In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: “1984”

  • Talking Heads- Little Creatures- David Byrne, Jerry Harrison

    Talking Heads- Little Creatures- David Byrne, Jerry Harrison

    Here to play with Talking Heads’ Little Creatures, even longtime fans might be hard-pressed to name the June 1985 release as their best selling studio effort ever, easily passing over two million copies initially. By the time  of Little Creatures, the Talking Heads were going through both major career growth and personal  maturity. Their preceding 1983 studio album Speaking in Tongues was their most popular to date; their foray into the major film world with Stop Making Sense was a critical and box office revelation; and band members and friends starting families all gave main songwriter David Byrne fresh new topics to explore. “And She Was” and “Stay Up Late” are just two examples.

    In 2002, their first year of eligibility, the Talking Heads were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No wonder: the following year many of those same music industry people responsible for the Rock Hall recognition would  place no less than four Talking Heads albums onto Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 500 Albums of All Time list, and additionally 1983’s Speaking in Tongues was deemed the #54 album of the entire Eighties decade by the same magazine.September 1977 was the moment of a significant debut by the Talking Heads. “I think that Talking Heads were one of the first groups who tried not to be about a fantasy that was bigger than life, but tried to be about being strong within a life that was ultimately real,” guitarist/ keyboard player Jerry Harrison points out here In the Studio.

    A casual perusal of the Talking Heads’ discography on AllMusic.com reveals more stars than a Texas sky on a clear night. Jeff Gold’s  sumptuous coffee table tome 101 Essential Rock Records   devotes two whole pages to their debut Talking Heads ’77,  which contained the  riveting tension of “Psycho Killer”. “One of the things that I think Talking Heads stood for,” muses keyboard player/ guitarist Jerry Harrison, “was  sticking to your guns, doing what you did best, and where it took you and whatever success it brought you, then that’s what happened. And I think that was inspiring to people. There’s often been a fantasy aspect to rock and roll where the artists try to be bigger than life. They try to look like pirates; they try to look like juvenile delinquents. All of these images where they try and look like ‘I’m the sexiest person alive’. And one of the problems with this is a lot of the musicians believe their own press, and believe this about themselves. I think it’s a reason why some get involved in drug excess, & get involved in trying to live this fantasy that a lot of people have about rock and roll.”

    “And I think it’s quite demeaning for the audience,” continues  Harrison. “The audience goes to a show, and maybe your girlfriend seems like she’s more attracted to the lead singer than to you anymore because he seems sexier. It’s a facade, & now you want to vicariously live that fantasy for yourself.”Singer/songwriter David Byrne and keyboard/guitarist Jerry Harrison joined me In the Studio for Talking Heads’  terrific cover of Al Green/Teenie Hodges’ “Take Me to the River” from More Songs About Buildings and Food; the pulsing pre-9/11 domestic terrorism in “Life During Wartime”; the MTV video classic “Once in a Life Time”;”Burning Down the House” and “Girlfriend is Better” from the brilliant 1983  Speaking in Tongues; the essential multi-media film by Jonathan Demme and soundtrack album Stop Making Sense in September 1984;  “And She Was” from June 1985’s two million seller Little Creatures;  and “Wild Wild Life” from True Stories. – Redbeard<

  • Van Halen- Women and Children First- Eddie & Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth

    Van Halen- Women and Children First- Eddie & Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth

    It always seemed that the Van Halen 1980 third album Women and Children First suffered from “middle child syndrome”. The first and last albums of the original band, the twin pillars of the 1978 debut Van Halen  and then blockbuster 1984,  have always garnered so much attention, and deservedly so, that we have tended to ignore Women and Children First  and its successor, Fair Warning,  as career flyover states. And that muted album cover for Women and Children First probably didn’t help matters any, either. Six years later, Bon Jovi would do better for packaging Slippery When Wet  with a Hefty trash bag and a spray bottle of water.

    My guests in this classic rock interview are original band members singer David Lee Roth, bass player/harmony singer Michael Anthony, drummer Alex Van Halen, and fretmeister Eddie Van Halen reminding of us of a time at the dawn of the Eighties when Van Halen was establishing itself as America’s premiere hard rock band with songs “And the Cradle Will Rock” and “Everybody Wants Some!”. But the pace of almost constant touring, stopping only long enough to make another album, plus the band’s notorious hedonism, were starting to kill the buzz. –Redbeard

  • David Bowie- Young Americans

    David Bowie- Young Americans

    “I was terrified of being trapped in that Ziggy Stardust character for the rest of my career,” David Bowie solemnly confessed to me In the Studio. So in early March 1975, Bowie executed a musical and visual image hard left turn, in homage to the vibrant soul music with which he had fallen in love while living in New York City then. The resulting albumYoung Americans contained the sweeping “Win”; the soulful “Somebody Up There Likes Me”, featuring the budding sax star David Sanborn (d. 2024) steaming like a Junior Walker acolyte; the huge hit with the John Lennon cameo, “Fame”; and the dance-floor flooding “Young Americans”. The late David Bowie from the In the Studio  classic rock interview archives marks the all-important career landmark Young Americans.

    By 1975 David Bowie had abandoned the Glam Rock he had virtually invented in the guise of the ego-tripping tragicomic fallen rock star Ziggy Stardust, first as New York City blue-eyed soul man, then the LA decadence of his Thin White Duke persona. David Bowie was rock’s Full Moon, irresistible in his pulling power, while the rest of the rock world was like the tide, following inexorably yet always lagging behind. But with Bowie’s mid-decade Young Americans  album with the #1 hit “Fame” and its John Lennon cameo pointing directly toward Disco’s dominance a mere two years later, hindsight clearly shows that the tide was rising quickly.

