Maisy Owen is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in that musical hub of Nashville, TN. After debuting with a 7-inch last October, she is releasing her debut long-playing record on classic black vinyl on May 1 through Tompkins Square. Dark on a Sunny Day is an assured set that excels through nimble fingerpicking, sturdy string bowing, and boldness of voice. The connection of folk music’s rich, long tradition is readily apparent.

As Dark on a Sunny Day unfolds, the songs are engaging and fresh while avoiding the tentative. Opener “My Youth Is All for You” connects like a tune that’s been passed down from older generations while eschewing the dustiness of a relic. Unsurprisingly released as Owen’s first single on a vinyl 45 in stereo and mono versions (copies still available), the track establishes a timelessness the artist alternately embraces and keeps at arm’s length.

“Letters” sounds like it could’ve been dished out solo for a few coffeehouse diehards on a slow, chilly New England weeknight, but this guitar and vocal core (this idyllic folk vision) gets fortified with bass played by the album’s producer Robin Eaton and viola that’s credited to Owen. The title track is a sturdier strummer, with some gentle electric fuzz tones in the weave. The drumming of John Radford gives the song a folk-rock feel that’s appealingly casual.

“The Rest of Me” exudes the gorgeous fragility of the best of Brit-folk, wispy gal picking and intoning on a haybale division, but sorta miraculously without affectation. “On My Way Down” is a more forceful affair, Owen strumming alone in singer-songwriter mode save for Eaton’s bass.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | On June 14, 1970, the Grateful Dead released Workingman’s Dead, an album that was unlike anything they’d ever done, one that showed the world a new side of the Dead.

It was clearly the same band as before, but now with a distinctly different sound and approach to the music, pivoting from psychedelic improvisation to folk-rock storytelling for the “everyman,” as the album’s title suggests. Today, Rhino High Fidelity presents new audiophile editions of the album on reel-to-reel and vinyl, plus Mickey Hart’s 2023 Atmos mix, available on Blu-ray for the first time.

Workingman’s Dead (Rhino High Fidelity) was cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Optimal in Germany. It features glossy gatefold packaging with newly written liner notes by author and Grateful Dead historian David Gans. The album is limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.

In the liner notes, Gans says the songs reflect a more direct, stripped-down approach, calling them “concise, countrified, and catchy as hell.” As bassist Phil Lesh recalled in his autobiography Searching for the Sound, the shift moved the Dead “from the mind-munching frenzy of a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon to the warmth and serenity of a choir of chanting cherubim.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Subtext, in association with Rolling Stone Films, proudly announces the highly anticipated domestic theatrical release of Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul on Wednesday, June 17, including one-week engagements in Los Angeles and New York as well as one-night exclusive screenings across the country. Directed by GRAMMY® and Golden Globe Award-winning filmmaker James Keach, the full-length feature documentary explores the life and work of Gregg Allman, one of the most distinctive voices in American music and, as co-founder and frontman of the Allman Brothers Band, a groundbreaking architect of Southern rock.

Two premiere events will take place ahead of the film’s theatrical release. The first, on June 9 at New York City’s Gramercy Theatre, will feature a special acoustic performance by Devon Allman and Duane Betts. The second will be held on June 11 at the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA, and will include a special appearance by Chuck Leavell. Both events will include a screening of the film along with a Q&A with members of the filmmaking team.

Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul offers a profound portrait of Gregg Allman, a luminous figure whose life and songs mirror his struggles and salvation. This visionary music documentary traces Allman’s turbulent, transcendent journey through profound personal tragedy and hard-won redemption—from a childhood ruptured by his father’s murder to the soulful emergence that birthed Southern rock and permanently reshaped American music.

Told through archival recordings, candid interviews, and electric live performances, the film weaves an intimate portrait of Allman, honestly reflecting on the death of his brother and bandmate Duane, his battles with addiction, and the personal demons that shaped both his life and his blues-driven music. The documentary is anchored by rarely seen concert footage that captures the Allman Brothers Band at their creative peak, offering audiences an immersive, front-row view of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most powerful live outfits.

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Remembering Ace Frehley, born on this day in 1951. —Ed.

The passing of Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley on October 16, 2025, marks the perfect time to take stock of a band that was more than a band—they were a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, like Elvis or The Beatles or Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” Yet their best album was a double live album; they recorded only a small handful of songs that the average person can name off the top of their head, and even an easy sell such as myself would not call them a great rock ’n’ roll band.

