Auction for Bobby Whitlock's 'Mountain Ring' begins

Sale began Oct. 11, ends Nov. 29 for jewelry created by former Derek and the Dominos member

Bobby Whitlock designed the
'Mountain Ring'
The Bobby Whitlock Mountain Ring auction is now underway. This exquisite piece of fine jewelry is being auctioned by Whitlock, the ring’s designer and owner. Whitlock was a founding member of Derek and the Dominos and played keyboards on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album.

The sale began Saturday, Oct. 11, and will run until its closing on Saturday, Nov. 29 at 11:59 p.m. Bids are to be submitted by e-mail to: whitlockmountain@gmail.com.

Auction rules:

A minimum bid of $15,000 has been established. Bids submitted under the minimum amount will be immediately disqualified. Any amount over the minimum will be accepted, recorded and the amount will be posted (amount only, bidders’ ID will not be posted). The highest bid received by the closing date and time will be declared the winner. In the instance of two like amounts, the one received at the earliest time will be the one accepted.

In order to place a bid, the bidder must be over 18 years old with a valid Pay Pal account and must include a legal name, legal address, working telephone number and valid e-mail address. By placing a bid, the bidder is agreeing to abide by all the requirements of this sale and has the means necessary to complete the purchase within 48 hours of the sale’s end. If the payment is not received within the grace period, the winner will forfeit and the ring will be awarded to the under bidder.

Payment will be in full and will only be accepted using a valid Pay Pal account. All sales are final.

 Shipping: The buyer agrees to pay for all costs shipping and insurance for either domestic or international mailings. The ring will be shipped within two business days after the payment has been received. A tracking number will be provided for all shipments within the continental United States.

Story time with Randy Bachman Part I

BTO, Guess Who main man shares tales from the past, talks up his new live DVD
By Peter Lindblad

Randy Bachman - Every Song
Tells a Story 2014
Randy Bachman just keeps rolling down the highway, carrying a truckload of enduring songs from his days with The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, as well as his solo work.

Along the way, his career in music spanning 50-some years, Bachman has seen it all and lived to tell about it. Which is exactly what he does on a new live CD/DVD package called "Every Song Tells a Story" that's similar to the "Storytellers" series made popular by VH1 in the mid-1990s. It was recorded in April 2013 at Pantages Playhouse Theatre in Winnipeg, Bachman's home town.

In his own understated and lighthearted manner, Bachman candidly shares the compelling stories behind some of his biggest hits, as a video montage offers a seamless visual history of his life and times. Journeying through the social and political unrest of the '60s in America, Bachman talks of Winnipeg's musical groundswell, his struggles to get BTO off the ground and forming a partnership with Burton Cummings, all while performing the classics that made him one of Canada's most revered and successful songwriters.

His legacy includes No. 1 hits in a number of countries, 120 gold and platinum album and singles awards and record sales topping 40 million. And in recent years, Bachman has become a radio personality, his award-winning radio program "Vinyl Tap" allowing him to impart a wealth of knowledge about rock 'n' roll and connect to fans who want to know more about this legendary figure. In this two-part interview, Bachman talks in-depth about his new live "storyteller" release and his own path to greatness.

What prompted you to do this kind of performance? I understand Ray Davies of The Kinks played in this.
Randy Bachman: Well, I’m a fan of Ray Davies, as most people are. He tells the story of The Kinks, and I go backstage and I say, “That was amazing.” And he looks at me and he says, “Well, you could do it better or more amazing than this.” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He says, “Well, you’ve got two bands. You could tell the stories behind the songs. You’ve got more hits than me.” And I went back to Vancouver after that, this little bit in London, and got asked to do a show for the Canadian Cancer Society – a fundraising dinner, $5,000 a play, black-tie dinner at a big golf country club, everybody’s dressed up and a silent auction is auctioning Harley Davidsons and stuff. This is to raise many hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cancer society, and the people voted that they wanted me as the entertainment. But they said, “Could you come and play for these people? But they’re having dinner. We would blow the plates off the table.” They said, “Can you kind of do an acoustic show?” And I said, “My music doesn’t really translate acoustically, at least the BTO stuff doesn’t. But how about if I sit on a stool and tell stories about how I wrote the songs, and I’ll play a little bit of the songs, and it won’t be a night of blasting it in their faces, because they can kind of talk as they’re having their dinner.” 

So I go there and I do the night and nobody talks when I’m telling my stories. They’re all listening. And I’m kind of frightened at this – that they’re listening to me. And then we play the songs, and when the evening is over, they came and said, “You know if you would put this on a CD or a DVD, we would buy a dozen copies and send it to our relatives all over the world. This is just the most wonderful insight into all these songs we all grew up with. It’s the soundtrack to our lives – our teenage lives, our married lives, our working life and everything.” So I let that go by and then somebody said, “Will you do that storytelling thing again? Will you do it again?” So it became “Every Song Tells a Story,” and I put it chronologically so it’s from the early Guess Who right up to the present. And I did a run last spring, about 38 dates, and near the end was Winnipeg. And my manager said, “Well, if you’re going to be in your hometown, where all these songs originated and you’re talking about Neil Young and the Guess Who and BTO and Portage and Main, and things like that, which is the main intersection in Winnipeg there, let’s DVD it.” So we did it and they put together a montage to show behind me, a visual of where we were – the haircuts, the clothes, the cars, the guitars at the time. So it’s kind of a history lesson of biographical significance if you grew up in Canada and into the States, too – you know these songs. 

Some of the greatest critiques I’ve had is that it’s the most wonderful history lesson of Canadian music, especially out of Winnipeg, that anybody could have, because that’s the music that rocked the world – the Guess Who and BTO and Neil Young were the music that came out Winnipeg that’s still going and still being played on radio to this day. So I’m kind of thrilled that … it wasn’t a big plan. No big producer came and said, “Let’s do this.” It kind of evolved from me just following my passion and getting that idea from Ray Davies and developing the idea, putting visuals behind it, incorporating both bands, taking it on the road, and doing a DVD of it and now this DVD that we put out a little while ago has now gone triple platinum in Canada. It’s triggered now releases in the States, in the U.K., in Germany, in Denmark, and Australia. So I’m doing phoners all the time, and I’m kind of stunned at the reviews. My manager just sent me 40 or 50 great reviews that are just … I’ve never had reviews like this in my life. I don’t know what I’m doing, but it must be something good (laughs). I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but it’s funny, it’s funny.

