By the time he joined Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968, David Clayton-Thomas was already a seasoned disciple of the blues, R&B, and soul — music that not only resonated with him as art forms to appreciate but ones which he could sing well and with conviction. “Actually, I first started out doing Mississippi Delta Blues with John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins and Jimmy Reed, stuff like that,” Clayton-Thomas tells Write on Music, recalling his formative days playing the Canadian bar and nightclub circuit. “Then I started hanging out with a lot of jazz musicians and started to get into R&B, people like Ray Charles and Otis Redding.” Such influences were integral to the expansive, brass-spiked palette of Blood, Sweat & Tears, of course, and with such classic sides as “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die,” and “You Made Me So Very Happy” Clayton-Thomas emerged as one of the most distinctive vocalists of the rock ‘n’ roll era. Though he ultimately left the band (and the rigors of nearly four decades on the road) in 2004, Clayton-Thomas has continued to write and record with the same integrity and passion that distinguishes his signature works. With his 2010 LP, Soul Ballads — originally released by Universal Canada upon the publication of his autobiography, aptly titled Blood, Sweat and Tears — Clayton-Thomas collaborated with producer and arranger Lou Pomanti on a set of R&B standards as a tribute to some of his biggest and most cherished influences. “We didn’t go looking for obscure R&B songs that nobody had ever done before,” says Clayton-Thomas of the album, which was released this week in the States on Airline Records. “We made the decision going right in that we wanted those great, iconic tunes that everybody already knows and loves.” For the Soul Ballads album, it really must’ve been a tall order to record songs by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke and others that the public already know so well.
When we did this album, I didn’t even take lyric sheets to the studio. I knew these songs so well. They’re a part of DNA. Lou [Pomanti] had been after me for quite some time to do this, and that was one of the reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it.… It was very intimidating. I love those songs so much that I didn’t think they could ever be done better. Maybe “better” isn’t what you’re working toward with these songs, though.
No, no. Well, we’re able today… When I went back to listen to the original records, [on] a lot of that stuff the recording was really terrible. They were recorded on a four-track machine or maybe even just in stereo — or a tape recorder, in those days — and of course we have the advantage today of a modern digital recording studio. And quite often, like the Bobby Hebb tune, “Sunny,” the horns were so out of tune on the original record I couldn’t believe it. But it didn’t matter because that soul just came through.… What we could do [though] was we could take these iconic songs and with the use of modern recording techniques and really superb musicians we could bring those songs into the twenty-first century. Based on that, I said, “Come on, let’s do this album.” And we did it, and Lou Pomanti produced it. He’d been my piano player in Blood, Sweat & Tears for about five or six years. We traveled the world together. He also played with me in the early days when we played jazz clubs and bars here in Toronto, and he heard me sing a lot of this material.
I’ve been reading your autobiography, actually. You’ve led a remarkable life — a remarkable life in extremes.
Yes, from the lows to the highs and then back again three or four times. What was it about the blues and soul and R&B that first drew you in, not just as music to enjoy but that which you could sink your teeth into as a singer and try yourself?
As you know — you’ve read the book — I spent most of my teenage years a homeless kid, in and out of reformatories, and the blues just seemed to be… That’s where the blues came from. The blues came off of chain gangs, prison work gangs, with the chants and everything else. And I just gravitated to that. Was there a moment early on, while working in the clubs as a young singer, when you realized that what you weren’t just acting out a passion but that — all modesty aside — you were really good at it?
Oh yeah, the first time I stepped on stage and performed. The rockabilly singer, Ronnie Hawkins, he just let me sit in one afternoon at the club. And I got up and I sang. I think I sang a couple of Jimmy Reed tunes and stuff like that. I was hugely influenced by Jimmy Reed. He’s kind of been forgotten in the whole history of blues, but that first album, Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall — double-album set — I learned every single note, every song on that album. It was just amazing. So I sang a couple of Jimmy Reed tunes and people stood up and they cheered and clapped and I said, “Hey, I must be pretty good at this.” But I’d already been doing prison concerts and stuff like that. It wasn’t like I was totally green performing. You got to see a lot of the music greats perform back then, too.
Yeah, that’s true. What’s described today as “The Toronto Sound” is just steeped in R&B. There’s a very good reason for that. When we were young musicians growing up and seeking out our idols there was a color bar in the States, especially in music. If you were a black band and you played in Detroit you played on the black side of town in black clubs to black audiences. And there were seldom any mixed bands. A lot of the bands that I worked with up in Canada were mixed. We couldn’t come down to the States, couldn’t get booked down there. I’m going way back now; I’m talking about the early sixties. Things have certainly changed. But the result of that was all those great Motown artists and the Chicago blues artists, they loved to come up here and play in Toronto where there was no color bar. They played to mixed audiences in nice clubs.
So [in] our various experiences working up and down what they called the Strip, which was the Yonge Street strip of about ten or fifteen bars, you’d be working and at a club next door would be B.B. King and down the street would be Ike and Tina Turner and the Temptations. They all came up here. So they really influenced the young Canadian musicians. Even today, especially Toronto, there’s a heavy R&B influence here. So I grew up with it. Your singing has always seemed so visceral. Was there a danger over time of losing that instinctive quality of your singing, like if you found out how the engine ran then maybe the engine wouldn’t run the same?
Well, I think you can get burned out. Now, I was on the road with Blood, Sweat & Tears for forty years. It was a big band with a lot of mouths to feed, agents, managers, an office and everything else. We were on the road two-hundred days a year for forty years with hardly a break ever. And you do get to a point where you’re thinking, Here we go again. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I left in 2004. There was just nothing left for me anymore. It was just going out and just doing the oldies night after night after night, making a lot of money doing oldies.
There’s no growth there. There’s no chance to write. There’s no chance to explore different things, and it can be very suffocating. I just got to a point where I wasn’t doing it for the money anymore ... and not only that, but I looked around me and didn’t know anybody in the band. It was all new guys, some of them weren’t even born when Blood, Sweat & Tears started. I just said, “I’ve had enough of this.” But I think a major reason was you just find yourself running out of inspiration. You’ve sung this song two-hundred times in a row, night after night after night — literally, over the years, thousands of times — and it starts to go stale.
But the people who come to the concerts, some of them are seeing you sing those songs for the first time in their lives.
