Your Sound Choice
Bios and stories about the artists we feature
Who doesn’t like stories about people being inspired to do great things? We all have moments in our lives when something adjusts our path in one direction or another. Not all are life changing moments like Jake and Elwood (The Blues Brothers) bathed in a ray of heavenly light watching Brother James Brown bring the […]
In guitarist-speak, RR has become a shorthand reference for the late Randy Rhoads. Though Rhoads passed away when the small airplane he was a passenger in crashed (while on tour with Ozzy Osbourne in Florida) on March 19, 1982, his legacy remains strong today. Volume 43, No. 07 of Guitar World commemorated the 40th […]
We last visited Levon Helm in a two part FTV back in April of 2020 (FTV: Mark L. Helm – Part 1 (4-15-20) and Part 2 (4-22-20)). Based on his autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire – Levon Helm and the Story of the Band (Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, updated 2013 for A Cappella […]
We left Part 1 with Jimmy Hendrix newly discharged from the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army. As soon as his bass playing buddy, Billy Cox, was turned loose, they changed the name of their band from the Kasuals to the King Kasuals. As Jimmy’s hair returned, he styled it into a ‘conk’ (see […]
Johnny Allen Hendrix lived anything but a charmed life in his early years. He was born on November 27, 1942 at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital while his father, Al, was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The Army feared he would go AWOL to see his new son so they locked Al in the stockade just […]
In Part 1 of Live Shows Revisited (2-23-22), I asked for stories about your favorite concert memories. Less than three days later, Howard Szaroletta from Reno, Nevada responded. In terms of ‘mining data’ for interesting stories, I have to say I struck paydirt on the first try. There is no way I could tell […]
In Cover Me – Part 1, we expanded on some of the cover songs discussed in the forty pages Classic Rock Magazine devoted to the topic in March 2022 (Issue #298). Some covers are better than others, some became more famous than the originals, and just about all have interesting stories behind them. Take […]
Reading Bill DeMain’s excellent introduction to Classic Rock Magazine’s feature on Rock’s Greatest Cover Versions (CRM # 298 – March 2022), it dawned on me that 95 percent of musicians get their start playing cover versions of other people’s music. The other 5 percent (and that may actually be an overly generous slice of the […]
Let me give you a hint: The above named artist and his musical partner are probably best remembered for their song I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight? It was released in 1967 and entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #87 before it climbed to #7 on the Cash Box chart and #8 on the BH […]
By now, readers of these FTV ramblings are well aware that ‘drummer’ is my main musical gig. I was inspired early on by the likes of Dave Clark (of the Dave Clark Five) to be a singing drummer and as such acted as the lead or co-lead singer in every band I was in. I […]