Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

The 2022 live concert season looks like it will shape up to be a vast improvement over 2020 and 2021, although as of this writing, the vagaries of the virus continue to complicate people’s lives and create uncertainties. Regardless of how the season plays out, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the better live concert releases that have arrived on store shelves. The live album doesn’t get the love it used to, but many excellent releases come out every year and shouldn’t be overlooked. All of the releases covered here, except for one, are available on vinyl and that one is also out on DVD. For this article, we will cover releases from artists primarily associated with the West Coast ’70s and singer-songwriter album genres.

First off, let’s start with Still Deliverin’ / Deliverin’ Again: 50th Anniversary Return to the Troubadour, Live In Concert, from Richie Furay from DSDK, available as either a two-CD set or a DVD. The Still Deliverin’ title refers to the live album Deliverin’ released by Poco in 1971, a group Fury founded. Furay was, of course prior to Poco, a founding member of Buffalo Springfield.

This live concert consists of two sets, recorded at the Troubadour in West Hollywood from November 16, 2018. The first set is a retrospective primarily of Furay’s non-Poco material, featuring two Buffalo Springfield and solo songs. The second set is a recreation of the famed live Deliverin’ album recorded at Madison Square Garden in 1971.

Furay really makes this material work well. Most of the songs here came from Poco, where Furay was joined by Jim Messina, Rusty Young, Timothy B. Schmit, and George Grantham. Through his sheer talents as a band leader and especially peerless vocalist, he comes up with one of the best live albums in memory. The set where Furay recreates the Deliverin album is flawless and a reminder of what a great band Poco was. Former Poco member and current member of the Eagles Timothy B. Schmit joins in on “Good Feeling to Know.” Poco was never really given its due and the merciless East Coast rock press gave them short shrift.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | With a howling and unholy mix of punk rock and the blues, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club exploded on the L.A. club scene in the early ’80s. By 1984, the band had gone through a few lineup changes and expanded their musical palette to deliver The Las Vegas Story, their most diverse effort to date.

Now the album is back as a super deluxe two-CD/DVD and double-vinyl set, containing a digitally remastered version of the original 11-track album produced by Jeff Eyrich. Both the vinyl and CD versions feature a bonus disc with 10 live tracks recorded at Scorgie’s in Rochester, New York on August 8, 1984. The CD package includes a DVD of rare footage of the band both on and off stage. This isn’t your typical high-gloss concert footage, but rather appropriately rough and raw footage that’ll make you feel as if you’re watching the iconic band in a club. The LP will include an exclusive download link for the video footage featured on the DVD.

For The Las Vegas Story, Pierce’s original Gun Club co-conspirator guitarist Kid Congo Powers returned to the fold after quitting The Cramps to find that Pierce had now become an accomplished guitarist in his own right. Original drummer Terry Graham also was back behind the kit, with his former Bags bandmate Patricia Morrison recruited to fill the bass slot vacated by Rob Ritter (who coincidentally had played guitar in the Bags alongside Morrison and Graham). This is the only Gun Club album to feature this classic lineup.

The CD version includes a 24-page booklet with liner notes by Terry Graham, Kid Congo Powers, and Patricia Morrison as well as producer Jeff Eyrich, and guest musicians Dave Alvin and Phast Phreddie Patterson. It also includes rare photos and ephemera. The LP version, housed in a gatefold package, also includes those liner notes, photos and ephemera.

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To say that Zoh Amba is making a sizable splash on the current scene is something of an understatement, as O Life, O Light, which features bassist extraordinaire William Parker and the brilliant drummer Francisco Mela, is one of three recordings coming out in 2022 with her name on the cover. Across three cuts (plus one short vinyl-only bonus) she more than holds her own on O Life, O Light, shining brightly throughout. The CD/ digital are available now and the vinyl arrives later this year.

Although currently based in New York City, tenor saxophonist and flautist Zoh Amba is originally from Kingsport, TN. Having moved up north to study with tenor titan and composer David Murray, along the way she attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for two years and more recently the New England Conservatory in Boston.

