Eric Clapton Slowhand (1977)

From classicrockreview.com

1977’s Slowhand was the pinnacle of Eric Clapton’s pop-rock phase during the late seventies, fusing well-crafted rockers, ballads, alt country, and blues numbers. The album came a few years into Clapton’s “comeback” following a four year hiatus in the early seventies. Prior to that Clapton had been one of the most prolific artists on Earth, forming and playing in the band The Yarbirds, John Mayell’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominoes, as well as releasing his debut solo release in 1970. Clapton then fell into a deep funk and heroin addiction due to his unrequited infatuation of Patty Boyd, then George Harrison’s wife. By 1974, Clapton had won Boyd over and began his comeback with the critically acclaimed 461 Ocean Boulevard, although that album was comprised mainly of covers. Clapton followed suit over the next couple years with studio albums which were about 60/40 covers to original but with less success.

With Slowhand, Clapton reached a nice balance recording more recently composed songs by other artists while writing many himself or in concert with members of his backing band. Here the formula is perfected with enough musical prowess to attract rock and blues fans and the right touches of pop craftsmanship to reach the radio-friendly pop audience of the day.

The album was produced by Glyn Johns who had previously worked as an engineer with several top caliber bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who, and The Rolling Stones. It contains three of Clapton’s most popular singles as well as several other classic rock standards that became Clapton classics. The album is an easy listen from front-to-back, with a sort of laid-back virtuosity that never sound pretentious or forced. Yet it is quite eclectic in the styles and approach used in forging each of the nine tracks.

Slowhand‘s hit songs are all stack up front. Right from the jump, the album establishes a nice groove with J.J. Cale‘s “Cocaine”. The combination of the song’s ever-infectious, groovy guitar riff and taboo subject made it both a cult classic and pop song all at the same time. I remember how big this was at a sixth grade, catholic school dance, where the chorus hook whipped us adolescents into a frenzy that totally baffled the chaperones who were on the lookout for the more overt shock-rock by artists like Alice Cooper and not this relatively calm, soft spoken Clapton song. For his part, Eric Clapton claims this is actually an anti-drug song, but that is definitely up for debate. There is no doubt this song did its part to inspire a lot of young people of the seventies to become coke heads in the eighties and because of its “ambiguous” message, Clapton rarely performed the song live for many decades.

What “Cocaine” did to proliferate drug use, “Wonderful Tonight” may have done for sex. This standard slow dance at weddings and events of all kinds got its start when Clapton was waiting for Boyd to get ready for a Paul McCartney concert they were attending in 1976 and the rest is history. As a disc jockey, I played this song at every single gig, always introducing it as “a song for the ladies”. Although I’ve heard this song way more than its fair share, it is still hard not to appreciate this as one of Clapton’s finest pieces, with the signature guitar riff and almost quiet vocals of Clapton, backed by the perfect slow-dance rhythm of bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jamie Oldaker.

Background singer Marcy Levy and rhythm guitarist George Terry wrote the album’s third hit, “Lay Down Sally”. This is an almost-country song driven more by Terry’s rhythm than the Clapton’s lead. The members of the backing band were all from Oklahoma and Clapton explained how the sound came much more naturally for them;

“It’s as close as I can get, being English, but the band being a Tulsa band, they play like that naturally…”

Levy also co-wrote “The Core”, a song on which she shares lead vocals with Clapton. The song has a great dancing riff that drives it along nicely through the verses with another excellent, counter-riff following the choruses. The long overall sequence and ending sax solo inflates the song to near epic length at close to nine minutes. “Next Time You See Her” is another fine song with a late sixties vibe due to its organ-rich backing and the chanting vocal style of the bridge, almost a revival folk song. “Mean Old Frisco” is an updated blues song which fills in nicely on the second side.

But the true heart of the album is a trio of largely forgotten classics which really put the album over the top. “We’re All the Way” is a tremendous ballad which ends the first side. It is every bit as romantic as “Wonderful Tonight” with nice harmonies and a perfectly subdued guitar riff that hangs in the background. “May You Never” is an up-beat folk song played as a reverse-schadenfreude barroom anthem, which should have been far more popular. The closer “Peaches and Diesel” is a beautiful instrumental. It predates the instrumental fad of the 1980s with a great, picked-out rhythm and a couple of simple lead riffs soaring above. It closes this pop-fueled album in a more classic style for Clapton.

Slow Hand‘s title derives from Clapton’s long-time nickname which was born in the early sixties during his days with the Yardbirds. The album ultimately reached #2 on the Billboard album charts, kept from the top spot only by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. It would be his highest charting album for nearly twenty years.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Americana (2012)

From pitchfork.com

Neil Young’s latest studio record, his first with Crazy Horse in nine years, isn’t so much a covers collection as it is a concept album in the vein of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads.

Neil Young’s legend has essentially been built through obfuscation; he’s accumulated one of the most celebrated yet byzantine songbooks in rock by impulsively shifting course album to album, whether it means periodically alienating fans, band mates, and record labels alike. But when it comes to covering other people’s songs, he’s an unabashed populist. “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “A Day in the Life”, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”, “On Broadway”, “Four Strong Winds”– Young is obviously not the sort of artist who selects covers to reveal something new about himself, or to prove how cool his record collection is.

Instead, true to his utilitarian ethos, he’s more interested in transforming the mythical into the practical, reclaiming once-vital songs that have essentially been overplayed into Muzak and investing them with a new sense of purpose. In Young’s hands, the most totemic songs in pop history become more flawed and, as a result, more down to Earth.

For this latest studio album– the first with Crazy Horse in nine years– Young applies that logic across an entire record. Americana joins Paul McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom and Iggy Pop’s Après in this year’s aging-rocker covers-album sweepstakes, though it’s less about digging into personal favorites as reclaiming some of the most popular songs ever written. And we’re not talking about mere golden oldies here, but ancient public-domain standards that predate the existence of pop radio and the music industry entirely: “Clementine”, “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”, “Oh Susannah”, and the like.

These aren’t songs anyone really listens to anymore, because we don’t need to. They’re practically part of our collective DNA: songs that you whistle while you work or use to sing your baby to sleep or to entertain impatient kids sitting around a campfire. Invariably, they’re also songs whose simple, sing-along melodies obscure the real-life maladies– poverty, unemployment, lost love, murder, crises of faith– that originally inspired them over a century ago. As such, Americana isn’t so much a covers collection as a concept album in the vein of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads: new variations on age-old themes that still resonate loud and clear today.

