Monthly Archives: February 2021

PHOTO: JIMMY FONTAINE | The path to success for most successful people in the entertainment business—or any business for that matter—is rarely a straight one.

Life is full of unexpected twists and turns, but it’s all about keeping one’s cool and choosing directions that make sense, even if there is a bit of risk involved. Jim Keller knows he didn’t just wake up one morning to become the longtime manager for Philip Glass who is one of America’s most celebrated composers and a Kennedy Center Honors recipient who was presented with the U.S. National Medal of the Arts by President Obama. It was a certain sequence of events that got Jim there.

Keller, of course, is a musician. You’ve all heard Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” blasting from car radios and being played by bar bands, and so has Jim Keller; and he loves it! Except, in his case, he happens to be co-writer and performer of that song and was in Tommy Tutone! After releasing that power pop classic, Keller continued to make music under his own name, on and off through the years, but now he is back with a brand new album produced by the great Mitchell Froom. The record is called By No Means and features Keller’s direct, infectious music that can cut so sweetly you don’t even recognize that you’ve been wounded.

Join me and Jim on this episode of Radar as we talk about the twists, turns, and many lives of his career, seeing the music industry from both sides of the stage, and the production and splendid songwriting that went into his new album, By No Means.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Sharp Notes each Saturday evening at 6pm and TVD Radar on Sundays at 5AM on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | On April 16th, 2021, Demon Music Group will continue their year-long Bob Mould reissue campaign with Distortion: 2008-2019, the third of four vinyl boxsets chronicling the solo career of the legendary American musician.

​It follows hot on the heels of October’s 8 LP Distortion: 1989-1995 box set, which took in Mould’s early solo outings as well as his records with the much-beloved Sugar, January’s 9LP Distortion: 1996-2007 box set continuing through the next steps in Mould’s solo career and his outings as LoudBomb and Blowoff, and the 24CD Distortion: 1989-2019 box, which covers the entirety of his post-Hüsker Dü output.

Distortion: 2008-2019 follows Mould through a number of standout records that include some of his most celebrated work—collected here are District Line (2008), Life and Times (2009), Silver Age (2012), Beauty & Ruin (2014), Patch the Sky (2016) and Sunshine Rock (2019), as well as a bonus disc Distortion Plus: 2008-2019, which features Mould’s collaborations with Foo Fighters and Butch Walker plus the 2019 single “I Don’t Mind.” It comes pressed on clear vinyl with an etched B-side.

As with the previously released box sets in the Distortion collection, each album in the set has been mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at Peerless Mastering in Boston and is presented with brand new artwork designed by illustrator Simon Marchner and pressed on 140g clear vinyl with unique splatter effects. The box set includes a 28-page companion booklet featuring liner notes by journalist Keith Cameron; contributions from J Mascis and Shirley Manson; lyrics and memorabilia.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Initially released in December 1967 and described latterly by Rolling Stone as “The Who’s finest album,” The Who Sell Out reflected a remarkable year in popular culture. As well as being forever immortalized as the moment when the counterculture and the “Love Generation” became a global phenomenon and “pop” began metamorphosing into “rock.”

​The new Super Deluxe Edition of The Who Sell Out features 112 tracks, 46 of which are unreleased, an 80-page, hard-back, full-color book, including rare period photos, memorabilia, track-by-track annotation and new sleeve notes by Pete Townshend with comments from the likes of Pete Drummond (Radio London DJ), Richard Evans (designer) and more.

The Super Deluxe package also includes nine posters & inserts, including replicas of 20” x 30” original Adrian George album poster, a gig poster from The City Hall, Newcastle, a Saville Theatre show 8-page program, a business card for the Bag o’ Nails club, Kingly Street, a Who fan club photo of group, a flyer for Bath Pavilion concerts including The Who, a crack-back bumper sticker for Wonderful Radio London, Keith Moon’s Speakeasy Club membership card and a Who Fan Club newsletter.

As a taster for the set an EP of Pete Townshend’s previously unreleased demos has today been released on all streaming services including “Pictures Of Lily” (New remix, previously unreleased) “Kids! Do You Want Kids?” (AKA “Do You Want Kids, Kids?”) (Previously unreleased) & “Odorono” (Previously unreleased).

The Who Sell Out was originally planned by Pete Townshend and the band’s managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, as a loose concept album including jingles and commercials linking the songs stylised as a pirate radio broadcast. This concept was born out of necessity as their label and management wanted a new album and Townshend felt that he didn’t have enough songs. The ground-breaking original plan for Sell Out was to sell advertising space on the album but instead the band opted for writing their own jingles paying tribute to pirate radio stations and to parody an increasingly consumerist society.

