Music, good or bad.

[bumblebee]

Stumbled upon this old favourite again on YouTube recently after not hearing it for so long.  Added it straight to my Spotify.  Wonderful!

 

[deleted]

11 hours ago, bumblebee said:

Stumbled upon this old favourite again on YouTube recently after not hearing it for so long.  Added it straight to my Spotify.  Wonderful!

 

Excellent tune, BB. I've been listening to it regularly for the past year. It's on my "Yacht Music" playlist. ;)

Interesting bit of trivia: "The Southern Cross is an asterism formed by the brightest stars in the constellation Crux. Largely unknown to observers in the northern hemisphere, it is the most familiar star pattern in the far southern night sky. The asterism carries cultural meaning and significance in many countries in the southern hemisphere."

[bumblebee]

It’s the star formation on the flags of Australia and New Zealand also I believe.  Interestingly Crux is a Latin word as the formation was known to the ancient cultures of the Northern Hemisphere.  Only found out this myself during the week, nice bit of trivia that may come in handy in a quiz some night :)

The bright stars in Crux were known to the Ancient Greeks, where Ptolemy regarded them as part of the constellation Centaurus.^[1][2] They were entirely visible as far north as Britain in the fourth millennium BC. However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered the stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes.^[3] By 400 CE, the stars in the constellation now called Crux never rose above the horizon throughout most of Europe.

[Pdoggg]

On 9/7/2023 at 6:22 AM, seven said:

 

Perhaps not their greatest cut , but it is what it is. 80 year olds who put most new acts to shame. Its only rock n roll, and I like it.

Good video.  As you said not the greatest but good to hear something new by the Stones.

Quote

In 2022, 17 years after the Rolling Stones released their most recent album of original songs, Mick Jagger decided the band had dithered and procrastinated long enough. Sessions had come and gone; unfinished songs were stacking up. Charlie Watts, the band’s lifelong drummer and rhythmic cornerstone, had died in 2021, but the band kept on touring without new material.

“No one was being the taskmaster,” Jagger recalled. “No one was saying, ‘This is the deadline.’” So the singer did just that. The result is “Hackney Diamonds,” a loud, cantankerous, unrepentant collection of new songs from a band that refuses to mellow with age.

For the new album, the sometimes fractious songwriting partnership of Jagger and Keith Richards found a way to realign. Near the end of the sessions, they even completed writing one song — “Driving Me Too Hard” — in a room together, as they had in their early years.

“We’re a weird pair, man,” Richards said via video from his manager’s New York City office, surrounded by Stones merch and memorabilia. His gray hair was tucked into a headband; framed cover art of the 1981 album “Tattoo You,” with Jagger’s striated face, hung above him. “I love him dearly, and he loves me dearly, and let’s leave it at that.”

“Hackney Diamonds,” due Oct. 20, is both a new blast and a summing up. It digs into the Stones’ long-established style: sinewy guitar riffs, Jagger’s proudly intemperate vocals, bluesy underpinnings and ever-improvisatory guitar interplay.

“You know, it goes like this — but maybe it could go like that,” Richards said. “Without improvisation, it wouldn’t be anything in the first place. I mean, there are no rules to rock ’n’ roll. That’s the reason it’s there.”

In the band’s new songs, Jagger sings about frustration, longing, escape, endurance and transcendence. “Angry,” the album’s opener, moves between conciliation and exasperation. The punky “Bite My Head Off” — which has Paul McCartney playing a jabbing, distorted bass — barks back at someone’s attempts at control. And the wistful, countryish “Depending on You” bemoans a lost romance: “I was making love but you had different plans,” Jagger sings.

The songs are unapologetically hand-played and organic, not quantized onto a computer grid; they speed up and slow down with a human pulse. And the album honors the band’s elder-statesman status, drawing guest appearances from McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga and Elton John.

Jagger scoffed at the idea of the Rolling Stones as an institution. “It’s only a band,” he said.

But Ronnie Wood, the guitarist who joined in 1975, cherishes the band’s six decades of continuity. “That has been my thing all these years, to keep my institution going,” he said in a video interview from his apartment in Barcelona. “When Mick and Keith fell out, I’d do my best to get them together again — at least get them talking and start the engines roaring again.”

The album’s title comes from London slang. Hackney is a borough in East London that had long held a rough reputation, though it has lately gone more upscale. Wood explained that “Hackney diamonds” are bits of broken glass from car windshields after break-ins leave them, in a word, shattered.

“A lot of the tracks on the album have that explosion,” Wood said. “This is a really in-your-face album.”

Making the new LP, the band regained “a sense of urgency,” Jagger said via video from Paris, with paintings of elegant French gentry on the wall behind him. Of course, the longtime members of the Rolling Stones — Jagger, 80, Richards, 79, and Wood, 76 — weren’t getting any younger.

“I said to Keith, ‘If we don’t have a deadline, we’re never going to finish this record,’” Jagger said. “So I said, ‘The deadline is Valentine’s Day 2023. And then we’re going to go out and tour it.’ That’s what we used to have to do. You know, you’ve got to finish ‘Exile on Main Street’ because you’ve got a tour booked.”

Even without new albums, the Stones kept touring in the 2010s and 2020s. The band had gone to studios occasionally to get started on songs, but never got around to finishing them. Meanwhile, Jagger and Richards had each amassed a backlog of new material in various stages, written separately but awaiting the band’s collaborative touches.

Jagger also realized, he said, that “We need to get someone involved who can crack the whip.”

That was Andrew Watt, who won a Grammy as producer of the year in 2021. Watt, 32, has made pop hits with Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber and revved up late-career albums by Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop. Watt is also a guitarist and Rolling Stones fan who has studied every lick in the band’s catalog.

As a producer, he was “results-oriented,” Watt said. “I was the newcomer. So I didn’t have the baggage that comes with a band that’s been together for over 60 years. There’s a lot of history between all of the people in the room, especially between Mick and Keith. So the only way I could think of how best to navigate those waters was moving quickly.”

After the years of inconclusive sessions and self-conscious second-guessing, the Stones made “Hackney Diamonds” in what Richards called “a blitzkrieg” — a matter of months instead of years.

“We worked fast, but that was the idea,” he said and added, with a cackle, “I’m still recovering.”

The tight recording schedule pushed aside second thoughts, Jagger said. “We do like four or five takes. ‘OK,’ and we move on,” he said. “So no one had time to really think, ‘Well, was this a good song? Should we be doing this song?’ Because I get introspective, you know. Is this song as good as the other one? Is this song like another one I’ve done? You can figure that out later. Let’s keep moving.”

