Monthly Archives: August 2021

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Like some lost treasure that Indiana Jones’ cooler roommate just happened upon, this triple vinyl release tracks the mighty Groundhogs on a 3941-mile journey from Richmond Athletic Ground to the Pocono Raceway track in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

It takes them from blues revivalists to head-friendly prog icons and power rock innovators; bridging the gap between their first two bluesy albums and the nirvana and nadir of the band’s most lauded line up of Tony McPhee (guitar and vocals), Pete Cruikshank (bass), and Ken Pustelnik (drums) at their final show on that big American tour that broke up the original trio. Along the way they were heralded by Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, became embroiled in student riots in Germany and were acclaimed in the weeklies as the hardest working band around, while guitarist Tony McPhee guffawed at comparisons to Hendrix, Clapton, and Peter Green.

Sitting in the Warner Brothers’ vault for 50 years, four reels of tape lay wedged between the masters of the groundbreaking albums Thank Christ For The Bomb, Split and Who Will Save The World… The Mighty Groundhogs. The first two boxes had a handwritten scrawl acclaiming them as ‘Groundhogs live at Richmond Athletic Ground, November 7, 1969.’ Originally it had been thought that they were recorded at the Ninth National Jazz And Blues Festival – a nomadic event that had previously rocked up in Richmond.

In fact, they turned out to be a one-off support slot to Free, a break from their Marquee residency; the mood is intimate, jokey between songs rhetoric punctuates a monumental set that debuts ‘Cherry Red’ at the time an unnamed “new song.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A co-founder of the P-Funk movement, Clarence Eugene “Fuzzy” Haskins was born in West Virginia in 1941 and started as a singer in the doo-wop vocal group The Parliaments, led by George Clinton in the late 1950s. He was a founding member of the groundbreaking and influential 1970s funk bands Parliament-Funkadelic. Fuzzy Haskins toured and appeared on P-Funk albums as a singer, and occasionally as a guitarist, throughout the 1970s. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997.

Despite the success of Mothership Connection, Fuzzy Haskins was growing frustrated that his songs were no longer being featured on albums by Funkadelic and Parliament. He also watched as Bootsy Collins, a relative newcomer to the family, embarked upon a solo career.

This added to Haskins’ frustration and at the height of P-Funk’s popularity, Fuzzy left the ensemble to pursue a solo career. Fuzzy Haskins released his first solo album, A Whole Nother Thang, in 1976. The album features funk “all-stars” from the likes of Bernie Worrell, Donald Austin, and Bootsy Collins. Haskins wrote eight of the nine songs and served as producer, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and even drummer. The result was an album that oozed quality.

With his brand of earthy and heavyweight funk, Fuzzy Haskins’ solo work fits right in with many of the other great P-Funk side projects. Also featured on the album is the track “Cookie Jar,” which was later recorded by Prince. Despite the quality of music, the album didn’t sell in vast quantities and didn’t find the audience it deserved. A Whole Nother Thang is a true gem to funk fans, mint vinyl copies are hard to find and pricey these days. If you are a Funkateer, this one’s for you.

Originally released on Westbound Records in 1976, now back available as a limited deluxe 180g tangerine color vinyl edition (400 copies) packaged in a gatefold jacket featuring the original artwork and liner notes.

Remembering Ron Bushy. —Ed.

For the past week or so I’ve been walking around singing “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” in a resonant voice, pretty much nonstop. I don’t sing all 19 minutes of it, mind you. You can’t sing a drum solo. Still, my significant other is threatening divorce, and we’re not even married.

A monolithic monument of molten metal sung by a guy with enunciation problems, Iron Butterfly’s 1968 “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (on the LP of the same title) hit the charts at the dawning of the progressive rock era, when 19-minute song cycles with titles like “Crystals Medusa” or “King Arthur’s Gelatinous Sceptre” were beginning to blight the musical landscape. There is nothing “progressive” about the 19 minutes of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”–the song’s a regressive return to the primitive simplicity of “Louie Louie” and anybody–even me–could play it, for hours if mood struck.

“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is all primal force, an implacable juggernaut that grinds exceedingly fine–you don’t listen to it as much as get out of its way. Forget the Age of Aquarius–to quote Blue Öyster Cult, “This ain’t the garden of Eden… and this ain’t the summer of love.”

No, it’s the most ominous song about Adam and Eve’s playground ever–guitarist Erik Braun’s repeated fuzz-guitar riff, keyboard player/vocalist Doug Ingle’s ominous church organ, and Lee Dorman’s speaker-shuddering bass are all menace, and the only problem I have with the song–and it’s a serious one–is the way its forward motion is interrupted by a couple of lengthy solos–the first (unconscionably) by Ron Bushy on drums and the second by Ingle on organ. I’d have preferred a impregnable wall of heavy metal noise with no exits, no interruptions, no let up—the West Coast’s retort to the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray.”

