boxoffrogs

channel image

boxoffrogs

boxoffrogs

subscribers

Evil Ways Album: Santana (1969)
Black Magic Woman Album: Abraxas (1970)
Santana

Evil Ways was originally recorded by Willie Bobo in 1965; it was written by Bobo's guitarist, Sonny Henry. Bobo was Latin Jazz percussionist who was a big influence on Santana and played on some of their tracks in the late '70s. "He was one of the first guys who tried to merge Latin music and blues together on record," Carlos Santana said in The Guitar Greats by John Tobler and Stuart Grundy. "He did it before us, because we were doing it on the street, and he was already doing it on records."

Gregg Rolie, who joined Journey in 1973, sang lead on this. Carlos Santana, whom the band is named after, rarely took lead vocals but got plenty of guitar solos. His solo in Evil Ways is about 90 seconds long.

Santana made a huge impact at the Woodstock festival, where they included "Evil Ways" in their set. They hadn't released their first album yet, but had made a name for themselves playing live shows on the West Coast. Their manager, Bill Graham, got them on the bill, playing the same day as their San Francisco cohorts The Grateful Dead. Their first album, Santana, was released two weeks later amid the raft of positive press from Woodstock. The rhythmic chant track "Jingo" was issued as the first single from the album, reaching #56 in the US. "Evil Ways" was the next single, and it climbed to #9.

"Black Magic Woman" was a hit for Santana, but few people know that it's actually a cover of a 1968 Fleetwood Mac song that hit #37 in the UK. Peter Green, who was a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, wrote the lyrics.

Many also don't know that Santana started out as a blues band, just like Fleetwood Mac. "I used to go to see the original Fleetwood Mac, and they used to kill me, just knock me out," Carlos Santana said in the book The Guitar Greats. "To me, they were the best blues band."

Santana put their own spin on the song, incorporating Latin textures, but they kept the basic sound from the original intact.

The 1:49 instrumental at the end is called "Gypsy Queen," and was written by the Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo. It was omitted from Santana's 1974 Greatest Hits album, even though radio stations usually play "Black Magic Woman" and "Gypsy Queen" as one song.

The original version is based on a blues song Peter Green wrote for Fleetwood Mac's first UK album called "I Loved Another Woman." Mick Fleetwood called the original version, "Three minutes of sustain/reverb guitar with two exquisite solos from Peter."

The royalties generated by Santana's cover of this song helped sustain the song's writer, Peter Green, after he left Fleetwood Mac. Green gave most of his money away when he left the band, and would have found himself destitute later in the '70s if he didn't get checks from his old hits.

After this was released, Peter Green befriended some people who were into black magic. In an interview with Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone magazine, Christine McVie txtlimt

My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) Album: Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) Album: Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Cortez the Killer Album: Zuma (1975)
Cinnamon Girl Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Young alludes to three specific artists in the lyrics of My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue):

"Rock and roll is here to stay" - This is the title of a 1958 song by Danny & the Juniors, a vocal group best known for their hit "At The Hop." They proclaim, "Rock 'n roll is here to stay, it will never die."

"The king is gone but he's not forgotten" - "The King" is Elvis Presley, who died in 1977, two years before this song was released.

"This is the story of a Johnny Rotten" - Johnny Rotten (real name: John Lydon) was lead singer of punk rock pioneers The Sex Pistols. He often seemed hell-bent on self destruction to ensure he would burn out and not fade away, but ended up having a very long and productive career.

Around 1977 Neil Young formed a band called The Ducks that included Jeff Blackburn. The band played for a $3 cover charge in the hip Santa Cruz club environment. "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)" came out of this period and Jeff Blackburn received co-writing credit on the track with Young.

Jeff Blackburn recalled to Uncut magazine: "We were old friends going back to the '60s. I was playing in Santa Cruz with John Craviotto and Bob Mosley (Moby Grape) who were a great rhythm section, when Neil ducked into it. That was a great summer. We played about 30 shows with The Ducks, we played every night. It really was a mighty month.

Neil and I swapped ideas. We both had material, we had ideas and things came together as we were rocking together pretty good. I had a song with the line, 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's better to burn out than it is to rust.' Neil liked that and the whole rust thing came from that line - rust never sleeps. Not many people share a credit with Neil Young. It's hard to say why I got one, you'd need to ask Neil. But you never know what he's going to do next."

Young released two versions of the song on the album: an acoustic rendition called "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)," and an electric version called "Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)" that he recorded with his band, Crazy Horse. Both versions were included on the single, with "Hey Hey, My My" the A-side, which is what most radio stations play. The electric version has slightly different lyric and omits the famous line, "It's better to burn out than to fade away."

"My My, Hey Hey" is on the first side of the album, which is all acoustic.

My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) was the first track on Rust Never Sleeps. Young released a concert documentary with that title the same day as the album.

Kurt Cobain's suicide note contained a line from My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue): "It's better to burn out than to fade away." That line has become one of the most famous song lyrics of all time. When Young was asked text limit

We Got The Beat
Our Lips Are Sealed
Album: Beauty and the Beat (1981)
The Go-Go's

The Go-Go's were an American all-female rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1978. Except for short periods when other musicians joined briefly, the band has had a relatively stable lineup consisting of Charlotte Caffey on lead guitar and keyboards, Belinda Carlisle on lead vocals, Gina Schock on drums, Kathy Valentine on bass, and Jane Wiedlin on rhythm guitar. They are widely considered the most successful all-female rock band of all time.

The quintet emerged from the L.A. punk rock scene of the late 1970s and in 1981 released their debut album Beauty and the Beat. A first for an all-female band writing their material and playing their instruments, the LP topped the Billboard album chart and remains an achievement yet to be matched. Beauty and the Beat is considered one of the "cornerstone albums of US new wave" (AllMusic), having broken barriers and paved the way for a host of other new American acts. It yielded two of the Go-Go's four biggest Hot 100 hits—"Our Lips Are Sealed" (no. 20) and "We Got the Beat" (no. 2)—and, after a long and steady climb, reached number one in the chart dated March 6, 1982. The album stayed at the top for six consecutive weeks, eventually selling over two million copies. The group, credited as simply Go-Go's on all of their US releases, was nominated for the Best New Artist award at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards.

The Go-Go's broke up in 1985, with each member embarking on a solo career and Carlisle being the most successful, having several top-5 singles through the late 1980s. They reconvened several times in the 1990s, releasing a new album in 2001, God Bless the Go-Go's, and touring. They received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011. Though the band's 2016 performances were billed as a farewell tour, the band remained active on an ad hoc basis for several years afterward. Head Over Heels, a musical featuring the songs of the Go-Go's, ran on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre from 2018 to 2019. The group was inducted into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, and shortly after that announced their disbandment.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1978 as the Misfits by Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle (vocals), Jane Wiedlin (guitar, background vocals), the Go-Go's also included Margot Olavarria on bass and Elissa Bello on drums.

