Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues

I realize I usually choose to write about albums that are in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.  But, today, I am on fire excited about the new solo blues album by Gregg Allman.  I’m not going to bore anyone with memories about Gregg Allman. I wrote my memories of The Allman Brothers live at the Fillmore East as one my first “music and memories” blogs. But, i have just heard what I believe to be the first great album of 2011. I’m talking about Gregg Allman’s first solo album in 14 years titled Low Country Blues

I had actually found out about this album being released a couple weeks back when a friend gave me a couple of recent issues of Rolling Stone magazine. One was the year-end issue with the complete last interview with John Lennon and the other was the November 25th issue with a cover story on Eminem and a story with Springsteen looking back at his album Darkness at the Edge of Town.  I flipped through the issue to find on page 28 the In the Studio column story of Gregg Allman and T-Bone Burnett making an album together.  I didn’t even read the article. I’ve been a fan of the Allman Brothers for years now and I’ve been a fan of T-Bone Burnett’s production style since he did the soundtracks for O Brother Where Art Thou? and Walk the Line and his earthy production for the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand.
I don’t know what I was expecting. I know Gregg has got to be one of the greatest white blues singers….and I had forgotten that too.  As is the routine when an artist releases a new album, they usually do some kind of mainstream media blitz. This past Sunday morning, he was a feature story on CBS’ Sunday Morning newsmagazine. He really came across very congenial and easy-going.  I don’t think I had ever read many interviews with Gregg Allman. There is a copy of his Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe in the DVD extras for Almost Famous.  From what Cameron talks about with that interview and the experiences that are portrayed in the movie, I don’t think the interview was an easy one.  Gregg also did a guest spot on Late Show with David Letterman. 
I went to work on Tuesday trying to find some music on my MP3 player to just knock myself up a notch and motivate me for the week. I had just written my blog on Cheap Trick at Budokan.  I was still on a big CT kick and felt like I was on the verge of a power-pop overload. So, I posted the question on Facebook to ask my friends what they were listening to.  Then, I talked to a co-worker about recent music he’d been listening to. I had a burned a couple of CD’s for him recently and was interested in his current listening habits.  It’s something that I still do after all those years working in a record store.  He said he’d liked all the stuff I had given him. But, he was really digging a copy of Muddy Water's Hard Again I had burned for him.  I thought for a second and realized that the blues are always something that I love to listen to (and go to) when the weather turns cold.  I remembered that Gregg Allman’s new album was to be released soon.  So, I checked my Napster app on my Android phone and noticed that Low Country Blues had been released that very day.  I saved it for a future listen.  That listen would be for my 25-30 minute commute home. I left work a little after 6pm, fueled up my car and pressed play on my phone’s touchscreen. In this age of technology and music at the touch of a finger, I was thrilled to hear new music that was so incredibly earthy and organic.
What I heard next just transported me from the front seat of my car and the cold and snow of central Nebraska to what I imagined to be a run down studio in the Delta region of the Southern United States.  Gregg’s voice reminded me of an old Delta Bluesman.  At 63 years of age, Gregg still seems like the “younger” brother of his late “older” brother Duane.  Of course, as a child of the 70’s, I remember when Gregg married Cher. It just seemed weird at the time. That will always be part of his history as is his storied life of drug and alcohol addiction. So, he’s lived the life of a troubled bluesman.  So, when you hear him sing, you can feel him wrenching out those stories on the road and the days of addiction too.
What gets me about this album is the production that T-Bone Burnett brings to this project. T-Bone takes these albums that are made in this century and makes them sound like they were made in the 1930’s or 40’s.  I listen to these blues covers and I think that finally someone has done this right.  Many blues artists and mainstream artists schooled in the blues try hard to make a blues album. But, somehow they fall short. I listen to the sparseness of Floating Bridge and Devil Got My Woman and I thought this was a Robert Johnson type of recording.  I’m a big fan of Eric Clapton and I think his blues albums are fantastic. But, I really wanted his Me & Mr Johnson album to be much more earthy like this album.  T-Bone Burnett recently produced another collaboration with Elton John and Leon Russell called The Union. So, I propose to Mr. Clapton to seek out Gregg Allman and T-Bone Burnett and make a truly great blues album. This just seems like the perfect pairing since Eric and Gregg’s big brother Duane recorded Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos Layla. 
I am really excited that a new release in 2011 has me pumped up for new music. This is not a sterile studio album. It is an album that breathes the blues. To add to how great it is, Gregg (and T-Bone) has Dr John, Doyle Bramhall II, Warren Haynes and the rhythm section of bassist Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose(from the Plant/Krauss’ Raising Sand) playing on this album.
It’s not often that I feel the need to sit down, talk and write about an album I’m enthusiastic about. But, this is one of them.  If you love a GREAT blues album with great musicians, I highly recommend this one.  If you love Gregg Allman’s vocals….If you love the production work of T-Bone Burnett….and if love great music,  Trust me on this one! You’ll love it!

