Day 345.
Queen....................................A Night At The Opera   (1975)










A Night At The Opera  showcases why I went off of Queen, although all the tracks are well crafted, for me they were all over embellished, what I used to like about them (in the early days) was the raw power of their music and vocals. This album has some great songs on it, but everything is overproduced and manufactured in my humbles.


The one track that I have always loved "39" is simple and not overproduced, the rest are ok I suppose but some have been overplayed to the point of diluting any fondness I once had, summing up this album wont be going into my collection, just too meh fir me.




Bits & Bobs;


Have written about Queen previously (if interested)





The album got its name from the Marx Brothers film of the same name, which the band watched one night at the studio complex when recording.

A Night at the Opera has a wide range of styles, including ballads, songs in a music hall, hard rock tracks and progressive rock influences.



The album produced the band’s most successful single in the United Kingdom, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which became their first U.K. number one and one of the best selling singles in both the U.K. and the world.



On its release, the album was a commercial success, debuting at number 1 in the U.K. and topping the charts for 4 non-consecutive weeks. In the United States, it reached number 4, which was the band’s strongest showing at the time.



Queen was known to be big in terms of sound and scale which is shown in their A Night at the Opera album.



All four members of Queen contributed to the album, showing their depth as a band.



The song “Death on Two Legs” from the album can be seen as Freddie Mercury’s hate letter to Queen’s first manager, Norman Sheffield, who was reputed to have mistreated the band and abused his role as their manager from 1972 to 1975.



Sheffield denied all allegation in his 2013 autobiography titled “Life on Two Legs: Set The Record Straight,” and referred to copies of the original 1972 management contracts between Sheffield and Queen.



During live performances, Mercury would start the song of by dedicating the song to, “a real motherfucker of a gentleman.”




In the Classic Albums documentary, which shows the making of A Night at the Opera, Brian May said that the band was surprised at the bitterness of Mercury’s lyrics.




The song “I’m in Love with My Car” was among Roger Taylor’s most famous songs in the entire Queen catalogue. The song was initially thought to be a joke by May.



The revving sounds at the end of the song were recorded by Taylor’s then current car, an Alfa Romeo.



The lyrics of the song were inspired by one of the band’s roadies, Johnathan Harris, whose Triumph TR4 was the “love of his life.” The song is dedicated to him as it stated on the album, “Dedicated to Johnathan Harris, boy racer to the end.”




When it came down to releasing the album’s first single, Taylor was so fond of the “I’m in Love with My Car” song that he urged Mercury to allow it to be on the B-side and reportedly locked himself in a cupboard until Mercury agreed.



“You’re My Best Friend” was Queen’s first single from the album and it was written by John Deacon.




Deacon composed the song while he was learning to play piano. The song was written for his wife, Veronica Tetzlaff and it was a top 10 hit.




The song “39” was May’s attempt to do a “sci-fi skiffle.” The song talks about a group of space explorers who go on a year long journey but, upon their return, find that a hundred years have passed because of time dilation; meaning that their loved ones have all either aged or died.




George Michael performed “39” at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert on April 20, 1992. Michael stated that it was his favorite Queen song, claiming that he used to busk it on the London Underground.





The song “The Prophet’s Song” was composed by May. May stated that he wrote the song after a dream he had about a great flood while he was recovering from being sick while recording the Sheer Heart Attack album.




The song is over 8 minutes in length, which makes it Queen’s longest studio song.





The dream that May had was about The Great Flood, and the lyrics have references from the Bible and Noah’s Ark.




The song “Love of My Life” was written for Mercury’s girlfriend at the time, Mary Austin, and is one of his most covered songs.




“Love of My Life” was such a concert favorite that Mercury would often stop singing and allow the audience to take over.




"Bohemian Rhapsody" 

 
Freddie Mercury wrote the lyrics, and there has been a lot of speculation as to their meaning. Many of the words appear in the Qu'ran. "Bismillah" is one of these and it literally means "In the name of Allah." The word "Scaramouch" means "A stock character that appears as a boastful coward." "Beelzebub" is one of the many names given to The Devil.




Mercury's parents were deeply involved in Zoroastrianism, and these Arabic words do have a meaning in that religion. His family grew up in Zanzibar, but was forced out by government upheaval in 1964 and they moved to England. Some of the lyrics could be about leaving his homeland behind. Guitarist Brian May seemed to suggest this when he said in an interview about the song: "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song."




Another explanation is not to do with Mercury's childhood, but his sexuality - it was around this time that he was starting to come to terms with his bisexuality, and his relationship with Mary Austin was falling apart.




Whatever the meaning is, we may never know - Mercury himself remained tight-lipped, and the band agreed not to reveal anything about the meaning. Mercury himself stated, "It's one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them." He also claimed that the lyrics were nothing more than "Random rhyming nonsense" when asked about it by his friend Kenny Everett, who was a London DJ.




The band were always keen to let listeners interpret their music in a personal way to them, rather than impose their own meaning on songs, and May stated that the band agreed to keep the personal meaning behind the song private out of respect for Mercury.


 
Mercury may have written "Galileo" into the lyrics for the benefit of Brian May, who is an astronomy buff. Galileo is a famous astronomer known for being the first to use a refracting telescope.


 
The backing track came together quickly, but Queen spent days overdubbing the vocals in the studio using a 24-track tape machine. The analog recording technology was taxed by the song's multitracked scaramouches and fandangos: by the time they were done, about 180 tracks were layered together and "bounced" down into sub-mixes. Brian May recalled in various interviews being able to see through the tape as it was worn so thin with overdubs. Producer Roy Thomas Baker also recalls Mercury coming into the studio proclaiming, "oh, I've got a few more 'Galileos' dear!" as overdub after overdub piled up.


 
Was Freddie Mercury coming out as gay in this song? Lesley-Ann Jones, author of the biography Mercury, thinks so.




Jones says that when she posed the question to Mercury in 1986, the singer didn't give a straight answer, and that he was always very vague about the song's meaning, admitting only that it was "about relationships." (Mercury's family religion, Zoroastrianism, doesn't accept homosexuality, and he made efforts to conceal his sexual orientation, possibly so as not to offend his family.)




After Mercury's death, Jones says she spent time with his lover, Jim Hutton, who told her that the song was, in fact, Mercury's confession that he was gay. Mercury's good friend Tim Rice agreed, and offered some lyrical analysis to support the theory:


"Mama, I just killed a man" - He's killed the old Freddie he was trying to be. The former image.



"Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead" - He's dead, the straight person he was originally. He's destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie.



"I see a little silhouetto of a man" - That's him, still being haunted by what he's done and what he is.


 
Queen made a video for the song to air on Top Of The Pops, a popular British music show, because the song was too complex to perform live - or more accurately, be mimed live on TOTP. Also, the band would be busy on tour during the single's release and thus unable to appear.




The video turned out to be a masterstroke, providing far more promotional punch than a one-off live appearance. Top Of The Pops ran it for months, helping keep the song atop the charts. This started a trend in the UK of making videos for songs to air in place of live performances.




When the American network MTV launched in 1981, most of their videos came from British artists for this reason. In the December 12, 2004 issue of the Observer newspaper, Roger Taylor explained: "We did everything we possibly could to avoid appearing in Top Of The Pops. It was one, the most boring day known to man, and two, it's all about not actually playing - pretending to sing, pretending to play. We came up with the video concept to avoid playing on Top Of The Pops."



The group had previously appeared on the show twice, to promote the "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" singles.


 
The video was very innovative. It was the first where the visual images took precedence over the song. It was based on their Queen II album cover, with the four band members looking up into the shadows. Directed by Bruce Gowers, it was shot in 3 hours for £3,500 at the band's rehearsal space.




Gowers got the gig because he was one of the few people who had experience working on music videos - he ran a camera on a few Beatles promotional clips, including the one for "Paperback Writer." The two big effects used in the video were the multiple images that appear in the "thunderbolts and lightning section," which were created by putting a prism in front of the camera lens, and the feedback effect where the image of the singer travels to infinity, which was done by pointing a camera at a monitor (like audio feedback, this is something you usually tried to avoid, but when harnessed for artistic purposes, was innovative). At the time, the video looked high-tech and futuristic. It was also the first music "video" in the sense that it was shot on video instead of film.


 
This was Queen's first Top 10 hit in the US. In the UK, where Queen was already established, it was #1 for 9 weeks, a record at the time.


 
This got a whole new audience when it was used in the 1992 movie Wayne's World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. In the film, Wayne and his friends lip-synch to it in his car (the Mirth Mobile), spasmodically head-bobbing at the guitar solo. As a result of the movie, it was re-released as a single in the US and charted at #2 ("Jump" by Kris Kross kept it out of #1).




In America, this marked a turning point in Queen's legacy. The band's 1982 album Hot Space contained a side of disco-tinged tracks at a time when disco was anathema to rock fans. The album had disappointing sales in the US, and also cost Queen in credibility. Their tour to support the album would be Freddie Mercury's last with Queen in America, and the band was largely forgotten there for the rest of the decade. When Wayne's World revived "Bohemian Rhapsody," American listeners remembered how cool Queen really was, and they the ringing endorsement from Wayne and Garth to back them up.


 
At 5:55, this was a very long song for radio consumption. Queen's manager at the time, John Reid, played it to another artist he managed, Elton John, who promptly declared: "are you mad? You'll never get that on the radio!"



According to Brian May, record company management kept pleading with the group to cut the single down, but Freddie Mercury refused. It got a big bump when Mercury's friend Kenny Everett played it on his Capital Radio broadcast before the song was released (courtesy of a copy Mercury gave him). This helped the single jump to #1 in the UK shortly after it was released.



There was a single version released only in France on a 7", cut down to 3:18, edited by John Deacon, but beyond the initial pressing of this French single, the only version recognized is the album version, at 5:55. This little-heard French single started right at the piano intro, and edited out the operetta part. Brian May admitted that there may have been additional parts for the song on Freddie's notes, but they were apparently never recorded.


 
Brian May recalled recording "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Q Magazine March 2008: "That was a great moment, but the biggest thrill for us was actually creating the music in the first place. I remember Freddie coming in with loads of bits of paper from his dad's work, like Post-it notes, and pounding on the piano. He played the piano like most people play the drums. And this song he had was full of gaps where he explained that something operatic would happen here and so on. He'd worked out the harmonies in his head."


 
In 1991, this was re-released in the UK shortly after Freddie Mercury's death. It again went to #1, with proceeds going to the Terrence Higgins Trust, which Mercury supported.


 
Elton John performed this with Axl Rose at the 1992 "Concert For Life," held in London at Wembley Stadium. It was a tribute to Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS the year before. In 2001, Elton John got together with Eminem, who like Axl Rose, was often accused of being intolerant and homophobic. They performed Eminem's "Stan" at the Grammys.



 
When this was re-released in the US, proceeds from the single went to the Magic Johnson AIDS Foundation. Johnson and Freddie Mercury were two of the first celebrities to get AIDS. Rock Hudson, who succumbed to the disease on October 2, 1985, was another.


 
Thanks to this track, A Night At The Opera was the most expensive album ever made at the time. They used 6 different studios to record it. Queen did not use any synthesizers on the album, which is something they were very proud of.


 
In an interview with Brian May and Roger Taylor on the Queen Videos Greatest Hits DVD, Brian said: "What is Bohemian Rhapsody about, well I don't think we'll ever know and if I knew I probably wouldn't want to tell you anyway, because I certainly don't tell people what my songs are about. I find that it destroys them in a way because the great thing about about a great song is that you relate it to your own personal experiences in your own life. I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself. He was certainly looking at re-creating himself. But I don't think at that point in time it was the best thing to do so he actually decided to do it later. I think it's best to leave it with a question mark in the air."


 
A Night At The Opera was re-released as an audio DVD in 2002 with the original video included on the disc. Commentary from the DVD reveals that this song had started taking shape in the song "My Fairy King" on Queen's debut album.


 
In 2002, this came in #1 in a poll by Guinness World Records as Britain's favorite single of all time. John Lennon's "Imagine" was #2, followed by The Beatles' "Hey Jude."


 
The name "Bohemian" in the song title seems to refer not to the region in the Czech republic, but to a group of artists and musicians living roughly 100 years ago, known for defying convention and living with disregard for standards. A "Rhapsody" is a piece of Classical music with distinct sections that is played as one movement. Rhapsodies often have themes.


 
Roger Taylor said, "Record companies both sides of the Atlantic tried to cut the song, they said it was too long and wouldn't work. We thought, 'Well we could cut it, but it wouldn't make any sense,' it doesn't make much sense now and it would make even less sense then: you would miss all the different moods of the song. So we said no. It'll either fly or it won't. Freddie had the bare bones of the song, even the composite harmonies, written on telephone books and bits of paper, so it was quite hard to keep track of what was going on." Kutner and Leigh's book also states that, the recording included 180 overdubs, the operatic parts took over 70 hours to complete and the piano Freddie played was the same one used by Paul McCartney on "Hey Jude."


 
Ironically, the song that knocked this off the #1 chart position in the UK was "Mama Mia" by Abba. The words "Mama mia" are repeated in this in the line "Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go."


 
The story told in this song is remarkably similar to that in Albert Camus' book The Stranger. Both tell of a young man who kills, and not only can he not explain why he did it, he can't even articulate any feelings about it.



