Celebrating Nancy Sinatra on her 86th birthday. —Ed.

The pairing of singer Nancy Sinatra and singer-songwriter-producer Lee Hazlewood made for one of the 1960’s most delightfully unusual pairings, though the collaboration was a relatively short one, consisting of a slew of singles and a sole LP…until they reunited for a follow-up in 1972. Nancy & Lee Again is that album.

It might seem like the delayed nature of Nancy & Lee Again’s reissue is to some extent down to neglect on the part of the rights-holders, but please understand that the duo’s 1968 debut Nancy & Lee wasn’t given a standalone new edition until last year, also by Light in the Attic, the label that has, along with the Nancy Sinatra Archival Series, returned a fair portion of Hazlewood’s solo catalog to print since early last decade.

The main reason for Nancy & Lee’s belated appearance is due to the easy availability of the contents on compact disc, the entire record included on Rhino’s 1989 compilation Fairy Tales & Fantasies: The Best of Nancy & Lee. Plus, secondhand copies of the LP were easily findable (in varying degrees of condition, of course) in thrift shops, if not necessarily music stores. Unlike Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’ Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Nancy & Lee wasn’t ubiquitous, but like Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 and The Association’s Greatest Hits!, it was quite a common find.

As these comparisons should help make clear, the descriptor of unusual isn’t interchangeable with strange. Now, anybody familiar with “Some Velvet Morning” and to a lesser extent, “Sand,” knows that pop psychedelic strangeness was part of Sinatra and Hazlewood’s stylistic bag. But weird took a back seat to playful C&W duets and proto-Vegas Middle-Of-The-Road-isms, with the palatability of both modes, and especially the latter, intensified by the combination of Sinatra’s youthful verve and Hazlewood’s buzzsaw tones and general eccentricity, a quality that was only laid on thick when it benefitted the song.

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Making Vinyl, the biannual meeting for the vinyl manufacturing industry, came to Alexandria, Virginia,
May 27 to May 29

When Ian MacKaye’s high school band broke up, they decided to put out a record only then to chronicle the sound they had urgently turned out for their fervent community. They had saved any cash received from the 50 or so gigs they played, stashed it in a cigar box, and were ready to spend it on making a record.

“We could have made a cassette and kept $200 a piece, but we wanted to document something that was fucking important to our friends and us,” MacKaye said. “And we had no idea how this was done.” The future Fugazi frontman told his tale late May as a keynote speaker at the twice-annual Making Vinyl conference, this one at the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, VA.

Before more than 200 professionals involved in mastering, manufacturing, labeling, and distributing vinyl records in a time of rapid growth, MacKaye related how he stepped gingerly into the record industry as a teen, a path that would lead to the creation of his own Dischord Records, an indie survivor that endures, chronicling underground bands in the DC area.

The process to make his first punk record involved advice from a local record store and a cold call to a Nashville pressing plant whose regular business was making country records. “They were so kind,” MacKaye said of the patient manufacturer in Tennessee, who found a way to accommodate the kids even when they were asking for something that seemed impossible: eight songs on a 7-inch single. (They were short, it was punk rock.)

While MacKaye gathered friends for folding parties to make picture sleeves for the records they copied, cut, and pasted, he realized: “This was the record industry: Making records for real.” Some fans made predictable noises about commodification and selling out. But for the band, it was a way to capture those “transcendent isolated moments that were undocumented for the most part.”

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I’ve always had reservations about this Hendrix fella. Sure, he was probably the most brilliant and innovative rocker to ever set fire to an electric guitar, and he looked cool as shit and was cool as shit, no doubt about it, but here’s the thing—great guitar players have never been my thing.

Eric Clapton bores me. Jeff Beck gives me a bad case of diarrhea. That Mahavishnu dude is okay, in small doses. Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn and all those other white blues guys can suck it. I’ll take Ron Asheton or Greg Ginn or Glen Buxton or J. Mascis any day of the week including Mumsday, which falls between Tuesday and Wednesday on the Galician calendar. Evidently it’s as difficult to learn Galician as it is to learn how to play guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix.

And I’m not the only guy with reservations about this Hendrix cat. Genius can be annoying, and nobody likes a showoff. Guy lit his eyebrows on fire and played a solo while his guitar was in another state once. Well, okay. The guy’s immense talent led Chuck Eddy to write (in his 1991 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe) “Hendrix was a humorless blowhard as given to onanistic showboat puke as any of his metallic heirs, and by knowing a million chords and displaying every last one of ‘em to mooncalves too stoned to get up and walk the other way, he initiated rock’s cult of virtuosity for its own sake, turning a once-vernacular music into something it was never meant to be.”

