As I ponder the next tsunami (physically and psychologically) which might upset my world, and my little collection of music I cannot live without I’m thinking of one word: iconoclast. The word iconoclast does not get much play these days. I find it curious given the fact that so many of our most sacred institutions, ideas and traditions currently totter under the weight of so much flux and attack. The word is defined as 1: one who destroys sacred images, and 2: one who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. Depending on your dictionary source (I looked at Answers.com and Merriam-Webster’s) either one could be the first definition.

The height of iconoclasm occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries at the height of the Byzantine Empire. Big happenings over idol worship between Christian viewpoints with statues and paintings destroyed ended up being the result. This behavior surfaced about eight hundred years later during the reformation when Protestants had their way in dismantling idolatrous art from the Catholic Church for a brief period in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. In both instances heads rolled.

In the latter part of the 19^th Century, anarchists embodied iconoclasm by demanding that all governments and government institutions should be toppled and done away with. Disenchanted iconoclastic people targeted the ruling class and assassinated a fair number of influential people, including two American Presidents, Garfield and McKinley. The institutions did not topple by their actions, but in a perverse way the 20^th Century wars-to-end-all-wars ultimately leveled many of the stratified class barriers that had caused the anarchists’ outrage. It has taken only sixty years to use up that window of opportunity, and we hear the latest iconoclasts of various persuasions torment religions, art and government institutions once again.

I bring this all up because I find it fascinating that old core struggles never seem to die. They are like those ash covered hot spots in the aftermath of a forest fire. Changes we prefer to think as revolutionary, become illusory when put to the fire. There will be new growth in the forest. The forest may thrive and be different for many years, but it is inevitable that the cycle of flames will reappear to reduce it in time.

Art mirrors life in the same respect, with accepted formulae crushed and rebuilt around some new perspectives that will die and pass into something else again. Through all these passages art remains intrinsically art, the creative expression of life.

There a very few iconoclasts in the world of artistic endeavors today. In the world of film the last great iconoclasts are all memory with the passing of Robert Altman. He and Sam Peckinpah were the last true movie directors to obliterate all those quaint film notions regarding bogus film-western values of virtue, cleanliness, chivalry and death where the good guys always won. The Wild Bunch remains the finest western ever made and it broke every story telling rule in the process. Above all, there were no good guys, only choices and actions. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller ranks right under Peckinpah’s masterpiece as a tremendous film achievement recording much the same struggle. Through Altman’s eyes the old west is reduced to a rainy dark dreary mining camp where the players are drawn to a small brothel and bar as the object of conquest. The brooding themes in Altman’s classic are expanded with the brilliant soundtrack composed by Leonard Cohen, one of the few living iconoclasts of popular music.

The first three Leonard Cohen albums were reissued on compact disc back in April 2007 by Sony/BMG. These are Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate. These three album reissues marked the fortieth anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable musical career. If you had to pick just one get the Songs of Leonard Cohen. This album contains most of the material from McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well the wistful tune Suzanne. The ubiquitous producer John Hammond produced this first Leonard Cohen album. I was googling and discovered Suzanne has been covered more than 1,200 times to date.

Two other records from the Leonard Cohen vault that I've grown old with and love are I’m Your Man and The Future, which whisper brutal truths of life in sinuous baritone. Songs like Waiting For The Miracle, Closing Time and Democracy from The Future all are epic tomes on the human condition whose themes are unlike any other in the annals of pop music. Anthem is another beautiful and tragic expression of life where the chorus intones, “Ring the bells that still can ring…. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.”

Atom Egoyan crafted an excellent film, Exotica, around the strange bonds between an exotic dancer and an obsessive club client who are locked in time to Cohen’s Everybody Knows. The song is on the album, I’m Your Man. Don Henley did a tremendous cover of this song that appears on his greatest hits album, Actual Miles.

In the world of music there was a gifted young man, Jeff Buckley, the son of another gifted young man, Tim Buckley. Both the father and son died tragically at very young ages. On the Jeff Buckley album, Grace, there is the most beautiful cover of a Leonard Cohen song my hears have inhaled. The song is Hallelujah. If I had to pick a top 100 song list this one would definitely be included.

