Fry Your Rock & Roll Bacon: Installment #1

This will either be a regular feature or a one-shot, depending both on how bored I get of it or if indeed anyone ever responds. It is fun for me to extrapolate like this though, over one of the very few subjects (and it really is a very very few) I know something about…’older’ rock music. So, in the spirit of what has become an iconic brain-stretcher of a Hollywood game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (read about its origins here) I am proposing a “Fry Your Rock & Roll Bacon,” with my own game of rock connecting.

Look below if you want to try a few. I am sure there are ways to connect that I haven’t thought of (and I give some clues for). But see if you can get from the beginning artist to the last in the amount of steps I allow…or even fewer if you can (and if you do, I’d love to know your steps).

For now, I will keep the ‘steps’ musicians who have played with other musicians, so what follows here isn’t all that difficult. Later (again, if there is a later) the clues/steps might grow a little more obscure, like an instrument or a particular well-known influence/geographical location linking players.

For now, enjoy:

1.

• Japanese musician/composer Kitaro to Al Stewart of “Time Passages,” fame, in four steps, including Kitaro and Stewart.

Clue: It’s so helpful to be, in a word, positive

2.

• The Kinks to Men Without Hats in four steps (again, the steps include The Kinks and Men Without Hats) .

Clue: Don’t be a pig.

3.

• Kate Bush to Chicago (the band, not the city). Again, in four steps.

ANSWERS:

#1. Kitaro and Jon Anderson of Yes, released Dream, in 1992. Anderson sings three songs and wrote all the lyrics while Kitaro composed the music and plays on the album. Anderson played in progressive rock band, Yes with keyboard wizard Rick Wakemen, Wakeman was a session musician for years and played on lots of albums (that’s his piano on both Bowie’s “Life On Mars” and Cat Steven’s “Morning Has Broken”).

One of Wakeman’s gigs was playing organ and piano on Al Stewart’s Orange album. 

#2. Andy Pyle played bass in The Kinks for two years in the mid-70s, his most famous stint. Prior to this Pyle was in a band called Blodwyn Pig. Guitarist Mick Abrahams, who plays on the very first Jethro Tull album, This Was, left the band just after, wanting a different musical direction from Tull’s dominant force/frontman/codpiece purveyor/flutist Ian Anderson and formed ‘the pig’ at that time. Anderson plays on the Men Without Hats album Pop Goes The World (and if you haven’t heard this 3^rd album from the “Safety Dance” crew, you owe it to yourself to check it out).

#3. Kate’s mentor/early producer/connection to UK record companies, when the teenaged Ms. Bush was starting out, was David Gilmour, he of Pink Floyd fame. David Gilmour plays guitar on two songs on Peter Cetera’s solo album One More Story (yes, Chicago’s high-toned vocalist/bassist Peter Cetera).