Hard rock, rock, rock and roll,rock opera, heavy metal
Occupations
Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, actor
Instruments
Vocals, guitar
Years active
1967–present
Michael Lee Aday (born Marvin Lee Aday, September 27, 1947), known by his stage name, Meat Loaf, is an American hard rock musician and actor. He is noted for the Bat Out of Hell album trilogy consisting of Bat Out of Hell, Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Helland Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose. Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 43 million copies worldwide.After 35 years, it still sells an estimated 200,000 copies annually and stayed on the charts for over nine years, making it one of the best selling albums of all time.
Although he enjoyed success with Bat Out of Hell and Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell and earned a Grammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for the song “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” on the latter album, Meat Loaf experienced some initial difficulty establishing a steady career within his native US. However, he has retained iconic status and popularity in Europe, especially the UK, where he ranks 23rd for the number of weeks overall spent on the charts. He ranked 96th on VH1’s “100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.”
Meat Loaf has also appeared in over 50 movies and television shows,[sometimes as himself or as characters resembling his stage persona. His most notable roles include Eddie in the American premiere of The Rocky Horror Show and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Robert “Bob” Paulson in Fight Club.
Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer.
Nicknamed The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s.She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and, along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists.
She scored a big hit with her first release, a coupling of “Gulf Coast Blues” and “Downhearted Blues“, which its composer Alberta Hunter had already turned into a hit on the Paramount label. Smith became a headliner on the black T.O.B.A. circuit and rose to become its top attraction in the 1920s.Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter months and doing tent tours the rest of the year (eventually traveling in her own railroad car), Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day.Columbia nicknamed her “Queen of the Blues,” but a PR-minded press soon upgraded her title to “Empress”.
Smith was gifted with a powerfully strong voice that recorded very well from her first record, made during the time when recordings were made acoustically. With the coming of electrical recording (circa 1925), the sheer power of her voice was even more evident.
Grammy Hall of Fame
Recordings of Bessie Smith were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. This special Grammy Award was established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least 25 years old and that have “qualitative or historical significance.”
In 2002 Smith’s recording of the single, “Downhearted Blues“, was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.The board selects songs on an annual basis that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
“Downhearted Blues” was included in the list of Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001. It is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the 500 songs that shaped rock ‘n’ roll.
Inductions
Year Inducted
Category
Notes
2008
Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame
Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC
1989
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
1989
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
“Early influences”
1981
Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame
1980
Blues Hall of Fame
St. Louis Blues (1929):
Baby Won’t You Please Come Home (1923):
Album of the day – The Essential Bessie Smith (1997):
“All the songs had to work completely and honestly by themselves on acoustic guitar or on piano. If they didn’t, they weren’t worth putting on the record.”
~Ryan Adams (about ‘Gold’)
“[Gold is] me not buying my own bullshit for two seconds.”
~Ryan Adams
Gold is the second studio album by Ryan Adams, released September 25, 2001 on Lost Highway Records. The album remains Adams’ best-selling album, certifying gold in the UKand going on to sell 364,000 copies in the U.S. and 812,000 worldwide.Adams noted that “with Gold, I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.”
Adams intended for the album to be a double album, but his record label, Lost Highway, condensed the album into a single disc.According to Adams, the label “took the last five songs, made it a bonus disc and put it on the first hundred and fifty thousand copies. Fucking my fans over and making them pay extra for a record I wanted to be a double album. They counted that as one record.”This bonus disc is known as Side Four; the disc’s title reflects the fact that the bonus material makes up the fourth side of the double LP edition of the album.
The album includes “When the Stars Go Blue“, which has been covered by artists such as The Corrs and Bono, Tyler Hilton, Bethany Joy Galeotti, and Tim McGraw. “New York, New York” became a notable MTV and VH-1 favorite following the September 11 attacks. “The Rescue Blues” was featured in the end credits of the 2001 film Behind Enemy Lines.
Adams’ friend and former roommate Adam Duritz (lead singer of Counting Crows) lends background vocals to several tracks.
Adams received three Grammy Award nominations in 2002: Best Rock Album, Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “New York, New York”, and Best Male Country Vocal Performance for “Lovesick Blues”.
Stephen King‘s 2006 book Lisey’s Story includes part of the lyrics to “When the Stars Go Blue”. Also, the song “The Rescue Blues” was featured in an episode of Scrubs. In 2011, “Answering Bell” was featured in the film and on the soundtrack to Bridesmaids.
