Monthly Archives: March 2020

VIA PRESS RELEASE | The versatile, hit-making career of one of the American recording industry’s legendary producers and executives is lovingly told in award-winning musician, writer and broadcaster Ben Sidran’s revealing new biography The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma. Read our exclusive excerpt below.

In 1967, Tommy was living in LA in an outrageously luxe apartment on Hollywood Boulevard that he shared with deejay Johnny Hayes. During the forties, Tyrone Power had rented the same apartment. You’d walk up a long flight of stairs that opened on a huge room with thirty-foot ceilings. It was like a movie set. Then there was another staircase that went up to a second floor where there were three bed- rooms and three baths off a spacious landing. Tommy paid a little more to have the master bedroom, which had a terrace overlooking Hollywood Boulevard.

Johnny had a fantastic sound system with a Fisher power amp and wonderful speakers. It was set up in the living room, and this room became a gathering spot for music freaks throughout Hollywood. Since the apartment was centrally located between La Brea and Laurel Canyon, people would stop by at all hours of the day or night because they knew it was a place you could always go to hear music, get loaded, or do whatever you wanted. Open door.

“You would never know who might show up,” says Tommy. “People would be at Martoni’s at two in the morning and they’d say, ‘Hey, let’s go to LiPuma’s.’ Randy Newman, Lenny Waronker, Reb Foster, Chuck Kaye, B. Mitchell Reed, pretty much everybody in the business crossed that threshold at one time or another. Every night you could find a bunch of guys sitting digging music.

Suffice it to say, a lot of music history went down in their Holly- wood Boulevard pad. Back when the Rolling Stones first came to town, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards, along with their manager, Andrew Oldham, had come to Metric Music looking for songs. Tommy started playing them some things from the Minit Records catalog. One by one they all split except for Andrew, who finally said, “Hey, do you know where I can get some smoke?” Tommy said, “Well, I don’t know where you can get some, but if you want some, I’ve got some.” He and Oldham drove to the pad on Hollywood Boulevard.

Read More »

“I grew up in the days when vinyl was the only high-fidelity music delivery system. So, I had a few albums with me when I struck out from our family homestead in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I picked up a few more records along the way before a basement flood ruined my album covers and also destroyed my very uncomfortable futon. Sad about the records. Sweet relief regarding that bed. I threw a party where I provided crayons and blank white LP jackets so that guests could help me replace my album art. But my record collection was never the same. The age of digital music set in and I became a CD guy.”

“I was a working musician at that point and from time to time I found myself in record company offices. Those visits always led to an invitation for me to poke my head into a bin of promotional CDs and just grab what I wanted. Pretty soon I had rows of these silvery wonders, and I was living that compact disc lifestyle, trying not to break jewel cases, keeping my discs in wallets, and not really knowing where anything was.

During this period when my music listening was devolving into a data storage issue, I was simultaneously noticing how the process of making music was changing, too. I found myself spending less time touching a guitar, and more time moving a mouse around, pointing at shapes. Everything besides singing and playing was starting to feel complicated.

Our collective fascinations with musical styles seem to follow a cyclical pattern. A simple idea emerges suddenly from some great new DIY-style group. Once we all realize we like it, imitations appear. Expert musicians begin to crowd in and create awesome variations on the original idea. The songs become more shiny and more wonderful. And just as we all start to get sick of the original idea, some new DIY-style band appears with a shocking new sound. The world turns its head in that direction and pattern begins again. In my mind this cycle is like a sawtooth wave. A slow ramping up of awesomeness and complexity and then a sudden catastrophic drop off to the simplicity of some garagey new sound.

Read More »

Upon the dissolution of the band Women, Toronto’s Patrick Flegel began recording solo as Cindy Lee, with results that blended classic pop motifs with wonderfully chilly late-night ambience and a bold defiance of gender norms. What’s Tonight to Eternity finds them back with an often-captivating set of songs and an undiminished love of guitar textures, including feedback. An abundant serving of alternately piercing, lilting and ethereal subterranean pop, it’s out now on W.25th, the contempo music subsidiary of the always interesting San Francisco-based reissue label Superior Viaduct.

For a lot of music past and present, the biographical info is pretty standard stuff. It’s the story of bands forming and maturing, of lone artists honing their skills, and additionally of individuals transitioning from groups into solo mode, which is the case with Cindy Lee, though with Patrick Flegel the change is deeper than it is for most, being aptly described as an evolution.

A Cindy Lee performance will reliably find Flegel in drag as their music explores queer identity and gender freedom. Like much queer art, it is deeply attached to prior touchstones while eluding the standard modes of homage. Simultaneously, while inextricably attached to the past, Cindy Lee isn’t camp; instead, their music is reminiscent of what an earlier era would have categorized as subversive. In the current moment, this is a total compliment.

Flegel’s influences include Nico, ’60s girl-group pop a la The Ronettes and The Crystals, the work of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and Karen Carpenter. The impact of the last name listed relates as much to the soft-pop icon’s personal struggles as it does musically, but don’t discount the Carpenters’ recordings in the Cindy Lee scheme of things. Still, Flegel’s post-Women oeuvre is generally lo-fi and occasionally severe in a manner that a typical fan of Karen and Richard would likely find off-putting.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Dark Horse Records and BMG are celebrating this year’s milestone Ravi Shankar centennial with the first ever vinyl release of his renowned 1997 album, Chants of India. Produced by Shankar’s longtime friend and collaborator, Dark Horse founder George Harrison, the acclaimed collection will be available on 2×12″ LP 180-gram red vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve with an exclusive 12″x12″ photo print. Limited to 3,000 in North America, Chants of India arrives April 18 as a Record Store Day exclusive release.

