BluesonaMonday brings us this sweet cut from the freshly re-minted self titled album Boz Scaggs. An extended 11-minute blues workout, “Loan Me a Dime,” functions as much as a showcase for a blazing Duane Allman as it does for Boz.
Eric Clapton and His Band are wrapping up their 2013 concerts this month with two shows in Basel, Switzerland. The shows are part of the “Baloise Sessions” indoor concert series and happen at the Event Halle in Basel. In front of 1,500 people, Eric and his band peformed a 20-song set on 13 November, including five songs in memory of JJ Cale: “Don’t Go To Strangers” (the opening number), “Since You Said Goodbye,” After Midnight,” “Call Me The Breeze” and “Cocaine.” “After Midnight,” rarely seen in a Clapton set list, was performed in the style of JJ Cale, rather than the way it had been recorded in the studio by Eric (in 1970 and 1987).
Bonnie Raitt
KSAN broadcast, San Francisco
Dec. 9, 1973
Recorded at the The Record Plant in Sausalito and broadcast on KSAN
01 Love Me Like A Man
02 You Got To Know How
03 I Thought I Was A Child
04 Under The Falling Sky
05 Everybody's Crying Mercy
06 Give It Up Or Let Me Go - band intros
07 Too Long at the Fair
08 I Feel The Same
09 Guilty
10 Women Be Wise
11 Love Has No Pride
12 Baby I Love You
Bonnie Lynn Raitt (born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer-songwriter and slide guitar player. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums which incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk and country. In the 1990s she had a major return to form with the release of her album "Nick of Time" after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success. The following two albums "Luck of the Draw" and "Longing in Their Hearts" were also multi million sellers generating several hit singles including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up on You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten Grammy Awards. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time and number 89 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
Early life
Raitt was born in Burbank, California. She is the daughter of Broadway musical star John Raitt and his first wife, pianist Marjorie Haydock. She began playing guitar at an early age. Later she gained notice for her bottleneck-style guitar playing. Raitt says she played "a little at school and at [a summer] camp" called Camp Regis-Applejack in New York.
After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1967 Raitt entered Radcliffe College majoring in social relations and African studies. Raitt said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". Raitt became friends with then 65-year old bluesman Dick Waterman. During her sophomore year Raitt took a semester off and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and a number of local musicians. Raitt says it was an "opportunity that changed everything."
1970 to 1976
In the fall of 1970, while opening for Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek Magazine, who began to spread word of her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer with Warner Bros. who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, many of whom praised her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, very few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists.
While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal acclaim; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales.
Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone Magazine, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate.
In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough when it yielded a hit single in her cover of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia – Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia...And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia — no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal."
Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt would have one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the a three-record gold album as well as a Warner Brothers feature film, No Nukes. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and numerous others.
For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning New Wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this would have a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers.
After nearly 20 years, Bonnie Raitt achieved belated commercial success with her tenth album, Nick of Time. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to the top of the U.S. charts following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone magazine list of 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. Raitt herself pointed out that her 10th try was "my first sober album."
At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "In the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (Although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives). Nick of Time has sold over six million copies in the US alone.
Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her 1991 album, Luck of the Draw which sold nearly 8 million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing In Their Hearts, her second no. 1 album. Both of these albums were multi-platinum successes. Raitt's collaboration with Was would amicably come to an end with 1995's live release, Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it sold well enough to be certified gold.
For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt said. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998.
-Wiki
Neil Young continues his extensive “Archives” program of official live reissues with “Live at the Cellar Door,” a collection from his late-1970 stand at the Cellar Door club in Washington, D.C.
Young’s stardom was accelerating at the time due to the release that August of his landmark “After the Gold Rush” album, from which five of these tracks hail. It was the era that gave him the reputation for his high-pitched wavering vocal style, but there’s little of that in evidence in these solo acoustic performances.
In fact, Young’s voice at 25 years old sounds strong and clear on this impeccably recorded set, which also includes selections from his first two solo albums as well as three of his tunes recorded as a member of Buffalo Springfield.
Hearing familiar Young touchstones rejiggered for solo guitar and piano renditions proves to be fascinating. He gives the Buffalo Springfield epic
Saturday Night Live has Neil Young live at the Cellar Door.
Having just released his third solo album, "After the Gold Rush," a 25-year-old Neil Young settled into Washington, D.C.'s, cozy Cellar Door nightclub for a six-night stand in late 1970: just the singer, his guitar and the occasional piano.
“Expecting to Fly,” rendered here on piano, an unrecognizable but lovely piano intro, then pounds its final phrases home with startlingly dramatic crashing chords.
Young also uses piano, for the first time, he tells us, to accompany himself on his early solo hit “Cinnamon Girl,” playing its signature riff with uncommon delicacy while reinventing the driving guitar anthem as a memorably plaintive ballad.
Another early Buffalo Springfield staple, “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong,” is the album’s high-water mark. After goofing around with the piano for a couple of minutes and cracking a few jokes, Young proceeds to deliver a stunning rendition of the song, which he tells us is “about dope” (this is 1970, remember), combining fragile but unerring piano playing with a breathtakingly pure vocal performance.