 
You can make the case that the song title is actually a parody, and a clever one at that. There is a rhapsody by the composer Franz Liszt called "Hungarian Rhapsody," and "Bohemia" is a kingdom that is near Hungary and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Furthermore, "Bohemian" is an adjective for something unusual or against convention, and the song is just that.



So, "Bohemian Rhapsody" could be a clever title that not only parodies a famous work but also describes the song. In a nod to the Liszt composition, Queen would go on to release a live DVD/CD package in 2012 titled "Hungarian Rhapsody," featuring their famous shows behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest on the Magic tour in 1986.


  
Queen fans, and also Brian May, often colloquially refer to the song as "Bo Rhap" (or "Bo Rap").


 
The name "Bohemian Rhapsody" makes many appearances in popular culture:


Session 14 of the popular anime series Cowboy Bebop is named "Bohemian Rhapsody."



The Jones Soda Company has a drink named "Bohemian Raspberry" in honour of this song.



 
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett used some of the lyrics in their book Good Omens . The main character (Crowley) plays it in his car all the time. They also refer to other Queen songs, but mostly "Bohemian Rhapsody."



  
In 2009, The Muppets Studio released a video featuring the Muppets performing this song. It was first web video for The Muppets, and it was extremely popular: the video was viewed over 7 million times the first week it was up. The furry ones changed the song a bit, omitting the lyrics that begin, "Mama, just killed a man" with Animal screaming "Mama!"


 
In an interview with Q magazine March 2011, Roger Taylor was asked if this seemed like a peculiar song when Mercury first suggested it? He replied: "No, I loved it. The first bit that he played to me was the verse. 'Mama, just killed a man, dah-dah-la-dah-daah, gun against his…' All that. I thought, 'That's great, that's a hit.' It was, in my head, a simpler entity then; I didn't know it was going to have a wall of mock Gilbert and Sullivan stuff, you know, some of which was written on the fly. Freddie would write these huge blocks of mass harmonies in the backs of phone books."


 
The song is one of Freddie Mercury's great mysteries - according to everyone in the band, only he knew truly how it would come together, and according to some sources, its genesis could have come many years earlier. Chris Smith, the keyboard player in Mercury's first band Smile, claimed that Freddie would play several piano compositions at rehearsals, including one called "The Cowboy Song," which started with the line, "mama, just killed a man."


 
In sharp contrast to the rest of the song's recording and composition, Brian May's signature solo before the opera section was recorded on only one track, with no overdubbing. He stated that he wanted to play "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody."



It is one of his finest examples of creating a solo in his mind before playing it on guitar; something he did many times throughout Queen's career. His reasoning was always that "the fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain."


 
Weird Al Yankovic took the entire song and sung it to a polka tune, called simply "Bohemian Polka," which is on his 1993 album Alapalooza.


 
In the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek stars as Freddie Mercury. In May, the trailer was released, showing some scenes where the song is discussed, including a part where they record "the operatic section." There is also this exchange:

Record company executive: "It goes on forever! It's six bloody minutes!"

Mercury: "I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever."

That record company executive is played by Mike Myers, who revived the song in Wayne's World.

arabchanter wrote:

 
In the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek stars as Freddie Mercury. In May, the trailer was released, showing some scenes where the song is discussed, including a part where they record "the operatic section." There is also this exchange:

Record company executive: "It goes on forever! It's six bloody minutes!"

Mercury: "I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever."

That record company executive is played by Mike Myers, who revived the song in Wayne's World.

Rami Malek? Jings, he was the main man in Mr Robot, could never see him playing Freddie Mercury!

The Queen album is a bit dated now, but it has a rare, for the time, John Deacon song on it, You're my best friend, which stands the test of time for me.
 

DAY 346.
Willie Nelson................................................Red Headed Stranger   (1975)









As far as country records go, this wasn't too bad, and any album that has a line like "you can't hang a man for killin' a woman who's tryin' to steal your horse,"in it is surely worth a listen.


This album is 100% country/western/cowboy, you can almost smell the horseshit, for me this would be ok to listen to as background, with not too much volume just enough to attract your ear and no more, I would love to buy this, just because I like the cover, and Willie Nelson seems like a boy I would like have a drink with, but finances being what they are, this album wont be going into my collection.



Bits & Bobs;

The Fascinating Story Behind Willie Nelson’s ‘Red Headed Stranger’


Like the imposing chimes of a grandfather clock, the six opening chords of Willie Nelson’s landmark  Red Headed Stranger signaled a new hour for music. A dark, rambling, bare-bones tale about a man’s jealous rage and his path to self-forgiveness, it cemented Nelson’s legacy as one of country’s greatest storytellers and proved that concept records were not exclusively rock’s domain. 40 years later, we look back at the impact of the complex album and its unlikely success.

First, some backstory. Nelson grew up on the plains of Depression-era Texas, and after his parents split, he and sister Bobbie were raised by their grandparents. At the age of six he was given a guitar, and he never looked back. Many of his music’s enduring influences can be traced back to his surprisingly diverse hometown of Abbot.His Mexican neighbors gifted him a lasting appreciation for music from south of the border. Having Czechoslovakian neighbors meant constant exposure to waltzing and polka dancing, whose hobbling downbeats are still crucial to modern country. And going to church every Sunday meant plenty of gospel got stuck in the young man’s head.



In 1973, Willie Nelson was beginning to make a name for himself in Nashville. He had just signed a $25,000 contract with Atlantic’s country branch in Music City ($133,000 in today’s money) and had released two successful records with them, Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages (another concept record, about divorce).

 But Atlantic decided to shutter its country experiment, which left Nelson without a label. His savvy manager Neil Reshen phoned up Columbia’s president Bruce Lundvall and negotiated a contract, but one that included a clause giving Nelson complete artistic control. This would prove to be a music biz anomaly, and Red Headed Stranger’s saving grace.


 Leaving Nashville turned out to be blessing in disguise. There, the expectation was to be clean cut in countenance and studio. The album sounds the way it does in part thanks to Nelson’s relocation to Austin. Its burgeoning hippie movement, which is still going strong today, made Willie feel like a misfit who found a home with other misfits. No longer having to worry about image, Nelson was free to focus solely on his sound.

 Nelson used to DJ a Fort Worth kids’ radio show from 1-1:30pm every day. It broadcasted tunes to exhausted parents who desperately wanted their children to nap for thirty minutes, and Nelson obliged them with songs like “Tale of the Red Headed Stranger” and Tex Ritter’s “Blood on the Saddle”, songs which might not be considered appropriate children’s music these days.


 Years later, having been handed the reigns by CBS, Nelson’s then-wife (his third) Connie Koepke inspired him to take the original Red Headed Stranger and flesh it out, turning it into an aural western novel. Engineer Phil York lured Nelson to Autumn Sound Studio in Garland, Texas, and they set to work. Any instrumentation favored by the glossy hot country of the day was stripped away, leaving Nelson’s plucky acoustic guitar Trigger, upright bass, drums, piano (played by sister and frequent collaborator Bobbie), and occasional accordion, mandolin, and harmonica. The sessions didn’t take long. Harp player Mickey Raphael said part of the reason the concept album is so sparse is because it was recorded live – there were very few do-overs. Bassist Bobby Earl Smith even claims that their version of “Blue Eyes” was a one-take recorded with everyone sitting in a circle. Like an intimate house show, the songs are spare but expansive and perfectly mic’d.


 The songs – vignettes, really – are mostly only at or under two minutes. They ingeniously alternate between the Stranger’s first-person travels and an omnipresent third-person narration, giving his voyage a fated feel, as if the Stranger is being watched from above with great care.


 After the first “Time of the Preacher”, a refrain repeated and modified throughout side one, the story begins. The Stranger loves his wife dearly but thinks she’s cheating on him; his suspicions are confirmed when, one day, he comes home to an empty house. He’s beyond distraught, and he cries “like a panther in the middle of the night.” He tries to forgive and forget, but the vacant hallways haunt him and his loneliness turns into a singular, coldblooded thirst for revenge. In “Blue Rock Montana”, he finds his ex and her new beau in a bar and shoots them so quickly, “they died with their smiles on their faces”.


 It is precisely then that The Stranger becomes the Red Headed Stranger. He aimlessly wanders from town to town in a fog of self-loathing, riding a black stallion and toting behind him the pony formerly used by his wife. When a drunk woman pets the horse, he thinks she’s trying to steal it and shoots her straightaway. He once again escapes Johnny Law, the logic being: “You can’t hang a man for killing a woman / Who’s trying to steal your horse”. (Show of hands: who else is glad the Wild West is no longer a thing?)


 If a picture is worth a thousand words, then so is the title of a lyric-less song, especially in the case of the handsome waltz “Just As I Am”. It ends side one but initiates the Stranger’s true quest for starting anew. Side two begins with our antihero meeting his new love in Denver; like the American Dream, he must move west to find his true self. The second half of the record is noticeably jollier, with songs like “Down Yonder” giving Benny Hill a run for his money.




Nothing about this record yodels ‘commercial smash.’ It flew in the face of current country practices, and many CBS execs fought not to put it out, claiming it sounded like a half-baked demo that no one would buy. “They thought I’d gone insane because there wasn’t that much there,” says Nelson of the now infamous board meetings. “I think Waylon Jennings shamed them into putting it out.” Since his contract stipulated complete creative control, no changes were made to the tapes, and the collection ended up more than surpassing expectations.



Ray Benson, who was working as a session guitarist in Nashville at the time, recalls colleagues getting angry and jealous at the album’s success, believing it was practically blasphemous and insubordinate to record country in so sparing a manner. But it did the trick. The Columbia Records release reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and remained in the charts for 43 weeks. Its first single, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”, won a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. Less than a year later it was certified gold; 10 years from then, it was certified double platinum. It has also become a part of the National Recording Registry.


 Rolling Stone has called it one of the top 500 greatest albums of all time, but CMT one-upped them and called it the best album of all time. CMJ has appropriately deemed it “the Sgt. Peppers of country music.” The album’s uncommonly lucrative no-frills attitude isn’t just for show – it’s just how Willie is. He remains humble despite his accomplishments. “I first saw him play in Wichita Falls sometime in the 1970s,” recalls outlaw disciple James McMurtry. “I was just fifteen or sixteen. And when he came out on stage, there was no big announcement. He just kind of snuck out from behind one of the speaker columns and started playing. I learned from that. That’s the way I come out on stage today.”


 At the time of the record’s release, Nelson was on his third wife and fifth child; he had the same blue eyes and long red hair of his protagonist. Red Headed Stranger gave Nelson both an enduring nickname, and the crown jewel of his extraordinary discography. Its leanness has helped it float through the years, becoming an otherworldly, timeless classic.








“My lungs were bothering me and I’d had pneumonia two or three times. I was also smoking pot, and I decided, well, one of them’s gotta go. So I took a pack of Chesterfields and took all the Chesterfields out, rolled up 20 big fat ones and put [them] in there, and I haven’t smoked a cigarette since then.”


Nelson has hardly made a secret of regular marijuana use, or his support for its legalization. (His rap sheet of pot-related arrests certainly backs up those claims.) As more and more states are legalizing the once-outlawed weed, Nelson has put his expertise on the topic to good use, and launched his very own brand of pot:Willie's Reserve!
 

Last edited by arabchanter (24/7/2018 11:34 am)

DAY 347.
Earth, Wind, And Fire...............................That's The Way Of The World   (1975)









This'll be quick, not really a big fan of EWAF or 70s funk for that matter, this album didn't "float my boat" at any point during it's 38 minutes.


None of the tracks even after a second playing, stood out, were memorable, in fact it was quite the forgettable album, to be fair I didn't mind a couple of their later singles, but would never have bought them, this album wont be going in my collection.




Bits & Bobs;


Earth, Wind & Fire got their name from drummer and founding member Maurice White's astrological sign. White's sign is Sagittarius, which has the primary elemental quality of Fire and the seasonal qualities of Earth and Air. "Earth, Air & Fire" didn't sound right, so "Air" became "Wind." White was previously in a band signed to Capitol Records called Salty Peppers; Maurice developed an interest in astrology and Egyptology while he was touring the world with them.


 
In 1975, Earth, Wind & Fire scored the soundtrack to a film about the dark side of the music industry called That's The Way of the World. EWF also appeared in the film as a band called "The Group." When Harvey Keitel's character sees "The Group" live, he produces their first album. The movie was a bomb but EWF's soundtrack was a huge hit, spending three weeks at #1.


 
A white songwriter named Allee Willis co-wrote several hits with the band, including "September" and "Boogie Wonderland." Allee told us that before writing with the band, Maurice White had her read the book "The Greatest Salesman In The World"


 
In 1995, Earth, Wind & Fire received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Several of the band's original members attended the unveiling ceremony. Later that year, drummer and founding member Maurice White announced that he would no longer be touring with the rest of the band, leaving Philip Bailey to handle most of the vocal duties at concerts.


 
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Earth, Wind & Fire held a benefit concert in Virginia to raise money for the American Red Cross. The show raised $25,000 for the charity. The band also performed at the closing ceremonies for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.


 
In 2004, Earth, Wind & Fire performed as part of a tribute to funk music at the 46th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. The band was joined onstage by Parliament Funkadelic, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and OutKast, who incorporated their hit "The Way You Move" into the mash-up.


 
President Barack Obama is a fan of Earth, Wind & Fire. In 2009, the group became one of the first musical acts to play at the White House since Obama took office in late 2008. The band played at the Governors' Dinner.


