Go Metric

ZZ Top: Do All Bands Incorporate Fire Into Their Shows?

By John Q. Adams III

My first ZZ Top concert was at Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium on April 1, 1980. The Aud was hardly an ideal live music venue, but for my third concert ever it was still an exciting experience. My memories of that show were recently revisited when I watched the ZZ Top: Live in Germany 1980 DVD. It’s a good bet that the April 20, 1980 German gig is pretty close to what I saw and perhaps why I enjoyed it so much.

The show — filmed at the Grugahalle in Essen, Germany for the Rockpalast TV series just after the release of their classic Deguello album — captures the band “before sequencers and synthesizers, epitomizing their ‘lil’ ol’ blues band from Texas’ nickname.” In addition to a number of choice Deguello tracks, the set is complemented by tracks drawn predominantly from their Tres Hombres and Fandango! albums.

I think the key here is “...before sequencers and synthesizers....”. 

By 1980, these three cats had been at it for 10 years and were a pretty tight little unit. 1979’s Degüello was the first ZZ Top album I purchased in a store (I had the previous LPs but probably ordered them through Goldmine or maybe from a record club) and I was really stoked to learn that they were coming to Buffalo. This would be my third concert — my first two were KISS at the Aud in 1978 and 1979 — and I was wondering what kind of show a band put on without all the blood and fire.

I’ll be darned — seems like this one started with fire after all. Blacked out stage with fiery logo below the drum riser with horns playing over the PA. Did all bands incorporate fire of some sort into their show? (Actually no, as I learned at a Bob Seger show five months later.)

That would look way cooler if I knew how to make a gif of it.

And then they start right into “I Thank You.”  Got the choreographed moves going right off the bat and Billy and Dusty are scooting around the stage in some kind of slipper-looking wrestling shoes. But the playing is solid and this is gonna be a real nice time.

Two songs later and we’re at “Jesus Just Left Chicago” — a favorite of mine (I always liked it and not just as the second part of a two-fer) and one of the bluesier things these guys have ever done.  But not the bluesiest. No, that’ll come two songs after...

“Manic Mechanic.” Two things about this one. First, the gravelly vocals by Gibbons. In listening to the LP, I always thought there was some kind of Frampton "Do You Feel" voice thing going on but in watching the video, it seems like it’s just Billy growling it out. Makes it even cooler, you ask me.  Second, the line “Have mercy Miss Percy, I done put the coon tune on this bet/(vette)”.  That always stuck me as a bit racist but I read somewhere that “coon tune” is Hot Rod slang for modifying a car which is keeping with the theme of the song.

OK, “Fool For Your Stockings.” This one stands out to me due to a radio broadcast of the May 4, 1980 show at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NY. Gibbons introduces the song saying “Blues time in the Capitol Theater, right now!” and any time I hear “FFYS,” I say those words to myself. It’s almost like that introduction is a part of the song and is hardwired into my brain. (I’m guessing he probably said “Blues time in Buffalo” or something similar at the show I attended, but if so it’s lost to me, whereas the Capitol Theater line has stuck with me.) I was familiar with the song since it was on Degüello but I had no idea what kind of monster it would turn into live. 

When the Reverend Willie G. started into his “Those $15.95 come see me at midnight stockings” sermon, at the 3:10 mark in the clip below, I was slack-jawed.  Where did this come from? That ain’t on the album! “The Green Cross. The Black Cross. The Heavy Cross...” What the hell?!... By the time he was finished, I was just about ready to jump up screaming “Testify!!”  As I mentioned, I had been to a couple KISS shows so I knew that between song banter was a given (Paul Stanley, right?!...) but this was some little speech right in the middle of a song. Quite a mind blower at the time, I’m here to tell you.

One song after that and then we get “El Diablo.” For me this is a nice little number. Off the Tejas LP, it didn’t really grab me originally but viewing it all these years later it has some nice guitar work and is a pretty decent song. A hidden gem, really.

After three more songs comes La Grange. Is there anyone who doesn’t know the “Hown, hown, hown..” beginning of this beauty? Tho’ to be honest, the intro on this one reminded me of the 1977 Brownsville Station tune “The Martian Boogie.”  A nice bit of slide guitar by Billy on this one too, by the way.