They were formed as a punk band and had roots in the L.A. punk community. They shared a rehearsal space with the Motels and Carlisle, under the name "Dottie Danger", had briefly been a member of punk rock band the Germs. After she became temporarily ill, she separated from the Germs before ever playing a gig.

The band began playing gigs at punk venues such as The Masque and the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles and the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco alongside bands such as X, Fear, the Plugz and the Controllers. Charlotte Caffey (lead guitar, keyboards, back text limit

Should I Stay Or Should I Go Album: Combat Rock (1982)
Train In Vain (Stand By Me) Album: London Calling (1979)
bonus track...
The Clash

Should I Stay Or Should I Go is one of the more popular songs by The Clash, this one uses a very unusual technique: Spanish lyrics echoing the English words.

Singing the Spanish parts with Joe Strummer was Joe Ely, a Texas singer whose 1978 album Honky Tonk Masquerade got the attention of The Clash when they heard it in England. When Ely and his band performed in London, The Clash went to a show and took them around town after the performance. They became good friends, and when The Clash came to Texas in 1979, they played some shows together. They stayed in touch, and when The Clash returned to America in 1982, they played more shows together and Ely joined them in the studio when they were recording Combat Rock at Electric Ladyland Studio in New York.

In a 2012 Songfacts interview with Joe Ely, he explained: "I'm singing all the Spanish verses on that, and I even helped translate them. I translated them into Tex-Mex and Strummer kind of knew Castilian Spanish, because he grew up in Spain in his early life. And a Puerto Rican engineer (Eddie Garcia) kind of added a little flavor to it. So it's taking the verse and then repeating it in Spanish."

When we asked Ely whose idea the Spanish part was, he said, "I came in to the studio while they were working out the parts. They'd been working on the song for a few hours already, they had it sketched out pretty good. But I think it was Strummer's idea, because he just immediately, when it came to that part, he immediately went, 'You know Spanish, help me translate these things.' (Laughs) My Spanish was pretty much Tex-Mex, so it was not an accurate translation. But I guess it was meant to be sort of whimsical, because we didn't really translate verbatim."

According to Strummer, Eddie Garcia, the sound engineer, called his mother in Brooklyn Heights and got her to translate some of the lyrics over the phone. Eddie's mother is Ecuadorian, so Joe Strummer and Joe Ely ended up singing in Ecuadorian Spanish.
About two minutes in, you can hear Mick Jones say, "Split!" While it sounds like it could be some kind of statement related to the song, Joe Ely tells Songfacts it had a much more quotidian meaning. Said Ely: "Me and Joe were yelling this translation back while Mick Jones sang the lead on it, and we were doing the echo part. And there was one time when the song kind of breaks down into just the drums right before a guitar part. And you hear Mick Jones saying, 'Split!' Just really loud, kind of angry. Me and Joe had snuck around in the studio, came up in the back of his booth where he was all partitioned off, and we snuck in and jumped and scared the hell out of him right in the middle of recording the song, and he just looked at us and says, 'Split!' So we ran back to our vocal booth and they never stopped the recording."

text limit

Truckin' Album: American Beauty (1970)
Touch of Grey Album: In The Dark (1987)
by Grateful Dead

The '60s was a time for traveling and discovering your place in the world. Sometimes what you found was an empty existence that just keeps repeating itself day to day. Having to deal with everyday life when you were always waiting for some kind of revelation to expand your consciousness was often depressing. In Truckin', The Grateful Dead deal with the banality by continuing their search for epiphany. They just keep truckin' on.

"Truckin'" is the Grateful Dead's coming-of-age story.

In Anthem To Beauty, a documentary covering the making of the American Beauty album, Dead guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir talks about the romance of striking out on the road. He says it was a rite of passage for young people in the 1960s - as it perhaps still is to some degree today, though the internet has robbed much of the mystery of the road. "Truckin'" covers the Dead's navigation through that rite of passage.

"We were starting to become real guys," Weir says, "and really enjoying the hell out of it."

For the Dead, that rite became a way of life. The band never made a ton of money from record sales, and their unique legacy was made by touring.

Also in Anthem, Phil Lesh talks about how the Dead's touring in 1970 preceded the "rock and roll bubble," when groups were isolated from fans and regular folks. The Dead were flying coach, riding busses, and staying in modest hotels. There were no handlers to protect them from the public or from the authorities.

That manner of living was exciting in its way, but it could also get downright boring after a while, with long hours spent in hotel rooms and waiting for transportation to the next show. This is why the song has a line going, "Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down."

Even though the song is autobiographical for the Dead, it also means a lot to the lives of many Deadheads and children of the '60s in general. Part of what defined that generation was the thirst for freedom and adventure, which led to lives on the road (and some people staying there too long).

Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are the credited writers on this track along with their lyricist, Robert Hunter. During recording, Hunter fed Weir one line at a time.

The line, "Busted, down on Bourbon Street" refers to an incident on January 31, 1970 when members of the band were arrested in a drug bust that netted 19 people in New Orleans. The group was in town to play two shows at a club called the Warehouse, and the raid happened the morning after their first show at the French Quarter hotel where they were staying. Lesh, Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzmann were all arrested along with crew members and fans of the band who had joined them at the hotel.

The story made the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune the next day, and drew national attention, with Rolling Stone running an article on the incident. text limit

Brass Monkey
No Sleep Till Brooklyn Album: Licensed To Ill (1986)
by the Beastie Boys

Brass Monkey is about an alcoholic beverage. Brass Monkey is rum, vodka, and orange juice mixed over ice. Very popular with college kids trying to get drunk. The Beasties are not limited to just this cocktail, however, as the song explores various alcohol-related activities and beverages, apparently financed by their producer, Rick Rubin ("Double R. foots the bill most definitely"). Also showing up in the song: martinis, Moet champagne, and Chivas Regal whiskey.

In some circles, a Brass Monkey is mixture of malt liquor and orange juice, typically made by adding OJ to a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English. That's not what the Beastie Boys had in mind though. As Mike D confirmed, they were referring to a premixed cocktail served in a can. Made by the Heublein Company, it was sold in the '70s and '80s. The company wasn't specific about the ingredients, claiming it was made from "a secret combination of liquors."

