NASA has a long standing tradition of greeting every morning the astronauts in space with music:
Use of music to awaken astronauts on space missions dates back at least to the Apollo Program, when astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion. The Apollo 15 crew, whose spacecraft was named “America,” (sic) [This was actually the name of the Apollo 17 command module] was awakened one morning with a segment of “The City of New Orleans” beginning with the lyrics, “Good morning America, how are you?” Several crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin’s popular song “Going Back to Houston.”
The common element of all these selections is that they promote a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the astronauts and ground support personnel. That, in fact, is the sole reason for having wake-up music; and it is the reason that NASA management has neither attempted to dictate its content nor allowed outside interests to influence the process.
On day 15 of the space shuttle Discovery’s STS-120 mission (that must have been November 6) Space Truckin’ was played for Expedition 15/16 Flight Engineer and STS-120 Mission Specialist Clay Anderson.
The astronauts were also greeted with Space Truckin’ on January 17, 2003, the second day of the fateful STS-107 mission. The song was played for Kalpana Chawla at her request.
Martin Popoff, the prolific writer of articles and guides about metal and hard rock, has just released the latest book in his new series, Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975; this time, concentrating on recordings from (as you might imagine) 1973 through 1975. In a similar manner to the Classic Album video series, he has gone to the sources of the recordings themselves, using interviews with the musicians to uncover the background surrounding these albums, and try to explain why they’ve become classics of the genre.
The albums he explores in this volume include
Status Quo – Piledriver
Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies, Welcome To My Nightmare
New York Dolls – New York Dolls
Uriah Heep – Sweet Freedom
Nazareth – Loud ‘N’ Proud, Hair Of The Dog
Montrose – Montrose
Bachman Turner Overdrive – II, Not Fragile
Deep Purple – Burn, Come Taste The Band
Robin Trower – Bridge Of Sighs
Buffalo – Only Want You For Your Body
The Dictators – Go Girl Crazy!
ZZ Top – Fandango
Budgie – Bandolier
Foghat – Fool For The City
Visit www.martinpopoff.com for more details about this book (or any of his many others), and to order.
Durham Concerto, which was performed on October 20, was recorded for the British radio station Classic FM and will be on the air tomorrow, November 4, between 5 and 7pm as a part of The Hall of Fame Concerts program. You can listen to Classic FM over the Internet here (Windows Media format).
This year Deep Purple have spend the All Hallows Eve in the Land of Dracula, trick-or-treating in front of 15,000 people. Metalhead.ro has pictures from the event.
If our first setlist poll have proved anything, it’s that most people can agree on what exactly the golden oldies are (and even there opinions varied wildly). Let’s tackle it from a slightly different angle — how many new vs. old songs should be in the setlist? By “new” we mean anything starting from 1995.
How many new songs in a set would you like
to hear?
6 (14%, 170 Votes)
5 (14%, 167 Votes)
8 (14%, 164 Votes)
10 (12%, 147 Votes)
7 (12%, 146 Votes)
4 (9%, 109 Votes)
Only new songs (5%, 63 Votes)
3 (5%, 57 Votes)
9 (3%, 38 Votes)
15 (3%, 35 Votes)
12 (3%, 31 Votes)
None (2%, 26 Votes)
2 (2%, 18 Votes)
1 (1%, 10 Votes)
13 (1%, 8 Votes)
11 (1%, 7 Votes)
14 (0%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,198
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Poll closes on October 27, at 23:59 UTC (let’s make it a blitz).
On Saturday Jon Lord and the Liverpool Philharmonics premiered his Durham Concerto at Durham Cathedral.
In a TV interview the day before the show, Lord called his latest venue ‘One heck of a cathedral’ and went on to expand on how he wrote the new Durham Concerto – and how Deep Purple became the loudest band in the world.
Find this, photos and comments to the success of Lord’s new Concerto at Jon Lord’s new official website, JonLord.org. Photo: John Attle.
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing