Rossington-Collins Band - Don't Misunderstand Me

On this day in rock history in 1977, tragedy stuck when the plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed in Mississippi on its way to Baton Rouge only three days after releasing their latest album. Six people perished in the accident including two members of Skynyrd including lead singer Ronnie Van Zant. Amazingly, six other members of Skynyrd survived and from the ashes of the plane crash emerged the Rossington Collins Band with their forgotten '80 tune, Don't Misunderstand Me.
Four of the surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd decided to resume making music but didn't want to call themselves Lynyrd Skynyrd out of respect for their fallen band mates. Instead they became the Rossington Collins Band named after guitarists Gary Rossington and Allen Collins. One big change was the addition of a female lead singer - Dale Krantz. Their 1980 debut album went gold, and its lead single Don't Misunderstand Me reached No. 55 on the singles chart.
While Collins survived the 1977 plane crash, his story did not end well. Days after Rossington Collins started to tour as a new band, Collins' wife died of a hemorrhage and the rest of the tour was cancelled. By 1986, Collins had gotten the band back together and was back in a relationship, but tragedy would strike again when the car he was driving (while intoxicated) crashed killing his girlfriend and paralyzing Collins, leaving the man who played one of rock's most iconic solos on Free Bird, unable to play the guitar. Collins would pass away in 1990 at the age of 37 due to pneumonia.
More drama followed the band as both Rossington and Collins would battle for the affections of Dale Krantz, but it was Gary Rossington who won her heart and the two were married in 1982. These days, the "new" Lynyrd Skynyrd tours although Rossington is the only original member still left in the band.  From: https://www.tampabay.com/the-legend-of-rossington-collins-and-dont-misunderstand-me/2299385/

Laura Nyro - Eli's Comin'

‘Eli’s Comin’’ is a love song with an ominous sound, that begins with a quiet warning then builds into an explosion of aggressive harmonies.  Laura Nyro was able to write songs that would speed up and slow down, setting the mood with the tempo concluding with a well paced climatic ending that is unparalleled by her peers.  The tempo in this song gets faster and faster as the relationship between the womanizer Eli and the woman who was warned to hide her heart intensifies.  Three Dog Night, with Danny Hutton, Chuck Negron and Cory Wells singing lead vocals did a high energy and a fast pace cover of this song on their 1969 studio album, Suitable For Framing.  Negron used to watch Nyro perform in New York City and he liked her sound.  He brought this song to the group, thinking it would be a good fit for Wells’ voice.  Most of the lyrics in this song are clear cut, being a prediction about Eli who is coming and that he will break this girl’s heart unless she is able to hide from him, except for one line.  I read an article by WordPress blogger and music aficionado John Holton which stated that the lyrics “Apollo by the bay” according to Answers.com is a place by the water in Australia.  Actually, the Temple of Apollo by the Bay of Baiae (now the Bay of Naples) was in ancient times considered to be one of the entrances to the Underworld.  However, I discovered something slightly different, being that the line “I walked to Apollo by the bay” comes from the story of Daphne and Apollo, which was an essay written by Patricia Spence Rudden.  The Roman and Greek god Apollo mocked Cupid the god of love for using his bow and arrow.  Cupid got insulted, so he shot Apollo with an arrow making him fall in love with the river nymph Daphne.  Cupid then shot Daphne with a different kind of arrow which caused her to reject Apollo.  Apollo appeared in the shape of a man and Daphne called to her father to save her.  Apollo used his powers of eternal youth and immortality to render Daphne into an evergreen.  For this reason, the leaves of the Bay laurel tree do not decay, and this became sacred forever thereafter to Apollo.  Laura Nyro was a proud feminist and women’s rights activist who dug into the sexist assumption that the only thing that causes a young woman heartache, or makes her hide her loving heart, or that can give her a broken heart is a man.  From: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2019/06/14/elis-comin/

Traffic - Coloured Rain

"Mr. Fantasy" was Traffic's first album and is also one of their most popular. This is one of the albums which leads to their categorisation as a Prog Folk band, later releases moving in a more jazz oriented direction. Prior to the release of the album in 1967, the band had enjoyed singles chart success with "Paper sun" and Dave Mason's "Hole in my shoe". Neither song was included on the original UK version of "Mr. Fantasy", Winwood feeling that the latter in particular did not represent how he envisaged the band sounding. They do both now appear though on the expanded CD remaster which contains the UK and US versions in full. The reason for the differences in the albums is that the US version was released some time after Dave Mason had departed for the first time. He had in fact left prior to the album's release in the UK, but the band were still credited as a quartet there. For the US version (initially called "Heaven is in your mind"), two of Mason's songs were dropped, while his "Hole and my shoe" was added along with "Paper sun" and another single "Smiling phases". The band however were presented on the sleeve as a trio.
It should be mentioned at this stage that around the time of this album's release Winwood was still a teenager, while the rest of the band were in their very early 20's. Even more astonishingly, Winwood had already been a member of the Spencer Davis group for four years before the formation of Traffic. Perhaps as a reaction to the success of their singles, the band, or at least three of the four them (Mason being the exception), appear to have made a determined effort here to create something with more substance right from the start. "Heaven is in your mind" mixes psychedelic influences with some bluesy instrumentation to create a relaxed West Coast sounding piece. The following "Berkshire poppies" indicates that Mason was not the only one prone to light hearted deviations, members of the Small Faces joining in to create an enjoyable but disposable drunken sounding ramble.
Mason's "House for everyone" is the only track of his which survived on both versions of the album, the song sounding rather like a Syd Barrett piece. The title track is an astonishingly accomplished and assured piece of pure proto-prog. Winwood is in superb vocal form as the track develops magnificently through passionate verses and striking instrumental passages.
"Utterly simple" is a "Norwegian wood" like slice of psychedelia, the mood continuing with "Coloured rain", which finds Winwood talking about when he was a "young boy"! "Hope I never find me there" includes some good old fashioned phasing from the period. The album closes with "Giving to you", an instrumental jam credited to all four band members which offers an early indication the style the band will later adopt.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=7040