At the recording sessions, Watt was an enthusiast as well as a critical listener. The album was made in Paris, New York City, the Bahamas, London and, primarily, Los Angeles, a convenient magnet for the album’s guest stars. Every day in the studio, Watt wore tour T-shirts from shows by the Stones and its spinoff bands like Richards’s X-Pensive Winos and Wood’s New Barbarians. He also sourced vintage equipment. A clear Plexiglas Dan Armstrong guitar, like the one Richards had played on “Midnight Rambler,” delivers the caustic riff of “Whole Wide World,” as Jagger sings about pushing past bad options, declaring, “You think the party’s over/when it’s only just begun.”

For the band members, the most crucial part of the Rolling Stones sound is what Richards calls “weaving” — the ever-changing, spur-of-the-moment interplay between the instruments, particularly the guitars. The band recorded the core of most of the songs together in the studio, playing off one another as they would onstage. For nearly every track, Watt placed Richards’s guitars on the left and Wood’s on the right — the opposite of what a concertgoer would see, but the way the band would hear itself onstage. “I wanted it to sound huge,” he said. “Because they are larger than life. They’re the [expletive] Stones. When you listen to this album you should picture the Stones playing in a stadium, because that’s what they are.”

Wood, who shares the tangle of guitar lines with Richards and Jagger, said, “Once the band gets together and that magic starts to happen, then who knows where it could go?”

A tour was put off, delayed by the lag in pressing vinyl and by stadiums already booked for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift tours. But the album got done; it was indeed recorded, though not fully mixed, by Feb. 14.

Jagger said, “I think we got along on this record really well. Of course we have disagreements about how things should be, but I think that’s pretty normal. I sometimes feel that Keith thinks I like everything too fast. But I know how fast they should be, because I’m completely a groove person.”

So is Richards. “Rhythm is the most important thing in your goddamn life,” Richards said. “A lot of what you hear ain’t what you hear — it’s what you feel. And that’s a matter of rhythm.”

The Stones groove got its foundation from Watts, who died at 80. “There would have been a Rolling Stones without Charlie Watts, but without Charlie Watts there wouldn’t have been the Rolling Stones,” Richards said. “He was one of the warmest guys I ever, ever met, just so tolerant of other people. He would actually stop me from murdering people. When I just thought his name, I started to weep. Thanks for bringing me to tears.”

Watts’s final full album with the band was “Blue & Lonesome,” a set of blues covers, in 2016. But Watts’s drumming, from sessions with the Stones’ previous producer Don Was, drives two songs on “Hackney Diamonds.” One of them, “Live by the Sword,” also includes the Stones’ retired original bassist, Bill Wyman, and some two-fisted honky-tonk piano from Elton John.

When Watts grew too frail to perform, the Rolling Stones continued touring with a new drummer: Steve Jordan, whom Watts had recommended to Richards in the 1980s when Richards started the X-Pensive Winos.

“Charlie was like a fireworks display, and Steve is like a train.” Wood said. “With the passing of Charlie and the baton handed over to Steve Jordan from Charlie, that was a very special moment. We were rehearsing in Boston when Charlie actually passed away. We were rehearsing when we heard the news, and we had one day off. And we thought, Charlie didn’t want us to sit around and mope and everything. We went straight back to the grindstone and carried on — kept the flame going.”

For the Rolling Stones, “Hackney Diamonds” is the beginning of the band’s next phase. “With Charlie leaving us, I think we needed to make a new mark with Steve,” Richards said. “To reset the band was important.”

Jagger said, “I don’t think it’s the last Rolling Stones album. We’ve got almost three-quarters through the next one.”

But the final group of songs on “Hackney Diamonds” hints at an alternate story. Richards sings lead on “Tell Me Straight,” a weary-voiced, introspective ballad that contemplates endings. “I need an answer/How long can this last?,” he sings. “Don’t make me wait/Is my future all in my past?”

It’s followed by “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a gospel-charged song about music as salvation, stoked by Stevie Wonder on keyboards. “Let us sing, let us shout/Let us all stand up proud/Let the old still believe that they’re young,” Jagger and an exuberant Lady Gaga sing, pushing each other to one peak and then, after a pause, restarting the groove as a studio jam that reaches even higher — an ecstatic climax to the album.

But then there’s an epilogue: a Jagger-Richards duet on the Muddy Waters blues that gave the band its name: “Rolling Stone Blues.” “It’s just Jagger’s voice and harmonica and Richards’s guitar, unadorned in real time, circling back to the love of the blues that brought them together as teenagers. It could be a career postscript or a reaffirmation.

“There were six takes total,” Watt said. “The one that made the record is take four. And as they went through each take, they moved closer and closer together. Closer and closer.”

Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988.

 

[seven]

6 hours ago, Pdoggg said:

As you said not the greatest

It grows on you . A real catchy tune, keep singing to myself. 

 

[Pdoggg]

The Year Lou Reed Gave Up on Music
Between quitting the Velvet Underground and writing “Walk on the Wild Side,” the singer endured a long stretch of doubt, frustration and failure.

By Will Hermes
Will Hermes is a culture journalist. This article is adapted from his forthcoming biography “Lou Reed: The King of New York.”

Lou Reed strode onto the stage at Max’s Kansas City late on a Sunday night in August 1970. “Good evening,” he said, addressing the crowd. “We’re called the Velvet Underground. You’re allowed to dance, in case you don’t know. And, uh, that’s about it.” He introduced “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a heroin addict’s codependent lament to his dealer, as “a tender folk song from the early ’50s about love between man and subway … I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.”

The Velvets were in the middle of a 10-week residency at Max’s, the outré tavern and artist hangout on Park Avenue South. The place was full of the usual demimonde, as it had been for most of the shows, but also in attendance were Sid and Toby Reed, Lou’s parents, who had made the trip from Long Island. Danny Fields, a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory who would soon discover the Ramones, was there, as he was virtually every night.

Up near the front of the stage was Brigid Berlin, Warhol’s nominal receptionist and daughter of the Hearst Corporation president, Richard E. Berlin. A society girl whose parents encouraged her to take amphetamines to control her weight, she earned the nickname Brigid Polk for her habit of poking people with speed-filled hypodermics.

Like Warhol, she was an obsessive taper, and had recorded a number of Velvets shows that summer. She had her trusty Sony mono TC-120 cassette recorder with her. Holding the microphone was Jim Carroll, a beautiful young poet. The tape would soon be passed around the underground and would eventually be released as an album — since Reed had decided this would be the last Velvet Underground show.

