Monthly Archives: March 2018

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Vinyl collection includes Springsteen’s four studio albums from the era, plus two EPs and a double-LP live album.

On May 18th, Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings will release Bruce Springsteen: The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996, a limited-edition, numbered boxed set composed of material recorded and released by Springsteen for Columbia Records during that period. The long out-of-print LPs are available remastered for the first time on vinyl. In addition to Springsteen’s four studio albums from the era, the boxed set includes a special 12” of 1988’s live EP “Chimes of Freedom,” Springsteen’s 1993 two-LP MTV Plugged special, and the first-ever vinyl release of the 1996 “Blood Brothers” EP for a total of 10 discs. All of this material comes in recreations of the original packaging, accompanied by a 60-page book featuring rarely seen photos, memorabilia and original press clippings from the period.

For The Album Collection Vol. 2, remastered albums from acclaimed engineer Bob Ludwig and Springsteen’s longtime engineer Toby Scott have been pressed on vinyl for the first time. The albums were transferred from the original analogue masters using the Plangent Process playback system. 1987’s Tunnel of Love and 1992’s Human Touch have also been expanded across two LPs to maximize audio quality.

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“My art teacher, Mr Jones, whom I loved dearly, gave me his copy of Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground featuring Nico LP. Back then, I played in a school band with his son, Matthew, who played drums, poorly. It wasn’t long before the record became the closer friend.”

“I’m listening to it now. We share a common history in the same way I do with my human friends. It’s a being. It has a life force. Like you and me. I love that about my record collection. We’ve stumbled together, with reference. A map of sorts as to where we came from and who we are now.

From the first beatific hit of the xylophone on “Sunday Morning” I was taken away to another place where everyone has enough of everything. Transcendence. Abundance. Nico. They’ll never be another voice like hers. The Femme Fatale embodying feminine Goddess. Sexy and scary, sensitive and stern at the same time.

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For Jerry Lee Lewis, 1973 was the worst of years and the best of years too; despite a brief turn in prison, the death of a son, a divorce (his fourth), and rampant drug and alcohol abuse, the Killer still turned out two seminal LPs with The Session… Recorded in London with Great Artists and Southern Roots: Back Home to Memphis.

The latter LP is nothing short of a miracle; Jerry Lee somehow managed knock off ten galvanizing performances even though he was, by all accounts, out of control even by his own berserk standards. When he wasn’t abusing legendary producer Huey “The Crazy Cajun” Meaux, the heavily medicated Lewis was threatening to kill a photographer and generally being a dyspeptic old cuss. “Do you wanna try one?” asks Meaux doing the proceedings. “If you got enough fuckin’ sense to cut it,” replies the orneriest cage-rattler to ever hail from the friendly state of Louisiana.

Let’s make one thing clear from the start; neither LP comes close to recapturing the anarchic feel and demented energy of Lewis’ early recordings, or the deranged ferocity (subtlety? toss it out the goddamn window!) of his hair-raising live performance with the Nashville Teens at Hamburg, Germany’s Star Club in 1964. His vocals are lazier, and his piano playing less a frenzied hammering at the gates of Hell, the place he’s always figured will be his final destination. It may have been the pills, but the old piano burner almost sounds relaxed at times.

In short, on Southern Roots The Killer proves there’s more than one way to skin a cat. He lays back in the groove and waxes sly and lewd by turns, sounding randy even at his most relaxed and pretty copacetic for a guy who has just threatened to murder another guy for having the audacity to point a camera his way. Whether he’s singing the songs of Doug Sahm or Isaac Hayes or breathing life into novelty tune about a haunted house, Jerry Lee mostly plays it cool but isn’t afraid to blow volcanic hot when the mood strikes him.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Garbage today announced the release of the 20th anniversary edition of their legendary second album Version 2.0. Due for release on Stunvolume/PIAS on June 22, the package will feature the whole original album, as well as 10 B-sides from the era. Visit Garbage.com for updates on standard and deluxe vinyl formats. The typically visceral “Lick The Pavement” is the first offering from the reissue and is out today. “Version 2:0 is in my opinion the quintessential Garbage record,” shared Garbage singer Shirley Manson. “We are all very grateful to the millions of people who took it to their hearts at the time it was released and to those who continue to love on it still.”

Initially released in May 1998, Version 2.0 spawned fan-favorites such as “Push It”, “I Think I’m Paranoid,” and “Special.” Shortly after its release, the Recording Industry Association of America honored the album with a platinum certification for exceeding 1 million units sold. Version 2.0 went on to sell over 4 million copies worldwide. The album was nominated for a total of four Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year and Best Rock Album. The album’s third single “Special” was further nominated the following year for Best Rock Song and for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. The video for “Push It” was nominated for eight MTV Video Music Awards.

Speaking about the enduring legacy of the record, the band’s drummer and co-producer Butch Vig explains: “Version 2.0 is the sound of a band growing up, evolving, and more than anything, gaining confidence. When we started recording, we made a conscious decision to not re-invent ourselves, but rather take everything we learned from our debut album and filter it through the new digital technology we were grappling with. Sonically, the album has moments of razor-sharp clarity and soft beauty. Indeed, it’s possibly our best album.”

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Johnny Mathis’ music has become synonymous with romantic pop ballads. Since his early hits with “Chances Are,” “It’s Not for Me to Say,” and “Misty,” he’s been recording and performing for decades, occasionally returning to the charts with things like his 1978 Number 1 “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” with Deniece Williams.

He’s released a truckload of albums along the way, evidenced by the massive 68-disc collection The Voice of Romance: The Columbia Original Album Collection which arrived in stores late last year. He’s not strayed from contemporary sounds, as his Johnny Mathis Sings the Great New American Songbook, produced by Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, includes hits from Pharrell Williams, Adele, and Bruno Mars among others.

This month, Real Gone Music and Second Disc Records have started a new series re-issuing Mathis’ albums from the 1970s. The series begins with Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, which includes covers of the title song as well as “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Johnny Mathis Sings the Music of Bacharach & Kaempfert, which includes his rendition of “The Look of Love” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” from Burt Bacharach, as well as versions of Bert Kaempfert’s work that includes “Danke Schoen,” “Spanish Eyes,” and “Strangers in the Night.” Both will be available as stand-alone CDs for the first time in the U.S., and both come with extra tracks.

We talked to Mathis about these recordings and more, from coming up through jazz to meeting The Beatles.

Your ’70s albums are just being reissued, starting last week with Johnny Mathis Sings the Music of Bacharach and Kaempfert and Raindrops Keep Fallen’ On My Head, a collection of songs from that period. What do you remember about those?

I had just started going to England on and off, and then on one of my occasions I just went on across the channel to Germany. I’d always been a fan of the music of Bert Kaempfert, and got a chance to work with him.

Ha! I hope I’m not giving out too much information but I had never had schnapps before. So I went over there and we got pretty heavy into schnapps before dinner and what have you. So now when I listen to that, I kind of remember that!

But, you know, you do so much in your life, especially at an early age when I was running all over the world singing. I even ended up in Brazil—places where I had to learn the language a little bit. It was fun to sing—some of it worked and some of it, ha ha ha, maybe…

You had worked with Bacharach quite a bit.

Yeah, Bert was really early on, he was very businesslike about his music, which I loved, and as I got to know him over the years, appreciated it. He jumped right in when I was available to sing single records and we became friends. I think he was in the publishing business with Mitch Miller, as some of the young writers were at the time.

Yeah, I got really lucky. He wrote a couple wonderful songs for me. I guess he wrote them for me—you never know, you know. I found out that later on, these people who came to me and said that they just wrote it just for me had written it 20 years before. But it didn’t really matter as long as we got the song.

They were waiting for you to come along.

I guess, I guess. Gullible as I was, I believed it.

The other album coming around had a lot of contemporary songs from that time, from Jimmy Webb to Paul Simon. Those songs really hold up don’t they?

Yeah. I’ve always enjoyed singing songs of the day, songs that people listen to over and over again, and I got a chance in my career to sing almost everything that I ever wanted to. And it’s fun because there are special recordings that I did, for instance religions albums, that were just for special people who wanted to hear that.

