Hello and welcome to Morganchem, the home of all things NErDy at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School and the official web presence of Michael Morgan.
I take your child's education very seriously. It is with that intention that I have provided this webpage for you and your child to help get a better understanding of what goes on in their Chemistry class. Here you will find our weekly and semester long schedules, copies of all the homework assignments and laboratories, daily announcements, and important information to help parents keep their children on track.
To learn more about my academic activities and the success of my students view my biography under the "about" menu. For those interested in the many different academic activities that my students are involved in on a daily basis outside normal class hours look at the Chem Club page on the "about" menu.
Over the past twenty years music education has disappeared from our schools. This becomes obvious when listening to new music on the radio only to hear music that is unoriginal or even bad. Most of today's so called artists do not write their own music or even play their own instruments.
So in the spirit of teaching you everything we can, this page features an Album of the Week. These are not ordinary albums in the history of music. These are the groundbreaking pieces of music that truly shaped how music was presented, recorded, and how it influenced other musicians and the public.
A few notes about the choices. They are albums and not collections of single songs thrown together willy-nilly. They were meant to be played in order. They often told a story or set a mood. Some of them defined a genre and some defined a generation. I strongly recommend that you ask your Parents/Grandparents to dig through their record collections and find their old copies of these and put them on the turntable and experience them the way they were meant to be experienced.
We discussed Tommy in great detail last year. The Who had done what no other rock and roll band could, they created a rock opera, toured it, and made a lot of money off of it. It was well received by the critics and audiences loved it. This was the band that “The Mods” of Britain were so in love with. This was a group of angry young boys who were yelling as loud as they could and then turned into a pretty sophisticated group doing rock and roll opera. Now it was time to change again. They grew up. Who’s Next was the follow up to Tommy and came out of an abandoned project called Lifehouse that was just too similar to Tommy. It was released in August of 1971 and was immediately a success with critics and fans. It was a much more mature sound incorporating more keyboards, synthesizers, and some strings. The songs were longer and some much harder. But at the same time several of the tracks were much more acoustic numbers and more introspective showing a more mature approach to their song writing. This is often cited as their best album and one of the best rock albums of all time. It helped pave the way for artists to stretch their legs into longer rock...(continued)
We discussed Tommy in great detail last year. The Who had done what no other rock and roll band could, they created a rock opera, toured it, and made a lot of money off of it. It was well received by the critics and audiences loved it. This was the band that “The Mods” of Britain were so in love with. This was a group of angry young boys who were yelling as loud as they could and then turned into a pretty sophisticated group doing rock and roll opera. Now it was time to change again. They grew up. Who’s Next was the follow up to Tommy and came out of an abandoned project called Lifehouse that was just too similar to Tommy. It was released in August of 1971 and was immediately a success with critics and fans. It was a much more mature sound incorporating more keyboards, synthesizers, and some strings. The songs were longer and some much harder. But at the same time several of the tracks were much more acoustic numbers and more introspective showing a more mature approach to their song writing. This is often cited as their best album and one of the best rock albums of all time. It helped pave the way for artists to stretch their legs into longer rock songs. The album starts off with “Baba O’Riley” which most kids thought was called Teenage Wasteland from a lone in the chorus. It was longer track with an amazing synthesizer opening sequence. Several more rock tracks follow and side one ends with a track called “The Song is Over” which is uncharacteristically mellow for The Who and helps to bring the listener in for a soft landing after a very bumpy ride over the first side of the album. Side two starts off with a mellow track called “Getting in Tune” and then it builds through several more songs. By the time you get to the last track “Won’t Get Fooled Again” you are in for the ride of your life. Ironically it is a protest song with Townsend warning about the danger of revolutions saying "a revolution is only a revolution in the long run and a lot of people are going to get hurt". The song may be famous for having the best scream ever heard in rock and roll. You may have heard these tracks on the radio or even as theme songs to TV shows. But at some point you need to hear theme in their entirety. Most radio stations of the time would not play the whole songs and had shorter 3-minute edited version produced for airplay. But as the 1970’s progressed some stations here in Los Angeles like KLOS and the now defunct KMET got braver and started playing the original versions and radio across the whole country changed.