Cheap Trick at Budokan

Power pop! Have you noticed that music has really become very categorized about the past 20-30 years. Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Grunge, Alternative, Pop, Punk, Glam, Thrash and the genre that this band (in my opinion) embodies the category of “Power Pop”!
CHEAP TRICK!!
I would say that this is a good way to describe “Power Pop”. Mix catchy tunes a la’ the Beatles and the Stones’ steady solid backbeat with the reckless abandon of Keith Moon from the Who along with a midwestern (from Rockford Illinois) work ethic. Wikipedia defined Cheap Trick’s power pop as:

a hard-edged yet melodic pop sound that combined the catchiness of The Beatles with the speed and energy of punk rock

This music memory is about Cheap Trick and the album that is lumped in with so many others as one of the greatest live albums of all time.  In the 1992 SNL spinoff Wayne’s World movie, Wayne told his girlfriend Cassandra that her band was “Live at Budokan, Double Live Gonzo and Intensities in Ten Cities”.  In case you didn’t know, that are the titles for this Cheap Trick album and two Ted Nugent live albums. For many, the rock of the 70’s is often regarded as a classic rock era. For that era, there are a handful of live albums that are included as part of that decade.  Deep Purple’s Made in Japan, UFO’s Strangers in the Night, KISS Alive, Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous, Frampton Comes Alive, The Who Live at Leeds and Cheap Trick at Budokan are the ones that immediately come to mind.
This album would ultimately be the band’s fourth album. It was never scheduled as the fourth album. It was just a small document of appreciation to the Japanese fanbase that had supported the band.  It was recorded over two nights at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall in April of 1978.  At first, It would only be available as an import in America. Then, a handful of DJ’s (most notably WBCN in Boston) started playing cuts from Budokan. Obviously, the tracks caught on nationwide and the hugeness of Cheap Trick escalated. From I Want You to Want Me to Surrender to an unbelievable cover of Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame,  Cheap Trick at Budokan became not only a nationwide phenomenon but a global one too.
The band was started by guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Brad Carlson(AKA Bun E. Carlos) in 1973 and added vocalist Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson a year later. I don’t know who the architect of the band’s image was. But, it was sheer genius! Instead of having a four piece group of members with stereotypical long hair rock star looks, the band opted for a 50/50 combination. The combination being that singer Robin Zander and bassist Petersson were placed as the good looking “cover” boys while guitarist Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos were shown as goofy nerdy guys who look less likely as members of a rock band.
I think I was introduced to CT when I was around 11-13 years old. My older sister Kathy had lost interest in her teenage obsession with the Bay City Rollers and traded it for newer acts she had heard like Cheap Trick. Truthfully, she had a thing for Bay City Rollers drummer Derek Longmuir and I think now had a thing for Robin Zander. At the time, I thought my sister was getting into some kind of drug addled hard rock act. I had been schooled (like many preteens) of the dangers of marijuana and rock music.  From the pictures I had seen of Zander and Petersson, I had deduced in my preteen mind….”they were on drugs!”  It wasn’t until I heard a small garage band of Junior High students come into McKinley elementary school to play a handful of cover tunes that really stuck with me. They opened with Hello There from the Cheap Trick at Budokan album. I remember that being just the ultimate song to open a set with….I still do! Pretty soon, in my teenage mind, Cheap Trick became THE cool band.

