On April 30, Willie Nelson will turn the big 80. With the passing of George Jones, the last of the true country artists, namely Willie Nelson along with the ageless Ray Price and Merle Haggard are the last of the dying breed of country stars who were big back in the 60s and 70s.
It's hard to know how many actual albums that Willie Nelson has released in his lifetime but a good guess is somewhere between 250 and 300 not counting countless cheapo compilations that you see in the 2 dollar bins. But he started all the way back in the very late 50s and if it wasn't for Faron Young and Pasty Cline to record Hello Walls or Crazy, Willie may have been a great behind the scenes songwriter in the tradition of Harlan Howard. Even back then when he first recorded for Liberty Records, Willie Nelson had a style of his own that defined Nashville. Although he's country influenced his music was also tin pan alley as well. Moving on to RCA, Willie toiled in just about obscurity until the hippie influences of Austin and Waylon Jennings gave him a new life as an outlaw country singer and after RCA gave up on him, Willie moved to Atlantic to become their first best known country singer with the conceptual Phases And Stages.
The Columbia years started with Red Headed Stranger to which it was stripped down Willie and he had a big hit with Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and for the next 20 years Willie would record just about anything that came to his mind. In 1978 Stardust, an album of old crooner standards was a huge seller. Anybody who was country Willie would record with, Ray Price, Leon Russell, Hank Snow, Roger Miller, Webb Pierce and of course, Waylon Jennings, or the Lennon/McCartney of country music. But the onset of so many albums from Nelson, he'd record at least two or three per year it seemed and not only that he started in a movie Honeysuckle Rose which is worth watching.
Like Waylon in the 1980's his albums begin to sell less and less although he would record all the time. His Columbia albums tend to be spotty even on the best ones Me And Paul, or Stardust. The first Greatest Hits (and some that will be) remains a fine introduction although there's too much filler to really recommend it, but I think I prefer it to the Essential Willie Nelson. While he was raking up success with Columbia, RCA reissue some of his albums, the classic Yesterday's Wine predates Red Headed Stranger and Felton Jarvis who produces keeps it fairly simple unlike other albums (Laying My Burdens Down 1971, hard to find on LP but I like it fine). All Time Greatest Hits Volume 1 is a good companion piece to the 1981 Greatest Hits set. Flashback's cheapo cheapo Whiskey River And Other Hits cherry picks the best of the two Atlantic albums that Nelson did.
After two uneven early 90s albums attempts to cash into the new country scene (the lackluster Born For Trouble and Horse Called Music) Don Was produced the final Columbia album Across The Borderline to which Willie sang with the likes of Paul Simon (Graceland) cowrote a song with Bob Dylan (Heartland) and did a duet with Sinead O'Connor on the Peter Gaberial Don't Give Up song. When the album tanked, Nelson moved to Island Records to make one of the best latter day albums in his career with Spirit, which is basically an acoustic album and beautiful in its own way. Teatro, on the other hand has Daniel Lanois producing and Emmy Lou Harris helping out on vocals but it's an odd sounding album. Milk Cow Blues has Willie hanging with B B King and playing the blues. After which, Universal after buying out Island, reassigned Willie to Lost Highway but he continue to defy the odds and play whatever came to mind. Countryman is Willie doing Reggae with help from Toots Hibbert, and after that did a tribute album to Cindy Walker the songwriter with the very good You Don't Know Me. The only album that I end up buying after that was Moment Of Truth, to which Kenny Chesney co produced and Willie begin to add songs from his sons in the process.
Last year, Willie Nelson returned back to Sony Music for the uneven Heroes to which Luke Nelson gets plenty of daddy loving but the best songs are by Willie alone or with Jamey Johnson singing. The new Willie Let's Face The Music And Dance is laid back fun, even though his voice is a bit more ragged he still enjoys revisit the oldies and standards that he loves the best. At age 80, Willie Nelson continues to do things his way and still touring and still playing and its best to see him while you can. For one day he may depart like George Jones did the other day.
Happy birthday Willie Nelson!
It's basically hard to grade all of the Willie Nelson so I'll just compile it down my suggestions of what to get.
Whiskey River And Other Hits (Flashback) B+
Greatest Hits And Some That Will Be (Columbia 1981) B+
The Troublemaker (Columbia 1978) A-
The Sound In Your Mind (Columbia 1976) B
Shotgun Willie (Atlantic 1974) B+
Phases And Stages (Atlantic 1973) B
Laying My Burdens Down (RCA 1971) B+
Yesterday's Wine (RCA 1972) A-
Red Headed Stranger (Columbia 1975) A-
Stardust (Columbia 1978) B-
All Time Greatest Hits Volume 1 (RCA 1989) A-
RCA Country Legends (RCA 2002) B+
Naked Willie (RCA 2009) B+
Me And Paul (DCC/Columbia 1985) B+
Island In The Sea (Columbia 1987) C
Tougher Than Leather (Columbia 1983) C+
Horse Called Music (Columbia 1989) B-
Born For Trouble (Columbia 1990) C+
Across The Borderline (Columbia 1993) B+
Spirit (Island 1996) A-
Teatro (Island 1998) B+
Healing Hands Of Time (SBK/Liberty 1994) C-
Milk Cow Blues (Island 2000) B-
Rainbow Connection (Island 2002) B
Countryman (Lost Highway 2005) B
You Don't Know Me (Lost Highway 2006) B+
Songbird (Lost Highway 2006) B-
Moment Of Forever (Lost Highway 2008) B+
Country Music (Rounder 2010) B
Heroes (Legacy 2012) B-
Let's Face The Music And Dance (Legacy 2013) B
Friday, April 26, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
Andy Johns
The music world lost one of the best recording and producer Andy Johns on Sunday. He was 61 and may have died from liver failure.
If you listened to FM radio and classic rock, you'll hear some of Andy's best known recordings from the likes of Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Mott The Hoople, Free and countless other bands up till the tail end of his life, Andy continued to work with L A Guns on their albums and even Godsmack figures into this.
A selected listings of Andy's work (incomplete)
Mott The Hoople-S/T, Mad Shadows, Wildlife, Brain Capers
Jethro Tull-Stand Up
Free-Highway, Heartbreaker
Rolling Stones: Get Your Ya Yas Out, Let It Bleed, Exile On Main Street, Sticky Fingers etc
Bonzo Dog Band-Urban Spaceman
Cinderella-Night Songs, Long Cold Winter
Pepper's Ghost-Shake The Hand....
Led Zeppelin-III, IV, Physical Graffiti, Coda
Other groups of note:
Stephen Stills
Jack Bruce
Ginger Baker's Air Force
Blind Faith
Eric Clapton (Derek And The Dominoes)
Spooky Tooth
Sandy Denny
Loudness
Autograph
Van Halen
West, Bruce & Laing
Los Lonely Boys
and many more.
RIP
If you listened to FM radio and classic rock, you'll hear some of Andy's best known recordings from the likes of Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Mott The Hoople, Free and countless other bands up till the tail end of his life, Andy continued to work with L A Guns on their albums and even Godsmack figures into this.
A selected listings of Andy's work (incomplete)
Mott The Hoople-S/T, Mad Shadows, Wildlife, Brain Capers
Jethro Tull-Stand Up
Free-Highway, Heartbreaker
Rolling Stones: Get Your Ya Yas Out, Let It Bleed, Exile On Main Street, Sticky Fingers etc
Bonzo Dog Band-Urban Spaceman
Cinderella-Night Songs, Long Cold Winter
Pepper's Ghost-Shake The Hand....
Led Zeppelin-III, IV, Physical Graffiti, Coda
Other groups of note:
Stephen Stills
Jack Bruce
Ginger Baker's Air Force
Blind Faith
Eric Clapton (Derek And The Dominoes)
Spooky Tooth
Sandy Denny
Loudness
Autograph
Van Halen
West, Bruce & Laing
Los Lonely Boys
and many more.
RIP
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Del Shannon
In essence Del Shannon next to Don Gibson are two of my favorite singer songwriters of the music era that I grew up in although in the case of Del, his first big hit Runaway became so popular he would never follow it up like that again. But his songs were based on the paranoid it seems, Keep Searching and Stranger In Town come to mind.
There was more to Del than just Runaway and the Rhino Best Of Del Shannon combined the majority of his big hits but stops at Sister Isabelle his failed 1970 single for ABC Dunhill. The best overall retrospective was the Raven Anthology which came out in the mid 90s and Raven Records, an Australia label manages to get most of his well known hits for Big Top, Amy, Island, Liberty, United Artists, Elektra/Network and Silvertone/MCA Gone Gator.
While Del's albums have fallen out of print in the US, across the pond most of his album are available in 2 on 1 CDs. Taragon pairs his Runaway album alongside One Thousand Six Hundred Sixty One seconds which came out on Amy, the latter album featuring Dennis Coffey who later go on to Motown and later Sussex and had a major hit with Scorpio in 1971.
His Liberty albums were spotty at best, and paired with pop producers didn't help either although The Liberty Years cherry picks the best of the bunch as Del worked with Snuff Garrett and Leon Russell and Dallas Smith later on. In 1967 he worked with Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones producer on Home And Away with sounded like a fascination with Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound sound. Or Pet Sound. The two albums beforehand Total Commitment and This Is My Bag didn't work, Liberty saddled him with some subpar hits of the 60s and they pretty much all bombed. The Liberty Years pretty much has Home And Away as a complete album as well as collected singles, and even though Shannon was perceived as a pop singer, some of his darker content was more compelling, check out the You Don't Love Me to which Del works up into a frenzy towards the end of song. A curio album The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover shows Shannon going more toward hippy dippy and to me it's the best of Liberty years, no commercial potential but gallant effort of doing something different.
Del really didn't make albums all that much but he co wrote a few songs with former teen idol Brian Hyland to which Hyland scored a big hit with a remake of Gypsy Woman for UNI in 1970 and Smith, a band featuring Gayle McCormick got a hit with Baby It's You to which Del produced. In 1981 a big fan of his music Tom Petty, produced and The Heartbreakers played on Del's comeback album Drop Down And Get Me, one of Del's finest moments but it didn't sell and the singles came out in the offshoot Network label. When that failed, Del went country and did a batch of songs for Warner Brothers but outside of a few singles, nothing came of that either. But Del remained popular on the oldies circuit and there was even a rumor going around that he was going to replaced Roy Orbinson in the Traveling Wilburys till depression took hold his life and ended it on a shotgun blast on February 8, 1990. Before that he was actually back in the studio with Tom Petty and another big fan Jeff Lynne to which Del would score a posthumous single with Walk Away in 1991, originally on Silvertone in the UK but when the one in the US refused to release it, Tom Petty released it on his Gone Gator imprint. A good follow up to Drop Down And Get Me, Rock On did have some excellent stuff on it, Who Left Who, Walk Away and a revisit of I Go To Pieces.
