Tag: 80

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Dickey Betts 4/2024

Dickey Betts 4/2024 (80) was born in West Palm Beach on December 12, 1943, and raised in Bradenton/Sarasota, Florida. He grew up in a musical family listening to traditional bluegrass, country music and Western swing. He started playing ukulele at the age of five and, as his hands got bigger, moved on to mandolin, banjo, and guitar.

At sixteen, feeling the need for something “a little faster”, he played in a series of rock bands on the Florida circuit, up the East Coast and into the Midwest, before forming Second Coming with Berry Oakley in 1967.

According to Rick Derringer, the “group called the Jokers” referenced in “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” was one of Betts’ early groups. In  February 1969, Betts and Oakley joined members of two other Sunshine State groups — guitarist Duane Allman and his keyboard-playing brother Gregg of the Hour Glass and drummer Butch Trucks – and Mississippi-born drummer Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson in a new unit that ultimately based itself in Macon, Ga. Continue reading Dickey Betts 4/2024

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Gary Wright – 9/2023

Mr. Dream WeaverGary Wright was born on April 26, 1943 in Cresskill, New Jersey, to Ann (nee Belvedere) and Louis Wright. His father was a construction engineer, and his mother was a singer, as were his two sisters. His older sister, Beverly, enjoyed some success as a pop and folk singer in the 60s, while his younger sister, Lorna, released the album Circle of Love (1978) and several singles.

His mother encouraged Gary to take an interest in music and acting. He appeared in the TV sci-fi series Captain Video and His Video Rangers, and when he was 12 he was hired as an understudy for a Broadway musical, Fanny. This resulted in him going on stage in the role of Cesario, son of the titular Fanny, played by Florence Henderson, and in 1955, appearing with Henderson on The Ed Sullivan Show.

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Robbie Robertson – 8/2023

Robbie Robertson (80) – the Band was born in Toronto, Canada on 5 July, 1943. His mother, Rosemary Dolly Chrysler, was a Cayuga/Mohawk Indian who had been raised on the Six Nations Reserve near Toronto. The man whom he believed to be his father and who raised him until he was in his early teens, James Robertson, was a factory worker.

When he was a child, his mother often took him to the Six Nations Reserve, where it seemed that everyone played a musical instrument or sang or danced. He thought “I’ve got to get into this club. I think the guitar looks pretty cool.” His mother bought him one, his older cousin Herb Myke taught him how to play.

“Rock ’n’ roll suddenly hit me when I was 13 years old,” Robertson told Classic Rock magazine in 2019. “That was it for me. Within weeks I was in my first band, Little Caesar and the Consuls,” with whom he performed covers of the then current rock and roll and r&b hits. In 1957 he formed Robbie and the Rhythm Chords with his friend Pete “Thumper” Traynor (who later founded Traynor Amplifiers). They changed the name to Robbie and the Robots after they watched the film Forbidden Planet and took a liking to the film’s character Robby the Robot. Traynor customized Robertson’s guitar for the Robots, fitting it with antennae and wires to give it a space age look. Traynor and Robertson joined with pianist Scott Cushnie and became The Suedes. 

His parents separated around that time, and his mother told him that his biological father was a Jewish professional gambler named Alexander David Klegerman, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident before she met James Robertson. Years later In his memoir, “Testimony”, he wryly commented on his Indian and Jewish heritage: “You could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution.”

In 1959, the Suedes, got a crucial break when they were seen by the Arkansas-based rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins.

Hawkins saw enough in Mr. Robertson to write two songs with him, ‘Hey Baba Lou’ and ‘Someone Like You’, which he recorded, and he later invited that teenage guitarist to join his band, the Hawks, initially on bass. Roy Buchanan, a few years older than Robertson, was briefly a member of the Hawks and became an important influence on Robertson’s guitar style: “Standing next to Buchanan on stage for several months, Robertson was able to absorb Buchanan’s deft manipulations with his volume speed dial, his tendency to bend multiple strings for steel guitar-like effect, his rapid sweep picking, and his passion for bending past the root and fifth notes during solo flights.” Robertson soon developed into a veritable guitar virtuoso.

The Hawks also included Levon Helm on drums; by 1961, the other future members of the Band were also in the fold. They toured with Hawkins for two more years and recorded for Roulette Records. By 1964, they had gone off on their own as Levon and the Hawks.

The Hawks recorded a few singles for Atco, all written by Robertson, and in 1965 he was contacted by Bob Dylan’s management and invited to be part of his backing group. While he initially refused, he did perform with Dylan in New York and Los Angeles, bringing along Levon Helm for those gigs. At Robertson’s insistence, Dylan wound up hiring all the other future members of the Band (Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko) for the full tour. Three of his fellow members — the drummer Levon Helm, the pianist Richard Manuel and the bassist Rick Danko — expressed those characters in distinctly aching vocals. Robertson rarely sang lead, instead finding his voice in the guitar.

