LATEST ADDITIONS

Jazz Fusion may have turned out to be a dead end genre exiled to The Weather Channel's 24 hour forecast, but at its inception arguably with the group Weather Report, the sun shone brightly on its possibilities. How ironic that the jazz offshoot took off with Weather Report and dead-ended on TWC!

Gene Clark owed A&M an album in 1972 and so to fulfill his contract he did what most artists do in such circumstances: he decided to make one for himself.

Graham Parker kissed off his label with an album called Mercury Poisoning. Van Morrison owed one to Bert Berns' Bang label. Berns had died but Van, who had had a volatile relationship with Bert and was anxious to go to Warner Brothers and record Astral Weeks, handed his grieving widow Eileen an unreleasable album containing the ten songs and the publishing rights thereto. The songs—actually a series of short ridiculous and nonsensical jams— had titles like "Blow In Your Nose," "Nose in Your Blow," and "Ringworm."

Friday and Saturday Nights in Person at The Blackhawk, San Francisco,everyone's second favorite small club live engagement (the first being Bill Evans at The Village Vanguard) finally gets the AAA 180g vinyl treatment with this double LP set from IMPEX. I wonder why it took so long for a reissue label to do this one?

I once lived on the second floor of an old farmhouse with a springy floor. How it got in my pants, I'll never know! I had a VPI TNT turntable at the time, on a VPI stand that had been filled with leadshot and sand. It was heavy! But the stand still bounced and the 'table's suspension couldn't deal with it and so the stylus bounced around in the groove.