This'll melt ya, honey.

Five years ago today I started my own humble little blog, and that same month U2 released the album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb."

They've had considerably more traffic than I.

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I ran that Sam and Dave clip from this same show featuring the "Stax/Volt Revue" on tour in Europe -- which meant that the house band was Booker T. and the MG's and the Mar-Keys -- a little earlier, but as good as Sam and Dave might have been, they paled in comparison to Otis Redding, who immediately followed them. He was The Man. This was his closing song. Whew. Seven months after this, Redding died in a plane crash. It was one of the great losses to music.

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drunken sufis

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I love seeing Laurie Anderson live; I've seen her about four times and have never been less than electrified. I was lucky enough to have bought the VHS version of Anderson's concert film, Home of the Brave, back when it came out briefly in the early 1990s. Laurie has been promising to put it out on DVD someday, but so far it's remained unavailable in digital form. It featured a great collection of talent, including Adrian Belew on guitar and Joy Askew on keyboards, and perhaps was best known for featuring appearances by William S. Burroughs, including a brief tango with Laurie. And great songs, too. This is my favorite piece on the tape; the studio version of "Sharkey's Day" on Mister Heartbreak is one of the great aural set pieces, and its power is somewhat muted in a live setting, but the stage work here is phenomenal, so it makes for a very cool show.

This version of Rock Lobster shows the young B-52s in true form. With singer Fred Schneider sportin a pornstache, and cranking out enough cow bell to satisfy even Christopher Walken, the band flat out nails it.

Buckle up for an amazing ride with Stanley Jordan and his band. I'm posting parts one and two of Return Expedition tonight, giving you eighteen minutes of teh awesome. Part one features a smokin' bass solo from Charnett Moffett, and drummer Tommy Campbell tears it up in part two. Oh yeah, and there's Stanley Jordan being Stanley Jordan -- playing two guitars at once, even tuning one guitar without missing a note on the other.

(h/t Akeem)

We're going to bring the room down for a little while this evening. Chet Baker's version of Elvis Costello's Almost Blue is sure to bring your pulse down and take you back -- or away to somewhere else. So kick back, grab a cuppa somethin' and relax...

I just happened across this very raw, live version of Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream and thought I'd share it with the class. I love the camera work, cool set, dueling stacks, Clapton's SG, and Baker's walkabout during the lead break.

Speaking of Eric Clapton, he was forced to bow out of this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert due to gallstone surgery. No worries, he's doing fine and Jeff Beck will be taking his place.

After the intro, Kirk feels around for the mikes, to make sure they’re in the right place, and starts playing both saxophones slung around his neck. During this tune, he remembers a few of his favorite things for a few moments, like a seemingly random thought that pops up in the middle of a conversation. At the end, he’s gone full blown and his saxophones sound like a stylized warning siren.

In addition to Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing a variety of saxophones, flutes and whistles, McCoy Tyner was limited to playing one piano, Stanley Clarke stayed with one bass throughout the performance, and Lenny White rounded out the rhythm section on drums.

Here, Kirk shows us how it’s done on Burt Bacharach’s ‘I Say a Little Prayer,’ made mainstream by the talented Miss Dionne Warwick and made soulful by the also talented Miss Aretha Franklin.

No one beats Kirk’s bling. I mean, it’s woodwinds and whistles.

All props to John Boswell of Colorpulse for finding a way to put the (otherwise) annoying Auto-Tune to great use.

After I first heard this, I pulled my copy of Cosmos off of the bookshelf for the first time in five years. Guess I'm going to have to break down and finally pick up a copy of A Brief History of Time, too. Who'd have ever thought that these two--Sagan and Hawking--giants in the field of astrophysics, would become pop stars in the field of music?

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(From the Secret World Live disc.) In the '80s and '90s I did a fair amount of music writing as a freelancer, and in that time I saw probably over a hundred concerts, including a lot of great grunge shows in the '90s. Still, seeing Peter Gabriel on the '93 Secret World Tour -- he played locally at the Tacoma Dome, but the show looked identical to the one captured here, in Italy -- remains probably my favorite. Gabriel's songs mean a lot to me personally ("In Your Eyes" was "our song" when my wife and I were dating), but the show was just riveting, and the talent (Youssou N'dor, Paula Cole, Tony Levin) was awesome. I also have a cool big-disc 45 of this song, which included an extended version that included the line poem at the end ("Accepting all I've done and said ..."), which does not appear on the album version, but is included here. Of course, on this song, even in the live performance, you can't help being reminded of Lloyd Dobler standing outside Diane Court's window with his music blaster.

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Another hometown hero of sorts for us Seattleites. Actually, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic were from Aberdeen/Hoquiam, where I spent a bunch of time working on my book about hate crimes, Death on the Fourth of July. A more bleak upbringing I could not really imagine, except maybe in Forks. Anyway, this is another cover, this time of a great David Bowie song from the era when Bowie was a great songwriter.

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Jimi is our chief hometown hero here in Seattle (Kurt Cobain being a very close second). This is from probably his most famous performance after Woodstock, live at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. (At the end of his gig, he climaxed "Wild Thing" by lighting his guitar on fire.) Anyway, I used to have an LP from Monterey with Jimi on Side One and Otis Redding on Side Two. (What a great album. Somewhere I lent it to someone and it vanished.) However, it didn't have the whole performance, and this was one of the songs left off -- which was dumb, since this is one of the finest versions of it. "Hey Joe" has been a rock standard for years, but Jimi's version is the standard by which all others are judged. Anyway, it's in the film version, and the newly remastered copy of the film is well worth owning.

PS Our sister site Newstalgia proudly features The Jags -- Live at the Paris Theatre, London, 1979 for your Saturday night listening pleasure.