Zero to 180 – Three Minute Magic
This month’s Zero to 180 music history piece is guest-written by a music industry insider who revealed on Popsike/Ebay how NRBQ — as their overbearing and musically-challenged alter ego, The Dickens — came close to having a 45 issued on Scepter Records, home of Dionne Warwick(e) and Chuck Jackson: The
You may recall me telling you how Tom Newbold dragged me to see Great Plains despite my misgivings. My young befuddled spirit had not yet cottoned onto the ‘radical’ notion that great music (gasp!) isn’t always about great musicianship. In fact, sometimes all the hemi-demi-semi-quavers and musical gymnastics can get
Someone posted a short list of “clavinet-fueled songs” that, of course, included “Up on Cripple Creek” by The Band. One commenter quibbled that the song should have been #1 on the list, “not only because it is better but because it was first” – but was it? The Clavinet is
Around the 7:55 mark in this heartfelt video tribute to ‘Q drummer, Tom Ardolino (who left us in 2012), there is powerful testimony from one of rock & pop’s most storied session drummers, Earl Palmer, who remarks on Ardolino’s prodigious wallop [“playing that backbeat!”] and inimitable playing style [“twirling that
I picked up an odds & sods collection of NRBQ tracks – Stay with We – taken from their short-lived stint on the almighty Columbia label. One tune that I found to be particularly energizing – “I Say Gooday Goodnite” – was identified in the CD’s liner notes as “previously
Two songs were recorded in 1971 that featured toy piano lines: “Butterfly” by Danyel Gerard – a big international hit – and “Only You” by NRBQ, a song from their Scraps album that was released as the B-side to “Ain’t It All Right.” For the longest time I thought (quite
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