Although Scott Shannon is stepping away from his microphone
over at WCBS-FM on December 16th, he has made it very clear that he will
continue to program and host the station he started nearly twenty years ago,
The True Oldies Channel, as well as his syndicated program “America’s Greatest
Hits.” (He just won’t be getting up at
3:15 am anymore to do them!!! Lol)
Sean Ross, who does the weekly Ross On Radio column, brings
us up to speed on modern day True Oldies … and then looks back to his initial
review from 2004 …
Pretty cool stuff!
FH Reader Scott Paton sent us this very moving piece on
Warren Zevon’s last appearance on The David Letterman Show …
The Night Warren Zevon Left the ‘Late Show’ Building - The
Ringer
ZZ TOP ROUND OUT
MASSIVE 2022 TOUR, ALBUM AND BOURBON RELEASES WITH LAS VEGAS RESIDENCY AT THE
VENETIAN DECEMBER 3 – 10
Tickets NOW On
Sale
ZZ Top are headed back
to Las Vegas for five shows at the Venetian Theater, December 3, 4, 7, 9,
10. The December dates at the casino top their year of unprecedented
touring.
The group’s great
roadshow supports the most recent album, RAW, the companion to the hugely
successful Grammy-nominated feature documentary That Little Ol’ Band From
Texas, as seen on NETFLIX and on DVD.
ZZ Top’s RAW Whisky
Tour also coincides with their activities in the spirits world with their
recently released “super smooth” Tres Hombres Bourbon released along with
2021’s Tres Hombres Texas Whisky, launched in partnership with Balcones
Distilling.
2022 ZZ Top Raw Whisky
Tour dates:
Nov 3 - Hattiesburg,
MS - The Lawn at Lake Terrace
Nov 4 - Huntsville, AL
- Mark C. Smith Concert Hall
Nov 7 - Paducah, KY -
Luther F. Carson Four Rivers Center
Nov 9 - Hiawassee, GA
- Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds/Anderson Music Hall
Nov 11 - Daytona
Beach, FL - Peabody Auditorium
Nov 13 - Pompano
Beach, FL - Pompano Beach Amphitheatre
Dec 2 - Scottsdale, AZ
- Talking Stick Resort
Dec 3 - Las Vegas, NV
- The Venetian Theater
Dec 4 - Las Vegas, NV
- The Venetian Theater
Dec 7 - Las Vegas, NV
- The Venetian Theater
Dec 9 - Las Vegas, NV
- The Venetian Theater
Dec 10 - Las Vegas, NV
- The Venetian Theater
More info here: www.zztop.com
And for all you survey collectors out there, check out this
announcement from long-time FH Reader Jack Levin …
Due
to a recent large survey purchase, I was able to put together a collection of
complete years 1964, 1965, 1966 & 1971, from WLS.
The
60's surveys are unbelievably clean.
Jack
Interested? Drop us a
line and we’ll hook you guys up! (kk)
The Decades Channel has been running non-stop episodes of "The Fugitive" all weekend long, one of my all-time favorite shows.
It all wraps up early Monday Morning with the two-part finale ... but I can't believe very many people will be watching at 4 and 5 am Eastern to see it! (Seems like that's a back-to-back episode you'd want to run during prime viewing time!!!) kk
More on Springsteen’s appearance on The Howard Stern Show
here …
https://www.noise11.com/news/bruce-springsteen-explains-why-he-sold-his-catalogue-20221102
The Weird Al Yankovic biopic started streaming last Friday
(November 4th) and I’m still dying to see it … and trying to figure
HOW to do so!!!
It’s streaming exclusively on the ROKU Network … and I’ve
yet to learn how to access it … so if anybody out there can give us some
guidance, it would be much appreciated.
(We’ve been waiting for this one to come out for quite some time now!) kk
The New Colony Six will be performing at the Annual Holiday
Tree Lighting Ceremony in Elk Grove Village this year, the Friday after
Thanksgiving, November 25th, from 4 pm – 5:30 pm …
https://www.linkedin.com/events/6994396902385496064/about/
Wait, you forgot the big sound of Dodge City,
10 year old's chart ahead of the trend!
Love that extra lead at #1! A tie at
#8!!! (WHY???)
Of course, MOST of these had big ties to the
WLS Silver Dollar Survey ... well, not #35 by the new singing sensation.