The tide is turning, right?
RB:  It’s like when you have a hit record. You go, “What did we do that made this a hit record? We’ve got to do it again, but we don’t know what we did. Everybody likes this song, so …” So everybody liking this DVD is really an honor to me and a thrill, and a way of people I guess acknowledging and recognizing that I’ve made a difference in their lives with my music.

I know Winnipeg was ideal for this, and the Pantages Playhouse Theatre was really a great location. 
RB: Well, that was our dream to play there back in the old rock ‘n’ roll days. I mean, I went to that theatre to see the "Dick Clark Caravans." I saw Johnny and The Hurricanes there. I saw The Champs. I saw the Bill Black Combo. I saw everybody there … Dick and Dee Dee, Lonnie Mack. Everybody would play the Winnipeg Playhouse. It’s now renamed the Pantages, but we knew it as the Playhouse. So when you came to Winnipeg, you either played there or the big arena, which is a big hockey arena, which is a big, booming barn. This is a theatre, where you sat down and really got to the see the band and hear the music. So for me to go back there – and it’s all been refurbished and it’s all really quite beautiful – it was really wonderful to go there. They say you can’t go home again, but I went home and it was really, really great. It was wonderful. I went home and celebrated the songs from both bands that I’d written there, and I knew the audience. I must have known everybody in the audience. They were all related to me. I either went to school with them or grew up with them or played in bands with them. I really felt like I was at home in a reunion, so I was very comfortable that whole evening and I really felt warmth and love from the audience, and I guess it shows in the DVD because people are saying it’s really a magical moment that we captured there.

Do you have a favorite moment from that show?
RB: My favorite story of all, which even amazes me, is the entire story of “Takin’ Care of Business,” how I started it in the late ‘60s, was called “White Collar Worker,” how it transformed to become what it became about five years later through an accident at a BTO show when Fred Turner lost his voice and I had to sing, to the pizza guy who came in and brought the pizza and played piano on it … that whole thing is … no writer in Hollywood could have written a better story, but it happened and I tell the story and it’s pretty amazing.

That is a great one, and it’s a longer story and it takes a while to spool out …
RB: I picked that one and that’s kind of appropriate for that night, right? And I tell people it’s a long story, because actually it starts when I went on the “Louie, Louie” tour with “Shakin’ All Over.” (mistakenly credited to The Guess Who's in the U.S. release of the single) That’s when it starts, that’s when I wrote that song. That’s when I met Stanley Greenberg, who was the blind engineer, Florence Greenberg’s son, the engineer at Scepter's studio. So it goes back to the beginning of the show and pulls it right up to the present, so it’s a little bit longer, but the threads pull the people in, because they want to know what happened in between.

You talked of Winnipeg in the ‘60s being like Liverpool. What made it such a vibrant musical community and how were you able to carve out your own place in it?
RB: Well, a lot of things made it vibrant. Winnipeg is about 450 miles away from anywhere else. It’s far to Minneapolis – 450 miles. Regina – 400 and something miles. There’s nothing near it. It’s the dead center of North America, the center of Canada and the center of nowhere. There’s nothing else near it, so consequently, when you’re there, you’re there. So the ethnicity of your parents, if they were from England or Germany, or Scotland, their parties, their bar mitzvahs, their church gatherings, their weddings – all that ethnic music is there. And then the stuff we heard late at night on the radio – because Winnipeg is the top of the Great Plains – so late at night I was able to listen to my little AM radio as Neil Young was listening, too, on the other side of town, and Burton Cummings listening to WLS in Chicago, WNOE in New Orleans, “Cousin Brucie” in New York, “Wolfman” Jack … on a good night I’d get “Wolfman” Jack from some station in Mexico or something, and hear this music that we’d never heard before. It was so exciting. It was called rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll was starting. We were like 14, 15, or 16, hearing this music for the first time, it was really, really amazing. 

And so when we started a band, the drinking age in Winnipeg was 21, so everyone from 21 on down came to your dance. High school dances didn’t have high school kids. All the older kids came who had graduated came back to their old high school. Being at a high school dance, you had 500 to 800 kids dancing in the gym, and they had already seen it on the rock ‘n’ roll movies, the Allen Freed movies – “Rock Around the Clock” – and they had seen it every week on “American Bandstand.” Everybody knew how to dance and there were 150 bands in this little town of 300,000 people playing every church, every community center … community centers were a building in the middle nowhere, where they’d flood the field in the winter and we’d play hockey on it. And then in the summer they’d put lines on it and we’d play baseball or soccer on it. We had these community centers, and women would play bingo there, and if you had a wedding, the wedding reception would be there. You’d go from the church to the community center, so we had all these high school gyms and community centers, and ethnic halls, like the Jewish Hall or the Polish Hall, where these people went for their weddings and stuff. And we also had friends and relatives in England who would send us this incredible music from England of Cliff Richard and The Shadows and the Telstars, and The Beatles and then all the Beatles clones, Gerry and the Pacemakers and everybody else. 

And we had this great music there, and we’d just all try to outdo each other, even though it was a community but we shared things because if someone got the first bass in town, and Jim Kell had the first electric bass in town and the amplifier, we’d loan it to Neil Young. If we weren’t playing a gig and Neil Young had a gig, he’d call and say, “Are you guys using your amp and bass next week?” And we’d say, “No, you can use it.” So we would take it to the gig and watch him play with The Squires, and then he’d come and see us play the next weekend. It was kind of a “helping each other out” kind of thing, because he’d play his end of town, and we’d play our end of town, and then we’d talk to each school or promoter and say, “Why don’t you book Neil Young and the Squires on our end of town?” And then he would talk to his places and say, “Why don’t you book The Guess Who in my end of town?” And we would trade community centers or halls and get to play other schools. And you’d make like $20 a night, and each guy in the band would get $4 or $5, and that was a big deal – better than delivering newspapers, which was how we earned our money to buy our guitars. We all had a paper route, do you know what I mean? Or mowed lawns … that was it.   

