Bob John Publicity

17/06/2026

To reiterate...
"I love making these videos, it brings me from the depths of depression to a nice warm glow from a job done well, and this one is a definite return to normality and my usual standard...thanks for listening and for watching." 🙏

Had a really lousy day, it seemed to drag on for ages, months, lol....

17/06/2026

In 1970, James Taylor had his first big radio hit with "Fire And Rain". On his sophomore Sweet Baby James record, Taylor wrote "Fire And Rain" by himself.

"Fire And Rain" begins with, "Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone / Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you / I walked out this morning, and I wrote down this song / I just can't remember who to send it to / I've seen fire, and I've seen rain / I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end / I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend / But I always thought that I'd see you again."

The song remains a fan favorite, even after so many years. Still, Taylor admits that he regrets some of "Fire And Ice". It was partly inspired by the tragic loss of a close friend, although he wishes he had changed some of the words.

"I always felt rather bad about the line, 'The plans they made put an end to you,' because 'they' only meant 'ye gods,' or basically 'the Fates,'" Taylor says. "I never knew her folks. But I always wondered whether her folks would hear that and wonder whether it was about them."

"Fire And Rain" was inspired by the loss of a good friend. But it was also inspired by Taylor's own battle with depression and addiction. The second verse begins with, "Won't you look down upon me, Jesus / You've got to help me make a stand." The lines are inspired by Taylor's battle with drugs.

"The second verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back," Taylor reveals. "And there, Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching, and the time was at hand when I had to do it. And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in Austin Riggs, which lasted about five months."

It took Taylor three different times to write what became "Fire And Rain". Painful at the time, Taylor recalls feeling a release when it was finally completed.

"That song relieved a lot of sort of tension," Taylor tells NPR. "There were things that I needed to get rid of. Or at least get out of me, or get in front of me, or at least have some other relationship than feeling them internally, either by telling somebody else or by just putting them out in a form in front of me so that I could say, `There they are,' you know, externalizing it somehow. And that part was hard, having the feelings that needed to be expressed in that way. But it was actually a relief, like a laugh or a sigh."

15/06/2026

My musical effort tonight is "An Ordinary Tune" on classical guitar...

Picked up my nylon string and went thru a tune that I play sometime...

14/06/2026

In 1964, David Bowie began releasing music, starting with his “Liza Jane” single. 11 years and more than 20 singles later, Bowie scored his first No. 1 single in the United States, with “Fame”. On his Young Americans album, Bowie wrote the song with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.

Fame may have been relatively new to Bowie, but it was familiar territory to Lennon as part of the Beatles. It’s Bowie who invited Lennon to the studio, where they began working on “Fame”. Lennon also sings and plays guitar on the song.

“We’d been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that. He was telling me, ‘You’re being shafted by your present manager,’” Bowie recalls with a laugh. “That was basically the line. And John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap. That there’s no such thing as good management in rock ‘n’ roll, and you should try to do it without it.”

When Bowie wrote “Fame”, he was coming to terms with the downside of success as a rock star, which is largely unknown to everyone but a celebrity.

“Fame itself, of course, doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant,” Bowie says. “That must be pretty well known by now. I’m just amazed how fame is being posited as the be all and end all, and how many of these young kids who are being foisted on the public have been talked into this idea that anything necessary to be famous is all right. It’s a sad state of affairs. However arrogant and ambitious I think we were in my generation, I think the idea was that if you do something really good, you’ll become famous. The emphasis on fame itself is something new.”

Sadly for Bowie, in later years, he found even more frustration with being a global superstar.

“Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them,” he says.

Alomar is Bowie’s guitar player, who came up with the riff in “Fame”. In 1990, the song appeared on the soundtrack for Pretty Woman.

13/06/2026

When The Zombies first walked into the studio in the West Hampstead neighborhood of London, they didn’t imagine they were about to cut a hit record. In fact, the thoughts running through their mind were quite the opposite, according to vocalist Colin Blunstone.

In a 2026 interview with Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty of BBC Breakfast, the singer revealed that the most prominent thought passing through his head was that the music industry wasn’t the business for him. Thankfully for all of us, he persevered.

Going into the studio as a young band can be quite the daunting experience. Recording music is a vastly different beast from live performance. (And that’s true even if a band opts to live-track everything at the same time.) There’s no room to hide on a recording. If you don’t know your part, it’ll show. If the engineer doesn’t know what they’re doing, that’ll show. Indeed, cutting a record is a tedious process that requires everyone to be at the top of their game. And that can be quite the shock for a band accustomed to the looser nature of playing on stage.

Based on Colin Blunstone’s recollections, that wasn’t the only hurdle The Zombies had to overcome to get through their first session at Decca. While speaking on BBC Breakfast, Blunstone revealed that their studio engineer was “blind drunk” and “very, very aggressive.” The singer recalled the engineer shouting obscenities into the talkback mic, pumping into the musicians’ headphones.

“Within twenty minutes, I knew this business was not for me,” Blunstone said matter-of-factly. “It was petrifying. But luckily, we had a bit of luck. He passed out cold on the floor. We had to carry him out of the studio, and his assistant took over.”

The assistant to the overindulged studio engineer was none other than Gus Dudgeon, who would go on to produce records for other British legends like Elton John and David Bowie. Back then, though, he was nearly as green as The Zombies themselves. With the drunk engineer out of the way and no more profanities being yelled into their headphones, the band continued with their recording session.

One of the tracks from that fateful day was “She’s Not There”, which The Zombies released as a single in July 1964. “You Make Me Feel Good” was the B-side. The A-side garnered the band tremendous success, peaking at No. 12 in their native United Kingdom and an astounding No. 2 in Canada and on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Considering this was the band’s very first single, the track’s commercial performance was a massive win for The Zombies.