Read More »

“When I think of vinyl I think about being a young kid, and going through my parents’ record collection. I’d look through them for hours, taking in the artwork and images. I’d take the records out the sleeves and would love dropping the needle.”

“The sound of vinyl is still so raw and nostalgic to me. My dad’s collection was a lot of classic stuff; The Who, Queen, The Beatles. I have such a love of The Who because of those records. My mum’s collection was stuff like Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond. I love Joni Mitchell and adore Paul Simon’s Graceland so a lot of that music has totally rubbed off on me.

Records feel like more than just a way to share music. They feel much more special than a tape or CD, so I keep my current collection in tip top condition. Between my partner and I we have really vintage original records handed down from our parents, plus classic albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Carole King’s Tapestry, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dark Side of The Moon, Queen’s Night at The Opera and a bunch of Paul Simon singles (I need to add Graceland to the collection ASAP!)

Read More »

A couple of weeks back I got into a big tussle with some Facebook friends for saying Jeff Beck didn’t impress me and I didn’t much care for anything he’d ever done. I was lying. Some of Beck’s Yardbirds stuff is great, and 1969’s Beck-Ola is a tremendous album and showcase of Beck’s whiz-bang guitar playing.

Exhibits A and B in my case against Jeff Beck are his twin forays into jazz fusion, 1975’s Blow by Blow and 1976’s Wired, both of which strike me as surgically sterile demonstrations of instrumental prowess for its own sake. I’ve searched Blow by Blow high and low for an ounce of soul, but its like that ounce of weed I lost my sophomore year in college. I looked everywhere, but I never found it.

Beck is a guitar player’s wet dream, but where’s the feeling? I wouldn’t go so far as The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who wrote upon Blow by Blow’s release that Beck “has absolutely nothing to say.” My gripe with Beck is that what he has to say he says in a cold-blooded language clinically detached from any emotion I can recognize. Beck isn’t a man–he’s a master class guitar workshop.

Unlike your best jazz artists, Beck takes no risks on Blow by Blow. And he’s anything but alone. Virtually all jazz fusion artists (the Mahavishnu Orchestra being a notable exception) play it safe, either because they lack the requisite jazz chops or they’re trying to peddle records to a listening public that finds the real thing too challenging. (See Albert Ayler = Zero Album Sales Formula.) Nothing wrong with making a buck, mind you, but in our day and age great “serious” musicians rarely produce “great art” by playing to the cheap seats.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Their live performances sound like an epic story we are being told—a novel, with differing chapters, changing moods, weather, seasons and exotic landscapes.” —Alan Warner

​Mute and Spoon Records are proud to announce the first in a series of long-awaited live album releases. Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975 is out May 28 on vinyl, CD, and digital platforms. If you think you knew Can, even after all the albums and through recently discovered material such as the legendary Lost Tapes, you’ll still find masses to surprise you here. This music is never the same river twice. In five parts, Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975 demonstrates an important and formidable element of the Can story—their live performance.

The Can Live series has taken the best of the bootlegged recordings and—overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer / engineer Rene Tinner—run them through the wringer of 21st century technology to bring you these vital historical documents in the best quality versions possible.

Founded in the late ‘60s and disbanded just over a decade later, Can’s unprecedented and bold marriage of hypnotic grooves and avant-garde instrumental textures has made them one of the most important and innovative of all time. These albums reveal a totally different perspective to the band. You may hear familiar themes, riffs and motifs popping up and rippling through these jams, but they are often fleetingly recognized faces in a swirling crowd.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | “More often than I can count, I’ve been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I’ve learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.”
—Paul McCartney, The Lyrics

​In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career—from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs’ lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney’s personal archive—drafts, letters, photographs—never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. There has never been a book about a great musician like it.

Read More »

Celebrating George Harrison on what would have been his 78th birthday. —Ed.

I have been guilty of saying mean things about George Harrison in the past, most of them having to do with the lugubrious and often wimpy tenor of the ex-Beatles solo work. But I am here today, dear members of the committee, to recant. I’ve been listening to 1970’s sprawling All Things Must Pass, and while it has its share of doleful bummers, what strikes me about it now is how hard it rocks.

The most anonymous Beatle could cook when he felt like it, and on All Things Must Pass he frequently felt like it, as did co-guitarists Eric Clapton and Dave Mason, and when all is said and done I’m forced to agree with critic Mikal Gilmore, who called All Things Must Pass “the finest solo work any ex-Beatle ever produced.”

The studio sessions were a clusterfuck, with superstars being dragooned left and right. The line-up included the players who would soon form Derek and the Dominos as well as the members of Badfinger, to say nothing of folks like Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Ginger Baker, and Gary Wright. Why, even Phil Collins played on one track.