And that’s what saves you, the audience reaction. You sing “You Made Me So Very Happy,” no matter how many times you’ve sang it, when you see people’s faces light up in the audience, it’s worth it. And of course I’m still singing those songs of Blood, Sweat & Tears, “Spinning Wheel,” “Lucretia Mac Evil,” all that stuff. I’m still doing them now, but I think I’m doing them with a little more joy, a little more energy because it’s not all I do. When you just go out night after night playing a medley of your hits… Then you’re just a legacy act.
Exactly right. And I just got to an age when I thought, Well, I don’t know how many years I’ve got left at this point. Do I want to spend the rest of them doing this? Nah, I don’t think so. In a sense, Soul Ballads brings your career full circle.
Yeah, and you know what? I’ve always been kind of obsessed with writing my own material, but I had so much fun making that album. Another thing that really influenced me in the old days was standards. I loved singing standards, “Stardust” and “Summertime,” stuff like that. I always had half a dozen standards in my show. I was so happy with the way the Soul Ballads album came out that I decided to do it again with standards. So we’ve just finished a new album. The hard work is being done now and it should be out later on this spring. It’s called Combo, which is five of Canada’s finest jazz musicians in a small combo doing standards. So, yeah, again full circle. I don’t know if it’s the age I’m getting to or what, but it indeed has come full circle. Maybe writing your autobiography a few years ago triggered something for you.
That’s a good point. I think you’re probably right. Writing a memoir… Human beings, we tend to take all the dark things in our lives and push them into the back corners of our minds and don’t think about them a lot. But when you sit down to write an autobiography or memoir you realize you’ve got to come clean. You can’t BS your way through this because many of the people who read this book were there. They know the story. So you’ve got to be right up front and you’ve got to dredge up some of those dark corners and bring them out again.
It’s cathartic, but it can be a little painful too…. I didn’t want to use a ghostwriter so I did it myself. You’re reliving those moments just about every day for a year and a half. But you’re also living the great moments too, you know? So it kind of balances out. I’ve got to say, I’ve probably had more great moments than the down moments, because once I started in music there was no turning back and I had a wonderful life from that point on.
The U.S. release of Soul Ballads is available now on Airline Records. For more information on David Clayton-Thomas, please visit the artist’s official website.
“That’s the story of my career,” says Dwight Twilley on the phone from his home in Tulsa, his hearty laugh and facetiousness belying the bane of what could’ve been: Mere weeks before his death in August 1977, Elvis Presley almost recorded one of Twilley’s songs.
“It was being discussed with the publishers,” says Twilley of “TV,” two minutes, sixteen seconds of reverbed, shivering rockabilly in praise of the almighty boobtube. “If you think about it, that probably would’ve been a pretty damn good tune for him.” It would’ve been a pretty damn good time for Twilley to have caught a break, too.
“TV” originally appeared on Sincerely, the debut LP by the Dwight Twilley Band, which besides its principal singing and songwriting namesake boasted one-man rhythm section and erstwhile vocalist Phil Seymour and lead guitarist Bill Pitcock IV. Though it earned rave reviews upon its release in 1976 — Rolling Stone hailed it as “the best rock debut album of the year” — Sincerely was a commercial disappointment, due in part to disputes at the band’s label that, nearly a year after lead single “I’m On Fire” had entered and exited the Top 20, effectively squelched the band’s momentum. As Elvis himself had once famously bemoaned, “Who do you thank when you have such luck?” Twilley’s troubles didn’t end there; in one way or another they’ve underscored most of his professional career. And yet from his formative days in the Dwight Twilley Band — the group broke up in 1978 following the lackluster sales of its sophomore LP, Twilley Don’t Mind — throughout such solo highlights as “Girls” (featuring former label mate Tom Petty) and “Why You Wanna Break My Heart,” Twilley hasn’t let his professional frustrations and misfortunes eclipse his musical enthusiasm. The latest installment of that enthusiasm is Always, Twilley’s third LP of original material in four years. Featuring such musical cohorts as Tommy Keene, Tractor’s Steve Ripley, and veteran session bassist Leland Sklar, the album boasts the sort of shimmering melodic pop and boisterous rock ‘n’ roll that longtime fans love. Sure, it’s familiar ground for Twilley, but few cover it so well. Always is your third studio album in four years. Are you a more prolific songwriter these days? Or have you always been prolific and you’re just now releasing more of what you write? I was always very prolific, but I had so many problems in the music industry as a kid that, now that I’m self-contained and have my own studio and record company, it’s up to me when I want to record and how much. I never had that opportunity before. Is songwriting something you enjoy? Some artists like having written a song, but not sitting in a room with a pencil and a guitar trying to write one. It’s a lonely feeling, because there’s nobody there to help you, usually. It just comes second nature with me. I’ve been doing it so long… The hardest part about it for me — it’s not the actual writing of the song because mechanically I just kind of do that second nature without really thinking about it — is the idea. Coming up with the idea? Yeah, coming up with the idea. “What am I writing about here? What am I trying to say?” Once I have that, I don’t have to think about it. The song just kind of appears. To what length will you chase an idea or inspiration? Can it drive you nuts to the point where you just discard it altogether? No. Sometimes if I don’t think about it, it works out better because those just come to me; and it’ll come to me at the strangest times. In fact, we’ve kind of promised ourselves that we’re going to stop recording for a while and do some other things — appear live more — and I have some other projects that I’m interested in doing. Even though you’ve promised yourself that you’re not going to write anymore or do anything else then you’ll come up with two or three good ideas. You live and work in Tulsa, which isn’t exactly the center of the music universe. No, but it is well known for some of the most talented musicians in the world. It’s not known just here. People around the world are very aware of Tulsa being a place for musicians that have thrived. I’ve always said part of the reason for that is this town just treats their musicians like shit. [Laughs] It’s why so many of them leave here and become big successes, because they certainly couldn’t do it here. If you want to be in the music business and you’re in Tulsa you better really love it or you better be really good. Can you discern how recording and writing in Tulsa has influenced how your music comes out? In other words, does your environment affect how your music ultimately sounds? I don’t think geographically it makes that big a difference to me. I think it’s just the whole freedom that I have, having my own studio that I’m in total control of. And it’s built onto my house so I can just walk out of here and be home, and I can stumble out of the house and be in here in my secret laboratory. Most of my life I had to get the big record company to pay the big dollars to be able to afford an album to record on X amount of days at X studio and be done that date, this whole big to-do. [With] this, I just have the complete freedom to work at my own pace and not have to worry about being thrown out of the studio at midnight or something; or some other artist is coming in; or the record company thinks you’re going over budget. I just don’t have those worries anymore.... I kind of take more of an artistic freedom to go, “I don’t really care what other people think or how a record is supposed to be structured, what the rules are anymore.” There really isn’t much radio anymore and there isn’t much of a record business anymore. For a few years now I’ve sat back and thought about it and thought, I’m a recording artist. I’m an artist at recording. People will say, “You should’ve done that; it’d have been more cool if you did this or did that,” I think to myself, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want to do because I’m in control of my art. This is the way I want people to hear what I do, and so that’s what they get. There’s nobody at any record company who can tell me to do it different. Does the home studio complement your creative drive or does it lead to obsession? Sure, you can become obsessive. You can take a long time to work on one record just to get it exactly the way you want it. I can be that way from time to time, but the proof of my discipline is in my last three albums. That’s a short amount of time to release three all-new studio albums, and I’m very proud of all three of them. My fans seem to appreciate them. That gives you a good feeling knowing when you release a record there are people all around the world that it makes very happy. That makes me feel good. I kind of stand behind my work in that way. Sure, I could get really obsessive, but at the end of the day I’m a recording artist and so I want to make a good product, a good piece of work. When you’re in the studio do you ever tailor a song — how it sounds or how it feels — to what you think it’ll translate to on the stage? No, not usually. I do sort of a different stage show. I like my stage show to be more of a rock ‘n’ roll event, where records to me are more artistic and, in a way, prettier. When I go out on stage I really like to scream my guts out, though I do a few songs in the course of the album that are definitely good screamers for the live show. But I prefer not to — in the middle of my rocking show — slow down and do acoustic things, which I think are real important to have and you want them on the record, but you don’t necessarily want to do them live that much. You can kill the momentum of a high-energy show if, four or five songs in, you say, “We’d like to slow it down a bit.” Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about it. I don’t like my live shows to slow down at all. [Laughs] Do you know anything about the status of the documentary [Why You Wanna Break My Heart: The Dwight Twilley Story] that was being made about you? As far as I knew that all crashed and burned. And now some people are working on the concept of trying to breathe new life into it. A portion of it was filmed. We’ve talked to a few people, and are looking around for somebody who might want to take over the project and complete it. And I have some ideas of my own in that regard. What gives you the biggest thrill in making music? Is it finishing a song? Is it getting an idea in the middle of the night that inspires you to write one? I think the most satisfying moment I have is when I lay down a guitar or piano and I put the main vocal on it correctly — in other words, the right words in the right place — and the song sounds like what I’d wanted it to be. That’s my most exciting moment. From then on it’s just the mechanics of building it into a record, which is a fun process. Don’t misunderstand me, now. I enjoy that process, but there’s nothing more thrilling… Because you know what the best song always is? The new one. And there’s nothing like having a new one. After you have the new song you have that excitement for a while. Then it becomes something you’re working on. Then you just look forward to the next song. Once you’ve reached that point where the song has achieved that basic shape of how you imagined it originally, is it instinct that then tells you when you’ve finally finished the song? Some artists have trouble putting things away. This whole album was a little bit like that. One of the things about it — it was a hard record to make — was when towards the end of recording the last album, Soundtrack, my dear friend and companion and co-worker, Bill Pitcock IV, passed away. Bill had been with me since “I’m On Fire,” and the last ten years or so we really worked closely together in the studio, all the time. We’d just do things… I could just sing a note to him and he’d know exactly what I wanted. It was kind of one of those things where you barely needed to talk. My wife, who engineers the records, would say, “Pitcock speaks Twilley,” because we just had a way of communicating. We didn’t have Bill there every step of the way. We’d record some songs completely by ourselves and kind of feel proud of ourselves: “We didn’t even need Pitcock on that.” Now we don’t feel so proud. It doesn’t feel quite as good anymore, the feeling of knowing that he is just not here. So it was suggested, “Why don’t you call on some of these friends who you’ve had through the years and get them to play on this record?” I thought that was kind of a good idea, but it kind of made it take longer waiting for the availability of different players and putting it together. There were times we called it “the record that wouldn’t die,” but eventually it did finish. But you can get caught up on a little tangent — and it’s a real thing — because you’ll hear the record and think, It’s all there but there’s some little thing missing. You just know there’s some little thing missing. Most of the time — if you rely on your instinct and don’t freak out on it — you just put that one little thing in there and it makes the record sit. It will settle down and say, “Okay, I’m fine now,” because usually the record will tell you what it wants. Despite all the setbacks and frustrations that have occurred throughout your career, you must feel a sense of satisfaction that you’re still doing what you love exactly how you want to do it. Very much. I would guess you would most likely be able to hear that in the album, Always.
From the late ’70s through to the early ’90s Dire Straits—founded by lead guitarist/vocalist Mark Knopfler, rhythm guitarist David Knopfler, drummer Pick Withers, and bassist John Illsley—reigned as British rock royalty, selling over 120 million albums, racking up a stockpile of classic hits (including “Sultans of Swing,” “Money For Nothing,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Walk of Life”) and forging a permanent residency on radio stations around the world.
While Knopfler has enjoyed more critical and popular success since the band’s demise, Illsley has nonetheless produced a string of respectable solo works as well, including his latest LP, Testing the Water. Enriched by warm guitar phrases and narrative lyricism, the album is informed by themes of both adversity and resilience—not least of all his own.
In 1999 Illsley was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), an illness he kept mostly under wraps for fifteen years. “I didn’t want it to become a topic of conversation,” says Illsley. “I felt that I had it reasonably under control from what I could work out.” His condition worsened over time, however, culminating in Illsley undergoing a stem-cell transplant—his sister was deemed a match—and an extensive period of recovery.
Illsley affirms, “I consider myself an extremely fortunate man.”
Testing the Water has traces of some of the softer music you made in Dire Straits, with the JJ Cale-styled shuffles in particular.