Alas, it’s also the sort of album where you pretty much know what it’s going to sound like just by reading the record’s spine and tracklist. What you see is what you you get: old-timey tunes subjected to Crazy Horse’s desecrating grungy grind. And given the over-familiarity and brevity of the source material, it’s a novelty that wears itself out quickly. While Young and the Horse effectively tease out the unpleasant undercurrents in songs like “Oh Susanna”, “Wayfaring Stranger”, and “Clementine” (which reinstates the oft-omitted line about macking on the deceased title subject’s sister), Americana doesn’t so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards– and in some cases, like the repetitious eight-minute trudge through true-crime tale “Tom Dula”, driving them into the ground.

Compared to his previous state-of-the-nation addresses, Young doesn’t so much attack the material as playfully mess around with it; nearly every track here concludes with some cheerful studio chatter that suggests what we just heard was the Horse’s first-ever pass at the song. This slackness defines Americana more so than its political intent; as the tracklist moves forward to relatively more recent fare like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and the Silhouttes’ late-1950s standard “Get a Job”, you might as well be listening to the Shocking Pinks.

But just as the aforementioned Murder Ballads capped off its orgy of carnage with a surprisingly redemptive cover of Bob Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End”, Americana boasts a similarly high-concept denouement: Only Young would deign to close out a tribute to the American folkoric tradition with a cover of the British national anthem. Whether it’s a backhanded salute to the country that incited the American Revolution in the first place, or simply a sly nod to his own roots in the Commonwealth, Young’s “God Save the Queen”– with its drunken drummber-boy beat, squealing electric-guitar fanfare, and cheeky choral vocal–proves to be just as blasphemous to Britain’s most sacred song as the namesake number by his one-time muse Johnny Rotten.

It ain’t exactly Hendrix doing “The Star-Spangled Banner”, but then that’s precisely the point: It’s Young’s way of saying that– even when you’re dealing with another country’s intellectual property– this song is your song, this song is my song.

Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’ (1995): 10 Things You Didn’t Know

From rollingstone.com March 2020

How the long shadow of “Creep,” a supernatural novel, a cameo from a future ‘Walking Dead’ actor, and more played into the band’s 1995 alt-rock classic

When Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood stepped into New York’s tiny Mercury Lounge in November 1994 to play an acoustic duo show, their band was known for a single song that they’d already grown weary of playing: “Creep.” They’d been on tour for two solid years in support of their debut LP, Pablo Honey, and by this point they had a handful of new tunes they planned to include on their next record.

“It was the first time that Thom and Jonny had played our songs to a live audience in this way: Thom thrashing an acoustic, and Jonny playing furiously on his electric,” the band wrote in a fan club newsletter. “The new songs were brilliantly received, with one lone request for ‘Creep’ being shouted down by the rest of the crowd.”

That lone voice spoke to an overwhelming fear within the band that they’d go down in history as nothing more than the “Creep” guys. “It was a complete crisis situation,” Yorke told Billboard in 1996. “No matter what we came up with, we were thinking, ‘My God, people are going to hate us.’ After ‘Creep’ and the fatigue from all the touring, we were scared shitless, really, and people were interfering. We had to claim our creative freedom.”

Released 25 years ago today, The Bends marks the band’s first truly great album, a cohesive set of songs built around washy, U2-style guitars and disquieting lyrics that foreshadowed the themes they’d explore two years later on OK Computer. They’d also get widespread exposure when Bends songs “Fake Plastic Trees” and “My Iron Lung” appeared on the Clueless soundtrack — with protagonist Cher Horowitz labeling the band “the maudlin music of the university station” — forever erasing the chances of Radiohead becoming one-hit wonders. Here are 10 things you might not know about the 1995 alt-rock classic.

1. With the band under immense pressure to follow up Pablo Honey, recording sessions were tense.

Yorke chose producer John Leckie based on his work on post-punk band Magazine’s 1978 record Real Life. During the first two months of recording, the singer began each morning with tea and a four-hour solo piano exercise. “New songs were pouring out of him,” Leckie told NME last year. “He’s an early riser, and at the time he had a lot of energy. You’d avoid interrupting him.”

However, after the mega-success of “Creep,” the band experienced a tough time in the studio. “The initial sessions for The Bends were quite stilted,” drummer Phil Selway told Rolling Stone in 2017. “Some good stuff came out of it. Like ‘Just,’ ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Planet Telex.’ So it wasn’t all bad, but there wasn’t an ease to it.” “Bless John Leckie,” added bassist Colin Greenwood. “He was very patient with us. We were aware that what we were going to release would have scrutiny after the first record.”

Their label, EMI, envisioned a fall 1994 release date — which proved unrealistic. “I think that maybe they didn’t want to become this sort of pop band that the label would have them be,” engineer Nigel Godrich said. “People from the label would visit and it got very uncomfortable.” The band went on tour to diffuse tension, exposing fans to Bends material. They finished the album upon returning to England.

2. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” was inspired by R.E.M. and an eerie novel Yorke read.

For “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” — originally titled “Three-Headed Spirit” — Yorke claims he drew inspiration from The Famished Road, a 1991 book by Nigerian author Ben Okri, which Yorke read while on tour in North America. Released in 1991, the novel tells the story of Azaro, a child who communicates with the spirit world. “He’s haunted by people who try to kill him off and send him back to where he came from so he can’t affect the human race,” Yorke said in a 1993 interview. “It’s a very weird book, and I liked it so much that I wrote a song about it.”

Talking to Third Way in 2004, Yorke also mentioned that the song was inspired by R.E.M., whom they’d open for in 1995 on the Monster tour. “It was just a straight rip-off,” he said. “I’ve ripped them off left, right and center for years and years and years and years.”

3. The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus appears in the video for “Fake Plastic Trees.”

The video for the album’s greatest song is a strange one: Yorke sits inside a shopping cart and glides down a grocery-store aisle, passing by neon-colored products and unique customers, including The Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus. The actor was 26 years old at the time, having just followed his then-girlfriend to Los Angeles by way of Spain. He found himself appearing in music videos for extra money, including Björk’s “Violently Happy” and Keith Richards’ “Wicked as It Seems.” “They literally pay you $150 and you’re there all day long,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I was happy to get it at the time.”

