Dinosaurdays - Livin' Blues

Talk about doing a round trip! We're now in Holland, where you'll find some of the best progressive and blues bands in the world. Livin' Blues were, without doubt, the pick of the bunch. Formed in the mid sixties in The Hague, they started out playing Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Little Walter covers before adopting a more blues/rock style. Their debut album, "Hell's Session", featured guitarist Teddy Oberg, bassist/keyboard player Henk Smitskamp, harmonica player/vocalist John Legrand, guitarist Nicko Christiansen and drummer Cesar Zuiderwijk, who left to join fellow Dutch outfit, Golden Earring, after the first album. The band became a major concert attraction in their homeland, releasing a number of charting singles and albums, probably the best known being 1975's "Blue Breeze". This album, "Rockin' at The Tweedmill", however, was recorded in the UK and was produced by the famous Mike Vernon. It did fairly well for them, and earned them a sizeable following in Europe.They went on to release about seven albums before disbanding in the late seventies, although they reformed in the late eighties and released a live album called "Snakedance" in 1989, with just Legrand and Christiansen left from the original line-up. It appears as if they split again, as no further albums were released, until 1995 at least, when Christiansen reformed the band yet again. A great album, "Out of the Blue", with three new musicians, appeared that year, and it seemed as if Livin' Blues were back with a vengeance, but since then, nothing (once again, that we know of, given the fact that information on bands like Livin' Blues is hardly easy to come by. Just our luck, they've probably released another two or three albums since then that we don't know about!). What we can tell you, though, is that if you fancy yourself as a music lover, you haven't earned your stripes if you don't have a copy of "Blue Breeze" in your collection.

(If you have more info on this band, please e-mail us)