In The Studio with Redbeard

Search results for: “Ten Years After”

  • ZZ Top 55th Anniversary- Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard, the late Dusty Hill

    ZZ Top 55th Anniversary- Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard, the late Dusty Hill

    In Spring 1972 ZZ Top released the much-improved second album Rio Grande Mud,  the vastly  underrated follow-up to the woolly ZZ Top’s First Album fifty-five years ago containing “Brown Sugar”. The stronger songwriting and much better production sound of Rio Grande Mud on such songs as “Francine”,”Just Got Paid”, and “Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell”, like the first album recorded in Tyler Texas about thirty minutes from my East Texas horse ranch, pointed the way to the 1973 national breakout Tres Hombres;  the half studio/half live Fandango  in ’74; Tejas, inspiring the legendary “Takin’ Texas to the People ” tour (which resembled not  so much a rock concert tour as a Lone Star version of Noah’s ark); 1979’s Deguello,  which permanently established tonemeister Billy Gibbons’ legend among his guitar brethren everywhere; El Loco  in 1981; the worldwide phenomenon that was Eliminator;  the high tech MTV monster Afterburner ;  and the bookend  Recycler  in 1990.

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    (L-R: Dusty Hill, Frank Beard, & Mr.Clean Billy Gibbons played the high school prom that year. Spelling apparently was phonetic for the year book staff.)

    Over those next two decades, ZZ Top batted ten for twenty, a hall of fame average in any league, all the while retaining the same personnel which continued until Dusty Hill’s death, a record unsurpassed by any working band. In this classic rock interview, Gibbons, the late Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard discuss why Dusty thought that being a trio contributed to ZZ Top’s longevity; what Billy saw as the challenges of superstardom after Eliminator; and why Frank Beard is the only member without one.

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    (Sharp dressed men in their custom-tailored Nudie suits on the Tejas  tour circa 1977)

    As to their legacy, Billy Gibbons says,”There’s a lot of luck, to start with. Some of these things you would like to prophesy, to plan this going a certain way. And yet it it’s always unpredictable, always probably exactly opposite what you think you’re going to do. But the first few notes that you’re rippin’, the first few chops that you’re stabbin’ at, you just don’t really know where you’re going.” Dusty Hill:” As much as music changed (over those years), hopefully we changed with it. But we play only one way. I don’t know that we know how to play any other way!”

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    (Left: July 2007 Dallas. If that’s me on the right, then where’s Frank?)

     

    ( Below: backstage Dallas/Ft Worth 11/1/2007 just before taking the stage for the dvd Live in Texas .That’s me front row center ZZBEARDNOV07dvd6between Billy & Frank )

     

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  • Steve Winwood- Arc of a Diver 45th Anniversary

    Steve Winwood- Arc of a Diver 45th Anniversary

    When I sat down In the Studio in Autumn 1990 with Steve Winwood to talk about his then new release Refugees of the Heart, he had already established himself with the breakthrough album  Arc of a Diver  ten years prior. Then between those, Steve Winwood released Back in the High Life, one of the biggest albums commercially as well as critically in the Eighties, followed by Roll With It.

    In my in-depth classic rock interview to mark the dual album anniversaries of Arc of a Diver and Refugees of the Heart, the shy quiet-spoken Steve Winwood covers a lot of musical as well as personal ground: eschewing the music business altogether through the mid-Seventies after a misdiagnosed illness at the end of the Traffic days almost killed him; his 1977 under-appreciated solo debut, Steve Winwood,  with “Hold On” and “Time is Running Out”; 1980’s hit “While You See a Chance” and the title song “Arc of a Diver”; Winwood’s long successful collaboration with Texas songwriter Will Jennings; and reconnecting with Traffic mate the late Jim Capaldi to write “One and Only Man”, a Top 20 hit from Refugees of the Heart. –Redbeard

  • R.E.M.- Fables of the Reconstruction 40th- Michael Stipe, Peter Buck

    R.E.M.- Fables of the Reconstruction 40th- Michael Stipe, Peter Buck

    After defining a neo-folk rock sound on their first full-length album Murmur in 1983, and refining that jangly style further with Reckoning a year later, indie band R.E.M. spun Fables of the Reconstruction in 1985, which put us on notice that all styles and lyrical subjects were fair game in R.E.M.’s rapidly-evolving future. “It’s a significant time-stamp within the band’s 14-album catalog,” writes Charles Moss in Spin, “a record about the American South, and what it means to be Southern at that time…” forty years ago.

    You will hear “Driver 8”, “Can’t Get There from Here”, and a rare live performance of “Maps and Legends” recorded in 1987 at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. With R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe and lead guitarist Peter Buck in my classic rock interview recalling playing for the door admission in clubs during their rice and beans days. Matthew Perpetua writing in Pitchfork described Fables of the Reconstruction (#28 on the Billboard sales chart)  aesthetic as “evoking images of railroads, small towns, eccentric locals, oppressive humidity, and a vague sense of time slowing to a crawl.” In other words, rural Georgia and the Carolinas.

