Here’s an example of why Pearl Jam is the world’s best band ever. Yellow Ledbetter was a Ten outtake and one of the first songs Pearl Jam wrote as a group. It’s a huge fan favourite and a staple of their live shows and this song had such humble beginnings! Yellow Ledbetter was selected by the band to be the second B-side to the 1992 single for the song Jeremy, which was where it first appeared. The song eventually found its way onto radio, peaking at number 21 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. The song was included on the 2003 B-sides and rarities album, Lost Dogs, and on Pearl Jam’s 2004 greatest hits album, rearviewmirror (Greatest Hits 1991–2003).
McCready’s guitar playing on Yellow Ledbetter bears strong similarities to the guitar style of Jimi Hendrix with the mimicking of Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” from the 1967 album, Are You Experienced, and Little Wing from the 1967 album, Axis: Bold as Love. The version of Yellow Ledbetter that was eventually released was the second take of the song. Without being released as a single, Yellow Ledbetter peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and number 26 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1994. The song has managed to become a staple among fans of the band. Although the song has never been released on one of the band’s studio albums, it remains to this day one of the band’s most popular songs.
Back in 1988 I first heard this song on a tape that I had bought of Guns n’Roses. The album was called Appetite For Destruction and the song in question was Sweet Child O’Mine. 22 years later, I still feel a euphoric aural wave washing over me every time I hear it, as soon as the opening guitar melody starts. It’s anthemic, its nostalgic, it’s arena filling and it’s fucking awesome.
Back then and for a few more years I thought that guitarist Saul Hudson aka Slash & Guns n’Roses couldn’t do any wrong. I woeruldn’t say that Slash is one of the best guitarists ever; he might not even make my top 25 list of all time greats. Infact, a big complain is that Slash has but one tone for all his solos. But what he made up for it was attitude & image most of all. Which rock fan could miss out the top hat, thick mop of unruly black curly hair that covered a quarter of his face, leather pants, cigarette dangling from his lips & followed by rock star poses on stage? He also gave us one of the most instantly recognizable sounds and beloved guitar riffs of all time.
So post 1993 GNR has been in name only, with Axl Rose owning & controlling the band name and piling a lot of strange musicians on stage with him for what was essentially his solo album & tour. Slash meanwhile released a solo album (sort off, he would call it a group effort) in 1996 and then later form a supergroup in Velvet Revolver and also play on stage with anyone who will have him. He recorded with whoever he liked on their released and had a great time while Axl sulked. Now, Slash has a new solo album out that he recorded with a bunch of his musician friends. I’ll be getting that soon but meanwhile here’s Slash performing live on stage at the Glastonbury festival. Joining him are singer Myles Kennedy (Alterbridge) and Todd Kerns (singer, guitarist of Sin City Sinners, former solo artist and ex member of Age Of Electric) on bass.
Despite the many years I’ve followed football, tennis and since 2000 ice hockey, I’ve never been able to attend a sporting event live at the venue with one exception when I was 14. I’ve attended the finals of a tennis tournament in Cochin, which mainly featured Indian players, way back in 1991. Nothing like the Chennai Open; much much smaller in nature.
So no international football matches (ha, I live in India) and NHL is out of the question. There are clay courts in the grounds of the Cochin Oil Refinery setup in Ambalamedu which is a bit far from where I live. I remember that in 1991 there was this tournament held on the clay courts and most of the top Indian talent were attending it. I spoke to an uncle and my cousin Raju and we though that it was something that we wanted to attend. So one Sunday in January 1991, the three of us took a drive from my grandma’s house to the courts in Ambalamedu to attend the men’s single final & the double’s final.
I remember that a young Leander Paes was facing an Italian expatriate player who lived & played in India for many years (I just can’t remember the guys’ name) and lost. They then played as a team in the doubles final and due to fatigue or illness, Leander and his partner had to forfeit the final. I managed to get an autograph from Leander and the Italian dude; it must be around here somewhere amongst my stuff from my childhood. That was a good experience for the 3 of us and we drove back home happily.
