Z Z Top's Frank Beard (the one without the beard) turns 71 today (June 11) By the time ZZ Top's Eliminator album rolled around, the MTV era was in full swing and visuals were nearly as important as the songs. Aside from the Eliminator car, the video for "Legs" featured the debut of the band's spinning furry guitars. Billy Gibbons says they have one of rock's early guitar pioneers to thank for that idea.
“The furry guitar was definitely an inspiration from Bo Diddley. He had chopped and channeled his own versions of the electric Spanish six-string for years and years, and one made an appearance covered in kind of like a shag carpet. Having made friends with Mr. Bo Diddley, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘go get yourself a sheepskin.’ He said, ‘It’ll probably work for ya.’”
Dennis DeYoung applauds the efforts of the actors and musicians from the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Washington who came together to perform a positive parody of his Styx song, "The Best of Times," which they've renamed, "The Best of Corona Times."
DeYoung says, "What a beautiful job you did on my song. Seeing all the different ages is the best part because music is the universal language and transcends time, for sure...
"I never take it for granted when people do heartfelt renditions of my songs, never. Whether it’s cover bands, college marching bands, characters in TV shows or movies, or the guy or gal in their bedroom pouring their hearts out trying to make a connection.
"When I was in Styx I preached the value of the song day and night to the guys and made the case that the songs will live on longer then our long hair and platform shoes and ability to perform them...
"Tommy [Shaw] and JY [James Young] haven’t played 'The Best of Times' since I was replaced. Shame really, although you’d need me there to sing it properly but everybody knows that. I suspect they know it as well..."
Here is former Styx singer-keyboardist Dennis DeYoung on why he wrote “The Best of Times.”
“In 1980, when the album was constructed, we’d just come through the Iranian crisis — remember when they held the hostages. We’d just come through, really, in my mind, the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the oil embargo, and now we had taking hostages. And ‘The Best of Times’ was a song about trying to rationalize in my own mind, having grown up, really, in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s in probably the greatest time to be alive in the history of mankind — to be in this country at that time -- and then to go through the turmoil of the late ‘60s and all through the ‘70s.”
Robert Plant is reportedly working with Alison Krauss on a follow-up to their 2007 album, Raising Sand, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2008.
In an interview with Uncut magazine, Lucinda Williams says she joined them in a Nashville studio along with their producer, T-Bone Burnett, to sing on a Pops Staples song.
Plant has been hinting at a second album with Alison for quite some time, even saying in 2017 that he was compiling a list of songs for them to record.
In 2015, Robert and Alison released “Light of Christmas Day,” which was on the soundtrack to the film Love the Coopers.
Derek Trucks turns 41 today. Nephew of original Allman Brothers member Butch Trucks and eventually guitarist with the Allman Brothers. The Allman Brothers song: "Melissa" written by Gregg Allman was named after a little girl he never knew. After something like 300 attempts, "Melissa" was one of the first songs the late Gregg Allman wrote that he felt was good enough to record. He wrote it on his brother Duane's guitar in 1967, and Duane loved it. But the Allmans didn't put it on their first few studio albums. It wasn't until Gregg played it at Duane's funeral that he decided to include it on Eat a Peach. Gregg talked about how the song got its name.
"It was a pipe dream. I was on the road, I was pretty lonely, and I made up this perfect lady. And I didn't know what really to call her, and I was in the grocery store one day, which is a place I don't really frequent, you know. And there was this cute little girl, she was running away from her mother, and her mother called out, 'Melissa, come back here.' And I thought, 'That's a pretty name.' So that's what I called it.”
On June 5th, 1975, Talking Heads played their first show, beginning a four-night stand opening for the Ramones at New York's CBGB. They performed "Psycho Killer" which was written before they were a band. The original three members of Talking Heads -- David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth -- met in college at the Rhode Island School of Design and started writing songs together even before they formed their first band, The Artistics. Weymouth recalls "Psycho Killer" being one of them.
“That song was written before we ever had a band, when we were in school. So to us it means something about our past when we were sort of young prototypical punks back in art school and we wanted to do something good and yet thumb our nose at the same time -- classic structure, but weird vocals.”
Tommy Shaw says all that's left for Styx to do on their new album is to record it.
