Author Archives: Steve Matteo

Father John Misty continues to make a case for himself as one of the most important solo musical artists in the world. The musician formerly known as Josh Tillman has taken a long and often circuitous path to the brink of peerless musical artistry. Father John makes much of what’s on the charts these days seem like a laughable and embarrassing exercise in show business branding.

The good father is a true artiste and an eccentric and uncompromising genius. His musical grasp of songwriting and ability to deliver a vocal of such conviction and passion, as well as his tendency to draw from an endless well of musical styles are nothing short of astonishing. Any descriptions or superlatives come up short in effectively conveying his artistry.

One wonders, if only for a brief moment, if the father is such an extraordinary artist, or if today’s popular music fails so spectacularly that it elevates his art. The argument favors the good father when one imagines him being around when true musical gods roamed the earth in the ’60s and ’70s. He would have fit right in and his place would have been just as elevated among solo music artists of that era.

Unlike the overnight sensations that hit the charts and are gone from sight by their third or fourth albums, the good father has been toiling and woodshedding for years to reach his current musical summit. Hailing from Seattle, under his given name, he made eight albums between 2003 and 2010 on a slew of small record labels and two albums with Saxon Shore prior to those solo albums.

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Badfinger was one of the most commercially and critically successful acts that were part of the early days of Apple Records in the late ’60s/early ’70s. The group’s Beatle-esque pure pop was a staple of FM radio at a time that saw the release of such classic albums as No Dice (1970) and Straight Up (1971) with the lineup of Pete Ham, Tom Evans, Mike Gibbins, and Joey Molland. Ass, released in 1973, was the last album from the group on Apple Records, the record label started by The Beatles.

The group that was the earliest incarnation of Badfinger was The Iveys, which included Ron Griffiths but not Joey Molland. Badfinger began with its contribution to the soundtrack albums of the film The Magic Christian (1970), starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with the Paul McCartney-penned “Come and Get It,” which was a big hit.

Unfortunately, bad management, record company squabbles, changing musical tastes, and for some of the members of the band, personal problems, ended the group’s creative and commercial peak shortly after they left Apple. They then made a handful of albums for Warner Bros. Now, by some miracle, a long-lost album has recently been released and adds another welcome musical chapter to the group’s abbreviated musical career, along with an anthology of demos from The Iveys.

The music on this new Badfinger release would have come out in 1974, with a lineup that included Ham, Evans, Gibbins, and Bob Jackson. While it has come out on CD in the past in demo form, the music on this album is taken directly from the final master tapes. After the album was completed, Warner Bros. rejected it. The group’s manager ran off with their advance and the label dropped them.

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Allen Toussaint holds a special and everlasting place in American music. He was truly a Renaissance man. He was a producer, arranger, songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist and built and co-owned with Marshall Sehorn Sea-Saint Studios, one of the most important New Orleans recording studios in a town that defined American music. He was a man who wore many hats, but also lived many musical lives. He died in Madrid, Spain in 2015 at the age of 77.

For all his accomplishments and singular place in New Orleans music, his influence on and collaborations with a slew of rock artists is incalculable. His work with The Band, Paul McCartney, and Elvis Costello, among many others, alone, is significant. Even with all that, over the years, he has taken time out from his many activities to record solo albums. He recorded eleven studio albums, but they were spread out over nearly a 60-year period.

He recorded four of them during his most prolific solo period, from 1971 through 1978, and they are the ones that are most representative of his heyday. The best of the bunch may be his first for Reprise, Southern Nights, after his first major label album Life, Love and Faith in 1972 on Warner Bros. That Reprise album, Southern Nights, released in 1975, captured the unmistakable mix of styles that was the key to his ubiquitous place in music in that period.

The album has a variety of strains coursing through its musical bloodstream and was somewhat of a concept album in that it brought together all the various musical styles of Toussaint’s Louisiana upbringing. The way short instrumental pieces are intertwined on the album and in some cases repeated as a musical motif or theme contribute greatly to the conceptual or thematic approach. There are of course all the ingredients for a gumbo of New Orleans music, but also funk, soul, pop, and more.