The spirit of Del lives on, in the music of The Smithereens, The Townedgers and countless others. The Rhino Best of covers the bases but the Raven Anthology is the home run of a complete overview. The Varase 25 Greatest Hits does offer the last two Shannon albums and is better than the Rhino comp. And there's plenty of imports that do a good job as well. Either way, everybody at least needs a Del Shannon best of in their collection. That's what I think.
The Albums (incomplete)
Runaway (Big Top 1962) B+
One Thousand Six Hundred Sixty One Seconds of Del Shannon (Amy 1965) B+
(Both albums are on a 2 on 1 CD from Taragon)
Sings Hank Williams (Big Top 1964) B+
Total Commitment (Liberty 1965) B-
This Is My Bag (Liberty 1966) B-
Home And Away (Liberty 1967) B
The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover (Liberty/BGO 1968) A-
Drop Down And Get Me (Elektra 1981) A-
The Best Of Del Shannon (Rhino 1988) B+
Rock On (Silvertone UK/Gone Gator/MCA USA 1991) B+
The Liberty Years (EMI 1991) B+
The Anthology (Raven Import 1995) A+
25 All Time Greatest Hits (Varase 2001) A-
The Essential Collection (Music Club Import 2012) A-
The Complete UK Singles (and more) (ACE Import 2013) B+
There was more to Del than just Runaway and the Rhino Best Of Del Shannon combined the majority of his big hits but stops at Sister Isabelle his failed 1970 single for ABC Dunhill. The best overall retrospective was the Raven Anthology which came out in the mid 90s and Raven Records, an Australia label manages to get most of his well known hits for Big Top, Amy, Island, Liberty, United Artists, Elektra/Network and Silvertone/MCA Gone Gator.
While Del's albums have fallen out of print in the US, across the pond most of his album are available in 2 on 1 CDs. Taragon pairs his Runaway album alongside One Thousand Six Hundred Sixty One seconds which came out on Amy, the latter album featuring Dennis Coffey who later go on to Motown and later Sussex and had a major hit with Scorpio in 1971.
His Liberty albums were spotty at best, and paired with pop producers didn't help either although The Liberty Years cherry picks the best of the bunch as Del worked with Snuff Garrett and Leon Russell and Dallas Smith later on. In 1967 he worked with Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones producer on Home And Away with sounded like a fascination with Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound sound. Or Pet Sound. The two albums beforehand Total Commitment and This Is My Bag didn't work, Liberty saddled him with some subpar hits of the 60s and they pretty much all bombed. The Liberty Years pretty much has Home And Away as a complete album as well as collected singles, and even though Shannon was perceived as a pop singer, some of his darker content was more compelling, check out the You Don't Love Me to which Del works up into a frenzy towards the end of song. A curio album The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover shows Shannon going more toward hippy dippy and to me it's the best of Liberty years, no commercial potential but gallant effort of doing something different.
Del really didn't make albums all that much but he co wrote a few songs with former teen idol Brian Hyland to which Hyland scored a big hit with a remake of Gypsy Woman for UNI in 1970 and Smith, a band featuring Gayle McCormick got a hit with Baby It's You to which Del produced. In 1981 a big fan of his music Tom Petty, produced and The Heartbreakers played on Del's comeback album Drop Down And Get Me, one of Del's finest moments but it didn't sell and the singles came out in the offshoot Network label. When that failed, Del went country and did a batch of songs for Warner Brothers but outside of a few singles, nothing came of that either. But Del remained popular on the oldies circuit and there was even a rumor going around that he was going to replaced Roy Orbinson in the Traveling Wilburys till depression took hold his life and ended it on a shotgun blast on February 8, 1990. Before that he was actually back in the studio with Tom Petty and another big fan Jeff Lynne to which Del would score a posthumous single with Walk Away in 1991, originally on Silvertone in the UK but when the one in the US refused to release it, Tom Petty released it on his Gone Gator imprint. A good follow up to Drop Down And Get Me, Rock On did have some excellent stuff on it, Who Left Who, Walk Away and a revisit of I Go To Pieces.
The spirit of Del lives on, in the music of The Smithereens, The Townedgers and countless others. The Rhino Best of covers the bases but the Raven Anthology is the home run of a complete overview. The Varase 25 Greatest Hits does offer the last two Shannon albums and is better than the Rhino comp. And there's plenty of imports that do a good job as well. Either way, everybody at least needs a Del Shannon best of in their collection. That's what I think.
The Albums (incomplete)
Runaway (Big Top 1962) B+
One Thousand Six Hundred Sixty One Seconds of Del Shannon (Amy 1965) B+
(Both albums are on a 2 on 1 CD from Taragon)
Sings Hank Williams (Big Top 1964) B+
Total Commitment (Liberty 1965) B-
This Is My Bag (Liberty 1966) B-
Home And Away (Liberty 1967) B
The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover (Liberty/BGO 1968) A-
Drop Down And Get Me (Elektra 1981) A-
The Best Of Del Shannon (Rhino 1988) B+
Rock On (Silvertone UK/Gone Gator/MCA USA 1991) B+
The Liberty Years (EMI 1991) B+
The Anthology (Raven Import 1995) A+
25 All Time Greatest Hits (Varase 2001) A-
The Essential Collection (Music Club Import 2012) A-
The Complete UK Singles (and more) (ACE Import 2013) B+
Friday, March 15, 2013
Stone Temple Pilots
Out of all the so called grunge bands of the 1990s, Stone Temple Pilots owed more to hard rock than the flannel driven sounds of Soundgarden or Nirvana to which I always looked at with more punk rock than grunge. STP wasn't from the great NW, from southern California and having a charismatic front man in Scott Wieland, who had more in common with Jim Morrison than Kurt Corbain. Wieland can deliver the goods vocal wise but most of the time his band mates wanted to strangle him. (ask Slash). I actually enjoyed the two albums that Scott did with the the ex GnR guitarist in Velvet Revolver (Libertard criminally overlooked and underrated).
In the early 90s, STP competed with Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger and Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam 10 and to a lesser extent Candlebox's first album but even though Core sounds grunge, part of the reason is that record goes on too long although they had hits with Wicked Garden, Dead And Bloated and Crackerman although I do like the 8 minute closer Where The River Goes but there's also crap like Wet My Bad or Sin to bore me. The first four albums were produced by Brendan O'Brien, Core being the least whereas No 4 remains their best. But more about that later.
The second effort Purple shows STP moving away from the hard rock and imitation grunge to a more pop sound although they still rock hard with Unglued, Meatplow and Vasolene although they show a pop side with Interstate Love Song and Pretty Polly. And then you get goofy shit like Army Ants, nuff said.
Tiny Music is their pop rock attempt and sounds more like a hard rock Cheap Trick and they got a few hits with Trippin On A Hole In A Paper Heart and Lady Picture Show but I also enjoy Pop's Love Suicide going into Tumble In The Rough and then Big Bang Baby. Side 2 kinda falls apart. By then the other guys were getting tired of Scott Wieland's act so they threw him out and got Dave Coutts to sing and they called it Talk Show. Made one album for Atlantic which recalled more of a popper side of the Beatles but it sold poorly. Wieland did Twelve Bar Blues
Somehow the Deleo Brothers and Wieland kissed and made up and put out the roaring No. 4 album, my favorite STP album. It's really a compromise of the previous three albums but they never rocked harder than they did on lead off track Down and even more so on Heaven And Hot Rods. They could tone it down on the ultra cool Sour Girl but the surprise track is the final one Atlanta, to which Wieland channels his inner Jim Morrison into a five minute ballad that should have been heard on radio.
But after that, the albums were as good nor memorable.Shangri La Dee Da sounds as tossed off as the title suggests. It sounded like a followup to No. 4 but the songs were all that great. Days In The Week was the hit but in band fighting started up again and they broke up. Atlantic cherry picked the best known songs for the Thank You best of which included a unremarkable new track All In The Suit That You Wear and a acoustic version of Plush. Wieland went back to a solo career, The DeLeo brothers picked up Richard Patrick of Filter for the one off Army Of Anyone album in 2006.
The 2010 Stone Temple Pilots album is very different from the others, it was self produced (with Don Was helping out) and was somewhat an improvement over the lackadaisical Shangri La Dee Da, but this record is their most pop sounding, the hard edges that made No. 4 or Core hard rocking were gone and perhaps gone for good. But I actually enjoyed their pop moves, it seems to fit in well with the band despite it being a poor selling album.
Perhaps the STP legacy was that they didn't owe their music to grunge but rather was a throwback to the stadium rock of the 1970s which annoyed the hip critics who hated their music. Nevertheless, Stone Temple Pilots have become the classic rock band of the 1990s now their music is now heard on the classic rock stations and modern rock as well. With Scott Wieland thrown out of the band for the 40th or 4th time you could make the argument that they are done but somehow I can picture them getting back together again somewhere down the road. For it has shown that no matter what the DeLeo Brothers and Eric Krentz do, that they can't make it over the hump without the enigma that is Scott Wieland.
As they say this is not over........yet. And so they regroup by adding Chester Bennington (Linkin Park) and made a five song EP that while passable, Wieland's personality and songwriting is missed. A couple good songs (Out Of Time, Black Heart) but even for a EP the lesser songs are just that. Uneven. In November of 2015 Chester Bennington left STP to return back to Linkin Park. What the guys will do in the future remains to be seen but there's always a chance Wieland will resume back into the lead singer role, pending if both him and the band can tolerate each other.
That will never happened. Scott Wieland was found dead in his tour bus prior before a show in Minnesota December 3, 2015. He was 48. Chester Bennington killed himself in 2017. In November of 2017 Jeffrey Adam Gutt was named new vocalist of STP, Gutt was a X factor contestant and did cover versions of Hallelujah and Pink (Aerosmith, not the female singer BTW). The 2018 album ushers in a new edition of STP, to which Gutt is a more suitable replacement than Bennington and at times the album shows flashes of brilliance but without Scott Wieland the results are not as memorable so to speak. Actually it's better than Shangri La Dee Da but I still like the 2010 S/T better than the 2018 S/T.
The Albums
Core (Atlantic 1992) B-
Stone Temple Pilots (Better known as Purple) (Atlantic 1994) B+
Tiny Music Or Songs From The Vatican (Atlantic 1996) A-
No. 4 (Atlantic 1999) A-
Shangri La Dee Da (Atlantic 2001) C+
Thank You (Atlantic 2003) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Atlantic 2010) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Rhino 2018) B
STP related:
Talk Show (Atlantic 1998) B
Scott Wieland: 12 Bar Blues (Atlantic 1998) B+
Velvet Revolver: Contraband (RCA 2005) B
Velvet Revolver: Libertard (RCA 2007) B+
Army Of Anyone (Firm/EMI 2006) C+
Scott Wieland: Happy In Galoshes (Softdrive/New West 2008) B
Scott Wieland: The Most Wonderful Time Of Year (Atco 2011) B
Stone Temple Pilots/Chester Bennington High Rise EP (Play Pen/ADA 2013) C+
In the early 90s, STP competed with Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger and Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam 10 and to a lesser extent Candlebox's first album but even though Core sounds grunge, part of the reason is that record goes on too long although they had hits with Wicked Garden, Dead And Bloated and Crackerman although I do like the 8 minute closer Where The River Goes but there's also crap like Wet My Bad or Sin to bore me. The first four albums were produced by Brendan O'Brien, Core being the least whereas No 4 remains their best. But more about that later.
