Jason Bonham: First Experience with Led Zeppelin Live was Frightening

Posted on June 6, 2015 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: This is an excerpt from my 1988 interview with Jason Bonham. The first excerpt and background story are posted here. 

Putting some perspective on this post, Jason Bonham was 10- or 11-years old in 1977.

Jason Bonham

Jason Bonham

Scott K Fish: Did you ever get to go on tour with your dad [John Bonham] when you were a kid? And watch [Led Zeppelin] play live?

Jason Bonham: I went with them on the ’77 tour. A couple of shows. We went down to Florida and played in Florida for a few days. And then we went to Tampa Stadium.

The band was onstage for something like 20-minutes and torrential rain – all of a sudden – came down. You could see the canopies above the stage billowing, full of water. And it was like, Panic Stations!

I think Jimmy [Page] got a short and very quick little shock. So they said, “We’ve got to stop the gig.” And all I remember was we were all in the dressing room, and all of a sudden the guy [body guard?] burst in and picked me up under his arm, and picked Peter Grant’s son up under his arm – Warren [Grant] – and yelled, “GO! GO! GO!”

I didn’t even know what was going on.

What had happened was, the band didn’t go back onstage. And the audience didn’t like this. Although it was torrential rain, the audience had broke down all the barricades and there was 87,000 kids running down towards us. And we was running for the limousines.

tampa_stadium_1977

‘Teenage Riot.’ Led Zeppelin, Tampa 6/3/1977. (Photo courtesy Matt Larson)

I remember just looking around and it was like seeing a riot running towards you.

We all jumped in the cars, and 15- or 20-seconds after we got in the cars, it was like they all piled onto the cars. Police bikes being knocked over. They wrecked something like eight limos.

I remember being thrown onto Jimmy Page’s lap. He was like, “Oh, hello Jason. How are you?”

I was going, “What’s happening, mom?” I was really terrified. And my mom was going, “No, it’s alright. It’s alright.” But, y’know, she was worried to death as well.

My dad was trying to calm everyone down.

But that was the first experience of [Led Zeppelin] live [that] I saw. It was frightening.

– end –

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Ed Soph on Intuitive Communicating with Music

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: The circumstances of this Ed Soph interview are posted here. 

Our exchange in this post involves two instances where musical communication is precise as verbal communication. I experienced it. Ed Soph experienced it.

Such instances are rare in my experience. I think such a high level of musical communication must take a high level of musicianship and listeners very aware of, and receptive to, their own intuition.

It would be great to hear from other musicians with similar experiences.

Scott K Fish: I’m thinking about a very high level of musical communication. For example, I read a [Joe Zawinul] interview [in which] he was relating some of [his] horrible experiences…as a child in war torn Austria.

Many months after that I saw Weather Report in concert. Peter Erskine had just joined the band. Zawinul played an unaccompanied, unannounced keyboard piece. As I listened, the music conjured up images of Zawinul’s childhood years in Austria. It was very moving.

When the piece ended, Zawinul announced the song title, and it was about his Austrian childhood during World War II.

Ed Soph: I’ll tell you about a similar experience. Wayne Darling and I did an album on Enja Records with Joe Henderson called “Barcelona.” [When] we were going out onstage to play, and Wayne said, “What do you want to do, Joe?” Joe said, “Oh, I don’t know. Something with a Spanish flavor.”

Ed Soph
Ed Soph

So we get done playing – and that’s what came out. Joe dictated the whole direction of the thing. Fortunately we followed and it came out pretty cohesive.

But, we got through, went back to the room and were listening to the tape. Joe’s sitting there cackling, going, “Yeah, man. We took a trip to Barcelona.” Joe had been to Barcelona during bullfight time, and that’s what he was playing off of.

About eight months later I had the [concert] tape with me and I was out doing a clinic. Dave Liebman was on the clinic with me. I said, “Have you heard this thing that we did with Joe?”

“No,” [Dave said]. “I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t heard it.”

I said, “Here. Listen to it.” Liebman listened to it and when the tape was through he looked at it and said, “Damn! You cats were in Barcelona, weren’t you?”

I said, “Did you know the name of the record?”

He said, “No. I’ve been to Barcelona around such-and-such a time.”

Goddam!

I asked Liebman, “Do you play off of geographic impressions and that sort of thing?”