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There are times when pop music artists try their hand at acting. It has been a phenomenon as far back as the jazz age with Al Jolson, continued through the age of the crooner with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and in the rock era it started with Elvis Presley.

Over the years such musicians have had mixed results as actors. Often less of a transition is when those in the acting profession move into being musical artists. Again, the results can be mixed. There have been some actresses who have recorded albums and even in some cases performed live, who have made some wonderful music lately, including Minnie Driver, Scarlett Johanssen and Maya Hawke.

Even more compelling is how they have, for the most part, eschewed just dabbling in the latest pop sound and made eclectic, timeless music. Perhaps eclipsing all of the above, but not exclusively just as an actress-turned-pop artist is Brit Suki Waterhouse. In one of her most well-known acting roles of the nearly 30 films or TV appearances to her credit, she played a member of the group in the series Daisy Jones and the Six, where her acting abilities and musical chops were both utilized. On only her second release, Waterhouse has made an album that has tremendous commercial pop appeal, but has also shows that she has a depth that marks her as an artist with a tremendous future.

Many British pop artists thankfully have the ability to work in a contemporary pop framework, while often being able to bring a more sophisticated and well-rounded edge to their music. Waterhouse is also creating music utilizing some of the methods that have become nearly extinct in record making for decades. She enlists arrangers to help her shape the vocals and put real care in the musical base.

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Richard Starkey, better known to the world as Ringo Starr, has just had his first number one solo album. He achieved that feat at the age of 84. From this fan of western movies and country music since he was a boy in the Wirral in Liverpool in the North of England way, the music on this smash hit album feels like a horse’s saddle that has been lovingly broken in over a lifetime of dusty rides over oft-trodden trails.

This is not just a collection of well-worn country classics played by anonymous Nashville studio veterans. This well-conceived project was helmed by producer T-Bone Burnett. For decades, Burnett has had an uncanny knack for producing roots music recordings that retain the authenticity of the genre (or genres) in which the artists he produces are working, while capturing a modern edge with freshness and simplicity.

Those recordings and this one are not over-produced saccharine country or today’s bombastic pop country committee creations. First of all, Burnett chose a small cast of roots players to provide a stripped-down welcoming base for Starr to show off his country vocal chops. The songs are heartfelt and fun, and Starr knows just how to sing them with his hang-dog plaintive croon. While the musical backing and songs are just right, it’s the way Starr duets with the various vocalists on this album that makes it more than just a collection of country songs.

The opening track kicks things off with the very accessible “Breathless” featuring the popular Billy Strings, but the tracks that really work the best are his duets with Alison Krauss on “Thankful,” and especially with the duo Lucius on “Come Back,” as well as the two tracks that include Larkin Poe, “Rosetta” (which also includes Strings) and “String Theory” (which also includes Molly Tuttle). Though Krauss has been around for years and has worked similar magic with her albums and tours with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, it’s the newer young roots artists here that help Starr create something vibrant and new.

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John Hammond holds a unique place in music. He released his self-titled debut album in 1960 just as the roots music revival was gaining steam. Hammond was a blues revivalist and like others who would come along in those hothouse years like Charlie Musslewhite, Paul Butterfield, Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block and even Steve Stills, Hammond was a white American who paid homage and added a new spin to blues music. While most of these artists either played strictly acoustic blues, mixed in electric blues or went electric, they were different than the British blues artists of the period who began playing electric blues in homage to black American blues artists but eventually used the sound to create British rock.

The music on this archival set was recorded 13 years after Hammond’s debut album and long after he not only established himself as a supreme blues interpreter, but recorded albums like Southern Fried (1969) that went beyond acoustic blues, the soundtrack album for the film Little Big Man (1971), and the roots supergroup summit Triumvirate (1973) album with Dr. John and Mike Bloomfield.

These live performances were recorded over two nights of a five-night run in July of 1973 at the famed Boarding House in San Francisco, with Tom Waits opening and John Lee Hooker in the audience on the last night. The club opened in 1971 and then slowly faded away in the early ’80s, but along with being a hotbed for up-and-coming comedians, it was a venerable spot for hip music from underground artists to international superstars. It was there that the iconic Old & In the Way album was recorded in 1975, featuring Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, David Grisman, Vassar Clemens, and John Khan.

