music Archives - Page 129 of 268 - Ramblin' with Roger

May rambling #2: Not to be used to bribe politicians

Muppet Rawk III: Revolver by Karin Madan

Not to be used to bribe politicians

How Long Does It Take To Figure Out If a Ten-Dollar Bill Is Real?

Historically, Income Inequality Is Known As A Destroyer Of Civilizations

Mass incarceration: An American problem

His last foray into international negotiations doesn’t bode well for his Kim meeting

There’s no cost to white people who call 911 about black people. There should be

Yes, He Is Making White People More Hateful

Congressman: Rocks tumbling into ocean causing sea level rise

Why did it take so long to find the Golden State Killer suspect?

Big Pay Gaps Are Bad for Business

Outlines of a Reading Project on the Class Divide

Seven Maps to Better Understand the World

All hail the mighty balloon lobby

A SON SPEAKS OUT By Moses Farrow

Why Be a Congregation?

Stores & Brands Offering Senior Discounts

Alan Bean, 4th Person to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 86

Toobin: What you need to know about Tom Wolfe

Memorial video for Comedy Store creator Mitzi Shore

An Open Letter to Wikipedia by Philip Roth (September 2012)

The cast of The Big Bang Theory gave their own tribute to fan Stephen Hawking

Have Your Heard Adulting is Way Hard?

According to a local official in the know, plannerding is “a thing.” “Nerding” is the act of being a nerd. Planning is obvious. Being a nerd, while planning (typically involving mapping and or data analysis) = plannerding

Alexa, Stop Spying on Me

Here’s to the Losers

Now I Know: The Solution to an Unanswerable Question and The Problem with Chinese GPS and How Strawberries with Sugar Ravaged Portugal and The Restaurant With A Rotating Grandma On The Menu

Hotel Duckmaster

We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel

MUSIC

Jaquandor and his bride have been married 21 years

Symphony No. 2 by Howard Hanson, the “Romantic”, in memory of Dr. Janice Wade of Waverly, IA

AFRICA – Peter Bence (Piano Cover of Toto song)

Coverville 1217: The Steve Winwood Cover Story II – my request! and Coverville 1218: Covering the 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Stand By Me Father – The Soul Stirrers

Higher Love – Lilly Winwood with Steve Winwood

The Flying Sequence from the score to Superman, by John Williams

Medley of Junk – Continental Co-Ets, surf/garage band from Fulda, Minnesota

Here’s to the losers

The Seeker – Fish

THE NATURE OF SOUND – Symphony of Science

Alright – Jain

The Song of Summer 2018

Why Stradivarius violins are worth millions

Burton Silverman’s Famous Painting

I’ll Never Hear Every Song

Stevie Nicks turns 70 May 26

“Back when she and Buckingham were just another struggling pair of hungry songwriters in San Francisco, Nicks used to visit a downtown store called the Velvet Underground.”

When the tease for Fleetwood Mac appearing on CBS This Morning aired on April 25, with Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, but NO Lindsey Buckingham, I had to record it and watch it that evening.

Fleetwood said that Buckingham “would not sign off on a new tour they’d been planning for a year and a half.” Nicks, who joined the band with Buckingham in January 1975, agreed with the decision.

She said, “This team wanted to get out on the road. And one of the members did not want to get out on the road for a year. We just couldn’t agree. And you know, when you’re in a band, it’s a team. I mean I have a solo career, and I love my solo career, and I’m the boss. Absolutely. But I’m not the boss in this band.”

The band is replacing Buckingham with two performers, Neil Finn of Crowded House and former member of the Heartbreakers Mike Campbell, who was recruited as lead guitarist a few months after Tom Petty’s death.

The revised Fleetwood Mac is touring starting in October, and they’re coming to Albany on March 20, 2019. Will I go? Peut être.

Listen to all (by Fleetwood Mac unless otherwise indicated):

Rhiannon (from Fleetwood Mac, 1975), #11 in 1976 – inspired by a book she read, Nicks made the protagonist into what she thought was an old Welsh witch

Landslide (from Fleetwood Mac)

I Don’t Want to Know (from -Fleetwood Mac) – one of her compositions written before she joined the group

Dreams (from Rumours), #1 in 1977 – “Nicks’ mystical assessment of her dying relationship with Buckingham”

Gold Dust Woman (from Rumours)

Sara (from Tusk, 1979), #7 in 1980 – she had a relationship with Don Henley of the Eagles

Storms (from Tusk) – “Nicks’ lament for her brief, messy affair with Fleetwood.”

Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around – Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, #3 for six weeks in 1981. Nicks, Campbell and Petty co-wrote this. From her #1 solo album Bella Donna.

Leather and Lace – Stevie Nicks and Don Henley, #6 in 1982

Gypsy (from Mirage, 1982), #12 in 1982 – “Back when she and Buckingham were just another struggling pair of hungry songwriters in San Francisco, Nicks used to visit a downtown store called the Velvet Underground, where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick shopped, and fantasize about being able to afford the clothes.”

Seven Wonders (from Tango in the Night, 1987), #19 in 1987

Silver Springs (from The Dance, 1997) – “Nicks intended this simmering requiem for her romance with Buckingham to be her crowning moment on Rumours… But the song (which originally ran almost 10 minutes) was too long to fit on the finished LP and was dropped.” A shorter version does appear as the B-side of Go Your Own Way in 1977.

Music throwback: No More Tearstained Makeup

No sponge has quite the power
to absorb the constant shower
of the tears pancake and powder could never cover.

Before Motown artists Martha and the Vandellas made it big, they sang background vocals on several of Marvin Gaye’s hits. Martha Reeves worked as a Motown secretary. They experienced major success in the first half of the 1960s with Dancing in the Streets and their signature hit, Heat Wave.

Watchout!, released in 1966, is the fourth studio album and fifth album overall by the trio, and oddly the only one I own (present tense, in vinyl). The group at that point was Martha Reeves on lead vocals, Rosalind Ashford, and Betty Kelly, who replaced Annette Beard in 1963.

You can tell that the label had already decided I’m Ready for Love was going to be the hit, based on the different colored lettering on the record jacket. Jimmy Mack, though, was just about as big, and the one I remember more fondly. Both songs were written by the legendary Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, who also created hits for the Supremes and Four Tops, who would leave Motown shortly thereafter.

Still, my favorite song on the album was the non-single No More Tearstained Makeup, written by the incomparable William (Smokey) Robinson. It’s the second verse that really nailed me:

Like a storm my tears have rained
since your shirt was lipstick-stained
and the stains that it contained were not my color.
No sponge has quite the power
to absorb the constant shower
of the tears pancake and powder could never cover.
But today as I look in the mirror
I see things a whole lot clearer.

Elvis Costello is also a fan of the song.

Listen to No More Tearstained Makeup
original here or here
a slower version, not used here
someone’s extended play here
Marvelettes cover (1970) here

Listen to
I’m Ready for Love, #2 soul, #9 pop in 1966 here or here
Jimmy Mack, #1 soul, #10 pop in 1967 here or here

May rambling: Red-Eyed Tree Frogs

The gayageum is a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

Change Can Happen Faster Than You Think

Sierra Club secures 24,000 pages of EPA emails, calls logs, and documents which expose the culture of corruption in and around Scott Pruitt

NYSUT congratulates Albany Med nurses on the decision to unionize

Waging Peace: Two Billboards Outside Albany, New York

Speaking in Code: Two phrases that no longer mean what they used to

Roy Cohn, the Original Donald Trump

America’s Word is Worthless

‘Project Trumpmore’ to Carve President’s Face into Melting Iceberg

Federal Employees Face Cuts To Retirement Benefits And Pay Freezes

Cartoon: Circular Sarah

What ‘Daily Show’ host Trevor Noah means by ‘the 5:30 curse’

The point at which the US politics firmly pivoted toward the Right

It’s A Toxic Myth That Celibacy Makes Men Violent

Monica Lewinsky: What We All Can Learn from My Disinvitation Debacle

Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World’s Largest

New Yorker cartoon: Late at night is my sacred time to catalog every single instance of when and how I am a terrible person

Is this the loneliest generation?

She was the first woman senator. Her term lasted exactly a day

Culture Cruise: ‘Homer’s Phobia’

Did Little Syria in Lower Manhattan Consist of Asian-Americans?

Their Ancestors Were on Opposite Sides of a Lynching. Now, They’re Friends

Free press: the future of Boulder, CO’s Daily Camera

The architecture of First Presbyterian Church in Albany, an article by Warren Roberts, who died this week, struck by two cars in Florida.