No, what made Kiss the most famous band in the world was spectacle, and in the rocket’s red glare department, humanity has never seen anything like them. In their stage make-up and outrageous outfits, they conquered the planet, thanks in equal part to a shock-rock stage show that included fire-breathing, blood-spitting, pyrotechnics, smoking guitars, shooting rockets, and a levitating drum kit. They took Glam Rock and turned it into a cartoon, and by so doing made David Bowie and Alice Cooper look like underachievers.

Why, the boys themselves told a story about how their seven-inch stack-heeled boots were so skyscraper high that one of the guitarists (I forget which) was always toppling over on stage, and how they actually had to make his falling flat on his ass part of the stage act. And the one time I saw them, it didn’t matter that their music didn’t do anything for me—I was so caught up in the blood and the explosions and the rest of the extravaganza, the music was an afterthought.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fifty years ago today, the Ramones ignited the punk rock revolution with the release of their debut, self-titled album, Ramones.

Fast, loud and relentless, Joey Ramone (vocals), Johnny Ramone (guitar), Dee Dee Ramone (bass), and Tommy Ramone (drums) cut through the era’s excess with a brash attitude and a set of songs; “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Judy is a Punk” and a dozen other short, combustible, stripped-down but groundbreaking blasts—that were like nothing else at the time.

“Punk rock started in 1976 on New York’s Bowery, when four cretins from Queens came up with a mutant strain of blitzkrieg bubblegum,” said Rolling Stone, when naming Ramones the #1 Greatest Punk Album of All Time (later naming it the #1 Best Debut Album of All Time). “But even if punk rock began as a kind of negation—a call to stark, brutal simplicity—its musical variety and transforming emotional power was immediate and remains staggering.”

In the five decades that have passed, “the album’s influence has been incalculable” (The New York Times), and the Ramones’ music reaches more ears today than ever before. To mark the occasion, the Ramones and Rhino are beginning a series of year-long festivities to not only celebrate the record’s generational legacy, but to honor the birth of a genre and the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers’ enduring impact on this global grassroots movement. From punk to pop to the perennially cool, music and style have never been the same since.

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How is it possible that a Spanish pop group with a German lead singer, living under the quasi-fascistic military dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, managed to score a Top Five single in the UK and the US? Was the Generalissimo a secret garage rock fan? Did he think The Kingsmen were the mierda?

I guess we’ll never know, but the fact remains that Los Bravos, whose lead singer Mike Volker Kogel (aka Mike Kennedy, Mike Keller) was coerced into moving to Spain by a Spanish band called The Runaways he ran across in Cologne, who then changed their name to Los Bravos and scored big internationally with “Black is Black,” one of the catchiest pop songs (you’ll know it if you hear it if you don’t know it already) released during the summer before the Summer of Love.

It’s got Swinging London written all over it, but it was written and recorded by a band (in addition to Kogel they were Antonio Martinez on guitar, Pablo Gomez on drums, Miguel Danus on bass, and Manuel Fernández on organ) that was based in Madrid and would have undoubtedly have ended up in prison (the concentration camps were history) had they written a song called “The Generalissimo Can Eat Me.”

So far as I know, Los Bravos never toured the UK or the US, but they were so popular in Spain they were the subject of two film comedies, 1967’s Los chicos con las chicas and 1968’s ¡Dame un poco de amooor…! I haven’t seen either, but Columbia Records released the soundtracks to both films. The former includes the frantic and very fuzzed-out “Going Nowhere,” on which Kogel barks out each word in a military cadence that would have made Franco proud. The latter includes the fuzz-guitar and organ garage-freakout “Like Nobody Else,” a stellar example of Authoritarian Groovy.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | How do you make a documentary about a man who was also a myth? About a musician who insisted he was more than human, more than earthly—an emissary from another plane? With Sun Ra, Do The Impossible: Original Soundtrack To The Documentary, the answer arrives not only on screen, but in sound.

Out May 22 from Sundazed, and now available for pre-order, this expansive double LP and CD release presents the complete soundtrack to Sun Ra: Do The Impossible, the acclaimed documentary directed by Christine Turner and produced by Firelight. The release also includes a Blu-ray edition of the film, offering a fully immersive journey into the life, philosophy, and music of one of the most visionary artists in modern history.

Premiering at the Tribeca International Film Festival in June 2025 after six years in the making, Sun Ra: Do The Impossible went on to screen at festivals worldwide before its national broadcast debut on PBS/American Masters on February 20, 2026, where it remains available for streaming. For an artist who proudly operated in what he called the “sub-underground,” Sun Ra’s arrival into the American Masters canon represents a long-overdue recognition, what executive producer Bradford Smith describes as a kind of cosmic justice.

