In Which Doctor Casino Listens to Classic Rock Classics for the First Time

That is totally amazing.

YES

fantastic

<3

I still say you rule, Sandy.

Call me the Breeze: I'm now paranoid about already knowing some of these songs, so the intros are always fraught with a certain tension: is this something I know? Or am I just thinking of something that sounds like it? Then as the verses kick in, it's either a done deal or clear sailing. So my first to-do item here is to go back and listen to the intro again, because I was feeling the interplay of the guitars and horns sliding around but it was backed up by this personal stress.

So yeah, this song. Loping along decently. I wish Skynyrd's bigger hits were like this, just kinda effective filler rock songs, unmistakably "southern" but also pretty studio-slick - those multitracked handclaps around the two minute mark didn't fall off the back of a peach truck, ditto the squonking but pristine licks that pepper the second verse (although a couple kinda sounded like mistakes). I like how the fairly rote piano line is just kinda wandering in and taking up space, feels very much like a demo for a part where they were later going to dub in a solo or another verse. This is maybe the first song we've done where I really do think it'd sound meaningfully different (rather than just better) if played loud, filling up a whole van or party. What was I saying? Oh yeah, so I feel like some of their songs are just too insistent on their big title hook, kinda in your face with SWEEET HAUUM AL-A-BAMuh or SIMPUUUUUUUUUL KIND UH MANNN. This is more laid back, which fits the idea of people calling this guy "The Breeze" (first name, presumably: "One Oh Three Five:"). Here's a band. They play your bar, you can boogie to it. They'll collect their pay at the end and head on down the road. Put them on your jukebox.

Second listen: Opening definitely more fun. I like how the guitar that comes in at 1:20 or so is kinda fuzzed over itself, just sounds like one continuous loop of white noise with only a vaguely discernible doodley-doodley-dee kinda playing. When he gets around to your more basic solo stuff it's just fine, and doesn't wear out its welcome despite being pretty long. Nice trick having the percussion kick in a little more after that. I guess the guy is the breeze cause he travels all over the place, huh? Like the Wanderer...I'm gonna choose to hear it more like, they call him The Dude, or Speedo, or Daddy-O or something. Breezy like Sunday morning. As it is, unless he really loves bopping along to this band, cruising down the highway hanging his head out the window and singing along to their Southern-fried chops, being the breeze doesn't actually sound very breezey: he has to keep running, I guess from women, to the point where he actually can't enjoy his stay in Georgia. "They Call Me The Fugitive," more like.

Overall, kinda dumb basically but thumbs up, I would endorse any CR station adding this to the playlist for texture.

loving all of Sandy's posts btw, feel touched that this thread has prompted 'em!

I only just now stumbled into this thread and am wondering what the hell my problem was.

Sandy's posts = A+

the first reported side effects from this experiment! fear of recognition, and stress-related inability to pay attention to intros. interesting! will have to report this to the journals.

I feel like some of their songs are just too insistent on their big title hook, kinda in your face with SWEEET HAUUM AL-A-BAMuh or SIMPUUUUUUUUUL KIND UH MANNN. This is more laid back, which fits the idea of people calling this guy "The Breeze"

yes! this song -- which i didn't know at all when i was growing up and first being exposed to the rock canon -- sounds nothing at all like the skynyrd radio songs that i did know, with their gigantic pop hooks. this one's a straight-up blues jam. i would have hated it. i was all AM pop-rock, and i could not get with the blues at all. i did know the other two j.j. cale monster rock standards ("after midnight" and "cocaine") and didn't much like them, if memory serves. nowadays, "call me the breeze" is by far my favorite of the three. it's a freedom song, and the playing echoes that feeling. while i think there's a dark underbelly to pretty much any road song -- that's kind of the implicit idea of the genre, isn't it, that i'm rolling now but there's probably going to be a price to pay one day? -- i don't hear "call me the breeze" quite as darkly as doctor casino does. i think right now he quite likes being the breeze and will enjoy wherever he's running or staying or hiding or heading for. he's free as a bird now.

see also: bob dylan/johnny cash "wanted man." grateful dead "friend of the devil." both darker than "call me the breeze," imo.

everybody otm about sandy's posts.