According to Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, he's the one who got turned on to Brass Monkey. Beastie Boys were signed to Rick Rubin's fledgling label, Def Jam, and one night in 1984, Ad-Rock ended up hanging out with a rapper on the label, T La Rock, and a DJ who worked with Rubin named Jazzy Jay. A bottle was passed around, and when he took a sip, it was a revelation: This is delicious!

Jazzy Jay told him it was Brass Monkey, found on the lower shelves of nearby delis near the cheap wine and malt liquor.
According to Mike D of the Beastie Boys, they originally wanted "the Brass Monkey" to be a dance, like The Twist or The Watusi. There are inklings of this intent in the lyric ("Brass, got this dance that's more than real") but the song clearly ended up being about the beverage.

"Brass Monkey" was the fifth single from the group's debut album, Licensed To Ill, following "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)," the song that put them in the national spotlight. Licensed To Ill became the first rap album to go #1 in the US and the best-selling rap album of the '80s.

The term "Brass Monkey" comes from the figure of speech, "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." An actual brass monkey was thought to be a naval contraption - here's the story we heard:

Back in the day of naval wars being fought with the old fashioned cannons, they would stack the cannonballs in a pyramid. This conserved space and made it easy to load them. However, they would roll around the deck if there weren't something to hold them in place. To solve this problem, they used a large metal plate with indents in which to place the bottom rows of cannonballs. They found that if they used iron, when it got wet the cannonballs would rust, so they used brass and called it a brass monkey. Brass tends to really expand and contract with the weather, and when it got really cold the indents would get smaller, causing the cannonballs to be dislodged, hence the saying, text limit

Aggression As A Trait Is Constitutional

Back To The Future 322. A short film inspired by my environment..

Runnin' Down A Dream Album: Full Moon Fever (1989)
American Girl Album: Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (1977)
by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

In Runnin' Down A Dream Tom Petty sings about driving into the great wide open, with nothing but glorious possibility in his path.

Petty started running down his dream of being a rocker in 1961 when he met Elvis Presley. Petty, 11 years old, came to the Ocala, Florida, set where Elvis was working on the film Follow That Dream - a title Tom took to heart. In a brief encounter, Petty saw how Elvis captivated onlookers and made the girls go crazy. Petty became fascinated with Elvis and set out to follow his path.

The animated video was inspired by a comic strip called Little Nemo In Slumberland by Winsor McKay. Each strip told the story of one of Nemo's dreams, and at the end, he always woke up.

Full Moon Fever was listed as a Tom Petty solo album even though members of The Heartbreakers played on it. Petty had another band at this time as well: the Traveling Wilburys, which included Jeff Lynne, who co-produced the album and played many of the instruments.
Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell wrote this with Petty and Jeff Lynne. The three of them worked on the album at Campbell's house.

Petty and Campbell were very impressed with Lynne's production techniques, and learned a lot from the experience. Campbell gave an example of Lynne's style: "We'd put the mics up on the drums, and he'd walk out and take the microphone over the drum and he'd turn it away from the drum facing the corner, and he'd go 'OK, record it like that.' Sure enough, 99% of the time he'd be right. We'd go, 'Yes sir, Mr. Lynne.' We learned so much from him about arrangements and countermelodies and all kinds of stuff."

The line, "Me and Del were singin,' little 'Runaway'" is a reference to the 1961 Del Shannon hit "Runaway." Shannon is credited on the album for "barnyard noises," which can be heard just after this song ends on the album. Under the animal noises, Petty says, "Hello CD listeners. We have come to the point in this album where those listening on cassettes or records will have to stand - up or sit down - and turn over the record or tape. In fairness to those listeners, we will now take a few seconds before we begin Side 2. Thank you, and here is Side 2."

Those noises were made by Shannon and Jeff Lynne; Petty used them as an interlude to mark the middle of the album, because you don't have to flip over a CD. This section was included only on CD versions of Full Moon Fever, but survived the transition when the album was released digitally.

In 2007, the documentary Runnin' Down A Dream was released. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, the film chronicles the career of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played Runnin' Down A Dream at the halftime show of the Super Bowl in 2008. Rather than the usual medley of hits, the band played four full songs, the others being "American Girl," text limit

Red House Album: Are You Experienced? (1967)
All Along The Watchtower Album: Electric Ladyland (1968)
by Jimi Hendrix

Running about 13 minutes depending on the rendition, "Red House" is a scorching blues number where Hendrix sings about returning home to see his girl, who lives in a red house. When he gets there, his key won't work, and he realizes she doesn't live there anymore. Instead of wallowing in his misery, he turns back and decides to pay a visit to her sister.

According to the book Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight, Jimi worked up Red House in New York City when he was still a struggling musician. He was staying in a friend's apartment that was decorated almost completely red, which gave him the lyrical inspiration for this song.

There have been lots of rumors about the origin. These are the most pervasive:

1) One of his girlfriends in Seattle lived in a house painted red.

2) It comes from a Hopi legend about a mysterious red city.

Red House is a very intricate song that demonstrates Hendrix' mastery on guitar. It's one that earned him the respect of many musicians, including Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Gibbons says he was "completely turned upside down" when he heard it.
Hendrix recorded this in a call-and-response blues style where each line is repeated twice. This style dates back to the field hollers workers would sing to pass time in the American south.

This was not included on the original US release of Are You Experienced?; the omission of Red House tweaked Hendrix, since it was one of his favorites. He often performed the song at his concerts, constantly changing the arrangement.

Hendrix recorded many versions of this song. The first release was on the UK version of his debut album, Are You Experienced? The original studio version of the song is 3 minutes, 49 seconds. Here's the timeline of the studio versions:

Version 1:
Recorded December 13, 1966, includes studio chat by Chas Chandler and Jimi, released on the original UK version of Are You Experienced? and on the 1997 30th Anniversary CD re-issue.

Version 2: This version
The same basic recording as version 1 but with a different vocal take by Jimi recorded March 29, 1967 and a different mix with more guitar echo. The studio chat introduction was mixed out, and the song released on the US version of Smash Hits in 1969, on the 1993 CD re-issue of Are You Experienced? and on The Ultimate Experience CD in 1993.

Version 3:
Recorded October 29, 1968 and introduced by Jimi as played by the Electric Church, it was released on Variations On A Theme: Red House CD in US only in 1989, released on Blues CD in 1994 and retitled "Electric Church Red House."
This song was covered on the 1997 G3 Live In Concert album, where it was performed by Hendrix acolytes Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Eric Johnson.

