Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
I was a city child with a dead-end smile / And a worm’s-eye point of view / Oh I knew my way, I was a backstreet stray / And I had my eyes on you
Now I got this friend and he’s a screwdriver-jiver / You know, some kinda automobeat on the street / And he has converted me to rock’n’roll
I just want to dance to / Honaloochie boogie yeah / Get in time, don’t worry ’bout the shirt shine / Honaloochie boogie yeah / You sure started somethin’
Now my hair gets longer as the beat gets stronger / want to tell Chuck Berry my news / I get my kicks outta guitar licks / And I’ve sold my steel-toed shoes
I used a verse from the Mott the Hoople song above as my quote for the senior page of my high school yearbook. This week’s playlist was sparked by a song too, “Let’s Be Us Again” by a Portland group called The Declines. Funny enough, pulling songs about “us,” “you and I,” etc. This wonderful tune just didn’t seem to fit as well as Ian Hunter and Gary Numan.
If you saw the recent Alison Ellwood directed documentary, The Go-Go’s, you’ll know that the band soared to the highest showbiz highs and sank to some pretty lousy lows. Witnessing the entire rock and roll rollercoaster from the drum throne was Gina Schock who joins me to talk about many things currently buzzing in the world of The Go-Go’s, but specifically the 20th anniversary and reissue of their 2001 reunion album, 
Santa Clarita, CA | New Indie Record Store, Gray Skull Vinyl, Opens in Canyon Country: A new independent record store, Gray Skull Vinyl, has opened in Canyon Country, where local music fans and collectors have suffered without one for years. Located at 19983 Soledad Canyon Road, the shop is stocked with new and used vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CD’s, VHS videos, DVDs, posters, framed photographs, t-shirts, caps, guitars, amps, music magazines, books, and more. Victor Torres Jr., a 25-year Canyon Country resident and lifelong record and music collector, and his family opened the retail shop in early April in the small strip mall anchored by the Oak Tree liquor store at Soledad and Langside. “Customers come in and they’re like, ‘Wow, I could spend a good half a day here going through all these records and talking about music,’” Torres said in an interview at the store last week. “That’s what I want when people come in and just enjoy the record store. “I want people to walk in here and feel like they’re 15 years old again, see a favorite record or a poster, and say, ‘Oh, I had one of those! I don’t know what happened to it,’” he said. “But if they find it here, 
Margo Price Launches Rarities Vinyl Record Club: Margo Price has launched a mail-order report membership, A Sequence of Rumors. The primary tune from will probably be “Lengthy Dwell The King” which is able to seem because the B-side to the Rumors spotlight “Hey Little one.” Additionally a part of the primary cargo bundle is “Twinkle Twinkle” b/w Worth’s tackle Bobbie Gentry’s “He Made a Lady Out of Me” and “Letting Me Down” b/w “I’d Die For You” (Synthphonic). The primary set of data will ship now, and subscribers will obtain their second/third deliveries in June/July. Some are misplaced songs from That’s How Rumors Get Began periods at each Hollywood’s East West Studios and Nashville’s Butcher Shoppe; others are from pre-production periods in Texas with Band of Heathens, or lockdown recordings with Worth’s band The Pricetags. Over three month-to-month shipments, A Sequence of Rumors members will obtain a restricted version, an autographed field of seven-inch vinyl data that includes music from Worth’s 2020 album, That’s How Rumors Get Began, backed with unique B-sides, covers and 
NEW RELEASE PICKS: Joe Morris / Damon Smith, Gusts Against Particles (Open Systems) Free improv/ avant-jazz guitarist Joe Morris has been active since the 1970s, debuting on record with Wraparound by his trio on his own label Riti in 1983. Double bassist Damon Smith is nearly two decades Morris’ junior and young enough that punk rock (’80s US u-ground division) was a source of inspiration before jazz and free improv. He’s recorded a bunch, and like Morris, he started his own label, Balance Point Acoustics. On his instrument, Smith is a beast, and in fact, so is Morris; as Gusts Against Particles plays, the sheer breadth of technique grows to utterly striking levels, largely because the goal is intensity of interaction. Morris’ sound is at times reminiscent of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne (in free improv mode) but he is ultimately his own man. The same is true of Smith as he pulls gargantuan notes on his bass and wrangles passages of massive extendedness. A wonderfully recorded LP (Smith’s breathing is audible at a few points) in an edition of 200 as Open Systems’ first release. With two digital bonus tracks. A
Maxine Funke, Seance (A Colourful Storm) New Zealander Maxine Funke sings and plays guitar with an uncommon gentleness that’s decidedly late-night and never cutesy. In fact, at a few points, like during the terrific “Moody Relish,” Funke conjures an atmosphere that’s notably tense. That same track also had me thinking of Young Marble Giants, a comparison that never crossed my mind when soaking up her 2018 LP Silk. Like on that album, Seance dives deep into the lo-fi folky zone, with that sound heard most straightforwardly in “Homage.” But as on Silk, Funke expertly evades cliché. As side one played, I thought more than once of Skip Spence’s Oar, which is high praise, as that record is a masterpiece. So is this one. Having played in $100 Band with Alastair Galbraith and Mike Dooley (also her bandmate in The Snares), Funke has roots in the Kiwi underground, and while the relationship remains tangible as her latest unwinds, her music isn’t easily comparable to others from the same scene, which is to her credit. It’s also worth noting that Funke’s strain of lo-fi is economical rather than murky. A
REISSUE/ARCHIVAL PICKS: Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage / Catherine Christer Hennix, Blues Alif Lam Mim (Blank Forms Editions) Since 2018, Blank Forms has enriched the world with a yearly release of work by the Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix. The first three date from the 1970s, but this set is of more recent vintage, the piece (full title: Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis) performed in 2014 in Brooklyn at ISSUE Project Room by Hennix and her expanded just intonation ensemble Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage and issued on CD in 2016 by Important Records; this 2LP (in a tip-on gatefold Stoughton jacket) is its vinyl debut. The ensemble features a five-horn brass section, live electronics and three voices (one of them Hennix herself) as the music extends to nearly 80 minutes at the intersection of drone, raga and the cosmic. The effect is meditative (the singers incant a devotional poem written by Hennix in Arabic that includes quotations from the Quran) but wields power and beauty in equal measure. Avant-garde sounds are rarely this welcoming. A
