The weekend began on a deceptively subdued note, but this would change.
My alarm clock performed its temporal duty, jolting me a deep slumber at the unearthly hour of 5:30 A.M. A shower washed the crunchy crystals of sleep from the corners of my eyes, and two 16-ounce mugs of coffee helped me keep them open. I phoned Edward to let him know I was on the way. No answer. Mild panic. Did he already leave? Had he changed his mind about taking me with him? Those were just a couple of the thoughts scurrying through my brain, accelerated and exacerbated by the caffeine coursing through my veins.
A day earlier, Edward Van Halen had invited me to accompany him to the NAMM Show (National Association of Music Merchants) in New Orleans. This is an annual convention where retailers, manufacturers, et al, get together to preview their new lines of guitars, amplifiers, drums, and any other musically-related gadgets and gewgaws. More than anything, though, it’s a chance to drink yourself unconscious on someone else’s dime. (more…)
Every day for two weeks, I had heard the song rise from what must have been a pair of seriously powered speakers, floating out over the hills of Hollywood like some sweetly-scented audio pollen. The music had to be screaming from those distant monitors because Billy’s guitar scuttled the birds in the trees and the vocals came down from the heavens like the very voice of God himself — if the Lord had spoken in a southern dialect and had a preoccupation with modified racecars. Precisely at 11 A.M., ZZ Top’s “Manic Mechanic” was spit out into the ether, signaling to the inhabitants of Laurel Canyon that it was time to start the day — and what better way to greet it than with those tres little hombres from Texas? Today, in another hour, I’d be doing just that, driving to Beverly Hills to meet up with Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard. And as the world’s greatest alarm clock woke up every other late sleeper in the gently sloping foothills, the song’s third verse took on even more serendipitous significance:
Showdown
You bet
And I haven’t saddled my pony yet
Well, I wasn’t heading for a showdown, exactly, more like a stimulating and witty exchange of musical theories; and, no, no pony to speak of, but there was some horsepower under the hood of my RX7 and the truth was, I hadn’t yet saddled up. I mainlined a cup of coffee, gathered up my cassette player and the band’s Deguelloalbum, jumped in the car and as Horatio Alger urged, headed west. (more…)
It was a day of unmatched California beauty; a startling and fiery sun perched high above in a crystal blue sky and blazed down promise. It was an essential day, a meteorological marvel meant to be stored away for future reference.
“Dude,” a friend would ask the following week, “do you remember how amazing it was last Tuesday?”
And of course you do. Even if the day itself was all you’d been given, that would have been gift enough. But the weather was merely an underscoring for the occasion, a gilded and golden opportunity to spend an hour with George Harrison. You’ll forget how to breathe before you forget this. Simply saying the words out loud (actually you’re reduced to mumbling them sotto voce because you’re afraid that anything above a whisper might reduce the reality to mirage) – “I am hanging with a Beatle” – is enough to render you stupid.
Then you start considering the notion that maybe Harrison himself ordered up the perfect day as an interview-ambience backdrop. We all knew that he spoke with God all the time (and if He was going to listen to anybody, He’s going to find a minute or two for a Beatle). So, anyone who recalls a glorious Tuesday back in 1974, somewhere around May or June perhaps, the presence of just a soupcon of magic embedded in the sunrays, you can thank George and God (though not necessarily in that order). (more…)
In 1973, I saw myself disappearing. I was a grammar ghost, a sentence-writing cipher with barely a byline to hang my rent on. I knew what I wanted to do – write about music and the people who made it – but I didn’t know how to go about getting there. I decided to send out concert reviews. I couldn’t send an interview because I’d never done one. But I could buy a concert ticket, go see a band, and write about it. That was within my limited financial and professional means.
Magazines did respond; they passed me over. Rolling Stone. Circus. Guitar Player. Creem. Crawdaddy. The memento mori of a career that would never be. Death head rejection letters. I was turned down by the best. There actually came a point when receiving personalized rejection notices made me feel like I was getting closer. After all, someone had to read the story in order to comment on how shitty it was. Did it matter that the work really was wonky? That I was sending live reports to publications that didn’t run that type of article? That I hand-wrote the stories because the letters a and y on my ancient Underwood manual didn’t work? The y wasn’t a problem. But you try and conjure words that don’t contain a certain letter – a vowel nonetheless – and all you can think of are words that do contain the vowel. Anonymity, shine your dim light down upon your stupidest son. I was fading like Levi’s.
