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

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/10/108959/2465028-daddylonglegs14.jpg

btw pretty sure my reading of this song is heavily influenced by this guy: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix3/daddylonglegskole.htm

I could likely write a really long and boring critical review of why this really long and boring song is so fucking awesome, but I'll spare you all. It's an erection of impotence. A viper who crawls. Some whisky drunk rambler aiming for the horizon, hoping he arrives home at last.

Plus, it ensures that Steely Dan gets played at every homecoming in Tuscaloosa. Who would've saw that coming after Katy Lied?

Would be cool if he yelled "ALL RIGHT RICO!" before each sax break

tbf, would be cool if someone yelled ALL RIGHT RICO before every sax break in all songs ever.

in honor of your acquisition of your first james gang album:

SONG #28: THE JAMES GANG "WALK AWAY"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICmD8P0x8_M

God "Walk Away" rules so much...so glad to discover James Gang from the classic rock poll thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_4iQDYDVNo

^^^much prefer that version to the LP version

Nice little song Pete Townshend wrote about a barbecue with the James Gang on tour:
http://youtu.be/ZUASUTR8Nv0

Aw that song is so great.

Yeah, it's so perfect. He only ever played it live once, on the Who's Cleveland stop on their 1996 tour. Pete and Joe had a mutual admiration society going on for a while: Joe gave Pete the Gretsch guitar and Fender amp that Pete subsequently used on Who's Next and everything thereafter, and Pete gave Joe the ARP synth Joe would use on "Life's Been Good."

Great Townshend quotes in here: If there's a better rock song than Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," I don't know what it is

Didn't Walsh also give Page the guitar that you can see in the Albert Hall show and which he used throughout LZ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLSz5vD9Dho

http://iconicaxes.blogspot.com/2012/12/jimmy-pages-number-one-gibson-les-paul.html

Page bought this guitar from Joe Walsh of the James Gang, and later of the Eagles, in April of 1969 while he in San Francisco on a tour of America. Jimmy recalled the transaction in 2004, "Joe brought it for me when we played the Fillmore. He insisted I buy it, and he was right." In the May 2012 issue of Guitar World just released, the magazine did an interview with Walsh where he told the story of the transaction: "Jimmy was still playing the Telecasters that he played in the Yardbirds. He was looking for a Les Paul and asked if I knew of any, 'cause he couldn't find one that he liked. And I have two. So I kept the one I liked the most and I flew...with the other one. I laid it on him and said, 'Try this out.' He really liked it. So I gave him a really good deal, about 1,200 bucks. I had to hand-carry it; I flew there and everything. So whatever my expenses were, that's what I charged him...But again, I just thought he should have a Les Paul for godsakes!"

thanks, Elvis!

Wonder if Walsh would be considered cooler these days if he'd never joined the Eagles

DON: Well, yeah

I suppose he'd also be a lot less wealthy tho

Walk Away is so, so alltime

also: I can remember being with my friend Che when we heard on the radio that Joe Walsh was joining the Eagles and we both just blurted out OH NO JOE WHY

(sorry y'all - on the road, which is very classic rock, but without a lotta listening time, which is not!)

Ha, I heard a "Karn Evil no. 9"/"Lucky Man" twofer at the gym tonight.

sorry y'all - on the road

note to self: queue up jackson browne's "the load-out."

i saw Jackson Browne last night. he told a story about giving the finger to a guy who had a video camera at one of his shows, made me think of Sandy's story.

He obv. likes to do that!

ha ha it seems like there should be lots of photos of Jackson flipping off the camera

In the song "Everything You Did," a lyric says, "turn up The Eagles, the neighbors are listening." Glenn Frey of the Eagles said, "Apparently Walter Becker's girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time. I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line." Given that the two bands shared a manager (Irving Azoff) and that the Eagles proclaimed their admiration for Steely Dan, this was more friendly rivalry than feud.[3]
Later that year in a nod back to Steely Dan for the free publicity,[4] and inspired by Steely Dan's lyric style,[5] the Eagles penned the lyrics, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" in their hit "Hotel California". Frey commented, "We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so 'Dan' got changed to 'knives,' which is still, you know, a penile metaphor."[6]
Timothy B. Schmit, who sang background vocals on "The Royal Scam" would later join The Eagles.

Frey commented, "We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so 'Dan' got changed to 'knives,' which is still, you know, a penile metaphor."[6]

Henley added, "Well, yeah." [7]

A+

Walk Away: oooh, a classic rock opening if I ever heard one! Jagged and crunchy. Bra-DANG! Dunk dunk, Bra-DANG! I like this thing about his socks not wanting to come off, neat way of saying he's tempted but not quite tempted. I have the faintest, faintest memory of this chorus - possible I've heard it at some distant point but not anything that made a surface impression. This is good though. Got the "drivin' that train, high on cocaine" rhythm to it, your basic highway rock and roll. The guitar break/solo is a little less compelling than the kinda post-Byrdsy/Beatlesy country rock chorus - could be a little more lively or inventive, though I like it when it does sound distinctively Walshian, on the high notes. Dunno what it is I like about those notes so much, in his playing generally - they connote something a little mournful, a little removed, which in some cases starts to feel like a distant sneer back at the main body of the song, but here it's more a flourish, the extra confident shimmy in the walk away. The wah-wah not so much, but the psychedelic mess it's starting to reach when the fadeout happens is interesting - would be down with more Eagles songs or "Life's Been Good" going that way. But of course the fact that they didn't is one of the things that distinguishes smooth-polished cocaine corporate rock from your turn-of-the-seventies rock shamble.