Thank goodness they didn’t let a drunk engineer get in the way.

13/06/2026

New guitar thing...called it

Saturday Sesh in West Wales UK...just me and my sound gear and my c...

13/06/2026

Ryland Peter Cooder (born March 15, 1947) is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.

Cooder's solo work draws upon many genres. He has played with John Lee Ho**er, Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, Gordon Lightfoot, Ali Farka Touré, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Randy Newman, Linda Ronstadt, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, David Lindley, the Chieftains, Warren Zevon, Manuel Galbán, the Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, and Carla Olson and the Textones (on record and film). He formed the band Little Village, and produced the album Buena Vista Social Club (1997), which became a worldwide hit; Wim Wenders directed the documentary film of the same name (1999), which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000.

Cooder was ranked at No. 8 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", while a 2010 list by Gibson Guitar Corporation placed him at No. 32. In 2011, he published a collection of short stories called Los Angeles Stories.

Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. (born May 17, 1942), better known by his stage name Taj Mahal, is an American blues musician. He plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments, often incorporating elements of world music into his work. Mahal has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more than 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Hawaii, and the South Pacific.

Mahal moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1964 and formed Rising Sons with fellow blues rock musicians Ry Cooder and Jessie Lee Kincaid, landing a record deal with Columbia Records soon after.

Ry Cooder here with Taj Mahal back in the day....

13/06/2026

She started the band in her mother's garage. She was 22 years old. They called themselves The Bangs. Nobody cared.

Then 5 years later, 1 song written by Prince hit number 2 on the charts. Then another hit number 1. Then the world finally paid attention. Far, far too late.

Susanna Lee Hoffs was born on January 17, 1959, in Los Angeles, California. Her father was a psychoanalyst. Her mother, Tamar, was a film director. It was a house full of art and ideas.

When Susanna was small, her mother played Beatles records. That was the moment that changed everything.

She learned guitar as a teenager. She graduated from Palisades High School in 1976, then headed to UC Berkeley. In 1980, she earned her bachelor's degree in art. She was 21 years old and had a diploma she never planned to use.

She came home with a dream that had nothing to do with any of it.

1981. Susanna connected with sisters Vicki Peterson and Debbi Peterson — 2 other young women in Los Angeles who wanted to make real music. Not manufactured pop. Guitar-driven rock. Harmony-soaked, jangly, alive. They called themselves The Bangs and played wherever anyone would have them.

Here's what most people don't know: the night before their first album was set to be pressed, they received legal notice. An East Coast band already held the name The Bangs. They had 24 hours to rename themselves.

They added 3 letters. They became The Bangles. A quiet nod to The Beatles.

1984. Their debut album, All Over the Place, came out on Columbia Records. Critics warmed to it immediately. Sales did not match the reviews. The public hadn't found them yet.

They kept writing. They kept touring.

January 13, 1986. Their second album, Different Light, arrived. The lead single was Manic Monday — written by Prince under the name Christopher, originally meant for his group Apollonia 6. He handed it to The Bangles instead.

Manic Monday climbed to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song that blocked it from the top spot? Prince's own Kiss. He had literally kept them out of number 1 with himself.

The real wave was still building.

December 20, 1986. Walk Like an Egyptian hit number 1 in the United States. It stayed there for 4 weeks. It also topped charts in Britain, Australia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Different Light was eventually certified triple platinum in America.

The Bangles were everywhere. Magazine covers. Television. Radio. Sold-out venues.

And that is when the trouble started.

The press did not know how to cover 4 women who played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. So they did what the press often does. They picked 1 face. They put it on every cover. They reduced the band to a solo act with backup players.

That face was Susanna's. She had never asked for it.

The band had always shared vocals, shared songwriting, shared the stage. Vicki Peterson was a ferocious lead guitarist. Debbi Peterson was a powerhouse drummer. Michael Steele anchored everything on bass. This was a group. 4 equal parts.

But cameras kept finding Susanna's eyes. By 1987, resentment had begun to quietly form.

October 1988. Their third album, Everything, was released. It produced 2 more massive hits — In Your Room, which Susanna co-wrote, and Eternal Flame, which she co-wrote with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly.

April 1, 1989. Eternal Flame hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped charts in 6 other countries. That achievement made The Bangles only the 3rd all-female group in history to reach number 1 on the Hot 100 more than once. The other 2 were The Shirelles and The Supremes.

The Shirelles. The Supremes. The Bangles.

And then, that same year, it ended.

1989. The band broke up. The stated reason was touring stress. The real texture of it was years of one member being pushed forward by an industry that couldn't handle 4 equals — and the damage that left behind.

Susanna went solo. The others went separate ways. For 10 years, they were apart.

1999. She reached back out. They made peace. They played music together again and remembered what they had built. By 2000, they had officially reunited. New albums followed in 2003 and 2011.

Susanna has never stopped. 5 solo studio albums. A marriage to filmmaker Jay Roach in 1993. 2 sons. And in 2023, her first novel — a romantic comedy about a musician — reviewed by the New York Times, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly. Universal Pictures bought the film rights.

She started in a garage at 22. She is still going.

What makes her story matter beyond the music is what she represents. Part of one of the most successful all-female rock bands in history — a band that wrote and played everything themselves — and the industry still tried to reduce them to 1 face on a poster.

All 4 of them refused to disappear.

Share this with someone who needs to know — that the world may only see 1 of you, but that doesn't mean the rest isn't real.