In a month, #70 would be #1 and my legendary
life with the band was solidified.
Don't worry, Chuck Buell, I would soon be
recording "No Milk Today" as an exclusive off KIMN Denver.
Clark Besch
24/7 Christmas Music has started on Chicago
radio.
Here's a suggestion for the programmers …
Let's boycott "All I Want For Christmas
Is You" this year and give Brenda Lee her first #1 in 62 years.
Ed #1
Hi, Kent!
Found this while going through my huge list of Biondi-related websites.
I'd forgotten about it, as it's from 14 years ago. An old ham radio
friend, who lives in the Chicago, area sent this in to the KAAY blog back in
2008.
Aside: I DID look like Bob Stroud in that picture! ;-)
http://kaay1090.blogspot.com/2008/12/dick-biondi-more.html
Mike
And Our FH Buddy Harvery Kubernik tells
us …
An upcoming four-part SHOWTIME Documentary Films series, SPECTOR,
which premieres on Sunday, November 6th at 9:00 p.m. and will be broadcast
during Winter, 2022, examines enigmatic record producer, songwriter and music
publisher, Phil Spector.
SPECTOR is
executive produced by Oscar-nominated producer Jonathan Chinn, TINA, and
Oscar-winning producer Simon Chinn, Searching for Sugar Man, and
Oscar-winning director James Marsh, Man on Wire. It’s produced by Lightbox
from directors Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott, Framing John Delorean.
Spector (Official Series Site)
Watch on Showtime
https://www.sho.com/spector
As a teenager in L.A. in the 1950s,
Phil Spector was glued to the sounds of the radio dial. He relished Patti Page
singing "I Went to Your Wedding" and the Chordettes' "Born To Be
With You." He soon discovered "Work With Me Annie" on a bus ride
through the City of the Angels. His life changed when he heard songs like
"Sixty Minute Man" and "Treasure Of love" on the great
R&B station KGFJ from DJ Hunter Hancock.
In 1957, Spector, along with his
future Teddy Bears bandmate Marshall Lieb, appeared on the local KTLA-TV
program Rocket to Stardom, sponsored
by salesman Bob Yaekel, who used to hawk Oldsmobiles during the broadcast from
his showroom. The duo sang “In the Still of the Night.” Spector then formed and
recorded with the Phil Harvey Band.
The "signature Phil Spector
sound" really has its roots in the loud instrumental live music guitarist
Harvey Philip Spector played around the Los Angeles area in 1959, after his
graduation from Fairfax High School in 1957. Most of the time, his group would
integrate sax player Steve Douglas, guitarist Elliot Ingber, who learned ninth
chords from Phil's fingers, and was later an original member of the Mothers of
Invention, bassist Larry Taylor, and for years a member of Canned Heat, and Mel
Taylor, on drums, who most people know from his decades with the Ventures.
Reverb was part of the general
room tone of the venues that informed Spector’ audio explorations. The
influence of The Rainbow Roller Rink, The El Monte Legion Stadium, and the Pan
Pacific Bowling Alley, next to the Kosher Puppy, around the corner from the
Fairfax area apartment he shared with his widowed mother Bertha and sister
Shirley. His father Ben was an ironworker in Brooklyn, who had taken his own
life when Phil was nine years old.
In the May 31, 1975, issue of
the now defunct Melody Maker, I published an interview with Spector,
culled from a series of interviews in Hollywood at the Sherwood Oaks
Experimental College, inside his own Beverly Hills mansion, and Gold Star and
A&M studio visits where he was producing Dion, and singer, Jerri Bo Keno.
At the College action-packed
question and answer seminar, Spector responds to an inquiry on how he got
started.
I was a young aspiring guitar
player. I played on some of Big Mama Thornton’s records. I always wanted to be
a producer. There’s an old story I’ve told before. ‘OK. Let’s play baseball.
You be the pitcher, you’re the catcher, and you’re the batter. Spector, you be
the producer.’ I was always into that.
Dave Bartholomew, Sam Phillips -
I wanted to know about the people behind the scenes. The guy who played the
solo n ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ The tape echo sound. These things interested
me. They were exciting.
I played on records before I
made ‘em. I worked with Leiber and Stoller. Anyway, the only way you get into
the record business is to make a record. I believed in individual distribution,
which nobody did at the time. You can’t do that today. The big companies will
eat you up and spit you out.
