In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: classic rock interview

  • Phil Collins- Hello I Must Be Going

    Phil Collins- Hello I Must Be Going

    Concerning his second solo album, Hello I Must Be Going in Autumn 1982, Phil Collins is keenly aware that there is a basic tenet of physics: that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and without a doubt that immutable law applies to popular music, as well. It happened to Elton John, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, Sting, and most recently U2: US radio and music video outlets overplaying the hits by these most popular musicians, in the programmers’ self-serving attempts at gaining a bigger audience. But the unfortunate by-product is that these listeners/viewers burn out on the saturation repetition to the peril of the musicians, and the predictable backlash unfortunately is misdirected at the musicians, who had no control over how their songs were appropriated. No one on the planet knows this better now than my guest Phil Collins.

    By Fall 1982, anyone who had underestimated child-actor-turned-rock-drummer Phil Collins should have wised up when his second solo album, Hello I Must Be Going,  was released then. After all, no one saw him coming when, essentially, he saved progressive rockers Genesis by hopping down off the drum riser six years earlier to fill the lead singer slot originally occupied by the seemingly irreplaceable Peter Gabriel. Then Collins wrote and sang Genesis’ biggest hit to date, “Misunderstanding”.
    Phil’s first solo album, Face Value, was quietly released in 1981 to little initial fanfare, but it contained one of the Eighties’ iconic songs,”In the Air Tonight”. Phil Collins wasted no time proving that he was just getting warmed up on Hello I Must Be Going  with another Top 40 hit, “I Don’t Care Anymore”, the Motown Supremes cover “You Can’t Hurry Love”(#10), and the catchy “Like China”. “There was something gleaming and optimistic about the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Supremes,” says Phil Collins, recalling in my classic rock interview the impact that those American Motown records had on him and a whole generation growing up in Britain in the mid-’60s. Collins first paid tribute to the Motown Sound on his second solo album in 1982, Hello I Must be Going, with his cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” paying dividends by becoming PhilCo’s first #1 in the UK. This was only eighteen months after Collins had surprised everyone with his first effort Face Value  containing the hit “In the Air Tonight”, and barely a year following his band Genesis releasing their most popular album to date, Abacab.  And it all transpired at the very launch of 24-hour music television in America. –Redbeard

  • Jackson Browne- Running On Empty

    Jackson Browne- Running On Empty

    About two-thirds of the way into my Jackson Browne interview recalling his December 1977 road tour chronicle album Running on Empty, the fabled singer/songwriter blurted out, “You’re making me want to do this again! It was really fun.” You know several of the songs by heart from Jackson Browne’s best-selling  album Running on Empty, including “The Load Out/Stay” medley, as well as the album’s title song, but did you know that it peaked at #3 on Billboard, sold over 7,000,000 copies just in the US, and wound up being a Top 25 seller of the entire Seventies?

    In 1977, highly-acclaimed Southern California singer/songwriter Jackson Browne found himself to be a new dad, a suddenly single parent, and a widower following the suicide of his wife. Conventional wisdom would assume that any one of those three challenges alone could require  an entertainer to put his or her career on hold indefinitely in order to provide parenting, get affairs in order, and to grieve. Yet Jackson Browne did exactly the opposite: he went on tour, finding the regimented structure and almost militaristic organization of a large touring band, with day-to-day and even hour-by-hour decisions managed by others, to be a sanctuary. And Browne found solace rather than solitude in the extended family of band members, lighting and sound technicians, riggers and roadies. From his 1972 debut, Jackson Browne had won praise as a superb song craftsman and a meticulous record maker, placing no less than three of his earlier studio albums onto Rolling Stone magazines Top 500 Albums of All Time list, but by far his loosest, least technically perfect album Running on Empty, released December 1977, outsold all three combined. Perennials “You Love Thunder” with call-and-response by Rosemary Butler; the lonesome sound of the late David Lindley’s fiddle on “The Road”; the clever backstage double entendre of “Rosie”; Browne’s mashup of his ode to road crews, “The Load Out”, with Maurice Williams’ “Stay”; and the rocking title song “Running on Empty” are all chronicled in detail by my guest Jackson Browne here In the Studio. – >Redbeard

