It’s night time in the big city
Thunder echoes through the streets
A man rents a hotel room under an assumed name
“Every week we tell you that we specialize in dreams, schemes, and themes. Every week we play a theme. The show itself is kind of a scheme. Well that leaves one subject left.”
“We play a lot of jazz singers on this show…but sometimes the great soloists go unappreciated. In the background, there’s a long tenor saxophone solo from a live recording by Dinah Washington. The saxophone player’s name is Harold Land, and like many great horn players he came from Texas. He moved to Los Angeles and played with both of the Liggins brothers, starting off with Jimmy’s band and then going with the more famous Joe Liggins.”
“I got to hear that intro again, can we hear that, Tex?”
“I always make a point whenever possible to give the names of vocal groups, because all too often they’re just given as a collective noun. Like in this case, you talk about the Chords, you’ve heard them played on oldies shows, on roots of rock shows, but no one ever gives them a moment as individuals. So for James, Carl, Claude, the other James, and Floyd, here’s their big hit, in 1954 – and they wrote it, by the way! It wasn’t even supposed to be the hit. You know Jerry Wexler, who was their A & R guy, had them record this Patty Page song, ‘Cross Over the Bridge,’ but the buying public wasn’t having it. They turned it over, and found this on the B side. Listen carefully to the saxophone solo. A lot of the guys that play horn on these records have deep jazz roots, and if you listen to the beginning of this solo, you can hear the sax player quote the standard, ‘Mean to Me.”
“…who by the way got their name from the same place as the English rock band, 10cc ”
“Here Tom Waits captures that drunken sea-sick lurch that dreams sometimes have, while he bemoans the real world.”
“Probably the most recorded solo instrumentalist in music history. He built RCA Studio B, probably the most hit-generating studio in Nashville. He lived for the music, and at one time said, ‘Years from now, after I’m gone someone will listen to what I’ve done and know I was here. They might not know or care who I was but they’ll hear my guitar speaking for me.' We hear ya, Chet.”
“He once had a dream about a snake biting its own tail. From that dream, he figured out the structure of Benzene. I woulda just figured it was a sex dream or something.’”
“It was great on the record, but especially when played live people could hear the birth of rock and roll.”
“Emerald Poet”
(Sings a few lines of Beautiful Dreamer)
Bob ran into her at Dunkin Donuts “She had an old fashioned powdered and I had a cruller”
“These are the most common dreams, as opposed to candy colored clowns.”