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Bobby Freeman 1/2017

Songwriter for Do You want to danceJanuary 23, 2017 – Bobby Freeman was born on June 13, 1940 in Alameda County and raised in San Francisco.

By his early teens Bobby was not only literally singing on street corners in the city’s Fillmore District but also spending every hour not in school dancing at the Booker T Washington community centre. He got his first taste of the record business as a tenor with a local vocal group led by Alvin Thomas; the Romancers, who made two singles for Dootsie Williams’ Dootone label in 1955. The group cut a further single for the local Bay Tone label (on which Freeman does not appear) before splintering, while Bobby formed another team, the Vocaleers. Having learned piano from Thomas, Freeman also began to write his own material in the mould of Little Richard and Fats Domino.

Itinerant deejay Jim “Specs”Hawthorne caught the group at a football rally at Mission High School in early 1958 and called for an audition at Sound Recorders. The rest of the Vocaleers weren’t interested, and so it was just Freeman and a bongo-playing pal who showed up at Sound Recorders in San Francisco. “Hawthorne asked, do you have any original songs, and I said yeah,” Bobby recounted to me in 2000. “He said OK, when I do this [points], start doing the material. There were some other songs, ‘Follow The Rainbow’, ‘Responsible’, and then we got into ‘Do You Wanna Dance’. Where the break is, the song was over. But Hawthorne wanted to get his money’s worth with whatever he was being charged, so he told me, do some more. That’s why the song starts up again – it wasn’t designed that way. But now, they call that a hook.” Continue reading Bobby Freeman 1/2017

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Marvell Thomas 1/2017

Memphis soul performer Marvell ThomasJanuary 23, 2017 – Marvell Thomas was born in Memphis Tennessee on August 22, 1941. The Thomas family is rooted in music and especially Memphis Soul. Legendary rock and roll pioneer Rufus (Walking the Dog) was his dad. His sisters Carla and Vaneese were much noted, especially Carla (the Queen of Memphis Soul) reached superstardom.

The eldest child of Rufus and Lorene Thomas, Marvell was born in 1941 and grew up in the shadow of Beale Street, where his father performed. “You could call it a second home,” Thomas said in 2011. “It was just three blocks from our house. I was a little kid, 5 years old, running up and down Beale Street all the time, much to my parents’ chagrin when they found out. Of course, I was there a lot legitimately too, when my father was hosting the talent show every Thursday night at the Palace Theatre.” Continue reading Marvell Thomas 1/2017

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Peter Overend Watts 1/2017

Overend Watts, bass player for Mott the HoopleJanuary 22, 2017 – Peter Overend Watts was born in the Yardley neighborhood of Birmingham, England on 13 May, 1947.

Watts began playing the guitar at the age of 13 and by 1965, he had switched to bass guitar and became a professional musician. Watts attended Ross Grammar School in 1963 and met his lifelong friend Dale Griffin aka Buffin and they played in local bands together such as The Anchors, Wild Dogs Hellhounds and The Silence when they met a rival band The Buddies who had Mick Ralphs and Stan Tippins as members and they collectively formed The Doc Thomas Group. Changes to that line-up occurred in 1968 and keyboard player Verden Allen joined and they changed their name to The Shakedown Sound.

In 1969 they all moved to London and came to the attention of record producer Guy Stevens who auditioned Ian Hunter and appointed him as their lead singer instead of Tippins and Mott The Hoople was formed. Watts was instrumental in getting David Bowie to write a song for the band and initially was offered the song “Suffragette City” which he turned down before David wrote especially for the band their now anthem “All The Young Dudes”. Mott The Hoople quickly built up a fearsome reputation as a dynamic live attraction playing gloriously ragged rock’n’roll and much of the group’s raw energy emanated from the bands propulsive engine room: the thunderous rhythm section of Overend and Dale. Visually the band also stood out and it was hard not to notice Watts in his thigh high platform boots, silver hair with a custom made bass guitar in the shape of a swallow! Continue reading Peter Overend Watts 1/2017

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Junie Morrison 1/2017

The giant behind funkJanuary 21, 2017 – Walter “Junie” Morrison was born sometime in 1954 in Dayton, Ohio. The exact date has not been found as if intentionally hidden by his later alter ego J.S. Theracon, showing up on an infrequent basis during his life, mostly when contractual obligations got in the way of making music.

Morrison sang and played piano as a child in church, soon learning a range of other instruments such as guitar , bass, drums and brasses, making gospel a foundation for his music. He soon became a student school choir director and orchestra conductor at Roosevelt High School in Dayton. In 1970, in his mid-teens, after graduating from high school, he joined the funk band the Ohio Players.

He became their lead singer, trumpeter and keyboardist, and soon their musical director and producer, involved in some of their major hits and the albums Pain, Pleasure, and Ecstasy. He was largely responsible for writing and arranging the band’s 1973 hit single, “Funky Worm“. The band members nicknamed him Junie, he told the Red Bull Music Academy, because they were older. “It took quite a while before they let me forget my age and lack of experience in the ‘ways of the world,’ ” he said. Continue reading Junie Morrison 1/2017

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Maggie Roche 1/2017

maggie roche of the rochesJanuary 21, 2017 – Maggie Roche was born on October 26, 1951 in Park Ridge, New Jersey. Together with her sister Terre, she dropped out of Park Ridge High School to tour as a duo in the late sixties. Maggie wrote most of the songs, with Terre contributing to a few. The sisters got a big real break when Paul Simon  brought them in as backup singers on his 1973 #2 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. In return they got his support and an appearance by the Oakridge Boys, when they recorded their only album as a duo in 1975 titled Seductive Reasoning.

A year later their youngest sister Suzzy completed the Irish singer/songwriting trio The Roches. Maggie was their main songwriter in the beginning as they became increasingly known  for their unusual harmonies, quirky lyrics and comedic stage presence. Continue reading Maggie Roche 1/2017

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Ronald ‘Bingo’ Mundy 1/2017

Bingo Mundy of the MarcelsJanuary 20, 2017 – Ronald ‘Bingo’ Mungo was born April 20, 1940 in Alleghany County, Pennsylvania. Just out of high school he joined the doo wop group The Marcels, named after a popular 1950s hairstyle ‘the Marcel wave’.

The group formed in 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and signed to Colpix Records with lead Cornelius Harp, bass Fred Johnson, Gene Bricker, Ron Mundy, and Richard Knauss.

In 1961, the Marcels recorded a new version of the ballad “Blue Moon” that began with the bass singer saying, “bomp-baba-bomp” and “dip-da-dip”. A demo tape sent to Colpix Records landed them at New York’s RCA Studios in February 1961 to record, among other things, a rockin’ doo-wop version of the Rodgers and Hart classic “Blue Moon” with an intro they had been using on their take of The Cadillacs’ “Zoom.” As legend has it, the day he heard it, New York DJ Murray the K played “Blue Moon” 26 times in a four-hour show. In March 1961, the song knocked Elvis Presley off the top of the Billboard chart, becoming the first No. 1 rock ’n’ roll hit out of Pittsburgh. Continue reading Ronald ‘Bingo’ Mundy 1/2017

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Mike Kellie 1/2017

drummer for Spooky ToothJanuary 18, 2017 – Mike Kellie – (Spooky Tooth, the Only Ones) was born on March 24, 1947 in Birmingham, England into a family with no musical background or inclination.. As a child, he showed an early interest in rhythm, practicing on a coal shuttle with hearth brushes to simulate a snare drum. In his teen years, he joined St. Michaels Youth Club band as a drummer. He later played at “The Track” at Tudor Grange Sports Centre in Solihull. On the basis of this work, he was invited by Brian “Monk” Ffinch to play with Wayne and the Beachcombers in Birmingham, which started his career as a professional musician.

In 1966, Kellie played in Birmingham in a band called the Locomotive with Chris Wood of Traffic, and later with the V.I.P.’s (later Art) in Carlisle.

Steve Winwood was ready to leave The Spencer Davis Group and I was in a band in Birmingham called The Locomotive with Chris Wood on tenor sax & flute. Chris, Steve & Jim Capaldi were forming Traffic at that time, around the latter part of 1966. The other band that Chris Blackwell, who managed the Spencer Davis Group, had was the VIP’s from Carlisle. They were a great rhythm and blues band and had come down to make it in London having conquered the North. Their drummer, Walter Johnson, missed his family and went back to Carlisle. Hence, in the office one day Steve suggested someone call me. I had a day job in a wood yard in Olton. I got a phone call from friend Paul Medcalf who said …“Steve wants to know if you’re interested in joining this band…” So I was off, next day, straight from New Street Station, with my drums, to Paddington. Met by VIP’s road manager, the legendary Albert Heaton I was driven to 155, Oxford Street where I met Mike Harrison and Greg Ridley. I met the rest of the band later that evening. The next day I was in Paris playing at Olympia with the VIP’s without any rehearsal!!  We were bottom of the bill, Chris Blackwell had done this deal for the band to open a star studded variety fundraiser in aid of UNICEF. It was held at Paris Olympia & was televised worldwide, similar to the way ‘All You Need Is Love’ was done. The VIP’s had a single out in France on Fontana and we were over to promote it, a Joe Tex song called ‘I Wanna Be Free’. So I had no real rehearsal, just the journey over in the van. We did the TV show after I had phoned my mother from a Post Office in Paris earlier that day and said ‘Mum, look in the Radio Times, I think we’re on a TV thing tonight.’ The record became a big hit in France following that show.

Manager Chris Blackwell found a singer and organist from the New York Tymes band named Gary Wright, added him to the line-up of Art and launched the band Spooky Tooth with Kellie, Greg Ridley, Jimmy Henshaw, Keith Emerson, Luther Grosvenor and vocalist extraordinaire Mike Harrison.*

With Blackwell being more focused on his fledgling Island Records, and in spite of the band’s wide acceptance in America and the European mainland, Spooky Toothe declined quickly in the early 70s and Kellie joined French Elvis Johnny Hallyday‘s band for a summer tour of France in 1974, before forming The Only Ones in 1976 with Peter Perrett, Alan Mair and John Perry.

The Only Ones, possibly best known for the single “Another Girl, Another Planet”, recorded three albums for CBS, although over time, their catalogue has contained many compilations and other releases, which now outnumber their studio albums.

In February 1978, Johnny Thunders moved to London with his family, and began playing with a loose revue dubbed the Living Dead. Kellie became part of this floating line-up (that also included Perrett along with various Sex Pistols including Steve Jones and Paul Cook) and recorded Thunders’ So Alone album together with his signature song “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”.

Following the Only Ones’ farewell in 1981 at London’s Lyceum, Kellie moved to the countryside north of Toronto, Canada, where he spent four years away from performing. He used this time to learn the piano and write songs.

Returning to Britain in 1985, Kellie spent several years hill farming in North Wales and Scotland where he became a shepherd. In 1999 Kellie reunited with Mike Harrison, Luther Grosvenor and Greg Ridley under the Spooky Tooth moniker. Together they released the Cross Purpose album.

In 2004, Kellie reunited with Mike Harrison and Gary Wright to play dates in Germany as another new incarnation of Spooky Tooth. The band later released the DVD Nomad Poets with live performances from Worpswede and Hamburg, Germany.

In 2007, the Only Ones reformed, touring the UK, Europe and Japan as well as performing on BBC TV’s Later… with Jools Holland.

In 2010, with the Only Ones undergoing another sabbatical, Kellie began recording his own collection of music which become his first solo album. Entitled Music from The Hidden, the album was produced by Kellie who also played drums, organ, bass and acoustic guitars, percussion and sang lead vocals. There are also contributions from Gordon Jackson (acoustic guitar), Finley Barker and Tony Kelsey (guitars), Steve Winwood (organ, mandolin and bass), Bill Hunt, Levi French and Tony Ariss (pianos), Rob Harrison (bass), Steve Gibbons (backing vocals) and Greg Platt Lake (guitar and vocals). The album was released in 2014.

Kellie was prominent among the musicians featured on the six-CD Jess Roden Anthology, presented by Hidden Masters. He contributed to the 2011 sessions for the Distractions re-union album, The End of the Pier, which was released on Occultation Records in 2012.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Kellie was besides a member of the rock bands the V.I.P.s, Spooky Tooth and the Only Ones, also a prolific session musician and worked with the Who on the film soundtrack of Tommy, Joe Cocker, Traffic, George Harrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees’s Maurice Gibb, Gary Wright, Johnny Thunders, Luther Grosvenor, Neil Innes, Steve Gibbons, Chris Jagger, Nanette Workman, Sean Tyla, Jim Capaldi, Pat Travers and Andy Fraser.

Mike Kellie died on 18 January 2017 following a short illness at the age of 69.

*For a magnificent account of those early London rock days go to http://www.mikekellie.com/PT_1.htm

Another interesting interview about the early days of British rock is this Interview with Mike Kellie – Spooky Tooth

 

 

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Steve Wright 1/2017

January 16, 2017 – Steve Wright (Greg Kihn Band) was born in El Cerrito California in 1950.

Wright had played in a band called Traumatic Experience with El Cerrito residents John Cuniberti and Jimmy Thorsen.
After changing their name to Hades Blues Works (later, Hades) they expanded into a quartet with Craig Ferreira in 1970

In 1975 Greg Kihn had already signed to Berserkley Records and had a song included on the album Beserkley Chartbusters before entering the studio to record the debut album with a new band consisting of Wright, Robbie Dunbar and Larry Lynch – the Greg Kihn Band.

What followed was 20 years of recording and touring with several monster hits composed by Steve Wright and Greg Kihn.  Continue reading Steve Wright 1/2017

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Richie Ingui 1/2017

the soul survivorsJanuary 13, 2017 – Richie Ingui (The Soul Survivors) was born the November 15, 1947 in Manhattan, New York.  

The predecessor group was formed in New York City in 1965 by Richie and his brother Charlie Ingui, along with Kenny Jeremiah. They first played together under the name The Dedications.  (Jeremiah released several singles under this name in 1962 and 1964). They adopted the name Soul Survivors in 1965 and signed to Philadelphia label Crimson Records, who put them in touch with Gamble & Huff. “Expressway to Your Heart” was a #1 hit regionally in Philadelphia and New York in the fall of 1967, and the tune reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 nationally. “Expressway to Your Heart” spent 15 weeks in the charts and sold over one million copies. Continue reading Richie Ingui 1/2017

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Tommy Allsup 1/2017

January 11, 2017 – Tommy Douglas Allsop (Buddy Holly)was born on November 24, 1931 near Owasso Oklahoma.

His musical career started right after highschool in Claremore, Oklahoma in 1949 with the “Oklahoma Swingbillies.” In 1950 he went to work with fiddle player Art Davis in Miami, Oklahoma; from there to the Cowboy Inn in Wichita, Kansas with singer, fiddle player Jimmy Hall. In 1952 and 1953, he moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma to join the “Johnnie Lee Wills Band.” From 1953 to 1958, he had his own band, “The Southernaires” in Lawton, Oklahoma with homebase being the Southern Club.

In 1958, Tommy’s career would take a different direction. On a trip to Clovis, New Mexico to record at Norman Petty’s famous studio, he met the late Buddy Holly. In April, he started playing lead guitar with Holly and the Crickets. He continued playing with Buddy until the fatal plane crash that took Buddy’s life, along with the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. It was Allsup who flipped a coin with Ritchie Valens for a seat on the ill-fated plane.

After Holly’s death, Allsup moved to California to join Liberty Records as A & R Director of all Country and Western product to begin producing the great Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. His association with Wills lasted through Wills’ “For The Last Time” LP, recorded on December 2-3, 1973, in Dallas, Texas, where Bob Wills recorded his first records in 1935. Allsup used some of the original Texas Playboys on the last recording (McAulliff, Shamblin, Dacus, Strickland). Bob Wills directed the sessions from his wheel chair.

While at Liberty, Tommy would produce Tex Williams, Willie Nelson, Joe Carson, Warren Smith, Billy Mize, and Cliff Crofford. While there, he worked with great artists such as Walter Brennan, Bobby Vee, Johnny Burnette, Julie London, and Vickie Carr, who sang harmony with Bob Wills on the LP “Bob Wills Sings and Plays.” After leaving California, Allsup moved to Nashville to head up Metromedia Records in 1968. In 1972, he met Ray Benson and Asleep At The Wheel and produced their first LP for United Artist Records. Later he produced 4 LPs for Capitol Records with the group.

Tommy Allsup had been a big supporter of Western Swing music over the years. He had produced 5 LPs with the great Hank Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys, 2 LPs with the Original Texas Playboys, and 2 LPs with the great Western Swing vocalist Leon Rausch. Tommy produced Swing LPs with Jody Nix, Curley Chalker, Mack Sanders, Johnny Bush, Willie Nelson, Tex Williams, and Billy Mize.

Tommy, who had few regrets, once said: “I never really wanted to be a big star, I figured I’d leave that to someone else.” In 1979, he started a club, “Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon”, in Fort Worth, Texas. The club was named for Allsup’s coin toss with Valens 20 years beforehand.

The last surviving member of Buddy Holly’s “touring” Crickets for the 1959 Winter Dance Party, Tommy Allsup died on January 11, 2017, at 85 years old in a hospital in Springfield, Missouri, after complications from hernia surgery.

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Peter Sarstedt 1/2017

January 8, 2017 – Peter Eardley Sarstedt was born on Dec 10, 1941 in Delhi, India where his parents Albert and Coral Sarstedt, worked in the British civil service as India was still a British possession in 1942.

The following year, his parents moved the family to Kurseong near Darjeeling, in the shadow of Mt. Everest, where Albert took over the management of a tea plantation. Peter Sarstedt was one of six children and, like his siblings, was educated at boarding schools favored by the British living in India for much of his childhood. From the time he was five years old, the family relocated to Calcutta, and later — amid the turmoil and uncertainty following independence in 1947 — the family finally moved to England in 1954. Albert Sarstedt had passed away during the extended preparation for the relocation, and it was a truly new existence that they began in South London that year. Continue reading Peter Sarstedt 1/2017

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Johnny Dick 1/2017

drummer for Billy ThorpeJanuary 6, 2017 – Johnny Dick. (played with numerous Australian rock bands). Johnny Dick was actually born in June 1943 in Wales in the town of Llanfairfechan, but as stated repeatedly, before he grew old enough to be able to pronounce the town’s name, his parents moved to New Zealand.  

Drumming since the age of 12 Johnny Dick has played with the cream of Aussie music. In New Zealand Johnny met Max Merritt. He first came to Australia as a member of Max Merritt’s band. Billy Thorpe saw Johnny performing with Merritt and offered him a gig in The Aztecs, which he took and played drums with Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs for almost 2 years. Continue reading Johnny Dick 1/2017

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Sylvester Potts 1/2017

sylvester potts of the ContoursJanuary 6, 2017 – Sylvester Potts (the Contours) was born on January 22, 1938 in Detroit and attended North Eastern High, the same school where Martha Reeves, Mary Wilson, and Bobby Rogers were educated at.

His love of music and the excitement he got from performing, made him once say he wanted to die on stage. In the fall of 1960, a Detroit group called The Contours (consisting of Joe Billingslea, Billy Gordon, Billy Hoggs, Leroy Fair and Hubert Johnson) auditioned for Berry Gordy’s Motown Records. Gordy turned the act down, prompting the group to pay a visit to the home of group member Hubert Johnson’s cousin, R&B star and Gordy associate Jackie Wilson. Wilson in turn got The Contours a second audition with Gordy, at which they sang the same songs they had at the first audition, the same way they claim, but this time were signed to a seven-year contract. Continue reading Sylvester Potts 1/2017

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George Michael 12/2016

December 25, 2016 – George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in Finchley, North London, England on June 25, 1963. His father, was a Greek Cypriot restaurateur, who moved to England in the 1950s and his  mother, was a dancer. Michael spent the majority of his childhood in Kingsbury, London, in the home his parents bought soon after his birth.

While he was in his early teens, the family moved to Radlett, Hertfordshire where he attended Bushey Meads School in the neighbouring town of Bushey, and where he also befriended his future Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley. Continue reading George Michael 12/2016

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Leonard Cohen 11/2016

leonard-cohen-marianne-ihlenNovember 7, 2016 – Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on September 21, 1934 and raised in the English-speaking Westmount area. His father, who had a clothing store passed away when Leonard was 9.

In high school he was involved with the student council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, after whom he named his daughter (Lorca) with artist/photographer Suzanne Elrod.

Even though poetry and writing were his first interests, he learned to play the guitar as a teenager and formed a country–folk group called The Buckskin Boys. Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him “a few chords and some flamenco.” Continue reading Leonard Cohen 11/2016

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Toots Thielemans 8/2016

Jean-Baptiste “Toots” Thielemans was born April 29, 1922, in the still-gritty, working-class Brussels neighborhood known as the Marolles. His parents ran a cafe on the same street where painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder lived in the 16th century.

Self-taught on accordion as a child, Thielemans bought his first harmonica while he was a teenager in Brussels after watching an American movie in which a prisoner was playing the harmonica while awaiting the electric chair. “That’s nice,” he remembered thinking, according to a 2011 interview with a Smithsonian jazz project. “I’m going to buy one.”

A guitar, he told the jazz magazine DownBeat, was acquired by chance when he was 21, during the German occupation of Belgium. Thielemans was home in bed with a lung infection, and a musician friend stopped by with a black-market guitar, expressing frustration with his inability to perfect a certain jazz lick.

“We were listening to Fats Waller records like ‘Hold Tight’ — there’s the quintessence of the jazz scale and everything you need in the blues in that song,” he explained. “I knew the song, but I’d never touched a guitar. I said that if he’d give me five minutes, I’d play ‘Hold Tight’ on one string. I played it, and he gave me the guitar.”

Thielemans had been enrolled as a math major at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, but playing music became increasingly important, and he never graduated.

When the war ended, Thielemans played jazz at the many officer’s clubs that sprung up in Belgium after the liberation. Records called “V” or “Victory” discs were widely available as well, and Thielemans was able to listen to recordings by American jazz stars such as Louis Armstrong and Art Tatum.

Thielemans also started studying the work of bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker, and took his nickname, according to one version of the story, from sax player Toots Mondello and trumpeter Toots Camarata. “Toots,” he liked to quip, “sounds a lot more hip than Jean-Baptiste.”

In 1947, when he was 25 years old, Thielemans went to visit his uncle in Miami, and at a jam session there, met Bill Gottlieb, whose seminal jazz photos of the 1940s put him on a first-name basis with the music world’s biggest stars.

When Thielemans arrived in New York, Gottlieb took him to a nightclub on 52nd Street and introduced him to the members of a group fronted by Howard McGhee, a trumpeter and composer who was at the forefront of modern jazz. By then, he had already played with Parker at a Paris jazz festival in 1949 and also jammed with him in Sweden.

As Thielemans recalled in a 2006 DownBeat magazine interview, he took out his harmonica and began playing. “In those days, the big identity, the key to the bebop door, was the third and the fourth bar of ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ ” he said. “I played it and the whole band fell on the floor. I was in after two measures.”

From there, Toots became a member of the Shearing Quintet — “the only permanent job I ever had” — he has said, before embarking on a successful freelance career as a guitarist, and, increasingly, a chromatic harmonica player.

In addition to his ample studio session work, he also recorded or toured with Quincy Jones, Dinah Washington, Paul Simon and a bevy of other singers and musicians. Furthermore, the lyrics of Mr. Thielemans’s composition “Bluesette” were penned by “Girl From Ipanema” lyricist Norman Gimbel, and it was recorded to great acclaim by Sarah Vaughan in 1964.

Thielemans became a US citizen in 1957, which, at the time, meant the mandatory loss of his Belgian citizenship. But it was regained in 2001, when Belgian King Albert II named the musician “Baron for Life”.

Thielemans’s first wife, Netty de Greef, died of cancer in 1977. A few years later, he married Huguette Tuytschaever, a Belgian artist.

Toots Thielemans made his final recording in 2012 during his 90th birthday tour and gave his last performance in 2014, when he played at the Jazz Middelheim festival in Antwerp, Belgium.

“It’s hard, it’s almost a crazy instrument to want to play,” Thielemans once told an interviewer about the chromatic harmonica. Preeminently a jazz musician who left his mark on many a rock song; it was the notes, not the instrument, that counted — his harmonica, he liked to say, “could be a broomstick or a tuba.”

Unlike the smaller, diatonic harmonica favored by blues musicians, Thielemans performed on the slightly larger chromatic harmonica, which has a spring-loaded slide that allows the performer to play every note in every key — sharps and flats included — on a three-octave scale.

His sound was at once wistful and wiry, full of complicated runs and languid tones. It was a sound, he often said, that was “in that little space between a smile and a tear.”

Jean-Baptiste “Toots” Thielemans, whose unrivaled mastery of the harmonica led to collaborations with jazz luminaries such as pianist Oscar Peterson and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and whose mellifluous sound graced soundtracks as varied as “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) and the television show “Sesame Street,”

Thielemans was also an accomplished guitarist and a first-rate jazz whistler — he often played his most famous composition, “Bluesette,” on the guitar while whistling the melody one octave higher. John Lennon reportedly switched to a solid-body Rickenbacker 325 guitar after seeing Thielemans play the instrument during a tour of Germany with the George Shearing Quintet, then one of the hottest jazz groups in the United States, with which he played from 1952 to 1959.

Yet it was Thielemans’s inimitable technique and distinctive sound on the chromatic harmonica, an instrument that he single-handedly proved could hold its own in the jazz repertory, for which he will be remembered.

“He has a level of virtuosity that you don’t have to make excuses for, you don’t have to put an asterisk on Toots. . . . You don’t have to say, ‘He’s great — for a harmonica player,’ ” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, who spoke as part of a 2006 New York University jazz master class with Thielemans. “He can sit up there with Dizzy and doesn’t have to take an apology because of the instrument. That’s the genius of the whole thing.”-

Indeed, it was Thielemans’s then-novel arrangement of “Stardust,” the 1927 jazz standard by Hoagy Carmichael, cut on an acetate disc in a garage studio in his home town of Brussels, that caught the attention of American bandleader Benny Goodman. Thielemans played guitar in Goodman’s sextet for a European tour in 1950, but he also persuaded the leader to allow him at least one number on harmonica each night. Not long after, he settled permanently in the United States.

Although Thielemans never shied away from commercial work — for TV, film and commercials, such as his whistling jingle in televised Old Spice deodorant ads — he was revered by many musicians for his unerring sense of harmony and his quicksilver runs, cementing his jazz harmonica reputation with a 1979 duo album, “Affinity,” with pianist Bill Evans.

Two years later, after having a stroke just shy of his 60th birthday, Mr. Thielemans lost most of the strength in his left hand, which cut his guitar playing down to just one or two numbers per show but also brought a new profundity to his phrasing.
“I can’t play bebop now,” he later told Dutch journalist René Steenhorst. But, he added, “All those fast notes didn’t make me that popular anyway. It’s much better now. I actually play the main line of a tune now. I say more with less.”

Toots Thieleman’s story here on earth ended on 22 August 2016 at the age of 94.

Besides being a one of a kind musician, Thielemans was well liked for his modesty and kind demeanor in his native Belgium, and was known for describing himself as a Brussels “ket”, which means “street kid” in old Brussels slang.

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Scotty Moore 6/2016

scotty-mooreJune 28, 2016 – Winfield Scott “Scotty” Moore III, (Elvis Presley) was born on December 27, 1931 near Gadsden, Tennessee. He learned to play the guitar from family and friends at eight years of age. Although underage when he enlisted, Moore served in the United States Navy between 1948 and 1952. Moore’s early background was in jazz and country music. A fan of guitarist Chet Atkins, Moore led a group called the “Starlite Wranglers” before Sam Phillips at Sun Records put him together with then teenage Elvis Presley. The trio was completed with bass player Bill Black, who brought a “rhythmic propulsion” that much pleased Phillips.

In 1954 Moore and Black accompanied Elvis on what would become the first legendary Presley hit, the Sun Studios session cut of “That’s All Right”, a recording regarded as a seminal event in rock and roll history. Continue reading Scotty Moore 6/2016

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Henry McCullough 6/2016

Henry McCulloughJune 14, 2016 – Henry Campbell Liken McCullough (Wings) was born in Northern Ireland on 21 July 1943. He first came to prominence as a guitar player of talent in the early 1960s as the teenage lead guitarist with The Skyrockets showband from Enniskillen. In 1964, with three other members of The Skyrockets, he left and formed a new showband fronted by South African born vocalist Gene Chetty, which they named Gene and The Gents.

In 1967 McCullough moved to Belfast where he joined Chris Stewart (bass), Ernie Graham (vocals) and Dave Lutton (drums) to form the psychedelic band The People. Later that year the band moved to London and were signed by Chas Chandler’s management team, who changed the group’s name to Éire Apparent. Under Chandler’s guidance after a single release they toured with groups such as Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Move and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, as well as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Continue reading Henry McCullough 6/2016

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Dan Hicks – 2/2016

Dan Hicks (Hot Licks) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on December 9, 1941, the only child of Ivan L. Hicks (a career United States Army and United States Air Force non-commissioned officer) and the former Evelyn Kehl. At age five, Hicks moved with his family to California. Following brief stints in Lomita, Cambria, and Vallejo, the family settled in Santa Rosa, the largest city in the North Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was a drummer in grade school and played the snare drum in his school marching band.

At 14, he was performing with area dance bands. While in high school, he had a rotating spot on Time Out for Teens, a daily 15-minute local radio program. After receiving an A.A. in general education from Santa Rosa Junior College, he went on to earn a B.A. in broadcasting from San Francisco State College in 1965. Taking up the guitar in 1959, he became part of the American folk music revival scene during his undergraduate studies, often dropping out intermittently to perform at venues across the United States. Strongly influenced by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, he would cultivate friendships with several of the group’s members (most notably Maria Muldaur) later in life.

Although he maintained an equivocal stance toward rock music (lauding the early recordings of Elvis Presley and The Byrds while retrospectively maintaining that “rock has never really been my thing”), Hicks joined seminal San Francisco psychedelic rock band The Charlatans on drums in 1965.

In this capacity, he participated in the group’s celebrated summer 1965 engagement at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. After the band failed to secure a long-term recording contract, he switched to rhythm guitar in 1967 and briefly performed his original material as the group’s frontman before leaving in 1968.

When Hicks reformed the band circa 1972, Page and Leopold remained, and vocalists Naomi Ruth Eisenberg and Maryann Price joined, followed later by guitarist John Girton. This group recorded three albums, culminating in 1973’s Last Train to Hicksville on which the group first added a sparingly used drummer, Bob Scott. Last Train to Hicksville was so good that Rolling Stone magazine put Hicks’ mustachioed mug on its highly coveted cover.

Though he disbanded the Hot Licks in 1974 at the peak of its popularity. Of this move, Hicks said, “I didn’t want to be a bandleader anymore. It was a load and a load I didn’t want. I’m basically a loner.”

For the next fifteen years, Hicks chose a lower profile, playing solo acoustic shows; writing commercial jingles for products such as Levi’s, Bic Lighters, and Ball Park Franks; and composing scores for films and television programs—most notably the score for the animated Ralph Bakshi film Hey Good Lookin’ (1982). Hicks’s songs were featured in the popular television shows The Sopranos and The Osbournes,and Hicks appeared in the Gene Hackman legal drama Class Action(1991), performing two songs in the film. During this period, Hicks was involved in only musical two projects that resulted in commercially released music; both were relatively obscure and remain somewhat rare.

In 1998, Hicks poised himself for a return to the mainstream when he signed a deal with Surfdog Records. This resulted in Beatin’ the Heat (2000), which became his first release with the newly re-formed Hot Licks since 1973. After that, he released a number of studio albums and collaborated with artists such as Jim Keltner, Gibby Haynes, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, Van Dyke Parks, Willie Nelson, and Jimmy Buffett. Hicks’s music is featured regularly on the Buffett-affiliated Sirius/XM satellite radio station Radio Margaritaville. In 2009, Hicks released Tangled Tales, his fifth album with Surfdog Records. Hicks and his band also released a Christmas album in 2010.

On tour in 2007, Dan Hicks’ Hot Licks included Paul Smith, Dave Bell, Richard Chon, and the two “Lickettes,” Roberta Donnay and the mono-monikered Daria. The combo paid homage to jazz greats such as Django Reinhardt with “Topsy” and Fats Waller with “Honeysuckle Rose.” Hicks sang Tom Waits’ infamous anthem to alcohol, “The Piano Has Been Drinking,” while the ladies were featured on “I’m an Old Cowhand,” a big hit for Bing Crosby back in 1936.

“My music is kind of a blending,” Hicks told a Colorado concert audience that year. “We have acoustic instruments. It starts out with kind of a folk music sound, and we add a jazz beat and solos and singing. We have the two girls that sing, and jazz violin, and all that, so it’s kind of light in nature. It’s not loud, and it’s sort of, in a way, kinda carefree. Most of the songs are, I wouldn’t say funny, but kinda maybe a little humorous. We all like jazz, so we like to play in a jazzy way, with a swing sound you know, so I call it ‘folk swing.’ There are a lot of original tunes that I’ve been writing through the years, so that has its personal touch on it.”

Discs released in 2009 and 2013 show Hicks still dabbling in early jazz and swing. The CD Tangled Tales has Hicks crooning “The Blues My Naughty Baby Gave to Me” from 1919 and “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” from 1912. On 2013’s Live at Davies, Hicks handled “Hummin’ to Myself” by the Washboard Rhythm Kings and Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” “Dan was one of contemporary music’s true innovators,” said Patricia Lockwood-Blais, poet, novelist, and essayist, who booked him in 2007 to play the Earlville Opera House in Upstate New York. “And his wit was irresistible.” In fact, humor has always been an important part of the Hot Licks’ act.

Dan Hicks died Feb. 6, 2016 at his home in Mill Valley, Ca, after a lengthy bout with throat and liver cancer. He was 74.

In a report on his death, the New York Times called Hicks “defiantly unfashionable, proudly eccentric and foot-tappingly catchy.”

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Paul Kantner 1/2016

Paul Kantner during Paul Kantner in Concert at Wetlands - 1992 at Wetlands in New York City, New York, United States. (Photo by Steve Eichner/WireImage)

January 28, 2016 – Paul Kantner (Jefferson Airplane founding guitarist) was born on March 17, 1941, in San Francisco, California. Kantner had a half-brother and a half-sister by his father’s first marriage, both much older than he. His father was of German descent, and his mother was of French and German ancestry. His mother died when he was eight years old, and Kantner remembered that he was not allowed to attend her funeral. His father sent him to the circus instead. After his mother’s death, his father, who was a traveling salesman, sent young Kantner to Catholic military boarding school. At age eight or nine, in the school’s library, he read his first science fiction book, finding an escape by immersing himself in science fiction and music from then on. As a teenager he went into total revolt against all forms of authority, and he decided to become a protest folk singer in the manner of his musical hero, Pete Seeger. He attended Saint Mary’s College High School, Santa Clara University and San Jose State College, completing a total of three years of college before he dropped out to enter the music scene.

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Glenn Frey 1/2016

glenn FreyJanuary 18, 2016 – Glenn Frey was born on Nov. 6, 1948 in Detroit and was raised in nearby Royal Oak. He grew up on both the Motown sounds and harder-edged rock of his hometown. He played in a succession of local bands in the city and first connected with Bob Seger when Frey’s band, the Mushrooms, convinced Seger to write a song for them. Frey can also be heard singing extremely loud backing vocals (particularly on the first chorus) on Seger’s first hit and Frey’s first recorded appearance, 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.”

But it wasn’t long before warmer climes called and Frey followed then-girlfriend Joan Silwin to Los Angeles. Her sister Alexandra was a member of Honey Ltd., a girl group associated with Nancy Sinatra producer Lee Hazelwood, and she introduced Frey to her friend John David Souther.

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David Bowie 1/2016

db-transformation-colour2016 – David Bowie was born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947 in South London, England. Bowie developed an early interest in music although his attempts to succeed as a pop star during much of the 1960s were frustrated. Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity”, reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969.

After a three-year period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single “Starman” and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, “challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day” and “created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture”. The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved to be one facet of a career marked by reinvention, musical innovation and visual presentation. Continue reading David Bowie 1/2016

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BB King 5/2015

BB King with Paul ButterfieldMay 14, 2015 – Riley BB King was born on September 16, 1925. Little new can be said about BB King, who passed away in his sleep at age 89 on May 14, 2015 at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was the King of the iconic living bluesmen of all time, the legendary BB King.

A Kennedy Center honoree, a 15-time Grammy winner and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has a museum bearing his name and landed the number six spot on Rolling Stone’s list of “100 Greatest Guitarists.”

He was born in Indianola, Mississippi and acquired the moniker BB King from his Memphis Days when he gained guitar wizardry as Beale Street Blues Boy. Continue reading BB King 5/2015

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Lesley Sue Gore 2/2015

Lesley GoreFebruary 16, 2015 – Lesley Sue Gore was born Lesley Sue Goldstein on May 2, 1946 in Brooklyn, New York City into a middle-class Jewish family, the daughter of Leo and Ronny Gore.

Her father was the owner of Peter Pan, a children’s swimwear and underwear manufacturer and later became a leading brand licensing agent in the apparel industry. She was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, a little distance from the George Washington Bridge and was a junior at the Dwight School for Girls in nearby Englewood when “It’s My Party” became a number one hit. The song was eventually nominated for a Grammy Award for rock and roll recording. It sold over one million copies and was certified as a gold record.

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Sam Andrew III 2/2015

Sam-AndrewFebruary 12, 2015 – Sam Andrew III was born in Taft, California on December 18, 1941, but having a military father he moved a great deal as a child. His early musical influences were Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard and by the time he was seventeen living in Okinawa, he already had his own band, called the “Cool Notes”, and his own weekly TV show, an Okinawan version of American Bandstand.  He also listened to a great deal of Delta blues. His brother Leland Andrew frequently stated his brother was the “Benny Goodman of Japan”.

He attended the University of San Francisco, and became involved with the San Francisco folk music scene of the early 1960s. However it was not until he returned from over a year in Paris and almost a year in Germany, that he met Peter Albin at 1090 Page Street. After playing together at Albin’s home, Sam suggested they form a band. They found guitarist James Gurley and drummer Chuck Jones, and Big Brother and the Holding Company was formed ready for their first gig, at the Trips Festival in January 1966. Soon after painter and jazz drummer David Getz, replaced Jones. As Big Brother and the Holding Company began to gel, Andrew brought many songs into the band. Continue reading Sam Andrew III 2/2015

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Rod McKuen 1/2015

Rod McKuenJanuary 29, 2015 – Rod McKuen was born on April 29th, 1933 in Oakland, CA. He ran away from home at the age of 11 and drifted along the West Coast, supporting himself as a ranch hand, surveyor, railroad worker, rodeo cowboy, lumberjack, stuntman and radio disk jockey.