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Since launching in October of 2020, the various Joni Mitchell archive releases have become among the better series to offer archival and reissue projects from a major artist. Mitchell’s peerless place in music is secure but these releases serve to bolster and enhance her lofty place in the pantheon of pop music from the past nearly 60 years.

The latest release in the Joni Mitchell Archives box set series is the fourth volume. These releases feature mostly previously unreleased material, including primarily live performances and demos. This latest release, available on CD and vinyl, explores perhaps her most experimental period—1976–1980—and focuses for the most part on music from the albums Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and Mingus, although some of the performances and songs pre-date 1976.

Mitchell’s previous album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, actually signaled the beginning of this rich and fertile period of bold experimentation. Short-sighted critics (many primarily East Coast based male critics that at the time coalesced around the burgeoning New York and London-based punk scenes) were not kind to much of this music when it was first released, but listening to these live versions and demos from the period only reinforces just how extraordinary the music was and how well it has held up.

This is music from an artist with unparalleled compositional prowess and genre-defying musical dexterity. Her musical command is otherworldly. Mitchell operates on a musical plane that other artists couldn’t even imagine. These recordings are based on songs drawn on a wide canvas. And it is Mitchell’s other life as a painter that informs the full breadth of the music.

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Van Morrison had a busy 2023, releasing three albums. The projects included another album of skiffle music, (Moving on Skiffle), one of instrumentals of unreleased material from the 1970s to the present (Beyond Words), and one of covers of rock, R&B, and country (Accentuate the Positive). His new album very much follows in the same vein of these releases.

Rather than a studio album of mostly new compositions, Morrison presents previously unreleased big band arrangements of songs from his catalog and some newer duets recorded between 2014 and 2019. While an instrumental album from one of the greatest singers in rock history seemed a bit odd, revisiting older songs and presenting them in a new way works beautifully for Morrison, given the quality of the songs and the vast singing and musical styles with which he is comfortable.

Also, while it would seem daunting for any living singer to match vocals with Morrison in a duet, the collaborators he chose here—Kurt Elling, Joss Stone, and Willie Nelson—are all up for the challenge and help Morrison draw from various musical styles from his background. This entire affair has a timeless quality and a first-take spontaneity that reminds one of Frank Sinatra at his studio peak, although there are times where Ray Charles seems a closer vocal touchstone. That’s some pretty heady company, but even at 79, Morrison makes it seem effortless and his voice has not lost any of its luster, which is truly remarkable.

Morrison revisits music from every decade of his solo career since the ’70s except the 2020s. From the classic His Band and Street Choir from 1970 he redoes the obscure “I’ll Be Your Lover Too.” From Period of Transition, released in 1977, he remakes “You Gotta Make It Through the World.” The ’80s is represented by “The Master’s Eye” from Sense of Wonder from 1985, and “Someone Like You” from Poetic Champions Compose from 1987.

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George Harrison’s triple album, All Things Must Pass, came out in 1971 and was a monumental release for the former member of The Beatles. After he issued the soundtrack to the film Wonderwall in 1968 and the experimental, electronic release Electronic Sound in 1969, many considered All Things Must Pass to be Harrison’s first true solo album.

Harrison often only had one or two songs he wrote included on an album when he was in The Beatles, with the songs of Lennon and McCartney dominating the albums and singles released by the group. All Things Must Pass included songs from the backlog of unrecorded material he had, collaborations with Bob Dylan (“I’d Have You Anytime”), and one with Bill Martin and Phil Coulter (“It’s Johnny’s Birthday”), and a cover of Dylan’s “If Not For You.” As good as the album was, Harrison did not come up with a follow-up studio album until 1973. The soundtrack to The Concert for Bangla-Desh was released in December of 1971. That next album from 1973 was Living in the Material World.

Given the sheer volume of tracks and the all-star backing musicians on All Things Must Pass, it would appear nearly impossible for anyone to follow up that release. Nonetheless, Living in the Material World was a commercial and critical success and in fact many fans and critics actually thought it was a better album than All Things Must Pass.