He said, “All the time.”

–end–

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Charlie Watts’s 74th Birthday: Jazz and a Jam Session

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Scott K Fish

Stones drummer Charlie Watts plays at Dakota Jazz Club
The birthday drummer sat in with several Stones sidemen on the song “Ruby Tuesday.”
By Jon Bream JUNE 3, 2015 — 12:08AM

Charlie Watts

…Charlie Watts, the jazz lover, went to the Dakota Jazz Club — even though it was his birthday. And he sat in on one song.

It was the playfully dubbed Band 2 featuring three Stones sidemen — saxophonist/leader Tim Ries, keyboardist Chuck Leavell and singer Bernard Fowler — and several Twin Cities musicians.

Watts watched the hourlong first set from the balcony…, watching intently as his pal, jazz-fusion drummer Steve Smith, sat in on one of the few non-Stones numbers, “Take the Coltrane.”

Watts reappeared at the start of the second set on the drum kit. Ries led the group in a quick “Happy Birthday” to recognize Watts’ 74th. And then it was…“Ruby Tuesday” with one of the world’s great rock drummers. The silver-haired time keeper was understated and steady before ending the song with a little flourish.

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Grand Piano Innovation: The World Contains Many Piano-Makers

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: How inspiring! In a quest for better sound, Messrs. Barenboim and Maene modify the acoustic concert grand piano. Who would have thought? For example, the new placement of the bass strings (see below) makes sense to my way of thinking.

wsj.com
Daniel Barenboim Plays Schubert From Memory on a Piano He Designed
At London’s Royal Festival Hall, pianist Daniel Barenboim is playing all 11 of Franz Schubert’s completed piano sonatas on an instrument he designed.
By ROBERT THICKNESSE — June 1, 2015 5:55 p.m. ET

London — The exclusive little club of the world’s most valuable pianos just got a new member. [T]his new kid belongs to the doyen of classical pianists, Daniel Barenboim, who designed it together with the Belgian piano-maker Chris Maene. It took 4,000 man-hours and 18 months to build, and last Wednesday was its public unveiling….

[I]t is a modern concert piano….

The Barenboim-Maene Piano

The Barenboim-Maene Piano

After playing Franz Liszt’s restored piano in 2011.., Mr. Barenboim vowed to create an instrument combining the power of a modern grand with the transparency and discrete notes, colors and registers he had felt and heard there. The concert Steinway played world-wide is an amazing, aristocratic-toned instrument with great consistency, but this venture has made us aware of its near-monopoly in a world that does, after all, contain many more piano-makers.

The new instrument has a beautiful and individual clarity of tone, pellucid and warm; the notes are clean and separate, with the distinct attack you hear in old instruments. There is something orchestral in the different textures of its low, middle and high registers—that is an echo of the old fortepiano—and maybe the bass is more sharply etched than usual (the big technical difference is that the bass strings do not cross diagonally over the others, as on a standard grand, and therefore don’t pick up resonance from them).

In the Sunday concert…Mr. Barenboim took us to worlds only Schubert inhabited, where emotions indescribable in words dance and overlap and music flows and flows, songlike, orchestral, mythic, with vast textural richness and variety. And yes, of course the piano had everything to do with this.

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Barenboim/Maene Press Release and Press Kit

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Grateful Dead Announces ‘Unprecedented’ 80-Disc Box Set

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Scott K Fish

Wall Street Journal
Jun 2, 2015 — MUSIC

Grateful Dead Announces ‘Unprecedented’ 80-Disc Box Set

In conjunction with the band’s 50th anniversary, an 80-disc box set dubbed “30 Trips Around the Sun” will be available on September 18. The collection will cull together a previously unreleased live show from each of the band’s 30 years on the road. The CD box set will be limited to 6,500 copies and retail for $699.98. For those Deadheads who prefer digital files, a limited edition USB will be made available and contain all the concerts in both FLAC and MP3 formats.

For fans who buy the box set, a special gold-colored 7” vinyl single will be included, with the A side containing one of the band’s earliest recordings, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” and the B Side being the final song they ever played live, “Box of Rain” at Soldier Field on July 9, 1995.

For those fans on a budget, a four-CD version of the collection will be released as well, which will have a live song from each year, from 1965-1995.

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