Santabarbara was a Spanish pop band founded in 1973, comprising Enrique Milian (born 1947; singer, bass), Mario Balaguer (guitar, vocals) and Alberto López (drums). They met as Georgie Dann’s backing musicians in 1970.
Mario Balaguer worked (born in 1947 in Barcelona and died in 1999) 1970 in a machine facotry in Erlangen/Germany and founded the band “Fantomas”. Two years later he play with a band called “Capitolo XIII” in Spain before he joined “Santabarbara” and …
… they got a big nº 1 hit with “Charly” in 1973.
Here´s their debut album …
… it´s a mixed bag: mostly MOR and cheesy Pop, including their Euro-hit from 1973 “Charly”, but …
… attention please: also three HardRocker gems hidden in between: “Rommel”, “Lucifer” and “Vueltas”
“Lucier” is a brilliant hard rock songs … it beginns very softly …but then you will hear great and exciting power chords on the guitar.
And “Vueltas” sounds a little bit like “Silve Machine” from Hawkwind !
So, give this album a chance … because you can three unknowns hard rock gems from the Seventies.
Personnel:
Mario Balaguer (guitar)
Enrique Milian (bass, vocals)
Alberto López (drums, percussion)
Tracklist:
01. Toda La Verdad (Milian/Girado) 3.20
02. Paz (Milian) 2.53
03. America (Balaguer) 4.02
04. Charly (Milian/Gil) 3.43
05. No Dejes De Sonar (Milian/Girado) 3.16
06. Adios Amigo (Girado) 3.30
07. Rommel (Milian/Balaguer) 3.19
08. Perdoname Otra Vez (Milian) 2.16
09. Lucifer (Milian/Balaguer) 5.55
10. Vueltas (Milian) 2.50
As the old saying goes, appearances can be deceptive. Yes a very hackneyed cliché, but often true. Take Unicorn for instance: signed to premier Progressive Rock label Charisma, produced by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd (then basking in the huge success of Dark Side Of The Moon), liberal use of a mandolin and this record emerged to the general public in the great-coat high watermark of 1974. Could this be anything other than super-overreaching, meandering Prog Rock? Well yes it is. If I am being totally honest, I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment at this. Relief because for me some Prog can be taxing in the extreme, disappointment as in the correct dosage it can remarkable listening in its insane over-ambition and sheer audacity. But let us accept and appreciate Blue Pine Trees for what it actually is, rather than what it clearly is not.
little of Needles And Pin” – mixing Proto-Power Pop, song story-telling and even a little Prog finally to great effect! It is wonderful.
Second Helping is the second studio album by Lynyrd Skynyrd, released April 15, 1974. It featured the band’s biggest hit single, “Sweet Home Alabama,” an answer song to Neil Young’s “Alabama” and “Southern Man”.[2] The song reached #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 1974. This L.P. was the last to feature Bob Burns on drums.
Les Dudek (born August 2, 1952, at Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, Rhode Island, United States) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter.
Les Dudek’s father, Harold, was born in Campbell, Nebraska, and was a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. His mother, Alma, born in Brooklyn, was a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette. Les has one older sister, Sandy, who was born in Brooklyn. The family is of Czech, German, Italian, and Russian ancestry. Six years after Les was born, his father retired from the Navy and the family moved to Florida where he grew up.
His next stops were as a guitarist for Boz Scaggs and The Steve Miller Band. Dudek was invited to play with Journey,[citation needed] but he had received an offer to record for Columbia Records as a solo artist. He recorded four solo albums for Columbia Records, Les Dudek, Say No More, Ghost Town Parade and Gypsy Ride. He had two minor hits with “City Magic” and “Old Judge Jones” which were played frequently on local radio stations in the Los Angeles, California area, where he lived at the time, having moved to West Hollywood in the mid-1970s.
John Henry Creach (May 28, 1917 – February 22, 1994), better known as Papa John Creach, was an American blues violinist, who has also played classical, jazz, be-bop, R&B, pop and acid rock music. Early in his career, he performed as a journeyman musician with such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Stuff Smith, Charlie Christian, Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Nat King Cole and Roy Milton.
According to Creach, knowing how to play in a variety of style was a necessity to survive as a musician in Chicago at the time:
James Henry Cotton (July 1, 1935 – March 16, 2017)[1] was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, who performed and recorded with many of the great blues artists of his time and with his own band. He played drums early in his career but is famous for his harmonica playing.
Cotton was born in Tunica, Mississippi. He became interested in music when he first heard Sonny Boy Williamson II on the radio. He left home with his uncle and moved to West Helena, Arkansas, finding Williamson there. For many years Cotton claimed that he told Williamson that he was an orphan and that Williamson took him in and raised him, a story he admitted in recent years is not true. However, Williamson did mentor Cotton during his early years. Williamson left the South to live with his estranged wife in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, leaving his band in Cotton’s hands. Cotton was quoted as saying, “He just gave it to me. But I couldn’t hold it together ’cause I was too young and crazy in those days an’ everybody in the band was grown men, so much older than me.”
E. C. Was Here is a 1975 album by Eric Clapton. It was recorded live in 1974 and 1975 at the Long Beach Arena, the Hammersmith Odeon, and the Providence Civic Center by Record Plant Remote during Clapton’s first tour since Derek and the Dominos in 1970. (by wikipedia)