  • Traffic- John Barleycorn Must Die- Steve Winwood, the late Jim Capaldi

    Traffic- John Barleycorn Must Die- Steve Winwood, the late Jim Capaldi

    The love and affection between my guests Steve Winwood and the late Jim Capaldi are clearly on display in our classic rock interview exploring one of rock’s most eclectic bands, Traffic, and their fourth studio album in July 1970 John Barleycorn Must Die. The line-up from which came the legendary first  Traffic albums Mr Fantasy  and  Traffic   included Dave Mason, but for John Barleycorn Must Die former Spencer Davis Group teen prodigy singer/organist/guitarist Steve Winwood, reed man Chris Wood, and drummer Jim Capaldi would form the trinity responsible for Traffic’s highest charting album at #5 on Billboard.

    Contrary to what their publicists would have you believe, bands rarely break up over “musical differences”. Of course the band members must share enough musical common ground to establish and sustain a creative dialogue, but equally importantly (crucially actually) is that the personalities in a band such as England’s Traffic must complement one another, not unlike a successful marriage but to multiple people. So try to imagine being in multiple simultaneous marriages and you’ll get an idea of the dynamics involved in a band. Guitarist/singer Dave Mason, a former Spencer Davis Group roadie, shared a talent for  melody with the other three on the first two Traffic albums but little else personality-wise, and was cut loose for the second and final time before the second album hit store shelves.TRAFFIC-early-foto-traffic

    Meanwhile Mssrs.Winwood, Capaldi, and Wood incorporated such diverse musical influences as Memphis soul, old English folk, light psychedelia, Latin rhythms, and unapologetic jazz.  Traffic was delivering World Music decades before the term was coined. Steve Winwood even reveals in this classic rock interview that Traffic, never a band for pop hits nor the 3-minute format, may have actually been among the first “jam bands”. Curiously they placed no album on Rolling Stone magazine’s original “Top 500 Albums of All Time” list, yet were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not more than a year before Jim Capaldi’s January 2005 death from stomach cancer (Chris Wood passed away in 1983  from liver failure). -Redbeard

  • Melissa Etheridge- The Awakening

    Melissa Etheridge- The Awakening

    Redbeard: “Tell me about the events leading up to your Autumn 2007 cancer recovery album, the cathartic The Awakening.”

    Melissa Etheridge: “It’s been such a crazy journey. When I started putting records out, my first couple were very innocent, they were. They were the music that I loved, the music that was coming out of me, that I was playing. And then somewhere along the line, the music business kind of…it started becoming ,’OK, let’s make something that the people want, or that they’ve already wanted. So let’s make something just like that’. And I started kind of fumbling around in my career. I mean, I was still writing from my heart and stuff, but every time I went in (the studio), my intention behind it was … I think there was a lot of fear involved. My own personal journey was getting more courageous and more centered. And then I made the album Lucky,  which was a lot of fun, but I still felt that I had to make a certain sound to get on the radio, which is an awful thing to be on your back. I felt like I had been to the mountain top and seen it, thank you very much. And then I kind of just shrugged my shoulders and looked up to the universe and said, ‘What now ?’.  I really thought that there was something more that I was going to do. I felt like I had stopped dreaming.”

    “And literally, I’m not kidding you, I remember it was Ottawa Canada and I was talking to Kenny my drummer and “Chainsaw”, and I said, ‘You know, I just kind of feel like I don’t know what’s going to happen next ‘. And that night I felt the lump in my breast for breast cancer. And it (life) just changed. I was diagnosed, and all of a sudden my whole world was completely blown apart. Just BOOM. Completely exploded and imploded. ”

    “And I got to lie still, and I stopped being a rock star. I stopped working, I stopped striving, I stopped everything. And I was completely still. And being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. I mean it. We just don’t do enough of it in our lives, and it is so important. And I just laid still, and I finally got to the point where my brain stopped chattering. It stopped waking up and wandering, and I started dreaming again. I started dreaming of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like .”