 
Sometimes bands find inspiration in unlikely places. The Swedish metal band Meshuggah has stated that Earth, Wind & Fire was the source of inspiration behind their 1995 album Destroy Erase Improve.


 
Tragedy struck the Earth, Wind & Fire family in 1993 when original saxophonist Don Myrick was fatally shot by a police officer. When attempting to serve a search warrant, the officer mistook a butane lighter in Myrick's hand for a weapon. Myrick was shot once in the chest and later died in hospital. In 1995, Myrick's family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles for $400,000.



"Shining Star"


Written by group members Maurice White, Larry Dunn and Philip Bailey, this was a #1 hit on both the R&B and Hot 100 charts. While many hits of the disco era were fun but meaningless, Earth, Wind & Fire considered all their songs meaningful, and this one projects a positive message in a turbulent time. To get a better idea, check out this quote from Maurice White from a 1975 Blues & Soul interview:

"There are certain disciplines we apply to our life in respect of diet and living, the way we live. There are certain aspects which have to be kept clean, things that relate directly to the Creator. By adopting a totally positive approach to our life, we can reflect this in our music - we won't allow it to reflect any negative vibes or thoughts. All our music is 'up' in the sense that it is intended to bring people to that state. It is truly gratifying to know that we are finally getting to people, they are accepting us."

Want to get deeper into White's vibe? Check out the book The Greatest Salesman In The World, which he had Allee Willis read before she collaborated with the group.



 
That's The Way Of The World was the soundtrack to a movie of the same name starring a young Harvey Keitel as a record producer and Earth, Wind & Fire as the group he worked with. The movie was a colossal flop, but the album was a huge hit, capturing the sound of the band's successful stage show on vinyl and going to #1 on the album charts, making EW&F the first R&B group to top the US album and Pop charts at the same time. The album was the biggest seller for Columbia Records in 1975, and helped prove that black bands could sell albums, not just singles - something Maurice White took a lot of pride in.




The failure of the movie didn't drag down the band thanks in part to Maurice White refusing to let the album be labeled a soundtrack. When the film was re-issued in America, it was with a new title: Shining Star.


 
Earth, Wind & Fire wrote and recorded the That's The Way Of The World album in Nederland, Colorado, which is outside of Boulder. Maurice White says he came up with the idea for this song after taking a walk one night and seeing a shining star in the sky. He took the phrase and directed it toward a positive message for the lyrics.


 
This won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.



 
This has been used in a variety of movies and TV shows. Among them: Glee, Seinfeld (used in a classic scene where Elaine tries to dance), Austin Powers in Goldmember, My Name Is Earl, and Muppets from Space.

 

"That's The Way Of The World"


This song was written for the low-budget movie of the same name about the corruption of a record label. It starred a young Harvey Keitel and was produced by Sig Shore of Super Fly fame).



 
Earth, Wind & Fire's brothers Maurice and  wrote this song with Verdine White their producer, Charles Stepney.



 
Pentatonix and Stevie Wonder performed an a cappella version of this song at the Grammy Awards in 2016 in honor of Maurice White, who died two months earlier.



"Reasons"

That's The Way Of The World was originally part of a movie of the same name - a low-budget flick about the corruption of the record business starring a young Harvey Keitel. Although the movie flopped, the soundtrack effectively launched the commercial success of Earth, Wind & Fire. A live (and more popular) version of this song is on the Gratitude album.


 
Featuring the falsetto vocals of Earth, Wind & Fire singer Philip Bailey, this popular wedding R&B ballad is actually about a one-night stand: "I'm longing to love you just for a night."

 
Maurice and Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire wrote this song with Charles Stepney, who was an arranger/piano player at Chess Records when Maurice worked there as a staff drummer in the '60s. Stepney did a lot of work with Earth, Wind & Fire when the band was starting out, and he did a lot of the writing and production on the That's The Way Of The World project. Stepney had a lot of experience in a studio and helped the young group create a very refined sound. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1976.



 

 

DAY 348.
Curtis Mayfield......................................Ther's No Place Like America Today   (1975)









Have got to say I love the album cover, although the original picture doesn't portray the impression Mr Mayfield, in my opinion is trying to suggest.



The original by Magaret Bourke-White (more about this in Bits & Bobs)









Anyways, the album was a bit too slow and lacking any form of energy for me, and there is only so much wah-wah this poor listener can handle and to be honest his vocals may be alright in small doses but a whole album can shred your nerves.

You know when you get that itch/tingle inside your ear, and it seems too far inside your ear to reach and stop that irritating buzz, so you stick your finger in your ear and wiggle it round and round like a bastard, as fast as you can, and you stop, and its gone, and it's almost like an orgasmic moment (at my age I take what I can get,) well that was me when he stopped singing on the last track, fuckin hallelujah.



So as you have probably deduced, this album wont be coming near my neighbourhood. (but would welcome the cover, as long as it was empty)




Bits & Bobs;


Have already written about Mayfield ( if interested)


The picture is justly famous; although, like many pictures which resonate with their time, the true circumstances of its origin differ somewhat from the projected message. The camera never lies, but it equivocates.


 A line of figures queues across the frame on the big-city sidewalk, all of them overcoated and be-hatted, many carrying baskets, buckets or bags, every one of them black. One or two eye the camera, maybe with curiosity, but with no friendliness or approval. Others look uneasily away from it or pointedly, resentfully ignore it. Yet others are simply unaware of the spying lens. They look ahead or nowhere in particular, faces unreadably glum - except for one man who seems to smile at a private thought. Each has the air of someone forced to endure what should be a personal moment in public, reacting with shame or anger, defiance or resignation.


 The picture must date from the Thirties, evoking as it does the Great Depression. Obviously, these people are awaiting a handout. Equally obviously, this is the last resort for them. They look like solid folk, driven by circumstance, by the failings of a callous and careless economic system, into the door of a soup kitchen.


 In fact, history never being so helpfully pat, they are victims of the weather, lining up for flood relief. The picture tells an entirely true story of its era, and of race in the USA, much as photographs from Hurricane Katrina do. It just so happens it might as easily date from the boom-time Twenties for all it has to do directly with the Depression - were it not for the punchline, the compelling irony that drew the lens and made the image a classic. Behind and above the line of unwilling supplicants, dwarfing them and devouring the centre of the photograph, stands an enormous billboard. A smart little car, hugely magnified, charges out of from the hoarding straight towards the queue. Inside it, a smart little white family, wholesome - loathsomely so, to today's eye - grotesquely clean and happy, smile in wonder and delight at the bleak vista below. (All bar the mother, who wears an expression of smug arrogance worthy of any Third Reich fraulein.) Across the poster, in exuberant, climbing letters, runs the slogan: "There's No Place Like America Today".


 Recreated, in tinted form, from Margaret Bourke-White's 1937 monochrome original, 'At The Time Of The Louisville Flood', and with the original advertising slogan adapted from "There's No Way Like The American Way", this is the cover of Curtis Mayfield's album of the same name. He couldn't have picked a more apt one; the record evokes its own time and place as surely as the picture represents the chasm between American dreams and street-level reality. 1975 was, for many in the cities of the USA, a particularly wretched time, one which even now carries the aura of winter, of hangover, of chills and meanness and struggle.


 America's mid-seventies are best remembered for their political events. The Nixon administration had packed up its tent to the accompaniment of national derision and delusion. The music and art, the journalism, films and novels of the moment reflect shock and disenchantment and outright paranoia - this last being one of Richard Nixon's own particular contributions - following revelations that the government of the USA had acted in ways that would have given the Cosa Nostra, if not sleepless nights, then at least a few handy pointers.


 But to many people, that didn't matter a damn. They had never expected anything better from the government anyway. What Nixon and his goons were up to was of far less import than the recession into which America had slumped. And those who felt it first and hardest were America's urban blacks, in towns such as Detroit, where the car industry was concussed by huge oil price rises. The message of Mayfield's album cover was clear. 40 years, and what's changed? Civil rights marches, changes in legislation, voting rights, LBJ's efforts to revive FDR's Great Society, and what's changed?


 Mayfield is best known as a master of fluid funk; as the creator of every funk-lover's favourite song ever, 'Move On Up', and thus as a positive and inspirational force; as a Blaxploitation soundtrack genius and consequently a seriously hip figure in the pantheon of Seventies music regenerated as style; and as a major influence during the early, pimpmobile days of Gangsta. (Ice T freely acknowledged that he was up to his armpits in hock to Mayfield.)


 Few remember him as a chronicler of austere times. Subtle and seraphic lovejuice maestro Marvin Gaye takes due credit for his ravishing and less sophisticated political opus, What's Going On; but There's No Place Like America Today seems to be missing from the canon. Mayfield is generally accorded his due, but one seldom sees mention of this particular record. A shame, because it's a masterwork.


 There's No Place Like America Today is a record of its time, which has its own fascination; but it's also an album of timeless intrigue. The world it portrays is very cold indeed, and the comfort it offers is as spare as its measured, melancholy funk. But it's comfort nonetheless, something buried so deep in the music that maybe those of us whose bones have never ached, day in, day out, on hard city streets - and good for us, I say - can't really get to grips with it.


 Mayfield's music is as restrained and insinuating on There's No Place Like America Today as it would ever be. His fluting falsetto, rather than being carried on the tide (as it was on 'Move On Up' et al), draws the instruments behind it. There are no breaks, no crescendos. The album never loses its mood of gentle insistence. It may be most sombre funk record ever made, which doesn't sound like much of a commendation. But it isn't sombre in the manner of, say, the grey-coated, white cerebro-funkers of the early Eighties. It's not heavy, dour or miserable. It's light on its feet, delicate, but no less serious for that. It sounds like an honest response to the mood of its times - Mayfield may have felt that he could hardly sound the call to party when so many of his audience were finding it difficult enough to get though the week.


 THE opening number of There's No Place Like America Today sees a convict, on the day of his release, find out about the shooting of an old friend, the 'Billy Jack' of the song title. The track, far from resembling a dirge, takes the form of tremulous piece of butterfly funk, as if Billy Jack's death were too predictable an event to be truly mourned: "Too bad about him - too sad about him/Don't get me wrong - the man is gone/But it's a wonder he lived this long." In almost miraculously concise fashion, Mayfield tells you everything you need to know about Billy Jack: "Up in the city they called him Boss Jack/But down home he was an alley cat/Ah! didn't care nothin' bout bein' black." And now he's dead, plugged in some petty criminal exchange. The whole history of the man is contained within; you could take that cameo and write a life from it. But first you'd have to tear your attention away from the song itself, which is as tight and irresistible as any of Mayfield's more upbeat work. As well as being as musical titan on the basis of his songwriting and record-making, Mayfield was an astonishing guitarist, with a style so cunning and fluent that attempts to copy it have often go clumsily awry.


 'When Seasons Change' could be the keynote address of 1975; so much so that temptation is to simply reprint the entire lyric and leave it at that. Certainly, it's the thematic cornerstone of the record. The onset of winter, the struggle to survive, the cold landscape, riddled with predators. "A lot of scars - the kind that scare you to remember/Scuffin' times - in seeing people trying to put you down/For goodness sakes/People trying to take what you know that you've found." But, as throughout There's No Place Like America Today , Mayfield shows no interest in attributing blame for the harsh situations he describes- or perhaps, rather, he considers the primary source of the trouble so obvious as not to require pointing out. The reproach to the powers that be is as strong and implicit as it is in the album's cover image. But if there is a message at the heart of the LP, it's "Look to yourselves." Even in 'Jesus', he points to Christ not with pie-in-the sky religiosity, nor as the traditional source of divine love in adversity, but simply as a human role model: "He never had a hustlin' mind/Doin' crime - wastin' time."


 'Blue Monday People' and 'Love To The People' follow the same idea, of seeking strength and warmth in the hearts of yourself and others. For a political album - and There's No Place Like America Today is deeply political, if unspecifically so - this is a remarkable premise, one on which Mayfield had been building since his sublime and generous Impressions song, 'Choice Of Colors'. His message appears to be: Yes, things are terrible, and through no fault of your own; but how will you respond? What will you choose? We will sink or swim together, Mayfield always insisted; the same message that he had put in more scathing fashion five years previously on the magnificent, apocalyptic '(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go'.


 From any more privileged quarter this would unquestionably be odious bootstrap piffle. Mayfield has a right to ask the question, though, brother to brother, as he so often did. It's almost as though we're listening in on a private conversation.Maybe this makes No Place Like America sound as if it's a preaching kind of album. That's not the case. It's much less so than What's Going On, for instance. There's nothing didactic in the tone of the record. That never was Mayfield's way.


 'Hard Times' is nothing more than what it appears to be; a lament for the collapse of decency, and the downward spiral of black-on-black violence. Although it's never openly stated, No Place Like America portrays the comedown from the Sixties. For affluent white kids, that decade may have meant peace and love (ie. plenty of drugs and unlimited opportunities for boys to sleep with girls too frightened of appearing repressed to complain about bad and/or unwanted sex), and the chance to play at being revolutionaries. For blacks, it meant political and social gains on a previously unimaginable scale; gains that by 1975 seemed to be reversed, in practice, at every turn. True, some of the promises of the Sixties were fulfilled; America has developed a large black middle class, a process which was well under away by the mid-Seventies. But it was those left behind who were the subject of Mayfield's album - the Seventies equivalents of the hard-worn folk on the cover, whose own present day successors have no reason to feel much differently. There's No Place Like America Today is a record of its time, all right, but it's a sad fact it is also a record of ours.


