There’s Brian and his Beach Boys, most obviously. Then there were Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young, those Eagles, and my own personal favorite Turtles, Byrds, Mothers of Invention and possibly even Runaways. Not to mention Lindsey Buckingham’s Big Mac.
Bob Dylan duly dumped about another thirty-seven (at last count) albums in our laps last year, while on much the other hand the vast majority of my aural Good Times! during oh-16 came courtesy of Micky, Peter, Michael and Davy. Nevertheless, there still remained room on the Pig Player for the following splendid, purely alphabetically-listed items as well …which you should all be playing too if you aren’t already:
Rolling Stone Magazine recently released their latest ‘list’, “The 100 Greatest Songwriters” rollingstone.com). Let me repeat that title, “The 100 Greatest Songwriters”. Their descriptive line states “From Brill Building tunesmiths to Punk poets, from Woody Guthrie to Max Martin, the visionaries who defined music history.”
“He knew how to produce records very well. He had a very strong spirit for recording music. He was a great producer.”
When no less an authority on making records as Brian “No Pier Pressure” Wilson spoke those words, he was paying tribute not only to a dear friend and respected contemporary, but to a man whose contributions to the creation of American West Coast music is somehow seldom ever given their rightful place alongside the achievements of, say, Phil Spector or Wilson himself.
There was a time when Jesus was the only person who ever came back from the dead.
Oh sure, they kill off Superheroes all the time now, and they come back too, but Jesus…Jesus was Numero Uno.
So, what project in your life has taken you the longest to complete? Has anything you’ve really wanted to do ever taken you 18 years? Most likely not, but that’s how long it took director Denny Tedesco to complete his documentary on a small group of musicians in Los Angeles who, from the late 1950’s through to the 1970’s, supplied the rhythm section (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion, saxophone) for hundreds, if not thousands of hit records.
There were at least eleven of us sitting around the restaurant table. It was an impromptu dinner, decided upon on a whim. No vote, no forethought, just a bunch of like-minded people who found themselves together and decided they were hungry.
Bullseye Records of Canada