This appears on the City Of Angels movie soundtrack, and was used in a scene in the movie where Meg Ryan, who plays a cardiovascular surgeon, requests a nurse to turn on textlimit

Love My Way Album: Forever Now (1982)
Here Come Cowboys Album: Mirror Moves (1984)
by The Psychedelic Furs

Furs frontman Richard Butler had a specific audience in mind when he penned the lyrics to Love My Way. He explained in an interview with Creem in 1982: "It's basically addressed to people who are f--ked up about their sexuality, and says 'Don't worry about it.' It was originally written for gay people."

To the best of our knowledge, Love My Way is the most popular song featuring a marimba as a lead instrument. The Forever Now album was produced by Todd Rundgren and recorded at his studio, Utopia Sound. It was his idea to use the marimba on this track, and he played it.

The demo of the song had a different instrument for those sections, but Rundgren had a marimba in the studio and thought it would be worth a shot. "It turned out that the little musical theme just sounded perfect with the marimbas, and became a signature element of the song," he said in an interview. "So it just was a question of availability. It's not like I had to go rent some marimbas. I happened to have them."

The lead single to their third album, "Love My Way" was the first Psychedelic Furs song to chart in America, where it reached #44 thanks in large part to exposure on MTV. To that point, most Americans only heard the band on college radio or at listening stations in independent record stores. When the song caught on in the States, the band moved there because they found the audience more receptive and they liked what New York had to offer.

Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of The Turtles sang backup on this track, but you would never peg the "Happy Together" singers as the backing voices. Producer Todd Rundgren used them essentially as an instrument, creating a wash of vocals under the chorus and at the end of the song.

The dreamy, heavily tinted video, directed by Tim Pope, was the first by the band to get significant airplay on MTV, which launched a year earlier. Like many new wave British bands, Psychedelic Furs had been making music videos from the jump and had refined the form by the time MTV went on the air. Their videos didn't rely on subplot storylines where actors would portray characters in the songs. Instead, they typically showed just the band, offset by some abstract imagery.

The Forever Now album marked a change in direction for the band, which had slimmed down to a quartet after losing saxophone player Duncan Kilburn and guitarist Roger Morris. Their first two albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite, but Todd Rundgren was at the controls for Forever Now.

Richard Butler doesn't write love songs, but he does write songs about love. He told Songfacts that "Love My Way" is a great example.
This song is included on the Valley Girl (1983) soundtrack. It was used in the scene when Nicolas Cage surprises Deborah Foreman in the bathroom at a party. Because of issues with music licensing, this song and others hits from the soundtrack, text limit

Aint Life Grand Album: Aint Life Grand (1994)
Blue Indian Album: Til the Medicine Takes (2001)
by Widespread Panic

Ain't Life Grand is the fourth studio album by the Athens, GA-based band Widespread Panic. It was released by Capricorn Records and Warner Bros. Records on September 6, 1994. It was re-released in 2001 by Zomba Music Group. On July 3, 2014, the band announced that Ain't Life Grand would be reissued on vinyl in August 2014.

The band got minor airplay for their cover of Bloodkin's "Can't Get High," as well as their own "Airplane." They performed the song '"Ain't Life Grand'" at Morehouse College for Good Morning America.

The band began rehearsing for the album by recording pre-recording sessions at John Keane's home studio like their first album, Space Wrangler. They were so pleased with the results that they decided to use the sessions for Ain't Life Grand instead of going into the studio on a future date with their producer Johnny Sandlin.

John Bell – guitar, mandolin, vocals
John Hermann - keyboards, vocals
Michael Houser – guitar, vocals
Todd Nance – drums, vocals
Domingo S. Ortiz – percussion
Dave Schools – bass guitar
Guest performers

David Blackmon – fiddle
Eric Carter – vocals
Adriene Fishe – vocals
John Keane – guitar, pedal steel, vocals
Dwight Manning – oboe

Ain't Life Grand
Widespread Panic

Watchin people roll by
Wonderin where they're goin
Hey, what's your job
What are you knowin

Drivin to the grocery store
Pull my money out
Passin by the liquor store
Throw my money down

Ain't life grand
Ain't life grand

My wife's got the blues
Now I've got them
Gonna bring her a kiss
Make those blues run

Ain't life grand
Ain't life grand

Sun came out the other day
Through those dusty clouds
And in my mind I was a child
And it felt good!

Ain't life grand (x4)

Blue Indian
Widespread Panic
Oh, Pappy left a chair like he's still sittin' there
Once I almost saw him make his move
Brave Indian who never changes his mood
In a painting on the wall right there

Oh, how long 'til the morning wakes
Oh, how long 'til the medicine takes

Oh, Sally buffalo in the apartment just below
Just a bein' without a care
Oh, children from my brood they come and bring me food
Maybe open up a window for air

Oh, just now I smell the cornbread bake
Oh, now, now, now I feel the medicine take

Just like home
Where the stray dogs go through it all
Still right here, still just here,
Brave little friend

Well, we got a party goin' on many spirits strong
Ain't preacher just a happy to meet ya
Half a bottle 'neath the bed keep our spirits fed
My hat's off to you, to you and you

And now our brave friends, too, dancing circles through the room
And a broom and a radio and a twistin out a dos-e-do
Brand new day, the whole world's goin'
Whole room's goin' so

Just now, don't hesitate (hesitate)
Oh, taste the morning break (morning break)
Sweet, sweet, young honeycomb (honeycomb)
On, now, now, now just like home (just like home)

Oh, just like, just like home
Wher

“The divine in human nature disappears and interest, greed and selfishness takes it place.
When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors the words of doom are already written upon its walls.”
Albert Pike , Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Black Sun Album: The Cult (1994)
American Gothic Album: Beyond Good and Evil (2001)
by The Cult

The Black Sun symbol. The Black Sun (German: Schwarze Sonne) is a type of sun wheel

Black Sun Lyrics

Don't you hit that defenseless child
What gives you that empty right?
Carry that for the rest of your life
Carry that for the rest of time

Did they hold you down?
Oh yeah
Did they push you around?
Oh yeah-yeah

Burning in the black sun
Like a jackle on the run, well
Burning in the black sun

Burning up in the black sun, whoa yeah
Rotten apples every one, ay
Look at them
Look at them run
Guilty now for what they have done

Did they hold you down?
Whoa yeah-yeah
Did they push you around?
Whoa yeah-yeah

Burning in the black sun
Like a dog on the run
Burning in the black sun
Well, the time has finally come, whoa yeah
Black sun
It's like a jackel on the run, whoa yeah
Burning in the black, the black sun

Caught their vein, you've gone insane
You've lost your mind, you're not my kind
I hate your soul, you kill my fun
You did no good, you better run

Gonna get you down, gonna put you down
Gonna stick you in the ground
Gonna stick you in the ground
Gonna make you
Oh, gonna make you, whoa

Burning in the black sun, black sun
Burning in the black sun, black sun, black sun

Don't you hit that defenseless child
What gives you that empty right?