The album is a more relaxed affair and given it came out in 1973 it was viewed less as an album by an ex-Beatle and more as a solo album from an artist that had by then fully established himself. There were also some people who simply didn’t like All Things Must Pass due to the heavy-handed production of Phil Spector and, being a triple-album box set, it was very expensive.

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The new movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, focuses on the controversy of his going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965. Dylan was the darling of the new folk scene in the early ’60s and was heralded as the voice of the generation. His poetic songs of injustice galvanized the anti-war and civil rights movements of the time. When Dylan chose to go electric, many viewed it as heresy for abandoning the purity and non-commercial aspects of folk. What often gets lost in this debatable topic is that the move in fact launched Dylan’s long career as a peerless and dogged performer.

Although acknowledged as one of the most, if not the most, important songwriter of the rock era, Dylan is a road-dog, who has performed and played with countless group configurations. His mid-’60s electric period was marked by controversy, but he and his backing group The Band (formerly the Hawks and comprised of Canadians Robbie Roberston, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and American Levon Helm) are one of the most successful collaborations between a rock artist and a backing group of musicians.

Although their time together on the road in the 1960s was often met with scorn by the folk crowd (loosely chronicled by Dylan in his songs “Maggie’s Farm” and “Positively Fourth Street,” to name two), they were making exciting music that could fit into Dylan’s description of music that he called that “wild mercury sound.” The difficulty of performing this music night after night in the face of mounting derision caused one of the members of The Band, drummer Levon Helm, to quit by the fall of 1965.

When Dylan had his motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, it brought a close to that chapter of his career that saw him release three monumental albums in a row (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 and Blonde on Blonde in 1966), but also resulted in his getting off the “wild mercury” caravan of raucous music, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as his tendency at this time toward self-doubt and fury.

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Ever since the 1994 Live at the BBC and the 1995 Anthology release of the TV series and VHS box set, and three multiple CD/LP sets, reissues of the music of The Beatles finally seemed to hit their stride.

The ongoing Beatles reissue program hit a high-water mark with the release of the group’s UK albums on vinyl in mono in 2014. Since the 50th anniversary of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 2017, reissues of the music of The Beatles and as solo artists have been going through a particularly strong and consistent period. Substantial and well-produced reissue programs that offer various editions of a particular release and archival projects have offered fans a wealth of officially previously unreleased material and bespoke, gift-worthy packaging.

The main releases that have elicited the most interest are those that mark a milestone anniversary of an important album. This has been particularly the case with the 50th anniversary releases of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (the White Album), Abbey Road, Let It Be, and the Disney series Get Back, but also some of the key solo albums from the members of the group that were released in the 1970s not long after the group broke up. The Live at the Hollywood Bowl was also a welcome release, as was the companion film Eight Days A Week in 2016.

Other more recent welcome releases include The Christmas Albums box in 2017 and The Singles Collection box in 2019. The reissue series for Revolver in 2022 seemed to pick up where Let It Be left off and appeared to set the stage for Rubber Soul to be given the deluxe box edition treatment. Instead, 2023 saw the reissue of the The Beatles: 1962–1966 (Red) and The Beatles: 1962–1966 (Blue) compilation releases, highlighted by the “new” track “Now and Then.”

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Beginning in 1966 with the self-titled debut album from Cream, the supergroup became a rock phenomenon that, even in an age that now seems to signal the end of the significance of rock bands, is still with us. The early era of the rock supergroup was primarily dominated by British groups other than Cream, such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer and another group like Cream that also included Eric Clapton, Blind Faith, among others.

Mixing one British artist (Graham Nash) and two Americans (David Crosby, Stephen Stills), Crosby, Stills and Nash released their self-titled debut album in March of 1969, establishing them as the American supergroup of the day. The album was a runaway smash and the group had created an entirely new sound that defied description.

As loaded with talent as CSN was, in mid-August they added yet another superstar to their lineup, Neil Young. Young had played with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield. Interestingly enough, Crosby had previously played with Stills, when Young decided not to play with the Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival way back in May of 1967. CSNY became an even bigger supergroup.

