Let's Get the Led Out!  Led Zeppelin is our Featured Artist!

This week's featured artist is none other than the first, and the greatest, heavy metal hard rock blues acoustic band in the world.  Formed in 1969 as a result of the split of the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham began a run that left genre labelers in the dark.  With their eclectic styles of blues, hard rock, acoustic rock, folk and even country, these guys set the rock and roll world on it's ear.

Click here for some fun reading and great deals on all the Led Zeppelin catalog.

Dateline Los Angeles, 1969

Today, (in history that is), in L.A. singer and guitarist Lowell George from Hollywood,

California and Bill Payne, piano player and singer from Waco, Texas, joined forces

with Roy Estrada, from Santa Anna, California on bass guitar and Ritchie Hayward

from Clear Lake, Iowa on drums to form a new soon to be legendary band.  The four

young men and some friends were sitting around jamming and trying to come up with

a name for the new group.  Worn out from pacing round the room, Lowell George,, who

has recently been fired by Frank Zappa kicked back in a chair and propped his feet

Guns and Roses is the Featured Artist for Rocktober 9 - 16, 2009

So that you won't think we are always doing the old folks boogie here at Music for Sight, I'm stepping aside this week and letting my youngest contributor, Ethan "Guitar Man" Bowen take over the featured artist spotlight and shine it where he will.

He has decided on Guns and Roses.  A raucous hard rock band from L.A. that critics liken to the early raucous rock and roll of the Rolling Stones.

Axl Rose and his band have been through some changes, and after a bit of time off, they have come back determined to re-establish themselves as one of America’s hard rock front runners.  with a new album called Chinese Democracy.

From their 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, through the 2008 release, the band has never been short on high energy rock...

Check out Ethan's coverage of Guns and Roses and order the CD's you need to fill to your Guns and Roses collection.

The Piano Player and Performer Emerges

...around 1954 Reggie began taking formal piano lessons.  In spite of the fact, or maybe because of the fact that the lessons were formal and his dad, a stern disciplinarian who enforced a constrictive home life, by 1956, when Reggie  heard those first Elvis Presley and Bill Haley records his mom brought home, knew that he wanted to play like that! Wild, free and unconstrained.  I think we call it rock and Roll, eh?   

They say by age 11 Reggie was dazzling the aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, friends and anyone nearby with his Jerry Lee Lewis like performances.  Imagine having a kid like that playing at the family holiday parties!

Reggie won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts and was, according to his instructors a model student who could listen to a recital of say a four page Handel composition just once, and then play it back from memory sounding like a recording in his flawless execution.  Years later, Reggie would say he was a bit of a rebel during those days, but his teachers don't remember it that way.  Ah, memories, like beauty, are so often as recalled, or seen by the beholder...

Reggie left school at 17, formed a band called The Corvettes and then a band known as Bluesology.  It was with Bluesology, who soon became the backup band for local legend Long John Baldry,  he recorded his first two singles, and, answering an ad in a local music rag after failing lead vocal auditions for King Crimson and Gentle Giant, met Bernie Taupin.