Blue Murder were an English rock band led by guitarist-vocalist John Sykes. The group was formed in 1987 following Sykes’s dismissal from Whitesnake. The initial line-up was rounded out by bassist Tony Franklin and drummer Carmine Appice. In its nascent stage, vocalist Ray Gillen and drummer Cozy Powell were attached to the project. In 1989, Blue Murder released their self-titled debut album, which cracked the Billboard 200 chart and spawned a minor hit with “Jelly Roll”. By the early 1990s, however, Blue Murder’s music had fallen out of fashion with the popularity of grunge. Franklin and Appice left the band, while Sykes put together a new line-up and released Nothin’ But Trouble in 1993. After a live album the following year, Blue Murder were dropped by their record label and broke-up. Since then there have been numerous attempts to reunite the band to no avail.
It truly was a super band with great pedigree rock musicians. There best song was by far “Valley of the Kings”
“Worn Down Piano” is a song by the American band The Mark & Clark Band, from their album Double Take. The song was written in 1977 by twin brothers Clark and Mark Seymour. The record was produced by Ron Dante of Archies fame, and was released as a single.
The song (duration 8:10) is about a piano that is being bid for at an auction. It starts in 6/8 time and changes to 4/4 time at the beginning of the piano solo.
Worn Down Piano was written by brothers Mark and Clark Seymour, who together played piano in a club in the US, where they lived. Alledgedly, one day a man told them that what they played was nice, but they just played other people’s songs and they should write some music themselves.
According to Mark and Clark in a mini documentary made for Dutch TV show Top 2000 A Gogo, Worn Down Piano was the result and people after a few days stood outside, wanting to hear the song due to the reputation it had gotten. A few labels showed interest and CBS, with the highest bid, got the contract. The version of Worn Down Piano that became a top 10 single in the Netherlands and appears on the only album by the Mark & Clark Band was recorded in New York. Fun fact: the single of the song had the song split in two parts, the first half appearing on side A and the second on side B of the 7″.
Despite the song’s success, budget ran out and the label asked the two to audition again. When they couldn’t present more commercial material, the band were released from their label, leaving their album Double Take as their only official release.
Papa Roach are celebrating 23 years of their legendary album Infest, which was released April 25, 2000. One of the many songs on the album is “Last Resort,”
Papa Roach vocalist Jacoby Shaddix described the song as a “cry for help”. He also said “That song was about one of my best friends, and then 12–13 years later, that song was about me. I found myself in that place, where I was like, ‘I can’t go on this way. I can’t do it anymore.'” Shaddix said that “Last Resort” is about a roommate he had who tried to commit suicide. Shaddix then said: “We caught him and took him to the hospital and he went into a mental facility and then he came out the other side better. He actually found God through the process, which was kind of crazy. So he’s on a whole different path of his life now, which is cool. I’m really proud of him for the changes he’s made in his life.
One of the definitions for music is vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony and expression of emotion, but it is so much more than that. Music brings hope in times of despair, comfort in times of grief and joy in times of sorrow. Music is like a time machine because a song or tune can bring you back to good and bad times. It can also be a tool of torture, a way of creating false hopes.
The power of music was understood, by both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
From the time the first concentration camps like Dachau were established in 1933, camp guards routinely ordered detainees to sing while marching or exercising or during punishment actions. This was done to mock, humiliate and discipline the prisoners. As Eberhard Schmidt experienced in Sachsenhausen, inmates who disobeyed the rules or who incorrectly carried them out (‘In even steps! March! Sing!’) gave the SS an excuse for arbitrary beatings:
“Those who didn’t know the song were beaten. Those who sang too softly were beaten. Those who sang too loudly were beaten. The SS men inflicted savage beatings.”
In December 1943, a 20-year-old named Ruth Elias arrived in a cattle car at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and was assigned to Block 6 in the family camp, a barracks that housed young women and the male orchestra, an orchestra of imprisoned violinists, clarinet players, accordionists and percussionists who played their instruments not only when the prisoners marched out for daily labour details, but also during prisoner punishments.
Performances could be impromptu, ordered whenever the SS felt like it. In a postwar interview, Elias discussed how drunken SS troops would often burst into the barracks late at night.
“First, they’d tell the orchestra to play as they drank and sang. Then they would pull young girls from their bunks to rape them. Pressed against the back of her top-level bunk to avoid detection, Elias heard the terrified screams of her fellow prisoners.”
In Westerbork, Max Ehrlich, a prominent performer in the risque pre-war Berlin cabaret scene, teamed up with fellow musician Willy Rosen to create the Camp Westerbork Theatre Group.
“Suddenly, the best cabaret in Europe was to be found in a concentration camp,” said Alan Ehrlich, the performer’s nephew. “Their music became Westerbork hits, with prisoners constantly humming their tunes.”
The camp commandant sat in the front row of all of the troupe’s performances of original songs, jokes, sketches and dance routines. Entranced, he kept the performers’ names off the lists of those destined for the death camps. “They were playing for their lives,” said Ehrlich
Tango in Auschwitz, was written in Polish by a 12-year-old Polish girl named Irka Janowski. Unfortunately, there is not much known about her other than her name and age. We do know she was not Jewish and that she was murdered in one of the Auschwitz camps. The song she wrote was set to a well-known pre-war tango tune and had become popular among the prisoners of the camps in the extermination complex.
Janowski’s song and biography are a reminder to us of an aspect that is often neglected in the recollection of Auschwitz. The complex comprised several extermination camps and many labour camps, and among the prisoners were many non-Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles, Romanis and people of colour, as well as French and Russian war prisoners, were murdered at Auschwitz. Janowski’s lyrics (translated into Yiddish by survivors) speak of the Auschwitz prisoners, but, surprisingly, do not focus on Jews:
The black man soon takes up his mandolin, and will soon start to strum his little tune here, and the Englishman and Frenchman sing a melody, so a trio will arise out of this sadness.
And also the Pole soon takes up his whistle and he will emote to the world – The song will light up the hearts who are longing for the freedom they miss.
The song’s chorus ignites hope in the hearts of the listeners: Our slave tango – under the whip of the beater, Our slave tango in the Auschwitz camp… Oh, freedom and liberty call!
The song was one of the songs recorded by Ben Stonehill after the war. In the summer of 1948, Stonehill arrived at the Hotel Marseilles in New York, a meeting point for Jewish refugees who had arrived in the United States after World War II. He brought with him heavy recording equipment and placed it in the hotel lobby. His purpose was to record the refugees singing songs they remembered from their homelands; folk songs their parents sang; holiday songs from the synagogue; songs from school and youth movements; and also – the songs they sang in the concentration and extermination camps, in the ghettos and in the hiding places, where they had spent the long years of war. The songs that he recorded were stored in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research dedicated to the documentation and preservation of a rich, pre-WWII Yiddish culture. The recordings eventually made their way to the National Sound Archive at the National Library of Israel.
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You probably think this is going to be a bout Finland’s finest ,Lordi, but you’d be wrong. It is going to be Denmark’s mega band ‘Mabel’ , ok mega band might be a bit of an exaggeration.
Mabel entered the Eurovision in 1978,in Paris, with the song ‘Boom Boom’ where they received a well deserved 13 points, earning them the 16th place out of 20.
The band name Mabel changed a few times. In 1978 Mabel moved to Spain and became ‘Studs’, releasing a debut self-titled album in 1981 and then moved to New York City and became Danish Lions in 1982. After recording demos, the band returned home to Denmark, however, Leader singer Michael Trempenau, who had changed his name to Michael Tramp, decided to remain in the USA. He met guitarist Vito Bratta and the pair decided to form a band named ‘White Lion’
Mike Tramp clearly wanted to put the Eurovision embarrassment behind him, and decided to go a different musical direction.
Their debut album Fight to Survive in 1985. The band achieved success with their No. 8 hit “Wait” and No. 3 hit “When the Children Cry” from their second album, the double platinum selling Pride. The band continued their success with their third album, Big Game which achieved Gold status and their fourth album Mane Attraction which included a supporting tour.
One of my favourite songs of all time is “When the Children cry” .However there is another of their songs I want to focus on.
“Cry for Freedom” is a political song about apartheid in South Africa and was one of many songs from the band that addressed social or political issues such as uprising to oppression. It is from the 1989 album ‘Big Game’
“Still Loving You” is a power ballad by the German hard rock band Scorpions. It was released in June 1984 as the second single from their ninth studio album, Love at First Sting (1984). The song reached number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was most successful in Europe, reaching the top 5 in several countries.
