Jimi Hendrix - In From the Storm

I'm too lazy to look up right now which studio album this would have been on or if it even was on an album. I first heard this Jimi song studying Hebrew flash cards in college while watching the Isle of Wight DVD.  I used to go out and buy music DVDs before having to stay up studying for tests.  It helped.

I absolutely love the riff on this one.  I wish they stuck with the riff more instead of getting so improvisational.  "In from the Storm"...

Scars on Broadway - Kill Each Other/Live Forever

System of a Down broke up but their sound still lives on through Scars on Broadway.  The singer of Scars is Daron Malakian, the guitarist and sometimes backing vocalists, sometimes lead singer of System, and John Dolmayan, the drummer from System, is also in Scars.  Daron is writing the music for Scars and wrote a lot of it for System.  So, yea, it sounds very, very similar.  The difference is that Scars follows more of a straight rock structure in their songs, unlike System which was always very unpredictable.  Scars almost sounds like pop hard rock to me.

I can't fully endorse their first self-titled album, but it's got some OK stuff on it.  Not as good as System in my opinion, but different, so it sounds new.

This is the album cover, if you see it out and about and want to get it.  Or click the pic and get it now or to be able to sample clips of all the songs. 

Rock Legends #1 - Stairway to Heaven has a hidden, Satanic message.

"Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin played backwards contains Satanic lyrics, words actually being sung to Satan.  Is this true or is it not true?  It can only be done with a record player.  I could be corrupted as a judge because I first watched videos that played the song backwards with lyrics of what you are supposed to hear if it's Satanic.  Interestingly enough, I've seen different versions of the lyrics and some of them are quite, quite different, but every time I have listened to it I do hear whatever is posted with the song.  Is this a case of the mind just synching up what's being heard with what is being read?

Here's a video with the song played backwards with no lyrics.  Watch it and see if you hear a Satanic message.  By the way, you might have to listen to the whole song, since some of the people who claim there is a hidden message don't have it matching with every line of the song being played forwards.  Let me know if you hear anything?

In closing, I think this song is actually pro-Chrisitian and anti-Satan.  The song the way I interpret it is about a lady who has it all, beauty, riches, and fame, and she thinks she on her own abilities can buy her salvation.  However, she finds that salvation can't be bought.  The store to do so is closed.  There's still time for everyone who is on her path to get on to the other path.  But then again, who can tell with this song?  It could mean anything?  There's even a line about when all is one and one is all.  That certainly sounds like new-age mysticism.  Here is what I do know.  In Genesis 28 Jacob has a dream of a stairway that connects heaven and earth and in John 1:51 Jesus references this dream and essentially says, "I am the Stairway to Heaven."  When you look at Christianity and what the Bible teaches, it is the only religion which says the way to salvation can't be bought.  It's the only free religion in the world.  It's the only religion in which God has stepped down and has done it all for your salvation.  The Stairway has come down to us and Jesus is that Stairway and He is a Rock that doesn't roll. 

Zephyr

I recently discovered the band Zephyr.

They are from Boulder of Colorado, the place a majority of the hippies eventually landed.  I've only heard tales of Boulder - it sounds like it's still the 60's there.

Zephyr only released three albums from what I can tell.  Their first two albums featured Tommy Bolin of Deep Purple fame.  He's the guy who came after Ritchie Blackmore.  So you know there's some really good guitar in this band.

They are fronted by a female named Candie Givens.  She sounds as good as Grace Slick and Janis Joplin.

I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this band earlier.  They sound as good as what I've heard from Jefferson Airplane, if not better.  Their jamming seems way better, and I mean why shouldn't it; their guitarist was good enough to replace Ritchie Blackmore.  Just good old classic late 60's sound, although they were an early 70's band.  I don't think there is a better era for rock. 

Read more about the band here: http://Last.fm.

Dust - Suicide

I've never quite figured out why so many bands write about suicide.  Ozzy had "Suicide Solution", Metallica had "Fade to Black", Soundgarden had "Like Suicide", Silverchair had to throw in "Suicidal Dream" in what was otherwise a really great album, and the list can go on and on.

I think this is one of the dark sides of rock; suicide.  Is the rigors of being in a band that bad?

Dust

Anyways, I was surfing youtube looking for Blue Cheer songs and I stumbled across Dust. 

I had never heard of this band before, but their album cover for the second album, Hard Attack, features three vikings in the midst of battle.  Pretty cool image if you are into fantasy album covers.

