabilly cat who moved to Canada figuring rightly they were dying up there for the real stomping thing, his fiercely rockin’ 1963 take on the Bo Diddley classic Who Do You Love was one of the very last rockabilly hits. Listening now, though, you can hear how his raw Arkansas sound (played by his crack Canadian bands) was heading well into the tough bluesier rock’n’roll starting to bubble and boil in roadhouses and bars in the States and Britain in the sixties. That nasty guitar here I think was Roy Buchanan, who, like Robbie Robertson afterward, had a sound much shaped by hard years playing in Ronnie’s gritty fired up bands. This wasn’t art, this was rock’n’roll. Just play yer asses off and give the people a show.