He went on to become one of the best-selling poets in the USA during the late 60s and throughout his career. He produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks and classical music. His songs include “Jean”, “Seasons in the Sun”, “The Loner”, and “I Think of You”.

He earned two Academy Award nominations and one Pulitzer nomination for his music compositions. In the early 1960s, he moved to France, where he first met the Belgian singer-songwriter and chanson singer Jacques Brel. He was instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world.

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Jack Bruce 10/2014

Jack-Bruce-500October 25, 2014 – Jack Bruce, probably best known as songwriter/singer and bass player for 1960s Super Group Cream, was born in Glasgow/Scotland on May 14, 1943.

His parents travelled extensively in Canada and the U.S.A. and Jack attended 14 different schools, finishing his formal education at Bellahouston Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, to which he won a scholarship for cello and composition. He left the Academy and his homeland at the age of 16, because of poverty and discouraged by his professors’ lack of interest in his ideas.

Jack travelled to Italy and then England, playing double-bass in dance bands and jazz groups, and joined his first important band in 1962 in London. This was Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc. with whom Charlie Watts, later to join the Rolling Stones, was their drummer. Jack left Alexis in 1963 to form a group with organist Graham Bond, guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Ginger Baker. This group became the seminal Graham Bond Organisation after McLaughlin left, and saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith joined. Jack was compelled by Ginger Baker to leave this band after three years, because his playing was “too busy”!

Jack turned down Marvin Gaye’s offer to join his U.S.-based band because of his impending first marriage. He then joined John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, where he first met Eric Clapton, followed by Manfred Mann in an ill-advised attempt at commercialism. It was Ginger Baker who initially asked Jack to form a trio with Eric Clapton. Eric insisted that Jack would be the singer.

Cream went on to sell 35 million albums in just over two years and was awarded the first ever platinum disc for Wheels of Fire. Jack wrote and sang most of the songs, including “I Feel Free”, “White Room”, “Politician” and perhaps the world’s most performed guitar riff, in “Sunshine Of Your Love”. Cream split in November 1968 at the height of their popularity; Jack felt that he had strayed too far from his ideals and wanted to re-discover his musical and social roots.  Continue reading Jack Bruce 10/2014

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Robert Throb Young 9/2014

September 9, 2014 – Robert ‘Throb’ Young (Primal Scream) was born in Glasgow, Scotland on November 19, 1964. Young met Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie when they were both studying at Kings Park Secondary School in Glasgow, and he joined the band in 1984.

Known as Throb to his bandmates and fans, this Scottish rock bassist and guitarist was most commonly known for performing both roles with the Glasgow-formed, Mercury Music Prize winning Primal Scream. A core member throughout their lengthy career, he joined when they were still unknowns in 1984 and departed for health reasons, after a lengthy and successful international career with the group in 2006.

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Dick Wagner 7/2014

July 30, 2014 – Dick Wagner was born on December 14th 1942 in Oelwein, Iowa, but grew up in Saginaw, Michigan area and graduated from Waterford Township high school in 1961. His first band, called the Bossmen, was a favourite in the Detroit area and scored radio play with the Wagner-penned composition “Baby Boy”, “You’re the Girl for Me” and others.

Wagner formed his next band, the Frost, with Donny Hartman, Bobby Rigg and Gordy Garris, in the late 1960s and built up a substantial following in the Michigan area. The band featured the dual lead guitars of Wagner and Hartman. The band released three albums during their tenure together on Vanguard Records: 1969’s Frost Music and Rock and Roll Music, plus 1970’s Through the Eyes of Love. Wagner was the principal songwriter, arranger and lead singer of The Frost. Their live appearances brought out large crowds of young fans throughout the region.

In the late 60s he formed his second band The Frost, it was in these days he penned one of the best-known songs “Only Women Bleed”. Continue reading Dick Wagner 7/2014

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Johnny Winter 7/2014

July 16, 2014 – Legendary blues musician Johnny Winter died in his hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland, on July 16th, 2014 at age 70. There are plenty of reasons why that’s notable — Winter was one of the first blues rock guitar virtuosos, releasing a string of popular and fiery albums in the late Sixties and early Seventies, becoming an arena-level concert draw in the process — but it’s the barest facts that remain the most inspiring.

Johnny Dawson Winter, who was born on February  23rd, 1944 in little Beaumont, Texas, afflicted with albinism and 20/400 eyesight in one eye and 20/600 in the other, made an iconic life for himself by playing the blues.

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Shane Gibson 4/2014

shane gibsonApril 15, 2014 – Shane Paul Gibson was born February 21, 1979 in Houma, Louisiana. He graduated in 2002 from the Berklee College of Music, moving then to Los Angeles, where he first worked as a roadie for Kiss and later on TV spots and music for movies, before becoming the touring lead guitarist for the rock band Korn, after the departure of Brian “Head” Welch in February 2005. He also played the lead guitar for the solo tour of Jonathan Davis from Korn.

He was than hired on and joined forces in a project group called, Mr Creepy. The band was formed by Arthur Gonzales who also brought in (studio musicain) Michael G Clark, award winning bassist/vocalist, Jasmine Cain, and ex-Black Label Society drummer, Mike Froedge. Continue reading Shane Gibson 4/2014

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Paco de Lucia 2/2014

Paco de LucíaFeb 25, 2014- Paco de Lucia was born Francisco Gustavo Sánchez Gomes on December 21, 1947 in Algeciras, Southern Spain. He was the youngest of the five children of flamenco guitarist Antonio Sánchez Pecino and Portuguese mother Lúcia Gomes; his brothers include flamenco singer Pepe de Lucía and flamenco guitarist Ramón de Algeciras (deceased).

Playing in the streets as a young boy, there were many Pacos and Pablos in Algeciras, and as he wanted to honor his Portuguese mother Lucia Gomes, he adopted the stage name Paco de Lucía. In 1958, at age 11, Paco made his first public appearance on Radio Algeciras.

His father Antonio received guitar lessons from the hand of a cousin of Melchor de Marchena: Manuel Fernández (aka Titi de Marchena), a guitarist who arrived in Algeciras in the 1920s and established a school there. Antonio introduced Paco to the guitar at a young age and was extremely strict in his upbringing from the age of 5, forcing him to practice up to 12 hours a day, every day, to ensure that he could find success as a professional musician. Continue reading Paco de Lucia 2/2014

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Pete Seeger 1/2014

Pete-Seeger January 27, 2014 – Pete Seeger was born May 3, 1917 born in Midtown Manhattan, New York. Seeger was born into a traditionally pacifistic and highly musical family, which was typically for the era politically translated into communist tendencies. His dad Charles Seeger was hired to establish the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, but was forced to resign in 1918 because of his outspoken pacifism during World War I. His parents divorced when he was seven.
He began playing the ukulele while attending Avon Old Farms, a private boarding school in Connecticut. His father and his stepmother, the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, collected and transcribed rural American folk music, as did folklorists like John and Alan Lomax.

He heard the five-string banjo, which would become his main instrument, when his father took him to a square-dance festival in North Carolina.
Young Pete became enthralled by rural traditions. “I liked the strident vocal tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing,” he is quoted as saying in “How Can I Keep From Singing,” a biography by David Dunaway. “The words of the songs had all the meat of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.” Continue reading Pete Seeger 1/2014

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Fingers Lee 1/2014

Freddie Fingers LEEJan. 13, 2014 – Freddie Fingers Lee was born Frederick John Cheesman in Chopwell, Durham, England in 1937. As a child an accident with a dart led to the loss of his right eye. Throughout his life he made light of his disability and refused to let it be a handicap. Though hardly a household name, Lee was a wild and notorious presence on the UK rock and roll scene from the early ’60s up to his death. Born in 1937, he lost his right eye at the age of three after an accident with a stray dart thrown by his father. According to the North Hampton Chronicle, Lee’s daughter remembers her father occasionally dropping his glass eye in people’s drinks while they weren’t looking. “He was the most unconventional dad ever, but I wouldn’t of had it any other way.”

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Pete Haycock 10/2013

pete-haycock-58October 30, 2013 – Pete Haycock was born on March 4, 1951 in Stafford, England. He attended St.John’s Primary School, then King Edward VI Boys Grammar School and played his first gig at a miners club at the age of 12.

In 1968 at 17, as lead guitarist, vocalist he founded the Climax Chicago Blues Band along with Richard Jones on bass, guitarist-vocalist Derek Holt, keyboardist Arthur Wood, George Newsome on drums and harmonica player- vocalist Colin Cooper. Two years later they changed their name to the Climax Blues Band in 1970. Continue reading Pete Haycock 10/2013

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Lou Reed 10/2013

lou-reed300October 27, 2013 –  Lou Reed was born Lewis Allan Reed into a Jewish family in Brooklyn , New York.

Although he acknowledged that he was Jewish, he always added, “My God is rock’n’roll. It’s an obscure power that can change your life. The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.”
Reed attended Atkinson Elementary School in Freeport on Long Island and went on to Freeport Junior High School, notorious for its gangs. As a teenager, he suffered panic attacks, became socially awkward and “possessed a fragile temperament” but was highly focused on things that he liked – principally music.

Reed resumed his education at Syracuse University in 1960, studying journalism, film directing, and creative writing. He was a platoon leader in ROTC and was later expelled from the program for holding an unloaded gun to his superior’s head. In 1961, he began hosting a late-night radio program on WAER called Excursions On A Wobbly Rail. Named after a song by pianist Cecil Taylor, the program typically featured doo wop, rhythm and blues, and jazz, particularly the free jazz developed in the mid-1950s. Continue reading Lou Reed 10/2013

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Joey Covington 6/2013

joey-covingtonJune 4, 2013 – Joey Covington (Hot Tuna) was born Joseph Edward Michno on June 27, 1945 in East Conemaugh, Pennsylvania. He became a professional drummer as a young teenager, taking gigs in, among other things, polka bands and strip clubs in his hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A colorful character, on his website he listed among his fondest early memories “Getting to New York City on a Greyhound bus with a suitcase, a set of drums, and a hundred dollars in my pocket.

He built a long storied career starting at age 10 as a self-taught drummer/percussionist, along with becoming an award-winning songwriter and ultimately recording on over 22 albums, of which 16 went gold and platinum.

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Piano C Red 6/2013

Piano C RedJune 3, 2013 – Piano C Red was born Cecil Fain in Montevallo, Ala. in 1933.

His mother sang spirituals and his father made moonshine, both endeavors playing a role in his musical career. He told the Chicago Tribune’s Mary Schmich in 2006 that he traded pints of his father’s moonshine for piano lessons from the local boogie-woogie player, Fat Lily.

By age 16 he was playing in Atlanta, Georgia as James Wheeler and later took his stage name from his instrument, the red piano, and the trademark red outfits he wore onstage.

Relocating to Chicago when he was 19 he performed with the likes of Muddy Waters, B.B King, Fats Domino and Buddy Guy, before becoming a cab driver to make the money necessary to pay the bills.

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Trevor Bolder 5/2013

trevor-bolderMay 21, 2013 – Trevor Bolder (Uriah Heep) was born on 9 June 1950 in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire, England. His father was a trumpet player and other members of his family were also musicians. He played cornet in the school band and was active in his local R&B scene in the mid 1960s. Inspired by The Beatles, in 1964 he formed his first band with his brother while taking up the bass guitar.

In his teens he took the direction followed by many other young males of his generation and switched to the guitar, at which time he formed The Chicago Star Blues Band with his brother. Stints in other Hull-based bands like Jelly Roll and Flesh came later, with Bolder eventually trading in his guitar for an electric bass; meanwhile, food was kept on the table through a series of day jobs that ranged from hairdresser to piano tuner. He first came to local prominence in The Rats, which also featured fellow Hull musician Mick Ronson on lead guitar.

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Marshall Lytle 5/2013

marshall-lytleMay 25, 2013 – Marshall Lytle (Bill Haley & His Comets) was born on September 1st 1933 in Old Fort, North Carolina. He was a guitar player before joining Bill Haley’s country music group, The Saddlemen, in 1951, but was hired to play double bass for the group, so Haley taught Marshall the basics of slap bass playing.

In September 1952, they changed their name to Bill Haley & His Comets. Soon after, he co-wrote with Haley the band’s first national hit, “Crazy Man, Crazy” although he did not receive co-authorship credit for it until 2002.

He played on all of Haley’s recordings between 1951 and the summer of 1955, including “Rock Around the Clock”. In September 1955, he, along with drummer Dick Richards and saxophone player Joey Ambrose, quit The Comets in a salary dispute and formed their own musical group, The Jodimars. They became one of the first rock ‘n’ roll groups to take up residence in Las Vegas.

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Jeff Hanneman 5/2013

Jeff HannemanMay 2, 2013 – Jeffrey John “Jeff” Hanneman was born on January 31, 1964 in Oakland CA, but grew up further south in Long Beach. He is best known as a founding member of the American thrash metal band Slayer.

The story goes that in 1981 he approached Kerry King, when King was auditioning for a southern rock band “Ledger”. After the try-out session, the two guitarists started talking and playing Iron Maiden and Judas Priest songs and decided to form their own band, and Slayer was born.

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Bob Brozman 4/2013

Guitarist Bob BrozmanApril 23, 2013 – Robert Charles “Bob” Brozman was born to a Jewish family living on Long Island, New York, United States. He began playing the guitar when he was 6.

He performed in a number of styles, including gypsy jazz, calypso, blues, ragtime, Hawaiian music, and Caribbean music. He also collaborated with musicians from diverse cultural backgrounds, from India, Africa, Japan, Papua New Guinea and Réunion. He has been called “an instrumental wizard” and “a walking archive of 20th Century American music”. Brozman maintained a steady schedule throughout the year, touring constantly throughout North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. He recorded numerous albums and has won the Guitar Player Readers’ Poll three times in the categories Best Blues, Best World and Best Slide Guitarist. In 1999, Brozman and Woody Mann founded International Guitar Seminars, which hosts over 120 students annually at sites in California, New York, and Canada. From 2000 to 2005 his collaborations landed in the European Top 10 for World Music five times. Continue reading Bob Brozman 4/2013

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Richie Havens 4/2013

Richie HavensApril 22, 2013 – Richard Pierce Havens (January 21, 1941 – April 22, 2013), known as Richie Havens, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. His music encompassed elements of folk, soul, and rhythm and blues. He is best known for his intense and rhythmic guitar style (often in open tunings), soulful covers of pop and folk songs, and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock. Richie Havens sang every song he knew when he was called in to open legendary Woodstock Festival in August 1969.

The Brooklyn born 6’6″ tall singer came out of a mixture of folk, blues, gospel and soul that he fine tuned during the sixties in New York’s Greenwich Village. A local celebrity he was originally scheduled as the fifth performer for the festival, but long artist travel delays forced him to play for 3 hours on end. Previously only regionally known, he came upon the world stage when he ran out of tunes and improvised his performance of ‘Freedom’ based on and incorporated into the spiritual ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child‘, made famous by Nina Simone.

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George Jackson 4/2013

george jacksonApril 14, 2013 – George Jackson was born on March 12th 1945 in Indianola, Mississippi and moved with his family to Greenville at the age of five. He sang southern soul from the 1960s into the 1980s. As a writer, he provided scores of songs for Goldwax and Fame in the 1960s and Hi and Sounds Of Memphis in the 1970s. As a singer, he had a versatile tenor that was influenced by Sam Cooke, and released many records over the years, for a host of different labels, but his recordings never made him a star.

His songwriter relationship with Malaco Records, however saw him pen material for dozens of artists, such as “One Bad Apple” for the Osmonds, “Old Time Rock & Roll” for Bob Seeger and “The Only Way Is Up”, which became a UK No.1 for Yazz and Coldcut, having been written originally for Otis Clay.

Jackson recorded dozens of singles in the 1960s but made his mark as a writer, beginning with FAME Studios. He later was a songwriter for Muscle Shoals Sound Studios. When Malaco bought Muscle Shoals Sound, they hired Jackson to write songs.

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Chi Cheng 4/2013

chi chengApril 13, 2013 – Chi Cheng was born on July 15th 1970 in Davis, California, to Jeanne and Yin Yan Cheng. His father, a prominent Stockton cardiologist, was a Chinese immigrant. Cheng graduated from Tokay High School and attended California State University in Sacramento, enrolling in 1989. He worked on campus, wrote poetry, and played as the original full time bassist of the alternative metal band Deftones from Sacramento, founded in 1988.

Deftones released seven albums, with three Platinum: Adrenaline, Around the Fur, and White Pony and one Gold certification for Deftones.

Their many hit singles include “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”, “Change (In the House of Flies)”, “Minerva” and “Hole in the Earth”. Chi was also the author of a collection of poetry titled The Bamboo Parachute released in 2000 as a spoken word album. Cheng gave proceeds from the CD to various charities and to buy musical instruments for kids in the Sacramento area. He was a practicing Buddhist and maintained an interest in Taoism and Shamanism. In addition to his conversion to Buddhism during his college years, he also became a vegetarian.

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Don Blackman 4/2013

Don BlackmanApril 11, 2013 – Don Blackman was born on September 1st 1953 in Jamaica, Queens, New York.

A childhood neighbor was Charles McPherson, and while still a teenager (15) he played in McPherson’s ensemble with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes. At the beginning of the 1970s, he played electric piano with Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Roy Ayers, before becoming a member of Lenny White’s group Twennynine, for whom he penned songs such as “Peanut Butter” and “Morning Sunrise”, key pieces in Jamaica Queens’ ’70s’ jazz-funk explosion.

He released his self-titled debut solo album in 1982 on Arista Records, including the songs “Holding You, Loving You”, “Heart’s Desire” and “Since You’ve Been Away So Long” that became minor hits in Europe.

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Derek Watkins 3/2013

Derek WatkinsMarch 22, 2013 – Derek Watkins (Session musician) was born in Reading, Berkshire, England on March 2nd 1945. His horn is heard on the Beatles’ classics ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, and Dizzy Gillespie called him “Mr Lead”.

The Watkins’ family was certainly a musical family, Derek’s great-grandfather, William Watkins was a brass player in Wales with the Salvation Army band, whilst Derek’s grandfather George taught brass at Reading University, and became a founder member and conductor of the Spring Gardens Brass Band in Reading, England, until succeeded by Derek’s father, Ted.
Derek was initially taught to play the cornet by his father at the age of 4, and went on to play that instrument in the brass band, winning several musical awards. He also played with his father’s dance band until he turned a professional trumpet player at the age of 17.

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Daevid Allen 3/2013

Daevid AllenMarch 13, 2015 – Daevid Allen, was born Christopher David Allen on 13 January 1938 in Melbourne, Australia.

In 1960, inspired by the Beat Generation writers he had discovered while working in a Melbourne bookshop, Allen traveled to Paris, where he stayed at the Beat Hotel, moving into a room recently vacated by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. While selling the International Herald Tribune around Le Chat Qui Pêche and the Latin Quarter, he met Terry Riley and also gained free access to the jazz clubs in the area.

In 1961 Allen traveled to England and rented a room at Lydden, near Dover, where he soon began to look for work as a musician. He first replied to a newspaper advertisement for a guitar player to join Dover-based group the Rolling Stones (no connection with the later famous band of that name) who had lost singer/guitarist Neil Landon, but did not join them. After meeting up with William S. Burroughs, and inspired by philosophies of Sun Ra, he formed free jazz outfit the Daevid Allen Trio (‘Daevid’ having been adopted as an affectation of David), which included his landlord’s son, 16-year-old Robert Wyatt. They performed at Burroughs’ theatre pieces based on the novel The Ticket That Exploded.

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Clive Burr 3/2013

Clive BurrMarch 12, 2013 – Clive Burr (Iron Maiden drummer) was born in London on March 8th 1957.

Previously a member of Samson, he joined Iron Maiden in ’79. An acquaintance of then-Iron Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton, he played on their first 3 records: Iron Maiden, Killers and their breakthrough release The Number of the Beast, but left the band in 1982 due to Iron Maiden’s tour schedule and his personal health problems. Clive co-wrote one song on The Number of the Beast, “Gangland”, and another song, “Total Eclipse”, that was cut from the album and showed up as the b-side of the “Run to the Hills” single, and later on the Number Of The Beast remastered CD re-release. He also appeared on “The Number of the Beast” and “Run To The Hills” videos.

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Bobby Smith 3/2013

Bobby SmithMarch 16, 2013 – Bobby Smith was born in Detroit, Michigan on April 10, 1936. He became the principal lead singer of the classic Motown group, The Spinners at the group’s inception in 1954.

The group, first called The Domingoes, was formed at Ferndale High School, where Bobby took over from James Edwards who lasted only 2 weeks. The Spinners also known as the Detroit Spinners or the Motown Spinners, had their first hit, with Bobby singing lead, “That’s What Girls Are Made For” in 1961, (which has been inaccurately credited to the group’s mentor and former Moonglows lead singer, the late Harvey Fuqua).

Over the years, the group earned half a dozen Grammy award nominations and around a dozen gold records including “Truly Yours”, “I’ll Always Love You”,in 1965. “I’ll Be Around”, “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”, “They Just Can’t Stop It the (Games People Play)”. In 1974 they scored their only No.1 hit with “Then Came You”, (sung by Smith, in a collaboration with superstar Dionne Warwick).

Smith sang lead on most of the group’s Motown material during the 1960s, and almost all of the group’s pre-Motown material on Fuqua’s Tri-Phi Records label, and also on The Spinners’ biggest Atlantic Records hits. These included “I’ll Be Around”, “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”, “They Just Can’t Stop It the (Games People Play)”. In 1974, they scored their only #1 Pop hit with “Then Came You”

Despite the fact that Bobby Smith led on many of the group’s biggest hits, many have erroneously credited most of the group’s success to only one of its three lead singers, the late Philippé Wynne. (Henry Fambrough also sang lead on many of the Spinners’ songs.) The confusion between Smith and Wynne may be due to the similarities in their voices, and the fact that they frequently shared lead vocals on many of those hits.

In fact Wynne was many times inaccurately credited for songs that Smith actually sang lead on, such as by the group’s label, Atlantic Records, on their Anthology double album collection (an error corrected in the group’s later triple CD set, The Chrome Collection). Throughout a succession of lead singers (Wynne, John Edwards, G. C. Cameron etc.), Smith’s lead voice had always been The Spinners’ mainstay.

With the March 16, 2013 death of Bobby Smith at age 76, from pneumonia and influenza, as well as fellow Spinners members C. P. Spencer in 2004, Billy Henderson in 2007, and bass singer Pervis Jackson in 2008, Henry Fambrough is now the last remaining original member of the group. Fambrough may still be performing with a current day line-up of the Spinners.

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Alvin Lee 3/2013

Alvin Lee 68March 6, 2013 – Alvin Lee,(Ten Years After) born Graham Anthony Barnes on Dec. 19, 1944, was a truly inspired blues rock guitarist-vocalist, whose performance with Ten Years After during Woodstock 1969, catapulted him into superstardom. The song “I’m Going Home” became legendary and his speed earned him the title “The Fastest Guitarist in the West”. A lifelong search for freedom resulted in more than 20 albums of superb blues rock. Ten Years After would ultimately tour the US twenty-eight times in seven years – more than any other UK band.

He was born in Nottingham and attended the Margaret Glen-Bott School in Wollaton. He began playing guitar at the age of 13 and in 1960, Lee along with Leo Lyons formed the core of the band Ten Years After. Influenced by his parents’ collection of jazz and blues records, it was the advent of rock and roll that sparked his interest.

He began to play professionally in 1962, in a band named the Jaybirds, they began that year to perform in the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany. After a couple of name changes by 1966 they had finally decided on the name Ten Years After.

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Bobby Rogers 3/2013

bobby rogersMarch 3, 2013 – Bobby Rogers (The Miracles) was born on February 19, 1940, on the same day and in the same hospital as his future singing partner Smokey Robinson. While not in the original version of the Miracles that formed in 1955 (then known as the Five Chimes), he joined a year later when another member dropped out.

The group auditioned for Brunswick Records, including label songwriter Barry Gordy, but were rejected. Gordy however soon followed up with them and, in 1958, recorded their first single, Got a Job. The record, released on End, didn’t chart but, at Robinson’s urging, Gordy decided to start his own label, Tamla Records. The Miracles first few singles for Tamla were licensed out to other labels and failed to score. It was in 1960 when the group released Shop Around/Who’s Lovin’ You, that their career took off. The song topped the R&B singles chart for eight weeks and made it to number 2 on the Hot 100.

Two years later, they scored again with You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me (1962/#1 R&B/#8 Pop) that started a long string of hits that would span into the early-70’s, including Mickey’s Monkey, Ooo Baby Baby, The Tracks of My Tears, Going to a Go-Go, I Second That Emotion, Baby Baby Don’t Cry and their only number 1 pop hit, Tears of a Clown.

At the same time, each of the members of the Miracles were also writing songs that were recorded by other members of the Motown roster, including The Way You Do the Things You Do which Rogers and Robinson wrote and was a the first hit for the Temptations.

In 1972, Smokey Robinson left the group and was replaced by Billy Griffin as the lead singer. For many groups, the loss of their most visible member would mean the end, but not the Miracles, who struck out with their new line-up and recasting their sound to the 70’s. In 1974, they hit the R&B top ten with Do It Baby (#4 R&B/#13 Pop) and, a year later, topped the pop charts with Love Machine (Part 1) (1975/#1 Pop/ #5 R&B).

When the group disbanded in the late 1970s, Rogers started an interior design business. But even after their hitmaking days, the Miracles continued to tour and occasionally record with Rogers and Ronnie White as the consistent members. The original lineup reconvened for the Motown 25 television special and, in 1993, a 35th anniversary compilation album once again reignited interest in the group.

In late 2006, Bobby re-united with original Miracles members Smokey Robinson and Pete Moore for the group’s first-ever extended interview on the Motown DVD release, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles: The Definitive Performances.

Rogers continued to perform throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe with members Dave Finley, Tee Turner, and Mark Scott in the current incarnation of The Miracles, which made him, as of 2009, the longest-serving original Miracles member. On March 20, 2009, Bobby was in Hollywood to be honored along with the other surviving original members of the Miracles (Smokey Robinson, Claudette Robinson and Pete Moore) as they received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Also on hand were Gloria White, the wife of original Miracles member Ronnie White who is deceased (White is responsible for discovering Motown artist Stevie Wonder), and Bill Griffin was in attendance. He replaced Smokey Robinson when he left the group in the early 1970s.

Rogers’ cousin, Claudette Rogers, was also a member of the Miracles, and later married Smokey Robinson. Bobby Rogers stayed with the group, through every lineup, from 1956 through 2011 when he was forced to leave because of poor health and the Miracles disbanded for good.

Bobby Rogers died on March 3, 2013, at the age of 73, due to complications of diabetes. Nine days later, on March 12, 2013 on their website, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame paid tribute to Bobby with the article, “Remembering Bobby Rogers of The Miracles”.

His final honor had come with the Rock Hall induction in 2012 with fellow member Claudette Rogers-Robinson

Over his 56 years with the Miracles, Bobby has been on all their hit singles including their 1960 single “Shop Around”, which was Motown’s first number one hit on the R&B singles chart, and was also Motown’s first million selling hit single. Other hit singles include “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”, “My Girl Has Gone”, “I Second That Emotion”, “Mickey’s Monkey”, “Going to a Go-Go”, “Ooo Baby Baby”, “Tracks of My Tears”, “Baby Baby Don’t Cry”, and “Tears of a Clown”. Referred to as Motown’s “soul supergroup”, the Miracles recorded 26 Top 40 hits and 6 top 20 singles.

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Jewel Akens 3/2013

Jewel AkensMarch 1, 2013 – Jewel Akens was born September 12, 1933 in Houston, Texas, the seventh of nine children in a working-class family. He became interested in music early in life, singing for the church choir as a child. In 1950, Akens moved with his family from Texas to Los Angeles, where he graduated from Fremont High School. There, he met his future wife, Eddie Mae, whom he married in 1952.

Akens began his career in the late 1950s, working with Eddie Daniels and guitar legend Eddie Cochran, and later recorded singles with the Four Dots doo-wop group.

In 1965, he was singing with an ensemble called the Turnarounds when record producer Herb Newman brought them “The Birds and the Bees,” written by his teenage son. The rest of the group disliked the tune, but Akens decided to record it solo. It became an instant hit, rising to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard pop chart in 1965.

“Let me tell you ’bout the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees,” went the catchy tune, which was later covered by Dean Martin and others.

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Richard Street 2/2013

richard streetFebruary 27, 2013 – Richard Street (The Temptations) was born on October 5, 1942 in Detroit, Michigan.

Born and raised  in Motown, he was the first member of the Temptations to actually be a native of the city which served as Motown’s namesake and hometown; all of the previous members were born and at least partially raised in the southern United States. He was a member of The Temptations from 1971 to 1993.

Street was the lead singer of an early Temptations predecessor, Otis Williams & the Distants, and took the spotlight on their local hit “Come On”. The Distants also included future Temptations Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Elbridge “Al” Bryant, who left The Distants and their record deal with Johnnie Mae Matthews’ Northern Records to form The Elgins (later The Temptations) with Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams. After their departure, Matthews had Street briefly lead a new Distants group in the early 1960s.

During the mid-1960s, Street performed with a Motown act called The Monitors, who had a hit in 1965 titled “Say You” which the Temptations included on one of their albums, and a minor hit with 1966’s “Greetings (This is Uncle Sam)”.

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Dan Toler 2/2013

dantolerFeb 25, 2013- Dan Toler (Allman Brothers Band) aka “Dangerous Dan Toler” was born in Connersville, Indiana on September 23, 1948.

Toler first entered the extended Allman Brothers Band family as a member of Dickey Betts’ Great Southern in the late 1970s. Toler played guitar in the group during one of The Allman Brothers band’s hiatuses in the late ’70s and appears on the classic Betts albums Dickey Betts & Great Southern and Atlanta’s Burning Down.

When The Allman Brothers Band reformed in 1979, Betts brought Toler into the fold, reinstating the band’s trademark twin guitar approach for the first time since Duane Allman’s death in 1971. Toler appeared on The Allman Brothers Band’s Enlightened Rogues(1979), Reach for the Sky (1980) and Brothers of the Road (1981) before the group split for a second time in 1982. His brother Frankie Toler later joined the band in the ‘80s after founding drummer Jaimoe disgracefully was dismissed from the group.

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Magic Slim 2/2013

Magic SlimFebruary 21, 2013 – Magic Slim was born Morris Holt on August 7, 1937 in Torrance near Grenada, Mississippi. The son of sharecroppers, he followed blues greats such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to Chicago, claiming and developing his own place in the Chicago blues scene.

He gave up the piano and turned to guitar after losing his right pinky finger in a cotton gin accident at age 13. In 1955 he moved to Chicago with his friend and mentor Magic Sam. The elder, Magic Sam/Samuel Maghett let Morris play bass in his band, and gave him his nickname Magic Slim.

However, he soon returned to Mississippi to work and got his younger brother Nick interested in playing bass.

By 1965 he was back in Chicago and in 1970 brother Nick joined him in his group, the Teardrops. Slim’s recording career began in 1966, with the song “Scufflin'”, followed by a number of singles leading into the mid 1970s.

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Kevin Ayers 2/2013

Kevin AyersFebruary 18, 2013- Kevin Ayers (Soft Machine) was born August 16, 1944 in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who later originated the BBC2 rock music program The Old Grey Whistle Test.

After his parents divorced and his mother married a civil servant, Ayers spent most of his childhood in Malaysia, where, he would later admit, he discovered a fondness for the slow and easy life.

At age 12, he returned to Britain and settled in Canterbury. There, he became a fledgling musician and founder of the “Canterbury sound”, an often whimsical English take on American psychedelia that merged jazz, folk, pop and nascent progressive rock. As psychedelic rock songwriter, guitarist and bassist, he was quickly drafted into the Wilde Flowers, a band that featured Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper.

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Tony Sheridan 2/2013

tony sheridanFeb 16, 2013 – Tony Sheridan was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity  was born May 21, 1940 in Norwich, England. To the rest of the world he was best known as the only non-Beatle to appear as lead singer on a Beatles recording which charted as a single, even though the record was labelled as being with “The Beat Brothers”. In Europe he was at times a superstar.

In his early life, Sheridan was influenced by his parents’ interest in classical music, and by age seven, he had learned to play the violin. He eventually came to play guitar, and in 1956, formed his first band. He showed enough talent that he soon found himself playing in London’s “Two I’s” club for some six months straight. In 1958, aged 18, he began appearing on Oh Boy, made by the ITV contractor ABC, playing electric guitar on such early rock classics as “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Glad All Over”, “Mighty Mighty Man” and “Oh Boy!”. He was soon employed backing a number of singers, reportedly including Gene Vincent and Conway Twitty while they were in England. In 1958 Johnny Foster sought to recruit Sheridan as a guitar player in Cliff Richard’s backing band (soon renamed the Shadows), but after failing to find him at the 2i’s Coffee Bar opted for another guitarist who was there, Hank Marvin.

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Kevin Peek 2/2013

Kevin PeekFebruary 14, 2013 – Kevin Peek (Sky) was born Dec 21, 1946 in Adelaide, Australia. He initially played classical percussion in the Adelaide Conservatorium of Music, before teaching himself the guitar.

In 1967 Peek formed a Psychedelic pop, progressive rock group, James Taylor Move but left by May 1968, moving to London. He returned to Adelaide, Australia, to join a newly formed rock band Quatro which, despite a contract from England’s Decca Records, proved artistically unsuccessful.

For a time, following their move to London, he and his fellow Adelaide-born bandmates—guitarist Terry Britten, bassist Alan Tarney, and drummer Trevor Spencer—made their livings as session musicians together, playing with everyone from the New Seekers and Mary Hopkin (Earth Song, Ocean Song) to Cliff Richard, whose regular backing band they became on stage and on record during the 1970s. Peek also worked with Manfred Mann, Lulu, Tom Jones, Jeff Wayne (War of the Worlds), and Shirley Bassey, among others. He also wrote the theme music for the internationally-broadcast “Singapore Girl” television advertisements for Singapore Airlines.

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Rick Huxley 2/2013

Rick HuxleyFebruary 11, 2013 – Rick Huxley  (Dave Clark Five) was born on August 5th 1940 in Dartford, Kent, England. He joined the Dave Clark Five in 1958 and played on all of the band’s hits including “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces”.

For a time in the mid-’60s, in the middle of the British Invasion, Rick Huxley was one of the two or three best-known bass players in all of rock & roll, his name recognition lagging only a little behind that of Paul McCartney, and probably much wider than that of the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman, the Hollies’ Eric Haydock, the Who’s John Entwistle, or the Kinks’ Peter Quaife. As part of the Dave Clark Five, and its longest-serving member after Clark, Huxley was also a veteran musician with six years under his belt before the group broke internationally.

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Cecil Womack 2/2013

Cecil WomackFebruary 1, 2013 – Cecil Womack aka Zekuumba Zekkariyas was born on September 25th 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. He and his brothers Bobby, Harry, Friendly and Curtis, began as a gospel group appearing on the gospel circuit in the mid 50s where they were seen by Sam Cooke of the Soul Stirrers. As Cooke’s protégés they changed their name to The Valentinos and in 1961 began to sing and record for secular audiences, producing hits such as “It’s All Over Now” and “Lookin’ for a Love”.

Cooke’s death at a L.A. motel in December 1964, had dramatic consequences for the Womack Brothers as SAR folded and Bobby Womack, who was now married to Sam Cooke’s widow, Barbara, left the group for a solo career. The Valentinos briefly disbanded before regrouping as a quartet in 1966, signing with Chess Records where they recorded the Northern Soul hit, “Sweeter than the Day Before”, written by Cecil Womack and Mary Wells. However, the group got dropped from Chess in 1968 after only two singles and Cecil Womack who had married former Motown artiste Mary Wells decided to leave the Valentinos.

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Steve Knight 1/2013

Steve Knight 1January 19, 2013 – Steve Knight was born on May 12, 1935 in New York to artist parents. From 1938–1950 his family lived in Woodstock, New York. In 1950, his father became a professor at Columbia University and moved the family to New York City. In 1952, Knight graduated from high school and enrolled at Columbia later that year. He stayed at Columbia for most of the 1950s (1952–1959) studying art, music and psychology. He earned a B.S. degree majoring in psychology, and had one year of graduate work in psychology.

From 1959 to 1968, Steve Knight recorded with or was a member of various bands including  The Feenjon Group, The Peacemakers, Devil’s Anvil and Wings (obviously not Paul McCartney’s group). In 1969, producer/vocalist/bassist Felix Pappalardi organized the heavy rock band Mountain. The initial line-up included Leslie West (guitar/vocals) and N.D. Smart (drums).

Even though he became the keyboardist, Knight was really a multi-instrumentalist, mastering both string and wind instruments. Prior to release of Mountain’s debut album, Climbing!, Pappalardi, who had known Knight from prior musical affiliations, added him to the line-up on keyboards. Corky Laing replaced Smart on drums. The band enjoyed a great deal of recording and touring success in the early 1970s including 3 gold albums, but called it quits in 1972. He performed at the infamous Woodstock Festival.

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Nic Potter 1/ 2013

Nic Potter (1)January 16, 2013 – Nic Potter was born on 18 October 1951 in Swindon, England.

He left school at 15, originally to train in carpentry. At 16, he joined a late lineup of The Misunderstood however and recorded on their 1969 LP Golden Glass.  At the same time as drummer Guy Evans, he joined Van Der Graaf Generator, when they were on a brief hiatus.

When Van der Graaf decided to reform after the release The Aerosol Grey Machine. When earlier bassist Keith Ellis decided to join Juicy Lucy, Evans recommended that Potter join as his replacement.

He first appeared on the album “The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other”, also playing some electric guitar on a few tracks in addition to his usual bass. He left the band in 1970 during the recording of their next album, ‘H to He, Who Am The Only One’, on which he recorded 3 tracks.

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John Wilkinson 1/2013

John-WilkinsonJanuary 11, 2013 – John Wilkinson was born on July 3rd 1945 in Springfield, Missouri.

John was drawn to music very early. At the age of 10, he famously sneaked into Elvis Presley’s dressing room before a show at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, telling Elvis, “you can’t play guitar worth a damn.” Elvis was amused and impressed with the kid and predicted they would meet again. They did. After playing in a high school band with his classmates called, “The Coachmen,” John went on to make a name for himself as a folk and country singer and guitar player.

He traveled around the country playing with such groups as , The Goodtime Singers, Greenwood County Singers, and The New Christy Minstrels.