"Since the lockdown, we've completed writing. It's all demoed and, you know, if we keep going it's gonna be a double album, which, we don't want to do a double album. But, you know, if you're a writer you write. So, maybe something will bump something else off of it. But, as soon as we can find a comfortable way to get everybody here (Nashville), we will be going over to Blackbird [Studios] and start tracking."
And drummer Todd Sucherman adds,
"I can say the music on this upcoming record is absolutely killer... There is a song called 'Sound the Alarm', and when I first heard it, I stopped playing and damn near burst into tears because the lyrics were so in tune with what is happening now. It sounds like they were written today."
When completed, it will be the first studio album since 2017's The Mission.
Meanwhile, the band's former singer and keyboardist Dennis DeYoung just released what he says is his last album, 26 East: Volume One, but it's not.
"We wrote so many songs, Jim Peterik and I -- we have 18 songs and the record company said they wanted them all. It was idea to split them into two records -- Volume One and Volume Two. Seems a little pretentious to me. I wanted to call them This One and That One, but they didn't like that idea. So yeah, there will be two. But this one here (26 East), this is really my goodbye album as far as I'm concerned."
On June 3rd, 1970, Ray Davies flew from New York to London to re-record one word in The Kinks' "Lola." Due to a BBC policy barring commercial references in songs, "Coca-Cola" had to be sung as "cherry cola" in order to receive airplay. The song was huge for the Kinks making it to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Ray Davies wrote "Lola" after his manager unknowingly went home with a man he thought was a woman at a club in Paris. Davies tells us the subject had interested him for a long time. Here is Ray Davies:
“Sexual ambiguity interests me, because so much, like, the generation particularly before mine -- the John Wayne idea of masculinity -- has always fascinated me. Y’know, why do people have to be forced to be like that? At school I was great at sport, I was a boxer, and I was really good at art. I was neither one or the other, I guess. I mean, it’s just the way I am. But there are a lot of people who’re kind of trapped, I guess, and you have to be a certain way.”
On this day (June 2) in 1978, Bruce Springsteen's album Darkness on the Edge of Town was released. The band says it was a fun one to record. Especially the song "Prove It All Night". Roy Bittan, who plays the song's intro on piano, recalls the sessions for "Prove It All Night" fondly
“The nice thing about some of those records like ‘Prove It All Night’ is just I have these great memories of us -- and great pictures of my mind of us -- being in the recording studio all together and just playing out to the maximum. That’s one of those songs that I feel that way about. We were just there and just rocking it.”
Monday is Ronnie Wood's 73rd birthday, and also the 45th anniversary of his first full show as a member of The Rolling Stones -- June 1st, 1975 at the LSU Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, his 28th birthday.
Woody, who was also a member of The Faces at the time, replaced Mick Taylor, who had joined the band in 1969. Here is Ron Wood on what he thought his role would be in the Stones:
"When I did come in it myself I felt, 'Well, hopefully I'm putting some humor in here and lightening things up,' you know. 'Let's try and keep this thing from going down into another crevice here. You know, into another chasm of darkness, you know.' Happily the music rescues all."
Wood was a salaried employee until the early '90s when he was finally made a partner.
Among the other guitarists who had auditioned or were considered as a replacement for Taylor were Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck and the late Rory Gallagher.
aul McCartney was asked in the "You Gave Me the Answer" section of his website if he had a favorite studio to work in.
He says his studio, The Mill in Sussex, England is "great favorite," but he adds that going back to Abbey Road in London is also "cool...because of the memories of the exciting times I had there."
Paul has a vast array of instruments and recording equipment in his studio, much if it from Abbey Road, which passed it along whenever execs there were upgrading and getting rid of old gear. What is in his studio, here is Paul:
"The stuff I keep put tends to be old stuff because it has a very warm sound. You know, they talk about real ale and lager and all that -- some people call these keg instruments. You know, it's the real thing instead of a sample of it or a synthesizer of it."
He has a hard time choosing just one favorite Abbey Road memory. But if forced to pick one, he says it was the recording of the orchestra on "A Day in the Life." "Once we realized we were going to use a symphony orchestra, George Martin said, ‘You can tell them what to wear.’ We wanted evening suits -- full, posh orchestral attire...[and] we suggested that they also wore funny hats and funny noses. That was very, very Beatles; we liked taking it to the extreme. A few people in the orchestra were good sports and put them on, and it was a fun session. That was fabulous to do."
Other places Paul has recorded include Scotland, Africa, the Caribbean, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York.
