“There was only ONE of those voices,” Peter Frampton reminded me emphatically one time. Here the late Steve Marriott displays one of the reasons he was inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the lead singer of the Small Faces , with one of their signature songs “Tin Soldier” performed live in 1981 with the reformed Humble Pie.
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Doobie Brothers- Minute by Minute- Michael McDonald, Pat Simmons, Tom Johnston, John Hartman
Back when the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute album was released in December 1978, I wasn’t aware of the following Hollywood maxim, but the band’s Warner Bros. record label apparently was. A little-known showbiz PR secret to which no one in Hollywood or network TV will ever admit is that when you suddenly see big movie stars who rarely grant interviews suddenly showing up on every early morning and late night talk show, it means that, from the reaction at private pre-release test screenings, the movie studio believes it has a stinker on its hands, and that it needs to have a huge opening weekend at the box office before word gets out. No doubt that is why the label dispatched Doobie Brothers singer/ songwriter/ keyboardist Michael McDonald to visit radio stations just days before Christmas 1978 and hand deliver the band’s new album Minute by Minute.I was filling in the afternoon show on ROCK 103 Memphis while the boss went on vacation at a slow time when all of the big touring bands and major record companies had shut down for the holidays, so imagine my bewilderment when Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers shows up unannounced and asks if I’d like to play something off their new album?! I had been a big fan of Michael McDonald’s smoky blue-eyed soul voice steeped in the tradition of Ray Charles ever since Michael had done his turn on Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and then augmented the Doobies when their main songwriter, Tom Johnston, took ill right before Takin’ It to the Streets, so the soft-spoken modest McDonald & I bonded easily that holiday afternoon.
Considerable assumptions, half truths, and flat out fantasies remain in the conventional wisdom surrounding the making of Minute by Minute by the Doobie Brothers, one of the Seventies’ most popular albums, so much so that for the story of that #1-selling, four Grammy Award-grabbing Album of the Year 1978, we gathered four Doobie Brothers who were actually there In the Studio when it was made: founders Pat Simmons, Tom Johnston, John Hartman of the San Jose CA band with singer/ songwriter/ keyboard player Michael McDonald. Sure, everybody knows that then-unknown singer/songwriter McDonald had replaced popular Doobie co-founder Johnston just days before recording started on their 1976 album Takin’ It to the Streets. But why? And everybody remembers that it worked, selling Top 10, but who remembers that the follow-up, Livin’ on the Fault Line, with the same line up and producer, was the first Doobie Brothers album since Toulouse Street not to go platinum?
In spite of containing the songs” Here to Love You”,”Minute by Minute”,”Open Your Eyes”,”Dependin’ on You”,”Don’t Stop to Watch the Wheels”, and the Grammy Song of the Year and Record of the Year ” What a Fool Believes”, at least one top executive at their record company predicted that Minute by Minute “…would be the final nail in their coffin”, quotes Michael McDonald with a chuckle.
Here In the Studio get the record straight in my classic rock interview about 1978’s Grammy Album of the Year, the biggest seller in the Doobie Brothers’ Hall of Fame long illustrious career of one of America’s most beloved bands. –Redbeard
( L-R John McFee, Tom Johnston, Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers 2018 )
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Rolling Stones- Jumping Jack Flash- Vancouver 12-18-94
“Jumping Jack Flash” was the song the Rolling Stones played at closing time of the Voodoo Lounge on the last night of the North American tour December 18, 1994 in Vancouver, and this recording of it comes from the In the Studio archives. But be sure to look and listen for the full Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge Uncut 2CD/DVD in stores and online now, and click the link below to register to win it! Btw, turn this up really loud and hear the World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band at full throttle after five months on the road and at the end of a two hour show!!!-Redbeard
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Tom Waits- Blue Valentine 40th Anniversary
The inimitable ragamuffin Tom Waits bagged another Grammy Award nomination for his 2013 Bad As Me . In 1978 my pick for album of the year was Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, which no doubt topped many such lists that year, but second by a hobo’s whisker on my list, however, was Blue Valentine by Tom Waits, an album which I can cherish easily for another forty years. During his acceptance speech at the RHOF induction, Waits remarked,” They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with. And they say that as if it’s a bad thing.” ( Rimshot ba-da-boom !) While no one was surprised when Springsteen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, that same recognition for Tom Waits was a pleasant surprise to many of us who have descended into his musical world of dim-lit back alley places populated by a large cast of vivid characters straight out of Central Casting. Since this November 1978 classic rock interview in Memphis, Waits has accumulated a separate body of work as a film actor, most recently in The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington, as well as Down By Law. In 1982 Waits combined his musical and film ambitions to receive an Academy Award nomination for the soundtrack to One From the Heart. Since his critically-acclaimed 1973 debut album Closing Time, Tom Waits has released another twenty-one albums while copping two Grammy Awards. –Redbeard
