VIA PRESS RELEASE | In early 1993, the legendary Johnny Cash found himself between contracts in his then nearly 40-year career and recorded an album’s worth of songwriting demos at LSI Studios in Nashville of songs he’d written over many years. LSI at the time was owned by his son-in-law Mike Daniels and daughter Rosey, and he wanted to help the family financially while also record some songs special to him. Not long after the fruitful session, Johnny met producer Rick Rubin, and the recordings were shelved as the two embarked on a prolific musical partnership that revitalized the Man in Black’s career that would last the rest of his life.

Some thirty years later, John Carter Cash, the son of Johnny and June Carter Cash, rediscovered the songs and stripped them back to just Johnny’s powerful, pristine vocals and acoustic guitar. Along with co-producer David “Fergie” Ferguson, the two invited a handpicked group of musicians that played with Johnny, including guitarist Marty Stuart and the late bassist Dave Roe, along with drummer Pete Abbott and several others, to the Cash Cabin, a hallowed space in Hendersonville, TN where Johnny would write, record, and relax, to breathe new life into the tracks, taking the sound back to the roots and heart of the songs.

Releasing June 28th via Mercury Nashville/UMe, the simply and aptly titled Songwriter, features songs written solely by Johnny Cash, one of America’s greatest songwriters and storytellers. Returning the focus to Johnny’s own songwriting, the 11-track collection showcases the breadth of his writing, one that has always represented the great expanse of the human condition: there are songs of love, family, sorrow, beauty, spiritual salvation, survival, redemption, and of course, some of the lighthearted humor Johnny was known for, all sung in his unmistakable, trademark, resonant voice.

Songwriter will be available to stream and download, as well as on CD and a variety of vinyl options, including standard black and several limited edition color variants. Songwriter is being previewed with the release of the first single, “Well Alright,” an upbeat and infectious tune about finding love in of all places, the laundry mat. With its humorous lyrics, galloping beat and taut acoustic upright bass “Well Alright” is prime Johnny Cash, harkening back to his ‘50s hits such as “Get Rhythm,” “Five Feet High and Rising,” “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” and “Big River.”

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Celebrating Chris Mars, born on this day in 1961. —Ed.

Minneapolis indie rock heroes The Replacements went from snot-nosed “let’s get drunk and puke on the ceiling then fall down on stage” punks to power pop legends on the strength of the deceptively effortless songcraft of Paul Westerberg, and Westerberg reached his peak on 1984’s audaciously titled Let It Be. Taking on the Beatles takes cojones, especially from a guy who once sang, “I hate music/It’s got too many notes.”

Let It Be hardly marked the end of their “too shitfaced to play” ethos, but it was, as Westerberg would note, “the first time I had songs that we arranged, rather than just banging out riffs and giving them titles.” “I Will Dare” is a bona fide slice of pop genius; “Unsatisfied” is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with more heart and more soul than the jaded Mick Jagger could summon up if you tossed him into a pile of cocaine and supermodels and let him stew until unhappy. But Westerberg hadn’t lost touch with his inner punk; songs like “Gary’s Got a Boner” and “We’re Comin’ Out” would have been right at home on 1982’s puke punk classic Stink.

Let It Be is the sound of a punk growing up just to learn that growing up isn’t all that much fun. But grow up you must, as John Mellencamp could have told Paul Westerberg if he’d been willing to listen. “Everything drags and drags,” sings Westerberg on the doleful coming of age tune “Sixteen Blue”; “It’s a boring state/A boring wait, I know.” You try to call your girl and all you get is her answering machine and what does that mean? It can’t be good. And what can you really expect from the future? “Everything you dream of/Is right in front of you,” sings Westerberg, “And everything is a lie.”

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Going somewhere else is sometimes the only thing you can do to really find your true voice. And I don’t mean taking a vacation or a daytrip. Moving from one state—or, coast—to another is a very adventurous move, but emigrating to another country to live is truly beyond what most of us might even consider doing. Can you imagine leaving your family and friends, everything you know in search of a new life? Looking for new employment opportunities? And don’t forget that eternal search for love.

Chiara D’Anzieri left her hometown of Turin, Italy and ended up in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. Of course the relocation had to do with music, but we all know what would instigate such a bold move: love certainly played a part. When she was younger, Chiara spent time in her Italian homeland studying cello in conservatories. However, she was ready to create some rock and roll and her Italian heritage coupled with her classical background gave her a unique lens with which to make this a reality. All she needed now was a new stage name, a professional moniker—make that Santa Chiara—named after her favorite monastery in Naples, Italy.

