What's New?

FEBRUARY 2003

 

YOUNG BROTHERS GET STONED
SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
LAST CHANCE TO SEE ELLEN
SEBASTIAN HARDIE REUNITE

THE OUTLAWS RETURN
SPECTOR’S LAST HIT?
DOORS SLAM EACH OTHER
BEATLES TAPES SAGA CONTINUES
SPRING CLEAN STRIKES GOLD
LOVE (TOUR) IS IN THE AIR
ON THE AIR

 

WHAT’S NEWS?

YOUNG BROTHERS GET STONED

As if seeing The Rolling Stones in the once-in-a-lifetime intimate setting of Sydney’s Enmore Theatre was not enough, fans lucky enough to get tickets for Tuesday’s concert enjoyed the unique bonus treat of seeing the band joined onstage by Malcolm Young and Angus Young from AC/DC. The Youngs joined the Stones and traded licks with Ronnie and Keef on a spirited rendition of B.B. King’s Rock Me Baby, an event also notable as one of the only times in many years that Angus has appeared on stage in long trousers. In a fairly neat coincidence, the episode of The Simpsons which aired the following night was the recent and extremely funny “Rock’n’Roll Holiday Camp” episode which features the voices of Mick, Keef, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello and Lenny Kravitz.

 

… BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

In another Acca-related story, it has been reported in several media outlets that former AC/DC bassist Mark Evans is (with good reason, we reckon) rather peeved at the fact that he has been specifically excluded from the group’s nomination to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Evans played with AC/DC between 1975 and 1977 and performed on many of their classic mid-70s recordings including their signature tune It’s A Long Way To The Top and the High Voltage, Dirty Deeds and Let There Be Rock LPs. Evans was sacked from the group in the UK in 1977 with the band citing that reliable old chestnut excuse of 'musical differences', although the actual reason for the sacking was apparently Evans' continuing clashes with Angus. Evans has worked for many years at a leading Sydney music store. He is far from happy at his discourteous exclusion from the Hall of Fame nomination and has engaged a New York law firm to get his name reinstated.

 

Mark is not the first local muso to receive such a slap in the face from a former band. Famed Aussie bassist Bob Daisley has for some time been slogging it out in the courts with his ex-boss Ozzy Osbourne. The dispute stems from the fact that last year Ozzy released two of his solo albums (featuring Bob) on CD, at which point Bob was chagrined to discover that the rhythm tracks recorded by himself and drummer Lee Kerslake had been replaced with newly backing tracks performed by anonymous session players. This “revision” is apparently part of a long-running dispute between Ozzy (and/or Sharon Osbourne) and Bob and Lee over unpaid royalties for the albums on which they played, to which Bob also contributed lyrics, including Ozzy’s (in)famous Suicide Solution (which is apparently about Ozzy’s own self-destructive behaviour, not about Bon Scott, as Ozzy has long claimed).

 

Interestingly, while the News page on Bob’s website carries an item (from late December) about a message board that was started on the Harmony Central website to agitate on Bob and Lee’s behalf, the link from Bob’s website is now dead and search of the Harmony Central site by MILESAGO today revealed no trace of any such messages. We can only assume that the “pro-Bob” forum has since been removed by Harmony Central’s administrators. Hmmmm

LAST CHANCE TO SEE ELLEN!

Aussie music fans have given a rapturous welcome-back to the legendary American singer-guitarist-pianist-songwriter Ellen McIlwaine, who has been touring in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and SA during February. Ellen began her career in Greenwhich Village in the late ‘60s, where she was a jamming-mate and friend of Jimi Hendrix. Her albums have long been regarded as classics by those who know her work and she has worked with some of music’s greatest, including Taj Mahal and Jack Bruce. She wowed Aussie audiences on her first solo tour back in 1980, proving herself to be exactly what fans had claimed – i.e. the foremost female blues-rock artiste in the world. Her incredible slide technique and her stunning voice routinely make instant converts of all who hear her, but she is still sadly underappreciated in this country. It’s been almost 20 years since her last visit, when she earned the bittersweet honour of being the last artist to perform at Sydney’s Regent Theatre.

 

Ellen’s final Australian show, just announced, will be at the Harp Hotel, Tempe on Saturday March 1. Ellen has been supported on most dates by friend and Aussie music legend Margret RoadKnight, but Margret has other commitments on that night so the support for this show will be another Aussie legend, the great Jeannie Lewis.