But then when you do the contemporary music that’s available all over the place, it sort of keeps you in the moment, and that was fun for me. I had certain responsibilities as a singer and also contractually to my record company to do as much as I could and wide-ranging, as far as musical genres were concerned. But when I sang the songs of the day, that constantly changed all the time.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Director William Badgley (Kill All Rednecks) has announced a US screening tour of his new documentary, Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits that premiered at the BFI London Film Festival. All of the screenings will include a Q&A with Badgley and special guests. Q&A guests include The Slits’ own Palmolive, Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile/Ex Stains), and Jennifer Shagawat (Shellshagg). More guests to be announced. Dates and Q&A details here.

Here to be Heard: The Story of the Slits tells the story of the young women pioneers of the mid-70s Punk era from a female point of view. Contemporaries of The Clash and Sex Pistols and the pioneering godmothers of the musical movement known as “Punky Reggae,” it runs from the bands’ inception to its end in 2010 coinciding with the death of lead vocalist, Ari Up.

Film includes interviews with Don Letts (former Slits manager / Punk documentarian), Viv Albertine (Slits guitarist), Ari Up (Slits vocalist), Palmolive (Slits founder / first drummer), Tessa Pollitt (Slits bass player), Bruce Smith (Slits second / PIL drummer), Hollie Cook (Slits vocalist / keyboards / percussion), Vivien Goldman (NYU’s Punk professor), Dennis Bovell (producer of The Slits album CUT), Paul Cook (Sex Pistols drummer), Gina Birch (Raincoats bass player), Adrien Sherwood (producer / long-time friend and collaborator of the band), and many more, as well as previously unseen footage and recordings of the band.

“It was sometime in 1994, likely spring or summer. I was 14 years old.”

“I grew up in a small town named Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario, Canada, about 6 hours north of Toronto. Now, I’ve been around records for most of my life. I mean, in an age where people had long since converted to cassette and, later on, CDs, being by far the most popular mediums at the time. At least that’s what it was like for the most part, where I was from.

At that time everyone had some old records hanging around the basement. The passionate music lovers would keep and cherish them, the rest would let them sit there or get rid of them. Which was great for me, ‘cause pawn shops (or ‘new & used stores,’ like we called them over there) had gems for very cheap. At the very least, I could snag some LPs for free off of one of my friends parents, or homes/establishments trying to make some space.

Which brings me to hearing the freshest thing I’d ever heard at that time. My parents owned a small construction company. One day, one of their employees, Dan, who was likely picking up the rubbish from one of the sites they were working on, had sifted out a couple of boxes of 45s. I skimmed through the boxes of singles, which turned out to be from a collection that was previously owned by the local radio station, CJKL.

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On which the late metal minimalist/ genius/ proud-to-be-a-lummox Lemmy Kilmister delivers the hard rock goods live in a couple of halls not including London’s Hammersmith Odeon. No sleep ‘til Hammersmith features Motörhead at their ferocious and pummeling best, and is the perfect corrective to the lyrical excesses, grand themes, and emphasis on musical virtuosity that characterized much of the metal then popular. Call them the anti-Rush.

With the able assistance of “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar and backing vocals and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor on drums, Lemmy bangs out some tunes (most of them of unfashionably short length and unfashionably fast tempos), announces in DIY fashion that Motörhead is its own damn road crew, and demonstrates that his very hoarse bark has real bite.

Kilmister possessed not a whit of glamor and about as much charm, but that’s exactly what made him so lovable; he wasn’t good looking, his tonsils hardly made the little girls swoon, and when push came to shove he was the perfect antithesis of, say, Robert Plant. “No Class” is addressed to (or so I suspect) some anonymous groupie hanger-on, but Lemmy would no doubt have agreed it applied to him as well; he had about as much class as your average lorry driver, and never pretended to have better manners than your average lorry driver.

In short, you could relate to Lemmy Kilmister. He sang about all of the things you cared about, and said fuck it to the darkest depths of Mordor. He was a creature of the road and of the tedium and excesses that entailed, didn’t give a shit about Xanadu or hobbits, and didn’t want to write the next “Stairway to Heaven” either. He was down to earth, didn’t look like he placed a very high premium on personal hygiene, and probably would have come in handy in a bar fight. He’s as close as English music has ever come to producing an outlaw country musician.

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