    My interview with Peter Buck and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. includes the earliest days of the Athens GA band, with songs from their first four full albums Murmur, Reckoning, the transitional Fables of the Reconstruction, & Life’s Rich Pageant. -Redbeard

  • Scorpions- Crazy World 35th Anniversary- Klaus Meine, Rudolph Schenker

    Scorpions- Crazy World 35th Anniversary- Klaus Meine, Rudolph Schenker

    Sitting with my guests singer/songwriter Klaus Meine and Rudolph Schenker, Scorpions co-founding guitarist/songwriter,  it was fascinating to be reminded by members of Germany’s  beloved band just how much rock music indeed  had changed this Crazy World by the time of that album’s late 1990 release. And the Scorpions should know better than anyone: they were there, living it every day in just the six short years after the  March 1984 release of Love at First Sting leading up to Crazy World. “We were not proud of our country, and our parents were not proud of our country,” says Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine. “They had just survived the (Second World) War. So rock music is the way we got out. And starting as young musicians playing English and American music, it was in a way something like an attempt to be part of the world community, to escape a place where you feel this burden.”

    The Scorpions from Hanover Germany had been the decade-long international long shot when their 1982 album Blackout  blew up Top 10 in the US, powered by the #1 Rock radio track “No One Like You”. The Scorpions’ follow-up album Love At First Sting  two years later soared to # 6 on the Billboard album chart with triple platinum sales, while delivering a blitzkreig of rock anthems including “Rock You Like A Hurricane”, “Big City Nights”, and the signature power ballad “Still Loving You”.

    Back in 2020 when I heard that Spotify was introducing podcasts by co-producing one based on the premise that the CIA wrote the Scorpions 1991 international hit “Wind of Change”, I literally giggled out loud. “What a hoot!” I thought. “They’ll have to get the song’s composer, Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine, to tell The New Yorker reporter Patrick Raddan Keefe the same story Klaus told me over twenty years ago, about being invited to meet and dine with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev in Summer 1990 when Scorpions played the Moscow Music and Peace Festival, which inspired Meine to write “Wind of Change” for the next Scorpions album, Crazy World.” But when I realized that podcast host Keefe was taking this CIA conspiracy premise seriously by expanding it to a series of eight episodes, and talking to everybody except  Meine or the Scorpions, my bemusement quickly turned to annoyance.

    “Sometimes I felt like a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist,” (quote) Keefe told Rolling Stone magazine. Well, as the late poet/activist Maya Angelou once said, “When people tell you who they are, BELIEVE THEM.”Rudolph Schenker (L) with Klaus Meine

    But the real story is how the Scorpions overcame potentially insurmountable barriers of distance, language, lack of management, lead singer Klaus Meine’s desperate throat surgery, the notorious East German Stasi secret police, and the Berlin Wall to be key players with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev’s dismantling of Communism in the Soviet Eastern Bloc. Lead singer/ songwriter Klaus Meine and guitarist/songwriter Rudolph Schenker share how rock’n’roll helped the Scorpions escape the uber guilt of Germany’s Nazi past and build a future.”We played Leningrad and the Moscow Music Peace Festival in 1988 and 1989, one hundred thousand Russians for each of two days in Lenin Stadium…When we were growing up in Germany, the Russians were the ‘bad guys’. But in 1989 there was such a feeling of hope…We told the Russians, ‘Our parents came with tanks. We come with guitars.” So were people from outside the Scorpions brought in to work on 1990’s Crazy World ? Absolutely, but the last I checked, veteran song doctor Jim Vallance and producer Keith Olsen were never with the CIA. The song “Wind of Change”, which went to #1 in Germany, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, France, Norway, Holland, #2 in the UK and Belgium, and #4 US, was captured perfectly in the zeitgeist of the time by Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine.

    The Moscow hotel near Gorky Park where the Scorpions stayed while playing the1989 Moscow Music Peace Festival, met with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev, and inspired Klaus Meine to write “Wind of Change” was named, ironically, The Ukrainer. Something tells me that since current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, that hotel no longer has that name. –Redbeard

  • The Outlaws- Ghost Riders 45th- Henry Paul, the late Hughie Thomasson

    The Outlaws- Ghost Riders 45th- Henry Paul, the late Hughie Thomasson

    With the forty-fifth anniversary of Ghost Riders by The Outlaws, a flood of personal memories have surfaced.”The ‘Burning of Bowling Green’,” Outlaws singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Henry Paul recalled aloud, invoking an almost mythical status like some Civil War battlefield to the 1975 Ohio music festival where we first met just weeks after the release of their first album, The Outlaws (#13 Billboard), in July 1975. It contained the late Hughie Thomasson and Monte Yoho’s “There Goes Another Love Song” and the instant Southern Rock classic “Green Grass and High Tides”.