Joydrop - Beautiful

Once you see Tara Slone burn her way through unforgettable Joydrop tunes like “Beautiful” or “Sometimes Wanna Die”, you might find it hard to believe that before she was singing for the band, she wanted to be an opera singer. As she says in her bio, “I received a scholarship at Dalhousie University and did a year of music program there. I quickly realized that although I loved singing, I didn’t want to spend every minute of my life living and breathing opera.”
So what did she do? “I left school, pierced my nose, got a tattoo, moved to Montreal and joined a rock band.” But it was still a while before she auditioned for Joydrop and the only reason she actually ended up in Toronto at all was so she could pursue a career in acting. After six months of struggling and feeling miserable because she wasn’t singing, she found an ad in a newspaper – “It’s funny thinking back to that, because I almost didn’t bother to call. I spoke to someone named Tony Rabalao (I thought he was Italian) on the phone and made arrangements to meet at the Joydrop rehearsal space. The connection was instant and the rest is history.”
The first big deal for the band was getting tremendous airplay for their song “Beautiful”, which was on Metasexual, their first album. From there, things got crazy and after getting noticed by Tommy Boy Records, they signed a record deal that has now resulted in the fantastic release, Viberate. “Sometimes Wanna Die” is the first single off this new album and already people have gone nuts for it. A lot of hit radio stations have even picked it up and have been playing it in high rotation. It didn’t hurt the band’s popularity that they filmed the video for “Sometimes Wanna Die” with veteran rocker, Tommy Lee Jones (of Method’s Of Mayhem/Pam-Anderson-videotape fame).
Collectively, singer Tara Slone, bassist Tom McKay, drummer Tony Rabalao and guitarist Thomas Payne have all combined their efforts to write their music. With four writers things can get a little harder to finish and as Payne said in an interview with UtterMusic.com, “A lot of bands have just one songwriter and the other musicians just augment that. With us, with four writers, it’s extremely difficult in a lot of respects. You’ve got four different visions but you have to make them work together so they’re all coming from the same place. Basically it’s a harder demo process, because everyone will bring in their songs and we demo tons and tons of songs and it’s really hard to pick the ones that go on the record.”  From: https://www.thegate.ca/music/03885/joydrop-opera-acting-music-mayhem/

R.E.M. - Finest Worksong

As R.E.M. sprinted toward a long-developing commercial breakthrough in 1987, they came to more fully understand their powers as a band – both musically and socially. They also came to terms with everything they'd left behind, a workaday existence where nothing is guaranteed. And all of that happened within "Finest Worksong," the opening cut on Document. "The minute we wrote that," Peter Buck said in Reveal: The Story of R.E.M., "we pretty much knew that it had to be side one, track one."
Document reached the Top 10 on Billboard's album chart, a first, even as the band prepared for a shift from indie I.R.S. Records to the major-label exposure provided by Warner Bros. They ended up reeling off five straight Top Five studio projects in the early '90s, including two chart-toppers, but this is where R.E.M. officially made the transition from college-rock upstarts to mainstream rockers.
"Finest Worksong" showed they weren't shying away from it, either. This riffy, U2-esque statement of populist purpose blended radio-ready, largely improvised sounds with a new lyrical assertiveness. The intent here, Michael Stipe said in Reveal, was to attack "the idea that you can work and work, and get what you want, and then try for even more. It's the American dream, but it's a pipe dream that's been exploited for years." He seethes with anger while singing lines like, "What we want and what we need has been confused."
This topical bent was a new development for a band that had largely avoided politics early on, choosing instead to couch their intent in elliptical phrases and just as elliptical guitar figures. They tended to walk a fine line, partly because of a reluctance to be seen as dilettantes, and also to keep some sense of mystery around the songs. "I don't like sloganeering, especially when it gets to something like the Clash who don't know what they're talking about," Buck once said. "They're fucking boneheads. People think that's revolutionary, and it's garbage!"
By 1984, however, R.E.M. was turning a corner, as Stipe began to engage in the issues of the day during extemporaneous comments on stage. Document showed they were now ready to fully integrate those steadfast beliefs into their musical narratives, as well.
"Rock 'n' roll is supposed to be about personal freedoms," Buck told UPI in 1987. "How can you do this and act like a clown, jump around in striped trousers, and then just go home and not worry about it because you've got your million? That's just sickening. I'm not saying you have to make social messages, but the Motley Crues and Van Halens, they have a tool to talk to every disenfranchised lower-middle-class kid who works in a garage and tell them something about what's happening to them – but all they tell them is 'go ahead and jump.' A lot of these bands make it on rebellion, but it's really safe rebellion. All the kids raise their hand in the air and yell and drink a bunch of malt liquor for about three hours, then they go right back home and go to the mall."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/rem-finest-worksong/

