How We Got Here

This will be complicated so I beg your indulgence. It can be argued if you show up in this corner of the Interwebz on a recurring basis you are already being indulgent. Fair Point (I'll wear a cap so you can't see it. Better?).

I live in an area of the USA where the phrase 'great radio' is never uttered. If you make your living on the air in my neighborhood, nothing personal; the stations aren't to my taste so I do a lot of CD listening to both really new music that often bewilders as it entices an old fogey like me as well as long doses of familiar music from people I know.

At some point along the way, I picked up a heavily annotated CD of "The Hollies- Epic Anthology from the Original Master Tapes" (Epic, in this case, being the subsidiary of CBS much of their US releases were on as opposed to well, you know the other epic).

I should have paid more attention to the label affiliation since my favorite stuff, "Look Through Any Window" (from Graham Gouldman, he later of 10 CC), "On a Carousel," and, most particularly, "Bus Stop," isn't on this disc because the originators of the compilation couldn't/didn't/wouldn't get the masters from whoever owns Imperial Records catalog.

That's sort of too bad because, and I suspect I didn't pay full price for the CD (why do they still cost so much money, btw? Corporate Greed? Oh, yeah that would explain it), it is an uneven listening experience, to be as circumspect as I know how to be and am genetically capable of.

It does have "Sandy" my favorite cover of a Springsteen song (sadly, instead of its sales going gold, the song went Plywood in Indiana) but it also has "Everything is Sunshine," and "Do the Best You Can." The former was previously unreleased and was that way for a reason (just sayin').

A few years ago my wife and I caught Tony Hicks on stage at The Big E in West Springfield, Massachusetts (The Big E is New England's version of a State Fair and is huge fun, especially if you like eating things that are deep-fried) and he looked and sounded well enough, though my ears had their nostalgia filters on so his mileage may have varied but the crowd really enjoyed him.

That's all really. Like most days in this neck of the woods, close to nothing is revealed but I did want to share a pretty decent and sort of unusual sounding live reading of "Bus Stop" with Allan Clarke and Graham Nash, co-founders of The Hollies, and David Crosby, for whom along with Steven Stills, Nash left The Hollies before Woodstock to go on to bigger if not better things. 
-bill kenny