    Riding to early gigs packed into the old metallic-painted windowless band van nicknamed “The Copper Coffin”, Tampa Bay’s The Outlaws risked life and limb to follow their collective dream. Fifty years ago legendary record executive Clive Davis, who had signed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Bruce Springsteen to his former label, introduced his new New York City-based record company, Arista, with a three guitar Southern Rock band’s debut album, The Outlaws. With the Allman Brothers Band forming in Daytona Beach and Lynyrd Skynyrd from the wrong side of Jacksonville, the state of Florida was Southern Rock Central in the mid-1970s, so any Stetson-wearing guitar-picking long-haired rock band in those parts  was graded on a mighty steep curve. Such was the case for The Outlaws from Tampa Bay who, like 38 Special and later Molly Hatchet, were second generation Southern rockers. The Outlaws combined the guitar army assault of their Lynyrd Skynyrd mentors with the stacked vocal harmonies of the Eagles on their July 1975 debut featuring “There Goes Another Love Song” and the instant anthem “Green Grass and High Tides”; “Gunsmoke” and “Hurry Sundown” from their strong 1977 concept album Hurry Sundown. Then there was the scintillating stratospheric vocal chorus of “You Are the Show”; and the galloping production showstopper “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. Henry Paul and the late Hughie Thomasson, the only musician to perform on every Outlaws album, joined me In the Studio for this classic rock interview marking the forty-fifth anniversary of Ghost Riders in what sadly turned out to be Hughie’s final one. –Redbeard

  • George Harrison- All Things Must Pass 55th Anniversary

    George Harrison- All Things Must Pass 55th Anniversary

    The first Beatle to fly solo to the peak position high atop the sales charts was not John Lennon nor Paul McCartney. In November 1970  All Things Must Pass  from  George Harrison, the self-described “dark horse”,  alluding to the youngest, quietest of the four moptops, it was in fact Harrison  who surprised everybody by becoming the most popular maker of solo music for the first five years after the Beatles called it a career.

    Harrison sussed that notable feat fifty-five years ago the hard way: with the three-record set All Things Must Pass. George Harrison, “The Quiet Beatle”, certainly got tongues wagging with the sheer copious amount of solo music as well as the quality of many individual songs on All Things Must Pass. George Harrison talks easily in my classic rock interview about “What Is Life?”,”My Sweet Lord”, and “Isn’t It a Pity” from the triple LP massive (and massively popular) All Things Must Pass;”Dark Horse”,”Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)”  “Blow Away”, and the tribute to his mate John Lennon with “All Those Years Ago” to mark All Things Must Pass from the late George Harrison on its fifty-fifth anniversary. – Redbeard 

  • J Geils Band 55th Anniversary- Peter Wolf

    J Geils Band 55th Anniversary- Peter Wolf

    After fifty-five years they certainly earned it: we throw down a J. Geils Band house party, hosted by lead singer Peter Wolf to mark the release of J. Geils Band’s first two studio albums, which quickly became legend with the release of 1972’s live Full House ; plus songs from their back-to-back two most popular studio albums of the ’70s, Bloodshot  and Nightmares from the Vinyl Jungle….

    Music writers loved this Boston-based jump blues band for several reasons, not least of which was the unabashed authenticity that the all-white sextet brought to indigenous American black blues and R&B songs, without the homogenization which usually diluted similar British attempts. Included are Smokey Robinson’s “First I Look at the Purse”, Magic Dick’s harmonica workout “Whammer Jammer”, and “Lookin’ for a Love” all from “Full House”.

    The ferocious Full House, the first album by the J Geils Band to get significant national FM radio airplay, set up their next studio album in 1973,  Bloodshot, which exhibited improved fuller sound courtesy of James Gang (later Eagles) producer Bill Szymczyk. With another smart cover song “Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party”, and lots of good originals by frenetic lead singer Peter Wolf and keyboard player Seth Justman, Bloodshot included the party song “Southside Shuffle”, the ferocious funk of “Back to Get Ya”, and the J Geils Band’s first Top 40 hit, “Give It to Me”. Nightmares & Other Tales from the Vinyl Jungle  repeated the J Geils Band’s strengths in September 1974 with the rock radio fave “Detroit Breakdown”, and their first big hit, “Must of (sic) Got Lost”. And we only had to wait forty-nine years to get the quadrophonic mix out on Blu-ray!It was at that time when I witnessed firsthand the incomparable heat that the J Geils Band could bring live, when they were selected to warm up 80,000 strong in Cleveland Stadium for the Rolling Stones. Local hero Joe Vitale and then the original Tower of Power had the massive audience simmering by the time the J Geils Band mounted the stage, but Wolf and Company proceeded to “scramble my eggs” with a set that no one in their right mind would try to follow…not even the “World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band”. Over the years of revelations, I figured that the Stones made us wait an interminable two hours before they would venture out because of Keith Richards’ heavy drug use by 1974. Band guitarist namesake John “J” Geils passed away in 2017, but now I wonder if Mick Jagger realized that no one could follow the energy and abandon which we had all witnessed from the J Geils Band that day, and Mick was smart enough to wait until all of that intensity had dissipated before letting the Stones roll onto that stage. –Redbeard 

