VIA PRESS RELEASE | Capitol Records/UMe and Frank Sinatra Enterprises announce a special new suite of physical and digital releases to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s first-ever live album: Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie & The Orchestra, arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones.

On October 23, 2026, Sinatra at the Sands will be reissued on 2LP 180gm black vinyl as the next release from UMe’s acclaimed Vinylphyle series. It’s available exclusively via uDiscoverMusic HERE. Arriving in tandem, fans can experience five complete shows from the original sold-out 1966 Sands’ Copa Room residency for the first time on the brand new 5CD set—Sinatra at the Sands 60th Anniversary. Dolby Atmos versions of both Sinatra at the Sands releases will be available the same day on streaming platforms. All versions are available for pre-order/pre-save HERE.

The new Vinylphyle Edition of Sinatra at the Sands boasts 2026 mixes from Sinatra’s longstanding trusted engineer Larry Walsh and best-in-class mastering courtesy of Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound. The 2LP Vinylphyle Edition is housed in the original gatefold packaging, which features GRAMMY®-winning liner notes by Stan Cornyn and now includes an insert of never-before-seen photos shot during the residency and new liner notes by New York Times best-selling author Charles Pignone.

While the original Sinatra at the Sands 2LP set was curated from several shows, Sinatra at the Sands 60th Anniversary showcases five complete, previously unreleased performances from the iconic residency, which ran from January 26, 1966–February 1, 1966.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fire Records will release the definitive version of The Evil One by Roky Erickson And The Aliens on October 30th, 45 years after its original release. For the first time since 1981, the release restores the original front cover from San Francisco’s 415 Records edition. The 15-track 2xLP is cut at 45 rpm, for maximum sonic depth and clarity.

The origin story behind The Evil One is a dark one. The 13th Floor Elevators were gaining attention in Texas and beyond with their compelling single “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” but their open association with psychedelic drugs also brought unwanted attention from the authorities. After Erickson was found with marijuana, he pleaded “not guilty by reason of insanity” to avoid prison and was sent to Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane. There, he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatment. During his three and a half years at Rusk, he formed a band, shaping early versions of songs that would later appear on The Evil One.

When Erickson was released in 1974, his reputation had grown thanks to the inclusion of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” on the landmark 1972 Nuggets compilation and top 40 radio support across multiple US states. His time in the hospital became a powerful source of inspiration. He formed Roky Erickson And The Aliens and began writing about zombies, demons, vampires, and other such subjects. Moving away from the Elevators’ psychedelic garage blues, Erickson And The Aliens created a harder-edged rock sound.

The Evil One was recorded in 1978 and 1979 with producer Stu Cook, best known as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bassist. The sessions yielded 15 songs, now presented together in this definitive version on Fire Records. Earlier UK and US editions, released in 1980 and 1981 respectively, each featured different 10-track listings.

Read More »

Celebrating Barry Gibb on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most twee of them all? Belle and Sebastian? The Shop Assistants? The Pastels? Well, sure, if you adhere to a literalist definition of twee as a post-indie phenomenon. But I take the sniper’s long-range view of music history, and like to think there’s nothing new—including twee—under the sun. For these reasons, I would argue that the sixties’ Bee Gees—those pre-Three Disco Kings with their chipmunk voices, vice-grip-tight three-part harmonies, and whimsical takes on Summer of Love psychedelia, baroque pop, and blue-eyed soul—were the tweest bunch to ever tiptoe through the pop tulips.

I was too young for the late-sixties iteration of the Bee Gees; the first I heard of The Bros. Gibb were their mid- to late-seventies megahits as Overlords of the Hustle and the Electric Slide. I didn’t much care for the Disco Bee Gees—although I’ve warmed to them since—and hence had no desire to check out the music they made before becoming the Typhoid Marys of Saturday Night Fever. Then I heard Alice Donut’s transcendent cover of “Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You,” and I was enthralled. This was one of the gr-gr-grooviest slices of psychedelia I’d ever heard, and it was by… the Bee Gees? I ran, didn’t walk, to Spotify. I had to skip the light fandango with the Brothers Gibb—and post haste!

Now what I’m about to say will shock you—perhaps even see me drummed in disgrace out of the critical corps, my quill snapped over the knee of TVD’s own General Patton, Jon Meyers. But I’ll say it anyway: having listened to it some 300 times, I can honestly say I enjoy Bee Gees 1st more than any Beatles album except that white one of theirs. And I exclude that one solely for sentimental reasons related to its inspirational effect on the Manson Family.

Read More »

Unearthed vault recordings of The Cramps are a cause for gleeful galivanting, particularly when the sounds are of the vintage captured on Gravest Gravy, which is out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Vengeance Records. The album delivers a dozen buzzy, fuzzy, thumping belters guided by the mighty hand of Alex Chilton in Memphis, Tennessee. Anybody interested in hearing uncut American greatness at its most frenzied should step right the fuck up.

In part through sheer commitment to an ideal of crazed trash-worshipping flamboyance, The Cramps have endured as one of the most beloved of all punk bands. Punk? Yes, it’s easy (and for some, preferable) to come up with a hyphen-laden genre descriptor to differentiate from standard, straightforward punk rock what singer Lux Interior, guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, and whoever spun through the revolving door to occupy the roles of third and occasionally fourth member, were up to.

The reality is that The Cramps date back to the days before punk became a largely codified stylistic experience. All a band needed during this initial burst of punkish activity was a loose handle on either inspired mayhem or savvy simplicity. Across the decades since then, a handful of the more unorthodox early punk bands have been awarded foundational post-punk status, but that doesn’t work for the scuzzy and sweaty roots junk of The Cramps.

Instead, Lux and Ivy and crew luxuriate in the same neighborhood as X, The Gun Club, The Blasters, The Flesh Eaters, Girl Trouble, Flat Duo Jets, Jon Spencer and the assorted bands of Ohioans Don Howland and Jeffrey Evans. It’s difficult to imagine labels like Norton, Crypt, and Estrus existing without The Cramps pointing backward with one hand and forward with the other.

Read More »

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.”

Read More »

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.”

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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).

Read More »

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.

Read More »