–Gary Rossington, Dale Krantz, Allen Collins interviews conducted by Redbeard May 1980 in a Manhattan hotel room.
-Source is analog open reel transferred flat to WAV file. A little noise reduction is the only processing.
-Silence gaps are open reel tape leader on master.
-For DEMONSTRATION ONLY, not for production. Copyright 2017 BeardedFISCH LLC, cannot be used in part or in toto without express written consent by copyright holder. Contact Mark Fischer for usage.
This timeless performance in December 1976 of soon-to-be classic “New York State of Mind” serves as proof positive that, even before his Autumn 1977 blockbuster The Stranger would bring him to mass popularity, Billy Joel was a terrific live entertainer with a superb band. This comes from the rare promo-only Billy Joel vinyl Souvenir . – Redbeard
As you hear during the In The Studio interview exploring Déjà Vu , rock myth collides head-on with fact regarding Neil Young‘s legendary 1970 solo album After the Goldrush. Young was two years and two albums into a budding solo career after leaving Buffalo Springfield when former bandmate Stephen Stills, ex-Byrd David Crosby, and Graham Nash from the Hollies all realized that the three of them could not pull off the song arrangements live that were on their debut album. So Young was recruited for the first Crosby Stills Nash tour, not a permanent member of the band. But after trotting him out on tour including at least one high-profile gig near Woodstock NY in the Summer 1969, the trio felt that Young needed to be on their sophomore release Déjà Vu. Neil only contributed two songs, no doubt saving even stronger material for his own third solo album barely five months later.
Entitled After the Goldrush, writer William Ruhlmann calls the title song “…a mystical ballad that featured some of Young’s most imaginative lyrics and became one of his most memorable songs.” Here is an exclusive unreleased performance of “After the Goldrush” from a 1986 concert in his adopted hometown of San Francisco . –Redbeard
For some reason this song never became memorable to me when the original studio recording was released in Fall 1977 on Billy Joel‘s The Stranger album. Yet when I remastered the live version from the oft-bootlegged December 1977 concert at his home venue Nassau Long Island Coliseum, it’s bossa nova vamping in the choruses of “Get It Right the First Time” really seemed to work. Billy Joel guests here for the fortieth anniversary of that timeless album The Stranger the week of September 18. – Redbeard
As Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton told me of first experiencing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s extraordinary guitar talent from outside an Austin nightclub, I had to smile. Like Chris, I had not actually seen the young blues guitarist the first time I heard him play live, but the memory is burned into my mind nonetheless. It was February 4, 1984 and I was part of the live regional network radio broadcast performing interviews of the myriad of performers at the annual Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam, backstage at Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium. Over ten years the Volunteer Jam had grown into an annual pilgrimage by the biggest names then in American rock music, featuring in one night the Charlie Daniels Band and guests the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers Band, the Outlaws, plus Billy Joel, Emmylou Harris, Ted Nugent, and James Brown!
Now this young Texas trio, who had defied all musical trends in 1983 with their critically-received debut album Texas Flood, had just taken the stage midway through the star-studded evening. From my vantage point at the broadcast table in the backstage area separated by a wall directly behind the stage, we could not see the Stevie Ray Vaughan nor his band or the 10,000 fans packed into the auditorium, but we could hear this huge sound. Slowly, as the wah-wah staccato of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar beat out a march duplicated by the bass drum, whispers of astonishment began to ripple through the backstage crowd of musicians and media guests: “He’s doing Hendrix! “ And then the realization hit me. ”He’s doing ‘Voodoo Child ‘!“ I muttered aloud in astonishment to no one in particular. 
You have to understand that prior to this night, no one did Hendrix, for two very simple reasons : 1) 99.8% of the world’s guitar players were not proficient enough to play his stuff, and 2) the precious few that actually could would have been publicly condemned for rock sacrilege. So I’m thinking, “Oh great, this new guy Stevie Ray Vaughan has decided to commit career suicide here at the Super Bowl of Southern Rock in front of his peers, the national press, ten thousand in the audience , and untold millions listening live on radio. Then he’ll walk off stage and straight to our broadcast table for a live interview, and I’ll have to pretend that we all did not just witness musical blasphemy.”
