Development of the British Blues & Rhythm
--- show 46 --- 3-24-2016Rory Gallagher 1977, 1978
Jack Bruce BBC 1975
Jeff Beck 1974, 1976
Eric Clapton 1974
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The
two Rory Gallagher albums we present
today are fairly closely tied together. In 1977, Rory took some studio time in
San Francisco with the idea of putting together his next album, but he was not
satisfied with the result and scrapped it.
It did not come out until recently as Notes From San Francisco, which
included a second disc of a live concert that we will feature as part of our
next show. A few of the tunes from that
session were redone when he next went into the studio in 1978, appearing on the
LP Photo Finish. In addition to Gallagher’s
guitar and vocals and Gerry McAvoy’s bass, we are here introduced to their new
drummer, Ted McKenna..
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I had originally intended on two sets from Jack Bruce‘s BBC sessions but instead
decided to include the second set in the next show to add a mellow segment to
complement the pair of high intensity rockers sharing that airing. Most notable of the artists joining Jack’s
bass, vocal and piano work is guitarist Mick Taylor, while Bruce Gary handles
drums and percussion as Carla Bley and Ronnie Leahy both cover the keyboards. One question: shouldn’t a song titled Without
a Word be an instrumental?In the gap created by the removal of the second Bruce set, you will hear a couple of songs from Eric Clapton’s 1974 album 461 Ocean Boulevard and another from George Harrison’s 1972 Concert for Bangladesh featuring Leon Russell on vocal.
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Jeff Beck was born June 24th 1944 in
Wallington, Surrey, and had a sister Annetta, four years his senior. His first instrument was the piano, which he
tried for a couple of years beginning at age eight. When his interest waned,
his uncle taught him violin and cello, and Jeff made his own guitar at age
fifteen. His sister's listening habits
got him interested in Rockabilly acts like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent along
with Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson, but when he saw Buddy Holly and the
Crickets in London in 1958 that sealed the deal.
Annetta introduced Jeff to Jimmy Page in the late-50s
and the two often played at Page’s home studio.
In 1960 Beck was playing in the Deltones for about a year as they were
active on the local Croydon scene with a repertoire favoring the music of the
Shadows. He began playing a Fender
Stratocaster around this time, completed one year of a two year course at the
Wimbledon School of Art and also met Patricia Rose Brown whom he would wed on
July 13th 1963.
By 1962, Jeff was a hired gun in about a dozen bands
and, in 1963, turned down an opportunity to join the Roosters, a band that at
one time had featured guitarists Eric Clapton and Tom McGuiness. Page got Beck recording for the Pye label
and, in 1963, Jeff met Stones’ pianist Ian Stewart who guided him towards the
Blues. Later in 1963, Beck was a
founding member of the Tridents, who released a couple of singles and acquired
a residency at The 100 Club beginning July 1964. “They were really my scene, because they were
playing flat-out R&B, like Jimmy Reed stuff, and we supercharged it all up
and made it really rocky. I got off on
that, even though it was only twelve bar Blues.” Jeff also declined an offer to join Mayall’s
Bluesbreakers, but after the Tridents shared a bill at the Marquee with the
Yardbirds in October 1964, Beck found a good fit and joined the band in
February 1965, making the Tridents just a historical footnote.
Seven months before Jeff joined the Yardbirds, Jimmy
Page reunited Cyril Davies All Stars members drummer Carlo Little, bassist
Cliff Barton and pianist Nicky Hopkins in a session that had Beck playing lead
guitar. We heard these July 1964 tunes (although
my most trusted source, Greg Russo’s highly detailed book Yardbirds: The
Ultimate Rave-Up, lists as occurring in late August 1965) as a short filler in
our 35th edition of this series when we featured Led Zeppelin. As a matter of fact, it was Page who was
first offered the Yardbirds job, but he was doing to well as a studio musician
to give it up for a group that really hadn’t made much of an impact, but he did
recommend his friend Jeff in his stead.
