For music fans who are also big concert aficionados, many of us are fortunate to have at least a small handful of shows that we saw that were really special ones. I’d love to hear about some of yours.

Certainly, one of those for me was the time that I saw Foo Fighters play an hour-long set inside a record store on Record Store Day in Niles, Ohio, a stone’s throw from where Dave Grohl himself had been born in Warren.

But the other one that comes up in my memory a lot is probably the most unique concert I’ve ever seen. It’s the time that the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies played a neighborhood in the suburbs here in Cleveland.

The Wheelies hail from Nashville and play a charismatic blend of blues-rock that rose and fell and always took you on some kind of journey. If it felt like a religious experience at times, that makes sense, because frontman Mike Farris eventually went solo and took what he described to be more of a “spiritual journey” with his work outside of the band. During their initial run in the ‘90s though, they toured heavily playing on a variety of different bills, including the H.O.R.D.E Festival in 1994 (which opened here in Cleveland in a particularly legendary way).

Their 1993 self-titled debut had been recorded at Ardent Studios and they got a solid amount of radio play with “Shakin’ the Blues.” 1996’s Magnolia album (their second record) was the one that really put them on my radar, thanks to the title track.

Though the first two albums (including Magnolia) had been released by Atlantic, they moved over to the reactivated Capricorn Records in 1997 and the label re-released the Magnolia album, so they were giving that record a second push.

Someone in our midst had the idea that we could do a big giveaway at WMMS. One lucky radio listener would win the Ultimate Garage contest and as the name suggests, would get a makeover of their garage, with all kinds of things to tune up their outdoor holdings (a lawnmower is one of the things that I remember being part of the items).

It was a pretty substantial stack of prizes, but the center of it all was the opportunity to have Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies play a concert in the garage. I don’t remember a ton about the person who won the contest, which is actually a really good thing, nearly 30 years later. As anyone working in radio will tell you, there’s a thing that can simply be called the “nightmare contest winner.” You remember those.

This particular winner was awesome, that’s all that matters. And they had a garage that was a good fit for having a touring rock band. My memory is that the Wheelies actually did play inside the garage itself. Regardless, it was a nice sized garage and driveway and the lawn that was next to the structure was open. There were no fences separating the houses. The whole space had a good community feel to it.

Certainly, as we know from recorded rock and roll history, bands have been playing in backyards for a long time (see Van Halen for one example). But for most of us, these tend to be high school bands (see my own high school band, the Intergalactic Transforming Cheeseburgers) or that “old guy band” you and your buddies have to play covers once a year at the big clambake.

For me in my mid 20s at that point, the idea of a touring rock band playing a local neighborhood sounded really cool, of course. But having worked at WMMS for a few years by then, it also sounded like a potential logistical nightmare. We had enough crazy situations to deal with on any given day, so we didn’t necessarily need another one.

Still, the music nerd in me couldn’t wait to see how this thing was going to turn out. So I showed up along with other staffers from the radio station. I believe the winner lived somewhere in Parma (a name that fans of the Drew Carey Show will recall). The Wheelies showed up and they didn’t just bring acoustic instruments to do a half-hearted traditional brief unplugged set, they brought amps, electric guitars and a full drum kit. This was going to be a real show.

After they got all of their gear set up, they began to soundcheck all of the instruments and equipment by playing through bits of songs and it was loud. It was so loud that in no amount of time, the police showed up to investigate the noise disturbance. The concert could have been over before it ever began. But these cops were cool and agreed to give us a window of time for the band to play and they’d turn a blind eye to it all

What followed was a true rock and roll miracle. The band began their set and played for at least an hour, though I remember it being closer to 90 minutes. The nice thing about what the Wheelies did was that they played a style of music that you didn’t have to know any of the songs to enjoy them. They were the type of band that if you happened to be walking by the local bar or outdoors at a area festival and heard them playing, chances were that you were going to stop off for a few and check them out.

That’s exactly what happened on this particular afternoon in that neighborhood. They wove together a set that was a musical finger, beckoning all within earshot to come over. What had begun as a small audience of family and friends (plus the record label and radio folks) grew progressively to include various neighbors who filtered in. Eventually, there were even a handful of senior citizens who were out there dancing away. It was one of those days that really demonstrated the power of music and how it can bring a lot of different people together.

You can get an idea what that day was like, at least musically, watching this short set which was captured around that same time in the New York City area.

(On a side note, if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, a buddy of mine has a bunch of his videos featuring a number other bands and artists recorded at the same venue and other area clubs archived here.)

The band later returned for a more traditional club gig at Peabody’s Down Under and I had the opportunity to see the guys on the afternoon of that show and they told me it was one of the most unusual gigs they’d ever played, but also, one of the most fun days they’d ever had playing music.

Their own timeline as a group was running short, as it would turn out, for a variety of reasons. But they’ve been back at it sporadically in recent years and played a July 2026 run of gigs in Nashville and New York celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Magnolia album.

They did two sets each night with the first one featuring a full performance of the record and the second offering up a different set each evening of favorites and deep cuts from the rest of the catalog (and even things like a fun cover of “The Wizard” by Black Sabbath). The Nashville shows were webcast by Volume.com and you can still see archived streams of two of the nights. The second show is probably where you want to jump in, since they had some livestream audio issues on the first night.

Of course, I wonder now where is that contest winner who also got to witness that Wheelies concert in the suburbs, at their house! Do they still live there? Do they have photos of the experience? While we lament everyone filming everything these days with their iPhone, this particular gig is one that I was had more documentation. Who knows, perhaps they’ll see these words and offer an update. A rock and roll fan can dream, right?

Featured image: Not from that particular show here in the Cleveland area, but a screen grab from the video I shared above that’s a good visual representation of the spirit and energy of the day.

I’m going to start with an article I wrote for Cleveland Scene about the legendary free concert that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played on August 9, 1978 to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of WMMS.

I had a lot of fun talking to different people from WMMS, plus folks like E Street Band members Little Steven and Max Weinberg, to get their memories of that time period.

I was fortunate to work at WMMS from 1995 until 2002, but I was a fan of the radio station before that. My family moved to Cleveland in 1989 and as the movers were unpacking the truck, one of them found out that I was a huge music fan and told me that I had to listen to WMMS. An important connection was made that day.

The WMMS I was listening to in the early ‘90s was one that was outside of its perceived glory years, but still a radio station focused on exposing people to new music or bands that they hadn’t heard. They did a ton of live concert broadcasts from the Empire Concert Club during the relatively short period of time it was open, in addition to bringing live music to the airwaves from other area venues as well.

Thanks to those live broadcasts, I heard future favorites like Sarah McLachlan, King’s X, Michael McDermott and the Gin Blossoms play full concerts, broadcast in incredible fidelity, moments that converted me to being a fan for life of each of those artists. They did low dough shows at other clubs as well like Dramarama on the Hi-Fi Sci-Fi tour in 1993 at Peabody’s Down Under with Slim Dunlap opening. Cue the scene of me buying every Dramarama CD I could get my hands on after that night. Eric Gales Band performing at the Draft House (soon to be the Odeon Concert Club) on the Pictures of a Thousand Faces tour was another favorite.

In short, I’d found a new outlet for music and even though I had dreams of working in radio, it didn’t seem possible that I could work at the legendary Buzzard. But dreams do come true. That’s perhaps a story for another day.

I will tell you this though. I hadn’t been in Cleveland very long before I had someone else who shared a very important detail with me. They told me that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had played a concert at the Cleveland Agora in 1978 and WMMS had broadcast the whole thing live.

Having grown up with a copy of Springsteen’s Live / 1975-1985 box set, I was a rabid fan, but I hadn’t yet started trading concert bootlegs or even looking for concert bootlegs. Hearing about this Springsteen Agora concert finally lit the fuse and sent me down a rabbit hole looking to get a copy.

I’d been buying copies of Goldmine magazine and one way or another, karma put a bootleg of the Springsteen Agora show in my path. It was called The Teenage Werewolf, issued by a “record label” called Silver Rarities on three CDS. I paid 70 dollars — an astronomical sum — to buy it via mail order from a record store in the Atlanta area. I’d already learned that it was an extremely limited pressing, so I was crushed when it showed up damaged, figurinng that my only chance at getting a copy had just evaporated.

But thankfully, the store had another copy (isn’t it funny how that works?) and I was soon listening to the holy grail and I quickly understood why the 1978 Agora concert had the mythical status that it does with Springsteen fans and music fans in general here in Cleveland.

(P.S. Teenage Werewolf is not the best sounding copy of the show…and it’s been released officially since then, but at that time, it was everything to get those CDs!)

I wrote this Scene article in August of 2018 as the legendary concert hit its 40th anniversary — and the station itself was turning 50. Enjoy!

(P.S. Also: If you haven’t heard this Agora show, you’ll need to remedy that as soon as possible and just know that I still have Kid Leo’s spoken introduction here memorized word for word…..)

As WMMS marks its 50th anniversary this year, there’s one event that looms particularly large in the station’s history. August 9, 1978, the legendary rock station celebrated its 10th anniversary with a concert featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who had become a cornerstone part of the station’s musical makeup in the preceding years. By all accounts, the Cleveland Agora was the place to be on that night — and thanks to a network broadcast coordinated by the station and Springsteen’s record label, Columbia Records, it was an event that would reach an audience much greater than the limited capacity of the club.

You can read Scene’s original review of the Springsteen Agora concert here.

“Kid Leo was pretty tight with the Springsteen folks. We wanted to have an act come and do our 10th anniversary show. We were pleasantly surprised and floored that Springsteen agreed to do it. So we booked the Agora,” former WMMS personality and music director Denny Sanders recalls now, during an interview with Scene. “We did tickets in a lottery. That was the only way to do it. I can’t tell you how many thousands of ticket requests we had. I don’t even remember. It was an amazing amount and it’s only less than a thousand people that can fit in the Agora. I don’t remember how we did it. I think we put them all in a big bag or something and just started picking things and made sure that if there was a duplicate, we would disqualify them and all of that. So that’s how we did the tickets, it was based on a lottery. When we were ready to go with the show, Columbia said, ‘This is really heavy, why don’t we make this available to other stations in other cities.’ They were owned by CBS in those days, so they had satellite channels available through CBS.”

The concert was broadcast on WMMS and seven other stations nationally in the United States. Fans were rolling tape, of course, and whether you were sitting by the stereo that night monitoring the recording or acquired a copy later through other channels, copies of the broadcast quickly became prized possessions that would be kept close, often remembered and discussed and occasionally upgraded across the decades that followed.

“It was one of the best….I think the critics usually say this was one of the best live performances that Springsteen ever did and you can hear it. As a matter of fact, it’s so good that it finally, after many bootlegs being out there — because it was on the air, anybody can just tape it off the air — it was finally released as a legal album,” Sanders says. “You can hear it. [His performance was] just pedal to the metal, fifth gear, overdrive, full throttle — and it was thrilling, to see a mature act like that, in a small club up close, performing full throttle. You almost never see that. The power of that performance was just tremendous.”

Former WMMS programmer John Gorman wrote in his book, The Buzzard, that drummer Max Weinberg called it the best show that the E Street Band ever did.

In a 2018 Scene interview with Weinberg, the drummer mentioned the Agora and Cleveland several times. “You know, particularly when you go to a place like Cleveland, which brings back memories of Swingos and the shows we did at the Agora and at Richfield Coliseum, I can tell you this — we knew when we rolled through Cleveland back in the ‘70s, we were going to have a good time — and we did,” he recalled with a laugh.

While he stopped short of copping to making the statement about it being the best show that they ever did, Weinberg made it clear that Cleveland holds a special place in their legacy.

“Cleveland was always great. Because there were certain cities — and there weren’t that many of them, where Bruce and the E Street Band went over really big. You know, you were working it. This was back in the ‘70s and we were traveling by cars and buses. Not even buses, vans, then [a] mobile home and then a bus. And not like a fancy bus, like the kind of bus that you get on to go from Freehold to New York. Cleveland was always one of those places where….I mean, you’re cranking out these shows and every one is individual. But you know when you get to Cleveland or in our case, Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, the audiences, they were already dedicated fans. Cleveland was one of those places.”

As Weinberg references, Springsteen had begun to build up specific pockets of dedicated fans in certain markets and Cleveland was no exception. Springsteen would acknowledge them during his Agora performance, shouting out “Cleveland Boys, a little party noise!” prior to his performance of “Sherry Darling,” one of several then-unreleased tracks that he included in the setlist that night.. In a 2014 article, John Soeder wrote that the guys even made an unexpected cameo during “Jungleland,” with Jim Kluter, one of the “Boys,” detailing that their association with Springsteen had come about as a result of a benefit softball game that they had played with The Boss during a 1976 visit to Asbury Park. Going forward, the New Jersey musician would always make sure that his Cleveland pals were covered with ticket access. Reflecting back on the Agora gig, the Cleveland Boys were present and accounted for in Weinberg’s recollections.