It was a strange and pivotal moment. Though the Velvet Underground are recognized now as one of the most influential rock groups ever, a touchstone for multiple generations of artists from David Bowie to Patti Smith to R.E.M., the band was a commercial failure, and Reed knew it. Through their association with Warhol, the Velvets had occupied a rarefied spot in the culture, performing at art galleries and happenings, but they couldn’t get on the radio and it looked as if the moment had passed them by.

The Sixties, an era the Velvets were in many ways at odds with, were over. Rock music was bigger than ever — but here was Reed, five years in, playing a tiny stage at his old haunt in a shadow of his original band. The drummer Moe Tucker, their heartbeat and Reed’s trusted ally, was out of the picture, pregnant with her first child. Reed had long ago fired Warhol as the manager. He’d also fired John Cale, the Welsh avant-gardist who was his creative equal when they formed the band together.

Now, he was firing himself.

But the demise of the Velvet Underground was known only to one person in Max’s that night: Lou Reed. And despite this, or maybe because of it, Reed led his band through an inspired set.

When the group launched into “Sweet Jane,” Reed adjusted the gender-fluid lyrics, putting Jack in a vest instead of a corset. Perhaps the change was for his family’s benefit. In any case, the performance was joyous; some rhythm-impaired fans tried to clap along, and Reed said, “C’mon, you can do better than that!” One imagines dancers hopping and gyrating in the low-ceilinged room: humid, hot, packed, redolent of sweat, cigarettes and weed.

The ambient banter picked up on Berlin’s tape would be nearly as valuable to future archivists as the songs that were recorded.

“Go get me a double Pernod,” Carroll can be heard instructing someone.

“What are ya lookin’ for?” a guy inquires, with a classic New York drug-hustle cadence.

“You got a down?” Carroll asks slurrily. “What is it? A Tuinal? Gimme it immediately.”

Finishing up the first set, Reed hollered, “It’s the beginning of a new age,” then followed “New Age” with “Beginning to See the Light.”

A man who sees each of his albums as sequential chapters of a novel does not draft his final set list randomly.

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Backstage, after the second set, Reed told his bandmates of his intention. The guitarist Sterling Morrison argued with him about his decision to quit the band. They still had a week of shows to do, and the album wasn’t even finished. Reed wouldn’t budge.

Word spread quickly as people lingered over drinks. “Someone came out and said, ‘Lou just quit,’” Fields recalled. He rushed to find Berlin. “Did you get that?” he asked her, gesturing to her recorder.

“Yeah!” she said. He informed her that she’d just recorded the final Velvet Underground performance.

Reed clomped down the staircase and out onto the avenue. He stowed his guitar in the trunk of his parents’ car, and Sid Reed drove home to the old house in Freeport, where his son would be staying for a while.

Reed spent his first days after leaving the Velvet Underground at home holed up in his room, sleeping. He confessed his depression to friends; his sister believes he was suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the crisis triggered or followed his decision to leave the Velvets is an open question. He started therapy again — a remarkable move, given his harsh experience with psychiatrists and electroconvulsive therapy in college — and possibly started taking medication, too. He’d take long beach walks with Seymoure, the dog he had adopted with his girlfriend at Syracuse University, Shelley Albin. He began working part-time as a typist for his dad’s accounting firm for $40 a week.

“Loaded,” the Velvet Underground album Reed had been working on, was released in late September, and he was startled when he heard it. There had been some changes from what he’d recalled as the final recordings. The incantatory coda to “New Age” had been shortened, and the bridge to “Sweet Jane” had been cut entirely, the song ending in a radio-friendly fade at 3:15.

In its original versions, “Sweet Jane” hinged on that bridge — the “heavenly wine and roses” section — which amplified the song’s self-consciousness with flowery phrases that sound lifted from a greeting card, followed by a string of sing-along-ready la-la-la’s. Anyone who “ever played a part,” posited Reed in the song, wouldn’t “turn around and hate it.” He might’ve been referring to his own performance as “Lou Reed,” rock star.

Reed would rail at these edits, which he claimed were released without his consent, although the bassist Doug Yule would maintain that Reed made them himself. “He edited it. You have to understand, at the time, the motivation,” Yule said. “Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing: to be successful.… You had to have a hit, and a hit had to be up-tempo, short, with no digressions … you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it.”

“Loaded” was released to little fanfare. Label promotion was minimal, unsurprising for a band whose frontman and primary songwriter had just quit. There were no hits, as the issuing of singles was halfhearted. By November, Reed’s bandmates were back at the Atlantic Records studios, working on a new “Velvet Underground” album.

Reed, meanwhile, recorded demos in his childhood bedroom. He was also thinking about roads less traveled. Earlier that year, the University of Chicago Press published “Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz,” a volume that the author, Reed’s mentor at Syracuse University, had begun compiling in his final years. Schwartz had pushed Reed, his star student, to be a “real” writer, telling him pop-song lyrics were worthless. Schwartz’s words stuck with him. Reed was also thinking about Shelley Albin. He called her, wanting to reconnect. When she heard his voice on the line, she was in a room with her new baby and her family.

“You must have the wrong number,” she told him, and hung up. The two never spoke again, and Albin destroyed all the letters Reed had sent her over the years. She didn’t want to be tempted to share them once he became famous.

Around the same time, Reed picked up the phone and called Bettye Kronstad, a woman he had invited to the last Velvets show at Max’s, where he’d given her a sweaty kiss and a promise to get in touch.

Reed first met Kronstad — who, some years hence, would become his first wife — in the spring of 1968. She was visiting their mutual friend Lincoln Swados, Reed’s troubled college roommate, at Mount Sinai Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Reed was sauntering out of the elevator as Kronstad was leaving Swados’s room. “Hey, you! Beautiful!” Reed snapped as she breezed past him. He reached out and swatted her behind.

She turned, angry, and sized him up. Reed was dressed head to toe in denim, with pearl-snap buttons on his shirt, frayed bell-bottoms, and a tumescent air of rock star entitlement. His well-groomed curly hair added a couple of inches to his height.

He asked what she was doing in a psych ward. “You look normal,” he said.

After learning of their shared connection to Swados and flirting a bit more, Kronstad agreed to meet Reed for a drink at the West End Bar, near her apartment and Columbia University, where she was working as a research assistant. Reed got hammered on Scotch, ranting about his problems with John Cale and the Velvets. Kronstad walked him to the subway, not expecting to see him again. But Reed didn’t forget her, and in a gesture that suggested he was already planning his second act, he invited her to his final Velvets show at Max’s.

Seeing him perform, from her spot in the crowd midway back, she felt him singing certain songs directly to her. She recalled the look on his face as “wild” and “almost pleading.” After Reed called her the following week from his parents’ house, they soon began seeing each other.

Kronstad was slim, with sparkling blue eyes and dirty blond hair, which she had cut short. She came from German-Scandinavian stock and a broken home with an abusive father, a World War II veteran who had fought at Normandy and suffered severe anxiety likely caused by PTSD, although it had yet to become a diagnostic classification. Like Reed, he’d received electroconvulsive therapy as part of his treatment.

Kronstad was smart but restless. After receiving a scholarship to study at Columbia, she’d begun taking acting classes with Sanford Meisner at the Playhouse on 54th Street. She lived in Manhattan with a couple of roommates; on weekends, Reed met her in the city, or she’d take the Long Island Rail Road to his parents’ house. Her style was preppy, and she impressed Reed’s parents. She was Protestant, but came across, in Long Island Jewish parlance, as “a very nice goil.”

Amid this throwback into his family and his childhood culture, Reed was rethinking his entire identity. Before the Velvets, he’d considered returning to school. Now, five years later, he turned his attention back to literature. “He was writing poetry and seriously reflecting,” Kronstad recalled. “He was very disappointed about the Velvet Underground not being as successful as they should be. He did want to continue in the music business. But while he was living at home, he was trying poetry. That was the guy I fell in love with.”

His first significant publication came through Fusion, the Boston-based music and politics magazine that had always supported the Velvets. When Fusion launched a book series, the editor, Robert Somma, had the idea for an essay collection around the theme of rock ’n’ roll deaths. Jimi Hendrix had asphyxiated after ingesting a massive quantity of barbiturates that September. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose not three weeks later. Brian Jones had drowned in his swimming pool the previous summer. “Why don’t you take a shot at writing an essay?” Somma asked Reed over the phone. Reed agreed in an instant.

“It wasn’t like I had to cajole him into it, believe me,” said Somma, who’d already agreed to publish some of Reed’s poems. “I don’t think we paid him for it. I don’t think he cared.”

“No One Waved Goodbye: A Casualty Report on Rock and Roll” was a landmark of pop-music criticism. It included work by the pioneering Australian music journalist Lillian Roxon, an early Velvets champion; a Q. and A. with Danny Fields; even a piece by the Velvets’ former manager, Al Aronowitz. Reed’s “Fallen Knights and Fallen Ladies,” however, is the book’s only essay by a musician, and he showed a remarkable dual consciousness, as both artist and fan.

“At the age when identity is a problem,” Reed writes, “some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties. The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large.… The singer has a soul but feels he isn’t loved offstage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only onstage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia. But we are all as common as snowflakes, aren’t we?”

Reed was proud of “Fallen Knights and Fallen Ladies.” It was at odds with the mainstream suburban lifestyle he had fallen into — working a day job, seeing his girlfriend on the weekend. But that was a more unsettled situation than it appeared. Bickering with his father, who was now his employer, too, sometimes got heated. “If we went out to dinner with his parents, Chinese food on a Sunday night, Lou just started drinking and couldn’t stop,” Kronstad said. “I’d try to keep up with him. It was just ridiculous.”

The Dec. 24 issue of Rolling Stone ran a review of “Loaded.” In it, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s future guitarist, praised Reed’s “incredible finesse” as a songwriter, and called it “easily one of the best albums to show up this or any year.” He wrote with even greater enthusiasm about the farewell run at Max’s, noting Brigid Berlin’s recordings in particular, then circulating as a bootleg. On paper, the Velvets still existed — but their posthumous apotheosis had already begun.

Danny Fields adored Lou Reed from the get-go, as both an artist and a friend. He wanted Reed to keep making music. So becoming his manager seemed like a good idea.

It wasn’t. The arrangement lasted two weeks. Fields, a music journalist and self-made talent scout who now worked at Atlantic Records, tried to convince his bosses to sign his new client as a solo act. But considering Reed had torpedoed the Velvet Underground just after the label signed them, that didn’t go well. So Fields shopped him around. Reed obsessed over Fields’s progress, calling him at all hours, demanding constant reports, giving orders. Fields bowed out.

“I couldn’t take it,” Fields said. “It was horrible.”

Reed’s suburban rewind became a double life. At home, he avoided the New York scene’s pressures. Kronstad slept on a foldout couch in the den, which Reed’s mother made up for her; on Sunday, they’d all have brunch with bagels and whitefish. Reed taught Kronstad to play tennis, de rigueur among aspirational Long Islanders. But he was an impatient teacher, and the first lesson ended in a fight.

Kronstad shared her interests in turn. She’d grown up riding horses on her father’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and one weekend took Reed to the Equestrian Center in Hempstead. He failed the riding test, and had to remain in the corral while his girlfriend cantered down the trail without him. “He was humiliated,” she recalls.

Sometimes they’d spend weekends at her place in Manhattan, and he’d introduce her to his friends. She felt the condescension. She was dismissed as “straight,” and snidely referred to as “the cocktail waitress,” according to Fields. Reed tried to forge a bond between her and Brigid Berlin, given the latter’s upscale pedigree. But it never took. So Reed largely remained in retreat on Long Island, and doubled down on his writing.

The St. Mark’s Poetry Project was run out of the 17th-century St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery by Anne Waldman, an heir to the Beats and the New York School poets. The project was an offshoot of a social program, Creative Arts for Alienated Youth. One such youth, Patti Smith, made her semi-musical debut there in February 1971. She recited “Oath,” a poem that began “Christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” She also sang Hank Ballard’s “Annie Had a Baby” and Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” and read a poem about a car crash accompanied on electric guitar by Lenny Kaye. It was a striking display, and people were buzzing about it.

When Reed appeared on the same altar the following month, it was with a sheaf of poems and no guitar. It was his first public appearance since the Max’s farewell, and his first proper poetry reading, sharing a bill with Allen Ginsberg and the Velvets fan Jim Carroll. Gerard Malanga, Danny Fields, and others from the Factory scene turned out to witness the transmogrification, or whatever it was that Reed had in store. Before the reading, Reed was anxious but worked the room like a pro, flirting and glad-handing, Kronstad hovering patiently nearby.

