Category Archives: Ramblings

I listen to a lot of Podcasts over a wide range of varying topics: music, sports, retro gaming, retro computers, a Wharton statistics podcast, among others.

One of the really great music podcasts I listen to regularly is The Prog Report, a podcast that covers the latest in Progressive Rock as well as goes back and looks at the history of Prog. They have some really great guests and it helps me find music I otherwise likely wouldn’t find or hear.

A recent episode of The Prog Report was the challenge of coming up with the Top 5 songs by Queensryche. So 5 each from the host, Roie Avin, Frontiers Music US Label Manager Nick Tieder and Radio personality and Rock expert Eddie Trunk.

After hearing the podcast and sharing it with a music bud, I thought we should take a crack at it ourselves. Wow, what a tough one! As you’ll hear in my audio portion (warning, not a professional, but I thought it would put some peer pressure on my bud), I did narrow down my view of the band and my Top 5, to the first 5 releases, the self-titled EP and then the first four full-length albums. I know the band continues beyond those 5 releases, but for me, that era was such a formative time for much of my music tastes, it’s where I felt it made sense to focus. I appreciate what they released after Empire and are still releasing today and am glad to see them still out on the road releasing new music.

The new album, The Verdict with Todd La Torre on vocal, is quite good, but the band is down to Eddie Jackson and Michael Wilton from the original lineup, so to me it is a new era of the band entirely.

Click below to hear my Top 5 Queensrÿche tracks and take pity on the “DJ”, he’s very green 😉

A couple weeks ago we were sitting around the house relaxing and I decided to fire up the YouTube app and queue some old live music to play on the big screen.  It’s something I’ve always enjoyed, playing DJ, from both my own collection and what can now be so easily found online through the various streaming sources, YouTube and the like.  Sometimes it just turns into reminiscing and other times introducing a friend to new-to-them music that I think they will like based on other mutual interests. (Or such as sucking in a non-KISS fan using the brilliantly recorded MTV Unplugged live show).

For whatever reason, we had recently been talking about old  TV shows and Don Kirshners Rock Concert came up in the conversation, so I went looking for some archive shows, which thankfully, there are a ton of on YouTube and also available to purchase in collections.   While looking for those shows I also came across archives of Burt Sugarman’s, The Midnight Special.  Just wow, between those two shows, what a collection of amazing live performances from the 70s and early 80s from across just about every genre of music during that decade or so that both shows aired.  I highly recommend checking out the history of both of those shows, some very rare live TV performances.

One of the live performances I found was of “Black Magic Woman” from 1974, by the early Peter Green led Fleetwood Mac.  At the time we watched it, I actually thought it was them covering the Santana classic, honestly just not being that familiar with the Fleetwood Mac era prior to the Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckhingham/Rumours that started the huge popularity of the band.  I was certainly aware of Peter Green the musician and of the earlier generation of the band, but not much of the specifics of his writing and the bands discography.

Bored and can’t find something to listen to?  Fire up YouTube and do a search, it will lead you down a rabbit hole for an hour two of queued up music you might not own or have listened to in a long time.