Traffic At The New Haven Arena

by | Oct 1, 2021 | Blog

The New Haven Arena was on Grove Street in New Haven. It was built for indoor ice hockey in 1914, burned down in 1924, and reopened in 1927. I never saw a hockey game there. My first visit was to see the circus as a very young child. I have a vague memory of the elephants and the tightrope walker, and not much beyond that. The Arena was demolished in 1974, replaced by the New Haven Coliseum that was completed in 1972.

What I remember most about the “Arena” are the rock & roll concerts I saw there. My all-time favorite was Traffic touring in support of the Low Spark of High Heel Boys LP, released in November of 1971. The concert took place on January 11, 1972. I was lucky to be working for the local newspaper at the time and had a New Haven Register ID. This allowed me to go up to the stage and take pictures. 

Generally, the sound at the arena was horrible; it sounded like you would expect a loud rock & roll band to sound like in a cavernous hockey rink. Also, they just put wood over the ice, so it was always freezing sitting in floor seats. 

That night’s show was completely different from all others. The sound was fantastic! JJ Cale opened and did a solo set. I have to say I had no idea who he was and don’t remember his set. 

Then Traffic hit the stage and hit the ground running with a tight set, playing the entire Low Spark of  High Heel Boys  LP. Steve Winwood switched off between a Gibson Firebird (later stolen on tour), a Martin D-28 (that looked pretty much new) and keyboards. Of course, they also played “Dear Mister Fantasy”. My favorite part of the show was when Steve played his D-28 on “John Barleycorn Must Die” and “Rainmaker”. Chris Wood looked like the picture of cool with his sax hanging from him while playing flute. I got right up to the stage and took pictures. This night was one of those concerts I look back on often. 

Yeah Yeah Yeah – Remembering The Beatles

Yeah Yeah Yeah – Remembering The Beatles

by | Sep 29, 2021 | Blog

What follows is a collection of memories I have carried with me since 1964. I was 11 years old, almost 12, and on February 9th, at 8 PM, my life was forever changed. I hope you enjoy my journey through the past. Please forgive any historical errors.

I was into the guitar, partly because my older brother had one. I used to try and play his. My father saw my interest, and whenever he saw someone playing a guitar on the television, he would call me into the living room to watch. On January 3rd, 1964, he called me to see The Beatles on The Jack Paar Show. That was the beginning of a musical obsession that would reshape my life and is with me still.  

On February 9th, The Beatles made their live television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. In that short span of time, their music had conquered America, and every waking moment of my life. My cousin Bette and I would scan the radio stations listening to their songs as many times as we could find a station playing one spinning the dial wildly looking for another sonic fix. We could barely contain ourselves waiting for a show featuring the Beatles to air, and, of course, the discussions would carry on well afterward. All we could think about was their next appearance scheduled for the following week, to be broadcast from Miami Beach on February 16th. 

Next up was the news that there was going to be a movie, A Hard Day’s Night. Bette and I were off-the-charts crazy to see it as soon as we could. The movie came out in the US in August. We were lucky to see it in an old-fashioned movie house, the Rivoli Theatre in West Haven, Connecticut. The experience was surreal, actually getting to see them on the big screen for over an hour, talking, joking, and playing music. 

The balance of 1964 into 1965 was filled with the release of Beatles LPs and 45s. August of 1965 would find Bette and me back at the Rivoli seeing Help!, the Beatles’ second movie. This one was in color, unlike the black and white Hard Day’s Night. They were already bigger than life; full color just made the experience more real. 

I bought my first 12-string Rickenbacker sometime in 1965. Playing guitar by this point had become one of the only things I truly cared about. Since George Harrison, John Lennon and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds played Rickenbacker guitars, I simply had to have one. They were not cheap, and to raise the money, I started working odd jobs, helping neighbors, delivering newspapers, selling my bike and most of my toys. It was worth it.   

One day in the summer of 1966, after spending some quality time playing guitar in the barn behind our house, my mom and dad said they had something they wanted to tell me. We were going to Shea Stadium on August 23rd to see The Beatles.  

(The author’s photo of the Beatles, taken from the back of Shea Stadium in 1964)

The journey down to New York included listening to the Beatles on the radio and singing along with the songs. The stadium seats were quite high up, and I will admit that the sound system was not great, but we could hear the band despite the screams around us. Fortunately, my father brought binoculars and a camera.  

I remember the setlist (at least some of it): 

  • Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry cover)
  • She’s a Woman
  • If I Needed Someone
  • Day Tripper
  • Baby’s in Black
  • I Feel Fine
  • Yesterday
  • I Wanna Be Your Man
  • Nowhere Man
  • Paperback Writer
  • Long Tall Sally (Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, Enotris Johnson and Richard Penniman, better known as “Little Richard”)

Little did we know that the August 29th show at Candlestick Park would not only be the last concert of that tour, it would also be their last tour. 

