• Ronnie’s Setlists – In addition to being the luckiest sideman in rock history, Ron Wood’s got a decent side hustle going as an artist. He does a lot of oil paintings of his bandmates in the Stones, other musicians, a handful of landscapes, a few animal portraits. He paints in a loose, expressionistic style, pretty much what you’d expect from a rock and roller.
About a decade ago, Ron decided that before every show on a Stones tour, he would hang a big blank canvas backstage, grab his brushes and paints and write out the evening’s setlist. He added the key the song would be played in and a few quick curlicue decorations. To me, they look like they would take up about a half hour of his time at each tour stop. Trust me, neither you or I can afford to buy one of the original canvases. But we can pony up for prints of many as we want for $100 a pop. They’re selling briskly, according to Ronnie’s online web store, and I don't doubt it. In 2018, U.K. specialty art book house Genesis Publications gathered them up for a limited edition coffee table book. 1000 copies, all signed by the artist. Asking price is $460 U.S., including shipping, to have one sent to the States. Nice work if you can get it.
• Friday Morning at the Funhouse – I'm more fascinated by the Sea of Tranquility YouTube music channel than I am entertained by it most of the time. The channel, created and hosted by Pete Pardo (right) from upstate New York, puts up so much regularly scheduled content, with a screenfull of Zoom contributors from the U.S. and U.K., on a weekly basis it rivals a television network. Pete is the on-screen point man for all of it, in addition to his full-time job, house, and family, and I'm one of many who wonder when, or if, the man ever sleeps. Sea of Tranquility content has a heavy bias toward heavy music genres that aren’t my cup of tunes, though, which keeps me from spending too much time with it.
But Friday mornings, when Pete does a one-on-one music discussion show (Friday Morning at the Funhouse) with heavyweight Canadian music journalist, historian, author, and media personality Martin Popoff, are a “must-see-TV” moment for me every week. The two of them brainstorm a topic every week, usually resulting in a list of some sort, and then riff on it for an hour or so. Unlike Pete’s other “co-captains,” Popoff isn’t stuck on the same heavy metal, hard rock, progressive rock treadmill that defines the channel. Popoff’s enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, every corner of rock music history leaps off the screen. He loves a lot of the bands and albums Pete loves, to be sure, but his tastes range far beyond SoT’s usual suspects, and his rants are guaranteed to wander into some pretty interesting places. Pete is usually the focus of the channel’s other panels, but with Popoff he’s often sitting back watching the fireworks, like the rest of us.
• Phil Hartman album covers - The three albums in the picture are pretty impressive heavyweights in music history, especially sales-wise. America’s History: America’s Greatest Hits, Poco’s Legend, and of course, Steely Dan’s Aja all sold a gazillion copies back in the day, and continue to be strong back catalog sellers now. The other thing they have in common is that their iconic covers were all designed by the same guy - SNL and NewsRadio star Phil Hartman. Phil had a degree in graphic arts and worked as a freelancer in California from the mid-70s until he veered off into comedy in the 80s, eventually landing in the cast of SNL. He had an impressive track record, to say the least, as an album cover designer before he decided to leave it behind.
• Stevie Nicks, “For What It’s Worth” - It was all over social media recently when Stevie dropped her new streaming-only single; a cover of the classic Buffalo Springfield track from 1966. I searched YouTube to check it out and ran into a bit of confusion – Stevie had already released a different song with the same title in 2011, a single from her album In Your Dreams.
Her version of the Springfield song is pretty much what you would expect. The arrangement is a carbon copy of the original, you just get Stevie’s voice instead of Stephen’s, which is nice, but maybe not essential. The other “For What It’s Worth” is a country-ish ballad co-written by Mike Campbell, the lead guitarist from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. It’s nice enough, a bit overproduced by Dave Stewart, but I couldn’t help but notice something Stevie’s wearing in the video. She’s got on one of those loose, layered, lacy, black stage costumes she currently favors to disguise the fact that she’s not the slim ingenue she was in the 70s (who is?), but it was her shoes that caught my attention. There are a couple shots of them in the video, one a close-up, and they appear to be some kind of orthopedic platforms – big, bulky, Frankenstein’s monster-looking things, that look incongruous with the rest of her outfit. She was in her mid-60s when the video was filmed, I’m thinking her days of twirling and dancing in spiky high heels were over by then, like mine are now.
"For What It's Worth" 2022 remake: https://youtu.be/MWkZBQivP74
"For What It's Worth" 2011 single: https://youtu.be/pwQhSg1G2OQ
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