When old met new and music bridged a generation gap

Many decades ago, 1975 to be exact, some friends and I took an impromptu road trip to Mountain View, AR, to attend the annual Ozark Folk Festival, a trip that showed that music truly has charms to soothe a savage breast.

A backdoor memorialization of Keith Relf

1969: Keith Relf, Hawken, Jane Relf seated; Dreja, McCarty standing

I was cruising the Internet this morning, landed on one of those This Week in Music sites, and found something interesting: Today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Yardbirds lead singer Keith Relf, who was electrocuted at home playing an improperly grounded electric guitar.

This story, new to me, is another entry on the mental list I have been keeping since Geezer Bob and I had a discussion a few weeks ago about rock musicians who have died under unusual circumstances. 

A deep dive into Lou Reed's catalog: The filler material

1983: Back-cover photo for Legendary Hearts

They can't all be gems, right? Thus far, we've gone through the real meat of Lou Reed's catalog of 22 studio albums, past the halfway mark into what I consider his 13 best.

Today, we're going to look at the five I consider lightweight, filler material. These albums are the back end of the bullpen, the taxi squad, the roster fillers. They're good enough to step up in an pinch, capable of delivering now and then when the regulars need a break. But they aren't the sort you want to turn to on a daily basis.

Woody Guthrie sang about my family

Armed with little more than his acoustic guitar, upon which he famously wrote, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” Woody Guthrie traversed this nation singing his Dust Bowl ballads, proclaiming the struggles and the dignity of working people, giving a voice to the voiceless as they suffered through the Great Depression and the killing fields of World War II.

In telling the story of a nation he also told the story of my family.

Doing the Pandora shuffle, 5th edition

"OK, Google: Shuffle my Pandora."

"Crimson and Clover," Tommy James & The Shondells (Crimson & Clover/Cellophane Symphony, 1991): Oh, yeah, one of those early hard-rock favorites that opened my mind for exploration beyond your typical Top 40 fare. I cannot express how much I loved this song in my early high-school years. Pandora is serving me the 5:32 version from the 1991 CD packaging of the band's 1968 and 1969 albums. To explain this one, let me start at the beginning: The single "Crimson and Clover," clocking in at 3:23, was released in November 1968 and quickly became the biggest of The Shondells' string of big hits. A month later, the band released the album Crimson & Clover, which featured a 5:25 version of the centerpiece song. This version essentially was the single with a long guitar solo by Ed Gray edited into the middle of the track. But that piece was inadvertently sped up slightly during the mastering process, and the 1968 album went out that way. Engineers corrected the mistake digitally for the 1991 package, resulting in the 5:32 version of the song, billed as the way the song originally was intended to be heard. It sounds as great as ever.