Heart - Cry To Me/Go On Cry

Heart’s sophomore album, Little Queen, arrived in a storm of controversy – or, more specifically, passive-aggression on the part of Heart’s former label, Mushroom Records. Unhappy that the band had defected to Portrait Records, Mushroom released the half-baked Magazine, which featured rough studio cuts and some live tracks, right around the time of Little Queen. But the sabotage attempt backfired: Little Queen reached No. 9 on the chart and helped Heart continue their ascent to superstardom.
Still, a legal fight with Mushroom hovered over the recording process for Little Queen. For starters, Heart had to make the album in just three weeks due to the looming court battles over their desire to dissolve the band's contract with its old record label.
“When we went in to record Little Queen, the lawyer had sat us down and said, ‘There’s a hearing in three weeks, and at that hearing, we don’t know if you’re going to be stopped from completing Little Queen until the lawsuit is settled, or not,’” recalls the album’s producer, Mike Flicker, in Jake Brown’s book Heart: In the Studio.
“Mushroom was seeking a temporary restraining order to stop Heart from doing any more recording at all till the lawsuit was settled. So the lawyer said, ‘But, if you actually get the album on the streets before then, the chances are way, way In your favor that the judge is not going to stop it.’”
Remarkably, Little Queen reveals little about this behind-the-scenes stress. The LP underscores their dual strengths: ferocious rockers ("Kick It Out," "Barracuda") and delicate acoustic numbers ("Love Alive," "Cry to Me"). "Dream of the Archer," with its regal mandolin and harmonies, conjures the band’s idols, Led Zeppelin; the title track is a smoldering blues-rock lope; and "Kick It Out" is a feisty, Rolling Stones-esque strut.
Still, the album is more consistent than Heart’s debut, 1976's Dreamboat Annie – and it feels rougher around the edges, albeit in subtle ways. For instance, "Go on Cry" is nearly six minutes long, and it’s a somber, almost hymn-like song buoyed by gospel-style choir harmonies, nimble bass and moody guitar.
And then there’s "Barracuda," which we described in our look at the Top 100 Classic Rock Songs, as “Stacked, Zeppelin-esque riffs rumble with the power of a buffalo stampede in tandem with the galloping drumming and Ann Wilson’s powerhouse voice — an instrument that’s simultaneously operatic, twang-touched and blues-based.”
Wilson’s rage at the misogyny she’d already experienced in the music business informed the song’s poetic lyrics. The stance Heart took in the song crystallized a galvanizing, pro-women message Ann and her sister Nancy Wilson still speak out about today.  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/heart-little-queen-35/

Hedwig & The Angry Inch - Wicked Little Town

Like watching the Moon landing or the moment they locked eyes with the person they love, people remember where they were the first time they saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The queer punk-rock musical about Plato, the Berlin Wall, love, gender, fame and self-acceptance started first as a stage show before becoming a much-loved cult film with a fervent fandom of "Hedheads" that unwaveringly adore it. Twenty years since the movie was released and 27 since John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask first debuted the character at New York nightclub Squeeze Box, Hedwig has been a constant presence, being screened and performed all over the world.
The story centres on Hedwig, a singer in a punk-rock band from East Berlin now living in Kansas following botched gender reassignment surgery that left them with an "angry inch". Hedwig has their heart broken twice, first by the GI who coerced them into the operation to allow them to marry and emigrate, and then by Tommy Gnosis, who fell in love with Hedwig but then stole their songs and used them to become the rock star Hedwig always wanted to be. It's a tale that many have a deep connection to, not just because it's hilarious, heart-breaking and has a phenomenal, timelessly cool, soundtrack but also because it taps into the fundamental question of identity and how it's shaped by the relationships we have.
Stephen Trask, co-creator, composer and lyricist of Hedwig, has seen that intense connection first-hand during theatrical performances, telling BBC Culture, "From the stage we would see couples break up and other people would come and get engaged. People would make life choices watching the show". For Trask that's evidence that Hedwig's enduring appeal is in its universal themes. "There's a lot of soul searching that Hedwig does about looking for a romantic partner and trying to find wholeness and be recognised for their music and their creativity; it's not just a gender journey. John and I were very much talking honestly about our own journeys and expressing them through this character that in many ways, most of our audience didn't have a lot in common with. But the story is so human and fundamental that people can figure out by watching if they are on the wrong path or the right path."  From: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211111-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-a-love-story-that-broke-taboos