“I remember it well, actually,” he says of appearing in the video, directed by Jake Scott. “They were like, ‘Can you push this cart down this aisle?’ I goofed around, kind of went a little overboard. I’m playing with ribbon on a string, I think. They liked it and kept it. I remember talking to the band and thinking they were all just super cool. I was already a Radiohead fan, like everybody else in the world. They were all just normal dudes.”

“It’s one of the great albums of all time,” Reedus says of The Bends. “That song in particular is one of those songs that reminds me of that era. I remember those days. It was back when you lived in an apartment the size of a closet and you were, like, loving life.”

4. The album marked the first time the band collaborated with their longtime cover designer.

Artist Stanley Donwood has designed every Radiohead album cover for the past 25 years, starting with The Bends. He began by designing the artwork for the “My Iron Lung” single. “We probably made something like 50 attempts at the single and they were all terrible,” Donwood told Rolling Stone. “We hired a VHS and went out and filmed stuff on the video camera. We would then take out the cassette and play it on a VCR and take photographs of the television and then go to the photo-developing shop in town and get our photos developed and scan the photos and use that. We wanted the degradation you get from that process. At the time, it seemed like the modern world. It was quite something.”

For the album artwork, Donwood first thought of shooting a real iron lung. “We were up against a deadline for the cover,” he recalled. “Somehow, I don’t know how we did that, but we snuck a video camera into a hospital, which I’m sure you’re not supposed to do. I think at the time I’d heard that they actually had an old iron lung. It’s a very boring object. It’s just a big metal box. You pressurize someone that can’t breathe properly. It must have been horrible. I didn’t film the iron lung because it was just this grey box in a dark room. They don’t use them anymore.”

Instead, Donwood captured a photograph of a TV screen showing a video of a resuscitation dummy. “It’s got those metal nipples,” he said. “I’ve never had direct contact with them. I’ve seen them on the telly when someone’s heart has stopped and you give them an electric shock to restart it. It’s to practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The expression on the dummy and the angle we filmed it from, it looked somewhere between agony and ecstasy. It’s an ambiguous expression.”

5. The Bends was also the first time they worked with longtime producer Nigel Godrich. 

Godrich, a young engineer at the time, produced “Black Star” while John Leckie was at a wedding. He’d go on to become the band’s producer on the rest of their albums to date. ” ‘Black Star’ is a beautiful song and that went really well,” Colin Greenwood recalled. “We used to hang out with Nigel and he was amazing. We love him so much.”

“Thom called me a few months after I thought the album was done and asked if I could record them in their rehearsal space,” Godrich remembered. “We did three or four songs, including ‘Black Star.’ It felt like the adults were away and we could work without any restrictions. It also became very, very clear that Thom is a very, very gifted writer. I remember he’d just written ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien‘ [which would appear on OK Computer] while we were doing The Bends. He’d sit there with his little book on his knees turning the pages. This wasn’t ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar.’ It was much more on-point.”

6. “My Iron Lung” was recorded live. 

After attempting to record the song in a studio, the band used a live recording from a performance at the London Astoria. The crowd noise was taken out, and they re-recorded Yorke’s vocals. “We just happened to record it onto a 24-track tape and having not done a very good version in the studio, we thought that it sounded much better from this concert,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Glamour Guide for Trash. “So we just used that.”

The album’s lead single, “My Iron Lung” is also the band’s response to the success they achieved with “Creep,” and the bitterness they felt about it. Over its signature guitar riff, Yorke quips: “This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time.” ” ‘Iron Lung’ was supposed to be just another nail in the coffin, the final nail in the coffin of the previously song that shall remain nameless,” he told B-side Magazine. “But it just wasn’t that at all … we released it because we found it very exciting when we listened to it.”

7. “High and Dry” is the oldest song on the record.

Yorke wrote the somber “High and Dry” at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s, with his short-lived former band Headless Chickens. “As far as I can remember, the words were originally about some loony girl I was going out with, but after a while, they got mixed up with ideas about success and failure,” he told Billboard in 1996. “It was an old demo we thought was rubbish, you know, too Rod Stewart or something. But when we came back to the track one day, it seemed like a mirror showing us all the things we had been through.”

8. The concept of the “Just” video was originally intended for a short film.

Jamie Thraves was approached by Radiohead’s creative director, Dilly Gent, to direct the video for “Just.” He had written a 10-page script with dialogue for an upcoming short film, but plans changed when he heard the Bends track. “My story and the song suddenly exploded in my head and collided, like they were meant to be together,” Thraves told Rolling Stone. “There was literally an explosion in my brain and I went blind for a split second, dazzled. I also felt an absolute chill race up my spine when I realized the ending of the story would work perfectly to the ascending guitar solo.”

The ending Thraves is referring to is the moment when the man in the video tells the assembled crowd why he’s lying on the sidewalk — he mouths his words but there’s no sound. So what’s the reason? “I haven’t told anyone in 25 years,” Thraves said. “I had no idea the video was going to cause so many people to ask what the man said. At the time I simply felt I had no choice but to subtract what was said, it created the magic. To reveal the answer would kill the video. I will probably take the answer to my grave unless a rich billionaire Radiohead fan wants to buy the secret from me. Please don’t make me tell you. You don’t want to know.”

9. The B side “India Rubber” features Jonny Greenwood’s laugh on loop.

There are some incredible Bends B sides, particularly “How Can You Be Sure?” and “India Rubber,” both from the Fake Plastic Trees EP — two songs that, sonically, would have fit perfectly on the record. “How Can You Be Sure?” is a dreamy acoustic track that features the background vocals of the Julie Dolphin’s Dianne Swann. “India Rubber” relies on fuzzed-out guitar and synthesizers, but two minutes in, things get weird with a maniacal laugh on loop. On the band’s message board, Colin Greenwood revealed it was actually the voice of his brother. “It’s Jonny laughing at one of his own jokes as usual that he’s nicked from Stephen Fry,” he said.

