Monthly Archives: May 2022

As a label based around the musical activities of Jamaican producer Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, Studio One’s output is almost comically immense. By extension, the Soul Jazz label’s extensive reissue dive into the Studio One vaults, which has been underway since the early 2000s, is showing no signs of running thin on quality. The latest offering in the series, Studio One Women Volume 2, is a model of consistency as it offers a variety of island reggae styles. It’s expected May 27 on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with a download code, and on a single compact disc.

To drive home the enduring vitality of Soul Jazz’s Studio One endeavor, it’s stated by the label that many of the tracks on Vol. 2 are impossibly rare, and in some cases, are being reissued for the first time. This only heightens the set’s thematic focus as the quality and the scarcity of the contents are primed to satisfy reggae newcomers and seasoned fans alike.

Numerous high-profile artists are featured, however. By my count, seven artists are reprised from Volume One, which Soul Jazz released in 2005, also on 2LP and CD. Of the returning singers, Marcia Griffiths is the most prominent, and on two of her three tracks she’s backed by Sound Dimension, Studio One’s house band, led by bassist-vocalist Leroy Sibbles with contributions from such heavyweights as guitarist Ernest Ranglin, keyboardist Jackie Mitoo, and saxophonists “Deadly” Headley Bennett and Cedric Brooks.

Both “Melody Life” and “Shimmering Star” are pop-savvy rocksteady groovers amply spotlighting Griffiths’ vocal prowess. Likewise, the set’s concluding number, the flip side to Griffiths’ recording debut from 1966 (“Wall of Love”), a nifty version of the oft-covered “You’re No Good.” First cut by Dee Dee Warwick and a chart hit shortly thereafter for Betty Everett and the Swinging Blue Jeans (long prior to Linda Ronstadt’s ’74 version hitting #1), Griffiths’ reading of “You’re No Good” is the nearest Vol. 2 comes to straight-up R&B (notably, the style that was Dodd’s primary early inspiration).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Beastie Boys’ multi-platinum album Check Your Head, on July 15, UMe will release a limited-edition reissue of the rare 4LP deluxe version of the album, originally released in 2009 as an artist store exclusive.

The long out-of-print and much sought-after box set features the 2009 remaster of the original double album, plus two extra LPs of bonus content including remixes, live versions, and B-sides. All four LPs are pressed on 180-gram vinyl and housed in a fabric wrapped, stamped, hardcover case. The Check Your Head 4LP box set can be purchased at participating independent retail outlets and will also be available to pre-order exclusively through the Beastie Boys online store, HERE.

Originally released in April 1992, Check Your Head was a milestone for Beastie Boys on multiple levels: It was their first album to be produced, in its entirety, by Beastie Boys with Mario Caldato Jr. and to feature keyboard player keyboard Money Mark, as well as the first to be recorded at the band’s own G-Son studios in Atwater Village, CA. Most significantly, however, Check Your Head marked the return of live instrumentation to the forefront and backbone of the Beastie Boys sound, with the bulk of the album featuring Mike D on drums, Adrock on guitar, and MCA on bass for the first time since the band’s early 1980s hardcore punk recordings.

Featuring the now-classic tracks “So What’cha Want,” “Pass The Mic,” “Gratitude,” and “Jimmy James,” Check Your Head stormed the U.S. Top 10, ultimately returning Beastie Boys to hard-touring, platinum-selling status, and setting the band up for the pop cultural dominance it would achieve in the decade to come.

To celebrate this week’s release of Top Gun: Maverick we revisit our recent TVD interview with Kenny Loggins. —Ed.

It’s an understatement to say that Kenny Loggins has achieved massive success in the entertainment industry. He’s been on the Billboard Top Ten charts over 20 times and sold over 25 million records. Many of the songs he’s created have become an important part of the musical fabric of a certain time and place in American history. All that aside, Kenny Loggins has had one of the most successful runs in history creating pop songs for film; so much so, that he’s known in the industry as “The Soundtrack King.”

Mr. Loggins celebrates his soundtrack kingdom by releasing a special vinyl compilation for 2021’s Record Store Day. The album will be called At the Movies and—believe it, or not—collects, for the first time ever, Loggins’ greatest soundtrack hits on vinyl, including “Footloose,” “Playing With The Boys” (Top Gun), “Danger Zone” (Top Gun), and “Nobody’s Fool (Theme From Caddyshack)” plus, it includes a newly recorded version of “Playing With The Boys.”

Kenny and I discuss the new release and his need to purchase a turntable—so he can hear it! But we go further: this industry legend gives valuable insight into how film music is different in today’s climate, he shares some stories about the ones that got away, and also describes the critical music magic that happened right in his own car.

These days, it’s hard to imagine the pre-internet impact and significance these blockbuster movies and songs had. While the films were all-encompassing cultural events, the soundtracks belonged to Kenny.

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.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant sure has a lot of brothers. Let’s see: there’s Donnie Van Zant, Johnny Van Zant, James Joyce Van Zant, Canadian Mountie Van Zant, and Larry, Curly, and Mo Van Zant, the three of whom put out three legendary albums with Iggy Pop.

But younger brother Donnie is the one we’re interested in here. He’s the long-time front man of 38 Special, who gets labeled a Southern Rock band when what they really are is a lame pop band—they’d lose an arm-wrestling match with Rupert Holmes. They’re the epitome of generic pop, but generic pop has long been a winning formula. So let’s give 38 Special their due—between 1981 and 1991 they scored two No. 1 singles and another eleven singles that broke the Top Ten mark. Contrast that with the Rolling Stones, who during the same period broke the Top Ten only five times and scored nary a No. 1. Take that, Mick and Keith!

