50 years ago today (May 18th, 1970), The Beatles released their final album, Let It Be, in the U.S., 10 days after its British release. The song "Get Back" was simple according to Ringo. He just kept doing what he was doing when they were working out the rhythm. It was released as a standalone single, it was remixed before appearing as the closing cut on Let It Be.' ' Ringo Starr says there's nothing particularly fancy about the rhythms he plays on The Beatles' "Get Back."
"'It's a fairly simple song, really, and that rhythm I was doing was just like when you're working it out, y'know, it's just like something to do. [hand claps, thigh slaps] Just, y'know, instead of doot-doot-dot-dot, y'know. And it really sounded good with the piece, y'know, so I just kept it in.”
Fleetwood Mac did their first show with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks 45 years ago this Friday (May 15th, 1975) in El Paso, Texas.
Stevie has occasionally commented on the show in interviews. It seems to have gone very well for her and the band, but until she walked on stage, she was a wreck. She recalls finding herself in the dressing room with all her stage clothes "scattered across the floor, just thinking, 'This is not going to work.' Nothing fit right, nothing looked good, nothing felt comfortable."
In a different interview, she says she was "very nervous before the show...sick to my stomach...really ill. And as soon as I walked out on the stage, that all went away."
Lindsey also remembers having to go through some musical changes during that first tour.
“If you go back to what Stevie and I had done, it was very guitar-based. It was a lot of finger-picking within tracks that had drums and everything on it. There was a sound, and that sound, even the guitar I was playing live, was not suitable for the pre-existing sound of Fleetwood Mac. And so there was a lot of adapting to do as an instrumentalist.”
David Byrne turns 68 today (May 14th) You may be surprised to learn the Talking Heads biggest hit was one of the few not written by the band. It's "Take Me to the River" They thought it would be fun to play live, but never intended to record it. It was on More Songs About Buildings and Food it peaked at number-26 on the Billboard Hot 100 Talking Heads frontman David Byrne says that he and drummer Chris Frantz played a different Al Green song, "Love and Happiness," in an earlier band together. He explains how they came to record "Take Me to the River."
“We didn’t see anything incompatible with doing the kind of stuff we did and loving this music from Memphis. So we thought we’d do another Al Green song and it was ‘Take Me to the River.’ We just thought it’d be a fun thing to throw into the set, in the same way that we used to do ‘1-2-3 Red Light,’ this bubblegum song. But ‘Take Me to the River’ ended up being really popular when we performed. Originally, we didn’t intend to put it on the record and people said, ‘You got to put it on there, you really do it good.’ So we put it on there and, sure enough, the one song you don’t write is the hit.”
Stevie Wonder turns 70 today (May 13) One of his songs off of Talking Book was number 1 in 1972 but he had help writing it. Jeff Beck released a version with Beck, Bogert and Appice later the same year, although it wasn't a single it got a lot of airplay.
Jeff Beck and Stevie Wonder were making music together in 1972. Stevie asked Jeff to play on the song "Looking for Another Pure Love" on his Talking Book album and was looking to return the favor. Beck tells us that "Superstition, which Motown president Berry Gordy ultimately deemed too good to give away, was initially headed his way. Here is Jeff Beck:
“That was originally written for me. Stevie wrote that for me in return for playing on the Talking Book album. The drum pattern came from me and some of the lyrics I wrote. He knew that I’d recorded 'Ain’t Superstitious' and he liked that — I don’t think he even knew the origin of it — but he said, ‘What if I write something about superstition,' so I wrote down half a dozen ones he’d never heard of, like the broken mirrors. The bad luck 13-month-old I think I wrote. And he waltzed off and within half an hour that song was born.”
Randy Bachman says it doesn't feel like 50 years since The Guess Who's "American Woman" became the first single from a Canadian band to go number-one in the U.S.
He tells the Toronto Sun, "No, it feels more like, I don’t know, 10 years... It feels like it’s in the past obviously but it sure doesn’t seem like five decades."
Guitarist Randy Bachman explains who the “American Woman” is
“We had just gone through the whole ‘60s being Canadians in the United States and second-hand witnessing Vietnam and the draft situation and what was going on in America. And at that time the American woman to us meant the Statue of Liberty and what it stood for. And basically at the time it was the war. So that’s why we were screaming, ‘Stay away from me. I don’t need your war machines and I don’t need your ghetto scenes. It was not the normal healthy good looking American woman you see walking down the street, who is no different from an Australian woman or Canadian woman or anything else. It was the Statue of Liberty.”
Touring at the height of Vietnam War protests, Bachman recalls, "there were no guys in any town from Iowa to Texas to California between 18 and 35 [because of the war]... So we’d pull into town...and it was like Stepford Wives. We were like the Stepford Guys. No matter how ugly we were or how fat we were, we were like guys between 18 and 35, and all the women were like nuts."
Bachman says the song's famous groove was basically a happy accident on his guitar after changing a broken string. "I started to tune and started to play that riff and everybody’s heads snapped around and looked at me and I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t let this go.'" With their set temporarily on hold, frontman Burton Cummings was killing time on the piano and then the flute and harmonica. And when Bachman yelled to sing something, his first words were, "American woman, stay away from me!"