It would be my next year in my Junior High 7th grade Art class that I would be involved with many conversations about some great rock bands. I had grown up with 3 older sisters and by the late 70’s and early 80’s, my two older sisters had moved out of the house and gotten married. My sister Kathy had become a big country fan in the wake of the movie Urban Cowboy.  So, I relied on some of my classmates who had older male siblings to make my way into the world of what was cool in Rock & Roll.  I remember in that Art class finding out about The Who and of course Cheap Trick. I also found out that one of the Junior High kids who had been in that garage band the year before was the older brother of one of my classmates. So, I heard about how cool Cheap Trick was.
As my Junior High years progressed, I soon heard lots of Cheap Trick. The one song that most of us heard was the live cut from Cheap Trick at Budokan that was played at every dance and played on the jukebox at Pizza Hut(okay that was me)…I Want You To Want Me.  I loved that song. It was upbeat and I secretly would play it for a crush I had on a female classmate.  I distinctly remember a Pizza party outing our Junior High swing choir had made. I had a definite crush on one of the females in the swing choir. I put my money in the jukebox and played that song. If she only knew…aaaahhh Youth!
As I’m writing this, I’m bowled over by the words used to describe this album from the liner notes of the 1998 release of the complete concert. Words like “Aural Juggernaut” are used to describe what is called an “inspired marriage of tuneful power-pop and heavy-metal clangor sans the studio niceties”.  I wish I could have put better words together to describe this album.  I think back to trying to make my own mix tape with I Want You to Want Me from my sister’s 8-track copy of In Color.  The original studio version didn’t seem to have the vitality and energy of the live version….it was too nice!
As the years passed, I would keep track of Cheap Trick. They obviously followed the momentum of At Budokan with the release of Dream Police and then All Shook Up (produced by Beatles’ producer George Martin) I became more entrenched in playing drums. My buddy Mick told me about a magazine called Modern Drummer. We honestly thought that was the coolest idea and I’ve been reading the magazine ever since. It seemed like there was always something in the pages pertaining to Bun E. Carlos. He was such an iconic figure in his individuality that he just seemed cool in his own geeky way. He was usually featured in Ludwig drums endorsement ads(among others). The band was mentioned in dialogue from Cameron Crowe’s 1982 Screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

“Can you honestly tell me you forgot? Forgot the magnetism of Robin Zander, or the charisma of Rick Nielsen?”

I even remember hearing radio ads for CT in concert with that soundbyte to promote tickets for the concert. For me, that period of time before MTV was in every home in America was a very magic and mysterious time in music. You had to imagine what the bands looked like. As I said before, I started buying copies of Hit Parader magazine. CT was still being written about. In 1980, Tom Petersson left the band after the release of All Shook Up.  He was replaced briefly by bassist Pete Comita. Comita is featured in the 1981 Chicagofest concert. I remember this concert being played on late Sunday nights on PBS. I would attempt to stay up and watch it. But, I would be so tired that I’d fall asleep. After that, Jon Brant became the steady bass player from 1981-1987. I bought cassette copies of One on One and Next Position Please.  When I think of my Next Position Please cassette, I think back to Friday nights of my teen years in North Platte. Before I owned my first car, I would drive my friends around in my dad’s Volkswagen Beetle. There wasn’t a tape deck in the car. So, I would usually take a boom box of some sort and listen to my tapes. I remember listening to Next Position Please one of those Friday nights. We pulled into a convenience store to get something to drink etc.(No alcohol…I didn’t drink till college)  I backed the “bug” out of the parking space and backed into a wooden fence separating the convenience store from an insurance agency and smashed out the back right turn signal. My dad was not happy with me. We fixed the turn signal. But, it hasn’t worked right since then….and yes…My dad still owns that VW Bug!
In 1986, Tom Petersson returned to Cheap Trick and released Lap of Luxury in 1988. This became a big platinum album for them and is considered their “comeback” album. The record label brought in professional songwriters for the album and the “factory ballad” The Flame was a big hit single for them and a cover of Elvis’ Don’t Be Cruel as the second single.  I remember opening the Lap of Luxury album for in-store play with my co-worker Natalie at Dustys. She was a fan of CT too. At first, I really loved the rockabilly flavor of Don’t Be Cruel. But that got old very fast in the age of MTV and overplayed singles in heavy rotation.
Also, in the summer of 1988, Cheap Trick was booked to play the Buffalo County Fair in Kearney. I was genuinely excited. But, by this time, the overexposure of The Flame and Don’t Be Cruel had really diminished some of that excitement. My Dustys co-hort and friend Bob went to the show at the fairgrounds. The crowd was less than enthusiastic. Bob and I stood in front of a guy and his mom(or older girlfriend) and would point out that between every song that Rick Nielsen would change to a different guitar. Sorry buddy…everyone can see that. This was the middle of the band’s great 80’s comeback and they just didn’t seem too excited to be playing a county fair in the middle of Nebraska. Then again, I also think my expectations may have been greater because the concert I had seen only a month before was the Van Halen Monsters of Rock tour in Kansas City with acts including Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions and Van Halen. It was a different concert environment altogether. I did manage to get one of Rick Nielsen’s guitar picks from the show

