At Wolfgang’s Vault, we’re constantly adding new material to our sites, and the Concert Video section is no exception.  As a special holiday treat, we’re offering an early glimpse of just one of the incredible new concerts we will be bringing you in 2012, this one from the recently acquired Metropolitan Archive – Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band live at the Capitol Theatre, 1978.

Beginning as a Vaudeville theatre in the 1920s, Passaic’s Capitol Theatre became renowned as a beloved music venue under the management of John Scher during the ‘70s and ‘80s, hosting a who’s-who of artists of the era.  The Metropolitan Archive contains many of these great performances captured on video, and as our restoration project continues, we will be adding these rarely-seen concerts to our site.

And who better to start with than the Boss?  While the video is in its rawest form, not yet enhanced in any way to improve audio or visual quality, it is still an outstanding document of Bruce and his band in top form, bringing a little holiday cheer to the Capitol Theatre.

This video, along with the entire concert from which it came, will be painstakingly restored and digitized to guarantee the best possible quality for online broadcast.  Check back with us in the New Year to see this and others from the Metropolitan Archive and all of our collections.

We are very grateful for the continued support of our online community, and we look forward to bringing you much more exciting content in the year to come.

Cheers!

[Merry Christmas from Passaic, NJ! is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

If you live in the Bay Area, chances are you’re familiar with Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Chances are you’ve even attended at least once over its 10 years running. It’s hard to disregard a massive, three-day festival that’s six-stages large and hundreds of thousands of attendees deep with a star-stacked lineup that takes place out in the emerald expanse of the Golden Gate Park every first weekend of October—the sunniest, warmest time of the year in San Francisco. Each year, Hardly Strictly features a staggering list of artists, with past festivals including performances by Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Randy Newman, Jonathan Richman, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doc Watson, Roseanne Cash, Gogol Bordello, Hot Tuna, the Avett Brothers, Joan Baez, MC Hammer, Los Lobos, and Emmylou Harris, the festival’s reigning matron who has played every year since its inception – hardly strictly all bluegrass.  And the festival is entirely, absolutely, free.

Yes, free. Ticket-free, sponsor-free, advertisement free. Which means it’s also BYOB. With sprawling, happy crowds, homemade snacks, dogs underfoot, pot wafting in the air, toddlers running around, lawn chairs and blankets dotting every conceivable area, organic collaborations, and inspiring performances, it’s an event that takes the prize in terms of multi-staged festival events.

Yes, it’s crowded. Crowded as hell, in fact. But is there anything like this anywhere else? A privately funded festival of this stature with performers who, on their own, could fetch ticket prices reaching into the triple digits, playing to both yuppies and penniless patrons alike, all basking in San Francisco’s most celebrated park? No, there’s not. And it’s all the gift of Warren Hellman, San Francisco’s own bluegrass aficionado billionaire.

Hellman may have well-known roots in Wall Street, but it was entirely too easy to remove his illustrious career in investment banking from the candid, effusive personality that greeted me when I went to his office in the Financial District to interview him about his work behind Hardly Strictly. The 76-year-old philanthropist is invigorated when talking about his musical pursuits, so thrilled he is to be able to celebrate his musical passions with his fellow San Franciscans… and to such a marvelous degree. The cost of throwing the festival doesn’t even come close to the amount of joy he’s clearly derived from doing it. Throughout our interview, which took place in his swanky 12th floor office draped in Hardly Strictly memorabilia with a small cache of musical instruments on display and for his personal use, he laughed every few sentences and was humble and self-deprecating throughout. It’d be hard to find a more enthusiastic subject.

Though he clearly identifies himself as a native Bay Area man, Hellman was born in New York, which he accredits to being “a real tragedy ‘cause [he’s] the only one in six generations that wasn’t born in San Francisco.” After finishing up school at Berkeley and getting his MBA at Harvard Business School, he spent 18 years at Lehman Brothers and then six more in Boston with a venture capital firm. As he says it, “I didn’t go straight ‘til about 10 years ago, when I started playing the banjo again and my life straightened itself out.”