Between 1964 (the year of the first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show) and 1966, (the year of The Beatles’ last concert) they released an incredible number of albums in the United States. 1964 saw the release of Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles Second Album, A Hard Day’s Night, Something New, and Beatles ’65. In 1965 they released Beatles Vl, Help!, and Rubber Soul. The Rubber Soul LP saw the band starting to take a major step beyond traditional rock & roll music. This continued with their next two albums released in 1966, Yesterday and Today, and the groundbreaking Revolver. 

Also, in 1966, The Beatles came up with a creative alternative to performing live. They would make videos that they distributed to TV stations. Years before MTV, The Beatles laid the groundwork for what would become a major networking tool. 

We started hearing that the next Beatles LP would be one of epic scope. To this day, 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is considered one of the greatest rock & roll LPs ever made. 1967 also saw the release of the trippy Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour and its soundtrack. 

The world was changing at breakneck speed both culturally, politically, and musically. Much of the expansion of popular music can be directly tied to The Beatles and Bob Dylan, each inspiring the other.

It was no surprise that 1968 would see yet another shift of musical direction from the Beatles. The Beatles (or The White Album as it’s commonly known) was released as a double LP. I have always felt that every great double LP would have made a fantastic single LP. In the case of The Beatles, I will admit there are songs I could have lived without back in 1968. But listening now, there were way too many great songs to fit on a single record, so why not take some chances with the left-over grooves!

1969 saw the release of Abbey Road featuring the classic John Lennon song “Come Together,” and the beautiful George Harrison songs “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Side two included a collection of song fragments tied together that end with the lyrics, “and in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take”. This line would soon take on greater meaning. John Lennon had privately left the band six days before the LP’s release, and by the following April, Paul publicly announced the band’s breakup. One of my favorite Beatles songs, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” was produced at the end of these sessions and released later as a 45. It was recorded as a duo with just Paul playing bass and drums, and John on acoustic and electric guitars. Despite the tension in the band, John and Paul were still able to pull it together in the studio.

1970 brought the long-awaited release of the final Beatles LP, Let It Be. Well ahead of its release bootlegs were leaked and we could hear firsthand the tension and dysfunction within the band, though there were still some amazing songs waiting to see the light of day. I went to see the Let It Be movie at the theater in Madison, Connecticut, with my friend Bill Thompson. By that time, he and I had a band and had been playing songs from the Let It Be bootlegs. Together we watched the final movie The Beatles would release as a band.

1970 would also bring the release of solo albums from each of The Beatles. My personal favorite is John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. John made it clear there would be no more new Beatles music. In his song “God,” John lists the many things he no longer believes in, leading up to these lyrics, “I don’t believe in Beatles… and so dear friends you’ll just have to carry on, the dream is over.”

There has never been a day in my life since 1964 that the music of The Beatles and their many solo efforts have not been playing as a soundtrack to my life. The music of the four Beatles, both as a band and solo, has offered me a worldview and a lifelong endeavor that has led to a life well-lived, “Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah!….”

The Replacements at Toad’s Place

by | Sep 16, 2021 | Blog

I spent the greater part of the early Nineties playing guitar in the electric alt-rock band The Name. One night in Middletown, CT, the band’s instruments and amps were stolen from a parked car. After a gig at The Moon in New Haven, we weighed our options and decided the easiest course of action was to become an acoustic rock band. The advantages were clear: less stuff to own, move and maintain.

I traveled to all our gigs in a beat-up Dodge van. The only thing that worked right was the cassette player. At the time, I was living on a steady diet of REM, The Silos and The Replacements. I was a true believer in The Replacements and devoured every recording. I would search out magazine articles and read everything I could about them.

Musician did two major stories that formed the backbone of my knowledge of the band (beyond their music). The December 1990 issue had the story “Replacements Kaput (say it ain’t so, Paul)”. After reading it, it was clear the band was not long for the road. When a February 1991 show at Toad’s Place in New Haven was announced, it was also clear that if I wanted to see one last show, I had to get my ass down to Toad’s!

It was a shitty snowy stormy night, and no one wanted to go with me, so I went alone. I got there early and sat down on the stage just to the right of where Paul Westerberg would end up taking the stage. I made a deal with another early arrival that we would hold each other’s spot by the stage if one of us left for a drink or to take a piss. Uncle Tupelo opened the show with a blistering take-no-prisoners set that was so tight and fast-paced that it felt over before it really got started.