Chorus is still stuck in my head ten minutes later, a good (?) sign. Thumbs up.

Love this tune. The James Gang are maybe my favorite power trio ever. Jim Fox's drum breaks on this song are so great!

This still rocks pretty good. Maybe a little too hard and drivin' for this fucking muggy, humid, limp-along end of summer. A difficult but key itch for classic rock to scratch - sometimes you want stew, sometimes you want jumping beans, but sometimes you want a huge pitcher of unsweetened ice tea and nowhere to be. "Drift Away" is key here as I've said before, but if I had to pick from the above, feel like Call Me the Breeze fits the times best (and not just because of the title) (though it'd be cool if he was trying to summon a breeze to himself). This is also a good time for the 80s things, which generally are "cooler" in palette - "Your Love," "Stand Back" and "You Got Lucky." And oddly, "Roundabout" has the right kind of freshness - a cool brook wends its way through the western forest of the elves. "Eminence Front" might also work; its iciness would cool the room, and the heat of the day might give the song a different story than I'd imagined - less New York in the fall, more LA in the summer, but still with the phonies.

"walk away" is probably my favorite song that we've done so far another excellent review, dr. c. "bra-DANG dunk dunk bra-DANG" pretty much covers it, i think! though i'm not sure it quite captures how fantastic those guitars sound.

and, yeah, please go away, september heat. 95 today according to my car thermometer today, but felt like 97. "call me the breeze" does indeed work well in these situations, though of course another approach is to just go with it and play "the fire down below" as loud as you can.

in honor of both doctor casino's recent road trip and the imminent end of the cosmic arena rock show known as summer 2014:

SONG #29: JACKSON BROWNE "THE LOAD-OUT / STAY"

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

Thread that didn't take off: Lines from the 2014 version of Jackson Browne's "The Load-Out"

*flips u off*

^^ looool

hahaha was gonna say, i've been looking forward to this one on account of sandy's story

ahhh fuck, and then i de-prioritized the bookmark by posting that and lost track! Sorry y'all, I really do want to get back into the rockin' groove here, really appreciate fcc bearing with me as the curation and the context/backstory for these has been so great.

welcome back! glad that you could, um, stay just a little bit longer. and really appreciate you sticking with it since you're doing all the heavy lifting here! the rest of us are just spinning the same tracks in the same rotation as we always have.

i think i have also been subconsciously avoiding this one because i keep expecting it will actually turn out to be a variant of "Roadhouse Blues," with Jackson oafishly grunting "LOAD OUT LOAD OUT" towards the end, but i think it's time to take a deep breath, ready my middle finger, and face down my fears

Wow, you really haven't heard this song then...

The Load Out / Stay: Pleasant start. Piano, someone's whistling. Must not be that popular of a song or the opening chords would get more of a response from the crowd. So... .... .... it's a ballad.

I don't mind this stage-setting, the roadies taking the stage. Not a ton of songs about that. I admit that Sandy's story is already coloring this a lot, I just picture Jackson flirting with the bartender and occasionally glancing back over at the stage and going "Huh, maybe I should pay those guys more. Oh well, what was I saying again?"

I'm of two minds about all the detail on what they have to do. Hahahahah, "you know you guys are the champs," Jackson Browne sounds like middle management or Mitt Romney now. I'd be like, fuck you dude, if I don't load this piano I don't get to go to bed. Even setting that aside, while it's nice that he gets into more detail about the material details of their labor rather than just kind of sweeping it aside as "they sure work hard" kinda thing, it means they remain just laboring bodies without interiority - do they have favorite songs, do they read, what do they think about while they toil? Basically they become background landscape for Jackson's interior monologue, the towns he gets confused about, the reasons why the band came.

Okay, what they listen to on the bus is nice, I wish the band tried to mimic the sound of 8-tracks and cassettes in addition to the sound of R&B and disco (I always love these moments in songs, like "Ready Steady Go"). That moment about Richard Pryor sounded really Warren Zevon-y to me. I guess they're developing a little more with interests and stuff, but once you get everybody on the bus, it's just one big "we" and the roadies cease to exist. How did they have Richard Pryor though? How common was having a TV on this kind of tour bus back then? Honest question, I have no idea.

Not sure what's going on really at this point, who's a thousand miles away from who? The roadies are waking up at home and Jackson has to go on tour? Serves you right! Or did Jackson sell all his tickets to people living a thousand miles away from the concert? Oops!

