RARWRITER PUBLISHING GROUP PRESENTS

CREATIVE CULTURE JOURNAL

at www.RARWRITER.com      

--------------------"The best source on the web for what's real in arts and entertainment" ---------------------------

Volume 1-2016

MUSIC    BOOKS    FINE ARTS   FILM   THE WORLD

ARTIST NEWS    THIS EDITION   ABOUT   MUSIC   MUSIC REVIEWS  BOOKS  CINEMA   FASHION   FINE ARTS  FEATURES   SERIES  MEDIA  ESSAY  RESOURCES  WRITTEN ARTS POETRY  CONTACT  ARCHIVES  MUSIC LINKS

                                 

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ABOUT RAR: For those of you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites. Use this link to visit the RAR music page, which features original music compositions and other.

Use this link to visit Rick Alan Rice's publications page, which features excerpts from novels and other.

RARADIO

(Click here)

Currently on RARadio:

"On to the Next One" by Jacqueline Van Bierk

"I See You Tiger" by Via Tania

"Lost the Plot" by Amoureux"

Bright Eyes, Black Soul" by The Lovers Key

"Cool Thing" by Sassparilla

"These Halls I Dwell" by Michael Butler

"St. Francis"by Tom Russell & Gretchen Peters, performance by Gretchen Peters and Barry Walsh; 

"Who Do You Love?"by Elizabeth Kay; 

"Rebirth"by Caterpillars; 

"Monica's Frock" by Signel-Z; 

"Natural Disasters" by Corey Landis; 

"1,000 Leather Tassels" by The Blank Tapes; 

"We Are All Stone" and "Those Machines" by Outer Minds; 

"Another Dream" by MMOSS; "Susannah" by Woolen Kits; 

Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and other dead celebrities / news by A SECRET PARTY;

"I Miss the Day" by My Secret Island,  

"Carriers of Light" by Brendan James;

"The Last Time" by Model Stranger;

"Last Call" by Jay;

"Darkness" by Leonard Cohen; 

"Sweetbread" by Simian Mobile Disco and "Keep You" fromActress off the Chronicle movie soundtrack; 

"Goodbye to Love" from October Dawn; 

Trouble in Mind 2011 label sampler; 

Black Box Revelation Live on Minnesota Public Radio;

Apteka "Striking Violet"; 

Mikal Cronin's "Apathy" and "Get Along";

Dana deChaby's progressive rock

 

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Rick Alan Rice (RAR) Literature Page

ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance" -AVAILABLE NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM AMAZON.COM. Use this link.

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects the building of America in a trilogy of novels collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores the development of the American West through the lens of public policy, land planning, municipal development, and governance as it played out in one of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious and cultural traditions that imbued the American Midwest with a special character that continues to have a profound effect on American politics to this day. Book One creates an understanding about America's cultural foundations that is further explored in books two and three that further trace the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as an icon in the development of a certain brand of American character. That's the serious stuff viewed from high altitude. The story itself gets down and dirty with the supernatural, which in ATWOOD - A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the monumental to the sublime. The book features the epic poem "The Toiler" as well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950, when the story is set. Richard Padilla has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns. Use this link.

 

EXPLORE THE KINDLE BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You will find classic literature there, as well as tons of privately published books of every kind. A lot of it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published books are awful, but some are truly classics. You can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works for two bucks.

You do not need to buy a Kindle to take advantage of this low-cost library. Use this link to go to an Amazon.com page from which you can download for free a Kindle App for your computer, tablet, or phone.

Amazon is the largest, but far from the only digital publisher. You can find similar treasure troves atNOOK Press (the Barnes & Noble site), Lulu, and others.


 

 

Hall of Fame Feature

Unexplained Files: Dave Grohl and all the Rest

Pop Culture Goo

By RAR

Fame has this way of cutting the famous off from those who gave it to them. It is the psychological equivalent of green money and exists with similar dynamics. Wealthy people tend to wall themselves off from the less wealthy and the poor, and famous people tend to wall themselves off from the less famous and the obscure. It is probable that neither class can feel understood by anyone outside their class. There is a pecking order to life and the peckers at the top are cloistered in such a way that they may, in their defenses, become far less engaging and interesting than those at the bottom. Obviously most of us will never know for sure, beyond what we can deduce from the autobiographies of the rich and famous, but then they are typically pretty tedious affairs. They tend to reveal the dreams and machinations of their subjects to be about as compelling as those of the non-rich, non-famous, distinguished only by amazing good fortune. This is why we admire them: they are proof of a mythology, examples of people for whom dreams really did come true.