Science Marches On

Wait But Why: A thing happened while I was at the coffee shop

This Video is about Red-Eyed Tree Frogs? and How to Win

Ken Levine on the state of network TV

Internet Wading: The return

“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”

Why Whales Got So Big

Gone to the dogs

Names list offers origins, statistics and popularity rankings for people names

Now I Know: The Color Changing Building (and Democracy Experiment) and The Accident and the Musical Savant and Why Dippin’ Dots Never Became the Ice Cream of the Future and When the NBA Doubled Its Money and I Can’t Believe It’s All Butter

Magnolias In The Park

Credit and Debt Management

The Best Coffee in Every State

MUSIC

Confounds the Science – parody of Sound of Silence

My Last Day Without You – Nicole Behari

Dire Straits’ “Sultans Of Swing” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

Birdsong – Kina Grannis

I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You – Louis Armstrong

I’m Not in Love – Don’s Mobile Barbers (UK surf act)

Slow Turning – John Hiatt

Coverville: 1215: Cover Stories for Adele and Captain & Tennille and 1216: The Irving Berlin Cover Story

Uptown Funk- Big Daddy

When I’m Sixty-Four -MonaLisa Twins

The Hamilton Polka – The Casts of Hamilton

Black Water – some Doobie Brothers and the Playing for Change Band

Riley B King – Keb’ Mo’

In The Mood – Henhouse Five Plus Two

Beatle For 13 Days

Hit Parade: The B-Sides Edition

Musician Steve Winwood turns 70

Working on a new solo album, Steve Winwood called in Chris Wood and Jim Capaldi to help.

I own this album: “Winwood is the first compilation album of music featuring Steve Winwood. This two-record set was issued in 1971 by United Artists Records and features music which Winwood performed with The Spencer Davis Group, Powerhouse, Traffic and Blind Faith.”

And I loved it, a great overview of his career up to that point. Alas, “Issued without Winwood’s authorization…, it was taken off the market after legal action by Winwood and Island Records.”

Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group at the age of 14, after playing at pubs with his father and his brother Muff as early as eight, “the piano… turned with its back to the audience to try and hide him.”

“Winwood met drummer Jim Capaldi, guitarist Dave Mason, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Wood when they jammed together at The Elbow Room, a club in Aston, Birmingham. After Winwood left the Spencer Davis Group in April 1967, the quartet formed Traffic.”

He was part of a couple supergroups, Blind Faith in 1969 with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Ric Grech, then Ginger Baker’s Air Force, with Grech, Denny Laine, and others. Working on a new solo album, Winwood called in Wood and Capaldi to help, which led to Traffic’s comeback album John Barleycorn Must Die in 1970.

After a few more Traffic albums, Steve Winwood became a solo artist and had greater success. Some favorite songs- links to all. Chart action refers to US Billboard pop charts.

Spencer Davis Group:

Keep On Running (#76 in 1966)- one of my favorite songs EVER, for its bottom; I hear it when I’m riding the stationary bike, even when it’s not playing
Gimme Some Lovin’ (#7 in 1967)
I’m A Man (#10 in 1967)
Can’t Get Enough of It
Somebody Help Me (#47 in 1967)

Traffic:
Paper Sun (#94 in 1967)
Heaven Is In Your Mind – heard the cover version by Three Dog Night before the original.
Dear Mr. Fantasy
Smiling Phases – heard the cover version by Blood Sweat & Tears before the original
Medicated Goo – my favorite Traffic song. I own the single, the one with the dead stop, which I prefer to the album version

Blind Faith:
Can’t Find My Way Home
Sea of Joy

Traffic:
Glad
Freedom Rider
Empty Pages (#74 in 1970)
Stranger to Himself
John Barleycorn (Must Die)
Every Mother’s Son
The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys
Rainmaker

Steve Winwood solo:
While You See a Chance (#7 in 1981)
Arc of a Diver (#48 in 1981)
Spanish Dancer
Night Train (#104 in 1981)
Valerie (#70 in 1982)
Higher Love (#1 in 1986), with Chaka Khan, won the Grammy Award for “Record of the Year”; you may have heard James Vincent Mc Morrow’s version in a recent car commercial
Freedom Overspill (#20 in 1986)
Back in the High Life Again, with James Taylor (#13 in 1987)