The second effort Purple shows STP moving away from the hard rock and imitation grunge to a more pop sound although they still rock hard with Unglued, Meatplow and Vasolene although they show a pop side with Interstate Love Song and Pretty Polly. And then you get goofy shit like Army Ants, nuff said.
Tiny Music is their pop rock attempt and sounds more like a hard rock Cheap Trick and they got a few hits with Trippin On A Hole In A Paper Heart and Lady Picture Show but I also enjoy Pop's Love Suicide going into Tumble In The Rough and then Big Bang Baby. Side 2 kinda falls apart. By then the other guys were getting tired of Scott Wieland's act so they threw him out and got Dave Coutts to sing and they called it Talk Show. Made one album for Atlantic which recalled more of a popper side of the Beatles but it sold poorly. Wieland did Twelve Bar Blues
Somehow the Deleo Brothers and Wieland kissed and made up and put out the roaring No. 4 album, my favorite STP album. It's really a compromise of the previous three albums but they never rocked harder than they did on lead off track Down and even more so on Heaven And Hot Rods. They could tone it down on the ultra cool Sour Girl but the surprise track is the final one Atlanta, to which Wieland channels his inner Jim Morrison into a five minute ballad that should have been heard on radio.
But after that, the albums were as good nor memorable.Shangri La Dee Da sounds as tossed off as the title suggests. It sounded like a followup to No. 4 but the songs were all that great. Days In The Week was the hit but in band fighting started up again and they broke up. Atlantic cherry picked the best known songs for the Thank You best of which included a unremarkable new track All In The Suit That You Wear and a acoustic version of Plush. Wieland went back to a solo career, The DeLeo brothers picked up Richard Patrick of Filter for the one off Army Of Anyone album in 2006.
The 2010 Stone Temple Pilots album is very different from the others, it was self produced (with Don Was helping out) and was somewhat an improvement over the lackadaisical Shangri La Dee Da, but this record is their most pop sounding, the hard edges that made No. 4 or Core hard rocking were gone and perhaps gone for good. But I actually enjoyed their pop moves, it seems to fit in well with the band despite it being a poor selling album.
Perhaps the STP legacy was that they didn't owe their music to grunge but rather was a throwback to the stadium rock of the 1970s which annoyed the hip critics who hated their music. Nevertheless, Stone Temple Pilots have become the classic rock band of the 1990s now their music is now heard on the classic rock stations and modern rock as well. With Scott Wieland thrown out of the band for the 40th or 4th time you could make the argument that they are done but somehow I can picture them getting back together again somewhere down the road. For it has shown that no matter what the DeLeo Brothers and Eric Krentz do, that they can't make it over the hump without the enigma that is Scott Wieland.
As they say this is not over........yet. And so they regroup by adding Chester Bennington (Linkin Park) and made a five song EP that while passable, Wieland's personality and songwriting is missed. A couple good songs (Out Of Time, Black Heart) but even for a EP the lesser songs are just that. Uneven. In November of 2015 Chester Bennington left STP to return back to Linkin Park. What the guys will do in the future remains to be seen but there's always a chance Wieland will resume back into the lead singer role, pending if both him and the band can tolerate each other.
That will never happened. Scott Wieland was found dead in his tour bus prior before a show in Minnesota December 3, 2015. He was 48. Chester Bennington killed himself in 2017. In November of 2017 Jeffrey Adam Gutt was named new vocalist of STP, Gutt was a X factor contestant and did cover versions of Hallelujah and Pink (Aerosmith, not the female singer BTW). The 2018 album ushers in a new edition of STP, to which Gutt is a more suitable replacement than Bennington and at times the album shows flashes of brilliance but without Scott Wieland the results are not as memorable so to speak. Actually it's better than Shangri La Dee Da but I still like the 2010 S/T better than the 2018 S/T.
The Albums
Core (Atlantic 1992) B-
Stone Temple Pilots (Better known as Purple) (Atlantic 1994) B+
Tiny Music Or Songs From The Vatican (Atlantic 1996) A-
No. 4 (Atlantic 1999) A-
Shangri La Dee Da (Atlantic 2001) C+
Thank You (Atlantic 2003) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Atlantic 2010) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Rhino 2018) B
STP related:
Talk Show (Atlantic 1998) B
Scott Wieland: 12 Bar Blues (Atlantic 1998) B+
Velvet Revolver: Contraband (RCA 2005) B
Velvet Revolver: Libertard (RCA 2007) B+
Army Of Anyone (Firm/EMI 2006) C+
Scott Wieland: Happy In Galoshes (Softdrive/New West 2008) B
Scott Wieland: The Most Wonderful Time Of Year (Atco 2011) B
Stone Temple Pilots/Chester Bennington High Rise EP (Play Pen/ADA 2013) C+
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Day Country Music Died March 5, 1963
Credit: Peter Cooper The Nashville Tennessean
Things were, after all, going well. Copas, who burst onto the country scene with four consecutive Top 10 hits in the 1940s, wound up on the cover of “Billboard” magazine. After that, he endured an eight-year slide in popularity before storming back in 1960 with a 12-week No. 1 hit called “Alabam,” a song that restored his standing as a major country star.
That Sunday, the 49-year-old Copas was in Kansas City, Kan., with his friends, playing three shows to raise money for the family of a disc jockey named Jack Call, who had died in a car wreck. For $1.50, people could see and hear Copas, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, George Jones, Billy Walker, Georgie Riddle, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, George McCormick and others as they sang their hits.
It wasn’t self-pity or depression that brought the Cowboy to tears; it was a post-show meeting with a longtime fan, a woman with cancer who told him that she wasn’t long for this earth. Copas introduced the woman to Riddle, and when she walked away, Riddle said, the singing star grew emotional.
“He said to me, ‘Poor thing, she only has six months to live,’ ” Riddle says. “It was ironic. Because Copas had much less time than that.”
That crash marked an unprecedented loss to the country music community. March of 1963 was a month of tragedy and devastation in Nashville. Days after the plane went down, on the same day of a Cline memorial, Jack Anglin of popular duo Johnnie & Jack died in a single-car accident on Due West Avenue in Madison. And later that month, former “Opry” star “Texas” Ruby Fox perished in a trailer fire.
In the half-century following the plane crash, Cline has been the subject of a feature film, a stage play and several biographies, while the lives of Copas, Hawkins and Hughes have been less studied. The focus on Cline has often been at the exclusion of the others, and that has been hurtful to some of those left in tragedy’s wake.
That focus has at times put history in the least fun of funhouse mirrors.
“When that plane went down, Copas was the biggest star onboard,” Cline’s widower, Charlie Dick, told “Opry” announcer, country music historian and WSM air personality Eddie Stubbs five years ago over the WSM airwaves.
“Usually, today, Patsy seems to get top billing,” says Dick in a Tennessean interview today. “But Patsy was a big fan of Copas and Hawk, and they were stars. Everybody on that plane was important to the music business. And all of them were top dogs.”
Copas was a veteran favorite and a deft guitarist. A soaring vocalist, Cline had already scored in the 1960s with hits “I Fall To Pieces,” “Crazy” and “She’s Got You,” and in Hughes, 34, she had a sharp and tenacious manager. Hawkins was a rising, charismatic star on a roll, married to future Country Music Hall of Famer Jean Shepard, and he had just released what would become his first and only No. 1 country hit, “Lonesome 7-7203.”
Tragedy needs no resume, though. Loved ones do not mourn vocal stylists, affable entertainers or industry power players. They mourn mothers, wives, husbands and fathers.
“I remember the morning Hawk left, he bent over the baby’s crib,”
says Shepard, who was eight months pregnant when the plane went down and
had a 1-year-old son. “He bent over the baby’s crib and said, ‘I want
another one just like that.’ ”
Harold Franklin Hawkins Jr. was another one just like that, born April 8, 1963, less than a month after the crash.
In the coming years, Shepard grew exasperated at the extent to which Cline’s death was emphasized and the others were set into the background.
“A lot of people think during this time that I’ve hated Patsy Cline,” Shepard says. “And that’s not the story at all. I resented the way it was presented, like she was the only person on that airplane. ... I lost a husband. I lost as much as Charlie Dick did. He lost a wife.”
Shepard and Dick are old and dear friends, and they understand each other. They’ve spoken about all of this, and they are in agreement.
“The person who lost the most was Kathy,” Shepard says. “She lost her father and her husband. I thought she had a lot more to bury than we did.”
True enough, but they all had plenty to bury.
“He didn’t know how to fly when he bought it,” says Kathy Hughes. “But Randy had high aspirations. As a manager, if he had a stable of stars he’d use that plane even more.”
Copas and Hawkins played the “Opry” that Saturday night.
Sunday morning, while Cline, Dick and Hughes were in the air, Kathy Hughes prepared fried chicken, and Hawkins and Copas played with Copas’ 11-year-old son, Mike, at Copas’ home. Kathy, her father and Hawkins then took the short ride to Cornelia and met Hughes’ plane. Charlie Dick was heading home — or, as he threatened, down to Tootsie’s to spend the previous night’s earnings on beer.
The Kansas City flight proceeded without incident, other than Cline’s complaints about how cold it was on the plane, and the performers arrived in time for the first of the day’s three shows at 2 p.m. Promoter Hap Peebles, disc jockey Guy Smith and country music artist Billy Walker organized the performances, which were designed to raise money to aid the family of the late disc jockey Call.
Fifty years later, it’s difficult to imagine scores of top-drawer country artists giving up many hours of personal time to help a radio personality’s family. These days, Kansas City is an eight-hour drive from Nashville. In 1963, taking back roads that were then the main roads, it was a significantly longer trip. Hughes’ plane made the excursion possible for Cline, Copas and Hawkins.
Cline and Hawkins, in particular, were reluctant to make the trip and eager to return. Cline, 30, was exhausted: She spent much of the past year doing four shows per day at The Mint in Las Vegas, and she wanted to be around her children, 4-year-old Julie and 2-year-old Randy. Hawkins, 41, had a baby at home, and his wife, “Opry” member Shepard, was soon to give birth to their second son. Hawkins was a horseman, and he had a mare ready to foal as well.
