Classic Rock - Blues

The List:

2010-12-16T17:38:00.001-08:00

Grateful Dead Live at Barton Hall, Cornell 1977:

Grateful Dead Live at Radio City October 31, 1980
Grateful Dead Hampton Coliseum October 8, 1989
Grateful Dead Hampton Coliseum October 9, 1989
More Grateful Dead shows HERE
Top 30 Grateful Dead Shows HERE
Last Days of the Fillmore 1971:

Cream - Reunion (2005) Live At Royal Albert Hall

2010-09-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

Cream Biography HERE

Mountain at Fillmore East 12-31-70

2009-12-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

Humble Pie at Fillmore East 1971

2009-12-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

Quicksilver Messenger Service

2009-12-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

Pride of Man in Stereo HERE

Mike Bloomfield

2009-12-16T19:37:00.001-08:00

"He didn't get a chance to expand the mission of his soul, but those few albums he played on – those are enough," says Carlos Santana, referring to Mike Bloomfield's death in 1981, of a drug overdose at age 37, and the key recordings Bloomfield left behind. Bloomfield helped Bob Dylan go electric with his work on Highway 61 Revisited (those are Bloomfield's skyward spirals on "Like a Rolling Stone") and two albums with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, including 1966's raga-blues monster, East-West. (Check out Bloomfield's winding, epic solo on the title track.) A native of Chicago, Bloomfield studied the local electric-blues legends like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf up close while he was growing up, and he packed those lessons into a piercing clean-treble tone and solos that took off with fluid, modal-jazz ecstasy. "Michael always sounded like a salmon going against the current," Santana says. "He comes from B.B. King. But he went somewhere else."

Butterfield Blues Band

2009-12-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

Paul Butterfield was born and raised in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. After studying classical flute as a teenager, he developed a love for the blues harmonica, and hooked up with white, blues-loving, U of Chicago physics student Elvin Bishop. The pair started hanging around black blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Junior Wells. Butterfield and Bishop soon formed a band with Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay (both of Howlin' Wolf's band). In 1963, a watershed event in introducing blues to a white audience in Chicago occurred when this racially mixed ensemble was made the house band at Big John's, a folk music club in the Old Town district on Chicago's north side. Butterfield was still underage (as was guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who was already working there in his own band).

Classic Climax Blues Band

2009-12-16T19:33:00.000-08:00

I am Constant (Live):

It's a Beautiful Day

2009-12-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Michael McDonald

2009-12-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

Jimi Hendrix

2009-12-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

Classic Jethro Tull

2009-12-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

Blind Faith

2009-12-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

Steve Winwood - Classic Traffic

2009-12-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

Traffic Biography HERE

BONUS: Live at the Fillmore East 1970

John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers

2009-12-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

Classic Savoy Brown

2009-12-16T18:28:00.000-08:00

Today I present Savoy Brown. Savoy Brown was founded by Kim Simmonds; with Guitarist "Lonesome" Dave Peverett, bassist Tony Stevens, and drummer Roger Earl. After leaving Simmonds in December 1970, the 3 added Rod Price on slide guitar and formed Foghat.

Chicken Shack was a band founded in the late 1960s by Andy Silvester (bass guitar) and Stan Webb (guitar and vocals), with Alan Morley (drums) and later joined by Christine Perfect (vocals and keyboards). Perfect left the band in 1969 when she married John McVie of Fleetwood Mac. Pianist Paul Raymond, bassist Andy Silvester, and drummer Dave Bidwell all left in 1971 to join Simmonds and his Savoy Brown. Confused?

BONUS MUSIC:

I'd rather go blind - Chicken Shack
Long Way To Go - Foghat
Slow Ride - Foghat
Ride, Ride, Ride - Foghat
Feel So Bad - Foghat

Lost and Lonely Child and The Boogie Part 1 & Part 2

Fleetwood Mac's Founder: Peter Green

2009-12-16T18:26:00.000-08:00

In late 1966, Peter Green had the job of replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Mayall told his producer, "He might not be better [than Clapton] now. But you wait... he's going to be the best." Soon, with the original Fleetwood Mac, he was Britain's most progressive blues guitarist, with a Chicago-informed aggression heightened by the melodic adventure on albums like 1969's Then Play On. Green soon entered a dark age of mental and health problems, returning in the Nineties with more subdued but recognizable gifts.

The Incredible Peter Green Story: Man of the World

The demo HERE
The film trailer HERE
Jam Session HERE

PETER GREEN BONUS: SUPERNATURAL & MY DREAM

Classic Fleetwood Mac

2009-12-16T18:24:00.000-08:00

Band's history: story: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Listen to Dust HERE
Listen to Bare Trees HERE

BONUS MAC: Spare Me a Little, Say You Love Me, Morning Rain, Over My Head, Homeward Bound, Future Games , Woman of 1000 Years & Sometimes

Jeff Beck

2009-12-16T18:22:00.000-08:00

Jeff Beck Biography HERE

Jeff Beck with the incredible Tal Wilkenfeld:

Wishbone Ash: Argus

2009-12-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

Blowin' Free:

Sometime World:

The King Will Come:

Warrior:

And: Phoenix, Blind Eye, Handy, Valediction, Alone, Sorrel, Lullaby

THE BEST BAND EVER: The Allman Brothers Blues Band

2009-12-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

Live at the Fillmore East 1971

HOF INDUCTEES

"The group's marathon concerts, best captured on the classic The Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East (1971), are the stuff of rock legend." I saw them 7 times, twice with the original lineup.

