Music
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Ok, what I really mean is what I'm saying; I just wanted to tie this post to the one about the contemporary reaction to Meet the Beatles. I don't think I had ever, until now, sat down and actually listened to this album. I'm not even sure I ever heard it all the way through as an…
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AllMusic.com sums up Jeff Beck's relative obscurity nicely: While he was as innovative as Jimmy Page, as tasteful as Eric Clapton, and nearly as visionary as Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck never achieved the same commercial success as any of those contemporaries, primarily because of the haphazard way he approached his career. After Rod Stewart left…
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You may have noticed the mention here and there over the past few days that February 9th of this years marks the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here is what some critics had to say. (Thanks to Robert W for pointing this out to me.) I remember watching the…
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Well, this was sort of inevitable, after Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues": That's pretty much the definition of blues-rock, and probably my favorite single Cream track. As good as they were, much of their music, at least as it made its way onto records, seemed to lack something. This "Crossroads" is a live performance.…
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Robert Johnson: Cross Road Blues Everybody interested in the blues knows the story about the crossroads, but not everybody is interested in the blues, so, for you: there's a legend that Johnson met the devil at a certain crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for musical ability. And here's one of his most…
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Dead at 94. One of my early encounters with the folk music movement of the early '60s was this song by Tom Paxton, sung, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, by Seeger. There was a little clock radio in the room I shared with my brother at home in north Alabama, and I…
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When I thought "Time for a folk guitarist" the first name that popped into my head was John Fahey's. Then I thought, "Nah, it should be someone more authentically folk, not someone who came to the music from outside"; Fahey was a middle-class guy who discovered blues and country in his teens. But his presence was…
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Time to touch base in the jazz world: Joe Pass, "Blues in G". Next week, a folk guitarist, and after that whatever strikes my fancy from week to week. Ok, one more, somewhat livelier: I wish I could say that I understood this kind of improvisation. I appreciate the enormous skill, and I…
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A little extra in the guitar series. It doesn't quite fit there, since the idea was to feature one guitarist in every post, although in a few cases (Duane Allman being the most obvious) it's hard to isolate one player from a group. And these three will all get their own posts at some point…
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I've been doing a regular weekend music post for several years now, and the choices have generally been pretty random, reflecting whatever I happened to be listening to. But for the next year, just for fun, and just because I love the guitar in all its forms, I'm going to focus on that instrument, and…
Light On Dark Water 