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Nico Hedley lives in Queens, NYC, USA. Painterly is his first album, recorded at Spaceman Sound in Brooklyn, landing in the racks of brick-and-mortar stores and available through online sales channels September 3 courtesy of Whatever’s Clever. The album, which can be purchased in standard black or smoky clear and black vinyl editions (plus digital), showcases Hedley’s abilities as a singer-songwriter and guitarist at the nexus of alt-country and indie folk with a touch of slowcore in the mix. Cohesive with considerable reach and sharpened by skilled players (Hedley’s “family band”), it’s a striking debut.

In the PR for this record as written by Winston Cook-Wilson (a member of the band Office Culture who contributes Fender Rhodes to Painterly), it’s stated that the lead singing on the album was inspired by none other than George Jones, and furthermore, that Jones, a mainstay of honky-tonk C&W and then countrypolitan, is Hedley’s “Nashville North Star.”

It’s a detectable association, though I find it necessary to elaborate that the similarity didn’t jump out to me during my initial handful of spins, reinforcing that Jones was an inspiration rather than a model for imitation. This infers subtlety on Hedley’s part, but it’s probably more accurate to relate that the songwriter’s intentions for Painterly were broad and decidedly contemporary.

Succinctly, Painterly isn’t a throwback album. Opener “Tennessee” makes this abundantly clear, with Hedley’s meditative vocals and guitar mingling first with Adam Robinson’s tenor sax and then with Hamilton Belk’s pedal steel, Jeff Widner’s drums and even a brief flash of backing vocals (by either Alena Spanger or Drew Citron). After the song kicks into full gear, it feels like it concludes just as quickly (the whole thing is over in a tidy two and a half minutes).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Gord Downie’s Coke Machine Glow was released in 2001, in between Music @ Work (2000) and In Violet Light (2002), the ninth and tenth albums by his mighty band of brothers in The Tragically Hip. The first solo project by one of the world’s great wordsmiths, Coke Machine Glow’s sixteen painterly songs were released with an accompanying book of poetry, collectively emanating Downie’s heartrending stories, from the road as from home, in his signature quirk and complex, approachable wit. Twenty years since its release, Coke Machine Glow remains a teetering, charming body of work, never static, shot across its canvas in brilliant glowing embers of “mustard and honey tones.”

Now, to mark its 20th anniversary, Arts & Crafts releases a special expanded edition that revisits the music and poetry of this prolific and pivotal time of Downie’s career. Entitled Coke Machine Glow: Songwriters’ Cabal, the triple-album features the original two-disc set plus a bonus record of twelve unreleased demos, alternate versions, and never-before-heard outtakes, carefully curated by Gord’s “oldest Toronto friend” Josh Finlayson and brother Patrick Downie with Arts & Crafts’ Jonathan Shedletzky. The in-all 28-song collection presents a portrait of Downie with rarely before heard intimacy, unrefined and dripping in the wildness of the moment.

The previously unreleased title track, an ominous and askew improvisation called “I Stand Before The Songwriters’ Cabal,” posits Gord, alone – save for notebook in hand – facing the pantheon of his craft, stepping to the mic, voice tinkling like a chandelier, with everything and nothing to prove. The spidery acoustic guitar and piano form a web around Downie’s bold yet tentative prose, securing it in the heft of the moment.

Elsewhere, two opposing versions of the mysterious outtake “Contact” reflect the distance and different shapes these words travelled with Downie in various envelopes over the years. Elegant alternate studio takes of “Vancouver Divorce” and “Lofty Pines” capture the fluidity of the “Goddamned Band” that comprised the Gas Station recording sessions in Toronto that May of 2000; while home recordings dated November 1999, Carlaw Avenue, of “SF Song,” “Trick Rider,” and “Chancellor,” and more, spotlight Gord in close communion with his tape recorder and coffee machine. The hotel room stationary and napkin blueprints practically fill the recordings with tape hiss ambience.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film By Todd Haynes – Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack, a 2CD and digital soundtrack that features both well-known and rare Velvet Underground tracks, will be released on October 15, 2021 via Republic Records/UMe.

Curated by the documentary’s director, Todd Haynes, and music supervisor Randall Poster, the album is the official soundtrack for the critically acclaimed Apple Original documentary, The Velvet Underground, which will be released in theaters and premiere globally Friday, October 15 on Apple TV+.

Featuring some of The Velvet Underground’s most well-known tracks, rarities and songs that influenced them, The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film By Todd Haynes – Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack serves as the perfect introduction to the band and companion piece to the film.

