Perhaps because I’m that old, I view the albums Santana released from 1970 through 1974 as among the best of the band’s and Carlos Santana’s own lengthy career. In fact, some of the lesser known albums from that period, particularly Caravanserai and Borboletta are among my favorites. Yet when you look at career fluctuations, Santana seems to have cycles of 10-12 years. The band’s latest release, Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time, may be marking the end of one of those cycles, one it appears he may have used up as the latest vehicle to success.

Santana landed seven albums in the top 10 between 1969 and 1981. In the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, though, the band and the guitarist gradually disappeared from the charts with an accompanying decline in sales. Fans like me would pick up occasional LPs that tended to reflect his Latin-influenced version of jazz-rock fusion. That changed dramatically in 1999, when Santana hooked up again with Clive Davis, who originally signed the band to Columbia Records, and released Supernatural. The album featured contemporary vocalists performing with Santana on a variety of songs written by him and the artists. The album not only reached number one, it was the first to win a Grammy. In fact, not only did Supernatural win Record of the Year, it received a record-tying eight Grammy Awards. Santana used a similar formula on his ensuing two releases by again inviting contemporary vocalists as guest artists.

He and Davis invoke that formula again with Guitar Heaven but while the vocalists are largely contemporary, the songs are not. These are classics to many older listeners. Eight of the 12 cuts come from the period in which Santana had great popular success, 1967 to 1972. The oldest is Willie Dixon’s 1961 “I Ain’t Superstitious” (with Jonny Lang on lead vocals but, interestingly, apparently not playing guitar on the track). The other songs come from 1979 (Van Halen’s “Dance The Night Away”), 1980 (AC/DC’s “Back In Black”) and 1983 (Def Leppard’s “Photograph”).

While the songs are familiar to listeners, Guitar Heaven opens in a somewhat interesting fashion. If a listener were blindfolded, it is unlikely they would identify the band as Santana on the first cut, Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” With Chris Cornell on vocals, only a slightly more musical yet esoteric approach to the song’s break distinguishes it from the original or another cover version. In fact, it is not until about halfway through the second cut, the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t Your Hear Me Knocking,” that a listener would really catch the percussive rhythm that marks Santana bands and the signature Carlos Santana guitar licks. While Scott Weiland’s vocals are well done and the tune is largely true to form, it is only it is bathed in the distinctive Santana sound that it really grabs a person’s attention.

The percussion, the Latinesque feel and Santana’s guitar runs are present on much of the rest of the album and, for example, give “Sunshine Of Your Love” a different style. “Sunshine” also features Rob Thomas, the vocalist on the Grammy Award-winning single, “Smooth,” from Supernatural. “Sunshine” and, more particularly, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” are the tunes that most seem to differ feel from the originals. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” opens with Yo-Yo Ma on cello and a harpsichord-sounding keyboard. The first part of the song leans more toward acoustic and India.Arie’s vocals imbue it with a more with a more serious and soulful tone than most other versions.

An effort is made to transform “Back In Black” but laying Nas’ rap vocals on top of a heavy rock guitar style. Yet with both it and “Photograph” (with American Idol‘s Chris Daughtry on vocals), the band never seems to generate any ownership interest. In fact, that may be the ultimate failing of Guitar Heaven. These are songs guitarists, particularly great ones, can invest themselves in. While Santana’s guitar work is top-notch, too much of the album sounds like he is indulging in having guest vocalists join him on classics that are distinguished from the originals, if at all, by the band’s Latin intonations and the guitarist’s stylings. Thus, by the time we get to Papa Roach’s lead vocalist doing “Bang A Gong” or Joe Cocker singing “Little Wing” the allure has worn thin. It is really only wanting to hear the guitar solos, few of which are extended ones, that maintains much interest. (Although it is a wonderful touch to have Ray Manzarek play organ on “Riders On The Storm,” something which gives it greater undertones of the original.)

For those who like to hear contemporary singers with Santana, Guitar Heaven may provide them with some classic rock guitar “standards.” Longtime Santana fans like myself certainly are comfortably familiar with the songs and appreciate Santana’s inimitable guitar style. We, though, don’t need a different singer on each cut to make us appreciate that style or the band’s overall sound. More important, fans in either camp may prefer to hear the Santana style in original music rather than a collection of covers.

“Back In Black”

In that regard, Neil Cossar’s This Day in Music is a sort of diary of the building blocks of history. For each day of the year, the book lists events and occurrences that are part of rock and pop music in the 20th and 21st centuries. With all but about a dozen pages of the book devoted to those 366 days (yes, February 29 is included), the work is self-limited. The need to fill a page for each day means significant cultural events, such as The Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (February 9, 1963), get roughly equal billing with such things as that on December 21, 2005, “Madonna is forced to cancel a romantic holiday … in Scotland after her private jet breaks down with technical difficulties at London Airport.” Entries like the latter, though, are also indicative of how and why perspective is an essential part of history.