We made a lot of records, played
on sessions by the Drifters, the guitar on ‘On Broadway,’ ‘Lavender Blue,’ and,
‘To Know Him Is To Love Him,’ the first one. That was the one I was gonna kick
ass with. I was part of the group the Teddy Bears. We did The Perry Como
Show.
-- Phil Spector
“Phil
studied guitar with Howard Roberts. I knew Phil in the late fifties, with his
friend, Michael Spencer,” waxed guitarist/arranger and record producer, Don
Peake. “We used to meet at a house on Highland Avenue, and they would play
‘Wonderful,’ the two of them in unison, and Phil would take a solo. Phil was a
pretty good jazz guitarist. May I point out to you [that], if you listen to his
recording with the Teddy Bears on ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,’ when that
bridge goes off to the planet Mars and changes key, that’s the stamp of a jazz
musician.”
The Phil
Harvey Band in 1959, followed his Teddy Bears group tenure, and were together
for only a month and a half. They dressed in western trench coats from the
1800's, Dusters, right out of the then current TV show, The Untouchables.
Their sound was twangy and echo-laden. The repertoire featured instrumentals:
"Bumpershoot," "Guitar Boogie Shuffle," Lonnie Donegan's
"Rock Island Line" and sometimes an uptempo version of "It's
Wonderful."
“I
like to have all the musicians there at once,” revealed Spector in 1975 on his
method of recording. “I get everything on one track that I need. I put
everything on 24 tracks just to see if it’s plugged in. The finished track
never ends up on more than one track.
“I
record in a strange way. I haven’t changed. I go from the basic track and put
it onto 24. Then I have one track and 23 open. That’s the difference between
having 24 filled or 19 filled. Which means, I can get 23 string players and
overdub them 10 times and have 200 strings then I put them on one track.
“My
engineer was scared to death to work with me. When I record, I put everything
on tape echo, everything. My engineer said, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ Do you
know Ray Conniff uses more tape echo than I ever used in my life? That’s a
fact.
“I
record basic tracks and then put it all onto one track or maybe two. Then I
condense. I put my voices on.
“I’ve
used Barney Kessel all the time for the last ten years. Terry Gibbs on vibes … everybody.
The better the talent is around you, the better the people you have working
with you, the more concerned, the better you’re gonna come off as a producer,
like a teacher in a class.
“The
musicians I have never outdo me. I’m not in competition with them. I’m in
complete accord with them. You need the ability so you hire the best. I have
the creativity. I know what I want.
“I
don’t wear a ‘Back to Mono’ button for no reason at all. I believe in it. I can
make quad, it’s easy.”
Last
decade I interviewed Gary Stewart, avid record collector and former executive
at Apple iTUNES who did music supervision and initiated licensing for the
company. I asked him about Phil Spector and Brian Wilson.
“To
me, Brian Wilson and Phil Spector are very different but connected in a way. Phil Spector did something better than
anybody. It’s not just ‘The Wall of Sound,’ which is terrific, and not heard on
a lot of other pop records, but the ‘Wall of Sound’ turned these records about
love, or lost love or those topics like they were the most important thing in
the world. Phil’s defining characteristic to me is he turned these things into
a matter of life and death than anybody else during that era.
“The
titles of his records, whether it be ‘Uptown’ or ‘He’s A Rebel,’ did tap in to
the teen identity. Even in ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ the stakes are higher
than they would be. In lesser hands they probably would be big hits but they
wouldn’t be as good and they wouldn’t be as lasting. It seems Phil treated this
like ‘Art’ with a capitol A.
“He
did two things ...
“He
had success in that area and a lot of the singers on Philles International were
black and he didn’t try and hide it and he didn’t lead for convention
either.
“Here
is my revelation about the session players on the Spector records, and also
regarding Brian Wilson’s recordings. All
of these people were great musicians and key to those records and almost none
of those people were artists. Or interested in being artists. They were just
doing a gig. If it was for love, it was probably in a genre like jazz, where
they couldn’t make enough money. And I have a theory that some of the best art
comes where there is a commercial pressure. At least at that point.
“Something
either burns long like Bob Dylan or the Velvet Underground or bright. There’s
some that do both. And the Phil Spector and early Beach Boys’ records they
found something, they expressed something, other people connected with it and
then they were on to the next thing.