And so she joins me on this episode to discuss her life and her latest record called, of course, Imported. The new album explores the immigration process from her point of view, but there’s more here, too. There’s hope and light connected with the anxiety and excitement of finding one’s way in a new country—not only is Santa Chiara finding her way around, learning how to fit in and stand out, but she’s making great art out of it, too. As the saying goes, “When in Rome.” Or, in Chiara’s case, it’s “when in Philly.” For now, at least.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

Remembering Gary Wright, born on this day in 1943. —Ed.

Namaste, fellow seekers! And welcome back to the Vedic District and your host, Michael Paramahansa Yogananda Little! On this week’s turn of the cosmic wheel we’ll be discussing New Age seer and synthesizer-around-the-neck avatar Gary Wright, whose chakra-cleansing songs and mystical crystal revelations make him the most spiritually evolved being on our astral plane.

Wright was, arguably, pop’s first New Age musician. Forget George Harrison–who turned Wright on to Eastern religions while they were recording 1970’s All Things Must Pass–he refused to give up on rock and roll. And compared to Wright, Van Morrison and Stevie Nicks are mere earthbound materialists–the Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rands of rock, respectively.

It’s all there on the cover of The Dream Weaver, where a blissed-out Wright rests his head against what is either a telepod to other dimensions or the Findhorn Community’s very own jukebox–the man was staking his claim as the first New Age technocrat, enlisting the aid of machines to further the cause of the Harmonic Convergence.

And, boy, did Wright make a splash. Who, my fellow theosophists, can forget the Annus Mirabilis 1976, when a cosmic convergence brought us both David Spangler’s book Revelation: The Birth of a New Age and Wright’s June 11th appearance on The Midnight Special, where he cast a magickal sorcerer’s spell on an entire nation with his mesmerizing performance of “Dream Weaver”? Surely the stars were coming into alignment at last, and the Age of the Enlightened Unicorn was nigh.

Of course that exalted age never arrived, nor did Wright’s success last. But if the former Spooky Tooth keyboardist’s fleshly fame was fleeting, he has accepted it with Buddhistic resignation–having parted the veil of Maya, he knows all too well that all we are is dust in the wind. Yet he continues to mould a new reality closer to the heart with his ecstatic ectoplasmic musical emanations, which make the ideal accompaniment to both Kundalini awakening and sweatless tantric sex.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Robyn Hitchcock has announced that his eagerly awaited new memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, will be published in the United States by Akashic Books on June 28. Pre-orders are available now.

Told with the inimitable wit, wisdom, wordplay (and original illustrations) fans have come to expect from this one-of-a-kind artist, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is a singularly unique portrait of a bright, slightly awkward boy becoming a significantly taller young man, as both he and the black-and-white world around him blast off into an iridescent new future. Hitchcock details a truly epochal year via his own exceptional experience, expertly chronicling a life-changing, mind-blowing 12-month span that both redefined the shape of everything to come and left an indelible mark on his own work as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left begins as 13-year-old Robyn arrives at Winchester College, a 600-year-old boarding school in the south of England, away from his rather complex relationship with his rather complex family for the first time. Hitchcock is quite suddenly thrown into the bottom tier of a determinedly male hierarchical universe, a backdated realm of arrested academics still living in their monochrome past as hormone-addled teenage boys teetering on the precipice of young manhood. Slowly and not entirely surely, he finds his way—and his place in this strange, peculiarly English, new world—through the strength of his humor, intelligence, and most importantly, an ever-increasing love of art and music.

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Celebrating Björn Ulvaeus on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

I love ABBA. I love them so much I contacted the Swedish ambassador last week to see if I could buy them. “ABBA are a national treasure,” the ambassador informed me. “But a thousand kroner would probably do it.” I was rather taken aback really, given ABBA are Sweden’s biggest export behind Swedish Red Fish and Swedish meatballs.

ABBA’s frothy brand of Europop and disco bring back fond memories of my first and last visit to a discotheque. The experience was unforfeitable insofar as it ended with me throwing up in the parking lot, but it wasn’t ABBA’s fault–staring at the revolving glitter ball above the dance floor gave me vertigo.

From disco classic “Dancing Queen” to “Waterloo,” ABBA’s songs were good, innocent fun. Who can resist their infectious melodies and perfect harmonies? Lots of people, evidently. ABBA were anathema to the “Let’s burn down the disco crowd,” and none other than Robert Christgau saw fit to describe their “real tradition” as “the advertising jingle.”

