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I was a big fan of Robbie Kreiger’s snake-lake guitar playing in The Doors, and had to break out my ’68 Gibson SG (always Robbie’s guitar of choice) for this one.
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I wrote this as an homage to that great period in music, around 1966, when you’d hear fuzz guitars, tablas, theremins, and vibes all blending together in a psychedelic melting pot. It’s the SG again, and the bass guitar was played with a wooden ladle, in case anyone wonders.
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Those of you that remember Sarah Jane on the Guitar Noir record may have read my reminiscences about the Sid McCoy all-night jazz show I used to listen to faithfully when I was a boy. He also used to play this tune every night, by those ‘sassy young rabbits, The Jazz Crusaders’, as he would refer to them. It was from their very first album, Lookin’ Ahead, on the Pacific Jazz label. Another song I have always wanted to do. Played on a ’54 Strat.
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The Optigan is such a charming instrument - you insert these big floppy discs and it accesses them while you play keys or push buttons for major, minor and diminished chords. It’s sort of like the original sampler. I wrote this, and it was somehow inspired by a black-and-white 1959 movie called Curse of the Undead, which was a cowboy vampire movie.
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The first of two songs from The Beatles’ Revolver album. What a year 1966 was! The Beatles released Revolver, the Stones released Aftermath, The Kinks released Face To Face, the list goes on and on. I remember when my father, a jazz pianist, heard The Beatles’ version of this for the first time, and said ‘NOW these guys are really on to something new!’ In my own way, I’m trying for some of the jarring strangeness and aural overload that was my experience when hearing that track for the first time.
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A great old Yardbirds song. I figured if I only sang ahh’s except for the song title, it would still qualify as an instrumental!
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I was a huge Eric Clapton fan when I was growing up. I would spend hours on end locked in my room learning his solos from the John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album, and all of his Cream stuff. This is from Wheels of Fire. My band loves doing this live, and we often open our shows with it.
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A two-pack from 1966, The Stones’ from Aftermath and The Beatles’ from Revolver. I was arranging this and had managed to segue from Black into Rigby no problem, but was really stuck getting back to the first song. I wrote out the melody of each song and discovered that the first seven notes are identical, so that’s how they are able to morph into each other at the very end. (Perhaps that’s how my subconscious mind knew they would work together to begin with.)
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I absolutely love this song, a not-very-well-known one from The Doors’ first album. People freak when we play it live.
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Randy Weston wrote this. I have the original lp on United Artists, with a sort of warning sticker that said ‘Music for the talented listener.’ Live we do it more like the original feel, with our drummer Jimmy Johns doing his Afro-Cuban thing, but on the record I wanted to go more for the modern, psuedo-hip-hop programmed thing with tablas, cellos, mellotron, etc. What Lonely Woman was to Guitar Noir, this song is to Out Of The Past.
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Cathy LaManna, a great drummer and friend of mine, turned me on to this song on a Nat Cole After Midnight Sessions album. The first five bars of the acoustic guitar solo are from Bill Evans’ piano solo in One For Helen, live at Montreaux, for all you jazz purists out there. I smile when I hear my wife’s voice on this, in her sexiest husky whisper.
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Greg Spencer from Blue Wave records was on the phone with me one day after I had thought this record was done. He casually asked, ‘Do you have anything on there like Warmth of the Sun, from Guitar Noir?’ I tried to explain that I really wanted to stay away from the pretty, melodic stuff and go for harder-hitting material, but his words sort of stuck in my head for a few days. So I asked myself what I could do that would be in that style, and remembered this song, always one of my favorites. I did it in the style of Albatross, by Fleetwood Mac. I like to close my eyes and imagine the triple guitar team of Peter Green, Danny Kirwin and Jeremy Spencer playing the melody in harmony, while John McVie plays the bass part and Mick Fleetwood uses his mallets on the tom-toms. Thanks for the push, Greg.
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CD Information