I had bought a used LP copy of Cheap Trick at Budokan during my days at Dustys Records. It was an album I always wanted to own. I remembered I had played Ain’t That a Shame one night at the college radio station after the KSC basketball team had lost an at-home basketball game. I never was much of a sports fan. So….”Oh well guys…you lost…Ain’t that a Shame!”  A fellow broadcast student called me up and tried to make me think he was a disgruntled sports fan. Of course he was joking. But, I didn’t realize how cool Bun E. Carlos drum solo intro was. I loved it and soon the album made into my LP collection and eventually a CD copy too. In the late 90’s, it was announced that Epic records/Sony Legacy was releasing a CD worth of live tracks from the Budokan concert that wasn’t on the original album called Budokan 2.  I jumped on that as soon as I could find it.  I bought it and had it in my collection and listened to it and enjoyed it. Then, a new DOUBLE CD was being released of the WHOLE ENTIRE concert!  I jumped on the old consumer treadmill and sold my old copies and bought Cheap Trick at Budokan – the Complete Concert! It really is a great collection. But, as you listen to the dead space between songs, you can hear as the female audience members are SCREAMING and with the new remastered technology you can REALLY hear them screaming “RAAAH BIN! RAAH BIN….ROBIN!” for lead singer Robin Zander. That is about my only complaint about that. I’ve always been a big “band as a whole unit” supporter. As a drummer, I get a little peeved when the singer is showered with all the attention.
Of course, I talk about how much I love the now iconic Bun E. Carlos. But, if we look back, it was yet another great band consisting of four equal personalities bringing four different inputs to make an incredible band that are a staple of classic rock radio and rock history. Robin Zander on vocals had great a great style that could go from Rock growling and screaming to heartbroken and forlorn.  Bassist Tom Petersson is now revered in Bass playing circles as a pioneer and one of the first bassists to ever use a 12 string bass guitar. The 12 string bass is a bass guitar consisting of four courses (of bass strings) of three strings each. Not many bass players use this kind of instrument. Two of them that come to my mind are King’s X bassist Dug Pinnick and Galactic Cowboys bassist Monty Colvin.  Guitarist Rick Nielsen was the musical genius of the band. He may seem quirky and strange on the outside….(He probably is) But, He was the prime architect of all of the band’s songs barring the use of outside songwriters in their power ballad days in the 80’s. He’s an avid guitar collector and has collected over 2000 guitars in his 35 year career. Even one of his trademark guitars “Uncle Dick” was designed by former Kearney Nebraska resident Scott Stephenson.
 
It is also known that both Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos were referred by producer Jack Douglas to play on session work for John Lennon’s Double Fantasy and the song I’m Losing You.  They were ultimately replaced by studio musicians by Yoko Ono’s choice.
But, the member that still lights me on fire is drummer Bun E. Carlos. When articles have been written about Cheap Trick and Bun E. Carlos, the term of Power pop is inevitably mentioned. Modern Drummer magazine wrote a review for the 1999 remastered releases of the first 3 Cheap Trick albums. Reviewer Ted Bonar wrote,

“Lesson #1: Ringo Starr. Lesson #2: Charlie Watts. Lesson #3: Keith Moon. If there was a college degree on mastering and combining the styles of these legends, Bun E. Carlos would be the master of that class.”

If a band can be mentioned in the same breath as the revered embodiment of British Rock Royalty, They must have done something good.
In the Artist update for the September 2009 issue, Patrick Berkery writes,

“before the term ‘Power Pop’ had even been coined, the Who’s Keith Moon was establishing guidelines for the genre’s future drummers with his spastic manner of serving Pete Townshend’s songs….
….for over thirty years, Bun E. Carlos has been infusing Cheap Trick’s songs with a style best classified as simplicity with a twist. – it’s not your run-of-the-mill power pop timekeeping!
….straight or with a twist, Bun E. Carlos has perfected the art of power pop drumming.”

As an inspiration to write this, I was watching Cheap Trick’s 2010 performance on the PBS show Austin City Limits. I was intrigued to see Bun E Carlos absent from the barstool. Apparently because of a back surgery, Bun is unable to tour with the band. He is still referred to as a member of the band, But, Rick Nielsen’s son Daxx is listed as the band’s touring drummer.

Watch the full episode. See more Austin City Limits.

So, as I watch these performances of a band 36 years into its career, I am inspired to hear more and yet I always go back to the album that shot them into the stratosphere….Cheap Trick at Budokan!

Yes….We’re ALL ALRIGHT!!

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