At the lectern, Reed recited the lyrics to “Sister Ray,” from the second Velvet Underground record. He read “The Murder Mystery,” reframing the experimental sound collage from the band’s third album as concrete poetry. He read “Heroin,” after which Ginsberg clapped vigorously. Reed sounded nervous at points: rushing through endings, knocking into the tape recorder as he turned pages. He introduced new material as his “gay poems,” specifying that they were “pro-” gay. There was a paean to dancing with a man (“the grip … so strong”), with an aside noting “my father will not speak to me.”

Another poem suggested cruising a longhaired boy at the library. Reed described the choice between presenting straight or not, and he imagined how nice it would be to just linger outside a movie theater, “arm in arm,” in a world where no one would take any special notice. He noted that John Rechy’s pioneering 1963 novel “City of Night” was one of his favorite books, and read a wistful prose fragment written from “out-and-out admiration” of it, in which a man, feeling over-the-hill, cruises men on a rainy night, then returns home to his girlfriend. Reed followed it with “Bettye,” an evident celebration of his girlfriend, and the lyrics to “Andy’s Chest,” professing his love for Warhol.

He ended the reading with a startling announcement: He was giving up music entirely to focus on poetry.

How much truth was in the declaration, only Reed knew. But the crowd was stunned by his earnestness. “Rather than being the ‘cool’ Lou Reed everyone expected to entertain them, he was sincere,” recalls Kronstad. “People seemed embarrassed for him.”

At Max’s after the reading, Reed tried to put on a good face, at one point challenging the rock critic Richard Meltzer to a drinking contest. But he felt the response to his reading had been decidedly lukewarm, and by the night’s end, Reed was drunk and miserable. Kronstad recalls him “with his head in his arms on a table in the back room, incredibly sad. He felt totally rejected.”

Soon after the event, Reed decided to revive his music career. Kronstad remembers a night of heavy drinking that ended at “a Long Island gay bar,” where Reed was received as prodigal royalty. They closed the place, and she drove them home in his dad’s Mercedes; they both passed out in his parents’ den. The next morning, Reed laid out his new career plans to Kronstad. He also proposed marriage.

Startled, Kronstad declined, asking for time to think about it. She figured Reed was an alcoholic. But she also figured he was a genius, and was confident that, for better or worse, he was en route to becoming a very famous, paid-in-full rock star.

The path back to rock stardom was circuitous.

Around this time, Reed had been in conversation with an Off Broadway director named Carmen Capalbo, who was trying to stage a rock musical based on Nelson Algren’s novel “A Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed had been approached to possibly contribute some songs, and even after the project fizzled, the book’s themes, and its title, stuck with him.

The first to hear what he would do with them was the rock ’n’ roll power couple Lisa and Richard Robinson. She was an ambitious music journalist, he an artists-and-repertoire man and youth-culture barometer at RCA Records. They both revered the Velvet Underground, and after meeting Reed through Fields, they had him over for dinner at their Upper West Side apartment in the spring of 1971.

That night, and on subsequent ones, they recorded him playing songs on acoustic guitar. Some were outtakes from the Velvets era; others were new, including a giddy sketch about Manhattan life with a hooky chorus revolving around the phrase “take a walk on the wild side.” Richard liked what he heard, and thought he could get Reed a record deal. He did.

Will Hermes is an occasional contributor to The New York Times and is the author of “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.”

[Zeppie]

2 hours ago, Pdoggg said:

The Year Lou Reed Gave Up on Music
Between quitting the Velvet Underground and writing “Walk on the Wild Side,” the singer endured a long stretch of doubt, frustration and failure.

By Will Hermes
Will Hermes is a culture journalist. This article is adapted from his forthcoming biography “Lou Reed: The King of New York.”

Lou Reed strode onto the stage at Max’s Kansas City late on a Sunday night in August 1970. “Good evening,” he said, addressing the crowd. “We’re called the Velvet Underground. You’re allowed to dance, in case you don’t know. And, uh, that’s about it.” He introduced “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a heroin addict’s codependent lament to his dealer, as “a tender folk song from the early ’50s about love between man and subway … I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.”

The Velvets were in the middle of a 10-week residency at Max’s, the outré tavern and artist hangout on Park Avenue South. The place was full of the usual demimonde, as it had been for most of the shows, but also in attendance were Sid and Toby Reed, Lou’s parents, who had made the trip from Long Island. Danny Fields, a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory who would soon discover the Ramones, was there, as he was virtually every night.

Up near the front of the stage was Brigid Berlin, Warhol’s nominal receptionist and daughter of the Hearst Corporation president, Richard E. Berlin. A society girl whose parents encouraged her to take amphetamines to control her weight, she earned the nickname Brigid Polk for her habit of poking people with speed-filled hypodermics.

Like Warhol, she was an obsessive taper, and had recorded a number of Velvets shows that summer. She had her trusty Sony mono TC-120 cassette recorder with her. Holding the microphone was Jim Carroll, a beautiful young poet. The tape would soon be passed around the underground and would eventually be released as an album — since Reed had decided this would be the last Velvet Underground show.

It was a strange and pivotal moment. Though the Velvet Underground are recognized now as one of the most influential rock groups ever, a touchstone for multiple generations of artists from David Bowie to Patti Smith to R.E.M., the band was a commercial failure, and Reed knew it. Through their association with Warhol, the Velvets had occupied a rarefied spot in the culture, performing at art galleries and happenings, but they couldn’t get on the radio and it looked as if the moment had passed them by.

The Sixties, an era the Velvets were in many ways at odds with, were over. Rock music was bigger than ever — but here was Reed, five years in, playing a tiny stage at his old haunt in a shadow of his original band. The drummer Moe Tucker, their heartbeat and Reed’s trusted ally, was out of the picture, pregnant with her first child. Reed had long ago fired Warhol as the manager. He’d also fired John Cale, the Welsh avant-gardist who was his creative equal when they formed the band together.

Now, he was firing himself.

But the demise of the Velvet Underground was known only to one person in Max’s that night: Lou Reed. And despite this, or maybe because of it, Reed led his band through an inspired set.

When the group launched into “Sweet Jane,” Reed adjusted the gender-fluid lyrics, putting Jack in a vest instead of a corset. Perhaps the change was for his family’s benefit. In any case, the performance was joyous; some rhythm-impaired fans tried to clap along, and Reed said, “C’mon, you can do better than that!” One imagines dancers hopping and gyrating in the low-ceilinged room: humid, hot, packed, redolent of sweat, cigarettes and weed.

The ambient banter picked up on Berlin’s tape would be nearly as valuable to future archivists as the songs that were recorded.

