I want everyone to know what I can really do
~Elvis Presley (to producer Bob Finkel)
Trouble/Guitar Man:
From Wikipedia:
Released
November 22, 1968
Recorded
June 1968
Genre
Rock and roll
Length
44:27
Label
RCA Records
Producer
Bones Howe
Elvis (NBC TV Special) is the thirty-fourth album by Elvis Presley, released on RCA Victor Records in mono, LPM 4088, in November 1968. Recording sessions took place in Burbank, California at Western Recorders on June 20, 21, 22 and 23, 1968, and at NBC Studios on June 27 and 29, 1968. It peaked at #8 on the Billboard 200. It was certified Gold on July 22, 1969 and Platinum on July 15, 1999 by the RIAA.
Hound Dog/All Shook Up:
From allmusic.com – John Bush: …………… Although he exhibited more nerves than he ever had in the past — a combination of the importance this chance obviously presented plus the large gap between the psychedelic music culture of 1968 and the rather quaint rock & roll of ten years earlier — Elvis delivered an incredible performance throughout the television special. His vocal performances were loose and gutsy, and his repartee was both self-deprecating and sarcastic about his early days as well as his moribund film career (“There’s something wrong with my lip!…I got news for you baby, I did 29 pictures like that”). He was uninhibited and utterly unsafe, showing the first inkling in ten years that there was life and spirit left in music’s biggest artistic property. The resulting LP, NBC-TV Special, combined sit-down and standup segments, but probably over-compensated on the standup segments. What impresses so much about NBC-TV Special is how much it prefigures the rest of Elvis’ career. Dramatic, intense, driven, and earthy, frequently moving, but not without the occasional cloying note, Elvis during the ’70s was the apotheosis of rock music, a righteous blend of rock and soul, gospel and pop, blues and country. …
~Read more over @ allmusic.com
This album also happens to contain one of Elvis Presley’s best songs…..
If I Can Dream:
Personnel:
Elvis Presley – vocals, guitar
The Blossoms – backing vocals
Tommy Morgan – harmonica
Mike Deasy, Al Casey, Tommy Tedesco, Scotty Moore – electric guitar
Larry Knechtel – keyboards, bass
Don Randi – piano
Charles Berghofer – bass
Hal Blaine – drums
John Cyr, Elliot Franks, Frank DeVito, D.J. Fontana, Alan Fortas, Jack Sperling staff drummer NBC Orchestra – percussion
What is it about this album?
Why is it so important in the americana /country/gospel music canon?
Satan Is Real is a gospel album by American country music duo The Louvin Brothers.
Released
November 16, 1959
Recorded
August 8–10, 1958
Genre
Country, Gospel
Length
31:54
Label
Capitol
Producer
Ken Nelson, John Johnson (Reissue)
The gospel/country duo Charlie and Ira Louvin was born and grew up in the Sand Mountain region of Alabama, they lived on a cotton farm south of the Appalachian Mountains, that’s where they developed their distinct harmony style in the deep Sacred Harp tradition of the Baptist church.
Ira Louvin died in a car wreck in 1965. Charlie Louvin died last year at 83 just a few months after publishing his story about The Louvin brothers.
In The recently published book, Satan is Real, the ballad of the Louvin Brothers, Charlie talks about their singing style.This is not a straight quote, but it goes something like this:
…people who saw the Louvin Brothers perform were mystified by the experience. Ira was a full head taller than me, he played the mandolin like Bill Monroe and sang in an impossibly high, tense, quivering tenor. I(Charlie) strummed a guitar, grinned like a vaudevillian and handled the bottom register. But every so often, in the middle of a song, some hidden signal flashed and we switched places — with Ira swooping down from the heights, and me angling upward — and even the most careful listeners would lose track of which man was carrying the lead. This was more than close-harmony singing; each instance was an act of transubstantiation.
I could not find any live footage from Satan is real, but this clip of them singing, I don’t belive you’ve met my baby is a fine showcase for their intricate singing style:
“It baffled a lot of people,” Charlie Louvin explains in his fantastic memoir. “We could change in the middle of a word. Part of the reason we could do that was that we’d learned to have a good ear for other people’s voices when we sang Sacred Harp. But the other part is that we were brothers.”
Morrison is still a brooder–“Why did you leave America?” he asks over and over on the final cut, and though I’m not exactly sure what he’s talking about, that sounds like a good all-purpose question/accusation to me–but not an obsessive one, and this is another half-step away from the acoustic late-night misery of Astral Weeks. As befits hits, “Domino” and especially “Blue Money” are more celebratory if no more joyous than anything on Moondance, showing off his loose, allusive white r&b at its most immediate. And while half of side two is comparatively humdrum, I play it anyway. A ~Robert Christgau (Consumer guide)
Street Choir – Van Morrison Live at Montreux 1974:
From Wikipedia:
Released
15 November 1970
Recorded
March–July 1970, at the A&R Recording Studios, New York City
Genre
Folk rock, R&B, blues
Length
41:40
Label
Warner Bros.
