Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

Let’s start with the bad news, so we can get it out of the way. Musician A.J. Croce lost his father—famed singer-songwriter, Jim Croce—before he was two years old. As if that weren’t enough, A.J. went through a long period of blindness as a child, and in 2018 he lost his wife from a rare heart virus. Faced with those challenges, most of us might not be able to find the strength to carry on, let alone produce a rich catalog of music and maintain a busy performing schedule, but that’s exactly what Croce has done, and that’s the good news.

His brand new album, By Request on Compass Records, features Croce utilizing his impressive piano skills and vocal stylings on a number of familiar songs, but with his own reworkings and unique spin. The goal behind the album was to give listeners an experience as though they were attending a house party thrown by Croce and hearing him entertain the intimate gathering with well-known chestnuts and unexpected gems.

Join Croce and me on this episode of Radar as we discuss the new record, his very eclectic vinyl collection, and the importance of the healing power of music; how sometimes music is the only prescription that truly succeeds in mending our wounded souls.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Sharp Notes each Saturday evening at 6pm and TVD Radar on Sundays at 5AM on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | From the haunting, funereal bells and emotional wails of opening track “Mother,” it was immediate—John Lennon’s first solo studio album was unlike anything he had made before.

​Recorded in 1970, shortly after the demise of The Beatles, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band saw John stripping away the artifice and ornamentation for a visceral artistic exorcism that was confessional, raw, painfully honest, and revelatory. Inspired by the primal scream psychotherapy he and wife Yoko Ono had been practicing with Dr. Arthur Janov, John, joined by the minimalist Plastic Ono Band—Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voorman on bass, and producer Phil Spector—confronted his demons, professed his love for his wife, railed against false idols and declared the dream was over on his most personal album. Today it stands as the towering achievement of his solo career—the moment the biggest rock star in the world bared his soul for all to hear—as real as it was revolutionary.

On April 16, Yoko Ono Lennon and Capitol/UMe will celebrate 50 years of John’s transformational and influential masterpiece, with the eight-disc super deluxe box set, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – The Ultimate Collection, an immersive, deep listening experience and in-depth exploration of what John described as “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Fully authorized by Yoko Ono Lennon, who oversaw the production and creative direction, and from the same audio team that worked on 2018’s critically acclaimed Imagine—The Ultimate Collection, including triple GRAMMY®-Award winning engineer Paul Hicks and mixers/engineers Rob Stevens and Sam Gannon, the Ultimate Collection puts listeners in the center of the studio and explores the album’s 1970 recording sessions at EMI Studios 2 & 3, Abbey Road along with John’s post-Beatles singles, “Give Peace A Chance,” “Cold Turkey” and “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” from inception to the final master through scores of unreleased and rare demos, rehearsals, outtakes, jams and studio conversations, revealing how these beloved songs came to be. Everything in this expansive box set has been newly mixed from scratch from brand new 192kHz/24bit hi-res transfers. In addition to the various new mixes, the set boasts 87 never-before-heard recordings.

This historical, remixed and remastered collection features 159 tracks across six CDs and two Blu-ray audio discs for more than 11 engrossing hours of music and includes two postcards (“Who Are The Plastic Ono Band?” and “You Are The Plastic Ono Band”) a “War Is Over!” poster and a comprehensive 132-page hardback book with lyrics, rare photos, tape box images, memorabilia and extensive notes. Designed and edited by Simon Hilton, the Compilation Producer and Production Manager of the Ultimate Collection series, the book tells the story behind each of the songs and the making of the album in John & Yoko’s words and the words of those who worked alongside them, through archival and brand new interviews.

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“My uncle had a huge vinyl collection full of good soul, funk, and R&B music and my grandmother also had lots of records in the house.”

“There was lots to listen to and choose from. We had Bill Cosby on vinyl, Bing Crosby, and even The Chipmunks Christmas. There was a lot going on! The record I gravitated to and will always love, must have come from my Uncle’s collection. It was Evelyn Champagne King’s record Get Loose. I repurchased this vinyl as an adult too. Boy oh boy was this a treat. “Love Come Down” of course was a smash that I loved to sing and dance to. I did not know about the other amazing funky records on the album like “Get Loose” and “I Can’t Stand It.”

I grew up with cassettes, CDs, and digital. Records like this allowed me to imagine myself being the life of the party in a time I didn’t live in. This record made me imagine myself being a bombshell in the late ’70s with my afro, bell bottoms, and a halter top. I stumbled into more black funk and disco artists because of this vinyl.