  • Alan Parsons Project- Turn of a Friendly Card 45th Anniversary

    Alan Parsons Project- Turn of a Friendly Card 45th Anniversary

    The real-life backstory inspiration for the Alan Parsons Project’s million-seller albums Turn of a Friendly Card (US #13) released in November 1980, and even more successful Eye in the Sky in June 1982, is pretty interesting. Due to the hit sales of their 1977 second album I Robot, in order to escape a 93% income tax bracket (!), producer/engineer Alan Parsons and songwriter Eric Woolfson had found themselves tax exiles from their native England, emigrating to the Mediterranean country of Monaco with its world-famous Monte Carlo casinos.

    “It started trying to be an album based on witchcraft,” Alan Parsons confessed to me about  Pyramid, the highly anticipated third album by the Alan Parsons Project, released in June 1978. “All areas of it, black magic, and the occult. But somehow we focused on the pyramid energy cult which was very fashionable at that time. You know, people were buying plastic pyramids in stores and keeping milk under them,” Parsons chuckled. “So it was led by this ‘pyramid power’ fashion. I had always been fascinated by the pyramids and their history and their mystery, and why the Egyptian and Mayan cultures went to such feats to construct such structures.”
    By the Summer 1982, exactly five years after “the un-Dynamic Duo” of Parsons and  Woolfson first broke through with I, Robot, you could just spin the FM radio dial to any album rock or Adult Contemporary radio station in America and hear various songs from the Alan Parsons Project’s sixth album, such as the hit title song “Eye in the Sky” or “Psychobabble”. Peaking on the album chart at #7,  Eye in the Sky received a Grammy Award nomination upon its initial release only to win that Grammy for the 2017 “Best Immersive Audio Album” thirty-five years later. To date Eye in the Sky has sold more than five million copies since release. –Redbeard

  • Loverboy 45th Anniversary- Mike Reno, Paul Dean

    Loverboy 45th Anniversary- Mike Reno, Paul Dean

    In 1980, the Canadian rockers Loverboy went from the throwaway pile outside my office door to the #13-selling album on Billboard Album Chart, no thanks to one of the all-time worst album covers ever. Reportedly a self-portrait Polaroid of the graphic artist hired to lay out the album cover, it could be the least representative of the straight ahead rock music inside since John Hiatt‘s debut, where he looked like a cadaver.

    Simply titled Loverboy, their American debut  in October 1980 suffered from an almost fatal album cover and virtually no promotion, but working late one night in  my ROCK 103 Memphis office, I found that first Loverboy  album in a throwaway pile and stumbled onto “Turn Me Loose” and “The Kid is Hot Tonight”, easy one-listen obvious hits. So when their sophomore effort Get Lucky came out in Fall 1981, these Canadian rockers were the right band at the right time.

    The first time we saw them around Thanksgiving  ’81 live at the Memphis Orpheum Theater opening for Point Blank, Loverboy started their tightly rehearsed set with a great song about “…everybody’s workin’ for the weekend…”. But this great song which they had just performed had not appeared on that first release. Bewildered, I rushed backstage immediately after their set to inquire,”What was that great song you opened with?” And who then could have possibly imagined that, over thirty years and 4,000,000 copies later, “Working for the Weekend” would be the soundtrack to the popular Radio Shack Super Bowl tv ads a few years back, seen and heard by over 100 million? North American rock radio was waiting in anticipation for it, along with “When It’s Over”, “Jump” co-written by fellow countryman Bryan Adams, “Gangs in the Street”, and “Take Me to the Top”. Get Lucky by Loverboy also was highly significant for its produced sound, which had a huge presence that really cut through on the radio, and it wasn’t long before the bands who would define Eighties rock including Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Metallica were all making the pilgrimmage to Vancouver’s Little Mountain Studio to work with Loverboy’s studio brain trust, producer the late Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock, who themselves had been musicians in Prism and The Payolas, respectively. Lead singer Mike Reno and guitarist Paul Dean recall how nice guys don’t necessarily finish last in this  In The Studio  classic rock interview.   –Redbeard

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