Monthly Archives: September 2022

VIA PRESS RELEASE | BMG are delighted to announce the release of a commemorative triple black vinyl album in honor of the 40th Anniversary of Iron Maiden’s seminal third album, The Number Of The Beast, which was also the first to feature Bruce Dickinson on vocals and was to become the record which catapulted the band to international stardom.

Included in the new vinyl package is Beast Over Hammersmith—available now officially for the very first time on vinyl—featuring the live concert from March 1982’s now legendary Hammersmith Odeon London show from the Beast On The Road World Tour. Recorded only days before the release of The Number Of The Beast album, it’s remarkable to think these now classic songs at that time were still brand new, unfamiliar, and being heard live by fans for the very first time. A real piece of history in the making.

The package features exclusive liner notes written by Maiden founder and bassist Steve Harris as well as restored and expanded artwork taken from the CD format of Beast Over Hammersmith, previously only available in the Limited Edition Eddie’s Archive boxset originally released in 2002.

Steve Harris comments, “On this vinyl release we get the chance to put “Total Eclipse” in its rightful spot on the album for the first time. The reason it didn’t make it in the first place was that it was all a mad rush when we were finishing the record and we had to get the “Run to the Hills” single out before the tour and we basically had to pick a B-side and it was between “Gangland” and “Total Eclipse” and we just picked the wrong one, really! I think “Total Eclipse” is a stronger song and the album would have been stronger if it had been on there.”

The great alt-country band Whiskeytown had only two permanent members during its tenure: one of them was Ryan Adams and the other was Caitlin Cary.

While Caitlin’s name will always be intertwined with that band’s history, she’s also got a history all her own. After the group disbanded, Caitlin decided it was time for her to share the songs that may not have gotten the attention they deserved in her previous group. So, after connecting with Chris Stamey and Yep Roc Records, in 2002 she released her first solo album titled, While You Weren’t Looking.

Well, while we weren’t looking, the album has now turned 20 years old and Yep Roc is giving the album a remaster, a reissue, and is finally putting Caitlin’s music on vinyl where her compositions seem yearning to belong.

Caitlin joins me to discuss her transition from those wild and wooly Whiskeytown days to her own solo career. We also explore how her songs may be ripe for a new audience in the 21st century. Nowadays, Caitlin enjoys her time as a noted visual artist creating needleprint designs and running her own art gallery, The Pocket, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

But, as she traverses through her latest life’s incarnation, every once in a while, she must get flashes of those heady Whiskeytown days and the creation of her own music. Even though she’s more or less left the music world behind, she’s still pleasantly amused that the music she released those two decades ago still reverberates today.

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.

Celebrating Marilyn McCoo on her 79th birthday. —Ed.

It seems like just yesterday I had hair down to my ass and was rolling in the mud at Woodstock. What a time! The dope was good, the music was far out, and even the brown acid was groovy, once you got past the part where your decomposing grandmother was squatting by your side, her breath reeking of grave dirt and burning sulphur. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and peace would soon be guiding the stars.

Odd, though, that “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” was the product of a very square Black chorale group that would have been more at home in a Las Vegas nightclub than Woodstock (where they didn’t play) or Harlem’s Cultural Festival that same year (where they did). The vocal group’s repertory of styles—which included R&B, jazz, pop and soul—was labeled “champagne soul,” perhaps because their musical stylings were all bubbles and no kick.

It’s hard to imagine a group less qualified to sum up the era’s Zeitgeist. To the hippies and yippies wearing psychedelic paint on their faces and nothing else, The 5th Dimension—whose best known songs are compiled on 1999’s Master Hits—had zero freak cred. At least you knew they weren’t narcs, because narcs made it their job to fit in. Amongst the Jimis and Joplins of the time, The 5th Dimension stood out like a house cat in a panther cage.

“The Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”—which first appeared in 1967’s risible Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical—is an example par excellence of cultural appropriation. The song took the revolutionary spirit of the time and diluted it, and by so doing offered the non-LSD crowd a reassuring lense through which they could catch a glimpse of a youth phenomenon they found threatening. How much of a menace could America’s young people be if their anthem was a song like this?