skynyrd are so much more than their radio hits. i wanna drive around in a van with a loudspeaker testifying on this very matter

oh jesus christ good god yes. grownup me is happy to have learned this.

srsly anyone following this thread who hasn't dug into the skynyrd catalog

GO

NOW

DO IT

Well,then, since we're still on Skynyrd, and everybody seems to enjoy the pictures, I have two more. I'm kind of sad that I don't have any good stories about them... I only met them this one time. They were really nice guys. None of them smelled like garlic.
Here's one of us with the late Billy Powell. Notice that Leon's hat has moved to my friend's head.

http://i62.tinypic.com/2hmogua.jpg

but where's your hat? did leon run off with it?

and here's my friend Jennifer with Allen Collins and Leon.

http://i61.tinypic.com/11liyo2.jpg

Loool, Leon's wife was wearing my hat by that point. She was a hoot.

Billy!!!!!

Gorgeous piano player if ever there was one. RIP

Oh man, the Skynyrd guys almost look like kids in those pictures! Thanks Sandy.

Wonderful pictures, Sandy!

And Leon was hella underrated as a bassist.

how's life, was gonna say the exact same thing!

while we're on the subject of road songs ... america's birthday is nigh, and you can't get much more american than this one. a favorite of bruce springsteen circa 1984 (he covered it live frequently) and a favorite of senator rand paul in 2014 (if you can believe his tweets):

SONG #9: ZZ TOP "I'M BAD, I'M NATIONWIDE"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDZ9Ve6n5U

as for The Breeze, it's not so much a dark undercurrent, just that the lyric doesn't quite come together as one convincing picture. Surely the Breeze could arrange to lengthen his Georgia weekend just a little, once he finds out how good the peaches are?

the breeze has a rather large fear of commitment. the better the peaches are, the faster he's gotta run. he knows this about himself, and he's ok with this. for now.

that ZZ Top song is still on my CR ballot, classic

This song is a total classic, interested to see DC's review.

xxpost Would have been a good concept album - The Rise and Fall of Breezey Peach-Juice and the Skynyrds from Jacksonville. He could cross over with other songs detailing the challenges he faces on the road, like "Your Driver's License, Breeze," or the reactions of disappointed fans who think he's gone corporate ("Fake, plastic Breeze") - and of course, the impassioned cry from one of the lovers he's left behind: "Breeze, Please Me!"

Yes, The Breeze is happy with his fear of commitment for now. But when he gets older, and he thinks about the women that might have loved him, he wakes up one morning, alone and hungover, and realizes that he is now Desperado.

Ha!

Sandy otm

in his desperado phase, the breeze alights on los angeles and forms a supergroup with henley and frey. their signature tune is a lengthy jam during which frey is constantly imploring the breeze to solo. it is called "take it, breezy."

Yeah, that'll happen... one of breeze nights.

I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide: Feelin this from bar one. Not as scratchy and bothersome as the other ones of theirs I know. Another nice medium-speed road groove. Not crazy about the phase (? flange?) on the lead vocals (there's something there, right?), or the way it sorta stops mid-groove to do the guitar/piano thing at the end of the chorus. But my toes are still tappin'. I'm not sure I'm convinced this guy is all that bad, but nationwide I could believe - they've got a good instrumental thing going on, would book them for the same reasons I'd book Skynyrd above. With the return of the verse around 3:00 I'm starting to lose interest though - this thing could use a bit more of a verse melody or some other hooks or something.

Okay, this got cool with the next instrumental break, the shuffley-shaky drums and the pling-pling organ (clavinet? guitar?) anchoring the solo theatrics and that awesome chugga-chugga-dunna-dunna thing. This is cool. Kinda bummed it just fades out from that - would have accepted one last quick chorus and find a cool way to say "nationwide" for an ending. Whole thing feels like an instrumental jam that just had to be a 'song' and they had this good line about being bad and nationwide and just figured they would make up the verses as they went along.

Second listen just to check the lyrics again and hear that sweet second instrumental section. I guess there are some nice touches of detail, "cold blue steel," "beautician at the wheel," "my gold tooth displayed." Chuck Berry it ain't, though. Thumbs mildly up.

