Laura Nyro’s most personal, mature and intense album of love’s struggles proved to be the stopping point for many fans of the earlier gospel-y good time Nyro who sung “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Eli’s Comin’,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoney End,” and even “And When I Die,” which was celebratory despite the song’s morbid title.
Calling Ricki Lee Jones’s Pop Pop an “enduring” audiophile classic would be an understatement, though getting a copy on vinyl has been difficult until now.
Listening to this previously unreleased 1971 Royal Albert Hall live performance makes clear that by this time The Byrds were little more than Roger McGuinn’s backing band, but with Clarence White on guitar, Skip Battin on bass and Gene Parsons on drums, what a good backing band!
Can rock’n’roll still be dangerous in the 21st century? Escovedo’s latest says “yes” with conviction. Produced by veteran Tony Visconti (I don’t have to cite credits do I?), this is a tight, hard-hitting package of unadorned guitar-driven rock that opens with a tune that sounds like a Bruce Springsteen demo track recorded at a time when Bruce’s music and his performances raged with authenticity.
The big problem with vinyl �greatest hits� compilations is that they are, of necessity, at least a generation down from the master tape. That�s because assembling the actual masters into a cutting reel usually isn�t allowed and even were a record label to allow it, levels, equalization and tape head azimuth issues make in nearly impossible to adjust between tracks as the tape reel rolls and the lacquer gets cut.
The contrast between this Sam Cooke playing a tiny Miami stop on the Chitlin circuit and the one who showed up at New York�s Copacabana the next year couldn�t put the singer�s flip sides into greater relief.
Like Richard X. Heyman, Matthew Sweet, Jason Falkner, Owsley, Myracle Brah (to a lesser degree), a guy named William Wisely, Jr. (whose record from last April I should have already reviewed but promise to right after this) and some others, Jim Boggia is a true keeper of the pop music flame lit by the early Beatles, Kinks, fellow Philadelphian Todd Rundgren and the others ‘60s icons— not to mention second gen acts like Badfinger.
Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes makes Freddie Mercury, Prince and David Bowie sound positively macho. His whiney vocalizing and gay shrieking makes glam-rock sound like Led Zeppelin. And while a Mercury song like “We Are the Champions” has become a ball game anthem, nothing in the Barnes oeuvre could possibly crossover—unless a day comes when what sound like gay diary entries become the favorite half-time sing alongs.
Before there was an Internet, before cell-phones but after smoke signals, news of this remarkable Leo Kottke album with the black and white armadillo cover spread throughout the “underground” almost immediately upon its release in 1969 on John Fahey’s Takoma Records label.