 From beginning to end, There's No Place Like America Today trickles like cold quicksilver. It feels deft and spare, which is curious, as it's not a minimal album; arranger Rick Tufo was lavish with the strings and horns. There is no drama about it, no wailing or wringing of hands. It is deeply funky. As on all of Mayfield's records, nothing is wasted. No surplus flesh. That it should be so low-key, so understated, that it should deal unflinchingly with such a desolate theme and still be such an affecting source of pleasure, is as fine a testament to Mayfield's genius as any of its better known predecessors in that extraordinary run of great releases to which it proved a coda.


 



 

DAY 349.
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers.............................................Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers   (1976)











Liked this one a lot, not a problem listening to any of the tracks, I remember hearing Tom Petty back in the 70s, and instantly liked him, something seemed that bit different, not edgey but certainly not the norm.


Although all the tracks were passable, obviously "American Girl" stands out, but I also liked "Breakdown" and "Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll" but my personal favourite was "Hometown Blues,"


Tom did me a "solid" by keeping the length down to just over half an hour, not one track longer than four minutes and for that reason alone I should really buy the vinyl, but to be honest I've got a greatest hits CD with the ones I particularly like on this album plus his later stuff, so this album although very good wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;


The band formed in Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida (The Gators). The first version of the band was called Mudcrutch, and included Petty and Campbell. They became popular in Florida, and occasionally played shows with another Florida band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. The only Mudcrutch song released was a single called "Depot Street."


 
Petty went by "Tommy Petty" until he started releasing albums - he went with "Tom Petty" because it looked better in print. Friends from before this time called him "Tommy."


 
When they made their album Hard Promises, MCA wanted to sell it for $9.98, which was $1 more than what most albums cost. Petty protested and threatened to name the album "$8.98," so the label backed off and released it at the lower price. Petty's vehemence in releasing the album at the $8.98 price is reflected on the Hard Promises album cover. In the lower right-hand corner, there are albums in a record bin. The album at the front of the right side of the bin shows the $8.98 price.


 
The band appeared in the 1978 movie FM, which was the inspiration for the TV show WKRP In Cincinnati. Petty has also been in the movies Made In Heaven and The Postman.


 
In 1988, Petty joined Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and George Harrison in The Traveling Wilburys. Harrison and Orbison played on Petty's 1989 album Full Moon Fever, which was produced by Lynne. The band toured with Dylan in 1986. In an interview with Esquire magazine, Petty said: "The great thing about the Wilburys was that none of us had to take the heat by ourselves. I was just a member of the band. Nobody felt like he was above anybody else. We had such a good time."


 
Their first success was in the UK, where they toured as a support act for Nils Lofgren in 1977. This got them some TV appearances in Britain, and the single "Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll" reached #36 there that summer. It wasn't until February 1978 that they cracked the American Top 40 with ".Breakdown"



 
In 1987, Petty's house was destroyed by fire in what was determined to be arson.



 
The albums Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers were credited as Tom Petty solo albums, but most of The Heartbreakers played on them.


 
Their videos have won several MTV Video Music Awards. In 1994, they received a Video Vanguard award for lifetime achievement.


 
Epstein died in 2003. Personal problems and drug addiction caused him to leave the band a year earlier, and it is likely that drugs played a role in his death.


 
The original Mudcrutch guitarist was Tom Leadon, brother of Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon. Tom Leadon left the band, but before his departure, Petty played bass.


 
For about two years starting in 1986, they toured with Bob Dylan as his backing band.



 
Petty appeared in The Simpsons 2002 episode "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation," where he shows Homer how to write lyrics. They come up with a song about a sexy girl walking down the street who is concerned with budget problems in public schools.


 
In 1999, the band received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.


 
A seminal moment in Petty's life came when he was 11 years old and met Elvis Presley on the set of the movie Follow That Dream in Ocala, Florida. This is when Petty started playing guitar.


 
Petty disowned the group's 1999 album Echo, feeling it was not up to snuff. He said he was going through a divorce and in no condition to make an album, but a record was due and he was pressured to make it.


 
They signed their record deal with Shelter Records, but in 1979, Shelter was acquired by MCA, and Petty had a lot of problems working with the label. When it appeared Petty was in debt to MCA, he filed bankruptcy. MCA sued him, and they agreed to let Petty record under a label they set up specifically for him called Backstreet Records.


 
At the request of producer Rick Rubin, they backed Johnny Cash on his 1996 album Unchained. Petty considered it some of their best playing.


He was Luanne Platter’s husband on King Of The Hill.


 Tom Petty made a rare foray into the world of voice acting when he played Lucky, a redneck who lucked out when he “slipped on pee-pee” at a gas station and won $53,000 in the resulting lawsuit. Eventually Lucky would also win the affections of Hank Hill’s niece, Luanne, and they would later get married and have a child. Towards the end of the show’s run, Petty was more or less a regular part of King Of The Hill's cast, even though he was still credited as a guest star. One can only hope that if a radio interviewer asked him if it was difficult to transition from music to acting, he would respond with "would you ask Billy Bob Thornton that"

 He’s been immortalized in the world of hip-hop… albeit with a different spelling of his name.


 In 2012, Little Dragon, Killer Mike, and Big Boi released the song “Thom Pettie,” which features the chorus “Thom Pettie that ho/Free falling, we out all night.” In an interview with the Canadian site Metro News, Big Boi claimed that “Tom Pettying” or “Thom Pettieing” simply referred to having a wild, unpredictable night out that could take you anywhere. This was originally referred to as “free falling,” and eventually morphed into “Tom Pettying.” I have no cue how Tom feels about this — neither does Big Boi — but… I guess he should be flattered? I mean, Big Boi and Killer Mike are hip-hop legends, so that’s pretty cool, even though they’ve both done far better work than “Thom Pettie.”


 He turned down a chance to record “The Boys Of Summer,” and it became a huge hit for Don Henley.



 In 1984, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell was working on a demo for what we become “The Boys Of Summer.” He offered the track to Petty, but he balked at it's heavy use of synthesizers, Campbell then offered the track to Don Henley, who wrote the lyrics, and had a huge hit. It’s interesting to think what the song would have become in the hands of Petty, but that’s a mystery that will never be resolved.



The first album Petty ever bought was Playboy, a 1962 R&B hit by the Marvelettes. 12-year-old Petty cashed in Coke bottles to raise the $3 he needed to buy the record.



Petty successfully sued the tire company B.F. Goodrich for $1 million after they used a jingle in a 1987 TV commercial that bore remarkable resemblances to his song, “Mary’s New Car.”



Petty appeared on The Simpsons episode “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation” (season 14, episode 2), alongside other rock greats Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Lenny Kravitz, Elvis Costello, and Brian Setzer.



Petty’s wedding in 2001 to his second wife, Dana York, was officiated by rock and roll legend Little Richard.



Petty worked for a time as a gravedigger in his youth. So, coincidentally, did Joe Strummer of the Clash and Dave Vanian of the Damned.



Petty, a native of Florida, very publicly changed his mind about the Confederate flag late in his career. The Heartbreakers had used Confederate insignia to market their 1985 album Southern Accents, but Petty later said that this was “a downright stupid thing to do.” He maintained “good feelings for the South” and its “wonderful people,” but he explained that “when they wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a black person. I blame myself for not doing that,” he added. “I should have gone around the fence and taken a good look at it.”



As a member of the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, Petty collaborated with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, and Jeff Lynne. All five band members adopted pseudonyms as members of the fictional Wilbury clan. On their first album, the triple-platinum Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 (1988), Petty was known as Charlie T. Wilbury, and on their second album, the misleadingly named Vol. 3 (1990), he was Muddy Wilbury.



Petty’s final appearance was at a sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl on September 25, 2017, one week before his death. The concert concluded a summer tour, partly in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Heartbreakers, which Petty had called their “last trip around the country.”  As show came to a close, he grabbed the mic and said, “We love you dearly. I want to thank you for 40 years of a really great time. We’re almost out of time. We got time for this, right here.”



"Breakdown"

 
At first, the distinctive guitar lick, courtesy of Heatbreaker Mike Campbell, was only used at the end of the song. A singer named Dwight Twilley came by the studio when Petty was playing it back and suggested they use it throughout the song. Petty liked the idea, and called the band back to the studio in the middle of the night to re-record it. Twilley, who had a hit in 1975 with "I'm On Fire," was signed to the same label as Petty, and was on the same career path for a while. Petty sang on some of Twilley's songs, including his 1984 hit "Girls."



 
Lyrically more sparse than most Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tracks, "Breakdown" finds Petty ready to end a union that has become toxic. "Go ahead and give it to me," he tells her.



 
When the band first recorded this song, it was 7-minutes long, with an extended guitar solo at the end. The final version clocks in at a tidy 2:43.



 
This was Petty's first single. When it was first released in January 1977 it went nowhere, but after months of touring, it was re-released in October and made it to #40 in the US.



 
This was featured in the 1978 movie FM. About a radio station in California, the movie was the basis for the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati. This was also included on the soundtrack.




"American Girl"



A track from the first Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers album, "American Girl" was never a hit, but it became one of their most popular songs. Part of its lasting appeal is its intrigue, as it is the subject of an urban myth that reads as follows:

The University of Florida is located in Petty's hometown of Gainesville, Florida. A dorm at the school, Beatty Towers, provided the backdrop to a popular urban legend at UF as well as the story behind this song. The story was that there was this virginal, All-American, debutante sort of girl, blonde locks and all, who decided to take hallucinogens for the first time while in her room at Beatty Towers. This being the 1960's and the age of limitless possibilities, it was pretty common to do something like that, especially in a college setting. Apparently, the girl thought she could fly, so she exited through the window and arrived face first on the concrete below. Some modern minstrels like to add that she jumped from the 13th floor, but this is probably part of campus lore. This incident was a big deal in Gainesville, which was still a picturesque Southern college town. It represented the end of innocence experienced by baby-boomers during the 1970's. Using it as inspiration, Tom Petty wove a captivating and poignant song based on this story for his first album and the rest is history. Expanding on the concept of innocence lost, this song speaks volumes and resonates even today. Beatty Towers are by State Road 441, which is mentioned in the second verse.



 
Tom Petty said of this song: "I wrote that in a little apartment I had in Encino. It was right next to the freeway and the cars sometimes sounded like waves from the ocean, which is why there's the line about the waves crashing on the beach. The words just came tumbling out very quickly - and it was the start of writing about people who are longing for something else in life, something better than they have."



 
Mike Campbell has been The Heartbreakers' guitarist since they formed the band. Here's what he told us about this song: "We used to have people come up to us and tell us they thought it was about suicide because of the one line about 'if she had to die,' but what they didn't get was, the whole line is 'if she had to die trying.' Some people take it literally and out of context. To me it's just a really beautiful love song. It does have some Florida imagery."



 
Mike Campbell said: "We cut that track on the 4th of July. I don't know if that had anything to do with Tom writing it about an American girl."



  
Even though Petty and his band were from the US, this caught on in England long before it got any attention in America. As a result, Petty started his first big tour in the UK, where this was a bigger hit.



 
This was featured in the 1991 movie Silence Of The Lambs. It was used in a scene where a female character is listening to it in a car before she meets Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who abducts her.



 
The Goo Goo Dolls played this at the 2001 "Concert For New York," a benefit show organized by Paul McCartney. Classic rockers like The Who and David Bowie were big hits among the crowd of police officers and firefighters, and they responded very well when The Goo Goo Dolls played this.




Petty gave his reaction to the performance: "I was watching the 9/11 concert in New York and the Goo Goo Dolls played 'American Girl.' I could see the crowd cheering in this really patriotic context. But it was just a story when I wrote it. In my mind, the girl was looking for the strength to move on, and she found it. It's one of my favourites."



 
Petty credits their producer, Denny Cordell, with helping him understand the importance of crafting a story in the lyrics to this song. Petty says Cordell told him, "When you put a little truth in a song, it elevates things."




In the Bob Dylan tradition, Petty doesn't have a typical singing voice, but as heard in this song, he writes compelling lyrics that he delivers with conviction.



  
Petty and the Heartbreakers played this to open their set at the halftime show of the Super Bowl in 2008.

 


Petty told Mojo that the girl in this song was not based anyone in particular. "She was a composite, a character who yearned for more than had life had dealt her."



 
Hillary Clinton used this song at her campaign rallies when she was running against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. The choice was based solely on the title, as they lyric about desperate longing wasn't the message she was trying to get across.



 
This was the last song that Tom Petty ever performed. His final gig was at the legendary Hollywood Bowl on September 25, 2017 and the rock veteran closed his set with "American Girl." Petty died a week later at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital on October 2, 2017 following a cardiac arrest.



RIP





 

Last edited by arabchanter (26/7/2018 11:51 pm)

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers: never really got into them either. 

Musically Petty's band were good, but I never enjoyed the singing.

This is a bit of a barren period in the 1001 list, for me.

DAY 353.
Boston............................................Boston   (1976)










After the celebration of the Bicentennial in the United States, engineer-turned-guitarist Donald "Tom" Scholtz and his bandmate's unleashed soft-rock's ultimate Christmas present in December 1976.


The definitive anthem "More Than A Feeling" alternatively lifting and loud, it sounds like a blueprint for "Smells Like Teen Spirit".......Nirvana even took to vamping it when they played "Teen Spirit" live. The song's enduring popularity helped make "Boston" a multi-platinum monster.