The soundtrack features such Velvet Underground favorites as “Sunday Morning,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “I’m Waiting for The Man,” and “Sweet Jane,” as well as the mono version of “Heroin” and the rare cut “Foggy Notion.” Also featured are live versions of “After Hours” and “Sister Ray,” Nico’s “Chelsea Girls,” and the tongue-in-cheek novelty song “The Ostrich” by The Primitives, an early band formed by Lou Reed and John Cale.

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Remembering Sterling Morrison, born on August 29, 1942, who passed on August 30, 1995. —Ed.

Have you ever driven over what you thought was a speed bump, only to discover later it was your grandmother? I know, I know, so have I. Well, don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s partly her fault for falling face down in the street like that, and then failing (those old hips shatter like china!) to get back up. And the rest of the blame lies with the fact that you weren’t paying attention, but instead singing “too busy sucking on a ding dong” along with Loud Reed on “Sister Ray,” the centerpiece of the Velvet Underground’s magnum dopus, 1968’s White Light/White Heat.

Like many people I know and despise, I’ve gone through phases with the Velvet Underground. Their 1967 debut will be my favorite for a while, then I’ll switch allegiance to White Light/White Heat, and then I’ll go turncoat and spend a year or so listening only to Loaded. But I have given the matter a lot of thought, and have decided that White Light/White Heat is VU’s best LP, because it alone gets to the point, the point being that life is an absurd and awful place, and the only real and valid goal of art is to communicate said absurdity and awfulness in as absurd and awful a manner as possible.

Lou Reed was a Janus-faced fellow, an Apollonian and a Dionysian by turns, and as capable of producing songs of formalist beauty (“Pale Blue Eyes”) as he was of creating songs of seemingly chaotic ugliness (“I Heard Her Call My Name”). Me, I’ve decided (having spent the past year in an anteroom of Hell) I prefer the ugliness and chaos, and all of the nihilistic accoutrements that come with them. And on White Light/White Heat Reed was definitely in chaos mode.

As for vocalist/multi-instrumentalist John Cale, who would leave the Velvets after White Light/White Heat, he preferred the chaos to the beauty for aesthetic reasons having to do with his avant-garde predilections. Meanwhile, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker were simply along for the ride. That said, they weren’t unwilling participants in the creation of the masterpiece of malignity and malice that is White Light/White Heat. Morrison summed up the band’s collective gestalt at the time by saying, “We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were all definitely going in the same direction. In the White Light/White Heat era, our lives were chaos. That’s what’s reflected in the record.”

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It’s not always about money and it’s not always about fame; sometimes an artist has a desire to just share the music that they can’t help but create, but every so often the industry gatekeepers also have more of an interest in art and creativity than just dollars and cents.

Meet Howie Klein, a writer, concert promoter, disc jockey, music producer, record label founder, record label executive, progressive political activist, and adjunct professor of music. He’s about as music industry as you’d like to get: he was general manager of Sire Records and was the president of Reprise/Warner Bros. Records. He was responsible for signing Lou Reed to the Reprise label and was an early industry champion of Wilco. Currently, he helms DownWithTyranny!, a popular political blog.

Through it all, he didn’t care about the money. He cared about the music, the people, the message. You know what he didn’t care about? He wasn’t entranced by those gaudy baubles that hypnotize most of the folks who reach the top of any industry. No way, no how. Howie plays by Howie’s rules.’

I would jump to discuss any number of fascinating subjects with Howie, but this conversation is focused on the reissues and re-releases of a record label that he founded with Chris Knab and Butch Bridges, 415 Records. The reissue campaign is led by another record label, Liberation Hall. The goal of the label was simple: to release independent music focused on local punk and new wave bands from the fertile San Francisco music community.

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We all have to do ugly things if we expect to get ahead in this world. Stab a competitor in the back. Cheat a close friend out of a promotion. Whack a guy named Joey Marbles then shove a dead fish in his mouth. Me, I had to listen to Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. Believe me, the guy who had to whack Joey Marbles had it easy.

The closest comparison to 1978’s Grease is 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, both starring a pre-Scientology John Travolta. But whereas the latter was a serious depiction of the then disco present, Grease was a nostalgic look back at the anodyne late 1950s, when life was simpler and the rough beast of rock and roll had been defanged, leaving America’s young people to worship at the altar of teen idols like Paul Anka and Annette Funicello.

Both films were instant smashes with wildly successful soundtracks, with this difference—the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is iconic and filled with unforgettable songs, while only a few of the songs from Grease will ring a bell with your average listener. Admittedly Grease spawned four hit singles, two of which topped the pop charts. But its two other singles tanked—one didn’t even make the pop charts. Compare that to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which is star studded with hits. Barry Gibb contributed four number ones (and some other greats) all by his lonesome, and the soundtrack featured hits by the Trammps, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Yvonne Elliman as well.

