The 50 years of McCabe’s Guitar Shop will be celebrated with a three-hour special on KCRW airing from 9 a.m. to noon on Thanksgiving Day.
The guitar shop was founded 50 years ago and its back room has, over the last 30-plus years, become one of L.A.'s most treasured concert venues. I consider it key to my musical education.
Program was inspired by the McCabe's 50th Anniversary Reunion Concert held at UCLA’s Royce Hall in October. Show will be hosted by current concert director Lincoln Myerson, and features interviews with all five of McCabe’s concert directors, as well as current owner Robert Riskin, former owner Walter Camp and  many of the artists who have performed there, including T Bone Burnett, Dave Alvin, Loudon Wainwright III and Peter Case.
The show also features performances recorded at McCabe’s by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, JD Crowe and the New South, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, Jesse Winchester, John Hiatt, Dave Alvin, Richard Thompson, Gillian Welch, Dan Hicks and others.

My column for today's Daily Variety focuses on the the great guitar shop/concert venue in Santa Monica. I had to cut a line I wish was still in there: As much as other coverage of their 50th anniversary and a concert at UCLA has rightly focused on great nights at the venue, its appeal to me rested in its consistency. Whether I was seeing a show when I was 15 or 35 or 45, I believed I would experience a musical event that would not be duplicated anywhere else. That was evident any time you saw an act making their McCabe's debut.

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game" will be honored as a Towering Song at the 2008 Songwriters Hall of Fame gala on June 19 at New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel.
As a fan of the tune - and what's more fun than inserting the names of teams that are not on the field (Devil Rays, anyone?) - it is vital that everyone sing the song when they visit the ballpark.   
Maybe it's a bit trivial, but few things are more annoying than a seventh-inning stretch turned over to some jingoistic, pro-America tune instead of the 100-year-old classic by Albert von Tilzer and Jack Norworth. Is it not a bit un-American to not sing "root, root-root" at a ballgame on North American soil?
Anyhow, a bit of "Take Me Out" trivia: Norworth was inspired to write the lyrics by a sign that read "Baseball Today -Polo Grounds" in the subway.
Neither Norworth nor Von Tilzer had ever attended a baseball game before writing the song.
It was first sung by Norworth's wife, singer Nora Bayes, and popularized by various vaudeville acts.
The Haydn Quartet singing group, led by tenor Harry Macdonough, recorded the definitive popular hit rendition for Victor Records.
It was one of the most popular hits of 1908.
Perhaps the event will settle one score: The lyrics are "I don't care if I never get back" and not "ever."
One of my favorite versions is below

  A reunion of Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom - Handsome Dick Manitoba, Andy Shernoff, Ross the Boss and JP Thunderbolt - will be among the key acts at the eighth annual Joey Ramone Birthday bash on Monday at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza.
Mary Weiss of the Shangri-La's and Television guitarist Richard Lloyd will headline.
Celebrating what would have been Joey's 57th birthday, party will conclude with the Joey Ramone Birthday Bashers featuring Jesse Malin, Cheetah Chrome, Walter Lure, Tish & Snooky, Jean Beauvior, Shernoff, Joe McGinty, Thunderbolt, Al Maddy, Ivan Julian, Bobby Steele and Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh.  Also appearing are Charm School, Semi-Precious Weapons, the Independents, Local H, L.E.S. Stitches and Rachel Newman. Sean O’Sullivan's Punk Pipers will round out the night on the bagpipes.   “Little Steven” Van Zandt, Matt Pinfield and Peter Aschner will be the emcees. Tickets are $25 ($30 day of show).

Billed as their one U.S. show to commemorate the 30th anniversary of "Never Mind the Bollocks," the Sex Pistols delivered a 65-minute set - complete with bathroom break for the band - for a room full of radio contest winners, radio station Indie 103.1 personnel and Motorhead's Lemmy. Sounding polished and prepared except for some missed lyrics, the Sex Pistols will perform three 30th anni shows at Brixton Academy in London in November.   
At the Roxy in West Hollywood on Oct. 25, they performed:
Holidays in the Sun / 17 / No Feelings / New York / Liar / Pretty Vacant / Submission / No Fun / (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone / Problems / God Save the Queen / EMI / Anarchy in the U.K.

