Tuesday, April 26, 2011

"Great Rock Road"

"Great Rock Road" Posted on Jul 15, 2010 at 01:53 PMJuly 15, 2010 at 2:04 pm

http://www.reverbnation.com/play_now/13607372
Classic live early 80's version of "Great Rock Road"


This song, believe it or not, came from the name of the road the Bourques lived on in Sherborn for a while! (Most all of us got stopped in the speed trap the Sherborn police had near there.) I said it, "Wow, Great Rock Road; sounds like a song." Everything sounded like a song, I guess. Plus, I managed to get the word "roll" in there with "rock" and "road". Lots of lyrical fun was involved.

The biblical imagery that came to mind was the "great highway" in Isaiah's book of Consolation. God was going to make a road for the people to come back to Him, lower the hills, fill in the valleys and so on. Jesus talked about his yoke being easy if we let God make the way for us. This is the idea in this song.

One memory with this is doing it at the Hartford Civic Center; I believe it was the show we did the whole "Prodigal Daughter" theme. Anyway, I remember the sound crew positively loved this song and came to tell us about it. I remember there was tape of this at one point and, boy, was it tight and it really rocked. We used to joke that we were all 'playing lead' during the lead.

This live version is an earlier one.  Later, we cleaned up the intro and made some other arrangement changes.  You may notice the 'Boston'-style pick-dragging on the strings the guitar used to do in some spots.  John Drahos took a stick of underarm deodorant and wrote something like "Anti-Evil Roll-On" playing on the words of the bridge, "I need to roll on"!

Good times...thank the Lord for this friendship that still goes on.

Mark L.[

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