“There was a group of guys, I don’t remembered their names individually, but they were known as the Cleveland Boys. It was like having the Dallas Cheerleaders,” he laughs. “They were so enthusiastic. You know, these are the days where it wasn’t as organized security-wise and stuff like that as it is now. So you really got to know the fans and they were right up close in your face. We weren’t even staying in the hotels for most of those days, we were just driving right to the next city. The Agora was incredible, because it was one of the [early] shows we did after we finished the Darkness on the Edge of Town album and it was really hot and it wasn’t a very big place. It was packed. Kid Leo was broadcasting and you know, it was just one of those nights. It’s taken on a bit of a mythical quality, but it was to us that night, the band just really was hot. We had just started playing those songs and you know, 40 years ago, I was 27 years old. So that’s very memorable. You know, playing in and around the Cleveland area, all of the colleges that we played. It brings back those days very clearly into focus, where we were a struggling young rock and roll band, who had each other for company. Bruce, of course, is our fearless leader. You never knew what was going to happen, really. Musically or even career-wise, because it was very up in the air.”

“Cleveland was a major, major city for us. Made even more important by crazy Kid Leo playing the Jukes’ demos, which this crazy friend of ours, Steve Popovich, who had leaked the demos to Leo before we even made the album,” E Street guitarist Little Steven recalled during a 2017 conversation with Scene. “They’re playing demos [on WMMS] — that’s gotta be unique in the entire history of radio, I’m sure! But it was one of those things that you know, the Agora, Hank LoConti and then later the Belkins and Swingos, the crazy hotel. You know, there was a lot of personality going on there. This was before Cleveland got rebuilt with the [new] Stadium and everything. So this is in the days when the river caught fire. [Laughs] You know, those crazy days! When you have a city like that that is kind of going through tough times, sometimes it brings out a lot of personality and also a freedom, I think. Because there was nothing really to lose! Kid Leo had complete freedom, which the minute he stopped having complete freedom, he quit, until I brought him back on SiriusXM where he had complete freedom again. But it was a very important part of our history with Bruce and Southside and myself. We just love going to Cleveland and I’ve got nothing but good memories from those crazy rooms at Swingos Hotel — every one of which was a different theme!”

During a separate 2017 interview with Scene, Gorman pointed out that it was Popovich, legendary record man, well-known for his own label, Cleveland International Records, that provided the springboard to success for Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album, who would also step in on Cleveland’s behalf to lobby with Columbia Records to make sure that Springsteen would wind up at the Agora that night. Because according to Gorman, there were other plans afoot at the label.

“Originally the label, before Steve Popovich intervened and we [WMMS] complained very loudly, the show was either going to be in Detroit or Chicago because those are the two larger markets,” Gorman recalls. “They were not looking at Cleveland, but it was a case of — we fought over it and we used the same line we used for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: if it’s in another city it’s just another concert, if it’s in Cleveland it is the concert.”

In his book, Gorman further details the events that led up to the eventual night, noting that Springsteen showed up in town a day early to hang out with the Cleveland Boys. Reportedly, E Street saxophonist Clarence Clemons had his radio stolen from his room at Swingos prior to the show and naturally, he wasn’t pleased. Springsteen’s reference to Clarence and his need for a new radio during a sprawling performance of “Growin’ Up” lends a lot of credibility to the story. During the song, Bruce also details a visit to God — a trip where he also encountered Kid Leo, who was “prayin’ for more watts” for WMMS. And related to that last bit, Leo was blown away by the mid-song namecheck by Springsteen.

“I never saw Leo cry. But that’s probably the closest he ever came,” Gorman told Soeder. “I was standing with him when Springsteen said that. Leo was in shock.”

Leo himself, a longtime supporter of Springsteen and his music, provided the memorable introduction for that evening’s concert, taking on the persona of a boxing announcer. “Round for round, pound for pound, there ain’t no finer band around. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!” The boxing theme carried forward as the band started their second set that night, with Springsteen offering up a spirited cry of “Alright, round two!” as Weinberg hit a cymbal in a fashion that sounded just like a boxing bell ringing in the next chapter of action, with Springsteen adding, “In this corner, weighing 260 pounds, the master of disaster, The Big Man, Clarence Clemons!,” introducing the instrumental “Paradise By The C,” a spotlight moment for Clemons, which ushered in the second set.

But first, on the heels of Leo’s introduction at the beginning of the show, Springsteen and the band strolled onstage, with Bruce ribbing the WMMS DJ, “Leo, he must have memorized that at home. I know you did! Cleveland, how ya doin’? Are you ready to shake them summertime blues?” as Weinberg’s drums came thundering in. “Well, I’m a gonna raise a fuss/ I’m a gonna raise a holler,” Springsteen sang, he and the band digging into a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” to launch the evening, which would span two sets and more than 20 songs, running nearly three hours in total length.

Listening to the recent official release of Springsteen’s July 7, 1978 concert at the Roxy in West Hollywood, California, it’s not hard to hear why the Agora concert is held in such high regard. Springsteen did a handful of now-legendary radio broadcasts in key markets in 1978 during the Darkness on the Edge of Town, and unlike some other artists and bands that might have kept a static setlist throughout the entire tour, there are song variations with each of the ‘78 gigs that give them individual and important charm. During the band’s performance of “Spirit In The Night” at the Roxy date, they slightly flub the intro, a moment which Springsteen handles with good humor, having them restart the song to get it right. And that’s what sticks out about the WMMS Agora broadcast — it was a night in which top to bottom, they got it all right. The songs, the stories, the ad-libs and the spirit of the night (really, that wasn’t an intentional Springsteen pun) that’s captured in the recording, all generate an emotional feeling that 40 years later, will still remind you of that moment that you first became a Springsteen fan. Wherever you were, whatever you might have been listening to, the feeling of that first moment is all compiled and bottled in the Agora recording, which was finally released for official consumption (read: purchase) in 2014 by Springsteen via his series of authorized archival concert releases, available on CD and download. Fans didn’t have to wait long for Springsteen to put it out, once he launched the initiative — it arrived five weeks later as the second entry in the series. Rolling Stone quickly heaped a lot of praise on the Agora release. “This is simply the greatest live LP this greatest of live rockers has ever officially released,” Rob Sheffield wrote in early 2015.

With the recollections of both WMMS personnel and the fans who were at the show that night, we can only imagine what it must have been like to be there in person. But thanks to WMMS, one of the most important nights in Springsteen’s career is forever preserved.

I’ve also had thousands of words drafted up, written in the Saturday space before the day gets going and right as I get close to having something that feels finished, the day begins and things move on. (Something, which I’m sure many of you have experienced!)

Anyway, I hope your summer has been a good one. I was out to pick up a bit of breakfast and put some gas in the car for an upcoming adventure and as I opened up Apple Music, the home screen reminded me that there’s new music I hadn’t gotten a chance to listen to.

I knew he’d announced a new album with the Chrome Hearts, due out September 18 (featuring five new songs, plus two tracks he’s revisited from the ‘60s), but hadn’t had a chance to listen to the single. My ears and eyes perked when I saw “Second Song EP” on my Apple Music. A chance to get more of a preview of the upcoming album (which, like the first single, is called Second Song) beyond just one single! Things dimmed when I saw it was just one song and I almost moved on.

But then I saw that one song is 11 minutes in length.

Friends, it’s 11 minutes that is well worth your time if you’re a fellow Neil Young fan. I’ll be (not the) first to admit that it’s challenging to keep up with Neil these days…and he’s 80! God bless these levels of productivity from our favorite cantankerous musical crank!

As we’ve witnessed, the music industry delivery system has finally caught up with Neil Young, which means that he’s been able to release albums when he wants to — something he’s doing fairly often. He’s also been able to dig back in the apparently endless backlog of his archives. Decades of work. So we’re constantly (it seems) getting previously unavailable albums, some of which we knew about, some of which we had no idea about. There’s also been Neil revisiting some of the albums we know well to frame them in a new light.

It’s all been a lot and I haven’t heard all of it, but more than occasionally, I hear a good amount of it. Of the archival stuff, I was particularly happy that he reissued Mirror Ball, his collaboration with Pearl Jam. I winced when I learned he had remixed some of the tracks. But I acquired the box set anyway (which paired Mirror Ball with several of his other albums from what was a strong period of work, Sleeps With Angels and so on).

Neil knows best, as it turns out. The material he chose to remix (I was curious why he didn’t do the whole record) fit seamlessly with the rest of the recordings as I’d known them. I’d had a chance in recent years to spend some time talking with Pearl Jam’s longtime audio guy, Bret Eliason and in that moment, got a bit of memories out of him regarding the experience of working on Mirror Ball, so the record was fresh on my mind when it came back around and it was a real joy (still is!) to hear it again.

According to his ongoing dispatches on his Archive website, he’s got a partial live album that he’s planning to put out (sometime soon-ish?) from the short amount of touring he did with Pearl Jam. I’m bummed that it doesn’t seem to be a full show, but happy that we’ll get something official from that period and I hold out hope that perhaps we’ll get something similar from his time playing shows with Booker T. and the MG’s.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that it’s a true joy that we have such an unfiltered view of Neil’s Ongoing Musical Thoughts at this point, both past and present. He’s finally got a way to share everything that he wants to share with us, whether it’s old or new. It’s a nice problem for us to have that it’s happening in an overwhelming fashion……in the end, it will give us a nice backlog to catch up on, if we choose that musical adventure.

“Second Song” is the name of the first offering from Neil’s upcoming set with the Chrome Hearts and on the one hand, it can feel like Neil is standing at the copying machine, pumping out similar reproductions of his past work. But the other view is that it’s pretty astounding that Neil continues to make music at this level. We can all rattle off a list of artists who we continued to buy the albums long after they became a shell of what they once were.

This is not that. “Second Song” is Neil Young continuing to meet you musically where you’re living in the same moment, inside your heart. How he finds his way in there? It remains a mystery. But I’m awfully glad that he’s still got the key to walk in and hit us with lines like this one…

The world needs all her song birds
She needs her music in the sky
Guiding souls both in and out
Showing weakness how to fly

Come ON. Who else is going to give us stuff like that besides Neil Young? No notes, sir. No notes.

Credit to who was in the midst of an interview when her subjects happened to mention being in attendance for that day’s ZZ Top happening (you’ll be able to read the unrelated story she’s working on at a later point!). She did some quick checking and discovered there was very little online. But as is her way, she found a few things, sent them to me and ordered me to get to work and talk to some people.

Maybe she didn’t say it exactly like that, but we both agreed it was a project that deserved a deep dive. She suggested I’d want to talk to Doug Herzog, who was at MTV and Viacom at that time. I reached out to Bob Merlis, the promo legend who worked at Warner Brothers for years and still works with Billy Gibbons and ZZ Top to this day.

He also said I should talk to Doug. I ended up on the phone with Doug and subsequently, Bob. The conversation with Bob led me to speak with Eddie Gorodetsky (seriously, just click that link and see everything that Eddie’s been involved with over the years).

Random Facebook posts connected me to Eric Hull and John “Red” Bartlett, who had both been in and around the area at the time. Eric let me know that Mark Goodman was one of the MTV folks who was around that day and suggested I’d want to connect with Mark.

In short, it was one of those really fun rabbit hole experiences, digging in to find stories about the day that ZZ Top performed on MTV’s Liberty or Death Party Barge.

If you read the story and feel like I got into the weeds, you’re not wrong. But just know that I could have gone even further into the weeds. The history of the ships that were involved (the M/V Block Island, which was retired later that same year, was the main vessel) and the area is all very fascinating. Eric and John shared a lot of detail regarding their experiences and I’ll share some of that here with you now.

John worked for Interstate Navigation, the company operated by the Wronowski family, who owned the M/V Block Island. He filled in an important detail, noting that a 300kw generator had been brought on board to help “fulfill the band’s electrical requirements.”

(L-R John “Red” Bartlett Jr. with John H. Wronowski and “Big John” Bartlett Sr.)

I didn’t work on that particular boat, but it was a boat from our fleet. I was aware of some of the preparations since we were all in the same company. I had several friends/coworkers that did sail on that vessel, but I lost contact with them years ago and know that at least 3 have since passed away.

As I understand it, MTV charactered the M/V Block Island to be a floating stage in NY Harbor for ZZ Top. The vessel was decorated and outfitted at the company’s dock in New London, CT. She sailed to NY with her crew and possibly others onboard still making preparations for the festivities. They dock on the west side of Manhattan in the Hudson River where they would embark and disembark passengers and the band for the show.

The M/V Block Island at her New London pier. That is where most of the preparations for the NY trip took place.

As I shared in my story for Ultimate Classic Rock, MTV was crashing the party, in a sense — something that they were quite good at. July 4, 1986 was the centennial year for the Statue of Liberty and the landmark had been closed to the public for remodeling since 1984. With the holiday, plans were unveiled for a massive four-day Liberty Weekend celebration to unveil the freshly restored Lady Liberty.

Eric Hull told me about that part of the day from his perspective. He was stationed on the neighboring Nelseco ferry, another ship in the fleet and also had interactions with ZZ Top that I included in my main story. Here’s more from Eric.

I was working as a deckhand on the boat. I was in college at the time, I was 20 years old, and they were having this big rededication ceremony. Just to get the invite to be part of it was amazing. So we ended up leaving Block Island, traveling up through the channel into New York, getting into the East River.

