Eric Clapton turns 76 today.

And it’s good to see Clapton’s whole career getting the long look it deserves from the Long Look industry.

Because he’s been one of the essentials for nearly six decades – a career getting up there into BB King or Les Paul level duration. He started out as a blues legend in his late teens, did some of the best music of any kind in the late sixties and early seventies, became a poster guy for the dissipation of stardom in the seventies and early eighties…

…and then it got intense.

For my money, here are a few of his best. my fave from the “Cream” years (from Cream’s 2005 reunion:

Has anyone ever written about trying to steal someone else’s wife as Clapton did about trying to heist Patti Boyd from George Harrison?

From his relatively fallow, drunk-all-the-time period (in this case, with original backup singer Marcy Levy back from forty years ago)?

And for my money, my favorite Clapton song ever. Most people go straight to “Layla”, but I keep going down the track list from that same album, and arrive here:

Keyboard player and co-lead singer Bobby Whitlock said about the recording of Keep on Growing:

The sessions started out with the four of us. Eric, Carl, Jim and me. Derek and the three Dominos.

When we started the recording process we treated it the same way that we treated our live performances. No different. We always started out where ever we were with a jam or two. No matter if it was Royal Albert Hall or the Speakeasy. In the studio nothing changed in that department. We jammed before “I Looked Away”, then into the song. Then we jammed before and into “Bell Bottom Blues”.

The third song was about to go down, so we did our usual jam and it was astounding! It had a groove like never before. Then suddenly Eric said, “Let me put another guitar on it!”

He did as I was standing in the doorway of the control room and looking at him through the glass about eight feet away from me. The song ended and he said again, “Let me put another one on.” He played the second over-dub without listening to the first one. When that was finished he said, “Let’s do another.” He put the third guitar part on without listening to the other two over-dubs while he was recording. When that one was finished he said, “Just one more.” Eric heard only the original guitar while he was doing the over-dubs. He could hear what he had already done in his head. When he was finished he got up and walked in and said, “Let’s hear what they all sound like together.”

It was amazing what we heard back. All of the guitars blended together as if they had been worked out long before the session. It was incredible standing there watching and listening to Eric the master at work.

I felt like a fly on the wall. I thought that was akin to watching Rembrandt at work. What a very special moment for me. And now you all! When we had finished listening to it Tom said that it was going to the can because we didn’t have room on this record for an instrumental. I said to them, “Give me twenty minutes!” I took a yellow note pad and a pencil out into the foyer of Criteria and my relatively short life fell out of me, words and melody and all, so fast that I could hardly get them down on the paper.

When I was finished I went back into the studio where Eric and Tom had been waiting in the control room for me to finish. The mike was there waiting for me, so I walked up to it and started to sing the song. I got half way through the first verse when I stopped it and said to Eric, “Hey man come on out here and let’s do our Sam and Dave thing to it.” Eric came out and we did it first run through.

First take! That was it! And the song “Keep On Growing” had been born.

I mean, if this song had spawned from weeks worth of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Born to Run” or “Be My Baby”-style studiomongering, I wouldn’t have liked it any less. Learning that part of the story after all these years?

Happy birthday, Eric Clapton.

Stopped at Kwik Trip for a bathroom break on my way up North for the weekend. Store music was Me and Bobby McGee, by Janis Joplin. I looked around at the employees and the customers, and realized the song was older than anybody in the store.

Except me.

Joe Doakes

Worse than that – a few years back, when my kids were at home, one of them was watching a music video. It was some Australian boy band doing a cover of “What I Like About You”, the 1979 hit by The Romantics.

And it occurred to me – a band at that time (2016) covering “What I Like About You” would have been the same as a band in 1979 covering a song from 1942.

Or, today, 1937.

While I haven’t probably kept up with all of Pete Townsend‘s work since “White City“, I have to say if I were to put together a list of his most overlooked solo/non-Who work, my list would look very much the same as this, and more or less the same order.

“The Sea Refuses No River” is far and away his most underrated song. And “White City Fighting” should have been a hit.

Pete Townsend – the idol of my early teenage years, and whose first memorable line was “I Hope I Die Before I Get Old” – turns 75 today.