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Sugarfoot Bonner 1/2013

leroy-bonnerJanuary 27, 2013 – Sugarfoot Bonner was born Leroy on March 14th 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Cincinnati, the oldest of 14 children. He ran away from home as a young teenager and played the harmonica on street corners for change.

He joined the The Ohio Untouchables when they regrouped in 1964. Leroy’s rip-it-up guitar work and taste for something funky the band went on to become The Ohio Players, with Leroy as their front man, lead singer and guitarist.

Their first big hit single “Funky Worm”, reached No.1 on the Billboard R&B chart and made the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the spring of 1973. Other hits followed, including “Who’d She Coo?” and their double No.1 hit songs “Love Rollercoaster” and “Fire” in January 1976.

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Patti Page 1/2013

January 1, 2013 – Patti Page was born Clara Ann Fowler on November 8, 1927 in Claremore, Oklahoma (although some sources give Muskogee ) into a large and poor family. Her father worked on the MKT railroad, while her mother and older sisters picked cotton. As she related on television many years later, the family went without electricity, and therefore she could not read after dark. She was raised in Foraker, Hardy, Muskogee and Avant, Oklahoma, before attending Daniel Webster High School in Tulsa, from which she graduated in 1945.

Clara Ann Fowler started off her career as a songstress with Al Clauser and his Oklahoma Outlaws at KTUL. Fowler became a featured singer on a 15-minute radio program on radio station KTUL, Tulsa, Oklahoma, at age 18. The program was sponsored by the “Page Milk Company.” On the air, Fowler was dubbed “Patti Page,” after the Page Milk Company. In 1946, Jack Rael, a saxophone player and band manager, came to Tulsa to do a one-night show. Rael heard Page on the radio and liked her voice. Rael asked her to join the band he managed, the “Jimmy Joy Band.” Rael would later become Page’s personal manager, after leaving the band.

Page toured with the “Jimmy Joy Band” throughout the country in the mid-1940s. The band eventually ended up in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947. In Chicago, Page sang with a small group led by popular orchestra leader, Benny Goodman. This helped Page gain her first recording contract with Mercury Records the same year. She became Mercury’s “girl singer”.

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Lee Dorman 12/2012

Lee Dorman - Iron ButterflyDecember 21, 2012 – Douglas Lee Dorman was born in St. Louis on September 15, 1942 and moved to San Diego, CA in the mid 1960s.He began playing bass guitar in his teens, he became best known as a member of the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly in the second part of the 1960s.

The band formed in 1966 in San Diego, California and signed its first record contract with Atco, a division of Atlantic Records, in 1967, according to the band’s Web site and in early 1968, their debut album Heavy was released. They were represented by the William Morris Agency who booked all their live concerts. The original members were Doug Ingle (vocals, organ), Jack Pinney (drums), Greg Willis (bass), and Danny Weis (guitar). They were soon joined by tambourine player and vocalist Darryl DeLoach. DeLoach’s parents’ garage on Luna Avenue served as the site for their almost nightly rehearsals.

Jerry Penrod and Bruce Morse replaced Willis and Pinney after the band relocated to Los Angeles in 1966 and Ron Bushy then came aboard when Morse left due to a critical family tragedy. All but Ingle and Bushy left the band after recording their first album in late 1967; the remaining musicians, faced with the possibility of the record not being released, quickly found replacements in bassist Lee Dorman and guitarist Erik Brann (also known as “Erik Braunn” and “Erik Braun”) RIP 2003, and resumed touring and then recording the monster album In-a-Gadda-da-Vida.

In terms of sound, the group took inspiration from a variety of sources outside of the rock arena, such as the bongo playing of Preston Epps and the rhythm and blues music of Booker T and the MGs. Around this time, the band notably ran into Led Zeppelin lead guitarist Jimmy Page, who later stated that he used the group as partial inspiration for the name “Led Zeppelin”. In 1969, Led Zeppelin opened for Iron Butterfly at Fillmore East in New York, a fact Dorman was fond of noting.

A commonly related story says that In-a-Gadda-da-Vida was originally “In the Garden of Eden”, but at one point in the course of rehearsing and recording, singer Doug Ingle got drunk and slurred the words, creating the phonetic mondegreen that stuck as the title. However, the liner notes on ‘the best of’ CD compilation state that drummer Ron Bushy was listening to the track through headphones, and could not clearly distinguish what Ingle said when he asked him for the song’s title. An alternative explanation given in the liner notes of the 1995 re-release of the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album, is that Ingle was drunk, high, or both, when he first told Bushy the title, and Bushy wrote it down. Bushy then showed Ingle what he had written, and the slurred title stuck.

“In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,” stayed on the national sales charts for two years and became a Top 40 radio hit and the album over time sold more than 30 million copies. The track has been featured in a number of films and television shows, including an episode of “The Simpsons.”

Dorman was an intricate part of the success of that song as he played bass in a style as if it was an equal instrument with the others which many considered an early example of moving from psychedelic rock to heavy metal.

When keyboardist Ingle left the band, due to the grueling tour schedules, Dorman founded another band, called Captain Beyond, in the 1970s. Captain Beyond was a rock group formed in Los Angeles in 1972 by ex-members of other prominent groups. Singer Rod Evans had been with Deep Purple; drummer Bobby Caldwell had worked with Johnny Winter; and guitarist Larry Rheinhart and Lee Dorman came from Iron Butterfly after they broke up. This lineup made their self-titled debut album for the Southern rock label Capricorn in 1972, after which Caldwell was replaced by Marty Rodriguez for their second album, Sufficiently Breathless(1973). Captain Beyond became inactive following the departure of Evans, but was reorganized in 1976. Caldwell returned, and drummer Willy Daffern was added as vocalist for Captain Beyond’s third album, Dawn Explosion (1977), recorded for Warner Bros. Dawn Explosion was Captain Beyond’s final effort.

From 1978 on Dorman continued touring with Iron Butterfly, during the many personnel changes, until he got too sick to do so in the early fall of 2012.

The last keyboard/singer of the band, German born Martin Gerschwitz, who had known Lee Dorman for seven years since he joined the band in 2005, said Mr. Dorman did not have any immediate surviving relatives at the time of his death.
He had suffered from heart problems for some time, a fact that ended his performing career in 2012.

Dorman was reportedly on a heart transplant list when he was found dead in his car, reportedly on his was to a doctor’s appointment, outside his home in Laguna Niguel, California, on December 21, 2012. He was 70 years old.

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Huw Lloyd Langton 12/2012

Huw Lloyd Langdon6 December 2012 – Huw Lloyd-Langton was born Richard Hugh Lloyd-Langton on 6 February 1951 in Harlesden, North London.

He started playing guitar at school, self styled and talented. In the course of those formative years in rock and roll he learned to read and write music and after high school graduation he moved to Germany where he got his first professional gig with a rather popular touring band called WINSTON G, which alternated gigs between Holland and Germany. He toured with them continuously for 6 months. The bass player was Pete Becket who later played with Player and Little Feat.

Back in England in 1969 he joined Hawkwind on their debut album in 1970.  He remained with them for next 2 1/2 years recording their first 2 LP’s, which sell regularly to this day. He left them after an illness in late 1971, and although he occasionally joined them he did not return full time until 1979 when their LP ‘LIVE 79’ went straight into the top 10 UK charts.

The rest of the Seventies showed him in a variety of gigs. A 2-year acoustic stint in vegetarian London restaurant PASTURES. John Butler DIESEL PARK WEST’S singer joined him for 6 months and Eddy Klima, RATTLES singer for another year. He taught guitar at a comprehensive school in Streatham for a year and did numerous sessions, one included writing the music for a cartoon, narrated by Viv Stanshall of the BONZO DOG DOO DA BAND and 6 months with LEO SAYER touring the UK & Europe.

Several band situations including working with John Lingwood MANFRED MANN’S long standing Drummer; AMON DIN with Dave Anderson AMON DUL’S bass player; GALLERY with Rob Rawlinson on Bass from Ian Hunters OVERNIGHT ANGELS; MAGILL with Pete Scott from SAVOY BROWN and he toured Yugoslavia with ALEKZANDER JOHN (known as Alekzander Mezek) who was one of their top rock performers. Another excellent band was the Trinidadian Band BATTI MAMSELLE, whose music had a strong Latin American influence with lead singer LONDON BEAT’S Jimmy Chambers. They appeared in briefly in the film ‘Alfie Darling’ starring Alan price. The Director wanted an all black band but they refused to perform without Huw.

From 1974 to 1978 he joined WIDOMAKER touring the USA and recording 2 LPs, which charted there. Lineup included Steve Ellis- LOVE AFFAIR, Aerial Bender- MOTT THE HOOPLE, Bob Daisley-RAINBOW, Paul Nicholls LINDISFARNE and ‘John Butler ‘, again)!

In 1979 he rejoined HAWKWIND where he remained for the next 10 years. Their LP ‘LIVE 79 went straight in the top 10 UK charts. Everything Hawkwind did between 1979 and 1985 was either in the pop, heavy metal or independent charts. In 1982 Huw formed LLOYD LANGTON GROUP (LLG) to gig between HAWKWIND quiet periods. LLG has 2 singles and 2 LPs in Heavy Metal charts during 80s. During this period he had his own column in GUITARIST magazine for 6 months titled ‘Langton’s Lead Lines’.

Between 1989 and the end of the 90s Huw joined the PRETTY THINGS on one European tour. Toured Italy in ’93 with DR BROWN who had 2 independent hits there. Toured the UK several times with LLG. In the spring of ’95 he toured Sweden with Ray Majors, MOTT THE HOOPLES last guitarist.

September 2000 Huw rejoined Hawkwind for ‘Hawkestra Re-Union’ gig at Brixton Academy. This sell-out show featured 21 past members, including Lemmy. However, the main nucleus on stage throughout was Dave Brock, Alan Davey, Richard chadwick and Huw Lloyd-Langton.

Huw officially rejoined Hawkwind in 2001. They played their first major Tour in the UK since 1977 playing 18-dates nation-wide in November 2001. They kicked-off at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 10th October. Huw contracted ‘Legionnaires Disease’ on this tour and was hospitalized. This left him extremely fragile. Hawkwind toured UK again December 2002 but Huw was unable to complete the last two dates as he suffered ill health on and off over next few years with a variety of broken bones (mainly arms and wrists).

He continued to make guest appearances with Hawkwind and played solo support slots on tour.

In August 2009, Huw played an acoustic set at Hawkwind’s 40th anniversary concert at Porchester Hall, in London.

One of the world’s longest-running bands, Hawkwind have undergone countless changes of personnel and musical styles over the years. Former members and collaborators include Motorhead’s Lemmy, science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, and ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker.

Huw’s health had been generally poor for a decade and he was quite frail, with several broken bones and minor injuries (rarely letting fans down though – he once played a gig with a broken arm, reworking his solos on the fly so that he could play them in one area of the guitar neck).

After being diagnosed with cancer in 2010 he died at his home on 6 December 2012, aged 61. His final recording with Hawkwind was a re-recording of Master of the Universe for the compilation album Spacehawks.

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Cass Cassidy 12/2012

ed cassidyDecember 6, 2012 – Edward Claude “Cass” Cassidy was born Harvey, Illinois, a rural area outside Chicago, on May 4, 1923. His family moved to Bakersfield, California in 1931. Cassidy began his career as a professional musician in 1937. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after his discharge held many jobs before becoming a full-time musician again. At one time in the late 1940s, Cassidy played 282 consecutive one-nighters in 17 states. He worked in show bands, Dixieland, country and western bands, and on film soundtracks, as well as having a brief stint with the San Francisco Opera.

Way back when rock ’n’ roll was countercultural — before the members of the Rolling Stones were anywhere close to 50 years old, much less celebrating their 50th anniversary together — the genre tended to emphasize rather than bridge generational divides.

So when the experimental group Spirit formed in the late 1960s, it was different not just for the way it fused jazz and rock, or the way it mixed psychedelia with a particularly tight backbeat. It was also different because its drummer was the 44-year-old stepfather of its 16-year-old guitarist, Randy California.

By the time Spirit formed in 1967, Mr. Cassidy had already had a notable and diverse musical career. He had played with jazz musicians including Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Cannonball Adderly and had formed a folk-blues group with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons.

While Cassidy was performing with other adults, his young stepson, Randy Wolfe, was becoming a fine musician himself. He impressed Jimi Hendrix when they met in a music store in Manhattan, and it was Hendrix who gave Randy the nickname he went by for the rest of his life, Randy California to distinguish him from bass player Randy Texas (Palmer). Hendrix wanted tot take the kid to London, but that was thwarted by Cassidy and soon enough, stepfather and stepson were playing and touring together.

Spirit released more than a dozen albums from 1968 to 1996, but it was the first work that was the most influential and critically praised. Its biggest hit and only Top 40 single, “I Got a Line on You,” was released in 1968; the band was also celebrated for its adventurous 1970 album, “Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus.” That record included the song “Mr. Skin,” which was the nickname Mr. Cassidy’s fellow band members had given him in honor of his shaved head.

Bob Irwin, the president and owner of Sundazed Records, which has reissued many Spirit albums and also released previously unissued tracks, said the band’s early recording sessions were “kind of like a jazz history lesson” in which Mr. Cassidy nurtured his much younger colleagues.

“Ed always encouraged them to color outside the box, to take chances onstage, to play to the best of and beyond their abilities,” Mr. Irwin said.

Early reviews were usually complimentary, but critics were less positive several years later, after the band’s lineup changed. (Mr. Cassidy and Randy California remained its only constant members.) The critic Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times in 1976, singled out Mr. Cassidy from what he said was an otherwise unimpressive performance.

“Mr. Cassidy’s drumming is still exceptional — his obligatory long solo at the end of the set was the subtlest, most musical part of the evening,” Mr. Palmer wrote.

Cassidy succumbed to cancer on Dec. 6, 2012 at age 89.

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Michael Dunford 11/2012

Michael DunfordNovember 20, 2012 – Michael Dunford (Renaissance) was born in 1944 in Surrey, England.

The reclusive and soft-spoken composer, a mainstay in the world of progressive rock, was born, raised and educated in Surrey. His first job was selling clothing in a local shop followed by a stint as an airside driver at Heathrow Airport which enabled him to form a “skiffle” group which lead to his first rock band called Nashville Teens in the early 1960s. Nashville Teens reached #6 on U.K. singles charts with their version of Tobacco Road. On leaving them, he formed several other bands including The Pentad and The Plebes. One night he went to see the original band Renaissance perform locally and ended up joining them in the early 1970s. The original band members were Jim McCarty, Louis Cennamo, John Hawken, Keith Relf and Jane Relf.

Dunford entered the band during a period of transition. Though he wrote (and played guitar on) ‘Mr. Pine’ from 1971’s largely ignored ‘Illusion,’ his influence wasn’t truly felt until Renaissance’s third album, 1972’s ‘Prologue.’ This was the beginning of the band’s classic ’70s period, cementing their trademark brand of epic, symphonic prog. Dunford wrote two tracks on his own and co-wrote two others, though he didn’t actually contribute to the recording. Nonetheless, his writing gave the band focus: The elegant title-track (written by Dunford) is one of Renaissance’s most powerful instrumentals, featuring Haslam’s towering voice, John Tout’s jazzy, Latin-tinged piano, and Jon Camp’s furious bassline.

From that point forward, Dunford (along with writing partner, lyricist Betty Thatcher) was the band’s guiding creative force. He co-wrote all but one track on the band’s 1973 breakthrough, the orchestra-backed ‘Ashes Are Burning,’ making his studio debut and showcasing his signature acoustic guitar playing: subtle, misty, and slightly majestic.

And with each subsequent release, both Dunford and Renaissance grew more powerful. Their masterpiece was delivered in 1975 with ‘Scheherazade and Other Stories,’ their most cinematic and densely layered work, concluding with the 25-minute epic ‘Song of Scheherazade’ (which was also captured–in an arguably more thrilling context — on the 1976 live double-album ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’).

Though Renaissance were a British band, most of their success during this peak period came in the United States: ‘Scheherazade’ landed at No. 48 on the Billboard Album Charts, and their 1977 follow-up, ‘Novella,’ reached the same spot. The band’s biggest success, however, came in their home country with 1978’s ‘A Song for All Seasons,’ which peaked at No. 35 in the UK, thanks in large part to the success of that album’s hit single, ‘Northern Lights,’ which was built on Dunford’s shimmering strums and John Tout’s newly utilized synthesizers.

But these were also dark times. Punk and disco were diminishing the prog-rock’s relevance, leaving bands like Renaissance with a choice: either adapt or face extinction. As a result, Renaissance–under Camp’s guiding presence–went through a radical makeover in the 1980s. They released two albums, 1981’s ‘Camera Camera’ and 1983’s ‘Time-Line,’ both of which sought to blend the band’s artful rock with a more streamlined, synth-heavy approach leaning toward new-wave. After both albums tanked, the band’s remaining core trio (Dunford, Haslam, and Camp) dissolved into their own factions, with Dunford and Haslam seeking to continue the Renaissance name separately. Without each other, the magic wasn’t there.

But Dunford managed to reunite with Haslam, the magical voice behind his band’s best music, for 2001’s ‘Tuscany’ (also featuring Tout on keyboards, along with original drummer, Terence Sullivan), an album that recaptured some of the original Renaissance spirit.

Sadly, both Dunford and his old band are rarely mentioned in the same breath as their prog peers like Genesis, Yes, and King Crimson. Part of the reason is exposure: Even during their mid-to-late ’70s prime, Renaissance were never chart-toppers or stadium sell-outs (though they did manage one UK top-ten single, 1978’s ‘Northern Lights’). And they were never as technically flashy or boldly experimental as those bands: Throughout the group’s quietly excellent lifespan, the Renaissance catalogue is middle-of-the-road, but in a good way — consistently built on Annie Haslam’s soaring, operative, five-octave vocals, Jon Camp’s propulsive and melodic basslines, and Dunford’s tasteful guitar playing and arrangements. They were never prog’s trailblazers or sonic innovators — but they were certainly one of the most consistently great, album-to-album.

Dunford, the guitarist and chief composer behind Renaissance’s sweeping, symphonic progressive rock, passed away on November 20, 2012 after suffering an Instantaneous Cerebral Hemmorage at his Surrey, England home. He is survived not only by his wife, two sons, and sister — but also by some of the most hauntingly beautiful progressive rock albums ever recorded.

Before his death, Dunford was as musically active as he’d been in a decade: He’d just finished the first leg of a well-received tour (with Haslam and a new Renaissance line-up), with a newly recorded follow-up album, ‘Grandine il Vento,’ scheduled for a 2013 release. Ironically, what began as an incredibly exciting year for Renaissance turned into its final chapter. And considering the circumstances, ‘Vento’ should be the band’s swan song.

Though Dunford’s never been one of prog-rock’s most visible icons, he’s a crucial player in the genre’s rich history. He should be remembered that way.

 

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Big Jim Sullivan 10/2012

bigjim92October 2, 2012 – Big Jim Sullivan was born James George Tomkins on February 14, 1941 British guitarist born in Middlesex. In 1959, he met Marty Wilde at The 2i’s Coffee Bar, and was invited to become a member of his backing group, the Wildcats, who were the warm up act on the television series, Oh, Boy!.

The Wildcats backed Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on their tour of Britain in 1960. In the 60s and 70s he also played on hits by Billy Fury, Frank Ifield, Adam Faith, Frankie Vaughan, Helen Shapiro, Freddie and the Dreamers, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Georgie Fame, Bobby Darin, Little Richard, The Walker Brothers, Donovan, David Bowie, Engelbert Humperdinck, Benny Hill, The New Seekers, Thunderclap Newman, Love Affair, Long John Baldry, Marmalade, Small Faces, The Tremeloes, Rolf Harris, George Harrison and many more as well as being a member of Tom Jones’ band.

He performed on no less than 55 No.1 hits singles during this life!!!

Continue reading Big Jim Sullivan 10/2012

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Danny Harris 10/2012

Danny Harris (65) – West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – was born Daniel Duffy Harris in Colorado Springs, Colorado in March 1947. Danny Harris and his brother Shaun grew up in a musical family — their father, Roy Harris, was a respected composer, and their mother, Joanna Harris, was a pianist who taught at Juilliard. Both of his parents were classical music legends, Roy and Johana Harris. When John F. Kennedy made his Time Capsule of his years in the White House, Roy Harris” 3rd and 5th Symphonies were included.

In 1962, their family relocated to Los Angeles and the Harris Brothers joined a local rock band called the Snowmen, with Danny on guitar and Shaun on bass. Danny and Shaun attended the same high school as Michael Lloyd, who was playing guitar in another, more successful local group called the Rogues; Shaun was recruited to join the Rogues as bassist, and soon Michael, Shaun, and Danny began working together on music of their own. They installed a makeshift recording studio at Lloyd’s house, and cut a handful of fine singles under the name the Laughing Wind, with John Ware as their drummer. Danny played guitar in bands such as Brigadune, California Spectrum, Markley, The Laughing Wind, The Rogues (5), The Snowmen (4), The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and Scorpio Rises

 The Laughing Wind had become acquainted with noted L.A. producer and scenester Kim Fowley, and Fowley introduced the band to Bob Markley, the Oklahoma-born son of a wealthy oil tycoon who had studied law but had ambitions of making a name for himself in music, having released an unsuccessful single for Reprise Records.

Markley owned a large mansion in Hollywood where he played host to the Yardbirds, who played a party at his home when they found they couldn’t book a public show due to problems with work permits. Markley was impressed by the attention the band received from the audience of music business insiders and teenage girls, and decided he wanted to form a band rather than work as a solo act. Markley liked the Laughing Wind well enough that he made them an offer: if he could join the group as vocalist and lyricist, he would bankroll touring expenses and new gear, including a full light show. The band agreed, and soon Markley had renamed the group the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band; he also drew up contracts that saw to it that he owned the group’s name, as well as their publishing.

And thus, one of the more offbeat acts to emerge during the psychedelic era, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were certainly eclectic and ambitious enough to live up to their slightly clumsy moniker, capable of jumping from graceful folk-rock to wailing guitar freakouts to atonal, multilayered, avant-garde compositions at a moment’s notice, but they also reflected a strongly divided creative mindset, with Bob Markley, the lyricist and ostensive leader of the group, on one side and the rest of the band on the other.

In 1966, Markley arranged for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band to release their first album, Part One, which appeared on a small local label, Fifo Records; it was largely devoted to covers (many recorded by the Laughing Wind before Markley’s involvement), though he did contribute some originals such as “Insanity” and “Don’t Break My Balloon.” While the album’s sales were modest, the band won a following in Los Angeles for their adventurous sound and elaborate light show, and they landed a deal with Reprise Records. The WCPAEB’s first major-label album, Part One, was the first full flowering of the group’s musically ambitious side, through Markley’s lyrics tended to draw a polarized reaction from listeners; the album also saw the group expand into a sextet with the addition of monster guitarist Ron Morgan, another former member of the Rogues who arrived as tensions grew between Markley and Lloyd, the latter of who thought little of Markley’s talents.

In August 1967, just prior to recording sessions for the WCPAEB’s second Reprise album, Shaun Harris took a hiatus from the band. His departure was partly due to his disillusionment with the group, primarily with the WCPAEB’s lack of success, and it served as a waiting period while his brother, Danny, was being treated for depression. Lloyd was gone from the lineup for their third LP, Vol. 2: Breaking Through, released later in 1967, with all but two songs credited to Markley and Shaun Harris. By the time the group began work on their third album, the WCPAEB were beginning to splinter — Danny Harris left the band due to health problems, with guitarist extraordinaire Ron Morgan handling all the guitar chores, and John Ware was out as drummer, with session musician Jim Gordon taking his place. The finished product, A Child’s Guide to Good and Evil, is often cited as the band’s best and most adventurous work, but Markley’s convoluted lyrics became increasingly pretentious and bizarre, and when the album failed to sell, they were dropped by Reprise.

The Harris Brothers and Lloyd formed a short-lived group called California Spectrum with Danny, Lloyd, and Jimmy Greenspoon., but when Jimmy Bowen, who had produced the group’s earlier work, launched his own label, Amos Records, the WCPAEB landed a new record deal. The group’s 1969 release Where’s Daddy? credited Markley and the Harris Brothers, though Michael Lloyd and Ron Morgan also played on the sessions; the album featured several songs that dealt with young women in a somewhat disturbing manner, and once again they failed to connect with a larger audience. California Spectrum toured the Midwest with Markley’s state-of-the-art light show, and released two singles in its brief recording career, “Sassafras” (the same version featured on Volume One) and a cover of the Left Banke‘s “She May Call You Up Tonight”, none of which were met with much attention. When Harris returned to the WCPAEB in 1968, he touted a completely different line-up, and promoted the California Spectrum with his column in the teen zine Tiger Beat until the group disbanded sometime in early 1969. 

Lloyd negotiated with Curb to distribute the group’s fifth and final album on Forward Records. Released in 1970, Markley insisted the album, originally self-titled, should be released under the name Markley, A Group. The album benefited from the full involvement and production experience of Lloyd, who sang the majority of the lead vocals, provided keyboards, and organized the orchestral arrangements. Danny Harris was a key influence on the album, writing half of its tracks. However, although the album is generally considered an improvement over Where’s My Daddy?, the group could no longer cope with Markley’s erratic behavior, and disbanded soon after the album’s release.

Even by this band’s standards, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s swan song was curious: Markley opted to rename the group Markley, and recorded an album titled A Group, though the full WCPAEB lineup appeared on the LP. A Group received little notice, and soon the group was history under either name. Lloyd went on to a successful career as a producer and A&R man, Shaun Harris launched a brief solo career before going into film, Ron Morgan first enriched the Electric Prunes and then went on to play with Three Dog Night.  Bob Markley produced material for other artists until he died in 2003. From the break-up on Danny Harris divided his time between acting and folk music.

Danny married his wife Victoria in 1984 and performed as a folk music duo for the full 28 years of their marriage, seven of these years in Sweden, where they resided near Stockholm. Daniel had left the band business after the demise of Westcoast Popart Experimental Band and worked in films and became a SAG member in 1997. His best role was the prison minister in The Green Mile.

Danny and his wife Victoria moved to Cambria in 2007 to care for Victoria”s mother, Irina Wilson, and remained residents in the same home. They performed locally as a duo at Sandy”s Deli and CARES, as well as Tognazzini”s Dockside in Morro Bay.  Daniel also became a member of the Cambria Chorale after having read in the Cambrian that director Michael Bierbaum”s favorite influences had been his father, Roy Harris.   Daniel also had performed in the Pewter Plough”s production of “Love Town.

Although Danny Harris was initially disillusioned with the music industry, he recorded the gospel album Thank Him Every Day in 1980. He also worked as a folk musician and actor before dying on the set of Saving Mr. Banks from a heart attack, during a noteworthy California heat wave on October 1, 2012. 

 

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – WCPAEB – A Veritable Rabbit Hole

To begin with there was the name itself. Long and unwieldy, it seemed designed to defy recollection and sink the heart of poster designers everywhere. Was it a six-word manifesto of creative intent, or simply a cynical attempt to climb aboard the ‘psychedelic’ bandwagon? Then there were the song credits and album photos, according to which a certain Bob Markley was the band’s driving force, a position seemingly confirmed by the appearance of his final ‘solo’ LP: ‘A Group’. Yet, somewhat confusingly, on the back of that album’s sleeve there appeared – for the first time since the band’s debut on the Fifo label – pictures of all four original members. Last, and definitely not least, there were the songs themselves. Along the way the music encompassed almost every musical genre – harmonic guitar pop, acoustic folk, psychedelic rock, jazz and avant-garde; and then there were those extraordinary lyrics – some starkly political, others naive and child-like; at times dark and sinister, at others simply insane. As Brian Hogg observed in his sleeve notes to Edsel’s mid-80s compilation ‘Transparent Day’: “(t)here are few groups as enigmatic, as mysterious or as plain contradictory…” This article does not pretend to be a definitive account of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – indeed, it now seems clear that some questions will never properly be answered – but the story which emerges is fascinating nevertheless, not least as an insight into how extraordinary music could emerge from a group driven by internal conflicts and held in the thrall of a man driven by dubious motives.

Born in Colorado Springs in 1946 and ’47 respectively, Shaun and Danny Harris were brought up with three sisters in an atmosphere of prodigious, but decidedly eccentric, talent. Their father, Roy Harris, was the world-renowned composer of sixteen symphonies while their mother, Joanna, was a classical pianist who taught post-graduate at New York’s Julliard School of Music. As Shaun ruefully recalls, such an environment proved to be something of a mixed blessing: “One day our mother was showing us a couple of harmony things on the piano and my dad came in and said to us: ‘You’re never going to even approximate my success, so let’s go out to lunch!’ Neither Danny nor I were trained in instruments when we were young and our parents didn’t force us. I think that was unfortunate. Later I would be asked to compose movie scores but I had to turn the work down because I didn’t know how to write music.” Years later, Shaun and Danny would proudly play their father the test pressing of the first Reprise album. As Dan recalls: “He listened to it in silence and then told us to sit down. We thought he really liked it until he said ‘It’s like bringing you up for seventeen years and realizing you’re members of the Hitler Youth Movement’! It was just so far removed from his way of musical thinking. That kind of thing has happened all our lives.”

Meanwhile, in Beverley Hills, despite the fact that neither of his parents were professional musicians, Michael Lloyd‘s mother insisted that he take lessons from a young age: “I had been playing classical piano since I was four. In the 4th grade of grammar school I met Jimmy Greenspoon who was a piano player too and we started playing duets and writing our own little instrumental songs. At that time we didn’t really sing so we decided that one of us had to learn the guitar. We both tried, but since Jimmy was more of a piano player than a guitar player, I learnt the guitar and that was when we started to play Surf music.” In 1962, while still at junior school, Michael and Jimmy formed their first band, the Dimensions, and began to play Surf instrumentals inspired by bands like the Ventures. The following year, having built up an impressive reputation locally as a live act, the New Dimensions [as they had now become] cut their first record at Stereo Masters, the 2-track studio where The Beach Boys had made their debut two years earlier: “We actually played with The Beach Boys at a couple of concerts, but we never thought of them as a Surf band because as far as we were concerned the real Surf music was instrumental!” Despite releasing several albums [recently compiled on a Sundazed CD], Lloyd’s band had little of the success of their illustrious predecessors, but it was while recording at Stereo Masters that Lloyd had a chance meeting which was to prove prophetic. As Kim Fowley recalls: “I was there mastering one day when I saw this kid being dropped off by his mother with several reels of tape under his arm. I guess I was 24 and he was 14. I said to him “Excuse me young man, are you a musician, engineer or producer?” He said “All three. Who are you?” It was the beginning of a friendship that was to prove highly significant, not just for Fowley and Lloyd, but also for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

When The Beatles invaded America in 1964 Michael Lloyd, in common with many others, realized that the future belonged to vocal music. For a brief period the New Dimensions performed and recorded as a vocal group under the name the Alley Kats, but when the members drifted apart Michael formed a new group, the Rogues. In the Fall of ’64 he left High School and entered the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Hollywood Professional School and it was there that he met the Harris brothers for the first time.

Shaun and Danny had been living very much in the shadow of their parents’ musical careers, which had taken them all over North America and beyond, but in 1962 the Harris family settled in Los Angeles. It wasn’t long before the two brothers joined the Snowmen, a local band who had already had a minor hit, ‘Ski Storm’, under the guidance of producer Kim Fowley. Shaun remembers: “The guitar player was Chris Gordon who I met at a Summer Camp for entertainers’ children in the mountains. I contacted him when we got back to LA and we ended up in that band. We had a rehearsal place behind one of the members’ houses. Up until then Danny and I had been playing more like folk music and I had never used an electric guitar – only a nylon stringed acoustic – but I really liked playing this guy’s Stratocaster and twin reverb amp. I liked being in a band but I never felt I had the stage presence for it – I just liked the music. The first recording I actually remember was called ‘While I Was Away’, or something like that. When it was pressed up I drove out to California going to little radio stations, but I had no idea of the complexity of the record industry. I heard it played a few times, but it never really saw the light of day. That was quite dispiriting really. When Danny and I went to Hollywood Professional School Lloyd was in a band called the Rogues and we were in the Snowmen. There was a little bit of competition and I remember them coming to see us one night. Michael had real dedication but the rest of his band were just High School students looking for something extra to do [one member of the group, Michael Lembeck, went on to be the Director of the TV show ‘Friends’]. Danny and I had a whole lot of dedication too and I started playing bass in the Rogues. I had never played bass guitar before, but Michael showed me how in about 5 minutes.” For a short while Shaun played bass in the Rogues and whilst he was a member the band released a single on Fowley’s Living Legend label. Entitled ‘Wanted: Dead Or Alive’ b/w ‘One Day’, the A-side was a joint composition between Michael and Shaun.

Danny also remembers this time: “I went to the same Santa Monica High School as Ry Cooder and we would play Bluegrass together. When Shaun and I joined the Snowmen I was 16 and he was 17 and we played every night at the Methodist Church in Pacific Palisades. Although I could play great Bluegrass and Country guitar, I was such a bad electric guitarist that they only allowed me to play a nylon acoustic and no one could hear me! It was just at this time that we met Michael who had his own band the Rogues. Shortly after that we started our last years in High School at the Hollywood Professional School. At that time Michael was living in Beverley Hills and we were living in Malibu, so we would come by and pick him up on the way into school. The teachers there were all at least eighty years old with shiny blue hair. I stood for Student Boy President and won! So I got to meet people like O.J. Simpson. He spoke at the Police Academy and told me: ‘Stay at school Dan and get into your music, but stay healthy!’ Kim Fowley and Michael came out to hear us playing at the church. That was the time when he had groups like the Laughing Wind who were recording on Tower Records. It was a week after that we started playing together. You could say that it happened over night. We were going to the same school and all playing in bands.”

After the trio realized that they shared a common passion for music, they used some recording equipment borrowed from Shaun and Danny’s father to set up a small studio in Michael’s bedroom. It was there that they made some of the rudimentary recordings which would later appear as ‘Volume 1’ on the Fifo label under the name of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Shaun: “My dad had some old Ampex recording equipment in his garage and we took this stuff over to Michael’s house. We would work all night and have school the next day and make demo records for people like Kim Fowley. The personnel in those days were Danny Belsky [who had already played sax with Lloyd in the Dimensions], Michael, Danny and me. Dennis Lambert was a guitar player in the band in the early days and later we added John Ware [who replaced Belsky] on drums. My girlfriend took the picture on the cover of the Fifo album – I think that was outside our recording studio in Beverley Hills.”
As Lloyd recalls: “We sat in my bedroom for a while with some Ampex tape machines and did some stuff there, but then that got to be crazy – we couldn’t have any drums. So we found a little place to rent nearby and we ended up putting our version of a little studio in and recorded all kinds of things, including that record. It was two track and Mono and we really squeezed by on whatever was handy – which wasn’t much – but it was fun. I remember at about that time the Yardbirds were playing in a club over in Hollywood and we hung around with them for a little while, specifically for Jeff Beck, and watched them play. So when we did the Fifo album it was, you know, Fender amplifiers up full and we would hit them and that’s what’s happening in our version of ‘You Really Got Me’. I don’t know if I could get the same sound again. It is just so over-driven, so much distortion – it was crazy! And that’s what all that was about. We would just kind of do each song, see what it sounded like, and then go on to the next one. Not a lot of time was spent on it.”

Danny: “The Fifo album was recorded in the Burton Way studio. The equipment was so good that word got around that we were not just a demo house – we were mastering. We would watch the British invasion on ‘Shindig’ and we loved the sounds. The harmonies of Peter & Gordon and Chad & Jeremy. We loved Marianne Faithfull, we thought the Dave Clark Five were stupendous and, of course, we saw The Beatles at the Dodgers’ Stadium. That was a catalyst to us in the sense that we thought: ‘If these guys can do it then so can we!’ After all, if it hadn’t been for Brian Epstein they might have stayed in Hamburg or Liverpool.”

Judging by their achievements thus far, it is clear that Shaun, Danny and Michael lacked neither the talent nor the ambition to achieve considerable success – had they been left to their own devices. According to Lloyd, the trio had already released a single on Tower records – ‘Good To Be Around’ b/w ‘Don’t Take Very Much To See Tomorrow’ – under the guise of the Laughing Wind. Their destiny was, however, about to take a rather unusual turn, for it was during the period of these early recordings that the fateful meeting with Bob Markley came about.

The unwitting introduction was made by Kim Fowley: “I first met Markley in 1960 because we shared the same Attorney. He was about 7 years older than me and was a guy in the tradition of Robert Conrad. He had a Colgate smile and he looked like an actor. As a child he had been adopted by an oil millionaire. He got a degree in law and was in college groups playing the bongos – a beatnik kind of thing – and he had a TV show in Oklahoma which was like American Bandstand. So there he was as the Dick Clark of Norman, Oklahoma when this Warner Bros executive came through town, saw him on camera and said: “Gee, why don’t you come to Hollywood and be an actor?” So he went to Hollywood and got signed to Warner Bros, but he failed as an actor and then he recorded that single – it was worse than Fabian! Luckily he still had his inheritance and his big house. So he was an actor, singer and lawyer who didn’t act, couldn’t sing and never practised law!” That single was, of course, the infamous Bob Markley ’45 released on Warner Bros: ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’ b/w ‘It Should Have Been Me’. Although on its surface a fairly standard piece of teenage doo-wop, there is something decidedly weird about the record and Markley’s spoken ‘rap’ anticipates the vocal style which he would later adopt on songs like ‘1906’. It would be no coincidence when, a few years later, the Reprise subsidiary of the same label released three albums by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

 In 1965 the Yardbirds followed hot on the heels of The Beatles with their first US tour. It was not a runaway success. As Kim Fowley recalls: “When I was in London in 1964 I met the Yardbirds at Richmond Athletic Club and became friendly with Giorgio Gomelsky. When they came to the States the following year he rang me up to tell me that they were in danger of being thrown out of the country because they didn’t have work permits. Apparently the only way they could perform was by playing a private party. So Giorgio asked me if I could fill a house with people that would break the group and I agreed.” The chosen venue was a smart mansion which Markley had rented in a fashionable district of Beverley Hills. “I told Epic to invite all the radio programmers and rock critics and we had over 180 industry journalists, programme directors, disc jockeys and a handful of the in-crowd. Al Kooper was the warm up act and Phil Spector came with his binoculars so he could watch Jeff Beck’s fingers. The Yardbirds started playing in the dark and when we put the lights up people cried and threw roses.” Amongst the guests were three awestruck teenagers – Michael, Shaun and Danny Harris. They were ‘blown away’ by the band and, like Spector, a certain member’s highly unorthodox guitar technique. As Lloyd recalls: “Jeff Beck was hitting the amplifier with his guitar and using an Vox AC30 to overdrive an AC100. In those days there weren’t any of the little attachments to produce that distorted feedback kind of sound. So there they were playing and I remember in the middle of ‘For Your Love’ and ‘I’m Your Man’ he was doing all these amazing things and we had never heard anything like it”.