That’s really the way that I’ve been sort of playing and working—with that kind of style of music—for a long time now, since Mark and I met in ’76. We had a mutual love for certain kinds of approaches to music and I suppose that just carried on over all these years. You add bits and pieces to it as you progress, but I suppose the fundamentals are always going to be there. It will have a certain resonance with the past, but I hope in some ways also that it’s not bogged down in the past. It doesn’t sound derivative. It sounds reminiscent.
That’s a better word. Reminiscent’s good. I don’t mind reminiscing. Is being a songwriter something you’ve had to grow into to be more comfortable?
It’s always quite difficult talking about songwriting. You’ve probably spoken with a few people about that in the past. I think I have grown as a writer. I would like to think so, anyway. Writing songs is most of the time, for me, a pretty laborious business, but there are certain elements of joy and clarity which emerge in the process. I just think that over time you probably just get a bit better at handling the medium. You’ve got to remember, I had quite a good teacher, in a sense, working with Mark. That’s a pretty important element in the way that I approach writing. He doesn’t really let anything go until he’s absolutely, one-hundred percent sure about it.
There were a couple of other songs that I could’ve put on this record, for instance, which I left off because I just felt it would’ve been slightly less strong with them on it. It’s quite a short record. I think it’s less than forty minutes.… I’d rather try to get the intensity right or the attitude right—the feeling right, if you like—on those few songs and make them work as little vignettes rather than crowd it out with a lot of padding. I don’t know about their running times, but there were a couple Dire Straits albums that had only seven or eight songs. Love Over Gold was only five, and of course that was produced at a time when vinyl was the medium. So on one side there were two songs, “Telegraph Road” and “Private Investigations,” and there were three songs on the other side. It still took as long [to record] as an album that’s got seven or eight songs on it, but that’s the way it comes out. “Telegraph Road” is still one of my favorite songs to play. I was playing it recently with some boys over in Italy. It’s a fabulous journey.
I was watching some old concert footage of the band in preparing to speak with you, and I was struck by the effect those songs had on some absolutely massive audiences.
It is an extraordinary kind of thing. In some ways you never really get used to that. And of course the last tour which we did was quite a biggie. We were playing to fairly large audiences and it never ceased to amaze me how quiet they would be when we were playing something like “Private Investigations.” How thirty-five or forty thousand people could stay that quiet I always thought was quite extraordinary. That sort of mass of people can create an extraordinary atmosphere which is completely unique. Just on a basic human level, how did you maintain a sense of purpose as a musician when you were contending with your illness? You wrote some of these songs while you were in the hospital.
It’s a good question. What I’ve discovered, though, is that a lot of people go through some difficult things in their lives. Some are more difficult than others.… I think in some ways we spend our lives dodging bullets. Thankfully, I’ve managed to dodge a few on this particular thing, but I think the initial shock was pretty devastating to be told at the age of fifty that you’ve got ten years to live, and you’ve got two very small children and you’ve got two older children as well. Basically, I thought, I’m not going to waste any bloody time. I was painting at the time, and I carried on painting. I went to Ireland; I worked with some Irish musicians and had some fun over there. I was feeling pretty much okay because I’d already had a whole load of chemo and that’s what gave me a new lease of life for a few years; it sort of knocked it down for a bit. I just sort of carried on and, I thought, I’m just going to keep working and just take every day as it comes. I actually managed to do quite a lot in that period of time before I got hit with it hard after the second load of chemo, which really only worked for about eighteen months to two years and then I went downhill very rapidly.
When I knew I was going to be in hospital for a month I asked if I could take in my guitar and my sketch books and all the rest of the paraphernalia I usually have in my life, and they said, “Sure.” I was in what you would call semi-isolation. You couldn’t just walk in the room. You had to have all sorts of things done to you before you came in because I was very susceptible to disease and infection. But while I was there it gave me time to think and ruminate and to work out what that was all about. One of the songs, “Railway Tracks,” is specifically about being in there. And also, in a sense, “When God Made Time,” as it says, “When God made time He made plenty of it,” and basically you’ve just got to use as much of it as you can and get on with things. It taught me a lot about myself. It taught me a lot about how other people responded to that and I got a tremendous amount of support from everybody, friends and family and such.
About a year and a half. You have to take these anti-rejection drugs for a long time. The body is dealing with a kind-of-foreign body and gradually that foreign body takes over and your own body says, “It’s okay for you to be here.” That takes quite a long time. I think I got the all-clear about eighteen months ago. About eighteen months ago I was told there was no trace of leukemia on board anymore, which was a fairly amazing day. It was quite an extraordinary moment. I have to say, we did open up a couple bottles of champagne. In a sense this album is really a celebration of survival. The album is not only a testament to survival but in a lot of ways, it seems, your music actually helped you through all that.
Without a doubt. I played that guitar every day in there and just fiddled around with these ideas and it just gave me a focus away from all the other bloody stuff. I had drips in me twenty-four hours a day for about a month, and every hour somebody would come in to take this and do that, fiddle around with this… Amongst all that the music just kept me absolutely centered. It was quite remarkable.
I want people to know that it’s not necessarily a death sentence. There’s a register you can sign up to [anthonynolan.org] where you can offer your stem cells to somebody you don’t know—could be on the other side of the world—and you can help them to have a life just by lying on a bed for three or four hours. You have your stem cells taken off and you replace your own within twenty-four hours. It’s extraordinary.
For more information please visit the artist’s official website.
“Hit after hit after hit after hit,” says Don Felder, pretty well summing up what fans should expect from the just-begun “Soundtrack of Summer” tour, on which the former Eagles’ lead guitarist shares the bill with fellow ‘70s survivors Styx and Foreigner. “Between all the hits that Foreigner has had and made, and hits that Styx has had and made, and the Eagles catalog and my solo stuff and [the soundtrack to] Heavy Metal, it’s going to be a four-hour party.”
Felder certainly has reason to celebrate. His 2012 solo album Road to Forever (which has been recently re-released with four additional songs) has garnered no shortage of critical and popular acclaim, producing four hit singles to date, including the venomous rocker “You Don’t Have Me,” which is now enjoying its second week atop the Classic Rock radio chart. The four additional songs on the new “extended edition” of Road to Forever are ones that you’d written originally for the album, right? Didn't you write something like 26 songs in all originally?