Recorded in the south Indian city of Chennai – then known as Madras – as well as Friar Park, Harrison’s home in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, Chants of India marked a landmark departure for Shankar. Though of course known around the world for his extraordinary work in Hindustani classical music, the album sees Shankar creating a collection of traditional Vedic and other Hindu sacred prayers set to music, offering his hope for peace and harmony among nature and all creatures.

The renowned sitar master is joined by a number of leading Indian musicians, performing on such traditional instruments such as tabla, santoor, veena, bansuri flute, tanpura, and mridangam, as well as violin, cello, and harp, with his daughter, Anoushka Shankar, conducting and Harrison contributing at Shankar’s personal request on acoustic guitar, autoharp, bass, vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, and backing vocals.

Released on CD in 1997, Chants of India proved both a popular and critical success, reaching #3 on Billboard’s “Top World Music Albums” amidst wide-ranging international applause. Entertainment Weekly’s Josef Woodard awarded the album an “A-,” hailing it as an “enchanting set of Indian music based on prayers and chants…Unlike Shankar’s classical raga recordings, Chants of India is a set of short, colorfully arranged pieces, enjoyable for neophytes and devotees alike. Another jewel from a humble world-music superstar.”

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Original motion picture soundtrack on 12” clear vinyl. First full career retrospective release with a limited edition first run of 1,000. First available on Record Store Day 4/18/2020.

If you watched television, went to the movies, or listened to radio in the ’80s and ’90s, you probably heard Suzanne Ciani’s work whether you knew it or not. Suzanne is a five-time Grammy award nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist whose work has been featured in countless commercials, video games, and feature films. A Life In Waves explores Suzanne’s life and innovations through her own eyes, offering a feminine glimpse into the world of electronic music.

With over 15 albums spanning 40 plus years, countless commercial scores and sound designs, Suzanne’s catalog is among the richest and varied of any artist working today. With selections ranging from Suzanne’s early modular experimentations, to her commercial sound design, to her romantic synthesizer works, to her delicate piano compositions, this soundtrack is the only collection of its kind. Like the film, it’s a journey into Suzanne’s mind, and a career-spanning exploration of this genre-defying artist.

Everybody’s favorite German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (nobody can understand the rest of ‘em) once wrote, “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” If so, Wasted Shirt, the new collaboration between Ty Segall and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, has integrity coming out the wazoo.

Listening to Wasted Shirt’s 2020 release Fungus II brings to mind the scene in Apocalypse Now where Colonel Kurtz says, “Are my methods unsound?” To which Capt. Willard replies, “I don’t see any method at all, sir.” Like Kurtz, the only method Wasted Shirt adheres to is chaos. (But let us tread carefully here; chaos can be a method too.)

The music of Wasted Shirt alienates most human beings, probably because we’ve been genetically programmed and behaviorally conditioned to prefer predictability and pattern over an inchoate din expressly designed to induce Edvard Munch Scream Face. Listening to Wasted Shirt requires that one completely rewire one’s mental circuitry to the extent that the only music one can stand listening to is Wasted Shirt.

I’m not quite there yet myself–I still enjoy listening to Black Oak Arkansas and the occasional smash hit by the Doobie Brothers. But I tried listening John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy the other night and it made me puke. though come to think of it Double Fantasy has always sent me running for the toilet.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Relive two legendary musical moments through the lens of legendary rock photographer Linda Wolf: 1970’s Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen Tour and the tour’s tribute concert at the 2015 Lockn’ Festival, led by the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Tribute: Cocker Power features exclusive, never-before-seen documentary photos, stories, and vignettes from both the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen Tour, known as one of the greatest rock-and-roll tours of all time, and the 2015 tribute concert at the Lockn’ Festival led by the Tedeschi Trucks Band with Leon Russell and original Tour alumni. This visually stunning volume, released on the 50th Anniversary of the Tour, includes contributions from over one hundred musicians and crew members, including Denny Cordell, Leon Russell, Chris Stainton, Rita Coolidge, Claudia Lennear, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Warren Haynes and many more.

A true labor of love to all who played a part in these exceptional times in the history of music and culture, and to everyone, collectively, who played their part in making it all happen, Tribute: Cocker Power is a must-have for devoted fans and newcomers alike.

“How to describe the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs & Englishmen Tour? A two-month traveling hippie circus that left hotel managers tearing their hair out, concert promoters screaming about a dog on stage, girls dancing naked on the rooftops of a New York city hotel, and forty-three people, including three kids and a five-person film crew, traveling together on a private jet that had COCKER POWER painted on its side. It was pure art and one of the greatest rock-and-roll tours of all time. Five decades later, the Tedeschi Trucks band took us back to the stage, honoring the legacy of Mad Dogs and Englishmen with one of the most powerful tribute concerts ever. This book is in honor of it all,” said Linda Wolf.

Read More »