Youthful exuberance and blissful ignorance is a heady potable but it will only take you so far. I needed to go farther. Change. A road trip. At that moment, changing who I was on any percipient level seemed about as likely as being published. But I could change where I was and the summer after high school, I embarked upon the wandering nomad-does-Europe incursion. I stuffed a backpack with a pair of jeans – my best faded Levi’s – a couple shirts, my best tale-telling writing pen and Kerouac’s On the Road (what else would you take?) and spent three months in Europe trying to find and lose myself. (more…)
The interview is set for 2:00 PM. At a quarter ‘til, the black hat, cascading curls, and nose ring saunter through the management office’s front doors. The receptionist raises eyes from a computer monitor and is momentarily stuck to her chair. She fights through the inertia of awe and approaches. Her hand is extended tremulously, but Slash ignores the shake and encloses her in a friendly embrace. He sees me sitting on the couch, walks over, and shakes my hand heartily. He even apologizes for being late when he’s 15 minutes early.
This is who Slash is. He understands the importance of keeping business appointments and hugging the people who work for you. Twenty years ago, back in ’87, when he recorded Guns N’ Roses’ debut, Appetite For Destruction, he set in motion the ritual beheading of the ’80s metal hair bands. With Velvet Revolver, he has synthesized the electric blues and R&B raunchiness of the Stones and Aerosmith and almost single-handedly brought about the Renaissance of the Les Paul.
At that moment in time, he made the transition from guitar player to Guitar Player God. With the metamorphosis came perks – engorged bank accounts and burning hot stripper girlfriends. Through it all, though, one thing stayed constant: His love for the guitar. He loves playing them and talking about them, and when we finally made our way to one of the conference rooms, that’s exactly what we did. (more…)
Chicago, Illinois, April 1977 — I knew what I was in for ten seconds after Guitar Player said to me: “We want you to interview Led Zeppelin.” My head filled with the clarion call of screaming guitars and in a moment of epiphany I saw it all: Jimmy Page would be my touchstone. Every story I’d ever written or ever would write would be measured against this one.
“Screw this up,” I also remembered muttering to myself, “and the closest I’ll ever get to another guitar player is looking at his picture on the cover of an album!”
I silenced the voice and plodded ahead. GP had only made one cursory call to Zeppelin’s record company offices in New York, and had left the rest up to me. I contacted Swan Song immediately. The baton had been passed and I ran with it like Forrest Gump.
“Run, Rosen, Run!”
What I thought would be a sprint turned into a marathon.
The next seven months were devoted to making phone calls and leaving messages. Dealing with Zeppelin’s demands and strange requests became a daily ritual. In many ways, they may have been testing my resolve, some sort of acid test meant to reveal just how truly motivated I was. (more…)
When you talk about classic rhythm sections, you probably think about John Bonham and John Paul Jones or Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. But Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, drummer and bass player, respectively, for Creedence Clearwater Revival, were responsible for recording some of the most driving and potent rhythm tracks ever laid down on tape. Clifford was a very simple drummer, but had a feel that perfectly complemented the songs of John Fogerty. For years, “Cosmo,” as he was affectionately known to friends, backed the guitarist/singer on a number of hits including “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and a host of others. But egos and politics came into the picture and a band that had sold millions of records, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, appeared at Woodstock, and developed a sound that would live on for decades, was broken apart.
For years, Doug Clifford has toured as part of Creedence Clearwater Revisited, a group that performs all the CCR songs in a type of greatest hits package. Stu Cook is on bass, of course, and the group is rounded out by Fogerty soundalike John Tristao on vocals, Steve Gunner on keyboards and guitars, and Tal Morris on lead guitar. The songs sound uncannily like the originals, driven in huge part by the presence of the original CCR rhythm section.
When you play all of these Creedence songs on tour, what feelings to they bring back? Are they good memories? Bad memories?