 

http:www/ellenmcilwaine.com

and
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~margretr

 

 

SEBASTIAN HARDIE REUNITE FOR METRO SHOW

It’s been announced that Aussie symphonic rock legends Sebastian Hardie will reform for a one-off show at Sydney’s Metro Theatre on Saturday 8 March 2003. Original Seb. Hardie members Mario Millo, Toiv Pilt, Alex Plavsic and Peter Plavsic are reuniting for a series of live performances which will culminate in a concert tour of Japan scheduled for later this year. The band successfully reunited in 1994 to do a one off performance headlining the annual two day “Progfest” Progressive Rock Festival in Los Angeles and the successful CD release “Sebastian Hardie Live in LA” was released from the recording of the performance. The group last performed in 2001 at the Gimme Ted benefit concert, where they were also reunited with the band’s original lead singer Jon English.

The Mario Mill Band band was (appropriately) scheduled as the support for the March tour by British prog-rock supergroup Yes, but regrettably the tour has been postponed until September because of the recent back injury suffered by lead singer Jon Anderson.

The Metro concert will be a two-part show. Part one will feature The Mario Millo Band, showcasing the new album Oceans of the Mind and also excerpts from the Symphinity album. The second half of the show will feature Sebastian Hardie performing music from their internationally acclaimed albums Four Moments and Windchase.

http://www.mariomillo.com/newsfaq/naffrset.html

THE OUTLAWS RETURN

Another must-see tour will feature the long-awaited return of two pioneers of Aussie Seventies roots rock, Greg Quill and Kerryn Tolhurst. Greg started out as a solo performer on the Sydney folk scene in the late 60s before putting together his seminal band Country Radio in 1970, recruiting Kerryn (ex Adderly Smith Band, Sundown)) soon after. He also wrote regularly for Go-Set magazine. Country Radio scored a big hit in 1971 with their classic Gypsy Queen and played at many famous ‘70s festivals including Sunbury. Kerryn left the band just after their appearance at Sunbury ‘73 and formed The Dingoes a couple of months later. Country Radio split in 1974 but Greg soldiered on until 1975, recording an acclaimed solo LP The Outlaw’s Reply along the way. He was among the first batch of local musos to receive an Arts Council grant, enabling him to study and travel overseas, and this eventually led him to settle permanently in Canada, where for many years he has been the Arts editor for the Toronto Star.

 

Kerryn of course enjoyed some commercial success and great critical acclaim with The Dingoes, and after their split he continued his success as a writer and producer in the USA, with credits including Pat Benatar’s international hit All Fired Up. Greg gave up performing entirely after settling in Canada, but a visit home in 2001 led to a emotional reunion with Kerryn and other old friends and this in turn led him back into writing and recording with his old partner. Greg and Kerryn have now completed a new album of original material, So Rudely Interrupted, and will tour east coast towns and cities in March-April 2003. For more information and details of the tour, visit

 

www.quilltolhurst.com

SPECTOR’S LAST HIT? (12/2/03)

The music world has been shocked (if not entirely surprised) by the news that legendary “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector was arrested on Monday 3 February and subsequently charged with murder. L.A. police allege that Spector shot and killed actress Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his palatial hilltop home in the exclusive LA suburb of Alhambra, just hours after meeting her at the Sunset Strip club The House of Blues, where she worked as a hostess. Spector was later released on US$1 million bail. Spector’s friend, lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, commented recently that he is convinced that the shooting was accidental and that Spector will fight the charges on this basis.

Dubbed “The First Tycoon of Teen” by author Tom Wolfe, Spector was a millionaire by the time he was 21 and he dominated American pop in the early-mid Sixties with a string of huge hits for acts including The Righteous Brothers, The Ronettes, Bobby Soxx & The Blue Jeans and Ike & Tina Turner. After the failure of his 1966 masterwork River Deep, Mountain High, he withdrew from the public eye for several years until he was brought in by John Lennon to produce the tracks which eventually became The Beatles’ Let It Be. This led to some of his biggest successes, including George Harrison’s classic All Things Must Pass, the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack album The Concert For Bangladesh, and co-producing John Lennon’s early solo albums. Spector worked only sporadically after that, producing Dion and Leonard Cohen, and he has lived as a recluse for more than 20 years since his last major production, The Ramones’ album End Of The Century, released in 1980.