Some of the funniest and most poignant moments had to do with your first trips to America. It was a country at war. What were your initial impressions of the country and how did they change as your career advanced?
RB: Well, there were two things going on at the time. We would play a concert, and a race riot would break out. We’d be in Chicago or we’d be in Minneapolis, and you were told by the promoter, if black and whites start fighting, do not stop playing that song. Play that song forever, because a lot of the people won’t know there’s a fight. There’ll be dancing. They’re hearing the music. The minute you stop and hear a scuffle, they’re going to go and it’s going to turn into a mass riot. So if it’s two or three guys having a fight or four or five guys in the corner, we’ll try to get the bouncers in, we’ll call the police. Don’t stop playing. But that is frightening when you’re playing, and you’re looking down and guys are fighting with knives in front of the stage and they’re black and white guys. I’m onstage backing a black band. I’m with the Guess Who. We’re backing The Shirelles or The Crystals or The Ronettes. We’re thrilled to be backing these black artists, because to us, they were superstars. And here they are fighting in the audience – it was amazing. 

And then some of the towns we went to, we would be the only guys between 18 and 30. Women would come to our dance and touch us like we were aliens. There was no guys in some of these places; they were all drafted. I’m talking about ’67, ’68 – there were no guys. The war was going full-tilt; they were drafting everybody. Then the riots were starting. The students were starting to protest the draft and the war, like, “Why are we at war? Why are we losing our youth to the war in a jungle somewhere, for what purpose? We don’t understand this.” And the whole thing was in turmoil, and here we were on tour, Canadians at the time. They tried to draft us. We came back to Canada and wrote “American Woman” on the spot. “Stay away from me/let me be/we don’t want your war machine.” That was the whole idea behind that. “American Woman” was the Statue of Liberty; that’s what that stood for. It wasn’t the woman on the street. And I tell that story on the DVD. It was like us almost being drafted and coming back to Canada and turning in our green cards. And that night onstage, I broke a string, I wrote the riff, Burton Cummings sang the line, “American woman/stay away from me” … bam, we wrote it, and it was a No. 1 hit.

Yeah, that was an amazing story from the DVD, and it kind of brings me into my next question. You describe your career as a “series of accidents” that you followed wherever they led. Was there a time when you felt most scared that the break you were looking for wouldn’t come, whether that was with The Guess Who or BTO?
RB: Well, the whole thing is, the whole music business, and from my thinking, you have a dream to be like Elvis. You have to have a dream to be like John Lennon. You have a dream to be like Clapton. You have somebody to look to. You have a dream if you’re a kid to be like David Beckham or Michael Jordan, or somebody like that. You have a dream to be like Robert Dinero if you’re an actor or somebody, or Nicholas Cage or somebody like that. So everybody laughs at you saying, “You’ll never be another Dinero. You’ll never be another Clapton.” And then suddenly, they’re paying money to see you act or play or shoot a hoop or play guitar, and then suddenly, they’re buying your record, and suddenly, they’re saying, “You’re the new Eric Clapton.” And so there’s this change if you keep at it. You have Plan A and if you stick to Plan A and Plan B is to stick to Plan A, which is you plan to chase your dream no matter what and climb every mountain that’s in your way and crawl through every gutter that’s in your way and keep chasing your dream and keep doing it, and suddenly you achieve and you become something. And your whole life becomes that. And in a way you’re a spectator and can look back at it and go, “Wow! We broke up 22 times, but the 23rd time we got back together, that’s when it happened,” because if we’d broken up, it never would have happened. 

And you learn to keep going, and then I also learned back when I was writing a song or seeing something or feeling something happening onstage to just let it happen. It’s almost like a psychic. You feel this thing coming to you, this revelation or this story or this fact about someone, you open up and let it come and suddenly you sit there, and you’ve written this amazing song in like five minutes and you write it down. And you go and play it for someone, and you say, “Listen to this,” and they go, “Did you write that? That’s amazing.” And all you can say is, “Yes, yeah. I think I wrote that. I think I wrote it,” because it’s in you and you don’t know where it comes from, and you don’t know if you’ve heard it before. If you play it for someone, they’ll say, “Oh, we’ve heard that. It’s on the new Beatles record, right?” And you go, “Really?” And they go, “Yeah. That’s Side 2, Cut 3.” And you go, “Oh, yeah. That’s a Beatles song. It was on my mind,” but if nobody recognizes it, you claim it as your own and as years go by, you have accolades for having written these songs and that’s what it is, because there’s nothing new. It’s so hard to get something new, and when something comes, I’m quite surprised that I’ve written something new out of all the things I know that are begged and borrowed and stolen. You know what I mean? And if you can shape something new and call it your own, it is in fact a miracle, and on this “Every Song Tells a Story” DVD, I’m celebrating about 50 miracles that nobody called me on. Nobody said, “Well, you stole that song.” They’re saying, “That’s a great song. You wrote it by yourself,” and so I’m excited to have that out there and I frankly tell the stories where the songs came from and what inspired them and all that.


Bobby Whitlock: Lord of the Rings

Guitarist/keyboardist for Derek & the Dominos, George Harrison puts 'Mountain Ring' up for auction 
By Peter Lindblad

Bobby Whitlock with wife CoCo Carmel
Black diamonds, it seems, are Bobby Whitlock's best friend these days, at least as far as his jewelry art is concerned.

Practically raised at Stax Records, the Memphis native played alongside soul legends Booker T. & the MGs and Sam & Dave, before joining Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, contributing keyboards to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album and forming Derek and The Dominos with Eric Clapton. But, Whitlock has other artistic interests outside of music.

Much of his attention these days is centered on his ability to create stunning jewelry, including an incredible new piece called the "Mountain Ring," which is being auctioned off right now. The auction began on Saturday, Oct. 11, and will conclude Nov. 29 at 11:59 p.m. Bids are to be submitted by e-mail to: whitlockmountain@gmail.com.

