Monthly Archives: July 2022

Celebrating Bill Berry in advance of his 64th birthday on Sunday.
—Ed.

On 1992’s Automatic for the People—one of the finest LPs released that year or any other year for that matter—Michael Stipe and R.E.M. play Risk. The goal of the board game is to conquer the world, and that’s exactly what Automatic for the People did. Sure, the LP had its detractors and haters, but they were holed up in Yakutsk and things weren’t looking good.

R.E.M. arose from the burgeoning Athens, Georgia indie rock scene with 1982 EP “Chronic Town,” a record that bore an element of mystery that had as much to do with Stipe’s indecipherable vocals as it did the fact that nothing else sounded quite like it. I spent significant amounts of time trying to figure out what Stipe was saying in “Gardening at Night,” but he may as well have been speaking Quechua. Stipe kept mumbling on 1983’s aptly titled Murmur, but indecipherable lyrics notwithstanding “Radio Free Europe” was one of that year’s best songs.

As Stipe began to enunciate the band lost some of its luster—1984’s Reckoning, 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, and 1986’s Life’s Rich Pageant all had their moments, but none broke new musical ground, and R.E.M. seemed a band going nowhere. Then came 1987’s Document and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” and suddenly R.E.M. found itself with a mass audience. They cemented their place as a commercial pop contender with the playful “Stand” on 1988’s Green and “Shiny Happy People”on 1991’s Out of Time. Both showed the band had a lighter sound, while “Losing My Religion” on the latter LP proved R.E.M. could produce a commercial blockbuster.

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Marshall Crenshaw bridged an important gap during the end of the twentieth century. His early hits glimpsed into the recent past; recognizing the work of the ’50s and ’60s masters but soldering it onto 1980s pop, thereby creating a sort of vintage-modern hybrid. Crenshaw also portrayed Buddy Holly in the 1987 film, La Bamba which added yet another layer to his aura back then: as if he were saying, “Hey, I’m going to nail this Buddy Holly cover right now, but stick around to hear my original music, too.”

And there was always plenty of fantastic original Crenshaw music to hear: “Someday, Someway,” “There She Goes Again,” and “Cynical Girl” and his co-written super-hit, “Til I Hear it From You” with the Gin Blossoms, a tune that was inescapable on rock radio during the 1990s (and beyond). He was also always writing and working. During the ’90s, Crenshaw forged a partnership with Razor & Tie Records, releasing several albums with the label.

Today, Crenshaw is revisiting those ’90s albums and reissuing them with fresh masterings and bonus tracks—many released on vinyl for the first time. In this episode, Crenshaw and I discuss his 1999 release, #447. Of course, we also talk about his major label days, the process of recording before digital became de rigueur, getting his act back on the road, and we also reminisce about the last time he and I spoke 10 years ago.

So, join us and remind yourself of how lucky we are to have Marshall Crenshaw in our midst. He might take an occasional glance in the rearview mirror, but his eyes are firmly planted on the road ahead.

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.

Your kind human being will tell you it’s in poor taste to speak ill of the awful, but speaking well of the awful is downright dangerous—it just encourages it. In the case of classic one-hit wonders Zager and Evans, finding good things to say about them and their 1969 LP 2525 (Exordium & Terminus) doesn’t make you a kind human being—it makes you their doting aunt.

Most everybody I know thinks bad thoughts about the LP’s title track—which topped both the US and UK pop charts—and no one I know has ever heard any of their subsequent singles, perhaps because not a single one of them made the pop charts. This is both a historical record and a good thing—it was as if the band’s later singles evaporated into the ether upon release, for the good of all mankind.

“2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” is an exercise in the ridiculous. It begins as a flamenco or something, boasts some spaghetti western horns and overt string treacle, over which the duo (Denny Zager and Rick Evans) quaver portentously and sententiously about mankind’s technology-induced doom, one century at a time.

