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.”
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.”