Old Timey Music for Howard and DC

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Thu May 12, 2016 9:16 pm

I dig Norwegian cats. Love the meandering styles from psych, to prog, to swinging groove. Just amazing the shit out that people haven't really heard, and amazing the shit that's on the YouTube.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Mon May 16, 2016 10:43 am

Happy birthday Pet Sounds.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Mon May 16, 2016 6:59 pm

Coincidentally, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde was also released 50 years ago, today.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri May 20, 2016 11:59 am

It's Summertime bitches. Time for some Bobbi.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Wed May 25, 2016 11:17 am

Much better than Fleetwood Mac IMHO.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Wed May 25, 2016 11:20 am

I thought I was her daddy but she had five more...

howard · Post by **howard** » Wed May 25, 2016 5:08 pm

I haven't heard that Peter Green record in forever. I'm gonna enjoy that.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Sat May 28, 2016 1:29 am

Early Dead magnificence.

Legal weed is great. My thought jewel is gleaming.

Plus that pork ribeye stuffed in a pineapple and wrapped in bacon and then smoked was mighty tasty, so I may be high from that.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon May 30, 2016 4:31 pm

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon May 30, 2016 5:23 pm

Otis Spann is my favorite of all the tremendous Chicago blues piano players.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Tue May 31, 2016 12:27 pm

DC47 wrote:Otis Spann is my favorite of all the tremendous Chicago blues piano players.

Same here.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Tue May 31, 2016 9:54 pm

That was a fine band. Luther Johnson on guitar in particular. Chicago blues drummers don't smash the place up, but Leary may be my favorite. Taste rather than crash. Spann is Spann.

Paul Oscher is notable for being a good enough harp player to be hired by Muddy Waters when he was just starting to shave. And he didn't hire bad ones. Little Walter, James Cotton, Jerry Portnoy. Further, he was the first white musician in a touring Muddy Waters band that I can think of. And not a short run -- well into the 70s.

Imagine touring day after day in a van with the men in this band and then when off the road living in Muddy's basement with Otis Spann. As a teenager. Now that's an education.

More of this show:

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Tue May 31, 2016 11:17 pm

Here's Waters a few years later in the legendary LA club the Ash Grove. He makes his stage appearance around 20 minutes into the video. Prior to that there's some fascinating back-stage footage, and an interesting interview that delves into what was going on for Waters commercially at that time. Largely, his decline. By '71 his enthusiastic black audience was long gone. Young blacks identified his music with their parents' generation, and preferred R&B, soul and rock. Chess Records had been sold; I think Leonard Chess was dead. A few years later Chess Records would be sold for the second time and for all intents and purposes, fold. The great Muddy Waters was even without a record deal.

When this video was shot in '71, Waters was touring hard just to get by, and often opening for others. I saw him a few years later in this role. It's incredible that a musician of his genius and achievement was reduced to this. But times change fast in the music business. Waters always had a great band, and he always did exactly his thing. He was pushed to record in various painfully modern styles in the late '60s and early '70s to try to get over to the young people by doing the new thing. But that's not the way he played his shows.

Like the '68 Copenhagen show, this '71 show in LA is a classic. The band has shifted a bit. That's Willie Smith rather than Leary (probably playing with Wolf then) behind the drums. Pinetop Perkins rather than Spann (possibly dead by then) playing the hell out of the beat-up up-right piano. That's an older and a more assured Paul Oscher on harp. Two fine guitar players, and a solid bass man.

Fortunately after a few more years of scraping by, Waters had a surprising career renaissance before he died in the early '80s. This was largely due to the work of Johnny Winters, recording out of all places Westport, Connecticut. He scrapped the conceptual tricks (e.g., horns, strings, rock music, psychedelia) the record companies had employed to try to sell records to modern audiences and again recorded Waters doing classic material with crack musicians in a manner true to his largely unchanging and unique style. Those are records worth listening to.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Tue May 31, 2016 11:20 pm

Nice stuff

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 8:03 pm

the full performance by Chicago Transit Authority, referenced in another thread. Cueing old trombonist DC47 to weigh in on James Pankow and these guys.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri Jun 03, 2016 5:13 pm

I know it is Friday, but this rules.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Thu Jun 09, 2016 11:31 pm

howard wrote:the full performance by Chicago Transit Authority, referenced in another thread. Cueing old trombonist DC47 to weigh in on James Pankow and these guys.