Spector, now 62, recently gave a rare interview in which he revealed that he has struggled with alcoholism, bipolar disorder and depression for many years. There has also been speculation that he was depressed by the forthcoming release of a “de-Spectorised” version of Let It Be. Paul McCartney has always famously loathed the lush treatments Spector gave to the tracks and both he and Starr were fulsome in their praise of the original version, which was produced by Glyn Johns, but was never released at the time. Interviewed recently in Rolling Stone, Johns himself was outspoken about the Spector production, saying that Spector had “puked” all over the tracks.

 

Phil’s defence team face an uphill battle, given that he has long been notorious for his paranoid and controlling behaviour and his gun-toting antics, both in and out of the studio. He is variously reported to have fired a gun into a studio wall while working with Lennon, and to have held The Ramones captive in the studio at gunpoint during the production of their album. In a recent interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, comedian Joan Rivers claimed that Spector had pulled a gun on friends of hers on several occasions in recent years:

"He dated my manager and she was having problems with him. She would say, 'He held a gun to my head', and, 'I woke up and there was a gun in my mouth' … And then I gave a Christmas party five years ago and she brought Phil and he pulled a gun! On Walter Cronkite's daughter, who's a very respectable young woman. It was amazing, we had to have him escorted out of the place. And I have the nicest neighbour, a very nice little Italian woman named Cynthia Maltese, and she ran into him in the lobby and she said something like, 'Oh, you're Phil Spector', and he pulled the gun again!"

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/09/1044725674691.html

In a recent news item about the case Spector’s friend, lawyer Marvin Mitchelson said that he believes the shooting was accidentl and that Spector will base his defence on that contention.

DOORS SLAM EACH OTHER (13/2/03)

Things have taken a litigious turn with the surviving members of legendary American rock group The Doors, according to reports in Undercover. Late last year it was announced that keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robbie Krieger were putting together a new ‘supergroup’ version of the band, with former Cult lead singer Ian Astbury and ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland. Notable by his absence was original drummer John Densmore, who had concurrently announced that he had repeatedly vetoed moves by the other two members to licence The Doors’ recordings for use in advertising.

 

When the new version of the band, dubbed “The Doors, 21st Century”, was unveiled last November, it was initially announced that Densmore could not participate due to chronic tinnitus, which prevented him from playing live. This has since been contradicted, with the most recent statement from The Doors saying that Densmore had repeatedly declined invitations to join the revived lineup. Densmore has just unveiled his own new band, Tribal Jazz, and is now suing Manzarek and Krieger to prevent them from using The Doors name and recover income from the shows already played. He claims that he he found out he was no longer in the band when he read it in Billboard magazine.

 

BEATLES TAPES SAGA CONTINUES (19/2/03)

Following on from last month’s stories about the recovery of stolen Beatles tapes, it’s been reported that more Fabs tapes were found when a Sydney home was raided by NSW police on February 14 as part of the anti-bootlegging program, “Operation Acetone”, which is being run in cooperation with ARIA.

The story began in mid-January when an advertisement appeared in a Sydney paper offering for sale two tape reels which, the ad claimed, were original Beatles studio tapes. The first indication that the seller, one Branko Kuzmak, might be a few bricks shy of a load was the fact that he advertised them in, of all things, the Trading Post, the well-known classifieds paper which is usually the venue for such mundane items as used cars, computers, musical instruments and the like. The second hint was Kuzmak’s modest asking price -- $5 million for the two reels. The third hint was the fact that the ad appeared only days after news of a major anti-bootlegging raid in Amsterdam by British and Netherlands police in early January, which netted some 500 reels of tapes from the 1969 Get Back film sessions. They were part of a large number of tapes, apparently stolen from EMI ca. 1970, which have been the source of hundreds of Beatles bootleg LPs and CDs over the years.

Kuzmak’s ad then became the subject of several items in the Sydney Morning Herald “Spike” column, triggering a NSW police investigation which led to the Feb. 14 raid, during which police seized two tape reels and album artwork and arrested the hapless 27-year-old, who was later released without being charged after signing over possession of the tapes to police. The two tapes were found locked in a safe in the Lidcombe home where Kuzmak lives with his parents and his 32-year-old brother. The tapes have been tentatively identified as genuine studio recordings from the Abbey Rd ‘White Album’ sessions, made by the Beatles some time between July and October of 1968. Although police could not confirm whether the tapes were definitely originals, they said that code numbers at the beginning of the reels indicated that they were the property of EMI Records. The tapes reportedly last about 15-20 minutes each, during which The Beatles are heard “practicing songs, chatting and trying new things”.

