Peter Frampton’s double concert album Frampton Comes Alive, released in January 1976, was so phenomenally successful, and his resultant fame so widespread, that it is hard to remember a time when Peter Frampton wasn’t a household name. I remember clearly my disappointment when Peter Frampton left Humble Pie, but was impressed that he wasted no time launching a solo career with the tasty 1972 release Wind of Change. Shortly after the release of the follow-up, Frampton’s Camel in 1973, I drove several hundred miles in a gas-guzzling Corvette Stingray (a risky thing during the Arab Oil Embargo) to see Peter Frampton open for the Edgar Winter Group in Massillon Ohio’s football stadium. Even with what looked to be about five feet of stage depth allotted and undoubtedly only half of the P.A. afforded to the support band, Frampton’s smartly-rehearsed live band exhibited the same energy, exuberance, and tightly arranged hooky songs that would be hallmarks of his record-setting Frampton Comes Alive three years later.
As you hear in my classic rock interview with Peter Frampton , the majority of Frampton Comes Alive! including “Show Me the Way”,”Baby I Love Your Way”,”Lines on My Face”, and “Do You Feel Like We Do?”came from a San Francisco concert in Bill Graham’s Winterland September 17,1975 , and one of the thousands of fans in the audience that night would later travel to New York City as a budding comedic actor, join the cast of the legendary Saturday Night Live, develop an ongoing skit with cast member Mike Myers that was expanded into a feature-length film, and invite Peter Frampton to do a cameo appearance in the movie. The hit film was Wayne’s World, and the fan from the actual Frampton Comes Alive! concert is Dana Carvey.
Now this is the way to start a new year: Peter Frampton In the Studio on the golden anniversary of his game-changing Frampton Comes Alive! Don’t miss my definitive interviews compiled over the decades regarding the ever-continuing story of the cultural phenomenon that is Frampton Comes Alive! – Redbeard
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
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
“In the case of The Who, the thing that comes across for me is that The Who started as a Pop band. Good Pop possibly is the sublime and the ridiculous, the important and the absurd,” opines Pete Townshend looking back on My Generation, released six decades ago and hitting #5 sales in the UK (April 1966 in America, but stiffing just before The Beatles would pretty much single-handedly make the LP format dominant in 1967 with Sgt. Peppers…).
You know, reading that back after Pete Townshend defined it to me here In the Studio, we really can just stop right here. I mean, there it is, right? That’s what I have always loved about Pete. “For God’s sake, man!” he exclaims to no one in particular,”It’s right there in front of our collective faces!” We have In the Studio The Who’s Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, plus archive comments from the late John Entwistle, in my classic rock interview to mark the.sixtieth (!) anniversary of My Generation.
As surprising as it may seem, not all famous rock’n’roll musicians are comfortable talking about their past, even involving their times of greatest creative accomplishment, fame, and fortune. The reasons can be myriad and not immediately obvious. Recalling your naive exploits, often at a time barely out your teens, can be awkward from the current perspective of a Rock Elder Statesman. Frequently the songs, albums, and tours are tied inextricably to behind-the-scenes issues of lawsuits, sour business deals, personnel defections and firings, and personal losses which are painful to re-examine. Some former stars whose careers are fading now are loathe to revisit past glories simply because it underscores for them just how far from grace they’ve fallen. And more than one famous rock star simply cannot remember key periods in their lives due to memory blackouts, a frightening and unfortunately permanent result of alcoholism or drug abuse. Pete Townshend of The Who has no such reservations, discussing easily the merits of The Who’s music from 1964’s “I Can’t Explain” right up to their current days, as well as their demerits for the band’s behavior along the way. “(Looking back) It wasn’t all painful, but it was poignant,” Townshend confessed to me.
As The Who’s recognized “Supreme Creator”, Townshend has assessed their more than six decades of musical creation and found it to be good. Pete is a delightful, witty, thoughtful, and refreshingly honest conversationalist who can easily and effectively examine The Who’s body of work through a slightly-detached objective eye in my classic rock interview, which only the passage of time plus maturity can provide. -Redbeard
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
In order to explore the Spirit concept album The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, I sat down with singer/songwriter/keyboard player Jay Ferguson to capture the spirit of the times through the best-known music of that eclectic Southern California band, including Spirit essentials “I Got a Line on You”, “Dark Eyed Woman”,”Fresh Garbage”, “Mr. Skin”, and the timeless “Nature’s Way”.
