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Tag Archives: Rolling Stones

BluesBreaking NewsBreaking (John Mayall, 1933-2024)

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July 25, 2024
Blues, Music, Pop Culture, Rock
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I didn’t ask for a Les Paul[1] for my birthday one year because of Eric Clapton; I did it because of Jimmy Page, who by 1973 had become all of Rock Music, as far as what most of the U.S. and England – therefore, most of the popular rock music world at the time – had accepted and acknowledged should be. Page maximized what a Les Paul guitar could sound like and expanded that context further than its namesake, an incendiary jazz player in his own right, likely imagined.

I don’t know that my request happens, though, without Clapton’s playing on what is probably the definitive British blues record of that time, in a period when British blues is reviving American blues sensibilities.

The Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, among others, witnessed it all and drew from it. “It,” in this case, is John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Mayall himself, a Macclesfield native son whose stretch we may not completely realize, died on Tuesday at 90, leaving an influence that extends at least as far as Cream and Fleetwood Mac.

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On Conan, The Destroyer

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June 25, 2021
America, Music, Pop, Pop Culture, Religion, Rock, Television
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On Thursday night, Conan O’Brien hosted what he has said would be his final late-night television episode, on his last late-night television program. He began on TV as a largely unknown 30-year-old in 1993 with exactly the kind of pedigree you would’ve expected then: Harvard-taught, an alumnus of both The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, an advocate for the weird and disruptive trends emerging in comedy to which, despite him being an Irish-Catholic Massachusetts native, he had a singular pulse.

My introduction to Conan’s work was via Late Night With Conan O’Brien, the show he hosted as the wedge between his beloved Johnny Carson and Jay Leno and which was repurposed as a day-after lead-in to The Daily Show on Comedy Central for a while. When it came time for Conan[1] to assume his seat at the top of NBC’s hierarchy, it suffered from poor ratings and a shift back to late-night along with the Tonight Show name, which Conan would fundamentally not accept. A back-and-forth ensued, and Conan eventually ceded the seat, leaving us bereft of him for a time while he popped up on tour and at music festivals – more on that later.

I understand that his is mainly a slightly-older generation of an audience, the tweeners that both lived to experience Nevermind in real time, cognizant of it or not, and also know how to navigate social media without sparking fights at a dinner table, but my friends and I – white and well-off-ish enough as we were – liked Conan better than any of the others mostly because we never knew what to expect.

Below is a list, mostly off the top of my head, of my personal favorite Conan segments, recurring and otherwise. I know this isn’t the end, but HBOMax’s app is horrendous, and anyway, it isn’t as widely accessible as he has been for thirty years otherwise. Conan, we only wish you well, as you ever wished us.

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