( Left to right: Stevie Vaughan, ROCK 103 Memphis’ Tom Stein, Redbeard, Rob Grayson )
Except that’s not what happened. That night, that stage, that performance changed so much. Sure, it introduced Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble to the national spotlight in a most memorable way. It literally introduced him to me later that night, which would serve me well when I moved to his Dallas hometown ten days later where we continued a professional relationship until his tragic death August 27, 1990. But what that performance taught me was that rock critics, record and radio execs, and other media “gatekeepers” cannot limit music, cannot determine which are sacred cows, cannot anoint only certain musicians worthy or intentions pure. And even though these self-appointed (and self-important) “experts” will try endlessly to convince us otherwise, great music is boundless, and to attempt to limit it rather than celebrate it is to miss the point of music altogether. -Redbeard
Now that Randy Newman has been inducted, here’s my nomination for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the most deserving American songwriter working today: John Hiatt. Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton and B.B.King, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Joe Cocker, Iggy Pop, Dave Edmunds, Gregg Allman, Willie Nelson, Buddy Guy, Delbert McClinton, & the late Jeff Healey can’t all be wrong. But John Hiatt is also a terrific live entertainer as well, as is clear in this tale of two Elvis fans who just wanted to borrow one of the King’s pink Cadillacs. – Redbeard
“I controlled the level of the PA from an amplifier that sat in front of the bass drum,” Robert Plant mused to me about Led Zeppelin’s first public performance November 9, 1968 at The Roundhouse at Chalk Farm. On Rolling Stone‘s Top 500 Albums of All Time list, magazine writers, contributors, and hundreds of recording artists ranked Led Zeppelin‘s January 1969 debut at #29. The UK magazine Uncut‘s list of the “100 Greatest Debut Albums placed it at no less than #7, but when the Q glossy compiled “The 21 Albums That Changed Music”, Led Zeppelin 1 clocked in at a breathtaking #6 on that uber-elite accounting. “Heavy metal still lives in its shadow”, Rolling Stone reminds us. Not bad for a fifty-plus old pensioner.
This remarkable first effort from young but experienced in-demand London session players Jimmy Page of the Yardbirds and John Paul Jones, plus unknowns Robert Plant and John Bonham, redefined the limits of rock music while magnifying its visceral power, its reckless abandon, and yes, some of its faults. Case in point: Led Zeppelin 1 received a surprising number of negative critical reviews from leading rock writers at Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and the aforementioned upstart Rolling Stone, whose heavy metal harangue blathered on whether white Anglo boys could play black American blues without exploiting the originators, a specious argument since the white music critics didn’t see the hypocrisy in them writing about African-American blues musicians for money while co-opting every lyric phrase and song title ( “Rolling Stone” is a Muddy Waters song, for Pete’s sake). The manufactured debate eventually was squashed by Led Zeppelin’s sheer worldwide popularity. 
John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant were awarded America’s highest cultural award by President Barack Obama before the 2013 Kennedy Center Honors gala for , among others, the songs on the January 1969 debut such as “Good Times, Bad Times”,”Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”,”Dazed and Confused”,”Communication Breakdown”, and Willie Dixon‘s “I Can’t Quit You”, while Page has released deluxe editions of the first three Led Zeppelin albums with alternate mixes, previously unreleased live performances, and remastered sound. Page and Plant are my guests In the Studio for this classic rock interview.- Redbeard
The popular Memphis radio morning show Ditch and Jake on legacy station ROCK 103 called today to get to the bottom of the facts regarding one of rock history’s saddest moments. Looking back on the circumstances surrounding my first of many subsequent Ozzy Osbourne interviews with the legendary classic rocker, my remembrance is bittersweet. In April 1982, little more than a month after a plane crash had taken the life of his young & talented guitarist Randy Rhoads on March 19, Ozzy chose my afternoon radio show on Memphis’ #1 station, ROCK 103, to make his first public statements concerning the tragedy.