Dylan also invited Robertson to perform in 1966 on a session for his album “Blonde on Blonde.” The next year, he asked the Hawks to move to his new base in the Woodstock area, and they rented a house in nearby Saugerties that was later known as Big Pink. It was there that they recorded the music released as “The Basement Tapes” and worked on the songs that would be included on “Music From Big Pink.”

“It was like a clubhouse where we could shut out the outside world,” Robertson wrote in his memoir. “It was my belief something magical would happen. And some true magic did happen.”

When “Music From Big Pink” was released in the summer of 1968, it boasted seminal songs written by Robertson like “The Weight” and “Chest Fever,”along with strong pieces composed by other members of the Band as well as by Dylan. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” according to another close Dylan associate, Al Kooper. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”

For the Band’s follow-up album, “The Band,” released in 1969, Robertson either wrote or co-wrote every song, including some of his most enduring creations, among them “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Rag Mama Rag,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which became a Top Five Billboard hit in a version recorded by Joan Baez. The album reached No. 9 on the magazine’s chart.

The Band’s next effort, “Stage Fright,” released in 1970, shot even higher, peaking at No. 5, buoyed by Robertson compositions like the title track and “The Shape I’m In.” Those songs, like many on the album, expressed deep anxiety and doubt, a theme that carried over to “Cahoots,” released in 1971. And while that album broke Billboard’s Top 20, it wasn’t as rapturously received as its predecessors. Possibly because time were changing fast in those year. Three of his fellow members — drummer Levon Helm, pianist Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko — expressed his anxiety and doubt in distinctly aching vocals. Mr. Robertson rarely sang lead, instead finding his voice in the guitar.

In its day, the Band’s music stood out as well by inverting the increasing volume and mania of psychedelic rock and by sidestepping its accent on youthful rebellion. “We just went completely left when everyone else went right,” Robertson said. The ripple effect of that sound and image went wide on impact, landing the group on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 and inspiring a host of major artists to create their own homespun amalgams, from the Grateful Dead’s album “American Beauty” (1970) to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection,” released the same year. The Band’s music so affected fellow guitarist Eric Clapton that he actually lobbied for entry into their ranks. (The offer was politely declined.)

Robertson produced an album for Jesse Winchester in 1970 and played on Ringo’s ‘Ringo’ (1973) and ‘Goodnight Vienna’ (1974). He is heard on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court and Spark’ and played guitar on ‘Mockingbird’ for James Taylor and Carly Simon. He was now one of the most sought after session musicians, working with Eric Clapton on ‘No Reason To Cry’ and producing Neil Diamond’s ‘Beautiful Noise’.

A collection of blues and R&B covers, “Moondog Matinee,” was released in 1973, and Robertson’s muse fully returned in 1975 on the album “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” which included “Acadian Driftwood,” his first composition with a Canadian theme. The original group’s final release, “Islands” (1977), consisted of leftover pieces and was issued mainly to fulfill the group’s contract with its label, Capitol Records.

In 1976, Robertson made the decision that The Band would stop touring. It caused the break-up of the group but they went out with one final concert, called ‘The Last Waltz’. The Band was booked to perform at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on 25 November, 1976. Robbie asked film director Martin Scorsese to film the event. The Band would perform with famous friends including included Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Paul Butterfield, Dr. John, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Emmylou Harris.

After the Band’s demise in 1977, Robertson released five solo albums, but devoted most of his artistic effort to movies, as a music producer or score composer.

The same year as “The Last Waltz,” Robertson produced a Top Five platinum album for Neil Diamond, “Beautiful Noise,” and a double live album by Mr. Diamond, “Love at the Greek,” which made Billboard’s Top 10 and sold more than two million copies.

Robertson told Musician magazine that he broke up the Band because “we had done it for 16 years and there was really nothing else to learn from it.” Another strong factor was Mr. Robertson’s frustration over hard drug use by most of the other members.

Without Robbie Robertson, the other members of the Band released three albums in the 1990s; the last, “Jubilation,” in 1998, was without Richard Manuel, who had died by suicide 12 years earlier at 42. Rick Danko died of heart failure in 1999 at 56, Levon Helm of throat cancer in 2012 at 71. 

Over the years, other members of the Band accused Robertson of taking more songwriting credits than he deserved. To them, it was a cooperative effort, with the other members adding important arrangements and contributing elements that helped define the essential character of the recordings. Levon Helm was particularly vociferous in his condemnation, amplified by his furious 1993 memoir, “This Wheel’s on Fire.”

In his own memoir, Robbie Robertson wrote of Levon Helm, “it was like some demon had crawled into my friend’s soul and pushed a crazy, angry button.”

The collaborations with Scorsese continued. Robbie scored Martin’s 1980 movies ‘Carney’ and ‘Raging Bull’ then later ‘The King of Comedy’ and ‘The Color of Money’. For ‘The Color of Money’, Robbie co-wrote the hit song for Eric Clapton ‘Its In The Way That You Use It’. Robertson also collaborated on film and TV soundtracks such as Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Silence (2016), The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

With his history it was remarkable that Robbie Robertson didn’t release a solo album until 1986. ‘Robbie Robertson’ was produced by Daniel Lanois and featured appearances from all members of U2, Peter Gabriel and his former Band mates Rick Danko and Garth Hudson.