Hellman was always interested in music and took the obligatory piano lessons as a child, but it wasn’t until he was (in his words) “a big Wall Street mucky muck” that he decided to learn to play the banjo. Says Hellman of that period, “I found a teacher up in Greenwich Village, and once a week I would board the Lexington Avenue subway and ride up to 4th street, go to my lesson in my three-piece grey suit. [One day] I said to the guy I was taking lessons from, ‘Hey, I’m about to have my 30th birthday. Do you know some kid who could play the banjo at my birthday party?’ So I came back the following week and he said, ‘Yeah I gotta kid, his name is Don McLean. But he wants 50 bucks.’ So I hired Don McLean to play the banjo for 50 bucks for my 30th birthday!

“That was probably the only interesting thing that happened along the way, other than becoming a mediocre banjo player. I’ve kinda stuck with that ever since, with a hiatus of about 30 years when my lovely banjo disappeared with my son-in-law when he disappeared from my daughter’s marriage.”

When I ask him for clarification he goes on, laughing as he tells me how he lost, and then found, his revered Whyte Laydie banjo, a rare make of instrument crafted around the beginning of the 20th century at a firm outside of Boston called the Fairbanks Music Company. “So anyways, 30 years later, I started taking lessons from a guy out here called Jody Stecher. And one Christmas a couple of years after I started taking lessons, he said to my wife, ‘You know, if you’re looking for a Christmas present for Warren you ought to get him a good banjo.’ And she said, ‘Well, once he had a Whyte Laydie.’ And they found a Whyte Laydie that was for sale in a stringed instruments store outside of Boston, so they bought it, shipped it out—I’m sure you know where this story is going—and I opened it, and I got my banjo back! I’ve had such fun telling that story that I never corroborated it, because it’s such a good story what difference does it really make?

So, a couple years later my ex son-in-law called me and said ‘Warren, the story you are telling everyone about the Whyte Laydie? Well, it’s true. I sold it to that music store. The only thing is, you didn’t have to call me a jerk!’ So I got my banjo back and wrote a song about it called ‘Whyte Laydie.’”

Today, Hellman is in a bluegrass band called the Wronglers, of which he is quite proud, although of his own talents he is exceedingly self-effacing. They will be taking the Porch stage at 11am on Saturday of this year’s festival. The Wronglers, made up of Hellmen (banjo, vocals), his wife Chris (vocals), Colleen Browne (bass, vocals), Nate Levine (guitar), B. Martin (mandolin), and K. Martin (fiddle), met a few years back when they were all taking lessons from the same teacher, who suggested they meet and play together. It was instant chemistry. Says Hellman, laughing, “We even have a mantra: ‘Simple tunes played by complicated people.’”

When I ask him if he plays any other instruments, he scoffs and says, “I’m not a good enough musician, and I’m old enough that if I can become a mediocre banjo player, that’s all I want.” When I point out they are in fact playing big stages, he laughs and says, “I understand, but that’s probably for the wrong reasons. Don’t you want to talk about the festival? Isn’t this just drudgery for you?”

I insist I am indeed interested in his work as a musician, and he responds. “Well, it’s really been fun, because at my age, everything is new to me, it’s like I was 10 years old or something.”

I inquire if he thinks he’ll be sharing the stage with any other artists this year, or if he can clue me in on any surprises or guest appearances. Hellman says, “I’m going to sit in with Earl Scruggs, and probably Ron Thomason and Dry Branch Fire Squad and he with us, if I’m lucky. And I want Jimmie Dale Gilmore to sit in on a song of his we do called ‘Deep Elem.’… I think there’s a pretty good chance that Robert Plant is going to fly in, like he did last year, and just sit in with everybody. That’s the thing I love the most about the festival. These great names come in, Emmylou Harris and everyone, and they play with all kinds of other people, and it becomes sort of a… party.”

A party that is 10 years strong and fast becoming a live music institution here in the Bay Area. Hellman, who is part owner of Slim’s and Great American Music Hall, recruited club booker/manager Dawn Holliday and her staff way back in 2001 to run the show, and it’s been a harmonious relationship ever since. “That was blind luck that we got them [to run it] because they are just sensational. Back then, none of us had the foggiest notion… I said, ‘Do you think anyone is going to show up?’ [The first year] was in the park, where the Banjo Stage is, and it was two days, and we called it ‘Strictly Bluegrass,’ because Emmylou, who agreed to come, was not playing bluegrass; I thought if I called it Strictly Bluegrass she’d put together the Nash Ramblers again. So after the second year we started calling it Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and by then we had a pretty good diversity of musicians. I think ‘Hardly’ is more prevalent than ‘Strictly’ now.”

I ask if he ever considered throwing the festival elsewhere, and Hellman says, “Well, at one point the city administration was being pretty bureaucratic, and so I threatened to move it to Oakland, but they said, ‘No, no, we love you guys, this is just normal city practices,’ and in the ensuing eight years, the city’s been wonderful, just really great.”

As to my inquiry of what kind of pushback they’ve received in terms of permits and things, Hellman hesitates, then says, “Well, eh… various departments at some point… there are some things that are hard, like the bicycle question. I mean, there are tens of thousands of bicycles, and the bicycle coalition has been great, but there are just an awful lot of bicycles, and when people are chaining them up in trees… And so that’s a perennial complaint. And a couple of the artists’ language—I always get emails from parents or letters saying ‘How could you allow someone to use this language in front of my children?’”

I express my disgust for trifling, annoying parents, and Hellman continues, saying, “Maybe there’s something else they could do with their time for that hour. Your poor children’s tender ears. They’re going to hear much worse stuff than this. But the city’s been wonderful, and we do this thing Friday morning where we bus in all the Middle Schoolers in San Francisco for a free concert, and they love it. We have five or six thousand kids there. And we have very, very traditional bluegrass there; MC Hammer is the performer. He really gets the kids going.”

I would think, for someone who clearly has such an affinity and passion for throwing big musical events, he’s probably considered pursuing other similar projects. Hellman, after first expressing this is not, in fact, the case, retracts that and admits, “Well… It’s crossed my mind. I’ve done a couple benefits; I’ve done two or three other benefits for KWMR out at my barn in Bolinas. We had Robert Earl Keen and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Steve Earle. You can imagine how Steve Earle went over in Bolinas. It was the biggest love fest you’ve ever seen in your life.”

When I ask Hellman if he has a favorite or most notable moment from the festival of year’s past that he’d like to share, after a long pause, he answers. “Hmm. No, there’s always, I mean every year there’s something that just blows my mind, leaving aside the performances. Sitting there at sunset on Sunday listening to Emmylou Harris has got to be emotionally one of the more poignant events of my life. But just stuff like, two or three years ago, I was listening to Emmy, and I was sitting there next to this woman who looks absolutely like an outer Broadway matron, dressed very, very upscale. And she’s sitting on the lawn, and I’m sitting next to her, and we started talking like everyone in the festival starts talking to each other, and I said ‘Boy, is there a strong smell of pot.’ And she said, ‘Want some?’”

Though I didn’t ask him whether or not he chose to imbibe, we shared our appreciation for how overtly tolerant San Francisco is, and Hellman continued. “Ya know, there are episodes like that. I love old banjos, as I told you about my Whyte Laydie, but at the festival everybody in the world it seems like, is trying to sell me something. Either a band—‘you gotta listen to our CD’—or if it’s beanies with propellers on them, or just something. And so I’m dodging and darting. My wife came up to me, I guess it was two or three years ago, and said ‘Warren, there’s a gentleman outside in the friends and family area who would like to show you his banjos.’ I thought, ‘Oh Christ.’ So I walk out and there’s this gentleman sitting there on the ground and he’s got three banjos. He said, ‘I understand you like old banjos, I’d like to show you some.’ And I said, ‘What, you trying to sell them?’ And he said, ‘No, I just want to show them to you.’ So you have to take that with a grain of salt. And he opens the first two, and they’re really beautiful. And he said, ‘But I understand you like Whyte Laydies. Well, I’d like to give you this one.’ I said, ‘Are you crazy!? That’s like a 3,500 dollar instrument!’ He said, ‘No, no, for what you’ve done for the festival, I’m giving you this banjo.’ And I, I just burst into tears!”

Hellman shows me the banjo, throwing in, of course, a requisite joke. “So I have three Whyte Laydies now, not including my wife and daughters.”