10. The band hasn’t played “Sulk” live since 1995.

The album’s penultimate track has long been overshadowed by the greatness of the “Street Spirit” finale and the simple fact that the band hasn’t played it live a single time in the past 25 years. Similarly, “High and Dry” hasn’t been performed since 1998. All other Bends tracks have been performed at some point in the 2000s — even “Bones,” a lesser-known song that was last played in 2006. The band performed the Pablo Honey song “Blow Out” on their A Moon Shaped Pool tour in 2018, so one can only hope they’ll bring back “Sulk” at some point in the future.

Van Morrrison His Band and The Street Choir (1970)

From rollingstone.com by Jon Landau Feb 5 1971

During his down and out days. Van Morrison used to live on Green Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After “Brown Eyed Girl” had hit during the summer of 1967, Van had followed his stars to the Boston of “Bosstown Sound” notoriety. Back then, the Boston Tea Party presented mainly local bands and the most popular of these was a group called the Hallucinations, which proved to be the forerunner of the J. Geils Band.

The Hallucinations used to do Morrison’s classic “Gloria” as a regular part of their show. One night, in front of an unusually restless crowd they introduced “the man who wrote this song” and Van came out to sing it in front of their very hard arrangement. No one seemed to know who he was. Frustrated and out of control he stood on the stage shouting meaningless phrases and incoherent syllables like some crazed demon. The audience’s mood went from indifference to hostility until one of the group’s guitarists grabbed the microphone and, in a fit of anger, screamed at the audience, “Don’t you know who this is? This man wrote the song.”

I saw Van Morrison over a year ago, playing second to the Band. He introduced most of the songs from Moondance there and they all sounded great. His band was great. The arrangements were great. Unfortunately, Van himself was again not in control of himself. And it wound up being just another one of those concerts that has given him a reputation as a stiff of a live performer.

Well, ladies and gentlemen. I saw Van Morrison perform a month ago, in front of 3,000 people, and he ain’t no stiff. As he was beginning his half of the concert I felt myself getting nervous at his nervousness. He took an exceptionally long time to tune and was obviously worried. He opened with a hesitant and shaky “And It Stoned Me,” but when he hit the second number, “These Dreams of You,” everything fell together. From then on, for the next hour and a half, he was like a locomotive moving down the tracks picking up steam at every stop.

When Van Morrison starts burning, it is without the mannerisms and posturings we have come to associate with stars. Short, uncharming, unglamorous, and unsmooth, he simply stands in front of his band, guitar in hand, and sings. There is no affectation. Everything is revealed and nothing hidden by the games of a false shaman. As he churned through the classics of Astral Weeks, and then “Moondance,” “Come Running,” and most of Moondance. I kept thinking that he was singing with the kind of feeling and fervor that some other artists have by now lost.

After “Moondance” the band left the stage for a solo by Van and then came back, minus the horns, for a superb “Ballerina.” When he got to “Into the Mystic,” the music was steaming and the audience was close to frenzy. The horns, which had trouble finding themselves earlier in the evening, were now providing perfect support for his voice and Van himself kept opening up, more and more, with every new verse and chorus.

The performance could have stopped there but now the three women who comprise the touring Street Choir joined Van for a great “Crazy Love” and “Domino.” He ended it all with “Caravan.”

For an encore Van offered “Cyprus Avenue.” Working his way up to a ferocious conclusion, he stood before the audience shaking his head back and forth, hair falling about him, looking like a man insane. Finally, with tension mounting, he ran across the stage, ran back again, jumped over a microphone chord, held the mike up to his face and screamed, “It’s too late to stop now,” and was gone.

Van Morrison’s road has been rocky, and it has not left him unscarred, but it is now obvious that he has not only made it through his personal bad times, but that he has come upon a period of great personal creativity. Beginning with Astral Weeks, he has released three albums of extraordinary quality in the last two years.

Moondance is, in my mind, one of the great albums of 1970. In it Van presented his fully developed musical style. The songs were gospel tinged but also touched with ballad-like prettiness. The band swung with the freedom of good jazz groups but locked itself into the simple melodic structure of the songs. The lyrics were simple, personal, and intense. And the singing was all things to all people: gospel, jazz and rock. Morrison has a great voice and on Moondance he found a home for it.

If Moondance had a flaw it was in its perfection. Sometimes things fell into place so perfectly I wished there was more room to breathe. Every song was a polished gem, and yet too much brilliance at the same time and in the same place can be blinding. The album would have benefited by some changes in mood and pace along the way. One or two light and playful cuts would have done the job.

On His Band and the Street Choir he seems to have realized that and has tried for a freer, more relaxed sound. Knowing he could not come up with another ten songs as perfectly honed as those on Moondance, he has chosen to show another side of what goes on around his house.

“Give Me A Kiss,” “Blue Money,” “Sweet Jannie” and “Call Me Up In Dreamland” are all examples of Van’s new, rollicking, good-timey style. “Give Me A Kiss’ is old rock and roll done with a light, jazzy touch. The chorus is enhanced by some simple back-up singing and, as on most of the record, drummer and associate producer Dahuud Elias Shaar moves things along perfectly. “Blue Money” features a sort of pumping piano by Alan Hand and a great nonsense chorus by Van and some of the Choir. “Sweet Jannie” is a straight shuffle about, presumably, Van’s wife Janet Planet: “Sweet Jannie, won’t you come out tonight wanna take you walking, by the pale moonlight,” and then, “Oh, baby c’mon, take me by the hand, I don’t want to stop walking, till we get up to the preacher man.” John Platania’s lead guitar is cool and mellow and plays against Van’s voice perfectly. And Van sings the blues with a lack of pretension we don’t normally associate with white singers.

“Call Me Up In Dreamland” is the sing-along of the year. Like “Blue Money” it has a sort of doubled bass in the bottom but the chorus, sung by what seems like everyone on the record, is especially powerful:

Call me up in dreamland,
Radio to me man,
Get the message to me,
Anyway you can …

While “Blue Money” sounds almost too loose and “Give Me A Kiss” for all its drive, a bit too conventional. “Call Me Up In Dreamland” is both loose and familiar, but still sounds thoroughly original and fresh.

As if to balance this assortment of light material, there is a group of down tunes all identified by the prominent use of acoustic lead guitar: “Crazy Face,” “I’ll Be Your Lover Too” and “Virgo Clowns.” The former is about a man who pulls out a gun and announces, “I got it from Jesse James.” The other two are simple love songs, the latter urging the girl to “Let your love come fill the room.”

