Sunday music

Why Does Love Got to be So Sad? - Derek and the Dominos



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Namesake of this blog, Uncle Dave's Dead Air, featured this gem last week:

The Other Side Of This Life - Jefferson Airplane



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Hope you are all having a lovely sabbath too!

PS: Map of where the week starts, worldwide. (that's just the sort of Tumblr-nonsense I end up lost in, for alarmingly long periods.)

Thursday music for your listening pleasure

Buddy Guy with David Myers (on bass) from the movie Chicago Blues (1970) --which I can not seem to locate, after much effort. Great 70s Chicago visuals!

Buddy Guy - First Time I Met The Blues



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I know I've shared this one before. Time for a reprise!

Cream - Born Under A Bad Sign



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Grateful Dead - Cassidy (Unplugged- Live) - 09/24/94 - Berkeley Benefit



One YouTube comment says this was actually a "Phil Lesh and friends" performance that included Bob, Jerry and Vince Welnick.

Taxes, Death and Trouble

Daisy's latest pesky earworms and other assorted music for your Thursday. Turn it up!

Only You Know And I Know - Delaney and Bonnie with Eric Clapton



Live from their British tour in 1969, also features George Harrison. YOWZA! Listen to them purty gee-tars! Excellent visuals, also.

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That song reminded me of this one, since Delaney and Bonnie play/sing back-up... we also heard the Jerry Garcia Band's version on the indispensable DEAD AIR (namesake of this blog) last night.

Lonesome and a Long Way From Home - Eric Clapton



Rest in Peace, Delaney Bramlett. A true son of the south, you rocked the house with aplomb and style.

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Got bluegrass?

Nice capsule history of this tune is provided before they break out the shit-kickin music. As I have written here before, my stepfather played bluegrass professionally, and he loved this song.

I always find it somewhat jarring to see bluegrass played by people wearing SUITS, ha.

Rocky Top - Osborne Brothers



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They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose....

Deacon Blues - Steely Dan



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Super Motown finale!

This song was the theme to the movie of the same name. (The movie's protagonist is named Mr T, and I've always assumed that is where the famous Mr T got his name.)

Smooooooooth and nice as gravy on rice. Unbelievable talent.

Biographical aside: I used to listen to this song every day before I went off to slog through the 10th grade... for several months. It made me feel like an otherworldly being! Especially when combined with other things, but we won't go there...

I just love love love it, and I was somewhat surprised to discover, in a check of this blog... that I have never posted it before. (Must correct this situation posthaste!)

Trouble Man - Marvin Gaye



And yes, it's where we get today's blog post title. Rest in Peace, Marvin.

I Feel Free

I Feel Free - Cream (promotional video-1966)

I Looked Away

Derek and the Dominoes - I Looked Away

Born Under a Bad Sign

Written by the late bluesman Albert King, this was the first version I ever heard. I've always loved it.

I think Eric Clapton qualifies as someone with bad enough luck to play this. ;)

Two from Disraeli Gears

Good lord, is Disraeli Gears really 41 years old?

From Wikipedia:

The title of the album was taken from an inside joke. Eric Clapton had been thinking of buying a racing bicycle and was discussing it with Ginger Baker, when a roadie named Mick Turner commented, "its got them Disraeli Gears", meaning to say "derailleur gears", but instead alluding to 19th Century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The band thought this was hilarious, and decided that it should be the title of their next album. Had it not been for Mick, the album would simply have been entitled Cream.

I've always wondered! Damn, the internetz rule!

Enjoy these two fabulous tunes. I shall love them passionately until I am lowered into the grave.

PS: The second song is NOT the Van Halen song of the same name!

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World Of Pain - Cream



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This song is so purty, you can't stand it...a big favorite of your humble narrator. Take special note of Clapton's heavenly riffs, and Ginger Baker's signature "tom-tom" drumming style. Lots of the otherworldly vibe is undoubtedly due to Felix Pappalardi's incredible production.

Dance the Night Away - Cream

Odds and Sods - Azaleas and Beatles

Left: Azaleas! Photo from my hike in Falls Park (Greenville, SC) last weekend.

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I've been entrusted to get the oil changed in Mr Daisy's car, but can't seem to rouse myself to do anything but putter around and look at Vanessa's cat drink out of the toilet. Lots of overwork lately, with attendant exhaustion. Where's my Rhodiola? I need an IV administered.

Whilst sifting through a mountain of ancient, illegally-recorded videotapes, I discovered A HARD DAYS NIGHT ("My grandfather? I thought he was your grandfather!"). And that reminded me: I need to stop and pick up Pattie Boyd's book, because clearly, there isn't enough trashy gossip in my life. I was talking about the book with a friend recently, who proclaimed it a must-read.

