Updated 26 July, 2019. A young Johnny Otis. He’d give Errol Flynn a run for his money   Writing the previous Leiber-Stoller post reacquainted me with that great rhythm & blues pioneer, Johnny Otis, and Shuggie, his talented multi-instrumentalist son. Shuggie, I believe, stood for ‘sugar’, his mother’s nickname for Johnny Jnr. Johnnie Otis Snr. was a…

[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text] Mike Stoller (left) with Jerry Leiber in the 1970s. Just as most non-classical music – rock and roll, R&B, jazz, pop, etc. – came from the blues, so one of pop music’s truly landmark song-writing partnerships began specialising solely in blues and R&B songs. I’m talking, of course, about the American rock and roll/R&B composers-supreme, Jerry…

The birth of blues rock and its path to hard rock then heavy metal New “How Blues & Rock Evolved” broadcast explores the origins of heavy metal  Prepare your ears for a special 30-minute-plus version of “How Blues & Rock Evolved”. We track how blues influenced the monster guitar riff … became blues rock ……

It recently occurred to me, I haven’t heard the term “hard rock” for what seems like decades. These days, it’s all heavy metal this or metal that, not to mention metal’s myriad sub groups. Once it was simple. There was hard rock and not-so-hard rock, otherwise known as pop. Soft rock was yet to become a genre. The original…

I can’t claim to know him but I certainly remember briefly catching the irrepressible Iggy Stooge (as Iggy and The Stooges circa 1972. Iggy’s bottom right. he was known then) record a track for The Stooges’ now cult album, “Raw Power”, at the CBS Studios in London in late 1972. Iggy had just relocated from…