August 1: The Late Great Jerry Garcia Birthday

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great – much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River Country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.
~Bob Dylan (Jerry Garcia’s Obituary – 10 August 1995)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Bruce Hornsby inducts the Grateful Dead at the 1994 Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony:

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July 28: The Late Great Mike Bloomfield was born in 1943

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]Expression, pure expression. Without a guitar, I’m like a poet with no hands. Actually I can articulate much clearer on the guitar than anything else.
~Mike Bloomfield (Rolling Stone, April 1968)

When I’m playing blues guitar real well, it’s a lot like B.B. King. But I don’t know, it’s my own thing when there are major notes and sweet runs. You know I like sweet blues. The English cats play very hard funky blues. Like Aretha sings is how they play guitar. I play sweet blues. I can’t explain it. I want to be singing. I want to be sweet.
~Mike Bloomfield (Rolling Stone, April 1968)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Son House, Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield discuss and play the blues:

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July 27: Happy 74th Birthday Bobbie Gentry

bobbie gentry

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]Can a song be so perfect, so successful, that it eclipses its creator? It can if it’s Bobbie Gentry’s Grammy-winning 1967 chart-topper Ode to Billie Joe, one of the most elegantly powerful pieces of storytelling ever to travel the airwaves.
~Dorian Lynskey (The Guardian)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Ode to Billie Joe:

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June 21: Ray Davies was born in 1944 Happy Birthday

“No one can penetrate me. They only see what’s in their own fancy, always.”
– Ray Davies

June 21: Ray Davies was born in 1944 Happy Birthday

Sir Raymond Douglas “Ray” Davies, CBE (born 21 June 1944) is an English musician. He was the lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist and main songwriter for The Kinks, which he led with his younger brother, Dave. He has also acted, directed and produced shows for theatre and television.

Ray Davies is one of my favorite british songwriters, he really is up there with Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards. He is that good!

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Ray Davies’ influence on british music is large and important. It really became visible during the brit-pop period, but I can hear his way of talking about the english way of live in today’s pop and rap/hip-hop also. They might not know why they do it the way the do, but we do, it is the way Ray Davies taught them through his songs .

While almost every other songwriter working in a rock band at the time was talking about altered states or sticking it to squares, Ray Davies developed a vocabulary of traditional English life, and even mocked Carnaby Street fashion on “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”. The Kinks were culture without the “counter” prefix, a rock band that anomalously acknowledged the dignity in the middle-aged woman who went out and bought a hat like the one Princess Marina wore, the one that adopted the mannerisms of music hall without pastiche or irony, the one that sang about tea and gooseberry tarts and favoring neighborhood life over new patterns of development.

– Pitchfork (Joe Tangari)

20 Century Man (Storytellers, vh1):

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June 18: Happy 76th Birthday Paul McCartney

“I think people who create and write, it actually does flow – just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It’s simple.”
― Paul McCartney

“What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.”
― Paul McCartney

Neil Young inducts Paul McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999:

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Happy 85th birthday Willie Nelson!

My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down – but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let’s all have another round.
~Willie Nelson

We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.
~Willie Nelson

He [Willie Nelson] takes whatever thing he’s singing and makes it his. There’s not many people who can do that. Even something like an Elvis tune. You know, once Elvis done a tune, it’s pretty much done. But Willie is the only one in my recollection that has even taken something associated with Elvis and made it his. He just puts his sorta trip on it…
~Bob Dylan (28 April 1993)

Bob+Dylan Willie+Nelson

Willie Nelson Induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame (1993):

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