If you're a fan, Leonard Cohen has a tour in full swing coming to a region near you. I've enclosed a link below that has all the concert information, and other cool Cohen confidences. If you cannot make a concert this time around, there is also an amazing documentary tribute DVD that was done a few years back entitled Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. This DVD features performances by U2, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and others. It recounts very effectively this poet and songwriter’s Canadian roots and travels of time, thought and life. Really a great view if you have not seen it. I hadn’t realized how closely Al Pacino resembles Leonard Cohen until I viewed this recently. Check out www.leonardcohenfiles.com if life needs a fresh look. Comments always welcome, spin one of your own.

Spring-time and thoughts of a long getaway fill my head. With this annual rite of passage upon us I am taking this opportunity to collect another batch of essential listening for my Desert Island Disc project. For this round of must-have music to sooth my jangled nerve endings I offer to you a group of artists one by one who marched only to their inner ear, troubadours of a singular stripe whose efforts were never based on popularity, trends, market-research and listening polls.

In today’s climate of “Idol” worship, where a tone deaf public pays for the privilege of anointing a new Lesley Gore or Bobby Rydell each season, it seems so radical to have just a few years back a wealth of talent so singularly inspired, and so anti-commercial that actually thrived. As we witness the music industry continue to implode with the only headlines of note being new litigation over content ownership squabbles and continued sales declines we find art on the brink of either breakthrough or collapse. Here’s hoping for a breakthrough while we recognize a monopolistic stranglehold has crippled our available choices to effectively hear and reward vibrant new voices.

As the Sixties were coming to a close, one of the greatest founding Los Angeles bands, the Byrds, were splintering apart with each new album release. One of the new additions to the Jim Roger McGuinn controlled line-up was a young man who had traveled west from Florida, Gram Parsons. Here was a true original whose idea of a great time was to play all rock tunes to a country bar scene, or all country tunes to a rock bar scene. Gram and Keith Richards became good friends, at a point in Keith’s life when drugs were beginning to be his only true companions. In 1968, after having released, as a member of the Byrds, the very under appreciated album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gram abandoned the band on a worldwide tour. Keith Richards had advised him that South Africa in 1968 was no place to travel to do a concert. He took Keith’s advice and went off to form the Flying Burrito Brothers with other former Byrd members Chris Hillman and Mike Clarke. For anyone interested there are a couple of fine websites devoted to the history of the Bryds, ByrdWatcher at http://www.ebni.com/byrds/ and the Roger McGuinn website, http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/mcguinn/.

The Flying Burrito Brothers, an itinerant collection of Los Angeles music players from Bernie Leadon to Leon Russell, made one decent record, The Gilded Palace of Sin. The album cover with band members dressed in Nudie’s country jackets was shot in the Mojave Desert. The Flying Burrito Brothers continued on for several years, but Gram Parsons had abandoned that project after only two records were released to go solo.

Several solo projects, and a tour called the Fallen Angels with Emmy Lou Harris left a trail of exhilarated or exasperated fans to praise or revile this mercurial musical talent. Parsons had gone to see Emmy Lou in a tiny club in Washington D.C. at Chris Hillman’s urging and decided on the spot to have her involved in his future music projects, but it would be a full year before he got on with it. His friendship with Keith Richards lasted up through the Stones epic release, Exile on Main Street, with an increasing addiction and the knowledge that several country tinged tunes of Jagger and Richards owed quite a debt to Gram Parsons. You certainly hear his influences on Country Honk, Dead Flowers, Torn and Frayed and Sweet Virginia from that period of 1968 through 1972. The Stones even offered him Wild Horses as a song for the second Flying Burrito Brothers album.

In spite of these outstanding credentials and continued critical support his solo album, GP, that he released during this period failed to sell. He thought Merle Haggard might produce the record, but things did not work out here in Bakersfield at the time. He ended up using Elvis Presley’s band along with Emmy Lou Harris and some old Burrito chums for the record. They would all get together during the spring and summer of 1973 for my Desert Island Disc selection here, Grievous Angel. Sadly, the album was released posthumously 1974, with Gram Parsons having died of drug overdose in the Joshua Tree Inn near the Joshua Tree National Park. His friend and road manager at the time, Phil Kaufman, ended up stealing Parsons dead body from an airport hangar, and torched it with his coffin in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park. In the wild early days of the Seventies, with Charles Manson still fresh on a lot of minds, this was just another ordinarily bizarre event for the folks living in California.

