The Steel Guitar Forum

I recall a radio station playing the coda of Layla in a loop for 30 minutes. It was hilarious. The DJ broke in from time to time anouncing other tunes, weather, radio ID, etc. A good way to gauge who's listening. Don D.

"FRISCO"

Obviously I was tweeking all Franciscans who are uptight about the "Slang"

I attended Roosevelt Junior High and George Washington High School...and spent a lot of time
in the shipyards at Hunters Point..and 6 months living on Treasure Island. I know full well what the "CIY" is all about.

I love what used to be a "GREAT CITY", sadly those days are long gone!!

Is "Bay Area" still acceptacle?


I have an old bassplayer buddy who now lives in Pinole?

Matilda,Della and the Dealer,Sweet home Alabama and Silver Wings are just a few that would get the band Tased and thrown in jail.

A noted jazz bass player, Ron Carter, I think, was doing an interview on NPR a few years ago and he said there were songs that he would not play because they had been done to death and he was just sick of them. "On Green Dolphin Street" and "All the Things You Are" were on the list, as I recall.

Jack Francis wrote:...spent a lot of time
in the shipyards at Hunters Point..I love what used to be a "GREAT CITY", sadly those days are long gone!!

I work right by what used to be the shipyards at Hunters Point. The shipbuilding industry has all gone now, of course; a sad decline of that area. The decline of San Francisco seems to have started in the 80's when they ripped up the old cable car system and modernised it. Before then you could go grocery shopping and use the cable cars as your local transport. Now it's overpriced and only for tourists. At the same time they closed the homeless shelters and forced them all out onto the streets. Sixty years ago the Bay Area had the greatest transportation system in America, with electric trains of three companies going out over the Bay Bridge and covering the whole area. That's all gone now, and the commute from Oakland over the bridge is horrific. Traffic in my own home town, Birmingham, England, is bad enough, but the only traffic I've encountered that's worse than the Bay Area is London in the rush hour.

Ironically, I'm always teasing locals about "Frisco". At the time of the Gold Rush, everyone there called it Frisco, but nowadays it's out of fashion.

Sorry for deviating from the subject...

Alan, I lived in San Francisco 1974-76. When you speak of the "cable cars" being "ripped up", do you mean the cable cars only, or the streetcars as well? The actual cable cars then were only in the steep hills, tourist-heavy area in a limited area of the northeast, "downtown" section of SF proper. (I gather these, as tourist fodder, survive?) Streetcars, and buses powered by overhead electrical wires, provided efficient public transportation to everywhere in the city, nowhere more than a couple of blocks away from a bus/streetcar stop.
(To my knowledge, non-automotive travel across the bay, other than BART, was already gone by then.)

BTW, I wonder if you've ever experienced the Washington, D.C. area at rush hour?

(I offer my own apologies for off-topic. )

My new CD! It's not quite done yet; the engineer called in sick for the final mix.

awesome! that's great, Cal!

Alluding to Cal's clever post with graphics included, and Cocaine on his list, I was reading an interview with J.J. Cale in the Los Angeles Times recently.

My wife and I are going to see him play solo at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma, here in Sonoma County, on April 1st.

The last time I saw him play was ballpark thirty-five years ago at Winterland in San Francisco, opening for Traffic!

He said in the interview that since the early 70's, 80% of his income has been derived from three songs he has written: Cocaine, After Midnight, and Call Me The Breeze.

Between Clapton and Skynyrd having big hits with the songs, which spawned many other versions, it sounds like Cale really hasn't had to work. I like his new album, some good stuff there.

I thought it was an interesting sidebar, and for that matter, when we see him in a couple weeks, he doesn't have to play Cocaine, I can do without it myself...

As far as "Frisco," IMO it's still a great city. I think some people get caught up in all the "gay news" that comes out of there, like that's 99% of what The City is all about, and it's convenient to compartmentalize that into a little box and there's your definition of San Francisco.

We have courtesy of billionaire financier Warren Hellman the incredible free music festival every October in Golden Gate Park, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. And a couple of Nashville-based musicians that have played the festival have told me that Warren pays great money to the acts.

Some of us here got to see at Hardly Strictly the final performance of The Desert Rose Band in their brief reunion tour last October, in a beautiful setting. They played an absolutely stellar set, and Jay Dee was of course, fantastic. Thank you Warren, and thank you San Francisco, "the city that knows how."

Brint Hannay wrote:Alan, I lived in San Francisco 1974-76. When you speak of the "cable cars" being "ripped up", do you mean the cable cars only...

