1990[-05-01] Ten Years After

Date and Location unconfirmed

Haven’t yet confirmed specific information about the date and venue. I saw Ten Years After during a reunion tour which I am pretty sure took place in 1990. This show was at a theatre in midtown manhattan (somewhere close to the roadhouse, if it wasn't the (Lonestar) roadhouse.

An important show for me to see because Ten Years After was certainly my very favorite rock band for awhile when I was growing up in the 70s, but they had mostly broken up since the 80s. With a friend who played guitar and later studied sound engineering, we got very tuned into Alvin and we proceeded to collect not only the 10 Years After records but also some of his solo work which was quite good. (I remember my buddy finding a great photo of Alvin jamming with Winwood on guitar back in the day, maybe from one of the Fillmores, and promptly tacking it up in the middle of his wall in his dorm room.) By this point Alvin had done his own thing for a long while. The reunion tour came as a surprise and rare opportunity to see them together again. Of course now Alvin is gone like so many other wonderful musicians included on this list. For me, TYA and Alvin are among the towering all-time greats of rock music, and at this point in time, perhaps one of the least mentioned and underappreciated of the great English rock bands of the 60s and 70s. They had a larger musical "footprint" than most people probably realize - and while "I'd Love to Change the World" regularly garnered radio time, their albums are mostly solid throughout and contain interesting songs rarely played on the radio. Although they are known as a blues-rock band (and they certainly played a lot of blues rock and hard rock), from early on they also incorporated some pretty heavy jazz influence and, later, funky clavinet and other more modern styles into their music. And they always rocked out and jammed like hell, before there was a category called Jam Band.