But Markley was, apparently, less impressed by the Yardbirds than he was by the crowd which they had drawn to his house – especially the large number of teenage girls. So when Fowley introduced him to Michael, Shaun and Danny and told him that they had a band of their own, he took an immediate interest. According to Lloyd: “He seemed like an OK guy. We were really impressed that he had this great house and he knew all these starlets and stuff. At that time we didn’t have too much equipment and we wanted to get a light show, and so here was this guy who was saying to us: ‘Well, I want to be in your band. What I’ll do is I’ll get the equipment and I’ll just play the tambourine or congas or something’. So that is what happened. He had seen the incredible amount of girls that thought rock and roll was really cool and that was his only motivation.”

Kim Fowley adds another insight: “Knowing Markley he hustled the younger guys. He saw that with Michael and the Harris brothers he could have a Hollywood Surf version of The Velvet Underground with some Frank Zappa thrown in. The Velvets had played in New York and nobody had paid much attention, but Markley followed the media – he wasn’t stupid.” So it was that in this unlikely alliance the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was born.

It seems that much of the material which made up the Fifo album was already completed by the time Markley became involved. However, the inclusion of certain tracks – ‘Don’t Break My Balloon’ [a prime example of Bob’s ‘singing’] and ‘If You Want This Love’ – indicates that he must have had some influence over the sessions and, more to the point, their subsequent release on vinyl. As Shaun concedes, it was Bob who had the money and the contacts: “The Fifo album came about because Markley was the one who had the money to press up the records and wanted something tangible. He came up with the name – I think it was after he saw The Velvet Underground – but I thought it was pretentious and over-long. We started playing at a trendy club called The Other Place (so-called because there was a trendier club nearby called The Daisy) on Tuesday nights and we had the first on-going light show with a movie screen [see the back cover of the first Reprise album]. Markley would bring people out to watch us and that probably led to the deal with Reprise.”

Danny’s recollections are similar: “How did we end up on Reprise? That’s where Markley came in. It all happened in about six months from the time of the Yardbirds party where he heard about us, but I don’t give Markley any credit. He didn’t discover us. We already had our own studio and he had a volcanic rock pool! Starlets would come up to his house on a Sunday and we wandered into that. It was a kind of trade-off. We said: ‘OK. We’ll record these songs and put them out as a West Coast Pop Art thing and in return we want to be able to come up here and hang out’. Markley was ten, maybe fifteen years older than us and with his long hair and expensive clothes he personified the sixties look, but he had the mind of an astute lawyer. He was gifted with his tongue but not in a musical way. The biggest taunt we could give him was when he was throwing a party and we would put on that single that he did for Warner Bros!
Markley was very good at meeting people and ingratiating himself. He said ‘I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma, son of an oil tycoon, I own my own house, I lease my place up here on the Strip and all I have to do is find a band, become a non-musical member and look the part’. Then he said that he had registered the name and not the members of the group, that he could replace anyone he chose and even sack the band. He put all the publishing through his own company – that was a typical Attorney’s move – and even though we played some big places like Birmingham, Alabama, all our earnings were nothing like they should have been.”

According to Lloyd, Bob “came to Hollywood, he had a lot of money and he liked to meet people. He played tennis at Jack Warner’s house, who used to own Warner Bros. It was a whole different kind of echelon from what we were working with – we would have been lucky to meet Jack Warner’s gardener!” As for the name, Lloyd explains: “The ‘Pop Art’ stuff was because of Andy Warhol, ‘Experimental’ because we could do almost any kind of music at that point and ‘West Coast’ because we were on the West Coast which at the time was this mystical, special place. Also it was just an odd name. It wasn’t a very serious statement of intent. I think we were just trying to put something together that sounded interesting.”

In the early days the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band appeared fairly regularly on the Los Angeles live circuit and it wasn’t long before they ventured beyond the rather cramped confines of clubs like The Other Place. As Shaun recalls: “The Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable had been up on Sunset and Markley assembled the light show. We played live at that time and I remember playing at some Exhibition Centre with Frank Zappa and Little Gary Ferguson.” A flier for a gig at The Shrine Exposition Hall on the 17th of September 1966 shows the group sharing a line-up with the Mothers of Invention, the Count V, Lowell George’s Factory and the ‘sensational 7 year old’ Ferguson. The band’s photo shows Lloyd, Markley, the Harris brothers and John Ware sitting in field of flowers. “That was an old picture. Danny is wearing the glasses and the guy on the right was John Ware who played drums.” The latter’s fairly scathing account of the band’s early days, given in an interview with the Omaha Rainbow in 1981, is well known. According to Ware the band’s live performances, dominated by an ambitious light show directly inspired by Andy Warhol, were “the ultimate street happening for a while”, but he suggests that Markley was cynically motivated by the commercial exploitation of his largely teenage audience. He concludes: “It was so dumb. It had nothing to do with music.” Shaun is not impressed: “Ware had a way of saying things which was pretentious, you could say delusional, even. We didn’t make tons of money.” The light show was clearly a large part of the band’s appeal. As Fowley recalls: “I only saw them play once – at The Daisy. It was full of lots of teenagers who Markley had assembled to witness his greatness. They had a great light show done by Buddy Walters, a Hillbilly guy who later did the lights for Hendrix and The Animals.” And Lloyd said: “I think we had some sort of a following around here, I mean the Mothers of Invention opened up for us at the Shrine Auditorium when we played there. It was this gigantic light show that we used.”

With a certain irony, in the summer of 1967 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band actually played with the Yardbirds [although Jeff Beck had by this time been replaced by Jimmy Page]. Also on the bill at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium were the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Captain Beefheart and Moby Grape and a review of the gig appeared in the LA Free Press. Despite describing the band as “instrumentally quite good” the reviewer took no care to disguise his contempt for their “non-participating producer and general hypester”, observing that “a kid in the audience was keeping better time on his tambourine than Markley.” How far this was a genuine reflection of the group’s live act, and the talents of their apparent leader in particular, is hard to judge – the Free Press was a notoriously left-wing newspaper which would inevitably have taken an antagonistic stance to a band from Beverly Hills – but photographs taken of the group playing at The Other Place the previous year, do show Markley brandishing a tambourine, his microphone conspicuous by its absence.

Wherever the truth lay, the Reprise debut album ‘Part One’ was a stunning album, not least on account of its lurid orange cover, which attempted to convey the excitement of the band’s live performance. In the effusive words of the Los Angeles Times reviewer quoted on the back cover, this was “a total experience. The group developed an S.R.O [standing room only] following”. The music occupied a broad scope, ranging from anthemic pop songs and acoustic ballads to harder-edged psychedelic numbers, but the eclectic mixture said much about the band’s internal contradictions. Markley’s influence surely lay behind the unlikely choice for the album’s only single: ‘1906’ b/w ‘Shifting Sands’. Since the songs were credited to Markley/Morgan and Baker Knight respectively, it was obvious who was in control. Despite being on a major label and having a limited release in France, the single, like the album, was not a commercial success and, given the A-side’s bizarre lyrics, this was hardly surprising. For example:

“See the frightened foxes / See the hunchback in the park / He’s blind and can’t run for cover / I don’t feel well / Hear my master’s ugly voice / See the teeth marks on my leash / Only freaks know all the answers / I don’t feel well.”

From the very beginning the rest of the band were unhappy with Markley’s dominance in the studio which was, in their opinion, out of all proportion to his musical ability. According to Shaun: “In the early days we had to acquiesce with Markley telling us what to do. The part that was frustrating was that he had no musical aptitude of any kind and so what he was trying to do to be different and innovative ended up sounding contrived. It was an embarrassment. I still feel that way.”
Danny agrees: “The musical talent in the band belonged to Shaun, Michael and myself, period. Shaun was an incredible bass player and on the first Reprise album I did a lot of the finger-picking stuff. But not only that. There was a lot of feedback, a lot of spontaneous stuff, a lot of one-take cuts.” It is arguable, however, that such internal tensions contributed much to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s unique sound, since one of the undoubted strengths of their three Reprise albums lay in the constant juxtaposition of musical styles; not just between songs, but also within them. One of those extraordinary tracks was ‘Leiyla’, another was the ‘Overture’ on ‘Volume Two’. Danny: “While decibels of sound were exploding outside I would be sitting in an isolation booth listening on headphones where I would lay on a little classical thing – like a Bach cantata – right into the song.”

Although Jimmy Bowen was co-credited with Markley as the album’s Producer, he apparently made little contribution to the actual recording. As Danny recalls: “Bowen would come in with his wife at the top of the sessions at United Western recording studios and then come back after three or four hours to check it out. By that time we would have finished a song, including the vocal harmonies and everything, and he would say: ‘My god! A silk purse from a sow’s ear!'” But the presence of Bowen, who had begun his career in Texas with Buddy Holly and later went on to be a Country music producer for MCA, may have had more to do with why the band were able to record for Reprise in the first place.

Shaun: “Jimmy Bowen was basically a southern guy and Markley was from Oklahoma and that was probably how they met.” Another southern contact was Baker Knight, who composed both ‘Shifting Sands’ and ‘If You Want This Love’. “Markley had a friend called Baker Knight who wrote Ricky Nelson’s songs and ‘The Wonder Of You’ for Elvis. Because they had been hits he acted as if he could write songs for any genre – even psychedelic music. He had written very good pop songs but these were fifteen years before. ‘Shifting Sands’ was a good song but I think this owed as much to our arrangement as anything else.” According to Fowley: “‘If You Want This Love’ was originally a hit on Aurora Records for Sonny Knight, a black artist. I remember Markley told me a story once that Baker Knight had tried to commit suicide by sticking his head in a gas oven and lighting a match and he had to have plastic surgery.” By an interesting coincidence [or was it?] Jimmy Bowen’s wife, Keely Smith, had also recorded a swing version of the song under the title ‘This Love of Mine’. Danny: “We changed the time signature and made it very driving. I remember when Baker Knight first heard the playback he didn’t know what to make of it and said [adopts gruff southern drawl]: ‘Hey! I thought this was a Country song!'”

The group’s more commercial side was represented by two tracks which showcased their immaculate harmonies. According to Danny ‘Transparent Day’ “came about in the studio, much like the Everly Brothers. Shaun and I wrote that with Michael.” ‘Here’s Where You Belong’ was, of course, written by the immortal P.F. Sloan: “We were recording a thing for the Ed Sullivan show at The Other Place. It wasn’t a live recording, they were taping our group with our lightshow. Phil Sloan came by with this tune of his – it was this folk-rock Byrds kind of song – and I think Shaun had heard some of his stuff and felt that, if it was embellished with some electric guitar and our three-part harmonies, it could become a very powerful song and help our album out. Michael agreed and so the three of us met with Phil and he had to show us sheet music and how it sounded – these were the days before you had demo tapes – and I guess we recorded that about two weeks later.”
Lloyd recalls: “P.F. Sloan was a big name around here, he was like a big time songwriter. We were going to do a another of his songs called ‘Where Were You When I Needed You’, but I think, because the Grass Roots had the hit, we just didn’t get it recorded in time.” Further contrast was provided by the tracks which closed each side of the album. According to Dan, ‘Will You Walk With Me’ was “primarily coming from a classical background – there’s a string quartet and a celeste.” The song was also a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability on the acoustic guitar. The announcement ‘Part 1: The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’, which introduces Van Dyke Parks’ ‘High Coin’, was an echo of the group’s live act, where the piece would be used to open each portion of the show.
Danny: “Parks was a brilliant musician. His was a piano rendition but for that first album I made my own arrangement so that it became like our break song. To me that was the high point were we blended the acoustic and electric sounds and tied it together with harpsichord.” As Lloyd recalls: “When we played live that was how we used to end each set and begin the next and that’s how ‘Part 1’, ‘Part 2’, etc. came about. We always liked that chord progression – it would fit into our folk kind of thing – but we never really knew the song.” The tune would later reappear on Lloyd’s wonderful Smoke album under the title ‘Daisy Intermission’.

There has long been confusion about who actually participated in the band’s recordings once they were signed to Reprise. According to Shaun: “We recorded the first Reprise album some time in 1966, although it wasn’t released until the following year. I was playing bass, Danny was playing acoustic guitar and either Hal Blaine or Jimmy Gordon played drums. I’m trying to remember who played guitar – I think it was Ron Morgan. Ron was friends with some of the Standells. He was a great guitar player but he had no sense of responsibility or being on time. Sometimes he wouldn’t turn up at all – he wouldn’t even get out of bed to catch a flight! The last I heard of Ron he was driving a cab in Denver.”
The involvement of Morgan, whose distinctive lead guitar playing can be heard on this and all their subsequent albums, has long been overlooked.

A clue to his involvement can to be found on the labels of the records themselves, where he is credited (alongside Markley) with writing some of the most significant songs: ‘1906’, ‘Smell Of Incense’, ‘Eighteen Is Over The Hill’, ‘As The World Rises And Falls’ and ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’. Despite this, he appears in only a single album photo – as the mysterious mustachioed figure in the round glasses and cowboy hat on the back of ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. He would look much the same a year or so later when he turned up as a member of the ‘new improved’ Electric Prunes on their dismal Reprise swan song ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’.

The involvement of Ron Morgan also had another significance, because it seems that his arrival coincided with the departure of Michael Lloyd, an early casualty of the internal conflicts which would eventually destroy the band completely. According to Shaun: “Morgan got involved to replace Michael which was a thing between him and Markley – that was the time when Michael was starting his other projects.” Danny recalls: “I was never involved in that. It wasn’t Michael’s fault. It was a personality conflict because people liked Michael and they didn’t like Markley. The people who liked Markley were the sort of people who wanted to hang out at his house and meet starlets. I remember we were recording an album and there was an argument between Michael and Markley about who was going to walk out of the studio with the master tapes. It developed into a fistfight and Michael broke a guitar over Markley’s back. He just decided ‘Who needs this when I can do this by myself?’ So the studio was shut down over at Burton Way and he had a custom-made 16 track put in his own home. At that time another guy was hired just to play the guitar – that was Ron Morgan. He was a very good lead guitar player and when the band dissolved he went on to play with Three Dog Night. Unfortunately he died last year in a car accident.”

Lloyd himself has difficulty recalling exactly which of the group’s recordings he participated in, but in view of the vast number of other projects in which he was involved this is hardly surprising. During 1966 and ’67, as well as doing production work for Kim Fowley and Mike Curb, he also produced, played and sang on LPs by October Country and his own band the Smoke. He even found time to score Steven Spielberg’s first short film ‘Amblin”. Lloyd only shared one song-writing credit on ‘Part One’ – the beautifully understated ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ – and although he had sung lead on the Fifo version of the track, the Reprise recording was sung by Shaun, who also took lead vocals on most of the other songs on the album. Michael’s name or voice would not reappear on any of the band’s records until the ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ LP. According to Lloyd: “The problem was that, after a little while, it became more and more difficult for the three of us to be in a group with Markley. I don’t want to make it sound like we hated him or that it got into a huge scene, but he started to believe that he was like, you know, the real deal, as opposed to the guy who doesn’t sing and doesn’t really have any musical thoughts and stuff like that. He wasn’t content anymore just being the guy who ended up with the girls that he could get from it. Now he wanted to be respected or something – he wanted more out of it. Well, we had a lot of problems with that, because that wasn’t the deal and yet we were in this kind of symbiotic relationship. So I ended up getting a deal with Tower and Shaun and Danny and I did some stuff over there as the Laughing Wind, but nothing really happened with that.”
On the question of who sang on the records, Lloyd says: “Sometimes all three of us would sing at the same time, like on ‘Sassafras’ for instance. We recorded that as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, but never used it and put it out later as the California Spectrum. Occasionally we did stuff like that, because Shaun and Danny were kind of folk based – acoustic guitar, finger-picking stuff, you know – and they were used to singing kind of group stuff together. Not like lead singer / backing singer, which I was used to, but people singing harmony all at once. That was something a little different for me and it was a good influence. We did a lot of stuff like that – I don’t remember now on a song by song basis – but a lot of them were Shaun alone. Who sang kind of depended on who was fighting with Bob at the moment and who wasn’t, you know. Before, on the first recordings, it was almost always me and then later, when I had a falling out with Bob, it was mostly Shaun. It was like ‘Well see, he’s my favourite now’, you know.”

Recorded and released in 1967, ‘Volume Two’ (Reprise RS 6270) was a more ambitious work than its predecessor, with all of the tracks credited either in whole or in part to members of the band. The cover art was particularly striking, at its centre a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens showing Shaun, Bob and Danny sitting bare-chested on the floor of a silver bathroom. Inspired, apparently, by the Bond film ‘Goldfinger’, the interior was also highly reminiscent of Warhol’s foil-covered Factory in New York. If one looks very closely, Markley appears to be grinning from ear to ear. On the back of the LP the band’s name appeared beneath the slogan: ‘Breaking Through’ and at the bottom was the declaration: “Every song in this album has been written, arranged, sung and played by the group. No one censored us. We got to say everything we wanted to say, in the way we wanted to say it”. Markley, no doubt, saw this as the perfect expression of the agenda which, like the name, he had foisted on the band, but as far as Shaun Harris is concerned, for ‘we’ read ‘Bob Markley’: “The cover was an Art Director’s bathroom in a house in LA. It was probably someone who Markley knew, but if you look at the back cover you’ll notice that his picture is bigger than Danny’s and mine and this is a guy who is hardly on the record!” Well, in one sense that is true, for, as on the other records, Bob did not play any instrument (with the possible exception of percussion) and even though he contributed some of the vocals this was generally limited to his manic speaking, leaving the actual singing to the Harris brothers. But his ideas and, of course, his lyrics, dominated the record.

The album’s startling opening was ‘In The Arena’, a bold, if not entirely convincing, political satire dominated by Morgan’s strident guitar, Markley’s megaphone-sounding voice and Shaun and Danny’s cascading quasi-religious harmonies. But none of this quite prepared the listener for what followed. ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes?‘ was again dominated by Markley’s extraordinary lyrics, although in this instance the missing credit should have gone to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The opening lines were borrowed from part of a famous anti-isolationist speech which he delivered at Chautauqua, New York State on the 14th of August 1936:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

Complete with ‘primitive’ noises, an army of percussion and building to an impressive climax before ending with the sound of a baby’s cries the composition stretches the listener’s credibility to its limits.
Dan: “Here’s this song with a strong rhythm behind it and we would slowly build up a wall of sound from the bottom up and the vocal was almost the least important part. The harmonies were right but the lyrics… well we thought that Markley was just an idiot who was trying to fit into a groove that he just wasn’t into.” Depending upon your point of view, it’s either one the most pretentious things you’ve ever heard or a brilliant expression of anti-war sentiment.

Despite co-writing and singing on the next track, ‘Buddha’, Shaun was not impressed with the results: “Believe me, I’m not going to ask that they play that at my wake! Markley would give you a page of lyrics and tell you what sort of song he wanted it to be – that would be ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ – but he couldn’t tell you nuances or anything like that.”
The album’s undoubted highlight, however, was ‘Smell of Incense’, which featured some wonderful interplay between Morgan’s hypnotic guitar, Shaun’s excellent bass playing and some extraordinary drumming from either Blaine or Gordon topped with the Harris brothers’ breathy vocals. Despite the track’s somewhat heady atmosphere, Danny insists that none of the band’s music was drug inspired: “We lived the legend without the drugs. Shaun and I were Irish kids so we both drank a bit, but Michael had a very strict upbringing so he never even drank and Shaun never smoked.” Kim Fowley adds to this: “I didn’t drink, Michael Lloyd was brought up strictly and he didn’t drink and Markley didn’t drink either. All this madness was done without drink or drugs – not even dope. All of Babylon was raging about us but Pat Boone could have walked in and not been offended!”

On the vexed question of what category the band’s music fell into, Danny has this to say: “Was our music psychedelic? I would say that it needed a moniker and all the rest of the stuff was bullshit. We were a band who considered that we could play any style of music – we had classical nuances in all of our albums. Many of these songs were created in the studio and Ron Morgan was a definite influence on the album – this was the one where Michael wasn’t there. Ron’s father was a jazz musician who played in pizza restaurants in Denver. Because he was a lead player I taught him how to fingerpick. This was an opening up our music into an honest statement of what it was – not when we were still searching for some common ground that people would buy. We never cared if it sold or not.”

After the Overture, with Danny’s short but beautiful coda, closed the first side, the flip was something of a contrast. For the first time – but not the last – the dominating theme of Markley’s lyrics was either girls or women, although the distinction between the two seems deliberately ambiguous. ‘Queen Nymphet’ opened the side with the words: “You’re too young / You’re just a child” and continued with the refrain “When you’re older”. ‘Unfree Child’, the B-side to the group’s second and last single – an edited version of ‘Smell of Incense’ – was also the nearest which Bob ever came to singing on record. Beyond the atmospheric beginning of slowed-down tape effects and echoing guitar and tabla the song addressed the unfree child “sitting at a dull desk in a dull school”, then built slowly to a climax before Markley declared: “Let her be free. Let her sneak off on an adventure. Come tomorrow we’ll watch the dawn. Delicate fawn. Let her be free.”

According to Shaun the blistering guitar track ‘Carte Blanche’, with its repeated “Hey Trish, come on home!” and lines like “You left behind a hotel chain and a stately reputation”, was based on a real person: “Carte Blanche was a credit card tied to the Hilton Hotels and Markley was friendly with Trish Hilton who was married to one of the family.” One of Danny’s contributions to the album was the banjo-driven ‘Delicate Fawn’: “That was a very polite little song about a guy who falls in love with a girl and wants to take her riding on his BSA motorbike. I said ‘I don’t want a bass player on this, it’s too heavy.’ So we used a tuba instead and we brought in a bagpipe player who was from the Black Watch – we got him through the Musicians’ Union! We didn’t know how to end the song so we just had him let the air out of the bag”. The song ended with the line “Stay away from dirty old men.” Says Shaun: “If Markley was obsessed with children it wasn’t in a positive way.”

Unfortunately, the inspiration behind the most obviously biographical song, the jazz-flavoured ‘Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday’ – about a girl who “lit her candle at both ends and started flipping out on Monday” – remains a mystery. According to Shaun: “These were always personal glimpses, these were people Markley knew.”

By 1968 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were poised to release their fourth album – but their last for Reprise. Thus far, in terms of record sales at least, they had conspicuously failed to set the world alight – or even the small corner they call Los Angeles. Yet in many ways ‘Volume III – A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil‘ was the group’s most extraordinary achievement. A newspaper piece of the time – the only contemporary record of Markley’s words beyond his lyrics and sleeve pronouncements – provides us with a tantalizing insight into the creative processes at work within the group. After describing a rare live appearance by the band at a Teenage Fair in Portland, Oregon – at which six girls apparently fainted – Bob was quoted as saying this about ‘A Child’s Guide’: “The lyrical content is so meaningful and gets in so deep that we are treading the fine line of perfect taste. Donovan did it on his ‘Sunshine Superman’ album, Dylan did it on ‘John Wesley Harding’ and I hope that we did it here. What I try and do is take as much material about a subject as I can, condense it to an exact point and hope to capture all the meaning that maybe forty pages of material would have.” The article pointed to the album’s closing track, ‘Anniversary Of World War III’, as the perfect example of Bob’s economy with words – three minutes of total silence.

Whether one views the comparisons with Dylan and Donovan as justified – or merely as evidence of Markley’s delusions of grandeur – the album was certainly the band’s most complex offering to date. As its title suggested, the work was a fusion of innocence and malice, the subject matter perfectly reflected in John Van Hamersveld’s striking cover art work. If the ‘butterfly mind’ represented both the transience of innocence and the psychedelic possibilities of a mind in free flight, its stark black and white setting rendered the image distinctly sinister. Hamersveld, who began working as an Art Director for Capitol Records in 1966, produced some of the most enduring images of the age, including the poster for cult surf movie ‘Endless Summer’ and album covers like Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Crown Of Creation’ and the Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’. In 1967 he formed the Pinnacle partnership and promoted gigs at the Shrine Auditorium by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Velvet Underground.

John recalls his work on ‘A Child’s Guide’: “Bob Markley wanted a photograph of the band on the back so I took them up onto a hillside near Burbank and photographed them in colour with a Hasselblad camera and a wide angle lens. For the front cover I used the face from a photograph of Stevie, an artist friend who would pose nude for me. I combined my drawings and letterforms in black and white to create a stark contrast in the record racks. Black and white was also an issue in terms of dark and light karma. The butterfly’s wings are a psychological symbol for reading in to the mind, like an ink blot test by a psychologist, but as art. In this image, the head is thinking of the butterfly image – freedom from the karma in the well of darkness.” It was surely one of the most powerful and iconic cover illustrations of its era.

The contrast between light and darkness extended into the music, with the naive peace-and-love message of some of the songs sitting uneasily beside the ironic cynicism of tracks like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’ (“We should have called Suzie and Bobby / They like to watch fires!” Bob cheerfully intoned). Once again, Shaun was distinctly unimpressed with Markley’s ideas and he is at a loss to explain the meaning behind many of the song titles – let alone the lyrics. Take ‘Our Drummer Always Plays In The Nude’, for example: “That certainly wasn’t true! It was just another of his contrived attempts to be hip”. Or ‘Until The Poorest People Have Money To Spend’: “Rest assured that Markley would have been the last person in the world to give anyone a farthing!” Shaun had grown increasingly tired of the way in which his carefully crafted pop compositions were being highjacked by Markley’s bizarre musical agenda: “There would be times when you would have a good melody and you would think: ‘I don’t want to waste it on this…'” Yet, arguably, it was precisely these contradictions which made the work so powerful and unnerving, the disparate words and music often entwining with remarkable effect. Nowhere were the group’s internal conflicts better highlighted than on the album’s title track. The song opened with Shaun’s gorgeous riff and the harmonic fanfare of the wordless chorus before descending unexpectedly into another of Markley’s extraordinary monologues:

“Take my hand and run away with me / Through the forest until the leaves and trees slow us down / A vampire bat will suck blood from our hands / A dog with rabies will bite us / Rats will run up your legs / But nothing will matter. “After the doors of many strange rooms have been bolted and locked / When you come back dragging your day dreams behind you / I’ll give you a new shiny face / And a yellow brick road / The rest of the world is wrong / Don’t let anyone change you. “Evil doesn’t exist anymore / Except for the war”

The mixture of the magical and the macabre was reminiscent of the ‘fairy’ tales of the brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ or ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, but set to music, as it was here, the unnerving contrast between verse and chorus made the song hauntingly effective.

Another highlight was the Markley / Morgan composition ‘As The World Rises and Falls’. The song’s irresistible guitar line evoked the chord progressions of ‘Smell Of Incense’ while the lyrics were some of Markley’s most mysterious and poetic. Sung by Shaun, the dreamy, echoing vocals and lead guitar leant the song an eerie beauty:

“Your eyes have grown tired of / Hunting for the fox and the owl / For smooth stones / And a safe place to hide in the hills by your home / Now you walk with bare feet / Through the wet sand / And the boy sees you and comes running over / And stands about forty seashells away / Wanting to walk on water / To turn you on / But you don’t pay any attention at all. “As the world rises and falls… “Now you have a woman’s shape / Thunderbolts in your fingertips / He has his eyes pinned on you / Be careful he has whips and chains / And he plays ancient games / Without anyone standing in his way / He can change the colour of the sky / If he wants to / But it’s only magic used (?) to him / Because you won’t be easily taken / Or he won’t remember you at all. “As the world rises and falls… “I tried to tell you not to love him / Strongly as you did / You’ll go out again some day / But you won’t forget him for a long time / He tore the mask off your face / And then put you down / And made you want him / More than anyone before / And then he walked away / And you don’t hear from him at all…”

Once more, Ron Morgan’s strident lead guitar dominated the record. For the first time electric sitar – the unmistakable sound of a Coral Electric – was much in evidence, featuring prominently on ‘Ritual #1’, ‘Until The Poorest Of People…’, ‘A Child’s Guide…’ and ‘Ritual #2’. As Morgan’s younger brother, Bob, recalls: “Ron could really put on his guitar antics! He would use some very unusual effects. He had a Magnatone which Seers Roebuck made for accordions and it had a wild organ-type of sound. He would also use a Lesley speaker and a lot of Vox equipment – amps and 12-strings – because the group were sponsored by them for a while.” The album also used some interesting tape effects. According to Shaun, the 3-note electric sitar line on ‘Ritual #1’ was pre-recorded and then looped. Even more bizarrely, ‘As Kind As Summer’ featured a speeded-up-and-slowed-down-tape sequence which sounded the same played both forwards and backwards but made no sense in either direction!

Like many classic albums (and, no doubt, many more deservedly forgotten) ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’ was recorded by a group in a state of crisis. Effectively, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band had now been reduced to a trio. The same newspaper article quoted above listed the personnel for the LP as: “Ron Morgan on lead guitar, Shaun Harris on bass, and Markley on percussion instruments – all sing”. Danny’s involvement was either minimal or non-existent.

As Shaun recalls: “By this time Danny had become ill. He had a sort of manic depressive illness”. The photo on the reverse of the album reflected the same line-up, showing (from front to back) Shaun, Markley and – at last – the elusive Ron, in apparently heavy disguise. According to his brother, after moving to LA from Denver in 1965 Morgan had swiftly immersed himself in the local music scene, recording a demo with two future members of the Iron Butterfly and playing with the early incarnation of Moby Grape, Peter and the Wolves. It was probably through his studio work that he became involved with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. “After the first Reprise album he flew back to Denver and he was real happy with that. But he wasn’t very happy with the singing. He wasn’t a solo singer himself – he just did a little back up – but he was always disenchanted with the vocals. Ron kept coming back and forth from LA and Denver and that was how he missed the photo shoot for the second album. It seemed like the band wasn’t organized at all – it was just a case of throwing stuff together whenever they could – and Ron was always out of time. When he got disenchanted with something, he got flaky. I remember that bit about him not getting out of bed to catch a flight. He didn’t want to go back to LA because he knew what he was going into. I think he really wasn’t into it at that time and just wanted to stay in Denver. He said that he would go into the studio where they would have laid down a lot of stuff and he would try and over-dub, but it would have just been awful – it almost had to be done again. To him the musicianship just wasn’t up to snuff. A lot of people had trouble keeping up with Ron – it was quite funny to watch some times. But by the time of the third Reprise album, he told me that the whole thing was just a total embarrassment – it was pieced together so haphazardly. By this time Ron was heavily involved with Three Dog Night so when it came to the photo for the back of the LP he shaved differently and wore these silly glasses and hat in order not to be recognized. And I think he pulled it off!”

Closer investigation of the label credits suggested that, besides Bob Markley, Shaun and Ron, others also had a hand in shaping the album. The fake ‘live’ track ‘Watch Yourself’, with its over-dubbed crowd noises and some very tasty guitar playing, was solely credited to one R. Yeazel. Later a member of Denver outfit Beast, Yeazel’s name would appear on that band’s 1970 single ‘Communication’ b/w ‘Move Mountain (You Got It)’ alongside a familiar cast of characters: Ron Morgan, Jimmy Greenspoon and Roger Bryant. The plot thickened since Bryant, who had shared a credit with Markley on ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes’, now turned up again on the track ‘As Kind As Summer’. An interesting story related by Morgan’s brother may shed some light on this: “According to Ron, Markley was a rare bird. He was off the wall, definitely. One time the band were rehearsing for a Santa Monica gig and they rented this studio at ABC. They were really killing on this one song ‘Watch Yourself’. That was by Bob Yeazel, a local guy. He’s in a bad way right now – got busted for drugs – music really took a toll on him! He was in the band for a short stint during that third album and so was the bass player Roger Bryant, who I also ran into not so long ago. An actor called Joey Bishop had his own TV talk show on the West Coast back then and he invited the band to come on that evening. They set up in the studio and all of a sudden Markley said: ‘Let’s do ‘Help I’m A Rock’. We’ve got to promote the first album!’ Ron couldn’t believe it. Of course the band completely bombed and they didn’t use it. Ron was really livid.”

It was amidst this atmosphere of increasing disillusionment that the California Spectrum was born. Ever since the ‘Legendary Unreleased Album!‘ was released in 1980 by Lloyd and the Harris brothers – apparently in an attempt to kick-start the reissue of all of the albums – this group and its connections with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band have been the source of much confusion. According to Shaun the origins of the California Spectrum lay in his own growing frustration with Markley’s domination of the group, stemming not only from his antics in the studio, but also his reluctance to promote the band seriously by touring. “Markley would sit there hyping everything and telling you ‘This is great!’ about the songs, but I was disenchanted. I would have been more prepared to believe that his way was right if the albums had sold zillions of copies and we had been really successful, but we weren’t. I think it took some effort to have three albums on Reprise – the same label as Jimi Hendrix – and never really see the light of day. We were never represented by a major booking agency and I don’t think Reprise ever really promoted the band so no one ever got a chance to hear us. I was always unhappy with the situation with Markley – I thought his ultimate aim was just to have an album to show some girl in LA and bring them up to his house. He wasn’t prepared to go out of town and play gigs, for example. Occasionally we would get a deal to play in places like Alabama, but that would have been a highlight – for the most part Markley didn’t aspire to anything other than playing in LA. He thought the Sunset Strip was the coolest place on earth and he was fixated with hustling girls. Twice a year he would get interest on his inheritance and so there were times when he had phenomenal amounts of money and times when he didn’t. He had his nice house up in Beverly Hills and he simply would not have done a hundred-day tour.

“I wanted to move ahead and start playing live more, so around 1968 I decided to take off with the California Spectrum. A guy named Bob Williams, who was this wannabe actor friend of Markley’s, approached us about going out on the road as a band and touring the mid-West, but we weren’t touring because Markley was keeping us in LA. I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave the band? I asked my father and he said he thought we should do it. So my brother and I bought this trailer and we used this drummer called Russ Olmstead. I forget who the guitar player was, but we went through a series of them. For eight months we toured around the central part of the US with a light show and played some West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band stuff, but it was really awful and we made no money. The highlight was playing in Chicago with the Animals in front of about 5,000 people, but we would also have to play beer bars in Illinois from nine ’til four in the morning. One time the Beach Boys were playing at a college nearby and Bruce Johnston, who was a friend of mine, joined us on stage, but no one knew who he was. That’s when I realised that I had made the wrong decision. On that trip I met a few people in the mid-West, bought a house and some offices in Denver and put out some records under the name of the California Spectrum on which I would sing. ‘She May Call You Up Tonight’ was done in just a few minutes at the end of a session Michael had, using musicians like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine. I would go in and throw the music down and they would play it and later we would add vocals. I sang all the parts on that and I think I speeded it up. The B-side ‘Rainbo’ was just some electronic thing. It was released on Shana records [Shana 7915]. ‘Sassafras’ [later released as Raspberry Sawfly 9735, the B-side ‘Obviously Bad’ was a leftover from the Fifo period] came about in the same way. I would write columns in Teen Beat and Tiger Beat and promote the songs and get them played on record, but there was no band to hire!” Intriguingly, a publicity photo for the California Spectrum gave an address in Hays, Kansas and showed the Harris brothers, Lloyd and someone looking very much like Morgan – everyone, that is, except Markley.

Somehow, despite all this upheaval, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band managed to record ‘Where’s My Daddy?‘, their fifth album and the last to be released under that six-word moniker. If their previous label had finally lost faith in the group then it appeared that Jimmy Bowen, at least, had not: the Amos label belonged to him. Nevertheless, after the consistently high standard of the trio of Reprise LPs, the new album was something of a disappointment. Quite apart from the quality of the songs and performance, the record simply sounded different. Whether or not the change of studio and engineer had anything to do with it (recorded at Wally Heider, Warner’s Joe Sidore, who had mastered the previous two albums, was replaced by Bill Halverson, engineer on the first Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions), the warm, echoing depth of its predecessors had disappeared and in its place was a crisp and closely-miked sound which appeared unsuited to the band’s style. Perhaps it was nothing more complicated than the absence of reverb, but although the record had its moments – particularly melodic songs like ‘My Dog Back Home’ and ‘Free As A Bird’ – much of the material simply sounded unrehearsed or even unfinished. Several of the songs – ‘Give Me Your Lovething’ and ‘Not One Bummer’ for example – were barely more than laboured riffs. The latter, in particular, suggested that this was a group running short of fresh ideas – if that guitar line sounded familiar that was because it had simply been lifted from Markley’s old single, ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’. Shaun offers a possible explanation: “On the first album we had been playing the songs live and working out arrangements beforehand, whereas later on the songs were just worked out in the studio whilst we were recording the albums.”

Lyrically, in place of the magic and mysticism of the previous album there was madness; instead of dreams, stark social reality. Many of the themes were familiar: the evil’s of wealth (‘Where Money Rules Everything’), conflicts with authority (‘Have You Met My Pet Pig’) and, of course, young girls. Although at first glance the album cover appeared innocuous, closer inspection revealed a distinctly unsettling image. A lonely, barefooted girl, clutching a doll and sitting beside a crumpled beer can, gazed straight into the eyes of the viewer, of whom she seemed to ask the question which was the album’s title. She was, most likely, the same girl whose shrill voice could be heard introducing the album’s second side with the words: “Part IV – The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band”; to be immediately followed by the song ‘Everyone’s innocent daughter’: “Licking her lollipop fingers / Soft is this girl / Wise is this child / Down below in the city / Faces as grim as granite / I want to run tell the world / How much fun you are…” Another track, ‘Coming Of Age In LA’, had even more questionable motivation. After a spoken opening which appeared to have something to do with puberty, Markley exhorted the listener with the cry: “Step right up folks and get your ticket to LA – the greatest freak show on earth!” Appropriately enough, the rest of the song ran through a bizarre list of lowlife characters, but the narrative began and ended with the tale of “Poor Patty, a beautiful orphan of ten in army surplus clothes” who finished up in court before a drunken judge having been beaten, raped and robbed. It ended abruptly with the voice of the same little girl as before exclaiming: “Judge! Not one bummer the whole beautiful summer!”

Against this backdrop the bare-chested photographs of the band on the album’s rear sleeve made an uncomfortable contrast – a return to the line-up of Bob, Shaun and Danny which had last appeared on the back of the second Reprise LP. The younger Harris brother, in particular, looked in a bad way. Shaun: “Dan was not in good shape. I look at that picture and I think that it was exploitative of Markley to allow him to have his picture taken at that time.” What is slightly puzzling, however, is the absence of Lloyd, despite the fact that he shared credits with Markley on three of the songs and could be heard singing on several tracks – ‘My Dog Back Home’ for instance. Likewise, Ron Morgan’s name was nowhere to be seen even though his spidery lead guitar could still be heard throughout the album. Perhaps he was still trying to remain anonymous.