Despite those concerns, the performers played three fine shows that day. They were professionals, even when playing a show that didn’t pay anything but expenses, and they brought full focus to their time onstage.
“These artists were part of country music’s golden era, and its greatest generation,” Stubbs asserts. “What they witnessed and were part of professionally took place during a very important part of the development of our industry. It was a special time, when it was more about the music, the family of musicians and entertainers, the closeness that bonded them and the genuine love they had for what they were doing.”
In between shows, Hawkins, Cline, Copas and the others greeted well-wishers. This was not an age when country musicians sought to, or could really afford to, hide in sequestered backstage areas. To their fans, they were not distant idols. More like distant, friendly cousins.
Access was not to be gained, it was a given, and the financial margins were small enough that selling and autographing promotional photos was often the difference between a successful appearance and a middling one. Interactions with fans were crucial, and performing artists were ambassadors for a Nashville that was still in its infancy as a music center and as an international tourist destination.
When those fans visited Nashville and the “Grand Ole Opry” at the Ryman Auditorium, they were likely to find performers drinking and socializing at Tootsie’s.
“Patsy was there a lot,” Riddle says. “You’d be telling jokes, and she’d come up with some dingers, too. She was kind of like one of the guys. Fun-loving. It was always, ‘Hello, hoss, how you doing?’ ”
“Opry” star Billy Walker, who had gathered most of the Kansas City talent, was slated to fly back to Nashville on Hughes’ plane, with Hawkins scheduled to be on a 6 a.m. commercial flight. But Walker received an urgent message Sunday night: His wife’s father had suffered a heart attack in Texas, and he needed to rush back home. Knowing the commercial flight would be faster than the private plane, Hawkins gave Walker his airline ticket and agreed to fly with Hughes, Cline and Copas.
After the third Kansas City show, Riddle and Cline spent a half hour talking at a reception thrown at the Town House motor hotel. The conversation was pleasant, not profound.
“We were talking about how it had been a long day,” Riddle says.
Monday
morning, it was clear that another long day was in store. Storms halted
all private flights out of Kansas City’s Fairfax Airport. Billy Walker
was back in Nashville by 9 a.m., to care for his children while his wife
went to Texas, and Hughes, Hawkins, Cline and Copas had to burn a day
in Kansas City.
“They got weathered in,” says Country Music Hall of Famer Bill Anderson. “I’ve been out with entertainers so many times when everyone gets awfully impatient. You get a case of what I call ‘Get Home-itis.’ It’s ‘Let’s go home.’ ”
Tuesday morning, the weather wasn’t much better and their impatience was heightened. The plane Hughes had purchased for convenience was proving less convenient than a car, and certainly less so than the tour bus that Cline and Dick dreamed of buying. Hughes decided to get back by hopping from small airport to small airport, waiting for storms to clear the area before taking off for the next short haul. They made it as far as Dyersburg, Tenn., northeast of Memphis and just east of Arkansas, and landed around 4:30 p.m.
In Dyersburg, roughly 170 miles from Nashville via nonstop flight, they were met by Evelyn and Bill Braese, the couple who ran the airport. Impressed to be meeting the country stars, the Braeses also were dubious about Hughes’ notion of flying to Nashville. Major storms roared to the east. The Braeses advised Hughes not to fly, and they arranged for motel rooms for the Nashville group.
“I talked to Randy in Dyersburg,” says Kathy Hughes. “He asked me how the weather was in Nashville. I said it had been horrible all day, but I looked out the window and said, ‘It has stopped raining, and it looks like I can see the sun trying to set.’ He said, ‘Do me a favor and call Cornelia Fort and tell them to turn the lights on. We’re going to make it in probably an hour.’ ”
“It was beginning to get dusky dark,” Shepard says. “And the most horrible feeling come over me that had ever come over me in my life. I just stood there a couple of minutes and kind of froze. I thought I was going into labor. ... That’s about the time the plane crash happened.”
The aftermath was chaotic and horrific. Pieces of the plane were strewn about the Camden forest: a wing in an oak tree, the engine divoted six feet into the ground. There was a kindness to the impact’s violence: No one on board felt a thing. They did not suffer. They were among friends.
WSM radio informed listeners, including family members, that a plane carrying “Opry” regulars Cline, Copas, Hawkins and Hughes was missing. The plane was discovered around daybreak. Singing, songwriting genius Roger Miller had been with Dick late into the night, and he drove to try and find the site while Dick stayed at home with his children. Miller got there in the morning and screamed at the scavengers who were already sifting through the woods, collecting ghastly souvenirs in the hours before authorities secured the scene, around 1 p.m. on March 6.
Cline’s remains went first to her home for a wake, and she is buried in her hometown of Winchester, Va.
Hughes’, Copas’ and Hawkins’ bodies are buried at Forest Lawn cemetery, and their preparations were made at Phillips Robinson Funeral Home on Gallatin Road. By Wednesday evening, the victims’ loved ones welcomed mourners.
“When I was in mourning about their deaths, the first thought in my mind was, ‘Kiddo, you’re not with your people anymore,’ ” says Kathy Copas Hughes. “My husband and my father ... it was a shocking thing. It numbs you for a while. But country music people, we kind of cling to each other. We all take sorrow according to our background and what we believe. If you don’t have anything to hang onto, it has to be the most horrible thing in the world. I believe I had divine help.”
Help came from many places.
Hughes and Ferlin Husky had started a publishing company, and Husky insisted that Kathy Copas Hughes, who had no publishing experience, retain half the company. That insistence meant she kept half the proceeds from country and gospel smash “On The Wings Of A Dove,” and she used that money to put herself and her two sons through college.
Marty Robbins wrote a song about Shepard’s situation called “Two Little Boys,” and he gave writer’s credit to Don Robin Hawkins and Harold Hawkins, Hawkshaw and Shepard’s sons, the second of whom was born April 8, 1963.
At Cline’s memorial service on Thursday, March 7, Bill Anderson sat in a pew at Phillips Robinson, just in front of Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright. Wells was the “Queen of Country Music,” despondent over the death of a potential successor. Wright, her husband, was half of groundbreaking duo Johnnie & Jack, along with his step-brother Jack Anglin.
“Getting up to leave, I spoke to Johnnie for a quick minute,” Anderson says. “A few minutes later, I saw Johnnie was walking on the little porch outside the funeral home, just bawling like a baby. Someone said they’d just told him that Jack was in an automobile wreck and they think he’s dead.”
Word spread immediately. Anglin was as much a part of the close-knit community as were the crash victims. Now, five were gone.
“If they’d lived, Copas would be 99, Jack Anglin 96, Hawkshaw 91, Randy 84 and Patsy 80,” says Stubbs. “We can only imagine what they’d be like if they were with us. As it was, they left us in the prime of their lives. Career-wise, they were all in a good place. The records were happening and show dates were on the books. They’d each had success and faced their share of tough times. But the present was good, and the future was something to look forward to.”
That future went dark, in deep, cruel woods and at a sharp and deadly bend on Due West Avenue.
Their music remains, unscratched and unsullied, at once timeless and young.
In March 1963, Patsy Cline was a rising star in country music, with a
powerful and nuanced voice capable of delivering up-tempo country
numbers, pop-leaning ballads and almost anything else she decided to
perform. After her death, Cline became an iconic figure. Among the most
influential vocalists in country music history, her records are studied
and emulated. Duplication, though, has proved a tougher trick.
“She was a hell of a singer,” says her husband, Charlie Dick, a biased and entirely correct source.
Mandy Barnett, who has often played the starring role in stage productions of “Always: Patsy Cline,” says, “She probably had to scrap quite a bit to get by. A lot of people that come from upbringings like that end up being people that have the biggest hearts. That’s one thing that comes across when she sings: how much emotion and passion she had as a person.”
Hawkshaw Hawkins
Harold “Hawkshaw” Hawkins came to country music notoriety as a member
of the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va. His uncommon height (some of
the most humorous “Grand Ole Opry” photographs involve horseplay between
the gangly Hawkins and the aptly named Little Jimmy Dickens) added to his charismatic stage presence.
“His personality just pulled everybody in,” fan Linda Goode says, while wife Jean Shepard comments, “He was the first professional entertainer I’d been around for any length of time. One of the best entertainers in the business.”
Hawkins’ entertaining went beyond music. He carried a Wild West show on the road with him, complete with two horses, a family of Native Americans and a bullwhip.
“I had to hold his targets for him,” Shepard says. “He like to cut my nose off one night.”
When the plane went down, Hawkins had just released “Lonesome 7-7203,” which would become his first and only No. 1 country record.
Cowboy Copas
The eldest passenger on Randy Hughes’ doomed plane, Lloyd “Cowboy”
Copas was 49 on March 5, 1963. He was an affable and engaging performer,
skilled enough as a guitarist to work as a sideman for Pee Wee King and
compelling enough to score solo hits including “Filipino Baby,”
“Tennessee Waltz” and “ ‘Tis Sweet To Be Remembered.” Copas hit a dry
spell in his career from 1952 until 1960, when his “Alabam” (a song that
featured his daughter, Kathy, on tambourine) became a No. 1 country hit
and re-established Copas as a prime force in Nashville music.
Copas seamlessly integrated his life as a performer and his life as a husband and father.
“Daddy was Daddy, onstage or at home,” Kathy says. “As I grew older, I realized not everyone had a singing troubadour for a father.”
Randy Hughes
A more-than-capable musician and entertainer, Randy Hughes decided he
would make his greatest country music mark guiding others’ careers as a
manager. He was both enterprising and fearless: As a driver, he was
sometimes called “The Hundred Mile an Hour Man,” and he had no
inhibitions about learning to fly the small plane he bought to attract
clients and make traveling to shows less grueling.
“He was a giving guy,” says his widow, Kathy Hughes. “He was also a young man on his way up. Whatever he was going to do next was going to be bigger and better, which is why he had the plane.”
Hughes and Copas often joked with one another, and that side of their relationship ramped up when Randy asked for Copas’ daughter’s hand in marriage.
“When I told my dad that Randy was going to come over and talk to him about us getting married, Daddy said, ‘When’s he coming?’ ” Kathy says. “I said, ‘He’ll be here on Saturday after a show at WSM.’ Daddy said, ‘OK, I’ll be right here.’ When Randy drove up and came in, Dad was sitting in the den with his shotgun across his lap.”
Jack Anglin
Half of country duo Johnnie & Jack, Jack Anglin was a versatile singer and musician. Between 1951 and 1962, Johnnie & Jack notched 15 consecutive Top 20 country singles, including the propulsive “Poison Love” and the chart-topping “(Oh Baby Mine) I Get So Lonely,” also a hit for the Statler Brothers in the 1980s.