Yes, I wrote 26 or 27 songs. I pared it down to what I thought would be the best 16 songs to put on an album, and went and recorded 16 songs. When they were finished we were getting ready to do final artwork, packaging, and also final manufacturing for the CD itself, and we got a call from the record distributor and my management and they said, “Amazon wants an exclusive song off the record; and iTunes wants an exclusive song; and we have a deal with Japan, they want an exclusive song; and Europe and Australia want an exclusive song.” So I had to pull four songs off of the CD and release it originally with 12 songs on it, which my full intent was to have the full 16 songs on the CD; I thought that made a really well-balanced and interesting collection of songs and a diverse collection of songs and music as well. So I was somewhat upset that I had to pull, like, a fourth of the songs of it and then wind up putting it out with less.… It’d be like if you had the Hotel California album and you left off “New Kid in Town” and “Fast Lane,” it’d be like, “Wait a minute. Those are all a part of the concept for that record.” So I suggested that we repackage it with all 16 songs in a deluxe edition and put it out for everyone to hear. Is that why the four songs are weaved throughout the album instead of being tacked on at the end, because this is how you’d intended it all along?
Correct, yeah. Song order on a CD is really important, and that was the song order I had laid out for the CD originally. Then we had to go through and pull out those four songs and it still worked, but I just wanted to release it the way I’d initially heard it, conceived it, ordered it. A couple years on now since the original release of the album, do all the songs wear well with you?
Yeah, they do actually. A lot of art to me comes from life experiences, whether it’s painting or film or books or music or songs… It all comes from things that people can relate to so that when people see or hear or walk by and photograph it reminds them of something that happened in their own life as well. They’re wearing quite well. In fact one of the songs, “You Don’t Have Me,” is currently Number One on classic rock radio. It’s doing pretty well. I was more than pleasantly surprised with radio’s reception of all the singles we’ve put out. The one before that was “Wash Away,” which got up to Number Four on classic rock radio. I think they’re wearing well with me and it seems that they’re wearing well on classic radio as well. Back in the day with the Eagles, were you guys ever mindful or curious about chart positions of singles? Was that sort of thing even on your radar?
Well, I’m certain our management and record companies were paying a great deal of attention to what songs were getting action and radio airplay and were being sold as singles. I’m certain they were paying really close attention to that and promoting the songs that obviously were getting the most radio airplay. It’s an interesting concept and it’s changed substantially: Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s people bought entire albums, so the A&R department and the artist and management would decide what one, two, or three singles on that album would be released and in what order. Then the promotions teams would go out and promote for radio. PR people would go out and promote news about that single and so forth.
Radio has changed and album sales have changed so dramatically where if you like a particular song you just go on iTunes or Amazon and just buy that one song. The whole kind of model for CD monitoring and sales is done all digitally now as opposed to counting how many units were manufactured, where they were shipped to, and what market was it playing well in on the radio [so] they would supply more product to that city or those record stores. All of that has changed dramatically. It’s a lot more accessible to be able to buy a CD if you like songs on it or you can buy one individual song as well. I think it’s a good change. So you guys never arrived to play in Milwaukee, for instance, and realized not enough people knew the latest single to know what you were doing at the time?
It really depended dramatically on every individual market back in the ‘70s. Now radio’s pretty much one or two massive conglomerates—they own all the radio stations. Back then, it was more individual by city and/or state. And if a certain programmer at a certain station loved your record they would play it as much as they wanted to, as much as they got phone response for it. Now it’s all kind of digitized and done on a national level so you don’t really have that much discrepancy from city to city or state to state as you used to have back in the ‘70s. We would get to certain markets and be surprised that people hadn’t heard the song as much as they’d heard it in a bordering state back then, but today everybody pretty much has access to it either online or on the radio, some source where they can find what they want to listen to. This “Soundtrack of Summer” tour you’re on with Styx and Foreigner, it seems like something that really couldn’t have been done in the ‘70s. People seemed to have had enough trouble getting along with their own bands, never mind that plus two other bands.
Well, yes and no. In the ‘70s the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac toured together for at least a summer, if not more. I was talking earlier about some bands having a bigger radio airplay in certain cities or certain areas… We would flip headlines, so if “Hotel California” was a bigger song in a certain city the Eagles would close, and if one of Fleetwood Mac’s songs was a bigger airplay hit in that city, they would headline and close the show. But we never had any real ego problems between the bands. As a matter of fact Don Henley was dating Stevie Nicks at the time, and after they broke up Joe Walsh started dating Stevie Nicks. It was less than combative between the bands. We got along really well. I still play golf with Mick Fleetwood now and then. There’s no hard feelings about any of that.
I have to say, though, when the proposition of doing this summer tour with Styx and Foreigner was first presented to me, I had to take a minute and really think about what it would be. Styx and I have done shows together, and the people that are involved in the Styx band and crew and management are really nice people. There’s no ego. There’s no drama. There’s no intensity. It’s a lot of fun. They love what they’re doing and they do it really well and we get along really well together. I had the pleasure of interviewing James “JY” Young a little while back, and he was the most genuinely kind man. He seemed so authentic in his enthusiasm for what he does.
Yeah, and you can sense that in people, not only in their music but in their stage presence and how they are and how they handle themselves and conduct themselves on and off stage. The people that are in these two other organizations, Foreigner and Styx—not only in the bands but in their crews and management—are just delightful people. It’s a pleasure for me to go on stage every day to not only play music with my band and to sit in with these guys but to live with them 20 hours a day off the road where you’re having brunch together or you’re hanging out backstage before the show. They’re just real good guys. It’s going to be a really great summer for me. One thing I’d like to get your take on is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This year’s induction sparked so much debate—of course they all spark debate, but this time in particular it extended to some of the inductees themselves, who criticized the voting process and minimized the honor. The Eagles’ induction [in 1998], is it something you’re particularly proud or appreciative of? What do you make of it?
Whatever field you’re working in there’s only a few honors that can be bestowed on you that really represent an acknowledgment of your creativity, your success, and acceptance of your work. And in the music business there’s just a few, just a handful of accolades—like winning a GRAMMY® for song or record of the year. Being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame really is one of the highest honors in the music business that a rock and roll musician can really hope for and should be very gracious upon acceptance when the induction takes place with that. It’s difficult for me to watch people squabbling and arguing about it.