“Go get me a double Pernod,” Carroll can be heard instructing someone.

“What are ya lookin’ for?” a guy inquires, with a classic New York drug-hustle cadence.

“You got a down?” Carroll asks slurrily. “What is it? A Tuinal? Gimme it immediately.”

Finishing up the first set, Reed hollered, “It’s the beginning of a new age,” then followed “New Age” with “Beginning to See the Light.”

A man who sees each of his albums as sequential chapters of a novel does not draft his final set list randomly.

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Backstage, after the second set, Reed told his bandmates of his intention. The guitarist Sterling Morrison argued with him about his decision to quit the band. They still had a week of shows to do, and the album wasn’t even finished. Reed wouldn’t budge.

Word spread quickly as people lingered over drinks. “Someone came out and said, ‘Lou just quit,’” Fields recalled. He rushed to find Berlin. “Did you get that?” he asked her, gesturing to her recorder.

“Yeah!” she said. He informed her that she’d just recorded the final Velvet Underground performance.

Reed clomped down the staircase and out onto the avenue. He stowed his guitar in the trunk of his parents’ car, and Sid Reed drove home to the old house in Freeport, where his son would be staying for a while.

Reed spent his first days after leaving the Velvet Underground at home holed up in his room, sleeping. He confessed his depression to friends; his sister believes he was suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the crisis triggered or followed his decision to leave the Velvets is an open question. He started therapy again — a remarkable move, given his harsh experience with psychiatrists and electroconvulsive therapy in college — and possibly started taking medication, too. He’d take long beach walks with Seymoure, the dog he had adopted with his girlfriend at Syracuse University, Shelley Albin. He began working part-time as a typist for his dad’s accounting firm for $40 a week.

“Loaded,” the Velvet Underground album Reed had been working on, was released in late September, and he was startled when he heard it. There had been some changes from what he’d recalled as the final recordings. The incantatory coda to “New Age” had been shortened, and the bridge to “Sweet Jane” had been cut entirely, the song ending in a radio-friendly fade at 3:15.

In its original versions, “Sweet Jane” hinged on that bridge — the “heavenly wine and roses” section — which amplified the song’s self-consciousness with flowery phrases that sound lifted from a greeting card, followed by a string of sing-along-ready la-la-la’s. Anyone who “ever played a part,” posited Reed in the song, wouldn’t “turn around and hate it.” He might’ve been referring to his own performance as “Lou Reed,” rock star.

Reed would rail at these edits, which he claimed were released without his consent, although the bassist Doug Yule would maintain that Reed made them himself. “He edited it. You have to understand, at the time, the motivation,” Yule said. “Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing: to be successful.… You had to have a hit, and a hit had to be up-tempo, short, with no digressions … you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it.”

“Loaded” was released to little fanfare. Label promotion was minimal, unsurprising for a band whose frontman and primary songwriter had just quit. There were no hits, as the issuing of singles was halfhearted. By November, Reed’s bandmates were back at the Atlantic Records studios, working on a new “Velvet Underground” album.

Reed, meanwhile, recorded demos in his childhood bedroom. He was also thinking about roads less traveled. Earlier that year, the University of Chicago Press published “Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz,” a volume that the author, Reed’s mentor at Syracuse University, had begun compiling in his final years. Schwartz had pushed Reed, his star student, to be a “real” writer, telling him pop-song lyrics were worthless. Schwartz’s words stuck with him. Reed was also thinking about Shelley Albin. He called her, wanting to reconnect. When she heard his voice on the line, she was in a room with her new baby and her family.

“You must have the wrong number,” she told him, and hung up. The two never spoke again, and Albin destroyed all the letters Reed had sent her over the years. She didn’t want to be tempted to share them once he became famous.

Around the same time, Reed picked up the phone and called Bettye Kronstad, a woman he had invited to the last Velvets show at Max’s, where he’d given her a sweaty kiss and a promise to get in touch.

Reed first met Kronstad — who, some years hence, would become his first wife — in the spring of 1968. She was visiting their mutual friend Lincoln Swados, Reed’s troubled college roommate, at Mount Sinai Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Reed was sauntering out of the elevator as Kronstad was leaving Swados’s room. “Hey, you! Beautiful!” Reed snapped as she breezed past him. He reached out and swatted her behind.

She turned, angry, and sized him up. Reed was dressed head to toe in denim, with pearl-snap buttons on his shirt, frayed bell-bottoms, and a tumescent air of rock star entitlement. His well-groomed curly hair added a couple of inches to his height.

He asked what she was doing in a psych ward. “You look normal,” he said.

After learning of their shared connection to Swados and flirting a bit more, Kronstad agreed to meet Reed for a drink at the West End Bar, near her apartment and Columbia University, where she was working as a research assistant. Reed got hammered on Scotch, ranting about his problems with John Cale and the Velvets. Kronstad walked him to the subway, not expecting to see him again. But Reed didn’t forget her, and in a gesture that suggested he was already planning his second act, he invited her to his final Velvets show at Max’s.

Seeing him perform, from her spot in the crowd midway back, she felt him singing certain songs directly to her. She recalled the look on his face as “wild” and “almost pleading.” After Reed called her the following week from his parents’ house, they soon began seeing each other.

Kronstad was slim, with sparkling blue eyes and dirty blond hair, which she had cut short. She came from German-Scandinavian stock and a broken home with an abusive father, a World War II veteran who had fought at Normandy and suffered severe anxiety likely caused by PTSD, although it had yet to become a diagnostic classification. Like Reed, he’d received electroconvulsive therapy as part of his treatment.

Kronstad was smart but restless. After receiving a scholarship to study at Columbia, she’d begun taking acting classes with Sanford Meisner at the Playhouse on 54th Street. She lived in Manhattan with a couple of roommates; on weekends, Reed met her in the city, or she’d take the Long Island Rail Road to his parents’ house. Her style was preppy, and she impressed Reed’s parents. She was Protestant, but came across, in Long Island Jewish parlance, as “a very nice goil.”

Amid this throwback into his family and his childhood culture, Reed was rethinking his entire identity. Before the Velvets, he’d considered returning to school. Now, five years later, he turned his attention back to literature. “He was writing poetry and seriously reflecting,” Kronstad recalled. “He was very disappointed about the Velvet Underground not being as successful as they should be. He did want to continue in the music business. But while he was living at home, he was trying poetry. That was the guy I fell in love with.”