Every stanza boasts at least one howler; my personal faves include “In the year 4545/Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes/You won’t find a thing to chew,” and “Everything you think, do, and say/Is in the pill you took today.” As if that pill wasn’t already available in 1969—it was called LSD, and the borderline freaky “2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” notwithstanding, I doubt the duo ever tried it.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “The Mark Knopfler songbook, since the Dire Straits years, is literally and pleasingly all over the map, and yet without any sense of an album being a miscellany—being merely the next thing Mark Knopfler comes up with.”

“Cohesion seems instinctual to him, both as a writer and a guitar player. He has his subjects, as any writer luckily will – youth and aging (often his own), the working grind, the demi-monde, the louche, wandering life of the road, women and love, history, literature, The North of England, Geordie issues. All of these preoccupations get fused into songs – melodies, stories (always stories), settings, characters, dictions, breathtaking guitar virtuosity burning hot from within – which seem always to come round to being about seeking grace; a real-time, minor key, on-the-ground grace. And also frequently about not finding it.”
—Richard Ford

Mark Knopfler – The Studio Albums 2009-2018, a 9 LP vinyl/6 CD boxset & digital SD/HD, will be released on October 7 by UMe/EMI, gathering together the second half of his solo songbook with his more recent studio albums, to add to last year’s ’96 – 2007 collection. The box will include Get Lucky (2009), Privateering (2012), Tracker (2015), and his latest release Down The Road Wherever (2018) plus a collection of studio b-sides and bonus tracks and two previously unreleased songs – “Back In The Day” and “Precious Voice From Heaven.” The audio quality has been overseen by the original mastering engineer Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering, while vinyl was cut by Bernie Grundman. You can pre-order/pre-save the album HERE.

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Remembering Richard Wright, born on this day in 1943. —Ed.

Back in the day–and I’m talking very back in the day–Pink Floyd’s 1973 stoner masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon played from behind the door of every pot smoke-filled room in my college dormitory. I say this with authority because I was in every one of the those dorm rooms, which meant I heard The Dark Side of the Moon a lot. And by that I mean I heard it to death, and by the time I got booted out of that dorm for smoking pot in dorm rooms, I hated The Dark Side of the Moon so much I vowed to never listen to it again. And for decades I kept that vow.

But you know how it goes. One day your curiosity gets the better of you. You think you’ve thrown The Dark Side of the Moon out with the bong water when one day you wake up and decide to give The Dark Side of the Moon another listen. This is what is commonly called failing to learn from experience. But in the case of The Dark Side of the Moon I was pleasantly surprised. I would hardly call our reunion a joyful one; it was more like running into an old friend you’d grown tired of only to discover he wasn’t the bore you remembered. Indeed, with the exceptions of “Money” and “Time” (both of which had continued to annoy me thanks to incessant radio play over the years), our reunion was actually cordial.

The Dark Side of the Moon, which was produced by the band and engineered by wizard behind the control panel Alan Parsons, is very much a “studio as band member” affair. Gone were the days when Pink Floyd, as guitarist and Syd Barrett replacement David Gilmour put it, went in for “the psychedelic noodling stuff.” Plenty of fans weren’t particularly pleased to discover there would be no more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants LPs along the lines of 1971’s Meddle, but The Dark Side of the Moon attracted a slew of new fans and made the guys in the band rich and famous. “Money” indeed.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In 1971, the great British rock group The Kinks embarked on a new phase of their career by signing with RCA Records. Freed from their old label Pye’s insistence on hit singles, Ray Davies’ songwriting accelerated his band’s move towards a new identity as makers of thematically ambitious, tenderly personal albums, building on preceding cult successes such as The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Buoyed by one more smash to start the decade –“Lola” – this most English of bands also firmly turned its sights towards the USA, where their exciting, charismatic live shows were reciprocally building a fervent new American fanbase.

This period’s first Kinks album, Muswell Hillbillies, is for many people their best of all. It conversely looked back on Ray and Dave Davies’ London roots, telling tales of working-class families migrating from the war-torn and redevelopment-ravaged inner city to the strange, leafy suburbs of North London.