The album, Grievous Angel, still sounds fresh today, particularly with those great duets between Gram and Emmy Lou. Songs like Hearts on Fire, Return of the Grievous Angel, In My Hour of Darkness, Love Hurts, Cash on the Barrelhead and Hickory Wind tell the strange and unique story of Gram Parsons. The album is always worth the listen.

I've taken a hiatus from politics for about a month now. I've been feeling like a character in Robert Heinlein's novel, Stranger In A Strange Land. I don't "grok" a lot of today's happenings, and the criminal political behavior has become so tolerated as just the way government and business do business now. But, that's okay. I've tuned-up the high fidelity throughout my home with very little computer interface. No i-pod or jingling ring-tone cellphone reality for me. To be honest I've never been a big fan of the whole portable music experience with the exception of a great car stereo system. The Sony Walkman(TM) craze that started this obsession of individual isolation, with those little earplugs, or earphones, on walkers-bikers-joggers-cubicle dwellers never did it for me. It seemed like a clever way to have people avoid one another rather than communicate, and the sound was terrible besides.

This growing isolation from community has taken an ugly turn. Without peer review we argue alone. We play video games one on none. We glean information through the Internet on our own, and can usually be seen driving solo in our singular vehicle environment. Today's cars, much like our homes are curious odes to individual retreat, complete with individual climate controls and entertainment options for each occupant. We have become turtles with hard shells not easy to penetrate and adverse to exploration.

It is not hard to understand that we now consider ourselves separate and unequaled. The small testaments to communal social enterprise finds like minded viewpoints and opinions that when challenged usually means excommunication at church, club, sporting event or workplace. Gates close off the public to little suburban developments where sameness is regimented by design, color, landscape and garbage can placement. This culture is so withdrawn that a growing number of parents homeschool little Jane and Johnny to avoid contamination with the rest of the public. I find this trend of turtle-ship ominous. It becomes pointless to try and engage in discussions with those of differing perspectives who wish only to maintain their vision of hide-behind-the-rock reality, who simply do not wish to reach beyond their shell.

This self imposed isolation by people might be a reason so many now simply shoot the messenger presenting alternate takes from their defined comfort zone of reality. You see this in the stupefying responses by these outraged turtle-people at newspapers, magazines and television when confronted with the disordered reality of the brutal day to day that is life. The government censored all photos of coffins because the pictures could harm the war effort. What does that indicate to you? When did less information and less knowledge become the preferred methods for making decisions? When did adult become child? When did the presentations of scientific research cause a vast personal attack on the presenters? We never need to examine and think about the data, that would require research and reading, and that is something busy Americans in their controlled habitats plugged into laptops, cellular phones and i-pods have no time for.

As the walls go up around this entire nation seeking withdrawal from the rest of the world, and as illiteracy becomes the national statistical norm there will be fewer messengers to present just the facts, and fewer to understand the facts when presented. When the Wall came down in Berlin we applauded freedom. What do we applaud as we erect our own Wall on the border? Fear?

Maybe the non-stop politics of today's life, or the non-stop pollution in the air, caused my sinus filters to finally snap, and filled my head with the unending fluid sack of misery. We come upon the ides of March in 2007, and witness a full blown 2008 Presidential campaign underway. We have been forced to live a life of unending political campaigns based solely on money while ignoring responsible public debate to find solutions to our growing economic crisis.

There will be no substantive campaign finance reform, ever. There will be no addressing the nation's tottering infrastructure where health care costs rob the citizens of life savings. There will be no progress on affordable alternative energy sources for consumers and real public transportation alternatives. Will a defense budget ever be lowered in the name of sanity? There was a recent warning regarding China spending $90 billion on defense for this past year, while failing to note that we in the land of liberty are on pace to spend two thirds of a trillion dollars on defense projects for year 2008. We committed $575 billion for our defense this year. We obviously prefer to build bombs over everything else with maybe one exception, prisons.