Seeing the [restoration of the] Statue of Liberty for the first time, the way it was, and seeing all the ships that were in the harbor at the time was really, really a special time for me at that point in my life. Seeing the John F. Kennedy up in the East River area for the ceremony with all the sailors on the deck, it was really just a magical time. To be part of that was a real special moment for me.

I had never really seen [the Statue of Liberty in person]. I’d seen pictures, of course. But just seeing it shining and being that beacon that we all reflect upon in terms of what makes America such a great place [was a real moment for me].

Then realizing what we were taking part in with the rededication ceremony and the recommitment to the principles that the statue represents [was special]. Hearing the different speakers talk about America and the hope, and the promise, just being a part of that was an unforgettable event.

Of course going alongside the JFK and seeing the soldiers all decked out in their uniforms, sitting on top of the deck, it just gave you an immense sense of pride to be an American.

Eric also shared some local color as far as the Block Island area itself.

Block Island is off the coast of Rhode Island and it is sort of a central area that that the vessels go through. So, our vessel, for example, came out of Providence. We'd go into Newport, then take people to Block Island. Others came from Point Judith, others came from New York, but it's sort of this small island off the coast of Rhode Island, that's really [best described as] a summer resort area.

Most of it's not well-populated. It's a very small annual population, but it just blossoms in the summertime. That ferry system shuttles people from the mainland to the island for the summer fun, including swimming and all of that sort of activity.

In a wild bit of coincidence, this is Eric you see with ZZ Top in one of the photos that I used for the story. I randomly wondered about that, as I was formatting it for upload and he emailed me to share that detail not long after the story went up.

This was not ZZ Top’s first 4th of July rodeo….

It’s not surprising that ZZ Top had been involved in other 4th of July celebrations in the past, including a bicentennial gig in 1976 at the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium in Memphis, where they (pun intended) topped a bill that also featured Blue Oyster Cult, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Outlaws.

(Boy, there were a lot of great shows that year celebrating the bicentennial!)

The concert happened in the midst of ZZ Top’s legendary Worldwide Texas tour, which is a trek that has always been fascinating to me. I’ve spoken with both Billy Gibbons and the late Dusty Hill about it. The bassist shared the following memories with me in 2019 as we were talking for UCR about their new documentary at the time, That Little Ol’ Band from Texas. There is some footage from the tour within the film, which was a real thrill to see…..so give it a watch, if you haven’t seen it! Here’s what he told me about the outing.

Man, I loved it. I had a great time. First of all, it started off, the germ of the idea, and it grew. We shouldn’t have really done that tour. We couldn’t afford it. We were going up north in places that we never had played. Never even played, never even opened for anybody else. We come into town with this giant circus, just expecting people to come. And they did! I had a lot of friends out there, a lot of the cowboys, the wranglers that wrangled the longhorn and the buffalo. You saw Ralph Fisher in there, the guy with the buzzard. Ralph’s still around. Frank was talking about his [in the film]. I had my own buzzard over on my side that tried to go for me all of the time. It was tethered down, thank goodness. They didn’t mention this in the documentary, but they’re tethered down, because you know, you don’t want those buzzards taking off in the big ol’ stadium.

But one of them came out and got untethered at one of the shows. Ralph, being the rodeo clown or the bullfighter or whatever you want to call him, had trained this buzzard to fly around the rodeo arena and land on his hat. And those things ain’t light -- they’re big, big birds. Anyway, thank God that happened, because this buzzard took off and it looked like part of the show! It looked like a great part of the show. We couldn’t put it in the show though, they wouldn’t let us get away with that. [Laughs] Buzzards are nasty! But anyway, it flew all around the stadium and people were [going crazy] and Ralph got up there and patted the top of his head and finally, he saw him and he landed there. He got a huge round of applause, plus, I didn’t want to let him do it again, because he got a bigger hand than we did. [Laughs] I’m joking. But it was fun. The buffalo took off one night, I mean, there’s a lot of stories.

I’ll go long on my own personal fan history with ZZ Top another time, but for now, I’ll leave you with a fun MTV performance from 1984 at the first Video Music Awards, which I mentioned briefly in my UCR story about ZZ Top’s 1986 4th of July gig for MTV. It’s a cool flashback to how huge the band was in that era.

My parents made a deal with me. I would buy my own car, pay for my own gas and they would pay for the insurance. Telling you that now, I question how well that deal worked out for them.

I was skittish initially about going on the interstate, which seemed a lot more high stakes compared to driving on city streets (and indeed it was). But once I got comfortable with the interstate, it became an important path to go to concerts (certainly, an big motivator) and I had additional ways to speed.

”Take it easy there, leadfoot,” the old saying goes and I’m sure I heard some variation of that from my friends and perhaps a different, yet still kind scolding from my dad. Whatever the speed limit was, it always seemed like it should be five or 10 miles per hour faster. I got speeding tickets. I came to realize that my parents’ insurance went up as a result of those speeding tickets.

Eventually (and with a period of years passing), I was old enough where I could get off of their insurance and get my own. But until that day arrived, they ate the consequences of that higher insurance price, letting me know that they weren’t happy about it. They weren’t hardcore enough to take away my car, but they probably should have.

You’re getting the somewhat short from me Cliff’s Notes version of the above, but I’ve shared that story with folks over the years as far as the car goes. While I didn’t necessarily appreciate it at the time, I came to appreciate that they made that deal with me and had me purchase my own car.

The lesson, of course, was to teach me the value of money. I’d been working at McDonald’s for about a year leading up to the moment when I got my license. They’d set the plan with me sometime early on, so I was saving money to buy the car. We were living in the Cleveland area by then.

Somehow prior to the internet, when it was time for me to get a car, my dad learned that his old secretary (coincidentally, the mother of my first little childhood girlfriend — a girlfriend who no longer spoke to me, illustrating the first pains of young “love”) was selling her 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme. Dad was a big car nut (something we should discuss further in a future dispatch), so he already knew that this was a good car, from seeing it arrive at the church every day while we were still in Illinois.

It was 500 dollars, a good price for a young person’s first car. We arranged to drive to Illinois to pick it up. I think I was spared seeing the ex, but it was nice to see her mom. Driving it back to Cleveland, I was of course thrilled to have my own pair of wheels.

The Oldsmobile was green, quickly christened by my friends as “The Green Machine.” A green and white Spin Doctors bumper sticker that I still miss was quickly placed in the back window of the car. (After nearly three decades of searching, I found one as I was writing this and bought it on eBay!)

The music part of the new ride had to be sorted out. It only had a cassette player (Only? You spoiled brat, you!), which was unacceptable for the kid who was quickly building a collection of CDs. It was a situation that would continue to grow once I got a record store job and yes, eventually, a gig at WMMS where I discovered promo CDs sat in the largest stacks I’d ever seen and it seemed like each day, record label people brought more and more of them (if they didn’t arrive, many packages at a time, in the mail).

Somehow, I heard about the cassette tape adapter and a bunch of you out there just smiled. So I quickly had a way to hook my Sony Discman up to the adapter and I was able to play CDs in the car. I became adept at gingerly predicting and navigating certain bumps so that the CD wouldn’t skip while I was driving.

This car of course became my everything. It was the vehicle that took me to so many early concerts — and sometimes, shows that were memorable for other reasons. We went to see the B-52s and the Violent Femmes at Blossom Music Center in 1992. The B’s were touring behind their first album without Cindy Wilson, Good Stuff — a record that I really enjoyed, so I was looking forward to seeing what the revised version of one of my favorite bands sounded like. Verdict: It was my first time seeing them, but they sounded great to me.

I was not really a Femmes fan, but that’s one of the early times I remember making an effort to see a group that I was unfamiliar with, something that was important to me when it came to opening acts or other bands on the bill. I viewed it as musical education and found a lot of new favorites that way. This particular experience didn’t make me go out and buy their catalog, but I appreciated what they were doing. “It’s fine,” as my comrade Jeff Giles would say.

The real memories happened in the parking lot after the show. It had been a particularly packed night at Blossom, so getting out of there was going to be a nightmare. Cars weren’t moving. We elected to all just hang out there and enjoy the night. My friends were delighted at the large stash of glass Dr. Pepper bottles I had in my backseat area. They cleared them out of the floorboard, laughing at the clinking of the glass as they hit the grass parking lot.

Back to CDs for a moment: Of course, once I had a way to play them in the car, I had many of them in the car. One day when I came out to the high school parking lot, one of my car windows had been smashed and the CDs were gone. A substantial part of my early collection? Gone.

Luckily, I’m working at the record store by this time and we took CDs in trade, so there was a good chance the culprit would take them there to trade them in. He did. Worse, my boss knew his mother, took the CDs in and then called his mom to address the situation directly.

Years later, I’m doing a heavy metal show on the radio. The kid, now fully grown, called in and was a winner for concert tickets I was giving away. He had to know it was me. The tickets were to go see a nationally signed band made up of folks we’d both gone to high school with. I debated telling him off and not giving him the tickets. Time had passed, life is short. I gave him the tickets.

I don’t recall the circumstances of how the Green Machine left my life. Learning to take care of a car was also a process. My recollection is that my mom told me a story once about burning up an engine because she didn’t realize at a similarly young age that a car needed oil. My dad was very on top of stuff like that, but still, there were things to learn.

Eventually, the Cutlass Supreme met its end. I’m surprised now thinking about how many different cars I had in the first decade or so that I was driving. My next car was a maroon Volvo station wagon. Made in Sweden, it had a great heater or “the inferno” as friends called it. It was perfect for hauling band equipment (a big plus, for our high school rock group, the Intergalactic Transforming Cheeseburgers, quickly shortened to I.T.C.). But it proved to be very expensive anytime something broke.

When it needed a new muffler system from front to back — and it had two separate systems — the Volvo was out the door. It was going to be more economical to buy another car instead of paying a couple of thousand dollars for the muffler repairs. Off to South Carolina I went on Greyhound, to buy (I think) an Oldsmobile Delta 88 that had no rust, since it was in the South — a big plus here in Ohio.

The bus broke down on the way to South Carolina, so by the time I got there, I’d missed having the luxury of spending the night at my grandmother’s house prior to driving it back. I picked it up at the dealership, grabbed a quick nap and headed back. The benefits of that trip didn’t last long. Sometime in less than a year, I got into an accident driving home from my “the record store has closed suddenly, but I need a job now” job at the gas station where I was working 16-hour double shifts.

It was early in the morning and I was headed out after working an overnight shift and hit a patch of black ice going over a local bridge not far from the gas station and went into a spin. One car hit me and as my vehicle spun around, an SUV hit the other half. Miraculously, I was okay, but the car was totaled.

The final car in our storyline here was a Pontiac Firebird that I bought from the dad of one of my high school classmates. It was a thousand bucks and I couldn’t believe there was any possibility that my parents would let me buy it. But I wasn’t thinking about how much Dad loved any “new” car. He’d help family friends shop for cars, happily. He’d sold cars during time away from the ministry in the mid-’80s, so he knew how to talk to the sales folks at the dealerships.

“I can’t possibly own every car I want to drive, so it’s a real thrill for me to help you do this,” he’d tell friends. Similarly, he was happy to help make the Firebird purchase happen, so he gave me backup as I talked to Mom about it. They both agreed.

It was a nice car with low miles. Once I got an internship at the radio station, I was driving to and from downtown at least six days a week. I put a lot of miles on the car pretty quickly. It was time to let it go, as my dad had taught me, while I could still get my money out of it. He helped me sell it and got two grand for it. We made money! I had a wonderful dad.

We spend so much time in our cars, I think they tend to become special things for some of us and I’m certainly in that category. A commute that usually clocked in close to an hour each way in the past 20 years gave me lots of time to listen to albums I was getting ready to talk about with an artist and really soak them in. I relished the long commute, because it gave me time alone to think. I’d have things that were bugging me at the office that I couldn’t sort out. I found that sometime between the moment I left and drove home and the next morning when I came back, the solution would come to me in that uninterrupted space.

It’s still a place I go to when life has been hectic. Sometimes it’s a drive across town to pick up books for . Other times, it’s longer than that — a drive of several hours to see a band out of town (most recently, Triumph’s reunion!). It’s a good reset and a chance to clear my mind of the noise that won’t leave.

Isn’t it something how many memories we can have tied up in a particular area of our life? For me, this dispatch was triggered by a question earlier this week that was put to me, someone simply wondering, “How did you get your first car? I’m guessing your parents paid for it.” It was more than that and in fact, completely different than that. But I’m grateful for the journey their initial purchase strategy opened up.

Mom, I’m also thankful that as my driving instructor, you kept me from hitting the mailboxes. I’m still successfully avoiding them.

"1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Advertisement People Magazine October 17 1977" by SenseiAlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Anyone who knows me for even a short period of time will come to learn that I’m a big fan of live albums and over the years, collecting live bootlegs from my favorite artists.

If I’m going to put a beginning stamp on it, we’re going back at least nearly 40 years to Christmas of 1986 when my parents gave me one of the biggest musical presents I’d hoped to find under the tree that year, Bruce Springsteen’s mammoth Live 1975-85 box set.

As a growing Springsteen fan, it opened a new door and made me realize that there was a lot more to hear from Bruce and somehow, even in that moment, I knew we were only getting a partial snapshot with the contents of the box.