Aside from changing lead guitarists, the Yardirds
maintained a stable personnel since the band’s inception in 1963. The drummer was Jim McCarty with Paul
Samwell-Smith playing bass, Keith Relf handled almost all the vocals as well as
playing harmonica and Chris Dreja was the rhythm guitarist. Samwell-Smith opted out of the band in favor
of the production side of the business so Jimmy Page was brought in, initially
to play bass until Dreja could learn the instrument.
Top Topham was the original lead guitarist until his
parents convinced him that continuing his education was the priority instead of
playing in a working band, and that is where Eric Clapton came into the
picture. Clapton would stay with the
band until it took a turn too far into the Pop market, their first successful
single For Your Love apparently being the deal-breaker, and he pursued his
Blues leanings, soon afterward signing on with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. This is where Beck steps in.
Drummer McCarty speaks of Jeff’s early impression on
the Yardbirds. “He definitely was
someone special. He played all the stuff
Clapton played before, but with a little bit extra to it. We still did the same repertoire as we did
with Clapton, but the music got better because Jeff used more effects and he got
weirder sounds and gave it more dimension.
Eric played straight guitar solos and Jeff played with more
effects. Jeff gave us an edge.”
Jeff’s first two sessions with the band provided the
material for the ep Five Yardbirds, which went to #2 – March 16th
produced I Ain’t Done Wrong while I’m Not Taslking and My Girl Sloopy were put
to tape on April 9th – and the three songs were also mixed in with
earlier tracks by Clapton on an album for American consumption, For Your Love,
reaching only #96 after its June debut..
From the first session also came Steeled Blues, but it was not released
until decades later.
Also intended to be laid down at the April session was
Heart Full of Soul, but the sitar played by an Indian session musician turned
out too weak for the recording another session was set up for April 20th where Beck imitated the
instruments sound with his guitar. Keith
Relf played acoustic guitar and bassist Ron Prentice replaced Samwell-Smith,
presumably because Paul was instead helping with the sound in the control room. Released with the B-side Steeled Blues in
June in the U.K. and climbing to #2, they came out in the U.S. in July and
peaked at #12.
At the next session, in July, the boys put together
Still I’m Sad, which McCarty and Samwell-Smith adapted from a Gregorian chant, and
Evil Hearted You and it is not certain that this was when Relf put Italian
lyrics to Heart Full of Soul.
The Yardbirds were scheduled for an American from July
2nd through September 6th but had to cancel due to
difficulties getting work visas.
Finally, on August 27th, the band got non-work visas so in
addition to the concerts dropped they also missed television opportunities on
Hullabaloo, Shindig and the Ed Sullivan Show, but it was still a worthwhile
trip as the band hit some historical recording studios. A lip-synch taping was done for Dick Clark’s
Where the Action Is but never aired because of the controversy and their long
hair kept them from staying at the hotel they reserved on the Sunset Strip or
being admitted into Disneyland.
On September 12th the band went into the
famous Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis where the engineering of Sam
Phillips helped them create Better Man Than I, a tune composed by Manfred Mann
drummer Mike Hugg and his brother Brian, along with the 1953 Tiny Bradshaw tune
The Train Kept A-Rollin’ but done in style of the Johnny Burnett Trio’s
version. From there they went to Chicago’s
Chess Studio on September 19th and cut a studio version of one of
their old standards, I’m a Man, in the same place that Bo Diddley recorded the
original version. The last stop was
Columbia’s New York studio where overdubs to the three songs were completed and
Relf led the band in a song he had just written, New York City Blues, extremely
closely derived from Eddie Boyd’s Five Long Years which had been part of their repertoire
since the Clapton days.
From the recent recordings, the group put out another
American-only 45 featuring I’m a Man and Still I’m Sad in October 1965,
reaching #17, followed quickly by the album Having a Rave-Up which contained both sides of the single
plus Better Man Than I, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You and Train Kept
A-Rollin’ on the Beck studio side plus four tracks from the live Clapton
performance released only in Europe as Five Live Yardbirds; the album peaked at
#53 during its 33 week stay on the U.S. charts.
