Bloggerhythms

Country Joe McDonald - who died March 7, 2026 at age 84 - and his band, The Fish were almost entirely known for "The Fish Cheer" and its accompanying song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag," but McDonald had a long career. He recorded over thirty-five albums and EPs with his group and as a solo artist, none of which are familiar to me. McDonald used his fifteen minutes of fame at Woodstock for his performance of the infamous cheer that leads into his still well-loved, anti-Viet Nam war protest song. Along with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" the "Rag" was a strong statement against the war and was even more pointed than Guthrie's sidelong, LP narrative. Just like Guthrie, McDonald used dark humor to get his point across even though the subject matter wasn't the least bit funny. I remember snickering the first time I heard it way back in prehistoric times when I was a teenager and ...

Stevie Ray Vaughan - deservedly elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 along with his band Double Trouble - is sorely missed. Sadly, Vaughan left us more than a quarter of a century ago with a discography that's limited in size due to his early passing in a tragic helicopter crash. In Step was the fourth and last studio album Vaughan recorded with Double Trouble, and it was the last one to be released in his lifetime. It went to #33 on Billboard's top 200 album chart. SRV's actual final recording was Family Style , an album on which he shared equal billing with his brother, Jimmie, who is best known for his work with The Fabulous Thunderbirds. Another excellent set, The Sky Is Crying , was issued posthumously two years later, but it was assembled from unreleased tracks found in the vaults. In Step is a fine record, and it opens with a blast. "The House is Rockin'" is nothing fancy, just good old fas...

Even if it's a current release by a newer artist, the kind of rock music I gravitate to more and more these days are the sounds of its formative years - those heavily influenced by the genres that preceded it - and that's exactly what you'll hear if you listen to Ruby James. James is new to me, but the kind of rock 'n roll the veteran recording artist sings is not. She has made several albums with her feet firmly planted back in the days when rock was rebellious, controversial and cool. "Bumble Bee" is the singer's showstopping, fiery lead single from her upcoming album, Call It Rock & Roll , that I'm sure you'll be hearing more about here upon its release. The record was a minor hit in 1960 for R&B singer Laverne Baker (#46 on the Hot 100). James takes Baker's fine, soulful, performance and updates it by turning it into an even better rock song with help from the highly regarded but not widely known  Ro...

Chicago has taken a lot of heat from critics over the years, and many fans - including me - have lamented what this formerly outstanding band became after beginning their career as darlings of the counterculture. In their early years Chicago was never a band to shy away from expressing their political beliefs. The anti-war wall poster that came with the third album - seen at the top of this post - is proof of that. Terry Kath could easily shred with the best axmen of the era, but the group often combined jazz, some classical, and even a little bit of country music into their often-sophisticated rock songs. So, to show non-believers the kind of music Chicago was capable of creating a long time ago here are three of their very early deep tracks that prove my point. "Mother"  from Chicago III  (1971) Chicago's third album was one of the group's more ambitious works and "Mother" - the son...

Today I'm rerunning a very interesting post that appeared here all the way back in April 2012. Later, it was discovered by Mom's Apple Pie's first manager, Larry Patterson, who published a brief comment about what I wrote. The ten piece horn-rock ensemble, Mom's Apple Pie, is remembered by record collectors more for the famously obscene cover from their eponymous, first LP (1972) than they are for their music. Let me be as delicate as possible. The artwork featuring the sexually explicit, steaming apple pie "Mom" is holding can be seen on the group's Wikipedia page and elsewhere on the Internet. I'm not posting it here because it may make some readers uncomfortable. Check it out on your own if you're interested. The cover of the Ohio band's second album (1973) - shown on the left - is far more mundane. Horn bands were still all the rage in '72 and Mom's Apple Pie tried very hard to cas...

Hammond B-3 jazz master Jimmy Smith (1925 - 2005) is someone whose music I've always enjoyed, but I've never owned any of his work until recently. While perusing the used jazz bins at a local, independent record store I saw his 2001 collaborative CD and grabbed it without reading any of the liner notes, so I really didn't know what I was buying. I would have preferred to have picked up a set that was truly a showcase for Smith's virtuosity, but it's my fault that I didn't. The disc, Dot Com Blues , is over an hour long with eleven tracks. Five of them feature guest vocalists, and that's more than any other full-length record Smith has ever released. William Ruhlmann of AllMusic  accurately described this album as Smith's version of Santana's  Supernatural  record - an attempt to "broaden his appeal" by bringing in a lot of guests. All of the singers spotlighted here identify more with blues than jazz and h...

Chuck Negron has passed away from heart failure and COPD at age 83. He was one of Three Dog Night's talented trio of lead singers. I was a big fan of the band and Negron in particular. He's in the foreground on the album cover pictured here. Negron sang lead on many of the septet's big hits including "One," "Easy to Be Hard," "Joy to the World," "An Old Fashioned Love Song," "Pieces of April," "The Show Must Go On," and a spectacular deep track - a melodramatic cover of Stevie Wonder's "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" that most music writers ridiculed. It's always been one of my go-to Three Dog Night songs. The band was a hit singles machine that placed twenty-one songs in the top 40. They seldom wrote their own material, but they had a knack for recording songs by many of the more talented composers of the era - often...

Ringo Starr turns 86 this year, and yet he never stops working. He continues to record albums and EPs and goes out on the road annually with his all-star band. Not bad for someone who was so sickly as a kid that many people believed he wouldn't survive to adulthood. Starr continues to collaborate with some of the top musicians and producers in the business and he mostly lets them run his recording sessions. I don't know if he lacks the confidence or the skills needed to take more control of his own work or whether he just enjoys the camaraderie and teamwork. Last year, he and T-Bone Burnett worked together on Look Up , Starr's very good, heavily country influenced, full-length album. Previously, for his 2024 EP, Crooked Boy , he turned the sessions over to Linda Perry, who's best known for the #14 single, " What's Up ," by the alt-rock, one-hit wonders 4 Non Blondes back in 1993. Perry gave Starr a couple of songs for two of ...