Call Me the Breeze is a fairly popular and covered song. I think it's originally by JJ Cale? You may have heard it before in some of its incarnations.

I dig the Spiritualized version of Breeze.

Cale version's pretty cool, too.

One of the many, many things I love about ZZ Top is that for decades, they refused to have guests on their albums—if there was a sound on there, a member of the band made it. So when they wanted to have horns on Degüello, they learned just enough saxophone to play the parts they needed.

ZZ Top always brings it, great singles band, great albums band. They were not at the right place at the right time to be quite as iconic but I always regard them as the closest the 70s came to Creedence

They're kind of unstuck in time to me - one of those acts that I knew of as sort of visual icons as a kid (here thinking late 80s, maybe even early 90s), without my really knowing what they sounded like. Since the beards, hat and sunglasses basically obscure their faces, they seem ageless to me - I know their 70s material is the core of their catalog, but they might as well have debuted in 1986 for all I knew, except that it was clear they were supposed to stand for something, since having them show up in a scene in a movie (I must be thinking of Back to the Future III here) or as a two-second blip in a commercial showcasing what you might see on MTV, or whatever, was meant to convey that rockin' had arrived and that everybody watching would know what it meant that these guys, these legends, are here! So for me they're actually more iconic than a lot of other bands, but that iconicity doesn't necessarily have much to do with their musical career as such.

I'm reminded here now also of how when I was a kid, my knowledge of 'heavy metal' and 'hard rock' really derived from, like, Teddy Grahams commercials, the 'guitar sound' button on electronic toys, and stuff like that. Maybe some kid eats a Fruit Roll Up and is transformed into a 'rocker' and therefore has crazy hair and a bandanna and is shrieking "OH BUH BAY-BAYYYY!" while lights flash and some kind of canned keyboard-demo rock is playing in the background. I'm pretty sure that's what I thought Bruce Springsteen's music was like as a kid, based on how everybody acted in Fox Trot comics. Or was it Bon Jovi...?

Oh, and the spinning guitars. I can picture them spinning their guitars around in unison, maybe with a bright blue sky in the background. Probably in the desert, or by a gas station on Route 66 or something.

ZZ Top always brings it, great singles band, great albums band. They were not at the right place at the right time to be quite as iconic but I always regard them as the closest the 70s came to Creedence

― noir-ish need apply (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, July 3, 2014 4:32 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hadn't thought of them that way before, but that's otm. They were one of the few bands of their ilk/era that still valued the idea of the single -- it wasn't square to them like it was for many of their peers. In retrospect, the fact that they were able to smoothly transition into the 80s, while the vast majority of their contemporaries floundered, isn't the least bit surprising. They kept making the great singles they had always made, and were smart/savvy enough to keep current with music-making/recording technology (although that backfired on the Six Pack reissue), even if it meant only one-third of their lineup playing on their records.

Gibbons on-stage with Fogerty:

http://youtu.be/lAOKwD0gabU
http://youtu.be/WfIlDk-FoCQ

One of my best friends was at that Fogerty show. Every time I see those clips I'm jealous.

I just spent this last couple of hours reading this whole thread and it's the most fun I've had on here in awhile!! Sandy rules!! And I love reading your reviews Doc!

Hi Jacob!!!

happy fourth of july to all the americans on this thread. as you barbecue today, please raise a glass to doctor casino for his amazing readings into these unknown classic rock classics, and another to sandy for her incredible photos and stories.

oh hell, let's make it three glasses.

SONG #10: GEORGE THOROGOOD & THE DESTROYERS "ONE BOURBON, ONE SCOTCH, ONE BEER"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ECZMvbLxg

"one bourbon, one scotch, one beer" is actually a medley of two songs, john lee hooker's 1951 "house rent boogie" and amos milburn's 1953 "one scotch, one bourbon, one beer" (which hooker later rewrote as "one bourbon, one scotch, one beer"; that's the version thorogood was apparently most familiar with).

thorogood seems like he'd be familiar which many versions of hooker

What I've always found weird/uncanny about this song is that Thorogood's delivery is so cribbed from Hooker that he winds up mimicking particularly Chicagoan cadences, to the point where at times he reminds me of Bernie Mac.