At this point the band takes a short break (with backstage footage on the DVD) before returning to the stage and introducing The Lone Wolf Horns to play along on “She Loves My Automobile.” The Lone Wolf Horns is a projection of the band playing horns on a screen behind drummer Frank Beard, who seems especially taken with this technology and continuously looks back at the screen.  The Horns stick around for “Hi Fi Mama” and then two songs later we get a spirited rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” which goes into “Tush,” a tune with probably Billy’s best known slide work.

Another short break and the band returns to play a rolicking version of “Tube Snake Boogie” (studio version released a year later on 1981’s El Loco) and finishes with “Just Got Paid” (with more sweet slide and the cool lyric “If you believe in working hard all day, just step in my shoes and take my pay.”)

Including a song that had yet to appear on an album and playing 9/10s of their latest release might seem like a surefire yawner of a show, but being in the audience back then and watching the Rockpalast DVD now, I realize this was one of my favorite shows as a teen.

The 1980 show was originally released in 2009 as part of a two-disc Double Down Live set but is now available separately. The other disc in the DDL set features 11 live numbers shot during their European tour in 2008 along with interview clips and backstage footage. 

At the risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson, they sure knew how to do it back in the day...

 

Paul Williams? Still Alive!!

by Gary Pig Gold

I first became aware of the man in 1970, as composer of what to this very day remains my absolute favorite Three Dog Night tune, “Out In The Country.”

Then, in the years to follow, that same man would somehow become downright ubiquitous upon the 25 living-color inches of the family RCA XL-100. On variety and game shows galore, on The Tonight Show of course (forty-eight times!), even trying to murder Police Woman Angie Dickinson. All as some form of mutant, leisure-suited hybrid of David Cassidy and adorable Cousin Oliver.  

Then, as did most pre-punk cultural icons in the immediate wake of that first Ramones album, Paul Williams seemed to vanish overnight from the audio/visual airwaves; a figment, perhaps, of our Top Forty, prime time past; an aberration, beloved as it may have been, from antiquated, tube-powered memory.

What defiantly remained however, losing not one single iota of their insidious appeal in all these decades since, was his string of perfectly crafted, instantly and forever recognized pure pop chestnuts – “We’ve Only Just Begun,” “Evergreen,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” the Love Boat and Boy in the Plastic Bubble themes for example; need I cite any more? – which still have the innate power to bore deep within our craniums and keep us shimmying, boogieing, or at least grinning into infinity. Why, he even constructed the, um, “so close to terrible and yet somehow believable” songs for Ishtar’s dynamic Beatty and Hoffman duo: "It was one of the best jobs I've ever had in my life. I've never had more fun on a picture, but I've never worked harder." 

Fun and bubble boys aside though, it looked, and certainly sounded as if this wealth of utterly brilliant four-minute, five-chord monuments to the middle of the road were all that would remain of Paul Williams’ legacy; perhaps even his epitaph.

Until, that is, a man named Stephen Kessler arose.

A through-and-through true child of the Seventies (“I still get excited when I see the words Hungry Man TV Dinner!”) who was raised in the cathode shadow of Danny Partridge twenty-six feet from the Long Island Rail Road – and to this day unabashedly claims he always wanted to be Paul Williams – Stephen decided to go one giant step further than simply wondering where his idol went. He picked up a camera, assembled a film crew, and hit the asphalt in search of his “friend from the television.”

The result is a truly touching, yet at times emotionally gut-wrenching documentary that really could only be called Paul Williams: Still Alive, newly available on DVD from Virgil Films. In oh so many ways it is a story of fame from a “morning after” perspective, yes, but with a (gasp) happy ending. I mean, after all, we are talking about the man who taught Kermit how to find the “Rainbow Connection.”

And therein’s not only the rub, but the proverbial key to Still Alive’s impact and success as a film. Forgoing the typical confrontational guerilla style of a Michael Moore or TMZ, Kessler approaches his subject first with wonderment – at the 2006 “Phantompalooza” Festival in Winnipeg, one of only two cities in the world, the other bring Paris, where the Brian De Palma / Paul Williams epic Phantom Of The Paradise was a box office smashapalooza. But then we watch that wonder turn to curiosity, soon enough respect, and ultimately not so much empathy or even sympathy as an understanding with and obvious kinship for his subject matter. 

Equally as curious was Paul Williams’ sudden decision, after filming had already begun, to go ALL the way, cinematically and otherwise and bring Steve, with lens, totally into his life and world for nigh on five entire years. A world which in many ways, good and bad – mainly good, though – is much, much different today than it was back in those glory years spent collaborating with De Palma and The Muppets …or mired deep within the Battle for the Planet of the Apes for that matter. 