The following year came ‘Markley, A Group‘. In all but name the last recording by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the album’s title was hugely ironic. In the back sleeve photos a boyish Michael Lloyd appeared alongside a sinister, grinning shot of Markley and the rather more sombre-looking Harris brothers for the first time since the Fifo LP. Indeed, Lloyd was even allowed to share the production credit. Any ideas the others may have had about a new spirit of democracy within the band, however, soon evaporated when Markley insisted on star billing. According to Lloyd: “The Forward album was about the last of Bob being really coherent. He had progressed to saying: ‘Oh, we can’t call it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – it’s got to be my name’. Well, I had arranged this deal with Mike Curb to do an album by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, which made some sense to him – not a great deal – but some sense. Then Markley wanted to change it. That didn’t come up until we had finished the whole thing and by then, of course, it was too late. It was the same old problem we had with song writing credits and other things and that’s really the way it was across all of the albums, but eventually it just got to be horrible with Markley and contractually impossible. It was a stupid thing really. I mean, we should have called it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band because at least we would have sold ten copies or something. I don’t know, at that point I think I probably just wanted to get out and get done with it.”

There was also a certain irony in the fact that the LP was on Mike Curb’s Forward label. After all, a year or so earlier it had been Curb who had famously thrown the Velvet Underground and the Mothers Of Invention off Verve (a subsidiary of MGM, of which he was President) because of their association with drugs and ‘weirdness’. Yet here he was releasing an album by a group of musicians who had not only adopted a name directly inspired by the former band, but who had also covered the latter’s ‘Help, I’m A Rock’ – and that was before one even went on to consider some of their own equally bizarre material. Lloyd speaks in Curb’s defence: “I think his motivation was honorable. When you think back to that period of time there were quite a few rock stars who were dropping dead from drug overdoses. Besides, by the time we joined MGM I don’t think the Velvet Underground were selling any more records and their contract might have been up. I went right through all of that and I never drank, I never used drugs – nothing – and I think it was a tremendous blessing. That was despite all of the influences around me, of course. In the 60’s you were almost an idiot if you didn’t take acid – you were like a downer – but I was very focussed on what I wanted to do and it wasn’t something that interested me at all. I didn’t need to feel better because I already felt great. I was doing all the things that I wanted to do.”

As the result, perhaps, of the inevitable confusion caused by the change of name, the ‘Markley, A Group’ album has long been overlooked. For those who favored the harder-edged psychedelic adventures of the earlier recordings, the change of direction after ‘A Child’s Guide’ must have been hard to swallow. Yet in a sense the band had come full circle. After starting out five years earlier in relatively humble fashion on the Fifo label, the high hopes of the three-album Reprise deal had ended with disillusionment and the virtual dissolution of the band. Now, after the low water-mark of the ‘Where’s Your Daddy?’ LP, the band emerged with a work which was, in many ways, a fitting end to their career. Inconsistent certainly, with the first side probably the strongest, the album still had many wonderful moments, particularly a number of delicately structured songs underpinned with subtle arrangements and over-layed with immaculate harmonies.

The record undoubtedly benefited from Michael Lloyd’s full involvement, bringing with him his now considerable production experience. Singing many of the lead vocals, his self-assured keyboard playing featured prominently on several tracks while his orchestral arrangements were exquisite. Danny, too, was once again a full participant in the album, co-writing well over half of the songs on the LP compared with only two on ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ and none on ‘A Child’s Guide’. A clue to his lack of involvement in the previous albums could be found in the opening track ‘Booker T & His Electric Shock’. Sung by Danny, the humorous lyrics belied their serious subject matter. According to Lloyd: “Danny had been a manic depressive and had gone through all kinds of horrible times from way before the band. That song was about a mental institution and the electric shock treatment which he had there. It happened many times and once it started it was almost impossible to stop. It was a horrible thing for him to go through – remember that this was a long time ago when they didn’t really know what to do – but eventually they found out that it was a lithium imbalance.” Shaun, by contrast, recalls having little to do with the album beyond singing on the re-recorded version of ‘Outside/Inside’. With its sweeping strings and trickling harpsichord this was an altogether more confident and polished version than the original, but once again Shaun regarded the lyrics – especially the line “I’m as rough as a cow’s tongue” – as a prime example of Markley’s misguided ruination of his melody.

It seems that Markley was particularly proud of his efforts on this final LP which, for the first time, came with a separate lyric sheet boldly declaring: “Lyrics by Markley.” They were certainly memorable. The usual tirade against wealth continued with ‘Zoom! Zoom! Zoom’ (“Money, Money, Money / Tear it to pieces / Money, Money, Money / I don’t care at all…”) and ‘Roger The Rocket Ship’ was a genuinely funny take on paranoia (“Look out for interplanetary spaceships and magnetic storms / Some sort of advance warning system should be set up / Look out for solar flares, polar bears, and a third eye / That watches every move you make, watches every step you take…”). Not for the first time, however, the abiding theme was childhood innocence facing corruption in an adult world, while a predilection for young girls was evident from the titles alone: ‘Elegant Ellen’; ‘Little Ruby Rain’; ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’; and ‘Sweet Lady Eleven And The Tattooed Man’. It is tempting to look amongst his lyrics for clues as to how Markley saw himself: perhaps as “the last electric man in the last electric band” of ‘Next Plane To The Sun’; or “Bobby the Bad Bum” loved by ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’. Amidst the apparently nonsensical words of ‘The Magic Cat’, however, there lay a passage in which Markley almost seemed to anticipate his impending fall:

“Straw the Pink Policeman / Tore thru the wall…DRAW!!! / ‘A gentle fawn on the lawn is nude / And that’s against the law.’ / Girls don’t know much so young / Everyone starts to run…”

If one track justified Markley’s arrogance, however, it was the beautiful ballad ‘Little Ruby Rain’, a song which proved that, despite the internal tensions, the band were still able to unite their disparate talents. Written by Markley and Danny Harris, the latter’s acoustic guitar, played alongside a gorgeous string arrangement, sounded like a mature reflection of his earlier composition ‘Will You Walk With Me’, while the lyrics, confidently sung by Lloyd, were among Markley’s most poetic:

“Stay in the shadows of my hand comfortable friend / You’re a tree-ripened girl, still green, seen on billboards / You’re a baby, not in age, but ideas / Toss and turn my friend to the end of the storm, underneath your sleeping eyelids. Little Ruby Rain, your storm is just a game / But it’s strange to be yesterday’s thunder. You’re the sun reflected in the sand of a faraway land / You’re a circus performer, magnificently twirling / The acrobat inside you is leisurely suspended, using no net / Destiny is below with its casual arithmetic, waiting. Little Ruby Rain… When the vines of Time, squared, electrify your soft hair / And four white horses with ruby-red eyes pull your casket away / Only a thimbleful of people will understand / And as the applause dies down, I’ll remember you the way we are today. Little Ruby Rain…”

If the ‘Group’ album was the last recording to be made by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, for Michael Lloyd it was only the beginning of an extraordinarily successful musical career which has, to date, netted him over one hundred gold and platinum records. After becoming the Vice President of A & R at MGM, aged 20, in the fall of 1969, Michael achieved his first major hit producing Lou Rawls’ single ‘A Natural Man’, winning himself a Grammy in the process. After forming his own band Friends, along with two Australians Darryl Cotton and Steve Kipner (ex-Tin Tin), Michael recorded an LP in 1973 only to see it pulled by MGM when he and Mike Curb left the label. Unperturbed he went on to record two further albums under the guise of Cotton, Lloyd and Christian. However, he soon discovered that his strength lay in producing and composing for others, most notably those toothsome Mormon siblings the Osmonds (including their ‘experimental’ ‘Crazy Horses’ period and Donny’s solo career), as well as other teen heart-throbs like Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. His greatest achievement – in commercial terms at least – came with the 1987 film ‘Dirty Dancing’, for which he acted as musical supervisor as well as producing and co-writing much of the music. It went on to become one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of all time. Now married with four children, Michael lives in a mansion which used to belong to Oscar-winning actress Gloria Swanson, star of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and, by a strange coincidence, an early silent film called ‘Shifting Sands’…

Meanwhile, Shaun had also continued his career in music: “In the early 70s when Michael became successful producing Lou Rawls I would act as contractor for his sessions, calling up the musicians and co-ordinating the union contracts. I put together a reel-to-reel tape of four songs and sent them around. Through Michael a single off my album come out on Verve under the name Brigadune, but nothing happened. Then Capitol agreed I could do an album. Both my parents appeared on that – my father arranged some of it and Michael and Danny helped out as well. Unfortunately it came out on Capitol on the same day as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ – how could I compete? After that I realized that if you want to be the creative artist you should get someone else to cut your deal for you. It’s not easy to do both and it was stupid to have an album on a major label and have no manager. Nevertheless, it was the first time I had the chance to do what I wanted to do. From that point I worked with Michael and became president of Barry Manilow’s publishing company. After that I started getting calls from everybody.” Apart from his solo LP (‘Shaun Harris’ and the Brigadune 45 (‘I’ll Cry Out From My Grave (God I’m Sorry)’ b/w ‘Misty Morning’), Shaun also collaborated with Danny and Michael on other singles under names like The Grand Concourse and Rockit. Shaun eventually grew disillusioned with the Los Angeles scene and thereafter lived with his family in Oregon. In recent years he has taken up the cause of standards in education, written a play about his childhood and set up a highly successful children’s film festival – even playing host to Margaret Thatcher.

Although Danny admits to losing the plot somewhat during the 70s, in 1980 he also released a solo album, ‘Thank Him Every Day’, which combined synthesisers with religion. He got his life back on track and in 1984 he married Vicky, who he had first met years earlier when she was running an incense booth at one of those infamous Teenage Fairs at which the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were playing. After they moved to Sweden, where he worked as an alcohol and drugs counsellor, he continued to play folk music – Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets Of London’ was a particular favorite – and recorded another album which has yet to be released. More recently he has established himself as a film actor, appearing in Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning film ‘As Good As It Gets’ where he can be seen dancing in the restaurant scene! He is now writing a book about his experiences in the band and beyond. He and Shaun and Michael remain close friends.

Despite being a founder member of Three Dog Night, Ron Morgan never got to share in their phenomenal success. As his brother recalls: “Ron didn’t do well under pressure. He suffered from bad stage fright, but it was really ‘drug fright’ – he was so high all the time that he became paranoid. They played the Whisky and when someone said Eric Clapton was in the audience he just froze. Ron found the pressure of living up to his image – and everyone’s expectation – was too hard to bear. When Three Dog Night gave him a contract he flew back to Denver and the family lawyer had a look at it. It didn’t look favourable for Ron so he didn’t sign and by the time he got back to LA they had already replaced him. He never thought it would amount to anything anyway. He would never admit it, but their success really bugged him. He felt persecuted.” Almost immediately another opportunity arose in the form of established Reprise act, the Electric Prunes, but unfortunately for Ron the group was about to hit the buffers. According to Dick Whetstone, drummer and vocalist with the final Prunes line-up, Ron became involved after John Herron quit unexpectedly during the sessions for the ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’ LP: “We knew Ron from a Denver band called Superband that included Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards. The two of them had landed a gig with the original version of Three Dog Night prior to the first album release. Ron was anxious to play in a less structured band – he wanted more solos! He was a world-class guitar player. He joined us in time to help finish the last tracks on the album and began touring with us, along with his Harley. Ron lived to play music, but the lifestyle contributed greatly to his death.” After Three Dog Night and the Electric Prunes Ron moved back to Denver. Bob: “He was disenchanted, but he wasn’t going to sell out. He did drive a cab for a while – he loved the freedom of it, there were no pressures and he was his own boss – but Ron got in a bad way. He was strung out on ‘reds’ – addictive sleeping pills – which he had been popping with Three Dog Night and he ended up on the street. He had no skills apart from music, but after he got married in ’76 he sorted his life out and became a janitor. He still played and we used to jam a lot. Then he had a motorcycle accident and things went down hill. He got put in a psychiatric ward for a time. His wife divorced him and kicked him out of the house. It was while he was in hospital that he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. The worst thing you can do with that is drink, but he had a strong constitution – he could always put away the drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately he didn’t know until it was too late. He died in his sleep in 1989 at 44. I can remember Ron getting his royalty cheques – they were usually for about 75 cents. Ron lived the way he wanted to, but I guess music never gave him the security he wanted.” Bob Morgan continues his brother’s legacy with his own band Blackwood Magazine.

And what became of Bob Markley? Appropriately enough his fate was the most bizarre of all. Towards the end of the sixties he was involved in a few other projects beyond the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, most notably producing an LP by J.J. Light – actually Jim Stallings, bass player with the Sir Douglas Quintet – called ‘Heya’. Despite claims that this album also involved other members of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, none of those spoken to have any recollection of it, although the guitar playing does bear the unmistakable signature of Ron Morgan. The title track was a hit throughout Europe and Markley later shared a song writing credit on a re-recorded version (although not the original) on United Artists under the priceless name of Zonk. He was also involved with Lloyd and Danny Harris in a gospel album called Goodness and Mercy. After the ‘Group’ LP, however, it appears as if Markley simply dropped out of music all together.

Fowley takes up the story: “It was 1971-2 and I had grown tired of living in Laurel Canyon. There were forest fires and I didn’t want to burn. Markley was living on the beach at Santa Monica and at his suggestion I moved down there too. When I walked into his place I couldn’t believe it! Here was a guy who had lived in a big mansion on Sunset Strip and now here he was living in this 1920’s house which was tacky and furnished like a beachcombers shack. I asked him: ‘What happened, did you lose your money?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to talk about it, but girls down here don’t like nice things – they want you to look like you just washed up on the shore.’ He wore a torn T-shirt and he had a dog to attract girls – he really was like a character out of a surf movie! I moved in to a place ten minutes away and I would go down to the beach and see this Pied Piper figure walking around with short girls and his big St. Bernard talking beach jargon. That’s when he said to me: ‘Never come by unless you call me first’. Eventually I moved to England where I reconnected with Jeff Beck and Ian Hunter and I lived there for about a year from 1972 to ’73. Then in the middle of all this I got a message from LA: ‘Bob Markley has run into problems’. I knew it had something to do with women. Well, I came back from England to the story that he had disappeared. Then I remembered his rule: ‘Always call first’. Now Markley, with all his wealth and emphasis on physical possessions, was always something of a bully, but it was then that I realised that, for all his indulgences, at least he didn’t involve his friends in his other world – and whatever the issues were that caused his problems with law enforcement. Bob was always very secretive about his male and female encounters.”

Shaun takes up the story: “One day the police came looking for Markley. I was living next door to him at the time, near the beach. They hassled me and even Gray Frederickson who was one of the producers of the Godfather movies. I heard that Markley ended up getting beaten up in Detroit.” Lloyd: “What happened to Bob is he kept seeing younger and younger girls. He was living at the beach – very Bohemian. You would never guess this guy was a successful attorney who used to live in a fancy house. Then one day he came home and there was a bunch of policemen outside the door. Shaun was living in the next apartment and he heard everything about it because then the police busted his place. Apparently Bob had been seeing two very young sisters down at the beach. I guess he was able to get away and we didn’t hear anything about him for some time – maybe he called or something. Apparently he ended up in Detroit. He had some horrible run-in with like gang members, got hit on the head with a baseball bat, he was in hospital – horrible stuff. It was something to do with some girls he was involved with there. Then he went to the Bahamas, something like that. Anyway he was gone for quite some time. Eventually he came back to LA and got arrested. He went to trial and I guess he was in jail for a short while, or maybe he had bargained some sort of plea. I would like to think that was in the early to mid-70’s. Every once in a while Kim would tell us what was going on, or we would get a call from Bob out of the blue saying: ‘I’m in such and such a place. I’ve changed my name’ – crazy stuff. It was very sad. I mean we had antagonistic times and everything, but still this was our friend. It was a bad scene. Years later, in about 1980, I was recording Shaun Cassidy and Bob was the furthest thing from my mind. Then out of the blue he called me – he was strange sounding – and he said: ‘I’ve written more stuff, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done’. Then he sent me this tape and it was weird stuff – you can’t imagine how weird! I still have it, the notes and everything. Not long after that he disappeared again. The next person to hear from him was Kim.”

Fowley continues: “In about 1983 I was lecturing at UCLA as part of a music convention. I was standing talking to some students when this guy walked up to me with a scarred face and these strange eyes – he looked like the Scarecrow of Oz! All the students were recoiling in horror and at first I didn’t recognise him. Then he introduced himself. It was Bob. I asked him what he was doing and he just said ‘You know me, I just like to have fun!’ Then he left. The rumour I heard was that he had disappeared from California and ended up in Detroit. He fell in love with a black girl and her family didn’t like it so they had him beaten up. Then one day in about 1988-89 I dropped by my lawyer’s office and there was this thing in the corner of the room – like a broken body crumpled up in a chair, shaking with palsy. You know those pictures of Howard Hughes in the last years of his life: toothless, weighing 70 pounds with white hair. But it was Bob. Apparently his father had just died and he had come by to pick up some documents – he was now worth millions. I went up to him and he looked right through me. It was very scary. Then a few years later, in 1991 or ’92, I heard a story from J.J. Light, who was an old friend of Markley’s. He told me that Bob had been sitting in this rowing boat on a lake near Las Vegas – he was like a recluse. It got loose from its moorings and he drifted off alone for a day and a half. He was already pretty messed up, but he got very badly dehydrated. When they eventually found him he was taken to some hospital and placed on a life-support system, unable to speak or think. J.J. went to visit him there, but he said he was so spooked by what he saw in the hospital that he never went back.”

Back to Lloyd: “This was maybe five years ago, probably more. He was in a hospital at this point, like a vegetable. We’ve tried to call a couple of times, but we can’t get through – you can’t even talk to the doctor. He has no family, no one to call, no one to say anything – just bunches of money. To me, in an awful sense, it sounds like some place he has been put where they know he has got a lot a money and he is just going to sit there sedated, or whatever they do to these kind of patients, because there is no reason to do anything else. It sounds horrible to say, but to me that’s what it looks like – he’s just being slowly bled dry.” Kim again: “So in the end Bob Markley was like Dorian Gray! He’s probably dead by now. One factor in all of this was Bob Markley junior. Apparently Markley had made a girl pregnant while he was at college. I don’t know whether he knew at the time or not, but I heard that he didn’t meet his son until the early 70’s when the kid was 18. Bob was mind-blown – apparently he was a really nice kid. Then his son died in a car wreck. Do you think that the death of his long-lost son threw him over the edge and led to a downward spiral? His only contact with decency and normality was gone. He was a guy with a trust fund – smart but not immensely talented; clever but not brilliant. He threw parties and then decided to form a band and write songs. Then, when it was all over, he found out he had a child who he never knew – who almost immediately died – and he freaked out because he was growing old, his only child was dead and his rock and roll hobby was over – so why not terrorize the neighbourhood!”

Shaun: “Markley? I’ve heard he’s in a mental asylum. I called there once out of curiosity but I couldn’t even get to talk to him. He seemed to do so many things in life. I’m not very big on religion but if there’s such a thing as karma he could be the poster boy for it. He took advantage of people – not just in a dollars and cents way – but he was ethically indigent and morally bankrupt and it ended up being reflected in his life. I think he was an encumbrance. To even refer to him as musical is outrageous. Musically he was an embarrassment – he would have a dead microphone on stage. It was like dealing with a caricature. I’m not sure if meeting him was such a good thing in the end. When you look at bands like Buffalo Springfield who had record companies who were involved in their careers and had direction, they were making musical statements instead of having this nut with a fascination for hustling underage girls. That’s partly why I became progressively less and less interested. If you look at the first albums I was really involved, but by the end it was a dry hole – it was just a vehicle for him to be able to say that he had a new album out. And he wasn’t getting cured either. The fact that he had his name on the last one, for instance. Look at the Doors – without Morrison the band could do nothing – but Markley brought nothing to the table. I think if we had not had Markley insisting that we do asinine stuff it would have been very good. I wish we had got a record deal without him. It would have been called something else, but I think we would still have recorded. We would have had more mainstream success – I don’t mean a cop out – but if you had taken any artist of the period and made them do the same thing I think it would have had the same sort of negative effect. I ran into a woman once who said she was a program director in Boston for seven years and they played ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ for the sign-on song every day. If we had been handled like a regular band with a major booking agency and management firm things might have been different.”

Lloyd: “Markley constantly wanted to do weirder things, but we weren’t into that. It was like two bands on one record – you can see from cut to cut. He made the deals and that was both a good and a bad thing. It was a good thing because it existed, but it was a bad thing because we had to deal with him. This was our compromise: for every ‘Transparent Day’ there would have been something like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’, or ‘In The Arena’ – that was Markley.” Kim: “Bob Markley created his own legend in his own mind and when he talked to me I almost wondered if it was a press release which he had written and then memorized. That was his downfall: he was narcissistic. He had certain musical ideas and wasn’t totally stupid, but there was so much psychedelic shit around in those days. Markley was attempting to be like the Mothers Of Invention but it was silly and a waste of time – except for getting laid. When Michael and the Harris brothers were left alone by Markley to sing and play it was remarkable – they were wonderful songs – but when there was all that weird shit, that was when Markley wrote the words and it was a waste of time.”

The history of music is littered with tales of missed opportunities and stolen chances, yet even amongst these the troubled story of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band reads like a fable. Undoubtedly, much of the abiding fascination with the group stems from Markley’s involvement, but it would be a mistake to concentrate upon his contribution to the exclusion of all else. For whatever Markley brought with him, he also took a great deal away – perhaps quite literally. Had the more accessible compositions been chosen for the singles; had they received more promotion from their record company; had they gigged more widely without an aging front-man who could not sing; had they even chosen a less cumbersome name, then it seems certain that – within their own time at least – they would have received the recognition they so richly deserved. Looking back over the intervening years, it is clear that Michael, Shaun and Danny have decidedly mixed emotions about their experiences and, from the recollections of his brother, it appears that Ron Morgan, too, became gradually disenchanted. Inevitably, much of their disappointment is focussed upon Markley – and who can blame them. His motives for joining the band were dubious, to say the least, and the nature of his talent will always be open to debate. Yet the fact remains that, while others came and went, it was Markley alone who made his unmistakable imprint on every album. Indeed, of one thing we can be certain: if Markley had never become involved then the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band as we know them would never have existed. The essence of any classic band will always be something more than the sum of their individual participants and here was a group filled with contradictions: they recorded ‘psychedelic’ music while, for the most part, eschewing drugs; they railed against the evils of money despite the fact that most of them came from privileged backgrounds; and they sang anti-war anthems whilst they fought with each other.

Giving his own impression of the West Coast scene of the time, John Cale wrote once: “It was some kind of airy-fairy puritanism that was based on the suppression of adult feelings about what was out there in the world.”

Undoubtedly an egotist, Markley was a spoilt orphan who came to despise his inheritance and who seemed terrified of growing old. The sleeve photos bear witness to a man obsessed with looking younger, while the album covers, song titles and lyrics became increasingly preoccupied with childhood and the transience of beauty and innocence. Yet what set the music of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band apart from many of their peers was the way they reached beyond such themes to explore the darker side of an age which, with the turning of the war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in many American cities and – in Los Angeles itself – the Manson murders, was about to reach an ugly climax. If one record, above all, tells you all you need to know about the group – and the influence of Markley in particular – it is ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. Its monochrome cover superimposed a butterfly’s wings upon a child’s face, while the songs dwelt on love and hate, greed and war and, above all, the concept of the innocence of every human being until corrupted. In doing so, it showed remarkable prescience.

Side one of the ‘Markley, A Group’ LP ended with the short, bittersweet coda ‘Message For Miniature’. Given that the missive was clearly addressed by an adult to a child and that its signatory had already appeared as an ageing, eccentric ‘hero’ on the J.J. Light album, it is tempting to assume that Henry B. Glover was Bob Markley. As things were to turn out, the song might serve well as his epitaph.

by Tim Forster

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Joe South 9/2012

Joe-South1September 5, 2012 – Joe South, aka Joseph Alfred Souter was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist born in Atlanta, Georgia on February 28, 1940. He started his pop career in July 1958 writing the novelty hit “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor”. In 1959, he wrote 2 songs which were recorded by Gene Vincent: “I Might Have Known” and “Gone Gone Gone”. He began his recording career with the National Recording Corporation, where he was staff guitarist along with other NRC artists Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed.

He was also a prominent sideman, playing guitar on the likes of Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools”, Tommy Roe’s “Sheila”, and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album.

His 1969 “Games People Play”, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic was accompanied by a lush string sound, organ, and brass, the production won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Song and the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

His compositions have been recorded by many artists, including Billy Joe Royal’s songs “Down in the Boondocks”, “I Knew You When”, “Yo-Yo”, later a hit for the Osmonds, and “Hush” later a hit for Deep Purple and Kula Shaker. Joe’s most commercially successful composition was Lynn Anderson’s 1971 monster hit “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden”, which was a hit in 16 countries and translated into many languages. Anderson won a Grammy Award for her vocals, and Joe won a Grammy Award for writing the song.

Joe was inducted into Georgia Music Hall of Fame. On September 5, 2012 he died from heart failure.

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Scott McKenzie 8/2012

August 18, 2012 – Scott McKenzie was born Philip Wallach Blondheim III in Jacksonville, Florida on January 10, 1939.

His family moved to Asheville, North Carolina, when he was six months old and he grew up in North Carolina and Virginia, where he became friends with the son of one of his mother’s friends, John Phillips. In the mid-1950s, he sang briefly with Tim Rose in a high school group called The Singing Strings, and later with Phillips, Mike Boran, and Bill Cleary when they formed a doo wop band, The Abstracts.

In New York, The Abstracts became The Smoothies and recorded two singles with Decca Records, produced by Milt Gabler. During his time with The Smoothies, Blondheim decided to change his name for business reasons:

“We were working at one of the last great night clubs, The Elmwood Casino in Windsor, Ontario. We were part of a variety show … three acts, dancing girls, and the entire cast took part in elaborate, choreographed stage productions … As you might imagine, after-show parties were common.
“At one of these parties I complained that nobody could understand my real name…and pointed out that this was a definite liability in a profession that benefited from instant name recognition. Everyone started trying to come up with a new name for me. It was comedian Jackie Curtis who said he thought I looked like a Scottie dog. Phillips came up with Laura’s middle name after Jackie’s suggestion. I didn’t like being called “Scottie” so everybody agreed my new name could be Scott McKenzie.”

In 1961 Phillips and McKenzie met Dick Weissman and formed the folk group, The Journeymen, at the height of the folk music craze. They recorded three albums and seven singles for Capitol Records. After The Beatles became popular in 1964, The Journeymen disbanded. McKenzie and Weissman became solo performers, while Phillips formed the group The Mamas & the Papas with Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips and moved to California.

McKenzie originally declined an opportunity to join the group, saying in a 1977 interview, “I was trying to see if I could do something by myself. And I didn’t think I could take that much pressure”. Two years later, he left New York and signed with Lou Adler’s Ode Records.

San Francisco was written with McKenzie in mind. Phillips orchestrated the session, playing the acoustic guitar himself and bringing in bassist Joe Osborn and drummer Hal Blaine, who had played on most of the Mamas and the Papas recordings, plus Gary L. Coleman on bells and chimes, to give the song a happy, springtime feel.
San Francisco, as its parenthetical subtitle suggested, implored listeners to make their way west, flowers strategically placed:”For those who come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there. In the streets of San Francisco Gentle people with flowers in their hair

It was released on 13 May 1967 in the United States and was an instant hit, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 2 in the Canadian RPM Magazine charts. It was also a number 1 in the UK and several other countries, selling over seven million copies globally.
Perhaps too ironically, the song was written and recorded by people from Los Angeles.

The song is credited with having added to the mass of youths arriving in the city for what became known as the Summer of Love. Whether San Francisco was equipped to handle such an invasion and its attendant problems was a bone of contention at the time. Many residents, including hippies who’d already been enjoying the city’s freedoms, resented the newcomers as well. Some of the local bands openly scoffed at the song, calling it nave and hokey, not to mention intrusive on their scene.

You know who really hated San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair?
The city officials of San Francisco!
It was apparent by the early months of 1967 that their city was going to be receiving an influx of young people once school let out and the weather warmed up some higher-ups were predicting that thousands of them might besiege the city, jobless, homeless, many of them taking drugs and congregating on the streets without a care in the world.
The migration had already begun in 1965-66, the city’s population swelling with seekers of love and life (many of them runaways escaping boring lives in boring midwest places), drawn to the vibrant, freewheeling culture and physical beauty of the city. In particular they were swarming to the Haight-Ashbury district, adjacent to Golden Gate Park. They’d spend their days lying about in that park and their evenings at one of the city’s newly sprouted rock music ballrooms, where they’d listen and dance to new bands with odd names like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead.
For the youth, San Francisco was a mecca, a place one could go to be around similarly inclined outcasts from around the country. Living was cheap and no one minded sleeping on the floor of a crash pad in one of the Haight’s trippy Victorian houses with a dozen new friends, toking on joints (or maybe popping a tab of Owsley acid) and passing bottles of cheap wine while the record player blasted out newly released albums like the Beatles’  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow and the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced. In January 1967 they held a Human Be-In to celebrate the very existence of their community.

Nonetheless, San Francisco (Wear Flowers in Your Hair) and its message of communality and gentle vibes struck a chord with a growing segment of the nation (and abroad) for which the phrase flower power was a new rallying cry against the Vietnam War. Many came to San Francisco to have a look, including both George Harrison and Paul McCartney and some even came to stay, like Janis. Most hung out for a little while and then moved on, either back home or, perhaps, to rural communes or other communities built around like-minded folks. Millions who never got near the Golden Gate Bridge simply liked the easy-flowing song enough to make it a quick success.

McKenzie followed the song with “Like An Old Time Movie”, also written and produced by Phillips, which was a minor hit (number 27 in Canada). His first album, The Voice of Scott McKenzie, was followed with an album called Stained Glass Morning. McKenzie also penned the song “Hey! What About Me” that launched the career of Canadian singer Anne Murray in 1968.

Scott ‘dropped out’ in the late 60’s. In 1970 he moved to Joshua Tree, a California desert town near Palm Springs. In 1973 he went to Virginia Beach, VA, where he lived for 10 years.
In 1986, original Papa’s Denny Doherty and John Phillips, with Mackenzie Phillips (John Phillips’ daughter) and Spanky McFarlane (ex Spanky and Our Gang) as female vocalists took a new version of the group onto the nostalgia circuit. Later, when Denny left the group, Scott joined John Phillips as the second Papa. However, when John left due to ill health, Denny returned and Scott took the role vacated by John Phillips.

In 1988 Scott co-wrote the Beach Boys hit Kokomo with John Phillips, Beach Boy Mike Love and the late Terry Melcher, long time producer of the Beach Boys.
Scott spent much of the 1990’s touring with the Mamas and Papas. Eventually, with no original members left, the group disbanded in 1998.

In the 21st Century Scott still performed on occasion. He performed in Germany and in 2003 performed on a PBS Folk special. During March 2005, PBS broadcast a concert called “My Generation — the 60’s Experience.” In the show Scott sings San Francisco and at the end of the program ‘unannounced’ a song called We’ve Been Asking Questions, one of the last songs written by John Phillips before his death in 2001.
In 2009 Scott recorded the Denny Doherty song Gone To Sea Again.

In retirement Scott lived in LA and became a big fan of Facebook where he had many friends in his “Asylum”. Scott was in and out of hospital since 2010 after falling ill with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a disease affecting the nervous system. It is thought he may have had a heart attack in early August, 2012. Staff did not want him to leave the hospital, but he wanted to be at home and passed away on 18th August 2012. He was 73.

 

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Lou Martin 8/2012

piano player with Rory Gallagher bandAugust 16, 2012 – Louis ‘Lou’ Martin was born on August 12, 1949 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

With very musically inclined parents, Martin started learning the piano at the age of six, and joined his first professional band, Killing Floor, in April or May 1968. In 1969 Martin and Stuart McDonald were recruited by 17-year-old Darryl Read who formed a band for Emperor Rosko’s brother (Jeff Pasternak) called Crayon Angels, which Read put together and played drums, while Rosko acted as manager.

Martin later left Killing Floor to play alongside blues guitar virtuoso Rory Gallagher, and is featured on several of Gallagher’s albums, including Blueprint, Tattoo, Irish Tour ’74, Against the Grain, Calling Card, Defender and Fresh Evidence. He also played rhythm guitar on one track, “Race the Breeze” from Blueprint.

After leaving Gallagher’s band, Martin and drummer Rod de’Ath formed Ramrod, after which Martin played with Downliners Sect and Screaming Lord Sutch, and also toured with Chuck Berry and Albert Collins.

Martin played in the Nickey Barclay band in London in the 1980s, alongside Barclay (ex-Fanny) on keyboards, with John Conroy (ex-Sam Mitchell Band) and Dave Ball on lead guitar (ex-Procol Harum). The band played across London on the blues rock circuit during the 1980s at venues such as The White Lion, Putney; The Star and Garter on Lower Richmond Road; The Golden Lion, Fulham and the Cartoon, Croydon.

Killing Floor released an album in 2004 named Zero Tolerance, on which Martin participated.

Lou died after a long period of illness including a battle with cancer and a number of strokes on August 16, 2012.

The following interview with Lou Martin was done by Markus Gygax, publisher of Deuce Quarterly for the issue 46 Feb. 1989 and gives a revealing picture of the life of a sideman in Rock and Roll.

Intro: Apart from Gerry MacAvoy, Lou Martin seems to be the most famous and most popular musician who has ever played in Rory’s band as you can gather from the more or less frequent polls in DEUCE; the letters that I get, as well as what the not-so-great-fans say about Rory’s music. Besides, Lou is the only one – what great news- who, after their split -up, joined the band once more to record an album (see Defender).

On the 20th of May, 1988, the Mick Clarke Band played Chur; it was also their first live performance with Lou Martin. It is true that Lou and Mick both played with the Killing Floor, the Ramrod and on the first two solo albums by Clarke. But they had never played live because they were just about to change the man on the keyboards.

In October 1988, the Mick Clarke band played a rather long Swiss and Austrian tour, which I have organized for them. On this tour, Lou Martin played as support, his only equipment was the piano and his vocals.

While being in Chur for four days with the band, Lou Martin talked about lots and lots of things. Lou was apparently enjoying the tour very much, probably because it was his first solo tour and therefore a special event. Unfortunately, we did not record any of the conversations we had during these days. Therefore I sent a written interview to Lou shortly after the concert, which he gave me back on my visit in London at the end of July 1988.

In my opinion, it is a most interesting interview a of a man who lives mainly for the music (he is also fond of flowers, dogs and cats). He has seen a lot in his life, he has got a quick eye for any kind of music, and it is always interesting to listen to what he tells you. It seems that giving interviews is an everyday routine for Lou, but you will see that he is not used to it at all. So now let’s hear what he has to say. Here is his very first interview for DEUCE;

MG- Lou, let’s start from the beginning. Where and when were you born?
LM- In Belfast, Northern Ireland on the 12th of August, 1949.

MG- As far as the music is concerned, were you influenced by your parents? Did you play any music at home?
LM- Yes, a lot. My father sang mainly operatic music, and my mother played the piano. We listened to the music all day, mainly classical music.

MG- When did you start to play the piano?
LM- At the age of six

MG- Who were the first people you played with?
LM- The first time I formed a band was at school. It was just for fun. Nothing serious. We played rock’n’roll, Shadows songs, rhythm & blues by Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, a few songs by the Animals, and almost everything which was in at that time.

MG- Did you do any kind of job before you started to be a professional?
LM- I intended to train for something, namely music teacher. But I think I was too infatuated with my own music.

MG- How many years have you worked as professional?
LM- This year, exactly 20 years

MG- When did you join Killing Floor?
LM- In April or May 1968. I saw their advertisement in MELODY MAKER and answered it.

MG- How come you didn’t play on the second Killing Floor album, Out of Uranus, but you name is mentioned on the cover just the same?
LM- At that time, I was not permanently in the band, so I played on only one song namely called Call for the Politicians. The producer wanted the keyboard sound far in the background; but he still wanted me to play somewhere.

MG- Who are your musical favourites?
LM- I am interested in many styles. I often listen to classical music, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachromicoff, often jazz, folk, Bob Dylan is one of my favourites, early rock, and of course, the blues.

MG- Who are your favourites on piano?
LM- Jerry Lee Lewis, Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Pete Johnson, Fats Waller, Dave Brubeck, Horace Silver, Ray Charles, Ramsey Lewis James etc.

MG- Do you write some of your songs?
LM- No, I just improvise known melodies and mix them somehow.

MG- Would you like to record an album?
LM- Sure, an album with a healthy mixture of my favourite styles and good musicians would be nice.

MG- Can you give me a list of your favourite LP’s?
LM- Oh, I could give you 200 titles. I will try it anyway, but I just cannot give you a sequence. There are Elvis Presley ( Vol.1 & 2, The Early Years), Carl Perkins, Little Richard (number 1 and 2), Jerry Lee Lewis (practically everything), Howlin’ Wolf (everything), Muddy Waters (everything), Bob Dylan (almost everything), Rolling Stones (almost everything), Chieftains (no.5), Dubliners (Revolution-album), John Fogerty (Rockin’ All over the World), John Mayall, etc.

MG- Now let’s talk about Rory. When did you first see him live?
LM- I saw him for the first time in 1968 at the Marquee Club in London, at that time with the first Taste setup, namely Eric Kitteringham and Norman Damery.

MG- When did you first meet him in person?
LM- It was sometime in 1971.

MG- How did you come to join Rory’s band?
LM- Rod De’ath, who was with the Killing Floor, just like me, substituted for Wilgar Campbell on the drums as everybody knows. Shortly afterwards, Rory asked me whether I would like to join them too.

MG- On the first album, Blueprint, you seem to play also on the guitar. On which songs?
LM- Only on one track, on Race the Breeze. I played the rhythm guitar. By the way, even nowadays, when I am at home, I play the guitar, even more often than I play the piano. Just to relax.

MG- Did you or other musicians in Rory’s band never give any interviews?
LM- We gave one in 1973 for New Musical Express. Gerry, Rod De’Ath and myself were interviewed. It would certainly have been great fun. But that guy was such an idiot. When the interview was published, everything had been misinterpreted. That cured us all. This one here is the second interview in my life, but this time I am convinced that you will publish what I have said.