“His tenor singing was admired by many in the business, including Earl Scruggs and Curly Seckler,” says Country DJ Hall of Famer Eddie Stubbs. “Listen to Kitty Wells’ monster hit of ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’ and you’ll hear Jack’s rhythm and bluegrass style guitar runs all through that piece. Johnnie was quick to admit that Jack’s vocal and musical ability were much superior to his. Jack did not have the interest or skills in the business end that Johnnie did, so their efforts complemented each other in making the act successful.”
Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Randy Hughes remembered, 50 years after plane crash
Fifty years ago, on Sunday, March 3, 1963, Lloyd “Cowboy” Copas shouldn’t have been crying.Things were, after all, going well. Copas, who burst onto the country scene with four consecutive Top 10 hits in the 1940s, wound up on the cover of “Billboard” magazine. After that, he endured an eight-year slide in popularity before storming back in 1960 with a 12-week No. 1 hit called “Alabam,” a song that restored his standing as a major country star.
That Sunday, the 49-year-old Copas was in Kansas City, Kan., with his friends, playing three shows to raise money for the family of a disc jockey named Jack Call, who had died in a car wreck. For $1.50, people could see and hear Copas, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, George Jones, Billy Walker, Georgie Riddle, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, George McCormick and others as they sang their hits.
It wasn’t self-pity or depression that brought the Cowboy to tears; it was a post-show meeting with a longtime fan, a woman with cancer who told him that she wasn’t long for this earth. Copas introduced the woman to Riddle, and when she walked away, Riddle said, the singing star grew emotional.
“He said to me, ‘Poor thing, she only has six months to live,’ ” Riddle says. “It was ironic. Because Copas had much less time than that.”
Plenty to bury
Fewer than 48 hours later, Copas and fellow “Grand Ole Opry” stars Cline and Hawkins were passengers on a doomed plane piloted by Randy Hughes, who was Cline’s manager, a talented musician and stage performer and the husband of Copas’ daughter, Kathy. Around 7 p.m. on March 5, Hughes’ plane dove into the hard, cold winter woods near Camden, Tenn., 85 miles west of Nashville. The plane’s impact was like an egg hurled to the ground. No survivors. No chance.That crash marked an unprecedented loss to the country music community. March of 1963 was a month of tragedy and devastation in Nashville. Days after the plane went down, on the same day of a Cline memorial, Jack Anglin of popular duo Johnnie & Jack died in a single-car accident on Due West Avenue in Madison. And later that month, former “Opry” star “Texas” Ruby Fox perished in a trailer fire.
In the half-century following the plane crash, Cline has been the subject of a feature film, a stage play and several biographies, while the lives of Copas, Hawkins and Hughes have been less studied. The focus on Cline has often been at the exclusion of the others, and that has been hurtful to some of those left in tragedy’s wake.
That focus has at times put history in the least fun of funhouse mirrors.
“When that plane went down, Copas was the biggest star onboard,” Cline’s widower, Charlie Dick, told “Opry” announcer, country music historian and WSM air personality Eddie Stubbs five years ago over the WSM airwaves.
“Usually, today, Patsy seems to get top billing,” says Dick in a Tennessean interview today. “But Patsy was a big fan of Copas and Hawk, and they were stars. Everybody on that plane was important to the music business. And all of them were top dogs.”
Copas was a veteran favorite and a deft guitarist. A soaring vocalist, Cline had already scored in the 1960s with hits “I Fall To Pieces,” “Crazy” and “She’s Got You,” and in Hughes, 34, she had a sharp and tenacious manager. Hawkins was a rising, charismatic star on a roll, married to future Country Music Hall of Famer Jean Shepard, and he had just released what would become his first and only No. 1 country hit, “Lonesome 7-7203.”
Tragedy needs no resume, though. Loved ones do not mourn vocal stylists, affable entertainers or industry power players. They mourn mothers, wives, husbands and fathers.
Hawkshaw
Hawkins and his wife, Jean Shepard, both Grand Ole Opry singers,
proudly show off their baby, Don Robin, in their living room Dec. 13,
1961. Their first baby weighed in at 8-pounds, 7-ounces at St. Thomas
Hospital and was named after the couple's Opry friends Don Gibson and
Marty Robbins. (Photo: Jimmy Ellis/ file / The Tennessean
Harold Franklin Hawkins Jr. was another one just like that, born April 8, 1963, less than a month after the crash.
In the coming years, Shepard grew exasperated at the extent to which Cline’s death was emphasized and the others were set into the background.
“A lot of people think during this time that I’ve hated Patsy Cline,” Shepard says. “And that’s not the story at all. I resented the way it was presented, like she was the only person on that airplane. ... I lost a husband. I lost as much as Charlie Dick did. He lost a wife.”
Shepard and Dick are old and dear friends, and they understand each other. They’ve spoken about all of this, and they are in agreement.
“The person who lost the most was Kathy,” Shepard says. “She lost her father and her husband. I thought she had a lot more to bury than we did.”
True enough, but they all had plenty to bury.
‘A long day’
Saturday night, March 2, Patsy Cline played three shows in Birmingham with Tex Ritter, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich and Flatt & Scruggs. The next morning, she and Charlie Dick flew to East Nashville’s Cornelia Fort Airpark in Randy Hughes’ little plane. Country music travel in those days usually involved back roads and hassles, and the Comanche was a way to sail far above those things.“He didn’t know how to fly when he bought it,” says Kathy Hughes. “But Randy had high aspirations. As a manager, if he had a stable of stars he’d use that plane even more.”
Copas and Hawkins played the “Opry” that Saturday night.
Sunday morning, while Cline, Dick and Hughes were in the air, Kathy Hughes prepared fried chicken, and Hawkins and Copas played with Copas’ 11-year-old son, Mike, at Copas’ home. Kathy, her father and Hawkins then took the short ride to Cornelia and met Hughes’ plane. Charlie Dick was heading home — or, as he threatened, down to Tootsie’s to spend the previous night’s earnings on beer.
The Kansas City flight proceeded without incident, other than Cline’s complaints about how cold it was on the plane, and the performers arrived in time for the first of the day’s three shows at 2 p.m. Promoter Hap Peebles, disc jockey Guy Smith and country music artist Billy Walker organized the performances, which were designed to raise money to aid the family of the late disc jockey Call.
Fifty years later, it’s difficult to imagine scores of top-drawer country artists giving up many hours of personal time to help a radio personality’s family. These days, Kansas City is an eight-hour drive from Nashville. In 1963, taking back roads that were then the main roads, it was a significantly longer trip. Hughes’ plane made the excursion possible for Cline, Copas and Hawkins.
Cline and Hawkins, in particular, were reluctant to make the trip and eager to return. Cline, 30, was exhausted: She spent much of the past year doing four shows per day at The Mint in Las Vegas, and she wanted to be around her children, 4-year-old Julie and 2-year-old Randy. Hawkins, 41, had a baby at home, and his wife, “Opry” member Shepard, was soon to give birth to their second son. Hawkins was a horseman, and he had a mare ready to foal as well.
Despite those concerns, the performers played three fine shows that day. They were professionals, even when playing a show that didn’t pay anything but expenses, and they brought full focus to their time onstage.
“These artists were part of country music’s golden era, and its greatest generation,” Stubbs asserts. “What they witnessed and were part of professionally took place during a very important part of the development of our industry. It was a special time, when it was more about the music, the family of musicians and entertainers, the closeness that bonded them and the genuine love they had for what they were doing.”
In between shows, Hawkins, Cline, Copas and the others greeted well-wishers. This was not an age when country musicians sought to, or could really afford to, hide in sequestered backstage areas. To their fans, they were not distant idols. More like distant, friendly cousins.
Access was not to be gained, it was a given, and the financial margins were small enough that selling and autographing promotional photos was often the difference between a successful appearance and a middling one. Interactions with fans were crucial, and performing artists were ambassadors for a Nashville that was still in its infancy as a music center and as an international tourist destination.
When those fans visited Nashville and the “Grand Ole Opry” at the Ryman Auditorium, they were likely to find performers drinking and socializing at Tootsie’s.
“Patsy was there a lot,” Riddle says. “You’d be telling jokes, and she’d come up with some dingers, too. She was kind of like one of the guys. Fun-loving. It was always, ‘Hello, hoss, how you doing?’ ”
“Opry” star Billy Walker, who had gathered most of the Kansas City talent, was slated to fly back to Nashville on Hughes’ plane, with Hawkins scheduled to be on a 6 a.m. commercial flight. But Walker received an urgent message Sunday night: His wife’s father had suffered a heart attack in Texas, and he needed to rush back home. Knowing the commercial flight would be faster than the private plane, Hawkins gave Walker his airline ticket and agreed to fly with Hughes, Cline and Copas.
After the third Kansas City show, Riddle and Cline spent a half hour talking at a reception thrown at the Town House motor hotel. The conversation was pleasant, not profound.
“We were talking about how it had been a long day,” Riddle says.
“Get Home-itis”
Monday
morning, it was clear that another long day was in store. Storms halted
all private flights out of Kansas City’s Fairfax Airport. Billy Walker
was back in Nashville by 9 a.m., to care for his children while his wife
went to Texas, and Hughes, Hawkins, Cline and Copas had to burn a day
in Kansas City.“They got weathered in,” says Country Music Hall of Famer Bill Anderson. “I’ve been out with entertainers so many times when everyone gets awfully impatient. You get a case of what I call ‘Get Home-itis.’ It’s ‘Let’s go home.’ ”
Tuesday morning, the weather wasn’t much better and their impatience was heightened. The plane Hughes had purchased for convenience was proving less convenient than a car, and certainly less so than the tour bus that Cline and Dick dreamed of buying. Hughes decided to get back by hopping from small airport to small airport, waiting for storms to clear the area before taking off for the next short haul. They made it as far as Dyersburg, Tenn., northeast of Memphis and just east of Arkansas, and landed around 4:30 p.m.
In Dyersburg, roughly 170 miles from Nashville via nonstop flight, they were met by Evelyn and Bill Braese, the couple who ran the airport. Impressed to be meeting the country stars, the Braeses also were dubious about Hughes’ notion of flying to Nashville. Major storms roared to the east. The Braeses advised Hughes not to fly, and they arranged for motel rooms for the Nashville group.
“I talked to Randy in Dyersburg,” says Kathy Hughes. “He asked me how the weather was in Nashville. I said it had been horrible all day, but I looked out the window and said, ‘It has stopped raining, and it looks like I can see the sun trying to set.’ He said, ‘Do me a favor and call Cornelia Fort and tell them to turn the lights on. We’re going to make it in probably an hour.’ ”
‘Something to look forward to’
Kathy Copas Hughes called Shepard and Dick to tell them when the troupe would finally be arriving. And Shepard gave her baby son a bath in the kitchen sink.“It was beginning to get dusky dark,” Shepard says. “And the most horrible feeling come over me that had ever come over me in my life. I just stood there a couple of minutes and kind of froze. I thought I was going into labor. ... That’s about the time the plane crash happened.”
