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".

Rolling Stones- Miss You- London Hyde Park 7-6-13

Rolling Stones sounding miraculously vital on this tasty version of "Miss You" when playing their "local", London's Hyde Park, back in July 2013...

John Fogerty- Born on the Bayou- May 1997 rehearsal

John Fogerty and his ace band to an adoring small private audience at band rehearsal May 1997 in Burbank, performing the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic which he wrote, "Born on the Bayou".

Simple Minds- See the Lights- Sydney 12-7-12

Even turned upside down under and standing on their heads, those "Simple Boys"( as the local pensioners would refer to them back home in Scotland ) can still make a big noise, as evidenced here in a very rare December 2012 Sydney concert recording…

Deep Purple- Now What?!- Roger Glover

It is the fifth anniversary of Deep Purple's impressive, muscular "comeback" album "Now What?!" April 26, 2013, and DP's Roger Glover joins Redbeard In the Studio.
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Dire Straits- Best pt 2- Mark Knopfler

When the song "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits became a worldwide hit in Summer 1985, the album Brothers in Arms spent a stunning nine weeks as the #1-seller in the US in 1985, eventually selling a staggering 26,000,000  copies worldwide. This kind of celebrity could not have happened to a more reluctant rock star than Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler, and trust me, there is absolutely no way to prepare for what comes next.

Dire Straits- Best pt 1- Mark Knopfler

Like David Bowie did five years before and Sting would repeat five years later, Dire Straits' October 1980 third release "Making Movies"  is Mark Knopfler's unabashedly "Big Apple" album through the eyes of an Englishman in New York who had grown up an ocean away on Hemingway, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan.