Thanks, Wheelz! Peter is a world-class racer. Glad I was able to feature him.
Major congratulations are in order for our friend and former Racer of the Week, Rich Panicaro from Trenton, New Jersey. This weekend, Rich runner-upped at the 10k Footbrake Race at Maple Grove. Great going, Rich! That is an awesome day for a drag racer to have, and I have no doubt that you will be right there again next time.
My pick for Racer of the Week is Jenny Wilson from Milan, Illinois. Jenny is a member of one of the most popular, successful and respected drag racing families in the Quad Cities area, the Wilson Family Racing Team. Her 1989 Camaro RS is a major competitor in the Super ET class and she has had considerable success running this car. Last year I featured her brother Jay Wilson and the whole family as Racer of the Week, and this time it's Jenny's turn to have the spotlight. I've been in touch with Jenny over the last month or so, and here is what she sent to me for tonight's information:
My dad and uncle started racing in 76. I was 4 yrs old and every weekend in summer they would drag me and my cousins out to the track. We were track brats. I started racing myself in 1996 in the street class. I got rookie of the year for my first season. My home track is Cordova drag way park in Illinois. I also raced Byron dragway in illinois. Where I placed 2nd place in 2002 and 3rd place in 2005 overall in street class. I bought a new 1989 camaro rs and moved to super et class at Cordova and pro class at Byron. In 2008 overall points at Byron I placed 2nd. 2011 I won the Illinois state championship at Cordova. With the help of my dad and my brother Jay, Auto Rons and Terry Coleman we built my 350 Chevy and got it running in the 11s. My best time is 11.54 at 117mph. I love racing with my family and we have 3 generations racing together right now. My father Jim wilson, my brother Jay, my cousin Jamie Rexroad and his son Douglas. I have enjoyed the last 38 yrs of hanging with my family and racing.
Jenny is a lifelong drag racer and she helps maintain the standards that her family established in the mid-70s. We wish her good luck, safe racing and best of times in the future.
The night I graduated from high school in June 1967, the whole class stayed out all night an partied. On my way home in my '65 Corvair Monza on Seawall Boulevard as the sun was coming up, I saw my friend J.D. sitting on the trunk of his GTO. I pulled up and hung out with him for a while. He had one of those portable battery-powered record players sitting next to him, and the album he was playing on it was one I'd never heard of before, a Los Angeles-based group called Love. The album cover was a hand-drawn collage of the members' heads mixed in with various nature-themed filler...it reminded me of the Beatles' Revolver but it was full-color. The music gripped me immediately. I heard elements of the Byrds, the Beatles, a Burt Bacharach and Hal David song, and music that didn't have a label yet but in another 10 years would be called Punk. Swirling, beautiful vocals and instruments mixed together to make this music truly extraordinary, and I stayed there with J.D. and listened to the whole album. It was a perfect end to a perfect night in my life.
The band, Love, was Arthur Lee, the mastermind of their music and direction, Bryan MacLean, the great musician and songwriter who was the perfect complement to Lee's insanity, whose vocals were often compared to Johnny Mathis on acid, and over the years, a rotating cast of incredibly talented and creative musicians. In late 1967, Love released the album that I'm focusing on in this segment. It was called "Forever Changes", and it was the first Love album I purchased myself when I was into serious record collecting in the early 1980s. The album is to be taken as a whole; detailing individual tracks in my opinion diminishes the overall impact of the statement. There is little to compare "Forever Changes" to. It stands alone as an unbelievable outpouring of pure feeling, synergy and a totally united consciousness. According to the sources I researched on this album, the entire 4-sided magnum opus was recorded in 64 hours as the band was breaking up, but althought the politics of their situation were concrete reasons and the standard ones that turn up when bands break up, the music, the vision, the execution of the material and the flow of the entire experience is beyond anything I've ever heard. It is, along with Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles, and the 13th
Floor Elevators' Easter Everywhere, a truly magnificent, cracked masterpiece, and it will never be approached as anything less. Arthur Lee went on to record and work as a solo artist after Love broke up, but Love made 10 studio albums, 5 live albums and 5 compilation albums outside of Lee's 6 solo efforts. His first album after leaving Love was called Vindicator and it featured Jimi Hendrix on guitar as well as several of rock's top guys on it.
I've never said this before, but this album served as one of the baseline templates for the Citykings' style and delivery. I saw it as the rock album that everybody should at least listen to, if not try to emulate.
Arthur Lee's life wasn't easy, as you might well surmise from these words. He lived to the extreme at all times. His last years were his most successful, and he toured and performed these albums right up until he got sick and couldn't carry on. We lost him in 2006, but his legacy as one of the most brilliant of creative minds in the history of rock 'n roll is immortalized in the recordings he left behind.
In an obituary of Lee in early 2007, Kandia Crazy Horse of Vibe Magazine wrote that Forever Changes (was) Arthur Lee's psychedelic masterpiece ... an exhilarating mash-up of West Side freak folk with East Side mariachi and blues. Lee out-jangles his heroes the Byrds on the immortal 'Alone Again Or' and aims his symphonic trigger dead at the Beatles on his greatest work, 'You Set the Scene.' In total, a glorious song cycle exploring the dark side of hippiedom."
If anybody is interested in getting their mind blown, find a copy of "Forever Changes" and sit back in awe. That's what I did and I still take a couple of hours from time to time to listen to it and be reminded that we're just passing through here, and if you want to, you can make every day, every hour, every minute, and every note count for something. Rest in peace, Arthur, and thanks.
Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It's a Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss. Everybody Rock on. Thanks, I'll see y'all next week.