For auction rules, go to http://backstageauctions.blogspot.com/2014/10/auction-for-bobby-whitlocks-mountain.html

"You know, it’s not so much the selling of it, as it is making my art available," said Whitlock. "This is the first interview I’ve ever done that has to do with my art, other than my musical art. And it’s really all one and the same. Art is art, just like love is love."

Bobby Whitlock's 'Mountain Ring'
As a teenager, growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Whitlock would go through stones and picture making "those big rings, those big, chunky things, and I always like that they symbolized something. I never knew that it’d be something, an art form, that I would express myself at any point."

That is until his wife CoCo Carmel came along.

"My wife and I, have been together 14 years, and the first thing I did was have something made for her, just ‘cause I wanted something unique and it was an earring," explained Whitlock. "And I had this idea that I’d make it for her, and I don’t know … it just seemed like I had a knack for it. And that piece won an award."

Other pieces followed, as Whitlock designed one ring and then another, without ever thinking he'd sell them. He enjoys the entire process, from finding the right stone through the casting of the wax. It was a trip overseas, however, that gave him the idea for the Mountain Ring.

"When CoCo and I went back and forth to Geneva, Switzerland, to perform for 5,000 Japanese people at a symposium they were having, I was really taken by the grandeur of the mountains and the cliffs," said Whitlock. "After going there three times, ‘cause we stayed each time quite a while, you get to know the place, and even when we were shopping ... when I came back and started  fooling around, I came up with the idea of the mountain range, but I didn’t know exactly how it was going to be, because it’s hard to make a mountain range. You don’t just put a stone on top of it (laughs)."

A trip to Geneva, Switzerland, inspired
Bobby Whitlock to create the
"Mountain Ring"
For the piece, Whitlock chose his old favorite, black diamonds, " ... which no one uses on the other end of the spectrum, and they’re beautiful," added Whitlock, who goes through a process of creating the design and drawing it out, then picking the stones, carving the wax, and then casting the gold through the lost wax process.

Making the Mountain Ring even more special, Whitlock used the very last bit of "rose gold" in his possession that was made by a friend, Danny Abbott, who used to render copper into 24-karat gold by "putting a little piece of penny into it," related Whitlock. "He’s no longer around ... and he was an alchemist and an incredible jeweler. That was his thing. He was frustrated because he wanted to be a rock star, you know. Everybody wants to be a rock star, but his gift … now he could play guitar, but his real true gift was incredible art."

That little touch helps make the "Mountain Ring" special. Some of it he used for CoCo's jewelry.

According to Whitlock, a number of people had a hand in making the "Mountain Ring."

"Charles Kirkpatrick owns the Midas manufacturing here in Austin, and there were different artists casting in that, and among them was a girl named Rima," said Whitlock. "She was one of the artists who was designing. And there were several other people … actually, in the making of the Mountain Ring;there were seven people involved in the piling of the wax, and that was one that worked and then we did another one where another artist got involved, and so I just started out with like a rough draft of just something I do, and the next thing you know I presented it to – in this case for the Mountain Ring – to Rima and we bounced around some different ideas and she said, 'Well, how about this, you know? It’s pretty incredible. She’s off doing her own thing here in Austin as well, so it’s never really the same person, except my stone setter Aaron. He’s a big guy, about 6-foot-3, a big man, and it always seemed interesting, setting a stone … that’s most important part of the whole thing, because the whole thing is built around the stone."

The 'Mountain Ring' has an
ounce of gold and an
ounce of black diamonds
As for Kirkpatrick, Whitlock said, "His thing is, he loves stones. He’s a stone man, and it was six months in finding the star sapphire that’s in the Mountain Ring. It was six months of going through stones and him going to different gem dealers and stuff to find the right stone. So the piece is built around the stone. So if the stone breaks or something compromises the stone, the piece is gone, because you’re not going to get another stone that’s just exactly that size. And everything changes, you know."

At his wife's suggestion, Whitlock is finally letting the public see his work, and he added that reaction so far to the Mountain Ring has been incredible.

"There’s over an ounce of gold in the thing, and over a karat of black diamonds – over a karat and a half or so of black diamonds, I can’t remember what the number is," said Whitlock. "It’s either 48 or 49 diamonds all throughout, and it’s absolutely a beautiful piece. I’m real proud of it. And I never thought about letting anybody see it in a public way, just people near me or in my circle … I don’t know, but it’s okay. We started now. We started Bobby Whitlock Jewelry, and it’s funny how it’s opening the door for something. Everything I do is a one-off anyway, and I may do some commissioned things down the line. What I’m going to do is just turn this “Mountain Ring” into something else, you know, for someone else, and just make that available … I don’t know, it’s just opening the door for maybe a jewelry store. There’s always a song in everything, my life is a song and just like that, the doors open for something like a jewelry store."

We'll have more with Bobby Whitlock in the coming days and weeks as he talked to us about his time in Derek and the Dominos, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and, of course, his work on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

CD Review: Gary Moore – Live at Bush Hall 2007

CD Review: Gary Moore – Live at Bush Hall 2007
Eagle Records
All Access Rating: B+

Gary Moore - Live at Bush Hall 2007 2014
Peter Green would have loved seeing Gary Moore on this May evening in 2007. Moore was Green's favorite pupil, soaking in all the blues-guitar knowledge he could from the Fleetwood Mac founder and '60s British blues boom architect.

Performing to 400 people in the cozy environs of Bush Hall, all of whom won tickets to the show from Planet Rock Radio, which originally broadcast it, Moore sweated out a rough-and-tumble set that fervently testified to his mastery of the blues. Live at Bush Hall 2007 is the first-ever audio release of that show, and the sound is exquisite, nicely capturing the intimacy of the setting.

Drawing liberally from Close As You Get, the album he'd released just prior to this outing, Moore led a quartet that included his old Thin Lizzy mate, drummer Brian Downey, through smoky supplications like "Trouble At Home," soulful readings of Phil Lynott's "Don't Believe A Word" and "Still Got the Blues" – two deeper cuts from a catalog begging for greater appreciation – and lowdown, junkyard growlers "Hard Times" and a particularly unruly "If The Devil Made Whiskey."

