Redbeard’s Blog

Hard+Heavy Box- Deep Purple, Whitesnake, KISS, Bad Company, Heart, Judas Priest, Boston

“Hard+Heavy” box set of classic hard rock interviews In the Studio with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company, Tom Schulz of Boston, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillian and Roger Glover, Heart throbs Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson, Rob Hanford from Judas Priest, Kiss mainstays Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Ted Nugent, Whitesnake’s David Coverdale.

Billy Joel- Captain Jack- Long Island 7-81

People that have not been in Billy Joel's corner since the days of The Hassles and Cold Spring Harbor  and Piano Man,  the latter album released November 1973, truly cannot appreciate the depth of affection millions feel for this guy. But…

Aretha Franklin: a Fond Memoir

The tributes and testaments started even before official word was issued that Aretha Franklin had passed away. Knowing that I have interviewed so many of the greatest musicians of the last half century, more than one news outlet  contacted…

Billy Joel- Billy the Kid- UConn 12-76

“From a town known as Oyster Bay Long Island, Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand...” As Billy Joel prepares to blow out the candles on seventy this week, it felt right to dust off something more akin to seventeen. There are moments…

Matthew Sweet- Girlfriend- Altered Beast- 100% Fun

The news that Intervention Records was staging one to rehab  past Matthew Sweet releases was cause for considerable buzz of a healthy kind in 2018. After all, we are talking about Girlfriend,  his 1991 third album which The Village Voice …

Boston- Hyperspace Pedal Blues- Tom Scholz

Irrefutable proof of why Tom Scholz of the band Boston had to move from his apartment house in Watertown , MA .Turn it up as loud as your gear can go . -Redbeard

Tommy Shaw- Girls With Guns- Dallas Ft. Worth 11-84

When Tommy Shaw, just recently estranged then from arena-fillers Styx, brought his Girls With Guns  solo band to a Ft. Worth nightclub in an otherwise empty strip mall on a chilly Sunday November night in 1984, what I expected to see and hear,…

Soul Asylum ” I Will Still Be Laughing” live 4-98

After several alarming live tv meltdowns exposed widespread lip-synching to recorded tracks, there  was a debate raging among rock cognoscenti twenty years ago about whether the majority of Nineties acts who were selling on the charts could…

Peter Frampton- Black Hole Sun- Austin 10-18-11

Way way back to even the eponymous Humble Pie  album in 1969 when barely out of his teens, I thought that Peter Frampton's lyrical, almost jazzy lead guitar figures set him apart from so many of his less imaginative peers, and it has been…

John Fogerty- Susie Q- I Put a Spell on You -rehearsal 5-97

Here's John Fogerty and his terrific band performing live at rehearsal in Burbank in 1997, reprising two Screamin' Jay Hawkins  songs which Fogerty's  Creedence Clearwater Revival covered on their debut,"Susie Q/ I Put a Spell on You".