Anyone who strives and suspects that they are getting nowhere doing it, dreams of the big break.

I was once upbraided in a fiction writing class by a professor who was furious at me for writing a short story in which the principal player imagined meeting “the right people” who could make him a success in the literary world. He seemed to be offended that my premise challenged his own claim to his exalted position on campus, and on the university faculty, as a literary master. The truth was, hardly anyone had ever heard of him, I’ve now forgotten anything but his first name – “Harry” – and he wasn’t much of a writer at all. He was more of a confectionary vendor, a waiter with a serving tray of pastes in popular flavors. He had identified a soft target and constructed his crap to tastes, and it had worked well enough to get him an easy job. It was as if he had died and gone to heaven, where he had free rein to hustle coeds. And damnit, he had earned this through his own God-given brilliance! There was no assistance needed at all.

The point is, the story of life is all about the journey, not the arrival, because the truth is that we never really get to where we are going. We know this inherently, and it is a big part of why some of us like to imagine that heaven awaits us after our mortal lives are over because it’s all just bleeding hell down here. There must be something good out there awaiting us, surely; some justified reward for all of us who never got their just rewards in life.

People long for rest and peace, the Elysian fields, the Forbes 500, and the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.

Surely we notice that the rich and famous appear to stagnate into caricatures of themselves almost as soon as they close the gates behind them, because there is no forward journey for them. In shameful fact, following or watching them represents a kind of fetid voyeurism. Their lives become exercises in clutching tightly to what they have gained. The drama tends to take place without them, among the rest of the world all around them for whom striving remains everything, even survival. No one cares if the rich and famous fall to rot, because they probably already got more rare fruit than they ever deserved in the first place. But for those people who continue to bang up against walls, to get knocked down, and then to get back up and keep going, because that is their only choice, we have tremendous respect. We tend to understand the rolling wrecks that are their lives. We recognize their panic, their exhilarations, and we feel their pains. We find them far more enthralling, and so the Creative Culture Journal tends to tell their stories and display their wares before all other.

In the pop culture world, fame is a fleeting thing, far more tenuous than wealth, which however disgusting tends to regenerate itself. The well-to-do tend to become more well-to-do simply because they are already well-to-do. It is this radioactive form of reproduction that mutates the wealthy into such horrid distortions of human life, but their control of the currency of our existence allows them to prevail, to carry on.

Popularity, on the other hand, tends to ebb and flow. You can be Kei$ha one day, and just plain old Keisha the next. You can become Lady Gaga, with Tony Bennett, after once having been Lady Gaga with a swooning cadre of little monsters. You can become Madonna, which must be its own special brand of purgatory wherein Nora Desmond yearns for one more close-up that doesn’t make children shield themselves from the horror.

America has devised a special buffer against the sickness of faltering fame. We have halls of fame all over the place where we recognize people who are already famous.

Hollywood does an annual version of this with the the Grammys, the Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards, which capture brief solar flares of publicity brilliance before the moment passes and their stars become mere faces on some subscription service. Those are the brightest flashes of recognition, however fleeting, but at the lower tiers we just have those halls where we immortalize people who we would otherwise forget. Of these, only the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, seems to have any real integrity, because baseball is old, engrained in our culture, and the boys honored there truly have only a few summers before they themselves become old and must melt back into the general population. It is nearly impossible to become enshrined in Cooperstown. Pete Rose can’t do it, nor can Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds, though their records of success were Herculean. They just weren’t good enough human beings, and Cooperstown has a standard regarding that. While it may be American to pedal baloney when it comes to sales, it is also quite American to draw the line on some things, and the Baseball Hall of Fame only recognizes godly types, beyond just mere gods. One can argue with their stodginess, but in terms of integrity they make all other competing halls of fame seem cheap, like tourist attractions built on questionable folklore; like the Fouke Monster Festival of Jonesville, Arkansas, or the Hatfield and McCoy Reunion Festival in Williamson, West Virginia.

