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“Metallica” (affectionately known as “The Black Album” in the same way The Beatles had been dubbed “The White Album”), Metallica’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and lead throat James Hetfield show how the band sits atop the family tree of hard rock/heavy metal evolution.
Al Stewart joins me In the Studio in a rare interview on the 45th anniversary of his breakout 1976 album “Year of the Cat”. Stewart might seem to be name-dropping big time, except it’s all true: sneaking backstage during a 1963 Beatles concert and talking with John Lennon; rooming in London next to Paul Simon; befriended by an unknown Cat Stevens; mc’ing at a London nightclub when another unknown, an American named Jimi Hendrix, decided to play his guitar with his teeth. But being witness repeatedly to rock history apparently accounted for nothing when Al Stewart’s seventh album, “Year of the Cat”, was unceremoniously turned down by every major UK record label.
“Basically he signed a blank tape,” Alan Parsons chuckles about 20th Century Records President Russ Regan greenlighting a concept album “Tales of Mystery and Imagination”, based on the books of Edgar Alan Poe, composed by the young Abbey Road studio hound and songwriter Eric Woolfson as The Alan Parsons Project.
Aerosmith “Rocks”. It was a declarative statement in Spring 1976 with no equivocation. If “Toys in the Attic” a year earlier had been the definitive mid-Seventies American hard rock statement, then Aerosmith “Rocks” made it musically imperative with “Back in the Saddle”, “Sick as a Dog”, the clever sequel to “Toys…” with “Rats in the Cellar”, and another infectious Steven Tyler/Brad Whitford hit, “Last Child”.
It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the long dreamed about, too good to last summit meeting of both Seventies- and Eighties-era YES members on the album “Union”, with Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Alan White, Steve Howe, Tony Kaye, and the late Chris Squire ALL In the Studio.
Back in 2015 when the Rolling Stones were playing tight and right, presciently Mick Jagger knew that they had better do something special for the Rolling Stones’ fiftieth anniversary of the landmark album “Sticky Fingers”, albeit six years early. The Stones played every song from it at the LA Fonda Theater, including this spirited version of “Brown Sugar”.
Eras in music no more follow the calendar than Mother Nature does. Thus fifty years ago in mid-March 1971 the last live performance of the Sixties in effect may actually gone down when the Rolling Stones ended their brief Scottish/ English tour at London’s Roundhouse with this final performance of “Honky Tonk Women”.
Five years ago Bryan Adams released a strong album, “Get Up! ” Bryan was so happy to rekindle his famous songwriting partnership with Jim Vallance that he needed ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne to collaborate on Bryan’s strongest new songs in years. Bryan Adams returned In the Studio exhorting us all to Get Up!
“The YES Album”, a progressive rock touchstone. If the British Invasion bands led by The Beatles and Rolling Stones wanted to be rock’n’roll’s second verse after “Be Bop a Lula” and “Maybe Baby”, then London’s King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and YES were determined to be rock’s “C” section, the musical bridge which takes the listener somewhere unexpectedly before returning to the familiar refrain.
Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor In the Studio with Redbeard on the 30th anniversary of “Innuendo”, Freddie Mercury’s final album, which Rolling Stone magazine called “Queen’s last masterpiece.”