[peel] Re: sleevenotes, etc

[John Gray]

OK - well I have surprised myself by typing quite a bit while listening to the footie on the radio (PNE 1 Notts Forest 0 so far).  So here is the basic sleeve note, and if necessary, I can supply the individual track notes.

John 

"John Mayall: The Blues Alone

In the summer of 1966 I was working for a radio station in Southern California and, in my capacity as resident Englishman and therefore intimate friend of all groups, I had to contribute a column of light hearted chatter about the British music scene to the station paper.  Part of this column was a listing of the current British top ten.
As far as the inhabitants of San Bernadino and Riverside counties knew, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers had a string of enormous hits during that summer – a number of them being, in some curious fashion, LP tracks.  Chart-rigging was a hideous reality in unsuspecting California.

Shortly after returning to London I met John Mayall and found him to be a very warm-hearted person despite his somewhat forbidding stage presence.  He has a huge laugh that springs from some deep recess within him and tumbles into all corners of the room.  I was featuring his LP ‘A Hard Road’ (Decca LK 4853) on the air and was amazed that, in addition to writing 8 of the 12 numbers on the record, playing 5 and 9 string guitar, organ, piano, harmonica and singing, he had written the sleeve notes and painted the portrait of the group on the front cover.

With this new LP he has carried all of this to its logical conclusion and has produced a record featuring no other musician than himself except for the occasional aid of his drummer Keef Hartley.  This then is John Mayall – one of the greatest bluesmen in the world."




On 22 Feb 2011, at 20:30, steve wrote:

Hi John,

Many thanks for your message. Thanks for the info. Sorry if the wiki seems difficult. I probably should have done a simpler format for that page.

Anyway, you'll see on the page that I've just done a few lines at most for each album (some. maybe most have far longer sleevenotes), so just a taster would be fine on a message here (or direct to me). 

What's best really is if we can hunt down places where the sleevenotes are already posted online (as I've done for a few), then it's a matter of just having a taster and a "read more" link to the other page.

Of course, we could go the whole hog and have full pages up on the wiki for all (or some) of the sleevenotes from each album (and then link them to the main page). But as you say, doing a whole LP's worth could take a lot of work.

So maybe just a couple of lines in a message here would be fine and I'll sort it out from there.

Cheers,

Steve