We are the most frightened nation on earth without a doubt. Our schools are now built to keep people out, or lock the kids down, much like ancient fortresses. Our open borders, a shining example to the rest of the world for so long, are now being fenced off. We are afraid of most of our own citizens today, which is why we incarcerate as a percentage more people than any other nation in the world. The other industrial nations of the world treat drug addiction as a health issue, we declare war and round up the usual suspects creating castles of power for drug distributors. Prisons are now simply the office complex for illegal drug distribution in America. At some point in the last century we gave up on rehabilitation, and are now creating the most angry and violent sub-culture imaginable with their own fortresses.

We're about as bankrupt a nation as a nation can get. Our apparent idea of democracy involves really rich people picking who they want to represent really rich people who can never honestly answer any simple question and refuse to solve any issue. In ancient Rome the plebes could vote down the patrician laws. There is no recourse for the plebes of today. This is not a liberal point of view. This is not a conservative point of view. The fact of the matter is that no political party matters much today for people without means. What keeps these parties alive is the dreamstate most people live in regarding their own circumstances, afterall everyone is only a lottery scratch away from being admitted to the country club.

It is already so boring to read about the current candidates raising piles of campaign money to get elected to do nothing but sustain the folks that hosted these fundraising dinners. We have become a very closed society with fading prospects and very little inclination to pay as we go. We are on borrowed time.

The Academy Awards show will air this Sunday, February 25, 2007. I cannot remember a year that I have had as little interest in the results as this one. However, I am rooting for Martin Scorsese to finally bag the big one with Departed. Clint Eastwood has won a couple of times with Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, so I'm hopeful that his big film in this year's mix, Letters From Iwo Jima, doesn't win. The others I just don't care about at all.

Forest Whitaker seems the likely best actor winner this year for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland. I cannot even root for Peter O'Toole for this year's best actor category. Will Smith could win, or maybe Ryan Gosling, but I'm thinking Forest has this one in the bank. The sad fact for Peter O'Toole is that he should have won several best actor Oscars over the years. He deserved one for his portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. He deserved one for playing Alan Swan (the fictional character based on Erroll Flynn), in My Favorite Year. I would also argue for his amazing performances in The Ruling Class and Stuntman, but even better than those performances was his transcending portrayal of King Henry in The Lion In Winter. Who would have thought that the young actor in his screen debut playing Henry's son, Richard the not so Lionhearted, in this movie would win an Oscar before Peter O'Toole. Well, folks, Anthony Hopkins did just that.

There are only a few categories that really matter to most of us anyway, unless you have friends and family in some of the technical award field. The ones that matter to me, usually, are the Best Pictures, foreign and domestic, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor/Actress. The rest of the awards become about as memorable as a lunch from a week ago.

I could have rooted for some Dreamgirls talent, but the way Hollywood stiffed, Jennifer Holliday, the original broadway star for this picture just did not sit well with me. Eddie Murphy has a good shot in a supporting role.

This year I have no picks, just hopefuls. Here they are:

BP- Departed
BFP- Pan's Labyrinth
BD- Martin Scorsese
BMA- Forest Whitaker
BFA- Helen Mirren
BSMA- Alan Arkin
BSFA- Cate Blanchett

Maybe some of you have some picks, or hopefuls you might want to share. I always find it interesting how very little coverage we see regarding films here in Bakersfield, which is less than two hours away from Hollywood. Some big mountain, huh?

I was talking about the importance of cities in the shaping of popular music trends on my second post with this Desert Island Disc compilation. The short sunlight of January amid the predominant overcast for the month always reminds me of Seattle. On those few days when the sun beams out on Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean beats against America’s Emerald City a person can get hooked on the place, yearning for a strong espresso mixture from a young and charming barista. Most of the time in Seattle, when the drizzle and gray permeates all life, you find yourself in the vicinity of grunge, bundled up in some flannel and jean outfit that acts as a sponge for all the cold and wetness.