I ask at this point if it ever crossed his mind to charge money for tickets. Hellman responds with a resounding, “No.

“We don’t have any corporate sponsors; we don’t have anything given away; we don’t let a clothing company give away… I mean, we’ll buy [the artists] something some years; we bought everyone underwear that says “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass” on them once. And that ribbon on the lamp over there, we gave to each of the bands last year. But nobody gets to advertise, and it’s a struggle, because all kinds of not-for-profits, say, ‘Gee, can’t we just set up a booth at your festival?’ And we sorta rejected that; we allow the California Bluegrass Association to have one, because that seems to be fairly connected, and I think there may be one or two others, but they are all related.”

Hellman is pretty clear that he has nothing to do with the booking of Hardly Strictly. When people ask him, he’ll pull from his pocket a customized business card with Holliday’s booking info for GAMH and Slim’s on it and ask the inquiring mind to turn it over. On the back in big, bold, black letters, it says, “Warren has no authority.”

He is, however, pretty well-versed in who most of the bands are that are slated to perform. And as a musician who’s taken to spending some time on the road himself, he is exposed to many unique and disparate artists that could easily fit into the Hardly Strictly billing. “Basically, the one thing I do contribute now that we travel a lot, is if there’s some kind of group that I think would not be that well-known and I like, I’ll bring back. There’s a band Friday afternoon at two that we found at a festival up in Colorado where we were playing called the Ebony Hillbillies, and they’re an all black band from Jamaica, Queens, who got their start busking at Grand Central Station. It’s kinda bluegrass, but it’s kinda sensational. You need to be there; they are fantastic. And we found a band a few years ago called the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers. And the reason I’m smiling is because there are about three teeth between the group of them. So anyway, that’s my part… About 90 percent of the time [Holliday] ignores me. But it’s good to have the separation.”

Of bands or artists that he’d like to see take the Hardly Strictly stage but haven’t yet, Hellman replies, “I would love to get Merle Haggard… It’s pretty disappointing that he’s never played.”

Since Hellman is so warm and eager to talk about his work, I figured it’s time to ask about the after-parties, and how I can crash them. Unfortunately, I’m shot down.

“There is one after-party, but it’s only for musicians. And I’ll tell you why you can’t crash it: The first couple of years I had a lot of friends there, and I almost got in fistfights with my friends, because it’s Saturday night and they get really drunk. And you know, we have unbelievable musicians there! So we made it strictly for musicians. And for the most part, we don’t even have their families there.”

So how does he feel the community of San Francisco lends itself to the overall experience of the festival? “I think, over the years, on the one side you now have people saying that they hate it because it’s too crowded and they’ll never go see it, and I say, ‘That’s really dumb. Forget the festival. Choose one stage and spend the day there and you’ll see at least four or five of your favorite bands, and if you don’t like the crowds don’t try to fight them from stage to stage.’ I mean, you’ll end up doing that anyways, but there are a lot of people who just go to the Rooster stage, settle in, and spend the day there, or two days there. But you know, I love the atmosphere; it’s kinda like Burning Man on steroids. People really try to get along; people are kind to each other. I think the people here really love it.”

I tell him that it’s perhaps my favorite event in San Francisco, and I think that’s the consensus among the people that go. It’s a very special and immensely generous gift that he’s given an entire community of people, and that’s quite a lofty legacy. Hellman replies, “I can’t decide if it’s just a lovely thing to do or if it’s the world’s most selfish gift. Maybe a little of both. But to be able to do this, to be in a position to be able to do it—the contrast I always draw is, would you rather own a Cezanne or put on a festival? And in my mind, maybe because my taste level is so low, you know it’s not even close. To be able to give this to three-quarters of a million people other than just something that’s in my house and is something I look at every night… It’s fun to give. I mean, I’ll be in an airport some place and see some guy wearing a Hardly Strictly t-shirt.

“The things that happen like that… I was driving back from Stinson one evening, and there was this young woman out there hitchhiking. And so I stopped, and I said, ‘Are you an axe murderer or something?’ And she said, ‘No, are you?’ And I said, ‘No. Well, jump in.’ And I was listening to classical music on the radio, and she said, ‘Oh, you like classical music? What you really ought to see, there’s this unbelievably wonderful festival…’ And I said—and this shows how self-centered I really am—I said, ‘Do you know who puts on that festival? Me!’

