DJTees Blog

When you’ve been collecting records for most of your life, you end up with some unusual records. Usually, they come as part of a job lot bought on the cheap. In one such job lot, I ended up with this:- Dennis-WeaverAn odd thing where the man who played detective McCloud made country albums on his own label. It’s terrible and sounds like he couldn’t make this music unless he put it out on his own label.On the other hand, a job lot contained this:-Gary-Myrick-Stand-For-LoveWhich is rather good and I‘d never normally have heard it.I highly recommend buying job lots, usually from...

I got turned on to southern rock before I knew it was southern rock. Like many, it was through the Allman Brothers. More specifically their compilation ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ which I loved and found super powerful. It took me to their discography which I bought in its entirety eventually though the first two albums were hard to find UK versions of. At this point, I recognised that the Capricorn label was my friend and I began to collect anything on the label. I didn’t know when I started that it would basically ground me in southern rock. I...

I have records that are less than half an hour long, most of them are from the early 1960s. Ironically I have EP’s that are 25 minutes long too and records from the 1970s that are nearly 70 minutes long, most rare 35-50 minutes per single album. I had the long album explained to me by someone familiar with mixing records and how you lost bottom end and top end to accommodate it. I’ve no reason to suspect that it's not true, except that The Best of Budgie is an hour long and nice and heavy and doesn’t seem to...

This was the first Dead album I ever bought in 1979. It was quite a departure from my usual rock n roll boog-a-loo of the time. More sophisticated and jazzy than my screaming guitar solo drenched music. Maybe it was a sign I was growing up. The truth is I was still too young for its pleasures with the exception of Stella Blue and the closing Weather Report Suite.To this day, I love Stella Blue. It speaks even louder now. ‘All the years combineThey melt into a dream’ Don’t they just. Robert Hunter’s lyrics are timeless and I think I...

To people of a certain age (me) the 1970s doesn't seem so far away really. But 1974 was fifty years ago. When I was 18, fifty years previously was the late 1920s and was a world away from our lives, listening to UFO and drinking snakebites.So I assume 18-year-olds today feel the same about the 70s; a distant land, unknowable and nothing to do with life today. Except it’s different. When I was 18, 62-year olds were not going to gigs and collecting records. There was no youth culture to look back on, but now there is.We had so much...

Rock music is full of great musicians who work behind the scenes, producing, writing and of course playing. Steve Lukather, later to be an important element of Toto, was the best paid, most in-demand guitarist in LA in the late 70s/early 80s. His solos are on so many records. If it's melodic and burns up the fretboard, it’s Luke. He’s very recognizable. Similarly a man you may not have realised is on a lot of your records is Andrew Gold.Unusually he wrote songs as well as played on them. If you saw Linda Ronstadt in the 70s, he was on...

A while ago, I was speculating why I had so many live albums. It’s remarkable really. I have loads of them. They started out as budget records and were considered a bit of a rip off because they invariably featured pre-existing material. It hadn’t seemed to occur to anyone that some bands would jam on songs and make them very different. Even when they didn’t, the roar of the crowd added to the excitement and attraction of the live recording. In rock and blues I’ve long wondered what the first live album was. I think the Kinks live at Kelvin...

The day I saw the Grateful Dead in September 1981 was a juxtaposition of cultures like no other. I had been a fan for 4 years at this point in my musical development and I thought I was pretty radical. But I had seen nothing like this at the Playhouse in Edinburgh. We’d travelled up from Newcastle. The gig was sold out and this was the biggest capacity in the country. Outside of the venue were hoards of people. I quickly worked out that these were the Dead Heads. Mostly ticketless Americans, they followed the band wherever in the world...

12” singles got a bad rap from the rock community. Rightly so in many cases where especially in the early years they’d just put the single tracks on them. Slowly labels realised that people deserved more than that and started to put unreleased and live tracks on.For many years I wasn't interested, assuming it was primarily for extended mixes of dance tracks. I changed my view a few years ago and started judicially buying a few. One of the first was Ozzy Osbourne’s So Tired which was a 5-track EP with 3 live tracks which you couldn't get anywhere else.And...

Which is the best support band you’ve ever seen? I started going to gigs in the mid 70s when the headline band rarely put on anyone too good or at least no one too famous. I presume that was because gigs were cheap and usually sold out, so they didn’t have to, not in the UK anyway.I think the best was Pat Travers supporting SAHB. I bought his debut album right away and I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been seriously impressed. One support band I loved but who few have heard of is Arbre, which is French...

You know that I was 13 when I started collecting records, falling in love with everything about singles and albums. Well, it could have gone in a different direction. Because around the  same time my brother bought Focus At The Rainbow on pre-recorded cassette. It was the first such thing I had seen. He bought quite a few, but when I played them, in the mid-70s, they were poor quality. I wasn’t bothered at all by hi-fidelity, it was the wow and flutter I hated. That distinct swooping and muffled sound was awful. Even when not doing it, the sound...

Dickey Betts has died aged 80. All things considered, he did well to live so long. I first heard him on’ The Road Goes Ever On’ an Allmans compilation, aged 16. That was the first I’d heard of them and I was bowled over. If you remember how you felt when you first heard the band, that feeling of shock and excitement and amazement is special. I just couldn’t believe something like In Memory Of Elizabeth Reid even existed, let alone was extended by almost telepathic jamming.His playing on Blue Sky pointed the new post-Duane direction. That is such a...

Did you always buy a programme at a gig? I’m ashamed to say I didn’t always, because I wish I had them all now. I only seem to have a rather thin thing from seeing Uriah Heep on the High And Mighty tour supported by the very good band Widowmaker, featuring Ariel Bender, who only lasted two albums. I don’t remember much about them, but they had Bob Daisley on bass.Most gigs had a tour programme, usually it was not a lavish affair and were often expensive. This is why I didn’t buy one. SAHB’s programme was like a comic...

It always fascinates me how it is that some music is widespread and popular in America, but doesn’t chart in the UK. You wouldn’t think tastes varied that much, or so radically, especially when it comes to classic rock. Take Foghat, they consistently charted in the USA, every album did so. But did not chart in the UK with any record. Not one, over a 13 year period. You’d think they might have just accidentally made the lower reaches. Similarly Savoy Brown consistently charted albums in America, but never did so in the UK despite being originally British. Indeed, even...

I think the ‘it was better in my day’ is a deeply unpleasant characteristic, best avoided. But when it comes to rock music, I genuinely think that the artform was pushed to its outer limit between 1965 and 1977. As a youngster I totally took for granted that something new and original would be released every week. In little more than a decade we saw the rise of prog rock, heavy rock, the birth of soul, jazz-fusion, disco, folk rock, blues rock, psychedelics, heavy metal, Motown and funk. That is objectively incredible. The whole industry continues, one way or another,...