38 Special are—album sales charts notwithstanding—primarily a singles band. So why take your chances on one of their twelve albums when you can hear the best on 2000’s long-winded 20th Century Masters—The Millennium Collection. You have to love that 20th Century Masters makes ‘em sound like Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal adaptation of Black Oak Arkansas’ “Happy Hooker” caused a riot at Austria’s Vienna Musikverein.

And the compilation proves that, to their credit, these pop savvy Southern rockers in name only bequeathed to the world several songs that—if disparaged by snobs like me—will burn forever like the eternal flame at Minsk, whose leaders are loathsome Russian lackeys whose government is already feeling the pinch of the embargo on copies of “Hold on Loosely.”

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Remembering Joe Cocker, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

Joe Cocker, he of the spastic stage gesticulations and mouthful of gravel, was one of rock’s greatest interpreters of other peoples’ material. He didn’t cover your song, he Cockerized it with that impossibly expressive rasp of his, and once he’d Cockerized your song you never heard it the same way again. He did it live, twitching like he’d just grabbed hold of a live wire, at Woodstock in 1969, and again on 1970’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, and the amazing thing is not that he never inadvertently hurled himself off stage in mid-contortion, but that it took four decades (!) for his legendary Woodstock performance to finally be released as an LP.

How was such an oversight possible? Did the master recordings fall into the paws of a rapacious monkey who demanded an exorbitant number of bananas? I don’t know, but their availability, even if it took 40 years, has made the world a better place. 2009’s Live At Woodstock featured Joe Cocker with the Grease Band, who were backing him at the time, and together they create sparks.

Their arrangements are loose—too loose in some cases—but Cocker (who passed away in 2014) had one of the best blues and R&B voices of all time, and the Grease Band could cook, and the results are evident on such amazing tracks as the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” a masterpiece of shifting dynamics, call and response, superb musicianship, and pure ecstasy. And over it all Cocker, expostulating, roaring, screaming—he goes right over the top, Joe does, and it’s enough to leave you enervated when it’s all over.

With the exception of the overly long (as in 12 minutes) “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” which I’ve always disliked and which suffers from a slow as molasses midsection of the sort that rendered many live cuts of the era unlistenable, Live At Woodstock is a great if flawed (more on which later) LP. From Cocker’s very loose interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Dear Landlord” (he speeds up the tempo and tramples all over Dylan’s lugubrious original) to the great “Hitchcock Railway,” which features organ, guitar, cowbell, and a rambunctious rhythm that runs right off the tracks, Cocker and the Grease Band play it loose and funky, while on slower tracks like the great Dylan tune “I Shall be Released” Cocker demonstrates his ability to convey pain and loneliness. He does the same on the slow and soulful “Do I Still Figure in Your Life,” an obscurity that he breathes pure soul into.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Any band that names itself after a Russ Meyer film has a reputation to uphold.

And with tracks like “Big Dictionary,” the fourth track on their 1992 album Whipped!, Faster Pussycat did just that, along with other blasts of Sunset Strip braggadocio like “Out with a Bang” (not to mention the dominatrix on the front cover). But a closer listen reveals a band hitting its hard rock stride right at the wrong time, when grunge flannel was supplanting eyeliner and big hair in the hearts of American youth. The minor hit “Nonstop to Nowhere” had a classic, country-ish Stones vibe, and “Mr. Lovedog” was a heartfelt tribute to deceased Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood; those were just two highlights on an album that was funny, surprisingly varied, and tuneful.

In short, Whipped! got largely ignored in the wake of the early ‘90s Nirvana-inspired craze but it deserved a better fate. For its first- ever U.S. vinyl release (the European vinyl release is real rare and pricy), we’ve whipped up a milky clear “whipped cream” vinyl pressing limited to 2000 copies, nestled inside a jacket with inner sleeve sporting lyrics.

What a great album! The songs are brilliant! The entire cast of musicians, which include Daryll Hall, Tony Levin, and Terri Roche defy the laws of talent! Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins also make guest appearances! And Mary Lou Green does hair! And does a bang-up job of it I’m sure!

On 1979’s Exposure—the first of his four solo albums—Robert Fripp condescends to the conventional, or as close as the dyed-in-the-wool avant gardist would get to making an album for progressive rock haters. Fripp has spent his long and illustrious career on the experimental end of the rock party; he co-founded and played guitar for King Crimson on all thirteen of the albums they released between 1969 and 2003.

He also kept himself busy during those years by recording two LPs with Giles, Giles & Fripp, two with the League of Gentleman, and collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and David Sylvian. He also fell in with the crowd attracted to the work of Russian spiritualist George Gurdjieff and went off to a ten-month course at Gloucestershire, where he achieved so much deep spiritual wisdom he would later say, “I was pretty suicidal.” I’m thinking of signing up myself.

On Exposure Fripp enlisted the usual array of prog-rock musicians, including Brian Eno, Tony Levin, Peter Gabriel, and Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator fame. But his real genius lay in enlisting Hall and Oates’ Daryl Hall in the project. Hall was not as surprising a choice as, say, John Denver, but many wondered why Fripp engaged a top notch pop songwriter and blue-eyed soul singer to participate in a project that—with the noticeable exception of “North Star”—made so little of Hall’s perceived musical strengths.

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