The song I found by Dust is "Suicide".  I'm by no means pleased with the name's song and I haven't even paid attention to the lyrics, but the music is great!  It's very fresh.  They sound like early, early metal, and they weren't British, like Sabbath, they were American!!!

Their drummer later joined The Ramones.

Here is the band's bio, copied straight from wikipedia:

Dust was formed in the late 1960s by Richie Wise and two teenagers, Kenny Aaronson and Marc Bell. Additionally, Kenny Kerner wrote the group's lyrics, and acted as their producer and manager. Their debut album was released on Kama Sutra Records in 1971, and was followed by a sophomore release on the same label the following year. While the group only released these two albums, they later became of historical interest to collectors interested in early American heavy metal.^[1]

The group's members all went on to other projects.

In the mid 1970s Bell worked with Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys and Richard Hell & The Voidoids. In 1978, he joined the Ramones, assuming the name Marky Ramone. Aaronson played with Stories and Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys in the 1970s and worked as a session musician into the 1980s. He also toured with Edgar Winter, Joan Jett and Billy Idol. Wise and Kerner went into production with Kiss, among others.

Buy Hard Attack if you like it!  Just click the link.

The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog

The Rock in the movie, Faster.

I recently saw the movie Faster.  It was The Rock (sorry, he'll always be The Rock to me and not Dewayne Johnson) finally starring in the action movie he deserves to be headlining.  It caught my attention because I am a Christian and most of the trailer had a tent-revival style preacher preaching about God and the errors in seeking revenge.  The Rock of course says, "Sermon's over!"  I really wanted to see what role Christianity and the preacher played in the movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised.  The preacher scene made the movie for me.  It redeemed the movie from being a straight-senseless violence movie.  It showed the power of sincere apology, confidence in God, repentance, and forgiveness.  It showed that love conquers evil, and even if it didn't play out the way it did in the movie, the preacher still would have come out on top.

So why am I writing about Faster on this blog about rock?

Iggy on-stage!

The movie featured a song I heard in a Guy Ritchie movie (I believe it was Lock Stock).  When I heard it in the Guy Ritchie movie it perfectly fit the tone of the movie and what was going on and the tune stuck out enough to me that I really wanted to know who it was, but I never found out.  So when the song kicked-in in Faster I knew I had to find out this time from the credits who it was.  Low and behold, it was the Stooges, the band which Iggy Pop fronted.

One of my first posts was on Iggy Pop.  I heard of Iggy Pop for quite sometime, but I had no need to listen to him until finding out that Henry Rollins is a huge Iggy fan.

So here is the song from Faster and the Guy Ritchie flick (whichever one it was):

Initially, upon hearing this song, I thought the band was some underground band from the 90's. Wow! The song is 40 stinking years old! It was released on The Stooges first album in August, 1969. Knowing this release date, I can picture that era more, and I can even picture Mick Jagger a little as Iggy sings. But this song sounds way before its time in my opinion.

Click her to buy this album!

Sugartooth

I bought a guitar magazine in the mid-nineties that contained a mix CD.  The CD was entitled Peaceful Greasy Feelin'.  The CD is now stored in an attic a long ways from where I currently live.  Most of it was garbage, but I pulled out a few songs that I thought were good and put them on a blank cassette tape.  One of those songs that stood out to me was "Booty Street" by Sugartooth.  I looked around for a CD of theirs but never was able to find one.  Now that almost anything can be found on the Internet I decided to search for them.  I can't find the song "Booty Street" anywhere on-line but I found some other songs, and they all sound really good.  Looking on Amazon it appears that the band has only released two CDs, the first being a self-titled CD (1994) and their second being Sounds of Solid (1997).

Most of my searches for the band also bring up Tool, and I think this is because the Sugartooth singer, Marc Hunter, at times sounds similar to Tool's Maynard.  A review for the their self-titled album compared their music to a mix between Led Zeppelin and 90's grunge.  I can easily hear this mix.  They sound like they should be from the 70's on "Booty Street" but their sound doesn't fit that era at all.

They never received a big following but opened for big name bands in the 90's.  The fame they did receive mostly came from being featured on an episode of  Beavis and Butthead.

I'd suggest searching for the actual song "Sold my Fortune" on youtube because it sounds better when you actually get to hear the song instead of Beavis talking.