It’s actually hard for me to listen to disco or funk if it’s not on vinyl. That’s the medium I was most familiar hearing oldies, disco, and funk on. It just feels different.

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Awaking from a nap to someone staring at you can be a little creepy. But it’s all benevolence and love in Eric Bazilian’s jangly new single “Sarah When She’s Sleeping,” getting its video premiere today at The Vinyl District.

The co-founder of The Hooters, whose songwriting has included Joan Osborne’s enduring “One of Us,” Bazilian says the new song is meant to be “a shameless declaration of love and redemption, for and by a good and kind woman. He says he’s trying to convey “the sense of home that I get when I see my partner peacefully at rest and hear the sweet sounds she makes when she’s there.”

That explains the bit of soft snoring at the beginning and end of the succinct single, but it’s all catchy power pop in-between, with Bazilian on guitars, bass, keyboards, and the mandolin-adjacent mandola. Drums are from Roman Ratej, recorded in Slovenia by Martin Stibernik.

It’s the fourth in a series of singles that precede Bazilian’s new solo album expected later this hear—his first since 2002’s A Very Dull Boy. (He released What Shall Become of the Baby with Swedish collaborator Mats Wester in 2012.)

Bazilian still lives in Pennsylvania, where the Hooters once sprang and notably played Live Aid in 1985. But he often records in Sweden, where he has a basement studio. It’s been in Stockholm where he’s been riding out the pandemic while working with developing artists like Slovenia’s Manu and Philly’s Alexis and the Medicine.

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What a bunch of jokers. Fear wanted a war and thought New Jersey would make the ideal place to start it, compared their cocks to cheap lunch meat, and called NYC a swell place if your tastes run to reed instruments. At the dawn of the eighties they were good for a couple of laughs

Los Angeles’ Fear are credited as being the first hardcore band to inspire audience ultraviolence at their shows, and the first to inject heavy metal crunch into their music. Notes Dez Cadena (Black Flag, D.C. 3) in Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, “Fear were probably a metal band before they were a punk band.”

He also notes “They really knew how to play their instruments,” which is why they arrived on the scene with a metal edge in the first place. Metal requires a modicum of musical proficiency, which couldn’t be said of most punk bands, whose basic MO was to pick up their instruments for the first time and play a show a week later. (And good for them.)

Outliers or not, Fear–who are best remembered for their appearance on Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 film The Decline of Western Civilization and their infamous performance on the 1981 Halloween night episode of Saturday Night Live–did a good job of summing up the hardcore ethos with “I Don’t Care About You.”

Fear may have specialized in snotty sarcasm, but when Lee Ving spits out that “Fuck You!” he isn’t joking. If the best of the remaining songs on Fear’s 1982 debut The Record (the only Fear LP that matters) have tongue at least partly in cheek, “I Don’t Care About You” is the real deal.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | With vaccines on the horizon and a few events being pencilled in for later this year, Record Store Day organizers around the world look forward to the future, but recognize that in 2021, celebrating independent brick and mortar record stores is still best done in the Drops format introduced so successfully in 2020. RSD Drops will take place at participating record stores, globally, on June 12 and July 17.

​Throughout the past year, record stores have found creative, flexible ways to operate under changing regulations and conditions, with tremendous support from their local communities. The ongoing worldwide pandemic makes it impossible to predict the status of any stores or locations in the next few months, and brings with it many unexpected side effects, including production and distribution issues that continue to disrupt record store supply chains.

The decision to once again shift the “Record Store Day energy”—usually focused on in-store performances and crowds and the world’s largest single-day music event—to focus on revenue generation for these local independent businesses, as well as for the artists, labels and distributors who play a major role, allows the largest number of stores worldwide to participate. The Lists of specially created titles coming to record stores as part of the RSD Drops dates will be launched soon.

About Record Store Day | Record Store Day, the organization, is managed by the Department of Record Stores and is organized in partnership with the Alliance of Independent Media Stores (AIMS), the Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CIMS) and promotes independent record stores year-round with events, special releases and other fun things. Record Store Day, the global celebration of the culture of the record store, takes place annually. The worldwide pandemic in 2020 required the creation of RSD Drops dates in 2020 and in 2021, RSD Drops will take place on June 12 and July 17 at record stores worldwide.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Nelson Riddle, arguably the greatest, most successful and prolific composer and arranger in the history of American popular music, was something of an enigma. Author Geoff Littlefield takes a deep dive into that story with the help of the late composer’s musician son, Christopher, in a revealing new biography, Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat.

​Seeing Riddle as a complex and forlorn genius, Littlefield traces Riddle’s life from the small town of Oradell, New Jersey, through a career that saw him hailed as the veritable king of what came to be known as the Great American Songbook—the canon of the most important and influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the early 20th century.

Riddle collaborated with all the biggest musical stars of his time, including Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. But it was his work with Frank Sinatra that made him a household name the world over. By the time his career was winding down, Riddle was working with new names on the scene like Linda Ronstadt, became musical director for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS, wrote music for the Batman TV show on ABC and turned down an offer from Paul McCartney to collaborate on a song. His shelf included Grammy and Oscar awards.

But Littlefield reveals that, like so many creative souls, Riddle was a complex and troubled figure. His marriage to Doreen, with whom he had seven children, was rocky and constantly under threat from his own numerous affairs.

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When it comes to the first wave of punk, Wayne (and later Jayne) County and the Electric Chairs are often sadly overlooked. And this despite such raunch’n’roll classics as “Toilet Love,” “Fuck Off,” and “Cream in My Jeans.” County, a Georgia transgender woman, combined glam punk with the sheer camp outrage of New York City’s Theater of the Ridiculous, and the results were both hilarious and irresistible. Yet none of the band’s albums were released in the United States, an inexplicable omission unless one concludes that U.S. record execs found County and the Electric Chairs’ songs simply too sleazy to touch.

County and the Electric Chairs were the biggest proponents of the trash rock aesthetic this side of the New York Dolls, but they took things much, much farther than the Dolls ever did. County might come on stage wearing a plastic vagina with straw pubic hair, and punk photographer Roberta Bayley recalls the time County, having decided (amongst many others, including Bayley) that Patti Smith’s “I’m the Second Coming of Arthur Rimbaud” shtick was so much pretentious horseshit, “did a big parody of her where he came on and he had a black wig and a white shirt, a tie and he did this whole thing about following one of Jim Morrison’s pubic hairs down the sewers of Paris.” If Jayne had never done anything but that, I’d still love her.

Subtle County wasn’t, but the Electric Chairs also released such bona fide trash-free classics as the celebratory “Max’s Kansas City,” the transgender anthem “Man Enough to Be a Woman,” and the most delirious song about wanting to have a number one hit since the Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation” in “Trying to Get on the Radio.” And the best way to listen to the multi-faceted County is to pick up a copy of 1982’s Best of Jayne/Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, which includes all of the above songs as well as such searing rockers as “Bad in Bed,” “Hot Blood,” and “Night Time,” to say nothing of the lovely “Eddie & Sheena” and the Transformer-flavored “Midnight Pal.”

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Mark Farner, the long-haired, bare-chested frontman of Grand Funk Railroad, keeps chugging along at 72, releasing a new DVD From Chile with Love this month with the band he fronts, which takes the name of one of Grand Funk’s most popular songs, Mark Farner’s American Band.

He’s also among the Michigan rockers asked to join in on Alice Cooper’s current album, Detroit Stories. And in a Covid-era that has otherwise wiped out touring schedules, Farner was one of the performers at the partisan, largely maskless New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago.

Farner still remembers the vinyl that has most inspired him, back when he was in The Pack, the Michigan-based, pre-Grand Funk group that had broken off from regional rockers Terry Knight and the Pack. “We were coming back from Nashville, Tennessee,” he tells The Vinyl District. “We had just recorded a record in this guy’s garage.” They were excited about their cover version of Bob & Earl’s “The Harlem Shuffle” and wanted to get it into the hands of Flint disc jockey Bob Dell at WTAC as soon as possible.

“We were driving fast, breaking the speed limit, trying to get to WTAC before Bob Dell went off the air, so we could hand him this acetate and see if he could play it,” Farner says. “So we come screaming into the parking lot, we all jump out and run inside the station. We say, ‘Bob, we just recorded this record, man, will you spin it?’ And he put it on the spindle and he spun our record. That’s how things got done back then.”

But as they were leaving, the disc jockey pointed to a pile of LPs by the door. “If there’s anything you want, take it, because all that stuff is going in the dumpster today,” Dell told them. Farner was taken by the striking turquoise and purple cover of Get It While You Can by someone he didn’t know, Howard Tate. “Out of all that vinyl that he was going to pitch out, that’s the only one that really caught my attention, I don’t know why. I thought, this one looks cool. I took it. And when I got home, holy crap, dude, I found out why.