Yet the fact This Day in Music runs the gamut from seeming minutiae to people and events that resonate even today gives an idea of its scope. It includes events from 2009 and going back to January 4, 1936 (the date Billboard introduced the first national pop music chart). And the book covers a wide gamut of music, from classic rock to punk to country to rap. (Jazz, though, is notably absent.) It deals with people, concert performances, movies, births, deaths and singles and LPs. Like the music itself, the book also has a bit of sass. Thus, the first item for January 2 is the photo that graced the cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins album, in which the two are standing in the nude. Likewise, a photo relating to Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl in 2004 is unedited.

Cossar, who played in a U.K. band in the late 1970s and early 1980s that “never troubled the charts,” began collecting music facts and trivia while working in a radio in the 1990s. In 1999, he launched a website called, not surprisingly, thisdayinmusic.com. That led to this book first being published in 2005 and updated this year. Cossar’s background may, though, present a minor issue for some American readers. Not only are there numerous entries dealing with British bands with which U.S. readers are likely unfamiliar, the book has not been edited to reflect differences between British and American culture. Thus, most monetary sums are listed in pounds, weights of individuals are given in stone and phrases like “drink driving” appear. This doesn’t mean American acts are overlooked, though. Numerous entries detail events in Bruce Springsteen’s career, including gigs with his earlier bands, The Castiles and Steel Mill.

As may be expected from a work with so many entries, This Day in Music is not free of error. For example, we are told that on August 31, 1957, Elvis Presley performed in Vancouver, Canada, “only the third time Presley has ever performed outside North America.” Even 50 years ago, though, Canada was in North America. In fact, Elvis’ travels outside the U.S. seem to be problematic. The entry for March 2, 1960, says that when his flight stopped for refueling in Scotland, he “steps on British soil for the first and only time in his life.” Yet 31 pages later, we are told that a year earlier, on April 1, 1959, Elvis performed in south London while on a brief visit from his Army station in Germany. It is the date proximity of such errors that makes them baffling. Thus, when Bob Dylan’s Desire LP hits number one on February 7, 1976, and Blood on the Tracks does so on February 8, 1975, both entries tell us it is “his second US chart-topping” album. Similarly, both November 8 and November 12, 1980, carry an entry as the day Springsteen’s album The River becomes his first LP to top the Billboard album charts.

To a certain extent, though, many of these errors are failures of proofreading. The overall context and content of This Day in Music has plenty for nearly any fan of modern music. There is the odd. On September 29, 1976, Jerry Lee Lewis “accidentally shoots his bass player … in the chest [while] blasting holes in an office door.” Other items offer a touch of social commentary. Cleveland banning rock ‘n’ roll fans under 18 from dancing in public unless accompanied by an adult (January 23, 1956) or the BBC banning “teenybopper acts” from appearing in person on the show Top Of The Pops when a riot follows a performance by David Cassidy (March 21, 1973). Most important, there is the historic, whether the invention of stereo records (March 27, 1958) or Dylan recording “Like a Rolling Stone” (June 16, 1965) or the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1, 1967).

Whether browsing a day. a week or a month at a time, This Day in Music provides plenty of slices of modern music’s developments, absurdities and trivia. There’s enough here for almost any music fan to find something of which they were unaware, something to laugh at or items that will cause them to pause and pursue their own recollections.

Neil Cossar, This Day in Music

While Browne is world famous and has nearly a dozen platinum and gold record albums to his credit, Lindley always has been far too overlooked outside the music industry. I’d always heard he was a master of virtually every stringed instrument he picks up — and he proved that Saturday night. Roughly the first hour of the show was Browne and Lindley (or Lindley solo for two songs) playing acoustic. They opened with tunes from Warren Zevon (“Seminole Bingo”) and Bruce Springsteen (“Brothers Under the Bridge”) and produced what may be the best version of Browne’s “For Everyman” I’ve heard. Lindley’s use of an oud gave “Looking East” a wonderful slant.

During an intermission — which followed Lindley’s wonderfully played and delightfully humorous “Catfood Sandwiches” — I told my wife I would rather have the entire night continue to be Browne and Lindley playing together than with the full band. Boy, was I wrong.

Browne’s band has been together for a while and is very tight (with kudos especially to guitarist Mark Goldenberg and bassist Kevin McCormick). With Lindley playing lap steel guitar, fiddle and other instruments, it was even stronger. Although they opened with three songs from Browne’s 2008 studio release Time the Conqueror, the balance of the second set was a dream for those of us who have been fans for 30+ years. It not only included songs from Browne’s first five albums but three from 1993′s I’m Alive, which, over the years, has become one of my favorite Browne LPs.

Combine the setlist with a wonderfully receptive crowd, an excellent venue and an encore of extended versions of Lindley’s “Mercury Blues” and Steven Van Zandt’s “I Am A Patriot” and it was an enthralling night for someone who considers Browne part of their “musical trinity.” In fact, I know it’s going on my “most memorable” list.

Title Cut, Jackson Browne, The Pretender