The lesson? Be careful what you become known for at 19…

I was working in clubs and Top40 radio when Milli Vanilli rose, conquered…

…and slinked a way in a cloud of shame when it became known that they hadn’t sung their album, and had lip-synched their “live” performances.

And it was about this time thirty years ago that the “scandal” blew up, wrecking the careers of most everyone involved…

…and about 3-5 years before it became pretty clear that it was more the rule than the exception in top-40 pop music, and probably ten years before technology started doing the things that Milli Vanilli’s producer had to get humans to do.

Just saying – had Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan come along ten years later, they’d still be megastars.

…only by a musician that hasn’t been a complete waste of time for most of his career:

NPR does what journalists actually should, and provides the needful – a list (and playlist) of all the songs referenced in “Murder Most Foul”.

(And before all the Billy Joel fans start beefing – Joel’s had two good moments in his career – and “Piano Man” was neither of them. There’s this song – which he wrote for Ronnie Spector, who covered it with the E Street Band in the background…

…and one whole, glorious album where I managed to mostly forget it was Billy Joel doing the singing.

And with that, I return to this blog’s official status quo: Bob Dylan is an eccentric genius, and Billy Joel is a talented douchebag.

Kyle Smith on the Met’s new exhibit of notable musical instruments of the rock and roll era.

Read the whole thing. But I thought I’d pullquote this:

Yet the mystical power of some of these objects drowns out the racket. Here is a surviving fragment of the guitar Hendrix doused with lighter fluid and set on fire at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, in a gesture intended to one-up Townshend’s guitar-ruination. Hendrix famously knelt in a pose of ecstatic worship behind the burning object, conjuring spirits from the vast deep. What was the meaning of that act? Hendrix was playing off the attraction of all things pagan for the hippie generation, but on a deeper level the ritual sacrifice cast rock as an art whose genuineness, hence its attractiveness, was tied up in its inability to control itself. Rock mesmerizes and destroys as fire does. To burn his own guitar showed Hendrix reveling in evanescence as not just the natural passing of youth but also a kind of death wish, an appetite for self-destruction. Like many of his peers Hendrix set fire to himself, and some part of it was performative, dutiful. Three years later he would be dead at 27.
It may be that the age of rock gods has already concluded, like the Jazz Age or the Big Band era. The youngest artists represented at the exhibit — Tom Morello, Lady Gaga, St. Vincent — seem unlikely to inspire veneration, or even much interest, circa 2049. Some alchemy of sound and performance on the one hand and societal tumult on the other made rock a leading cultural indicator, for a time. “You’ve left your fingerprints on the audience’s imagination,” Springsteen once said, “and they stick.” Rock matters, or at least mattered, and the Met’s imprimatur on the form is well justified.

That was certainly what grabbed me as an adolescent with more emotion than reason.

Still does, in some ways.

The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” turns 50 this year.

Kyle Shaeffer has a retrospective:

Yes, Tommy is very 1960s. Pinball competitions and psychedelic acid trips are not exactly hallmarks of today’s world. But of course, what makes the album sotimeless is the music. From great singles such as “Pinball Wizard,” “I’m Free,” and “The Acid Queen” to the more intricate musical tapestry and recurring themes laid out in the five-minute overture, this is an album one can, and should, listen to front-to-back in one sitting.

While hailed as a triumph by most critics upon its release, Tommy did have its detractors. Some found the theme overly twisted and its ideas of physical and sexual abuse and subjecting children to acid trips just too distasteful. Even at the ripe old age of 23, when he began work on the project, Pete Townshend was not a simple man. It should be noted that to compose songs for the two most disturbing parts of the opera, “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” Townshend asked bassist John Entwistle to do the honors. Having been sent by his parents to live with a clinically insane grandmother for two years as a child, they brought up too many dark memories better left to his autobiography.

I discovered The Who about the same time I discovered pop music – I was a moody adolescent, and Pete Townsend was a moody arrested adolescent, so it wasn’t a huge stretch. I think I was 15 when I first checked out Tommy from the library. I did in fact sit down and learn the whole thing on guitar – I probably could have played it from memory, almost, at one point.

And I thought – next year, Tommy will be closer to the end of World War I than to the present day. Or,, to put it another way, neither were all that long ago, really…