    RB: “With the diagnosis of breast cancer, you still could make plans for the future even before you completed chemotherapy and radiation ?”

    ME:” Oh my gosh, I want the rest of my life ! No no no, I’m not done at all, I’m just beginning. And with that new excitement, I started looking at what I had created, what I’m creating now, and what I wanted to create. I started reading like crazy, I started reading everything from cosmology to quantum physics, string theory, agnostic gospels, Buddhism, everything ! And everybody is saying the same thing, this simple thing : that we’re all here to create, to be happy, and to love. You know, give me the peace signs and all the gooey stuff, but that’s really what I started feeling. And when I started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to write a new album ‘, I had this joy behind it. I had this great desire to put my experience down and to ignite people and light ’em up and sa , ‘Look, you can do this too. We don’t have to do it this way ‘. ”

    RB: What attitudes and behaviors should we all look at ?melissa-etheridge-750-470x260

    ME: Today, right now, we have a choice. We have marketed ourselves into a little bitty corner of sound bites and fast food, and we think we can sustain ourselves on this. We think we can go to McDonald’s every day, eat in our car, and be fine. We can just download that one little song that sounds just like that other son . They’re little pieces. If you want to live your life on just little pieces of life, okay, that’s your choice. But I think that there’s a large bunch of us who really want more, who really do believe that the best food comes from the earth; that it grows up out of the dirt; and then you eat it and it nourishes you. And that music is made channeled through an artist. They craft it, they put it down in a certain place, and you can enjoy it for three minutes, or an hour , or you can even go to a live concert and enjoy it for three hours. Imagine giving yourself that time!  But I think our society needs to take a breath and step back, and get off this wheel that we’re on of faster, faster, faster. I do.”- Redbeard

  • Lou Reed- Transformer

    Lou Reed- Transformer

    The late Lou Reed, discussing his 1972 Transformer second solo album, was one of the most formative interviews in my career, precisely because his unvarnished directness and honesty made it so challenging. I could not help but notice that, in his role as host/inteviewer on the syndicated television series Spectacle,  Elvis Costello was obviously star-struck when interviewing Lou Reed who, along with John Cale, co-founded the Velvet Underground. As a songwriter, Costello knows all too well that without Lou Reed, there would have been no Glam Rock, no Punk Rock, no New Wave, no Alternative Rock, no future for the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten even to  sing “No future…”

    Part one begins with the pioneering Velvet Underground debut and its far-reaching influence, confirmed here by an amusing story from one David Jones, who was living in London an ocean apart from Reed and the Velvets. After hearing an unreleased VU acetate, young Jones changed his name to David Bowie, started a band, and began wearing a dress. Lou Reed focuses on his second post-Velvet Underground album containing the Top 20 alterna-hit “Walk on the Wild Side”. Rolling Stone magazine writers rank Transformer  at #109 now on their Top 500 All Time list. And finally Lou, the New York City Man himself, was invited in from the “Dirty Boulevard” to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, posthumously. –Redbeard

  • Steely Dan- Can’t Buy a Thrill- Donald Fagen, the late Walter Becker

    Steely Dan- Can’t Buy a Thrill- Donald Fagen, the late Walter Becker

    Of all the albums on 2022’s impressive golden anniversary list, Can’t  Buy a Thrill from unsung song peddlers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan may be one of the most evergreen. When I casually run the list in my head of the most significant debut albums in rock history (The Doors,  Are You Experienced,  Please Please Me,  Van Halen,  Led Zeppelin 1,  Boston, Chicago Transit Authority,  Appetite for Destruction,  My Generation,  Never Mind the Bollocks,  Mr Tambourine Man,  The Ramones) invariably I forget to include Can’t Buy a Thrill  in November 1972 from Steely Dan. This first varied assortment of smart, (“subversive”, Donald Fagan told me) pop from the songwriters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker sounds the least like any Steely Dan album which would follow, but there are some very clear reasons why.