The aftermath was chaotic and horrific. Pieces of the plane were strewn about the Camden forest: a wing in an oak tree, the engine divoted six feet into the ground. There was a kindness to the impact’s violence: No one on board felt a thing. They did not suffer. They were among friends.
WSM radio informed listeners, including family members, that a plane carrying “Opry” regulars Cline, Copas, Hawkins and Hughes was missing. The plane was discovered around daybreak. Singing, songwriting genius Roger Miller had been with Dick late into the night, and he drove to try and find the site while Dick stayed at home with his children. Miller got there in the morning and screamed at the scavengers who were already sifting through the woods, collecting ghastly souvenirs in the hours before authorities secured the scene, around 1 p.m. on March 6.
Cline’s remains went first to her home for a wake, and she is buried in her hometown of Winchester, Va.
Hughes’, Copas’ and Hawkins’ bodies are buried at Forest Lawn cemetery, and their preparations were made at Phillips Robinson Funeral Home on Gallatin Road. By Wednesday evening, the victims’ loved ones welcomed mourners.
“When I was in mourning about their deaths, the first thought in my mind was, ‘Kiddo, you’re not with your people anymore,’ ” says Kathy Copas Hughes. “My husband and my father ... it was a shocking thing. It numbs you for a while. But country music people, we kind of cling to each other. We all take sorrow according to our background and what we believe. If you don’t have anything to hang onto, it has to be the most horrible thing in the world. I believe I had divine help.”
Help came from many places.
Hughes and Ferlin Husky had started a publishing company, and Husky insisted that Kathy Copas Hughes, who had no publishing experience, retain half the company. That insistence meant she kept half the proceeds from country and gospel smash “On The Wings Of A Dove,” and she used that money to put herself and her two sons through college.
Marty Robbins wrote a song about Shepard’s situation called “Two Little Boys,” and he gave writer’s credit to Don Robin Hawkins and Harold Hawkins, Hawkshaw and Shepard’s sons, the second of whom was born April 8, 1963.
At Cline’s memorial service on Thursday, March 7, Bill Anderson sat in a pew at Phillips Robinson, just in front of Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright. Wells was the “Queen of Country Music,” despondent over the death of a potential successor. Wright, her husband, was half of groundbreaking duo Johnnie & Jack, along with his step-brother Jack Anglin.
“Getting up to leave, I spoke to Johnnie for a quick minute,” Anderson says. “A few minutes later, I saw Johnnie was walking on the little porch outside the funeral home, just bawling like a baby. Someone said they’d just told him that Jack was in an automobile wreck and they think he’s dead.”
Word spread immediately. Anglin was as much a part of the close-knit community as were the crash victims. Now, five were gone.
“If they’d lived, Copas would be 99, Jack Anglin 96, Hawkshaw 91, Randy 84 and Patsy 80,” says Stubbs. “We can only imagine what they’d be like if they were with us. As it was, they left us in the prime of their lives. Career-wise, they were all in a good place. The records were happening and show dates were on the books. They’d each had success and faced their share of tough times. But the present was good, and the future was something to look forward to.”
That future went dark, in deep, cruel woods and at a sharp and deadly bend on Due West Avenue.
Their music remains, unscratched and unsullied, at once timeless and young.
The lives of those lost, March 5 and 7, 1963
Patsy Cline
Patsy Cline
“She was a hell of a singer,” says her husband, Charlie Dick, a biased and entirely correct source.
Mandy Barnett, who has often played the starring role in stage productions of “Always: Patsy Cline,” says, “She probably had to scrap quite a bit to get by. A lot of people that come from upbringings like that end up being people that have the biggest hearts. That’s one thing that comes across when she sings: how much emotion and passion she had as a person.”
Hawkshaw Hawkins
Hawkshaw Hawkins
“His personality just pulled everybody in,” fan Linda Goode says, while wife Jean Shepard comments, “He was the first professional entertainer I’d been around for any length of time. One of the best entertainers in the business.”
Hawkins’ entertaining went beyond music. He carried a Wild West show on the road with him, complete with two horses, a family of Native Americans and a bullwhip.
“I had to hold his targets for him,” Shepard says. “He like to cut my nose off one night.”
When the plane went down, Hawkins had just released “Lonesome 7-7203,” which would become his first and only No. 1 country record.
Cowboy Copas
Cowboy Copas
Copas seamlessly integrated his life as a performer and his life as a husband and father.
“Daddy was Daddy, onstage or at home,” Kathy says. “As I grew older, I realized not everyone had a singing troubadour for a father.”
Randy Hughes
Randy Hughes
“He was a giving guy,” says his widow, Kathy Hughes. “He was also a young man on his way up. Whatever he was going to do next was going to be bigger and better, which is why he had the plane.”
Hughes and Copas often joked with one another, and that side of their relationship ramped up when Randy asked for Copas’ daughter’s hand in marriage.
“When I told my dad that Randy was going to come over and talk to him about us getting married, Daddy said, ‘When’s he coming?’ ” Kathy says. “I said, ‘He’ll be here on Saturday after a show at WSM.’ Daddy said, ‘OK, I’ll be right here.’ When Randy drove up and came in, Dad was sitting in the den with his shotgun across his lap.”
Jack Anglin
Half of country duo Johnnie & Jack, Jack Anglin was a versatile singer and musician. Between 1951 and 1962, Johnnie & Jack notched 15 consecutive Top 20 country singles, including the propulsive “Poison Love” and the chart-topping “(Oh Baby Mine) I Get So Lonely,” also a hit for the Statler Brothers in the 1980s.
“His tenor singing was admired by many in the business, including Earl Scruggs and Curly Seckler,” says Country DJ Hall of Famer Eddie Stubbs. “Listen to Kitty Wells’ monster hit of ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’ and you’ll hear Jack’s rhythm and bluegrass style guitar runs all through that piece. Johnnie was quick to admit that Jack’s vocal and musical ability were much superior to his. Jack did not have the interest or skills in the business end that Johnnie did, so their efforts complemented each other in making the act successful.”
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Whitesnake
If there's one thing about me, it is that I'm thoroughly reliable when
bands make new music that I buy their stuff. Most of the bands that I
known usually make one or two and then quit or get bounced from their
label. The one thing about classic rock bands was that you knew that
they would have a album out every year and we'd wait outside Target or
Krackers or Record Realm to be the first on the block to get it. Kids
of today don't know that, the fine art of new release Tuesday. In this
day and age, you can steal it while playing video games while text
messaging all the while yakking on a cellphone. Come to think of
it, a lotta folk my age do that quite a lot.
So begins the story of Whitesnake, a band led by David Coverdale after Deep Purple Mk 3 lineup ended. Coverdale was always foreshadowed by Ian Gillan when he took over in 1974, in fact DC had to share vocals with Glenn Hughes, who could hit the Gillan high notes. For their benefit however, they did make a classic album in Burn, which spurned two hits and the spotty Stormbringer before Richie Blackmore had a hussy fit and took his guitar home to be replaced by doomed Sioux City native Tommy Bolin for the underrated Come Taste The Band. Expectations was so high that Bolin eventually ODed in late 1976 and Deep Purple closed the book (for the time being). The contractual Made In Europe was offered and David formed Whitesnake.
The Whitesnake of that era actually mirrored the bluesy swagger of the MK 3 Purple lineup although the first two albums were kind of a feeling out period. Snakebite was actually half Whitesnake/half Coverdale solo album and like a snake wondered all over the place while Coverdale was looking for a style. It did lead a minor hit with Come On in the UK and is a Whitesnake staple to this day. United Artists Records signed Whitesnake and released two albums Trouble and Love Hunter, the latter with a racy cover art. Nevertheless, while the music was shaped up by two great guitarists in their own way Micky Moody and the underrated Bernie Marsden, the band was bogged down by a drummer Duck Dowle, who may have been a good drummer but the albums he played on proved that he was holding the band down. Out of all the reissues that Geffen put out, Trouble and Love Hunter went by the wayside and nobody in the US bothered to even issued their best album Ready n Willing from 1980 on CD.
Which in 1980, things changed for the better for Coverdale. Jon Lord joined up on Love Hunter and Ian Paice followed on Willing, thus shaped up that Whitesnake had three Deep Purple bandmates in the band. Atlantic signed them up, and then stuck them on Mirage Records but still Whitesnake got a big top ten hit with Fool For Your Loving which sounded like the second coming of Burn. For the next three years, this lineup of Coverdale, Marsden, Moody, Lord, Neil Murry and Paice would be consider the best lineup up till Saints N Sinners to which Marsden left and was replaced by Mel Gallery from Trapeze. Ian Paice would leave to join up with Gary Moore and later a reformed Deep Purple to which still plays today.
In 1984 Coverdale took the band more into a heavier rock feel with Slide It In, to which Cozy Powell sits on drums and Moody was replaced by John Sykes of Thin Lizzy fame. This is where Whitesnake begins their hairmetal period and the wheels begin go fall off. In no way is Slide It In a bad album it actually rocks hard. Soon Jon Lord would exit and rejoined Paice in the MK2 lineup of Deep Purple and Don Airey replaced him in the band for the next offering to which would propel Whitesnake into greater heights and loss of identity
.
Cryin In The Rain, was a more bluesbased rocker on Saints n Sinners, but on the S/T album, it bares out of the speakers like a runaway train. At this point Gallery left and John Sykes was the sole guitar player and he changed the sound of the band with outrageous whammy bar and Van Halen like HM cliche riffs abound. Second track Bad Boys was led by some of the most powerful drumming in heavy metal history. Ansyley Dunbar may have been a hired hand at best, he didn't tour with them when they came through town with Motley Crue, but his drumming on the first two tracks was the most wildest he's ever done. But Whitesnake had two major hits with the Led Zep like In The Still Of The Night and hairmetal ballads Here I Go Again and Is This Love. This Whitesnake was night from the daytime sounds of Ready N Willing but with fame came a bad case of sellout.
The band went through a big change with Adrian Vandenburg and Steve Vai joining up to replace John Sykes, Rudy Sarzo replaced Murry on Bass and Tommy Aldrich was the masterbeater on the forgetful Slip Of The Tongue to which Whitesnake became a bad punchline to the joke, a bad parody of itself. And while Coverdale kept the band going, he lost the love interest of his videos, the odious Tawny Katien and most of the guys left on. So what's to do when the hairmetal which was so vital, like a dinosaur made extinct by the grunge movement and all your videos being laughed at by Bevis and Butthead?
