Here’s the latest music video from ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash: “Beautiful Dangerous” with Fergie on vocals. When Slash’s eponymous, guest-star filled album came out earlier this year, we were impressed with Fergie’s rock pipes. Check out this video and you may come away impressed with a few more of Fergie’s, ah, attributes. Slash is opening for Ozzy Osbourne on the Prince of F***ing Darkness’ latest tour.
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Singer/songwriter Robert Earl Keen is one of our favorites, and most of Texas agrees. He is going to be featured this weekend on an all-new episode of “Austin City Limits,” and this video is a behind the scenes record of events leading up to the show’s taping.
Scenes of the load-in, stage set up, rehearsal, pre-show, and on stage are all put together to give an idea of what goes on before a taping at studio 6A. And of course, this is one of the final shows to be recorded in 6A – the entire “Austin City Limits” production moves to a brand-new studio in downtown Austin early next year.
Remember – Robert Earl Keen and Hayes Carll this weekend on “Austin City Limits,” on PBS (check local listings for your time and channel).
This version of “Racing In the Street” has different lyrics, violin and it rocks. It will be included on the double CD, The Promise, and the massive Darkness on the Edge of Town box set due to hit stores shelves and digital download sites on Nov. 16.
A bit of history happened Saturday night in Mountain View, California, as the three surviving members of legendary rock band Buffalo Springfield reunited for the first time since 1968. Playing to benefit the Bridge School for children with cerebral palsy, original Springfield members Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Neil Young ran through a loose set of classics including “Mr. Soul,” “Rock and Roll Woman,” “On The Way Home” and of course, “For What It’s Worth.”
Catch more videos from the Buffalo Springfield reunion at GuitarVibe.com
Morgus The Magnificent
Television was the one thing found in just about every house in the 1960s. I knew people living in mobile homes who didn’t have a dinner table, but they had a TV. And I remember sitting in front of the damned thing for hours when I was a kid. Radio, I suppose, had the same attraction for kids in the generations before mine – just as cable TV, video games, DVDs and the internet have enthralled generations after mine.
There was a local scary TV show host when I was growing up; I believe his name was Dr. Ghoul-man or something, he appeared late nights on TV around a rerun of some crummy horror movie. People still talk rapturously about Morgus the Magnificent in the New Orleans area, or whoever did the hosting in your area (see link below).
Rod Serling
But the really scary shit on TV appeared on prime time: “The Twilight Zone” hosted by Rod Serling frightened the bejeezus out of me on more than one occasion, sending me to bed more than a little nervous. Then later it was “The Outer Limits,” which was more science fiction but fairly scary nevertheless. Now I grew up in Southeast Texas and whenever a hurricane blew in the TV stations in the late 1960s stayed on all night so they can provide weather updates (they usually signed off around midnight with the national anthem). And in between weather reports, local TV played reruns of “The Outer Limits,” which added to the already-pretty-damn-real fear factor. The Weather Channel today pales in comparison.
My kids were turned on by old “Twilight Zone” episodes, and the best of them are among the greatest things ever to appear on television. You owe it to yourself to catch these on reruns, if you never have. It’s prime chills, 1960s’ style: cheap thrills indeed.
MP3: “Twilight Zone” main title music
MP3: “The Addams Family” theme song by Vic Mizzy
MP3: “The Munsters” by the Comateens
MP3: “Whatever Happened To Eddie?” by Butch Patrick w/Eddie & the Monsters
YouTube: “The Munsters” TV show opening
MP3: “Morgus The Magnificent” by Morgus & the Ghouls (w/Dr. John)
MP3: “Frankenstein of ’59” by Buchanan & Goodman
MP3: “The Inner Sanctum” radio show – “Wailing Wall” w/Boris Karloff (1945)
MP3: “The Halloween Shop” Sears radio commercial by Bobby “Boris” Pickett
MP3: “The Halloween Song” by Bing Crosby, Victor Moore and Boris Karloff
MP3: “The Twilight Zone” 1985 show theme by the Grateful Dead
YouTube: “The Outer Limits” opening
Egor’s Chamber of TV Horror Hosts
Download a free Halloween music sampler at Amazon.com
1972 was a year of hard-rockin’: the Rolling Stones cut their classic Exile On Main Street, the Allman Brothers invited everyone to Eat A Peach and Rod Stewart promised Never A Dull Moment. The Band, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks and Creedence Clearwater Revival still walked the earth. But when it came to rockin’ the top of the pop charts, there was really nobody like Bread.
You might consider Bread to be some mellowed-out schmaltz for old hippies, but back in the 
day those mellifluously rockin’ hits could sink their sharp little hooks in your soft fleshy parts. So get ready – today we’re spinning Baby I’m-A Want You, Bread’s fourth and most commercially successful album.
Bread was made up of four members who happened to be virtuoso musicians, and most of the lead vocals were handled by David Gates and James Griffin, who also wrote the lion’s share of the group’s songs. In 1971 original bassist Robb Royer left and was replaced by another virtuoso, Larry Knechtel (who played the piano on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”). This foursome started the Baby I’m-A Want You LP with a guitar rocker, “Mother Freedom.” This is safe, middle-of-the-road rock: everything is very tastefully played and sung.