Producer
Van Morrison
His Band and the Street Choir (also referred to as Street Choir) is the fourth solo album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was released on 15 November 1970 by Warner Bros. Records. Originally titled Virgo’s Fool, Street Choir was renamed by Warner Bros. without Morrison’s consent. Recording began in early 1970 with a demo session in a small church in Woodstock, New York. Morrison booked the A&R Studios on 46th Street in New York City in the second quarter of 1970 to produce two sessions of songs that were released on His Band and the Street Choir.
Domino (Midnight Special TV-show, 1977):
Reviewers praised the music of both sessions for its free, relaxed sound, but the lyrics were considered to be simple compared with those of his previous work. Morrison had intended to record the album a cappella with only vocal backing by a vocal group he called the Street Choir, but the songs released on the album that included the choir also featured a backing band. Morrison was dissatisfied with additional vocalists to the original quintet that made up the choir, and these changes and others have led him to regard Street Choir poorly in later years.
“His Band and the Street Choir is a free album. It was recorded with minimal over-dubbing and was obviously intended to show the other side of Moondance. And if it has a flaw it is that, like Moondance, it is too much what it set out to be. A few more numbers with a gravity of ‘Street Choir’ would have made this album as close to perfect as anyone could have stood.”
~John Landau
His Band and the Street Choir was as well received as Morrison’s previous album, Moondance. Street Choir peaked at number 32 on the Billboard 200 and number 18 on the UK Album Chart. It owes its success mainly to the US Top Ten single “Domino”, which was released before the album and surpassed Morrison’s 1967 hit, “Brown Eyed Girl”. As of 2010, “Domino” remains the most successful single of Morrison’s solo career. Two other singles were released from the album, “Blue Money” and “Call Me Up in Dreamland”; although less successful, they still managed to reach the Billboard Hot 100.
I’ve been working (From Van Morrison in Ireland, 1979 in Dublin and Belfast):
Tracks:
All songs written by Van Morrison.
Side one
“Domino” – 3:06
“Crazy Face” – 2:56
“Give Me a Kiss (Just One Sweet Kiss)” – 2:30
“I’ve Been Working” – 3:25
“Call Me Up in Dreamland” – 3:52
“I’ll Be Your Lover, Too” – 3:57
Side two
“Blue Money” – 3:40
“Virgo Clowns” – 4:10
“Gypsy Queen” – 3:16
“Sweet Jannie” – 2:11
“If I Ever Needed Someone” – 3:45
“Street Choir” – 4:43
Jason Ankeny (allmusic.com):
After the brilliant one-two punch of Astral Weeks and Moondance, His Band and the Street Choir bringsVan Morrison back down to earth, both literally and figuratively. While neither as innovative nor as edgy as its predecessors, His Band and the Street Choir also lacks their overt mysticism; at heart, the album is simply Morrison’s valentine to the R&B that inspired him, resulting in the muscular and joyous tribute “Domino” as well as the bouncy “Blue Money” and “Call Me Up in Dreamland.”
It’s not enough. By anyone else’s standards, of course, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 is an embarrassment of riches — five albums and ten years’ worth of barroom, hockey-arena and baseball-stadium dynamite; greatest hits, ace covers, love songs, work songs, out-of-work songs — the ultimate rock-concert experience of the past decade finally packaged for living-room consumption, a special gift of thanks to the fans who shared those 1001 nights of stomp & sweat and the best possible consolation prize for the poor bastards who could never get tickets.
~David Fricke – rollingstone.com
“Thunder Road” – October 18, 1975 at The Roxy Theatre:
Live/1975–85 is a live album by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. It consists of 40 tracks recorded at various concerts between 1975 and 1985. It was released as a box set with either five vinyl records, three cassettes, or three CDs. There was also a record club only release which came on three 8-track cartridges, which is extremely hard to find.
Spirit in the Night – July 7, 1978 at The Roxy Theatre:
Springsteen’s long-awaited and highly-anticipated live album generated advance orders of more than 1.5 million copies, making it the largest dollar-volume pre-order in the history of the record business at the time.Record stores around the country found fans waiting in line on Monday morning before opening and one New York store reportedly sold the album right off the back of the delivery truck. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart, a rare occurrence that hadn’t happened in ten years since Stevie Wonder‘s Songs in the Key of Life in 1976.
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) – (again) – July 7, 1978 at The Roxy Theatre:
Not surprising, given Springsteen’s reputation as a live performer and the sheer scope of the 40-song set, most reviews were overwhelmingly positive. There were, however, a few critics that felt the album could have been better, citing the omission of several concert highlights such as Springsteen’s live rendition of “Prove It All Night” and his rousing cover of John Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, among others.
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..I need to address this issue of leaving out a 78-version of “Prove It All Night”. This is a tragedy.. it’s alright for those of us collecting bootleg concerts… and thus having heard the 78-version countless times, but what about the rest ? IMO Bruce made a real bad judgement…
So I really need to include a brilliant version in this post:
Prove it all Night – Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ. 19-9-1978:
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But.. back to “Live/1975-85”.. Here is the brilliant “The River” w/rap:
The River – September 30, 1985 at the LA Coliseum:
Let’s close the “youtubes” with Badlands..
