Category Blues & Roots
HOLLYWOOD BLUESEVARD
The 60s bands of UK born John Mayall are legendary for being the workshop where some of the eras most revered guitarists honed their chops. Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac), Eric Clapton (Cream) and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones) all served under the benign yet exacting blues baton of Mr Mayall. Yet by the end of the […]
ROCKIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD – INTRO/USA
One of the delights of blogging is the sense of sharing interests and passions with people around the globe. This is especially true of music with its capacity to cross boundaries, cultures and even language. Now and then I’ll bring up the map of the world showing number of views (by country) depicted in varying […]
VERTICAL RETURN
We’re back with the vertical gatefold sleeves for a couple more instalments. This should not be construed as an attempt to show every specimen, but simply present further examples that have caught this record collector’s eye. First off we have a very recent addition to the genus. Bob Masse is a legendary Canadian-born artist and […]
COUSIN HOOKER
Earl Hooker was an unsung hero of electric blues guitar. Born near Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1930, Earl (middle name Zebedee) moved to Chicago with his family but left home at an early age to go play music. And play he certainly did, adding his Robert Nighthawk influenced slide playing to recordings by Sonny Boy Williamson, […]
HOT DOG!
My first job in tertiary Student Services was at an Institute of Technology in the industrial inner-west of Melbourne. The institution was, in all truth, more interesting than my job. But the team was diverse and lively, and it was here I first entertained the notion of becoming a counsellor. It would mean more study, […]
DUST-MY-BLUES
Ever had those mid-week, demanding-boss, traffic-jam, forgot-to-get-milk-on-the-way-home-so-partner-was-pissed-off blues? If it was 1967 you had a number of musical options to sooth your troubled western mostly-white electric-urban-blues soul. Loose the bad vibes, lose the hyphenated sentences, enter the transatlantic none-more-blue worlds of John Mayall and Paul Butterfield. You might imagine John Mayall was dismayed by the […]
OUT OF JUICE
Here are some albums I’ve been enjoying recently. * YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) – After Service Alfa Records, Japan 1984 Live double LP set from Japanese electro-pop solid state survivors, featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto. * Hatfield & The North – Afters Virgin Records 1980 Odd afterthought compilation from Canterbury scene English proggers, featuring chunks of the […]
STRUT REDUX
If you survive initial rock and roll success, what follows is very much like growing up in public. To be sure, survive is a potent word in this context. So many musicians have gone to join the choir invisible it’s a wonder that there are enough left to form a band. Yet numerous artists who […]
BB KING RIDES THE FRANKSTON LINE
Every month the postman would deliver a ‘Classical Music’ LP from the Australian branch of the World Record Club. Often, under the watchful eye of my mother, I’d get to carefully liberate the new disc from its square cardboard mailer, but I had insufficient status to actually play records on the stereogram. That was a […]
AS WE WIND ON DOWN THE ROAD – ZEPPELIN AND FOLK
This article continues a feature on the bursting forth of folk influences on Led Zeppelin III. It uses as a springboard quotes from Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and looks at albums that would have been important for the musicians as well as those released in the lead-up to the writing of material […]