An ebullient cover of Sonny Boy Williams' "Eyesight to the Blind" allows Moore to display his feel for authentic interpretation, something that's even more apparent in the stunning, bare-bones reading of Son House's "Sundown" – Moore's deft slide guitar work, seemingly dug straight from the fertile soil of the Mississippi Delta, on this version is nothing short of brilliant – that brings the curtain down. And when he turns rowdy, as he does on gloriously rambunctious and raw versions of "Walking By Myself" and Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days," Moore doesn't hold anything back.

Throughout Live at Bush Hall 2007, Moore wrings every ounce of emotion out of his instrument when he bends strings to his will and holds sustains as if he's choking a mortal enemy to death, his elegantly wild leads so expressive, so tightly woven and so vibrant, as evidenced by Moore's 4:34 solo "Gary's Blues 1." If only some of the slower songs weren't so dawdling, a minor quibble by the way, Live at Bush Hall 2007 would be absolutely essential. As it is, it's works as a boon companion to Moore's studio legacy. http://www.eagle-rock.com/
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Rigor Mortis – Slaves to the Grave

CD Review: Rigor Mortis – Slaves to the Grave
Rigor Mortis Records
All Access Rating: A-

Rigor Mortis - Slaves to the Grave 2014
No Mike Scaccia means no more Rigor Mortis. The thrash/speed metal tyrants have apparently refused to soldier on without him.

Felled by a heart attack onstage at a homecoming show for Rigor Mortis in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2012, the guitarist was the maggot-filled heart and worm-eaten soul of a band that laid waste to the late 1980s extreme metal underground.

Without their breakneck tempos, frenzied beats, insanely furious riffage, and putrid, R-rated lyrical content inspired by horror and gore films, and a fascination with serial killers, there would be no Toxic Holocaust, no Goatwhore even. Who'd want to live in a world like that?

Only days before Scaccia, also known for his work with industrial-metal giants Ministry, as well as a slew of other Al Jourgensen-related projects, shuffled off this mortal coil, however, he finished his guitar parts for what would become his and the band's swan song, Slaves to the Grave, a record – their first in the 23 years since the punk/metal manifesto Rigor Mortis Vs. The Earth ... – the reunited Rigor Mortis was working on prior to his untimely demise.

No record labels wanted to touch it. Needing assistance with funding to release it themselves, Rigor Mortis raised money through an IndieGoGo campaign, and with a little help from some friends in the industry, this burning slab of fierce, raging death metal is finally seeing the light of day. And what a fiery, no-holds-barred send-off it is, "Flesh for Flies" taking the prize for "biggest wall of buzzing guitar noise ever conceived" by these remorseless attack dogs.

Resting only briefly for an unexpectedly melodic and tasteful intro to "Rain of Ruin," before trashing the place with a barrage of scabrous drums, bombing guitars and war-torn imagery, the original lineup of Scaccia, bassist Casey Orr, barking vocalist Bruce Corbitt and drummer Harden Harrison brutally stomps all over a gruesome "Ancient Horror" and tears through the blistering "Poltergeist" and an equally venomous "Fragrance of Corpse" like a cyclone.

And while the staggering hyper speed with which they play still makes jaws drop to the floor, as it does in "Curse of the Draugr," Rigor Mortis has other tricks up their tattered, blood-spattered sleeves, with Scaccia letting nervous six-string manipulation skitter like frightened, amphetamine-fed spiders or unpacking the unusual, repetitive muted stutter and quickened chug of the instant-classic "Blood Bath" and its whiplash change of pace. This may well be Scaccia's finest hour, and in turn, the rest of Rigor Mortis have fully realized their disturbingly warped vision of humanity and sonic brutality.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Mr. Big – ... The Stories We Could Tell

CD Review: Mr. Big – ... The Stories We Could Tell
Frontiers Music s.r.l.
All Access Rating: A-

Mr. Big - ... The Stories We Could Tell 2014
"To Be With You" had hit written all over it. Spun from pure acoustic guitar gold, with pleading hooks, a sunny disposition and a gushing romantic sensibility, it brought Mr. Big worldwide fame and fortune. Even the overwhelmingly dour grunge movement couldn't darken its glow.

Somehow, even as other like-minded acts were being publicly flogged for their crass commercialism and lack of substance, Mr. Big's sterling reputation for world-class musicianship survived all that completely intact. ... The Stories We Could Tell, the band's second album since a 2009 reunion of the original lineup, won't tarnish it any.

Always able to walk that fine line between crafting accessible pop metal and punching out nasty, bluesy rockers like the sizzling "The Light of Day," the bumping and grinding "It's Always About That Girl" or the swaggering "What If We Were New" – all off the new record – Mr. Big's appeal was never limited to love-sick girls, high-brow musos or scowling, testosterone-fueled metal heads. They found a middle ground, as they do here, with the big, gusty strumming and flooding harmonies of "Eastwest" and the aching beauty, thorny hooks and tough, tenderized heart of "Fragile" hitting all the sonic erogenous zones. "Fragile" is the kind of song Def Leppard should be making.

Of course, it helps to have one of the most dynamic bass players in rock history in Billy Sheehan and a high-flying guitarist such as Paul Gilbert, not to mention a versatile, soulful singer in Eric Martin and the well-manicured bashing of drummer Pat Torpey. Sparks fly as they put their blazing chops on display throughout ... The Stories We Could Tell, the hard funk of "I Forget to Breathe" updating Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic" for the 21st century, while "Gotta Love the Ride," and the title track mix slinky, laid-back grooves with Zeppelin-like power and mystique.

Lance the boil that is the plodding "Cinderella Smile" and take the leash off Gilbert, as they do on a smoldering, hot-wired "The Monster In Me," and Mr. Big ends up tearing the roof off the place on ... The Stories We Could Tell. The production is striking and bold, heightening the band's kinetic energy, as well as its obvious vim and vigor. Mr. Big has never sounded ... well, this big. http://www.frontiers.it/
– Peter Lindblad

Randy Bachman: Still 'Takin' Care of Business'

New live release from iconic artist tells tales of a life in music
By Peter Lindblad

Randy Bachman - Every Song Tells
A Story 2014
What a life Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business" has lived.