Robbie Robertson’s fifth and final solo album appeared in 2019 with a title, “Sinematic,” that underscored his devotion to film work in his last four decades. He recently completed the score for his 14th film project, Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2023.

At the age of 80 years old Robbie Robertson took his marvelous talents elsewhere when he departed this world on August 9, 2023 after a lengthy battle with prostrate cancer.

Marveling over where life had taken him, Mr. Robertson once told Classic Rock magazine: “People used to say to me, ‘You’re just a dreamer. You’re gonna end up working down the street, just like me.’ Part of that was crushing, and the other part is, ‘Oh yeah? I’m on a mission. I’m moving on. And if you look for me, there’s only going to be dust.’”

Robbie Robertson was inducted into the Canadian Juno Hall of Hall in 1989. In 1994, The Band were inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Robbie was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2003. In 2005, he received a doctorate from York University and in 2006 the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. In 2008 Robbie was given a Lifetime Grammy Achievement Award. In 2011, he was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and in 2011 made Officer of the Order of Canada. Robbie is also on Canada’s Walk of Fame, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Native American Music Awards in 2017 and was given the keys to the city of Toronto in 2019.

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Manny Charlton – 7/2022

Manny Charlton (80) – Nazareth –  was born on July 25, 1941 in La Linea, Cadiz, Spain, near the English territory of Gibraltar. The family moved back to Dunfermline, Scotland when he was 2 years old and Charlton grew up in drab, conservative 1950s Britain, finding his escape in playing the guitar and listening to the sound of American rock’n’roll.

Prior to forming Nazareth, he played in a few bands, most notably the Mark 5 and later the Red Hawks. He was 27 before he teamed up with singer Dan McCafferty, bass guitarist Pete Agnew and drummer Darrell Sweet in a band known as the Shadettes, playing covers of bubblegum pop hits in the local ballrooms while dressed in matching yellow suits.

“I knew Pete [Agnew] and Dan [McCafferty] because we were both playing in the Kinema Ballroom with the resident band.
“They played on one stage and we played on the other.”We used to walk up the road after the gigs with our fish suppers; we always spoke about trying to do something together one day. They had a pretty good guitarist who left to go to university.”
“They asked me to take his place, and I said sure, but only if we do originals.”

“I joined just as the so-called progressive music wave was starting to take over and at the time was listening avidly to John Peel’s radio show,” Charlton recalled. His arrival heralded a change of both musical direction and image, as the band “told the Brylcreamed Locarno ballroom brigade to stuff it”, grew their hair and replaced the suits with denim and loon pants.

 

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Jerry Slick – 3/2020

Jerry Slick (80) – The Great Society/Jefferson Airplane – was born Aug. 8, 1939 to patent attorney Bob Slick and Betty Slick in Berkeley. He grew up in Palo Alto and attended the private Menlo School before graduating from Palo Alto High School. He was the oldest of three brothers, one of which was the younger Darby Slick who co-founded The Great Society with him in the mid-’60s in San Francisco. Upon his release from the Army, he married Grace Wing, his former next door neighbor, in San Francisco on Aug. 26, 1961. After their honeymoon, Jerry Slick enrolled in film courses and began making student films while Grace worked in a department store. Before long the couple fell into San Francisco’s intellectual beatnik scene, listening to folk music and, later, jazz, and growing marijuana in their backyard.

By 1964, Jerry had become more involved with filmmaking. For a short film titled Everybody Hits Their Brother Once, he called upon Grace to provide the music and she entered a recording studio for the first time, playing Spanish guitar to accompany scenes in the film. The film won first prize at the 1964 Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, but although Jerry Slick graduated from San Francisco State College with a degree in cinematography, their future lay not in the medium of film but rather in that of rock and roll. 

Neither Jerry nor Grace had much interest in rock—Elvis Presley and the early Beatles had not impressed her. But when Grace heard the Rolling Stones it hit home with her—she admired their scruffy looks and rough-edged, R&B-laced music. While leafing through the San Francisco Chronicle in the summer of 1965, she saw an advertisement for a concert by a new rock band called Jefferson Airplane at a club called the Matrix, and convinced Jerry to go see them. Instantly Grace and Jerry knew what direction to go. They recruited Jerry’s younger brother, Darby Slick, then 21, to play guitar. Jerry played the drums and Grace sang and played guitar. A few others came and went until they settled on a name—the Great Society!! (taken from a domestic program championed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson)—and, before long, a lineup that also included David Miner on vocals and guitar, Bard DuPont on bass, and (later, replacing DuPont) Peter van Gelder on flute, bass, and saxophone.

Jerry did not have much musical experience, but got in on the action by playing drums. Inexperienced drummers, and inexperienced musicians in general, weren’t that rare in the days when the bohemian music of choice was switching from folk to rock, and people found themselves playing instruments they had never or rarely touched. Skip Spence of the early Jefferson Airplane, for instance, was a guitarist, switching to drums immediately when he was recruited for the drum kit by Marty Balin. Still, Slick’s drumming on the Great Society tracks available on several albums’ worth of live and studio material that was unreleased in the ’60s (as well as on their sole single) is raw, though adequate for the fledgling psychedelic band’s needs.