Other standouts include “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” an excellent ballad that would remain unreleased for decades, a version of “Old Man” recorded two years before its release on “Harvest” and a sweetly aching version of “Birds” from “After the Gold Rush.”
A dreary version of “Down by the River” is the album’s only dud, with Young’s acoustic playing unable to summon much of the drama of the monolithic electrified original.
Other than that, “Live at the Cellar Door,” out Dec. 10, presents Young at the artistic peak of his troubadour phase. Old songs, new songs, unreleased songs, it doesn’t matter — he sings like an angel on all of them.
Here we have Close To The Edge (Early Assembly/Rough Mix) from the freshly re-mastered Close to the Edge, one of my all time favourite Yes albums.
1972 stands out as one of the key years of Yes' long history. In a little over 9 months the band consolidated its growing popularity and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, created one of it's most revered and enduring pieces and, in the process, said farewell to a founding member. Even in the face of this setback, the undeniable momentum which had begun gathering with The Yes Album (1970) and Fragile (1971) enabled yes to embrace change with relish. Following January's short series of European warm-up gigs, in February Yes embarked upon a 38-date tour across America, taking the music to bigger and more enthusiastic audiences than before. This influx of interest was undeniably helped by the presence of Roundabout on FM radio. Bill Bruford recalls relaxing by a hotel pool and hearing the song roughly every 45 minutes. Returning to London at the end of March, the band reconvened in the basement of the Una Billings School of Dance, Sheperd;s Bush, London piecing together the ideas and sketches that had accrued from writing sessions between Jon Anderson and Steve Howe in the hotels, soundchecks, and dressing rooms across America. "We knew we were going to do a long-form piece, something that would take up the sode of an album," recalls Squire. "Heart of the Sunrise had really been the germination of that idea where you had different sections, with contrasting flavours all working together."
There was never any doubt in Jon Anderson's mind as to the shape this new composition would take. Despite lacking the technical skills to reproduce precisely what he was seeing and hearing in his head, Anderson's abilities as an animateur, which had been honed out of necessity as he guided Yes, were second to none. "I was always aware of where we were heading structurally" he explains. "I was listening to a lot of classical music while touring and Sibelius' 5th Symphony I liked. It's got a very wild first movement, a gentle second and the third movement is very majestic. I thought the band could get into performing with that sort of musical positioning." Having heard the recently released Sonic Seasonings. a couble album by Wendy Carlos consisting of four wide-long suites, brimming with evocative Moog-enhanced ambient environments, Anderson discussed with Eddie Offord how they might come up with something similar. "I wanted to create this sense of energy or force field before the band started, and then have the group climb out of it with a wild and crazy solo section, raving away as though we didn't know where we were going. You'd get to a certain point and you're going to stop dead and a very straight choral thing would come in and then the band would carry on again. The idea was very simple."
As Offord and Anderson looked on from the control room, Howe turned in an octave-jumping daredevil of a solo that owes little to the rock guitar conventions of the day. "I wouldn't say we were influenced by the Mahavishnu Orchestra directly but we were all full of admiration and respect for them. It was that way-out jazz side of things we were drawing on. Bill's got jazz roots and so have I. We didn't want to play jazz standards but rather our own version of rock and jazz."
The Solid Time of Change was in part seeded from Howe's past. "You tend to have plenty of ideas and sketches which don't necessarily have a home, wo you pitch them in. Jon and I worked like that all the time like with one of my songs which had the line "close to the edge, down by a river" which actually referred to where I was living at the time, next to River Thames." When Anderson heard the phrase, the symbolism of the river immediately connected to metaphors within Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. which he'd been reading at the time. "The river leads you to the ocean, all the paths lead you to the divine. So the idea was that as human beings we are close to the edge - the edge of realisation, whatever anybody else might wnat to think," laughs Anderson.
Another Howe song pre-dating the rehearsal and recording sessions was thrown into the mix. As the guitarist sang "In her white lace" Anderson countered with his own melody. "I started singing 'Two million people barely satisfy'. I had my head to the ground about what was happening around the world, starvation in African countries, where so many people lived so well and so many people didn;t. I get high and low on the whole concept of life. I get up, I get down. So it worked out that Steve and Chris sang that while I sang my melody over these exact same chords. It was magical more that anything because it...well, it just happened." Not so spontaneous, though just as crucial, to I Get Up I Get Down is the cathartic appearance of the church organ. Recorded in the Londaon church. St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, Wakeman recalls there were huge challenges. "Back then technology couldn't do what I wanted to do. So it was a matter of recording the church organ separately and then 'floating' it into the track from quarter-inch tape, a long and very fiddly process but absolutely worth it/"
The build in the finale of Seasons of Man is a glorious example of Yes at its most cinematic and remains a favourite 'goosebump' moment in the piece for most members of the band. "That big end section, climbing the mountain. That's that place where it's like we're climbing the mountain, you get there and you sit back and take in the view...my head was spun every time I listened to it or sang it," says Anderson. "When we started touring it we had to drop that end section a full tone below F," comments Howe. "To this day I think how Jon sung originally in the studio in G minor is just amazing."