I was a huge fan, right from the start. Their material up to the death of Terry Kath around '77 was tremendous. But really, any rock or soul band with horns playing any decent material was right up my alley. There wasn't much like this in popular music, especially when r&b and soul moved away from this direction.

Golden era Chicago (as above) was a tremendous band. Everybody could really play. Guitarist Kath was the standout from my point of view. I really liked the arrangements. Unlike the killer tracks in the soul and R&B genre, Chicago didn't just cut 3 minute tunes that inherently limited the role of the horn arrangements. They stretched out. There was room for arrangements that went beyond a groove or hook. The horn section as a whole took the role of a featured soloist. With no second guitarist, and Lamm not much of an improviser on the keyboards, they were an instrumental centerpiece along with Kath.

My Chicago love was so deep that I labored hard over arrangements of '25 to 6 to 4' and 'Saturday in the Park' that featured -- you guessed it -- the trombone. But I couldn't find anyone who wanted to play this stuff back in the day. My peers were all about various forms of jazz fusion (electric Miles, Corea, Mahavishnu, Zappa). Electronics were in, melody was out. Chicago wasn't cool. That kind of horn stuff wouldn't get you props at Berklee.

This particular concert is one of my favorites on the internet. Another are the TV specials set at Caribou Ranch in the Rockies, north of Boulder, where Chicago recorded many of their Golden Era albums. That studio burned down 30+ years ago. But it is no coincidence that my family will be staying at a nearby ranch during part of our summer vacation.

A special bonus near the end of this clip: Al Green in fine form, backed by Chicago. Chicago does nothing special here -- they submerge their style to fit Green's usual backdrop. But it's a rare chance to hear Green singing live in this part of his career. I'd love to hear him singing some of the classic Chicago tunes, but no such luck.

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 10, 2016 8:53 am

Wow, I do (barely) remember watching that on TV. I couldn't afford to buy many albums, so beyond Chicago's first two albums which I picked up used/bargain bin, I was limited to the radio cuts. By '73-'74 when I had a few bucks to buy records, I had become more interested in Tower, EWF, War and the like. That first album was such a revelation, a breath of fresh air. My dad even admitted liking the instrumental parts.

I just picture these white guys, growing up in and around Chicago, studying music, listening to the Beatles and mainstream rock and roll, but also listening to all the blues and jazz available in that city.

Here's something that will give you a laugh. I had a couple of friends in school who were musicians, and I messed around on the piano with them on occasion. Before I turned to baseball, I had learned enough basics to handle simple things like the piano intro to Saturday in the Park. One guy was a drummer, he had been my best friend in 7th grade, we remained friendly through high school (and since.) The other guy was a gifted trombone player, studied music in college but I lost track of him. His name is Craig Harris. But not that Craig Harris (a famous jazz trombonist, in case anyone else is reading this conversation between DC and me), whom I only learned about several years later.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sat Jun 25, 2016 10:49 pm

My ears latched on to Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago before I had really heard much Tower or EWF. Chicago was the clear winner in that horn-driven race. But eventually I dug them all. Though never War. I'll have to go back to them to see what I might have missed.

My take on guys in Chicago is that they had classical backgrounds as much as they did jazz backgrounds. And I didn't hear blues. One tip was that their early albums they had songs that never got radio play that were clearly based on classical forms. Multi-part suites in particular. It was interesting to me that Chicago didn't use horns the way they had been used on Stax cuts. That was curious as that sound was behind a stream of gigantic hits, that the Chicago musicians must have been steeped in when they were growing up.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:01 pm

Post by **Shirley** » Fri Jul 01, 2016 11:42 am

David Gilmour's still got it.