During March and April the band was active in the
studio recording several demos and backing tracks which are justifiably
relegated to only the most completist sets of Yardbirds material, although a
couple of them are interesting to hear.
The long drought of Yardbirds’ English singles English
singles was quenched in December 1965 with Heart Full of Soul and Still I’m Sad
charting individually at #10 and #9 respectively, but as a single package they
rated at #3.
They made a second tour of the states, this one six
weeks commencing December 10th 1965, interspersing studio time with
the stage shows. AFTRA, I believe
standing American Federation of Theater and Recording Artists or something
similar and being the union which stood in the way of much of the previous
tour, again weighed in with a restriction of no more than three television
appearances, choosing a January 3rd Shivaree, January 4th
for 9th Street West and on January 11th The Lloyd Thaxton
Show while having to decline three other offers.
The Yardbirds were on the other side of the stage for
two shows in Chicago, December 13th for Muddy Waters and December 14th
when Howlin’ Wolf even invited Beck to join in, and then back in town again for
their own December 20th performance at the Thumbs Up Club followed
the next two days by another Chess studio session. After finishing the tune Shapes of Things,
the band returned to Thumbs Up where they sat in with Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy,
James Cotton and Shakey Jake Harris.
Three of the Yardbirds joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’ January
10th performance at The Trip in Hollywood. After the next day’s Thaxton show, the band
headed to New York City where they wound up their visit by spending January
17-19 in the Columbia doing a pair of songs in Italian for an upcoming song
festival they were booked for.
Shapes of Things was released in February 1966 with
different B-sides in different countries, reaching #3 U.K. and #11 U.S. On March 15th while on a day off
from the Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton joined in at the Marquee, marking the only
time he and Beck performed together on a Yardbirds gig.
Even though the band found the American studios and
engineers more adept at capturing their sound than the Brits, they were never
completely pleased with the way they were presented on vinyl. According to Beck, “I don’t think anyone in
this generation is capable of recording us to sound like us”, or Relf, “I
always felt that when we got to the recording situation, it never really
captured anything that we ever did live . . . it was probably too raw to put
down on tape”.
April saw the band in the studio again to put together
the follow-up single to the highly successful Shapes of Things. They composed Over Under Sideways Down (also
the title of the American LP) which had Jeff playing bass as well as guitar
backed up by the instrumental Beck’s Boogie.
The single reached #10 U.K. and #13 U.S. as the recordings continued
towards the next album, produced over five days in the end of May and early
June. The English version, with a
slightly different song selection and released as The Yardbirds although later
referred to as Roger the Engineer, reached # 20 after its July 1966 as the
American pressing hit #52.
In May 1966 Beck took part in a session which was
thought might bring out a new super group.
Conjecture was that the Who’s John Entwhistle would play bass and sing
lead but that never came to fruition, nor were they joined by either Stevie
Winwood or Steve Marriot. The players
who were there were plenty impressive as Jimmy Page shared guitar duties with
Beck, Nicky Hopkins was on piano, Page’s future Led Zeppelin bandmate John Paul
Jones played bass, and the Who was represented by drummer Keith Moon. A few tracks were put to tape but the only one
to surface would Beck’s Bolero, as the excellent instrumental flip side to
Jeff’s first single, Hi Ho Silver Lining. The other members of both the Who and the
Yardbirds were unaware of this session.
Samwell-Smith was often unavailable to play in the
studio because he was tied up in the mixing room and, being tired of the
rigorous touring schedule, opted out of the band in favor of going into the
production side of the business fulltime.