In celebration of B.B. King's 82nd birthday on Sunday, let's look back 40 years ago, when King's management made a concerted effort to expose the guitarist-singer to a rock audience. It was in 1967 that King, already a staple in the blues world, first performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Newport Folk Festival and San Francisco’s Fillmore West.
In 1968, King had a top 10 R&B hit with “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss” and shared bills with the Yardbirds, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Mothers of Invention and Terry Reid. A year later, he opened 18 shows for the Rolling Stones.

For the early show on June 8, 1968 at San Francisco's Winterland, King played:
I Don't Want You / It's Gonna Work Out Fine / Every Day I Have the Blues / How Blue Can You Get? / Please Love Me / Confessin' the Blues / Woke Up This Morning (My Baby's Gone) / Instrumental jam with Albert King / Sweet Sixteen

How good was he in 1968? Check out this TV performance.

Today - July 17, 2007 - marks the 40th anniversary of the death of John Coltrane. The tenor saxophonist who affected jazz on a level parallel to the effect the Beatles had on pop music, his legacy continues to grows for a handful of reasons. No 1: Listeners finally get it. It has taken box sets, tribute concerts, McCoy Tyner's testifying and arrangements for big bands for it all to set in - the passion this man transferred from his lips and lungs into sound remains untouched - there was no one better before and no one has come close to touching his legacy since. And for novices, the simple way to assess his music is in chronological order; it all becomes crystal clear if one hears "A Love Supreme" later rather than sooner.
Clearly he was the last giant figure in the music's history: no jazz players have approached his depth as a composer, innovator and performer. The most recent raiding of the vaults has produced "My Favorite Things: Coltrane at Newport," a 1965 concert that was released two weeks ago.
A roundup of today's Coltrane offerings on the Web: Bret Primack has a documentary on the relationship between Coltrane and Sonny Rollins; Newsday has a piece on Coltrane's New York home and a classic video; one 1965 performance of "Naima" is on YouTube; and details are set for the 30th John Coltrane Memorial Concert, which will take place in September in Boston. Sadly, JohnColtrane.com has not been updated for some time.
P.S. It was the critic Ira Gitler who coined the phrase "Sheets of Sound" to describe Trane's style. he came up with the term in late 1958 after Coltrane had left Miles Davis band and was about to embark on of the greatest journeys in the history of American music.

It was the best show at SXSW and here's to hoping it is the best show of the summer at the Hollywood Bowl. Stax Records, the label that gave Memphis its musical identity in the 1960s and remains a standard-bearer for Southern soul, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with concerts celebrations, reissues, a PBS documentary and a revival of the label by its new owners, Concord Records.
The Hollywood Bowl will be home Wednesday to the show that was previewed at Antone's during SXSW and put Booker T.  and the MG's behind two underrated legends, William Bell and Eddie Floyd.Isaac Hayes emceed that show - he continues to recover from a stroke - and he is expected to perform at the Bowl. Naturally, they will be performing songs by the label's greatest artist, Otis Redding, and it is highly likely that some Sam and Dave material will be thrown in as well.
For all the giddiness that surrounds the celebration of Stax and its sister label Volt, there is still a scar that dates back to Warner-owned Atlantic - and then CBS Records - driving the label into the ground in the early 1970s and the city of Memphis refusing to do anything to save the label's old HQ, a shuttered movie theater dubbed Soulsville U.S.A. Memphis spent the last 30 years of the 20th century attempting to recover from its place as the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the Stax legacy paid a price; the city seemingly wanted to wash away its black history, attracting the tourists with Graceland and Sun Studios. In the last few years, with the revival of Beale Street as blues-driven tourist outlet, Memphis has come to embrace its place in soul music history and even launched a Stax museum.
Some of the blame for the vanishing of Stax, too, lies with the former catalog owner, Saul Zaentz and Fantasy Records, which provided little followup to the label's brilliant three box sets that brought together every A and B side ever issued on 45 by the label. Those three spectacular box sets, buoyed by Rob Bowman's expert liner notes, are a model for any label attempting a completist approach to an era - and for a few years in the early 1990s, there were soul music fans wondering where they would find the Mad-Lads, the Soul Children or Barbara Lewis. (Rufus Thomas did actually enjoy a bit of a revival at the time.)
Best part of the 50th is getting Bell centerstage with a band equal to his talent. He continues to record, but the lack of financing is always apparent in the sound of his efforts. If there is one musician from Stax's past that should be ushered back to the label, it is he. And Wednesday, not only will we get Hayes, Bell and Floyd, Mable John, the former Raelette and sister of Little Willie John, will sing as well.