JOHN MAYALL - BLUES FOR THE LOST DAYS

BLUES FOR THE LOST DAYS

JOHN MAYALL & THE BLUESBREAKERS

SONGWRITER: JOHN MAYALL & THE BLUESBREAKERS
WHERE: PRAGUE 2011

COUNTRY: U.K.

ALBUM: 70 TH BIRTHDAY CONCERT

LABEL: EAGLE ROCK ENTERTAINMENT

GENRE: BLUES

YEAR: 2003

70th Birthday Concert is a live electric blues video recording of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers to celebrate Mayall's 70th Birthday. Recorded in Liverpool, England on July 19 2003, the concert was notable as it featured Eric Clapton as a guest, so marked the first time he and Mayall had performed together in almost 40 years. The set also features Mick Taylor and Chris Barber..

John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers was an English blues rock band, led by singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist John Mayall, OBE. While never producing a radio-friendly hit on their own, the Bluesbreakers greatest legacy is as an incubator for British rock and blues musicians. Many of the best known bands to come out of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s had members that came through the Bluesbreakers at one time, forming the foundation of British blues music that still appears heavily in classic rock radio. Among those with a tenure in the Bluesbreakers are Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce (later of Cream), Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie(who would form Fleetwood Mac), Mick Taylor (the Rolling Stones), Aynsley Dunbar (Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention), and numerous other musicians.

Mayall used the band name between 1963 and 1967, but then dropped it for some fifteen years. However, in 1982 a 'Return of the Bluesbreakers' was announced, and the name was in use until the band again dissolved in 2008, to be resurrected again in 2009. The name has become generic, without a clear distinction between recordings that are to be credited to Mayall alone and recordings that are to be credited to Mayall and his band.

Looking back through the years

Like I got myself a time machine

Memories flood around me

People and places where I've been

I had the blues for the lost days

Back then when times were lean

From a home in the country with the blues

On my wind-up gramophone

Headin' out to the city

Movin' round like a rollin' stone

With a band of bluesbreakers

Make a mark down here on my own

We had Freddie King, Sonny Boy and Hendrix

And they'd be sitting in till the break of dawn

Sweating at the all night Flamingo

And comin' out to pigeons on a Sunday morn

So many good times, so much music

But back then nobody knew

That the London blues were born

It's a sad, sad feeling

When your best friends all drift apart

Some of them are dead and gone

But they still live on in my heart

That's why I have the blues for the lost days

There ain't never gonna be no counterpart.