In Colorado there is the Music Hall of Fame, which is a relatively recent confection, apparently mounted as a tourist attraction by the survivors of the former Feyline Productions concert production company, which for years brought big-name musical acts to the state. Denver has, from its mining & mineral beginnings, been a town committed to imported entertainment, and over time a number of movers and shakers have moved into the Denver/Boulder area. The University of Colorado has been a significant magnet of talent. Some creatives have emerged from that engine of education, including musical acts The Astronauts and Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. A fan base developed from out of that college town, and others along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, and most particularly from among the many ski resorts that host the state's energetic tourism industry.

There developed a musical culture in Colorado that has appealed to a far-flung set of music industry types, so Colorado has long been a retirement home for people from the mainstream entertainment industry. Englishman Joe Cocker died there this year, on a ranch outside Crawford, Colorado (pop. 430). (This will almost certainly land him a spot in some future edition of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.) James Guercio, of Chicago fame, retired to Colorado decades ago but still operated a boutique recording business through Caribou Ranch Recording Studio, which catered to other famous people (Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Elton John) who came to record in mountainous seclusion from their real lives in the real world. It has always been a place where jazz musicians went to their rest. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it became a retreat for refugees from the Los Angeles music community; particularly those who had stood in the flames of competition on the coasts, been fried, and so wished for some regenerative Rocky Mountain High, ala John Denver. That never really happened for any of them, of course, because Colorado for them was largely a place to go to think back on the good old days, not a place for creating good old days anew. Those places are always on the coasts, where the ports of entry and points of embarkation are situated, from which the new age is launched as a matter of practical economics. The digital age has not really flattened the world as much as some may wish to imagine, for in the U.S. the mother lodes of information technology still reside on the east and west coasts, with hardly more than tendril connections to places like Austin and Boulder. Music is inescapably a product of information technology, and so that industry, too, continues to be a denizen of the near oceans and the rocky shores.

The Colorado Music Hall of Fame, previous to this year, featured The Serendipity Singers and Sugarloaf. Let that sink in for a minute. Judy Collins was in it, too, and John Denver: pretty syrupy stuff, I think you’d agree. The potential list of inductees is limited by the musical fortunes of the state, which have not been great; in fact, probably not great enough to require a hall of fame to keep it all straight. (You could actually do it on a napkin.) Filling out the roster has been an exercise in expanding tastes and redefining barriers. Of course, horrible taste in music comes as pleasantly to some as cash comes to others. It is endemic to hall of fame processes, to wit this snipe below at the big Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which also has a thickly padded roster, though for entirely different reasons.

December 16, 2014, Salon Magazine Headline:

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a mess: Why does the induction committee have such bad taste?

Here at the CCJ we have railed against our “national” Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame, in Cleveland, for reasons perfectly described by former Talking Head Chris Franz. He told the Huffington Post – “…when we talk about the R&R HOF we are talking about a celebration of the music industry. It is a night when the music industry can get dressed up, spend a ton of money for a table and say to themselves, ‘See that band up there? They're up there because of me and my people. We took care of business for them so that they could write songs, do tours, have their records played on the radio, and be Rock Stars.’" And that from a member of the Talking Heads who has been enshrined in that particular Hall of Fame.

Why would famous people need to be recognized in a hall of fame anyway? Aren’t their whole lives sort of like halls of fame, but ones in which they take the cash receipts themselves? So what is any other hall of fame?

The answer may be found at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, where the Colorado Music Hall of Fame has set up a museum of music industry artifacts, presumably to capitalize on the concert traffic that the old Feyline Productions played such a key role in developing.

This year the Colorado Music Hall of Fame honored Poco, Manassas, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the latter of which featured, and still features, John McEuen, who is featured in this edition of the CCJ. None of those bands are actually from Colorado, but rather are from a gooey L.A. country-rock community of late 1960s derivation. That really also includes Firefall, also inducted, whose original lineup really only boasted one Coloradoan, that being Jock Bartley, from Boulder. Everyone else in that initial lineup had retired to the state from the coasts. (Bartley caught some updraft when he replaced Tommy Bolin in the rock band Zephyr.) Zephyr was great but somehow never went anywhere commercially, which qualifies them for our (i.e., the CCJ Hall of Fame, as if) Colorado Hall of Fame. Manassas never sold any records either, and they weren't really even a Colorado band, but neither lack of record sales nor lack of residence qualifies them for our roster of HOF-worthy Coloradoans. It seems feasible that none of these types of conversations swirl among the four-or-five non-musicians on the Colorado Music Hall of Fame selection committee. The Cleveland Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame is the same way, with a few industry insiders choosing the inductees. Use this link to get a sense for the makeup of their Board of Directors. It's not exactly the staff of Julliard. So it is with the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, where Gene and Jeff and who knows who set the laurels. (These, by the way, are the jokes, should you be having difficulty following along.)