    Steely Dan duo singer/keyboard player Donald Fagen and the late guitarist Walter Becker recall their humble beginnings at Bard College, then being stranded a continent away in Los Angeles expected to write pop hits for others, before concluding that no one else could interpret their quirky, dark sense of lyrical humor with jazz-informed arrangements.( The late Walter Becker (L) with Donald Fagen of Steely Dan )

    At that time in November 1972 I had no knowledge that the band’s name came from a dildo which William Burroughs had personified in Naked Lunch, nor did I realize that their debut album’s title Can’t Buy a Thrill  had been lifted lock, stock, and Zimmerman from Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” off of Highway 61 Revisited.  What was obvious, though, was that the two initial singles from Can’t Buy a Thrill,  “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years”, were some of the most inventive pop rock to liven up Top 40 playlists in years, and the subsequent Steely Dan debut in Autumn 1972 declared this baby band full term on delivery. Bringing the songs of New York college buddies Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to life included guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, plus singer David Palmer and singing drummer Jim Hodder on album tracks “Dirty Work” and “Midnight Cruiser”, respectively. Yet it was the distinctive vocals of stage-shy Donald Fagen on the hits “Do It Again” (Billboard #6) and “Reelin’ in the Years” (Billboard #11), plus the tasty jazz-inflected “Fire in the Hole”, that quickly settled the Steely Dan “quarterback controversy” after just the first album, which Rolling Stone magazine ranks at #238 on their “Top 500 Albums of All Time”. In early September 2017 Steely Dan co-founder/ guitarist Walter Becker  passed away  from esophageal cancer. Walter Becker was 67.Rivaled only by The Eagles first album that same year, Steely Dan’s debut Can’t Buy a Thrill has to be on any serious list of most successful first efforts by an American band. With two Top Ten hits from their first time up to bat, “Do It Again”and “Reeling in the Years”, Steely Dan’s calling card of smart, sophisticated pop/rock actually made American Top 40 radio compelling in 1972.

    In early September 2017 Steely Dan co-founder/ guitarist Walter Becker  passed away  from esophageal cancer. Walter Becker was 67. Donald Fagen hosts the fiftieth anniversary of Steely Dan Can’t Buy a Thrill here In the Studio, with archival insights from Walter Becker.  –Redbeard

  • George Harrison- Cloud Nine

    George Harrison- Cloud Nine

    To borrow fromWhen Harry Met Sally, the Rob Reiner/Billy Crystal/Meg Ryan hit movie of that day, George Harrison’s Cloud Nine comeback album could alternately be titled “When Harri(son) Met Lynne”. You see, by 1987 Jeff Lynne had ceased to make neo-Beatles-influenced music with Electric Light Orchestra/ELO, while ex-Beatle Harrison simply had stopped making music, period. After a  series of very public well-intentioned but ill-fated charity causes (the Concert for Bangla Desh cost George $2.25 million in personal tax- no good deed goes unpunished), business lawsuits, scathing British press attacks, boring critical reviews and diminishing album sales, Harrison mercifully left the music business for five years, instead  making Monty Python movies with his Handmade Films and tending to his garden at Friar Park.

    But according to what the late Tom Petty told me, in October 1987 there they were, the ex-Beatle and the ELO exile, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, all beaming smiles backstage, first in Birmingham England and then again in London’s Wembley Arena when Petty and the Heartbreakers toured the UK as Bob Dylan’s band. “George Harrison had given me his unreleased Cloud Nine  album, it was just about to come out,” Petty told me. “He had given me a cassette of it, & when I got home (to Los Angeles) I put it on and thought,’Man, this is amazing! The sound and the songs and everything, Lord this sounds good, and original, and different. Man, that Jeff Lynne just blows my mind.’ I was playing it all Thanksgiving Day 1987.”