MG- Otherwise, which were the best moments during the period in Rory’s band?
LM- Over the years, there had been so many marvelous live shows. It is impossible for me to pick out particular concerts because most concerts with Rory were marvelous. The very best memories are those of the gigs at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1976 or ’77 – even Bob Dylan got so enthusiastic over this shows that he came to see Rory in the dressing room after the concert- and all the shows we did during ’72 and ’76 in Belfast and Cork in Ireland.

MG- Are there any bad memories of the Rory era?
LM- If my memory does not fail me, there are hardly any bad memories. Except for some occasional trouble with the instruments there were not any. We were much more constant than other bands and this goes for Rory even nowadays.

MG- Which LP, do you think, is Rory’s best one, choosing from those on which you played? Which one, in your opinion, is his best of those you did not take part in?
LM- Of course I have my favourites -20:20 Vision on Tattoo is really nice. At the Bottom on Against the Grain has always been one of my favourites, then Banker’s Blues on Blueprint; I have still a great respect for the album, Calling Card. On this album, the band sounds incredibly compact. It has got a marvelous sound, fantastic songs. In my opinion, everything is perfect. Besides, I am happy with the version of Seven Days from the Defender album. Anyway, Defender is one of his very best LP’s.

MG: How did the surprising cooperation for the Defender LP come about?
LM: Rory rang me up and told me that he was going to record an acoustic blues track for his new album. He thought that my style would be good for the song. It took us one afternoon to get the track finished.

MG: In which country is Rory most popular?
LM: I am not able to tell you because I really don’t know. But I think his prestige throughout the world guarantees his success in every country.

MG: Did you change your attitude towards the Rory Gallagher Band before you became a permanent member and since you left the band?
LM: I always admired the band and I still do so now. Rory’s set-ups have always been great; he has always had excellent musicians with him.

MG: Before recording Defender, did Rory ever ask you to play on one of his other albums?
LM: No, he did not

MG: How was the situation when the split between Rod de’Ath and you happened?
LM: Very friendly

MG: Are you still in touch with each other?
LM: We meet each other occasionally, but our engagements make it sometimes difficult. The contact is still there, though. I think we are always glad to meet now and then.

MG: Have you ever had any contacts with other musicians of the Taste/Rory?
LM: I met most of them and had a good drink with them. I have never met Norman Damery, Eric Kittering ham and John Wilson.

MG: After the split, have you seen Rory live again?
LM: I am quite ashamed to admit that I never have. Just once I watched a TV show with Ted McKenna on the drums. But I do want to see Rory again, particularly when he plays Mark Feltham.

MG: Did you get any “precious metals’ for Rory’s albums on which you played?
LM: For Tattoo there was a gold disc, a silver disc each for Against the Grain and Irish Tour ’74. I hang them all in the front room if my house.

MG: Are Rory’s Irish tours so fantastic as it is described everywhere?
LM: Absolutely. Ireland is our home country. The enthusiasm and gratitude which we received on our Irish tours is indescribable. It is the most thankful audience in the world. Emotional and excellent concerts. I am sure that this is still the case nowadays when the band plays there.

MG: What do you think of the albums which Rory recorded with black artists such as Albert King and Muddy Waters?
LM: Excellent albums. These people are our roots.

MG: What did you do after the split with Rory?
LM: Rod De’Ath and I formed Ramrod. Then I tried to get solo engagements. Band wise, I did not do anything except a few sessions with Dowliner Sect and Screamin’ Lord Sutch. A few things with Mick Clarke. The Southside Blues band, sessions with Tommy Morrison, tours and concerts with Chuck Berry and Albert Collins.

MG: What are you doing at the moment?
LM: I have a flower shop on my own, which I run during the day. In the evenings, I have a permanent job with a West-end French restaurant where I am the bar pianist. It is near Leicester Square, Central London. Sessions happen occasionally.

MG: How did the co-operation with Chuck Berry come about?
LM: The London Capitol Radio announced that they were looking for two musicians for a Chuck Berry tour. A friend of mine, a musician, told me about it. I got in touch and go the job.

MG: How was the engagement with Albert Collins arranged?
LM: Again, a friend of mine, also a musician, gave me a ring and told me that Collins was looking for a pianist for his two shows in London. I played there and got the job.

MG: What about the Screamin’ Lord Sutch?
LM: We recorded an album, which was arranged by Rod De’Ath. Sutch’s old hits were being re-recorded for an LP which was planned to be put on the German market. Keith Grant (bass) and Terry Gibson (guitar), two old friends of mine, who played with the Dowliner Sect, were also there.

MG: What about the recordings of Gerry McAvoy’s solo album?
LM: All the recordings were organized by Gerry. They were recorded before and after I left the band. Most of the recordings were recorded live in the Bridge House, one of the best clubs at the end of the 70’s. At that time, there were many friends helping each other at concerts or studio sessions.

MG: What about Tommy Morrison? Is he a club performer in England or how would you describe him? I have never heard anything about him….
LM: Tommy is a good friends of Paul Rogers ( ex-Free/ Bad Company/ The Firm). Since Paul and I know each other, he asked me and Rod De’Ath whether we would like to record an LP with Tommy. I do not think Tommy has ever played live.

MG: How big, do you think, is the chance for a successful future for the Mick Clarke Band? Can you imagine a break-through of the band, similar to Vaughan’s, Thorogood’s?
LM: Mick and I have been very close friends for over 20 years. His development as a guitarist is most remarkable. In my opinion, he certainly ranks among the top musicians. His voice and stage performance have improved greatly. So why not?

MG: Is there the possibility of you becoming a permanent member of the band?
LM: I would like to spend as much time as possible with the band. But because of my engagements, it not possible just now. I would like to be more involved. Anyway, I play on the first two of the four albums by Clarke. If I had more time or if there were not so many engagements, I would not have to think twice.

MG: Which musicians did you do jam sessions with? Are there any hard rock bands among them?
LM: It is hard to remember everybody, but there were certainly a few sessions worth being remembered. For example, there was a very fine one in 1975 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Rory was there, Rod De’Ath and Gerry MacAvoy, Louisiana Red came, Harvey Brooks on bass, a West Coast veteran, who played on Mike Bloomfield’s LP’s. Besides, there was the whole brass band of Etta James. During an American tour there was a big encore with the Rory band and the Doobie Brothers. During a break in 1973 in Chicago, I played two days in Otis Rush’s band. At that time I saw lots of interesting people for the first time live, for example, Junior Wells, Phillip Guy, Mighty Joe Young……In 1968, we (killing Floor) played with Freddie King. There were hardly any hard rock musicians, no famous ones for that matter.

MG: Music wise, which moments do you consider the best?
LM: The first time I was live on stage with Freddie King and Rory, the gigs with Otis Rush, the shows with Albert Collins and Chuck Berry, then of course when I met Muddy Waters, the concert with the Mick Clarke Band in Chur was brilliant.

MG: Which was the best period?
LM: When I was with Rory, no doubt. Everybody in the band was improving incredibly fast because we played most nights and everywhere. In any case, I learnt most at that time.

MG: What did you enjoy more, to play live or in the studio? Which live performances did you enjoy most?
LM: I liked every band a lot. We always had a lot of fun on stage. There were so many fine gigs with Rory. And even though they were writing so many negative things about Chuck berry nowadays, I must say that at least every third gig with him was fantastic. As far as the studio is concerned, I usually played with Rory. But other studio recordings , too, were nice. Apart from Rory, it is probably Mick Clarke I like working with most.

MG: Which LP, in your opinion, is the best from those you played on?
LM: Calling Card, because of the way I play and also the whole feeling of the album. I would have liked to have made an LP with Chuck Berry because the group he had at that time was really great. I also like the two albums with Mick Clarke, particularly, Rock Me. It would be nice to get a gold disc for that one.

MG: Now, here is a quite different subject: What do you or other Rory band members think of fanclubs?
LM: No idea. Anyway, I think a good fanclub is important for 90% of the musicians. I do not think that it is smiled at. Probably there are many people who realize only now that there is a Rory fanclub and that the fanzines is really interesting. In any case, I like reading it.

MG: Apart from music, do you have any other hobbies?
LM: I’ll enjoy a good drink…..

MG: Here are a few questions which I am really interested in. Is it something special to play at the Montreux Jazz Festival?
LM: It is one of the most important jazz festivals in Europe. Beautiful setting and scenery.

MG: I would like to know what do you think of my favorite musicians. Here they are: Canned Heat, Stan Webb’s Chicken Shack, Taj Mahal, John Hammond and Tony McPhee’s Groundhogs.
LM: During all the years that I have been in the music scene, I have met musicians, either personally or at least I saw them live. Of course I have also collected their LP’s. My favorite if those you mentioned are John Hammond and Canned Heat. During one of Rory’s concerts in 1974 or 1975 in Canada, there was a session with John Hammond. Later we were joined by Freddie King. I also saw Taj Mahal live. However, I prefer his early works when he played more blues than he does now, Nowadays, Stan Webb’s Chicken Shack, as well as Tony McPhee’s Groundhogs play mainly the clubs in London. In general, their shows are still very good.

MG: Here comes my last question, which might also be quite interesting for our Deuce readers. What would you do if Rory asked you whether you would like to join the band again?
LM: If he really offered me this job, I would probably say yes. We have the same roots and he has certainly influenced me over the years.

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Jon Lord 7/2012

July 16, 2012 – John Douglas “Jon” Lord ( Deep Purple/Whitesnake)  was born in Leicester, England on June 9th 1941 and retained a strong bond with the city throughout his life. His father was an amateur saxophone musician and encouraged Lord from an early age. There was an old upright piano in the house and Jon showed an early interest in the instrument so his parents enrolled him for formal piano lessons when he was seven. At nine he found another teacher, Frederick All, who gave recitals for the BBC and played the church organ. “He was a marvelous teacher”, says Lord. “He could impart a love of music to his students as well as teaching them to play it. He taught me to enjoy music and to want to play well.” Those influences were a recurring trademark in Jon’s work.

He attended Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys between 1952 and 1958 and then worked as a clerk in a solicitor’s office for two years, but was fired for taking too much time off work.

Lord absorbed the blues sounds that played a key part in his rock career, principally the raw sounds of the great American blues organists Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and “Brother” Jack McDuff (“Rock Candy”), as well as the stage showmanship of Jerry Lee Lewis and performers like Buddy Holly, whom he saw perform at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester in March 1958.

Lord moved to London in 1959–60, intent on an acting career and enrolling at the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London’s Swiss Cottage. Following a celebrated student rebellion he became a founder of Drama Centre London, from where he graduated in 1964. From here on his life became a Who’s Who in the early London years of the British Invasion and beyond.

Small acting parts followed, and Lord continued playing the piano and the organ in nightclubs and as a session musician to earn a living. He started his band career in London in 1960 with the jazz ensemble The Bill Ashton Combo. Ashton became a key figure in jazz education in Britain, creating what later became the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. Between 1960 and 1963, Lord and Ashton both moved on to Red Bludd’s Bluesicians (also known as The Don Wilson Quartet), the latter of which featured the singer Arthur “Art” Wood, brother of guitarist Ronnie Wood. Wood had previously sung with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated and was a junior figure in the British blues movement.

In this period, Lord altered the spelling of his name from his birth name “John” to “Jon” and his session credits included playing the keyboards in “You Really Got Me”, The Kinks number one hit of 1964, however in a Guitar World interview Ray Davies of The Kinks stated it was actually Arthur Greenslade playing piano on that particular track.

Following the break-up of Redd Bludd’s Bluesicians in late 1963, Wood, Lord, and the drummer Red Dunnage put together a new band, The Art Wood Combo. This also included Derek Griffiths (guitar) and Malcolm Pool (bass guitar). Dunnage left in December 1964 to be replaced by Keef Hartley, who had previously replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. This band, later known as “The Artwoods”, focused on the organ as the bluesy, rhythmic core of their sound, in common with the contemporary bands The Spencer Davis Group (Steve Winwood on organ) and The Animals (with Alan Price). They made appearances on the BBC’s Saturday Club radio show and on such TV programs as Ready Steady Go!. It also performed abroad, and it appeared on the first Ready Steady Goes Live, promoting its first single the Lead Belly song “Sweet Mary” — but significant commercial success eluded it. Its only charting single was “I Take What I Want”, which reached number 28 on 8 May 1966.

The jazz-blues organ style of black R&B organ players in the 1950s and 1960s, using the trademark blues-organ sound of the Hammond organ (B3 and C3 models) and combining it with the Leslie speaker system (the well-known Hammond-Leslie speaker combination), were seminal influences on Lord. Lord also stated later that he was heavily influenced by the organ-based progressive rock played by Vanilla Fudge after seeing that band perform in Great Britain in 1967, and earlier by the personal direction he received from British organ pioneer Graham Bond.

The Artwoods regrouped in 1967 as the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre“. This was an attempt to cash in on the 1930s gangster craze set off by the American film Bonnie and Clyde. Hartley left the band in 1967 to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Lord next founded the “Santa Barbera Machine Head”, featuring Art’s brother, Ronnie Wood, writing and recording three powerful keyboard-driven instrumental tracks, giving a preview of the future style of Deep Purple. Soon thereafter, Lord went on to cover for the keyboard player Billy Day in “The Flower Pot Men”, where he met the bass guitarist Nick Simper along with drummer Carlo Little and guitarist Ged Peck. Lord and Simper then toured with this band in 1967 to promote its hit single “Let’s Go To San Francisco”, but the two men never recorded with this band.

In early 1967, through his roommate Chris Curtis of the Searchers, Lord met businessman Tony Edwards who was looking to invest in the music business alongside partners Ron Hire and John Coletta (HEC Enterprises). Session guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was called in and he met Lord for the first time, but Chris Curtis’s erratic behaviour led the trio nowhere. Edwards was impressed enough by Jon Lord to ask him to form a band after Curtis faded out. Simper was contacted, and Blackmore was recalled from Hamburg. Although top British player Bobby Woodman was the first choice as drummer, during the auditions for a singer, Rod Evans of “The Maze” came in with his own drummer, Ian Paice. Blackmore, who had been impressed by Paice’s drumming when he met him in 1967, set up an audition for Paice as well. The band was called the “Roundabout” at first and began rehearsals at Deeves Hall in Hertfordshire. By March 1968, this became the “Mark 1” line-up of “Deep Purple”: Lord, Simper, Blackmore, Paice, and Evans. Lord also helped form the band “Boz” with some of its recordings being produced by Derek Lawrence. “Boz” included Boz Burrell (later of King Crimson and Bad Company), Blackmore (guitar), Paice (drums), Chas Hodges (bass).

Lord pushed the Hammond-Leslie sound through Marshall amplification, creating a growling, heavy, mechanical sound which allowed Lord to compete with Blackmore as a soloist, with an organ that sounded as prominent as the lead guitar. Said one reviewer, “many have tried to imitate [Lord’s] style, and all failed.” Said Lord himself, “There’s a way of playing a Hammond that’s different. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that you can play a Hammond with a piano technique. Well, you can, but it sounds like you are playing a Hammond with a piano technique. Really, you have to learn how to play an organ. It’s a legato technique; it’s a technique to achieve legato on a non-legato instrument.”

In early Deep Purple recordings, Lord had appeared to be the leader of the band. Despite the cover songs “Hush” and “Kentucky Woman” becoming hits in North America, Deep Purple never made chart success in the UK until the Concerto for Group and Orchestra album (1970). Lord’s willingness later to play many of the key rhythm parts gave Blackmore the freedom to let loose both live and on record.

On Deep Purple’s second and third albums, Lord began indulging his ambition to fuse rock with classical music. An early example of this is the song “Anthem” from the album The Book of Taliesyn (1968), but a more prominent example is the song “April” from the band’s self-titled third album (1969). The song is recorded in three parts: 1. Lord and Blackmore only, on keyboards and acoustic guitar, respectively; 2. an orchestral arrangement complete with strings; and 3. the full rock band with vocals. Lord’s ambition enhanced his reputation among fellow musicians, but caused tension within the group.

Simper later said, “The reason the music lacked direction was Jon Lord fucked everything up with his classical ideas.” Blackmore agreed to go along with Lord’s experimentation, provided he was given his head on the next band album.

The resulting Concerto For Group and Orchestra (in 1969) was one of rock’s earliest attempts to fuse two distinct musical idioms. Performed live at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 September 1969 (with new band members Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, Evans and Simper having been fired), it was recorded by the BBC and later released as an album. The Concerto gave Deep Purple its first highly publicised taste of mainstream fame and gave Lord the confidence to believe that his experiment and his compositional skill had a future

Purple began work on Deep Purple in Rock, released by their new label Harvest in 1970 and now recognised as one of hard rock’s key early works. Lord and Blackmore competed to out-dazzle each other, often in classical-style, midsection ‘call and answer’ improvisation (on tracks like “Speed King”), something they employed to great effect live. Ian Gillan said that Lord provided the idea on the main organ riff for “Child in Time” although the riff was also based on It’s a Beautiful Day’s 1969 psychedelic hit song “Bombay Calling”. Lord’s experimental solo on “Hard Lovin’ Man” (complete with police-siren interpolation) from this album was his personal favourite among his Deep Purple studio performances.

Deep Purple released another six studio albums between 1971 (Fireball) and 1975 (Come Taste the Band). Gillan and Glover left in 1973 and Blackmore in 1975, and the band disintegrated in 1976. The highlights of Lord’s Purple work in the period include the 1972 album Machine Head (featuring his rhythmic underpinnings on “Smoke on the Water” and “Space Truckin'”, plus the organ solos on “Highway Star”, “Pictures of Home” and “Lazy”), the sonic bombast of the Made in Japan live album (1972), an extended, effect-laden solo on “Rat Bat Blue” from the Who Do We Think We Are album (1973), and his overall playing on the Burn album from 1974.

Roger Glover would later describe Lord as a true “Zen-archer soloist”, someone whose best keyboard improvisation often came at the first attempt. Lord’s strict reliance on the Hammond C3 organ sound, as opposed to the synthesizer experimentation of his contemporaries, places him firmly in the jazz-blues category as a band musician and far from the progressive-rock sound of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman. Lord rarely ventured into the synthesizer territory on Purple albums, often limiting his experimentation to the use of the ring modulator with the Hammond, to give live performances on tracks like Space Truckin’ a distinctive ‘spacy’ sound. Instances of his Deep Purple synthesizer use (he became an endorser of the ARP Oyssey) include “‘A’ 200”, the final track from Burn, and “Love Child” on the Come Taste the Band album.

In early 1973 Lord stated: “We’re as valid as anything by Beethoven.”

Lord continued to focus on his classical aspirations alongside his Deep Purple career. The BBC, buoyed by the success of the Concerto, commissioned him to write another piece and the resulting “Gemini Suite” was performed by Deep Purple and the Light Music Society under Malcolm Arnold at the Royal Festival Hall in September 1970, and then in Munich with the Kammerorchester conducted by Eberhard Schoener in January 1972. It then became the basis for Lord’s first solo album, Gemini Suite, released in November 1972, with vocals by Yvonne Elliman and Tony Ashton and with the London Symphony Orchestra backing a band that included Albert Lee on guitar.(Ritchie Blackmore had played the guitar at the first live performance of the Gemini Suite in September 1970, but declined the invitation to appear on the studio version, which led to the involvement of Lee. Other performers were Yvonne Elliman, Ian Paice, Roger Glover, Tony Ashton).

In March 1974, Lord and Paice had collaborated with friend Tony Ashton on First of the Big Bands, credited to ‘Ashton & Lord’ and featuring a rich array of session talent, including Carmine Appice, Ian Paice, Peter Frampton and Pink Floyd saxophonist/sessioner, Dick Parry. They performed much of the set live at the London Palladium in September 1974.

This formed the basis of Lord’s first post-Deep Purple project Paice Ashton Lord, which lasted only a year and spawned a single album, Malice in Wonderland in 1977, recorded at Musicland Studios Musicland Studios at the Arabella Hotel in Munich. He created an informal group of friends and collaborators including Ashton, Paice, Bernie Marsden, Boz Burrell and later, Bad Company’s Mick Ralphs, Simon Kirke and others. Over the same period, Lord guested on albums by Maggie Bell, Nazareth and even folk artist Richard Digance. Eager to pay off a huge tax bill upon his return the UK in the late-1970s (Purple’s excesses included their own tour jet and a home Lord rented in Malibu from actress Ann-Margret and where he wrote the Sarabande album), Lord joined former Deep Purple band member David Coverdale’s new band, Whitesnake in August 1978 (Lord’s job in Whitesnake was largely limited to adding color or, in his own words, a ‘halo’ to round out a blues-rock sound that already accommodated two lead guitarists, Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody.

A number of singles such as “Here I Go Again”, “Wine, Women and Song”, “She’s a Woman” and “Till the Day I Die” entered the UK chart, taking the now 40-something Lord onto Top of the Pops with regularity between 1980 and 1983. He later expressed frustration that he was a poorly paid hired-hand, but fans saw little of this discord and Whitesnake’s commercial success kept him at the forefront of readers’ polls as heavy rock’s foremost keyboard maestro. His dissatisfaction (and Coverdale’s eagerness to revamp the band’s line-up and lower the average age to help crack the US market) smoothed the way for the reformation of Deep Purple Mk II in 1984.

During his tenure in Whitesnake, Lord had the opportunity to record two distinctly different solo albums and was later commissioned by producer Patrick Gamble for Central Television to write the soundtrack for their 1984 TV series, Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, based on the book by Edith Holden, with an orchestra conducted by Alfred Ralston and with a distinctly gentle, pastoral series of themes composed by Lord. Lord became firmly established as a member of UK rock’s “Oxfordshire mansion aristocracy” – with a home, Burntwood Hall, set in 23.5 acres at Goring-on-Thames, complete with its own cricket pitch and a hand-painted Challen baby grand piano, previously owned by Shirley Bassey. He was asked to guest on albums by friends George Harrison (Gone Troppo from 1982) and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (1984’s About Face), Cozy Powell (Octopus in 1983) and to play on an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic, Wind in the Willows. He composed and produced the score for White Fire (1984), which consisted largely of two songs performed by Limelight. In 1985 he made a brief appearance as a member of The Singing Rebel’s band (which also featured Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) in the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais-scripted film Water (1985) (Handmade Films).

In the 1980s he was also a member of an all-star band called Olympic Rock & Blues Circus fronted by Pete York and featuring a rotating line-up of the likes of Miller Anderson, Tony Ashton, Brian Auger, Zoot Money, Colin Hodgkinson, Chris Farlowe and many others. Olympic Rock & Blues Circus toured primarily in Germany between 1981 and 1989. Some musicians, including Lord, took part in York’s TV musical extravaganza Superdrumming between 1987 and 1989.

Lord’s re-emergence with Deep Purple in 1984 resulted in huge audiences for the reformed Mk II line-up, including 1985s second largest grossing tour in the US and an appearance in front of 80,000 rain-soaked fans headlining Knebworth on 22 June 1985, all to support the Perfect Strangers album. Playing with a rejuvenated Mk. II Purple line-up (including spells at a health farm to get the band including Lord into shape) and being onstage and in the studio with Blackmore, gave Lord the chance to push himself once again. His ‘rubato’ classical opening sequence to the album’s opener, “Knocking at Your Back Door” (complete with F-Minor to G polychordal harmony sequence), gave Lord the chance to do his most powerful work for years, including the song “Perfect Strangers”. Further Deep Purple albums followed, often of varying quality, and by the late-1990s, Lord was clearly keen to explore new avenues for his musical career.

In 1997, he created perhaps his most personal work to date, Pictured Within, released in 1998 with a European tour to support it. Lord’s mother Miriam had died in August 1995 and the album is a deeply affecting piece, inflected at all stages by Lord’s sense of grief. Recorded largely in Lord’s home-away-from-home, the city of Cologne, the album’s themes are Elgarian and alpine in equal measure. Lord signed to Virgin Classics to release it, and perhaps saw it as the first stage in his eventual departure from Purple to embark on a low-key and altogether more gentle solo career. One song from Pictured Within, entitled “Wait A While” was later covered by Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø on her 2003/2004 album My Heart. Lord finally retired from Deep Purple amicably in 2002, preceded by a knee injury that eventually resolved itself without surgery. He said subsequently, “Leaving Deep Purple was just as traumatic as I had always suspected it would be and more so – if you see what I mean”. He even dedicated a song to it on 2004’s solo effort, Beyond the Notes, called “De Profundis”. The album was recorded in Bonn with producer Mario Argandoña between June and July 2004.

Lord slowly built a small, but distinct position and fan base for himself in Europe. He collaborated with former ABBA superstar and family friend, Frida (Anni-Frid Lyngstad,) on the 2004 track, “The Sun Will Shine Again” (with lyrics by Sam Brown) and performed with her across Europe. He subsequently also performed European concerts to première the 2007-scheduled Boom of the Tingling Strings orchestral piece.

In 2003 he also returned to his beloved R-n-B/blues heritage to record an album of standards in Sydney, with Australia’s Jimmy Barnes, entitled Live in the Basement, by Jon Lord and the Hoochie Coochie Men, showing himself to be one of British rock music’s most eclectic and talented instrumentalists. Lord was also happy to support the Sam Buxton Sunflower Jam Healing Trust and in September 2006, performed at a star-studded event to support the charity led by Ian Paice’s wife, Jacky (twin sister of Lord’s wife Vicky). Featured artists on stage with Lord included Paul Weller, Robert Plant, Phil Manzanera, Ian Paice and Bernie Marsden.

In July 2011, Lord performed his final live concert appearance, the Sunflower Jam at the Royal Albert Hall, where he premiered his joint composition with Rick Wakeman. At that point, they had begun informal discussion on recording an album together. Up until 2011, Lord had also been working on material with the recently formed rock supergroup WhoCares, also featuring singer Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, guitarist Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath, second guitarist Mikko Lindström from HIM, bassist Jason Newsted formerly from Metallica and drummer Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden, specifically the composition “Out of My Mind,” in addition to new compositions with Steve Balsamo and a Hammond Organ Concerto. Lord subsequently cancelled a performance of his Durham Concerto in Hagen, Germany, for what his website said was a continuation of his medical treatment (the concert, scheduled for 6 July 2012, would have been his return to live performance after treatment).

Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra was effectively recommissioned by him, recorded in Liverpool and at Abbey Road Studios across 2011 and under post-production in 2012 with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performing, conducted by long-time collaborator, conductor Paul Mann. The recording was at completion at the time of Lord’s death, with Lord having been able to review the final master recordings. The album and DVD were subsequently released in 2012.

In July 2011, Lord was found to be suffering from pancreatic cancer. After treatment in both England and in Israel, he died on 16 July 2012 at the London Clinic after suffering from a pulmonary embolism. He was 71.

• On 11 November 2010, he was inducted as an Honorary Fellow of Stevenson College in Edinburgh, Scotland. On 15 July 2011, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree at De Montfort Hall by the University of Leicester. Lord was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 8 April 2016 as a member of Deep Purple.

• Lars Ulrich, founding member and drummer in Metallica commented, “Ever since my father took me to see them in 1973 in Copenhagen, at the impressionable age of 9, Deep Purple has been the most constant, continuous and inspiring musical presence in my life. They have meant more to me than any other band in existence, and have had an enormous part in shaping who I am. We can all be guilty of lightly throwing adjectives like ‘unique,’ ‘one-of-a-kind’ and ‘pioneering’ around when we want to describe our heroes and the people who’ve moved us, but there are no more fitting words than those right now and there simply was no musician like Jon Lord in the history of hard rock. Nobody. Period. There was nobody that played like him. There was nobody that sounded like him. There was nobody that wrote like him. There was nobody that looked like him. There was nobody more articulate, gentlemanly, warm, or fucking cooler that ever played keyboards or got anywhere near a keyboard. What he did was all his own.”

• Former keyboard player of rock band Yes, Rick Wakeman, who was a friend of Lord’s, said he was “a great fan” and added “We were going to write and record an album before he became ill. His contribution to music and to classic rock was immeasurable and I will miss him terribly.” In mid-2013, Wakeman presented a BBC One East Midlands-produced TV program about Lord and his connection to the town of his birth.

• Singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad (ABBA), who described Jon Lord as her “dearest friend”, paid him tribute at the 2013 edition of Zermatt Unplugged, the annual music festival which both he and she served as patrons. “He was graceful, intelligent, polite, with a strong integrity,” she said. “He had a strong empathy and a great deal of humor for his own and other people’s weaknesses.”

• Keyboardist Keith Emerson said of Lord’s death, “Jon left us now but his music and inspiration will live forever. I am deeply saddened by his departure.” In a later interview in November 2013, he added, “In the early years I remember being quite jealous of Jon Lord – may he rest in peace. In September 1969 I heard he was debuting his “Concerto For Group & Orchestra” at the Royal Albert Hall, with none other than Malcolm Arnold conducting. Wow! I had to go along and see that. Jon and I ribbed each other, we were pretty much pals, but I walked away and thought: ‘Shit, in a couple of weeks’ time I’m going to be recording The Nice’s Five Bridges Suite … not at the Albert Hall but at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon!’ A much more prosaic venue. Later, Jon wanted me to play on his solo album, Gemini Suite, but that was around the time ELP were breaking big and we were touring. He was a lovely guy, a real gentleman.”

• A concert tribute to Lord took place on 4 April 2014 at the Royal Albert Hall. Performers and presenters included Deep Purple, Bruce Dickinson, Alfie Boe, Jeremy Irons, Joe Brown, Glenn Hughes, Miller Anderson and Steve Balsamo.

• In December 2012 the Mayor of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby, joined the campaign to honor Lord with a blue plaque at his childhood home at 120 Averill Road, where he lived until he was twenty, saying it would be “an important reminder of the city’s contribution to the world of contemporary music.”

• Lord was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Deep Purple in April 2016

 

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Bob Babbitt 7/2012

July 16, 2012 – Bob Babbitt (Funk Brothers) was born Robert Kreinar on November 26, 1937 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up in the Mt. Washington and Beltzhoover neighborhoods and graduated from South Hills High School. His parents had immigrated to America from Hungary and his dad found work as bricklayer. Bob earliest music influences were his parent’s gypsy music and classical music. Both of his parents sang in gypsy bands and their gypsy music was constantly heard on the family radio and record player.

Bob learned the upright bass in elementary school and played in his elementary school orchestra. He took private classical bass lessons for two years from a female bass player who was the main bass player at the Pennsylvania College for Woman. Bob then studied for three years with the principle bassist for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Anthony Bianco. During his three high school years from 1953 to 1955 Bob played classical upright bass in the Pittsburgh Symphony Jr. which featured the top Pittsburgh area high school musicians. Bob sites his early influences as Pittsburgh bassist Ray Brown and Charles Mingus.

Bob was frequently asked to sit in with Hungarian gypsy groups at Hungarians clubs that he went to with his family. His first paying job as musician was with a gypsy band.

As a teen Bob turned to rhythm-and-blues playing influenced by Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” and Red Prysock’s “Hand Clappin'”. He spent a lot of time playing along to listening to R&B songs played on Pittsburgh radio by Porky Chedwick and Mary Dee and others. At age 15 Bob began performing in Pittsburgh area nightclubs. He began by sitting in with a group led by a black sax player in a club and began working weekends with them. He switched from upright bass to a louder and easier to transport electric bass guitar at age 17. He bought a ’60 Jazz Bass and used the 1-2-4 classical fingering system until he learned to use his 3rd finger.

Bob’s father died when he was a high school senior. His family moved from Mount Washington to the Glen Hazel projects. The University of Pittsburgh offered him a music scholarship but he turned it down. Instead he took a job to help support his mother. But it was hard to find a good paying job without a skill and he did not want to work in the steel mills. His uncle in Michigan urged him to move, saying he could earn much more money in Detroit. Bob hopped a Greyhound bus to Motown in late 1957 or early 1958.

Detroit had a lively club scene, a growing recording business, and an up and coming new R&B sound. Bob worked construction during the day and played the clubs at night. In Detroit Bob picked up the nick name Bobo that morphed into Babo, Bobbitt, and finally into “Babbitt”. People he met for the first time thought it was his real name. With all of his musicians friends calling him “Babbittt”, he took it as his stage name.

He heard a band called the Royaltones rehearsing in a Detroit club one day and introduced himself. He brought in his upright bass to play with them. They hired Bob to record with them on 24 songs released between 1961 and 1964. Led by the saxophone of George Katsakis the Royaltones played instrumental rock n roll. Eight of the Royaltones’ songs hit the Billboard charts including their 1961 top ten hit “Flamingo Express.” Bob became a member of the Royaltones in 1962. Singer Del Shannon hired the Royaltones as his band and toured and recorded with them through 1964. Bob played on Del Shannon’s 1962 hit “Little Town Flirt.” After the Royaltones broke up in 1964 Babbitt became a studio musician.

As his reputation in Detroit grew Babbitt found steady work in 1966 as a session bass player at Golden World Studio, United Sound, Terashirma, and every other consequential studio in the Detroit area except Motown. He worked seven to eight recording sessions every week. During this time he recorded the signature bass line on the Capitols hit single “Cool Jerk”. He also played on the classic R&B tunes “I Just Wanna Testify” by the Parliaments and “Love Makes the World Go Round” by Dion Jackson. Babbitt played on his first Motown recording in 1967. After touring with Steve Wonder, Wonder brought Babbitt to Motown to record with him on ‘We Can Work It Out’ and the classic ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ .

At Golden World Studio Bobbit worked with several of Motown’s moonlighting session players including keyboardists Joe Hunter and Johnny Griffith, guitarist Eddie Willis, drummer Benny Benjamin, and Rock Hall of Fame bassist James Jamerson († August 2, 1983)). As Motown’s popularity grew more musicians were needed to work recording sessions. When bassist James Jamerson became unreliable due to alcoholism Babbitt was brought in as a replacement. As he proved himself, Babbitt was accepted into the inner circle of the Funk Brothers. Babbitt worked steadily at Motown from 1967 through 1972 and was under contract to Motown from 1970 to1972.

The contract prevented him from becoming a member of Jeff Beck’s band. Prevented from working for other studios and bands Babbitt tried to supplement his income working as a professional wrestler for six months. In 1972 Babbitt recorded with Marvin Gaye on one of Motown’s biggest selling records the classic “What’s Goin’ On.” In interviews Babbitt said they the arranger Dave Van dePitte let him write his own base lines on the songs “‘Mercy Mercy Me’ and ‘Inner City Blues’.

Motown’s Detroit Hitsville Studio closed in 1972 when Barry Gordon moved Motown to Los Angeles. The Funk Brothers learned they were out of work when they read a note on the locked doors of the studio. In 1973 Babbit went in the opposite direction and ended up in New York where he began working with producer Arif Mardin. In this new city he worked on recordings for Frank Sinatra, Barry Manilow, Gloria Gaynor, Robert Palmer, and Alice Cooper. Babbitt and former Motown drummer Andrew Smith became one of the hottest rhythm sections in New York. They were sought out to record with Stephanie Mills, Jim Croce, and Bonnie Raitt to Engelbert Humperdink and Frank Sinatra.

Philadelphia International Records also sought the services of Bobbitt and Andrew Smith. Working with producer Thorn Bell they recorded the Spinners classics “Then Came You,” “Games People Play,” and “Rubber Band Man.” By the late 1970’s Bob Babbitt was working constantly with many artists in many different styles. He recorded 3 complete albums in three weeks working with the Spinners in L.A., Alice Cooper in Toronto and Frank Sinatra in New York. Babbitt became a jazz player in the early ’80s touring and recording with flutist Herbie Mann and fellow Pittsburgher saxophonist Stanley Turrentine.

When studio work in New York slowed down Bob moved in June of 1986 to the next hot recording center Nashville. Music City became his home for the next 26 years. During this period Babbitt worked recording sessions with Shania Twain, Carlene Carter, Tracy Nelson, Vanessa Williams, Elton John, Robert Palmer, Lee Atwater, Jimmy McGriff, Bobby Rydell and others. In between recording dates he toured with Brenda Lee, Robert Palmer, Joan Baez and others.

Bob and the Funk Brother came to national attention in 2002 with the release of the film “Standing In The Shadows”. The film showed that the Funk Brothers and Bob Babbitt were the heart and soul of the Motown sound. The film was based on Allan Slutsky’s Funk Brothers book. The film highlighted that the Funk Brothers “played on more number-one hits than The Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys Combined”.

The brothers toured the country with special guest Joan Osborne on lead vocals. They performed at the 2004 Grammy Awards where they received the Lifetime Achievement Award. With recognition of the contributions of the Funk Brothers Bob received more offers for recording sessions and gigs. Phil Collins flew him to London to record the “Going Back” album in 2010.

Babbitt was honored in Pittsburgh on July 23, 2008 where he received a Lifetime Achievement award from Duquense University. The City of Pittsburgh declared July 23 Bob Babbitt Day and the mayor presented Bob with the official proclamation. To celebrate the occasion he performed in concert with B.E. Taylor, Jeff Jimerson, Hermie Granati, guitarist Jimmy Bruno and other Pittsburgh musicians. Babbitt was honored again on October 31, 2009 when he performed in concert at the August Wilson Center’s “A Pittsburgh Tribute to Motown Records’ 50th Anniversary.” With his classical and gypsy music roots that he learned in Pittsburgh along with his great talent and creativity, he made music history.

In early 2011 Babbitt was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He passed away in Nashville at age 74 on July 16, 2012.
One of the most versatile and most recorded bassists in music history

Bob Babbitt was one of the greatest and most recorded bass players in the history of popular music. Over 100 million copies of records that feature Bob’s bass have been sold. He performed on over 200 top 40 hits earning 25 gold records and several platinum awards. Babbitt laid down a melodic rhythmic groove that gave soul to hundreds of all time classic pop records. Bob was a versatile bassist whose work ranged from R&B, rock, jazz, pop, country, and folk. In the R&B genre Babbitt recorded and performed with The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Lou Rawls, Gladys Knight, Diane Ross, Ashford & Simpson, The Spinners, Phyllis Hyman, Mary Wells, the O’Jays, Sister Sledge, and Major Harris. He rocked with Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Robert Palmer, Alice Cooper, Peter Frampton, Joe Cocker, Nils Lofgren, Steven Bishop, the Euclid Beach Band, and Yoko Ono. In Jazz and blues Babbitt worked with Dextor Gordon, Herbie Mann, Stanley Turrentine, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Taj Mahal, John Mayall, and Bonnie Raitt. Bob performed on the country and folk recordings of Shania Twain, Carlene Carter, Louise Mandrell,Tracy Nelson, Joan Baez, and Tom Rush. Babbitt was at the top of the pops working with Frank Sinatra, Dionne Warrick , Engelbert Humperdinc, Laura Nyro, Brenda Lee, Frankie Vallie, Del Shannon, Jim Croce, and Barry Manilow.

