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.
Time for it to get loud. If you were a kid in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970’s or 1980’s Van Halen was the band you held up as a badge of honor. They were the local boys who made it big and that you had seen playing in the small clubs like the Bla Bla Café on Ventura Boulevard and the Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset strip. They covered the best songs of your favorite bands (The Kinks) and made them sound totally original. I will never forget the day after KMET played their cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” for the first time. Every kid at school was talking about it the next day. So for this week we will focus on their first album. Some info from Wikipedia:
Soon after its February 1978 release, Van Halen became regarded by fans and critics as one of rock and roll's greatest debut albums; however, its initial critical reception was mostly negative. In 1978, music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a negative review, writing: "For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley ... The term becomes honorific when the music...(continued)
Time for it to get loud. If you were a kid in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970’s or 1980’s Van Halen was the band you held up as a badge of honor. They were the local boys who made it big and that you had seen playing in the small clubs like the Bla Bla Café on Ventura Boulevard and the Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset strip. They covered the best songs of your favorite bands (The Kinks) and made them sound totally original. I will never forget the day after KMET played their cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” for the first time. Every kid at school was talking about it the next day. So for this week we will focus on their first album. Some info from Wikipedia:
Soon after its February 1978 release, Van Halen became regarded by fans and critics as one of rock and roll's greatest debut albums; however, its initial critical reception was mostly negative. In 1978, music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a negative review, writing: "For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley ... The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier." Also in 1978, Rolling Stone critic Charles M. Young predicted, "in three years, Van Halen is going to be fat and self-indulgent and disgusting ... follow[ing] Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin right into the toilet. In the meantime, they are likely to be a big deal."
According to Rolling Stone ' s Holly George-Warren, with the album's release the mainstream media focused on Roth's "swaggering good looks and extroverted persona", while fans and musicians "were riveted by Eddie Van Halen's guitar mastery", which included "an array of unorthodox techniques". She notes that, even before the band's debut, "Eddie became a legend among local guitarists".
The cover photos for Van Halen were taken at the Whisky a Go Go, a Los Angeles club at which Van Halen often performed during the mid-1970s. The guitar pictured on the cover of the album is Eddie Van Halen's famous FrankenstratGuitar, a Fender prototype replica of which is now housed in the Smithsonian Institution. Assembled by Eddie in his parents' garage, the "Frankenstrat" features a neck purchased from Boogie Bodies and a Stratocaster style body custom made by Wayne Charvel in California.