With original songs written by Grace and Darby Slick, the Great Society (the exclamation points were generally ignored) became a favored attraction at the city’s budding rock ballrooms, including the Fillmore Auditorium, booked by proprietor Bill Graham. Along with other new bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Great Society was ubiquitous at local events. For a publicity gimmick, the Great Society manufactured buttons mocking the Airplane’s slogan Jefferson Airplane Loves You—theirs read The Great Society Really Doesn’t Like You Much at All.

The Great Society didn’t record much during their brief lifetime. In October 1965 they entered San Francisco’s Golden State Recorders for the first of several sessions that would take place over the next couple of months. Their producer was a young, ambitious rhythm and blues disc jockey named Sylvester Stewart who would, a couple of years later, do just fine for himself under the name Sly Stone.

Signed to the local Autumn Records, owned by disc jockey Tom Donahue, the Great Society recorded, on Nov. 30, 1965, the only single that would be released while they were in existence, “Someone to Love,” written by Darby. While (with a B-side titled “Free Advice”) it failed to make any impact outside of the Bay Area, the A-side would have a much greater impact when Grace Slick left the Great Society and took the song with her, renaming it “Somebody to Love.” She would also take with her a song she wrote and performed with the Great Society, a bolero called “White Rabbit.” Both would make the top 10 when re-recorded by the Airplane, and they remain classic rock staples to this day.

By the summer of 1966, Grace was starting to think more of her own future. When the Airplane’s female singer, Signe Anderson, then pregnant, decided to quit the band, it was a no-brainer for Grace Slick to move into her place. The Great Society had little chance of survival once Grace made the jump to the more popular band. In recordings released after their demise, their music, ranging from sloppy/amateur to inspired, is emblematic of the city’s psychedelic rock scene, but it was not enough to give them staying power without their focal point.

The Great Society briefly attempted to continue after Grace jumped ship in October of ’66 but when Darby left to travel and study in India, they called it quits. Grace’s marriage to Jerry also disintegrated quickly, and while they stayed legally married until 1971, she had relationships with the Airplane’s drummer Spencer Dryden and then guitarist/singer Paul Kantner before the divorce papers with Jerry were signed.

The surviving music of the Great Society was later collected on various posthumous album releases, first on the Columbia label and then on other collector labels. Surprisingly, considering that he considered himself a filmmaker first, Jerry Slick then joined another San Francisco band the Final Solution. The Final Solution played modal early psychedelia with some similarities to the Great Society, except their material was much darker and not nearly as strong. Slick gave their arrangements a lot of input, however, and the Final Solution even lifted excerpts of Great Society songs to plug into Final Solution ones. While Slick was in the lineup, they made some rehearsal tapes, and one of the songs, “Bleeding Roses,” was issued on a flexidisc that came with the first issue of the San Francisco ’60s rock fanzine Cream Puff War.

The Final Solution broke up in 1967, and Slick again concentrated on his first love of filmmaking. A commercial he made, aimed at recruiting San Francisco police, won a Clio award in 1971. He later narrowly missed a big Hollywood break, when Director George Lucas interviewed him to be director of photography on a film he was working on, but Jerry Slick had to turn the job down as he had ruined his shoulder pursuing his other passion, driving his MGB in races put on by the Sports Car Club of America, and couldn’t use a handheld camera as Lucas requested.

Gary Coates, a motion picture color editor who freelances for Pixar, met Jerry Slick in the 1990s when Coates was a lab technician at Palmer Films on Howard Street. Part of that job was fixing mistakes in cinematography, but Jerry Slick’s film never needed correcting, he said.

“Jerry and I go back to the photochemical era when the cinematographer really had to know the craft, how the lights work and how to pick the right lens, camera and film negative,” said Coates. “Jerry was a pro with all that knowledge.”

Jerry Slick met his second wife, Wendy Blair, in 1979. She was a filmmaker who started the video department at College of Marin. Jerry Slick was overqualified for the entry-level class, but he was looking to make the transition from film to video, to stay up with the times. Right away he was asking the instructor, 10 years younger, out on dates. She turned him down for a variety of professional and personal reasons. But Jerry Slick found a workaround by casting his instructor for his final class project.  This got him both an A in the course and a date with Wendy.

They eventually moved in together into a house in Mill Valley. They then formed a husband-and-wife production company called Slick Film. She did the directing, and he was the cinematographer. They shot promotional videos for Carlos Santana and the San Francisco Opera, and promotional films in the early days of Silicon Valley.

“Jerry was the preferred cinematographer for Steve Jobs,” said Wendy Slick. “All those corporate types liked him because he made them look good.”

