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By 1967, the Motor City is still monopolizing the music charts and airwaves, cruising full speed ahead, rivaled only by Britain’s Fab Four. But there’s turbulence and static on the horizon stemming from a strong current blowing from the West Coast, along with inner tensions within Hitsville U.S.A., a.k.a. Motown Records.These combined factors would eventually…
Last you heard from me, husband-and-wife singing duo Delaney & Bonnie were working on their album Home, their first recording on the Memphis-based Stax label, between February and November of 1968. The general idea in the minds of the Stax executives was to create an album that would introduce the world to the “first white…
He was home making lunch for the kid when the call came. “I was a stay-at-home dad,” says Ivan Doroschuk, of the baritone voice and dwarven video. “I’m in Victoria, B.C. (where he’s lived for 20 years) and the phone rings and it’s (Montreal promoter) Rubin Fogel. I hadn’t spoken to him for 10 years.…
In 1966, a gruff-voiced blues singer was looking to put a band together that might finally propel his straggling career to the next level. Joe Cocker—born John Robert Cocker in 1944— lived on Tasker Road in the English city of Sheffield. As early as 1960, at the age of sixteen, Cocker was already well under…
While the Supremes, with the support of their writing and producing team of Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, a.k.a. H-D-H, continued their winning streak with “I Hear a Symphony” in October, 1965, and “My World Is Empty Without You” in December of the same year, squeezed in between those two months, in…
In an earlier piece, I spoke about sharing with you, dear reader, a three-part homage to one of the biggest musical influences in my young life in Chicago—Booker T. & the M.G.’s. In Part 1, I touched on the first pair of tunes from the band that grabbed my attention and affected me for the…
The Beatles will never be irrelevant. Ask any question about John, Paul, George, and Ringo and you’ll instantly have six people who wanna know the answer, six who think it’s absurd to even have to ask, and six more who think they have a much better question. It’s a never-ending cyclone that has insinuated itself…
Episode 51 This week we’re revisiting a favorite episode from this past year – Jay Jay’s conversation with Frank Marshall. Hear Jay Jay chat with the acclaimed film director and producer, who recently directed the Bee Gees documentary “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Listen to this unique interview to hear Jay Jay and…
A 12-year-old kid is at a local Woolworth’s store on Ashland Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. It’s the early ‘70s, and he’s spending his few allowance dollars on cheap “cut-out” vinyl albums, shelved at the front end of the checkout counter, neatly tiered, four rows high and ten albums deep. That twelve-year-old was…
I was born in the ‘60s, a decade when records and radio waves were in perfect sync. You could hear every kind of music, at any time of day or night; all you had to do was cruise up and down the AM dial. We had a station in Chicago—WVON—that played great urban music. My…
Episode 31 This week’s guest is Director, Producer & Rock Doc veteran DJ Viola. Hear all about DJ’s recent directorial project “Biography: KISStory,” which chronicles the band KISS’s five decades in the business, as founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons reflect on their historic career. Jay Jay talks about catching KISS shows in their early…
A recent article by PMA Magazine editor Robert Schryer got me wondering about when I began to think of music and audio — and, specifically, of myself as an audio hobbyist. The answer to “when” can’t be clearly defined by a single moment; it’s scattered across a handful of events that took place over a…
I’d heard about Paul Whitehead from my colleague Michel Plante, who clued me in that Paul is a California-based artist who paints wonderfully complex, spiritual, surrealistic art, who also did the artwork on three Peter Gabriel-era Genesis albums: Trespass, Nursery Cryme, and Foxtrot. Michel thought it’d be a good idea to interview Paul for PMA…
Episode 21 This week on The Jay Jay French Connection is Blues guitar legend Joe Bonamassa! Joe began his career at the age of 12, opening up for the one and only B.B. King. He has had a remarkable solo career since – releasing upwards of 13 studio albums, 17 live albums & 3 collaborative…
Episode 11 On this week’s episode of The Jay Jay French Connection: Beyond the Music, Jay Jay chats with his friend chef Michael Lomonaco. Tune in to hear Jay Jay and Michael cover all things New York, the complex relationship between the entertainment and food industries, the current state of the restaurant business, the phenomenon…