Classic Rock Interviews

He had already influenced the sound of Pop music earlier in the Eighties by moving drummer Kenny Aronoff up front in the mix on the #1 hit "Jack and Diane" and "Hurt So Good", and with his ninth album "The Lonesome Jubilee" in August 1987, John Mellencamp not only influenced Pop and Rock but infiltrated the citadel sound of Nashville as well. Almost instantly, acts as diverse as Paul Simon and The Talking Heads took notice. John Mellencamp is my guest In the Studio.

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".

"Trilogy", Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's third studio album and fourth overall in barely two years,  was released in July 1972, a high watermark peak for Progressive Rock's quality as well as massive popularity ( #2 UK, #5 Billboard in the US )...Trilogy has remained a favorite over these many changes in rock music as the place where Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer's ambitions to expand the palette of rock music were perfectly balanced by terrific songwriting and production on "The Endless Enigma", "From the Beginning", a terrific concert showstopper cover version of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown" from the stage musical Oklahoma!, and the title song opus. Carl Palmer hosts with archival interviews from both the late Keith Emerson and Greg Lake.

Down through the history of mankind, first flights such as The Eagles are revered: the Montgolfier brothers in Paris in 1783 with their hot air balloon; the Wright brothers in 1903 with powered flight, Apollo 11 landing on the Moon...In June 1972 when the debut album by a Southern California-based band The Eagles was quietly released, it had none of the anticipated date-with-destiny public spectacle shared by all of the aforementioned events. But history proved that the original quartet's first flight would quickly allow a career to take wing that would soon soar, resulting in The Eagles becoming the most popular American band ever. Original member Randy Meisner & co-founder the late Glenn Frey are with me In the Studio for the story on the 50th anniversary of The Eagles.

Preparing this interview with Black Crowes co-founders singer Chris Robinson and his younger guitar-playing brother Rich Robinson to mark their second release, "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion", the deja vu was uncanny and not a little bit unsettling. Constantly I had to remind myself that the trends these Atlanta natives were seeing in the mid-1990s, and the predictions they made then, sound eerily like today's headlines. Peering now into their spyglass in reverse, it is both remarkable in its accuracy but, I must admit, troubling in its sense of creeping inevitability.