“We’ll make it The Paulie and Steve Show!” the former, in true Little Enos Burdette bravado, insisted after bonding with Kessler one day over garlic pepper squid at Thai House Express. In a “keep your enemies closer” mode, perhaps? Whatever the cases may be, there goes a newly emboldened Steve, following his subject backstage, eavesdropping on him checking e-mails and doing throat exercises from hotel hallways, and ultimately becoming a quite unwilling participant on Paul’s especially harrowing post-9/11 tour of the Philippines, which is indeed every bit as Apocalypse Now as it is “An Old Fashioned Love Song.” “Safe and scenic, safe and scenic,” the local promoter continually insists upon packing all involved onto a six-hour bus haul through the treacherous – especially according to U.S. State Department warnings – Mindanao jungle between gigs. But once safely back on a California golf course a few weeks later, for all his terror-fuelled troubles, Stephen is rewarded with an actual sleep-over chez Williams! That includes bed and breakfast. 

Then, later, the motherlode: Paul actually lets his chronicler loose in a storage locker filled with memorabilia including over 600 hours of VHS tape. Then lets him take home, and USE, anything he wants.

Stretching all the way back to Paul’s on-screen debut in 1965 as a twenty-four-year-old child actor alongside Jonathan Winters in The Loved One, that exhumed footage, as fascinating and kitschily coated as much of it may be, honestly never once manages to overwhelm or even upstage the sight of the renewed, revitalized 21st Century Williams. No, The Paulie and Steve Show more than holds its own against vintage clips from Bugsy Malone or even Baretta, such is the unmistakable, undeniable buddy-charm which “director” and “star” grow between them as Still Alive spins out its rollercoasting eighty-four minutes.

Cue “You and Me Against The World,” and fade to Bonus Footage.

P.S.: And if you haven’t gathered as much already, I’m most pleased to report our unflappable hero remains happy, healthy, and ultra-productive to this very day. Since 2009 Paul has guilelessly served as President and Chairman of the Board of ASCAP, keeps his own songwriting chops sharp (on the Scissor Sisters and Richard Barone, for example) while proudly keeping his goldies alive on stage (with Craig Ferguson just the other week), is at this moment co-writing a book based on, in his own careful words, “gratitude and trust” (“the two rails my choo-choo runs on”), continues the good fight to get Phantom Of The Paradise mounted at long last upon the Broadway stage, and graciously savors each and every sincere and loving “heart payment” he receives back from folks both known and unknown the world over – yes, even deep within the Filipino jungle – in recognition of his beautifully sculpted, musical lyrical body of work.

See? I told you this story has a happy ending! 

Or, as the man himself explains, “I didn’t have the best childhood, but I had the longest.” Words to remain Still Alive to, yessir, for lovers, dreamers, you and me.

A Brotherly Christmas

by Gary Pig Gold

Yes indeed, it goes without saying that Brian Wilson and his familial band have enjoyed a career quite unlike any other across the cuckoo annals of show business.

Scoring a local hit in 1961 straight off the mark with their very first little indie single, then soon after placing a sophomore release into no less than the hallowed Billboard Hot 100 – and all at a time when the majority of the guys still had to be home in time to attend class the next morning – The Beach Boys, it could be argued, really started their marathon run at the very tip-top, suicidally crash-dove towards oblivion a few short years later, and only then slowly but surely began their struggle up the ladder of ever-lasting fame, fortune and, ultimately, all-American glory …and just finished touring the globe promoting a new (!!) hit album, need I remind anyone.

Ten Reasons to Immediately Watch Bachman & Turner Live at the Roseland Ballroom, NYC

by Gary Pig Gold

Elvis May Have Died on August 16, but Scott Asheton was Born on August 16

by Gary Pig Gold

As the opening credits of this MVD Visual DVD state, (and I quote), "On September 3, 2010, Iggy and the Stooges performed Raw Power live in Monticello, New York. Six fans filmed the concert and interviewed Iggy and the Stooges after the show."

Really then! A concept so crystalline in both its simplicity and beauty – much like Iggy himself, one such as myself could argue. But the result is mountains above and beyond the ultimate DIY epic for Generation YouTube: What we have here is a real-time and, of course, real LOUD (thanks in no small part to the work of audio recordist Max Bisgrove) down 'n' dirty antidote to all those precious Jonathan Demme-style concert films regularly being awarded art-house praises and prizes.