I had this album back in the day, and still love "More Than A Feeling"

DAY 351.
David Bowie............................................Station to Station   (1976)










This is not one of my favourite Bowie albums, it's by no means the worst, and it does have one of his best songs from his post Aladin Sane days, the very catchy TVC 15 seemingly about Iggy Pop thinking his girlfriend's been swallowed up by a telly? TVC15 and Golden years were the only tracks that I really had any time for, the rest were pretty average in my humbles, apart from the title track, that was 10 minutes of torture, ken the boy was haeing issues but for fucks sake, what the fuck was that aboot.


Anyways, I'm repeating myself again, but much preferred his earlier stuff, this album wont be going into my collection.



Bits & Bobs;

Have written loads about Bowie previously (if interested)




Found this piece that might give you a wee insight into Bowie's state of mind in '76;



Corinne Schwab is probably the last holdover from David Bowie’s glitterglam phase — the days of Aladdin Sane, Moonage Daydream, gaudy costumes, hulking bodyguards, ex-manager Tony De Fries and the back-room-at-Max’s-Kansas-City mystique. In her three years as his secretary, Corinne has watched Bowie shrewdly work up to his most difficult move yet: the switch from cultish deco rocker to a wide-appeal film and recording star/entertainer. “I want to be a Frank Sinatra figure,” Bowie declares. “And I will succeed.”

Wheeling a cart in a Hollywood supermarket just three blocks from where David is working on his new LP, Station to Station, Corinne says she has no doubts about something so obvious as Bowie’s success in achieving his stated goal. The way she sees it, David has only one problem. “I’ve got to put more weight on that boy,” she sighs. And with that she carefully places eight quarts of extra-rich milk in the basket.



 Down the street at Cherokee Studios, David Bowie is just back from three vice-free months in New Mexico where he starred in Nick Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. He is still glowing from the experience and, says Corinne, the healthiest he’s been in years. He is relaxed and almost humble as he scoots around the studio and directs his musicians (Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, guitars; George Murray, bass and Dennis Davis, drums) through the songs. It is a complete evolution from the David Bowie of six months before. But then, of course, anything less than a total personality upheaval would be entirely out of character for him. “I love it,” he cracked several months earlier. “I’m really just my own little corporation of characters.”



 He is actually anything one wants him to be at any given moment — a paranoid hustler, an arrogant opportunist, a versatile actor, a gentleman, maybe even a genius. He had, after all, made a warning up front. “Don’t expect to find the real me … the David Jones [his true name] underneath all this.”



 May 1975 — It’s four in the morning, Hollywood time, and David Bowie is twitching with energy. He’s fidgeting, jabbing a cigarette in and out of his pursed lips, bouncing lightly on a stool behind the control board in a makeshift demo studio, staring through the glass at Iggy Pop.



Bowie has spent the last nine hours composing, producing and playing every instrument on the backing track, and it is finally time for Pop to do his bit. After all, this is Iggy’s demo.


 Bowie touches a button and the room is filled with an ominous, dirgelike instrumental track. The shirtless Iggy listens intently for a moment, then approaches the mike. He has prepared no lyrics, and in the name of improv, he snarls:

 You go out at night from your sixty dollar single down in West Hollywood
With your ripped off clothes that are bulging at the seams.
I can’t believe that you don’t know you look ugly.
I mean, are you really all that dumb?
I mean, I don’t want you to be that dumb, you know.
But you are.
You’re just dumb. Straight out of the cradle and into the hole with you.
He begins screaming.
When I walk through the do-wa.
I’m your new breed of who-wa.
We will nooowwwwwwwwww drink to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.




 Bowie clutches his heart and beams like a proud father watching his kid in the school play. His whisper is full of wonder. “They just don’t appreciate Iggy.” he is saying. “He’s Lenny fucking Bruce and James Dean. When that adlib flow starts, there’s nobody like him. It’s verbal jazz, man!”



 Pop himself is spent from his eruption; he listens only once to the completed cut and groggily proclaims it “the best thing I’ve ever done.” A woman acquaintance materializes, as if on cue, to drag him out by a handful of his platinum-dyed hair.


 “Go and do what you will,” Bowie calls after them. “Just don’t be too long. We have a lot more work to do tomorrow.”

 “Don’t worry,” Pop mumbles. “She never lets me kiss her anyway. Ever … “


 “Good, Good.” David adds an afterthought. “Iggy, please keep healthy.”

 Pop is still mumbling as he walks out the door. “I don’t believe my patience,” he says to no one in particular. “I just don’t believe my patience. She won’t even let me give her one little smooch … ”


 He leaves Bowie laughing, partly at the soporific antiwit, but mostly over a successful effort at producing the unproducible.



 Less than a minute later, Iggy Pop is the farthest thing from his mind. Bowie’s blanched, bony face has already fallen into furrows. “I am very, very bored,” he says.


 But he is still charged up. He jumps to his feet, skips to the next room and straps on an electric guitar. This is Bowie the rocker and the image is striking. He stands under the studio’s deep blue light, dressed like a scruffy street corner newsboy from the Thirties, bashing on a bright orange instrument that perfectly matches the hair peaking out from under his cap. Over the next couple of hours, Bowie moves at breakneck speed. Before long he has written and recorded a new song and entitled it “Movin’ On.” Only three months before, he and John Lennon had come up with the Number One single “Fame” in only 45 minutes. “Another song,” he groans. “That’s the last thing I need. I write an album a month as it is. I’ve already got two new albums in the can. Give me a break.” He is happy. It’s 7 a.m. and David Bowie is finally content as he locks up the studio.



 Driving a borrowed VW bug through sluggish morning traffic toward the Hollywood Hills, his eyes never stop scanning the streets. He thrills over the massage parlors, billboards and stumbling itinerants. “L.A. is my favorite museum,” he says.


 Bowie had fled New York by train (he does not fly) only five days earlier. After the numerous lawsuits, countersuits and injunctions over his split with manager Tony De Fries and the MainMan Companies, New York, he says, began to “close in on me.” Now he is staying at the home of Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes. While Purple is on tour, he’s been living there with Hughes’s housekeeper, Phil. When he lets himself into the house, David finds a stranger, Phil’s houseguest, drunk and half asleep on the sofa.


 Bowie extends his hand tentatively. “Hello, I’m David. Who are you?”




The stranger is quickly aroused. Looking exactly as if he’d just awakened to find David Bowie standing in front of him, he pumps the hand wildly. “I’m Jack,” he says. “Hey man, fucking-A great to meet you. Phil told me you were staying here too. He’s asleep now … so how you fuckin’ doin’ anyway?”


 After a quick breakfast spent dodging inquiries (“I hear you only play soul music now. That true?”), Bowie graciously explains that he’s late for an appointment. He leaves the house, hops into the car and shrieks: “Oh my God, what a cretin! He’s totally wrecked my nerves, that oaf! Christ!” He claims down and politely begins easing out of the planned interview — his first in more than three years. He begs exhaustion after two full days without sleep. “Why don’t I just drop you off at your hotel and we can get together next week?” He has already swung into the direction of the Beverly Wilshire. “You know, I may even check myself into the hotel for a day of sleep. No one will know where I am, no one will bother me … yes, that is exactly what I’ll do.” At the front desk, however, he hears that guitarist Ron Wood is staying in Room 207, and Bowie decides to pay his old friend a visit. He procures a fine champagne and raps on the door.



 Wood has just fallen asleep, but is glad to see Bowie nonetheless. They exchange stories on what they’re up to in L.A., then settle down to listen to a cassette of the Jeff Beck Group live at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. Sprawled across the hotel room bed, Bowie is by now well into his fifth or sixth wind. And the interview is on. “Well,” he asks, “what do you want to talk about?” One mentions the MainMan lawsuits.



 Bowie’s speech assumes a quiet, studied tone. “The split had been building up for some time. For the last year and a half, I’ve had no empathy with them whatsoever. It took me that long to stop touring and come back to finding out where the office was really at. I guess it was a bit hard for them to come to terms with what I wanted to do. A lot of people who I never even met got involved. I grew to dislike their attitude. So I just said goodbye. No, of course, it isn’t that simple, but I’m going to make it that simple. It’s not going to bother me. I’ll survive. I’m far from broke. I’m free.” (Reached at the New York MainMan offices, De Fries refused to comment.)





I‘ve never been so happy,” Bowie says. “I’ve got that good old ‘I’m gonna change the world’ thine back again. I had that once. I was a strong idealist once, then when I saw all my efforts being mistranslated. I turned into an avid pessimist. A manic depressive. Now I feel strong mentally again. You could probably hear from Young Americans that I’m on an upper. It’s the first record I’ve actually liked since Hunky Dory.



 “Basically I haven’t liked a lot of the music I’ve been doing the past few years. I forgot that I’m not a musician and never have been. I’ve always wanted to be a film director, so unconsciously the two mediums got amalgamated. I was trying to put cinematic concepts into an audio staging. It doesn’t work.”



 At the time, Bowie had already signed the contracts for his film debut in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Not that director Nick Roeg (whose previous credits include Far from the Madding Crowd, Walkabout, Don’t Look Back and Performance) had an easy time procuring his star. David disliked the script sent him but was fascinated by the fact that Roeg had waited eight hours for him after he forgot an appointment. The two held an eight-hour conversation lasting into the next afternoon and Bowie was sold. “It didn’t take long for me to realize the man was a genius. He’s at a level of understanding of art that tremendously overshadows me. I was and still am in awe of Roeg. Total awe.” Still, parts of the script were rewritten.



 Before he fell to earth, Bowie had been reported ready to star with Elizabeth Taylor in Bluebird. “I never said that,” David counters, “Elizabeth Taylor did. It was her idea for me to be doing the film. I read the script though and it was very dry. I mean she was a nice woman and all, even if I didn’t get much of a chance to get to know her. She did tell me I reminded her of James Dean — that endeared me to her — but her script was so … boring. My own films are more important anyway.”



 Bowie has been voraciously writing screenplays and scenarios ever since his three-month Diamond Dogs tour of two years ago. His first completed script is Dogs, a film which could star Terence Stamp and Iggy Pop if Bowie can work it out. David is especially amused by his casting. “Terence is going to be Iggy’s father,” he titters. “Isn’t that lovely? I can’t wait to direct it.



 “I think, you see, that the most talented actors around are all in rock & roll. Iggy never should have been a rock & roll singer, he’s an actor. Dave Johansen [the former New York Doll] is an actor. A renaissance in filmmaking is going to come from rock. Not because of it, but despite it. I’ll tell you, I’ve got nothing to do with music. I’ve always interpreted or played roles with my songs.”



 Ron Wood, who’s been quietly listening all along, comes alive. “Why did you get into rock & roll, then?” he asks.“Rock & roll is a very accessible medium for any young artist. Don’t you think so? I like music but it’s not my life by any stretch of the imagination. I mean I was a painter before, but as a painter I couldn’t make enough money to live on. So I went into advertising and that was awful. That was the worst. I got out of that and tried rock & roll because it seemed like an enjoyable way of making my money and taking four or five years out to decide what I really wanted to do. I have no ideals on being a starving artist at all.”


 “Same as me,” Wood chortles. “Otherwise we’d both still be in art school, eh?”“Absolutely.” Assured that Wood is an interested listener, Bowie settles into a monologue:“It’s interesting how this all started. At the time I did Aladdin Sane, all I had was a small cult audience in England from Hunky Dory. I think it was out of curiosity that I began wondering what it would be like to be a rock & roll star. So basically, I wrote a script and played it out as Ziggy Stardust onstage and on record. I mean it when I say I didn’t like all those albums — Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live. It wasn’t a matter of liking them, it was ‘Did they work or not?’ Yes, they worked. They kept the trip going. Now. I’m all through with rock & roll. Finished. I’ve rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted but I won’t do it again.”


 One can assume then, that Bowie is asking for a separation from the “Glitter Rock King” tag?

 David is offended by the notion. “Not at all. I’m very proud of that tag. That’s what the public’s made me and that’s what I am. Who am I to question that? I am the King of Glitter Rock, aren’t I, Ron?”


 “The reigning king.” Wood goes to his writing desk and scribbles. “I don’t like giving people tags,” he cackles, “but here. For the king.” He hands Bowie a $15 price tag, on the back of which he’s written “King of Glitter Rock.”


 “Fifteen dollars!” Bowie deadpans. “Well, I guess glitter rock was always cheap anyway.” A full minute is spent in laughter, then Bowie abruptly turns skittish and paranoid. “I keep drifting off.” He admits to being tired. “My thought forms are already fragmented, to say the least. I’ve had to do ctitups on my writing for some time so that I might be able to put it all back into some coherent form again. My actual writing doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense … frankly, I’m surprised Young Americans has done so well. I really, honestly and truly, don’t know how much longer my albums will sell. I think they’re going to get more diversified, more extreme and radical right along with my writing. And I really don’t give a shit … ” Finally Bowie bows:


 “Could I have a little break? I can’t go on like this. Just sitting here, talking … it wears me out.”


 June 1975 — A straw hat cocked lazily over one eye, David is sitting cross-legged against the wall in a small, candle-lit, book-lined room. The framed cover photo from Aladdin Sane hangs above his head in direct juxtaposition. It is one of his favorite ploys — striking not only poses but whole portraits.



 It’s been three weeks since the last meeting, and he’s moved from Hughes’s house into the more centrally located Hollywood home of lawyer and former booking agent Michael Lippman. Bowie and Iggy never did make it back into the studio. Pop slept past the booked time, called up drunk several nights later and when Bowie told him to “go away” — meaning “hang up” — Iggy did just that. Now he’s disappeared. “I hope he’s not dead,” says Bowie, “he’s not a good act.”