Well, it wouldn’t be bad memories, or otherwise I wouldn’t be out there flogging it, because traveling is not easy these days and you’ve got to have something to look forward to. The songs are great; they always have been. Anything that happened in between and after the fact really doesn’t matter to me — and certainly not when I’m playing the songs. (more…)
November 1974, St. Paul, Minnesota – In the fall of 1974, Creem magazine flew me out to the Twin Cities to interview Ritchie Blackmore. There had been a renewed interest in Deep Purple after they made a killer appearance at the Cal Jam concert seven months earlier. On that seventh day of April, the band stunned a crowd of 200,000 Ontario Motor Speedway fans when Ritchie shoved Marshall cabinets into the photographer’s pit and trashed his guitar Hendrix-style. He pushed the headstock of his Strat into a TV camera lens and shattered it, and then was nearly blown up when a flash pot ignited just inches from where he was standing.
It was rock and roll full throttle; it was Ritchie Blackmore without a leash. The show was bigger than life and crazier than hell, the elements that have been a part of every memorable concert from the Stones to Zeppelin. Purple was the greatest band in the world that evening, tearing up the night with a set list made up of songs from the just-released Burnalbum. It would be impossible to capture that kind of drama every night, however, and less than a year after that performance, Blackmore would call it quits to form Rainbow.
But there was nothing but a buzz of energy when I was finally ushered to the backstage area of the concert hall. The unique choreography of a rock and roll show was taking place. Amplifiers were given final tweaks and guitars underwent last-minute tune-ups. David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, the newest members of Purple Mark III, were strolling about. Out front, you could hear the St. Paul auditorium filling up, the crowd happy to be out of the 47-degree cold and growing ever louder in anticipation. (more…)
January 1976, Hollywood, California – The first time I saw Paul Kossoff play was back in 1969. Free were opening for Blind Faith on their first (and only) US tour. They were appearing at the 17,000-seat Inglewood Forum, a huge arena where the Los Angeles Lakers played. This was years before I started writing and I really didn’t know much about guitar players. I didn’t remember too much from the show but I did recall Kossoff having this really aggressive rhythm style and a simple melodic approach to his soloing. You could hear the Clapton connection in his approach.
I did learn that Paul was absolutely enamored with Eric’s playing. When I finally met Koss about seven years later, he couldn’t stop his gushing.
“The first real inspiration I had to get into it was seeing Eric Clapton with John Mayall at a small club. I didn’t know who he was or what had gone down, but here’s all these people yelling, ‘God, God!’ He really caught my attention and then I wanted to play.”
Paul finally met his hero on that Blind Faith tour. During our interview in 1976, he also told me of that momentous meeting.
“Clapton came up to me and asked ‘How the hell do you do that?’ talking about my vibrato. “And I said, ‘You must be joking!’” (more…)
December 1973, Hollywood, California – Back in 1973, before he was Joe “Fucking” Perry, the Aerosmith guitarist was just another kid in a hard rock band from Boston. Thirty-five years ago, he hadn’t racked up album sales in excess of 150 million or been immortalized in a video game. He was neither one-fifth of the Bad Boys from Boston nor one-half of the Toxic Twins. And he was still at least 10,000 broken strings away from becoming one of the coolest and most copied guitar players of all time.
But you could have never told Joe Perry that. From the moment Aerosmith were formed in 1971, the guitarist had a vision, and the balls and chops to back it up. In his head, the gold records were already mounted on his walls – right next to all of the framed guitar mag cover stories. The concept of Guitar Hero may have escaped him, but it certainly wouldn’t have surprised him.
Aerosmith were stars just waiting to happen.
That blind faith, however, was sorely tested at the beginning of ’73. Columbia Records had released Aerosmith, their eponymous debut, but it had barely broken into the Billboard Top 200. “Dream On,” their first single, had stalled at number 59 on the Pop Singles charts.
