"Guitar Town " Steve Earle shares here In the Studio for his #1-charting Country debut in March 1986: "I'm a straggler from what was going on in Austin and Nashville in the mid-70s. I had good teachers, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, B.W. Stevenson...when I first got to Nashville on any given night, you could go to Guy's house. And he'd have everybody, from the street level where I was to Mickey Newbury and Neil Young, with the guitar going around. So it was a good place to learn. Then, basically cocaine sort of created a caste system  and killed that real fast!"

The fact that the Doobie Brothers reinvented themselves for their March 1976 album "Takin' It to the Streets"  is quite widely known, but the reasons for the musical shift, and the manner in which they made it work so successfully, is a fascinating back-story worthy of an HBO mini-series.. On the album's 50th anniversary, Tom Johnston, Pat Simmons, & Michael McDonald are all here In the Studio to recall how it really went down.

Jethro Tull's singer/ songwriter/ flautist Ian Anderson ( left ) returns here In the Studio  next week for the band's big fiftieth anniversary of "Aqualung", so this should prime the pump with another angle on all of that material. Here's another of the rare "Dressing Room Tapes" performances in the backstage bowels of the concert hall before a Zurich Switzerland 1989 concert with guitarist Martin Barre  ripping a spirited "Locomotive Breath".