Burning in the black sun, black sun, black sun, black sun, black sun
Like a dog on the run

Burning in the sun
Burning in the black sun

Black, black sun
Black, black, black, black sun

Yeah, you were a bully
The universal bullies
Ha ha ha
Who's laughing at you now?
Who's laughing at you now?
You ain't got no hold on me
You ain't got no piece of me
You are lost in your own mind
Yes you are you're declining in

Oh yeah-yeah, black sun

Burning in the black sun, black sun, black sun, whoo
Yeah-yeah, black sun
The black sun

Burning in a black sun, black sun, black sun, yeah

american gothic
The Cult
I look inside your black heaven
I see your naked altar there, yeah, yeah-yeah
They rip you down and criticize you
Too strong to bend, too strong to care, oh-oh, oh

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the death machine

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the death machine

American gothic raven boy
Child monster with insect hair, yeah, heh-heh
You destroy this moral prison
You free the slaves, you free the slaves
You free the slaves, you free the

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the, the death machine

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the, the death machine

Black star, white light
A black star, white light
A black star, white light
A black star, white light

American gothic, your black heaven
American gothic, your black heaven, yeah, your black heaven
American gothic, your black heaven, yeah, your black heaven
American gothic, it's your black heaven, your black heaven

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the, the death machine

Black star, white light
Black star, white light
Eating the cancer cells from the, the death machine

American gothic
American gothic
American dream
Your black heaven
Your black heaven
Your black heaven

Intergalactic Album: Hello Nasty (1998)
Sabotage Album: Ill Communication (1994)
by Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys go to space in "Intergalactic," with alien-sounding vocals created with a vocoder, an electronic device originally created to encode speech. The funk musician Roger Troutman used the device on a lot of his songs, which were later sampled by hip-hop artists, but artists like Earth, Wind & Fire ("Let's Groove") and Daft Punk ("Around The World") really associated it with space. The original space-rock party jam, highly influential on Beastie Boys, was "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force, with a vocal that sounds like a vocoder but is actually a Lexicon effects unit. (Another song that sounds like vocoder but isn't: Cher's 1998 hit "Believe," done with Auto-Tune software that came on the market in 1997.)

The robotic sound inspired the lyrics, which mention the planet Uranus (cue Butt-Head) and Mr. Spock's Vulcan death grip. Also mentioned in the lyrics are rapper Kool Moe Dee and the song "Ooh Child" by The Five Stairsteps.

The song dates back to 1993 when they started cooking it up for their Ill Communication album, released the following year. They had been using a beat from Bo Diddley's 1971 album Another Dimension and making up lyrics with a space theme, using "another dimension" and "intergalactic, planetary" as the hook. It wasn't very good so it didn't make the album, but they revisited it for the Hello Nasty album when Mike D procured a vocoder. They wrote a new set of verse lyrics and this time the song worked.

There are bits of classical music flowing through Intergalactic. Rachmaninoff's "Prelude C-sharp Minor," sampled from a recording by Les Baxter played on a synthesizer, is blended into the verses. The piece of classical music at the beginning of the song is "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky. This part is edited out of the radio version.

Also sampled is "Love is Blue" by The Jazz Crusaders.

Some of the pioneering hip-hop acts that emerged in the early '80s distorted their vocals in inovative ways (check out "Jam On It" by Newcleus), but in the '90s, rappers usually went for a big, bold sound without any distortion. Beastie Boys bucked that trend, using a karaoke microphone to squiggle their raps on tracks from their 1992 album Check Your Head, notably "So What'cha Want." By the time they recorded "Intergalactic" for the Hello Nasty album, they had access to a vocoder.

Beastie Boys sampled themselves on this one, which they were wont to do. The word "drop" in the line, "Beastie Boys known to let the beat drop" comes from their track "The New Style" from the 1986 Licensed To Ill album.

"Intergalactic" was a huge hit for the Beastie Boys and helped nudge them further from their 1986 debut single "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)," which became a curse when they started to embody the frat boy personas from the song. By this time, they were Beastie men. text limit

Fell On Black Days
Black Hole Sun Album: Superunknown (1994)
by Soundgarden

Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell wrote Fell On Black Days about how he suffered from a severe case of depression during his teenage years, rarely leaving the house. At one point, he spent a whole year without leaving his house, during which time he would play drums and guitar.

It was released as a single in different versions, each with different B-sides.

Cornell told Artist Direct in a 2012 interview that the song is "about waking up and realizing you're in a dark period of your life."
Cornell had the idea for this song - and the title - about three years before he completed it. The delay came because he couldn't get in "the right musical mood to support the lyrics," until one day he was playing his guitar and came up with the riff he was looking for.
In 1994, Chris Cornell spoke to Melody Maker about creating the song and the meaning behind it. "'Fell On Black Days' was like this ongoing fear I've had for years. It took me a long time to write that song. We've tried to do three different versions with that title, and none of them have ever worked," he said. "It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything's going well, things are exciting - when all of a sudden you realize you're unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is f--ked!"

The band is named after a sculpture in Seattle called "Soundgarden," and longtime speculation was that Black Hole Sun got its name from another Seattle sculpture called "Black Sun" by the artist Isamu Noguchi. (The piece is located in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill. It looks kind of like a huge, black doughnut and is aimed so you can see the Space Needle through the middle of it.)

Chris Cornell stated in a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly that the title came from something he heard on the news - he thought the anchor said "black hole sun," but he really was saying something else. Cornell started thinking about the phrase and decided to write a song around it, as he felt it was a thought-provoking title. He wrote the lyrics first, then composed the music based on the images he came up with.

Black Hole Sun was written entirely by Chris Cornell. "If I write lyrics that are bleak or dark, it usually makes me feel better," the Soundgarden frontman said.

Black Hole Sun is certainly bleak, with references to snakes, a dead sky, and the summer stench. It's one of the more morose songs to get consistent airplay, and it helped associate the grunge sound with depression and angst. Cornell, however, was simply expressing some dark thoughts in song - he was not suffering or crying for help in the manner of Kurt Cobain.

In an interview with Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, he said of this song: "We'd had singles before. But that was easily our text limit

One Trick Pony
God Bless The Absentee Album One-Trick Pony (1980)
by Paul Simon

One-Trick Pony is the fifth solo studio album by Paul Simon released in 1980. It was Simon's first album for Warner Bros. Records, and his first new studio album since 1975's Still Crazy After All These Years. His back catalog from Columbia Records would also move to Warner Bros. as a result of his signing with the label.

Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony was released concurrently with the film of the same name, in which Simon also starred. Despite their similarities, the album and film are musically distinct: each features different versions of the same songs, as well as certain songs that appear exclusively on either the film or the album. The title track was released as a single and became a U.S. Top 40 hit. Two of the tracks (the title song and "Ace in the Hole") were recorded live at the Agora Theatre and Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio in September 1979, while the rest are studio cuts.

Several session musicians appearing on the album also appeared in the movie as the character Jonah's backing band: guitarist Eric Gale, pianist Richard Tee, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Steve Gadd. Simon toured Europe and America in 1980 with this band in support of the album, with one concert from Philadelphia recorded on video and released on VHS under the title "Paul Simon in Concert", then subsequently on DVD under 2 different titles for the same concert footage ("Live at the Tower Theatre" and "Live from Philadelphia").

In 2004, One-Trick Pony was remastered and re-released by Warner Bros. Records. This reissue contains four bonus tracks, including "Soft Parachutes" and "Spiral Highway" (an early version of "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns") both of which were featured in the film but were missing from the original album release. Also included in the re-release were the outtake of "All Because of You" (an early version of "Oh, Marion" that would also spawn "God Bless the Absentee") and "Stranded in a Limousine", which originally appeared on the 1977 compilation Greatest Hits, Etc...

The title is a colloquial American expression meaning a person specializing in only one thing, having only one talent, or of limited ability.

Paul Simon – vocals, nylon string guitar, electric guitar, percussion
Eric Gale – electric guitar
Richard Tee – Fender Rhodes, piano on "God Bless the Absentee"
Tony Levin – bass guitar on all songs except where noted
Patti Austin – vocals
Bob Friedman – horn and string arrangements
Lani Groves – background vocals
Dave Grusin – horn and string arrangements
Ralph MacDonald – percussion
Hugh McCracken – acoustic guitar

Brain Damage
Eclipse Album: The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Pink Floyd

This is probably about insanity, something the band was quite familiar with. Ex-singer/guitarist Syd Barrett's experiments with hallucinogens caused his unfortunate fall in the late '60s.

Many people consider this and "Eclipse" one song because they run seamlessly together at the end of the monumental album, The Dark Side of the Moon. Radio stations usually play them together.

The line, "You raise the blade, you make the change" is a reference to frontal lobotomies.

The line, "And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes" is a specific reference to Syd Barrett's propensity for playing the wrong song on stage during his "episodes" towards his final days with Pink Floyd, which subsequently led to his dismissal.

Many people believe that The Dark Side of the Moon synchs up with the movie The Wizard Of Oz (beginning the record just as the third roar from MGM lion is displayed). This song plays while the scarecrow sings "If I only had a brain."

The lyrics, "The lunatic is on the grass" do not refer to the drug marijuana, but rather actual sod. Roger Waters based the line on the signs that state "Stay Off The Grass" and how he thought anyone who disobeyed the signs was crazy. The line, "Got to keep the loonies on the path" supports this, meaning that people must not get off the path and onto the grass.

The closing track on Pink Floyd's famous Dark Side of the Moon album, this seamlessly follows "Brain Damage" to close it out - radio stations almost always played the songs together. The album was well into production but didn't have an ending until Roger Waters came up with the song. It reprises some lyrics to the opening track "Breathe" ("All that you touch, all that you see") before closing out the album with the words, "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."

This closing statement is the voice of Gerry O'Driscoll (often misspelled "Jerry Driscoll"), who was the doorman at Abby Road studios, where the album was recorded. His is one of many random voices that show up throughout the album; Waters recorded people around the studios, looking for spontaneous thoughts, and Driscoll, with his sincere delivery and Irish accent, made the finished piece. He can also be heard on the track "The Great Gig In The Sky" (the line that begins, "I am not frightened of dying...").

Dave Gilmour recalled to Rolling Stone in 2011: "I remember working hard on making it build and adding harmonies that join in as you go through the song. Because there's nothing to it - there's no chorus, there's no middle eight, there's just a straight list. So, every four lines we'll do something different."

The working title for the Dark Side of the Moon album was "Eclipse: A Piece For Assorted Lunatics." They began working on it during rehearsals for their concerts, and performed early versions live during shows in 1972. This was an era when bands text limit

In honor of the Eclipse I give you
For Whom The Bell Tolls Album: Ride The Lightning (1984)
by Metallica

The rules change April 8th. 04/08 2024
Forty-eight is the double factorial of 6
The number of symmetries of a cube.
The number of Ptolemaic constellations.
According to the Mishnah, Torah wisdom is acquired via 48 ways (Pirkei Avoth 6:6).
In Buddhism, Amitabha Buddha had made 48 great vows and promises to provide ultimate salvation to countless beings through countless eons, with benefits said to be available merely by thinking about his name with Nianfo practice. He is thus hailed as "King of Buddhas" through such skillful compassion and became a popular and formal refuge figure in Pureland Buddhism.
On Tool's album Ænima, there is a song named "Forty-Six & 2", the sum of which is 48.
48 Hours is a television news program on CBS.
'48 is an alternate history novel by James Herbert.
The number 48 in ASCII is what you add to any single digit integer to convert to its ASCII value.
In my world, a 48 is an Incomplete Sequence Relay / Blocked Rotor

The lyrics are based on the 1940 Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name. The book is about an American who is given the job of taking out a bridge held by the Fascist army in the Spanish Civil War - the precursor to World War II. He fell in love and then found out very disturbing things about life and death.

The phrase "For Whom The Bell Tolls" originated in a 1623 poem by the Englishman John Donne, who wrote:

Send not to know
For whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee

Hemingway's book used the title.

This song is a commentary on the futility of war. The last few lines of the song diverge from the book to make this point. >>
This is another song in which Cliff Burton's unique lead bass style is often mistaken for a guitar solo. Burton played the intro using light distortion on his bass.

According to Kirk Hammett, Burton regularly played the intro bass riff when the pair of them were hanging out in their hotel room. The guitarist recalled to Rolling Stone in 2014: "He used to carry around an acoustic classical guitar that he detuned so that he could bend the strings. Anyway, when he would play that riff, I would think, 'That's such a weird, atonal riff that isn't really heavy at all.'"

"I remember him playing it for James (Hetfield, vocals), and James adding that accent to it and all of a sudden, it changed," Hammett added. "It's such a crazy riff. To this day, I think, 'How did he write that?' Whenever I hear nowadays, it's like, 'OK, Cliff's in the house.'"

