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.
John Fogerty celebrates a milestone birthday today (Thursday) as he turns 75.
Achieving success first as a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival and then on his own, he is an Army veteran and a member of both the Rock and Roll Hall and Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as the National Baseball Hall of Fame. John Fogerty says he doesn't try to rush his songwriting:
"There's this sort of agonizing exercise you go through, sometimes its just minutes, and other times it's months if not years where you know somewhere down in you is the exact right way to say that -- so that it's really just excellent. I mean you know that, you feel that it's in you somewhere, but you can't, for the life of you, you just can't figure it out. To me it's an awful lot like a math problem back in school. But if you have enough time, if you give yourself enough time you'll get it."
One song took no time at all. Inspired by his anger at young men being sent off to fight in Vietnam by politicians whose own sons rarely did so, John Fogerty recalls that when he began writing "Fortunate Son," the words just came tumbling out.
“Probably the quickest song I ever wrote. I had all the chord structure, I had the guitar lick and I had the title and pretty much how the melody went, but no real words. And I went into my bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed with a little tablet and with probably a word changed here and there -- you know, cross one out, put one in -- I wrote three pages, one verse on each page, exactly the way you hear it on the record, in about 20 minutes, maybe a little less.”
Stevie Nicks turns 72 today. She wrote the Fleetwood Mac song "Golddust Woman. A bit long for a single, it was the B-side of "You Make Loving Fun," which peaked at number-nine on the Billboard Hot 100. When Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood thinks of "Gold Dust Woman," from Rumours, he thinks of its writer, Stevie Nicks.
“It is so her, everything about it: the theater in it; the way it paints a picture, if you like; the mystery — everything that Stevie is to a lot of people. And yet there’s always that other side of Stevie that a lot of people don’t realize -- that she’s a real homebody. She has a very normal side — and I’m not saying the other side is abnormal — but the mystique she loves, ‘cause she loves theater and poetry."
Bernie Taupin is 70 today was born on (May 22nd), Lyricist for Elton John, they have been writing together for decades. Elton John's 1975 Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was an autobiographical concept album about the struggles Elton and his lyricist Bernie Taupin went through in their early days of their career. Taupin says the words to that album's only single, "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," came straight out of Elton's life.: "Someone Saved My Life Tonight"
“It was regarding an incident that happened to Elton where he was supposed to get engaged to this girl and everybody around him thought it was going to be disaster. Myself and a guy that Elton used to play for called Long John Baldry, who was a great British blues singer, we all went out one night and totally dissuaded him — got him thoroughly drunk and he came crashing through the door saying, ‘It’s over! It’s off! It’s off!’ And then she pretended she was doing away with herself and then he pretended to do away with himself. It was all those bits and pieces thrown together.”
Original Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch is 65 today (May 21st) His simple drum part made the song "You Got Lucky". Actually it was a looped tape of the drum part. Guitarist Mike Campbell explains how.
“Stan had come over to my house and I had drums set up and a little 4-track and I had some mics up and he was just playing a beat. And there was just like one measure of it that really had a great groove, so I just cut the tape and made a loop of it and then ran that off on one of the 4-track things and made some music up to it. ‘Cause of the keyboard thing, I thought it maybe wasn’t quite right for the group, and then Tom heard it and goes, ‘I know what to do with that.' And then we went in and recut it the same way with the drum loop and then overdubbed some real drums against that. That was the story behind that one.”
Just like everyone else, Dennis DeYoung is staying home and going out only when he has to.The voice of suchStyx classics as "Lady," "Babe" and "Mister Roboto" injects a little humor into his current life.
"You know, I've been in this house for two and half months. This morning, my sweatpants, they stormed into my bedroom and demanded that I finally wash them. See what I'm saying? The grocery store is two blocks from my house. That's it! I go there, I come back. That's it. That's all I've done."
This isn't the year he expected. The lifelong Chicago White Sox fan released 26 East last month, and he says it will be his final album. But he accepts that he won't be touring to support it. Dennis DeYoung says halting concerts and live sports pales in comparison to the need to find a coronavirus vaccine.
"Trivialities, my friend, none of that, none of that stuff, baseball or music... concerts... all the trivialities of life, valuable that they are to me, I can't be thinking about that right now. Sure, I'd like it back, we all would. But let's put all our effort right now into a vaccine -- getting this thing under control. And the rest will, you know, everything else will fall into place."
Pete Townshend is 75 today, born on May 19th, 1945. In The Who song "My Generation" Be careful what you hope for. Practically since he wrote it, Pete Townshend has been answering questions about the line declaring, "I hope I die before I get old." Here's what he had to say about it at a 1989 press conference in New York.
“The only thing now is that looking back on those words, ‘I hope I die before I get old,’ I really know now that that will happen — that will happen to all of us — and in a sense, in a lot of ways, it has already started, that process. Certain bits of me, which were operating extremely well when I wrote those lines, don’t function quite so adequately today.”