Before it was released in 1973 and included on BTO's Bachman-Turner Overdrive II album, it had lived an orphan's existence, unable to find a permanent home.

Eventually, though, it did, and it became one of the biggest hits of Randy Bachman's career. The story of how "Takin' Care of Business" came to be is one of the highlights of a new CD/DVD set titled "Every Song Tells a Story," which finds Bachman mining his past for tales from a musical life and playing a number of favorites from The Guess Who and BTO.

"My favorite story of all, which even amazes me, is the entire story of 'Takin’ Care of Business,' how I started it in the late ‘60s, and it was called 'White Collar Worker,' how it transformed to become what it became about five years later through an accident at a BTO show when Fred Turner lost his voice and I had to sing, to the pizza guy who came in [to the studio] and brought the pizza and played piano on it ... no writer in Hollywood could have written a better story, but it happened and I tell the story and it’s pretty amazing," said Bachman.

That's right. A pizza delivery guy named Norman Durkee played piano on the recorded version, adding his part at Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle, Wash. This song that had started out as a story of a recording engineer who took "the 8:15 into the city," going by train, and was originally called "White Collar Worker" when Bachman wrote it while with The Guess Who got a new name when Bachman heard the phrase "takin' care of business" on the radio while heading to a gig in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Turner's voice gave out that night. Bachman had to take over on vocals and started singing "White Collar Worker," only with a new chorus, "Takin' Care of Business."

"Every Song Tells a Story" is a CD/DVD live set that captures Bachman's "Storyteller"-type performance from Spring 2013 in his hometown of Winnipeg at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre. Here's a teaser clip of the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rqJ8pG0Ir0&feature=youtu.be

Ray Davies of The Kinks is the one who persuaded Bachman to do this. Bachman saw him do something similar in London.

"Well, I’m a fan of Ray Davies, as most people are," said Bachman. "He tells the story of The Kinks, and I go backstage and I say, 'That was amazing.' And he looks at me and he says, 'Well, you could do it better or more amazing than this.' I said, 'Well, what do you mean?' He says, 'Well, you’ve got two bands. You could tell the stories behind the songs. You’ve got more hits than me.' And I went back to Vancouver after that, this little bit in London, and got asked to do a show for the Canadian Cancer Society – a fundraising dinner, $5,000 a plate, black-tie dinner at a big golf country club, everybody’s dressed up and a silent auction is auctioning Harley Davidsons and stuff; this is to raise many hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cancer society, and the people voted that they wanted me as the entertainment."

When asked, Bachman was a bit apprehensive. They were persuasive.

"They said, 'Could you come and play for these people?'" recalls Bachman. "I said, 'But they’re having dinner. I don't want you to blow the plates off the table.' They said, 'Can you kind of do an acoustic show?' And I said, 'My music doesn’t really translate acoustically, at least the BTO stuff doesn’t. But how about if I sit on a stool and tell stories about how I wrote the songs, and I’ll play a little bit of the songs, and it won’t be a night of blasting it in their faces, because they can kind of talk as they’re having their dinner?' So I go there and I do the night and nobody talks when I’m telling my stories. They’re all listening. And I’m kind of frightened at this – that they’re listening to me. And then we play the songs, and when the evening is over, they came and said, 'You know if you would put this on a CD or a DVD, we would buy a dozen copies and send it to our relatives all over the world. This is just the most wonderful insight into all these songs we all grew up with. It’s the soundtrack to our lives – our teenage lives, our married lives, our working life and everything.'"

Thinking that was the end of that, Bachman was asked again to "do that storytelling thing again," and it became “'Every Song Tells a Story,'” he said, "and I put it chronologically so it’s from the early Guess Who right up to the present. And I did a run last spring, about 38 dates, and near the end was Winnipeg. And my manager said, 'Well, if you’re going to be in your hometown, where all these songs originated and you’re talking about Neil Young and the Guess Who and BTO and Portage and Main, and things like that, which is the main intersection in Winnipeg there, let’s DVD it.' So we did it and they put together a montage to show behind me, a visual of where we were – the haircuts, the clothes, the cars, the guitars at the time. So it’s kind of a history lesson of biographical significance if you grew up in Canada and into the States, too – you know these songs."

The reviews, so far, have been glowing.

"Some of the greatest critiques I’ve had is that it’s the most wonderful history lesson of Canadian music, especially out of Winnipeg, that anybody could have, because that’s the music that rocked the world – the Guess Who and BTO and Neil Young were the music that came out Winnipeg that’s still going and still being played on radio to this day," said Bachman. "It wasn’t a big plan. No big producer came and said, 'Let’s do this.' It kind of evolved from me just following my passion and getting that idea from Ray Davies and developing the idea, putting visuals behind it, incorporating both bands, taking it on the road, and doing a DVD of it and now this DVD that we put out a little while ago has now gone triple platinum in Canada. It’s triggered now releases in the States, in the U.K., in Germany, in Denmark, and Australia. I’m kind of stunned at the reviews. My manager just sent me 40 or 50 great reviews that are just … I’ve never had reviews like this in my life. I don’t know what I’m doing, but it must be something good (laughs). I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but it’s funny, it’s funny."

"Every Song Tells A Story" is out on the Independent Label Services Group.

We'll have more from our interview with Bachman in the coming days.



CD Review: Sarah Silverman – We Are Miracles

CD Review: Sarah Silverman – We Are Miracles
Sub Pop Records
All Access Rating: A

Sarah Silverman - We Are Miracles 2014
Danger lurks behind that sweet facade, that girlish laugh and those twinkling eyes.

Just when the brilliant comic Sarah Silverman has buttered an audience up with some charming little story about her Jewish childhood, growing up in New Hampshire, she drops the hammer, delivering a shockingly funny and incisive punchline about rape jokes – she's not a fan, by the way – or religion that feels like a knife in the gut.

And after she's done twisting it, she smiles as if to say, "Sorry," even though she doesn't really mean it. Because she will do it again ... and again and again and again.