    Later that Thanksgiving day Petty would find himself stopped at a traffic light, only to spy none other than Jeff Lynne sitting in the car next to his. Coincidence? Fate? Urban planning? We’ll never really know for sure, but of this we are certain: George Harrison’s Cloud Nine  set off a musical chain reaction which would revitalize not only the Quiet Beatle’s music career, but result directly in Petty’s Full Moon Fever,  Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl, and spawn the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. – Redbeard

  • Cream- Wheels of Fire- Eric Clapton, the late Jack Bruce

    Cream- Wheels of Fire- Eric Clapton, the late Jack Bruce

    By the time of Summer 1968 and their third album’s release Wheels of Fire, London-based trio Cream had quickly earned their dual reputations as 1) makers of artsy psychedelic records which fused jazz, blues, and rock’n’roll, with 2) an equally enviable benchmark as the most powerful live act in concert for its time. Cream’s breakthrough album Disraeli Gears only nine months earlier tee’d up the English/Scottish trio’s June 1968 third release, Wheels of Fire, for some impressive numbers. It went almost immediately to #3 sales in the UK and a bonafide #1 in the US, becoming the first double album to sell over a million copies.

    Though Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cream’s Disraeli Gears  most recently at #170 album of all time, and the late Ginger Baker as one of rock’s three greatest drummers (along with The Who’s Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham), the other key numbers for Cream’s quicksilver career are startlingly single digits: years together- 3 ; albums released- 4; number of reunion albums/tours in the half century since – 1.At the time, nothing sounded quite like the songs on Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire: “Strange Brew”,”Sunshine of Your Love” (rivaled only by “Purple Haze” that same year as the most subversive single to ever penetrate Top 40 radio ), the elegant romantic falsetto of “Dance the Night Away”, and the psychedelic lyrics of “Tales of Brave Ulysses” absolutely mesmerized me with each repeated playing. That went double (pun intended) for Wheels of Fire less than a year later, which included “White Room”, “Born Under a Bad Sign”, “Those Were the Days”, and two live performances, Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” sung by Eric Clapton, & the epic extended jam around Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”. Wheels of Fire also resides on Rolling Stone‘s Top 500 list, at #205.

    When I talked to Eddie Van Halen, Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush,  Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani, or guitar phenom Eric Johnson, they and countless other musicians easily cite Cream as the gold standard which inspired them all to make the transition from rock music fan to rock musician. The degree to which my guests Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce (who passed 2014), along with the late Ginger Baker as Cream, influenced multiple generations of bands  is incalculable. Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and frequent lyrics contributor Pete Brown are all gone now, leaving Eric Clapton as the sole spoonful of Cream left.-Redbeard

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  • Queen- News of the World- Brian May

    Queen- News of the World- Brian May

    With the October 1977 release of News of the World, London-based Queen moved into the upper echelons of international rock bands, with arena-filling (soon to be stadium-sized) anthems “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”. But my guest, Queen guitarist/composer Brian May, reminds us that News of the World also contains “Spread Your Wings”,”Get Down, Make Love”, and the under-appreciated mini-opera, “It’s Late” as well. Astrophysicist Dr. Brian May, PhD (!) is my guest here In the Studio sharing Queen’s breaking News of the World.