In an interview with Songfacts, Rudolf Schenker explained, “It’s a story about a love affair, where they recognized it may be over, but let’s try again”
“I came up with the composition’s melody and everything. It took about six years of trying to get the song somehow on the album. Matthias Jabs came in with the guitar part, and the feeling was immediately right, so Klaus (Meine) noticed it was right. Therefore, he wanted to write something very special. He told me about how one day he went out into the fields in the snow, and it was then that he came up with the lyrics. He came back home and threw them down, and here we are. It’s a story about a love affair where they recognized it may be over, but let’s try again. It’s the old story; always the old story. I mean, what can we use? We can’t reinvent the wheel. What we always do, is say something which has already been said many times, in our own way.”
Once I had a discussion with a friend. She told me that she didn’t like Heavy Metal, she only liked classical music. I asked her if she had ever listened to Heavy Metal? Because if she had , she would probably would have heard that Metal and Classical are really not that different, The only difference is the choice of instruments and the number of musicians.
I advised her to listen to Yngwie J Malmsteen. A Swedish Heavy Metal Guitarist who is a classically trained musician.
Concerto for Group and Orchestra is a live album by Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Arnold, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in September 1969. It consists of a concerto composed by Jon Lord, with lyrics written by Ian Gillan. This is the first full length album to feature Ian Gillan on vocals and Roger Glover on bass. It was released on vinyl in December 1969.
These were just 2 examples, there are a great number of Metal bands whose basis lie in Classical music.
I know there will be people who might think the title of the post is quite disrespectful, but it is far from it. The post will reflect how close and relevant the Holocaust still is.
So many great rock songs would never have been written or recorded if the Nazis had succeeded in their plans to murder all Jews. I have done a post on Kiss before, both Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are children of Holocaust survivors, as is Billy Joel.
However, there are so many other rock musicians who have a direct connection to the Holocaust. Below are just a few of them.
Bass player Bob Glaub may not be a household name, but check the credits on Rod Stewart’s album “Atlantic Crossing” and John Lennon’s “Rock & Roll.”
He is a bass player and session musician. He has played with such artists and bands as Journey, Steve Miller Band, John Fogerty, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ringo Starr, Dusty Springfield, Aaron Neville, Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Donna Summer, John Lennon, Rod Stewart, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bee Gees. He has also accompanied Dwight Yoakam — on concert tours. He’s the bass player on Adam Sandler’s, “Hanukkah Song.”
His mother, a Hungarian-speaking Czech, and Glaub’s mother, Edith, were working as a nanny in Budapest when Hitler’s troops swept through Hungary in 1944. His father, from the same Czech village as his mother, spent the war in a series of slave labour camps in Ukraine. Glaub’s parents were reunited after the war and immigrated to the United States in 1949. (His father, Zoltan, paid their way by helping to paint the ship.)
One of the most iconic rock classics is Procol Harum”s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The song’s most innovative feature is its unique pairing of musical source material from Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach and from soul singer Percy Sledge’s hit, “When A Man Loves A Woman.
“We skipped the light fandango… .“Her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale” — were the product of the band’s co-founder and poet-in-residence, Keith Reid, one of only a handful of nonperforming members of rock bands.
Reid’s father, Irwin Reid, a Viennese lawyer fluent in a half-dozen languages, was one of over 6,000 Jews arrested in Vienna during Kristallnacht on November 9 and 10, 1938. Like most Viennese Jews, he was transported to Dachau. He was, however, released several months later after promising to leave the country; with his younger brother, he promptly immigrated to England, leaving behind his parents, whom he would never see or hear from again and whose fate remains a mystery.
Canadian Rock band ‘Rush’ Geddy Lee’s (born Gary Lee Weinrib) parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland who had survived the ghetto in Starachowice (where they met), followed by their imprisonments at Auschwitz and later Dachau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during the Holocaust and World War II. They were in their teens when they were initially imprisoned at Auschwitz. “It was kind of surreal pre-teen shit”, says Lee, describing how his father bribed guards to bring his mother shoes. After a period, his mother was transferred to Bergen-Belsen and his father to Dachau. When the war ended four years later, and the Allies liberated the camps, Morris set out in search of Manya and found her at a Bergen-Belsen displaced person camp. They married there and eventually emigrated to Canada.
