BIG IN THE BOYS ROOM

What do you get when you have three teenage brothers with insatiable thirsts for guitar rock, who don't want their individual record collections to overlap, combined with two stereos, and one bedroom? Besides stereo wars happening on a daily basis (despite the parent mandated one-stereo-at-a-time rule), you get junior proto-crate diggers, each trying to score that new favorite band before the others. Given the era, there was no shortage of bands for me and my brothers to discover, and a few were pretty obscure given our young age. For example, Ted got Beck, Bogart and Appice, Tim got Captain Beyond, and I got Mountain. That's just three random ones (not in any sort of chronological order). Another few that immediately come to mind: Randy California, Johnny Winter, Montrose, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher, Roy Buchanan, Sabbath, Mahogany Rush, Peter Kaukoken, ...you get the idea. Somewhere in the frenzy, my younger brother Ted hit on Cactus, a perfect example of that era. They were hard rock, very loosely based in blues, and had the requisite guitar slinger, bonus points if he had a Marshall stack. (On 'Ot N' Sweaty, the first Cactus LP to enter the bedroom, it was Werner Fritzschings.) Listening to them now, it's almost embarrassing to hear their reworking of Howlin' Wolf's "Evil," but they were typical of the bands we listened to. (We were a year or two away from backtracking to the original blues artists many of these bands covered.)

I hung out with Ted for several hours last night. It was our first one-on-one in a while. There was a lot of talk about music, and it was great to talk about those bands again, as well as music in general. So these are for him.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Cactus - One Way or Another mp3 at The Cargo Culte
Cactus - Parchman Farm mp3 at Cold Splinters
Cactus - Evil mp3 at La Vie en Robe
Howlin' Wolf - Evil mp3 at Snuhthing Anything