Slick Film also produced both short and long-form documentary films. A half-hour documentary they shot for ODC/Dance, called “The Long Run,” got picked up by PBS and was shown nationwide. His camera work was also in “Lou Harrison: A World in Music,” a documentary on the composer by Eva Soltis that got a screening at the Castro Theatre.

Always quick with a one-liner or wry commentary, Jerry Slick was a regular feeder of quips and observations to Leah Garchik‘s column in The Chronicle. “He just had an unusual mind,” said Wendy Slick. “He saw things from a different point of view and always delivered more than what was expected.”

The rest of his career life was in film as a cinematographer and director, known for Steel Arena (1973), Congo the Movie: Descent Into Zinj (1995) and Great Performances (1971) etc.

Jerry Slick died March 17, 2020, at his Mill Valley, California home. His death is believed to be caused by cancer.

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Bo Winberg 1/2020

Bo Winberg – The Spotnicks – was born 27 March 1939 in, Göthenborg, Sweden.
The Spotnicks originated from a duo, “The Rebels” (1956), formed by Bo Starander (later known as Bob Lander) and bassist Björn Thelin. Winberg was soon invited to join the group, and became “Rock-Teddy and the Blue Caps” in 1957. In 1958 they added Ove Johansson on drums, and changed their name to “The Frazers”. They signed a recording contract in 1961, and changed their name to “The Spotnicks”, a play on the Russian satellite Sputnik as suggested by their manager, Roland Ferneborg.

They became the first Swedish group to have international success with their czar sharp Bo Winberg inspired instrumentals. Like the Shadows in the UK and the Ventures in the US, the Spotnicks were instrument driven rockers.
One of their early records, “Orange Blossom Special”, became their first big international hit, making the Top 30 in the UK Singles Chart in 1962 and reaching No. 1 in Australia. Around this time they began wearing their trademark space suits on stage. They recorded their first album, The Spotnicks in London, Out-a Space, in 1962.

Further hits included “Rocket Man” (based on the Soviet/Russian folk march “Polyushko-polye”), and “Hava Nagila”.

This group of outstanding musicians faced the upcoming changes in musical flavors with the Beatles and Stones, The British Invasion, the later sixties Psychedelic rock and classic rock with many personnel changes, but split up in 1970 after releasing their fifteenth album: The Spotnicks Back in the Race; an album with a live feeling, lacking the perfection of their previous works, but still very good!

In spite of their breakup, the band was still popular in Japan, and they soon reformed under Winberg’s control in 1971 at the request of a Japanese record label. Bo Winberg takes part in the band for the Swedish production of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
Winberg continued to lead versions of The Spotnicks, occasionally including Lander and/or Björn Thelin, on tour and in recordings. They kept producing albums year after year and found an audience for their work and toured Germany and Japan numerous times.

In 2013, Winberg and Lander announced that they would be undertaking a final tour, finishing in May 2014.

Bo Winberg died in Sweden on 3 January 2020 aged 80.

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Ginger Baker 10/2019

Peter ‘Ginger’ Baker – Cream/Blind Faith – was born on 19 August 1939 in Lewisham, South London. His mother, Ruby May worked in a tobacco shop. His father, Frederick Louvain Formidable Baker, was a bricklayer employed by his own father, who owned a construction  business and was a lance corporal in the Royal Corps of Signals in World War II; he died in the 1943 Dodecanese campaign. Baker went to Pope Street School, where he was considered “one of the better players” in the football team, and then to Shooter’s Hill Grammar School. Here he was nicknamed “Ginger” for his shock of flaming red hair.
While at school he joined Squadron 56 of the Air Training Corps, based at Woolwich and stayed with them for two or three years.

Ginger Baker began playing drums at around 15 years of age. In the early 1960s he took lessons from Phil Seamen, one of the leading British jazz drummers of the post-war era.
In the early 1960s he joined Blues Incorporated, where he met bassist Jack Bruce. The two clashed often, but would be rhythm section partners again in the Graham Bond Organization, a rhythm and blues group with strong jazz leanings. Their relationship was so volatile that Baker once attacked Bruce with a knife during a concert. Despite this volatile relationship, Baker and Bruce reunited in 1966 when they formed Cream with guitarist Eric Clapton, which became one of the first Supergroups of the 60s. He was the first guy we saw with two bass drums and the first guy to do an extended drum solo on record.

Cream played a fusion of blues, psychedelic rock and hard rock. The band released four albums in a little over two years before breaking up in late 1968.
“Disraeli Gears” was released in November ’67, the year underground FM radio began to burgeon, with KMPX in San Francisco joining the aforementioned WOR.
And then, during the summer of ’68, “Sunshine Of Your Love” crossed over to AM and the band and the scene exploded.