    Arguably, the sound of the Seventies may have dawned as early as August 1971 with Who’s Next,  or as late as April 1973 with Dark Side of the Moon. But with David Bowie’s June 1972 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, not only did the exaggerated stereo and dry close-miked perspective make the sound of The Spiders seem to threaten to pierce the invisible barrier of your speakers, but Bowie’s hair, makeup, cross-dressing, and outrageous onstage behavior looked and acted like nothing we’d ever seen outside of a Frederico Fellini film festival. David Bowie took my assessment of the Seventies’ line of demarcation one better: “The Seventies really felt like a new century. The Sixties were a coda to the rest of the (20th) Century,” David stressed. “I think the Seventies showed conclusively that we live on a thread of rationality, that in fact the cosmos is far more complex and non-understandable than we had perceived. That everything we know is WRONG!” –Redbeard

  • Van Halen- 1984- Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony

    Van Halen- 1984- Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony

    To this day I remember waking up on New Years Day 1984, flipping on the TV to watch the Rose Bowl football game from Pasadena CA, and whenever the network took a break, they were already playing a brand new Van Halen song, “Jump”, from a new album 1984. That’s how  mainstream Van Halen had become.

    To truly comprehend just how massively popular this album was, it helps if you actually write it out numerically: more than 12,000,000 copies of Van Halen’s sixth album, 1984, were sold in the U.S. alone in the four decades since it was released. Propelled by Van Halen’s very first #1 hit “Jump”, three million of those were sold in America in the first ninety days! Already America’s most popular hard rock band prior to its release, 1984   propelled the Pasadena quartet of innovative guitar whiz Eddie Van Halen, drummer brother Alex, bass player and unmistakable harmony singer Michael Anthony, and showman extraordinaire David Lee Roth into the stratosphere of rock’s elite with additional songs “Panama”, “I’ll Wait”, “Drop Dead Legs”,” Top Jimmy”, and the video which made even MTV blush, “Hot for Teacher”.ut as any high-flying throttle jockey can attest, the view from the top is exhilarating, but the dizzying height is disorienting and there’s no air up there to breathe. Like water on pavement, celebrity seeks out every crack and crevice in a relationship, and when relations turn from chilly to frosty, the cracks can quickly expand into chasms. The 1984  album and subsequent sold-out tour closed that chapter on the original band, with the Van Halen story becoming a never-ending soap opera that was constantly controversial.
    While the facts contained in this interview remain true and accurate over time, the opinions expressed here by Eddie, Alex, and Michael clearly are a snapshot of just one of the many seasons in this saga, at a time before David Lee Roth was invited back into Van Halen, as well as before Michael Anthony was dismissed and Eddie Van Halen would perish from throat cancer.- Redbeard

  • Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble- Pride & Joy- Austin 4-15-84

    Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble- Pride & Joy- Austin 4-15-84

    To celebrate this month’s fortieth anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Troubles entry onto the national stage with their debut Texas Flood, here is a performance of “Pride and Joy” in front of a proud Austin audience in April 1984.-Redbeard

  • Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble- Cold Shot- Austin 4-15-84

    Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble- Cold Shot- Austin 4-15-84

    When Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble welcomed  Jimmie Vaughan to join them on stage April 15, 1984 at the Austin Opera House to help them perform “Cold Shot”, Stevie’s big brother was actually a bigger star then by virtue of anchoring the butt-rocking guitar slot in the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Younger sibling Stevie’s second album, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, was just being released, and the good-natured rivalry between to the two bands over the next six years would lead a major musical Texas renaissance that was magic to behold. –Redbeard

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

    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, and what was actually offered up, were two completely different things, providing a real learning moment for me in my career. Standing in the dressing room surrounded by singer/ songwriter/ guitarist Shaw,  Billy Joel saxophonist Richie Cannata, and Paul McCartney and Wings drummer Steve Holley, I expected to hear these three veterans of playing “the big rooms” lament slogging back to the bars as if it was a minor league assignment. Boy, was I wrong.  What you will hear in this radio interview which Tommy Shaw did with me before the live performance later that night is how big-time professional musicians approach their craft regardless of whether it is a 20,000 seat arena or a nightclub in Ft. Worth. Shaw had just come off the Styx Kilroy Was Here  arena and stadium tour a year earlier, a rock musical which was probably ahead of its time by about fifteen years and most definitely not suited for the stadiums and sports arenas in which Styx had staged it. With his first solo album and tour, Tommy Shaw was hungry to reconnect with the fans on a level where every bead of sweat was counted, and every note played was accountable. You’ll hear “Girls With Guns”, “Come In and Explain”, a live “Man in the Wilderness” with Styx, “The Race is On” with Richie Cannata steaming on sax, and finally the In the Studio  acoustic version of Tommy Shaw’s “Crystal Ball” as performed live on my ROCK 103 radio show in Memphis in 1983. –Redbeard 

  • Scorpions- Big City Nights- Athens 9-11-13

    Scorpions- Big City Nights- Athens 9-11-13

    We have a unique and fascinating appearance In the Studio by The Scorpions  to spotlight their  biggest album Love at First Sting , featuring the song “Big City Nights” which appeared on that album originally but which  translated surprisingly well to their September 2013 unplugged performance in Athens Greece captured on CD and DVD as MTV Unplugged .  And check guitarist Rudolph Schenker’s Flying V acoustic below. Zehr gut! –Redbeard

     

    scorpions-unplugged