RollingStone.com – David Fricke:
…… Gold lacks the concise ache of Adams’ indie solo prize from last year, Heartbreaker, but it is stronger on naked truth. In “Harder Now That It’s Over,” a messy tale of jealousy, gunplay and handcuffs co-written with Chris Stills, Adams sings with the straight, clear sorrow of a fool who beat doing hard time but sentenced himself to life alone. “I’m less than nothing now/I’m the one between the bars,” he admits over whispered accordion and a slender stream of steel-guitar tears — an age-old story told be a young singer-songwriter wise enough to let his heart speak for itself. read more: rollingstone.com
Andrew Gilstrap @ popmatters.com:
……
Overall, though, Gold feels like a record hiding behind masks. Maybe Adams has spent so many years laying his heart out on the line that he’s trying to create a little distance. In some cases, especially on the uptempo numbers, that works just fine. However, the album’s surprisingly minimalist lyrics and derivative arrangements make it stronger on vibe than actual content. Adams recently complained that he’s sick of himself and sick of being deep, and Gold may very well be his respite from that, exercising his inner music geek rather than his soul. Or maybe he’s just trying to say what he needs to say without revealing as much as in the past. Whatever the case, most of Gold lacks the universality and the heart-wrenching beauty of much of Adams’s earlier work. read more over @ popmatters.som
Track Listing:
All songs written and composed by Ryan Adams unless otherwise stated.
“New York, New York” 3:46
“Firecracker” 2:51
“Answering Bell” 3:05
“La Cienega Just Smiled” 5:03
“The Rescue Blues” 3:38
“Somehow, Someday” 4:24
“When the Stars Go Blue” 3:31
“Nobody Girl” (Adams/Ethan Johns) 9:40
“Sylvia Plath” (Adams/Richard Causon) 4:10
“Enemy Fire” (Adams/Gillian Welch) 4:09
“Gonna Make You Love Me” 2:36
“Wild Flowers” 4:59
“Harder Now That It’s Over” (Adams/Chris Stills) 4:32
“Touch, Feel and Lose” (Adams/David Rawlings) 4:15
“Tina Toledo’s Street Walkin’ Blues” (Adams/Johns) 6:10
“Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd.” (Adams/Causon) 3:25
Bonus disc: “Side Four”
“Rosalie Come and Go” 3:54
“The Fools We Are As Men” 4:01
“Sweet Black Magic” (Adams/Johns) 2:35
“The Bar Is a Beautiful Place” 5:58
“Cannonball Days”
Personnel:
Ryan Adams – Vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo, piano
May–June 1991 at Sound City Studios, Van Nuys and Devonshire, North Hollywood,California
“Polly” recorded in April 1990 atSmart Studios, Madison, Wisconsin
Nevermind is the second studio album by the American rock band Nirvana, released on September 24, 1991. Produced by Butch Vig, Nevermind was the group’s first release on DGC Records. Frontman Kurt Cobain sought to make music outside the restrictive confines of the Seattle grunge scene, drawing influence from groups such as the Pixies and their use of song volume dynamics.
Despite low commercial expectations by the band and its record label, Nevermind became a surprise success in late 1991, largely due to the popularity of its first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit“. By January 1992, it had replaced Michael Jackson‘s album Dangerous at number one on the Billboard charts. The album also produced three other charting singles; “Come as You Are“, “Lithium” and “In Bloom“.The Recording Industry Association of America has certified the album Diamond (over 10 million copies shipped), and the album has sold over 30 million copies worldwide.Nevermind was responsible for bringing alternative rock to a large mainstream audience, and critics subsequently regarded it as one of the best albums of all time.
From allmusic.com – Stephen Thomas Erlewine:
Nevermind was never meant to change the world, but you can never predict when the Zeitgeist will hit, and Nirvana‘s second album turned out to be the place where alternative rock crashed into the mainstream. This wasn’t entirely an accident, either, since Nirvana did sign with a major label, and they did release a record with a shiny surface, no matter how humongous the guitars sounded. And, yes,Nevermind is probably a little shinier than it should be, positively glistening with echo and fuzzbox distortion, especially when compared with the black-and-white murk of Bleach. This doesn’t discount the record, since it’s not only much harder than any mainstream rock of 1991, its character isn’t on the surface, it’s in the exhilaratingly raw music and haunting songs. Kurt Cobain‘s personal problems and subsequent suicide naturally deepen the dark undercurrents, but no matter how much anguish there is on Nevermind, it’s bracing because he exorcizes those demons through his evocative wordplay and mangled screams — and because the band has a tremendous, unbridled power that transcends the pain, turning into pure catharsis. … read more @ allmusic.com
Legacy:
Michael Azerrad argued in his Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (1993) that Nevermind marked the emergence of a generation of music fans in their twenties in a climate dominated by the musical tastes of the baby boomer generation that preceded them. Azerrad wrote, “Nevermind came along at exactly the right time. This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored, or condescended to.”