There was also extensive overdubbing, and while the production duties were formally in the hands of the mercurial Phil Spector, Harrison has said Spector required 18 cherry brandies just to BEGIN work, leaving poor George to handle much of the production himself. In addition, Harrison’s mother was dying, and he was nurturing a burgeoning heroin addiction.

Let me make it clear from the start; I’m not much for “My Sweet Lord,” the song the LP is probably best known for, nor am I wild about its companion piece, “Help Me Lord.” LP opener “I’d Have You Anytime,” which was co-written by Harrison and Bob Dylan, does nothing for me, nor do the run of the mill “Run of the Mill,” the milquetoast “I Live for You,” and the “I need love” sentimentality of “I Dig Love.”

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | The best in vinyl records packaging was celebrated today (2/24) at the Making Vinyl Packaging Awards Virtual Ceremony. The video reply of the ceremony is here.

​Now in its 4th year the Making Vinyl Packaging Awards garnered more than 219 entries in 15-categories that were then reviewed by more than 21 judges on both sides of the Atlantic. The ceremony was hosted virtually by renowned packaging legend Craig Braun (the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out) who’s been an actor for the past two decades. The final round judges (Gail Marowitz; The Visual Strategist, Brian Schuman; Concord Music, Scott Pollack; A to Z Media; Sean Mosher-Smith, Echo Designlab, & Bryan Ekus; Making Vinyl) took turns announcing the winners and runners up.

The awards are part of Making Vinyl, the first B2B conference dedicated to the rebirth of the vinyl record industry, and produced by Colonial Manufacturing Cooperative, a buying collective among media manufacturers. More info about the awards is here.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Spiritualized and Fat Possum Records are proud to announce the first stage of The Spaceman Reissue Program: definitive vinyl releases of the first four Spiritualized albums. Curated by J Spaceman, the series will kick off April 23 with Spiritualized’s classic 1992 debut, Lazer Guided Melodies.

​Elevating the gritty, narcotic garage blues of Pierce’s recently disbanded Spacemen 3 into a crystalline space rock/pop wall of sound, Lazer Guided Melodies was recorded from 1990 to 1991, its 12 songs divided into four distinct movements. Reflecting on the transition from Spacemen 3 to the first realization of the Spiritualized sound, Pierce recalls:

“The last Spacemen 3 record was under-realized to me. When I listen back to that stuff it sounds like somebody finding their way. There was a lot of ideas but no way to put them into a space that would make them all work. So, there was a huge freedom forging over the last Spacemen 3 record and when Spiritualized started it was like, ‘OK it’s all yours. Go’…

We recorded the tracks in the studio near my flat which was a place where they predominantly recorded advertising jingles and it’s where we made all the Spacemen 3 records, but then the recordings were taken to Battery Studios in London, to explore a more professional way of making music… Once I approached that way of doing things I opened up a whole world and I was astounded that somebody could take those tracks and turn it into the record it became…”

Read More »

Where to start when talking about the music of Professor Longhair, given name Henry Roeland Byrd? His piano makes you want to do a crazy 3 a.m. strut down Bourbon Street. And his vocals–which quaver and wander willy-nilly off pitch–make you want to smile. A voice like his is one in a million; not so hot you think, until you find yourself knee-deep in glad.

Professor Longhair created the distinctive “New Orleans sound,” which Allen Toussaint called “that mambo-rhumba boogie thing.” Dr. John, who has made hay from the good Professor’s musical innovations, said Longhair “put funk into music… Longhair’s thing had a direct bearing on a large portion of the funk music that evolved in New Orleans.” But enough with the ethnomusicology; suffice it to say that Longhair was one of America’s great originals, with a distinctive style of playing piano developed, it’s worth noting, out of necessity–he learned how to play on a piano with missing keys.

But Professor Longhair is isn’t just a piano original. His vocals–sly, insinuating, and delivered with a wink–are ingratiating, that is when he doesn’t sound flat-out demented, as he does on the great “Tipitina.” Whether meandering off pitch like a drunk staggering down Bourbon Street at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday night or coming off like a deranged Elvis Presley, Professor Longhair’s singing will keep you on the edge of your seat–he’s the most unpredictable singer this side of Black Oak Arkansas’ wild pitch throwing Jim “Dandy” Mangrum.

Everything about Professor Longhair is improbable–he got his start with a band called the Shuffling Hungarians, for Christ’s sake. The toughest part of my job was choosing which album to review: 1972’s New Orleans Piano, which compiles music recorded by Atlantic Records between 1949 and 1953, and includes the original (and definitive) “Tipitina?” 1980’s Crawfish Fiesta, which is nothing less than the good Professor’s final LP and as great a Longhair album as any?

Read More »