Formed in 1972 by Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, ABBA first made their mark by winning the 1974 Eurovision Contest–a sure step to superstardom, as evidenced as by such memorable bands as Teach-In and Herreys. It took awhile for ABBA to catch on with US listeners, but when they did they did it big—in the years between 1974 and 1981 they placed a dozen singles on the American Top 40.

The ABBA sound is a study in contradictions. On one hand their music is as frothy as it’s frosty; detractors will tell you their music is as cold as a dip into a Hellasgården ice bath. But to pop and disco lovers their music is something you’ll want to warm your hands over—especially if you spent your formative years listening to “Dancing Queen.”

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Friends groaned when it came time for me to move and they had to hoist those boxes of old Trouser Press magazines I’d saved: Was I really moving them again?

Well, yes. From the late ’70s until 1984, the plucky magazine was an invaluable guide to not only the best of classic British rock, but a window to the emerging bands in punk, new wave, and the American indie music scene. Sharper, more thoughtful and centered exclusively on music, even the title of Trouser Press was a wink to Anglophile rock fans—it was lifted from the name of a Bonzo Dog Band song. The magazine ceased publication in 1984 after 96 issues, but remained a vital source through a series of Trouser Press Record Guides.

Now on the 50th anniversary of its first mimeographed issue, sold for a quarter outside a Rory Gallagher concert in New York, there’s a big new book collecting its most choice selections, Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974–1984, edited and annotated by its co-founder Ira A. Robbins, who spoke to The Vinyl District in a recent Zoom call.

Why this book now?

With the impending 50th anniversary of the magazine in March 2024, it felt like I needed to do something. It would not do just to let the day pass. And because I’ve got a book publishing company that I’m running now, it seemed like a doable thing, which it hadn’t always seemed before, because I’d always imagined it as something I’d have to sell a publisher, which I felt would never happen.

It makes for a definitive look at the era, with interviews that can’t be found elsewhere.

I would hasten to point out that all of these articles have been available on the Trouser Press website for years, for free, for anybody to read. There was a bit of concern on my part that I was just packaging stuff that was already out there. But I didn’t really want to do a history of the magazine. I’d been over that a bit.

I wanted to pull together what I thought best represents the magazine and put it out there. I’ll agree that a lot of the stuff we did back then, in retrospect, seems kind of bizarre and amazing—that we were able to confront artists on a level that I don’t think gets done very much any more in terms of interviews.

And maybe the artists trusted the magazine enough to provide access?

Well, we had an advantage at the beginning, that when British bands came to New York, we were interested in talking to them, whereas a lot of the music press didn’t care about the bands that weren’t going to matter to a lot of people. Like when the Troggs came to New York, we were like, “Wow, we’re going to meet the Troggs!” Whereas for most other people, they were an oldies band that had “Wild Thing” once upon a time. Why would we be interested in them?

We were very historically geared in our minds, so if a band had a long and interesting story, it didn’t concern us one way or another if they weren’t of current value to a commercial audience. So like Status Quo came through, and we were like “My god, we get to meet Status Quo!” And those kinds of bands. And some of the prog rock bands like Camel. How many people were interested in what Camel was doing?

Remember, in the ’70s there was very little in the way of reference materials about bands like that. Dave Schulps and I—he was one of the three co-founders of the magazine—we had this project that we did which was his idea where we looked at microfiche copies of [the British weekly] Melody Maker going back to the ‘50s, and just started writing down all the musicians that we could find mentioned in the paper, and what bands they had been in and when, and what records they made and stuff.

It was just kind of an obsession of ours. And it gave us a real advantage when we interviewed some of those artists, because we knew who they were. It wasn’t like, “Oh I read the press release and you were in this band.” It was like, “When you played with Johnny Kidd, what was that like?” And they were impressed. So it was a good tool for us.

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Living Waters is the fifth full-length record from E, a band with members based in Boston, MA (Thalia Zedek, guitar-bass, and Ernie Kim, drums) and Boulder, CO (Jason Sanford, guitar, electronic devices). The sound is piledriver heavy and the playing spring-action adept, qualities appropriate for this power trio cut from the cloth of noise rock. 35 years ago, E would’ve fit right in on the Touch and Go Records’ roster, but in 2024 their latest is pressed onto vinyl by the Czech label Silver Rocket. Domestically, it’s self-released via Bandcamp, available now.

The heavyweight punch of E’s sound is impressive given that this is Kim’s full-length debut with the band, replacing Gavin McCarthy. On opener “(Fully) Remote” the sound is pummeling yet elastic, precise without faltering into the overly tight. There is strength through unity; Sanford sings lead with a sense of calm while Zedek wails the choruses, and their combined guitars reach far beyond the standard noise rock approach.