Now “Fresh Cream”‘s production was credited to Robert Stigwood, it’s unclear who really twisted the dials, who was really responsible for the sound, but it didn’t have the edge of what came after, it was almost like a blanket was thrown over the speakers.
But Felix Pappalardi produced “Disraeli Gears,” and it was a much better representation of the band’s sound. This was back when stereo was stereo, when instruments were in different channels, when we sat in front of the speakers, put on headphones to get the full effect. This was also when there was so much less on the records, you could hear all the instruments. You could hear Jack Bruce’s voice on “Sunshine Of You Love,” but the key to the track’s success, it’s infectiousness, was that guitar. It was the year we saw Jimi Hendrix‘s “Axis: Bold As Love” came out in January of ’68, so Cream was no longer alone, “Purple Haze” sat along “Sunshine Of Your Love” at the apex of riff-rock that started with the Stones’ “I can get no satisfaction. And then came “Piece Of My Heart,” by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis Joplin got a lot of ink, she was a dynamic performer, she could not be denied and when people purchased “Cheap Thrills,” with its R. Crumb cover, we were not in Kansas anymore, the screw had turned, it was a whole new world in music.

And “Wheels Of Fire” was released in August of that same year, double albums were not unknown, but this one came in silver foil and the second record was a live one.
The visual energy in Cream all came from the man behind the kit, Ginger Baker. Clapton just stood there being “Slowhand”. As did Jack Bruce, albeit a massive voice. You couldn’t help but focus on the drummer, who seemed on the verge of losing control as he stoked this freight train down the track. The sheer power impacted your gut.

And then “White Room” became a hit and the word got out. Suddenly everybody was talking about Cream. People you thought were decidedly unhip, out of the loop, got the message. And “Wheels Of Fire” started to explode. And on side four, there was a sixteen minute drum solo entitled “Toad.”
Yup, blame “Toad” for that execrable five to twenty minutes in every live show where everybody takes a pee break and the drummer flails on. They were all inspired by Ginger Baker, he was the progenitor, they all wanted to BE Ginger Baker, suddenly the drummer was no longer an afterthought, but a virtuoso who could express himself.
And then the band said it was breaking up and went on a final tour.

And the victory lap, “Goodbye Cream,” had a bigger impact in the public’s consciousness than anything that came before, it was the zeitgeist, people bought it after the band broke up, lamenting they’d never gotten to see the act. “Goodbye” resurrected “I’m So Glad” from the first LP. “Sitting On Top Of The World” was definitive. And “Badge” was a gift for those who’d been there all along.
It was like not only the band, but its members had died, there were posthumous live records, everybody wanted more of what they could never get again.
But they did get the short-lived “supergroup” Blind Faith, comprising of Eric Clapton, bassist Ric Grech from Family, and Steve Winwood from Traffic on keyboards and vocals and Ginger Baker on drums. They released only one album, Blind Faith, before breaking up.

Blind Faith was the first supergroup. That was the definition back then, they had to coin it for this concoction, an act made up of the stars of other acts, come together to make something new and triumphant.
But of course Blind Faith imploded, but the album gets short shrift, the first side is phenomenal, everyone knows the cuts, from the explosive opener “Had To Cry Today” to Clapton’s first shining solo moment, “Presence Of The Lord” and the cover of Buddy Holly’s “Well All Right” to Winwood’s piece-de-resistance, “Can’t Find My Way Home.”
The second side had Ginger Baker’s fifteen minute opus “Do What You Like.” Filler or a nod to Baker’s genius, who knows?
And when Blind Faith broke up, Winwood tried to go solo but got back together with Traffic. Clapton decided to play small, with Delaney & Bonnie, Ric Grech disappeared, and Ginger Baker formed his Air Force in 1970, yup, he was gonna continue to play for all the marbles.
Baker’s Air Force album sold, but then the act faded away, there was great playing but no songs.

After the demise of both groups Baker built a recording studio in Lagos, Nigeria. Paul McCartney & Wings recorded ‘Band On the Run’ at Baker’s Batakota Studios. The studio went bust not long after and its failure sent Baker to drugs.

Ginger Baker withdrew from the music industry throughout most of the 80s. He had developed a heroin addiction and withdrew to Italy where he lived on an olive farm until he overcame the addiction.

Eventually Baker played with the Masters Of Reality, in the nineties, which seemed a step down, but the truth was there was no band big enough to contain him. He had an edgy personality and still an original. He was the original Keith Richards, nothing could kill him. Everybody knew who Ginger Baker was, it’s just that we didn’t hear his playing that much. He was drunk, he was stoned, he played polo, he was involved in shenanigans, but the legend always exceeded the present.

And yes, there were the Cream reunion shows in 2005. A triumph in London’s Royal Albert Hall, an almost queasy afterthought in New York’s Madison Garden. He was still Ginger Baker, he could still do it, but this was nostalgia.

A decade later, living in South Africa, Baker revealed he had ‘serious heart issues.

Ginger Baker died 6 October, 2019 at the age 80.

But if you talk about legacy…
Ginger Baker is right up there. He was the first. He showed what could be done with the drumkit. He was a trailblazer, a true rocker, one who couldn’t be contained, there was nothing corporate about him. He was a beacon, may he continue to shine.