This was announced on June 20th and the search for a
replacement began. At this time, Jimmy Page
was now ready to give up his hectic session man status and actually be a part
of a band. It was determined that the
multi-instrumentalist would take over on bass until Dreja could become adept
enough to move the Yardbirds into a dual lead guitarist group as Page would
ideally complement and contrast each other
--- Here I ran out of time to complete the last five
months or so of Beck’s tenure with the Yardbirds. I’ll try to get to it in a couple of days and
repost the blog. Sorry. ---
Upon leaving the Yardbirds in November of 1966, Beck
played next on January 19th 1967 when he recorded Hi Ho Silver
Lining. A rarity, Jeff actually sang on
the tune backed by John Paul Jones and former Johnny Kidd and the Pirates
drummer Clem Cattini. The 45 was
released in March 1967 and hit #14 in the U.K. and the July follow-up, Tallyman,
climbed to #30. Ron Wood played bass on
the song and Aynsley Dunbar was the drummer as again Beck provided the vocal.
Starting in January, Beck began to assemble his next
band. He had Rod Stewart for the vocals
and Ron Wood on second guitar along with former Shadows bassist Jet Harris and
former Pretty Things drummer Viv Prince, but in February Wood switched to bass
and Roger Cook straddled the drum seat.
After a failed concert in March, Mick Waller replaced Cook, but Waller
quit in April with Rod Coombes succeeding him and Wood once again changed
instruments, this time back to guitar, as Dave Ambrose took over the bass
duties. After an April gig at the
Marquee, Ambrose and Coombes quit, causing Wood to make another switch back to
bass and bringing former Bluesbreaker drummer Aynsley Dunbar into the
group. After four months, Dunbar felt
the band wasn’t playing Blues, quit, and Waller returned in August. This was the band that became the Jeff Beck
Group – Waller, Wood, Beck and Stewart – and Rod’s vocals appeared on Rock My
Plimsoul, the B-side to Tallyman. In
April 1968 Wood left to join Creation but returned in June, otherwise the group
remained intact.
If I knew at the time about all of Wood’s instrumental
back and forths, it would have been no surprise when I saw the band, I think at
the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco, that Beck played bass as he gave Wood
the opportunity to show off his guitar talents on Plimsoul! Nicky Hopkins was on piano for that
show. He had been a part-timer in the
band until he committed completely in September 1968 and I believe this show
was a part of the tour that began in the U.S. in October.
Beck’s third single was not even released in the
states because Paul Mauriat hit #1 with his version of the song, Love is
Blue. No big loss because it was a piece
of Pop elevator garbage with only the B-side, I’ve Been Drinking, performed by
Rod and the band. The show I saw was
after the American release of the Truth LP in July of 1968 and the album
reached #15 but its November issuance in the U.K. was nowhere near as
successful. The Jeff Beck Group began
their second U.S. tour in March 1969.
Wood and Waller had both been fired in February, but after the first
American show Wood was brought back to join the new drummer, Tony Newman. Hopkins departed in May and the group pretty
much had fallen apart by June, but there was still a U.S. tour commitment
beginning on the fourth of July and lasting about a month. They were also supposed to play at Woodstock
in August but were able to back out of that one.
Their second album, Beck-ola, had been released here
in July 1969, before that last tour, and topped out #15 in its months on the
charts. The band also backed up
Donovan’s Goo Goo Barabajagal single, which went #12 U.K. and #36 U.S. Also in 1969, Beck was being considered as a
replacement for Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones.
Beck wanted to take another stab at putting together a
super group and wished to combine Vanilla Fudge’s bassist Tim Bogert and
drummer Carmine Appice with Stewart, but a car crash on November 2nd
1969 put the kybosh on that, for a while at least. Bogert and Appice instead formed the band
Cactus.
Jeff began putting his next group together in April
1970 with Colin “Cozy” Powell, the only member he retained from an unfinished
session at Detroit’s Motown studio. With
Jeff unsure which label he should sign with, Powell went about playing as a
session drummer until, in April the next year, they found bassist Clive Chaman
who suggested keyboardist Max Middleton.
In May and June, these four backed vocalist Alex Ligertwood in the
studio for EMI session, but when Jeff decided in June to drop his management
staff and sign with Epic Records, EMI could not release the recordings and they
have yet to surface. Ligertwood was also
not deemed the right fit for the group so, in July, Bob Tench was brought in as
vocalist and second guitar player.