Mark Fry, Dreaming With Alice (Now Again Reserve) In 2013, an original copy of this record, first released by RCA subsidiary It in 1972, sold for a smidge over $4,000. When obscurities go for that much, it’s safe to assume the master tapes are lost and someone’s planning a reissue mastered from clean vinyl. But Now Again’s edition, available on wax and CD, is sourced from the rediscovered tapes, and the fidelity is totally up to snuff. The music is psych-folk of unusually high quality and sustained levels of bentness, and the story (in short) is that while studying painting in Italy, Fry cut this record for It, the label teaming him with the visiting Scottish band Middle of the Road. Along with a title song that’s broken into segments (each featuring a verse) and spread across the album, there are flutes and sitars and a general druggy atmosphere, with the folky vibes mildly reminiscent of Nick Drake and Donovan. A prior reissue by Akarma came in a sleeve paying homage to/ ripping off the cover of Barabajagal, but this sports the original design and adds six CD bonus cuts of a substantially mellower disposition. A-
Melbourne, AU | After a difficult 2020, Thornbury Records has relocated to High St, Northcote: We chat to Thornbury Records owner and manager Clayton Pegus about the tough journey to his new store. Thornbury Records launched in the early months of 2011. At the time, Thornbury wasn’t quite the bustling locale of cafes, bars and boutiques it is today. Although it mightn’t be accurate to give T-Recs all the credit for catalysing this evolution, it was definitely one of the earliest examples of High St Thornbury’s rising hipsterdom. Earlier this year, Thornbury Records celebrated its tenth anniversary. It was a bittersweet occasion, however, as owner and manager Clayton Pegus had recently been forced to abandon the shop’s original location. “We had our ten-year anniversary without a shop, 
Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN | Best of the Twin Cities, 2021: It’s been a hell of a year—yet there is much to celebrate. So get out there, Twin Cities, and let’s make the best of it. …While 2020 was like a bad scratch in your favorite album, Electric Fetus will persist, thanks largely to a pandemic bright spot: Folks fell in love with browsing vinyl again. “People are responding. It feels like this is driven by the passion to support local, appreciate old friends—and old stores—and make the most of the time at home,” says Aaron Meyerring, co-owner of the 53-year-old retail icon. And the Fetus is not alone. All three locations of both Down in the Valley and Cheapo, Roadrunner Records in Kingfield, and Eclipse Records on Wabasha Street in St. Paul are among the other indie vinyl shops who managed to survive the pandemic. June 12, this year’s Record Store Day, 
Rock’s most impish rotters only released four LPs. Or five if you count 1974’s live Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners, which was credited to both Stewart and the Faces—a sly signal that Stewart’s band mates were no longer equals, but in effect had been relegated to his backing band. It was this development that caused the great Ronnie Lane to split the band, to be replaced on bass by Tetsu Yamauchi, and that soon led to guitarist Ronnie Wood’s desertion to the Rolling Stones, spelling the end of one of my favorite bands in the universe.
That said, I have this to say about 1980’s Laughter; it never fails to make me laugh. Which is to say Laughter isn’t such an ironic title after all. Even at his most lugubrious Dury–who was, and will likely always remain, England’s most lovable vulgarian–cheers me up, and that’s a rare gift. Down in the mouth Dury may have been, but he hadn’t lost his cheek, and he still managed to produce an album chockfull of dance friendly grooves and happy-making pub rock sing-alongs. So what if “Uncoolohol” is a dark ode to the perils of alcoholism; I spent plenty an alcoholic night cheerfully slurring along to its rousing chorus while falling down drunk. Laughter is not unlike one of the later Beatles albums; John and Paul may well have hated one another’s guts, but you’d never know it listening to the music.
London, UK | London’s record shops in the spotlight: Peckham resident Garth Cartwright has been fascinated by record shops for years, so much so that he wrote a book called Going For A Song: A Chronicle Of The UK Record Shop in 2018. This led to him getting a deal with The History Press to write a book solely on London’s contribution to record outlets. So, available very soon is London’s Record Shops, writes Michael Holland. ‘After my first book,’ says Garth, ‘I was aware that I didn’t have the space in that book to document how lively the current London record shop scene is. I got Tina (Quintina Valero) along to photograph Supertone Records in Brixton – the oldest reggae shop in South London – and her photos were so striking I was determined we should do a book that celebrates 
Forbes: Revolutionizing Main Street: How Shopping Hubs Are Changing: What becomes of Main Street when all of its retail traffic is redirected to Dot-Com Avenue? El Centro knows. El Centro is an example of how many retail hubs are evolving to keep pace – we mean literally, as in foot traffic – with a customer base that has grown accustomed to shopping everything online. The residential and retail complex, on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, has recently added Amoeba Music, the world’s largest independent record store, as an anchor tenant. The choice is both untraditional and natural – meaning opportunistic. Amoeba has a long history in Hollywood, but it closed shop nearly a year earlier due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By courting Amoeba to open at El Centro, developer DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners brought the comfort of nostalgia and “normalcy” to a community holed up for a year. After all, if there is one thing many of us can relate to, it’s 