Some of their selectees do have merit.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is a special case because they have always been devoted to what brought ‘em, so to speak, which was the country music so brilliantly featured on their Will the Circle Be Unbroken albums. They have never really been cool, but they have always been hip. With great integrity and excellent musicianship, they have earned the allegiances of country music masters, and they have contributed to American culture with undeniable modesty and honesty. They are in a separate class, rather like those distinguished by the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, where entry is based also on character.

But what about these others?

Poco was peopled by folks who weren’t mean enough to get into The Eagles, outré enough for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, or who simply arrived too late for The Byrds, but still had superb industry connections. Poco was born to be a big deal. Richie Furay had emerged as a promising light released from the solar flare that was Buffalo Springfield, where he was a sideman to Stephen Stills and Neil Young, but he emerged rather prophetically as a guy who could contribute as long as the rest of the band wasn't around. That's how he had recorded "Kind Woman" for Buffalo Springfield's swan song album, and so he became psychically adrift about the time people started paying attention to him. (No coincidence that he became a pastor just a few years later.) He saw Poco as his band, which made it a contentious affair and left it artistically in a certain place that could not quite crack the top 50 of the Billboard charts. The band had the kind of record company support that was going to get them played on certain radio stations, but industry insiders began to grow doubtful about the band's actual sales potential. People like Jim Messina kept getting angry at Richie and kept leaving. Poco never became other than a second tier act, in terms of headliner status, because they were not doing anything special musically. It was in their DNA to sound just like a hundred other AM radio bands. They were of a kind that came out of a Southern California country music incubator that started initiates off in folk, bluegrass or jug bands, slowly introduced them to the Fender bass and traps, and eventually to electric guitars. Chris Hillman was one such initiate, and Michael Clarke, the other part of The Byrds' rhythm section, was another. Hillman came out of a bluegrass band, and Clarke was playing nothing more than the bongos when he met Roger McGuinn and became the drummer for The Byrds. They all came together at places like the Troubador in L.A. Those who could keep company congealed into the goo that defined ‘70s-era AM radio (The Eagles, CSNY, Poco, Firefall, and that latter-day version of The Byrds) and those who went solo were largely lost to history (Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther).

There was something fey about all of those acts, a kind of effete panzy-boy modality in which the songwriters were all self-absorbed dreamers riding romantic streaks in between snorting lines of blow. It was like music from reformed hippies who dreamed of a life around testicles, along with some girls, with neither being the kind you’d want to spend time with. Introspective simps, I think you’d call them. That, by the way, was not Colorado's fault, though the state has claimed so many of these acts, because whatever had gotten into the drinking supply of these early-70s country rockers was mined out of Southern California, so the crime is theirs. Ironically, I doubt that there is now a Californian below the age of 60 who would even know who Poco was, and that might even be true in Colorado, too. On the other hand, I have been wrong before. Who knew that people would pay real money to see Steve Miller and Journey in 2014, when each were punch lines back in their heydays?

Life generates its own hall of fame. Run your Microsoft Word spell checker and it will properly recognize the band name The Byrds, but not Poco, who gets renamed “Pico”, Firefall, who gets renamed “Fireball”, or J.D. “Southern”.

Microsoft’s default settings may not be the last word in cultural legitimacy, but still.