Burton, Hetfield and Lars Ulrich are the credited writers on the song.

Ride The Lightning is the second Metallica album, and the first co-produced by Flemming Rasmussen, who worked on their next two albums as well. He came on board when the band decided to record the album in Europe, where studio time cost much less than in America thanks to a favorable exchange rate. They chose Rasmussen's Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen and text limit

Otherside
Scar Tissue Album: Californication (1999)
by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Anthony Kiedis explains that this song is about his drug addiction. The "slide" is how far he will get back into his drug addiction, since he would stop doing drugs for a time, then get right back into it. "I don't believe it's bad" is a refrence to how he doesn't regret doing drugs.

In 2004, lead singer Anthony Kiedis released his autobiography, which was titled Scar Tissue. In the book, he explained some of the lyrics: "Sarcastic Mr. Know-it-all" is Dave Navarro, whom Anthony refers to as "the King of sarcasm." "With the birds I'll share this lonely view" was inspired by birds that Anthony saw while he was singing outside of Flea's house, and he also says that the line has to do with how he felt like an outsider, looking in. Anthony was introduced to pot when he was 12, but he first got high when he was 4. He was walking down the street with his dad, and his dad blew pot smoke in his face.

The video shows the band driving through a desert. It was directed by French director Stephane Sednaoui, who also directed the videos for "Around the World" and "Give It Away." In the video, the band members are all battered and bruised and the neck of John Frusciante's guitar is broken. Also, John is seen driving; the irony being that he can't actually drive.
This won a Grammy for Best Rock Song.

This spent a record 16 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart.

The line, "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you 'cause," Anthony Kiedis is referring to guitarist Dave Navarro, and how in the music video for "Warped" (off the One Hot Minute album), they both kiss at the end of the video.

A string quartet version (performed by the Vitamin String Quartet) was used in the 2020 movie The King of Staten Island.

Flea (real name: Michael Balzary) was born in Melbourne, Australia, but moved to Los Angeles with his mom and stepfather when he was 10, three years after his parents divorced. The name Flea comes from his manic energy - he was always bouncing around.
Kiedis was born to actor Blackie Dammett and had some early acting roles in F.I.S.T. (1978) and Jokes My Folks Never Told Me (1978). You may not have recognized him because he was billed as Cole Dammett. His mother is part Apache Indian.
Flea has had a robust acting career. His filmography includes:

The Big Lebowski (as Nihilist)
Back to the Future, Part II and Part III (as Douglas J. Needles)
My Own Private Idaho (as Budd)
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (as The Ruined Man).
Babylon (as a studio executive)

He is also the voice of Donnie on movie and TV series The Wild Thornberrys.

Irons and Slovak formed a group called What Is This? as a side project in the early 1980s, which contractually prevented them from recording with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but they quickly returned to the lineup to tour.

Hillel Slovak died of a speedball (heroin and cocaine) overdose 1988 on a European tour. Their drummer Jack Irons left soon after because he said, "I didn't want to be part of something where my friends were dying." That's when they replaced them with John Frusciante (guitarist), and Chad Smith (drums). John was eventually having drug problems and he left before they were able to start recording One Hot Minute so they replaced him with the former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, just for that album. Then in 1997 John came back to start their next album Californication. He has been with the band ever since. The only two members of the RHCP that have been with the band since the beginning have been Anthony Kiedis and Michael "Flea" Balzary.

Mother
Goodbye Blue Sky Album: The Wall (1979)
by Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd's album The Wall is mainly the creation of founding member Roger Waters. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a young boy who loses his father in the war and is raised by his overly protective mother, who is the focus of this song. The child grows up alone as an outsider that absolutely does not fit in. He feels trapped by his overly protective environment while being shunned by the men around him.

Waters told Mojo that the mother portrayed in the song has some similarities to his own mum. He said: "My mother was suffocating in her own way. She always had to be right about everything. I'm not blaming her. That's who she was. I grew up with a single parent who could never hear anything I said, because nothing I said could possibly be as important as what she believed. My mother was, to some extent, a wall herself that I was banging my head against. She lived her life in the service of others. She was a school teacher. But it wasn't until I was 45, 50 years old that I realised how impossible it was for her to listen to me."

When Mojo asked Waters if his mother saw herself in the song, he replied: "She's not that recognizable. The song is more general, the idea that we can be controlled by our parents' views on things like sex. The single mother of boys, particularly, can make sex harder than it needs to be."

The main character in the song and throughout The Wall is named Pink. In this song, he's portrayed by Roger Waters, who asks his mother a series of questions:

Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they'll like this song?

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is the voice of the mother telling him the world is terrifying, but she'll protect him:

Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing

Unlike many of the songs on The Wall, "Mother" works well when extracted as an individual song, making it suitable for airplay. The songs on the album all flow together, so most don't have clear starting and stopping points, but "Mother" follows "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," which ends with the sound of a phone ringing. There's then a brief silence before we hear Roger Waters take a deep breath and sing the first line of "Mother." The song is the last track on Side 1 of the double album, so it has a clear ending on the line, "Mother, did it need to be so high?"

Radio stations took advantage and gave the song lots of airplay, playing it right off the album because it wasn't released as a single. It endured for many years on classic rock radio.

The Wall was made into a 1982 movie starring Bob Geldof as Pink. There are animated sequences throughout the film created by Gerald Scarfe, who visualized the mother as a huge monstrous woman with a brick-wall bosom. Roger Waters told Mojo magazine December 2009: "The song has some connection with my mother, for sure, though the mother that text limit

It's a mother beautiful bridge...

Somebody Told Me Album: Hot Fuss (2004)
by The Killers

As the Killers strolled onto the rock scene in the early ’00s, their unique blend of classic rock and ’80s flavored dance beats took a minute to catch on—but once it did, it spread like wildfire. Their heavy-on-the-synthesizer debut was preceded by several hit singles, including “Mr. Brightside,” “All These Things I’ve Done” and “Somebody Told Me” that defined rock music of the era.

“Somebody Told Me” was not an instant success. Cowering in the colossal shadow of the lead track “Mr. Brightside,” the song didn’t quite measure up. However, after the group shared a revamped version of the track, it rose in the ranks, settling in comfortably beside its predecessor atop the charts.

The song’s meaning has long been debated amongst fans with many thinking a deeper metaphor lies underneath the pulsing club rhythm.

When you first listen to the Bowie-Esque disco of “Somebody Told Me,” the lyrics seem to point to a man trying his darndest to get the attention of a girl in a club—a typical unrequited love tale for the rock outfit.