“So those are the things. I ran over a curb going over to Berkeley a couple weeks ago and flattened three of the tires on my car. And I was standing there waiting for Triple A and this guy comes up and said, ‘Are you the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass guy?’ And I said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘My whole year revolves around that.’ And how can you not be sorta vain abut that? I’m just as thankful to them for coming and hanging out.”

[The Vault bids farewell to Warren Hellman, founder of San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

In the beginning, there were tapes — literally thousands of tapes of every format used in the capture of moving picture and sound from the last 50 years.  Some were in such a state that they may only have had one more play-back left in them before the footage they contained was stripped away forever, while many others suffered from dubious labeling practices, making it difficult to determine what sort of content they might hold, where it was filmed, or even when.  It has taken four years and millions of dollars to archive and restore this content so that it may be preserved and presented in the best possible form for your enjoyment, and we are proud to announce that the time has come for the great unveiling — the Concert Video section of Wolfgang’s Vault has arrived.

Bringing these aging concerts into the Internet era was painstaking work from beginning to end.  Utilizing the best facilities available, we sought to gently improve the quality of our video concerts without robbing them of their natural vintage flavor.  Once restored, each video was reviewed by our team of music experts to assess quality and catalog information about each performance, including exhaustive research to verify dates and venues of performances, as well as titles and cue points for each individual song — tens of thousands in all from the Bill Graham Archive, the King Biscuit Flower Hour, and the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals.

During the course of this process, we uncovered a huge spectrum of performances from some of the biggest names in music at legendary venues across the country: we found the Who at Tanglewood when Bill Graham brought the Fillmore East to Massachusetts, we found Ray Charles casually joining Aretha Franklin at the piano during the recording of her landmark live album at the Fillmore West, Lynyrd Skynyrd playing the Oakland Coliseum just a few short months before their tragic plane crash, even the Sex Pistols performing their last concert ever at Winterland — and that’s only the beginning.

We found hours of terrific concerts by lesser-known acts stretching all the way back to the ‘60s, and we have treated these with the same care and attention given to their more famous contemporaries.

Our goal is always to be as true to the live source recordings as possible, and we have maintained that commitment with our video content.  In exploring the Concert Video section, you will immediately notice a wide variety in recording quality, even in videos from the same era:

Excellent Audio and Video

Excellent Audio / Dark Video

Poor Audio / Dark Video

When considering these concerts in their historical context, we simply couldn’t justify not sharing some of them due to these flaws.

It is important to remember that most venues were not lit to maximize the quality of video recordings, and the equipment available at the time offered little to compensate; consequently some of the content appears quite dark as stage lights change or come down altogether between songs.

Luckily in most cases, the audio portions of these videos are spectacular, so using the music as our guide, we have included even concerts or portions thereof that are less than perfect visually.  Likewise, there are rare occasions where the audio suffers due to degradation or limitations of the recording method, or even simply from the unavoidable complications of live sound, but we have chosen to feature these portions as well.

We’ve also included some live concert ambiance whenever available — you’ll see the audience filing in and hear Bill Graham introducing the band; you’ll even get the rare glimpse backstage.

All of this has been carefully preserved and curated in an effort to bring you the most authentic live concert video available.

And because we love live music, all of this incredible archival footage inspired us to create new concert videos, too.  The best in indie rock from San Francisco’s annual Noise Pop Festival and Austin’s SXSW have been added to our already stellar collection of videos.

Plus, we’re adding more all the time with upcoming location shoots across the country, and with our Vault Sessions series, which offers a little peek inside the Vault with some of the best performers on tour from yesterday and today.

To showcase all of this outstanding material, the Concert Video section of Wolfgang’s Vault has been designed for easy browsing and sharing.  From any video page, you can share videos via Facebook or Twitter or simply by email, and registered users have the added benefit of saving their favorite videos to their MyVault page for easy access.