Then comes the title song, written and sung by Gates. Today, as then, you could hear the enormous influence that Paul McCartney had on Gates’ work. “Down On My Knees” doesn’t resemble the Beatles as much it does Badfinger; nevertheless, you can see the place Bread filled in the era’s pop music. “Knees” is sung by Griffin, and it’s listed as a co-write between him and Gates. There was some tension between the two, because Gates’ songs were usually chosen for the A-sides of the singles and those were the tunes that became big hits.
Bruce Springsteen’s massive and long-awaited Darkness on the Edge of Town box set comes out in less than a month on Nov. 16. Here is the audio of “Fire” that will be included on the live DVD shot at The Summit (now Lakewood Church) in Houston on Dec. 8, 1978. Our own, Denny Angelle, attended that show and will tell us all about in the coming weeks.
One of our favorites, Austin’s own Alejandro Escovedo, will appear this weekend on an all-new “Austin City Limits” episode. This time he will showcase songs from his latest CD, Street Songs of Love. Here’s a behind-the-scenes sneak peek at the rehearsal and part of his ACL performance, which airs Saturday on a PBS station near you (check local listings for time).
The mid-1980s was a bad time for records. Nobody wanted to buy vinyl albums any more, so the cassette was on the rise. Likewise with good old plastic 45s; eventually those gave way to the “cassingle,” or cassette single. But when it came to singles, the record labels didn’t stop there – they put out “extended play” singles with more than just two songs on it; “double packs,” with two singles (or four songs) for the price of one; and the dreaded 12-inch “extended version” singles.
Some labels were quicker to jump into the future than others, so today we’re going to listen to some singles that sort of reflected this rapid change taking place around 1987. First, let’s jump back a year to ’86, and a good old-fashioned 
two-sided 45 by John Mellencamp.
Mellencamp had evolved from his Johnny Cougar days and by 1986 he had added his real surname to the John Cougar handle, as he had turned into a roots rocker with the hits “Pink Houses” and “Crumblin’ Down,” and he was one of the heroes of the annual Farm Aid concert started the year before. Mellencamp’s 1986 album was Scarecrow, which had as its main songs the urgent “Rain On The Scarecrow,” which focused on the then-precarious financial plight of the American farmer, and the self-explanatory “Face Of The Nation.”
The singles that came off Scarecrow weren’t so heavy: “Lonely Ol’ Night” is an old school rocker, and “Small Town” was cut from the same cloth as “Pink Houses.” But the biggest hit off the album had nothing to do with farmers and everything to do with Heartland America: “R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.” subtitled “A Salute To ’60s Rock.” The tune is a mix of vintage Motown, Mitch Ryder’s Detroit sound, some California vocal harmonies and a pinch of Texas garage rock organ. It was Scarecrow‘s biggest hit, going all the way to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1986. The flip side was a cover of the Drifters’ “Under The Boardwalk,” which was not found on an album until the pot-luck Rough Harvest (1999).
Running neck and neck alongside Mellencamp in the Great American Heartland Rocker category was Detroit’s own Bob Seger. Seger and his Silver Bullet Band had been hitmakers since 1976, thanks to the two albums he released that year: Live Bullet and Night 
Moves. Jump ahead ten years, and Seger was about to reach the tail end of his immense success. His album Like A Rock came out in 1986, and it was his first LP in about six years. The title song was a hit and a truck commercial, but today we want to spin “American Storm,” the anti-drug (specifically anti-cocaine) rant that modernized Seger’s sound to the times.
The flip side of the conventional single was a live cover of John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son.” But at the time I was working for a music magazine and Capitol sent over a special “extended play” record that put the A and B sides on one side, and on the flip were studio and live versions of “Hollywood Nights,” the leadoff tune from 1978’s Stranger In Town. Whenever I listened to “Hollywood Nights” I kind of pictured it in the soundtrack of a movie where dudes were snorting lines in a Hollywood mansion; so it was kinda funny to hear it paired with Seger’s anti-coke tune. In fact, this was the era of the hit TV show “Miami Vice,” and one song from Like A Rock – “Miami” – actually appeared in one episode.
MP3: “Hollywood Nights” (live)
So now, let’s jump ahead a couple years to 1988. The year before, I bought my first “cassingle” (it was the Grateful Dead’s “Touch Of Grey”) but there was already something new on the horizon: these little shiny things called compact discs. Do you remember what a compact disc looked like in 1988?
They were only 3 inches in diameter! Originally designed as the digital replacement for 
the 45 single, the CD-3 (as it was called) featured many of the big artists of the day but by the 1990s the practice proved to be not as economical as just pressing CD singles in the standard disc size we know and love today.
Our blog co-editor George bought this CD-3 as an import: Bruce Springsteen’s “Spare Parts,” from his 1987 Tunnel Of Love album. “Spare Parts” was a stripped-down rocker released as a single in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden. The best version of the “Spare Parts” single, though, is a Japanese CD-3 from 1988 which features a studio and a live version of the song as well as “Pink Cadillac” (which appeared as the B-side of the “Dancing In The Dark” 45) and a live cover of Dylan’s “Chimes Of Freedom.” That song would anchor its own EP in 1988, but without the little pre-song speech that Springsteen delivers on this version.
Early voting has started in most parts of the country, and running down the list of candidates this song came to mind. Thanks, Cee-Lo Green, for this little message to our incumbent and wannabe political leaders.
30 Days Out 