We Are Miracles is a audio recording, released by Sub Pop Records, of Silverman's first headline special for HBO, a fearless and hysterical performance that earned her an Emmy nomination. Eschewing political correctness for blunt honesty, Silverman starts by talking about how she incorporates watching internet porn on her phone into her "Nightly Rituals" and what strange key words she uses, before calling into question the sanity of some deeply held religious beliefs of Christians and Scientology – Silverman remarking how strange it seems that some would choose to follow a guy named Ron – that require an almost superhuman leap of faith.

Even when addressing uncomfortable subjects, such as bed-wetting into her teens and the futility of vaginal deodorants in dealing with what she says is women's greatest insecurity, "smelly vagina," Silverman elicits howls of laughter, her uncanny ability to spool out multi-layered jokes in stages to save the biggest reveal for last being just one of many qualities that make her, as Rolling Stone said, "the most outrageously funny woman alive."

More than that, however, Silverman is fiercely intelligent and disarmingly empathetic, especially when it comes to discussing insecurities and how they manifest themselves in ridiculous female and male behavior. Like the best comedians, Silverman is eviscerating in her social commentary, but there is a deep-seated concern for humanity and feminine empowerment hidden inside the racy, caustic humor.

A multi-talented actress who's worked alongside John C. Reilly in the animated kids' film "Wreck It Ralph," made memorable appearances in critically acclaimed TV shows "The Good Wife" and "Monk" and taken the Comedy Central series "The Sarah Silverman Show" to places TV feared to tread, Silverman is in her element onstage. Oh Sarah, you are, indeed, incorrigible.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Stryper – Live at the Whisky

CD Review: Stryper – Live at the Whisky
Frontiers Records
All Access Rating: A-

Stryper - Live at the Whisky 2014
A modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah in the '80s, the Sunset Strip was swimming in sin and depravity. It was the sort of place a vengeful God might reduce to rubble with a wave of His mighty hand.

Into this devil's playground walked four yellow-and-black clad crusaders, carrying the cross of Christian metal into dens of iniquity like the Whisky a Go Go. What a place for a band like Stryper to try to make a name for itself, fighting the good fight and eventually gaining acceptance from skeptics with a rugged, uplifting pop-metal sound full of blissful vocal interplay and spiraling, pealing guitar harmonies.

Some 30 years later, long after the platinum success of To Hell With The Devil, Stryper's original lineup of vocalist/guitarist Michael Sweet, guitarist Oz Fox, drummer Robert Sweet and bassist Tim Gaines made its return to the Whisky last November, eager to perform for the first time material from the heaviest album of their meaningful lives, No More Hell to Pay.

Available now as a 16-track CD/DVD package from Frontiers Records, Live at the Whisky is the raw, punched-up recording of Stryper letting it all hang out that night, kicking into high gear immediately with a venomous, hard-charging version of No More Hell to Pay's "Legacy" and churning through the tough, defiant riffs of "Marching into Battle," before sinking their perfect teeth into the big, joyous pop hooks, striking melodies and ragged glory of "Reach Out," "Calling on You," "Always There For You" and taking a whip to a high-spirited cover of the Doobie Brothers' "Jesus Is Just Alright."

Playing to a raucous crowd behind them every step of the way, Stryper deliver the goods and then some, giving as good as they get in return with a tight, energetic performance, as Fox and Michael Sweet reach deeply into their bag of tricks to solo like demons and harmonize like angels. A rampaging take on "The Way" rams into the double-barreled blast of "To Hell With The Devil" and "Soldiers Under Command" with all the force of a wrecking ball, as Robert Sweet's drums snap and crack and Gaines controls the low end with a firm hand.

This is Stryper firing on all cylinders, invigorated and sweaty, evangelizing without sermonizing and having the time of their lives. On message and on point, they play with renewed vigor and a sharpened sense of purpose that should be obvious to anybody with an open mind. The yellow-and-black attack is back, and it's ready to embark on another crusade.
– Peter Lindblad

New Pink Floyd album artwork unveiled

More details about 'The Endless River' revealed
By Peter Lindblad

Pink Floyd - The Endless River 2014
A classy tribute to a fallen comrade, keyboardist extraordinaire Richard Wright, the cover to Pink Floyd's upcoming LP The Endless River features a lone boatsman paddling across a blanket of clouds into a glorious sunset.

The metaphor may be a bit obvious for the Floyd, whose album art is usually somewhat more enigmatic, but it's a beautiful and poignant piece of work and given the circumstances surrounding this release, it's an entirely appropriate meditation on mortality, loss and the afterlife.

Wright died of cancer in September 2008, leaving only guitarist/singer David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason as remaining members, following Roger Waters' acrimonious split from the group.

In 1993, the trio hunkered down at Brittania Row and Astoria Studios for sessions that yielded the Division Bell, Pink Floyd's last studio album. It was the first time they had done so since the seventies, when they hashed out the iconic Wish You Were Here LP, another moving Pink Floyd record that ruminated on former band leader Syd Barrett's sad decline and mental disintegration.

Last year, Gilmour and Mason went back through the music that came out of the Division Bell studio work and decided to hone and shape these orphaned pieces – with the help of modern recording technology – for a new album, The Endless River. The whole LP is a celebration honoring the genius of Wright, whose keyboards helped mold Pink Floyd's uniquely spacey and conceptual progressive-rock sound.

According to a statement on the www.PinkFloyd.com web site, The Endless River is "a mainly instrumental album with one song, 'Louder Than Words,' (with lyrics by Polly Samson), arranged across four sides and produced by David Gilmour, Phil Manzanera, Youth and Andy Jackson."

Some, like Mike Portnoy, have expressed their reservations about the new album, wondering how it can be a proper Pink Floyd album without Waters and the deceased Wright and Barrett. He would prefer a special edition reissue of the Division Bell. That's splitting hairs, especially considering the contributions Wright made to these recordings while still alive. Throughout music history, there are numerous instances of artists taking work from sessions for one album and using them later for another.

How many stories are there out there of songs being written long ago in the distant past and then brought out of retirement for inclusion on future releases? What makes these creations any different? And as for Waters, he made his own bed, opting to go solo and talking about how Floyd was "a spent force" way back when and prematurely proclaiming the band's death. It was his hubris that led to his departure, and while he certainly was the driving force in Floyd in the aftermath of Barrett's death, how much of that was due to his own need to for full control?