As you browse through the Concert Video section you may notice some familiar scenes along with the rarely and never-before-seen footage.  Wolfgang’s Vault owns the copyright to 98% of the content featured on the site, and we have licensed parts of these concerts for film and television, including productions by MTV, VH1, CMT, CBS, and A&E.

All copyrights have been filed with the Library of Congress, and the few videos that we do not own have been licensed from a third party.  Licensing is an important part of our business, so please contact us directly if you are interested in using some of this content in an upcoming project.

Once again, dear friends, we find ourselves at the beginning of something truly wonderful, and we are honored to share it with you, our faithful community.  In the coming weeks and months we will continue to add new videos and feature classic material from our collection.  We also understand that maintaining this vast archive is an on-going process, and we will be making improvements to existing content and site features along the way.

Please enjoy this latest addition to Wolfgang’s Vault, and thank you for your continued support.

Cheers,

Braden Towne
Director of Video Programming

Watch videos at Wolfgang’s Vault

[Announcing the Arrival of Concert Video is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Bolstered by a stint opening for the Who in ‘73 which solidified their reputation as a powerful rock ‘n roll machine capable of holding their own even against the juggernaut that was Townshend, Moon, et al, the band was enjoying ever-increasing fame by the time of this Bay Area appearance.   But you can’t take the country out of the boy, and Van Zant and his band mates never lost sight of their down home, Southern roots in Jacksonville, Florida.  Take a look at this exclusive footage, and remember that all-too-brief time when Ronnie Van Zant stood center-stage.

And if one shot of Skynyrd wasn’t enough, you can drink the whole bottle at  Concert Vault.

[One More from Lynyrd Skynyrd is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Rod had already been performing for years when he took the role of lead singer with the Jeff Beck Group in 1966, and in that union, the eponymous guitar player had found the perfect complement to his unhinged virtuosity.  At 21, Rod already possessed the confident swagger and whiskey throated vocals that would become his trademark, but there was also a tender sweetness evident that can likely be attributed to his fondness for R&B artists like Sam Cooke.

The opening to “Morning Dew” shows this softer side Rod’s voice before descending into total electric chaos near the two minute mark; anyone that can stand up to Beck’s machine gun bolero with nothing but a microphone has already passed the test.

When the Jeff Beck Group eventually dissolved, Rod and band-mate Ronnie Wood took up with the recently smaller Small Faces who had just lost singer/guitarist Steve Marriott after years of textbook abuse at the hands of the music industry.  A rather difficult point for the band, but for Rod Stewart it was the moment that would solidify his reputation as one of the best singers and songwriters of all time, both with the Faces, as the new incarnation came to be known, and simultaneously as a solo artist himself.

If the Faces aren’t the best band of the 1970s, then they’re at least the most fun and lovable.  Alternately trading in raucous, rip-this-joint belligerence and bleary morning-after sentimentality, they were everything great rock ‘n roll should be and more.  This performance of “Too Bad”, even with the absence of founding Face Ronnie Lane, demonstrates exactly this point – the Faces came to have a good time, so expect them to throw an arm around your shoulders and drag you in merrily.

Of course, this sort of calamitous perfection could only teeter towards oblivion for so long before the wheels came off, and off they came when the demands and success of Rod’s solo career took priority.

Whatever your opinion of the ensuing years of Rod Stewart’s music, there remains that sly charm, and above all else, that singular voice.  While many of his contemporaries have persevered by doing their best impression of their younger selves, Rod has entertained various styles that suited him at the time, and he’s willing to admit his mistakes.  In a way, the path he’s chosen has allowed him to do the one thing that has eluded a lot of rock starts of his era – age gracefully.

So I wish Rod Stewart a happy 66th birthday.  And when I finally nail down who should be on guitar, bass and drums in the greatest supergroup of all time, Rod will still be standing in the spotlight up front.

[The Curious Case of Rod Stewart is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

If this song doesn’t at least make you crack a smile, you can expect a big lump of coal in your stocking from me, because your last name must be Scrooge.  At their best, Quiet Riot epitomizes everything that is fun and joyous about heavy metal.  But for their success they are forever indebted to another hairy band of miscreants.