“This is the guy I tried to pattern my vocals after: Howard Tate. And if you listen to that album Get it While You Can, that influenced so many people. Janis Joplin, it influenced her. It influenced Aretha Franklin. It influenced Little Stevie Wonder. The people, after years had gone by, and I had been developing my style you hear all this people in different articles, they would mention Howard Tate.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Featuring music from 6lack, Black Thought, Cautious Clay, Common, Duckwrth, Lupe Fiasco, Roberta Flack, Nubya Garcia, Freddie Gibbs, H.E.R., Amber Mark, Curtis Mayfield, Keb’ Mo’, Otis Redding, Pop Smoke, Esperanza Spalding, Tank and The Bangas, and Summer Walker.

​Vans, the original action sports footwear and apparel brand, is teaming up with Record Store Day to release two albums, Songs for You, Vols. 1 & 2, to spotlight and support Black-owned record stores. The limited-edition vinyl releases will be available to purchase at independent record stores on Record Store Day 2021 (June 12th). As a salute to the community power of Black-owned businesses, Vans and Record Store Day will reinvest proceeds from the albums into Black-owned record stores across the United States.

Nineteen tracks from prolific Black artists are featured across the two compilations, including previously unreleased music by Roberta Flack, whose uplifting rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of Gaye’s groundbreaking LP and song.

According to Flack, a six-time Grammy Award-winning trailblazer and one of the music industry’s most iconic R&B artists, the Black-owned record store experience is as important and influential as ever: “Black-owned record stores have historically served as places where our community has gathered to learn, listen and celebrate. They have been places of political activism, where we find our voices through the music we hear. Marvin’s song that I include in this project is sadly as relevant today as it was when it was released 50 years ago.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Drummer Frank Derrick III (born 1950) grew up in Harvey, Illinois in a musical family. His father Frank Derrick Jr. was a professional musician and arranger who played with notables such as Duke Ellington and Earl Hinges.

​Frank Derrick III began playing the drums when he was ten years old and at the age of nineteen, he was already playing professionally in the renowned Chicago jazz scene. Frank has led a multifaceted national and international music career. He is a virtuoso performer, composer, and educator. Next to his own recordings he has performed and recorded with numerous legends and artists including Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Eartha Kitt, Roberta Flack, Donna Summer and countless others.

Frank Derrick III toured worldwide with Cab Calloway for ten years and was the drummer for The David Letterman Show on NBC. He is also no stranger to symphonic fans around the world (he was a member of many renowned symphonic giants such as The Royal Philharmonic).

As an educator, he served as Chairman of Percussion at Henry Street Settlement in New York, presents master classes, is the respected author of Focus On Technique For Drummers, is a contributing author to various educational publications, and is the Drum set editor for The Percussive Arts Society. Last but not least, he was honored with an A.S.C.A.P. Special Award.

Frank has a WIDE range of musical experience—his precision, driving rhythmic style and “straight ahead” jazz compositions make him unique and a master of his craft. He is a powerfully swinging (yet tasteful) drummer who always makes sure his skills ‘serve’ the music he’s performing.

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Celebrating Robyn Hitchcock on his 68th birthday with a look back from our archives. —Ed.

Love from London, the latest record from UK-based long-server Robyn Hitchcock, might not blow the doors off the classic records upon which his reputation is based, but it’s clear that he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Interestingly, it finds him far more impacted by the precedent of John Lennon than by the example of the late Syd Barrett, a figure that floated around much of his earlier work, and dedicated fans should find the LP a keeper. And happily, in its best moments, new listeners could also find the impetus to investigate his substantial back catalogue.

Robyn Hitchcock’s career finds him particularly well suited for later-age productivity. Beginning with The Soft Boys, it’s been a trip of unusual if accessibly eccentric consistency, with Hitchcock’s first group standing out quite a bit from not only the scorching punk of their first label Raw Records but the grand scheme of ’77-era UK punk in general.

For starters, The Soft Boys were far more musically adept then the average punk outfit of the period, and their songs also tangled with subject matter that was considerably more advanced than the standard shout-along topics of the time; before they were done they released a pair of albums, ‘79’s A Can of Bees and ‘80’s Underwater Moonlight, that are deserved cult-classics.

Additionally, The Soft Boys were one of the earliest punk acts to take influence from the psych-rock of the previous decade, a connection that occasionally found them tagged in the press as “neo-psychedelic;” ‘twas a circumstance that Hitchcock continued to explore after the band’s breakup through his highly touted solo work, frequently with coconspirators the Egyptians and more recently the Venus 3.