Anyway, you'll be able to form your own opinions when The Endless River comes out on Nov. 10.

Here's the track listing for The Endless River:

"Things Left Unsaid"
"It's What We Do"
"Ebb and Flow"
"Sum"
"Skins"
"Unsung"
"Anisina"
"The Lost Art of Conversation"
"On Noodle Street"
"Night Light"
"Allons-v (1)"
"Autumn '68"
"Allons-v (2)"
"Talkin' Hawkin'"
"Calling"
"Eyes to Pearls"
"Surfacing"
"Louder Than Words"

Book Review: Jim Peterik – Through the Eye of the Tiger: The Rock 'N' Life of Survivor's Founding Member

Book Review: Jim Peterik – Through the Eye of the Tiger: The Rock 'N' Roll Life of Survivor's Founding Member
BenBella Books
All Access Rating: B+

Jim Peterik - Through the
Eye of the Tiger: The
Rock 'N' Roll Life of
Survivor's Founding Member
Usually, rock 'n' roll autobiographies are a damn sight more tawdry and scandalous than this.

A faithful husband devoted to his wife of 40-some years, Karen, and a good Catholic, whose greatest vices seem to be a love of fast cars and vintage guitars, Jim Peterik, practically a teetotaler, never experienced a harrowing descent in the dark world of addiction or took part in out-of-control sex orgies with underage groupies and farm animals.

Nobody's doing blow off a stripper's ass or tossing televisions out of hotel room windows in the refreshingly sweet, sometimes tumultuous and deeply personal "Through The Eye of the Tiger: The Rock 'N' Life of Survivor's Founding Member," from BenBella Books. Aside from a brief moment of weakness in a hotel room with Connie, made famous in the Grand Funk Railroad song "We're An American Band," that ended before anything serious happened, Peterik was practically a choirboy.

His story is pretty tame stuff compared to the endless debauchery of Motley Crue's "The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band" or even Sammy Hagar's "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock." The juiciest bits have to do with Peterik unwillingly ceding control of Survivor to Frankie Sullivan and their often fractious relationship, as well as behind-the-scenes power struggles with meddling music-industry Svengali types – kingmaker John Kalodner being one of them – and the dirty dealing that resulted in .38 Special's hit version of "Rockin' Into the Night," originally written by Peterik and members of Survivor for their own use.

Mostly a straightforward account of Peterik's struggles and triumphs in a music industry, as well as interpersonal relationships with band mates, friends and family, "Through the Eye of the Tiger" –featuring a forward by REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin – focuses on Peterik's almost obsessive drive for success, which almost cost him his marriage and his own sense of identity. The commissioning of the rousing Survivor anthem "Eye of the Tiger" by action-movie star Sly Stallone for "Rocky III" is addressed right up front and without delay, and his sometimes scattered prose, competently shaped by writer Lisa Torem, turns almost giddy with excitement any time the conversation turns to the process of making music, which, for him, has always been something magical. That's what garners the lion's share of attention in the book.

From his teen years fronting Ides of March and riding the smash hit "Vehicle" to the top of the charts on through the mega success of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," Peterik leads readers into intensely creative studio sessions, recalls sensational live performances and gigs that fizzled, and handles uncomfortable matters, such as the firing of band members or personal failings, with kid gloves. His musical fandom and admiration for bands like The Turtles, the Allman Brothers and British Invasion influences comes shining through, as well, and, in the end, even though it's not a torrid page-turner, "Through the Eye of the Tiger" has a charming and rare innocence and a good heart that other books of this ilk simply don't. That makes Peterik's story one worth telling.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Cannibal Corpse – A Skeletal Domain

CD Review: Cannibal Corpse – A Skeletal Domain
Metal Blade Records
All Access Rating: A-

Cannibal Corpse - A Skeletal Domain 2014
Cannibal Corpse has crossed just about every line imaginable in its 26 gore-splattered years of existence.

So, when the band's new producer, Mark Lewis, says of the death-metal destroyers' new Metal Blade Records release, A Skeletal Domain, that "there are moments on this record that have never happened in musical history," he may not simply be engaging in wild hyperbole.

Lewis, who's worked with such heavy-hitters as DevilDriver and the Black Dahlia Murder, replaces Erik Rutan, who honed the sound of the band's last three records. Having updated Cannibal Corpse's extreme sonic assault, Lewis has somehow intensified their already enormous, swirling maelstrom of violent, blood-and-guts imagery, frenzied blast beats, George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher's guttural roar, Alex Webster's impossibly fast bass currents, psychotic tempo shifts and flaying riffs seemingly run through a wood chipper.

Executed with surgical attention to detail and a tortured mix of calculated instrumental discipline and crazed, completely unpredictable guitar attacks from Pat O'Brien and Rob Barrett, A Skeletal Domain is a uniquely brutal rampage of thrash energy. Unleashing a barrage of diabolical progressions that go places that would be off limits to less twisted imaginations, delirious blitzkriegs like "High Velocity Impact Splatter," "Icepick Lobotomy," "Sadistic Embodiment" and "Kill or Become" – "Corpsegrinder" raging, "Fire up the chainsaw" with homicidal intent – become scary aural loony bins, with complex stuff going on in the dark recesses that's truly shocking and unexpected.

There are interludes of heavy, slower crawls, such as those in the title track, that allow for brief respites from the all-out war Cannibal Corpse fights in the closer "Hollowed Bodies," where the chugging guitars grind bones into sawdust, just as they do in "Vector of Cruelty." Amid the malevolent chaos there is structure, and it's strong and flexible enough to withstand this wicked, destructive sonic turbulence.

Inevitably, most Cannibal Corpse conversation revolves around the ridiculously graphic nature of the band's iconic album covers and lyrics, the depictions of mutilation and dismemberment so outrageous they're almost cartoonish. The ferocious ambition and sheer audacity of A Skeletal Domain, suggestive of bands like Meshuggah, might just steer the discussion more toward Cannibal Corpse's technical skill and lethal precision.
– Peter Lindblad