The number one British album today in 1969 was the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”:
The number one British single today in 1980 came 12 days after its singer’s death:
The number one song today in 1986:
The number one album today in 1975 for the second consecutive week was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
Today in 1961, this was the first country song to sell more than $1 million:
The number one single today in 1962:
The number one single today in 1970 (which sounded like it had been recorded using 1770 technology):
The number one album today in 1975 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
The number one song today in 1961:
A horrible irony today in 1964: A plane carrying all four members of the group Buddy and the Kings crashed, killing everyone on board. Buddy and the Kings was led by Harold Box, who replaced Buddy Holly with the Crickets after Holly died in a plane crash in 1959:
Today in 1976, Chicago had its first number one single, which some would consider the start of its downward slope to sappy ballads:
The number one song today in 1957 …
… came from a just-opened movie:
The number one song today in 1967:
The number one British album today in 1973 was the Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup,” despite (or perhaps because of) the BBC’s ban of one of its songs, “Star Star”:
Who shares a birthday with my brother (who celebrated his sixth birthday, on a Friday the 13th, by getting chicken pox from me)? Start with Paul Simon:
Robert Lamm plays keyboards — or more accurately, the keytar — for Chicago:
Sammy Hagar:
Craig McGregor of Foghat:
John Ford Coley, formerly a duet with England Dan Seals:
Rob Marche played guitar for the Jo Boxers, who …
One death of note: Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night CBS-TV show showed off rock and roll (plus Topo Gigio and Senor Wences) to millions, died today in 1974:
Those who read my former blog last year at this time, or have read this blog over the past months, know that I am a big fan of the rock group Chicago. (Back when they were a rock group and not a singer of sappy ballads, that is.)
Since rock music began from elements of country music, jazz and the blues, brass rock would seem a natural subgenre of rock music. A lot of ’50s musical acts had saxophone players, and some played with full orchestras …
… but it wasn’t until the more-or-less simultaneous appearances of Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears on the musical scene (both groups formed in 1967, both had their first charting singles in 1969, and they had the same producer) that the usual guitar/bass/keyboard/drum grouping was augmented by one or more trumpets, a sax player and a trombone player.
While Chicago is my favorite group (but you knew that already), the first brass rock song I remember hearing was BS&T’s “Spinning Wheel” — not in its original form, but on “Sesame Street,” accompanied by, yes, a giant spinning wheel.
I remember liking Chicago’s “Just You ‘n Me” when it was released as a single, and I remember Chicago’s ABC-TV special filmed in Colorado …
… but it wasn’t until my uncle the audiophile played Chicago’s entire 13-minute-long “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon” on his reel-to-reel tape player, at double-digit volume, that I became hooked on Chicago forever:
Chicago’s appearance at the 2010 EAA AirVenture (and the former Marketplace Today blog was the first media outlet in the entire world to announce Chicago was coming to EAA) is the third time I’ve seen them in concert. I remember thinking as they ended their set having not played either “Make Me Smile” or “25 or 6 to 4” that they couldn’t possibly do a concert without them, could they? And then they returned for their encore with, yes, the whole 13-minute “Ballet” and ended with “25 or 6 to 4.”
(Readers also know my father, who was in southern Wisconsin’s first rock and roll band — which had no brass section — had a Walter Mitty moment when he played one song with Ray Charles in the first Dane County Coliseum concert. I’ve been to three Chicago concerts — half of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band was at the first — and the group has never asked me to jump on stage and play. As with the lack of a Corvette in my garage, life is unfair.)
Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears are the best known, but not the only, brass rock groups in existence. Earth Wind & Fire, which came onto the scene a few years after Chicago and BS&T, could be termed “brass funk”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQJ2QiK4QU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jLGa4X5H2c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfLEc09tTjI
The Brian Setzer Orchestra has, as you might imagine, a backing orchestra for the founder of the Stray Cats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNYrkMvLIxg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICJ76Hsg-XE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODFrMvLYkMY
The group Chase (which had more trumpets than Chicago, but no sax or trombone) had its work prematurely ended by a fatal plane crash:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6FDxD0ha9A
Those who enjoyed Survivor in the 1980s may not have known that one of its founders, Jim Peterik, previously was with the Ides of March:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRu93TEcSl8
There was also the Canadian group Lighthouse, which took Chicago’s rock-band-with-horns concept and substituted “horns” with “orchestra”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvVN_KRriTM
Other groups cannot be called “brass rock” groups, but they have brought in brass from time to time (including, in the case of Three Dog Night’s “Celebrate,” Chicago trumpet player Lee Loughnane, trombone player James Pankow, and sax player Walter Parazaider). That includes the Beatles and the Rolling Stones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3xLSJbFiEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqUiWpGGCmI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqLqgfTnnlE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUHMrGx_jG0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4_r-x9MOYU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK0x6U1aPuk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wwfUEM3BWU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_N2kJg29v4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOErZuzZpS8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xraj86LNgYc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJYYJY81lLo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR_goU4fJA8
And every once in a while in the ’60s and ’70s, a trumpet player released a song that got radio airplay. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass released a lot of singles, but his music doesn’t seem like “rock” to me. Still …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KDPUTyDyQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5RJ-GlMsW8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUrAl4jQyaI
Bill Conti did the score for the movie “Rocky,” and trumpet player Maynard Ferguson rerecorded the theme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioE_O7Lm0I4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsvy0b_N-3c
Those readers who played in middle school or high school bands (the third generation in our family starts this fall) know that band geeks (another word is often used in place of “geeks,” but I’m not repeating it) are well down on the coolness scale in their school. (However, stick it out and get admitted to UW–Madison, and you could be a member of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, only the greatest marching band on the planet.) Groups like those noted here are the sort of music to which high school band members can aspire. You can play football only until your 30s, but note that Chicago is still touring more than 40 years after the band first formed.
See? Brass does rock. (Just ask the members of the new Brass Rock Facebook group.)
Not many listeners of Rush Limbaugh know that his original radio idea was to combine rock music with conservative political thought. I don’t know where that would fit in radio today (and if a radio exec thinks it does, contact me ASAP), but it would be a fun idea particularly for a right-wing fan of rock music, irrespective of rock’s usual politics — (insert deep announcer voice here) rock and roll … and the right.
So I thought I would occasionally post some music (which, of course, is the property of the copyright-holder(s)), assuming those who post the music allow it to be posted. (And if not, you’ll get a big black box and a message about that.)
My two favorite songs are from the rare sector of music that I call “brass rock” — rock bands with horn sections, including Chicago (minus the sappy ballads), Blood Sweat & Tears, the Ides of March, Tower of Power, and others.
Readers of my previous blog know how enthralled I was when Chicago played the EAA AirVenture last July. My uncle once played Chicago’s 16-minute-long “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon” (including “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World”) at ear-splitting levels in his house for me, and I was hooked from then on.
“Make Me Smile,” from Chicago’s second album, “Chicago II,” turned out to be their first AM top 40 radio song. That album also produced my kids’ favorite of theirs, “25 or 6 to 4,” a song about … writing a song:
Song number three is from a Canadian group, Lighthouse, which (as with most Canadian groups) was much more famous north of the border than here. (For one reason, Canadian broadcasting includes local-content requirements, which would never fly in a country that had the First Amendment.) “One Fine Morning” got to number 24 (probably in its inferior shortened version) on the Billboard Hot 100.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 