In 1984, Geddy Lee together with Neil Peart and Alex Lifeson wrote “Red Sector A” is a song that provides a first-person account of a nameless protagonist living in an unspecified prison camp setting.
Geddy Lee explained the genesis of the song in an interview:
“The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British and Canadian soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp a few weeks later.) The whole album “Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, “is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.”
Though ‘Red Sector A,’ like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.
I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says during a phone conversation. “She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”
Just think of the impact the Holocaust had on the arts and music and how much worse it could have been.
When it comes to heavy metal it probably doesn’t get better then this. It is the forgotten Live Aid project.
Hear ‘n Aid was a charity record recorded by a large ensemble of 40 heavy metal musicians and released in 1986. The project was organized by Ronnie James Dio, Jimmy Bain, and Vivian Campbell, all from the band Dio. Proceeds from the album were used to raise money for famine relief in Africa.[1]
The 40 musicians were gathered together by Dio and recorded the single “Stars” together; the rest of the album was filled out with eight other tracks, several of which were contributed by artists who were on tour and unable to attend and participate in the mass recording session. A music video was released as well, produced during the recording sessions.
The credits list for “Stars,” which was spearheaded by the late Ronnie James Dio, reads like a who’s-who of ‘80s metal.
Lead vocals
Eric Bloom (Blue Öyster Cult) Ronnie James Dio (Dio) Don Dokken (Dokken) Kevin DuBrow (Quiet Riot) Rob Halford (Judas Priest) Dave Meniketti (Y&T) Paul Shortino (Rough Cutt) Geoff Tate (Queensrÿche)
Backing vocals
Tommy Aldridge (Ozzy Osbourne) Dave Alford (Rough Cutt) Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge/King Kobra) Vinny Appice (Dio) Jimmy Bain (Dio) Frankie Banali (Quiet Riot) Mick Brown (Dokken) Vivian Campbell (Dio) Carlos Cavazo (Quiet Riot) Amir Derakh (Rough Cutt) Buck Dharma (Blue Öyster Cult) Brad Gillis (Night Ranger) Craig Goldy (Giuffria) Chris Hager (Rough Cutt) Chris Holmes (W.A.S.P.) Blackie Lawless (W.A.S.P.) George Lynch (Dokken) Yngwie Malmsteen Mick Mars (Mötley Crüe) Michael McKean (in character, and credited as David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap) Vince Neil (Mötley Crüe) Ted Nugent Eddie Ojeda (Twisted Sister) Jeff Pilson (Dokken) Rudy Sarzo (Quiet Riot) Claude Schnell (Dio) Neal Schon (Journey) Harry Shearer (in character, and credited as Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap) Mark Stein (Vanilla Fudge) Matt Thorr (Rough Cutt)
Lead guitar solos 1st solo:
Craig Goldy (Giuffria) Eddie Ojeda (Twisted Sister) 2nd solo:
Dave Murray (Iron Maiden) Adrian Smith (Iron Maiden) Bass
Jimmy Bain (Dio) Drums
Vinny Appice (Dio) Frankie Banali (Quiet Riot)
Keyboards
Claude Schnell (Dio)
Enjoy the full 10 minutes.
Yahoo Entertainment spoke to Mark Weiss, Ronnie James Dio’s widow Wendy Dio, and publicist Sharon Weisz, who oversaw the project. “Stars” is clearly the metal gift that keeps on giving.
Sharon: The [Los Angeles radio station] KLOS event that sparked all of this was a radiothon for African famine relief over the weekend of Feb. 22, 1985. That’s when [Dio band members] Vivian [Campbell] and Jimmy [Bain] decided that the metal community could do something as well. … Everyone was talking about “We Are the World” and raising money for Africa, and they started talking about how were no metal people on that record.
Wendy: I think that they wanted to get together with “We Are the World,” but as musicians with “dirty nasty heavy metal people,” they didn’t want us to do anything with them. So we decided to do our own thing.