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PHOTO: KELSEY HART | Deap Vally is known for their raw, high energy, and liberated rock. Lindsey Troy (guitar, vocals) and Julie Edwards (drums, vocals) have consistently brought unladylike rock ‘n’ roll realness to the stage.

Their sophomore album Femejism (2016), produced by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, engaged with a more post-punk garage rock sound after their hard blues-rock debut album Sistrionix (2012). Last year saw the release of Deap Lips, a collaborative project between Deap Vally and Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Deap Lips is the first in a series of Deap Vally releases to follow later on this year.

The just released “Digital Dream” EP is a subtle transition to organic collaboration with different artists and friends. Whether it be a mutual fan encounter at a restaurant or bonding over a bonfire at Brody Dalle and Josh Homme’s house, each artist had met Deap Vally’s members during chance encounters over the years. Rather than limit themselves to their customary guitar and drums arrangement, they added whatever instrument a track called for in whatever genre or mood was spontaneously occurring.

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Never Is Enough is the sixth record from the new jazz/ new music trio Thumbscrew, coming hot on the heels of their stunning Anthony Braxton birthday tribute project from late July of 2020. In fact, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and bassist Michael Formanek recorded this album simultaneously with the Braxton set, but more on that below. Featuring three originals by each member, the selections cohere into an immersive smoker that’s available now, and please take note that Cuneiform Records is offering a limited 2LP edition with four exclusive live tracks on side four. These cuts aren’t on the CD or the digital download; this review focuses on the nine-track core release.

Recording two albums at once might seem like it’s setting up a stressful, potentially even harried situation, but that’d be far more likely if the dual task derived from a studio scenario where time equates to money spent. Contrasting, Thumbscrew has a productive relationship with City of Asylum, indeed so beneficial that this is the second time the trio has cut two records at once in conjunction with that Pittsburgh-based arts organization.

Thumbscrew’s previous undertaking produced the 2018 albums Theirs, a disc of interpretations of material by others, and Ours, which consists of Thumbscrew originals (side four of Never Is Enough features live recordings from the Theirs and Ours tour). The Anthony Braxton Project and Never Is Enough constitute a similar (but not exact) attempt at making the most of their latest City of Asylum residency, as the former is devoted to readings of work from Braxton’s extensive Tri-Centric Foundation archives, while the latter, like Ours, is all original material.

In Cuneiform’s press release for Never Is Enough, it is mentioned that the two records were “not intended as the same kind of dialogue” as Theirs and Ours (which were released on the same day in 2018), but that the Braxton album and Never do speak to each other, with Formanek stating that he believes the influence of Braxton’s music is felt on Never, and if not a direct influence, then certainly inspiration from a massive body of work to which all three members of Thumbscrew have direct connections, Halvorson most extensively.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Artists include Foo Fighters, DeadMau5, Carly Simon, Sheryl Crow, Ziggy Marley, Silversun Pickups, Gavin Rossdale, Juliette Lewis, Macy Gray and more! Amazon Music to stream concert through its app and Twitch Channel, Rolling Stone and YouTube to also Broadcast.

​Legendary producer & Hall of Fame songwriter Linda Perry is set to curate and perform at the upcoming two-day Rock ‘N’ Relief: Live Stream Series. Founded by Sean Penn and Ann Lee, CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort) is a non-profit organization dedicated to crisis response.

CORE has been working tirelessly on the frontlines with partners to provide equitable access to free testing and vaccines across Los Angeles for the past year. This two-day live stream will benefit CORE’s life-saving programs. In addition, the concert will also benefit CORE’s work supporting the City of L.A.’s mobile vaccination program, which brings access to the vaccine directly to communities who need it most across L.A.

The mobile vaccination program targets low-income communities of color that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. By providing direct access within the community and offering on-site registration, CORE is helping to eliminate the disparities in health equity as it relates to vaccine distribution and COVID-19 testing.

Additionally, CORE helps operate the City of L.A.’s mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium, which is currently serving as the largest vaccination site in the U.S., providing an average of 8,000 vaccines daily, with the capacity to administer more than 12,000 vaccines per day, pending vaccine supply. Linda Perry’s Rock n’ Relief concert aims to be a magnet to bring awareness to CORE as well as raise money in support of CORE’s daily outreach to broaden its impact in the community during this pandemic.

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