On the rocking material the arrangements involving the whole band are kept to a simple minimum, with most of the creative sounds coming from the high pitched horn section. On the ballads, the rhythm section is kept loose with the lead acoustic predominating, and the horns, again, adding a distinctive and unexpected touch. Van’s singing is as smooth and powerful as it’s ever been. Occasionally he employs some eccentric phrasing that disrupts the flow of the music rather than enhancing it, but much more common is the soulful intensity with which he sings. “You’ll be my queen, I’ll be your king, Then I’ll be your lover too.”

The creative core of the album lies in four songs. “Gypsy Queen” is a sort of tribute to the Impressions that doesn’t really sound like the Impressions. It merely gives Van an excuse to use his falsetto, which he does brilliantly. “I’ve Been Working” is one of two songs on the album that makes direct use of Van’s roots in modern soul music. The born riff could have found its way to a James Brown session without any problems. The chorus in which the horns and Van’s voice come together to say “Woman, woman, woman, you make me feel alright” is breathtaking. And the rhythms especially bass, drums, and guitar are an awful lot funkier than one would have expected.

Finally “Domino” mixes that R&B funk with some pop lyrics and melodic ideas and it turns out to be Van’s top ten single. The guitar figure at the beginning of the cut is not only a great way to start a single, but a fine way to begin the album. Van’s singing is at its best, as all its eccentricities and nuances make sense here: “Oh, Domino, roll me over Romeo, there you go …” The bass, drums and horns it all hangs together as well as anything cut recently in Muscle Shoals or Memphis.

As “Domino” opens the album with a show of strength. “Street Choir” closes it with a burst of both musical and poetic energy which is not only better than anything else on the album but may well be one of Van’s two or three finest songs. Here, the keyboard holds the arrangement together, while the Street Choir enhances the chorus as they do only as well on “Call Me Up In Dreamland.” And finally, Van’s lyrics take over to complete the album’s statement,

Why did you leave America
Why did you let me down,
And now that things seem better off,
Why do you come around,
You know I just can’t see you know,
In my new world crystal ball,
You know I just can’t free you now,
That’s not my job at all.

His Band and the Street Choir is a free album. It was recorded with minimal over-dubbing and was obviously intended to show the other side of Moondance. And if it has a flaw it is that, like Moondance, it is too much what it set out to be. A few more numbers with a gravity of “Street Choir” would have made this album as close to perfect as anyone could have stood.

But notwithstanding its limitations. His Band and the Street Choir is another beautiful phase in the continuing development of one of the few originals left in rock. In his own mysterious way. Van Morrison continues to shake his head, strum his guitar and to sing his songs. He knows it’s too late to stop now and he quit trying to a long, long time ago. Meanwhile, the song he is singing keeps getting better and better.

Eric Clapton From The Cradle (1994)

From nobilliards.blogspot.com

It’s quite fitting that Clapton’s only solo UK number one album is his most determinedly purist, even though the record thrives on strands of impudent impurity. I think his focus on electric blues far outstrips his overly polite forays into “classic” blues. It acknowledges and underlines the absolutist importance of modernism.

Look at Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Eric Clapton, a perfectly decent 2003 anthology which doesn’t go beyond 1970, though does reference John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album from 1966, a great album which I didn’t realise was great until I unknowingly heard it through the speakers at Ray’s Jazz Shop. It is such a great record because, while faithful to the concept of the blues, it doesn’t forget to be a pop record too, and perhaps also an experimental jazz record on the side – the young Alan Skidmore pops up now and then to make some rather barbed, stern comments on tenor.

The anthology includes nothing from From The Cradle, but starting with the ferocious Hubert Sumlin roar which announces “Blues Before Sunrise,” one realises that this represents Clapton back in his element for the first time in nearly thirty years. And yes, he is perhaps trying to be Elmore James vocally, and that may be unnerving for people familiarised with the placid stupor of “Wonderful Tonight,” but this is unavoidably vital music. Or at least tries its best to be.

The invention carries on throughout the lengthy “Third Degree,” in which Clapton attempts to justify his protagonist being a 100% shit. “Bad luck is killing me,” he intones, as though about to consume his last packet of prawn cocktail crisps on Death Row. But there are also subtle jazz guitar chordalities out of Jim Hall. We have to recall that this may all be symptomatic of premature parental bereavement – though there is too much unclenched anger here for something like “Tears In Heaven” to feel comfortable. “She had the nerve,” he attests four times in “Five Long Years” – four rhetorical bangs of the judge’s gavel, the fourth deliberately slower-paced – before proceeding to the blindly outraged payoff: “…TO PUT ME OUT!”

Things otherwise become a little too comfortable. Nothing here is terrible, but too much of it is too damned reverent. With Clapton’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” one is slightly reminded of Craig Douglas essaying Sam Cooke. It all starts to get a little samey, a little so-what-this-is-1994-for-heaven’s-sake.

But then, on “Sinner’s Prayer,” something happens. Something in Clapton wakes up, realises that the blues are not all about textbook reproductions but about pouring one’s self into the music, letting whatever “everything” is come out. He maybe remembers what attracted him to the blues in the first place. From the patient launchpad of “Lord have mercy…Lord have mercy on me,” he leaps up like an abruptly-aroused jaguar – “if I’ve done somebody wro-HONG, LORD!,” “I used to HA-HA-HA-HA-HAVE plenty money,” sung as though slashing his chest with barbed wire, or laughing at his own damnation.

“Motherless Child,” a Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) song, not the old spiritual, is a surprisingly successful acoustic jug band exercise in the manner of McGuinness Flint – not that far-fetched a comparison, since the drummer on Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton was Hughie Flint – but “It Hurts Me Too” is startlingly modern, with near-atonal punk guitars from both Clapton and Andy Fairweather Low and piano from Chris Stainton which in places recalls John Cage. “I WON’T STAND TO SEE YOU PUSHED AROUND!” roars Clapton, telling that Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and G Love & Special Sauce who’s blues-at-one-remove boss. Clapton’s solo at the climax of “Someday After A While” is strangely exuberant but sounds liberated; note the throat-clearing coda.

