VIA PRESS RELEASE | Following its limited release as a Record Store Day Exclusive earlier this year, Marshall Crenshaw’s The Bootleg Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: 1984–87 will receive a wide release on October 23 via Yep Roc Records, and is now available for pre-order.

Personally curated by Crenshaw from his archives, the collection brings together previously unreleased home demos, live performances, and studio recordings, capturing a particularly fertile period in the career of the acclaimed singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The Bootleg Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: 1984-87 offers a revealing look behind the scenes, through the songwriting process, and the home recordings of songs that shaped his third and fourth albums, Downtown (1985) and Mary Jean & 9 Others (1987). The early demos sit alongside live tracks from 1986 and 1987, as well as other long-lost material from the archives.

Among the collection’s highlights is a previously unreleased rendition of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” featuring Gary Tallent and Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. The track is a nice homage for Crenshaw, whose deep connection to Holly’s music famously includes portraying the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer in the 1987 La Bamba.

One of the collection’s most intriguing stories comes from “(We’re Gonna) Shake Up Their Minds.” After hitting a songwriting block, Crenshaw sent the backing track to acclaimed British singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl to see where she might take it. “Kirsty wrote a song to the track called “All I Ever Wanted,” but by the time I got it back from her in the mail, I’d figured out the storyline to “Shake Up Their Minds,” and finished that song.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | More than a half century after Buck Owens and the Buckaroos took the stage at Las Vegas’ legendary Mint Hotel and Casino, a remarkable document of the band at the height of its powers is finally seeing the light of day. At The Mint, Las Vegas, 1968, a previously unreleased, professionally recorded live album sourced from the long-lost original Capitol Records reels will be released on October 23 via Sundazed Music. The album is now available for pre-order.

At The Mint, Las Vegas 1968 is a revelation, considering Owens was a man who rarely left worthwhile recordings sitting in a vault. Famously prolific throughout the 1960s, he put his recordings from the era to good use.

Yet somehow, an entire professionally recorded performance by Owens and one of the greatest lineups of the Buckaroos remained unreleased and largely unknown for nearly six decades.

The set finds Owens joined by Don Rich, Doyle Holly, Tom Brumley, and Jerry Wiggins, tearing through hits and deeper cuts with the precision, energy and unmistakable Bakersfield sound that made the Buckaroos one of the most formidable country bands of their generation. At The Mint is more than a newly discovered Buck Owens concert. The tapes preserve the evening virtually as it happened, offering a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into the making of a live album in 1968.

Beginning with legendary country broadcaster Ralph Emery warming up the audience and continuing through his closing thanks, the recording captures stage banter, between-song exchanges, and candid moments that almost certainly would have disappeared had Capitol prepared the tapes for release at the time. The unfiltered quality gives the album an intimate look into an unreleased concert from one of country music’s most iconic artists.

Celebrating Van Morrison on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Four years before Ronnie Van Zant uttered the immortal words “Turn it up” to open “Sweet Home Alabama,” Van Morrison was uttering the same injunction—but in his case, he was talking about your radio, not the world’s greatest Southern Rock band. The Gaelic soul singer with the mystical streak turned the phrase into a mantra on “Caravan” from the 1970s Moondance, and by so doing, transformed your cheap hand-held FM transistor radio into a means of tuning into the cosmos. That little radio is, quite literally, our ticket to Heaven.

From “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night” with his days with Belfast, Ireland’s Them to the brilliant string of solo efforts that extended from 1968’s Astral Weeks, 1970’s Moondance and that same year’s His Band and the Street Choir, 1971’s Tupelo Honey to 1972’s St. Dominic’s Preview, Morrison veered from the simple romantic lyricism of songs like “Tupelo Honey” and “Moondance” to deeply spiritual and more ambitious songs like “Listen to the Lion,” “Cypress Avenue,” and “Madame George.” Call them his Songs of Innocence and Experience.