It was pretty close to midnight when The Replacements took the stage, opening with an ear-bleeding “ Don’t Know”. For a band on the verge of breaking up, you wouldn’t see any evidence that night. They played an amazing 28-song set. Slim Dunlap’s leads on “Bent Out of Shape” were just that. I remember him leaning into Paul and the two of them cracking a simultaneous smile. I’ve never heard “Waitress in the Sky” played so fast or “Chuck Berry” played like that, before or after. Not only did they play all their classic songs, but they also played a bunch of songs from the new All Shook Down LP. Tommy Stinson looked happy as a kid in a candy shop and Paul wasn’t too far behind with a constant shit-eating grin on his face. The band was really “on” and the audience loved it. They ended the set with “Left of The Dial” and “Alex Chilton”.

Walking out into the cold night air singing “who knew that avenue was bound for Happy Town?,” I ran into a friend who also had been at the show at the parking lot on Broadway, where I parked my car. When she started talking to me about the concert, I realized her words sounded like paper being torn. I’m pretty sure the show was the loudest concert I had ever been to and standing against the stage dead in front of the speakers was not the best plan after all.

I remembered this while reading The Replacements bio Trouble Boys, where Steve Foley (the drummer on that tour) recalled the deafening volume of that last tour. I had seen Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Sonic Youth, and Social Distortion eight days before (third row at the New Haven Coliseum). and that show was nowhere near as loud. At some point, my hearing came back, kind of. I have hearing loss to this day and feel attending concerts starting in 1965 with no hearing protection played a part in it.

That last concert included many songs from the “last” Replacements LP All Shook Down. The LP has been referred to as the “Paul gets a 12-string acoustic guitar” album. This is not completely fair as Paul used an acoustic from the beginning. Paul recorded most of the songs without the band, bringing them in for overdubs. It is a testament to how tight the band could be live, and that with electric instruments the songs retained the feel and vibe they had on the more acoustic treatment they received on All Shook Down.

There was the benefit album for Slim Dunlap who suffered a stroke in 2013, but little else new has been released under The Replacements name. Tommy and Paul continue to release amazing solo recordings to this day. To quote a line from one of Tommy’s songs, “anything could happen.”

Lunch Is For Suckers

by | Apr 21, 2021 | Blog

(Photo of Jerry Garcia at Woolsey Hall  by Joe Sia)

Between 1972 and 1975, I worked at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. We used to get an hour for lunch, which was pretty nice, but I’ve never been a big lunch eater. Most days I would wander down the street to Rhymes or Cutler’s Record Shop and sort through the import record section for any LP’s with cool vintage guitars on the cover. Another favorite pastime was to go over to Woolsey Hall with a cup of coffee and play my guitar.

The Beinecke Rare Book Library is one side of a plaza at Yale created with Woolsey Hall and a dining hall. Woolsey Hall is one of Yale’s premier performance spaces. Its main lobby was on a well-worn path between colleges and generally unlocked to allow students to cut through and save time. The actual Performance Hall was always locked. Most of the time I would just go up the hallway from the lobby to a balcony for some privacy.

This one time, I was sitting there with a cup of coffee and I could hear guitar playing. It was 1:00 in the afternoon (not a time for performances), so I was curious. I tried the main Hall doors and found them unlocked. I quietly entered and sat in the very last row. To my amazement, on the stage was Jerry Garcia and one or two other people. Jerry was plugged in and playing some crazy good stuff. It’s too bad the iPhone hadn’t been invented yet.

I was there for about 20 minutes before one of the people on the stage noticed me. He came back and told me to leave. I explained that wasn’t really an option and that I promised to sit and be quiet. We finally agreed that I could stay as long as I didn’t move from my seat and made no effort to interact or disturb Jerry.

I asked where the rest of the band was and why was he sound checking by himself. He explained that Jerry liked to check out performance venues and play by himself as a way of connecting with the space before every show: “to get to know the room.”
room”.

Sitting there I could not help but think of how insane it was. I was the only one in the audience with Jerry standing alone on the stage of Woolsey Hall for about two hours lost playing the sounds inside his head. If I was the kind of person who liked to eat lunch, I would have missed it. When he was finished playing, he looked back at me and waved. True to my word I smiled and left, getting back to work from lunch quite late. The date was 10/22/1975 and I’m pretty sure Jerry was playing his white Travis Bean guitar.

Cream Go To Yale

by | Apr 7, 2021 | Blog

When my father got his first stereo component system, instead of tossing the console unit to the curb, he and I dragged it into my bedroom, down the end of the hall. It was on this unit late one night on the Yale FM station WYBC I first heard The Cream’s first LP played in its entirety. It was one of those life-changing nocturnal emissions that changed the way I viewed playing electric guitar forever. My best friend Peter Mitchell and I promptly went to Merle’s Record Rack in New Haven and bought the LP.