One of my main interests is railways and all forms of rail transportation. My grandfather was a tram (streetcar) driver. San Francisco was an enormous network of cable cars, electric trolley cars, and steam dummies in the good old days. (Far before our time.) The old cable car system, which by the sixties had been reduced to California Street, Powell and Mason, and Powell and Hyde, (which itself had been created from a truncated part of the California St. Railroad Co.) still had the original trackwork, and still had all the old crossings in where the cable car lines had crossed streetcar lines which had gone many years before. When they tore up the lines and replaced them, which took about two years, they also did away with all the old crossings, which were part of history, and they rebuilt the car barn and winding house. At the time I was living on Russian Hill at Leavenworth and Pacific, and we used to use the cable cars as regular means of transport. We would go shopping and load all that onto the cars. When the system reopened most of that history had been destroyed, and they changed the fare system which precluded locals from using it.
The Bay Bridge railway carried the Southern Pacific, Sacramento Northern and Key System trains on the lower deck, from the Transbay Terminal at 1st and Mission, across the bay, to fan out north, south and east, serving most of the East Bay. The Sacramento Northern went out, way beyond Sacramento, to Chico, about 180 miles away. In addition, Marin County had the Northwestern Pacific electric trains to serve Marin and the wine country area, and San Jose had an extensive electric railway system to, which made connection with the San Francisco Muni 40 line. All that disappeared just before WW2. The final Sacramento Northern electric trains were freight-only and were taken off in 1958. The trackbed of the Sacramento Northern through Montclair became a public footpath, where I used to walk my daughters when they were kids. It's about half a mile away from where I live right now. The length of the Sacramento Northern in the Walnut Creek area became part of BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit.

But San Francisco is starting to see the folly of its ways. They've restored streetcars (which they now call Light Rail Vehicles) on 3rd Street, and regular streetcars on the Embarcadero route, which they've relaid. The system is being continually enlarged. Soon they will be digging a tunnel to take the Third Street line through Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco is the only town I know of that never did away with its trolley buses, and they have plans for converting more regular bus routes to trolley buses. The last one I remember them converting was the Sacramento Street route.

The only thing I can't understand is why American towns are going for bendy buses, which take up twice the space on the road as double-deckers. New York used to have an extensive double-decker bus system in the 30s, and San Francisco was using double-decker buses on the cable car routes during the conversion work. Grey Line have a fleet of double-decker buses used in the Bay Area.

Again, sorry for drifting off the original subject....

Cal Sharp wrote:My new CD! It's not quite done yet; the engineer called in sick for the final mix.
...

Great, Cal. If you really want it to grate get a school band in the background, I'll certainly buy a copy.

ok so I have Rip Torns' voice looping in my head saying "HELLO FRISCO"

a couple of the songs mentioned were written by friends of mine.

in both cases the songs bought the houses they live in.... and paid for in full...

a couple of times....

When I was in graduate school I used to work construction on old houses in hampton roads, virgina. We took old homes and refurbished them to use for low income housing.... I had a very talented old guy for a boss... I did lots of finish work and some framing... I asked him once how he knew what to assign to us to do... he looked over his glasses at me and said, "I put the idiots on demolition because just about anybody can tear something down."

There are songs that I don't own and songs that I don't listen to... but any fellow musician lucky and talented enough to get a contract and make records gets some respect from me.

A guy I know worked in a studio in los angeles and said he worked with Barry White before he was famous... he said he was the most amazing musical mind he'd ever heard.. he could sing all the parts to the players and could envision the entire song before it was recorded.... he has some hilarious stories about stuff that would go on... but had great respect for him...

ahhh pickin on the brothers gibb! wow... I'd give my right whatever to have written some of their songs!

I'd suspect that the long lists could not be repeated for the 80's or 90's or 2000's because most guys don't know that many memorable (positive or negative) songs....

I broke out a medley of 70's pop hits awhile back with the fellers and at first they were very dubious about it...until we played it for the people and they LOVED it.

(it never rains in california, too late to turn back now, whiskey chasin, pure love)

Everybodies gotta find their joy somewhere I suppose.

I spend a day a week in the city, btw, and it is still a great city.

I also find that the only people worried about the frisco thing are people who visited it and believe all that stuff, and folks who abandoned the city and cling to that... most people I know refer to SF as the city, but I dont know anybody who gives people crap for calling it frisco...

It is a wonderful wonderful place... my wife and daughter were there today to attend a play and dinner, they just got home and said it was glorious.

Wow... lots of songs on the $hit list. I prefer to have an audience come to hear the band perform the material the band likes... and having a blast performing them. Its a great way to filter out the audience that wants to hear the songs you don't want to play. At my age... I want to have a good time too. I don't get paid enough to put up with to much BS. ;-)

Show me any song that is more irritating than Garth Brooks/The Red Strokes and I'll have a stroke. Foster Brooks should a sung it.

MOST "ANY" SONG BY....BARF GROOKS!

AND....I KNOW THE OAKS....AND I LIKE THEM....
BUT....EVERYTIME THEY'RE ON THE TUBE...SINGING...
....."ELVIRA".......I JUST WANT TO SHOOT THE TV!

OH YEAH.....I FORGOT!

ANYTHING BY "THE DIXIE $HITS".....I MEAN....
"-CHICKS!"

I'm not an American, but I know which I prefer:

Chicks

Carey

Here's one of those lists that they make up:

Click here

I quite like The Firm's `Star Trekkin'`

Arch.

Archie Nicol wrote:I'm not an American, but I know which I prefer:

Chicks

Carey

I'll see your "Chicks" & "Carey" and raise you an "Isaacs" (my favorite version of the song)!!!

Sonya, Ben, and Becky Isaacs can sing pretty darn good when they put down the mandolins and banjos.

Alvin, I think they can sing pretty darn good when they're pickin' as well!

Very True Mark.

A score draw, to use a football analogy.

Arch.

When I hear a song advirtised and supposed to be Country with distorted guitars and drummers building condos behind the singers..Those are my nerve graters...And did I mention Singers that can't sing?