Monthly Archives: April 2017

An event that is now all but ubiquitous, the annual celebration-cum-gathering that is Record Store Day has, in its decade-long existence, proven to be the great watershed for the vinyl revival of the twenty-first century.

Conceived of in 2007, this worldwide get-together is an all-encompassing shindig for both independent record stores and the record-crazed themselves, with shops across the globe participating in special releases and a plethora of in-store performances, which is to say nothing of the music titans who have carried the torch for Record Store Day as ambassadors over the years, such as Iggy Pop, Chuck D, and Dave Grohl.

Hot on the heels of RSD’s tenth anniversary event this April 22nd, we talked with co-founders Carrie Colliton and Michael Kurtz about the day’s history, their favorite releases, and some plans for the future.

So, since you guys got this up and running in 2007, this is the big tenth anniversary, isn’t it?

CARRIE: It is. Our first one was in April of 2008, but we had this idea in September of 2007. Having done it ten times now, I can tell you that the idea that we thought of it in September and did it in April is astounding to me. It’s a year-round process now.

I would assume there’s going a little something extra thrown into the mix for the event this year?

CARRIE: We try to do that every year, throw something extra into the mix. There are great releases and in-store performances. Everything is kind of amped up a tiny little bit.

Could you give me a sense of where the numbers were at in terms of vinyl sales at that time? Vinyl was really on its last legs, was it not?

MICHAEL: I think it was in the hundreds of thousands of releases. It was less than a million dollars a year. I think we’re up to a billion a year now.

Would you say the effects were rather immediate?

MICHAEL: Well the first year, there were only about ten releases. There were almost no independent labels involved because nobody had the confidence to produce records because it’s so expensive, and I think that’s been the side effect of Record Store Day. This residual buildup of confidence over the years has led to everyone producing records with the expectation that they will sell.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation will be releasing an anniversary edition CD/ Digital Album, titled Iconic Performances From The Monterey International Pop Festival on June 9 to celebrate Monterey International Pop Festival’s 50th anniversary.

It features previously unreleased performances by The Grateful Dead and Laura Nyro, as well as iconic performances of the festival by Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Big Brother & The Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, The Electric Flag, The Mamas & The Papas, and others. The album includes a new essay by NME journalist Keith Altham, who attended the festival in 1967, in addition to a reproduction of the original festival Artist pass, 16-page booklet, and a gold-foil package to mark the 50th anniversary of the festival.

Monterey International Pop Festival has been called one of the most important events in the history of Rock & Roll music. It was the first major rock festival and rock charity, a forerunner and blueprint for charity concerts such as Live Aid, Farm Aid, as well as the commercial festivals, Coachella and Outside Lands. The festival was a historic musical and cultural explosion, introducing to the world Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and The Who, to name a few. With its motto, “Music, Love and Flowers,” Monterey International Pop Festival drew hundreds of thousands of people to Northern California in 1967. It was a celebration of benevolence and cultural change, the key event of the Summer of Love, and presented rock music as a movement, not just in California, but globally.

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“One of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting cross-legged on the floor of my family home in East Oxford riffling through a pile of seven-inch singles. They were mostly my mum’s and were eighty percent Beatles though there were others that I remember quite clearly too: “The Ying Tong Song” b/w “I’m Walking Backwards For Christmas” by The Goons, “Out and About” by Mike Sarne, “Ferry Cross The Mersey” by Gerry and The Pacemakers, “The Last Time” by The Rolling Stones… This was my earliest musical education.”

“It was the mid 1970s. I don’t think I was really aware of anything contemporary until I started to watch Top Of The Pops a few years later. But by then I was well and truly hooked on The Beatles and nothing would ever knock them from their position at the toppermost of the poppermost. I would sit for hours loading up my mum’s Dansette record player with a stack of singles and I played them until I wore them out. “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Day Tripper,” “I Feel Fine,” “She Loves You.” I knew The Beatles singles career long before I was aware of their LPs.

I loved the feel of vinyl in my clammy fingers. The smell of the ten-year old generic Parlophone paper sleeve. The weird adverts for Morphy Richards hairdryers that were often printed on them. I loved the crackle at the start of each record and as I grew to know the songs inside out so I came to know the cracks and pops too. To me they were part of the experience.

Later in my teen years I got into LPs and Abbey Road became my favourite record. The opening song on side two—”Here Comes The Sun,” of course—soon developed a wicked scratch but it didn’t bother me. Later still when I bought my first CD copy I missed that scratch. Vinyl is a far more personal listening experience. A CD or an mp3 will only ever be what it starts out as. It will never develop a personality like a record will.

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PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | If there’s a common thread that runs among those who join us for a record rummage at Washington, DC’s Som Records, typically and most obviously they’re avowed denizens of record stores and vinyl fanatics, and they also tend to be what could be deemed outsized personalities. Be they Grace Potter or Charli XCX or The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling or Gwar even, they’ve arrived raring to go.

Recently we were delighted to hear that Agnes Obel had accepted our invitation to join us at Som Records in between two live dates at DC’s 9:30 Club in support of her current and universally praised release Citizen of Glass. We wondered as well, would she arrive to Som bearing the same thoughtful and contemplative approach to record shopping as in evidence on Citizen of Glass?

Well, actually yes—and no. Ms. Obel is warm and engaging, funny and indeed thoughtful with an eclectic knowledge of music in its varying forms—and she also lingered far longer than the aforementioned outsized personalities. In fact, it turned out to be our longest shoot to date, the lure of the arcane finds in Neal’s “Expensive Shit” category proving too interesting to breeze by.

Thus, in advance of Record Store Day 2017, we’re record shopping with Agnes Obel at Washington, DC’s Som Records!

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Let me say it right from the start—the only “supergroup” I’ve ever met that deserves the moniker is Derek and the Dominos, with Eric Clapton playing Derek. That said, Blind Faith—the pre-Derek English blues rock conglomerate that featured Clapton as well as Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech—came close with their 1969’s Blind Faith, an excellent but flawed album that opens with some real fireworks only to fizzle out in a spectacularly self-indulgent example of dragged out, drum-solo heavy rock’n’roll bloat.

Short-lived and seemingly doomed from the beginning by Clapton’s ambiguous attitude towards landing himself in the straightjacket of yet another supergroup like Cream, from which he had just escaped, Blind Faith staggered about in the dark just long enough to play one tour and record one album, Blind Faith. Its sound is a sometimes lumbering and sometimes wonderful admixture of the heavy blues played by Cream and the airier, almost jazz-like tones preferred by Winwood’s former and future project, Traffic. And despite the band’s Frankenstein’s monster aspect, I actually find Blind Faith more consistent than I do most Cream and Traffic LPs.

“Had to Cry Today” is a Cream song—complete with barbarically heavy guitar riff and all the rest of the trimmings—with Winwood’s vocals mixed in, and if I prefer it to most Cream tunes it’s because Winwood’s voice is achingly exposed and actually capable of conveying confusion, pain, and loss. Cream always sounded too cold-blooded and purely technically proficient to my ears, and Clapton didn’t come into his own as a vocalist until Derek and the Dominos. “Had to Cry Today” moves jamward but never loses the thread, and is as fine an article of heavy music as any recorded at the end of the sixties. On the other hand, “Well All Right” is looser and has Traffic written all over it; hell, you can actually dance to it without pretending you have a wooden leg, which is the case with most Cream songs. Mr. Baker’s drum spiel—beyond the obligatory and annoying cymbal punching at the beginning—is sublime, and that goes double for Winwood’s keyboard work.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “When it comes to funk and words, lyrics and language, there couldn’t be a better pairing than Ben Greenman and Prince.” —George Clinton

There has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet who shattered traditional ideas of race and gender, rewrote the rules of identity, and redefined the role of sex in pop music and introduce the sex pills to have better sex relations.

Ben Greenman has been listening to and writing about Prince since the mid-’80s and owns thousands of Prince and Prince-related songs. Here, with the passion of an obsessive fan and the skills of a critic, journalist, and novelist, he mines his encyclopedic knowledge of Prince’s music to tell both his story and the story of the paradigm-shifting ideas that he communicated to his millions of fans around the world. Dig If You Will the Picture is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary talent.

Ben Greenman is a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor who has written both fiction and nonfiction. His novels and short-story collections include The Slippage and Superbad, he was Questlove’s collaborator on Mo’ Meta Blues and Something to Food About, and he has written memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, McSweeney’s, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | By the time Motown released The Supremes A’ Go-Go, the group’s ninth studio album, on August 25, 1966, the group had already scaled the charts with hits like “Where Did Our Love Go?,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” and “I Hear a Symphony.”

The Supremes A’ Go-Go solidified Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard’s hold on the American and global marketplace, the first of their albums to go to #1 on the Billboard 200, marking the first LP by an all-female group to do so, spawning two Top 10 hits in the #1 “You Can’t Hurry Love” and the #9 “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart.” The album also featured the trio tackling an array of hit cover material, mostly from their Motown stablemates the Four Tops, the Temptations, Martha & the Vandellas, Barrett Strong, and the Isley Brothers, but also contemporary hitmakers Nancy Sinatra (Lee Hazlewood’s “These Boots are Made for Walkin’”) and the McCoys (Bert Berns and Wes Farrell’s Brill Building chestnut “Hang on Sloopy”).

UMe will now reissue the classic album in a deluxe, expanded two-CD edition, featuring the original 12 tracks, featuring both the stereo album, along with rare mono album mixes, alternative vocal versions and mixes, as well as a duet of “Shake Me Wake Me (When It’s Over)” with the Four Tops. There are also rarely heard album outtakes, such as covers of fellow ‘60s stalwarts Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satsifaction.”

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