By the ‘90s, I was collecting additional Springsteen bootlegs, both in certain record stores and via mail order and eventually, through tape and CD trading, but that came later.

Some of the first bootleg trading I did happened with a friend who I’m still in contact with more than 30 years later as he started to send me some choice recordings on cassette of Del Amitri, another big favorite. I connected separately with someone else who was a big Michael McDermott fan and had gotten close with Michael, who had given him permission to tape shows from the soundboard. My love for collecting live music blew up in the ‘90s and that’s just a very small snapshot and a couple of examples.

In the music industry, one thing I hear people say quite a lot is that anyone who is collecting bootlegs (however it happens these days and there are many different ways, hello, YouTube and hello, files) already owns all of the albums by the band or artist they’re pursuing.

There’s an asterisk on that thought with streaming, but I think the point is still valid. They’ve bought the live albums and they still want more. This doesn’t hurt your band or artist, because as you continue to release things, they’ll continue to buy them.

In this age where artists are seemingly putting out everything, after decades of waiting for some of them to put out anything from their archives, it’s become clear who has a lot of stuff in master tape quality vs. those who clearly don’t. Some of the artists, like Pink Floyd, it’s pretty well-known that they have large gaps in their touring history where they didn’t professionally record anything. To that end, Sony/Legacy recently released (in the past couple of years) a legendary 1975 Floyd recording from Los Angeles — from an audience tape source recorded by late taper Mike Millard, whose recordings are building their own legend with fans who are hearing them.

While taking an audience recording like the Pink Floyd concert and releasing it officially is less common, it’s happened a decent amount in the past (a rabbit hole we won’t go down with today’s entry) and has allowed us as music fans to hear certain tours at a mainstream level with officially released product that fans who are not serious collectors (and as a result, would likely remain unaware of the existence) to own recordings from key tours that were not previously available to them. As you know, for shows or tours that you saw personally, or things from a period of a band that you particularly hold dear, it’s an opportunity that means a lot.

Yes and Chicago are two bands that I always wanted more from (again, just a couple of artists from a much longer list). While I had no shortage of bootlegs from each of them, I wished we could get more from their archives. Better copies of certain shows or even just official ones that already sound great.

The initial live box sets from each suggested that perhaps those archives were a bit thin. In the case of Chicago, their Decades Live box set seemed to reveal that their own personal holdings were a bit patchy, particularly as you get into the ‘80s. Yes put out The Word is Live, painting a similar picture.

With each box set, fans were frustrated, knowing the wealth of material that they had personally that sounded better. In the years since Chicago released that box set, they’ve opened the door a bit more, putting out a box set of all of the shows recorded for their Carnegie Hall live album that’s really fantastic. They have so much improvisation in their live performances from that era that it’s a real treat to hear each concert, because you feel like you’re taking a different journey every night they step on stage and the song selection varies as well.

They put out another show, recorded later the same year after the Carnegie Hall run that seems like it would be redundant, but again, because of how Chicago was developing and evolving at that time, it’s a magnificent listen.

The Yes releases have been a different story. They do have a lot of official live albums already that they’ve released over the years (something which was not the case for many years with Chicago, who had only put out an initial Carnegie Hall live release in the ‘70s that didn’t sound great, and a Japan live release, import only, from that same relative era that sounded much better).

Progeny: Seven Shows From Seventy-Two, released in 2015, presents seven full shows from the Close to the Edge tour, a set that was assembled after a number of multi-track recordings of concerts from that time period were discovered. There was still a lot of cleanup work required and I wish I could find my copy of the book that goes with that box set, because it’s a pretty fascinating story of how they prepared the recordings for release. (Among other things, they had to fix Chris Squire’s bass, due to technical recording issues with his captured tracks within the multi-track mixes.). Here’s one review that takes stock of the contents of the set. My quick review: It’s an interesting trip and amazing to have seven full concerts from that era, but there’s less variation from night to night when you compare it to the Chicago box.

More recent Yes concert releases have often been within box sets for the albums they’re associated with. Many of them have been incomplete and pretty raw (Steve Howe apparently has a collection of straight soundboards that they’ve been sifting through for some of this material). Some of them get broken out eventually as vinyl releases for Record Store Day.

A new upcoming release (set to arrive July 17) breaks that cycle: Yes - Live at Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, 17 June 1976, presents a full concert recorded during the band’s touring cycle for Relayer, featuring keyboardist Patrick Moraz in the lineup.

It’s a pretty legendary show that was at the time, broadcast by New York powerhouse WNEW-FM. The essential Forgotten Yesterdays fan site has been taking a look at how the audio that’s been released so far compares to the existing bootleg recordings. In short, it doesn’t appear to be a huge upgrade (yet it’s one I can’t wait to acquire, readers).

They also brought me back to a favorite book that I really enjoyed when it was first released in 2001. As a guy who’s been working in radio for over three decades now, I’ve always loved reading about the classic era of radio and though there are many books/memoirs on the subject now, at the time that Richard Neer released FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio, books like his were harder to find. If you love fly on the wall perspective about radio in the ‘70s and the record industry in that time, Richard’s book is essential.

WNEW is among the legendary stations that Neer worked at during his career and as Forgotten Yesterdays points out, he devoted a good bit of text to sharing the story behind the radio station’s broadcast of the Roosevelt Stadium gig and it’s quite a tale, which I’ll paste in here from FY’s Facebook share.

[Scott] Muni, through his friends at Atlantic Records, had set up a live broadcast of Yes from the now defunct Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City This was a major coup and the record company took the position that the station should pay for the technical arrangements. They reasoned that a band of Yes’s stature assenting to a live broadcast constituted doing the station favor.

We spoke to Mel about producing the show and he immediatled balked. Since we already worked for WNEW-FM, why should we be paid extra to produce a station event?

The answer was that it required days of preparation time and that this task had nothing to do with our jobs as disc jockeys. We’d have to lease a truck, set up lines to the stage, pay our technical whiz David Vanderheyden to mix the show, et cetera. It was a big undertaking, and we weren’t getting rich by doing it.

Mel didn’t see the need to have a separate mix for radio. Why didn’t we just take a feed off the mixing board? That was possible, we said, but highly unreliable since what may be acceptable audio for a thirty-thousand-seat stadium wouldn’t necessarily work on a stereo broadcast. Plus we’d be at the mercy of the mixing engineer’s skill level.

Mel wasn’t buying it. He decided that we’d just take a feed off the board. What about the production? we asked. Coordinating stage cues for radio? Not necessary, he ruled. You guys will be there as hosts anyway. I’m sure you can handle it on the fly. We offered a third way. We said that for $125, we’d oversee the whole operation so that the show would run crisply. but not take responsibility for the mix, which was out of our control. He said no, and that ended our discussion. We decided to merely act as announcers for the event -- and let the chips fall where they may on the production end.

The night of the concert was a disaster. The station’s chief engineer brought a couple of microphones out for radio introductions and set them up in the huge infield area behind the stage. We had no means to communicate with the stage manager, so we had no idea when the band would be ready to begin. We made several false starts. The lights went down and we came on, described the scene, and told our listeners the concert would start momentarily. After a few minutes killing time with banter about the group. the lights went up again and we threw it back to the station. Muni was angry.

“Why is this so poorly organized? What’s going on with you two?”

“Scott,” I said, “we’re not in charge here. Mel decided not to hire us to produce, so we’re just here to help you host.”

“Why didn’t he hire you to produce?”

I then uttered what could have been fatal words. “Because he’s a cheap bastard who doesn’t care what this sounds like. He’s just trying to save a couple of bucks, and we’re the ones who look bad.”

Pat [Dawson] added, “Yeah, we tried to talk some sense into him but the hard-headed bastard wouldn’t listen.”

Unbeknownst to us, Karmazin was back at the station, supervising the broadcast from that end. While we were talking to Muni, holding the microphones at our side, the overmatched engineer had kept them active. A live feed of everything we said was beaming back directly to the station, where Mel listened on the cue channel

We finally got the show on, and the mix, although not up to our standards, wasn’t bad. During intermission, we got word that Mel had heard our conversation and wanted to see us the next morning, ostensibly to fire us.

Scott said that he’d handle it and indeed he did. He later told us that Karmazin was furious and wanted our heads, but had to admit that we were right and that he should have used us to produce the concert. And from that point onward, any live broadcasts we did were under control and came off flawlessly.

See what I mean? As I said, the Neer book is great and the above passage sent me back down the rabbit hole to start a fresh read. The Roosevelt Stadium show might not be a five star recording, but I do like and appreciate that they’re giving us an official release of that material, cleaned up with today’s technology and presented to us in a proper package. It gives me hope that when they get to the Tormato era, hopefully we’ll get a similar release for the band’s 1978 Ohio performance at the Richfield Coliseum, a long gone venue located a short car ride from the Cleveland area. Broadcast by WMMS-FM at the time, it’s one of their best recorded performances from the decade, in my opinion.

Listen below for yourself and form your own opinion. (But let me help..it’s such a good show!)

Let’s be clear: getting a chance to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on any concert stage is a real pleasure. I think the most recent time I got to see them with was when they played at the Kent Stage here in the Cleveland area, which according to my brief internet research, was back in 2011? That’s way too long. They’re here this summer (for a regular concert), so it might be time for an update.

The Acoustic Reckoning trek finds the pair saluting Reckoning, the Grateful Dead’s 1981 double live album (which was also acoustically-based) as it marks its 45th anniversary. It’s an idea that Welch shares was suggested to them, though they both are longtime fans of the group.

She remembers the precise moment when the Dead switch flipped on for her as a music fan. “I started seeing the Dead - when I was 18. My first show was at San Francisco Civic on Chinese New Year, 1987. And then I followed them for a while. You know the reference in our song, ‘Wrecking Ball’ to being “a little Deadhead,” that’s for real,” she told WMOT in an interview published in April.

Welch admitted that because the music means so much to them both, it’s been a daunting prospect taking it on. “It’s already been an extraordinary experience for us, shedding and learning the songs,” she explained. “I mean, I’ve known the songs for decades, but it’s a different thing to play them, you know? Much like yourself, that acoustic record is really a big deal for a lot of folks. So it’s a great way for us to kind of dip our toe into the Grateful Dead pool.”

Nugs did a broadcast of one of the shows (here’s a preview) on the tour and you can also see a fan capture of the first date of the run at Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville. Spoiler alert: it’s a good night of music and there are still a few opportunities for you to catch it this summer, including at the Newport Folk Festival. A lot of the shows have been selling out, so grab tickets now if you’re interested in going. (Or go see one of their normal gigs. You won’t regret it!)

Now Hear This: Little Feat in New Orleans

Another musical must (from where I’m sitting) is going to see Little Feat on what is being billed as The Last Farewell Tour. Will it be that? You know how these things work and the title seems to acknowledge with humor that the idea of a farewell tour rarely sticks. (It’s also a clever callback to 1975’s The Last Record Album.)

I think it’s a concert that if you’re a fellow fan, you’re not going to want to miss it. In this business where I write a lot about Classic Rock Things, we hear a lot of “feedback.” The most common term that comes our way is “tribute band” or worse, for any band that announces a tour where they only have one original member or in some cases, no original members.

It’s a strange time, for sure. It makes me think of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when there were versions of various Motown bands going out with no original members and the lawsuits that inevitably showed up in Rolling Stone where you’d read about the surviving members of a band fighting another one of the members who had taken the group out on the road without them.

Sometimes, it was a replacement player who had no claim to the name — or in more recent years, something like the story of Little River Band, where the original guys lost the rights to the name and have now watched their former group tour without them. That particular situation has festered to the point that the existing band (again, without original members) got booked in 2015 on the Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. It caused a bit of a stir.

“Ghost band” is a term I’ve started to hear floating (hey, intentional pun!) around, which brings us to Little Feat. They are not that. If anything, the “ghosts” of key departed members like Lowell George, Richie Hayward and Paul Barrere are on stage with the current band, still featuring founding member and keyboardist Bill Payne, plus bassist Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton from the group’s classic lineup that was minted by 1972. Guitarist and vocalist Barrere, who joined that same year, also remained part of the Feat until shortly before his passing in 2019.

The current group is rounded out by guitarist Fred Tackett (a member since 1987) and the group’s two most recent additions, guitarist Scott Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone, who joined in 2019 and 2020 respectively, Little Feat has long faced questions and criticism about their legitimacy since they reformed in 1987, nearly a decade after the unfortunate death of George in the summer of 1979. The lead vocalist and guitarist was the heart of the band, so much so that it seemed impossible that they’d be able to carry on without him.

1987 brought their official attempt to figure that out and like Little Feat in general, it’s been a evolutionary process in the past three decades, one that’s been pretty fascinating to follow. That’s what I appreciate about the current “farewell tour” is how they’re taking stock of the Little Feat legacy as it stretches close to 60 years.

They offered a 90-minute distillation of what they’ve been doing out on the road during their performance at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the beginning of this month that began with a spirited reading of the title track from 1988’s Let it Roll and gave the crowd an hour and a half that must have been impossible to walk away from. If you were there, you were staying there.