It was a bad year for a baby rock band trying to make its bones. (more…)
![Eddie-Van-Halen[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/Eddie-Van-Halen1.jpg "Eddie-Van-Halen[1]")
![zztopbw7[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/zztopbw71.jpg "zztopbw7[1]")
Every day for two weeks, I had heard the song rise from what must have been a pair of seriously powered speakers, floating out over the hills of Hollywood like some sweetly-scented audio pollen. The music had to be screaming from those distant monitors because Billy’s guitar scuttled the birds in the trees and the vocals came down from the heavens like the very voice of God himself — if the Lord had spoken in a southern dialect and had a preoccupation with modified racecars. Precisely at 11 A.M., ZZ Top’s “Manic Mechanic” was spit out into the ether, signaling to the inhabitants of Laurel Canyon that it was time to start the day — and what better way to greet it than with those tres little hombres from Texas? Today, in another hour, I’d be doing just that, driving to Beverly Hills to meet up with Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard. And as the world’s greatest alarm clock woke up every other late sleeper in the gently sloping foothills, the song’s third verse took on even more serendipitous significance:![460px-George_Harrison_1974[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/460px-George_Harrison_19741.jpg "460px-George_Harrison_1974[1]")
It was a day of unmatched California beauty; a startling and fiery sun perched high above in a crystal blue sky and blazed down promise. It was an essential day, a meteorological marvel meant to be stored away for future reference.![4042141[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/40421411.jpg "4042141[1]")
In 1973, I saw myself disappearing. I was a grammar ghost, a sentence-writing cipher with barely a byline to hang my rent on. I knew what I wanted to do – write about music and the people who made it – but I didn’t know how to go about getting there. I decided to send out concert reviews. I couldn’t send an interview because I’d never done one. But I could buy a concert ticket, go see a band, and write about it. That was within my limited financial and professional means.![slash[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/slash11.jpg "slash[1]")
The interview is set for 2:00 PM. At a quarter ‘til, the black hat, cascading curls, and nose ring saunter through the management office’s front doors. The receptionist raises eyes from a computer monitor and is momentarily stuck to her chair. She fights through the inertia of awe and approaches. Her hand is extended tremulously, but Slash ignores the shake and encloses her in a friendly embrace. He sees me sitting on the couch, walks over, and shakes my hand heartily. He even apologizes for being late when he’s 15 minutes early.![jimmy002_silverdome-april1977[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/jimmy002_silverdome-april19771.jpg "jimmy002_silverdome-april1977[1]")
Chicago, Illinois, April 1977 — I knew what I was in for ten seconds after Guitar Player said to me: “We want you to interview Led Zeppelin.” My head filled with the clarion call of screaming guitars and in a moment of epiphany I saw it all: Jimmy Page would be my touchstone. Every story I’d ever written or ever would write would be measured against this one.![doug04[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/doug041.jpg "doug04[1]")
When you talk about classic rhythm sections, you probably think about John Bonham and John Paul Jones or Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. But Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, drummer and bass player, respectively, for Creedence Clearwater Revival, were responsible for recording some of the most driving and potent rhythm tracks ever laid down on tape. Clifford was a very simple drummer, but had a feel that perfectly complemented the songs of John Fogerty. For years, “Cosmo,” as he was affectionately known to friends, backed the guitarist/singer on a number of hits including “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and a host of others. But egos and politics came into the picture and a band that had sold millions of records, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, appeared at Woodstock, and developed a sound that would live on for decades, was broken apart.![images144632_Stratocaster_Blackmore_Ritchie[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/images144632_Stratocaster_Blackmore_Ritchie1.jpg "images144632_Stratocaster_Blackmore_Ritchie[1]")
November 1974, St. Paul, Minnesota – In the fall of 1974, Creem magazine flew me out to the Twin Cities to interview Ritchie Blackmore. There had been a renewed interest in Deep Purple after they made a killer appearance at the Cal Jam concert seven months earlier. On that seventh day of April, the band stunned a crowd of 200,000 Ontario Motor Speedway fans when Ritchie shoved Marshall cabinets into the photographer’s pit and trashed his guitar Hendrix-style. He pushed the headstock of his Strat into a TV camera lens and shattered it, and then was nearly blown up when a flash pot ignited just inches from where he was standing.
January 1976, Hollywood, California – The first time I saw Paul Kossoff play was back in 1969. Free were opening for Blind Faith on their first (and only) US tour. They were appearing at the 17,000-seat Inglewood Forum, a huge arena where the Los Angeles Lakers played. This was years before I started writing and I really didn’t know much about guitar players. I didn’t remember too much from the show but I did recall Kossoff having this really aggressive rhythm style and a simple melodic approach to his soloing. You could hear the Clapton connection in his approach.
December 1973, Hollywood, California – Back in 1973, before he was Joe “Fucking” Perry, the Aerosmith guitarist was just another kid in a hard rock band from Boston. Thirty-five years ago, he hadn’t racked up album sales in excess of 150 million or been immortalized in a video game. He was neither one-fifth of the Bad Boys from Boston nor one-half of the Toxic Twins. And he was still at least 10,000 broken strings away from becoming one of the coolest and most copied guitar players of all time.