The next Colorado Music Hall of Fame inductees have already been announced: Dan Fogleberg and Joe Walsh. Joe Walsh (who is being inducted on the fame of his band Barnstorm, if by some miracle you remember them), who was born in Kansas and largely raised in Ohio and New York, did live for a time in Boulder, Colorado, even losing a daughter there in a horrible car crash in 1971. There is a plaque to her in a park in North Boulder. Personally, I have always admired and respected Walsh and would tend to give a tip of the hat to any honors he may garner. I’m not sure he is really a Colorado guy, though. Dan Fogleberg was produced by Joe Walsh, and was not a Colorado native either (he was from Illinois by way of Tennessee), though he lived in Colorado after working as a Nashville session musician. He was not born of that Southern California fever that gripped Poco, Firefall, Souther-Hillman-Furay, and many others like them, but he still gave the world some of the most self-conscious, self-indulgent pap in AM music history, with songs like “Leader of the Band” and "Same Old Lang Syne".

Fogleberg died in 2007 in Maine. He was on a par with Terry Jacks (“Seasons In the Sun”). Remember him? He’s in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

Looming Large in Colorado Musical Legend

The view from Wikipedia...

The Serendipity Singers were a 1960s American folk group, similar to The New Christy Minstrels. Their debut single "Don't Let the Rain Come Down" was a Top Ten hit and received the group's only Grammy nomination in 1965.

 

 

 

 

Sugarloaf was an American rock band in the 1970s. The band, which originated in Denver, Colorado, scored two Top 10 hits, with the singles "Green-Eyed Lady" and "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You".

 

Judy Collins' debut album A Maid of Constant Sorrow was released in 1961, but it was her cover of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now", released on her 1967 album Wildflowers, that gave Collins international prominence. The single hit the Top 10 on the Pop Singles chart , and won Collins her first Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance. She enjoyed further success with covers of "Someday Soon", "Amazing Grace", and "Cook With Honey". Collins experienced the biggest success of her career with her cover of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" from her best selling 1975 album "Judith". The single charted on the Pop Singles chart in 1975, and then again in 1977, spending 27 nonconsecutive weeks on the chart, and earned Collins a Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.

 

John Denver was an American singer-songwriter, actor, activist and humanitarian, whose greatest commercial success was as a solo singer, starting in the 1970s. He was one of the most popular acoustic artists of the decade and one of its best-selling artists. By 1974, he was firmly established as America's best-selling performer, and AllMusic has described Denver as "among the most beloved entertainers of his era". After traveling and living in numerous locations while growing up in his military family, Denver began his music career in folk music groups in the late 1960s. Throughout his life, Denver recorded and released approximately 300 songs, about 200 of which he composed, with total sales of over 33 million.

Poco - Their first album, Pickin' Up the Pieces (1969), is considered a seminal album of the country rock genre. However, the album performed weakly, peaking at No. 63 on Billboard album chart. Their second studio album Poco (1970) again resulted in low sales, peaking at No. 58. The band's next album, Deliverin' (or DeLIVErin' as it sometimes represented), picked up moderate airplay, Furay's "C'mon" hitting No. 69. Deliverin’ became Poco's first album to reach the Top 40 on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 26. Messina chose to leave the band in October 1970, feeling Furay exhibited too much control over the group's sound and left the band to return to studio production. The realigned Poco, now on its third lineup on just its fourth album, hired Steve Cropper as producer and released From the Inside (Poco album) (1971). Again, poor sales were the result as the release landed at No. 52. The band and its management were dissatisfied with Cropper's production and hired Jack Richardson, who oversaw the next three albums, beginning with A Good Feelin' to Know (1972). The band built the LP around the title track, a popular concert tune, but the single failed to chart. The album itself peaked at No. 69. As a result, Furay became increasingly discouraged with Poco's prospects, especially since ex-bandmates Stills, Young, Meisner and Messina were so successful with their respective groups. In an April 26, 1973 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Cameron Crowe he vented that Poco was still a second-billed act and had not increased its audience. After Furay's departure, the band released their last two albums with Epic; Seven (1974) and Cantamos (1974). The albums charted at No. 68 and No. 76 respectively. Poco left Epic after Cantamos and signed with ABC-Dunhill Records. Head Over Heels was their first ABC release, featuring Schmit's acoustic "Keep On Tryin'", which became the group's most successful single to date, charting at No. 50 on the Billboard Hot 100. Around the time of the release of Head Over Heels, The Very Best of Poco was released as a compilation album that documented the group's years with Epic. Epic's release fought with Head Over Heals for attention though neither charted very well, hitting No. 43 and No. 90, respectively. The group's next ABC-Dunhill album was Rose Of Cimarron which also failed to generate much enthusiasm and peaked at No. 89. Another Epic release also came out in 1976, the live album Live. Indian Summer was released the following spring, peaking at No. 57, while the title track reached No. 50.