Back in 1986, Kuwait tv showed a mini-series based on a novel by Sidney Sheldon called If Tomorrow Comes. The 3 part mini-series with the same name starred Tom Berenger, Liam Neeson, David Keith, the late Richard Kiley, CCH Pounder and the gorgeous Mandolyn Smith.
For my 9-1o year old self, she was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. She didn’t look like most women I saw on tv – she was slightly darker or tanned and she had a sensuality that even a blind man couldn’t miss. She starred as Tracy Whitney, the main protagonist in the series, the heroine around whose life the series is woven and whose path gets entangled with deceit, imprisonment, love, vengeance, scandal, burglary & life as a con artist.
I haven’t seen her in anything other than this series although she has acted in big name movies like 2010, Urban Cowboy & Funny Farm except for an episode of Due South and when she came on the screen I remember shouting aloud ‘hey that’s Tracy Whitney’.
Her acting listings do not show her as having appeared in anything after that and it’s perhaps because of her wanting to focus on raising a family. She got married to Canadian NHLer Mark Osbourne who used to play for the Winnipeg Jets, The Toronto Maple Leafs & the New York Rangers. But I still think that she’s gorgeous and she’s had that look that not many actresses can carry. I’m going to be downloading the series if I can find a suitable torrent and I’m re-reading the novel at the moment (which was what brought about this post).
When I was a kid uptil the age of 12, I read Nancy Drew books. Yes I did! And the Hardy Boys too.
And the Famous Five! Remember that they had a tv series as well – 4 British kids and Timothy the dog who have these adventures solving mysteries. I think there was another book series based on 7 kids instead of 5, Secret 7 if I can remember it correctly. Kids solving crimes & mysteries – that was a big deal when I was a pre-teen. Not so much once I turned 13!
Nancy Drew with her best friends George (who is actually a tomboy named Georgina) & Bess went on these trips to solve some mystery or the other. She was aided on occasion by her boyfriend Ned and once in a while her lawyer father Carson. Frank & Joe Hardy, sons of detective Fenton Hardy & Laura Hardy, are teenage detectives who have on occasion joined Nancy & her buddies to solve a really puzzling mystery.
The Famous 5 novels feature the adventures of a group of young children — Julian, Dick, Anne and their cousin George — and their dog Timmy. I only remember one book very vividly – possibly because that’s the only one that I actually owned, the rest were from the library or from friends.
Yeah all kiddy books that I wouldn’t be caught dead with! But they were fun when I was a kid.
Rush sing about smoking the best drugs out there..weed and probably stuff you put in hookahs. Passage To Bangkok played live in the marijuana capital Amsterdam.
I don’t think she was that bad to be honest. When I was in the 10th grade, we had this elderly English teacher who, I hope it isn’t too rude to say, should have retired a few years before she joined our school. She was a grandmother and she was a disciplinarian and boy was she strict.
I remember a few incidents about her : she didn’t like boys growing their hair long! And when I mean long it wasn’t even shoulder length. She was crazy about it. About 6 of us in the class had longish hair and we were all into hard rock and metal music so our dream was to have even more longer hair. It was 1992 and we were 15 and we all had dreams of looking like Bon Jovi or the Scorpions. So she made it a point to constantly criticize and nag us to death about it. She even once demanded that we all cut our hair short before the next day! We rebelled and didn’t do it. She was livid.
She could be guilty of favoritism and partiality and she was not the nicest person to be around. Indian schools tolerated teachers using the cane and she did it once or twice. It barely hurt as she was not strong enough to inflict much pain. Anyone of us could have pushed her down with the slightest of ease and she would have broken a hip or some other bone. But we still treated her with respect because that’s what kids are supposed to do.
I learned that she passed away in 1999 and most of us had only good things to say about her at that time. Even the 6 of us rockers who had long hair and rebelled against her.