In 1969 CSNY set out on tour and began writing music and performing some of the songs that would make up their debut album Déjà vu, which would be released in 1970. CSNY was short-lived and other than a tour in 1974, the group wouldn’t work together in any capacity until they released their second album American Dream in 1988.

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Country music went through a seismic change beginning in the mid-to late-1960s, that culminated in the explosion of what was called the “outlaw” movement in the mid-1970s. The movement was primarily spearheaded by folks like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others, even though many of them, Nelson and Jennings included, had been around for a long time.

This change in country music was also affected by the emergence of folk and rock artists who used country as part of their sound or in some cases whose music was directly impacted by the counterculture. Kris Kristofferson could also had been categorized as a key component of this group, but two artists who were also part of the scene, while taking divergent seminal paths, came together for a brief time in the earlier part of the ’70s to make a music all their own. They were Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Parsons died not long after his second solo album in 1973, and that album was helped greatly by Harris, who is still going strong today.

The story really begins with Parsons who must be considered the father of country rock for his work leading the International Submarine Band, who released their one and only album, Safe at Home, in 1968. He was also a key player in the first mainstream country rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo with The Byrds, which was also released in 1968. That would be his one and only album with The Byrds, before he and fellow-Byrd Chris Hillman departed to form the Flying Burrito Brothers with Sneaky Pete Kleinow and Chris Ethridge in 1969 with their debut album The Gilded Palace of Sin.

Parsons would only record one more album with the group, Burrito Deluxe, in 1970, which also included new members Bernie Leadon and Michael Clark, the former drummer with The Byrds. Chris Etheridge had left the group and did not appear on that album.

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There has probably been no other rock music artist who has had more of their music released posthumously than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix died in September of 1970 and since his death the music he made in his short life has been issued and reissued in many formats and in many ways.

For many years, under the official label of Experience Hendrix, his family has done a respectful job in putting out his music, chosen wisely in what unreleased music to put out and conceived projects that add greatly to our knowledge and understanding of what may be rock music’s greatest guitar player.

Hendrix was mercurial and mysterious and his music was not easily definable. These projects have helped round out the story and the untrodden road that Hendrix traveled. This new project, Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision, doesn’t so much elucidate a particular side, or foremost time period of his music, as shine a light on the legendary recording studio he conceived and owned.

Electric Lady Studios was originally to be a performance space. That’s what it was when Hendrix and his manager Mike Jeffery bought it in 1968 when, after its initial incarnation as the Village Barn, it was named the Generation. It was located in downtown Manhattan in Greenwich Village and was an eclectic venue that hosted a variety of musical styles.

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Few pop music artists to emerge in the 1960s were more controversial, intelligent, funny, prescient, and just plain far out as Frank Zappa. As a guitar God who never took that pose seriously, who introduced jazz, classical, avant-garde, and cabaret on acid theatrics into his indescribable live act and recordings, nearly everything Zappa did in the ’60s and 1970s still sounds light years ahead of anything made today. At that time, Zappa skewered not only the fake post-’50s fat cats and plastic people, but himself and the so-called hippies who loved his music.

Zappa’s early records with the Mothers of Invention are unhinged freak-outs of sound and (bongo) fury. While serving up blistering critiques of the phoniness of both middle America and the power elite, the humor which with Zappa infused his bizarre music made it all the more lovable and just plain fun.

Along with The Fugs, The Holy Modal Rounders, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and a handful of others, Zappa, solo and with the Mothers, sought to poke twisted barbs of ridicule at all that was fake, mean, and phony. Unlike the others, Zappa was not a member of the underground drug culture and didn’t even drink. While his appearance was counterculture, his approach was counterintuitive.

Zappa recorded for Verve and his music was later distributed by Warner Brothers during the ’60s into the ’70s. While no major record label in the world would touch Zappa today, those days of rage allowed iconoclasts like Zappa to have a sandbox in which to blow up cultural bombs. By the time we get to Apostrophe, Zappa’s sixth solo album (not to mention 12 further albums he made with the Mothers), he had built up a rabid following and the counterculture of young people had become a demographic behemoth, propelling the album to gold sales status.

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