September 3:
♫ Happy Birthday To Us! Hi there music lovers and yes it really has been two whole years we’ve been out there on the internet, somewhere, whether on our old home, our current home or the new home we might be embracing in the future! No less than four snippets of news for you this week before we start our issue proper. For starters, Alan’s Album Archives has now embraced the world of tweeting and you can follow all our wonderful creative and monkeynuts thoughts by following alansarchives. In between our usual bouts of writing newsletters we’ll be letting you know about big music events, quoting song lyrics and generally letting you know what we’re up to so make sure you log on to stay in the loop (or is that loop on to stay on the log?! I never could get the hang of modern technical jargon!) Secondly, and rather weirdly, some of you may have noticed that Mojo music magazine chose last week to look back at Paul McCartney’s early solo years, concentrating on the very album we were looking at last issue. In fact the first couple of pages of the article are basically our newsletter in a slightly different order, which is remarkable seeing as both of us published the exact same day. Spooky eh? And to think people don’t believe our claims about Beatles synergy! (The odds of Brian Epstein living in that city with that band and getting an audition for them with that producer, the list goes on...)
Oh and thirdly, if you’re not signed up to it already look out for the new Track Records catalogue which is for me the best of the lot so far – all the really rare Kinks Arista CDs from ‘Soap Opera’ through to ‘Word Of Mouth’ at £7 each (!) and the fantastic Nils Lofgren Rockapalast concerts which I gthought had disappeared off the face of the earth forever! How typical we have yet another bank holiday in this country this week – now I won’t get my exciting post till Tuesday! But best of all, our site might be eligible to funding from www.inbiz.co.uk – we’re busy preparing our submission this week and will let you know how we got on in a fortnight’s time! Please keep emailing in with your ideas for the site – we’d love to move to a new home where all our work can be found together and with a proper advertising budget, but we’ll just have to see! Oh and our website is now up to 1680 hits, going up 70 in the last week alone! Yes we’ve said it before (and we’ll no doubt say it again sometime soon), but things are really looking up here at the AAA.
♫ Beatles News: Ringo’s family home of the early 1960s was scheduled for demolition along with the rest of the neighbourhood in 2006 and yet a dedicated band of followers have been campaigning against it ever since. The followers have just won another round of the interminable court battles and it now looks as if Ringo’s house will instead be moved to somewhere else – possibly America. Ringo’s take on all this? He doesn’t care a bit, claiming that he wanted to see it demolished when he was still living there!!
Byrds News: Bassist Chris Hillman has just released his latest collaboration with his old friend Herb Pedersen, a friendship that goes back to the pre-Byrds days when Hillman was still playing mandolin. The album, ‘At Edward’s Barn’, is a live recording from 2009 and well as including songs the pair have made together as a duo and in the Desert Rose Band there are a few surprises, like covers of the Byrds songs ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, ‘Eight Miles High’ and the overlooked ‘Have You Seen Her Face?
Janis Joplin News: There will never be another Janis Joplin, but that hasn’t stopped her old group Brig Brother And The Holding Company from trying to find one. ‘Hold Me – Live In Germany’ is the band’s latest release with Sophia Ramos fronting the band and featuring most of the songs on our AAA classic album ‘Cheap Thrills’. If you want to compare that to the original then you need look no further than the reissue of an old Joplin-era concert, ‘Ball And Chain’ – released a few years ago under the name ‘The Lost Tapes’ – a 2CD set which contains a gig from San Francisco in July 1966 and a reportedly staggering set from January 1967.
Neil Young/Pentangle News: Neil Young has often raved about Bert Jansch’s acoustic guitar work and at long last he’s done the decent thing and offered the Pentangle man a slot opening for his latest tour. Alas the bad news is that the two aren’t performing together – Neil claims in Mojo that ‘he’s too good – I’d get in the way!’ Let’s hope the pair’s debut concert at California’s Fox Theatre is followed by a UK tour!
In other news, there’s a new coffee-table book on Neil out, ‘Long May You Run – The Illustrated History’ by Daniel Durcholz and Gary Graff. The book follows volumes on, gulp, Led Zeppelin and Queen, but don’t let that put you off – there are apparently lots of rare photos that haven’t been seen before (including Neil aged two, by far the earliest photo of him around) and lots of pages.
♫ ANNIVERSARIES (August 30th-September 5th): Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday dear readers, happy birthday to us! Oh and happy birthdays to Al Jardine (guitarist with The Beach Boys 1961-1989) who turns 68 on September 3rd and Gene Parsons (drummer with The Byrds 1968-72) who turns 65 on September 4th. Anniversaries of events include: John and Yoko’s ‘One To One’ benefit concert takes place for disabled children and is pretty much the last Lennon concert we get (barring a TV performance of ‘Imagine’ and a guest spot with Elton John) (August 30th 1972); Drummer Denny Seiwell becomes the second member to quit Wings as the band are all packed for Lagos and ‘Band On The Run’ (August 30th 1973); Paul Simon releases AAA classic no 78, ‘One Trick Pony’ (August 30th 1980); the completely ridiculous court ruling that George Harrison stole the hook from ‘My Sweet Lord’ from the Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’ is passed (George clearly got it from the Hawkins’ Singers’ ‘Oh Happy Day’; August 31st 1976, a full five years after the single came out!); The Rolling Stones join their old pals The Beatles in suing manager Allan Klein for ‘falsely representing’ them with ‘intent to deceive’ (September 1st 1972); 10cc’s eponymous debut album hits the UK chart for the first time (September 1st 1973); Keith Richards’ house ‘Redlands’ suffers its second devastating fire in 10 years (September 2nd 1982); The Hollies finally score their American breakthrough surprisingly late, with Graham Gouldmann’s ‘Bus Stop’ (September 3rd 1966); The Beatles attend their first official recording session at Abbey Road, recording 17 takes of first single ‘Love Me Do’ (September 4th 1962); The Who, already deep in debt, have £5000 worth of equipment stolen from their touring van which is – wait for it – parked outside Battersea Dog’s Home whilst the band’s managers enquired about buying a guard dog. You can’t make these stories up can you?... (September 4th 1965); The Rolling Stones release ‘Street Fighting Man’, the second Stones single to be banned in a year (for ‘inciting riots’ – don’t the censors actually listen to these songs?! September 4th 1968); The Stones begin their second American tour on September 5th 1965 and record several of their best known songs in America around this time, starting with ‘Get Off My Cloud’ and finally, John and Yoko attend a screening of five of their short films at the London Art Spectrum, including such gems as the promo video for the harrowing ‘Cold Turkey’ and the pairs film of naked buttocks titled ‘Up Your Legs’ (September 5th 1971).
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