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings proudly celebrates the 60th anniversary of Vince Guaraldi’s breakthrough album, Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, with a variety of reissues. A deluxe, expanded edition of the 1962 album—featuring the GRAMMY® Award-winning instrumental hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”—offers 16 bonus tracks, including 12 previously unreleased selections, with outtakes and alternate takes of nearly every track on the album.

Available to pre-order beginning today, this definitive edition will be released as a 3-LP, 2-CD, or 24-track digital collection, with newly remastered audio by engineer Paul Blakemore. Produced by Nick Phillips, the original album is cut from the original master, while the bonus material was transferred from the original analog tapes by Plangent Processes. Lacquers for the 3-LP edition were cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed at RTI on 180-gram vinyl. Both physical formats also include new, in-depth liner notes by jazz writer Andrew Gilbert (San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, KQED Arts). The digital offering comes in standard and Hi-Res options. The CD and digital formats will be released on November 18th with the LP set due to follow on February 24th.

Additionally, Craft will offer a limited and numbered pressing of the original, eight-track album as part of their acclaimed Small Batch series, which offers discerning listeners the highest-quality, authentic sound—distilled to its purest form. As with previous Small Batch pressings, Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus was cut from its original analog tapes by legendary engineer Bernie Grundman and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI using Neotech’s VR900 compound and a one-step lacquer process—as opposed to the standard three-step process—allowing for the utmost level of musical detail, clarity, and dynamics while reducing the amount of surface noise on the record.

The limited nature of these pressings guarantees that each record is a true representation of the original lacquer and is as close as the listener can get to the original recording. Craft’s all-analog, one-step series has drawn praise from critics far and wide, with Hi-Fi Choice describing the audio quality as “Extraordinary,” while Stereophile commented that the series is “beautifully done,” and Record Collector described the sound as “flawless.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Beach Boys landmark albums, 1972’s Carl and the Passions—“So Tough” and 1973’s Holland, will take center focus in Sail On Sailor – 1972, a new expansive multi-disc and digital box set, releasing November 18th via Capitol Records/UMe, that documents and dives deep into their transformative and fruitful 1972 era.

The latest chapter in the Beach Boys’ archival series was produced by Mark Linett and Alan Boyd, the team behind 2013’s GRAMMY® Award-winning SMiLE Sessions and last year’s acclaimed Feel Flows – The Sunflower and Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971, the comprehensive 6CD Super Deluxe Edition features newly remastered versions of Carl and the Passions – “So Tough” and Holland, plus “Holland’s Mount Vernon and Fairway (A Fairytale)” EP (complete with its original instructions to “please listen in the dark”), and boasts an unreleased live concert recorded at NYC’s famed Carnegie Hall on Thanksgiving, 1972, the first-ever release of a complete Beach Boys concert from this era with the original setlist.

Similar to Feel Flows, which topped many year-end lists in 2022 and was selected by MOJO as their prestigious “Reissue Of The Year,” Sail On Sailor – 1972 includes a bounty of unreleased outtakes, live recordings, radio promos, alternate versions, alternate mixes, isolated backing tracks and a cappella versions, culled from the historic album sessions. In all, it contains 105 tracks, 80 of which are previously unreleased.

Sail On Sailor – 1972 is being previewed with the previously unreleased performance of Carl and The Passions’ album opener, “You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone,” recorded live during their performance at Carnegie Hall on November 23, 1972. The complete Carnegie Hall set, which has remained unreleased for 50 years, was recorded on then state-of-the-art 16-track tape, rare for the time and a great advantage given the number of instruments and vocalists in the band.

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Soulful gal vocal group Honey & the Bees began recording in the mid-1960s and released their only LP in 1970 for the Josie label. Featuring their best known single, a version of the Royalettes’ “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle,” original copies of Love are scarce and quite expensive, so here comes Real Gone Music to the rescue, with a high quality reissue remastered by Mike Milchner and pressed on honey colored (bees)wax in an edition of 2,000 copies. If not a masterpiece, its contents are thoroughly enjoyable, and it’s difficult to imagine a fan of classic soul not wanting this set in their collection. It’s out October 7.