Mark: I think at that period of time, 1985 — I went to the PMRC hearings with Dee Snider, [protesting] against the stickers that PMRC did with the records labels. And so that period right there was really like, we were shunned upon. There was the thing with Judas Priest, a suicide that people tried to blame on the music. So I think [other charity singles] made a conscious decision just to stay away from us because they felt that lyrically, some of [the artists] were a little dark. And, you know, they really weren’t. …Like Ozzy’s “Suicide “Solution” wasn’t about killing yourself, it was a reference to the alcohol-related death of his friend Bon Scott. But anyway, I think because of all the press, all the tabloid shows, all the court cases, I don’t think they wanted [metal acts] to be attached.
Wendy: I think hard rock and heavy metal have always been stigmatized by the other people. They’re like, “Oh no, we don’t anything to do you!”
Mark: We just wanted to help. Don’t let us not help because of what we write about! Everyone talked about how we want people to know that we’re not bad guys and we really do want to help. I mean, there was no reason not to.
Sharon: So the three of us [Dio, Campbell, and Bain] just started talking and I said, “So, what — you wanna make a record?” We all went our separate ways that night, and they apparently called a few friends in the metal community and said, “What do you think?” And then they called me and said, “OK, we think we could get a bunch of people together and make a record. What do we do now?” … And they sat down that night and started writing a song, the three of them, which was cool.
Wendy: Ronnie was very intent. He had a lot on his head. He was the producer, the arranger, the writer, everything. So he was kind of really steeped into his business mode. … Ronnie being Ronnie, he was a control freak and he just took over, took off with it.
Sharon: Jimmy wanted to call it “Hearing Aid.” Wendy thought we were calling it “Hear in Aid,” which sounded more serious, but we settled on “Hear ‘N Aid,” like “rock ’n’ roll.”
Mark: If anyone were to pull it off, I don’t think anyone else was going to but Ronnie. … Ronnie was like the godfather of rock, pretty much. He was like a big brother, maybe even like a father figure, to a lot of these artists.
Sharon:so, I happened to represent Lindsey Buckingham, who was managed by a man named Michael Brokaw who worked for [music manager] Ken Kragen [who had worked on “We Are the World”]. So I called Michael to set up a meeting for us. I thought I wanted to meet with Ken. But Michael said, “No, you want to meet with Marty Rogol,” who actually was the head of USA for Africa. So he set up the meeting, and [Marty] explained how difficult it would be to make this record. And then he showed us the rough, rough video of “We Are the World,” sitting there in the office. We were looking at the TV, then looking at each other. And we left saying, “OK, I think we can do this.” And basically Marty gave us all of the vendors he gave us. Everybody that helped make the USA for Africa record, he gave us access to, otherwise we never could have done it. Marty really helped us structure the foundation and steered us toward people that had donated goods. We ended up with a half a million dollars in donated goods and services. … And by the way, the black backdrop used in the studio during the recording and filming of chorus on the first night was the black velvet stage curtains from Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage tour — borrowed by me.
I also thought we should reach out to Bob Geldof I reached out to Bob Geldof via “telex” — remember those? — which was how we reached out to a lot of people back then. And one morning I came in to the office, the phone rang, and it was Bob Geldof. He was asking a lot of questions about what we were doing and gave us his blessing, which was absolutely shocking. … When I told him what we were doing, he said “F***ing great!”… I remember he told me that he was about to make a big announcement about an event that was tied to Band Aid, which of course was the Live Aid concert.
This Hear ‘N Aid project then became my life for essentially about 18 months. I kept a diary of that entire time and used a lot of it to create the written promotional materials. The overarching vibe of my writing is that we weren’t being taken very seriously, but once we committed to making the record, there was no thought of going back. … The tracking session took place on April 1, 1985 at the late, great Sound City. In addition to having two drummers — Vinny Appice and Frankie Banali — there was also supposed to be another bass player besides Jimmy Bain and another guitarist besides Vivian Campbell. The two other musicians, Nikki Sixx and Brian May, were no-shows — in the not-taking-us-very-seriously vein.
Mark: Wendy gave me a call and said, “You’ve got to come out!” [for the May 20-21 sessions at Hollywood’s A&M Studios], because I was on the East Coast. I said, “Sure, it’d be an honor. Whatever you want to do with the photos, so it can help raise awareness and also rid this heavy metal stigma of the black sheep of the rock ‘n’ roll family, that would be nice too.” So they flew me out.