On 1970’s Moondance—which is horn-heavy and replete with female backing vocalists—Morrison works the innocence vein, while imbuing many of its songs with a deep strain of Irish mysticism that charges even the simplest of subjects with a sense of awe. On “And It Stoned Me,” he gets drunk on a jar of water from a mountain stream. On “Into the Mystic,” he takes us spiritually seaward—just as he does on “Tupelo Honey” and “Listen to the Lion.” He implores us to let our spirits fly; tells us he wants to rock our gypsy souls, and lets us know “it’s too late to stop now.”

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The first time I saw W.A.S.P. I was a kid at the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino, 1984. They were opening for Krokus and Helix, and I didn’t have the vocabulary for what happened to me that night. Forty-two years and more shows than I can count later, I’m still not sure I do. But I know what kept me there, and it wasn’t the buzzsaws or the blood or any of the things that got the band on the evening news. It was that Blackie Lawless meant it. I could tell that from the cheap seats at fourteen, and I can tell it from a photo pit now.

That’s the thing, people who only know the headlines never got it. The imagery was real because the man was real, and when the imagery stopped serving him, he changed it, at considerable cost, more than once. He made the record his label didn’t want and watched it go gold in a week. He built The Crimson Idol alone in a studio with no clocks. He still records to tape. He’ll tell you exactly why, and he doesn’t soften any of it.

He’s about to take that first stretch of his catalog back on the road (the “1984 to Headless” tour, forty-plus North American dates starting September 10 with KK’s Priest), and he’s six years into an autobiography, Tales From the Square Mile, that turned out not to be about him at all. He talked about the closet he lived in across the street from the Hollywood Palladium, three feet by twelve. The laundromat where they set up between the washing machines. The meat locker. Bela Lugosi dying seventy-five feet from where he slept, which he only learned decades later while fact-checking his own life.

Early in our conversation, he waved off my thanks and said that what he does and what I do aren’t so different. “We’re reporters. We write down what we see, or we record it, and we tell people about it.” I’ve thought about that line ever since. Here’s what he told me.

Take me back to before anybody knew what W.A.S.P. was, before the makeup, before the buzzsaws, before any of it. What was the actual plan when you started in ’82? Because I don’t think the way this began and the way the world eventually saw it are the same story.

You’ve got to understand, how we got started and what the world eventually saw were two completely different things. We were trying to get a record deal, and we’d been here long enough to know that most bands don’t get deals by playing live. They get them off demo tapes, because the label is looking for something they can manage, something they can put a quarterly report on. I wrote those songs in early ’82, “I Wanna Be Somebody,” “L.O.V.E. Machine,” all of that, and we did a set of demos. We put them out and we weren’t hearing back from the labels. So we thought, these demos are pretty good, why don’t we take them out in front of people and see what happens?

We had no clue what to do. We looked at each other and said, “Well, do we just stand still and look at our shoe tops?” And we thought, no, that’s not really us. It started morphing from there.

I was playing guitar then. Don Costa was our original bass player, and Don and Chris were butting heads, and Chris gave me an ultimatum. I knew Randy Piper from having worked with him before, but the problem was we had three guitar players and no bass player, and I knew those other two guys were never going to give up guitar. So, I was basically elected to play that instrument.

We never intended on playing live. And the irony is that we got known for the show. That first record is considered a classic now, but nobody was really listening at the time, because the show was so powerful. We were scratching our heads. At the end of the day we didn’t care, as long as it got us from point A to point B, that’s all that mattered.

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Song inspired by Irwin “Master of Disaster” Allen, performed by early disco heroes The Trammps backed up by the fellow Philadelphians in MFSB–how can you go wrong?

Clocking in at almost eleven minutes, 1976’s “Disco Inferno”—which wouldn’t become a Disco Mountain-sized hit until it was included on the soundtrack of the following year’s Saturday Night Fever—proved that longer could be better.

Covered by the likes of Tina Turner (soul-scream great), Cyndi Lauper (pure technosuck), and the mighty Killdozer (brain-battering brilliant), but not by 50 Cent, whose song of the same name is NOT a remake—“Disco Inferno” has firmly established itself as part of the entire world’s musico-cultural landscape.

Proof lies in the fact that there have been more dance remixes of the song than you can count on your three hands!