One of the last real City Scene happenings in the rock world occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the former Boeing capital. Ferocious poundings on slow tempos set against dissonant changes that were coupled with the highest amplified settings of thoughtful angry downer lyrics brought a sound that was nothing like Seattle’s former rock royalty, Heart, ever imagined. Nirvana, Sound Garden, Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam were the toast of the music world for about five years. These bands owe big debts of gratitude to Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and The Clash for inspiration. But for all that, they created their own force and mystique that was the refreshing antithesis to the boring sameness of hair bands and pseudo “new wave” acts swallowing rock by the early 1990s. I have two albums from two of Seattle’s fab four bands heading on the flight to my island, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Vs. Kurt Cobain’s In Bloom happens to be one of those masterpieces that sticks with you forever, and the fact that Pearl Jam wages the good fight to this day against gross commercialism while not allowing their packaged goods to be sold in plastic throwaway holders, with Vs. being their first environmental statement, makes the choices pretty easy. Like most inspired sound awakenings, Grunge and these acts fostered a lot of really terrible imitations and spin-offs but must not be held accountable for a public marketed into swallowing limp biscuits with their “venti” espresso.

San Francisco gave the world hippies on the half-shell during and after the Summer of Love from 1966 to 1970. All those bands with peculiar names like Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe & The Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks (Airplane and Dead previously mentioned in part 1 of this fable) and all those drugs ingested actually produced a fair share of worthwhile music notables that have endured. At the height of acid nights and pot-filled days free form improvisations ruled the city by the Bay.

There were a few holdouts from the jam assaults in the area that grooved to a different beat at this point in time. One was a young disc jockey working in the City, who produced one of San Francisco’s first charting bands, The Beau Brummels. For most radio guys that would have been a ticket to the Promised Land with a producer’s credit to gain access to other pop wannabees in big city recording studios while working for record labels making good dough. Sylvester Stewart wanted to make revolutionary music instead. He came and went in a flash of funky beaten ferocity mixed around rock and soul roots of genius that paved the way for masters of funk like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to take flight and soar. Stand! was one of the most original and revolutionary records made. Ever! The infectious beat and the politically charged lyrics from this charismatic black man and his Family Stone changed the course of music for quite awhile. Every song on the record made a statement and made you dance. Everyday People, Stand!, I Want To Take You Higher, Sing A Simple Song, You Can Make if You Try and Somebody’s Watching You are timeless classics. Extended jams Sex Machine and Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey still resonate. Though Sly was a sad casualty of psychedelic excess and abuse, this great record, Stand!, dances the night away on my island.

On my last post I mentioned New York as one of those important cities in defining rock over the last several decades. New York has always been a music source, from show tunes to jazz, and has served as a destination to countless musical souls looking for inspiration. Bill Graham, the legendary rock promoter, who is still missed in this world after so many years gone, needed a venue in New York to make peace with himself that he had made it. This after establishing in San Francisco the ultimate rock stage at the time, The Fillmore. The Fillmore East building had previously been the Village Theater, and before that was once the Loew’s Commodore, playing movies to the Lower East Side Manhattan crowds. There were many great shows put on in the old restored movie palace, but it was a relatively unheard band from the south in the spring of 1971 that defined the Fillmore East.

At this time most of the authentic blues music was coming from England with bands following the early Rolling Stones model of beefing up original blues songs with a big jolts of electric guitars riffing around lengthy arrangements. Bands like John Mayall & The Bluebreakers, Fleetwood Mac, Savoy Brown, Foghat, Joe Cocker & the Grease Band, Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton with whomever dominated the blues rock genre of the period.

In America, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band had already gone through four incarnations by the end of the 1960s with most of the original band gone to various solo projects. Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop went solo and each contributed their own stylistic chops to fewer hard core fans. By 1971, Soul music had nothing to do with the blues and Jimi Hendrix had already died.

The Allman Brothers Band had released their first album on Atlantic Records in 1969. One of the songs from the record had garnered a little attention, Whipping Post. For their follow up record, Idlewild South, the sales results were better and critical reviews were pouring in from a growing rock press corps. Their third record, The Allman Brothers At Fillmore East, cemented their status as blues rock icons of the day and created a whole new category of recorded music to sell to future generations, the concert album. The group also opened the doors to a floodgate of southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, Wet Willie, 38 Special and The Marshall Tucker Band to name a few that would provide that refried-rock-boogie backdrop for so many.