Later covered by Lenny Kravitz and Kelly Clarkson, "American Woman" spent the second, third and fourth weeks of May 1970 at number-one.
Bob Seger celebrates a milestone today (Wednesday) -- his 75th birthday.
Born in Detroit on May 6th, 1945, he broke onto the national scene in 1968 with "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," and then launched a half-dozen years as a singles-chart mainstay with "Night Moves" in 1976.
He has sold over 53 million albums and earned 13 platinum and seven multi-platinum discs. A Grammy winner, Seger is a member of both the Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame,
Seger completed his final tour last year, but is open to doing more shows -- just not long tours.
Here is Bob Seger on what he tries to achieve with his songwriting.
"I'll tell you honestly, I've always tried to write something that had some germ of universality. You know, I've felt that way, I've been there, I've known that person, whatever. And that's what I strive to do. I think that's what every artist strives to do is strike a familiar chord with people. If I've been able to do that, great. It's pretty amazing, knock wood. It's very flattering. I'm glad the stuff has held up."
Bob Seger says he had no idea whatsoever at the time he wrote it that "Turn the Page" would eventually become one of the most popular songs in his catalog.
“I thought it was a rather oddball song and I thought it was a rather narrow appeal song. I thought truckers would love it. Traveling salesman would love it -- people who were on the move a lot, people who travel a lot for a living. And it struck a chord with people. So I don’t know what people take from them, but I’ve always tried to write something that had some germ of universality — I felt that way, I’ve been there, I’ve know that person, whatever.
Former Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward turns 72 today. The song "War Pigs" came out of a an on stage jam. The band came up with the anti-war anthem's riffs during onstage jam to a sparse audience. The song became one of their most well known. Guitarist Tony Iommi explains how it happened.
“We used to play a lot of places in Europe seven three-quarter hour spots a day, which was a lot of work every night of the week for however long you were there. And it was so boring, ’cause you’d have like two people in in the afternoon and you’d think, ‘Oh, God,’ and you’d got to go and play the set. So we just used to make things up and I used to make riffs up. And ‘War Pigs’ was one of the ones I made up. We basically put that song together while nobody was in the clubs. We were just jamming.”
Mick Mars was born on May 4th, 1951, he turns 69. Heart-stopping talkbox guitar "stuff" from Mick Mars takes the place of a traditional solo at the end of Nikki Sixx's song about about the time his heart actually stopped "Kickstart My Heart". The second single off Dr. Feelgood, following its Top 10 title track, "Kickstart My Heart" peaked at number-27 on the Billboard Hot 100 It was nominated for a Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy and its video for an MTV Video Music Award. Crue bassist Nikki Sixx wrote the song about a now-legendary drug overdose, during which he was actually declared dead for two minutes only to be revived by a couple of shots of adrenaline in his heart. Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars on "Kickstart My Heart.”
“When I was first playing it, it didn’t have any of the licks in, and I started putting a bunch of licks in it and stuff. Then I decided, ‘I don’t want to do a normal solo in this,’ so I did it with the talk box and at the end I just started playing all this stuff -- all these solo things over the end of the song with the talk box. And I remember [producer] Bob Rock going, ‘Jesus, Mars’”
Ronnie Wood's first performance with The Rolling Stones was 45 years ago, on May 1st, 1975, when the band announced their Tour of the Americas from the back of a moving flatbed truck in New York City. (Ronnie's first full concert with the Stones took place on June 1st, 1975 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was also his 28th birthday.)
Here is Ronnie Wood on The Rolling Stones performing on a flatbed truck on May 1st, 1975 in New York City.
"I remember going down Fifth Avenue and seeing [Alice Cooper's manager] Shep Gordon come around the corner with his briefcase going to work, and all the police are going, 'Get me tickets. Get me tickets.' And I'm going, 'Where you want to come to Madison Square Garden? Get your own tickets.' You know, it was really funny."
It was Charlie Watts'sidea to announce their tour in that way. Here is Charlie Watts on The Rolling Stones performing on a flatbed truck in New York City on May 1st, 1975.
"Playing in the middle of the street I thought was fantastic. It's like they do in New Orleans. That was the best one."
TOMMY LEE is fed up with so-called "fans" who ask for his autograph, only to turn around and SELL it. He even tries to personalize things so they're harder to resell. But he just posted a picture on Instagram of a drum head that he signed . . . and the guy rubbed out his own name so he could sell it. In the caption, Tommy said:
"Just wanted to do a public post saying that I'm done doing Fan mail . . .I'm done taking my precious time to have people eBay my signature. There are literally hundreds. Hundreds of hours wasted. I thought I was doing the right thing by addressing the fan mail to people by their names so that they wouldn’t be re-sold online, but now people are being so shady that they are whiting out their names and reselling on eBay. Those of you that got a signature, I hope you enjoy it & appreciate it, and those of you that are selling can go [eff] yourselves!!!"