Well, the "stay" bit is cute I guess but not really clever - "the promoter don't mind" laaame. I guess this is the end-of-show crowd-working angle, like, please ask me to stay for an encore? I wish Jackson actually went for the falsetto rather than having a backing singer wander in for that one line, let your damn hair down. Oh well he's doing it now - or wait. I guess that wasn't him. Anyway, y'know, I wanna see my rocker actually go for the funny voice, don't be afraid to fuck it up and sound like a jackass. The roadies are having a beer and chuckling at him from the shadows: what a yutz. This instrumental section is just fine, very warm. It almost sounded like he was about to start getting everybody to really stomp-clap along for a few bars before a big finish but then it petered out.

Overall, kind of a slog. The slow ballad part is going for a "Turn the Page" assessment of this hard life on the road, but it's a little too ponderous and sure of its own Serious Song-ness, and that puts too strong a spotlight on Jackson's roadie sympathies. It invites the Sandy critique from the word go. Things got a little better when the rest of the band showed up (I picture Jackson, hands on his hips, tapping his foot, glaring at a roadie desperately trying to get everything plugged in), but it was pretty tuneless throughout. Thumbs down for "The Load Out," I guess sort of thumbs horizontal for "Stay," that's a good song and hard to really fuck up too bad, and I liked the arrangement.

I also like picturing the backup singer as Michael McDonald in that SCTV bit, racing in from a thousand miles away to deliver exactly one chorus. Won't you stay just a little bit longer, indeed!

How did they have Richard Pryor though? How common was having a TV on this kind of tour bus back then? Honest question, I have no idea.

First of all, huge huge yays that Doctor Casino is back reviewing these songs! I have been missing our classic rock talks, so much fun. I'm psyched that Jeff W. stepped up to the plate to run the AM Gold poll, I wish it were happening sooner.

Now, to answer the question... this song was written and recorded in 1977, IIRC. It was January 1978 that Jackson flipped me off, so I know that the song was current at the time. Most of the tour buses then did have TVs, of course they weren't equipped for cable or anything like that, they would just pick up local stations that the crew could watch during their down time (and for some of the crew people, there's a lot of down time... those guys work LONG, long days, but some of them kind of work in spurts), and on most crews, there was always at least one guy who was an electronics junkie and had either a Betamax or a VCR. Betamaxes were pretty popular on tour buses from what I remember. Roadies loved anything Sony made back then.

So yeah, they could have been watching Richard Pryor.

Also I should add that most of the crew guys I know hate that song. The line about them working for minimum wage pisses them off, it makes them sound like Wal-Mart workers or something. Crew people get paid pretty well, especially the ones who are on retainer and get paid year round even if they're not on tour. One of my friends who worked for Metallica was making 52K a year in 1990, which equates to about 95K today, plus they're getting per diems for food and shit when they're on tour. And they get goodies. Another friend of mine from when I lived in Seattle works for Pearl Jam, and in addition to his salary, they bought him a Prius for working on an album. Most crew guys are very, very skilled at what they do. A lot of guitar techs are great players themselves who just don't want to perform for one reason or another. I have a lot of respect for crew guys. Plus, they're fun to hang with and there's always at least one person on a crew who loves to gossip and has stories that make mine seem totally dull.

Oooh, thanks for sharing, Sandy! For whatever reason I just never pictured them with TVs, but I think my picture of a "tour bus" is sorta hazy and has more to do with multiple DIY punk bands sharing a van than big rock acts that have a crew and so on.

It's a shame Jackson kind of blew the opportunity to write a good crew anthem, seems like there'd be tons of material for a poignant rock ballad thing, especially in the idea that they can actually play, maybe even better than the band, but choose a different road.

so good to be back at this!

Must not be that popular of a song or the opening chords would get more of a response from the crowd.

to be fair, the live version was the original release. so when they did the live recording, it wasn't out yet. when it did come out, it got oodles and oodles of radio play. fm radio loved those long, serious ones. (but this one required you to sit through a lot to get to the payoff of "stay," which was not quite as good a payoff as, say, the loud part of "stairway to heaven.")

That moment about Richard Pryor sounded really Warren Zevon-y to me.

jackson was producing warren at the time, so that makes total sense.

Not sure what's going on really at this point, who's a thousand miles away from who? The roadies are waking up at home and Jackson has to go on tour?

i believe he's taking to us, his loyal audience, here. we will go home after the show, while he will be getting on a bus headed for chicago, or detroit, he don't know, he does so many shows in a row.

i've always thought this could have been a billy joel song. reminds me of the kind of song the narrator of "the great suburban showdown" would move on to once he got out of the suburbs for good and became a rock star, touring somebody else's suburbs.

The line about them working for minimum wage pisses them off, it makes them sound like Wal-Mart workers or something.

that line always pissed me off, because if jackson thought they actually were making minimum wage, maybe instead of singing about it he should have, like, paid them more.

David Lindley the guitarist, who is a talented weirdo, does the high falsetto.

Ha, I almost brought up Billy Joel too but figured I'd already brought him up too often in this thread!