https://exchange.prx.org/p/610204
It's a full hour of uninterrupted free-form rock this time around. Enjoy!
Artist: Dr. John
Title: Right Place Wrong Time
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Mac Rebenack
Label: Atco
Year: 1973
Mac Rebenack was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene for over 50 years. He first started performing publicly in his teens, lying about his age to able to play in some of the city's more infamous clubs. At age 13 he was expelled from Jesuit school and soon found work as a staff songwriter and guitarist for the legendary Aladdin label. In 1957, at age 16, he joined the musicians' union, officially beginning his professional career. In the early 1960s he got into trouble with the law and spent two years in federal prison. Upon his release he relocated to Los Angeles, due to an ongoing cleanup campaign in New Orleans that had resulted in most of the clubs he had previously played in being permanently shut down. While in L.A., Rebenack developed his Dr. John, the Night Tripper personna, based on a real-life New Orleans voodoo priest with psychedelic elements thrown in (it was 1968 after all). By the early 1970s Dr. John had developed a cult following, but was getting tired of the self-imposed limitations of his Night Tripper image. In 1972 he recorded an album of New Orleans cover songs, following it up with his most successful album, In The Right Place, in 1973. Produced by the legendary Allen Toussaint, In The Right Place provided Dr. John his most successful hit single, Right Place Wrong Time, which went into the top 10 in both the US and Canada and has remained one of the most recognizable tunes of the early 70s thanks to its use in various films over the years. Around this time he returned to New Orleans, but continued to record at some of the top studios in the country, both as a solo artist and as a session player, appearing on literally thousands of recordings over the years. Dr. John continued to perform until shortly before his death on June 6, 2019.
From Dr. John we go to Dr. Winston O. Boogie, better known as John Lennon...
Artist: John Ono Lennon
Title: Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): John Lennon
Label: Apple
Year: 1970
Following the failure of Ike & Tina Turner's version of River Deep, Mountain High to break into the US top 40 in 1966 (although it was a top 5 hit in the UK), legendary producer Phil Spector reportedly lost his enthusiasm for the music business in general, only briefly emerging in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for A&M Records. In early 1970, however, he was persuaded by the Beatles' new manager, Allen Klein, to come to England and visit Apple Records, where a chance meeting with George Harrison led to Spector being invited to produce John Lennon's new single, Instant Karma! Spector applied his "wall of sound" production technique to the recording, which became a top 5 hit in both the US and UK and the first solo effort by a member of the Beatles to sell over a million copies. The song was remixed and retitled Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) for its US release. The success of the record led to Spector's being asked to salvage the taped sessions that became the Let It Be album.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Ride Captain Ride
Source: CD: Open
Writer: Blues Image
Label: Sundazed (original label: Atco)
Year: 1970
After having mild commercial success with their self-titled debut album in 1969, Blues Image deliberately set out to write a hit song for their second LP, Open. The result was Ride Captain Ride, which made the top 40 in 1970. The album itself, however, did not do as well as its predecessor, and was the last one issued by the band's original lineup.
Artist: Mike Oldfield
Title: Tubular Bells
Source: LP: Tubular Bells
Writer(s): Mike Oldfield
Label: Virgin
Year: 1973
So you probably immediately recognize this piece as the theme from The Exorcist. But have you ever heard the entire album-length version of the piece, entitled Tubular Bells? Well, you're hearing the first half of it now. A bit of trivia: Tubular Bells was the first album ever released by Virgin Records. Several sequels have been recorded in the years since the album's original 1973 release, including Tubular Bells II and III and The Millenium Bell (released in 1999).
Artist: Aerosmith
Title: Dream Om
Source: CD: Aerosmith
Writer(s): Steven Tyler
Label: Columbia
Year: 1973
My former bandmate and roomate, the late Jeff "Quincy" Adams, was an Air Force brat like me, although my dad was an enlisted man and his father was a full bird colonel. One of the many places Quincy lived was the Boston area. Quincy once told me about this band that had a practice room down the street from where he lived. As an aspiring guitarist in the early 1970s himself he would try to check out this band whenever possible, but as a young teenager he was of course too shy to actually approach any of the band members. Quincy, looking back on those times fifteen years later, swore that one of the songs that band was playing was Dream On, a song that was not recorded until 1973, when it came out on the first Aerosmith album. So was that jam band down the street indeed Aerosmith, or perhaps one of Steven Tyler's earlier bands (Tyler has said that Dream On was written about four years before Aerosmith was formed)? Could be.
Artist: Cream
Title: Sitting On Top Of The World
Source: CD: Wheels Of Fire
Writer: Vinson/Chatmon (original) Chester Burnett (modern version)
Label: Polydor (original label: Atco)
Year: 1968
Throughout their existence British blues supergroup Cream recorded covers of blues classics. One of the best of these is Sitting On Top Of The World from the album Wheels Of Fire, which in its earliest form was written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon and recorded by the Mississippi Shieks in 1930. Cream's version uses the lyrics from the 1957 rewrite of the song by Chester Burnett, better known as Howlin' Wolf.
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Title: Since I've Been Loving You
Source: CD: Led Zeppelin III
Writer: Page/Plant/Jones
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1970
The Yardbirds were Britain's premier electric blues band, featuring the guitar work of first Eric Clapton, then Jeff Beck and finally Jimmy Page (who had already established himself as an in-demand studio guitarist by the time he joined the band). As the 60s came to a close, the band began shedding members until Page found himself the only member left. With new vocalist Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John-Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, the group continued for a short while as the New Yardbirds before settling on a new name: Led Zeppelin. The group's repertoire was a mixture of original tunes and blues covers arranged to showcase the individual members' strengths as musicians. This mixture served as the template for the band's first two albums. By the third Led Zeppelin album the group was moving away from cover songs and from the blues in general. One notable exeception was Since I've Been Loving You, a slow original that is now considered one of the best electric blues songs ever written.
Artist: Firesign Theatre
Title: Voice Prints Of The Sixties (excerpt from Ben Bland's All-Day Matinee)
Source: LP: Just Folks...A Fireside Chat
Writer(s): Proctor/Bergman/Austin/Ossman
Label: Butterfly
Year: 1977
The Firesign Theatre lost their contract with Columbia Records following the release of their ninth album for the label, In The Next World, You're On Your Own, in 1975. At this point the four members of the group, Phil Proctor, Peter Bergman, Phil Austin and David Ossman had become burned out with constantly trying to come up with new material and decided to take a break before releasing any more albums. In early 1977, however, they came up with the idea of repackaging material from their early 1970s radio shows, Dear Friends, and Let's Eat as a way to introduce the incoming POTUS, Jimmy Carter, to Ducktown, a typical American community. New material recorded for the album included Ben Bland's All-Day Matinee, a parody of the kind of Dialing For Dollars movie hosts that pretty much every American city had on one of their local TV stations weekday afternoons. Like the real Dialing For Dollars, Ben Bland's All-Day Matinee featured frequent commercial breaks for products like Voice Prints Of The Sixties, which you could only order by calling a certain phone number.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Minstrel In The Gallery
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1975
Following the back-to-back album-length works Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play, Jethro Tull returned to recording shorter tunes for the next couple of years' worth of albums. In late 1975, however, they recorded the eight minute long Mistrel In The Gallery for the album of the same name. The song (and album) was a return to the mix of electric and acoustic music that had characterized the band in its earlier years, particularly on the Aqualung and Benefit albums. A shorter version of Minstrel In The Gallery was released as a single and did reasonably well on the charts.
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