With their outrageous stage antics and fist-pounding anthems like “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”, Slade served as inspiration for countless hard rock and metal bands that followed in their wake.  While never garnering huge audiences in the States, Slade were revered back home in England where rabid fans were rewarded in 1973 with a holiday song all their own.

“Merry Xmas Everybody” is perfect as a Christmas carol, but it’s perfect as rock and roll, as well, and the same glad tidings can be drawn from both.

It’s true that family and friends and the spirit of giving are all undeniably sources of love, comfort and joy, but I’ll probably be spending a little time with Slade and Quiet Riot this Christmas, too.

Listen to Quiet Riot at the San Antonio Civic Center, 10/19/1984.

[Metal Health for Xmas is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

In the course of our work here, we often have the great privilege of unearthing a rare gem of a concert — a performance that sparks conversation around our offices, affirms fans’ adoration, and surprises new listeners — and Dio live at the San Jose Civic Auditorium was one such show.

The sheer explosiveness of this performance makes it easy to imagine the spectacle of Dio in his prime. The man and the band which bore his name attacked every stage with unrivaled energy and theatricality, spinning instrumental wizardry and histrionic vocals into an extravaganza often emulated but seldom duplicated.

While we are heavyhearted today, we are grateful for the vast amount of music that Ronnie James made in his lifetime, and proud of his concerts that we are able to share with you.  Take some time to explore more of the magic of Ronnie James Dio on Concert Vault.

Listen to Dio, live at the San Jose Civic Auditorium, October 5, 1983

Read Crawdaddy!’s remembrance of Ronnie James Dio

[Long live the music of Ronnie James Dio is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

It may be a bit of an obvious place to start, but this track from AC/DC’s eponymous 1979 album makes it clear where the evening is headed right out of the gate. And if Hell is your destination, this particular band of hirsute Australians are undoubtedly scarier than anything Satan could conjure, making them ideal travel companions.

Though many of rock ‘n’ roll’s early pioneers managed to rile the delicate sensibilities of mid-20th century America, most of their performance antics now seem quaint. True shock rock as we’ve come to know it begins here. Alice Cooper was ghoulishly glamming it up with grease paint and stage blood when Kiss was still boogie-rockin’ in Staten Island rec centers, and his creepiness shows no signs of fading – he’s even made golf a little more scary.

These quirky brainiacs might seem an odd choice amidst a gaggle of gruesome hedonists, but the unnerving quality of David Byrne’s trembling vocal makes “Psycho Killer” a chilling listen in a much more relatable way. This is no fantasy narrative about monsters and ghouls; this is the quiet guy in the flat upstairs nervously coming unhinged, and you might be the first name on his hit list. It’s modernist fright for the art school set, and it’s deeply terrifying.

What Halloween playlist would be complete without the Prince of Darkness himself? Ozzy was so scary, he got kicked out of Black Sabbath, which by itself is pretty alarming when his bandmates’ proclivities are considered. But Ozzy’s evil genius pushed him to even greater heights without the mighty Sabbath. 40 years into his career he still reigns supreme, as illustrated by this galloping ode to lycanthropy.

A more contemporary entry, for sure, but no less fiendish in its message. L.A. power pop favorites Phantom Planet even share their name with a kitschy ‘60s Sci-fi film. But the shivers don’t end there: Manic guitar swells and the carnal urgency of singer Alex Greenwald’s holler create a delightfully unsettling atmosphere in this performance.

The creepy fun continues with the complete Spooks and Creeps playlist on Concert Vault.

[Things That Go Rock! in the Night is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

I came to the guitar at a young age and mostly by accident.  I enjoyed music, and I certainly was no athlete, so in an effort to get me involved in something extracurricular, my parents asked if I might be interested in taking guitar lessons.  I was 7 years old.  I began on a 3/4-size classical guitar, and politely sat in a tiny studio week after week while my instructor went over my previous assignment, at which I had barely glanced.  This continued for a couple of years, until two gifts arrived that would profoundly influence the rest of my life – my brother got a copy of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Jimi Plays Monterey, and I got an electric guitar.