One could join the hairmetal touring troupe and make a living playing the same old hits like Poison or Vince Neal or Britney Fox, or you can start from scratch and recruit new people and get back to a form of rock and roll you can play and believe in. With Born To Be Bad, the new Whitesnake are relative unknowns but have a better understanding on how to make a listenable record. Doug Aldrich is the cowriter and lead guitarist and doesn't have to rely on the whammy bar as much as Sykes did when Sykes played in the band. Reb Beach is the other guitarist, Uriah Duffy is the bass player, Chris Frazier is the drummer and the keyboardist Tim Drury, who is the most Jon Lord like sounding since Lord was in the band. And for the first time since at least Slide It In, Whitesnake returns to a compromise of sound, yes there's the hairmetal guitars but not as Over The Top, and yes that is the sound of a hammond organ in the background or something to that effect. Coverdale is not going to wow people with his lyrical content anytime soon, but at least he sounds like he's having a lot more fun with the songs than he ever did on the classic S/T album. What makes Born To Be Bad a fun listen that it sounds like it came from 1987 and would have been the followup to Slide It In had some Geffen executive told them to up on the Whammy leads. Some of the songs do borrow a lot from other songs, All I Need sounds like a Still Of The Night rewrite but again the guys sound like they're having fun. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the ballads sound like true ballads and not of the Over The Top meatheadness and perhaps Summer Rain might be the best Whitesnake ballad ever. It definably has more roots in Ready N Willing then Slip Of The Tongue.
Even the bonus live cd has a bit of surprises there. They lead off with Burn with a snippet of Stormbringer thrown in for good measure and they visit forgotten classics like Living In The Shadow Of The Blues, Ready N Willing and Don't Break My Heart Again. And though there's no Vai or Vanderburg or Alldrich around, the Baby Whitesnakes play more as a band than the superstars of the past and even the crowd gets into the singalongs as well as they did twenty years ago.
But don't look for this album to crack the top ten charts here. They're not on Geffen anymore but rather on the SPV label, which is the European answer to CMC International, a home for old bands. Which is a good thing actually. Which means that Whitesnake doesn't have to answer to the Geffen/Universal pricks anymore, that Coverdale and company can continue to focus on the music and delivered it to the fans. The US public can be fickle but the HM fans across the ponds never forget their bands of yore and Whitesnake does sell them out on the summer festivals abroad. What Born To Be Bad reminds us is that a good album can take you back twenty years, before cell phones and CDs, before the internet that we all lived for the new music and that when bands made good albums we came back for the followup regardless.
That's the fun of Whitesnake. The reminder that it's all right to still love rock and roll, to still roll down your window at age 47 and scream with the best of them and to live for rock and roll and for the moment. The freaks on the street with their baggy pants and crappy rap don't know but the ones that like to rock will understand.
And that's all right.
PS: Since this article, Whitesnake moved from the bankrupt SPV Steamhammer label to Frontiers for the loud and in your face Forevermore and Brian Techy replaces Chris Frazier on drums. While good, the album does tend to plod a bit more longer than Born To Be Bad. Somehow Wal Mart had this CD on sale. If you're familiar with Whitesnake's metal, this would fit in your collection. I don't play mine much though.
Doug Alldrich remains perhaps the best guitar player and compatible writer that David Coverdale has had since the days of John Sykes although I still prefer the one two attack of Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody. But the Deep Purple soundalike Whitesnake is long ago and far away. David Coverdale continues the lead Whitesnake deep into the 21st Century and even one time drummer Tommy Aldridge has return behind the drummer's throne replacing Brian Tichey. Hard to believe that 25 years ago Whitesnake was on top of the hard rock road and Tawny Katilen used to be good looking too.
Ah youth!
Albums:
Snakebite (Geffen 1978) B
Trouble (United Artists 1978) NR
Love Hunter (United Artists 1979) B-
Ready An' Willing (Mirage/EMI 1980) A-
Live In The Heart Of The City (Mirage/Geffen 1980) B
Come And Get It (Mirage/Geffen 1981) B-
Saints And Sinners (Geffen 1982) B+
Slide It In (Geffen 1984) B+
Whitesnake (Geffen 1987) B
Slip Of The Tongue (Geffen 1989) C-
Whitesnake's Greatest Hits (Geffen 1992) C
Good To Be Bad (SPV 2008) B+
Forevermore (Frontiers 2011) C+
So begins the story of Whitesnake, a band led by David Coverdale after Deep Purple Mk 3 lineup ended. Coverdale was always foreshadowed by Ian Gillan when he took over in 1974, in fact DC had to share vocals with Glenn Hughes, who could hit the Gillan high notes. For their benefit however, they did make a classic album in Burn, which spurned two hits and the spotty Stormbringer before Richie Blackmore had a hussy fit and took his guitar home to be replaced by doomed Sioux City native Tommy Bolin for the underrated Come Taste The Band. Expectations was so high that Bolin eventually ODed in late 1976 and Deep Purple closed the book (for the time being). The contractual Made In Europe was offered and David formed Whitesnake.
The Whitesnake of that era actually mirrored the bluesy swagger of the MK 3 Purple lineup although the first two albums were kind of a feeling out period. Snakebite was actually half Whitesnake/half Coverdale solo album and like a snake wondered all over the place while Coverdale was looking for a style. It did lead a minor hit with Come On in the UK and is a Whitesnake staple to this day. United Artists Records signed Whitesnake and released two albums Trouble and Love Hunter, the latter with a racy cover art. Nevertheless, while the music was shaped up by two great guitarists in their own way Micky Moody and the underrated Bernie Marsden, the band was bogged down by a drummer Duck Dowle, who may have been a good drummer but the albums he played on proved that he was holding the band down. Out of all the reissues that Geffen put out, Trouble and Love Hunter went by the wayside and nobody in the US bothered to even issued their best album Ready n Willing from 1980 on CD.
Which in 1980, things changed for the better for Coverdale. Jon Lord joined up on Love Hunter and Ian Paice followed on Willing, thus shaped up that Whitesnake had three Deep Purple bandmates in the band. Atlantic signed them up, and then stuck them on Mirage Records but still Whitesnake got a big top ten hit with Fool For Your Loving which sounded like the second coming of Burn. For the next three years, this lineup of Coverdale, Marsden, Moody, Lord, Neil Murry and Paice would be consider the best lineup up till Saints N Sinners to which Marsden left and was replaced by Mel Gallery from Trapeze. Ian Paice would leave to join up with Gary Moore and later a reformed Deep Purple to which still plays today.
In 1984 Coverdale took the band more into a heavier rock feel with Slide It In, to which Cozy Powell sits on drums and Moody was replaced by John Sykes of Thin Lizzy fame. This is where Whitesnake begins their hairmetal period and the wheels begin go fall off. In no way is Slide It In a bad album it actually rocks hard. Soon Jon Lord would exit and rejoined Paice in the MK2 lineup of Deep Purple and Don Airey replaced him in the band for the next offering to which would propel Whitesnake into greater heights and loss of identity
.
Cryin In The Rain, was a more bluesbased rocker on Saints n Sinners, but on the S/T album, it bares out of the speakers like a runaway train. At this point Gallery left and John Sykes was the sole guitar player and he changed the sound of the band with outrageous whammy bar and Van Halen like HM cliche riffs abound. Second track Bad Boys was led by some of the most powerful drumming in heavy metal history. Ansyley Dunbar may have been a hired hand at best, he didn't tour with them when they came through town with Motley Crue, but his drumming on the first two tracks was the most wildest he's ever done. But Whitesnake had two major hits with the Led Zep like In The Still Of The Night and hairmetal ballads Here I Go Again and Is This Love. This Whitesnake was night from the daytime sounds of Ready N Willing but with fame came a bad case of sellout.
The band went through a big change with Adrian Vandenburg and Steve Vai joining up to replace John Sykes, Rudy Sarzo replaced Murry on Bass and Tommy Aldrich was the masterbeater on the forgetful Slip Of The Tongue to which Whitesnake became a bad punchline to the joke, a bad parody of itself. And while Coverdale kept the band going, he lost the love interest of his videos, the odious Tawny Katien and most of the guys left on. So what's to do when the hairmetal which was so vital, like a dinosaur made extinct by the grunge movement and all your videos being laughed at by Bevis and Butthead?
One could join the hairmetal touring troupe and make a living playing the same old hits like Poison or Vince Neal or Britney Fox, or you can start from scratch and recruit new people and get back to a form of rock and roll you can play and believe in. With Born To Be Bad, the new Whitesnake are relative unknowns but have a better understanding on how to make a listenable record. Doug Aldrich is the cowriter and lead guitarist and doesn't have to rely on the whammy bar as much as Sykes did when Sykes played in the band. Reb Beach is the other guitarist, Uriah Duffy is the bass player, Chris Frazier is the drummer and the keyboardist Tim Drury, who is the most Jon Lord like sounding since Lord was in the band. And for the first time since at least Slide It In, Whitesnake returns to a compromise of sound, yes there's the hairmetal guitars but not as Over The Top, and yes that is the sound of a hammond organ in the background or something to that effect. Coverdale is not going to wow people with his lyrical content anytime soon, but at least he sounds like he's having a lot more fun with the songs than he ever did on the classic S/T album. What makes Born To Be Bad a fun listen that it sounds like it came from 1987 and would have been the followup to Slide It In had some Geffen executive told them to up on the Whammy leads. Some of the songs do borrow a lot from other songs, All I Need sounds like a Still Of The Night rewrite but again the guys sound like they're having fun. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the ballads sound like true ballads and not of the Over The Top meatheadness and perhaps Summer Rain might be the best Whitesnake ballad ever. It definably has more roots in Ready N Willing then Slip Of The Tongue.
Even the bonus live cd has a bit of surprises there. They lead off with Burn with a snippet of Stormbringer thrown in for good measure and they visit forgotten classics like Living In The Shadow Of The Blues, Ready N Willing and Don't Break My Heart Again. And though there's no Vai or Vanderburg or Alldrich around, the Baby Whitesnakes play more as a band than the superstars of the past and even the crowd gets into the singalongs as well as they did twenty years ago.
But don't look for this album to crack the top ten charts here. They're not on Geffen anymore but rather on the SPV label, which is the European answer to CMC International, a home for old bands. Which is a good thing actually. Which means that Whitesnake doesn't have to answer to the Geffen/Universal pricks anymore, that Coverdale and company can continue to focus on the music and delivered it to the fans. The US public can be fickle but the HM fans across the ponds never forget their bands of yore and Whitesnake does sell them out on the summer festivals abroad. What Born To Be Bad reminds us is that a good album can take you back twenty years, before cell phones and CDs, before the internet that we all lived for the new music and that when bands made good albums we came back for the followup regardless.
That's the fun of Whitesnake. The reminder that it's all right to still love rock and roll, to still roll down your window at age 47 and scream with the best of them and to live for rock and roll and for the moment. The freaks on the street with their baggy pants and crappy rap don't know but the ones that like to rock will understand.
And that's all right.
PS: Since this article, Whitesnake moved from the bankrupt SPV Steamhammer label to Frontiers for the loud and in your face Forevermore and Brian Techy replaces Chris Frazier on drums. While good, the album does tend to plod a bit more longer than Born To Be Bad. Somehow Wal Mart had this CD on sale. If you're familiar with Whitesnake's metal, this would fit in your collection. I don't play mine much though.
