In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: 1989

  • The Cult- Love 40th Anniversary- Billy Duffy

    The Cult- Love 40th Anniversary- Billy Duffy

    It was the mid-Eighties, and rolling the streets of Dallas/Ft.Worth at night felt less like a big-block muscle car and just right in a fire-engine red BMW M3, moonroof open, with The Cult Love  cassette alternately jammed in the dash player blasting “She Sells Sanctuary”,”Nirvana”, and “Rain”, with the follow up in April 1987, Electric, slamming “Love Removal Machine”,”Wild Flower”, and “Lil Devil”. Hard to believe it was forty years ago. Even harder to believe that The Cult recorded the complete album, which we now know as Electric, twice.

    This Billy Duffy 1987 interview concludes with the hypnotic, tense, dynamic “Elemental Light” from the strong 2012 comeback  Choice of Weapon . And it is all dedicated to the late Jerry Barrett who, as the Reprise Records Southwest Promotion person for the Cult’s US label, believed in this band more than anybody I know. -Redbeard

  • Eddie Money- Sound of Money (Best Of)

    Eddie Money- Sound of Money (Best Of)

    Just before Christmas 1989 Eddie Money joined me In the Studio to discuss his roller-coaster career and first “best of” compilation, The Sound of Money. Alternately hysterically funny and harrowing, in my classic rock interview Eddie Money shares the real backstories behind “Two Tickets to Paradise”, “Baby Hold On”, “Gimme Some Water”, and “Trinidad” from his first three albums; his life-threatening drug overdose and comeback with “Shakin’ “, “Think I’m in Love”, and the autobiographical “No Control”; relapse and rehab while recording “Take Me Home Tonight” and “I Wanna Go Back”; and as the Eighties closed and the Berlin Wall fell, redemption with the hits “Walk on Water” and “Peace in Our Time”.

    From the  archive, the late Eddie Money was my featured guest In the Studio on the best of The Sound of Money. -Redbeard

  • John Mellencamp- Big Daddy

    John Mellencamp- Big Daddy

    With 1989’s Big Daddy, we find Indiana singer/songwriter John Mellencamp, who ran the table in the Eighties with four platinum albums in a row, writing even more while enjoying it less, and wondering aloud why he still wasn’t happy.
    If the Eighties made anyone a star, it was John Mellencamp. In direct contrast to the Pop Metal of the day in those  years from Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue and a horde of hair bands, John Mellencamp had progressed from writing ” a little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane…” into deeper waters of social issues, but when the self-described “just a song and dance man” waded into the deep end, he found the cross currents of public scrutiny to be swift, with riptides unseen until you are swept up in them. It was about that time that John Mellencamp’s new-found stardom, wealth, and lack of privacy started to raise issues with his working class values, in his mind and, in at least some cases, his personal relationships. The 1989 release Big Daddy  exposed a sense of malaise that had crept into his lyrics even as Mellencamp’s career was at a peak.

    His second marriage was on the rocks, he had just turned the Big Four Oh, and his daughter made him a grandfather all about this same time, reflected in the songs “Pop Singer”, “Martha Say”, the stinging Reagan indictment “Country Gentleman”, and the bleak “Jackie Brown”. In this revealing classic rock interview, John Mellencamp takes the American electorate out to the woodshed for sleepwalking through the democratic process while complaining about the dysfunctional results. –Redbeard

  • Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble- In Step

    Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble- In Step

    If you run the numbers of the Summer 1989 album In Step  by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, just the mere facts are impressive. In Step  was the Texas trio’s fourth studio album, but their first after Vaughan’s collapse and near death from substance abuse while on tour in Germany had forced both Stevie and Double Trouble bass player Tommy Shannon into rehab hospitals. In Step   won a Grammy Award, one of six that Vaughan amassed, while racking up the best sales of Vaughan’s lauded career because of “The House is Rockin’”,”Crossfire”, “Tightrope”,”Let Me Love You Baby”, and the stunner “Riviera Paradise”.

    SRV 9-89-redder days

    Yet the significance of In Step   as a musical statement of intent cannot be told completely by mere sales or awards. It can only be assessed by the friends who knew Stevie Vaughan best (Eric Clapton), the musicians who inspired him first (Buddy Guy, the late Doyle Bramhall), the players who supported him before and after recovery(Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon), the musicians who in turn Vaughan inspired (Joe Bonamassa ), and the biographer who tried to capture his lightning in a bottle (author Joe Nick Patoski). They are all In Step  here In the Studio. –Redbeard

  • Peter Frampton- Shine On Early Best

    Peter Frampton- Shine On Early Best

    The sub-title of this classic rock interview, originally in conjunction with the early best-of Shine On, should probably be “Frampton Barely Survives”. Everybody knows that young Englishman Peter Frampton revolutionized the recording industry in early 1976 with his record-setting live double album Frampton Comes Alive.  But where did those now-iconic songs like “Show Me the Way”, “Lines on My Face”, “Baby I Love Your Way”, “All I Want to Be (Is By Your Side)“, and “Do You Feel Like We Do” originally come from? Peter joins me In the Studio to trace the days after he left Humble Pie, his struggles with four solid but woefully under-exposed solo studio albums, his phenomenal transformation into pop superstardom with the live album, and the tumultuous years immediately after, trying to survive it all.   