I’m eager to hear Amba’s debut recording O Sun, which was released by the Tzadik label on March 18 of this year. Along with Amba on tenor, the band on that CD is comprised of bassist Thomas Morgan, drummer Joey Baron, pianist Micah Thomas, and on one track, alto saxophonist and Tzadik head honcho John Zorn.

Did I say eager? Yeah. That’s an attractive lineup to be sure, but the primary reason I’m so amped up to hear O Sun is that Amba plays so exquisitely across O Life, O Light’s appealingly tidy runtime, and in a configuration that effectively emphasizes her music’s similarities to the fiery beauty of the great Albert Ayler. Specifically, both the trio lineup and the instrumentation here is the same as on Ayler’s cornerstone free jazz masterpiece, Spiritual Unity, though there is enough variation in the combined execution to avoid any insinuation of the imitative.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | To mark its 20th anniversary, The Libertines’ era-defining debut “What A Waster” is being repressed on seven-inch single (backed by original b-side “I Get Along”), while the new “What A Waster Live From The ICA” EP will be made available on streaming services.

This digital only edition features live versions of “What A Waster” and “I Get Along” recorded during the band’s legendary show at the iconic venue just up the road from Buckingham Palace on the original day of release, 3rd June 2002. Preorder here.

Part calling card from the stars, part postcard from the gutter, “What A Waster” dropped you straight in the middle of the energy and chaos that surged through the lives of Pete’n’Carl’n’Gary’n’John. It wasn’t a song to help you get your bearing with a new band, it was a clarion call that made you realise The Libertines would become your whole world.

Produced by Bernard Butler, “What A Waster” came out of the blocks at full pelt, but there was a preciseness and a thought behind its ramshackle charms. Twenty years on from its release, The Libertines’ opening salvo retains a freshness that is as much down to its wisdom beyond its years as it is the youthful exuberance it inspired. Available for the first time, the live recordings of “What A Waster” and “I Get Along” from the ICA show capture the first fruits of a band destined to make a long and enduring impression.

The single and digital EP will be released on 3 June 2022. Stay tuned for Up The Bracket anniversary releases.

Celebrating Bob Dylan on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Lots of supposedly sane folks shouted “Masterpiece!” when Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind came out in 1997; Elvis Costello, to pick a seemingly sober-minded celebrity name out of a hat, said, “I think it might be the best record he’s made.”

Hoo ha, said I. Sure, Time Out of Mind was a marked–no, make that very marked–improvement on the rather desultory couple of albums he’d released before it. So if you wanted to call it a resounding comeback, that was fine by me. But masterpiece? Forget about it.

Well, time has softened me some. I still wouldn’t call Time Out of Mind a masterpiece–so far as I’m concerned Dylan stopped producing them in the mid-seventies, at latest. But it includes at least one song that stands with the very best of his work and a couple of others that are pretty damn good, and that’s not bad for an artist who was born before America entered WWII.

And the album as a whole is noteworthy for its unremittingly dark tone. Dylan sounds lost, desperate even; love makes him sick and has him all mixed up, things are disintegrating, and while it’s not dark yet, it’s getting there. This baby is one long twilight stroll through the graveyard of Dylan’s mind, and he’s not whistling; he taking a reckoning, and wondering whether the journey was worth the cost.

Time Out of Mind is an autumnal, and even elegiac, work; you can practically hear the shadows gathering. The dark and sublimely lovely “Not Dark Yet” is the album’s linchpin and one of the greatest songs Dylan will ever write. On it Dylan finally looks back, if only because there doesn’t seem much ahead; “Behind every beautiful thing,” he sings, “There’s been some kind of pain.” This is the sound of a man sinking beneath his burden of years, and you’re forced to wonder; does he fear the darkness, or look forward to it?

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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.

Celebrating Morrissey who turned 63 yesterday. —Ed.

I’m a Morrissey fan by temperament—of all the musicians who have ever lived, Manchester’s most famous miserabalist (he even beats Mark E. Smith!) comes closest to sharing my belief that hope is the lubricant that keeps the human meat grinder running—and because I consider him the funniest musician to ever kvetch into a microphone.