Manassas was an American rock band formed by Stephen Stills in 1971. Predominantly a vehicle for Stills’ artistic vision, the band released two albums during its active tenure, 1972’s Manassas and 1973’s Down the Road. The band dissolved in October 1973.

 

Firefall is a rock band that formed in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. It was founded by Rick Roberts, who had been in the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Jock Bartley, who had been Tommy Bolin's replacement in Zephyr. The band's biggest hit single, "You Are the Woman", peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard charts in 1976. Other hits included "Just Remember I Love You" (#11 in 1977), "Strange Way" (#11 in 1978), "Cinderella" (#34 in 1977), "Headed for a Fall" (#35 in 1980), and "Staying with It" (#37 in 1981) with female vocalist Lisa Nemzo.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was founded around 1966 in Long Beach, California by singer-guitarist Jeff Hanna and singer-songwriter guitarist Bruce Kunkel who had performed as the New Coast Two and later the Illegitimate Jug Band. The band's first single, "Buy for Me the Rain," was a Top 40 success, and the band gained exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as well as concerts with such disparate artists as Jack Benny and The Doors. Their version of "Mr. Bojangles" became the group's first hit, peaking at #9 on Billboard's all genre Hot 100 chart. In May 1977 the Dirt Band was the first American group allowed by the Soviet Union to tour Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Latvia playing concerts and a televised appearance that is estimated to have been watched by 145 million people. Their single "American Dream" with Linda Ronstadt reached No. 13 on the popular music charts. The band also appeared on Saturday Night Live, and, billed as The Toot Uncommons, provided backing for Steve Martin on his million-selling novelty tune, "King Tut." The albums Make a Little Magic and Jealousy were released in 1980 and 1981, with the single "Make a Little Magic" featuring Nicolette Larson reaching the Top 25 on the pop chart. The band returned to its original name and its country roots in 1982 with the lineup paring down to Hanna, Fadden, McEuen and Jimmy Ibbotson rejoining for recording sessions in Nashville, Tennessee for the album Let's Go, which yielded the success "Dance Little Jean" which was a Top 10 country hit. Carpenter rejoined the band in 1983 and the next album, 1984's Plain Dirt Fashion had the band's first No. 1 success, "Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper's Dream)". There were two more No. 1's: "Modern Day Romance" (1985) and "Fishin' in the Dark" (1987). Other successful songs were "Dance Little Jean" (1983); "I Love Only You" (1984); "High Horse" (1985); "Home Again in My Heart," "Partners, Brothers and Friends" and "Stand a Little Rain" (1986); "Fire in the Sky," "Baby's Got a Hold on Me" and "Oh What a Love" (1987); "Workin' Man (Nowhere to Go)" and "I've Been Lookin'" (1988); and "Down That Road Tonight" and "When it's Gone" (1989).

Joe Walsh is an American singer, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Walsh has been a member of five successful rock bands: the Eagles, the James Gang, Barnstorm, The Party Boys, and Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. He scored in May 1978, with "Life's Been Good", which featured his hit comedic depiction of rock stardom, peaked at #12 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and remains to date his biggest solo hit. Walsh also contributed "In the City" to The Warriors soundtrack in 1979, a song penned and sung by Walsh that was later rerecorded for the Eagles' studio album, The Long Run.

 

Dan Fogleberg - The song "Part of the Plan" became Fogelberg's first hit. After Souvenirs, he released a string of gold and platinum albums, including Captured Angel (1975) and Nether Lands (1977), and found commercial success with songs such as "The Power of Gold". His 1978 Twin Sons of Different Mothers was the first of two collaborations with jazz flautist Tim Weisberg. 1979's Phoenix reached the Top 10, with "Longer" becoming a #2 pop hit (and wedding standard) in 1980. The track peaked at #59 on the UK Singles Chart – his sole entry on that chart.[4] The album reached #42 on the UK Albums Chart, likewise his only entry there. It was followed by a Top 20 hit "Heart Hotels".

 

 


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