In “Standin’ Round Crying” he sounds a reborn child (“yew-aynt-nuthin-LAAIKE you used to be!” “When I was DEEP in LOVE with ya!”). And, while the concluding “Groaning The Blues” doesn’t really touch the hem of Otis Rush’s garment – not that it doesn’t try – Clapton’s is quite a spectacular rendition, topped and tailed with rippling, wall-smashing guitar codas which not only remind us specifically of Hendrix, but also of Pete Townshend’s comment that, much as he liked “Layla” as a song, he preferred Derek and the Dominos thrashing it out rather than politely, acoustically crooned on MTV Unplugged. Electricity, dynamism, life. Note Clapton’s stentorian growls, the parched earthquakes that he makes of “STARVATION” and “DESERT SUN,” Stainton’s tremulous piano responding to “shake down in my bones,” and the final, gnarled shout of “MURDER!” which is more than worthy of Nick Cave. Blues out of the country, from the cradle, and into the city, where no obviously palpable grave awaits. But perhaps a second, conscious childhood is to be witnessed

Duke Ellington Latin American Suite (1970)

From desguin.net

When Duke Ellington and his musicians left New York for Rio de Janeiro on the first day of September, 1968, it was—rather surprisingly for such world-travelers —their first excursion to Latin America. “I’m giving up a lot of my virginity on this trip,”” Ellington observed as the Aerolineas Argentinas jet headed south. “I’ve never been to South America or below the equator before.”

They played in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, and always they were welcomed in packed houses with an enthusiasm that moved the most experienced and blasé among them. At receptions in the different U. S. embassies, these unofficial ambassadors met and discussed affairs of the day with members of the diplomatic corps as though such occasions were routine to them. The main responsibility, however, fell on Ellington himself, his wit, charm and composure everywhere making a big impression. In addition to the concerts and the more-or-less obligatory social affairs attended by his men, he not only had to make television and radio appearances, but also field questions of all kinds at extensive press receptions in each new city visited.

He did this with unfailing skill and tact, although often he was very short of sleep because of the infrequent air services between South American cities (infrequent, that is, as compared with what is normal in his own country and Europe). His patience, too, seemed inexhaustible, and everyone who wanted an autograph received one, no matter how much time it took. “l can’t let these people down,” he said once, refusing to escape by a back door from a theatre besieged by admirers. The affection between artist and audience reached a peak in Buenos Aires where, after his last performance, people waited crying, trying to touch him, and in many cases thrusting gifts upon him that did not even bear their names.

“The generosity and enthusiasm of the audiences,” he said on leaving, “‘were altogether the inspiration of a lifetime — a virtual ~summit in my career. Everything and everyone has been so completely and warmly attuned that I am truly overwhelmed, and at a loss to express my appreciation. Perhaps I can do so at a later date, in music.””

The music in this album is the expression of that appreciation, and much of it was actually written while the tour was in progress. He had agreed to present a new work, which he had tentatively titled Mexican Anticipacion, in Mexico City on September 28th, and he was writing this and trying out sections of it during the band’s performances en route. The warmth of the welcome in South America, however, soon caused him to decide that the Mexican sections would have to become part of a larger Latin American Suite.

There were occasional opportunities for him to hear authentic native music, as in Sao Paolo, where an extremely talented group of folk musicians was specially gathered together in a small club for his entertainment. Moreover, authorities of regional music brought him books and records to supplement their discussions with him. But essentially The Latin American Suite is not an attempt to re-interpret the musical forms indigenous to the countries he visited; it reproduces musically the impressions made upon him by those countries and their people. Thus the rhythmic underlay is always oriented in a Latin American direction, but it is achieved by his regular rhythm section, without the addition of the congas, bongos and timbales most composer-arrangers would have felt necessary.

A striking difference between this and his other suites is in the much greater emphasis on the ensemble and the piano player’s role.

For once, most of the other soloists take second place. In this, perhaps, and in the unison voicing, Ellington echoes practices of those Latin American bands that were influenced in their instrumental devices by the big U.S. bands.

The suite opens with Oclupaca, a title that is a typical Ellington inversion. If you have ever been there, you will know that it is a delightful place for a vacation. The band spent a very relaxed day on its beaches, and played for an equally relaxed dance, at which Ava Gardner made a radiant appearance. The happiness of that occasion, even an impression of sunlit good health, are present in a performance that yet has an exotic, yearning undercurrent, as though the weathered inhabitants of the red hills beyond were remembered, too. Fittingly, the band’s champion swimmer is given the major solo responsibility, and Paul Gonsalves makes the most of it in a manner that may bring back fond memories of Ben Webster on Conga Brava.

Chico Cuadradino portrays “a little Spanish square doing his thang!” Humcrous and animated, it has a boisterous trombone solo by Buster Cooper and another sterling contribution from Gonsalves. Note the audible presence of the late Johnny Hodges in the reed section, and the handclapping of the maestro in the background. The inspiration was derived from another of those occasions when the band played for dancers.

Eque has to do with Ellington’s first crossing of the Equator, an event that would stir the imagination even without the presentation of a commemorative document in elegant, courtly Spanish. Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves share solo honors with the piano player.

Tina is an affectionate diminutive for Argentina, whose people reacted so emotionally everywhere. Ellington noticed that the Brazilian response was stronger to the more rhythmic numbers, whereas the Argentinians showed more appreciation of his music’s melodic qualities. Played only by the rhythm section, here including two bassists, Tina has a pretty, fragrant theme, and appropriate references to the tango, a dance still popular in Argentina.

The Sleeping Lady and the Giant Who Watches Over Her are the two snow-capped mountains whose presence is always felt in Mexico City. Although it is the closest to the U.S., Mexico is yet in many respects one of the most “foreign” of the Latin American countries, and these brooding mountains are an unforgettable part of its singular landscape.

Somehow, Ellington the composer has managed to convey, along with their serenity, something of the extraordinarily colorful history they have witnessed.

Latin American Sunshine is a catchy piece that grew on tour from a rhythmic work-out by piano and bass to an extremely exhilarating statement by the whole band. The reeds always contrived to make their entry with a special lift. Note the invaluable role of Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone in the counter-melody and Lawrence Brown’s jaunty interpolation. The sunshine in the title should not, of course, be taken too literally, for it embraces the warm smiles and warm hearts encountered throughout Latin America.

Brasilliance, surging with life and rhythmic power, can be regarded as a tribute to the huge nation to the south. A long way from the cool sophistication of the samba, it salutes both the industrial energy of Sao Paolo and the frontier spirit of those who are opening up the vast interior. Paul Gonsalves, again in marvelous form, is in his element, as he was in Brazil, where his knowledge of Portuguese made him the band’s official interpreter.