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Eddie Shaw 1/2018

Eddie Shaw was born on March 20, 1937 in Stringtown, Mississippi. In his teenage years, Shaw played tenor saxophone with local blues musicians, such as Little Milton and Willie Love. At the age of 14, he played in a jam session in Greenville, Mississippi, with Ike Turner’s band. At a gig in Itta Bena, Mississippi, when the then 20-year-old Shaw performed, Muddy Waters invited him to join his Chicago-based band.

In Waters’s band, Shaw divided the tenor saxophone position with A.C. Reed. In 1972 he joined Howlin’ Wolf, leading his band, the Wolf Gang, and writing half the songs on The Back Door Wolf (1973). After the singer’s death in 1976 he took over the band and its residency at the 1815 Club, renamed Eddie’s Place. Shaw led the band on Living Chicago Blues Vol. 1 and Have Blues – Will Travel (1980) and recorded albums with different backing for Isabel Records, Rooster Blues, and Wolf Records.

Shaw’s own recording career started in the late 1970s, with an appearance on the Alligator Records anthology Living Chicago Blues (1978) and his own LPs for Evidence and Rooster Blues, and more recent discs for Rooster Blues (In the Land of the Crossroads) and Wolf (Home Alone).

Shaw’s many contributions to the blues included arranging tracks for The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (which featured Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, Ringo Starr and others) and performing with blues notables, including Hound Dog Taylor, Freddie King, Otis Rush and Magic Sam (on his Black Magic album).

In 2013 and 2014, Shaw won the Blues Music Award in the category Instrumentalist – Horn. May 3 is Eddie Shaw Day in Chicago, by proclamation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Shaw died on January 29, 2018, at the age of 80.
One of his sons, Eddie “Vaan” Shaw Jr. (born November 6, 1955), joined the Wolf Gang and played on some of his father’s recordings. A disciple of Wolf’s protégé Hubert Sumlin who passed away on December 4, 2011, he has recorded two albums of his own – Morning Rain and The Trail of Tears.

Another son, Stan Shaw (born 1952), is a character actor based in Hollywood, California. (this made him father at the age of 15!)

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Robert Bilbo Walker 11/2017

November 29, 2017 – Robert Bilbo Walker Jr. was born on February 19, 1937, on the Borden Plantation in Clarksdale, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

Walker was named after his father, Robert “Bilbo” Walker Sr., who was also nicknamed “Bilbo” — that’s how Walker Jr. acquired the nickname, which he hates. As he explains in the liner notes to Promised Land, people in his Clarksdale home would distinguish between his father and him by referring to them as Big Bilbo and Little Junior Bilbo. Later, after he began making a name for himself in Delta juke joints, Walker was called Chuck Berry Jr.
Walker was a completely self-taught musician who played piano, guitar, and drums. He got his musical education thanks to his father, who would have “Little Junior Bilbo” playing piano behind a curtain at country juke joints around his native Clarksdale. Continue reading Robert Bilbo Walker 11/2017

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Corki Casey O’Dell 5/2017

May 11, 2017 – Corki Casey O’Dell was born Vivian J. Ray Casey on May 13, 1936 in Phoenix, Arizona where she grew up as teenage guitarists with the likes of Lee Hazlewood, Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy.

In 1956, she joined then-husband, guitarist Al Casey, playing rhythm guitar on Sanford Clark’s country, pop and R&B hit “The Fool,” which would later be recorded by Elvis Presley, among others. The tune was penned by songwriter-producer Lee Hazelwood, who would use O’Dell on several of the sessions he produced.  Continue reading Corki Casey O’Dell 5/2017

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Udo Jürgens 12/2014

Udo JurgensDec 21, 2014 – Udo Jürgens was born Udo Jürgen Bockelmann  on September 30, 1934  in Klagenfurt, Austria. Udo grew up in the family castle Ottmanach in Kärnten with his brothers John (1931) and Manfred (1943). In 1939 he gets a harp (harmonica) as a present and he teaches himself to play national anthems on it. In 1942 he moves up the ladder with an accordeon and six years later he gets his formal music education at the conservatory of Klagenfurt in piano, singing and compositions.

In the 1950 he won a composer contest organized by Austria’s public broadcasting channel ORF with the song “Je t’aime” and he gets his music education on the road with the Udo Bolan band and several other reincarnations. The 50s is a long learning curve and his first record deal comes apart in a big flop and in 1956 he changes his artist name into Udo Jürgens.

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Reggie Tielman 3/2014

reggy-tielman March 13, 2014 – Reggie Tielman (Tielman Brothers) was born on May 20, 1933. Tielman was born in Makassar, Celebes, Dutch East Indies. Both his father, a KNIL captain named Herman Tielman, and his mother, Flora Laurentine Hess, were Indo-European. Aside from Reggie, the couple had 5 children: Reggie, Phonton, Loulou (Lawrence), and Jane (Janette Loraine). When the Japanese invaded the Indonesian Islands, the elder Tielman was imprisoned; Reggie and his siblings were taken care of by his mother. Together with his siblings Ponthon (4 August 1934 – 29 April 2000), Andy (30 May 1936 – 10 November 2011), Loulou (30 october 1938 – 4 August 1994)
Jane Tielman (17 August 1940 – 25 juni 1993) they formed the Tielman brothers in 1945 in Surabaya, Indonesia.