    As I was preparing the accurate context of Queen’s place in the rock constellation upon the release of November 1977’s News of the World,  I stumbled upon another website’s contention that, “In the autumn of 1977, it looked as if Queen’s reign might be over… The future of their sixth studio album, News Of The World,  looked bleak at best…”. WTF? At least in America, nothing could have been further from the truth. With the release of November 1977’s News of the World , Queen had succeeded as four real “mates” on an international scale, which  would continue only to increase for the next decade. With four writers and vocalists, the band had a surplus of strong songs, while Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury possessed such an operatic voice that it’s easy to forget that both Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor also sang lead on select songs. (Freddie Mercury of Queen, from the Neal Preston book Exhausted and Exhilarated)

    What really impressed me then and now is how appreciative Brian May is of the fans, the countless deejays, and journalists for supporting Queen’s efforts over the years. Brian would later suffer a broken marriage, separation of his kids, and the passing of both parents, but nothing short of the untimely death of Freddie Mercury  in 1991 could silence the original band. And even that wasn’t permanent. –Redbeard

  • Edgar Winter Group- They Only Come Out at Night

    Edgar Winter Group- They Only Come Out at Night

    “What we wanted to do is make an album for everybody,” declares singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter regarding  November 1972’s They Only Come Out at Night, “from the all-star all-American rock’n’roll band. That was our outright intention. I really wanted to have a utopian band…The thing that made They Only Come Out at Night different (from his eclectic debut Entrance, then the blues/gospel Edgar Winter’s White Trash,  and the rock’n’soul live Roadwork) was rather than being for a specialized musical audience, it was an album for everybody.” Containing the perennial hits “Free Ride”,”Hangin’ Around”, and  #1 groundbreaking instrumental “Frankenstein”, the Edgar Winter Group’s platinum seller They Only Come Out at Night is hosted by a rare appearance by Edgar Winter here In the Studio, plus my archival interview with the late electric guitarist Ronnie Montrose prior to his death in March 2012.

    The top of the American music charts is a long way from the oil refineries of Beaumont TX, where kid brothers Johnny Winter, age 14, and Edgar only 11, started playing at Tom’s Fish Camp, a sawdust-floored juke joint. Roadhouse owners Tom & his wife Tiny paid the albino, legally blind boys $8 a night. “If they had hired adults to play, they would have had to pay a lot more. But it was good experience for us,” Edgar Winter assured me. The Edgar Winter Group was an all-star band with Dan Hartman, Ronnie Montrose, and producer/guitarist Rick Derringer. Songs include John D. Loudermilk’s classic “Tobacco Road”; the autobiographical “Keep Playing That Rock’n’Roll”; “Dying to Live”; “Easy Street” from Edgar Winter Group 1974’s Shock Treatment;  and three hits from They Only Come Out at Night,  “Free Ride”,”Hangin’ Around”, and the #1 song in May 1973, “Frankenstein”. And don’t miss the show closer, the Rick Derringer-penned “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo”, featuring incredible lead vocals by Edgar Winter and guitar by Kenny Wayne Shepherd from the Les Paul and Friends  2005 compilation.

    By achieving the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, the Edgar Winter Group joined the very exclusive club of instrumental songs which went to #1, an extremely short list which includes “Telstar” by The Tornados (1962) and Paul Mauriat’s “Love is Blue”(1968)  (Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas” just missed at #2 in Summer 1968).( Younger Winter brother Edgar (L) with the late Johnny in center of collage)

    “I had been to a lot of the all-Black churches where they had organ, guitar bass, and drums, and they would create pandemonium. People would go crazy in those tent revivals. There would be four or five thousand Black people there, and two or three of us,” explains Edgar Winter.”That’s what Ray Charles did, he translated that into Pop muic. Took it out of church. I think that whole Gospel thing is overlooked. Frequently you hear about the influence of Blues (on Pop/Rock), but you never heard shouting in popular music. And that’s basically where that came from, was from church.”

    This edition of In the Studio is dedicated to multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter Dan Hartman (died 1994), guitarist Ronnie Montrose, Edgar’s big brother Johnny Winter (died 2014), and now guitarist/songwriter Rick Derringer (above left), composer of “Hang On Sloopy” and “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo”. This rare classic rock interview with Edgar Winter reveals a true Texas gentleman. – Redbeard