This brings back so many memories! It’s a video from 1987 – just after guitarist John Norum quit his band Europe at the peak of their success, due to disinterest in the more keyboard dominated sound, he started his own solo project. From his debut solo album Total Control, here’s the video for Back On The Streets. If I’m not mistaken the vocals are provided by fellow Swede Goran Edman.
Ah, the 1980s had some major power ballads and Whitesnake had some of the best ever. This is Is This Love performer live at the Hammersmith in London, 2004.
The year is 1992 a few months before I turned 16. I had completed high school and enjoying 3 months of summer vacation before pre-degree in a college. Not knowing how to spend my time, I joined Datapro for a 2 month course on Computer Basics. I enjoyed my time there and made a couple of friends. One of those afternoons on the way back home I stopped at this music store / gift shop. I saw the cover of a tape of a band that I had never heard of before. I liked the cover – a young boy kicking a skeleton and the background was a wall made entirely of dominoes. So I bought the album, called Roll The Bones and put it on as soon as I reached home; this song Dreamline came on and boom – I was introduced to the world of Rush!
One of the best episodes in any of the Star Trek franchises, and certainly one of the funniest, The Trouble With Tribbles takes place on Deep Space Station 7 in a section of space that has a disputed planet – disputed between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. According to the Organian treaty, each side is given a chance to show who is better suited to develop the planet’s resources. The Enterprise answers an emergency hail from DS7 but Captain Kirk is annoyed to find out that the alarm was raised to protect the storage of a grain, the only kind which can be grown on the planet. On orders from an admiral Kirk is forced to place guards to protect the grain. Meanwhile the Klingons appear, headed by Captain Koloth (played by William Campbell).
The Klingons claim that they are for shore leave and Kirk reluctantly allows them to send down only 12 soldiers at a time and he also allows his own crew to take shore leave on the station. While at the station’s bar, Uhura is gifted a tribble, a small furry creature that seems to purr in a manner that makes humans (and Spock too even though he won’t admit it) calm and affectionate towards the creatures. Unfortunately, feeding it only creates a problem – the tribbles multiply like crazy. Each tribble can deliver 10 at a time and soon they are all over the station and the ship.
While on shore leave Scotty & Chekov get into a bar room brawl with Koloth’s first officer Korax and it develops into a big fight between the humans and the Klingons. Funny part – when a drunk Korax insults Kirk, Scotty restrains Chekov from hitting the Klingon but when the drunk officer insults the Enterprise twice Scotty hit him. Equally funny is when Scotty admits to throwing the first punch and the bemused and embarrassed look on Kirk’s face when he finds out that insulting him was a lesser sin for Scotty than insulting the ship!
The humour carries on to the interaction between Kirk and Nilz Baris, a Federation official in charge of the planet development project. And the reactions to seeing lots of tribbles on the ship including the bridge. It also seems that the tribbles seem to like humans and Vulcans but do not like Klingons. This is crucial in unmasking Baris’ assistant Arne Darvin as a Klingon spy – the tribbles emit a shrill sound when in proximity to him just as they do with all Klingons. In turn the noise they make seems to make the Klingons nervous. Hence at the end, Scotty beams all the tribbles from their ship…onto the Klingon ship!
Truly classic episode and it has it’s fans far and wide. A must watch for anyone even if you are not a Star Trek fan.
RIP Ronnie James Dio. He was, what I always thought to be, the greatest rock & metal vocalists of all time. Hell the most powerful vocalist of all time. He passed away in May, while my computer was down, and so I couldn’t blog about it athe time. Here is my favourite Rainbow song – Catch The Rainbow, sung live by Dio and his band.
Kip Winger performs his band’s biggest hit solo on a 12 string acoustic guitar for VH1. Man this song brings back so many memories. 1990, Winger was huge. I used to listen to this song along with my cousins a lot. We played it off mixed tapes of the late 1980′s & early 90s rock hit singles. Almost each one of my cousins at the time knew of this song & it’s lyrics. I love this song.
