Izzy Stradlin - Spoonful

This is a real treat.

Izzy Stradlin and Rick Richards performing "Spoonful" on the nationally-syndicated radio program: Rock-Line.

"Spoonful" is a blues standard written by Willie Dixon and commonly associated with Howlin' Wolf.

It's also been recorded by Cream, Etta James, Paul Butterfield, Canned Heat, Allman Bros., Ten Years After, Grateful Dead, Gov't Mule, and The Who.

I always thought of it as a heroin/cocaine song, because of the lines:

Men lie about that spoonful
Some cry about that spoonful
Some die about that spoonful

But, I think that's taking the song too literally.

Anyway, I did always think of it as a "drug" song.

The Rockline radio show used to be a really big deal to my friends and I. This was before the internet, and MTV was still in its infancy. I'd stay up late to listen to Rockline, with the sound of crickets drifting in through the open Summer windows of my teenage bedroom.

Up until a few years ago, I still had a few cassette tapes of Rockline segements. My favorite was when Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia were asked what they did during set breaks.

Their answer was radio gold.

For a moment I had an inkling of what it was like to listen to radio in the 1940s.



Thanks to Been A Fix for the images
and RockIsDead/RIP for the audio.

-Mack "La Macchina" Arillo