Spirit was an interesting amalgam of opposites and contrasts which reflected many of the various musical styles informing late-1960s Southern California culture. Singer/songwriter Jay Ferguson, bass player Mark Andes, and keyboard player John Locke were talented teenagers influenced by the Beach Boys, Mamas and the Papas, and The Byrds; psychedelic blues guitarist Randy Wolfe (nee Randy California) was only 16 when Spirit started, having received that nickname while backing up Jimmy James before he evolved into Jimi Hendrix; and veteran drummer Ed Cassidy, twice the age of the others, was a serious West Coast jazzer who jammed with Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and Art Pepper. Jay Ferguson, who along with Mark Andes and brother Matt Andes would go on to success in Jo Jo Gunne, does a fine job in my classic rock interview chronicling the rapidly changing times through the Spirit songs “I Got a Line on You”,”Dark Eyed Woman”,”Animal Zoo”,” Mr Skin”, and “Nature’s Way”, those last three from their most popular album, 1970’s The Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus, while delivering a touching eulogy to his lifelong friend Randy California. –Redbeard
In Autumn 1970 The Kinks presented the all-powerful, very conservative British Broadcasting Corporation with their new single, “Lola”, which sang of a transvestite lover who “walks like a woman but talks like a man…” and whose sweet kisses “taste just like Coca Cola…”.
“Well now, that simply won’t do,” said the BBC censors. “You are banned from radio airplay unless you change the offending lyrics.” So composer Ray Davies re-recorded the shocking lyrics, this time singing about a trans lover who tasted not of Coca Cola but “cherry cola” instead.
“Much better,” replied the BBC. You can’t make this stuff up.
Fifty-five years ago The Kinks’ lead singer/songwriter Ray Davies kast a keen eye on his kompatriots in the music business with the koncept album Lola vs Powerman and the Money-go-Round, sending up not only their peers The Beatles and the Rolling Stones but us in the music press taking it all so seriously. Sir Ray joins me here In the Studio for a droll, witty, incisive look back at the hits “Lola” (Top Ten in both US and UK), and “Apeman” (#5 UK).
My dear friend Patrick Moore, a retired Inspector with the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) as well as a guitarist and keen music fan, writes,”My personal and professional experience of Sir Ray Davies was his being cantankerous and willfully contrary (though I still love the Kinks’ music). As a Londoner, I think they produced the best collection of ‘London songs’...”
Patrick’s assessment of Sir Ray notwithstanding, the relative importance of The Kinks as somewhat less than The Who and Small Faces may be a prevailing one for the UK, at least in the US the band’s import musically is absolutely seminal. This inspired me to share one of several classic rock interviews I’ve had with Ray Davies about the essential band, The Kinks’ earliest years, and their musical legacy on the double-nickel anniversary of Lola vs Powerman…. –Redbeard
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
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
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
Peter Frampton’s double concert album Frampton Comes Alive, released in January 1976, was so phenomenally successful, and his resultant fame so widespread, that it is hard to remember a time when Peter Frampton wasn’t a household name. I remember clearly my disappointment when Peter Frampton left Humble Pie, but was impressed that he wasted no time launching a solo career with the tasty 1972 release Wind of Change. Shortly after the release of the follow-up, Frampton’s Camel in 1973, I drove several hundred miles in a gas-guzzling Corvette Stingray (a risky thing during the Arab Oil Embargo) to see Peter Frampton open for the Edgar Winter Group in Massillon Ohio’s football stadium. Even with what looked to be about five feet of stage depth allotted and undoubtedly only half of the P.A. afforded to the support band, Frampton’s smartly-rehearsed live band exhibited the same energy, exuberance, and tightly arranged hooky songs that would be hallmarks of his record-setting Frampton Comes Alive three years later.
