Great entertainment!

Let it be known that the Darkness is upon us but, the LIGHT shall kick it’s ass.

okay…..okay………..don’t get me started

Great Stuff
Huge fan of Richard and Coast2Coast

Peace Out

And I don’t mean to be rude, honestly, but I’m also at a stage in music listening where I’ve been going back to the original players and innovators, rather those ‘inspired’ by them, for the most part. For tone, touch, creativity and just kick-ass rock and roll.

But here’s an update: I took the tix for the April show, afterall, and gave them to an older woman in my office who’s going through a divorce, but has recently discovered blues rock and she is loving it. She has my JB disks, some Gary Moore, some SRV, etc. and was really excited to go to the show. Now, if I can just figure out how to eBay-auction the f*cking letter I wrote to Rolling Stone on JB’s behalf. . .

It’s nearly impossible for me speak objectively about what he’s doing now. As you know I had such a visceral attachement (and emotional investment) to his early music that It’s hard (if not impossible) to evaluate his later material from an unbiased perspective. At first glance, I felt unfulfilled and disappointed with most everything released post-Eric and post-Kenny.

However, if I didn’t have that basis for reference, and just discovered him when, say, The Ballad of John Henry was released, I’d probably like his new stuff a lot more. I must admit his new stuff is still quite good compared to most of what’s available today. I really like India and it’s segue into Mountain Time on his live album, among others…but if I went to a Joe show today I wouldn’t be all geeked up to start a Street Team. But things are different now, who feels the need to help an artist gain exposure who’s selling out theatres? It was just a moment in time when all the circumstances were right…a blistering power trio playing in taverns and lacking the attention they deserved. It was new, fresh and exciting.

I didn’t have the same experiences with him that you did. He always treated me decently, but who wouldn’t be nice to some moron who’s volunteering his time and resources to help advance your career? I’m kind of surprised you’ve moved into the let-bygones-be-bygones phase. Had I been approached and/or spoken to like you were by JB and his Dad, I might well be still ginding that axe.

But anyway it’s fun to look back and see JB’s success, and to think that I had a (very small) part in helping create a sort of subculture and/or mindset among his fans that made it kind of ‘cool’ and fun to participate in a grassroots promotional effort. I wish him well. His work ethic and his music is the real reason for his success. He earned it.

And the Billy Joel period you speak of is fair game, I think, because people were putting out wonderful, new, fresh music each week, but the proof in the puddin’ was whether their next album sucked or not.

I think if you spent some time with it would grow on you. But maybe not.

However, that’s the record I ‘discovered’ him with, and as mentioned in that post, I lost interest with his subsequent releases.

I tend to agree with your Stones timeline. ‘Some Girls’ in 1978 was the last RS record that I really liked. That being said however, any band that releases such epic recordings as ‘Let it Bleed’ ‘Sticky Fingers’ and ‘Exile on Main Street’ back-to-back-to-back has pretty much earned their spot in my personal music Hall of Fame!

Miles:”Jimi’s gonna do a thing he wrote called. . .Message of Love. . .2,3, 4. . . . . .BOOM! It goes off like a bomb and the intensity is breath-taking and full of Jimi’s signature octave-chords. Then, it happens after a handful of really cool bars puncuated by Cox and Miles’ back-up falsetto vocals: Jimi flies off for Saturn at light speed, a smeared brushstroke of electric green and purple shooting through the night sky. It’s his ‘solo’ and it’s one of the most frighteningly beautiful, stunningly aggressive bursts of creativity and raw talent you’ll ever hear. He refuses to let you go until he is satisfied the rocket fuel tank is nearing empty and he needs to land.

And that’s one tune. I was just listening to “We Gotta Live Together” on the way home from work and it’s just killer! Jimi does this squaking, pinch-harmonics run at the end and he blows the hell out of 90% of the players out there to this day. Just amazing, really. Forty years ago.

And every “what if” he asks in this clip is true, already. Not “what if” but “when” the things he wonders about, rhetorically, happened. The parties are the same at their core, in my opinion, and the fringies on both sides have way, way too much influence on party platforms. Look at the Repubs this year, flavored with tea:They can’t get their own stuff through, Boehner has to run interference to do damage control in an election year. I noticed that Cantor and Rand Paul and even Sarah from Wasilla have been unusually quiet recently with the Repub candidates weekly blood bath. Bachmann disappeared as the leader of Congressional TP Caucus after she suspended her campaign.

The two parties, at their core, are more alike than apart. Most older, sensible Republicans and Democrats talk fondly about the era when a Dem leader of Congress would have drinks and dinner with the opposition at Ebbett’s Grill or some other Beltway watering hole and work out the differences without going to a podium and attacking on tv and internet, then trying to negotiate, post-public attack.

I have never seen the level of anger and pure hatred of opposing thoughts, attitudes and accusations of wrong doing. And that’s just the back and forth of this week’s Republican presidential candidates. I mean, seriously, people! Rick Santorum might beat Romney? What, was the custodian at RNC not available to run? They really don’t like their front-runner.

But it’s like the weather in Utah. Don’t like it? Wait 10 minutes and it will change.