 Bowie announces that he’s got a new project, his autobiography. “I’ve still not read an autobiography by a rock person that had the same degree of presumptuousness and arrogance that a rock & roll record used to have. So I’ve decided to write my autobiography as a way of life. It may be a series of books. I’m so incredibly methodical that I would be able to categorize each section and make it a bleedin’ encyclopedia. You know what I mean? David Bowie as the microcosm of all matter.”


 If the first chapter is any indication, The Return of the Thin White Duke is more telling of Bowie’s “fragmented mind” than of his life story. It is a series of sketchy self-portraits and isolated incidents apparently strung together in random, probably cutout order. Despite David’s enthusiasm, one suspects it may never outlast his abbreviated attention span. But it’s a good idea. At 29, Bowie’s life is already perfect fodder for an autobiography.


 The son of a children’s-home publicist, David Jones grew up prowling the tough neighborhoods in the south of London. One fistfight paralyzed his left pupil. Today, caught at a certain angle, it looks like a clear marble. Eye operations kept him prostrate for the better part of his 16th year. During the same bedridden time, his brother Terry, six years David’s senior, was committed to a mental institution. It was then, he remembers, that he began to draw up the blueprint for David Bowie.


 “Who knows? Maybe I’m insane too, it runs in my family, but I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought. ‘Fuck that. I want to be a Superman.’ I guess I realized very early that man isn’t a very clever mechanism. I wanted to make myself better. I always thought that I should change all the time … I know for a fact that my personality now is totally different to what it was then. I took a look at my thoughts, my appearance, my expressions, my mannerisms and idiosyncrasies and didn’t like them. So I stripped myself down, chucked things out and replaced them with a completely new personality. When I heard someone say something intelligent. I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked. I took it. I still do that. All the time. It’s just like a car, man, replacing parts.”
 Bowie learned to apply this theory to his music. “If I’d been an original thinker. I’d never have been in rock & roll. There’s no new was of saying anything.”


 He recalls himself as a “trendy mod” through his late teens. “I was never a flower child. Look what’s happened to them with all their love and peace. They’ve grown up into the SLA kidnapping Patty Hearst and the like. I’d been into meditation years before it became fashionable through Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. I was always a sort of throwback to the Beat period in my early thinking. And when the hippies came along with all their funny tie-dyes and things, it all seemed naive and wrong. It didn’t have a backbone. I hate weak things. I can’t stand weakness. I wanted to hit everybody that came along wearing love beads.



 “I never got into acid either. I did it three or four times and it was colorful, but my own imagination was already richer. I never got into grass at all. Hash for a time, but never grass. I guess drugs have been a part of my life for the past ten years, but never anything very heavy … I’ve had short flirtations with smack and things, but it was only for the mystery and the enigma. I like fast drugs. I hate anything that slows me down.”


 A high school dropout, David had already changed his name and gone through a number of pop groups when he met his wife Angela. She was the girlfriend of a Mercury Records talent scout who refused to sign David. Later, she pulled strings and he got a contract with the label. Within months he had a hit with his first single, “Space Oddity.”“I married her,” David explains, “because she was one of the few women [his emphasis] that I was capable of living with for more than a week. We never suffocated each other at all. We always bounced around. No. I don’t think we fell in love. I’ve never been in love, thank God. Love is a disease that breeds jealousy, anxiety and brute anger. Everything but love. It’s a bit like Christianity. That never happened to me and Angie. She’s a remarkably pleasant girl to keep coming back to and, for me, always will be. I mean, there’s nobody … I’m very demanding sometimes. Not physically, but mentally. I’m very intense about anything I do. I scare away most people that I’ve lived with.”


 In 1971, the Bowies had a son, named Zowie. Having a child, Bowie says, “pleased my ego a lot. I think Zowie’s a survivor. He’s very definitely an independent person, of his own choosing, it seems. And I find it quite easy to think of him not as mine or as Angie’s, but as Gibran has said, ‘a little plant.’ I don’t feel very paternal about him.”


 Bowie adamantly states that he is still and always will be bisexual. And he will not deny that he has fully exploited the media potential of that. “I remember the first time it got out. Somebody asked me in an interview if I ever had a gay experience and I said, ‘Yes, of course, I am a bisexual.’ The guy didn’t know what I meant. He gave me this horrified look of ‘Oh my God, that means he’s got a cock and a cunt.’ I had no idea my sexuality would get so widely publicized. It was just a very sort of off-the-cuff little remark. Best thing I ever said, I suppose.”


 He returns to the subject of his autobiography: “It’s not that I have anything to say, it’s a matter of laying antistyle on people and making them upset. ‘Who the hell is Bowie to think he deserves an encyclopedia?’ But it’s not what you actually put on the canvas, it’s the reason why you did it. Like the Andy Warhol thing. It wasn’t why he painted a Campbell’s soup can. It was ‘What sort of man paints a Campbell’s soup can?’ That’s what aggravates people. That’s the premise behind antistyle. And antistyle is the premise behind me.


 “I already consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretension. Really. I’m quite serious about that. The only thing that seems to shock anybody anymore is something that’s pretentious or kitsch. Unless you take things to extremes nobody will believe or pay attention to you. You have to hit them on the head and pretension does the trick. It shocks as much as a Dylanesque thing did ten years ago.”


 Suddenly — always suddenly — David is on his feet and rushing to a nearby picture window. He thinks he’s seen a body fall from the sky. “I’ve got to do this,” he says, pulling a shade down on the window. A ballpoint-penned star has been crudely drawn on the inside. Below it is the word “Aum.” Bowie lights a black candle on his dresser and immediately blows it out to leave a thin trail of smoke floating upward. “Don’t let me scare the pants off you. It’s only protective. I’ve been getting a little trouble from … the neighbors.”


 Something has triggered the emergence of another David Bowie — the apocalyptic theorizer in albums ranging from Ziggy to Diamond Dogs. “I think we are due for a revival of God awareness. Not a wishy-washy kind of fey, flower-child thing, but a very medieval, firm-handed masculine God awareness where we will go out and make the world right again. I’m feeling more and more that way.


 Rock & roll has been really bringing me down lately. It’s in great danger of becoming an immobile, sterile fascist that constantly spews its propaganda on every arm of the media. It rules and dictates a level of thought and clarity of intelligence that you’ll never raise above. You don’t have a fucking chance to hear Beethoven on any radio station anymore. You’ve got to listen to the O’Jays. I mean, disco music is great. I used disco to get my first Number One single [“Fame”] but it’s an escapist’s way out. It’s musical soma. Rock & roll too — it will occupy and destroy you that way. It lets in lower elements and shadows that I don’t think are necessary. Rock has always been the devil’s music. You can’t convince me that it isn’t.”


 How about specifics? Is Mick Jagger evil?

 “Mick himself? Oh Lord no. He’s not unlike Elton John, who represents the token queen — like Liberace used to. No, I don’t think Mick is evil at all. He represents the sort of harmless, bourgeois kind of evil that one can accept with

 “I’ve got this thing that rock shouldn’t be overstated. I did my bit of Ziggy, I made my explosion and that’s it. When the artist and song is novel and new and enigmatic, then that’s good. That’s when it’s strong, But when it has a familiarity and understanding, it’s no longer rock & roll.


 “I wasn’t at all surprised Aladdin Sane made my career. I packaged a totally credible plastic rock star — much better than any sort of Monkees fabrication. My plastic rocker was much more plastic than anybody’s.


 “I fell for Ziggy too. It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn’t have been hard. Concerts alone got so enormously frightening that even the papers were saying, ‘This ain’t rock music, this is bloody Hitler! Something must be done!’ And they were right. It was awesome. Actually, I wonder … I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.


 “I was thinking a few days ago that when I got bored with films and had far too many showings in art galleries of my paintings and sculptures, maybe I should be prime minister of England. I wouldn’t mind being the first English president of the United States either. I’m certainly right wing enough. Do you think Jerry would swap positions with me? I think that would be lovely, don’t you?”


 Chain-smoking Rothman after Rothman, Bowie is now just spilling words and concepts out without regard for their ramifications. His sole target now is impact. Shock. Effect.


 “Listen, I mean it. I’ll bloody lead this country, make it a great fucking nation. I can’t exist happily and make records and be safe because, man, it’s depressing … Everyone whimpering about the state of things. So what do I do? Just sit by and wait for someone else to sort it all out? No way. The masses are silly. Just look at the cultural leaders of today. Once they were Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Elvis Presley. Now it’s Robert Redford and John Denver … and these are supposed to be the degenerate Seventies. It doesn’t look good for America. They let people like me trample all over their country.


 “I have this dream. I’d like to host a satellite television show and invite all the biggest bands onto one stage. Then I’d come out with a great big wheelbarrow of machine guns and ask them, ‘Now how many of you are gonna do anything? How many are going to pick up a gun and how many of you are gonna cling to your guitars?'”


 Before he can pick up the thread again one feels the need to question Bowie on the seriousness of his tirades. He answers with an impatient huff that seems to ask, how much longer will it take you silly mortals to understand? “I have to carry through with my conviction that the artist is also the medium. The only way that I can be this abrasive as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view. I can only do that by believing in my point of view with sincerity. And I do. I honestly believe everything that I’ve said. I believe that rock & roll is dangerous. It could well bring about a very evil feeling in the West. I do want to rule the world. There’s always a pendulum swing, right? Well, we’ve had the high with rock. It’s got to go the other way now. And that’s where I see it heading, bringing about the dark era. That we weenie boys with our makeup and funny clothes and whatnot, I feel that we’re only heralding something even darker than ourselves. ‘Cause we were never dark ourselves. We just bounded around the periphery. Lou [Reed] is not evil. Iggy isn’t evil. There’s something else. And it’s evil because it supplements people’s sensitivity. Just look at Led Zeppelin. Our natural inclination to be adventurous with our brains is being repressed. I don’t like or approve of loud rock & roll.”


 That’s why he broke up his backing group, the Spiders from Mars. “I gave them more life than I intended. And I was also getting honestly bored. There’s only so much you can do with that kind of a band. I wanted no more to do with that loud thing. Hurt my ears. Wasn’t pleasing my mind too much either. Since then, poor Mick [Ronson] has completely missed his vocation. From his faulty solo career right on down. I’ve been disappointed. He could have been amazing. I just don’t know. Christ, I haven’t spoken properly with him in years. I wonder if he’s changed.”


 One reminds Bowie of a remark Ronson made to Melody Maker that “David needs someone around him to say ‘Fuck off, you’re stupid.’ He needs one person who won’t bow to him … “


 Bowie grins. “I’ve got God. Who’s Mick got?” He turns stern. “I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about rock & roll. Now look what I’ve done. Let’s talk about something else.” He picks his appearance on the Grammy awards as the next topic. “Did you see it? It’s on videotape in the next room if you didn’t. You really should see it. It’s only a minute. You see, the Grammies were very significant for me. It was like walking a tightrope. There were mostly aging middle-class show business people in that audience. It was a question of entertaining them or coming off like just another rock singer. I really did feel I was David Bowie and not a rock singer. It was very strange. Strange, strange, strange.


 “There are very few who have broken out of rock and into any other medium, much less films. I’m determined to do it. The media should be used. You can’t let it use you, which is what is happening to the majority of rock stars around. And as for touring, I honestly believe that it kills my art. I will never ever tour again.”


 Several months later, Bowie apparently changed his mind and announced that on February 2nd he would kick off a 34-date North American tour. “The tour,” Bowie explained, “will make an obscenely large amount of money which I desperately need to set up my media-production company, Bewlay Bros.”


 The tour is a turnabout for Bowie; the production company is consistent with his previously stated goal of breaking the “dreaded circle” of being a star enmeshed in the music business. “I’m optimistic enough to think that of any rock singer, I’ve got a better chance of escaping. One person who I admire, quite honestly, is Frank Sinatra. He’s broken out. He hates the fucking music business game and so do I. I refuse to play it. I’ve never made an album capitalizing on the success of the previous one.

 “I want to be an impact on myself. I’d much rather take chances than stay safe. Like in the movie I’m doing. Everything’s against me. I’m going into a dead straight, nonmusical role. No singing. And I will be bloody good. I have to be. ‘Cause if I ain’t, that’s it. Another rock singer … is still a rock singer. If that’s the case, I want to go out like Vince Taylor.”


 Vince Taylor?


 “Yeah. He was the inspiration for Ziggy. Vince Taylor was an American rock & roll star from the Sixties who was slowly going crazy. Finally, he fired his band and went onstage one night in a white sheet. He told the audience to rejoice, that he was Jesus. They put him away.” David Bowie straightens up, removes the straw hat and rakes several fingers through his orange hair.


 “Think you can use any of that?”



"TVC 15"

 
Bowie wrote this after hearing about Iggy Pop's drug-induced hallucination, where he thought a girlfriend was being consumed by her television set. Details of the story are sketchy, as Bowie remembers little about the drug-fueled recording of his Station To Station album. The song proved a modest hit on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching #33 in the UK and #64 in the US.


 
Bowie performed an upbeat version of this at the Live Aid concert in London in 1985.


 
American keyboardist Roy Bittan, who is best known as a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, tinkled the ivories. Bowie asked him to sound like New Orleans blues singer and pianist Professor Longhair.