Sharon: Guitar solos were scheduled to be recorded at regular intervals during the first day of recording, May 20 — Neal Schon being first, around 12 noon. He called me at 6:30 a.m. to tell me he had the flu, and I apparently told him to go back to sleep and we would book him on a later flight — back when you could do that at will. When he did arrive much later that day, he entertained the troops with his impression of Bruce Springsteen singing on “We Are the World.”
Mark: For me as a photographer, I was like a kid in the candy store. It was like, anywhere I turned, I would have a photograph. Looking at the pictures now in the book, it’s amazing that I was able to capture those moments. It was a moment caught in time, as Ronnie James Dio would once say.
Sharon: Everyone was shockingly punctual. Dedicated! Virtually everyone arrived on time, some brought from the Holiday Inn by a Hollywood Fantasy Tours double-decker bus. Only Michael McKean was late, because he was shooting the film Clue at Paramount. He changed into Spinal Tap gear in the men’s room.
Wendy: I liked the Spinal Tap guys. I thought that was crazy that they came.
Mark: Spinal Tap were like the real stars there, you know. Everyone was swapping stories, because everything that happened in that movie has probably happened to at least half of those bands in real life.
Sharon: We thought they were perfect … How they got involved was, a woman named Harriet Sternberg managed them — and she worked for Ken Kragen.
Mark: I first met Spinal Tap when they did their first walk-on interview at MTV [a few months earlier]. They just said they were in this band from England and everyone went with the whole thing, and I thought they were a real band. I kind of schmoozed up to then, trying to, like, get a gig out of it! And then later on, I found out Michael was guy on Laverne & Shirley. So you know, they knew how to play the part. And when they walked into [A&M Studios], they were in character. They had their wigs on. I remember them being interviewed and I think one of his lines was, “This is like one big black leather metallic family,” when they asked him how he felt about being there.
Sharon: At 10 p.m., Ronnie prepared to rehearse the choir and appointed [Quiet Riot frontman] Kevin DuBrow to keep order, because he had “the loudest voice.”
Mark: I remember when they were doing the chorus and it was like 40 of them there, and Kevin was front and center, taking the stage, kidding around. He was a good guy, and a good friend of mine. Kevin at the time — and probably till the day he died, God rest his soul — people didn’t like him, because he always spoke his mind. He was the nicest guy, but he was the loudest guy. And to see him with all of these artists… not that he had any qualms with any of them, but you know, he always thought he was the best and that everyone didn’t give him credit for what he had done — which was really pave the way for a lot of rock bands as the first heavy metal band to go to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. Credit where credit’s due, but he never got it.
Sharon: Ronnie was shocked that the choir actually sounded like one – remember, many of them were not singers — but he was concerned about the enunciation of “We’re stars”: “It’s not ‘we’re studs!’ It’s sounding more like ‘weird stars,’ which is probably true.” Rob Halford sang a full octave above everyone else.
Wendy: It was a real exciting time and there were no egos involved — everybody just wanted to do it to raise money for Africa. There was no rivalry. Everybody was there with their heart — as I find most musicians I know are, always there giving their heart with all of my charity work, and their time and their talent too.
Mark: That’s the beauty of this kind of music. There isn’t any rivalry. We didn’t need any [“Check your ego at the door”] signs [like the “We Are the World” session had], because everyone loved everyone. I mean, maybe once in a while one of them stole another person’s girlfriend or something, but that’s about it.
Sharon: Ken Kragen surprisingly showed up, because he felt like this was a continuation of something he had started, in a way. … When Ken arrived, everyone started singing “We Are the World” to him.
Mark: Everyone was there for hours and hours and hours. They stayed around even if they weren’t going to be playing, just to watch the other artists. It was a remarkable couple days. … Ronnie and Don Dokken, they went back a while, and I remember them playing off other, joking around. I think Don made some kind of a joke about one of Ronnie’s lyrics, like “Rainbow in the Dark,” because that’s so Ronnie James Dio — he always talks about rainbows. So Don put the lyric in there [“We all want to touch a rainbow”], just for a rainbow reference. And then Ronnie chuckled and said, “Hey, GQ is waiting for your photo shoot,” because Don was dressed up in a white suit, like really a GQ look. That was a good laugh there.