Their first release, Rough and Ready, consisting of
six Beck compositions and one by Middleton, failed to fly off the shelves when
it came out in October 1971, but the second LP, simply titled the Jeff Beck
Group and produced by Steve Cropper in Memphis, contained five cover tunes and
fared better upon its July 1972 release.
July 23rd concluded the band’s European concert obligations
and Beck was ready to move on again.
Beck had been in contact again with Bogert and Appice, whose band Cactus
had just broken up so, along with Middleton and vocalist Kim Milford,
rehearsals for a U.S. tour commencning August 1st began, but just
one week into the tour Milford was dropped and Tench was hurriedly brought in
as his replacement. Both Tench and Middleton dropped out of the band after the tour
and Beck, Bogert and Appice appeared as a trio (with Appice handling most of
the vocals) for the first time on September 16th, but the ensemble
was relatively short-lived, releasing only one album, April 1973’s Beck, Bogert
& Appice, while another studio session was never made available. There was also a live disc released only in
Japan.
Okay,
I have to leave this here to grab a couple of hours sleep before the show but
this WILL be completed when we next visit Beck, most likely in May. Please pardon any errors as I have not had
time to proofread this segment.
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Okay, one of my friends who is too young to know the
sixties firsthand likes it when I talk about my experiences when I had a
leather shop on San Fernando Street down by San Jose State between 1968 and
1972, so here I go. Probably my best
friend on the street was Bob Sidebottom, who was the proprietor of the comic
book store right across the street from my shop. Bob was at least ten years older than me and
had a vast knowledge of Jazz and Blues.
To this day I tend to say that my three favorite Bluesmen are Magic Sam,
Howlin’ Wolf and Freddie King and it is no coincidence that those were an exact
echo of Bob’s opinion, although I have added Luther Allison to the list. Since I was still eighteen when I started my shop,
it is obvious that Bob would truly be my mentor, opening my ears to some of the
more obscure Bluesmen of the day.
Bob did not think any of the white guys (Musselwhite,
Butterfield, Johnny Winter or any of these Brits) were true Blues musicians
until one time I was sitting with him at a San Jose State Fountain Blues
Festival and he finally heard one he would make the exception for: Roy Rogers. But Bob’s real love was Be Bop Jazz,
particularly Charlie Parker, and when he had another love enter his life he
named her, his daughter, Parker. I
couldn’t get into Be Bop back then but over the past decade or more it has
become a real part of my listening experience.
Just proves out Bob’s good taste.
After I closed down the shop my visits were much rarer
but, whenever I came by, Bob would switch his turntable from Jazz to Blues, usually
something he thought I should know about.
When I began at KKUP, he told me he always wanted to do a radio show and
throw a bunch of albums on the floor, turn out the lights and just play
whatever he happened to grab; I still wonder how he would have cued them up in
the dark, but it could be much more easily done with CDs.
I’m pretty sure Bob had owned a record store in the
past. After a while living in the back
of his store, he rented an apartment in the building right above it, and that
is when I found out the vastness of his vinyl collection. In addition to what he kept in his store for
his listening pleasure and some for retail, one of the walls in his apartment
was crammed floor to ceiling for about twelve feet with albums; very
impressive.
One of Bob’s friends whom I met was Leland, who worked
at Moyer Music on the same block. When I
bought an old Hawaiian lap guitar at the flea market that needed some work, I
took it in there, and when it was done he brought it by the shop and refused to
let me pay, saying it would be more than the guitar was worth. It really sucked when I found out later that,
while he was working one night at their store at Stevens Creek and Lawrence
Expressway, some asshole robbed them and killed him.
I imagine that dealing with a lot of kids sometimes
using his store more like a library would wear on someone and Bob became to be
considered somewhat of a curmudgeon, but he actually savored that image. When I went to Bob’s wake in the early
nineties I was surprised to see Johnnie Cozmik among a small handful of other
familiar faces in the crowd, but Johnnie says he remembers me as well from the
shop days. It is funny because Johnnie
once expressed the exact same visual memory as is foremost in my mind -- the
centerfold of the album Electric Mud with Muddy Waters and an electric guitar, dressed
in some type of white church gown as he sported a magnificent pompadour
hairstyle. A terrible LP but a great
photo, which was hung high right by the door so you couldn’t miss it on the way
out of the store.
Of course, Bob’s business was selling comic
books. Old, new, off color, if it was
available Bob sold it. This led him to a
friendship with likely the best known of the new era of comic artists, R Crumb. Sharing a musical passion similar to Bob’s,
Crumb put together a drawing, presumably of Bob with his hair kinda standing on
end as he gazed upon a comic book, which Bob used as the graphic for his
matchbook covers. I thought I had lost
all of mine but came across one recently; it is one of those momentos I just do
not want to have disappear.
So
how does this tie into today’s show?
While I’ve wanted to solidify my memories in this way for a long time
now, there is a bit of a convoluted connection.
Bob was friends with a record store owner in Mill Valley who specialized
in the right kinds of music so Bob and I, along with Lou, who worked at
Underground Records on our block, made an expedition to see what we could find.
If I thought really hard I could maybe
remember all of the four or so LPs I got but two of them are still favorites in
my collection, although now replaced on CD.
One was by Billy Boy Arnold and since his brother was the bass player in
the Butterfield Blues Band and a couple of the other players were members of
Magic Sam’s band I felt comfortable taking the risk, The cover of another one intrigued me because
the guy just looked like he had definitely paid his dues. I asked Bob what he knew about him and he
said he was a longtime regular in the Chicago Blues clubs. That was Hound Dog Taylor and the graphics
from that first Alligator Records release graced our Blues marathon t-shirt of 2010. So, on our way through San Francisco we
stopped at a movie theater and saw George Harrison’s Concert for
Bangladesh. I never told my wife because
she would have been displeased that I went without her but I did buy her the
album when it came out. As I recall, the
only tune I remember liking was Leon Russell singing Young Blood (not even
remembering it was tied into Jumping Jack Flash) and, since it is the only song
I have from the album, it is included here in a short Clapton set. And that is the longest write-up I intend to
put together for one song!
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Since it is still relatively new, I thought I’d
mention that KKUP is now streaming on the internet and, while it is still in a
developing stage, we have been putting out the word. I’m not all of that good with high-tech
stuff, but it seems pretty easy to access.
If you go to our website at KKUP.org you will see on the home page a
strip of options immediately above the pictures of the musicians the next to
the last option being LISTEN ONLINE. By
clicking this, it brings up a choice of desktop or mobile. I can only speak for the desktop but after
maybe a minute I was receiving a crystal clear feed. As already mentioned, this is still a work in
progress and we are currently limited to a finite number of listeners at any
one time. I mention this so you will be
aware to turn off the application when you are not actually listening. (I put the player in my favorites bar for the
easiest of access.) Now we can reach our
listeners in Los Gatos and Palo Alto, even my family in Canada. Let your friends elsewhere know they can now
listen to your favorite station, and while they have the home page open they
can check out our schedule.
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Rue the DayPersuasion
Fuel to the Fire
B Girl
Overnight Bag
Cut a Dash
Out on the Tiles
Rory Gallagher (Notes from San Francisco) 27
Scatterbrain
TheloniusShe’s a Woman
Constipated Duck
Cause We Ended as Lovers
Freeway Jam
Jeff Beck (Blow by Blow) 44
I Can’t Hold Out
Steady Rolling ManEric Clapton (461 Ocean Boulevard)
Jumping Jack Flash / Youngblood
Concert for Bangladesh
The Mississippi Sheiks
Brute Force and IgnoranceJuke Box Annie
The Last of the Independents
Early Warning
Rory Gallagher (Photo Finish) 34
Can You Follow?
Morning StoryKeep It Down
Spirit
Without a Word
Jack Bruce (BBC ‘77) 29
Head for Backstage Pass
Led BootsCome Dancing
Sophie
Play with Me
Blue Wind
Jeff Beck (Wired) 29
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