Bittan recalled to Uncut in 2016: "When I recorded with him on Station to Station, the first thing he wanted me to play was 'TVC 15.' He said to me, 'Hey can you do like a Professor Longhair thing on this song?' I was like, 'Professor Longhair? This Brit is asking me about Professor Longhair?' I was really taken aback.

The funny thing was that literally three weeks before that session, we had been in Houston and (E Street bassist) Garry Talent and I had seen in the paper that Professor Longhair was playing in some roadhouse outside of town. So we went to this place and Longhair was sitting at an upright piano and playing in this little club – it was fantastic. So when David asked me to do that, it was a very fortuitous moment and very surprising."



"Golden Years"

Bowie's ex-wife Angela claims this was written for her. Bowie does appear to be addressing someone specific in this song, encouraging them to revel in their "golden years": "Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel, come get up my baby, look at that sky, life's begun, nights are warm and the days are young."


 
Bowie wrote this with the intention of giving it to Elvis Presley, but he reportedly refused the song. Elvis died two years later. (I couldn't imagine Elvis singing this)


 
Bowie performed this when he appeared on the TV show, Soul Train, in 1975. He was one of the first white singers to appear on the show. Bowie reportedly got drunk beforehand to try and calm his nerves and the footage does appear to show him stumbling over his lyrics.


 
Producer, Harry Maslin, said he achieved the "round" quality of the backing voices by using an old RCA microphone.


 
 

and



Looking up a bit. Although not in any favourite albums list for me, there are quite a few song I enjoy on these two. Most of the Station to Station album tracks were released as singles, quite unusual.

Favourites from the two are Roadrunner, Golden Years and especially TVC15.

So I was feeling a wee bit optimistic, and then the Eagles came along.

DAY 352.
Joni Mitchell.............................................Hejira   (1976)











One welcoming point about this album was she wasn't quite so screechy, this was alright if you read the lyrics as you go on, but have to repeat what I said about her last album

" Joni Mitchell without a shadow of a doubt is a polished and accomplished wordsmith, and  a lot of her subject matter tends to be in the "bring me down zone," lyrically she does rank up there with all her contemporaries."

"For me the problem I have is musically it doesn't nearly match the beauty of her writing, it seems like it's almost an afterthought a lot of the time (maybe I'd prefer her as a poet?").


So this is my feelings towards Joni Mitchell, and as a consequence not enough to let this album find it's way into my collection.



Bits & Bobs;


Written loads about this artist previously (if interested)



Here's a Rolling Stone review about the album;



It is the tug of war between the symbolist and the siren that makes Joni Mitchell’s albums alternately alluring and forbidding. On the one hand she is the most ruthlessly analytical member of the music-as-therapy songwriting school, and often her songs seem intent only on making private sense of her own experience. On the other hand, as a public performer, Mitchell wants to be heard and even enjoyed. To that end she conducts a cool flirtation with her audience. Like a Victorian gentlewoman, she seems afraid that we won’t respect her if she makes obvious advances. Thus, though Court and Spark showed Mitchell blossoming into accessibility, last year’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns brought back the arcane priestess of For the Roses. But now, with Hejira, Mitchell has gravely come a-courting once again.


It is true that she has all but abandoned melodies anyone can whistle, and her brief fling with the standard bridge seems to be over. But if she has denied her listeners memorable tunes and conventional formats, Mitchell displays other musical charms: new, seductive rhythms (not funk, but nearly as entrancing) and lush guitars. While Hejira (the title itself refers to Mohammed’s “flight from danger”) represents a retreat from the inviting accessibility of Court and Spark, it is a retreat with a self-renewing purpose. Mitchell has withdrawn to her roots, to redefine them.



 Nearly all the new songs are built from the bare bones of her early work: modal guitar patterns and near-English-ballad structure. There are none of the frank flirtations with rock-pop Mitchell has used as lures in the past. Hejira contains no “Raised on Robbery,” no “Big Yellow Taxi.” The one concession to popular tastes is the dreamy, blowsy “Blue Motel Room,” which is too much tongue-in-cheek to sustain the torch-song illusion for long. For the rest, verse after long meditative verse is resolved in a single-line refrain which gains in meaning with repetition. The refrains (“Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” “Black crow flying in a blue sky,” etc.) are the only devices approaching a hook: recurring, memorable tags that sum up the song.



 By writing for instruments that she plays well (guitars) and within a genre she understands (folk), Mitchell avoids the self-conscious artiness that marred The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Despite its apparent simplicity and spare instrumentation, the sound is as sophisticated and arresting as anything she’s done. Mitchell has taken advantage of the music’s structural freedom to write some of her most incisive and humorous lyrics. Her singing, too, has developed new warmth; it is breathier than ever. Where she once sounded simply ethereal, she now introduces a sexual roughness which she uses with precision. In fact, her voice is often flexible enough to create the continuity and the climaxes that her melodies lack. But the album is truly held together by the motion of the music, which is as unceasing and hypnotic as the freeways Mitchell describes in her songs.



 For Hejira, as any glance at the cover or the lyrics will prove, is about the Highway: as a symbol of distance or flight; as a stage for encounters or revelations; as a communal umbilical cord relating separate souls and random experiences. The road runs through every song. The old pastoral conventions have been revived in Mitchell’s freeways. Like Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden or Mark Twain’s Mississippi, the highway is a place where the obligations of power and wealth, or merely the confines of civilization, can be momentarily forgotten.



 The road is further represented as Mitchell’s only source of anonymity and acceptance. There she can masquerade as one in a gang of vagabonds (“The Refuge of the Roads”), drink and dance with the locals (“Coyote”) or find unencumbered solitude (“Hejira,” “Amelia”). The desire to escape, to start over, to make things simple again is universal, but in addition the artist often pays for success with a frightening isolation, a woman artist perhaps even more so.



 A current of success-induced guilt ran through such earlier Mitchell songs as “For Free” and “People’s Parties.” Now she openly acknowledges the rewards of achievement along with the penalties, accepting the conflict as inevitable. Her new songs take a long, sometimes painful look at a problem of particular concern to ambitious women: how to reconcile the demands of one’s chosen work with the demands of love and family. The business of music with its irregular hours and frequent travel plays hell with steady love affairs, yet Mitchell can examine these problems with tolerance (“Coyote”) and humor (“Blue Motel Room”).



 The really difficult conflict is between the long-taught myth that a woman should make a total commitment to love and the hard-won discovery that a career may require the same all-consuming passion. When Mitchell sings, “In our possessive coupling/ So much could not be expressed/ So now I am returning to myself/ These things that you and I suppressed,” she is deciding in favor of the artist’s need for unfettered experience and unhampered self-expression. But in “Song for Sharon,” Mitchell admits to the devastating attraction of bridal lace and all of the truelove fantasies that it represents. The only hint of rapprochement between love and music comes at the end of this song, and it is significant that the lines can be read in two ways—as a choice in favor of uncoupled independence or as a vision of a future, perfect love:


 But you still have your music
And I’ve still got my eyes on the land and the sky
You sing for your friends and your family
I’ll walk green pastures by and by




 It is to Joni Mitchell’s credit that she comes to no glib conclusions. The conflict between freedom for art’s sake and the need for love forms the basis of most of her songs, and it is her uncertainty, the alternating warmth and chill, which is most fascinating. But if Mitchell is not always inviting, she is never complacent. With Hejira she redefines the elements of her music with as much courage as when she scrutinizes her aims and motivations. And despite the songs of love lost and plans changed, despite the urgent, often stark consciousness of mortality and the absence of comfortable solutions, Hejira is a curiously optimistic album. In “Black Crow,” Mitchell sings, “In search of love and music/ My whole life has been/ Illumination/ Corruption/ And diving, diving, diving, diving…,” her voice swooping and spiraling on the repeated word. That is what Hejira is about: it is not the answers that are most important but the search itself.



 

DAY 355.
Abba............................................Arrival   (1976)











By 1976, Abba had escaped from the deadly stigma that affects the musical credibility of all Eurovision Song Contest winners. Moreover, their string of hits had proved that they had the commercial wherewithal to continue and expand on their musical conquest of Europe and take on the U.S. market.

DAY 354.
Eagles........................................................Hotel California   (1976)












By the time this came out I'd had just about as much Eagles as a boy can take, I bought the 1972 album "Eagles" on vinyl, but probably looking back,more for nostalgic reasons (singing their songs on the last bus and stuff) than any love for the band.

Even though they had numerous hit songs on the album, I found it quite boring and of it's time, and although I knew most of the songs they seemed very jaded and tired to my old ears, I don't think there was anything on this album that would have made me want to buy it in '76, and you can bet your sweet arse there's fuck all on there that would persuade me to buy it today, this album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;


Have written about this band previously (if interested)


Glenn Frey, was justifiably proud of his band's achievements. Their meticulous harmonies and relaxed country-rock sound dominated airwaves and cassette decks in the 1970s, with global album sales in excess of 150 million.


 Don Henley called Frey "the glue" of the band - a business-minded taskmaster who steered them towards commercial success.


 "He's a big sports fan, so he applied coaching principles to running this band," said the singer. "He recognises people's strengths and gets them to do what they do best."


 The band's manager, Irving Azoff, said: "Early on, he was running around with a T-shirt that said, 'Song Power'.


 "[He] was saying the Eagles were a team and not everybody can be the running back or the quarterback. He was the quarterback."


 Frey's lofty ambitions were fulfilled by Hotel California, The Eagles' fifth album. Released in 1976, it sold 16 million copies in the US and double that figure worldwide.


 While they had been successful before - a greatest hits album collection released earlier the same year had become their first number one - Hotel California was "the zenith of The Eagles", said Frey in 1992, "in that what we had to say came together with our learning of how to make records".


 It sealed the band's reputation. It also sealed their fate.


 The title track remains their most famous recording, a long and intricate rock ballad whose duelling guitar coda has been named the best solo of all time.


 It is ostensibly about a luxury hotel visit that crosses over to the dark side - but it is really an allegory about the hedonistic lifestyle the musicians enjoyed in the 1970s.


 Or at least, that's the most popular interpretation. The song was also rumoured to be about heroin addiction, cannibalism or devil worship (the album cover allegedly shows Anton LaVey, leader of the Church of Satan).


 "Everybody wants to know what that song was about, and we don't know," Frey said in a BBC interview eight years ago.


 A decade earlier, he was more forthcoming, telling NBC's Bob Costas that he and Henley "wanted to write a song that was sort of like an episode of the Twilight Zone".


 "All of our songs were cinematic, but we wanted to open up with [a montage]," he said.


 "It was just one shot to the next - a picture of a guy on the highway, a picture of the hotel, the guy walks in, the door opens, strange people.

 "We take this guy and make him like a character in The Magus, where every time he walks through a door, there's a new version of reality.


 "We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it. And then a lot was read into it - a lot more than probably exists.


 "I think we achieved perfect ambiguity."


 While Henley and Frey wrote the lyrics, guitarist Don Felder composed the bulk of the music, initially recording the song's 12‑string riff in his four‑track home studio.


 When he first played it to the band, they perceived it as "a bizarre mix of musical influences" and the song's working title became Mexican Reggae.


 Recording began in Los Angeles, but the first version of the song was in the wrong key for Henley's raspy vocals.


 "He sounded like Barry Gibb in this high voice," said Felder, who transposed the song from E minor to B minor "which is not a particularly guitar-friendly key, but it was perfect for his voice".


 A second recording turned out to be too fast, so the band started again in Miami, fine-tuning the instrumentation and the lyrics in the process.


 Producer Bill Szymczyk said, "When we recorded it the third time, that was the charm,"


 The band recorded several takes, then spliced together the best bits to create the version we know today.


 "At this stage in their career, The Eagles were pursuing perfection," said Szymczyk, "and in the process of editing I'd hear, 'Well, see if you can do that, Coach,' which was my nickname back then.


 "This might refer to replacing one drum fill with another fill that was a little better, so there'd be an edit at the front and an edit at the end. That's the kind of perfection we were dealing with."

 Once the basic track had been constructed, it took two days to record the closing guitar solos, with Felder and Joe Walsh trading riffs side-by-side in the control room.


 Felder had initially assumed they would improvise this section - but Henley and Frey had other ideas.


 "Joe and I started jamming, and Don said, 'No, no, stop. It's not right,'" Felder said", I said, 'What do you mean it's not right?' And he said, 'You've got to play it just like the demo.'


 "Only problem was, I did that demo a year earlier; I couldn't even remember what was on it. So we had to call my housekeeper in Malibu, who took the cassette, put it in a [ghetto]blaster and played it with the phone held up to the blaster.


 "We recorded it, and I had to sit in Miami and play exactly what was on the demo."


 The perfectionism paid off. Hotel California is the band's most enduring song, still played more than 200 times a month on UK radio, and covered by artists as diverse as The Gipsy Kings, The Killers and Frank Ocean.


 When a US spy plane made an emergency landing in China in 2001, the crew members were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nationality. Apparently, their Chinese captors considered that "the song symbolised America".


 Henley would have disagreed. "We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest," he told Rolling Stone. "Hotel California was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles." In 1995, he referred to the record as being about a "loss of innocence".

 The album, which also contained the singles New Kid In Town and Life In The Fast Lane, "was the best work we did together," Frey said in 1992.


 "We were bristling with confidence. We weren't afraid to step out and take chances. And we had a very, very prolific couple of guitar players," he said.