One of these days he's going to cut you into little pieces.

https://vid.me/AppV

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:13 pm

Happy Canada Day!

Post by **Shirley** » Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:40 pm

Nice back-to-back posts. Pink Floyd and Neil Young dominated my senior year of high school music listening. Mostly Animals and The Final Cut from Pink Floyd, and Harvest and Live Rust for Neil Young.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Fri Jul 01, 2016 2:02 pm

Last night I was playing Down by the River in the car, and my 15 year-old got a big kick out of the juxtaposition of the happy poppy la-la-la background vocals with the lyrics of "... I shot myyy bayy-beee. Dead... shot her dead, shot her dead..."

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Mon Jul 25, 2016 6:03 pm

Stan Ridgway's a bizarre guy.

A couple of great albums in the late 80s and then further and further into weirdness (at least musically).

But some of his stuff is just amazing.

Post by **Shirley** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 12:01 pm

I'd never heard of these dudes until I saw a video posted on Facebook. This video is from 1959 and these dudes are from Indonesia. They rock!

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 1:07 pm

Whoa! They tore it up!

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Wed Jul 27, 2016 2:31 pm

That was great. I still love the 50s rock of guys like Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochrane, Gene Vincent, early Elvis...

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 9:50 pm

I'm very late to the party, but I've been getting into (old) Genesis lately.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 10:29 pm

I assumed a prog guy like you was already super-drenched in old Genesis.

Personally, I was never a prog guy. I loved Rush, but came from the hard rock side of that equation. Was never much into Yes (although I love Chris Squire's bass), or Genesis, Floyd, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, et al.

To this day though, basic rock-n-roll is my touchstone, whether I hear it in its pure form, or in punk, or hard rock, or country.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 10:46 pm

My buddy that got me really into Rush (not Max) is SUPER into Genesis. He tried to force them onto me, and I really hate Peter Gabriel's later stuff so I closed my mind to it.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 5:52 am

Gabriel's first four solo albums range from really good to fantastic. Then it all went bad. But you know, guy has to make money.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 12:14 pm

HDO45331 · Post by **HDO45331** » Mon Aug 08, 2016 10:03 am

Great band, back in the late 70s, from SE Ohio. The untimely deaths of the percussionist (Steve, heart & soul of the band) and lead guitarist/vocals (Bob, great guitar and lead vocals) crippled this up and coming band.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Mon Aug 08, 2016 1:21 pm

Killer "Texas-style" southern rock.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Mon Aug 15, 2016 10:43 am

You know.

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Aug 18, 2016 2:36 pm

Cold Blood was an electric blues band with a kickass horn section from SF back in the day, in the shadow of Tower of Power. Tower is more funk, Cold Blood more blues, to oversimplify. I love 'em both. Their singer, Lydia Pense, a wonderful talent. They still perform frequently, and Lydia has done nothing but improve with age.

Here is a full concert from 1998. Last three songs are the best.

Here is a tune I often think of, an old Chuck Willis song that Elvis had a single with it a decade earlier than Cold Blood. This whole album, Thriller, is wonderful start to finish, even includes a Boz tune.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Thu Aug 18, 2016 7:09 pm

I took a couple bass lessons years ago from a guy who was a one-time bass player for Lydia Pense and Cold Blood (early 70s). I quit before I really even got started, but my daughter picked it up, and now the Fender Jazz bass belongs to her.

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Aug 18, 2016 7:26 pm

There were several, I bet. And players were always moving between bands, Tower, Sons of Champlin, Savoy Brown, and backing bands for Boz, Elvin Bishop and Santana, plus I'm no doubt forgetting some.

What kind of stuff is your daughter currently playing?

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Thu Aug 18, 2016 7:34 pm

howard wrote:What kind of stuff is your daughter currently playing?

The genres she is into in particular (as described by her) are "metal-core" and "pop punk". Basically the kinds of bands who play the Vans Warped Tour. (But, then again, she also likes Adele, so she's not too pure or elitist about it.)