Every track on The Allman Brothers At Fillmore East is crisp and the improvisational flow of guitars by Duane Allman and Dickie Betts around twin percussion, bass and Greg Allman’s keyboards shimmers throughout. Duane Allman had made quite a reputation appearing as a guest session guitarist for Boz Scaggs’ debut album and he worked on Eric Clapton’s Layla recordings during 1971 before dying in a tragic motorcycle accident. His band mate Berry Oakley would die the same way a little over a year later. Tragedy aside, the band has always continued to deliver over the years, and this legendary concert record is one for me to count pebbles of sand over under the palm fronds. For sentiment’s sake I’m also bringing their Brothers & Sisters release that bridged the blues with that southern-country groove that is so identified with the second stage of this band’s career.

The Beatles always seemed to have the Rolling Stones to play off during their time on the stage, and the Allman Brothers Band always had Lynyrd Skynyrd joined in raw blues-baked southern powered tragedy. Lynyrd Skynrd also had a seminal live release recorded at the historic Fox Theater in Atlanta that will make the island journey, One More From The Road. This band rocked, had great ballads that would suddenly soar. Classics like Tuesday’s Gone, which Metallica did a great job of covering, and Free Bird define a sound and a time. I will also take along “Street Survivors”, because it was one of those eerie premonitions where art foretold reality. The original album’s cover had the band engulfed in flames and was released just prior to their disastrous plane crash. The unsold originals were all boxed up and pulled from the market and replaced by a black cover and the untouched original photo minus the flames.

As the temperature continues to drop, and the skies gray with overcast I come back to Seattle, birth place of James Marshall Hendrix. You can spot the great ones by how many imitators try to emulate the original. The list of people inspired by Hendrix continues to mount. Possibly only Robert Johnson can claim to have influenced as many players and listeners as Jimi Hendrix. He took the blues and rock to unimagined levels by a sheer force of hard earned talent and an astonishing imagination. It amazes me to this day that he released only three studio albums, one live concert performance and a greatest hits package in his lifetime. For my island getaway I’ll take his three studio albums, Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland, along with me, particularly since they have been re-mastered by the people who worked and cared for him when he was alive. After years of having his legacy tarnished by hustlers interested only in making money for themselves, Michael Jeffrey and Alan Douglas, Jimi’s father, Al, finally got it right by creating the company Experience Hendrix.

It’s a wrap for part 3, add some commentary of your own if you feel the pull.

On my first shot at putting essential listening to cover the rock life cycle I chose a group of collections from seminal artists. For this addition to the original post, and for the remaining future installments, I am selecting only individual albums to round out my Desert Island Disc collection.

The reason for all this reflection is the continued bad news from the music industry at large. The business is not getting better with this drive to computerize and bit-size music. What is happening today is the total destruction of the album concept and the long form song. We are witnessing the birth of the micro-minute hits only business, driven solely by the commercials these few various songs appear in. Even the one-minute intro into television shows with musical driven theme songs is now disappearing from our scene. Every artist is now begging to get on Radio Toyota TV for any chance at exposure. Digital rights management issues continue to strangle music at every turn. The days of turning people on to interesting new acts and becoming advocates of a particular sound seem as far removed as the horse and buggy. File sharing, which on the surface seemed like such a great idea ten years ago, simply killed album oriented music.

There were other factors that contributed to the death of rock and album oriented music, and the downsizing of the package containing the sounds was certainly a big one. Rock was more than the songs, it was just as much about the art that housed the discs. Price increases that spiraled out of control by major record companies was also a disease the patient could not endure for long, particularly when singles to promote album sales were being sold at five bucks a pop.

But all that is ancient history, just like my next ten picks for island living.

Many years ago I had a good friend. We'll call him Nert. We would argue late at night and into the early mornings about music and culture. He always had natural gift of finding the next big movement. He believed in the power of cities. Culture had always, and would always, emanate from the city to the rest of the world. He was a city watcher, and London was a key city.