“Now with a new record company and a new image, I could bring some of the old wild western spirit into my music,” Ray Davies said. “These albums capture the re-emergence of the Kinks as a touring band.” Dave Davies adds “Muswell Hillbillies is one-of my favourite Kinks albums. It’s a bit of a backstory to the Davies family and the characters involved.”

Muswell Hillbillies’ release was supported by more US touring, including two 1972 nights at New York’s iconic Carnegie Hall. Tapes of those anarchic shows, heavy on Muswell material, formed the live half of 1972’s double-album, Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star. Its studio sides explored The Kinks’ long months on the American road with wistful humour. Its epic finale, “Celluloid Heroes” confirmed the band’s new world. Among the elite cream of Kinks songs, it saw Ray use Hollywood as a prism through which to view ordinary Americans’ bittersweet dreams.

The announcement comes alongside the release of “Celluloid Heroes (US Single Version 2022 Edit).” Ray Davies composed the classic Kinks track reflecting on everyday folk aspiring to be Hollywood stars. The song names several famous actors of 20th century film (including Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Bela Lugosi, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe) and mentions LA’s Hollywood Boulevard, alluding to its Walk of Fame. Taken from The Kinks’ seminal 1972 RCA album Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star.

With his latest album, the unfettered brilliance of guitarist-banjoist Glenn Jones perseveres unabated. Long established as one of the prime extenders of the American Primitive guitar style, Jones is a nimble-fingered rememberer, but he is also a builder. Never one to retreat into the comfort zones of nostalgia, his playing is as progressive as it is invested in history. And further testifying to his consistency is the allegiance of his label; Vade Mecum, available now on translucent red vinyl, compact disc, and digital is once again released by Thrill Jockey of Chicago.

Spanning back almost a decade now, I’ve reviewed every full-length record Glenn Jones has made since My Garden State, his second for Thrill Jockey, came out in 2013; and as his solo LPs go, he’s only been on one other label, Strange Attractors Audio House, that Washington State-based enterprise the issuer of his first three loner efforts after they put out a string of records by Jones’ experimental rock band of the 1990s, Cul de Sac.

I mention my dedication to Jones’ efforts not as a brag, but rather, to set up the observation that many will no doubt have, and that admittedly entered my own mind when contemplating a review of Vade Mecum; that is, specifically, the possibility of running dry of new things to say about the work of a solo instrumentalist, and one with such a clear disinterest in any pretense to “originality.”

Much has been made of Jones’ relationship with John Fahey, which extended beyond influence to friendship and then to collaboration, as Cul de Sac cut a record with Fahey, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, in 1997 (that one came out on Thirsty Ear). Interestingly, Fahey’s creative trajectory began in what many unfamiliar with the American Primitive guitar movement would simply assess as a folk-blues place and ended up in the midst of the ’90s avant-underground, which is where Jones came to prominence before intersecting with Fahey and then going solo in distinctly American Primitive mode.

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MANSFIELD, MA | It was a “long, hot summer” night—nearly 90 degrees outside of Boston—for Keith Urban’s “The Speed of Now” world tour at The Xfinity Center, an intimate and energy-packed evening.

Ingrid Andress opened the show with a sweet, sassy enthusiasm, and gave several shout outs to those sitting in the “way back” of the venue, recalling that it wasn’t long ago that she was in the grass seats. No stranger to the Boston area, the Berklee College of Music grad expressed an abundant gratitude to the fans and appreciation to be on the bill with Urban. Andress played her recent singles, including “Wishful Drinking.”

Cheryl Leary and her daughter Allison, of Tiverton, RI, traveled from the Ocean State to see Friday’s show. This would be Leary’s 27th Keith Urban concert, and first Urban show since before the height of the pandemic. “My daughter has been coming with me since she was 13 and I just told her that when I’m elderly, she needs to continue to bring me to see Keith Urban,” said Leary, her smile beaming.