Doug Alldrich remains perhaps the best guitar player and compatible writer that David Coverdale has had since the days of John Sykes although I still prefer the one two attack of Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody. But the Deep Purple soundalike Whitesnake is long ago and far away. David Coverdale continues the lead Whitesnake deep into the 21st Century and even one time drummer Tommy Aldridge has return behind the drummer's throne replacing Brian Tichey. Hard to believe that 25 years ago Whitesnake was on top of the hard rock road and Tawny Katilen used to be good looking too.
Ah youth!
Albums:
Snakebite (Geffen 1978) B
Trouble (United Artists 1978) NR
Love Hunter (United Artists 1979) B-
Ready An' Willing (Mirage/EMI 1980) A-
Live In The Heart Of The City (Mirage/Geffen 1980) B
Come And Get It (Mirage/Geffen 1981) B-
Saints And Sinners (Geffen 1982) B+
Slide It In (Geffen 1984) B+
Whitesnake (Geffen 1987) B
Slip Of The Tongue (Geffen 1989) C-
Whitesnake's Greatest Hits (Geffen 1992) C
Good To Be Bad (SPV 2008) B+
Forevermore (Frontiers 2011) C+
Sunday, February 3, 2013
The Day The Music Died
Plane crashes are somewhat rare and unusual until somebody you know or loved dies from them. In the music world we seem to know what we were doing when it happens. 1964 Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas became one for the ages, 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd lost Ronnie Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines became angels and 1990 Stevie Ray Vaughan took the helicopter out to the promised land. But in 1959 the most historic one was the Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and JP Richardson the Big Bopper who crashed into a barren Iowa cornfield after playing one of the most memorable concerts in rock history at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. The weather of 59 in Iowa was the usual, crappy, cold and plenty of arctic cold fronts and Alberta Clippers that is the norm of Iowa winters and sad to know that the inexperienced and perhaps starstuck Roger Peterson ended up meeting one of those blinding Clippers that would take him and the three stars into the music heavens. And that Dion, who couldn't afford the plane rental and Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings would survive and carve out their own music careers as well as Frankie Sarzo a foot note to it all. Dion becoming a teen idol of sorts then becoming a folk singer and born again Gospel singer before returning back to a folk blues sound that he's been doing most of his 70 years of being here. Tommy Allsup becoming a producer and you knew what happened to Waylon, a country outlaw but forever haunted by the plane crash till his untimely death in 2002.
Out of the three, Buddy Holly was the innovator and pioneer what I consider guitar garage rock although by the time the original Crickets left Buddy was coming closer to pop music with the posthumous It Don't Matter Anymore and True Love Ways but in the meantime recorded a bunch of recordings for future use. It Don't Matter Anymore written by Paul Anka and having the arrangements of Dick Jacobs for that 50's type of sound may not been what Buddy intended but perhaps more so with Learning The Game a very sad and dark type of love song. There are no shortages of Buddy Holly greatest hits out there, MCA original 6 record Complete Buddy Holly (1979) captures just about everything that Buddy recorded whereas the now deleted Hip O Select Not Fade Away adds more songs. Steve Hoffman's remastered 1987 From The Original Masters updates the sound to CD standards and it still remains the best sounding best of and cheap too. The Complete Buddy Holly is probably too broad for those who just want the hits, so you're better off with GOLD and Down The Line-The Rarities In his lifetime Buddy recorded two albums proper, The Chirping Crickets and the S/T Buddy Holly albums. The Great Buddy Holly released after his passing is a collection of his Decca output which didn't sell and was closer to country/rockabilly but still has its charms. The Chirping Crickets and Buddy Holly are essential 50's albums.
As great as Buddy was, Richie Valens had the most potential to make it even big or at least be a bigger Latino rocker even Los Lobos cite him as a influence. At age 17, Valens had two top ten hits with La Bamba and Donna but since he was just starting out, he really didn't have much music out there. Jasmine has The Complete Richie Valens, and Wounded Bird reissued Richie Valens and Richie, perhaps the best overview is Rockin All Night-The Very Best Of Richie Valens which includes the cream of Richie's songs. In Concert At Pacoima Jr High and The Richie Valens Story is Del Fi's scrapings of the bottom of a small barrel. The live recording poor sounding and even Richie sounds ragged on this brief EP. Better to stick with the Very Best Of Richie Valens.
JP Richardson or The Big Bopper as he was better known was one of the best novelty songwriters of the 50s with White Lightning and Running Bear, both hits for George Jones and Johnny Preston but he had some hits of his own for Mercury with Chantilly Lace and the hilarious Big Bopper's Wedding. Like Valens, Big Bopper's albums are few, Hellooooo Baby the only one I can think of that came out. Rhino did collect a few more for the more definitive Hello Baby, Best Of The Big Bopper (1990) and adds the Purple People Eater meets The Witch Doctor. For the most part Richardson didn't vary his beats all that often, most use the same as Chantilly Lace but still Richardson's sense of humor makes it a must hear.
On the other side of the pond, the UK seems to cherish the memories of the The Big 3. A interesting artifact is Recall's The 50th Anniversary Last Performance to which Jay Richardson, JP's son compiles what would have been the set list of the acts performing there including Dion and Frankie Sardo. The plane crash drawing is creepy though.
The plane crash didn't kill rock and roll but set it back a couple years but the influences of all artists, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Bopper would influence The Beatles, The Searchers, Bobby Fuller and many many more for years to come.
Rating:
Buddy Holly:
The Chirping Crickets (Brunswick 1958) A
Buddy Holly (Coral 1958) A
The Great Buddy Holly (Decca 1960) B
For The First Time Anywhere (MCA 1988) B+
From The Original Masters (MCA 1987) A
Buddy Holly: GOLD (Geffen 2005) A-
Down The Line:The Rarities (Geffen 2008) A-
Richie Valens:
Down The Road: The Very Best Of Richie Valens (Del Fi 1995) A-
Richie Valens (Wounded Bird 2006) B
Richie (Wounded Bird 2006) B
Live At Palmona Junior High (Del Fi/Wounded Bird 2006) C+
The Richie Valens Story (Del Fi-Rhino) C+
The Very Best Of Richie Valens (Rhino) A-
The Big Bopper
Chantilly Lace (Mercury 1958) B+
Hello Baby-The Very Best Of The Big Bopper (Rhino 1990) A-
Other:
The Day The Music Died (101 Distribution) NR
The 50th Anniversary Last Performance-Surf Ballroom Feb 2, 1959 (Recall 2009) NR
American Pie/Don McLean (United Artists 1971) Draw your own conclusion.
Out of the three, Buddy Holly was the innovator and pioneer what I consider guitar garage rock although by the time the original Crickets left Buddy was coming closer to pop music with the posthumous It Don't Matter Anymore and True Love Ways but in the meantime recorded a bunch of recordings for future use. It Don't Matter Anymore written by Paul Anka and having the arrangements of Dick Jacobs for that 50's type of sound may not been what Buddy intended but perhaps more so with Learning The Game a very sad and dark type of love song. There are no shortages of Buddy Holly greatest hits out there, MCA original 6 record Complete Buddy Holly (1979) captures just about everything that Buddy recorded whereas the now deleted Hip O Select Not Fade Away adds more songs. Steve Hoffman's remastered 1987 From The Original Masters updates the sound to CD standards and it still remains the best sounding best of and cheap too. The Complete Buddy Holly is probably too broad for those who just want the hits, so you're better off with GOLD and Down The Line-The Rarities In his lifetime Buddy recorded two albums proper, The Chirping Crickets and the S/T Buddy Holly albums. The Great Buddy Holly released after his passing is a collection of his Decca output which didn't sell and was closer to country/rockabilly but still has its charms. The Chirping Crickets and Buddy Holly are essential 50's albums.
As great as Buddy was, Richie Valens had the most potential to make it even big or at least be a bigger Latino rocker even Los Lobos cite him as a influence. At age 17, Valens had two top ten hits with La Bamba and Donna but since he was just starting out, he really didn't have much music out there. Jasmine has The Complete Richie Valens, and Wounded Bird reissued Richie Valens and Richie, perhaps the best overview is Rockin All Night-The Very Best Of Richie Valens which includes the cream of Richie's songs. In Concert At Pacoima Jr High and The Richie Valens Story is Del Fi's scrapings of the bottom of a small barrel. The live recording poor sounding and even Richie sounds ragged on this brief EP. Better to stick with the Very Best Of Richie Valens.
JP Richardson or The Big Bopper as he was better known was one of the best novelty songwriters of the 50s with White Lightning and Running Bear, both hits for George Jones and Johnny Preston but he had some hits of his own for Mercury with Chantilly Lace and the hilarious Big Bopper's Wedding. Like Valens, Big Bopper's albums are few, Hellooooo Baby the only one I can think of that came out. Rhino did collect a few more for the more definitive Hello Baby, Best Of The Big Bopper (1990) and adds the Purple People Eater meets The Witch Doctor. For the most part Richardson didn't vary his beats all that often, most use the same as Chantilly Lace but still Richardson's sense of humor makes it a must hear.
On the other side of the pond, the UK seems to cherish the memories of the The Big 3. A interesting artifact is Recall's The 50th Anniversary Last Performance to which Jay Richardson, JP's son compiles what would have been the set list of the acts performing there including Dion and Frankie Sardo. The plane crash drawing is creepy though.
The plane crash didn't kill rock and roll but set it back a couple years but the influences of all artists, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Bopper would influence The Beatles, The Searchers, Bobby Fuller and many many more for years to come.
Rating:
Buddy Holly:
The Chirping Crickets (Brunswick 1958) A
Buddy Holly (Coral 1958) A
The Great Buddy Holly (Decca 1960) B
For The First Time Anywhere (MCA 1988) B+
From The Original Masters (MCA 1987) A
Buddy Holly: GOLD (Geffen 2005) A-
Down The Line:The Rarities (Geffen 2008) A-
Richie Valens:
Down The Road: The Very Best Of Richie Valens (Del Fi 1995) A-
Richie Valens (Wounded Bird 2006) B
Richie (Wounded Bird 2006) B
Live At Palmona Junior High (Del Fi/Wounded Bird 2006) C+
The Richie Valens Story (Del Fi-Rhino) C+
The Very Best Of Richie Valens (Rhino) A-
The Big Bopper
Chantilly Lace (Mercury 1958) B+
Hello Baby-The Very Best Of The Big Bopper (Rhino 1990) A-
Other:
The Day The Music Died (101 Distribution) NR
The 50th Anniversary Last Performance-Surf Ballroom Feb 2, 1959 (Recall 2009) NR
American Pie/Don McLean (United Artists 1971) Draw your own conclusion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
