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Booker T. Jones – 82 Years of the Memphis Sound
Booker T. Jones in a 1978 A&M Records publicity photo. Photo: Jim McCrary, A&M Records (public domain). The Sound That Never Left There is a riff that almost everyone on earth recognises within two notes. It is low, patient and unhurried, played on a Hammond organ with the kind of confidence that cannot be taught…
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Remembering Mitch Mitchell: The Drummer Who Refused to Sit Still
Mitch Mitchell during a Jimi Hendrix Experience performance for the Dutch TV show Hoepla, 1967. Photo: A. Vente. CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, via Wikimedia Commons. On the morning of Wednesday, 12 November 2008, in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, the music stopped for John Graham “Mitch” Mitchell. He was sixty-two years old, and he…
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Remembering Henryk Górecki: The Saddest Song in the World
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki – Composer of “Symphony No. 3 – Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons. The Record Nobody Expected In 1992, something happened in classical music that nobody — least of all the composer himself — had seen coming. A symphony written sixteen years earlier, by a man most listeners outside Poland had…
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Remembering Leon Russell: The Piano Man Who Turned a Weakness Into a Sound
Leon Russell, Billboard, February 1970. Photo: Shelter Records. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Room Leans In There is a particular silence that falls when a great piano player sits down to work — the held breath of a room that knows something is about to happen. Leon Russell could create that silence with a…
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Madonna – Like a Virgin: The Story Behind the Song
Madonna’s wedding dress for the “Like a Virgin” video, exhibited at the Hard Rock Cafe, CityWalk.Photo: Lori (Flickr). CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Bride on the Cover In the autumn of 1984, a record sleeve stopped people in their tracks. It showed a young woman lying on a satin bed, dressed for a…
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John P. Hammond – 84 Years of Listening Hardest to the Blues
John P. Hammond performing in 2008. Photo: Ron Baker, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. He was seven years old when his father took him to hear Big Bill Broonzy, and he never really left that room. John Paul Hammond was born in New York City on 13 November 1942, and he died on 28…
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Idris Muhammad – 87 Years of the Drums That Never Stop
Fats Domino, whose “Blueberry Hill” Muhammad drummed on at 16 (NOT Muhammad himself). Credit: Publicity photo, 1956. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. He learned rhythm from a dry cleaner’s steam press, and by sixteen he was playing on one of the biggest records in America. Idris Muhammad was born Leo Morris in New Orleans on…
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Remembering Bruno Maderna: The Boy Who Conducted La Scala and Invented the Future
Bruno Maderna, 1963.Credit: Unknown author, 1963. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. He died on 13 November 1973, in Darmstadt, in Germany, of lung cancer. He was 53 years old. Fifty-three years ago today, the music world lost one of its most remarkable figures: Bruno Maderna, an Italian composer, conductor and teacher who had been a…
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How ZZ Top Made ‘Tush’: The Three-Minute Soundcheck Boogie That Became Their First Hit
Most bands labor over their first hit. ZZ Top wrote theirs in about the time it takes to boil an egg, on a dirt floor, in the middle of an afternoon soundcheck — and half a century later, it was still the song they closed their shows with. “Tush” is a twelve-bar blues in G…
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How Willie Nelson Made ‘Pancho and Lefty’: The Song His Daughter Found, Cut in One Take in the Middle of the Night
The greatest duet Willie Nelson ever recorded nearly didn’t happen, and the man who wrote the song swore he couldn’t explain it. “Pancho and Lefty” — the tale of a Mexican bandit betrayed by his friend, who ends his days in a cheap Cleveland hotel room with the dust in his mouth — was written…