Monthly Archives: November 2021

The Show is the latest studio album drop from New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Evan Toth. Its stylistic tone and overall sound are reminiscent of classic ’70s singer-songwriter records released during an era when The Album reigned supreme.

And, this nostalgic quality is brought even more to the forefront by the album’s backing band members themselves who are, in effect, Billy Joel’s core group from the ‘70s: drummer Liberty DeVitto, saxophonist (and organist) Richie Cannata, and guitarist Russell Javors. Classic Billy Joel albums Turnstiles, The Stranger, 52nd Street, Glass Houses, and the Nylon Curtain all featured these experienced instrumentalists, who today perform on their own as The Lords of 52nd Street. Original bassist Doug Stegmeyer sadly passed away in 1995, and Malcolm Gold has assumed the role.

Consider for a moment the sonic grandeur of such classic recordings as “New York State of Mind,” and pretty much the entirety of The Stranger, recordings for which The Lords are partly responsible. Echoes of this particular studio sound are ever-present on The Show, and Toth being a piano man himself, serves as an ideal frontman for such a band in this recording context, whose original songs are instrumentalized with the experienced studio musicians they deserve.

The Show offers the cohesion that ’70s concept or thematically-conscious records also did over the course of its ten original songs. Echoes of Billy Joel’s influence, via some song composition and vocal and piano delivery, can be heard throughout. Joel’s “self-conscious performer” songs like “Piano Man” and “Zanzibar” are echoed in Toth’s title-track “The Show,” which narrates his character’s experience surrounding a concert appearance.

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Since debuting with a self-titled LP in 2018, The Cutthroat Brothers, a duo consisting of guitarist-vocalist Jason Cutthroat and drummer Donny Paycheck, have been busy. On Friday December 3 they issue their fifth full-length and second of 2021, with their latest the second consecutive release to feature the bass playing of Mike Watt, who deepens but doesn’t radically alter the punky-bluesy appeal. Produced and mixed by Jack Endino, Devil in Berlin fits snuggly into the discography of Hound Gawd! Records. It’s available on vinyl, CD, and digital.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion The Cutthroat Brothers aren’t blood siblings, It’s an established fact however that both men are barbers, with Donny Paycheck clipping wigs in Takoma, WA and Jason Cutthroat doing the same in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. In matters musical, Paycheck did some drumming with Seattle-based punk thrashers Zeke before hooking up with his partner in coiffure and spiking a potent vein of throbbing scuzz-pummel.

In terms of comparisons, The Cutthroats have chalked up quite a list, including The Cramps, The Stooges, X, The Gun Club, and even Nick Cave. But maybe more impressive is getting Texacala Jones (she of 1980s cowpunk notables Tex & the Horseheads) to sing on “Black Candle” from their second LP (and first for Hound Gawd!), 2019’s Taste for Evil.

It’s the sort of gesture that reinforces a sturdy base of knowledge and strengthens a healthy streak of non-genericism. In turn, the Cutthroat Brothers have thrived exclusively on full-length releases (their third album, the digital-only Live in Europe, came out in May of 2020), a format where many outfits of similar roots-punk temperament simply run out of creative gas.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings celebrates the 30th anniversary of Natalie Cole’s iconic smash-hit, Unforgettable…with Love, with a variety of special reissues.

The newly remastered 1991 album—which earned seven GRAMMY® Awards, topped the Billboard 200 and went on to be certified 7x Platinum by the RIAA—features Cole’s groundbreaking virtual duet of “Unforgettable” with her father, Nat King Cole, plus an array of classic hits from the Great American Songbook. As a bonus, CD and digital editions of Unforgettable…with Love include Cole’s stunning renditions of “At Last” and “Cottage for Sale,” both of which were released as B-sides during the album’s original release. The original 22-track album will also be available on 180-gram vinyl as a 2-LP set.

In stores February 4th, Unforgettable…with Love is currently available to pre-order today in all formats, while fans can find a limited-edition purple vinyl pressing of the album (as well as exclusive merch) on Cole’s official website. Ahead of that, Target will offer a pink vinyl edition of the LP on January 7th, while an exclusive white vinyl will be available at Barnes & Noble in tandem with the wide release. Fans can visit their favorite streaming site today to hear the newly remastered edition of “Unforgettable.”

