Notorious B.I.G., Life After Death (Disc 2) Full Album Zip 16
Reuquen Boyett
Who could have thought of conjuring a musical marriage between the hard-rocking, mystical frontman of blues-rock legends Led Zeppelin and the fiddle-playing chanteuse most famous for her bluegrass with band Union Station? Plant and Krauss did after finding common ground during their first performance together at a Lead Belly tribute concert in 2004.
"When we got 75 percent of the way down the line, I realized we'd created something that I could never have dreamt of," said Plant on the pair's Facebook page. Krauss shared that enthusiasm, saying the differences between the artists' backgrounds and career paths only served to enhance the collaboration.
Run-D.M.C. were a successful hip-hop group from Queens, N.Y., with a few minor hits before they decided to meld their style of rap with classic rock by dusting off Aerosmith's 1977 hit, "Walk This Way." The trio incorporated their own lyrics and style, and invited Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry to join the party on their 1986 breakthrough album, Raising Hell.
Not only did Run-D.M.C. score a No. 4 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (and their first GRAMMY nomination for Best R&B Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal for the album), but rap became a mainstream radio fixture and Aerosmith was jolted back into relevance, launching into arguably the most successful decade of their career.
More recently, metal maestros Metallica joined with art-rock pioneer Lou Reed for 2011's Lulu, which, according to comments by Reed on the project's website, was "the best thing I ever did, with the best guys I could possibly find on the planet. I wouldn't change a hair on its head."
The burgeoning electronica/dance music genre has also been gaining mainstream presence on the strength collaborations featuring DJs and artists, such as David Guetta's performance of "I Can Only Imagine" featuring Chris Brown and Lil Wayne at the 54th GRAMMYs as part of the telecast's first-ever dance segment. Foo Fighters also collaborated with Deadmau5 for the GRAMMY-nominated remix of the rock band's "Rope."
Other pairings that will likely be ingrained in musical minds for decades to come include David Bowie and Bing Crosby's 1977 Christmas TV special performances of "Little Drummer Boy" and "Peace On Earth"; Frank Sinatra and Bono's 1993 duet of "I've Got You Under My Skin"; and William Shatner's entertaining 2004 album Has Been, featuring songs with Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Brad Paisley, and Henry Rollins.
Arguably one of the more unexpected collaborations came with Elton John and Leon Russell's 2010 effort, The Union. The album was a smashing success, garnering a GRAMMY nomination for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals for "If It Wasn't For Bad" at the 53rd GRAMMYs, and earning the No. 3 spot on Rolling Stone's 30 Best Albums of 2010 list. The Union also marked the highest-charting release for both John and Russell since the '70s.
While John and Russell had been good friends and well-decorated contemporaries who respected each other's music, they hadn't spoken for 35 years until John picked up the phone one day and called Russell, one of his musical heroes. He had one goal in mind for the album.
"If Leon can get the accolades he deserves and be financially OK for the rest of his life, I will have done something decent with my music," John told The New York Times in October 2010. "His music takes me back to the most wonderful time in my life, and it makes me so angry that he's been forgotten."
"As a person, I live very much in the moment, not too far in the past and not very far in the future either," Slash asserts. "So it's hard for me to really look at everything I'm doing in the bigger scheme of things."
The initial seed for the project was planted with the guitarist's late '90s group Slash's Blues Ball, which jammed on genre classics. Those live, spontaneous collaborations appealed to him, so when he had a small open window to get something done recently, he jumped at the chance to finally make a full-on blues album.
Released May 17, Orgy Of The Damned serves as an authentic bridge from his musical roots to his many hard rock endeavors. It also sees a full-circle moment: two Blues Ball bandmates, bassist Johnny Griparic and keyboardist Teddy Andreadis, helped lay down the basic tracks. Further seizing on his blues exploration, Slash will be headlining his own touring blues festival called S.E.R.P.E.N.T. in July and August, with support acts including the Warren Haynes Band, Keb' Mo', ZZ Ward, and Eric Gales.
Wow, that's awesome. That was the track that I knew was going to be the most left of center for the average person, but that was my favorite song when [Stevie Wonder's 1973 album] Innervisions came out when I was, like, 9 years old. I loved that song. This record's origins go back to a blues band that I put together back in the '90s.
Right. We used to play "Superstition," that Stevie Wonder song. I did not want to record that [for Orgy Of The Damned], but I still wanted to do a Stevie Wonder song. So it gave me the opportunity to do "Living For The City," which is probably the most complicated of all the songs to learn. I thought we did a pretty good job, and Tash [Neal] sang it great. I'm glad you dig it because you're probably the first person that's actually singled that song out.
With the Blues Ball, you performed Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher" and Robert Johnson's "Crossroads," and they surface here. Isn't it amazing it took this long to record a collection like this?
[Blues Ball] was a fun thrown-together thing that we did when I [was in, I] guess you call it, a transitional period. I'd left Guns N' Roses [in 1996], and it was right before I put together a second incarnation of Snakepit.
I'd been doing a lot of jamming with a lot of blues guys. I'd known Teddy [Andreadis] for a while and been jamming with him at The Baked Potato for years prior to this. So during this period, I got together with Ted and Johnny [Griparic], and we started with this Blues Ball thing. We started touring around the country with it, and then even made it to Europe. It was just fun.
It had been stewing in the back of my mind subconsciously. So I called Teddy and Johnny, and I said, Hey, let's go in the studio and just put together a set and go and record it. We got an old set list from 1998, picked some songs from an app, picked some other songs that I've always wanted to do that I haven't gotten a chance to do.
Then I had the idea of getting Tash Neal involved, because this guy is just an amazing singer/guitar player that I had worked with in a blues thing a couple years prior to that. So we had the nucleus of this band.
Then I thought, Let's bring in a bunch of guest singers to do this. I don't want to try to do a traditional blues record, because I think that's going to just sound corny. So I definitely wanted this to be more eclectic than that, and more of, like, Slash's take on these certain songs, as opposed to it being, like, "blues." It was very off-the-cuff and very loose.
It's refreshing to hear Brian Johnson singing in his lower register on "Killing Floor" like he did in the '70s with Geordie, before he got into AC/DC. Were you expecting him to sound like that?
I think he was one of the first calls that I made, and it was really encouraging the way that he reacted to the idea of the song. So I went to a studio in Florida. We'd already recorded all the music, and he just fell into it in that register.
When it came to doing it for this record, I wanted to have something different, and the idea of having a young girl's voice telling the story of talking to her mom to find out about her infamous late father, just made sense to me. And Demi was the first person that I thought of. She's got such a great, soulful voice, but it's also got a certain kind of youth to it.
When I told her about it, she reacted like Brian did: "Wow, I would love to do that." There's some deeper meaning about the song to her and her personal life or her experience. We went to the studio, and she just belted it out. It was a lot of fun to do it with her, with that kind of zeal.
"Oh Well" was a song that I didn't hear until I was about 12 years old. It was on KMET, a local radio station in LA. I didn't even know there was a Fleetwood Mac before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I always loved that song, and I think it probably had a big influence on me without me even really realizing it. So no, it didn't have a direct influence on "Double Talkin' Jive," but I get it now that you bring it up.
Playing with Carole King [in 1993] was a really educational experience because she taught me a lot about something that I thought that I did naturally, but she helped me to fine tune it, which was soloing within the context of the song. [It was] really just a couple of words that she said to me during this take that stuck with me. I can't remember exactly what they were, but it was something having to do with making room for the vocal. It was really in passing, but it was important knowledge.
The session that really was the hardest one that I ever did was [when] I was working with Ray Charles before he passed away. I played on his "God Bless America [Again]" record [on 2002's Ray Charles Sings for America], just doing my thing. It was no big deal. But he asked me to play some standards for the biopic on him [2004's Ray], and he thought that I could just sit in with his band playing all these Ray Charles standards.
That was something that they gave me the chord charts for, and it was over my head. It was all these chord changes. I wasn't familiar with the music, and most of it was either a jazz or bebop kind of a thing, and it wasn't my natural feel.
When you say styles, I don't really have a wish list for that. Things just happen. I was just working with this composer, Bear McCreary. We did a song on this epic record that's basically a soundtrack for this whole graphic novel thing, and the compositions are very intense. He's very particular about feel, and about the way each one of these parts has to be played, and so on. That was a little bit challenging. We're going to go do it live at some point coming up.
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