Leary said she would travel anywhere to see Urban, adding that she would soon drive up to Gilford, NH to see him play at the Bank of NH Pavilion, two days later. “I listen to him every day. It’s all about Keith Urban. I’m so excited for the show to start—I can’t wait.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Mute and Spoon Records today announce Can Live in Cuxhaven 1976, the third in a series of Can live albums. This is the latest in the acclaimed series which began in 2021 with Can Live in Stuttgart 1975 and presents a shorter, more concise performance by Can over four sections. The new album is set for release on limited edition blue vinyl, CD, and digital platforms October 14.

The Can Live series has taken the best of Can’s bootlegged recordings—many of which were recorded by Andrew Hall, who sadly died in April 2021—and, overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinner, have fed them through the wringer of 21st century technology to bring you these vital historical documents.

Can Live in Cuxhaven 1976’s sleeve notes were written by the French author Pascal Bussy, whose books include The Can Story (co-authored with Andy Hall, 1989) and Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, and Music (1993). Talking about Can live, Bussy states, “Until the end, Can gigs were not only logical extensions of their studio work, they were definitely a work in itself. And we are so fortunate to still have a lot to discover.”

This new album follows Can Live in Brighton 1975 and Can Live in Stuttgart 1975. The albums have been featured in the year end round ups from Uncut, The Wire, MOJO, Record Collector, Electronic Sound, Treble, Aquarium Drunkard, and more.

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How great are ELO? Randy Newman wrote a song (“The Story of a Rock and Roll Band”) making fun of ‘em! Talk about your honors. That’s better than a Grammy! Six Grammys! A dozen Grammys even!

And how dumb was poor Roy Wood, who split Electric Light Orchestra before they sold like a gazillion records to form Wizzard, who sold like six! No wonder hairy Roy looks like a crazy recluse who’s spent the past 40 years in the wilderness, subsisting on a diet of spotted squirrel and sterno–he has!

The words “symphonic rock” frighten the bejesus outta me. But (at least on the best of their songs) ELO pulled it off, partly on the strength of their top-secret recipe (write Beatlesque melodies, then just add strings) but also because–and this is critical–unlike the pompous schmucks in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, ELO approached their classical-rock fusion in a spirit of fun. I don’t much care for many of their songs for the simple reason that I have a low tolerance for cellos and the like, but there’s something self-consciously preposterous in their shtick that makes me love them anyway. Call it ironic distance if you like, but the distance counts for a whole lot in my book.

There are plenty of ELO best-of compilations out there, but I’ve yet to run across one that makes me completely happy. They either dispense with the filler but fail to include some of my favorite songs, or include my favorite songs but toss in a bunch of songs I really don’t want to hear. With its 38 cuts 2001’s The Ultimate Collection falls into the second category; I have no use for “Shine a Little Love,” “The Diary of Horace Wimp, “Ticket to the Moon,” or “Last Train to London,” but the comp includes such personal must-haves as “Do Ya,” “Ma-Ma-Belle,” and “10538 Overture.”

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1,000 Masks is a new album release from California-based singer-songwriter Brynna Campbell. Its title track, whose themes run throughout the album, is a quick-paced and racing meditation on the various roles we inhabit throughout the course of a day, and the corresponding masks we wear to communicate these roles to the world around us. The result is an energetic sprint of a song that inspires the listener to reflect on their own mask-wearing, and the seemingly endless chase we are all on to maintain a successful balancing act for the needs of others, of our immediate selves, and of our individual ego dragons that never sleep.

In part, most of the album’s seventeen tracks swim through waters of the inner mind. Brynna Campbell offers a wry yet sensitive voice depicting the female experience amidst wistful piano lines that offer hope among somberness. Her musical character is in the spirit of intelligent chanteuses such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, but with two feet planted firmly in 2022 and in full view of the year’s trials and tribulations.

Many of the songs’ voices are full of angst that only a pandemic era could have inspired, or at least brought out into the light—thoughts previously half in shadow. There is social anxiety (the title track) and a standout on the album,“Party” which cleverly articulates the tug of war that goes on inside the mind of a person who does—and does not—want to go into the party, and who focuses a great deal of energy amid the song’s chorus with the mantra “just get out of the car.” The songwriting brings to mind Andy Shauf’s similarly focused “Early to the Party,” yet offers a fresh female perspective.

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