After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the family was reunited. A few years later, Reggie and his siblings were performing jazz standards at private functions using the musical training their father had given them. They were performing throughout nascent Indonesia, which had proclaimed its independence from the Netherlands after the Japanese surrender. The siblings’ repertoire included both American and traditional Indonesian music.

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Hubert Sumlin 12/2011

Bluesman Hubert SumlinDecember 4, 2011 – Hubert Sumlin was born on November 16, 1931 near Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up across the river in Hughes, Arkansas, where he took up the guitar as a child; by his teens he was playing for local functions, sometimes with the harmonica player James Cotton. The first time Sumlin saw Howlin’ Wolf in action, as he told Living Blues magazine in 1989, he was too young to get into the club, so he climbed on to some Coca-Cola boxes to peer through a window; the boxes shifted and Sumlin fell into the room, landing on Wolf’s head. After the gig, Wolf drove him home and asked his mother not to punish him. “I followed him ever since,” Sumlin said.

At the time Wolf was working with the guitarists Willie Johnson and Pat Hare, but Sumlin was occasionally permitted to sit in. Then, in 1953, Howlin’ Wolf left the south for Chicago, where he would develop his music on the bustling club scene and in the studios of Chess Records. In spring 1954, he sent for Sumlin to join him, and soon afterwards the 23-year-old guitarist was heard on records such as Evil and Forty-Four, and a couple of years later the sublime Smokestack Lightning, though for a while he played second to more experienced guitarists like Johnson and Jody Williams.

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Koko Taylor 6/2009

koko-taylorJune 3, 2009 – Koko Taylor was born Cora Walton on September 28, 1928 on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee. Her daddy was a sharecropper. She lived with her parents and five brothers and sisters in a “shotgun shack” with neither electricity nor running water. Although never professional singers, her parents used to sing enthusiastically while working the cotton fields, and she began to sing gospel in church. She also soaked up the blues played on local radio, which she and her siblings would surreptitiously perform with improvised home-made instruments, despite their father’s opposition.

By the time she was 11, both her parents had died and she too was forced to work in the cotton fields. But growing up, she and her five brothers and sisters had amused themselves by singing the blues, accompanying themselves on homemade instruments. (Their father did not discourage them, although he would have rather they sang gospel music.) Continue reading Koko Taylor 6/2009

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Boots Randolph 7/2007

Boots RandolphJuly 3, 2007 – Boots Randolph was born Homer Louis Randolph III was born on June 3, 1927 in Paducah, Kentucky, where he grew up in the rural community of Cadiz.

When Boots Randolph was “tootin’ his horn”, he did more than just play the saxophone. More than just pop out music notes. And that’s why his saxophone sounded like it could sing…could talk…could almost speak to deaf ears! His ability was awesome. His versatile style still has no equal. He brought audiences to their feet ever since the early sixties, when his signature song– “Yakety Sax” — first hit the airwaves. It took off like gangbusters and turned the young musician into a celebrity, probably before some of his friends in the hills of Kentucky could even spell it!

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Johnnie Johnson 4/2005

Johnny JohnsonApril 13, 2005 – Johnnie Johnson (Johnny B Goode) was born July 8th 1924 in Fairmont, West Virginia. He began playing the piano in 1928.
While serving in the US Marine Corps during WW II, he was a member of Bobby Troup’s all serviceman jazz orchestra, The Barracudas. After his return, he moved to Detroit and then Chicago, where he sat in with many notable artists, including Muddy Waters and Little Walter.

He moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 and put together a jazz and blues group, The Sir John Trio.  with the drummer Ebby Hardy and the saxophonist Alvin Bennett. The three had a regular engagement at the Cosmopolitan Club, in East St. Louis. On New Year’s Eve 1952, Bennett had a stroke and could not perform. Johnson, searching for a last-minute replacement, called a young man named Chuck Berry, the only musician Johnson knew who, because of his inexperience, would likely not be playing on New Year’s Eve. Although then a limited guitarist, Berry added vocals and showmanship to the group. When Bennett was not able to play after his stroke, Johnson hired Berry as a permanent member of the trio.

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Sam Phillips 7/2003

July 30, 2003 – Samuel Cornelius “Sam” Phillips was born on January 5, 1923 in Florence, Alabama and a graduate of Coffee High School. As a youngster he was intensely exposed to blues and became interested in music by African workers on his father’s cotton farm.

He became an important record producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 40s and 50s, and played an important role in the emergence of rock and roll as the major form of popular music in the 1950s.

He is most notably attributed with the discoveries of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash and is associated with several other noteworthy rhythm and blues and rock and roll stars of the period.

Sam was also founder of Sun Records, the studio that was vital to launching the careers of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas and numerous other significant artists. As well as owning the Sun Studio Café in Memphis, he and his family founded Big River Broadcasting Corporation which owned and operated several radio stations in the Florence, Alabama, area, including WQLT-FM, WSBM, and WXFL.

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