Music Break

Once again, one of these is overdue.  To start, here's some heavy metal from Scorpions, called The Zoo.

I remember Heart coming out with Even It Up, from their 1980 album Bebe Le Strange, their first after kicking original lead guitarist Roger Fisher out of the band.  Nancy Wilson plays the guitar solo, while guitarist Howard Leese, bassist Steve Fossen and drummer Mike Derosier all pretend to play saxes, which in reality were played by the Tower Of Power horn section.  From what I remember of the liner notes, lead vocalist Ann Wilson also plays the bass on this one.  When I saw Heart perform in 1982, Fossen and Derosier had been replaced by Mark Andes (formerly of Spirit and Firefall) on bass and Denny Carmassi (formerly of Montrose) on drums.

In 2002, I was eating lunch in a small restaurant in St. Ives, England, when this next one came over the place's sound system.  I was already familiar with John Fogerty's live version, based on the studio track from his 1975 eponymous album, but I found myself thoroughly enjoying what I heard, the 1977 cover of Fogerty's Rockin' All Over The World by the British group Status Quo.

The second album by Yes, Time and a Word, includes Astral Traveller, written by lead vocalist Jon Anderson.  The song's instrumental break starts with a quirky organ riff played by Tony Kaye, which is then quickly joined by quirky drum parts from Bill Bruford, bass parts from Chris Squire, and guitar parts from Peter Banks.  The instruments all seem to move back and forth when the song is listened to using headphones.

To finish, I have to include something written by new Nobel literature laureate Bob Dylan.  His song All Along The Watchtower, once covered by Jimi Hendrix, was used in the 2004-2009 science fiction series Battlestar Galactica, a "re-imagining" of the original series which ran from 1978-1979.  This version was created by the show's musical director Bear McCreary, with his brother Brendan on lead vocals.

In the show, a small group of characters hear this song after fleeing from the Twelve Colonies (12 planets on which humans had settled and built their civilization) which had been destroyed by their enemies, the Cylons.  (Spoiler alert!) The series ends with the surviving humans and some allied human-looking Cylons landing on our Earth, about 150,000 years ago.  Thus, people were listening to this song 150,000 years before Dylan wrote it.  For more information on the show, you can go to Battlestar Galactica Wiki.