Inspired by Allen’s 1974 film The Towering Inferno, Killdozer has recorded the only other tribute to the film in the hilarious “Man vs. Nature”—“Disco Inferno” more than makes up for its lack of funny with a towering sound that has transformed many a checkered disco floor into a dance conflagration capable of setting fire to the disco ball on the ceiling.

The Trammps—who got their name from Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 silent film The Little Tramp, then added the extra “M” to indicate they were “superior tramps”—were largely a vocal group. I’m talking about five, count ‘em five vocalists, only two of whom played instruments (they would be bass vocalist Earl Young on drums and non-singer Ronald Baker on bass).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Jethro Tull’s first five studio albums introduced a band that would radically redefine the boundaries of rock, blending blues, folk, classical, and hard rock into a singular progressive vision. Rhino High Fidelity captures the meteoric rise and creative peak of that era in a new audiophile vinyl boxed set, Jethro Tull 1968-1972. It arrives, along with a reel-to-reel edition of the band’s biggest album, Aqualung.

The Jethro Tull 1968-1972 (Rhino High Fidelity) boxed set includes This Was, Stand Up, Benefit, Aqualung, and Thick as a Brick, all cut AAA from the U.K. analog master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal in Germany. The set is housed in a leatherette slipcase. Each album comes in a glossy gatefold jacket with new liner notes featuring commentary from Ian Anderson. The set is limited to 3,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.

Aqualung (Rhino High Fidelity R2R) was duplicated in real time from a 1:1 copy of the original U.K. analog master tape. The result is a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of the recording. The 15 i.p.s. half-track 1/4” tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5” metal reel. The Reel-to-Reel edition is limited to 350 copies worldwide and available exclusively at Rhino.com.

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Celebrating Martin Lamble, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

I know what you’re thinking—If you’re going to write about Fairport Convention, why not choose Liege and Lief, their undisputed masterpiece and the album that practically kick-started the English folk rock movement? Because I’d like to kick the English folk rock movement, that’s why. It’s what I call, unaffectionately, Renaissance Faire Musick.

And Liege and Lief exemplifies its most annoying hallmark, namely the tendency to recast Ye Olde English folk songs, complete with annoying verbal anachronisms, and add electric guitars. What you end up with is Sandy Denny singing in that ethereal voice of hers about kirtle greens (whatever they are) and dudes named Reynardine. Worst of all, she actually utters the word “maidenhead.” And unless used ironically (e.g., “Twas at a show by the Grateful Dead/That I lost my maidenhead/Beneath the bleachers/During ‘Tennessee Jed’”), I consider “maidenhead” (along with “merkin”) an automatic deal-breaker.

So while I like some of the songs on Liege and Lief—“Medley: The Lark in the Morning” hoedowns along like Roy Clark on Hee Haw—I ultimately opted to review Fairport Convention’s eponymous debut album instead. For one, the band recorded it before they got their folk freak on, and there isn’t a single song on it that goes, “So he’s gone ta fetch a claes prop/And he rammed it up the koondy.” (Rammed it up the koondy? His own koondy?? That sounds extremely painful.) Also—and this may be the real reason I picked it—Richard Thompson’s brilliant guitar playing is all over it.

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On Gerry Beckley’s new solo album, Merciful, it is perhaps the song transition from the thought-provoking title track to the blissful, upbeat “Get it Right” that most accurately articulates his sonic character.

His music, since his earliest recordings in the early ’70s, has always balanced shades of night and tones of daylight, moving from the uncertain and subdued to the purely joyful and optimistic. Though he is one-half of the rock-pop duo America with Dewey Bunnell—formerly a trio with Dan Peek, who left the group in 1977—Beckley remains consistently productive as a solo musician.

Merciful serves as a beautiful and coherent addition to his 50-plus years of recording output. Key themes that color the album range from resisting the temptation toward complacency, to keeping the faith, and honoring the eternal pact an artist makes with their creative talent.