The biography of Honey & the Bees isn’t exactly extensive, but the story is that a group using the moniker cut a couple singles for the Academy label in 1965, but the members quickly spilt the scene, which led musician-songwriter-producer Phil Hurtt to organize a new lineup under the name, with the recruits Jean Davis, Nadine Felder, Gwendolyn Oliver, and Cassandra Ann Wooten debuting on a 1966 single for the Arctic label, “I’m Confessin’” b/w “One Time is Forever.”

The B-side to the 45 was written by Kenny Gamble, an info tidbit that’s a tipoff to what’s heard on Love, and don’tcha know that Leon Huff plays piano on the album? Yes, the ten songs do indeed have a tangible connection to the sound of Philly Soul, but as the record lands pretty early in the scheme of that regional state of affairs and with what was pretty clearly a modest budget (but resourcefully utilized), the songs counterbalance finesse, as the strings arrangements are plentiful, with heft, as the punch of the rhythm section hits the ear like a predecessor to the production work of Leon Michels.

In 1970 Honey & the Bees’ manager Jimmy Bishop moved the group from Arctic to the Josie label, a realignment that improved their fortunes a bit, with single “We Got to Work Together,” the opening track on Love, generating a little buzz, and “It’s Going to Take a Miracle,” the closing track on side one, enduring as their highest profile tune amid numerous versions, preceded by the Royalettes and followed by Laura Nyro’s take with LaBelle on her ’71 album Gonna Take a Miracle and Deniece Williams’ ’82 R&B smash.

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2022 marks the 70th anniversary of the birth of Sun Records. The label was founded in Memphis, Tennessee by Sam Philips. The independent label essentially put rock ‘n’ roll on the map and launched the careers of some of the most important rock ‘n’ roll, blues, country, and R&B artists. It was the label’s rock ‘n’ roll recordings of Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and especially Elvis Presley, among others, that forever enshrined the label in popular music history. To mark the label’s anniversary, a wide variety of albums are being reissued on 180-gram vinyl and in most cases have been curated by Chris Isaak. The albums are also very affordably priced, with beautiful era packaging.

A great place to start for the novice is Sun Records’ 70th Anniversary Compilation, Vol. 1. The album is curated by Chris Isaak and includes his liner notes. This album gives a fine overview of groundbreaking, legendary, and popular Sun artists, including the aforementioned, along with Johnny Cash, Patti Page and others. Staples of the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll are here, such as “Mystery Train” from Little Junior’s Blue Flames and “Breathless” by Jerry Lee Lewis, along with country classics like “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues” from Johnny Cash. The album does not include any of the music Elvis recorded for Sun, which occurred before he signed with RCA.

Other than maybe Johnny Cash, the Sun artist whose career lasted the longest was Roy Orbison. Orbison’s voice and the accompanying production have made his recordings some of the most beloved in popular music history. His rebirth and eventually joining the Traveling Wilburys attest to his timeless music and the respect he commands among musicians. The Original Sound, released in 1969, is one of Orbison’s more obscure albums, but it includes such classics as “Ooby Dooby.” While the album came at a stage in his career when the hippie rock culture was ascending and his influence and popularity were waning, it’s still an excellent album and one worthy of such a well-conceived reissue. This reissue includes liner notes by Orbison’s son Alex.

Like Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins had a long career and his influence on other musicians is incalculable. George Harrison of The Beatles was heavily influenced by the way Perkins played guitar. Perkins is perhaps the most important rockabilly artist in popular music history. Perkins was also a member of the famed Million Dollar Quartet, with Elvis, Cash, and Lewis. The King of Rockabilly is a collection of his hits, including an alternate version of “Honey Don’t,” famously covered by The Beatles. “Matchbox” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” also covered by The Beatles, are included here as well. This reissue includes liner notes by Carl’s son Stan Perkins.

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