The best way to evaluate the relative musical merits of the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks is to compare the bands that dominate them. Saturday Night Fever is a vehicle for the glitterball-era Bee Gees at the top of their form. Grease, on the other hand, showcases the novelty act Sha Na Na doing its retro-fifties shtick. Tell me you prefer the latter and I may just get in touch with the wise guy who shoved a fish in Joey Marbles’ mouth.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In celebration of its 15th anniversary, The Kooks today unveil the long-awaited reissue of their seminal debut album Inside in / Inside Out. Repackaged for new and old fans alike, the deluxe edition features the original album remastered and thirteen previously unreleased tracks. Out today via Virgin Records/UMe, stream here.

Out today, the release is coupled with a nostalgic visual for “She Moves In Her Own Way” featuring unseen footage from the iconic music video in 2008, directed by Diane Martel (The Killers, The 1975, The White Stripes). The new video shows a fresh band from Brighton celebrating their successful debut album on the road; a wholesome time capsule that is reminiscent of an unforgettable era in pop culture for British Indie bands.

Speaking about the reissue, The Kooks say: “We’re delighted that Inside In/Inside Out has been reissued to celebrate its 15th anniversary” said Luke. “It brings back so many fond memories of our early days as a band and we can’t wait to celebrate it again on tour next year.”

Originally released in 2006, the quadruple-platinum-selling album spawns timeless hits including BRIT nominated “She Moves In Her Own Way,” “Seaside,” and the band’s top five single “Naive.” With over 1.3 billion streams on Spotify today, the unstoppable Inside In / Inside Out is a record that fizzes with the exuberance of youth and a certified staple of British indie which continues to win over new fans as its remarkable streaming figures prove. Inside In / Inside Out became an essential classic and remains so today.

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Remembering Alice Coltrane, born on this day in 1937. —Ed.

One of the most suitable resurgences of esteem to have occurred over the last quarter century relates to the discography of multi-instrumentalist and composer Alice Coltrane. For far too many years far too many people erroneously ranked her as a major accompanist and downgraded her leadership efforts as being of primary interest to aficionados of freeform, modal, or spiritual jazz. Today Coltrane is justly recognized as a master, her output loaded with jewels; none are better than ‘71’s Universal Consciousness. 

Had Alice Coltrane somehow not recorded Universal Consciousness she’d still stand as one of the defining talents from jazz’s most exploratory era. And even if the woman born Alice McLeod on August 27th, 1937 in that hub of American artistry Detroit, Michigan had never managed to cut an album under her married name, her creative achievements would endure as quite notable.

In assuming the piano bench in the band of John Coltrane, she assisted in shaping the late-period of one of recorded music’s most vital exponents. With the departure of pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones, Coltrane’s “Classic Quartet” (which the saxophonist had been augmenting across 1965) was receding in the rear-view mirror. Drummer Rashied Ali, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and reedman Pharoah Sanders remained as assorted percussionists and Alice Coltrane entered; as of this writing the results remain galvanizing.

Studio evidence of her contribution didn’t emerge until after her husband’s death on July 17th, 1967; Expression arrived the following September, Cosmic Music, co-credited to Alice and John, the next year, and Stellar Regions, sourced from rediscovered tapes, belatedly appeared in 1995. The majority of the collaboration rests upon performance documents, though only one, late-‘66’s Live At The Village Vanguard Again!, was released prior to the bandleader’s succumbing to liver cancer.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when troubadours would travail the twilight streets of New York City with a guitar strapped to their back and scribbled lyrics written in coffee shops crammed into the pockets of their Levis. These minstrels would then perform those tunes to audiences who went out specifically to see something new, to learn about new voices and musical directions. Willie Nile can tell you more about it, he was there.

Discovered by Clive Davis in the late 1970s, in many ways, Nile was the last of that generation of New York City poet/ songwriters to get a shot at the big time. Willie brings that timeless poet’s sensibility to his recent run of albums. His newest project, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a record focused on the impact and experience of our recent pandemic times.

Willie is a lot of fun to talk to—he’s a bit of divining rod to the sea of emotions that exist just below the surface of the city. He’ll tell you all about the new album, but his conversation is full of rich context and wisdom that only someone who’s howled songs into the night sky over Manhattan during the wee hours would truly understand.

It feels a little bit as though the Earth has stood still for the last year or so. During times like these, when it seems we’re often at a loss for words, we’re lucky to have guys like Willie around to fastidiously fill in our collective blanks with rock and roll music sealed with the magic of a poet’s touch.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.