Raw Power Live: In The Hands Of The Fans is in fact, with all apologies to The TAMI Show, the best on-screen rendering of rock 'n' roll I have ever seen.

Is Paul McCartney Really Going To Be 70 Years Old This Month?

by Gary Pig Gold

In the summer of 2005, a package arrived at the Hollywood offices of Highway 61 Entertainment from London with no return address. Inside were two mini-cassette audio tapes dated December 30, 1999 and labeled The Last Testament of George Harrison.

A voice eerily similar to Harrison's tells a shocking story: Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in November of 1966 and replaced with a double!
 British intelligence, MI5, had forced the Beatles to cover up McCartney’s death to prevent mass suicides of Beatle fans. However, the remaining Beatles tried to signal fans with clues on album covers and in songs.

Until now, the “Paul Is Dead” mystery that exploded worldwide in 1969 was considered a hoax. However, in the film Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison, the mysterious voice on the tapes reveals a secret Beatles history, chronicling McCartney’s fatal accident, the cover up, dozens of unknown clues, and a dangerous cat and mouse game with “Maxwell,” the Beatles' MI5 handler, as John Lennon became increasingly reckless with the secret. The voice also claims that Lennon was assassinated in 1980 after he threatened to finally expose “Paul McCartney” as an imposter!

Highway 61 Entertainment has investigated this stunning new account of the conspiracy to hide McCartney’s tragic death and produced this unauthorized documentary that includes newly unearthed evidence. The mysterious voice on the audio tapes narrates the entire film in what may prove to be the most important document in rock and roll history, leaving little doubt that PAUL McCARTNEY REALLY IS DEAD!

Nevertheless, as undoubtedly and forevermore convincing as this stunning film may certainly be, yours quite truly has in fact gone totally metric to fearlessly uncover, believe them or not...

Ten More Reasons Paul is Really, Really Dead

1. Give My Regards To Broad Street (…especially the movie).
   
   
2. James Paul McCartney (the real one) was born in Walton Hospital, Liverpool, on the 18th of June, 1942. Numerically, that makes him a Number 6. However, the sixth song on the album Beatles 6, “Words Of Love,” was in fact composed by Buddy Holly, who died not only on the third of February, 1959, but stipulated in his last testament that all posthumous, universal rights to his publishing catalog be granted in perpetuity to none other than JAMES PAUL McCARTNEY for the nominal fee of… two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars (U.S.)
   
   
3. When spoken backwards, the title of the 2006 Paul McCartney classical album Ecce Cor Meum is MUEM ROC ECCE.
   
   
4. Paul McCartney’s first fiancé, the actress and cake decorator Jane Asher, most recently appeared on British television in the comedy series The Old Guys. Its first season theme song was composed by the Scottish poet/humorist Ivor Cutler who, in 1967, was actually hired by the fake Paul McCartney to portray bus conductor Buster Bloodvessel in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Buster, in one of the film’s most truly disturbing of many such sequences, is seated at a restaurant table alongside Ringo’s auntie Jessie as she is being served shovels full of stale, flaccid spaghetti by none other than… JOHN LENNON.
   
   
5. Throughout the Beatles Anthology “bonus” material featuring Threetles Ringo, George and “Paul” sitting and reminiscing over ukuleles together, George is constantly seen being painfully condescending to (when not ignoring altogether, that is) none other than… PAUL McCARTNEY.
   
   
6. When you hold a hand mirror beneath the title written across the top of The Beatles’ Second Album jacket, you have to be very careful not to tilt the cover too much to the right, otherwise the record itself will fall out of its sleeve and most likely become soiled and possibly even permanently damaged by coming in contact with the floor below.
   
   
7. “I haven’t spoken with Paul in several weeks now myself”:  RINGO STARR, Press Conference, Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, June 23, 2010.
   
   
8. Everyone, from producer George Martin on down, seems to agree that the Beatles’ 1968 double-length White Album should have been shortened by at least fifty-per-cent. But nobody to this day – including EITHER Paul McCartney – can agree on exactly which songs to cut!
   
   
9. Throughout the 1999 Nitin Sawhney remix of the Fireman single “Fluid (Out Of Body),” an electronically-altered tape loop of a voice sounding strangely like that of Percy “Thrills” Thrillington can be heard saying, over and over, “Fluid (Out Of Body) doesn’t really mean Fluid Out Of Body, as in Fluid pouring Out Of somebody’s Body – presumably mine – like the Bodily Fluids, mainly blood, which supposedly poured out of my body when I was decapitated and left to look like a walrus during a horrific car crash late on the rainy night of November 9, 1966 after I angrily stormed out of a Beatles recording session following a heated debate with John Lennon over why I wasn’t allowed to perform on the track ‘She Said She Said’ …REALLY!”
   
