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Rock’s living history, streamed online
By Larry Hendrick | February 18, 2006
At first reading of the headline, it was not clear what the story would include. Yeah, another streaming radio station on the web, ho hum … I was surprised as I read and began to grasp what what happening here.
Coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies created many memories based on music. It was a time of expansion for Rock ‘n Roll and with it, some of the amazing bands were touring and filling auditoriums with screaming fans (not all of them female).
One man, Bill Graham, was largely responsible for this revolution and when you learn of the collection of material he amassed, it leaves one awe struck. Now that Bill Sagan owns this collection, he has decided to make some of it available for free, while other pieces of nostalgia can be bought for a price.
Rock’s living history, streamed online | CNET News.com
SAN FRANCISCO–In 1970, 20-year-old student Bill Sagan had his first real brush with rock and roll history at an early Led Zeppelin concert at Chicago’s fabled Aragon Ballroom.
Now the entrepreneur owns one of rock’s biggest treasure troves of recorded shows by Zeppelin and other history-making bands, and he’s beginning to share it freely online.
Since 2002, Sagan has owned the full archives of legendary promoter Bill Graham, whose concerts featuring performers such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and others helped define the late 1960s and early ’70s. Late last week, Sagan began putting excerpts from these concerts, many of which have never been released, online by way of a free Internet radio station on his company’s Wolfgang’s Vault site.
“My view is that a live performance is better than the studio,” he says. “Live is what a band played that night. If they talked between songs, it’s there. If they broke a string, it’s there.”
Topics: Life |