Category Blues & Roots
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 […]
WALKING TOWARDS SUNSET
Chapter One: A potted history from 1963 – 1967 Being an ambitious but ultimately ludicrous attempt to summarise the early days of blues legend John Mayall. Skip to Chapter Three if uninterested in early British blues. John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers started playing London’s famous Marquee Club in late 1963. In the following year they […]
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