   
10. Had the real James Paul McCartney still been alive, the makers of Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison would certainly have already heard from his solicitors.
    
    

They Ain't Heavy…

by Gary Pig Gold

Never as naughty as the Rolling Stones, nor as pin-up perfect as Herman's Hermits; seldom as musically adventurous as the Yardbirds, nitty-gritty as the Animals, or full-on bombastic as The Who. Of course, as truly no-one was, they just weren't as precociously talented as those Beatles either.

In fact, throughout the entire artistic marathon which was 1960's pop, perhaps their only true competition – in the vocal department at least – would be from the all-American Beach Boys. And, like them, it seems the only true "crime" The Hollies ever committed during their illustrious decades-long career was that they solely concentrated on, well, just making good records.

For you see without the assist of a cut-throat manager, cutting-edge studio supervision, wily publicist or even with-it wardrobe consultant (as late as 1972 the Hollies could still be found touring North America in the kind of matching cream-colored suits even the above-mentioned Mike Love & Co. had jettisoned by 1969) Allan Clarke, Graham Nash, Tony Hicks, Bobby Elliott, Terry Sylvester et al were left more or less to simply let their own string of absolutely fab hit singles do their walking and talking for them. 

And what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?

A whopping twenty-two (!) of those hits and then some now generously fill Eagle Rock/Reelin' In The Years' two-hour-plus The Hollies: Look Through Any Window DVD, packed alongside enough behind the scenes reminiscences, vintage newsreel clips (including a fourteen-minute glimpse inside a 1967 Hollies session at Abbey Road) and even personal road-view home movies to please the most discriminating British Invader out there, I'd wager. 

Well, then! Our story begins as a six-year-old Allan Clarke is fatefully seated next to Graham Nash in an otherwise nondescript Manchester classroom. A decade later, the two pals chance upon the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" at a Catholic Girls School dance and their destinies, both musical and otherwise, are immediately and foreverafter bonded.

So, as teenagers did throughout late-Fifties Britain, Allan and Graham began honing their harmonizing in local pubs and social halls, eventually forming a series of increasingly sophisticated beat combos which, in the wake of the Beatles' initial success – and despite Graham having not a single unbroken guitar string left on his Harmony acoustic during their audition – won a recording contract with none other than EMI's Parlophone label.

A flurry of effortlessly pop-go-lucky Hollies hits follow, each lovingly illustrated within Look Through Any Window via a veritable goldmine of seldom-seen promotional and performance clips, unencumbered with annoying voice-overs and left to unspool in their pristine totality. Watch a Queen Elizabeth look-alike stroll somnambulantly through what appears to be a flower shoppe for 1963's pioneering "Little Lover" jukebox video. See the band bravely face down various Stones, Searchers, and even Beatles at the 1964 NME Poll Winners concert, then see – and hear – the Hollies meticulously craft "On A Carousel" in the recording studio (…it seems the Granada TV crew had just been ushered out of a "Penny Lane" overdub session being held next door). Clearly, for an outfit so often dismissed as being image-less and/or less-than-charismatic, we recognize instead five guys who can more than hold their own against the antics of a Gerry and the Pacemakers or even the on-stage fury of a Dave Clark Five.

Between these astonishing clips we hear the tantalizing back-stories told in contemporary interview footage with Graham, Allan, utterly brilliant drummer Bobby Elliot and wiz-kid vocalist/guitarist Tony Hicks, the latter of whom actually picks up the nearest 12-string to demonstrate his trademark "I'm Alive" solo, "Look Through Any Window" Byrds lick, and still-astonishing "Stop Stop Stop" banjo/balalaika hybrid. The man was, and remains, a disarmingly soft-spoken yet nevertheless undeniable musical wonder.

Watch closely too and you'll see various Hollies cavorting around Japan to the accompaniment of "King Midas In Reverse," discover who "Carrie Anne" really began life as, and even watch Allan Clarke looking for said song's steel drum band hidden down his trouser legs at Yugoslavia's Split Festival, I kid you not.