His first significant publication came through Fusion, the Boston-based music and politics magazine that had always supported the Velvets. When Fusion launched a book series, the editor, Robert Somma, had the idea for an essay collection around the theme of rock ’n’ roll deaths. Jimi Hendrix had asphyxiated after ingesting a massive quantity of barbiturates that September. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose not three weeks later. Brian Jones had drowned in his swimming pool the previous summer. “Why don’t you take a shot at writing an essay?” Somma asked Reed over the phone. Reed agreed in an instant.

“It wasn’t like I had to cajole him into it, believe me,” said Somma, who’d already agreed to publish some of Reed’s poems. “I don’t think we paid him for it. I don’t think he cared.”

“No One Waved Goodbye: A Casualty Report on Rock and Roll” was a landmark of pop-music criticism. It included work by the pioneering Australian music journalist Lillian Roxon, an early Velvets champion; a Q. and A. with Danny Fields; even a piece by the Velvets’ former manager, Al Aronowitz. Reed’s “Fallen Knights and Fallen Ladies,” however, is the book’s only essay by a musician, and he showed a remarkable dual consciousness, as both artist and fan.

“At the age when identity is a problem,” Reed writes, “some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties. The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large.… The singer has a soul but feels he isn’t loved offstage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only onstage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia. But we are all as common as snowflakes, aren’t we?”

Reed was proud of “Fallen Knights and Fallen Ladies.” It was at odds with the mainstream suburban lifestyle he had fallen into — working a day job, seeing his girlfriend on the weekend. But that was a more unsettled situation than it appeared. Bickering with his father, who was now his employer, too, sometimes got heated. “If we went out to dinner with his parents, Chinese food on a Sunday night, Lou just started drinking and couldn’t stop,” Kronstad said. “I’d try to keep up with him. It was just ridiculous.”

The Dec. 24 issue of Rolling Stone ran a review of “Loaded.” In it, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s future guitarist, praised Reed’s “incredible finesse” as a songwriter, and called it “easily one of the best albums to show up this or any year.” He wrote with even greater enthusiasm about the farewell run at Max’s, noting Brigid Berlin’s recordings in particular, then circulating as a bootleg. On paper, the Velvets still existed — but their posthumous apotheosis had already begun.

Danny Fields adored Lou Reed from the get-go, as both an artist and a friend. He wanted Reed to keep making music. So becoming his manager seemed like a good idea.

It wasn’t. The arrangement lasted two weeks. Fields, a music journalist and self-made talent scout who now worked at Atlantic Records, tried to convince his bosses to sign his new client as a solo act. But considering Reed had torpedoed the Velvet Underground just after the label signed them, that didn’t go well. So Fields shopped him around. Reed obsessed over Fields’s progress, calling him at all hours, demanding constant reports, giving orders. Fields bowed out.

“I couldn’t take it,” Fields said. “It was horrible.”

Reed’s suburban rewind became a double life. At home, he avoided the New York scene’s pressures. Kronstad slept on a foldout couch in the den, which Reed’s mother made up for her; on Sunday, they’d all have brunch with bagels and whitefish. Reed taught Kronstad to play tennis, de rigueur among aspirational Long Islanders. But he was an impatient teacher, and the first lesson ended in a fight.

Kronstad shared her interests in turn. She’d grown up riding horses on her father’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and one weekend took Reed to the Equestrian Center in Hempstead. He failed the riding test, and had to remain in the corral while his girlfriend cantered down the trail without him. “He was humiliated,” she recalls.

Sometimes they’d spend weekends at her place in Manhattan, and he’d introduce her to his friends. She felt the condescension. She was dismissed as “straight,” and snidely referred to as “the cocktail waitress,” according to Fields. Reed tried to forge a bond between her and Brigid Berlin, given the latter’s upscale pedigree. But it never took. So Reed largely remained in retreat on Long Island, and doubled down on his writing.

The St. Mark’s Poetry Project was run out of the 17th-century St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery by Anne Waldman, an heir to the Beats and the New York School poets. The project was an offshoot of a social program, Creative Arts for Alienated Youth. One such youth, Patti Smith, made her semi-musical debut there in February 1971. She recited “Oath,” a poem that began “Christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” She also sang Hank Ballard’s “Annie Had a Baby” and Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” and read a poem about a car crash accompanied on electric guitar by Lenny Kaye. It was a striking display, and people were buzzing about it.

When Reed appeared on the same altar the following month, it was with a sheaf of poems and no guitar. It was his first public appearance since the Max’s farewell, and his first proper poetry reading, sharing a bill with Allen Ginsberg and the Velvets fan Jim Carroll. Gerard Malanga, Danny Fields, and others from the Factory scene turned out to witness the transmogrification, or whatever it was that Reed had in store. Before the reading, Reed was anxious but worked the room like a pro, flirting and glad-handing, Kronstad hovering patiently nearby.

At the lectern, Reed recited the lyrics to “Sister Ray,” from the second Velvet Underground record. He read “The Murder Mystery,” reframing the experimental sound collage from the band’s third album as concrete poetry. He read “Heroin,” after which Ginsberg clapped vigorously. Reed sounded nervous at points: rushing through endings, knocking into the tape recorder as he turned pages. He introduced new material as his “gay poems,” specifying that they were “pro-” gay. There was a paean to dancing with a man (“the grip … so strong”), with an aside noting “my father will not speak to me.”

Another poem suggested cruising a longhaired boy at the library. Reed described the choice between presenting straight or not, and he imagined how nice it would be to just linger outside a movie theater, “arm in arm,” in a world where no one would take any special notice. He noted that John Rechy’s pioneering 1963 novel “City of Night” was one of his favorite books, and read a wistful prose fragment written from “out-and-out admiration” of it, in which a man, feeling over-the-hill, cruises men on a rainy night, then returns home to his girlfriend. Reed followed it with “Bettye,” an evident celebration of his girlfriend, and the lyrics to “Andy’s Chest,” professing his love for Warhol.

He ended the reading with a startling announcement: He was giving up music entirely to focus on poetry.

How much truth was in the declaration, only Reed knew. But the crowd was stunned by his earnestness. “Rather than being the ‘cool’ Lou Reed everyone expected to entertain them, he was sincere,” recalls Kronstad. “People seemed embarrassed for him.”

At Max’s after the reading, Reed tried to put on a good face, at one point challenging the rock critic Richard Meltzer to a drinking contest. But he felt the response to his reading had been decidedly lukewarm, and by the night’s end, Reed was drunk and miserable. Kronstad recalls him “with his head in his arms on a table in the back room, incredibly sad. He felt totally rejected.”

