Free Republic

Daily Sporran No.7. Cover of "March The Mad Scientist" (by Jethro Tull) | 2:00Stewart Wood | 4.92K subscribers | 1,750 views | March 26, 2020

Steely Dan’s long lost song "The Second Arrangement" has surfaced online. The track, recorded in December 1979 while the band was laying down material for their 1980 album Gaucho, has long held a kind of mythological place among Steely Dan fans. As the story goes, the group recorded the majority of the song, with only a few simple additions needed to bring it to completion. After heading home for the night, they returned to the studio the next morning, only to discover that the "The Second Arrangement" tapes had been accidentally erased. The band tried to recreate what they’d recorded,...

On December 9, 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on TV screens across America and instantly captured the hearts and ears of a generation. Bolstering the animated special, based on Charles M. Schulz's immensely popular PEANUTS comic strip, was an engaging score from Bay Area jazz artist Vince Guaraldi, who brought characters like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Snoopy to life through his evocative cues... Guaraldi's soundtrack, meanwhile, has since become one of the best-selling jazz albums in history, second only to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, and regularly ranks among America's top-selling holiday albums every December.Vince Guaraldi Trio - Christmas...

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter recalled how he helped make Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” a hit using a $35 guitar. And the Steely Dan co-founder, who went on to work with the Doobie Brothers, said he nearly hadn’t bothered attending the session for Summer’s 1979 album Bad Girls. The single was Summer’s second of four No. 1 hits. It opened her music to new listeners with a more rock-oriented sound as she crossed over from disco music under the auspices of Italian producer Giorgio Moroder. “It almost didn’t happen,” Baxter told Vertex Effects in a recent interview (below). “My assistant forgot to...