Apparently, the UK edition is titled Wonderful Today, which is perfectly fine, but in the USA, it was changed to Wonderful Tonight, in case we didn't know which famous fellas she was attached to. ((rolls eyes))

Quote from Times review:

In “Wonderful Tonight,” Boyd seems like a real person who happened to be lucky enough to live shoulder to shoulder with rock deities. The prose is clear and unpretentious, and although she writes candidly about the pain her husbands’ infidelities caused her — particularly [George] Harrison’s affair with Ringo Starr’s first wife, Maureen — this isn’t a bitter tell-all screed. There’s an aura of sweetness around Boyd’s approach. Her early years with Harrison, who comes off as a relatively gentle man, clearly were happy ones, and she rather openly states that she regrets leaving him — although she’s quick to acknowledge she would have regretted missing out on the passion she felt for [Eric] Clapton.

GEORGE AND MAUREEN! I MUST KNOW MORE!!!

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I know I am pretty delinquent in my coverage of the Pennsylvania primary, which I knew Hillary would win, anyway. I am getting plenty depressed as the media and the electorate wallow in blatant racism and sexism, then self-righteously yammer that "The candidates should just focus on the issues!"

Hey! In case yall haven't noticed, those ARE the issues!

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Speaking of George, this was the first song he ever wrote to appear on a Beatles album, and is also prominently featured in the aforementioned A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. George and Ringo called themselves "the economy-class Beatles"--usually George was rationed at two songs per album, max. (John and Paul were very territorial in the songwriting department.)

Not sure who he was talking about in the song. He was somewhat shy and introspective (especially compared to the other three) and was likely referring to various hangers-on, groupies and weirdos coming out of the woodwork after the Beatles became mega-famous. Certainly, he wasn't talking about our beloved Pattie!

Enjoy this little-known Beatles tune, which I've loved since I was about six years old. Feminists will appreciate that lots of us little girls sang it to boys who bothered us (in unison, too!) and we also jumped rope to it. (People who wonder why Pete Best got canned, just listen to that BEAT. The name was Beatles for a reason, people!)

The Beatles - Don't Bother Me

[via FoxyTunes / The Beatles]

Captain Walker didn't come home

Left: Tommy's mother, Ann-Margret, swims in baked beans, for reasons unknown, in Ken Russell's version of The Who's TOMMY (1975).

If you've never seen Ken Russell's phantasmagoric version of The Who's rock opera Tommy, you will have the chance tomorrow at 6pm EST, on Turner Classic Movies.

As a big Who fanatic, I will admit here: I used to hate the movie. As a teenager, I wanted the story of Tommy to be all hippie-sensitive and Dr Phil... sort of like the Broadway version turned out, I guess. But now? Bollocks, as Pete Townshend would say.

How often do you get to see Roger Daltrey dosed with acid (by Tina Turner, no less) borne by hundreds of hypodermic needles in some kinky-weird lotus-blossom creation? Keith Moon as child-molesting Uncle Ernie? ("Your mother's left me here to mind you/Now I'm doing what I want to!") Check out Jack Nicholson, as Tommy's concerned physician, sagely intoning "He seems to be completely un-recep-tive! The tests I gave him show no-sense-at-all!" And BTW, where did this American doctor come from? And how did American Ann-Margret get to be the mother of Roger Daltrey, with that Shepherds Bush accent of his? And who doesn't want to see Ann-Margret swimming in baked beans? Come on, admit that you do not see that every day.


Ken Russell is berserk, and extended his berserkery to the film. For those of us who had very definite ideas about Tommy, who he was, what he represented, the movie smashed all of that to hell. Of course, I now see that this deliberate iconoclasm was the whole intention; Townshend was giving the finger to those of us who were deifying Tommy, which was the warning delivered in the rock opera: Don't deify human beings. Only God deserves our worship.

Left: Tommy passes the acid test.

There is one truly incredible, bang-up sequence in the movie, delivered by hizzoner Eric Clapton, which I have included below. The blues classic Eyesight to the Blind (written by Sonny Boy Williamson) was the only non-original song in the rock-opera and was simply too perfect not to include, since Tommy IS deaf, mute and blind. This sequence--Tommy's mother taking him to a faith-healer played by Clapton at a Marilyn-Monroe shrine--is Ken Russell at his finest and most trippy. (Other times, if you've ever seen Russell's indescribably bizarre films The Devils or Lair of the White Worm, you know he can drift far off into Andromeda somewhere... Earth to Ken!) This particular sequence manages to be just bizarre enough to be utterly fabulous.

Great observations, meditations and hallucinations about music, God, worship, disability, trauma, child abuse, sexual abuse, religious hucksters and all of that good cosmic stuff. If you've never seen it and you have a taste for the strange, don't miss it.

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