At the time of the first British Invasion that included notables like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds, The Animals and lesser luminaries like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas and so forth, the blues scene in the London underground was beginning to erupt. The Yardbirds lost a guitar player and the Alexis Korner Group lost a rhythm section. The result was Cream by June of 1966.

Cream's first album, Fresh Cream, set the tone but their second album Disraeli Gears was absolutely mind boggling for the time. In every word this was a revolutionary album for the time and a record whose biggest hit, Sunshine of Your Love, would be covered by everyone in the music business for years to come. This was the first "supergroup" with a line up of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They would tour extensively in Europe and America over the next two years with bold improvisations and jams around the individual songs. Clapton abruptly called it a day and found Blind Faith for a brief moment at the end of the decade. Cream was over for nearly four decades, but Disraeli Gears goes in my Desert Island Disc collection and their reunion concerts showed that these old geezers still have amazing punch after all these years. The band was one of a kind.

Another city another time.

I had another music compadre in the Bay Area in the early 1980s who loved all things Austin. "E" was a big fan of Joe Ely, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and many lesser-knowns that plugged away in obscurity. The Thunderbirds had a guitarist, Jimmie, whose younger brother played guitar on David Bowie's last big hit, Let's Dance. At the time, Bowie was gearing up for a big tour to promote said hit, but his new guitarist had the audacity to refuse the $500 per show offer to accompany the great chameleon. The kid brother had other plans to showcase his skills and figured Bowie was simply trying to take advantage of him. Also, if you have the right agent things generally work out. The kid brother guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, had legendary music man John Hammond working out the details for a CBS record deal. Hammond had a pretty decent track record with CBS having brought them Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Not bad for an old geezer with ears to pluck a little guitarist from the bowels of Texas bar stools and present to an eager audience Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble's Texas Flood. For audacity of borrowed influences and virtuoso command that made his sound so unique and distinctive, and for really putting on Austin on the big music map I've got Texas Flood en route to my getaway.

Before David Bowie started going through guitar players more frequently than soap stars go through sweethearts he had a monster player, Mick Ronson, with him to lead the Spiders From Mars. The two had made three albums that showed progress and a wild androgynous look to foster the hype of a big breakout. Not many folks in 1972 were prepared for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The album redefined the concept album. It was a spellbinding mixture of aural depth and panning telling the quasi science fiction fable of rock stardom and death. Every track is a gem from start to finish. Bowie's album persona spawned a host of imitation and reworking from the New York Dolls and Mott The Hoople to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards affected Bowie's look. The album was a revelation and gets a front row seat next to a palm tree on my sandy beach.

Los Angeles has always been a mercurial city, fast and fleeting in pace without a basic core to pin it down. The early days of Hollywood dictated a bevy of musicians would be needed for orchestra pits in the grand theaters springing up everywhere to showcase the silent movies. When sound arrived musicians were needed for all those musicals and background music to sustain the ambiance of the silver screen. Movies reflected lifestyle and by the late 1950s surfing on the west coast was an exploding teen life event. Novelty records like Itsy Witsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dotted Bikini happened first, but a core of local musicians formed a new echo sound of guitar driven music as the soundtrack to this lifestyle. Dick Dale & The Deltones, The Ventures, The Surfaris and The Beach Boys all caught the wave and laid down borrowed tunes with mixtures of Latin and Chuck Berry tempos laced with double-picked strings. Most of these surf sound pioneers were one gear hot-rods, and flamed out on a too heavy mixture of their own exhaust, but not the Beach Boys. These guys owned pop music during the early 1960s along with Frankie & Annette films at the beach. When the Beatles knocked them off their perch, Brian Wilson dug as deep as he could go to produce one of the most astounding albums ever made, Pet Sounds. This record was so non-Beach Boy and so layered with harmonies on top of sound textures it defied categorization. It didn't sell to the record company's expectations as well. It traumatized the band and its leader. It is an awesome achievement and comes along with me in order to always hear the Wilson brothers with Al and Mike harmonize Caroline No.