A listener’s journey traverses from the haunting title track—where Beckley sings, “…merciful, are these cobwebs that we cling to,” tackling the inherently human fear of mortality—to the horn-forward “Goodbye Heartache, Hello Sunshine,” which reminds us that goodness is often just around the next corner.

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Is it possible that the greatest psychedelic noise rock group in the history of the world is an obscure Japanese band with a difficult name whose former members include a plane hijacker? And who couldn’t be bothered to release much of what they recorded? And whose singer/guitarist/resident genius, Takashi Mizutani, whose one-time association with members of Japan’s outlawed Red Army Faction led him to become a bona fide recluse out of fear he’d end up in prison?

It’s more than possible—it’s a fact. At their best, such as on the live recording YaneUra Sept. ’80—which wasn’t released until 2024, some five years or so after Mizutani’s death, the actual date of which is sketchy and didn’t become public knowledge until some two years after he passed away—delivered on some of the most ferocious guitar workouts ever to be committed to vinyl.

They weren’t exactly prolific songwriters—most of their many releases feature the same maybe dozen or so songs, which they would play completely differently on any given night. And the sound quality varies from recording to recording—one of the many advantages of the live YaneUra Sept. ’80 is that it sounds clear as a bell.

The band’s early sound from the late sixties to early seventies was truly chaotic, and so cranked-up in volume that someone said, “It was so loud, it hurt my skin.” They would cover songs like “Twist and Shout” (a must-hear) to “Tobacco Road” and played mostly at the destined-to-be-razed OZ club, hence the seminal OZ Tapes, which wasn’t released until 2022 by the frequent LRD chroniclers at the Temporal Drift label. There’s also OZ Days Live, a twofer released in 1973.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Girlschool never did things the easy way.

In August 1981, little more than two years after the all-female south London metal band launched itself onto the UK club scene, they were firmly established among the very few New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts either capable of, or deserving to, top the first night bill the annual Reading Festival—the first female rock band ever to headline the festival and, all these years later, still the only one.

They were fabulous, as well; indeed, by the end of the festival, filing out drunk on 26 bands’ worth of music, more than a few voices reckoned that Girlschool should have headlined the entire event. No-one could better have wrapped things up late on Sunday night.

But first, the band’s hired car—a pink Caddy said to have belonged to actress Jayne Mansfield—was involved in a fender bender and arrived at the venue “broken and rattling.” Then, one of the roadies restrung lead guitarist Kelly Johnson’s guitar with two D strings; and, finally, the band’s flashing neon backdrop was sabotaged by one of the other bands on the bill.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings and HighTone Records proudly announce a new deluxe reissue of Blackjack David, the esteemed 1998 album from GRAMMY®-winning Americana icon Dave Alvin. Featuring highlights such as “Abilene,” “Evening Blues,” “California Snow,” and “Blackjack David,” the album will be available on October 16 on 2-LP, CD, and digital (including hi-res) and is available for pre-order/pre-save.

This special reissue also includes two bonus tracks: “Dixie Highway Blues,” which was written for the album but originally released on 2008’s The Best of the HighTone Years, and the previously unreleased “Angel On Your Shoulder,” recorded during the same sessions, with finishing touches added recently by Alvin and his longtime producer, Greg Leisz. Alvin says of the track, “[It] got away and it shouldn’t have, so it’s great to have it be part of the canon now.” Physical formats also feature new liner notes by music journalist and No Depression co-founder, Peter Blackstock.

GRAMMY-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer Dave Alvin (b. 1955) has long been counted among the pioneers of Americana music. A Southern California native, Alvin began his career in 1979 as a founding member of The Blasters, alongside his brother Phil. Their unique blend of punk, rockabilly, and classic American music soon made them a fixture in the early Los Angeles punk scene. By the middle of the decade—after stints with X and The Knitters—Alvin was eager to embark on a solo career, launching with his 1987 debut, Romeo’s Escape.

By the mid-’90s, Alvin was finding his groove in stripped-down settings—a departure from the high-voltage, electric stylings of his earlier work. 1998’s Blackjack David marked the pinnacle of this era, with primarily acoustic arrangements that let his storytelling and emotive vocals take center stage.

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