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Lynyrd Skynyrd- Woman of Mine- Memphis 10-30-73
The story behind how this ultra-rare recorded Lynyrd Skynyrd performance even exists from almost half a century past is a real Southern Rock mystery. First, “Woman of Mine” is one of only two Leon Wilkeson collaborations with lyricist/ singer Ronnie Van Zant (that’s Leon in the big ten gallon hat), but had it not been performed live in Ardent Studio in Memphis on October 30, 1973 during a promotional broadcast on Memphis radio station WMC-FM, there is a real high probability that we would never have known of its existence. Though clearly available to record as much as six months prior to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s April 1974 release Second Helping, there is no evidence that it ever was. Matter of fact, guitarist Gary Rossington and Wilkeson himself both told me that this performance may actually be the only recording of it anywhere. It quite possibly would have slipped into oblivion until I gave the tape to the record company for Collectybles in year 2000. Major props to the two Memphis Jons- former deejay and veteran record promoter Jon Scott for making the original broadcast happen, and Recording Academy Executive Director Jon Hornyak for finding the recording of it and “Woman of Mine” in Dick Williams’ closet! –Redbeard
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Who- Love Reign O’er Me- Toronto 12-82
The Who had announced that their 1982 tour would be their final one, and at least one member of the band, Pete Townshend, really believed it to be true at the time, making this final stop of that tour in Toronto December 17, 1982 and this performance of “Love Reign O’er Me“, the finale from Quadrophenia , particularly emotional for the band and audience alike. -Redbeard
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U2- Love Rescue Me- 1987
Maybe one of the reasons why U2‘s Rattle and Hum film and soundtrack album did not receive quite the same critical worship that their preceding album The Joshua Tree had is because all five U2 studio efforts to date had been conceived with the band’s uniquely Irish perspective. Rattle and Hum saw the gauzy media perceptions of American culture by Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen jr jammed up against a Reagan-era reality that did not always ring true.
Case in point is “Love Rescue Me“, which starts out here like a country and western song in its simplicity, veers off midway with a guest verse sung by the late Bob Marley‘s son Ziggy Marley, then goes to the sanctified church, touching many of the musical bases which U2 grew to love about American music from afar. –Redbeard
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Heart- Dog and Butterfly- Nancy and Ann Wilson
Without sacrificing any of the hard rock cred for which they had so tenaciously fought, Seattle sisters Ann Wilson and kickin’ guitarist Nancy Wilson of Heart showed considerable growth and songwriting confidence in 1978 on Dog and Butterfly containing “Straight On,”Cook With Fire“, and the ambitious “Mistral Wind“. Often thought of as their third album in as many years, it is easy to forget that, by some superhuman effort only known to them, the Wilson sisters and Heart had in fact been required contractually to make a fourth album, Magazine, in that three year span, all the while touring tirelessly to promote the Seattle/ Vancouver border-straddling band. It’s ladies’ choice here in this classic rock interview from Hall of Famers Heart In the Studio . –Redbeard
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Sting- The Last Ship- pt 2
When sitting down to consider Sting’s The Last Ship, either his album version or the stage musical production which saw a limited run on Broadway in 2014, one must check your assumptions at the door. “It was never my intention to write a rock musical,” Sting stated emphatically here In the Studio in part two of our conversation, “and I don’t think rock’n’roll necessarily fits into the theater. It (rock theater) always seems a little bit fake. Theater is too small to really create the visceral energy of a rock’n’roll show, which is noisy and powerful. Theater is a smaller kind of music. And that’s what I wanted to make – a kind of old-fashioned musical, in a way, which harkens back to a different era.”Growing up beside the Swan Hunters shipyard in Wallsend near Newcastle England, “We didn’t have that many records, but my mother bought Carousel, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma and South Pacific which wasn’t one of my favorites. But I listened to those records like they were the bible. I love that music. And I fell in love with augmented chords, those things that Richard Rodgers used to write. And The Last Ship is full of those things, just little references to that love, that homage to that musical form. But that was my musical education. I didn’t study at a conservatory, I just poured over records.”
AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson is featured on two songs including the rousing “Shipyard” on The Last Ship by Sting. This is the conclusion, part two of two. –Redbeard