“Rock and Roll Doctor” is another choice moment that arrives early in the set, with “Spanish Moon” and “Fat Man in the Bathtub” popping in later, both stretching well past the 10-minute mark. An acoustic version of “Willin’” that goes into a bit of “Don’t Bogart That Joint?” As I said, if you’re here, you’re not leaving.

The current tour takes it even further. They’ve been changing the set from night to night and playing a show that is broken down into two sets. The Austin date in April started at 8 P.M. and according to Setlist.FM, wrapped up around 10:45 P.M. You’ll get your money’s worth.

Listening to the New Orleans performance, which you can purchase here as a download or CD (which sounds great, by the way), one thing that you’ll appreciate is just how connected these guys are. They’re one of those bands that everyone sings and plays a billion different instruments and aren’t groups like that so much fun to watch? Each night on stage is a challenge and it’s fun to watch (or listen) to these guys chop it up.

Hearing the Jazz Fest gig, it’s hard to imagine that Little Feat will really leave the stage for good. They still sound so vital and if that’s against the odds here in 2026, close to 60 years after they first began their musical mission, well then, they are showing us how they are beating those odds, seemingly with ease.

I’ve had a few chances to chat with Bill over the years and my first experience came in 2013, with my dear comrade Jeff Giles. Without revisiting the conversation in full, I can tell you that one favorite memory of the hour we spent with him came as he demonstrated a few musical sections on the piano to make his point about the things we were discussing. This was pre-Zoom interviews being the norm, so we couldn’t see what was going on, but it was a glorious noise.

Give it a listen if the spirit moves you and you’re absolutely right, you need to go see Little Feat before they hang it up and they’re generously giving you lots of tour dates between now and November to do that.

Photo of Little Feat circa 2026
Credit: Fletcher Moore, courtesy of Big Feat PR

That’s notable on this side of things for me because it’s my favorite Cracker album, which is a topic we’ll have to dig into at a later point. , my favorite and resident editor, tells me I should keep these things shorter than they’ve been. I respect (always) her advice!

The first few dates are in June in the Boston area (in Cambridge), plus New York and Falls Church, Virginia, with additional shows on tap through the summer. According to David Lowery’s socials, business is brisk — an August concert in Richmond, Virginia quickly sold out and there’s a low ticket alert for the Cambridge gig as well.

They’ll be operating with more firepower at some of the shows as well. The Madison stop promises the “big lineup” of Anne Harris, Bryan Howard, Johnny Hickman, Carlton Owens, David Lowery (of course) and Megan Slankard, while the New York concert will feature special guest Kenny Margolis on keyboards (hey, we know him from Smithereens albums, too!), who played with the band in The Golden Age era.

The tour page on their website makes it a bit difficult to track which shows are full album performances and which ones are not (it’s easier of course, with the festival gigs). Because some of the headlining concerts are labeled specifically, while others (the Richmond show, for example) are not, even though they are Golden Age-focused gigs.

But it’s worth the research to find out whether or not you’ve got a Golden Age show in your zip code. I saw the original tour here in Cleveland at the Odeon Concert Club in May of 1996 and it remains one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Listen to this Denver show from the same relative time period and you’ll get a sense of what I witnessed.

Nearly 30 years later, I saw the band again last summer at the Winnetka Music Festival in Illinois (which is a great reason to take a trip if you’re a music fan, by the way) and though I’ve seen them a number of times in between, I can tell you that the power hour I saw that night was verification that they’ve still got it. In short, these shows will be good.

I’ve interviewed David a few times over the years and I was curious how much we’d discussed The Golden Age in any of those conversations. Not at all, according to my interview files. I thought I knew myself pretty well. But I guess not!

For your reading pleasure, here’s a chat we had in 2013 to talk about La Costa Perdita, the first of two Camper Van Beethoven albums that were released back to back. While you’re reading this, I’m going to see if I can chase down Lowery to talk all things The Golden Age….

Hearing the stories behind how the new Camper Van Beethoven album came together, we’re not surprised to find out that God is a CVB fan. And as you listen to La Costa Perdita, the new Camper album which landed in stores on January 22nd via the fine folks at 429 Records, it’s a safe bet that He has a permanent spot on the guest list whenever the band comes to town.

David Lowery and the members of Camper Van Beethoven were set to play a show at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur in June of 2011 when rain — an unusual visitor for that particular time of the season — forced the band to postpone. With the unexpected opening on their schedule, the band decided to seize the opportunity to launch into the writing process for what would become their first album of new Camper material since New Roman Times in 2004.

The moments of collaboration were fruitful, birthing enough material for an album and then some. There’s a distinctive Northern California tint to the songs, something that was an intentional homage on Lowery’s part, while CVB violinist/guitarist/keyboardist Jonathan Segel adds (via a press release about the album) that the feeling of the material carries themes that remind him of The Beach Boys 1973 Holland release.

La Costa Perdita is perhaps the most accessible Camper Van Beethoven release to date and as we spoke with Lowery about the new album, it became very clear that as much as they’ve learned about how to work together to produce the results that they desire collectively, it’s a learning and exploratory process that is always in motion, with no end in sight.

The writing sessions for this album produced nearly two albums worth of material. The stuff that wound up on this album hangs together really well as a record. What’s the plan for the rest of the material that’s not on here?

There’s bonus tracks – we ended up using kind of the acoustic demos for that, because it just has this cool weird shambly kind of feel. So that takes a couple of them that we didn’t use. But the other ones, I think it’s the other half of an album, basically, and we’re just figuring out when we’re going to do the other half.

We learned a lot doing this first half. But that’s sort of why I think this kind of holds together, is because we actually just pulled out the songs that we felt fit together and then added a couple that didn’t for contrast. So I think that’s why we were able do this is.

For so long, Camper has always put 14 to 23 songs on an album and our response to music being file shared is ”okay, well we’ll give you less at a time.” [Laughs] That’s our response.

It flows at a good pace. I was surprised to see that it’s actually 43 minutes. It goes by very quickly and before you know it, you want to take another trip through it again. It doesn’t lag at any point.

That to me is the sign of a great record, you know? I remember when Dolittle came about, by Pixies. I was driving across Nevada and I think I was just leaving Reno and I had gotten barely outside of town it seemed like, before the album was done. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known it was so short. It was just totally engaging, you know what I mean?

Absolutely.

That always has stuck in my mind. One of the Weezer records that I like is really short too and I always kind of enjoyed that. It’s long enough to be an album, but it doesn’t just drag on. I think the CD actually was not necessarily great for bands, because you didn’t have to make the hard choices, like [you did] when you were making stuff for vinyl.

There’s some really lush sounding material on this album, ”A Love for All Time,” for example. With this band and the variety of instrumentation involved, how easy or complicated was it to put the wraps on a song and know that it was done?

Well, I’m always leaning towards less things. Some of the guys in the band lean towards more things and you know, that’s just being a band, you’ve got to come to that compromise. I don’t have a problem having a song finished with two guitars, bass and drums. But it’s not just my band. We have five people in the band and [the music of] Camper is very interesting, because there’s so many little nooks and crannies that get filled that other bands don’t do and that’s part of the dynamic. So in a way, I don’t want to stop that. But I think that actually is a difficult thing for Camper. Camper has always sort of worked like somebody who has a notebook and they’re doodling on it and they’re filling in every little nook and cranny and that’s been sort of our strength and challenge.

So making that work is always really interesting. A lot of the credit I think actually goes to Drew Vandenberg who mixed this, for just figuring out how to make it all fit together. Everything is complex on this record, from the drumming – I mean, Michael Urbano and Chris Pederson are just fantastic on this. They completely overplay the whole time, but it doesn’t sound like it – which is really hard to do! I’m praising that, as much as I said that I have an easy time just stopping at two guitars, bass and drums, you know, with a couple of drum fills? But that’s what’s fantastic about things like ”Someday Our Love Will Sell Us Out,” Michael Urbano pretty much plays a drum solo the entire time. He’s like Ginger Baker and Mitch Mitchell, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience [combined] through the whole thing and that’s really cool.

So that’s what I mean. That’s sort of the strength, to be able to overplay like that and I really think a lot of credit goes to Drew for making it sound simple when it’s really, really complex.

I love things like on ”A Love For All Time,” Victor [Krummenacher] and Michael have the biggest and most complex bass and drum thing going against what sounds like a really simple melody. And then me, Jonathan and Greg [Lisher] are changing keys the whole fucking time. You know what I mean?

Oh yeah.

But it’s supposed to be like this little pop thing and I don’t know, to me, that was really….and then Jonathan and his wife Sanna [Olsson] were killing with the background vocals….that one, I can’t believe we actually pulled that one off with the amount of shit going on and the amount of key changes and dissonant notes. Even the drums and bass all had these overtones that conflict with other things we’re doing, but actually in other ways make a melody [that works].

Since you mentioned keys and interesting things like that, I’ll ask a question from one of my comrades. He was talking about sitting down to learn Cracker’s ”Low” and discovering that it’s in a major key and that there’s no minor chords in that song. He wondered if that’s your strategy, to find non-standard solutions for standard songwriting challenges and in doing so, coming up with things that do the job of ”rock and roll songs” without resorting to those traditional rock and roll cliches and structures.

I can answer that indirectly, but it gets to the point of it. I love the constraints of a song structure [in its] traditional form. Like taking the limitations of the song form, like blues rock or something like that and then just breaking a few of the pieces. I think Camper does that really, really well and I think Cracker does it in a different way. A lot of it has to do with the notes that Johnny [Hickman plays] – he’ll take it one blue note too far with Cracker. There’s one kind of non-traditional wrong note in a lot of our riffs and grooves and to me, that’s much more interesting than saying there are no rules. This is pop music – it’s not like we’re making great art. This is part of like a cultural dialogue, so it’s so much better to work within some rules and violate a couple of them. That’s more interesting, to take a couple of those things and just break them.

It sounds like things came together really organically. Hearing Greg talk about how you would bring in material in the earlier times of the band that already had a defined structure – it sounds like there was more of a loose approach this time around for the songs on this album. Having both Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven active at relatively the same time now, have you seen your process change as far as your specific songwriting approach for each band?

Sort of. The songwriting thing, there’s never been a usual way that we ever did a Camper and a Cracker record. I don’t want to totally contradict Greg, but I’m going to contradict him a little bit. Some of our albums have been just completely us jamming in the studio – or a lot of the songs are – or in the rehearsal space and they just sort of come together. Some of them have been people bringing in songs completely written with every note. Like Jonathan has done that, Greg has done that, Victor has done that [and] I have done that. There’s not really a pattern. The thing that we did with this album was that I didn’t want to really – aside from some little fragments and stuff like that – I didn’t really want to start with things that had really existed before. I just wanted the four of us playing together on our main instruments to define the songs and what we do. And I think that really worked. It’s not like we didn’t pull something out of the past, but we got a much more modern current version of who we are as people, musicians and artists. It came together.

And I’m not quite answering your question, but that being said, because it’s like us now, it can’t help but have the two bands influencing each other, right? The last Cracker record, we also did a similar thing where I really only brought in fragments and then we sort of all finished them together. So we actually did the same kind of thing with the last Cracker album. Just being who we are and how we’ve been working together, I would say that yes, definitely my experiences with both bands are kind of indirectly influencing each other. You can hear it in one way that I think since Camper and Camper have both been around and working, Cracker has sort of gotten odder and a little more psychedelic. And Camper Van Beethoven has kind of dug in and rocked a little more. I think actually those have been both good influences on the band and that’s simply from playing a lot of shows together and stuff like that, that sort of tweaked those two things.

That totally makes sense. Listening to this album and the themes that seem to go throughout. Being that this is the first half of two records or one really long record, however you really want to look at it. Did you get to a point where you found yourself writing in one direction for the stuff that wound up on this album? Because it has that connected feel.

I think actually what we did was we went back and collected the songs together that shared similarity and then took the other ones and we’ll use them for the next album. So I think it wasn’t so much that…..what we collected together was basically the Northern California stuff, with the exception being ”Summer Days,” which is set in Stockholm, but really, that was supposed to be in Oakland. But I wanted the whole Norse god paganism thing in there. Because it’s like summer days in the winter and you know, there’s not really spring/summer/winter/fall in California so much, so I had to move it to Stockholm, to get that. I had to move it there so I could get that paganism element and the real contrast between winter and summer and the deep, deep recesses of our collective experience as humans with the change in seasons, which doesn’t work so well in Oakland! But really, that’s Oakland.

”Come Down The Coast” is an interesting lead-off track. How did that one rise to the top as the one that would launch the album?

Because it’s set like [in] Big Sur and it loosely makes reference to not just Kerouac, but Henry Miller [also]. We had gone down to the Henry Miller Library to play a Camper Van Beethoven show. We were going to play Key Lime Pie down there on the coast and you know, very few people live down there – it’s kind of remote and that’s just kind of a cool and important thing to do, to go and play at the Henry Miller Library when you’re a band from Northern California. So we went down there to do it and we had this unseasonable rain in June, which never really happens – so we had to postpone it a week. So instead of going back home to the east coast, I just stayed out with Jonathan and we wrote this album in California. But because it was over that next week, we basically wrote the main part of this album and that was because we had this [planned] show in Big Sur. We had been in Big Sur and then we were going to have to go back, so that to me signaled that that was the beginning of the album, because that song is set there.