Ellington’s tremendous resources in thematic and orchestral invention are once again revealed in The Latin American Suite. Certainly, no one associated with jazz has succeeded in blending its emotional content so felicitously with the rhythmic impulses of Latin American idioms.

Al Di Meola Land Of The Midnight Sun (1976)

From jazz-rock-fusion-guitar.blogspot.com

Land of the Midnight Sun is the first album by Al Di Meola, released in 1976. The complex pieces (which include the three-part “Suite-Golden Dawn,” an acoustic duet with Chick Corea on “Short Tales of the Black Forest” and a brief Bach violin sonata) show Di Meola’s range even at this early stage.

One of the guitar heroes of fusion, Al di Meola was just 22-years-old at the time of his debut as a leader but already a veteran of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. The complex pieces (which include the three-part “Suite-Golden Dawn,” an acoustic duet with Corea on “Short Tales of the Black Forest,” and a brief Bach violin sonata show di Meola’s range even at this early stage. With assistance from such top players as bassists Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke, keyboardist Barry Miles, and drummers Lenny White and Steve Gadd, this was a very impressive beginning to di Meola’s solo career.

After joining Chick Corea’s Jazz-Fusion project, Return To Forever in 1974, guitarist Al DiMeola released his first solo album in 1976, named “Land of the Midnight Sun”. DiMeola was 21 at the release of the album and I am surprised over his mind-bogglingly technical skills at so young age, and this album shows both his technical skills, as well as his songwriting skills very nicely through-out the album’s (shockingly short) playing time at 35- minutes. Another great positive with this release is that DiMeola is themed up with a nice handful of guest musicians, including Jaco Pastorius from Weather Report and Chick Corea, who plays a beautiful acoustic duet with DiMeola on the last track. The music has very few weak moments and is a pleasant surprise to your ears. Overall, “Land Of The Midnight Sun” is a completely necessary release to be featured in your Jazz-Rock collection (or Jazz collection for that matter). The only real flaw is the short playing time. Otherwise, there’s not much here to dislike. One of the best debut’s I know!

Having recently shocked and awed the JR/F world with two amazing albums (Hymn To The seventh Galaxy and Romantic Warrior), Return To Forever was riding high on the wave it had created, riding on Corea and DiMeola’s incredibly fast playing, displaying a monstrous but cold virtuosity that would eventually have a lot of fans grinding their teeth. ADM’s debut solo album was another monster that would enthral fans around the world. This writer bought the album within the month it came out, well before he would indulge in Nucleus of Liles’ start of the decade masterpieces, so for a few years, this album represented what jazz-rock was all about. Although called a solo album, you’d swear this could yet another RTF album as all of the RTF members appears at one point or another on this album. Musically speaking, this album is a bit schizophrenic, as 2/3 pf it is pure jazz rock,, while the last third is more eclectic.

Starting out on one of the album’s highlight, Wizard, with its superb rhythm section and Latin percussions ala Santana and Al’s guitar, often Santana-esque as well. Starting almost on the same feel, the title track is a tremendous piece, where Al and Chick trade incredibly fast and virtuosi lines. But in this case, Al’s guitar resembles more McLaughlin’s while the Latin percussions might sound a bit odd for this supposedly Norwegian-inspired track. In terms of jazz-rock, this album would be stuck between Santana’s bests (Caravanserai), Mahavishnu’s best (Birds Of Fire) and RTF’s Romantic Warrior. Closing the album’s first side is a slow Bach piece (Sarabande), which might sound out of place, but provides a welcome interlude.
On the flipside, the album starts on the equally XXX , a progressive pieces that comes with delicate female/male vocals that could come out of Carlos Santana & Alice Coltrane’s Illuminations. The lengthy three-part suite Golden Dawn brings us back to the album’s main focus, a sizzling JR/F (can’t speak of pure fusion jazz album yet). You’d swear this was McLaughlin with Hammer duelling/duetting back in 72 for BOF. The closing Black Forest is a Chick Corea-written acoustic piece that displays the duo’s talents and closely the album in a very worthy manner.
ADM’s solo debut album is one of the late 70’s crown jewels, one of those albums that will probably never age and is part of the history of its genre. A very highly and warmly recommended album, and probably my favourite, even over the usually better rated Elegant Gypsy album that was to follow this one.

The Who ‘That’s When They Were on Fire’: Inside the Who’s ‘Live at Leeds’

From yahoo.com February 14th 2020

On the 50th anniversary of their most legendary show, longtime sound engineer Bob Pridden reflects on capturing the group at their peak

It was 50 years ago today that the Who walked into the University of Leeds Refectory in Leeds, England, and played what many rock fans consider to be the greatest concert of all time. At the very least, the album they recorded that night — Live at Leeds — is one of the most celebrated live albums in the genre’s history, up there with the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, the Band’s The Last Waltz, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Live Bullet, and Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Live at Leeds, we phoned up the Who’s longtime sound engineer Bob Pridden to chat about the momentous gig. He joined their ranks in 1966 and, amazingly, stayed on the road with the Who until 2016 when he decided that half a century traveling around with a rock band was enough. “It was getting hard,” says the 74-year-old. “I wasn’t getting any younger. The pressure each night was getting hard for me.”

Pridden witnessed well over 1,000 gigs during his life with the Who, but he says they reached their peak in the late Sixties and early Seventies. “That’s when they were on fire,” he says. “The were working all the time and just on top of their game. As a unit of just four people, a band couldn’t be any better.”

It was his job to mix the sound every night for the room, but actually recording the shows for posterity wasn’t even a thought for the band in their earliest years. Tragically, that means that the hundreds of gigs they did between 1963 and 1968 have been completely lost to history beyond little bits here and there.

“About two years before Live at Leeds, I thought I’d try recording them with a couple of microphones plugged into a tape recorder,” Pridden says. “I brought an Akai seven-and-a-half–inch reel-to-reel and started taping shows on it. We went from that to a Vortexion where you can take a D.I. [direct input] into it and then put two mics into it and mix them in together.”

