Music has always reflected the mechanical sounds of the era it’s made in. Roger McGuinn noted as much in the liner notes to the Byrds’ debut, using a lot of made up words like “rrrrrrrrooooaaaaahhhhh” and “krrrrrrriiiiiisssssshhhhhh” to illustrate his point. As annoying as that sounds, he was right. Early…
In 1965-1966, it was still possible for a garage band to make the leap to Top 40 and back to obscurity all in the same year. These Sundazed reissues brilliantly capture that moment before the window of opportunity closed like an automatic garage door. With so little time to make…
Here’s where Josh Homme and the gang forget about their Stone Age evolution from Kyuss and start making the “Queen” part of the name count for something. Just like a baked version of Sheer Heart Attack, songs run together with no gaps in between, making each installment seem stranger than…
Back when Ricky Nelson sang about being a lonesome “Teenage Idol” playing one-night stands, road songs were still a novelty, something chain-smoking Brill Building songwriters cooked up in between gulps of coffee. Once rock stars began writing from their own personal experiences, hundreds of songs came down the pike lamenting…
You don’t see the “Simultaneous Two New Album Release” every day, and with good reason. 1991: Nobody can convince Axl Rose to pare down a pair of new Guns N’ Roses albums, each CD with over 75 minutes of music — the length of two White Album sets minus all…
In 1971, John Lennon issued a No. 1 album and Top 5 single both titled “Imagine.” The following year, Lennon and Yoko Ono self-directed a 55-minute film also titled Imagine, which included clips for all 10 of the album’s songs plus two from Ono’s Fly record, making it the precursor…
By the fall of 1959, Marty Robbins had amassed a recorded catalogue of five albums and 32 singles. Embedded in this waxwork were songs with whistling, songs with yodeling, songs with rockabilly guitar licks and songs with Little Richard-type squeals. One song even had sped-up chipmunk vocals. There was a…
Sometimes towering insignificance is the very thing that draws the most attention. Take Sony Legacy reissuing not one, but four Burton Cummings CDs with previously unheard bonus cuts.Burton Cummings? In rock ‘n’ roll hero terms, he’s Atom Man, the Justice Leaguer who only saved the day by doing something really…
You seem like a person who knows from fun — here’s an exercise guaranteed to provide you your required dosage of cruel hilarity. You know that panic-stricken look that comes over people when their CDs get stuck and start skipping violently? It’s a million times worse than the sound of…
Here’s a snatch of overheard conversation, circa 1983, taking place inside a Greenwich Village record store on Bleecker Street called The Golden Disc. At the counter, two men are quietly conferring like doctors around a malignant x-ray. The shopkeeper is holding the sleeve of XTC’s latest import single, “Wonderland,” now…
Editor’s note: Maybe it was the tight wristband cutting off the oxygen flow to his brain. Or perhaps it was the kiboshing he got from crazy mofos in the Flys’ mosh pit or the foolhardy mixture of sun, sound and Alabama Slammers from four different venues. Maybe he’s attended too…
If you polled a Family Feud studio audience for “reasons people become musicians,” answers like “sex,” “drugs,” “fame,” “money” and even (yawn) “the music” would all be greeted with dinging bells and a deep tongue kiss from Richard Dawson. Just as surely, Greg Sage’s reason, “the appearance of the grooves…
Various artists Unsigned 1 — Nuth’n But Hits (Ameritone Records) Picking up a compilation of local unsigned bands is like spying your co-worker’s kid selling chocolates around the office — the rush of generosity is usually supplanted by a sick, queasy feeling in the back of your gullet. All the…
“In 1966, one of the great albums in rock ‘n’ roll history was made: Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys. Even today it holds up. I listen to it and moan, sit on my bed encircled in a knee-high pile of paper and write poetry.” So who’s that waxin’ wimpy…
Jimmy Winston’s mum must be proud. Keyboardist for the Small Faces’ first two singles, he was booted out before he got to appear on any album covers. Now, 35 years later, he finally gets to flash his surly mug, albeit on a diminished four-and-three-quarter-inch Guinness coaster of a cover. Not…
As various-artist-album concepts go, this one is pretty unique. Rather than celebrate one artist, this one praises an interstate. You know it, you love it, you can’t get to work without it — ladies and gentlemen, I give you I-10! You might think the assembled artists would opt to take…
Trunk Federation Lay the Hip (Plastique Recording Co.) That Trunk Federation even managed to get together and put out a third album after a year of dissolution, defections and personal problems is amazing enough. That Lay the Hip turns out to be their best effort to date is nothing short…
One doesn’t approach the annual South by Southwest music festival like an average bout of nightclubbing. Music writers train weeks for this cacophonous conference, rigorously avoiding all kinds of music so that their hearing will be in fine fettle for a beat surrender to the senses. Otherwise they could overload…
Paul Revere and the Raiders was the first beat group signed to the once rock-phobic Columbia label. This fourplay of Sundazed reissues captures all the crucial periods of the band’s career and, in the process, makes a pretty compelling argument for reevaluating the musical legacy of these current-day state fair/casino-circuit…
When soothsayers foretold that the end of the century would bring our human community to ever higher levels of enlightenment, I don’t think Fox’s Secrets of Street Magicians Finally Revealed was what they had in mind. Or figuring out what space-age adhesive was holding up Jennifer Lopez and her Grammy…
I suppose the question on everyone’s minds with this latest Oasis opus is “how the hell are they going to survive without ‘Bonehead’?” Magically, the opaque void that was always Bonehead hasn’t been filled so much as decorated around — after all, how do you replace a presence so aggressively…
Remember when every year that passed was the 25th anniversary of something? The release of Sgt. Pepper. The first performance of Tommy. Jimi and Janis’ expiration dates. Then when it got to be the 25th anniversaries of “Disco Duck” and the Osmonds usurping the Jacksons on the pop charts, people…