Over the past couple of years, you’ve added ”professor” to the list of items on your resume. Is this something that has been mutually educational for you? What are you learning from today’s hopeful musicians?

A lot of my students are not musicians – they’re business majors, which is really interesting, because it’s in the business college at UGA, the Terry College of Business, which is interesting. Because I teach the finance side of it and publicity and marketing – that’s what I teach. So I have a lot of students that aren’t musicians and it’s actually kind of cool to be around people who aren’t musicians and who experience music as consumers and get their perspective on it. Because basically, I’m always around people who are in the music business, so actually, that’s the interesting thing to me.

The main thing there that I’ve learned being a professor is that really, all of the same things that I learned in the 1980s about the ”do it yourself” band stuff – it’s really still all the same today, it’s just that they’re sort of enabled differently. But the way we go about building a grassroots following is still the same and ultimately if you want to sell albums or have a long career, you eventually have to engage old mainstream media, like television and radio. So I think that’s what is interesting to me is just how much things are still the same.

Seeing these guys as consumers, is there a common thing that you see with them as far as how they’re consuming music. Is there a common thread that you see? It’s an interesting time, because you have kids who have never put a CD in a CD player. And at the same time, with the resurgence of vinyl, there seems to be a desire to have something tangible.

I think the resurgence of vinyl is a little overrated. If I pick 250 kids that are between my classes, I would say that maybe about two dozen of them buy vinyl. What I do notice about what kids are doing is that obviously streaming is very important to them and that’s the way forward, so we have to figure out how streaming is going to work so that it pays artists fairly, because it doesn’t right now. Because it does replace most album sales for that generation and it doesn’t really generate enough revenue. If we had to rely on Pandora and Spotify earnings to make an album, we wouldn’t make albums. So that’s a challenge, but I’m working on that. I have my Tri-Chordist blog as you and we’re just building up the awareness of all of these things. There’s sort of this notion that music is free these days, right?

Yeah.

And A, first of all, it’s not – because even on the illegitimate sites, they’re monetizing it with advertising or premium download speeds where they charge people – so free music isn’t actually free, it’s just that the money doesn’t go to the artists. It’s sort of like the old 1950s record label concept where the record label guys would just, once the artists complained, they would buy the artist a Cadillac. It’s just like that except that you don’t get the Cadillac anymore. Somebody else does, like mobsters in Russia get the Cadillac, or Google does through DoubleClick, which is their advertising company. So the notion that music is free nowadays is not actually true – it’s just that their revenue stream is going the wrong way.

Secondly, I think that as an artist, if you insist on giving away your music – all of it – there’s sometimes to give away music. We’ve always given away music as artists – the music industry has always worked on free promo copies – that’s always worked on some free [level]. But if you insist that all of your music is free, you’re just going to consciously devalue your own music.

By asking people to pay for your music, you’re actually going to be treated as a more serious artist and a lot of young artists don’t understand that, that if you want to be taken seriously, ask people to pay for your music. I think if people like Pandora and Spotify and other music services that sort of want to be free, realize that, they’ll have a much easier time making money.

You mention promos and for instance, your piece about Emily White from NPR, there’s somebody who has known nothing else but promos. Working on the radio side of the business, I got a lot of promos, but I also bought I would say, just as much music as a consumer. But I know that’s not the norm. I had people that I worked with that if they didn’t get a promo of it, they wouldn’t buy it – even if it was their favorite band – and that’s a problem.

Well, that’s where we’ve always dealt with free in the music business. We decided that DJs and journalists shouldn’t pay for music so that they write about us and play our records. [Laughs] That letter about Emily White is more complex, because it’s actually about how you value the pipes that bring you the music, like your internet connection or your 3G connection on your phone and you value the hardware that plays the music, but you don’t value the actual music yourself. That’s actually what that letter is about. It’s a much more complex thing.

There’s always been file-sharing and there’s always been piracy in the music business. We’ve always dealt with people who get their music for free that shouldn’t. It’s like the difference between the kind of corruption that you have in Sicily, which has always existed and the kind of corruption and free-for-all that you have in Somalia. The internet is basically like, as a market – it’s [in] a failed state. Before in the music business, we had plenty of piracy, most of it run by organized crime, just like it actually is now, but it was at a lower level. You’re never going to get rid of any of that stuff. You’re never going to prevent people from making cassettes or [now] taking a little flash drive and passing it from person to person, but what you can actually go after, is the industrial scale, for profit, of cyber lockers and BitTorrent operations, which are operated by for profit companies. That’s what I’m about.

People are always going to copy each other’s iPods and drop a file on this or that, but you have to stop the piracy on the industrial scale. I’m just like the Grateful Dead was. Everybody points to the Grateful Dead for their sharing policy. Their sharing policy was really specific. It was like you could share it, as long as nobody is making money off of it. As soon as it crosses that rubicon to where somebody is profiting on it – it’s not sharing and it’s not allowed. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don’t really understand how centralized and profitable free music cyber lockers and BitTorrent actually are. It’s billions of dollars a year.

You recently had the chance to sit down at the Smithsonian and talk shop with David Byrne about music and his new book. Besides the obvious subject at hand, what did you guys talk about?

We talked about that, specifically, how other people make money off of our music in the new digital paradigm without sharing revenue with us. Neither David Byrne or myself are hardcore copyright hawks. We actually have a really mixed history – Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have like 4,000 tracks on the Internet Live Music Archive that are freely available – we’ve always been kind of mixed. But the conversation was both of us saying ”okay, now we’re crossing the line where some people are making a lot of money from musicians who aren’t really fairly sharing the revenue anymore” and that’s kind of what we were talking about.

That’s exactly where I came up with the line that it’s like the old 1950s music business except that you don’t even get the Cadillac.

Final bit here – what’s on the table as far as a new Cracker album?

I’m not sure yet. We’ve got to start writing another one and we’ll probably start on something before the next Camper record comes out, but it will be a little while before we get to that.

Now, some 2026 Camper Van Beethoven news for you all as we wrap up…..

Okay, so that was David Lowery circa 2013. Since we’re in the Camper Van Beethoven area of things, there’s some good news for fans here in 2026. Here’s more on that from their social media.

We are pleased to share that our second album (originally released in 1986) is getting a 40th Anniversary Edition on both vinyl and CD this May. This record was us stretching out pulling in folk-punk, alt-country, European folk detours, cover songs, and whatever else we felt like trying at the time.

If you know Telephone Free Landslide Victory, this is the next step, that same unpredictable path - songs like “Sad Lovers’ Waltz,” “No Krugerrands For David,” “4 Year Plan,” and our version of Sonic Youth’s “I Love Her All the Time” all sitting in the same strange space.

But we’re really happy to say that II & III is coming back on exclusive Teal Vinyl and 2CD which pairs the original album with a 17-track live set from our 1986 tour with R.E.M.

Available to pre-order now.

Released on the 29th May 2026.

There you have it. Thanks for reading this Wardlaw Dispatch and sharing with your friends!

It was in my plans this weekend to go and see the new Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition documentary and when I woke up Saturday morning, I had a fresh bit of energy and also a new plan. With the Maiden doc headed for a physical release (and I assume, streaming as well) later this year, it felt like a good idea to use that portion of the day differently. Doing that would reset other parts of the day in a helpful way, so that became the movie.

The first order of business? Let’s mow the lawn since Cleveland is set to start receiving 18 days of straight rain (a slight exaggeration, but we’re due for a lot of it). I was able to borrow a neighbor’s mower since our normal landscaper was a bit AWOL and take care of a good portion of the front lawn before it bit the dust (a bit of an expected outcome, since the neighbor had warned me of this particular quirk).

Two things happened after that — I heard from our landscaper, so all will be eventually right with that green side of things….and then we got our first dosage of storms not long after that text message rolled in. Things will eventually work out. You’d have to see it to fully understand, but the partial haircut did a lot of good in the sense that we no longer have to walk through a jungle to get to our car.

Talk to Me…

I’ve started a few different pieces here in the past week and they’re sitting as drafts, future status unknown. But the musical thoughts continued to circulate through my mind as I listened to various things, talked to folks and did things this week, so I thought I’d share a few (or several?) things of note that happened.

Top of the list? My wife put out her latest book this past Tuesday! Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs is now available anywhere and everywhere you might think to get books. It was an absolute joy to watch her speak about All Things Stevie on Wednesday night to a full house.

As I was driving around earlier today, I started thinking about how the music of Stevie Nicks first entered into my world. I do think it was her solo work that was the first thing that really registered with me as I was growing up in the ‘80s, because that’s what was on the radio as I was really starting to become a huge music fan.

We didn’t have MTV in this particular moment, living in a rural area. So I’m not sure how I first saw the video for “Talk to Me” from 1985’s Rock a Little album, but the song caught my ear on the radio and when I finally saw the video, seeing the visual force that is Stevie Nicks hooked me in for life.

Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night came next in 1987 and a decade later, I saw my first FM show in November of 1997 on the big reunion tour, which played Cleveland on the heels of the success of The Dance MTV special and subsequent album. I’d seen a lot of concerts by now, but this one blew my mind.

The years in between 1985 and 1997, other things had happened as well. I’d grown to know more about the individual characters — and dysfunction — that made up Fleetwood Mac. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by each one of them? I still want to know more about Mick Fleetwood, who is probably my favorite character this side of Stevie.

The ‘80s and early ‘90s also found me getting into Lindsey Buckingham’s solo work. “Holiday Road,” his contribution to the soundtrack of National Lampoon’s Vacation was part of my eternal quest when it came to songs I wanted to own on CD, right next to Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby.” The two songs both remained fairly elusive on digital for a lot of years before they finally found their way to proper album thanks to compilations.

But it was Lindsey’s 1992 solo album Out of the Cradle that was probably the first one from his catalog that I listened to top to bottom, since WMMS (I was still just a listener, not yet working there) played “Wrong” as a single. It’s still a Concert Regret that I missed Lindsey’s performance at Peabody’s Down Under in March 1993, a ridiculously small place to see him perform and a purposeful underplay — the venue only held about 500 people.

By the end of the ‘90s, it was my boss Greg at WMMS (still a dear friend) who handed me a copy of the Buckingham Nicks album from the station’s vinyl library and asked if I could dub it to CD for him. Why don’t you just buy the CD? It doesn’t exist on that format, I learned. I took the LP back to one of our production studios and put it on the turntable. From the first moment that I dropped the needle, I quickly began to understand Greg’s connection with the album.

I became similarly obsessed and as you might know, we all got our collective wish last summer when Buckingham Nicks was finally remastered and put on CD for the first time, along with vinyl and streaming. The internet tells me that you can get the CD as I’m writing this for only $6.99 which is a bargain on any planet and worth that much just to add “Frozen Love” permanently to your life.

To bring it all back around to where we started, Annie’s book (Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs!) bottles up a lot of good Nicks history and knowledge and you can even get signed copies thanks to Mac’s Backs, a bookstore we both love, which also gives us a good excuse to buy books and eat lunch/dinner at Tommy’s next door anytime she gets the call to go and sign copies. You can find more details on how to get a signed copy at the bottom of this page on Annie’s website.

Fans of Eric Carmen and ‘80s music in general, let’s take a brief pause and all enjoy this via Annie, who shared it with me….

Brother Cane’s Magnolia Medicine

One of the songs in Annie’s Stevie Nicks book is “Every Day,” from the sorely underrated Trouble in Shangri-La album from 2001. It’s a song which was cowritten by Damon Johnson and John Shanks.

Damon Johnson, some folks will know that name from the ‘90s rock band Brother Cane. Quck primer? Three words: “Got No Shame.”

A lot happened for Damon near the end of the decade when the group members went their separate ways. The next time I saw him, he was playing guitar for John Waite, another longtime favorite. He took on similar duties for Alice Cooper, Thin Lizzy and more recently, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

But he also was writing songs for and with other people, including Nicks, “On the Other Hand” with Sammy Hagar for his 1997 solo album Marching to Mars and many others.

We first met in the early 2000s when he was part of a group called Slave to the System that also featured Queensryche drummer Scott Rockenfield, producer Kelly Gray and bassist Roman Glick. Gray had worked with Queensryche and also, Johnson and Glick, as the producer behind the board for the final Brother Cane album, 1998’s Wishpool.

I was offered the chance to do a radio session with Slave to the System where the band would come in and play live…on Easter Sunday. Once I realized the significance of the date, I reached out to the promo person and pointed out that it was Easter Sunday, just in case that was going to cause conflict. I got a quick reply back that they were all good with it if I was. There we were on Easter Sunday, talking music and if I recall, it was a pretty crummy day weather-wise, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Here in the past decade, Johnson has been putting out some really good solo albums. I’m fairly certain that I told him at least once that it was a shame that these records weren’t coming out underneath the Brother Cane name, but that no matter what it might say on the album cover, it was some of the best work and songwriting I’d heard from him to date. I stand by that assessment and urge fellow fans to go back and check out those albums, 2019’s Memoirs of an Uprising and 2020’s Battle Lessons.