I can’t help but love a man who quipped, “What’s the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning? Wish I hadn’t.” And was quoted as saying, “I have found the best way to avoid ending your life as a bitter wreck is to start out as one.” The Mancunian misanthropist’s feckless take on life is utterly hilarious, and what I’ll never get over is there are people out there who don’t think he’s funny. No wonder Morrissey’s miserable; he’s a great comedian but nobody gets his jokes.

And the jokes just keep on coming on The Smiths’ third studio LP, 1986’s The Queen Is Dead. Morrissey possesses a savage wit; “Girlfriend in a Coma” is a black comedy for the ages. And on The Queen Is Dead Morrissey is in top form. He opens “Bigmouth Strikes Again” with the lines, “Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking/When I said I’d like to/Smash every tooth in your head/Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking/When I said by rights/You should be bludgeoned in your bed” and you can practically hear him cackling. And his take on dying a romantic death on “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” (“And if a double-decker bus/Crashes into us/To die by your side/Is such a heavenly way to die/And if a ten-ton truck/Kills the both of us/To die by your side/Well, the pleasure—the privilege is mine”) never fails to crack me up.

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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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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The official trailer for Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music is out now, featuring Talib Kweli, Indigo Girls and composer/pianist Vijay Iyer. The film has been selected as the closing night film at the Richmond International Film Festival June 12, with additional festivals to be announced.

Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music is an entertaining, impactful documentary that explores the unifying power of music and examines the relationship between musical artists and their fans. Featured artists include Indigo Girls, Vijay Iyer, and Talib Kweli. The film is written and directed by Kathleen Ermitage and is her directorial debut. Previously, she was an associate producer on Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary; Sergio Mendes: In the Key of Joy; Herb Alpert Is; and the forthcoming What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

Amy Ray of Indigo Girls said “It is an absolute honor to be part of this poignant film that truly shows the power of music through the eyes of the artist and the receiver of that art. It sheds light on the alchemy that happens when music enters the public space and is a catalyst for healing, spiritual connection, activism and creative growth.”

The Indigo Girls generously share details about their creative process and work which, in turn, sparks the imagination and changes the life of arguably their biggest fan. Jazz and classical musician Vijay Iyer expertly questions issues of immigration and race while inventing a life in music for himself; his work touches the heard of a “man of the streets” from Kingston, Jamaica.

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Celebrating Pete Townshend, born on this day in 1945. —Ed.

When it comes to grandiosity, Pete Townshend takes the cake. He’s always had huge ambitions, as his numerous concept albums—both with The Who (Tommy, Quadrophenia, the abandoned Lifehouse, and The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether–wait, that one was by The Alan Parsons Project) and on his own—demonstrate. And I suppose I always took it he had an ego as big as his ambitions. But what is one to make of his 1972 debut solo album, Who Came First, on which he turns things over on two of the LPs nine tracks to other people? And performs a third song he didn’t even write? Certainly that’s an act of humility, if not abject self-abasement.

And Who Came First isn’t particularly ambitious, either: he throws on a song that would later appear on The Who’s Odds and Sods, along with a prayer set to music for his spiritual guru Meher Baba, and so on. But there’s something becoming about Pete’s laid-back approach on Who Came First—he’s not trying to conquer the world for once, just to be content in it. And the LP includes a cool bunch of tunes that you’re guaranteed to love, even if “Parvardigar” (his salute to Meher Baba) isn’t one of them.

Pete isn’t entirely without ego. While he admirably declined to fill the studio with a star-studded cast of ringers, he went too far in the other direction, recording almost the entire LP all by his lonesome. The great Small Faces/Faces bassist and singer Ronnie Lane makes a cameo, as do musical gadfly Billy Nicholls and percussionist Caleb Quaye, best known for his work with Elton John and Hall & Oates, and that’s it. Townshend even plays the drums, adequately if not inspired, and who knew? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he also took charge of mopping the studio WC.

Opener “Pure and Easy” is real pretty, lovely actually, but it doesn’t measure up to The Who version on Odds and Sods, with its powerhouse closing and great drumming by Keith Moon. But Pete’s take is still quite nice, and well worth a listen, for his guitar solo, his equally cool keyboards, and the song’s takeout, which features some nice drumming and Townshend repeating, “There once was a note, listen,” which may be cooler on The Who version, but still packs a punch here.

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