Eat A Peach 1972

The Allman Brothers 40th Anniversary Tour Ends

2009-12-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

click to enlarge

In 1970 and 1971, 38+ years ago, I had the good fortune of seeing two concerts that shaped my love of rock music: Derek and the Dominos (Eric Clapton) in London and the Allman Brothers Band in Boston. I later learned that the late great Duane Allman held a link (Jam 4) & (Jam 5) between the two. The Allman Brothers remain the best band ever in my mind. Click photos below for full view:

Last night I was treated to a wonderful night of dancing and music with Widespread Panic and The Allman Brothers Band at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion outside of Houston.

Before Sunset

"Dreams" (live from 2003)

"In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" (live from 1970)
"Whipping Post" (live from 1970)

Additional Classics:

Albert King

2009-11-26T19:29:00.000-08:00

When Rolling Stone reporter Jon Landau asked Albert King in 1968 who his guitar influences were, King replied, "Nobody. Everything I do is wrong." A pioneer of electric blues, King (who was left-handed) played a right-handed 1959 Gibson Flying V upside down, with the bass strings unconventionally facing the floor. He used an indecipherable secret tuning, hitting notes with his thumb. The six-foot-four, 300-pound King was able to bend notes farther and more powerfully than almost any other guitarist, and his records influenced a generation: Eric Clapton lifted the "Strange Brew" solo from King, and Duane Allman turned the melody of King's "As the Years Go Passing By" into the main riff of "Layla." Jimi Hendrix was star-struck when his hero opened for him at the Fillmore in 1967. "I taught [Hendrix] a lesson about the blues," said King. "I could have easily played his songs, but he couldn't play mine."

Freddie King

2009-11-26T19:14:00.000-08:00

In a 1985 interview, Eric Clapton cited Freddy King's 1961 B side "I Love the Woman" as "the first time I heard that electric lead-guitar style, with the bent notes... [it] started me on my path." Clapton shared his love of King with fellow British guitar heroes Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Mick Taylor, all of whom were profoundly influenced by King's sharpened-treble tone and curt melodic hooks on iconic singles such as "The Stumble," "I'm Tore Down" and "Someday, After Awhile." Nicknamed "The Texas Cannonball" for his imposing build and incendiary live shows, King had a unique guitar attack. "Steel on steel is an unforgettable sound," says Derek Trucks, referring to King's use of metal banjo picks. "But it's gotta be in the right hands. The way he used it – man, you were going to hear that guitar." Trucks can still hear King's huge impact on Clapton. "When I played with Eric," Trucks said recently, "there were times when he would take solos and I would get that Freddy vibe."

Eric Clapton

2009-11-06T09:17:00.000-08:00

Eric Clapton Biography HERE

Bobby Caldwell

2009-11-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

Jesse Colin Young

2009-11-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

King Curtis at Fillmore West

2009-07-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

The King Curtis Biography HERE

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

2008-12-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

BONUS: That's All

CHARLEY PATTON, Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll

2008-12-16T19:52:00.000-08:00

A mean, hard-hearted mean, Patton's blues inscribed all the experiences of a Mississippi man into the rough and sometimes barely audible sounds he made for Paramount. He was one of the oldest of the major bluesmen - born in 1887, he bridges the gap between the blues and songster generations - and he sounds like a gruff, irritable figure, a self-taught musician but someone who knows he's damn good, even if he has his own manners. Blues didn't start with Patton, but he personified its expressionism - in the heat and flood of "Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues" and "High Water Everywhere" - and lived out its tissue of "saints and sinners" with an intensity which still strikes through these ancient records.

Mississippi Fred McDowell

2008-12-16T19:14:00.000-08:00

Robert Johnson

2008-12-16T19:13:00.000-08:00

If we didn't have these scratchy etchings it would have been necessary for someone to fake them. This is how the blues sound in the root of every imagination. Johnson was of an age with several still-surviving bluesmen - but his work, preserved from a moment in time in an anyway short life, supersedes all the journeymen traces the bulk of the recorded blues is every now and then heir to. The sessions had always carried with them the whiff of legend - when this set, augmenting the original releases ever so slightly, came out, it outsold every other record in America that same week. Johnson's guitar is as polyphonic as the wheels of a train, his voice as elemental as the wind; they pass the listener at an unbiddable distance and leave only the faintest trace, like steam on a window. This music is all about impermanency, which is possibly one reason why Johnson looks like a jaunty black tulip on the cover.

T-Bone Walker

2008-12-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

Aaron Walker pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influenced all popular music that followed.

He played one of the first electric guitars in the mid-‘30s, recording with it in 1939. His “T-Bone Blues,” recorded as a member of Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra, and “Stormy Monday” both became blues classics, demonstrating his jazz-based blues style.

His single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Walker continued to perform through the ‘70s, dying of a stroke in 1975 after suffering ulcer and alcoholism problems most of his life.

Elmore James

2008-12-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

Bluesman Elmore James was inspired by the local performances of Robert Johnson to take up the guitar. It was, in fact, a number by Johnson ("Dust My Broom") that became James’ signature song and laid the foundation for his recording career. First cut by James in August 1951, “Dust My Broom” contains the strongest example of his stylistic signature: a swooping, full-octave opening figure on slide guitar. His influence went beyond that one riff, however, as he’s been virtually credited with inventing blues rock by virtue of energizing primal riffs with a raw, driving intensity.