Here’s the good news — Brother Cane reunited in 2022 with Johnson, original bassist Glenn Maxey and rounding out the lineup, keyboardist Buck Johnson, guitarist Tony Higbee and drummer Jarred Pope.

They played some reunion shows that were well-received and in 2023, put out a couple of new songs. Here in 2026, we’re now staring at a new Brother Cane album, Magnolia Medicine (grab your own copy at the band’s website), which was released in March. Produced by longtime associated Marti Frederiksen, this is an album that’s more than worth the nearly 30 years we had to wait to get it.

I’m already running long here, so I’m not going to go longer regarding Magnolia Medicine, but I’ll say this — I’ve got an interview upcoming with Johnson where we spent about an hour talking about the new album and a few other things. It’s always good to talk music with Damon and I’ll look forward to sharing that with you all relatively soon.

In the meantime, while I have many favorites on Magnolia Medicine, two songs for you to start with: “Prince Charming,” Damon’s gorgeous tribute to the late Gary Rossington, which features guests Johnny Van Zant and Rickey Medlocke, plus “The Wolf on the Mountain.” Both are songs I’ve been unable to get out of my head since I first heard the full album late last year.

Stripped for Parts

Annie moderated a panel after a local screening this week of Stripped for Parts, with the director (Rick Goldsmith) and several journalists, including two who are in the film. It’s a magnificent film that I wish didn’t need to exist, but having watched the destruction unfold both locally and nationally with newspapers I love, it was a topic I had keen interest in.

My grandfather worked for 43 years for the Abilene Reporter-News in Abilene, Texas. By the time he left the Reporter-News, he was the editor and subsequently wrote a book about the first 100 years of the paper that’s sadly difficult to find these days.

As a kid in the ‘80s, I got to hear my grandfather lament the unfortunate shape that the paper was in. He and I would read the newspaper together each day when I would visit — and he got several. Already a voracious reader, I was allowed to read his copies of the Reporter News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as long as I agreed to put each paper back together section by section in the order it had been delivered.

He was a serious person, but one who had a dry wit and I could see a twinkle in his eye as he was winding up to have some verbal fun with his grandson. I came to learn that his serious no-nonsense demeanor had been one of his trademarks in the office. Yet, his colleagues that I’ve met over the years (or read recollections from on Facebook) appreciated what he brought to the newsroom. “A real newsman” and “Firm but fair” are two examples that stick in my memory.

When I would get letters from my grandparents, his dispatches always arrived courtesy of the manual typewriter that was a familiar presence in the room where I would sleep when visiting.

However disgruntled he was by certain aspects of the newspaper (and I could tell that he still had no shortage of love and pride for it), I have no doubt that he’d be angry about the current state of journalism on every level. He had no idea how bad things would get for the Abilene Reporter-News.

In 2022, they moved out of the building that I’d visited with a kid and toured years later with my mom, who wanted me to see how the newspaper was printed and assembled. By 2023, they were down to just a couple of full-time employees with the rest of the content piped in by Gannett, their owner. In 2023, Greg Jaklewicz — the last remaining employee and the editor of the Reporter-News — retired after a 47-year career, a good chunk of it spent at the paper.

What’s he doing now? Teaching sixth-grade English, “helping shape the next generation of writers and journalists,” as one local piece recently put it. I’ve wanted to talk with Greg about his journey and we’ve been in contact briefly in the past few years, sharing a quick exchange on social media not long after his Reporter-News journey.

I was moved to reach out, because I’d been following the closing moments of his time at the Reporter-News for months. After he wrote his final column, I held back tears while reading it. The thing that he and so many unique characters in Abilene, Texas had been a part of for so long, was officially dead. He had so much class as he made his exit.

After 47 years in journalism, starting one night in June 1976 at Bill Hart’s desk on the second floor of the Abilene Reporter-News and ending four blocks north on Cypress Street, I’ve folded my reporter’s pad closed, clicked my pen and holstered the very necessary cellphone.

I have retired from your local newspaper.

Having seen other journalists fade away as their careers closed, I long ago vowed to leave as valued.

I believe I accomplished at least that.

I urge you to read his full piece and watch Stripped for Parts. Because while it’s too late for some of our favorite newspapers like the Reporter-News (now being printed outside of the city with all of the content coming from Gannett, the last I heard), there are thankfully folks out there who are doing the good work to fight what’s happening, while trying to salvage what’s left.

Concerts, Concerts

We were fortunate to catch the start of the Sugar reunion tour, a big bucket list item marked off for this Bob Mould fan. Late last week, we also saw David Byrne, which was as good as you think it probably was. Go see both if you have the opportunity to.

I’ll also be checking out Corrosion of Conformity, who are in the early stages of touring in support of their new album, Good God / Baad Man (that’s not a typo, that’s really the second part of the album title!). The new album is their best (in my opinion) since America’s Volume Dealer in 2000. If you hated that album, here’s the good thing. A lot of people are saying — and I agree — that this new record wraps in a little bit of each part of their sound and history as a band. So there’s something there for everyone and who’s going to pass on getting an hour’s worth of new music from COC?

Here’s a chat I had with Pepper and Woody about the album for Ultimate Classic Rock and if you check out our associated podcast, you can hear the full hour I spent with them talking about the record and a number of other subjects.

L7 announced their farewell tour + while a tour featuring the Psychedelic Furs and Living Colour was sadly announced and quickly scrubbed due to health issues within the Furs camp, there is a mighty fine triple bill heading out featuring Squeeze, Adam Ant and Haircut 100. We’re stoked and now you are too!

David Lowery shared that Cracker will be playing shows later this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Golden Age, which is still probably my favorite Cracker album. They’ll be playing the full record, which means they need to add a show somewhere in Ohio. I saw the original tour and would happily relive that experience. You just name the date and time, Lowery.

Thanks for reading, here’s where this thing ends for today, I think………

Like so many things with my Dad, he left me with a lot of good, but occasionally Very Dad Memories.

I owe him a lot, because he introduced me to the music of Willie Nelson. Sort of.

One of my earliest musical memories is the yellow t-shirt he had from one of the local places my parents liked to go to in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Without getting too deep into it, Cloudcroft would have been Willie’s kind of place.

It was a village of 500 people when our family first started going there in 1979. The Western Cafe became a favorite spot for all of us for different reasons. The food was good. The characters that went there were people like I’d never seen. And they had a great jukebox where I first got to play the music that I wanted to hear in public.

Out of those selections, one that sticks with me is getting to hear “Elvira” by the Oak Ridge Boys pumped through the speakers of the jukebox and when I hear that same song now, I still hear it the way I heard it through the jukebox and I can remember how the Western smelled (which was not a bad thing) and the general noise within the establishment, the pool table I was always thrilled to get to a turn at if the bar wasn’t too crowded. The list goes on.

My dad had a yellow Western Cafe t-shirt that had a Willie Nelson quote on it. I wish I could remember what the quote was. I’ve looked for the t-shirt itself over the years. It doesn’t seem to survive within my parents’ stuff and (to date) it hasn’t been anything that someone’s been selling on eBay from the early ‘80s.

That being said, it planted a curiosity inside my head. I wanted to know more about this Willie Nelson character. In time, I found out. Willie eventually played another role in my early mornings with Dad. We watched a local morning news program here in the Cleveland area hosted by Tom Haley and Del Donahoo.

When I say that we watched it, we watched it every single morning. When Hank came on the screen each day (watch the firsr part of the above and you’ll see what I mean), I replied “Henry!” as Hank gave us his traditional morning greeting. Even in my early teens, I knew that a program like Today in Cleveland was old school, from a different era and something that would have been off the air a long time ago in a different market. But each market has their local traditions and dearly loved personalities and Del and Tom had earned that title and then some.

Both Del and also, Tom, had amazing careers.

They’d start the show with a different piece of music each morning, with Tom doing his dance and one of the things they played quite often was Willie’s version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” That sealed the deal. I’d heard a few things prior to that, including his duet with Julio Iglesias and I think the Highwaymen were on my radar a bit. But hearing his take on “Sunny” made it clear he was my kinda guy.

The Stardust album was my first purchase of many Willie albums. My buddy Kevin pointed me to Healing Hands of Time in the early ‘90s. The Great Divide came along in 2002 (I’m just giving you the Cliff’s Notes version of all of the Willie albums I’d bought by that time) and close to 20 years later, I was thrilled to get a chance to ask Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty about his experience collaborating with Nelson, who cut “Recollection Phoenix,” a wonderful song that the singer had written for The Great Divide, which was being produced and overseen by longtime MB20 associate Matt Serletic.

I can hear that it’s Rob’s song. But I can really hear, having love for both artists, what Willie brought to it. Like anyone I’ve had the chance to discuss Willie with, Rob told me that the experience of working with him did not disappoint.

“You know, [Nelson] liked that song because he felt like a lot of times, people write a song about being on the road, and people write about women on the road, but it’s usually the woman that gets left at home,” Thomas explained. “And this was from the point of view of my wife, who is a woman who is on the road with me. He said he’d never seen that in a song before and there’s a line in there that says, ‘You might think the road has made her colder,’ and he liked that, and he liked the line,‘I wonder when the hell did I get older.’ He was always joking that he was wondering when that was going to start for him.”

“I got to spend a lot of time with him and we got to do some shows with him and we got to play with him a lot. We got to hang out. I think for me, that was the dream,” he says. “I used to get asked all of the time, ‘Who do you want to work with the most?’ And it was always Willie. He’s always been a legend. So to be able to hang out with him and for him to mentor [me]. I’ve been really fortunate with people like him and people like Carlos [Santana], who is one of my closest friends, having that [experience with them] is pretty invaluable.

Those memories we have tucked inside Willie’s songs are also invaluable. Eventually, I stored up enough of them that it occurred to me that there was one thing I didn’t know that was an important part of the source material.

How did Dad get into Willie’s music? What’s his favorite album or Willie song?

I asked him and his answer surprised me. “I’ve never really been a fan.”

So I suddenly realized that like many of us do at some point, he’d bought the Western Cafe shirt with the Willie quote because he loved the Western Cafe itself. I guess I should be grateful that they didn’t have a wide line of merch, because if Dad doesn’t buy that shirt, do I end up being a Willie Nelson fan?

You’re right. Probably so.

This has all gone further than I intended, which is often the case. I just wanted to write a quick bit on the occasion of Willie’s 93rd birthday, to share a quick anecdote about my own personal connection (not so quick, as it turns out!) and point you all towards something I enjoyed listening to today.

One of my favorite podcasts is Texas Monthly’s One by Willie podcast. The program is hosted by John Spong, who is a walking encyclopedia of Willie Nelson knowledge.

With each episode, he invites a different guest to go deep on their favorite Willie song. Combined with his knowledge, it’s a must-hear play that I look forward to as each episode arrives.

For Willie’s 93rd birthday, Rolling Stone’s Joseph Hudak turned the tables on Spong and invited him to do a collaborative episode of the podcast that would be hosted at One by Willie and also on Rolling Stone’s feed. The goal: to get the story behind how Spong does the podcast, the origins of the idea and so on. Spong, naturally, gets Hudak to share the stories and memories associated with his own favorite Willie Nelson song.

It’s a fun listen on a lot of levels, including being able to hear Spong speak as a journalist who has been working for decades in Willie’s backyard and what that looks like, having access to Willie on an ongoing basis and how he got that access to begin with.

I’ll leave you with this. If you want to take a journey with Willie’s music, Texas Monthly’s ranking of all 155 Willie Nelson albums will help you down that path. Spong had a big part in the ranking (which is now ongoing and updated as Nelson releases new albums) too. He’ll tell you about it during the above episode.

Enjoy and happy birthday to Willie. Here’s to many more!

Willie Nelson photo credit: Minette Layne

For Yes fans, lineup changes are hardly surprising. When I talked to Rick Wakeman years later in 2016 as he and Anderson and Trevor Rabin had teamed up to tour as ARW, I made the comment that one positive of what they were doing is that it was probably less complicated than figuring out business/projects on a normal day in Yes.

Trust me, it’s never easy. Brian [Lane, longtime Yes associate] has been back managing me personally since 2011. I mentioned to him about Jon and Trevor and Brian said, “You’ve got to make this happen.” I said, “Look, you’ve got such a connection with Yes over the years and the Yes music and Jon and Trevor. Why don’t you give them a ring and put forward your ideas about how you think it could come together and see what they say.” This is what Brian did and then Brian took on the project. It’s never easy to put anything like this together, because it’s complicated, to put it bluntly. You’ve got to get all of the musicians together and we’re still deciding exactly on who is going to play drums and bass and we also want to get a guitarist and keyboard player to do the secondary parts for Trevor and myself.

You’ve got to suddenly start looking at production, you’ve got to start looking at how you’re going to put rehearsals together, because you know, we live six thousand miles apart. You’ve got to look at all sorts of things and I know this might sound really daft, but you’ve also got to look at the fact that between Trevor, Jon and myself, our ages total over 200 years. So it’s something that we have to look at very closely to go, “Hang on a minute, if we’re going to set about this solid two month tour, we want to be really fit, because if you’re really fit, then you can play to your best and you can be really strong.