For those who want to experience Unforgettable…with Love sooner, PBS will offer the CD exclusively during their pledge drive, beginning November 27th. This Saturday, PBS GREAT PERFORMANCES will also air a special encore of the Emmy®-winning 1992 concert, Unforgettable, with Love: Natalie Cole Sings the Songs of Nat King Cole (check local listings).

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Remembering Ronnie Montrose, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Nowadays the band Montrose is chiefly remembered as the rock boarding school one Sammy (“I can’t drive 55/With my thumbs stuck in my eyes”) Hagar attended before graduating to a disappointing, if not semi-disastrous, tenure as front man of the post-David Lee Roth Van Halen. How unfair. At their best, namely on their debut 1973 self-titled debut, Montrose rocked balls, kicked ass and took names, and established themselves as perhaps America’s best response to Led Zeppelin. As for Montrose itself, some consider it America’s first true heavy metal LP. Me, I’d go with Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but that’s beside the point.

Montrose came out of California, where guitarist Ronnie Montrose—who played sessions for Van Morrison (amongst others) and did a stint in The Edgar Winter Group—decided to put his own band together. The finished product included Sammy Hagar on vocals, Bill Church on bass, and Denny Carmassi on drums.

Ted Templeman, who played an instrumental role in getting the band signed to Warner Brothers, produced the LP. Unfortunately this turned out to be a mixed blessing as Warners, which made it a practice to push only one LP from each genre at a time, already had the Doobie Brothers (!!!) in the rock slot and Deep Purple in the hard rock slot. Without publicity push from Warners, Montrose got left out in the cold, and only managed to reach the 133 spot on the U.S. Billboard charts.

But you can’t keep a good album down, not forever anyway, and the Montrose LP has received increasing attention over the following years, thanks to its strong songwriting, Montrose’s great guitar work, and Hagar’s hard-hitting vocals. I’ve always found it exceptionally easy to poke fun at Hagar, but on Montrose he proves the joke is on me, by doing things with his vocal chords that are illegal in Mormon Utah. (No, I have no idea what that means either.) In any event, Montrose has received its just desserts, which is more than you can say about Warners’ beloved Doobie Brothers, who deserve to be tied to a large stone and dropped into some deep and very black water.

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Vinyl gets plenty of love in the 21st century even though streaming offers plenty of convenience and stability, while the venerable CD quietly sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. But what’s left for the cassette?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Iain Taylor who joins us all the way from Birmingham City University in the UK. Taylor is a Lecturer in Music Industries, and a researcher within the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. As an educator, Iain teaches primarily on the Music Industries degree, leading modules which explore the cultural and emotive value of music, and how this translates into the business models and intellectual property rights of the music industries.

Earlier this year, Dr. Taylor wrote an article at The Conversation website titled, “Audio cassettes: despite being ‘a bit rubbish,’ sales have doubled during the pandemic – here’s why.” In that article, he explores the origins of the cassette and even the fact that the medium was more – or less – disowned by its creator. However, for all of their awkwardness and their inferior sound quality, cassettes still hold a place in the hearts of those who collect physical media, if only as a way for human beings to connect with something tangible, something real.

So, join Dr. Taylor and me as we explore the cassette from points of view nostalgic, economic, and humanistic. Cassettes may bring back some warm memories of days gone by, but no one looks forward to respooling a tape that had been eaten by a player with a number 2 pencil.

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.

First, a plug. I’m reading 2001’s Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth, The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, From The Banana Splits to Britney Spears. Edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay, the book is the Rosetta Gumball of preteen pop, including as it does essays on the machinations of record label svengalis like Don Kirshner, behind the scenes super-producers such as Kasenetz-Katz, here-and-gone-in-a-45rpm- flash record labels like Colgem Records, cartoon groups from Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids to The Beagles, and most importantly bands you’ve probably never heard of, like Salt Water Taffy, The Yummies, and Professor Morrison’s Lollipop.

Amidst such obscurities the group that most piqued my interest was The Poppy Family, because they weren’t really a bubblegum band at all. In fact they were an anti-bubblegum band. Their songs lacked bubblegum’s sunny sound and infectious choruses. Instead they were dark vignettes of existential despair which, strung from end to end, would make for a sturdy Juicy Fruit noose.