At the end of the 1960s rock was taking on a much denser quality in sound and attack. Two Londoners and former members of the Yardbirds not named Clapton pushed the envelope of this aural thunder to distinctly different conclusions. Jeff Beck had followed Eric Clapton as the obligatory guitar hero in the Yardbirds, but grew tired of the the band and left by the end of 1967. He formed the Jeff Beck Group with Ron Wood and Rod Stewart, who would join Ronnie Lane in the Faces within in a couple of years. Beck released two exceptional records, Truth and Beckola , with this line-up before changing directions and forming a new Jeff Beck Group that began experimenting with R&B and Jazz influences. Apparently, still not satisfied with the results after two albums, Rough & Ready and Jeff Beck Group, he got in touch with the rhythm section from Vanilla Fudge to make a really forgettable record. Fed up with all the lineup changes and declining sales results he opted for an instrumental record that defined a new music genre, Fusion. Blow By Blow was a groundbreaking album release that blended jazz and rock into a completely alternative universe. After years of various experimentation in the 1960s by such dignitaries as Miles Davis and John McLaughlin who tried for the same results it was Jeff Beck mastering the art. I can't blame him for all the pretentious copycat product he spawned in the wake of his success. Blow By Blow makes the trip.

The other guitarist from the Yardbirds was, of course, Jimmy Page. After every original member of the Yardbirds had left the band to form their own brainchildren (Cream, Jeff Beck Group, Renaissance and 10cc) Page was left holding the name. He decided to ditch it and adopt a phrase Keith Moon is said to have made over how well this last incarnation of the Yardbirds would go over, "like a lead zeppelin." They dropped the "a" and stormed the world. The first Led Zeppelin record was sonically brilliant with high headroom and range. It mixed blues, rock and folk elements in a way not previously heard. This album, like Jeff Beck's first two projects created the term and the initial definition of heavy metal. Led Zeppelin 1 gets storage and turntable time on my Desert Island.

One big city that needs to be mentioned at this juncture is New York City. In the 1950s and 1960s most pop songs came out of a hit factory at the Brill Building in New York City. Don Kirshner was there with Neil Sedaka, Al Kooper, Gerry Goffin and Carole King turning out big pop fluff hit after hit. By the end of the 1960s most of these talented individuals were off developing their own projects. Al Kooper began a lucrative career playing sessions with Bob Dylan and hooking up with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills on a Super Session project that had stunning results and spawned an era of big star rock jams that hearkened back to the old Verve At The Philharmonic Jam days on records pioneered by Norman Granz in the 1940s. Don Kirshner went into band management and concert promotion. He made oodles of money. Carole King divorced her co-writer hubby Gerry Goffin and moved to Los Angeles. She had tried a couple of times to launch a singing career without much success. In 1971 she struck gold, then platinum and then mega-platinum with her release of Tapestry. Every woman I knew, or was casually acquainted with, or saw driving in the state owned this record. It was mix of old original songs that were completely retooled, and new songs that spoke to the gentle gender in a way very few records had spoken to them in the past, certainly not of that particular generation. I Feel The Earth Move, It's Too Late, You've Got A Friend and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman captured the liberated spirit of the times for young women. Tapestry gets the ride in the hopes that I won't be by myself on the island.

I mentioned earlier that the West Coast in the late 1950s and early 1960s catered to the beach crowd with sun, sand and hot-rods as the backdrop to pop film and music projects. On the East Coast, folk music and civil rights were the order of the day. Devotees of Woody Guthrie's and Pete Seeger's brand of communal conscience built around the construct of social protest songs spoke to a fierce and attached young audience. Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, John Phillips, Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan mined folk gold and brought old and new material to the world's sound stage. Bob, though, was in a class all by himself. Everyone can argue until the end of the world which records Dylan released had the most effect during his stunning first five year period between 1962 and 1966. For this Island project I choose three albums, The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.

That's ten for this segment. I promise this will not be simply an homage to a particular decade of material. However, the life cycle of rock mirrors the life span of a few generations of people, and much of the the radical formulations occurring on record, as well as in life, occur in adolescence and young adulthood. I hope you to see your comments continue on the desert island musical excursion.