Bloggerhythms

During my college years of the early 70s I played Jim Croce on my radio show mostly because the station had a required playlist that every DJ had to follow. It wasn't the hippest college station in the world and every third song we played had to be from that list. I liked Croce more than most of the other atist's records we were forced to spin so I didn't really have a problem airing his stuff.  I knew all about Croce, his eight top 40 hits in about eighteen months (including two #1s), and the tragic plane crash that took his life at age thirty. I also knew Croce was a local boy who spent most of his youth in Upper Darby, Pa, but what I didn't know is how highly respected he was as a singer-songwriter. I plead ignorance in that regard unless his reputation as a great, working class storyteller grew over the years and elevated him above the status of just being another 70s soft-rocker. He never became the rock...

Kylie Minogue is the biggest selling, Australian, female singer of all time so it's hard to believe it took her until 2015 to issue a seasonal album as her thirteenth full length release. Among the sixteen songs on the deluxe version of  Kylie Christmas  are four originals and a six song, bonus DVD. It's a fun set of  tunes that covers a lot of ground. Minogue becomes a female Michael Bublé on both "Winter Wonderland" and "Let It Snow." Each one employs a big band with strings. She succeeds on the rarely covered "Christmas Wrapping," the great Waitresses classic - featuring guest star Iggy Pop - with a fairly straightforward, rocking arrangement that doesn't stray too far afield from the original. Many perennial Christmas standards are pleasantly well done and should bring a smile to your face even though Minogue doesn't necessarily offer many fr...

Cream was another victim of the infighting and creative differences that frequently plague and bring an end to many renowned bands, yet Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker managed to go out the way they began - by playing virtuosic rock that is still listenable today. Cream's last record, Goodbye , is brief by their standards. It clocks in at just over thirty minutes and to their credit it lacks the excessively long jams that were the trio's specialty and sometimes their Achilles heal. There are no side-long, fifteen minute drum solos, like Baker's "Toad," that will either bore or annoy you. The three live tracks from side one show the group to be at their blues-rock best with all three of them playing stupendous stuff. Clapton is his usual God-like self, but the real star is Bruce whose bass work is so dazzling that he proves to be more than a supporting player. On the 9:12, live take of "I'm So Glad" he's in the forefront as much as Clapt...

I don't know why I never wrote about this sad event before today. Inspiration came from a recent tweet I saw that said John Lennon has now been gone from planet Earth longer than he was on it. So, better late than never, here is the story of how I found out about his assassination. For whatever reason my wife and I went to bed earlier than usual on Monday night, December 8, 1980. We normally watched the local 11:00 PM news and Johnny Carson's monologue, but on this night we didn't. Neither were we tuned into Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football for his big announcement on ABC-TV, so we didn't learn about my favorite Beatle's passing until the next morning. On Tuesday, the alarm went off as usual and we awoke to popular morning drive DJ, Harvey In The Morning on alternative rock station WIOQ, 102.1 FM, in Philadelphia as we did every single day. On this particular morning there was something unusual happening on the radio. Harvey was playing the long Abbey Road m...

My wife's friend recently gifted me much of her CD collection after she fully digitized it. So far, I've added over 1,200 songs to my iTunes account and my ipod Classic now holds over 18,000 songs. While perusing boxes loaded with her old discs I discovered a 2014 album by a band I never heard of before - The Revelations, a loud, rocking, R&B quartet from Brooklyn, NY. On the eight song The Cost of Living   Wes Mingus is the guitarist, Gintas Janusonis plays drums and the singer is Rell Gaddis who replaced founding member Tre Williams . Bass has always been a revolving door, and on this record the job belonged to  Ben Zwerin . Williams and Gaddis started the band with the former serving as lead singer on two earlier full length albums and an EP. From the beginning, Gaddis wrote for the band and served as a second singer, so when Williams departed he was the obvious choice to become...