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With Belfast-born Van Morrison’s July 1972 sixth album “Saint Dominic’s Preview”, the mainstream rock audience finally caught up to the quality jazzy, folksy rhythm’n’blues Morrison had been belting out consistently since critics began lauding his debut,”Astral Weeks”. This rare 21st century classic rock interview was conducted in Belfast by the BBC’s intrepid John Bennett.
By the time Guns’n’Roses “Appetite for Destruction” passed the 18,000,000 sales point early in the 21st century, several rock magazines and websites had revised their original reviews from the July 1987 release. My guest In the Studio GNR lead guitarist Slash remembers, fondly in most cases, but admits to at least one rookie mistake that left a scar that smarts to this day.
Styx co-founder Dennis DeYoung, lifer James “JY” Young, and then recently recruited Alabama boy Tommy Shaw all join me here with current Styx keyboardist/vocalist Lawrence Gowan In the Studio for the early days of being the perennial opening act, saddled with the curse “big in the Flyover States”, all the while writing and recording “Fooling Yourself”,”Come Sail Away”,”Miss America”, “Man in the Wilderness”, and “Grand Illusion”.
“You Can Still Rock in America” by Night Ranger, one of the Eighties’ signature bands, performed in concert by the Nineties’ first supergroup, Damn Yankees. Here is the guy who originally wrote and sang it, Jack Blades, out front of Tommy Shaw, Michael Cartellone, and Ted Nugent in Denver’s Mile High Stadium three decades ago
After years of struggle as the undercard rock palooka who could take a punch and never go down, in 1984 Sammy Hagar answered the bell and came out swinging, scoring a technical knockout with his mainstream hit “I Can’t Drive 55” from his eighth solo album “VOA”. Then in 1987 Sammy won by a knockout with his solo album “I Never Said Goodbye”, at #14 his highest charting album ever, and that while being newly installed as Van Halen’s lead singer. Sammy Hagar is my guest In the Studio.
John Fogerty had attracted an “A” list live band and had been rehearsing at Burbank’s Center Staging, so we did the interview there, then turned those thoroughbreds loose on the song “Blue Boy” in front of a lucky small audience of guests in May 1997.
Eddie Money was always an effortless interview before his death in September 2019, a real pleasure, because he loved people, he loved to tell stories, and he had a million of ’em. As I prepared dual anniversaries for two of the late Eddie Money’s best selling albums, “Eddie Money” debut in October 1977 and the big breakthrough “No Control” five years later in June 1982 forty years ago, it occurred that one of the less recognized aspects of the brief but all-important Punk Rock trend in the latter half of the Seventies is how it aided and abetted countless upstart bands at the same time which were not necessarily a part of that CBGB Club scene. The late Eddie Money is my guest here In the Studio.
In an alternate universe where being boring and predictable is the Original Sin, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx, and Tommy Lee of Motley Crue would be sanctified saints, because they have been waging jihad against the tyranny of the mainstream for a full four decades. Peaking at #2 on Billboard Album Sales chart, “Girls, Girls, Girls” would eventually equal their preceding mega-seller “Theatre of Pain” with another four million copies sold. The always eyebrow-raising Nikki Sixx and hilarious Vince Neil are my guests In the Studio for “Girls, Girls, Girls”..
This was something longtime ZZ Top fans had been dreaming about for decades: a horned toad’s eye view of Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard, and now dearly departed Dusty Hill at rehearsal in the Lone Star state in historic roadhouse Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, nestled in the Texas Hill Country, knocking the bottom out of the ornery bucket shuffle “Tubesnake Boogie” for the Grammy-nominated film documentary ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas.
The story of Heart’s debut “Dreamboat Annie” remains one of the Cinderella fairy tale chapters in rock history, but the major label follow up released in 1977, “Little Queen”, was made amidst a legal battle prompted precisely because initial big money, & the potential for more.