“In
the case of Spector and Wilson, there is also the influence of Los Angeles on
them and their music. It’s weird ... I don’t think of Phil Spector or Brian
Wilson as Los Angeles artists. They went international. And factually I know
everything about them was so L.A. When I think of L.A., I think of the Doors,
Love, Grass Roots, the Troubadour, the sort of live music scene, the L.A.
garage rock bands like the Standells or the Leaves. And with Spector and
Wilson, we’re talking about two things that were largely studio creations.”
One afternoon in 1977, I did an interview
with Spector inside his home with Robert Hilburn, the former pop music critic
of The Los Angeles Times.
Spector spoke in reverence about
songwriter Doc Pomus, who co-wrote "Save The Last Dance For Me" with
Mort Shuman that Phil did with Ike & Tina Turner. Pomus had given Spector a
helping hand early in his career, even getting young Phil into an Elvis Presley
RCA studio session.
When Pomus died in 1991, Spector
sat shiva with his family. “Here's a
person, who happens to be a songwriter, and is in a wheelchair, and writes
'Save The Last Dance For Me,'” marveled Phil. "My graduating theme,"
[at Fairfax High School] Spector related to me in his Beverly Hills mansion in
1977, “was 'Daring To Be Different.' The moment I dared to, they called me
different.’
"I always thought I knew
what the kids wanted to hear. They were frustrated, uptight," Phil
continued, " I would say no different from me when I was in school. I had
a rebellious attitude. I was for the underdog. I was concerned that they were
as misunderstood as I was.
“When you see a Kubrick movie,
you tell me how many names you immediately remember in the cast. One, two? It's
the same with Fellini, and that's what I wanted to do when I directed a
recording. Singers are instruments. They are tools to be worked with.
We quizzed Phil about his
recording techniques, the Beatles and John Lennon.
“It was very easy to work with
John Lennon. There was no problem working with him. I think he is one of the
greatest singers in music. I honestly believe that. I feel the same way about
Paul (McCartney) as a singer. They are in a league with few others. I don’t
feel the same way about George (Harrison) or Ringo (Starr). John and Paul are
great rock and roll singers.”
Phil discussed the Crystals’ "Then
He Kissed Me." "That was an experimental record. John (Lennon) told
me the Beatles got the idea to use a 12-string guitar (Barney Kessel played)
from that record. But I thought it was too spaced out. I was against it coming
out. I was gonna can it."
I interviewed
keyboardist/arranger and author Don Randi in 2010.
“Phil and [arranger] Jack Nitzsche
always knew great songs. The songs always told a story. The songs in themselves
were films. And, especially in Phil’s case, he knew how to write them and how
to produce them. And in Brian Wilson’s case, Brian always knew where he was
going with it. He may have not known at the beginning, but after a while he had
an idea and he developed it. We were there to help him develop it. Jack was a great translator for Phil.
“You know what kills me, every
time I hear Jack’s ‘The Lonely Surfer.’ I’m on it. It still gives me chills
because it’s a great song. Jack wrote a great song. I didn’t hear it until the
day we went in. You know, we never rehearsed. (laughs). The composition. He went to Westlake School
of Music. I’ll tell you what gripped me was his brilliance. You gotta remember,
there was brilliance without Phil. There was Phil and there was stuff you did
on your own. And people forget about that. And, as great as it was, we were
making up parts half the time. With Jack, Phil was able to go to Jack and he
would translate what Phil wanted. There
was camaraderie. You got to remember we all were together. Jack Nitzsche, Phil
Spector, myself and Sonny Bono, who Jack knew from the late ‘50s at Specialty.
“I like mono but not quite a
‘Back to Mono’ guy. I still like the old LP’s and I still play them. For the
simple reason that unfortunately when they do these things, they have a
tendency to digitize everything where they clean it up so much that you lose
the character of the song itself. You lose the room ambience. My God, if a
guitar player squeaks on a note leave it! But they can get it out today so they
choose to do that. If a singer took a
breath before he or she sang a note, I used to love to hear that. It was part
of the record. And they don’t do that anymore.”
One of our Forgotten Hits Website pays homage to the talents
of Phil Spector.
Written and assembled by FH Reader Steve Knuettel, you can
find the whole thing here: https://fhphilspector.blogspot.com/
Tomorrow's Coast To Coast 1972 Surveys Sweeps takes us into Connecticut ...
Hope to see you there! (kk)