Although, I have proposed numerous times to the people at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—because I do shows with them and work with them, do benefits to raise money for the Rock Hall—to categorize the inductees, much like the GRAMMY® does: They have Best Country Artist, Best Pop Artist, Best Rock Band, Best Vocal by Duo or Group. It’s more categorized so that you don’t have people in the same eligibility.… Like KISS and Donna Summer, how do you compare those two acts to be worthy of being inducted into the Rock Hall? Now if they were in their own categories then it would be easy to separate: Donna Summer should’ve been inducted as a pop/disco singer, as opposed to KISS, which is a totally different band. How do you vote for or justify that? Donovan, how do you compare him to Aerosmith? It needs to be categorized. You know, it’s run the way it is and I respect their decisions and I’m honored to be a part of the Rock Hall. My original double-neck white Gibson EDS-1275 that I played on for years on “Hotel California” is on exhibit at the Rock Hall in the Eagles showcase there. It’s quite an honor being part of that. A lot of the squabbling this year was with KISS, with some of them criticizing the fact that no members beyond the original four were inducted.
The Eagles were fortunate in that there were only seven people that were involved in the band, and we asked Bernie [Leadon] and Randy [Meisner], who had since left, to come and participate in the induction and receive the award because they had been a big part of the original founding concept and early records. We felt that they should be part of it. But if you’ve got a band that has a lot of transient members, it’s difficult to do that when you’ve got 17 guys on stage being inducted into one group. Dates and venues for the Soundtrack of Summer tour, featuring Don Felder, Styx, and Foreigner, are listed on donfelder.com. Road to Forever (Extended Edition) is available now on Top Ten, Inc. Records.
Neal Preston was in enough garage bands as a teenager to know he was never going to make it in rock 'n' roll as a musician, but as a photographer he recognized his ability to capture its magic without ever having to play a note.
Barely in his twenties, yet with a half-decade of experience already under his belt, Preston was working at Atlantic Record's west coast publicity department in Los Angeles, tasked with photographing assorted gold-record presentations, press junkets, and parties whenever one of the label’s roster of artists rolled into town. It was at one such function that he met Led Zeppelin's imperious manager, Peter Grant, who in 1975 hired him as the band's official tour photographer, affording him exclusive and unfettered access to the band—Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham—and its coveted inner circle.
Onstage, backstage, aboard the band’s private jet—wherever Led Zeppelin rocked and roamed—Preston was there, observing his subjects with almost surreptitious intent, but picking his shots with discretion. He was on the payroll, after all. And so while he was essentially welcomed as one of their own, Preston heeded an unspoken pact not to photograph anything potentially incriminating or salacious.
When he wasn’t on the road with the band, Preston sought out new opportunities. He took portraits of the Jackson 5 and Iggy Pop, among others, and landed high-profile magazine covers like Rolling Stone and People—assignments which, particularly in the years after the band's demise (upon Bonham’s tragic death in 1980), have earned him near peerless distinction. An official photographer at Live Aid and six Olympic Games, he’s also immortalized moments on the concert stages of popular music's most influential and celebrated artists. Preston's live images of Bruce Springsteen in ‘85, Queen in ‘86, and Michael Jackson in ‘87, in particular, are definitive.
His experience with Led Zeppelin was seminal, though, and his images of the band continue to resonate with visceral, timeless intensity. Led Zeppelin: Sound and Fury, a mammoth multimedia collection boasting over 250 photographs—including a hundred previously unpublished images—brings it all back in a vivid 300-page digital book, available exclusively on Apple's iTunes Bookstore. Along with select friends and insiders from that time, Preston offers insightful context throughout, whether in written narrative or in select audio and video commentary of what was, admittedly, the experience of a lifetime.
“You get a call to work for Led Zeppelin, yeah, it's a big deal,” Preston tells Write on Music. “This is the biggest band in the world. Sorry, Mick Jagger, but let's be honest here.”
In the book you write, “I never knew I was a good as I am.” Back when you were shooting Led Zeppelin was there any tipping point or revelatory moment where you thought, “Now I've got the hang of this. I'm not just snapping pictures here?”
It would've been way before I worked for Led Zeppelin. I'm a big fan of photography, period, and being a fan of photography I'm a big fan of photographers. I'm very fortunate in that I'm self-taught, completely self-taught. I never went to school for photography, never took any courses or anything. ... I chose not to go to college because I was already working in the business. I was already a working photographer.
When I picked up my first camera it just made sense to me. The analogy that I like to make is some 14-year-old kids get behind the wheel of a car for the first time—they may not know how to drive—but they instinctively know the relationship between the brake to the gas pedal to the clutch. You know what I mean? They get it. That's the way I was with my first camera. It's not even that it spoke to me; it was kind of in my DNA already, I guess. There's no other way to describe it.
It sounds like something a musician would say, actually. Like, the first time Eric Clapton picked up a guitar he didn't know the chords but he felt the instrument belonged in his hands.
Exactly. It feels right and you understand it. You may not know the technical end of it. Like you say, he may not have known how to play a #C or an #F or a #G chord, but he figured that out pretty quickly, and above and beyond as we all know. Same thing with a camera. I may not have understood how it worked, but I could very quickly figure out the relationship between the shutter speed and the f/stop, et cetera, et cetera, and it just made sense to me and I loved it from day one. ... What ended up happening was I realized that I had a talent for photographing people on stage. Obviously it's not all that I do or all that I've done in my career, but that came as naturally as the sun coming up in the morning. What's the point where I realized I had that talent? I don't know, but it was certainly before I worked with Led Zeppelin.
You also mention in the book about how you learned to recognize certain magical moments in the set, moments that would be repeated each night—like Jimmy Page leaping in the air during “Rock and Roll”—but you also write about having to be on guard for those magical moments that came up out of nowhere.
Yes, and that's all part and parcel of being a photojournalist. When I was growing up I used to read Life magazine and Look magazine. I loved those magazines. I've always been kind of a news junkie. I don’t know if you ever went to journalism school, but I’m sure you know enough that as a writer and as a journalist you observe and you are taught not to become part of the actual story. It’s the same with me. I’m there to observe. I know I'm doing my job when people don't even realize I'm around. I can't tell you how many times I've been working and someone from a band has come up to me and said, “You know, I didn't even realize you were here;” or, “I forgot you were here;” or, “You just blended into the scenery.” I don't take that as a derogatory remark; that’s a huge compliment. That tells me that I'm doing my job in a constructive way, in a professional way. And that's what a photojournalist does.