In short, he was Emerson, Lake & Palmer in a single psychedelic headband!

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Varèse Sarabande and Craft Recordings announce Michael Giacchino’s iconic score for the pivotal third season of Lost will debut on vinyl in conjunction with the season’s 20th anniversary.

The 2-LP set is pressed on “forest green” vinyl and comes packaged in a gatefold jacket featuring the creative notes from the original 2006 CD release by Giacchino and producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. The release is set to hit stores on July 24 and is available for pre-order today. This follows the label’s 2024 2-LP release of the Lost: Season 1 soundtrack and the 2025 “black smoke” 2-LP release of Lost: Season 2 soundtrack.

Giacchino’s work is celebrated for both its ingenuity and his remarkable speed in developing themes and ideas, qualities that culminated in the creation of an essential score in the fast-paced world of television production.

In a 2024 interview with IndieWire, he explained: “We never really spotted any of the episodes for the entire run of the show. There just wasn’t time to discuss music episode by episode, as the showrunners were cranking out scripts and shooting episodes, so I would receive the episode and have (in many cases) three to five days to write and turn it around—meaning recording as well.”

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Celebrating Richard Butler on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

Love a band? Hate a band? It often comes down to simple timing. For instance, had My War been the first music by Black Flag I ever heard, instead of their earlier EPs and singles, I would never have given them the time of day. The same is true for The Psychedelic Furs. I first heard them when they were putting out such catchy and undeniably lovely new wave songs such as “Love My Way,” “Heaven,” and “Pretty in Pink.”

Unfortunately, I disliked new wave, because in the wake of first-generation punk it sounded too wimpy, emasculated, and dance-oriented for my tastes. To paraphrase one David Bowie, “I never got it off on that new wave stuff/How bland/Too many Duran Durans.” Or to quote the great Minutemen, “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”

But had I heard the Furs around 1980, instead of, say, 1983, things would have been very different. In fact, I’d have loved them. Because 1980 was the year they released their debut LP, the eponymous and post-punk The Psychedelic Furs. Forget their melodic new wave tunes that ended up on film soundtracks and got played at every prom in the land.

The Furs’ debut is a fabulous collection of droning grooves over which vocalist Richard Butler talk/sings enigmatically about who knows what to the accompaniment of guitars and one great saxophone. And to think I never heard so much as a song off it until Kid Congo Powers covered the ecstatic “We Love You” at a live show here in DC. Thank you, Kid, for your great tastes in music and your great mustache and for turning me on to The Psychedelic Furs. I owe you big time.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Pat Travers and Bob Dylan. It’s a marriage made… if not in heaven, then at least in a place where dreams come true and the blues keep rolling. On March 20, 2004, early a tour that would keep them on the road across North America and Europe until July, the Pat Travers Band headed to Houston, Texas, to record what would become one of the most exhilarating live albums of his career, Snortin’ Whiskley.

Accompanied by southern rock maestro Greg T. Walker (Lynyrd Skynyrd/Blackfoot) on bass and former AC/DC skin basher Simon Wright on drums, Travers would lead this ruthlessly stripped back trio deep into their roots. The result, releasing on June 26, is a Texas-sized slab of electrified blues packed with epic versions of fan favorites “Boom Boom Out Go The Lights” and “Snortin’ Whiskey”; barnstorming work-outs… including a colossal 13-minute version of “Born Under A Bad Sign”; and well-chosen covers—the Allman Brothers’ “Statesboro Blues,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return); and—released as a single today—Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Not that their rendition of the title track from the bard’s second album of 1965, has much in common with Dylan’s original—as Travers warns at the outset of the song, “we’re gonna kick your ass.” And then this leanest, meanest line-up of them all slams into a Mach 2 firestorm, percussion and bass setting up an irresistible pace and rhythm, while Travers plays like a man possessed, his guitar spilling liquid fire over all around.

Hungry and raw, the energy never dips. If anything, it gets even more intense as the show rolls on, until that closing salvo of “Born Under A Bad Sign” and “Statesboro Blues” makes it clear that no-one on earth could have followed it, and that includes the band.

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Celebrating Freddie Stone, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

By 1970, Sly Stone was no longer his happy-go-lucky, upbeat-hits-producing self. Stone and his band had taken to ingesting large quantities of cocaine and PCP, a paranoia-inducing combo if ever there was one, and Sly’s own intake was such that he carried his stash in a violin case. The results were predictable. Sly went from multi-racial inspiration to Richard Nixon-level paranoiac, and hired shady characters, gangsters, and even a Mafioso as a Praetorian Guard to keep an eye on his “enemies,” some of whom happened to be members of The Family Stone. Recording came to a standstill, and Stone began his infamous habit of missing gigs.

When Stone finally dragged his bad self into the Record Plant in Sausalito to record the band’s fifth album, the results were completely unlike any previous Family Stone release. What is surprising, given Stone’s precipitous psychic decline, is that the result, 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, is perhaps the most brilliant LP he ever recorded.

Dark? No shit. Gone was The Family Stone’s trademark cheery psychedelic rock and soul, replaced by a raw funk—which would reverberate in the ears of George Clinton and innumerable future funkers like a revelatory crack of thunder—that was as every bit as murky and hopelessly disillusioned as it was bracing. “I Want to Take You Higher” had become “I Want to Bring You Down, Way Down.” There’s a Riot Goin’ On was a sign o’ the times—of riots in the inner cities, Altamont, The Manson Family, and the Death of the Age of Aquarius—just as his more playful earlier LPs had been signs of theirs. But Sly had done more than just tap into the gestalt; he had just recorded his Exile on Main Street.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings commemorates the centennial of one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century with a special vinyl reissue of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark spoken-word album, Howl and Other Poems. Originally released by Fantasy Records in 1959, the recording captures Ginsberg performing many of his most celebrated works, including the era-defining title poem “Howl.”

Arriving September 4 on eco-friendly green blend vinyl, the limited edition reissue faithfully replicates the original 1959 package design. The album is available for pre-order today and can also be streamed across digital platforms.

The set combines recordings from the Big Table Reading at Chicago’s Shaw Festival with additional sessions recorded at Fantasy Studios in San Francisco. Alongside “Howl,” selections include celebrated works “America,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “A Supermarket in California,” and “Footnote to Howl,” capturing the radical candor, urgency, humor, and musicality of Ginsberg’s early performances.

The release arrives as part of a broader centennial celebration honoring Ginsberg’s life and legacy. Additional events, exhibitions, performances, and commemorative programs taking place throughout the year can be found at AllenGinsberg.org.

Born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg emerged as one of the defining literary voices of the twentieth century. For Ginsberg, the second half of the 1950s marked a transformative period. Following the first public reading of Howl at San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery in October 1955 and the publication of Howl and Other Poems by City Lights the following year, he found himself at the center of one of the most consequential literary controversies in American history.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Nearly ten years ago we released an album that changed our lives forever,” says JJ Julius Son, lead singer of KALEO. “In honor of the 10th anniversary, we’re re-releasing A/B with eight bonus tracks featuring studio rarities and a few of our most iconic live performances.” A/B (Deluxe Anniversary Edition), a limited edition double-vinyl pressing, will be officially out June 10 via Rhino Records, will commemorate the group’s breakout record with a special pressing that both revisits and reimagines this time.

The debut album spawned hits like “All The Pretty Girls,” “No Good,” and the global sensation “Way Down We Go,” which landed at number one on Billboard’s Alternative Rock chart, has nearly 4 billion streams and featured in over 3 million TikToks worldwide. The deluxe anniversary 2LP highlights the vinyl debut of the “Way Down We Go” stripped version, “Up In The Sky,” a studio track previously unreleased outside of Iceland, and the premiere of a new spin on an old classic, “Still No Good.”

Emerging from Mosfellsbær, a small town in the suburbs of Reykjavik, Iceland, KALEO formed as childhood friends in 2012. Made up of JJ Julius Son (vocals/guitar), David Antonsson (drums), Daniel Kristjansson (bass), and Rubin Pollock (guitar), the group has gone on to global success, amassing over 6+ billion global streams, 70+ international gold, platinum, and diamond certifications, countless sold-out headlining shows, plus appearances at noteworthy festivals including Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and more.

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Remembering Jimmy McCulloch, born on this day in 1953. —Ed.

There are One Hit Wonders and One Album Wonders, and occasionally the paths of those two dubious honors intersect. One such instance is UK group Thunderclap Newman, mostly celebrated for their single “Something in the Air” but also noted for their only LP, 1969’s Hollywood Dream. The record contains that superb single, but it also features a surplus of additional charm, and while its profile has increased substantially, it’s sadly plagued by its reputation as the sole document from one of rock’s notable underachievers.

And to be blunt, Thunderclap Newman is a questionable entry into the club of the One Album Wonder anyway. They have the solitary LP down pat, but a passionate bout of quibbling just might break out over the Wonder part of the equation. For Hollywood Dream, released after “Something in the Air” spent three weeks as a UK number one hit, was something of a stiff in terms of sales. It climbed no higher than #161 in the US album chart, and the single was a bit of an American sleeper, making it to only #37. And in an odd twist, apparently the LP was even more coolly received in their home country.

When the band’s back-story is added into the mix, Hollywood Dream’s landing with a splat of relative indifference becomes something of a persistent head-scratcher. Vocalist/drummer John “Speedy” Keen had previously penned “Armenia City in the Sky” for The Who’s 1967 album The Who Sell Out. Pianist and band namesake Andy Newman looked like a dry run for the likes of Bun E. Carlos and banged on the keys like an auxiliary member of the Bonzo Dog Band. A suitable nickname for their young guitarist would be “The Kid,” or maybe even better “The Face,” for it’d be well nigh impossible to find a more splendiferously Mod figure than the one cut by Jimmy McCulloch on the record’s cover.

Throw in that Pete Townsend played bass on the LP and its lack of performance is indeed a stumper. It’s in essence an album tailor made for Beatles fans, registering at times like a slightly more twee incarnation of Badfinger, though they never cross the line into the precious. Maybe the problem was that at the point of the record’s release The Beatles hadn’t really broken up yet (though the end was certainly near). However, Badfinger’s sales figures in ’70 and ’71 surely benefited from the realization of many that their favorite band was no longer extant.

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Some bands play rock and roll. Van Halen rebuilt it from the studs up, and for more than four decades, Eddie Van Halen’s fingerprints have been all over the blueprint—the tapping, the tone, the grin you could hear in every run. I have loved this band since I was a kid spinning records in my buddy Tommy B’s bedroom on 26th St. in San Bernardino, and I have chased them across roughly 25 shows in every lineup they ever fielded. So, when a record I had never heard of landed in my lap, I did not expect it to knock me flat.

The 5150 Sessions arrives not as a cash-grab, live bootleg but as a defiant act of preservation, a window into Van Halen with the curtain pulled all the way back.

Culled from 2006 and 2007 rehearsals at Eddie’s own 5150 studio, this is Ed, Al, and a young Wolfgang running full set lists twice a week with no singer in the room. Andrew Bennett, the filmmaker who lived inside those sessions, pulled the uncompressed files straight off the soundboard and handed them to producer Howard Wulkan, who mixed and mastered them at Farmadelica Sound.

The result floored me. This does not sound like a soundboard feed—it sounds like a finished studio album, every string and cymbal sitting in its own pocket of air. Wolfgang’s bass is rock solid, locked tight with his uncle and his dad, though I will always miss the rafter-shaking high harmonies and bottom end of the one and only Michael Anthony. What you get instead is something rarer: Eddie and Alex stripped bare, two brothers reading each other’s minds in real time.

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Although they had long since reformed to cut a pair of albums, Urge Overkill delivered their swan song to the Alternative Rock ‘90s in the middle of that decade with Exit the Dragon, the second of two records originally released by the Geffen conglomerate. Now, with its recent double vinyl edition, it joins Saturation in Porterhouse Records’ reissue program. Listening to the set with fresh ears finds it holding up better than expected. Indeed, it now registers as the high point of the band’s major label sojourn. For its 30th anniversary, it arrives in a pressing of 1,000 copies, with options for pink or purple vinyl.

Saturation basked in the glow of Geffen’s abundant Alternative era success through the DGC imprint (Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Beck, Hole, Weezer, Counting Crows, Elastica, The Posies, Teenage Fanclub, The Sundays, that dog, Boss Hog, Veruca Salt) and was the Urge Overkill record that was fresh in the store racks during the extended Pulp Fiction hubbub; the band’s solid cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” accompanies a crucial scene in Quentin Tarantino’s second feature.

Naturally, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” landed on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, but listeners new to the band who were looking for more would’ve likely gotten their mitts on Saturation or the album’s single “Sister Havana,” which was a moderate airplay hit. Saturation was also a charting album, but it’s something of a surprise that Exit the Dragon was their biggest-selling record.

The surprise is mainly due to a certain amount of Alt-rock fatigue setting in by the point of Exit the Dragon’s release. Related to this was the uninhibited gusto in Urge Overkill’s striving for Big Time commercial success and how the boldness of their collective image compounded this, as the band disdained the simple t-shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors favored by a large percentage of the indie rock brigade for flashy outfits befitting a trio striving for rock star dominance.

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