 Critics may have accused the Eagles of being too slick and polished, but the band had the perfect riposte - 16 platinum discs.


 "Critics lose their leverage all of a sudden when something gets mass acceptance," said Frey. "They're no longer arbiters of taste."


 Still, the accusations stung. Reviewers who poured scorn on the band were added to a "punch on sight" list.


 But success had a downside. The band found themselves creatively confounded, obsessing for three years over follow-up album The Long Run.


 "It had stopped being fun," Frey said, "We no longer trusted each other's instincts, so there was considerable disagreement. Plus, both Henley and I had developed drug habits, which didn't help matters.


 "Going to the studio was like going to school - I simply didn't want to go. But most importantly, during the making of The Long Run, Henley and I found out that lyrics are not a replenishable source.


 "We, Don in particular, said a mouthful on Hotel California, and a big part of the problem was, 'What do we talk about now?'


 "Towards the end, we just wanted to get the record finished and released. It is a very polished album, as well it should be after all that, and has some excellent moments, but none of us wanted to go through that again."


 Things came to a head as the band wound up their 1980 tour with a benefit show in support of California senator Alan Cranston.


 According to Frey's account, Mr Cranston came backstage before the concert to thank the band for their efforts, but Felder responded with a less-than-enthusiastic: "You're welcome, Senator… I guess."


 It led to a huge backstage row, with beer bottles smashed against the wall. "I felt Don Felder insulted Senator Cranston under his breath, and I confronted him with it," said Frey.


 "So now we're on stage, and Felder looks back at me and says, 'Only three more songs till I kick your ass, pal.'


 "We're out there singing Best of My Love, but inside both of us are thinking, 'As soon as this is over, I'm going to kill him.'


 "That was when I knew I had to get out."




 
"Hotel California"


Written by Don Felder, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, this song is about materialism and excess. California is used as the setting, but it could relate to anywhere in America. Don Henley in the London Daily Mail November 9, 2007 said: "Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce."




On November 25, 2007 Henley appeared on the TV news show 60 Minutes, where he was told, "everyone wants to know what this song means." Henley replied: "I know, it's so boring. It's a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about."




He offered yet another interpretation in the 2013 History of the Eagles documentary: "It's a song about a journey from innocence to experience."


 
California is seen from the perspective of an outsider here. Bernie Leadon was the only band member at the time who was from the state (Timothy B. Schmit, who joined in 1977, was also from California). Joe Walsh came from New Jersey; Randy Meisner from Nebraska; Don Henley was from Texas; Glenn Frey was from Detroit, and Don Felder was from Florida. Don Felder explained: "As you're driving in Los Angeles at night, you can see the glow of the energy and the lights of Hollywood and Los Angeles for 100 miles out in the desert. And on the horizon, as you're driving in, all of these images start coming into your mind of the propaganda and advertisement you've experienced about California. In other words, the movie stars, the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, bikinis, palm trees, all those images that you see and that people think of when they think of California start running through your mind. You're anticipating that. That's all you know of California."




Don Henley put it this way: "We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. Hotel California was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles."


 
This won the 1977 Grammy for Record of the Year. The band did not show up to accept the award, as Don Henley did not believe in contests. Timothy B Schmit had just joined the band, and he says they watched the ceremony on TV while they were rehearsing.


 
Don Felder came up with the musical idea for this song. According to his book Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles, he came up with the idea while playing on the beach. He had the chord progressions and basic guitar tracks, which he played for Don Henley and Glenn Frey, who helped finish the song, with Henley adding the lyrics.




Felder says they recorded the song about a year after he did the original demo, and in the session, he started to improvise the guitar part at the end. Henley stopped him and demanded that he do it exactly like the demo, so he had to call his maid and have her play the cassette demo over the phone so Felder could remember what he played.


 
The lyric, "Warm smell of colitas," is often interpreted as sexual slang or a reference to marijuana. When we asked Don Felder about the term, he said: "The colitas is a plant that grows in the desert that blooms at night, and it has this kind of pungent, almost funky smell. Don Henley came up with a lot of the lyrics for that song, and he came up with colitas."




The Eagles aimed for a full sensory experience in their songwriting. Felder adds, "When we try to write lyrics, we try to write lyrics that touch multiple senses, things you can see, smell, taste, hear. 'I heard the mission bell,' you know, or 'the warm smell of colitas,' talking about being able to relate something through your sense of smell. Just those sort of things. So that's kind of where 'colitas' came from."


 
This was recorded at three different sessions before the Eagles got the version they wanted. The biggest problem was finding the right key for Henley's vocal.


 
Glenn Frey compared this song to an episode of The Twilight Zone, where it jumps from one scene to the next and doesn't necessarily make sense. He said the success of the song comes from the audience creating stories in their minds based on the images.


 
The line, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" is a reference to Steely Dan. The bands shared the same manager (Irving Azoff) and had a friendly rivalry. The year before, Steely Dan included the line "Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening" on their song "Everything You Did."



 
Don Felder and Joe Walsh played together on the guitar solos, creating the textured sound.


 
The lyrics for the song came with the album. Some listeners thought the line "She's got the Mercedes Bends" was a misspelling of "Mercedes Benz," not realizing the line was a play on words.


 
Glenn Frey: "That record explores the underbelly of success, the darker side of Paradise. Which was sort of what we were experiencing in Los Angeles at that time. So that just sort of became a metaphor for the whole world and for everything you know. And we just decided to make it Hotel California. So with a microcosm of everything else going on around us."



 
When the Eagles got back together in 1994, they recorded a live, acoustic version of this song for an MTV special that was included on their album Hell Freezes Over. Don Felder came up with a new guitar intro for this version the day they recorded it, and while it was not released as a single, it got a lot of airplay, helped the album top the charts the first week it was released, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, a category introduced in 1980 when the Eagles won with "."
Heartache Tonight



Felder had some beef with how the credits were listed on this new version - the original single had the composers as "Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey," implying that Felder wrote most of the song and Frey the least. The new version was credited to "Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Don Felder." Felder claims that Henley and Frey added nothing original to the new version, and that this was simply a power play. Felder was fired from the band in 2001 after disputing payments and royalties.


 
All seven past and present members of the Eagles performed this in 1998 when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.



 
The hotel on the album cover is the Beverly Hills Hotel, known as the Pink Palace. It is often frequented by Hollywood stars. The photo was taken by photographers David Alexander and John Kosh, who sat in a cherry-picker about 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard to get the shot of the hotel at sunset from above the trees. The rush-hour traffic made it a harrowing experience.



 
Although it is well known that Hotel California is actually a metaphor, there are several strange Internet theories and urban legends about the "real" Hotel California. Some include suggestions that it was an old church taken over by devil worshippers, a psychiatric hospital, an inn run by cannibals or Aleister Crowley's mansion in Scotland. It's even been suggested that the "Hotel California" is the Playboy Mansion.


 
The music may have been inspired by the 1969 Jethro Tull song "We Used to Know," from their album Stand up. The chord progressions are nearly identical, and the bands toured together before the Eagles recorded "Hotel California." In a BBC radio interview, Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson said laughingly that he was still waiting for the royalties. Anderson makes it clear that he doesn't consider "Hotel California" to be borrowing anything from his song: "It's difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn't been used, and hasn't been the focus of lots of pieces of music. It's harmonic progression is almost a mathematical certainty you're gonna crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you sit strumming a few chords on a guitar. There's certainly no bitterness or any sense of plagiarism attached to my view on it, although I do sometimes allude, in a joking way, to accepting it as a kind of tribute."


 
After Don Henley came up with the title, a theme developed for the album. Don Felder told us how some of the other songs fit in: "Once you arrive in LA and you have your first couple of hits, you become the 'Kid In Town,' and then with greater success, you live 'Life In The Fastlane ' and you start wondering if all that time you've spent in the bars was just 'Wasted Time.' So all of these other song ideas kind of came out of that concept once the foundation was laid for 'Hotel California.' It was a really insightful title."


 
Don Felder: "I had just leased this house out on the beach at Malibu, I guess it was around '74 or '75. I remember sitting in the living room, with all the doors wide open on a spectacular July day. I had this acoustic 12-string and I started tinkling around with it, and those Hotel California chords just kind of oozed out. Every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great just plops in your lap."


 
An alternative interpretation of the meaning of the lyrics is that the song is a description of the journey from Need to Love and Marriage to Divorce and ultimately to the impossibility of regaining the life and happiness of the pre-divorce state.




Initially the traveler is feeling the need of a relationship ("My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night"). The traveler meets his love and gets married ("There she stood in the doorway. I heard the mission bell"). A marriage commitment opens up the possibility of happiness but also the traveler is aware and vulnerable to the possibility of intense unhappiness ("And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell")




Unfortunately the marriage dissolves and his love becomes obsessed with money ("Her mind is Tiffany-twisted") where Tiffany" refers to the very expensive jewelry store, Tiffany & Co. With the divorce there is the division of property - she got the Mercedes Benz. After the breakup when he sees her with any guys she reassures him that the pretty, pretty boys" are just friends." In this new world of being single the other singles he meets do their dance in the courtyard" of life. They generally fall into two groups: There are those who can't stop talking about their Ex ("Some dance to remember") and there are those who don't what to say anything at all about their past marriage ("some dance to forget").




Now in this world of being divorced he longs to return the pre-divorced state of happiness ("So I called up the captain, please bring me my wine"), but he finds that his happiness is now irrevocably in the past ("We haven't had that spirit here since 1969").




Deep into the post-divorce single's scene with "mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice" he is reminded that "we are all just prisoners here, of our own device." He and others want this divorce nightmare to be over, yet - "they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast." Now frustrated, he panics and is "running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before" But he is brought up short when the night man informs him that "You can checkout any time you like (commit suicide), but you can never leave" (become pre-divorced).



There are two choruses in the song and each mention the "Hotel California." Around the time the song was written, California was experiencing the highest divorce rate in the nation. Each chorus has lines that remember his past marriage ("Such a lovely place") and his past lover ("Such a lovely face"). The first chorus indicates that there can always be more divorces ("Plenty of room at the Hotel California, any time of year, you can find it here"). The second chorus points out that as a part of divorce you will always "bring your alibis."



 
The Hotel California album is #37 on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. According to the magazine, Don Henley said that the band was in pursuit of a note perfect song. The Eagles spent eight months in the studio polishing take after take after take. Henley also said, "We just locked ourselves in. We had a refrigerator, a ping pong table, roller skates and a couple cots. We would go in and stay for two or three days at a time."


 
According to a reader-submitted poll for Guitar World magazine, the guitar solo for this song is ranked #8 out of 100.


 
Don Felder told Gibson about his contribution to this track. "I thought it was really unique and different to anything ever written. The Eagles had been heading in a conventional country-rock direction. I was added to the band for my electric guitar, slide-electric ability and to help turn them into more of a rock and roll band. I was writing stronger guitar tracks that used electric guitar like "Victim Of Love'' and 'Hotel California.' When I came up with the 'Hotel California' progression, I knew it was unique but didn't know if it was appropriate for the Eagles. It was kind of reggae, almost an abstract guitar part for what was on the radio back then.





When I was writing for the Hotel California album, I was working on a TEAC 4-track in a beach house in Malibu and I was putting down ideas on tape. Then I made cassette copies and gave them to [Don] Henley, [Glenn] Frey, Walsh and [Randy] Meisner. Henley called me to say he really like the Mexican bolero, Mexican reggae song. I knew exactly which track he meant. Don came up with a great lyric concept for the song."


 
This followed "New Kid in Town" as the second single released from the album. There was no doubt about the song's merits as an album track, but issuing it as a single defied convention. Don Felder told us: "when we finally finished that whole album, the record company had been pounding on the door trying to get in and get this record, because they wanted to release it. We were about four months overdue on delivering our record per our contract. So we finally let the record company in. The execs come in and we had this playback party for them at the record plant here in Los Angeles. And after the song 'Hotel California' played, Henley turned around and said, 'That's going to be our single.'




In the '70s, the AM format, which was what we were really aiming for, had a specific formula; your song had to be between three minutes and three minutes and thirty seconds long, and it had to be a dance track, a rock track, or a trippy ballad. The introduction could only be 30 seconds long before the singer started, so the disc jockey didn't have to speak so long.




'Hotel California' is six and a half minutes long. The introduction to it is a minute long. You can't really dance to it. It stops in the middle when the drums stop: 'mirrors on the ceiling,' that section, and it's got a two minute guitar solo on the end. It's the complete wrong format.




So I said, 'Don, I think you're wrong. I think that's a mistake. I don't think we should put that out as the single. Maybe an FM cut, but not a single.' And he said, 'Nope, that's going to be our single.' And I've never been so delighted to have been so wrong in my life. You just don't know."


 
In Chicago at the time of this song's popularity many people called the Cook County jail "Hotel California" because it is on California street. The name stuck and now people of all ages and races refer to the jail by this nickname.



 
This was featured in the first episode of the TV series American Horror Story: Hotel, which is about a haunted and horrifying hotel run by Lady Gaga. The show in many ways is a visual representation of the song, and this episode ("Checking In") ends with a man moving into the hotel under duress. The song plays as he starts the process, and when he gets to his room, the episode ends, punctuated by the line, "You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never leave."


 
Testifying on Russian influence over American affairs before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 27, 2017, businessman William Browder invoked this song, saying, "There's no such thing as a former intelligence officer in Russia. It's like the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but never leave."


 

Last edited by arabchanter (30/7/2018 11:59 pm)