When I was about 8 or 9, Kuwait’s national network started showing a cartoon series on their Channel 2. I hadn’t known that they would be showing a new cartoon but when I switched on the tv, this white, energetic drawing appeared and I was a fan.
Kimba The White Lion was a Japanese anime series from the 1950s. Created by Osamu Tezuka and based on his manga of the same title which began publication in 1950, it was the first color animated television series created in Japan. The English series started in 1966 (which were the ones that I saw). It’s the story of a young cub Kimba (Leo in Japanese) whose parents were captured by a hunter and after his father was killed, his pregnant mother is sent on a ship to be taken to a zoo. Kimba is born on the ship.
After a storm wrecks the ship, Kimba finds himself alone in the ocean, guided by fish & butterflies and encouraged by the face of his mother formed in the clouds. He is found and cared for by some people. He learns the advantages of human culture, and decides that when he returns to his wild home he will bring culture to the jungle and stand for peace like his father. The series follows his adventures as he grows up.
It wasn’t just a cartoon, it has a message and also tackled death. That was rare in cartoons that I saw and I just felt nostalgic for this series when I saw a photo of a white lion in Flickr. I think I’ll try to watch some of it online.
It’s 1989, Aerosmith have made their big comeback and then they release their magnum opus PUMP and one of their hits of the album is the wonderfully catchy Take Me To The Other Side.
When I was in the 10th grade I made a friend who was new to our school. He was a loud-mouthed, arrogant yet smart & friendly former Saudi resident named Sameer Siddique. Guy was a smart ass and pissed people off at first but then they understood that he was just kidding and soon most of my classmates started warming up to him. For that year and for the next couple of years, he was my best friend.
Sameer had a volatile temper and a mouth with a motor attached to it. Petty things that 15 year old boys could dole out in class could really rile him up. And the teachers would turn to me to calm him down! I had that effect on people (stopped when I started getting a really bad temper by the age of 25). Anyways, it was a really good friendship. My family knew him well. I got to know his sister & his mom and even went to his dad’s office (he was a heart surgeon) at times.
I hung out at his house a lot; whenever his parents & sister were away visiting relatives, I’d stay over and we’d watch movies, eat a lot of good food and talk about the future. I even went a mosque with him (I was an atheist by then but still curious). We’d go to movies together (I went to this really awful Kamala Hassan Tamil movie back in 1991) and teamed up for a couple of events at school. His sister’s first child was even named Roshanara after me despite their claims that it isn’t
By 1993-94 he moved to Velloor to study medicine and become a doctor like his dad. His friends would always support him and say that finally he would discover what was wrong with him once he could self-diagnose himself . But jokes aside, he was very single minded in his ambition to become a doctor and focused on it. I lost touch with him around that time. During the summer of 1997, he called me up and asked if we could hang out and go for lunch or something. So we hooked up with a couple of other buddies from school and went for lunch and a movie.
That was the last I saw of him. Over the years since I’ve thought about my childhood and my old friends a lot. I miss a lot of them and I miss Sameer. As I grow older I’ve begun to really appreciate the positive figures I met in my life and I’ve tried reaching out to the old friends I’ve lost touch with. I’ve tried Orkut & Facebook and MySpace in an effort to find out my old school friends. I haven’t found Sameer in any of them yet but I hope to someday.
And oh yeah – he had this big mouth so we used to call him Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger back in the day!
Back in 1986, Kuwait tv showed a mini-series based on a novel by Sidney Sheldon called 
One of the best episodes in any of the 
When I was about 8 or 9, Kuwait’s national network started showing a cartoon series on their Channel 2. I hadn’t known that they would be showing a new cartoon but when I switched on the tv, this white, energetic drawing appeared and I was a fan.
. But jokes aside, he was very single minded in his ambition to become a doctor and focused on it. I lost touch with him around that time. During the summer of 1997, he called me up and asked if we could hang out and go for lunch or something. So we hooked up with a couple of other buddies from school and went for lunch and a movie.