To this day, Jimi’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival renders me slack-jawed in utter amazement.  It’s almost inconceivable how much fucking noise those three guys made, and when considered in the context of its time, the performance truly boggles the mind.  What must people have thought when they heard that?  There are sounds on that record that aren’t even recognizable as instruments, but the moment I heard it, I knew I wanted to make that noise, too.

This was the mid-‘80s, and the musical landscape was ripe with shredding guitar players.  I was a fan of many, but those closest to my heart were the ones that echoed the bluesy psychedelic abandon of the Hendrix Experience, and chief among these was Stevie Ray Vaughan.  With influences tacked to his billowy, paisley sleeve, Stevie tore into the instrument with passion and aggression, but still sounded so fluid and effortless.  Though it is certainly a cliché to state it in such a way, his guitar was absolutely an extension of his body – there was no delineation between the two – and it was awesome.

And the tone of his guitar!  Hendrix I could approximate by simply plugging in and turning everything all the way up, and I certainly learned a lot about harmonics and overtones and feedback control, but SRV’s sound was gorgeous and deliberate – the product of a very specific combination of guitar and amp, and little else, except of course the hands of a one-of-a-kind player.  In fact, a very lucrative industry has been born from guitarists attempting to emulate the tones of Hendrix and SRV.  And it is here that I first began to stray.

Much of my professional life was spent in a guitar store where my days were spent talking to people about their heroes and trying to help them achieve a similar sound and technique.  While this could have been an opportunity to learn and share with kindred spirits, it quickly became a colossal drag.  I grew tired of talking about wah-wah pedals and 6L6 tubes versus EL84s, and tired, too, of talking about my heroes.  I sought out increasingly obscure bands, and eschewed technique in favor of attitude.  In short, I was becoming a snob, too cool for all that guitar god nonsense – “you think you’re the first guy on earth to discover Hendrix?”

But now, a little older and wiser, and with the benefit of the Concert Vault, I think I must admit that I was wrong…  at least in part.  I don’t regret all the music I ‘discovered’ for myself during that period, or the music that I continue to find.  What I do regret is that it came at the expense of some of the things that made me love music and guitar in the first place.  I convinced myself that the two couldn’t coexist in my heart and in my record collection, and that was foolish.

So, I’m reclaiming classic rock and guitar gods for myself, starting with this Stevie Ray Vaughan concert.  And I’m looking forward to November, when we’ll be Cracking the Vault on hundreds of other new performances and those already streaming, making them available for download for the very first time.  More epiphanies to come!

[Forgive me Guitar God, for I have sinned… is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

There are a couple of reasons for this bizarre behavior.  First, he would never purchase records or CDs himself (I think it goes without saying at this point that we were in college BDE – Before the Downloading Era) because he was both thrifty and too lazy to be bothered with the part of the album that wasn’t the song he liked.  This meant everything he listened to had to be borrowed and copied.  Secondly, his thriftiness precluded his possession of many furnishings commonly associated with college students, chiefly among them a stereo system of any kind.  The repercussions of this second point were that, not only were his duping projects always conducted in my dorm room, the enjoyment of their product was practiced there, too.

To say that I didn’t understand this predilection at the time would be an understatement.  Certainly there were loads of songs that I loved and would listen to at least once a day, but the pleasures of, say, Oasis’ “Wonderwall” for 90 consecutive minutes during a Madden ’97 tournament was well beyond me.  Then I heard this:

This, gentle readers, is one of the purest and most expertly crafted pop songs of all time, and if you don’t like it, may I direct you to foxnews.com, because you hate music, and fun, and everything that is good.  I could listen to this song almost endlessly and never tire.  I’ve already heard it about eight times during the composition of this post, and I think I’ll play it again.  How about a version from the songwriter, himself?

This is Elvis Costello’s song, and it’s his to tear apart in his inimitable fashion, but blow for blow, I’m sticking with the early-Beatles perfection of Edmunds (who debuted this track on the contextually hilarious Repeat When Necessary album).  Regardless of the performance, and there are a few on Concert Vault, including one by Edmunds’ erstwhile pub rock all-stars, Rockpile, this song has more hooks than a heavyweight bout.  If you’re not punch-drunk by the end of the first play, you need to listen to it again… and again, and again.

[Girls Talk, We Listen is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]