I had a trio at the time with Peter on bass and his brother John on drums. We started learning the Fresh Cream LP song by song. When we found out that Cream was going to appear a short drive down I 95 at Yale’s Woolsey Hall, Peter and I knew we had to attend the concert. The online date for this show is recorded as 4-10-1968, which would have made me 16 years old for only three days, explaining why my father drove Peter and me to the concert. There will be more about my dad in this story later on.

Our seats were front row balcony, almost in a direct line with the bass player Jack Bruce. The strongest recollection I have of the set was the first song, “Spoonful.” I had never heard it before and was transported to a state of ecstasy. It was not included on the US release of Fresh Cream , so the song was a complete surprise. It was centered on just two notes and went on for what seemed like forever, most likely about 20 minutes or so. It took the help of a friend to figure out those two notes the next day! The other song from that show that sticks in my mind is the last song, “Toad.” Ginger Baker’s extended drum solo in this song was equally as long as the extended guitar solo in “Spoonful.” Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce left the stage for this part of the song, leaving Ginger alone on stage. When they came back they both had a beer in their hand.

After the show, we went down to the stage to check out their amps. By the time we met up with my father, it was well after the concert. He asked what took so long? “Eric wanted to meet you. I told him you had a Les Paul and had spent hours learning his songs.”

I was pretty skeptical. My father was known for being a joker. It was when he showed me the beer he had from backstage that I knew he was telling me the truth. My dad was in law enforcement and knew the police doing security backstage. They let him in, and he got to hang with the band during “Toad’s” drum solo.
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Advice For Beginners

by | Jan 8, 2021 | Blog

Most people want to play the guitar, but they make these three main mistakes. One: They buy a cheap guitar. Two: They’re overconfident. Three: They try to learn on YouTube. I’m sort of ok with this. The less people that play guitar, the cooler it is that I play guitar. But… It’s also really sad to see people fail and give up. So, here’s some advice.

 “I’ll buy a cheap guitar between $200-$400. That way, if it doesn’t work out, I didn’t lose that much money”. If you think this way, then you’ve already quit. Giving yourself the option of quitting before you’ve even started is stupid. As humans, we are programmed to gravitate towards the simplest option, because, thousands of years ago, the simplest option for our ancestors was still really hard. Our brains have not evolved that much since then, but convenience has. 

Cheap guitars are hard to play, so it’s either fight the strings or watch Netflix. Cheap guitars sound awful, so it’s either sound terrible or go on Instagram. It’s common for people to choose the latter is both instances. 

Paying $800-$1200 for your first guitar will motivate you. Your mentality will change to: Practice a song for twenty-five minutes and reward yourself by watching a show for twenty-five minutes. Or, even better, just practice and don’t watch TV. This will keep you from quitting the guitar. 

Also, (I’m not excited to tell you this) if you still end up quitting (LOSER!), you can resell a more expensive guitar and only lose $200-$400 dollars. 

“I’m a quick learner, I’ll be good at the guitar in no time”. If you think this way, then you’ve already quit. Jimi Hendrix didn’t think he was good at the guitar, which is why he kept challenging himself to come up with new licks. Overconfidence clouds the mind and creates false assumptions. Beginners don’t realize that hand position and posture are the hardest part about starting. Some chords will be easy to play. Your arm will feel relaxed and you’ll think you’re a superstar. But then you’ll have to switch to another chord and all of a sudden you’re attempting to be a contortionist. This frustration will send you from cocky to quitter unless you go into practice knowing it’s a slow process. 

YouTube is badass for learning anything. I’ve learned so much about music, psychology, philosophy, business… But most beginners don’t know how to apply the information to their guitar. “Be wary of unearned knowledge,” said Carl Jung. You can watch five hundred YouTube lessons and retain some of the information, but if you can’t use it on your instrument, that information is useless. You’ll get cocky. When you pick up the guitar you will be overwhelmed. 

A teacher you can talk to will center you. You can ask them questions about a video you’ve watched. They can elaborate on the information and help you apply it to the guitar. Most teachers will know a lot of helpful YouTube lessons that they can recommend. This way you aren’t getting too ahead of yourself. Every video will leave you with questions. This is what weekly or bi-weekly lessons are for. 

Also, investing more money into the guitar by paying a teacher, will encourage you to keep going. 

There are a million other mistakes beginners and professionals make, but these are the ones that make people quit before they’ve even started. Mistakes are lame but overcoming them is the key to brilliance. The reason people want to play guitar is to feel good about themselves, but it’s impossible to feel good if you haven’t experienced the struggle.