What Kim Cooper’s essay on The Poppy Family, which was really just a front for husband and wife team Susan and Terry Jacks, is doing in this anthology is just as great a mystery as why if you licked The Archies flexi disc on a box of Honeycomb it tasted suspiciously like the Monkees flexi disc on a box of Raisin Bran.

I suspect it came down to the fact that Cooper co-edited the anthology and could do whatever the hell she wanted. More importantly, the band’s name perfectly encapsulated the bubblegum aesthetic; you blow bubbles and they pop, and wholesome family values still meant something to the preteens of that era. Not only could they stomach their parents, they even fantasized about starting bands with them. Just ask the Partridges.

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We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for the Thanksgiving holiday. While we’re away, why not fire up our Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up and we’ll see you back here on November 29.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | There were quite a few photographers on L.A.’s early punk scene, but Melanie Nissen’s pictures have always stood apart. The legendary photographer shot for illustrious punk rock fanzine Slash from 1977-1980 and will release the first official collection of her work with HARD + FAST, a hardbound art book published by Blank Industries due out February 1, 2022.

In its early years, the L.A. punk scene was egalitarian, and the mix of people in her pictures is astonishing. Senior citizens, people of every race, children, swells in fancy clothes, people in rags – everyone was welcome. “The early years were special,” Nissen reflects. “There was a real sense of camaraderie and everyone was generous with their work.”

Immersed in the burgeoning scene herself, Nissen was friends with most of the people she photographed. This created a unique trust and comfort for her subjects to act naturally, injecting a biting sense of humor and extravagant body language into her photographs. There are also elements of formal portraiture evocative of work by Richard Avedon; like Avedon, Nissen sometimes prints her portraits framed with rough outlines of thick black ink that give them an unconventional edge.

“I can see that these are also documentary pictures because they include elements of Los Angeles that have disappeared,” concludes Nissen. “The Tropicana Motel, bars and cocktail lounges, newsstands, nightclubs, the street life on Hollywood Boulevard, boutiques run by and for punks, burger stands, phone booths – these things are gone today, and they represent an aspect of L.A. history that shouldn’t be forgotten. The entire city had the familiarity of a neighborhood then, and that’s no longer the case. L.A. is my home, though, and I’ll always remain loyal to it; I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

When Nissen left Slash she embarked on a career in the record industry, working as a photographer and graphic designer for the four major labels – Warner Brothers, Atlantic, Virgin, and A&M – for more than two decades.

Celebrating Clem Burke in advance of his 67th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

A bit of history: When Blondie signed on with Australian producer Mike Chapman (of Chapman and Nicky Chinn glam rock fame) to record their 1978 breakthrough LP Parallel Lines, little did they know what they were in for. Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and the rest of the band had a rather punk attitude towards the studio, and everything else for that matter; as Chapman noted later, “They were really, really juvenile in their approach to life—a classic New York underground rock band—and they didn’t give a fuck about anything. They just wanted to have fun and they didn’t want to work too hard getting it.”

Chapman the perfectionist called Blondie “hopelessly horrible” and explained his attitude towards the sessions in frankly dictatorial terms: “I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, ‘You are going to make a great record, and that means you are going to start playing better.’” And they did. The result was a landmark record that everybody should own but you know what? I really kind of miss the hopelessly horrible band that gave us Parallel Lines’ predecessor, Plastic Letters.

Sure, Plastic Letters lacks the gloss of Parallel Lines’ disco-inflected “Heart of Glass” and a song quite as catchy as “Hanging on the Telephone,” but it possesses the same gritty and off-kilter NYC charm as the first recordings by the Dictators and the Ramones. Spies, strange happenings in the Bermuda Triangle, and cheating at poker by means of telepathy—Plastic Letters may be an imperfect recording, but boring it ain’t.

That said, Parallel Lines is still loads of fun, and retains that good old punk spirit on such numbers as “Hanging on the Telephone” (love Harry’s New Yawk squawk), “One Way or Another” (great chainsaw riff meets manhunt disguised as love song), and the belligerent closing track, “Just Go Away,” which boasts wonderful shouted backing vocals and really snotty vocals by Harry. And then there’s the pneumatic “I Know But I Don’t Know,” which features some great vocals by an unnamed member of the band, who accompanies Harry and sounds about as New York, New York as they come.

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