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.

The new year teases us with traditional promises of hope and change for this next notch on the global calendar. Most of us at some level realize not much changes, and we live much like Sisyphus rolling a giant stone up each hill cycle before falling back into the valley of perennial status quo.

We stage elections that promise change and find our outrage ignored. If Iraq shines as the current litmus test for foreign policy failure and political fallout why does today's headline point out the "the old guard back on Iraq policy" in the Los Angeles Times? Why are we planning on sending more troops? Obviously, elections mean nothing in a land dominated by industrial monopolies where corporate interests always outweigh public interests.

Does anyone think a real health care solution will happen in a country where nearly fifty million people remain uninsured? We sit by and watch insurance companies routinely deny coverage when an illness threatens the bottom line, delay coverage for purely financial reasons, cancel coverage on individuals by looking for mistakes on applications or claim forms, raise premiums while slashing coverages and make record profits in times of national disasters. Mr. T remains the philosophical giant of our age with his astute national observation, "Pity the fool." The fool would be us.

We buy the idea we matter so much, but we find we matter less and less. If we mattered so much why are wages so low in an era of record profit taking by our corporate masters? Why are we working around the clock tied to corporations with contrived communication devices and earning less? We only seem to matter as a market share of eyes viewing advertised crap on a tightly controlled media net. How many phones must a family own today? Have people looked at those phone bills and questioned why the cost of communication has jumped by more than three to four times during this new millenium? Does anyone notice the stark lack of communication and entertainment alternatives today as merger and acquisitions remove democracy and choice?

The idea of consumers dictating the economic health of the nation is stupefying. In the retail world we shoppers have only benefited WalMart and Target, as we find everything purchased about as valuable and long lasting as a roll of toilet paper. On the internet we have benefited AOL, eBAY, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo who continue to make the individual increasingly irrelevant while reaping vast financial gains.

As a nation we no longer make our own clothes, make our our own cars, make our own electronics or produce our own energy. We now deny a decent education to more than 75% of our population while allowing only the wealthy and their chosen poster-children to have access to the highest learning standards, which are all found in private schools.

We do watch a lot of professional football to the benefit of thirty-two owners, their battered and drugged employees and the Busch family. We watch a lot college football that rewards a handful of the same schools each year with huge sums of television and bowl money that excludes more than 90% of colleges from the take. Think about all that money going to the NCAA while higher education tuition costs continue to climb to unaffordable levels for the majority of families. Think about a dishonest failed pro-football coach getting 32 million dollars to coach a college team in Alabama while half of that state is illiterate.

I find rolling that stone each year less enjoyable. I wonder what Sisyphus is thinking.