In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: “One of These Days”

  • Joe Bonamassa- Sloe Gin

    Joe Bonamassa- Sloe Gin

    I readily admit that I was a little late to the Joe Bonamassa party, but quickly became a believer with 2007’s Sloe Gin, already his sixth studio album. Joe Bonamassa may mine a musical vein stretching way back into the field hollers of 19th century African slaves forced to pick cotton in America, but his recording career is pure 21st century. Here is Joe Bonamassa In the Studio.

    Just in case you have not been  paying attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century- like maybe on an interplanetary mission to Mars and back- let’s catch you up on the dizzying career of Upstate New York guitarist/singer/songwriter Joe Bonamassa. On a Guinness Book record-setting pace since his 2000 debut New Day Yesterday  at the tender age of only twenty, Joe Bonamassa  recorded and released  more than fifteen solo  albums. Then there were the two collaborations with singer Beth Hart, plus the three studio albums with Black Country Communion. In his free time Bonamassa  toured tirelessly in North America and Europe, resulting in more than half a dozen live albums and an equal number of DVDs, including 2013’s An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House   and the massive Tour de Force: Live in London   four-DVD set.

    These live filmed concerts, in particular 2009’s Live from Royal Albert Hall , placed Joe Bonamassa repeatedly on PBS television stations and into the mainstream unlike any since Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s death in 1990. Bonamassa shared the Albert Hall stage with his hero Eric Clapton, who has logged enough hours there to claim it as his “local”, but Bonamassa did so before he turned thirty. By the 2018 baseball All Star break Joe had already released Black Coffee  with Beth Hart and British Blues Explosion Live.

    In the Studio Joe Bonamassa shares details on his life and heady accomplishments in a modest way, while sharing songs such as “Further on Up the Road” live with Eric Clapton at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Chris Whitley‘s “Ball Peen Hammer”, the epic title song “Sloe Gin”, and a tasty interpretation of Paul Rodger’s “Seagull”. – Redbeard

  • Pink Floyd- Meddle 55th- David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters

    Pink Floyd- Meddle 55th- David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters

    Judging by the sheer outsized volume of well-deserved attention heaped on Pink Floyd’s 1973 game changer Dark Side of the Moon, one could easily assume it was the Cambridge, England quartet’s first album of any consequence. But with October 30, 1971’s Meddle, containing the embryonic epic “Echoes”, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and co-founder (with Syd Barrett) Roger Waters unanimously maintain that Meddle was their Apollo 8 musical mission, which would soon after allow  Pink Floyd’s lunar landing on the far side of rock history.

    Meddle by Pink Floyd certainly is not the most famous of their Seventies output, but nevertheless it is a formative stylistic bridge to essential icons Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall , which makes Meddle one of Progressive Rock’s most important releases. You’ll hear Pink Floyd’s debut single “See Emily Play” and “Astronomy Domine” from their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Syd Barrett’s meteoric flash of brilliance and subsequent flame out; “One of These Days”, with the appearance of the supercharged lap steel guitar wielded ever since by David Gilmour; and “Childhood’s End” 2016 remix, originally found on Meddle‘s follow-up, Obscured by Clouds. David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Roger Waters are my guests here In the Studio in my classic rock interview for eyewitness accounts from the front lines of progressive rock history. –Redbeard

  • Ten Years After- A Space in Time- the late Alvin Lee, Leo Lyons

    Ten Years After- A Space in Time- the late Alvin Lee, Leo Lyons

    Alvin Lee never hesitated to credit fate and dumb luck for first putting him and the band Ten Years After on the bill of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and then documentary film director Michael Wadleigh  for choosing to include their closer, “I’m Going Home”, in the final cut of the Woodstock   movie. “When things get put onto celluloid, they tend to get bigger than life,” the late guitarist/ singer Alvin Lee told me in my classic rock interview, explaining how Ten Years After was catapulted from the second tier of English boogie and blues by their prime spot in the Woodstock Festival   movie documentary. The band utilized that momentum to negotiate a new US record deal and deliver their most popular album ever in late Summer 1971,  A Space in Time,  which included “One of These Days”, “Baby Won’t You Let Me Rock’n’Roll You“, and what turned out to be their biggest hit, “I’d Love to Change the World“. A Space in Time  peaked at #17 on Billboard‘s Top 200 album sales chart, the highest of any Ten Years After album. Legendary British blues rock guitarist and singer Alvin Lee died during surgery March 6, 2013. –Redbeard