Season 3 Episode 8 of The Story of Rock and Roll Radio Show aired at 7 pm on 8 October 2020. It was a particularly special episode due to the sad death of Edward Van Halen on 6 October 2020. Eddie was very special to me and to pretty much all my friends and acquaintances. The show was dedicated to him but it wasn’t as much to showcase his work as to point out why Eddie was so special. So, in the spirit of that, we kicked off with the traditional Dr Who intro and went straight into Eruption.
As I said the idea was to celebrate Eddie and rock and roll and not to get fucking morbid so we had some Judas Priest and Accept and then hit the new tracks. ACDC have a new release coming up and the first track ‘Shot in the Dark’ was released yesterday at 12h00 so we played that and then the brand new Bruce Springsteen track called ‘Ghosts’. There was so much good stuff it’s hard to know where to start, we had lesser-known bands like Rhino Bucket, The Answer and The Horrible Crowes, we had South African music from The Fismits, The Black Cat Bones, Pilgrim South, Piet Botha & Valiant Swart. We played a fair amount of blues with Kenny Wayne Shepherd, SA blues god Dan Patlansky and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of Voodoo Child.
Punk was taken care of by The Professionals and Anti-Flag, Australia by Rose Tattoo, the heavy stuff by Sepultura. Another notable mention is the Brendon O’Brien remix of Pearl Jam’s classic album Ten. It simply called Ten (Redux) and it’s incredible, it just brings the guitars to life. We’ll be playing everything off it in the next few weeks. We ended off pretty much-saying cheers to Eddie with ‘Little Dreamer’ because that’s what he did, he turned a world of young guitar urchins into little dreamers and because of him so many people really got stuck into this instrument. The show closed with the sobering sounds of Avenged Sevenfold with ‘Seize the Day’, Ozzy’s ‘Under the Graveyard’ and finally cheers to Ed the way he would have wanted it, he would have wanted us to ‘Dance The Night Away’.
Artists featured: Van Halen, Warrant, Piet Botha, Judas Priest, Accept, The Answer, Rhino Bucket, ACDC, Greta Van Fleet, The Michael Schenker Group, Dan Patlansky, Valiant Swart, Avenged Sevenfold, Faith No More, Q5, Seether, Pearl Jam, Peter Frampton, Anti-Flag, The Black Cat Bones, Alice In Chains, The Damned Things, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Y&T, Bruce Springsteen, The Horrible Crowes, Aerosmith, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The Fismits, Ozzy Osbourne, The Professionals, Sepultura, Pilgrim South, Rose Tattoo & Therapy?