Soon after the event, Reed decided to revive his music career. Kronstad remembers a night of heavy drinking that ended at “a Long Island gay bar,” where Reed was received as prodigal royalty. They closed the place, and she drove them home in his dad’s Mercedes; they both passed out in his parents’ den. The next morning, Reed laid out his new career plans to Kronstad. He also proposed marriage.

Startled, Kronstad declined, asking for time to think about it. She figured Reed was an alcoholic. But she also figured he was a genius, and was confident that, for better or worse, he was en route to becoming a very famous, paid-in-full rock star.

The path back to rock stardom was circuitous.

Around this time, Reed had been in conversation with an Off Broadway director named Carmen Capalbo, who was trying to stage a rock musical based on Nelson Algren’s novel “A Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed had been approached to possibly contribute some songs, and even after the project fizzled, the book’s themes, and its title, stuck with him.

The first to hear what he would do with them was the rock ’n’ roll power couple Lisa and Richard Robinson. She was an ambitious music journalist, he an artists-and-repertoire man and youth-culture barometer at RCA Records. They both revered the Velvet Underground, and after meeting Reed through Fields, they had him over for dinner at their Upper West Side apartment in the spring of 1971.

That night, and on subsequent ones, they recorded him playing songs on acoustic guitar. Some were outtakes from the Velvets era; others were new, including a giddy sketch about Manhattan life with a hooky chorus revolving around the phrase “take a walk on the wild side.” Richard liked what he heard, and thought he could get Reed a record deal. He did.

Will Hermes is an occasional contributor to The New York Times and is the author of “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.”

a lot to wrap up, which about explains it.......

[seven]

OMG. Unannounced last night at Farm Aid in Indiana. Decent lineup; Bob, Neil Young, Willie Nelson etc. Bob back playing guitar , Tom Pettys  Heartbreakers backing him. Maggies Farm, Positively 4th street and Ballad of a thin man.

 

 

[Pdoggg]

 

[Woodie]

3 hours ago, Pdoggg said:

 

Well I have heard worse!

Was in a little bar in SanDiego, owned by a guy that could have been Benny Hills brother. Had an old black guy who I think from memory, called himself Black Cat, doing a music show. Blues music. Had been an act down in New Orleans in his younger days. Very good. Played a mean guitar. He gave me a cd of his own making.

[Pdoggg]

On 10/13/2023 at 5:38 PM, Soju said:

I've been humming this oldie since I woke up this morning... damn Ronnie was good!

Nice one Soju!

Here's something a bit different.......sexy singer/dancer Kylie Cantrall who recently turned 18 doing a mashup of Rogers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things (Sound of Music)with Tchaikovsky's March of the Toy Soldiers (Nutcracker Suite).  Clever music and choreography!

 

[Pdoggg]

On 10/14/2023 at 6:53 AM, Pdoggg said:

Rogers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things (Sound of Music)

Sexy Ariana Grande's version of My Favorite Things is not quite as wholesome as Julie Andrew's.

 

[duke007]

1 hour ago, Pdoggg said:

Sexy Ariana Grande's version of My Favorite Things is not quite as wholesome as Julie Andrew's.

 

Do you think the Julie Andrews video would be allowed these days in our PC world? 

Do prefer Miss Grande's version btw 

[Woodie]

Have a listen to Miss Grande and Taylor Swift singing, Don't Dream it's Over, ( Crowded House from downunder?). A very good cover.

[Pdoggg]

13 hours ago, duke007 said:

Do prefer Miss Grande's version

Although Miss Grande's version that I posted is a very sexy video, I prefer this remix.

But 7 Rings is quite different than My Favorite Things. A more direct comparison would be Julie's version vs Kylie Cantrall's. I prefer Kylie's version but really just a matter of personal taste.

 

[Zeppie]

I just can't get into any of this....it's so commercially manufactured.....

[Dan Miller]

I'm also kinda stuck in music from the past. All these duets from Meat Loaf, with Patricia Russo, Marion Raven, Ellen Foley etc ... magnificent. 

His music will never be matched, classic 4 ever.

 

[Pdoggg]

1 hour ago, Dan Miller said:

duets from Meat Loaf, with Patricia Russo

As the Scooter would say, they hit a home run in Rotterdam with this one!

 

[Zeppie]

12 hours ago, Dan Miller said:

I'm also kinda stuck in music from the past. All these duets from Meat Loaf, with Patricia Russo, Marion Raven, Ellen Foley etc ... magnificent. 

His music will never be matched, classic 4 ever.

 

Absolutely fabulous...."The Meat".......nothing will ever touch, bat out of hell.......still got the LP

[Zeppie]

10 hours ago, Pdoggg said:

As the Scooter would say, they hit a home run in Rotterdam with this one!

 

So unique and so powerful.......he gave his soul to the people........had a lot of up and a lot of downs.....truly magical

[Pdoggg]

On 9/6/2023 at 7:22 PM, seven said:

 

Perhaps not their greatest cut , but it is what it is. 80 year olds who put most new acts to shame. Its only rock n roll, and I like it.

Here's the entire album:

 

[Pdoggg]

Just now, Pdoggg said:

Here's the entire album:

Just had a quick listen. Interesting because it's the Stones.  Quality of the songs seems pretty even, nothing bad but at the same time nothing jumps out at me as wow.  If the Stones did not exist and I had a listen not sure how excited I'd be. But hey, they exist and well, it's the Stones.

My intention was to pick out a favorite or two but can't at this time.

[seven]

On 10/30/2023 at 6:28 PM, Pdoggg said:

it's the Stones.

It's not bad. Been listening to it a few times now. Some say its their best since 1982s Tattoo you.

Jagger singing great. 

I like this track

 

[Woodie]

10 hours ago, seven said:

It's not bad. Been listening to it a few times now. Some say its their best since 1982s Tattoo you.

Jagger singing great. 

I like this track

 

Looking at that record, I started thinking, why did they settle on the turntable speeds that they did. ie the old 78, then 45, 33 and so on. Any ideas?.

When I was a kid we used to sit on the back lawn winding up the old record player and sometimes throwing the records (78's) around like a discus. Was fun watching them buckle in the sun!!!

[Pdoggg]

It’s not just another day in the life for Beatles fans, because the iconic group is releasing its final “new” song today. Called “Now and Then,” it was written by John Lennon in 1977 and left on an unreleased demo tape until a production team used AI to isolate Lennon’s voice and let Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr turn it into a fully realized track.