We’re all very aware that we’ve got to make sure that we are really on the ball health-wise and musically and in every sense of the imagination. It is easier when you get older to some extent, because you no longer want to go out clubbing after a show. You don’t want to wander back to the hotel at five in the morning, you know, wondering what your name is. I think you realize that you’ve got to look after yourself a bit, which actually isn’t a bad thing at all. There’s a lot more that has to be taken into consideration.

So of course, when the planned ARW album never came to light, I instantly thought of the above words from Wakeman. “There’s a lot more that has to be taken into consideration” seems like a quick summary that one can often apply in the world of Yes.

But getting back to that idea of Yes without Jon Anderson, how do you do that? What does that look like? We got a taste of that scenario at the beginning of the ‘80s when the two sides went their separate ways and Yes continued onward, picking up a couple of Buggles, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes for 1980’s Drama album.

Fans were not thrilled. (But 2026 Matt actually has a lot of affection for the record, which he was too young at the time to hear when it was first released).

Though the Buggles-related Yes experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, yet another new configuration of Yes was taking shape that featured Anderson back in the ranks — something that happened in the closing moments of the sessions for the album. But it wasn’t planned that way.

It’s a long story to recap the circumstances of how 1983’s 90125 ultimately ended up including Anderson (and it’s been told plenty of times), but as a fan, I’m glad it happened that way. Vocalist and guitarist Trevor Rabin and Anderson were a wonderful combination, even if the 90125 record, much like Drama, ended up being a polarizing record for fans.

That’s not saying much though, if you were hanging around alt.music.yes in the earlier days of the internet, which was the place where I first really learned that Yes fans can and will argue about anything, no matter how good it is. Somewhere, there’s probably someone right now complaining about how the Close to the Edge album could have been better.

The events of 2008 would really give them all something to complain about. The prog legends grabbed vocalist Benoit David (a relative unknown, for most of us) after finding him on YouTube and went out to salvage their previously scuttled summer tour plans.

The Internet tells me that I held out for about eight months before caving in (like many Yes fans do) and checking out the latest experiment when David and Yes came to the Pine Knob Music Theatre in the summer of 2009. I was drawn in by the double bill of Yes and the original lineup reunion of Asia.

I would have told you that this show happened later, because famously, my wife came to town relatively early in our dating history, for a surprise visit. She was equally surprised when I told her I planned to keep my previously scheduled plans to go see the original lineup of Asia at the House of Blues. The way I’ve told the story in the years since is that I was going to the show because I was marking off an important item on the Asia fan bucket list. But I guess I’d already marked that off. Oops.

Reader, she married me anyway.

The Detroit show (Clarkston, if we want to get technical about it) was another interesting bucket list moment, if only to get the chance to see Steve Howe doing double duty with both bands. But musically, it was a great night too and speaking of bucket list things, we were finally getting to see Yes play songs from the Drama album live! The closest I’d come to that previously was seeing Dream Theater play a bit of “Machine Messiah” while they were on tour with Yes.

David finally made his debut on album a couple of years after that with the arrival of 2011’s Fly From Here. The album, produced by Trevor Horn and the band, now featuring Downes back on keyboards, was centered around an unfinished piece of music that the pair had begun back in that ill-fated Drama era and they’d even performed it live during the tour for the record.

Marshall Bowden has recently taken a deep dive into the album for his excellent New Directions in Music newsletter, so I’ll point you to that for the long cut when it comes to Fly From Here.

For me personally, Fly From Here was a stunning return to form for Yes, against many odds — though looking at their discography now, it really stands as the next chapter in what had been a fairly solid run of Yes albums starting with 1997’s Open Your Eyes.

Though I enjoyed Open Your Eyes — and the tour that really brought me into the circle as far as “Classic Yes” — it was really 1999’s The Ladder, produced by powerhouse producer Bruce Fairbairn (who unfortunately passed away near the end of the band’s time working on the album) that brought me fully back onboard with being a Yes fan.

It’s interesting now to look at how short the relative timespan is of everything that happened with Yes between Open Your Eyes and 2001’s Magnification. But they were very active, touring regularly and things kept happening — like the return of Rick Wakeman to the lineup. I think that’s why it stung so much for me when Anderson made his (somewhat) forced exit. They had been on a really strong path and I wanted to see that continue.

The reality is that if we look at the time between Magnification and Fly From Here, things had gotten pretty stagnant (even though there were some good things happening along the way — I enjoyed the orchestral tour that brought us the Symphonic Live album). They continued to be great in the live setting, but there wasn’t much happening beyond that.

That’s another reason that Fly From Here was a breath of fresh Yes air. Even with the significant loss of Anderson as a writer, a monumental loss that could have been catastrophic (as we’ve seen with so many other bands) for the album that followed, Fly From Here somehow rose above.

A big part of that success, in my opinion, was the title suite, which clocks in at 23:49 (apparently, I forgot, beating their previous “longest” song, “The Solution,” from Open Your Eyes, by two seconds. Well done, guys.), but it’s not the whole foundation that holds the house up here. There’s other strong material on the record, Chris Squire’s “The Man You Always Wanted Me to Be” and also, “Hour of Need” are two favorites for me, as the guy who likes introspective Yes. “Into the Storm” is another major highlight.

It was a short-lived victory (he says, understanding that not all Yes fans feel as positively about Fly From Here). Less than a year later, David developed vocal issues (reportedly a respiratory illness) and was replaced by vocalist Jon Davison, a recommendation that came via Squire’s friend, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.

Davison had his own prog roots, having been the frontman of the progressive rock group Glass Hammer at the time he was enlisted into Yes and he also had previously worked with Seattle-based psychedelic rockers Sky Cries Mary. Though he grew up as a fan of Genesis, Rush and Queen, it was Yes that he named as his favorite group and greatest musical influence during a 2010 interview for the official Glass Hammer website.

He’s still the guy as I’m writing this and though he’s been a part of perhaps the most dismal (in my opinion) Yes album in their catalog, I’ve enjoyed the work he’s done with them since then.

But I always wished the David era would have gone on longer — and if you’re in that camp as well, you’ll be interested to know about the 2026 re-release of From a Page, which arrived initially as an EP in 2019.

The original EP collected four recordings that had been done during the initial period of songwriting and work on Fly From Here when Oliver Wakeman was still in the band as keyboardist.

As Downes came back into the Yes lineup, Wakeman found himself on the sidelines and understandably, with feelings about the experience that were pretty raw. But he’d had a long connection with the band members — particularly Steve Howe, who he’d worked with prior to even joining Yes. Eventually, as he detailed in a 2019 interview, he found himself drawn back to the recordings he’d been a part of, an experience that seems like it was therapeutic following the passing of Chris Squire.

When I was no longer in the band I decided I didn’t really fancy listening to Yes music for a bit. A few years went by and I hadn’t really thought about Yes for a while and then I heard that Chris was ill and so I dropped him an email and just wished him well and hope everything was ok and that he would get better soon.

A few months later I was about to move house and I realized I hadn’t listened to the Live from Lyon album at all since I received my copies. For some reason, as I was packing up my studio in my house, I thought I’d put that record on and have a listen to it. So I put it on and I can’t remember exactly what track was playing, but I’m sure it was a track that is quite heavily bass-driven. Anyway, I went downstairs and my laptop was on the dining room table. I looked at the screen and there was a message from Paul Silveira (who was the tour manager) and the email told me that Chris had passed away that morning. I was shocked as I could hear Chris playing on the record upstairs. A strange moment indeed.

When I left the band, they sent me DVDs with the files from the recording sessions of the songs that I’d been working on with them. I decided that once I’d moved house I would have a listen to them and see if there’s anything that was usable. So I moved into the new house, set up my studio and then opened up the files (starting with the “Gift of Love” because that was originally from a song that Chris and I had written) and I put a lot of time just pulling parts together and going through all the takes and trying to see what there was.

I started to pull it into quite a good shape, I added some more keyboard parts and additional vocals but the majority of the track was there from the original sessions. I decided to do this work in memory of Chris and also to have a Yes piece just for me so I would always remember that we had been a creative recording lineup, not just a touring entity. For a long time, it was just my own private Yes track!

Fast forward a few years and I kept listening to the “Gift of Love” track over and over again and I thought there must be something here if I keep listening to it!

I think I just put a tweet out on Twitter that said I’d just been listening to a new and unreleased Yes track which I really liked and the Yes management got in touch with me. We had a phone call and went through a few different variations of how it could be released. It was then decided that the best thing to do was for me to get all the tracks into shape and then have a meeting with Steve Howe to talk about the project.

I did the rough mixes and then met up with Steve and we talked about the options for releasing the track and in the end came to an agreement and that’s how it came together really.

I recall hearing the From a Page EP at the time and naturally, there was a curiosity to hear more from the David era. It didn’t fully land with me. I don’t have a great excuse, but I can tell you that I’m not really an EP or singles guy. As one who likes albums, anything that’s shorter than that tends to get lost in the shuffle.

Sometimes, as you’ll appreciate as a music fan, it’s just the timing of it all and how much music you’re being bombarded with (which is a good problem to have!). I can’t tell you what I was listening to in that particular moment, but I gave it a quick listen, on streaming most likely, and moved on.

So I was interested when I heard that there was an expanded reissue of From a Page coming out, available on vinyl and also a double CD edition. That’s a lot to get out of something that started as four tracks, right?

I was skeptical too. But let me tell you, when I pressed play this morning, I was pretty excited as I started to listen to the material. Here’s some more about the origins of the songs from the press release for this new reissue, which landed on Friday.

In 2010, after a last-minute show in Zacatecas, Mexico, the band (Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White, Benoit David & Oliver Wakeman) met up in Phoenix, Arizona to begin writing for the next YES album. This two-week session would bear fruit to the 4 released songs in addition to “Into the Storm”, “Hour of Need” & “The Man You Always Wanted Me To Be”, all of which would appear on the Fly From Here album featuring Geoff Downes after Wakeman departed during the recording sessions.

Overseen by Oliver Wakeman, and mixed and remastered by Karl Groom, this expanded and remastered edition of YES- From A Page incorporates the original 4 songs, along with alternate keyboard versions of 3 songs from Fly From Here, featuring Oliver Wakeman’s keyboard parts from the original writing sessions replacing the keyboard parts added by Geoff. Disc 1 also features the studio version of the Chris Squire-written song “Aliens”, which was played during the 2008 ‘In The Present’ tour, to create the album which was envisioned prior to Trevor Horn’s arrival.

Disc 2 includes demo versions of many of the songs, including “Updraft”, which became the basis for the ‘Army of Angels’ section of “Into The Storm”, “Don’t Take No For An Answer”, which was not on the original album but worked on during the sessions, along with an acoustic alternative version of “Words on a Page” and the single mix of “To The Moment”, which was previously only available on the original vinyl.

I agree with some of the early commentary that I’ve seen online about this new edition of From a Page that it presents David in a light vocally where he sounds more comfortable. I think there’s also something to be said for the excitement and positive energy that comes about as you’re first digging into something new creatively, in this case, writing songs for the first time as Yes with David in mind. You can hear that in these recordings.

I like that Wakeman, as the PR materials describe, took what he’d started with the original From the Page EP even further, “to create the album which was envisioned prior to Trevor Horn’s arrival.”

I found the sequencing to be pretty revelatory, placing the songs that we know from Fly From Here in the flow of the stuff from From a Page. It all suddenly has a greater context that was missing previously. The demo versions, also, show how far along some of this stuff was as far as the vision, even in the early stages.

It made me miss Chris Squire and it also made me wish (again) that David would have gotten a better chapter and outcome with Yes. But I also appreciate that we’re able to hear it now. You can probably name five examples easily of material you wanted to hear from your favorite artist or group that stayed locked in the vaults for decades before it hit your ears officially.

So it’s a good thing that we’re in an era now where we can hear things sooner than that. Everything I’ve read, it seems like Wakeman got some good closure being able to work on these recordings then (for the 2019 release) and now and I missed the detail that “Aliens,” which I first heard on Squire’s Squackett album with Steve Hackett, actually began its life in this period (and had been performed on tour prior to them tackling it in the studio).

There’s a lot to dig into and soak up with From a Page and hopefully it will give certain fans a fresh set of ears to give Fly From Here another shot. Admittedly, that’s difficult, since it’s been scrubbed from official streaming and replaced by the version that features Horn on lead vocals. Going the physical media route and grabbing a CD is an annoying suggestion to have to make here. But if you dig any of what you’ve heard here, I think you’ll appreciate it now.

P.S. Here’s how you can acquire the new versions of From a Page:

LP: https://amzn.to/4e3KDDs

CD: https://amzn.to/4t0bkMV

Streaming: It’s on Spotify and anywhere else you might listen to music.

P.S.S. Yes, I’ll be ready in 2030 when Oliver decides to give us the six disc box set with even more of these sessions.

P.S.S.S. What do you think of the newest Yes single, “Aurora,” as long as we’re here talking so much about Yes?

P.S.S.S.S. We should talk more about the fantastic music that Jon Anderson has been making with the Band Geeks, but this has already been really long. Go and check out their True album, go see a live show and get ready for another new Anderson album later this year.

P.S.S.S.S.S. Thanks for reading all of this.