Badlands – November 5, 1980 at Arizona State University, the night after the election of Ronald Reagan to the United States presidency:
My voice was never really that glamorous. But a big vocal range really isn’t necessary for the type of songs I sing. For what I sing, my voice does pretty well.
(Bob Dylan to Greg Kot in August 1993)
“My songs come out of folk music…..I love that whole pantheon. To me there’s no difference between Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe.”
(Bob Dylan)
Here is a brilliant live version of “Blackjack Davie” from 1993.09.12 – Great Woods – Mansfield, Massachusetts:
Wikipedia:
Released
November 3, 1992
Recorded
Mid-1992
Genre
Folk, blues
Length
55:31
Label
Columbia
Producer
Debbie Gold
Good as I Been to You is the twenty-eighth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in November 1992 by Columbia Records.
It is composed entirely of traditional folk songs and covers, and is Dylan’s first entirely solo, acoustic album since Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. It is also his first collection not to feature any original compositions since Dylan in 1973.
On the charts, Good as I Been to You reached #51 in the US and #18 in the UK.
Since launching the Never Ending Tour in June 1988, traditional covers became a feature at virtually every concert, often as part of an acoustic set. After recording Under the Red Sky in 1990, Dylan would not release an original song until 1997, and during that time, he would increasingly rely on his stockpile of covers for ‘fresh’ material. Dylan called these covers “the music that’s true for me.”
Aftermath:
The response to Good as I Been to You was surprisingly positive, particularly for an album with very modest ambitions. It drew comparisons with the acoustic sets featured in Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” shows, drawing much praise for his interpretive skills. A number of critics pointed out that Dylan’s voice was now physically ravaged, but the focus was often on the phrasing. “Dylan sounds now, in comparison to his younger self, like one of those ghosts,” wrote David Sexton of The Sunday Telegraph, “but a powerful ghost. The effect is not so much nostalgia…as deeply inward.”
Michael Gray:
….Yet this album, imprecise, errant, at times blurred and furry, is a singular creation that gains as well as loses by Dylan’s loss of the effortless certainty
of youth. Dark, complex, surreal and fractured, it is like an inspired, lost work from some opiumthralled folk archivist throwing his own torrid genius into celebrating the myriad strengths of anonymously created song: song from before there was a music industry to kill off its mystery and its purpose. Stand-out tracks: ‘Hard Times’, ‘Arthur McBride’, ‘You’re Gonna Quit Me’, ‘Diamond Joe’ and ‘Froggie Went a-Courtin’’. The fine outtake ‘You Belong to Me’ was used on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers.
–
Here is “Jim Jones” from the second Supper Club Show Nov 17 1993:
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David Wild (Rollingstone.com):
…..In its stripped-down intensity, Good As I Been to You recalls the midshow acoustic segments that in recent years have been a consistent highlight of Dylan’s Neverending Tour. Even more than that, the album’s intimate, almost offhand approach suggests what it would be like to sit backstage with his Bobness while he runs through a set of some of his favorite old songs. This is a passionate, at times almost ragged piece of work that seems to have been recorded rather than produced in any conventional sense.
Only a quarter of a century late, this is the sort of album the people who booed Dylan’s decision to go electric wanted from him. And for the most part, the songs on Good As I Been to You are the same sort of material that might have appealed to the younger, freewheelin’ Dylan back in the days when he was being influenced — by Woody Guthrie, for example — rather than exerting profound influence in his own right. Still, at least one selection — the unlikely but oddly delightful “Froggie Went A Courtin'” — evinces some of the fascinating perversity that fans have come to expect from Dylan in his middle age.
………… This fascinating exploration of musical roots is more than a diversion for musicologists. Good As I Been to You shows that sometimes one can look back and find something that’s both timeless and relevant. It also proves once again that Dylan can still be every bit as good as he’s been to us in the past. Which is, of course, as good as it gets. Read more @ rollingstone.com
My fav song from the album is “Hard Times“.
An extremely sincere rendition of this song was recorded in the summer of 92 and released on Dylan’s “Good As I Been To You”. Dylan premiered the song in concert on April 12, 1993 in Louisville, Kentucky. The song which was always employed as a show opener, was an almost constant feature throughout Dylan’s 93 summer tours, until it was suddenly dropped, mid tour, on August 21, 1993, never (as of yet) to return.
~Derek Barker (The Songs He didn’t write)
Here it is:
Here is Dylan & “Hard Times” @ Willie Nelsons’ 60th Birthday TV Special (KRLU-TV Studios – Austin, Texas, 27 April 1993):
Tracks:
All songs are traditional, arranged by Bob Dylan, except where noted.
“Frankie & Albert” (arranged by Mississippi John Hurt) – 3:50
“Jim Jones” (arranged by Mick Slocum) – 3:52
“Blackjack Davey” – 5:47
“Canadee-i-o” – 4:20
“Sittin’ on Top of the World” – 4:27
“Little Maggie” – 2:52
“Hard Times” (Stephen Foster, arranged by De Dannan) – 4:31
“Step It Up and Go” – 2:54
“Tomorrow Night” (Sam Coslow and Will Grosz) – 3:42