However, the lyrics also seem to point to the ever-growing challenge for a songwriter to reach their audience. Whether it’s a romantic connection or fame frontman Brandon Flowers craves, he lays it all out in this song.

Breakin’ my back just to know your name
Seventeen tracks and I’ve had it with this game
A breakin’ my back just to know your name
But Heaven ain’t close in a place like this
Anything goes but don’t blink, you might miss

In the first verse, Flowers sings about being in a dance club and hearing 17 songs come and go while trying to capture the attention of a woman he’s interested in. Many Killers fans also point out that the “Seventeen tracks” line could also point to creating oodles of music without reward, leading Flowers to “be done with this game.

Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend
Who looked like a girlfriend
That I had in February of last year
It’s not confidential, I’ve got potential

Inside the chorus, the double meaning continues as he sings both about the couple being attracted to similar-looking people—so it must mean they fit together well too. Conversely, when reading between the lines, it could point to someone having written a song that is similar to one Flowers has penned.

When talking about this track, Flowers has only ever said, “We were going out to clubs a lot at the time. It speaks to a young man’s frustration, the difficulty of picking up girls.”

However, the song was released as part of the group’s debut studio album, Hot Fuzz, and was little noticed by the industry. So much so that this single had to be released in two separate forms to gain traction. The first iteration of the track was released with the above pink single cover, but due to poor sales, production stopped altogether. A newer version, featuring a blue background, was re-released which then began to garner some buzz.

text limit

Turn Blue
Fever Album: Turn Blue (2014)
by The Black Keys

It was reported in February 2013 that Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach and his wife Stephanie Gonis were in the midst of divorce proceedings. Many of the lyrics on the Turn Blue address the breakdown of his marriage and the moody title track finds the vocalist battling depression as he struggles to "stay on track just like Pops told me to."

The arrival of Turn Blue on May 13, 2014 was announced using Mike Tyson's Twitter. The idea to have the boxer unveil the album originated after he called the band to thank them for licensing a song for use in a documentary he was making and he offered to do them a favor in return.

The title is based on a catch phrase used by Ghoulardi, a Cleveland TV host of a late night horror movie presentation between 1963-66. The Black Keys were asked by the BBC what made this appropriate as the title track? Auerbach replied: "We just liked the phrase, first off. We liked the association with Ghoulardi, this kind of weird freak from Ohio from the early 60s - that was phrase he used to use. And then so much of the album was lyrically melancholy and introspective and personal, so it was very blue. I guess it just made sense."

He added: "We also liked how we could translate Turn Blue into artwork for the cover."

After the Black Keys had finished touring El Camino in January 2013, the pair headed to the Key Club studio in Benton Harbor to record an album's worth of songs on Sly Stone's old console. "We left the building once in two weeks," guitarist Dan Auerbach recalled to NME. "It felt like we were on a ship in the ocean."

The band felt that they'd unnecessarily rushed the process and only retained two cuts from the sessions for their Turn Blue album "Fever" and "Gotta Get Away."

This was released as the first single from Turn Blue. The Black Keys gave the song's first UK airing on XFM's Evening Show with Georgie Rogers. "Ultimately I think it's something different than anything we've done before," drummer Patrick Carney told Georgie. "It's a pretty diverse album and a little bit more psychedelic than the last record."

"It always feels strange releasing a single because you have to separate the song from the whole album and you kind of listen to a song out of context for a few weeks," he added. "That's the part I have always had trouble wrapping my head around because for Dan and I, our albums are meant to be listened to as albums. I'm excited for people to hear the song. I'm more excited for people to hear the whole album."

The song's music video features Dan Auerbach as a televangelist, whilst Patrick Carney nods along approvingly on the side. The clip was directed by photographer Theo Wenner, who is the son of Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann Wenner.

Auerbach urges his followers to call his donation hotline number - 1 (646) 397-6172 , which flashes at the bottom of the screen. Try dialing it for a largely indecipherable pre-recorded text limit

Arizona Album Blackout (1982)
Always Somewhere Album Lovedrive (1979)
Scorpions

Lovedrive is the sixth studio album by the German rock band Scorpions, released in 1979. Considered by some critics to be the pinnacle of their career, Lovedrive was a major evolution of the band's sound, exhibiting their "classic style" that would be later developed over their next few albums. Lovedrive cemented the "Scorpions formula" of hard rock songs combined with melodic ballads.

Lovedrive was the band’s first album to be released by Harvest Records in Europe and Mercury Records in the United States and Canada following the band's departure from RCA.

This is the first album to feature Matthias Jabs on lead guitar, and thus the first record to feature the band's "classic" lineup. Jabs replaced Uli Jon Roth who went on to form his own band, Electric Sun.

Michael Schenker, younger brother of rhythm guitarist Rudolf, had just split from UFO. He recorded lead guitars on "Another Piece of Meat", "Coast to Coast", "Holiday", "Loving You Sunday Morning" and "Lovedrive". At the beginning of the Scorpions' German tour in February 1979, Michael rejoined the band and the group reluctantly parted ways with Matthias Jabs. However, in April 1979 while the band was touring in France, Michael quit, which led to Jabs' immediate return after intense negotiations.

The original album cover depicted a well dressed man and woman seated in the back of a car, with the woman's right breast exposed and connected to the man's hand by stretched bubblegum. The back cover featured the same man and woman, but holding a photograph of the band, and with the woman's left breast completely exposed without any gum. It was created by Storm Thorgerson of the design firm Hipgnosis. It caused some controversy in the US upon the album's release, with later pressings of the album bearing a simple design of a blue scorpion on a black background. The original uncensored art was restored for the remaster series.

Recalling the cover photo with the woman and the car, Thorgerson remarked: "Not exactly the most politically correct scene you've ever seen. I thought it was funny, but women read a different inflection into it now."

In a 2010 interview, singer Klaus Meine commented on the album cover, stating: "We just did not know it would be a problem in America, it was just sex and rock 'n' roll. It is odd that in America some of these covers were a problem, because in the '80s when we would tour here, we always had boobs flashed to us at the front of the stage. Nowhere else in the world, just here. We just did not think it would be a problem to put out a record like Lovedrive in America"

Blackout is the eighth studio album by the German rock band Scorpions. It was released in 1982 by Harvest and Mercury Records
After losing his voice during the writing of the album, lead singer Klaus Meine had to undergo surgery on his vocal cords and was uncertain as to whether or not he would be able to record. txtlmt

SHOW MORE

Created 4 years, 10 months ago.

393 videos

Category Music

I engineer in forward and reverse.
The Lord of Lejeune & The Prince of Pensacola
Head Nigger in Charge of the Crescent