(MQMurphy photo)
This Saturday's show (10/31/09) is The DeeJay's Choice Show.
It’s the DeeJay’s choice because the deejay turns 58 on the 30th. Forty years ago in 1969 I was eighteen.
In 1969.
God – for how many of us did it seem like we’d never find our way out of those years from 16 to 18?
For some reason the Byrds tune "Eight Miles High" has become something I've focused on in this playlist.
Tunes like Eight Miles High – you heard them – they mixed the rock and roll that you knew with the jazz that you didn’t know and the images of faraway places – “Rain gray town, known for its sound - in places, small faces unbound” - Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark.
That tune was written in 1965. It was all new. Small Faces – that phrase became the name of a rock and roll band. There was so much going on – everything influenced everything else, it seemed.
This, from Wikipedia:
Jim McGuinn's twelve-string guitar playing, particularly the introductory solo, was inspired by John Coltrane's saxophone playing on the song "India" from his 1963 Impressions album.[3] McGuinn is very guarded of the effort that went into his approximation of Coltrane's technique to guitar.[citation needed] The song is driven along by Chris Hillman's bass line, while the rhythm guitar work by Crosby and fast drumming of Michael Clarke add dramatic turbulence. In a 1966 promotional interview, which was added to the 1996 CD re-issue of the Fifth Dimension album, Crosby said that the song's ending made him "feel like a plane landing".
Coltrane’s “India” – on Impressions – was a live recording from sessions at the Village Vanguard in November of 1961.
I didn’t know where that melody had come from – all the times I listened to the cut – but you knew – we teenagers knew - there was something there that you hadn’t heard before.