In Detroit during the 1960s Bob Babbitt played on dozens of hits recorded in the Motown and Golden World Studios as a member of the legendary Funk Brothers studio band. His signature sound is heard on the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk,” Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown” and Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours”, Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train To Georgia”, Diana Ross’ “Touch Me In The Morning”, and War” by Edwin Starr. Babbitt is featured on Motown biggest selling album Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” album. As part of the Philadelphia soul scene in the 1970s Babbitt played on the Spinners hits “Then Came You” and “Rubberband Man”. Working in New York he was heard on Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye”. Robert Palmer’s “Every Kind Of People”, and Barry Manilow’s “Ready To Take A Chance”.

Bob Babbitt was well known for decades among musicians but was little known to popular music fans. The Funk Brothers were often un-credited on Motown recordings. The Funk Brothers were bassist James Jamerson and Bob Babbitt, guitarists Robert White and Joe Messina, keyboardists Joe Hunter and Earl Van Dyke, and drummers Benny Benjamin, Richard Allen and Uriel Jones. Bob Babbitt and his fellow Funk Brothers gained national recognition for their outstanding contribution in the Grammy winning film about the Funk Brothers, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown”. Bob Babbitt toured with the surviving members of Funk Brothers and Joanne Osborne.

Among Bass players Bob’ 90 second solo on the Denis Coffey single “Scopio” is a standard. It is a difficult solo that bassists strive to learn to prove their mastery of the bass.

Bob Babbitt and the Funk Brothers were inducted into the Nashville-based Musicians Hall of Fame in 2007. The Music City Walk of Fame honored Bob Babbitt with a star in June of 2012. He is the only session instrumentalist to be honored by the Walk of Fame. Bob Babbitt as a member of the Funk Brothers was was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2004.

“Bob was a teddy bear of a guy and he was an extraordinary musician — a player’s player.” – former Motown engineer Ed Wolfrum

“It’s probably safe to say that every minute of every day, 365 days a year, Bob Babbitt’s bass is pumping out of some radio station somewhere.” Rick Suchow – Bass Guitar Magazine (Jan, 2010)

“Bob Babbitt changed the world with four strings and a groove,” -bass player Dave Pomeroy, president of the Nashville Musicians Association, inducting Babbitt into the Walk of Fame

With 25 Gold and Platinum records under his belt he is famous for his work as a member of Motown Records’ studio band, the Funk Brothers, from 1967-72, as well as his tenure as part of MFSB for Philadelphia International Records afterwards.

Also in 1968-1970, with Mike Campbell, Ray Monette and Andrew Smith he formed the band Scorpion. His most notable bass performances include “War”, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours”, “The Tears of a Clown”, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, “Inner City Blues””Band Of Gold” (by Freda Payne), “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)”, “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)”  

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Dennis St.John 6/2012

dennis-st-johnJune 5, 2012 – Dennis St. John (Neil Diamond’s drummer and musical director) was born on November 9, 1941 in Beatrice, Nebraska, to Jeanne and Colonel Ralph St. John.

In 1947 my mother and I were amongst the first American military dependant families to live in Germany. The German prisoners of war at my father’s depot had a great Dixieland band. Every Friday I got to sit and listen to this band in the warehouse, before they had to report back to the stockade. It was my first experience with live music and has stayed with me ever since. When we returned from Germany in 1950, we moved to Chicago, and that’s where I heard my first Fender electric bass, which helped nudge me closer to music. After a couple more moves, and high-school bands in Olympia, Washington and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I graduated in 1959. I immediately put on my Princeton t-shirt, and took my fake ID to the world famous Somers Point, New Jersey traffic circle, home of Bayshores, Tony Mart’s, and Steele’s Bar. I’d spend day after day, night after night listening to the legendary Jimmy Cavallo & the House Rockers. That’s when I decided I’d like to be a drummer.

He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

A gifted percussionist, he began his career in music after forming a band in college (St.John and the Cardinals) part of which became the root for the Atlanta Rhythm Section. After college he relocated to Los Angeles, where he went on to play on over fifty gold and platinum albums with top artists of the sixties and seventies.

His name may not be instantly recognizable, but during the height of his career in the sixties and seventies, Dennis toured and recorded with several top artists, drumming on sixteen top-10 records and over fifty Gold and Platinum albums. If you’ve ever heard the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow” or “Spooky” or “Spiders & Snakes” or Linda Ronstadt’s “Desperado” or Neil Diamond’s “Forever In Blue Jeans” or “America”, then you’ve heard just a small sampling of the hundreds of recordings featuring his playing.

Dennis crossed paths with an impressive number of artists such as James Brown, Kenny Rogers, Barbra Streisand, Roy Orbison, Ronnie Milsap, Sammy Davis Jr., Liberace, Little Richard, Rufus Thomas, Tommy Roe, The Standells, Otis Redding, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. But he’s best known as Neil Diamond’s drummer and musical director from 1971-81. Several herniated discs forced him to quit active touring in the early 1980s and he formed a talent development company, guiding many future performers to stardom in the years after.

He described the most memorable event of his career as the 10 days of recording Hot August Night in 1972 (at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles) saying “it was by far the most energetic, creative, and satisfying gig I’ve ever played.”

This link to a Classic Drummer Interview with Dennis gives a great insight into Rock and Roll in the early days.

Dennis died from complications of esophageal cancer on June 5, 2012 at the age of 70.

Taking to Twitter to pay his respects, Neil Diamond wrote, “Lost my old friend Dennis St. John. His drumming graces my recordings from Hot August Night to The Jazz Singer – I’ll miss him big time.”

Entry on his obituary: “I knew Dennis. He used to come to the bar I worked at for many years when he came to visit his mother. My husband always referred to him as the guy with the pony tail. He was a true gentleman and always took time to talk to me even though I was just a bartender there. I often introduced him to people, but they always seemed to fail to understand what impact he had in the music business. I have not worked for around 4 years and was so sad to hear that he had lost his battle with cancer. He always took such good care of his mother and felt bad if he didn’t feel she was being taken care of correctly. Everyone was so happy to see him when he visited. There just aren’t enough words to do this man justice.”

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Bob Welch 6/2012

bob-welchJune 7, 2012 – Bob Welch (Fleetwood Mac) was born on July 31, 1945 in Los Angeles, California, into a show business family. His father was the successful Hollywood movie producer Robert Welch, best known for his work with Bob Hope. Neighbors were Yul Brunner and Jonathan Winters. As a youngster, he learned clarinet, switching to guitar in his early teens and developed an interest in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock music.

He was accepted into Georgetown University, but instead moved to Paris, planning to attend the Sorbonne. Welch told People in a 1979 interview that, in Paris, “I mostly smoked hash with bearded guys five years older” and spent most of my time “sitting in the Deux Magots café“. He returned to Southern California, where he briefly studied French at the University of California, Los Angeles but did not complete a degree.

In 1964, Welch joined the Los Angeles-based vocal group The Seven Souls as a guitarist. The Seven Souls lost a battle of the bands competition, the prize being a contract with Epic Records, to Sly and the Family Stone. The Seven Souls’ 1967 single “I’m No Stranger” made no impact at the time of its release, despite subsequent issue in France and Italy. Its B-side, “I Still Love You”, has since become a Northern Soul anthem, with original copies selling up to £400. The Seven Souls broke up in 1969.

Welch subsequently returned to Paris and started a trio, Head West, which was not a success. He later told People that his time in Paris (1969-1971) was “living on rice and beans and sleeping on the floor.”

In 1971 while living in Paris, he received a phone call from Mick Fleetwood asking him to come to London. Fleetwood met him at the airport, Welch told the Nashville Tennessean in 2003. “He was driving a yellow VW. He was 6-6 and weighed about 120 pounds. He was a strange-looking human being.”Welch was invited to replace founding guitarist Peter Green to join Fleetwood Mac, and along with  Christine McVie, Bob helped to steer the band away from Peter Green/Jeremy Spencer’s blues roots into a more melodic direction.

During the time he spend with Fleetwood Mac they released their album Future Games in 1971, Bare Trees in 1972 with guitarist Danny Kirwan, this album included Welch’s song Sentimental Lady, Mystery To Me in 1973 (included Bob’s son Hypnotized), also that year the band released Penguin and Bob’s final album with Fleetwood Mac Heroes are Hard To Find in 1974.

Things became problematic between Bob and other guitarist Danny Kirwan, due to the latter’s alcohol abuse. Kirwan left the band in August 1972 after he refused to go on stage at a concert after an argument with Welch and Mick Fleetwood fired him. Welch left the band in December 1974, after a brief affair with Christine McVie, much to the dislike of bass player John McVie.

In 1974, Welch was the only guitar player in the band. Warner Bros. made a new deal with Fleetwood Mac, releasing the album Heroes Are Hard to Find on Reprise in September 1974. The album became the band’s first to reach the Top 40 in the United States, peaking at No. 34 on the Billboard chart. The subsequent tour would be Welch’s last with Fleetwood Mac. Welch was suffering with personal and professional issues: his marriage was failing, and he felt he had exhausted his creativity with the band. Later, he explained that he felt estranged from John and Christine McVie, yet close to Fleetwood, with whom, he asserted, he was running the band in 1974. Welch resigned from Fleetwood Mac in December 1974, just prior to mainstream success with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, with the 1975 album “Fleetwood Mac” and then “Rumors,” Fleetwood Mac’s acclaimed 1977 global superhit album.

The following year he created Paris, the Hard Rock band with Todd Rundgren, Thom Mooney, Hunt Sales and bassist Glenn Cornick (Jethro Tull). Paris released their first album “Paris” and “Big Towne, 2061” in 1976, the band split up the following year, after which Welch then embarked on his solo career.

He scored a massive hit with “Ebony Eyes” in 1977. The album from which it was culled, “French Kiss,” featured a number of former Fleetwood Mac members, as well as a rendition of “Sentimental Lady,” a song originally recorded with Mac but reworked by Welch.

French Kiss his first solo album was released in September 1977, Three Hearts in 1979, The Other One that same year followed by Man Overboard in 1980 and Bob Welch in 1981. The albums contained several singles successes including “Hot Love, Cold World”, “Ebony Eyes”,  and “Precious Love”. His next album Eye Contact was released in 1983 the same year he became addicted to heroin.

Bob then met his wife Wendy Armistead Welch at Johnny Depp’s club the Viper Room, when it still was called Central. They got married in 1985, moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1990, and had no children.
Wendy Welch was given credit by her husband, in his own words he said:

The time frame between 1984-1998 was a story for me of pulling out of major depression, drug addiction and extreme negativity, which I was able to do, thanks to a. the LA Sheriff’s Dept (busted), b. Cedars Sinai hospital (in a coma 2 weeks), and, especially, c. a lovely lady named Wendy Armistead, who helped me stop beating my head against a brick wall ! During this time Wendy helped me to get back into reading music again, to want to do a band again, (the Touch, Ave. M), and to regain my musical and personal identity, which had gotten pretty trashed.

In 1999,  after three years  clean of drugs he released Bob Welch Looks At Bop. Between 2003 and 2004 he released His Fleetwood Mac Years & Beyond I and II, and Live at Roxy in 2004.

Welch had undergone spinal surgery three months prior to his death. Despite the surgery, doctors told him his prognosis for recovery was poor, and he would eventually become an invalid. He was still in considerable pain, despite taking strong pain medication for six weeks.

On June 7, 2012, around 6:00 a.m., Welch died by suicide, shooting himself in the chest in his Nashville home where his wife Wendy discovered his body. He left a nine-page suicide note and love letter for Wendy; he did not want her to have to take care of an invalid. He left a suicide note, but its content were not  revealed. He was 66 years old. Wendy died on November 28, 2016, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart disease, also aged 66. Bob and Wendy Welch are buried beside each other in Memphis, Tennessee.

An exhibit chronicling Bob Welch’s career opened at The Musicians Hall of Fame at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on August 27, 2018. Despite the lawsuit over a decade earlier, Fleetwood wrote a tribute for the exhibit. Bob and Wendy Welch’s estate has endowed a scholarship to support Belmont School of Music students.

Fleetwood Mac and its former and some current members were inducted in  the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, however Bob was not.

“My era was the bridge era,” Welch told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1998, after he was excluded from the Fleetwood Mac line-up inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “It was a transition. But it was an important period in the history of the band. Mick Fleetwood dedicated a whole chapter of his biography to my era of the band and credited me with ‘saving Fleetwood Mac.’ Now they want to write me out of the history of the group.”

• Mick Fleetwood, who hired Welch in 1971 after the departure of Peter Green, said Welch was a key part of the band’s evolution. “He was a huge part of our history which sometimes gets forgotten. Mostly his legacy would be his songwriting abilities that he brought to Fleetwood Mac, which will survive all of us,” said Fleetwood. “If you look into our musical history, you’ll see a huge period that was completely ensconced in Bob’s work.”

 although Stevie Nicks and Welch weren’t in Fleetwood Mac at the same time, she released a statement expressing her admiration and regrets: “The death of Bob Welch is devastating …. I had many great times with him after Lindsey and I joined Fleetwood Mac. He was an amazing guitar player — he was funny, sweet — and he was smart — I am so very sorry for his family and for the family of Fleetwood Mac — so, so sad …”

• David Adelstein, who served as Welch’s keyboard player from 1977 through 1982 said: “For me, they were very exciting times back then. We were the opening act for Dave Mason back around February 12, 1978, our first show at Rocklyn College, NY. A short time later, Bob was leading us up the stairs to what was the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen, Cal-Jam II. We opened the show with a 10:00 AM call! That was a rush — 250,000 people in the crowd at the old Ontario Motor Speedway. During that tour, Bob opened shows for not only Dave Mason, but for Jefferson Starship, Heart, Beach Boys, Styx, Allman Bros. and of course [Fleetwood] Mac (a great billing — the best of both worlds)”When it came to the follow up album, Bob and his producer, John Carter, gave me my first opportunity to play on that album. When it came around to the third album, Bob gave myself and guitarist Todd Sharp the opportunity to include an original song on the album. This launched my songwriting career. All in all, I have awesome memories from my time playing with Welch, sharing dinners at some wonderful restaurants (he appreciated great food), along with his love of music and that included all kinds of music! The circle of friends here in the LA area … are already missing him much.”

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Robin Gibb 5/2012

robin-gibbMay 20, 2012 – Robin Hugh Gibb (BeeGees) was born on 22 December 1949 in Douglas, Isle of Man, to Hugh and Barbara Gibb. He was the fraternal twin of Maurice Gibb and was the older of the two by 35 minutes. Apart from Maurice, he had one sister, Lesley Evans, and two brothers, Barry and Andy. They lived in utter poverty.

In 1953, the Gibbs watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on the television. Their neighbour in Willaston, Isle of Man, Marie Beck who was the friend of his mother and her sister Peggy. Another neighbour, Helen Kenney was living in Douglas Head as Kenney recalls “Barry and the twins used to come into Mrs. Beck’s house and we would mind them, Robin once said to me, ‘We’re going to be rich one day, we’re going to form a band!’ “Little did I realise he meant it”.

His family moved to Manchester where at aged 8, Robin started out performing alongside his brothers as a child act encouraged by their father Hugh, a drummer and band leader. The Gibb brothers formed The Rattlesnakes which consisted of Barry on guitar and vocals, Robin and Maurice on vocals, Paul Frost on drums and Kenny Horrocks on tea-chest bass, and the quintet performed in local theatres in Manchester, their influences at that time such as The Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard and Paul Anka. In May 1958, the Rattlesnakes were disbanded as Frost and Horrocks left, and the name changed to Wee Johnny Hayes and the Blue Cats. In August 1958, the family traveled to Australia on the same ship as Australian musician Red Symons; it is rumored that the brothers began committing petty crimes such as arson, which may have been the reason the family moved to Australia.

While schoolboys in Manchester, Barry, the oldest Gibb brother, and his younger twins Maurice and Robin perfected the art of singing in close harmony. They first performed, aged nine and six, in the toilets of John Lewis, because that was where the best acoustics in town could be found. That shared bond as performers helped them escape from their handto-mouth existence; the family moved house every few weeks at one stage in order to stay ahead of the bailiffs.

Robin explained: “The real world was just too real and we didn’t want to be a part of normal life. We wanted to create a magic world for the three of us. The three of us were like one person, and we were doing what we needed to do: make music. It became an obsession.”

The brothers also developed a taste for truanting and getting into trouble. “Barry and Robin were pilfering right, left and centre from Woolies and getting away with it,” recalled Maurice in an interview before his death in 2003.

“One day, I was walking home and all the billboards in the main street in Chorlton were blazing away, firemen and policemen running around everywhere. That was Robin, the family arsonist. Another time he set the back of a shop on fire.” The family were advised about assisted passage to Australia by the neighbourhood policeman, who seems to have hinted that it was that or legal action. The three boys performed in their pyjamas every night on the deck of the ship which took them away.

Once in Australia, the brothers continued to perform and took the name Bee Gees, an abbreviation of brothers Gibb.

In 1963 their first single, “The Battle of The Blue and The Grey”, made the charts in Sydney and led to an appearance on a local TV station. In 1965 their single “The Spicks and Specks” gave them their first Australian No.1.

Dreaming of more than the Australian market, they returned to the UK in 1966 where they were auditioned by impresario Robert Stigwood, who got them a recording contract with Polydor, here they had their first major hit with “To Love Somebody”, co-written by Robin, followed by hits including “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You”, “Massachusetts”, “Words” and “World”. But the lead vocals were credited to Barry, this eventually led to tension and in 1969, Robin left the group…

Once back in the UK in 1967, success came quickly; legendary music impresario Robert Stigwood took them on and they had their first hit in Britain with New York Mining Disaster. Robin was only 17, and fell in love with the first woman he met: Molly Hullis, Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s secretary. They were married within a year, and quickly had two children, Spencer and Melissa.

The BeeGees second single – To Love Somebody, co-written by Robin – became a pop standard and over the years was covered by hundreds of artists. The lead vocals on the record were taken by Barry. This led to considerable tension in the band, with Robin accusing Stigwood of favouring his brother as the lead vocalist.  The band hung together for more chart successes, including Massachusetts and Words. But when his song Lamplight was relegated to the B-side of Barry’s First of May in 1969, Robin quit the group.

The pressure of fame was simply too much for vulnerable Robin, and his drug use became uncontrollable. “We used to go to America for a tour and I would stay up all night, collapse and then wake up in hospital suffering from exhaustion. I didn’t know what I was doing.” His parents had him made a ward of court because they were so concerned. He even quit the band – the first of many attempts to walk away from his brothers.

He had one hit single, Saved by the Bell, but was unable to follow it up and decided he was not cut out for a solo career. In 1970 the band reunited and achieved an immediate chart hit in the US with Lonely Days, which they followed up with How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? But it was clear that The Bee Gees’ brand of soulful ballads was no longer in fashion and there was a real danger they would fade into obscurity. Stigwood persuaded the brothers to switch their sound towards disco and their next single, Jive Talkin’, saw them make a chart comeback in both the US and UK.

His marriage was falling apart as the band became more famous, with Robin jetting around the world while Molly stayed at home with the children in Epsom, Surrey. A gulf opened up between the brothers, too. Maurice was a drinker, but Barry and Robin continued to share a taste for amphetamines. Each had their own manager, the arguments were frequent and Robin walked out several times.

At the summit of the band’s incredible success with the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever in 1977, (How Deep is Your Love, Stayin’ Alive and Night Fever, their most successful track), when the Bee Gees were at the height of their reincarnated fame as tight-trousered, bouffant-haired, nutmeg-tanned sex symbols, Molly told him their marriage was over.

“I loved my wife, but I was still very young and still attracted to other people,” he admitted. “I have a high sex drive and I was unfaithful. I’ve had quite a few physical encounters – probably more than 100. Some of them were disappointing. They were mostly a distraction, almost like notches on a belt. I didn’t have sex for love, just for fun.”

The separation was acrimonious, and Robin did not see the children for four years, although he got on better terms later. He recalls being unable to eat while the divorce dragged on. “I felt I was going to die from complete misery,” he said. Robin even ended up in prison in 1983 after the divorce judge found that he had breached an agreement by talking publicly about the marriage. Sentenced to two weeks in jail, he appealed and spent only a couple of hours inside.

Gibb continued writing songs for other artists, co-writing four of the tracks – among them hit song Woman in Love – on Barbra Streisand’s Guilty album with brother Barry. Robin also co-wrote material for Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick and Kenny Rogers.

At a low ebb in 1980, he was introduced to his second wife Dwina. Sharing a birthday and an interest in history, Robin says it was love at first sight, and once contended that he might have known her in a former life. The birth of their son Robin John a year after his divorce from Molly was not publicly revealed until the kid was nearly one.

Early in the marriage, his younger brother Andy sought sanctuary with Robin and Dwina at their Oxfordshire home. He was just 30, and running away from a failed marriage, failing career and the rumored chaotic after-effects of cocaine addiction. He died suddenly at Robin’s home from natural causes of an inflammation of the heart muscle, as it turned out later.

The Bee Gees however continued to record and perform and achieved some chart success, even though Barry had also been suffering from a number of health problems including arthritis, while in the early 1990s Maurice sought treatment for his alcoholism.

In 1997 they released the album Still Waters, which sold more than four million copies, and were presented with a Brit award for outstanding contribution to music.

In January 2003 tragedy struck again with the sudden death of Maurice at the age of 53. Following his death, Robin and Barry disbanded the group. Andy’s death had hit Robin hard, but a harder blow was the death of his twin Maurice, always the peacemaker and the extrovert in the group. Maurice died suddenly after his intestine burst. Robin was so grief-stricken that for months he couldn’t come to terms with his brother’s death. “I can’t accept that he’s dead,” he said later that year. “I just imagine he’s alive somewhere else. Pretend is the right word.”

Robin continued to tour and record and reunited with Barry in Miami in 2006 for a charity concert, prompting rumours of a possible reformation. In 2008 he was at the forefront of the campaign for a permanent memorial in London to the men of Bomber Command.
Two years later he sang the Bee Gees hit I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You with a group of soldiers in support of the Poppy Day appeal.
Also in 2008, Robin performed at the BBC’s Electric Proms, marking the 30th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever topping the UK charts.
But ill health dogged him. In 2010, he cancelled a series of shows due to severe stomach pains and went on to have emergency surgery for a blocked intestine, something his twin brother had died from.

In late 2011 it was announced that Robin had been diagnosed with liver cancer. His gaunt appearance prompted suggestions that he was close to death. However, he went into temporary remission and had been in recovery for several months. “I feel fantastic,” he told BBC Radio 2 in February. “I am very active and my sense of well-being is good.”
His final work was a collaboration with his son, RJ, on The Titanic Requiem, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the naval disaster.

Robin transitioned after contracting pneumonia while bravely battling against liver cancer on May 20, 2012.

From their early incarnation as pop troubadours to their dramatic reinvention as the kings of disco in the mid-1970s, The BeeGees notched up more than 200 million album sales worldwide. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Robin Gibb was a talented singer and songwriter whose best work came from his collaboration with his brothers.

“There are songs we wrote in 1968 that people are still singing,” he told one interviewer in 2008. “There’s very few artists with that kind of history.

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Donna Summer 5/2012

donna-summerMay 17, 2012 – Donna Summer was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines on December 31, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts. Summer was one of seven children. She was raised in the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill. Her father was a butcher and her mother was a schoolteacher.

She began singing at a young age in the church. Summer’s performance debut occurred at church when she was eight years old, replacing a vocalist who failed to show up. In her early teens, she formed several musical groups imitating Motown girl groups such as The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. She attended Boston’s Jeremiah E. Burke High School where she performed in school musicals and was considered popular.

In 1967, just weeks before graduation, Donna left for New York where she joined the psychedelic blues rock band Crow as lead singer. It was a move influenced by Janis Joplin’s life story that she dropped out of school, she later stated. After they were passed on by a record label that was only interested in the band’s lead singer, the band broke up and Summer stayed in New York to audition for a role in the counterculture musical, Hair. She landed the part of Sheila and agreed to take the role in the Munich production of the show, moving to Munich, Germany after getting her parents’ reluctant but not needed approval. Continue reading Donna Summer 5/2012

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Adam Yauch 5/2012

adam-yauchMay 4, 2012 – Adam Yauch aka MCA (Beastie Boys) was born in Brooklyn New York on August 5th 1964.  While in high school, he taught himself to play the bass guitar and formed the Beastie Boys with John Berry, Michael Diamond and Kate Schellenbach.

They played their first show, then still a hardcore punk band on his 17th birthday. At age 22, he and the Beastie Boys, had turned into a hip hop trio and were touring with Madonna in 1985. A year later they released their debut album Licensed to Ill, which was followed by 7 other albums, the last being their 2011 album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.

Under the pseudonym “Nathanial Hörnblowér“, Adam directed many of the Beastie Boys’ music videos and in 2002, he built a recording studio in New York City called Oscilloscope Laboratories. He also began an independent film distributing company called Oscilloscope Pictures. Yauch directed the 2006 Beastie Boys concert film, Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, although in the DVD extras for the film, the title character in “A Day in the Life of Nathanial Hörnblowér” is played by David Cross.

He also directed the 2008 film Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot about eight high school basketball prospects at the Boost Mobile Elite 24 Hoops Classic at Rucker Park in Harlem, New York City. Yauch produced Build a Nation, the comeback album from hardcore/punk band Bad Brains. In addition, Oscilloscope Laboratories also distributed Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (2009).

2009 was the year that he was diagnosed with a lymph node cancer.

By 2010 The Beastie Boys had sold 40 million records worldwide and in 2011, Yauch received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, the college he attended for two years. The award was “given in recognition of a significant contribution to the American artistic or literary heritage.”.

In April 2012, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yauch was inducted in absentia due to his illness. His bandmates paid tribute to Yauch; a letter from Yauch was read to the crowd.

As a Buddhist, he was involved in the Tibetan independence movement and organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the mid 1990s.

Adam died battling cancer on May 4, 2012. He was 47.

“There is a lot of misconception in all layers of society about what actually brings happiness. We’re caught up in all these promoted ideas that having a lot of money or having somebody beautiful to have sex with or owning some cool objects -a cool car, a cool stereo – a Gibson Les Paul 1957 – a cool house in a cool neighborhood or whatever……… is going to make us happy. All that actually does not bring us happiness. Compassion, empathy, altruism, sharing brings happiness. Those are values that make us smile when practiced.” 

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Levon Helm 4/2012

Levon-HelmApril 19, 2012 – Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm  was born on May 26, 1940 in Elaine, Arkansas. Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet west of Helena, Arkansas. His parents, Nell and Diamond Helm, cotton farmers and also great lovers of music, encouraged their children to play and sing. Young Lavon (as he was christened) began playing the guitar at the age of eight and also played drums during his formative years. He saw Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys at the age of six and decided then to become a musician.

Arkansas in the 1940s and 50s stood at the confluence of a variety of musical styles—blues, country and R&B—that later became known as rock and roll. Helm was influenced by all these styles, which he heard on the Grand Ole Opry on radio station WSM and R&B on radio station WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee. He also saw traveling shows such as F.S. Walcott’s Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels that featured top African-American artists of the time. Continue reading Levon Helm 4/2012

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Greg Ham 4/2012

greg-hamApril 19, 2012 – Greg Ham (Men at Work) was born September 27, 1953 in Melbourne where he attended Camberwell Grammar School.

A virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, he played saxophone, flute, keyboards, percussion, harmonica and guitar as well as vocals and is best known for playing multiple instruments as a key member in the 1980s band Men at Work.  They are the only Australian artists to have a simultaneous No.1 album and No.1 single in the United States with Business as Usual and “Down Under” respectively. They achieved the same distinction of a simultaneous No.1 album and No.1 single in the UK.

They also won the 1983 Grammy Award for Best New Artist; that same year, Canada awarded them a Juno Award for “International LP of the Year”. As an actor, Greg was a regular cast member on While You’re Down There. Later in life, he taught guitar at Carlton North Primary School in Melbourne.

Even though the circumstances of Greg’s death were initially circumspect, the autopsy confirmed a massive heart attack killed him at the age of 58, some days prior to the day he was found on April 19, 2012.

By some accounts, Ham’s personal demons of drug and alcohol dependency began as far back as Men at Work’s glory year: 1983. It was in that pivotal year that the band was touring nonstop as well as worldwide. The stress by all accounts was horrific, and fights between band mates were all too commonplace.

In regard to the band’s in-fighting, Hay told me in 1997, “The band broke into two sectors: me and Greg on one end and (John) Rees and (Jerry) Speiser on the other, with Ronny (Strykert) struggling to stay in a neutral corner.” One can only imagine what the lack of sleep, breakneck tour schedule and in-fighting must have done to a delicate, sensitive man like Greg Ham.

With his posh, two-story former home studio sold to help ease his financial woes, Ham purchased a rather dismal, smallish home (complete with a multitude of telephone poles and wires encircling it) just a few miles away from his former home. There he sat, in the heart of the business section of downtown Carlton North, Victoria, Australia, alone. Greg Ham found himself-despite his fame and high esteem among Australia’s music community-on very shaky ground.

On April 19, 2012, Greg Ham’s friends became alarmed when Ham’s telephone answering machine went unheeded for days on end. A subsequent inquiry among Ham’s neighbors revealed that no one had seen him for days. Ham’s long-time friend and pharmacist David Nolte went to the house in the afternoon, where he discovered Ham’s body in the front room of Ham’s home. An autopsy revealed that Ham had been dead for days.

Mr. Nolte, who runs a Rathdowne Street pharmacy, had known Ham for 30 years. He told the Australian press that he went to check on Ham after a friend was unable to contact him for some days. By the time that Nolte arrived at Ham’s home, it was already too late; Greg Ham was dead. His lifeless body was found in a sitting position against the wall in the home’s front room. He had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Said Nolte, ”Greg’s friend told me they tried to ring him over a number of days and … it kept going to voicemail and the cats obviously hadn’t been fed.”

In the aftermath of Ham’s sudden demise, an unnamed friend of Ham’s stepped forward with the alarming claim that Ham’s abuse issues were far more serious than what had been previously reported. This “mystery man” alleged that Ham had been heavily using heroin, and that Ham’s abuse of alcohol had intensified after the Kookaburra case. Observed the friend, sadly shaking his head, ”The whole case had undone him.”

Immediately following the death of Greg Ham, furious fans began a barrage of hate mail and threatening phone calls to Larrikin Music Publishing Company and Norman Lurie retired not long after.

Greg Ham’s family and friends held a private funeral for Ham at the Fitzroy Town Hall in Melbourne, on May 2, 2012. Gregory Norman Ham was finally laid to rest at The Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Roman Catholic area of plots, Compartment O, Section 3, Row 1 Grave 55.

Said Colin Hay, fondly recalling his band mate (and beloved friend of 40 years) “He was the funniest person I knew. We shared countless, unbelievably memorable times together, from stumbling through Richmond after playing the Cricketers Arms, to helicoptering into New York City to appear on ‘Saturday Night Live’, or flying through dust storms in Arizona, above the Grand Canyon. We played in a band and conquered the world together. I love him very much. He’s here forever. He was a beautiful man!”

I heartily agree, Colin.

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Jim Marshall 4/2012

Jim Marshall AmpsApril 5, 2012 – Jim Marshall  Even though Jim Marshall was a drummer who made a good income teaching drums to many British rockstars in the early fifties, his being in these pages is based on his importance to Rock as a builder of Rock’s most important amplifiers and speaker boxes.

It was the physical embodiment of rock’s power and majesty — a wall of black, vinyl-clad cabinets, one atop the other, crowned with a rectangular box containing the innovative circuitry that revolutionized the music.

This was the famed Marshall stack, the amplification gear that has dominated rock stages since its introduction in the early 1960s, bestowing on guitarists the ability to achieve unprecedented volume and controlled distortion.

From the Who, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s on through Peter Frampton, Van Halen, AC/DC, Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana in succeeding decades, the cursive “Marshall” emblazoned on the speakers has served as an inescapable backdrop signature.

The Marshall stack was so much larger than life that it lent itself to excess as well. The famous amp in the mockumentary “Spinal Tap” with a unique setting of 11 on the dial was a Marshall, and no rock image was more over-the-top than that of KISS’ four members performing in front of some 40 Marshall cabinets.

Of course, they didn’t need that many.

“Hendrix used three 100-watt amps and three stacks,” their inventor Jim Marshall once said. “KISS go a lot further, but most of the cabinets and amps you see on stage are dummies. We once built 80 dummy cabinets for Bon Jovi. They all do it — it’s just backdrop.

“It would be stupid to use more than three 100-watt amps, wherever and whoever you are.”

Marshall died at 88 in an English hospice after suffering from cancer and several severe strokes, his son Terry Marshall told the Associated Press. Musicians, competitors and fans were quick to salute Marshall, who had retained an active role at Marshall Amplification well into his 80s.

Comments on Twitter came from Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx (“R.I.P. Jim Marshall. You were responsible for some of the greatest audio moments in music’s history and 50% of all our hearing loss”), Slash (“The news of Jim Marshall passing is deeply saddening. R & R will never be the same w/out him. But, his amps will live on FOREVER!”) and Megadeth’s David Ellefson (“You made rock n roll what it is for so many of us.”)

“RIP Jim Marshall. Such a huge loss for the music community,” was the sentiment expressed by Fullerton-based Fender Guitars, whose Bassman amplifier served as Marshall’s model when he set about to redefine the technology in 1962.

It was an unlikely undertaking, but Marshall’s life had consistently defied the odds. Born in London on July 29, 1923, he saw his youth interrupted by a case of bone tuberculosis that immobilized him in a hospital from the age of 5 to 13.

When he recovered, he took on menial jobs, began educating himself in engineering, learned to tap dance and became a big band singer and drummer. He worked as a toolmaker for aircraft manufacturers during World War II, but soon music took precedence.

He began giving drum lessons and opened a drum shop in London. One of his students was Mitch Mitchell, who would later introduce him to the leader of his new trio, Hendrix. The shop’s customers included the son of one of Marshall’s big band cohorts, a young rock musician who encouraged Marshall to add guitars and amps to his inventory.

Marshall took Pete Townshend’s advice, and business boomed. When Townshend and friends such as Ritchie Blackmore learned about his technical background, they prodded him to devise an amplifier with more power and rougher tone than the pure, clean-sounding Fenders.

Marshall took on the challenge, working with guitarist-electrician Ken Bran and hiring engineer Dudley Craven away from EMI Records to help him achieve the sound he envisioned. They adapted airplane vacuum tubes into the design, Marshall packed four 12-inch speakers into a tongue-and-groove cabinet whose top half angled slightly upward and they set a 50-watt amplifier on top of it.

They got it right on the sixth prototype, but the rock musicians were becoming intoxicated with the potential of greater volume and soon their urging led to a 100-watt amp powering eight speakers — two of the cabinets in the famed stack formation.

Marshall quickly built his enterprise into a consistently successful firm, adding midrange and low-end lines to the catalog. He twice received the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement and was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2004. He was regularly listed among Britain’s wealthiest individuals.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the man known as “the father of loud” did suffer some hearing problems. But it’s not what you might think.

“My right ear is not very good at all,” he said in a 2005 interview with the New Zealand Herald. “And I’d always put it down to when I was playing the top cymbal, but it was probably the brass section in the orchestras I was playing in the ’50s. So it happened before I was dealing with rock ‘n’ roll.”

Jim Marshall was almost 89 years old when he died from cardiac arrest on 5 April 2012.

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Bugs Henderson 3/2012

Bugs HendersonMarch 8, 2012 – Buddy “Bugs” Henderson was born on October 20th 1943 in Palm Springs, California, but grew up in Tyler, Texas. At age 16 he formed a band called the Sensores and later joined Mouse and the Traps. Living in Dallas-Fort Worth during the early 1970s, he became lead guitarist for the blues/rock band Nitzinger before one-hit pop wonder Bruce Channel recruited him into a band.

He established his own band the Shuffle Kings, and spent his entire working life as musician performing from Fort Worth clubs and all over the world, forging and establishing a large cult following. He released 18 albums, while his guitarplaying style impressed musicians such as Eric Clapton, Freddie King, Johnny Winter, Johnny Hyland and Ted Nugent.

Henderson was hugely popular in Europe and toured the continent often from the 1970s on. Continue reading Bugs Henderson 3/2012

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Michael Hossack 3/2012

michael-hossackMarch 12, 2012 – Michael Hossack (drummer for Doobie Brothers) was born in Paterson, New Jersey on October 17th 1946. He started playing drums in the Little Falls Cadets, a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps, as well as Our Lady of Lourdes Cadets and Fair Lawn Cadets. He always credited these experiences for teaching and preparing him for playing in a two-drummer group such as the Doobie Brothers.

After graduating high school, he served for four years in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. Following his honorable discharge in 1969 he returned to New Jersey, where a close friend talked him into auditioning for a California-based band called Mourning Reign.

They played heavily in upstate New York, before relocating to the San Francisco bay area and signing with a production company that had also signed the newly formed rock band, the Doobie Brothers.

Although Mourning Reign was short-lived, Hossack’s abilities gained considerable exposure and having learned of his availability, was invited to jam with the Doobies in 1971. Little did he know that the “jam session” was an actual audition which took place at Bimbo’s 365 Club. After hearing founding drummer John Hartman and Hossack together, the Doobies decided that having two drummers would beef up the rhythm section and so adopted the “dual drummers” sound pioneered by bands such as the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers. Hossack played alongside Hartman on the band’s breakthrough albums Toulouse Street in 1972, The Captain and Me in 1973 and What Were Once Vices are Now Habits in 1974, which spawned the band’s first #1 hit, “Black Water”.

After a grueling ten-month tour in 1973, Hossack left the Doobies. He went on to join Bobby Winkelman’s band Bonaroo (band) which released one album then disbanded shortly afterwards. In 1976, he had a brief stint with a band called DFK (or the Dudek Finnigan Krueger Band), with Les Dudek, Mike Finnigan and Jim Krueger. In 1977, Hossack became a partner in Chateau Recorders studio in North Hollywood.

An avid outdoors man, when he wasn’t in the studio or on tour, he was either riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, hunting or fishing. A family man as well, Mike enjoyed spending as much time as possible raising his two children.

In 1987 former band member Keith Knudsen called Mike and asked if he would participate in a series of benefit concerts for veterans of the Vietnam War. Being a veteran himself, Mike agreed and the Doobie Brothers (after a five-year hiatus) were back together again. Due to the huge success of these concerts, the Doobie Brothers decided to reform with band members Pat Simmons, Tom Johnston, John Hartman, Tiran Porter, Bobby LaKind and Michael Hossack. Not long afterwards, they were offered a recording contract from Capitol Records. Since then, Mike’s unique style can be heard on the albums Cycles, Brotherhood, Rockin’ down the Highway: The Wildlife Concert, Sibling Rivalry, Live at Wolf Trap and World Gone Crazy.