Sharon: “Stars” was finished and mastered in the following weeks, before Dio left on tour in early August 1985. … There were a couple of reasons [for its delayed release]. First of all, we were still hoping to add some additional people to the record. Like, the manager of Iron Maiden realized that he had probably made a mistake by not committing them to be part of the project. So members of Iron Maiden ended up doing one of the guitar parts, but they weren’t there for the chorus recording.
One of the people that we wanted to get was Jimmy Page. … A recording session in Philadelphia was set up for July 14 because Jimmy Page said he would record a guitar solo on the record the day after Live Aid. … [Led Zeppelin] was playing at Live Aid, and we’d gotten a commitment from his manager that he would do a guitar part if we could record it in Philadelphia. I found a recording studio to donate their staff to do this recording, and Ronnie and Wendy flew in. Then Jimmy decided not to do it. … He canceled that afternoon, after we all had arrived in Philadelphia. No reason given.
Wendy: Also, for all the people that were involved, you had to get releases from their record labels, from their management, from all that. That’s what takes time. It’s not the artists — the artists give their arm and leg for you. But you’ve got to deal with the business aspect of it.
Sharon: Wendy brought the project PolyGram and they wanted it, but they decided that it would do better if it was an album. And so then the process began of getting donated tracks, which in a funny way was a precursor to the Dio tribute album [This Is Your Life, which Wendy put together in 2014 to benefit Dio’s Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund]. We spent six months getting donated tracks to make the Hear ‘N Aid album, with the “Stars” track as the single. I don’t know if there had been another album like this, with donated tracks, at that point. … Phonogram/PolyGram was originally going to release it in September, but were going to re-release [Band Aid’s] “Do They Know it’s Christmas” at pretty much the same time, so they decided to delay.
Mark: It probably comes down to radio. … Let’s face it, a lot of the metal bands that got on the radio, it was with either a ballad or some more pop and commercial. “Stars” was just this really just a heavy metal song. Maybe it was just wasn’t meant to be a commercial song. … But I’m surprised it didn’t do well, to be honest with you. Why wouldn’t it, with all those people on it? Today it would have done good because of social media. Everyone would be blasting it out. But back then we just relied on a company to do it, and that company wasn’t behind it.
Sharon: It’s certainly possible that [the delay, with “Stars” not coming out until January 1986] took the momentum away. There was a lot of publicity going on around the recording. We had a press conference when we were done with it, and there was a big story in the L. A. Times. A lot of the music magazines had covered it too. … But there was probably a fundraising record every two or three months at that point.
Wendy: But we raised money, and we actually did a clever thing because I think “We Are the World” sent the money and a lot of money got eaten up by the government. We bought [farm] machinery and sent it to [Africa].
Sharon: Hear ‘N Aid raised $1.2 million, from record, video, and merch sales and direct donations.
(Kiss’s ‘Heaven’s on Fire’ is track 5 on the Hear ‘N’ Aid album)
Mark: I felt these photographs needed to be part of my book, because the book is a visual history of how hard rock and heavy metal kind of changed: Sabbath and Priest at Live Aid, Hear ‘N Aid, Farm Aid where Bon Jovi was at, the Moscow Peace Festival, the PMRC hearings.
Wendy: But that is the way of the metal world, isn’t it? We always get left behind, and it’s only the real true fans that are there, that are buying it or listening to it. If you ask any true metal fan, they know about Hear ‘N Aid. If you ask the mainstream, no, they don’t know about it. Because we’re not mainstream.
AC/DC will celebrate their 50th anniversary later this year. I was surprised to find out that their first singer wasn’t Bon Scott but, Dave Evans, Although he only recorded one song with the band.
He was the original lead singer for AC/DC in 1973–1974 and sang on their debut single and one other single shortly ,before being replaced by Bon Scott. Evans then went on to join the band Rabbit who were active into the early 1980s. He resumed a solo career shortly after the year 2000.
Dave recorded AC/DC’s first two singles, “Can I Sit Next To You Girl” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go”. But in October 1974, less than a year after AC/DC’s first gig, Evans was out of the band.
History of Sorts 
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