In his In The Studio interview marking Ozzy Osbourne’s second solo album Diary of a Madman , Ozzy told the real story of how the light plane stalled and a wing actually clipped the tour bus as the pilot, the band’s tour bus driver, attempted to take an aerial photo of the bus with Rhoads & the band’s 58-year old seamstress Rachel on board, while Ozzy and wife/manager Sharon Osbourne slept in the rear of the tour bus. As tragic as the accident was, ten feet further back at impact and both Ozzy and Sharon would have been killed along with the plane’s three occupants. –Redbeard
By the mid-1980s Hollywood awkwardly concluded three decades of getting it all wrong finally by releasing a series of popular mainstream blockbusters with subject matter and/ or cornerstone scenes built around rock and roll, including Purple Rain, La Bamba, The Buddy Holly Story, Rock and Roll High School, The Blues Brothers, and Almost Famous which easily come to mind. And who can forget the career-breaking scene by a very young Tom Cruise in tighty whities lip-synching in Risky Business to Bob Seger singing “Old Time Rock and Roll” ? For the original buddy movie Beverly Hills Cop starring veteran Nick Nolte paired up with Saturday Night Live hot young comedian Eddie Murphy, Glenn Frey on hiatus from The Eagles had sung “The Heat Is On” which became a big hit, so the movie sequel soundtrack producers Harold Faltermeyer and Keith Forsey went back to Frey to sing their composition “Shakedown“. Except Frey didn’t like the lyrics. Or maybe Frey’s manager didn’t like the deal. Whatever the case, Frey suddenly reported “laryngitis”, the musician equivalent of a police strike’s “blue flu”. 
Frey did however suggest his fellow Detroit running buddy Bob Seger take a swing at the fast-paced tune, and after getting the green light to re-write some of the lyrics, the resultant single “Shakedown” from the soundtrack to Beverly Hills Cop II actually became Bob Seger’s first #1 single in August 1987. Here’s Bob talking about songcraft with me In the Studio. -Redbeard 
Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever clawed its way to #17 on the Billboard album chart, becoming his third consecutive multi-million seller after 1975’s Ted Nugent containing “Stranglehold”, and Free for All the following year. Nugent would take Cat Scratch Fever‘s instant success and transform it through the remainder of 1977 into the top-grossing rock concert act that year. But it hadn’t always been that way. Far from it.
Tyranosaurus Ted and I still reminisce about him playing the tiny Findlay (Ohio) College gym with the Amboy Dukes in Fall 1971 to an audience of about 100. Or the following Summer 1972 playing in a cornfield outside North Baltimore Ohio, where someone in that crowd had tossed a tomato at Ted’s head during a guitar solo. Even though blinded by the glaring stage lights, Nugent spotted the incoming red missile hurtling out of the darkness and miraculously caught it one-handed while never missing a note on the guitar neck with his left. When the song ended, Ted stopped the show, calling out the cowardly perpetrator in the inky blackness of the crowd while holding the tomato in his fist and shouting,” Is this what you wanted to see?” Nugent suddenly smashed the tomato on his face, then launched into a blistering song while the audience absolutely erupted! 
There is no denying that Ted’s Motor City motormouth has immersed his rump in hot water in the past due to his sharp elbowed political views. But love him or loathe him, it’s truly remarkable…even admirable…that after almost fifty years since the Amboy Dukes sang “Journey to the Center of Your Mind”, Ted Nugent is not only ” workin’ hard and playin’ hard”, but working at all. This TED talk may have nothing to do with technology, but it has everything to do with passion, conviction, and a most colorful storyteller. – Redbeard
( At Nugent’s Central Texas ranch, L-R my brother Rob,Ted, Redbeard )