On June 22, 2001, while heading to a show at Caesars Tahoe in Lake Tahoe, Mike suffered multiple fractures from a motorcycle accident on Highway 88 and had to be airlifted to a Sacramento-area hospital where he underwent surgery. After months of healing and grueling physical therapy, Mike was back with the band. He was a permanent fixture until he developed cancer in 2010 and had to take a leave of absence to focus on his health.

On March 2012, Hossack sadly died of cancer at his home in Dubois, Wyoming at the age of 65.

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Ronnie Montrose 3/2012

ronnie montroseMarch 3, 2012 – Ronnie Montrose. There are credible sources that claim he was born November 29, 1947 in Denver, Colorado, and others say he was born in San Francisco, California. No confusion is there about his early childhood in Colorado.

In his own words Montrose was born in San Francisco, California. When he was a toddler, his parents moved back to his mother’s home state of Colorado (his father was from Bertrand, Nebraska, and his mother was from Golden, Colorado). He spent most of his younger years in Denver, Colorado until he ran away at about 16 years old to pursue a musical career. He ultimately spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay area, where he became an influential, highly-rated player whose crunchy riffs, fluid licks and mesmerising solos lit up FM radio during the 1970s.

Continue reading Ronnie Montrose 3/2012

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Joe Moretti 2/2012

Joe MorettiFebruary 9, 2012-  Joseph Edward “Joe” Moretti  was born in Glasgow, Scotland on May 10, 1938. Moretti moved to London in November 1958 with his wife Pina, and instantly became part of the burgeoning rock and roll scene based around the The 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho.

There he found opportunities backing up singers such as Gene Vincent, Vince Eager, Colin Hicks & The Cabin Boys and other skiffle acts and nascent rock n’ roll outfits. It was in the 2i’s, in early 1959, that Moratti learned that guitarist-singer Tony Sheridan had quit Vince Taylor’s band, The Playboys, and Moratti was asked to take his place.

Moretti toured with Taylor in the UK and cut the iconic “Brand New Cadillac” in the spring of 1959. Shortly after, Moretti left the band to take up with Johnny Duncan’s Bluegrass Boys. The following year, 1960, Moretti was to play guitar on another session after being called into the studio by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ guitarist Alan Caddy to play leads on two songs: UK #1 single “Shakin’ All Over” and its follow-up “Restless”.

Throughout the 1960s Moretti continued to tour and record with artists such as Nero and the Gladiators, Ronnie Jones and The Nightimers and Eddie Calvert. In addition, Moretti was in demand as a session musician and, along with other UK guitarists such as Big Jim Sullivan, future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and Vic Flick, often himself having played guitar at a recording date without being credited. Moretti claims to have played guitar on hits for Jet Harris and Tony Meehan (“Scarlet O’Hara” and “Applejack”) and Donovan’s hit record “Mellow Yellow”.

It is now acknowledged that he played guitar on at least two more UK number one records: Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” and Chris Farlowe’s Rolling Stones cover “Out Of Time”.

He lived in South Africa until his death from lung cancer. Joe Moretti was 73 years old when he died on 9 February 2012.

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Clive Richard Shakespeare 2/2012

Clive-Shakespeare_-picFeb 15, 2012 – Clive Richard Shakespeare (Sherbet) was born in Southampton, Hampshire on June 3, 1949.

With his family he emigrated to Australia and settled in Sydney. As lead guitarist, he joined various bands including The Road Agents in 1968 in Sydney with Terry Hyland on vocals. He was a founding member of Down Town Roll, which was a Motown covers band, alongside Adrian Cuff (organ), Frank Ma (vocals), Doug Rea (bass guitar), Pam Slater (vocals) and Danny Taylor on drums.

In April 1969 Rea, Shakespeare and Taylor founded pop, rock band, Sherbet with Dennis Laughlin on vocals (ex-Sebastian Hardie Blues Band, Clapham Junction) and Sammy See on organ, guitar, and vocals (Clapham Junction). See had left in October 1970 to join The Flying Circus and was replaced by New Zealand-born Garth Porter (Samael Lilith, Toby Jugg) who provided Hammond organ and electric piano. Sherbet’s initial singles were cover versions released by Infinity Records and distributed by Festival Records.

From 1972 to 1976, Sherbet’s chief songwriting team of Porter and Shakespeare were responsible for co-writing the lion’s share of the band’s material, which combined British pop and American soul influences. For their debut album, Time Change… A Natural Progression (December 1972), Shakespeare co-wrote five tracks including the top 30 single, “You’ve Got the Gun”. Other Sherbet singles co-written by Shakespeare include “Cassandra” (peaked at number nine in 1973), “Slipstream” and “Silvery Moon” (both reached number five in 1974), and their number-one hit “Summer Love” from 1975. Sherbet followed with more top five singles, “Life” and “Only One You” / “Matter of Time” and their worldwide hit “”Howzat” in ’76.

In January 1976, Shakespeare left Sherbet citing ‘personal reasons’. He later explained “I couldn’t even go out the front of my house because there were all these girls just hanging on the fence […] There was always a deadline for Garth and me – another album, another tour. When it did finally end, I was relieved more than anything because I had had enough. I left the band early in 1976 for reasons I don’t want to discuss fully … but let’s just say I wasn’t happy about where all the money went”.[6] The last single he played on was “Child’s Play”, which was a No. 5 hit in February. Shakespeare was soon replaced by Harvey James (ex-Mississippi, Ariel). In 1977, Shakespeare issued a solo single, “I Realize” / “There’s a Way” on Infinity Records.

Shakespeare set up Silverwood Studios and worked in record production, including co-producing Paul Kelly’s debut solo album, Post (1985).

Shakespeare rejoined Sherbet for reunion concerts including the Countdown Spectacular tour throughout Australia during September and October 2006. That year also saw the release of two newly recorded tracks on the compilation album, Sherbet-Super Hits, “Red Dress” which was written by Porter, Shakespeare, Daryl Braithwaite, James, Tony Mitchell, and Alan Sandow; and “Hearts Are Insane” written by Porter. In January 2011 bandmate Harvey James died of lung cancer – the remaining members except Shakespeare, who was too ill, performed at Gimme that Guitar, a tribute concert for James on 17 February. Clive died on February 15, 2012 from prostrate cancer at age 64.

“You go thru life doing what you feel is your utmost best,” he wrote a week before his death. “We all wonder what sort of impression we leave, to get the acceptance of your peers, then when a crisis like this comes along and your peers are there for you not because they are making a lot of money, not because they are contracted, not because it is a good career move, but because they want to be there for you.

“I am, and will be eternally humbled.”

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Michael Davis 2/2012

Michael DavisFebruary 17, 2012 – Michael Davis (MC5) was born June 5th 1943. Michael Davis (68) American bassist; he became the bassist for Detroit’s radical proto-punk band the MC5 in 1964. After dropping out of the fine arts program at Wayne State University, Davis became the bassist for the MC5 in 1964, replacing original bassist Pat Burrows when singer Rob Tyner and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided that they liked Davis’s style and wanted him in the band. He played on the band’s three original albums, including their debut Kick Out the Jams, and remained in the group until 1972.  Their first album “Kick Out the Jams” was released in 1969 and became an international hit.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, Davis spent time in Kentucky’s Lexington Federal Prison on a drug charge, where he was unexpectedly reunited with Wayne Kramer. Upon his release from prison, he joined the Ann Arbor-based art noise band Destroy All Monsters at the urging of friend Ron Asheton of The Stooges.

Davis spent seven years with Destroy All Monsters, penning the underground punk hits “Nobody Knows”, “Meet the Creeper”, “Little Boyfriend”, “Rocking The Cradle” and “Fast City” among others. The band recorded and released on Cherry Red Records, toured the U.K., and then broke up. Their music touched on elements of punk rock, psychedelic rock, heavy metal and noise rock with a heavy dose of performance art. They described their music as “anti-rock.” Destroy All Monsters never found mainstream success, but earned some notoriety due to members of notable rock groups The Stooges and MC5 who joined the group in various reincarnations.

Although Destroy All Monsters never recorded a proper album, Sonic Youth singer/guitarist Thurston Moore released a three compact disc compilation of the group’s music in 1994.

After time served with Destroy All Monsters Davis moved to Arizona, where he played in Blood Orange. In the spring of 2003, Davis reunited with fellow surviving MC5 members Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson to play a show at London’s 100 Club as part of a promotion for an MC5 inspired line of apparel for Levi Strauss Vintage Clothing. This spawned a 200 city world tour and a trip back into the studio to write new songs. Later he co-founded the group DKT-MC5 with former MC5 members Wayne Kramer on guitar and Dennis Thompson on drums, hence their band name.

Since the mid 70s Michael had spent more and more time with his love of painting. In 2011, one of his paintings titled “Black To Comm Sk8r Boys” appeared as the cover art for the Easy Action Records multi-media audio/DVD release from the 2009 sold- out performance by British rock superstars Primal Scream and the reunited surviving members of the MC5 at the Royal Festival Hall.

Following a serious motorcycle crash on a Los Angeles freeway in May 2006, Davis along with his wife Angela Davis, launched a non-profit organization called Music Is Revolution Foundation, dedicated to supporting music education programs in public schools.

Michael Davis was 68 years old when he died on 17 February 2012 from liver failure.

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Johnny Otis 1/2012

johnny otis (1)17 January 2012 – Johnny Otis was born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes on December 28th 1921 in Vallejo, a predominantly black neighborhood in California.

Otis began playing drums as a teenager, when he purchased a set by forging his father’s signature on a credit slip. Soon after he dropped out of Berkeley High School during his junior year, Otis joined a local band with pianist friend ‘Count’ Otis Matthews called the West Oakland Houserockers. By 1939, they were performing at many of the local functions, primarily in and around the Oakland and Berkeley area, and became quite popular among their peers.

He then started out playing drums in a variety of swing orchestras, including Lloyd Hunter’s Serenaders, and Harlan Leonard’s Rockets, after which he founded his own band in 1945 and had one of the most enduring hits of the big band era, “Harlem Nocturne”. A true pioneering rhythm and blues singer, talent scout, disc jockey, composer, arranger, author, record producer, vibraphonist, drummer, bandleader, pastor, he was commonly referred to as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues”.

He discovered tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely, who then performed on his uptempo “Barrelhouse Stomp”. He began recording Little Esther and Mel Walker for the Newark, New Jersey-based Savoy label in 1949 and began releasing a stream of hit records, including “Double Crossing Blues”, “Mistrustin’ Blues” and “Cupid Boogie”; all three reached no. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart. Other of his hits included “Gee Baby”, “All Nite Long” “Mambo Boogie”, “Sunset to Dawn” and “Ma He’s Making Eyes At Me”.

In 1950, Otis was presented the R&B Artist of the Year trophy by Billboard. He also began featuring himself on vibraphone on many of his recordings. In 1951, Otis released “Mambo Boogie” featuring congas, maracas, claves, and mambo saxophone guajeos in a blues progression. This was to be the very first R&B mambo ever recorded.

Around the time Otis moved to the Mercury label in 1951, he discovered vocalist Etta James, who was only 13 at the time, at one of his talent shows. He produced and co-wrote her first hit, “The Wallflower (Roll With Me, Henry)”.

In 1952, Otis auditioned singer Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton. He also produced, co-wrote, and played drums on the original 1953 recording of “Hound Dog” (he and his band also provided the backup ‘howling’ vocals). It was also co-written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, He had a legal dispute with the songwriting duo over the credits after he learned that Leiber and Stoller revised the contractual agreement prior to a new version of the song being recorded by singer Elvis Presley, which became an instant no. 1 smash hit. Claiming Leiber and Stoller illegally had the original contract nullified and rewrote a new one stating that the two boys (who were both 17) were the only composers of the song, Otis litigated. However, the presiding judge awarded the case to the defendants based on the fact that their signing of the first contract with Otis was ‘null and void’ since they were minors at the time.

One of Otis’ most famous compositions is the ballad “Every Beat of My Heart”, first recorded by The Royals in 1952 on Federal Records but then became a hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961. He also produced and played the vibraphone on singer Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was at no. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts for 10 weeks. Another successful song for Otis was “So Fine”, which was originally recorded by The Sheiks in 1955 on Federal and was a hit for The Fiestas in 1959. As an artist and repertory man for King Records he discovered numerous young prospects who would later become successful, including Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard, and Little Willie John, among others.

In addition to hosting his own television show titled “The Johnny Otis Show”, he also became an influential disc-jockey in Los Angeles, hosting his own radio show in 1955.

In April 1958, he recorded his best-known recording, “Willie and the Hand Jive”, a clave-based vamp, which relates to hand and arm motions in time with the music, called the hand jive. This went on to be a hit in the summer of 1958, peaking at no. 9 on the U.S. Pop chart, and becoming Otis’ only Top 10 single. The single reached no. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart. Otis’ success with the song was somewhat short-lived, and he briefly moved to King Records in 1961, where he worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson.

In 1969, Otis landed a deal with Columbia Records and recorded “Cold Shot!” and the sexually explicit Snatch and the Poontangs (which had an “X” rating), both of which featured his son Shuggie and singer Delmar ‘Mighty Mouth’ Evans.

A year later, he recorded a double-live album of his band’s performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival titled Johnny Otis Show Live at Monterey!  A portion of the performance was featured in the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty For Me.

Although Otis’ touring lessened throughout the 1970s, he started the Blues Spectrum label and released a fifteen album series entitled Rhythm and Blues Oldies, which featured 1950’s R&B artists Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, Richard Berry, and even Otis himself.

During the 1980s, he had a weekly radio show which aired Monday evenings from 8 to 11 pm on Los Angeles radio station KPFK, where he played records and had guest appearances by such R&B artists as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Otis also recorded with his sons Shuggie on guitar and Nicky on drums, releasing a slew of albums, including The New Johnny Otis Show(1982), Johnny Otis! Johnny Otis! (1984), and Otisology (1985). In the summer of 1987, Otis hosted his own Red Beans & Rice R&B Music Festival in Los Angeles which featured top-name acts and hosted a Southern-style red beans and rice cook-off. He moved the festival site to the city of San Dimas, where it ran annually in association with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation for twenty years until 2006.

Otis and his family moved from Southern California to Sebastopol, California, a small apple farming town in Sonoma County. He continued performing in the U.S. and Europe through the 1990s, headlining the San Francisco Blues Festival in 1990 and 2000. In 1993, he opened The Johnny Otis Market, a deli-style grocery store/cabaret, where he and his band played sold-out shows every weekend until its doors closed in 1995. He was inducted to both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Blues Hall of Fame in 1994.

Aside from his many accomplishments, Johnny was held responsible for launching the career of the late Etta James Hawkins; who passed 3 days later in the same week. It is rumored that they had a long lovers relationship that produced singer Beyonce, who’s real rumored age would be 42.

Johnny Otis was 90 years old when he died of natural causes on 17 January 2012.

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Robbie France 1/2012

Robbie_FranceJanuary 14, 2012 – Robbie France was born in Sheffield, United Kingdom, on 15th December 1959. He was the youngest of three sons born to Arnold and Margaret. Sadly his father Arnold passed away when Robbie was quite young and Margaret went on to marry Jack who became Robbie’s step-dad and brought him and his two elder brothers, David and Melvin up.

At the age of around ten, Robbie and his family emigrated to Australia, where Robbie continued his schooling and his love for music and drumming started to develop big time. At the age of fourteen he was granted special permission to leave school early and attend the National Academy of Rudimentary Drummers of Australia, where he was tutored by Harry Lebler; at the age of fifteen Robbie started teaching at the Australian Academy of music.

While living and traveling in Australia, Robbie formed the jazz-fusion group, Carnival, performed at the Oz Jazz Festival and supported John McLaughlin. He worked with Stevie Wright of the Easybeats, Marty Rhone, Ray Burgess, Tim Gaze, and most major Australian artists. He amassed over 1,000 television, radio and advertising credits, including eight documentaries and four film scores, including ‘Band on the Run’, one of the most successful surfing films ever made. Robbie also did some acting in commercials for which he often co-wrote the music.

Robbie left Australia in 1982 and returned to England, joining ‘Diamond Head’ the following year; after the band split he went on to work with ‘Ivan Chandler’s All Star Quintet, playing at various venues around London. In 1985 Robbie toured and recorded with UFO for a year and in 1986 he formed ‘One Nation with Kipper’; by this time Robbie was also teaching in drum clinics all over the world.

Robbie set up a teaching studio in Kingston upon Thames where he went on to work with many well known names in the music industry, including Mike and the Mechanics, Power Station, 10 CC and Jean Michel Jarre. In 1987 Robbie joined Ellis, Beggs and Howard, whose first single ‘Big Bubbles, No Troubles’ won the Diamond Award for the best new group. After his time with EBH, Robbie joined ‘Wishbone Ash’ in 1990, touring with them and recording the album ‘Strange Affair’.

In 1991 Robbie returned to Australia and spent the best part of three years concentrating on his favourite music style which was jazz, returning to London in 1994 where he became a founder member of ‘Skunk Anansie’, recording and co-producing their debut album ‘Paranoid and Sunburnt’. He also co-wrote the hit track ‘Weak’, which has since been covered by Rod Stewart.

In 1995 he joined German group Alphaville and toured and recorded with them until he suffered a bad accident which severed his Achilles tendon. The doctors said thet he would probably struggle to walk properly again, let alone play drums… how wrong they were!

Robbie moved to Puerto de Mazarron in 1998 and life continued at breakneck speed, running Pulpo Negro Records, Publishing and Studios until 2004, producing several award winning Spanish bands like ‘Second’ whose album ‘Pose’ was voted Album of the Decade. Over the past few years Robbie played locally with the Cas Band. Robbie broadcasted for a number of radio stations in Spain including TKO Gold, Real Radio and Costa Calida International for the last five years. Robbie had a passion for sailing and three years ago he bought a boat… he told Karen, his partner, that he had bought it for her Christmas present when he unveiled it at the marina and named it ‘Karina’. Robbies first book entitled ‘Six Degrees South’ has just been published and he had started writing the second part of the trilogy. His trademark was his string-vests, one of which he is wearing today, I am told that he has a drawer full of them at home; it seemed fitting for Robbie’s final journey to include a pair of his sticks too.

He died on January 14, 2012 from a ruptured aorta at age 52.

He lived all over the world and moved in esteemed drum circles as an amazing drummer with power and finesse as he packed into 52 years what would have taken most people three lifetimes to complete. 

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Bob Weston 1/2012

Bob WestonJanuary 3, 2012Robert Joseph “Bob” Weston was born in Plymouth, England on 1 November 1947. Initially he was taught violin at 8, but at the age of 12 decided to switch to guitar. Arriving in London in the mid-Sixties, he joined a group called The Kinetic, which recorded an album and supported Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix at concerts in France.Back in London, Weston’s skills as a creative blues guitarist led to work with the singer Aliki Ashman and the organist and singer Graham Bond.  In 1970, Weston joined the backing group of the blues singer Long John Baldry, touring Europe and the US as well as playing on Baldry’s album Everything Stops for Tea (1972), produced by two of the singer’s proteges, Rod Stewart and Elton John.

Baldry’s band sometimes performed on the same bill as Fleetwood Mac, which since 1968 had been in the forefront of British blues groups. This was due mainly to the imagination and skill of the singer and guitarist Peter Green, who had crafted such big hits as Albatross and Man of the World (both 1969). But Green began to binge on LSD, and left the band in 1970; the following year, during an American tour, his fellow guitarist Jeremy Spencer walked out of his hotel in Los Angeles to go shopping and never returned — he had joined a religious group called The Children of God. A third guitarist, Danny Kirwan, was fired in autumn 1972, to be replaced by Weston. In 1972, the remaining members decided to recruit Dave Walker of the blues rock band Savoy Brown as lead vocalist, and Weston as lead guitarist.

He recalled meeting Kirwan in The Speakeasy, a musicians’ club in London’s West End. “He rather sarcastically wished me the best of luck, adding ‘You’re going to need it.’ Kirwan’s remark proved to be prophetic, although to begin with, Weston made a significant contribution to the group’s sound on stage and in the studio. Fleetwood Mac was in transition from being a blues band to a more melodic pop-rock one, and Weston was adept at both styles. He played on the 1973 albums, Penguin and Mystery to Me, co-writing several songs. Penguin is regarded by many Fleetwood Mac aficionados as one of the group’s most underrated recordings.

They were also on a schedule of relentless touring, which was beginning to take its toll. Walker was unceremoniously fired early in 1973, there were tensions between the husband-and- wife team of Christine Perfect (McVie) and John McVie, and when Weston began an affair with Jenny Boyd, the wife of drummer Mick Fleetwood and sister of George Harrison/Eric Clapton wife Patti (Layla), the scene was set for a split. This duly came in Lincoln, Nebraska, during an American tour in October 1973. Weston was woken by a phone call summoning him to the tour manager’s hotel room. He was told that other group members had already departed, that the remaining tour dates would be cancelled and that his services were no longer required. He was put on the next flight back to London. Weston was featured on the album Penguin (1973), playing lead guitar alongside Bob Welch. He also sang with Christine McVie on Did You Ever Love Me, and wrote the instrumental Caught in the Rain. On the album Mystery to Me, he co-wrote the track Forever.

Weston’s fall from grace was one of the more pedestrian dramas to have afflicted the band’s line-up over the years. Named after the drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bass guitarist John McVie, Fleetwood Mac initially featured the great Peter Green who started the group and named it after his favorite Engine Room, Fleetwood and MacVie- on lead guitar, and had its first No 1 single in 1969 with Albatross.

Weston however landed on his feet in London, where his Fleetwood Mac credentials opened doors. He had abortive discussions with George Harrison about collaborations, but toured with blues veteran Alexis Korner and played on Sandy Denny’s final album, Rendezvous (1977). His most lucrative project was with the actor Murray Head, star of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Weston featured on Head’s album Say It Ain’t So (1975), a big hit in France and Canada, and led Head’s touring band.

Weston also recorded three solo albums, Nightlight (1980), Studio Picks (1981) and There’s a Heaven (1999), and spent much of the last two decades writing or arranging music for films and television in France and Britain. Still in touch with older musicians, he had been due to record with the ex-Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.

Weston, who lived alone in a flat in Brent Cross, London, was found dead on 3 January 2012. His post-mortem showed he died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage

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Mark Reale 1/2012

mark realeJanuary 25, 2012 – Mark Reale, heavy metal guitarist best known for being the only constant original member in the band Riot, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955. He grew up listening to The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Gary Moore, Ritchie Blackmore and lists George Harrison as one of his greatest influences. After attending concerts by Ronnie Montrose, Rick Derringer and Edgar Winter he decided to become a rock guitarist, forming the band Riot in 1975 who are still active today.

Mark Reale was the principal songwriter and main creative force behind Riot starting with the band’s 1977 debut album Rock City. The group’s most acclaimed album was 1981’s seminal Fire Down Under, the last of three studio albums to feature original vocalist Guy Speranza. Other notable records include Restless Breed (1982), the band’s comeback album, Thundersteel (1988), and its follow-up, The Privilege of Power (1990). Riot’s most recent album was Immortal Soul in 2011. Riot has toured all around the world and been a support act for major acts such as Kiss, AC/DC, Sammy Hagar, Molly Hatchet, and Rush while maintaining a particularly strong fanbase in Japan and Continental Europe.

In the early to mid 70’s his influences included the likes of Edgar Winter, Ronnie Montrose and Rick Derringer. He also loved a range of bands and artists from Al Di Meola to Deep Purple. In 1975 Mark formed his band RIOT, then at a block party Mark’s father found vocalist Guy Speranza. Mark’s guitar style and his passion for writing songs that told stories that were so deep and moving had made a real connection with those who would become lifelong fans. The fans felt so connected to Mark because the lyrics in RIOT’s songs were extremely close to the stories of their own lives. His song writing style could weave tales of anything from old lore to battle fields and warriors, personal loss and triumph. And heavy metal anthems that will be with us for decades to come.

After Riot’s temporary breakup following the Born In America (1983) release, Reale formed a short-lived outfit named Narita with former members of S.A. Slayer, including future Riot bassist Don Van Stavern. The band recorded a sole demo in 1984 before calling it quits. Reale decided to re-activate Riot which led to a new record deal with CBS Records and the Thundersteel album in 1988. In 1998, Reale co-founded the group Westworld with vocalist Tony Harnell of TNT fame. Westworld released three studio albums and one live disc between 1999 and 2002.

The brethren of brothers that Mark spent his life long career in music with and whom he leaves behind or joins in heaven are, Guy Speranza, L.A Kouvaris, Kip Leming, Peter Bitelli, Rhett Forrester, Rick Ventura, Jimmy Iommi, Sandy Slavin, Tony Moore, Don Van Stavern, Mike Flyntz, Pete Perez, Bobby Jarzombek, Mike Dimeo, John Macaluso, Bobby Rondinelli, Mike Tirelli, Frank Gilchriest and Damon Di Bari who was always like the “6th” member of the band being Riot’s lighting director / production manager / tour manager and Mark’s personal assistant from 1988 through 2008. Mark’s final days were spent with Damon at his hospital bedside, sharing the fans’ thoughts, well wishes and prayers. Even though Mark began his career in New York, San Antonio was a special place he loved and not only lived here for a while but had planned on moving back here to make San Antonio his permanent home.

On January 25, 2012, Reale died of complications related to Crohn’s disease. Reale, who had Crohn’s disease most of his life, had been in a coma since January 11 due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage.

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Larry Butler 1/2012

larry-butlerJanuary 20, 2012 – Larry Butler  was born March 26, 1942 in Pensacola, Florida. He began his career at the age of six with the Harry James Orchestra; at age ten he sang with Red Foley, and before he was old enough to drive he had hosted his own radio show and played piano on The Lynn Toney Show, a live television show in his market.At age ten he sang with Red Foley and before he was old enough to drive he had hosted his own radio show and co-hosted a live TV show in his market.

He moved to Nashville and soon his unique style of piano playing supported such hits as “Hello Darlin” by Conway Twitty and “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro. He was in high demand as a Nashville session player and backed up such as Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Bobby Goldsboro, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Lynn Anderson and more.

In 1973 Butler made one of his most significant career moves by joining United Artists Records as head of the label’s Nashville division. His leadership and vision brought in such acts as Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle, Dottie West and The Kendalls and established the label as one of the most successful and respected in Nashville.

Butler and Chips Moman and penned the number 1 hit “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song”. Topping the charts for both Pop and Country, the song became one of B. J. Thomas’ greatest career hits. It was a BMI 3 million performance song and earned Butler a Grammy for Song of the Year.

Unquestionably, Butler’s biggest success was producing Kenny Rogers. Their studio collaboration yielded many of Kenny’s greatest hits. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, he worked with Kenny Rogers. Many of his albums with Rogers went gold or platinum and accumulated many millions of sales around the world.

These albums include Kenny Rogers-1976, The Gambler-1978, Gideon-1980, I Prefer The Moonlight-1987 and If Only My Heart Had A Voice-1993. Larry also participated in Rogers 2006 retrospective DVD The Journey. In 1984 Larry formed his own music company, Larry Butler Music Group, Inc. where he produced the likes of George Strait, Charlie Rich, Keith Whitley, Eddy Raven, Billie Jo Spears, Kenny Rogers, Don McLean, John Denver and Vern Gosdin. Larry was the only Nashville producer to win the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year.

Eventually Butler left UA and started his own independent company, Larry Butler Productions. His acts included

  • Charlie Rich (“You’re Gonna Love yourself In The Morning”)
  • Mac Davis (“It’s Hard To Be Humble”)
  • Debbie Boone (“Are You On The Road To Loving Me Again”)
  • Billie Jo Spears (“Blanket On The Ground”)
  • Don McLean (“Crying”)
  • John Denver (“Some Days Are Diamonds”)

Butler died in his sleep in Pensacola, Florida on January 20, 2012.

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Dick Kniss 1/2012

Dick KnissJanuary 25, 2012 – Richard Lawrence Dick Kniss was born on April 24, 1937 in Portland, Oregon. His father left the family when he was very young. Reared by his mother, Bernice, he was a bit of a drifter into his late teens, never graduating from high school and focusing on his future only when he found music. His first instrument was the guitar, though, as his wife tells the story, he was lousy at it. “Someone suggested he play the bass because it didn’t have so many strings,” Ms. Kniss said. “And he just became passionate about it.”

He began an itinerant music career in San Francisco, then moved to Troy, N.Y., to play in the short-lived trio Dick, Dick and Nick before landing in New York City.  Active in the 1960s civil rights movement, Kniss performed at benefits for a range of causes and played during the first celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday.

An upright bass sideman with Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Zoot Sims, Don Friedman, Teddy Charles, Sal Salvador and Woody Herman early in his career, he was hired by Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers to be their bass player in 1964, not long after they recorded their early hits “Puff the Magic Dragon” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He was playing in a band led by the clarinetist and saxophonist Woody Herman when he heard that Peter, Paul and Mary were looking for a bassist. He accompanied them throughout the 1960s as they became, with their sweet harmonies, earnest activism and flower-power message, one of the decade’s signature musical groups. Except for an 8 year hiatus that he spent with John Denver’s back up band the self-taught musician stayed for more than 40 years behind Peter, Paul and Mary, becoming a veritable fourth member of the folk-singing trio. Peter, Paul and Mary broke up as the sixties decade ended, and Kniss went to work with Denver, who was another popular, sweet-tempered folk-singing activist. But when the trio reunited in 1978,  Kniss once again became their bassist and appeared with them until Ms. Travers’s death in 2009. He made his final appearance with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey in December that year.

Kniss (as in knish, the k is not silent) also had an eight-year association with the singer-songwriter John Denver and helped write one of his biggest hits, “Sunshine on My Shoulders”, as well as and “The Season Suite”.

Peter, Paul and Mary’s Peter Yarrow said in a statement that Kniss was “our intrepid bass player for almost as long as we performed together. “He was a dear and beloved part of our closest family circle and his bass playing was always a great fourth voice in our music as well as, conceptually, an original and delightfully surprising new statement added to our vocal arrangements,” Yarrow said.

He was considered as much an improvisationalist as he was a timekeeper. “Basically he was a jazz bassist who didn’t think in terms of the pop point of view,” Mr. Yarrow said in a telephone interview on Friday, “and he really would develop melodic lines to complement our voices.”

In a separate interview, Mr. Stookey said Mr. Kniss was not an ideal studio player because he found repeating riffs or phrases laborious; onstage, however, he said, Mr. Kniss was inventive, especially when a singer was soloing. “He had this capacity to weave countermelodies,” Mr. Stookey said. “He was the master of when to answer. In folk music, we’re telling a story. The guitars would begin it, but Dick was an orchestrator, and his entry often signified a particular turning point in a song.”

Mr. Kniss played with Denver from 1970 to 1978, was featured on many of his recordings and wrote “Sunshine on My Shoulders” with him and Mike Taylor. But he joined the band simply because he needed the work. In 1970, Denver had not yet become the clear-voiced crooner of popular, sentimental ballads like “Annie’s Song” and “Rocky Mountain High,” though he had written “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which Peter, Paul and Mary turned into a No. 1 hit in 1969.

Denver asked him to play electric bass, which he did for the only time in his career.

“Back then when you flew, the bass was carried in its own seat in the plane, like a child, and John Denver couldn’t afford it,” Diane Kniss recalled. Denver asked Mr. Kniss to set the stand-up instrument aside and play the electric. “Denver said, ‘When we get some money, the first thing we’ll do is bring it back,’ ” she said. “And that’s what he did.”

Dick Kniss died from pulmonary disease at age 74 on January 25, 2012.

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Rhino Reinhardt 1/2012

larry-rhino-reinhardtJanuary 2, 2012 – Rhino Reinhardt was born in Bradenton, Florida on July 7th 1948. In his early music career in the 60s he played with local outfits like The Thunderbeats and Bittersweet between Sarasota and Bradenton.

In those early days “El Rhino” was also a member of two Georgia bands… The Load (1967-69) with bassist Richard Price and drummer Ramone Sotolongo, performing mostly original, psychedelic blues-rock. When the the band landed a house gig in Gainesville, at a club called Dubs, Reinhardt evolved into joining The Second Coming (1969-70) with Duane Allman, Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley and Reese Wynans, who eventually went on to form The Allman Brothers Band, with Wynans joining Stevie Ray Vaughan. Continue reading Rhino Reinhardt 1/2012

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Jim Sherwood 12/2011

Jim SherwoodDecember 25, 2011 – Jim “Motorhead” Sherwood  was born on May 8th 1942 in Arkansas City, Kansas and is notable for playing soprano, tenor and baritone saxophone, tambourine, vocals and vocal sound effects in Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. He met Zappa at high school in 1956 in Antelope Valley in the Mojave Desert (also Captain Beefheart) and sat in with Zappa’s first band, R&B group The Black-Outs, at various performances, where he was often a highlight.

Then the brothers moved to Ontario, California, and started a new band, the Omens, which also included Sherwood. He would regularly jam with Zappa in a string of different groups, and eventually, in 1964, the Mothers.

He appeared on all the albums of the original Mothers line-up and the ‘posthumous’ releases Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, as well as certain subsequent Zappa albums. He also appeared in the films 200 Motels, Video from Hell and Uncle Meat. Jim later also contributed to various projects alongside his fellow Mothers alumni, including records by The Grandmothers, Mothers keyboardist Don Preston, Ant-Bee and Sandro Oliva.

The original madcap woodwind player of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Sherwood, an adept and classically trained multi-instrumentalist, played baritone and tenor saxophone, percussion and vocals to the Mothers of Inventions’ landmark first psychedelic records, including 1966’s debut Freak Out! and 1968’s Cruising with Ruben & the Jets.
A childhood friend of Zappa’s, Sherwood also performed on Zappa’s first solo album, 1967’s Lumpy Gravy, and in the 1971 avant-garde film 200 Motels. Sherwood later described his 200 Motels character as “in love with a vacuum cleaner.”

After the album’s release in June 1966 on MGM’s Verve label, the band went on tour, then in November that year took up a six-month residency at the Garrick theatre in New York, during which they played 14 shows a week. Sherwood was working for the band as equipment manager and roadie, and sometimes operated the lighting during the Garrick shows. These were a bizarre mix of music and performance art, featuring puppet shows and interludes when the band would pelt the audience with fruit.
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It was when the Mothers made their first trip to England, in mid-1967, that Sherwood was finally hired as a full-time musician. It was the band’s vocalist and percussionist Ray Collins who gave Sherwood the nickname “Motorhead”, through his love of working on cars and trucks and motorcycles: “He said ‘it sounds like you’ve got a little motor in your head’, so they just called me Motorhead and that seemed to stick.”

Zappa told Rolling Stone in 1968:

Euclid James ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood I’ve known for 12 years. We were in high school in Lancaster together. He used to play baritone sax in the Omens. He has the ability to perform a dance known as the bug, which resembles an epileptic fit. He’s one of those guys you say, “I know this guy who’s really weird and I want to show him to you.” He was our equipment handler for a while and when we started the atrocities we started handing him our instruments to see what would happen. He played things more imaginative than the proficient musicians could lay down. It was just him against the machine in his mouth, a saxophone. He is also very proficient at dolls and visual aids.

After the Mothers of Invention disbanded in 1969, Sherwood still collaborated with Zappa and his bandmates; the group’s epic swan song, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, hinged largely on his aggressive instrumental theatrics.

Sherwood appeared on the further Zappa releases You Are What You Is (1981), Civilization Phaze III in 1993, the year of Zappa’s death, and the Läther box set, released three years later.

In the 1980s, Sherwood performed with the Grandmothers, and played on a couple of albums with them. During the 1990s, he joined forces with Billy James and his Ant-Bee project.

James, a graduate of Berklee College of Music, Boston, wanted to express his fascination with psychedelic and experimental music from the 1960s, for which he assembled musicians from the Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart’s band. Sherwood appears on three Ant-Bee albums, though by this time he had given up playing the saxophone and his contributions are limited to “snorks”, in which you “snort through your nose, sucking air in through your nose”. He added further snorks to Sandro Oliva’s album Who the Fuck Is Sandro Oliva?!? (1995).

Jim Sherwood passed away after a short but severe illness on Christmas Day morning December 25th, 2011 at age 69.

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Dobie Gray 12/2011

dobie-grayDecember 6, 2011 – Dobie Gray was either born Lawrence Darrow Brown on July 26, 1940 in Brookshire Texas or Leonard Victor Ainsworth, possible born around the same time in Houston’s suburb Simonton. Born into a family of sharecroppers in and greatly influenced by his grandfather, a Baptist Minister, Dobie’s early life revolved around family, the church and music. Thus, Gospel, Country, Tex-Mex and R& B all found a comfortable home in his repertoire.

Moving from Texas to California in the early 60’s, Dobie met Sonny Bono (Sonny & Cher), then A&R manager for Specialty Records. That encounter led to his first notable single, “Look At Me.” (later recorded by The Righteous Brothers). Although “Look At Me” remained on the charts a healthy five weeks, Dobie’s real breakthrough came in 1965 with the release of “The ‘In’ Crowd.”

In Hollywood he enrolled in acting classes, and appeared in Theatre-group Productions, including “A Raisin In The Sun,” “The Amen Corner,” “Look Homeward Angel” and “Rhinoceros.” His dramatic gifts eventually landed him a role in the L.A. production of the Mega – Hit, Musical “Hair,” in which he remained for two and a half years.

In 1972, he won a recording contract with Decca Records (shortly before it became part of MCA) to make an album with producer Mentor Williams in Nashville. Among the songs they recorded was Mentor Williams’ “Drift Away”, featuring a guitar riff by Reggie Young. Released as a single, the song rose to #5 on the US pop chart and remains Dobie Gray’s signature song. It placed at #17 in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1973, sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc by the RIAA on July 5, 1973.

“Drift Away” became a hit again in 2003, when he covered the song as a duet with Uncle Kracker on the latter’s No Stranger to Shame album. The re-recording hit #9 and placed at #19 in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2003 as well as logging a record-setting 28 weeks atop the Adult Contemporary chart in 2003-2004.

In the 30 years that had passed in between Dobie Gray increasingly concentrated on songwriting for a variety of ‘country’ artists including Ray Charles, George Jones, Johnny Mathis, Charley Pride, and Don Williams. He also toured in Europe, Australia and Africa in the 1970s. He performed in South Africa only after persuading the apartheid authorities to allow him to play to integrated audiences, becoming the first artist to do so.

He died on December 6, 2011, from complications of cancer surgery in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 71.