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Celebrating Doug Clifford on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

1969–here in America, it was the best of years, it was the worst of years. On one hand, Woodstock marked the high-water mark of hippie utopianism. On the other hand, the Vietnam War, Altamont, and the dark specter of the Manson Family made clear that far from harkening the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, Woodstock was but an idealistic hiccup–three days of peace and music were nice, but they didn’t change the ugly and immutable basics of bestial human nature.

The soul of America was at stake in 1969, and musicians reacted to this struggle in different ways. Some sang topical protest songs. Others–Bob Dylan being the most notable example—simply exempted themselves from struggle altogether.

Two bands exemplify yet another approach. Both the Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival mythologized America, creating timeless songs filled with archetypes and imagery. The bands had much in common; they weren’t hippies, they didn’t perform free-form jams or go in for the dayglo trappings of psychedelia—for both groups, LSD, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love might as well have never happened.

But the two bands approached America in very different ways. On their eponymous 1969 release, the Band looked fondly backwards towards an idealized past–with the exception of the dire “Look Out Cleveland,” they eschewed the dark currents of 1969 altogether. As for Creedence, they occasionally addressed the issues of the day; “Fortunate Son” addressed the Vietnam war, and “Run Through the Jungle” gun proliferation in the U.S.A. But for the most part they dealt with the dark undercurrents of American history more obliquely. John Fogerty’s is an apocalyptic vision of America; if there’s one word that sums up the mood of his archetypal songs, it’s dread.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Wewantsounds continues its reissue program of Bob Shad’s cult jazz label, Mainstream Records, with Hadley Caliman’s superb 1972 album, Iapetus.

Recorded in LA and featuring a heavyweight lineup of West Coast players including Todd Cochran, Woody “Sonship” Theus, Luis Gasca, and Victor Pantoja, the majority of the album was composed by Todd Cochran (aka Bayeté) soon after he had composed Bobby Hutcherson’s Blue Note classic, Head On. A true hidden treasure, it is reissued here on vinyl for the first time since 1971, featuring its original gatefold artwork with rare first-generation photos. This edition comes with newly remastered audio and a two-page insert with exclusive liner notes by Todd Cochran, reflecting on Hadley Caliman and the making of the album.

Tenor saxophonist and flutist Hadley Caliman was a key figure in the West Coast late ’60s underground scene, whose versatile style made him a first-call collaborator across genres. A fixture of the San Francisco music scene, Caliman’s rich tone and musical creativity saw him crossing over into the city’s lively jazz and psychedelic rock circles, contributing to recordings by Gerald Wilson, Mongo Santamaria, Santana, and the Grateful Dead. By 1971, he had established himself as a prominent member of this creative community, which led to his signing with Bob Shad’s Mainstream Records.

​Following his 1971 self-titled debut, Caliman returned to the studio later that year to record Iapetus. The session featured a heavyweight lineup of fellow West Coast fixtures, including trumpeter Luis Gasca, bassist James Leary, and a powerhouse percussion section of Woody “Sonship” Theus, Victor Pantoja, and Hungria Garcia. The album’s sophisticated modal structures were captured by pianist and composer Todd Cochran (aka Bayeté).

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How do you mess up “Louie, Louie”? Butcher The Who’s “I Can’t Explain”? And why does the record sound like it was recorded by a guy in the very back of San Francisco’s Winterland with an eight-dollar tape recorder? And how is it that a band that so often sounds out of tune spends so much time tuning up?

These are just a few of the questions that passed through my mind when I heard the Flamin’ Groovies’ Live 1971, San Francisco. But here’s another question I keep asking myself—if the damn album’s so terrible, how come I keep listening to it?

Come 1971, the Flamin’ Groovies were in peak form. They released their third LP, Teenage Head, in March 1971, and it was so good that none other than Mick Jagger thought it was better than Sticky Fingers. Sticky Fingers! Mick Jagger! So how is it that come July 1971, when the Flamin’ Groovies played one of the shows leading up to the closure of Winterland, they sound (at their worst) like a no-admission-cost Bourbon Street bar band?

No wonder Winterland head honcho Bill Graham hated ‘em! Along with everybody else connected with the famed concert venue!

Well, it doesn’t always help that five of the LP’s ten tracks (or eleven if you count, and you shouldn’t, Bill Graham’s 13-second introduction), are moldy oldies and staples of no-admission-fee Bourbon Street bar bands. The Flamin’ Groovies obviously wanted to put on a “Fuck art, let’s party” old-fashioned rock and roll show, and there are times when their reaching into rock and roll’s past pays off. Why, they even include an original that sounds every bit as hoary as the Golden Oldies.

Robert Christgau once dubbed the Groovies “the thinking man’s Sha Na Na,” but since when has thinking done anyone any good? It’s the reason the FGs mess up “Louie, Louie”!

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