Police said that they did not think that Kuzmak had made bootleg copies from the reels himself. Kuzmak claimed when interviewed that he had purchased them legitimately at a Parramatta record fair in 1991 for $1000. How the tapes came to Australia and who they were bought from is not known. Equally puzzling are the questions of how Kuzmak -- who would have been only 15 at the time -- was able to outlay $1000 to buy them, and why he decided to draw so much attention to himself by advertising in the Trading Post. According to the Herald, Kuzmak may still face charges under the crimes act for possession of stolen property and breaches of the copyright act. Police say that they believe the sale was motivated by the Amsterdam seizure, which would have dramatically increased the value of Kuzmak’s tapes.

MARTY’S SPRING CLEAN STRIKES GOLD (17/203)

On a vaguely similar but much happier note, Ed Nimmervol’s Howlspace site reports that singer Marty Rhone recently made a fortunate discovery when unpacking some old boxes at his home. He found an old tape which proved to contain recordings of himself and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, performing impromptu versions of The Beatles' Rain and The Troggs' Wild Thing back in 1966. This was apparently a fairly common practice for the Bee Gees at this time and according to Joseph Brennan’s Gibb Songs site, guitarist Dennis Wilson recalls hearing a carbon-copy Gibb version of Paperback Writer which was cut just two days after the Beatles’ original was released. The Gibb-Rhone recordings were done at Ossie Byrne’s famous St Clair recording studio in Hurstville which was the venue for the Bee Gees’ last Australian recordings as well as hits by Marty, Steve & The Board and many others. Marty has taken the tape to the Screensound archive in Canberra for restoration.

 

LOVE (TOUR) IS IN THE AIR (20/2/03)

It has just been announced that famed American singer-guitarist-composer Arthur Lee, founder of the legendary ‘60’s Los Angeles-based psychedelic rock band Love, will make his first tour of Australia in April.

 

Lee and Love have been cited as a key influence on many major acts including The Doors and Led Zeppelin, and Love’s version of Bacharach & David’s My Little Red Book was reputedly the inspiration for Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive. The classic incarnation of Love recorded three influential LPs: Love (1966), Da Capo (1967), and the seminal Forever Changes (1967). Love was also notable as one of the first racially integrated American rock bands. The writing and vocals were split between Lee and singer-guitarist Bryan Maclean (the brother of Maria McKee) whose influence in the band was long underestimated (and probably downplayed by Lee). Maclean left the band in 1968 and effectively retired from music; he died in 1998.

 

Lee has performed only sporadically since the 70s and has been off the scene for some time due to a combination of drug problems and a recent much-publicised stint in prison for firearms offences. Now clean and clear, Lee and his current version of Love (which has been together for about ten years) are touring the UK, Europe and Australia. The downunder dates will unfortunately be only “Love with Arthur Lee”, not the full-scale “Forever Changes” show in which Love are accompanied by a string and horn ensemble.

 

The Love tour lineup will be:

Arthur Lee - guitar, lead vocals, harmonica
Dave Chapple - bass
Rusty Squeezebox - guitar, backing vocals
David Green - drums
Mike Randle - lead guitar, backing vocals

Love with Arthur Lee tour dates:

 

Thursday 17th April: SYDNEY, Gaelic Club Tickets from The Metro Ph: 92872000,
Redeye Records and Fish Records, Newtown $45 + bf

Saturday 19th April: BYRON BAY, East Coast Blues & Roots Festival. On sale
now from www.bluesfest.com.au or ph: 02 6685 8310

Sunday 20th April: MELBOURNE, Corner Hotel Tickets from Gaslight, Greville,
Polyester & Missing Link and the Corner Hotel ph: 03 9427 9198 $45 + bf

C
lub shows on sale February 28.

 

http://www.lovewitharthurlee.com/

 

ON THE AIR

  • SBS are repeating the music documentary A SKIN TOO FEW: THE DAYS OF NICK DRAKE on Saturday 22 February at 10:00 pm

  • David Bowie will be one of the guests on PARKINSON this Saturday 22 January (ABC-TV, 9:30 pm)

 

 

 

 

 

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