For this album, Zedek has added an extra pickup to her guitar and is running it through a separate pedal chain and octave shifter plugged into a bass amp. This effectively allows her to add guitar and bass to E’s scheme at the same time (rather than multi-tracking one of the two later, which lacks spontaneity). Additionally, Sanford continues to be a wiz with electronic devices in service of harnessing guitar distortion and has redesigned his monosequencer, an apparatus (now all-analog) that triggers bass pulses through a stomp box (leaning again into spontaneity).

Sanford’s guitar is also one he built himself, described as a steel-guitar, though he straps it on like a standard electric, dishing out slide scorch that, as said, lands firmly in the noise rock realm; there are no nods to the blues tradition here. Sanford is heard loud and clear in “(Fully) Remote,” but neither Kim nor Zedek take a back seat role as the band fully clicks.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary proudly present The Round Robin Monopoly’s Alpha: a rare psychedelic-funk nugget from Stax Records’ hallowed vaults.

Featuring the frequently sampled track “Life Is Funky” (as heard in tracks by The Chemical Brothers, LL Cool J, Ice-T, and Public Enemy), the 1974 album will return to vinyl for the first time in 50 years on June 28th, while it will make its digital debut in both standard and HD audio. The latest title in Jazz Dispensary’s album-centric Top Shelf series—which reissues the highest-quality, hand-picked rarities—Alpha was cut from the original analog tapes (AAA) by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI. Rounding out the package is a tip-on jacket, replicating the album’s original art. Very special bundles pairing the album with merchandise and other funky gems are available exclusively on the Jazz Dispensary store.

Led by the Los Angeles-based singer and keyboardist “Round” Robin Lloyd (who gained a following in the ’60s with regional hits like “Do The Slauson” and the mod-era “Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann”), The Round Robin Monopoly was one of a handful of bands that Lloyd assembled during his career. 1974’s Alpha (released on Stax’s short-lived Truth imprint) marked the group’s sole full-length. Despite the album’s deliciously inspired blend of funk, psychedelic pop, and R&B, Alpha never received the fanfare that it so deserved—perhaps due in part to the fact that Stax shuttered its doors less than a year after its release.

In the decades that followed, however, the album gained an underground following, coveted by crate-diggers and DJs around the globe. Single “Life Is Funky” (released as a 45 in 1974 and previously featured on Jazz Dispensary’s Cosmic Stash compilation), in particular, became the album’s stand-out track—sampled over the decades by such tastemakers as LL Cool J (1989’s “It Gets No Rougher”), Ice-T (1993’s “It’s On”), Public Enemy (1994’s “Whole Lotta Love Goin on in the Middle of Hell”), and The Chemical Brothers (2002’s “Come With Us”).

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Celebrating Doug Clifford, born on this day in 1945. —Ed.

During a recent crawl down Bourbon Street in New Orleans I heard a lot of mangy cover bands manhandle a lot of my favorite songs. Was I outraged? Hell no. I enjoyed every minute of it. There’s nothing I love more than listening to a band of barely competent rock ‘n’ roll discards–I’m a rock ‘n’ roll discard myself–butcher the classics. My only regret is I didn’t hear a single one of them do their honorable worst to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Because I loves me some Creedence. During the psychedelic era, when just about everybody else was jamming away ad infinitum to songs about peace, love, and sundry other species of Aquarian bullshit, CCR’s John Fogerty was writing unfashionably short songs as tightly wound as Swiss clocks about dread and menace. He saw bad moons rising, wondered who was going to stop the rain, and warned that when you’re running through the jungle, it’s best not to look back. And unlike, say, the Velvet Underground, his songs were immensely radio friendly–they might as well have come equipped with payola. J. Fogerty is that rarest of all creatures, a natural-born hitmaker, and a hitmaker of such prolixity that Creedence fell into the habit of releasing double A Sides. You have to write a lot of damn good songs to be that cocky.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was, with the arguable exception of the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead, the premier American band of their era, and on 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory–the band’s fifth album in two years, amazingly enough–CCR hit their creative zenith. On it Fogerty makes writing great songs look dizzyingly simple; only 2 of its 11 songs fall short of indispensable, and they’re both covers. The rest of ‘em are stone cold classics, and they range from monumental covers (the 11-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which is less a jam than a carefully structured exercise in locking down a groove) to a foray into friendly lysergic-country pastoralism (“Lookin’ Out My Back Door”) to a note-perfect Little Richard tribute (“Travelin’ Band”). And I could go on.

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