When you're working on a rock tour, you've got to be ready for... You're there to document what's going on. You're there to do a job whether it's for Led Zeppelin or Fleetwood Mac or Queen or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer—whomever. My job is to make sure I can deliver the photographs that my client needs for the purposes they need them for. To that end, I'm left to my own devices to get those photographs. There's a 24/7 component to all of this, if you will. It's always been easy for me to remain invisible or as much as possible, to be that fly on the wall.
From reading your narrative in the book and from my own knowledge and appreciation of Led Zeppelin’s career, the common thread that comes to mind is instinct. How you worked, how the band worked—even how Peter Grant managed the band and who he allowed in its inner circle—it all relied on instinct.
That's a really good thing you've picked up on, because Peter certainly worked by instincts and street smarts. I'm not a rock critic. I'm not a rock writer. I don't do that for a living, but what I know of them in terms of how they would work... It certainly was not a case of Jimmy or Robert or anyone saying, “Let's follow this road map,” or “Hey, we did a ballad. Now let's do a fast one.” It was certainly by instinct and what they wanted to do and how they felt. You would know better than I. You're a critic, and you would know more about those things. But there's certainly a modicum of trust involved. Peter took a liking to me and trusted me. He held the keys to the kingdom, let's be honest. If you couldn’t get past him—the lord high executioner or whatever you want to call him—that was it. So with Peter's blessing—and I do definitely mean with Peter’s blessing—I was hired. And I plowed ahead, and I was allowed to do what I do the way I do what I do.
Can you perceive in any constructive way how working with Led Zeppelin prepared you for the work you've done since?
That's a good question. Photographically I would say no. In terms of being a red-letter day, if you will, in the list of things I've done—a landmark job—certainly that helped a lot. As someone who has a career like I've had—and we both know there haven’t been that many people that have had this kind of a job, and there's less people that've done it well—it doesn't hurt when you can put that on your résumé, so to speak. What it might've prepared me for down the line was maybe just a reinforcement in my own mind that what I do and how I do it really does work for me and really can work for the biggest bands in this business, the most important bands in the business. ... It's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of work. You're working with four people with extremely strong personalities. You're working with a manager and a tour manager [Richard Cole], both of whom have extremely strong personalities. And it's a very cloistered bunch. Talk about being in the eye of the hurricane, man. That’s exactly what it felt like, but I never really had that kind of out-of-body experience, like, “Oh my God, I can't believe I'm doing this.” Or, if I had that thought it was fleeting at best because I was too busy doing my job.
You mentioned working with such strong personalities. That had to have helped you in later years, being able to deal with a diversity of personalities when you're photographing a Michael Jackson or a Freddie Mercury or a Bruce Springsteen—people who are known for being mercurial artists. That had to have been a pretty good foundation for dealing with those kinds of subjects.
Yeah, you're right. It wasn't a starting-off point because I'd already been working in the business, but yeah, you're right. Every tour, every shoot where you're working with someone like that, it helps the next one down the line. Absolutely. A lot of it goes back to another word you used, which was instinct. There's a lot of common sense involved. Look, I’m there to shoot the pictures that the band, the client, [or] the record company needs for whatever reason; that's what I'm hired to do. Over and above that, there are all those other elements involved that you have to be aware of that I believe are just a lot of common sense: Keep your fucking mouth shut. You don't need to tell Peter what Paul's saying, or vice versa. And you certainly don't need to act like you're the fifth member of the band. I'm lucky in that my ego doesn't require that. I don't need to walk on a tour plane with anybody with a big sign that says, “I am here, ladies and gentlemen.” Common sense tells you, shut your fucking mouth, keep your eyes open, keep your hand on the button, keep a roll of film loaded in the camera, and do your job.
Led Zeppelin: Sound and Fury by Neal Preston is available now exclusively at the iTunes Bookstore.
For more information on Neal Preston, please visit his official website.
Nearly half a century ago Colin Blunstone emerged as one of England’s most singular, evocative vocalists. As the lead singer of the Zombies, whose classic hits like “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season” helped define the British Invasion, Blunstone imparted sophistication and grace that were rare for the era. Although the group called it quits upon the release of their 1968 LP, Odessey and Oracle, Blunstone eventually found his footing as a solo artist beginning with 1971’s One Year, with such gems as “Caroline Goodbye” and “Though You Are Far Away” earning him even further distinction. While his post-Zombies endeavors haven't enjoyed the same success in the States as they have in his native country, Blunstone has continued to explore and expound upon his talent, whether recording under his own name or in collaboration with other artists, most notably Alan Parsons and fellow Zombies alumnus Rod Argent. For a little over the past decade, in fact, Blunstone and Argent have (with an otherwise revamped lineup) brought the Zombies back to life in the recording studio as well as on the concert stage. “It reminds people of what we did years ago,” says Blunstone, “and I hope it enhances it.” The same could be said for his eleventh and latest solo effort, On The Air Tonight, which reflects the hallmark sublimity of Blunstone’s classic works in timeless, touching ways. The Zombies had a very distinct sound. Did you guys consciously strive to have a unique sound or did that unique sound come about because of the makeup of the band, particularly with Rod Argent on keyboards? It was just the way the band sounded naturally. I think to some extent that sound evolved over a period of years. What I would say is that we consciously didn’t try to copy. That’s the one thing I would say. We didn’t try to copy people. And of course we had two quite prolific and sophisticated writers in the band. I think that that was one of the great strengths of the band that we had these two writers, Rod Argent and Chris White. Rod had always written good songs, and Chris had [too] but he really progressed in the three years we’d been on the road that by the time we got to Odessey and Oracle they were both writing really, really fine songs. In some ways that’s one of the main things that sets us apart from other bands. I know that there were some that were writing, but they had their own sound too. But there were other bands that were just copying, but we certainly weren’t. And of course our band was very much a keyboard-based band. It was musically based on Rod’s keyboard abilities, and he’s a world-class keyboard player. And I think that gave us a very distinctive sound as well whereas most bands of that time — in the mid ‘60s — were very much guitar-based bands. There were very few that were keyboard-based bands. So that did make us sound very different and possibly unique.