    Peter Frampton had the Cinderella story of Frampton Comes Alive  two years earlier turn nightmarish by early July 1978. Personal and professional betrayal, infidelity, exhaustion…it all came crashing down, literally, and it almost cost Frampton  his career and even his life. But Peter’s current health concern  with a progressive degenerative muscular disease, which prompted 2019’s farewell tour, is certainly not his first crisis, as you will hear in this in-depth frank classic rock interview. The guy was the first post-Elvis Seventies superstar, but you won’t find him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – yet. But this is the year that glaring omission gets rectified. It is inexplicable why he has been denied Rock Hall induction until now, and any attempt at a plausible answer short of blacklisting is an exercise in futility. Instead Peter Frampton tells his unique dramatic story here In the Studio. –Redbeard

  • R.E.M.- Turn You Inside Out- 1989

    R.E.M.- Turn You Inside Out- 1989

    R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry just slams the snot out of the drums on this 1989 performance of Green‘s “Turn You Inside Out”, appearing on the band’s TourFilm   the following year. Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills join me here In the Studio for the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Green  album the week of Oct. 30. –Redbeard

  • John Mellencamp- Seventh Son- Chess Studio, Chicago 5-’89

    John Mellencamp- Seventh Son- Chess Studio, Chicago 5-’89

    John Mellencamp and his wonderfully talented band left his garage in Central Indiana back in early May 1989 and headed north by northwest to  legendary Chicago Chess Studio and cut this live version of the Willie Dixon song made famous by Johnny Rivers , “Seventh Son”, straight off the studio floor, no overdubs. –Redbeard

  • Rolling Stones- Mixed Emotions- Toronto 9-3-89

    Rolling Stones- Mixed Emotions- Toronto 9-3-89

    When interviewing Keith Richards in early January 1989 ostensibly about his solo album Talk is Cheap,  I was repeatedly reminded by his delightful publicist Jane Rose not to ask about the 900 pound gorilla in the studio: the Rolling Stones,  and Richards’ long and very public estrangement from Mick Jagger then which had rendered the band up on blocks, for both recording and touring, for the bulk of the Eighties.

    When I prefaced a question for Keith by acknowledging that the Rolling Stones’ future was uncertain, he coyly responded,” Oh really? Is that true?”, followed knowingly by a raspy laugh.

    “Well, you should know,” I said, caught quite off guard. “What can you tell me?”

    Richards lowered his voice, sober now, and said quite definitively,” I think that 1989 will be a very big year for the Stones.” True to his prediction nine months earlier, Keef & Company released Steel Wheels , the first new Rolling Stones studio album in a half decade, and kicked off their first tour since 1981-82  on August 31, 1989 in Philadelphia.

    Paul McCartney had decided the same thing that year, as well, & together they revitalized the whole concert industry with effects remaining to this day ( coincidentally, both McCartney and The Stones are touring now). The importance of this decision to reunite, & thesubsequent “Steel Wheels” album & tour which started 8/31 thirty years ago, cannot be overstated.

    Here is “Mixed Emotions” by The Rolling Stones live from the start of that momentous tour. –Redbeard

  • Edie Brickell of the New Bohemians- Dallas January 1989

    Edie Brickell of the New Bohemians- Dallas January 1989

    It would be fascinating to watch the latest Oscar-nominated remake of A Star is Born  with Dallas-based Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, whose 1988 debut Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars  was THE Cinderella best-seller that Fall and into 1989, peaking at #4 on the Billboard  album chart and selling over a million copies largely on the strength of the hit single and video “What I Am“. The buzz earned them a coveted performance slot on national tv broadcast Saturday Night Live  over the 1988 holiday season, so upon Edie’s return to Dallas thirty years ago I had the chance to catch up with her in the midst of that improbable rocket ride of fame and, in Ms. Brickell’s case, a life-altering romance. –Redbeard 

  • Tom Cochrane- Calling America- Dallas 1989

    Tom Cochrane- Calling America- Dallas 1989

    Leave it to the Man from Manitoba, Tom Cochrane, to use his adjacent perspective vantage point from America’s northern neighbor to take an impassioned, affectionate, yet unflinching look at a post-Reagan US in this stripped down 1989 live performance of “Calling America”. During my live Friday afternoon broadcast on Q102 in a Dallas Mexican restaurant, Tom is supported impressively by tasty electric guitarist Peter Mueller. – Redbeard