In its citation placing it at number 17 in its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, Rolling Stone said, “No album in recent history had such an overpowering impact on a generation—a nation of teens suddenly turned punk—and such a catastrophic effect on its main creator.”
Time placed Nevermind, which writer Josh Tyrangiel called “the finest album of the 90s”, on its 2006 list of “The All-TIME 100 Albums”.
Pitchfork named the album the sixth best of the decade, noting that “anyone who hates this record today is just trying to be cool, and needs to be trying harder.”
In 2006, readers of Guitar World ranked Nevermind 8th on a list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Recordings.
In 2005, the Library of Congress added Nevermind to the National Recording Registry, which collects “culturally, historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings from the 20th century.
Track listing:
All songs written by Kurt Cobain, except where noted.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Cobain, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic) – 5:01
“In Bloom” – 4:14
“Come as You Are” – 3:39
“Breed” – 3:03
“Lithium” – 4:17
“Polly” – 2:57
“Territorial Pissings” (intro lyrics from “Get Together”, written by Chet Powers) – 2:22
They call him the Boss. Well that’s a bunch of crap. He’s not the boss. He works FOR us. More than a boss, he’s the owner, because more than anyone else, Bruce Springsteen owns America’s heart.
~Bono (induction speech for at the 1999 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
From Wikipedia:
Also known as
The Boss, Bad Scooter
Born
September 23, 1949 (age 63)
Long Branch, New Jersey, United States
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed “The Boss“, is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey and his lengthy and energetic stage performances, with concerts from the 1970s to the present decade running up to an uninterrupted 250 minutes in length.
Springsteen’s recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwideand he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 20 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time, the 96th Greatest Guitarist of all time on their latest list and the 36th Greatest Singer of all time in 2008.
From allmusic.com – William Ruhlmann:
In the decades following his emergence on the national scene in 1975, Bruce Springsteen proved to be that rarity among popular musicians, an artist who maintained his status as a frontline recording and performing star, consistently selling millions of albums and selling out arenas and stadiums around the world year after year, as well as retaining widespread critical approbation, with ecstatic reviews greeting those discs and shows. Although there were a few speed bumps along the way in Springsteen‘s career, the wonder of his nearly unbroken string of critical and commercial success is that he achieved it while periodically challenging his listeners by going off in unexpected directions, following his muse even when that meant altering the sound of his music or the composition of his backup band, or making his lyrical message overtly political. Of course, it may have been these very sidesteps that kept his image and his music fresh, especially since he always had the fallback of returning to what his fans thought he did best, barnstorming the country with a marathon rock & roll show using his longtime bandmates.
.. read more over @ allmusic
Some of his recognition’s:
October 27, 1975: Bruce Springsteen appears simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time
Polar Music Prize in 1997.
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1999.
Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, 1999.
Inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, 2007.
“Born to Run” named “The unofficial youth anthem of New Jersey” by the New Jersey state legislature; something Springsteen always found to be ironic, considering that the song “is about leaving New Jersey”.
The minor planet 23990, discovered September 4, 1999, by I. P. Griffin at Auckland, New Zealand, was officially named in his honor.
Ranked No. 23 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Ranked No. 36 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Singers Of All Time.
Made Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People Of The Year 2008 list.
Won Critic’s Choice Award for Best Song with “The Wrestler” in 2009.
Performed at the Super Bowl XLIII half time show.
Kennedy Center Honors, 2009.
Rolling Stone magazine also ranked 8 out of 16 Springsteen’s studio albums in their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” in its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time list, in 21st and 86th, respectively.
Forbes ranked him 6th in The Celebrity 100 in 2009
John Steinbeck Award
Named 2013 MusiCares Person of the Year
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We will post some Bruce Springsteen lists later today / tomorrow.