Another thing is that your voice, unlike those of a lot of English bands of that era, sounded British. Many British singers seemed to affect an American accent perhaps to appeal to a wider audience, but you — along with Syd Barrett and David Bowie, for instance — had a distinctly British character to your singing. There’s a lot of rock ‘n’ roll tunes that [are] very tempting to sing with an American accent. Sometimes, I think, you possibly have to sing in an American accent. But certainly in the ‘60s I did try to maintain my English accent. It wasn’t something that I laid awake at night worrying about. It just seemed more natural to me. I found that if ever I started singing with a bit of an American accent I think I found it a little bit embarrassing, really, and a little bit unreal. So it was more natural for me to sing in my English accent, and to some degree I still do. I try to make my singing as natural as possible. I do think about singing a lot. Every phrase has been discussed and thought about and maybe even argued about — every phrase in every song that we record. The new album, On the Air Tonight, includes a version of “Though You Are Far Away,” which you first recorded in 1971. Was there a particular reason you wanted to revisit that song? There was. There’s a very famous Belgian singer, Jasper Steverlinck, who recorded this song. He used the string arrangement from my first album and interpreted that on piano. Of course that’s how it was written in the first place. The arranger for this song is called Chris Gunning. When he first played this arrangement to me he played it on piano, and later on we used a string quintet to interpret his piano arrangement. Then Jasper went back to the piano. I just thought that it was really striking when I heard it. I thought, “I’d like to try it on stage,” which is what we did. We put it into our stage act and we got such a good response from when we were playing it live that I thought, “I’d like to re-record it.” So that’s what I did.
Do you have to pay any special attention to your voice today—perhaps in ways that you didn’t 40 years ago—in order to preserve it? Well, 40 years ago I didn’t pay any attention to it at all. It was just the natural sound that came out. But as you get older your voice does change. Both Rod [Argent] and myself went to a singing coach about 10 or 15 years ago. I only studied with him for a few weeks, but he taught me a little bit about singing technique and he also gave me some exercises that I can practice. I found them a great help. Especially as you get older, you need to exercise your voice and to strengthen your voice. It taught me to keep my voice strong, and I think it’s made me a little bit more accurate with regard to intonation.
The way your voice works within the structures of these songs on the solo album, particularly slower ones like "For You" and "The Best is Yet to Come," inspires a lot of unpredictable moments, little deviations in the melody — kind of like a Burt Bacharach composition, where you don’t really know where he’s going with it. It’s funny, my touring band will sometimes say that. We play half of the album when we play live. Nearly all the songs we play live, you’re never quite sure what’s going on next. So you have to really put some work in before you start the tour so that you know these songs inside out. Some of them seem quite simple, and when you start to think about them you think, “It’s not as straightforward as you think.” I like songs like that, especially if they sound quite simple on the surface. And then when you start to really dig deep you realize that there’s a lot more to the song than you first thought.... I get really excited about chord progressions. A lot of the chord progressions [on the new album], they’re not what you think they are and they’re not like a lot of contemporary music, which is a lot more predictable. These chord progressions are very unusual. And they very often have different bass notes than what you would expect, which also, I think, enhances it. It’s an area that I really like. Do you encounter songs that you appreciate but don’t necessarily feel you could do them justice or, for lack of a better phrase, make them your own? Do you have those moments? I do. I can’t think of any instances off the top of my head, but it does happen. Especially if someone’s put a really wonderful vocal performance onto a great song, I think you realize it’s just best to leave it as it is because everything that could be said about that song has been said in that performance. Yeah, it does happen. The other thing is, generally but not always, I try to do a song in a different way. I try not to copy. There have been occasions when they have been pretty close, but usually I would do them in a totally different way. But certainly, yeah, there have been lovely songs that I thought, “Well, that’s just been done so well, I think it’s best to move on now and try something else.” And it doesn’t even have to be a case where someone has recorded a definitive version of a song and you just don’t want to infringe on that, but rather an instance where you say, “That’s a great song, but the way I sing — my technique, my sound — wouldn’t complement it as well as I’d like.” It just doesn’t go with your aesthetic, really. I have felt like that over the years, yeah. More than that, I’ve started singing a song — not often — and I might’ve given up on it and said, “Listen, this song’s not for me.” It would usually be some kind of phrasing issue; I just felt I wasn’t getting my head around the phrasing of a song. That would usually be the main problem, I think. But there are many songs out there, so you have to find something that you really like and that you feel you can sing well. It takes time. I don’t think people realize how much time and effort goes into making an album. When you’re looking for other people’s songs it can be very, very hard to find them. And I do try to write more and more. It’s so much more natural to sing your own songs. You don’t even have to think about it, usually. I find it very exciting to take a song from that initial spark of inspiration through to recording it and then eventually take it out onto the stage and play it live in front of an audience. I think that’s one of the most exciting things about being in the music business — if you can do that. I’ve never been a particularly prolific writer; it’s very hard for me to write songs. But when I’m fortunate enough to do it, I think it’s a very thrilling situation.
When you write, is that a process you enjoy? I’ve heard songwriters say that they like having written a song, but they hate trying to write lyrics and coming up with a chord structure — everything that it takes to get from that initial spark of inspiration to the finished song. Me, personally, I’m trying to write songs all the time. And I think I must drive people around me crazy because when you’re writing songs it doesn’t always sound very attractive. You’re just trying things all the time and often it doesn’t work. And so I just sit here doodling with my guitar, and I think it must be a bit trying for people that are around me. But I’m almost doing it subconsciously now. It can be a real struggle. Once in a while I’ve written a song really quickly, but they’re real exceptions. Usually it takes months from that first little chord progression or maybe just a little bit of lyric and then you just have to build on it bit by bit.
Despite not being prolific, then, you do appreciate the process. I do, to be honest. It quite intrigues me although it can be very frustrating. I’m not really an accomplished guitarist. When the Zombies first started I was a rhythm guitarist. So I’ve always played guitar, but I’m not an accomplished player. I couldn’t make a living being a professional guitarist. So it means I’m a bit limited musically when I compare to other writers, and that can make it frustrating. I’ll find that my hands will fall onto the same chord progressions if I’m not careful. I’m just playing the same thing over and over, and I have to really work on expanding my knowledge of chords and music to try to write fresh songs. Because you fall back on what you know. Well you do. It’s a subconscious thing, really. You sit down, you relax, pick up your guitar, and you find you’re playing a progression that you’ve played a million times before. You just have to force yourself to move into new areas.
Posts