Most unfortunately however, the fun and games – though thankfully not the hits – began ending circa 1967 as Graham suddenly got himself all "serious" (as in severely profound-o-delic); a curious, demoralizing change of attitude, not to mention altitude, which just didn't sit at all well with his pot-pie-as-opposed-to-pot fellow Hollies. No matter though: after a bizarre fling with DayGlo menswear and albums named after holometabolous insects, the man was soon sent packing aboard his Marrakesh Express to the supposedly hipper climes of Los Angeles …and into the welcoming arms of Messrs. Crosby and Stills. Good on ya then, Willy. 

Enter ex-Escort/Swinging Blue Jean Terry Sylvester, straight into Graham's old white suit and bow tie as we watch the second chapter in Hollie History unfold with the UK # 3 hit "Sorry Suzanne" through "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" (featuring Elton John's £12 piano part), "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress," "The Air That I Breathe" and, twenty-two years too late, induction at last into that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

Consider this entire package then, including Ben Fong-Torres' studious liner notes for the accompanying 12-page "Hollies Scrapbook," a (re-)introduction to the deceptively simple 'n' smiling musical magic which continues to be this band's stock in trade. An admittedly upbeat combo whose music, in Graham's well-put words, nevertheless remained "serious as a heart attack," with nary a vocal harmony configuration left unexplored or an instrumental note misplaced, overlooked, or thankfully overplayed. In short then, The Hollies exemplify the long-lost art of a band that did only what needed to be done; nothing more, but hardly nothing less.

Or, as Allan Clarke best sums up, "We were just a great group who sang great songs and had a lot of hits." Case closed.    

The Hollies: Look Through Any Window is but the latest addition to Reelin' In The Years' exemplary British Invasion series, so if you haven't already grabbed the rest of the set, what on Earth are you waiting for ??

P.S. Gary Meets The Hollies in 1977 Toronto

Ten Reasons to Now Revisit Hendrix at Winterland and In the West

by Gary Pig Gold

1. These original live recordings – totaling 47 tracks over five hours plus – have previously been semi-available only on long-out-of-print releases (not counting quite inferior-sounding bootlegs), and in the case of the Winterland performances now features three (!) full discs of additional material.

2. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, celebrating both its second anniversary together and the release of their landmark new Electric Ladyland, filled San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom for three nights running in October of 1968. Understandably, after over a solid year on the road, the trio sound a bit frazzled at points, often struggling to keep both in time and in tune …and not just with one another, either. Still, the passages of sheer magic, power, and true resplendence (e.g.: a downright incendiary "Foxey Lady" on Winterland Disc 1) much more than outnumber the odd lyrical or even musical clam.

3. Meanwhile over with Hendrix In The West, the five additional tracks never heard on its long-ago-killed-by-litigation vinyl edition include a ten-minute "Spanish Castle Magic" which not only interlopes "Sunshine Of Your Love" but even lets the late, extremely great Mitch Mitchell indulge in the kind of tasteful drum solo Ginger Baker only rarely seemed capable of. Plus, of course, original In The West favorites "Red House" (in what many believe to be its definitive reading), a semi-funk afternoon soundcheck "Blue Suede Shoes," and even "God Save The Queen"/"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" from the Isle of Wight remain intact and are still guaranteed to raise a smile.

High Tide and Fazed Cookies

by Gary Pig Gold

The jury – to say nothing of the legal teams – appear to still be out on precisely how much of a bigger bang the Rolling Stones are planning to mark their fiftieth (!) year together as a band during 2012. Will they in fact, even for a concert or two, be able to regain the best bass player they ever had? Can even long-lost Mick Taylor again be convinced to try to fill Brian's musical shoes for maybe a solo or two?? Anything to prevent, or at least delay, the next Jagger so-low album, I can already hear all of you thinking out there!

Lindsey Buckingham: The Small Machine That Could

by Gary Pig Gold

For all intents and purposes, Lindsey Adams Buckingham has lived a charmed life.

Raised in the comfy Bay Area opulence of 1950's Atherton, California, a handsome, athletic golden boy suddenly and forever sidetracked by his elder brother's Elvis and Buddy Holly 45s. He quit the school water polo team, moved with his guitar into a local hotshot band called Fritz, left for L.A. with their singer Stevie, produced with her the magnificently understated Buckingham Nicks album, was soonafter asked to join Fleetwood Mac with whom he helped craft a 40-million-plus-selling album called Rumours and, by 1978 at the age of twenty-nine finally found himself at the very tip-top of his game.

For all intents and purposes, that is.