The enormous success of 1969’s Tommy forced the band to think more seriously about recording their shows. The rock opera gave them a huge new audience, but it was largely a studio creation that didn’t capture their explosive onstage sound. When they headed to America in the fall, Pridden was instructed to tape 30 shows for a live album that was envisioned as the perfect follow-up to Tommy. (Bootlegs were also becoming big business at this point, and the band wanted to beat the pirates at their own game.)

In Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am, he recalls speaking to Pridden after the tour and realizing he hadn’t taken any notes about the relative quality of each show. “There wasn’t enough time for us to wade through 30 shows again,” he wrote. “Plus we now had an additional eight that Bob had recorded in England — including the most recent show at the London Coliseum. For me to listen to 38 shows would take five days in a studio. Even with notes I would lose track. The live album was never going to happen if we didn’t do something, and fast.”

This was early in February 1970, and the band had only two gigs coming up before a long break, at Leeds University on February 14th and Hull’s City Hall the following day. “‘Hire an eight-track rig, record the shows, I’ll mix them both at home on my new eight-track machine, and the best of the two nights will have to do,’” Townshend instructed Pridden. “Bob was looking anxious again. ‘What do I do with the live tapes from the tour?’”https://www.youtube.com/embed/XhGyq2YjSiI?feature=oembed

In a move he’d later label “one of the stupidest decisions of my life,” Townshend told Pridden to burn the tapes so that they’d never wind up in the hands of bootleggers. Pridden remembers the moment well all these years later. “I burned them in a dustbin in the back of a cottage I had,” he says. “I put them in the bin, dropped a match and that was it. I felt weird, but we were already planning on playing another show. I didn’t think that 20 years on people would be crying out for these things. But it couldn’t have been everything because some of them did eventually surface and they got used.”

Pridden’s bonfire put immense pressure on the Who as they headed to Leeds and Hull. They had just two nights to capture a perfect concert after thinking they could simply pick the best out of 30 in America. Making matters worse, the mobile recording kit that Townshend envisioned the label sending over wound up being “a bunch of bits and pieces in military-grade boxes” that arrived in a van. This equipment was set up in the cafeteria one floor below the general assembly hall where the Who were performing.

“They played in the room where students would get together and the headmaster or the teachers would talk from the stage,” says Pridden. “There were no seats at all and it was really packed. People were hanging off the side of the wall and onto things. It was packed to the gills. I don’t think these days that amount of people would even be let in.”

The set featured the vast majority of Tommy along with earlier hits like “I Can’t Explain,” “Happy Jack,” and “Substitute,” along with covers like “Fortune Teller” and “Summertime Blues,” and a nearly 16-minute version of “My Generation.”

“I played more carefully than usual and tried to avoid the careless bum notes that often occurred because I was trying to play and jump around at the same time,” Townshend wrote. “The next day we played a similar set in City Hall in Hull. This was another venue with good acoustics for loud rock, but it felt less intense than the previous night.”

When Pridden listened to the tapes, he was horrified to discover that John Entwistle’s bass parts somehow weren’t recorded at Hull. “Forget about Hull then,” Pridden recalls Townshend telling him. “Concentrate on Leeds.”

That show had its own problems though. In addition to intermittent clicks, the backing vocals weren’t recorded properly. “I arranged a session at Pye studios,” Townshend wrote, “played the show back, and John and I simply sang along. We covered the backing vocals in one take, preserving the immediacy of the live concert.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/kcVmJGkMTgc?feature=oembed

Townshend tried slicing out the clicks with a razor blade and quickly realized it would be impossible to get all of them. But subpar-sounding bootlegs were flooding the market at this time, so the band just added a note to the label saying the clicks were intentional. The cover was a faded stamp reading “The Who: Live at Leeds” on brown paper, mirroring the look of illegal vinyl bootlegs of the era.

The original Live at Leeds, released May 23rd, 1970, featured just six of the 33 songs played at the show, and not a single one of them was from Tommy. It wasn’t until 1995 when a CD version arrived containing 14 of the songs, and the complete gig wouldn’t see the light of day until the release of a deluxe edition in 2001.

All this time, the master tapes for Hull sat in storage. They were presumed to be worthless because of the issues with Entwistle’s bass parts, but when prepping a 40th anniversary of Live at Leeds a decade ago, Pridden listened to the full Hull show for the first time. “That bass wasn’t there for the first five or six numbers,” he says. “Then all of a sudden it kicked in and stayed.”

He went to Townshend with his discovery. “Let’s get someone to overdub a bass on it,” Townshend said. “We can use it.” Horrified at the idea of someone else attempting to replicate John’s bass parts, Pridden came up with a better solution. “I thought to myself, ‘They did exactly the same set both nights,’” says Pridden. “‘Maybe we can lift the bass from the first few numbers on Leeds and drop it in.’ This is when Pro Tools was on the go.”

He tasked an audio engineer, Matt Hay, with the delicate task of lining up the Leeds bass parts to the Hull recordings. “We went in and set up an eight-track machine, which Hull was recorded on, and lifted the bass from Leeds and dropped it onto the track with Pro Tools,” says Pridden. “Poor Matt was running for two days and nights marrying the bass from Live at Leeds. But when we did, it was fantastic.” (Live at Hull was released on the 40th-anniversary edition of Live at Leeds in 2010 and as a standalone disc two years later.)

After the Leeds and Hull shows, the Who slowed down the pace of their touring considerably so they could focus on the creation of complex studio releases like Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. Their tours after 1971 were shorter affairs marked by private planes, drug binges, and sloppier sets, especially when it came to the work of Keith Moon. These were still incredible gigs by the standard of most any other band, but the magic of Live at Leeds — the culmination of seven years of relentless road work — was never quite achieved again.

After Moon died in 1978, the group never again played as a four-piece band, despite coming close in 1999 and 2000 when Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle were joined only by drummer Zak Starkey and keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick.

“They are still fantastic, though,” says Pridden. “I went to the concert at Wembley last year. It was certainly different with the orchestra, but it was magical. Maybe the next thing they’ll do is go back to a four-piece, but I don’t think there’s a chance in hell it’ll happen. It would be amazing, though.”

And looking back at Live at Leeds five decades later, Pridden says he and the band were moving so quickly they didn’t realize what an amazing legacy they were leaving for future generations to discover. It was just another show.

“We were making history,” he says. “But we weren’t history. We never thought about making history. We were just wandering minstrels out there having fun.”